Brave Heart Fellowship
Champions for Change
CA Native Youth Collective
Remembering Our Sisters
Building Communities of Hope
Creative Native
Democracy is Indigenous
Giselle is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Data Science and Native Studies. She is aiming to pursue her PhD in Computer Science and apply it to her interests in healthcare for BIPOC communities in reducing AI bias.
During her time as a 2025 Brave Heart Fellow, Giselle plans to create workshops that teach recent Native admits to Berkeley.
About Giselle’s Project
During her time as a 2025 Brave Heart Fellow, Giselle launched Uplifting Native, a community-centered project that helps Indigenous people reconnect with land, culture and traditional ecological knowledge.
Drawing from her own journey of finding healing and belonging after moving to Berkeley, Giselle focused her efforts on revitalizing native plants and pollinators in urban areas, where climate change, development and colonization have disrupted ecosystems and severed connections to land-based practices.
Giselle conducted field research on the relationship between native plants and bee species, then shared her findings by creating educational materials, distributing Native seed kits at little libraries and community events and developing a resource website. She also partnered with local Indigenous groups and created good medicine gifts for community members who shared stories of cultural disconnection.
She is also building an app, SageWell, which will combine language, plant knowledge and wellness guidance (see screenshots from app development below). Her ultimate goal is to help restore relationships between Indigenous people and the land by making cultural knowledge, native seeds and wellness resources more accessible in urban Native communities.
You can explore her work and resources at californiaindigenous.org.
