(Blackfeet/Red River Métis)
Community Engagement Coordinator
Iko'tsimiskimaki "Ekoo" Beck (they/she) is Blackfeet, Red River Métis, German American, and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe of Montana. Ekoo has worked as a community organizer for Montana Women Vote, Western Native Voice, and Montana Native Vote. Ekoo grew up in Missoula (the settler occupied homelands of the Bitterroot Salish) and spent much of their life on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. They graduated from Harvard University with an honors degree in Social Studies, writing their senior thesis “The Black Robes must be to them in the place of their wise woman” on the forced reformation of gender and Blackfeet cosmology at the Holy Family Mission Boarding School on the Blackfeet Reservation. They are a descendant of many boarding school survivors who attended Holy Family Mission (MT), St Peters (MT), Fort Shaw Industrial School (MT), St. Ignatius Mission (MT), and Chemawa Indian School (OR) during the assimilative period. Ekoo currently resides in Gaakaabikaang (Minneapolis) with their kitty cat Natáyo.