Main Street
Michael Patrick Cullinane on the Presidential Race; Arlene Krulish is a Bush Fellow
Support for Prairie Public is provided by North Dakota Living, celebrating 70 years of featuring the great people in places of North Dakota, and proudly serving the members of North Dakota's electric cooperatives. Welcome to Main Street, I'm Prairie Public, I'm your host Craig Womenschein. Coming in the second half of today's show, my former colleague, Ashley Thornberg, speaks with Arlene Krulich, a new Bush Foundation Fellowship recipient. She discusses the obstacles she overcame to earn the fellowship, emphasizing the value of perseverance and creativity, and she plans to use the fellowship to become the Spirit Lake Tribe's first nurse practitioner specializing in psychiatric mental health. But first, I spoke to our go-to presidential historian, Dr. Michael Patrick Colenane today. There is so much to catch up on in the presidential race, including what's happened in just the last 24 hours. And it's my pleasure to welcome back to Main Street Presidential Scholar, Dr. Michael Patrick Colenane. He's the Loman Walton Endowed Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies at Dickinson State University. Dr. Colenane, wow, we've had quite the last few weeks here in a presidential campaign. Welcome back to Main Street. Great to be back. Craig, we've been talking about this for months now. And I can tell you, as a historian, there is nothing more exciting, more strange, more scary than the last six months of politics. But so important to our nation. Let me just begin by telling everyone my first question to you today was going to be. Did you think Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee for president this year and on the presidential ballot? Now he has chosen to step aside, and we now know the answer. Were you surprised that we heard this yesterday? So I was not surprised. I was actually saying to my family on Sunday, just before the news came out, that I thought that he would drop out on Monday or Tuesday. And I think the pressure had just become too much, and not just the pressure from politicians. We heard Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, two of his closest confidants, really, had come by and said that they thought it was time to drop out. But we also heard that donors had cut off funds. We heard that polling had come out. But it sounds like he was in Roeboth, and he was sick, he had COVID, still probably does have COVID, and he just decided that, along with family, that the time had come. And to be honest, I think there's a sense of relief among Democrats. And I think there's a shared sense among Democrats that this actually works in his favor in terms of his legacy, if not for the party right now. I kind of envision this as an athlete who just has a hard time deciding when to retire. We think of Michael Jordan, what he retired three times, Brett Favre. He came back and came back again, Muhammad Ali, all of these great athletes who just couldn't make the decision. And here we have a president who essentially has been at the same place in his life deciding whether he can continue to do that, which he wants to do. Yeah, I love that analogy. But the one thing I think it's different with Biden is that it's an age thing with him. It's not like a performance, I mean, it is performance too, obviously, but it's not like Michael Jordan took a baseball after he gave a basketball. I don't think we're going to see Biden take up another another pastime, but it is it is remarkable that it's come to this. And this is a historic first. This has never ever happened before in our country. There's been other times and presidents have decided not to run. We can talk about Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson or 19th century presidents, but it has never happened this close to a nominating convention and the actual general election date in November. Truman and Johnson, of course, dropped out in March of their respective years, but their parties went on to lose then the upcoming general election. What sort of impact do you think this might have when it's been expected? Now this country will get to learn, I guess, have reintroduced to it a vice president, Kamala Harris, potentially. Yeah, and there's some real similarities between those cases as well. This is so late in the day, it is so different from in March when, say, Stevenson took over or when Hubert Humphrey took over, actually Hubert Humphrey doesn't take over until much later. In fact, because Robert Kennedy was the expected nominee in 1968, but he is assassinated. So, 68 does have some similarities to it. I mean, the vice president takes over very late in the stage and actually Hubert Humphrey does pretty well. He comes within a point of beating Nixon, so it wasn't quite the runaway. And I think we're probably looking at something like this now too, because Biden had said before he decided to drop out of the race that only three things would push him to do so. One would be if he thought that he couldn't win, two was if he thought Harris could win, and three, he thought if there was a sense of party unity and his legacy would improve from this. So, all of those things seem to be close, I mean, obviously, whether Kamala Harris can actually win is an open question, but I think in