By SAVANNAH PETERS Associated Press

2025-2026 Miss Indian World winner Dania Wahwasuck, citizen of the
Prairie Band Potawatomi. (Photo Credit: Gathering of Nations)

Codi High Elk was a shy teenager most comfortable caring for horses on her family's ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation when she threw away an application to compete in a new pageant for Indigenous women — an application her brother fished out of the trash, sending her on a path to becoming the first Miss Indian World.

That was in 1984, when High Elk remembers letting her six older siblings do most of the talking and wanting no part in a competition that required public speaking. But the event that transformed her from shy teen to an ambassador for her people has come to an end.

"From the day I got my crown, my life changed," said High Elk, who credits her time as Miss Indian World with giving her the confidence to pursue two degrees and a career expanding credit access for Lakota people. "I want that same opportunity for my granddaughters."

The pageant has been a headlining event at Gathering of Nations, a massive and at times controversial event that bills itself as the largest powwow in North America, for more than four decades. The competition shaped the lives of young women from across the U.S. and Canada eager to share cultural knowledge and compete for the prestigious title and iconic, intricately beaded crown.

But this year will be the last for the powwow, with the final Miss Indian World named in 2025. Organizers have said the time has come for the events to end, but gave no other details.

The pageant's rotating collection of beaded crowns are set to be retired when the two-day gathering culminates Saturday. In time they may be offered to a museum for display, said Melonie Matthews, daughter of the Gathering of Nations founder.

Left: 1984-1985 winner Codi High Elk, Right: 2025-2026 winner Dania Wahwasuck.
(Photo Credit: Gathering of Nations)

Stiff Competition

Dania Wahwasuck, of the Prairie Band Potawatomi and Pyramid Lake Paiute tribes, won her title before a roaring crowd last year. Her pastel-colored crown and sash featuring a star quilt motif and another set that sparkles with rhinestones and shades of pink will be among those retired Saturday.

The pageant invited Indigenous women, aged 18 to 25, to compete. Contestants had to be single, with no children and pledge to maintain specific moral standards.

Contestants described an intense five-day process with interviews, public speaking and a highly anticipated traditional talent showcase.

Tori McConnell, who won the title in 2023, sought advice from Karuk and Yurok elders while developing her performance. She showcased traditional basketry, explaining first in Karuk and then in English how she weaved using materials gathered from her ancestral homelands in northwest California.

"To have our art recognized on that level was so validating," McConnell said. "Not just for me but for my community."

A Cultural Ambassador

The Miss Indian World crown has traveled around the world, from a Māori Haka competition in New Zealand to the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan and the Oceti Sakowin camp at the height of protests at Standing Rock against an oil pipeline.

In the summer of 1984, High Elk recalls scouring a Paris grocery store for ingredients to make fry bread and Lakota tripe soup for the university students who had invited her there.

"You become an ambassador not just for your own culture but for all Indigenous peoples," said Shayai Lucero, who was crowned Miss Indian World in 1997.

Lucero, who comes from Acoma and Laguna pueblos in New Mexico, did not grow up in a powwow culture. But at the 1997 Stanford University Powwow, she was embraced by a community of pueblo people who had been in the Bay Area for decades due to a federal program that sought to relocate Native Americans off reservations and into cities.

"All these people showed up who knew my family, knew our language and traditions," said Lucero. "Suddenly, I felt at home."

During their tenure, winners have advocated for causes ranging from Indigenous language revitalization to domestic violence prevention.

Cheyenne Kippenberger, Miss Indian World 2019, focused on mental health as COVID-19 forced ceremonies, cultural events and community gatherings to shut down. As the only two-year titleholder, she hosted online events and encouraged Native people to get vaccinated.

"I remember thinking, everybody's feeling really lonely and confined. We need to find a way to connect people," said Kippenberger, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Florida.

Representing the Gathering of Nations from 2019-2021 is Miss Indian World
Cheyenne Kippinberger, she is surrounded by the First and Second runners-up in 2019.
(Photo Credit: MVSKOKE Media)

The End of an Era

There are no plans for the Miss Indian World pageant to continue, the organization said. The title is trademarked by the Gathering of Nations, Ltd., the nonprofit that operates the powwow and pageant.

Over the years, Gathering of Nations has been criticized and called overly commercial. Founder Derek Mathews, who at times has claimed distant Cherokee ancestry but is not a tribal citizen, has made few public comments in response.

Melonie Matthews, who is Santa Clara Pueblo on her mother's side, said the organization did not consider transferring the Miss Indian World trademark to any other group.

"The Miss Indian World pageant goes hand in hand with the powwow. It was never a stand-alone event," she said in an emailed statement.

Several former titleholders, however, have been exploring the creation of a new national pageant for Indigenous women.

"A lot of us were saying 'Miss Indian World is bigger than one powwow,'" Lucero said. "We don't need the powwow to continue her legacy."

Many tribal nations and powwows crown royalty. But young women who dream of representing their communities on a national, Native-focused pageant stage won't have that avenue. Five years ago, Miss Native American USA crowned its last winner. The Miss Indian Nations and Miss Indian America titles also are defunct.

Many past Miss Indian World titleholders who went on to become lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, language and culture bearers and sisters to one another say the crown empowered them as leaders.

"It's a bittersweet feeling," said Kippenberger, who now heads a tribal consulting firm. "But I feel full confidence and optimism that something positive will fill in the gap."

Sacred Indigenous Life and Corn People

By: Danny Beaton

In Memory of Alicja Rozanska

Mohawk Farmer Lehman Gibson tending his crop in
1995 after the creation of The Traditional Native American
Farmers Association. (Photo Credit: Danny Beaton)

A farmer all his adult life, Clayton Brascoupe Mohawk/Algonquin elder is a Traditional farmer, artist, teacher and much more. Clayton is director of The Traditional Native American Farmers Association founded in 1992 in New Mexico, USA, with his wife Margaret and four children. Yesterday I asked Clayton: "Could you talk about what is threatening Mother Earth and traditional indigenous farming and the importance of Sacred Indigenous Life?"

Protecting Our Life Culture and Corn: Clayton Brascoupe Speaks

“We Corn People are trying to educate the world of the threat of GMO, genetically modified organisms, a threat to traditional seed heritage and indigenous farming. Traditional farmers understand that through growing our own food and cooking it, having that traditional diet, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and many other illnesses can be healed and prevented. Today traditional farmers say the current threat has been if genetically engineered corn cross-pollinates with traditional corn. The current laws are in favour of the corporations; they will now own the genetics of the traditional corn it may have crossed with. This has been a threat for some time now. The document “Seed Protecting” is a list of SW that could enable the corporations to "own" the genetics of the traditional corns. The Traditional Native Farmers Association, TNFA based in New Mexico, has been proactive in protecting the seeds by hosting workshops and events on the topic of threats of GMO corn especially. We have been pushing to create our own seed banks, seed policies, not only here in SW U.S.A., but also with our Mayan relatives in Central America and Mexico where it has been said corn originated. That was one of the focus points of the International Indigenous Peoples Corn Gathering in Belize. We have also been hosting a regional seed exchange here in New Mexico since 2006. Climate change, climate chaos will be and perhaps already is impacting farm production. It’s our own firm belief that the traditional seed diversity will be critical now and in the future for a healthy and secure diet. Traditional varieties have the resiliency needed to address climate changes, along with traditional agricultural practices. I hope this information will help others."

Left –Clayton Brascoupe, farmer from Six Nations, Canada, toiling the fields with his daughter, Phoye. (Photo Credit: Danny Beaton) Right - Clayton and his wife, Margaret. (Photo Credit: Unknown)

Indigenous people of north, south and central America have been working to protect Creation and all life species on Mother Earth for generations. Society has created a super crisis and a man-made Global Warming and Turbulent weather, so that scientists have been sounding an alarm. For the past 40 years the alarm has been sounding from scientists and indigenous people that Mother Earth has become so fragile. Ecosystems that protect life are in a catastrophic state, like the great oceans which produce photosynthesis and create at least half of the world’s clean oxygen with the help from algae and plankton, but they are rapidly dying throughout the great coastal reefs. Scientists throughout the world confirm heat is being trapped in the upper atmosphere and upper oceans, causing trapped heat and killing the oceans natural currents that travel from north to south.

Society is facing what The Great Hopi Nation calls a World Out of Balance. The old elders have been giving this message over and over again that Mother Earth is being assaulted and is in grave danger. The indigenous people of the world have been giving this message over and over again. Mother Earth is so sacred, but we the people have to protect her and take care of her. The scientists of the world are saying if our oceans keep heating up and heat is trapped in the upper ocean, we will decimate life-supporting systems that support all life on Mother Earth; and if the oceans die, all life will die. If Mother Earth dies the oceans will live on, but Mother Earth cannot live without healthy oceans.

The leaders of all countries keep talking about regulations, but many leaders break their own rules, agendas and laws, creating more danger and consequences for indigenous people and all humans. Society would think their own children need security, but it seems many leaders don't care about their own children or their future. Maybe these leaders do not understand natural economy, or the reality of turning Mother Earth into a pile of holes. It seems many minds are not connected to life forces or Mother Earth. It seems our so called leaders don't care or understand an earth-based economy with real values that sustain life. If only developers would listen to their elders or professional experts of climate, real humans who have studied the universe. It looks like the leaders of countries and communities can’t see the difference between positive and negative activities. The world banks seem more focused on destroying everything that can provide a profit, using our pure clean water to extract oil and gas and contaminate our rivers, lakes, aquifers and ecosystems that support life.

A student from the Akwesasne Freedom School, honoring Mother Earth. The school
is dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the Mohawk language, continuing
traditional ceremonies, songs, dances and practices, and promoting the principles
of good mind, peace and strength. (Photo Credit: Akwesasne Freedom School)

Every day we wake up and know we need to solve problems. We want to be creative, but after 40 years, 50 years since the media started bringing the environmental crisis to our newspapers, television and all forms of communication into our homes and into our minds, why can’t we make things better instead of continuing mass destruction of Mother Earth and her blood, the water and our forests? There is a collective understanding now in society and the world from all the messages from indigenous people and scientists that Climate Change is real. As Turbulent Weather and Global Warming is a crisis, there are environmental refugees possibly in the millions.

Every day the caregivers and social activists of the world look around and see that there are no laws to protect the poor and no laws in place for rent control, or no low-income homes in mass construction. The real thinkers and leaders are not being respected or consulted in order to solve issues and protect all life. Somehow the people or leaders who do not have a spiritual relationship or connection with Mother Earth and the people should step aside and look to indigenous elders and leaders who have insights and concern for life and ecosystems. If this does not happen, leaders who strive for business and financial gains will be the ones responsible for all environmental catastrophes. Mother Earth cannot take care of her children if we do not take care of her. The indigenous leaders of the world understand this concept. Oneness with Mother Earth and Natural Law supersedes man-made law, which keeps being broken just as sacred treaties have in North America. Our elders, chiefs and clan Mothers have been sending this message to the ones exploiting Mother Earth for profit, not caring that Mother Earth is an earth economy that can feed and nurture the world; but the ones creating negative work cannot see Sacred Life Species all around them. The indigenous people of the world understand natural life and follow natural law. It is the beauty of The Boreal Forest in Northern Ontario, Canada, which is the largest intact forest of the world, which is under threat by corporations. Maybe The United Nations Environment Program will denounce this crisis by Ontario Provincial Government. All farmland, vegetation, plants, medicines, flowers have a spirit just like the rivers, streams, lakes and ocean. Everything on Mother Earth is Sacred. Our oldest Chiefs tell us we humans are a voice for the Wolf, we are the voice for all four-legged ones, the winged-ones, all fish life and insects.

About the Author

Danny Beaton (Turtle Clan Mohawk) is an environmentalist, who has worked for over 30 years protecting indigenous land and advocating the preservation of clean water. He has been honored by the Canadian Parliament and in 2010, Mr. Beaton received the Environmental and Natural Resources Award at the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Awards in Regina, Saskatchewan, on behalf of the Canadian Government. He is a traditional flute player and self-taught writer, where his creative works are featured in First Nations Drum and News from Indian Country.

Robert Redford Remembered for his Deep Legacy in Environmental Activism and Native American Advocacy

By Hillel Italie, AP National Writer, Images by NAT

The legendary Robert Redford

Lorie Lee Sekayumptewa, a former administrator with the Navajo Nation Film Office, remembers seeing Robert Redford at traditional cultural dances at the Hopi village of Hotevilla in New Mexico. It was more than 30 years ago and he was serving as executive producer of the 1991 release "The Dark Wind," a drama about Navajo life.

