New wellness center looks to heal, empower Rocky Boy youth

A new facility intended to bring wellness and culture to Rocky Boy by working with its youth took a major step forward last week.

The Rocky Boy Health Center broke ground on its new Miyo Pimatisiwinkamik Youth Center in a Thursday-morning ceremony last week with speakers sharing their hopes for the center and how it will help local young people, especially those struggling with addiction.

"It's a big day for the tribe, a big day for our people," said Chippewa Cree Business Committee Chair Harlan Baker.

A release form the Health Center said the $20 million building will be between 25,000 and 30,000 square feet, with exam rooms, multi-purpose classrooms and offices, as well as a commercial kitchen and cafeteria along with a gymnasium with enough room for two basketball courts.

Speakers at the event said young people in Rocky Boy often struggle, and while the medical services of the Health Center are vital, there are limits to what it can do, being primarily focused on addressing people's immediate medical needs.

Speakers said the facility will be designed to foster connections between young people, their peers, their elders, their culture, their languages and themselves by addressing not just their medical needs, but also their mental, emotional and spiritual health.

At the ceremony Thursday, Baker said a lot of young people at Rocky Boy are struggling and this facility has been a subject of conversation among tribal leaders for a long time.

Back in 2016, he said, Rocky Boy was in a really rough spot, having trouble even cashing its payroll checks and being denied grants, but now they see new homes being built along with new infrastructure and a big part of that is the devotion of the tribe's leadership.

Business Committee Vice-Chair Ted Russette III also spoke, thanking everyone who made this possible as well as those attending the event.

Russette said it's been a long road to this point and this facility will make a massive difference for the community, its children and their children.

However, he said, Rocky Boy isn't the only community that will benefit, as the facility will welcome young people from other communities like Havre, Gildford, Kremlin, Chinook or even Great Falls.

Any young person who needs guidance toward the right path is welcome, he said.

Montana Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, also talked to the attendees of the ground breaking, and praised the tribe's leadership for pursuing this facility so tenaciously.

Windy Boy said he believes it will have lasting effects on them for years to come and the community needs that.

He said the unfortunate reality is that tribes like theirs are an afterthought in most mainstream politics but they persevere anyway and will continue to do so.

He said Indian Country faces a lot of problems and will need creative solutions to address them, so everyone needs to dig deep to find them.

Rocky Boy Health Center CEO Joel Rosette was also among the speakers that day, a day that he said was very emotional for him.

Rosette said he had tears in his eyes all day, thinking about the ancestors who never had the opportunity to get the kind of help this facility will provide and he hopes that it will, when it is completed, fulfill its goal of educating and empowering the people of the community to live well.

He said the vision of this youth center is one of collaboration and trust and represents an investment in the community's future.

"For us to be a part of that is special," he said.

Rosette said communities like theirs are painted with a lot of labels but projects like this allow them to tell their own stories and will have a tangible impact.

Addiction is a hard road, he said, but this community will be there for young people as they face it.

What young people need to thrive

Another leader at Rocky Boy Health Center, psychologist Dr. Deborah Essert, spoke at the event and said she wanted to talk a little about how this facility would interact with and complement the health center.

In western medicine, Essert said, health care providers focus first and foremost on addressing and treating people's immediate needs, and there is tremendous value in that approach, but sometimes that focus lets a person's overall wellness go unaddressed.

If someone goes to the doctor with a severe headache, she said, the doctor will do everything they can to get their pain under control and address their headache, but the person who leaves that office, even if their pain is gone, may not be wholly well, and that is why facilities like this exist.

"I may have no symptoms, but I may not be healthy," she said.

Essert said plenty of research exists on wellness and communities around the world have people consistently living longer than people in the U.S., in some cases by more than a decade, and maintaining their health longer, and while all of these communities are different, all of them have some shared attributes.

She said the people in these communities have a very holistic approach to maintaining not just their physical health, but mental and spiritual health as well, and one common theme seen throughout these communities is the view of the self as sacred.

They view their bodies and themselves as individuals worthy of respect and care from others but also from themselves, and don't feel bad about taking the time they need to rest when they need it.

"They sleep eight to 10 hours every single day," she said. "I work with some of you and you're lucky to get that in a week. ... When they are tired, they sleep. They take care of themselves. They don't say 'oh my gosh, you have no right to be this tired, go go go.'"

She said this mindset extends to their treatment of each other, reciprocating the care they are given and caring for others in turn in a way that isn't transactional but, instead, an acknowledgement of the inherent value of every member of their community.

One other thing these communities have in common, she said, is a shared sense of culture passed down to them through their ancestors, imparting a sense of personal and collective strength and resilience that has been built and passed down over generations.

She said the youth center aims to bring these kinds of things to young people, especially those who are struggling.

Essert said studies have been done on trauma for years, and there is evidence to suggest that even the most horrific events a child can experience may not develop into trauma if they have enough of a support system around them, people who are there to care for them when they need it and challenge them when necessary.

She said this extends beyond a child's family and to their community, and that children are so much better off when living in a place where people know each other enough to feel comfortable looking after each other's children when necessary.

She said so many children don't feel connected to others, feel no sense of belonging, and they need to understand how valuable they are, to understand that they deserve a bright future, and if this community can provide that then they will be able to survive any hurt that comes their way.

Essert said young people need to be educated and receive specialized attention for whatever issue they are facing, whether that is addiction, depression, pregnancy or anything else so they can navigate this complex time in their lives.

She said the needs of the area and its people are complex and no one thing is going to fix their problems but if they build effective systems of support using the well of resilience the community has already built up over generations then they can do truly great things for their children.

"At the foundation of this wellness center, is what this community already has that makes it resilient," she said.

Language and culture as healing tools

Mahchiwminahnahtik Chippewa and Cree Language Revitalization Executive Director Dustin Whitford also spoke at the event about how his organization is working to integrate language studies into the wellness center's activities, which he said provides a vital link for local young people to their culture and history.

Whitford said language creates connections between the people of the past and present and is interwoven into the history and culture of the tribe in a way that transcends simple conversational translation.

He said the center tried to focus primarily on conversational language when they were first starting, but eventually it became clear that the teaching of the language couldn't be separated from an understanding of the tribe's culture.

He said he asked his grandmother to help teach the words that meant things like sunny, windy, thunder and so forth, but she said there was too much of a disconnect between the words and their English translations.

He said the word "sunny" describes the weather, but the word the tribe's ancestors would use didn't refer to the weather itself, but the spirit they believed caused the weather to be that way.

There was a completely different layer of meaning to those words that people wouldn't understand without being taught about the culture of the tribe, and that culture and young people's ability to connect to it can do incredible things for their mental and spiritual health.

Whitford said an understanding of themselves through culture can help fill the void that might otherwise be filled by destructive things like drugs, but that connection, at least through language, is largely missing and he thinks their organization can help with that.