Sacred Defense Fund (SDF) is a Native-led nonprofit dedicated to protecting the lands, waters, and Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island. Founded in 2024, SDF grew out of the Lakota People’s Law Project, an Indigenous-led legal advocacy group that has been defending Native communities for over 20 years. Native communities across North America are disproportionately affected by pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, and systemic legal and social injustices that have long threatened Indigenous peoples and the lands they steward. “The people we work with are watching their own sacred sites and cultural places be destroyed by mining and extractive industries,” says Dov Korff-Korn, SDF’s legal director. SDF fights back against these injustices by engaging in legal advocacy, media production, community organizing, and public education initiatives that amplify Native voices. Serving Native communities across the continent, Sacred Defense Fund is at the forefront of protecting Indigenous rights and sacred sites in North America.
Paiute-Shoshone elders visit their sacred sites on Thacker Pass. Photo: Lakota People’s Law Project
With ten full-time employees and dozens of volunteers and part-time staff, SDF is a collective of land defenders, water protectors, and knowledge keepers working to strengthen Native peoples’ sovereign rights. In July 2024, SDF’s Lakota People’s Law Project launched the Sacred Defense National Parks and Monuments Initiative, a first-of-its-kind intertribal fund enabling visitors to U.S. national parks and monuments to donate directly to the tribal nations who have long called these lands home. Over the last few years, SDF has represented Paiute-Shoshone tribal members in legal advocacy efforts to secure these tribes’ continued access to their sacred sites surrounding the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Humboldt County, Nevada. SDF is currently collaborating with Earthjustice, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, and NDN Collective to build a coalition called “Save the Black Hills,” which is working to protect nearly 2 million acres of South Dakota’s Black Hills from uranium, lithium, gold, and graphite mining.
The Black Hills are home to many sites held sacred by the Lakota people. Photo: Save the Black Hills