GUILFORD — When Jonah Petrie returned in July for his fourth year to La Plant, S.D., with the Brattleboro Area Interfaith Youth Group, he had earned the role of youth leader and stepped into that role with ease.
More tentative was his hope to rekindle his friendship with a young Lakota boy named Xavier whom he had met when Xavier was a seemingly happy-go-lucky seven-year-old.
Now Xavier is a lanky 12-year-old with the weight of his heritage on his shoulders.
His older brother hanged himself shortly before Jonah met Xavier for the first time. Nonetheless, Jonah and Xavier bonded over their shared love of basketball.
Having missed going last year, Jonah was relieved when Xavier appeared the second day, and over the week they were constant companions - sometimes uneasy, but always keeping track of each other.
This past July was the fifth year a group of teens have made the trip to South Dakota. Jonah has been four times, others have gone as many as three times, and most have gone at least twice. It is a commitment the group takes seriously, as trust among Lakota people for anyone not Lakota is rare.
The Simply Smiles Organization has begun to change that, hosting 16 groups every summer and slowly reweaving relationships shattered by missionaries and nonprofits who would promise big things, only to become disheartened with the poverty and extreme weather, and leaving just disappointment behind.
The groups from Brattleboro have especially helped - certainly in maintaining relationships, building homes, and providing a summer camp but also, for the past three years, by helping support a suicide-prevention program there that was developed by the Center for Health and Learning, a Brattleboro nonprofit, of which Joellen Tarallo is executive director.
Thanks in part to these efforts, there have been no youth suicides in La Plant since 2014, and Xavier himself took part in the training this year.
The local interfaith teens, under the leadership of Rob Szpila, Joellen Tarallo, and myself, along with other adults and teens, have stretched to return and to expand their knowledge of indigenous history each time we make the trip.
This year, we had the fortune to meet up with Marlboro professor John Willis on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He has developed deep relationships there with artists and activists whom he introduced to the group. He also traveled north to meet the group at the site of the Standing Rock protest after the week in La Plant.