COLUMBINE was senseless. In the aftermath of the Littleton, Colorado school shooting in 1999, as this country searched for answers in the music, the gun laws and the violent video games, everyone seemed to agree that it was all so senseless. It just didn't add up that two kids from good homes in idyllic suburbia would be capable of such destruction.
But no hands will be wrung for Jeffrey Weise, who last Monday walked into his Minnesota high school with a 40-caliber handgun and a .12-gauge shotgun. Weise's morning, which had begun with the murder of his grandfather and the grandfather's girlfriend, ended when he took his own life, after shooting a security guard, a teacher and five other students.
Weise, whose dedicated adherence to Nazism, violent Web sites, and trench coats invites comparison to the Columbine shooters, is nevertheless a less likely candidate for the postfacto search for understanding. No one asked "how could this happen" in the case of Weise, because we already knew the answer.
Weise was a Chippewa, a member of the Red Lake Indian reservation; his story is simply a more dramatic incarnation of the despair and destructive forces that have enveloped so many Native American communities. Weise lost his father to suicide and his mother to a car accident that left her brain-dead in a nursing home.
The five thousand member reservation that was his home suffers from a 40 percent poverty rate, 60 percent unemployment rate and often fatal gang violence.
So as we bemoaned the tragedy of innocent life-lost, if the news story caught our attention at all, we did so with the comfort of distance. The story was dismissed with the knowledge that the enormous difference between Weise's reality, a reality common to so many American Indian communities, and our own would insulate us from any true soul searching.
The frustration is familiar; like Columbine, the usual hypotheses about school violence seemed not to apply last week. Nearly every current undergraduate at the University spent at least a year in a post-Columbine American high school and therefore many of us have salient memories of lockdown testing, evacuation procedure reviews, and even metal detectors greeting us at the school entrance. Yet Red Lake High School, with its vigilant security team, demonstrated the utter flaws in the idea that increased security was the magic bullet. In fact, the security guard standing watch at the door of the high school was the first victim of Weise's shooting spree.
The calls for stricter gun control that arose out of the last crop of school shootings find a similar irrelevance in this most recent case. The weapons and flak jacket with which Weise armed himself were stolen from his grandfather, a tribal police sergeant; even among the most ardent gun-control activists, few would endorse a policy of disarming law enforcement agents.
Amid all the futility, however, last week's tragedy does provide us with an opportunity unlike any that arose out of the ashes of Littleton. That opportunity is an occasion for sorely needed reflection on the lives of American Indians.
Few of us realize how complicit our present day government is in the inequity and oppression of these lives.According to the American Psychiatric Association, while American Indians have the lowest life expectancies in not only the U.S., but the entire hemisphere, save Haiti, funding for Indian Health Services has decreased by close to 20 percent over the last decade. The overall alcoholism mortality rates in American Indian communities are about 9.5 times the national average, and suicide rates are nearly 43 percent higher than in the rest of the U.S.; over half of those who commit suicide on a reservation are never seen by a psychiatrist, as most reservations operate with less than a third of the staff required to provide adequate social services.
There are obvious obstacles to dealing with poverty, depression and alcoholism on reservations, not the least of which are the legitimacy struggles that arise in dealing with what are legally sovereign nations. But this latest tragedy should serve as a reminder that compromises must be reached, and solutions found. It is unfathomable that such abject poverty exists in the heartland of the richest nation in the world.
Columbine was senseless, Red Lake was not. And with comprehension comes the moral imperative for action.
Katie Cristol's column usually appears Monday in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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