Redford stood out for his Hollywood looks and for his un-Hollywood behavior, from his earnest desire to learn more about the tribe's spiritual knowledge to his visits to the Navajo Nation, where Sekayumptewa's father served as the dean of students at the tribal college and would show Redford's movies at the student union building.

"Even at home, he would bring that camera and film home to us, put up a sheet and we would invite our neighbors and the kids and we would all be there in our living room, watching these movies," the 54-year-old Sekayumptewa, who is Navajo, Hopi and Sac and Fox Nation, said of Redford.

"We were all fans."

Redford, who died at age 89, was hardly the only liberal activist to emerge out of Hollywood, but few matched his knowledge and focus, his humility and dedication. Fellow actors and leaders of the causes he fought for spoke of his unusually deep legacy, his fight for Native Americans and the environment that began at the height of his stardom.

The movie Jeremiah Johnson connects with Native Americans through the mountain man's journey
on the frontier, which includes interactions with the Crow and Flathead tribes, his marriage to a
Flathead woman, and his subsequent conflict and reconciliation with various Native peoples.
(Photo Credit: Warner Bros)

In the mid-1970s, around the same time he was appearing in such blockbusters as "The Sting" and "The Way We Were," he immersed himself in the emerging environmental movement. He successfully opposed a power plant being built in his adopted state, Utah, and lobbied for the landmark bills the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. He also joined the board of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, where he remained a guiding force up to his death.

"His legacy was extraordinary," says NRDC CEO and President Manish Bapna. "One of the things that was most extraordinary about him was that he understood the power of storytelling. He could talk about climate change and the toll it was inflicting on people and communities — the fisherman coping with rising seas, a family fleeing for their lives from a raging wildfire. He would record messages, give talks or speak in front of Congress."

Bapna last saw Redford a few months ago, when they dined in New York City.

"He chose his words carefully, and every word he said was profound. He said we must continue to find ways to tell stories that reach people," Bapna said.

Redford had a longtime affinity for the environment. After growing up in Southern California in the 1930s and '40s, he was disheartened to see Los Angeles transform after World War II into a mecca of pollution and traffic jams. In the early 1960s, when he came upon Provo Canyon, Utah, during a cross-country motorcycle trip, he was so awed and invigorated by the landscape that he eventually settled in the area.

Entertainers over time have come to identify and, be identified with, a given cause: Harry Belafonte and civil rights, Paul Newman and nuclear disarmament, Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War. Redford, as much as anyone, helped make the environment an issue for the Hollywood elite, whether for Fonda or Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Leonardo DiCaprio, a fellow NRDC board member who called Redford's death "a huge loss to our community" and cited his legacy an actor and activist.

"More so than anything, he was a staunch environmental leader," DiCaprio said Monday.

In 2013, Redford joined with then-Gov. Bill Richardson to create the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife to fight efforts by a Roswell, New Mexico, company and others to slaughter horses. The following year, the foundation reached an agreement with the Navajo Nation to manage thousands of wild horses on the reservation and keep the animals from being sent to slaughter houses.

For Redford, the wild horse was representative of the American West. His advocacy also was channeled through the nonprofit group Return to Freedom, Wild Horse Conservation. The group posted on social media Tuesday that they were heartbroken.

"We have all lost an irreplaceable artist, activist and environmentalist," said Neda DeMayo, founder of RTF. "Robert Redford was and is an iconic and inspiring human being forever interwoven with the beauty and majesty of the West. I feel very grateful to have known him and to have had his support."

Robert Redford meeting with Native American filmmakers at 1994 Sundance Film Festival.
Of recent, Redford served as an executive producer on the popular Native American-themed
show, Dark Winds. He appeared in a cameo in season 3. (Photo Credit: Sundance Institute)

Redford's activism extended to some of his film projects, whether the probes of the political system in "All the President's Men" and "The Candidate" or the drama "The Milagro Beanfield War," in which a local resident fights a real estate mogul for control of his land. His final work was "Dark Winds," an AMC show that premiered in 2022 and is based, like "The Dark Wind," on the fiction of Tony Hillerman.

John Wirth, the series showrunner, said that "Dark Winds" wouldn't exist without Redford, who served as an executive producer and appeared in a short cameo that aired earlier this year. The show, Wirth said, gives audiences a look into the Navajo community, with actors and writers largely holding Native identities.

Redford "endeavored to give people a shot at making art, you know, where they maybe hadn't had the ability to have access to mainstream media."

_____

Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Itzel Luna in Los Angeles; and Sian Watson in London contributed to this report.

Robert Redford, photograph by Alan Silfen, 2013. (Photo Credit: The Redford Center)

To learn more about Robert Redford’s film career, click here.

His Art Was Real. His Native American Heritage Wasn’t.

By Michael Hall

Roxy Gordon in front of the Bone House, in Dallas. (Photo Credit: Paradise of Bachelors)

Nobody could tell a story like Roxy Gordon. He would stay up all night on the porch of his house in East Dallas—this was in the eighties and nineties—surrounded by artists and musicians, spinning tales, singing songs, drinking vodka. Roxy, who wore his dark glasses even at night, had the charisma of a rock star, with long black hair spilling out of his cowboy hat, a coyote-tooth necklace, and a tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm. In his deep West Texas drawl, he would talk about growing up in a small town near San Angelo, going off to Montana to live on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation, or the time he met Willie Nelson. The books he’d written, the albums he’d made, the magazines he’d started. Roxy knew his Western history and told about the Indians in Texas, their struggles with Anglo settlers, and his own journey as a man of mixed blood.

Some of his stories would change with the telling, but no one seemed to mind.

His home, which he shared with his wife and two young sons, was well known in Dallas as the Bone House because of all the skulls, femurs, and vertebrae from cattle, horses, and sheep hanging from the ceiling on the front porch. Almost every night there was some kind of gathering under the bones, with Roxy holding court. Sometimes the famed songwriter Townes Van Zandt would come over and the two would stay up all night drinking. They shared the same birth date and were similar characters: stubborn, whimsical, alcoholic, doomed. “Roxy Gordon is a brother of mine,” Van Zandt said once. “I don’t like the word ‘poet’; it is usually used too lightly. Roxy, however, is a real one.” Van Zandt died of hard living on January 1, 1997, at age 52. Roxy met the same fate three years later and two years older.

While many Texans know Townes’s dramatic story, few have heard of Roxy, an outsider who enjoyed bewildering everyone he met. From the start, as an imaginative boy in a small town, Roxy was determined to do his own thing—writing, drawing, painting, storytelling. He grew up to be, in the words of his friend Sally Wittliff, “one of the world’s first hippies,” a subversive and literary troublemaker. “Roxy Gordon is one of the great outlaw artist misfits,” artist and songwriter Terry Allen once said. Roxy made albums, though he wasn’t really a musician, and wrote songs, though he wasn’t really a songwriter.

He worked as a Native American activist, though he wasn’t really a Native American. He said he was—and he might have believed he was—but Texas Monthly was unable to find any evidence that he had Native heritage. Today Roxy, who was intent on creating his own artistic identity, no matter the cost to himself or those around him, would be called a “pretendian” or a liar. He would say he was just telling stories. “I don’t know the difference,” he once wrote. “Truth, lie, all the same thing. I’ll use either one that’ll work. Either one I can get away with.”

(Photo Credit: The Gordon Family)

Roxy Lee Gordon was born March 7, 1945, in tiny Ballinger (35 miles northeast of San Angelo), and grew up in tinier Talpa, a few miles away. He was an only child. His mother ran the post office and played piano in the Methodist church, and his father was a World War II vet who spent much of his time drawing and painting. Roxy was an artistic kid, always drawing and writing, something of an oddball in a town where most of the other boys played sports. He loved history, often immersing himself in stories about the Alamo and the Civil War. He had plenty of Texas history in his lineage, including several Texas Rangers, one of whom was his great-grandfather. His grandparents owned a house about six miles east, in the area near Bead Mountain, and he spent a lot of time there. He called it the Hill and wrote about it in mythic terms. “The Hill was rugged and close, always in my sight, drawing me the way hills and mountains have always drawn human beings. I was both fascinated and afraid.”*

Inspired by the Beat poets and writers, he played guitar and read Jack Kerouac. Roxy was determined to be a writer, and at Talpa-Centennial High School, he and his friend Mike Rush published a zine with their stories. Roxy was, he would later write, “always thinking and talking about writing, trying to discern what a writer might be, how a writer might approach life and experience.” He published another zine as an English major at the University of Texas, where he’d enrolled because he’d heard “that Austin was full of communists, and it sounded pretty good to me.” For the four-page newsletter, Ramblings, Roxy wrote fiction and poems; his new wife, Judy Nell Hoffman, created the art; and friends of theirs wrote nonfiction and poetry. Roxy was an early agitator against the Vietnam War, excoriating world leaders in a 1965 essay: “Murderers! I wish you eternal nightmare.” He also wrote for the Texas Observer, penning a sweet, evocative short story about a meeting in downtown Dallas between two men from West Texas. When Roxy wasn’t playing the guitar with his folk singer friends, he was hanging out with writers, and he soon became editor of the student literary magazine Riata, working with young bucks such as Larry McMurtry and Dave Hickey. Roxy and his friends sat around the Chuck Wagon, a cafe in the UT student union, and told stories about what they would do when they got rich and famous.

Anxious about the draft, he and Judy joined the Volunteers in Service to America program in 1968 and were sent to tiny Lodge Pole, Montana, where the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes lived on the Fort Belknap reservation. The couple resided in a one-room log cabin and published the tribes’ weekly newsletter, Fort Belknap Notes. They also became friends with an older Assiniboine couple named John and Minerva Allen; he served on the tribal council, and she was a poet. The two would become crucial to Roxy’s Native American journey.

After a year on the reservation, the Gordons moved to San Diego, where Roxy—full of the hubris of youth—worked on a book about his life so far. In 1969 he attended a writer’s conference in San Diego and befriended hippie poet Richard Brautigan, as well as rock star poet Jim Morrison. Roxy and Judy met more poets and musicians when they moved north to Oakland, California, and hung out in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

After their son John Calvin (known as J.C.) was born, in 1970, the Gordons moved to Moriarty, New Mexico, near Albuquerque. In 1971, Bill Wittliff (later of Lonesome Dove fame) published the autobiography Roxy had been working on, titled Some Things I Did. It got good reviews; Texas Observer critic Steve Barthelme wrote of “the mean beauty of Roxy Gordon’s mind” and said that his gift is “to be self-conscious without being so terribly serious.”

Gordon’s ‘I Used To Know An Assiniboine Girl’
(Photo Credit: KUTX)

During this time, Roxy wrote poems and criticism for the Observer in which he wasn’t afraid to go after his peers—including by taking potshots at Bud Shrake’s Strange Peaches (“a combination rich-Texan joke/liberal horror story”) and Larry McMurtry’s All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (“another of McMurtry’s elegies for the west. He’s been killing off the west for years now.”). Roxy seemed to be going somewhere, writing essays for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. In August 1973, Rolling Stone published a list of one hundred poets to watch, and his photo was under Nikki Giovanni’s and to the right of Louise Glück’s.

Roxy loved the progressive country music coming out of Texas, so in 1974 he started a magazine dedicated to the scene and called it Picking Up the Tempo, after the Willie song. Roxy did a lot of the writing, and he published up-and-coming journalists such as Joe Nick Patoski, Ed Ward, and Richard Meltzer. Like the artists he profiled—Willie, Van Zandt, Billy Joe Shaver—his own writing could be rebellious and inventive. In 1978 he penned a nine-thousand-word review of Butch Hancock’s debut record, West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes, for a British magazine called Omaha Rainbow. It’s a remarkable piece of criticism about an album that would later be considered a classic, with Roxy laying out—in four separate sections—the physical and cultural landscape of West Texas before going into the songs, all of it seen through the lens of his own West Texas upbringing. “Maybe,” he wrote, pondering reincarnation, “I’ve always lived on these prairies and maybe I will, for centuries to come.”

