How Engaging Youth Strengthens Our Wellness Mission

How 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 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

our relatives living with HIV. Homophobia was a real challenge and didn’t significantly change among our youth until I, a respected adult in their lives, came out to them. The wellness of the Indigenous community is profoundly impacted by intersecting injustices. The Indigenous Peoples Task Force always centers a call for social justice in our work. In the early days of HIV, we marched to rallies led by ACT UP! ACT UP was led and Indigenous people whose relatives are missing and murdered who created a movement to establish the databases and wrote the legislation to bring some resources to finding our relatives and close the loopholes in jurisdictional issues between tribal governments and state and federal crime bureaus. And it was LGBT Two Spirit people who created the Love is the Law all over this country, standing up to homophobia and bigotry.

by people living with HIV who were dying and watching their friends die with little help from the federal or state governments. Social Justice movements in this country have always been led initially by the very groups most affected. Our tribal people living on the Caribbean islands, and the people on the east coast were the most affected by the pilgrims and Spaniards fleeing religious persecution and then doing the exact same thing to tribal nations. It is the women who were battered by their husbands and partners who began the domestic violence movements, IPTF has been a part of these later movements, ACT UP, Vote NO, Missing and Murdered Indian Women and Relatives (MMIWR), and of course trying to save our life source, the waters. Our youth have been involved in many of these activities, marching for MMIWR, walking for the water, putting their creativity to work to send messages to their peers about avoiding teen pregnancy, preventing HIV, educating their peers about cybercrimes and trafficking, and talking about historical trauma. At the heart of all these activities are our original teachings to be kind, be loving, be courageous, seek knowledge and wisdom, be humble, be honest and generous. The Ikidowin Youth Theater Ensemble continues to tell the stories that are our stories—stories of resilience, stories of triumph, stories of love and inspiration born out of fire, born out of despair, born out of knowing this is our land. This is our spot on the globe where creator placed us and we will protect it and each other. The young people at the heart of our work move us forward to preventing HIV, HEP C, and getting people motivated to get vaccinated to prevent COVID infections. We teach the youth to use their voice to demand justice and resources. We create our own resources as Indigenous people growing our own foods and asserting our sovereignty.

Sharon M. Day, (Ojibwe) is the Executive Director and a founder of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF), formerly known as the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force. She leads IPTF’s flagship program, Ikidowin Youth Theater Ensemble, and mentors youth via theatrical expressivity. Day is an artist, musician, and writer. Her play, We will do it for the Water has been produced by Pangea World theater. As an actor she has performed with Pangea World Theater, Spiderwoman Theater, Illusion Theater, American History Theater and with festivals at the Guthrie and Ordway. An environmental activist, she has led 20 plus Water Walks since 2011, walking over 10,000 miles to offer prayers for these rivers. She is an editor of the anthology, Sing! Whisper! Shout! Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World: Edgework Books, 2000. She is also one of two contributors to Drink of the Winds, Let the Waters Flow Free, Johnson Institute, 1978.