Ten years ago, one of the most compelling movements in support of Indigenous sovereignty took shape at Standing Rock. The ripples of the protests and prayers and encampments from that time are still with us today. “Mní Wičóni” (Water Is Life) remains a resounding and essential call, articulating a rallying cry in support of the rights of what truly is a water planet. Today, across the world, Indigenous Nations are continuing to transform how we understand justice — extending it beyond human laws to the living systems that sustain us. From freshwater to marine systems, from the Klamath River to the waters of the South Pacific, the Rights of Nature movement is reshaping how societies recognize the inherent rights of fish, whales, rivers, and entire oceans to exist and thrive.
This issue of The Pulse brings together powerful stories of leadership, resilience, and restoration, from Indigenous Nations advancing groundbreaking laws to families healing the waters that have long sustained them.
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Shifting the Tides of Justice: Advancing the Rights of Fish and Aquatic Mammals
In this powerful conversation, Raynell Morris (Lummi Nation) and Juliette Jackson, JD (Klamath) share how their Nations are advancing Rights of Nature protections rooted in Indigenous law and values. From recognizing the inherent rights of salmon and orcas to ensuring ecosystems can thrive for generations to come, their work reflects a centuries-long commitment to defending the natural world as kin, not property.
Moderated by Britt Gondolfi of Bioneers, this session highlights the growing movement among Tribal Nations to integrate Indigenous worldviews into modern legal frameworks — and to restore balance between people, animals, and the waters that sustain all life.
When the Salmon Died: A Family’s Fight to Restore the Klamath River
For generations, the Yurok people have fought to restore the Klamath River — a lifeline for salmon, culture, and ceremony. In this powerful excerpt from her new book, The Water Remembers, Amy Bowers Cordalis (Yurok) recounts the devastating 2002 fish kill that became a turning point for her family and her Nation’s long struggle for justice.
The Klamath now flows freely again and holds legal personhood under Yurok law, allowing the river itself to be represented in court. It’s a profound shift that mirrors what Amy’s story captures so vividly: a river’s suffering intertwined with a people’s resilience, and the restoration of both.
Tonga’s Bold Move to Grant Whales Legal Rights (Atmos)
In the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, whales are not just wildlife — they are ancestors, deities, and kin. Now, whale and ocean advocates are working to ensure that sacred relationship is reflected in law. Ahead of Tonga’s upcoming elections, a proposed bill called Te Mana o te Tohorā (Authority of the Whale) would grant whales legal personhood, recognizing their inherent rights to exist, thrive, and be healthy.
Led by Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho and supported by Indigenous ocean advocates across the Pacific, this effort could make Tonga the first nation in the world to legally recognize the rights of whales, reshaping global ocean conservation through ancestral knowledge and modern law.
In “Stop Killing the Klamath: Rights of Nature Protections within Tribal Jurisdictions,” Juliette Jackson (Klamath Tribes) proposes a bold new pathway for Tribal Nations to defend the sacred. By pairing the National Historic Preservation Act’s Traditional Cultural Property designation with emerging Rights of Nature frameworks, Jackson illustrates how Indigenous law and federal statutes can work together to protect life-sustaining ecosystems. Her work is both a legal innovation and a love letter to the Klamath homelands — showing how ancestral law and modern advocacy can unite to restore balance.
The countdown is on! Registration for the 2026 Bioneers Conference opens in early December, and you’ll want to be among the first to grab your spot. Stay tuned to your inbox for announcements, or sign up for conference alerts to get early access to tickets.
A transformative movement is emerging at the intersection of Tribal Sovereignty and the Rights of Nature, as Indigenous Nations lead efforts to recognize the inherent rights of fish, aquatic mammals, and the ecosystems they inhabit. This panel explores how Tribal Nations are adopting Rights of Nature policies in a centuries-long effort to protect marine life and the ecosystems essential to all beings.
This panel highlights the visionary leadership of Indigenous leaders who have spearheaded innovative laws and grassroots movements to integrate Indigenous values into Western legal systems. Their work serves as a global call to action, urging a reimagining of legal frameworks that honor Indigenous wisdom and foster a world where the rights of nature and human rights are interconnected and respected. Moderated by Britt Gondolfi, J.D. With: Raynell Morris (Lummi Nation), Erica Perez and Juliette Jackson, J.D. (Klamath).
Trevor Warmedahl, traveled around the world apprenticing with traditional, pastoral cheese makers. His discovery of terroir–a flavor that expresses the landscape, the animals and the process–came as an almost spiritual revelation while working in the Alta Langhe hills in Italy where they make a regional cheese called Tuma. The following is an excerpt from new book Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir, (Chelsea Green Publishing February 2026) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
Satori
That the smell of this unassuming little cheese with its microbial wilderness could induce this state of rapture in me as it released its spores and aromatic compounds into the air was revelatory. It was my first cheese satori, to adopt the Zen Buddhist term referring to a sudden enlightenment, a feeling of total presence, an extreme, consciousness–expanding epiphany. That a cheese could have such a characteristic personality made real what had been just a concept before, introduced to me in that Seattle bar ten years earlier. The notion of terroir crept out of my brain like a spreading fungal mycelium and moved through my whole body. Some cheeses are consciousness altering, more entheogen than food. These few moments of heaven are locked permanently in my flavor memory bank, setting a precedent from which I would spend the next three years recovering. Chasing that first high, I would venture into the forgotten folds of the planet where other boundary–dissolving, cheese–born intoxicants lurked, guarded by faithful initiates, persecuted by the servants of an empire that fears everything unabashedly sexual and of the earth.
I had never experienced such an undeniable sensory experience of what I would later dub deep terroir, where a direct aromatic correlation exists between a cheese and the place it is made. That place wasn’t just a creamery, mind you. It was a field of plants about to enter winter dormancy, growing from wet, fecund September earth on a west–facing hillside above a tributary of the Po River in the Alta Langhe hills on the piece of Planet Earth that is temporarily called Italy. The creamery, with its pleasant aroma of souring sheep milk and the yeasty rind of the tuma, could be viewed as a carrier of the terroir seeded by the land and animals. An amplifier, the space in which the seeds of this cheese germinate. That field and this cheese smelled of sheep, with hints of their manure as a seasoning in this aromatic stew. Not in a bad way, but in a pleasant, complementary way. It wasn’t the aroma of many sheep in a closed barn, packing urine and manure into an ammoniated cake without enough interwoven dry plant matter. The aroma of that field included as one element the input of a small flock of healthy sheep with plenty of space, being moved daily. It was a light sprinkle of ovine biology that didn’t overwhelm the other flavors in the stew—the wet grass, dark soil, and rotting leaves. The sheep lay in that field, breathing its air, eating its plants, and walking its contours. The milk carried a certain essence that I couldn’t identify when drinking it. It was likely very subtle, below the threshold of perception for most of us. This essence was then somehow magnified to a perceivable level and altered by the fermentations involved in the cheese make and the subsequent short ripening. Milk can have hints of terroir, but it is really the process of turning it into cheese that can unlock this potential and allow a coherent voice to start speaking.
This cheese is one of the greatest I have tasted, based on that initial powerful sensory imprint left by smelling and then eating it in the place it was produced. Terroir in cheese went from something conceptual to a highly tangible, blissful experience. There was no packaged starter added—the cheese slowly fermented as the bacteria native to the milk sprouted in the infant cheese, into a heavenly cloud of moldy milk that brought me to the verge of a mystical realization. There are cheeses you eat, and there are cheeses that let you shake hands and sit down for a drink with God.
For Trevor Warmedahl, food and flavor are passions and ways to experience other cultures. Working in restaurants in Seattle led to his first cheese-making job and stoked an interest in learning more about the full cycle of cheesemaking. He then worked on small farmstead dairies in California and Colorado, and ultimately had an offer to work in a cheese factory in Mongolia. Though his mission there was to teach a European style of making cheese, his eyes were opened to a traditional pastoral foodway that roused his curiosity and launched a global journey to learn cheesemaking from the waning cultures of pastoral people in Asia and Europe. His forthcoming book,Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir, documents his extraordinary culinary journey.
ARTY: In your global travels, sometimes you planned your trip and other times you say you took a leap of faith that someone would appear and help. There’s a quote in the book: “Sometimes losing the trail is the trail.” You must have been very resourceful to convince people in a variety of countries with different cultures and language barriers to accept you as an apprentice. What was your experience around all of that?
TREVOR: When I first started traveling, I did a trial run trip when I was in Mongolia and I went out and spent time in the countryside staying with families. That’s where this concept of “cheese-trekking” came from. It was quite easy in Mongolia because of the incredible sense of hospitality there. It was nothing out of the ordinary for people to welcome me into their homes and let me observe what they were doing.
And I found that to be the case with pastoral people around the world. There’s an underlying hospitality. It seems to be a trend. I’ve relied on that quite a bit.
Quite often I’m visiting places that are fairly remote and hard to get to, and there are not a lot of travelers visiting these regions, so there’s also not as much of the infrastructure in place for tourism. So, for me to just show up is a novelty and doors open for me. Walking up to some of these villages or shepherds’ camps, the first reaction was, “What do you want?” When they realized I wanted to hang out, people started feeding me. It hasn’t really been a problem.
I’ve mostly had good luck everywhere I’ve gone. At times, things were strange. I ran into a lot of heavy alcoholism and sometimes very rigid social norms around gender roles. There’s a dark side out there, but in general I’ve had really good experiences. And the more I’ve done this, the more I’ve built a résumé for it and more people start inviting me. It’s become easier to find cheese-makers to work with.
Photo by Alexander Pomper
ARTY: There is another quote in the book that, to me, epitomizes your motivation for your trekking: “To see what remained of older, more practical approaches to making cheese that are not reliant on purchased inputs, to learn the techniques and recipes before they were buried in modernity’s rush, to slaughter everything slow and holy.”
TREVOR: That does sum up the drive that I had. First, It was the sense that something very meaningful was being lost, and that it’s really easy to get bogged down in the tragedy of that and to lament what’s being lost. I decided that the only way to adequately respond to what I was seeing was to go out and experience it while it was still there, and to see if there was anything I could do.
A lot of what’s being lost is being forced out. There’s a paradigm to making food that has been applied from the top down. We see it clearly in agriculture with patented crops and the reliance on fertilizers, the whole systems of industrial agriculture that’s been forced on country after country. The same thing has happened with dairy foods and with cheese. It’s epitomized by the starter cultures and the rennet that are being used. These products are made by a few transnational corporations, and they’re seen as what is modern and what is efficient and reliable.
My work pushes back against that and shows that people have been able to produce these things on their own or locally for a very long time with a very successful track record that I think can actually be safer and more reliable than these purchased inputs. I’m trying to tell the stories of the places where these old ways haven’t been eradicated, those places where people are resisting or who have been removed from wider economies for so long. But, there is a transition that’s happening and those old ways are fading.
