By J1 Reporter Nika Kouassi

This year Marian invited the Blue Bird Cultural Initiative described by Executive Director Nicole Benegas, is “an organization led by Native directors and staff who are focusing on revitalizing cultural practices, traditions, and traditional arts” to perform, discuss, and enlighten the girls on their Native American Culture and aspects.

Marian girls, as a collective school have not been exposed to Native American Cultures, unless in history class, were all very excited with no idea what to expect. Met with high praise from Marian students and faculty, the beats from the percussion instruments filled the East gym as the performances began.

Flashing colors and smiles quickly took over Marian for the 45-minute presentation. The cultural chants and facts from BlueBird Cultural Initiative made Marian girls leave with touched hearts and enlightened minds.

Native American Heritage Month is the entire month of November and has been a worldwide month of recognition since 1990. The Marian Diversity Board has done numerous things to commemorate Native American Heritage Month. For example, a poster made by Marian students hung in the senior quad area that says “Happy Native American Heritage Month,” the diversity board director Ms. Ty Nared has multiple varieties of Native American candies in her office for students and faculty to try, and lastly the hour long Crusader Activity Block or “CAB” dedicated to Native American history and culture. 

Diversity Board, led by Nared is a group of 12 juniors and seniors at Marian. Their main purpose is to oversee and facilitate diversity, belonging, and inclusion. Junior Liz Nguyen diversity board member, explains her duties for Native American Heritage Month: She says a lot of the work she created was a mix of her individually and with Nared. “Before November started, I designed a poster… so now there’s a Native American Heritage Poster in the bathroom stalls.”

However, the planning of the cultural performance was by Nared from as early as September. However, that does not mean the students of Diversity Board did not have important duties to complete. “We also did some content creation for social media and some banners to bring some awareness for Native American Heritage Month.”  As the social media chair, Nguyen communicated plenty with Nared on what the Diversity Board’s Instagram posts regarding Native American Heritage Month should say and look like. Some other things Nguyen did include “talking individually with students, with my friends, we also met with STUBO who highlighted Native American Heritage Month in their small stall talks.” 

The most rewarding experience from native American CAB for Nguyen was “the student body being exposed to these cultures, things that they have never seen before. I’ve never seen a Native American performance in person before, so I think it’s a rewarding experience for girls to get a diverse experience at Marian and get to experience all these cultures in person.”

”We don’t really bring up Native American education here at Marian and I think after this CAB a lot of girls learned about the culture of Native American Tribes and what the dances and garments are symbolic of, and I think girls got to know more about things that they didn’t get to know before,” Nguyen said.

Nicole Benegas Executive director of the Blue Bird Cultural Initiative speaks on why it is important for school with a one predominant race to be knowledgeable on minority cultures:

”I think, especially if you’re looking at high school, is that most of the colleges are very multicultural, And so being able to relate to or having some baseline understanding of where maybe some other people may be coming from and how to best work with other people and be involved with them and either academic areas or if they’re working in careers, to hopefully help everybody to kind of understand each other a little bit more,” Benegas said.

Though Native American Heritage month has ended, the Marian community is leaving the month with new found knowledge and hope to understand other cultures better in the future.