Oceti Wakan has created a program to deal with alcohol and drug abuse. This includes a student's personal workbook. This program incorporates ancient Lakota values and virtues along with the lastest prevention education today, to help a child make healthier choices. On our products page you will find 'Learning Prevention Using Lakota Values-Primary' workbook and 'Learning Prevention Using Lakota Values-Secondary' workbook. Both of these are avalible with an accompanying 'Parent's Handbook-Raising Resilient Children' to help increase knowledge and support what the child is learning. Many of our schools have used this program successfully. If you have an interest in using this in your school, please contact us to set up an appointment.
Today, our children are learning in our schools what alcohol and drugs do to the physical and mental aspects of their body, but very little about how it affect the emotional and spiritual body. With alcohol and drug use at epidemic proportions on the reservations, Oceti Wakan believes we must put our resources into prevention. Programs such as "No Child Left Behind" and "Just Say No" have had little success on our reservations. The only successful drug/alcohol programs uses a spiritual approach. Therefore, we felt that it only makes sense to design our prevention program in the same way. On Pine Ridge Reservation 70% of our children do not graduate from high school and we feel that drug and alcohol abuse is a big contributor to this.
Oceti Wakan is approaching this problem in a holistic way by creating a medicine wheel approach to develop the best tools for prevention. Our workbooks are designed for the child to use a personal journal to record their feelings. The program will then help them to learn ways to best deal with them and will follow with an exercise or story to reinforce that knowledge.
