Stone Child College meets with Texas county commissioner

Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia of Texas met with Stone Child College leadership Monday and Tuesday as part of a cultural exchange and long-range community partnership to fight the pandemic in their respective areas.

Garcia, who represents Precinct Two of Texas's largest-population county that includes the city of Houston, said there is a great deal of similarity between the area he serves and the one Stone Child College is a part of, and he hoped they could provide each other advice on successful COVID-19 mitigation strategies as they attempt to carry on during the pandemic.

He said learning about Stone Child's work in combatting the pandemic while not just maintaining its strong educational programs but also expanding them was impressive, and something he wants to bring back to Harris County.

He said the preservation of culture and language is important to him and, something he's worked to enhance in his own majority-minority county and learning from the successes here will certainly be helpful to his constituents.

Unfortunately, Garcia said, the pandemic is the driving force behind this exchange, having hit both of their communities particularly hard.

Garcia said the precinct he represents has the lowest median income, lowest educational attainment rate, highest number of people without health insurance, and highest rates of cancer, acute asthma and diabetes.

These combined with limited access to health care has created health care deserts in his community and when the pandemic came, it hit them hard, killing more people more quickly than other places in Texas.

He said a focus of his well-before the pandemic began was addressing these health care deserts and the pandemic made the importance of addressing the issue more obvious than ever.

"We have to attack these health care deserts, we have to attack the barriers to access," he said. "... The pandemic showed us how vulnerable we were."

Garcia said he commissioned a health disparity study in 2019 that found the extent of these problems and he brought that study to Stone Child hoping it may serve as a model for them and help efforts to address similar problems.

He said their communities have a lot of similarities and he hopes he's been able to help.

On the other side of the exchange, Stone Child College President Cory Sangrey-Billy said meeting Garcia and his family had been great and she feels this has been a fruitful endeavor.

Sangrey-Billy said Garcia's work promoting the development of bilingualism in his community through immersion has been particularly impressive, and it's something they want to try in their ongoing efforts to preserve the Cree language.

She said the community is working to establish a full-immersion day care which will teach young children the language from a young age, and talking to Garcia about his community's successes in Texas will help them in their own efforts.

She said COVID-19 has taken many elders in the community including many fluent speakers of Cree and this has set their efforts to preserve the language back, but during COVID-19 they also saw some successes.

Sangrey-Billy said the transition to remote and online learning at the college was surprisingly smooth, despite some initial difficulties in getting high-quality devices for their students to use, and that success showed them that they can do remote learning even post-pandemic.

"We learned a lot about ourselves and what we can do because of COVID-19," she said.

She said there are community members who live around the U.S. who can now learn Cree through the college online that weren't able to before the pandemic, and Garcia said this success is something he wants to bring back home.

Despite this silver lining, Sangrey-Billy said, the pandemic has hit the community very hard, not just physically but emotionally.

"We're such a small community that we're all related out here, everyone one knows everyone so every COVID-19 death has really hurt us," she said.

She said she looks forward to this continuing partnership with Garcia and they will see each other again when they go to visit his community in February.