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UNITY executive director Mary Kim Titla has won many awards throughout her career and was inducted into the Cronkite School Alumni Hall of Fame in 2006. “ A 2ND ACT FRONTDOORS MAGAZINE | 47 Arizona’s first Native American TV journalist tells young Native Americans, ‘There’s nothing you can’t do.’ BY JUDY PEARSON Going to my first United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY) conference was like going to Disneyland,” said Mary Kim Titla. “It was a magical experience. But just like Disney, that magic is difficult to explain. You can only feel it when you are a part of it.” For Titla, that magic expanded into a passion, touching the lives of thousands of other Native American youth across the country. Titla was born to poor teenage parents on the San Carlos Apache reservation. Her prospects looked dim. On a visit to a tribal office as a teenager, she found a newspaper article about UNITY. It talked about events going on around the country and the big conference taking place in Oklahoma. She begged her parents to take her, which they did, along with her two siblings. “The conference was life-changing and inspired hope for young Indians looking ahead to the future,” Titla said. Winn ing the Cultural Tug-of-War