PINE
RIDGE, S.D. — OUTSIDE the Oglala Lakota tribe’s child protection
service office, staff members updated a police officer on the latest
emergency: An 11-year old girl had texted her cousin that she wanted to
kill herself and then had gone missing.
A
damp breeze swirled smoke from the caseworkers’ cigarettes, and the sun
flitted between mottled clouds, the advance guard of an approaching
spring blizzard. The officer jotted down some specifics on the girl and
the remote area where she was last seen, then pulled away from the curb.
They didn’t want to lose another child.
Since December, nine people
between the ages of 12 and 24 have committed suicide on the Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation — home to Crazy Horse’s Oglala band of the Lakota —
in southwestern South Dakota.
They come to Pine Ridge every few years,
these suicide epidemics, with varying degrees of national media
attention and local soul-searching. What the news media often misses
though, and what tribal members understand but rarely discuss above a
whisper, is that youth suicides here are inextricably linked to a
multigenerational scourge of sexual abuse, with investigations into
possible abuse now open in at least two of the nine recent suicides.
I’m
a wasicu (Lakota for “white person”) from Massachusetts, but I’ve spent
about half of the past decade living on the rez, working mostly as a
teacher and archery coach. Within two weeks of starting my first job
teaching high school English here, a veteran teacher told me something
he thought was critical to understanding life on Pine Ridge: By the time
they reach high school, most of the girls (and many boys, too) have
been molested or raped.
His
anecdotal observation seems to track with the available statistics.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Native Americans
are 2.5 times more likely
to be sexually assaulted than other Americans, and the numbers on Pine
Ridge, one of the largest, poorest reservations in the country, appear
to be even greater. “We started two clinics for reproductive health in
the largest high schools on the reservation,” said Terry Friend, a
midwife who works at the year-and-a-half-old Four Directions Clinic,
which specializes in sexual assault and domestic abuse. “When I take a
sexual history of a patient, I ask, ‘Have you had sex against your
will?’ At the high schools, girls answered yes more than no.”
Numbers
are harder to come by for boys, but local medical professionals
estimate that they are also high, and that such rates of abuse can
translate to high rates of suicide. One recent study found that
nationally, teenage boys who were sexually assaulted were about 10 times more likely to attempt suicide, girls more than three times more likely.
At
some point, most local child sexual assault cases cross the tribal
prosecutor’s desk. “Unfortunately, many of those same kids have suicidal
ideations and attempts,” said the tribe’s attorney general, Tatewin
Means. “I definitely think there’s a strong connection between sexual
assault and suicide here on the reservation.”
THE BOY LOVED
the sweat lodge. He was a troubled student but took solace in the
traditional Lakota form of prayer, with steam hissing off big glowing
rocks in the center of a small lodge made of bent saplings and canvas
tarps. School and tribal officials said the boy showed up to school one
day last spring when he was supposed to be on suspension, climbed a pine
tree in the schoolyard and hanged himself from a thick branch. Teachers
and students saw him, and he was quickly cut down. Struggling to
breathe, he sprinted for the school’s sweat lodge, where he took refuge
until the police and a relative calmed him down.
It
wasn’t the first time he had attempted suicide in or around school
grounds, administrators said. He’d been depressed, and behaving
erratically, with signs that he was using drugs and “huffing” gasoline.
There had also been signs of sexual abuse, involving not only him but
also a younger brother and male cousins he lived with. Every time one of
the boys showed new signs of abuse or talked about suicide, school
officials said, they called the tribe’s child protection unit, and every
time they were told the same thing: “It’s still under investigation.”
The
child was not removed from the home. Then in December, two weeks after
his 14th birthday, the boy hanged himself at home and became the first
in the recent string of nine suicides.
His
case was lost, it seems, in the web of tribal bureaucracies and federal
oversight bodies that are long on backlogged cases and short on
funding. The tribal child protection unit, for instance, currently has
two investigators for the entire reservation, which the federal census
puts at more than 18,000 total residents (though tribal officials say is
closer to 40,000). The two investigators are responsible for handling
upward of 40 new cases a month, and hundreds more in the long-term case
management system.
About
a month after the boy died, a 14-year old cheerleader killed herself.
Soon after, rumors of an all-too-familiar detail started to spread:
Before her death, the girl told friends that her stepfather, a longtime
teacher and coach at her school, was sexually abusing her. What followed
broke the usual mold, though: Her friends came forward to tell school
officials. Charles Roessel, a member of the Navajo Nation and director
of the federal Bureau of Indian Education, which oversees the school,
said administrators acted quickly to suspend the accused teacher and
refer the case to federal investigators. No charges have been brought.
Shortly
after his suspension from the federal school, the cheerleader’s
stepfather was brought on, according to school officials, as an unpaid
intern by the reservation’s Shannon County school system, which is
overseen by the state. His job was to shadow one of the system’s
principals so that he could learn to be a school administrator. The
stepfather did not respond to requests for comment.
TRIBAL LEADERS
and experts are struggling to understand the recent suicide epidemic
(specifics on many of the cases aren’t widely known), but there’s
general agreement on one underlying cause: the legacy of federally
funded boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native
American children from their homes. Former students and scholars of the
institutions say that the isolation and lack of oversight at the mostly
church-run schools allowed physical and sexual abuse to run rampant.
“My
grandmother used to tell me that she didn’t think she was pretty,” said
an E.M.T. friend of mine who responds to a suicide attempt every week
or so, “because when the priests used to sneak into her dorm and take a
little girl for the night, they never picked her.”
Left untreated, such sexual abuse can lead to elevated rates of drug and alcohol abuse and suicide, said Dr. Steven Berkowitz, director of a center on youth trauma at the University of Pennsylvania.
One
sad irony of the recent suicides is that they come in the middle of new
initiatives to address sexual assault. The Four Directions Clinic is
treating young abuse victims who were previously sent to distant
hospitals off the reservation. Tribal and federal law enforcement
officials now confer regularly to better coordinate investigations. High
school students recently petitioned the Pine Ridge school board to
create health classes for vulnerable middle school students, and the
board unanimously voted to find necessary funding.
Still,
the challenges are enormous. Six days after the 11-year-old girl went
missing, protection services still hadn’t located her, though a
caseworker says the hope is that the girl and her mother have gone to a
domestic violence shelter somewhere — the reservation doesn’t have its
own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/whats-lurking-behind-the-suicides.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150516&nlid=32999454&tntemail0=y