In recent weeks I’ve brought you inspiring stories from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and a visionary production company in Boston. This week’s interview is a little closer to home, with an individual who’s worked with my own kids. Figuring out how much to share of this story has been tough because I wasn’t expecting so much of it to be deeply connected to sacred experiences. In the spirit of our Summit Stages values of cohesion, reverence and inspiration, I’ve decided to share the full, authentic story.
Jerry (J.J) First Charger Jr. is a local Blackfoot man from Kainai who is a hero to many young people, including some of my own children. I first met Jerry when I was helping in a community-building collaboration between Blackfoot and settler high schoolers in our area. Jerry was great with the kids, and enthusiastically helped them develop confidence in themselves and each other. I was also wowed by the breadth of his talents and his willingness to share them: with us he competently taught break-dancing, stage-combat, Indigenous singing, improv, acting and more.
More recently, Jerry’s dance crew, the Westwind Thunders, made Global News (a Canadian network) on a dance tour where they mixed breakdancing and Indigenous styles of dance, (including hoop, fancy, grass, chicken and jingle dress and fancy shawl). I was able to attend one of their performances and was almost brought to tears. I was taken aback by the skill and stamina of the dancers, the joy I saw on the faces of the kids, and the beauty of the dances, especially those performed by Indigenous students in full regalia. My son, who had carried water for the Thunders working as an EA, said it was just as impressive to see how Jerry worked with the kids, that he “leads through pure rapport. The kids would do anything for him, and because of him they know they can do anything.”
I had worked with Jerry, but knew next to nothing of his history. As such, I was especially eager for this interview. I was surprised and moved by the spiritual roots of Jerry’s approach to teaching and the degree to which personal experience has helped him relate and help so many young people and communities who have endured generations of persecution and personal trauma. Here is his story:
Leading with Empathy and a Vibrant Sense of Fun
Jerry was 22 years old when he woke up in a drunk tank in Cardston, Alberta. This was not a first-time experience. He didn’t remember what brought him there–but that wasn’t new either. Only a few months earlier, he’d gotten drunk to the point of black out at a family wedding and wound up severely beating up his little brother, only to wake up the next day with no memory of the conflict. It terrified and deeply shamed him that his brother could have died at his hands. Not knowing how to cope, he’d retreated even further into drugs and alcohol.
Jerry asked the guard what had happened and learned that he’d been at the home of some friends who had wound up calling the police and did not want him coming back. He didn’t know what he’d done, but it was once again threatening his relationships. Why did he keep messing up like this?
His substance abuse had begun in his childhood. It was in the summer after fifth grade when some older cousins had introduced him to sniffing solvents. His mother eventually became aware and put an end to it, but months of solvent abuse damaged his brain to the point that when he started 6th grade, he couldn’t even do simple math. Then, in Grade 11 mechanics class, he discovered he was intensely sensitive to the solvents they were using to clean car engines. He found himself suddenly high, hallucinating, with a strobe-light effect on his vision. For months afterward, if someone so much as used liquid paper, nail polish or permanent marker in the classroom he was in, it would trigger a trip. He was constantly afraid of losing control in front of his peers, and school administrators did not understand when he explained the situation, so he started skipping school and wound up getting in with a crowd of teens who were abusing drugs and alcohol.
He had tried to get help and only gotten more alienated. He felt abandoned and angry at his family, friends and society. All of this had brought him here, sitting on the cold, hard floor of a drunk tank, scared and hopeless. In his distress, he prayed, and he heard an answer, an invitation to change his life. That wasn’t happening. He’d seen friends and family go to treatment, only to relapse as soon as they came out, a month, or even a year later.
Again, he heard a divine invitation to change. He couldn’t do it, he said. He would fail. He knew that his friends would mock him if he tried, just like he had mocked them when they had tried.
The invitation came again, with thoughts of his family laughing and having fun together and a longing to be with them. In the last few years, his father had quit drinking and joined the Christian faith to which his family belonged. They were happy. But Jerry finally had a position of some status on the streets. He was a middle man that people came to for their fixes. He didn’t want to lose that status.
Once again, the Creator invited him to quit drugs and alcohol and change his life. He thought about how his life seemed like a waste to this point. He wanted to be remembered as a good person, who helped others out, not as a menace to society, leaving wreckage in his wake. But he knew he couldn’t do it. He was too weak and he would fail.
The Creator said, “You can change. Trust me.”
“But how?” he asked.
Again, he heard, “It can be done. Just trust me.”
He had no arguments left. He agreed he would change, but only if the Creator agreed to never leave him. “Because if you do, I will fail.”
Jerry's eyes fill with tears and he pauses to regain his composure before repeating what he heard next: “J.J., I will never leave you. I will always be there for you.”
A few hours later, Jerry walked out of the drunk tank, never to return, “because of the love of the Creator and because I called my spirit back,” he says. He returned to church and the Creator, true to His promise, has been with him ever since.
Seven years of sobriety later, Jerry got a call from a friend who said the Young Offenders Centre in Lethbridge was looking for a youth mentor to run a drumming and dance program for young inmates. Jerry was a musician, and a BBoy (breakdancer). He had a passion for everything the program aimed to do. But he had no credentials in this line of work. He was still in the early years of a degree in Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge (which he completed in 2007). Thinking it was a long shot, he applied anyway and was shocked when they hired him on the spot.
