20 comments (clockwise from left) Lexi, 5, Roxanne, 18, Margo, 20, and Maellina, 8 months, on Sauvie Island. BY BETH SLOVIC | bslovic at wweek dot com On Margo Guajardo's right arm is the tattoo "N8ive Pride." It may be callous to ask what she has to be proud of.
Callous, but not entirely inappropriate. By traditional standards, Margo's own life story has not been one of triumph. Twenty years old, she has two kids, one of whom was fathered by Margo's uncle.
She is unemployed, unmarried and largely unmoored. She does not know much about her biological mother, other than that she was once a prostitute. She has no relationship with her father.
She has a history of drug and alcohol addiction. And she has $103 in her bank account. At times, it appears Margo's existence is as fragile as the plastic hairclips that hold open the burgundy curtains on the front window of her outer Southeast Portland home.
But Margo, a member of the Mnicoujou band of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe (also known as the Lakota), does have reason to be proud. As a Native American, Margo belongs to Portland's most disenfranchised minority, one whose members face challenges that dwarf the hurdles confronting Portland's other marginalized communities. While media and political pressure is focused yet again this week on the rights of illegal immigrants, her story is a reminder of a different minority that receives far less attention.
It's a story that's 400 years old, not 40. And it's a story that is often hidden under a shroud of obscurity as dangerous and as seemingly benign as a warm blanket infected with small pox. worries more about Mexican people being here illegally," says Margo, whose biological father was Mexican.
"You hear more about that because it's OK to talk about." By several measures, the Native American experience in Portland stinks. According to the most recent figures from the city's Bureau of Housing and Community Development, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives comprise 10 percent of the homeless population.
Yet they comprise only about 1 percent of the city's overall population, according to the U.S. A recent Portland Schools Foundation study revealed Native American students in 2004 had the lowest high-school graduation rate of any ethnic group.
More than 13 percent of all foster-care cases in the state in 2005 involved Native American youth, although Native American children made up only 1.3 percent of Oregon's under-18 population. And while the numbers are not available locally, Native Americans have the highest rates of suicide, binge drinking and poverty of any minority group in the United States, according to various government sources.
They also have the lowest median income, according to the Census in 2000. The situation is no less bleak for Native Americans in the criminal justice system. "Native American youth are disproportionately showing up in the correctional system at a higher rate than any group but African Americans," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a California-based advocacy group.
Compared with the overall state population, the official number of Native Americans in Oregon is small indeed, less than 2 percent. But while Portland is the 23rd-largest metropolitan area in the United States, the Portland area also has the ninth-largest Native American population in the U.S.
, about 38,000 people. Still, the plight of Native Americans may be one of the untold secrets of the "minority beat" in modern-day journalism. Rarely does one read about members of the 300 tribes represented in Portland.
Even rarer is a discussion of what is causing Native Americans to fall behind or what is preventing them from advancing. What does remain in the news is talk of the nine Indian casinos in Oregon. And although profits at the nine casinos vary widely from tribe to tribe and not every tribal member in Oregon is entitled to money from those operations, many people continue to assume that the benefits of Indian gambling are spread among all Native Americans.
What follows is a photo essay about a young Portland woman whose life is both a confirmation of some startling statistics defining what it means to be Native American today and a rebuke of the forces that cast a shadow on her valued heritage. It was 's arrest at the age of 14 that began her ascent from hell and led her to create the family she has today. For most of her life, Margo bounced between foster-care families and relatives' houses in Texas, where she was born, and South Dakota, where her tribe is based.
But at the age of 9, Margo and her younger half-sister moved to Sheridan, near McMinnville, to live with their uncle and his wife. In 2001, when Margo was caught along with friends for stealing and crashing one friend's mother's car, she was arrested and placed in juvenile detention in McMinnville. As she was about to be released back into the custody of her uncle, she told an officer there was something she wanted to share.
Her uncle, Margo said, had been molesting and raping her since she was 9. Weeks later, Margo would discover that she was five months pregnant with her uncle's child. Her uncle, Art Ashley, would ultimately be sentenced to nearly 48 years at the Snake River Correctional Facility in eastern Oregon on 27 counts including five counts of rape in the first degree, four counts of rape in the second degree and 18 counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, for incidents spanning a period of nearly three years.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the sexual-assault rate among Native Americans is double that for all other races.
Margo calls her daughter , who's now nearly 6, her "magic" baby. Even given the circumstances, Margo considers the moment of Lexi's birth to be a moment of rebirth for her, too. "I'll never be his friend," Margo says of her uncle.
But I've come to let go of what he's done. [Lexi's birth] opened my eyes to adulthood and to adult responsibility. I had a lot to learn, and it took me a few years after I had her to understand what I had taken on.
" Two years after Lexi was born in 2001, Margo entered drug and alcohol treatment, and for another two years she was under the thumb of caseworkers who monitored her schooling, her finances and her parenting. It was during this time period that she moved to Portland. "I guess I have major authority issues because I've been in the system all my life," says Margo, whose sentences are frequently followed by nervous giggles.
"Once I got to the age I could do something about it, I took charge and kicked them to the curb," she said before laughing quietly. Last year, Margo and her boyfriend, , who is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, decided to get married when Tony turned 21. He is now 17.
is their 8-month-old daughter. Margo met Tony, who has green eyes and black hair that he sometimes slicks back like John Travolta in , in the summer of 2005 at a college-prep program sponsored by the Native American Youth and Family Center. "I talked to him first," Margo says.
"I told him he looked like a porcupine," because he had dyed the tips of his hair blond. "No, a hedgehog," she said, correcting herself and insulting him at the same time. Back then, Margo was still living at the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, an independent living program in Northwest Portland for pregnant and parenting teens.
She had pink bangs, tattoos and piercings. "I liked that he was different and unique and that he wasn't afraid to say he liked soft music like Mariah Carey," Margo says. He was "hip-hop," she adds.
She was punk. He was a virgin, and she already had a young child. He was 15.
She was 18.
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