07 Dr Twyla Baker Second Introduction

My name is dr.Twyla Baker I am the president of new itza Hadassah sawfish College Inn on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation it’s the tribal a chartered College of the MHA Nation and I’m from there I was born and raised on Fort Berthold left for quite a while to go get my higher education and then I came home and I came back at the request of a few tribal members to come and apply for a Dean position that was available within the tribal College and at that time it was Ellis spot a bear that was the one who gave me the Kohen said hey we’ve got this spot open for you for you I know you just defended you’ve got your doctorate done you need to come home now and I said Ellis I have a lot of children I can’t at that time the oil boom was you know was going full-bore and housing was at a premium and I said Alice I can’t come home unless there’s housing that’s not a FEMA trailer so she made the effort to go before the tribal council and she um my brother was live texting me while she was presenting and presented my case and talking about how we need our educated people to come home to come in fill these positions and stuff for us and we need you to the tribe to provide housing for her and they passed a resolution and then I got a text from my brother and said resolution passes - I was coming home so that was amazing that was amazing and so Alice was one of the drivers of me coming back and she was always my hero like since I was a teenager and unfortunately she passed and she quite literally passed like I think two weeks before I actually arrived home I got the message from my Michael ancestors and Alice’s is gone and I had to pull over in the side of the road and just you know because I was so shocked just be in the moment for a look for a little bit and because you know honestly that type of thing that always kind of feels like it’s like it’s almost at the core of who we are as tribal people I feel like she knew something was going on she she knew that there needed to be more people coming home and I feel like the timing of her call the work that she did on my behalf everything like that was like a blessing on the top of a blessing on top of a blessing and she really made this path for me to come home and I feel like a lot of the work I do I think of her and I keep her in mind so that I can you know keep going because she was really strong very well respected and she was very she was quite upfront about things she didn’t take any guff from anybody so you know um I try to remember her in the work that I do and you said talk about family okay so I am of the three tribes I’m enrolled mhm a nation of the three tribes I am Mandan and Hidatsa and I was basically raised in a Hadassah household with two Hadassah speakers my mother and my father and they were I’m the second youngest child of a second youngest child so we are he’s third youngest actually we I think myself and my brothers were raised a little bit differently and almost like a generation back from a generation that I grew up with because my parents were older when they had me and they were birthed and they weren’t birthed into hospitals they were birthed at home they were delivered by their grandmothers they were first their first languages were Hadassah they were very much so steeped in the traditions in the culture that existed prior to the dam prior to garrison dam so and they remember all of those stories they talk about those stories and things like that they were also boarding school era students so I kind of had a different understanding of things and like my immediate peers might have I feel lucky that I was raised by my parents to really cherish Who I am and to really be strong in that culture my mother made a point of taking us to our clan kinship gatherings because we reckon our kin very differently from like mainstream culture and population around here where matriarchal matrilineal and we