We can go ahead and start.

Thank you for joining us today.

I call the November 2nd, 2023 meeting of the Native American Commission to order.

Let's begin with an introduction of current commend commission members starting with uh Suzanne.

Good morning.

I'm Suzanne Senski, the Ho Chunk Nation, Charity, Cherokee, Choctaw, Pawnee, and Ka.

Good morning, Ashley Littlewolf, Boys Fort Bandovo Didway.

Whitney Johnson, Oglala Lakota.

And right now we don't have enough members for a quorum present, so three of us today.

So we won't be um voting on the agenda in minutes just yet.

So we'll go ahead and move on to item number three in our agenda, which is public comment.

The next item, um, so speakers must state their name and be will be limited to two minutes.

Comments should not contain profanity or personal attacks.

Do we have anybody signed up for public comment?

No.

Okay.

Is there anybody present today that wishes to sign up for a public comment?

All right.

And so we'll move on to the fourth item in our agenda, which is their our meeting schedule for 2024.

Um, members will have that in in our packet.

Um we're gonna be just meeting every other month, um, as we had agreed on previously.

So for the public's reference, um, the our meetings for the coming year will be January 4th, March 7th, May 2nd, September 5th, and November 7th.

And I know that it seems though when you're tracking that, it seems like we're missing a month.

We are gonna try to plan to have a board retreat in July.

So that would uh take the place of that meeting.

Um the next item on the agenda is a report from Indigenous Association.

I don't think Brandon is here today, and I don't see uh Tawny either.

Um I don't uh I don't know if I can give a full report, but I could give a little bit of brief rundown.

Um October was a really busy month for Indigenous Association.

There's a lot of events going on, um, the biggest being Indigenous People's Day.

That was a really great event again this year.

Um it was really, I think there was a lot of things going on throughout the day.

I Indigenous Association did an awesome job publishing an event guide.

It was a beautiful event guide, and it was nice for people to have that um available to them so they knew what all was going on and when uh even after uh Indigenous Peoples Day, I had some other events going on.

Um during the month of October.

They hosted the community potluck a few times and um held a screening of a film that Ruth Buffalo was in.

Ruth Buffalo is a former member of the Native American Commission.

Um, and that was well attended, I heard, and um pretty cool that I believe that film that Ruth was in is uh available on Prairie Public.

Oh very cool and it would be good to check out if people are interested in in that.

Uh that would all that would be all I would have for kind of a run brief really brief rundown for things from Indigenous Association.

Um we can also just add here that uh Brandon Beatty was awarded the Gladys Ray Award from the City of Fargo Native American Commission.

So yes, he was, yes, because that was um that was really great.

So the the next item on the agenda, kind of breezing right along here.

Um is uh subcommittee reports and uh kind of a review of the subcommittees um education and cultural awareness is Suzanne Amanda and Ashley, Health and Wellness, Emily, Whitney and Dale, Housing, Ashley and John Strand.

Um, I can start, I don't have much of an update from health and wellness, uh, but I can offer up that uh is the members of the health and wellness subcommittee, Emily Sargent and I volunteered to hold a training on um intergenerational trauma and the effects of trauma disorders arising from that at the Yomcom Center on Indigenous People's Day.

That was super well attended.

It um it was a free event, but it did we did uh have all the registration spots fill up.

So there's 88 um professionals and community members at that.

So it was it was great.

Um it went really well.

Um hoping to kind of do things like that in the future, continue to do things like that in the future.

That was one thing to to mention.

Any other um updates from any of the other subcommittees?

I have one for the Indian education.

So we had a back to school night.

It was very successful with the Indian education board, so that was awesome.

Uh, there were about 40 kids in attendance from the uh local school district, Fargo Moorehead in West Fargo, and uh it was really nice.

They put on um some food and it provided some school supplies.

Um would definitely look forward to partnering with them to get them additional school supplies as well as classroom supplies.

Um also since there's no Johnson O'Malley programs any longer available to them, we're looking at athletic equipment, so tennis shoes and things like that.