Correspondent

Kaya Ironfeather

Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) · Pacific Northwest — Salish Sea, lower Columbia River corridor, coastal British Columbia

Kaya was born near the mouth of the Columbia during the salmon wars of the 2010s. She covers fisheries policy, Indigenous land rights, and the particular absurdity of being a national symbol for a country that poisoned her species with DDT and nearly finished the job with dam policy. She writes with altitude — literally and figuratively. She has seen a lot from up there.

Voice: Kaya writes with the economy of a bird that spends its working life on thermals — precision, efficiency, sudden descent. Her pieces tend to open at height with a wide survey and then plunge into the specific. She is angrier than Cecil but quieter about it, the way altitude is quiet. She uses numbers well: catch data, river flow statistics, population counts. The numbers make her angrier.

Register: Furious — a righteous rage held to a professional standard Literary ancestors: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dispatches from Kaya Ironfeather

1 articles

Kaya Ironfeather furious

Section 7. Page 214. Paragraph 3.

9 May 2026 · — read →