This is part of a monthly series highlighting Arizona's climate leaders and answering readers' climate-related questions. The stories aim to help connect and inspire Arizonans who care about protecting a livable climate and may be struggling to find hope in that effort lately. You can nominate an Arizona climate leader or ask a question by filling out the form at https://forms.gle/QCCxBPSHGy1bUJQ99 or by emailing climate reporter Joan Meiners at [email protected].
Distant lightning illuminates a gloaming sky as Nicole Horseherder inches closer to Speckle, her favorite horse.
The young Appaloosa escaped earlier this year, ran wild in the hills for weeks on the Navajo Nation's Black Mesa, then returned on her own. Horseherder had scanned the landscape from her hilltop hogan, a dome-shaped traditional home with a single room encircling a wood stove, hoping for the horse's return. But it was nothing too concerning for the Diné woman raised in the footsteps of her free-roaming shepherd grandmother.
"From the minute I could get up and walk, I was following her," Horseherder said. "It was simple: 'drink a cup of water before you go off with grandma.'"
Back then, freshwater springs bubbled up from the ground all over the plateau, making it more possible to wander with a flock, to grow modest crops and to count on natural sources for clean and plentiful drinking water. In the decades since, contamination and extraction by the coal industry as well as depletion by climate change have dried up many options and ways of life.
Nicole Horseherder has seen it all unfold from her grandmother's winter sheep camp on Black Mesa.
They used to have everything they needed here. Now, like Speckle, they venture beyond the range for food, water and answers, while being penned in ever more by federal grazing restrictions, land use policies and global climate change. The roads she drives home, waving at cousins and aunties along the way, have become so muddy after rainstorms that fell heavier but less often year after year — a sure sign of a warmed atmosphere — that she sent her younger children to high school and the dorms in Flagstaff so they wouldn't miss as many days and opportunities.
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It was tough raising four children without running water — still the reality for about one-third of homes on the Navajo Nation. As she also saw springs disappear, she realized the water issues in her community were bigger and deepening. In the early 2000s, she filed paperwork for a 501(c)(3) to try to do something about it.
Horseherder had a vision. She had documents about water rights settlements, testimonials about springs drying up, and data from a study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council connecting that change to when Peabody Energy, a global coal mining company headquartered in Missouri, started pumping groundwater.
But she lacked funding. And the Navajo leaders, Horseherder believes, lacked the will to stand up to the giant corporation bringing in jobs and revenue. For years, the effort trickled while she pulled a paycheck as a coordinator for her local Hard Rock chapter and immersed herself in the Navajo language and way of life.
"When Tó Nizhóní Ání (Navajo for "Sacred Water Speaks") first started, I had a very unstable life financially," she said of the nonprofit she cofounded with her husband and a friend, and now leads as executive director. "I was struggling."
A young mother newly returned from a master's program in linguistics in British Colombia, Horseherder kept the cause at a simmer while she cradled an infant and watched her grandmother weave. Often they just sat together in silence.
"Sometimes we didn't even have to talk," she recalled from behind the wheel of her vehicle in July as she navigated a long detour home, reversing out of fresh mud near Pinon to more accessible dirt roads on the Hard Rock side. "I would just be there, and it would help balance whatever chemistry levels in my body were needing to be balanced."
Horseherder doesn't quite know what drives her to take action on mud-stuck environmental woes, instead of simply enjoying time with her family and animals amid expansive Black Mesa views.
"I've wondered about that a lot."
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She slows while passing a procession of 30 or so tribal members on horseback joined by a line of cars keeping pace along the opposite side of the road. A solemn-faced man rides at the front carrying a staff cloaked in red cloth. Horseherder explains that it's a three-day ceremony to help him return to peace within himself after hardship. Experiencing these parts of life on the Navajo Nation is the only way she thinks certain lessons about family, the land, the importance of affirmations and how everything is connected can be absorbed.