But over the course of visiting these places with the imperative to see the traditional ways before they disappeared, my philosophy has become a lot more optimistic. I see that even though the old ways and the traditions are being eroded, new things are popping up that are very interesting, and the old ways live on in kind of unsuspecting ways and have a strange way of popping back up again.
ARTY: Mongolia was your first stop. You didn’t go there with the idea of starting your journey of cheese-trekking. What did you learn and what did you unlearn in Mongolia?
Photo by Alexander Pomper
TREVOR: I went to Mongolia to manage a cheese plant, more or less, in the same style of cheese-making that I was attempting to get away from, using commercial starter cultures, pasteurizing the milk, and making European style cheeses. But it struck me as being absurd to do that in a country that has vast traditions of making dairy foods.
I went there to do this job, but quickly became jaded and left. And that turned out to be the right thing to do. But Mongolia was where my vision of learning cheesemaking from pastoral people was born.
In Mongolia, I observed people raising huge herds of animals without fences or barns, which I did not understand. It didn’t make sense to me. Oftentimes in the U.S., when livestock get out of the fence, people freak out. If there are animals in the road, the animals freak out. It’s like a weird jailbreak. But in Mongolia, it was the opposite, people would fence in their house to keep the animals out rather than fencing them in. I learned that these people had a profound understanding of the behavior of the animals and that they were working with them; they were integrating themselves into the social structure of a flock or herd and allowing the animals to do what they do. They worked with the psychology of the animals in a completely different way that wasn’t about control. There wasn’t as much manipulation of the behavior of the animals even in their breeding and their genetics. Everything was more hands off.
I saw the same thing in how the cheeses were being made. There wasn’t a need to control what microbes are going in and doing the fermentation. There was a knowledge of how milk ferments. It was a very deep science, a folk science.
There is a romantic image that pastoral communities are just simple shepherds. But, what I encountered were highly intelligent people who were very good at a number of different skills from caring for animals, such as veterinary service, to butchering. They are also very skilled at hunting and fishing and even things like repairing automobiles, and making clothes and tents. They have a vast skillset. That really appealed to me as a different way of approaching knowledge that, unfortunately, so much of which was being lost in the erosion of this lifestyle.
ARTY: One example of a practice that you came across in Mongolia and Italy, and maybe other places, that is quite different from a Western industrial process and which probably would horrify most Western people as highly unsanitary is the animal teats were never sterilized before milking.
TREVOR: Now it appears strange to me how standard the practice is in the U.S. Sterilizing the teats is done by large industrial producers that probably should be doing it, but even by people who have just a couple of goats. They’re told that they need to put iodine on the teats of the animals, either before and after milking or just after milking. The idea is that when you milk an animal, the orifice that the milk comes out of stays open for a while after milking, and the idea is that bacteria can get inside of it and potentially be problematic for the milk. The science on this is very much debated. I don’t think you really can sanitize something like a biological orifice of a cow. I don’t think it really works that way and I don’t know that you would want to.
Milking a goat in India (photo by Alexander Pomper)
I noticed that in so many other places, they weren’t doing this. At first I was concerned: “Won’t that result in bacteria being in the milk?” And people were like, “yes, of course, there’s supposed to be bacteria in milk.” There’s always going to be bacteria in milk, whether you kill it, or whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to be there. Milk is a breeding ground for bacteria. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a very good thing. Milk should ferment into a sour milk state or into something that becomes cheese. This is what has been done with milk for the vast majority of human history.
Noticing that made me want to understand the science and microbiology. If you have healthy animals that are not either transmitting diseases internally from their bodies or spreading them amongst themselves, the bacteria that’s living on their teats and going into the milk could be generally okay. People have been drinking milk made like this for a very long time generally by fermenting it and by not refrigerating to prevent it from fermenting. The cultural practice is to encourage it to ferment in a safe and predictable way into something that’s healthy and delicious.
That way of doing things is very much rooted in biology. There is a community of microbes that lives on the body of an animal that we could either distrust and try to disrupt it, or we could work with it and try to actually allow it to flourish and allow it to be a part of the milk that’s becoming the cheese, and potentially making the cheese even more a product of the place where it’s from if it’s being fermented by the microbes that are wild or being semi-cultivated in the spaces where we make cheese.
ARTY: But taking that one practice and putting it into a Western industrial setting isn’t advisable. The microbiome of the animal is in relationship to the microbiome of the environment and of the people working with the animals. So, in the environments that you visited, there are interrelated microbial communities whose diversity is the basis for food safety by creating a balanced and healthy microbiome in the whole system. That is quite the opposite of the toxic environments of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).
TREVOR: That’s correct, and that’s what’s been broken. It is hard to have these conversations because I’m talking about systems that have evolved in a place and with a certain level of economy, comparing them to the opposite extreme of dairy farming in America. In those situations, the way large herds of dairy animals are being raised puts stress on the bodies of the cows who are being forced to produce as much milk as possible. It’s not a healthy situation. It’s a situation that is ripe with opportunity for the spread of pathogens and illnesses.
So you can see why things like pasteurization, rigorous sanitation with harsh chemicals, and things like iodine dips have become standard because when you have a broken system that encourages the spread of disease, you have to take all these measures. It’s similar to applying chemical fertilizers, plowing, and planting a mono crop, you end up with a lot of pests and other problems that you have to use more chemicals to take care of.
I’m not advocating that we just kind of leave all of those modern protocols behind, but I want to see where the middle ground is between some of these more extreme situations that I’ve seen and the mess that is modern industrial dairying.
Cooking milk over a fire in India (photo by Alexander Pomper)
ARTY: You observed another example in Italy of how pastoral folks live with and use the microbiome of their whole environment. Christian at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde made cheese in the same room that it was being aged. If I have this right, that’s not a typical Western practice. How does that affect the process?
TREVOR: Christian makes a cheese that’s ripened for a very short period of time. It’s a small sheep milk cheese made with raw milk and no additional starter culture. By aging the cheese in the same space, the theory that I’ve come up with is that the room itself was kind of being a carrier for the yeast that’s growing on the cheese. The cheese is ripened mainly by yeasts and a little bit of white mold. These were thriving in the air and on the walls and on the cheeses themselves. So it was like once the new fresh cheeses came out and were salted, they were, in a way, immediately inoculated with this beneficial rind microbiome. So the cheese room itself becomes a carrier of this culture. It was the first time I had experienced that.
I’ve found this to be true in many situations, even situations where people are attempting to sanitize all their equipment. I think that these microbes are very resilient, and that, despite all our attempts to eradicate life from a space like this, we fail. And this mentality that we should treat a creamery like it’s a hospital has about the same results as treating a hospital like a hospital – it hasn’t done us very much good to have this delusion that we can sterilize life out of a space. It’s fraught with peril.
ARTY: Let’s talk about something that I think is near and dear to your heart and near and dear to your work, and that’s what you refer to as deep terroir. You talk about the distillation of the land into milk and cream. Can you explain that? What are the influences that develop a distinctive terroir?
TREVOR: That ended up being a big quest in the book, trying to understand if terroir in cheese is possible the way it is in wine. When it does occur, how is it happening? What are the mechanisms or the vectors for a cheese having a very unique taste of place? That was what I was searching for.
When I first found what I now call deep terroir, it blew my mind. Deep terroir means there’s a direct aromatic link between a cheese and somewhere on the farm–a barn or a creamery–a place that has the taste of the cheese, and that was at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde, the spot we were talking about earlier with Christian. I went out in the field with him and I put my hands in the dirt, which was kind of muddy in October, and I smelled the soil and it smelled like rotting leaves, grass, fungus, and sheep. Then I went into the creamery and put my face close to one of the cheeses and smelled almost the exact same profile. It was different. It was modified, but there was a continuity. So that hit me in a really big way, where it was like, okay, terroir definitely is possible. I’m experiencing it right now, and this cheese is beautiful; it literally tastes like the field that it came from.
I’ve come up with about four types of terroir sources. The first would be the landscape itself, the place where the animals are being raised, the pastures and the water. It also relates to the climate and the soil.
Sheep herding in Bulgaria (photo by Alexander Pomper)
Then there’s the livestock, who are the carrier of that terroir, who turn the landscape into milk. It is also the breed and the type of fat and protein that that breed produces.
And then there’s the human culture, which is not only the recipes and the techniques for making the cheese, but also how they build the barns, how they farm, where they cut their hay, and what they do with the manure. Even the tools that are used to make the cheese, and the practices that are handed down through experiential transfer of knowledge, all these things are directly impacting the terroir of the cheese.
The fourth, the smallest fractal, would be microbes. All of the previous three are feeding into this microbial terroir, which are the microbes that are unique to a place or more likely a microbial community that’s unique to that place but made up of players that are found all over.
The microbial potential of raw milk is being steered by how humans are raising livestock in particular places into particular cheeses, oftentimes without an understanding that that’s what they were doing. That has led to cheeses that have these really unique tastes and aromas and textures. All of that makes up terroir, it’s a web of connections.
For me, terroir is a subjective feeling, it’s something that just kind of strikes me. I’m not going to try to define it any more than that because being in these places, eating the cheeses, and having the experiences that I’ve had has been the reward that I didn’t know I was seeking.
The industrial approach seems to be kind of the antithesis of terroir. If everyone’s using the same cultures, following the same kind of protocols, using the same equipment, then you’re eradicating the potential for unique communities of microbes to be thriving in these situations. You’re actually intentionally disrupting the flow of microbes from landscapes through milking barns into creameries and aging spaces.
ARTY: That’s the most comprehensive definition of terroir I’ve ever heard. In the book, you talk about the Western psyche, the feeling that people in the West do not quite feel at home on the planet, inherently predisposed to damage ecosystems. But in Italy, you saw grazing practices that actually nourished landscapes. In Norway, you saw grazing animals properly had created park-like conditions. Those are examples of foodways that can be immersed in functioning, healthy ecosystems.
TREVOR: Another angle that I’m always looking for is the potential of raising dairy livestock in a way that is ecologically beneficial rather than ecologically destructive. In some places, people are implementing these newer planned grazing programs Allan Savory-style, with a lot of electric fencing and regular moves, and pasture observation, and analysis and planning through those protocols. Those seem to work pretty well.
But what I’m interested in bringing to the conversation is places where it’s a little less planned and a little less controlled, where people are still moving animals on foot or horseback and are able to maintain ecological relationships in particular habitats and agricultural landscapes that have been built up over time involving livestock and maintained by these movements of herds and people. The main one that a lot of people are familiar with is transhumance, which is the movement of animals and people from a valley where they spend the winter, up to mountains in the summer where they have access to the alpine pastures, and their milk and cheese is made there. So quite often, those alpine pastures are actually being maintained by the fact that these animals are being brought up to graze.
