Ever wondered how you can do more for public lands but you aren’t sure where to start? Outdoor Alliance’s Outdoor Allies series explores how other outdoor adventurers got their start in advocacy work and their advice for how you can harness your passion for the outdoors into advocacy for the land and water you love. Cooper Davis is a Jesuit educator in Phoenix, Arizona dedicated to uplifting Indigenous youth voices in defense of our common home and creating opportunities for young people of all backgrounds to experience the outdoors.

What do you like to do outside and how did you first get connected with the outdoors?

Strider the Husky still getting us outside at the ripe age of 13!

I first got connected with the outdoors when I went to college in Flagstaff, and I got a Husky and he wanted to go on every adventure imaginable. I got started on hiking and that got me into mountaineering and rock climbing, and then I had to start riding bikes since my dog was so fast. Recently I’ve been really getting into whitewater, too. Going outside wasn’t part of my family’s culture growing up, but in college, I dove headfirst and even considered a career in the outdoors. But I realized I wanted to be outside with people.

When I first became a teacher ten years ago, I started asking administrators how I could take students outside and it’s now one of my favorite parts of my job. We take cultural immersion trips, the first one I ran was visiting Supai in the Grand Canyon. Coming down, hiking in with backpacks full of art supplies and science experiments really combined my love of advocacy and teaching with my love of the outdoors.

What do you think the outdoors offer your students that’s so important?

Rowing lessons on the 8th grade San Juan rafting trip

Outside of the classroom setting, you get to experience relationships on a deeper level. These awe-inspiring situations bring out a different side of kids, it lights them up. We are a Catholic school, and working with Indigenous students, finding the beauty of God’s creation and connecting with it on a deeper, more spiritual level is something we do every time we take kids outside. Our bodies, the water, the land, the air—the gifts we have been given.

It also helps foster stewardship. If they have a really good time, build great memories, and connect those dots with the spiritual component, it really animates them to come back to school and to work with me and other organizations on protecting places and conserving the environment. It’s easy to draw those between connections between enjoying the outdoors and protecting the outdoors for students who have had those experiences outside.

This was just covered in an amazing episode of Dirtbag Diaries and on Patagonia’s blog, but will you tell us a little bit about what led you to help organize the Prayer Run to protect Oak Flat?

I started to lead the Native American Club at Brophy Prep, and wanted to do something cooler than just eat lunch together. I wanted to figure out what would animate the club. At about that time, I saw an article what was happening at Oak Flat. An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) had just been published, and there was a 60-day clock before Oak Flat would be transferred to foreign mining companies.

In response to that, Wendsler Nosie, leader of the Apache stronghold, invited people out to pray at Oak Flat. I went and started talking to them and it became clear they wanted to do this run and make it happen in the midst of covid. Vanessa Nosie had had a dream about people running from all four directions so they were looking for people to manifest that dream. We volunteered ourselves to run from the north because all our students were from Tribes north of Oak Flat: Navajo, Hopi, Alaska Natives. It was a beautiful experience that united a generation of students on this campus. The ripple effects of that experience are still driving us. The next day after that run, the Biden administration rescinded the EIS. Now the timeline is unclear, but we have more time for advocacy. And a delay is definitely better than inevitable destruction.

Marching into Oak Flat to end the 227 mile spiritual run. Photo credit Shaun Price.

As a teacher, what have you learned about young people and their relationship with advocacy? How do they think about their ability to change things?

It’s part of our mission as a school to envision a hope filled future and my students are pretty hope filled. They feel like they have a voice, they feel like they can stand up and make a difference. Instead of trying to identify problems, we think about how to use friction positively. We think about how we develop relationships to solve problems. We do that in all sorts of ways, from how to throw away trash on campus to how to work with the federal government to pass legislation.

This generation is really good at being uncynical. And it’s well received. We had a meeting with the governor of Arizona’s staff this week along with Sierra Club and Access Fund, and you can see how much the dynamic in these offices change when lawmakers hear young people speaking from their hearts.They are so fresh, they have hope, it really inspires action.

In your environmental advocacy courses, what do you want students to come away knowing?

Bouldering at Oak Flat with members of Brophy Native American Club and ally Tommy Caldwell. Photo credit Shaun Price.

I want them to understand how you take a relationship driven approach, how you understand other people, and how they play a role in the systems that define our world. Everything is an interconnected system and what holds it together is people. If you can understand people, make them feel heard, you can accomplish goals because they become everyone’s goals. Instead of thinking about using other people to get what you want, I get them to think about working with other people to get something everyone wants.

Lightning round:

Favorite close to home spot: Oak Flat, there’s no place that’s ever been more important to me

A book you would recommend: Holes, which we read on a Grand Canyon trip recently

Another advocate you admire: Tommy Caldwell, if more pro athletes took his approach, we wouldn’t have an environmental crisis

Outdoor Allies: Cooper Davis