May/June 2012: Say It Again in Salish: Native Youth = Native America’s Future

In our effort to strengthen Native American nonprofits and encourage new ones, First Nations also focuses on empowering Native youth through the Native Youth and Culture Fund, which is generously supported by the Kalliopeia Foundation along with other foundations, tribal, corporate and individual donors. We believe Native youth represent the future success and well being of our communities, and that cultural and language preservation is a key aspect of that empowerment.

Enter AlterNative Soulutions at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Flathead Reservation in Montana.  First Nations Development Institute provided a $19,400 grant to this youth organization that allowed it to participate in the 2012 Celebrating Salish Conference in Spokane, Wash., in March, hosted by the Kalispel Tribe of Indians.  At the event, AlterNative Soulutions presented a Salish-language play that was produced from material collected from Salish elders as part of AlterNative Soulutions’ Native Youth and Culture Fund grant. We also supported the attendance of AlterNative Soulutions’ director, Joshua Brown, at our 2011 L.E.A.D. Institute (Leadership, Entrepreneurial and Apprenticeship Development program), which is an essential component of our nonprofit capacity building strategy.  The program helps identify and train the next generation of Native nonprofit leaders.

The Salish conference strongly reinforces the goals of cultural and language continuity and nonprofit capacity building.  It includes sessions on effective fundraising as well as developing language-immersion schools, plus activities such as a Salish Karaoke contest and a youth Salish storytelling session.

“When the youth learned that many people around the world, especially other Salish communities, are trying to revitalize their languages and cultures in all kinds of ways, they were amazed and felt like they are a part of a noble global phenomenon,“ said Josh of AlterNative Soulutions.

According to the Flathead Indian Nation’s Char-Koosta News, only a “handful of elders” still speak the Kootenai and Salish languages on the reservation. The efforts of AlterNative Soulutions will go a long way toward averting a disappearance, which would take with it “tens of thousands of years of accumulated cultural heritage, sophisticated environmental understanding, spiritual traditions and a precious aspect of humanity.”

You can help First Nations in its mission and programs such as the Native Youth and Culture Fund. Please give generously online or through the mail.