Leah Salgado
Before joining IllumiNative, Leah worked as a Senior Associate at Hattaway Communications, where she developed messaging and communications strategies for clients including The Rockefeller Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and the Harlem Children’s Zone. Leah had previously led strategic communications work for the National Indian Education Association. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Cornell University with a focus on racial and gender inequality.
Presentations from Facing Race 2020
Disrupting Native American Invisibility and Dismantling Racism
The workshop will showcase IllumiNative’s unprecedented research projects. Our founding research showed the profound invisibility of Native peoples in contemporary society fuels toxic misconceptions, bias and racism against Native Americans. Our most recent research project, the Indigenous Futures Survey, showed the priorities, concerns, and aspirations for the future of Native peoples today. Together, our research shows the power and critical need of changing culture and narratives to include Native peoples. Through a creative presentation, small group dialogue and large group engagement, the workshop will create space for shared learning and explore how participants can utilize and integrate the research and newfound understandings in their own lives to support and amplify Native voices and issues and build a stronger multi-racial movement for equity, inclusivity and justice.
Engaging with the research is a critical first step for participants, given the entrenched nature of Native invisibility across society. We will host a short Q&A after the presentation. From there, we will move into small groups where participants can apply the research to their own life experience and their own work for systems change. We will distribute a strategy brainstorm worksheet for recording ideas for activating narrative change and strengthening our collective movements for justice and then report back, looking at the overarching key recommendations for moving forward that were generated in the session.
Speakers: Crystal Echo Hawk, Leah Salgado