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From: Bonnie White <oakridge@gorge.net>
To: <<clipped>>
Subject: Biographies for Feb 28-29 event
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 09:04:22 -0800

In case the first transmission of this document left out the end of Johnny's biography and the beginning of Tom's.  I am resending to avoid confusion.  Thanks to all.

Biographies

Chief Johnny Jackson:

Johnny Jackson is the Cascade-Klickitat Chief of the fourteen bands and tribes of the Yakama Nation; a national council member of IEN, an international organization with an affiliation of over 200 indigenous organizations and nations; a member of the International Treaty Council; and a board member of the Columbia Gorge Audubon Society.

Johnny's activism began after he was served an eviction notice from the government, asking him to move out of the in-lieu fishing site and go to the reservation.  Since the fight to save his home, Johnny has become a well-known and respected activist involved in issues such as Native fishing rights, the protection of sacred land and vision quest sites, development along the Columbia River, upholding treaty rights, the removal of dams, polluting industries, and Hanford, to name a few.

Johnny Jackson is the voice of his people in protecting sacred sites such as Lyle Point [Lyle, Washington], Enola Hill [Oregon], and Juniper Point [Washington] which is located on the Columbia Hills.  In September of 1993, Johnny helped set up an encampment on Lyle Point to stop further development of new, private "windsurfing community" condominiums, and to protect a newly constructed fishing scaffold after one had been thrown in the river.
 

Tom Goldtooth:

National Coordinator, Indigenous Environmental Network; Board Chair, Honor the Earth Campaign; Board Member of the Washington Office on Environmental Justice, the Environmental Justice Fund Initiative; and the Great Lakes Regional Indigenous Environmental Network.  He is an advisor to the staff of the Greenpeace U.S. Native Lands Campaign, and recently completed his term on the U.S. EPA environmental justice advisory council subcommittee on waste facility and siting.

Tom is the national spokesperson for the Indigenous Environmental Network (lEN).  lEN is a national, grassroots, environmental organization involved with stopping toxic and nuclear dumping on or near Indigenous lands and with leading the struggle to reform national environmental, economic and energy policies that are genocidal to Indigenous people. Tom is the Coordinator of the Red Lake Nation (Minnesota) Environmental Protection Department that is developing an Indigenous environmental infrastructure based on traditional eco-knowledge. He is involved with local, state, national and international issues directly related to the environmental justice movement.  He advises various science and historical museums on the repatriation and reburial of human remains and return of cultural items. He is dedicated to the empowerment of grassroots communities, maintaining Indigenous traditional values, and the protection of Indigenous rights and self-determination. He believes that to work for the struggle of protecting the earth, one has to respect the sacredness of the creative principle of women that is rooted in Mother Earth.

Goldtooth has been a leader within native social, economic and environmental justice issues for over 20 years. He has provided local, regional, national and international leadership to indigenous tribal nations and grassroots communities concerning environmental protection policies on or near native lands.  He has an international reputation for his work on environmental issues in relationship with traditional eco-knowledge and sustainable community development.  Along with the coalition members of the Indigenous Environmental Network, officially formed in 1991, Goldtooth works unceasingly to protect the Sacredness of Mother Earth from contamination and exploitation - all based on his understanding of traditional teachings.  He also advises various science and historical museums on repatriation and reburial of human remains and return of cultural items.

Bradley Angel:

As Greenpeace's Southwest toxics coordinator, he spent 11 years helping communities fight for their health, their land, and often their survival.  Angel has organized in the Mojave Desert, where Native Americans are fighting to stop the construction of a nuclear-waste dump; in West Oakland, where low-income residents are trying to force Caltrans to clean up toxic ground water; and in the Central Valley, where farm workers are organizing against a hazardous-waste megadump.  So in July 1997, when word came down from Greenpeace's national office that all environmental-justice campaigns would be discontinued in January 1998, community leaders all over California started thinking about how to keep Angel's work going.

Angel and some former workers from Greenpeace, and colleagues from throughout the state, decided to start a new group to pick up where Greenpeace had left off. The new group is called Greenaction.

Bradley Angel has also assisted the Dakota People of the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in ongoing efforts to stop a major landfill project from moving forward.  Bradley's efforts have reached Native Peoples' communities across the Western Hemisphere.
 

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