If you’ve read Standing Our Ground for the Land: An Indigenous Philanthropy, you know how important we believe it is to honor the relationship created by a donation to the IKhana Fund. The IKhana Learning Circle provides donors an opportunity to learn more about Indigenous Knowledge so they can move more closely into, and better understand, our community and this work we’re all doing together.
Once a month we send IKhana Learning Circle participants an exclusive email with a passage from the work of a respected Indigenous writer, artist, filmmaker, Elder, scholar, leader, or teacher, and an explanatory commentary that puts the shared passage in a context that helps Western allies understand what the work means and why it’s important. Each passage we share has a full citation, with information about how you can find a copy of the original source, or see the film or artwork in a theater or museum, if you’d like to learn more from that particular person’s work. Each exclusive monthly email also shares a unique photograph of the Land and our Relations that supports or engages with the Knowledge in the text in a meaningful way. From time to time, we engage with participants one-on-one to find out how they’re doing, what they’d like to learn more about, and how we can better serve their process of learning about and engaging with Indigenous Knowledge and the people working to advance it. We carefully read everything a donor shares with us in these interactions, and we think about their experience with a real intention to tailor this program of learning opportunities to each person, to the best of our ability to do so.
The IKhana Learning Circle is an optional process however. There is no requirement or obligation for donors to participate. An Indigenous person already familiar with Indigenous Knowledge, who donates simply to support the people doing Indigenous Knowledge work, has our deepest gratitude just for that! Kia ora![1] Thank you! And if a Western ally donor is simply too busy to take on anything new at the moment they share resources with us, that’s fine too. Again, Ekosi![2] Thank you! to you as well. And if any donor who opts out of participating in the IKhana Learning Circle early on decides later that they’d like to participate after all, that’s fine too.
YAKOKE![3] Thank you for supporting IKhana Fund and the Indigenous people working to advance Indigenous Knowledge!
Footnotes.
[1] Kia ora is “thank you” in the Māori language of IKhana Fund co-leader Fiona Cram.
[2] Ekosi is “thank you” in the Cree language of IKhana Fund co-leader Shawn Wilson.
[3] Yakoke is “thank you” in the Choctaw language of IKhana Fund co-leader Dawn Hill Adams.