COLLEEN FRIDAY
WIND RIVER CONSERVATION ORGANIZER
As the Wind River conservation organizer, Colleen provides organizing support to protect and restore Indigenous conservation priorities, including water, buffalo restoration, treaty rights, and ancestral foods.
Colleen’s connection to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is rooted in being born and raised on the Wind River Reservation. In high school, she tagged along with her sister and brother-in-law to measure the water flow and depth throughout the reservation’s rivers and streams, since it was her brother-in-law’s job to track waterway depths at recording stations on Tribal land. This experience eventually led her to degrees in Environment and Natural Resources / Rangeland Ecology and Watershed Management and she has gotten to know many areas of the GYE through working as a range department intern at the Bureau of Indian Affair’s Wind River Agency office in Fort Washakie and conducting her own plant inventory thesis project in two high elevation basins in the Wind River Mountains.
In her free time, Colleen is usually spending time with her family, camping in the outdoors, or creating art. She enjoys exploring different areas of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem via trails, roads, and waterways. When creating art, she interweaves her studies in rangeland ecology, environment, and natural resources with Arapaho symbolism and culture.
Favorite Greater Yellowstone Animal: Bison
First Job: Goat herder
Favorite Season in Greater Yellowstone: My favorite season is Fall. I enjoy the cooler temperatures and the changing of the aspen leaves with their bright pops of yellow throughout the landscape.
