{"id":16654,"date":"2017-03-15T22:57:10","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T04:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=16654"},"modified":"2017-03-16T07:02:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T13:02:03","slug":"high-achieving-crow-salish-woman-builds-on-family-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/03\/high-achieving-crow-salish-woman-builds-on-family-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"High-achieving Crow-Salish woman builds on family tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bear\"<\/a>

Mitchell Rose Bear Don’t Walk was recently named to the newly formed Tribal Youth Health Advisory Board to the National Indian Health Board.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mitchell Rose Bear Don\u2019t Walk said her family instilled in her the idea that she would go to college, and that she would use her knowledge to do good things.<\/p>\n

Her family\u2019s accomplishments, as much as their words, showed her the way.<\/p>\n

Her mother, Eldena Bear Don\u2019t Walk<\/a>, who was born in Missoula and raised in Billings, was the first female chief justice of the Crow Tribe, serving from 2007 to 2011.<\/p>\n

Her grandmother, Marjorie Bear Don\u2019t Walk, is Salish and is the longtime executive director of the Indian Health Board of Billings, and her grandfather, Urban Bear Don\u2019t Walk, was only the second member of the Crow Tribe to earn a law degree, and was among the first American Indian attorneys in the United States.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it is no surprise that Rose, as she is known, who graduated from Yale University last year and is now teaching in St. Ignatius, was recently chosen as one of 24 members of the newly formed Tribal Youth Health Advisory Board to the National Indian Health Board.<\/p>\n

She and Abaki Beck<\/a>, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe, will be the advisory board\u2019s only two representatives of the Billings Area, an Indian Health Service region that encompasses all of Montana and Wyoming. The board is made up of two people from each of the IHS’s 12 regions.<\/p>\n

Bear Don\u2019t Walk hopes her work on the advisory board will be an extension of the work she did at Yale, where she earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in political science, with a focus on environmental policy.<\/p>\n

She and other Native students at Yale started the Indian Health Initiative<\/a>, which promoted physical and mental health through a combination of nutritional, traditional food and exercise through participation in tribal games.<\/p>\n

An important part of her studies focused on \u201cfood sovereignty,\u201d the idea that people should produce or have access to healthy, nutritional foods that are culturally relevant to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cReservations are not known to have the most healthy options available,\u201d she said, going back to the days of commodities distributions that consisted almost exclusively of \u201cwesternized foods\u201d that had nothing to do with traditional eating habits.<\/p>\n

Bear Don\u2019t Walk wants to approach emotional and physical health on Indian reservations in a holistic way, \u201cto make sure in the future we\u2019re not trying to fix the problem after it happens. \u2026 I really want to improve the health and wellbeing of tribal communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bear Don\u2019t Walk, 22, was mostly raised in St. Ignatius, on the Flathead Reservation, where her mother had a law practice for years. Her mother is now the managing attorney in the public defender\u2019s office in Polson.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Marjorie Bear Don\u2019t Walk said her granddaughter, though \u201ca little girl compared to the rest of her family,\u201d was always active in sports, academics and extracurricular activities. \u201cYou can\u2019t say that she sits around,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Marjorie Bear Don\u2019t Walk said she had nothing to do with the formation of the national youth advisory board, but there has been a need for such a group for many years.<\/p>\n

The widely recognized problems on Indian reservations, including family dysfunction, high dropout rates, suicide and poor health, \u201chave to be solved by the people involved,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In the midst of all the troubles, she said, \u201cthe ones that are successful are very successful. We need to be really proud of them because it\u2019s not easy. Unless they have the social skills and are able to look out for themselves, they are kind of set up to fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rose Bear Don\u2019t Walk said she was accepted to several prestigious schools, but chose Yale partly because \u201cthey had a really good support system for Native American students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yale also offered her a generous financial aid package, which supplemented her Gates Millennium Scholarship<\/a>. As a result, she said, she was able to graduate \u201cwith essentially no debt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her goal\u00a0is to eventually work with tribal communities on environmental issues, including resource extraction and food policy. \u201cIt\u2019s a really, really tense but empowering time,\u201d she said, referring to the recent fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other environmental battles on Indian reservations.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Bear Don\u2019t Walk was awarded a Udall Foundation Congressional Internship and she spent the summer in Sen. Tom Udall\u2019s office in Washington, D.C. That\u2019s where she met Beck, who was also an intern. Bear Don\u2019t Walk said it was completely coincidental that she and Beck both applied to serve on and were chosen\u00a0for the Tribal Youth Health Advisory Board.<\/p>\n

Both women were planning to fly out of Missoula Thursday morning to attend the 2017 Native Youth Health Summit at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. The summit will also serve as the inaugural meeting of the youth health advisory board.<\/p>\n

Since graduating from college, Bear Don\u2019t Walk has been teaching Salish language at St. Ignatius High School, her alma mater. She said she learned just a smattering of Salish as a girl\u2014and a few words of Crow while riding horses near Lodge Grass with her grandfather\u2014but studied Salish by Skype during an independent language class at Yale.<\/p>\n

She said she is nowhere near fluent in Salish, but the curriculum she\u2019s teaching from\u00a0is the same one she used at Yale, so she is learning more and reinforcing what she knew every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always believed that language is the root of a culture,\u201d she said. \u201cIf the language is gone, there\u2019s so much of the culture we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although she wants to go on and do big things\u2014she recently applied to a master\u2019s program in environmental science at the State University of New York in Syracuse\u2014she\u2019s happy to be back in St. Ignatius, sharing her knowledge with kids in the school she attended.<\/p>\n

And that, by the way, was another reason she chose Yale: it has the same mascot as St. Ignatius High.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce a Bulldog, always a Bulldog,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mitchell Rose Bear Don\u2019t Walk said her family instilled in her the idea that she would go to college, and that she would use her knowledge to do good things. Her family\u2019s accomplishments, as much as their words, showed her the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[5632,5633,5635,5631,5629,5628,5634,5630],"class_list":["post-16654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-abaki-beck","tag-eldena-bear-dont-walk","tag-marjorie-bear-dont-walk","tag-mitchell-rose-bear-dont-walk","tag-national-indian-health-board","tag-tribal-youth-health-advisory-board","tag-urban-bear-dont-walk","tag-yale","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16654"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16661,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16654\/revisions\/16661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}