Help a Lakota Child with Lifeskills Development

Can you help a Lakota child develop Wellness skills that will lay the foundation for their lives?  For only $40, you can change the life of a child for generations! Oglala Lakota County School District (four out of ten schools) will be teaching our Wellness/Life Skills Prevention Program this fall from K-8. The school district had enough funding to purchase Teacher’s Manuals, workbooks for the teachers and counselor, and Parent’s Handbooks; however, they did not have enough to purchase a workbook for each child as the program was designed for. There are 1000 students who will be using this curriculum on a daily basis, and we need your help to ensure each student has their own workbook!  Each child having their own individual workbook is very important as they include lessons, activities, journals, and resources they can refer to in the future when faced with difficult choices and challenges.

Oceti Wakan's new Wellness Program is designed for children from 2nd - 8th grades. This program was created to educate and heal their trauma; develop healthy life skills for their physical, emotional, spiritual and mental bodies; to teach them virtues development; and to create a strong positive Lakota identity. The Wellness program gives our children the tools needed to live healthy lives, avoid the pitfalls of addiction plaguing our communities, and helps to restore the Lakota Culture.  

This program was designed as an answer to over 500 children in one year who attempted suicide. Pine Ridge Reservation is the poorest community in our country.  A County to County Population study was done by the University of Wisconsin, in March of 2015 which was published by Time.com whose headline read: "This map shows the deadliest counties in the U.S." This article opened with these words "Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, is the deadliest county in America..." this is where these children are growing up. The article goes on to report of the 25 Counties with the highest mortality rates, 5 of the top 6 are Lakota communities in South and North Dakota. 

We can make a difference in their lives; we can help stop the cycle of addiction; we can help provide hope for their futures by giving them the tools they need!  

Peter V. Catches was invited to be a part of a panel years ago at NIH (National Institute of Health), which was moderated by the Surgeon General of the United States, he told Peter that after all these years of research, they've found the best money spent is on prevention. It was after this conversation that Peter and Cindy Catches started developing this Wellness Curriculum based on the Medicine Wheel and addresses our four bodies; the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, and mental aspects of each human being! 

Each workbook is between $35 and $40, can you make a donation today to help change the life of a Lakota Child which will help with healing for generations?

More information about Oceti Wakan: We are a small grassroots non-profit on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which has the highest mortality rate in the country along with other Lakota reservations. Our mission is to preserve the culture and turn this around by developing seven years of a culturally-based curriculum (2nd to 8th grades, but applicable for teens and older). Our goal is to break the cycle of addiction and give our children the life skill tools to have healthy physical, emotional, spiritual and mental bodies. A parent workbook has also been developed to help promote parenting skills, please help us turn this cycle of addiction around.