Lannesse Baker is an Anishinaabe national public health leader, strategic systems thinker, and relational leader with 20 years of experience serving urban and Tribal American Indian and Alaska Native communities. An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, she serves as Executive Vice President of the National Indian Health Board and previously served as Associate Officer of Public Health at the Urban Indian Health Institute. Her work builds the capacity of organizations, communities, and people to lead transformational change, with particular expertise in maternal and child health.

She advances community-centered, culturally attuned, and strengths-based approaches that recognize Indigenous communities as possessing the knowledge, resources, and capacity to create solutions grounded in their own ways of knowing. Her national influence spans funding, research, and policy. She secured a competitive $5 million grant addressing the maternal health crisis among American Indian and Alaska Native women and serves on the Listening to Mothers Advisory Council, helping advance a national maternal health survey that included the first-ever oversample of American Indian and Alaska Native women. She also contributed to an expert working group convened by U.S. Senator Ben Ray Luján that developed five landmark reports outlining Native maternal health policy solutions.

She holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Minnesota and is a PhD candidate in Indigenous Health at the University of North Dakota. Grounded in matriarchal values, her leadership is driven by ensuring Native women, infants, and children survive and thrive for generations to come.

Abra is Iñupiaq from Utqiagvik, Alaska. Abra is a Birthworker, Doula and co-founder of the Alaska Native Birthworkers Community, a role through which she advances reproductive justice while serving Indigenous birthing people. She serves as a Core Committee Member with the State of Alaska Maternal Child Death Review. In this role, she brings knowledge of Alaska Native culture as well as lived experience with rural healthcare and rural emergency response systems.

She has held many roles, including managing the Pre-maternal home for Utqiagvik and the surrounding North Slope communities. She has also worked as a 911 dispatcher in the Arctic. Abra currently resides in Dgheyey Kaq’, also known as Anchorage, on Dena’ina land.

Tess Abrahamson-Richards, MPH (she/her) is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe and has lived here

in Seattle on Coast Salish territory for the past 17 years. A lifelong urban Native, she was born in London, England before spending most of her childhood in Spokane on her maternal ancestral homelands. Tess is a mother of two and is currently pursuing her PhD in Social Welfare at the University of Washington where her research is focused on Indigenous reproductive justice,holistic family wellbeing, and access to parental leave. Prior to joining Hummingbird, Tess spent 12 years working in Indigenous evaluation and research roles in university and private sector settings. In those positions, she served on the leadership team for a multisite evaluation ofTribal early childhood home visiting programs and led and contributed to a variety of other Indigenous early childhood, higher education, and public health focused projects. Tess is passionate about evaluation that centers participants’ voices, Indigenous methods, community action, stories, and strengths. She is grateful to our local Indigenous community for all of the beautiful, nurturing, creative, resistant and reclaiming spaces we share in and the healing legacies we continue to build across generations.