terms of satisfying Biden's three requirements, she's still very close in the polling. So, it's not going to be a runaway election as of yet at least anyway. You look at polling president Trump and vice president Harris are very similar in their unfavourables, and those who like and support them, they each have a higher unfavorable rating. If you look at summaries of polls relative to a favorable rating, how should that have changed for president Trump bouncing out of his presidential convention, which now, to me, quite honestly, Michael seems like a long, long, long time ago. It does. There's a couple of days ago, really, but it seems like in the political cycle, it's a lifetime away. I mean, in a way, the Democrats are stealing a beat. I mean, after every convention, usually a politician gets a big boost, and I think Trump got a little bit of that boost. And I think what we saw from Trump was unity, which is something that we haven't seen in the past. Party unity, as well as the sense of bringing the nation together, it's the first time we saw a teamster ever at a Republican convention. I mean, so talking about labor relations in a Republican convention is remarkable. So there's all of that, but this is where the drama is at right now. General Harris is going to have to pick a vice president. There's some drama with that. There's going to be a Democratic National Convention. There'll be drama with that. Whether she is anointed the successor to Biden or whether she has to fight for it. I mean, she said in her letter that she was going to fight and earn the nomination, and I think that's probably necessary given that no one is voted for her to be president yet. So there is a lot of drama to come, and I think this story is unfolding as we speak. Speaking of drama, as I was preparing to chat with you today, I read some history of the 1924 Democratic convention. Refresh our memories about that. I can't imagine what it would have been like 103 ballots and 16 days of just intense, violent sometimes debate. Yeah. And we forget sometimes, too, the 24 rolls the record, 1924 rolls the record for the longest number of ballots, was over 100 ballots, and in the end, Al Smith is nominated by the Democrats. But this is a contentious convention, and it's a model that we don't really have anymore. But back then, this was far closer to the norm. I mean, you could even think of the Republicans in 1920, in 1920, there are several ballots, the three leading candidates who get almost all of the primaries, the win almost all the primaries can't agree with who should be the eventual nominee, and they all lose to a guy that nobody knows who eventually then becomes president, who's Warren Harding. And Al Smith runs a very interesting campaign in 1924 that's contentious, and it's divisive. I don't think we're there now. I mean, the convention that's coming up in the middle of August looks like it's going to be rather straightforward. It looks a lot more like 1968 than it does like 1920 or 1924, in the sense that there's a candidate that is there, two-thirds of the congressional delegation have already swung behind Kamala Harris. Many governors in the world. It's been quick. Yeah. It's been very quick. And many of the governors that you would have thought would have been in contention for the nomination. People that I would argue were running from the beginning, like Gavin Newsom, he said straight away, "She's our candidate." Gretchen Whitmer said that Kamala Harris is the- Corin Booker hasn't been too vocal on his support yet. Yeah. It's interesting to want the senators and Congress people that have not yet come out. I mean, Nancy Pelosi also has not yet come out for Harris, but I mean, this is only within the space of 24 hours. You and I are talking, you know, in the next 24 hours, if we don't see her anointed Biden successor, we will, you know, we'll probably have the plans of an open convention laid out. In this case, we might be talking about 1924 or 1920. Through your lens, though, really, do you see that happening? I don't. No, I don't either. I think there's been so much support for Kamala Harris. I also think that the party has been talking actively about law and how fundraising needs to be transferred within the campaign. We've heard about how the staff, the Biden staff, have all swung behind Harris. I mean, the momentum is there for her, so I don't really see it happening. The Pelosi's idea of an open convention or a contested convention, which is what she advocated for only a couple of days ago, it does have traction amongst the political wonks and the, you and me, we like the drama. Wouldn't that be great? If party, the party hates it, though, right? That's the last thing they want. Sure. Kamala Harris has described a center left in her views. And I watched this morning, a rerun of Face Nation yesterday when Joe Manchin was talking about what might happen and advocating for President Biden at that time to remove himself from the race. But he said something that was really interesting to me. He said that 50%, more than 50% of the those who elected president are registered, he said, as independents. And I found that as very hard to believe. But if that's true, doesn't that bend well for a center left person relative to somebody who's more far right in an upcoming election? I think