Alyce Sadongei

Alyce Sadongei BA ’81 writes: “I was recently named to OZY media’s list of Native Americans Changing the World. Since graduating from L&C, I was the executive director of a national nonprofit Native American arts service organization for several years. During that time, I was also a grants reviewer and chair for funding panels at the National Endowment for the Arts. After that, I worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Museum Programs and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). My role there was to develop the training programs for tribal museums and cultural centers. Some of the programs I started there are still in place, most notably the intern program. I left Washington, D.C., and moved to Tucson and have been working at the University of Arizona. I was the assistant curator for Native American relations at the Arizona State Museum. I also wrote a grant in partnership with the Arizona State Library that targeted tribal museums, archives, and libraries that ran for eight years. After that, I started working at the American Indian Language Development Institute, also at the University of Arizona. I am currently codirecting a project funded by the Doris Duke Foundation to digitize and return to tribes a collection of oral history recordings that were collected during the 1970s. For this project, I am working again on behalf of the Arizona State Museum. Along the way, I have served on numerous boards and commissions, most recently as commissioner for the Tucson Pima County Historical Commission. Also, I’ve had many speaking engagements over the years at various conferences and meetings. The most recent are keynotes at the International Council of Museums and OCLC, a global library collective. I wrote poetry while at L&C, and, after graduation, I was included in Harper’s Anthology of 20th-Century Native American Poetry. Even though I have not published a lot of poetry since then, my poems have been published in French and Hungarian poetry books over the last five years or so. In 1991, I received the Outstanding Young Alumna Award from L&C. I have been married to Phil Cash Cash, an Oregonian from the Umatilla Indian reservation near Pendleton for 28 years. No children, but we have had some wonderful cats! All this with a BA from Lewis & Clark College!”