Check out all of the amazing speakers that we will have at the Mining Injustice Conference this year – from within Canada and around the world! The conference begins Friday night with a social at the United Steelworkers Hall, and then continues Saturday and Sunday at the Earth Sciences Building at the University of Toronto!
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Amani Mustafa Mhinda
Amani Mustafa Mhinda is the founder and executive director of the NGO Haki Madini, a Tanzanian policy analysis and advocacy organization working on mining, environment and community issues. He is a lawyer by training and has been actively involved in research, legal analysis and engagement with civil society initiatives around extractive industries. He is also a fellow with the Revenue Watch Institute and PETRAD Norway.
Andrés Idárraga Franco
Andrés Indárraga Franco is a member of the Network Against Large-Scale Mining, RECLAME-Colombia, which brings together seventy different organizations representing communities that have been affected or threatened by large-scale mining. Mr. Franco is a researcher in mining and energy issues and natural resources in the National Union Institute of Colombia’s Corporation for Education, Development and Research (CEDINS). He is also a professor of human development in the Graduate Program at the University College of Cundinamarca, Colombia. Andrés works with impoverished communities, urban and rural, throughout the country, as an international liaison working for the defense of environmental rights for communities affected by the extractive industry.
Aniseto Lopez
Aniseto is the active coordinator of FREDEMI – the Coalition for the Defense of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala – a wide-reaching group of community members throughout the municipality in resistance to local Goldcorp mining operations. Aniseto has also worked as a member of ADISMI – the Association of Integral (Holistic) Development in San Miguel Ixtahuacán that has worked to carry out local consultations throughout the municipality and develop sustainable agricultural projects.
Avi Chomsky
Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her books include A History of the Cuban Revolution (Blackwell, 2011), Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Duke, 2008), They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (Beacon, 2007), and The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals, and Human Rights (Casa Editorial Pisando Callos, 2007). She has been active in Latin America solidarity and immigrant rights organizations for over 30 years. She is currently working with Appalachian and Colombian communities affected by coal mining.
Bob Lovelace (appearing via skype)
Bob Lovelace is a long-time social activist and popular educator, and has worked on such diverse topics as climate justice, health and aging, colonialism, North-South solidarity, and mining and extractive industry issues. A member of the Algonquin First Nation, Bob has played a pivotal role in advocating for recognition in indigenous ways of knowing and advancing indigenous rights. His work has been diverse in scope, and in particular has sought to shed light on the links between issues affecting indigenous peoples to social and environmental justice. While he has held a variety of positions throughout his life, he currently teaches at Queen’s University in the Development Studies program.
Bodia Macharia
Bodia Macharia is a Native of the Dem. Rep. of Congo. From 1999 to 2002 Bodia Macharia has researched on Congo geopolitics and links with the international political economy and written The International Political economy of the Assassination of Patrice Emery Lumumba: The implication of the CIA, the US and Belgium as the capstone thesis for the International Political Economy studies at the University of Arizona. Bodia Macharia is an academic and an educator at the University of Toronto, a mining justice activist, and a recipient of the Women Human Rights institute at the University of Toronto. She is also a Member of the CUPE International solidarity. Bodia is a board member of Friends of the Congo and FOTC President in Canada.
Chris Cosack
A recent graduate of the University of Toronto, Chris Cosack grew up in Central Ontario, near the site of the proposed mega quarry. He has been involved as a concerned citizen since the inception of NDACT (North Dufferin Agricultural & Community Taskforce). Chris and NDACT work to preserve and protect the unique and non-renewable resources of North Dufferin County, including the prime agricultural farmland, the region’s socio-economic fabric, and the headwaters that supply water to hundreds of thousands of Ontarians.
Clayton Thomas-Muller
Clayton of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan) in Northern Manitoba, Canada, is an activist for indigenous self-determination and environmental justice. Clayton has been organizing in Indigenous communities for over a decade. He is a prominent organizer against Tar Sands development, and an advocate for climate and energy justice. He is part of many organizations, including the Indigenous Environmental Network, Defenders of the Land, the Global Justice Ecology Project, and the Black Water Mesa Coalition.
Cory Wanless
Cory Wanless is a lawyer at Klippensteins Barristers & Solicitors in Toronto. Klippensteins currently represents 13 Mayan Q’eqchi’ in three lawsuits against Canadian company HudBay Minerals over a series of horrific attacks by mine security personnel against Mayan Q’eqchi’ community members. Cory also practices in the areas of native rights, environmental law, affordable housing, housing cooperatives, defamation and civil rights. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto.
Daniel Tubb
Daniel Tubb is completing his PhD in Anthropology at Carleton University. His doctoral research is on the informal economy and artisanal gold mining in Afro-Colombian communities in the Chocó region of Colombia. He recently completed two years of ethnographic fieldwork with communities affected by illegal mining, the underground economy, and forced displacement due to Colombia’s internal conflict. Daniel also holds a MA in Political Economy from Carleton University where his research and publications focused on public policy responses to violence in the city of Medellín, Colombia.
Elizabeth Babin
Elizabeth Babin is a recognized traditional elder in her community of Wahgoshig First Nation in northern Ontario. The journey from being raised on the land with a traditional lifestyle has given her the skills and knowledge to sustain a family within the land. Elizabeth has been actively involved in local industry and advised many organizations, including Kitcimama Grandmothers Council for Wahgoshig First Nation, Abitibi Model Forest, Kunuwanmanu Native Child Family Services, Wahgoshig Environmental Committee, and the Strategic IBA for Wahgoshig First Nation. Central aspects to her life are community, family, tradition, ceremonies, prayer, and global unity in environmental protection.
