The homeland ecologies that have sustained Indigenous communities for countless millennia are essential parts of their identities, cultures and well-being. Indigenous photographer Joe Whittle, an enrolled citizen of the Caddo Nation and descendant of the Delaware Nation, has been documenting Indigenous People connecting with and caring for their homelands for over 25 years. He believes the original stewards of the land are still its best stewards today.
Whittle says every Indigenous community he’s known still honors the “Natural Laws” of reciprocal and sustainable relationships with nature that have allowed their societies to thrive for thousands of years. He believes Indigenous leadership and land return can help reverse the degradation our planet’s ecologies and climate have experienced. As America honors Native American Heritage Month and celebrates another Thanksgiving holiday, it’s a good time to reflect on the connection Indigenous People have had with this land since time immemorial, and what the world can learn from that.
The following images depict some of Whittle’s favorite moments from his time spent with Indigenous People maintaining their ancient relationships with their homelands.
Nez Perce tribal member, Allen Pinkham Jr., and his granddaughter, Lily, test a newly-carved dugout canoe on the waters of Wallowa Lake, Oregon, in 2017. This was the first time a traditional Nez Perce dugout canoe had floated on Wallowa Lake’s waters since their ancestors were forced from that area during the Nez Perce War of 1877. Allen has been working to revive Nez Perce canoe culture for several years as a way to bring awareness to efforts to remove the dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers to support salmon health and other aquatic river species, and the overall health of the rivers themselves. The canoe-making process involves carrying on ancient knowledge about the way trees grow and water flows that upholds sustainable practices of relationship to the land.
Joe Whittle
Navajo (Diné) elder Glenna Begay tends to her sheep on Black Mesa, Arizona, where she has lived her entire life without running water and electricity. Glenna lives in her ancestral home illegally, resisting a government relocation program that has removed over 14,000 Navajos from their homes since the 1980s. Most of the land vacated ended up underneath the Peabody coal strip mine not far from Glenna’s home. The mesa’s only aquifer, which its residents and wildlife depend on for survival, was drained of water to operate a slurry pipeline that transported the coal 200 miles to a generating station. One of the reasons many Indigenous activists believe in returning public lands to Native Americans is because America’s public lands produce 20% of U.S. carbon emissions thanks to all of the fossil fuels that are mined out of them. Indigenous guardianship could return America’s public land base to being a carbon sink, rather than a net carbon emitter.
Joe Whittle
Joe Whittle’s daughter, River Whittle, gathers plant medicines on the shores of Caddo Lake, which sits on the border of Northeast Texas and Northwest Louisiana. Caddo creation stories state that Caddo people first emerged from the earth near Caddo Lake. It has been said that when Caddo people were forcibly removed from their homelands in Louisiana during the Trail of Tears era, many Caddos chose to walk into Caddo Lake and reunite with their ancestors by drowning themselves, rather than leave their beloved homeland. Whittle’s great-great-grandfather survived the Trail of Tears as a child, but his infant brother did not.
Joe Whittle
Indigenous “horse warriors” gather on the Backwater Bridge at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for a ceremony held during the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement of 2016. Indigenous activists known as “water protectors” fought back for months against a tar sands pipeline that was forced through the reservation’s drinking water. Two weeks after this photo was taken, the paramilitary police and mercenaries depicted here blockading the other side of the bridge, sprayed water cannons on hundreds of Indigenous People gathered in prayer on the bridge in below freezing temperatures, giving over 140 people hypothermia, and partially blinding one woman and tearing the lower arm off of another woman with “nonlethal” armaments. Since its completion the Dakota Access Pipeline has ruptured and leaked multiple times, just as water protectors predicted it would.
Joe Whittle
River Whittle gathers wampum (quahog shells) at Rockaway Beach, New York, in her Lenape (Delaware) homeland. Wampum represents a sustainable balance between all living things. Its trade built an economy modeled after the ecology itself and the reciprocal relationships woven into it millions of years before human beings arrived. It represents a familial bond formed in the exchange between individuals and other communities of life, be they human or otherwise. Indigenous people learned from the land and its older communities of life that the land manages us, we do not manage the land.
Joe Whittle
Kanim Moses-Conner and his dog, Dutch, prepare to swim back to shore from an island in the middle of an alpine lake in the Walwalmox Mountains found in Kanim’s Nez Perce homeland. Kanim is the great-great-great-grandnephew of Chief Joseph. His ancestors have been wandering these mountainsides since the glaciers were still sculpting them. The last remaining shreds of those glaciers can be seen behind him. Decades of climate change-driven melting and retreat have reclassified them to “permanent snowfields”, and there are no longer any “glaciers” in that ancient mountain range.
Joe Whittle
River Whittle gazes into morning fog blanketing the Delaware River Valley in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation after a sunrise ceremony during her first visit to her Lenape homelands in 2019. All of the sovereign nations of the Lenape people were driven out of Lenapehoking (their homeland — which includes Southeast New York, all of New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, and parts of Delaware and Maryland), by plagues, war, exploitative treaties and scalp bounties. Whittle is part of a growing movement known as “landback”, which seeks to support the return of massive swaths of land, including public lands, to Indigenous tenureship. Landback activists believe returning public and other lands to Indigenous People would serve not only as long overdue reparations for the illegal violation of every Indian treaty the U.S. ever signed, but as a way to better combat climate change and ecological devastation.
Joe Whittle
A pow wow dancer prepares to enter the arena at the annual Wallowa Band Nez Perce Tamkaliks Celebration of 2009. The Tamkaliks Celebration is held in Wallowa, Oregon, and hosted by the Wallowa Band Nez Perce Homeland Project. The event and project celebrate and promote the historic efforts of Nez Perce people to reestablish their presence in the ancestral homelands their people were forced from during the tragic Nez Perce War of 1877, wherein Chief Joseph and his people as well as other Nez Perce bands were violently exiled from their homeland, which led to a daring and epic military retreat and attempt to escape confinement on a reservation in Idaho.
Joe Whittle
A fancy dancer dances at the Wallowa Band Nez Perce Tamkaliks Celebration of 2001. Pow wow dancing is one way that Native Americans across the United States and Canada have come together to build shared traditions and practices that unite Indigenous Peoples in cultural solidarity, and uphold universal Indigenous values of honoring each other and the lands that sustain their communities.
Joe Whittle
Kanim Moses-Conner disappears into the Walwalmox Mountains of his Nez Perce homeland for a weekend connecting with one of the wildest places left in the Lower 48 states. Returning public lands such as the U.S. Forest Service land that holds those mountains to Indigenous tenureship, could capture up to 12 gigatons of carbon by 2050 according to the UN sponsored Project Drawdown climate change reversal initiative.
Joe Whittle
Andrew Wildbill (Hinmat Kakykt – Thunder Strikes) Cayuse, and Ashley Harding, Navajo, skip rocks on the Columbia River at Celilo Park, Oregon. The slackwater shown here sits behind The Dalles Dam, which displaced an entire Indigenous village and devastated the Columbia River ecology. Andrew is the Program Manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation Natural Resources Department Wildlife Program. Their tribal government has been a key player in the protection and recovery of the Columbia River watershed by using treaty rights to force compliance with fish passageway requirements in the Columbia River dams, and other protections for the region’s fish and wildlife. They have implemented countless programs to help recover threatened and endangered species in the Pacific Northwest. They are guided by principles of sustainable and reciprocal relationship with nature they call Tamanwit.
