These past two days have been wonderful connection with the rest of the kids at this program, with this i would like to share what happened. On Thursday July 13,2017, the day started off so energetic with our indigenous games with Hector and Josh. These games empowered me and helped me gain such important values such as discipline and unity. I enjoyed making the soap stone necklace with Julia although it did take me longer to finish than everyone else but at the end i loved doing a hand on activity. Although we did many activities this day I would actually say that the activity that had such a huge and powerful impact in my life would have to be the blanket exercise with our brothers and sisters from Canada.
The blanket exercise was basically a visual representation of the struggles and the impacts the European men had on the lives of the indigenous people of Canada. While the exercise was going on I felt such an anger in me not only because of how the indigenous people were affected but on how it is affecting all indigenous people today especially the other students in this program. Once the exercise had ended we all got to share our thoughts and feelings on what we felt an/or saw. while going around I got to hear many unfortunate storied of my fellow peers about how they were affected and there families were affected as well by the colonizers. I was heartbroken and surprised to hear these stories from them because you don’t really expect to hear those stories from people. I am very happy for this exercise which helped me connect and have more trust in these wonderful people here in this program as well as take my anger and use it to go back home and find more ways to help our people regain what was taken from us many many years ago.
Today July 14,2017 was a day of connecting and sharing with the rest of the young ladies in this program. Once lunch ended boys and girls got separated to have some time to connect in between gender groups. In our session we spent time doing arts and crafts with our elder Julia. We began once Julia set the individual bags with beads, wire and 4 loose chains in them. Once we all had our own bags with beads I began to add one by one of my beads onto my wire, with every bead I put into my wire I felt a connection being built with the rest of these beautiful and strong young women who were sitting besides me. While hanging the 4 loose chains onto my bracelet I felt thought of 4 women traumas and that is what each of the loose chains on my bracelet mean. Once we were done wit our bracelets we all picked one paper with a beautiful design on the front and an inspirational quote on the back. While doing this we all connected by dancing, singing and being very silly. Before this happened we got an amazing opportunity to spend three hours with ur aztec math teacher Vicente, during these three hours we did danza and Vicente shared some amazing stories with us that I will keep in mind. I appreciated everything we did today and want to give thank to everyone for really trying to connect.
Peace and Love Christine
nativeyouth2college.org 