November is Native American & Indigenous Heritage Month

National Native American Heritage Month, which is also referred to as American Indian or Alaska Native Heritage Month, was established in 1990 to recognize the significant contributions of Indigenous people. This originates back to 1915 when Episcopal priest and Native rights activist Rev. Sherman Coolidge, an Arapahoe, called on the country to observe American Indian Day the second Saturday of each May.

Thanksgiving, one of the biggest U.S. holidays of the year, also falls in November and if you downloaded our Diversity Calendar, you'll know that Thanksgiving is called "Day of Mourning" by many Indigenous people. We will bring you more on this in our next newsletter.

To celebrate Native American Heritage, check out our interviews with Sondra Seguro and Cynthia Masterson from last year. Sondra is an indigenous artist, writer, and singer using art to preserve the Haida language. Cynthia is a teaching artist creating art with traditional indigenous beading techniques.

You can also watch this Tedx Teachers College talk by teacher and photographer Matika Wilbur, "Changing the Way We See Native Americans." Matika is a Seattleite who quit her job in 2012 and drove 600,000 miles throughout the U.S. to photograph all 562 federally recognized tribes (since then, more have been recognized). Project 562 culminated in a beautiful book a decade later. Most us at Cultures Connecting have the book Project 562 and you can buy your own copy online or in-person at the indigenous art gallery Tidelands in downtown Seattle. Matika also did a Tedx Seattle talk called "Surviving Disappearance, Re-Imagining & Humanizing Native Peoples" which you can watch too.