In places where this tradition has been lost, you see forests encroaching on grasslands. That can be a negative thing.
What I’ve seen in places like Norway, Northern Italy, and Slovenia are these mosaic landscapes that include forests, meadows, and zones in between, with hedgerows or stone walls that create a unique habitat where plants and animals are seen that aren’t necessarily seen on either side of that line, or where a forest meets a meadow. Those places can be this very rich inter-exchange of biology, nutrients, etc.
The use of livestock tied in with other forms of agriculture, like orchards and growing crops can create landscapes that maximize the amount of these edges, creating more habitat for more animals, plants and microbes. That’s the ideal. I’ve seen it, but it’s been degraded in many places. But there is a resurgence happening. You see it especially in Europe where quite a few countries have now gotten UNESCO protection for transhumance and certain types of mountain farming and mobile pastoralism.
In the conversation around the impact of livestock on ecosystems and on the climate at large, I think there’s really important voices to be included from some of the countries that don’t get as much recognition.
Based on his extensive travels, Trevor shares his knowledge of traditional cheese making inThe Sour Milk School typically held on a dairy farm. The 5-day workshops are a hands-on, immersive introduction to cheese-making from an alternative perspective.
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If plants have shaped fashion’s past, could they also hold the secret to its future?
In The Nature of Fashion, Carry Somers takes readers on an epic journey through the plant origins of what we wear — tracing how the fibers that clothe us have transformed landscapes, cultures, and economies. Told through intimate human stories, the book uncovers both the devastation and beauty interwoven through the history of textiles: the exploitation of land and labor, and the resilience of those who continue to work in rhythm with nature.
This excerpt tells one of those stories. When Yolanda Contreras and a small group of women in northern Peru set out to revive their ancestors’ colorful native cotton, they faced skepticism, government bans, and the daily strain of survival. Yet their determination grew into a movement that restored biodiversity, reclaimed cultural heritage, and redefined what sustainable fashion can mean.
The following is an excerpt from Carry Somers’s new book TheNature of Fashion(Chelsea Green Publishing, November 2025) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
Some called it courage, others said it was recklessness when Yolanda Contreras gave up her job at the chicken factory, especially since she had a young family to support. It all started with the group of women she passed on the way to work: two o’clock every Tuesday afternoon, always there, deep in discussion by the side of the road. For weeks, Yolanda only glanced at them in curiosity. Then one day, she summoned the nerve to ask what they were doing. That’s when she heard about their dream: to revive the native cotton their forebears once grew, the cotton that sprouted brown and beige, yellow and orange, lilac and green – and perhaps black and blue. The plant they called simply algodón El País: country cotton. Yolanda felt an invisible thread tug her back to her grandmother, who had made clothes from seeds passed down like heirlooms. Yet it wasn’t just nostalgia that convinced Yolanda to join them. Coloured cotton was an opportunity, a means of escaping the drudgery of the chicken factory where every dead bird was docked from your pay. Yolanda hung up her apron and joined their crusade.
There was only one obstacle with growing such cotton – well, two or three it eventually turned out. The most immediate was finding seeds. The women searched high and low throughout Mór-rope, scouring every ditch and hedgerow, combing their homes and fields. Eventually they found a handful of seeds buried in the fluff of mattresses and pillows, and a few forgotten plants clinging to life in the countryside. Starting with so little felt like an impossible task, particularly as Yolanda had no idea how to cultivate them. The region has a desert climate and, with no irrigation in her field, she brought water in by donkey, digging holes one by one and carefully filling them with seeds. Some plants grew, others withered and died. But turning this handful of seeds into a livelihood wasn’t the women’s only battle because their husbands weren’t exactly cheering them on either, grumbling that they shouldn’t have given up their day jobs so hastily. Still, they persevered.
Just as their efforts were taking root, literally and figuratively, the Ministry of Agriculture arrived with orders to destroy their entire crop. There was a law, they explained, prohibiting the cultivation of native cotton. The government sees cotton’s promise, but their field of vision is confined to the commercial pima variety, which only grows white. Those native colours might cross-contaminate, muddying its coveted whiteness, shortening the extra-long staple fibres or harbouring pests that could damage the lucrative crop. And they might not, Yolanda thought bitterly as months of backbreaking work went up in smoke. Well, perhaps not quite all, because each cotton boll produces numerous seeds and it wasn’t hard to find a few escaped handfuls. This native cotton, this country cotton, this cotton the government disparages is proving to be a plant so tough it will withstand all attempts to eliminate it. Yolanda’s anger solidified into determination. She would not let them extinguish biodiversity and cultural heritage in a single swipe. If the law required her to grow white cotton, then that’s what she would do. She planted a field of pure white pima cotton, just like the government wanted. And in the middle, she grew her country cotton, her coloured cotton, her cultural heritage, wrapped like a secret within a veneer of conformity.
The women tended their crops, harvesting, spinning, storing, anticipating the day the world would catch up. After eight years they grew tired of waiting and invited the technical coordinator from the Ministry to come and inspect their plants. To the government’s surprise, these women had been right all along: native coloured cotton posed no threat to the white variety after all. In truth, it had some distinct advantages. While its staple length is short, native cotton is naturally resistant to the pests that plague commercial varieties. It thrives with minimal maintenance, requiring no fertilisers or pesticides, and the bushes can be harvested for up to six years. Unlike the monoculture of pima, native cotton is often planted as hedgerows to protect other crops from foraging animals. The government reversed the ban. Then they went further, officially recognising native cotton as the genetic, ethnic and cultural heritage of Peru. Yolanda and the other women had done more than rescue five colours from the verge of extinction; they had woven their efforts into history, reclaiming their cotton as a national treasure.
As Yolanda tells me her story, she sits on a woven petate palm mat, a strap around her back suspending her loom between her body and a nearby tree. Her shuttle moves to and fro, weaving alternating stripes of beige, brown and white. A young boy sits in the shade of her loom, while a girl sidles up to lean on her grandmother’s shoulder, absorbing the craft. Not that this is surprising – they’ve been surrounded by coloured cotton since the day they were born. In their culture, this fibre is for more than weaving. When a baby is born, the father will bury the placenta while the mother bathes herself and her baby with purple cotton. Then she wraps a pillow or hat made from brown cotton around the newborn’s head – no other colour will do. This cushions the baby’s soft skull against the nocturnal hooting of the great horned owl, which could easily split it in two. As the child grows, a loop of cotton around the ankle will ease leg pain, while a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol soothes toothache and mouth ulcers, always burned after use. A compress for bites, a remedy for fright, it seems there’s nothing native cotton cannot do.
Today the women’s group that met on the roadside every Tuesday has grown into a movement, encompassing not just her community but twenty others besides. With the money she earns, Yolanda has sent one of her daughters to medical school, while another works beside her growing cotton. As Yolanda pushes her bobbin through the warp threads, pulling the batten towards her to tighten a strip of rich chestnut weft, her heritage comes alive on the loom. Sometimes she thinks back to life in the chicken factory. But not very often.
For more than a century, the Klamath River has been at the heart of one of North America’s most significant environmental justice movements. Beginning in the early 1900s, a series of hydroelectric dams cut off salmon migration routes, destroyed fisheries, and devastated the livelihoods and cultural practices of the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath, and Shasta Nations.
In 2002, a massive fish kill on the Lower Klamath caused by low flows, high temperatures, and disease became a turning point. For Tribal communities, it was a moment of both unbearable grief and renewed resolve.
That resolve has carried through generations and is now transforming the river itself. The largest dam removal project in U.S. history began in 2023. The river now runs freely for the first time in over a century, signaling a new era of ecological and cultural revitalization led by the region’s Tribal Nations.
Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok attorney and former General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe, has been at the center of this fight. In her new book, The Water Remembers, she tells the story of her family’s 170-year struggle for justice on the Klamath — from her great-grandmother’s resistance during the Salmon Wars to her own role in securing the river’s restoration.
The following excerpt takes us back to the moment when that fight became deeply personal: the day Cordalis and her family discovered thousands of salmon dying in the river. It’s a heartbreaking scene, but what followed is a story of reclamation, resilience, and the enduring power of Indigenous leadership to heal a river and a people.
Enter our giveaway for your chance to win a free copy of The Water Remembers!
“It smells like death,” Mike said, “some kind of organic decomposing. I don’t smell or see any chemicals, so it’s not a chemical spill. It seems to be only salmon dying.” There were no smaller fish, like trout, or larger fish, like sturgeon, dead. On the banks, the birds still flew and there were no visible dead animals. Only the salmon were dying.
“Should we pick the salmon up?” Merle asked, peering down into the electric-green water.
“How we gonna pick them up?” I asked incredulously. “Their gills and bellies are rotting, and the water looks toxic.”
The fish next to the boat were dead, their mouths clenched open and eyes clouded over. The sides of their bellies were wounded, the skin brown, red, and gray where it appeared to have burned and then rotted. My stomach turned, followed by my heart. Their gills were not their usually bright pink and instead were light gray with white spots. I was paralyzed and in shock by the sight. I felt extreme panic, devastation, and confusion. These were the fierce River beasts that I had battled for me and my family’s survival. I knew them as aggressive fighters who could break human bones with a whack of their tail or move their bodies back and forth to jump out of fishing boats. Now, they had succumbed to something so powerful it killed them en masse. What had killed them? How could we stop it?
Mike broke me out of my stupor. “This is serious, guys. Let’s go up the River. There are probably more.”
We turned a bend in the River near the glen. Merle pointed up the River.
“What is that? Do you see it?” He gunned the boat toward an eddy, where the water pulled in a circle and then shot out whatever it caught onto the riverbank. After which a five-hundred-foot straight stretch of River came into view.
“Oh my god,” I murmured as we got closer.
“Stop the boat, Merle,” Mike said somberly.
Before us, for the next half mile, were hundreds of dead salmon in the water and on the riverbank. Large salmon. Some were floating down the surface of the River and others got caught in the eddy, circling eerily. More had been pushed out of the eddy and were beginning to pile in layers along the riverbank, three to four salmon deep, their bodies distorted and tortured. Just like the first dead salmon we saw, here the salmon’s gills, rotted and gray, swelled out from their heads. They were white and filled with small white dots, tiny organisms that had sucked out the blood and oxygen that would have normally flowed through a healthy gill. Their bellies had exploded from the inside out, like they had swallowed a bomb. Blood and guts poured into the River. What skin remained intact was a dark red, a stark contrast to its normal silvery chrome color, and gray from rotting. The water where the salmon pooled was covered with a bubbling film, toxic blue-green algae, and a gray sludge that moved with the carcasses.
