Current Programs
Gedakina’s activities focus on leadership development, early reader literacy, community health and wellness, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), sustainability practices, traditional food systems, healthy relationships, and cultural revitalization. Participating youth acquire skills that will enable them to overcome challenges they will face throughout their lifetimes. More practically, usable knowledge will lead to greater economic development opportunities, employment, and continuing education.
One Shelf Book Project
The One Shelf Book Project is a giveaway hosted by Gedakina. We honor and celebrate Native American wisdom by giving away culturally relevant, historically accurate, and high-quality traditional Native American literature and educational material free to school districts and libraries serving American Indian children. The shelf includes 50+ books for K-12 as well as Teacher Resources, poetry, and more.
Educational Initiatives
Educational Initiatives focus on culturally appropriate and historically accurate literature for teachers, parents, and students alike to prevent bullying and build good self-esteem. This will include teacher consulting, professional development, and training around equity, social justice, and diversity issues. These trainings help teachers identify stereotypes and biases that might be the root of the bullying our children sometimes receive daily without their teachers’ knowledge or understanding. We also work with k-12 teachers to help them understand appropriate Native American children’s literature and appropriate art activities.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Braiding Sweetgrass supports grassroots community-based projects inspired and led by women and girls. Project organizers promote self-determination, cultural continuance, and well-being while organizing programs focused on sexual and domestic violence prevention and healing and cultural and social activities of importance to women and girls. Braiding Sweetgrass is a multi-generational mentoring and support system that helps nurture and encourage all women in the community. Programs seek to:
Reclaim traditional ceremonies, including the Strawberry Planting, and Green Corn, that celebrate women and girls and teach about respect and responsibilities while creating pathways for recovery from historical and ongoing trauma.
Empower women and girls to find their voices by sharing stories, including writing and spoken word activities.
Recover traditional and sustainable women-led agriculture, reconnecting women and girls to the land and its cultivation while teaching practical skills to increase access to fresh vegetables, fruits, and traditional medicines. Includes developing community cooperative systems where families grow and harvest food that is shared between families and elders.
Foster women-led cultural activities, including language recovery, hand drum crafting, regalia making, and other activities related to revitalizing song and dance, including those that have historically built community among women.
We are currently developing a women-led outdoor adventure education program, offering activities that include canoe and kayak paddling, camping, hiking, snowshoeing, and challenge courses that build confidence, skills, and collaboration. These activities and other programs also provide foundational learning for women interested in careers in ecotourism, environmental and adventure education, wilderness medicine, guiding, and recreation.
Cultivating Mother Corn
Cultivating Mother Corn – A Recovery of Women-Led Indigenous Agricultural Practices for New England Native American people. Cultivating Mother Corn is a multi-year initiative to recover indigenous food systems and strengthen women and girls’ leadership. Cultivating Mother Corn incorporates Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge, indigenous cultivated agriculture (mound planting), the recovery of indigenous wild ricing, and the Reciprocity Principle as integrated pathways for indigenous people’s health and well-being and the natural world. The long-term goal of Cultivating Mother Corn is the active and continual recovery of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge as it relates to sustainable indigenous food systems and food sovereignty, to:
Increase access to and use of organic, healthy, and nutritious fresh foods for indigenous people.
Reduce dietary-related illness and overall hunger/food insecurity.
Strengthen leadership capacity for women and girls in their families, communities, and beyond.
Cultivate the traditional bond between women, their families, and the land.