Alcohol's legacy handed down
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BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. — It's almost dark. A small, thin boy walks quickly up a road.
He holds a paper plate of pink cake and chocolate-chip ice cream that look like they'll slide off any second. He's smiling. The Disney party for his 1-year-old cousin was fun. He hugged her.
He loves babies. He loves his cousins. He loves birthdays.
At his own birthday party, he fell into his cake, face-first. Everybody laughed. He loves making people happy. Especially his mom. She makes him happy.
Last week at the Alco store in Gordon, she bought him a red remote-control car just because he wanted it. Sometimes, when he's scared, she lets him curl up beside her at night instead of making him sleep on the top bunk in their bedroom.
"Baby," she calls him, and it makes him sort of mad — he tells her he's almost 13 years old.
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She got drunk most every weekend her baby was in her womb. She'd leave the older kids with Grandma and go party with friends. The day of his birth came six weeks too soon. He was smaller than other babies born six weeks early — 2 pounds, 10 ounces.
"I could hold him just like this," Geraldine White Dress says, cupping her hands together over the kitchen table. "It was sad. They flew him to Rapid (City). He couldn't come home until he was
5 pounds.
"I had to learn all kinds of things, like for his apnea I had to learn how to work the machines."
She's done making skillet bread for dinner. It's piled on a plate, covered with a dish towel. She's frying pork now. The smell fills the two-bedroom split-level, shared by eight people.
Sorry the house is cold, she says. Nobody has the $100 to fill the propane tank.
Other than her sisters, she says, she never really talks about Carl's condition with anyone. She'd like to forget he has it, but she faces it every day.
He didn't look like other babies. Still doesn't. He's smaller than kids his age, slower in school. His eyes are smaller. He doesn't see well. His hearing isn't that good, either.
She's never told him he has fetal alcohol syndrome. He just knows he gets money each month — $564 — because he's a special kid.
"He's really lovable. He always gives us hugs."
He loves talking with other kids, but some of them like to fight him. They tease him. He gets in trouble. He can't control his behavior.
Her drinking affected his brain that way.
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According to the South Dakota Department of Health, alcohol consumption by pregnant women in Shannon County, home of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is about 27 times greater than the national average.
The exact number of kids on the reservation whose brains have been damaged by their mothers' drinking is hard to pin down, says Neva Zephier, coordinator of programs on fetal alcohol syndrome and sudden infant death syndrome for the Aberdeen Area Tribal Chairman's Health Board.
Many of the mothers deny they drank in pregnancy. Many don't let their kids get tested. Some of the lesser effects won't show up until kids are in the late elementary-school years.
"They don't want to tell you," Neva says. "They'll fight you. They'll deny it. They can't admit it's their fault they were drinking while pregnant."
The number of kids with learning disabilities may be one indicator of the scope of the problem here. On the reservation, about 25 percent of kids have learning disabilities. In the Lincoln Public Schools system, 5.72 percent of kids do.
Fetal alcohol syndrome kids often have normal intelligence. But because of frontal lobe damage, they usually lack the ability to problem solve and tell right from wrong. They are impulsive and easily manipulated. They are targets for sex abuse. They are followers.
Gangs are a growing problem here, and Neva and others say many kids in the gangs have fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effects, a term for those with mild to moderate symptoms of FAS.
Many such kids end up in trouble with the law. Many end up alcoholics.
"They are born drunk," Neva says. "So it's in their blood."
And girls with FAS and FAE, she says, are more likely to grow into moms who drink while pregnant.
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Geraldine White Dress knew better than to drink when she was pregnant.
"I tried not to. But sometimes it's hard."
She drank because she was depressed. She drank because she'd already lost two babies. An 18-month-old girl died in a car wreck just down on the main road. She was sitting on Geraldine's lap in the front seat.
A baby boy died the year before Carl was born. She woke up one morning. He was in bed with her. They told her it was SIDS.
Geraldine is 42. Now she's the grandma everyone dumps the babies off with, she jokes.
Kids and grandkids gather around the table, drawn by the smells of supper.
Carl is back from the birthday party. He runs up the front stairs. They sit together on the couch, beside a big drawing of a Native mother holding a baby.
He tells her about the party.
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There's a building down the hill. It's painted bright blue.
It's an office of Northern Plains Healthy Start, a federally funded program.
Inside, two people passionate about preventing fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effects on the reservation work.
Frederick and Gail Cedar Face see the tide beginning to turn.
They feel the mothers in the program, especially teen mothers, are getting the message that they can't drink while pregnant and must get prenatal care.
Education has been the key: getting into schools, getting into homes of pregnant women, coming out with brochures that are easy to read.
Despite what many people may think, the Cedar Faces say, teens are not the most likely group on the reservation to drink while pregnant. Schools are getting the message out. And pregnant teens often live under the protection and guidance of a grandmother who keeps them from drinking.
The most likely to drink are older moms, women like Geraldine White Dress.
That's the harder ground to win, the Cedar Faces say, because their drinking isn't rooted in ignorance so much as it is in depression, hopelessness, living with other people who drink.
These women often have no car or truck to get to the doctor.
"The biggest problem," Gail Cedar Face says, "is that you can easily walk to a bootlegger almost anywhere on the rez."
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He runs into the bedroom to get something.
There's a big bang.
Geraldine looks down the hallway to find Carl on the floor. He's fallen trying to get up the ladder to the top bunk. He laughs. Everyone laughs.
Soon, a red remote-control car is zooming down the hallway and circling her feet.
It wasn't his birthday or anything, she says. She couldn't really afford it.
She just couldn't tell him no.
"It still makes me feel bad that I drank with him. So I guess I baby him a lot."
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