Envisioning a Sustainable Future: The Native FEWS Ambassador Program

The Native FEWS Alliance seeks to address the crisis in access to food, energy, and water systems in Indigenous communities, as well as to expand the limited FEWS educa­tional and career pathways available to Indigenous peoples. Through foundational projects and steppingstone programs, the alliance has established opportunities for students from K-12, post-secondary, and post-baccalaureate levels. The initial 10 foun­dational projects included the Coast Salish Youth Coalition, the Diné Greenhouse and Water Project, the American Indian Student Engineering Society (AISES) K-12 Indigenous Curriculum Learning Center, the STAR (Service To All Relations) School, IndigigLOBE, the Indigenous Correspondents Program, the University of California (UC) Berkeley Native FEWS Initiative, the Native FEWS Certificate Program, A Student’s Journey, and the PhD Minor and Master’s Program.

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) has served as the Native FEWS backbone to ensure the alliance maintains a central hub, an annual gathering, and web-based dis­semination of best research practices. The alliance has comprised over 20 partnerships with institutions such as the University of Arizona (UA); UC Berkeley; California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt; the University of Colorado, Boulder; and numerous nonprofits, local schools, and communities.

As the Native FEWS Alliance entered its fourth year in the fall of 2024, the initiative’s leadership recognized a need for student voices. Those voices became part of the alliance’s overall discussions, as they offered input, shared personal experiences, and amplified the work of the Native FEWS Alliance through what became known as the Native FEWS Ambassadorship Program.

EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA

The Native FEWS Alliance had gone through a restructuring period in the summer of 2024, seeking to empower Indigenous leader­ship. As part of this new structure, I joined the leadership team alongside Dr. Karletta Chief of UA and Dr. Alice Agogino from UC Berkeley. Drs. Chief and Agogino had identified students from their graduate programs and created space for them to participate.

The initial Native FEWS ambassadors were Nieves Vasquez, a graduate student at UA; Kanani D’Angelo, a graduate student from UC Berkeley; and LaCher Pacheco, a PhD student at UA. As the alliance met, leadership was interested in the tribal college and uni­versity (TCU) student perspective. I was just finishing up summer programs with AIHEC and recently stepped into the TCU engage­ment coordinator role. I sought successful students who could be strong advocates and who completed the interest forms. Three students responded from this group: Charles Wells, a current student at Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC); Erica Kleinman, a recent graduate of TOCC; and Gayla Gould, a recent graduate from Northwest Indian College.

For the pilot year of the ambassador program, from October 2024 to May 2025, participating students collaboratively built the program’s framework. Previously, there was student participation throughout Native FEWS Alliance events, but no designated group of students with whom the alliance could discuss ideas or turn to for student perspectives. The pilot year proved successful with student representation from Santo Domingo Pueblo, the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians, the Navajo Nation, the Nez Perce tribe, the Huachichil Chichimecatl Mexican people of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the Chippewa Cree tribe, and Native Hawai’i. Each voice led to the establishment of the ambassador program for the Native FEWS Alliance.

With the ambassadorship program, Native FEWS leadership created opportunities for professional development, mentorship, and support through stipends to Native students. Each student participant was a representative of their university, TCU, and/or tribal community. As the semester was busy for the students, I had to be creative in gathering input and ideas through monthly discus­sions, surveys, and by collecting responses through an online work­space that allowed teams to collaborate, brainstorm, plan, and design collectively in real time. This was great for our team of ambassadors, as we had individuals from different parts of the country and in different time zones who also had to work alongside their busy school schedules. The results provided focused on the overarching goals, mission, and vision of the ambassador program, which also aligned with the Native FEWS Alliance’s mission and vision. One suggestion was to develop a community that builds upon its work within the alliance, fostering transparency and clarity around alliance-wide initiatives and structure. Ambassadors bene­fited from safe and effective communication, improved connection with students, and increased visibility in the community through Native FEWS’s 10 foundational projects.

Ambassadors provided different ideas on how to contribute. One idea was utilizing space at the fourth annual FEWS gathering, including pairing ideas with action items. They also suggested actively participating in research poster session presentations. Another idea was to have hands-on activities focused on cultural knowledge, experience, and Indigenous research and data. Each idea led to opportunities for collaboration at the Native FEWS annual gathering as well as with the geoscience Alliance, which accepted proposals for workshops and posters for its conference at Duke University. There were also other opportunities to create workshops at student-led conferences and to highlight the work the ambassadors sought to contribute to the alliance. The significance of contributing their thoughts was to allow the program to grow and to give students a space to advocate.

