ADVISORY CIRCLE

Cheryl Demmert Fairbanks, Esq. supports AVF through a collaboration with the Life Comes From It Foundation. She is Tlingit-Tsimshian and was born in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Cheryl works in the area of Indian law as an attorney and tribal court of appeals justice. Currently she is the Interim Executive Director of the UNM Native American Budget and Policy Institute. She recently was in Oregon serving as the Walter R. Echo-Hawk Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Lewis and Clark; and also she was a visiting Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico’s Southwest Indian Law Clinic. Formerly a Partner at Cuddy McCarthy LLP, she had a general practice in Indian law, including tribal-state relations, personnel, tribal courts, peacemaking and family conferencing, mediation, family, school, education, and indigenous law.

Chief Jake Singer serves as the Alliance for a Viable Future’s Spiritual Advisor

Chief Singer is a Dine Navajo Medicine Man, Sun Dance Chief, Ceremonial Leader and decorated Vietnam Veteran. He conducts many traditional ceremonies for his community and has been working for twenty-plus years on bringing awareness to support Native American Veterans, as the Commander of Walk with the Warriors, an advocacy and education organization for Native American Veterans. In that role, he walked across the entire continental United States and has held traditional ceremonies in Washington DC to bring awareness to this issue.

He helped to introduce a Bill into the House of Representatives, proposed by the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Holland, to officially establish November 7th as a Federally-recognized Native American Veteran’s Day holiday.

Chief Singer has been conducting ceremonial prayers for AVF and it’s Executive Director and Founder, Lev Natan, for the last ten years. He adopted Lev as his grandson, sponsored him as a Sundancer, and ordained him to pour the ceremonial sweat lodge.

Thomas Linzey serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” movement which has resulted in the adoption of hundreds of municipal laws across the United States. He also sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation.

Linzey is a graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, and is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania.

Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability (PM Press 2016), and the co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (PM Press 2016). He was a co-host of Democracy Matters, a syndicated public affairs radio show broadcast from KYRS in Spokane, Washington. He was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film 11th Hour and We the People 2.0 (Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival), assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable Rights of Nature, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country.

Linzey’s work has been featured widely, including in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Nation magazine. In 2007, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and he was named one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in the two-volume encyclopedia, American Environmental Leaders (3rd Ed. Grey House Publishing 2018). He is currently working on a new book, “Modern American Democracy (and other fairy tales)” (forthcoming, Spring 2021).

Margaret Behan is a Native American woman—Southern Arapaho-Cheyenne on her mother’s side and Northern Arapahoe/Northern Cheyenne on her father’s side—and a fourth generation descendant of an ancestor who was a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre. Behan is the founder of the Cheyenne Elders Council, a group of native healers and teachers, and a former member of the International Council of 13 Grandmothers.

The Honorable Robert Yazzie, Esq. supports AVF through a collaboration with the Life Comes From It Foundation. He served as the Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation from 1992 through 2003. He practiced law in the Navajo Nation for 16 years, and was a district judge for eight years. He is now teaching Navajo Law at the Navajo Technical University. He was the Director of the Diné Policy Institute of Diné College (Navajo Nation), developing policy using authentic Navajo thinking. He is the author of articles and book chapters on many subjects, including Navajo peacemaking, traditional Indian law, and international human rights law. He is a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, an adjunct professor of the Department of Criminal Justice of Northern Arizona University and a visiting member of the faculty of the National Judicial College. He recently taught Navajo law at the Crownpoint Institute of Technology. Chief Justice Yazzie continues a career devoted to education in formal participation in faculties, lectures and discussions of traditional indigenous law at various venues throughout the world. He has a global audience and he has frequently visited foreign lands to share his wisdom about traditional indigenous justice and governance.

Wanonah Spencer is Shawn Stevens sister. She has attended the Indigenous Peacemaking Council in October 2022 and 2023, and received AVF’s first ever Mohican Ancestral Healing Fellowship to deepen her relationship with The Berkshires - her people’s homeland. She lives on the Mohican Reservation in Wisconsin. The Fellowship supported her leadership development and relationship-building with partner organizations in the Berkshires. She attended Kripalu’s Non-Profit Leaders Retreat and also offered workshops at the Flying Deer Nature Center. Wanonah’s long-term plan is to establish a sister organization dedicated to cultural revitalization and climate education on her reservation in Wisconsin.

Michael Johnson is a seasoned peace builder who draws on many years as a yoga practitioner for inspiration and inner tranquility. He has inspired people to take positive actions for peace through his writing, personal coaching, public speaking, documentaries, national and local media interviews and community events.

For many decades, Michael has used his creative talents to create documentaries on social issues and global peace initiatives, including the United Nations International Day of Peace.

Daniel Roth is the co-founder of Jumpscale Consultancy. He is an experienced social entrepreneur, movement strategist, and integrative healthcare professional focused on sustainable development, indigenous cultural revitalization, and healing arts. Over the last two decades, he has launched over a dozen non-profit organizations, campaigns, and coalitions. Prior, he served as Director of the Cornell Campus Sustainability Office, started New York's first car-share business, and served as a Board Member of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development. As a healthcare professional he brings together acupressure, Ayurveda, somatic movement therapy, and massage therapy. He has provided therapeutic services to uninsured clients at the Ithaca Free Clinic and served as a faculty member at the Finger Lakes School of Massage.