A nonprofit that focuses on working with Indigenous people to support and protect their territories attended its first Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture this year.
Nia Tero was founded in 2017 and co-hosted an event at the festival. The group prescreened a film about Rapa Nui's native people and their cultural survival.
The nonprofit works with a variety of different initiatives and provides direct funding via grants and contracts to different Indigenous organizations.
"The work we're doing at Nia Tero is really about supporting Indigenous communities to do what they need to, to be able to remain in their homelands, to be able to be active guardians, caretakers of the land and sea and each other," said Nia Tero Chief Strategy and External Relations Officer ʻAulani Wilhelm.
Additionally, the group also focuses on the impacts that climate change has on different communities.
"Climate change is a symptom, not a cause," said Justice Joseph Williams, who is a board member at Nia Tero.
"This is the great distinction between, to use the cliché, the way of the colonizer is against the way of the colonized. At Nia Tero, we use this term guardianship, ocean guardianship, ocean kinship, land guardianship. We spend all of our energy, all of the resources we can get from rich people to be able to transfer to Indigenous peoples to assist them to perform their obligations of guardianship in their territories, their oceans and their lands," Williams said.
To learn more about the nonprofit, click here.
This interview aired on The Conversation on June 17, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
