35-year-old Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree, one of Canada’s First Nations, was raised on the land like her parents and grandparents: hunting moose and drying the meat, using local plants as medicines, spending summers deep in the boreal forests and muskeg swamps and winters in a village with no running water. But her community’s traditional lifestyle is under threat from oil development in the nearby Alberta tar sands. Laboucan-Massimo travels around the world to speak about the threats to her of life, while raising awareness about violence against women and Indigenous people, including discussing the social problems that arise in oil extraction communities. Photo credit: Greenpeace
