Caitlin Lupton ’09
Indigenous Advocate
Hometown: Wiscasset, Maine
Major: Environmental Studies
Minor: Anthropology
When Caitlin Lupton ’09 was looking into colleges, Mount Holyoke’s academic excellence and its international student population impressed her. “I grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine,” she said. “Mount Holyoke offered an incredible opportunity to enter a global community and have diverse experiences, both academically and socially.”
An environmental studies major, Lupton chose a concentration in culture and environment and spent the fall semester of her junior year in Cairns, Australia, studying natural and cultural ecology. “I worked on a project to benefit Aboriginal communities there,” she said. “I created a guidebook about how to record cultural heritage and oral tradition using modern technology. That’s when I discovered my passion for indigenous advocacy and environmental justice.”
When Lupton returned from Australia, a friend at MHC alerted her to an internship posted by the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. The summer position was in Mexico with El Hombre Sobre La Tierra, an organization that supports Mayan communities in the Yucatán. “They work specifically on projects of food security and sufficiency, forest conservation, product diversification, and social capital, such as sustainable ecotourism. It felt perfect for me so I applied and was accepted.”
Lupton spent two months in the village of Muchucuxcah, where she interviewed women about their gardens, took inventory of their crops, and determined what percentage was consumed and what percentage was sold and for how much. “This information helped track the development of the grant-funded food security and self-sufficiency program. I also taught a small English class so that the women could communicate with groups visiting the village for sustainable ecotourism.”
As a senior, Lupton was awarded a fellowship from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to spend a year in Colombia after graduation. Now in Bogotá, she is studying ecotourism collaboration between indigenous communities and the Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia. Lupton is affiliated with the Universidad de Javeriana, where she is taking classes in the master’s program in rural development.
“If I’d gone anywhere else, I wouldn’t have had the services of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, which connects students with incredible projects abroad. Mount Holyoke opened doors to the world community for me and gave me the confidence to step through them.”