A10 EZ RE KK THE WASHINGTON POST.‘We are s
T
he city of Anchorage sits on the homeland of the
Dena’ina tribe. The Anchorage Museum installed “This
is Dena’ina Ełnena” on its facade as part of its land
acknowledgment efforts to recognize the Indigenous people of
a place. The Indigenous Place Names Project has come up
with 30 locations to place new signs, like the one seen here in
Chanshtnu Muldoon Park.
Aaron Leggett, 40, the president of the Native Village of
Eklutna, has made it his life’s mission to change assumptions
that natives are long gone in Anchorage, the city where he
grew up and where his ancestors have lived for thousands of
years. During his senior year at the University of Alaska at
Anchorage, he and a professor organized a class for youth
about Dena’ina history and culture. They challenged students
to find public recognition of the Dena’ina people in the city. It
would be the beginnings of what would become the
Indigenous Place Names Project.
The Indigenous Place Names Project drew knowledge from
Dena’ina elders, who for the last 40 years have worked to
document over a thousand place names throughoutBY DANA HEDGPETH
AND RACHEL HATZIPANAGOSIntroduction by Dana Hedgpeth, a local re-
porter and member of the Haliwa-Saponi
tribe of North Carolina.“B
ut you don’t look like an Indian!”
I’ve heard that response more
than a few times from people
when they learn that I am an
American Indian. I am a member of the
Haliwa-Saponi tribe of North Carolina. I grew
up in the D.C. suburbs, not on a reservation.
In fact, our tribe doesn’t have a reservation,
but my family often travels to Hollister, N.C.,
where the Haliwa-Saponi have their tribal
homelands, for cultural gatherings or events.
It’s a common frustration for many of the
country’s American Indians and Alaska Na-
tives: People react with surprise or disbelief
when we tell someone that we’re from a tribe
that is Indigenous to the United States.
Many people assume all American Indians
are dead; they have an image in their heads of
old black-and-white photos of some western
Plains Indians who performed in Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West shows. Or they wrongly
generalize that we’re all confined to reserva-
tions, living in poverty or flush with casino
cash.
For many of us, the message to the rest of
society is simple: “We’re still here.”
There are more than 570 federally recog-
nized American Indian and Alaska Native
tribes and villages in the United States.
According to the 2020 Census, fewer than a
quarter of American Indians and Alaska
Natives reside on reservations or other tribal
lands. Most of us — close to two-thirds — live
in major cities or smaller metro regions and
suburban areas.
For Native American Heritage Month, my
colleague Rachel Hatzipanagos and I talked
with several American Indians and Alaska
Natives about their work to remind non-
natives that we are still here.
They represent different tribes and varied
professions, some working on reservations
and some at major institutions in big cities
around the country. They acknowledge the
struggles of their people and are determined
to educate their children and the public about
their history and their current lives.
Inupiaq photographer Brian Adams creat-
ed a visual response to our theme of “we’re
still here.” He documented the efforts of the
Indigenous Place Names Project, which looks
to reclaim these Dena’ina spaces. The move-
ment creates place markers throughout An-
chorage with the names of the locations in the
native Alaskan language.
As we say in our Tutelo-Saponi language,
le: maini:naose — “we are still here.”Nikki Bass
MEMBER OF THE
NANSEMOND
I NDIAN NATION OF
HAMPTON ROADS, VA.
Nikki Bass, who
lives in D.C., said peo-
ple are often surprised
that she’s a Native
American whose tribal community is in the
D.C. region.
She’s a member of the Nansemond Indian
Nation, which has a population of roughly
600 and is one of several tribes in Virginia
that received federal recognition in 2018.
“People who live here don’t realize there
are Native American communities living
throughout the Chesapeake Bay area and
we’ve never left,” said Bass, a chemist and the
associate director of the science policy divi-
sion at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Bass, 39, said one of the most common
myths people have about American Indians is
that “Native American identity is divisible.”
“They think you can be a fraction of a
Native American,” Bass said, referring to a
controversial practice of trying to determine
the amount of “Indian blood” a person has. It
has been used to determine whether individ-
uals are eligible for federal benefits, and some
tribes still use it to determine membership.
“Our identities are not based on a myth of
racial purity,” which she calls harmful. She
said many Native Americans, including her
own family, have “been living as part of a
blended society for centuries.”
Bass said she has African, European and
Native American ancestors. “I’m proud of the
whole story of my family,” she said.
“Our land was stolen, and we survived in
blended communities,” she said. “There’s
nothing in our survival story that weakens my
Native American ancestry.”Jordan Dresser
CHAIRMAN OF THE
NORTHERN ARAPAHO
TRIBE OF
FORT WASHAKIE, WYO.
