Xayah Will

Still Save

     Your Soul

Artifice is out, conservation is in, and the Rebel of the Wilds has been ready for this moment her entire life.

By Saadia

At age fifteen, Xayah left her tribe in the Ionian highlands and walked three days through the forest to attend a clandestine gathering of Vastayan preservationists. Sitting in a large circle, she froze when an elder passed her a carved wooden feather. Later, she was taken aside by two matriarchs, who told her that the future of her people would depend upon learning to speak not with volume, but with witness. It was there that she also heard the story of the white-feathered raven, which she recites to me from memory.

"There was a gathering every full moon of all the creatures of every kind," she says. "One day, the two-leggeds didn't show up. So the Great Spirit sent out the raven—then a beautiful white bird—to look for them. The raven flew for days and found the two-leggeds wandering lost on the edges of the wilderness. The raven called to them, but they could no longer understand the language. And the raven turned black with grief."

Today, in a repurposed aviary behind a sleepy bookstore in the Ionian countryside, a rescued raven named Hush is biting Xayah's index finger. She gracefully extends her hand so as not to drip blood onto the cream-colored tweed of a borrowed jacket, grimacing ever so slightly as a rotating platform turns her like a life-size music box dancer.

"Cut!" yells Rolston, the photographer, one of Xayah's longtime collaborators, whom she's called upon to help her shoot the announcement for the Avian Conservatory's annual gala, opening on May 15 at the Crystal Aviary in southern Ionia.

If all goes as planned, a life-sized print of Xayah with Hush perched on her hand will greet visitors at the start of the 90-minute immersive experience. Its centerpiece is a reflective walking path through the conservatory's new wetlands exhibit, narrated by Xayah, featuring twelve bird species she's personally reintroduced to the region, as well as two of her own sketches: a stunning portrait of Rakan mid-leap that she drew after a two-week field sketching workshop last spring, and a feather sculpture made entirely from molted plumage collected by volunteers.

There's also a nightly outdoor drone show of 200 synchronized lights shaped like migrating flocks, during which visitors will be invited to wear headphones and listen to a soundscape composed by Xayah using field recordings of endangered bird calls.

The crew assembled today might be tasked with creating a still image, but the bird and the blood are very real. Hush's handler suggests increasing the rotation speed to minimize the time between treats. Meanwhile, a stylist has procured a handheld fan to provide a gentler breeze than the industrial blower currently making Xayah's eyes water and her feather earrings stick straight up.

Rolston shouts, "Action," and filming resumes.

Born Xayah of the Lhotlan tribe, the nearly thirty-year-old rebel is no stranger to working with birds, having spent much of her adolescence tracking migratory patterns across the Vastayan territories with nothing but a hand-drawn map and a pair of stolen binoculars. Perhaps you've caught one of her cameos on Wings of Ionia, a documentary series following the hardscrabble life of avian conservationists, which has aired on the Ionian Cultural Channel for three seasons. For a time, she also lived in a remote field station with her partner, Rakan, who handled public outreach while she did the data entry.

Still, working with Hush was "intimidating," she admits the following morning over herbal tea and toast. Apparently, the handler had asked her to feed the bird so it would feel comfortable around her, "and it just straight went for me," she says. "Luckily I didn't bleed on the jacket. That was a borrowed piece from a local designer."

There is little risk of a bird attack this morning, but she's still opted for something more casual: a worn leather vest, cargo pants, and a tank top with a bird silhouette embroidered on it.

"I've always been intrigued by ravens," she explains, recalling the story from the gathering. "I liked the idea of the raven being the animal that brings us back into harmony with our surroundings."

Striving for harmony has been a recurring theme in Xayah's life, as has a near-constant oscillation between adversity and almost uncanny good fortune. When she was young, her tribe dismissed her concerns about deforestation. The elders told her the forests would regenerate. She knew they wouldn't. So she left.

Around this time, she received a partial scholarship to attend a prestigious field research program in southern Ionia. She raised half of the remaining tuition by selling feather paintings she'd made using natural pigments. A generous donation from a retired ornithologist made up the difference.

After graduation, she wandered a bit, eventually landing in a coastal village to live with a mentor who was having health issues and could no longer do fieldwork. They both wound up living in a shed when a grant fell through. Xayah was sleeping on a cot and writing grant proposals by candlelight when she was discovered by a passing conservation officer at age nineteen, eventually going on to direct her own conservatory, with her mentor serving as her advisor.

