ABOUT TOKALA

Frank has been fighting alongside her community to remove the dams on the Hoopa Valley Reservation’s Trinity and Klamath rivers. “It’s going to be the biggest dam removal project in American history,” says Frank. “The permits are in the tribe’s hands now; we've got indigenous engineers designing the destruction of the dams.” Removing the dams will help restore a healthy fish population and is expected to improve the health of the river’s downstream, which is part of the route that Chinook salmon take from the ocean to their upstream spawning grounds.

Meanwhile in the Heights, Bouhbal addressed ground-level issues, filling up community fridges and passing around flyers in Spanish and English to let people know they shouldn’t fish in the Hudson River because the water quality is toxic.

“Before I could finish filling up the fridge, the food was gone,” she says, noting her neighborhood has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the city.

Alongside matriarchs from the community and scientists, Looking Horse toured the Grand River by boat to assess river restoration by decommissioning inoperable dams. The river “has a lot of sediment and pollution settled at the bottom,” she says. “There’s only one way to clean that, and it’s just letting the river clean itself out, letting it move, and eventually it will be healthy again.”

“There are so many people that have been yelling and screaming [about the injustices they’ve been facing] for decades and no one’s been listening. So it’s my responsibility to speak when no one is speaking, but it’s also my responsibility to hold the microphone over those that have been speaking for decades and facing systematic oppression.”

Throughout her childhood, Chavira wasn’t aware of the exact reason why this was such a widely followed rule, though she got a better sense later on. Located in Commerce City is the Suncor Energy refinery—Colorado’s only oil refinery—which remains one of the state’s largest emitters of greenhouse gasses and toxic air pollutants. The refinery continues to have adverse effects on the air, soil, and water quality in its surrounding neighborhoods, all the way from Montbello to Reunion. “Growing up, I only knew Suncor because we would pass by it and it stank,” says Chavira.

Mostly undeveloped and 20 minutes from the mainland, Sapelo is a world apart. The oblong-shaped island is often hot and humid, with wide beaches and sweetgrass marshes as well as maritime forests dense with oaks and palmettos. The north end of Sapelo Island holds the tabby ruins of Chocolate Plantation, where enslaved Africans cultivated Sea Island cotton, corn, and sugarcane. Further south sit the University of Georgia’s Marine Institute and the Reynolds Mansion, a 13-bedroom dwelling that belonged to tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds during the Great Depression and is now a state-owned overnight rental. It was Reynolds who consolidated the 15 or so Black settlements left on the island into one: today’s Hog Hammock.

Alaska, the largest US state, is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the country. With shrinking glaciers and melting permafrost, the land is fast eroding and heat-trapping gases are being released, accelerating the warming. Land and marine habitats are becoming increasingly inhospitable to the life they’ve long sustained. Wildfires are more common, as are insect infestations. For Evans, capturing the impact of the climate crisis–not least on his community’s way of life–is integral to his work, which centers Indigenous storytelling. “I want to use it as a way to protect and preserve our culture. And then, of course, as we deal with the climate crisis that becomes a point of interest and point of concern.”

“As Native Peoples, our land and our stories and our traditions have been ripped away from us,” she says. “And that’s because, for Western imperialism and their systems, nothing is sacred. The message of colonization is: You are not sacred and this land is not sacred. Whatever you do to take care of yourself and to take care of your land is invalid. That’s why we’re always going to be fighting for land justice and water justice and climate justice and liberation.

True to her word, four years later, Mahelona is continuing to fight for a variety of causes—including water justice around the Red Hill water crisis on O‘ahu and land and climate justice following the devastating Maui fires on August 8.

In 2022, New Mexico experienced its largest wildfire to date—and it was no accident. Burning across 300,000 acres of land in northern New Mexico, the destructive blaze ignited when two separate wildfires merged into one. In the first week of April, the US Forest Service lost control of a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest near Hermit’s Peak, where they had hoped to thin the overgrown forest.

Over 900 structures were damaged in the wildfire—particularly affecting those living in the smaller communities around the area, like Mora and Rociada. (The fire also burned the upper reaches of the Gallinas River watershed, one of the main drinking water sources for more than 17,000 people in New Mexico, and even as far as Las Vegas.)