Abby Reyes: Engaging ‘the slow work’ in the face of urgency and crises (Ep450)
“Maintaining the still point, even in the face of urgency or crisis, is, for me, an active daily practice... My community and I do a lot of somatic practice to make sure we’re tapping into a deeper source, a stronger current than the urgency.”
In 1999, Terence Unity Freitas, the partner of our guest today, along with two other Indigenous activists Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa and Laheʻenaʻe Gay, were murdered in Colombia after they left the U’wa territory, where they were visiting to support the Indigenous U’wa community.
Now, in one of her first interviews about her new book, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, Abby Reyes is here to share her story — and her journey of navigating grief and healing while fighting for truth and accountability from Big Oil.
How has the U’wa community been resisting against colonial-capitalist interests? What does it mean to depart from urgency culture and to tap into the “slow work” of deep, social change? And what is the relationship between engaging in the “inner” and “outer” work of systemic transformation?
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About our guest:
Abby Reyes champions community climate solutions. She started out conducting rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian Indigenous U’wa pueblo in their fight against big oil – an experience at the heart of her first book, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: “The Storm” by Adrian Sutherland
Episode artwork by Lorena Arévalo
Dive deeper:
Truth Demands, a book by Abby Reyes
Read more about the pueblo U’wa in Colombia here.
Find out more about the recent Victory for the U’wa Nation: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights Holds Colombia Accountable for Violating Indigenous Rights for the First Time
Learn more about the work and lives of activists Ingrid Washinawatok, Laheʻenaʻe Gay and Terence Freitas
Learn more about social change worker Fran Peavey
Learning True Love, a book by Sister Chân Không.
Discover more about the Accompaniment of Pueblo U’wa on Abby’s website
Learn more about EarthRights International
Expand your lenses:
Independent media is more important than ever! Please consider joining our Patreon or making a one-time donation today.
interview transcript
Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.
Abby Reyes: After college, I went to work in the Philippines, my father's homeland. There, I learned about environmental legal assistance—doing rural legal assistance with fishing and farming communities, protecting their lands and waters. Some of those communities were Indigenous. And one of those communities was the Tagbanwa. They live in the northern part of this tiny island in the South China Sea, near the islands of Palawan.
And at a certain point when I was there, the oil companies—Shell and Occidental—came knocking, so to speak. They wanted to build a gas pipeline through the ancestral fishing waters of this community. The community asked our organization for help. They wanted to know what these companies were doing with Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, how they were interacting with the communities.
So when I came back to the United States, I did that research, and that's how I met Terence. He was working with a similarly situated community in Colombia. And that community is called Pueblo U'wa. They live in the northeastern part of Colombia on the border with Venezuela in a cloud forest on a set of rivers. And they are an Indigenous community of about 11,000 people. They still maintain very traditional ways of life about their waters and their lands.
For the U’wa, oil is the blood of the Earth, our Mother, and therefore we need to keep oil in the ground.
We can't take the oil out of the Earth, or we will have a catastrophe. Much like the climate catastrophes that we are living through today. For the U’wa people, the purpose of human life is to maintain the balance or the equilibrium between the world above and the world below. When the multinational oil companies began encroaching on their lands in the 1980s, by the 1990s, the U’wa community was threatening to commit mass suicide to avoid further oil exploitation.
We knew that this was not an empty threat because at the height of Spanish colonization, to avoid enslavement, many U’wa families did throw themselves collectively off a cliff. So many bodies accumulated at the bottom of the cliff that it changed the course of the river below. And with the threat of more oil extraction in more contemporary times, the U'wa pueblo knew and thought of the oil pipelines as magnets for armed violence. They didn't want that.
They sought help from national groups within Colombia and international groups here in the United States and across Europe and Australia. That's when Terence and later Ingrid Washinawatok and Laheʻenaʻe Gay became involved. Terence helped coordinate an international pressure campaign against those oil companies. And a few years into that work, Ingrid Lahe, and Terence began to walk alongside oil leaders in pursuit of their goals to support Indigenous education—that was the specialty of Ingrid and Lahe.
