Awarded Grants

In the past 4 years the BHWAIAM has proven to be a critical economic asset for American Indian artists and craftspeople in the Black Hills and Northern Plains. To retain this market and ensure its sustainability into the future, a strategic plan guided by experienced people is necessary.

This program will utilize existing/new resources (school garden, hoop greenhouse, Lakota-fluent elders, Lakota-learning teachers, community outreach, organizational collaboration) to provide language immersion for 50-60 children, K-8, advancing LWS’s mission of incorporating Lakota language/culture into the daily curriculum with Waldorf experiential hands-on teaching methods, leading to ultimate goal of language fluency.

The expansion to our existing pilot project will increase the scope of our Ahtna language program. Through the development of blended curriculum and lesson plans we will expand immersion instruction in the classroom of our Ya Ne Dah Ah Tribal school.

This project will create an initial plan for an expanded cultural campus through interdepartmental collaboration while utilizing existing spaces to increase the number of community members familiar with traditional and contemporary tribal arts.

The Nisqually project will help retain tribal traditions through the creation of a Nisqually Lushootseed specific language curriculum. Deliverables include the development and publishing of 84 Lushootseed alphabet, concept books, resources for student-created language books, training of 2-4 additional Lushootseed language teachers and creation of a Lushootseed font app.

The training will help leverage our programs awareness and strategies to help sustain, preserve, revitalize and advance our peoples culture, art, and oral stories and traditions to empower native people as a whole.

The purpose of the proposed project is to build our internal capacity and increase our knowledge base in the following areas: Lakota language fluency, teacher education, and the best practices in indigenous language revitalization.

Mission: Our goal is to raise the self-valuation of Arapaho individuals on the Wind River Reservation in order to increase success in education, employment and the development of community assets through collaboration with the Northern Arapaho tribal government, all local schools, communities, parents and fluent speakers of the Arapaho language.

The Wâchônumuhucheek Wâânutam8ôk Project lays the groundwork for comprehensive state and tribal language teacher certifications for our growing preK - Grade 8 immersions school, while continually incorporating parent and family involvement into school design and students' grade level advancement in order to retain 90 percent of our current immersion cohort.

This project will increase the number of proficient first language speakers within the Oneida community by creating an immersion-only classroom that utilizes the current On^yote’aka Tsi Nitwaw^not^ and Head Start “As it happens” curriculum.