The Native American Activist Taking On Hollywood — and Winning
Crystal Echo Hawk aims to change how America — and funders — see her people. And Melinda French Gates just asked her to give away $20 million however she sees fit.
Crystal Echo Hawk’s advocacy took an unexpected turn about a decade ago. A citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Echo Hawk had spent her career working to advance the rights and well-being of Native Americans, just as earlier generations of her family had done through the law and nonprofits. Yet her daughter was being abused and bullied at school for her Dakota name.
The school’s principal, Echo Hawk remembers, blamed her and her husband; they should have given her an English name. Her daughter asked to stop using her traditional name and later experienced severe mental-health issues. “As we tried to access healthcare it was assumed that I was either unemployed, an alcoholic, or an overall bad mother,” Echo Hawk remembers.
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Crystal Echo Hawk’s advocacy took an unexpected turn about a decade ago. A citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Echo Hawk had worked most of her life to advance the rights and well-being of Native Americans, just as earlier generations of her family had done through the law and nonprofits. Yet her daughter was being abused and bullied at school for her traditional Dakota name from her father.
The school’s principal blamed the parents, she remembers. You should have given your daughter an English name, he said.
Shortly after, the couple’s daughter asked to stop using her traditional name. Later, she began to experience severe mental-health issues. “As we tried to access health care, it was assumed that I was either unemployed, an alcoholic, or an overall bad mother,” Echo Hawk remembers.
Those painful experiences gave her new perspective on the work that she and her family had pursued for so many years. Little could change, she concluded, until perceptions about Native Americans changed. In 2018, she founded the group IllumiNative to tell authentic stories about Native peoples, lift their visibility, and counter racial stereotypes. It backed a new line of research into views of Native Americans, and Echo Hawk became a regular in Hollywood and the media fighting commonplace yet harmful narratives.
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Today, green shoots of change are evident in American culture, with IllumiNative helping to seed the ground. The Washington Commanders, a professional football franchise, changed its name under pressure from Echo Hawk and others. Lily Gladstone, an actor of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage, was nominated for an Oscar last year for her role in the Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon — the first Native American to get the nod in the best actress category. And the TV shows Reservation Dogs,Rutherford Falls, and Prey — all with Native Americans in lead creative roles — have won acclaim and audiences.
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IllumiNative this year formed a media-production and financing company to invest in and support Native creatives and promote authentic Native storytelling. “Americans are becoming increasingly aware of Native peoples and Native issues,” Echo Hawk, 51, says. “There is a hunger to learn even more, and there is a greater demand to see more Native representation in TV, film, media, and other sectors, including social media.”
The Chronicle spoke with Echo Hawk about her work, philanthropy and Native Americans, and the changes the past year have brought. The conversation is edited for brevity and clarity.
Even before you launched IllumiNative, you started Reclaiming Native Truth, a research project to examine the dominant narratives and perceptions about Native Americans. Can you share the top lines from that work?
What we’ve found is that one of the biggest threats to Native peoples is invisibility. Nearly 80 percent of Americans said that they knew little to nothing about us. As we looked at key parts of the country where there are no reservations or other larger Native populations, a lot of people were not sure that we existed.
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When we went out and surveyed, we saw that nearly 90 percent of schools in the country didn’t teach about Native Americans past 1900. There are generations of Americans who have been conditioned to think that we fade to black at the end of the 19th century and we no longer exist. Even looking at representation in TV and film, it was less than 0.4 percent.
There are contradictory stereotypes as well — the notion that all Native Americans are on welfare benefits, yet they’re also getting rich from casinos on tribal lands.
It’s fascinating that people can hold contradictory beliefs — that, for example, all Native Americans are deeply spiritual and can speak to animals, but they’re horrible alcoholics.
What was philanthropy’s view of Native Americans when you did the research? Has that changed?
There is a lot of ignorance and implicit biases that are not intentional. Philanthropy talks about being data-driven, so if we are not collecting data on Native Americans and being very intentional, we become invisible.
That was one of the more powerful insights in our first round of research. A grant maker from one of the largest foundations in the country said, “When making big decisions about funding, we don’t see any Native American data.” It’s not intentional, but Native peoples are being erased.
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Philanthropy has come a long way in the last six years, stepping out and building relationships outside the usual suspects that they were funding prior to 2018. But there is still a long way to go.
Talk about how groups have changed their approach to grant makers.
When we did the initial research, philanthropy just could not see us as anything other than a very complex problem to be solved. Talking with funders privately, you could see their eyes glaze over, because it feels like the challenges in some of these communities are almost insurmountable. No one in philanthropy could see us outside of a deficit mindset.
But after the Standing Rock pipeline protest, and post-pandemic and post-George Floyd, etc., I saw a lot more organizing in Indian Country to flip the narrative and take on a more abundant mindset. A lot of leading organizations, including ours, got together and flipped the way we talk about our work. Even though philanthropy is asking us to present in a certain way, we don’t have to play into that. We don’t have to play the deficit problem game anymore.
How did you become one of the people that Melinda French Gates is funding?
I had an opportunity to meet with Melinda last year. She had a lot of curiosity and a lot of great questions about women and girls in Native communities and the issues and opportunities there. That was a really lovely opportunity to connect.
Then, out of the blue, I got an email asking us if we would be part of this new chapter of her philanthropy. I had to read it a couple times to make sure it was real!
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What are some issues that you want to address with this money?
There are so many opportunities. Since 2018, we have been tracking the rise of Native women into key leadership roles, whether it’s running for office, leading organizations, organizing work at all levels. We’re seeing a level of engagement from Native women that is unprecedented.
What does it look like to support this explosion of Native women and girls getting into leadership positions across all different types of sectors? What does it look like to support that energy and that momentum?
We continuously face the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. There has been increased attention and understanding, but it is so underfunded. We’ve found a lot of ignorance in the public and victim-blaming towards Indigenous women and girls that creates a lot of biases and injustices in the way that law enforcement and other agencies are dealing with this. We also have some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the country perpetuated by non-Native offenders. Those are definitely issues that we are looking at.
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Correction (Oct. 10, 2024, 10:22 a.m.): An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the recent television shows with Native Americans in lead creative roles as Reservoir Dogs. It's Reservation Dogs.