Amplify Utah supports and facilitates dynamic journalistic storytelling to celebrate diverse points of view. By partnering with traditional media, we cultivate an environment that encourages stories be shared widely and made easily accessible for our communities to read, hear, watch and engage.
Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
07-06-2025 By Savannah Stacey
These women have entered their public speaking era.
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"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
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05-11-2025 By Marissa Bond
“When you forget your history, you repeat it,” says a 94-year-old Japanese American in the University of Utah student-made documentary.
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For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, powwow season has emerged in the Mountain West.
Brigham Young University, Weber State University, Utah Valley University and the University of Utah began hosting competitive and social powwows earlier this spring. This week, the American Indian Student Leadership club at Salt Lake Community College will host its annual social powwow on the Taylorsville-Redwood Campus.
The 2022 SLCC Spring Social Powwow — a gathering to honor Indigenous culture through drumming, dancing and socializing — is set for Saturday, April 16, from noon to 10 p.m. (with a dinner break from 5 to 7 p.m.), and is free to the public.
According to Rocklyn Merrick, a student and the event’s coordinator, it marks a return to normalcy for many Native and Indigenous people living in the Salt Lake area.
“My spirit feels full,” said Merrick, who is affiliated with the Diné, Oglala Lakota and Omaha Nations. “I feel whole again.”
Doors open at the Lifetime Activities Center at noon for the inter-tribal powwow, which will feature drummers, dancers, indigenous vendors, a frybread stand and a gathering of tribal members from across the Salt Lake Valley, Utah and neighboring states.
Though the event is free, members of the AISL club encourage attendees to donate non-perishable food items to benefit the Adopt-a-Native-Elder program, which delivers groceries, medical supplies, firewood and other goods to elders living on the Navajo reservation.
The nearly two-year pause on cultural events, including many Native powwows and rituals, created a void for many Indigenous community members who felt disconnected from each other and their traditions.
“I look forward to seeing people again that I have not seen, and in the powwow culture I miss the drumming, singing and the dancing,” said Jeanie Sekaquaptewa Groves, who is affiliated with the Hopi Nation of Hotevilla, Ariz.
Virtual gatherings were fine as a fill-in, Groves said, but powwows are meant to be experienced in person.
“When you are there, you feel everything, you feel the drum,” said Groves, an Indian education coordinator with Utah public schools.
For most Native American and Alaska Native tribes, Groves said, the drum represents the heartbeat and peoples’ connection to the earth.
“As an Indigenous woman and mother, the responsibility we feel is the need to connect to our Mother Earth to protect and to teach respect and honor her,” Groves said. “As mothers, it is our job to teach our children to do the same.”
In most Native American communities, the elders are the keepers of tribal history, traditional stories and cultural practices. A tribe’s knowledge and wisdom – language, agricultural and hunting practices, creation stories and ceremonial traditions – is passed down from generation to generation through oral traditions.
“We lost so many of our elders [to COVID-19], and we miss them,” Groves said, “but we also lost the knowledge.”
Merrick, a pre-med major at SLCC and co-coordinator of the spring powwow, also volunteers with the AISL club. His intent is to help inspire Native youth to connect with both their culture and academics.
“My hope is to touch other Native kids’ hearts and to let them know that we are here,” she said. “There is a Native community at SLCC, and we are here to help them in their academic career.”
Merrick recalled that when she was a child, she attended the 2005 SLCC powwow — and was fascinated to see other Native people in an academic setting different from the boarding school she attended in Montezuma Creek, Utah. After attending the SLCC powwow, Merrick said, she knew she wanted to someday attend college.
“Being a first-generation college student, I didn’t have someone to look up to, and I didn’t want our traumas that come with being an Indigenous person to bring me down,” she said. “I wanted to prove I could do it, and that’s what drives me to put on this powwow.”
Attending powwows, Merrick said, offers a way to build connections between Natives and non-natives. Powwows were among the Native American spiritual and religious practices that once were federally outlawed, and finally made legal in 1978, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“Powwow is a time of social gathering [and] is fun and meant to be experienced,” Merrick said. “A lot of non-Natives ask me, ‘Am I allowed to go?’ Yes! Come feel the spirit of Indigenous culture and why … we fought so hard to have powwows.”
