1
The Lost Girl
Tell me a fact and I will learn
Tell me a truth and I will believe
Tell me a story and I will carry it in my heart forever!
—INDIAN PROVERB
I seldom logged on to my Facebook account. For some reason, though—maybe the same angels at work who’d put the Tamara story in front of me in the first place—I did on March 15, 2016, and found six months’ worth of friend requests and messages. One leaped out at me. It was from someone named Tamara. I immediately wondered whether this could be a message from the young girl I had met at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation nearly three decades ago.
I responded by asking if by any chance she was from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and I asked her the name of her grandfather. She replied that she was from that reservation and gave me the name of her grandfather. That is when I knew: This was the young girl in the photograph!
What I would learn next stunned me.
Decades after the beating she had suffered in the foster home, Tamara was thirty-three years old and homeless in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She struggled with nightmares and debilitating anxiety.
“I really don’t have much memory of my youth,” she would later tell me. “Most of it is a blank. My mind seems to have found a way to black out most of the bad things that happened.” As a result, the source of her psychic scars remained a mystery. “Why am I sick and homeless?” she wondered. “Why do I have PTSD? What could have happened to me?” She had fleeting visions of a dark room with a crib off to one side. Musty smells.
So she went to the library and used a computer to search for any information that might help her understand her PTSD and what might have happened to her as a young girl.
Her Google search produced a surprising result: She discovered a speech I had given when I was a U.S. senator. In it, I described the serious challenges Native American youth faced with the poverty and violence on some reservations, and while describing those conditions, I also told a story of the abuse and horrific beating a young child named Tamara had suffered in a foster home on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation years ago. The account read to her like it was a horror story about someone else. She couldn’t recall any of it.
That discovery is what prompted her to contact me to find out more. She also thanked me for using her story as an example, hoping her experience would help other Native American children get better care.
I opened my desk drawer and looked again at that yellowed newsprint and that photograph, the tear on her cheek. It had been twenty-seven years. She was thirty-three now. Suddenly, she was real again. She had survived. But how?
As we continued to correspond, Tamara described the road she had traveled during those nearly three decades. A broken, twisted road.
* * *
For many years, Tamara was homeless, on the streets, enduring bitter cold in the winter and hunger year-round. She made herself invisible, a slight girl looking for food and refuge. Most people looked away anyway.
“When I was homeless in Minneapolis, some of the time, I would sleep under a bridge,” she remembered. Other nights it was in the park or, in the bitterest cold weather, huddled in handicapped (therefore larger) port-a-potties.
“You would meet a lot of different people,” she said. “All of them in the same boat. Homeless. I made a few friends there who would protect me.”
What else got her through? Pride. Pride and resilience. She had difficulty finding or keeping a job because of her PTSD. At one point, she worked briefly cleaning bathrooms in nightclubs. At another point, she worked a couple of summer months for a carnival helping put up and take down the rides. For two years, she lived on one meal a day. “I could never ask people for money,” she said. “I was too proud. I could never sit on a corner and hold up a sign.”
Tamara’s story could be the story of a hundred or a thousand or five thousand young boys and girls who are the children of the First Americans—homeless, in a way, from the start.
For a myriad of reasons, many of those who live on the Indian reservations have been left behind. The promises offered the First Americans in treaties and agreements were swiftly broken. As broken as the bones and the heart and soul of this young girl. Unemployment, poverty, rape and child abuse, rampant alcoholism, and teen suicides are part of everyday life—and death—on too many reservations, the kind of thing you would expect to see in a third-world country. But in America?
The lengthy trail of broken promises that were made to Native Americans has led to the burdens and challenges faced by too many Native American communities.
Yes, those living on the reservations are responsible for their own actions, but the external pressures and broken promises that have visited the reservations bear much of the responsibility.
Tamara didn’t have anything resembling a normal homelife. For much of her young life, she was shuttled between grandparents and an occasional aunt and uncle. “My parents were alcoholics,” she said. “They lost custody of their children because of child neglect stemming from their alcoholism. But there were times when we were sent back to our home only to be taken away again when things became intolerable.
