Shaping Climate Justice through Indigenous Knowledge

Join the UBC Centre for Climate Justice for a dialogue between Jeannette Armstrong and Christine Winter to discuss how Indigenous knowledge shapes climate justice. This dialogue will be begin with short presentations from both Armstrong and Winter, followed by a discussion moderated by Naomi Klein.

About the speakers:

Dr. Jeannette Armstrong is Syilx Okanagan, a fluent speaker and teacher of the Nsyilxcn Okanagan language and a traditional knowledge keeper of the Okanagan Nation. She is a founder of En’owkin, the Okanagan Nsyilxcn language and knowledge institution of higher learning of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. She currently is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Okanagan Philosophy at UBC Okanagan. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Ethics and Syilx Indigenous Literatures. She is the recipient of the Eco Trust Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership and in 2016 the BC George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an author whose published works include poetry, prose and children’s literary titles and academic writing on a wide variety of Indigenous issues. She currently serves on Canada’s Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

Dr. Christine Winter is Senior Lecturer in environmental, climate change, multispecies and indigenous politics at the University of Otago. Her research focuses on the ways in which political theory, and particularly theories of justice, continue to perpetuate injustice for some Peoples (and more specifically for Māori) and the environment. She developed a decolonial critique of intergenerational justice in The Subjects of Intergenerational Justice: Indigenous philosophy, the environment, and relationships (2022 Routlege). She is currently engaged with decolonial framings for the political theories of multispecies, environmental, climate and planetary justice, the planetary boundaries.

Naomi Klein is Director of Public Engagement at the Centre for Climate Justice and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching take place at the intersection of crisis and political transformation. At UBC, she focuses on how the climate emergency can and must act as a catalyst for bold, justice-based transformation in our bioregion and beyond, with particular attention to the intersections between climate justice and Indigenous land rights; the gendered and racialized labour of care; and the rights of migrants. Prior to joining UBC, she was the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and she co-founded The Leap.