cultural diversity

Yearly Ritual Focused On Foster Care Helping Native Families Heal In Iowa

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War Eagle, a Yankton Sioux chief in the 1830s, was a friend to the white man. Specifically, to the fur trappers who traded with the Yankton Sioux, Santee Sioux, Winnebago and other Native people at the confluence of the Missouri and Big Sioux rivers just outside Sioux City, in the northwest corner of what is now Iowa. But War Eagle’s hospitality and desire for peace eventually paved the way for white settlers to move in and push Native people out. Today, a monument to War Eagle, or Wambdi Okicize, stands on a bluff overlooking the Big Sioux River where the chief and his daughters were buried more than 150 years ago. It is a sacred place, locals say, from which one can see the expansive prairie that is South Dakota and Nebraska.

campus hate

Iowa College Campuses Respond To Bias- And Hate-Related Incidences

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As soon as students get off Highway 30 and arrive at Iowa State University, in Ames, they are greeted with bright yellow banners saying, “welcome,” in multiple different languages. This is just one thing Julian Neely, a journalism and communication major from Des Moines and the 2018-19 Student Government president, said the university does to promote inclusivity and reach out to students of different backgrounds.

college diversity

Low Numbers, Low Awareness For Support Programs Dampen University Of Iowa Experience For Many Minority Students

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The University of Iowa has services and programming to help African American and Latino students feel welcome but a lot of those students don’t know about them, students at a Thursday night IowaWatch/KCRG-TV9 public forum on diversity at the university said. Meantime, these students struggle to exist in a predominantly white campus, African American and Latino students at the forum said. “When you think of universities, you think of white spaces,” Kimberly Chexnayder, a senior from Kansas City, Missouri, said. “It’s so hard for white people to think about their own privileges.” ?

The Politics of Fear: What are we so afraid of?

Hear The IowaWatch Connection Report: Immigration And Fear

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The clock is ticking down toward expiration of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, provisions. At issue — what to do with so-called DREAMers, people who were brought to the United States from other countries at an early age without documentation but who since have been educated in U.S. schools and consider this country to be home. Madeleine McCormick, a fourth-year student majoring in digital media at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, reports on the topic of immigration by talking with police officers, lawyers, DACA recipients and DREAMers.