Amid climate and biodiversity crises, photographer Kiliii Yüyan’s stunning imagery captures Indigenous knowledge that is already sustaining the planet

interview by Cathy Carroll | photography by Kiliii Yüyan

In Guardians of Life, Seattle-based, award-winning National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan captures the critical yet underrecognized role that Indigenous peoples around the world continue to play in sustaining biological and cultural diversity. Large-scale images throughout the 9-by-12-inch hardcover range from narwhals swimming along sea ice in Greenland to spearfishing divers in the remote islands of Palau. It is powered by the wisdom of more than two dozen Indigenous voices as the biodiversity and climate crises converge, with a call to support Indigenous leadership.

How did an encounter with orcas influence your decision to tell the stories of Indigenous communities around the world?

Once, in the San Juan Islands, from my kayak I watched a dozen black fins drift motionless in the distance while my friend Erin (a great lover of orcas) hummed with barely contained excitement. When the waiting became too much, she leaned out over the water and started singing Bob Dylan. My rational side resisted, but when she shifted into “Hey Jude,” my love for The Beatles won out and I joined in, my voice traveling through the skin of the kayak and out into the sea.

Almost instantly, the fins stirred and turned toward us. In that moment I heard my grandmother’s voice: “If you want the whales to come close, sing to them.” She was Nanai/Hezhe, Indigenous to Manchuria, and what I’d once taken for folktales I later began to see as thousands of years of ecological wisdom.

An orca calf surfaced, nudged Erin’s stern, then slipped beneath my boat, its pressure wave rising up through the hull and into my legs. I had sung to the whales, and they had remembered.

How can the Indigenous perspectives in your book help guide efforts to restore and protect the planet?

The cutting edge of the environmental community understands that Indigenous peoples are by far the most successful conservationists. Nearly 40 percent of all remaining natural land is Indigenous territory, and 80 percent of all the species on earth live in Indigenous lands.

We need to move beyond land acknowledgments and into a deeper understanding of how, exactly, Indigenous stewardship works. It seems almost magical, but is actually grounded in specific Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous peoples have evolved amazing systems to manage their places for thousands of years, but almost no outsiders know these stories, from restoring the bowhead whale population in Alaska to managing landscapes with fire in Australia.

Understanding how the nine communities in the book work, almost invisibly, is the first step to helping the rest of the world understand why it is important to support the land title of Indigenous peoples and how to start seeing the land as First Peoples do.

Describe a favorite example of traditional ecological knowledge and its importance today.

One is the system of fishery management, in Palau, an Indigenousmajority island nation in the Pacific. The bul is a traditional reef closure system. One day, the chief of the region hears from a fisherman that a particular reef has few parrotfish remaining. So he swims it and sees that’s true, declaring a change in the bul, closing that reef for fishing and a previous closure is re-opened.

One night, some teenagers sneak over to the closed reef and catch many big parrotfish that have re-populated there and sell them. But a community member sees the teenagers’ fishing. Soon, those teens are getting harangued by their auntie and their family for the next month, and they wish they’d gotten put in jail instead.

This is extremely effective, lever-aging social intelligence, community enforcement, real-time ecosystem observation. The traditional values of Palauans are encoded into law because it is an Indigenous-majority nation, and this is why Palau has one of the largest marine protected areas on earth and some of the healthiest fisheries and coral reefs in the world.