Progress 09/01/18 to 08/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience:We try to target tribal students interested in Tribal Land Management and Environmental Sciences. However, we are happy to have any students in our regional area come and participate as it helps us better our programs. Often, non native producers who take our courses end up being an asset to the instructors and others taking the class. So we welcome them in addition to our tribal operators who also bring a lot of extra value to our program delivery with their own experience of ranching and operating agricultural programs for generations. We also bring a variety of people together through our work on the neighboring reservations where we hold courses as well on the Yankton Sioux reservation in Marty, SD where Ihanktowan Community College is located two and a halfhours east of us. Lower Brule Sioux Tribe is also within the same drive time but located north and east of our Rosebud Sioux Tribe and has the Lower Brule Community College. These folks are expanding our program delivery by adding more classrooms on campus for us to offer 300 and 400 level classes in addition to recent distance learning programs added across the board at SGU. This will allow us to bring students across the nation to us. Changes/Problems:I think the program went well but it is tough to get through some of the issues we have at TCU's due to the pressures from our own people about the process of accreditation. We have to be sensitive to the fact that if we create something that fails it will be held against our TCU as a reason to not fund or accreditate future programs by the schools. We are already scared that people will take our knowledge against our will and turn it into profit from a book or something such as that. Also our culture bearers are not totally trusting of us as we lose people in our Lakota Studies dept and other areas where our people hold certain knowledge not available to mainstream folks who may want to exploit any type of thing we hold as sacred or ceremonial in nature. Some of which may be forbidden to discuss or share with outsiders who may be looking to take something of ours that is valuable like our orthographies and copyright or patent certain things that may belong to a certain family or group. I am not complaining but rather explaining to your good audience who have been very patient as we turn out our body of work. I hope to help continue to keep our work active in this very important vein. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We have continued to promote and grow our program to be one of the best bison educational programs in the country. We have aligned with community members and tribal folks from all corners of our world in addition to working withindustry professionals and academia from SDSU and other tribal colleges to develop our programs that enhance cultural knowledge about bison, horses, lands and vegetation and how to sustain their growth and development through the generations that have learned to manage all of this wealth of information about how to tame the west essentially. We have watched as our tribes began to bring the bison home to our lands and manage them and now we want to help to develop our people's ability to raise them in their own communities (each of our 20 communities has lands and access to grow herds) across the 5-county area. We haven't done too much training yet but we do bring visitors to the field, including classes to explain bison and how we are trying to bring them back for our people to live with again. It has been said that when the bison die, so too will the Lakota people. So we are continuing to try to train and develop programs to help us better manage our efforts to bring them home. We are one of only two remaining TCU's with bison herds. Sitting Bull sold their herd and the Crow Tribe works with Little Big Horn College as the only other educational entity working in this area. We are developing our traditional arts and culinary arts at the same time as we do this professional development on bison, we have another grant to do this now for next year. There is a lack of people with cultural knowledge about our relations to the bison and how we use that to educate our people. We hope to help develop this important piece of work related to how our people and the animal nations relate. We learned from how the bison interacted with one another. The bulls are on the outside and the calves are protected in the center of the herd as one example. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Word of mouth is we have a herd that is used to educate our people and to help feed people during times of need like funerals and wakes and timeswhere they feed large groups. We do offer hides, skulls, and organs to the tribal members who request them from us. We have given bison hearts for sundances as they put a bison heart in the ground before a cottonwood tree is put in the groundfor the sundance. Last month a family requested to have hides for their two children they laid to rest. Wehave the moccassin telegraph that we rely on to get the word out on our work. In our new NIFA grant on arts and foods, we will go out to the communities and continue to share our work about the bison curriculum development and how they can help us with their own family stories about how the bison are one with our Lakota people. Given we have 5 counties on our reservation and our sister tribes have several counties as well, I would think we saturate south central South Dakota as good as it can get. Our SGU Adult Basic Education program is located in four counties and we use their office and space as well to promote our good work. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We continue to increase the interest in our student base in the programs and efforts of the Land Grant programming done through our work with NIFA and in collaboration with other entities of the tribe across the spectrum of Food Sovereignty, Food Security and Food Safety. We have been active at the Farmer's Market with our Greenhouse staff. We have continued to promote the good work we continue to do in this area of outreach and promotion of eating healthy and being good stewards of the land. We are fortunateas tribal members to also beshareholders of this unique system of gov't,where we are owners, operators and teachers of our ways of being and sustainers of our Lakota cultural upbringings as hunters and gatherers. As we add science to our own ways of teaching and learning, we continue to enhance our delivery of educational services of our tribal students and our professionals and culture bearers among the tribal peoples we live amongst. Our university was accredited by WINHEC for ten years and we hope to getour courses through thisprocess to grow our programs through the Bachelor of Science process in our Environmental Sciences. We continue to recruit students to this program and have more than 50 that have shown interest in pursuing a degree in it.
