RESERVATION DISTURBED BY TEEN SUICIDES

5 deaths, dozens of attempts blamed on alcohol, boredom

McLAUGHLIN, S.D.

ROBERT Jaycob Jensen was first.

The lanky 17-year-old Sioux Indian, who had been drinking heavily and
having run-ins with police all summer, slipped into his family's dank
basement Aug. 30. Toward the corner, past the rusted-out furnace and broken
sewer line, he threaded a braided leather belt over a board nailed between
floor beams, buckled it around his neck and hanged himself.

On Nov. 16, in the same basement, with the same type of belt, Robert's
16-year-old cousin and best friend, Charles Gerry, hanged himself from a
pipe.

Three other Indian youths on the Standing Rock Reservation have taken their
lives since then -- the latest was buried Jan. 24. In the five months since
Robert's death, 43 reservation boys and girls have attempted suicide, some
more than once.

Counselors are keeping tabs on 150 teenagers considered at risk. The
hellish epidemic, they say, is brought on by a lethal mix of alcohol,
drugs, poverty, boredom and wholesale family breakdown.

``There's so much pain here,'' says Faith Taken Alive, whose 14-year-old
daughter, Dani Black Fox, attempted suicide with a friend in October. ``You
wonder where it came from and why it hit at once.''

McLaughlin, population 799, is the biggest town on the 2.3 million-acre
reservation. For the most part, its Indian and white residents live
separate lives. They report to separate court systems and separate police
forces. They even keep separate time: Whites observe Mountain Time, while
Indians keep to Central Time because tribal headquarters, across the border
in Fort Yates, N.D., falls within the Central Zone.

With its big, gray grain elevator jutting from the rolling prairie,
McLaughlin from a distance looks like hundreds of other Midwestern farm
towns. But there was trouble even before the suicides.

Burglaries have become common, as have fights, vandalism and petty theft,
residents say. Jude's Jack and Jill grocery was burglarized so many times
the owners finally covered the storefront with steel grating.

Three of four Indian adults have no jobs, and half the students at the
tribal school in Fort Yates drop out before 10th grade. Alcohol is easy to
get. Even teens say panhandlers will readily buy them booze for a tip of a
dollar or two.

MANY of the dropouts wind up roaming with loose-knit gangs that commonly
brawl with others, but the tribe has only two detention cells for juveniles
and just one probation officer to track up to 60 cases at a time.

The troubled youths, says Robert Preuss, local director of mental health
programs for the Indian Health Service, wind up doing ``what they want,
when they want.''

The despair isn't new, and it isn't isolated to one Indian reservation. But
at Standing Rock, this fresh turmoil is churning up new efforts to halt the
self-destruction. The nation's top-ranking Indian official has challenged
the tribe to become a model for other reservations by taking needed drastic
steps, including banning alcohol and institutionalizing alcoholics.

If they do that, vows Kevin Gover, the Interior Department's new assistant
secretary for Indian affairs, the Clinton administration will supply the
money for social services and law enforcement now sorely lacking.

That would be a start.

Robert Jensen was active in traditional Sioux rituals, including the Sun
Dance and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and he loved to box.

But the boxing club disbanded and he was kicked out of school last year
after a fistfight with a classmate. He started drinking heavily, his family
says, and was constantly getting arrested for fighting.

He talked about suicide with friends, says Dani Black Fox. ``He used to
always ask whether we would go to his funeral if he died. I didn't take him
seriously at first. I thought he was just kidding.''

Exactly two months after Robert's death, Dani's sister found Dani and a
friend trying to hang themselves.

DANI denies the stories going around that some teens had signed suicide
pacts. She says most of the youths who have tried to kill themselves,
including herself, were simply drunk. ``We do need something to do,'' she
says. ``All anybody ever talks about at school is drinking.''

Besides booze, she says, teens find marijuana ``pretty easy to get,'' and
for a cheap rush, kids take turns choking each other with their hands or
rubber bands to induce brief blackouts.

Rocky White Mountain, a local pastor, says he once sat for hours with a gun
in his mouth after a business went bad in 1985. He believes suicide is a
way troubled Indian youth try to get attention in a society where
``everything is basically out of control.''

The Indian Health Service in Washington, D.C., gets reports of suicide
epidemics like the one plaguing Standing Rock at least once or twice a
year. Gover, who became assistant interior secretary in November, is making
clear that curbing suicides, crime and alcoholism is a priority.

``There is nothing more significant going on in your community than this
crisis,'' Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe and a recovering alcoholic,
told Standing Rock leaders recently.

Tribal leaders are compiling a wish list of youth programs to submit for
government funding. And in McLaughlin, non-Indians are leading a drive to
raise money to convert a boarded-up movie theater into a restaurant, weight
room and playhouse.

Teens would work at the restaurant and learn how to run a business, says
Judene Maxon, who owns the Jack and Jill store with her husband. The
parking lot could be used as a hockey rink in the winter and basketball
courts in the summer. The county already has promised to waive property
taxes.

``It wasn't in vain,'' pastor White Mountain says of the suicides. ``God, I
believe, is working some good out of it. There is a lot of focus on the
youth.''