Tribes attempt to curb suicides and turn despair into hope for Indian youths
Dances, teen centers offer alternatives for kids
By Ben Shouse
Ben Shouse
published: 04/17/05
McLAUGHLIN - This northern outpost is reeling from a grief beyond
understanding - the suicides of seven young people last year.
Though these recent sorrows are not widely known, the underlying story
of poverty and social problems on Indian reservations and in other
remote communities is familiar. And it has led to other tragedies.
For example, the Cheyenne River reservation, just south of McLaughlin,
lost 17 people to suicide in 2002 and 2003. And last month, a high
school student on the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota killed 10
people, including himself.
Reservation communities often draw attention when things go wrong, but
once the crisis fades, tribal residents are left to battle alone
against the longstanding obstacles to change.
But beyond the headlines, there is another story, some say even a
possible solution, in the inspired few who turn the expectation of
failure into small feats of hope.
Mary Hayes, for example, lost her 16-year-old granddaughter, Billie
Jean Left Hand, to suicide on Dec. 30. First she despaired about the
girl she helped raise, but now she has started taking in troubled
teens in McLaughlin, leading youth trips and raising funds to do even
more.
"It's like she sucked all the life out of me, emptied my cup of life,
and now I'm filling it with something good," Hayes said.
There are other hopeful echoes, too.
Just as Left Hand's life inspired her grandmother, other victims have
inspired efforts to counteract hopelessness. A mother in Eagle Butte
plans an alcohol-free teen center. A McLaughlin teacher runs the
town's first youth drum and dance group. And Left Hand's death has
inspired a Native American rapper to speak out against suicide.
Poverty and gangs
They have much to overcome.
The suicide rate among young Native American men was almost double the
national rate in 2002. In South Dakota, the rate for young Native
American men is four times the rate for whites and at least three
times the rate for Native Americans nationwide, according to the
January report, "South Dakota Strategy for Suicide Prevention."
Official statistics for 2004 are not yet available. But in McLaughlin,
local newspaper editor Merle Lofgren, relying on coroner reports, puts
the number of suicides at seven. Many in town agree that is accurate.
Translated to this town of 775, the suicide rate is almost 70 times
the state average.
The underlying problems are even more daunting. The counties that make
up Standing Rock and Cheyenne River have higher rates of poverty than
98 percent of the country. Alcoholism is a persistent problem, and
some residents say gang activity and child neglect are almost as bad.
In Eagle Butte late one recent evening, dozens of kids were hanging
out on Main Street. Many of them wore red, which Janet Collins said
signifies allegiance to the Bloods, named after a gang that's most
associated with Los Angeles.
Collins is a member of the tribe's gang task force and says she's
upset to see Eagle Butte kids imitate outside gangs.
"It's like they have no identity."
Her son, Alonzo, never joined a gang. And soon after she became a
born-again Christian, Alonzo did too, she said.
But none of that stopped him from killing himself in June 2002.
Troublesome fame
His death was part of a "suicide cluster," which occurs when knowledge
of one suicide influences other people at risk. One anecdote shows how
that might have happened in Eagle Butte.
For Alonzo's funeral, some young people wrote his name on the rear
windows of their cars. After the funeral, many did not erase it. The
same has been done for others who have died. So the suicide victims
begin to take on an exalted position among young people, according to
Julie Garreau, director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project.
"One of the teachers - my cousin - she said one of the kids asked her
who those famous people are," she said.
The danger of glorifying suicide seems especially great in isolated
places such as Eagle Butte or McLaughlin, where teens say they have
little to do but cruise Main Street or drink with their friends.
Even Alonzo, who was trying to help his friends avoid those problems,
succumbed to despair. His mother later found out he had started
drinking, despite his parents having sworn off alcohol.
"He was the one who tried to keep his peers on the right track,"
Collins said. "He was the one they went to for counseling."
Now Alonzo's 13-year-old sister, Caitlin, is facing some of the same
pressures. She says some of her friends have already taken up
drinking, and many claim gang membership. She doesn't drink or
"claim," she says, and is not sure whether she will stay on the
reservation after finishing school.
"If it's going to be the same, then no," she said. "If it's going to
change, then maybe."
Her mother is among those trying to change it. This summer, Collins
plans to turn an unused room in her husband's service station into an
alcohol-free hangout for anyone 18 and older.
She'll call it "Zo's Place," using her son Alonzo's nickname.
Younger teens will have their own place later this year, when the
Youth Project's Billy Mills Youth Center finishes its $2.5 million
teen center. It will include basketball courts, an art studio and an
Internet cafe.
Garreau said the teen center was already in the works when the
suicides started to happen, but afterward, "I knew we had to do it."
Yet the suicides in McLaughlin and the shootings at Red Lake emphasize
how stubborn the problems are.
That's especially true because they cut across racial and economic
lines. One of South Dakota's other suicide clusters, for example, was
a group of a dozen mostly white youths from Hughes County in the
mid-1990s.
And although the latest school shooting was on a reservation, the most
infamous was in the more affluent suburban community of Littleton, Colo.
"It's not another Indian issue. It's not that at all. It's a mental
health issue," Garreau said.
'Never, never give up!'
But social situations often are crucial. In McLaughlin, Billie Jean
Left Hand suffered from depression and from family instability.
