Remembering Cheryl Chetkiewicz
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2024-07-30WCS Canada – and our planet – lost a remarkable human being in June.
The passing of Cheryl Chetkiewicz, WCS Canada’s Director of Indigenous Communities and Conservation, has meant the loss of a compassionate, considerate, and thoughtful colleague.
Cheryl's humanity and dedication to conservation were inseparable, and she gifted us with an important legacy of meaningful approaches to the global conservation crisis. This is best illustrated by her evidence-based yet passionate advocacy for big-picture, more comprehensive assessment and planning processes, alongside her unwavering dedication to fostering deep engagement with Indigenous communities and pursuit of innovative ways to make space for their conservation leadership.
Cheryl joined WCS Canada in 2009, when this organization was only five years old, as the first leader of our then-nascent Ontario Northern Boreal Program. In 2017, she took on a national-scale role as Director of Indigenous Communities and Conservation. Over her 15-year tenure with us, the strength of her imprint and the often-profound influence her thinking, approach, words, have had on so many people -- within and outside this organization – cannot be overstated.
Cheryl’s personal life and career crossed continents and intersected multiple disciplines. She was an experienced and passionate field scientist with a lifelong interest in carnivores that started with her family’s move to Zambia when Cheryl was just five years old. Over her academic journey, she studied bears in Alaska while working with the Inupiaq, then cats in Peru, cougars in the Sierras, followed by a jaguar study involving various Indigenous groups for the Wildlife Conservation Society, then more work with cougars and bears in Alberta. Her groundbreaking work on identifying important wildlife corridors in the Bow Valley and the Crowsnest Pass laid vital groundwork for conservation action in a region with a rapidly growing human footprint.
”Cheryl’s work was the first real scientific focus on wildlife movement (bears and cougars). Since then, I think there have been at least a dozen projects and papers written on wildlife corridor and wildlife movement in the Bow Valley, but Cheryl’s work laid the cornerstone for this ongoing work. In fact, right now we are revisiting the updated GPS grizzly bear data to further our knowledge of wildlife corridor use and conservation building upon the work that Cheryl started decades ago. Her contribution to wildlife connectivity has and will continue to reverberate into the future.”
John Paczkowski, Alberta Parks ecologist
In northern Ontario, Cheryl carved out WCS Canada’s niche in this vast complicated landscape, building many important and enduring relationships, particularly with remote Indigenous communities. She understood what was really at stake in this region – while decision-makers focused almost exclusively on mineral resources, and she made a powerful case for a comprehensive and proactive approach to planning for future development to anticipate, avoid, and address cumulative effects from future mining and associated infrastructure development.
Cheryl led the writing of a widely cited landmark report: Getting it Right in Ontario's Far North: The Need for a Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment in the Ring of Fire (Wawangajing) that kick-started valuable conversations at the highest levels of decision making within provincial and federal governments regarding the way development (especially mining) would take place in the region. Her research and thinking on these issues led to numerous invitations to speak on issues such as cumulative effects management, environmental planning, and community-based monitoring.
“Cheryl’s contribution [to Canadian conservation science] was to demonstrate the need for strategic regional land use planning in Ontario’s Far North. It is one of the most intact ecosystems on earth and also home to the Ring of Fire, the potentially massive mining development. Cheryl has dedicated years of her career to tirelessly push for comprehensive land use planning for the region before it is opened up to large scale development . . . Cheryl has played on important role in having the region selected by the government of Canada as a priority for strategic regional environmental assessment, which should require decision makers to give pause and think not only about economic benefits of developing the region but also the ecological risks.”
Matt Carlson, ALCES Group
As articulated in a recently-posted GoFundMe profile for Cheryl, “In some ways, Cheryl’s career might be described as a series of stepping stones taking her from one side of the pond with both feet deeply planted in wildlife biology to, with each hop taken, an ever-firmer embrace of Indigenous-led conservation, a sometimes-controversial professional stance.” The more her work brought her into deeper relationships with Indigenous Peoples and other ways of knowing and doing, the more she focused on the need for greater collaboration between conservation scientists and Indigenous communities.
That, in turn, led her to see the need for a cross-cutting initiative at WCS Canada focused on supporting Indigenous communities and conservation. Cheryl’s natural inclination to collaborate and share across the organization made her a perfect fit for this role and challenged us all to be much more deliberate in our relationships with Indigenous community members, in the spirit of Reconciliation.
