The fate and future of our young people has to stop being an election campaign promise that gets dragged out every cycle and then isn’t followed up. If you don’t think the young people notice this then you’re the one who is blind. They notice it, hear it and reject it as empty promises. Ask them, and you will find it is an essential element of their disenchantment with the current state of Indigenous politics.

At the same time, we cannot put the whole responsibility for the development and empowerment of our youth on Indigenous governments and their programs. There is a great deal we – the citizens – can do through non-governmental efforts. One of the nationwide efforts are Boys and Girls Clubs in Indian Country. There are many successful local programs and projects being carried out by non-governmental, non-profit community based organizations.

These approaches are successful because they’re not based on campaign promises. They are the efforts by people who genuinely care about the future of our youth and are doing something about it. And I believe they’re part of the reason we haven’t seen an explosion of hate, hopelessness and frustration.

Indigenous governments can’t and shouldn’t do everything for everybody. This is still the colonial models we inherited from the settler governments. From the outset these models were developed to maintain control and power over the colonized. We mindlessly jumped at the opportunity to take these models over when the settler bureaucracies offered them to us. In doing so we became the oppressors, the colonial administrators.