Daniel Hernandez/ Arcia Tecun is the Fall 2023 Community Practitioner in Residence at the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Program. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the residency program aims to forge reciprocal relationships with community leaders who are using the tools of humanities and culture to further transform solutions to the climate crisis and environmental racism.
Darren Parry was our Spring '23 Practitioner-in-Residence. Darren is the former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and teaches Native American History at Utah State University. He is on numerous boards, from PBS Utah to Utah Humanities. Throughout the Spring '23 semester, Darren presented on the Bear River Massacre, moving beyond the land acknowledgement, merging western science with Indigenous wisdom, and a Shoshone approach to climate change.
Madeline McGill is a political scientist and narrative strategist living in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the unceded lands of the Eastern Shoshone and Goshute peoples. As an organizer and strategist, she has worked with organized labor, candidates for office, and advocacy organizations across the country on building campaigns that are committed to storytelling and transformational organizing strategy. Madeline moved to Utah in 2019 to help found the Rural Utah Project, bringing their fundraising and communications programs online. Since, she has worked as a freelance organizer and consultant, building, learning, and dreaming across the Mountain West.
We are so excited to welcome Alastair Lee Bitsóí as our Spring ‘22 Practitioner-in-Residence! Alastair is from the Navajo Nation community of Naschitti, below the Chooshgai Mountains on the New Mexico–Arizona state line. He is currently the Southern Utah reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. He has been an award-winning news reporter for the Navajo Times and communications director for the Indigenous-led land conservation nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah. His consulting business, Near the Water Communications and Media Group, trains media, nonprofits, businesses, and governments in cultural sensitivity.
Braidan Weeks is our Fall '21 Community Practitioner-in-Residence. He is the director of the Ute Land Trust, board member with Equality Utah PAC and the Natural History Museum of Utah’s Native Advisory Board, and host of KRCL 90.9fm's Living the Circle of Life.