(St. Stephens, WY) – Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office received a $49,996 grant through the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Native Institutions.
This grant opportunity is intended to help Native Cultural Institutions to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and provide humanities programming to their communities. Funds were provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 passed by the U.S. Congress.
Funds support the Reclaiming the Past for Future Generations Project that will support the organization and creation of an Arapaho Story Map. The Arapaho Story Map is designed to infuse historical documentation from the Cleaver Warden anthropological collection at the Chicago Field Museum with contemporary stories and photos from living Arapaho Elders.
The Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) along with a cohort of tribal experts, will utilize the Cleaver Warden information to create educational materials to inform our tribal members, community, and schools by creating a timeline or what we are calling the Arapaho Story Map. We have organized an outline of the timeline and will be working with Elders and a cohort of educational and humanities experts to collect stories from living Elders and photos to complete a story map to put in the hands of every Arapaho. We will work with schools to present the Arapaho Story Map (ASM) through lesson plans developed by our cohort and classroom teachers to meet state standards and incorporate the ASM into the general curriculum by the following steps:
- Generating a story map to educate and teach our youth;
- Building a genealogical timeline;
- Creating a Ken Burns type of Powerpoint to share in Reservation schools
- Use pre and post-questionnaires as evaluations to measure effective aspects and ineffective aspects and ineffective aspects of the programs and improve for future presentations
- Working with classroom teachers to generate lesson plans based on the ASM THPO will fulfill a piece of our mission to preserve traditional ecological knowledge for the Northern Arapaho people and provide materials that will carry on for future generations to study and learn.
“This will be for the betterment of our community, inclusivity of our Elders and bringing our older and younger generations together to learn more about our past, for the future,” shared Crystal Reynolds.
“COVID-19 hit Tribal communities particularly hard. The pandemic is not only responsible for the loss of culture keepers, Native language speakers, elders, and government leaders, but also the closure of cultural institutions, furloughed staff, and reduced programming,” said ATALM President Susan Feller. “This opportunity will provide much-needed financial support and create humanities-based programs that bring cultural practitioners and the public together in a dialogue that embraces the civic and cultural life of Native communities.”
Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office was selected by an independent Peer Review Committee and is one out of 84 awardees to receive funding. Other awardees representing 25 states include Tribal governments and Native nonprofit organizations, as well as higher education institutions and non-native nonprofit organizations working in partnership with state or federally recognized tribal entities. A total of $3.26 million was granted.
A list of grantees is available at www.atalm.org.
“The National Endowment for the Humanities is grateful to the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums for the association’s important work in administering American Rescue Plan funding to help Native American cultural institutions recover from the pandemic,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “These grants provide valuable humanities resources to tribal communities and represent a lifeline to the many Native heritage sites and cultural centers that are helping preserve and educate about Indigenous history, traditions, and languages.”