Craig, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think if you, if Kamala Harris wasn't popular in the Democratic primaries, but the same reason why Donald Trump wasn't popular in the Republican primaries, she was far too center, centrist candidate, then say people like, oh, I mean, even Joe Biden was swinging to the left in the primaries. And this is back in 2020, of course, when she ran, she ran for election. So she wasn't popular for that reason, but that might make her very popular because what we see is a swing to the polls to the left, basically the Democrats and to the right for the Republicans in the primaries, and then a move to the center for the general election. So this might suit Kamala Harris. I think that the biggest problem that she's going to have, though, is not whether she's left of center or center center. It's that people don't know her and that actually is probably both a negative and a positive in the sense that the American electorate likes new things. You know, your lifespan as a politician, especially a presidential politician, you know, Donald Trump got voted out of office in 2020, probably because people could pin things to it. Same with Joe Biden. Re-election is getting harder and harder in U.S. election cycles. Kamala Harris doesn't have a whole lot to pin herself against, or people can see her as a new-ish candidate at least anyway, whereas they know what Donald Trump is and they can say either they like that or they don't like that, but they might be willing to take a bet or a gamble on Kamala. Now on the other side of that, though, too, she's an enigma and people will say that she doesn't have the experience. You know, she was a prosecutor, she was an attorney general, she was a senator for a very short time and then vice president. So maybe, I think this is the tack of the Trump campaign already. They're saying actually we can pin the Biden years on Kamala Harris and whether that sticks or not is probably going to be the result of the election. They'll be testing out those arguments. I think also they're going to go after Kamala's attempted effort to intervene in the immigration crisis that we have and I think the Republicans are generally going to say that she was not successful in how she managed that, how she's going to manage a presidency. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think the Republicans of the immigration question, the country as a whole seems to be pulling behind Donald Trump on immigration and on the economy. So I don't think Kamala Harris is going to want to talk about inflation or about the border. I think what Kamala Harris is going to want to talk about is abortion, which is something that Donald Trump has really tried to pull his party back from the national abortion ban. Even though JD Vance is advocating a national abortion banner has done in the past, but he's trying to pull the party back from that stance and to say that it's up to the states. I think Kamala Harris, we saw this even with the fundraising in the last 24 hours, Emily's list, which is a major pro choice group has sent 20 million to the high risk campaign. So she's going to want to talk about women's reproductive rights and Donald Trump is going to want to talk about immigration and about inflation. It's hard to see how either one of them are complete wins for either side. They really do play to each other's bases very well. We're enjoying our conversation with presidential scholar Dr. Michael Patrick Cullinane. Dr. Cullinane, what have you been thinking about since the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump? Yeah, it's a great question. So you know that I'm a Theodore Roosevelt scholar and I, when I watched the event that so many of us did live, which is, I mean, that's another historical first watching the near assassination of a president, a former president, live on TV is remarkable. But I did think about Theodore Roosevelt. I thought to myself, the presence of mine that Donald Trump had to take a pause and put his fist up in the air while he was wounded was truly remarkable. And it reminded me of Theodore Roosevelt, who took a bullet and then gave a 90 minute speech afterwards. It is, it is heroic. And I think that despite the fact that the assassination, the way they handled the assassination was incredible, both Trump and Roosevelt. It didn't leave them to win the election in the end. Theodore Roosevelt came second to Woodrow Wilson and lost. I mean, the conditions were slightly different, of course. But I don't know does the assassination equal a win for Donald Trump? It surely makes for incredible drama. It makes for incredible stories. It is something that, you know, I know that the Homeland Security is putting together an investigation of this now too, because there's clearly some shortcomings here from the Secret Service, but I don't know does that equate to an election victory? What did you think about when President Trump chose Senator Vance of Ohio to be his running mate? Jaynie Vance is such an interesting politician. So one of the things that I thought was most interesting is that he was not a never-trumper, but he was an anti-trumper for a while. So this seemed like an interesting choice. He also is very much, you know, backed by the tech community. Peter Thiel is his real sponsor, Peter Thiel being