Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians

COVID-19 Response

Building a Jiiman creates an opportunity for Youth and Elders to work together in order to restore, retain, and, document this cultural tradition for future generations. Furthermore, this project will leverage the relationship between LTBB elders and youth to preserve our traditional ways of sharing, increasing our ancestral knowledge.

This project will create opportunities for tribal youth struggling emotionally and spiritually with issues of identity, purpose, and place to increase positive identify development and cultural knowledge through participation in traditional Anishinaabe rites-of-passage ceremonies.

The ultimate purpose is to increase the number of tribal youth that demonstrate positive identity development and the number of tribal children that demonstrate an increase of cultural knowledge. This program expands and integrates a newly developed land-based curriculum with our out-of-school time programs.