Robyn Pepion stands near the bear in the medicine wheel on the campus of United Tribes Technical College.
 

Mother as student is strengthened by spiritual resolve and presses on through tough situations in life
 

By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place

BISMARCK, North Dakota — Robyn Pepion, 29, speaks from a student’s perspective. She also speaks from the perspective of a mother and she speaks as a spiritual person.

One of the strengths of a tribal college is instilling in students a sense of self, cultural identity, Native history, expectations and hope. Dr. David Gipp, president of United Tribes Technical College sounds this alliteration to students: “Rebuilding,” “Rebirth” and “Renaissance.”
“This college is unique,” said Pepion, during an interview at a picnic table outside the Wellness Center, where she works as a wellness assistant. “They do a lot of things with prayer, not too much, but there is prayer. There is a sweat lodge here.”

Pepion, studying medical coding, is Blackfeet and Northern Cheyenne. She was raised in Browning, Montana, in the Rocky Mountains, near Glacier National Park, not too far from the Canadian border with Alberta. She is the mother of four boys.

For Pepion, the Bismarck campus of UTTC is a safe haven for her and her boys. She studied here once before and was certified as an injury prevention specialist, intending to work on domestic violence, alcoholism and suicide prevention issues prevalent in the community.

“I have seen a lot of domestic violence,” she said. “I went through it. For Native Americans, alcoholism and domestic violence are problems that we need to overcome. I think it all stems from a sense of trauma.”

That trauma is blight on history.

“At boarding schools, they took us away from our own culture and made it wrong,” she said. “In the fourth generation since the boarding schools, the trauma still survives. A lot of children were kidnapped and taken to boarding schools. Parents wouldn’t know where their children were. They cut the boys hair. They couldn’t speak their language. Of course, there was emotional trauma because of being taken from parents.”

Pepion said her mother’s generation, faced abuse by Catholic priests who got Indian girls pregnant. Indian boys were faced with the dire task of burying stillborn babies fathered by priests.

Pepion’s mother was born in 1953.

“Intergenerational trauma means we have to come to terms with it and learning how to forgive,” she said.

Echoes of abuse, the later need to forgive, cry out from some of the buildings at UTTC. Part of the campus is a former military installation that was used as an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

“We need forgiveness instead of blaming,” Pepion said. “Just accepting what happened, not hanging on in an angry way, we can learn from each other. Two worlds come together. What we were told: White people are this way. Black people are this way. Indians are this way.

“We are all the same,” she said. “We all have our gifts to give. Not everyone sees that — not yet.”

Pepion worked at a women’s shelter for a year. Then she returned to UTTC and is working toward a certificate in medical coding. Students learn ICD-9 coding. In the near future, they will manage medical records. It appears that medical coding is headed for its heyday.

Even before his inauguration in January, President Obama promised to computerize all the country’s medical records within five years.

“This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests,” Obama said in a speech. “But it just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs; it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system.”

According to statistics provided by the White House, “only about 8 percent of the country’s 5,000 hospitals and 17 percent of its 800,000 physicians use electronic medical records.

“Those numbers help to keep a clear definition of what’s going on,” Pepion said. “My classmates joke among ourselves that we are the Navajo Code Talkers of the healthcare team.”

Pepion wants to work for the Indian Health Service when she completes training in spring 2010. Ideally, she wants to take her boys, 8, 5, 4 and 2, back to Browning. She is cautious about her boys and the halting generational malady already seen too much in her life.

“Domestic violence was learned somewhere,” she said. “If that’s all you know, then that’s the way you are going to be. People can learn not to be that way if they are that way. Healing, some find it through the church, is the beginning of change. It’s about finding that balance.

“To help a tree in an unhealthy forest, you have to start from the root up,” Pepion said. “Off the reservation we are exposed to a lot of things. We have to learn ways to live without drinking, without fighting, without yelling at each other.”

As already mentioned, social problems stem generations.

“I don’t want my boys to go through that,” she said. “I want them to live in a safe house. They will be accountable. I’m glad I have boys. I’m trying to expose them to as many positive males as possible. They are great guys.

“I had to reach bottom before I got out of that violent relationship in 2005,” Pepion remembered. “Everybody has to do it in their own time. When I reached bottom, I was looking for answers everywhere. My eyes were opened to a lot of positive things.”

Nowadays she subscribes to Eckhart Tolle’s “living in the moment.”

“I pray a lot,” Pepion said. “I do meditation and visualization. I pray a lot. I have positive thoughts. Thoughts have energy. More people are aware of that. I pray for everybody. Sammy, a medicine man, told me, ‘Think of how many people were praying for you when you were going through what you went through and you didn’t even know they were praying for you.’”

Robyn Pepion sits in front of a teepee set up on the United Tribes Technical College campus during the annual powwow.