Bill Hall (Tlingit)
Bill Hall is a Tlingit Indian of the Raven Clan from a small fishing village in Southeast Alaska called Hoonah.
Bill is a Community Advocate for the Native American Community on HIV, a CAB member of the Equity in Research Group through Seattle Children’s Hospital, as well as a CAB member of the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at Harborview Medical. His main area of focus is the stigma of HIV in the Native Community, and he speaks to this at meetings at the Urban Indian Health Institute, conferences, and open forums.
He has dealt with cancer twice now. The first being Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and currently he's at the end of treatment for Prostate Cancer. He fully believes that the way to get through cancer is to believe in my mind, and in my heart that I will get through this. Anyone dealing with a life-threatening illness should make “Love, Medicine & Miracles” by Bernie Siegel their Bible. It is an amazing book that paved the way for the mindset that he has not only had as a person living with AIDS, but a cancer survivor as well.
Jenny Martin (Cherokee Nation Citizen)
Jenny Martin is an enrolled Citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She was born and raised in western Washington. After graduating from high school she moved to Bellingham, WA to attend Northwest Indian College (NWIC), a Tribal College on the Lummi Nation Reservation. She completed her degree from NWIC in 2019 with a BS in Native Environmental Science, with a special emphasis in ethnobotany and Indigenous knowledge systems. Jenny wanted to continue her studies as well as connect more to the Irish side of her heritage so she moved to Ireland and completed an MA in Culture and Colonialism while studying the Irish language (as well as Cherokee (Tsalagi) language online) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her thesis focused on traditions of Indigenous intellectualism and Indigenous pedagogies. Understanding how culture, language and non-human relations influence Indigenous health and sense of self is an ongoing passion for Jenny. She currently works at the Lummi Tribal Health Clinic as the Healing Spirits Gardener through the Diabetes Prevention Program.