He taught the youth inmates to sing, drum and dance. He found this to be a gateway to connection. He noticed that the youth came to trust him first as their music and movement mentor with whom they had fun, and that opened the door to honest discussions about personal responsibility and the power to change. Drumming, he has since learned, is correlated with resilience among war-torn people in Africa. He didn’t know that then, but he started seeing that same burgeoning resilience in the youth with whom he was working.
Four years later, the Youth Offenders Centre shut down. Jerry moved his program to youth care and family preservation, became an Lethbridge College instructor at the adult correction facility, where he developed a curriculum for personal development, and then added on a Native Liaison position at the correction centre. He started including improv games in his program. Music, dance and drama gave him a natural way to teach the inmates that making mistakes is not a good reason to be beaten down. “Everybody makes mistakes. That’s how you learn and grow.” This allowed him to teach about choice and consequence as a learning rather than a punitive experience. Instead of using language like “good and evil” that tended to activate inmates’ shame and their fear of rejection, he taught about choosing between positive energy and negative energy. Jerry told the inmates that, “before you can help your children, you better fix yourself, take on some personal responsibility for your actions, be mindful and accountable.”
Inmates loved it. They told him that his program was a sharp contrast to the rest of their prison experience. Among the things they said were, “We love coming to your programs because you make us think,” “You made me feel like I was not in jail. You took the walls away from me,” and “You helped me enjoy myself and learn that life can be fun again.” It was a novel approach to correction, but Jerry believed the system should be focused on rehabilitation not punitive measures, because those just fueled the inmates’ anger while simultaneously helping offenders to network and learn each other's tricks.
Jerry eventually moved from corrections to the school system in 2007 when he was offered a position as a Family School Liaison Counsellor. There, he began to work with kids who were struggling to cope with chaotic home lives, and with parents who feared having their battles with addiction, anger and so forth revealed to a counsellor in a system that they didn’t trust. Once again, music and dance were the gateway he needed to get into a position of trust from which he could help.
He discovered a deeper urgency to help in October 2014, on a home visit to a family on the reserve. The children had hardly been to school that year and he dropped by to find out if he could help. He learned that the family had been staying up nights, armed with sticks and bats, to protect their home from gangsters. The mother had been promised the harassment would stop if she’d give up her boys to the gang. But the mother would do no such thing, and instead, they had witnessed a brutal machete attack on their own front porch.
Jerry couldn’t stop thinking about the hopelessness of the mother, the powerlessness of the community, and the corruption among leaders who should be helping. As he prayed and meditated about the situation, he was reminded of a traditional Blackfoot story called “The Lost Children.” It tells of some orphaned children and the adults of their people, who refused the responsibility to care for them, chased them from their village and let their children persecute them. Eventually, some friendly dogs showed the children the way to the Sun Father and Grandmother Moon, who wanted to know why they had returned home so prematurely. When he heard their story, the Sun Father burned with indignation, the rains dried up and the people suffered greatly from drought and famine. The dogs informed the people that the Sun Father was enraged at their neglect of the orphans, the people came to understand and made reconciliation to the Sun Father, and the famine ended. The people made a symbol of six circles for The Lost Children and placed it high on their lodges, on the south teepee flap, to remind them of their responsibility toward all children. It remains a common symbol on Blackfoot teepees today.
Hard on the story came the impression that the suffering of his people is a consequence of neglecting the children. A couple of days after remembering this story, Jerry was awakened in the middle of the night by intense pain that he recognized as the suffering of children, born and unborn, throughout the entire world. “For three hours, it was the most horrendous emotional pain that I had ever endured,” he recalls. He still doesn’t understand why he experienced it, but he resolved to do his utmost for the children he can help. The symbol of the Lost Children now hangs in his office and in his home, reminding him of his responsibility toward all children.
One of the key tools he uses now to fulfill that responsibility is BBoying and BGirling (breakdancing). He has learned that it helps kids self-regulate. Breakdancing and hip hop were popularized as an antidote to violence in the Bronx, New York, when gang violence was so pervasive that you could get killed for crossing the street wearing the wrong colours. Former gang leader African Bambaataa persuaded other leaders to embrace the creative expression offered by Hip Hop as a way of pulling back from the brink of annihilation. Gang members started settling turf wars with dance battles instead of weapons. It allowed them to flex their muscles and show off how tough they were, but in a way that left them alive to better themselves and compete again another day. “The old school BBoys said that they were [so] busy practicing for the next battle that they did not have time to do criminal activities.“ As a local elder of Hip Hop, he says the whole point of BBoying or BBGirling is for “peace, love, unity and fun”
He speaks about one struggling student whose family would not let their boy anywhere near counselling. But they were happy to let Jerry teach him breakdancing and that helped the boy develop the supports he needed and the self-regulation skills to cope better at school.
Jerry cites new understanding of the therapeutic power of play. “The experts in the field of therapy are pointing out that dance, art and play are effective tools for dealing with trauma. That is where the healing happens.” The program only works effectively when you have parents, administrators and teachers on board, and Jerry is grateful for the support of all three in Westwind School Division.
To conclude our interview, I ask Jerry what he would say he’s here to do. I expect him to say something like, “Help my people understand the world they live in and how to better themselves while they are at it” (an explanation he will later give me for his Native American Studies and his dreams of post-graduate work). But he surprises me by choosing a different mission as his defining one: “To help people understand not to take life so serious; to help them enjoy life… It’s through fun and games that we gain capacity.”
It's a powerful message, one that resonates deeply with my own heart. Music, dance and drama have mighty, healing power. What an incredible gift it is that they are also so much fun!
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