The United Nations celebrates the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on Sunday, Aug. 9. ToU participates in the UN Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which raises the visibility of Indigenous Peoples at the local, national and international level. As we mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, it is a fitting moment to look back at the Indigenous leaders who have shaped the Temple of Understanding’s Eco Justice for All series.
65th Anniversary and Hollister Awards
On November 8, 2025, the Temple of Understanding marked its 65th anniversary with a global interfaith summit. The evening was emceed by Roberto Múkaro Borrero, a longtime friend of the Temple who has also spoken at the UN through TOU’s CSW program alongside Betty Lyons, Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance. Borrero currently chairs the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ related body, the UN Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Also speaking that evening were Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Paula Horne — Paula is a Dakota Sisseton Wahpeton singer, artist, and lifelong advocate for Native rights who has helped organize World Peace and Prayer Day since 1996.
The evening honored the legacy of the Juliet Hollister Awards, with performers from the Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers taking part in the celebration. The group, made up of musicians, educators, and artisans from the Mashpee, Aquinnah, and Herring Pond Wampanoag communities, performs traditional eastern social songs and dances in traditional dress, accompanied by a water drum and handcrafted rattles, and is known for inviting audiences to dance alongside them rather than simply watch. They’ve performed at venues including Jacob’s Pillow, the JFK Library, and the Peabody Essex Museum, and have led the First Light Float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for three years running. Executive Director Alison Van Dyk described the anniversary as both a celebration of legacy and a call to action for the future.
Indigenous Voices from Australia and the Pacific on the Climate Crisis
September 28, 2023. Watch and read more
This dialogue gathered four leaders whose lives sit at the exact fault line where climate change meets cultural survival, the low lying islands and ancestral coastlines of the Pacific.
Kevin Aipopo (350.org, Samoa/USA) works at the intersection of Black American and Samoan identity, gender fluidity, and climate liberation.
Pastor Ray Minniecon, a descendant of the Kabi Kabi and Gureng Gureng nations of South East Queensland, has spent over 40 years building Indigenous ministries and institutions across Australia, from the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation to the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship of Australia. He cochairs Australia’s Indigenous Peoples Organizations.
Willy Missack, founder of Learn to Serve Vanuatu, works directly with his government’s climate negotiators at the UNFCCC on Loss and Damage.
Safaira Baba Tagivuni, Executive Director of Grace Trifam Ministry in Fiji, has spent two decades championing environmental stewardship across the Pacific through faith based community networks.
Women’s Leadership on Climate Change: Coastal Ecology and Native Wisdom
March 21, 2022, CSW66 Parallel Event. Read more
Held alongside the UN Commission on the Status of Women, this dialogue placed Native American women’s knowledge of land and water at the center of the conversation.
Theresa Dardar, a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe and President of the Lowlander Center, spoke to the lived reality of vanishing land in coastal Louisiana, one of the fastest disappearing coastlines on Earth.
Jamie Bissonette Lewey, Director of nkawadzowôgan: A Center for Healing and Transformation in Maine, moderated, holding space for diverse Native perspectives on survival and relationship to the natural world.
Dr. Riki Ott and Robin Hadlock Seeley, both scientists, grounded the conversation in oil spill recovery and seaweed ecosystem loss, in dialogue with Indigenous testimony.
Cosponsored by the United Religions Initiative, GreenFaith, Bioneers, and the UN Committee on the Rights of Indigenous People.
Messages from the Elders: Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2021
October 2021
Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations.
Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation and longtime advocate at the UN for Indigenous rights.
Grandmother Mona Polacca, President and CEO of the Turtle Island Project and representative of the Indigenous World Forum on Water and Peace, a coalition backed by 60 global organizations at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
FORUM 2020: Science, Spirituality, the Climate Emergency, and Our Future
October 16–17, 2020, held for TOU’s 60th anniversary. Read more
This two-day forum, presented with Marble Collegiate Church, brought together more than 40 international speakers and is where several of the Temple’s longtime Indigenous collaborators first joined TOU programming.
