Helena Gualinga

Sumak Helena Sirén Gualinga (born on February 27, 2002) is an Ecuadorian environmental and human rights activist from the Kichwa Sarayaku community in Pastaza, Ecuador.

Early life Helena Gualinga was born on February 27, 2002, in Sarayaku. Her mother, Noemí Gualinga is an Indigenous Ecuadorian former president of the Kichwa Women's Association. and her grandmother Cristina Gualinga are defenders of Indigenous women's human rights in the Amazon and environmental causes. Her father is Anders Sirén, a Swedish-speaking Finnish professor of biology

Gualinga spent most of her teenage years living in Pargas, Finland, and later in Turku, Finland, where her father comes from. She attends secondary school at the Cathedral School of Åbo.

From a young age, Gualinga has witnessed the persecution of her family for standing against the interests of big oil companies and their environmental impact on Indigenous land.

She and her family describe numerous ways in which they, as members of Indigenous communities in the Amazon, have experienced climate change, including a higher prevalence of forest fires, desertification, direct destruction and disease spread by floods, and faster melting snow on mountain peaks. These effects, she says, have been noticeable firsthand in the lifetimes of community elders. Gualinga describes that those elders have become aware of climate change regardless of their lack of scientific background.

Attendance in COP Gualinga participated in the COP25 in Madrid, Spain. She spoke about her concern on the Ecuadorian government authorizing oil extraction in Indigenous land. She said: "Our country's government is still granting our territories to the corporations responsible of climate change. This is criminal." She criticized the Ecuadorian government for claiming interest in protecting the Amazon during the conference instead of attending Indigenous Amazon women's demands brought to the government during the 2019 Ecuadorian protests. The movement was founded as a response to the failing of COP25. Gualinga returned to attend the COP26 as a member of Sarayaku Indigenous community, highlighting her critics of company, bank and government financing the destruction of Amazon and advocated that indigenous people became frontline to protect their forest against the extractive industries

In popular media Helena Gualinga is the protagonist of the documentary "Helena Sarayaku Manta" (Helena of Sarayaku), which documents her life and activism related to teaching the Sarayaku ways of living. The film was directed by Eriberto Gualinga and premiered on March 18, 2022 at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital.

On April 4, 2022, Helena Gualinga and her sister Nina Gualinga were featured in Revista Hogar magazine. Their photographs were on the cover of the 691st issue of the magazine and according to Helena's social media, it was the first time ever that indigenous women were on the magazine's cover. On April 22, 2022, Helena Gualinga was pictured in Vogue magazine in an article on traditional Kichwa Sarayaku face paintings written by Atenea Morales de la Cruz.