These Indigenous women are organizing a movement to stop a deadly pipeline

Catawba Mountain is covered by dense forests, traversed by meandering streams, and full of karst caves and sinkholes. The mountain is also very steep. "They were going to bury 42-inch pipe and send high-pressure gas through it," says Desirée, who has a background in natural resources management. "That's one of the largest diameter gas pipes ever built, and it's never been tested on steep terrain." She had visions of gas leaks and explosions as well as landslides as heavy rains washed soil from the destabilized slopes.

As a mother with young children, though, Desirée's capacity to take action on the MVP was limited. In 2018, the year after her family moved to Virginia, crews began laying pipe up Catawba Mountain. "It was kind of traumatizing and very, very frustrating," says Desirée, who drove past the work site regularly while taking her oldest daughter to story time at the library. "They were slashing down trees and clearing land." And sediment from the aftermath of that destruction is already a problem.

During severe rainstorms, sediment overwhelms the measures intended to safeguard waterways. "It's a huge, steep incline with sediment pouring down into streams ― if you live here you see all that," Desirée says. All that sediment threatens aquatic life, including the endangered Roanoke logperch, and water quality.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline also raises deep-seated environmental justice issues. "The rural parts of Virginia get much less attention politically than other areas of the state," Desirée says. , adding that the populous areas in the north near Washington DC dominate state politics. "It was easy to push the pipeline through ― living here feels very much like you're in a Sacrifice Zone."

Desirée, who is Monacan, was even more distressed when she learned that the Mountain Valley Pipeline's route encroached on sacred Indigenous sites. "Part of the reason we moved here was that we wanted our kids to have a connection to ancestral homelands," says Desirée, whose third baby was born this summer.

Landowners on Bent Mountain, which is about half an hour from Desirée's house, told her of multiple Monacan burial mounds as well as pottery and other artifacts on their properties, and she went to see for herself. "It's important for us to go there and pray, and to honor, respect and protect our ancestors," Desirée says.

These sacred sites are not officially recognized, rather knowledge of them has been passed down through generations locally. "There's been erasure of a lot of East Coast tribes," Desirée says, adding that British colonialists displaced, fragmented, and re-wrote the narratives of Indigenous peoples. "Documentation of our history has been a challenge."

A turning point in Desirée's work to protect rural communities, land and water as well as sacred Indigenous sites from the Mountain Valley Pipeline came in 2019, when she got a job as a climate justice organizer with Mothers Out Front, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children from climate change. In addition to the MVP’s other devastating environmental impacts, the project will also enlarge Virginia's carbon footprint. "Mountain Valley Pipeline will double emissions for the state," Desirée says, explaining that methane is a greenhouse gas with 25 times the potency of carbon dioxide for trapping heat in the atmosphere. Now, giving voice to other mothers' concerns about ― and raising awareness of ― the pipeline's environmental impacts is part of her job.