Goldtooth (born 1953)[1] is a Native American environmental, climate, and economic justice activist, speaker, film producer, and Indigenous rights leader.
Dennis, a retired Navajo Nation policeman, is the son of Frank Goldtooth Sr., a renowned medicine man known as Bȅȅsh Biwoǫ (Iron-Metal [Gold] Tooth).
[citation needed] Tom often stayed with his paternal grandmother, Margaret Goldtooth, in Tuba City, and frequently visited his grandfather, Bȅȅsh Biwoǫ.
Page eventually became a tourist center for water recreation due to the damming of the Colorado River and the creation of Lake Powell.
The early scouting experience along with following the Goldtooth family tradition as cattle and horse ranchers along with the Navajo Hunter Way culture and Diné ceremonies, became the building blocks for his leadership in years to come.
Through his experience in the Puget Sound region of Washington State in American Indian Child Welfare Act hearings and learning from Northwest Coast Native women about the needs for the protection of children and families, Tom provided leadership in strengthening casework in domestic and sexual abuse cases on the Navajo reservation.
It was Wilford Gurneau, Red Lake Anishinaabe, that is credited with helping Tom develop Minnesota State's first all-Indian urban foster care program.
It was at the St. Paul American Indian Center that Tom developed the Back to Mother Earth Program that would provide an opportunity for Native children and parents to re-learn indigenous agricultural ways with urban gardening and taking families into the country to learn cultural ways of building lodges, skinning game animals and tanning and sweat lodge ceremonies.
[17] Goldtooth also collaborated with Melissa Nelson, executive director of the Cultural Conservancy Project, in San Francisco to establish the first Bioneers Conference Indigenous Forum, starting in 2007.
[18] Goldtooth also co-produced "Drumbeat for Mother Earth," an award-winning documentary which explored toxic and synthetic chemicals contaminating the food web, violating indigenous rights set forth in treaties between the United States and Indigenous nations who are situated between their borders, and the cumulative consequences that exposures to these chemicals causes as they bio-accumulate and bio-magnify in the bodies of Native-Indigenous women, children and men that is passed from one generation to the next.
[19][20] Goldtooth's participation as an Indigenous non-governmental organization (NGO) observer in the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) meetings from 1998 to 2000, in partnership with Sheila Watt-Cloutier, then President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), elevated the issue of human rights – rights of Indigenous Peoples in these global INC meetings negotiating the reduction of and elimination of 12 toxic chemicals called POPs, which is defined as "chemical substances that persist in the environment, bio-accumulate through the food web, and pose a risk of causing adverse effects to human health and the environment".
[5] His son, Dallas Goldtooth is the Keystone XL campaign organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, Dakota language-instructor, writer, artist, and member of the comedy troupe The 1491s.