MEET THE AMBASSADORS

This past year, I had the pleasure of working alongside six amazing individuals in the Native FEWS Ambassadorship Program. Each brought a unique background and cultural perspective on climate justice. These individuals have dealt with various issues within their communities and are working towards their respective programs at their learning institutions.

Charles Wells participated in the Summer Climate Resilience Program in 2024. Wells investigated how the possible invasion of zebra mussels, an exotic non-indigenous species, would impact the Flathead Watershed in an environment already affected by climate change. The study also explored the impact on tribal mem­bers and their communities. The Flathead Watershed is considered sacred to the Salish, Kootenai, and Pond d’Oreilles tribes and is an important food and water resource. His extensive knowledge and interest in helping his community made him a vital contributor to the ambassador program.

Gayla Gould, another participant in the Summer Climate Resilience Program, conducted research that employed traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in studying the impacts of invasive terrestrial species. TEK and her Indigenous cultural experience have led Gould to advocate for her traditional homelands. “Invasive species in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon are impacting our traditional foods and land-locking usual and accustomed gathering sites,” explains Gould. “We find our food in the only places we have left.” At its heart, Gould’s research is Indigenous research, rooted in Indigenous data. “Indigenous relationships and a sense of place are important,” she says. The analytical methods used in her study are mostly personal communications within Indigenous familial and social networks. Gould has also created communications with non-Indigenous tribal employees who have been working with or for the Nez Perce tribe for an extended period. Both Gould and Wells completed the program and continue to take part in community discussions. They also contributed their voices during this past year’s Native FEWS Alliance leadership meetings.

Erica Kleinman recently graduated from TOCC with an associ­ate’s degree in life sciences and liberal arts. She transferred to Northern Arizona University to continue her studies in biology during the ambassadorship’s pilot year in the fall of 2024. Kleinman is strongly committed to applying Indigenous perspec­tives and TEK to solve climate issues. She has traveled between Arizona and California to lend a helping hand in water quality surveys and studies and plant species identification. “Our work in the Los Angeles urban waterways has resulted in cataloged muse­um samples of novel occurrences,” she says. “The exotic snails found are now contained in the collections at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.” Kleinman has also helped with field research in assessing the effects of human interference in ani­mal movement and migration.

Ambassador program co-chair LaCher Pacheco is from Santo Domingo Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Her parents valued their trade school degrees and encouraged her to be successful in her academic pursuits. Pacheco earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico as well as a Master of Arts in secondary education and American Indian education. She surprised her family with a third Master of Arts degree from Fort Lewis College in cultural linguistic diversity. Currently, she is a PhD student at UA in teaching, learning, and sociocultural studies with an emphasis on children’s and young adult literature in a diverse world; her minor is in environmental sustainable educa­tion. Pacheco enjoys school and hopes to help others acquire an affinity for and love of academics. She believes “bilingual brains are beautiful” and enjoys working with Tucson’s diverse popula­tions. During her time at UA’s Indigenous Resilience Center (IRes), she worked with the STAR School, offering workshops and profes­sional development to staff with hands-on pedagogy lessons.

Kanani D’Angelo is from Aiea, Hawai’i, and is in her final year of graduate school in landscape architecture and city planning at UC Berkeley. On the island of O’ahu, D’Angelo supports the com­munity-based restoration of Loko I’a Pāʻaiau, a traditional Hawaiian fishpond on the shores of Puʻuloa (Pearl Harbor). grounded in these efforts, she is interested in the restoration of ahupua’a (traditional Hawaiian land management systems) in urbanized areas, particularly in her community. Upon graduation, D’Angelo looks forward to returning home to continue to support this work through the restoration of Hawaiian cultural and spiri­tual places and practices. D’Angelo also assisted with the UC Berkeley Native FEWS Indigi-grade lecture series during the spring of 2025, which brought presenters from across Indian Country to share their experiences and research and offer discus­sion for students in the STEM fields.

