Indigenous Health
How Engaging Youth Strengthens Our Wellness Mission
H
ow does working with youth engaged in the art of storytelling, theater, and music strengthen an Indigenous organization in its mission and purpose to improve the health and welfare of its constituents, especially when the strategies are to reduce the rates of HIV, Hep C, and the attendant issues such as drug use and abuse, mental health issues of PTSD, commercial tobacco misuse, and food insecurity? I will try to explain how this works for us at Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF). In 1990, IPTF was known as the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force and had a single mission to provide prevention and direct care services to people living with AIDS and their family members. In the early 90s people were dying from AIDS, and we had lost so many talented, creative, young, gay Native men and lesbians. The first two clients in our case management program were lesbians. One was a nurse, the other was from Leech Lake. As many more gay men enrolled in the case management program, they became the population that was overrepresented in the Native community living with AIDS. IPTF knew we had to reach youth with a prevention message to protect and save their lives. With a $15,000 grant from The Bremer Foundation, we began a theater project based on research that said Peer Education works as a prevention strategy. We learned everything we could from the literature and then began to create an outline of the education we
By Sharon M. Day
22
Spring 2022
knew was important: AIDS 101, death and dying from Indigenous perspectives, healthy sexual behaviors from a cultural standpoint, communication skills, and teen pregnancy prevention which included basic biology and physiology. We used a Planned Parenthood lesson where they created their reproduction systems using balloons and pipe cleaners. We are still using it today. It was also important to include sessions on creativity and dreams, therefore for these lessons we used a progressive muscular relaxation exercise, meditation along with guided imagery. The students then drew a picture of what they visualized during the relaxation and guided imagery session. Later we learned this technique is known as devised theater. Below is a piece that came out of one of the dream/creativity sessions and is included in the play, “My Grandmothers’ Love.” I was walking down a hallway, and there was this big kid, and he started pushing me and shoving me. I ran and I ran, and I ran. The big kid kept on chasing me and I turned and hit him in the head and his head hit the floor and
went bang, bang, bang. All of a sudden, I fell down these stairs and ended up in this really junky basement filled with really bad smells. I ran and I ran, and I ran trying to find a way out, I had to find a way out. When the big kid was chasing me, I was really small, now, I was really big. I found a window, I opened it up, I climbed out. There were grass and the air smelt like springtime. I looked back at the room, and I knew I had to keep going, keep living. During the summer program, our students are multi-racial. These exercises work with young people of all ages and races. We spoke of our identities, our clan systems. The students from Somali, Ethiopia, Hmong, and Lakota and Ojibwe all have clan systems. In this exercise, I asked them to think about their families, what makes them proud, and where is home. A young man shared that in his culture, once in their lifetime, they must make a pilgrimage to Mecca, a holy place. The Lakota students talked about going home to Sundance ceremonies and the Ojibwe students talked of traveling to Bad River to Midewiwin ceremonies. In the acting portion, all the students were marching to Mecca, hands clasped in a prayerful position. These young people connected in a spiritual way that was told through their authentic storytelling. Often, we relied on our elders for providing the lessons about culture and wellness. They came in and sat with us in talking circles, they blessed the drums, hides, and furs we used as costumes, they spoke to us about respect and equality and about how harmful homophobia was for
MetroDoctors
The Journal of the Twin Cities Medical Society