She emphasized that powwows, while social events, also honor Indigenous culture and encouraged non-Natives to attend in reverence. Merrick’s student club, AISL, posted a notice of powwow etiquette on their website, which features guidance for showing respect to Native performers and powwow traditions.
Valene Peratrovich wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Valene Peratrovich wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
With daily advances in artificial intelligence technology advances, scientists and researchers have been looking into the risks and benefits A.I. would carry in the 2024 election.
While some fear that bad actors will use A.I. to misinform the public or affect security, one University of Utah professor is making the argument that A.I. can be viewed as a tool rather than a risk.
Mike Kirby, a professor in the U.’s Kahlert School of Computing, is a leadership member of the university’s Responsible AI Initiative (RAI), which is meeting with community members — including state leaders, lawyers and psychologists — to collect data about how to use AI most effectively.
The initiative, backed with a $100 million investment from the university announced in November, aims to use advanced A.I. technology responsibly, to tackle societal issues including the environment, education and health care.
Elections aren’t now in the initiative’s field of interest, but Kirby says they could be.
The media, Kirby said, portrays A.I. as either a utopian supertool or a dystopian mechanism that will bring the world’s end. RAI, he said, lies somewhere in the middle of those polarized extremes.
“We don’t take a dystopia or a utopian view,” he said. " We try to take a measured view, a healthy optimistically measured view.” Kirby clarified, however, that “healthy” optimism isn’t the same as “blind optimism.”
RAI, he said, looks for the positives of A.I. and determines how to use the technology as a tool — while understanding that A.I.’s potential use will come with challenges.
In applying the initiative’s research to the U.S. electoral system, he said the technology could be used to harm election results — but also to counteract those harms.
For example, he said, some forms of A.I. can detect voting anomalies, by “sifting through data at rates that [humans] can’t, and look for patterns that are anomalous and should be investigated.”
AI isn’t “bad,” Kirby said, and A.I. shouldn’t be treated “as if somehow its the entity that has a choice.” Many of the evils attributed to A.I. — such as “deepfakes” and spreading disinformation to voters — are, he said, the fault of “bad actors with bad intentions.”
The practice of using A.I. for disinformation is, he said, “encouraging a vigilance on the part of us as consumers — just understanding the fact that [we] need to be mindful of this.”
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions has published guidelines on how to spot fake news, boiled down to a handy infographic. The guidelines include considering the source of the information, checking the sources provided and the date of publication, and factoring in the news consumer’s own biases.
Josh McCrain, assistant professor of political science at the U., said A.I. is not a concern when it comes to election security. Election infrastructure is “extremely secure,” he said, and those casting doubts on its integrity often are people with “bad intentions and bad faith” when a vote goes against their preferred candidate.
“These are really secure elections,” he said, “and anybody suggesting otherwise has political motivations.”
Deepfakes — A.I.-assisted video or audio that make it appear that someone said or did something they didn’t — are a main concern, McCrain said. Deepfakes have been around for years, he noted, but they are expected to become more prominent as the technology advances.
“That is definitely something that can be exploited by bad actors,” McCrain said.
In January, NBC News reported, a robocall with a simulated voice resembling President Joe Biden’s went out to Democrats in New Hampshire, urging them not to vote in that state’s presidential primary that month. The attorney general’s office in New Hampshire issued a statement that said “this message appears to be artificially generated.”
There have been moves by some states to regulate deepfakes. For example, according to an Associated Press report from January, six states have criminalized nonconsensual deepfake porn.
Otherwise, though, McCrain said it’s up to social media platforms to regulate themselves.
Solving the issue of deepfakes and disinformation is not as easy as recognizing anomalies of bad actor interference, Kirby said. There’s also the concern that regulating A.I. too tightly will remove factual information, he said.
It’s a challenge to keep the right balance, he said, but “this is the amazing thing about our liberal democracies.
