#33 of 42 articles from the Special Report:
Conversations
Ethel Blondin-Andrew is a former Liberal MP and cabinet minister now working with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. Photo submitted by Ethel Blondin-Andrew
For Ethel Blondin-Andrew, the most important solution to Canada s climate crisis is also dangerously underfunded: Indigenous-led conservation.
“We have the vision, we need the resources,” Blondin-Andrew said in this year s first Conversations event with
Canada’s National Observer founder and editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood on Thursday evening. “We have a head start. We have the fundamental traditional knowledge, the relationship.”
Blondin-Andrew was the first Indigenous woman elected to the House of Commons and to serve in federal cabinet. She now works with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) to develop Indigenous governance and stewardship of the land via programs that train Guardians and educate youth on land use planning. She explained at
“It’s a matter of life or death. It’s a matter of being able to keep your voice.”
This is how Dene trailblazer Ethel Blondin-Andrew, the first Indigenous woman elected to the House of Commons and to serve in federal cabinet, described building Indigenous leadership and power during a 2019 United Nations panel on Indigenous women in politics.
Blondin-Andrew has kept her voice from the beginning. She delivered her first speech in Canada’s House of Commons in her Dene language. Through her 17 years as an MP, she brought issues of northern Indigenous sovereignty to Ottawa, fighting against infringement on self-governance, whether by the Meech Lake Accord or pulp mills along the Mackenzie River.
Posted: Dec 15, 2020 7:00 AM CT | Last Updated: December 15, 2020
Raymond Yakeleya is one of three Sahtu beneficiaries who claim financial irregularities and wrongdoings around the purchase of Canol Outfitters in 2017. (Livia Manywounds/CBC)
A three-year controversy surrounding the purchase of an outfitting company in the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories came to a head last week at the Sahtu Assembly.
Canol Outfitters, previously known as Rams Head Outfitters, was purchased in 2017 by the Sahtu Land Corporations for $5.8 million. Much of that money came from a loan from the Sahtu Secretariat Inc. (SSI). At the time of the sale, then-chair of the secretariat Ethel Blondin-Andrew told CBC that the money for the loan came from a