New Year, New Beginnings

It is with great pleasure that we announce the launching of the new Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign (ITSC). Since its inception, the ITSC has been a project of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) based in the United States, and we have enjoyed working with IEN while the program has grown and developed. However, given the realities of organizing in Canada we have decided that this campaign needs to be based in Canada with a Canadian fiscal sponsor to help administer the program and help ensure its financial viability and management needs.

Therefore, as of January 2013, the Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign will be located in Ottawa, Ontario, based at the Polaris Institute. We are excited about building this relationship, and more importantly we are profoundly committed to stopping the tar sands. It is with a heavy heart that we thank IEN for many great years of collaboration and we hope the best for the continued work that IEN does in the area of environmental justice for Native American communities.

In this next year we have high hopes for the campaign to grow and develop. We remain firmly committed to standing with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the Beaver Lake Cree Nation in their ongoing litigation. We are working on implementing a plan for the Line 9 expansion in Ontario and we will continue to support the work in British Columbia to stop the pipeline tanker plans to deliver tar sands crude to the West coast. We are continuing to work on the other side of the pond with the financial sector highlighting the “risk” of investing on disputed First Nations lands. The campaign will be sending delegations again this year to BP and Shell AGM’s with our partner the UK Tar Sands Network.

Overall, our program of work will continue to grow and we hope to be more effective, more accountable and most importantly do the best job that we can to support Indigenous communities taking on the largest extractive industries on earth.

For more information please feel free to contact us at the Polaris Institute: (613) 237-1717 ext. 106

Yours in Respect and Peace,

Co-Directors of ITS - Campaign

Heather Milton-Lightening

Twitter: @Inktomilady Email: [email protected]

&

Clayton Thomas-Muller

Twitter: @CreeClayton Email: [email protected]

*Facebook group and website coming soon.

Video: Co-director's Heather Milton-Lightning and Clayton Thomas-Muller at the #J28 #IdleNoMore protest on Capitol Hill, in Ottawa -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXD2SAv87qs