Dear Friends and Relatives,

Please accept our sincere gratitude for standing strong with us to achieve so much this year despite the intense suffering so many of our families and communities have faced during all of the traumatic events of 2020 including the mishandled COVID-19 pandemic, racist attacks against Black, Brown and Indigenous lives, extreme violence against womxn, the continued assault on Mother Earth and Father Sky with fossil fuel and mining development, the escalation of a changing climate with no real governmental action for cutting emissions at source, outrageous politics with a termination agenda towards Indigenous peoples and our inherent rights of self-determination and sovereignty...and more.  We send continued prayers to the families whose relatives have started their journey home and to those who are coping with painful losses.  We extend our hands to you now in the spirit of reckoning, healing, and deeply transformative action as we enter 2021.




Thanks to your support this year we not only continued our organizing and campaign work but we were also able to pivot quickly in response to the pandemic providing direct mutual aid to our communities during these extremely difficult times. Thanks to you, the Indigenous Environmental Network was able to purchase and distribute over 160,000 KN95, N95, medical disposable, and reusable cloth masks to over 50 communities from Alaska to the Amazon; and provide $672,251 in small grants to an additional 217 Indigenous community-based/grassroots Mutual Aid efforts and small home business owners. 


Please consider making a targeted contribution this holiday season directly to the COVID-19 Mutual Aid Fund : [link removed] or to the Protect the Peoples Emergency Fund : [link removed] to keep these lifelines flowing.  With infections and deaths still on the rise in Indian Country, we remain hard at work collecting and distributing emergency resources to the hardest hit communities. 


Please CLICK HERE : [link removed] to make a general support gift if you prefer! 


As always your donation goes to supporting the front-line organizations Indigenous Environmental Network works directly with-- consulting and advising members of our network to strengthen their ability to lead effective community organizing, coalition building, legal and policy strategy, media and narrative creation, and non-violent direct action. 


Your support continues to strengthen Indigenous Power by mobilizing movement building strategies standing with a mass-scale of groups rooted in economic, climate, energy and environmental justice. Your donation supports us to continue to strive towards fulfilling our IEN Mission given to us by our youth, elders, women and men societies and spiritual leaders that reads: IEN is an alliance of Indigenous peoples whose mission it is to protect the sacredness of Earth Mother from contamination and exploitation by strengthening, maintaining and respecting Indigenous teachings and natural laws.


Among those we mourn the loss of this year is IEN Board member and co-founder Chaz Wheelock : [link removed], who became a staff member and who began his journey home in May to be with the relatives who walked before him. The impact of Chaz’s life and love for his people will continue to echo through this world with his work on the Iroquois Farms, a tribal organic agriculture venture, which established a management structure reflecting the Oneida worldview of cooperation and sharing.


In honor of Chaz and all of the teachings he contributed to IEN’s guiding principles over the last 30 years, we are excited to announce that in 2021 we will be releasing a new Indigenous Principles of Just Transition : [link removed] curriculum that he and others have written!  This curriculum will be used to help tribal communities create and lead their own sustainable community-building projects and provide education on interconnected principles of Responsibility & Relationship of our Indigenous Original Instructions, Tribal and Indigenous Sovereignty, and Transformation for Action.  To reclaim our future, we must change our present!


As always, you are in our hearts and minds and we appreciate your friendship.  


With Hope & Courage,
Bineshi Albert, Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Tom BK Goldtooth
IEN Leadership Team

Campaign & Staff Reports

Each of our staff have prepared brief snapshot reports of our accomplishments this year that you will find below.   There's so much more we've shared with you on our website* than we could include in this format - so please CLICK HERE : [link removed] OR click "READ MORE" at the end of each staff section - scroll down and look for the campaign title you're interested in - and we hope you enjoy these year end messages with a nice hot cup of tea or coffee! 

 

*And pardon the unfinished website - we're working on the redesign to be completed early 2021.
 

Food Sovereignty Program Coordinator, Simone Senogles 


Recognizing and promoting Indigenous Women's power and influence within the global fight for Mother Earth has been an exciting part of IEN's work this year. We have built with our sisters in South America to expand what feminism means to us, and how it fits into our efforts to protect our homelands, waters and peoples. Women and Fems are leaders and powerful change makers. 


