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The awards ceremony, which will feature performers including Buffy Sainte-Marie and Crystal Shwanda, will be hosted by Tinsel Corey of Twilight fame and Raoul Trujillo, who appeared in Apocalypto.
Another award winner is Monica Pinette for sports. Recognized as a trailblazer in Canada for the women’s modern pentathlon, Pinette competed in both the Athens and Beijing Olympics. In Athens, she was one of the first Canadian women to compete in the sport at an Olympic Games. She was also the only athlete of Native descent to compete in Athens.
Through its education program, since 1985 the NAAF has awarded more than CA$32 million (US$31.4 million) in scholarships and bursaries to about 8,400 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis (a group of mixed Native and European ancestry) students nationwide.
One of Beaton’s more recent causes was the effort to stop Dump Site 41 in Simcoe County, Ontario, a landfill slated to be built on top of Alliston Aquifer, reputed to contain some of the purest water in the world.
Opponents claim the landfill would contaminate not only Alliston Aquifer but also nearby Georgian Bay.
To raise awareness, Beaton led a five-day 75-mile “walk for water” from Tiny Township to the Ontario Legislature in Toronto. He launched a Facebook petition against the proposed dump that received 9,000 signatures, and locals set up a peaceful blockade to prevent construction from going ahead.
Last August, Simcoe County councilors voted 22-10 in favor of a one-year moratorium on the controversial landfill. The decision will be followed by a future vote to scrap the project entirely, according to the Council of Canadians’ Web site.
“Water has been disrespected in so many ways over and over again, basically for profit,” says Beaton. “That is life and that is negative, but there is still the positive force. The corporations do not have to function for the negative—we can have trade and commerce in a positive way.”
He adds that he strives to “bring native values and philosophy to mainsteam society where there is a missing link toward solving problems.”
“It is about coming together in unity and solving the environmental problems Western society created from greed or profit through mismanagement of Mother Earth,” Beaton says.
