Serving Individuals In the Deaf Native American Community

Presenters: Carleen Anderson, Mark Azure, Alan Cartwright, Dick Corbridge, Tupper Dunbar, Eugene Edwin, and John Evans

WEDNESDAY, April 4, 2001

>> Good morning. This is the session on working with people who are Deaf Native Americans, so if that's where you want to be, you are in the right place. My name is Kathy West-Evans. I am with Region X RSA Seattle. We work with the four regions of Alaska, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and my co planner of the session Dan just flew in and walked in the room. So thanks for being here, Dan. (laughter) it's a long flight from Alaska. It's very exciting to be here and really exciting to see all of you interested in this very, very important topic. We have, as of a few minutes ago nearly 200 people registered for the northwest conference from about ten states and the Virgin Islands. So we are very excited to have you here sharing in this important information. We have built in time for networking and just getting to know each other and learning from each other and supporting each other. That's what it's all about, the opportunities to learn what we are doing in several different areas. This morning we have a very dynamic group of people and it's always very interesting working were people who are Deaf and people who are Native American. A lot of similarities, and it shows in the way planning happens and the saying of it will happen when it happens, just be flexible. So that's how we have kind of gone with the session. We are going to start off by having Dick Corbridge. He is my boss, really my team member in Seattle, and he has been one of the drivers of developing Native American programs on reservations, not one of the drivers, the driver, working with Native people and setting up VR programs on the reservations and he will talk to you this morning about the programs, where they are, where they are expanding to and how we can work together. And then Carleen Anderson, my co-worker from Seattle, as well, and John Evans, another partner, as well are going to talk about the similarities of Deaf and Native culture. So then we are going to go into some time with a wonderful friend Tupper, who is going to talk about language and similarities. And then we will introduce the afternoon team. We are very dynamic and kind of flowing here.
 (laughter)

>> Welcome. I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Dan La Brosse, and I work for the state of Alaska, and I'm trying to follow the interpreter a little, and I'm a northern region specialist in Deafness. I cover the whole northern part of the state of Alaska which is quite a bit bigger than the state of Texas, so I have one of the biggest regions in the country so because of that region I work with a lot of Native American folks. I helped establish two programs this past year one in Nome, and I worked with some of the speakers here to have the intertribal Deaf conference in Fairbanks last summer that was attended by over 250 people from all over the country and Canada. It was a very successful conference, this afternoon we will have several members from several board members from the tribal conference presenting the first one is Mark Azure who comes from Oregon here, and he is going to be working with the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Tribal Conference, Eugene Edwin, who comes from Fairbanks and was born in a village but came to school here in Vancouver. He has a very interesting background. Also doing the presentation with these guys is going to be Alan Cartwright who is the director of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Center in Anchorage and a colleague of mine in Alaska and very well experienced working with the Native American community, not only in this country but other countries like Ecuador and Nepal. So that's what we have lined up for this afternoon.

>> Get comfortable, enjoy the experience. Feel free to ask questions, and we are just going to go with what we are going to go with. Here is Dick Corbridge from Seattle RSA.

>> Thank you very much for the planning committee for having the foresight to establish this track, this very important conference. As Kathy West-Evans mentioned the Seattle region office of rehabilitation services administration, your federal partner normally is a dynamic office. We have a self-starting team and you will have met Kathy and Carleen, and you know them to be dynamic people. I'm kind of the plodder that kind of hangs behind and picks up the pieces. So we work like an inverted triangle, and it's always inverting so we never know who is on top. Leadership evolves from all levels in our office.

 I'd like to introduce you to a very important part of the Rehabilitation Act. Are you familiar with the Rehab Act? Who is familiar with the Rehab Act? Good. Most of you. Okay. The Rehabilitation Act is an old act dating back into the 1920s. For a lot of years, the primary funding went to the state Vocational Rehabilitation agency. And that continues today. The state Vocational Rehab agencies are really the center fold of the Rehabilitation Act.

You have two documents that I -- we passed out that I'd like to refer to. One is an outline of the points I am going to try to make, and the second one is a listing of all of the existing tribal Vocational Rehabilitation agencies in the country. They are organized by state, and you will find them as you leave through to be represented in 22 states in the country.

In 1978 it says -- in 1978 the Navajo Tribal Group said hey we are not getting much services from the state VR system. We would like to help you write section 130 into the Act. That will provide funds so that Tribal Governments can have their own Vocational Rehabilitation agency. So that was done, and from '78 to 1986 the Navajo Nation had the only Voc Rehab program run by the Tribal Government and funded under the act. In 1986 they discovered -- the congress discovered that, hey, this Navajo thing is working pretty well. Let's open this thing up to the rest of the Tribal Governments. So they opened up the funding, and that year we had three additional Tribal Governments apply and were funded. Now we have 65 tribal VR programs. What are they doing? They are providing Vocational Rehab services in a different sort of way. Based on the foundation of the state Voc Rehab process he have they have brought the culture of the community into the system. The culture means a lot in Native American communities. As you know, it means a lot in the Deaf community. Culture often drives who we are and who we become. We are finding that Native culture various with the number of Tribal Governments and communities there are. Surprise. Surprise. So the Voc Rehab program in tribal communities varies with the community in which it's being administered. And we are helping that -- we are facilitating that action by helping to interpret the act as broadly as we possibly can. I'll give you an example, and let's go north to Alaska. That's a very important part of our Native American rehab community, because it has the most programs of any state in the country. It has nine of them. And for the first time in the history of the state, Vocational Rehabilitation services are available almost throughout the state. There are a couple of blank spots we are trying to fill for the first time. Because the state program has really become -- has became really an urban program, and that's important to know, because the tribal program becomes primarily a rural and remote kind of program. And for those of you who are curious about employment in tribal communities in villages where the Voc Rehab counselors have to travel by snow machine to get there, what kind of work exists? Well, a few years ago we helped Alaska think through employment in terms of the community where it exists, and so what? People who are living on subsistency economies are employed to survive. So we define employment by -- not by a paycheck or not by the number of hours worked on the job, we define employment by the function that it provides to the benefit of the community. So you will find a lot of self-employment opportunities developing in our rural and remote Native VR programs. Of course the state's using the same concept. So Alaska is quite different from the southern 48, and I believe it's important that we understand that the Rehab Act is so flexible it allows for that variation without confusing about what it wrote.

So in 2001 we have nine tribal VR programs serving well over a hundred villages. Well over a hundred villages. One grant of ours at Bristol Bay I think serves something like 32 villages throughout the huge Bristol Bay community, which is only available and accessible by a float plane or swimming or boating or whatever. And when the counselors go out to meet with people with disabilities out there, they don't know when they are coming back. They plan to come back tomorrow, but the weather can set in, and, guess what, they will be there for two or three days waiting for the weather to break. It's a different kind of rehabilitation. The reason I give you this experience is because that's the kind of Voc Rehab definition that we are applying in tribal communities. A little more about that in a moment, and please watch my time because I don't watch it very well. I don't watch it well because when I get into this topic, I really kind of have a lot to talk about because it's an exciting -- it's a very exciting topic.

