KNOW NOW:
Native America’s Youth
Crushing Challenges
This is eighteen-year-old Denic Tafoya, standing proud after parading through large summer crowds in Santa Fe. Hot and dusty in the piercing afternoon sun, her squint turns to a smile as she smooths her Miss Native New Mexican Teen sash and strikes a pose. Ambassador to schools, festivals, even the state capitol, Tafoya wears the crown to promote tribal customs and culture that define, or by their absence, defy common identity. Hers is a big challenge, given those legacies are unknown to many of her own people.
Thriving as she enters adulthood, this teenager from Santo Domingo Pueblo somehow beats overwhelming odds. Most Native Americans in the United States face crushing blows to their development before they enter this world. That’s because their maternal health critical to carry and bear children is commonly confounded by depression, diabetes and other disorders, all with a punishing correlation to child mortality. Violence against women pervades daily life; eighty-plus percent of females report experiencing it. One out of every three native women will be raped; murder is their third leading cause of death. The injury and killing is familial, tribal, and far beyond the reservations.
Tragically under-reported each year are thousands of missing and slain Native females, from Oregon to Florida. Law enforcement rarely picks up or investigates these disappearances and deaths, much less prosecutes them. Meanwhile, Indigenous social service providers report a cauldron of sex trafficking inside reservations, where impoverished, desperate and sometimes-unassuming natives drop their women and youth.
At Tafoya’s pueblo this afternoon, the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women will host a community conversation about date rape. The Santo Domingo Pueblo is a standout among tribes because it’s matrilineal: the name, the rights, the property confer from and to females. But clearly, abuse of women and feminicide pose enough threat here to warrant this event. During today’s talk, the Coalition will also update attendees on its work to combat human trafficking, stalking, and sex crimes on and off the reservations.
Why so many disturbing data points on Native America?
“It speaks to our invisibility,” contends Lacey Horn, recent treasurer of the Cherokee Nation, now chair of the Tribal Advisory Committee to US Treasury. A top executive often seen beaming from tribal magazine covers, she speaks slowly through a pained frown as she moves through the sources of startling statistics. When the government stripped Native Americans of their land and many families of their children, its forced removal policies sent boys and girls to institutions, boarding schools and work camps that changed their names, their dress and their beliefs. Assigned to new parents, youth lost their language, their traditional diets, and their commonality. By the 1970s, more than a third of Native offspring were extracted from their homes, put in detention centers, in foster care, or up for adoption, all with the attending risks of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Ninety percent of placements were with non-Natives.
Today, upward of six million Native Americans have sprung from 570-plus tribes spread throughout 35 states, but most live outside the reservations in urban zones where their tribal connections are more diffused. It’s those collective claims to ancestry, land and language that Denic Tafoya and other young leaders want to ignite. They’ll have to work hard and fast to keep pace with an already explosive reality. Right here in New Mexico, over three quarters of young Native children live in poverty. Opioids and other addictive drugs hit Indian Country hard, where young overdose deaths far surpass other minorities. Native youth smoke more than any other racial or ethnic group in the nation, a distinction particularly toxic given their widespread obesity. Teen pregnancy is surging; it starts even earlier among Native American girls. Suicide is the number one cause of death among Natives aged 11-22.
Local voices and native energy best target these challenges. Alarmed by painkiller abuse among its native adolescents, New Mexico’s health department enlisted popular Santa Fe New Mexican cartoonist Ricardo Cate to splash his beloved, brightly colored characters in an anti-opioid campaign on billboards and posters across reservations. Cate, from Santo Domingo Pueblo, captures readers with humor, despite the mental anguish he illustrates.
Outside resources, and multipliers like the Aspen Institute’s new Center for Native Youth pluck promising young native talent to train others and deploy them back right into the community. Aspen’s teams reintroduce communities to what they’ve lost, or never known, and they rely on local youth to reverse the decay of communities. Moving inside out, identifying leaders and engaging people who have long abandoned their roots, they’re gaining traction, for example, restoring native diets by supporting tribal leaders with local food movements. Success means reversing generations of bad habits and poor nutrition cultivated since the 1850s when the government supplied processed, often sub-standard packaged and canned foods to replace the hunting, fishing and farming integral to Native American life. The timing is critical, given Native Americans’ enormous reliance on SNAP, the federal food stamp program now under White House scrutiny for dramatic cuts. The prospect is terrifying to low-income natives, especially residents of remote Tribal lands known as food deserts.
From nutrition to personal safety, the moves and messages of young leaders are closely watched by the community. For Tafoya and her contemporaries, date rape will remain high on the outreach agenda, including tackling sexual abuse among teens with Open Mike Nights, online poetry and spoken word competitions that combine therapy with a stinging message of authenticity attached: young Indigenous girls know they’re at great risk.The New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs warns the overwhelming Native responses of denial, shame, and fear of retribution must convert to active support. And given the cultural anonymity, even the invisibility that Horn and others describe, it’s urgent. Horn sees "disproportionately high Native struggles and barriers” and an almost certain way to surmount them, one individual at a time. Calling on wisdom from tribal elders and from those "who have perservered," Horn just launched a new partnership with the Native American Advancement Foundation to “match mentors with these youth before they become another heartbreaking statistic.”
DO NOW:
Want to engage and unsure how? Take a look at this comprehensive city and state listing of Native needs. This first-rate resource lays out a vivid array of funding and growth opportunities, from the granular (money to pay the water bill) to the grand strategy (college scholarships for aspiring professionals). Seeking ways to change a young person’s life? Local groups and national organizations draw on Native and non-Native mentors. Consider youth programs with First Nations and the Native American Advancement Foundation. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America from Washington State to Maine seek student athletes, civic, social and fraternal groups, senior citizens, social workers and guidance counselors. Make numbers count: weak data on Native American communities compromises resources and diminishes financial outlays for their families, tribes and lands. Get involved in the US census, learn about fellow Americans, and help create an accurate 2020 count. Get Out the Vote: help Native Americans push back against physical and technical impediments, and exercise their voting rights at the ballot box. For a contemporary read of urban Native life, see Tommy Orange’s prize-winning novel, There, There.