{"id":9894,"date":"2016-01-14T22:58:36","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T05:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=9894"},"modified":"2016-01-15T07:40:06","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T14:40:06","slug":"indian-and-white-listening-and-other-simple-virtues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/01\/indian-and-white-listening-and-other-simple-virtues\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian and white: Listening and other simple virtues"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Abuse\"

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Crystal Rondeaux-Hickman, left, makes a point Thursday night at the Billings Public Library during a discussion of Native Americans and substance abuse.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nobody said it was going to be easy.<\/p>\n

Billings authors Adrian Jawort and Russell Rowland took on a complex, divisive and longstanding problem when they started the Native American Race Relations and Healing Consortium last year.<\/p>\n

Their inaugural event, an all-day symposium<\/a> featuring three different panel discussions, attracted nearly 75 people to the Billings Public Library in August.<\/p>\n

The second offering was held Thursday night in the library\u2019s Royal Johnson Community Room, and drew about 35 people. It was the first in what is projected to be a monthly series of lectures and discussions.<\/p>\n

The 90-minute event featured two counselors who were scheduled to talk about mental health and addictions, and the resources available to those in need. Their remarks and the discussion that followed seemed a bit formless at times, heavy on anecdotes and light on solutions.<\/p>\n

But by the end of the session there was the feeling that maybe this was the way forward\u2014just talking about things that mattered to individuals, telling a few truths, introducing people to new ideas and establishing relationships.<\/p>\n

As one of the main speakers, Crystal Rondeaux-Hickman, said, \u201cWe start changing the world by showing up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jawort said he thought it was important to talk about addictions because it is \u201cthe elephant in the room.\u201d A white man at the August symposium said the only Indians he ever saw were drunks on the street, and while that might be an absurd or bigoted observation, Jawort said, it was true that a large proportion of drunken transients in Billings are Native American.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>One reason for that, Rondeaux-Hickman said, was that Indians are used to surrounding themselves with extended families, and when a person is forced to leave his family because of his shameful addictions, he creates a new family on the street, consisting of fellow alcoholics.<\/p>\n

Most Indians, she said, are \u201ccontextual people,\u201d who measure themselves by the number and depth of their relationships.<\/p>\n

Rondeaux-Hickman has worked as a mental health professional for many years in Billings and is now a mental health facilitator for the state Office of Public Instruction in Pryor. The other speaker was Joel Simpson, whose job is to help street people deal with their addictions and mental health problems.<\/p>\n

His is a counselor at the Rimrock Foundation and is also the resource outreach coordinator for the downtown Billings Alliance. He works with downtown police officers to provide case management, advocacy and outpatient counseling to transients.<\/p>\n

He cited some familiar statistics and gave a few updates. Before he started working the streets last March, he said, people working on homelessness had determined that of the 700 to 800 people considered homeless in Billings on any given day, 74 were identified as chronic offenders, public inebriates always in trouble with the law.<\/p>\n

\"Meeting\"

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

About 35 people showed up for the event, sponsored by the Native American Race Relations and Healing Consortium.<\/p><\/div>\n

And 96 percent of those 74 people were Native American, said Simpson, a member of the Crow Tribe. But there has been marked progress. He said he has made contact with 56 of those 74 people and has gotten many of them into treatment.<\/p>\n

He said three street people in particular had 44 arrests among them during a one-year period. During the past five months, all three have been in treatment programs and none has been involved in a single police call, he said. He also mentioned that one man graduated from the treatment program in October, after a life on the streets in various cities, and a second man is scheduled to graduate in February.<\/p>\n

Contrary to popular conceptions, Simpson said, everyone he meets on the street hangs on to some strength, takes pride in some artifact of his past and hopes, however faintly, to get beyond addiction and life on the street.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery one of them, at one point, had a life that didn\u2019t involve living on the streets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

After Rondeaux-Hickman and Simpson spoke, a woman who identified herself as the product of a Sioux-Cheyenne mother and a Scots-Irish father told a long, harrowing story of alcohol and drug abuse, violence, rape and repeated stints in prison.<\/p>\n

\"Joel\"

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Joel Simpson is the resource outreach coordinator for the downtown Billings Alliance.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAs a half-breed\u2014that\u2019s what you\u2019re called on the rez,\u201d she said, it was hard to find an identity, which contributed to her search for a chemical solution to her problems. She said she \u201chit rock bottom many times\u201d but has completed a state treatment program, has been clean since last March and is preparing to study marketing at Montana State University Billings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been doing really well,\u201d she said at the conclusion of her extended talk. \u201cI look forward to my future.\u201d<\/p>\n

That prompted another woman, half Crow and half Dutch, to ask what the point of the evening was. \u201cI wanted to hear about solutions,\u201d she said. A little later, she said she didn\u2019t drink, but alcohol abuse by others had caused her so much pain that she didn\u2019t even want to talk about it. And at that point she left.<\/p>\n

Another woman said it was all good, that people \u201cneed to tell our stories,\u201d however painful, and need to listen to one another. Several others in the crowd agreed, saying the solution might not lie with programs or organizations but simply in continuing dialogue, empathy and close listening.<\/p>\n

One audience member, Dan Struckman, turned to the woman who had related a life of abuse and violence, whose story had as yet been greeted only by stunned silence, and thanked her for having the courage to tell her story. \u201cI\u2019m grateful to you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jawort then read a quote from the write Franz Kafka, who said that while it is possible to hold oneself back from the suffering of the world, \u201cperhaps this very holding back is one suffering you could avoid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simpson asked people to remember that all these efforts to help transients get back on their feet arose from grassroots meetings of downtown residents and business owners, not government officials. He also said we should celebrate the fact that city police officers and Tina Volek, the city administrator, sat down with the Montana Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council and asked its members for ideas and solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen have you seen that?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

The next lecture in the series is scheduled for Feb. 17 at the library. John J. Robinson, former president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, will speak on tribal sovereignty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nobody said it was going to be easy. Billings authors Adrian Jawort and Russell Rowland took on a complex, divisive and longstanding problem when they started the Native American Race Relations and Healing Consortium last year. Their inaugural event, an all-day symposium featuring three different panel discussions, attracted nearly 75 people to the Billings Public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[137,90,3657,975,2492,3658,608],"class_list":["post-9894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-adrian-jawort","tag-billings-public-library","tag-crystal-rondeaux-hickman","tag-downtown-billings-alliance","tag-joel-simpson","tag-montana-wyoming-tribal-leaders-council","tag-russell-rowland","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9894","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=9894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}