“Sometimes when we were taken away from our home, it was through the legal system. Other times, it was my grandparents who would see that things were bad in our house, and they would just come and get us and take us away to live with them. That cycle continued through the years.
“Living in the house with my mother was very hard. She constantly berated me and attacked me for the least little thing. It seems awful to say, but while I have only limited memories of my childhood, I have no fond memories at all of my on-again/off-again life at home with my parents.
“My grandparents were a godsend for me. They were the only ones who seemed to care what happened to us.
“One of the few positive memories I have of my childhood that makes me smile is a time when I was eight or nine years old and my grandmother would make a dance costume for me and I would go with them to a powwow and dance with the other fancy shawl dancers. I know my grandma didn’t have much material with which to make a dress for the dance, but she used whatever materials she had, and when she finished, to me it looked like the most beautiful dress I had ever seen. I went to the powwow in Wakpala with my two other sisters, and I was happy and so proud to be able to dance with the other kids at the powwow.
“It wasn’t easy for my grandparents to take us in and provide for us. They never had very much, but they found a way to make it work. They got food from the government commodity program, and they would stretch that through the week. My grandmother would also recycle hand-me-down clothes through the cousins in our family. I wore mostly hand-me-down clothes, and it wasn’t unusual to see a younger niece wear a shirt I had worn five years ago.
“I struggled in school because of my PTSD and other problems I suffered because of my injuries, but I graduated from eighth grade at the Pierre Indian Learning Center. I had difficulties completing regular high school, so I enrolled in the Boxelder Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center in South Dakota and graduated from high school while there.”
The description Tamara offers of her life as an adolescent on the Indian reservation is not unique or uncommon. There are a number of Indian reservations where the relentless poverty impacts nearly every other aspect of daily living. It’s one thing to describe it and quite another thing to live it.
“I ran away from home as a teenager a number of times. On one of those occasions, I was sent to a Fort Yates group home for punishment. When I was released from the group home, I continued an aimless existence, trying to resolve my health issues and trying to find a place to live that had some stability. But a stable, predicable life seemed to be unattainable for me. I was alone a lot, struggling with my emotional health.
“At age twenty, I enrolled in the Job Corps program in South Dakota and studied business technology. But the PTSD that I suffered from made both studying and working very difficult for me. I did graduate from the Job Corps program but was not able to find a job, given my health difficulties.
“I became a wanderer from Timber Lake, South Dakota, to Valley City, North Dakota, to Rapid City, South Dakota, to Wakpala, Standing Rock, and more places in between. I knew I had PTSD that affected much of what I did, and I was struggling to find a purpose to my life.”
The fate of too many young children on Indian reservations is often well beyond their ability to alter or influence the direction of their life.
For Tamara, the severe beating she had suffered early in her life and the brutal treatment she said she had faced at the hands of her mother put her on a path that made for a very difficult recovery.
The Relentless Challenge of Poverty
Those circumstances of poverty, hunger, crime, all things that subjected Tamara to a very difficult life, should have the rest of our country hanging its head in shame. We have visited upon the American Indian population a horrible disservice. They have been lied to, cheated, and robbed with little more than broken treaties to show for it. The relentless poverty, the violence, and other difficulties they experience rest very close to the front door of all of us. There are some success stories of Indian communities that have escaped much of the poverty and related problems, but far too many reservations and communities have been profoundly affected.
If you need specifics, take, for example, a snapshot of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a reservation with major challenges. Unemployment hovers around 80 percent (or higher) with a median income of $4,000. (No, the editors haven’t missed a zero. Four thousand.) The median household income in America in 2016 was $55,775.
Alcoholism is pandemic on Pine Ridge. Many babies suffer fetal alcohol syndrome, and the infant mortality rate is five times the national average. (Tamara is convinced that her mother’s chronic drinking damaged her.) All this despite the fact that the sale and consumption of alcohol is prohibited by tribal law. Liquor stores just one mile beyond the border of the reservation in Nebraska do a booming business.
Teen suicide there is four times the national average. Life expectancy is forty-eight years for men on the Pine Ridge Reservation and fifty-two for women, lower only than that of Haiti. The school dropout rate is over 70 percent, while teacher turnover is eight times that of the national average. Gangs and gang violence permeate the shadows. Law enforcement is outmanned and underfunded.
