Hello relatives,

Thank you so much for being here, and I am so excited that you are taking the time to learn more about our students.

Just by reading this, you are putting in more effort than the average person makes to get to know Native cultures and peoples. In fact, Native peoples are slowly becoming invisible in the minds of most Americans. According to the results of a groundbreaking research project called Reclaiming Native Truth performed by the First Nations Development Institute and Echo Hawk Consulting, 40% of Americans believe that Native people no longer exist. Given what I have experienced, this is a crisis and human rights issue. My team and I are here to change that narrative and show that Native peoples are in fact thriving and more than capable of attaining higher education.

I am fortunate enough to live and teach in the Rosebud Indian Reservation, amongst one of our country’s 562 native groups, the Lakota of western South Dakota. This group is far from nonexistent, representing approximately 70,000 people spread across not only South Dakota, but also all fifty states (American Indian Heritage Foundation); one does not need to live in a reservation to be an enrolled tribal citizen. The Lakota are a proud people who in modern times still practice ceremonies given to them by the creator. In my experience, these ceremonies impart a kind of strength on a people that cannot otherwise be taught. They teach generosity, humility, grit, and sacrifice. The spiritual world is alive, and interpreters, or medicine men, act as liaisons between it and the physical world, relaying messages to the common man.

These ceremonies and this culture define a people, and therefore we must respect and preserve it.

Education is how we can allow Lakota youth to respect and preserve it. If they become aware and learn of the systems of oppression working against them, they are more apt to act on them and in doing so preserve their culture. We need more Lakota lawyers to fight back against frivolous land use cases, more Lakota architects to build their own community centers, and more Lakota teachers to tell their own history. However, as it stands today, these goals are lofty; only 1 in 5 Native students that start college in South Dakota will actually finish with a degree (Reclaiming Native Truth). We need your support to build infrastructure and programming that will not only get our youth to college, but also help them finish with a degree. 

This is a call to action.

If we do not act as a collective to preserve Lakota and other Native cultures, they will soon disappear. The President of the United States can wipe away a reservation with the stroke of a pen, which would give land-hungry state and local governments free rein to dismantle a people, as they have attempted to do for decades. Also consider that Native Americans make up approximately just 1.7% of the total US population (National Congress of American Indians). This means that politicians have no reason to cater to them, as they represent a minuscule percentage of the US electorate. In other words, why spend finite campaign funds on a group of people that will not have any effect on the election? If no one else will fight for them, it will have to be us, in concert with the already great efforts being made, of course. I have outlined some of these below.

Let us make history and ignite a more positive educational future for our Lakota people.

Mitákuye oyás’iŋ (all my relatives)

In partnership,

Troy Blake

Executive Director, Rosebud Scholarship Fund