Two Worlds 

Reservation Suicides

While driving nine hundred miles home, from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the middle of a snow storm, I was trying to make some kind of sense of the mind boggling number of violent deaths that are occurring on our Indian reservations. News had just come in about the school shooting on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. What would possess a fourteen year old boy to kill his grand parents, a teacher, a security guard, five fellow students, and then to turn the gun on himself and take his own life? I spent the night in Poplar Montana, tribal headquarters for the Fort Peck Indian Rez, with my inlaws. My sister inlaw who works as a jailer reported to us that they had booked eleven people into jail that night. The majority of incarcerating on the reservations are drug, alcohol, and violence related. The next day I continued my journey through the snow storm, watched a speeding van hit the ditch on the Fort Belknap rez, and finally had to hold up because of the storm in Browning on the Blackfeet Rez. I spent the night at my sons house. A few people stopped by to visit and shared some shocking statistics from a public health forum they had attended that day. On the Blackfeet rez in the last three years there have been nine hundred plus suicide attempts and over sixty successful. From 1998 to 2002 on the Standing Rock rez there has been over six hundred attempts and two hundred twenty four successful. On New Years night 2004 on the Standing Rock there were six attempts. For the four year period Standing Rock had the highest teen suicide rate per capita in the USA. That's not all, while on Standing Rock a friend came to visit and shared shocking news from the Fort Thompson rez in South Dakota. Fort Thompson has now taken over as the suicide capital of the US. Reports are now coming in that the Alaska natives and Eskimos are taking their own lives in shocking numbers. What is going on? To give a little perspective, since the beginning of the Desert Storm there have been fifteen hundred American soldiers killed. That is about the same number of Indians that have been killing themselves or each other in the same time period. Nobody seems to care if an Indian blows himself away, but we rise up in protest when one American soldier is killed. Maybe its because, since we haven't been able to assimilate the Indians into the larger culture we will just let them blow themselves away. The federal government has sent in teams of experts without much success, tribal governments are ineffective, no one seems to be offering a solution that is more powerful than just turning out the lights. In my first article, "NO MORE MULLAHS", I spoke about empowering. The idea of empowering is to invigorate, to enable someone to succeed. But the opposite of empowering is to weaken, to disable, impotence, ineptitude, incapacitate. I think the latter describes the Native American reservation experience. What I see is a people who have been stripped of their identity. Author, Kent Nerberg described it best in his book "Neither Wolf nor Dog". Nerberg illustrates the life of a people who are walking the edge of the dominant culture and desperately trying to cling to the old ways that are slipping away. In observing the reservation youth I see our young people imitating gang bangers, MTV culture, Goths, the drug culture, rappers, and more or less the culture of death. The values of past generations, and the identity of Native cultures has lost it's impact on the youth. Our reservation fathers and mentors are lost in a perpetual state of adolescence and offer no positive direction. So what am I trying to say? Its time to wake up. We have a real problem and the sugar coated solutions of the past are not working. We need a revolution of ideas. We need to break out of the mold and we need to be empowered.

Amish at Healing for the Natives Campmeeting 

Indians & Amish

Indians & Amish Who would ever make a connection between Native American people and the Amish people? Both of these people groups have one thing in common, disentanglement from the world. Both groups fiercely protect their cultural boundaries and try to live within the safety of what they have created. They are like water and oil; they just don’t mix. Having spent the majority of my life on the rez there is a sense of comfort and safety when I return. I remember the day I returned home from four years of military service. My eyes searched the horizon for a glimpse of mountain peaks off in the distance. When I crossed that rez line I felt the security of home. When I was growing up on the rez we encountered strange people called Hutterites. The Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish are branches of the European Anabaptists. Hutterites settled mostly in the Midwest and Canada where they operate collective farms. Well, the Hutterites would stop by our dusty little farm house and sell my mom vegetables. I remember the dogs going crazy when these men in black clothes and black hats with long beards would come knocking on our door. We couldn’t understand their strong Germanic accent and they couldn’t understand our Indian lingo. I remember the boss man always called my mother, Mrs Hubberd. It was probably because he saw twelve kids and no food in the cupboards. I never did know the reason my dad took to chasing one of them around their truck one day. It’s a good thing he didn’t catch him, but there was one scared Hutterite. When I got older I had my own encounter with the Hutterites. They were building a new colony and several contractors had bids on their buildings. Being a builder myself I put a bid in on their work. That day I developed a deep prejudice in my heart when the job boss told me, “We don’t want any of you Indians working around here, the last Indian we hired took his first paycheck and went on a drunk.” Growing up rez has a way of spawning prejudice towards any one different, Mexicans, Blacks, and especially the White Man. Indians are so prejudice we hate each other. We hate Crows, Crees, Flatheads, those short west coast Indians, Cherokees, and any other tribe. We are even prejudice against our own children and grandchildren. Full bloods hate half breeds, half breeds hate full bloods, Catholics hate Pentecostals, Pentecostals hate traditionalists, and traditionalists hate them all. With all this prejudice going around who could ever imaging Indians and Amish coming together. Of all of the Anabaptist groups the Amish are the most separate of them all. They do not want any contact with the outside world unless it is unavoidable. They fiercely maintain their ancient traditions and religious practices. They have no electricity or modern equipment, such as cars and trucks. They still drive the horse and carriage and have maintained their traditional wardrobe. Men have beards, the ladies wear bonnets, and they continue to speak in their native German language. One thing about the Anabaptists, they love Jesus and remain devout pious Christians. I think God looked down from heaven one day and said, “I’m going to stir things up a little bit.” I’ll tell you about it on my next post.

