The first day of the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Meth Summit was winding down when Ebony Tiger, a 17-year-old Yankton Sioux Tribe girl took the microphone to speak. Her testimony on growing up in a house dominated by a meth addicted mother was riveting – and heartbreaking.

Held March 24 and 25 at the Ft. Randall Hotel and Casino near Lake Andes, South Dakota, the summit, hosted jointly by the tribe and the North American Inter-Tribal Task Force, began with perfunctory presentations on investigative and judicial procedure by representatives from FBI and U.S. Attorney field offices in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Tiger, from nearby Wagner, said: “I am here to tell you how methamphetamines have affected my life. My mother is an addict, and has been for most of my life. I’ve lived with demons on my back for so long …” Shaken, the teenager continued, “It’s not easy living in the shadow of my mother’s addiction … it takes a toll on my life … at one point, I became so depressed … I didn’t have the motivation to do anything…

“Every day was like living in a prison. I was left in the care of people I did not know … I never had a home … I never felt the love I saw being given to other children. Many bad incidents occurred between me and my mother because her addiction got the best of her. In 2014, one of these incidents ended very badly …”

Soon after that incident, Tiger met Jodi Zephier in her capacity as Unit Director for the local Marty Boy’s and Girl’s Club. Zephier, also current Vice Chairman of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, was well aware of the exploding meth problem among her tribe’s young adult and youth population. She founded an organization in November of 2014 called Native American Youth Standing Strong (NAYSS), dedicated to providing solutions and alternatives for the tribe’s most deeply meth-affected youth.

The morning of the second day of the summit, Zephier gathered several of NAYSS’s youth members to discuss meth’s devastation of their communities. The seven teenagers, five girls and two boys, all said that Ebony Tiger’s story was one they could all relate to.

One young woman, now vibrant and happy, said she was five years old when she was first in the presence of meth. “My mom and my dad would do it. I was seven when me and my sisters and brothers got taken away. Our house was busted – somebody snitched – we got taken away – and my mom went to prison.” Her story ends well. “Right now, my mom and my dad are 12 years clean,” she said with a smile. “But there’s still others in my family using, that’s why I joined this group.

Other NAYSS members have not been as fortunate. Zephier said she started NAYSS because there simply wasn’t anything else. “Boys and Girls Clubs nationally had a program called Meth Smarts, but for some reason it got discontinued. The following school year, at least half a dozen kids of various ages came to me and shared things with me – and it all had to do with meth.

“Things like ‘their lights got turned off,’ or ‘our parents sold all our EBT and we don’t have any food,’ ‘I was supposed to get basketball shoes, but my parents used the money for meth,’ those kinds of things,” she said.

The tribal vice-chairman believes that in the sad hierarchy of reservation pathologies, meth addiction replaced alcoholism as the number one enemy. Another young NAYSS member, quiet and thoughtful, described her addiction up until two months ago. “I could never sleep. I was always fidgeting. When I was coming off of it I couldn’t smell anything and I couldn’t eat – I was on it for two months … the withdrawals were terrible.”