We have several consortia you will find in the listing where one tribe serves other tribal communities and other reservations. So we have 65 grants out there, but we are covering 91 reservations and villages -- or reservations, plus the villages in Alaska. So we really have a broad sweep at this point in time. You may be interested in how this program is funded. When congress appropriates money to the state VR program, we grab from the top and say, "okay. Put this in the Native American Voc Rehab program, and then distribute the money to the states." so any -- that encourages the state VR agencies to promote partnershipping with their tribal communities because they benefit by bringing more rehab dollars into the state, and that strategy has worked really, really well. Because the state programs now are sharing cases with our tribal VR programs and each are learning the value of each other, a culture, plus the rehab technology that the states have had 80 years to develop. The best of the best is coming through. Some of the tribal programs don't want to adopt some of the state practices because they are too bureaucratic. So that's okay. Because we get into self-governments, and the real question is: why is this working so well? And the real answer is: no surprise, because they are running the program for their own communities. They are hiring primarily their own Native people to be Voc Rehab counselors. So people who are networked in the culture, in the community are the ones who are delivering services to their neighbors. With that comes a lot of problems about family members serving family members and all that kind of stuff, because there is a lot of -- there is a lot of very close-knitness in many tribal villages. So there is a lot of accommodations that have to be made on the tribal VR agencies' staff's part.

A major component of the program, and one of the reasons that I believe it's working so well is the recognition that spirituality is a key element of Native culture. Spirituality varies, but at the core, it's omnipresent. With spirituality comes an opportunity for people to fully participate and understand the program through the eyes and through the vision of the tribal Voc Rehab counselors. These people are -- those counselors are really getting challenged. It's a very, very difficult program when you start applying it in different cultures by the people themselves who are not trained in Vocational Rehabilitation. So the burden in the training falls on us. The burden of training falls on the state VR agencies to partner up with their tribal partners and do joint training. We funded training programs throughout the country that are available to our tribal counselors. Many of our counselors have Bachelor's degrees. Carleen did research about four years ago asking what kind of degrees we are looking at, and over half had a Bachelor, a Master's or a Ph.D., but under -- but also a half did not have a Bachelor's degree. So we have many, many mothers who have children and families who are themselves middle-aged who are challenging themselves as Voc Rehab counselors. They are learning, but that is the strength of the program. The mothers who want better for their children than has been available before.

Vocational Rehab is a program you may have been introduced to in a variety of ways. It's a program that is different, very different in tribal communities in that most tribal cultures did not have a concept of the language of disability. The term "disability" was offensive to many of them, is offensive to some of them. One of the more humbling experiences of my life was sitting across a table with a tribal leader talking about his Voc Rehab program and I kept talking about people with disabilities, and he put his hands flat on the table with a crescendo -- stop using that word! Whoa. The Rehab Act talks about people with disabilities. That's who we serve. He said not in this community. So what can we use to talk, sir? He said, "I don't care what you use, but use something that we understand." How about people with special needs? That will work. Okay. We are on our way again. Simple, hey. Who has special needs? How about the substance abusers? They have special needs. Damn right.

Excuse me. I don't know how you spelled that (laughter) so a lot of our clients have multiple disabilities including substance abuse, and they are very, very difficult clients. Certainly difficult because the state system had such a difficult time trying to serve the population. They understand that it really takes a special nature and preparation of the tribal member to do this program. Native healing is definitely a part of the Voc Rehab services. Native healing in sweats. Native healing in prayer, and Native healing however is applied are appropriate services in this program. And it's a key -- it's a center for many people. Family services are participating. Families of all kinds participate. Significant others participate and give the support that their friend or family member with a disability needs to be successful. Native communities have a lot of services available within them. Education, treatment, health care, public assistance. Social Security, again, Native healing, school-to-work -- all that stuff exists in many of the Native communities. So our VR program is finding its way into school-to-work transition. Into helping people that are held up in penitentiaries to return to their communities. Helping folks who are institutionalized for public health -- or mental health reasons -- helping them return to their communities, and as the leaders of the Tribal Governments watch this program emerge, they see its comprehensive nature, that it is not finished until it has helped the folks find employment and suitably adjust to it. We don't have a big drive on outcomes like some of the state programs have. Outcomes are important, but we don't underscore -- we are not totally driven by that. We are driven mostly by seeing sure the person is suitably rehabbed before we make the closure.

Just a brief -- a brief moment on the -- again, on the state tribal relationships. Again, the state VR, and the tribal VR are serving the same -- some of the same clients. One of my tribal programs or tribal programs in Alaska was started on that. It was all of the cases were going to be tribal and state partnershipping. Well, over the years, I was going to drop down now to maybe 50 percent are. I don't know what the percentage is, but earlier tribal VR agencies were improved because of the partnershipping with the state VR systems, and then as we weaned the tribal programs away from all of the bureaucracy of the state system and drug the best of the best out, that's what you are seeing in tribal VR programs now is the best of the best in a culturally appropriate approach. Economic development is going on. We have a lot of new businesses started with Voc Rehab funding, helping individuals start new businesses. We have transportation systems that have started. We have convenience stores that have been started. We have recycling centers that have been started with Voc Rehab Activity with consumers of Voc Rehab participating in self-employment ventures, and the agency developing opportunities for work hardening, work testing, and work experience.

The outcomes -- and I told you we are not driven by numbers, but in the year 2000 -- the year 2000 -- fiscal year 2000, 12 months, we served, 4178 people with disabilities. 4178. That's what that means. 963 of those people were successfully assisted into employment and closed rehab. 963. This was 55 programs reporting. That is a successful outcome rate of 62 percent, which means once you help the person write a rehab plan and start the plan, 62 percent will be successful. It doesn't seem too high. It's the same exact rate as the state VR agencies across the country experience. The value in this program is not only those outcomes, but the assistance in life that the 38 percent that didn't achieve a rehabilitation outcome receive from our cultural VR program. My last comment to you is a -- is one that's close to this conference. In a very quick survey I took yesterday, randomly selecting the programs to talk with, I think there were 11 programs I talked with. How many of your clients have hearing impairments or Deaf? The programs average three to four. One program said 50. Whoa. 50. That was an Oklahoma program. Yes, most of those are hearing impaired, not Deaf, and we are able to work with them. When they are totally Deaf we have a hard time with that so we partner with a state agency.

