A few days before Christmas, Santana Janis, a 12-year-old Lakota, decided that she did not want to live anymore.
A bright, outgoing girl, Santana’s moods had turned dark. She lived in a derelict two-bedroom trailer with a grandfather, Earl Tall, and as many as a dozen siblings and cousins. Her mother, an alcoholic, was an intermittent presence in her life. Their town, Manderson, was torn by drinking, fighting and violence.
Tall overheard his granddaughter’s talk of suicide and called her other grandfather, Keith Janis. “I sat down with her and said, ‘Please, promise Grandpa you’ll never do that,’” Janis recalled. “She gave me that big, beautiful smile of hers and said, ‘OK, Grandpa, OK.’”
Six weeks later, Santana hanged herself in a small, unheated building next to the trailer.
Since December, the Pine Ridge reservation, a vast, windswept land of stunning grasslands and dusty plateaus, has been the scene of an unfolding crisis: Nine people between the ages of 12 and 24 have committed suicide here.
Two teenagers hanged themselves in December. In the next three months, seven more young people were found dead, including Alanie Martin, 14, who was known for her love of basketball, cheerleading and traditional Indian hand games. When Santana killed herself in February, she followed another recent suicide of a boy who attended her school, Wounded Knee, named for the 1890 massacre that occurred where the reservation stands today.
Many more youths on the reservation have tried, but failed, to kill themselves in the past several months: At least 103 attempts by people ages 12 to 24 occurred from December to March, according to the federal Indian Health Service (IHS). Emergency medical workers on the reservation, which is the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, say they have been called to the scenes of suicide attempts sometimes several times a day.
Tribe officials, clergy members and social workers say they cannot remember such a high rate of suicides and attempts in such a short period on the reservation, which is overwhelmed with high rates of unemployment, poverty, domestic abuse and alcohol addiction.
In 2013, five people, including adults and children, killed themselves, according to the Oglala Sioux tribe. However, officials at Pine Ridge said they were mystified by the far more pronounced increase in the past several months and had searched, unsuccessfully, for answers.
As the suicides began to mount in February, the Oglala Sioux tribe president, John Yellow Bird Steele, declared an emergency on the reservation. In response, the IHS deployed additional counselors, but many people here say it is not nearly enough: There are only six mental health professionals on the entire reservation, which has a population of 16,000 to 40,000 tribal members based on varying government and tribal estimates.
“It is devastating,” Steele said. “I don’t know if they were cyberbullied, or if they had living conditions they didn’t want to put up with, or they were sexually abused. Were they hungry? I don’t know.”
“When you have a good understanding of what’s happening,” he said, “come back and tell me.”
However, family members and tribe officials said they had seen disturbing clues.
Outside the Pine Ridge School, where four of its 800 students have committed suicide in recent months, Myra Slow Bear, 15, a friend of Alanie’s, said other students had been bullying Alanie.
“I knew she was depressed,” she said. Among teenagers at the school, she said, attempting suicide is not unusual.
“It’s just a common thing,” she said.
Tall, Santana’s grandfather, also said that she had conflicts with other students at school. An official with knowledge of the case said that shortly before Santana committed suicide, another girl at school had written to her on Facebook, urging her to kill herself.
Several officials with knowledge of the cases said that at least one of the youths who committed suicide was influenced by Slender Man, a tall, faceless creature who appears in storytelling Web sites, often as a figure who stalks and kills victims. Two girls in a Milwaukee suburb last summer said the character had inspired them in the attempted murder of a classmate.
“They call him the Tall Man spirit,” said Chris Carey, a minister who works with youths, some of them suicidal, on the reservation. “He’s appearing to these kids and telling them to kill themselves.”
Steele, who said many Native Americans traditionally believe in a “suicide spirit” similar to Slender Man, said young people had been sharing disturbing videos on Facebook that encourage suicide. One video, he said, gave instructions on tying a hangman’s noose. Another directed children to go to a specific place outside the village, saying there were ropes there. “Go use them,” the video instructed.
John Two Bulls, a pastor who works with youths on the reservation, said that two months ago, he was tipped off to a group suicide planned in a wooded area outside the town of Pine Ridge. Frantic, he drove to the spot.
“It was cold, it was dark, and there was a row of trees with ropes hanging off the branches,” he said. “I was thankful that we were able to get there without finding anybody hanging from those ropes.”
Some teenagers had already congregated there, he said, and he urged them to gather around. “I counseled them, prayed with them, talked with them,” he said. They told him that “they were tired of the lives they had at home, no food, with parents all intoxicated, and some were being abused, mentally or sexually.”
Mental health professionals said they suspected that in some cases, young people might have been influenced by previous suicides.
Feeling neglected, they can be attracted to the public displays of mourning that follow a death; and once they hear about the method of suicide, they imitate it.
“Contagion does occur with teenagers,” said Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon, executive director of the Front Porch Coalition, a suicide prevention group in Rapid City, South Dakota. “Kids are young, they don’t think clearly, their brains aren’t fully developed. I know that things seem to be getting worse for kids. Things seem to be getting more dire.”
Ted Hamilton, superintendent of the Red Cloud Indian School, a Jesuit school on the reservation, says suicide is an issue that schools grapple with constantly.
“To be Lakota in this world is a challenge because they want to maintain their own culture, but they’re being told their culture is not successful,” Hamilton said.
Children on Indian reservations, he added, have extraordinary challenges: The legacy of oppression and forced removals, the lack of jobs and economic opportunity, and the high levels of drug and alcohol use around them.
“The federal government dropped the ball in terms of mental health resources,” Hamilton said. “The system is overwhelmed. No matter which reservation you go to, that’s what you’ll find.”
Ron Cornelius, the Great Plains director of the IHS, said in a statement that the recent suicides were “an incredibly sad situation” that the agency was determined to address. “IHS is committed to working with the tribe to address this heartbreaking problem,” he said.
When Janis, a longtime activist, talks about Santana’s death, he points to the “multigenerational trauma” inflicted on Native Americans by whites and the tensions that still exist between the groups. On an overnight trip to Rapid City over the New Year, a group of girls including Santana overheard a white woman call them “filthy Indians” as they passed through a hotel lobby, he said.
“My beautiful Lakota granddaughter,” he said. “She had to hear that. Our kids today just want to die because they’re sick of all this oppression.”
Last month, at the Pine Ridge Gospel Fellowship, a small, white clapboard church in the heart of the reservation, a group of clergy members, social workers and tribal elders met for an informal prayer session.
As one pastor played hymns on an acoustic guitar, Norma Blacksmith, who lost a grandson to suicide several years ago, bowed her head and closed her eyes.
“In our culture, Lord, the children are sacred,” she said. “We thank you that there have been no suicides in this last week. You answered our prayer.”
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