Ever since his time in Montana, Roxy had been fascinated with Native Americans, the ultimate outsiders. In 1979, he and Judy, now living in Dallas, named their second son, Quanah Parker Gordon, after the child of Cynthia Parker, an Anglo woman who was abducted as a child in 1836 by a Comanche band in East Texas. Roxy was immersed in Indian history, reading every book he could find and writing his own dark and bloody stories and poems about the battles between Indians and Anglos. Several times he traveled back to Lodge Pole to spend time with the Allens, who became his mentors. Roxy often reached out to them, said J.C. “He always leaned on John and Minerva when he himself was probably trying to find direction in his life.” In a Texas Observer book review, he had once written about “white Indians,” Anglos whose lives were changed after meeting Native Americans. In a few instances, he wrote, these Anglos “actually become Indians.” Roxy—child of West Texas, scion of a Texas Ranger—was determined to understand the Native American way of life.

So he “became” an Indian. Roxy’s poems and short stories began appearing in anthologies of short fiction by Native Americans, such as Earth Power Coming. He cowrote a couple of plays with Choctaw author LeAnne Howe; their comedy Indian Radio Days would be performed dozens of times all over the country. He began reading his poems in bookstores and clubs in Dallas and Fort Worth. “He started getting a reputation,” said J.C. “If you wanted a counterculture opinion or if you wanted the Indian side of something, people just called. The phone was constantly ringing.”

Roxy and Judy Gordon. (Photo Credit: Paradise of Bachelors)

Roxy and Judy were part of Dallas’s vibrant underground literary scene, self-publishing their own chapbooks of art and poetry as well as those of other artists. In 1984, a small Austin press put out a book of his Indian-themed poems, stories, and drawings called Breeds. The book featured a blurb from famed songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The couple had started their own publishing company called Wowapi Press and, in 1985, published Roxy’s book Unfinished Business. That same year Roxy worked with artist and songwriter Terry Allen to record a voice-over for his installation China Night, which explored how Native Americans who went to war in Vietnam encountered ancient relatives of theirs from thousands of years before.

Roxy had always loved music, and in the mid-eighties he started performing his poetry with various musicians behind him at local art galleries and punk clubs, the perfect venues for his confrontational pieces about Indians. Friends such as Bill Johnston on fiddle and Frank X. Tolbert 2 on washtub bass would join him, and Judy or young Quanah would sometimes play a hand drum.

After the shows, the party would continue at the Bone House, in Lower Greenville, where artists and musicians hung out on the porch and listened to Roxy. His friend Mike Rush remembered how Roxy’s charisma drew people in. “He would turn an ordinary experience into an exploration. He had this ability to create these little zones that other people wanted to be part of.”

And they would stick around, sometimes for days, said J.C., who spent a lot of time in his childhood bedroom, away from the drinking and drugs. “There were people coming and going night and day, seven days a week. My dad was always playing real hard at cowboys and Indians. He passionately lived that lifestyle. It was the essence of his storytelling as an artist. That never shut off; that was 24-7.” Van Zandt, who would play Poor David’s Pub, just down the street, would crash on the Gordons’ couch for days at a time. Roxy was a huge fan of Van Zandt’s—he had once written about the “perfect darkness of his music”—and the two would stay up all night, telling stories and drinking vodka. Hard drinking ran in Roxy’s family, he wrote, and though friends such as Howe tried to get him to temper his excesses (sometimes including a quart of vodka in a day), he wouldn’t listen. Howe remembered, “He was like, ‘This is my life. This is the way I want to live.’ ” The drinking eventually drove her and other friends away.

(Photo Credit: The Gordon Family)

Roxy started releasing albums of his poetry with music: Unfinished Business, in 1988, and Crazy Horse Never Died, a year later. Crazy Horse was a dark, intense affair, the music sometimes antagonistic (screechy keyboards) and other times sublime (fingerpicked acoustic guitar). His sympathies were plain to hear, from the title poem (“The white man came to Crazy Horse’s home and wanted buried resources there to run their white men’s world, but Crazy Horse said no.”) to “The Texas Indian,” a rewriting of the old folk song “The Texas Rangers,” giving the Indians’ point of view about a battle on the Rio Grande. The highlight of the album is “I Used to Know an Assiniboine Girl,” a bleak, heartrending story of a battered Indian woman who fought back against her abusive white husband and was sentenced to prison.

By this point he was saying openly what he had mostly only hinted at before: that he was Native American. He appeared on a public access TV show in Tyler and avowed that he was Choctaw on both sides of his family, though on his mother’s side he was also a fifth-generation Texan. “So I’m a genuine breed—lots of white and lots of Indian.”

Culturally, psychologically, and politically, yes. But biologically? Roxy had never talked about being Choctaw when he was growing up, nor did he write about it in his autobiography, and J.C. has never found any documentation of it. “I cannot find any evidence that my father was Choctaw or had Choctaw lineage in the family beyond what he expressed through his writings, art, and music,” he said. According to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma membership department, Roxy was not an enrolled member of the tribe. Today, everybody from Bandcamp to the Texas State Historical Society to the Austin radio station KUTX calls Roxy Choctaw, but if he were alive, he would also be called a pretendian, like politician Elizabeth Warren, pop singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden.

(Photo Credit: The Gordon Family)

To Roxy’s credit, he didn’t use his alleged heritage to gain fame or wealth. To his friends, the whole thing was a natural progression of his artistic personality. “He saw in the tribes people who were leaning into the past and living the past in their lives,” said Rush. “Seeing himself as a Native American gave him a unifying point of view to his written, visual, and spoken art.” Terry Allen agrees. “He was totally caught up in what was happening to Indigenous peoples in the West. That’s where his heart was and that’s where his visions came from.”

But art is different from life, said J. Todd Hawkins, a Fort Worth poet and citizen of the Choctaw Nation: “There has to be a genetic connection if you’re going to claim to be a Native.” Hawkins said he welcomes cultural allies who can write from an outside perspective without saying they are Indians. “I write a lot of blues poetry. I love blues music. But if I were to assume the persona of being Black, that would be problematic. That’s the thing about writing—you can pick up any persona you want to write a poem from. But once you step outside that persona and you’re the poet again, that’s where that line needs to be drawn. This appropriation is a part of what has been systematically done to erase a people.”

Anglos who take on Native identities are part of a long tradition of “playing Indian,” says Kim Tallbear, a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate nation and professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, whether they are dressing up in football stadiums or around Boy Scout campfires. “This is part of a long-standing problem of appropriating our stuff,” she said, “our material resources and our voices.” She acknowledges that many who do it are well-intentioned, like Roxy: “Sometimes people find a more profound meaning in Native cultures, and there’s also a desire to belong to this land, not feel morally complicit in colonialism, in ongoing colonialism and the theft of Indigenous land. We have lots of people who do good things with our communities without lying about who they are.”

Roxy, the eternal outsider who had finally found his place in the world, did both. He falsely appropriated an identity for his own benefit—and he genuinely cared for and was embraced by his Native friends. He organized and played at benefit concerts and readings to help the American Indian Movement and to advocate for the release of Leonard Peltier, a Native American convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI agents in South Dakota. Calling himself a “militant Indian poet,” Roxy helped put on a special day at the Kerrville Folk Festival that featured Native American acts. His good works and good intentions didn’t go unnoticed, at least by John and Minerva Allen. In 1991 they invited him to Montana and adopted him into their family. At the end of a four-day Sun Dance ceremony, Roxy was given a new name, and, at least for him, his transformation was complete. From then on, he was Roxy Gordon, First Coyote Boy.

Roxy would sometimes read his poems with friends backing him—here Jim Richmond
(left) and Frank X. Tolbert 2. (Photo Credit: Paradise of Bachelors)

Even as Roxy lived his artist’s life—self-releasing three more albums and several homemade books of poetry, as well as performing and speaking at workshops all over the state—he would travel back to Coleman County to visit his parents and the Hill. Once again, he would wander the terrain, feeling the presence of the past. “We spend as much time as we can there,” he wrote, “amongst ghosts and other mysteries and memories and a south wind that blows forever.”

In 1992, he started writing a column for the Coleman Chronicle & Democrat-Voice, and over the next eight years he would publish more than 125 stories. For thirty years he had been writing—as a callow journalist, a rock star poet, a strident activist—and now he seemed to find his voice as a seasoned veteran of Texas letters, writing in a wry, minimalist style about his wild life, the world around him, and his plans for the future: “All I want to do is write songs, prose, and plant a garden, maybe paint strange things on the side of the house.” You can hear Roxy’s love of history and his curiosity about people and why they do things as he tells stories his grandmother had told him—and relates adventures with Brautigan, Hickey, and Van Zandt, who (a week before he died) called Roxy and said he’d had a dream about moving nearby and starting a donkey ranch.

After his father died, in 1997, Roxy moved back to Coleman County for good, to help take care of his mother and aging grandmother. But Roxy himself was in terrible shape. He had always hated going to the doctor, and his final year was a difficult one, some of it spent in a wheelchair. He died February 7, 2000, of cirrhosis of the liver. “He drank himself to death,” Howe said.

Roxy was only 54, and it’s hard not to feel sadness at what could have been. “Bill in particular thought he had a lot of unused talent,” said Sally Wittliff, referring to her husband, who died in 2019. Mike Rush hated seeing Roxy’s self-destruction and thinks his charisma ultimately hurt him. “I wished he could have been able to stay focused on storytelling rather than being the wizard of this little cultural niche that he created.” Roxy was stubbornly Roxy, and Brendan Greaves of Paradise of Bachelors records, which rereleased Crazy Horse last year, thinks that has a lot to do with why so few today know of him and his work. “Part of his obscurity was willful,” Greaves said. “I think he self-sabotaged a lot.”

(Photo Credit: Paradise of Bachelors)

Roxy’s reputation probably suffered from his refusal to focus on one type of art—he was a writer, critic, poet, and visual artist. He was a bit of a trickster, said Rush, a shape-shifter. “He was an artist,” said Terry Allen. “I think Roxy lived pretty true to his desires, and you can’t say that about everybody.”

Greaves says he will be releasing some of Roxy’s other obscure albums, and J.C. is also trying to get more of his dad’s work out into the world. Growing up, J.C. had a sometimes fraught relationship with his distant father, and when he finally left home, he was resentful. “I wanted to leave and not look back,” he said. But a few years ago, after raising a son of his own, J.C. made a conscious choice to let go of his anger and get to know the man who had always been a mystery to him. He began looking through boxes of old stories, poems, and drawings, and he was so moved by what he saw that he set up a website to host them as well as photos of his mom (who died in 2022) and dad. He pored over the hundreds of stories from both the Coleman Chronicle & Democrat-Voice and Picking Up the Tempo. While he wants to find a publisher for them, he’s not in any hurry. “I miss my father,” he said, “but I have found a way I can cheat his death and meet him as a person, not as a dad.”

About the Author

Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue. Mike graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in government. He wrote for various publications, including Trouser Press, Third Coast Magazine, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Austin Chronicle. In 1997, he joined Texas Monthly, where he has won two Texas Gavel Awards from the State Bar of Texas and four Stephen Philbin Awards from the Dallas Bar Association. He was named Writer of the Year at the City and Regional Magazine Awards in 2015. His stories have appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Da Capo’s Best Music Writing, the New York Times, and Men’s Journal. Mike is also a musician and has played in Austin bands the Wild Seeds, the Setters, the Lollygaggers, and the Savage Trip. He pitches for the Burkas, the Texas Monthly softball team.

To read more of Mike Hall’s coverage on Native American News:

The Karankawa People Want You to Know They’re not Extinct

James Reyos Has Always Been Innocent. After 40 Years, the Courts Agree

To Read Steve Harrigan’s story about Karankawa:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/karankawa-people-today/

About Texas Monthly

For half a century, Texas Monthly has chronicled life in the Lone Star State, exploring its politics and personalities, barbecue and business, true crime and tacos, honky-tonks and hiking. They present those stories on every platform where our audience might enjoy them, from their website to their printed magazine, podcasts, videos, books, and live events.

The Checkered History Of The Poinsettia’s Namesake And The Flower’s Origins Get New Attention

By MORGAN LEE
Associated Press

A variety of Poinsettias on display. (Photo Credit: The Sumter Item)

Like Christmas trees, Santa and reindeer, the poinsettia has long been a ubiquitous symbol of the holiday season in the U.S. and across Europe.

But now, nearly 200 years after the plant with the bright crimson leaves was introduced in the U.S., attention is once again turning to the poinsettia`s origins and the checkered history of its namesake, a slave owner and lawmaker who played a part in the forced removal of Native Americans from their land. Some people would now rather call the plant by the name of its Indigenous origin in southern Mexico.

