dream warriors
Dream Warriors is a collective of Indigenous Artists who believe in pursuing passions, dreams, and gifts to better loved ones and communities while also uplifting others. Dream Warriors started as an arts collective in 2015 and is now moving into a new phase as a nonprofit organization. The Dream Warriors nonprofit will offer services around arts, culture, generational wealth building, and power building to foster healing, sustainability, and growth.
Their new organization will be based in Minneapolis, MN, with a focus of providing programming for both urban and reservation based Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. Dream Warriors artists will be established across the country to provide youth and communities with access to cultural, arts, financial literacy, health/wellness, and food sovereignty programming.
Dream Warriors will cultivate safe spaces that facilitate empowerment for Indigenous artists and the communities they serve. In this way, Dream Warriors will uphold a sober and secure place for any and all members of the community.
Paul Wenell Jr. – Project Lead
Paul Wenell, Jr. (Tall Paul) is an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota and was born and raised in south Minneapolis. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2010 with a B.A. in American Indian Studies and a minor in Sociology. He was a full-time youth worker for the Division of Indian Work from 2011-2017, where he primarily worked in school and after school programming at a Native American Magnet school called Anishinabe Academy. In 2017, Paul pivoted to being a full-time artist, inspirational speaker and workshop facilitator as an active member of the Dream Warriors artist collective. Since then he has traveled extensively with the group, hosting performances, speaking engagements, workshops, community building initiatives and more.
Tanaya Winder – Advisory Council
Tanaya is an author, musician, poet, motivational speaker, and educator who comes from an intertribal lineage of Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, and Duckwater Shoshone Nations, where she is an enrolled citizen. In addition to serving as a Board Director for InteRoots and the Community Liaison for the Where Warriors Wake project, Tanaya served as the Director of the CU Boulder’s Upward Bound program for 11 years. She is also the founder of Dream Warriors Management and cofounder of As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a literary magazine publishing works by Indigenous women and women of color.
Dr. Lyla June Johnston – Advisory Council
Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, author, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
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