Wind River? No: Red River

There is a new movie out "Wind River", about the murder of Native American women on a reservation (Wind River is in Wyoming, and no, I never worked there. )

I haven't seen the movie (will have to wait until it hits HBO since I doubt it will be shown in our theaters) so I don't know if it is accurate. Wikipedia states the movie notes this:

A title card states that the FBI does not keep statistics on missing Native American women, whose numbers remain unknown.

I suspect the movie was inspired by the Red River women in Canada. This is a BBC article on those women. Here is one of the "faceless" victims:

Tina Fontaine

Her murder was the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of violent attacks against Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. Between 1980 and 2012, nearly 1,200 Aboriginal women and girls were murdered or went missing, according to a report released last year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

We did not have a lot of murders when I worked in the IHS, but we did have a lot of people die of exposure or accidents....

but of course, I only am familiar with a couple of areas, and I suspect many of these murders were "off res", committed off the reservations, e.g. those drinking at nearby bars (often reservations ban alcohol), runaways, homeless women, etc... so I would only know about them because I treated the kids.

I should note also that, although we did have a lot of rapes, most were never reported, especially if it was an AmerIndian woman raped by a white guy when she was intoxicated: why bother to report it? And the sociopaths of all colours knew that, so the women were at risk.

Sigh.

The dirty little secret: It is not unusual for people to die in wintertime after drinking.

I had a patient who froze to death when he decided to leave a party to sleep in a barn 100 yards away, and got lost in a blizzard in the dark.

And we almost lost one young girl who arrived home after a party, found the door locked, and went to sleep on the front porch...luckily a neighbor found her and saved her life.

Indeed, one argument for allowing alcohol on reservations is that too many people die of exposure trying to hitchhike back home after a party. Here is an LATimes article from 2015 about 17 such deaths near Gallup NM... read the whole thing, which goes into how locals are trying to help the problem.

and note that part about expecting the number to go up in the spring? When I worked in Minnesota, we often didn't find the missing until the thaw melted the snow...

Those most vulnerable are those who are caught between two culture. I don't know the answer for this: Not assimilating means living in poverty (The do gooders who think this is the answer should try it)... but assimilation means losing one's cultural heritage.

One big problem is lost children: a lot of older people are raising the grandkids (or other relatives or even children someone dropped off to a babysitter and never picked the kid back up). The usual cause is because mom is addicted to alcohol/drugs.

This is not something limited to one ethnic group in the USA, of course.... and I get angry at the "drugs should be legal" propaganda: Those who think drug use is okay, and push for legalizing all drugs need to notice all those kids brought up by relatives.

but of course, alcohol is also a drug, and banning that lowered the rate of alcoholism, but cause an increase of crime.

Often our rehab centers included traditional ceremonies to help our folks remember their roots.

The problem being that some of those teaching this were new age people, not those who actually were local healers...

so what is the difference? Well, new agers are into ascending to a higher power via feel good mysticism.

Native American ceremonies is about healing a person's soul and making him at peace with his family and clan. Even a Lakota "vision quest" is to find your place on how you can help your community...

Although I should note that each tribe differs: there is no one spiritual belief system you know.

Catholics and Anglicans tend to assimilate what is good in the various spiritualities in Native American communities. I once heard an Anglo criticize Saint Kateri for her prayer/fasting and penitential exercizes for imitating what was worse among hysterical French Catholicism, but the guy was clueless that her actions had a lot of similarity to tribal religious customs.

and my son, at a Catholic high school, had to read Black Elk Speaks, and his young hip teacher there was praising BlackElk's mysticism as opposed to Catholicism... I told my son to tell the teacher that Black Elk later became a Catholic, and a catechist... he said it was because Catholic beliefs gave him a deeper understanding of the God he already believed in.

The answer? maybe the churches could start preaching about drug use instead of global warming.