Some things to know:

WHERE DID THE NAME POINSETTIA COME FROM?

The name comes from the amateur botanist and statesman Joel Roberts Poinsett,
who happened upon the plant in 1828 during his tenure as the first U.S. minister
to the newly independent Mexico.

Poinsett, who was interested in science as well as potential cash crops, sent clippings of the plant to his home in South Carolina and to a botanist in Philadelphia, who affixed the eponymous name to the plant in gratitude.

A life-size bronze statue of Poinsett still stands in his honor in downtown Greenville, South Carolina.

Poinsett’s statue in South Carolina.
(Photo Credit: Undiscovered Charleston)

However, he was cast out of Mexico within a year of his discovery, having earned a local reputation for intrusive political maneuvering that extended to a network of secretive masonic lodges and schemes to contain British influence.

IS THE 'POINSETTIA' NAME LOSING ITS LUSTER?

As more people learn of its namesake's complicated history, the name
"poinsettia" has become less attractive in the United States.

Unvarnished published accounts reveal Poinsett as a disruptive advocate for business interests abroad, a slaveholder on a rice plantation in the U.S., and a secretary of war who helped oversee the forced removal of Native Americans, including the westward relocation of Cherokee populations to Oklahoma known as the "Trail of Tears."

In a new biography titled "Flowers, Guns and Money," historian Lindsay Schakenbach Regele describes the cosmopolitan Poinsett as a political and economic pragmatist who conspired with a Chilean independence leader and colluded with British bankers in Mexico. Though he was a slave owner, he opposed secession, and he didn't live to see the Civil War.

Flowers, Guns and Money by
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Schakenbach Regele renders tough judgment on Poinsett's treatment of and regard for Indigenous peoples.

"Because Poinsett belonged to learned societies, contributed to botanists' collections, and purchased art from Europe, he could more readily justify the expulsion of Natives from their homes," she writes.

A CHRISTMAS FLOWER OF MANY NAMES

The cultivation of the plant dates back to the Aztec empire in Mexico 500 years
ago.

Among Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mexico, the plant is known as the cuetlaxochitl (kwet-la-SHO-sheet), meaning "flower that withers." It's an apt description of the thin red leaves on wild varieties of the plant that grow to heights above 10 feet (3 meters).

Year-end holiday markets in Latin America brim with the potted plant known in Spanish as the "flor de Nochebuena," or "flower of Christmas Eve,`` which is entwined with celebrations of the night before Christmas. The "Nochebuena" name is traced to early Franciscan friars who arrived from Spain in the 16th century. Spaniards once called it "scarlet cloth."

Florist sells poinsettias and other ornamental flowers and plants at Los Viveros
flower market in Mexico City. (Photo Credit: Rodrigo Cervantes)

Additional nicknames abound: "Santa Catarina" in Mexico, "estrella federal," or "federal star" in Argentina and "penacho de Incan," or "headdress" in Peru.

Ascribed in the 19th century, the Latin name, Euphorbia pulcherrima, means "the most beautiful" of a diverse genus with a milky sap of latex.

SO WHAT IS ITS PREFERRED NAME?

"Cuetaxochitl" is winning over some enthusiasts among Mexican youths, including
the diaspora in the U.S., according to Elena Jackson Albarrán, a professor of
Mexican history and global and intercultural studies at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio.

"I've seen a trend towards people openly saying: 'Don't call this flower either poinsettia or Nochebuena. It's cuetlaxochitl,'" said Jackson Albarrán. "There's going to be a big cohort of people who are like, 'Who cares?'"

Most ordinary people in Mexico never say "poinsettia" and don't talk about Poinsett, according to Laura Trejo, a Mexican biologist who is leading studies on the genetic history of the U.S. poinsettia.

"I feel like it's only the historians, the diplomats and, well, the politicians who know the history of Poinsett," Trejo said.

THE MEXICAN ROOTS OF U.S. POINSETTIAS

Mexican biologists in recent years have traced the genetic stock of U.S.
poinsettia plants to a wild variant in the Pacific coastal state of Guerrero,
verifying lore about Poinsett's pivotal encounter there. The scientists also are
researching a rich, untapped diversity of other wild variants, in efforts that
may help guard against the poaching of plants and theft of genetic information.

The flower still grows wild along Mexico's Pacific Coast and parts of Central America as far as Costa Rica.

Trejo, of the National Council of Science and Technology in the central state of Tlaxcala, said some informal outdoor markets still sell the "sun cuetlaxochitl" that resemble wild varieties, alongside modern patented varieties.

Poinsettias varieties: ‘Mouse Ears’, ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Golden Glow.’
(Photo Credit: Mary Schier)

In her field research travels, Trejo has found households that preserve ancient traditions associated with the flower.

"It's clear to us that this plant, since the pre-Hispanic era, is a ceremonial plant, an offering, because it's still in our culture, in the interior of the county, to cut the flowers and take them to the altars," she said in Spanish. "And this is primarily associated with the maternal goddesses: with Coatlicue, Tonantzin and now with the Virgin Mary."

A LASTING FIGURE IN HISTORY

Regardless of his troubled history, Poinsett's legacy as an explorer and
collector continues to loom large: Some 1,800 meticulously tended poinsettias
are delivered in November and December from greenhouses in Maryland to a long
list of museums in Washington, D.C., affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.

A "pink-champagne" cultivar adorns the National Portrait Gallery this year.

Poinsett’s name may also live on for his connection to other areas of U.S. culture. He advocated for the establishment of a national science museum, and in part due to his efforts, a fortune bequeathed by British scientist James Smithson was used to underwrite the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

The Shoshone-Bannock People and Its Special Alliance with Idaho National Laboratory

By Michelle Goff

(Editor’s note: This story is partially adapted from a Tribal historical write-up titled, “The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.”)

One story about the land where the Idaho National Laboratory Site now sits begins with a muskrat. In the “Legend of Creation” held by the Bannock Tribe, the area used to be “nothing but water.” As the story goes, the Father parted the foam on the water and called for the water people to come up to him. Beaver was the first of the water people to join Father. They talked and smoked, and then Father asked him to dive back in.

After waiting three days for Beaver to come back, Father repeated this process with Otter. But Otter also did not return. Finally, he called to Muskrat, the youngest of the water people. When Muskrat dove down, he went into the water “very straight and very deep.” On the third day, Father saw him floating, appearing to be dead. Crying, he took Muskrat into his hands.

Shoshone-Bannock dancers at INL’s Central Facilities Area.

While Father was holding Muskrat, Muskrat began to breathe. Father saw mud on his nose, and he took the mud and rolled it around and around in his hands. Using the mud, Father shaped mountains and valleys. He divided the waters and created rivers and oceans. From the mud of Muskrat’s nose, Father created the Earth on which we live today.

The Shoshone and Bannock people lived in Idaho as far back as 12,000-plus years ago, according to both tribal and archaeological accounts. The aboriginal lands of the Shoshone and Bannock people were much larger than the land where many of them live today, including parts of Canada and Mexico. Over time, they moved into extended family groups throughout present-day Idaho, known by the names of the areas where they lived or the food they ate.

Early Days of the Shoshone and Bannock People

The Shoshone people are linguistically related to the Comanche people in the south, who helped them introduce horses into Idaho. The Bannocks are culturally similar to the Shoshone, with distinct language differences. They were related to the Paiutes who left the mountains of Oregon for the prairies of Idaho, where they also acquired horses and began to travel more.

Before fur trappers arrived in the 1810s, the areas occupied by the Shoshone-Bannock people teemed with wildlife species, including buffalo, mountain sheep, bears, deer, elk, moose, salmon, trout, rabbit, marmot and beaver. The arrival of fur trappers dramatically changed life for the Shoshone and Bannock people. In 1834, Nathaniel Wyeth founded the Fort Hall Trading Post, and this became a popular spot for white travelers on the Oregon and California trails. In 1843, a permanent white settlement was established in Bear River Valley, sending settlers flocking closer to Fort Hall.

The Fort Hall Reservation was established as part of the 1867 executive order that set up the Fort Bridger Treaty of July 3, 1868. The order called for 1.8 million acres of land on the reservation, but a survey error reduced that initial amount to 1.2 million acres. The original reservation was reduced further to make land available for white settlers and railroad construction. Currently, Fort Hall consists of only 544,000 acres. Because of their land acquisition program, 97% of the current Fort Hall land is tribal trust land.

Shoshone-Bannock students at Middle Butte Cave, an important cultural site on the INL desert.

The ancestors of the many bands of Shoshone and Bannock people were removed from their homelands in southwestern, southeastern and central Idaho, in addition to land outside of Idaho, to the Fort Hall Reservation. These included the many bands of Shoshone and Bannock people from the Salmon area, the Agai Deka, Boise Valley, Bruneau, Weiser, Yellowstone and Southwestern Montana. Today, their descendants return to their ancestral areas to hunt, fish, gather and visit areas of spiritual significance.

Idaho National Laboratory Involvement

Since all INL campuses sit on the ancestral land of the Shoshone-Bannock people, the lab’s relationship with the Tribes is an important part of INL’s 75 years of history.

INL’s Cultural Resource Management Office has a dedicated team of archaeologists, historians and preservationists who help safeguard the history of this land, working closely with experts from the  Cultural Resources/Heritage Tribal Office (CR/HeTO) of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office. Additionally, INL researchers and the lab’s K-12 STEM Education team have partnered with the Tribes to build their workforce and advance the nation’s clean energy future.

Energy Research

INL researchers, including members of the Tribes, have given presentations to Shoshone-Bannock students at Fort Hall on different energy resources, including hydropower.

The Tribes and INL, along with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, are partners on an effort to upgrade the Fort Hall irrigation system. The study will help identify areas where modernizing the system could maximize benefits. The ongoing case study will include engagement meetings between technical tribal staff members and tribal policymakers.

“This partnership is very important for both the Tribes and INL,” said Cleve Davis, a geospatial data scientist with INL and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. “Not only will it be an excellent opportunity to include a federally recognized Tribe for an irrigation modernization case study, but it will also strengthen the existing partnership between INL and the Tribes.”

Cultural Resource Management

Throughout INL’s history, cultural resources staff members at both INL and the Department of Energy (DOE) have collaborated with members of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Cultural Resources/Heritage Tribal Office, to manage the land and its cultural resources through an agreement in principle (AIP).

Shoshone-Bannock dancers at INL’s Central Facilities Area.

According to the agreement, DOE and the Tribes are committed to working together to address concerns regarding the environment, energy-related matters, educational opportunities, and natural and cultural resources issues. These issues are within the authority of and consistent with the laws and regulations by which DOE and the Tribes are governed. DOE acknowledges its trust responsibility to consult and work cooperatively with the Tribes, and to exercise statutory and legal authorities to protect tribal lands, assets, resources and treaty rights. Additionally, DOE strives to fulfill this responsibility through the agreement in principle, DOE American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Government Policy, and other American Indian program initiatives.

Essentially, this agreement ensures that the Tribes have knowledge of Site operations, a voice in what’s happening there and how the land — particularly cultural and natural resources important to the Tribes, is being managed. DOE ensures that members of the Tribes have continuous access to those areas.

Additionally, members of the Tribes’ CR/HeTO regularly participate in INL’s archaeological surveys and monitoring. This ensures that tribal cultural resources are handled appropriately and also that the CR/HeTO can be involved as principal investigators in research related to the land. Members of INL and DOE’s cultural resources team also meet with the Fort Hall Business Council whenever required, to discuss the laboratory’s scope for new and ongoing projects. DOE and INL cultural resources personnel also meet monthly with CR/HeTO during their Cultural Resources Working Group meetings to discuss projects and surveys.

Education

In 2021, INL and the Tribes partnered to create pathways for Shoshone-Bannock School students to enter high-paying, high-demand jobs. The lab and the Tribes signed a memorandum of understanding that helped develop several educational partnership programs.

INL designed hands-on programs in trade careers, based on high need areas in the next 10 years that were identified through workforce projections. Lab experts built programs in industrial mechanics and construction to prepare students for work as entry-level INL employees. As part of this program, participants do six weeks of paid work each summer with INL and form relationships with mentors in their field.

Signing the educational partnership Memorandum of Understanding. 

An additional goal of the memorandum is to support the Shoshone-Bannock School in gaining a STEM designation through teacher training and curriculum coordinating. A key aim of this process is ensuring that, as the school transitions to the STEM designation, it continues to incorporate Shoshone-Bannock cultural and educational curricula.

