If you haven’t yet heard of the new movement called “Idle No More,” it’s time to pay attention.

This movement has to do with Canada’s conservative government and bill No. C-45, which would allegedly facilitate the surrender of First Nation reserve lands and gut heretofore protected Canadian waterways. It is about four women of Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, who founded the Idle No More Movement in late 2012 in response to Bill C-45.

It is about Chief Theresa Spence, Chief of the Attawapiskat tribe, who began a hunger strike on Dec. 11, 2012. She is living in a tepee in the dead of winter on Victoria Island, Ottawa, within sight of Parliament House. Her courageous commitment to “fast to the death” comes from her long-sought and thwarted attempts to call attention to the deplorable living condition of her tribe, from the environmental threats to their lands from the oil and gas companies, and the Canadian government not abiding by treaties signed with the First Nation people in the 1920s. She is seeking a meeting at which both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Gov. General David Johnston are in attendance and who are willing to have in-depth discussions about treaty rights and environmental protections.

The movement has spread across the globe. Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike have felt the pull of truth. In Juneau, Alaska, “flash mobs” (impromptu round dancing and drumming in shopping malls), rallies in Brisbane, Australia, where handmade signs read, “We hold the future of our children in our hands,” a flash mob in the Mall of the Americas in Minnesota, and others. On the streets of Portland, Maine, on Friday, Jan. 4, local activists and representatives of every Maine tribe came to support the Idle No More movement. A young Passamaquoddy tribal leader, George Neptune, said, “We will not watch as you continue to strip away our way of life.”

Why should we pay attention? Why should we care?

We should pay attention because the Earth is our Mother. We should care because we are responsible for the care of our Mother Earth. And because the indigenous peoples on this planet were here before us white folks, and they have a history of caring for this, the only planet within striking distance of providing us a habitable living space. We should care because the First Nation peoples are crying out to us in Maine about the environmental hazards associated with the tar sands of Canada.

Bill McKibben, of 350.org, long ago began to document the environmental problems occurring in our soil, water and air. Eighteen months ago, when he began warning us about the hazards of the Keystone Tar Sands Project, he reports that the first allies were those of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

“They’d been working for years to alert people to the scale of the devastation in Alberta’s tar sands belt, where native lands had been wrecked and poisoned by the immense scale of the push to mine ‘the dirtiest energy on earth,’” he said.

And now, here we are, with our indigenous brothers and sisters leading the way. As McKibben writes, “The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world. . . Canada’s First Nations are in some sense standing guard over the planet.”

Sally Breen lives in Windham and wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters standing guard over the planet.