IndigenousVision

Help us Celebrate Native American Heritage month all year long by supporting Indigenous Vision - an educational nonprofit! Your generous donation will support any one or all of our ongoing projects, wellness and emergency honorariums, and overall organizational activities.

Indigenous Vision (IV) is based in Montana and Arizona with many of our projects operating in the states of Nevada, New York, and Washington led by an all-Indigenous team.

Your donation will directly support:

Indigenous Mapping Project:

Your donation supports the time and travel expenses for the mapping team and all historical, cultural and traditional ecological knowledge activities. We need funds for exhibit signs, road side signs, buffalo jump/pishkun/3D roasting pit exhibits. Activities include working with private landowners to record and translate the artifacts and other traces of the ancestors left on the land such as cairns, fasting shelters, pictographs, rock effigies and tipi rings. We also provide community environmental and cultural educational tours and classroom opportunities, large classroom maps and classroom activities. We are also using working dogs to get the job done, and our K9 is being trained in search and rescue and invasive mussels. Our dog partner work is successful in CWD detection in lab and we are working to bring that to field monitoring. This project is the first time dogs and TEK have been used in methodology. The current projects of the IVMapping program are the Blackfoot PlaceMap, the Food Forest, and the CWD and Contaminant Mapping Project.

The Food Forest Project:

The Food Forest is 24 acres of land donated to IV located in New York state where the community members can gather, cultivate and grow traditional foods, practice traditional crafts and artwork. The forest will also be an experimental stewardship forest for all nearby Indigenous scholars and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) practitioners needing land to test their methods. This is where IV will be testing traditional burn styles to test impacts on weakening Chronic Wasting Disease Prions. Support is needed to clean up small and ongoing illegal dumping activity, test well water, install new camping/sanitary infrastructure, a community and professional kitchen and overall general maintenance including removing invasive trees. Needs: backhoe, side by side, gravel, building supplies for cabins, equipment for studio, incinerator toilets, electrical fees etc.

CWD and Environmental Contaminant Mapping:

The goal of the Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and Contaminant project is to support cultural practices and the hunting and harvesting rights of Indigenous people across the Nation. The project and mapping activity is currently focused on summarizing all known contaminants and disease found in cultural use areas. CWD is an emerging prion disease that is 100% fatal and has a minimum 20+year viability in soil and water. It’s impacting elk, moose, reindeer, and deer and is carried by wild boars, scavengers, and beavers. There are still some prion free areas and negative deer found in heavily contaminated areas, and we would like to know why.  So, we started tallying all the known contaminants such as heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and hopefully soon PFAS or plastics.

MMIWG’s (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls) Self Defense:

IV is proud to offer free self defense classes to Indigenous women and girls across the US through our Self Defense Sponsorship and Martial Arts Gym Program. We will fund a 6 week program through a gym of your choice to learn self-defense. We also provide the opportunity to host Self defense events where we cover the instructor, the gym, and provide the agenda and facilitation guide. For example, in the state of Nevada we currently have weekly classes in Las Vegas in partnership with our partner organizations and we’ve handed out over 250 self defense kits in 2023 in Arizona, Nevada, and Montana. We are currently organizing a MMIWGP’s Retreat in Washington State for the spring of 2024 to continue the preventative work and empower the current women leading the work in their communities.

IVMedia: Ensuring the voices from our talented music community are heard along with our voices as Indigenous women are heard, is where your support lands with IVMedia. We’ve produced over 250 IVMusic Episodes (syndicated radio music program) featuring some of the brightest Indigenous talent from across North America. Our goal is to provide support to musical artists needing to purchase studio time, professional mixing and mastering, and attending artist development conferences and events. We would also love to establish a recording artist retreat studio at the New York Food Forest and cabins will be provided to allow Indigenous musicians and youth the opportunity and professional recording equipment to make music and videos. This will need cabins and equipment. The IVPodcast recently reached its 100th episode this summer and we continue to grow our listenership sharing our one of a kind Indigenous perspectives. We honor all guests who take the time to share their knowledge with us on the podcast with honorariums.