Francisco Ramirez Cuellar
Francisco is the former President of SINTRAMINERCOL, the union that represented workers in the Colombian state-owned mining company MINERCOL. Currently, he’s Secretary of FUNTRAMIENERGETICA, the federation of Colombian energy sector unions including the oil industry workers union USO. He is a lawyer, a human rights activist and an expert on the proliferation of multinational and Canadian corporate control of Colombia’s mining-energy extractive industries (mainly gold, coal, oil and gas). In 2005 he co-authored the book The Profits of Extermination: Big Mining in Colombia with Avi Chomsky.
Kevin Best
A self-professed activist since the age of 12, Kevin Best is a business and social change entrepreneur. As a strategic consultant, he has devoted his work to the causes of energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, culture, and indigenous treaty rights. He co-founded the Grey Bruce Power Council which incorporated the Grey Bruce Renewable Energy Co-op and was the first to sell green power in Ontario. He is currently developing bio diesel initiatives and SunFish Solar systems. When Kevin learned of the proposed mega quarry in Central Ontario’s Melancthon township, he was called to engage particularly because of the threat to the water. Kevin’s group, Earth’s Big Heart Society, has been working to form a strategic coalition calling for environmental reviews of the proposed quarry.
Mark Rowlinson
Mark Rowlinson is a member of the United Steelworkers and lawyer who drafted Bill C-354 that aims to hold corporations legally accountable for human rights violations committed abroad.
Maria Pia Silva
Maria is a member of the citizen assembly network in the Riojas region of Argentina, an activist movement that resists the development of mega-mining projects in the northwest of Argentina. The movement has been successful in blockading and deterrining some major mining developments, not least one proposed by Barrick Gold. Maria has her degree in social communication from the University of Cardoba in Argentina, and is working on a research project entitled “Dipositivos Hegemónicos y construcción de (neo) mapas en la Argentina actual” (Hegemony and the Construction of (neo) maps in modern Argentina).
Michael McClurg
Michael is an associate at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP. He is co-counsel to Wahgoshig First Nation in the matter of Wahgoshig v. Solid Gold Resources Corp. Wahgoshig was recently granted an injunction to stop Solid Gold from exploratory drilling in its traditional territory. Michael is a graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School and Trent University.
Michel Thursky
Michel is a member of Mitchikanibikok Inik – Algonquins of Barriere Lake First Nations community. The community is engaged in a legal battle with the Canadian government which seeks to side-step an agreement that, if and when enforced, would give the community the power and ability to make decisions about its governance, the use of its land, and to participate in resource-revenue sharing. Instead of honouring this hard fought for agreement, the Canadian government established a band council for the community without the community’s consent or approval. The band council has already made deals with forestry companies. Without the agreement being honoured, the community does not have a say in the nature and extent of the forestry (and other) operations and may not be provided equitable compensation for the operations on its unceded territory.
Rene Chimbo Grefa
Rene is the president of the indigenous Pueblo Kichwa de Rukullakta in Ecuador. The Pueblo Kichwa consist of 17 different indigenous communities that have been resisting heavy oil extraction in the Amazonian area of Rukullakta. He is visiting Canada to share stories of his people’s struggle for sovereignty and environmental justice.
Sergio Campusano (appearing via skype)
Sergio is the President of the Diaguita Descent Community Los Huasco Altinos in Chile. Since he assumed the role of president, Sergio has been fighting against the greed of the mining corporations and the local agriculture companies in order to maintain the rights of his People. He has participated pressing charges in countless times even against the Chilean State and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He’s conscious they’re fighting not only to represent the living, but the ancestral thought of preservation of the ecosystem for the entire world, for the children of us all. In this clear idea is impregnated the principles of auto-destiny, autonomy, and the right of the indigenous peoples of self-determination.
Stepan Wood
Stepan Wood is an associate professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School and Acting Director of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS). His research focuses on corporate social responsibility, sustainability, globalization, transnational private governance, climate change and environmental law. He has published A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance (2010, with Stephen Clarkson), Climate Law and Developing Countries (2009, as co-editor) and Environmental Law for Sustainability (2006, as co-editor). He played a central role in the campaign to ensure that the proposed international law collaboration between York University and Jim Balsillie’s private think-tank, CIGI, protected academic integrity, and later to reject it when it became clear that the parties were not willing to do so.
Stuart Trew
Stuart Trew is a trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians, a national social justice advocacy organization funded by its over 60,000 members. The Council works through its network of volunteer chapters to advocate for progressive policies on energy, climate, trade, health care and water at the municipal, provincial and federal level. Stuart has been with the organization for six years in various roles, including as researcher, organizer and campaigner. His work focuses on the impact that free trade and investment agreements have on human rights, environmental and public policy.
Todd Gordon
Todd Gordon is a social justice activist from Toronto. He is the author of Imperialist Canada, and teaches political science at York University.
Ulises Garcia
Ulises organized the local referendum against Manhattan Resources which managed to expel a powerful global mining company. He is the founder of a grassroots organization called Tropico Seco, which focuses on the promotion of peaceful resistance and the holding of community and municipal referendums in Latin America concerning development initiatives.
Walter Lindstone (opening prayer)
Walter Lindstone was born in Sault Ste. Marie and is a colonial member of the Batchewana Bay First Nation. He has been living in Toronto, Ontario his entire life. Raised in a dysfunctional home in Scarborough; growing up in a 84 unit Aboriginal Housing project he had to learn how to adapt and regain his identity. Having been raised by a mother who was a survivor of a missionary school, he did not learn the traditions of his culture/peoples. At a young age Walter was chosen by the spirits to do traditional healing work, and began his journey with apprenticeship through many different healers in his life. Today, he is gifted with carrying a traditional bundle for his people and conducts ceremonies to assist individuals in need of guidance, direction, balance and clarity in his or her own life.