I think that represents the condition of the programs today. I think that's a good representation of what you would find if you talked with all 65 programs. I don't know think you would find too many of them that would say 50. I think that's an estimate. I think most of them would be three or four. There is a lot of work to be done, and I really salute again the planners of this conference to bring this track forward, to allow us to spend some time on it, and since there are so many states here -- I don't know if there are that many states represented in this group, but look at that listing of the tribal VR programs for your state. See if there is any way you can interface with them and help them to access resources, to access the network. I'm in touch with them, -- Carleen and I are in touch with them almost weekly. We have a lot of people -- a lot of the programs call in once or twice a week, and we do case staffings over the phone, and so they are going to bring the whole issue -- and there is a national teleconference that my team partners in Washington, Suzanne Tillman and Pamela Martin are the team partners in the Washington, D.C. office, and they have a monthly teleconference with all of these programs. So we keep raising the issues. We would love to see a high energy activity interfacing the two programs. I've recommended and suggested that the intertribal council of the Deaf make an application for a special d program this year -- special demonstration program this year to try to help that interaction take on more results. Thank you, and I know I'm over, but it's as small as I could say on a big topic. (applause)

>> Great to have this overhead turned off now. I was just noticing now how John removed the wire around the microphone stand. He took and lifted up the stand and removed it on the bottom, and I was thinking about it, and I thought well, I need to move that over the top. (laughter) And so I guess it's a difference in the way that we do things, and I think that today what we want to do is talk about some of the things that maybe we are a little different in and also to talk about areas that we are very similar in with the Native culture and the Deaf culture, and let me start by telling you who I am. I'm Carleen Anderson, and I'm a member of the Colville confederated tribes which is located in eastern Washington state. On both sides of my family were fur traders, and it's interesting to think about where we come from. In our language when we meet someone we tell them what our names are, and we tell them who our parents are, and then we tell them which tribes we are from, and in our language we greet folks by saying, "white hust" -- "in our language that means hello, what is in your heart? When John and I were planning our talk, I wanted to share with folks a little of the history of Native people in this part of the country, and I wanted to do that because I think that this area in particular played a big part in all of the tribes in the northwest. This was the area where most of the fur traders settled initially. This is the area where both my great grandparents came from. They came from Montreal with the Hudson's Bay company, and came to Astoria and this area, and both of them settled here, and as they traveled up the Columbia River before the dams -- long before the dams, they met my grandmothers, and in a nutshell, that's why I'm here. And so our history talks about very much of who we are and where we come from. John and I talked about our lives. I was raised a lot by my grandma in the little town in the center of our reservation. I spent a lot of time with my grandmas and my grandpas. My Grandpa Carson -- or my Great Grandfather Johnny Pachett was blind, and I remember taking him from our house outside from our house so he could go to the bathroom, and I can remember spending those good times with my grandparents. I remember also when I was six years old that I was taken to a mission boarding school, and I remember vividly that day. I remember those feelings of alienation, not knowing why I was there, who these people were, and I remember we had children that came there who spoke the language, and were punished for speaking the language. A lot of people think this is way old history, and it's not way old history. The first records I see where parents were taken away from their families and brought to boarding school was 1895, and I have seen letters from parents who wrote to their -- to the Indian agency saying why did you take my children? I need my children. So in those mission boarding schools, and I was there for seven years until I was 13, we lost our language. We couldn't talk about our rituals. Our sweat houses were considered pagan. Our winter Dances were considered pagan. And so in those boarding schools many of us -- and there were about 300 students there while I was there -- many of us lost who we were. Many of us lost that sense of identity of where we came from and what was important to us.

 And I think that experience -- that experience of being boarding -- in boarding schools is something that we need to link together to bond our partnership, and, John, do you want to talk about --

>> I hoped also to open with a bit of background about myself, and I notice that right away there is a big difference in our presentation style. Hers is very laid back, slow paced, and you see culturally how her mannerisms and speaking -- that's just way different. We are very animated very motivated I say let's communicate. We have this going on back and forth between the two of us, that's a big difference between the culturing of Indian people and with Deaf people and also east and west coast, Washington and so forth. Chelan, Washington -- I grew up there with three brothers and sisters who are all Deaf, and I also went to the school for the Deaf in Vancouver, and went to the Deaf program, and we did very well. I mean, we just -- it was a different experience for us in the Deaf education system. But the system itself wasn't all that hot. I mean, it's really more hoping for us to be in the school for the Deaf but we were yanked out of those systems and were placed in some place out of our home systems and placed in some residential institution and that was a scary experience. If you are placed in a residential program without any knowledge or reason -- what was the purpose of that? That was a scary experience, but let me tell you something. I learned to love it, and I learned that those people, those people there -- and I shared a commonality about being Deaf, our language, and we bonded with one another. We became brothers and sisters, and let me tell you I really appreciated that. That big difference between my home family and system, which that was my life. But I didn't know any difference or any better. I didn't know there was another world out there, something I could be involved in where I grew up. And then here I was placed there, and I wasn't the only person with this particular viewpoint of life. I mean, there were a lot of Deaf people. They were all placed in the residential schools, and we became a tribe so to speak. And I mean, we established a Deaf culture, and real culture with common values, and we came from different background, different families, we had different histories and so forth. Different ways of being raised. Both positive and negative but we shared in so many different ways, it was amazing, and as I traveled across the united states I see there is a lot of common experiences and bonds we all share. The frustrations we have had with the system both the positive and negative things of growing up in the Deaf world, and this -- I mean -- many denominators that -- common denominators that we all deal with, and we see parallels that have really made an impression on me about the commonalities that we share with American Indian and Native cultures, and in this presentation this morning I wanted to be open so we can share and do a comparison and contrast, and, with the structure that we have today, I want to talk about how we can identify the different issues that we have, and the next presenter that we have is really going to make some more specific points in a number of those issues, in service provisions, in resources, lps and so forth, so we would really like to put a challenge forth to the various service providers, professions to really deal with these particular issues that are identified because we do have many commonalities in our respective cultures and sometime this afternoon I think Tupper is going to speak about the various languages, the various sign languages, modes of communication that are involved and the challenges we face with those, as well. So you notice there is a different. I mean -- she is so calm. She is so laid back (laughter) I ain't going there. I mean -- but you can still see that her heart is there. The emotions are still there, and the undercurrent, and the compassion is not lost. And so, you know what we have there is not lost yet. There are people in the world that are going their own way, but I really encourage you, do not lose your culture. Maintain your roots, and do not forget -- you know, that some of us might be working toward the goal of breaking out of our ruts, our molds, because we don't really know where we have come from. So when you see people speak, you know, you speak from the heart, and don't forget we have got our brothers and sisters here. We don't want to forget our brothers and sisters, we don't want to forget our cultures, we don't want to forget what we face and our extended family that we have and the daily frustrations that we deal with. Maybe some don't, but there are a number of us who do, and don't ever for get that. Okay. Are you still with me Tupper? You got everything that I said up there on those captions? I hope you got it all, right? Okay. To begin with. So you know a little bit about my culture now. We have Deaf time. Deaf time. Do you know what Deaf time means? I mean we take our time -- you know, what's most important for us is to finish our conversations you can wait until we are done. We are going to change the schedule because it fits us we don't fit the schedule. This is this is very critical. That value is always there because Deaf people feel a sense of isolation and we see another one whether they are from Alaska or Oregon or anywhere else, that's our networking. Because we are out in the hearing world every day facing all of these challenges, and here we are with our own people, our own culture, and it's euphoria for us. And you say we are not punctual. It's Deaf culture, am I right or what? Now what about Native cultures?

