Awaasúua Ítche/Good Home: Importance of Returning

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Please join us for the first Property, Territory, and Sovereignty on Indigenous Land workshop meeting of 2025. Apsáalooke people find their home at the crossroads of the Big Horn Mountains and the rolling sea of the Great Plains. Using the idea of home, LaFrance will braid together the strands of dissecting the true history of Apsáalooke lands, the importance of fulfilling the responsibility of returning home, and ways of creating opportunity to thrive where she is rooted. 

Co-sponsored by Stanford Stanford Law School


 

About the Speaker

JoRee LaFrance, also known as Iichiinmáatchileesh/Fortunate with Horses, comes from the Apsáalooke/Crow Nation in Montana. She is Greasy Mouth and is a child of the Ties the Bundle Clan. JoRee holds a BA in Earth Sciences and Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and is, now, an aspiring water scientist studying surface water quality in the Little Bighorn River watershed as a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Arizona. As an environmental science scholar, she was an Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellow, Aspen Institute Forum on Women and girls SOAR Fellow, UofA CALS Impact Leader Fellow, CLIMAS Environment and Society Fellow, Carson Scholar, National GEM Fellow, Sloan Scholar, NSF NRT Indigenous Food, Energy, Water Security, and Sovereignty (Indige-FEWSS) Fellow. On top of her research, JoRee co-manages the Ilíiaitchik: Indigenous Correspondents Program and the Biawaatchaache Collective that she founded. JoRee also works as a team leader for the Apsáalooke Energy Justice Project (AEJP) with the Plenty Doors Community Development Corporation on the Crow Reservation. JoRee focuses on the Apsáalooke landscape ranging from water quality, energy justice, to women empowerment. She enjoys being a community organizer/advocate, hanging out with the elders and youth in her family, riding horses, playing with her two dogs, beading, and running a few games of basketball.