New Zealander India Logan-Riley represented indigenous peoples with their speech at COP26.
Video / UN Climate Change
A young Māori activist from Hawke's Bay has told those at the COP26 conference to "get in line or get out of the way".
India Logan-Riley, a former Haumoana resident, addressed world leaders at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
Logan-Riley said world leaders needed to listento indigenous people as they had many of the answers to the climate crisis, adding their acts of resistance that were helping reduce emissions.
"We're keeping fossil fuels in the ground and stopping fossil fuel expansion. We're halting infrastructure that would increase emissions and saying no to false solutions.
"In the US and Canada alone indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual emissions. What we do works."
Logan-Riley expressed frustration that after being lauded at the Paris talks five years ago for relaying climate warnings of wildfires, biodiversity loss and sea-level rises, nothing had changed.
The former Taikura Rudolf Steiner student spoke of skies along the east coast turning red due to the Australian bushfires, and being told by a doctor that higher numbers of people had presented with breathing problems because of the smoke.
"In that moment our health was bound to the struggle of the land and people in another country.
"In the effects of climate change are fates intertwined, as are the historic forces that have brought us here today."
India Logan-Riley, an indigenous climate activist from Hawke's Bay, speaks at the opening of the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Photo / AP Alberto Pezzali
Logan-Riley expressed frustration that their messages had been repeated many times since they first spoke at COP21, with messages ignored.
"If you aren't willing to back us or let us lead, you are complicit in the death and destruction that is happening across the globe.
"Learn our histories, listen to our stories, honour our knowledge and get in line or get out of the way."
Mark McGavock, a former associate principal at Taikura Rudolf Steiner School who taught Logan-Riley between 2009 and 2012, said it came as no surprise to see his former student take the world stage.
"It's just amazing."
McGavock said Logan-Riley was the kind of person who made teaching "such a joy".
He said it left him in no doubt as to what an "amazing" asset the former student was for the school.
