We’re sending Lakota youth to college.
Montoya Makes Room For Them, Miss Teen Rosebud Indian Reservation 2018
Our mission is to improve the livelihood, sovereignty, and cultural vibrancy of tribal citizens by empowering Native American youth with education.
Shallon Bordeaux is an incoming freshman at Hamline University. Her mother passed when Shallon was nine, and soon after, her father developed a narcotic and alcohol addiction and left her life. Her two older sisters guided Shallon on her path to becoming a level-headed, determined, and resilient young woman with an amazing head on her shoulders.
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.
The Oceti Sakowin have been here for thousands of years from the East Coast, the Carolinas, to Canada, to Kansas, to the Rockies and Grand Tetons. We are here today because we have our inherent rights; no one can give us our inherent rights and no one can take them away, we just have them. We have our own Language, Customs, Societies, and Ceremonies. I encourage all of our relatives to get their education but, to balance it out, also learn their Lakota language as much as they learn with their college degrees. Then you will have fulfilled my Tunkasila Tatanka Iyotaka's (Sitting Bull's) vision: ‘Learn what you can on the white man's road, but leave what is not good.’
— Phil Two Eagle, Sicangu Lakota
Executive Director of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Treaty Council
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