Gyasi Ross: Native communities must invest in our young men

Within Native communities, we show that we expect girls — young women — to be great moms by giving them serious responsibility at a young age. They babysit and become familiar with child-rearing at a very young age. They even take on the responsibilities of being the fill-in mother in these families where mom has to work and dad is not around. It should be no surprise that Native women, in general, have become the backbone of our family structures and kept us together with almost no help for quite some time.

There are certainly Native people who still practice specific coming of age ceremonies for young women. Yet, this process — babysitting and then ostensibly being the head of the household — has become the de facto coming of age ceremony within many Native families.

But there is no such corresponding responsibility with young men within most of our communities. We neither invest in the development of young fathers nor do we expect that young Native men are supposed to be great fathers.

That was not always the case. History informs us that Native people have always had specific ceremonies to teach young men accountability to the family and to the greater community. In Regaining Control of our Lives, John Mohawk warns us , that “One of the alarming aspects of the loss of culture (of acculturation) is that in the absence of processes that meets people’s needs, social disintegration occurs.” We’re there. We no long rely upon the processes that have met our needs to teach fatherhood skills and survival techniques for tens of thousands of years…a dangerous state of affairs.