Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
[Oleksa:]
At this point, we set up programs—the suicide prevention hotline, the drug and alcohol prevention program. We bring in social workers, law enforcement officers to do our best to contain the epidemics of antisocial or self-destructive behaviors that now have engulfed not just one family or one individual. It’s a community system or situation. The problem being that this introduces a whole new wave of: “We white guys know how to do this and you Native people can’t deal with it.” So it comes full circle just like the teachers from one hundred years ago maybe inadvertently sending the message, “We’re smart and you’re not. We know how to do these things and you can’t.” That was Mrs. Big Bustle’s message in a rather indirect way one hundred years ago, but we’re reinforcing it now by bringing in the outside experts to deal with the current level of problems. So we have this cycle of confusion and frustration and anxiety leading into greater bitterness and anger and grief, moving right into drug and alcohol abuse and self-destructive behaviors, bringing in more money, more expertise, and more outside experts to address these problems, and so the more we try to help, the worse it gets. And it seems to me the only way out of this rather destructive cycle is to raise up indigenous people to take control once again of their own lives and their own community.