Medicine Wheel.

• Author: PAN, ESTHER

A federal program that actually works

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO ON THE PINE Ridge Indian reservation, a call to the police about domestic violence wouldn't have come to much. The tribal police would have been surly and reluctant, if dispatched at all. Police had to personally witness an act of violence in order to do anything. As one officer says, reflecting back, "If I knocked on the door and some guy came to the door and said everything's okay, I would've left"

Confronted by the same situation a few months ago, the same officer refused to leave. Explaining, "I need to talk to everyone else in the house," he pushed in over the man's protest and saw children crouched on the living room floor. "I wouldn't have seen them before," he says. "I had to he taught to look." Entering the bedroom, he saw a huddled figure so bloody and bruised it barely looked human. Then she lifted her head. It was a woman whose husband had been beating her for two days. "Thank God," she choked out. "You're the angel I've been praying for."

Thanks to a strikingly original social program, more and more women on the Pine Ridge reservation have had their prayers for deliverance from abuse answered. Cangleska, Inc., a 13-year-old violence prevention and treatment program founded by and for Oglala Sioux Indians in southwestern South Dakota, has achieved dramatic results in reducing domestic violence. The program has incorporated traditional culture and the strengths of the Native American community to not only stop abusers, but to rehabilitate them so they can rejoin their families and community. In so doing, Cangleska has earned recognition as one of the most innovative government programs in the country, winning, most recently, an Innovations in Government award from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University.

The History

In the traditional culture of the Oglala Sioux (also called Lakota), women were highly honored. Domestic violence was considered a crime against the tribe. Men who beat their wives and children were held to be unfit to lead their families. But when soldiers and settlers arrived west in the 1800s, the tragic saga of the Native American began. Despite valiant struggles, the descendants of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Black Elk now live on bleak stretches of dusty land in the center of the United States, intimately familiar with alcoholism and violence.

Domestic violence had become just another fixture in Pine Ridge's landscape of despair. The average annual income is $3,400. The unemployment rate is 84 percent. Over 70 percent of Lakota adults are alcoholics. A Department of Justice report released in February found that Native Americans are twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than any other group. They have the highest suicide rates in the nation. They are twice as likely as any other ethnic group to be arrested for an alcohol-related offense, and four times more likely to spend time in jail. Most troubling of all, Native American women are at the bottom of the lowest trough: The Justice Department report found that the level of violent crime experienced by American Indian women is nearly 50 percent higher than that reported by black males.

On Pine Ridge, domestic violence, complicated and augmented by all the other problems, finally grew too widespread to ignore. In 1987 tribal elders convened a meeting to address the issue. One after another, women stood up to describe the terror of being battered: of never knowing when the explosion would come, of nights spent sleeping with their children in abandoned cars, or begging policemen to put them in jail so their husbands couldn't beat them that night.

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