About 30 local teens are keeping plenty busy this summer, learning about their heritage and taking part in community service projects in the Fort McDowell Summer Youth Program.

The program takes part over the course of six weeks this summer, introducing teens to a wide variety of activities and giving them the opportunity to help out the community with various projects.

Thursday morning, June 19, Education Director Dr. Bill Myhr gave a tour of the group’s “Amazing Race” camp site, where participants built a wassihelva (ramada) and wahmbuunvahs (wickiups), learned traditional games, basket weaving, how to make fire and even prepared a traditional meal for Fort McDowell elders and council members.

“We created teams with adult advisors and the kids have been taking on a lot of challenges,” Myhr explained.

“One of the first challenges was building these wickiups, which are covered in willow.”

A few days later, however, cows came in and ate half of the willow coverage, giving the wickiups some additional windows in the process.

Jordan Williams, Summer Youth Program Cultural Advisor, continued a recent tour, showing off several traditional games that the youths were in the middle of playing.

“Most of these were gambling games back in the day, where they gambled everything including moccasins, handkerchiefs, beads, metals and things of that nature,” he explained.

The Summer Youth Program has been ongoing since 1999 and is open to any teens in high school or getting ready to enter high school.

“We do a number of service activities, like cleaning up the community, the tribal cemetery, and things like that,” Myhr added.

“This week’s project involved Jordan taking them to the Montezuma Well and Boynton Cave to show them the birthplace of the Yavapai and tell them the creation story on site.”

In turn, the four teams went on to various community locations to tell the creation story themselves, a condensed version of a tale that traditionally takes a week to tell. For their version of the story, teams used everything from PowerPoint presentations to dolls and drawings to add their own flair.

“Eventually, in this program, we will get into financial literacy, Internet safety, higher education and more,” Myhr said.

“They’ll also be making a public service announcement, talking about whichever issue is most important to them. We’re trying to immerse them in their history, culture and language, and also throw in some good life skills.”

Some of the older participants, too, take part in internships at the fire department, local pet resorts, We-Ko-Pa, etc.

According to Summer Youth Program Director Cathy Quintana, the program is shaping up to be another success this year, something she hopes participants will remember in the years ahead.

“Each team is actually making a team museum, too, of different artifacts from their experience,” she said.

“These will include pieces of the wassihelva and wahmbuunvahs, their camp dress and ribbon shirts, their water drums, the drills for the fire…pretty much anything they used for their team can be utilized to help share that story of their culture.”