The Seventh Generation
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By KEVIN ABOUREZK / Lincoln Journal Star
In a place where hope seems to have been washed away in a torrent of beer, abuse and crime, some are looking to Pine Ridge’s youth to lead them to a better future.
PINE RIDGE, S.D. — The police cruiser — sirens screaming in the early dawn light — comes to a halt near the dueling couple. Oglala tribal police Officer Ken Franks is nearing the end of his prom night shift.
“This is when it starts really happening,” he says, “because people are really starting to sober up.”
As he gets out, he sees a teenage girl yelling at her boyfriend, who is behind the wheel of a blue Chevy Lumina. Her right eye is black, and the boy yells at her when he sees the police: “Look at what you’ve done. You caused all this.”
The two officers try to detain the boy, but he fights to get free. An officer sprays Mace in his face, and the boy shrieks.
“What are you doing?” the girl yells at the police. “He didn’t do nothing.”
The night didn’t start this way.
Earlier, at the high school, Principal Linda Earring spoke into a microphone to the gym full of seniors: “Memories will be built tonight.”
Where two roads meet
In this place, two roads meet.
Where they cross, it is holy.
The black road winds north from Whiteclay, Neb., to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
On any day, men and women drink Budweiser and tall cans of malt liquor on the steps of abandoned buildings and under store awnings in Whiteclay. When it’s warm, they walk the two-mile stretch of asphalt from Pine Ridge on the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s dry reservation.
They are the most visible signs of Whiteclay’s massive alcohol trade. In 2003 alone, alcohol peddlers in Whiteclay sold the equivalent of 4.5 million cans of beer, mostly to the Lakota.
So much of what’s going wrong here is blamed on beer.
Tribal activists blame alcohol sales for what they estimate is an 80 percent reservation alcoholism rate. They blame beer for teenagers lost to car accidents and for the cursed lives of Lakota children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. They blame beer for domestic abuse and for the wave of crime tribal police must fight each day.
But others, including some tribal members, blame the Lakota themselves.
The red road winds west from Wounded Knee.
Near a frozen creek there in 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry killed more than 300 Native men, women and children. Some say the massacre broke the spirit of the Lakota. Others say that spirit lives on in the growing movement of people getting sober and educated.
Those who walk this road today are mothers fighting to keep their children sober and educators working to give students alternatives to substance use. Many have relatives drinking in Whiteclay and struggle to remember each day that it is a disease they fight, not a family member.
Alcohol sales in Whiteclay have appalled social activists hundreds of miles away in Lincoln, who have fought for tougher enforcement in the town. Their efforts have had limited success, despite the help of a few politicians willing to introduce Whiteclay legislation.
But like the breeze on this wind-swept landscape, solutions are hard to grasp.
Some say education is the way to prevent the next generation from picking up the bad habits of its parents. Others say rehabilitation is the way to end the cycle of substance abuse that has crippled the Lakota.
Still others point to jobs as a way to give the Lakota hope. It is hopelessness, they say, that has driven so many to slowly drink themselves to death.
This is where the roads cross. Where good and evil, hope and despair, meet.
It is a place scarred by the massacre of Wounded Knee but infused with the spirit of great chiefs like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. A place forged by the legacy of Red Cloud.
It is a land of contradiction, as poor in resources as it is rich in culture and history.
In this place, two roads meet.
Where they cross, it is holy.
The prophecy
It’s half past 6 o’clock, and many tables are still empty. Robert Ten Fingers decides to start the prom banquet anyway.
He begins by welcoming those in attendance, then takes out a glass ball.
“I see a bright and radiant future in store for all of the graduates in this room tonight. Oh, but wait,” he says, “many more surprises will come into play.”
A common prom ritual, the reading of prophecies, holds special meaning for these students.
Many come from homes ravaged by alcoholism, abuse and poverty and are here tonight because someone cared about them. Someone fought to get them through high school, to keep them from joining so many of their peers on the reservation’s dark roads, roads that were the scene of 247 accidents involving kids in 2003.
The prophecies are mostly humorous: “April Brown Eyes, you have used the cell phone so much you got tired of carrying one around and just had one installed in your head, just to get better reception.”
The audience laughs.
Unspoken, another prophecy rests on the lips of those in the room.
The holy man Black Elk spoke of the Seventh Generation of Lakota who would come after him and mend the sacred hoop, the continuity of the Lakota people. Some believe the hoop was broken by the tragedy of Wounded Knee.
