Tipi of Courage co-ordinator wins peace prize

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For 10 years, Whiley Eagle Speaker struggled to find his own peace. Five days before World AIDS Day (Dec. 1), YMCA Calgary honored Eagle Speaker as a peacemaker for his work in raising HIV/AIDS awareness in the Aboriginal community.

Presented with a Community Initiatives Award for his work with the Canadian Red Cross Society, Eagle Speaker is the first Aboriginal person to receive a Peace Medal Award from the YMCA Calgary.

Eagle Speaker said this was the most important award he has ever received. He told Sweetgrass that he saw a lot of horrible things on the Blood reserve where he grew up. Then he moved to Calgary and became a gang member.

"I really pulled myself out of really hard situations ... and to be acknowledged as a peacemaker among my people is a very beautiful thing," said Eagle Speaker.

The Tipi of Courage project began as an idea from the Calgary Coalition on HIV/AIDS Aboriginal Working Group to have a mobile tipi that would travel to various communities and bring people together to talk about HIV/AIDS issues. The project runs under the Canadian Red Cross where Eagle Speaker became the Tipi of Courage project co-ordinator in July 2003. Driven by what he saw was a lack of representation in the mainstream communities about the seriousness of the issue he expanded the original concept to include traditional philosophies. As a result, the program has been very successful.

"This handing out of condoms, this attending HIV/AIDS symposiums, which again I don't knock in any way, they're very necessary, but doing just that is not enough any more. We need to go back to how we really do things," said Eagle Speaker. "We can't go back to living in the tipis and on buffalo, but we can take the same teachings that it took to survive that world and apply them to our landscape of today."

Tipi of Courage has three components: the mobile tipi, leadership training and warriors. The mobile tipi goes to various events such as powwows, dances and conferences, providing current information on HIV/AIDS. The second part of the project trains Aboriginal people with the warrior teachings that they use as an empowerment tool to do community workshops. The third part, warriors, involves volunteers that work with each trainer to do outreach in the community and at events.

Eagle Speaker based the warrior component on the traditional role of the warrior, which he describes as useful by fighting for the continuation of the tribe.

"We really relate that to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in that your standing up to make a stand against HIV and AIDS is ensuring that we're taking part in our epidemic so that there's Aboriginal people 100 years from now."

Aboriginal people from all walks of life have volunteered to role model. The youngest trained warrior is 12 and the oldest is in their late 80s. Warriors highlight HIV/AIDS as an issue for the community simply by their presence in their Tipi of Courage warrior jackets.

"Even if people don't even come up and talk to us, they still see a huge group of warriors, walking around, staying in a positive frame of mind," said Eagle Speaker.

"They've called us an innovative program but in essence we're not innovative. We're reclaiming what's truly ours, the morals, the teachings, the true way of being and we're doing that without feathers and medicine wheels and blue beads and sacred red roads."

Tipi of Courage also works in part because of the wide range of volunteer warriors they recruited.

"The young mothers a lot of times can't relate to, say, a male HIV positive homosexual man, so we go and find young mothers. A lot times people who aren't HIV [positive] can't relate to people who are HIV [positive], so we find non-HIV positive people," explained Eagle Speaker.

The Calgary program has only been operational since March, but it already has 100 warriors, trainers and supporters, and it is expanding to other parts of Canada.

Tipi of Courage works hard to dipel myths around HIV/AIDS. "We hear a lot of people say things like you only get HIV/AIDS if you sleep around. But we come back and say well, in the Aboriginal community, getting married up is a very common thing and we'll jump from relationship to relationship to relationship. We tell people, eight people unprotected in one weekend is the same as eight people unprotected over five years."

Another myth Eagle Speaker hears often is that HIV/AIDS is for gay men. However, females represent nearly half of all positive HIV test reports among Aboriginal peoples, compared with 19.5 per cent of reports among non-Aboriginal peoples. Eagle Speaker explained that he does not want to take a moralistic stance, he just wants to role model healthy and positive behaviors that fit into the reality of Aboriginal culture.

"Because Health Canada tells us that by 2010, every Aboriginal person in Canada is going to have either someone they know closely affected, or someone within their family affected, which is HIV positive. That's six years from now, and there's lots of scary projections," said Eagle Speaker.

Health Canada estimates that 30 per cent of HIV positive people are unaware of their infection. In 2002, Aboriginal peoples accounted for 12.9 per cent of the total AIDS cases that reported ethnicity, when only 3.3 per cent of the Canadian population is Aboriginal. Health Canada estimates that the rate of HIV infected Aboriginal people is 250 to 450 cases per year, or one person a day.