Our Tribe


We are the women and men who feel that the loss of ancient cultures would be a loss for our whole world. There is wisdom in the languages, art, stories and songs of the tribal people who weave the fabric of our being-ness, those who once lived freely in nature and who need our help to preserve the precious pieces of their cultures. We may live more fully by listening, feeling and belonging to the stories of the indigenous people of the world.

 
Janis Salin, President

Janis Salin

President

Janis is a retired corporate attorney who served as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Tetra Tech, Inc. after leaving private practice. In addition to her role with TTF, she is active in the local non-profit community through her membership on the Boards of the Carpinteria Children’s Project, CALM and Prepare Kids for Life. She is also a member of the CALM Auxiliary Executive Committee as Vice President of Governance, and recently co-founded Friends of the United Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Barbara County. In addition, Janis volunteers for the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara (serving on the Governance Committee), the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. She earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Maya Shaw Gale, Secretary

Téana David

Vice President

With a passion for creating at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and social justice, Téana David served as the director of Deepak HomeBase in New York City where she designed, curated, and produced a year-round transformational event series featuring hundreds of authors and activists. Currently the co-director of Circle of Wisdom, she conducts video interviews with wisdom-keepers from many traditions to make their knowledge available to the next generations. Recent producing credits through her media company, Wise Planet Media, include livestream events Artists United for Amazonia, No Vote Left Behind, and the Protect Our Planet’s Vital Organs film which played at the Washington Mall throughout Earth Week, 2021. She also serves as the co-director of the annual Shift Your World Film Festival and is a founding member of Artists For Amazonia, engaging the entertainment industry with critical issues impacting the Amazon Rainforest..

Holly Sherwin

Holly Sherwin

sECRETARY


Holly Sherwin has spent her career working in the environmental field as an educator,
advocate, author and artist.
She began as a naturalist and boat guide in southwest Florida, then travelled to Nashville
where she worked in film for the PBS show “Tennessee’s Wildside”.
After her move to Santa Barbara, Holly became involved with SB Channelkeeper as well as the
Community Environmental Council.
In her work she has always encouraged others to strengthen their relationship with the earth,
it’s creatures and sacred plants.
Sherwin believes that “We as humans have the least experience with how to live on this earth,
and thus the most to learn, and so must look to our teachers among the plants and creatures
with which we share this planet”.

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Margaret Loncki

Treasurer

Margaret is the Director of Operations at Certis Capital Management, a multi-family office primarily specializing in non-correlated alternative investments. Margaret oversees all aspects of operations and directs efforts to continually improve and customize Certis’ capabilities to best serve clients’ needs. Margaret graduated from Claremont McKenna College with dual degrees in economics and organismal biology. She played varsity soccer and golf all four years at Claremont, and in her senior year, won the Division III golf National Championship both individually and as a team. As an ocean-loving, avid diver she is also a fully rated SCUBA instructor. With a passion for ocean conservation, she has conducted research on the effects of apex predator ecotourism on the conservation outcomes of marine protected areas. 

Barbara Savage, Founder

Barbara Savage

Founder, Executive Director and Treasurer

Over the past twenty-five years, Barbara Savage has dedicated her time, energy, expertise, and resources to further the mission of the Tribal Trust Foundation to share indigenous wisdom. She has personally witnessed the struggle for survival of indigenous peoples throughout the world and identified the sustainable cultural preservation projects supported by the foundation. An activist, educator, and thought leader, Barbara produced two award winning documentary films that required her to risk her life in politically hostile environments to support the threatened indigenous people requesting her help.
Marilyn O'Malley, Board Member

Marilyn O'Malley

Board Member

Marilyn O'Malley has been interested in cultures and wisdom since she was a young child. Her whole life she has ventured to explore the world, science, spirituality, creativity, and truths that empower the well-being and evolution of humanity. As a successful certified personal and professional development coach she works with leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, pioneers, healers and highly sensitives, that are positively transforming the way we perceive ourselves, others and the world around us. She taps in, tunes in and shares the wisdom of the past and future that empowers others to stand up, stand out, speak up and make a difference in the World and in the Universe. She is a visionary of love and healing.

 Board Member

Jill Elisofon

Board Member


Jill has over 30 years of fundraising experience working with international nonprofits including the Smithsonian Institution and Conservation International, both in Washington, DC. Since moving to Florida in 1996, Jill has consulted with varied nonprofits to advise on fundraising and strategic planning. In addition, Jill continues to expand her secondary career as a jewelry designer, which was inspired by her experiences with indigenous people and her father's African Art collection. She visited the Mbuti Pygmies in The Congo's Ituri Forest in 1972 when her father, Eliot Elisofon was photographing them for National Geographic. Her one-of-a-kind necklaces feature tribal and exotic pieces from around the world. In 2021, she created a Frida Kahlo inspired collection which was purchased by the Norton Museum of Art Shop in West Palm Beach.
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Amber Bassett

BOARD MEMBER


Amber Bassett is an indigenous Tšumaš woman from Ojai California whose work is centered on the intersections between holistic economy, decolonization, and stewardship. She's currently enrolled in an artist residency program hosted by the Buckminster Fuller Institute on the weaving between art, design, and science as a lens for stewardship at the scale of whole systems thinking. Having evolved as an artist-turned-researcher, the best description for her field in Regeneration is working as a Co-Creative Society Strategist. Co-Creativity is about releasing the participatory and generative energies of people. She believes that an evolved society has less to do with maximizing technology but in advancing our capacity for engaged compassion through the conduit of our human agency in symbiosis with life.
 
