So obviously culture plays a huge role in in everything that you do when you work with different groups of indigenous folks. Where does your focus go in terms of blending all the things that you know they need to get from you; like do you have your things they need to walk away with?

Whenever I do any presentations, participants are leaving with tools. You can’t use the same kind of pace as in a school, and counselors are using school pace to try and understand our techniques with students. It’s impossible because we’re using an acceleration technique which I don’t even know if they know about, and its vehicle is culture. You can watch them make three years of growth and maturity, to increase their understanding of themselves.

From a cultural context, how do you blend the need for information and attend to their pace, where they’re at? How do you see them as individuals and try to get them to a better place?

Most people want to dissect things and go backwards, pull it apart so they can find the root of the problem; for us it does have to be acknowledged, but there are ways you can take it off their backs. What healed myself & my family was that I began to look at myself back through the generations to understand who I was on paper. I traced our trauma all the way back to Indian removal. From where I was standing, at a point of realization from a point of inflection, everything went away because I no longer had to blame myself for it and I was able to disconnect from it; it set me free to be able to say “Well ****, what do I want to do now?” That’s where we begin that acceleration technique of being able to say OK now, this is where we bring us all up to speed regardless of what it is that you’ve been through; here’s the justification. Let’s look for it and begin to see and then build. Help them to become cut off from a negative path – bring back their original footsteps, presented in in a way that we look to creation story.

“This is what becomes intrinsic all your life – you’ve identified yourself by these experiences, adversities, and mistakes that you’ve made, and you’ve been carrying this weight; now that you’ve set it down, let me tell you what creator told you that you were. Let’s build that foundation and bring it forward so we can pick you up when you put your footsteps back on the ground.” Explain how they are a child of creation in a way they can understand. We are rebuilding a foundation of resiliency again and then from that point we implement an objective conversation. Now these young people can begin to identify exactly where they’re at. Rather than you having to pull it out, you set it down in front of them and say, “OK this is what it’s supposed to look like, this is what creator and culture told you that you should be every day.” They see that it doesn’t match up with their lives, so we do an adapted cultural needs assessment.

We had societies based upon who was good at what, so it’s kind of like re-implementing that with wherever people are. We ask “What’s your strength? What are you good at? Because through that I can show you the power of your contribution and ask you to build your self-worth and understand that you have power, you have a contribution. Most young people don’t have that and that’s one of the biggest things that affects their self-esteem; they feel like they are lacking purpose, that anything they do does not matter. Some of them think “All I do is go to school and get grades but beyond that I feel lost.” But the moment that you give them an opportunity to be able to make a strong positive contribution and get positive feedback, that’s when the light starts to shine. It’s going back to those traditional principles of looking at how community functions.

There’s a reason why people were able to thrive for thousands of years – generational learning was simple. In implementing that societal structure, so to speak, to being able to say which common contributions can bring those people together so that they can form relationships, grow, and build off one another. They can understand how it is that they interact socially and how they can complement one another. When they come together as a whole, they can create something powerful in the long run. We are amplifying individuality and uniqueness in a beautiful way; you’re not setting them apart to single them out. They don’t know there were a hundred other people just like them.

When I am engaging people, even in conferences when people ask me to speak, I read the crowd to see where people are at, and then give them snapshots of everything I was talking about in a way where I can allow them to understand. Like flash cards are a process I use because I’ve only got an hour to spend; hopefully students can take something away with it – there’s an opportunity to grow and learn about themselves. As it is culturally based, we look back at how we can reinterpret things in a modern-day context and how are they applicable. The only thing that’s changed is the environment and the tools that we have in our hands – that and all the shirts with positive cultural messaging!

Tell me about a couple of your biggest challenges since starting Thrive Unlimited.

As with every Native organization, funding is always one of the biggest challenges; since we are coming from a culturally based approach in a world of academia, working in the realm of mental and emotional health, we have a different approach. It’s amazing to me that I started as a graffiti writer and do hip hop as an MC/Producer – that’s what began my community work and that’s my degree, and now I am presenting all of this in front of rooms full of psychiatrists, clinicians, and professors. It’s just me standing here, breathing, carrying my family name. I’m living, breathing proof of the power of this approach. People’s minds are fixated in the conventions and systems that we work inside of, which is what caused us to diverge from an indigenous pathway in the first place. The biggest challenges are funding and community expectation; I guess it’s the ideology that comes from a ration mind state from the past. We expect everything to be handed to us, everything to be done for free. It goes along with the funding thing and has a potential to have a profound effect in communities. But in some communities, many people are in that res mind state, that bare minimum is enough, I’d rather just show up and get my paycheck.”

That’s been our effort over the past three years, how do we get past that so rather than having to partner with tribal programs or implement this through tribal programs, I would just (out of my own pocket) host a seminar for whoever is willing to receive the information. From there, that became my window in the communities because now I had someone who went through the process, who felt it, who believes in it, who supports it, and is willing to make it happen in the right way. It’s a vehicle for advocacy and dialogue in the way that we’ve approached it. From a branding context, now it becomes valuable, changing people’s mindset. Instead of having to go to these tribal programs to reach the people, what we figured out was we must get past this tradition because it’s not reaching the community, it’s not reaching the moms and dads and the people that really need it. The more that we can drive forward as we as we step into this affiliate status where we can function as nonprofit, the more we can package our services in a way where we can go out and seek funding and partnership so that all of this is paid for. I want to just hand it over to the people now and create a digital platform to get all the web work done and have it all paid for.

Learn more about Thrive UNLTD –> https://thriveunltd.com/