Dr. Alex Red Corn, Coordinator for Indigenous Partnerships and Co-Chair Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance at Kansas State University, is the 2023 recipient of the O’Brien Award for Human Rights Education.
The Human Rights Educators USA (HRE USA) announced the award on Dec. 5, according to a K-State press release.
Established in 2015 in memory of Edward O’Brien, pioneer human rights educator, the O’Brien Awards annually honor outstanding contributions to human rights education in the United States. The 2023 award was presented to Dr. Red Corn on Dec. 7.
Alex Red Corn, 2023 O’Brien Award Winner
Dr. Alex Red Corn, Osage, is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Kansas State University (K-State), which sits on lands 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, according to the release.
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 collaboratively created the Osage Nation Educational Leadership Academy, in which he helped 16 reservation-based Osage students receive their master’s degrees from KSU, 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.’” According to the release, 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.”
