26th July 2023

'Our Foods Are Beautiful!'

Food is life. Food sustains the body and feeds the spirit. With this knowledge as a framework, First Nations community partner YAKANAL, a New Mexico-based international program, is reconnecting Indigenous people to their land and traditional agriculture.

5th January 2023

Ke Kula ‘o Pi’ilani: A One-of-a-Kind Hawaiian Immersion School

On the island of Maui, Hawaiʹi, there exists a school like no other: Ke Kula ‘o Pi’ilani, the only private, independent, and nonprofit Hawaiian language and culture immersion school in the world. It is surrounded by the rising, lush-green cliffs of the ‘Īao Valley, and a powerful river flows through the island to the sea. It is the perfect setting for a curriculum focused on the four themes of fresh water, heavens, land, and ocean.

OC Family Magazine • 23rd February 2018

AWARD WINNER! The 'Other' Woman

Houston, we have a problem. Her name is Carolyn. Carolyn is my ex-husband’s girlfriend. They live together with her two pre-teens and most likely, they’ll marry. I’m OK with that part. You know what they say: “One woman’s junk is another woman’s treasure.”

Wisconsin School News • 1st June 2021

We are listening!

A few years back, Jack Jorgensen and his colleagues were driving back to Madison from the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance (WiRSA) Conference in Stevens Point when they had an epiphany.

5th January 2023

How a Colorado Herbalist is Growing Philanthropy

Emery Golson has loved to grow things ever since she was a young girl helping her mom in the family garden. “I think that experience really connected me with the earth,” she says. Now everything that the 31-year-old philanthropist, herbalist, wife, and mother of two has a hand in seems to blossom.

11th June 2019

Our Founding 'Feathers'

History was never my favorite subject in school. When you’re young and your future is spread out in front of you like dazzling jewels, the last thing you want to focus on is the past. Who can keep all those dates and bloody wars straight, anyway? So imagine my surprise when I discovered in my daughter’s last year in high school how fascinated I was by U.S. history.

Spectrum Magazine • 18th February 2018

Living Biracial

Every kid, every day, whatever it takes. That's Rainey Briggs' motto. Thirty-seven-year-old Briggs ... is the only African American male elementary school principal in the Madison area.

OC Family Magazine • 3rd May 2020

Husbands Come and Go. But Dogs are Forever.

Then I had to face the truth. The REAL reason I didn’t want a cat was Higgins – my beloved Cocker Spaniel who died last year. Higgins had been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The ex and I got him when we were dating. I was smitten from Day One. (With Higgins, that is.) He crawled out from the bottom of a puppy pile, this tiny fur ball with red, floppy ears, and stood in the middle of a milk bowl for a quick lap with his tiny tongue. SOLD!

Indian Country Today • 28th February 2018

Indian Trail Trees: Hang a Left at Your Ancestral Roots

In 2002, a group of retired men began hiking together once a week in the Appalachian Mountains and started finding old, scenic trails they claimed nobody knew about.

5th January 2023

The Historic Malki Museum: ‘We’re COVID-Safe!’

Last year, a digital billboard off Highway 10 in Banning, California, not far from the Morongo Band of Mission Indians Reservation, flashed this reassuring message for three months: “Malki Museum: Celebrating Southern California Indian Culture for over 50 Years. We’re COVID-Safe!”

Madison Magazine • 16th February 2018

The Newcomer's Guide to Madison

When you move someplace new, you're lucky if there is a moment of reassurance that yes, you're in the right place. For newcomers to Madison, that moment is likely to happen when ...

26th July 2023

Troubled Waters: What the Aleut Community is Doing to Restore Health to the Bering Sea

The Aleut Community of St. Paul Island (ACSPI) is a federally recognized tribe of more than 1,800 enrolled members from St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea. This rural Indigenous community is historically and culturally tied to the ecosystem of the Bering Sea, home to large numbers of mammals, birds, shellfish, and at least 419 species of fish.

Wisconsin Center for Education Research • 8th June 2021

Re-Making the World of Education

Pancake-making robots. A mechanical horse. A life-sized mousetrap. No, these aren’t highlights from the latest episode of “Shark Tank.” But they are real-life inventions of a burgeoning community of artists, do-it-yourselfers and entrepreneurs known as “makers”...

3rd May 2020

Grandma's Teapot

A very old silver teapot sits like a trinket on a table in my hallway, surrounded by pictures and other tchotchkes. Like many things that are old, it goes unnoticed. Not one person who has ever walked by that table has ever commented on the tarnished antique. Nor, shame on me, have I ever made them aware of it.

26th July 2023

Meet the Doctor Bringing Peace and Improved Health to the World

Early in his life, Dr. Norbert Goldfield had his sights set on a career in Renaissance art history. Instead, he went into medicine to honor his parents’ wishes. “I come from a generation where I did what my parents told me to do,” he tells First Nations. For more than 30 years, Dr. Goldfield has worked at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a board-certified internist, caring for the “poorest of the poor” in his city.

26th July 2023

One Native Group’s Fight to Protect Sacred Land From Destructive Lithium Mining

The green-energy agenda coming out of Washington, D.C., is being touted as the panacea to climate change. But at what cost to some Native American communities? That’s what People of Red Mountain is asking ─ a grassroots organization of traditional knowledge keepers and members of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe fighting hard against a proposed lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada.

St. Mary's College • 18th February 2018

'House of Cards' Star Opens Up

You could say that the 38-year-old Mahershala Ali owes his acting career to his grandfather. A gifted athlete from Hayward, Calif., Ali attended Saint Mary’s College on a basketball scholarship.

26th July 2023

The Yuchi Language Comes Home

Since time immemorial, languages have been passed down in the home, from parent to child. It is how languages survive ― and cultures thrive. And it is for this reason that in Halay Turning Heart’s home, only the Yuchi language is spoken. “We have three kids, ages 6, 4, and 2, and we are raising them to be first-language speakers,” says the administrator of the Yuchi Language Project (YLP), a community-based, nonprofit organization in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, launched in 1994 by her father.

23rd February 2018

AWARD WINNER! Sorry Situation

Last week, my oldest daughter dropped a bombshell. She did not want to spend the night at her dad’s anymore because she doesn’t sleep well there. “It’s dark and cold” and her sister snores. To my great surprise, I was overcome with compassion for my ex.

OC Family Magazine • 21st February 2018

Sun-Kissed: Summer Ends and So Does My Daughter's Childhood

This summer, my daughter was kissed by the sun, by nature herself. Kisses of a different kind await my newly minted teenager in the summers ahead. Probably while I'm at work ... and not watching.