Description
We are recommending an urgent needs grant of $250,000 from the Theology Program and the Initiative on Native American Intellectual Leadership to the Leadership Institute (LI) of the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS). This grant would be used to help tribal communities in the Southwest develop and implement plans for spiritual and cultural recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds would come from the Theology Program’s 2020 allocation.
As you know, Indian Country, and especially tribal nations in the southwestern United States, have been hard hit by the pandemic. The Navajo Reservation has seen the most cases, but there are also hotspots at Zia, Zuni, and San Felipe Pueblos as well as on the White Mountain Apache and Hopi Reservations. At the same time, lockdowns intended to limit the spread of the disease have negatively affected the health, economic, and spiritual well-being of these communities and others in the region. Food supply chains have been interrupted; ceremonies that help to ensure that communities thrive have been cancelled or are being conducted in private, counter to tradition; elders who are culture bearers have been isolated for their own protection; family incomes have been reduced drastically.
All of these impacts contribute to increased risk of culture loss. More than four centuries of concerted attacks on Indigenous people, language, religion, and culture have exacted a terrible toll on Native nations. They have struggled mightily to preserve, recover, and pass on traditional beliefs, artistic practices, ceremonies, language, astronomical and agricultural knowledge, and much more. And, indeed, Native nations and cultures are extraordinarily vital and vibrant today. But they also remain challenged—by mass media, by out-migration from tribal lands to urban centers, by school curricula that remain largely Euro-American in orientation, and by the passing of elders who are living repositories of cultural knowledge.
The COVID-19 pandemic compounds these challenges, threatening the health of elders especially, keeping children from programs that seek to facilitate cultural transmission to younger generations, disrupting communal rituals and celebrations that bind people together, and separating family members from one another. COVID attacks what Leadership Institute co-director Carnell Chosa (Jemez Pueblo) calls “Gifts of the Creator”—“land, language, ‘religion,’ a way of life, governance, indigenous laws, customs, families, communities, resources…[a]ll of [which] are interconnected…” If these gifts are taken away or lost, then so too are meaning, identity, belonging—for individual members of a tribal community and for the community as a whole.
Right now, Native nations in the grip of the pandemic are struggling to treat the sick, protect the vulnerable, and supply the needs of communities that are facing scarcity. But Chosa and his co-director Regis Pecos (Cochiti Pueblo) recognize that, very soon, these nations will have to face the challenge of spiritual and cultural recovery, of making the community whole again, of repairing damage done, of ensuring that the Creator’s gifts remain cherished and protected.
What this means precisely will vary from community to community: each nation has its own way of life that has been affected differently by the pandemic. The Leadership Institute proposes to convene a series of virtual community institutes—a program strategy the LI has regularly employed in the past. These institutes will bring together participants from many tribal communities in New Mexico and Arizona, representing different generations, professions, and perspectives. They will be invited to explore together such questions as: “What have our communities lost during this time and how do we recover spiritually? What… programming efforts… can strengthen and preserve [our] ‘way of life’? What do we want our children and grandchildren to inherit?“
The LI will produce a “grey book” summarizing these discussions and will, informed by the community institutes and guided by a planning committee of community leaders, identify and provide grants to particular community-based recovery initiatives. The preponderance of Luce funds will be used for these community grants; the remainder will be used to compensate LI staff and to hire an evaluator and a community engagement fellow—likely a member of the Pueblo PhD Cohort at Arizona State University.
The Leadership Institute of the Santa Fe Indian School was founded by Chosa and Pecos more than 20 years ago to encourage collaborative work among New Mexico’s tribal communities to address shared challenges. It functions as a think tank, convener, and advocacy organization. Pecos is a former governor of Cochiti Pueblo, chief of staff to the Speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, and Executive Director of the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs. Chosa received his PhD from Arizona State and worked as a planner at the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs. The LI is based at the Santa Fe Indian School, founded by the Federal government in 1890 and now controlled by the 18 governors of the New Mexico Pueblos. The LI is eager to participate in and contribute to the learning community organized by the Public Religion Research Center and comprising other Theology Program-funded, community-based, COVID-relief projects.
For all of these reasons, we strongly recommend that the Luce Foundation award an urgent needs grant of $250,000 to the Leadership Institute of the Santa Fe Indian School. Thank you for your consideration.