the former PayPal CEO and Y Combinator. So a lot of- The billionaire, they say the least. Not only deep pockets, but a clear vision of what he wants the country to look like. And Jaynie Vance is very much his spokesperson and now the vice presidential nominee. And I don't think, and Trump isn't that, right? Trump is not the guy with special interest in his pocket. In fact, that's how he ran successfully, I think, against that idea that he was going to do this on his own. Of course, he's got money coming in from corporate sponsors and other sponsors as well. But he would have run regardless of that and he very much didn't start his campaign like that. Jaynie Vance is not the same person. Jaynie Vance also has really strong views on abortion. He has very strong views on nation and the people of the nation, extremely strong views on immigration. He is probably the most outspoken anti-immigration candidate, and I don't see him as necessarily a trumper. I think he is a different kind of politician with a different kind of vision. And yet what he brings, I think, is a Rust Belt credential to the campaign. He's going to, I think, hang out in Western Pennsylvania for the duration of this campaign and tell Pennsylvanians they got to vote for Donald Trump because he's from Ohio. He knows the Rust Belt. He knows the poverty of middle-class America and you should vote for Trump because of that. Speaking of Pennsylvania, many pundits suggest that Josh Shapiro, the current governor of Pennsylvania, would be a good candidate for Kamala Harris if she were to be the nominee for president for her vice president. Who might we see considered for that position? It's a great question. I think it's the million-dollar question of the moment as well. So Josh Shapiro has been speculated. Governor Cooper of North Carolina has been speculated as a possible choice. I think these choices also reflect the nature of the top of the ticket as well. Kamala Harris represents an African-American woman, an Asian woman. And I think having a white man on the ticket might be some consideration. I think a big consideration is going to be the state that they come from and whether they need to win that state. So whether it's Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Virginia or, you know, I mean, these are states that not all of them are in play, I mean, North Carolina is clearly trending towards the Republicans right now. So I don't know if Governor Cooper gave you that big of a boost, but Pennsylvania is a swing state. You know, Gretchen Whitmer has said that she's not going to run for vice president, but Michigan is a swing state. There's also Mark Kelly in Arizona who's been speculated as a, this is of course the former astronaut and senator of in Arizona. So I think all of these, these choices are going to be a calculus based on what the ticket looks like in terms of demographics, but also what the ticket looks like in terms of swing states that need to be won. You have a much better feel for presidential history than I do, but it surprises me when you have a senator Vance or a Senator Graham who at one point in their lives can be so against a person in this case, President Trump, yet days later in Senator Graham's case or maybe months or years later in Senator Vance's case, do a 180 I guess and be their great supporters. Does that surprise you when you look at these things in terms of political history? It does surprise me because I think if you do take a long look at some of these, you know, key political figures, they haven't always back around to a candidate that they really detested. So if you think about the way the parties used to operate, there were power brokers within the party and if they didn't get on with the presidential candidate, they just faded away until they could get on with the next presidential candidate. And now we don't really see that quite as much. I think what we've seen is that every sort of cycle, Democrat or Republican, you have to swing behind the candidate. You can't be on the sidelines. And I think that's a product of how divisive the electoral politics have gotten. There's so few states that can be lost now and you know, the electoral college votes are so narrow between Democrats and Republicans that you really need to have the entire party behind you. And this is why this decision to have Kamala Harris be taking over from Biden is so important that she gets the party behind her from the beginning. Because without that momentum, if there is division, if there's another candidate that might try and, you know, take the leadership of the party away from her, that could really torpedo the Democrats. And I think that's why Biden was so reluctant to leave the race in the first place. Do you anticipate a Harris Trump debate or two? Oh, I absolutely did expect it. Yeah, I expect the debate that they were going to have in September, Biden and Trump will now be it will be Harris and Trump. And I also expect that JD Vance will be will be debating whatever vice presidential candidate there is. So yes, I mean, of course, this is all unpredictable. As we know, the debates of the last cycle have not been have not been normal. I mean, Donald Trump didn't debate anyone within his own party for the for the nomination. So that happened again, possibly. But my hope is that we will