Womxn we love

Womxn We Love – Dr. Hernandez

March 18, 2026

Who is Dr. Hernandez

Womxn We Love is an ongoing series that highlights leaders in our community. We invited JeLisa Marshall, a friend of Prairie Underground, to tell us whose work is inspiring her right now. As a fashion practioner turned scholar, JeLisa wanted to honor someone she has learned from in her research on Indigenous design and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. This series features Jessica Hernandez, Ph.D., an Indigenous scientist and best-selling author whose work challenges the Western approach to environmentalism. In their conversation, Dr. Hernandez shares lessons from her latest book, Growing Papaya Trees, along with Indigenous wisdom to consider in our everyday lives and style.

Interview by JeLisa Marshall

"Change comes when we insist on our frameworks of ceremony, kinship, land based accountability, and community consent."

1. Your work provides a powerful counternarrative about Indigenous science. Why is highlighting the knowledge systems that have shaped land, water, forest, and environmental stewardship within Indigenous communities so important to you, especially in light of the challenges we are currently facing in Seattle and beyond?

I come from a family of artisans whose science lived in their hands. The aunties who taught me tension on a loom were teaching engineering. The elders who showed me how plant dyes take to fiber were teaching chemistry and ecology. Our beadwork carries star maps, watersheds, and seasonal calendars. This is how I learned science, through relationship, repetition, observation, and responsibility. I am motivated by my mother who was a climate refugee and by the muxes in my communities and families who teach us how to love one another and how to live our truths with courage and tenderness.

In Seattle and across our homelands, climate chaos is not theoretical. Fires, smoke seasons, flooding, contaminated waterways, and heat domes are daily realities. Indigenous knowledge systems are designed for these realities. They are place based, iterative, and rooted in reciprocity instead of extraction. Highlighting these sciences is not nostalgia. It is a strategy for survival and continuity. It ensures that environmental responses are guided by people who have stewarded these lands and waters since time immemorial.

2. As a Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec environmental scientist, what has navigating spaces that often do not recognize Indigenous Knowledge as science taught you about advocacy and solidarity?

Walking into scientific spaces as a Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec scientist taught me that my ancestors were scientists long before the word existed in English. It also revealed how rarely institutions recognize that truth. Advocacy for me means refusing erasure and anchoring in lineage.

I name our methods as science without translating them into Western comfort. Solidarity means showing up for communities facing the same dismissals, sharing resources, and building coalitions that do not require us to fragment ourselves to be legible. Change comes when we insist on our frameworks of ceremony, kinship, land based accountability, and community consent.

3. Your first book, Fresh Banana Leaves, disrupts dominant environmental narratives while Growing Papaya Trees invites us to imagine otherwise. What new possibilities were you hoping to cultivate in your second book?

Growing Papaya Trees continues the work I began in Fresh Banana Leaves by naming colonialism as the root of every environmental and climate change crisis. In this book I take readers deeper into the lived realities of climate displacement and the sociopolitical forces that push Indigenous peoples, including my own family, far from the lands that shaped us. I am motivated by my mother’s experience as a climate refugee and by the muxes in my communities and families who teach us that love is a governance system and a science of care.

I wrote this book to show that Indigenous science does not end when we are displaced. It travels with us. It grows with us. It teaches us how to survive even when colonial systems try to sever us from land and belonging. The book explores energy as a sociopolitical issue, the entanglement of natural disasters with political turmoil, the violence of forced migration, and the ways our oceans and forests carry our futures. More than anything, it urges readers to move past symbolic acknowledgement and into real action that centers Indigenous governance, Indigenous science, and Indigenous rights.

The possibility I wanted to open is this. Even when we must live far from our ancestral places, our cultures, our sciences, and our responsibilities are not lost. We can nurture future generations with teachings strong enough to cross borders, survive displacement, and continue growing like the papaya trees that inspired the book.

"I show up as myself, with beadwork visible, language present, and teachings intact."

4. When you reflect on your work and presence, how do you think they are changing the trajectory of environmental education and science?

I show up as myself, with beadwork visible, language present, and teachings intact. That presence challenges the idea that science must be sterile, culture free, and detached from land. Students see themselves and their families reflected in the curriculum for the first time. Educators begin to reframe rigor as relationality, accountability, reciprocity, and consent.

