LAME DEER, Mont.- A year and a half ago when her mother met LaTisha Brien at the bus station in Forsyth, Mont., she knew something had gone dreadfully wrong in her daughter's life. The young woman, brutally murdered last Jan., had come home from the Upper Sioux Reservation in Minnesota to Mont. for her grandfather's funeral. "There were big circles under my daughter's eyes and a bandage on her hand," Alvina Nightwalker said. "She told me she'd hurt it sledding."
Nightwalker, who in the mid 1980's convinced the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council to pass domestic violence codes, took her daughter to the hospital. "She started crying and said her boyfriend stabbed her," she said. "He'd beaten her in the country and left her. She had to walk back."
The he in question was Burr Crowsbreast III, whom LaTisha met at Chemawa Indian School. From the beginning their relationship had been stormy. Counselors told Nightwalker that Burr was mean to Alvina, but that no one had seen him hit her.
LaTisha's graduation in 1996 should have been cause for celebration for her mother. The young woman, who had become pregnant at 14, had finally earned her diploma. The milestone was marred when Crowsbreast and his mother met LaTisha at the Billings Airport and she decided to go Minnesota with them, instead of returning home to Lame Deer.
Months later when LaTisha called her mother from a motel room in Sioux Falls where Crowsbreast had beaten and left her, Nightwalker brought her home and expressed her concerns about the relationship. LaTisha made up with her boyfriend and off she went. "I couldn't get her to stay away from him," Nightwalker said.
It was the beginning of a pattern. Nightwalker was certain that if she could get her daughter to stay in Lame Deer, the situation would improve.
Pregnant with Crowsbreast's child, LaTisha moved back to Mont. Something had happened in Granite Falls. Nightwalker never learned what it was. This time she did manage to convince her daughter to stay.
LaTisha remained in Lame Deer, but once the baby was born, she began drinking. "She had trouble being a mom," Nightwalker said of her daughter. "I raised her first child. She was going back out there and I didn't want to raise this baby. She'd sleep until noon. She was working at the casino here, but her mind was in Minnesota."
Nightwalker finally asked her to move out. "I couldn't be codependent," she said. "I didn't want to enable the drinking."
While LaTisha partied, her oldest child went to live with her uncle at Crow Agency. Crowsbreast's mother took the baby. "LaTisha would tell me she loved her boyfriend," Nightwalker said. "She'd cry and say she wanted her baby; she wanted to be a mother and raise a family."
Last November, she drove her daughter to Minnesota in an attempt to regain custody of the child. "I told the judge that her boyfriend beat her all the time and I didn't want my grandson to be raised in an environment like that," Nightwalker said. She said the judge told her that spouse abuse wasn't a parenting issue and awarded custody to Crowsbreast's mother.
LaTisha stayed in Minnesota. November was the last time mother and daughter would speak. "I told her, 'He's putting scars on you," she said. "'I don't want you to be like that.' The only way I could have made her come home is to tie her up and force her in to the car."
Alvina Nightwalker knew about battering from personal experience. "I saw domestic violence in my family," she said. "My father beat my sisters and brothers; he beat my mother. It was so bad we'd run to my grandmother for protection," she said.
"Domestic violence is inter-generational," she said. "I left LaTisha's father because he beat me. I came to a point in my life when I knew I had to change because I didn't want my son and daughter to see this. It was hard to walk away and I've had to go to counseling to get where I am. It's not easy to leave a violent relationship. I remember being scared to sleep and scared of the phone. I left because I didn't want to pass the violence on," she said.
Recently she has been re-reading LaTisha's letters. "She always talked about him changing, about how things could be different, of how she wanted their life to be," she said. "She kept thinking that he would change."
She struggles with what she terms "partial responsibility" for her daughter's destructive, and ultimately lethal, choices. "I have to live with the fact that her dad and I showed her the domestic violence," she said. "I kept telling her it can be different," she said. "You can love somebody. Somebody can love you and he doesn't have to be mean."
Keeping afloat emotionally is difficult. One semester away from a B.A. in Sociology and an A.A. in Indian Studies at Montana State University, she has temporarily withdrawn from school to become an advocate for domestic violence awareness. "When things get really bad for me, I go and sit at the domestic violence program office here and read books on domestic violence and I write," she said.
She has shared some of her writing on the local television station and in the newspaper.
That helps, but nothing can erase the heartache. "I miss my daughter," she said. "We buried her in Lodge Grass next to her grandpa. I went to the grave on Memorial Day when they delivered the headstone. Before that, I kept thinking she would be coming back, but now I know I'll never see her again in this world."
Read Kay Marie Porterfield's background piece on domestic violence and alcohol.