A British Columbia First Nations woman who spearheaded the fight against a multibillion-dollar gold mine is one of this year’s recipients of the richest environmental award in the world.

 

Marilyn Baptiste will be honoured tonight with the Goldman Environmental Prize, a $175,000 award handed out annually to six grassroots activists around the world.

 

Baptiste, the former chief of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation in the B.C. Interior, is being recognized for her work against the New Prosperity gold and copper mine proposed by Taseko Mines Ltd.

 

“At first of course it was ‘no, no, I’m good. Find someone else,’” she says with a laugh.

 

But the award is shining an international spotlight on her community and their cause, she says.

 

“These kinds of recognitions do help in our campaign and our fight.”

 

Taseko has twice applied for environmental approval to mine what is believed to be the tenth-largest gold deposit in the world, located in the traditional territory of the Tsilhqot’in Nations 550 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

 

The province has approved the project but the federal government has twice rejected the proposal following contentious environmental assessment hearings involving the Tsilhqot’in and several environmental groups.

 

The company has asked the federal court to overturn that decision and is also suing the Wilderness Committee environmental group for defamation over its comments on the mine.

 

The original mine project proposed draining a lake of significance to the Tsilhqot’in for use as a tailings pond. The revised proposal said Fish Lake, or Teztan Biny, could be saved and the tailings pond built elsewhere.

 

The Canadian Environment Assessment Agency panel said it did not believe the revised project could avoid contaminating the lake.

 

The Tsilhqot’in also recently won an historic court victory establishing First Nations’ land title in Canada.

 

The Goldman committee says Baptiste, who grew up in the Nemiah Valley and learned to fish and forage as her people had for centuries, helped lead her community in their battle over Fish Lake.

 

She followed in her father’s footsteps and was elected as chief of the Xeni Gwet’in in 2008.

 

At one point, she erected a one-woman blockade to stop company crews from reaching the site.

 

 

Baptiste anticipates a third proposal from the company. “It’s definitely not over yet,” she tells Yahoo Canada News.

 

“I knew definitely it would be a long, ongoing process and at the very beginning, but I didn’t know all of the workings of these processes.”

 

She seems dug in to continue the fight.

 

“I was born into this – we all are, as Indigenous people, born into this. We all have a part in it,“ she says.

 

Her community is celebrating with her.

 

“Marilyn worked tirelessly with community and other Tsilhqot’in Chiefs to protect Tsilhqot’in lands from the Prosperity/New Prosperity projects and this prestigious award is a great encouragement to all of us,” Xeni Gwet’in Chief Roger William says in a statement.

 

The ceremony will be held Monday night in San Francisco.

 

The prize “recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk,” says the Goldman committee.

 

Baptiste will be honoured along with Myanmar activist Mhint Zaw, who launched a movement that stopped construction of the Myitsone Dam; Haitian activist Jean Wiener, who led the effort to establish the country’s first marine protected area; Kenya’s Phyllis Omido, who organized her community to shut down a lead smelter in Mombasa after discovering her own breast milk was tainted with lead; Howard Wood, who spearheaded the campaign that established Scotland’s first marine protected area; and Berta Caceres of Honduras, who rallied the Indigenous Lenca people to fight the Agua Zarca dam.