All my relatives
A year with Chickadee
The nonprofit I founded, Chickadee Community Services, celebrates one year this November, and I’m so glad it all happens during Native American Heritage month. One year after our first funds rolled in, I have so many people to be thankful for. I joked recently that my superpower is asking people for help, but that is actually the truth: I know so many smart, experienced, and wonderfully giving people that it feels almost disrespectful not to ask for help. And it would certainly be ungracious not to thank them for all they’ve done.
Thank you.
I am so grateful to Chickadee’s board of directors, who are thoughtful and supportive, ask me to think in different ways, and guide Chickadee in doing the right things: Bill Swaney, Lark Real Bird, and Mike Geboe.
We appreciate, beyond measure, the hundreds of individual donors who have made this work possible, in addition to very generous foundations providing support for specific projects and general operating expenses. None of this happens without you.
I thank the partners who have entrusted Chickadee with their projects of incalculable value, for example the Chippewa Cree tribe’s TANF program who asked us to record elders telling stories and speaking Cree; and a graduate student studying the effects of mining on her tribe’s traditional plants. Your trust means everything.
I am indebted to special advisors who counsel me when I’m not sure what to do next. You know who you are, answering the phone, fielding my early-morning texts, engaging in talks on long car rides. Thank you.
I believe the most important thing Chickadee does, before all else, is to build relationships. And I appreciate my relationships with all of you, beyond measure.
Reflections, a year in.
I love that sometimes, my full-time job developing Indigenous language courses for the Montana Digital Academy overlaps in inspiring ways with the work that Chickadee seeks to accomplish. A couple of weeks ago I presented what I have done with MTDA at a conference located at Turtle Mountain Community College, on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota: Ojibwe country, relatives of Montana’s Little Shell and Chippewa Cree people. Everyone is related! And everyone there demonstrated generous hospitality and gracious welcome. It’s possible that developing Ojibwe language resources via Chickadee, with some of the wonderful people I met there, is the best place place to start.
Chickadee’s successes have surprised me. One huge shock was the devastatingly high number of participants who signed up for the summer Native American Studies for Teachers course, over 130 of them. I’d spent over half a year developing that course, and no fewer than 15 Indigenous speakers agreed to be interviewed1 for the curriculum. Without those relationships I never could have built such a rich, engaging experience for the participants, whose reviews of the course gushed, nearly unanimously.
In another surprise, as a grantee of the Potlatch Fund, a funder of Indigenous programming, I was asked to participate in video-recording a promo spot for their fundraising gala. A few days after the interview I received an invitation to the gala itself, a high-dollar-plate affair on Suquamish land outside of Seattle. The Chickadee board’s vice chair, Lark, and I will go and represent our organization, and I could not be more thrilled about that opportunity.
More and more, I hope the work Chickadee does can assist in decolonizing the ways philanthropy functions. I want to align myself with deconstructing barriers and promoting Indigenous ways of thinking.2 Some examples: writing gifts into grants in ways that are legal3 yet satisfy traditional protocols; eliminating paperwork for cultural specialists,4 particularly the elderly; paying consultants what they are worth rather than the pittance they often receive; focusing on relationships rather than a paper trail.5
As a non-Indian person working to support Indigenous concerns, I am often called an “ally.” And just as elsewhere in humanity, lateral violence swings an ugly bat in the “ally” world, where white people judge other white people for their level of informed-ness, their virtue signaling on Indigenous issues,6 the trail of humble-bragging they’ve dragged behind them. Abandoning that bat in the closet is sometimes a struggle for me. Not swinging it at myself is also a strain. Finding the balance of appropriate humility, a common Indigenous value, remains elusive.
What I’ve learned.
I love talking to people about Chickadee but need to work on concise narratives.
I can manage nearly $17,000 from over 300 donations in a 90-day span, including accounting, receipting, and juggling bank apps.
Non-profits have different rules from basically everyone else. My accountant is good with the tough love.
I suck at social media production but I have excellent helpers!
Next year, and the year after, and the year after…I’m ridiculously excited about what comes next.7
I believe in the mission of Chickadee. I trust in my experience. And beyond all, I value the relationships I have, with all my relatives.
Six live via zoom webinar, nine recorded.
A great example of this from Potlatch Fund is that they don’t require data-heavy reports or receipts. They want you to tell them a story about what you did with their funding, and you can tell it however you like.
I’m told the IRS frowns on buying gift cards with tax-deductible donation money.
There is an IRS rule that benefits cultural specialists.
Obviously I keep books and have receipts and submit tax forms and all that stuff. I just try to find ways for the people I work with to avoid it.
A term that had to be explained to me but now I know it, I see it everywhere.
Thank you for quilting this good cause.