WORDS MATTER: Indigenous, Ecological and Legal Pathways for Healing Earth

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 30 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019). He also was recently nominated for “Nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.” Tiokasin is a “perfectly flawed human being.”

Nicholas A. Robinson, is Kerlin Professor of Environmental Law Emeritus, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New York. He drafted New York’s wetlands laws, and was the founding chair of New York’s Greenway Heritage Conservancy for the Hudson River Valley. For seven decades, he has worked to build legal stewardship for nature through the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), helping to establish and support the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Peoples. As a scholar at both Pace and the Yale School of Environment, he has advanced knowledge of the Human Right to the environment, with its roots in Magna Carta, and has contributed to adopting in 2021, and now implementing, the right to the environment in New York State’s constitutional Bill of Rights. IUCN and American Bar Association, among others, have recognized his contributions to environmental law. He currently serves as Executive Governor of the International Council of Environmental Law (ICEL), founded in India in 1969, Earth’s first and oldest environmental law organization. He has lived in Sleepy Hollow, New York, along the Hudson River’s banks for the past six decades.