Nature Rights Council
The Nature Rights Council is ensuring a sustainable future through advocacy, education and social change emphasizing traditional ecological knowledge.
Ancestral Guard:
The Ancestral Guard is an indigenous organizing network. Our programs combine traditional ecological knowledge, science and values of world renewal. Currently, Ancestral Guard is working on the Victorious Gardens Initiative to develop gardens, deliver fresh produce, and assist families with growing and preserving vegetables in Yurok tribal lands.
Youth Empowerment:
Our youth empowerment work focuses on mental health and wellness, grass roots organizing and skills trainings. Projects include: Youth Action Camps, Community Organizing, Youth Wellness Workshops, Non-violent Direct Action Trainings, Know Your Rights Trainings.
Food Autonomy:
Creating community gardens are an effective way to build a healthy community. We are developing victory gardens to grow vegetables, fruits and herbs at private residences and public parks within the ancestral territories of Del Norte and Humboldt Counties. These gardens challenge childhood obesity, diabetes and other illnesses related to the dismantlement of traditional diet and replacement of corporate commodity supplies. The narrative of our community as a food desert must change if we want to win the war on obesity and heart disease that has plagued our people.
Environmental Advocacy:
The Nature Rights Council believes that healthy ecosystems result in abundant natural resources that can sustain people who live in these places, as they have for thousands of years before the era of industrialization. Long-term environmental degradation has resulted in a massive decline in our fisheries populations and other resources necessary to the survival of indigenous people and river communities.
