Name: Autumn Peltier
Age: 17
City: Ottawa, Canada
Area of Focus: Water protection and Indigenous rights
At the First Nations’s annual winter meeting in 2016, Autumn Peltier was supposed to give Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a water bundle as a gift.
The 12-year-old was scheduled to deliver a speech at the event, too. But when Peltier came face-to-face with Trudeau, she couldn’t stop herself from directly expressing her disappointment.
“I said, ‘I am very unhappy with the choices you’ve made,’” Peltier recalled. “And he said, ‘I understand that.’ And I started crying and all I got say after that was, ‘The pipelines.’”