We are mourning the loss of Sue Moodie of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was a kind, principled, and determined community activist, who loved music, being with friends, and living in the bush.
Working for the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) in the late 1990s, Sue was deeply disturbed by the pillage caused by mining in the Yukon, and helped found MiningWatch Canada and the Western Mining Activist Network (WMAN), where she consistently and passionately fought for Indigenous and community rights, environmental justice, and gender equality.
The author of more than 20 publications (many of them peer-reviewed), she wrote Overburdened: the Impacts of Mining on Women and the Community Monitoring Toolkit. She was an organizer of the ground-breaking Gaining Ground Conference on Women and Mining in Whitehorse in 2001. That same year, she led the battle to get the powerful placer miners regulated in the Yukon, and braved death threats for doing so. Within days of purchasing her beloved squatter’s cabin in the woods, a miner staked a nuisance claim on it.
A toxicologist, she completed her doctorate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her consulting company CCSG Associates was involved in a variety of diverse mining related projects, research, advocacy, policy and regulation development, grassroots organizing and outreach in northern, national and international contexts.
She wrote: “I have held it as my goal to work as a translator between academia, industry, policy and community-based values to achieve substantive work that has meaning on many different levels, with my skills as a researcher on the ground and in the books with a local focus.”
Rest in power, Sue.