Chickadee Community Services

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In my regular job at the Montana Digital Academy, my primary task is to develop online Indigenous language classes in partnership with tribes of Montana. MTDA serves K-12 students, not adults or college students or teachers or communities. But after we launched our Crow language course, there was an outpouring of interest from just those kinds of people. I received phone calls and emails about it and continue to field questions at presentations I do. This started me thinking about the ways in which Indigenous education projects are often cast aside, either under-funded or un-realized because there are no people who have time or expertise to do the work.

TL;DR I birthed a rad non-profit and you can donate here.

And by “Indigenous education projects” I mean all kinds of things: language work, sure, but also support for Indigenous speakers in schools, assistance to tribes wishing to forge partnerships with school districts, Indigenous language education conferences, and more. Some of this happens, sometimes. Most of it does not. I had an idea for a solution.

What is Chickadee Community Services?

Chickadee Community Services is this idea. I founded Chickadee earlier this summer as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in order to secure foundation/grant funding for specific projects and donations for other kinds of support. The board consists of three experienced Indigenous educators whose advice and guidance is invaluable. Together we honed the following mission statement:

The mission of Chickadee Community Services is to provide aid and support to Indigenous-focused education projects with particular emphasis on tribal programs. Our goal is to promote Indigenous education, Indigenous language revitalization, and to serve educational needs in other worthy sectors related to education of, by, and about Indigenous peoples.

But what are we doing?

First, we have a tentative partnership with the Chippewa Cree TANF program and some potential funders for that project, to create educational modules for the TANF clients that will help teach them some of their own heritage language and culture, which they’ve largely lost through colonization, the legacy of boarding schools, and other aggressive assimilation tactics. Chickadee’s role will be to create the modules (after traveling to Rocky Boy for recording purposes) and host them. All of the materials will come from language and culture experts, who will also be compensated.

We have also begun to develop a plan for a Class 7 language conference modeled after previous conferences, to help our state’s language and culture teachers build instructional skill. Class 7 teachers are language speakers who have been certified by their tribe as competent to teach it, but many of them have not attended a teacher education program and have expressed a desire for training in pedagogy. This conference and the TANF project would be grant-funded.

In addition, opportunities arise all the time to support one-off Indigenous education projects, whether it’s helping a speaker travel to a school, or helping a group of students attend a language and culture conference. We may want to purchase books or bus reservation kids to an Indigenous writers’ workshop in Missoula. Maybe a speaker could be arranged for reservation teachers but the schools cannot provide travel assistance. I’ve seen these needs multiple times since I founded this organization and certainly before now too — they are real, and Chickadee can help.

Intellectual Property/Cultural Knowledge: Not a Footnote

All language, cultural, and other materials that Chickadee Community Services may help create in service of a project will always remain with the respective tribe and be controlled by the partnering tribal entity. Taking language and cultural knowledge¹ and copyrighting it, withholding it from tribes, and/or selling it in any form is wrong and I would not be party to such activity.

Goal: $10,000

Giving Tuesday is next week! We aim to raise $10,000 so we can begin 2024 with a healthy ability to participate in projects and support Indigenous education programs and people right away. If you have $25 to spare, or $250, or even more, you will not be disappointed by what we will be able to do with it, whether that’s supporting students/teachers/speakers or helping launch a project, sponsoring a dinner for Indigenous speakers at a conference and more.² If everyone on my subscribers list donated $25, we’d have close to $5000 already! Your donation is tax-deductible. Here’s the link to donate.

Why believe in me

And here’s the cringiest part of this newsletter, but I’m going to be blunt. If you know me, you know I get shit done. You also know that I’ve worked in tribal communities for 25 years in the field of education. I know how schools work, I understand the world of grants, I create online educational content for a living. I have assembled a kick-ass board to help direct a cool non-profit, and I hope you will support the work.

1. by recording it, mainly

2. We have a facebook page if you’d like to keep up with our activities.