Two Wisconsin Native American tribes are being recognized for their efforts to improve health and wellness on their reservations by weaving traditional cultural practices into their schools and health clinics.
The Menominee and Lac Du Flambeau tribes are among eight communities across the country to receive a $25,000 Culture of Health prize from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Lac Du Flambeau tribal language teacher Wayne Valliere said the tribe has found that reconnecting with traditional native culture has helped the tribe deal with health problems like diabetes and drug addiction.
"For a long time, we had a lot of different systems coming from the outside telling our people how we should live and what we should do to solve some of our problems, when the answer was staring us in the face for many generations," said Valliere.
Valliere said the problems the tribe is trying to address can be traced back to federal cultural assimilation programs. For many years, Native children would be removed from their homes and forced into boarding schools, where they were forced to give up their language and reject their Native culture.
[For more of this story, written by Gilman Halsted, go to http://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-t...asize-native-culture]
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