Methamphetamine has ravaged reservations across America, including California rancherias where monthly gambling checks are sometimes blown on the corrosive white powder.

Janessa Starkey, a teenager from Placer County's United Auburn Indian Community, has made a film about it, "Behind the Door of a Secret Girl." The film, which was used by Harvard, will be screened Monday at the 35th annual American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco.

Starkey, 19, began writing it when she was a depressed, lonely 13-year-old who cut herself after other girls bullied her for being Indian.

Her film tells the story of a teen who cuts herself because she can't cope with depression fueled by her meth-addicted mom, who lives in a trailer on the reservation with an abusive meth dealer working for a Mexican cartel.
The story hits close to home in California, where several Mexican drug trafficking organizations are deeply imbedded, said Kent Shaw, assistant chief for the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

"It's a growing problem we've struggled to get our arms around," Shaw said. "Many of these groups are poly-drug traffickers – those running the big marijuana grows are also involved in meth, cocaine and heroin."
Meth – which is cheap to make and not easily detected in remote rural areas – "has hit several tribal communities very hard and many would characterize it as their No. 1 problem," Shaw said.

Starkey co-directed the film with the United Auburn tribe's media arts teacher Jack Kohler, a Stanford-educated Hoopa Indian who saw meth destroy lives on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, a 12-mile square in Humboldt County.
"One of my relatives has been in and out of jail his whole life," said Kohler, 49.
Meth use among indigenous Americans is more than double that of whites (1.7 percent vs. 0.7 percent) according to a national survey.

"Now meth has replaced alcohol addiction – it's a lot easier for kids to get meth and make meth, because many reservations have a no-alcohol policy," Kohler said. "The cartels realized Native Americans were an easy target."
Meth dealers have married American Indian women and set up shop on the reservations, Kohler said.

Meth hasn't ravaged United Auburn, whose 300 members live throughout the area because their reservation was terminated in 1959 by the federal government.

The tribal government was restored in 1994 and now operates Thunder Valley – one of the nation's most profitable casinos. The tribe has a Health and Wellness Department that provides free treatment and counseling to members struggling with substance abuse, depression, marital problems and mental illness.

Casino revenues also fund a first-class tribal school where students learn Maidu and Miwok dances, their Nisenan language, native history, filmmaking and animation.

"We couldn't do any of this if we didn't have Thunder Valley," said Kohler, who took Starkey under his wing after she dropped out of Lincoln High School at 16.
Starkey said she was raised in Roseville and Lincoln by her single mom. "My dad wasn't in my life." At 13, she cried easily, dressed in black, got into fights, saw her grades tank and began cutting herself with an Exacto knife. "I felt like was alone, that nobody cared … ."

Sammy, the girl in the film – played by Kohler's daughter Carly, a Stanford student – tells her friend David she cuts her wrists "because it makes me feel something … it makes me feel I'm a person, I'm real."

Starkey learned about meth from a friend "who had to clean, cook and take care of her household because her mom was into drugs."

Starkey's depression – one of the film's central themes – is something American Indians have dealt with for 500 years since the Europeans arrived, Kohler said.
Along with the nation's highest rates of meth usage, alcoholism, poverty and unemployment, American Indians have the highest suicide rate among ethnic groups, Kohler said.

He encouraged Starkey to write a screenplay – a process that helped her climb out of depression and find herself.

"It gave me something to do – I had a goal and a means of self-expression and felt better because I wasn't holding things in and wasn't so closed and miserable," she said.

Before she went to tribal school, "I had no idea where I came from and didn't want people to know I was Indian," she said. "Now I know traditional dances, I've learned a lot about my culture and feel like a whole person."
Starkey has also seen other tribal members totally transformed by casino revenues: "People who drank alcohol all the time are all cleaned up and have a good life."

She wanted to help other youths through the film, which was shown at Harvard to about 60 American Indian teens grappling with drugs on their reservations.
Starkey now lives in her own home in Auburn and helps Kohler teach filmmaking to other kids at the school.

"I'd like to make another feature film, maybe about what happened to us during the Gold Rush," she said. "We had to pretend we were Mexican because our scalps were worth $50, $500 today. But we have a lot of hope in this tribe, and we've found better ways to solve our problems."

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