Warning: too long
On Saturday, March 10, 2018, me and Mia went out to
Santa Rosa, CA to attend the 1st annual Native Men’s and Women’s
Wellness Gathering at the Sonoma County Indian Health Clinic. It was kind of
hectic getting there because I woke up almost late and I rode my bike real fast
to the train station where I barely got on the train, and then surprisingly enough,
I crossed paths with one of my classmates. Then I went to San Fran and met up
with Mia and we took off. When we got there, we signed in and got some cool yellow
shirts. When I was here I went to two workshops, one was about Cultural
Identity and the second was about Healing your Inner Child.
The first one was very relevant, because they talked
about how we were socially conditioned to believe that the introduced concepts
like money was more important than our traditional objects.
One of them told a story about how an
Indian and another person went to New York City. The Indian heard something in
spite of all the traffic and conversations on the busy streets, and the other
person thought he was crazy, so the Indian followed the sound and found a rock,
and under the rock was a cricket. The other person said “How can you hear that
little thing in all this traffic?” And the Indian replied “I was listening for
something different.” The facilitator then further explained how if you drop a bunch of
coins in the middle of the street, everyone is gonna look, which then
validated that to these people, money was more important than the little things
in life.
We then did this 🅱ool activity where he had a circle
rope in the center, and all of us had to pick it up and stretch it out, so that
it would get tight, and one person would have to walk the rope. He made it all
the way through, and the teaching was that our people had to walk on this path,
that everyone had full support, and that it would not happen in a square or a
triangle, but a circle, in that the sacred circle will help you get on the
right path.
The next workshop was about
how we should stay positive in life even if we had past trauma. He talked to
most of us individually in front of the group about how it would be if we
experienced adversity as a child and how we would have been a different person
if we kept these thoughts close to us, and that we should give our thoughts to
Creator because keeping them would make you sick. The activity for this one was
going around in a circle and a bunch of people sat in the inner circle and the
outer circle had to go to each person and tell them good things even if we didn’t
know them personally and show them that you can think of good things about a
person and how reassuring positive thoughts can be and that’s how we should be
talking to each other instead of being negative.
After all that we had dinner and left, then those
other people went to go dance. I would go back next year if I could. The picture I got off their facebook post.
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