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By Mary Annette Pember, ICT
Five Native Americans have been selected by the Bush Foundation for its prestigious Bush Fellows program for 2025, each with plans to build and enrich their personal leadership skills while forging a vision for themselves and their communities.
The five are among 26 fellows selected in the highly competitive process, which awards up to $150,000 each to support a self-designed leadership plan. The organization received 1,000 applications for the 2025 fellowships.
“Decades ago, the Bush Foundation made a commitment to Native nations, sovereignty and tribal governance,” said Anita Patel, vice president of grantmaking at the foundation, which funds projects and people in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota, and the 23 tribal nations in the region.
Patel said the Native fellowship recipients in this year’s class stood out for several reasons.
“They are so clear not only on who they are but who they are a part of,” Patel said. “The histories they carry with them, the culture within them and how that shows up in the kinds of change they want to see is so grounded, not in serving themselves but in a greater purpose.”
The Native Americans selected for the program include a filmmaker and producer, a director of Native recruitment for a South Dakota university, president and chief executive of a nonprofit that supports Indigenous artists as culture bearers, a tribal official who plans to attend law school, and a tribal court judge who is working to revitalize Indigenous justice.
The foundation’s fellowship program, created in 1963, awards up to 30 recipients annually. It is working together with communities to create change.
“They (fellows) are working together on creating change and coming from the idea that who they are and the community they come from has so many gifts to bring to the change we all need to see,” she said.
The Bush Foundation, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, was founded in 1953 by Archibald and Edyth Bush, who built a company that later developed into IBM. The foundation also funds programs that help entrepreneurs thrive in rural areas, growing the next generation of Native leaders, and creates programs that help build generational wealth. The 2025 fellows were announced earlier this month.
The five Native fellows spoke to ICT about their plans.
Leya Hale
Leya Hale, of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and Diné nations, spoke to ICT from St. Paul, Minnesota, where she worked as a filmmaker and producer for Twin Cities PBS for more than 13 years. Hale has produced several Emmy Award-winning documentaries and has earned national acclaim for her work on films such as “Bring Her Home,” and “The People’s Protectors.”
Hale described her selection as a Bush Fellow as an honor and a blessing. “I’m just really looking forward to exploring the different ways that I can enhance my leadership abilities,” she said.
“The fellowship is an investment in one’s leadership,” Hale said. “It’s really a way for already established leaders in their communities to find ways to harness what they can do and create more of an impact in their field of study.”
Hales current production, “Medicine Ball,” explores how Native basketball was born out of boarding schools.
“I’ll be following two Native basketball athletes out of the University of Minnesota, Morris,” Hale said.
The film will examine the history of Indian boarding schools, what it means for younger generations who may be removed from that experience, and what they have learned from their ancestors’ past experiences at the schools.
Sports, according to Hale, allowed young people at boarding schools to create community and sometimes receive better treatment. “It’s really fascinating to hear of the resilience [gained from participation in sports],” she said.
Hale mentors up and coming Indigenous and people of color storytellers in her work. “Every time I have a new project I make sure that I bring another Native filmmaker with me,” she said.
She is currently working with Frankie McNamara, Ojibwe, who works as Hale’s assistant editor, and frequently works with artist Jonathan Thunder of the Red Lake Nation in animation.
With her Bush Fellowship, Hale plans to strengthen her Dakota language skills, expand her technical and narrative filmmaking skills, and build a global network of Indigenous creatives reshaping the future of media.
“I’m hoping that I can help contribute to encouraging more Native people to enter the field and feel like the fellowship is going to help me figure out what I can do to assist that goal,” Hale said.
“Hey, we’re born storytellers,” she added.
John Little
John Little, Standing Rock Sioux, described his selection for the Bush Fellowship as surreal.
Little is currently director of Native recruitment and alumni engagement at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where he has worked hard to increase Native student enrollment by building trust and ensuring institutional support for students. .
During the course of his fellowship he plans to work on finding ways to get other schools to actively consider rural and Native students in their recruitment. Some recruiters for larger schools tend to think of Native people as poor, he said.
“We’re kind of thought of as flyover country for a lot of national universities and colleges,” he said. “When people do think of us, it’s in a deficit model, but we have a ton of talented Native and rural students in South Dakota and they deserve these additional opportunities.”
During his fellowship, Little plans to spend time studying the recruitment methods of other larger institutions and challenge them to think differently about recruiting Native students. He also wants to encourage them to set up supports for those students. For instance, he plans to spend time at Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where officials have had success in recruiting Native and rural students.
“I want to meet and network with leaders that are doing this type of work and see what best practices would be good for South Dakota,” he said.
Little’s ultimate goal is to create a description for a structure or organization that would help carry out his goals. He credits his family with encouraging and guiding him through the fellowship process.
He also plans to include cultural Dakota and Lakota self-care during his fellowship. “I think the more you can learn your culture and language the more empowered you are going to be for the rest of your life,” he said.
