YES Magazine!

• Researcher Abaki Beck, 23, has vivid childhood memories of helping her mother, grandmothers, and aunts pick traditional foods and medicines on the Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana. Because her great-grandmother passed down her vast knowledge of the tribe’s traditions, Beck learned the importance of eating these foods at an early age.
• Well before white settlers colonized their land, Blackfeet Nation members used more than 200 types of plants for food and remedies. But forced assimilation and reliance on the U.S. government for food adversely shifted most nations’ diets from whole foods to industrialized processed foods and eroded tribal health
• More than 80 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native adults are overweight or obese, and half of American Indian children are predicted to develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes, according to the Indian Health Clinical Reporting system.
• Her report, published in May, “Ahwahsiin: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Contemporary Food Sovereignty on the Blackfeet Reservation” (ahwahsiin translates to “the land where we get our food”), features oral history interviews with nine Blackfeet elders who discussed the nation’s traditional foods and the health issues connected to a modern American diet.
• A 2016 survey —the Blackfeet Nation has approximately 17,000 members—found that one of the most cited barriers in accessing traditional or local foods was lack of knowledge.
• The report was funded by a $10,000 grant from the First Nations Development Institute and is available on the organization’s website.
• “Some Westernized foods and medicines are not best for tribal people,” says Carolyn Angus-Hornbuckle, director of public health policy and programs at the National Indian Health Board. “These health disparities are happening throughout Indian Country, and we could see positive health impacts if Blackfeet chose to share Beck’s report and their knowledge with other communities.”
• “I wish I had known of our traditional ways of eating when I was younger,” she adds. “I didn’t really learn about eating healthy in school, either.”

Mix of anecdotal evidence as well as data, facts, and figures.

The Seattle Times

• The last person who spoke fluent Quinault passed away in 1996.
• By using recordings of those who spoke the language in the 1960s, a handful of people in the Olympic Peninsula tribe are slowly and painstakingly piecing it back together — and teaching it to a new generation.
• Johnston was the first person in recent memory to earn a world-language credit at the University of Washington by showing she had achieved “intermediate low-level proficiency” in that language.
• “It’s everything to me,” Johnston said of the importance of reviving her tribe’s native tongue. “Language is culture,” she said, and the tribe “right now is literally making history” by bringing it back.
• Chris Teuton, chair of American Indian Studies at the UW, hopes students eventually will be able to learn both those languages in for-credit courses, joining the 55 other languages already taught by the university.
• Lushootseed was revived by Upper Skagit author, teacher and linguist Vi Hilbert, who died in 2008 at the age of 90. Hilbert taught Lushootseed for credit at the UW until her retirement in 1988, and it has been taught intermittently at the university since then, along with Navajo and Yakama.
• Lushootseed’s sentence structure is different from English, and includes sounds that don’t exist in English.“It’s like my tongue is tap-dancing,” one speaker marveled during a recent language table session.
• The language’s history in the Puget Sound area dates back thousands of years. English, in contrast, has been spoken around here for fewer than 250.
• America’s past is threaded with a long, ugly history of white settlers separating Native Americans from their languages and cultures. In the 1900s, many Native American children were sent to boarding schools, where they were forced to speak only English.
• Johnston, of the Quinault tribe, says her grandfather spoke the language, and her mother asked him to teach it to her. But he refused — the older generation feared their children wouldn’t be successful if they spoke a Native American language, she said.
• Native American knowledge, he said, “is really grounded in our language — the grounding of stories, our storytelling traditions, our words for the natural world, words that describe our social relations.”
• Language is also a vital cultural connection for many Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, said Manuhuia Barcham, a UW lecturer who helped organize the Hawaiian language table.
• “This provides an academic incentive and establishes it as an equal language, a world language,” said Russell Hugo, a linguist in the UW’s language learning center. “Hopefully more students can do this, so we can build stronger ties of support and recognition” for local indigenous languages.

More anecdotal evidence, very few instances of data, facts or figures. However, since this program it’s in an early pilot stage, they’re might not be a lot of data yet in regards to the program.

The Taos News

• For a doctor or social worker, having a more complete and nuanced medical history at hand is especially important for patients with complex medical and social needs that smudge the boundaries of a siloed health care system.“Both mental health and addiction have this added heavy aspect ... the social connectedness piece,” said Waller. Where someone lives and the support they rely on affect their health care needs. Complex patients, like those facing addiction, require care from a menagerie of providers in a health care landscape in which even small gaps create a fractured system. Those complex patients rely on the most expensive part of the health care system — the ER. Just 1 percent of patients in Camden account for 30 percent of that city’s health care costs, according to the coalition. They call those patients “super-utilizers.”
• At the time the coalition began its “seven-day pledge,” only 20 percent of people were going back to a primary care doctor. Today, the coalition sees about 40 percent of people return to the doctor.
• Within 72 hours after a patient is discharged from the hospital, the organization’s 15-person care management team of nurses and social and community care workers tracks down patients for face-to-face conversations, whether that’s in their home, a shelter or at McDonald’s.
• “A lot gets lost in translation when they are in a provider’s office. Maybe they clam up. Or maybe they can’t express themselves,” said Renee Murray, associate clinical director for care management initiatives.
• “We really learn the patient’s story. We get a comprehensive picture of what’s going on medically and socially,” said Murray.
• The care management team’s targeted intervention for super-utilizers has touched about 500 lives since its most recent iteration in 2012.

Mix of anecdotal evidence and data.

