Autumn Peltier: ‘Water Warrior’ for Marginalized Communities
Fifteen-year-old water protector Autumn Peltier, Anishinaabe-kwe, comes from the Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island in northern Ontario, Canada. It was there, after observing that Indigenous people on the island could not drink the water in their communities, that she began her fight for clean water.
“It all started by learning why my people couldn’t drink the water on Ontario Indigenous lands. I was confused because Canada is not a third-world country, but in my country, the Indigenous people live in third-world conditions,” she said when she addressed the United Nations Global Landscapes Forum in September 2019.
Peltier was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prizeby the David Suzuki Foundation in 2017, 2018 and 2019. She was also recognized as an Ontario Junior Citizen for her environmental advocacy work and won a WE Day award for Youth in Action when she was 12. She has shared her message at hundreds of events around the world and has been dubbed a “Water Warrior” for her continued activism.
Learn more about sustainability through an Indigenous lens
In 2016, she famously confronted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about his failure to protect Indigenous people’s water at a meeting of the Assembly of First Nations in 2016. She was just 12 years old when she told him, “I am very unhappy with the choices you made.” Through tears, she added only “the pipelines,” to which Trudeau responded, “I will protect the water.”
For years and years, our ancestors have passed down traditional oral knowledge that our water is alive and our water has a spirit.Autumn Peltier
In her U.N. speech the following year, Peltier explained that boil water advisories have existed in some Indigenous communities in Canada for over 20 years. She also mentioned learning about Flint, Michigan and other marginalized communities’ struggles to obtain clean water around the world.
Peltier’s passion comes, in part, from the tradition in which she grew up. Her great-aunt, Josephine Mandamin, served as thechief water commissioner of the Anishinabek Nation, a position Peltier took on when she was just 14. In her 2019 U.N. speech, Peltier described the spiritual significance of water to her people.
“For years and years, our ancestors have passed down traditional oral knowledge that our water is alive and our water has a spirit,” she said. “Our first water teaching comes from our mother. We literally live in water for nine months, floating in that sacred water that gives us life.”
During her firstU.N. speech in 2018, Peltier urged the general assembly to “warrior up” and take serious steps to defend the planet. In 2019, she called for a banning of plastics and a return to older, more sustainable ways of life.
"We can't eat money or drink oil." she said.
