The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock
Long article well worth a read.
Jasilyn Charger was 19 when she learned her best friend had killed herself. Charger was Lakota Sioux, and she had left the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota for Portland, Ore., just a few months earlier. But in the summer of 2015, she flew home for her friend’s funeral. Then, two days later, while she was still in Eagle Butte — the largest town on the Cheyenne River Reservation with a population of 1,300 — another friend killed herself. Charger was shocked. “It hurt all of us because these were people who we thought we knew but really we had no idea what they were going through,” she said. “It really woke us up.”
In the weeks that followed, more teenagers on the reservation killed themselves with belts, knives and handfuls of Benadryl. Native American teenagers and young adults are 1.5 times as likely to kill themselves as the national average, with suicides often clustering in epidemics that hit and fade. Suicide is so common on the reservation that Lakota youth don’t bother to say “committed suicide” or “attempted suicide.” They just say “attempted” or “completed.” By the end of that summer, Jasilyn told me, 30 Cheyenne River kids attempted and eight completed.
“We said, ‘They committed suicide for a reason,’ ” Charger told me. In Eagle Butte, reasons weren’t hard to find. Their elders liked to talk about them as the future, but no one seemed to pay much attention to how their lives were hard, bordering on hopeless. Cheyenne River kids had families struggling with poverty and parents and relatives with serious drug-abuse problems. Often there was violence at home, to the point that many youths had nowhere safe to go at night. And amid all this, there was a hard-edged social pressure to drink or use drugs.
Charger had seen all of this. Her father died before she was born; her mother, she said, “paid the bills and drank.” She and her twin sister, Jasilea, were incredibly close even if, by 13, they were also perfect foils: Jasilea, willowy and bookish, a good student; Jasilyn, chubby and wild, cutting school and running away on the weekends to do odd jobs — mowing lawns, babysitting, breaking horses, selling weed — that helped put food on the table. But her mother called her in as a runaway one too many times, and the South Dakota Division of Child Protection Services took both girls, sending them to group homes on opposite sides of the state.
“It felt like something had been sawed off,” Charger said about her separation from Jasilea. She got so depressed she was moved to a psychiatric unit, where she often got into fights. She aged out of the system at 17, but when she returned to the ranch developments and trailer parks of Eagle Butte, she struggled with depression. She and Jasilea had gone “from knowing everything about each other to being strangers.” She fell into a monthslong cocaine binge, crashing in abandoned cars with other homeless kids. Her weight had dropped to 80 pounds by the time that her cousin, Joseph White Eyes, intervened. “He would say, ‘You’re killing yourself, and we need you,’ ” Charger recalled. “ ‘Don’t get high, let’s go to a sweat.’ He got me off drugs and into our culture.” She eventually found a job in Rapid City on the production team of the local Fox News affiliate but quit, she said, after her boss made one too many “cowboys and Indians” jokes in response to Native Americans’ being shot by the police. In early 2015 she moved to Portland, as far away as she could get. She hadn’t intended to return.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-youth-group-that-launched-a-movement-at-standing-rock/ar-AAmtAzV?li=BBnb4R7&ocid=edgsp