And what it teaches the rest of us about strategy, sovereignty, and what philanthropy looks like when it doesn’t write a check.
By Joanna Aguirre
Girls from the NAIWA Daughters — the youth wing of the North American Indian Women’s Association — were tubing on the Oconaluftee River one afternoon when they noticed visitors moving river stones around. Those stones are the habitat of the eastern hellbender, and disturbing them wrecks the ecosystem that keeps the creature alive.
So they started advocating for the salamander, only to be redirected by elders. The advice? Target the water and protect more than the salamander.
What followed was 18 months of ordinary, unglamorous, deeply effective organizing. And on January 8, 2026, those girls — ages 10 to 17 — walked into the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council chamber carrying headwaters from the Oconaluftee River in two clay pots, set the water beside them, and presented a resolution they had spent a year and a half building. The council chamber was full, with supporters standing in the doorways, and the vote was unanimous.
What They Won
The resolution granted legal rights to the Longperson, an interconnected waterway system whose headwaters rise in the Great Smoky Mountains and whose “feet,” as the Cherokee describe it, reach the Gulf of Mexico some 790 miles later. To the Eastern Band, the Longperson is not a natural resource to be managed, but a living relative to be protected.
The resolution recognizes five inherent rights: the right to exist and regenerate; to be free of pollution and invasive species; to shelter wildlife; to flow unobstructed; and to be protected under Cherokee law and enforced by tribal authorities. It is the first all-female-led rights-of-nature effort in United States history, and only the second drafted by Indigenous youth anywhere in the country.
That afternoon, the girls carried the two clay pots back down to the river and returned the water.
How They Actually Did It: A Sovereign Good Strategy Breakdown
Attorney Britt Gondolfi, who worked with the NAIWA Daughters through the Bioneers Indigeneity program, put it plainly: “The young women behind this law didn’t AI themselves into this historic moment. They consulted with elders, lawyers, experts in the field, and culture keepers.”
Here is what 18 months of that looked like in practice:
They started with community knowledge, not a campaign. The girls didn’t begin with a press strategy or a petition. They began by understanding the thing they were trying to protect — the salamanders, the water, the cultural and spiritual significance of the Longperson to their own people — and grounding their argument in that knowledge before they brought it anywhere else.
They drew on existing precedent. The NAIWA Daughters were inspired by the Mashpee Wampanoag, who had done similar rights-of-nature work for herring in their territory. They used the rights-of-nature legal framework — a growing body of law that grants ecosystems legal standing rather than treating them as property to be exploited — and connected it to Cherokee tradition and sovereignty in a way that gave the council both a legal vocabulary and a cultural one for yes.
They organized internally, not externally. They hosted community dinners, polled tribal members, ran outreach tables, and even met with council members one at a time. When they finally brought the resolution to the Tribal Council on December 17, 2025, it came with co-sponsorship from the Cherokee Youth Council — meaning it arrived with pre-built community consensus.
They chose the right arena. This is the decision that made everything else possible. These girls did not petition the federal government, file a federal lawsuit, or wait for an environmental organization to notice them. They went to their own Tribal Council, in their own governance structure, using the sovereignty their nation already holds. They asked their own government to protect their living relative. And because they’d done extensive preparatory work, the answer was yes.
Jasmine Smith, chair and founder of the NAIWA Daughters, said: “I have watched them give everything to this, showing up tired, overwhelmed, and emotional, sacrificing school breaks and weekends, and still fighting for our sovereign rights to be Cherokee.”
Is This Philanthropy? And Why That Question Matters.
We want to pause on something, because it comes up whenever we write about organizing and legislative wins at Sovereign Good: is this philanthropy if no one wrote a check?
Yes. And the question reveals something important about how narrowly we tend to define giving.
Philanthropy, at its root, is the love of humanity expressed through action for the common good. The dominant American model has defined it almost entirely through financial transactions — the donor, the grantee, the dollar amount. But that framework misses entire categories of impact that are, by any honest measure, more durable than most charitable gifts.
What the NAIWA Daughters created is a legal instrument. The Longperson now has enforceable rights under Cherokee law. A follow-up resolution has committed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to lead a fundraising campaign to remove the decommissioned Ela Dam, which currently blocks migration for the sicklefin redhorse. A tribal Rights of Nature task force is now monitoring the waterway’s health and guiding policy implementation. The girls are building workshops to share their playbook with other nations.
A check can be spent, and a law can be enforced, but a network of Indigenous nations learning to replicate this model is a movement. The girls gave 18 months of their time, their weekends, their school breaks. They gave expertise — earned through consultation with elders, lawyers, and culture keepers. They gave their credibility inside their own community. Those are philanthropic resources.
This is also, specifically, tribal legislation (not federal or state) which is the strategic heart of the entire effort. Tribal nations in the United States hold sovereign authority over their own lands and waters. That sovereignty is a legal reality that most organizing campaigns outside Indigenous communities cannot access. The NAIWA Daughters grew to understand that their greatest asset was their own government’s power to act within its own jurisdiction — right now, without waiting for anyone’s permission.
Grant Wilson, executive director of the Earth Law Center, said it well: “Those with the deepest cultural and spiritual connections to the land are often the ones best equipped to give Nature a voice in law.”
What’s Happened Since
By March 2026, a separate tribal resolution passed committing the EBCI to lead a fundraising campaign for removal of the Ela Dam. The Rights of Nature task force held its first meeting in May. An annual Honoring Longperson event in September brought volunteers to clean the river. And the NAIWA Daughters hosted workshops for younger community members to build the next generation of organizers the way their elders built them.
The model is already being shared with other nations.
What Sovereign Good Takes From This
At Sovereign Good, we work with donors and foundations who want to give with intention — to move resources toward impact that is structural, specific, and built to last. The NAIWA Daughters didn’t need our help. But if they had walked into our office, here is what we would have recognized immediately:
They identified the right governance lever and built internal consensus before making the external ask. They chose a framework — rights of nature — with legal potential and connected it to a cultural logic their audience already held. They thought past the win to the enforcement mechanism, and they trained the people behind them to repeat it.
This is strategic activism, and it produced something that a donation to a conservation organization could not have produced: a legal right, held by a living waterway, enforced by the sovereign authority of a tribal nation.
For donors and foundations watching this: the question is not “how do I fund something like this?” The question is “am I funding the conditions that make something like this possible?” That means funding Indigenous-led organizations before they have a victory to show you. It means funding legal capacity, cultural programming, and youth leadership development — the unglamorous infrastructure that produced 18 months of community dinners and council member meetings before the historic vote.
It means trusting that the people with the deepest relationship to a place know how to protect it, if they have the resources and the legal tools to try.
TAKE ACTION
Follow the NAIWA Daughters on Instagram at @naiwadaughters for updates on their ongoing work and the playbook they’re building for other nations.
Learn about the rights-of-nature movement and how it’s expanding through the Earth Law Center at earthlawcenter.org.
If you’re a donor or foundation interested in funding Indigenous-led environmental advocacy, legal capacity, or youth leadership — we’d love to talk. Visit sovereigngood.org or reach us at hi@sovereigngood.org.