Keeping a promise this Indigenous Peoples Day
Ashley Hemmers
Fort Mojave Indian Tribe
In March, President Biden used the authority established by the Antiquities Act to designate the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, an action that ensured the highest level of U.S. protection for this sacred landscape in the Nevada Desert. Avi Kwa Ame is a culturally and spiritually significant home to critical desert biodiversity and the site of Mojave creation for people like me — a Mojave woman whose ancestors have stewarded Avi Kwa Ame and the surrounding desert since our origin.
The campaign to create the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument offers a new model to empower and engage communities most vulnerable to climate impacts. The model intentionally centered the voices of tribes, built connection to the communities surrounding them, and advocated more broadly to communities interested in supporting the two.
For too long, tribal advocacy has taken the form of asking for Indigenous and rural voices to have seats at philanthropic conservation tables. Instead, we moved allies from their seats to meet tribes and rural communities at the points of immediate impact — to the land — to engage with tribes through tribal government systems and meet with local leaders.
We found that when tribes and surrounding communities approached each other with our “why,” the “hows” became easier to answer. For some, support came from wanting to ensure that Nevadans could continue to enjoy recreational activities without fear of the landscape changing. For others — like our partners in Searchlight, Nevada, a 348-person historic mining town adjacent to the newly designated National Monument — the landscape directly links their town’s history with the fortitude and resilience of its people. Still others across the U.S. supported the protection of Ave Kwa Ame because they believe that if America has the ability to do the right thing by the environment, then the answer is simple: it should.
For me, I just wanted to wake up without worrying that the center of my world was at risk of becoming irreparably destroyed by others for profit without remorse. The moment that Avi Kwa Ame was given the highest level of U.S. protection, all I could feel was relief.
While my tribe’s efforts to protect our ancestral homelands is unique to our geography and history, the efforts to protect and steward land is shared by Indigenous communities worldwide. Today, although Indigenous communities comprise less than 5 percent of the world’s population, Indigenous peoples protect 80 percent of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity in the forests, grasslands, oceans, and deserts we call home.
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Sadly, the fear of destruction of ancestral homelands is a shared worry that is all too familiar to Native Americans in the United States. Such feelings of anxiousness about climate impacts have more recently been identified by researchers as climate anxiety.
In fact, researchers at Yale University have shared pivotal research to help mental health professionals understand how to help the increasing number of people seeking to ease anxiety about ongoing climate-related natural disasters. Distress about climate change can manifest as intrusive thoughts of hopelessness, shortness of breath, or even behavioral changes that impede the ability for individuals to function at work, home, or school.
Climate anxiety induced by the threat to Avi Kwa Ame was not only real to my people; its implications reverberated throughout our community. So finding every possible way to help my tribal Leaders share the importance of this landscape in hope of finding common ground for its protection was nothing in comparison to the alternative — the fear that a non-tribal agency could potentially release it for the sale of its destruction, the feeling of panic that overcame me when thinking about having to possibly face what to do if the point of my people’s creation was lost, the loneliness that set in when the road to its protection was unclear.
Some people looked at Avi Kwa Ame and saw open land, presumably free for the taking. When I look there, I am reminded of the purpose that has been passed down in my tribe since our creation. I see my responsibility to the desert and all that rely on my understanding of it. Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is a reminder to America of what is possible when groups of people refuse to give up.
This Indigenous Peoples Day, I don’t just celebrate Avi Kwa Ame. I celebrate what can happen when we help America keep her promise to honor the land and protect her people.
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