CIRI shareholder Tia Hale (Athabascan and Inupiaq) is passionate about, well, just about everything.
Shareholder Spotlight: Tia Hale
CIRI shareholder Tia Hale (Athabascan and Inupiaq) is passionate about, well, just about everything.
Volunteers distributed 12,000 pounds of fish to Alaska Native families on March 25 and 26 as part of Operation Fish Drop, a grass-roots initiative to ensure Alaska Native Elders and others have access to traditional foods this spring.
From an air-conditioned trailer in the Iraq desert, CIRI descendant Torin Jacobs started making the beats that would define him as a hip-hop artist, electronic musician and producer.
Original CIRI enrollee Richard Perry (Yup’ik and Athabascan) describes himself as an artist, writer and storyteller.
CIRI shareholder Clara Amidon (Yup’ik and Unangan) never dreamed she’d be teaching virtually during a pandemic.
Even during a global pandemic, CIRI shareholder Eric Watson is committed to helping the eight federally recognized tribes within the Cook Inlet region collaborate and strengthen their relationships with each other and with Cook Inlet Tribal Council.
CIRI shareholder Amber Christensen Fullmer (Inupiaq) decided to mark her hands and arms with traditional lines because, as a mixed-race person, “I could step out of being Native and into whiteness without thinking about it,” she explains.
A family tragedy at a young age set CIRI shareholder Cynthia Demientieff on a lifelong path of helping others.
When LeeAnn Cooper Garrick was a young teen, her father picked her up after school one day and took her to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to apply for her Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood card.
CIRI shareholder Rhonda Shelford Jansen’s art may evoke images of the past, but it took coming into her own as an adult and evolving past a “fear of failure that begins to diminish when you reach middle age” to commit to the act of creating said art.