“You [Cheryl] are the first western accredited scientist that I met who showed deep appreciation of our Illilewuk knowledge, someone who gave me hope that collaboration was possible and hell yeah-- we are achieving it with your colleagues and friends. At a time when I was about to pivot and go back to school, you came along and helped to spearhead this new relationship with WCS which continues to blossom with each season. I can't express how grateful I am, Mikwec Love.”
Jennifer Simard, Moose Cree First Nation ecologist
Amongst her many accolades, perhaps the most precious reflection of her career-long dedication to Indigenous leadership in conservation is her Blackfoot name Ut-ksoo-nut-tsee Aimmonisi Aa-kii-koan (the Blue Otter Woman), gifted in a ceremony by dear friends and Piikani elders Ira and Ruth Provost in celebration of her indefatigable spirit, love for Nature, and respect for Indigenous Peoples.
“Ruth and I adopted Cheryl into our Blackfoot way of life through ceremony, we captured her kindness and pursuit of a good way of being. Cheryl is a guide and a lady of an immense and beautiful spirit; she will always have a seat in our camp and be free to belong to our way of life.”
Ira and Ruth Provost
Cheryl practiced science with tremendous rigour, integrity and discipline. During her years as an active field biologist, she planned many expeditions involving often complex transport into hard-to-get places; set up systems for data collection anticipating all the equipment the field team might need; mastered the complex art of shooting with a tranquilizer dart and deployed GPS-tracking collars and data collection devices in difficult circumstances and conditions. And she lovingly organized all sorts of community events and engaged as a mentor to so many over the course of her career, and was a powerful writer, documenting influential ideas and syntheses based on a solid foundation of deep reading and scholarship.
Most importantly, Cheryl’s influence really lay in her deep compassion and care for others and her generous sharing of ideas and boundless moral support. What stands out about her career is how inspirational she has been to so many and how she seems to have had that unique ability not to show people what she wanted them to see, but to guide them so they could see it for themselves, always and everywhere.
“Cheryl shaped my career in more ways than I can count. Her passion for conservation, especially Indigenous conservation, was inspiring. Cheryl's ability to develop relationships with the Mattawa First Nations in a time when their voices were not well heard was a turning point in my career. After learning about Cheryl's work and developing our working relationship, I realized that I had much to learn from my mentor (and still do!) about how to engage with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous conservation, and integrating different ways of knowing.”
Megan Hornseth, Senior Cumulative Effects Biologist at Government of Yukon
Even with so many accomplishments and years of accumulated experience, Cheryl was still young. And she had so much more to give. As challenging as it has been for us to learn to live without Cheryl over the past year of her illness, it was extraordinarily difficult for her to be so severely limited in her ability to contribute. With amazing strength, she still took part when she was able, which included writing a chapter for a forthcoming book, Mega-Projects and Extractivism in Indigenous Territories: What is Good Development? And delivering a presentation to WCS Canada’s Weston Foundation Boreal Research fellows, among other things.
Cheryl leaves behind her son, Aidan Raygorodetsky, who only just entered adulthood, her husband and soulmate Gleb Raygorodetsky, her father, Jan and brother Christopher. She also leaves a beautiful legacy, with WCS Canada profoundly changed and influenced by her thoughtful approach and her clear vision for a better way forward, and with all of us wiser for having known and worked with her.
Cheryl is clearly a very empathic individual, expressing her care for both Nature and oppressed people in all that she does and in how she behaves day to day. I believe this comes from a deep spirituality on Cheryl’s part, and the realization that some things are sacred. The world desperately needs a better developed collective sense of the sacred, something that Cheryl can inspire us to pursue.”
Donald Reid, WCS Canada biologist (retired)
Cheryl has made huge advances in defining how scientists and non-government actors work with Indigenous individuals and communities in a genuine way and what defines this kind of relationship, particularly in the era of Reconciliation. Right from the start, she had an unusual, quiet and forward-thinking way of looking at this that shifted views. It certainly shifted mine. If we have to carry on without her, we can feel very confident that the foundation she has seeded is solid. It’s mostly the way she goes about this – with a mixture of deep intellect and historical perspective (from digestion of enormous amounts of material), her openness to different viewpoints, and her extraordinarily kind and thoughtful and compassionate personality and means of interacting.
Justina Ray, President and Senior Scientist, WCS Canada
