Blackfeet Literacy Project

left to right: Actor Mark Reed, Maria Ferrara, Jeff Butler, Harold Dusty Bull, Kinder Hunt, Actor Steve Reevis, Macile Reevis, Actor Geroge Randall, Toni Running Fisher, Actor Saginaw Grant, Author Karen Kay In January of 1999, Toni Running Fisher and Harold Dusty Bull, from the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, MT; arrived here where I live in Los Angeles to begin training on a literacy project. Together, Toni Harold and myself are working in conjunction with many other people here in Los Angeles and on the Blackfeet reservation, to raise the standard of reading and education on their reservation.

Toni Running Fisher, Karen Kay, Maria Ferrara, Harold Dusty BullHere is our story…

In May of 1998, while on tour, I met Toni Running Fisher, who was then President of the student body of the college on the Blackfeet Reservation. After giving my husband and myself a tour of the college, Toni, my husband and myself began to talk at some length about education. I told Toni that I would love to help her people in any way that I could and asked her how the students were doing in general.

It was then that I discovered that the students had recently been given placement tests and that the average reading skills of the young people were below average. Toni asked me if I knew of anything which might help. I told her that I might and arrived back home to do some investigation.

In September of 1998, on invitation, Toni and two other representatives from the reservation arrived in Los Angeles to tour the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project. This project, under the direction of Kinder Hunt and her husband, Jeff Butler, has been so successful, that is has grown–by word of mouth–from only one small office into international status. And in only two years.

H.E.L.P. volunteer Kelly; Steve Reevis, Maria Ferrara, Harold Dusty Bull, Karen Kay

Saginal Grant and Toni Running FisherFree to anyone who walks in its doors, it utilizes mentor/tutor programs and the universal Study Technology of L. Ron Hubbard which teaches the person not what to study, but how. If one were to tour the center, he would find many different sorts of peoples and nationalities, as well, as completely divergent age groups, all talking and coaching and helping one another. One could find a grandmother tutoring a youth, or a youth tutoring a grandmother. The only thing that is necessary to learn at the center is the desire to do so. A person is never forced to be there. Everyone who is there is there because he wants to be.

And daily the project accomplishes its goal of returning to the individual the ability to become an independent learner, self-sufficient and confident that he can study anything that he applies himself to, a powerful and completely necessary skill in this, our modern society.