>> he won't come to my place, I don't want to go there. Okay? (laughter) we talk about family. We talk about our extended family. We have so much alike in that area. Any time you go to a pow wow -- and I encourage you to go to pow wows. Any time you go to an Indian Reservation, you will hear folks talk about their aunties and their grandmothers and their grandfathers, et cetera. I am going to share a little bit about my life. I'm in recovery. I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict in recovery, and in my using behavior, I fell in love a number of times. And so my children have many grandmas and grandpas, and I can remember a friend of my daughter's crying to her mother, "mom, how come Michelle has so many grandmas, and I only have one or two?" (laughter) but those extended families, those relationships aren't necessarily by blood. They are by people who care about you. I look at my aunties, and my aunties are folks who would take care of me and teach me, and I'm not related to them by blood or marriage. They are just people who care about me, and I think that that's a similarity that we can find in common with us are those extended families that are so important to all of us.

>> So you have alcohol problems, in your culture? This is a problem you have in your community? So do we.

>> No --

>> Why is that? I wonder why? I put that question to you why is it our respective cultures appear to have more alcohol problems per capita. What's the cause, the etiology of that? We could end treatment programs. That's a real hassle. Cost prohibitive. What about our issues of confidentiality? We won't be able to keep confidentiality because we will be sharing with all these outsiders in the group and they will know who I socialize with and here we go to the same bowling alleys and so forth, we share common friends. It's really hard to find our own separate groups that we can open up to how about you?

>> Confidentiality -- let's start there. I grew up on my reservation, and I worked on my reservation or for my tribe for many, many years, and I can remember the Indian folks on the reservation laughing to ourselves when we had attorneys come to work for our tribe that said they had to create confidentiality codes so that everybody's information would be private. Do you know what it's like to grow up with people and know their history from the day that you met them until the day that they died? You have the same thing going on in your community. Confidentiality doesn't mean anything to us.

We all know what our history is in the reservation community generally. We know the good parts and we know the ugly parts, and we know the in between parts, and yet that's part of what makes us a community. That bond. We have alcohol and substance abuse issues on the reservation, and I think it would take a whole maybe two days to talk about where that came from and why we have that, and it would be a -- an issue of history. It would be a reason and not an excuse for it, and I think that as we look at those issues of drug abuse and substance abuse in general, one of the things that happens in our community is even -- even when I was the worst drunk and the worst drug user, I could be, my community still held onto me. My aunts and my uncles were hurt by what I was doing. My family was hurt by what I was doing. But they didn't throw me away. I was still a part of that community, and I was still cared for in that community. Is that what happens in your community?

>> Quite a bit. We have so many commonalities between us. Let me tell you. We have a propensity to see ourselves and our extended family environments because we know each other very well. Now, as far as confidentiality -- hmmm I don't know that's a hard one.

 I think it depends upon the profession itself. If they understand the value of confidentiality, a code of ethics confidentiality issues. Now we have a tendency to share quite a bit of information about one another because we are looking for one another to succeed. How is that person doing? Did you pay your taxes? Did you get that car? And so how is your marriage going? Did you succeed in recovery from dealing with your alcohol problems and we share back and forth. Our lives, our deaths, our births are all shared, and it's like a circle, a cycle for us, so we want to know what's happening with each other. When you talk about confidentiality, that's not an easy one. In my community it's well enough to know that the children are good, you know when you see them grow up, and they are going to become adults and then they are not going to have privacy. We know a lot about each other, divorcees, conflicts, each other's domestic violence situations, the good, the bad, the ugly. Let me tell you. You have to be careful. Confidentiality is a challenge, and the important areas that we see confidentiality are professional, interpreters, counselors, mental health, because we have these very important, very private issues and if the Deaf person shares it, then you know we have got to accept ownership in that sharing. But at the same time we have got to maintain confidentiality and keep quiet and allow them to keep their personal information personal, and we will say it, it's personal. Just personal and confidentiality rather are synonymous, so we do share something like that. It's also kind of interesting that our cultures face isolation. I mean, here we have isolated from one another and spare parts of the community and at home and work we are the only Deaf person, and we find its a critical mass. You know, when Deaf people get together. A number of us, not just one all buy myself or something, because I always face so much isolation in our respective homes and in Alaska I can imagine it's so much worse. In Washington we are lucky we have Seattle we have King County, Tacoma, Vancouver, but in Washington you know they are pretty isolated, eastern Washington, it's pretty hard. So how do you resolve that? Do you face the same kind of isolation? You have reservations, but, you know, to interact with a larger community might be kind of hard. I try to get out there and interact with outsiders but they look down upon me and I feel like I'm a second-class citizen at times, and but they look down on me because I'm Deaf they cop an attitude. Nobody looks at me eye to eye. That's kind of sad. Do you face the same kind of thing?

>> Very much so, John. I think that Indian people and probably minority people, folks from the African American and the Latino and also the Asian community share that kind of isolation. I think about I now work for reach and tend RSA. I'm the only Indian in RSA, and there are times when I feel so isolated, and I think that our people feel that same isolation when they are out in cities and off reservations.

 Within the reservation communities, I think that there is a lot of interaction. There are a lot of things that Native folks do together. We have senior programs. We have community centers where folks gather. We have name-givings where people come and eat together, and we have what we call our give-aways where people share with people in their communities by giving things away. We have memorials. A lot of things happen in our community that help us get together and stay together.

 There are also the pow wows. I used to work for Western Washington University, and one of the things that my colleague said there -- she said that I can't believe that no matter where you go in this country you always run into somebody who knows somebody you know, and I think that happens in your communities, as well; we are a small family in a big world, and I think that sense of who we are, that sense of our culture -- that means so much to us.

>> now, we have pride in our culture (laughter)

>> golly.

