YMCA INTERNET Event Registration page
HELP is here! Existing member guide for registration
HELP is here! New member guide for registration

============================================================
Oct 10-12, 2008
Sycamore Canyon
Reserve your spot on the Y web site.
Cost per person: $25
 

============================================================

How the YMCA Indian Guides programs began

The first Y-Indian guide program was developed to support parents' vital roll as teachers, counselors, and friends to their children.  Harold S. Keltner, St Louis YMCA Director, initiated the program as an integral part of Association work.  In 1926, he organized the first tribe in Richmond Heights, Missouri, with the help of his good friend, Joe Friday, an Ojibway Indian, and William H. Hefelfinger, chief of the first Y-Indian Guide tribe.  Inspired by his experiences with Joe Friday, who was his guide on fishing and hunting trips into Canada, Harold Keltner established a program of parent-child experiences that now involves over 200,000 children and adults annually in the YMCA.

Joe Friday planted the seed for this program during a hunting trip he and Mr. Keltner took to Canada.  One evening, the Ojibway said to his white colleague as they sat around a blazing campfire: "The Indian father raises his sons.  He teaches his son to hunt, to track, to fish, to walk softly and silently in the forest, to know the meaning and purpose of life and all he must know, while the white man allows the mother to raise his son."  These comments struck home, and  Harold Keltner arranged for Joe Friday to work with him at the St Louis YMCA.

The Ojibway Indian spoke before groups of YMCA boys and their fathers in St Louis, and Mr. Keltner discovered that fathers, as well as boys, had a keen interest in the traditions and ways of the American Indian.  At the same time, Harold Keltner, being greatly influenced by the work of Ernest Thompson Seton, great lover of the out-of-doors, conceived the idea of a father-and-son program based upon the strong qualities of the American Indian culture and life - dignity, patience, endurance, spirituality, harmony with nature, and concern for the family.  Thus the first Y-Indian Guide program was born more that half a century ago.
 

Updated: September 17, 2008