I went to school at Mahpiya Luta Owayawa (Red Cloud High School) on the Pine Ridge Reservation. My junior year I was chosen to participate in college courses offered by the school for Lakota Language paid for by South Dakota State University. I spoke with elders daily and became proficient in the Lakota Language. My classmates and I created the first Lakota only podcast called Woiwahoye Gluotkunzapi (Keeping the Promise). We became the first students in South Dakota to graduate with and earn the Seal of Biliteracy in the Lakota Language. The school also took me and a couple of students on a research institute at Marquette University to study the archives of Holy Rosary Mission. The archives are stored within the university library archives. We stayed in the dorms for two weeks and picked a topic for an essay that needed to be turned into a slideshow. Both the paper and the slide show were going to be put on banners and displayed before the community. When school started back that fall we presented our research on the banners to the peers, students, teachers, and family. The whole experience dealing with the documents, touching students homework, dealing with information that doesn’t come lightly. It was a traumatizing experience as if we were living out their lives. My fellow students and I found relatives, loved ones in year books, free write journal entries about homecoming or a basketball game. We became connected to our research and remained in prayer. While in Milwaukee, we went to Indian Community School and saw the diversity with the tribes that attending school their. The importance of conserving Native culture within the school was beautiful and refreshing. I’ll never forget my experience in Marquette and Milwaukee because that’s what I want to do. I want to help with Mahpiya Luta’s Truth and Healing Project that brings comfort to families knowing what their family was like and the experiences they went through. After I graduated high school from Mahpiya Luta Owayawa, I worked for a non-profit organization called “100 Horses Women’s Society” as an intern. Their name came from the belief that a Lakota woman is worth 100 Horses. We went out the communities on my reservation, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and fed the people. We played a traditional game called hand games with the kids, told them stories about a sacred person in our culture, Pte San Win. We visited to the women and children in these communities, we heard there stories, we heard their prayers. We showed them how to put up a Thipi and the importance of it. This strengthened my want to help my people my communities. I knew that when I went to college that Fall I would be doing it for my people to go get my education and use my degree to help in any way I can. I am a huge history nerd because I believe we can learn something from history. To preserve it and keep oral tradition and Lakota language is something I strive to keep in my life and in my educational journey. It’s definitely what motivates it for sure.