To find out more about her work, visit www.regenerativefootprint.org
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Jackie Gilbert

Board Member

With a background as a researcher, organizer and volunteer in several social movements in South America, Jackie is dedicated to supporting Indigenous peoples’ struggles for land and water protection. She has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Cuba, and Colombia with a focus on water scarcity from an anthropological lens since 2014. After living in La Guajira, Colombia during 2018 and 2019 where she worked with Indigenous Wayúu communities on issues related to coal mining, Jackie cofounded One Thread Collective, a social enterprise dedicated to women’s empowerment, economic autonomy, and sustainable community-led development in remote communities. She continues to direct One Thread Collective’s programs remotely from her home in Santa Barbara, CA, returning to Colombia annually to work in the villages. Jackie is passionate about supporting the self-determination of First Nations communities, and about holding extractivist industries accountable for human rights abuses and violence against nature.

Dawn A. Murray, M.S., PhD

Alexandria Piccinini-Wilton

Board Member

Alexandria Piccinini-Wilton (she/her) is an Educational Therapist serving middle and high school students with learning differences from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. Her work with students involves identifying strengths to overcome weaknesses, scaffolding learning assignments to reduce the cognitive load, and building up executive functioning skills. She is in the process of establishing a private foundation focused on intersectional environmentalism with a goal of improving the lives of marginalized peoples. She holds a MA in Educational Therapy and a mild/moderate special education teaching credential from Holy Names University and a BBA with English & Peace and Justice minors from the University of San Diego.
Dawn A. Murray, M.S., PhD

Dawn A. Murray, M.S., PhD

Director of International Education & Research

Dawn received her masters and doctorate in Ocean Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She researched the effects of climate change on intertidal life, deep sea jellies, and created a citizen science program. She created the environmental studies program at Antioch University Santa Barbara and is passionate about conservation and environmental justice. She spent 6 months in Bhutan teaching at the Royal Thimphu College and 6 months in Costa Rica teaching in the cloud forest. She has led many ecocultural trips, including to Bhutan and the Galapagos Islands, focusing on preserving indigenous cultures and habitats. Dawn works to promote conservation initiatives advocating for a sustainable future. She was past president of the board and has been a proud TTF board member for over 8 years.

Maya Shaw Gale

Maya Shaw Gale

Advisor

Maya has had a deep love affair with nature since childhood and was naturally drawn to the wisdom ways of indigenous cultures that support living in harmony with the Earth. As a Certified Life Coach, Hakomi practitioner and international trainer, Maya has been passionately immersed in the field of mind/body/spirit wellness for over 40 years. Her work is grounded in eco-psychology, embodied mindfulness and energy medicine; she respectfully integrates the ceremonial and shamanic practices she learned from her Wampanoag, Cherokee, Lakota, and Paiute teachers to support people in healing themselves and their relationship to nature. Maya is the founder of Write from the Heart and Inner Nature/Outer Nature Retreats and Power with Heart, a feminine-principled leadership training. She is also a published poet and playwright. (The Last Wild Place).
Bob Hitchcock, PhD, Board Advisor

Bob Hitchcock, PhD

Advisor


Bob (PhD, University of New Mexico, 1982) is currently a professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as well as an Adjunct Professor of Geography and Geospatial Sciences at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. He is a board member of the Kalahari Peoples Fund, a nonprofit 501©3 organization that assists poor people in southern Africa. Bob has worked on indigenous peoples’ rights issues in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas since the 1970s. He has provided anthropological expertise in land and resource rights-related legal cases involving indigenous people, including in Botswana, Namibia, and the United States. Some of his early field work was among Al-Murrah Bedouins of eastern Saudi Arabia, Chumash of the Santa Barbara and Malibu and Santa Ynez Valley regions of southern California, and Navajo (Diné) of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. His work focuses on genocide and human rights among indigenous peoples world-wide.

Bob Hitchcock, PhD, Board Advisor

Cory Stover

Advisor


Corey Stover is the Director of Vocational Education at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. Through his career in education administration, Corey’s focus is on enhancing the lives of community members through recruitment into Oglala Lakota College’s award winning technical training programs provided under the Vocational Education department. Corey is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe and holds a Bachelor's degree in Lakota Studies with emphasis in Indian Law as well as Associates degrees in Lakota Studies and Tribal Law from Oglala Lakota College. Along with his career, Corey is a self-taught traditional Lakota artist focusing on traditional Lakota beadworks and dance regalia. Corey is very knowledgeable of the Lakota culture and way of life as well as the Lakota language.

Corey grew up in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation and has lineage tracing back to Chief Whistling Elk of the Northern Cheyenne. Corey graduated from Shannon County Virtual High School in 2008, making history in South Dakota for being the first Native American in the state to graduate from the first virtual high school in South Dakota while also being on an Indian Reservation. Corey is currently working on a Masters degree in Indigenous Peoples Law from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Corey has also served as the Vice President for the Medicine Root District Executive Board from 2019-2021.

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Art Cisneros

Advisor

Art Cisneros is a Chumash Elder and firekeeper. The Chumash People are the original native peoples of the central California Coast. Art holds the sacred space for their annual Tomol crossing to Limu on the Channel Islands. His spiritual name means “Earth Man with a Good Heart” and he truly embodies these virtues. Art also speaks throughout the US for the indigenous voice and for those who have no voice. He offers fire ceremonies for the Santa Barbara community and also offers healing and cleansing ceremonies.