“What we don’t want,” Kirby said, “is the mechanisms that we create to try to squash disinformation to be those mechanisms that squash the voice of freedom that’s needed.”
Libbey Hanson wrote this story as a student at the University of Utah. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Libbey Hanson wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Rachel Santizo spent nearly a decade living on the streets of Salt Lake City, finding safety from abuse and assault at night by sleeping in public spaces, often under parked cars. A drug addiction, triggered with prescribed pain pills which shifted to meth and heroin, had led her there.
“You have to hit multiple rock bottoms,” she said. “After an almost 10-year battle, I became exhausted. I literally could not do it anymore.”
Last August, Santizo walked on the stage at the Maverik Center, earning her degree in criminal justice with a 3.92 GPA as one of Salt Lake Community College’s 2021 Graduates of Excellence.
Her path to graduation, though, came with numerous obstacles, including a decade of addiction and homelessness. Santizo remembers weighing her options back in 2012.
“It was treatment or suicide, and I didn’t have the courage to commit suicide,” she said. “I was broken and defeated. I had lost everything I loved.”
Santizo decided to seek treatment and detox through the Odyssey House in 2012. In March, she will celebrate 10 years of sobriety.
Santizo, now 43 and living in South Jordan, said she went through a period of feeling judged for her history of substance abuse. “Addiction is very complex and often feared or misunderstood,” she said. “I believe in the power of change. I have to. If not, I wouldn’t be here.”
As she worked on understanding her addiction, Santizo said she realized she could use her experiences to help the community.
“I have a unique view that can bridge gaps that may not otherwise be seen or heard … I want to help people and create change in my community,” Santizo said. “I speak the language and understand the behaviors, so criminal justice was the perfect fit for me.”
The decision to enroll at SLCC, Santizo said, “terrified” her. She said she doubted her ability to succeed, but those feelings dissipated when she started her classes.
“My professors never made me feel less than,” Santizo said. “My biggest struggle was writing papers. I was extremely intimidated. When I expressed any concerns I had, my teachers listened and walked beside me.”
Santizo left a “lasting impression” on her professors, who described her as an engaged learner, community leader and role model.
Adjunct professor Anna West — who teaches the Life, Drugs and Society course at SLCC — said she appreciated the candor and willingness with which Santizo disclosed her past to her classmates.
“She wrote a term paper that was so good, we published it in the Open Catalog of Student Work, and it’s a sample for all students,” West said. In the paper, Santizo compiled research about access to health care for those living with severe substance-use disorder. “It was one of the best papers I have seen at all levels of education,” West said.
Assistant professor David Robles characterized Santizo as a distinguished student who made an immediate impression in his criminal justice course.
“I remember the first day of class, hearing about her past experiences, and truly acknowledging the depth that Rachel was going to bring to the classroom,” Robles said.
Robles said Santizo often led discussions with her peers and always contributed “insightful comments and questions, even when discussing difficult and controversial topics.”
Santizo’s impact on her professors extended beyond the classroom. When West got a chance to teach SLCC courses at the Utah State Prison, she sought advice from Santizo, who had taught and worked in several Utah prisons.
“She built my confidence and told me that I have everything I need to go into the prison, because all the students inside need is patience and kindness,” West said. “I’m grateful that I could ask her, because I was nervous, and she put me at ease."
Robles echoed that sentiment. “Since I practice a pedagogical approach — where both the student learns from the teacher and the teacher learns from the student — Rachel was a student who I learned plenty from,” Robles said.
“Rachel exemplified excellence by completing her degree,” Robles said. “Although this accomplishment may seem simple to others, if you know about Rachel’s life, this was a long and enduring process that challenged her in many ways.”
To Santizo, being named Graduate of Excellence was a “complete honor and mind-blowing.” During SLCC’s commencement ceremony, Santizo walked before thousands of people in the Maverik Center carrying a banner representing the School of Applied Technology and Technical Specialities.
