Dune Lankard

President and Founder, Eyak Preservation Council
Executive Director, NATIVE Conservancy
Executive Director, Fund for Indigenous Rights and the Environment
Movement: Environmental Protection

"The morning the oil spill happened was the day the ocean died and the day that something came to life in me," says Dune Lankard, recalling the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. A member of the Eyak tribe in Alaska, Dune has spent most of his life as a commercial fisherman in Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta. After the oil spill, Dune felt compelled to work to preserve, protect, and restore his tribe’s culture, ecosystem, and sustainable fishing economy. Dune hopes what he calls "social profits," successful businesses that are socially beneficial, will transform the way people think about their impact on and relationship to the environment. He is developing a cold storage facility where local fishermen can sustainably process and directly market the fish they catch; the facility could jumpstart 50 new small businesses in his hometown of Cordova and serve as a model for indigenous people across the country and around the world. Every year Dune donates thousands of Copper River salmon to individuals, nonprofits, and other organizations to support their events, an avenue through which he is publicizing the importance of preserving natural salmon habitats. Dune believes his work in Alaska will act as a catalyst for environmental change at the national level: "I create effective models of change to empower people to positively influence their local economy, protect endangered homelands, and provide real solutions for energy and pollution challenges."

Dune continues to fish commercially for several months a year, while also leading three Alaska-based organizations that further his environmental goals. He is the founder of The Eyak Preservation Council, which seeks to preserve his tribe’s indigenous way of life and its main resource, the Copper River salmon habitat. Dune is also executive director of the NATIVE Conservancy, a land trust that reclaims ancestral tribal lands, and the executive director of the Fund for Indigenous Rights and the Environment (FIRE Fund), a grant-making organization that funds indigenous people and environmental causes around the world. In December 1998 he was recognized by TIME magazine as one of its “Heroes for the Planet” and in 2006 he won an Ashoka Fellowship. He is also a co-founder of an Alaskan statewide organization, Resisting Environmental Destruction On Indigenous Lands (REDOIL).

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