Due to COVID-19 one of IEN’s strategies for educational work is to do what everyone is doing, going online. We have initiated a series of webinars with the overall title of “Feminisms and Indigenous Women” with subtitles denoting the particular focus of each webinar. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

Carbon Pricing Education Coordinator, Tamara Gilbertson

In July 2020, IEN began the carbon pricing training program. Native-Indigenous lands in Turtle Island (North America and globally) are being targeted by carbon offset managers and brokers. Sovereignty is at stake and communities rarely know the full story behind the scam that allows fossil fuel industries to continue to pollute because of carbon pricing programs and actors. The program builds on the Carbon Pricing Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 : [link removed]. READ MORE : [link removed].
 

 

Green New Deal Outreach Organizer, Ashley Nicole McCray 


This year the IEN’s Green New Deal work evolved, transformed, and developed throughout the course of 2020. From direct engagement with our grassroots and frontline communities, to interfacing with high-level political spaces - including regular meetings with Representative Deb Haaland’s office, IEN demonstrated the breadth and depth of both our commitment to Indian Country, Unci Maka, and future generations through our willingness to engage with pressing difficult issues at all levels. Some of the major highlights from 2020 include developing our Indigenous Principles of Just Transition...
READ MORE : [link removed].
 
Counsel on Climate Change and Indigenous and Human Rights, Alberto Saldamando 


What used to wait for a face-to-face meeting turned into almost immediate zoom meetings with increasing frequency. In keeping track of climate change, the Human Rights and Climate Working Group (HR&CC) began monthly meetings, and now has teams addressing issues such as agriculture, COVID, and Women’s rights that meet during the month. 


IEN’s work with Rainforest Action Network in the Banking on Climate Chaos : [link removed] is ramping up as the 2021 Banking on Climate Change publication date approaches.  READ MORE : [link removed].

 

Keep It In The Ground Campaign Organizer, Dallas Goldtooth
 

IEN’s Keep it in the Ground Campaign has grown a lot over the years. What began as a program focused on fossil fuel pipelines has now grown to include local fights against the development, extraction, transport and refinement of fossil fuels! We are currently active in supporting frontline fights in stolen lands of Alaska, New Mexico, Great Plains, Minnesota, Texas, Alberta, British Columbia, Washington, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon and California.
 

On top of these on-the-ground efforts we have also been active in national coalitions to stop the expansion of fossil fuels on Turtle Island. Some of the coalitions IEN belongs to include Promise to Protect : [link removed], Alaskan Refuge Defense Campaign : [link removed], Stop the Money Pipeline : [link removed], Insure our Future : [link removed], US Tar Sands : [link removed], and Keep it in the Ground : [link removed] coalitions. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

Indigenous Just Transition Coordinator, Loren White 
 

This unprecedented year of the pandemic has been defined by pivots, pauses and replanning and it has also redefined relationships, resourcefulness and resilience. While much of the on-the-ground work has changed and adapted there has been a continuation of engagement, involvement and collaboration with front line communities, allied groups and organizations around Indigenous Just Transition strategies and the innovative solutions grassroots communities are doing and planning. In 2020 we have provided communities training on how we can finance visionary Just Transition projects...READ MORE : [link removed].
 
Save Our Roots Organizer, BJ McManama
 

As an organizer for the Save Our Roots : [link removed] campaign, like all of us at IEN, 2020 included a lot of Zoom conferences, calls, emails, and even a couple digital “retreats.”

 

In November I was humbled to be nominated as one of four front line organizers to be chosen to receive the FracTracker Alliance Community Sentinel Award for Environmental Stewardship : [link removed]. This honor was bestowed on me for the part I played in bringing over four dozen Indigenous Water Protectors from across Turtle Island to Pittsburgh PA for the 2019 People Over Petro Coalition's Defend the Water Days of Action. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

Radio Program, Govinda Dalton 
 

This solar year found me on the road traveling from place to place in Indian Country as usual applying our tools for radio and mobile communications to the task of uplifting and amplifying the voices of the People.  When the virus hit, I was in Kamloops with the Tiny House Warriors, and had to jam back to my homestead in CA to address the catastrophic fires threatening our homestead.  READ MORE : [link removed].
 