see a debate between the two because this is a new race now. This is not the same race as it was before. And I think people have been sighing leaf of sorts because nobody thought that that Biden was in a position to run again. I don't think I mean, it was very few at least anywhere. I know we saw John Betterman come out and say that he's fit to fit to run, but but really the general public seemed to suggest that he wasn't fit to run. So, and so this is a new race and we need a new debate. What do you think about those who are saying, hey, look, President Biden, if you're not fit to run, you're not fit to serve. Has there been anything else in presidential history along those lines where there was pressure for someone who was either aging or had a medical condition to step away from office? Yes, absolutely. There's some great instances of this happening. So I mean, the most famous one is probably Woodrow Wilson, who has a series of strokes in 1919, his last year in office. This is mainly because of the Treaty of Versailles, which he's negotiating. You can imagine the stress that he was under and they bring in a constitutional amendment after that because it was his wife, Edith Wilson, who was basically saying that she could interpret what the president want. And so they bring in the 25th Amendment, which is the amendment that allows the cabinet to effectively oust the president if he's unfit to do the job. And that's been brought up in the case of Trump, it was brought up in the case of Ronald Reagan when he was shot by Hinkley. So that has been invoked in many times. But let's remember in later histories, Johnson was deemed not physically or mentally unfit for the job, but kind of morally corrupt. I mean, the Vietnam War was not going well and the Democratic Party didn't want him to be there. But the way our system works is that you're president for a four-year term and that's it. I think in the case of Biden, he might not be fit for another term physically and mentally. But there's no signs that he's not fit right now. I understand why the Republicans are saying that if you're not fit, you know, what they really want to do is they want to pile the pressure onto the Democrats. The way our system works is, I mean, if you can have three strokes like Woodrow Wilson and still stay on its president, you're not fit. You're not fit. And they brought in the 25th Amendment for that very purpose. But I don't think we're at that stage yet. Real briefly, we have a few seconds left. I think we'll hear from President Biden this week. What do you think he'll tell us? I think the reason why we haven't heard from him yet is because he's sick and let's face that politics is very much an optics game. You know, his optics were terrible in the debate and they've been terrible since, really. He didn't want the optics of his departure to be that as well. So he's obviously, his voice probably isn't up to shape. And so he's going to come out and say his, give his resignation speech and do course in the next couple of days. I think what we're going to see is at that stage, Harris probably will have a lot of momentum behind her, if not complete control of the party apparatus by then. And he can say, he tried to do with his letter, actually, and his letter, his first letter out, he wanted to say, this is what I've accomplished. In his second letter, which came 30 minutes later, he said, and I endorse Kamala Harris. So I think we'll probably see more of that in really what he's doing for the duration from now until the end of his term in 2025, he's going to be talking about what he's accomplished as president. His history will also tell us that there was some real drama on how those two letters were constructed. And we'll have to leave that discussion maybe for another day. Presidential scholar, Dr. Michael Patrick Colonnay, he joins us periodically on Main Street. He's a Lomond Walton Endowed Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies at Dickinson State University. It's always a pleasure and we will have more to talk about here in the weeks to come. Thanks for joining us again, Dr. Colonnay. Thanks as always, Craig. In just a quick update in the last couple of hours since we visited with Dr. Colonnay, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former House Speaker, has issued a statement endorsing the presidential candidacy of Vice President Harris. Coming up after the break on Main Street, my former colleague, Ashley Tharnberg, visits with Arlene Kirlich, a recipient of the Bush Foundation Fellowship. That's after this. Welcome back to Main Street, I'm Craig Blumenschine, my former Vice President of State of Illinois. Welcome back to Main Street, I'm Craig Blumenschine and welcome back to Main Street. Welcome back to Main Street, I'm Craig Blumenschine, my former Vice President of State of Illinois. Welcome back to Main Street, I'm Craig Blumenschine, my former Vice President of State of Illinois. On Prairie Public, I'm Craig Blumenschine, my former colleague, Ashley Tharnberg, visited with Arlene Kirlich, a recipient of the Bush Foundation Fellowship. Kirlich shares the challenges she faced in obtaining the fellowship, highlighting the importance of persistence and innovative thinking. Here's Ashley's interview. Arlene Padamia, thank you for being on Main Street. Yes, thank