>> so I mean, with our culture -- we don't want people to change us. We don't want to be fixed. I mean, we want you to accept us for who we are. We don't want you to change our language. We don't want you to change our structure. We don't want you to kill our roots. We don't want you to remove our schools for the Deaf. This is our culture, and we are very, very proud of it. And you call me disabled, and I'm not. I happen to have this glorious gene called Deafness. And this is passed on in my family, and I am very proud of that. So why does the society want to fix me? Why? When I don't want to be fixed. Leave us alone. Let us grow, and accept us for who we are. I mean, why is that?

>> you know, John --

>> do you have those feelings?

>> I have those feelings. I do. It happens every day. I -- people want me to be something I'm not. I picked up a book at a bookstore a couple of weeks ago because of where I work, and not because of the people or the office I work in, but the book is, "how to write and speak better English." and I got that because I find that I didn't know I talked different. I didn't know (laughter) I didn't know that, and I think Indian people all over the country face the same thing. The rest of the world wants us to be like them, and, you know, how can a fluffy, middle-aged Indian woman raised on a reservation change at this tender age of 25?

 (laughter) it can't happen. But, yes, the world tries to change us. I think it comes, John, from that time when they thought we were kind of animals, that we weren't human. Did they think that you weren't human, too

>> oh, that we were all animals. We actually all are animals (laughter) they think we are, we sign. We move around. We are like crazy people. Crazy animals.

>> sometimes we are too. I jokingly say that sometimes I'm not quite house broken (laughter) that I live so close to my community that it wouldn't be too hard for me to go back to some of those baser instincts that folks call base but I don't think are so base. How do we deal with that?

>> well, I'm going to leave that to the next people over here. I mean, those are the problem solvers back there, okay? We are just identifying problems over here. We are going to leave it to those people to resolve the problems, all right? That's their respective field, is it not? I think it's interesting that in our culture that we deal with a lot of frustrations and when we go to service agencies -- I mean, rehab programs, the various programs that -- you know, they want us to be the same. They want us to bond. Excuse me -- we want to bond with one another because we find we have Deaf people and those are our peers our colleagues so in rehab services that makes sense. So if I have a Deaf professional they know where I'm coming from my educational barriers my frustrations and if I'm dealing with a hearing person they look down on me not understanding where I'm coming from. Don't misunderstood me I know as a counselor for a number of years the number of times, the limited number of times that I have had a client on my caseload -- and not because John is a great counselor -- they don't come to me because John is a great counselor they come because I'm Deaf. He's Deaf too, all right. Do you feel the same way back there? I mean, Deaf counselors are popular. We get a big caseload, and what's the reason for that? I mean; is that right? Is it possible for the system to handle something like that? I mean, what's wrong with hiring more Deaf people, more people who actually have grown up understanding the feelings, have the same experiences in their heart so they can provide those services for those people. Do you feel the same way in your communities?

>> yes, we do very much. I think that's why the Native programs and the VR programs within the Native communities are able to make -- how many successful rehabs? 963. That's why we are so successful in doing that in our own communities. But we are also successful in partnering with folks to get those successful rehabilitations, and it's these partnerships that we create in meetings and in sessions like this that we bring you into our community so that you can find out how better to serve the folks with disabilities within our communities.

 I think Native people should be hired also within the general agencies to provide services and to teach people how to work with our community. How many people went to -- have gone to social service agencies and not been served and went away thinking you were not served because you were just too damn hard to serve? A lot of people. And I think that's what's happened with your community, as well as our community. We are just too Dang hard to serve sometimes. We are not easy. Have you found that to be the case, John?

>> uh-huh. We have a lot of similarities between us. One thing we would really like to promote and develop is training of people that actually our clients can identify and build a rapport with. We need that. Not just intraculture but outside of our culture as well. We need to have success stories. And I'm wondering about your role as an elder. In Deaf culture, you know our elders are the ones that hold on to our culture and they show us about our roles. They -- rather they are our role models that we look up to, and there are times that I look up on these older Deaf people, as my parents, my father, my mother. They are the ones that have known us all of our drives as we have grown up. And they have leadership roles, and at times those leadership roles maybe are not the best, but -- might not be very current, but let me tell you, this is a glorious society that we have. Our elders pass on to our young people -- it's very difficult, very powerful and it's a heritage that we want but sometimes the elders will hang on to that, they will just hang on to it, because it's like a hierarchy in our culture that begins on a local level and it goes up to a state level, and then up to the national level and then you have all this political stuff going up to the top of the hierarchy, and there is a world level, as well, but our elder's role are very significant, and in Native cultures do you also have elders and what are their roles

>> our elders, too, are very important to our people, and hold a very special place in our communities. We look to them for sharing the culture. We look to them for teaching us the language. We look to them for direction. I would not be presumptuous to say that I'm an elder. That's a description that someone else would have to give me. I would not take that description, and I think that when people look to our elders, that's a very special -- that becomes a very special relationship. Because it is, as John says, a nurturing, a teaching, a bonding that takes place between people and the folks who help us carry on our traditions and our culture.

>> our youth are really going about their own ways, and they don't seem to recognize a lot of our values. The important parts and structure of our culture and our heritage. It seems that our youth have other priorities now. Why is that? Do you face the same kind of things?

>> (nods head up and down) our children --

>> what's happening in our society that distances us from one another? I mean, our culture seems that we are a number of subcultures, a strata of cultures. We have the African American subculture within our culture. And we have the Native culture within our culture. And we have the gay and lesbian subcultures within our cultures. We also have the Asian subcultures within our larger Deaf community, and there is a lot of -- not only striation, but discontent from one another, and we are trying to bring one another together, and it seems like everyone has their own agendas and their own lives, and we are looking at what's going on with this, and what's happening. Are you facing the same thing?

>> I think we are. I think that in looking at our history, there have been attempts from this area, at least, for 150 years to take away from our people who they were, their identity. There was -- there were attempts at termination, which would have taken our reservations away from us and sent us out and away. There was what we call relocation, which was taking Indian people and sending them to big cities across the country like Los Angeles and Chicago, San Francisco, to get them away from reservations so they would lose who they were and they would join the melting pot, and we would become more like everyone else, and what happened in those instances, especially with relocation, is that when the Indians got to the cities, they found the other Indians, and now you see major cities with major community centers where Native people get together.

 the issue with our youth is the same issue that you have. How do they -- how can our children learn who they are with all of this noise around us? The media, the toys, the violence, the fighting one another, the conflict, the Chinese taking our airplane, the, the, the -- the media, the news that is going on in front of our eyes and our being every day. It's easy for our children not to know who they are, and it's easy for our children not to appreciate where they come from and to value who we are. It's hard for them to carry those seeds. It's hard, but it's not impossible, and I think that's where we have to work hard is that by these relationships that we forge with one another, that we find those good things that we can share with our children that hopefully they will pick up.

