Anti-smoking campaign for youth

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A new program designed to get young people in Onion Lake First Nation to butt out is reaching its target audience by including students in the project from the ground up.

Onion Lake Youth Anti-Smoking Initiative 2001 was launched earlier this year after the community received a $75,000 grant as one of three First Nations across Canada to take part in a First Nations youth anti-smoking pilot project.

Terry Clarke, principal of Eagleview Comprehensive high school, submitted the successful Onion Lake application. According to Clarke, the call for applications fit in perfectly with the school's plans for tackling the smoking problem among its students.

During last school year, students and staff had a designated area on school grounds where they could smoke, Clarke said. This year, the decision was made to ban smoking completely.

"This is kind of a double whammy for kids, because, in most schools, students are allowed to walk off school grounds and have a cigarette. Our schools, you can't leave school grounds. So now we've got adults, they're 18, 19, they're coming to school, and they can't leave school grounds, and they're not allowed to smoke. And we said, 'Ooh, we're going to have a problem with this'."

Clarke said plans to deal with the problem were initially discussed during policy review last April. Then, over the summer, he received information about the pilot project, and applied for funding.

"Getting that $75,000 is just a bonus, as far as I'm concerned. We were going to do this anyway. It just made life a little easier."

The purpose of the anti-smoking project is two-fold, Clarke said, focusing on preventing kids that don't smoke from starting, and helping those that do smoke to quit.

"We have a prevention strategy, which takes care of the kids who don't smoke, and that's basically over at Chief Taylor, which is the elementary school. And we have some prevention at Eagleview here too. But mainly at Eagleview, the high school, we're looking at cessation. Stop the smoking," Clarke explained.

"The activities that we do are all based around what the kids want to do. We talk about smoking. we have mentors that come in. We've hired a full time person to work at the learning centre to develop aids, resources, pamphlets, all around First Nations culture and the traditional use of tobacco.

"People have kind of forgot the traditional use. If you go to a round dance or you go to many of the ceremonial functions around here, people come around with a cigarette pack and give you cigarettes. Well, that's not the traditional use, or so I've been told. It's not the traditional use of tobacco. When you go up north and you shoot a moose or something, and you take something from Mother Earth, you give it back, through the use of tobacco. That's traditional use. "But it's so widespread now, smoking amongst our youth. We did a poll last year of Eagleview students. We found that 75 per cent of the kids smoke. That's an astonishing figure. Our goal this year is to get it down to 25 per cent."

The campaign is making an impact at the school, Clarke said, with many staff and students quitting or trying to quit.

"I really honour the students for trying, because it's really hard to quit smoking. I know. I've been there, and I'm doing it right now. It's really tough," Clarke said.

"The students drive this thing," Clarke said. "It's wonderful."

Some of the activities organized by the students as part of the anti-smoking campaign have included a poster contest, petitions, taping messages to air on the radio, having motivational speakers in, Elders in the classrooms, skits on anti-smoking, chants on anti-smoking, anti-smoking buttons, and jump rope for heart. The activities are organized within both the high school and the elementary school.

"Right now, I know there's a petition going out to the band office. They still smoke over there. And the kids have done a petition that they're going to give to chief and council, thatall public facilities in Onion Lake be smoke free. And that's a big step."

Although the campaign is school-based, it won't end with the school year in June. During summer holidays, the campaign will continue through the youth centre, then move back to the schools in September.

"What we want to get into the hands of all the people in Onion Lake is some kind of booklet that's age appropriate, for them to understand the hazards of smoking. And we'll get that done probably in September," Clarke said.

"This is a long term thing. We've got a full year to do this. But I really like what's going on so far. It's really been positive."

Getting the posters, pamphlets and information out is the job of Jason Chocan, a graphic designer who works out of the learning centre creating the campaign materials.

"The idea is to keep it based mostly on keeping kids from starting smoking. And there's always a lot of material on anti-smoking out here, from the health centre, but none of it's really geared towards First Nations people. So that's my job, to kind of send that information out, but with kind of like a First Nations twist to it," Chocan said.

"I do comparisons between what traditional tobacco use is, and what tobacco abuse is. Also a little bit about the history of tobacco, and that our peoples were the first to actually use tobacco."

Chocan has designed three different lines of materials, aimed at different age groups. For the younger kids in elementary school, he created a character named Bucky Buffalo to help him get the anti-smoking message out. Another line is targeted at older kids in the high school, and the third uses humour to try to convince adults to quit.

The campaign has been well received within the community, with people pointing him out as the guy who makes the posters.

Chocan is glad to see people are paying attention to the material he's created, "because it gets people thinking about, I guess, how smoking has really affected our community. Becausethere's a lot of people out here that have actually died of cancer. There's like 4,000 people, and there's like four or five deaths a year here from cancer. That's a lot. I never really stepped back and looked at it before, but that's how it's been - heart related or smoking related disease and illness. It's actually really prevalent out here."

Chocan spoke about the high rate of smokers at the high school, saying trying to get those numbers down is a priority for him.

"It's kind of a big thing to me, to try to get that down. Because kids are kind of hard to reach in the high school. They tend to know what they want, or think they do. And I'm trying to go about it in a way where they don't feel like they're being preached to. They're being involved," Chocan said.