I spoke to the man helping draft the Green New Deal – the most radically progressive environmental and economic policy the US has seen in decades – about identity, climate justice, and hope for the future.
By Eric Holthaus
At 26, Julian Brave NoiseCat has already grappled with a range of human experiences wider than many people will know in a lifetime.
“There was a memorable moment when he was maybe 11 or 12,” recalls NoiseCat’s mother, Alex Roddy. “We were in a drive-by shooting on the baseball field. Truly, we were. The bullet went right behind me and right past his coach’s ear, and I was shoving the kids in the car.”
Growing up with a single mother in Oakland, NoiseCat also spent stretches of his childhood dip-netting and drying salmon with family in the Secwepemc and St’at’imc territories in British Columbia, and travelled and competed on the powwow circuit before attending Columbia University and Oxford.
It’s the kind of childhood experience that might have left other kids reeling with confusion, guilt or shame. Not NoiseCat.
Roddy says her son has always known who he is: “How he formulated his identity as a child was very unusual.” As a boy, while other kids were playing video games, she had to stop NoiseCat watching – for the umpteenth time – a video series called 500 Nations. “I mean, he was five. It was a history series on public television, a box set, that chronicled the history of native people on the continent. He was, as a child, literally obsessed with it.”
As I talk with Roddy, the electricity is out – an intentional shut-off by PG&E, California’s largest private utility company. These power outages have become a common and controversial occurrence as the threat of large-scale wildfires grows due to drought and deferred maintenance. The company was forced to declare bankruptcy after its power lines were linked to dozens of fires in recent years, including the horrific Camp Fire which razed most of the town of Paradise – the worst wildfire disaster in the history of California.
NoiseCat’s childhood TV viewing grew into a devotion of the stories of his heritage and an understanding of his place in thousands of years of community-building, genocide, and spiritual traditions. According to his mother, he felt “some indignation ... for what had transpired and how the people he came from had been treated”, but their stories helped him to “put together the world in a way that could explain the past and look forward to the future”.
At this formative age, a future prime mover of the Green New Deal developed “a notion that there was another way to live”.
An Architect of the Green New Deal
For decades, the world has been under the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Our businesses have become deluded by the illusion of eternal economic growth on a finite planet for so long that we’ve lost track of the whole point of civilisation: to make each other’s lives better.
And still, carbon emissions keep rising. For decades, almost nothing the mainstream environmental movement has done to counter this trend has worked. It’s absolutely clear that we are not prepared for this. Now we need to rethink everything. It may be flippant to say so, but NoiseCat seems perfectly suited for the job.
NoiseCat explains how he fits in: “I have had the experience of both getting a scholarship to study in the United Kingdom and of bailing my own father out of jail. Both of those things have happened in my life. It shaped the lives of my family, my father, and my own. But I had an opportunity to not be consumed by that ongoing reality … I think I have an imperative to do something.”
As one of the architects helping to put together the Green New Deal – a set of policy ideas that puts justice and equity at the centre of climate action – NoiseCat is hoping to change the course of not only American history, but world history.
Please continue this interview here: https://thecorrespondent.com/152/meet-julian-brave-noisecat-the-26-year-old-shaping-us-climate-policy/3466057672-40a9042f
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