Thursday, April 19 6 to 9 pm Sem II B1105 The Evergreen State College

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend! This event is free of charge. Please feel welcome to participate in our discussion following the panelists' presentations.

Learn about environmental justice impacts on tribal sovereignty, culture and resources; events in Oaxaca; the effects of corporate personhood on economic inequalities; health and human rights violations; climate change; the imperative connections between social justice and environmental activism; and much, much more.

Our panelists include... Shelly Vendiola of the Indigenous Environmental Network Lin Nelson, Health and Environment faculty at Evergreen Melissa Poe, Environmental Anthropologist on issues in Oaxaca Karen Coulter of the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project ...and perhaps more!

Sponsored by the Environmental Resource Center (erc@riseup.net)

Read more.

Speaker Bios:

Michele (Shelly) Vendiola (Swinomish/Lummi/Filipina) - Bellingham, Washington
Email: msvendiola@comcast.net
Website: www.tribalpeacemaking.com

Ms. Vendiola is a certified mediator, educator and community activist. Currently she works as a consultant to the Families/Communities/Schools Partnership project as a Community advocate for the rights of native students and families. Recently she worked with the Northwest Indian College—Tribal Governance Leadership Enhancement Project, developing curriculum on tribal leadership decision-making. Shelly serves on the Board of Directors for the Indigenous Women’s Network, an international coalition of Native American women whose work includes support and advocacy for community-based economic development, human rights, environmental justice, health and wellness of native women. She serves on the Board of Directors for Agricultural Missions, a US based non-profit supporting rural agricultural development internationally. She has served as the Program Director at the Indigenous Environmental Network and continues to lead the Persistent Organic Pollution Tribal Initiative for the Northwest region. Shelly also serves as an advisor and advocate for the Lummi CEDAR Project—Youth Leadership Institute and facilitator for the Lummi Ventures – Shaping Lummi Education Conference. Ms. Vendiola became a certified mediator through the Indian Dispute Resolution Services, Inc., where she also produced and led Alternative Dispute Resolution training events. She also received training from the San Francisco Community Boards Program. Shelly provides conflict resolution training and facilitation services and together with her mother conducts a five-day Tribal Peacemaking Training Institute for tribal communities and programs throughout the country. Shelly has a M.Ed. in Adult & Higher Education and practices popular education methodology within all aspects of her work as an educator, activist, and community organizer.

Karen Coulter - Fossil, Oregon
Email: karen@poclad.org
Phone: 541 385 9167

Director of the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project in eastern Oregon. Karen has been a grassroots activist on environmental, anti-nuclear and social justice issues since 1980; part of the Earth First! movement since 1984; worked for the AFSC against the MX missile; for Greenpeace International as Acid Rain campaigner and international lobbyist on ozone depletion. Helped create the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. Graduate of Reed College.

Lin Nelson - Olympia, Washington
Email: nelsonl@evergreen.edu

Lin Nelson is a teacher/researcher/advocate around issues of environment and social justice. Before she came to Evergreen in the early 1990's, she worked with various movement organizations in the Northeast, in particular with the Akwesasne Mohawk Environmental Justice project, the Labor-Environment-Justice Network of NYS, and the National Women's Health Network. She's been a writer/contributor on the environmental/occupational health chapter of Our Bodies Ourselves. Here in WA, she collaborates with the Washington Toxics Coalition and other environmental health organizations. Currently Lin's working with Anne Fischel and the Evergreen Labor Center on a project about pollution impacts on families in working class communities.

Melissa Poe
Email: mpoe@u.washington.edu

Melissa Poe, M.A., PhC, is an environmental anthropologist who recently returned from Oaxaca, Mexico where she has been conducting research since 2002. Poe is finishing her doctorate at the University of Washington, Seattle where she focuses on issues of environmental politics and social justice in a communal forestland in the Sierra Zapotec region. Poe's undergraduate degrees in Sociology and Spanish, together with her early career experiences in sustainable development (vis-à-vis ecotourism), provided just the right background for graduate-level ethnographic work in Latin America. Identity issues – of race/ethnicity and gender – and how these affect rural (indigenous) people’s access to forest resources and environmental decision-making have been central emphases of her research. Poe is the co-author of the article, Community Forestry in Theory and Practice: Where are we now? forthcoming in the Annual Review of Anthropology. She maintains a long time interest in communities and forests and has recently been working on collaborative forest management in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. Poe teaches undergraduate courses on the political economy and cultural politics of environmental change, world development and inequality and using ethnography to understand complex human-environment relationships.

If anyone is inspired to ask questions of the speakers ahead of time, please email erc@riseup.net and we will forward your discussion topics to each panelist.