Young Leader to Watch: Danielle Frank, Rios to Rivers Board Member
Protecting and caring for her home lands was ingrained in Danielle Frank from a young age, and now she’s turning that instinct into action on a much wider level—at the ripe old age of 20. Leading a charge to protect waters and lands as a board member of Rios to Rivers, and introducing young native professionals into the philanthropic sector, Frank is busy making change.
Learning the value of advocacy
Before she turned 10, Frank, a Hupa tribal member and Yurok descendant, had attended protests with her father, marching to free the Klamath River from four dams. She says of her father, “He did his best to make sure that we knew that it was our job to take care of the places that we come from.”
Growing up on the Hoopa Indian Reservation, she founded the Hoopa Valley High School Water Protectors Club as a student.
“We were able to bring students from a reservation school, 90% native population, together to talk about water policy and tribal sovereignty—the way that policies and legislation actually really affect us, even though we are a sovereign nation, and how water rights and diversions and all of these things come to happen because our decision-makers are the ones who are deciding what's important and it's not our people,” she says.
The group took trips down to Sacramento to make public comments, and she realized just how powerful it was to show up and make their voices heard—and how disadvantaged their community was by not being able to afford to travel like that to engage with policy more.
“That's why we're not in these rooms,” she noted. “Because you don't make it accessible to us. If we weren't here on a school's dime in a school van, then none of us would be here.”
Eventually, the water board ended up giving them meetings in Redding, about two hours from her community, and they were able to co-host the largest water board meeting in the state of California history. Together, their group brought together nine tribes and hundreds of people.
“That was the first time that I was just like, ‘Whoa, look at what we can do if we just bring people together.’ Everybody has a story. Everybody has a value. We just need to show them that,” Frank says. “We need to show our decision-makers that we’re still out here and we need to show our people the importance of going to those decision-makers, because we can influence them. We do have a voice. It hasn't always been like that. Right now, it's like that more than ever."
Photo from one of the first protests Danielle went to with her Dad in Sacramento. Photo Credit: Danielle Frank, 2017
Taking advocacy to the next level—policy
While working in advocacy was a natural progression for Frank, she realized over time that grassroots activism needed to be taken to the next level if real change was going to happen. As she dived into the history of her family and her people, learning that much of the trauma, violence and atrocities they’d been dealt had actually been legal, Frank realized that to change things in the future, she would need to change the laws herself.
“I started looking at, ‘How did we get from there to here?’” she says. “It was definitely community pushing. It was resistance. It was advocacy. But at the end of the day, all of that was followed up by policy… The people who made that happen were policy-makers, the decision-makers.”
Frank says she’s still met very few native lawyers, and that learning to navigate federal law and native law will be crucial to moving forward. “I can get this law degree,” she says. “I can learn how to write these pieces of legislation. I can learn how to propose them, and who to propose them to. I can make people listen to me if I have this law degree, and I can eventually change things. I can erase some of these policies that are detrimental to my people. I can understand why our rivers are being diverted and killed and I can bring something to fight that.”
The modern day warrior, she says, is the lawyer fighting for tribes in a way nobody else can. And Frank has her sights—ultimately—set on the Supreme Court.
Connecting to the water and land, physically
For Frank, learning to kayak was another thing that changed her outlook. As a young college student working for multiple environmental and policy advocacy organizations in Sacramento, she jumped at the chance to get involved when Rios to Rivers reached out to her. She’d heard of the exchanges they facilitated in her home river basins, but had never had the chance to be involved. This time, she joined as a student counselor, learning to kayak.
“I've never had a relationship with the water in this way,” she says. “That in itself has just been life changing. But being able to share my expertise in the legal field and in advocacy and in community and culture, all in one with the students from my own river basin and river basins right up the river and down the river has been a blessing.”
Photo from Paddle Tribal Water’s latest group trip on the Deschutes River, October 2023.
Rios to Rivers, as an organization, works to connect young indigenous people to their local waters and to each other, empowering them to be the next generation of leaders defending their communities and the environment. Through Rios to Rivers, Frank has connected more intimately with her home rivers, and also stepped onto the international leadership stage, attending the UN Climate Conference in Egypt, where she sat on an international panel about hydropower and the dangers it imposes on indigenous communities.
“I got to learn from our relatives in Bolivia and France and Chile and all these other places, and really recognize how big of a problem this is,” she says. “That the only solution is to make everybody recognize that hydropower is just not a sustainable solution.”
Passing the torch to other young indigenous leaders is crucial, she says, and part of the work Frank does now as a board member with Rios to Rivers.
“Paddle Tribal Waters is a program we're using to train and uplift young indigenous people from the Klamath River Basin, river-based communities, young indigenous folks to train in whitewater kayaks to be able to paddle as the first descent in over 100 years from the headwaters of the Klamath River, Klamath-Modoc territory, all the way down to the mouth of the ocean down at Requa Yurok Territory,” Frank says.
The key here, she says, is that it’s about so much more than recreational activity.
“This program is everything that I think we didn't know we needed,” she says. “Yes, it’s working on training students for the first descent. But it's also training our students to be indigenous leaders, to learn about advocacy and the reason that the Klamath Dams were being removed and the reason they were put there in the first place, and how we got from there to here. It's a program that is bringing the Klamath River basin and tribes together in a way that is so healing.”
The fight to remove the four dams on the Klamath River took more than 100 years. And now, looking forward to the end of next summer, the Klamath River will once again run free. Frank says the movement coalescing on the Klamath is reminding them all that their voices deserve to be heard, “They have to get involved in these fights. As tribal people, we don't have a choice. It's not something you choose to be an advocate and choose to be an environmentalist. It's in our DNA. Being able to give them the resources and tools to be successful in these fights and know what's going on before they even get there, that is something that's going to change their lives.”
Before and After Copco 2 dam removal comparison. Photo credit to Shane Dawson
Learn more about the Paddle Tribal Waters program here.
We’re in a defining moment—a moment where we can choose to be overwhelmed, disconnected and discouraged, or where we can choose to be positive, embrace change and lift up the work of others seeking a better future together. We’re proud to support the work of the people and organizations out changing this world for the better—for all of us. Some may be small, some large. All are mighty. Each month, we’ll be highlighting one of our Mighty Partners and we encourage you to get to know them, support them, and share their work with your friends, families and colleagues. Let’s get to work.