Quannah Chasinghorse.Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty

Quannah Chasinghorseis opening up about what she’d tell her younger self.
While attending the Green Carpet Fashion Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, the model spoke candidly about the adviceshe’d now give her younger self.
“I would just tell young Quannah that you’re beautiful,” the model tells PEOPLE. “And no matter what people tell you, no matter how many bullies tell you that you’re not beautiful, that you are.”
The Indigenous model and land protector, who wore a long fitted black gown with cut-out shoulders to the event, continues: “And you have such power in your voice and that your voice carries power through generations, because my people have suffered from countless attempts of genocide. And the fact that we’re still here is radical.”
Chasinghorse, a long-time advocate for protecting the environment, also would tell her younger self that her existence is enough. “My existence is radical and I want to just comfort young Quannah and just tell her that your existence is radical in itself, and you are beautiful, and you are doing it and your lived experience is just enough,” she tells PEOPLE.
She also revealed she feels the most beautiful when she’s “at home laying in some moss and one with the earth.” She continued: “We are nature. And so when I’m connected with that, when I’m connected with my whole being as who I am, that’s when I feel most confident and most beautiful and feel most myself.”
Quannah Chasinghorse.Stefanie Keenan/Getty

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
According to the event website, The Green Carpet Fashion Awards celebrate positive forces in fashion and entertainment, and changemakers who look crisis and conflict in the eye tochampion active hope and deep, truthful work for transformation. This message resonates with Chasinghorse and she takes her role as an advocate seriously.
“It’s sad, because I grew up in a community that is so far from the rest of the world in a sense, where we have no accessibility to groceries or to the luxury of what we all have here,” she says.
source: people.com