After that first trip altogether in the territory on their way to the airport, coming home, they were kidnapped. Eight days later, their bodies were found by a farmer in a cow field just across the Venezuelan border. So I walked through the gates of these murders into my adulthood. And I wrote this book to share what I learned.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing about your background and the backdrop of what happened. Of course, we're going to dive deeper into a lot of this. And I know it's shared as a summary here in this moment, but it was years ago. So much happened during this time. It might be summarized as a sentence, but so much is encapsulated there that, of course, you wrote a whole book on it. But I know even the book doesn't truly encapsulate everything.
There's so much in the book that I would encourage our listeners to dive into because there's so much to it. I dove deep into it yesterday and today, as I shared before our call, and just the emotional aspects about the work, the solidarity work, the political context. There are so many layers to this, so I appreciate how you beautifully translated your story into this book to share with the world.
As you supported Terence's solidarity work from behind the scenes, you noted how, at a certain point, his approach started shifting from reactivity to proactivity and how the U’wa leadership was calling for more holistic approaches. Can you elaborate on what they meant by “more holistic approaches” and how the solidarity work at the time might not have been fully aligned or not caught up to that yet?
Abby Reyes: Yes. I think you're talking about a section of the book at the beginning, in which I'm reflecting on what I just anecdotally call “the slow work”. The slow work versus the fast work. And perhaps I should just read a couple of paragraphs that describe this concept, and then I'll tell a story.
[Abby begins reading an extract from the book]: Back in 1999, which is when the murders took place, many of us were still learning how to move in relation to the slow work.
The cultural norms and protocols that informed mainstream international environmentalism did not match the depth called for by the U’wa.
We said “Yes”, without comprehending that the U’wa communities asked more of us than reactivity. Yes, there was an urgent threat. But there was more. They were asking us to join them in maintaining the balance between the world above and the world below. We heard that call and lifted it up.
Our communiques started to tap into this rich language and context. But we did not yet comprehend that to walk alongside Pueblo U’wa as they requested could mean changing the ways we walked. Terence foresaw this and sought more than a shift from the anti-oil campaign to a community-driven development agenda. He sought more than a shift in our ways of seeing. He sought a shift in our ways of being.
This shift would entail comprehending and embodying what T.S. Eliot called the still point: “Except for the still point, there would be no dance and there is only the dance.” The still point is both the essential state of being and the container that enables us to sustain the dance of life. If we are to transform society in a manner that restores the equilibrium, we need to figure out how to sustain the still point.
And what I can say about it is that a lot of the people involved with supporting the U’wa community in many different ways at that time and for the decades thereafter have done a lot of work to figure out the still point. There's an entire sector in progressive social movements that arose pretty much right at the same time to draw upon multiple, ancient, and diverse traditions of contemplative work to inform how we go about pursuing social change work.
So I'm very proud to say that work has deepened over the decades. For me, this work is alive right now.
Maintaining the still point, even in the face of urgency or crisis, is, for me, an active daily practice.
The allure of urgency, of responding at the intensity of the harms that are coming our way, is strong. And so my community and I do a lot of physical somatic practice with each other to make sure that we’re tapping into a deeper source, a deeper current, a stronger current than the urgency.
So, for example, coming here today is difficult for me. It's difficult for me to talk about this set of facts, this set of events, even though I feel a duty to. I think that the difficulty arose right in the days right after we found the bodies in 1999. It was early March. I was in New York City, as were the families of the other two people whose lives were taken at the same time. We were all working out of a central command center during the kidnapping, working 24/7 for their release.
When the bodies were found, I think the next day or the day after, Amy Goodman invited me and some others onto “Democracy Now!”, the radio program. And I went because, of course, it was urgent and it was important, but it was the last place that I needed to be in that moment. I went in depleted, and I left more depleted. And I often wondered, where were the grown-ups? We have to figure out how to do that with and for each other in the moment.
Talking with you is one of the only times since then that I've talked and agreed to talk on the air. And I'm eager for it and I'm excited about it, but the way that I have arrived there is through the cultivation of the slow work. I needed to figure out a way for us to talk, Kamea, in a way that would give me as much as it's taking from me. And I arrived there basically through the somatic practices that helped me remember the true nature of what we're doing.
