Opening Those Closed Doors - Advocacy and Actions, We Must
Meet Kendra M. Root, MA, Research Associate, NIWRC
Citizen of Muscogee Nation
Descendant from the Euchee/Muscogee Nation Snow Family of the Polecat Ceremonial Ground Region
Master’s Degree from University of Oklahoma - Native American Studies Department
Current Ph.D. student Oklahoma State University - Department of Education and Human Sciences: Social Foundations of Education
Visit Kendra’s Biography: niwrc.org/staff
We are excited to introduce Kendra M. Root, MA as our new Research Associate at the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC). In her new position, her efforts will expand our research arm for the development of culturally, respectful, and ethically sound research.
The Importance of Culturally Appropriate Research
With our Indigenous lens, our research approach will provide culturally appropriate methods of study regarding our Indigenous communities, to lift our Indigenous women’s voices, experiences, and stories in a cultural, respectful, and ethical way. Our goals include Indigenous acknowledgment, lifting our traditional ways of teachings and life-ways, and advancing grassroots advocacy into action with lasting social and political change. Our Indigenous communities are our best resource and we will continue to expand on culturally appropriate research that has worked within our communities. We will further utilize constructed research to develop and produce academic resources to assist in providing information for training and technical assistance to our relatives and communities and push for policy reform purposes.
With a team of Indigenous women, educated in western constructs, we will provide transformational resistance to serve our Indigenous communities in a way that acknowledges, understands, and ultimately provides strategies of resistance to help preserve and promote self-determination and Tribal sovereignty for the safety and well-being of our Indigenous women.1 Research constructed from the heart and in a good way is the only way to uplift our Indigenous women’s voices, experiences, and stories, then and only then, will the work count.2
Honoring the Words of Tillie Black Bear
On December 10, 2021, Opening Those Closed Doors - Advocacy and Actions, We Must, was released in honor of the late Tillie Black Bear, the founding grandmother of the movement. In the continuation of our Indigenous research, a poem was written to honor and celebrate Tillie Black Bear on her birthday last December 10th, which is also recognized as Human Rights Day. Through a culturally appropriate qualitative research method recognizing the potentials of losing or missing the oral power in written narratives and through an Indigenous lens, this powerful poem was developed through observation of Tillie Black Bear’s testimony on Battered Women: Issues of Public Policy U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from January 19, 1978.
With the development of Opening Those Closed Doors - Advocacy and Actions, We Must, the purpose is to uplift Tillie Black Bear’s 1978 powerful testimony in poetic form and to importantly uplift her Indigenous voice of awareness, activism, and recommendations for the crisis of violence toward Indigenous women, which is still unfortunately very relevant today.
As grassroots advocates, we must continue the efforts of advocating and demanding action for the safety and protection of Indigenous women and children. Violence is not our tradition! We must continue to share Tillie’s wise words through education of the ongoing crisis of violence against our Indigenous women. We must call upon policymakers to prioritize immediate action and provide the critical resources needed to assist Indian Tribes in safeguarding the lives of Native women.
As part of the research framework used to develop the poem, a video of the poem being read can be viewed in NIWRC’s Resource Library: n8ve.net/q5FDo.
IN HONOR OF TILLIE BLACK BEAR OPENING THOSE CLOSED DOORS - ADVOCACY AND ACTIONS, WE MUST
As a Native American, I would like to make you aware of the fact of the problem of violence against Native American women, we must.
It happens with Native women and women of rural America; I am rural America,
an Indian reservation and a survivor of domestic violence, we must.
I already had a master's, I was working, and I never thought that I would be in this situation, but I was; getting out of the situation, we must.
Immediate facilities and support groups for our Native women, we must.
Providing women’s shelters for rural and bigger cities, we must.
The fact that the lack of money, lack of involvement; the problem has not been raised at a conscious level with the people, we must.
Interdisciplinary cooperation among agencies, we must.
This problem of violence against Native women, we need to deal with reverse discrimination, we must.
The family unit is an important unit within communities, we must.
We need to get in there and make people aware of our problem, we must.
We need to start opening those closed doors, we must.
Making people aware of our problem and that some action be initiated, we must.
- Brayboy, B. M. K. J. (2005). Transformational resistance and social justice: American Indians in ivy league universities. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(3), 193-211.
- Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, con-versations, and contexts. University of Toronto Press.
