“When we fight pipelines, when we fight oil projects, when we fight all of the extractive development that harms our mother, we don’t do that just for ourselves,” Krystal Two Bulls says, director of the LANDBACK Campaign within the Indigenous advocacy organization NDN Collective in Grist. Elaborating, “We do that so we can all actually have an earth to live on in the future. So that future generations that aren’t even born yet have an earth to come to.”

Ultimately, she believes that opposition to Landback and what it will mean for the descendants of settlers comes from a place of guilt. “Your fear is rooted in the fact that you think, when we get our land back, we will treat you the way that you have treated us.”

Replicating systems of oppression has never been part of the plan, and proponents of the movement say they could use some help from white people in dispelling that knee-jerk fear and explaining why this solution will benefit everyone. “A lot of our allies and accomplices could play a really important role in helping lead some of those conversations,” Tilsen says, “so that we, as Indigenous people, can focus on getting our damn land back.”

Read the full article here.

Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) recently announced the launch of “Call & Response: The Sound of Black Arts Revolution,” a campaign and “a call to funders in the creative youth development nonprofit space to do better by the Black and brown leaders who give so much of themselves to their communities, and the young people they serve. Black Pay Matters. Black Legacy Matters. Black Rest Matters,” according to the announcement in late March.

The brand-new Call & Response website and Episode One of our campaign web series provide details about the initiative, organizing around power and institution building through real investment, and how MMI is putting their dollars to work to transform the way Black creative youth development is centered and funded. You’re going to want to watch the video!

Learn more here.

Image courtesy of MMI.

“For decades, arts and music education in California has been dying a slow death in many schools, strangled by budget cuts amid an ongoing emphasis on core subjects like reading and math and test scores as the measure of student success,” reports Louis Freedberg in EdSource.

Freedberg states, “That’s why the initiative (former Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin) Beutner, is promoting will still be needed. In fact, it would simply help schools follow the spirit, if not the letter, of what they are already required to do by law.” Resuscitation appears on the horizon, as Freeburg shares, “With the backing of a growing number of artists and educators, Beutner wants to put an initiative on next November’s ballot that would require the state to spend between $800 million and $1 billion extra each year out of its general fund for arts and music education in the state.”

Read more here.