Publications
|
Progress 09/01/21 to 08/31/22
Outputs
Target Audience:We have a good amount of interest in the Range Land Management area within the Environmental Science program. We have 50 students that are interested in ES degrees. We also have a lot of people interested in bison and horses among other ranch interests. Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of the families that were operators in the past generations. Many young people do not know about ranch and farm life because their families were forced to get out of the industry. My grandparents and many uncles have been ranchers but I wouldn't know where to start with developing my own ranch and I feel the same can be said about many of my fellow community members. I grew up riding horses at the grandparents ranch and still have passion for the land and those trying to keep our ranch community strong. They too are our audience even though they may just be inspiring 4H'ers right now. Their retired grandparents can afford some tack and they too would be welcome to work with us to provide any type of ranch activity they can bring. These are the type of people in our community who we target every year to work with and work for among all the good stuff we do here. Changes/Problems:Since our tribe had mandated some of our shut downs and we haven't not fully opened our campus without vaccinations and such things as masking and social distancing. It put a real difficulty on service to the public on classes and campus programs as well as working with our students and folks on their farms and such. These are all things that we are not used to dealing with and that alone was a challenge just to find some changes that we could make feel normal. Most of the ranch type of work that is done requires people being together. We can't teach how to fence or fix a well so easy from the internet as an example. These things are slowly changing and we are opening our communities a little more each month. That has been our biggest challenge in dealing with the extra rules put on us by our local government. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We have been working with young men in our bison program to help them build their capacity. We have a handful that have come and got experience then moved on saying they wanted to come back and be a student in our program. One recently entered the Army and we look forward to seeing him grow as a young man and hope that we can help him when he gets done. We have a couple others who are also interested in getting their degree and working with us in this field of study. They particularly like working with bison daily and make good hands. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have people from our five county area and the county south of us in Neb that ask us for help every month for wakes and funerals, and other public gatherings like sundances and other ceremonies. People know they can come to us to ask for things like bison hearts, which are used in the sundances, liver, intestines, kidney, skulls and hides. We ask them to give us a letter of request but have given thousands of lbs. of meat and entrails to our people who have monthly ceremonies and ask for some of these items. Recently, we ran short of bison meat for groups sundancing and we purchased a bull from a private owner at a pretty good sum to make sure we don't leave people short of resources during this most important season where on our reservation alone over 30 sundances are held during the summer. Moccasin telegraph is very important but having one of the only bison herds in the region for 25 years is no secret here. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We hope to get these certificates approved quickly and have ten to twenty students active before the grant ends next August. Once we have the certificates approved we can really market the courses. I think we have been worried to much about a four year program and we need to concentrate on the smaller bites that we can manage easier.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We continue to develop our certification programs including the Ranch Essentials certificate and the Ranch Land Management certificate. We still need to get approval from the appropriate groups like the faculty council and academic folks. We were just given approval this year for a ten year accreditation from the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC) and I would like to see our programs go through their process before it goes on to the others to be grounded as best as we can in developing Indigenous certifications that would lead to four year Environmental Science B.S. degrees. Due to covid 19 restrictions on our reservation we have not been able to place students out into the field at ranch homes that we expected to work with when we wrote the grant. We continue to recruit students and hope to find another Ranch Land Management faculty that we have a hard time keeping here. But with our being approved to offer online courses that may not continue to be an issue. Hopefully, by having online classes now we can push our programs better by keeping faculty more than two semesters long.
