November is Native American Heritage Month, which provides an opportunity to platform Indigenous peoples amid a season usually wrought with anti-Native prejudice and cultural appropriation. While Indigenous peoples should be highlighted for the work that they do all year round, youth in particular are often overlooked despite the integral roles they play as the rising generation of language keepers, culture bearers, artists, tribal leaders, educators, and more. Whether through robotics or literary movements, Indigenous youth work tirelessly out of love for their communities, bringing better futures to fruition.
To honor Indigenous youth of marginalized genders making a difference in their communities, here are interviews with 11 outstanding people you should know. This list is in no way exhaustive. But language is a powerful tool for celebration and sharing community. And given that storytelling is many of our first and most cherished love languages as Indigenous young people, it only makes sense as the way to uplift and celebrate these changemakers.
Pte San Win Little Whiteman, 22, Oglala Lakota
A spoken word artist and facilitator with Dances with Words, a poetry program for Lakota youth on the Pine Ridge reservation, Pte San Win Little Whiteman knows that storytelling is an important nexus for healing in their community. They have been a part of the program since its inception as an extracurricular club at Red Cloud Indian School, and have since helped students attend Brave New Voices and Lakota Nation Invitational poetry slams as a mentor, among other artistic endeavors to platform youth poets from their reservation.
“I really strive for our youth to have safe spaces to create, open up, and express themselves as they’re figuring out who they are in the world,” Little Whiteman says. “As Indigenous peoples, we’re storytellers. It’s very important that we stay true to our oral traditions and teach our young ones about them.”
For Little Whiteman, poetry is an integral and often overlooked healing mechanism for Native youth, especially given high rates of suicide and substance use disorder as a result of colonization and generational trauma. They especially hope that other queer youth will feel supported and loved in spaces like Dances with Words: “Where we come from, it’s so easy to fall into a spiral of harm and substance abuse… I want our youth to know that there’s other ways to heal from struggles we face, mentally and emotionally. To hear laughter in our space.”
Keyra Juliana Espinoza Arroyo, 20, Kañari Nation of the South Andes of Ecuador, Cojitambo
Courtesy of Keyra Espinoza Arroyo
For Keyra Espinoza Arroyo, being raised by a family of agriculturalists from Ecuador meant that intersectional environmental work was always a part of her life. “I already grew up with those values, seeing the land as something you can’t exploit,” she says. “Those values that normally people in Western society aren’t raised with.”
Since high school, Espinoza Arroyo has been working to raise awareness about anti-Blackness in Ecuador, especially in environmentalism. “There are Afro-Ecuadorian communities… people there that live in ancestral communities and are impacted by extractive industries that are in their territories,” she says. Along with other Afro-Ecuadorian advocates, she started El Cambio en Ecuador, an anti-racist educational group. She’s also done work with Polluters Out and Roots & Routes IC, helping ancestral Afro-Indigenous communities fight for Rights of Nature.
Now, she is working for Indigenous Intentions, a brand run by Dr. Tomasina Chupco, an Afro-Indigenous scholar who raises awareness about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. She is also continuing her studies at the University of Miami, but hopes to return to Ecuador to work in solidarity movements. “I want to see if there can be more collective unity instead of people trying to categorize and divert,” she says. “If we unite, it’ll make a much greater impact against a common oppressor. Our voices will be much stronger.”
Keana Gorman, 21, Diné
As an undergraduate researcher at Harvard, Keana Gorman recognizes the power of history. The 21-year-old started off as a pre-med student but soon found herself drawn to literature and anthropology while writing about Navajo gender history for a class. Out of curiosity, Gorman started researching nádleeh singer and weaver Hosteen Klah, whom she had encountered in anthropological texts and posts by other queer scholars. She then began researching what nádleeh meant in Navajo culture, as well as how Navajos performed gender outside of normative concepts of manhood and womanhood. With several grants from Harvard, Gorman traveled to the Humboldt Forum in Germany to listen to wax cylinder recordings of Klah performing ceremonial Navajo songs.
Engaging with these archives has given Gorman a deeper sense of belonging and understanding. By spotting inconsistencies and bridging gaps in translation, she works to construct better understandings of how Navajos have thought about themselves, the world, and the universe over time.
“There are ways we could revitalize our culture, language, and understandings of gender… through Indigenous artifacts that are sitting in museums gathering dust,” Gorman explains. “[With access] to them, we can fill in gaps… [and see] how language itself has adapted and shifted based on needs over time. We don’t just want our stuff back just because it belongs to us. We want to engage with them. It’s our history.”
In the immediate future, Gorman will be finishing her thesis and continuing work in academia. Ultimately, however, she would love to return home to engage with her community, including building a space where queer and trans people can have access to gender affirming care, food, shelter, and housing on the Navajo reservation.
“I want more for my family and community,” she says. “And the only way that’s possible is through community organizing and building solidarity with one another.”
