For Immediate Release: August 12, 2022
Kayenta, AZ – On Saturday August 13, NDN Collective and Protect the Sacred will co-host a community event on wheels – encouraging community members to bring skates, skateboards, scooters – to engage Native youth and young adults around the importance of voting in the midterms.
Special guests will include two stars of the Hulu series Reservation Dogs:
- Nathan “Doggface” Apodaca, a Northern Arapaho skater who is best known for a beloved, viral video of him longboarding to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ and has since gone on to star in a hit single with Snoop Dogg.
- Gary Farmer, an actor – best known for his roles in Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Smoke Signals – and pioneer of First Nations media in Canada, as the founding director of the Aboriginal Voices Radio Network.
At the end of the ride, there will be free food, live music from Scotti Clifford and DJ Sqeme, speeches from community leaders, and voter registration
“We’re meeting Native young people where they are – on their boards and skates, reclaiming their rightful land through movement and joy,” said Lycia Maddocks, policy director at NDN Collective. “We want to show folks that voting is a community event and our opportunity to select local leaders that will represent us at home and nationally. It’s an essential way to start taking back our power as Indigenous people, help protect the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves, and push towards the future that we want for ourselves and our people.”
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NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building, and narrative change, we are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.