Source: San Jose Mercury News Contact: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 Author: Philip Brasher of the Associated Press RESERVATION DISTURBED BY TEEN SUICIDES 5 deaths, dozens of attempts blamed on alcohol, boredom McLAUGHLIN, S.D. ROBERT Jaycob Jensen was first. The lanky 17-year-old Sioux Indian, who had been drinking heavily and having run-ins with police all summer, slipped into his family's dank basement Aug. 30. Toward the corner, past the rusted-out furnace and broken sewer line, he threaded a braided leather belt over a board nailed between floor beams, buckled it around his neck and hanged himself. On Nov. 16, in the same basement, with the same type of belt, Robert's 16-year-old cousin and best friend, Charles Gerry, hanged himself from a pipe. Three other Indian youths on the Standing Rock Reservation have taken their lives since then -- the latest was buried Jan. 24. In the five months since Robert's death, 43 reservation boys and girls have attempted suicide, some more than once. Counselors are keeping tabs on 150 teenagers considered at risk. The hellish epidemic, they say, is brought on by a lethal mix of alcohol, drugs, poverty, boredom and wholesale family breakdown. ``There's so much pain here,'' says Faith Taken Alive, whose 14-year-old daughter, Dani Black Fox, attempted suicide with a friend in October. ``You wonder where it came from and why it hit at once.'' McLaughlin, population 799, is the biggest town on the 2.3 million-acre reservation. For the most part, its Indian and white residents live separate lives. They report to separate court systems and separate police forces. They even keep separate time: Whites observe Mountain Time, while Indians keep to Central Time because tribal headquarters, across the border in Fort Yates, N.D., falls within the Central Zone. With its big, gray grain elevator jutting from the rolling prairie, McLaughlin from a distance looks like hundreds of other Midwestern farm towns. But there was trouble even before the suicides. Burglaries have become common, as have fights, vandalism and petty theft, residents say. Jude's Jack and Jill grocery was burglarized so many times the owners finally covered the storefront with steel grating. Three of four Indian adults have no jobs, and half the students at the tribal school in Fort Yates drop out before 10th grade. Alcohol is easy to get. Even teens say panhandlers will readily buy them booze for a tip of a dollar or two. MANY of the dropouts wind up roaming with loose-knit gangs that commonly brawl with others, but the tribe has only two detention cells for juveniles and just one probation officer to track up to 60 cases at a time. The troubled youths, says Robert Preuss, local director of mental health programs for the Indian Health Service, wind up doing ``what they want, when they want.'' The despair isn't new, and it isn't isolated to one Indian reservation. But at Standing Rock, this fresh turmoil is churning up new efforts to halt the self-destruction. The nation's top-ranking Indian official has challenged the tribe to become a model for other reservations by taking needed drastic steps, including banning alcohol and institutionalizing alcoholics. If they do that, vows Kevin Gover, the Interior Department's new assistant secretary for Indian affairs, the Clinton administration will supply the money for social services and law enforcement now sorely lacking. That would be a start. Robert Jensen was active in traditional Sioux rituals, including the Sun Dance and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and he loved to box. But the boxing club disbanded and he was kicked out of school last year after a fistfight with a classmate. He started drinking heavily, his family says, and was constantly getting arrested for fighting. He talked about suicide with friends, says Dani Black Fox. ``He used to always ask whether we would go to his funeral if he died. I didn't take him seriously at first. I thought he was just kidding.'' Exactly two months after Robert's death, Dani's sister found Dani and a friend trying to hang themselves. DANI denies the stories going around that some teens had signed suicide pacts. She says most of the youths who have tried to kill themselves, including herself, were simply drunk. ``We do need something to do,'' she says. ``All anybody ever talks about at school is drinking.'' Besides booze, she says, teens find marijuana ``pretty easy to get,'' and for a cheap rush, kids take turns choking each other with their hands or rubber bands to induce brief blackouts. Rocky White Mountain, a local pastor, says he once sat for hours with a gun in his mouth after a business went bad in 1985. He believes suicide is a way troubled Indian youth try to get attention in a society where ``everything is basically out of control.'' The Indian Health Service in Washington, D.C., gets reports of suicide epidemics like the one plaguing Standing Rock at least once or twice a year. Gover, who became assistant interior secretary in November, is making clear that curbing suicides, crime and alcoholism is a priority. ``There is nothing more significant going on in your community than this crisis,'' Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe and a recovering alcoholic, told Standing Rock leaders recently. Tribal leaders are compiling a wish list of youth programs to submit for government funding. And in McLaughlin, non-Indians are leading a drive to raise money to convert a boarded-up movie theater into a restaurant, weight room and playhouse. Teens would work at the restaurant and learn how to run a business, says Judene Maxon, who owns the Jack and Jill store with her husband. The parking lot could be used as a hockey rink in the winter and basketball courts in the summer. The county already has promised to waive property taxes. ``It wasn't in vain,'' pastor White Mountain says of the suicides. ``God, I believe, is working some good out of it. There is a lot of focus on the youth.''