“At one point in my life, I wasn’t sure if I would live to see another day,” Santizo said, remembering the ceremony. “I had never held my head so high. I looked up at my children and in that moment, I knew that all my hard work had paid off — that I was worthy of great things, that I am the woman I had been fighting to be.”
Santizo has returned to Odyssey House, where she went for detox, to take a job as program manager of their residential program. “It is incredible to have the opportunity to give back what has been given to me,” she said.
Santizo also co-hosts a weekly podcast, with veteran Utah TV anchor Randall Carlisle, called “Odyssey House Journals.”
“We speak about recovery and different stories pertaining to substance dependency and alcoholism,” Santizo said. “Every week, I get to hear another story from a hero who had the courage to do something different in their life.”
Santizo works Monday through Friday at the Odyssey House, and noted the importance of keeping a structured schedule. Weekends are reserved for writing letters and sending care packages to her son in the National Guard, sleepovers with her 2-year-old grandson, and doing recovery work at Fit to Recover, where she helps teach a fitness boot camp.
“[Boot camp] is soul food,” she said of the free class, which focuses on offering support to those tackling mental health issues or seeking freedom from alcohol or substances. “We exercise, connect with each other in a non-judgmental way that allows us to come as we are and leave a little bit better each time, together.”
Through adversity, Santizo said she has battled addiction and used her experiences and empathy to help others with similar experiences, but she realizes this is only possible with support from others.
“I am 100% convinced that I cannot do sobriety on my own,” she said. “I need support around to encourage me during times I struggle. I need love when I am not at my best. I need to be OK with not being OK — simply stated, the acceptance of being a human being.”
Santizo began her educational career convinced that graduating from SLCC was an unattainable goal. She has a message for those who feel the same way.
“The deeper your fear or story, the more you have to tell others after you conquer what is in front of you,” Santizo said. “Fear is motivating if you allow it. Education is empowering. You get one life, so in order to fully grasp all there is to know, an education is critical. Everyone is deserving of that.”
Amie Schaeffer wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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Alpine skier Jesse Keefe has been busy. Since November, the 17-year-old has traveled to British Columbia, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden, racing the best adaptive skiers in the world.
Now, Keefe is in Beijing, where he’ll represent the United States of America, alongside fellow skiers Ravi Drugan and Andrew Haraghey, when the 2022 Winter Paralympic Games begin Friday. While the three men hail from Sun Valley, Idaho; Drugan, Ore.; and Salt Lake City, respectively, they also call Park City home as athletes at the National Ability Center.
The National Ability Center (NAC) is a non-profit organization based in Park City, whose programs are designed for individuals of all abilities, including those with physical, developmental and intellectual disabilities. At the 2018 Paralympic Winter Games, NAC athletes received 7 medals. And the NAC’s ski and snowboard teams have prepared myriad athletes for success at the highest levels again this year.
Keefe, the youngest alpine skier on Team USA, wasn’t sure there would be a spot for him, which are determined by the points and ranking in qualifying races and the number of slots made available by the International Paralympic Committee. But that didn’t stop Keefe from buying a plane ticket in advance. Then, two weeks before he was supposed to fly out, word came that he’d be on the team during the Games in China.
“I can’t believe a life goal of mine is actually coming true,” he wrote on social media.
Now that he knows he will indeed be going, he’s already thinking about the next one, he said.
“I’m going to do my best, but I’m only 17. I’ve got at least another Games or two in me,” he said. “I’ll know what it’s going to be like the next time, so I can fully prepare myself and get the most of my training for the next four years.”
Keefe started skiing at age two and has raced in a World Championship and several World Cups, winning gold in both slalom and giant slalom at the 2021 National Championships in Winter Park, Colo. Keefe, an amputee born without an ankle bone in his right leg, skis under the LW4 classification, a Paralympic Alpine and Nordic ski designation that stands for “Locomotion Winter,” and means he has an impairment in one leg only. He skis standing with a prosthetic inside of a regular boot.
Although Keefe mainly trains at his hometown mountain of Sun Valley, he’s also spent a lot of time at the NAC with Head Alpine Coach Erik Leirfallom.
