Keynotes
Jayden Foytlin
Jayden Foytlin is a 16-yr-old climate justice activist and two time flood survivor from Deep South Louisiana. She is currently one of 21 plaintiffs involved in a landmark case suing the US government for its contribution to climate change and climate disaster. Jayden has been highlighted in Vogue, CBS’ 60 Minutes, The Guardian, among others. In November of 2018 she was named among Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21, which spotlights “extraordinary young women, girls, and femmes making waves in their industries or passions of choice.”
Cherri Foytlin
Cherri Foytlin is an afro-indigenous (Din’e) organizer, writer, speaker, and mother of six who lives in southwest Louisiana. She is the author of “Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion,” and regularly contributes to BridgetheGulfProject.org, and other written platforms. In the Spring of 2011, she walked to Washington D.C. from New Orleans (1,243 miles) to educate and call for action to regarding the BP Deep Water Drilling Disaster. More recently, as a founder of the L’eau Est La Vie (Water is Life) Camp she has helped to lead an inspiring direct action campaign to stop the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. She is also the executive director of Louisiana Rise, an organization dedicated to a just transition for local Louisiana communities, an advisory member for Another Gulf is Possible, the National Poor People’s Campaign, and a National team member for Extinction Rebellion US.
Photo Credit: Maria Merkulova / RAN.org
Winnie Overbeek
Winnie Overbeek has been the International Coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement since January 2011. WRM is an international initiative that aims to contribute to struggles, reflections and political actions of forest-dependent peoples, indigenous, peasants and other communities in the global South. WRM is part of a global movement for social and environmental justice and respect for human and collective rights. WRM is the southern hub of the Campaign to STOP Genetically Engineered Trees.
WRM was founded in 1986 by activists from different parts of the world in response to the ongoing destruction of forests in the global South and excessive consumption of tropical timber products in the global North.
Its main role is to support struggles that defend the collective rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples and peasant communities who live in and with the forest over their territories, lives and cultures.
Winnie is based in the Brazilian town of Vitoria in the Espirito Santo state. He is also an active member of the Brazilian Alert against the Green Desert Network that provides support to communities affected by against-large scale tree plantations and other large-scale (agro) industrial projects.
Winnie will speak about monoculture timber plantations and communities taking their land back from those companies, governments that stole it for the timber plantations and the situation in Bolsanoro's Brazil including the Amazon region. He also will talk about the Business for Nature schemes that use trees as a false solution to climate change.
Photo: EJOLT
Barney Bush
Shawnee/Cayuga poet and indigenous activist Barney Bush was born in Herod, Illinois. He earned a BA at Fort Lewis College and an MA in English and Fine Arts at the University of Idaho. Bush took nature, family, and his Native American heritage as subject matter. His collections of poetry include By Due Process (2004), Petroglyphs (1982). Nato Records recorded several of his musical and spoken-word performances, including Left for Dead: Prisoners of the American Dream (1994). Several anthologies, including Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (1988) and Songs From This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983), have featured his work.
Bush is a member of the Society of Artists, Composers and Editors of Music. His honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He helped establish the Institute of the Southern Plains, a Cheyenne Indian school located in Oklahoma, and helped many universities develop Native American studies programs. He taught at the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and serves as chair of the Council of the Vinyard Indian Settlement. Bush currently lives and works on the ancestral homelands in the Southern Illinois.
Click Here for more information about the Shawnee People and the Vinyard Indian Settlement
Panelists
Anne Petermann
Panel Moderator: Anne Petermann is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and is a co-Founder and the Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project. She has been working for the protection of forests since 1989. She began campaigning for the rights of Indigenous Peoples in 1991. Her work on Indigenous rights, forest protection and against GMOs led her to begin investigating and documenting the social and ecological impacts of genetically engineered trees and industrial tree plantations in 1999. Since then, she has presented her findings to Parties and delegates at UN Climate Summits, Biodiversity Conventions and Forest Forums on five continents, winning an important decision from the UN warning countries of the dangers of GE trees in Bonn, Germany in 2008.
