Meeting 1: San Diego State University
Culture and Community

Overall we believe that a person with stronger cultural identity is more inclined to be empowered to excel in academics and in their personal lives. Cultural identity comes in many forms, it comes from our ceremonies, cultural artifacts, prayer, and much more.  In the case of Indian Country it also comes from family and community. In an effort to create our community we started our program to introduce our students and mentors to each other through a series teamwork exercises that will continue throughout the summer. Sometimes these methods don’t have to be fancy but do have to have the ideals friendships and motivation to accomplish our community and the beginning of friendships with one another.

Meeting 2: San Diego State University: AquaPlex
Culture / Science and Design

Many times non-natives considered our Tribes as primitive and without science or the ability to be industrious therefore it is easy for the non-native community to take away or destroy our sacred sites or cultural items. But when you think of the great accomplishments throughout our present country, Native Americans have contributed many great innovations to the world as well as their philosophies. 
Within this meeting we wanted to see how hard it was to do many of the things that our ancestors had accomplished and therefore we attempted to create boats that many of our inland and coastal Tribes had accomplished. In all honesty, it is hard to do this. Of all boats designed only one was able to float and carry a person.
Contributions of our ancestors in boating design in only one of many great contributions that Native Americans have given to our society. To realize that astronomy, pueblos, farming and more are some of the great contributions that have made our Tribal Nations rich in both history and culture.

Culture has many areas and to lose any of these parts means a loss of our cultural identity. Culture includes our traditions, families, ceremonies, our understanding of our environment and where we live.

At this meeting we went to the La Jolla Shores Underwater Park & Ecological Reserve where this reserve is a protected waterway where long ago Kumeyaay villages existed and now holds numerous artifacts of the Kumeyaay Nation that are now submerged. Working with envoronmentalist, many cultural preservationist worked to protect this region from development and looting by divers. The combination of these two groups now preserves a part of Native lands that have belonged to the Kumeyaay long before the first Europeans landed within the region.

In all this kayaking event for our program was more than what our expectations could have imagined.

At this meeting we were going to have a Lacrosse demonstration but as the meeting progressed it took another direction. To understand culture we have to understand that it contains many avenues that include historic artifacts, our ceremonies, traditions and family. So in our workshop to understand what we hold important to us, we looked more into our own values and in turn more on our cultural values that hold significant importance to us. We did this by using the historic egg drop and how we protect it from breaking. Like our own cultures that we hold with great care we examined how are we going to protect it. Each group symbolically held that egg and gave it what values they wanted to see in it. Many, if not all, related their values to their cultures and how to protect it. Once we defined our values then we wrapped the heck out of it. Most was successful and one was subject to closer examination. In the end this led to a greater discussion of NAGPRA and understanding how important this law is to our Tribal Nations.

Environment dictates how we live, so in harsher environments they live differently than what people live in more abundant claimants. Torrey Pines was one of the locations that the Kumeyaay had villages in and at the visitors center (at the upper location) there is a section on how they lived in this region. The main purpose here was to give the example of a location in which tribal people once had lived in, to take hikes on the plant life that grew here, and to end up at the beach to jump in the ocean (and after the hike this was the first thing we did).

We can learn many things through standard learning practices such as classroom lectures, however, to have it really take hold in our minds we attempted to live through what we have been learning about through theatre. We divided up our program into small groups to present a live version of a cultural issue and how would deal with it. With the help of Native American Monitors and our mentors we presented an array of solutions from our student groups. Oscars will be given out later. Overall, we thank all our students participants as we had one of the greatest summers yet and more importantly we met new friends. As for cultural preservation we learned alot and we created our own culturally based community of Native Youth, this summer. Thank you to all our community partners for making this summer possible.

We cannot state how much fun we had this summer and how much we learned. Culture is everywhere and exists in both our cultural artifcats and ceremonies and it also exists in our people and our communities. Our greatest strength is our people and when they come together as a community we are as strong as ever. Although some of our meetings were modified we learned so much and most of all we learned that we created our own cultural community here in our AIR Program.

Thank you to all our community partners, mentors, parents, and San Diego State University Dept. of American Studies for their support.