Corine Fairbanks

Fairbanks was born in 1968 in Santa Barbara, where she also grew up, and graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara. Fairbanks became involved in the American Indian Movement in Big Mountain, Arizona in 1986. Then in 1992, she began organizing under Fern Rosebud Eastman-Mathias, a great niece of Charles Eastman, of the American Indian Movement.

On August 29, 2010, while Fairbanks was Co-Director, AIM Santa Barbara filed a complaint against Viacom and MTV, including Johnny Knoxville and others, in the federal courts when an episode of "The Dudesons in America" called "Cowboys and Findians" aired. The group began a letter-writing and call-in campaign to ask the network to quit airing the episode when they saw it in May 2010. The episode featured "The Dudesons" claiming to become "honorary Indians" when Native American actor, Saginaw Grant, purported to explain and officiate the "rites of passage." Mr. Grant was not acting in any official capacity, nor on behalf of any tribe, group, or organization.[3] The defendants agreed to pull the episode in the Western hemisphere and scrub their social media of any related content [4]

On October 15, 2012, Fairbanks led a successful petition to halt the sales of T-shirts labeled Manifest Destiny by the GAP brand.[5]

In 2014, Fairbanks was involved in a coalition of Californian Native Nations against fracking that stimulated the Los Angeles City Council to ban fracking on February 28, 2014 [6]

In April 2015, Fairbanks protested the canonisation of Junípero Serra who founded the California Mission system in the 18th and 19th century, dramatically affecting the lives of California Indians.[7] Public events against the canonization included a court of trial by descendants of California Mission Indians on September 21 [8] and a day of mourning was observed on September 25, 2015.[9] Fairbanks stated “How can anyone celebrate when the bones of Native Americans are buried within the walls of the mission.”[10][11]

Foreword for Lorin Morgan-Richards’ Me’ma and the Great Mountain.