Tell me about your organization:

All projects are related to indigenous issues (EDI training). Since the pandemic, we have been doing mostly strategic training and initiatives for COVID via social media. We have been teaching tribes how to share information about COVID with each other and how to successfully encourage vaccination and healthy behaviors through social media.

It’s a small community in Denver so I always know who to reach out to for what project. For example, if I get pulled into an art project, I can think of who else is in the community that could help.

Our organizations services are strategic planning; health communications re: COVID; and training in Native culture and education.

What are some of your past and current behavioral health initiatives?

Right now, we are working with Johns Hopkins Center for AI Health; NW Portland Indian Health Board; & the SW Plains Indian Health Board. In all these collaborations, we encourage youth to engage in positive sexual health by: Respecting yourself, respecting your partner, & taking care of your community by taking care of yourself. it’s a reflection of good mental well-being if you are consistently taking responsibility for your sexual health. It’s stressful not knowing your status, and we are trying to encourage youth to get tested (prep & post). For example, not everyone knows that there are free testing kits from John Hopkins if you are native and we are helping them spread the word through our campaign.

We measure impact through social media reach: our indicators, are sharing, commenting, liking. When someone posts something negative, it expresses institutional mistrust. How do we productively address institutional mistrust? Historically and contemporarily, we have good reason for it – forced sterilizations, boarding schools, and the list goes on…there was never a break in the cycle of this mistrust; that’s why it continues to this day with things like forced sterilizations of immigrant women at the border. Dealing with people respectfully and asking where they are getting their information; that’s a good starting point. Sometimes it doesn’t work; people will not be convinced, and they will call you ‘colonizer’ and things like that. They will tell us that we are with big pharma and big government. I know when it is not productive to engage with that type of person anymore, but I have had a lot of good results by starting off with a respectful tone, which is unheard of in this age of internet culture where people are ‘keyboard warriors’, emboldened to say mean things to one another.

I am an indigenous woman scientist, and if you have something to ask me, I can tell you how it is. I mistrust the government just as much as other indigenous person so that puts us on more of an even level. The pandemic is different because some of us got into public health to serve our native communities; now we are helping to bridge information. Now we have people on the inside of these institutions. There are an army of Native clinical researchers, folks who are medical providers that are looking for adverse events and aren’t going to let happen what happened before. For our campaign regarding vaccination in Indian country, we have an artist on board telling our stories in a beautiful way that people can see themselves in; a picture tells a thousand words. This is our cultural value – to take care of one another. That is different from “The CDC says….”

What role does culture play in the development and implementation of your program’s initiatives?

All of our projects and collaborations involve helping Native people, whether or not they are Native organizations themselves. It is important to look for all opportunities that will benefit our people, especially on a large scale. When I do cultural training, I acknowledge some of the dumb stuff that I and my friends thought and did in the past – stuff that makes me cringe when I think of it now. But we learn and we grow; letting people know that we are in this journey together and that I am not judging them, I am judging their behavior…especially when I am talking to teachers, I let them off the hook a bit because they never learned, and the cycle has got to stop somewhere. It’s not their fault to some degree…This is also different in a professional environment than it is in a personal environment. I expect a lot more in a personal environment from a friend than I do in a professional environment with a colleague or a superior.

Do you have any success stories/outcomes from these initiatives?

Native Americans in Denver have the highest vaccination rates in the city and that is a point of pride, more than I could have ever hoped for. It’s the result of a lot of collaboration between Indian organizations that traditionally have not collaborated at this level before because we are all competing for grant dollars consistently, which pits us against one another. Everyone came together and worked together; mobile vans were available, these vans and other organizations showed up at events, and participants got to see their neighbors and people that looked like them giving and getting the vaccine.

What challenges or barriers have you encountered in your field?

Institutional mistrust is a big one; distrust among Non-Profits; and within tribal organizations there is mistrust of tribal councils, etc. It’s just politics among organizations. Even in an area like conservation, we are competing for the same resources and that puts us against one another, against our nature. It’s a scarcity environment and mentality. We have seen great things when we have put that aside in Denver and take the time to understand each other and work together.

When I work with non-native clients, they don’t expect me to have calls to action sprinkled in the training, but this is an important part of what I do – why do it if there is no action plan! They just want to be able to get the information without engaging….But when I run into teachers who have had the cultural experience training, they tell me what genuine things they have added to their classroom culture, like adding Native American authors to the summer reading list, Indigenous film week to a film class, adding indigenous woman’s week to women’s month activities….they are proud to tell me what they have done, and that is exciting and rewarding, knowing it will impact all students in a positive way.

What would it take to get teachers to do more than start new traditions, but to spread this training to others like parents?

Hearing the student voices is the most influential thing I can do for educators. When they hear from students, they discover that all students but especially first nation students have an expectation of them! Teachers are used to telling students what they expect from them but not used to hearing students’ expectations. Native students know how they want their culture represented in the curriculum and include not just historical but contemporary contributions as well.

Check out Project Mosaic for more information –> https://projectmosaicllc.com/