“We derive so much from our regular interactions with the Tribes,” said Betsy Holmes, who leads the cultural resource management team for DOE’s Idaho Operations Office. “Our work is so much improved by their voices, involvement and knowledge.”

About the Shoshone-Bannock Nation

The Shoshones and Bannocks entered into peace treaties in 1863 and 1868 known today as the Fort Bridger Treaty. The Fort Hall Reservation was reserved for the various tribes under the treaty agreement. The Fort Hall Reservation is located in the eastern Snake River Plain of southeastern Idaho. It is comprised of lands that lie north and west of the town of Pocatello. The Snake River, Blackfoot River, and the American Falls Reservoir border the reservation on the north and northwest. Currently, 97% of the Reservation lands are owned by the Tribes and individual Indian ownership.

About Idaho National Laboratory

Battelle Energy Alliance manages the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, celebrating 75 years of scientific innovations in 2024. The laboratory performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.

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(Editor’s Note: All photographs by Chris Morgan, courtesy Idaho National Laboratory)

Black Belt Eagle Scout`s Latest Record Inspired by Return Home to Swinomish Tribe`s Ancestral Lands

By MICHAEL CASEY
Associated Press

Illustration of Black Belt Eagle Scout. (Photo Credit: Jules Pools, Pacific Standard)

The beginning of the pandemic was devasting for the leader of the indie rock band Black Belt Eagle Scout, Katherine Paul. All her tours, including one headlining across North America, were canceled and she feared her ascending music career might be over.

She got a day job at a nonprofit and returned to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community`s homelands in Western Washington. But as Paul, or KP to her friends, spent time in the cedar forests and walked along the Skagit River, she turned to her guitar to deal with the isolation and stress. Those snippets, recorded on her phone, provided the foundation for what would become songs on her powerful, grunge-soaked new record "The Land, The Water, The Sky."

"I feel like if the pandemic hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t have made this record," said KP, who writes the songs, sings and plays guitar in the band that was the only Native American artist at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this month.

"I spent a lot of time outside. I spent a lot more time than normal going on hikes, being part of the land," she continued. "It's not like I never do that stuff but it brought me back to a place where this is who I am.”

The new record, which came out in February, helped launch what has probably been the most successful year so far for Black Belt Eagle Scout. The band toured Europe and will go to Australia later this year. Two of her songs, "Soft Stud" from an earlier record and "Salmon Stinta" from her latest, appear this season on the television series "Reservation Dogs."

Reservation Dogs Music Supervisor Tiffany Anders said she was introduced to the band’s music by the show’s creator, Sterlin Harjo, when they started working on the second season.

"It's always been important for us on this show to include Native American artists, but beyond representation, Black Belt Eagle Scout's music is beautiful and emotional, and fits these characters, their world and landscape __ and the vibe of the show," she said in a statement.

A performance during the Pitchfork Music Festival at Union Park in

Chicago on Saturday, July 22, 2023. (Photo Credit: Chicago Music Guide)

Then there was Pitchfork, a three-day festival that is a significant milestone for indie musicians. The festival is held every year in Chicago’s Union Park and this year’s headliners included Bon Iver, Big Thief and The Smile, which has members of Radiohead.

She admitted stepping on that stage last weekend was nerve-wracking given her high hopes for the show, a feeling compounded by concerns that storms could scuttle their performance. But as she launched into the blistering set of mostly new songs in front of thousands of eager fans, KP found solace in her guitar. She launched several long jams that were punctuated by her twirling her jet- black hair around to the point it obscured her face.

"It was totally a moment," she said with a laugh.

"I kind of cried after we played because it felt so meaningful," she added. "Like, I've always wanted to play this music festival. I remember trying to play one of the years before the pandemic when I was touring and it didn't happen. This year, I was just so stoked to play."

Reaching Pitchfork has been a long journey for the 34-year-old artist, who is a member of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and left her home on the reservation in LaConner, Washington, when she was 17 to attend Lewis & Clark College in Oregon and play rock music.

Growing up on the reservation off the Washington coast on islands in the Salish Sea, she drummed and sang cultural songs. As a teenager, she discovered local Pacific Northwest bands like Mount Eerie and the sounds of the Riot Grrrl movement and played one of her first gigs at a small bar called Department of Safety. She moved to Portland, Oregon, due to its outsized role in the indie scene that featured bands like Sleater-Kinney and quickly immersed herself in the music scene playing drums and guitar.

She joined an all-female outfit whom she met at the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls in Portland. She went on to play a lot of small, basement shows with bands like Genders __ whose wolf tattoo she still has on her left arm.

Katherine Paul, who records as Black Belt Eagle Scout. (Photo Credit: Nate Lemeul)

But she wanted to write her own songs and formed Black Belt Eagle Scout in 2013. Her early music was defined by her ethereal singing about love, friendship and healing __ often only accompanied by minimal guitar strumming. But she did rock out on songs like "Soft Stud," which featured searing solos.

"She is a really an authentic musician and she carries a lot of power on stage with her presence and sound," Claire Glass, who plays guitar in the band and first saw KP seven years ago.

KP has said her Native American identify has always been present on her records. But her latest music paints a more vivid picture of life on the Swinomish reservation. There are references to chinook salmon, which are traditionally fished, and a powwow dance.

"I started thinking of feeling grateful for the life that I have been given; this place that I`m from; how much the land, the water, the sky means to me __ being surrounded by it,” KP said of writing the song “Don’t Give Up.” “It has so much more meaning because the land, that's where my people are from.”

Black Belt Eagle Scout is on the cover of her latest album. The scene depicts the musician's connection to the area in Washington where she grew up.

Her songs aren’t meant to directly confront issues like the crisis of missing and murdered Native American women or tribes` forced relocation. It’s not the way she writes songs. Instead, she envisions them connecting with people, drawing more Native Americans to indie rock shows in places like Minneapolis, which has a vibrant Native American community, and inspiring young Native Americans to connect with her after shows.

"Isn't me like being here existing with my music good enough? Can't I just be who I am?" she asked, adding she doesn`t need to speak out from stage about these issues because being Native often means she is already wrestling with them. A judge, for example, ruled in March that BNSF Railway intentionally violated the terms of an easement agreement with the tribe by running 100-car trains carrying crude oil over the reservation.

"As a Native person, you know someone who is missing. Your tribe is trying to get your land back. Those are topics that are part of your everyday life,” she said. "I care about those things deeply but there are certain ways in which my music is, maybe not as direct, but it can be healing."

KP also doesn`t want to be seen just as a rock musician or as a Native artist. "I am a musician who happens to be Native, but I am also a Native musician ... I think I am always both," she said.

Black Belt Eagle Scout performs at SXSW. (Photo Credit: Paul Hudson)

Her latest record aims to show that.

"I kind of had in the back of mind, just kept thinking what would Built to Spill do," KP said of the guitar-heavy, indie-rock band from the Pacific Northwest. "I`ve gone on tour with them and seen their three guitars at one point playing together and how they overlap and all these other things.”

It’s also a more collaborative effort with more musicians playing on the record__ a departure for KP, who is accustomed to doing everything herself. A cellist who played with Nirvana, Lori Goldston, is featured on several songs, as are two violinists, as well as a saxophone and mellotron player.

Takiaya Reed, a first-time producer who is also in a doom metal band, described the experience of working on the record as "beautiful and amazing`` and said the two bonded over their love of punk. Reid also brought her classical training and love of "heavier sounds" to the studio.

"We approached it fearlessly. It was wonderful to be expansive in terms of sonic possibilities," she said.

KP also wanted to find a place for her parents, whom she had grown especially close to during the pandemic, to play on the record. She chose the song "Spaces, " which she described as having a "healing vibe.” Her dad, who is one of the main singers at the tribe’s cultural events, embraced the idea of lending his powerful powwow chant to the song. Her mom sang harmonies.

KP said: "It meant the world to me to have my parents sing because it felt like it was full circle in who I am.”

'The Land You Know Has Been Given to You,’ Film Documents Quechan Battling Gold and Lithium Mining

Article by Brenda Norrell
Censored News

Members of the Quechan Indian Tribe in California and other groups are in opposition of gold mining taking place on 20 acres of public land. (Photo Credit: The Land You Know Has Been Given to You)

Gold is the 'snake's blood; and the creatures in the desert will die because of the greed of corporations, including the Canadian gold company now targeting Quechan's sacred land

This land was given to the people and creatures long before the Europeans came here. Now, gold, lithium, and geothermal miners are destroying it. They are not from here, it doesn't matter to them, and it is the public that is letting them do it, said Preston Arrow-Weed, Quechan elder. "They have no right to go and destroy it for the gold," says Arrow-weed in a new film, "The Land You Know has been Given to You," just released.

"The gold is the snake's blood," he said, adding that the big corporations come in, and leave all that destruction behind.

"This land was given to us."

"My knowledge of history comes from songs," Arrow-weed said, sharing the history of the Quechan here.

In the Cargo Muchacho Mountains, northwest of Winterhaven, in southern California, is the Quechan homeland, the Oro Cruz project mineral exploration is on about 20 acres of public lands and consist of up to 65 drill sites within seven drill areas. The overall area for the plan’s boundary is about 626 acres. The project is by the SMP Gold Corp., of British Columbia, Canada, in the existing Oro Cruz Mine Area, where multiple drilling and large-scale open pit operations had previously existed before ceasing operations in 1996 because of declining gold prices, the SMP Gold website stated. -- Calexico Chronicle

Arrow-weed said they are destroying the mountain, simply to get gold to line their pockets. They're digging for gold everywhere they can and creatures are dying. They are mining for lithium and geothermal digging near the San Andres fault.

"It's the public that lets them do it."

"The people with the money are running the government."

Faron Owl, Quechan Tribal Councilperson (left) with film producer-director
Robert Lundahl .(Photo Credit: The Land You Know Has Been Given to You)

Filmmaker Robert Lundahl said, "Honored to participate with Preston J. Arrow-weed and Faron Owl, along with Bradley Angel and Greenaction in the creation of this video, "The Land You Know Has Been Given To You." Ceremony and discussion about lithium and gold mining in California."

See the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqo0w_8MQnM

Bradley Angel and Robert Lundahl, Producers and Directed by Robert Lundahl ©Copyright 2023, Agence RLA, LLC, Greenaction, 14 minutes

ALL THE NEWS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE

Censored News is published by Brenda Norell, a well-known journalist in Indian Country for 40 years. She began as a reporter at the Navajo Times during the 18 years she lived on the Navajo reservation. Norell was a stringer for AP and USA Today and holds the rare distinction of being blacklisted by all the mainstream media for 17 years.

Strawberry: The Food of the Skyworld

by Doug George-Kanentiio

Among the traditional Mohawks there is a special appreciation for the strawberry plant-called Niihontesha. It is a unique plant as its seeds are outside of the skin of the berry and is the first one to ripen in the early summer.

The strawberry plant itself comes from Karonhia:ke (the Skyworld). It is said that when the first human type being descended to the earth from the sky world (Karonhia:keh) she brought three plants with her: Niihontesha, Onenstateh (corn) and Oienkwa:onweh (tobacco).

Called Atsitsakaiion (Mature Flower) Skywoman created the current dimensions of the continent we call Anowara:kowa (the Great Turtle) as she danced counter-clockwise, her feet caressing the land as the seeds of the plants took root and grew. The rhythm and style of her dancing is carried on by the Mohawks to the current day with the “Women’s Dance” songs said to be the first ones sung by human beings in this part of the world. It is also the food which sustains us once our physical bodies die and our spirits begin their journey along the great star path back to Karonhia:ke which lies beyond Teka:tsi:stoh:kwaieron:nion:ha:ton (the “many constellations” aka the “milky way”).

When Iroquois Mother Goddess, Sky Woman, fell from the sky she was clutching strawberries in one hand and tobacco in the other.

When the strawberries are ripe in their natural state in the fields a group of female and male spiritual advisers called “faithkeepers” (Iakoterihonton for the women and Roterihonton for the men) will counsel the leaders of the nation (Iakoia:ne-clanmothers and Roia:ne-male “chief”) that the time is right for the people to gather at the longhouse to celebrate the return of the plant.

A one-day ceremony will be held during which the people will prepare a special drink of strawberry juice and maple syrup, blended to be light and refreshing. The leaders will address the plant itself as the Mohawks believe that which grows, whether tree, animal or earth, responds to the human voice. The Mohawks have long held that water and other earth elements have what is referred to as their own way but interlocked with our lives. They react to what we say and particularly the music we make with our voices and minds.