“They’ve helped me get to where I am now, building up points and eventually getting to race against the national team. Once I started beating some of their guys, that’s how I got on,” he said. “I could call Eric right now and ask him for advice. It’s just that kind of relationship.”
Keefe will join 26-year-old Haraghey, who raced at the 2018 Winter Paralympic Games in PyeongChang and has been on the national team for five years.
In early February, Haraghey raced at the Huntsman Cup World Para Alpine Ski qualifying race, hosted by the National Ability Center at Park City Mountain. He had already qualified for the Games, but the event was an important training opportunity, one of the last in an intensive year of training and preparation.
Haraghey skis under the LW1 designation and has lower-body impairment in both legs due to Cerebral Palsy. He started skiing at age 7, and has been racing for more than a decade, but it took some time to find the best equipment.
“I use a regular set of two skis and then outriggers, [which are] like forearm crutches with skis on the bottom,” he said. “They provide a little extra balance and support. I have my ski tips tied together … because of my disability, sometimes my feet rotate outward, and it’s not exactly fast to be going into reverse snowplow racing down the hill, so that helps keep my skis more parallel."
Haraghey initially raced without outriggers, but once he tried them, they helped his form and technique.
“They just let me work around my disability a little better.”
A Utah native, Haraghey trains regularly with the NAC. There, he benefited from having an experienced and consistent coach, he said.
“Having a solid coaching base and someone who’s seen your progression, can give you that feedback and know what you need — or don’t need — to help you develop is super helpful,” said Haraghey, who recently has spent a lot of training time at the center to get back to competition level after a few injuries last year.
While Keefe and Haraghey ski upright with two skis, 32-year-old Ravi Drugan uses a monoski, or sit-ski. Like Keefe, this will be his first Paralympic Games. And although he’s no stranger to competition, it was only recently he started turning his sights toward Beijing.
“When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a pro skateboarder in the X Games,” he said. “I ended up going to the X Games for monoski and getting a medal there. But even being on the national team was never something I necessarily was striving to do.”
Still, Drugan, who lost both of his legs above the knee at the age of 15 after being hit by a train, said he wanted to compete against the “best guys in the world.”
“I just wanted to be the best skier I can be,” he said. “It [wasn’t] until last season [that] it started becoming apparent that I was going to have a shot at going to the Paralympic Games.”
Drugan’s racing expertise is in monoski X, or monoski cross, a freestyle event in which numerous skiers simultaneously race a course with jumps, gaps and berms. But there are no freestyle skiing events at the Paralympics. There, he’ll be competing in slalom, giant slalom, super g, slalom combined, and possibly downhill. Adjusting his training to prepare for those events has been rewarding, he said.
“I started ski racing because that’s what I was bad at, skiing down a hard icy slope,” he said. “I can go free ski anything, but [with racing], setting up a certain turn radius and a designated number of turns? Sounds good to me.”
While Drugan said he has enjoyed training for events that are relatively new to him and is eager to compete at the most prominent event in his sport, he has the long-term goal of pushing the progression of adaptive skiing. With his background in freestyle, he wants to show what is possible on a sit ski.
“Racing’s a fun challenge, and who wouldn’t like timing themselves against the best in the world, but I’m not just a ski racer. I’m a skier,” he said. “I ski everything, but I have the most fun skiing out in the trees and out in the moguls and in the terrain park, where there is so much potential.”
After the Games, he said, he plans to get back into the terrain park.
“Over the years, I’ve tried to show the adaptive community that we can ski anything a non-disabled skier can,” he said. “I’d like to prove that.”
Drugan may not be a Utah native, but he keeps finding the time to return to Park City after a decade of competition. Some of his first races were hosted by the National Ability Center.
“The NAC kind of took me under the wing,” he said. “They helped me be the racer and freeskier I am now. Ripping around Utah was the first time I ever skied bottomless, super soft snow. It keeps me coming back. It is like they say, the greatest snow in the world.”
Matt Didisheim wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Matt Didisheim wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
