The Forge Project Toolkit is an open-ended project to share links to new ideas around Indigenous world-building.
A guide for In Light and Shadow: A Photographic History from Indigenous America (2025) was created by In Light and Shadow contributing artist and Forging (2024) contributor Nīa MacKnight.
It is designed for educators and students looking to explore the social, political, and economic dimensions that shaped the work of early and contemporary Indigenous photographers from the Americas.
For more than 150 years, spurred by federal assimilation policies beginning in the early 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to boarding schools across the country. In many cases, they were forcibly removed from their homes.
A new book surveys a range of creative output from around the Americas, collectively replacing outdated narratives of Indigenous cultures with the perspectives of the artists themselves.
The Washington Post talked to four survivors of Indian boarding schools who attended the institutions in the late 1940s and 1950s and are now in their 70s and 80s.
Still We Smile: Humor as Correction and Joy, curated by Dr. Meranda Roberts (Northern Paiute and Chicana), features the work of six Native artists who embrace wit, irony, and satire to communicate messages regarding their lived experiences and cultural worldviews. Collectively these works embody the resiliency of our communities by illuminating the many ways we have always found amusement in the everyday, thus ensuring our survival in the past, present, and future.