ICWA Personal stories video Project launch
Recognizing the need for Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) public education materials that can be distributed widely and throughout social media channels, the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) partnered with award-winning Producer/Director Karen Odyniec and Producer Milo Daemgen to produce four short-form digital stories that are informative.
The multi-part digital storytelling series, The Heart of ICWA, features Native families sharing their stories of family upheaval, perseverance, healing, and resilience in the face of threats to their well-being. In this series, families convey firsthand what happens when the basic protections of ICWA are followed and the devastating consequences when families and children are deprived of these basic rights.
Over the next month, these videos will be launched on NICWA’s YouTube channel and shared over social media. For more info, see: www.nicwa.org.
NAP launches Generation Indigenous Response Fund
Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP) is launching a response fund to support youth organizing and activism that requires immediate action at Standing Rock. This new Generation Indigenous Response Fund will be housed at The Minneapolis Foundation and will bridge funders and organizers to support Native American youth organizing and its commitment to systemic change and social justice in Indigenous communities.
With the Native American youth-led movement at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) taking a national stage, NAP and The Minneapolis Foundation recognize that we are living in a pivotal moment for youth-led movements. “Across the country, and at Standing Rock, young people are playing leading roles in social justice movements that advance a vision for a just society. Now is a critical moment to support Native American youth who are showing a readiness to organize in building lasting movements for social change,” said Sarah Eagle Heart, CEO of NAP.
The NAP GenIndigenous Response Fund will provide grants up to $5,000 to youth organizing groups responding to the current moment in ways that build long-term power for Native youth. The fund will provide grants to Native American-led organizations playing leadership roles at Standing Rock while considering efforts to support the long term engagement of Native American youth leaders in advocacy efforts. The grant will focus on strategic communications; education; workforce development; juvenile justice; resiliency; traditional knowledge; sustainability; environmental justice; health & well-being; as well as trauma & healing. For more info, see: nativephilanthropy.org.
‘Warrior Nation’ wins Denver Public Library history prize
“Warrior Nation: A History of the Red Lake Ojibwe,” written by Anton Treuer, has won the Denver Public Library’s Caroline Bancroft History Prize. The annual prize is “awarded to the author of the best book on Colorado or Western American History published during the current year”.
“Warrior Nation” explores 250 years of the history of the Red Lake Nation. It offers a chronicle of the Red Lake Nation, and a compelling perspective on a difficult piece of U.S. history.
Treuer conducted oral histories with elders across the Red Lake reservation, learning the stories carried by the people. For the book, the Red Lake band for the first time made available its archival collections, including the personal papers of Peter Graves, a political strategist and tribal leader for the first half of the 20th Century, which tell a story about the negotiations over reservation boundaries.
The winning book collects a $1,000 prize. “Warrior Nation” won the Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History in June, and was a finalist for Minnesota Book Award and the Hogander Book Award.
Minnesota Groups Honored for Improving Lives
Some of Minnesota’s human-service groups and agencies have been selected to receive the 2016 Commissioner’s Circle of Excellence Awards from the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
Emily Piper, state commissioner of human services, said these are groups that help support healthy people, stable families and strong communities. Among this year’s winners is the White Earth MOMS program, which works with pregnant and parenting women and their partners to reduce the number of babies born with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome.
Other groups honored this year include the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Human Services Division, Carlton County Public Health and Human Services, the Korean Center, Morrison County’s Accountable Community for Health, the Food Group and The Arts Center of St. Peter.
