AWASQA

Explore Issues
Filter by Country
  • Photo: NDN Collective

    Indigenous People Will Not Be Erased

    NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH Some may call the celebration of Native American Heritage Month merely a symbolic gesture. But symbols and the movements behind them matter. BY CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK, NICK TILSEN – NOVEMBER 8, 2019, Originally published by NDN Collective For nearly three decades, the month of November has been recognized as Native American…

  • School in Canada celebrating Orange Shirt Day

    #OrangeShirtDay: Boarding School Survivors Speak Out, Seek Truth and Healing

    September 30th or #OrangeShirtDay has become in Canada, and slowly in the US, a day of resistance and resilience for the intergenerational survivors of indigenous boarding schools—a cruel colonial practice of family separations and children forced “assimilation” into white Christian capitalist society that began in the 1860s and lasted for more than a century. It…

  • Natural Dyes as Part of Mexico’s Cultural and Spiritual Heritage: A Hands-On Workshop

    This spring I had the great privilege of meeting Porfirio Gutiérrez, an educator and social justice activist from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, who with his Zapotec family is part of an indigenous movement striving to revive the ancient practice of handcrafted dyes for textiles. His sister Juana Gutiérrez Contreras has become a master in the…

  • Osh-Tisch, (picture Indian Country Today)

    Two Spirits, One Heart, Five Genders

    SOURCE: Indian Country Today. Indian Country Today is a daily digital news platform and nonprofit organization that covers the Indigenous world, including American Indians and Alaska Natives. This story was originally published on January 23, 2016. For European settlers the Original Peoples way of life was perplexing, including the Two Spirits tradition. “The New World.”…

  • Language, Our Roots, and Justice

    During most of the 20th century, national states in the US continent, almost without exception, developed policies of forced assimilation of Native peoples. The “democratic” obsession with equality ended by making invisible, and in many cases, lead almost to the extinction of Native peoples’ languages, cultures, and ethnic identities. Economic inequality generated an internalized colonization…

  • The Red Road: Documenting the Lives of Northern Tribes

    Two friends with a love for storytelling (Danielle SeeWalker from the Sioux tribe) and documenting life experiences in pictures (Carlotta Cardana), came together to capture the lives of Northern Tribes, of their living cultures and resilience, despite centuries of oppression. We transcribe here excerpts of their own description about the inspiration behind this project (as…