Film
Rising Tides, Raising Voices
Indigenous Pacific Islanders with Disabilities Race Against Time to Ensure that When the Next Disaster Strikes, No One Is Left Behind
The Pacific region is among the most impacted in the world by climate change. Among its low-lying islands, there is no escape from rising coastal waters and extreme weather events. Freshwater exists in precarious balance with the encroaching sea. As part of a legacy of systemic oppression, Indigenous Pacific Islanders with disabilities are particularly at risk. Because they are less likely to be formally employed, their livelihoods depend on fishing and farming – which have been significantly affected by climate change. During disasters, the structural barriers that Pacific Islanders with disabilities face every day – like the lack of accessible information and transportation – can become a death sentence. Faced with the urgency of increasing disasters, disabled grassroots activists across the Pacific are championing disability-inclusive climate action. It’s a fight not just against nature, but against a world that often overlooks people with disabilities. Shot by Disability Justice Project fellows and staff, Rising Tides, Raising Voices calls for intersectional, inclusive, community-led solutions to the encroaching global crisis.
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This video is endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development as a Decade Activity. Use of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development logo by a non-UN entity does not imply the endorsement of the United Nations of such entity, its products or services, or of its planned activities. For more information please access: https://forum.oceandecade.org/page/disclaimer.
Filmmaker: Jody Santos
A human rights filmmaker, Jody Santos (she/her) has traveled to some 30 countries across five continents, documenting everything from the trafficking of girls in Nepal to the widespread and often abusive practice of institutionalizing children with disabilities in the U.S. and other countries. Santos became involved in disability justice after her son was diagnosed with autism and she began to navigate the various systems – educational, medical, etc. – that seemed to exclude if not actively work against persons with disabilities.
Santos is an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Her documentaries have appeared on public television and cable networks like Discovery Channel, and her work also has been featured on New England Public Radio and in advocacy journals like Mad in America. Regardless of the medium, Santos’s goal has been to highlight those narratives that are usually unseen or underreported.
Santos is the recipient of American Women in Radio & Television’s Gracie Allen Award, and she was nominated for an Emmy for a special report on black-market guns airing on NBC Boston. She is the author of Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions published by Rowman & Littlefield’s Lexington Books.
