I'm the indigenous first arts and gift shop coordinator.

I get to work with the artist and we buy their work.

I have hosted art shows with them.

I have MCD art shows, and I've helped set up art shows.

I helped redesign this art gallery just last November.

I, Chinese, French, Polish, Irish, Native American and German half Chinese, though, so I've always identified as all of those.

All of those make up who I am.

The American Indian Community Housing Organization is a nonprofit in Duluth, Minnesota.

We are a housing organization.

First, so we have a lot of women and children that are getting away from homelessness or domestic violence that live here.

So we're a safe house.

We have a cultural program that represents indigenous arts, foods and books.

It's the indigenous first arts and gift shop.

We really focus on our environment here, and we have solar panels on the roof.

We have two gardens.

We have one on the roof, and we have one downstairs that the kids can harvest food from that we usually use for cooking in the meals that, before Covid, we used to serve at dinner time.

And we have a kids program really all together.

ACO is a cultural program, so I thought eco was the only like one of the only places in Duluth with a large cultural background that I could work with people of color and not feel different or, not be subjected to getting less pay because I'm a woman or any of that.

So I guess I would say the culture brought me in.

I enjoy what I do, I enjoy representing everybody and impacting Duluth positively and everything else I do here.

You know, I just don't.

I work in the gift shop, but I help out in every other area.

We're a cultural center, so we're very used to having people in here.

And it's it's sad that we can't allow guests to come into our art gallery, but the benefits are worth it for the safety of everybody.

I'm really lucky.

Lucky to work with such artistic people daily, even though we're it's during Covid right now, I still get to talk to artists daily, and help represent them and diversity and Duluth.

I also built the website Indigenous First org that took about eight months prior to Covid, but we were so busy with our art shows and our cultural programing.

Even though we're closed, it's really amazing to still get to represent our Native American artists, authors and agriculturalists, and we're doing a great job of that online, on social media, on Facebook, on our website.

Even a website is doing a great job of continuously representing our artists when it's hard to get representation.

It's all online.

Our artists are are losing income because these shows, the summer shows, the powwows, the events where they usually make money, it's, it's canceled.

So for us to continue to support online has been very helpful to them.

So in March, we were giving our tenant 14 day food boxes and our Polish center, which was very large, turned into a food pantry.

And our our fridge was completely full of meats.

We went shopping and we also started to use foods from indigenous first and local farmers in those boxes.

And to have that security net of food, was really important.

We made two different food boxes.

The indigenous food box and the intertribal food box.

The indigenous foods box has white cornmeal from bow and arrow and Red Lake Nation Foods pancake mix, healing tea from Sacagawea Farms, Spirit Lake, wild rice and Spirit Lake sirup and Red Lake jam, and the intertribal food box I came up with because a lot of those foods I had, I had met the farmers at the Intertribal Food Summit the year previously, and we still wanted.

Even though the summit was canceled in-person, we still wanted to represent these food vendors in some sort of way, too, because of these food sales.

Some of the farmers said that they once had been able to pay their employees.

And in March and in April, had we not sold at the volume that we did, this just has to succeed this year, because the artists, they really need it.