"Inexplicable" Violence?

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"Inexplicable" Violence?

The Press Ignores Social Causes of Minnesota Shooting

In today's New York Times, Kirk Johnson writes: "The violence that ripped through Red Lake High, on the reservation of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, will probably always be on some level inexplicable."

Perhaps Mr. Johnson, in his search for explanations, could look within his own sentence. Instead, the Times did not print a word about the poverty and despair commonplace on the modern reservation.

Overall, the social realities related to life on the reservation have been largely ignored by the press, who prefer to continue insisting that "the violence" is "inexplicable." Instead, they focus on Weise's internet use and interest in Nazism.

Despite noting that the shooting occurred in "one of the poorest counties" in Minnesota, ABC Nightly News left it at that in their one story this week (3/23/05). They jumped around from the fact that the school had metal detectors to the poverty of the county to how sad people were, in less than 50 words time. ABC called Weise "a lone and troubled killer" and gave about 100 words to his postings on a neo-Nazi website.

The CBS Evening News' March 23rd story was a little better than ABC, noting the "worries, more public than ever, about the effects of Red Lake's culture of poverty" on reservation children. Yet they didn't pose the "culture of poverty" as an answer to Weise's aunt, who claimed: "We don't know what went on. We'll never know. We'll always ask the question 'Why'?"

NBC Nightly News devoted much more time than CBS & ABC to the violence in Minnesota, but they didn't delve much deeper into the social root causes.

Instead, in their March 24th report, they chose to focus on "the portrait...of the young man behind the shootings," a portrait that included the facts that he once gelled his hair in the shape of horns (a fairly popular countercultural youth hairstyle), took Prozac (since 1988, 22 million people have taken this drug), wrote on neo-Nazi websites, and made a "violent animation."

In one of their March 23rd reports, NBC did at least discuss Weise's troubled family background, something the other networks neglected (his father committed suicide and his mother's brain was severely damaged in a car crash, which put in motion his being sent to the reservation). But, no surprise, they kept it personal, noting that Hitler was Weise's "hero" and that he wore the spiked hair. NBC doesn't talk about how his family problems caused him to essentially fall through the holes in the social net, holes that have become larger and are still growing under the Bush administration.


I suppose this isn't all that surprising for a press that buys into the Horatio Alger myth; one of the greatest American myths of all time. If they don't believe that social classes and inequalities exist, how could the press ever use them as tools to help explain to the public why crime occurs?

Much as the Columbine shootings were blamed on the media (specifically targeting people like Marilyn Manson), this case looks like it will be just the latest installment in everyone's favorite game show, "Blame the Media for Youth Violence." I agree the media should be blamed, but not in the way that it is being blamed. The media, by ignoring these issues of social class and failing to explore root causes of social problems, is failing in its duty to help readers and viewers understand the world. If we don't understand these causes, we can't fight against them.

And the cycle continues.

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Reservation Life Grinds Down Indian Youths
Suicide, Depression, Poverty, Among Problems That Plague Young American Indians on Reservations


By DEBORAH HASTINGS


The Associated Press

Mar. 27, 2005 - The obituary in the small town paper was heartbreaking: Chase Albert "Beka" Lussier, born Dec. 23, 1989, died March 21 at Red Lake High School. A freshman who played basketball and loved computer games. Six paragraphs down, beside the photograph of a chubby-cheeked, smiling boy, came this sentence: "He spent his time juggling life between his family and his son."

A father at 15. Dead three months later. Shot with eight others by an alienated, despondent upperclassman who, at the end of his 10-minute walk through Red Lake High School, turned one of his guns on himself.

The deaths, conspicuous in their senselessness, highlight the problems that American Indian teenagers have been quietly suffering in greater numbers than most adolescents: suicide, violence, depression and pregnancy.

By themselves, the numbers for the Red Lake Indian Reservation are staggering. A state survey conducted last year of 56 ninth-graders showed that 81 percent of the girls, and 43 percent of the boys, had considered suicide.

Nearly half the girls said they'd actually tried to kill themselves. Twenty percent of boys said the same numbers about triple the rate statewide.