Lori Pourier
Lori Pourier, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, has spent 25 years as president and chief executive officer of the First Peoples Fund, a nonprofit that invests in Indigenous artists as culture bearers.
As current senior fellow at the organization, Pourier will spend her Bush Fellowship focusing on exploring socially responsible investment strategies that create sustained resources for Native artists. During her initial meetings with the Foundation, Pourier was challenged in speaking outside her work with the First Peoples Fund.
“I’ve been in many rooms where I had to sit there and make the case for Indian Country and for traditional culture bearers and art,” she said. But talking about herself, her dream and her work was different. “It’s always been about community for me so it was a challenge.”
In her new role with the fund, Pourier is no longer carrying the weight of the entire organization. During her meetings at the Bush Foundation, Pourier found that ultimately, her new work will also benefit the community.
“I think I was ready for that next step,” she noted.
Most of the sort of socially responsible impact investing on which she wants to focus is being done around climate change, Pourier said. Traditional artists are quietly on the front lines of climate change because they see the impact of the changes on the raw materials they use in their work.
“They are the ones who depend on the land to do the work they do, such as basketweaving,” she said.
Pourier envisions impact investing as helping to protect the natural resources of traditional artists and culture bearers in longterm sustainable ways. She compares this change in her focus on her longtime rock-climbing hobby.
“They always say in rock climbing that if you go six inches, you see a whole new world; so for me, I want to see what’s up there six inches away,” she said.
Whether its philanthropy or impact investors, Pourier sees the goal as putting equity into Native communities to support addressing the impacts of climate change as well as sustainable support for artists. In the past, she noted, Native artists who have won awards were expected to make such investments themselves. But they often lack the knowledge, background or sufficient capital to do so effectively.
Fellowship recipients are encouraged to develop a wellness plan to support self care that can be carried forward in their future lives. Pourier’s self-care plans include spending time with her mother and family, learning more about their history and family tree.
“We want to go to all the sacred sites with our medicine people and healers and teach our whole family about those sites,” she said. “I also want to just pause, reflect, breathe and do some writing. I’ve been doing this work for a very long time.”
Curtis Rogers
Curtis Rogers of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota will explore his love of analytical thinking by pursuing a degree in law. In his current job as deputy director of the White Earth Nation, Rogers championed initiatives sch as paid parental leave, culture-embedded tribal law, and leadership development and leadership pipelines for staff and leaders. He plans to spend his fellowship period at the Native American Law and Sovereignty Institute at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota.
“I really love the analytical thinking style of attorneys; I want to be able to help our tribal leaders and employees in making decisions that affect our nation of 17,000 members,” Rogers said. He also wants to apply the knowledge to assist the tribe in land back and jurisdictional issues.
Rogers has worked in his current position for five years but he confessed to having “imposter syndrome,” a psychological pattern in which people doubt their accomplishments. Although he’d wanted to apply for the fellowship earlier, he didn’t feel ready.
“But I looked at the (fellowship) application and I was able to identify some of the things I need to do to strengthen my leadership so I can better show up for our people and leadership,” he said.
Even as a child, he has wanted to help the tribe. “My family struggled with addiction and I ended up living with my auntie, but my goal has always been to get my education and come back to work in community service,” Rogers said.
One of his dreams is integrating traditional leadership into tribal governance. “We’ve had these boiler-plate governments and constitutions forced upon us but I want to figure out how to instill traditional ways into our institutions,” he said.
Mitchell Hamline is allowing Rogers to pursue his degree using a hybrid online model so he can remain present in his current work with the tribe.
Although his wellness care plan is not yet fully formed, Rogers wants to learn more about traditional Ojibwe culture and ceremonies and bring them back to the community.
“I want to learn as much as I possibly can and bring those teachings back to my own children and the youth in the community,” he said.
Megan Treuer
Megan Treuer, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, is revitalizing Indigenous justice by returning tribal court systems to their cultural and spiritual roots.
An experienced tribal court judge, Treuer has led initiatives like family dependency and wellness courts that emphasize healing, accountability, and connection. Her work has helped both state and tribal systems embrace Anishinaabe values and language as pathways to justice.
Treuer said she was thrilled to learn she’d been selected for the fellowship. The ability to structure one’s own program was especially attractive to her.
“I’ve been hoping for this for a long time,” she said. “They believe that leadership knows what they need to do.”
Although a successful and busy lawyer and then judge, Treuer found she was neglecting her traditional ceremonial life and noticed her Ojibwe language skills had declined since her youth.
She plans to spend her fellowship immersing herself in the Ojibwe language and connecting with legal scholars and spiritual leaders around the world about Indigenous justice practices. The third component of her time includes focusing on self-care.
“It’s been a wild ride these past few years, so I’m planning to take some special trips with my wife and kids, reconnecting with them,” she said.
Ultimately, however, Treuer will follow the path of the Manidoog (spirits).
“So many of our people are lost and don’t know where to start,” she said. “I really want to get at our vision for the change we are trying to make in our community. My hope is that in the future nobody will ever have to go looking again for who they are or how to get the healing that is already available to us.”
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