Peggy Smith

Dr. M.A. (Peggy) Smith (Miskwaanakwadook—Red Cloud Woman) is of Cree ancestry from the James Bay Treaty #9 area in northern Ontario, Canada. She resides in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and is a Professor Emerita in Lakehead University’s Faculty of Natural Resources Management and a retired Registered Professional Forester with the Ontario Professional Foresters Assoc. She continues to work on turning the course she taught—Indigenous Peoples and Natural Resources—into an online textbook. She has been researching the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ principle of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). She has been active in the Forest Stewardship Council since its founding in 1993 when she worked with the National Aboriginal Forestry Assoc. She is a member of the FSC Canada Indigenous Chamber. She has served on the FSC Canada Board, FSC Canada’s Standards Development Group, working groups to develop guidance documents on FPIC, both for Canada and internationally and the FSC Policy and Standards Committee responsible for approving national forest stewardship standards. She has contributed over the past 10 years to efforts to have Indigenous Cultural Landscapes recognized and implemented in FSC. She chairs the Rights and Resources Group Board, an international non-governmental organization that serves a coalition dedicated to advancing the forest land rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities. and Afro-Descendant communities, mainly in the Global South.