Harrington Receives Bush Foundation Fellowship
Mille Lacs Band member Bradley Harrington is one of 20 Minnesota community leaders, and four from out of state, to receive an annual fellowship from the prestigious Bush Foundation. The winners were selected out of nearly 500 applicants from Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and 23 Native American nations in the three states. Each recipient will receive up to $100,000 to fund leadership opportunities and further their education and training.
Harrington has a vision to combine contemporary digital resources with traditional nature-based Anishinaabe culture. Harrington has not been known away from his past coming from a life of chemicals and crime, including two stints in prison. Serving his latest sentence in 2009 through 2012, he made the decision to change his path moving in a different direction as he began to seek knowledge of his ancestors and traditions. He started reading books, and studying his culture. When he was released in 2013, he began taking courses in community leadership and studying the Ojibwe language, culture, ceremonies ,and history.
Language is a critical component to traditional Anishinaabe lifestyle. Harrington’s vision is to integrate Ojibwe language into interactive apps that include speech recognition and artificial intelligence technology to further the learning process. His vision is geared for the young and also the young at heart who do not know life without a cellphone or device.
“Technological resources for culture will need to compete with what’s out there for the contemporary society,” Harrington said. “If we follow our spirits, learn with the news apps on our own time, we will get creative and share with each other.”
Harrington said he is humbled to know there is an organization such as the Bush Foundation who is willing to give resources to “somebody like me who grew up on a reservation, spent time in prison and jail, has been chemically dependent and gone through treatment, but yet they see something in me that maybe I don’t see yet and help me lift myself up higher and to be able to build others up also.”
He said he missed some points in his life, like getting a college education, and he has plans to further his own schooling with help from the Bush Foundation fellowship. He also has a vision to trace the migration story from Mille Lacs to the east coast and gather the story of how the Anishinaabe got here to better understand where Ojibwe people came from in order to share his knowledge with others.
Other Minnesotans who received the fellowships were Kaltun Abdikarani, New Brighton; Jaime Arsenault, Bemidji; Rose Chu, Little Canada; Prince Corbett, St. Paul; Comfort Dondo, Plymouth; Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, St. Paul; Rebekah Dunlap, Esko; Mike Elliott, Brooklyn Center; Devon Gilchrist, Minneapolis; Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, Richfield; Abdiaziz Ibrahim, St. Paul; Rania Johnson, Woodbury; Ifrah Mansour, Woodbury; Hoang Murphy, St. Paul; Rahel Nardos, St. Louis Park; Shirley Nordrum, LaPorte; Artika Tyner, St. Paul; Pahoua Yang, Cottage Grove; and Pang Yang, New Hope. Out of state fellowship recipients include Tashina Banks Rama, Pine Ridge, S.D.; Erin Griffin, Sisseton, S.D.; Janice Richards, Porcupine, S.D.; and Lori Walsh, Sioux Falls.