Chippewa Cree Youth Cultural Education and Healing Conference set for Wednesday and Thursday

A group of Rocky Boy elders, community members, and mental health professionals are setting up the inaugural Chippewa Cree Youth Cultural Education and Healing Conference Wednesday and Thursday at the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation Celebration Grounds.

The event will feature breakout sessions designed to teach local Native American youth about their people's history, traditions and language, which local mental health providers believe can significantly improve young people's chances of developing a solid foundation for mental wellness.

The event is being set up by the Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education Program, the Generation Indigenous Program and the ACE Program of Stone Child College, and is part of a larger effort to address mental wellness on the reservation, particularly for young people.

The event will feature elders sharing their knowledge about various aspects of Chippewa Cree culture and history including language, food, history, healing practices, protocols for interacting with elders and more.

Two tepees will be set up where the elders will speak about these various aspects of culture, along with a third that will focus on mental wellness.

Darlene Sellers, a mental health care provider for the Rocky Boy School District, said she thinks teaching young people on the reservation about the culture of their people is an element of mental health care.

Sellers said she thinks understanding one's own identity, culture and language is critical to building resilience, and being in touch with these things will assist young people in developing good habits for maintaining good mental wellness.

"We're trying to build resilience through culture," she said.

She said they decided to have the event alongside this year's Rocky Boy powwow because they thought it would complement the event well and give them access to a lot of young people who might be interested in learning from such a knowledgeable group of elders.

"I think it's going to be a beautiful gathering," she said.

Sellers said, among the many speaking at the event, will be Chippewa Cree Language Revitalization Program Executive Director Dustin Whitford and Russell Standing Rock, who has a wealth of experience and knowledge about traditional prayers and ceremonies.

Sellers said young people, especially in the wake of the pandemic, have a lot to deal with and Native American youth face a number of problems that compound an already difficult situation.

In the past year, she said, she's met many incredible young people at Rocky Boy who should be incredibly proud of who they are as individuals and members of their community, but there is a pervasive feeling of hopelessness that she finds heartbreaking.

She said the pandemic hit Native American communities especially hard, taking the lives of many elders, including a lot of native language speakers, which will only make preservation efforts harder.

She said one young person she spoke with recently lost six family members to COVID-19.

Even without COVID-19, Sellers said, young people growing up on the reservation face a lot of systemic issues that make their lives harder, but also face more direct prejudice which can have a profoundly negative effect on them.

"As much as we try to deny it, there is still so much racism and discrimination," she said.

She said her own grandson has told her that he's seen first-hand how differently he is treated versus his Native American friends.

Sellers said she thinks this cultural education and the benefits it will have for students' mental wellness will also improve academic performance in school, and one of the event's primary organizers, Ron Walker, of the AWARE Program agreed.

Walker coordinates a multi-tiered system of support for the Rocky Boy School District, a system designed to proactively address mental wellness among students.

He said support systems like this, which offer three tiers of wellness assistance for students at various levels of need, are provided through the Montana Office of Public Instruction and are common throughout the the state, but Rocky Boy's is unique in that it offers a fourth tier which includes cultural education about the Chippewa Cree way of life.

He said this is one of the reasons OPI is interested in their program and will be filming part of Thursday's event.

These programs generally take about three years to be fully implemented and Rocky Boy School District just wrapped up its second year, though they didn't really have a chance to start until part-way through their first year.

Walker said while improving academic performance is a goal of this program, its method of doing so is to focus on the student as a person, not their performance in school.

He said schools that adopt this approach see academic achievement and graduation improve naturally after a few years.

During a meeting Monday morning, Sellers, Walker, and a group of mental health providers, elders and community members hashed out the details of the event, which had, up until that point, been in flux.

Walker said they didn't have as much time to plan the event as they would have liked so plans were still a bit nebulous, but now things have more or less crystallized.

"We feel pretty satisfied with it now," he said.

He said setting this event up has been a collaborative effort between the elders and other stakeholders in the community and seeks to be a balance of academics, behavioral health and cultural education for Native students.