From the Grassroots to the Courts:
How criminalizing ecocide could benefit frontline defenders?
Tuesday February 16th
4pm PST | 7pm EST
Midnight GMT
Featuring:
Sleydo (Molly Wickham) is a fierce spokesperson for Wet'suwet'en Nation members and their allies who are fighting the Coastal GasLink pipeline. She was among 14 people arrested in 2019, when heavily armed Mounties enforced a B.C. Supreme Court injunction at the Gidimt'en Checkpoint. After completing her master’s degree in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria, she moved home, to Lhudis Bin territory, with her family. She is passionate about governance, the health and well-being of the yin tah (territories) and the transmission of culture, language, and traditional song and dance.
Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm is the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation's lead voice on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Porcupine caribou. The Gwitchin are once again facing down a threat to their way of life, as outgoing Donald Trump makes a late-game effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration before he leaves office. These are the pristine calving grounds of the largest animal land migration on earth. The survival of the Porcupine caribou is linked to the survival of his nation, its culture and identity.
Melissa Mollen Dupuis is a member of the Innu community of Ekuanitshit on Quebec's Côte-Nord. In 2012, she created with Widia Larivière the Quebec branch of the Idle No More movement. In 2014, Melissa became president of Wapikoni's board of administrators, and in 2017, Amnesty International named her Ambassador of Conscience along with five other figures of Canada's First Peoples' movement. In 2018, she became the Boreal campaigner for the David Suzuki Foundation.
As international grassroots outreach for Stop Ecocide, Louise coordinates multiple national teams and develops strategies while upholding the local knowledge and expertise of volunteers on the ground. She is passionate about weaving networks of solidarity across lands and oceans. She believes tremendous change lies in the merged advocacy of Indigenous rights, women leadership and climate justice. She trained as a techno-anthropologist in Copenhagen, where she concluded a three-year long research project "Circle of Voices", a digital journey on cultural revitalization among Quebec First Nations.
This event will be moderated by Suzanne Dhaliwal, climate justice creative, campaigner, researcher, lecturer in environmental justice, and trainer in creative strategies for decolonisation.