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Mitakuye Foundation

2021:YEAR IN REVIEW

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In the second year of the Global Pandemic – 2021 surprised us in many ways! The year has seen dramatic shifts in the way we have worked with our students from the entirely online early Winter months, through the uncertainty and hopefulness of Spring, to the embrace of new in-person programming approaches in Summer, to our largest School Arts Program launch in Fall: 2021 has been a year full of swiftly-changing circumstances. And we have been there every step of the way providing arts education and resources for kids to express themselves as they navigate these rapidly changing and uncertain times.

We started the year off with our Monthly online Hoye Wayelo Arts Academies and with the totally remote 2020-2021 School Arts Program. By Spring we started meeting with schools, community leaders, and Tribal officials to figure out if in-person programs would be at all possible or safe for the Summer. We finally came up with a plan to serve hundreds of kids with in-person and remote learning through our Summer Arts programming.

We travelled to schools and community programs across Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations with our Art Days and pop-up programs.

Our Hoye Wayelo Black Hills Summer Arts Academy was a beautiful reminder of the healing power of art!

Check out more on our summer programs here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/summer-arts-2021-is-a-wrap/

We were able to expand our Hoye Wayelo School Arts Program for the 2021-2022 school year. Building on what we had created in 2020-2021, we were ale to deliver art supplies to 1,800 students on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations and we recorded a whole new series of lessons for students to follow both in the classroom and remotely for students who were still in an online format.

Check out more on our School Arts Program here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/school-arts-2020-2021/

We were thrilled to be able to restart our Creators Club programs. Our Fall Art Contest theme was Freedom!

We ended the year off with our Winter Toy Drive and were able to get over 600 creative and educational toys to kids across Pine Ridge and Rosebud.

We are already looking ahead to the new year! We hope you will help us reach even more kids with the healing power of art in 2022!

Your tax deductible, end-of-year donations can be made here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/donate/

WINTER TOY DRIVE 2021

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The 2021 Winter Toy Program is on!

Thank you to everyone who has been asking about contributing to the Winter Toy Drive this year! The global shipping and supply chain issues – on top of the global pandemic! – has posed a few challenges. But we have worked out a way, with some of our wonderful partners, to make sure we can get toys ordered and delivered on time!

So this year we will be taking monetary donations and purchasing toys directly. You can donate at https://mitakuyefoundation.com/donate/ Please be sure to mark “TOY FUND” in the program box.

The fundraiser will run through December 1st. Right now our goal is to purchase toys for 500 – 600 kids, but we will purchase as many toys as we can with the funds that come in. If you would like to arrange for a large or bulk donation please contact us directly to set it up.

Thank you all for your continued support! Delivering some uplifting and creative toys to the awesome young people we work with will be a wonderful way to end 2021!

SUMMER ARTS 2021 IS A WRAP!

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Mitakuye Summer Arts 2021 is a WRAP!

It was an incredible summer of programs this year! We were thrilled to be able to return to some of our in-person programming and continue our efforts to provide online and remote art opportunities for kids.

The pandemic has changed the world and definitely gave us some increased challenges for programming. But we were happy to find creative solutions for the kids.

We traveled to schools and programs in Pine ridge and Rosebud to do Art Days with the kids! Watercolors, Oil Pastels, and Tempera were a few the mediums we experimented with. Each child got to take home their own art kit and activity booklet. We also passed out over 300 art kits to schools and communities for kids who were working remotely.

Our Black Hills Arts Academy was a beautiful reminder of the healing power of art! We went above and beyond to keep everyone safe and exceeded all CDC required protocols to create a safe and Covid-free environment for learning. We offered smaller programs this year and all students, faculty, and staff were vaccinated. On top of that we required additional negative Covid test results before any students or staff could begin the program. We also found creative ways to work distancing, hand sanitizer, and open ventilated spaces into all of our creative experiences.

We started every day with a nature walk, morning stretch, and meditation / clearing the mind – getting ready for creativity.

Verola Spider, our resident Unci, 5th generation storyteller, master quill, bead, and quilt artist, and teacher of Lakota Language and Culture started off each meal and each morning with a blessing. As always – the elders were the center of our teaching and provided a backbone in traditional knowledge that grounded our work every day.

Traditional arts included: beading, star quilts, sewing with traditionally tanned hides, moccasins, and working with sweetgrass.

Students worked with beautiful, fresh, sweetgrass provided by our dear friend Vanne Mocilac.