you for having me. Congratulations on the Bush Foundation Fellowship, how does it feel? So I was so happy when I found out that I was getting a Bush Fellowship because this is not the first time I applied. You know, I applied, this is the third time I've applied and it's a process, it's almost a year-long process from the time you initially apply to when you find out that you received a fellowship. That's a lot of waiting and you are far from the first person I've ever talked to who said that it took two or three tries before being selected for the fellowship. Did you ever want to give up? Why not after that first no say, "Okay, well, I guess it's not for me." No, I found out about the Bush Fellowship because I had a boss who received a Bush Fellowship. And so every time I would think, "Okay, what can I do differently?" And I would try to do differently. But really, what the Bush Fellowship is all about is thinking outside the box and thinking about what you are capable of and, you know, barriers aside, what can you do and what you want to do, but really push yourself to your maximum limit. It's not just average, "Oh, okay." I was saying, "Oh, I wanted to get a master's degree." Yeah. I started narrowing it down, "Okay, I want to get a nurse practitioner degree. Our tribe, the spirit-like tribe, we don't have anyone in our enrollment population of members. We do not have anyone who has a nurse practitioner degree." Yeah. Let's talk about that right now because you are, I'm reading the paragraph about why you were selected and it says that you have a calling to end drug addiction in tribal communities. Let's talk about things like systemic racism and access to healthcare disparities and how those can play into so dramatically the rates at which people on reservations can be impacted by that. I know that that is an enormous question in scope here, but explain for our listeners who might not understand what things like systemic racism really are and some examples of that. So, since I was young, I wanted to be a provider and I started to watch the health system and I noticed that every time we used the health system, we always had a different provider. There wasn't any consistency. There was always doctors that were here for a short period and they were gone. We had to continue telling your health history so you had to deal with people that were coming in that didn't have a stake in your community. They were just visitors. They were here for a job and they were gone. And so, when I, after I finished nursing school, I came back and I became the CEO at the Spirit Light Health Center to help with the recruitment and to help bring in consistent providers. And that was one of my goals right away to get consistent providers there that the population would be able to have the same providers. They wouldn't have to have different ones to tell your story to every time you come through. With our health care, the federal government only funds 50% of health care for Native Americans. So, there's always this bias that we get pre-health care, but it's not free. We're only funded at 50% of our needs. And so, a big part of your health care responsibilities is looking at your third party revenue and making sure you have third party revenue coming in and you're working on making sure that it's consistent. And so, we have to deal with biases there as far as all you get free health care, all you get free education. You know, we get some funding, but it doesn't meet all that our needs and the level of needs that we have. Yeah. And factoring in things like systemic racism playing into poverty rates and playing into self-esteem and even into things like epigenetics, which is what happens when things like trauma can change the expression of the genes. So racism can be changing a person on literally a genetic level. I want to read a quote from a 2002 report from nd.gov's website that says, "The Spirit Lake Nation has one adolescent addiction counselor for the entire reservation. This is particularly troublesome in light of the report that methamphetamine abuse is growing on the reservations." Now, Arlene, this report is 20 plus years old. What's changed in the last two decades that you have seen? So, the tribe had taken over and they run their own health center and that was in 2016. The tribe started managing the health care. There has been the addition of a medicated assisted therapy, the MAT program that's been used in behavior health there to help people that are on addiction, to use suboxone and help people that might be addicted to math or some type of other drug in the use of suboxone to help them with the withdrawal. And that's something that was introduced after the tribe took over. So, there's practitioners that, with the psychiatric nurse, they help with that program and also the director and they have maybe about three counselors besides that. So, there's been an addition of that program to help. We're visiting today with Arlene Krulisch. She is one of this year's fellowship recipients from the Bush Foundation and plans to use the funds and the time to enroll as a nurse practitioner with an emphasis here in psychiatric mental health and this would make her the first nurse practitioner enrolled in the Spirit Lake tribe which as of January 2021 had a total enrollment of just under 7,600 