And so it goes on too many reservations across America. The poverty bleeds out beyond the borders, too, in cases like Tamara’s. Each day, good people and good families wage a losing battle against the tide of despair, crime, and dysfunction.
* * *
It’s important to point out that not all reservations have the same challenges as Pine Ridge. Experiences differ in other parts of the country, and they differ in some state-recognized tribes and urban Indian communities as well.
But the challenges confronting Pine Ridge are too common, especially in many tribes in the northern plains. These conditions are the symptoms. The disease itself is complex, and its origin goes back hundreds of years.
You can’t look at our history and view the concept of Manifest Destiny as anything but a license for genocide. It’s an ancient tactic: Dehumanize your enemy to ease the consciences of those charged with stealing the land and eradicating its inhabitants. Even today, the ignorant, pervasive racism from those who claim “just another drunk Indian” makes it easier to ignore something within our own borders that would have us talking about human rights in another country.
Americans believe this country has most often been a force for good in this world.
Imperfect and clumsy, misguided at times, but the character of this nation is one of ideals, fairness, freedom, and justice for all.
Justice! Ultimately, this is a story—and a test—about social justice for the original Americans. We have to ask ourselves how we can purport to be an international beacon of freedom and justice when at home we have not really provided the First Americans with a seat at the table in our society.
If you can assign a soul to a nation, then the two great blots on the soul of the United States of America are slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. We can study the past and learn from it, but we can only navigate the future. Granted, there has been progress, but not enough. We know well the civil rights struggles, advances, and setbacks of black Americans, and that is still a work in progress, painful and slow, but inching forward.
But the plight of American Indians, the First Americans, has been ignored, at best an afterthought.
Cardinal Roger Mahony said, “Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members—the last, the least, the littlest.”
When we consider those words, it’s hard to argue that Native Americans have not suffered more grievously over the course of American history than any other people.
If you can someday, walk the shores of the Missouri River, where Mandan Indian earth lodges once dotted the hills overlooking the river, the aquatic highway that brought explorers and traders—and smallpox. Imagine the thriving agrarian society that once existed here.
Science tells us we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction in half a billion years; this one, if not induced by mankind, has certainly been accelerated by it. We are seemingly a species bent on suicide, and most at risk are the indigenous peoples who see themselves as the spiritual caretakers of the planet. The irony is evident.
There are 562 federally recognized Indian tribes in America. The American Indian Wars ended long ago, but the carnage never stopped. Today, it’s less a case of malice than neglect, but the intent matters less than the reality, which is that America’s First People remain America’s Forgotten People. This speaks to who we are as a nation.
Our people need our help. And in the end, for us there will be, if not absolution, maybe forgiveness, a positive turn of the karmic wheel. Maybe we are also saving ourselves.
Imagine your own child in that photograph of Tamara. Study that tear. It’s like a crystal ball, but cloudy, filled with unknowns. Tamara’s future was uncertain, like that of hundreds of other children with horrific stories of their own.
Funny thing about change. We imagine great marches and movements, but it always starts with an idea, a mission. We touch people every day, and when we do so in a positive manner, it reverberates like rings from a pebble in a pond, one person to the next, one generation to another. The hope is Tamara’s story will touch you.
Tamara is the pebble. This book is the ripple in the pond.
Introduction
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.
—CHIEF SEATTLE
Often we don’t choose our journey; the journey chooses us.
That’s how this book began.
In 1990, I was reading The Bismarck Tribune at my desk in my U.S. congressional office in Washington, D.C. The front page included a story headlined: FOSTER HOME CHILDREN BEATEN—AND NOBODY’S HELPING. It was about a girl named Tamara from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation who had been so horrifically beaten in a foster home when she was two, that, three years later, she was in full emotional retreat. According to her grandfather, she spent her time huddling in the shadows, singing television jingles as if they were hymns that might bring her into the light.
The article posed the question, “Are Indian children being seized from their parents by Bureau of Indian Affairs social workers and practically sold into servitude as a way for the social workers’ acquaintances to collect a foster care paycheck?” With rampant unemployment on the Indian reservation, had children become a government-sanctioned commodity?