Traditional Hide Tanning students worked on buffalo, elk, and deer.

Visual Artists worked in 2D and 3D mediums including acrylic and water color paint, oil and soft pastels, graphite and charcoal, plaster, clay, and a special project painting on rawhide with traditional earth paints.

Filmmakers took their project to the next level with production design and visual effects!

Check out their film HERE

Our Taku Skan Skan Dance Crew worked hard!

We shot a special dance film with some of our Fancy Shawl and Traditional dancers (coming soon!)

As always we ended the program with an exhibition of dance, spoken word performances, and film – and a gallery showing and art walk for all of the traditional and visual art created during the program.

Photo’s taken by: Jennifer Jessum, Simon Joseph, Colette Crowley, Denise Bouchard, Ramsey Brown for The Mitakuye Foundation.

SCHOOL ARTS 2020-2021!

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Our Inaugural School Arts program 2020-2021 was a great success! We worked with over 1,500 kids at 12 different schools on Pine Ridge and Rosebud and kept the creativity going during a difficult year! Here is a peak at some of the 35 video lessons we created for students:

SUMMER ARTS ACADEMY 2021

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We are pleased to announce that we will be doing our Black Hills Summer Arts Academy this year. This summer’s program will be much smaller to accommodate all CDC guidelines and all who attend must be vaccinated.

We will be doing immersive programs in visual art, film, traditional arts (moccasins, star quilts, beading), traditional brain tanning, dance and performing arts, and writing. Deadline for submissions is June 15th.

2020: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

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2020 has been unprecedented on every level. After the pandemic hit and we began to realize the enormity of the situation – we thought we would have to cancel most of our programming for kids. But after some creative problem solving and innovation – 2020 has turned out to be one of our biggest years ever.

At the beginning of the year we had hit the ground running and started off the year with a Creators Club Awards Program and School Tour for our Winter contest winners:

We had record breaking numbers of entries for all of our Art Contests:

We also had the opportunity to continue the work we have started with the Elder’s Project by hosting our Advisor Richard Moves Camp – Lakota spiritual leader, teacher and historian, to Los Angeles to do a presentation at UCLA. The Elders Project focuses on celebrating and preserving the wisdom and knowledge of Lakota Elders and creates inter-generational opportunities and programming for youth to learn from elders and participate in archiving their knowledge.

  • Joseph Marshall lll
  • Photo Credit Amanda War Bonnett
  • Verola Spider

Elders and traditional knowledge form the backbone of the educational opportunities we create for kids.

  • Kevin Locke
  • J.T. Shinning OneSide
  • Duane Reddest

When the pandemic hit – we were determined to keep the art happening for our summer programs, but we knew we would have to make some drastic changes since in-person learning was not an option. So we shifted our Hoye Wayelo Summer Arts Academy online and expanded our Summer Arts Program to support over 100 kids with art supplies and lunches for a community kids program, and sent out over 300 Art Kits, snack bags, and Creativity Guides to kids in Pine Ridge and Rosebud, for our Summer Art Challenge

See more on The Summer Arts Academy Here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/summer-arts-2020-2/

See Summer Behind The Scenes Here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/summer-2020-behind-the-scenes/

The summer programs were so successful we decided to keep up programming in August with a weekly academy Mitakuye Mondays. We saw the need and the response and decided to keep programming going on a regular basis with a monthly online Arts Academy. The Fall Arts Academy launched in September and ran the first Sunday of every month through December.

We had been working on ideas to create year-round arts programming for kids by partnering with reservation schools. When we learned that kids would not be returning to the classroom in the Fall we shifted gears and launched our most ambitious project to date. The Hoye Wayelo (“ I Am Sending A Voice”) School Art Program supplied over 1,500 students with Art Kits at 12 different schools across Pine Ridge and Rosebud. We created 35 videos for online weekly art classes!

See more on the School Art Program Here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/school-arts-program/

See Behind The Scenes for the School Art Program here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/school-arts-behind-the-scenes/

We wrapped up this year with our largest Winter Toy Drive ever! This year it took on special significance as kids have been enduring such tough times and most of the organizations that usually supply and deliver toys were not running. So we stepped up our game and stepped in to help. We brought in over 1,000 toys, packaged them and helped deliver them to schools and communities in Pine Ridge and Rosebud. It was a great joy to be able to provide arts and educational toys to young people during these very difficult times.

