MAKE A
NEW WAY

Make a New Way Foundation was established with one purpose—To create resources fostering individual, intergenerational, and communal healing in two communities that survived massacres, the Greenwood District in Tulsa and Cheyenne communities in western Oklahoma and Montana. To date, no local, state, or national effort to promote healing has been offered. Our leaders have responded as an addict; blind to what is visible, deaf to what is spoken, using defense mechanisms of denial, suppression, and rationalization, and when pushed to respond, projection, gaslighting those wanting to be heard as if

it is they who do not understand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though the trajectory of trauma through generations, profoundly visible, continues taking a heavy toll, we look the other way.

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In 2023 and 2024, Make a New Way Foundation received a small grant from Ascension St John Foundation in Tulsa to create a Children’s System of Care, centered on the Greenwood District. The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services entered into contracts with five small behavioral health agencies focused on serving the community, to create a healing network of providers. At this time when Manifest Destiny is rising again as justification for harm created in forming our nation; diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are being hollowed out; history is being rewritten; and healing is taking a further back seat to punishment, our efforts are met with unrelenting resistance.

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In 2025, the call of the principal chief of the Cheyenne during the Indian Wars period, Wohehiv (Morning Star), will continue to inspire us. When he helped shape treaties, he spoke of a time when there would be a coming together of people from different cultures, shared ways, and each would draw strength from the other. He called upon his people to Make a New Way of Life preparing for a shared world. His faith in the United States government has not yet been fulfilled but the promise has not yet been

extinguished.