Bella Colla

• Like other First Nations, the Nuxalkmc were targeted by colonialism. The Nuxalkmc survived the intentional spread of smallpox in 1862, which decimated populations. They survived the ban of their potlatch governing system from 1884 to 1951, and the genocidal violence of residential schools.
• Eventually, the Nuxalkmc moved away from their traditional bighouse system and over time, like many First Nations reservations, the communities were obliged to live in housing conditions, imposed by government, using standards, contractors and consultants unfamiliar with West Coast weather and the community’s social, cultural and economic needs.
• Richard Hall, 63, is a Red Seal carpenter (international standard of excellence for skilled trades), a certified building inspector and the community champion of the apprenticeship program. Hall lived away from Bella Coola for more than 15 years. Wally Webber, the chief at the time, was known to say, “I’m not a smart man, I just bring people who know more than me home.”
• Hall inspected about 7,000 homes and buildings in B.C., on and off reserves. He explored the belly of the housing beast from the ugly inside-out. He saw third world conditions in what was supposed to be a first world country, he said in an interview one morning, seated behind a pile of paperwork in his office.
• When Hall logged, he worked 16 hours a day, six days a week.
• They were amazed to see 30 interested students show up to the information session, an unbelievable surprise, for such a small community, they said.
• . The three worked hard to access funding streams for 16 apprentices. Nielsen secured about $5,000 for each student, through the Canada/BC Job Fund, through the Employment Services and Support Program and the Ministry of Advanced Education, for materials, instructors, classroom and shop space. Underwood and Wilson worked on tuition and book costs.
• Both Wilson and Underwood are Indigenous and have committed their lives to uplifting other First Nations youth and communities. Underwood worked for years with the Coast Salish Employment Training Society, visiting communities and reserves across Vancouver Island. He said he saw a lot of the same housing issues that the apprenticeship program intended to address and he was inspired by the strategy of the Nuxalkmc's approach.
• Moody researched tiny homes, and wondered whether it was possible to spend the roughly $200,000-250,000 she estimated it would cost the Nation for one home in a different way, and use it to build four tiny homes.
• Another essential moving piece is council support, Moody explained during an interview while driving through the valley she and her ancestors have always called home.
• It's hard to imagine Brook without a smile. But she says she is often frustrated by all the paperwork and government bureaucracy standing in the way of getting access to funding. The Trudeau government has increased post-secondary funds for First Nations, she said, but she finds it difficult to constantly have to prove that the students are eligible for grants for trades and occupational work.
• Since the apprenticeship program started, the Nuxalk community has seen pride sweep through the valley as they rebuilt homes lost to fires, transformed old buildings and solved problems with sustainable solutions that ejected outside materials and employees.
• The Nuxalk construction crew has minimized costs, maximized value and educated tenants about their roles and responsibilities in maintaining their homes. The crew uses wood finishing, LED lighting, radiant floor heating, mould resistant drywall, wood beams, siding posts and trimming and solid wood cabinets and countertops. They have designed and developed appropriate crawl and storage spaces, proper heating systems and new techniques to deal with unique weather conditions.
• They have constructed new triplexes, six new tiny homes for single occupants, and a brand new restaurant. They also have plans to build a new bighouse, a ceremonial gathering space for potlatches and other social, political and cultural events.
• Mix of anecdotal evidence and data, but overall does seem to have more anecdotal evidence.

Equal Voice News

• more than 65 percent of Native Americans live in urban areas. In the Albuquerque school district, many are falling through the cracks, as invisible as the reservations that dot New Mexico’s landscape.
• They are 237 percent more likely to drop out and less likely to graduate from high school than white students, typically lagging two to three grades behind in reading and math, according to a report released by the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators.
• This fall, the NACA Inspired Schools Network will have five schools open in New Mexico, with five more on the way. The network is building these schools on NACA’s model of strong academics and college preparation that promote Native American culture, identity and community.
• This focus on tribal identity is the heart of the Academy’s approach, which focuses on meeting students where they are, showing them the tribes they are from and getting them into college. This approach is working. Last year, 67 percent of NACA seniors graduated from high school on time, only slightly below the 69 percent statewide average for all students, and well above the 46 percent among Native students in Albuquerque Public Schools, according to a report by the NACA Inspired School Network.
• Its ideas continue to spread through the national Native Voice Network, which is comprised of more than 30 organizations working to elevate Native American issues and have reached the Seattle-based National Urban Indian Family Coalition.
• What we say is good for our community is actually a (model) and a framework that should be reflected for many people around the globe,” says Kara Bobroff, one of the founders of the school and its first principal.
• “We intentionally and organically try to incorporate community into the ways in which we offer our educational program.”
• “It takes all the community to help run this school,” says Toya-Waconda, whose son graduated in 2013. “Literally, we are a huge family.”
• The vast majority of the school’s students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, some families live on $6,000 a year, and many lack a home computer.
• In Albuquerque, more than one in four Native Americans live below the federal poverty line, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2013.
• School data reflected their struggles. Among Albuquerque school district students, Native Americans not only had the lowest four-year graduation rate, at 46 percent, but also the lowest scores in reading, math and science proficiency among identified racial and ethnic groups, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department.
• After his sophomore year, Haynes’ mother convinced Haynes, who is Navajo and Black, to return to NACA for his final two years of high school. At NACA, his grades rose to a 3.5 GPA and he became a state champion in the 400-meter dash.
• “Honestly, man, I’ve always had this confidence,” says Haynes, who sports a tattoo on his arm declaring, “I am of this world.”“It’s just that no one’s ever come to me to hear what I had to say.”
• It is the first urban charter school specifically focused on increasing the number of Native American students who choose the path of college — many as the first person in their family,” the NACA Inspired Schools Network says on its website.

Official data tell part of the school’s success story. The academy received a “B” from the New Mexico Public Education Department on its 2015 report card, and standardized test scores among its students are rising.

Heavy use of data, stats, and figures.