Department of Education, Office of Indian Education
This five year, $1.1 million grant was awarded to prepare American Indian students to become teachers and administrators. A focus of this grant is to prepare educators of science, technology, engineering, math, or computer science (STEM) fields. This is the second consecutive year of this award by the U.S. Department of Education – Bureau of Indian Education. The Electa Quinney Teacher Training and Administrative Leadership Program (TTAL) is a five-year partnership between the Indian Community School (ICS) and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) to recruit and prepare undergraduate, post-baccalaureate or graduate level students to build capacity in public, private and charter schools in Milwaukee and tribal schools in the Great Lakes region. This project will address teacher and administrator shortages in the American Indian community and will work with school districts throughout the state.
Profiles of the recipients of this and earlier DOE grants

Greater Lakes Intertribal Council, Native American Research Center for Health
The $40,000 annual award to UW-Milwaukee supports the American Indian Science Scholars Week. This 10-day on campus experience, which is free to participating families, gives American Indian students an introduction to college life. The program is for high school students (freshman year completed), who have a GPA of 2.5 or higher, and live in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Minnesota. The student development program supports students who are interested in health care research and occupations. Through this program, students are provided with academic support, career guidance, and opportunities for hands-on learning experiences from middle school through their Bachelor’s Degree.

Department of Education, Office of Indian Education awarded $1,149,000.00 to the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to train American Indian students to become qualified teachers and administrators.The Electa Quinney Teacher Training and Administrative Leadership Program is a four-year project to recruit and train a total of 20 undergraduate, post-baccalaureate or graduate level students to build capacity in public, private and charter schools in the City of Milwaukee and tribal schools in the Great Lakes Region. EQI has the history and is well-qualified to meet the unique social and economic challenges facing today’s American Indian urban, suburban and reservation schools. This project will address the need of teacher and administrator shortage in the AI community and will work with school districts throughout the state.

National Science Foundation Award The Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant highlighting a partnership with two tribal colleges, The Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe (Wisconsin) and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe (Michigan). This collaborative research is titled, Expanding the Documentary Record for Two Algonquian Languages of the Great Lakes will support the preservation and teaching of Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) and Menominee languages. The total award is nearly $ 340,000.00 with UWM receiving $ 100,000 and each partner institution receiving $ 120,000.00.
This project is a partnership between a state and tribal colleges in urban and rural areas to increase and preserve two indigenous languages. The NSF – Documenting Endangered Languages program allows each institution to develop research projects specific to the local knowledge in each respective community. At UW-Milwaukee, Margaret Noodin and a group of students will focus on using the data from the Wisconsin Native American Languages Project (WNLP) created in the 1970s and adding new material in recordings and transcriptions. Michelle Haskins at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College will work with elder women to record the vocabulary and complex phrasing they believe is important to pass on to the next generation. The goal is to connect the knowledge of multiple communities and generations to restore the original rich complexity of linguistic, social, and scientific knowledge. Adam Haviland at Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College will work with George Roy to preserve the local history of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. The hopes are to transfer these stories into Anishinaabemowin while also educating the broader community about the boarding school system. (This material based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1664512.)

Lannan Foundation
In partnership with the Indian Community School of Milwaukee, Inc. this grant supported the running of the 2017 Stabilizing Indigenous Language Symposium. With the generous support of the Lannan Foundation, we were able to bring in two keynote speakers that added great value to the attendees of the symposium.

Research Growth Initiative
Ganawendamaw: Emerging Anishinaabe Environmental Ideologies. This project utilizes a hybrid ethnographic, linguistic, and literary analysis along with archival documentation of various images, stories and practices related to instruction of Anishinaabe. This project offered a unique trans-disciplinary approach to the investigation of environmental stewardship by working with Anishinaabemowin speakers and teachers with a range of dialects and fluency in order to fully represent the knowledge available at this moment in history. RGI®, is an internal seed-funding competition aimed at enhancing the university’s research and scholarly work and supporting the state’s economic development through innovation.