My voice is a conduit for voices who can’t speak up.
That sense of being in alignment and part of a long lineage of ancestors, people here still on the earth and people who have already passed and communities that are working for social transformation around the globe, is what can make it possible, at least for me—to have the courage to step into the flow and to put voice out there in these times when it's urgently needed.
Kamea Chayne: I'm honored to get to be the first one to speak with you about this after a while, and I want to continue to honor how you would best like to co-lead this conversation for the rest of our shared time together here.
Something that came up for me, or that your response reminded me of, is Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s quote, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.” And of course, that represents a lot of what you just shared. And it invites me to think about the difference between reacting versus responding.
I know this is a question that, specifically, one of our listeners has brought up before. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. And also, what is at stake if we don't take a pause and if we don't slow down and mimic the forms which the crises are happening in our responses as well?
Abby Reyes: I love the question “What is at stake?” What is at stake if things keep going the way they are is what my mentor Fran Peavey, a social change worker from San Francisco, would call a strategic question. It can be a beginning question that informs change, that in turn can then inform action.
So, just to tell a story from this very set of events described in Truth Demands, the book, what was at stake were people's lives. What was at stake was the ability for an Indigenous community to assert its right to self-determination over lands and waters that they had managed and been about for millennia.
When we heeded their call to stop this LA-based oil company from continuing to explore for oil on their ancestral lands, when we heeded their call to urge the Colombian government to stop that incursion without free prior and informed consent by the Indigenous community, we were doing so in ways that met that call and in ways that we knew how to do at the time. Much of it was in reactivity, and that felt necessary. The more time that
Terence spent time in various U’wa communities on the eastern border of Colombia, and the more he came to understand that for them, the pressure campaign against the oil company was part of a much broader endeavor and vision they had for community development solutions. Not only to energy, but also to management of water, forests, education, social services, and health.
The responsive dance to those visions put forth by U’wa leaders is something that Terence and his colleagues Ingrid Washinawatok and Laheʻenaʻe Gay, went to Colombia in February of 1999 to pursue. They went there to work with U’wa women and to listen to U’wa elders—and women in particular—talk about their visions for reclaiming Indigenous education there and what that could look like if done well.
What we had in this set of activities was a situation in which the pressure campaign against the oil companies and the violence coming from the Colombian public forces and other extralegal armed actors needed to be reactive to protect life. The deeper strategies were being pursued in the slow ways, in the right way, at the very same time, in this corner of Colombia in which the Civil War had arrived. And in which the existing oil pipelines were already in a place where violence, armed violence, intensified.
When Terence and Ingrid and Lahe were killed, there was a sense that the slow work had been clipped. And what ended up happening for decades was that the work just went underground. It went underground and we have emerged now on the other side of it, in which the young U’wa people who have been trained and who have indeed benefited from U’wa-rooted education and the education of the dominant systems within Colombia—those young people are now leading in the community as social workers, lawyers, mayors, teachers and as spiritual leaders in training.
Over these decades, the legal work that many people, including Terence, began in the late 1990s has come to fruition.
There’s an instance now, where just last month, in December 2024, after a 25-year legal case, the U’wa won in the highest human rights court in the hemisphere. The U’wa won protections not only for their community, but also for all Indigenous people across Latin America. It's a beautiful story in which the slow work has prevailed. The cost of the rapid response work was that we did indeed win.
Kamea Chayne: You started touching on the legal system here. Something that I'm always curious to dive deeper into is the “how” of systemic change. And I know you had chosen the path of becoming a lawyer to learn ways to navigate and work within these political systems while supporting Indigenous land defense and resistance against extraction.
And at the same time, in the book, you also write about the example of how even with the colonial legal paperwork of the Spanish recognizing the territory as their sovereign lands, at one point, the Nation State legal system of Colombia overwrote that to continue standing on the side of oil corporations looking to expand their operations.
How do you grapple with and think through the limitations of trying to work from within when ultimately these laws and the interpretations of them, and even the enforcement of them, are still being defined by Nation State entities with their biased interests, worldviews, and cosmologies?
Abby Reyes: Well, that is exactly why the story of pueblo U’wa is so exciting. I will go back a little bit for the benefit of the listeners to refer to what you have just said.
