Written By: Rachael Schuit (OKLAHOMA) Catalyst News is proud to launch our new project “Rooted Together”. The goal of this project is to provide support for caregivers of Muscogee children that want to connect them to their Indigenous culture. Our team will be creating a toolkit to help provide culturally disconnected Native parents as well as non-Native parents with the resources they need to ensure their Indigenous children are culturally connected.  This project has been made possible because of a grant from Oklahoma Clearinghouse.  “Establishing and growing the culture of Native Americans, and no matter what family they're growing up in, or that they're being raised in is important,” said Sarah Yanez, a member of the Kaw Nation and recently appointed Treasurer for Catalyst News.  After decades of forced assimilation and cultural erasure, many parents and caregivers do not have the support or the connections to integrate their Indigenous child’s culture into their daily lives.  Catalyst News will also seek input from both Native and non-Native parents through surveys and events about what cultural learning to prioritize, the challenges they face when integrating culture into their children’s lives and what type of support they are looking for. The Catalyst News team will then incorporate that feedback into the toolkit, which will be developed for families of children aged 0 to 5 years old.  By helping Indigenous blended families connect children with their culture, it will also help Native children develop a sense of belonging and cultural identity from a young age, regardless of what type of family they are raised in. Yanez herself is part of an Indigenous blended family. Her four children are Indigenous and Hispanic. She says a toolkit like this will be helpful for families like hers.  While she has taken her children to several powwows and other cultural events over the years, Yanez says having a toolkit will still be really helpful.  “Even as a Native mother, I didn't grow up, quote ‘on reservation’,” said Yanez. “I am excited about what Catalyst is doing and for myself, being a Native, to have a toolkit, have some resources at hand for me to use with my children, because I didn't get that when I was young.” Catalyst News is partnering with the Muscogee Nation Cultural Department and Muscogee Nation Child and Family Services to create the informative hands on cultural guide. It will include several different elements ranging from storytelling, hands-on-activities, language learning, and tribal traditions. In-person outreach events for this project will take place in September and October. “Everybody needs to have some engagement in their community and I'm super excited to be on the Catalyst board to see what they can deliver for these blended families,” said Yanez. The work will not stop when this project is complete. Though this toolkit is being developed to support Muscogee children, it will also be designed in a way that other tribes who wish to create a toolkit for parents and caregivers of children in their tribe can adapt it to their own cultural teachings. The toolkit will be released in the spring of 2026.

United States of America

Oklahoma

“Rooted Together” to provide cultural support for caregivers of Muscogee children

Catalyst News

Muscogee Reservation

Written By:<a href="https://app.verifiednews.network/users/87" target="_blank"> Rachael Schuit</a> 
(TVLSE, Okla.) The City of Tulsa has an extensive history of historical injustice that continues to manifest inequities for Indigenous and Black community members. Recent data from the <a href="https://civicinfoindex.org/about/" target="_blank">Civic Information Index</a> highlights how Tulsa County struggles with equity and justice compared to other counties in the United States.
<a href="https://catalystnews.io/equity-and-justice" target="_blank">Read this story on Catalyst News here.</a>
The Civic Information Index measures civic health using 21 datasets from sources like the US Census Bureau, the Department of Education, and Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. It focuses on four pillars: news and information, civic participation, equity and justice, and health outcomes.
The equity and justice pillar includes indicators like life expectancy, medical debt, youth disengagement, and poverty levels. Tulsa County scored in the 37th percentile for this pillar.
Life expectancy: Tulsa ranked in the 42nd percentile.
Medical debt: Tulsa ranked in the 31st percentile.
Youth disengagement: Tulsa ranked in the 58th percentile.
High poverty levels: Tulsa ranked in the 38th percentile.
As far as the Overall Index, Tulsa County ranks in the 63rd percentile, nearly double Oklahoma’s average of 32. Factors of the higher overall ranking include Tulsa being in the 100th percentile for total news outlets and 99th percentile for giving and philanthropy. 
Yet, racial inequity and injustice persist.
<h3>Historical Injustice’s Impact</h3>
The impacts of historical injustices such as the Indigenous Probate Scandal and Tulsa Race Massacre are still felt today. 
Indigenous families continue to experience the effects of <a href="https://app.verifiednews.network/articles/share/3504" target="_blank">stolen land</a>, Indian boarding schools, and disproportionate death rates during Oklahoma’s early statehood. The <a href="https://app.verifiednews.network/articles/share/1332" target="_blank">Tulsa Race Massacre</a> left hundreds of Black residents dead and many others homeless, and devastated a once-thriving community. 
<a href="https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/24185/indicator-22.pdf" target="_blank">Tulsa Equality Indicators</a> provide further insight on Tulsa’s homeless problem, and how it disproportionately impacts BIPOC community members. For example, Native American youth are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness compared to their white peers.
As far as addressing wealth, Tulsa does appear to be slowly moving the needle for Black Tulsans regarding <a href="https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/24171/indicator-8.pdf" target="_blank">median household income</a>, up nine points since 2018. But the median household income of white households is still 57 percent greater than that of Black households in Tulsa. 
And Indigenous families are not measured on that indicator at all.

