WEA: North America Program

WEA North America Programs

The North America Program links our Advocacy Network of pro bono legal, policy and business advocates nationwide with Indigenous women leading grassroots environmental campaigns in North America.  Through rapid response advocacy, long-term policy working groups, trainings and delegations, WEA’s innovative advocacy partnerships protect sacred sites, promote energy justice, and ensure environmental health on Indigenous lands.

Why the Need?

North American indigenous communities face both acute and chronic challenges resulting from environmental degradation. In response to the systemic and intentional targeting of indigenous lands and communities for environmentally-destructive industrial projects such as mines, hazardous waste facilities, oil refineries and coal-fired power plants, the indigenous environmental justice movement – a grassroots-led movement with national impact – has arisen within the past several decades to demand sustainability and equity. 

 “According to the Worldwatch Institute, 317 reservations in the United States are threatened by environmental hazards, ranging from toxic wastes to clearcuts. . . . Reservations have been targeted as sites for 16 proposed nuclear waste dumps. Over 100 proposals have been floated in recent years to dump toxic waste in Indian communities. Seventy-seven sacred sites have been disturbed or desecrated through resource extraction and development activities.”

-Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land Rights and Life,

Boston: South End Press at 2-3 (1999).

As community caretakers, guardians of future generations, and resource stewards, Indigenous women are the front-line problem-solvers in environmental crises, employing such diverse tools as cultural tradition, non-violent direct action, legal and policy advocacy, and economic development.

To achieve their goals, Indigenous women leaders engage with federal, state and tribal legislatures; federal courts; federal and state administrative agencies; and international decision-making bodies such as the United Nations. Yet the access gap – limits on financial resources, personnel, and information – can limit or prevent campaign success for these leaders with respect to law, policy, and economic structures.

How will Team Efforts Translate to Impact

WEA work in 2012 will include the integration of learning from the 2011 Advocacy Training, the development and implementation of advocacy strategy through our Working Groups, the continued growth of WEA's rapid response Advocacy Network, and planning for WEA's next cycle of Advocacy Trainings. WEA's key partner, Indigenous Environmental Network, as well as Tia Oros Peters of the Seventh Generation Fund, have expressed clear interest in continuing and deepening our organizational collaborations after the Training.

How the WEA North America Program Creates Sustainable Global Change

WEA’s Advocacy Network links grassroots indigenous women leaders who are organizing their communities against environmental exploitation, with the technical expertise of our nation’s best advocates in law, policy, and economic development.

WEA work:

●      Ensures a rapid and sophisticated legal response to proposed fossil fuel and commercial development projects on sacred indigenous lands.

●      Catalyzes change in regional and federal policy on energy, climate and land use, to support indigenous peoples in protecting their land and transforming tribal economies.

●      Provides indigenous women leaders and their communities with the legal tools and economic development expertise they need to launch viable economic development projects based in traditional cultural values and the renewable energy potential of tribal land.