Publications
|
Progress 09/01/20 to 08/31/21
Outputs
Target Audience:The SGU Range Land Management Programworks with the existing STEM-based programs at Sinte Gleska University to develop a problem-based learning model for its courses. The project addresses the area of Range Ecology Management. The University utilizes the SGU Bison Ranch for developing and implementing field-based experiential learning. The curricula will focus on cultivating critical-thinking and leadership skills to conserve tribal lands with culturally-appropriate land stewardship practices. The project will recruit up to 10 students each year. The anticipate project outcome is an increased number of tribal students participating in our programs andgaining an Associate of Science or Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science with emphasis in Range Ecology and Management. Changes/Problems:It is a little tough to reach out to the public as much as we would like to during this pandemic and our tribe is again talking about shutting down some of the public spaces in our community. Also it has been tough to recruit another faculty member to replace the last one. We continue to push for more courses and activities but it is tough when there isn't enough staff or adjunct faculty to push all the courses I want them to teach. We have a good STEM coordinator but I think he gets stretched thin sometimes and I hate to stress them out. The Covid challenges also make it difficult to foster outreach activities especially when our tribe and others in the state are hypersensitive to the problem. Lastly, this is expensive business and I don't have too big a budget when I need to purchase things like corrals and equipment for things like haying and bailing. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We have hired some more bison wranglers or caretakers as we call them that have been instumental in keeping fence, animals and people out of the bison ranch areas even though we allow fishing to take place in our pasture area. This keeps our employees busy along with putting in more water tanks and fixing some old wells. All of this is instrumental in managing an operation and this training includes chasing stray animals and helping to move them from one pasture to another as well as helping harvest the animals and process them. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have a vaiety of ways to put out the word on our activities throughout the year. We have emails that go out to students, faculty and staff that share info on what is going on in the Land Grant department. We also have flyers that are posted in the region from employees and students. The tribe owns a radio station with two channels that has both youth and adult audience members. We also use print media to inform the public of activities that are being sponsored by the program. We also inform our tribal officials, who carry the message to their own constituency across five counties and attend community meetings with staff that carry the info further into their twenty communities. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We have three people now working daily with the herd and on fencing and maintaining our operation. They continue to improve the property and our herd is healthy again. We want to maintain our herd health and the health of the soil in our pastures. We will continue to fix our fence and water as well as promote our workforce development efforts whilerecruiting students. Using our recruiting from the New Beginnings person on staff to working with new students here and at the local high schools, I believe we will continue to grow our student base in the area of Environmental Science.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We added a recruiter to the staff and he has extensive experience in working with wildlife management from our local Game, Fish and Parks dept of the tribe. He is part of the New Beginnings program but he has been influential in helping to bring more people to the table in the area of Environmental Science. We also collaborated with the STEAM folks and added Arts to our effort, which works well with traditional arts of working with bison and we plan on having a drum making class and maybe a class on making shields with our bison hides, which have to be worked hard to get them pliable and that is a lesson in and of itself as well as bringing in artisans to show how to make drums in a culturally appropriate way. We have a good number of young people interested in working with the herd and even have volunteers, which hardly ever happens here with us. We added two new bulls to the South herd and two more new bulls to the North herd this past year. We increased our capacity in developing water and fixing wells. We finished redoing the well on the North side but it recently started leaking so we will fix that but it is indicative of the constant maintenance requirements. We added more cross fencing and downsized our herd to within the numbers required by the lease- we were a little oversized and had to trade bison for more corrals to help with our downsizing sale. Our ranch looks more professional and we are hoping to see student activity soon in our outdoor classroom.
Publications
|
Progress 09/01/19 to 08/31/20
Outputs
Target Audience:We lost our Adjunct Professor in the fall and we haven't been able to find someone to fill that role. We were able to provide a couple of Environmental classes that were paid for using other funds from another department. Most of the work that was done was with regard to upkeep in our bison ranch. We were able to fence areas that were not previously done as well as put in some new gates and we are working on adding water to our south pastures and we have made improvements to the north pastures and also purchased some new bison panels that will help us to have a sale and reduce the size of our herd. We have several hundred animals and our capacity is about full but we are excited to see our herd grow. We will soon be adding in new bulls to help our genetics and we were offered five bulls from the Yellowstone herd but that might have fell through the political cracks. We feel that we could take some faculty and students out to the handling facilities and do some classwork soon to show how to sort and handle bison when we do a sale. Changes/Problems:During this pandemic it is pretty hard to run an institution of higher learning and we here sit on many committees and do a lot of work to just keep the doors open and students flowing through them constantly. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We have the set up to do training for our young operators who want to become bison ranchers and do the various programs that work along with bison ranching like culinary arts and butcher classes. Our tribe owns a grocery store so we have wanted to get in there and do training on our people. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?As I stated before, we have done some work with people who have disseminated that work to the public. I will have to research and find out what exaclty they publish but I need to get this report in and it seems like we are expected to really provide this type of work when it is often not easily done in our communities. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?I want to continue to try to build our capacity up both with students and the outdoor facilities we need to do this work. It is difficult and expensive and we aren't truly operators but rather educators so we meet the challenges as best as we can but need more time.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
I feel that we are still in the developmental stages of programs here and we are preparing to be able to showcase our work with bison. It is hard to get students to want to take these courses when we are replacing teachers often. We had a person come in and teach Environmental classes which helps to generate interest in our programming but it is still tough to get a room full of students when there are full depts. recruiting them all the time.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Not sure if we can claim his work, but Ron Solano comes out annually and studies our herd. He probably publishes but I don't know where. I hate to say we are doing something for him other than allowing him to do this. Seems wrong.