Nieves Vasquez pursued a Master of Science degree in water, society, and policy at UA, a uniquely interdisciplinary water science program. As a first-generation student with roots in Huachichil Chichimecatl (México), she sought an education that aligned with her environmental and community values, and which reached beyond academic disciplines. Vasquez hopes to bring this knowledge back to her community. She was hired initially as a graduate research assistant at UA in the IRes where she supported faculty, student, and staff research projects focused on the nexus of food, energy, and water systems for Indigenous communities. UA received partial funding from the Native FEWS Alliance to support these efforts. “The collaboration between the grant and our institution was successful because IRes played a crucial role in supporting research for and by students,” elaborates Vasquez. Her research focuses on how equitable science communi­cation can be a tool for community resilience while facing soil and water quality issues. Mining and ecologically extractive practices exacerbate heavy metal contamination in soil and water for com­munities on or near Indian reservations or those in downstream neighborhoods. “Instead of a deficit perspective that relies on out­side ‘expertise’ to remediate contamination in these communities, I argue that there is an innate abundance within communities that, when elevated throughout the remediation process, fosters stronger and resilient communities,” asserts Vasquez. “Scientists are not just Western-trained academics, but a variety of elders, youth, cultural practitioners, singers, dancers, journalists, artists, and more, who contribute to how we face resiliency in a changing environment. Resiliency to adapt to our environment should not mean losing our ancestral, cultural ways, but instead, be elevated to the forefront.”

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

Each year, the Native FEWS Alliance and partners gather annually. In 2025, the University of Montana in Missoula hosted the meeting. Although ambassadors meet bi-weekly throughout the year, sharing stories and knowledge is limited. The annual in-person FEWS Alliance gathering therefore allows ambassadors to meet, greet, and even present in a workshop that highlights the research and work they are doing.

FEWS ambassadors Charles Wells and LaCher Pacheco attended the 2025 FEWS Alliance gathering at the University of Montana. The annual meetings allow ambassadors to meet, greet, and share their research in workshops.

At the fourth annual Native FEWS gathering in Missoula, Pacheco and Wells conducted a workshop titled, “Ways of Knowing Environment Using Children’s Picture Books and Storytelling.” They presented on eight Indigenous-authored children’s books, illuminating how TEK served as the central theme of the books. While the books linearly presented this knowledge, the underlying teaching principles stemmed from holistic Indigenous practices passed down through tribal oral traditions. Pacheco led the presentation of these books, emphasizing the significance of pre­senting TEK linearly in children’s literature by Indigenous authors and highlighting the limited selection of published Indigenous authors on this subject. Pacheco effectively captured the audience’s attention and fostered engagement throughout the presentation.

Meanwhile, Wells talked about the vegetation that grows in Montana and how important plants are to people. The change added a nonlinear perspective connected to the theme of “Gathering—Food Is Energy.” Wells spoke about bitterroot, sage, and huckleberries, as Pacheco presented the book, Sunflower House, by Eve Bunting.

Listening to a reading of the picture book, participants were asked to create a map of plants that grow in their neighborhood. The participants drew a variety of plants, trees, and even grasses. Some drawings included traditional names of plants, which were accompanied by short memories and stories. The group dialogued about the plants that were significant during their youth. After sharing plant stories, the panelists talked about the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing and how these philosophies can be brought to the classroom. The goal of the presentation was met as tables of eight or more shared their plant stories and traditional ecological practices and resource management strategies.

Pacheco also presented with co-chair gayla Gould, discussing their research and traditional ecological knowledge. Pacheco offered her experience, concerns, and overview of Native FEWS. The significance of contributing their thoughts to this platform exemplifies the student voice, which is essential for programs that are working directly with students.

LOOKING AHEAD

The development of a transition plan and the onboarding of new ambassadors were to begin in August 2025. However, on May 2, the Native FEWS Alliance received devastating news that the National Science Foundation had terminated funding that supported Native FEWS, effective immediately. This news impacted the alliance’s foundational projects. The ambassadorship program completed its first and only year. Along with all the outcomes noted above, it also provided the student ambassadors with valuable experience in understanding the impact of local and federal decisions, contributing to their growth and resilience. Many of these students were looking forward to completing their programs and moving forward with the knowledge that UA’s IRes and UC Berkeley’s mentorship provided.

It was an honor working and learning from the students this past year through the ambassador program, as well as being part of the Native FEWS Alliance. Due to the current administration cutting and terminating funding, these past six months have been a whirl­wind of events that have been an emotional rollercoaster for our partners, projects, and programs. The alliance’s partners have completed years of research. These programs have important and life-changing implications for tribal communities on and off reservations. Our leadership team has continuously advocated on behalf of the programs.

But another turn of events occurred on June 30, 2025, when the UC research community took its case to the U.S. District Court for northern California. The court ruled for funding to be reinstated. Safeguarding programs like Native FEWS and seeing how the efforts of the alliance can create opportunities has been inspira­tional. It is our hope that this latest judicial decision will help us impact more lives.

 Lisa Vandever (Diné) is the coordinator for Native environmental intern­ships at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.