Lily Painter, 20, Kiowa/Winnebago
Lily Painter with her hands by her face in a big red cardigan.Courtesy of Lily Painter
Lily Painter knows that space for healing in social movements is necessary. As a UNITY 25 Under 25 youth leader and Aspen Institute Center for Native American Youth Remembering Our Sisters Fellow, Painter has been involved with advocating for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples for years. Last spring, Painter created an installation in partnership with Afro-Indigenous owned floral company “The Wild Mother” to commemorate those who are missing and create a space for reflection, grief, and rumination on healing. The installation debuted at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. They also recently launched Matriarch Medicine, an online database of resources and collection of stories centering Indigenous matriarchs.
“There’s a sort of power reclaimed when you tell stories through different avenues,” she explains. “Whenever you tell them, you are not only honoring storytelling tradition, but evoking a power that lies in the collective– our ability to express and make change through the things we can create.”
For Painter, it’s important to center stories from family members and advocates with the MMIP movement since it can often be reduced to data and numbers. But she also underscores the importance of creating spaces for healing for those involved most directly with the cause: “You can’t move forward and keep doing work if you’re being bombarded by statistics. There’s a need to promote healing to do the actual work involved. We can create with each other… to have space and time to process grief and trauma.”
Sareya Taylor, 20, White Mountain Apache/Diné
Courtesy of Sareya Taylor
Sareya Taylor has a powerful voice. At 20 years old, the Institute of American Indian Arts student has served as a member of the Advocates for Young Women’s Reproductive Justice Council and the National Coalition for Sexual Health Adult Advisory Group. During the pandemic, she helped to deliver PPE kits to her reservation and raised over $35,000 of COVID essentials as a member of the International Indigenous Youth Council. She is also an accomplished poet, having served as the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Phoenix and a UNITY 25 Under 25 youth leader.
“I liked to write when I was in elementary school but didn’t know it was necessarily poetry,” she says. “I thought poetry was either really depressing or about love and sunshine but it had to be written by dead white guys.” She recalls that her advisor for the Future Inspired Native American Leaders youth council had emailed her an application for the Youth Poet Laureate program in Phoenix, citing her love for writing. Taylor was “shocked” when she learned she was a finalist, then “mind blown” when she was announced as Poet Laureate: “I ran around my house and woke up my siblings to tell them… It’s been the best time since then.”
She views her advocacy and her writing as inseparable forces for good: “Advocacy varies in definition for everyone and can be… writing poems about matcha lattes, my grandma’s hands, and so forth.” Taylor stresses that her work is always aligned closely with her youth organizing: “My birth as an Indigenous woman has already positioned me in an activist role. Writing is how I’m able to find joy and love within it.”
Danielle Boyer, 21, Ojibwe (Sault Ste Marie)
Courtesy of Danielle Boyer
Growing up, Danielle Boyer and her younger sister loved science and tech, but could not afford to attend local extracurricular STEM programs. While at the store one day, she saw animal puppets and asked her mom if she could use them to teach an animal science class. She then taught a class of kindergarten students, which spiraled into teaching, at age 10, more and more affordable classes for youth.
In high school she joined a robotics team, but as one of the only girls, she says she experienced repeated harassment and alienation. Wanting to create a safe learning environment in science and tech for Indigenous students, she founded The STEAM Connection at 18 years old. The nonprofit focuses on making tech education accessible and safe for youth of marginalized genders through robotics. Specifically, Boyer has been creating wearable robots that are language revitalization tools for Anishinaabemowin. As a queer scientist and engineer, Boyer dreams of expanding these safe learning spaces for Native youth. She also sees a future where self-sustaining tech jobs stay within Indigenous communities.
“We encourage youth to leave the Rez and pursue jobs in corporate settings, but we should enable students to build solutions right here,” Boyer says. “If that’s as scientists, that’s cool, but it’s important they have skills they can use right now. That looks like building STEM centers in our communities and getting funding for students to sustain projects they want to work on.”
Ha’åni San Nicolas, 25, CHamoru and Samoan
Courtesy of Ha’ani San Nicolas
Raised on the island of Guåhan, Ha’åni San Nicolas’s work will always return to her community. As a poet and PhD candidate studying Indigenous politics and gender studies in Hawai’i, her academic research and community organizing is deeply and inextricably tied to her art. As associate producer for Deep Pacific, a podcast that breaks down “false borders” throughout the Pacific, she centers connections between their diverse communities through conversations with Pasifika artists, activists, and writers. She’s also the Indigenous Relations and Communications Director for Famalaoan Rights, which fights for access to reproductive care and abortion in Guåhan.
“The best writing is political,” she says, paraphrasing the late scholar Haunani-Kay Trask. “People always try to separate politics from creativity, but there’s absolutely no way you can do that as an Indigenous creative.”
San Nicolas’s intersectional work largely tracks narratives of CHamoru and Samoan women. “If you look through historical records, we’re hidden in the footnotes,” she says. “I’m invested in writing about our experiences as CHamoru women, but specifically the joyful and uplifting histories. Our ancestors have done the hard labor of giving us stories of colonization. Now we want to do the work of remembering and recalling what makes us happy.”
San Nicolas plans on finishing her PhD, but her dream is for all Indigenous peoples to share their stories of rapture and happiness through storytelling: “I want to see children on the playground, going to school speaking our mother tongue. I want to see them come into their own and realize that… we can find strength in our communities and relationships with one another.”
