This week on Minnesota Native News, we hear from the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, which just received a $500,000 grant from the Bush Foundation. We also check out the Minnesota Indian Education Association Conference in Hinckley.
Transcript
This week on Minnesota Native News, we hear from the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, which just received a $500,000 grant from the Bush Foundation. We also check out the Minnesota Indian Education Association Conference in Hinckley. Here’s reporter Cole Premo.
MIWRC
The Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center in Minneapolis, or MIWRC, recently learned it has won a $500,000 grant from the Bush Foundation. It’s one of five nonprofits in MN and the Dakotas to receive the grant.
I talked with CEO Patina Park to get her reaction on receiving the no-strings attached Bush Prize for Community Innovation grant and more on what the nonprofit does for the native community.
PARK: “We are like beyond thrilled, surprised, uh, very excited. Um, but to be completely honest, we really didn't think we would win. And so when I was called several weeks ago to be informed of, uh, winning the prize, I almost didn't call her back because it was a Friday and I thought, well, I'll just wait for Monday for the bad news.”
But she ended up calling back that day and it was indeed real.
PARK: “I had moment of being completely struck dumb. I couldn't, I had to get my brain to reprocess the fact that we actually won, which means wow.”
The grant means a lot for an emerging nonprofit with humble beginnings. It was founded in the 1980s as a training facility to help other service providers work better with the community.
PARK: “We rapidly realized that we needed to do service provision ourselves. So we started with a chemical dependency program, added a childcare program and it's kind of grown from there to now encompass five main program areas, 17 sub. And I have about 50 employees and we do everything from mental health to chemical house to um, advocacy, case management, child welfare, parenting, um, traditional healing.”
Park says they plan on spending about $100,000 on a new boiler for their building, so that the building has reliable heat all winter long. Park says they’re working on how to spend the rest, but that it may include housing for those in need.
PARK: “ .”
MN Indian Education Conference
In other news, the Minnesota Indian Education Association Conference kicked off for a three-day run in mid-November at the Grand Casino in Hinckley.
According to event organizers, it’s the largest attendance the conference had in its 35-year history -- with over 600 attendees.
The conference featured many notable keynote speakers, including Ojibwe Word of the Day’s James Vukelich, Leech Lake’s Tribal Education Director Laurie Harper and Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux’s secretary/treasurer Rebecca Crooks-Stratton.
Crooks-Stratton is leading her tribe’s latest philanthropic campaign, Understand Native Minnesota, which seeks to improve the Native American narrative in Minnesota’s K-12 schools. Here is part of her keynote speech.
CROOKS-STRATTON: “If we're going to dramatically improve the positioning of native people and tribal nations in the consciousness of our fellow Minnesotans, it just naturally leads us to concentrate most of our efforts on the kids who will be tomorrow's citizens, workers, voters, taxpayers and employers. All of us here can succeed in helping non-native American kids see us. Despite our essential invisibility in popular culture in the media, we can get them to understand our histories and accept the concept of tribal sovereignty and we can sensitize them to the bias and stereotypes which marginalize us still today to achieve these goals, the Shakopee Midwakaton Sioux community just announced a new philanthropic campaign called understand native Minnesota last month. We are committing $5 million over the next three years to advance native American narrative change in Minnesota is public schools.”
In addition to keynote speeches, the Indian Education Conference featured many, many breakout sessions touching on such subjects as empowering indigenous youth through traditional teachings, helping tribal youth become media producers for a digital age, language revitalization and much more -- focused on a better future for native education.
I’m Cole Premo.