Identity Crisis with Dennis Fox Jr.

When i came back to the reservation i like charlie said i grew up in aberdeen south dakota my parents worked for the bia i was in pine ridge i did some ranching i came back here worked for the newspaper and then i went to dc and i worked for the smithsonian for quite a while and did some work for the university of maryland and then came back here not knowing what i was going to do and saw the earth lodge and disrepair and started working on the earth lodge and trying to repair it and it’s on charlie’s family’s land where the earth lodge was and that earth lodge has fallen apart so we tried to fix it and some people noticed and i had an opportunity to work with youth build which was a program for troubled young people who may have dropped out of school was looking for an alternative way to achieve and get their ged or graduate from high school however they could and help them whatever was troubling them at that time of young adulthood get him to be a contributing community member and part of that main concern and we had a hard time selling it to the national organization youth build but we saw it here on fort berthold and the people involved were mike cross kelly fox richard pease and um i don’t know where it goes [Music] smith which smith goes by uh made his brother i can’t remember his name i got it to verdal it’s verdell but uh he goes by a different name thunderhorse or something brunel thunderhorse anyway what we found within that young person coming is that they suffered from an identity crisis they didn’t know where they fit they didn’t really know who they were to fit they would come in acting like they were um in the wrap sort of movement and dressing with baggy pants or cussing every other word that they had a problem with the identity of who they were and where they’re coming from and what we tried to teach them is their history and what it meant to be who they were and how to participate in the community as a tribal member and as a com as a contributing member to society and the most important thing was telling them who they are and what that meant being within a clan having an indian name understanding that your person you may be sitting to you next to you is your brother or your sister clan way or um a distant relative to you from um from a family that had significant medicine so to speak and that they had to be respectful in such a way and they couldn’t be any away how they were acting and so you boil that down to the traditional values and you try to try to figure those out and i found a book called uh manager as a warrior and it had those tets in it of what it meant to be a warrior and it was written by a white guy down in uh in pine ridge and um he’s a pretty cool guy though and he lived amongst the educators and students in the pine ridge area and wrote a very well conceived curriculum to help understand what it meant to be a native person and trying to achieve leadership within the community and so we taught that and we weren’t successful in every case but every now and then i’ll see a youth build member that’s pretty successful in the community and that just makes your heart shine and you really feel good about it that person’s come around but gotta say there’s others still struggling but they’re gonna come around and we keep praying for them and we keep talking about those tenets so to speak of what it means to be a manager as a lawyer and um that self identity as a tribal member of a nation is important and it’s not important to just you it’s important to the ancestors that have fought for you to be able to be here to put yourself in a particular way and present yourself to the world that’s all i got