.jpg)
At just seven years old, Hoopa activist and water protector Danielle Rey Frank attended her first protest on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California where she grew up. “I went to my first in-person water dam protest with my father,” says Frank, now 18. “It’s been an intergenerational fight to get these dams taken down. My great uncle was the one who actually proposed it—and the fight is still happening right now.” Since that first rally, Frank has been heavily involved in the fight to restore water levels in her community. “If these rivers dry up, the salmon will die, and we’re not going to be able to make baskets or do our traditional boat dances,” she says.
Frank is one of many inspiring young people who are the subject of a new series spotlighting a generation of BIPOC climate activists. Titled Tokala, it’s spearheaded by creative director/stylist Marcus Correa and photographer Carlos Jaramillo, along with filmmaker Jazmin Garcia and the nonprofit Future Coalition’s Youth Direct Action Fund manager Thomas Lopez. “The climate activism space is a very white-led space,” says Correa. “But POC communities are being disproportionately affected by climate change. There's so much strength in these communities, and these activists should be getting this celebrity treatment. We wanted to tell their story in a visual way that’s optimistic and uplifting.”
The name “Tokala” is derived from the historical Tokala (Kit Fox) Society of the Lakota tribe, a group of warriors who showed bravery and leadership from a young age. In the new photography project, which is published exclusively on Vogue, the team set out to find present-day youth who are proving to be leaders in their respective communities.
The team traveled across the U.S. to capture activists—all under the age of 25—and the evolving environments that have motivated their work. “Our goal is to empower all these subjects and give them a platform to hopefully inspire younger generations or other people in their community,” says Jaramillo. The first segment of the series focuses on the West Coast, looking at issues happening in Hoopa Valley—focusing on Frank—and in L.A., where they zeroed in on the activist Atlakatl Ce Tochtli Orozco. “We wanted to shine light on places that have not been given light—getting a good mixture of different regions and issues,” says Correa.
As they met and photographed different subjects across the nation, Lopez also worked with Future Coalition to provide each subject with additional funding (up to $5,000) so that they can continue their activism work. “I feel blessed that I get to use a lens of beauty to help uplift others’ stories and to find moments of visual poetic justice,” says Garcia. “It’s also the biggest blessing to work on projects where you make art, family, and most importantly community.”
The way the subjects were styled also plays a role in telling their larger stories. Many of the activists wear designer pieces mixed in with their own regalia or personal pieces with a history of their own. “I wanted to reflect their identity and just really accentuate who they are,” says Correa. Lopez adds, “To me, the purpose of this is to show that people are still winning and thriving. Even in the middle of a climate crisis, we can find beauty—we can find things not only to fight for, but things to love and feel good about. It shows how beautiful, strong, and resilient we are.”
Below, meet two West Coast youth activists in the first installment of the multi-part Tokala series for Vogue.
Atlakatl Ce Tochtli Orozco (Mazahua, Rarámuri, Chicano), 23
In November 2020, 23-year-old activist and organizer Atlakatl Ce Tochtli Orozco was among hundreds of housing rights activists who faced off against officers from the California High Patrol (CHP) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) in El Sereno, California. Hundreds of vacant Caltrans-owned homes were being occupied as a protest against housing inaccessibility in the area—and sit-ins quickly turned violent as officers began forcibly removing organizers from the properties. “These homes have been vacant for decades,” says Orozco. “They were purchased to be demolished for the expansion of the 710 freeway, but it never happened—and they’ve just been boarded up since.”
Homelessness in the L.A. area—El Sereno is an Eastside neighborhood of the city—has only intensified amid the pandemic. During the first 12 months of the pandemic, overall deaths of unhoused people in Los Angeles County increased by 56 percent compared to the previous 12 months. L.A. is currently home to an estimated 66,000 unhoused people, and the state accounts for a staggering 20 percent of all Americans who are without a home. “Nationwide, and even worldwide, housing isn't a human right,” says Orozco, who has made the housing crisis a key focus of their organizing and activism work. “Especially in a city like Los Angeles—where there’s homes already built, and there's a massive police budget—there should be action taking place to address homelessness on a care-based level. We're coming from decades of homelessness continually being criminalized.”
The protests in El Sereno began in May 2020 when a handful of families—many of whom were homeless or housing-insecure—became overwhelmed by rising rents and a lack of accessible housing options. Unable to find shelters that would accommodate them, they began moving into the vacant Caltrans-owned homes. “It was inspired by Moms 4 Housing who had occupied a vacant home in Oakland,” says Orozco. “At first, the city and Caltrans responded with creating low-income leasing agreements, but it was just bandaid-ing the situation.”
In November 2020, dozens of families decided to overtake the homes, demanding they be turned into accessible housing units. “[The city] response from the reclaiming was really violent, and turned into an armed eviction,” says Orozco. Activists and families were forcibly removed from the houses they’d occupied. “We were a corner house, and all the surrounding blocks just became swarmed with California Highway Patrol cars.” The activist ended up being one of the first of 62 organizers to be arrested. “Eventually, they emptied out every home, and they just continued to re-board up each one.” Since then, the housing crisis has been at something of a standstill. Some new legislative efforts—both at the local and state levels—are focusing on developing affordable housing in the neighborhood. “Some developers are working in conjunction with the city, and officials are trying to create an affordable housing plan,” says Orozco. “It’s definitely created a dialogue on a large scale. At least something is happening.” The El Sereno Community Land Trust, led by over 30 community activists including Orozco, also offers visions and proposals for how to move forward, including the creation of 252 affordable rental housing units.
The homelessness crisis has a clear connection to climate. As natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity, more people will have their housing destroyed. And for those who are already unhoused, extreme weather adds to the dangers they face.
