Imagine balancing multiple roles within an organization while leading efforts to secure funding and address environmental justice through an indigenous lens, all in the face of limited resources.

For Andrea Nawage, the tenacious chief executive director and founder of the Harvest of All First Nations, this is her reality.

Twenty years ago, Nawage found herself frustrated, she felt a calling to do something for the land. A voice inside her said, “To work with the land, you need to work with the people,” which she remembers close to her heart in her current work. In 2018, she was working with social services and left that job to pursue her calling. She got her degree in environmental studies with an Indigenous background and soon after, HAFN bloomed in 2021. Ever since, Nawage has beenworking tirelessly to advocate for Indigenous environmental practices and help communities reconnect with the land.

When starting her organization, Nawage realized that “People can not care about the environment if they do not have a relationship with it.” This prompted her into the beginning of HAFN’s philosophies. Western assumptions have taught that working with the land and soil means that one is poor, but for HAFN working with the soil is a privilege and healing method to reconnect with Mother Earth.

Nawage describes her organization's environmental way of thinking as regenerative concepts instead of sustainability. These concepts are centered on creating a relationship with the land, “We are giving back to the land what land has given us.”

Nawage shares the importance of building a connection with the land because people can not live without the land, but the land can live without people.

If you’re interested in supporting HAFN we accept donations from individuals and other organizations through our website. We are grateful for the support. The organization views environmental justice in different branches all intertwined. For example, access to land impacts the access to food, mental health help, and overall privilege, “We are trying to bring Indigenous perspectives into governmental ways of thinking so they can recognize where the land is comingfrom.” HAFN is not just looking at the environment as it is right now, but looking at all the durations of time past.

Sometimes, Nawage does not have enough time to do all the work needed for the organization, which is only harder when funding is an issue. This is one of their biggest challenges, to receive funding and count as an organization, there needs to be a certain amount of people within the organization. Even with the right amount of people, only 5% of all the funding goes to Indigenous women-led nonprofits.

HAFN is already at low capacity, and on top of that, these extra jobs have been taken on do not pay as full-time jobs, even though they are full-time for the members. Nawage explains the necessity for funding, “30% of my hours are volunteer and my payment as an executive director is 25% of what an executive director should be getting paid.”

HAFN faces the obstacle of stigmatization, “You get asked or told a lot ‘You speak English really well’ or ‘You are very well informed’ and that is the stigma which brings barriers and shows the privilege we are dealing with.”

Nawage explains the Indigenous way of thinking as slowing down, but her organization is always on the go. She hopes that her organization gets more funding to get back to this way of thinking again so that they can continue to walk the path that they are trying to build for the community.

Although facing many challenges, the organization positively made its mark on the local community with the Corn Festival. About 2021 people came from all different nations and communities of color. The festival was led by Indigenous people which helped to create a sense of community in the land that had been ostracized from them.

When Nawage thinks of the future of her organization and its impact, she pictures a place where her Indigenous people can have a piece of land where they can develop their community, grow their lands, and develop a center of healing. She wants a place in the government where policy can be actively changed with Indigenous voices. Her biggest vision of all is for every neighborhood to have a community garden that has all the food that they need to process it for the whole year, where different people take on different tasks like hunting and then other ones do the gardening.

A complete transformation of what a society looks like, “It is dreamy but I don’t think we need to create a barrier in thinking that it is way too big.”

Francesca Patton
Journalism Student, University of Colorado Boulder