Celebrating Indigenous Expertise in Sustainability

Hosted by Concordia University, this event brings together guest speakers to discuss and celebrate Indigenous expertise in environmental sustainability. Sub-events include “Decolonizing Climate Policy in so-called Canada”, “Co-developing knowledge with Indigenous communities to facilitate sustainable fisheries management”, and “Partners in Indigenous Conservation and Environmental Futures”.

Decolonization Is for Everyone | Nikki Sanchez | TEDxSFU

Indigenous environmental activist Nikki Sanchez discusses decolonization’s target audience during her TEDTalk. She discusses the uncomfortable question to the settler of “can you name the territory your grandmother was born on?”.

Good Fire Podcast

The Good Fire podcast is a show that began in 2019 to provide insight into the vast benefits of intentional practices by many First Nations around the world. This includes cultural burning, seasonal burns, and more, which rejuvenate the landscape by clearing out dead underbrush and delivering essential nutrients to the ecosystem. They discuss how Indigenous fire stewardship is critical to cultural empowerment of many nations, since it is a practice that brings together community, acknowledges cyclical events, and provides intense healing and release. Good Fire subverts Western notions of fire as destructive and “evil,” by recentering Indigenous knowledge and practices of fire as balancing.

York University’s Indigenous Environmental Justice Project: Aki-naagadendamowin Youth Outreach

The Aki-naagadendamowin Youth Outreach program offered through York University’s Indigenous Environmental Justice Project is an initiative which recruits Indigenous youth (either in high school or university) to engage in storytelling, events, and other outreach projects to present at local schools in the GTA. This program is broken down into three sections—Climate Change Futures, Listening to the Land, and Changing Your World—

Indigenous Climate Action

Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) was founded in 2015 by Indigenous women from Alberta who sought to begin a dialogue about climate change and Indigenous rights. ICA is an Indigenous-led grassroots organization made up of a vast group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, water protectors, and land defenders. The organization models their work and structure on systems of free, prior

Forests Ontario Reconciliation Community Tree Plant

The Reconciliation Community Tree Plant (RCTP) event was created through a partnership between Forests Ontario and First Nations communities across Ontario. These ongoing tree planting events aim to amplify First Nations voices and to highlight the relationship between reconciliation and ecological restoration. By hosting an event where settlers and Indigenous communities alike come together

Water First

Water First is a Canadian based program that attempts to address water issues that affect many Indigenous communities through education, training and meaningful collaboration. They strive to create collaborative programs with Indigenous communities using Indigenous knowledge, traditions, customs and values to ensure long term sustainable solutions for the water crisis.

Parks Canada – Indigenous Relations

The creation of National Parks in Canada meant the sequestering of lands and removal of Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories as well as ways of life in order to create nature reserves and tourist areas managed by the colonial state. Parks Canada has been working in tandem with Indigenous communities in order to foster more inclusivity in public parks discourse and decision making.

Ionkwa’nikonri:ro Thompson Island Cultural Camp

The Thompson Island Cultural Camp is located on the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation. The Eco-Tourism camp is open to all community members and non-Indigenous people who are interested in learning local cultural knowledge. The camp includes Eco-Cultural Educational activities such as medicine plant identification, wilderness survival, traditional agricultural practices, canoeing, and traditional teachings.

City of Lethbridge: Pathway to Canada – Target 1 and Lethbridge Reconciliation Plan

Pathway to Canada Target 1 is an initiative that was created in response to the 2020 Biodiversity Goals and Targets for Canada. The Target 1 goal, as stated on both websites, is to conserve “[b]y 2020, at least 17 percent of terrestrial areas and inland water, and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas, are conserved through networks of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures.”

Conserving & Protecting Cowichan Fresh Water for a Climate Resilient Future

The Conserving & Protecting Cowichan Fresh Water for a Climate Resilient Future is a 26-month project occurring in Cowichan Bay in British Columbia. It is a volunteer-based community project that is engaging community members of all ages and all cultures in hopes to reconnect with the land and build awareness of the current climate in order to make a real sustainable impact.

Unify Toronto Dialogues presents: Indigenous Rights Holders, Indigenous Land Defenders

This session of Unify Toronto Dialogues explored how exercising Indigenous Rights and re-establishing Indigenous governance are the best, if not the only, hope for protecting the land and water from further assault and beginning the process of regeneration. Presenters looked at how realizing this hope requires spiritual, political, technical and social action.

