The Fund Speaks with David Kennedy

The Fund recently had the chance to speak with Wieden+Kennedy Co-Founder David Kennedy on his experience working with the American Indian College Fund.

David Kennedy addresses attendees at the Flame of Hope Gala in New York City.

What piqued your interest in the college fund in the first place?
When I walked into my office on the morning of December 19, 1991, there was a letter waiting on my desk from Barbara Bratone, executive director of the American Indian College Fund. It briefly described the fund and its mission and asked if we would be interested in taking them on as our pro bono account.

I ran screaming down the hall to Dan's office, shoved the letter in his face, and shouted, "Dan, look!" He read it, and said "Kennedy, You've got to do this!" I called Barbara that very moment. We set up a meeting in Portland, and within a couple of weeks, we were the agency of record for the American Indian College Fund—a partnership that has lasted a decade and a half.

Until that day in December, I had not heard of the Fund. I had helped out from time to time with its model, the United Negro College Fund, in Chicago, during the Black Panther, Chicago Seven, and Democratic Convention riots era, but I had no knowledge of a like organization for Native Americans.

The reason Barbara had contacted Wieden+Kennedy was that she had seen a tiny article in the New York Times about some upstart agency in Portland, Oregon, that was making ads for Nike. It was about the time we were introducing Air Jordan with Michael and Spike Lee, so we were beginning to get some national ink.

Why Barbara wrote to me instead of Dan (who was listed as president of the firm), I will never know. After all my years amongst Indian people, I know better than to question these things. They just happen. What she didn't know was that I was completely predisposed to embrace her proposal. I suppose the situation was serendipitous for both of us.

The fact is, I had grown up in Oklahoma surrounded by five reservations: The Creek Nation to the east, the Seminole to the south, the Pottawatomie to the west, and the Sac and Fox to the north. My mother's family settled early in Oklahoma, coming west from Arkansas not long after Indian territory was opened up to Sooners.

My grandfather established a general store in what would become Lincoln County, Oklahoma, on the southern edge of the Sac and Fox nation, boyhood home of Jim Thorpe. Eventually, they moved to the nearby town of Prague, a Czech settlement on the Ft. Smith and Western Railroad. I grew up there, and, as a boy, I ran with Indians. Many of my closest friends, classmates, and teammates were Native Americans.

My father was a wildcat oil driller. At times we moved often-up and down the eastern face of the Rockies, where the oil was more plentiful and the shallow deposits were easier to drill. We roamed from Billings to the Brazos—the ancestral range of the buffalo.

I rough-necked on the drilling rigs and my Indian contact continued. On the Northern Plains, there were Blackfeet, Crow, Arapaho and a few Cheyenne and Lakota. In the Southwest: Navajo, Ute, and Pueblo. And on the Southern Plains: Comanche and Kiowa. I become a powwow junkie.

When I graduated from college in Colorado, my wife and I moved to Chicago, then Oregon, and for close to 30 years, I had a little or no contact with Native people. So you might well imagine my joy and excitement when Barbara's letter arrived that December day. It was the greatest Christmas present I have ever received—or will ever receive.

By spring, I was back on the rez: Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Flathead, and Crow. That summer we were filming: Navajo, Ojibwa, Lakota, and Salish. And by fall, vision became reality as College Fund commercials and print ads began to be seen by millions of Americans, and college education was made available to thousands of native students for whom that door would never have opened otherwise.

What does it mean to you to work on the Fund's public education campaign? Is there anything that distinguishes it from the other work you do? How?
To have been fortunate enough to amass this unbelievable stable of creative talent here at Wieden+Kennedy, the best and brightest minds in the business—to have that incredible resource and not put it to use for some higher purpose would have been unforgivable. In my mind, the thing that needs repair first— not acts of God, not floods, mine disasters nor tsunamis—is the culture that we, ourselves, have all but destroyed (or at best, ignored): the indigenous people of this land, to whom we owe so much.