Wenona Wolf spent the first part of her childhood on an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Wisconsin in what she describes as a wonderful time in her life as she lived a traditional Native American lifestyle and participated in beautiful Native traditions with her tight-knit family.
“I have so many great memories from that time in my life. Keeping those stories and traditions alive from my culture are so important to me,” Wolf says. “We’re not going to be able to keep those important traditions or our culture alive unless some of the big issues facing native people today are addressed. When we talk about poverty and lack of access to health care, environmental racism, things of that nature …. we need to have access to a quality life and a quality well-being for our kids.
“We have to fight for that while also fighting to keep our culture and our traditions alive which are super-essential to Native American people,” she adds. “There’s been so many attempts to wipe that out. Our culture and our traditions are one of the few things that we have that are just ours and connects us to our ancestors who have sacrificed so much for us.”
Wolf has been a strong advocate for people on the margins of society with her work as communication and development manager for the Kids Forward, whose mission is to inspire action and promote access to opportunity for every kid, every family, and every community in Wisconsin. She has also been a powerful and vocal activist for Native American rights and recognition. For her amazing work, she was recently recognized as a 2017 “Native American 40 Under 40″ by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development in Tulalip, Washington, just north of Seattle.
Kids Forward Executive Director Ken Taylor, Race to Equity Project Director Erica Nelson, and Wolf’s co-workers Michelle Robinson and Chet Agni nominated her for the award and sent in Wolf’s nomination application, resume, letters of recommendations, and some of the work that she had done.
“I was super-excited when I found out that I was going to be recognized and was going to be a part of the awards ceremony and I was really excited about the opportunity to meet the 39 other people that they were recognizing and seeing and reading about the work they are doing throughout the United States,” Wolf tells Madison365 in an interview at Barrique’s in downtown Madison. “The organization [National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development] mostly focuses on economic development and business but if you go through the list of people who won that award, there are also a large proportion of people who are doing community, non-profit, social justice-type work.”
With over 40 years of assisting American Indian Tribes and their enterprises with business and economic development, the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development has evolved into the largest national Indian specific business organization in the nation. Their prestigious “40 under 40″ award is bestowed upon individuals under 40 years of age who are nominated by members of their communities. These individuals have demonstrated leadership, initiative, and dedication and made significant contributions in business and their community.
“I was very excited to see what everybody was doing and what everybody was accomplishing in Indian country at this award’s ceremony,” Wolf says. “At dinner, I sat by a gentleman from Minnesota who works for the Mille Lacs Band – I’m enrolled in the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe – and he found me and we talked. I got to know a woman who was a psychiatrist down in Oklahoma from the Cherokee tribe. I sat next to a woman who has written six books already. It’s interesting to sit in a room where you are excited about what you do but also very impressed by what others have accomplished before the age of 40.”
Wolf was born in Shell Lake, Wisconsin and grew up in the small city of Cumberland in northwestern Wisconsin. “Part of my life, I grew up on the St. Croix Chippewa Reservation just outside of Cumberland,” she remembers. “When I was in middle school, my parents moved off the reservation and I finished school there.”
Wolf looks on fondly on the time spent with her family on the reservation and says that too often when people think about Indian reservations, they only hear about the really negative sides about reservation life. “I think a lot of that is true and it’s because of policy and because of very purposeful ways to remove, relocate, or diminish our culture. But for me, for the most part, I have really positive memories of being on the reservation,” says Wolf, who went on to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and later earned her master’s degree in public administration at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. “It was four big families living on the reservation. My cousins were there, my aunts and uncles were there, my grandma was there. The culture was really strong. Grandma really instilled and encouraged our traditional ways on us. So, my youth years on the reservation were good memories.”
Like many Native Americans who leave the reservation and live in non-Indian communities, Wolf finds that it can be difficult to keep up with the traditions of the culture she was raised in. The Native American community in Madison is extremely small at about 0.4 percent of the population.
“I have to be more intentional about remembering to do things or about going back home,” Wolf says. “But I really think that a big piece of being Native American is having that strong culture, so I continue to learn my traditional ways as I get older, to be more vocal about my community and go back home once a month to see my relatives.”
Unfortunately, the dominant culture in the United States simply does not know very much about Native American culture and history. It’s no exaggeration to say that their stories have been missing from most history books, media coverage and classroom discussions.
“I’m often shocked by the lack of education that people have on tribes particularly because Wisconsin is all indigenous land and we have 11 strong, amazing tribes in this state,” Wolf says, “but people haven’t been educated on them. Public schools did not incorporate education on tribes until recently and there is still a lack of information out there.”
Wolf remembers taking an ethnic studies class back at UW-La Crosse and was shocked at some of the things she saw in that class. “I was sitting in this predominantly white class in college and we got to our Native American section and the teacher admitted she knew nothing about Native Americans so she couldn’t really teach a whole lot,” Wolf says. “So, students started raising their hands with questions that they had: Do they live in tee-pees? Do they wear war paint?’
“That was a little shocking and saddening for me,” she adds, mentioning she hopes things have changed since she’s been in college.
Lack of awareness and knowledge of Native Americans often leads to awkward situations, some of which Wolf described in her award-winning article in Madison Magazine that dealt with stereotypes and misinformation about Native Americans as well as the dismal racial disparity statistics.
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) recently recognized Wolf for that powerful and insightful essay calling attention to the inequities facing Wisconsin’s Native American communities. “What it’s like to be native in Madison” earned the 3rd place award for “Best Column in Print” from the organization, and she was honored at the NAJA National Native Media Conference in Anaheim, California on September 9.
(Photo courtesy of Madison Magazine)
“The Kids Forward staff and community are so excited to congratulate Wenona for receiving this well-deserved honor,” says Kids Forward Executive Director Ken Taylor. “From our fundraising operations to our recent rebranding process, Wenona’s insight and perspective have proved invaluable to our work. As an organization that is committed to racial equity, we are fortunate to work every day with such a fierce advocate for Wisconsin’s indigenous communities.”
Wolf’s Madison Magazine article was an eye-opener for many white Madisonians. Outside of an occasional mascot controversy or a pipeline protest, it seems like white Americans don’t really know or really care about Native American issues or that Native communities suffer more of the usual predictors of poor health, such as poverty, unemployment and a very high school dropout rate.
“Yeah. I agree. We’re often out of sight. Natives live on reservations which are purposefully very remote locations throughout our state or we’re kinda mixed in with other communities of color,” Wolf says. “There’s a small population of us so we’re often not at the table being able to raise our voice. Or we simply are not asked to be at the table. That’s another problem.
“So that’s one of my goals: to make people more aware that they should be paying attention to the Native community,” she adds. “We provide a lot for Wisconsin economically, culturally. There are a million things named after us. I just want people to remember that we are still here.”
As Madison (and the United States) begins to discuss the impact of racial disparities more and more among its black and Latino populations, Wolf wants Native Americans to be a larger part of that discussion on racial inequality, too.
“My hope is that people begin to educate themselves and to seek out information about the tribes. There are things here in Madison that people can do that I don’t even think they realize that they can do,” Wolf says. “I had an opportunity to go on one of the effigy mound tours; that was even educational for me and a neat experience. We have so many cultural things that happen in this city. The Ho-Chunk tribe is not far away. You can reach out to them.
“I think that’s important for policymakers and non-profit organizations to make that initial step and reach out to tribes and Native American people and ask them to be at the table and ask them for their input and value what they have to say and what their needs are,” she adds.