In this period, in the year following the 1999 murders, about which this book, Truth Demands, is based, the U’wa people faced severe violence from armed actors—both from their government and from extralegal armed actors in the region, because they were putting their bodies on the line. They were blocking the road to the oil drill site that was in their ancestral territory and their title territory.
[The U’wa] had to block the road because the domestic legal channels we had been pursuing with the U’wa to assert their rights within Colombia had failed for the kinds of reasons that you were just saying. So, direct action was their option. And in the course of putting bodies on the line and being met with all sorts of manipulation and violence against those bodies, there was a certain point at which soldiers were pushing U’wa women and children off the road, and their only option was to jump into the river. So moms were jumping into the river, some of whom had their kids, their babies, tied to their backs. And this led to more deaths.
When the news hit regionally there in Colombia of the death of one baby girl during that period of violence, out of the woodwork came a civil servant—who remains anonymous—to remind U’wa leadership about the existence of what we were calling at that time the "Royal Land Deeds” issued to pueblo U’wa by the King of Spain before the formation of the Colombian nation state.
The Royal Land Deeds demarcate and show the vast extent of U’wa territory within Colombia. And the U’wa leaders have always known about the existence of the Royal Land Deeds and had, over generations, taken such good care of them that they fell out of the focus of contemporary U’wa leadership. So when alerted to the continued existence of the actual pieces of paper of the Royal Land Deeds, we were then able to mobilize around that.
And what you were just referring to is the fact that we raised that claim, the claim being that the U’wa people have been here since before the formation of this nation state.
When the Nation-state claims the right to the subsoil of any state lands, that does not apply to the U’wa pueblo. We’ve got artifacts that demonstrate this relationship between our community and this territory.
And the Colombian government punted when presented with that argument for decades.
Just in December 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights said, “No, you can't punt, you've got to address this issue. That court also, for the first time, held Colombia accountable for violating Indigenous rights in a ruling that sets a precedent for the protection of Indigenous peoples, not only in Colombia but across Latin America.
The cool thing about this case is that the court, in the context of the global climate crisis, the ruling itself highlights the importance of ancestral knowledge in protecting fragile ecosystems. It also emphasizes the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination in the face of projects that threaten their existence. The ruling itself also underscores the urgency of rethinking development, to base it on respect for human rights, environmental justice, and sustainability. That is a tide turning from within the system.
My son and I were sitting there at the hearing, which took place in the spring of 2023 in Santiago, Chile, where the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was convening at this time, it was to hear Caso U’wa, which is what this case is called. This was right at a moment when the government of Colombia, in defense against what the U’wa were saying, was trying to make the case that oil development is just a balancing of interests among stakeholders, and for our economic survival, we need to be able to do this. That's what the expert witness for the government was saying.
My son whispered to me, “Mom, couldn't the government of Colombia just put on a witness who agreed with the U’wa?” And then the lawyer for the government could just say, “Yeah, well, actually they're right”. “And maybe they'd all get fired, but couldn't that happen?” And I had to laugh and respond with love and compassion to my 13-year-old and say, “Yeah, we're on that cusp. May it be so.” And indeed, the ruling came out in the favor of pueblo U’wa, much along those lines.
Kaméa Chayne: I want to ease into the process of healing. So I know a significant part of this journey for you was accompanied by Ram Dass's guidance and teachings. And part of that was going from the both/and of doing the inner work and inner healing, while also going back to fighting the systems through legal work and more tangible work.
And as you kind of look back now, how would you reflect on going from that both/and approach to later learning the integration of the heart and mind? How has that supported you in arriving where you are today?
Abby Reyes: This book, Truth Demands, is a deeply personal account of that navigation. The navigation between inner and outer work and the balance thereof. It’s also a universal story about navigating grief, uncovering the threads that connect us, to the Earth, and the collective power of community. It's my effort in this book both to possibly be a salve for anyone on a healing journey from trauma and to be helpful reading for the burgeoning climate activists, or those of us coming into greater awareness of our ecological selves.