Healing for the Natives Campmeeting 

No More Mullahs

NO MORE MULLAHS It is high time American Indian people take a good look at themselves and the river we have been sold down. The Bush Administration is pumping billions of dollars and countless lives into the rebuilding of Babylon. The 2005 budget for Afghanistan and Iraq is well over seventy billion dollars. The investment in lives and blood cannot be calculated. This lofty price for the ideals of freedom and democracy is gaudy but to reservation Indians it seems empty and hypocritical. How would it look if we applied American Indian Policy to the rebuilding of Iraq? It has been interesting observing the evolution of the American Government policy regarding the people of Iraq. As best as can be described, US policy appears to be; the empowerment of the Iraqi people to become an independent sovereign nation, to govern internal affairs, economy and security. American policy has taken painstaking efforts to recognize and honor the divergent ethnic groups and unite them under one banner of Iraqi democracy. For the most part Iraqis have responded positively by stepping up to the plate and taking their future into their own hands. How their version of democracy plays out will be directly connected to their ability to consolidate power, security, and economic independence. With the American financial engine behind them rebuilding infrastructures, training security forces, stimulating the economy, and restoring oil production; Iraqis should be well on their way to establishing national sovereignty. Iraq is testimony to the premise of empowerment. But just for the sake of speculation, let’s apply the principles of American Indian policy to the Iraqi equation. In order to establish American supremacy we must make them into a domestically dependent nation. We can accomplish this by first of all, destroying all cultural identity, humiliating traditional leadership, banning all religions, and making English the official language. By doing this we can take their land, superimpose our culture and values upon them, and strip the land of its natural resources (oil). To the victor goes the spoil! Remember the superiority of western civilization and the doctrine of manifest destiny. Surely we should replace the old fashioned middle aged eastern civilization with a more highly civilized democratic society. What happened to the good old policy of greed? Next we can subjugate each tribal group or sect by putting them on their own land, we can call them reservations. A small tract of land can be given to each family (to teach them the work ethic and to encourage the concept of ownership). Preferably, put them in the desert or in the mountains. Give them a monthly ration. Just enough to keep them going, but we don’t want to make them lazy, and preferably a high carbohydrate diet to keep them warm. We will set up medical clinics so we can practice the latest medical techniques, train doctors, and experiment with the latest pharmaceuticals. No more Mullahs! We must outlaw all religions and religious practices. Do away with mosques and shrines, and no more loud speakers in the streets. Instead give them a bland sterile form of westernized religion, something that will keep them poor, guilty, and subservient to the cloth. We must not allow pride or nationalism to rise up, and we surely do not want any free thinkers. We can allocate a religious denomination to each tribal group to facilitate control until they can be fully absorbed into normal society. Make sure the religious fathers continually remind them that their culture is from the devil. Use fear to suppress any form of personal expression, and they must always think they are dumb and lazy, and unworthy. An important element in destroying their cultural identity is to take their children away from them and educate them in the western model. Make sure they do not use their indigenous names or speak their native language; always let them know that English is a superior language. By teaching them the superiority of western culture we can degrade their native culture, and be assured they will be ashamed to be called Iraqis. By taking the language, we take the identity. Create a system of government for them that gives the illusion they have power and sovereignty, but in reality they are the scum of the earth. Create a maze of rules and regulations that will keep them in confusion and under stress. Allow a few of them to become experts at running the maze and they will become the best enforcers of the system. As long as we can keep them running the maze they will have no time to lift their heads up to see the light. Remember, who ever holds the purse strings, holds the power. Throw them a bone every now and then and let them think you are the benevolent father looking out for their well being. When you throw a bone into a bunch of hungry dogs you can watch them fight and tear each other up. You can depend on this kind of leadership to destroy each other. Keep their eyes on the bone. Native American people are the weakest people on earth. We have been exposed to and submitted to unimaginable betrayals. Its time to wake up. We see the nations of the world rising up and taking destiny into their own hands. Why can't we? I am sick and tired of Indian leaders kowtowing to a system of failure. It is time for a revolution of ideas. Ideas that will set the captives free.