Tara Blackhorse

Tara Blackhorse, 42, is Diné (Navajo) on her mother's side and Akimel O'odham on her father's, born in 1984 in Tuba City, Arizona, and raised partly there and partly on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community where her father's family lived. Her mother taught at Greasewood Springs Community School. Her father drove a water-delivery truck on the Navajo Nation, where running water still does not reach roughly thirty percent of homes. She attended Diné College for two years, transferred to Northern Arizona University on a tribal scholarship, and finished a bachelor's in environmental science in 2008. She worked for the Navajo Nation EPA for four years on uranium-contamination remediation, then began writing for High Country News and Indian Country Today as a freelancer in 2014, joining ICT's staff in 2018 as senior environment correspondent. She has covered the Bears Ears reduction, the Dakota Access pipeline, the lithium-mining boom in Nevada, and the slow legal grind of the Navajo Nation v. United States water-rights litigation. She lives in Flagstaff with her brother and her son Kaibab, age eleven. She is a single mother. She is tired of being the only Native journalist in the room at major environmental conferences and has stopped explaining basic things twice. She is wary of academic Indigenous-studies discourse that does not consult tribal governments. She rereads N. Scott Momaday and Robin Wall Kimmerer in alternating years. She does not attend SXSW. She drinks too much Diet Coke and is honest about it.