Tulsa, June 19—A team of Native American researchers, storytellers, and activists here in the South are transforming the national narrative about their people in the media, the entertainment world, and in political debates in the state and Washington.
Crystal Echo Hawk, a Pawnee Native American, founding director of the Illuminative organization, comments in an interview with La Jornada at her offices in this city that in these first five years this initiative has helped promote the confirmation of the first Indigenous woman in the presidential cabinet in the history of the country, is providing research, data and narrative capacities to expand the power and sovereignty of Indigenous communities, nourish campaigns about missing and murdered Indigenous women, disseminate “erased” histories of these peoples, and participate in campaigns and projects to nullify racist images and messages in sports and entertainment and even advise on the production of new expressions such as a successful television series (Reservation Dogs).
The influence of the EZLN
Echo Hawk says this effort to change the narrative and generate power stems from what she learned as a young woman in Mexico, when she visited Chiapas in the 1990s. “I will be forever grateful for my time with the Zapatistas,” she says, recalling her solidarity work with the EZLN. “I just think about that incredible moment and movement, a movement that went global, of being able to really learn about the power of words, storytelling, and culture, and when that intersects with politics and grassroots organizing, magic can happen—magical moments of movement.”
Illuminative's first step was to conduct extensive research on how Americans perceive Native Americans. They found that "78 percent had heard little or nothing about Native American communities," Echo Hawk says. The results of this research revealed that 90 percent of schools in this country teach nothing about the Native American experience beyond 1900; 72 percent of Americans rarely—or never—encounter information about Native peoples in their country; and 53 percent of men admitted that the only time they see anything about Native Americans is at sporting events because of the mascots or team names.