>> okay. Our cultures -- I can't speak for everyone, but we have a value of money, and we also should value our societies -- our social structure. Our baseball teams, our bowling teams, and the lack -- our Deaf camps. We value our social activities, and that perspective really is an important part of information sharing, of bonding, of getting together, because we work all the time and make money, and invest and so forth -- that's a new concept for us. Let me tell you that's a new concept. I mean Deaf people are investing now. There hasn't been that many but thanks to Gallaudet -- we put value within our culture, and we are really bonding more with people and these assets, and it's a higher value. And that's because these Deaf people are our family. Do you feel the same?
 

>> okay. Let's dispel some myths, first, okay? I don't get a check every month. I don't know whether there are any tribes in the country that get a check every month. Not all of our reservations have casinos. There are some tribes that have casinos. Not all of us are on welfare. A lot of us are like you folks. We are in the trenches plugging away at it every day. There is something, though, about money that I think we kind of do -- or not do, I guess, would be a better description. We haven't learned how to bond with it generally very well (laughter)

>> same.
 (laughter)

>> we share that. It went in one hand and out the other. I spend it right and left. The SSI checks right at the first of the month go away. I depend upon that government check. We are all going to be in Seattle at the same time on Friday. The first Friday of the month every month to get our check, the second, third, and fourth day of the month, don't worry we are not going to be there because the money is gone.

>> it's kind of like hunting and gathering. When you have it you use it. Why put something away that you can use? And I think that generally speaking, I guess, for most of the people I know is our employers didn't put money away for retirement, and we weren't able -- if we were able to get to it -- if I could get to it -- to hell with 62 or 65.

 (laughter) we believe that if you have it you share it and you use it. That's something that we do in our communities, I think, that's really vital in keeping us who we are is sharing and giving. I alluded a while ago to our ceremonies that we have. And I want to share with you again a piece of my life. My mother passed away in 1996. For the last two years of her life she was very, very sick, and she did not want to be in a hospital so we kept her home, and my sister and my dad and I took turns taking care of her. When she was getting close to the time for leaving, she told us, "I don't want any police here, I don't want any sirens here. When I leave I want you to take care of me." and so when she finally drew her last breath, we called the physician's assistant that we knew we had her come and do whatever paper work they had to do, and my father and my sister drove her to the funeral home, and when it came home -- came time for the services they picked her up and brought her to where the services were.

As part of our funeral ceremony, we had to wait where people sit and talk about the person and laugh and talk, and we have the person who has gone on with us right there at that time. And we eat. Two times we eat together in that period of time. We eat the evening before and then after the services and after the person's resting in the ground. We also honor them for a year, and by honoring them for a year, the person who has gone on -- we don't go to celebrations, we don't take part in any of the activities in our community, and we gather things in that year. We gather things and we make things in that year. And after that year is over with -- after that year is over with, we have a memorial, and that memorial is our family getting together and inviting people to come and share with us a meal. And after that meal is over with we sit around and pass around pictures of the person who has left, and we do a give-away. Everything that we gathered in that year we give away. We give away -- we gave away towels, pots and pans, clothes, socks, blankets, hats, gloves, personal things from the person who went on. And those give-aways are something that is vital to our community. Giving away happens when there is a naming. A child gets a new name or a person gets an Indian name. Give-aways and meals are done at that time. It happens when people have what we call in this part of the country or our part of the country a winter Dance or a Chinook Dance. Part of that is giving and sharing Chinook. And I understand that happens in you're community, too, giving and sharing?

>> I think that we have a -- interesting material bartering system. I mean, you do something for me, I do something for you. We scratch each other's back. We have this interchange. I mean you know, it really takes school, though, at times because here I'm sharing something with you, you have got skills you can share with me. It's not just material things but also intangible things. Knowledge can be shared with each other. Expectations of our culture. If you are a cultural member, you have some knowledge. You can give advice. You can be a counselor in rehab and so forth. In mental health we have an exchange -- and this is no cost -- the expectation is not that I'm going to pay you for your skills, I'm going to pay you for your knowledge. I mean, we are both Deaf. So the expectation is that you share your knowledge with us. I think that's. In rehab all the clients -- I go bowling, and here comes my clients, and they want counseling services. They want to be rehabilitated. Excuse me I'm here to have some fun. I want to enjoy myself have some fun but they pull me in. So where is the etiquette? Where is the respect? It's not like that. They are not insulting me and I don't insult them back it's just a mutual explanation we will be available for one another and we will have that interchange of one another's knowledge. Do you have something similar?

>> I think that's -- the idea of giving and sharing is different in our Native communities or as I have seen it, and I guess now would be just as good a time as any to tell you that I'm not an expert on all Indians across the country. I don't know everything that happens in this nation with Indian people or within their cultures across this country. I can only talk to you from what I know from my life experience.

 in my experience with giving in our community is that when you -- when you -- when I give something away, I'm done with it. I don't expect something in return. I have let it go. And one of the things that RSA has a -- such a hard time with, and the federal government is I guess this is unethical that you give things and apparently there is always supposed to be reciprocation. Giving something says I'm done with it and I don't expect you to pay me back anything. Knowledge -- having special knowledge -- I think our people in our community expect us to share that knowledge when they ask for it. If you do

>> (audience member:) if you do receive something and you try to give back because it's part of your culture -- you receive something, is it an insult or -- so you are not doing something incorrectly?

>> I would have -- if I give you something and you gave me something back, I would probably accept it, but I would also tell you that you did not need to do that. It's -- that -- and I guess I would feel hurt that you would want to give me something back, because I think it's really important for people to know -- and I can only say this for me -- that when I give something, it's because I wanted to give it, and it's because I want you to have a piece of my life.

>> (audience member:) and not feel that you are owed?

>> you don't owe me anything

>> (audience member:) okay

>> and I think that's a very, very significant difference

>> (audience member:) giving away can also be associated with a new birth or rebirth or a dramatic change in your life --

>> can you hold on for a second. We have some people using the mike for an assistive listening device. You need to talk into the mike so they can hear what you are saying.

>> (audience member:) giving away in some Native cultures can be associated with a rebirth, a renewal, a dramatic change in your life. You are threw with that old, and you are making way for something new. It's kind of like spring cleaning. Everything goes and then you start new with a new year.
 

>> now, let me tell you. We expect s si. I mean we expect that you are going to pay for our interpreters. You are not going to charge us a dime for them. Let me tell you we expect that you will have service provision free for us, and you are not going to charge us a dime. We expect that we are going to have our medical card, Medicaid. Our hearing aids will be free, and you are not going to charge us a dime. That's kind of interesting. Our expectations are the society owes us a living. I mean, that's a little different, and that's something that probably needs to change and we need to change that. But our expectations are kind of interesting. Do American Indians have any expectations that society owes you something?

