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Maria Olaguera and Michele Beacom - 17 August 2026
Meet Nipuni Amaratunga
Just five years after joining Teck Resources Limited’s sustainability team as a co-op student, Nipuni Amaratunga is helping to shape one of the company’s most important priorities: building lasting partnerships with Indigenous communities.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business with a concentration in sustainability and social impact, Amaratunga was hired full-time as an Indigenous relations advisor. She now leads Teck’s initiatives that advance Indigenous participation, foster inclusive workplace cultures and address operational impacts. She works in close partnership with Indigenous communities and organizations, focusing on employee engagement, cultural awareness and community development. She also serves as Teck’s partnership liaison with the World Economic Forum, supporting cross-organizational collaboration and leadership engagement.
CIM sat down with Amaratunga at CIM CONNECT 2026 in Vancouver in May to discuss reconciliation and mentoring the next generation.
CIM: You helped launch Teck’s Indigenous Cultural Awareness Training program in 2021, which has so far been completed by 91 per cent of staff. How has the training been received by your colleagues during this rollout?
Amaratunga: One of the most rewarding and beneficial outcomes of this training has been our employees’ receptiveness to the training and the motivation to be actively involved, to be allies, in advancing reconciliation and thinking about Indigenous inclusion in our workplace.
CIM: Part of your role is to align Teck’s business goals with Indigenous concerns and goals. How do you approach these potentially conflicting priorities?
Amaratunga: When thinking about mining and reconciliation, they are inherently inseparable. Both are land-based relationships.
We know that mining impacts land and can also deliver benefits to communities. At the same time, Indigenous peoples have been stewards of that land over time. With that understanding, we must work in unison, in partnership, because building relationships with Indigenous people is not an optional thing to do. It’s essential to understand what it looks like to have healthy communities, to mitigate negative impacts, and to think about how our mining activities can be carried out responsibly so that future generations can also be as healthy as possible.
CIM: What lesson in building trust in high-stakes environments would you prioritize instilling in the next generation?
Amaratunga: For me, when I look at what it means to be an ally, I often reflect on the fact that building trust comes from what you do over time, as opposed to what you do in a moment in time. Are you able to actually follow through on commitments and show that you’re in this journey alongside Indigenous peoples?
CIM: You’ve worked on several initiatives for executive participation in Teck’s community investment activities such as the Bears’ Lair business reality TV show and participation at Elders’ gatherings. How do you see these initiatives making real change?
Amaratunga: Through our community investment program, I’ve been able to work with some phenomenal Indigenous-led organizations on advancing community priorities. One of the things that has really stood out to me, and where we’ve really been able to make change, is moving away from a traditional donor model and moving to true partnership—actually rolling up our sleeves and working with those partners to look at what it means to deliver programs in a community in a way that meets company priorities and benefits those communities.
CIM: As you help develop Teck’s Reconciliation Action Plan, what is the legacy you hope your current projects will leave?
Amaratunga: Right now, we’re working on the first edition of Teck’s Reconciliation Action Plan. A lot of the work on this is centred around having a dialogue on the legacy and impact that we will have as an industry.
This has been a really rewarding experience because it has allowed me to think about how the actions that we take today will have long-term impacts on the generations to come.
When I think about our broader industry, I really hope that initiatives like these create that stimulus to think about how reconciliation can be embedded as a core component of the work that we do, because it will truly lead to more responsible and better mining for the future.