Along with their organizing work around L.A.’s homelessness, Orozco currently serves as a youth board member on the Future Coalition’s Youth Direct Action Fund, where they help redistribute funds to those in need. “It’s really accessible for on-the-ground resource redistribution,” says Orozco. “There's been requests for research, mutual aid, and for art materials for marches or strikes.” They also recently participated in the Redwood Forest Defense, taking actions to protect redwood trees—such as organizing educational hikes and protesting clear-cutting logging sites—and are involved in LA Youth Uprising. “It’s a plan for youth development resources, as an alternative to the incarceration of youth and the juvenile system in L.A.,” says Orozco. “It reallocates funds from probation to this youth development department, then supports community-based organizations to connect with youth.”
This weekend, Orozco will also be helping organize a Farce of July event in L.A., which helps honor the history of Native people. “It’s an all-nations community concert gathering with speakers, vendors, and mutual aid,” says Orozco. No matter the work they’re doing, Orozco sees the efforts of young people at the core of making communities a better place. “It’s been amazing to see,” says Orozco. “All our worlds are connected in some way.”
Danielle Rey Frank (Hoopa), 18
Danielle Rey Frank understood from a young age that her community’s water flow was important. It’s her culture’s lifeline. “The Trinity River runs through the heart of the Hoopa Indian Reservation, and our home is beautiful—it’s built around the river,” says Frank. She grew up fishing for salmon on the river and doing her Hoopa culture’s boat dance ceremonies, where “we perform our boat dances on top of the river in canoes dressed in regalia,” says Frank. “It's a world-renewing ceremony. It's meant to balance the good and the bad in the world.”
But Frank has been protesting practically her entire life because her people's water and traditional ways of life have been under threat. Since the Central Valley Project was enacted in the 1930s, 18 dams and reservoirs have been put into place on major rivers—including Hoopa’s Trinity River—to create electricity and transport water to thirsty crops in nearby cities. This has caused a water shortage in their community and made the little that is left drastically decrease in quality. “For the past four or five years, the river has been very unhealthy,” says Frank. “By the end of August, our local news channel flashes all these warnings where we're not allowed to have our kids or dogs down there, because ingesting that water could kill you.” She sees protecting Hoopa’s main water source as crucial to her people’s survival—and key for the next generations to flourish, too: “We are a piece of the land, and it’s a piece of us; When it’s hurting, we’re hurting.”
Frank credits the matriarchs in her community for getting her involved in water protection work at such a young age. At 11, she met Margo Robbins, who is now the president of the Cultural Fire Management Council on the Hoopa reservation. Together, they worked on developing her Hoopa Valley High School’s Water Protectors Club. In high school, she met Melodie George-Moore, a medicine woman and Hoopa language teacher who served as her cultural mentor and educator, alongside her auntie Deborah Mcconnell.
Frank currently works for the organization Save California Salmon as its youth coordinator, where her current boss Regina Chichizola has served as another mentor. She joined the organization when she was just 16. “We created a curriculum called ‘Water Advocacy in Native California.’ It's actually a standardized curriculum that's being taught in about 30 public schools in California now,” says Frank. In her new role, she’s also worked on producing events such as Hoopa’s Fish Fair, where she will travel to schools and educate youth about the cultural importance of salmon.
Frank’s most impressive work to date, however, has been fighting alongside her community to remove the dams on the Hoopa Valley Reservation’s Trinity and Klamath rivers. “It’s going to be the biggest dam removal project in American history,” says Frank. “The permits are in the tribe’s hands now; we've got indigenous engineers designing the destruction of the dams.” Removing the dams will help restore a healthy fish population and is expected to improve the health of the river’s downstream, which is part of the route that Chinook salmon take from the ocean to their upstream spawning grounds.
Restoring the river’s downstream will also have a positive cultural impact—especially for the Hoopa tribe’s cultural boat dance ceremonies. As it is now, Frank says, “we have to fight every year for water to be released from these reservoirs, just to flush out the river enough so that our boats don't scrape the ground and we can actually perform that ceremony.”
In addition to her water work, Frank has recently been focusing on community outreach with a video series highlighting different Indigenous pathways of success. “Our youth are really struggling right now with substance abuse and mental health issues: I want to see our youth really thrive,” says Frank. She will also be running an Indigenous Youth Education Conference in L.A. later this year. “I’m able to take the lessons my matriarchs have taught me into my activism and career. My long term goals are to see the public education system change, to include the Indigenous perspective. It's going to take time to change the public education system—it's rooted in colonization, and full of lies.”
Abalone Eyes
Featuring: Danielle Rey Frank, Juliana Pole, Melodie Kay George-Moore, Margo Robbins, Deborah McConnell, Mary Hall
Director: Jazmin Garcia
Cinematographer: Edson Reyes
Creative Direction & Styling: Marcus Correa
Producer: Brent Assayag
HMU: Juliana Pole
1st AC: Nina Pilar Portillo
Art Director & Director's Assistant: Tasnim Boufelfel
Editor/Sound Design: Eva Dubovoy
Score: Harriet Brown
Sound Mixer: Branden Brown
Outreach / Creative Consultant: Atlakatl Ce Tochtli Orozco
Production Company: Anno
Additional photo credits
Photographed by Carlos Jaramillo
Creative Direction & Styling: Marcus Correa
Production Manager: Thomas Lopez
Hair & Makeup: Carla Perez (LA); Juliana Pole (Hoopa Valley)
Photo Assistant: Jack Bool (LA); Gabrielle Potts (Hoopa Valley)
Style Assistant: Zahira Chaudry
Producer: Kaylah Brathwaite
Visual Editor: Olivia Horner