Join us on September 5-7, 2025, at the Lower Elwha Tribal Center, where we will gather the powerful voices of land and water defenders from the Salish Sea and beyond.

All across Turtle Island, Indigenous land and water defenders are in an ongoing battle with dirty energy corporations expanding across the so-called tar sands region in Treaties 8 and 6. The unfettered expansion equates to ever-expanding toxic tailings ponds and lakes, an increase in mancamps, unreliable infrastructure, a self-reporting industry of oil and bitumen spills, and increased oil tankers in the Salish Sea.

Indigenous Peoples are on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction on our territories. From toxic air and tailings ponds that surround our communities, aging and new North American pipelines failing an average of 1.7 times daily, the increased presence of oil tankers on the West Coast, a multifaceted threat to the marine life and ecosystems, to the waste by-products used to produce the plastics, breaking down into micro and nanoplastics in our food, water, and bodies. This is environmental violence and a violation of our rights.

For generations, we have witnessed the destruction of our shared planet and communities by extractive and exploitative colonial and capitalist systems of oppression. Indigenous Peoples, as stewards of the world’s oldest and most precious ecosystems for millennia, possess invaluable knowledge systems that uniquely position us to combat the extraction crisis.