Blog

English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance co-created “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe economic consequences resulting from...

Indigenous land-based education has implications for science, culture, politics, language, environmental stewardship, land rights, reconciliation - and the future of this planet. For anyone who seeks an understanding of what Indigenous land-based education is, it may be instructive to begin by grasping what it is not. If your mind went straight to “taking the classroom outside” or “outdoor education,” bingo: that’s what it’s not . Or at least, that’s not all it is—not by far. A multi-faceted...

Some months ago, I was catching up with my dear friend and board member, Roberto Rivera . As an entrepreneur and community organizer with a doctorate and Lin-Manuel-Miranda-level freestyle abilities, he is a teacher to me in many ways. I was sharing with him that for a long time, I’ve struggled with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs . The traditional interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is that humans need to fulfill their needs at one level before we can advance to higher levels. As...

Prior to European colonization of North America, millions of bison roamed the Great Plains. By the turn of the 20th century, those numbers had dropped to less than 1,000. The deliberate decimation of buffalo herds was a direct attack on the Native American people, who colonizers saw as an obstacle to their "Manifest Destiny, " and who the U.S. government engaged in a systematic attempt to eliminate or force into docile submission. For thousands of years, bison were a sacred, inseparable part...

Food sovereignty has been important to tribal communities like the Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, but the pandemic amplified the need for it. “With the COVID-19, we saw a renewed interest in returning to holistic ways and traditional ways of living and being and part of that is food,” said Lori Nelson, director of agriculture and land grants at NHS College. And in early February, the college received a two-year $100,000 grant to carry out a...

Tribes in Arizona will get another $88 million in housing grants – the most of any state – from the $450 million in tribal housing assistance released Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The national funding, which was included in the American Rescue Plan, will come in addition to the $651 million that tribes across the country were already scheduled to get in fiscal 2021 under the annual Indian Housing Block Grant. Arizona tribes’ share of the grant rose from the...

THE WISDOM OF THE ELDERS Time of the Sixth Sun is an inspirational and uplifting documentary film about the shift in global consciousness and the emerging movement to find a new way to walk more lightly on this Earth. Our ancestors understood our symbiotic relationship to nature and the elements, and foresaw the collapse of an unsustainable world. Filmed predominantly in North America, Mexico, Peru, S.Africa, India, Egypt, Israel and Australia, this film is a synergy of ancient wisdom from...

Healing the Heart Through the Creative Arts, Education & Advocacy Hope, Healing & Help for Trauma, Abuse & Mental Health “ Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”. Kahlil Gibran The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php or here's the PDF -...

A fierce Indigenous woman is now the caretaker of the nation’s public lands and waters for the first time in U.S. history. Deb Haaland was confirmed as the nation’s 54th Secretary of the Interior in a 51-40 vote Monday, making her the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency. Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan broke from party lines to vote to confirm Haaland, a notable choice given other Republican senators publicly saying she was not the...

T ransforming Trauma Episode 037: NARM and Healing Complex Trauma within Native Communities with Trilby Kerrigan On this episode of Transforming Trauma, our host Sarah Buino has an engaging conversation with Trilby Kerrigan, a NARM-trained Behavioral Health Therapist at a Tribal health clinic in Northern California. Trilby is a member of the Karuk Tribe of California and is deeply committed to supporting community reconnection through education and treatment of complex trauma. Throughout the...

Telling the truth about philanthropy is the first step to transforming it for generations to come. What would it mean to “decolonize” philanthropy? Language matters. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have powerfully argued, “ Decolonization is not a metaphor ,” and shouldn’t be used to describe anything but fundamentally dismantling white supremacy. That means centering oppressed perspectives, supporting the rematriation of land, redistributing resources, shifting power and decision making, and...

The American Rescue Plan was enacted by Congress Wednesday and will be sent today to President Joe Biden to sign into law. The U.S Senate Committee on Indian Affairs pegged the total spending for tribes at $31 billion. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-New Mexico, tweeted that she would be voting for the measure to “get urgent relief to families in New Mexico and across the country.” This may end up being Haaland’s last vote as a member of Congress if she is confirmed soon as Interior Secretary. She is a...