Mitakuye Foundation

2022 has been so busy we have barely had time to post! But we are always happy to take a pause to reflect on all of the great things happening at Mitakuye!

As 2022 started – many schools were still in hybrid mode with students working both in class and at home. Our School Arts Program was a big hit as it allowed kids to work both in the classroom and remotely! Our School Arts Program provides arts curriculum, instruction through over 50 filmed art lessons, and art supplies to kids across Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and neighboring towns and reservations. We delivered over 1800 art kits for the 2021-2022 school year.

With schools back in person we were able to bring our Art Contests and Creators Club back in full swing:

Our summer programs started off with the 500 Mile Sacred Hoop Run. 2022 was our 10 year anniversary of supporting the Run and over 160 kids participated: 

Special prayers were made for all of the MMIW. Randi Raeni-Shawaway applies paint and says a blessing for each runner:

 We even made time for an impromptu art class with the runners at Devils Tower:

On the last day our friend and long time supporter, Lo Sprague, was honored with a star quilt to recognize all of the support she has given to Mitakuye and the Run over the years:

Our summer art programs served hundreds of kids through our Mitakuye Art Days and Residencies in schools and communities across Pine Ridge and Rosebud including a special dance residency at Lakota Tech High School:

We also had the opportunity to support some young dancers by sponsoring a Youth Dance Special at the White River Wacipi with the help of our friend and expert judge Randi Raeni-Shawaway:

We expanded our Black Hills Arts Academy this year to experiment with offering shorter programs for younger kids in addition to our full time program which included kids from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Mission and Rosebud plus a special residency for the dance team at Lakota Tech High School.

We started off the week with setting up the tipi then got busy making art:

You can check out the film the students made here: https://vimeo.com/785475392

Our special sweetgrass project made with sweetgrass provided by our friend Vanne Mocilac!

Morning Circles, Daily Smudge, and of course, lots of time for fun and s’mores!

Our 2022-2023 School Arts Program is in full swing! Our junior staff helped out to prepare and deliver 2,000 art kits for students across Pine Ridge and Rosebud! Thank you Cisco, Elliana, Rita, Ramsey, Steph – aka Gramma Pepper – Dante & Shayne for making it happen!

We finished the year supporting 2 important community events – a Winter Toy drive in memory of our dear friend Eileen Janis & the Thunder Lake New Years Eve lock-down to give kids a safe and fun event to ring in the new year!

Wopila to everyone who supports these awesome young people and helps to give them opportunities to experience the healing power of art! If you want to help create more opportunities for these kids in 2023 you can donate here: https://mitakuyefoundation.com/donate/

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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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!

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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/

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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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Check out their film HERE

Our Taku Skan Skan Dance Crew worked hard!

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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.

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

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:

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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 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:

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!