The Native American Curriculum

Last week I attended a three-day meeting to discuss the curriculum. We were deciding on additions, updated statistics, videos, and changes to the curriculum. These decisions are made by the entire group of trainers that can attend.

Three days of training are tough for me now at my age and a few others who are older than me. We will have dinner each night also and it makes for a long day. My recuperation time is usually a few days after. It was never like that when I was working full-time.

The Native American Curriculum (NAC) has been presented in Minnesota since 2009. The curriculum was purchased by the state of Minnesota from South Dakota. It was mandatory training for the treatment programs in South Dakota. It has not been a required training in Minnesota.

Even though it has not been mandatory in Minnesota, there have been 4-8 trainings for most years, since then. Trainers have gone into the prisons, and treatment centers, state treatment facilities, and a few colleges around the state.

One of the first things we reviewed was the evaluations. One of the items that turned up from our last training was the participants would have liked to have more than one talking circle, rather they would like one each day.

In our training, a talking circle is explained, and they are asked if they have ever participated in a talking circle. When we first started the training very few people had been in a talking circle. Now, more have and realize the benefits of a circle.

In the training, there is an emphasis on how Native American people all benefit from grief counseling. I tell counselors if they are not comfortable doing grief work with their clients then I would ask that they have someone good to refer their program participants for grief work.

We tell participants that it will be a revolving door for our people and others who have a similar need to do grief work.

The Native American Curriculum training is important to have in Minnesota as we have many treatment centers, and the majority will take Native American people. The joke is like being the land of 10,000 lakes we are also the land of 10,000 treatment centers.

When we started this training, we surveyed as did South Dakota and very few people had any training working with the Native American client. One of our larger counselor training groups had requests every year for more training on American Indians in Minnesota.

We get positive feedback and from pre to post-test the gain in knowledge is 25% pretty consistently. They take a large book of good handouts with them when finished and we encourage their reading the handouts during the training, so they are familiar with what material is available.

Our wish is that the training will always be available or it will become unnecessary as everyone in the substance abuse and mental health field will have been trained. They will say, I learned this in school. Right now they say, "Why didn't we learn this in school?" And they sound upset.

In the past several years the curriculum has been used to train other disciplines also. Prevention specialists benefit from this training as well as social workers, education professionals, and childcare workers. We have also seen nurses, psychologists, red cross volunteers and many others.

There is a yearly training of trainers (TOT) where trainees go through a process to train on the curriculum. Passing the TOT requirements makes it possible for them to train on the curriculum in their communities. They are welcome to use parts of the curriculum in other presentations.

We are hopeful that by offering the TOT annually, we will replace some of our older trainers and we will be able to retire completely.