At Ka Wai Ola A Kane Camp participants hold a banner that reads “Aina Back”– “LANDBACK” in the Hawaiian language. Photo by Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

Graphic Art by NDN Collective.

The NDN Foundation is excited to announce the opening of the 2024 Community Action Fund! The grants provide up to $40,000 for direct action and frontline organizing efforts across Turtle Island and surrounding island nations. The Community Action Fund is meant for those most impacted by issues like climate change, resource extraction, and systemic racism, to ensure resources and decision-making lies with those most equipped to address immediate challenges.

Graphic Art by NDN Collective.

On Friday, January 12, Pennington County issued a state of emergency due to a cold front that brought the temperature as low as –60℉ with wind chill in Rapid City, SD. NDN Collective and community partners including Wambli Ska, Oaye Luta Okolakiciye, Lakota Homes, and the Oyate Center, came together to provide emergency warming shelters for unhoused relatives in the area. 

Without providing alternative solutions or guidance on where to direct folks during this time, Rapid City officials delivered a written stop work notice to these community organizations. NDN Collective went live on its social media to call attention to the issue and ask the community for additional support in protecting our unhoused relatives. 

NDN Collective and its community partners are asking locals to support these efforts to protect our relatives by donating warming supplies, clothes, food & water, or your time.

NDN Collective and its community partners are asking locals to support these efforts to protect our relatives by donating warming supplies, clothes, food & water, or your time. Donations can be dropped off at:

Woyatan Lutheran Church
522 Anamosa St.
Rapid City, SD 57701

Attending Radical Imagination Artists pose alongside NDN Collective Staff concluding the 2023 Radical Imagination Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by Angel White Eyes for NDN Collective.

In August 2023, the Radical Imagination Experience provided an opportunity for artists and creatives of the 2021 Radical Imagination Cohort to come together, share their work, and celebrate resistance through art in Santa Fe, NM. The free, immersive experience had panel discussions, hands-on art-making activities, art installations and presentations, and ended with a live performance.

The event aimed to uplift Indigenous artists as part of the two-year Radical Imagination grant as well as create a space to acknowledge the importance of art in grassroots organizing and movement building.

Photo Courtesy of Native Conservancy.

The Native Conservancy from the Copper River Delta in Alaska is a model example of restoring our people, land, and values-based economies. This land trust formed in 2003 with the vision of creating resilient futures for Indigenous peoples by preserving, repatriating and restoring ancestral homelands, traditional food sources and subsistence practices to revitalize Native culture, habitat, health and spirituality. They built strong partnerships to establish a permanent conservation easement to protect their ecology, economies, and ways of life.  

The Native Conservancy focuses on habitat restoration, land protection, Landback, Oceanback and food sovereignty through their Stewardship Fund. This Fund supports their ability to hold the conservation easement in perpetuity, establishes a cultural easement on the land, and protects the land from destructive development. They operate a Remote Processing and Cold Storage Program for subsistence and commercial fishermen, which offers access to food safety certified processing facilities and mobile cold storage to support local economies and food sovereignty. Part of their habitat restoration work includes a kelp enhancement program to help heal the water and sequester carbon while restoring habitat, in addition to launching an exciting and innovative regenerative kelp farming business. They also launched the Regen Grant Program this year – a targeted small grant program for Indigenous youth on the rise, who are actively contributing to their village, and identified by their Elders and community leaders.   Native Conservancy is truly changing the game of restoration on multiple fronts.

LANDBACK For the People provides an up-close-and-personal experience that is bold, action-oriented, and solution-focused. Photo by Willi White for NDN Collective.

In this episode, Nick Tilsen visits with longtime mentor Dune Lankard, who shares stories and knowledge from his fight to protect his homelands in southcentral Alaska. From protecting millions of acres, to standing up for the bears, to fighting climate change while feeding the people with kelp, Dune shows what it means when he says, “ocean back.” As Dune says, “if it’s not regenerative then just don’t do it.”

The Rapid City Journal reported on the efforts of Indigenous organizations in Rapid City to provide warming shelters for unhoused people in the area during sub-zero temperatures. These efforts were halted by city officials who delivered a Stop Work Order for the emergency warming shelters citing permitting issues.

Lorenzo Serna, Director of NDN Tactical Media Team, operates the camera as another episode of NDN Live commences. Photo by Willi White for NDN Collective.

Join Lorenzo Serna, NDN Collective’s Director of Tactical Media at Camp Nenookassi in so-called Minneapolis, MN. Since August 16, 2023, Camp Nenookassi, a Native-led healing camp has been cultivating a community for over 150 residents and unhoused relatives.

The camp was forcibly evicted on January 4th at the order of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and has been moved to a nearby lot.

