lakota_mami303

I think this is a very good article....very true

Red Lake: A tragedy of denial
As a longtime teacher in Native villages, I know the story of this school shooter all too well.
By Nick Jans

The recent school shooting spree in Red Lake, Minn., seemed eerily familiar: An alienated teenage male apparently plots with others, goes on a murderous rampage, then turns his gun on himself, leaving behind a stunned, grieving community and more questions than answers.

But the obvious parallels between the Red Lake and Columbine tragedies, right down to the black trench coat and red-laced combat boots that Red Lake shooter Jeff Weise wore, don't illuminate the darkness or depth of the wider story. As a teacher for 20 years in Native villages in bush Alaska, it is one that I know only too well. It's the story of a young Native fighting a losing battle with cultural ambiguity, poverty, substance abuse and depression — all ending in a violent death.

Weise described himself on a Web entry as “nothing but your average Native American stoner” struggling with “accumulated rage suppressed by … brief glimpses of hope … faded to black.”

By this description, and by his early death, I've known 15 or 20 “Jeff Weises” in my life. Though each tragedy wears its own skin, in the end, only the faces and details change. I've known these kids, who shoot themselves as well as each other, who die alone with makeshift nooses around their necks or in 100-mph crashes. Others step through holes in the ice or are found frozen on a trail, eyes covered with frost.

If there's anything notable about the Red Lake tragedy, it's the awful scale and circumstances — enough to lift it past a tribal or clan code of silence into the discomforting glare of national scrutiny.

Usually, there's scarcely a ripple beyond the victims' own families and communities. Most of the suicides and deaths of kids I knew didn't even make the papers in Fairbanks, just 250 miles away.

But these ripples, gathered together, form a towering wave:

•According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), injuries and violence — intentional or accidental — account for 75% of deaths in Native Americans younger than 20.

•The suicide rate, especially among Native young men between 15 and 19, is horrific — far above the national norm. In certain areas, including Alaska and southern Arizona, teen suicides are six to eight times above the national average.

•Among young Natives, 78% of firearm deaths are the result of a deliberate act.

•Alcohol, other drugs and depression are factors woven into many of these tragic cases.

The fact is, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre and their victims — white, upper-middle-class teens — were statistical anomalies. On the other hand, Jeff Weise and most of those he is accused of killing or maiming came to an end so predictable for their demographic group that in a cold, pie-graph world, they scarcely raise a blip on the numerical radar.

Other inescapable facts: Jeff Weise's father also killed himself. In the past five years, the U.S. attorney's office has filed charges in a dozen murders and seven cases of manslaughter on the Red Lake reservation (population roughly 5,000) — a place where suicides and attempts, violent injuries and early deaths are all too common.

The toll of this negative environment seems intensified in the young. According to the results of a 2004 survey of 56 Red Lake ninth-graders, more than half admitted to marijuana use and said they'd been beaten or hit during the past year. More than half — a staggering 81% of the girls — claimed to have contemplated or attempted suicide.

Of course, many in the Red Lake Nation would resent such negative statements, especially levied by a glib outsider. What could he know of the deep, inward bonds that exist, the web of love and care that radiates among their people?

I bow my head to accept that rightful criticism; I've never been to Red Lake. I don't mean to deny the real love and sharing that I'm sure is a daily fact of tribal life, as it was in the villages where I lived.

At the same time, I offer that I have grieved for many such Native children whom I taught. I wept at their funerals and helped bury them, until they became a collective blur and I became almost too numb to mourn. Denial and turning inward are tactics I'm all too familiar with. They solve nothing; in fact, they perpetuate this malaise.

Meanwhile, this problem is too vital to be ignored. I have no solution to offer. If I said I did, I'd either be a liar or a wise man — and I'm neither. But there are first, difficult steps that must be taken. A truism of modern psychology, echoed by a far more eternal spiritual wisdom, is that a problem cannot be addressed, let alone solved, until it is recognized and owned — in this case, by all of us, for this is truly an issue that transcends race. Clearly, there is something dreadfully wrong among these children, upon whom the future of entire cultures depend. And finally, these young people, like this problem, belong to all of us.

Answers — and surely they must exist — begin with that realization.


Alaskan writer Nick Jans is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. He also is author of the forthcoming book The Grizzly Maze, to be published in July.

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~*iF u dOnT kNo BaBy nOw u kNo.....bOy i KaN dO tHaT*~

badmaninc

I know a lot of men and women who are similar to this young First Nations man in Red Lake. They are incarcerated in prisons throughout our province. I have spoken to too many who have said that they had to come to prison to learn some of our culture. Prior to that they were a lot like many of our youth. They existed on a day to day basis, continually wondering why they even existed. For many of our youth, they don't see any benefit in practising "traditional" ways. They believe that following this path means they are sentencing themselves to an obsolescent way of life. We don't celebrate being NDN or Aboriginal. I don't mean through awards shows or getting trophies; although that is a nice thing that is now happening. I mean showing people that we are proud of who we are and what we have survived over the years. I have traveled extensively throughout our province and through parts of the Pacific Northwest. All of the troubles that befall our communities are pretty much static. We are always marginalized, told we are from broken dysfunctional homes. Many of our ancestors were traumatized by residential schools and abused in one way or another. All of us need to struggle through this and become enpowered by our survival. Numerous other cultures or ethnic people would have been too devastated to recover from the atrocities. Yet we continue to march on albeit slowly. We need to tell our children that we can't run to try and catch the people who are in front, we need to take off the chains and also help the people beside us who are struggling. Our people weren't made to get to the top by any means necessary. Some of us have forgotten that. We need to stay away from the "crabs in the bucket" mentality.