They believe the young people in this room are the Seventh Generation. Through them, the hope of the Lakota people will be renewed.
The idea of a Seventh Generation has become a rallying cry to improve the lives of Pine Ridge youth, who have a 31 percent high school dropout rate.
But for some, the idea of a savior generation is only a myth.
Later, the sweet smell of hair spray wafts through the high school gym as couples and friends kiss and hug. Parents snap pictures of the giddy teenagers.
Eric Clapton croons “Wonderful Tonight” as Robert and his date lead the prom procession through an archway of blue balloons.
The night explodes with camera flashes.
Border patrol
A black Dodge Durango and three police cruisers block the road to Whiteclay. As cars pull up, they are stopped and searched, their drivers asked for licenses. An officer walks a dog around the vehicles.
The search begins when the dog barks.
After just an hour, the roadblock has nearly shut down business in Whiteclay. Nearly.
Toward Pine Ridge, officers watch a car slowly weave back and forth across the center line as it rolls toward Whiteclay.
The officers know this car and its owner. But the heavy-drinking former bull rider they call Fast Eddy isn’t behind the wheel. He’s in the back seat as the car pulls up to the roadblock.
Officers pull the driver and his two passengers out of the dark blue Lincoln Town Car. They pin the resistant driver to the hood of a cruiser and handcuff him, then push him into the back of the car.
A borrowed suit
He almost didn’t go to prom.
Robert Ten Fingers had only a white dress shirt, socks and a pair of black leather shoes. The rest he borrowed.
This president of the Pine Ridge High School junior class. This Army Reserve cadet. This 18-year-old prom committee organizer.
Nearly forced to miss the night he helped create.
Less than a week before prom, he had checked himself into the Pine Ridge hospital, worried he might commit suicide. He had been suffering from severe depression after getting kicked out of his home.
Robert knew from the age of 13 he was gay. When he was 17, he told his mother.
She embraced the news at first. Then she rejected it, arguing he was just confused. He ran away.
His head filled with thoughts of suicide, he went to the hospital.
That ended one of the best and worst years of his life. A year in which he had become junior class president, run through the gym as a mascot in a feathered headdress and admitted to police he dropped a hand-written bomb threat on the floor of the boys’ bathroom.
He was nearly thrown out of school for the bomb threat, which he says was a call for help. It happened after one particularly difficult morning, a morning that came to represent the sum of all his teenage troubles.
“Imagine waking up one morning and having everyone yelling at you, going to school to be made fun of, beaten up and dragged through the halls by your heels,” he says.
Rumors of Robert and another boy at school had raised the ire of other male students. In vain, he had fought back.
He spent weeks in the hospital after the bomb threat that spring of 2003.
Now, here he was. At the center of it all. The refracted light from crystal balls splashing red, yellow and blue rays through a gym filled with balloons and Styrofoam castles. A fantasyland.
If only for a night.
Running from the law
The 42-degree air sends a chill down Officer Ken Franks’ spine. But the cold isn’t enough to deter the teenagers he is chasing from jumping into the creek.
Franks drove to this place a mile east of Pine Ridge after a caller alerted police of the party. Shortly after 3 a.m., he and four other officers pull the shivering teens from the water.
The eight youths stagger and begin stripping themselves of wet clothing as the officers put them, one by one, into the cruisers and take them to the juvenile detention center in Kyle.
An officer recognizes one as a star basketball player for the Pine Ridge Thorpes, named for Native Olympian and professional football player Jim Thorpe.
On the reservation, running from police is a game, Franks says. A badge of honor.
Here, kids always run.
A fiery end
The weekend ends in flames.
As the police cruiser pulls up, the officers realize the burning car is Fast Eddy’s.
They walk to the fiery scene to see if anyone is inside.
An older man emerges from a nearby restaurant. He wears an oxygen mask over his face that is connected to a tank he carries in his right hand.
He tells the police he heard an explosion and came outside to see Fast Eddy jumping near the engulfed car and yelling. Burn baby, burn!
The police find Fast Eddy two blocks away, hiding near an abandoned building. He tells them his real name — Eddy Addison. He and his friend, Dave Two Bulls, were sleeping in the 1990 Lincoln Town Car. Two Bulls had been smoking.
Firefighters from a Nebraska town down the road douse the fire.
Nearby, four empty beer cans lie crumpled, blackened from the flames.
The end of the road.
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