When the elders of
the Northern Arapaho
Tribe in Wyoming were
reunited with items they hadn’t seen in a very
long time, such as rawhide bags adorned with
special designs, they had tears in their eyes.
“That brought me hope that this is some-
thing that’s important for all of us,” said
Jordan Dresser, 37.
For Dresser, one of the youngest chairmen
of the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming,
this was one of the proudest moments he has
had in helping repatriate items and, in some
cases, human remains that were taken from
the tribe and now reside in museums and
other institutions.
In that case, the Episcopal diocese ofWyoming, the offices of which are in Casper,
had a collection of 300 Arapaho items that the
tribe was able to get back on loan.
“None of them were human remains or
sacred items. They were everyday stuff that
our tribal people make,” Dresser said. “It’s all
about those human connections because they
remember all that stuff.”
After working as a journalist and later
receiving a master’s degree in museum stud-
ies, Dresser began producing documentaries
about his community and chronicling efforts
to repatriate items belonging to ancestors.
“It’s important because with the human
remains, we bury them. So we’re completing
their life cycle as opposed to having them
sitting on shelves.... And in the end, repatria-
tion is basically a human rights issue,” Dresser
said. “That’s really what it is. Because native
people were always historically treated as less
than.”
Dresser is working with the Field Museum
in Chicago, which has a large collection of
Arapaho items including quillwork, a style of
embroidery that predates beadwork and is
made from porcupine quills.
“I always believe that something that we
think is lost can be found again,” Dresser said.Jacqueline
Brixey
MEMBER OF THE
CHOCTAW NATION OF
OKLAHOMAJacqueline Brixey’s
great-grandmother,
who was Cherokee, did not want her children
to speak any Indigenous languages.
“She wanted them to speak English, possi-
bly for economic opportunities, or just because
of racism and oppression, and thought that
would ease their lives,” said Brixey, 33.
Brixey, who is a member of the Choctaw
Nation of Oklahoma and whose parents also
didn’t speak the language, didn’t end up
learning Choctaw until she moved to Califor-
nia to attend the University of Southern
California, where she studies computer sci-
ence.
She took a community language class in Los
Angeles, taught by a fluent speaker of the
Choctaw language, meeting for two hours each
Saturday. Out of the tribe of about 200,
people, it’s estimated there are fewer than
1,000 left who speak Choctaw.
“In linguistics, there’s really the under-
standing that these languages are important,”
said Brixey, who lives in Los Angeles. “They
mean a lot to the culture and the community
that speaks the language. And as scientists, we
lose a lot each time we lose the language.
“I hope we can see the value of using
technology as a tool to help preserve and to
revitalize and to reclaim our languages,” Brix-
ey added.
When she started pursuing a master’s de-
gree in computer science, she wanted to create
a chat bot to allow others to learn the language.
Now, six years into her PhD program, Brixey
has nearly finished her chatbot, which is called
Masheli, meaning “fair sky” in Choctaw.
The bot could also have implications for
other tribes. “It’s language agnostic to the
point where, given enough training examples
or questions, it can work for other Indigenous
languages,” Brixey said.
Of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in
the United States today, two are healthy, 34 are
in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a
generation without serious intervention, ac-
cording to an article from High Country News.
“As an Indigenous person, it makes a huge
difference when you do see your language
represented,” Brixey said.Dakotah Lane
MEMBER OF THE
LUMMI NATION OF
BELLINGHAM, WASH.
Dakotah Lane never
forgot his grandfather
telling him when he was
growing up that he needed to come back and
do work for the tribe.
Initially he got a degree in electrical engi-
neering at the University of Washington and
worked for AT&T and IBM. But he decided the
best way to serve his tribe was as a doctor, so he
went to medical school. After graduating from
the Weill Cornell medical college in New York,
he went back to work as the medical director at
the health clinic for his tribe.
Lane, 41, is the first doctor from his tribe to
serve his people since 1978, and he is part of a
small cadre of Native American doctors in the
country. Fewer than 1 percent — 0.3 percent, to
be exact — of the roughly 918,500 licensed
working doctors in the United States are
Native American or Alaska Native, according
to 2019 data from the Association of American
Medical Colleges.
Lane was born in Bellingham to a White
mother who worked in commercial real estate
and a Lummi father who is a retired commer-
cial fisherman and now does maintenance
work at the tribe’s casino. Before his arrival at
the clinic, Lane said, many people within the
roughly 5,300-member tribe were nervous
about going there because there wasn’t a
Lummi doctor in charge. He said he’s been able
to build a trust with his tribal patients over the
years. That relationship, he said, was crucial
when the coronavirus pandemic hit, as the
disease has been especially hard on Native
American communities. At least 80 percent of
the Lummi Nation is vaccinated, Lane said.
He said that in the “post-George Floyd era,”
many Americans have become more focused
on “different minority groups that everyone
ignored before.”