These elements of our lives go hand in hand. If you think about what it is that we feel sorrow about, the flip side of sorrow is our love. What is it that we feel angry about? The flip side of the anger is our demand for justice. The flip side of our fear, the antidote or connector to fear, is courage.
The feeling of emptiness when overwhelmed by the contemporary crises can, when cultivated, be equanimity, or perhaps, space to make the leaps we need to take.
I don't know many people who can dedicate themselves to working for social transformation, meaning deep and lasting fundamental changes in how we organize society, who can sustain themselves in that work, without tending to the interrelationship between the inner and the outer.
I'm inspired, in fact, by work that's happening now that is helping us understand that to get at the root causes of the crises that are interlocking in democracy, climate, economic justice, et cetera, we would do well to turn to cultural and ways of being work. To the arts, to the fiction, to the visioning that is rich and replete in our culture for helping us see into the future, for helping us remember from our deepest roots what the future for seven generations out of children could be and what it feels like and looks like to walk alongside other humans with our eye on that far horizon.
That cultural, creative work is part and parcel. We cannot be on Capitol Hill speaking meaningfully to the urgency without the sustenance, strength, and direction of those deeper sources. As you know, because of the kind of work that you do and the kind of listening that you do, those guides abound in our society.
Kaméa Chayne: I think a lot of this vital work is less visible. It's less sensationalizable. It's kind of like “shifting the inner and undercurrents of our being”. The vital work that is not necessarily visible or glamorous, but is so central.
Abby Reyes: Right, and that's why I'm so excited to be part of the set of people who are walking alongside Pueblo U’wa right now, as they have just, 30 years in, finally come to this momentous recognition from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Because it is this moment where we can see those two systems touching each other, in which the visionary and rooted ancestral assertion of our interdependence and the cutting through the illusion of separation between humans and the natural world, where that mindset has prevailed and pervaded into a judicial decision.
And that's happening more and more. It's happening in lower-level tribal courts. We're seeing that. It's happening even at district courts. It's happening in state judicial systems in different parts of the world as people begin to go ahead and get creative in asserting the rights of rivers, the rights of mountains, the rights of forests. It's happening. Pueblo U’wa’s story is just the latest installment of that, and one that is taking place at a fairly large scale.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much doom and gloom, and of course, the resistance of a lot of communities all over the globe continues. But I feel very inspired hearing this significant moment, and I'm excited to dive deeper into learning the details of this case and all of the different moving pieces that it took for it to bring about this materialized result.
I just want to share my deepest gratitude to you again for sharing your story. It moved me to the depths and parts of me that I haven't felt moved in a while. There are also just so many lessons that we can learn from personal growth and healing, to building community, to social organizing, to global solidarity work. Deepest gratitude to you again for all of this.
With all these things in mind, as you take a pulse on where we are collectively today, knowing the immense loss that a lot of us are already having to grieve with a planet in crisis, and more loss and pain that we will continue to have to metabolize while we keep working on various forms of climate, social, environmental activism and solidarity work—what are some other guidance from your journey of connecting personal healing to collective healing that you'd like to offer here?
Abby Reyes: Thank you. I think what's important for me to share is that this book, Truth Demands, is a love story at its core. It's a book that is dedicated, not only to Terence, but as a tribute to Ingrid Washinawatok and Laheʻenaʻe Gay. It's a love letter to the U’wa community and to the Earth itself.
I was turning grief into resilience and, in some ways, love into action.
It feels important to me to highlight for listeners who Ingrid and Lahe were, the people who were accompanying Terence and who met the same fate when kidnapped and murdered while exiting U’wa territory so long ago.
Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa was a beloved Native North American leader from the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. Her inter-governmental work to protect Indigenous rights helped to seed many of the gains that Native communities here and abroad have achieved in recent years, including the establishment of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That was her work. It was so many people's work, and it was Ingrid's work.
And it's that declaration, for example, that gets evoked in a case like Caso U’wa—that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights just ruled upon to say, “Well, we've got to figure out what does this mean? What does free, prior, and informed consent mean, that is, a right of Indigenous communities to have and to give before having an extractive project be placed on their lands or in their waters?”
