Valerie Courtois, Executive Director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, discusses Indigenous-led approaches to stewardship as essential for healing the land from ecological crises
By Danielle Vienneau
Valérie Courtois, a member of the Innu community of Mashteuiatsh, located on the shore of Peikuakami, or Lac-St-Jean, Québéc, is not just a national leader in Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship, but also a passionate advocate. As the Executive Director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI), she is deeply committed to supporting Indigenous Nations in honouring their responsibility to care for lands and waters. SAY Magazine recently had the honour of interviewing Courtois to learn more about her journey and ILI’s work.
Courtois has directed ILI since its launch in 2013. Before that, she served as a forestry advisor for the Assembly of First Nations of Québec and Labrador, as a forestry planner for the Innu Nation, and as a consultant in Aboriginal forestry. It was in her role as the Senior Indigenous Advisor for the Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI)—a former conservation and stewardship organization under the International Boreal Conservation Campaign—that she realized something had to change. The scope of her work included all of Canada; however, given her profession and years of experience, Courtois knew this would be an impossible task. She remembers saying, “I could be on a plane 24/7 and still not make a dent in all the work that has to happen. We need to bring in more Indigenous Peoples.”
After consulting with Indigenous leadership from various communities already involved in conservation initiatives, the ILI was established. In 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected, the nature of the opportunities with the federal government changed in terms of advancing some of the interests in conservation, stewardship, and nationhood in general.
“We brought everybody together in our networks. We gathered the existing Guardians programs in 2014 in Squamish, British Columbia, and there were just over 30 of them,” says Courtois. “We asked them how we could help and what we should do as an organization. They gave us three instructions: 1) Funding of projects. People were tired of writing proposals for $25,000 at a time. There needed to be a better way; 2) Networking. They knew notionally that other Guardians existed, but they had never met them or had a chance to exchange; and 3) They wanted the profession of Guardianship established because there were so few of them that they had to explain what Guardians were for every partner and often had to prove the model to do that.”
As the only Indigenous-led organization in this space, ILI took on many of these challenges and lobbied the federal government to launch funding initiatives through Environment and Climate Change Canada. In 2017, ILI secured an initial federal investment of $25 million over five years in Guardians programs and helped encourage Canada to invest $200 million in 2021, which went directly to Indigenous Nations to support Guardians and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas.
ILI also helped lay the groundwork for the launch of the First Nations National Guardians Network in 2022—the world’s first Indigenous-led national stewardship network. In addition to connecting Guardians and offering training, the Network provides a first-of-its-kind model for allocating funds led, designed, and managed by First Nations.
“Guardians networks exist, but this is the first one at a national scale in the world,” explains Courtois. “And now all the monies that Environment and Climate Change Canada was awarded through the budget process for Guardians are run through the network.” Through the Indigenous decision-making process, ILI can maximize the social and economic returns on that investment because the Guardians do so much more than just protect lands. “I’ve heard so many Guardians say that becoming a Guardian has literally saved their life in creating hope and a purpose in the community.”
According to Courtois, there are now over 200 programs across the country and over 1,500 Guardians working every day “to ensure that our lands and waters are safe and healthy and that we’re meeting our responsibilities as nations towards our lands and waters.”
“All of the conservation work that Indigenous nations are doing around what is now known as Canada has been key to our success in establishing Indigenous protected and conserved areas, ” says Courtois. “It could transform the conversation nationally with major projects and critical minerals. Indigenous Guardians will ensure [those] can happen safely and in places where local communities can benefit as much as possible,” states Courtois. “And it’s a great career. If I had known, in high school and university, that I could become a Guardian, you could bet that’s what I would have done.”
When asked about Canada’s most significant challenges when it comes to conservation, Courtois says, “We have an existential crisis in front of us between climate change and biodiversity loss. And honestly, the public system does not have enough money to fund change. To deal with the scope and scale of the problem, we have to be creative about financing these things, and we have to recognize that for many places, particularly in northern remote areas, the economy should be a conservation-based one instead of a resource development one. I’m not saying that resource development shouldn’t happen. On the contrary, I think many of our communities deserve higher standards of living and access and decision-making, but I think we can’t make the mistakes of the past, which is ‘use, use, use’ without thinking more about and inserting and applying the values that have ensured our sustainability for millennia.”
Courtois credits the great work that ILI is doing to an incredible team of dedicated and skilled individuals. “This work is a culmination of so many people’s dedication and passion. Like the nations themselves, we are out there and doing that hard work of pushing for conservation and saying, no, we don’t need 10 mines; maybe two is enough. And that’s hard work. So, there are a lot of people who are contributing to this movement.”
Courtois holds a degree in forestry sciences from Université de Moncton, an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from the University of Guelph, and an honorary Doctorate in Forestry Sciences, honoris causa, from Université Laval. She was named to the 2023 TIME100 Climate list, the inaugural list of the most influential climate leaders. Courtois was named the 2023 winner of Stanford University’s highest environmental prize, the Bright Award for Environmental Sustainability. In 2024, Courtois was honoured with the Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions for revolutionizing the climate conversation in the Canadian Arctic.
Danielle Vienneau, Editor-in-Chief of SAY Magazine, believes in sharing positive stories to inspire greatness in others. To submit your story, email editor@saymag.com.
