Tekatsitsiakawa Katsi Cook

Tekatsitsiakawa Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan) is an Indigenous midwife-elder, environmentalist, Native American rights activist, and women's health advocate. She is best known for her environmental justice and reproductive health research in her home community, the Akwesasne First Nation.

Katsi founded the Woman is the First Environment Collaborative, which supported community-based health projects to empower Native women of all ages and increase knowledge about reproductive health.

She is an advocate for Indigenous women’s health across the lifecycle, drawing on a longhouse traditionalist perspective to advance the idea that Woman is the First Environment. She has based previous work in the First Environment Collaborative, working at the intersections of environmental health and justice and reproductive health and justice research and policy.

Her groundbreaking environmental research on Mohawk mothers’ milk revealed the harmful generational impact of toxic pollutants within the St. Lawrence River.

"Woman is the First Environment. We are an embodiment of our Mother Earth. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of the generations, both to society and the natural world. With our bodies we nourish, sustain and create connected relationships and interdependence. In this way the Earth is our Mother, our ancestors said. In this way, we as
women are earth.” - Tekatsitsiakawa Katsi Cook