The film opens with ominous music, the unimaginable grief of an entire community and the woman trying to hold them all together.
“The Bears on Pine Ridge,” one of this year’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival short docs, explained how the Oglala Sioux Nation of Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota declared a state of emergency in 2015 for high rates of suicide among their youth.
Between Christmas 2014 and June 2015 on Pine Ridge, 11 kids died by suicide and another 176 attempted suicide, according to Indian Health Services. The local Sweetgrass Suicide Prevention Project made contact with 276 kids exhibiting behaviors associated with suicidal ideation in that time, too.
The film quoted the then Oglala Sioux Nation president John Yellow Bird, stating: “We are struggling. We simply cannot bear to lose any more of our children … Whenever we lose one child, it hurts the spirit and soul of every one of our people.”
Despite the request for federal assistance, they weren’t given enough aid to meet the tribe’s mental health needs and so several residents came together to form suicide prevention programs like Sweetgrass.
Yvonne “Tiny” DeCory is one of the strongest advocates for these kids and has dedicated her life to supporting them.
One of the opening scenes of the film depicts DeCory guiding crying teens with candles and memorial signs in a march. She instructed them to pray for their lost peer, to be there for one another and to never leave the side of their struggling friends.
“This is a hard time for us because we don’t have any answers,” she said to the gathered mourners. “And we can ask each other why, but we’ll never know why because he’s taken everything with him. But you guys have to be there for each other.”
Director Noel Bass became interested in Pine Ridge’s situation in 2011, after he battled mental illnesses himself. He spent time volunteering on the reservation and soon got to know DeCory. They became close over the years as he made more frequent and extensive trips to the reservation and in 2015 he decided to make the film to spread awareness of the issue.
“I’m hoping that people connect with the individuals themselves, that they really feel what they’re going through. They feel the crisis. They feel the fear. They feel the reality of the suicide situation,” Bass said. “This isn’t just statistics, this isn’t just things you could find online or a news broadcast that goes in for a day and covers a story, this is an investment in trying to get people to care.”
The kids of the BEAR Project shared their stories, they spread joy through dancing and they refused to give up.
Even when Sweetgrass lost funding less than a year into the state of emergency, DeCory never gave up either. She knew the suicides would keep happening if nobody was there to help. So she’d help, money or no money.
“I feel like I just don’t have a choice, you know?” DeCory said. “I don’t have a choice to quit. Because that’s not me.”
Read more on Missoulian.com.
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