New Mexico’s OT Teton Saltes on a mission to change, save his native land

HENDERSON, Nev.>> Unabashed laughter can be heard in Oglala Lakota, the largest of the three Native American counties on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

“People are always laughing, always joking,” New Mexico football player Teton Saltes said during the Mountain West Media Days at the Green Valley Resort. “That’s how they deal with life. They laugh through the pain. They make other people laugh. Laughter is the best medicine.”

Pine Ridge is one of the most impoverished places in the country, with more than 50 percent of the population living below the poverty line. The life expectancy is the second lowest in the Western Hemisphere, trailing only Haiti.

“You read the statistics,” Saltes said. “We have a teen suicide rate almost five times the national average. You read all the statistics of my reservation — my home — and it sounds terrible.”

Saltes moved from the reservation to Phoenix when he was in the sixth grade; and then made another move to Farmington, N.M., two years later; and then to Albuquerque, where he is an offensive lineman for the Lobos. But each break, he returns to Pine Ridge to help 65-year-old Yvonne “Tiny” DeCory, his grandmother.

DeCory and Eileen Janis are healers who live by the principle that “it’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” They have fitful nights as they battle Pine Ridge’s biggest challenge.

Saltes said it is not uncommon for his grandmother to receive a call from parents “screaming, crying, saying they ‘can’t find my child. He ran off in the woods.’ It’s the middle of the night, 1, 2, in the morning. It’s the middle of nowhere. She’s by herself, and she’s running frantically through the woods trying to find this child. She comes upon him, and she sees him hanging (from) a tree. She runs up, and she’s holding him up. Sixty-five years old, she’s trying to hold him up to relieve tension in his neck. She’s screaming for help. She’s crying, holding this kid up, trying to get the rope off his neck.”

Saltes said he and DeCory were summoned to a house, when they heard a gunshot. They kept the family away while they packed pieces of a skull into bags. “She’s cleaning up the room so the family doesn’t have to see that,” Saltes said.

“This,” Saltes said, “is the reality of the reservation I come from.”

It is why Saltes signed up as a mentor with BEAR — Be Excited About Reading — which initially started as a literacy mentorship program. It has evolved into life awareness and suicide prevention.

“Suicide doesn’t discriminate,” Saltes said. “We go into white schools, black schools.”

They put on skits. The message is hope. “The community is in disarray, but there’s always that one person who stands up in every community and brings everybody together and helps to heal the community,” Saltes said. “That’s the theme. All it takes is one person to care.”

Saltes recently became a student ambassador for the Save the Children Action Network. This summer, he was in Washington, D.C., lobbying for legislation catering to children and child care. He is scheduled to meet with Deb Haaland, a U.S. congresswoman from New Mexico.

“From where I come from, the children are sacred,” Saltes said. “If we don’t do our job to raise children to be strong, to be powerful, then ultimately we’re setting up our country for failure, setting up children for failure.”

Saltes and Radson Jang, a Lobo offensive lineman and Kamehameha graduate, often speak on cultural issues. They agree that Native Hawaiians and Native Americans share a similar history. “We do have the same struggles,” Saltes said.

New Mexico coach Bob Davie said Saltes agreed to accept a football scholarship as a way to “facilitate change.” UNM has a program that specializes in Native American law.

Saltes, who is 6-foot-6 and 284 pounds, has pro football aspirations. But his long-term goal is to help Pine Ridge residents. He said he plans to attend law school.