2023 O’Brien Award Winner: Dr. Alex Red Corn
Dr. Alex Red Corn is a citizen of the Osage Nation in what is now Oklahoma. He is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Kansas State University (K-State) in what is now the state of Kansas, historically home to many Native nations. Dr. Red Corn specializes in teaching qualitative research courses and shares his research about the needs of American Indians in education in the university setting and well beyond.
In addition to his full-time university position, he serves as Executive Director of the Kansas Association for Native American Education (KANAE), whose mission “is to support, promote, and advocate for the unique educational needs of American Indian/Alaska Native students, families, nations and educators in Kansas.” He has collaboratively created the Osage Nation Educational Leadership Academy, and he serves as the K-State Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance co-chair. He is also the Chair of the new Kansas Advisory Council for Indigenous Education Working Group (KACIE-WG).
Dr. Red Corn’s passion for advocacy and education has taken him across Kansas as well as across the country. He has helped current and future educators reexamine curriculum and resources to dispel myths and reframe thinking by including past and present Native American contexts. His work clearly reflects his belief in education as a means for social change. He has said, “Once people start learning and peeling back the labels, that’s when the actual change starts to occur.”
One nominator said of him, “He brings together communities to learn [and] urges educators to move beyond land acknowledgements to taking action: ‘Do you actually want to improve learning about Indigenous peoples and nations? Or are you just trying to check a diversity box? To go beyond the acknowledgement and make them meaningful, we need to have action to go with it.’”
Dr. Red Corn’s own words best summarize his dedication to this work: “Just as our ancestors have always done, we are persistent in asserting our rights to exist as a people. Our persistence must triumph [over] the pernicious status quo we are constantly enduring, because our future depends on it. So we press on.”
HRE USA is proud to honor Alex Red Corn for his commitment and service to human rights education in the United States.
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