In my last post I talked about foster care and us doing our part if we are able to. Today I wanna talk about the importance of the way we are raising our children & future leaders.
We know that the government used residential schools to try to strip us of our culture. We know that physical, sexual, & emotional violence were common. While they may have been common for Europeans, that shit ain’t common amongst our people! As always, we are left to pick up the pieces from the destruction the Europeans caused and continue to cause even today.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever thought about how things would be done if you were in charge? All the different safeguards you would have put into place to keep the children safe? I do. While their methods were usually sadistic, the general idea of what they were trying to do shouldn’t just be ignored.
What I’m talking about still has to do with fostering, but also encouragement for those who think big like I do. Lol! They wanted to start with our children to rip away our culture. I’m saying let’s start with the children to immerse them in our culture & history, but more importantly, their own spirituality.
I look at our people today and what I see are 2 things. The first is that there are many ways for our youth to take the wrong path in this life simply because of the circumstances they were born into. The second thing I also see is many of the youth eager to change the way things are right now for our future generations. They can see and might even be living in some of those not so good circumstances.
I visited a women & children’s home once that was very interesting to see. It was a huge place in the mountains with lots of acres. They had, depending on the size of the family, different apartments for the women who had kids. Across a lake was 2 big houses that housed foster kids. One was boys and the other girls. There was a store on the land that had groceries, cleaning supplies, clothes, appliances, furniture, etc..
Furniture, clothes, & appliances were donated so they would let the women have what they needed. The groceries were able to be bought with food stamps but they also took them into town to go to Wal-Mart every week in case they needed other things. There was a van that would take them for doctor appointments as well.
The ladies were able to work there and outside of the home if they chose as long as they had childcare. I think there was a program for the mother’s who worked outside of the home so that they could help them move out of there after so long. It was a really cool setup & helped those women a lot. Many had nowhere to go with their kids.
The reason I’m bringing this up should be obvious by now. Lol! With all the domestic violence our women see, I think a place like that could help save some of our kids from even having to enter foster care. I like the idea of having 2 separate homes for foster boys & girls as well. You usually hire a married couple who manage the households together, but only have separate sleeping arrangements.
If we could have a school included in that, it would be the perfect setup. There could be classes on aquaponics, hunting, building, beading, weaving, raising bees for honey, farming, cosmetology, traditional dance, language classes, etc.. Anything & everything indigenous that you could want & then some!.. (I told you, I’m a dreamer. Lol!)
Besides reading, writing, math, & our history the only other required class would be meditation. Did you know that they did a study within a violent prison where they had taught the inmates meditation techniques? The outcome was that violence within that prison decreased dramatically. We should never ignore something like that and more research into it could have you hooked…
A book that I read recently called Autobiography of a Yogi changed my life. I am not a religious person at all & had considered myself agnostic. Then I read that book. All things I believed about spirituality were confirmed & explained scientifically! It was amazing! I actually cried when I realized what the ones who tried to keep this from us had done. It was beyond pulling the wool over our eyes. They were essentially trapping our souls in an endless cycle of death & rebirth! I highly recommend you read it yourself.
That is why I want spirituality to be the most important aspect of it. When we are conscious of who and what we truly are, we can start letting these attachments go that have damaged us in this life & past ones. Only you know who you truly are which is why meditation is so important. That is you looking within, scraping off all the grime of life that has built up around your soul, & finally finding out who you were meant to be before any damage had been done.
If we could help these kids heal and send them out into the world ready to take it on, it could potentially be a domino effect. If enough of these places were open to help our women and children, we could change the future for our people. We have had it bad for the last 500 years, but our roots go much deeper than that! That isn’t who we were. It’s never too late to fix what has been broken & get back on the right path. I see so much good already!..
Stay tuned to my next post where I dive deeper into spirituality and why I believe what I do.
Confessions of an Assimilated Ndn 