The story was captivating. The questions were very important to me as a member of Congress from North Dakota, which has a large Native American population. But what captivated me was the large color picture that accompanied the story.
There she was, Tamara, a beautiful five-year-old with a short bowl haircut, hands clasped as if in prayer, glancing warily at the camera, a single tear running down her cheek, caught in limbo, certainly in darkness, facing an uncertain future. And so it is with too many children on the reservation.
That tear. It’s not possible to see that photograph without it being seared into your consciousness. Oh, life can change you in an instant, all right. Tamara’s life had been forever altered. So had mine.
According to the story, “a Bureau of Indian Affairs Social Services document shows that Tamara’s mother had her five children taken from her by court order after accusations of child neglect.” At Tamara’s foster home, safety was an illusion. She could have died.
During what was described as a drunken party at that home, she suffered massive injuries. Her leg, arm, and nose were broken, and some of her hair was pulled out at the roots. She lay suffering alone in a dark room for several days before social services officials arrived at the home and demanded to see her.
The Tribune story described how the social services representative finally rescued Tamara: “As a foster child, Tamara was enrolled in the Fort Yates infant development program. Everything was fine at first. But then the case manager was denied access to the foster home for two weeks. Finally, she went to the foster home with two other social workers. They heard a radio, but nobody answered the door. After repeated knocking, they were finally let into the house.
“At first the foster family wouldn’t let the social workers into the bedroom where Tamara was laying. They said she had chicken pox. ‘They let us see Tamara after about fifteen minutes,’ the case manager said. ‘She was bruised all over. Her leg was wrapped in an Ace bandage. Something was wrong with her arm … her toes were swollen.’
“‘I told them we would have to take her to the Fort Yates hospital … It seemed like she’d shut down. You’d look into her eyes and it was like she wasn’t there.’”
Her grandfather was a former tribal policeman who, according to the newspaper story, was attempting to take legal action against the Bureau of Indian Affairs for what had been done to his grandchildren.
The news story reported when the children were removed from their home because of child neglect, they were placed in a foster home in the household of an extended family member.
According to the story, the two older children ran away from the foster home. One of them was caught and locked in a basement room with a Doberman pinscher.
Tamara’s grandfather, who was still reeling over the loss of another five grandchildren in a fire, said, “There was a crime that occurred here. Human beings were abused. But nothing was done.”
Just another day in a forgotten corner of America?
It was impossible for me to read the story, look at the photo, and then set it aside. The photo of Tamara gnawed at me. It held great power.
Even before I read that story, I had long known of the danger that some foster homes on Indian reservations held for some children. Yes, I know many were loving homes that served the needs of the children in a safe and competent manner, but there were also others that failed. Horribly.
I had worked over many years in Congress to help Indian tribes find the resources to address serious problems, including the issue of safeguarding Indian children who were placed in foster care. It hadn’t been enough. It certainly wasn’t enough to offer safety to a two-year-old child whose serious injuries would plague her for the rest of her life.
Enraged, I suppose, would be the best description of my emotions as I read the story over and over again, riveted for minutes at a time by the sad photograph. I was determined to find out how this could have happened and how we could stop it from happening in the future.
A child was severely beaten, and no one was charged for committing the crime. Someone had to answer for this.
The very next weekend after reading the newspaper story, I traveled to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to meet with Tamara and her grandfather. She was sitting on his lap staring at the floor. She didn’t speak and didn’t even seem to notice I was in the room.
Then I met with tribal officials and social services workers on the reservation. I learned that the child welfare system on the reservation had caseworkers assigned to an absurd number of child welfare cases. They were ridiculously understaffed and could not possibly assure the safety of all the kids they were responsible for placing in foster homes.
So I launched an inquiry. I demanded answers. But there were no good ones, just lame excuses and finger-pointing all around.
Following my visit to the Indian reservation, I kept in touch with Tamara and sent her notes along with Christmas gifts over the next couple of years. But when her grandfather died, I lost track of her. I inquired about her from time to time when I would travel to the Indian reservation for my work as a congressman and then a senator from North Dakota, but no one seemed to know what had become of the young girl. She just seemed to disappear.
