Cheyenne Kippenberger said she grew up on the chattier side. Her mom joked she could sit next to a wall and get it to talk back, and she wasn’t reprimanded for it.

She said her mom encouraged her to use her voice – a trait that landed her on the TEDx stage in September. Her mom, Dr. Susan Kippenberger, introduced values that helped her remember the importance of her voice.

“To think that if my mom didn’t encourage me to keep talking and instill that secure feeling of your voice matters, you should speak up for yourself, it’s okay to talk. … If [my mom] didn’t do that, I don’t know if I would be here doing what I’m doing now,” Kippenberger said. “I’ve always been secure in my voice, but then it was just finding where it could be best utilized.”

Before giving a TEDx talk, Kippenberger was Miss Florida Seminole in 2018-2019 and Miss Indian World 2019-2021. She presented her talk on Sept. 24 at the NSU Art Museum auditorium.

She said everyone has their own gifts and purposes in life and hers is the ability to speak, talk and connect with people.

“I think back to being a student that wouldn’t shut the hell up, and I just gave a freaking TEDx speech. … There’s a beauty to that and going through self-discovery and homing in on your skills, on your talents, and building them up for yourself,” Kippenberger said.

After pursuing nonprofit work following her time as Miss Indian World, Cheyenne decided to look into policy in Florida. In the future, she said she wants to go to law school, and she is currently doing an environmental policy and management program. Now, she has a consulting firm through which she does public speaking, among other things.

“It’s cultural and historical competency, really bringing that lens of Indigenous peoples, our traditional knowledge systems, whether that’s ecologically speaking, politically speaking, socially speaking. At the root of it, I tell people that I consult in cultural and historical competency of Native and Indigenous people with a specialization in the Seminole Tribe,” Kippenberger said.

She was approached to give a TEDx talk because someone remembered her from a land acknowledgement she did a couple of years ago.

“I was terrified. Even, I think, with these really, really cool things under my belt, and being only 28, I still feel like I go through a lot of imposter syndrome,” Kippenberger said.

The TEDx programming was in accompaniment with the Delphi Neonatal Innovation Conference. At first, she said she was boxing her talk into relating to medicine and neonatal care. After learning she didn’t have to cover those topics, she scratched everything she had so far. She considered her audience at the conference and that her talk would be online and reach other audiences, Native and non-Native.

“It was really led by love for my upbringing, love for my community, love for our lands, love for our cultural ways, tradition, stories, etc. … I think that Native people, … what’s ingrained into us is this idea of legacy,” Kippenberger said. “We come from a legacy of resilience and resourcefulness and beautiful deep love for the land and culture and community. And then bringing that into who I am now. What do I want to leave behind from that? What the hell do I want to share with the world?”

During the drafting phase of her talk, she said humanity and climate change were coming to mind.

“People need to know that we all have a responsibility to take care of the planet. And not just to educate ourselves on why we’re experiencing what we’re experiencing now with climate change,” Kippenberger said. “But, recognizing that we can focus on putting the blame somewhere, or we can all come together and really come up with ideas to live sustainable lives in alignment with the earth and recognizing that this extractive kind of western view of the world is why it’s dying, and why we’ve like gotten to the point that we’re at.”

Her brainstorming came together as her TEDx talk titled, “Honoring Our Roots: Connection, Community, and Nature,” which is on the TEDx YouTube page.

“I thought about all the things that I’m constantly like preaching in a way, like in all of my speeches, and I somehow felt like I was able to encompass all of it into this really short TEDx speech. Community, culture, loving the land, respecting the land, [and] reciprocity. The implementation and respect for traditional Indigenous knowledge systems in practices as well. Respecting cultural differences too.

And what does exchange amongst generations, educational backgrounds, cultures, countries, etc, like, what does that look like when it’s actually grounded in respect and understanding? And how that same idea, that same value being mirrored onto the relationship with the land and recognizing that it is a reciprocal relationship with the land, with the natural world, the physical world. It was really beautiful. There was a lot of heart that got put into it,” Kippenberger said.

Kippenberger does public speaking events often and all over the country. She said one of the most common talks she gives is the “101 of Native history.” This includes a basic timeline of colonization, what Native Americans went through in the U.S. and highlights the fact that within the 574 federally recognized tribes in America, there is a lot of diversity.

“There’s the differences of culture, traditional clothing, language, ceremony, etc., and sometimes it’s really hard for people to grasp that each tribe had its own historical experience,” Kippenberger said. “That’s usually where I come in, and I share about our tribe’s experience in Florida with the U.S. government, the Indian Removal Act, the three Seminole wars, the attempted takeover and forced relocation. The violence that takes place, I think, is also really hard for people to grasp, and sit with, because it’s uncomfortable.”

She does question and answer sessions as well, and she said the truth of her responses get challenged occasionally.

“It’s hard because you so badly want to just get to the nitty gritty main issues that we’re fighting for, right? You know, human rights, respect, political representation, media representation. But you’re having to go through this preliminary process of literally rehumanizing yourself and our community at large,” Kippenberger said.

Kippenberger said she enjoys educating and raising awareness, though it’s emotionally and intellectually taxing work. She tries to be mindful that not everyone was raised the same way with comprehensive historical education, she said.

“You can’t go into this type of work thinking that you’re just going to be, like, shaming everybody else. That doesn’t work. … You have to meet people where they’re at. You have to be graceful,” Kippenberger said.

The success of her tribe in the face of challenges, historically and in the present, makes her a very proud person, she said. She encourages people to give back to their communities in their own way.

“Our job is to find our gift, to find our lane, to find our purpose, and just run with it. I genuinely believe that our ancestors would have wanted us to just be happy and to thrive the way that we have. There is no bigger success in the face of colonization than it is to just be happy and successful,” Kippenberger said.