I'll go back to my culture camps, because for some indigenous people—not all—there's a great deal of emphasis that they place on their culture.
You have somebody standing at the door going out from the military, somebody who spent 20 years, 25 years, or whatever, and he walks out the door. He may have had his wife at the SCAN seminar, but the SCAN seminar doesn't touch anything about culture.
The first time I ran a sweat lodge in Borden, I had two young infantry corporals from the RCR, and believe it or not, one was Palestinian and the other one was Iraqi. I couldn't believe it, but they were my storemen and they were looking after the troops. They had watched what was going on with the elders and the students, and the day the sweat lodge came, they came up to me and asked if they could do the sweat lodge, too. I said yes, by all means.
Those two guys were exposed to having their friends killed in Afghanistan. They were on the front lines in Afghanistan, and they had lost some close friends. The first guy got out of that sweat lodge and he had tears in his eyes when he came over, and he thanked me for allowing him to go in there. He said he had never experienced anything like it in his life.
The second guy came out, and he said he didn't know what was going on in there but before the door was closed, he felt people moving around him. And he said nobody was there. Everybody was inside. So I told him to go talk to the elder. I didn't want to get involved in that.
In Yakima, Washington, they have a week of culture camp, where they take veterans and their families. What my culture camp is designed for is to ground people back to mother earth. If somebody invites you to a sweat lodge and the sweat lodge is already built, what have you learned? Zero. The only thing you learned was what took place inside the sweat lodge. A veteran down in Washington state was having major problems with PTSD, and he went back to his community under the guidance of his elder. His elder had him for four days. They talked. He cut wood. He cut the wood that was going to be used to construct a sweat lodge. They went through the teachings, understood everything to do with the sweat lodge.
It's not the fact of going to a sweat lodge. It's the fact of going out, understanding what mother earth is all about, leaving the cellphones, leaving the computers, leaving all those things that are negative and that take away from what it is.
Is there a culture? A promising thing that can be done, if the will is there, is to have these indigenous people and their families...because the family has been side by side through everything that has gone on. Maybe there was only one family member deployed, maybe two were deployed. This includes the children. Everybody is affected by what that service was.