Ka Wai Ola A Kane Camp. Photo by Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

On January 17th, 1893, a group of American oligarchs, backed by US Marines, overthrew the Native Hawaiian-led Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and ushered in the rapid colonization and exploitation of the Hawaiian Islands and its people. A group of American-born, Hawaiʻi residents and business men led by Sanford Dole, coordinated with US Minister, John L. Stevens, deployed US Marines to Honolulu so the oligarchs could seize the throne from Queen Liliʻuokalani. This coup dʻetat was launched as tension increased between American capitalists and the Indigenous-led Kingdom government.

The American business interests in Hawaiʻi were focused on producing and exporting sugar for the American market. Sugar was highly lucrative in Hawaiʻi, attracting relentless American capitalists who unabashedly stole land and water from Native Hawaiian hands, and imported cheap immigrant labor from Asia. The oligarchy that seized control of the Hawaiian Kingdom opened the floodgates for American colonization and the exploitation of Hawaiʻi’s resources. The current state of unfettered tourism, disastrous over-militarization, and more frequent climate crises such as the Lāhaina wildfire, that we now see in Hawaiʻi are legacies of colonization and the act of war that occurred on this day 131 years ago.

Today is a necessary reminder to everyone that the Kingdom of Hawai’i is illegally occupied by the US empire and its military forces that continue to destroy the Land, Waters, and Hawaiian lifeways. While resorts, billionaires, and outsiders buy up land and raise the cost of living throughout Hawai’i, far too many Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian people) struggle to remain and thrive in their own homelands.

The Kingdom of Hawaii stands strong today as Kānaka ʻŌiwi continue to protect their homelands, rights, and communities through direct action, organizing, and collective resistance. NDN Collective stands in solidarity with our Hawaiian relatives today and everyday as we all fight for LANDBACK and the decolonization of their homelands, putting Kānaka lands back in Kānaka hands.

We call upon friends and allies to support Native Hawaiian efforts to reclaim control of their lands and waters!

The LANDBACK bundles are hot off the press! Each bundle includes:

• Issue 2 of LANDBACK Magazine featuring perspectives on the need for an independent Hawaiʻi in wake of the Lahaina Fire, producing in the era of Indigenous filmmaking, and overcoming disconnection through motherhood and ceremony. 

• ‘Let’s Get the LANDBACK’ booklet written by PennElys Droz is a roadmap and resource guide for getting land back to tribes.

Land Back is a generational movement with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands. At NDN Collective, we stepped into this legacy with the launch of the LANDBACK Campaign in 2020 as a mechanism to connect, resource and amplify, this movement. The Ȟesápa is our cornerstone battle where we are focused on the closure of Mount Rushmore and the return of all public lands in the Black Hills.

**Limited copies of LANDBACK bundles are available, orders while supplies last**

Hesapa Action Camp, July 2023. Photo by Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

Send TEXT messages to Minneapolis City Officials’ and demand they provide permanent housing and cultural healing solutions instead of an eviction!

💻Follow @‌CampNenookaasi on IG, X, and Facebook
📩Donate: Venmo: @‌Nenookaasi-Camp  CashaApp: $Nenookaasi

Our Palestinian Relatives have faced genocidal, colonial violence, and the destruction of their homelands for nearly 100 years – far too long.

NDN Collective recognizes there is no joy, justice, or peace until Palestine is Free. This is a struggle that Indigenous peoples are far too familiar with, existing in a world that consciously proceeds to carry on in celebration while simultaneously averting their eyes from the severe atrocities that their fellow human beings could face.

This is not a time for celebration or complacency; instead, this is a time to demand a permanent ceasefire, lift the siege on Gaza now, release all Palestinian prisoners, end the occupation of israeli settlers, and end western complicity in zionism.

We encourage our Relatives who want a better world for all people and Mother Earth to collectively rise, uplifting these demands beyond a ceasefire so that we can move closer to a liberated Palestine. Across the world, we face mass genocide due to capitalism, colonization, and white supremacy. We must continue to look out and care for one another. This is the only way forward.

Continue to call upon your Tribal leaders and representatives to demand a FULL CEASEFIRE and humanitarian aid be delivered to Gaza.

The Director of Donor Organizing will oversee all facets of NDN Collective’s individual giving program, including the planning, implementation, ongoing management, and evaluation of the program. 

Reporting to the Managing Director for NDN Holdings, the Senior Project Developer is directly responsible for organizing, supervising, scheduling, planning, and obtaining financing for internal construction as well as business planning to maximize cost efficiency and motivate contractors to complete assigned projects on time and under budget.

The Media & Public Relations Officer acts as the primary media contact for the NDN Collective ecosystem and the President & CEO, creating and managing communications and messaging that shape public opinion and increase awareness of the NDN brand.