Marcella Gilbert is a Lakota and Dakota community organizer with a focus on food sovereignty and cultural revitalization. Her mother, Madonna Thunder Hawk was a leader of the American Indian Movement, and together they fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Their activism is highlighted in the Peabody nominated documentary film Warrior Women (2018), which explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.

Marcella Gilbert will discuss her involvement in a recent oral history project documenting the history of the We Will Remember Survival School (WWRSS). Founded in 1974 in Rapid City, this Indian-led school was envisaged as a space for cultural revitalization and as an alternative to mainstream education. WWRSG centered Indigenous knowledge, culture and history, and students practiced self-determination through collectively building their curriculum, and developing their own pedagogy and learning program. As a student of We Will Remember Survival School, Marcella participated to protests and occupations across Indian country. She was also part of a contingent of students who represented their nations at the first UN Conference on Indigenous people in Geneva in 1977, and went to Cuba in 1978 for celebrations of the UN’s International Year of the Child. During this event, Marcella will reflect on her own WWRSG experiences of transforming and decolonizing education, as well her the Warrior Women Project’s ambition to build upon it’s legacy in sharing Indigenous histories of resistance, survival and empowerment.