Indigenous Activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim Receives This Year’s Jolli Humanitarian Award
Photo Courtesy of WIkimedia Commons
Indigenous activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim spoke to Upper School students on February 16th.
This school year, when students walk toward the 9/10 building, they will see a placard above the entrance bearing the name “Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim.” Ibrahim, an activist for environmental justice, won this year’s Jolli Humanitarian Award. As an Indigenous woman, she shared her unique perspective on climate change with members of the Upper School during an assembly on February 16th.
Each year, tenth graders are given the opportunity to research a humanitarian whose message speaks to them, and then nominate the individual for Riverdale’s annual Jolli Humanitarian Award. According to Dean of Faculty Mr. Ricky Lapidus, the faculty advisor who oversees this award, “students present their nominee for the award in the winter in front of their classmates, and together, they decide whom they think should be the victor.” When juniors Kai and Lea Hostetter-Habib were in the tenth grade, they nominated Ms. Ibraham, and the rest of their class voted to grant her the award.
Lucia Zambetti / Riverdale Review
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim’s name will remain atop all entrances of the 9/10 building until next year.
When the Hostetter-Habibs started researching activists to nominate for the award, they were immediately drawn to Ibrahim. They wanted to choose somebody who works to spread awareness about environmental justice because they believe that the next ten years will be crucial for the fight against climate change. Lea recognizes that “people say this every ten years,” but she thought that “the urgency is clearer now than ever before and the moment is now to take action. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim can inspire us to meet this moment.” Kai felt that Ibrahim was the perfect messenger because “she is an advocate for everybody, whether it be women, Indigenous people, or young people, as Ibrahim started her climate activism when she was only 16 or 17 years old.” When they contacted Ibrahim over the summer, she responded joyfully about the opportunity to speak with the Riverdale community.
During the assembly, Ibrahim described the devastating toll climate change has had on her Mbororo tribe, which is spread across several nations in the Gulf of Guinea region of Africa. The Mboro tribe live in pastoral communities and are nomads who search for water sources. Her community does not have the infrastructure or the financial resources to deal with the impacts of climate change that have hit them harshly.
In the region of Chad where Ibrahim was born, there are no hospitals, marketplaces, or schools. In the summer, people in this region have to deal with sweltering heat, up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, in addition to storms that are becoming more frequent. Ibrahim explained that this combination “results in greater food insecurity, as people cannot [farm] in the heat...[and] an increase in homelessness because [there is not the housing infrastructure] for extreme weather.” The crushing poverty that the climate crisis exacerbates has resulted in desperation among Indigenous populations. Terrorists in the Sahel region of Africa exploit this desperation to recruit more men to violent causes.
Additionally, the water source of Ibrahim’s community, Lake Chad, is rapidly shrinking. Lake Chad used to be the fifth largest water source in the region. When Ibrahim’s mother was born in 1960, Lake Chad was 25,000 square kilometers, but now it is only 10,000 square kilometers. This is one example of how climate change has prompted more conflicts between different tribes, as they fight over vital resources such as water.
These struggles amongst Indigenous communities motivated Ibrahim to act by using her unique understanding of nature as an Indigenous woman. At the beginning of her speech to the Upper School, Ibrahim summed up her message by saying, “Indigenous people are the victims of climate change, but we are also the solution.” Instead of looking on an app to predict the weather, members of her Indigenous community can observe the wind direction and bird migrations. Their ancestors taught them to measure the movement of insects to determine whether it will rain in the next few hours. The Indigenous people in her community also search for patterns in animal reproduction, which informs them of the climate for the next year.
Ibrahim has used this knowledge in her role as an Indigenous envoy to the Paris Climate Accords and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development goals as they pertain to climate change. She expressed that it was “difficult to get [her] voice out as an African Indigenous woman from an underserved community, so [she] spoke [her] truths louder.” Ibrahim urges members of the Riverdale community to do their part to combat climate change by recognizing the distinct ways in which it affects Indigenous people and ensuring that they are given a seat at the global table to fight it. She encourages students to foster discussions about climate change that include the Indigenous experience and to share these dialogues with their elected representatives.
