Phoenix Johnson

A native Two-Spirit person, Phoenix Johnson traces their ancestral homelands to their mother’s home in the Tlinget and Haida territory, north of what we now call Bellingham, Washington. 

“In a military environment since birth”—Johnson’s father was a career serviceman in the Coast Guard—Johnson joined the Air Force at the age of 17. Trained as an air surveillance technology instructor, Johnson found some pride and meaning in the work, but the environment of sexual harassment and abuse ravaged Johnson’s health, and they left the Air Force. Johnson struggled with Military Sexual Trauma and social isolation while working for poverty wages as a young veteran and single mother.

As a college student at Portland State University, Johnson connected with About Face, and began to discover that “apparently, I am an organizer.” Johnson was visible as an Indigenous veteran among several thousand other veterans in support of Native Water Protectors’ 2016 resistance to the building of The Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota. In recent years in Seattle, Washington, Phoenix Johnson was elected president of the local Veterans For Peace chapter, and worked to link VFP’s work with the Black Lives Matter social justice uprisings of 2020.