‘Birmingham of the North’

By Mahtowin Munro
Stephanie Hedgecoke

As we go to press, it is still not clear whether Jeff Weise acted alone or in concert with other youths.

The violent spiral into tragedy of Red Lake Ojibwe youth Jeff Weise has brought the despair and impoverished living conditions of tens of thousands of Native people in the United States to the forefront.

Weise, a mentally ill Ojibwe youth, killed two family members and killed and wounded several youths and adults at the small Red Lake High School in Minnesota before killing himself March 21.

The Red Lake community has been devastated. With about 5,000 people enrolled in the Red Lake Band, nearly everyone knows each other or is related. Through out Indian Country searing pain has been felt at seeing so many Native people—mostly young—die so senselessly.

But while the corporate media have compared the tragedy at Red Lake with the Columbine school shooting, many Native people made a sharp distinction. According to Audrey Thayer of nearby White Earth Reservation: “It’s a class issue. Columbine [is] an upper-middle-class community. This is not. This is totally different.” (Democracy Now! March 24)

Mattie Harper of Leech Lake, another neighboring Ojibwe reservation, also inter viewed on “Democracy Now!,” detailed the history of genocidal attacks on Native sovereignty and culture that began with the boarding schools program in the mid-1850s. She said: “Kids died of malnutrition. They were starved. And they were forced to speak English.”

Harper traced a direct progression of those conditions to the poverty, alcohol and substance abuse and related violence experienced today.

Thayer said that in the six-county northern Minnesota area including Red Lake, Leech Lake, and White Earth, 97 percent of those incarcerated are Native. “We are considered the Birmingham of the north,” she said.

She slammed Minnesota Gov. Tim Paw lenty, “who has completely massacred pro grams that would affect Indian people, state programs. We have an administration that does not serve any dollars for Indigenous people.”

Minnesota has a racist history of attacks on Indigenous peoples, including the lynch mob movement against Native fishing rights that was at its height in the 1980s.

“When compared with other groups ... Indians of all ages are 670 percent more likely to die from alcoholism, 650 percent more likely to die from tuberculosis, 318 percent more likely to die from diabetes, and 204 percent more likely to suffer accidental death.” Native alcohol-related deaths are 17 times the national average. (Washington Post, March 25)

Bush cutbacks
of Indigenous programs

Racism, poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, inadequate housing, drug and alcohol abuse all lead to an appallingly high Native youth suicide rate two to three times the national rate.

A 2004 survey of Minnesota Native youths found that of 56 ninth graders, 81 percent of the girls and 43 percent of the boys had contemplated suicide.

Nearly half the girls and 20 percent of the boys said they had attempted suicide. (AP, March 26)

Sister Patricia Wallis, who works at a Red Lake church mission school, spoke of “grinding, dehumanizing, relentless poverty. . . . If something happens, or someone dies, or there’s been an accident, [students] don’t come regularly. Some stay at home because they have to baby-sit their siblings or they have to help out.” (AP, March 26)

In 2004, 80 percent of Red Lake High School students met U.S. poverty standards for school lunch benefits.

Many voices across Indian country criticized President George W. Bush’s failure to express sympathy with the Red Lake Nation. Bush was busy pushing anti-worker Social Security “reforms” and posturing about Terri Schiavo; he apparently could not be bothered to notice the devastating tragedy in Indian Country.

American Indian Movement National Director Clyde Bellecourt said: “From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn’t said or done a thing. When people’s children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don’t think he’d have any problem doing that.” (Washington Post, May 24)

As a result of public outcry, Bush finally mentioned Red Lake on March 25. But he confined his terse remarks to recognizing the role played by the high school’s security guard.

Bush’s true feelings for Indigenous people are shown by administration plans to cut more than $100 million from Native programs—already pared to the bone—next year alone.

The role of Prozac

Jeff Weise’s father committed suicide four years ago. His mother shortly thereafter suffered permanent brain damage as the result of an alcohol-related auto accident. Weise was abused by his mother’s boyfriend and possibly others. When he returned to Red Lake to live with other family members, he felt isolated and friendless.

Clearly, this youth needed help. But Native people have limited access to health services, which on the reservations are solely dispensed through the U.S. government-run Indian Health Service. Access to mental health care is especially limited.

What Weise got from IHS was minimal counseling and a prescription for the antidepressant drug Prozac. His dosage of Prozac was increased shortly before the incident.

Many articles have questioned the safety of prescribing Prozac for adolescents. Some scientists believe it can increase suicidal behavior. Dr. Frank Och berg, former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, told the New York Times that recent research had changed his mind on the question of a link between the drugs and homicidal acts. “Suicidal and homicidal intentions together could theoretically follow the same path.”

The mainstream media made much of the fact that Weise had recently posted to neo-Nazi websites, as though that provides the entire answer to the question of why this tragedy happened. Many have asked how a Native youth could possibly identify as a neo-Nazi.

Weise was clearly alienated and felt hopeless. Like some other young people in his circumstances, he may have been attracted to the simplistic answers provided by reactionary or fascist programs. He had spent his whole life suffering the toxic effects of the capitalist system, but did not know how to label that experience. Like some other disaffected youths, perhaps he felt the need to blame others for the ills of capitalism.

There is an important avenue of escape from hopelessness for youth: becoming part of the struggle against racism and for economic and social justice.

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