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• Ian B. G. Mackenzie FI ‘09

Ian B. G. Mackenzie FI ‘09

Ian Mackenzie is an independent author, photographer and filmmaker based in Vancouver, British Columbia. A linguist by training, for over twenty years Mr. Mackenzie has been a champion of the environment, conservation and human rights, particularly in his native British Columbia, Indonesian-occupied New Guinea, and Malaysian Borneo.

He has traveled and photographed extensively in some of Canada’s most remote wilderness areas, with a heavy emphasis on places that are threatened by logging and other industrial development. Among other projects, these travels resulted in the book Ancient Landscapes of British Columbia (1995), which documents the remaining wilderness of the province through photographs, prose, and maps.

In New Guinea, Ian Mackenzie clandestinely shot the footage for Cry of the Forgotten Land (1995), a television documentary that portrays the plight of New Guinea forest dwellers confronted with multinational logging interests and the Indonesian military. It was broadcast nationally in Canada and Australia, and received a total of eleven awards in the USA and Europe.

Similar circumstances led Ian Mackenzie to begin what has become a long relationship with the Penan people of Sarawak. His first project was Nomads of the Dawn - the Penan of the Borneo Rainforest (1995), a book co-authored with Wade Davis, FN ‘87 that portrayed the Penan people’s struggle to save their homeland from logging. He has continued to make semi-annual visits since, drawing on his linguistic training and over two years of fieldwork to produce a dictionary and grammar of the Eastern Penan language, a short English-Penan dictionary, and a collection of myths, oral histories and other texts which he plans to publish in both English and Penan.

Ian Mackenzie has traveled in some fifty countries, on six continents, and speaks eleven languages. He is currently working on both a book and a film about the Eastern Penan religion, a belief system about which almost nothing has been known until now.