Native American Activist Builds Bridges Between Tribal Communities and Funders

Anthony Guillen

Sarah Eagle Heart and her twin sister, Emma, couldn’t believe their eyes. The two Oglala Lakota girls, then 16, watched their high school’s annual Warrior Homecoming Ceremony. The tradition had gone on for more than a half-century in majority-white Martin, S.D.

Five young women dressed in Native American costumes sat around a fire and sang fake “Indian love songs,” while a “medicine man” examined their ears and teeth, checking their suitability as a mate for the “big chief.”

“We realized it was really wrong, and nobody else was going to do anything about it,” says Ms. Eagle Heart, now 40 and leader of Native Americans in Philanthropy, a 27-year-old Minneapolis-based group that seeks to build ties between grant makers and Native communities.

Aghast, the twins hatched a plan to protest the event the next year, alerting people on the neighboring Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. Schoolmates threatened the girls and called them names. Undeterred, they led peaceful protests annually for four years, even after they graduated. Eventually, the school abandoned the ceremony.

That episode sparked a career in activism for Ms. Eagle Heart. In July, her work combining storytelling with a fierce sense of social justice won her Independent Sector’s American Express NGen Leadership Award.

Since winning the recognition, she’s heard from other Native Americans. “They say, ‘It’s us!’ " Ms. Eagle Heart reports. “And they’re so excited. They’re so excited that it’s us that have been recognized.”

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Investing in Youths

The last couple of years have thrust Native American concerns into the spotlight in a way they haven’t been for decades. The Obama White House launched Generation Indigenous, an effort aimed at fostering success in Native youths. And the monthslong protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its supporters drew thousands of activists, significant news coverage, and philanthropy, before the arrest of the final holdouts this past February.

Still, Ms. Eagle Heart says, Native voices are often left out of the social movements that get donors’ attention. Government and foundation-funded studies that don’t include Native Americans — that document racial inequities largely between blacks and whites — also pose a problem.

“Philanthropy really pays attention to research,” she says. “And if that research doesn’t include Native Americans, then they don’t see us as needing funding, because they don’t see our need at all.”

‘A Breath of Fresh Air’

Native Americans, about 2 percent of the U.S. population, battle severe challenges: a poverty rate of 28 percent, compared with 16 percent for the nation over all. Life expectancy for Native Americans is more than four years lower than for Americans over all. Natives are twice as likely as all Americans to be sexually assaulted. Indigenous youths have the highest suicide rate of all racial and ethic groups.

“I’ve been thinking about how much it takes for a Native person to succeed,” Ms. Eagle Heart says. “A lot of the messaging that a lot of Native youth get is, ‘You’re not good enough.’ In order to succeed, we have to literally ignore all of the messages we receive. We have to stand strong in our spiritual beliefs and in our cultural beliefs.”

Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment, first met Ms. Eagle Heart in 2015 when he took a cold call from her soon after she was hired for her current job. He’s been impressed by how she persuades social-justice activists to fight their battles alongside her.

Dr. Ross points to her participation in Invisible No More, an event co-sponsored by the California Endowment in May at the Underground Museum, in Los Angeles. The event was aimed to build and celebrate the Native movement. Speaking to a diverse audience, Dr. Ross recalls, “she pretty much stole the show — with a tough-sell L.A. crowd.”

He says Ms. Eagle Heart brings Native American issues to the forefront as she ties them to other groups’ struggles. “And she does it in a way that’s quite spiritual and authentic and meaningful,” he says. “She’s a breath of fresh air.”

Since Ms. Eagle Heart arrived, he says, the California Endowment has increased its support of Native Americans in Philanthropy. In March, the fund made a two-year, $551,750 grant to her nonprofit to improve health equity in Native communities in California. In August, the group opened a second office to build stronger ties with the state’s grant makers — renting space at the Endowment.

“We’ve been feeling very inspired by her advocacy and her leadership,” Dr. Ross says. “I suspect we’ll begin to see other foundations step up as well.”

Powerful Stories

Activists are driven in part by a desire to improve the world for their children, Ms. Eagle Heart says. Her two sons, both now in college, “want to be things that I have never could have imagined. One wants to be a sound engineer, the other wants to be a fashion designer.”

When she was young, such dreams lay out of reach. Ms. Eagle Heart and her sister were raised in a tribal community by their grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunts. Their father wasn’t in the picture, and their mother suffered traumatic brain injury from a car accident when they were young.

Many tribal communities, Ms. Eagle Heart notes, “lack access to mental-health care, even something as simple as therapy.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree from Black Hills State University and an MBA from the University of Phoenix, she worked for the Episcopal Church, serving as team leader for diversity and ethnic ministries and program officer for indigenous ministry.

There she helped push the church to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, a 15th-century papal decree that served as the basis for Spain claiming land “discovered” by Christopher Columbus. The doctrine was cited in the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. McIntosh as a legal basis for the United States taking possession of tribal lands.

The Episcopal Church rejected the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009, and other Christian denominations have followed suit, including the United Methodists, the Evangelical Lutherans, and the Presbyterians.

Working on the campaign, she realized how few people knew Native Americans’ history — including many Natives themselves. She worked with Native nonprofits to create videos and curricula that explored how the doctrine had devastated their communities. Storytelling using personal examples, both hers and others’, was particularly powerful with young people.

“I knew that they could see themselves in my story,” says Ms. Eagle Heart. “And I began to see what the impact of the story could do.”

A Trip to Standing Rock

One of Ms. Eagle Heart’s more important accomplishments at Native Americans in Philanthropy is making the needs of Native communities come alive for donors and grant makers, says Edgar Villanueva, the group’s board chair. There’s a glaring need to build those ties. The share of foundation grants directed at Native causes barely registers at 0.3 percent, according to a Foundation Center report.

Last October, Ms. Eagle Heart took a group of grant makers, including officials from the American Heart Association, Northwest Area Foundation, and Wallace Global Fund, to the protest encampment against the Dakota Access Pipeline, taking pains to explain the context of what they saw. Ms. Eagle Heart describes her relationship to the foundation world as being “the cousin who can tell it like it is.”

A number of gifts and grants resulted, including more than $1.2 million awarded in June to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from the Wallace Global Fund.

Mr. Villanueva, an executive at the Schott Foundation for Public Education and a member of the Lumbee tribe, could not be prouder. “Bridging this divide between institutional philanthropy and our community, seeing folks being moved and compelled to act in that way, that’s the best work we can do,” he says

Give and Take

Native communities and organizations want to be more than just beneficiaries of philanthropy; they also want to offer solutions. Mr. Villanueva points to Native ideas about improving the food supply and alleviating violence as examples. “We have a lot to share,” he says.

Ms. Eagle Heart’s main tasks in the years ahead will be to continue to build relationships with traditional philanthropy, to keep Native concerns on their radar. But all that repetitive explaining can be exhausting, she acknowledges with an edge of frustration. She wants more grant makers to take time to learn about Native communities firsthand.

“If we have an hour with a funder to talk about a project, you have to explain the history, explain all the issues that have happened to our community,” she says. “And maybe if you’re lucky, you might have 15 minutes to actually talk about your project. And I do believe that’s a barrier to our success.”