Native Family

Learning Lodge

Our Kinship Care Model

Kinship Care is an Indigenous practice where children are raised by extended family members and members of the community.

This approach demonstrates the importance of maintaining connections to family, lifeways, language, and community. We work to co-create community-based approaches to language and culture revitalization centered around early childhood kinship care. We develop a culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum and resources for kinship caregivers that align with our Indigenous values and prioritize Indigenous languages and cultural practices.

Our Indigenous Centered Approach

We provide culturally centered early childhood care led by our Indigenous and Black community that reclaims, revitalizes, and maintains our cultures and languages. We achieve this through our multilingual and multicultural approach, including Indigenous outdoor education, land-based learning, storytelling, art, and more. These components are ones that our Indigenous communities have done since time immemorial.

We strive to reconnect alongside our children with the land, with our languages, and with our diverse Indigenous cultures.

Land-Based Learning

We take children to learn outside with the land as much as possible, rain or shine! We learn how to pick medicine in a good way, to grow ancestral foods and tend to our plant relatives, and how to receive the nourishment from the Earth through our cultural foods and plant medicine.

Language Revitalization

Throughout the day, our children hear all the Indigenous languages represented in our group - eight languages - actively including Haida, Blackfeet, Lakota, Choctaw, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, Hidatsa, Tagalog, and Mandarin Chinese. We are always seeking to learn and share more of our Indigenous languages with our children.

Cross-Cultural Solidarity

Not only are our children connecting deeply with their own Indigenous cultures and the cultures of all their cousins, they are also learning and practicing how to be in solidarity with all our relations striving for sovereignty across the world, from Sudan, to Congo, to Haiti, and Palestine.

Waking up our ancestral knowledge and sharing it with our children and one another fosters a space where we can learn and begin to heal the wounds our Ancestors endured so that we can be here today, and our children, tomorrow.

Culture keeping is one of the cornerstones of Native Family Learning Lodge

By learning and preserving our traditional lifeways, our children and families share this knowledge with our community and pass it down to future generations.

Our Children's Joy is Our Resistance

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We are always looking to expand our relationships in community to build up our children's outlets for learning and connection. Please email us if you have opportunities for collaboration, skill share, field trips, professional development, educational materials, or funding (as examples).