We stood in the boat staring, slowly moving upriver. There were so many dead salmon in the water. We didn’t want to run them over, but it was almost impossible not to. All three of us were silent, in shock. “No one touch anything,” Mike finally said. “This looks like ich, a fish disease. But in case it’s something else, don’t touch the fish.” “This is a massive fish kill. I don’t know how else to describe it,” Merle replied, staring out into the water. “What is going on? How did this happen?” “Why are they dying?”
“How do we stop it?”
We fumbled for words as our minds raced through a series of unspoken questions and fear of what could happen next. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I thought of all the fish stories and Yurok myths my family had told me. None of it made any sense.
This River was made for salmon. It was September, when the salmon migrated up the River. How could the salmon be dying here?
“There has to be a biological explanation for this,” Mike reasoned. “Some ecological reason. It’s a drought year. The water has been low for a while, and it got lower recently. It’s been hot, much hotter than normal.” “We’ve been catching a lot of fish over the last few days,” Merle noted. “We have a big allocation this year. It must be a big run. I think the bulk of the run is in the River now.”
“The water is so low it has been moving slow, almost stagnant. The water is hot too,” I said.
“The flows at Iron Gate went down 41 percent to six hundred cubic feet per second two days ago. The bureau probably cut the water flows to the River to give more water to the farmers. The US Vice President was in Klamath Falls two weeks ago to visit the farmers,” Mike said. “They must have reached a deal. They must have diverted the water. That would explain the low flows.”
We started the boat back up and continued up the River. The size of the fish kill grew as we traveled. Just fifty yards ahead, in another eddy, the same scene: hundreds of salmon dead, their bodies mutilated. The farther we traveled, the more salmon we saw lining the banks of the River. The sun was baking them, turning rotting fish into rotten corpses. The smell was so concentrated and potent, I gagged. “Here, put this over your nose,” Merle said, handing me a cloth. “Merle, let’s stop at my dad’s camp at Brooks Riffle and see if it’s the same there.” “Sure,” Merle said.
As we pulled around the last River corner before Brooks Rif- fle, two to three layers of dead fish lined the banks of the River for a five-hundred-yard stretch. They lay there mangled, battered, and bruised like a line of dead soldiers waiting to be buried. Yet the redwoods, alder, and willow trees all continued to stand tall. The mountains and the ridges towering over the River stood still. The birds still flew by overhead. The water still rolled toward the ocean, but it moved at a lethargic pace, quiet and solemn, as if in mourning.
If water has memory, it would remember this day. It would remember growing hotter, holding those salmon as they died, as they gasped for air, as the fish disease sucked the oxygen from the salmon and killed them. It would remember how it had failed the salmon, unable to provide them with sanctuary.
This excerpt is posted with permission fromThe Water Remembersby Amy Bowers Cordalis, published by Little Brown and Company, October 2025.
When a devastating fish kill nearly destroyed the Klamath River, Cordalis stepped into a legacy of resistance stretching back more than 170 years — one shaped by her great-uncle’s Supreme Court case defending Yurok rights, her great-grandmother’s leadership during the Salmon Wars, and her community’s unrelenting defense of their homelands. As General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe, Cordalis helped hold powerful corporate interests accountable and helped lead the largest river restoration project in history.
Part memoir, part historical record, and part call to action, The Water Remembers is a profound testament to Indigenous resilience, relational law, and the commitment to defend the sacred.
Five randomly selected winners will receive a copy of The Water Remembers.
Scroll down to watch The Water Remembers: Year Zero, Amy Bowers Cordalis’ powerful talk from the 2025 Bioneers Conference, where she shares how Indigenous leadership and community action sparked a historic river restoration movement.
Amy Bowers Cordalis – The Water Remembers: Year Zero
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In forests across North America, a humble forager shapes ecosystems in ways few people notice. Squirrels, with their endless caching and forgetfulness, are not just entertaining backyard acrobats; they’re essential engineers of our forests. Every nut they bury and fail to retrieve plants the possibility of a future tree, a quiet act of reforestation repeated millions of times over.
In Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World, author Nancy F. Castaldo invites readers to see these small mammals as more than scatterbrained hoarders. Through wit, history, and ecology, she reveals the profound intelligence behind their behavior and their role as keystone species sustaining the health of entire ecosystems.
In this excerpt from Chapter One, “As a Keystone Species,” Castaldo explores how the squirrel’s “enhanced” cognitive abilities, instinctive drive for survival, and sometimes-forgotten food caches knit together the forest’s living architecture — proving that even the smallest creatures can hold up the biggest systems.
“Keystone: a central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together.” —Oxford English Dictionary
“I learned a fun fact about squirrels. . . . Squirrels cannot find 80 percent of the nuts they hide. Are you kidding me? Is that the greatest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? First of all, animals aren’t supposed to make mistakes. But secondly, I made this realization. . . . Hold your skulls in, because your brains are gonna [f***ing] explode. That’s how trees are planted,” pronounced comedian Sarah Silverman.
Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist and pioneering founder of the Boy Scouts of America, wrote in the foreword to his 1922 animal-fiction story Bannertail: The Story of a Graysquirrel, “In the nut forests of America, practically every tree was planted by the Graysquirrel, or its kin. No squirrels, no nut-trees.” While Seton often anthropomorphized his animals with the human qualities of curiosity, desire, and sympathy, garnering negative and vocal criticism from other naturalists, his observations should not be discounted.
Is Seton or Silverman correct? Perhaps both or neither. Plants rely on seed dispersal for their survival. While some plants have seeds that fly away in the wind, many need a creature, such as a bird or squirrel, to carry away the seed. Whether a seed is picked up on fur and brought inadvertently to a new location, excreted after being eaten, or carried away and planted in the earth, plants have relationships with dispersers. These relationships are crucial to the survival of forest ecosystems; they are crucial to our own survival. Evidence of a seed dispersal crisis in Europe in 2024 indicated that for 30 percent of plant species, most of their dispersers are threatened or declining, demonstrating how vital seed dispersers, such as squirrels, are in our world.
Squirrels are dispersers. They do plant trees, but the process is more complex than both Silverman’s and Seton’s pronouncements. Squirrels have used their skill at finding food to their advantage, and this demonstrates an “enhanced” cognitive ability. Their food-caching behavior does not lack purpose or direction. And so we must consider the brains of squirrels, how squirrels contribute to the health of our forests, and their role as keystone species.
“Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel. Huge portions of what is loosely termed ‘the squirrel brain’ are given over to one thought: food,” wrote Kate DiCamillo in Flora and Ulysses, a novel centered on a girl and a squirrel that won the John Newbery Medal in 2014. DiCamillo wasn’t wrong in describing squirrels’ focus and behavior toward food. But that drive for sustenance is present among most animals. From wolves to pelicans, wild creatures constantly think about their next meal. It’s a matter of survival. Squirrels aren’t an exception. Without that drive for sustenance, they perish. But there is more to the squirrel brain than DiCamillo’s description suggests.
Squirrel brain is often used as a derogatory metaphor for someone having scattered and fuzzy thinking without much depth or connection. The truth is much different. Squirrel brains, about the size of a walnut, are substantially more complex. Just as scientists have observed in other creatures, there is a great deal we are uncovering about animal brains and cognition. Squirrel brains are quite large compared with the size of their bodies, quite larger than those of other rodents. This ratio, comparable to that of many primates, demonstrates cognition complexity. This complexity is seen in the way they group their nuts. Squirrels use the method of “spatial chunking,” keeping their nuts grouped according to type, to help them remember where they are stashed. Walnuts with walnuts. Hazelnuts with hazelnuts. They also group nuts by size. This is not fuzzy thinking.
Noted US squirrel researcher Michael Steele, along with researchers from Germany and the United Kingdom, explored the “enhanced” cognitive ability of gray squirrels. While they found that some cognitive abilities in gray squirrels, such as solving novel problems, has undergone mild variation as they have adapted to new environments, the previously reported enhanced performance is likely a general characteristic that brings fitness advantages to this species and contributes to their adaptability to new environments. Squirrels demonstrate exceptional problem-solving abilities and have a complex communication system that includes both sound and scent to share information of threats and food sources. “Squirrel brain,” then, is far from scattered and fuzzy. And having that brain also has a huge impact on our forests.
In Bannertail, Seton captured a squirrel’s robust autumn food drive: “No longer wabbly or vague, as in that first autumn, but fully aroused and dominating was the instinct to gather and bury every precious, separate nut. Bannertail had had to learn slowly and partly by seeing the Redsquirrels making off with the prizes. But he had learned, and his brood had the immediate stimulus of seeing him and their mother at work; and because he was of unusual force, it drove him hard, with an urge that acted like a craze. He worked like mad, seizing, stripping, smelling, appraising, marking, weighing every nut he found.”
Anyone, like Seton, who has observed squirrels during autumn can relate to Bannertail’s urge that made him act in a “craze” to gather nuts. The urgency squirrels exhibit not only enables them to feed throughout the cold months ahead; their behavior also builds forests.
This wasn’t the first time Seton wrote about squirrels. A decade earlier, he included squirrels among sixty mammalian wildlife species in Life-Histories of Northern Animals: An Account of the Mammals of Manitoba. Most of his remarks that follow the sections on classification are his personal observations or those of his friends and colleagues. “I am informed by A. K. Fisher that at the southern end at Lake George, in early autumn, it is sometimes an everyday occurrence to see Red-squirrels swimming across the lake, from west to east (about two miles)—never in the opposite direction. The chestnut grows abundantly on the eastern side of the lake, but it is comparatively scarce on the western, and these extensive migrations always take place in years when the yield of chestnuts is large.”
Lake George is a thirty-two-mile-long lake in northern New York state’s Adirondack Mountains. The mountains make up the southern part of the Eastern Temperate Forests ecoregion, which extends into Maine and eastern Canada and is home to the state’s Adirondack Park Forest Preserve. The forests in the park and around Lake George consist of hemlocks, spruces, beeches, pines, and broad-leaved trees. Red squirrels, as well as eastern gray squirrels and two species of flying squirrels, make their home in the forests along with a host of other mammals, including moose, deer, and beavers.
A. K. Fisher’s observations of chestnut-searching swimming squirrels in Lake George were not the only observations in the Adirondacks. Early studies of red squirrels in the mountains reported sightings of squirrels swimming across Big Moose Lake, Long Lake, Brantingham Lake, and Lake George. Seton also included James Higby’s observation of June 1877; Higby witnessed as many as fifty squirrels crossing Big Moose Lake.
