Keynotes

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is an award-winning performance artist, poet, actor, curator, storyteller and writer. She is Kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) known for performing uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance. Her collaboratively created play Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Toronto Theatre Critics Association award and travelled internationally before the pandemic. Winner of the inaugural Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award from the Inuit Art Foundation, she has contributed new work in Abadakone (National Gallery of Canada) and is co-creator of the first piece of Inuit art involving a moving picture to the Art Gallery of Ontario. She performs and collaborates with many artists and is a fierce advocate for Inuit artists. She lives in Iqaluit with her husband and 3 children.

Now nominated for the 2021 Sobey Art Award!

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned economist and environmental activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two-time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.

As Program Director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with Indigenous communities. And in her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation-based non-profit organizations in the country, and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, recognizing her leadership and community commitment. In  1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age.  She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, Ms.Woman of the Year ( with the Indigo Girls in l997), and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project. The White Earth Land Recovery Project has won many awards- including the prestigious  2003 International Slow Food Award for Biodiversity, recognizing the organization’s work to protect wild rice from patenting and genetic engineering.

A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues.  She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA  and is presently an advisory board member for the Trust for Public Lands Native Lands Program as well as a board member of the Christensen Fund. The author of five books, including Recovering the Sacred, All our Relations and a novel- Last Standing Woman, is widely recognized for her work on environmental and human rights issues.