Anne has also been researching and writing about climate change, false solutions to climate change and their interrelation with forests and human rights since 2001. In 2004 she co-founded the Durban Group for Climate Justice in Durban, South Arica; in 2007 she co-founded Climate Justice Now! In Bali, Indonesia and in 2008 she co-founded Climate Justice Action in Copenhagen, Denmark. GJEP is also one of the founding members of the Climate Justice Alliance. She was banned from all future UN Climate Conferences for an unpermitted direct action inside the UN conference center in Durban, South Africa in 2011.
Mike Africa, Jr.
Mike Africa, Jr. is a member of The MOVE Organization, a revolutionary, a conscious hip hop artist and a motivational resilience speaker who pushes his revolutionary message with his stage performances. He has shared the stage with the likes of Marc Lamont Hill, Tarana Burke, Ramona Africa, Dead Prez, Immortal Technique and countless others; tackling issues such as mass incarceration, police brutality, environmental protection, systematic oppression...
Mike is the son of 2 political prisoners who were recently released from prison after 40 years. Secretly born in a Philadelphia prison following a police raid on his family’s home, Mike was taken from his mother and placed in an orphanage where he was physically and mentally abused. At age 13, Mike began using his music to raise awareness in the hopes of gaining support to get his parents home; finally on June 16th, 2018, after 40 years in prison, Mike finally got his mother released. Four months later on October 23rd, 2018, Mike got his father released.”
“Let’s use these victories to encourage people to continue to press on in revolutionary action”
Mike Africa, Jr.
Edxi Betts
Edxi Betts is a Black Blackfoot Filipina/Trans/Queer liberation artist and autonomous organizer. Their work is centered around advocating for non-white queer and trans communities, and bringing support and attention to political prisoners and restorative-mediation work. They emphasize art as cultural production for the sake of inspiring healing, political education, counter narrative, oppositional alternatives, cultivating resistance through self-organizing and direct action.
Brenda Jo McManama
Brenda Jo McManama Brenda Jo is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and has been involved with Indigenous and environmental issues for over 25 years. Beginning in the early 1990s working with WV State agencies on NAGPRA, opposition to mountaintop/strip coal mining & public education. For the past 14+ years she has contributed to IEN’s mission in different capacities ranging from graphic design/ web administration to media coordinator and campaign organizer. BJ was a member of two Indigenous cultural delegations who traveled to the jungles of Peru and central Mexico to meet with Indigenous community leaders. The focus of these exchanges were grounded in sharing of cultural information and current mitigation, restoration, and subsistence challenges centered on forest and aquatic regions.
BJ is a member of the Campaign to Stop GE Trees steering committee and works closely with both Indigenous and Front Line community organizations on forest protection, false solutions to climate change, opposition to genetically engineered trees for biomass/biofuel production on Indigenous lands, climate justice and Indigenous rights of sovereignty and self-determination. When not working on these and other national and global environmental issues, BJ works with grassroots organizations in her home territory of the Ohio River Valley protecting water resources and forests from encroaching oil and gas extraction and expanding operations from the petrochemical industry.
The Indigenous Environmental Network has brought together and organized with Indigenous Peoples and communities globally on issues related to Indigenous land rights and autonomy. Most recently IEN has focused on the impacts of energy corporations on Indigenous communities in North America; and on the impacts of land grabbing and forest carbon offsets schemes on Indigenous communities in North America and globally.
Rachel Smolker Phd.
Rachel Smolker is codirector of Biofuelwatch where she works to reveal and oppose the impacts of large scale bioenergy on public health and the environment, promote the protection of biodiversity, and advance climate justice. She has worked to oppose wood pellet exports to European Union and biotechnology-for-advanced-biofuels (GE crops, trees, algae and microbes). Her work spans from grassroots community organizing to participation in United Nations conventions on climate and biodiversity. She is on the board of the Global Forest Coalition and steering committee of the Campaign to STOP GE Trees, and is a founder of “Protect Geprags Park”, a citizen group based in Hinesburg Vermont that is opposing a fracked gas pipeline. Rachel has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in biology and prior to her current position, worked as a field biologist studying ecology and zoology. She is author of numerous scientific and popular articles as well as a book (To Touch A Wild Dolphin, Doubleday 2001).
Orin Langelle
Orin Langelle (photolangelle.org) is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and began his activism opposing the Vietnam War when he was in high school. His activism on issues ranging from forest protection and worker’s rights to Indigenous solidarity, anti-racism, anti-globalization, climate justice and women’s rights has continued to the present day. Langelle is also an award-winning concerned photographer, who for close to five decades has been documenting peoples’ resistance to war, corporate globalization, ecological destruction and human rights abuses.
