Learn About and Follow Indigenous Womxn Climb
"We realized that social media has the capacity to promote and support our own representation, but also to educate non-Indigenous climbers..."
The summer solstice, June 21, is National Indigenous Peoples Day, first announced in 1996 as a day for all Canadians to recognize and celebrate the diverse cultures and contributions of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
Erynne Gilpin is a Victoria-based Saulteaux-Cree Métis PostDoctoral fellow and activist who is the founder of Indigenous Womxn Climb on Instagram: “A community of Indigenous climbers which promotes diverse representation of Indigenous bodies in the climbing world and educates non-Indigenous communities about issues such as Land protocol, permissions, power and privilege and accountability.”
Gilpin took part in the Climbing Through Barriers panel at the 2019 Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, along with top climbers Kai Lightner, Mikhail Martin with Brothers of Climbing and Bethany Lebewitz of Brown Girls Climb.
“There’s this myth that our communities never had first ascents,” says Gilpin, “but they were just never documented in the same ways.” Watch Gilpin in a short video below from the Banff Centre.
The event was one of many at the annual festival on diversity in the outdoors, including Campfire Conversation: Diversity in the Outdoors with the founder of The Lady Alliance Kieren Britton, top climber Sabrina Chapman and James Mills, a freelance journalist, founder of The Joy Trip Project and author of The Adventure Gap.
In an interview with David Bell last year titled Climbing an Act of Decolonization for Indigenous Women, Gilpin said: “We realized that social media has the capacity to promote and support our own representation, but also to educate non-Indigenous climbers and communities around relational governance, protocols, land permissions and cultural values, which inform our relationships to land. We thought, let’s make a social media space for that, and the response has been really wonderful.”
Be sure to follow Indigenous Womxn Climb on Instagram below and scroll down to listen to an interview with Gilpin. Fore more information on National Indigenous Peoples Day visit here.
Indigenous Women and Mountain Climbing
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