Pacific Climate Warriors Speak at Climate Strike

Teaching Activity Draft. By Matt Reed and Tim Swinehart. 2019.
Students learn the names and stories of dozens of climate justice activists.

Article. By Bill Bigelow.
The story of how teachers, parents, and students in Portland, Oregon organized to demand that climate change be taught honestly and to pass a climate justice resolution.

Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O’Neill and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
A role play on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.

Article. By Moé Yonamine. Rethinking Schools, Summer, 2019.
A high school ethnic studies teacher describes how students in the Pacific Island Club used poetry to refocus the narrative surrounding climate justice onto frontline communities.

Poetry. By Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. 2017. 90 pages.
Poetry reveals the traumas of colonialism, racism, forced migration, the legacy of American nuclear testing, and the impending threats of climate change.

Film clip. Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. Various years.
Video poems by a Marshallese artist show the injustices and harm of environmental racism, nuclear weapons, and climate change around the world.

The climate justice resolution passed on May 17, 2016, by Portland, Oregon’s school board was the country’s first such comprehensive resolution. Portland’s Educating for Climate Justice, the organization that initiated this effort, offers some thoughts on what contributed to this successful effort as well as some of the things that they’d do differently were they starting over.