Awarded Grants

The ultimate purpose of Tawokaga is to 1) increase the number of community members engaged in Tawaokaga, making beautiful things, our Dakota word for art; and 2) leverage the successes our intergenerational group of artists have had over the past two years to increase the visibility and sustainability of Dakota arts in Native and non-Native venues in Minnesota through relationship building with individuals, communities, and organizations. These capacity-building steps will advance our Tawokaga goal of reclaiming and sustaining the intrinsic value of Dakota arts in relationship to artists and communities in southwestern Minnesota.

The purpose of the White Corn Project is to create access to white corn products among Seneca Nation of Indians members and to increase awareness of the benefits of white corn among Seneca Nation members, leveraging the availability of white corn products to improve the health and well-being of Seneca Community members. To increase white corn usage at the Seneca Nation, cooking demonstrations featuring white corn will be held at the Salamanca and Seneca Nation Farmers Markets and training sessions will be conducted for the kitchen/ nutrition personnel of several Seneca Nation agencies.

The ultimate purpose is to (1) create a youth led micro-enterprise in which youth develop products that educate others about their tribal communities while increasing the number of locally made Native art resources offered in a new social enterprise gift shop, and (2) increase the set of skills these same youth bring to a specialty retail employment training program in which they will serve as peer mentors for other youth. In addition, the project will give the youth a more nuanced understanding of Native business development thereby (3) increasing their control over the larger program they are helping to create.

The ultimate goal of the Gimaajii Mino Bimaadizimin Artist/Community Collaboration is to enhance Native American artistic development. We create opportunities and spaces for Native American artists to share their talents, and we support Native American artists to 1) increase their skills in their trade or art; 2) retain and transmit their artistic skills to others; 3) increase entrepreneurial and leadership skills; and 4) leveraging these skills into increased opportunities to teach and sell their work.

This proposal's ultimate purpose is addressing food access issues by 1) creating a new model for food distribution within and among our communities with potential widespread practical and policy implications, 2) increasing accessibility to traditional foods, 3) leveraging a massive yet COMPLETELY untapped network of facility and human infrastructure in the FDPIR program to play a central role in promoting expanded local food production and consumption in our communities in a manner that shifts control to those respective communities, and 4) strengthens the infrastructure required to effectively promote increased intertribal trade, commerce, and collaboration.

The ultimate purpose is to 1)Increase Lakota leaders in our community by connected young people to Lakota culture, and 2)Leverage this project with our Workforce Development Program to have a more holistic well rounded program for young people in the workforce program, further connecting them to our community while 3)Creating an environment that encourages identity development through spirituality and culture.

The ultimate purpose of RLLFI is to 1) create a local foods economy by leveraging existing land, human and traditional knowledge resources to encourage entrepreneurial producers to engage in commercial food production, 2) inviting the communities to control food access through participation in farmer's markets and by extension via consumer demand, determine what the producer plants, and 3) increasing consumption of healthy local foods through marketing, education and peer support, thus reduce diet-related illness. Additionally, this project will, through individuals learning cold-climate greenhouse operations, a workforce will be developed to serve large scale aquaponic developments being developed by RL Nation.

The ultimate purpose of this project is to increase the capacity of Yuchi youth to be successful both as professionals and as culture bearers. This project will create a framework to ground Yuchi youth in their unique cultural identity as a basis for preparing them to succeed in any educational or work setting. This project will address the need for cultural continuity by empowering youth to be lifelong leaders in the Yuchi community, mentoring them in making healthy choices and connecting them with a support network.