Guest Column | Topic: Native men’s, women’s behavioral health

By Samibah Straits

I went to the “Resiliency Through Shared Wellness” Native American Behavioral Health Conference at the Isleta Resort Casino, hosted by Charlene Poola and others from the Albuquerque Area Southwest Tribal Epidemiology Center.

There were many well-known Native American guest speakers such as Dr. Dolores Bigfoot, Dr. Clayton Small, Ms. Tahlia Natachu, and Ms. Kelly Gilbreth.

Many of the presenters spoke about missing and murdered indigenous women, suicide prevention, addressing intimate partner violence, and culture and resilience.

I was very lucky to participate in this wonderful meeting that went from the 1st to the 3rd of March, 2022.

Behavior health means the well-being of your actions. When you bike, that is positive behavior. When you drink, that is a negative behavior.

People need to watch their actions before they get after someone else if they are drinking themselves. Also, if they see a friend drinking, they should help their friend to stop drinking.

Often, people who drink hurt themselves and other people and are dragged under by guilt, grief and other strong emotions, according to Dr. Clayton Small.

For those who don’t know what a conference is, this will explain what this meeting was like. This conference was in a large ballroom in the Isleta Resort and Casino. At the conference there is food and vendors selling pottery and jewelry. There are tables with pamphlets for helping people with behavioral health. Most of the vendors want to help the people and their friends. When they offer their service, they are giving their help to all of those who need it.

At the meeting one of the speakers said New Mexico has the largest rate of missing and murdered indigenous women. This is important to Native American families with young women who live in New Mexico or in the Navajo Nation.

People need to understand how bad it’s been because a lot of Native families in New Mexico still have missing relatives. Native Americans need help to find their loved ones.

Dr. Teresa Brockie explained that kids were forced into boarding schools. Many of these children lost their identities. Also, almost all the kids that went never returned home. If they do, they have experienced trauma. Teenagers are then more likely to commit suicide.

People need to see the pain that this has caused to many Native American families. Many families are stressed out. Then they start to act without thinking through drinking and fighting within their families. Then they become what Dr. Small said, quoting, “knuckleheads.”

Many of the speakers said that the solution is to heal the hearts of these families.

Ms. Tahlia Natachu spoke about the Zuni Youth Enrichment Program, which helps kids understand and find their heritage. ZYEP helps the kids understand the Zuni culture by allowing them to make dresses and dancing traditional dances.

The kids can meet counselors who are older kids. This helps the Zuni kids feel safer when they have others like them around. Many kids never get the ability to learn so freely about their own traditions in schools.

In my opinion, many schools ignore learning about the history of Native Americans, that kids should not ask to learn.

Teachers educate that Native American people are hostiles. When children are schooled this way, they think that it’s their fault that kids and the teachers dislike them, and bullying is often the result.

One of the presenters, by the name of Clayton Small, was hilarious. He said that Native men are knuckleheads. He stated that Native men were the first to “invent pouting.”
He made a remark that Native men were found hitchhiking because they don’t listen to the women and thus the saying, “my way or the highway.”

He wanted to help Native young men. Young Native men are often the ones in more danger of suicide. Also, Native men get beaten up or killed more often than women.

Furthermore, he commented that a lot of Native men are “chicken littles,” which means that they are the people who get the whole tribe confused and discombobulated. They are the ones who scream “the sky is falling!”

Many people thought that was funny, but he had a message and was warning us not to be those chicken littles. We must help each other and not get each other in problems.

Finally, I just want to say that the meeting was awesome and hit some very left out parts, such as suicide and intimate partner violence.

As a youth, it is important to understand what suicide is. Many schools don’t give kids the chance to learn topics such as suicide.

In addition, all the speakers were Native speakers. It is a pleasure to hear the other side of an argument from a Native American perspective. You often just hear it from the white perspective, and that puts brown people and black people as the bad guys.

When you hear it from a Native’s perspective, then you get all the juicy, bitter details.

Lastly, I think that we should pay attention to all the problems I heard being talked about in the meeting. These are important issues because they are our leak holes that we need to fix in our systems of leaving out the pain many families carry.

Maria-Fernanda Samibah Straits, Quechua/Navajo, is a 12-year-old 6th grade homeschool student in Albuquerque. She wrote and illustrated several unpublished stories. Twice, she placed first in her grade for reciting poetry in Spanish. Samibah enjoys writing because it makes her imagine things as if she were taken from one place to another like magic. She is an avid reader, pianist, and animal-lover.

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