School of Sustainability

The schoolgirls who carried a river's rights into the tribal council

Jasmine Smith says she was eleven when she first walked into a room of elder women to pitch a youth chapter, and she was nervous. The women belonged to the North American Indian Women's Association, a nonprofit inside her tribe, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, better known among members for its cooking than for organising. Her idea was simple: the girls of the tribe should be able to talk to their elders, and the elders to them. The women said yes.

Smith's third great-grandmother, Ruth Littlejohn, helped found the community's fire station and raised money for its housing programme, then joined Ethylene Conseen and another woman to build a network of Indigenous women that grew from a Cherokee chapter into a national body. The youth side dwindled after her great-grandmother passed away; the girls are bringing it back, hosting youth caucuses when the national conference returns to Cherokee this year. Her second great-aunt keeps the books for both; aunt, grandmother, mother, sister and Smith make four generations inside one organisation.

From that base, the girls went after something bigger. After taking a course on indigenising the law, Smith connected her chapter with a Native youth ambassador programme, and the young women brought a resolution before the Eastern Band of Cherokee Council: rights for the Long Person, the Cherokee name for its river and streams. It passed, the first of its kind there. It created a task force, and the council has begun moving toward removing a dam from one stretch of the river.

Smith is careful to note what the chamber looked like when they walked in. When she was small she had never seen an Indigenous woman in tribal leadership; the council now seats four women, since the 1990s, and they backed the resolution. The girls were not, as she puts it, talking to a room full of men. They were talking to women who looked like them.

Bioneers · Read the source