2006 Oak Fellow: Joan Omaming Carling

Joan Omaming Carling

Carling argues that combating climate change and achieving the SDGs cannot happen without the protection of indigenous peoples lands. “In Brazil,” for example, “their president is giving away the Amazon for mining, for ranchers, for logging, and even for business, eco-tourism. That’s a complete regression.”

Theme: Environmental Human Rights

In the fall of 2006, the Oak Institute welcomed Joan Omaming Carling of the Cordillera People’s Alliance.

Ms. Carling has been an activist and grassroots organizer in the Cordillera region of the Philippines for twenty years and is one of the foremost activists working on indigenous peoples rights and campaigning against dam and mining projects that are destructive to their communities.

Ms. Carling arrived in Maine in mid-August and was in residence during the fall semester. “At that time I was facing a serious threat to my life,” she said. “My colleagues had been killed, and I was completely stressed, getting burnt out because it’s not easy dealing with that kind of situation.” The fellowship came when she really needed a break. During the alliance’s campaign against mining, she said, none were built, which made the activists unpopular in some circles. “It [the fellowship] really helped me gain my balance a bit, but also strengthened further my commitment to human rights, also because the students were really warm, very interested in the issue.”

While at Colby, she taught one course that covered the human rights of the Filipino indigneous peoples in comparative perspective, examining communities’ struggles confronting environmental damage from large scale mining and dam operations. She returned to her work in the Philippines in mid-December.

At Colby, she found the students’ interest in human rights very inspiring. “I also started my activism as a youth, so it always gives me that hope that the young people will always nd their ways and means to contribute to shape their future,” she said, “and I felt that strongly also when I was at Colby.” Together with students, Carling visited indigenous people’s lands in Maine. Some Colby students later went to the Philippines for internships.

When she returned home, the situation had improved, enabling her to continue her work. In 2008 she moved to Thailand to work for the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, where she twice served as the secretary general. She has also been involved with the United Nations as an expert on indigenous people’s issues. In May 2014, the Foro Internacional de Mujeres Indígenas (International Indigenous Women’s Forum) awarded Joan its annual Leadership Award. She was also recently featured in this article in Cultural Survivor magazine. In 2017 she became the co-convenor of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group for Sustainable Development. In 2018 she was included in a list of alleged armed rebels and labelled as a terrorist by the Philippine government; she was cleared in January 2019. The very same year, she won the Champions of the Earth award from the United Nations, the organization’s highest environmental honor.
Recently, Carling was in Copenhagen, Denmark, for a conference on climate change and the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “The biggest crisis that we’re facing is climate change. And the biggest ambition that we have is sustainable development. But they are looking at both issues, not from the lens of human rights, and that is the danger because it’s again business as usual,” she said.

Carling argues that combating climate change and achieving the SDGs cannot happen without the protection of indigenous peoples lands. “In Brazil,” for example, “their president is giving away the Amazon for mining, for ranchers, for logging, and even for business, eco-tourism. That’s a complete regression.”

In India, she said, conservation organizations started a legal battle, going as far as the Supreme Court, to overturn the Forest Rights Act, which allowed indigenous people, the adivasi, to claim their land in protected forests. She said that those organizations believed that indigeneous people would destroy the forest. “I’m so mad at them, so mad,” she said about those organizations, because the Indian Supreme Court might decide on the eviction of two million people. “Two million, that’s what they call the biggest eviction in the name of conservation,” she said.