Vital Impacts Names 2026 Grant Recipient
Whitney Snow (Blackfeet Nation, Montana)
Whitney Snow’s project The Women’s Grass centers on women in the Blackfeet Nation who are reviving sweetgrass traditions, ensuring the plant—and its teachings—endure for future generations amid climate change. Image via Vital Impacts.
Last month, Vital Impacts announced the 2026 recipient of the Madonna Thunder Hawk Environmental Photography Grant, a $5,000 award named in her honor.
Vital Impacts established this grant to recognize Madonna Thunder Hawk’s lifelong commitment to protecting both people and the environment, and to honor that legacy by supporting photographers whose work highlights impactful, solutions-based environmental stories.
The 2026 recipient is Whitney Snow, a documentary photographer and member of the Blackfeet Nation. Vital Impacts selected her project, The Women’s Grass, for its focus on women-led efforts to restore sweetgrass traditions in Blackfeet territory amid growing ecological disruption and climate change. We recently spoke with Whitney regarading this award and she shared,
“It is a true honor to have received the Madonna Thunder Hawk Vital Impacts Grant for my project, The Women's Grass. My work centers on the revival of culturally significant sweetgrass on Blackfeet land through traditional propagation methods and ecological restoration practices, including beaver dam mimicry. At its heart, the project documents the leadership of Indigenous women in restoring plant knowledge, land relationships, and intergenerational teachings. The change I hope to make through this work is both ecological and cultural, ensuring that sweetgrass and the knowledge surrounding it remain alive and accessible for future generations.’
Sweetgrass is one of the most sacred plants for many Indigenous peoples. It has been tended and braided by Blackfeet women for generations. As climate change intensifies, it now survives only in fragile pockets across the Northern Plains. As Whitney Snow shares on her website, “Its loss is more than botanical. It is cultural and spiritual. Without sweetgrass, ceremonies are incomplete, medicines are weakened, and intergenerational teachings risk being lost.”
In reflecting on why Vital Impacts chose to name one of its environmental photography grants in Madonna Thunder Hawk’s honor, co-founder Ami Vitale emphasized that the grant is not simply commemorative, but a reminder that resistance, care for the land, and truth-telling have a lineage—and that responsibility is carried forward by those continuing this work today.
“So much of what we’re living through right now feels bleak, exhausting, and cyclical. But when I look at her life and advocacy, I’m reminded that humanity has always moved through periods of violence, erasure, and uncertainty where progress is anything but guaranteed. You do this work without the benefit of hindsight, without knowing how history would judge these moments, only knowing that resistance and truth-telling are necessary.
It’s a refusal to accept injustice as destiny. This grant isn’t just an honorific, it’s a reminder that change has always been made by people who keep going when it is hard. The messages, the legacy, and the ongoing work you do help ground us in the fact that resistance has a lineage and that our responsibility is to carry it forward, not to assume the outcome is already written.”
Image via Vital Impacts
Warrior Women Project is pleased to join Vital Impacts in celebrating and uplifting Whitney Snow’s beautiful and important work. It carries forward the legacy of countless Indigenous women who worked to protect the earth. You can read more about the grant and Vital Impacts’ environmental photography programs by visiting their website and Instagram.
You can also explore Whitney Snow’s work directly through her photography portfolio and Instagram.