Native Losses
For the last two years, Rita Ledesma has spent countless hours studying how Native Americans in Los Angeles and South Dakota process grief and bereavement. It’s an undertaking both clinical and personal for the Cal State L.A. social work professor, an L.A. native of Mexican and Lakota Oglala heritage. Funded by a grant from the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute Project on Death in America, Ledesma’s work was discussed at the Healing American Indian Nations conference in Los Angeles in November and will be developed as curricula for professionals who work with Native Americans. She spoke with us recently about often-overlooked challenges faced by Indians in Los Angeles, who number more than 50,000, constituting America’s second largest urban Indian community, according to 2000 U.S. Census data.
What drew you to focus on death and grieving in your work?
I grew up in East L.A. surrounded by my loving traditional Mexican family. My mom was Indian. Henry Standing Bear is my blood great-grandfather and Luther Standing Bear is his brother. Both went to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which hauled them 2,000 miles away from South Dakota with the expressed intent of educating the Indian out of the Indian. My uncle and many Indian children died there. When I started clinical practice, I worked with primarily poor people and developed an interest in loss. If you’re Indian, you’re born into loss.
What does that mean, to be born into loss?
We’re the survivors of people who were conquered and colonized. Those are loss experiences, to be the survivors of an American holocaust, to be the survivor of genocide. There were the boarding schools from the 1890s to the 1970s. We see the rise of alcoholism in the Indian community in the 1930s and 1940s, when that first generation goes away and comes back. When you look at Indian people demographically, there’s a lot of accidental death, suicide, a lot of alcoholism and violence.
How does living in a big city complicate bereavement for Indian people?
Many Indians in L.A. are utterly poor. How much does it cost to bury someone in L.A.? Indians who are poor live in communities alongside other poor ethnic and racial groups. Their needs are hidden behind the needs of that particular community.
Are there common cultural traditions for Indians when a loved one dies?
Indian nations represent different linguistic and cultural groups, but there are similarities. They will share a belief that when people die that they are still available to you. So when you pray, you pray to the creator and you ask for help from your relations. When you give thanks, you thank the creator and your relations. Most tribes believe that you need some time to pass, like a year. Many tribes cut their hair when they’re in mourning. It’s an outward sign of pain and suffering. There are a million examples.
Is life for Indians in Southern California different now? Has casino revenue changed the landscape?
The Times just did a whole story on the Chumash and casino money. Casino money has brought American power to some Indian communities, not all. What is American power? Rockefeller money, Standard Oil money, railroad money. Casinos are a diversion. They’ve given some Indian communities resources to build infrastructures, some political power and ability to lobby, and that’s the American way. People are on a rampage about casinos and whatever tax revenues may be derived from casinos, but no one was on a rampage 20 years ago about the lack of indoor plumbing, education, health care, or the death rate, the suicide rate, the homicide rate.
How would you describe the driving purpose behind your research?
What I’m interested in is, how do people survive and thrive? There is resilience. People do bounce back. We look at Sudan, Rwanda and the Jewish Holocaust and see how they survived. I can’t change Wounded Knee or that my mom was in boarding school or my grandma died young, and my story is typical. I’m trying to help people understand how they go on.