Harsh, angry music or words deter a plant’s growth, just as it will a child, and actually effect the energy and appearance of lakes, rivers and streams. Music of this kind also has a negative impact on the water we consume and since our bodies are mostly liquid that kind of angry human expression may bring harm to ourselves.

By outwardly expressing thanks to the strawberry, we release its curative and nutritional powers. The Mohawks are careful in their selection of which berry to pick and will always leave the first plant as it is the guardian for the rest. As the picking takes place the Mohawk harvester is saying words of gratitude and apology for taking the fruit of the plant, assuring it that enough is left behind to regenerate and that it will be used for the right purposes. No chemical is permitted as this may bring harm to the fruit.

Attendees at the annual festival.

Once assembled the people will bring the strawberry to the ceremonial place and will take their seats according to which of the three clans (bear, wolf, turtle) they belong. The individual will rise and give thanks using a quiet and respectful tone. After this is done the clanmothers will announce to the people that in the past few months a certain number of girls (Ieksa:ah) have been born since the Midwinter Ceremony in winter. They are now ready to be shown to the people to be welcomed into the longhouse family. The female infants (boys are named at another ceremony months later) are carried by the Roiane to the centre of the longhouse and show to the people and to the four directions with their new names spoken so that all of creation will know of this new being.

The names given to the girls are theirs along and will be used throughout their lives as the primary means by which they will interact with the plants, medicines, animal live, the earth and by the spiritual beings. These are called Rationhia:kehronon (sky people). Others may call them “angels” but to the Mohawks the relationship is much more dynamic and involved. The sky people will, depending upon need and specific request, provide guidance and direction to the infant throughout their lives.

The Strawberry Ceremony is one of the most ancient of all Mohawk rituals. Throughout the year the preserved fruit will be used to give thanks for the gift of life. Since it is in a heart shape, with long root threads resembling arteries and veins, it is an excellent natural medicine for that organ. People who have heart disease or are recovering from a heart attack are advised to heal by consuming the fruit and drinking tea from its roots and leaves.

Eleanor Spears Dove, Narragansett elder, sampled a strawberry from a basket passed at the Narragansett Strawberry Thanksgiving, another popular event.

It is said the strawberry plants likes to be among humans and can be found in its natural state near the homes of the Mohawk people. It is also taught that other humans from across the salt water will bring about great environmental destruction to the Great Turtle to the extent that indigenous plants and animals will disappear. In time, natural strawberries will no longer grow, a certain sign of the great ecological changes now imminent.
While the strawberries carry on their original instructions it seems human beings are now far from theirs. Yet the Mohawks continue to celebrate this most wonderful of Skyworld gifts.

(From News from Indian Country)

Influential American Indian Scholars

By Academic Influence Staff

Our list of 35 scholars of American Indian descent features historians, anthropologists, professors, and researchers alongside artists, authors, educators, and activists. These luminaries have helped shape the course of history within their communities, the broader cross-section of American Indian peoples, and for America as a whole.

These influential Native American scholars include academics and professionals who span a wide breadth of disciplines and who are touchstone figures in a broad spectrum of cultural movements and moments. The people highlighted here include historians, anthropologists, professors, and researchers alongside artists, authors, educators, and activists. Representing a sweeping diversity of Native American Tribes and Nations from Crow to Choctaw; Tuscarora to Muscogee Creek; Abenaki to Cherokee, the luminaries included on our list have helped shape the course of history within their respective indigenous communities, for the broader cross-section of American Indian peoples, and beyond.

Also represented within our list are the deep roots that so many Native American scholars have planted in the academy. The list below, which is composed both of living influencers and powerful figures who are no longer with us, demonstrates the profound and permeating influence of so many renowned American Indian academics, educators, and creatives. Included are people who remain active in the academy, and who still impact the world of learning, often in a multidisciplinary capacity. And there are those that, though deceased, have achieved a far-reaching legacy of influence and impact that persists today.

The people included in our list were identified using our machine-powered Influence Ranking algorithm, which produces a numerical score of academic achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia/data, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and an ever-growing body of data in order to identify top influencers in their respective areas of expertise.

Find out more about our Methodology.

The following list is presented alphabetically and is therefore not intended to suggest a ranking of individuals. Instead, this is a comprehensive list of the top American Indian Scholars impacting the world today.

Influential American Indian Scholars

#1

Osceola Macarthy Adams
1890 - 1983

Osceola Macarthy Adams was an American actress, drama teacher, director, and clothing designer. She was one of the 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Born to a life insurance executive in Albany, Georgia, Macarthy was mixed with European, Native American, and African American heritage. She attended schools in Albany, Georgia including Albany Normal School, a predecessor to Albany State University, and then attended Fisk University's Preparatory School. Later, she attended Howard University, where she studied ancient Greek and philosophy.

#2

Taiaiake Alfred

Gerald Taiaiake Alfred is an author, educator, and activist, born in Montreal, Quebec in 1964 and raised in the community of Kahnawake. Alfred is an internationally recognized Kanien'kehá:ka professor. Alfred grew up in Kahnawake and received a B.A. in History from Concordia University, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. He served in the US Marine Corps in the 1980s. Alfred was the founding director of the University of Victoria's Indigenous Governance Program (serving from 1999 until 2015) and was awarded a Canada Research Chair 2003–2007, in addition to a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in education.

#3

Alvin Eli Amason

Alvin Eli Amason is a Sugpiaq Alaskan painter and sculptor. He was raised in Kodiak and is of Alutiiq ancestry. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University and taught for several years at Navajo Community College. For seventeen years, he taught at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was the head of the Alaska Native Art studies program there. After retiring, he was asked to join the Department of Art at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and develop an Alaska Native Art curriculum.

#4

JoAllyn Archambault

JoAllyn Archambault is a cultural anthropologist with an expertise in Native American people. She is the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Indian Program. Born to a Sioux father and Creek mother, Archambault was raised in Sioux traditions and is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. Archambault has made a great contribution to anthropology by providing an insider’s perspective to her research on Native American people.

#5

Noelani Arista

Denise Noelani Manuela Arista is an associate professor of Hawaiian and US History in the Department of History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her scholarship focuses on 19th century American History, Hawaiian History and Literature, Indigenous epistemology and translation, and Colonial and Indigenous history and historiography. Arista was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi and she graduated from the Kamehameha Schools in 1986. She received both her BA (1992) and her MA (1998) in Hawaiian Religion from the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. In 2010, she earned her PhD from the Department of History at Brandeis University. Arista's dissertation, "Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters with Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793-1827," won the 2010 Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for the "best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history". Arista was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2008. In 2013-14, Arista was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, Arista was promoted to associate professor of Hawaiian History at the University of Hawai'I.

#6

Jodi Byrd

Jodi Byrd holds a master's degree and Ph.D. (2002) in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism's Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before moving to Cornell University, she taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, and before that she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012. In 2012, she was adopted as a Clan Sister (one of the central organizing members) of the Native American Literature Symposium, which she has stated has been an inspiring community for her since her first days as a graduate student.

#7

Gregory Cajete

Gregory Cajete is a Tewa author and professor from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Cajete earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology and sociology from New Mexico Highlands University, with a minor in secondary education. His Master of Arts degree is from the University of New Mexico, and his doctorate is from the International College, Los Angeles's New Philosophy Program. His Philosophy Doctorate is in social science Education with an emphasis in Native American Studies. Currently he is director of the Native American Studies program and associate professor of education at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He has been a New Mexico Humanities scholar of ethnobotany and is a member of the New Mexico Arts Commission.

#8

Ward Churchill

Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1990 until 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial and provocative views, written in a direct, often confrontational style.

#9

Joe Medicine Crow
1913 - 2016

Joseph Medicine Crow was a Native American writer, historian, and war chief of the Crow Nation. His writings on Native American history and reservation culture are considered seminal works, but he is best known for his writings and lectures concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876.

#10

Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey A. Gibson is a Mississippi Choctaw -Cherokee painter and sculptor from the United States, based in Hudson, New York. Background Early life Born in Colorado, as a child his family moved frequently. As a youth he lived in and Korea. Important to his role as an artist, press releases state that “This unique combination of cultural perspectives and exposure are essential to understanding Gibson’s artworks that combine and transform seemingly disparate references drawn from both Western and non-Western sources.”

#11

Richard W. Hill Sr.

Rick Hill is a citizen of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee at Grand River. He holds a master's degree in American Studies. He is the former Assistant Director for Public Programs, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; Museum Director, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and Assistant Professor, Native American Studies, SUNY Buffalo. He recently retired as Senior Project Coordinator of the Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre at Six Nations Polytechnic, Ohsweken, Ontario. Rick is currently a Distinguished Fellow – Adjunct Professor and curriculum developer at Mohawk College, in Hamilton, Ontario.

#12

Valjean McCarty Hessing
1934 - 2006

Valjean McCarty Hessing was a Choctaw painter, who worked in the Bacone flatstyle. Throughout her career, she won 9- awards for her work and was designated a Master Artist by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in 1976. Her artworks are in collections of the Heard Museum of Phoenix, Arizona; the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma; and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian of Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others.

#13

LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe (born April 29, 1951) is an American author and Eidson Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens. She previously taught American Indian Studies and English at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

#14

Georgia Mills Jessup
1926 - 2016

Georgia Mills Jessup was an American painter, sculptor, ceramicist, muralist, and collage artist. Early life and education Jessup, a native of Washington, D.C., was of African American, Native American, and European descent. Her father, Joseph Mills, was a member of the Pamunkey tribe; her mother was Margaret Hall Mills, a hairdresser who had dreamed of a career in the theater. The thirteenth of eighteen children, she was one of twenty-nine members of her family who followed an artistic profession. After an early display of artistic talent, she was apprenticed to Herman L. Walker; two of her paintings were shown at the 1939 World's Fair, when she was just 13 years old. Jessup was a 1943 graduate of Dunbar High School. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Howard University, where she studied with Loïs Mailou Jones, in 1959, following that with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Catholic University of America in 1969.

#15

Jennie R. Joe

Jennie R. Joe (born 1941) is an American academic, medical anthropologist, and fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Initially trained as a nurse, she was one of the health clinic workers during Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. She is a professor in the Departments of Family and Community Medicine and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Joe was one of the inaugural board members for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and serves on the board of the Urban Indian Health Commission.

#16

Ruthe Blalock Jones

Ruthe Blalock Jones is a Delaware Shawnee painter and printmaker from Oklahoma. Jones was born on June 8, 1939, in Claremore, Oklahoma. Her parents are Joe and Lucy Parks Blalock. Her tribal name is Chulundit.

#17

Daniel Heath Justice

Daniel Heath Justice is an American-born Canadian academic and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia. He started his studies at University of Northern Colorado and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He began his career at the University of Toronto, where he taught English and worked in association with the Aboriginal Studies Program. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018) is the winner of the NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association) Award for Subsequent Book published in 2018. It also received the 2019 PROSE Award, granted by the Association of American Publishers, in the category of Literature and was nominated for the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism from the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL). In 2015, Justice was awarded the UBC Killam Research Prize in recognition of his leadership in the field of Indigenous Literary Studies and for his many contributions to it, including Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006) and The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (co-edited with James H. Cox, 2014). In 2010, he was awarded the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize at the University of Toronto.

#18

Tsianina Lomawaima

Tsianina Lomawaima is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous Studies, anthropology, history, and political science. She is a professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She specializes in the interaction between sovereign Native nations and U.S. federalism, the status of Native people as U.S. citizens, and federal Indian policy particularly in education. Her historical focus is the early 20th century.

#19

Henrietta Mann

Henrietta Mann (Cheyenne, b. 1934) is a Native American academic and activist. She was one of the designers of the Native American studies programs at University of California, Berkeley, the University of Montana, and Haskell Indian Nations University. In 2000 she became the first American Indian to hold the endowed chair of Native American studies at Montana State University and was honored with the Montana Governor's Humanities Award. She retired in 2004 and became a special advisor to the president of Montana State University.