Chief Arvol Looking Horse opened the forum with a traditional prayer as 19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle for the Great Sioux Nation.
Chief Oren Lyons delivered a keynote address as Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan and Member Chief of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs and the Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Eda Zavala Lopez, an anthropologist, sociologist, and shaman of the Wari people of Peru, brought a message from the Amazon as Program Leader for Impact a Village and the Rainforest Action Network.
Grandmother Mona Polacca, of the Hopi, Havasupai, and Tewa Nations, delivered a message from the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers as President of the Turtle Island Project and a member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.
Lyla June, of Diné (Navajo) and Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) lineages, joined the Women in Leadership on the Environment panel, speaking from her background in environmental anthropology at Stanford and her work as co-founder of the Taos Peace and Reconciliation Council. She’s since become widely recognized nationally for her work on regenerative land stewardship and Indigenous food systems.
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, plant ecologist, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, also spoke as part of this women’s leadership series, drawing on her work as founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY-ESF.
TruthsGiving: Intergenerational Indigenous Women on Violence Then and Now
March 18, 2021, part of the 65th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW65). Read more
This session focused on the voices and experiences of Native American women confronting historical and contemporary violence — the toxic legacy of colonialism, eco-justice disparities, health inequalities and the epidemic of violence and murder suffered by Native women.
Samantha Maltais, Aquinnah Wampanoag, co-led the #MayflowersKill Campaign at Survival International and now sits on that organization’s U.S. Board of Directors.
Kisha James, Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota, is the granddaughter of Wamsutta Frank James, founder of the National Day of Mourning, and now co-leads its organizing as a youth organizer with United American Indians of New England.
Chief Clarissa Sabattis, RN, Tribal Chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians in Houlton, Maine, is a registered nurse who has also served as a public health consultant for tribes across the region.
Moderated by Jamie Bissonnette Lewey, Director of nkawadzowôgan: A Center for Healing and Transformation in Maine.
Youth Voices on Climate From Religious and Spiritual Perspectives
June 28, 2023. Read more
Alethea Phillips, an Indigenous and environmental rights activist from the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa and Lead Organizer of Native Youth Alliance, has spoken at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues about protecting Indigenous land from extractive industries and preserving Indigenous languages, and represented her tribal nation as part of SustainUS’s first ever all Indigenous delegation to COP25.
She spoke alongside Madeline Canfield, Aashna Patel, and Aly Tharp.
More Recent Voices
Theresa Ardler, a Gweagal Aboriginal woman of the Eora Nation in Sydney and Director of Gweagal Cultural Connections, spoke on ToU’s Ecojustice for Women and Communities dialogue in March 2024.
Bangii-Kai Bellecourt, Aquinnah Wampanoag and a docent at the Aquinnah Cultural Center, spoke on TOU’s Youth Finding Peace in a Time of Turmoil dialogue in July 2024.
In Memoriam: Simone Senogles
Simone Senogles, who spoke as part of ToU’s Ecological Justice programming on food sovereignty, passed away on September 20, 2025, at age 54. A member of the Migizi (Eagle) Clan, she spent more than 25 years with the Indigenous Environmental Network, working on food sovereignty, Indigenous feminism, and climate justice, and co-founded MMIW218, a grassroots group dedicated to missing and murdered Indigenous women.
UN Resources and History
For readers who want the fuller history behind the day, a few foundational documents from the UN:
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — Adopted by the General Assembly on September 13, 2007, this is the most comprehensive international instrument on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, affirming rights to self-determination, land, culture, and free, prior and informed consent, among others.
Background: International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples — August 9th marks the anniversary of the first meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, held in Geneva in 1982. The General Assembly formally designated the day by resolution 49/214 in December 1994, and the first observance was held in 1995.
UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) history — The Forum, an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council, was established by ECOSOC resolution 2000/22 in July 2000, following calls dating back to the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, and held its first session in May 2002. It’s the body Roberto Múkaro Borrero’s UN Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples works alongside.
Explore the Archive
Explore the full Eco Justice for All archive on YouTube or at templeofunderstanding.org