See more on the 2020 Winter Toy Drive here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/2020-winter-toy-drive/

As we shift into this new calendar year – we do not know what 2021 will hold in store. But we do know that the creative skills and and thinking that we share with the kids will be priceless tools to help navigate the unknown. And we will use those tools to continue to refocus and evolve our programming to fit the ever changing needs of the young people and the ever changing world they are navigating. And with that healing and creative spirit as the focus and the center of everything we do – we look forward to a new year of healing and creativity!

2020 WINTER TOY DRIVE!

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2020 was a difficult year – but we were able to end it on a very bright note with our largest winter toy drive ever! This year it took on special significance as kids have been enduring such tough times and most of the organizations that usually supply and deliver toys were not running. So we stepped up our game and brought in over 1,000 toys, packaged them and helped deliver them to schools and communities in Pine Ridge and Rosebud. It was a great joy to be able to provide arts and educational toys to young people during these very difficult times! Our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed and who volunteered to help make this happen!

SCHOOL ARTS: BEHIND THE SCENES!

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Sharing some Behind The Scenes of our biggest project ever!!


Our Hoye Wayelo “ I Am Sending A Voice” School Art Program launched this fall and has supplied over 1,200 students with Art Kits and online weekly art classes!

See our post on the Hoye Wayelo School Arts Program here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/school-arts-program/

The task was daunting and urgent as schools had already started and we had to fight to find materials – that were now in super high demand due to the pandemic. But, after a generous donation by the Sprague Family Foundation (thank you Lo!!), painstaking hours tracking down supplies, getting them to our regional head quarters in neighboring Wyoming (space graciously donated by Jill Smith – thank you!!), and a marvelous feat of assembling massive amounts of art supplies into kits (heroically coordinated by Ramsey Brown – thank you!), all the while following CDC safety guidelines … we pulled it off!

And with some help from volunteers, delivery helpers, and our local staff Stephanie Apple and Dante Witt – we delivered 1,200 art kits to schools in Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations – plus art supplies to our Monthly Art Academy Students and 200 lunches for them and their siblings!

At the same time we wrote the curriculum and quickly had to expand our 15 lesson plan into 31 videos to serve the needs of a full K-12 range of students. We embraced the remote creative landscape we were in and filmed and edited the lessons between California, Massachusetts and South Dakota. Lessons beautifully taught by Colette Crowley, LMHC, ATR.

  • photo credit Michael McGlaughlin

We worked with one of our long time students, Nora Marshall, who is an 8th grader at Loneman School in Oglala, to illustrate the intro video.

Check out the post about her here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/celebrating-a-young-artist/

The best part about arts education is that it helps inspire creative thinking. It is exactly that type of thinking that inspired us to find solutions to keep the arts opportunities flowing for students during this pandemic. Teachers now have a full 12 weeks of art lessons for students of all ages and over 1,200 kids have art supplies to work with. Our next step is to raise funding for 12 more weeks of lessons and a second semester of art supplies for even more students. We hope you will join us in our efforts!

Donate here to help us make that happen! https://mitakuyefoundation.com/donate/

WINTER TOY DRIVE 2020

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2020 has been rough year. Let’s have it end on a bright note by providing some love to kids on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations!

Holidays can be difficult, especially for kids living in extreme poverty. The pandemic has only amplified many of the very challenging circumstances that many kids live in. So we are working hard to extend our reach and serve as many kids as we can.

We are striving to provide holiday gifts for 400 – 500 kids… but can easily deliver to over 1,000 if more come in. As an arts and educational organization – we favor gender-neutral arts & educational toys and toys that inspire physical activity and creativity. But straight up fun toys are great too. We just ask that toys not promote violence – i.e. any type of weapons – and are culturally appropriate for First Nations youth.

Our WishList on Amazon has suggested items but feel free to order whatever you like.:

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/3U6VYB0R90CQ2?ref_=wl_share

If the shipping address does not show up in your cart you can enter it manually:

Mitakuye c/o Ramsey Brown
333 French Creek Rd.
Buffalo, Wyoming 82834 (605) 454-4000

We also have secured special pricing for hand drums for kids. If you would like to contribute to that you can contribute to our “Drum Fund”. You can also donate to our “Toy Fund” and we can purchase the toys directly. Donate here and note “toy fund” or “drum fund” in the program box:

Donate

Delivery times are supposed to be extra long this year so we suggest that all purchases be made by December 1st and arrive at our headquarters by December 12th so they arrive in time to be delivered to the kids.