Board Profile:

N. Bird Runningwater

Bird Runningwater is born of the Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache peoples, and was reared on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. He currently serves as the interim executive director of the Fund of the Four Directions. Based in New York City, the Fund focuses its grantmaking to Indigenous-controlled organizations that work to revitalize the languages and lifeways of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Bird also currently serves as the chair of the board for Native Americans in Philanthropy, a national membership organization of Native people who serve on the staffs or boards of grantmaking institutions.

Prior to joining the Fund of the Four Directions, Bird worked with the Ford Foundation in the Education, Media, Arts and Culture Program where he helped build and manage funding initiatives focusing on specific issues in the Media, Arts and Culture fields. The emphases of those initiatives included: expanding arts and cultural programs that play a role in public discourse on important civic issues; reducing systemic media bias against racial and ethnic minority communities; expanding efforts to strengthen the infrastructure that supports non-commercial television, radio and other public service media; and, strengthening Native media programs and institutions that combine web-based technologies with other media practices.

Bird currently serves as an advisor to the Sundance Institute's Native Film Program, as an advisor to the First Peoples Fund's Community Spirit Awards, and on the National Editorial Advisory Board for YES! A Journal of Positive Futures. A recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's National Fellowship in Public Policy and International Affairs, Bird is an alumni of Americans for Indian Opportunity's American Indian Ambassadors Program. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma with degrees in Journalism and Native American Studies, he received his Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Bird serves as a contributing writer to Native Americas and YES! magazines, and the Progressive Media Project. He has been a featured lecturer and speaker at Marquette University, the University of Hartford, Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and Close Up on C-SPAN. Most recently, he was featured and profiled in The Color of Our Future, a book written by ABC News correspondent Farai Chideya.

When we asked Bird what his work with NAPT and Native media meant to him, here's what he had to say. "My premise for involvement in the media and Native media fields is to support Native media artists and to ensure the accuracy of the portrayal of Native people in the media. As consumers of popular culture, we as Indigenous peoples exist in a critical era. So much of what has been portrayed on film and television have been the thoughts and perceptions of what others expect us to be.

"As we prepare to enter the next millennium, we will have to determine whether media will become an integral part of our efforts to revitalize our languages and lifeways. Media can be a powerful tool if we embrace it and allow it to reinforce our traditions and languages, rather than replacing them. There are great opportunities for Native media artists to become the storytellers and the conveyors of culture in our communities, and NAPT has the opportunity and resources to shape a movement that will have a strong impact on the media field and society in general. By shifting the source of the narrative, we can influence a shift in the consciousness of popular culture, and change the perception of the American Indian."