"I don't have an explanation for that," said Brenda Child, who teaches American Indian history at the University of Minnesota and grew up on the reservation. Her cousin, 14-year-old Ryan Auginash, was shot in the chest during 16-year-old Jeff Weise's march through the campus.

She doesn't want to view the shootings through the prism of American Indian troubles. "I see it as a problem of a young man who was deeply depressed," she said. "Sadly, that can happen anywhere."

Here, where the Red Lake band of Chippewa has lived in isolation on more than 830,000 acres in northern Minnesota since 1889, such things are not openly discussed.

It simply is not their way. For much of the week, they slammed the door of their reservation to the prying eyes of television cameras and reporters who wanted to know why Weise shot his grandfather, a tribal policeman everyone knew as "Dash," and the man's girlfriend, then drove to the high school entrance behind the wheel of his grandfather's police car. Weise, wearing his grandfather's gunbelt and toting a shotgun, opened fire at the front door, by the lone metal detector.

Tribal elders have said little, as have residents. Some students have been more open, describing Weise as a depressed, friendless boy who talked of shooting people.

On Web site postings, Weise described himself as "nothing but your average Native-American stoner" and described his life on the reservation as "every man's nightmare. This place never changes and it never will."

Weise had not always lived on the reservation. He arrived after his father committed suicide four years ago. His mother, a heavy drinker, was severely injured in an alcohol-related auto accident. The boy had nowhere else to go.

Some on the reservation say Weise had been seeing a professional and taking medication for his depression, which is evident on Internet postings such as this one, where under a section titled "A Little About Me," he typed "16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black."

On Thursday, outside the hospital in Bemidji, a small town 32 miles south of the reservation, Andrew Auginash was there to visit his wounded brother, Ryan. "I don't want anything bad said about our reservation," he said. "It's like any other place."

The Minnesota survey of Red Lake students said they assaulted other classmates and used more alcohol and drugs than other students across the state.

Nationwide figures show that American Indian teenagers commit suicide at three times the national rate; are involved in alcohol-related arrests at twice the national average, and die in alcohol-related incidents at 17 times the national average.

They are third-highest in teen pregnancies, behind Hispanics and blacks.

"My mother moved us off the reservation when I was very young. And I am very glad she did that," says Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Native American Press-Ojibwe News, a 5,000-circulation weekly newspaper in Bemidji.

"The kids there come from drugs, alcohol, broken families, abuse," he says sadly. "To grow up under these circumstances is a tremendous ordeal. And to consider suicide means you think there is no other way out."

Lawrence is a member of the Red Lake band and has relatives and friends on reservation, he says. "Only the most gifted students can overcome this stuff. A lot of kids don't go to school. About 50 percent don't graduate. How do you go on after that? They're not qualified to get a job or go to college."

Sister Patricia Wallis has lived at the reservation, off and on, since 1951, working at a mission that has a school and convent. To Wallis, the problems here come from grinding, dehumanizing, relentless poverty.

"They're not able to succeed in school. If something happens, or someone dies, or there's been an accident, they don't come regularly. Some stay at home because they have to baby-sit their siblings or they have to help out."

Another problem is housing, she said. There aren't enough places to live on the reservation, so families and cousins and children live crowded together in single homes. This has worsened lately, Wallis said, because many who left to make their way in the outside world are now returning in large numbers after failing to find any kind of work because they have no experience or training.

"When you put a lot of adults and children together in one house, you get bedlam," Wallis said. "The children get no rest, they get no sleep, arguments break out between the adults and they come to school carrying all this."

Wallis has not lost hope, and she is careful in choosing her words to describe life here for young people. "I love these people with all my heart," she says.

Then she tells the story of a sixth-grade boy whose father got a new girlfriend. The woman didn't like the boy. "She said "Either he goes, or I go.' And guess who had to go? Now he's living with his cousins and he's suffering."

The boy grew angry in class at the reservation, she said, and he was pulled out by his relatives and sent to public school.

Children and teenagers here, despite the isolation and the cultural importance of turning inward, have only to sign on to the Internet, or turn on the satellite TV, to see that other people, in places not that far way, have things they don't.

"If you've never really been loved, how can you love yourself?" she asks. "How can you make something out of yourself?"


Associated Press writer Joshua Freed contributed to this report from Bemidji, Minn.


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