Sacred Trust Initiative

The Sacred Trust is an initiative of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation in British Columbia to stop the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project.  Its mandate is to oppose and stop the  pipeline project, which would see approximately 900 km of new pipeline built alongside the Trans Mountain Pipeline

River Run 2016: Healthy river, healthy people

In Spring 2016, individuals from Grassy Narrows First Nation traveled 1700 km to Toronto, Ontario to address Premier Kathleen Wynne. They demanded justice, and for the 9000 kg of mercury that was dumped in their river in the sixties to finally be cleaned up.

Indigenous Health Conference

This annual interdisciplinary conference is hosted by the Continuing Professional Development Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.  The conference has a strong focus on the voices of Indigenous people, and is committed to improving knowledge sharing and cultural sensitivity for better healthcare delivery and research directions for Indigenous people in Canada.

Rising Tide: Vancouver Coast Salish Territories

Rising Tide Vancouver Coast Salish Territories (RT – VST) is a grassroots
environmental justice group committed to fighting the root causes of climate change and the interconnected destruction of land, water and air. RT – VST has recently been involved in the Burnaby Mountain Blockade against Big Oil Company, Kinder Morgan, as well as organizing community events to raise funds in support of the Unis’tot’en Camp.

Free Grassy Narrows

Asubpeeschoseewagong– the Indigenous or Anishinaabe name for Grassy Narrows – is situated 80 kilometers north of Kenora, Ontario in Canada. Approximately 50 percent of community still depends on hunting, trapping, and gathering berries and medicines from the land.

Cowboys and Indians Alliance

The Cowboy and Indian Alliance is a movement put together by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Although the Keystone XL portion of this pipeline is based in the United States, it is a continuation of the Canadian pipeline, and the alliance consists of Canadians as well. 

Aamjiwnaang Solidarity Against Chemical Valley

The purpose of this site is to create a forum for communication and action around the toxic reality of living in Chemical Valley. Through this forum, Aamjiwnaang First Nation community members can share their experiences, and can increase wider public awareness of this unacceptable situation of environmental racism.

Nawtsamaat Alliance: Protect the Salish Sea

The Nawt-sa-maat Alliance is a coalition of Coast Salish Indigenous
Peoples, environmental activists, and community members who care about the land and waters of the Salish Sea. The alliance was created to increase awareness of threats to this region as a result of the fossil fuel industry.

Mining Watch Canada

Mining Watch Canada is “a pan-Canadian initiative supported by environmental, social justice, Aboriginal and labour organizations from across the country.” This initiative was created “in 1999 to address the need for a coordinated public interest response to the threats to public health, water and air quality, fish and wildlife habitat and community interests posed by irresponsible mineral policies and practices in Canada and around the world.”

Halifax Coalition Against Fracking

The Halifax Coalition Against Fracking is a loose network of activists, concerned citizens, environmentalists, Indigenous Peoples and others who have come together to draw attention to and oppose irresponsible resource development in Nova Scotia and beyond. They stand in solidarity with Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, restitution, reparations and those rights stipulated under the United Nations Charter on the Rights of Indigenous People.

Joint Stewardship Board: Haudenosaunee-Red Hill Agreements

The Joint Stewardship Board oversees the Haudenosaunee-Red Hill Agreements which define a partnership between the Haudenosaunee and the City of Hamilton, Ontario. The Red Hill Valley is an area that is of historical and cultural significance to the Haudenosaunee.  Ancestral remains dating over 10,000 years old have been located in this area. Since 2003, the Joint Stewardship Board has initiated a number of partnership projects including medicine plant recovery, environmental and ecological monitoring, deer inventory and community engagement.

Case Study: The Sacred Water Circle

Case Study: The Sacred Water Circle

by Cherylanne James

In 2011, Dorothy Taylor from Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario took up a call from Indigenous spiritual leaders around the world.  The Hopi, the Dalai Lama and the spiritual authorities of Gonawindua (Sierra Madres de Santa Marta, Colombia) had called out to the world to protect the water and to bring awareness to the beauty and living giving force of water. In recent years, the government of Canada has implemented detrimental policies that looked to further develop and extract resources from the land, at the cost of polluting Mother Earth and life giving water. Dorothy took up this call, and with a group of interfaith people from various cultural backgrounds, they formed the Sacred Water Circle.

Rising Tide Toronto

Rising Tide Toronto (RTT) is a “grassroots collective that challenges environmental injustice and the root causes of climate change on Turtle Island through direct action, in solidarity with people’s struggles locally and globally.” Most recently RTT has been working especially on resisting tar sands production and pipeline projects. For instance, RTT has been working with other groups throughout Ontario and Quebec to stop the Enbridge Line 9 reversal.