GONA: Gathering of Native AmericansA Circle of Care Conference

RAPID CITY—Mental health care is one of the major areas of service currently lacking in the Indigenous community of Rapid City. Access to care, programs and trainings are unfortunately few and far between. One of the many goals for the Gathering of Native Americans (GONA) conference recently held in Rapid City was to help come up with actionable items that can be implemented to fill the current gaps of care and services.

“This is the end of three years of data collection and planning through Circles of Care,” said Eltina Three Stars, Program Manager of Circles of Care. “It is SAMSAH funded.”

SAMHSA stands for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration which is the agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services that leads the public health efforts to advance the behavioral health of the nation.

The Circles of Care strategically invited partnering agencies here in the Rapid City area along with current partners who have been working with Circles of Care for the last three years. “We also invited cultural knowledge keepers and tribal members from Oglala, Cheyenne River and Rosebud,” Three Stars said.

What is a GONA? A GONA mainly addresses unresolved grief and historical trauma. They break it down over the course of four days.

“What we did was shove the curriculum over the course of two and half days,” said Three Stars “Ours is not a traditional GONA. It is GONA-ized. I had very specific outcomes I wanted from having this meeting and the goal ultimately was to connect, collaborate and commit resources by the end of this for all the organizations that were at the table, people in their capacities in whatever roles that they serve just better ways to make sure relatives that were receiving behavioral health services and those looking for behavioral health services were not falling through the cracks. That is the overall purpose of Circles of Care. To identify those gaps and the next grant, which would have been Systems of Care would be to fill those gaps with what we have identified.”

Circles of Care provides cultural awareness and trauma informed trainings for the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board staff, Oyate Health Center providers as well as community partners that service our Native relatives in programs like WAVI and the Rapid City Police Department. They make sure to offer these cultural awareness trainings to them and even provide generational trauma and historical trauma type trainings for them so they have a better understanding of the impact that has on our Native relatives.

The three facilitators flew in from different areas. They are SAMHSA’s Tribal Technical Assistants. “They are free for us to use,” said Three Stars. “That is their job. They go from different reservation to different reservation and do GONA’s. It’s basically to hear from the community, community input, strategies how to address the hurt in the community and coming out with solutions and action items. That’s our goal at the end of day three with this group is to come up with some change strategies with our current behavioral health system. How can we improve these services? The system? What can we change? What can be better?”

On the day Native Sun News Today visited with Three Stars the subject discussed was the processes of a GONA to see, hear and feel what a story teller is trying to convey. “We had a storyteller Stephanie Two Crow today who shared her own personal story about health issues and how to utilize Western medicine and traditional medicine and how that helped her in her fight,” Three Stars said. “We talked about norms of sharing and vulnerability and building trust. I went over and I overviewed Circles of Care and the grant deliverables over the years and the activities that we have done. Our last activity that we did here today was focusing on the strengths of the culturally relevant programs currently available here in Rapid City.”

Circles of Care is very big on culture. “We understand that culture is healing and then connecting that identity piece,” said Three Stars. “We are hoping to dream big and hopefully come out of here with several solutions that we can integrate.”

Where are these great ideas going to be housed? “This will all be included in my final report at the end of November,” Three Stars said. “With that information it will be released out into the community and to our funding partners. It will include things that we have identified as gaps in the system and possible solutions to filling those gaps. If we want to apply for further grants through SAMHSA we can use the findings in this report to include things like transportation or whatever the gap was that we identified. The hope is to find realistic solutions to these gaps. By inviting outside partners we know some of these partners in the community already have certain resources going on we wanted to collaborate more with those resources. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we really hoped to have them come aboard to collaborate and commit to helping to fill those gaps.”

“My hope for having this was to make sure nobody falls through the cracks,” said Three Stars. “If it is just one person being impacted by the changes we make today then we did our job. It seems really basic, but that could be the difference between life or death for some people.”

The next event for the Circles of Care will be a Wopila, or thank you celebration on November 16, 2023, at the Holiday Inn near the Monument. This event is free and open to the public. For more information on SAMHSA and their programs, please visit www.samhsa.gov/.

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