|
Progress 09/01/18 to 08/31/19
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience will be tribal students with an interest in obtaining jobs in the Tribal Land Management field and students in Environmental Science program with emphasis in Range Ecology and Management fields. We also hope to recruit students with interest in bison and food sovereignty efforts. We also want to recruit tribal members from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who just want the knowledge and experience of working with the bison program. We have seen the increase in bison operators and people interested in working with bison by-products such as arts and crafts. Changes/Problems:We invested a lot of resources in a large bison ranch for the past couple of years, however, we are having to go to court against our own tribe for cancelling our lease in February. We have been concentrating our efforts to develop a safe outdoor classroom for experiential learning for our students to develop more hands on training in the area of working with our bison relatives as their caretakers. We have had some questions from our university personnel about our curriculum development and delivery and what is the best model to use to develop here on campus. The Higher Learning Commission creates some obstacles, too many at times, to developing our programs that make us want to pursue other means to delivering those vital educational services that our tribal membership desires. We have had challenges dealing with our herd at Wiwila Wakpala due to distances to reach the ranch( nearly 60 miles of travel to get there is not easy to overcome when animals get out). We are determined to succeed and won't be deterred by these obstacles nonetheless. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We offered a workshop on Small Farm and Ranch development and hosted training for SGU staff and students on bison ranching and cosponsored Leadership training for students. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have been on social media platforms like SGU Facebook and other mediums as well like emails to our entire campus. We have been in local newspapers and on local radio, as our community owns two stations that have been made available to use to get word out to the public on all of our activities. We put flyers out and mocassin telegraph out as in word of mouth. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We want to more fully explore avenues of delivery that develop our students with both short courses for community members who want to pursue the education and experience for knowledge sake while also developing the path to a career in Environmental Sciences using the World Indigineous Nations Higher Educaion Consortium (WINHEC). We will continue to revise our Tribal Land Management emphasis in the Environmental Science program to Range Ecology and Management program. We will continue to add short courses and workshops for community education purposes. We will continue to support and develop arts and crafts programs with bison by-products. We continue to manage two large herds of bison, and until recently managed a third smaller herd of bison that we began to do appreciative inquiry activities with them for the health of the herd. We will continue to promote working with bison and help grow the species double to what it is now with groups like the National Bison Association.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Developed collaborations with SDSU to develop rangelands and buffalo herd health classes and assess our bison ranch lands at Wiwila Wakpala Bison Field Station and our Antelope Lake Campus ranch. We were able to get SDSU to move a rangeland specialist to our campus from a larger town 40 miles away so we can use his expertise more often in developing our rangelands. We provided training in Lakota philosophy and care of the buffalo while participating in a ceremony to lay our dead bison to rest with a medicine man. Review of literature about buffalo management and the cultural aspects of the buffalo in relation to the Lakota people. We continue to develop curriculum and try to develop methods of field-based work and classroom instruction utilizing partnerships with private herd owners and professionals in the field. Participated in bison studies by sending fecal samples to several organizations and universities including Texas Tech. Recruited, hired and later lost faculty in our program. We also have increased the Native American student success in STEM areas. We researched and developed STEM and Project based Bison Range Mgmt curriculum using the four foundations of indigenous education: Wellness, Academics, Culture and Language, and Leadership. We are working well with local high schools and recruiting them.
Publications
|
|