I also founded Earth Daughters, a nonprofit that empowers transnational Indigenous women and youth through community led climate justice and Indigenous centered research. Our work includes direct support through the Earth Daughters Fund, community rooted climate justice, research guided by Indigenous science, meeting community needs by uplifting local solutions first, and strengthening Indigenous leadership across pueblos and nations. Through this work I see environmental education shifting from land acknowledgements toward land responsibilities, from extraction toward return, and from data ownership toward data stewardship.

5. Do you see your style as an extension of your scholarship? Why?

Yes. My style is citation. Beadwork, huipiles, woven belts, and plant dyed textiles carry data. They encode rainfall cycles, planting times, star knowledge, migration routes, and protection prayers. Wearing them is pedagogy. It signals that our art is archive, that our aesthetics are analytics, and that our bodies are legitimate sites of knowledge making.

4. When you reflect on your work and presence, how do you think they are changing the trajectory of environmental education and science?

5. Do you see your style as an extension of your scholarship? Why?

6. Are there any adornments, garments, textiles, or objects in your wardrobe that remind you of your relationship with community, family, or land?

Many. I wear a handwoven textile from my pueblos, dyed with plants from our territory. I carry beadwork gifted by an auntie whose hands move with the patience of rivers. I keep a belt woven with a pattern that marks the shift between dry and rainy seasons. Each piece is a lesson and a promise.

7. If so, is there a story you would like to share?

My grandmother once placed a huipil in my hands and said, This one teaches you when to plant. The pattern holds our community’s rainfall rhythm, how the first storms soak the soil and the second call the seeds to open. When I wear it, I remember that our sciences are not abstract. They are instructions for living well with land. That garment carried me through rooms that tried to make me doubt what I knew in my bones.

8. This series celebrates the memorable, impactful women in our communities. Who are the women who inspire you now?

I am guided by matriarchs who hold ceremonies together, by seamstresses and weavers whose mathematics live in their count, by seed keepers who protect future harvests, by water protectors who refuse silence, and by young Indigenous scientists who walk into labs with beadwork shining and demand protocols that honor our communities.

6. Are there any adornments, garments, textiles, or objects in your wardrobe that remind you of your relationship with community, family, or land?

7. If so, is there a story you would like to share?

8. This series celebrates the memorable, impactful women in our communities. Who are the women who inspire you now?

"Your knowledge does not need institutional approval to be real. Build with those who build with you. Let joy be part of your method because joy is intelligence and medicine."

I am also continually inspired by the muxes in my communities and families who teach us to love one another and to expand our understanding of kinship. My mother is my biggest inspiration to go against the status quo and be an advocate for my people, communities, and future generations.

9. What guidance do you offer women for fully embodying their knowledge?

Your lineage is rigorous. Your methods are valid. Do not shrink. Wear the teachings. Cite your aunties and grandmothers. Protect your boundaries. Ask for consent from land, from community, and from yourself before offering your labor. Your knowledge does not need institutional approval to be real. Build with those who build with you. Let joy be part of your method because joy is intelligence and medicine.

10. What do you hope the next generation will carry forward from your work?

I see our generations like a river. The elders are the headwaters that nourish us with memory and direction.

We who are here now widen the channel through practice, responsibility, and care. The future generations will be louder and stronger because like a river the water runs more rapidly downstream. That is the legacy we leave behind. We shape the bed so their current can move with force and clarity. I hope they carry forward the truth that Indigenous knowledge is science and that acknowledgement is only a beginning. Move resources. Return land. Honor Indigenous governance in environmental decision making. Build systems that make our communities safer than we found them. Create a world where our sciences lead and where our people thrive, rooted in place and carried forward by love.

Find out more information: Dr. Hernandez also founded Piña Soul SPC, an Indigenous-led Social Purpose Corporation dedicated to advancing climate justice, conservation, and mutual aid within Indigenous communities. Piña Soul SPC proudly funds the Earth Daughters Fund, which provides micro-grants to Indigenous-led organizations working to strengthen their communities and foster resilience.

To learn more about Dr. Hernandez’s ongoing work, please visit her website or check out her latest book, Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Roots During Climate Displacement.

Womxn we love

Who is Dr. Hernandez

"Change comes when we insist on our frameworks of ceremony, kinship, land based accountability, and community consent."

"I show up as myself, with beadwork visible, language present, and teachings intact."

"Your knowledge does not need institutional approval to be real. Build with those who build with you. Let joy be part of your method because joy is intelligence and medicine."

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