I kept the Tribune story and the photograph of Tamara in my desk drawer for nearly three decades. I would come across it from time to time while going through the desk drawer, and I wondered what became of that little girl whose life had begun with such tragedy.
Then, twenty-seven years later, I got a message from the most surprising direction and learned the rest of the amazing story.
* * *
Tamara’s journey is about how she’s dealt with adversity. It is also a clear-eyed account of the circumstances, issues, and conditions she and too many other Native American youth face every day, a microcosm of the inequities and shortcomings of this great country that extend far beyond Indian reservations. Hers—and theirs—is not an easy story, but it is not without hope.
It’s important to understand that tribal governments, parents, teachers, and many others important in the lives of young Native Americans have made and continue to make valiant efforts to effect positive change. This book only includes a fraction of those stories. But it is an undeniable fact that despite those efforts, too many First Americans have been left behind. And that’s especially true of Native American youth, many of whom have been caught up in a cycle of despair. A dull ache permeates the souls of many of these young Americans. And the tragedy of teen suicide on Indian reservations is one manifestation of those conditions.
One tragedy of our times is the unending headlines in our country about school shootings. Yet in this book, you will hear from a teacher who lost thirteen of her Native American students to suicide in eight years. There were no headlines about that.
This book tells the story of one young Indian child named Tamara, but it also describes, without blinders, the horrible injustice that American Indians have faced and the resulting deplorable conditions on too many Indian reservations that must be addressed.
The treatment of Native Americans over two centuries has been a shameful chapter of American life.
It is an incontrovertible fact that the Native Americans were here first. It’s also a fact that over the centuries, too many of our government policies dealing with Native Americans have been breathtakingly dishonest. The cheating, the stealing, the racism, and the lies that victimized American Indians are well documented in history. But simply acknowledging that sordid history, although laudable, does not right the wrongs that have occurred.
As we contemplate the tentacles of the past that sometimes strangle the future, it’s easy for a more prosperous white America to avoid accountability.
“Wasn’t that between my ancestors and your ancestors?” a member of the audience said to Joseph Marshall III, a preeminent Lakota author, after a 2008 lecture on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder. “Why should I be held responsible for the plight of Native Americans?” the man asked.
“Because you know the story,” Marshall said. It’s a profound concept. Once we become aware of an injustice, we become obligated to try to fix it. There are many talented and resourceful Native Americans who desperately want the cycle to end. But how will it end? Or is it destined to last forever? What or who will spark the changes that could create a path of greater opportunity for Native Americans and allow them to become full participants in all that America has to offer?
It seems overwhelming at times. Just as Tamara defensively has occasionally chosen to look away from her unhealed scars, so, too, has America. We don’t want to face the atrocities and genocide perpetrated for the benefit of white Americans. We don’t want to be accountable. But we are. Because we know the story.
“Not having been alive when an injustice was committed seems like very good reason for denying any responsibility,” wrote Julian Rieck, a German scholar in a 2014 essay entitled “A History of Responsibilities.”
But can you reject the burdened legacy of your community in the same way you can turn down inheriting your deceased parent’s debt? You have been born into a specific society with all its achievements and atrocities. You enjoy the benefits like education, the infrastructure, the healthcare system, etc. on the one hand. This means you cannot simply ignore your society’s evil past on the other hand. Every German must come to terms with Hitler as part of his or her identity, and not just Goethe or Schiller. Australians and U.S. Americans benefit from past acts of dispossession, slavery and forced assimilation.
In addition to describing the mistreatment of Native Americans, this book will tell inspiring stories about the wonderful work some very special Native American youth are doing to lift others up and provide role models for survival and success.
There is some remarkable wisdom and philosophy to be shared from generations of a culture that revered nature in a way we would do well to emulate, a generous, nonmaterialistic people who believed it was better to give than possess. In responding to our obligations to the Native Americans who were here first, I believe we help ourselves live up to the full promise and potential of America. Because their story is that of too many others in our country, where, despite its first-world wealth, pockets of people live in third-world conditions.
For all of those reasons, I want to tell you Tamara’s story and that of her people.
Copyright © 2019 by Byron L. Dorgan