Another account was documented in Winslow Watson’s history of Essex County: “The autumn of 1851 afforded one of these periodical invasions of Essex County. It is well authenticated, that the red-squirrel was constantly seen in the widest parts [about seven miles] of [Lake Champlain], far out from land, swimming towards the shore, as if familiar with the service; their heads above water, and their bushy tails erect and expanded, and apparently spread to the breeze. Reaching land, they stopped for a moment, and relieving their active and vigorous little bodies from the water, by an energetic shake or two, they bounded into the woods, as light and free as if they had made no extraordinary effort.”
The massive chestnut trees at the Adirondack lake were appreciated not only by native squirrel species; they also appeared in many works of art at the turn of the century, including Robert Melvin Decker’s Old Chestnuts at Bolton, Lake George, circa 1890–95. Alfred Stieglitz captured a dying chestnut tree on the eastern edge of Lake George in a 1927 photograph. None of this art captured swimming or climbing squirrels.
However, those chestnut trees, a boon for American red squirrels, were doomed when the nonnative Chinese chestnut tree entered the United States with a lethal fungus.
On an autumn day roughly a century after Stieglitz took that photo, I sat near that site at the southern end of Lake George, reading Diane Ackerman’s passages about squirrels in her book Cultivating Delight.
As with my many other visits to the lake over the years, I did not witness a single red or gray squirrel swimming in the lake. I also haven’t seen those majestic chestnuts that propelled the swimming behavior that Seton memorialized in 1909. The lack of chestnut trees altered the composition of the forests and the behavior of the wildlife that depended on them.
Fortunately, those American red squirrels did not completely rely on the chestnuts for their survival. But it is easy to see how we could have had a different outcome with the population of our common squirrels.
These days, post chestnut tree habitation, red squirrels harvest seeds from Adirondack conifers, including pines, spruces, and firs. They also feed on birch catkins and sugar maple bark and seeds. The Adirondack forests also provide them with nuts from beaked hazelnut and American hazelnut and the berries of northern wild raisin, wintergreen, and partridgeberry. They are regularly seen on all forest trails.
In this program, we drop in on a remarkable conversation between two world-renowned Native American women artists. National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo riffs with renowned photographer Cara Romero. They discuss how life is art, and how they make their art to reflect the lived truths of their cultures and people.
Featuring
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
Cara Romero is a contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe in California, her art is shaped by a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective. Along with her art career, Cara is the Executive Director of Bioneers.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer: Emily Harris
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Production Assistance and Program Engineer: Mika Anami
This program features music by Joy Harjo and from Nagamo Publishing, the Indigenous-created music library.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, we drop in on a remarkable conversation between two world-renowned Native American women artists. National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo riffs with distinguished fine art photographer Cara Romero. They discuss how life is art, and how they make their art to reflect the lived truths of their cultures and people.
This is “The Power of Art for Healing and Justice” with Joy Harjo and Cara Romero.
Cara Romero (CR): Wow. Another full house. Good afternoon, everybody, thank you for coming today. My name is Cara Romero. Welcome to the 18th annual Indigenous Forum. We’re on day two of our annual conference. I’m really excited to be here with you…
Host: In March 2025 during the annual Bioneers conference, Cara Romero – Executive Director of Bioneers and Co-Director of the Indigeneity Program – sat down with celebrated poet Joy Harjo for a conversation at the Indigenous Forum.
Cara Romero and Joy Harjo at Bioneers 2025
A musician and performer, Joy Harjo is a Muscogee Creek matriarch. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the heart of Muscogee Creek Nation. She comes from a people rich in tradition. They are language speakers, storytellers, singers, artists, preachers, dancers, and fierce protectors of their culture and community.
Joy came of age amid the 1960s backdrop of intense political and civil rights movements, including those for Native rights. Poetry became part of her artistic life amid this larger upheaval. She has received numerous awards and written eleven volumes of poetry, From 2019 through 2022, Joy served three terms as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, She has been an inspiration for countless young Native artists.
Cara Romero is a contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe in California, Her art is shaped by a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective. She uses contemporary photographic techniques to depict the modernity of Native peoples, illuminating Indigenous worldviews and aspects of supernaturalism in everyday life.
Here’s Cara Romero and Joy Harjo.
Cara Romero (CR): I wanted to talk to Joy today about what art has given to me, to my community, and what her art inspires us to think about and to be about.
I wanted to ask you about your earliest memories, about your childhood, about those memories that form us, that make us who we are later in life. And I know the stories of the Muscogee Creek people and how they made it to Oklahoma. Can you talk a little bit about your family’s history, about coming to Oklahoma, and maybe a little bit about what you were like as a young girl?
Joy Harjo(JH): Oh man…That’s a long story. Like where do we start? Because we started out in the Southeast, and were illegally removed by Andrew Jackson, who is—went against Congress, etc., to force us out. And my relatives stood up at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against that illegal move, but here we are in, now in Oklahoma. The Muscogee Creek Nation is now in Oklahoma.
And my father, my father’s Muscogee Creek, and we knew the story. We knew our relatives’ names. And that’s just always part of you. It’s not something that…I didn’t come from a stereotype. I came up in a family. There was cool stuff. My mother wrote songs and did demos for her music. And my dad, he was so good looking, and he loved to party. And we lived next door to the bootlegger. So we had some good times until they weren’t any good times.
Joy Harjo. Credit: Karen Kuehn
But I grew up in a house of music. But also, really, I mean, now there’s a word for historical trauma. There wasn’t then. But, you know, there were those kinds of things happening too. But in the middle of it all, I knew I was loved, and I always had a kind of of compassion for my father and my mother.
And I think of my earliest memories, of course, is being a kid, and you realize—I mean, you think about your consciousness now, but when you’re a little child, your consciousness was still there. And as a child, I can remember being in that realm where I…It’s like the realm you go to when you create, or if you’re really good at fixing cars, and you’re listening to the engine and all that. It’s the same kind of realm. Or scientific study, or with a baby in your arms at 3 in the morning while you’re trying to rock them to sleep. It’s a similar kind of realm, where you’re in touch with things.
And I remember very early on that I preferred to be there sometimes, or outside. I wanted to be by myself, often. I always—I felt more myself by myself. I was in the closet a lot. The closet was full of my art, as was the garage.
Joy at Institute of American Indian Arts as a high school student in the 1970s
But we were laughing the other day about names and naming, and I said, well, I was so morose, but they named me Joy. I mean, I was funny. I cared about my mother so deeply. I would run her bath and I would do things to make her laugh. I was the trickster. I was always doing things to make people laugh that I’d get into trouble. I got into more trouble than any of my brothers and sisters, just because I would run—I was very creative. But I loved – art is where I found myself. We don’t really have words for art. I think it’s part of something everybody did. You’d sit at the table, people would be drawing, carving—it was all—knitting, whatever people did. It’s just all part of life, the art of life and the art of living.
CR: I think my very earliest memories are when our family relocated from Los Angeles. I was born in Redondo Beach in Los Angeles to interracial parents. My dad is Native. My mom is non-Native. And our tribe had reorganized in the heart of the Mojave Desert, and my whole family moved back—my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my mom and dad, my brother and I. We all lived in one trailer at the end of a dirt road, which eventually became our first council house for our tribe.
And we had the most pristine, undeveloped shoreline on the California side of Lake Havasu, and it was just in its kind of new strange beginnings at an edge of—all of our ancestral homelands were under the water, and here we were moving back as a tribe after a time of great sadness. You know, everybody had left when they flooded in the valley, and we moved back.
But I never thought of myself as an artist. It wasn’t something that we pursued as—like it wasn’t a pursuit. But I think back, as we get asked these questions a lot – when did you know you were an artist, or when did you become an artist. And I have to think back to these early memories and think, well, I was always an artist. You know? That was my best friend.
When there was chaos, when there was drinking, when there was trauma, when there—when you got sent to your room for getting in trouble, art was always there never asking anything from me. It was always just a place that I could go.
And so I drew. I drew for hours. You know, I grew up before cellphones and computers and all of that. And I think of those early childhood memories so fondly. And I think that they’re really important to who we become and how we form as young individuals.
Because, I think a lot of times we grew up out of place. You know, here we are like young Native kids in public school systems, and we live in these parallel worlds where it’s one way back home and then representation and academia or media or Hollywood is absurdly different. You know? Or what we read in textbooks about ourselves, or when we study cultural anthropology.
When I stumbled back into art, for me it was photography that changed my life. But I knew instantly that I was going to be able to tell stories through the art; that I wasn’t going to fit in writing textbooks or maybe being a Native studies professor, but it was actually through art.
Can you talk a little bit about the power that you felt when you became an artist to maybe do more for your community and for people than you ever imagined?
JH: I always felt like an artist, but I thought I was going to be a painter. Because I could go into that space, into that space, and listen and create, and so on.
And I was at the University of New Mexico, and part of KIVA Club, which was our Native student center and place where we could go and be with ourselves and be with each other. And we were—because of the times, I think it started as kind of a social club, but it became a place of awareness and issues, political gatherings and so on. We became very active.
And a lot of the political actions, Native rights movements were going on, and so on, and a lot of the surrounding Native communities, some of them would come to us because, well, we’re Native students at the university, so we must be smart in those kinds of ways, because that’s why a lot of us were sent there or were there, so we could go back to our communities with what we learned out there.
I remember going out to some of these meetings with uranium companies out near Laguna, or out in Navajo land who were dealing with the coal companies, and just sitting there and witnessing. I was a witness. And that’s where, for me, poet—my mother’s a song lyrics poetry and music, but listening to how these beautiful ways these people talked, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in English, that was very metaphorical in the way that I think all of used to use language.
I’ve heard language people in Muscogee, Hawaiian, and other Native languages say people don’t speak in metaphor like they used to, because when you use text, you usually don’t speak in metaphor. Well, what does metaphor do? It opens the space up from maybe two dimensional or three dimensional to maybe five or six dimensional. That’s the power of metaphor.
So I was listening to these people in the community make this connection with who they were as a people, and how they belonged to the land, and how they had been there, why they were there, and what their connection was. And they were standing there as guardians. Really, that’s really what got my writing started. I started writing poetry. But, I came to realize that what motivated me was healing and justice. Those became major motivators.
Poetry to me was similar to art in the sense that you were still, even in art, you’re dealing with rhythm, you’re dealing with color, you’re dealing with phrasing. It’s just—You know, and images in a certain way. I used to tell the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, I said you paint like a writer and I write like a painter. And that’s what started my poetry.
Which made no sense to anybody. How are you going to make a living? Poetry? And then nobody wanted to give you money—for scholarships—because poetry was not useful. You know? We need doctors. We need educators. But there was something, and what is that? There was something that was planted in me that I had to take care of.
It didn’t make logical sense. I’m a mother with two children, how are you going to make a living? But it was something I knew beyond knowing, and it gave me to create, and then to work with that. It’s very demanding. And nothing is given to you for free. I. I realize it was not about me at all. It was about what needed to come through on behalf of healing, on behalf of justice.
