An Interview with Menominee College Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation Chair Myra Warrington: Multiple Menominee Nation Challenges
Above: One of the buildings on the College of the Menominee Nation campus
Below: Activist Myrna Warrington, director of the Nation’s Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation, tribal legislature member, multiple committee member and unofficial Menominee historian
By Jonathan Gramling
Myrna Warrington is a Menominee community activist. She is a tribal legislator, committee member and chair, director of the Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation at the College of the Menominee Nation, veteran and a grandmother who helps take care of her grandchildren. She is a busy woman with her heart in the right place, the welfare of the Menominee people.
“I just took over my three great grandchildren because they lost their mom,” Warrington confided. “So I have them. There is a 3-year, 6-year and 13-year-old and they are all in school. I get them off to school, come to work and my older granddaughter is there after school until I get home.”
We met Warrington at her Voc Rehab offices at the college. While she had reports to do, she said she could spare five minutes, which turned into 30 minutes. She has worked at the college for 21 years, previously serving as an advisor in student services.
Voc Rehab serves a 30-mile radius from Keshena, the main municipality of the Nation. Her department operates similarly to DVR.
“We have a skills lab next door here where we have computers and different text books for them to look at,” Warrington said. “We have four computers people can use to do their resume or they can do job searches. They can also take online classes on them. They have to have a documented disability: mental health or physical. We try to emphasize our program and we present it to veterans yearly on what is going on and encourage them to apply for our program. A lot of veterans are getting old., kind of like me. It’s hard to find people. You have to be able to work. The program, bottom line, is helping people find a job. If you can’t work or don’t want to work, then you’re not for the program.”
People stay for in the program for several months to several years, depending on what their needs are.
“Some people find jobs right away,” Warrington said. “Some we have for several years, 4-5 years, just to help them. Some are going to school. We give them that support while they are in school. Sometimes we’ll help with tuition, books, supplies, transit and gas tickets.”
Warrington has especially focused on AODA addiction and prevention efforts.
“I’m on our drug addiction and intervention team,” she said. “We meet every two weeks for that. We develop and use protocols and things like that to help our community because we’ve had quite a few deaths from drug overdose. Part of it is the opioid epidemic. It’s been coming in here the last few years. It’s very scary what people take to make themselves not be themselves. It’s beyond me how you can take a horse tranquilizer and be high and not wake up maybe.”
It does go back to trauma as well. There are losses that we experienced as a tribe. Men were usually hunters and gatherers. There are a lot of them, but not enough. These young men need role models. And so I am a school counselor by profession. When I worked in schools, that was one of the biggest needs, having real role models and there was no male in the family.
Warrington also serves the people as a tribal legislator. “I’ve been on the tribal legislature for 15 years,” Warrington observed. “That is two terms of three years and five terms of three years. And you can only do three terms at once. I term out this year. I will be off in February. To me, it’s really important to have a historical perspective when you are sitting on the legislature because you are serving 9,000 tribal members. You have to make sure that your decisions affect everyone and it isn’t personal. You have to make sure that the decisions you make are good for them, for the entire tribe. them, for the entire tribe. That goes for people all over the country. We even have people out of the country. I think we have a lot more flexibility than the state legislature. We’re not dominated by the taxpayers. And so we have our own Constitution that we have to abide by. That’s the biggest thing. And getting elected is a part of that. Anything that follows like your meetings are governed by the Constitution of the tribe. It was adopted in 1979.”
She sits on the Health and Family Committee, which is trying to expand the level of health services on the reservation.
“With that comes the Commission on Aging, the hospital committee, and a program, which is part of the UWMadison,” Warrington said. “It’s making sure of what is going on the outside and what’s available on the outside so that you can bring that back to the people as a part of the services. UW-Madison recruits Native Americans for their medical school. I’ve been on that for about six years. We recently requested them to come meet with us at our treatment facilities to be able to bring interns from psychology and psychiatry to help with our treatment center. We just
met Monday or Tuesday. We believe we’ll be in place by January for people to come up from the school to help our people. It’s called NASM. It’s called Native American School for Medicine. They’ve had several graduates. They did bring up with them who will probably be interns for psychiatry. It will be a good experience that they can put on their resume.”
Warrington attributes much of the AODA problems on the trauma that the Menominee people have experienced over the past century or so. One source was the reservation termination in the 1950s.
“When the feds terminated the tribe, my mother had to take us and move to Chicago so she could work,” Warrington recalled. “She did work in the hospital. There was a tribal hospital run by nuns. She worked there. When they terminated, the hospital shut down (Cont'd down below United Way 211 ad.)