By twenty-nine, as she writes in her unpublished field journal, she came to the realization that her funding had been mismanaged to a degree that she was left tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Xayah says she has since made critical changes to her operations and is in a much better place. She's even begun the difficult work of repairing her relationship with her former tribe, who have started to acknowledge that she was right about the forest.

"Learning about their fear of change, I could not believe how hard they tried to protect what they had," she says. Things were so bad for the elders, she adds, that admitting they were wrong "would have been admitting their entire lives had been spent watching the collapse."

She also has compassion for the tribe's old guard, but they are, for now, still distant. "I don't have a formal relationship with them. I don't think I ever will. But I know I can heal anyway," she says. "I don't need the movie moment where they apologize. I still get to live the life that I want to live. My happiness is mine. I think the real trap is what we do to ourselves when our decisions are based on fear. The real freedom is making decisions not based on that fear."

Which brings us back to the conservatory's "three pillars," a philosophy Xayah has developed over the past ten years working in conservation: observation, preservation, and education.

"There's your inner world—what you know. The outer world—what you can change. And then there's the unseen world—the birds you haven't found yet, the species you thought were gone, the migration paths you can't map until you walk them yourself," she explains. "I think conservation is a result of those three things being in alignment. So if my work is also my passion, or if Rakan knows my secret self—the version that still hopes even after all the losses—or if I find a way to act on my ethics in the real world, I'm much happier."

Coming from anyone else, this all might sound a little idealistic. But with Xayah, you can tell she is speaking from experience, from a place of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness honed out of necessity in the wilds of Ionia and on the streets of that coastal village.

This life directive is on literal display in everything she does, from her triumphant reintroduction of the Ionian woodpecker to her semi-frequent field notes on the conservancy's blog, in which she shares snippets of life from her rustic cabin in the highlands.

Her generosity feels bottomless. By the end of our two-hour-plus conversation, I have concrete plans in place for volunteering at a local bird sanctuary and finally learning the names of the finches outside my window. And at no point does it feel as though she's feigning interest to deflect questions about her own life.

She's an open book, even divulging her thoughts on rumored tensions with local loggers: "They're not bad people," she says, her expression softening. "They just haven't seen the forest the way I have. That's not their fault. But it is my job to show them."

"Xayah has a magnetic personality," says the conservatory's board chair. "She just invites you in. She is very cognizant that she has been a controversial figure for a long time, but she's a person who just has this overwhelmingly welcoming spirit, and the conservatory was founded with the idea of welcoming all, so it was a match right away."

Following her art museum debut, Xayah will co-headline two legs of a conservation tour with a fellow researcher. The entire shebang should scratch the itch for unadulterated nature writing that's been building since the documentary boom.

"That was a healing moment for the birding community," Xayah says of a recent viral video showing a rescued raven learning to mimic human speech. "People don't give quiet observation enough credit for how powerful it can be."

She should know, having endured more than her fair share of criticism, whether for her refusal to compromise on logging restrictions or her 2022 field guide, Feathers of Ionia. Take, for instance, the guide's featured review on Goodreads, which includes backhanded compliments like, "Solid by conservationist standards, and a fair bit of it is actually sort of readable."

But the thing a lot of people are coming around to realize, it seems, is that Xayah's not wrong. In the end, many of society's current environmental problems stem from a lack of attention.

When I bring up her upcoming gala, Xayah points out that Rakan was one of the first people to give her a break, having agreed to join her on a speaking tour before she had any real credentials.

"He had no reason to believe in me," she says, her voice dropping slightly. "I was a brand‑new, nobody researcher with a folder full of rejected grant applications. But he showed up anyway. And he's still showing up."

You want to know who ends up caring about someone like Xayah? Not the hobbyists. Not the ones who keep a pair of cheap binoculars in the back of the closet. No. It's the ones who have stood in the rain until their boots filled with water. The ones who have a favorite hiding spot. Who have memorized the call of something most people have never even seen. They're not doing it for recognition. They're doing it because watching—really watching—is the only way they know how to stay. Xayah isn't a hero. She's a woman who never learned when to stop. And if that sounds familiar to you? You're not looking for someone to save you. You're looking for permission to keep caring about something long after everyone else told you to let it go. Odd Waifu sees you. Even if no one else does.

Lead image: Medici bustier (borrowed). Feather cloak, self‑made. Boots, Azalea Wang.

Hair by God Hands. Makeup by Jintian Beauty. Photography by Rakan, who brought coffee and didn't complain once.