Inmate gets another chance to rediscover his traditions
Prague 2007: Common Ground
“Hi, I am Butterfly,” a six-foot tall and muscular Indian with calm, nice eyes said as he shakes our hands. He wears glasses and his ponytail sometimes hides under his blue jacket.
His white T-shirt and blue jacket are the clothes that inmates in the low-custody section of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge usually wear. Joshua Butterfly is one of those inmates.
His youthful forays into illegal drugs and crime eventually led Butterfly, 29, to the prison, where he is currently serving 20 years for sexual intercourse without consent. He’s been at the prison for about five years, he said.
Originally from Browning, Joshua Butterfly attended grammar school through the eighth grade. After grade school, he moved to Great Falls to live with his aunt.
“I felt that I was losing a lot when I was leaving,” he said. “My family, tradition, ceremonies, sweat lodges, drumming: that has been there all the time.”
He enrolled in high school in Great Falls, but it never held his attention.
"It wasn't for me," Butterfly said.
He dropped out of school, and it was about this time that his problems started. “I was drinking alcohol a lot, partying, and ended up on meth,” he said of his downfall. “I had a lot of losses in my family and this was my way to deal with the pain,” Butterfly said, sipping from a glass of cold water.
“But towns offer so much. There are more things to do, and better schools,” Butterfly said. Asked about problems that he never had on the reservation that he had to deal with in town, he said he felt urban people are prejudiced and it was very hard for him to adapt in such a community. Later it was very hard for him to find a job, too.
“It is really hard,” he said. “There was always somebody hating me for being Indian.”
For Butterfly, going to prison was a rescue. After overcoming his meth addiction, and with lots of help and support for his grandmother, he started to work and to study.
“My life switched from the criminal pattern,” he said.
To keep busy, Butterfly goes to school in the morning, studying grant writing and getting involved with inmate advocacy groups. When he is released, which he hopes will be in 2010, he wants to start an organization to help people coming out of prison get accustomed to life on the outside and to give them a second chance.
"Some guys come out and have no support there, they return back to prison," Butterfly said. And for some inmates, Butterfly knows, it’s easy to get too comfortable with prison life.
"This is the place where you have no worries,” Butterfly said, referring to the roof over his head and the three meals a day. “Some of the prisoners don't feel it’s like a temporary stop, but home."
It’s a problem prison officials are well aware of, said Linda Moodry, public information officer at the prison.
"When the prisoners come out of the prison, it's very hard for them to start the new life, if they don't have the support from the family," she said.
Butterfly also spends a lot of time with beading, filling in other chunks of time with physical exercise at the prison gym.
He is lucky that his family has not let him down. He said that here, he understands who he is for the first time.
“It taught me to think,” said Butterfly.
The death of his grandmother last autumn touched him very deeply. For Butterfly, she was the person who gave him the drive to go further, and showed him a good way, “and also what I’ve lost along the way,” he said.
Asked about the Blackfeet Reservation, Butterfly said he wants to go back there someday, although opportunities to find work there are fewer than off the reservation.
“I feel at peace there; it is my home,” he said.
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Posted by: Addiction | September 19, 2007 at 11:03 AM