The Young Warrior Society

Website: https://www.nanamkin.com/

Budget Size: Between 50 and 100k

Region: Central

County: Okanogan

Population Centered: BIPOC, Rural

Mission Statement: We are an indigenous-led community volunteer group creating experiences and joining opportunities that empower our community’s health through food sovereignty, indigenous cultural resiliency skills share, land-based education, and arts, that inspire healing, success, humanity and hope.

Community Accelerator Grant Award: $25,000

Primary Impact Category: Financial Impact

In the summer of 1937, artists from Washington State College struck out into the dry plateau regions of Eastern Washington, seeking a place to establish an art colony that might bolster their own reputations and the fortunes of their small fine arts department. They landed in Nespelem, a small town located on the Colville Confederated Tribes Reservation – the ancestral lands of the San Poil and Nespelem tribes, also home to Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce, the Snake River Palouse, the Sinkiuse, the Okanogan, and six more plateau tribes that had been forcibly relocated by the federal government. The artists spent the next four summers creating artworks documenting a people and a way of life they expected would soon disappear altogether.

Eighty-six years later, Dan Nanamkin, a descendant of the Nez Perce, Okanogan, and Lakes people, is reimagining the Nespelem Art Colony as a way to celebrate the past, present, and future of the Colville confederated tribes.

Dan’s organization, The Young Warrior Society, is an extension of his life’s work as a song-carrier, storyteller, teaching artist, and community leader. He works with youth and elders across the reservation to preserve the distinct artistic and cultural traditions of the twelve tribes that now call it home. “We try to encourage [the youth] to heal and become strong,” he says, “to improve their health through food, through plant medicines, and, even through the history that we endured, to find the beauty in art and the things that bring joy and happiness to life.” He and his collaborators visit schools and community centers across North Central Washington to share traditional stories, music, and dances, all augmented with modern technology – videos, lights, even smoke machines. Dan sees these updates as necessary for capturing the imaginations of young audiences who have grown up on the internet and welcomes the challenge of finding innovative new ways to make his stories sing.

The Community Accelerator Grant has helped Dan fund several group trips to the ancestral homelands of relocated tribes, gathering natural materials such as cedar bark, porcupine quills, and elk teeth that are integral to traditional regalia, medicines, and art. In the spring, over 220 youth gathered roots and lichen in the plateau regions south of Nespelem, and Young Warrior Society members led 570 youth on guided hikes in the forests outside Camp Disautel. This fall, the Young Warrior Society is supporting several families gathering hides and natural implements in preparation for a hide-tanning workshop that will allow them to create more art with youth over the winter months.

Dan is currently focused on parlaying remaining funds into re-establishing the old art colony as a gathering place. Nespelem is very remote, and one of the main difficulties Dan faces is in bringing his community together in person. He envisions the colony (which too will be called The Young Warrior Society) as a place of hope and welcome, somewhere anyone could come to teach or learn a new skill like flint napping, basket weaving, or organic gardening. The Young Warrior Society has been hard at work constructing tipis and a sweat lodge, and Dan is looking forward to hosting a group of muralists who will adorn the colony with art celebrating ancestral figures like Raven and Coyote. “There’s nothing else like this in Indian country,” he says, “and I think this could be something big. That’s my hope.”