Celebrate 2020 With Us

With your help, CIER can keep tackling complicated problems. Join us in changing the world.
​
This year…

We’ve Educated

Shining Lights: Energy Literacy and Language in the Northwest Territories
​
In the Northwest Territories, many communities rely on diesel energy. By increasing knowledge and energy literacy, these communities can decrease their reliance on diesel-supplied energy. CIER’s Shining Lights Energy Literacy and Language in the Northwest Territories project consisted of three different workshops across the Northwest Territories that reached 56 Indigenous women and youth from diesel-reliant communities.
​
The Shining Lights workshops focused on identifying attainable energy-saving actions that can be done on a personal and household level.

---

Focusing on the energy literacy of Indigenous women and youth increases the chances that communities will make the best possible individual or household level energy choices. It also paves the way for the possibility of community energy planning.

Read more about Shining Lights here. ​

We’ve Collaborated

Collaborative Leadership Initiative

We cannot take on big issues like clean water if we’re alone and divided. That’s why CIER, the Winnipeg Metropolitan Region, and the Southern Chiefs Organization brought together Chiefs, Mayors, and Reeves from across Southern Manitoba. They went from being a group of strangers who’d never been in the same room as each other to allies, united against the common issues they all face.

---

"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." – Henry Ford

Since local regulations and social distancing efforts made it impossible for the leaders to meet in person, they changed many of their 2020 meetings to online gatherings, taking this historical event into the digital age.

​Learn more on the Collaborative Leadership Initiative Website.

We’ve Empowered

Seventh Generation Waste Warriors

Youth are the future. They are future leaders, advocates, parents, partners, and more. When we empower and educate them, we are empowering all of our futures.

Martin McLean from Lake Manitoba First Nation’s eventual goal is to encourage his community to start a recycling program. Right now, like in many First Nations across Canada, recyclables are thrown away and end up in a landfill. CIER’s Waste Warriors program helped Martin work towards achieving his goal, but the first step was education, awareness, and accountability about garbage and recycling in Lake Manitoba First Nation.

---

Thanks to Indigenous filmmakers Code Breaker Films, you now have the opportunity to follow the journey of the Seventh Generation Waste Warriors. Join Martin and other passionate youth from First Nations across Manitoba as they learn about leadership, waste management, and collaboration.
​Learn more on the Innowaste Website.

We’ve Inspired

Dakota Field Guide and Storybook

We need to re-learn how to listen to birds, they have so many things to tell us. Our ancestors highly respected the birds around us, but now people barely pay attention to them. CIER’s Dakota Field Guide project aims to change the ways that we view and interact with nature.

The prairies are vanishing. If we don’t act now, we’ll lose the species who call the grasslands home, including 42 North American birds. By inspiring youth from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation to learn more about over 80 species of birds, we’re ensuring the next generation will work to protect and fight for diminishing breeding grounds.

---

Part of this project included working with Dakota Elders to create a Field Guide, full of the Dakota language and knowledge. We want to encourage you to take an interest in the birds you see in your community, learn their Dakota names, and maybe take a second to really listen to them next time you’re outside.

Learn more about the Youth Workshops and Read the Field Guide here.