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Vuntut Gwitchin chief named to TIME100 Next list

Time Magazine identifies Dana Tizya-Tramm among 100 rising stars
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Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm is on Time Magazine’s list of 100 rising stars in 2022. (Yukon News file)

Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm has been named to Time100 Next list.

The Time Magazine list recognizes 100 rising stars from around the world.

As the magazine highlighted in a Sept. 28 article: “There is no one way to have an impact, so there is no one way by which TIME measures the influence essential to its selections. As a result, and by design, the 2022 TIME100 Next list features musicians as well as medical professionals, government officials as well as movement leaders, and high-profile whistle-blowers alongside top CEOs—all curated by Time’s journalists and informed by their reporting.

“What unites these individuals are their extraordinary efforts to shape our world—and to define our future.”

Tizya-Tramm is one of 20 featured in the leaders category. It’s noted in his profile that Tizya-Tramm was elected chief of the First Nation in 2018 when he was 31, becoming the youngest known chief of the VGFN and representing “a community battered by global warming” as permafrost in Old Crow thawed and carbon and salmon populations declined.

In 2019, Tizya-Tramm pledged to make the community carbon-neutral by 2030. He then oversaw the installation of one of the largest solar projects in the Arctic, which started running in August 2021 and supplies about a quarter of Old Crow’s electricity needs and has reduced diesel consumption by approximately 200,000 litres per year.

As reported by the News, the solar farm is made up of 2,160 single-sided mono-crystalline panels and is configured east-to-west to maximize solar generation during the long daylight hours in summer.

The solar array works alongside a 616 kW battery energy storage system and micro-grid controller, helping to curtail the use of diesel generators by 2,200 hours per year.

“Now he is planning wind towers and a biomass plant to provide electricity through the dark Arctic winters,” Time Magazine states. “Other First Nation communities are taking note, he says—and so should everyone else.”

(Stephanie Waddell)



Stephanie Waddell

About the Author: Stephanie Waddell

I joined Black Press in 2019 as a reporter for the Yukon News, becoming editor in February 2023.
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