Host: After the break, Joy Harjo and Cara Romero explore whether making art is selfish or self-care, overcoming the steep barriers for women artists, the gift of mentors and ancestors, and the irreplaceable role that art plays in healing culture and history to honor future generations.
Host: Now, let’s return to Joy Harjo and Cara Romero in conversation at the Indigenous Forum, which took place at the Bioneers Conference…
CR: As you get older – I’m at the great in-between at almost 50 now, and I can look back and talk to my younger self and remember that the darkest times in my life were when I wasn’t creating, and the lessons that that gave me, that there’s some kind of self-sabotage that maybe we as Native people coming through trauma think I don’t deserve to have that happiness, or I don’t deserve to take care of myself.
And I think with art making, it can feel very…from the outside, frivolous. Or like you have this need to be selfish with time, but it’s actually for all of us, this radical act of self-care, to give yourself time to create.
And I think when we become mothers, it’s in our nature to sacrifice everything. Right? I think I learned that when I was making milk that my body would steal its own bone marrow to nourish my children, that this child was the most important thing. But that metaphor for me was like, you may also sacrifice your art making, or the things that keep you spiritually whole. And we have to problem solve as mothers, as art makers, like how can we look at this importance of spiritual health and creating, especially as women, to carve out that time for ourselves, and to give us that—It’s not selfish; it’s self-care. You know? And it actually makes your children healthier.
JH: Yeah, but there’s so much judgment for women who pursue an art. You have to walk through that. I remember I was so proud that I got an NEA grant, and I had just graduated from the University of Iowa, so I would be home working and people would say, well, because you’re not doing anything…[LAUGHTER]… Or even taking that time there’s been a judgment, well, you took that time away from your children. There’s a lot of that. A lot of it’s unspoken.
And women, we have to fight for our time and even place sometimes in the whole—in terms of being an artist, because there’s so much with our children. I love how you were talking about nursing and how you would do anything. It’s built in.
But, you know, our art’s also like that. It’s out of the same place of creating and giving birth and taking care of children. Art is, it’s the same thing, in a way, because you’re giving birth to something that comes through you, and you give birth to it, and you nurture it, and you grow it. It’s very similar to having children.
And there’s also—You were talking about self-care, and then I think also about culture-care, which is similar. When you’re doing your art, it’s not just about you.
And that’s how we know who we are as people, is our artists. And yet it’s so difficult to get funding for arts and artists, and Native arts and artists when—I was a founding board member of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. But I remember we thought, okay, early on we have to raise money. Well, we’ll go to tribal nations and raise money. Yeah, think again. No one wanted to give money for art. “Well, what does that do for us? How does that help? We’re just trying to get by. You know, artists, they’re just selfish.” And yet I mean, how do we know our history? How do we know who we are, what makes us? It’s all about the arts and creativity.
CR: One of the things that we have to do as artists is we have to figure out how. And art is like this never-ending renewable resource, right? Like your creativity is never-ending. You know, it will always regenerate and it comes from something more than human. It comes from an incredibly special place.
So there have been times, as a mom, where I’m like I just can’t do this, but you have to figure out how. You have to drink coffee at night. You have to turn off the TV. You have to get a babysitter on the weekends. And for me, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, other than being selfish, or that’s what it seemed like, but I was able to make art. That kept my spirit happy.
And in 2017, I got one of the grants from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. That was how we met. I was so excited. They said we got to go to Minneapolis and I was going to get to meet Joy Harjo. She’s in that room over there. And I was just like a big fan girl. I wanted to tell you in seventh grade I played the saxophone.
JH: That’s cool.
CR: And that I knew she had gone to the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I had studied in Oklahoma. I was so excited to meet Joy Harjo.
But they gave me $25,000 to make art for a year, and I made more art than I had ever made in my life, and I made good art.
JH: You did, and you do!
CR: And it put me on the map. And you guys did more than that. You connected me with museums. And it was never a time in my life before I got that grant where they said you’re good enough; just go make it. Whatever your imagination can think of. And when you free artists to feel that they’re not frivolous or spending their electric bill money on creating dioramas or installations or things from their imagination, magic happens. Right?
And once it’s made, our society loves it, and centers these arts so much. But there’s a lot of us out there struggling, problem solving. And some of us, like my husband in particular, we can’t be anything else. And we’re often like the black sheep of the family. Right?
JH: Yeah, my brother and I decided we were the black sheep of the family.
CR: And I just say push through. You know? Like you have to continue pushing through, and being the artist, and that it will come.
JH: Oh that place saved my life. When I went there, I think it was the late ‘60s. I think it started in about ‘64, and I was there ‘67. But it literally saved my life. I mean, I went from a house of music to a stepfather who essentially banned music. When it was his time to come in, my mother would stop singing, and she didn’t sing like she used to. And I was—I accidentally forgot what time—I was singing, and he came in and banned. He said there’s no singing in this house.
And so I tried to find a way out, and suicide was a possibility. And I heard about—I thought, I want to go to Indian school. I didn’t know about IAIA then. So my mother took me over, because I wouldn’t have lived if I had stayed there. And we went over to the agency, the BIA. But as we were going out the door, my mother said, oh, and she’s a really good artist. And the agent said, well wait a minute, there’s a new school here out in Santa Fe, Institute of American Indian Arts, and gave me the brochure. So I applied and I got in based on my art. And I was thrilled and went out there, and that changed everything.
I mean, you can imagine, I’d always thought of myself as an artist, and there I was with—It was—Then, it was eighth grade to twelfth grade and two years post-graduate, and young Native people all, and that’s when I thrived. Before, I would not talk in class. I didn’t engage much except with the friends I had. The Institute, that changed everything because I felt I was there in a place I belonged with all these young Native artists.
Then we had teachers like Fritz Scholder, Allan Houser, I mean all these incredible Native artists.
And you know, even though we were kids, we would sit and talk together about what art meant, and our art, and how it related. Even talking about sovereignty before there was a word sovereignty that was used as it is now. And we kind of knew that and there was something coming through us of that generation, that we knew that it was part of our, not just our survival, but thriving as Native people. And that generation was, I think, coming through at that time, really changed things.
CR: Within these abilities that we have to be artists is healing. And if there’s something that we need in our communities, and really with all peoples now, it’s healing. And we see art disappearing from our schools, and art disappearing from all the places where we desperately need it.
And I think it’s especially scary for me because I’ve always looked especially at Native arts as the things that carry educational bundles that exist against all odds. We were allowed to gather our shells. We were allowed to make our dance regalia. And we hid things. We hid knowledge. We hid traditional teachings in our art. And I think a lot of times when you go to see Native arts now, all of that power is still hidden.
It’s so important because art is disarming. You know? And everybody can bring their own experience to art. And it doesn’t ask anything of you. But if you can find a space where people, no matter their background, to think about things they’ve never thought about, or to have empathy for Native Peoples, or Afro-Indigenous artists, or Asian diaspora artists, or Latin artists, that is the power of art for social change.
That is the other beautiful thing about art is that it asks nothing of us. We don’t need those institutions to share and to embrace and to celebrate. I think the artists always during these times rise up.
JH: That’s true.We found our way through it before.
CR: And I guess you’re bringing up for me this idea of courage, and there’s a moment as artists where we find our voice. And sometimes it’s like—we’ll talk about finding our voice or finding maturity. For me, there was a few things that I felt a moment of liberation, liberation from the pressure of what people thought—liberation from expectations of the art world.
My grandmother, and there were elders in my life that inspired me, that gave me courage. And there were three of them that come up for me right away. My grandmother, when I would have moments of self-doubt, she said, “Oh Cara, you need to stop worrying so much about what other people think.” And it was just a moment where she was such a strong woman, and I never forgot that.
There was another moment where we were relearning our dances as I was much older. I was in my 30s. And this is something that we go through as Native people. Things were taken away, and there’s a certain humiliation that comes from relearning things at an older age when you’re not a little kid. And my friend, Wiletta[ph] Wilder taught me—she was from [INAUDIBLE] High[?]—and she said that as an older woman, she first started going to the dances, and the younger girls were teasing her. And she said never be afraid to dance; it’s between you and Creator. And that, for me, carried over into all of the art making. You know, we often talk that it comes from a place bigger than self, but never worry about what other people think, and you don’t have to worry about stereotypes or whether your art fits in, or what the world expects from you or where it’s going to go. Do it because you’re in communication with something much bigger than this world and yourself.
What gives you courage to be who you are and what you’ve given to the world? Are there people? Is there something that drives you?
JH: Well, I know what happens when I don’t. It’s true. You know? I’ve had a lot of teachers in terms of facing fears and stepping through. So I’ve had a lot of—I’ve had a lot of mentors. I’m not here by myself, necessarily.
I like what you were saying about the Creator in yourself. That relationship is prime, and that’s what art is, is that relationship and what comes out of that relationship, the shape of your life, what you’re doing, whether you’re an artist or not, comes down to that relationship. You know? There’s that presence always there.
And as a little kid, I remembered feeling that and feeling. We all have that child in us. That’s important to think of when you think of younger people and little children. Their consciousness, it’s all there. They see what’s going on. They may not be at a certain point of intellectual comprehension or language comprehension, but their soul sees and knows, and that’s who we are. And all of that is within us. Even our elder selves, even as we’re a little kid, because there is no—Time works differently in that space. We’re who we are. At whatever age.
CR: Well, I just wanted to say thank you for taking those risks and being brave for all of us to see what’s possible. You have affected a lot of young Native women, and that’s a really special legacy to leave. And we honor you for being here. Can we get a round of applause for Joy Harjo?
JH: And Cara Romero!
Host: Joy Harjo and Cara Romero, “The Power of Art for Healing and Justice”
Across Turtle Island, Indigenous youth are reshaping movements for justice, sovereignty, and ecological healing. Grounded in ancestral knowledge and community responsibility, they are crafting solutions rooted in relationship — to land, to culture, and to future generations.
In Hawaiʻi, student organizers are building zero-waste systems and advancing policy to phase out single-use plastics. In Louisiana’s bayou, young leaders from the United Houma Nation are transforming climate grief into collective action and community resilience. On Cape Cod, Mashpee Wampanoag youth are helping lead a growing Rights of Nature movement that restores both waterways and cultural memory.
These young leaders are not waiting for permission — they are changing narratives, shaping policy, and defending their homelands with clarity and care. This Native American Heritage Month, we honor their leadership and the movement they are building.
Your support helps grow this work by sustaining Bioneers’ Native Youth Leadership Program and empowering the next generation of Indigenous changemakers.
