Cassandra Yazzie-Hotchkiss, a member of the Navajo Nation, was killed in an accident on the Southern Ute Reservation in Colorado on Monday. She was 30.

Yazzie-Hotchkiss and three of her children were struck head-on by a vehicle that crossed into their lane. The children were seriously injured and have been undergoing treatment at Children's Hospital in Denver. Her husband, Jason Hotchkiss, was not in the vehicle at the time.

Yazzie-Hotchkiss was a 2009 graduate of Fort Lewis College, a school with a large Native population. She started Small Axe, Small Steps, a group dedicated to working on environmental and social justice issues, and volunteered for Our Sister's Keeper, a tribal coalition that provides assistance to survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

"She just had a way of really getting people involved. She would come up with really great ideas and then she'd just recruit people," Chris Jocks, a Fort Lewis faculty adviser to the group, told The Durango Herald. "Suddenly, we were spending all kinds of time on it."

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Fort Lewis graduate, activist dies in collision (The Durango Herald 11/19)