She worries aloud about that knowledge fading as younger generations assimilate with mainstream cultures. She keeps her four children close, and they allow her to track their iPhone locations. One of her middle daughters is cataloging Black Mesa plants at the Tó Nizhóní Ání office back in Flagstaff to help document changes related to drought and coal-plant disturbance, work Horseherder says that both the mining company and the nation's environmental staff neglected to do. Her son, the youngest, is home at the hogan.
In the passenger seat, her eldest daughter, Jessica, who aims to pursue a graduate degree in energy systems, catches a quick nap between stops on the day's mission to bring lunch to horseback riders from their district who are escorting their elected council delegate, Germaine Simonson, to a leadership gathering in Window Rock in the traditional way. It's a long drive to deliver sandwiches, but Horseherder prioritizes investing in her people — a stark contrast to the longstanding neglect and disinvestment by U.S. officials who seem to view Navajo as a sovereign nation when it comes to sharing the Colorado River, but an extractable resource when needs for taxes and energy arise.
"Our community has been deeply, deeply affected by federal policy," she said. "The number of times they have gone back on their word is just astounding. The distrust works its way into how people see themselves. They feel like they have no power, and you can see that in the way they live their lives and how they speak to each other."
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Just as Horseherder's living legacy has inspired her children to engage with environmental causes, she still draws inspiration from the memory of how her grandmother faced impossible challenges. When the government abruptly canceled the family's grazing permits and the way of life they'd always known, she remembers her grandmother deciding "no one is going to stop me from feeding myself."
"That perspective she had is what really laid the groundwork for what I do today," Horseherder said.
That groundwork and subsequent legwork has paid off. After nearly two decades of staying afloat as a volunteer effort, Tó Nizhóní Ání scored its first substantial grant in 2017, allowing her to leave a job working for council delegate Dwight Witherspoon to focus on fighting the coal industry for the preservation of local water reserves. She now oversees seven full-time and 10 seasonal employees while helping to train four college interns. Her dedication has yielded results for her tribe, as well as recognition with the 2023 Heinz Award for her "achievements of lasting good."
Ongoing funding comes from small grants and private donors wanting to support climate solutions, coal transitions, clean energy policy or work by Indigenous women. She now spends up to half her time fundraising to sustain this momentum and the other half writing, preparing reports, doing outreach and helping jump-start similar organizations.
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On June 9, severe drought conditions prompted Navajo leaders to declare a state of emergency. The need for water hauling services increased. Residents were asked to restrict available gallons for human use, Horseherder said, leaving families like hers with livestock, horses or crops high and dry.
"It's terrible that people are not able to feed themselves anymore," she said. "It gets reported in the newspapers. But people don't get it. They don't get it because their hands are not in the soil. We get it. We see it because of the way we live. We are seeing the impacts of policy and climate change today, now, in real time."
Horseherder no longer sees the Indian wild rice grass she remembers wandering through with her grandmother. Gone, too, is the mutton grass for lack of rain. And if the livestock are struggling, she said, so are the wildlife.
"It weighs on your mental health, which then impacts your physical health."
Years ago, an interaction with U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Bullhead City, confirmed her belief that solutions must sprout from those native to an area, who know the balance of its ecosystems from intimate experience. Gosar asked Horseherder if her quality of life is better now with various modern amenities than it used to be. When she started to explain that there are tradeoffs, that it's not all better, he cut her off.
Fighting for environmental justice and water rights on behalf of her community still drives her, she said this July as her windshield wipers waged their own war against a fierce downpour on the way back to Flagstaff. But if, in the course of putting corporations under control, you lose the practice of living on the land, what do you have to return to? The path forward is lined with soft native grasses and the wisdom of footsteps that came before.
"You need to live the life you're trying to save, daily."
Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Send tips or questions to [email protected] or follow her work on Instagram at @joan_bikes_arizona.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Nicole Horseherder aims to save the Navajo waters her grandmother knew