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In the land of Corn Mothers and Katsinas, promoting wellness, happiness and peace to children may humbly be considered a right and noble effort. Hopi people live with a world view, deeply religious in nature, whereby it is their spiritual duty to maintain harmony in the universe through prayer and ceremony. In our rapidly changing world, on and off this reservation, it's valuable to heed Mahatma Gandhi's words, "if we are to teach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with children." A local effort promoting whole-person health for Hopi children described is inclusive of the concepts of awareness, maintenance and prevention. Awareness being the acquisition of knowledge; maintenance, routinely acquiring positive habits and elimination of self-destructive behaviors; and prevention, both awareness and maintenance plus the reinforcement efforts essential to preventing acquisition of new negative risk-taking behaviors.
During an August 2001 talk, Tich Nhat Hanh, Zen teacher, author and peace activist, made mention of a poem he had written many years earlier upon seeing the beauty of a shooting star. Coincidentally, a couple of weeks before his presentation I had looked up into the clear, dark and expansive high-desert sky of northern Arizona, where I live, and saw a brilliant shooting star. At that moment it occurred to me how a shooting star is metaphorically like our lives " brief, yet bright. From the random convergence of two shooting star moments, an opportunity to share wellness and mindfulness to local children of all ages flowered.
As a public health and nutrition educator for the U.S. Indian Health Service, I've endeavored to routinely come up with new songs about being healthy, taking care of ourselves and enjoying this life, to bring into local Hopi, Apache, Ute and Navajo Reservation classrooms. Over the past twenty years many schoolchildren have sung my songs with me about mindful consumption, rightful speech and effort; with titles such as We'll be eating lots of Good Food, the Fat Cat and Skinny Little Lizard songs, We All Are Watering (happy seed song) and (I Get Up on the) Bright Side of the Bed. Through the medium of song, fun messages of health and happiness have been accepted in classrooms and on the local Apache and Hopi native...