Native Americans Battle Suicide, Poverty
Sat Mar 26, 1:53 PM ET
By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP National Writer
RED LAKE, Minn. - The obituary in the small town paper was heartbreaking:
Chase Albert "Beka" Lussier, born Dec. 23, 1989, died March 21 at Red Lake
High School. A freshman who played basketball and loved computer games.
Six paragraphs down, beside the photograph of a chubby-cheeked, smiling
boy, came this sentence: "He spent his time juggling life between his
family and his son."
A father at 15. Dead three months later. Shot with eight others by an
alienated, despondent upperclassman who, at the end of his 10-minute walk
through Red Lake High School, turned one of his guns on himself.
The deaths, conspicuous in their senselessness, highlight the problems that
Native American teenagers have been quietly suffering in greater numbers
than most adolescents: suicide, violence, depression and pregnancy.
By themselves, the numbers for the Red Lake Indian Reservation are
staggering. A state survey conducted last year of 56 ninth-graders showed
that 81 percent of the girls, and 43 percent of the boys, had considered
suicide.
Nearly half the girls said they'd actually tried to kill themselves. Twenty
percent of boys said the same a?? numbers about triple the rate statewide.
"I don't have an explanation for that," said Brenda Child, who teaches
American Indian history at the University of Minnesota and grew up on the
reservation. Her cousin, 14-year-old Ryan Auginash, was shot in the chest
during 16-year-old Jeff Weise's march through the campus.
She doesn't want to view the shootings through the prism of Native American
troubles. "I see it as a problem of a young man who was deeply depressed,"
she said. "Sadly, that can happen anywhere."
Here, where the Red Lake band of Chippewa has lived in isolation on more
than 830,000 acres in northern Minnesota since 1889, such things are not
openly discussed.
It simply is not the Chippewa way, and they have slammed the door of their
reservation to the prying eyes of television cameras and reporters who want
to know why Weise shot his grandfather, a tribal policeman everyone knew as
"Dash," the man's girlfriend, and then drove to the high school entrance
behind the wheel of his grandfather's police cruiser, wearing his gunbelt
and toting a shotgun. He opened fire at the front door, by the lone metal
detector.
Tribal elders have said little, as have residents. Some students have been
more open, describing Weise as a depressed, friendless boy who talked of
shooting people.
On Web site postings, Weise described himself as "nothing but your average
Native-American stoner" and described his life on the reservation as "every
man's nightmare. This place never changes and it never will."
Weise had not always lived on the reservation. He arrived after his father
committed suicide four years ago. His mother, a heavy drinker, was severely
injured in an alcohol-related auto accident. The boy had nowhere else to
go.
Some on the reservation say Weise had been seeing a professional and taking
medication for his depression, which is evident on Internet postings such
as this one, where under a section titled "A Little About Me," he typed "16
years of accumulated rage supressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of
hope, which have all but faded to black."
On Thursday, outside the hospital in Bemidji, a small town 32 miles south
of the reservation, Andrew Auginash was there to visit his wounded brother,
Ryan. "I don't want anything bad said about our reservation," he said.
"It's like any other place."
The Minnesota survey of Red Lake students said they assaulted other
classmates and used more alcohol and drugs than other students across the
state.
Nationwide figures show that Native American teenagers commit suicide at
three times the national rate; are involved in alcohol-related arrests at
twice the national average, and die in alcohol-related incidents at 17
times the national average.
They are third-highest in teen pregnancies, behind Hispanics and blacks.
"My mother moved us off the reservation when I was very young. And I am
very glad she did that," says Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Native
American Press-Ojibwe News, a 5,000-circulation weekly newspaper in
Bemidji.
"The kids there come from drugs, alcohol, broken families, abuse," he says
sadly. "To grow up under these circumstances is a tremendous ordeal. And to
consider suicide means you think there is no other way out."
Lawrence is a member of the Red Lake band and has relatives and friends on
reservation, he says. "Only the most gifted students can overcome this
stuff. A lot of kids don't go to school. About 50 percent don't graduate.
How do you go on after that? They're not qualified to get a job or go to
college."
Sister Patricia Wallis has lived at the reservation, off and on, since
1951. To Wallis, the problems here come from grinding, dehumanizing,
relentless poverty.
"They're not able to succeed in school. If something happens, or someone
dies, or there's been an accident, they don't come regularly. Some stay at
home because they have to baby-sit their siblings or they have to help
out."
Another problem is housing, she said. There aren't enough places to live on
the reservation, so families and cousins and children live crowded together
in single homes. This has worsened lately, Wallis said, because many who
left to make their way in the outside world are now returning in large
numbers after failing to find any kind of work because they have no
experience or training.
"When you put a lot of adults and children together in one house, you get
bedlam," Wallis said. "The children get no rest, they get no sleep,
arguments break out between the adults and they come to school carrying all
this."
Wallis has not lost hope, and she is careful in choosing her words to
describe life here for young people. "I love these people with all my
heart," she says.
Then she tells the story of a sixth-grade boy whose father got a new
girlfriend. The woman didn't like the boy. "She said "Either he goes, or I
go.' And guess who had to go? Now he's living with his cousins and he's
suffering."
The boy grew angry in class at the reservation, she said, and he was pulled
out by his relatives and sent to public school.
Children and teenagers here, despite the isolation and the cultural
importance of turning inward, have only to sign on to the Internet, or turn
on the satellite TV, to see that other people, in places not that far way,
have things they don't.
"If you've never really been loved, how can you love yourself?" she asks.
"How can you make something out of yourself?"
___
Associated Press writer Joshua Freed contributed to this report from
Bemidji, Minn.