Graduate honored for addiction recovery efforts

Brave Heart received the Consistent Activity in Recovery in Education Award. One of the awards is given annually for extraordinary service to the Hazelden recovery community. Hazelden officials said Brave Heart has referred about 100 people for treatment at Hazelden and has sent about 150 educators and other professionals to the center for training in addiction recovery.

He completed training at Hazelden in 1973.

In accepting the award, Hazelden, who is a native of Pine Ridge, said he was doing so on behalf of the Lakota Nation.

“This recognition goes out to all the recovering Native Americans and is a result of the grace offered me by our creator. Sobriety is a gift I have been given by the creator and I’m just giving it back.”

According to a story in the Rapid City Journal when he was honored, Brave Heart was a high school principal on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation at Busby, Mont., and a superintendent on the Wind River Indian Reservation near Riverton, Wyo., in the late 1970s. He also served as superintendent of schools for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation from 1987-92.

In the early 1980s, he helped start the Hope Lodge halfway house and a chemical-dependency program at Loneman School at Oglala, S.D. He also directed an employee-assistance program and treatment program at Little Wound School at Kyle.

During this period, Brave Heart also initiated the Circle of Hope program to provide information and share resources in combating alcoholism and drug addiction in the schools and the community.

In an interview with Steve Miller of the Journal, Brave Heart said schools and other institutions should renew their efforts to combat addiction much as they did in the 1980s. He added that with the arrival of methamphetamine the problems have increased in recent years.