Suicide awareness walk focuses on need for change in attitudes

Montana State University's Sweetgrass Society, in collaboration with the Little River Institute and Northern's Healthy Lifestyle Advocates, hosted a suicide awareness walk Wednesday with nearly 100 people in attendance.

The event featured a pair of speakers from the Fort Belknap Indian Community who talked about their experiences with suicide and how it affected their lives and communities.

The first was Sweetgrass Society President Aryn Longknife-Jake, who talked about the people she's seen take their own lives in her community at Fort Belknap, as well as her own mental health struggles.

"I love my people and I don't want to see them hurting anymore," Longknife-Jake said.

She said she suffered domestic abuse from the age of 5 to 8 and was forced to be a surrogate mother to her infant sibling at a very early age. She said the situation was very traumatizing and was not something she felt like she could talk about for a very long time.

"I thought it was normal," she said, "I didn't know I was supposed to tell somebody. And our neighbors they let it happen. They knew their were kids in that household but they didn't say nothing for three years."

She said it all stopped one day when her family's abuser committed suicide.

She said it was a loss she did not mourn at the time, but she was young and this would only be the first in a long series of suicides she witnessed in her life.

Longknife-Jake said she was bullied through her time at school and, when she was 13, very few people talked to her, one of whom was 13-year-old boy named Hunter, a boy who would commit suicide before his next birthday.

She said she had a feeling before it happened that she should go talk to him, a feeling she didn't heed and after his loss she fell into a spiral of guilt.

"I carried that guilt around for years," she said.

Longknife-Jake said she now knows that it wasn't her fault, but when she heard the details of how he took his own life shortly after it happened it only made things worse and made for an extremely difficult situation.

Many years later, in 2019, four people on the reservation committed suicide within weeks of each other, and she knew all of them.

Fort Belknap declared a state of emergency that summer.

The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services reports that Montana has been in the top five states in the U.S. for high suicide rates for the last 30 years.

Longknife-Jake said the Native-American community has a higher suicide rate than virtually any other demographic in the U.S., partially because of generational trauma, a result of decades of othering, dehumanization, and cultural erasure that has resulted in brining many Native languages to the brink of extinction.

She said this history results in a cultural disconnect that can cause extreme emotional turmoil for people in her community over their identity.

"Who am I? Where do I come from?" she asked.

She also said a lack of Native-American therapists makes it difficult to talk about in inter-generational trauma so many feel, because people who haven't experienced it just aren't going to understand it.

She said her community also faces a great deal of problems like poverty and alcoholism, but even when those problems are acknowledged they are often used to create negative stereotypes about her people as "alcoholics" instead of people with problems, "dirty" instead of people suffering from poverty.

These conditions combined with the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse in Native-American communities and the fact that it is still considered a taboo subject to talk about by so many creates an environment where addressing mental health is very difficult.

Longknife-Jake said the lack of funding for mental health treatment in communities like hers makes things worse as well.

She said having a mental health problem is not a choice people make, and the stigma around seeking help must be combated.

Longknife-Jake said despite the circumstances, steps can be taken as individuals and as a community to make things better.

She said people should try to find a balance between taking care of their mind, body, emotions, and spirit by eating right, exercising and pushing away negative emotional influences.

She said people need to be kinder to each other and acknowledge that they cannot know where other people are emotionally.

"Sometimes I'll be walking around, and I won't even hear people talking to me because I'm up here," she said pointing to her head.

Longknife-Jake said people in her community can no longer afford to be afraid of talking about these issues if they want to address the problem of suicide and break the generational cycle of violence and trauma.

Terry Brockie of the Aaniiih Tribe, also from Fort Belknap, spoke after Longknife-Jake, who he praised for her ability to talk about these heavy subjects from the heart.

Brockie said life is hard at the best of times, especially for Native-Americans, but the word in his language for difficult can also mean brave, and that is the ultimate virtue of Native Americans.

He said he knew the boys in Fort Belknap who took their own lives two years ago as well, and it had a deep impact on the community and himself.

"Those four boys she talked about, I buried two of them," he said.

He said his own grandfather experienced first-hand the cultural erasure inflicted by colonizers that Longknife-Jake talked about when he was taken from his parents to a boarding school in Kansas at the age of 5 and was subjected to six years of indoctrination into a culture that was forced upon him.

He agreed with Longknife-Jake that this erasure has left a huge scar on Native-Americans, but the worst of it is over, and their culture still survives, a bit different than it was centuries ago, but no less resilient.

Brockie said it is OK for people in the community to not know their native language and historic cultural practices, that their lack of knowledge does not make them lesser, but learning about that culture can be very helpful in finding emotional balance and a sense of community.

He said language especially can be used to express helpful ideas that can't be articulated in quite the same way in English and may help people deal with their emotions in different ways.

He said, as a man with a Native-American father and a white mother, he understands it can be difficult to know where one stands culturally, and that confusion is natural and nothing to be ashamed of.

"It's okay to not know what it means to be an Indian sometimes," he said.

Brockie said Longknife-Jake is right when she said the community can no longer afford to be afraid to talk about these issues, that their people need to stand tall and be willing to take a risk if it means things could get better.

He said people need to understand that their words can have a profound impact on others, not just negatively but positively as well.

He said people never know when asking someone how they are doing or praising them when they deserve it may heal emotional wounds they didn't know were there, and this is true of all people, not just of Native-Americans.

He said all of Montana is facing the problem of high suicide rates and the people of the state need to work together.

"We're all relatives," he said.

After the group heard the speakers, Longknife-Jake sang a song called "Don't Cry," a piece of music she has always used for meditation.

The group then proceeded outside and walked to Tilleman Field, planting signs in the ground with the names of the the people they've lost to suicide and praying for them. The group then played the traditional game of double ball.

During the event an award was given the Little River Institute Director and Sweetgrass Society Co-Advisor Erica McKeon-Hanson, one of the event's organizers, for her work at Northern in her capacity as an educator and beyond, as well as the enormous positive effects she's had on students.

McKeon-Hanson said she was not expecting to receive the award and she that she wouldn't change anything about the last 20 years and how so many students have touched her life.

"This is one of the greatest honors of my life," she said.

In an email this morning, McKeon-Hanson said the attendance of the event was greatly appreciated.

"We really didn't have any expectations in terms of turnout," she said. "With that being said, we were very humbled by the amount of campus and community support for this event. As an advisor of the Sweetgrass Society, I was incredibly proud of the students who identified this topic as important to our community and worked so hard to raise awareness and provide a forum for support."

Longknife-Jake said McKeon-Hanson had a profound effect on her as a student.

"This lady changed my life," she said. "She saw things in me that I forgot I had."