Katłıà’s (she/her/hers) interest in environmental justice first began when she was an elected council member for her First Nation, the Yellowknives Dene in the Northwest Territories, where she worked towards demanding that the government compensate the Yellowknives for the mess that was left when the infamous Giant Mine was abandoned leaving behind 237,000 tonnes of inorganic arsenic on the lands of the Akaitcho Treaty 8 in Chief Drygeese Territory.
After receiving a Bachelor of Justice Studies and finishing year of a Master’s Program in Environmental Management at Royal Roads, Katłıà returned to the north and was on the NWT Negotiations Team for the groundbreaking Mackenzie Valley Transboundary Water Management Agreement between the NWT, Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. She also worked as the Director of Indigenous Education and Community Development at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a land-based post-secondary curriculum program partnered with UBC.
Realizing she could generate further change as a lawyer, Katłıà enrolled in the Joint Degree Program in Canadian Common Law and Indigenous Legal Orders (JID) at the University of Victoria and graduated in 2023.
Katłıà served as the inaugural Climate Writer in Residence at West Vancouver Memorial Library in 2022. She is an accomplished author and is working on her next book which is about global warming from a northern Dene perspective called “Mother Earth is Our Elder."
In her spare time, she enjoys reading to her grandson and writing stories about life growing up in the north.