'A no holds-barred Elder': How one man is helping to heal his Indigenous community - PBS NewsHour

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Donald Prince:

I walked through the empty city. My soul is hurt and torn. I'm surrounded by loneliness. Why was I even born? I wish I could find a way out of this world of violence. I cry out at night and I hear only the silence.

I remember I was about probably 10 years old, just when I started school, I started drinking. The feelings of fear and insecurity and not feeling a part of, and all this other stuff sort of went away. When I drank, fights, I remember a lot of fights. My dad was a big guy, so he was always screaming and yelling and different things like that, the cops coming.

Reality, dirty breath in his face. He's back in line. Thoughts gone, food coming. Boy, I'm sure hungry. Been standing in line for years. Hope they don't see me.

I used to get picked on in school by all these bullies, they used to wait for us. And the biggest guy, they came after me and I stabbed him in the face. I cut him right from his mouth right up to his ear. The cops came, they picked me up that night and threw me in jail.

He stands in the line and hides his face. Keeping up to the others, doesn't lose his place. He stares at the holes in his shoes. Dirty pants, stale shirt. Hey, move it, buddy. What are you dreaming about, wine?

Ended up in jail again, '89, but these couple of guards, they said, Prince, when in the hell are you going to learn, when you're going to smarten up, you know? I said, yeah, yeah, but I don't know what the hell I thought, I seemed like I can't. I don't know what the hell's going on with me. So anyway, one of them said, Well, why don't you start writing some of this stuff down? Write it out. And I thought, OK. So I went back and I started writing and I wrote about how I felt about love and about hate and about anger and wishing for a better life and wishing for a love that was true or wishing for, you know, have my kids in my life and things like that, right?

Well, I remember when my oldest daughter, Crystal was born I just held her and looked at her and I said, I will never do the things to you that were done to me and I never did. For the first 14, 15 years of her life, I was never there much. One time Paula was in jail, the guard comes up to me and says your daughter phoned, there's an emergency. She said that Amanda got run over, Amanda, my younger daughter, she was five years old. So I'm on the phone and I said, well, is she OK? And all I can hear is crying on the other end. And I thought, she's dead. I thought my daughter was dead. Finally, Crystal was able to talk, and she said, no, she's in pretty bad shape, she in a hospital, but she's going to make it. But I remember going and walking away on that phone call, thinking, you know, what the hell kind of a dad am I? You know, my kid's 500 miles away, ran over, the other one's getting in trouble. What the hell is wrong with me? You know, why? What's the matter with me?

Strange, foolish desires. They come over me. I feel the chains tighten. I am no longer free.

I went and saw this drug and alcohol counselor. He says, Well, I just want to know what people did to you. I said, What do you mean? He said, What did people do to you when you were a kid? And holy —-, that blew me away. You know, nobody ever asked me what happened to me. You know, they always want to know what a bad guy I was. And I look back now, that was the key. That was the key to locking all the unlocking, all that bitterness and hate, anger I had for the world. I haven't had a drug or a drink since.

We provide a place where people can get help, whether that be counseling or traditional healing or traditional medicine, ceremonies, different things like that. We don't follow any Western way of doing things, we do things our way, the Indian way. We don't have anybody who works here was not Aboriginal.

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