National Geographic Explorer photographer Kiliii Yüyan's recent book of documentary photos and essays, Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science, and Restoring the Planet, is an anthology of messages from nine Indigenous communities. The images and words highlight the successful land and water stewardship by these communities based on their philosophies, knowledge, and traditional science. Based on over a decade of work, the book is published by Braided River, an imprint of Mountaineers Books. It covers Indigenous communities from Australia to Ecuador, from the Klamath River to Utqiaġvik, Alaska.
Yüyan grew up in the United States and Taiwan. After 20 years of building traditional skin-on-frame kayaks, he took on photography. His stories on Indigenous communities for National Geographic Magazine are popular with readers. Yüyan spoke with the Emerald about his work on this book.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Photo captions of Kiliii Yüyan's images come directly from the book.
Tell me how you decided to write this book.
I didn't start out knowing that I'd work on this book. I went where my curiosity took me and found there's been a throughline in my projects throughout my photography career. I also would approach the topic without the initial skepticism that other photographers in these spaces might have. I can start off by assuming that what Native people tell me is right.
You said that you grew up with your grandma a lot of the time. What was your grandma like?
She taught us how to make butterfly nets, and we'd go out and catch dragonflies and butterflies. She encouraged us to catch things and interact with them. I remember once I grabbed a really large grasshopper when we were living in Texas, and it kicked me with sharp legs, so it sliced my hand, and I was bleeding, so I let it go. She said, "Don't let it go. You put it through the pain of being caught. You need to hang on to it to observe it before you let it go if that's what you had set out to do."
You bring up sovereignty in your book as a powerful place from which to affect policy. Tell me more about that.
A lot of places where conservation is working well are in Indigenous-majority nations, which means that their laws were created around the values of the people that live in them. So in Greenland, for example, you can't own private property. There's no such thing as private property ownership, because everyone owns the land. You belong to the land. The land belongs to you. You can own a house that you've built, but you cannot own the land that it sits on. Imagine that here. How different would that be?
In Canada and the U.S., where there are Indigenous nations inside of nations, the more sovereignty a people have, the more effective they can be at preserving their environment, like on the Klamath, where they took down the largest dam in the history of the world. It took 30 years of them exerting their sovereignty using whatever legal means were within their power. Now, the river looks like a natural river, flowing in a snake pattern.
You mention a special relationship with a community in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Tell me about the community in Alaska and how they were able to take back their stewardship of the whales, the very thing they hunt, after they were banned from whaling.
In the late '70s, the International Whaling Commission sent a scientist team to look at the health of whale populations. They stood on the ice and counted whales that went by. Their estimate of the number of whales was low, and they banned hunting them. This was devastating to the local Iñupiat community, who depended on whale hunting for subsistence. The local elders knew the scientists had the numbers wrong and told the scientists bowhead whales also swim under the ice and away from shore where you can't see them. They said the population is many times bigger.
The local community elders said, "Look, we know that you can do good science, but you need help, so we're going to have our hunters get you to the places that you didn't go to, and we're going to use traditional models to show you where the whales are." The new count came back at closer to 8,000 whales. After that, the locals very quickly were able to obtain rights in court to manage their own whales. Thirty years later, the population of bowhead whale numbers have more than tripled under Indigenous management, while they hunt the whales.
How do you go about your work of documenting Indigenous communities and their knowledge?
I trust in the process. I go to these communities and ask them to be formally introduced to the community. There's always an opening ceremony. The community shows up. I show my work. We eat a lot of food. I play with a lot of kids, and then we work on the project. Along the way, they'll pass along their message to me. In Mongolia they had a specific message, "We're bringing you to a particular place in the mountains because we believe that spirituality is conservation, and we'll show you why that's important."
What do you hope people take away from the book?
We designed this so that the different communities [featured in the book] can hand it to their policymakers to advocate for causes that protect their environment, saying, "We're here in this book. What we do is not a one-off. We're part of an international movement."
Another audience is the young people in those communities themselves, so they can see their own community reflected back at them, because the messages in this book are not from me: They're from that community for the next generation.
Then, we're also offering the book to the people who are conservation-focused, from the wealthy nation public, with a nod that human beings should not be evicted from natural spaces. It helps to explain why Indigenous practices work.
You live in Judkins Park. Tell me about what you like about the area you live in in Seattle.
I love that you can see all these different communities interacting in our neighborhood. They're in the U.S., and all these traditional ways of relating to each other, especially in how they relate to food. In a [neighborhood restaurant] there are sometimes large gatherings in a back room where they're serving a special, traditional meal just for their community, so people are celebrating for 12 hours, hanging out. That's so beautiful, and it's one of the things I truly love about being here. It's not something you see in many places.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
Editor's Note: This story was updated on April 8 to include the full title of the book.
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