IllumiNative

Background

IllumiNative emerged from the Reclaiming Native Truth project, a public opinion research initiative co-led by Crystal Echo Hawk through her consulting firm, Echo Hawk Consulting. The project documented what it characterized as widespread public ignorance about Native Americans, finding that roughly 80 percent of Americans had little to no knowledge about contemporary Native communities. Echo Hawk established IllumiNative within the New Venture Fund‘s fiscal sponsorship structure in 2018 to translate those research findings into advocacy campaigns. As a fiscally sponsored project of the NVF rather than an independent organization, IllumiNative operated with limited public financial transparency. ^{6 7 5}

Activities

Voter Mobilization and the Indigenous Futures Survey

IllumiNative was a lead sponsor of the Indigenous Futures Survey (IFS), a multi-year polling project first conducted in October 2020 in partnership with the Center for Native American Youth and the Native Organizers Alliance. The survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, gathered responses from 6,460 Indigenous people between June and August 2020, making it one of the largest such studies on record. Its findings were released weeks before the 2020 presidential election and were used to inform get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in competitive states; Echo Hawk later described conducting phone and text banking in Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada ahead of the election, drawing directly on IFS data about voter priorities. ^{7 8}

The survey continued through subsequent election cycles, with IllumiNative describing the IFS findings as having informed GOTV and policy advocacy strategies through the 2022 midterms and the 2024 Presidential election. ^{9 10}

Sports Team Name and Mascot Campaigns

IllumiNative sponsored petitions and social media campaigns calling for the renaming of professional sports teams, including the NFL team formerly known as the Washington Redskins and the Kansas City Chiefs. In its Super Bowl LV talking points document, the organization compared the use of Native American mascots to tactics it attributed to slave owners and Nazis. ^{11 12 13}

Dissolution

In late 2025, Crystal Echo Hawk announced that IllumiNative would cease operations by year’s end, citing shifts in philanthropy and a changing political and media environment. The organization described its closure as a strategic “sunset” rather than a failure, stating it intended to redistribute its remaining assets through grantmaking to Native-led nonprofits. ³