A lot of that work was advanced by Ingrid and her whole cohort of fellow Native, mostly women, leaders over the decades. Laheʻenaʻe Gay herself a Native woman from Hawai’i, was a renowned photographer and a leader in Indigenous education. They planted so many seeds for the work that is done today. And their work together with Terence, the sacrifices, the ultimate sacrifice that they made, they're not alone. They're extraordinary human beings, and they're not alone.
Earth rights defenders are being killed at a higher rate today than ever in history around the planet.
There are many protections set up for their defense. And many challenges remain in most of the places in which we see these contested battles over the resources we currently get from underneath the Earth to power our contemporary lifestyles.
So I wanted to highlight that for a broader context for our listeners. I think that my greatest hope is that this book may be of use as we collectively navigate the climate catastrophes that are already baked in, and as we figure out ways to dedicate ourselves to averting the worst. And as we co-create the solutions, we need to transform the problems at their root.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. As we're coming to a close for our main conversation, I want to leave space here as well for you to share anything else that is on your mind that you would like to share with our listeners.
Abby Reyes: An element of the story that we didn't talk about at all is that the reason that I wrote this book now is because about 20 years after the murders, Colombia invited me and the mother of Terence to become recognized as victims in Colombia's post-Civil War truth and recognition process.
So this is a tribunal in which the government of Colombia invited us to share with them our stories, share with them our questions, share with them what in English got translated to Truth Demands, what are our demands for the truth? So I wrote this book out as a witness to that process that I was going through with Terence's mom to articulate our truth demands.
And when I was doing that, I came to understand clearly that there's so much more that the truth demands of all of us right now in this moment of ecological collapse and social transformation. And so I wrote about that too. So what's on my mind to share with listeners indeed is an invitation to read this book as a way of letting oneself go ahead and get in touch with what we already know to be true. Which is that we've got a bunch of things that we need to change at the root.
[Musical intermission]
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately, or publications you follow?
Abby Reyes: The book I want to highlight is called Learning True Love. It's by Sister Chân Không. She's a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. It's about how she learned and practiced social change in Vietnam during the American War there.
It was the book that I carried around with me, dog-eared, for the first few years after the murders, because the way she explained this need to find a balance in the way that you've been asking me here during this last bit of our conversation. A balance between working in the world for peace, but in a way that is also from the root of peace inside of us. It's full of stories that were super instructive to me about how to do that daily during the intense years after the murders.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Abby Reyes: The Post-It note on my computer monitor right now just says fewer “F”s. And it doesn't mean give less “F”s about the issues that we all care about. It means give fewer “F”s about being perfect. Give fewer “F”s about having it all ready to go before you put yourself out there. Because we're not in that moment anymore. We can't hold off for that. Perfection is not part of this game right now. It's getting our voices out there.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Abby Reyes: Truly, my greatest source of inspiration is my colleagues in Santa Ana, California. Santa Ana is a mid-sized city outside of LA, full of really strong immigrant leadership. And the community organizations that I get to work with there are not only fighting the bad, but they're also building the new.
So worker-owned co-ops, community land trusts, urban farms for food sovereignty, infrastructure for mutual aid, and health equity-focused direct services. All of this in the context of building towards a community climate resilience center there—one of 11 being planned right now across the state of California, that are part of a network of similarly situated communities all across the United States. The work of building the new ie happening.
Don’t believe the headlines that we’re doomed. Work is happening in a culturally rooted and grounded way all over the country.
Kamea Chayne: Amazing. Well, Abby, thank you so much again for joining me on the show today. It's been an incredible honor to have you here. As we wrap up, where can our listeners go to learn more about your work and your book, and what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with?
Abby Reyes: Listeners can please go to abbyreyes.org. There's a page there called Accompaniment of Pueblo U’wa. You can find their links to learn about the U’wa community directly from them and to learn about how to be part of and to support Earth Rights International. This is where the work that I've been talking about to create the conditions for earth rights defenders to thrive is happening. So there are plenty of ways to get involved there.
My final words of wisdom would be only the ones that I need. Let's find our people and hold them tight. Let's let go of the notion that things are gonna stay the same because everything's changing. Let's go ahead and pack our go-bags, and let's make sure that our neighbors know how to do that too.