* * *
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Jacquie found a seat in the back of the main ballroom. There was an old Indian guy in a baseball cap who had one hand up like he was praying, while the other flicked water out of a water bottle at the crowd. She’d never seen anything like it before.
Jacquie’s eyes wandered the room. She studied the Native decor. The room was big, with high ceilings and massive chandeliers, each one of which consisted of a grouping of eight flame-shaped lightbulbs surrounded by a giant band of corrugated metal with cutouts of tribal patterns, creating tribal-patterned shadows on the walls—multiple Kokopellis, zigzag lines and spirals, all up there at the top of the room, where the paint was the brownish red of dried blood. The carpets were crowded with winding lines and variegated geometric shapes—like every casino or movie-theater carpet.
She looked around at the crowd. There were probably two hundred or so people, all of them sitting at circular tables with glasses of water and little paper plates stacked with fruit and Danishes. Jacquie recognized the conference types. Most of them were old Indian women. Next came old white women. Then old Indian men. There were no young people to be seen. Everyone she saw seemed either too serious or not serious enough. These were career people, more driven by concern about keeping their jobs, about the funders and grant requirements, than by the need to help Indian families. Jacquie was no different. She knew it and hated this fact.
The first speaker, a man who looked like he might be more comfortable on a street corner than at a conference, approached the podium. You didn’t often see men like him standing on a stage. He wore Jordans and an Adidas tracksuit. He had an unrecognizable faded tattoo above his left ear that went up to the crown of his bald head—it could have been cracks, or webs, or a half crown of thorns. Every few seconds he opened his mouth in an oval shape and wiped the outside of it with his thumb and forefinger, as if there was excess saliva there, or as if, in the wiping, he was assuring himself he wouldn’t spit and look sloppy.
He stepped up to the mic. He spent a long, uncomfortable minute surveying the crowd. “I see a lotta Indian people out there. That makes me feel good. About twenty years ago I went to a conference like this, and it was just a sea of white faces. I came as a youth. It was my first time on a plane and the first time I was away from Phoenix for more than a few days. I’d been forced into a program as part of a plea bargain I took to stay outta juvie. That program ended up being featured at a conference in D.C.—a national highlight. They chose me and a few other youth not based on our leadership skills or because of our commitment to the cause, or because of our participation, but because we were the most at-risk. Of course all we had to do was sit on the stage, listen to youth success stories and to our youth services staff talk about how great our programming was. But while I was on that trip my little brother, Harold, found a gun I kept in my closet. He shot himself between the eyes with that gun. He was fourteen,” the guy said and coughed off-mic. Jacquie shifted in her chair.
“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.”