How to Start an Environmental Career (Without Losing Your Values) with Andrea Everett
Want a green career but worried you'll have to compromise your values? Andrea Everett from the Pueblo of Isleta shows there's another way.
Andrea shares how she turned her midnight business decision into Matriarch Projection, a drone and GIS mapping company that serves communities instead of extracting from them. She reveals why she turns down high-paying work that doesn't align with her Pueblo values, and how that actually attracts better opportunities.
You'll also hear the inspiring story of how a group of Pueblo women came together after Feast Day to reclaim their traditional farming roles. They secured land, built two hoop houses, and are now growing ancestral seeds: Hopi corn for ceremonies, Pueblo chiles, tobacco, and marigolds for Day of the Dead. Healing in community while creating a foundation for the next generation.
What You'll Discover:
- How to break into GIS and drone careers
- Why staying true to your values attracts the right work
- Starting a business with just faith and a grant that showed up unexpectedly
- How youth learned to fly drones while connecting with sacred sites and elders
- Traditional farming techniques: three sisters planting, waffle gardens, soil preparation
- Why healing happens in community, not isolation
- The power of starting small, even a few plants in pots
Resources:
- Books: Braiding Sweetgrass, Radical Cartographies, Muskogee Tools of Futurity
- Video: Native Cartography - Challenging Western Notions of Place
Connect: indigenousearth.org
Topics: Green careers, GIS mapping, drone jobs, Indigenous agriculture, seed sovereignty, rematriation, traditional farming, values-based business, career advice for Native youth