members. Arlene, I read again in the write-up about you that you earned a degree from the University of North Dakota School of Nursing and you have been working over the decades to improve the quality of health care on the reservation and this would be specific to Western health care and now you are wanting to bring in more of the ancestral and tribal ways of your people. Could you give us a few examples of what you mean by that and how the two systems can be complementary to one another? So, my personal belief is when somebody is going through treatment for them to really recover fully they also have to have a spiritual foundation and so as part of the therapy maybe starting out with a smudge and praying before you start your therapy or if you're in like a long-term facility start the day off with smudge and prayer and then end the day with smudge and prayer again and also having availability for the residents or your patients to attend the sweat lodge the evening so they have that available to help in their recovery. Earlier Arlene you used a phrase that the fellowship really focuses in and asks you to dive deep into to use the phrase you used what you are capable of expand on that for us a little bit here. What are you capable of Arlene? So, a lot of times we can be our own biggest barrier you know the mind of a powerful tool and we could convince ourselves oh I can't do this so I can't do that and really put up barriers for ourselves instead of telling ourselves and having positive self-talk saying you know I'm capable of it you know I can do it and yes I'm going to do it and I'm going and this is my plan and really making a plan and working it yeah sometimes coming from like my background growing up on a reservation coming from a poverty and living right in the middle of the reservation and seeing all the things I've seen as a young person sometimes you do a lot of self doubting you do like you do make barriers for yourself but to really be positive and in talk yourself in a good way. What the Bush Fellowship does on a bigger level is they help you to get in touch with mentors. There's mentors that are available that can help you with the process if you're feeling like you need to talk to somebody you know to they have mentors available you meet so many people and even the group that I'm in there's 24 people when we went through orientation we did a lot of talking and getting to know each other and every time you went to eat like breakfast or lunch you had a number so you were sitting with different people so you met different people in your group but we have a big group chat and we try to keep encouraging each other and being positive on there and so you get to meet people that are doing work similar to yourself that can be somebody that can help you through if you're self doubting or if you're coming there's a barrier that you don't think you could cross there's somebody out there that can help you with it. When you are going through this process like you said of trying to figure out what it is you are actually capable of Arlene was there anything that surprised you like you know what I can't pull that off. Well it helped me to think about when I was young and when I was young I was a nerd and so one of my sons said mom I think you're going to have to find that nerd in you again and so it's true you know I'm pretty smart and I'm pretty capable and just playing a side self-talk and self-doubt. I've been working on surrounding myself with positive people and really have a network of friends where I could reach out to that will help me and help bring me up. We're visiting today with Arlene Krulishi as one of this year's recipients of the Bush Foundation Fellowship and the tagline that they use is investing in great ideas and the people who power them and much of the application process deals with things like leadership and both barriers to being a leader but also what makes a person a leader. Arlene what does the word leadership mean to you? So leadership is not about myself but it's about a team. I mean it's helping people and mentoring people so that they can reach their greatest potential and helping them to drive the team that you have. So when you're taking a position where you're in leadership you're building your team. You're helping them to find that confidence and giving them their kudos when they need it and also being there when you need to maybe talk to them about something that's not going right but also to get their buy-in and really have them directing their part of the team like say if it's a business manager that business manager knows those reports, knows that business area so really giving them the confidence that okay I'm coming to you because you're an expert but so you've really built your team. Arlene in talking to you about your leadership skills and your desire to surround yourself with mentors and learn how to be a better leader that is an obvious draw of a fellowship like this but I get the sense that really for your application in particular it's not really just about you and your leadership skills. What will you take away from the fellowship? The greatest obligation I feel is to be able to serve my tribe and native people and help with the in the area of addiction. I feel that this opportunity is one that has opened up and it's a great