“I need to train my staff so we can overcome the effects of trauma, not perpetuate it,” says Blacksnake, who is acting director of the Seneca Arts & Learning Center, which comprises the Nation’s early childhood education, language, and education departments.

A former school counselor, Blacksnake is working on an ambitious and expansive multi-year plan to boost well-being among Seneca families. Intergenerational trauma will be taken into account in all programs at the Seneca Arts & Learning Center, she says, starting with infants in the early childhood learning center.

In her vision, there would also be daily language training for existing preschool teachers and staff to create a strong connection to Seneca language and culture. Professional development programs would create a pipeline of new early childhood teachers. Clubs and other learning opportunities would interest children in careers from an early age. And health fairs, fitness events, and educational workshops would promote health, wellness and parenting skills among families.

Along similar lines, the Nation’s Seneca Strong program, launched in 2014 to address drug and alcohol abuse, emphasizes healing and forgiveness rather than punitive measures, says director Dawn Colburn.

“Our culture is our biggest strength, and we’re trying to bring that back, including ways of healing ourselves,” Colburn says.

Seneca Strong capitalizes on those who know the community—and the struggles of addiction—best by using a peer outreach and recovery support model that sends guides who are themselves in recovery to the homes of people struggling with addiction.

Since the program started a year ago, Colburn says, guides have reached out to about 300 people. One third have gone to in-patient treatment, and half have used some kind of treatment or services, including counseling, AA meetings, employment support, and cultural programming such as sweat lodges and talking circles. Seneca Strong also incorporates prevention and sobriety programming into traditional rites of passage, outdoor skills camps, and powwows.   

Relationships with local police departments aim to channel more Seneca members who struggle with drugs and alcohol into recovery services, rather than county jail, where they are overrepresented. And the Seneca Nation’s judicial branch has plans to start a program that will link drug offenders to a comprehensive set of services coordinated by social workers.

Showing compassion is at the heart of the approach, Colburn says. “It’s not tough love. It’s all just straight up love.”

Among the initiatives the Nation has launched:

• Restoring indigenous plants: Seneca Nation in 2013 became the first federally recognized tribe to enact an indigenous plant policy. Since then, all new landscape planting in public spaces on Seneca lands is exclusively comprised of native species such as winterberry, gray dogwood, black chokeberry, bay berry, hazelnut, high bush cranberries, and sugar maple. Owners of private property are encouraged to replace invasive European and Asian plants with native ones.

• Cultivating native animals: The Department of Conservation harvests the eggs of several local river species that are at risk of becoming endangered, including the 2-feet-long hellbender salamander and palm-size Blanding’s turtle, raises them and returns them to the wild, as a way to ensure their survival. The Nation’s conservationists also capture walleye from the Allegheny River for breeding in a fish hatchery built in 2010 using a federal grant. Millions of walleye, which have been a source of food for the Seneca for hundreds of years, are released into the Allegheny River each spring and summer.

• Moving toward energy independence: In March, the Nation began using a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine on its Cattaraugus Territory, and this fall its new 1.9-megawatt solar array on the Allegany Territory will go online. The turbine and array will reduce the Nation’s carbon footprint by about 125 million pounds over 25 years. The Nation is also working on a plan to build a microgrid that would power its community center on the Cattaraugus territory and allow the center’s use as an emergency facility. Anthony Giacobbe, director of Seneca Energy, says more than half of the energy powering Seneca government facilities will come from renewables by next year.

The Nation’s environmental consciousness is rooted in its concept of responsibility to seven generations, says Seneca member Jody Clark, transportation director for the Nation. “Any decision you make has to stand the test of time.”