Indigenous Youth & Elders at COP25 Protest Canada’s Support of Dirty Tar Sands Projects

Credit: Democracy Now!

Indigenous women protested outside the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, Spain, on Tuesday morning to demand action to address the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls across North America. Madrid police shut down the protest within minutes. On Monday, indigenous youth and elders gathered outside the Canadian Embassy in Madrid to protest the Canadian government’s support of the Alberta tar sands extraction and new fossil fuel infrastructure, including a pipeline that would cut through indigenous lands to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to Wisconsin. We speak with one of those demonstrators: Eriel Deranger, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the executive director of Indigenous Climate Action. “Canada comes to these meetings touting themselves as a global leader in addressing the climate crisis, as having great relations with their indigenous peoples,” she says. “But the reality is … not a single project that has ever been proposed in the Alberta tar sands has ever been denied.”