#20

Devon A. Mihesuah

Devon A. Mihesuah (born 2 June 1957) is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation, a historian and writer, and a previous editor of the American Indian Quarterly. She is the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. She is the second Native woman to receive a named/distinguished professorship (the first is Henrietta Mann). Her lineage is well-documented in multiple tribal records. Mihesuah has written award-winning books and articles about colonization, boarding schools, stereotypes, research methodologies, Indigenous women, AIM, repatriation, racism, violence against Natives, "fake news," slander and libel against Natives, in addition to a series of award-winning novels.

#21

Simon J. Ortiz

Simon J. Ortiz (born May 27, 1941) is a Native American writer, poet, and enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. Ortiz is one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. He attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, as a chemistry major with the help of a BIA educational grant. While enthralled with language and literature, the young Ortiz never considered pursuing writing seriously; at the time, it was not a career that seemed viable for Native people; it was "a profession only whites did." Since 1968, Ortiz has taught creative writing and Native American literature at various institutions, including San Diego State University, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Diné College, the College of Marin, the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska University, and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches at Arizona State University.

#22

Bertha Parker Pallan
1907 - 1978

Bertha Pallan Thurston Cody was an American archaeologist, working as an assistant in archaeology at the The Autry Museum. She was also married to actor Iron Eyes Cody. She is thought to be the first Native American female archaeologist of Abenaki and Seneca descent.

#23

Christopher J. Pexa

Christopher Pexa specializes in 19th and 20th century Native American and U.S. literatures, Native American studies, and settler colonial studies, with an emphasis on questions of indigenous ethics, sovereignty, and nationalism. He completed his latest book with University of Minnesota Press, entitled Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakota Oyate, that explores the ambivalent ways in which allotment-era Dakota authors played to white regimes of legibility while at the same time honoring tribal common sense and producing a contemporary Dakota nationhood. Pexa's essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Wíčazo Ša Review, SAIL, and MELUS. He is also a published poet and is currently working on a book of prose poetry, entitled Throne of Horses, about the afterlives of Indian boarding schools.

#24

Jolene Rickard

Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle Clan, is an artist, curator and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in indigenous peoples’ issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

#25

Alice Mary Robertson
1854 - 1931

Alice Mary Robertson was an American educator, social worker, Native Americans’ rights activist, government official, and politician who became the second woman to serve in the United States Congress, and the first from the state of Oklahoma. Robertson was the first woman to defeat an incumbent congressman. She was known for her strong personality, commitment to Native American issues, and anti-feminist stance.

#26

Luana Ross

Luana K. Ross (born 1949) is a Native American sociologist of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located at Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Montana in 1979, her master's degree from Portland State University, and her doctorate in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1992, before serving as faculty at the University of California, Davis and University of California, Berkeley. Since 1999 she has been a faculty member for the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She has also been an Adjunct Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington since 1999. In January 2010, she was appointed president of Salish Kootenai College, effective in July of that year. She resigned from the position in 2012.

#27

Leilani Sabzalian

Dr. Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education and the Co-Director of the Sapsik'wałá (Teacher) Education Program at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on creating spaces to support Indigenous students and Indigenous self-determination in public schools, and preparing teachers to challenge colonialism in curriculum, policy, and practice. She is also dedicated to improving Indigenous education in the state of Oregon by serving on the American Indian/Alaska Native State Advisory Committee and collaborating with the Office of Indian Education on professional development to support the implementation of Tribal History/Shared History, a law that mandates curriculum on tribal history and sovereignty in all K-12 public schools in Oregon.

#28

Audra Simpson

A member of the Mohawk Tribe, Audra Simpson is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Simpson focuses on the politics of recognition, specifically the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk struggles in keeping their legal and cultural rights. Her book, Mohawk Interruptus, was celebrated by Indigenous studies scholars as a critical addition to education on tribal community and national identity. As an anthropologist, a career in a field that is notorious for exploiting and thinking of Natives only in the past tense, Simpson pushes against these notions by centering on Native epistemologies.

#29

James Thomas Stevens

James Thomas Stevens (born 1966) is an American poet and academic. He is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. James Thomas Stevens was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and his Mohawk name is Aronhió:ta's. His father was a Welsh-American and his mother is Mohawk. In 1993 Stevens earned his MFA in writing from Brown University Graduate Writing Program, where he had a full fellowship. He earned a Creative Writing AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he received the Gerald Red Elk Scholarship in 1990, allowing him to attend the Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program. Stevens briefly attended the School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College in New York. Stevens was an associate professor in the English Department of SUNY Fredonia and the director of American Indian Studies. He has also been an Instructor of Poetry at Brown University and taught at Haskell Indian Nations University. He is an author of numerous volumes of poetry. An international poet with professional invitations to France, Turkey, and China, Stevens spoke at the IIPF in the United Nations in 2006. He formerly taught at Haskell Indian Nations University and remains a vibrant member of the Native community as well as a leading young American Poet.

#30

Kim TallBear

Kim TallBear (born 1968) is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, as well as a descendant from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma.

#31

France Winddance Twine

France Winddance Twine is an American sociologist, documentary filmmaker, a visual artist and an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma. A native of Chicago, she is the granddaughter of Paul Twine, Sr., a Civil Rights activist and founding member of the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago, a Civil Rights organization that brought Irish, Italian, German, Polish and Black Catholics together to fight for racial justice. Dr. Twine is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she regularly teaches courses on race, gender and class inequality, sociology of the body, sociology of work, girlhood, assisted reproductive technologies and qualitative research methods.

#32

Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. After a stint in the military upon returning to the United States in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G.I. Bill funding to complete his undergraduate degree at New York University. He followed this with postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he also undertook graduate teaching. After teaching at the university, between 1964 and 1968, Vizenor worked as a community advocate. During this time, he served as director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which brought him into close contact with numerous Native Americans from reservations. Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor. He investigated the case of Thomas James White Hawk, convicted of murder. Vizenor's perspective allowed him to raise difficult questions about the nature of justice in a society dealing with colonized peoples. His work was credited with enabling White Hawk to have his death sentence commuted.

#33

Robert Allen Warrior

Robert Allen Warrior (born 1963) is a scholar and Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. With Paul Chaat Smith, he co-authored Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. He is generally recognized, along with Craig Womack, as being one of the founders of American Indian literary nationalism. Warrior served as President of the American Studies Association from 2016 to 2017. He earned a bachelor's degree in speech communication from Pepperdine University, a master's degree in religion from Yale University, and a doctoral degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1999, Warrior taught at Cornell University. Warrior previously taught at Stanford University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Illinois Chicago. He has served as president of the American Studies Association (ASA) and helped found the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In 2018, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted Warrior.

#34

Robert A. Williams Jr.

Robert A. Williams Jr. is an American lawyer, author, and legal scholar. He works in the fields of federal Indian law, international law, indigenous peoples' rights, critical race, and post-colonial theory. Williams teaches at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, serving as Regents Professor, E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and Faculty Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program. Williams is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina. He earned his B.A. from Loyola University Maryland in Maryland in 1977 and his J.D. from Harvard University Law School in 1980.

#35

Alfred Young Man

Alfred Young Man, Ph.D. or Kiyugimah (Eagle Chief) (born 1948) is a Cree artist, writer, educator, and an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree tribe located on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Montana. He is a former Department Head (2007–2010) of Indian Fine Arts at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan, and former Chair (1999–2007) of Native American Studies, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge and University of Regina.

About Academic Influence

Academic Influence is staffed by academics and data scientists working to provide an objective, non-gameable influence-based ranking for the people, schools, and disciplinary programs that make up higher education. They have engineered a unique ranking technology that employs machine learning to measure the impact of work produced by the world’s top academic influencers. The Influence Ranking™ engine brings to light the achievements of top institutions and top academics across the globe. The organization maintains an incredibly rich and varied website, with features to help readers explore the world of higher education.

Homepage Photo Credit: American Academy of Arts and Sciences

OP-ED: Indian Country’s Once-In-A-Seven-Generation Opportunity

by Dawson Her Many Horses

Her Many Horses is head of Native American Banking for Wells Fargo. The bank underwrote a historic $50 million commitment to address the unique economic, social, and environmental needs of Native Peoples, where Her Many Horses leads the initiative.

For centuries, tribal communities and individual Native Americans and their families have bobbed and weaved when confronted with severe conditions and immoral treatment. Some did more than survive; they thrived in the face of adversity. While COVID-19 highlighted harsh realities of the disparate treatment of Indian Country, it also surfaced a once-in-a-seven-generation’s opportunity to reimagine how Indian Country could position itself — not just for the immediate future but for decades and centuries to come.

This opinion provides an analysis of the challenges and opportunities for achieving economic resiliency in Indian Country, starting with three barriers to action: data gaps, the digital desert, and a fragmented capital landscape.

Data Gaps

Unlike state governments or publicly held companies, Tribal governments, and the businesses they own, do not disclose financial information. In return, data and information that businesses with an interest in expanding into tribal communities would typically use to make investment decisions is not available for Indian Country.  Revenue from businesses controlled by tribal governments (not tax revenue) provides the bulk of funding to tribal governments, which funds essential services such as housing, infrastructure, health care, education, elder care, and cultural and language preservation.

Digital Desert

Digital solutions buoyed companies, communities, and economies that successfully leveraged them during the pandemic, which disproportionately impacted people and places on the other side of the digital divide. Businesses with a strong online presence outperformed those without. Expanding broadband access could enable a wave of technology entrepreneurship, build foundations for professional, academic, and social networks, and provide access to digital banking (reducing the number of unbanked tribal households and helping low-income households apply for government and nonprofit programs).

Fragmented Capital Landscape

Fragmentation of Indian Country’s capital landscape — featuring many different types of financial institutions with varying levels of presence and investment ranges and thresholds — is an obstacle to investment and development. This report exposes gaps that could provide opportunities for new capital providers (private equity, venture capital, digital, and neo-banks), once longstanding barriers to investment have been resolved.

The Opportunity Set

The decision-making framework presented in this report is intended to empower traditional and non-traditional stakeholders to effectively prioritize opportunities across tribal communities over the near and long term.

We designed 10 archetypes of tribal economies, aiming to surface common challenges and opportunities for promising inter- and intra-tribal partnerships while avoiding an overly simplistic approach. Starting with a broad universe of opportunities ranging from infrastructure and resources to manufacturing and construction, consumer goods marketing, and technology and other services, leaders can identify and prioritize a specific set of opportunities.

Building true economic resiliency in Indian Country demands new ways of thinking and responding. Tribes can start executing on high-priority, high-potential opportunities including bridging the digital divide. National banks can start partnering with other capital providers to provide funding and share technology. Governments at all levels (federal, state, and local) can establish public-private partnerships to build out projects. All of these constructive actions could have the cumulative impact of contributing to a more prosperous, vital, and economically resilient Indian Country.

We provide a three-phase analysis of opportunities for driving economic resiliency in Indian Country and prioritizing action through the lens of Tribal Nations.

Resiliency principles and key performance indicators (KPIs): Aligning on key themes and drivers of economic resiliency to lay groundwork for analysis.

Baseline and tribal archetypes: Evaluating the current state of Tribal Nations with a data-driven approach and grouping them into archetypes to simplify recommendations and opportunity prioritization.

Prioritization framework and identification of key opportunities: Providing a prioritization framework that can be adapted to a tribes’ circumstances and reviewing and highlighting key opportunities for economic resiliency with examples.

Our recommendations focus on enabling factors that support and drive economic resiliency by improving self-determination.

Lastly, we summarize conclusions and specific next steps for stakeholders (including tribes, National banks, and governments) to act on these recommendations.

Native American Participants Selected for Animation Lab

The LA Skins Fest recently announced they have selected the 8 participants for their Native American Animation Lab, a talent development program that aims to boost the careers of Native American in the field of animation.

“We have a talented community in need of exposure, access, and opportunity. This new endeavor will get more Native American voices in front of the right people who can develop their animation projects and build their animation careers.” stated Ian Skorodin (Choctaw), LA Skins Fest Founder.

The participants will take part in a five day curriculum that will have them meeting with executives from Universal Pictures, Cartoon Network Studios, Kung Fu Monkey Productions and many others. The lab will consist of daily workshops, seminars and one-on-one mentoring to help each participant develop a project for the pitch panel at the end of the lab.

The five day total immersion lab will be mentored and guided by Writer/Producer Donick Cary (Simpsons/Parks and Recreation/Ap Bio). At the end of the program, each participant will pitch a panel of executives from the program’s corporate supporters.

The Lab was created to expand the amount of Native Americans working behind the camera, as a way to increase fair and accurate portrayals of Native Americans on television.

