Health | National

Center for Native American Youth tackles racial equity and healing

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota), standing, with the Center for Native American Youth's 2016 Champions for Change. From left: Brayden White, Vanessa Goodthunder, Samuel Slater, Christie Wildcat and Noah Blue Elk Hotchkiss. Seated on the far right is Patty Talahongva. Photo from CNAY / Facebook

The Center for Native American Youth has launched a new effort aimed at promoting racial equity and healing for Native youth.

A $450,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is funding the three-year program. It will incorporate peer-to-peer dialogues among Native youth and highlight the strengths and resiliency of Native youth.

“Native youth are doing incredible things to address the considerable challenges across Indian Country,” Erik Stegman, the executive director of the Center for Native American Youth, said in a press release. “With support from the W.K. Kellogg foundation, CNAY will work with our partners to lift up those positive stories, connect Native youth leaders to one another, and continue our collective efforts to remove the barriers between Native youth and success.”

Resiliency has been a common theme of Generation Indigenous, an effort launched by President Barack Obama after he visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota in June 2014 and learned how young people on the reservation are thriving despite facing numerous obstacles.

First Lady Michelle Obama, who also went to Standing Rock, has carried on the theme at the White House Tribal Youth Gathering last summer and at the Santa Fe Indian School graduation ceremony at last month.

"As we all know, this school was founded as part of a deliberate, systematic effort to extinguish your cultures – to literally annihilate who you were and what you believed in," the First Lady said on May 26. "But today, the Native languages that were once strictly forbidden here now echo through the hallways and in your dorm room conversations at night."

The Center for Native American Youth was founded by retired Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) to address issues facing American Indian and Alaska Native youth. It is based at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C.