If one were to look for images of Indigenous people in various forms of mainstream media such as magazines, newspapers, and television, they are likely to find these common stereotypes: the pitiful victim, the angry warrior or the noble environmentalist (The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People,1996b). Stereotype is an act of reducing, simplifying and categorising characteristics of individuals or a group of people in our attempt to understand them, which excludes and marginalizes certain individuals and social groups in the process and have many damaging effects on Indigenous communities. However, in this paper, I will argue that not only some Indigenous communities in Canada have been aware of the stereotypes of them, they have also learned to use them constructively in order to tackle environmental and social issues that affect their livelihood. Since environmental issues, such as the damage caused oil extraction, mining and logging, are intertwined with social issues like poverty and substance abuse, it is important to first define their relationship to one another before attempting to show evidence of how the Cree community in Canada has succeeded in using these stereotypes to their advantage. Finally, I will proceed on to discuss how Cree people’s have made progress in the reconstruction of their identity using these stereotypes. In order to make sense of the interconnectedness of environmental and social issues that Indigenous face in Canada, it is necessary for one to understand the relationship between Indigenous people and their land. It is not merely one between humans and their surroundings, it ‘is a very spiritual, emotional, mental and physical relationship between human beings and their surroundings’ (Beverley Jacobs, 2010). Thus, environmental issues caused by overexploitation of resources has had a profound effect on Indigenous people’s livelihood. T?ake the current oil tar sands development in Alberta as an example­ it took place without the consent of Indigenous people and the resulting large-scale pollution has caused devastating effects on their living environment. Not only the tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production, it has led to many serious social issues in Alberta: from rising unemployment to housing crises and damaging the health of local people. Thus, it came as no surprise that on average, 55.6% of Aboriginal people living in Canadian cities were poor in 1995 (Urban Poverty in Canada: A Statistical Profile (CCSD, 2000). Moreover, irreversible ecological damage and loss of biodiversity caused by oil tar sand extraction have taken away Indigenous people’s food security and traditional way of living such as fishing and hunting for survival. Thus, came with environmental damage is the loss of culture and identity, which ultimately worsens every other aspect of Indigenous people’s livelihood. The use of the ‘the noble environmentalist’ stereotype in many advertising campaigns created by non­Indigenous peo