In Thomas Cole's painting "The Oxbow,"
I see this dichotomy
between wilderness and development.
I think that he is really calling out the fact
that our way of developing, our way of improving the land
or making it profitable was pushing nature out,
indigenous people out.
I noticed that he's sitting on the wilderness side
and that makes me think that he is seeing
a certain value in it,
a certain value in keeping it, you know, wild.
My name is Xiye Bastida and I'm a climate activist.
I'm originally from Mexico, from a small town
called San Pedro Tultepec,
and there I was raised
with this cosmology and philosophy of reciprocity
in terms of yes, taking from land, but also giving back,
which is very common in indigenous culture.
There's a lot of things that happened in my town.
There's a lot of factories there that put all
of their waste into our river.
So we not only had all
of these different little glimpses of what it looks
like to be a victim of environmental injustice,
in 2015 my hometown experience flooding.
So you can really see how the water took over everywhere.
This is like the shallower part too.
People could still walk on it,
but there were parts where it was really bad.
And this is my mom right here on the side.
That was just something that showed me
that the climate crisis is not going to happen
at the end of the century, that it was already happening.
We were already seeing the effects of it.
And I really came to understand the social injustices
of not only my town, but really the world,
when I moved to the United States.
Looking at Cole's painting, you see the wilderness side
and you see it as empty, but that is not how it should be
and how it actually is or was.
Obviously at this time,
the Indian Removal Act was happening.
And this Act caused a lot of suffering,
caused a lot of pain.
It pushed indigenous peoples
into reservations that were areas
that they had no knowledge of, no connection to,
and also they were the most infertile areas,
so they couldn't even really practice their traditions.
And so what happens with these people who are there?
Who is standing up for them?
There's this really beautiful saying that my dad taught me
which is common to indigenous communities
all around the world that says we need to look at the wisdom
of the past seven generations to ensure the stability
of the future seven generations.
And we haven't been practicing that.
I asked myself like we all do at some point,
what can I do to address this issue?
So I started to organize the first global climate
strike in my school.
I was not yet a citywide organizer.
And I started to just talk to people about the strike,
about what it meant, about the importance of showing
up and started printing posters,
putting them everywhere.
The next day they would all be taken down.
So I would put them up again.
The day of the strike,
I got 600 of my classmates to walk out.
That first global climate strike,
we had 5,000 kids in New York and this first strike
we didn't have any parents, any teachers.
It was just kids.
And it was so amazing.
But the most important thing was that a lot
of the times people don't have avenues to act.
So when you give them avenues to act
they will show up.
Just this factor
of having solidarity and knowing that we're fighting
for something bigger is enough for us to feel
like we're in this movement together.
My dad still speaks the Otomi language
and I'm learning.
One of my favorite things is that the word for skin,
for our skin is the same
as the word for the outer layer of the Earth.
So the message there is that if you hurt Mother Earth,
you're actually hurting yourself.
And that type of relationship in language,
in the deepness of tradition and culture
really shows a lot of the things
that we need to actually solve
the climate crisis is indigenous knowledge.
We need for all
of us to adopt that type of thinking of reciprocity.
And we need to learn how to respect Mother Earth
and respect each other through that.