IEN Communications, Jennifer Falcon
 

This year IEN continued to grow in our media presence and our team! We brought on a social media intern, a radio show producer and will bring on a new Media Coordinator in 2021 to expand our capacity to support IEN’s campaigners and our frontline warriors. We not only provided media and comms support to our frontline KXL and Line 3 fighters but we also held trainings for our frontline groups so they could shape their own narrative and media. We partnered with our sisters at Indigenous Climate Action for webinars and held down our own Indigenous Feminisms webinar series. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

Native Energy & Climate Campaign Coordinator, Kandi White
 

Many of us can relate to 2020 being an emotional rollercoaster and for me there were definitely extreme highs and extreme lows too.  The start of the year was quite powerful, and I believe that the prayers our IEN leadership team laid down at the camp at the base of Mauna Kea in the beginning of January have helped to carry me through this tumultuous year. I was really honored to have been asked to be there to lay down those prayers while simultaneously strategizing how our leadership team was going to lead our quickly growing team.  We felt accomplished and happy to have a plan for the year; little did we know it was a plan that was about to change rather dramatically. READ MORE : [link removed].
 

Movement Building, Bineshi Albert
 

This year was an exercise of reimagining and re-engaging work in a different way. While we reached out to communities in Brazil physically we had to look how to again do that work more remotely. This also included reimagining the International Feminist Organizing School. On movement building work we did similar reimagining except in one instance of standing up against a Trump rally in OK. I feel good about the joint practice work we have been doing with It Takes Roots and in keeping our relationship with The Rising Majority. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

#NOKXL Organizer, Joye Braun 
 

The fight against DAPL and KXL continues here at IEN. New challenges in the time of COVID-19 made organizing interesting but we pulled off some wonderful events despite that by working with local grassroots people insuring a digital online rally and art build, hosting a pow wow at a KXL pipe yard, and launching a MMIWR solar house campaign-- all working with partners, allies and co-conspirators. READ MORE : [link removed].
 

Philanthropic Relationships Manager, Eva Blake
 

2020 was a whirlwind hurricane monstrous beast of a year but despite the enormous grief and rage we feel as a result of the destructions, Âs Nutayuneân-- We Still Live Here!  Hope and Love will guide us through what I anticipate to be continued challenges ahead as humanity continues it’s great awakening and we witness the birth of the Indigenous Just Transition and the healing that it will bring.  READ MORE : [link removed].
 

Executive Director, Tom BK Goldtooth
 

Working with the Leadership Team of Simone Senogles, Kandi White and Bineshi Albert, we came out of a December 2019 meeting with the IEN board of directors (Manny Pino, Sayokla Kindness and Debra Harry) that laid out the 2020 agenda for continuing our organizational development and need for strategic planning. We all recognized the growth we are experiencing. However, we didn’t know of the upcoming pandemic virus that would hit and change our personal and organizational work in more ways that could have been imagined. 
 

By late March to the current time, I and the Leadership Team shifted gears implementing COVID-19 policies with travel restrictions. Following March, we entered a world of virtual meetings, sometimes with over four meetings per day. Our commitment to our work with community and movement building with allies increased with a commitment to the importance of communication. READ MORE : [link removed].

 

IEN/WMAN (Western Mining Action Network) Mining Mini-Grant Initiative
 

This year, our joint partnership with the Western Mining Action Network, which offers financial grant assistance to communities threatened or adversely affected by mining in the U.S. and Canada, disbursed 58 IEN/WMAN Mini Grants totaling $200,455. We experienced a reduction in the number of overall IEN/WMAN applicants, particularly with Indigenous communities, as our communities were facing another level of a long-term structural issue of inequities in health care exacerbated by COVID-19. This year, states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada were taking advantage of the distraction of COVID-19 by pushing through mining development without proper consultation and consent of Indigenous Nations in the U.S. and First Nations in Canada. For more information on seeking grant information or overall mining information, contact: Sayokla Kindness Williams, WMAN Indigenous Coordinator and IEN board member at [email protected] : mailto:[email protected] . READ MORE : [link removed].



The Indigenous Environmental Network - PO Box 485 - Bemidji - MN - 56619

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