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A group of Cherokee girls, ages 10 to 17, set out to protect a salamander and ended up making legal history. Guided by elders who told them to start with the water itself, the NAIWA Daughters spent a year and a half hosting community dinners, meeting council members one by one, and showing up, as their founder Jasmine Smith described, “tired, overwhelmed, and emotional, sacrificing school breaks and weekends” – until the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians unanimously passed the first all-female-led rights-of-nature resolution in the United States. On the day it passed, the girls carried clay pots of headwaters into the chamber and set the water beside them as the vote was taken; afterward, they carried it back down to the river. The resolution recognizes the Longperson — the interconnected waterway stretching 790 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Gulf — as a living entity with inherent rights, and it asks a question that outlasts any single law: “Do we see nature as something we own, or do we view it as something we have the responsibility to protect?” What these young women built was not just policy but a way of belonging to a place — and a demonstration that a moral compass has no minimum age.
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