opportunity for me to be able to do that. How many people did you know growing up who were facing the disease of addiction? I grew up in an alcoholic home. I grew up in what is now called the old housing and the spirit like reservation so it's the oldest housing unit and I seen addiction around me on a daily basis. It wasn't so much drugs but it was more alcohol. Nowadays I see more drugs. I see more people struggling with addictions to math to addictions through pills and also addictions to alcohol but mostly lately I see a lot of the drugs addictions to math and pills. Arlene, in the decades that you have been in healthcare what changes have you seen about our understanding of addiction for so long and still is to a great degree stigmatized and sort of considered a matter of will more recently understood as a disease and something that you would treat like any other disease like cancer. Are you seeing specific to our attitudes about addiction? What I'm seeing is just about every family knows somebody or has somebody that's part of your family who is dealing with addictions and it's come to the point where you could see it. You could see people and you know something is not right with them. You know that they're using in some form and it's come to the point where you see it and people don't they're more accepting of it even in their own home and I think that's because there's not a lot of answers for addiction. There's not a lot of places for people to go for addiction. Earlier you described yourself as a nerd. Tell us a little bit about your childhood Arlene and the path that you took that led you into a career dedicated to healing. So I never really was into sports but with my children I really am and my grandchildren it's even more so. So I did a lot of reading. I was a poor student you know lived on the reservation and anywhere I needed to travel I traveled through books and so as a young person I learned that books were the places where I could create my journey and nowadays I do a lot of traveling. I enjoy going and exploring places and that's something that interests me. And now you get to live out some of those fantasies right from your books Arlene. Again, congratulations on the Bush Fellowship. Thank you. Arlene Krulish, one of this year's recipients of the Fellowship from the Bush Foundation. Support for Dakota Datebook is provided by Books on Broadway, Mantecota Sota and Coffee Company of Williston featuring coffees and a wide variety of books for children and adults. Books on Broadway, the independent bookstore for independent minds. North Dakota Native American Essential Understanding number seven is about native identity. It states, "individual and communal identity is defined and supported by shared native languages, kinship systems, Tio Shba'i, clan structures, traditional teachings, values, sacred laws and ceremonies. A continuum of tribal identity, unique to each individual, ranges from assimilated to traditional lifestyle. There is no generic American Indian." In this episode of Dakota Datebook, we'll listen to Kenneth Jerome Hill, an enrolled member of Spirit Lake Nation, talk about how it's important to be proud to be Dakota. I'm very proud to be Dakota. Everybody that is Dakota should be very proud of who they are and where they come from. You know, they should know that like me, you know, I know the language, I know the language pretty good, I know how to speak, I understand it, there's a lot of them that don't know the language. There's even people like us, oldest, Oliver, and you know, it's kind of sad, but they don't, if you talk to them in Dakota, you know, they don't know it and, you know, some of them are older than I am and, you know, they don't know their identity or the Dakota language. I mean, they know where they're from and stuff, but they just don't really know like they don't really care what you, you know, I know in the long run, you know, being in Dakota or anybody, any kind of trip, whatever you try to be from, you know, you shouldn't really know your identity and where you come from and be proud of it, you know. There's nothing to be ashamed of, you know, it's just, I know I'm not that I am proud of who I am, I'm proud of Dakota and from two different players from here and it's just a tinsel. So, let's be proud of who you are. I'm Scott Simpson. If you'd like to learn more about the North Dakota Native American essential understandings and to listen to more indigenous elder interviews, visit www.teachingsofourelders.org. Dakota Dade Book is produced in cooperation with the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Funding for this series is from Humanities N.D. and the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction. We'd like to thank the North Dakota Council on the Arts for supporting arts programming here on Prairie Public. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Main Street. We're delighted that you've spent time with us. Tomorrow we'll be joined by North Dakota psychotherapist Alana Danderan to discuss social media and youth in light of the search in general's recent recommendations. And additionally, we'll hear again from NDSU's Dr. Brad Strand who believes we may not be on the best path regarding youth sports. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow on Main Street. [MUSIC PLAYING]