Thómas Lopez Jr. on Uplifting Others

As a young child growing up in a Native community in Denver, Thómas Lopez Jr. was surrounded by warriors. They are, as they’ll proudly share, a grandchild of Chief Leonard Crow Dog Sr., a notable spiritual leader who played a critical role in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and worked diligently to preserve Native traditions in his community. Lopez is also the child of Water Woman Sharon Dominguez and Sundance Chief Thómas Lopez Sr., a matriarch and patriarch in their community who were also organizers and activists—even if they don’t use those terms themselves—and who instilled in Lopez a sense of duty and responsibility. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m a climate activist.’ Or I didn’t wake up one day and decide I’m a queer trans advocate,” Lopez says. “Those are things that we don’t really get a choice in as people of color, Indigenous people, as Black people. We don’t really get that luxury of just sitting back and not having to fight for everything.”

Now thirty-two, Lopez has spent years following in their family’s footsteps by advocating for their community. “From a really young age, I was exposed to a lot of the different fights that were happening, not only in my own backyard but all around me,” they recall. “It wasn’t like this was a job or we were activists. It was like, this is just what we do. We fight for the land, we fight for the water, we fight for the people.”

While growing up in a politically minded household primed Lopez to become the activist they are today, it was a call to action from the International Indigenous Youth Council at Standing Rock in 2016 to join a yearlong fight with other mostly Native activists to disrupt the construction of a pipeline that catapulted them into their current climate advocacy work. “They made a call to action along the lines of ‘any young person that breathed air or drank water.’ It was basically a call to all young people,” they recall.

A scheduled week in Standing Rock turned into three, then Lopez returned to Denver to pack up another bag and went right back for three months to be in a vibrant Native community of young people organizing to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a time Lopez describes as deeply traumatizing, with the militarized response to protests including burned teepees, tanks, and protestors getting maced and arrested. “That was when I got very exposed to what we now know as frontline direct action in the way that we often have to do it,” they recall. “I would say that was the moment, those were the moments when we realized, ‘Okay, how do we take that sense of warriorship and make it something that is understandable to the world, to everybody?’ That's really ultimately when I found that voice.”

When Lopez came back to Denver from Standing Rock, their eyes had been opened to the structures that have ruined the Earth and the environment around them. They noticed a large oil refinery that they drove by every single day, one that contributes to the poor air quality in Denver, which at least two studies have shown is among the ten worst air areas in the United States. This led Lopez to organize a climate strike protest in 2022, in which young people, in part, shut down banks with links to oil pipelines. “We actually shut down Chase Bank, and we strung up a piñata of [Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon right outside of the bank. This is after they’d already shut down, they cleared out their ATMs. We were celebrating that we had shut them down, and we just hit this piñata filled with candy outside of their bank,” Lopez shares of the action, which consisted of mostly young people between the ages of eleven and nineteen. “It was really amazing to see those young people step into that power and feel that power of the frontline, and not just the power of a frontline but the power of a win from organizing to actually see that we did what we said we were going to come here to do. Nobody got hurt, luckily, and nobody went to jail and everybody played their role in the way that we said we were going to. It was a really beautiful experience.”

Throughout Lopez’s time in traditional climate movement spaces, which they note can be extremely white spaces, they’ve found the lack of support for Native youth infuriating. The recent death of his sister, Andrea Ann Rose Kat, pushed them to start their own organization. “You guys don’t give a shit about the drug addicts. You don’t give a shit about the people who have to sell their bodies. You don’t give a shit about the people who don’t go to college, who don’t have a certain reading level, who don’t have a certain socioeconomics,” Lopez says of many of the organizations that claim to advocate for climate justice. “Let’s be fucking real here.”

Earlier this year, Lopez launched the nonprofit INDIGiQUEER to support and provide visibility for queer and trans, Black and Indigenous creatives and artists. The organization will provide fiscal sponsorship support as an incubator for grassroots initiatives by Native youth across the country and create opportunities for young Native people to gather in community and connect with one another. A few of INDIGiQUEER’s initial grantees include Ice Vice Magazine, a fashion and art magazine highlighting queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color who shape culture; Love & Water, a mutual aid group in South Dakota supporting youth by, in part, distributing back-to-school supplies; and HEARTSPC, a Black- and Indigenous-led group in North Carolina bringing together the community through a range of cultural events.

Ultimately, Lopez says, they’re organizing for a society that returns to Native ways, which are older than the systems of today like capitalism and provide ways of supporting life rather than extracting it for profit. “These structures that are placed before us, they’re in their infancy still, the American and British rule,” they say. “It is not ancient. I saw that at work, how these Indigenous ways are [still] there and they fought for them and held onto them for a very specific reason—because they work, because they’re strong. They do have the ability of getting us out of what we’re in right now.”

It is through the combination of their identities, as a Native and queer person, that they see their work intimately intertwined with who they are. “I was once told that what we’re doing to the Earth we’re doing to ourselves. That statement was extremely profound to me and has resonated with me throughout all of my work,” Lopez shares. “The climate crisis is ultimately a story of erasure and that experience is not limited to climate, [but is] rather a shared experience also held by both my Indigenous and queer identities. When I fight, I fight to undo the erasure of all living beings, including the Earth, of Indigenous peoples and of queer peoples around the world.”

For more information, please visit INDIGiQUEER.org. See this story and many more in print by ordering our eighth issue here.