Road tripping as addictions therapy
Though he might have only known sobriety for two months and counting now, Nemaska resident Wayne Rabbitskin has already come up with an innovative plan to get kids off drugs by showing them the consequences.
Rabbitskin is an awareness, prevention and aftercare worker for the National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program (NNADAP). He says he is frustrated with the lack of resources available to youths at risk or in need of post-rehab care in Nemaska.
So he is pitching Nemaska band council to fund the Youth Intervention and Prevention Awareness Campaign. The campaign would take post-rehab kids and at risk youth to volunteer in poverty-stricken Native communities across Canada where they could witness the long-term effects of drugs and alcohol.
While traveling with the youth, Rabbitskin plans to chronicle the reactions to the program participants on DVD after witnessing homelessness, long-term alcoholism, child-abuse victims and other social ills that accompany addiction. Then they would post them on the program’s proposed website.
The idea is to show youth what a lifetime of substance abuse can do to an individual in the hopes that they would not go down the same path. Another goal is to trigger emotional breakthroughs in the participants. At the same time the program could create awareness through its website and have a ripple effect in the community.
Rabbitskin admits he is no stranger to substance-abuse problems, having grown up with addicted parents and having had his own experiences with drugs, alcohol and gang violence.
After witnessing his own father’s desire to sleep in an alleyway amongst other homeless Crees after falling off the wagon, Rabbitskin said he began to question where the Cree Nation was going and decided to do something about it.
Rabbitskin said that he was also deeply affected by the propane explosion accident that happened in the community in recent years that was a direct result of youths huffing propane.
For the time being, Rabbitskin is looking to take the project to the community to see if he can garner the support of council board members and get some funding to hire consultants and counselors to design the program. At this time he is still uncertain how much his project could cost.
Were he to get the program funded, Rabbitskin would be looking to leave the community in the spring with about eight youths to start with. Two counselors would be available to help the youths express their emotions to the cameras while recording their reactions to gruesome circumstances. Their website would then be updated daily with the youth’s reactions and footage of what they had witnessed.
The trek across the country would not be limited to impoverished reserves where the youths could volunteer; Rabbitskin also hopes to take his group to visit homeless urban Aboriginals in places like Winnipeg. Along with seeing the negative, trips to powwows across the country would also be part of the experience to show the youth positive aspects of Native culture.
Rabbitskin said that he takes particular issue with the youth in the community who are selling drugs and would really like to see some of those youth in this program.
“If we could get one of them out in this program, by doing these kinds of things he could learn to take what people call obstacles and turn them into opportunities. If we can get the pusher out of the streets and back into school, that is a positive objective of this program and a success for that person,” said Rabbitskin.
More so than anything, Rabbitskin believes that this program could possibly help in the future development of programs for kids because he believes that it is the youth that are not being listened to when it comes to delivering what they really need.
“They have wings; we just have to teach them how to fly! If we could listen, we would be able to create these programs for them. If we can have a program like this, programs can then be created out of this. We will let them say what they want, we can hear them,” said Rabbitskin.