Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
While water managers from two countries, 30 tribes, seven states and countless other federal, state and local water managers discussed how to address the Colorado River’s structural deficit this week, Indigenous women were working to grow the next generation of water policy leaders. Some of those women were honored Wednesday [December 13, 2023] at the annual Tribes and Water Luncheon during the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting. The Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network was formed to connect emerging Native women working in environmental and natural resources fields to established women leaders, according to Daryl Vigil, co-chair of the Tribes and Water Initiative. The leadership network is part of the tribal water initiative. But to the women in the program, it’s not just about networking, learning leadership skills or scholarships. It’s a way to restore women’s rightful place in tribal societies, as leaders, culture holders and bearers, and nurturers.
Lorelei Cloud, the acting Southern Ute Indian Tribe Chairwoman, is the network’s current co-chair. The leadership positions change hands over time to give other women leadership opportunities, Cloud said. Other current co-chairs could be part of a Native Who’s Who: former Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Chairperson and environmental and cultural activist Nora McDowell; Gwendena Lee-Gatewood, the first woman chairperson of the White Mountain Apache Tribe who now serves as a policy manager for the American Indian Cancer Foundation; and Fort Yuma-Quechan Tribal Councilmember Darnella J. Melancon, who’s also a noted crisis intervention specialist.
“We wear different hats — mother, daughter, office staff, hydrologists and attorneys,” Cloud said. “But those roles don’t end when we get home.”
[…]
Colonization caused oftentimes catastrophic upheavals in social systems that had sustained communities and allowed them to thrive for millennia. Native women have labored to restore these systems ever since. Native women tend to be overlooked in a patriarchal mainstream society, Cloud said. But for more Indigenous women to enter leadership roles in tribal governments, environmental and water programs and the legal profession, women have a duty to help each other, she said…
[Autumn] Powell said her mother and aunts loomed larger than the men in the family. But when she left the nation to attend college, she learned that not everybody thinks having women in leadership roles is a good thing. “The patriarchy is misdirected,” said Powell, a geography major at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County who studies how place has value from the human perspective. She also learned that Native people on the East Coast have suffered greatly from colonial erasure. “‘They don’t live here,'” she recounted people saying about local Natives. “I said they were literally right here.”