Tulalip Tribes

And yeah, so I'm an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe of Washington State.

And I grew up on the Tulalip Res that's about 45 minutes north of Seattle.

And my native identity has always been a really important part of my life.

And while we were at WSU together, we were very involved in college TV, cable 8, and stuff like that.

People like Necco Case bought a copy, which I did not know Necco Case at this point, you know, like.

And, you know, it really gave me a lot of encouragement to further pursue using comedy as a means to, you know, educate people about Native issues through things like I had like a digital series I released through Comedy Central called Gone Native, you know, working on shows like, you know, Spirit Rangers and things for younger audiences and using comedy to kind of educate about Native things.

And it really stems back to like, you know, I remember like Growing up in Washington growing up on a rez going to like schools run by you know The Tulalip tribe like I was surrounded by other native folks at all times So I was like given a fairly good education about this growing up I remember when I first went to WSU it was my first time really being around other people who would like not been around a native person ever in their life that they know of and so i started all of a sudden getting just insane questions from freshmen questions like you know if you're native were you born in a tp which i'm from washington it would have been a long house also i was born in the 80s so it was a hospital you know um like if i uh like if i can if i'm native why do i get to vote in united states elections which is like i don't know man why are you asking me this you know do i get free money from the government and it

That I think

Hi, I'm Matika.

I belong to the Swinomish and Tulalip people.

I'm a photographer and the creator of Project 562.

And I'm Adrian.

So the very first study we did showed that exposing Native high school students to Chief Wahoo lowered self-esteem.

I remember when I first became, um, familiar with that study.

I was teaching in Tulalip at the time.

I was just feeling so overwhelmed by the sadness in the community and by going to so many funerals in our community and thinking, like, if, if negative representations are affecting the self-esteem of our kids, and I'm constantly having to lay my kids to rest because of, of early death for whatever reason, suicide or-

And in the case of American and Alaska Native folks, sometimes that population data is suppressed, so much so that it's really hard to figure out what is the status of my population health.

Under Secretary Shaw and in collaboration with the Tulalip tribes here in Washington State, our agency is the first agency to develop a data sharing agreement with a federally recognized tribe.

And so you might think, well, cool, that's not really a big deal.

Here's why that matters and here's why that's such a huge success.

Where are we healthy? Where are we succeeding? And also, where do we need to invest our time and resources and energy? And for many tribes across the state, there's a real lack of trust between government and tribal nations because of a lot of history that really informs that trust.

But because of this sort of attitude that I think states often bring to the table with tribes, which is, well, this is how we've always done it.

And really rejecting this idea of this is how we always have done it is what I think led to this sort of groundbreaking data sharing agreement between the Tulalip tribes and the State Department of Health.

And what this agreement allows for is the transfer of accurate, timely, full data to the tribe per their requests.