EventsCommon Ground
Indigenous Resistance in the Black Hills
Thursday, March 11, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Nick Tilsen & Krystal Two Bulls in conversation with Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson on the Black Hills Land Back campaign. We’ll conclude with a performance/reading by Jordan Brien.
In this Talk
Please join us for a conversation with the NDN Collective on the Land Back campaign to reclaim the Black Hills—the sacred Lakota lands on which Mount Rushmore is situated—and to return the land into the stewardship of the Indigenous nations who have historically called the Black Hills home.
Nick Tilsen
President & CEO of NDN Collective, Nick Tilsen is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He has over 18 years of experience building place-based innovations that have the ability to inform systems change solutions around climate resiliency, sustainable housing, and equitable community development. He founded NDN Collective to scale these place-based solutions while building needed philanthropic, social impact investment, capacity and advocacy infrastructure geared towards building the collective power of Indigenous Peoples. Tilsen has received numerous fellowships and awards from Ashoka, Rockefeller Foundation, Bush Foundation and the Social Impact Award from Claremont-Lincoln University. He has an honorary doctorate degree from Sinte Gleska University.
Krystal Two Bulls
Director of the NDN Collective’s LANDBACK Campaign, Krystal Two Bulls is Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne from Lame Deer, Montana. She has experience as an organizer and on the frontlines of local, national and transnational campaigns for social, racial and environmental justice. Krystal’s identity as a Native American veteran is central to her organizing and storytelling. At the heart of Krystal’s work are the connections between collective wellness, environmental justice, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, and anti-militarism. In healing from her experience as a soldier, Krystal has dedicated herself to embodying the essential quality of a warrior: a commitment to the well-being of not only her People and their relationship to the land, but that of all Peoples.
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson
A 35 year old Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, TN. As a member of multiple leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has thrown down on the Vision for Black Lives and the BREATHE Act. Ash-Lee has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of the National Bailout Collective, and is an active leader of The Frontline. She is a long-time activist who has done work in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, for LGBTQUIA+ folks, for environmental justice, and more.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