11/26/2022
Nathan Balk King is a senior at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He won a Diller award in 2020. King is half-Jewish and half-Rosebud Sioux.
In high school, he attended a national model U.N. conference in New York City, and noticed a startling lack of Native American representation.
“If you go to this conference,” he said, “either your school has a lot of money or your school fund-raised a lot of money. A lot of these schools were these big, international private schools. The people for whom we were discussing solutions to improve their lives were not part of the conversation and probably wouldn’t be.”
This was particularly poignant because, when King was eight years old, his mother took him to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigienous Issues.
Nathan Balk King Nathan Balk King (Courtesy photo)
“In the back of my mind, since I was really young, I associated the United Nations with a platform for Native Americans to discuss global indigenous issues. When I was at the model U.N., I didn’t notice any other Native American students or specifically indigenous delegations there. If someone were to do a U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues simulation, there wouldn’t have been indigenous people actually there in the conversation,” he said.
In response, he started Model United Nations: Indigenous (MUNI) to empower indigenous communities by giving Native high school students the tools, impetus and confidence to participate in public policy and human rights advocacy, from the community level to the global stage.
He recruited 12 delegates and fundraised to send them to the next year’s National High School Model U.N. conference. The International Model United Nations Association (IMUNA) endorsed MUNI and included the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at NHSMUN for the first time in its 45-year history.
Now, MUNI offers an online education service for Native youth to learn about indigenous human rights, the United Nations and Model United Nations, and hosted a virtual MUN: Indigenous conference due to the pandemic. The Diller funds will help fund mentors to keep the program going as King continues his physics studies beyond college.
“There’s something missing when you’re talking about benefiting certain people’s lives or trying to fix a certain issue that people experience; there’s something lost, when you don’t include those people who’ve experienced it firsthand,” he said.
“The upward political mobility of indigenous peoples is very difficult, and there aren’t a lot of venues for it. If you’re an indigenous high school student and you want to become a politician, or you want to become a world leader at the United Nations, there are not a lot of doors open for that to happen, especially if you’re from the reservation, you’re in a poor area, or you don’t go to as to a nicer school.”
As a child, King couldn’t afford to attend a Hebrew studies program after school, but the community provided him with opportunities to participate for free or reduced cost. Now, he’s paying it forward.
“The value of education is beyond money,” he said.
Ariel Beck and Nathan Balk King created initiatives to launch female entrepreneurs and Native American activists.
