By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) If I was to give a graduation speech this year I would in all probability begin by stating the obvious: I am proud of all about to receive their diplomas because so many of your classmates are not standing beside you. You have shown the determination to face all of the odds and finish what you started. For most of you, those odds were stacked against you from the day you entered school, and as Chief Dan George said in The Outlaw Josie Wales, “You endeavored to persevere.” I am sure all of you are sitting here wondering what comes next. For some it will be entering the military service, for others moving on to the next level in pursuit of an education, and for others maybe a timeout to contemplate what next lies ahead. There are not too many in the Class of 2014 who have not lost a classmate to the scourge of Indian Country: Teenage suicide. As the old saying goes; Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But try to explain that to a despondent teenager living in poverty on an Indian reservation. You look around you and see the alcohol, the drugs and the violence that follow the consumption of these products. Oftentimes you are the victim of that violence. And sometimes you are pushed to join in the frivolities of the addicted simply because the afflicted are friends or relatives, but too often that frivolity turns to viciousness because that is what alcohol and drugs can do. You wonder what went through the mind of a friend who took his or her life even before it had a chance to start. You know all of the statistics: Suicide among teenagers in Indian Country is three to five times higher than in the rest of America. The poorest counties in America are on Indian reservations. The statistics are cut and dried, but what in the heck do they mean to you or to your future? On the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona a rash of teenage suicides paralyzed the community. It caused the citizens of that reservation to take a look at themselves and ask, what is it we are doing or not doing that is causing our young to kill themselves? The people turned the clock back to the centuries old traditions, culture and spirituality that in the past had made them strong. Is that what the Indian nations of today must do to reverse this horrible trend? These should not be the problems of you, the proud graduates of today, but in a way they are your problem and the problem of the next graduating class. All of you have lived through it and perhaps some of you may have the solution. Maybe it will be this class that has the answers and the cure. But you are about to embark on the next phase of your lives because you have found the light at the end of the darkness. Your spirits have risen above the things that could have dragged you down and you are about to walk in the footsteps of your mothers and fathers, your grandmothers and grandfathers, and in the footsteps of those great Indian warriors who cleared a path and made it easier for you to get your cherished diploma this day. You walked in the company of giants. There are many more things I would say, but these words would be at the heart of it. Tim Giago was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1991. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com
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