Date and Time
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2026 | 2 PM ET/11 AM PT | ZOOM
Event Description
Our February session will feature Grandmothers’ Fire: Indigenous Birth, Justice and Health, a gathering in October 2025 organized by the Native American Women’s Dialog on Infant Mortality (NAWDIM). Leah Tanner (Nez Perce), Tanya Marceau (Blackfeet; Red Lake), and Shelley Means (Ojibwe; Lakota) will lead the conversation. Indigenous organizing is rooted in cultural world view and values and relies on relationships and accountability to community. At the same time, operating in the nonprofit sector requires that we navigate the western/colonized structures (competitive and top down, for example) as we encounter the systemic erasure of our people in data and policy advocacy. State by state, a movement is growing across Indian Country to bring deep Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the survival of our future generations. This session will explore elements of Indigenous movement building across Indian Country, including coalitions, collaboratives and inter-generational movement work; the strategies that have collectively been named; and the challenges that birth workers, policy advocates and organizers are facing in today’s political climate.