Mother Earth Is Our Elder

Indigenous solutions we can all apply today to make our lives more sustainable and engage with earth and community from award-winning Dene activist and writer Katlia.

The Dene in Canada’s North West territories have lived alongside nature for many generations. From battling environmental racism on the front lines of historical environmental protests, to innovating sustainable resources, to living a balanced life through effective individual and collective governance, the Dene have long protected Mother Earth from destruction through their intricate knowledge systems, natural laws, and age-old principles, which are shared here for the first time thank to the contributions of tribal elders.

This is ancient information, but it’s new to those outside the Dene community, and Katlia’s voice channels our collective energy toward surprisingly simple scalable solutions such as:

Adhering proudly to these responsibilities and values, Katlia (pronounced cat-lee-ah) writes a Dene manifesto fit to address the state of emergency we’re in. Informed by Katlia’s decades-long award-winning work and advocacy as a writer and activist, and her life experiences as a Dene woman from the north, this book achieves global relevance by focusing on the local.