How has your understanding of your own leadership changed through the Fellowship to date? How do you now view the role of self-care in sustaining your ability to lead?

Hau Mitakuypi (Hello my relatives),

I hope this blogs finds everyone well and thank you for taking the time to read this. Since the beginning of this fellowship, I have been interested in exploring my own definition of leadership from our Lakota perspective.  Wolakota is both a term and way of life that Lakota’s strived to live.  Within the term, our values of Humility, Wisdom, Bravery, and Generosity, were a way of life for our communities since we have been on this earth.

Viewing the fellowship through this lens has lead me to rethink about the needs of our young people in our community and how traditional Lakota leaders have always sought solace to reflect on their own needs to be better leaders for their communities. This reflection took place in various forms such as spirituality, intentional isolation, and honest feedback from other community members to grow an individual’s leadership.

What stands out to me about this is the intentional nature of looking at how people led in the community and the time it takes to go through this process.  In a similar way, the Bush Fellowship strives to help leaders from our region receive the same result. With some of the resources provided to me, I was able to apply for the Rockwood Leadership Institute and will complete this training next spring because of scheduling commitment. I am excited to complete this training because I think I will be able to look at where I have been in various leadership positions and where I hope to go in the next 10 years.

Another aspect of this intentional is looking at what self care means for us and our families and for me personally, this was one of the more exciting aspects because I believe as leaders, we tend to doing things really well but at the expense of not taking care of ourselves.  This is a huge need in the work that I have been doing with young Native leaders in our communities in South Dakota because I often see a lot of them burnout without healthy outlets because of this unhealthy model of leadership.

Being able to think about self care and how to use this fellowship to develop life long skills and practices is usually viewed as a radical way of taking care of ourselves but in reality it is not. A few of the things I have been able to do because of the generous investment in our leadership is being able to travel and actually take a vacation that lasts longer than a few days in places that I have always wanted to go including a trip to Peru and France.

These trips abroad have been a great way to build my individual leadership skills because in both cases I speak limited Spanish and French, so I had to rely on my non verbal skills and generosity of others to communicate when I checked into hotels and ordering food.

On my trip to France, I posted briefly on social media I would be in the area and within a few minutes, family and friends were already connecting with people in Paris.  I was able to meet up with a long time friend who lived in France and another Native person from the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana. It was wonderful to have another person who lived in the area and spoke French show me around the Eiffel Tower; we went bowling (they only bowl 10 frames in France), and shared about our understandings as indigenous people living abroad/traveling abroad/being from the area.

5 months after this trip, I travelled to Peru to network with International funders who focus on Indigenous issues. Through this meeting, I met another group I am hoping to connect to our work with Native youth in the Northwest. I was honored to help my partner complete an item on her bucket list with a trip to Machu Picchu and it was absolutely amazing because of the history and enormity of the place that was mind boggling in a good to think about how it was built.

With both trips, I learned it was perfectly fine to take time to rest and enjoy my surroundings because we never know when we will be in these places again.  Self-care is an important way to build our own leadership skills and I was able to gain wisdom, have humility, receive and give generosity, and adventure out of my comfort zone. I will be forever grateful for this opportunity to be a 2015 Bush Fellow.

Pilamiya (Thank you)