Crisis of Indian Children Intensifies as Families Fail
By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: April 5, 2005
....Tribal officials (at Lummi Indian Reservation, Washington) estimate that fewer than half of the 1,500 children on the reservation are living with a parent full time. A breakdown of the American Indian family, mirrored throughout reservations across the country, has been building for generations but is now growing worse, tribal and outside experts say.
The crisis gained new attention this month after a troubled youth went on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. The broken family of the teenager, Jeff Weise, 16, who the police say killed nine people and then himself, is typical among Indians. With his father dead and his mother disabled by a drunken-driving accident, he was staying with his grandmother on the reservation, after living with his mother, before her accident, in Minneapolis....
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Lummi tribal officials say their roster shows that 11 percent of the children on the reservation have been placed in foster care or with relatives receiving foster care payments. Statewide, about 8 percent of Indian children are in foster care, Washington officials say. But like national statistics, those numbers tell only a sliver of the story.
Even though tribes have made great strides over the last two decades in keeping children from troubled homes, a cascade of statistics paints a bleak picture of the roughly 850,000 Indian and Alaska Native youths, about half of them living on Indian reservations, according to the Census Bureau. Compared with whites and with other minorities, Indians have extremely high teenage suicide rates, are more likely to get into fights at school and carry weapons to school, and have high rates of substance abuse, several recent reports show....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/national/05native.html?oref=login
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