Ally Gee, 23, Diné
Growing up in Low Mountain, Arizona, Ally Gee rarely talked about sexual health or menstruation with her family. The topics were largely considered taboo. But when she began working as a student at Fort Lewis College’s health clinic and saw a need for more sexual wellness education and menstrual health supplies, she knew something had to change. Roughly halfof the undergraduate student body was Native, and most of the community members the clinic was serving were people of color.
Working with the nurse practitioners at the clinic, Gee helped to secure a grant that provided months of free reproductive health services and menstrual health products for students. She says that’s where her passion for providing accessible sexual health and wellness services started.
“As the only woman of color at the clinic, I became an advocate for a lot of students that came in,” she says. Students still come to Gee for education, though she has stopped working at the clinic. As of now, Gee is seeking other funding sources and working on expanding educational materials for students that she developed as a UNITY 25 Under 25 youth leader. Her dream is to one day have a comprehensive program that could provide free reproductive health resources and education.
“It would be amazing to combine knowledge about how Diné people view menstruation,” Gee says, “including Diné stories, songs, and teachings that celebrate menstruation.”
Gusti Rattling Hawk, 25, Oglala Lakota
Many people would think that data-driven conservation science and the arts are polar opposites. Indigenous creatives have consistently proven them wrong, including Gusti Rattling Hawk. Rattling Hawk is a youth development coordinator for First Peoples Fund, a nonprofit that directly supports Native artists across the nation. They are also a conservation and environmental scientist studying the management and restoration of grasslands for large land-based tribes. Recently, they helped to co-host Wooyake Theca Oyate, an arts festival for youth on the Pine Ridge reservation.
For Rattling Hawk, conservation and preservation of the land is integral to sharing gifts with their community. “A lot of folks don’t think arts nonprofit work and science mix together,” Rattling Hawk says. “But for me, it’s the Land, protecting it and creating with it, that intersects both. I want other kids on the Rez to have the experiences I had growing up. I want them to run around real wild and understand everything, experience the landscape for what it is.”
Rattling Hawk also insists on the importance of finding inspiration right at home on the Rez: “You can make art just where you’re from, and as Native young people, that’s so important because we’re all out here together, surviving and being innovative with the landscape. You can tell how rivers migrated across the Land, how the wind carved out all the rocks, old growth, new growth… Rocks are our first and oldest storytellers. We just need to take the time to understand and remember.”
Raylen Bark, 20, Cherokee/Hualapai/MS Choctaw/Hidatsa
When Raylen Bark started looking at colleges, she jokes that law and linguistics were not quite at the top of her family’s priorities. She was a basketball star, raised by a young single mother who also loved the sport. She played varsity for four years, making All-Stars while balancing academics. But the older she got, the more she found her passion for linguistics. Working with Cherokee first language speakers through a grant, she realized the importance of creating immersive curriculum for students on her reservation. “We don’t know how much time we have left with these speakers, for one,” she says. “This is work that should’ve been done 20 years ago.”
Now a junior at Dartmouth College pursuing a career in Federal Indian Law, Bark boasts a diverse list of accomplishments. She works with Ilíiaitchik: Indigenous Correspondents Program to advocate for Indigenous environmental issues through storytelling. She was also recently crowned Miss Cherokee, running on a platform of teaching and preserving language. But she’s insistent that all of her work is interconnected– and ties back to her community.
“The common theme throughout all of this is sovereignty,” she says of law, language, and environmentalism. “I want our children to grow up in a world where they’re not seen as ‘subjects’ because of their intersectional identities.”
When speaking to younger generations, Bark encourages them not to limit themselves in their aspirations: “We can exist in many different worlds and thrive… I want Native youth to feel that they can choose their own paths and still give back to their communities.”
Charitie Ropati, 21, Yup’ik/Samoan
For Charitie Ropati, education was the best way to address racism in her Anchorage school district’s curriculum. The then-high schooler created a Native-centric curriculum that is still taught in schools, and was part of the movement that allowed any student in the school district to wear their cultural regalia at graduation. “We have a graduation crisis in Anchorage,” she says. “I do the work that I do so the pathway to education is easier for my younger sister, my younger brother, and other Native youth.”
The former Champion for Change is now at Columbia, researching permafrost, soil, and ecology with an interest in how climate change is affecting her community. As an enrolled member of the Native Village of Kongiganak, she’s working on utilizing testimonies of Native peoples to seek funding for better infrastructure. “It’s hard but it’s worth it,” she says. “I’ve been in science since I was 10 or 11, and it’s brought me where I am today, doing research on the resilience of our communities.” She also runs Lil Native Girl in STEM, which started as a way for Native women in STEM to talk about intersectional challenges in the workplace.
“Native men in STEM are very cocky when so many of our innovations and why our communities function are because of the Native women in our communities,” Ropati jokes. But her advice is for other Native youth to seek this connection through community, even if they aren’t interested in STEM: “Finding community helped me. There are people rooting for you, who look up to you and support you. Find those people and stick with them.”
