Appalachian Community Fund on behalf of the Appalachian Rekindling Project

The Appalachian Rekindling Project will utilize In These Mountains Infrastructure funds to invest in infrastructure to support cultural exchange through Indigenous-led site visits to successful land rematriation, and cultural preservation spaces stewarded by Indigenous and First Nations communities across the US and Canada. These resources would facilitate participatory research activities including co-creating conceptual frameworks connecting renewed reciprocal relationships to lands and waters while redressing cultural losses and equity gaps facing dispossessed groups. Additional funds would support gathering qualitative data through hosting virtual and in-person talking circles, focus groups and arts-based inquiry with intergenerational knowledge holders in Appalachian Indigenous communities to validate framework themes addressing cultural losses. Investments would also build communications infrastructure to responsibly disseminate insights, including online interactive storytelling spaces curating community narratives, hosting public webinars with movement leaders advancing structural transformations, coordinating meetings with funders and other institutions to compel investment shifts, and designing participatory monitoring tools tracking future shifts in policy and perception.

The Project will explicitly center pathways for healing and restoration across Appalachia's vibrant yet vulnerable Native arts, cultural, and storytelling traditions endangered by enduring harms from land theft and forced removals. This initiative will uplift connections between renewing Indigenous stewardship over dispossessed ancestral places and profound revitalization of community knowledge flows and the renewal of creative traditions.