Current Page: Welcome, Alastair Lee Bitsóí!
Welcome, Alastair Lee Bitsóí!
January 10, 2022Brooke Larsen
We are thrilled to welcome Alastair Lee Bitsóí as our Spring '22 Practitioner-in-Residence!
Alastair is from the Navajo Nation community of Naschitti, below the Chooshgai Mountains on the New Mexico–Arizona state line. He has been an award-winning news reporter for the Navajo Times and communications director for the Indigenous-led land conservation nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah. His consulting business, Near the Water Communications and Media Group, trains media, nonprofits, businesses, and governments in cultural sensitivity. Alastair is co-editor with Brooke Larsen of the Torrey House Press anthology New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings, and Climate Crisis. Along with being a 2021 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the Op-Ed Project and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, he has a master's degree in public health from New York University College of Global Public Health and is an alumnus of Gonzaga University. He now writes for the Salt Lake Tribune as the Southern Utah reporter.
Alastair has written extensively on environmental justice issues, from articles on the Four Corners Potato and Indigenous boarding schools to op-eds on queer voices and the climate crisis.
He has held various roles, from advocate to journalist. This provides him with a diversity of skills, experiences, and perspectives to share with our students as they consider their own role in critical environmental issues. Alastair's work showcases the importance of humanities tools, such as writing, storytelling, communication, and culture, to bring about transformative change.
Our community practitioner-in-residence program is made possible thanks to funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Tags: community engagement, environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, practitioner-in-residence, writing