Hayes, her grandmother, said Left Hand's legal custody changed roughly
30 times during her 16 years. Left Hand knew she could confide in
Hayes, but that wasn't always easy when she was staying in foster
homes, Hayes said.
Like Alonzo Collins, Left Hand seemed to be on a road leading away
from despair, though it was a bumpy one. Hayes said the suicide almost
crippled her emotionally. But then, she said, she is convinced Left
Hand communicated with her somehow.
"She opened up our eyes and made us realize we can't mourn."
Since then, she has given a temporary home to a 15-year-old boy and
lets other youths stay over when needed. In March, she organized 17
kids and eight chaperones to go on a traditional Lakota walk to the
summit of Harney Peak in the Black Hills. That brought a call from a
tribal youth program.
"They were really impressed and said next year, they want to have
busloads of youth down for the walk," Hayes said.
Judy White Bull, the McLaughlin School home-school coordinator, is
pulling together the town's first drum and dance group with
traditional costumes and elders to show students the "old-timey way."
She said 68 of the 420 kids in the school have joined. "I'm just
learning how to be Indian myself."
One of her reasons for starting the group was the fact that many
students see native finery only at funerals.
"They see all this satin and beautiful star quilts hanging on the
caskets," she said. "Why don't we turn that around and give it to them
while they're alive?"
The school's response also includes a puppet show, "No More Suicide."
Kids from first through fifth grade play a group of aliens and a group
of animals. The play starts with a monkey that has committed suicide
and ends with the aliens giving advice on how to prevent more deaths.
At a recent performance at the McLaughlin senior center, school
counselor Mary Gabbert led the young puppeteers as they delivered the
final line.
She counted down, "One, two three," and they all shouted:
"Never, never give up!"
Peer-to-peer help
Having young people talk to their peers might be the right place to
start. The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe had success with that strategy after
five suicides in the last two months of 2003, said Tolly Estes,
suicide prevention community coordinator with the Indian Health
Service in Fort Thompson.
"All I dealt with for a year here was people crying," he said.
His team responded using a program called Peers Helping Peers. They
trained five to 10 youths each week for 12 weeks, then told each to go
out and talk to 10 more.
With about 800 youths on board, the community's ability to reach those
considering suicide was stunning.
"They stopped their suicides, literally. I can't take credit. We
started it, but they're the ones that went out and did it," Estes said.
But his program constantly battles to keep its financial head above
water. The current round of funding runs out in September, and despite
a proven record, it has not been renewed, Estes said.
"It needs to be sustained. We're running on this grant cycle thing of
two or three years, and that doesn't work."
On top of that, health care providers are strained and often burned
out, and funding priorities are out of whack, he said. The Rosebud and
Lower Brule Sioux tribes, for example, are building facilities that he
says don't address the problem.
"There's no money for prevention out there right now, so the only
response is they're building juvenile detention centers," he said. "We
should be building playgrounds, we should be building all these
wonderful things that children should have, but instead, we're
building juvenile detention centers."
Money for prevention
On Standing Rock, some programs are in place. The tribe has a
suicide-prevention program, it's sponsoring a wellness conference this
month, and IHS has school programs for prevention and grieving.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., held a meeting on Standing Rock last month
with about 50 tribal officials, mental health officials and relatives
of people who committed suicide.
The meeting yielded no direct insight into the reasons for the recent
Standing Rock deaths; however, some things were clear, Dorgan said.
"There are terribly inadequate mental health services on the
reservation. They are not available to the extent they should be.
Substance abuse is a very serious problem. The lack of treatment
facilities is very acute.
"We need to do a lot more to address some of these issues."
Dorgan plans to hold a hearing in the Senate Indian Affairs committee
on youth suicide prevention and another one at Standing Rock in coming
months.
Even in a tight budget climate, Dorgan said, Congress can find new
emergency money for programs to reduce the rate of Indian youth suicides.
"It seems to me, there is not much that is a greater emergency than
this sort of thing," he said. "I will not rule out that we can find
additional funding. We really have to find a way to address this, and
funding is part of it."
In e-mail messages, Sens. Tim Johnson and John Thune and Rep.
Stephanie Herseth said they are concerned about the problem in
McLaughlin. Johnson and Herseth said it is important to fund a
suicide-prevention measure Johnson co-sponsored last year.
For Hayes, the grass roots are at least as important as the leaders.
"When you get the government involved, then it's politics," she said.
"To me, it's up to the individuals.
"I think the thing that would keep it alive is the survivors of
suicide, we have to be involved with our heart."
When that happens, some of the survivors' efforts literally become
works of art. Marcus Frejo Littleeagle, a Los Angeles-based rapper
known as Quese IMC, knew Left Hand and got a message from her the
night before she died. He wasn't able to call back in time.
"I just kept listening to that message over and over and over," he
said. "If I would have just called her, I maybe could have given her
another month or two months or who knows?"
After her death, he tried to compose a song about her but had trouble
writing.
"I heard a little voice, 'Just freestyle it,' " he said. So he
recorded what came to him. The words are, in part:
"Standing Rock, please stand strong, stand in the gap, even when
you're alone ...
"And in this song, we can tell the young ones to stay strong, and tell
them the truth, and tell them there's beauty in life, and maybe save
one youth."
Reach Ben Shouse at 331-2318.
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Last updated on April 23, 2005