Its sponsors include: Comcast NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Company, Cartoon Network Studios, Sugarshack Animation, Women in Animation, and Otter Media brands, Crunchyroll, Fullscreen and Rooster Teeth.

For more information, visit laskinsfest.com

The 8 participants:

Ben-Alex Dupris is Mnicoujou Lakota, and also an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes where he grew up. Dupris creates work that pushes the boundaries of modernity and traditionalism in hopes of changing perspectives of Indigenous concepts without censorship. His directorial debut "Sweetheart Dancers" won Grand Jury Award for Best Short Film at Outfest 2019. He recently directed an American Masters "Masters in the Making" for PBS and Firelight Media about the artist Bunky Echo-Hawk that premiered at DOC NYC 2019. He is developing an animation series based on tribal legend stories that reflect the changing nature of Indigenous relationships to the earth in the 21st century.

Pasquale Encell and Steve Encell. Pasquale (Modoc) and his partner, Steve (Modoc), who is also his father, started a small animation team in Thailand. Steve served in the US Army and studied Agricultural Business at Cal Poly, and realized that the Native elders he knew were disappearing and soon they would be gone forever. Because of this, he decided to study with several medicine men and leaders before their knowledge disappeared. With his partner and son, Pasquale, they created Thunder Eagle Productions and chose animation as their main conduit of production. They have made several animated movies that have played in film festivals all over the world. They have won awards including Best Animated Film in the New Hope International Film Festival for their animated feature film Eagle Feather.

Jeanette Harrison is a director, writer, actor, and producer, who has spent most of her career in theater. For television, she co-wrote with Sharmila Devar a half-hour comedy about family and cultural identity, FEATHERS AND DOTS, DOTS AND FEATHERS. She created and was Head Writer for the webseries The Breakdown (3 seasons); and was a staff writer for the webseries Coach Dan. For SPASigma, she was Head Writer and 2^nd Unit Director for their most recent documentary, and a staff writer on Personality Quotient (2018). In 2004 she co-founded the award-winning AlterTheater in the San Francisco Bay Area. At AlterTheater, she architected the ground-breaking AlterLab playwright residency program. She has shepherded more than 20 new plays to world premiere productions. A Native New Yorker, she is of Onondaga descent.

Chag Lowry is of Yurok, Maidu, and Achumawi ancestry from northern California. He is an author, filmmaker, and educator. His most recent publication is the graphic novel titled Soldiers Unknown with art by Rahsan Ekedal. This book was published by Great Oak Press and focuses on the Yurok Native American military experience in World War One. Mr. Lowry has a M.A. in Education and is currently writing a comic anthology titled Reflection.

Vladimir Perez (Taino) is a comedian from Brooklyn NY. As an actor he can be seen in network sitcoms that include Modern Family, Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Unicorn and the upcoming Disney+ show Diary of a Female President. As a writer, Vlad was honored to be a part of the LA SKINS FEST Native American TV writers Lab. Vlad is also a proud recipient of the Groundlings NBC/Universal Diversity scholarship 2018. Vlad’s sketch "Resting Gangster Face" was selected to be filmed for the 2017 IFC Showcase during the San Francisco Sketchfest. At UCB, Vlad hosted the LA Weekly Top Pick show The Hip Hop Source Awardz and performed improv on UCB Mess Hall team Fresh Kicks. He is a proud alumni of the CBS Diversity Showcase as a writer in 2016 and an actor in 2017. Vlad is currently working on an animation series based on a Taino super hero.

Sierra Revis (Yuchi) is a Graphic Designer currently working for the Native-owned marketing agency, Buffalo Nickel Creative based in Pawhuska, OK. Her design work on the Native Now and Indigenous People's Day campaigns was praised by audiences throughout Indian Country. Sierra has also put her video editing and animation skills to work on various documentary-style shorts for a state-wide campaign on commercial tobacco-use cessation and prevention among Native American tribes. A graduate of Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology with a degree in Visual Communications, Sierra recently developed an animated language video and created the story board, illustrated the visuals and animated the components.

Jason Turner (Potawatomi and Kickapoo) is an accomplished filmmaker, producer, editor, and director. A music video he shot and directed won the Art at Work award in 2013 from the Arts Council of Kansas City (ArtsKC). Many of his films have screened at film festivals. His motion comic, The Iron Detective: Sentinel, won the Achievement in Animation award at the 2017 LA Skins Fest and streamed nationally on Xfinity Streampix. Those same shorts have screened at Planet Comicon in Kansas City. Jason has also served on Planet Comicon panels. For four years he ran the Kansas City 48 Hour Film Project (KC's branch of the 48 Hour Film Project). He is also a published comic book author. His comic book "Sentinel" can be found on Amazon and has been made into an animation short, The Iron Detective: Sentinel.

Reclaiming Native Truth: Changing the Narrative

Groundbreaking Research Reveals America’s Attitudes, Public Perceptions and Dominant Narratives about Native People and Native Issues, and Provides Opportunities for “Reclaiming Native Truth”

First Nations Development Institute (First Nations) and Echo Hawk Consulting (EHC) today released groundbreaking research about attitudes toward and perceptions of Native Americans as part of a jointly-managed effort called Reclaiming Native Truth: A Project to Dispel America’s Myths and Misconceptions. The project also released two messaging guides based on the research findings and a narrative-change strategy framework that will be used to begin to change the false and misleading narratives about Native peoples.

The project seeks to create a long-term, Native-led movement that positively transforms popular narratives and images of Native Americans. A two-year phase, launched in 2016, created a solid foundation of unprecedented public opinion research and data, building upon previous research efforts. It was funded by a $2.5 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and significant financial contributions from numerous other entities and individuals.

 

“Some incredible findings were unearthed through this research – many of which had long been experienced and assumed but not proven,” said Michael E. Roberts (Tlingit), President & CEO of First Nations. “The findings clearly validate the realities that so many Native people face in their day-to-day interactions in communities. They provide our project, and the larger movement, with a strong foundation upon which to move forward.” Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), President & CEO of Echo Hawk Consulting, shared, “This research informed how we could create a new narrative that would be effective in changing misperceptions. We formulated a new narrative, created by renowned Native American artists and storytellers,  that proved to change people’s understanding of Native people and issues.  We are excited to take this new narrative and our research findings and transition into a new phase of this project, harnessing the power of a movement of movements.”

FINDINGS

Highlights from the publicly available findings include:

• Discrimination: Most Americans surveyed significantly understate the degree of discrimination against Native Americans. Only 34 percent of Americans believe that Native people face discrimination. At the same time, myths about the abundance of Indian gaming and free government benefits to Native Americans are widely held and fuel bias across diverse demographics and within institutions.
• Narratives: The research found that people have limited personal experience with Native Americans but accept pervasive negative narratives that are erroneously set or reinforced by others, and that proximity shapes some perceptions. For instance, people who live near or work in Indian Country, especially in areas of great poverty, are likely to hold significant bias. Only 56% of survey respondents living in close proximity to Native communities believed the U.S. should do more to help Native Americans compared to 64% of respondents further removed.
• Invisibility: Unsurprisingly, another key finding was that Native Americans are assigned to a romanticized past. However, one of the biggest barriers identified was the invisibility and erasure of Native Americans in all aspects of modern U.S. society. Respondents, including members of Congress and administrative officials, agree that invisibility, stereotypes and narratives set by others do impact policy.
• Desire for Complete History: One of the key opportunities uncovered is that, across the research, people are well aware of the inaccurate historical lessons they have learned about Native Americans, and want more accurate education about both historical and contemporary Natives. This was reflected in national polling that indicated that 72 percent believe it is necessary to make significant changes to school curricula on Native American history and culture.

TESTING A NEW NARRATIVE

Narratives are broadly accepted, overarching stories that reinforce ideas, norms and expectations in society. Repeated over and over, through diverse platforms and channels, a narrative becomes the story people accept without question. Often a narrative reinforces the status quo and perpetuates unfair systems, structures and norms. The Reclaiming Native Truth project worked to identify and test a new accurate narrative that can support cultural shifts to advance social and policy change to support racial equity and justice for Native Americans and tribal nations.

• 78% – Most Americans are generally open to hearing this narrative. A majority in this survey say they are interested in learning more about Native American cultures. Strong majorities support Native American positions on most issues — mascots excepted — without hearing the narratives.
• 81% – The public reacts strongly to our narrative.
• 88% – Nearly nine in 10 respondents find it credible.

One of the most significant outcomes of the project related to developing and testing a new strength-based narrative that incorporated messaging related to values, history and the visibility of Native peoples. The narrative was tested through an online survey conducted between April 27 and May 1, 2018, with 2,000 Americans over age 18. Majorities of Americans support the new narrative and find it credible. A 65 percent majority say they would be willing — 31 percent very willing — to share these ideas with others. More issue-specific narrative messages written around key issues — mascots, the Indian Child Welfare Act, tribal sovereignty and pop culture depictions of Native Americans — find similar validation.

Most noteworthy is the objective difference between those exposed to the new narrative (treated group) and those that were not (untreated “control” group). Large differences emerge among the half that read the new narrative, which gave them a framework for understanding information about key Native issues related to the Indian Child Welfare Act, sovereignty, mascots and other issues. For example, 39 percent of Americans who were not exposed to the new narratives support a ban on Native American mascots. Among those who read the narratives, 53 percent support such a ban.

“We are encouraged by the findings of the research and narrative message testing in this first phase,” said Vicky Stott, Program Officer at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “As a philanthropic partner to the project, we are committed to telling more authentic and complete stories about who we are as interconnected people living in America. This work has the potential to transform the way we understand and relate to one another and, ultimately, co-create a new story about our shared humanity.”

THE NEXT PHASE

The next phase of work will focus on bringing the power of many movements — of organizations, tribes, grassroots leaders, non-Native allies, foundations — each of whom can adopt, adapt and disseminate the new shared narrative as part of their ongoing efforts and work, while leading implementation of their own priority strategies. An introduction to the narrative and messaging strategies are available as part of the Reclaiming Native Truth messaging guides at www.ReclaimingNativeTruth.com. The detailed research report and the Narrative-Change Strategy are also available online.

Potential allies, supporters and others can partcipate in the movement of movements. The network will contain a support and infrastructure function that will be determined jointly by core organizations working collaboratively on the initiative.  There will be many ways for allies to do their their part to shift the narrative, remove bias and barriers, and achieve the collective vision for the change that is sought: that Native peoples collectively author and powerfully lead a more equitable reality where they fully benefit from and contribute to both Native and American society. Interested partners are encouraged to download the messaging guides from www.ReclaimingNativeTruth.com.

“The project provided us the critical opportunity to begin to assemble an incredible team of not only researchers, but other experts and thought leaders across Indian Country, and both Native and non-Native allies and professionals in the media, the arts, entertainment, politics and education, as well as others who have worked on successful racial narrative change projects,” noted Echo Hawk. “We have the new research foundation built, a cadre of willing and able experts at the ready, and we have the desire and ability to move this project into the next phases where we can begin to shift the narrative.”

Roberts shared, “We have also sought and received input and feedback at every step in the project, from more than 180 stakeholders, including an incredible swath of Indian Country that came together in a new and different way to support these efforts. Their voices are reflected in this project and we are all committed to work together going forward. Native Americans and tribes have faced discrimination and bias at every level of society, institutionally, and within government. They have been held back from reaching their full potential by the negative stereotypes, damaging misperceptions and lack of awareness that prevail within education, the media, entertainment, popular culture, and among thought leaders. Changing that begins now.”

For more information visit: www.ReclaimingNativeTruth.com.

About First Nations Development Institute

For 38 years, using a three-pronged strategy of educating grassroots practitioners, advocating for systemic change, and capitalizing Indian communities, First Nations has been working to restore Native American control and culturally-compatible stewardship of the assets they own – be they land, human potential, cultural heritage or natural resources – and to establish new assets for ensuring the long-term vitality of Native American communities. First Nations serves Native American communities throughout the United States. For more information, visit www.firstnations.org.

About Echo Hawk Consulting
The mission of Echo Hawk Consulting is to help create new platforms, narratives, strategies and investment that can help catalyze transformational change for and by Native Americans. It partners with Native American, philanthropic and diverse multi-sector partners to move hearts and minds and drive institutional, policy and culture change. Founder Crystal Echo Hawk was recently recognized by the National Center for American Indian Economic Development as its 2018 “Native American Woman Business Owner of the Year.” For more information, visit https://www.echohawkconsulting.com.