Advocacy and Education

Any documented & notable presentations, panels, conferences, etc. that NACF staff speak at to further understanding & awareness of Native arts and cultures.

Forget Me Not: Mothers and Sons by Marie Watt (Seneca), NACF Visual Arts Fellow, on view at the Portland Art Museum.

NACF President Profiled by Philanthropy Northwest

Lulani Arquette, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation President & CEO, spoke last spring with Philanthropy Northwest about the challenges,  successes, and opportunities she has encountered through her leadership of the…
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Vicky Holt Takamine

Conversations on Hula

“Our people can’t live without hula and hula cannot live without our people.” 2015 NACF Fellow Vicky Takamine and Kahikina de Silva recently talked to Americans for the Arts about…
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The Profound and Numerous Benefits of Arts and Cultures

I believe there is a benefit of arts and cultures that has not been written about nor studied enough in more intentional ways, although it has gained value in arts and philanthropic circles in the past few years. This is the value of arts and culture as a social change tool. The head of a social change organization and one of the national proponents of social change and the arts had this to say: “The single most powerful social change tool in the world is arts and creative expression. There is nothing that transcends barriers across language, economics, cultures, and place in a way that engages people and community like arts and cultures can. Nothing (emphasis) is that powerful.”

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The 1960’s had a great impact on me

In my lifetime, I have not seen this level of racial discrimination and hatred in our country since the 1960’s and early 1970’s. As a very young girl, too innocent to understand what was going on, but intuitive enough to know that something very wrong was happening, I remember seeing on national television these horrific images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on the demonstrators in Birmingham, the violence at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, and the burning neighborhoods of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. These images from Alabama and California flashed on TV screens across our nation and stayed with me for a long time.

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