In solidarity,
The Bioneers Indigeneity Program team
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Investing in Native Youth Leadership
For more than a decade, the Native Youth Leadership Program (NYLP) has brought Native youth from across Turtle Island to the Bioneers Conference and Indigenous Forum to build cultural pride, leadership skills, and community power rooted in Indigenous values.
The impact lasts for years. Jade Begay (Tesuque Pueblo/Diné) first joined Bioneers as a Native Youth Scholar — an early step on a path that led her to shape national climate policy, advise on federal environmental justice strategy, and support Indigenous-led solutions from the Amazon to the Arctic. Her journey is one of many that began with early leadership support through NYLP.
This program is funded entirely by donors. Your support provides travel, scholarships, mentorship, and a powerful space for Indigenous youth to lead.
Indigenous Youth Defend Sacred Waters & Rights of Nature
Youth Leading to Protect the Planet & Communities
In Mashpee, Massachusetts, the Native Environmental Ambassadors of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe are leading a powerful movement rooted in ancestral responsibility and natural law. At just 17 years old on average, these youth passed the first-ever youth-led Rights of Nature law to protect herring, relatives essential to their ecosystem and culture.
“We’re not protecting nature — we are nature protecting itself,” said elder activist Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca).
Their work sparked a growing national youth coalition supported by the Bioneers Indigenous Rights of Nature Initiative, now spanning 21 Tribes across Turtle Island.
When UN leaders failed to pass a meaningful global plastics treaty, youth in Hawaiʻi and Louisiana made a decision: they would not wait for governments to act. On Hawaiʻi Island, students with Mālama ʻĀina Compostables launched a zero-waste program that has already diverted 19,000 pounds of food waste from landfills while pushing Bill 83, a local ban on single-use plastics.
Their work has sparked powerful alliances. At the Zero Waste Youth Convergence in Nāʻālehu, 70 young organizers from across Hawaiʻi and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley came together to confront plastic pollution from both ends of the pipeline, where it’s produced and where it washes ashore.
Supported by Recycle Hawaiʻi and Bioneers’ Indigenous Rights of Nature Initiative, these youth are proving that real solutions rise from the community level — one ordinance, one compost bin, and one act of solidarity at a time.
What started as a cohort of five youth in the Bioneers Intercultural Conversation program has blossomed into its own robust initiative. The Bayou Youth Leadership Project continues to rise strong from the heart of coastal Southeast Louisiana — led by Indigenous youth dedicated to protecting their lands, waters, and culture. Over the past year, youth have traveled near and far — from the bayous of Dulac, LA, to cultural gatherings around Turtle Island — representing the voices of their people and their vision for a just, sustainable future.
Through community workshops, cultural exchanges, and storytelling circles, youth are learning from elders while shaping their own path forward. They ground their leadership in the values of stewardship, responsibility, and kinship with all living beings.
From restoring coastal ecosystems to advocating for Indigenous rights, the Bayou Youth are carrying the teachings of their ancestors. Their collective goal is simple but powerful: to uplift Indigenous youth voices, protect their homelands, and build a future where our communities thrive — rooted in tradition, guided by purpose, and connected to the Earth.
Navigating the Currents of Change: A Conversation with Sammy Gensaw III — In this 2024 interview, the Ancestral Guard founder and Klamath River defender reflects on dam removal, cultural revival, and why youth leadership is essential to the future of Indigenous sovereignty and ecological justice.
How a Klamath River Kayak Journey Rewrote Indigenous Water Rights — This New York Times feature follows Indigenous paddlers on a journey down the Klamath River, weaving in the long fight for water rights, river restoration, and cultural connection to ancestral waterways.
Shreya Chaudhuri – Reclaiming Roots: The Global Fight for Indigenous Science — In this Bioneers 2025 keynote, youth climate leader Shreya Chaudhuri challenges colonial environmental frameworks and calls for a return to Indigenous knowledge systems, reminding us that real climate solutions are not new, they’re remembered.
When negotiators met to finalize the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty in mid-August, the desperate need to stem the growth of toxic plastic pollution rested on the promise that a binding agreement could finally curb the petrochemical industry’s destruction. But as the talks collapsed under the weight of corporate lobbying, youth movements around the world felt what many already knew: Governments aren’t going to save us from plastic. The treaty’s watered-down language — stripped of enforcement mechanisms and loopholes for “recycling technologies” that burn more than they restore — left young people realizing that true change must rise from the ground up.
“Every day we pick up the same plastic bottles that washed ashore last week,” said one student from Hawaiʻi Island. “We don’t need more negotiations. We need action.”
In the absence of international accountability, youth from Hawaiʻi and Louisiana are organizing their own alliances. For them, the fight against plastic is not an abstract policy — it’s a matter of life and death. In the shadow of one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical industries in the country, known as Cancer Alley in Louisiana, youth grow up under skies laced with the smoke of petrochemical plants that feed the world’s plastic addiction. On Hawaiʻi’s southern shores, that same plastic reappears as trash tides that bury the sand and choke honu. While global leaders were failing to deliver a treaty that matched the urgency of the crisis, these young organizers had already decided to build the future themselves — one community, one ordinance, one compost bucket at a time.
Youth from Oʻahu, Maui, and Hawaiʻi Island came together—through a gathering organized by Big Island youth—at the 2024 National Recycling Congress to confront the full life cycle of plastic waste, from its production in “Cancer Alley” to its accumulation on Hawaiʻi’s beaches.
The gathering, led by Recycle Hawaii and supported by an EPA Recycling Education & Outreach grant and the Bioneers Rights of Nature Initiative, created a space for young people to share stories, learn from one another, and build new strategies for environmental justice.
Bridging the Places Where Plastic Hurts
Recycle Hawaii works with youth on plastic reduction policies and recycling advocacy along the island’s south shores, far from tourist beaches and close to the ecological disaster locals call “trash beach.” With its new EPA grant, the organization is uniting youth from communities most impacted by plastic pollution at both ends of its life cycle: where it’s made and where it ends up.
To bridge the story from production to pollution, Recycle Hawaii partnered with two Louisiana youth groups: Brilliant Mindz and Rural Roots Louisiana. Their communities in Bogalusa and Donaldsonville live in the shadow of major industrial sites — a paper mill, a nitrogen plant, and the corridor known as Cancer Alley — where pollution and poverty are part of daily life.
Recycle Hawaii used its Youth Ambassador grant from the Bioneers Rights of Nature Initiative to sponsor the travel of four Louisiana youth to attend the National Recycling Congress, joining their Hawaiian counterparts in dialogue and collaboration.
Youth Voices Lead the Way
Over the week-long gathering, youth from both states “talked story,” sharing the realities of pollution in their communities and learning about zero-waste initiatives, systems thinking, and Rights of Nature laws. Together, they explored how to turn their lived experiences into policy change.
“To watch our haumāna present in front of the NRC attendees was a huge privilege,” said Ulu Makuakāne, Recycle Hawaii educator. “You could see and feel their kūpuna throughout the presentation. They were grounded, centered, and knew they were representing something bigger than themselves.”
“This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments that clearly inspired these students, showing them that achieving big things is possible,” said Justin Canelas, Executive Director of Recycle Hawaii. “It’s been truly special to watch them grow into young professionals. For this group, the sky is the limit.”
While world leaders stall, Hawaiʻi County youth are drafting the future. Bill 83, an ordinance to ban single-use plastic in food service, is their rallying cry. When the bill appeared before the county council, the same youth who sort cafeteria trash and tended compost bins showed up to testify. They spoke not as students but as experts in lived experience.
“This generation isn’t afraid of change,” said Laura Acasio, of the County Office of Environmental Resilience. “They know it’s necessary — for their health, their island, and their future. What they’re doing is shifting the narrative from fear to responsibility.”
Acasio reminded them that government is a tool they can wield. “You have civic agency,” she told them. “Your voice matters. There’s nowhere for the trash to go — it’s an island. That means we must do better.”
For the youth of Kaʻū, Bill 83 represents more than a plastic ban — it’s a paradigm shift. It moves the county’s 2007 Zero Waste Resolution from intention to action. The students understand that “disposable” only works when you have somewhere to throw it away — and their landfill is nearly full. With their testimony and organizing power, they’re proving that local legislation can carry the moral weight that global treaties have failed to deliver.
Building a Movement for Change
Thanks to funding from the EPA and the Bioneers Rights of Nature Initiative, these youth leaders will continue to meet in the coming years to connect the worlds of waste production and pollution. Together, they are raising a rallying cry for a future where no communities are called “Cancer Alley” and no beaches are known as “trash beach.” Their work reflects a generation determined to turn the tide — from waste and harm to restoration and justice.
Malama ʻĀina Compostables: The Kaʻū Youth Movement
In the rural district of Kaʻū, a group of teenagers decided to start where change was most tangible — their school cafeteria. They called themselves Malama ʻĀina Compostables, guided by the belief that taking care of the land begins with what we throw away. Partnering with a local pig farmer, they began collecting leftovers, diverting nearly 19,000 pounds of food waste from the landfill in just two years.
“Sometimes people think you have to start big,” said Kona, one of the youth organizers. “But we started with lunch trays. That’s how you build momentum — one meal, one bin, one community at a time.”
As their compost program grew, the youth realized their school was a model for the island. They began presenting to principals, holding waste audits, and urging other schools to follow. Their message is both practical and spiritual: waste is not just a management issue, it’s a relationship issue. “You take care of your home, and your home takes care of you,” said one student. “This isn’t just a place to visit. It’s our house.”
The Malama ʻĀina crew is showing Hawaiʻi, and the world, what zero-waste leadership looks like when it’s rooted in aloha ʻāina. They’ve proven that youth-led initiatives can fill the policy gaps left by global systems, embodying resilience not as a buzzword but as everyday practice.
The 70-Person Youth Convergence: From Cancer Alley to Kaʻū
This October, Recycle Hawaiʻi and Bioneers’ Rights of Nature Initiative helped bring together seventy young people for the Zero Waste Youth Convergence in Nāʻālehu — the southernmost town in the United States. Youth from every Hawaiian island gathered alongside visitors from Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, where petrochemical plants poison the air that feeds the world’s plastic addiction. It was a historic meeting of two ends of the same crisis — where plastic is born, and where it dies.
“We talk a lot about the circle of life,” said Recycle Hawaiʻi program director Ulu Makuakāne, “but here we were talking about the circle of waste — from production to pollution — and how youth can break that cycle.”
At the convergence, Louisiana delegate Lael Judson shared her story of being born premature due to chemical exposure. Her testimony stunned the room. “We thought plastic hurt the ocean,” one Hawaiian student reflected, “but she showed us how it hurts people first.”
For four days, youth built alliances across oceans, learning composting systems, cultural protocols, and civic advocacy side by side. They swam at Punaluʻu Beach, where sea turtles nest in black sand shadowed by corporate neglect. There, surrounded by the evidence of both natural beauty and man-made harm, they made a pact: to be the generation that ends the age of plastic.