>> well, (laughter) I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you (laughter) let me tell you that in Indian country -- and I have to share some history here -- please bear with me, and I can only again talk for my tribe -- for those familiar with the state of Washington, our tribes' area of being was from the cascades over to probably the Montana border, up into Canada, clear down to priest rapids. When Stevens in 1855 and those years started making treaties with tribes, what -- part of what he said -- and let's remember that in English law, which is what u.s. law is based in -- contracts can only be made between equals. And Indian people did not know generally the meeting of -- the meaning of ownership of land. We just knew where our areas were that we traveled. So when treaties were made and we were put on reservations -- our reservations has 12 bands, and we didn't necessarily get along with each other when they put us together, either. That agreement, that executive order or that agreement said the Colville tribes will have this piece of land 3 million acres in perpetuity. I looked that up in the dictionary. You know what that means? That means forever and forever and forever, and our chiefs and our leaders agreed to that and not willingly.

 a year and a half went by after that agreement was signed, and gold was discovered on the north half of our reservation. Well, then the government said, "oh, we changed our mind, you guys. You need to move to this half part and stay down there because we are opening this up to mineral exploration up there." and they did. They took the north half of the reservation away from us. And so perpetuity only meant like a year and a half really (laughter) when all of that happened, the agreements that were made said you will have education, your welfare will be taken care of, your health needs will be taken care of, but you have to stay within this reservation. This is where your people have to be. Our people took those words seriously. We don't expect everything to be handed to us, but we do expect the u.s. government to keep its word. So, yes, we do have Indian health services, yes, we do receive some educational assistance. Yes, our tribes run themselves and yes, within our borders we say that we rule, but that's, in a nutshell why we feel this way. Do you think that our people would take commodities if they were able to go out and hunt and fish and gather if they were able to get what they used to get wherever they used to get it? I don't think so. But because of all of those things being taken away, what we got was commodity, and what we have today are the last vestiges of what was taken so many years ago. There was no war here. I had somebody say, "gee, why don't you guys just get a life? Those treaties happened years ago. My family didn't make those treaties. Why should I live with it?" and I said, "your constitution of this country -- or our constitution of this country is old. Do we not pay attention to it because it's old?" that's why we expect some things.

>> (audience member:) who is going to interpret for me? Will you interpret? Something bothered me that you said a while ago -- it bothered me that you said Deaf people expect to get SSI. I don't think Deaf people expect SSI. That's what we were trained and told all our lives from the schools and teachers get your SSI. They told us repeatedly. So I don't think it's fair to say we expect it because we were trained to do so, and in regards to what Carleen was just saying about our expectations -- the government said they were going to do it, so let's take it, and we will use that government support to go get our education and whatever. We were trained that way all of our lives. So, you know what I'm saying?

>> well, that training -- that training led to the expectation. You know, I was taught the same things. Since I was 18 years old they said go get your SSI, and I said, "what? Why? You are Deaf you are qualified. How much is it? Oh, $340 a month? Okay I'm there, sounds good to me (laughter) every month I got that check, and I was still a junior in high school. So that's a lot of money for a kid my age, let me tell you. But, you know, it's like they trained me from cradle to grave to get everything from a to z at the school for the Deaf so you say the white man made promises, well, all these hearing people with their hearing attitude made us promises. They said oh, if you are mainstreamed in the most appropriate environment educationally, then you can give up your Deaf school so you can be mainstreamed and you have the most effective schooling in those systems. But what I see is the communication completely disintegrated and there wasn't qualified people that could communicate with us at all and the promises were not kept so I can relate. One of the things I'm curious about that I'm like to ask you about is the research says that you carried -- that you brought your sign language from South America -- from centuries and centuries ago, the Native people were all able to sign intertribally with one another. Various tribes and nations could all communicate with one another and understood each other, and Deaf people have received this gift from you. Our signs that we have that we cherish and we value -- we are very proud of our sign language, and we pass that on, and sometimes we fight to keep the integrity of our language. Our visual gestural language, I'm wondering about you. Where did you lose it? What happened? You invented the sign language, and you passed it on until, what, 1910, 1920? And it's like all gone from your culture, and I'm wondering why? I don't understand.

>> first, let's back up for a second. Everyone who is here in this session needs to go out and talk to six people that you know and ask them to share with another six people that it wasn't the Indians who got a monthly check. I think somebody got mixed up (laughter)

>> oh. We do have some differences, as well. I get it now. All right.

>> and, John, I wish I knew what happened to our sign language. History shows that our tribes, even though they spoke different dialects and different languages talked to each other by sign. I don't know what happened to it. Maybe when we were put on reservations and weren't allowed to roam any more and have contact with other tribes, it just died away. And isn't that sad? Because it was a wonderful gift that we had, and if we could rekindle it today, that would be so good for everybody, not just Indian people, but for everyone. That's where even our Native languages are today, as well. In my tribe there are probably only 20 -- maybe 25 elders who still speak the language, and they are trying desperately to share that language, and I hope that we can hang onto that, because, again, I think your language and our languages help keep alive who we are. And our cultures -- the Native culture and the Deaf culture -- hopefully we can work together and from this meeting today we can make our circle and our bond with one another stronger and better for both our cultures.

>> ladies and gentlemen, our presentation was not designed to disseminate solutions. It was not designed to present and preach and tell people about the glorious majesties that we have and what we can resolve. But just to identify the similarities that we have amongst ourselves, and a number of the key areas -- language, isolation, communication, education, employment, oppression -- those that exploit us, and those that -- the services and resources that we are out looking for and we don't know what's available for us. Our inability to know how to get out of it, and at the same time to hang on and to cherish these things so we can function independently and still maintain and preserve our culture. We don't want to be changed. Our presentation this morning was to sometime late your thinking, because this afternoon you are going to have an opportunity to hear from the professionals that are on the agenda. People like Tupper that can talk about language and cultures. I mean, he has lived all those. He lives it every day. We can't speak on that because we don't live it every day. I'm not Native but he is and so are the other speakers on the agenda this afternoon. So we have a great wealth of information. It's right here, and we hope we can stimulate your thinking enough so when all of you come to the presentations this afternoon that you be chock full of questions and be able to hear and solve some of the problems we have talked about and come up with strategies to help our communities success not just Deaf culture but Native cultures as well and for American Indian and Alaskan Native cultures as well, and we want to give much expression of appreciation for all of you today. Thank you we really appreciate it a great deal (applause)

>> I have three or four disks with the Native listings on them for those of you who need it in that format let me know.
 
