Bright, Young Fire – Ta’Kaiya Blaney, 11-year-old activist

It takes an 11-year-old girl to put political leaders to shame. Ta’Kaiya Blaney is Canadian from the Sliammon First Nation and has made a bit of a name for herself at a young age singing and acting. But it is her words on the environment which are cutting and should make politicians lower their heads in shame.

Ta’Kaiya has recently been speaking out at Idle No More events in support of protecting the environment. Her message is that there can be no compromise over the environment. She castigates political leaders for the false rhetoric and failed promises, especially what she saw at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, where she was a speaker.

She speaks of her shock at the oils spills, the knocking down of mountains for coal and minerals, and the horror of pollution, unable to comprehend why they want to sacrifice “our only Earth” and a livable life for future generations.

Ta’Kaiya has spoken at a host of events and protests in Canada and around the world.

She’s done her homework. Initially inspired by her grandfather, she has put great effort into learning about the environmental threats to her people’s land and to Canada as a whole. She has written and performed songs that speak of her fear for the environment if steps are not taken to get off our addiction to fossil fuels.

She co-wrote her song “Shallow Waters” after learning of Enbridge’s bid to build twin 1,170 kilometer pipelines to transport oil from the Alberta tar sands to British Columbia’s north coast.

As she is aware, Enbridge’s Alberta-B.C. pipeline is widely opposed, largely because it would bring hundreds of oil supertankers a year to the Great Bear Rainforest—an ecologically significant region along a particularly dangerous route for tankers.

“Oil pipelines and tankers will give people jobs, but if there is an oil spill like the [BP spill] in the Gulf of Mexico, that will take other people’s jobs and the wildlife will die,” Ta’Kaiya told Yes Magazine.

Our responsibility as humans is to the land and water, she says.

“Human beings have messed up,” she says, but there is still hope to turn things around.

Ta’Kaiya Blaney speaks at an Idle No More protest