Colonization, climate change, and indigenous health from Algiers to Acre

Colonization, climate change, and indigenous health: from Algiers to Acre

Reda SadkiGlobal health

A familiar diagnosis

I sat in a conference hall in Rio Branco, Acre State, Brazil.

My mind was in a sanatorium of Algeria.

This was where my mother was sent as a girl.

They told her she got tuberculosis because she was an “indigène musulman”.

In 1938, the year of my mother’s birth and after over a century of colonization, about 5 out of every 100 Algerian people got infected with tuberculosis each year.

French colonial reports show that Algerians died from tuberculosis at much higher rates than French settlers.

They claimed the disease was endemic due to the supposed inferiority of our people.

And that she was going to die.

Colonialism is a liar.

She survived.

And it took less than eight years for an independent Algeria, free of the scourge of colonialism, to eradicate the scourge of TB.

Listening to the leaders at Brazil’s First National Seminar on Indigenous Health and Climate Change, I heard that same lie being dismantled.

The body of the territory, the body of the people

I listened.

I heard a diagnosis specific to their lands and histories, and recognized a familiar pattern.

The territory is a living body, they said.

When it is sick, we are sick.

Ceiça Pitaguary is an indigenous leader and activist from the Pitaguary people in Brazil.

The crisis, she xplained, is a daily reality of “prolonged droughts, devastating floods, intense storms, and the rise in temperatures” that represents “real losses experienced in the body and on the territory”.

This is a wound with many layers.

There are the physical symptoms an epidemiologist would recognize: respiratory illnesses from fire and waterborne diseases from floods.

But the deeper sickness that speakers diagnosed, one after another, is a systemic decay.

I listened as Wallace Apurinã stated that when the floods come, “traditional medicine, which is such an important and fundamental knowledge for our subsistence… this ends”.

It is a crisis that creates what Elisa Pankararu named a “collective sadness”.

“Our people are sad,” she said, because the world is in imbalance.

This is a spiritual wound, like the one Juliana Tupinikim described.

She said the Krenak people lost not just a river to a mining disaster, but “fundamental elements of their spirituality and cultural identity”.

The crisis, Gemina Shanenawá insisted, is not abstract.

“It has a face, a name, and a territory: the face of Indigenous women”.

She gave voice to their struggle: “‘I lost everything, I lost my house, I lost my pigs, my chickens. And now? What am I going to do?’”.

The architecture of failure

There is a pathogen worse than fossil fuel.

It is colonialism.

I recognized its stench in the testimony of the leaders.

It is a system designed to fail its most vulnerable.

Weibe Tapeba, Brazil’s Secretary of Indigenous Health, described the paralysis.

“Today, our Indigenous territories are not understood as federal units,” he said.

This means that they are unable to issue crucial decrees themselves, which severely hinders their ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from increasingly frequent catastrophic events.

“We do not have the autonomy to issue such a decree ourselves”.

This intentional powerlessness leaves communities exposed.

It creates the chain reaction that researcher Renata Gracie detailed in the Yanomami territory, where illegal mining leads directly to “an enormous increment in the occurrence of malaria, trachoma, measles, tuberculosis, malnutrition”.

The state’s response—culturally inappropriate food baskets were one example I heard—is changing.

It was impressive to see how government, with leadership from Tapeba and others, engages in meaningful, open dialogue by and for indigenous communities.

What you call anecdote, we call ancestral science

An invisible but profound violence of colonization is the dismissal of a people’s way of knowing.

Your science is ’data’.

Ours is ’folklore’.

The entire seminar was a rebellion against this lie.

In my own talk, I spoke about how health workers’ expertise – what they know because they are there every day – is often devalued as mere “anecdote”.

Putira Sacuena provided the most powerful rebuttal.

She spoke of a small frog in the Xingu territory.

“We stopped hearing its sound in the territory”, she explained.

The frog’s silence predicted the rise in respiratory illness and diarrhea.

She said: this is ancestral science.

It is a signal from a highly sophisticated, multi-generational system of environmental monitoring.

Our existing systems do not just miss this data.

They are structurally incapable of recognizing it as data in the first place.

The challenge, then, is to begin the work of unlearning the colonial biases that prevent us from seeing the knowledge that is right in front of us.

It requires us to abandon the “high, hard ground” of our self-referential expertise.

The fight for health here is, more than we realized, a fight for cognitive justice, a demand that such knowledge be seen not as a cultural artifact, but as essential data.

As Ceiça Pitaguary declared, “The fight against the climate crisis will not be won without Indigenous peoples”.

That is not a political slogan.

It is a vital, scientific truth of our time.

It demands that we, in our institutions and our fields of practice, dismantle the systems that are causing this devastation.

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Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025