Kweh omateru, I am Wandat, a citizen of Wyandotte Nation and I grew up in West Virginia and North Carolina. We have experienced many removals from our original homelands in what is now called Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada through Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas to eventually establish a home in Northeast Oklahoma. Our language and culture are Iroquoian but we had a separate alliance from our Haudenosaunee cousins. I currently serve as a language facilitator for our online language classes and try to go to Oklahoma as often as I can. I’m grateful that during the COVID-19 pandemic, my tribe made the decision to begin language classes online so that citizens who live far away are able to reconnect to our language, culture, and community.

I do this work because I wanted my career to focus on Indigenous women and to be able to use my cultural values of consensus and relationship building, facilitation, balance, and persistence. While I was at Tribal Tech, LLC contracting with the Administration for Native Americans, I was fortunate enough to be able to create relationships with Tribal and Indigenous communities from all over the United States. While I loved and appreciated the people I worked with, I struggled with the power dynamic between the federal government providing the funds and using things like required reporting to gatekeep access from the community members doing the work to solve problems in their own communities. I share the vision of changing power dynamics and access to capital to build a more equitable future for the generations to come to thrive in. I currently reside in Washington, DC, homelands of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway Peoples.