“One of the teachings that our ancestors teach us is that when we go away from our home fire into the world, we're carrying that fire with us, and when we're carrying that fire with us, we become representatives of our nation, and we become like vessels of light out into the world to share who we are as nations and people,” Shane Patterson imparts. He is from the Yankton Dakota reservation and is a member of the Seven Council Fires of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota speaking people. His Dakota name is Man Who Walks with the Sacred Hoop. 

For the past five years, Patterson’s been working independently to build community capacity through training on lateral kindness, vicarious trauma, grief and addiction support using his own traditional wellness therapy model. He’s also worked alongside a colleague and they have delivered their programming in nearby communities, gradually expanding to reach more people. He recently completed a Masters in Development Practice-Indigenous Development with the University of Winnipeg. With what he has learned, he helps people look at healing and colonialism in different ways. 

His advice for youth looking to leave home and study in a larger community is to find programs well-suited to support their cultures and with peer support for Indigenous students. He recommends accessing programs and asking questions to manage the overwhelm of navigating urban environments. In doing those things, he feels Indigenous youth can better advocate for and support themselves and have better post-secondary experiences. He also sees Indigenous youth going into the world for their education as ambassadors of their nations and lights going out into the world. 

As for his own learning, since he was a child, his parents exposed him to culture, ceremony and spirituality. Lodges were his learning place, giving him access to his Indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing and being. he explains. Mentors, knowledge keepers and others he was in relationship with also impacted his learning. “A lot of what I try to articulate and broker for myself as a Dakota person is trying to be reliant on the Dakota language, because that's where I'm able to tap in and access a different kind of education that's separate from the colonial education that we have to learn,” he confides. 

Getting his master’s degree later in life was a challenge, given he was studying while working, caregiving, after just having lost his mom during the pandemic. “I needed this different energy to learn, and disrupt some of that dark and some of that grief and those kinds of things that I was going through in life,” he reflects. 

The program he selected was an ideal fit. “It was really a program that resonated in terms of the intersections of health, Indigenous health, the LGBTQS+ issues, politics, identity politics and economics, and just the various multi disciplines. It gave a really, really good experience to understand how colonialism impacts in these various disciplines,” he shares. With more perspective, he finds himself better able to support people and understand how complicated issues can get.

When it comes to obstacles, Patterson struggled with losing a parent also moving away from his community at an early age. Growing up so fast and starting a family so soon meant he missed out on some of the rites of passage that his peers enjoyed. At the same time, he attributes those missed opportunities to why he ended up supporting child and youth professionally, honouring childhood by being a helper. 

Losing his father young meant he had to make sacrifices to facilitate and lead ceremonies at a young age, causing him to miss out on enjoying his relatives as he was called to being a helper instead. Called to resilience and strength, he didn’t get to grieve, something he learned is important. “What I realized with grief, and my relationship with grief is we have to take that time to to be vulnerable with ourselves when we're in these losses in our life… being more compassionate, leaning into oneself and being vulnerable and being being kind to oneself when we're going through these things, because it's is hard and and having that tenderness on ourselves, on our hearts and our spirits, I think, is really, really important,” he muses. 

Staying balanced has been challenging for Patterson, when he’s responding to a crisis or whatever life throws at him. He’s been learning about somatic healing lately. “It's not just breathing, or breath work, it's having a practice that helps you move that energy away from your body through catharsis and releasing that in a way where you're not holding it,” he says. He’s been building a wellness practice including stretching, breath work, herbal medicines and plants, moving his body, meditating with the Creator, attending ceremony, as well as calming and soothing his nervous system. He recognizes the importance of being around trustworthy people and of safety. 

“That wellness practice, I think, has been really important for me, because if we're centered and grounded, then we're able to access that part of the prefrontal cortex in the brain where executive functioning and creativity and higher learning happens… It gives me a different outlook and a different perspective on the things, whether that's looking at things critically, reflectively or intentionally from those kinds of experiences and then, and you can see those things with the meaning and purpose and intent, whatever those things are in our life. I think having a really good wellness practice for yourself, whatever those things are, could be really beneficial to improving a person's overall well being, from a mental, physical, spiritual and an emotional place,” he affirms. 

In closing, he expresses his wish, “I hope that these words can be like medicine to to the young people and when they when they hear these words, I hope that they know that they're not alone, and that these words can be of encouragement and uplift and and make them feel good in a good way.”

Sharing teachings to strengthen communities, bringing what he learned in lodges and in university, Shane Patterson is building capacity wherever he goes. With a broadened perspective from a post secondary program that was an ideal fit and his own cultural teachings, he’s found new ways to support people through difficult challenges. Strengthened by his own wellness practice and the wisdom he’s learned about moving through grief, Patterson has found how to take care of himself and others, too.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.