Langelle’s first photographic assignment was to cover the protests against the Vietnam War at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.
He has worked behind rebel lines to document the struggle of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Mexico. He also co-produced the film Lacandona: The Zapatistas and Rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico to expose the links between the destruction of the resource-rich Lacandon rainforest and the conflict of the government and the Zapatistas.
Langelle has also documented Indigenous movements in Brazil, Nicaragua, Chile, Paraguay, James Bay, Quebec, Indonesia, Kenya and across the US.
He has photographed and participated in forest protection campaigns, protests, direct actions and other events at national and international forums on six continents including UN climate and other summits, World Bank meetings, the U.S. Democratic and Republican Conventions, the World Water Forum, the World Social Forum, and meetings of the G8 and G20.
Publications: Langelle’s photographs have appeared in hundreds of print and online publications including La Jornada, Time Magazine and USA Today, and have illustrated numerous book covers
Exhibits: Langelle’s photography has been displayed in across the US and around the world, from Amsterdam to Copenhagen to Bali, Indonesia, and in small Indigenous villages in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, Mexico and in Campo Lorro in the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay.
Convergence Coordinating Committee Welcomes:
Tabitha Tripp
Tabitha Tripp is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and is born and raised in a small town in southernmost IL, Tabitha Tripp works to protect the Cache River Wetlands and Shawnee National Forest communities from fragmentation and exploitation from fracking, mining and logging companies.
Tripp is an artist, a parent, a founding member of Shawnee Forest Defense! and coordinating committee member for the NAFCMC a steering committee member of SAFE, (Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment). Recently, she also set precedent in the fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline by filing as a pro se intervenor on the grounds of a taxpayer and parent of two children who will ultimately inherit the problems created by our fossil fuel addictions.
Ruddy Turnstone
Ruddy is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and is a GE trees campaigner for Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) and is on the Campaign to Stop GE Trees Steering Committee. She works to ban genetically engineered trees from commercialization globally, nationally and locally.
A mixed-race Desi living in the southeastern so-called U.S., Ruddy provides direct action climb trainings for Earth First!, Greenpeace, at Trans and Women’s Action Camps, and tree climbing to the public as recreation. Ruddy also provides direct action trainings and has worked with various coalitions on fighting energy infrastructure, ICE and biotech projects in “FL” and nationally.
John B. Wallace
John B. Wallace is on the Convergence Coordinating Committee and is a recently retired public land and municipal water source manager. John also worked as an environmental educator from Southern Illinois University’s Touch of Nature Environmental Center. As a forest activist on the Shawnee National Forest and public land in and around the southern Illinois region for 30 years, he has taken on public awareness campaigns, lobbied legislators, tackled pro se litigation and participated in non-violent direct action in defense of the natural world. John is a founding member of the recently organized, Shawnee Forest Defense! and the 25 year old Shawnee Chapter of the Illinois Audubon Society. He is currently the Shawnee Audubon Chapter president and serves on the Land Acquisition and Sanctuary Committee of IAS, the oldest, non-governmental conservation organization in Illinois. John has a BS in Plant and Soil Science from SIU and has been known to portray the writer, mountaineer and conservationist, John Muir, in living history performances.
Charles FW (Chaz) Wheelock
Campaign Organizer/Tribal Liaison
Chaz is a member of the Oneida Nation West and has worked for many years for sustainable, responsible development in rural communities that looks ahead seven generations. He works with IEN campaign organizers, partner and allies elevating the ideals of positive transitions from the destruction of the extreme extraction to regenerative and resilient community-based economies built on Traditional Indigenous Knowledge. Chaz’s past and present work in the twin themes of diaspora and sustainable community development for Indigenous peoples has provided a diverse field of references and resources from an international to a local context. Early on, Chaz helped to develop the Iroquois Farms as a tribal organic agriculture venture which established a cooperative management structure reflecting the Oneida worldview of cooperation and sharing – and which drew upon another model, the Mondragon cooperative in Spain. He has been active in a wide range of organizations, including the National Congress of American Indians, the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, the International Indian Treaty Council and the Midwest Treaty Network.