Spirituality, A Career And Compassion Drive Brings Plenty
By David Melmer

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Individuals can maintain a cultural life within themselves while pursuing a career or any other dream or goal. At the same time, those individuals can open doors for others, serve as role models for youth and give back to a community.

There are many people who profess those goals in many professions, but for one man who has chosen acting and music as a career; it is his basic motivation for success.

Moses “Mo” Brings Plenty, Oglala Lakota, television, film, stage actor, traditional singer and drummer is such a person. He immersed himself in his culture as a youth on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is now making films and music so that young American Indians throughout the country can see an American Indian on the big and small screens and on stage entertaining and acting.

Brings Plenty said he was motivated by what he heard from young people to pursue a career that puts him in a light that would show them they can have careers and goals and still maintain their cultural life.

“Young people told me they don’t see our people on TV. Then it hit me, they are right. Where are our indigenous people, people who are proud of who they are?” Brings Plenty said.

(Read more in the Summer 2008 issue…)