Equity and Justice in Tulsa County: New Data Highlights Ongoing Challenges

This article is the first in a series exploring decolonization in northeast Oklahoma.
Written By:<a href="https://app.verifiednews.network/users/87" target="_blank"> Rachael Schuit</a> 
(TVLSE, Okla.) For hundreds of years, colonizers have fought to erase or at the very least oppress Native people, culture and ways of life. While some tribes were destroyed, more than 500 tribes remain.
<a href="https://catalystnews.io/the-first-steps-1" target="_blank">Read this story on Catalyst News here.</a>
Over 8 million people in the United States identify as Native American or Alaska Native. Experts estimate nearly twice that many Natives were living on the land that would later become the United States, and seven times that many were living on what many Indigenous groups call “Turtle Island”, or North America, before colonizers came over from Spain in the late 1400s. Those colonizers were soon followed by expeditions and conquests from the Dutch, French, and finally the British. 
Fast forward to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when tribes like the Muscogee (Creek) were forced from their ancestral homelands to west of the Mississippi River. Many tribes, like the Apache, Arapaho, Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita were already living in what is now Oklahoma. Today, the state is home to 39 tribes. 
The City of Tulsa sits on the intersection of three tribes: Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Osage Nation, and Cherokee Nation. Though Tulsa was once allotted land, a small fraction of that land remains with its original allottees following legalized theft systems established following the forced removal and exacerbated by the Crime of 1908.
Colonization has had significant negative impacts on Native people, in addition to the accounts of loss of life, land, and culture above. Those losses have also manifested in health disparity and wealth inequality many communities still struggle with today. And no clear end in sight.    
While decolonization efforts have been steadily building over the last several decades, in 2024, the systems of colonization still hold fast across Turtle Island.  
Dr. Ijeoma Nnodim Opara, a double board certified doctor and editor of the Racism and Health section of PLOS Global Health, says those championing the idea of decolonizing global health might need to rethink their course. 
In her article <a href="https://speakingofmedicine.plos.org/2021/07/29/its-time-to-decolonize-the-decolonization-movement/" target="_blank">“It’s time to Decolonize The Decolonization Movement,”</a> Opara writes the first step to authentic decolonization is breaking free of colonial frameworks. 
“We cannot decolonize global health using the same logics, dynamics, and paradigms that birthed it in the first place,” she wrote. “We cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”
Opara’s decolonization framework through a global health space lens also provides a strong foundation for the first steps for decolonization in our communities, and one dependent on community involvement if that framework were to be followed: 
- Be flexible to multiple definitions and interpretations. Opara writes it is a colonial construct that everything has to be rigidly defined and have only one definition.
- Center Majority World leaders in all decolonization efforts.
- Integrate with other movements working to dismantle intersecting systems of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and others. 
- Conduct critical introspection of how power systems and people benefit from intersectional systems of oppression.
“Liberation begins in our own imagination, in our own individual and collective selves before it can be translated externally,” Opara said. “Decolonizing our minds and emancipating our imagination is key to our liberation.” 
Opara also provides the wrong way to decolonize, including: 
- Efforts devoid of a critical analysis of power, history, and sociopolitics
- Curricula that re-marginalizes, de-prioritizes, and minimizes the lived experiences, expertise, and epistemologies of indigenous communities
- Views of situations in binary terms and, therefore, in “tension” versus in multifaceted, intersectional, and in harmony
- The absence of a commitment to justice and engagement with community-led justice and liberation movements 
“Without healing from our own trauma, we are doomed to reproduce it among ourselves and reinforce the same systems of dominance in our problem-solving processes,” Opara said. “We need to be thoroughly purged from centuries of psychosocial conditioning and internalized colonization grounded in European and American myths and lies of who we are, where we come from, our abilities, value, contributions to the world, and how our current state of affairs came to be.”
What do you think about Opara’s framework for decolonization? 
<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc_hoamcEtR9RMZ0Gf_2Lv7OyZOBb5I146-sAhO7HcekYO1_g/viewform" target="_blank">Take the Catalyst News Decolonization survey and let us know if you would be interested in exploring these topics further as a collective. </a>

Catalyst News

“Rooted Together” to provide cultural support for caregivers of Muscogee children

Equity and Justice in Tulsa County: New Data Highlights Ongoing Challenges

The first steps to decolonization