 

 *** (noon break) ***
 

4/4/01 1:35 To 3:15 (Part 2)
"Serving Individuals In The Deaf Native American Community"
Eugene Edwin, Tupper Dunbar, Alan Cartwright, Mark Azure, Dick Corbridge, John Evans, And Carleen Anderson, Presenters

>> okay. Is everyone able to hear me or is it too loud. Why did they hand me the mic? I'm Deaf. (laughter)

>> I'd like to introduce Alan Cartwright. He is the director for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Center in Anchorage, and he is going to be the facilitator this afternoon.

>> Thank you. Thanks to my partner there, too. Anyway. I'd like to start this afternoon -- by first telling you we are going to jump in and just start swimming and that's how we are going to learn. When I first got to Alaska, I didn't know anything about Alaska. Of I've been there 25 years and I don't know it all still. So I'm asking you all to join me this afternoon. You have had lunch. Don't fall asleep. I'm expecting everybody to be wide awake and keep up with me. We are going on a journey we are going to fly. Some people say I look a little bit like a bald eagle. Can you picture that up here? I'm asking you to fly with me. Take a trip to Alaska. I understand some of you have never been there. I am sure you have read about it, dreamed of Alaska, in fact. That's not good enough. You need to be there and experience it. . What you read in books just isn't enough. What you hear in stories just isn't enough. What people tell you isn't enough. You need to have that experience firsthand in order to understand what Alaska is all about. So. A lot of people hear the word Alaska, but what I'd like to do today is I'd like to draw Alaska. I will draw a map. I'm not a great artist. Drawing isn't my strong point. But I'm going to use a map -- I'm going to tell you of how I think of Alaska. First of all the back kind of like the back of the head is always flat. That's the easiest part (laughter) the top of the head of Alaska goes like this, kind of the forehead, can you picture it? . A nose. Did you know Alaska had a beard? Remarkable. Alaska. Right? That looks like Alaska. Oh, what a beautiful map. Perfect. Alaska looks like a face. So now let's see who is behind that face. It's bearded. You see the nose. You see the forehead. Wearing a hat, right, and the long braids. I'm going to introduce a real live Alaskan for you. See some of the Alaskans in the room have beards. Another one in the back there. Right? Alaskans have beards: the men have beards. The men have beards. Now, I didn't ask Trevor to stand because he doesn't have a beard, and he's not from Alaska anyway, he's Canadian. (laughter) now, I have a picture of Alaska. No. No. Well, Alaska hasn't had a lot of women. There are more and more women coming to us now, and the numbers are pretty even now, but traditionally Alaska has been mostly male. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to conduct an interview. We are going to imagine that you want to go to Alaska, and you have never been there. Who has never been to Alaska. Tell me some things you know about Alaska. Alaska is cold. We hear that a lot. What else do you hear about Alaska? You hear there is fishing. That's another thing. Mother? We have very long days and -- right. Right. The sun goes round around in the sky and doesn't set. It also goes around and around below the horizon and is very cold. We have cold. Long days or long nights. We have one more comment about Alaska. Oh, bears. I'm looking for another one. Igloos. And someone asked me if I live in an igloo all the time I have another story once this is finished we will go into igloos. You might be interested in how an igloo is built. We will talk about that later. Oh, Alaska is far, far away. Those are the three big myths that we hear about Alaska. That it's cold, that it's dark, and that it's very far away. .

>> and it's those three myths that prevent the people we meet from coming to Alaska. The pay in Alaska is very good. But what we have is attitudinal barriers against Alaska. First of all you have a very beautiful state. Clearly very beautiful. People have heard of the state of Texas? Yes. If you took two Texases, they still wouldn't be as big as Alaska. A lot of people think of Alaska as being five different states in one. There are five distinct environments. There is the forest, the glaciers, the ocean, volcanic and they are all quite a bit of distance from each other. I'm not going to talk about all of the towns, but most of the communities -- we are going to talk about the communities in Alaska. Who do you think -- what community lives in the north of Alaska. No, not you. Something saying something about the North Pole? No, I'm sorry. The North Pole is way off our map here. Somebody who doesn't know their geography. I'm talking about in the state of Alaska. First community I'm going to talk about is Barrow, Alaska. You could call that the eye, in a sense. It's kind of in the top of the head. It's not really the place for the eye. Nome? . Here we have Kotzabue -- that's the eye. So Barrow and Kotzabue are signed similarly. Somebody keeps telling me -- somebody keeps telling me the nose, the nose. That's the nose, and right there is Nome. Working our way down to the mouth. We don't call it -- we don't call that city "mouth." does anybody know? Bethel is the name of that city. We have Fairbanks, right. Somebody spotted that one. Anchorage, correct. Juneau, everybody knows Juneau, Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, everybody knows those. Now, that you have got a bit of a picture of Alaska, let's talk about the roads. I come to Oregon, and boy it seems pretty easy to drive from place to place. If I want to go to Burns, I can drive there. Pretty easy to get from place to place in Oregon. In Alaska, though, we have got roads. That's all the roads we have got. To get to any of these other cities you have to fly. Okay. Are we getting a clear picture of Alaska now? Let's talk about what kind of services we have in the state. Deaf services tend to be center in Juneau, Anchorage and Fairbanks. And there are pretty much no services for the Deaf in any of these other cities. That's a giant challenge for us. And you get some services that -- in some of the smaller communities near the borders in the east and the south. Now, I'm a director of a program centered in Anchorage, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Center we provide a variety of services, interpreting services, counseling, and we have the largest center. Ask we have clients who come to us because we are Deaf, and I believe in providing direct service to clients, and that's what's bringing people in our door. Dan's office, called Deaf Community Services, is a smaller agency. -- that was an interpreter error, I am with Deaf Community Services, Dan's with VR: they don't have any Deaf counselors in that program, and the interpreting services are kind of spotty. In Juneau -- Juneau is the state capital, and they have only got one person providing services for the Deaf and hard of hearing in Juneau. No interpreting services at all. They have to bring in interpreters who usually work in the schools. So if you fly into Juneau -- because if I fly into Juneau because I want to testify to the legislature, there are no interpreters there. So access is a major problem. The Alaska School for the Deaf. The student living center which is a group home, part of the school, is in Anchorage. Let's talk about some of the outlying cities, let's talk about what their situation is like. They have no services. There is no office there at all. And to fly someone out there for service costs a tremendous amount of money. For you to fly from Seattle or Portland into Anchorage is cheaper than to fly from barrow to Fairbanks. Far cheaper. So when a Deaf person needs services what can they do if they need an interpreter, if they need some kind of guidance counseling. They are on their own. That's a major problem. We talked a little bit about isolation this morning and about identity, and that is a giant issue. People are very separate and very isolated. How are we going to deal with the issue? Should we put offices in the -- in every city? How can we get people to come to Alaska if there are no