“Their bond,” said Justin Canelas, Executive Director of Recycle Hawaiʻi, “showed what’s possible when we unite the places where plastic hurts the air and the places where it hurts the sea. This is how movements begin.”
Bioneers is honored to have supported this youth group’s efforts by providing funding for travel scholarships and to help cover the costs of their youth convergence. If you want to support more youth-led organizing, we welcome you to support our Indigeneity Program’s Native Youth Leadership program.
Although young people cannot vote, they are realizing that they can organize, legislate, and build grassroots momentum for a future where our laws honor people’s rights to a clean ecosystem and nature’s right to thrive.
In 2023, a group of Mashpee Wampanoag youth formed the Native Environmental Ambassadors (NEA), to advocate on behalf of their ancestral lands and waters.
They sat with elders and culture keepers who reminded them that there was a time, not very long ago, when plants and animals were abundant. They were devastated by the stark contrast between the elders’ recollections and the state of their homelands today.
The group’s first efforts focused on protecting herring, a keystone species along the Eastern seaboard. Once abundant, herring populations are now at 5% of their pre-European contact levels. Without herring, the ecosystem would face devastating consequences. They drafted a groundbreaking emergency declaration for the Rights of the Herring to exist, persist, and thrive, as well as the Tribe’s right to protect and advocate for their ecosystem’s survival. It was passed unanimously by their Tribal Council.
“The youth are working really hard to figure out how to protect the herring, how to protect the river from the damage that’s being done from things like nitrogen and chemical runoff, from the oil that’s coming out of these boats and the invasive species that the boats sometimes carry in. . . the big story is that we’re all related . . . to the herring, we’re related to this water, this water has a spirit, and it is all as well.” —Renee Lopes, Mashpee Wampanoag Matriarch.
Since then, the Native Environmental Ambassadors have hosted river clean-ups, paddles, and educational days at their Tribal headquarters. They have attended Climate Week in New York City. They have spoken throughout the US, including Bioneers Conferences, advocating for the Rights of Nature.
In August, they organized an Intertribal Gathering in Mashpee, MA, to mobilize for the Rights of Nature. In addition to hosting a public forum, over 70 invitees from organizations including Bioneers, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature [GARN], LINK (Linking Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Knowledge), Movement Rights, and Native Land Conservancy came together.
“There’s something very important about youth leadership and also inclusion with elders in the same spaces, and giving both equal platforms. I don’t even want to call them platforms, because it’s not that one has higher power than the other. It’s recognizing that there’s so much wisdom that comes from an Indigenous youth perspective and an Indigenous elder perspective.” —Isabella Zizi, Northern Cheyenne, Muskogee Creek, enrolled Citizen of Three Affiliated Tribes, Movement Rights Youth Leader
Some of the most prominent environmental activists in Indian Country presented on issues from food sovereignty to Indigenous land stewardship, ecological restoration, and how to Indigenize the law.
“We’re not protecting nature — we are nature protecting itself. We have to internalize that with every breath we take. Her water flows through us, the breath we share is one breath with the wind and the thunder nation, and what warms us is from the Father Sun. When we gather like this, it reminds us that natural law is still alive — and natural law will always guide what happens with every species.” —Presenter Casey Camp-Horinek, Ponca Tribe, Elder Ambassador for Movement Rights
“For me, it’s never been about just protecting property or resources. It’s about protecting relatives manoomin, the wild rice, the fish, the water, the air. These are not resources, they are sources of life. And when we take it to court, we are making the system recognize that truth. We’re not asking for permission, we’re asserting our responsibilities. That’s the shift Rights of Nature makes.” —Presenter Frank Bibeau, Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Ojibwe Attorney
A central goal of this InterTribal Gathering was to inspire other youth to “Indigenize the Law.”
“Being able to host and have all my people here from other tribal nations—it’s very healing for me, and to see other people happy to be here and to experience the different cultural things we do as coastal people.” —Amaya Balbuena, Youth Leader, Mashpee Native Environmental Ambassador
“I hope they take home the idea that we’re making a change, that we can do this, and that we can impact the future generations not let our water get sick, not let our marine, plant, and bird relatives become extinct.” —Oakley Robbins, Mashpee Wampanoag, Native Environmental Ambassadors Youth Facilitator
The Native Environmental Ambassadors recognize that legislation is just one step in preserving the planet, and they have demonstrated this with the counsel of elders and the courage to speak out, showing that young people have the power to shape the country’s legal future.
In passing the first youth-led Rights of Nature law, the Native Environmental Ambassadors set a precedent for what Tribal Citizens can accomplish to safeguard nature. And their work has just begun.
While it is impossible to quantify the long-term impact of this historic gathering, where the average organizer’s age was 17, the Native Environmental Ambassadors have sparked a nationwide youth-led movement for the Rights of Nature.
“I hope they take home the idea that we’re making a change, that we can do this, and that we can impact the future generations not let our water get sick, not let our marine, plant, and bird relatives become extinct.” —Ciara Oakley-Robbins, Mashpee Wampanoag, Youth Facilitator, Native Environmental Ambassadors
Since 2023, 13 youth groups representing 21 Tribes have formed a coalition to fight for ecosystems coast-to-coast under the guidance of the Bioneers Indigenous Rights of Nature [IRoN] team. At the time this article is being written, several more are forming!If you are as inspired as we are by these incredible young leaders, join us in supporting them. You can donate directly to the Native Environmental Ambassadors here. You can also give to the Bioneers Indigeneity Program, where we gift the youth ambassador groups grants to advocate for nature. Click here to donate to the Bioneers Indigenous Rights of Nature initiative.
Additional Quotes From the InterTribal Gathering
Words from Presenters
Casey Camp-Horinek, Ponca Tribe, Elder Ambassador for Movement Rights
“The purification is already here: the wind is stronger, the floods are floodier, the droughts droughtier. Mother Earth is cleansing herself, and we have to decide how we will live in balance so our children and grandchildren can survive.”
“At first I thought, not another law, no thank you, Western concepts. But then I began to understand the Rights of Nature as indigenizing those Western forms, turning their tools back to honor the oldest way possible. For us, it became the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature Statute, passed in 2017 after many community meetings. It went into our courts, it passed through tribal council, and yes, even through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We had to go through their systems, but at the heart of it, what we are doing is asserting what has always been true: the land wants us, the water wants us, the Earth wants us to be caretakers.”
Frank Bibeau, Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Ojibwe Attorney
“Rights of Nature is what I sometimes call a disruption law. It lets us decide — within our tribal laws, our community values what is important, rather than relying on state or federal systems that were never designed to protect us. And once you put it in tribal law, it can be appealed, and you can force federal courts to look at it. That’s what makes it powerful. The courts may not like it, but they have to respect the process. We are asserting that we’re not just stakeholders — we are Nations with inherent rights, and so are our rivers and our fish.”
“For me, it’s never been about just protecting property or resources. It’s about protecting relatives manoomin, the wild rice, the fish, the water, the air. These are not resources, they are sources of life. And when we take it to court, we are making the system recognize that truth. We’re not asking for permission, we’re asserting our responsibilities. That’s the shift Rights of Nature makes.”
Juliette Jackson JD, Klamath, Clerk at Patterson Real Bird & Wilson LLP, Native Law Group
“As a baby lawyer, I feel so lucky to have interacted with people some attorneys never meet in their whole careers trailblazers in the American Indian Movement and leaders in Rights of Nature. They’ve challenged me to think about law in ways I was not taught in law school. Rights of Nature pushes us to step outside the box, to see treaties, trees, and jurisdiction differently. It reminds me that the tools we get in law school are not the end-all, be-all — they are one way of seeing the world, but not the only way. Our elders and our youth are teaching us new, and very old, ways to understand law.”
“My message to young people is simple: your willingness is enough. If your heart is calling you to this work, trust it. The mentors will come, the resources will come, the money will come, but none of that matters if you don’t step forward. Our communities need people willing to bring their skills home and apply them. That’s what inspires me about the youth here — they didn’t wait for permission, they organized, they brought us all together, and in doing so they’re shaping the future.”
Samuel Gensaw, Yurok, Ancestral Guard
“When these places get sick, we get sick. When our river is sick, we are sick. I shouldn’t be criminalized for trying to feed my grandmother the foods our family has eaten for generations, or for walking the same grounds my ancestors walked. But that’s the reality many of us face — laws designed to erase our ways of life. Rights of Nature is a path to change that, to assert that we are not separate from these places. We are part of them, and they are part of us.”
“Our ancestors didn’t do this work because they wanted to — they did it because they had to. That’s what we are doing now. When I was 17, we started the Ancestral Guard. We piled eight people into a beat-up car just to make it to meetings where we demanded a future for our kids. We didn’t have food, we didn’t have places to sleep, but we knew if we didn’t go, nobody else would. This isn’t a gimmick. It’s a pathway to autonomy, to taking care of our people in ways that haven’t been done in over a hundred years. That’s what Rights of Nature is about.”
Words From Forum Participants
Renee Lopes, Mashpee Wampanoag, Matriarch
“The youth are working really hard to figure out how to protect the herring, how to protect the river from the damage that’s being done from things like nitrogen and chemical runoff, from the oil that’s coming out of these boats and the invasive species that the boats sometimes carry in. They rinse off, they leave behind these species in the pond. We’re trying to address all of those pieces, and the big story is that we’re all related. They’re related to the herring, we’re related to this water, this water has a spirit, and it is all as well.
The whole goal is to figure out how to stay connected to all those things, how we can all live sustainably. We look after those things, and the kids are not just learning that, they’re figuring out how to do that as people. With the help of groups like Bioneers and other allies, their goal is—we want our way of life back.
We had this way of life that was symbiotic, that everybody could thrive. But we all need to work together so that we can continue to thrive. And if they die off, we die off, and we’re seeing that. There’s a big need to tend to these relatives in a good way.”
“Being able to host and have all my people here from other tribal nations—it’s very healing for me, and to see other people happy to be here and to experience the different cultural things we do as coastal people. Going quahogging today, seeing everybody out in the water, was just an awesome sight to see.”
Sophie Atkins, Mashpee Wampanoag, Native Environmental Ambassador Youth Member
“Doing this makes me think about social activism in the future, whether as a career path in law and policy, or just as something I live by. Even if it’s not a job, I’ll still advocate for nature’s rights.
To non-Natives: you’re living on this land, so it’s your responsibility too. Too many people are passive, like someone else will solve it. There’s no sense of urgency—but there needs to be. It’s an individual responsibility. Keep going. It might not look good at this point, but change will come. Even when it looks tough, don’t get dismayed by what’s happening in the wider world.”
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