The towns of Wolf Point and Poplar will be hosting Miss America 2018, Cara Mund. It is our understanding that this will be the first time that any Miss America will visit a Native American reservation. She will be speaking about female empowerment, staying in school, and following your dreams.
Chasing your dreams and turning them into a reality takes more than effort. Maybe you dream of becoming a Division I or a professional athlete, maybe you are working towards being chosen for a scholarship or an elite job...whatever it may be, those goals require you to have a lot of faith and belief in yourself. You will meet many bumps along the road and face a lot of bitter disappointments along the way.
Miss America 2018 will be speaking to lots and lots of kids on March 15. Maybe, just maybe it’s the inspiration those kids need to keep their dreams alive. Maybe their dream is to be the first person in their family that goes to college, or maybe they want to own a business. Regardless of their specific dream, none of them want to let the 3rd world conditions that they live in dictate their future. They do not want to succumb to the extreme hopelessness that they are presented with.
To become Miss America, there must have been hundreds if not thousands that wanted the crown, but only one winner can emerge. Some of the reasons others could not continue were family, illness, finances, relationships, etc. This is magnified geometrically on the reservation with the temptations that pry dreams away from these kids. They have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the country. Add that to poverty, unemployment, broken homes, and the idea of fast cash through crime or drugs. It's no wonder that the cycle of hopelessness continues. A cycle, might I add, that gets more and more difficult to escape.
There is a massage therapist in Norfolk, MA that Dr. Kevin’s family has known for over 2 decades. She said that when she was a kid a former Miss America visited her small town grocery store in Arkansas. That interaction changed her life. Fast forward 40 years, and she still has the Miss America autographed picture from that day. This massage therapist went on to compete in beauty contests and helped other empowered girls to do the same. She says that visit helped shape her life, her confidence, and her belief in herself.
When you make a snowball in your hands, it is relatively small. When you roll it in more snow, it gets bigger and bigger. There are so many great things happening on the Fort Peck reservation, and as each of those snowballs gain traction, we are seeing historical firsts. We're so proud and so excited that one of those historical firsts will be Miss America's presence on the Reservation.