As more and more people get sober on Pine Ridge, they are helping others walk the "Red Road" and inspiring this generation of young Lakota to turn the tide.

BY KEVIN ABOUREZK | Lincoln Journal Star

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — He looks tired in his orange jumpsuit. His right hand is bandaged. He complains about the food.

“They don’t give us enough,” Vine Hayez says. “We don’t get sodas or candy bars.”

It’s May 2004, and the 29-year-old has been in the Oglala Sioux tribal jail for 30 days.

He was drinking when he got busted. His wounded right hand is the only reminder of the drunken brawl that landed him here.

It’s his 10th visit to the jail in a year.

It won’t be his last.

To Ruth Cedar Face, Hayez is an unshika, or pitiful, person.

The unshika people walk the streets of Whiteclay, begging for coins to buy beer. They die on dark roads in car wrecks and beat their wives, blinded by rage and too much booze.

If they are lucky, they end up on her doorstep.

As treatment coordinator for Anpetu Luta Otipi (Living in a Red Day), the 37-year-old Lakota woman sees her people’s most desperate cases. Cedar Face, who grew up on the reservation, estimates as much as 70 percent of people on the reservation use either alcohol or drugs.

“One hundred percent of the people on the reservation are affected by alcohol,” she said.

But the news isn’t all bad.

Terryl Blue-White Eyes, director of Anpetu Luta Otipi, the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s only treatment center, sees the culture of drinking changing on the reservation, for the better.

She sees it in the growing number of people getting sober, she said. And they, in turn, are teaching their children not to drink or use drugs.

This sobriety movement has been decades-long in the making, fueled each year by more people learning the tools to fight alcoholism, she said. Those tools are often the very ceremonies and cultural beliefs the Lakota have carried with them for centuries.

Those who find sobriety often grow into the tribe’s strongest leaders, encouraging others to follow their example, she said.

They are people like Lauren “Big Bat” Pourier, owner of the popular Pine Ridge hangout, Big Bat’s convenience store. The sprawling gas and grocery stop sits at the reservation’s busiest intersection, across from the tribe’s headquarters.

Turned down five times for loans, the 52-year-old Lakota finally got the financing he needed to start the store 16 years ago. Today, he employs nearly 70 people at the Pine Ridge store and at three more he’s built in the area.

His success, he said, started 24 years ago when he put down the bottle.

“My foundation is sobriety,” he said sitting at a booth in his Pine Ridge store. “It makes you think a lot clearer.”

Pourier estimates about 80 percent of people on the reservation are addicted to alcohol. When considering such an astounding figure, he said, one must also consider what it takes for those who are sober to keep their communities functioning.

“It’s that 20 percent holding that 80 percent up, and it’s hard work.”

Nearly every two weeks, when the tribe — the reservation’s largest employer — sends paychecks to its hundreds of employees, Pourier finds his business in crisis.

Employees who decide to skip work in favor of drinking force him to hire new people constantly, he said.

And those who drink tend to act from their worst emotions — fear and jealousy. Pourier has seen his own relatives try to pull him down out of jealousy, he said.

“We have to become modern-day warriors, and we have to be straight to do that,” he said.

With each passing winter, more Lakota are learning what it means to be modern-day warriors.

When Blue-White Eyes started with Anpetu Luta Otipi 18 years ago, nearly all of her clients were ordered to be there by a court. Today, many check themselves in, she said.

Of the 694 people the center served in 2003, 435 were self-referrals. It’s a promising sign. Those who check themselves in tend to be more successful, she said.

“You’ve got to live here to see the difference in the community,” she said.

Twenty years ago, few sober individuals could be found on the reservation. It’s now common to find entire families trying to stay straight, she said. Where it was once not unusual to see drunken people at public events, they have become a rarity at such places as basketball games and powwows.

Blue-White Eyes credits increased public awareness of the dangers of alcohol use, a result of education in schools and through such tribal media outlets as KILI radio, she said.

Rather than simply telling people to drink in moderation, the message is this: Lakota aren’t able to drink socially, so please don’t try.

“We’re either drinking or we’re sober,” she said. “There is no social drinking.”

Take Gene Giago.

He shares his story sitting on bleachers in the Pine Ridge High School gymnasium, where his 19-year-old daughter practices for the next day’s graduation ceremony.

After many years of heavy drinking, the 50-year-old hospital property manager quit 26 years ago. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma and had gone to a Lakota medicine man to heal him.

The medicine man cured him of his disease, he says, as well as his desire to drink.

He tells his five children his story in the hopes it will inspire them to stay sober.

“Hopefully, this next generation will carry it on with their children.”

The next day, his daughter, Jennifer, joins a procession of seniors dressed in red robes and caps.

It hasn’t been easy guiding his children through the maze of pitfalls that await teenagers on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

But, for the third time, he has done it.

“I’m real proud of my kids,” he says. “I’m just sad to see my daughter go. I’m sad and happy at the same time.”

Like Giago, other Lakota are finding strength in their traditional ceremonies and cultural beliefs.

At Anpetu Luta Otipi, the staff uses the Lakota inipi, or sweat lodge, to aid in the recovery of their clients.

The center started as a 12-step program based on Alcoholics Anonymous, but the staff eventually realized traditional ceremonies and beliefs were more effective, said Blue-White Eyes.

Combined with ceremonies, teaching clients such Lakota values as courage, wisdom and generosity gives them a sense of identity and community. They begin to see themselves as the heirs of their people’s warrior legacy, she said.

“Our Indian issues don’t have white answers,” she said. “If we’re going to get well and find solutions, we’re going to find them in our Indian ways.”

In a valley below Anpetu Luta Otipi’s offices, a group of clients prepares an inipi.

The seven men stand near a fire in front of the lodge. Two lean on the pitchforks they use to feed logs to the fire.

Vine Hayez is among them.

The now 30-year-old who spent much of the previous summer behind bars came to the program last fall after being arrested on a slew of charges, including assault and driving while intoxicated.

“I was trying to fill a void in myself,” he says of his past behavior. “I needed a family.”

In two days, he will leave the family he’s found here, a graduate of a 30-day in-patient program.

He’s always been spiritual and says he plans to continue taking part in Lakota religious ceremonies once he leaves. He also plans to spend more time with his four children, whom he often ignored in favor of drinking.

He holds his head high now when he speaks. He doesn’t complain.

His right hand is no longer bandaged, and he uses it to carry rocks into the sweat lodge. Around his neck, he wears a brown leather pouch containing a spirit rock he found nearby.

It will protect him, he says. It will help him stay sober.

“It’s going to help me walk the Red Road.”