It’s midnight on any day of the week. Do you know where your kids are? Not where they said they were going, but where they truly are?
Keeping your kids safe is one of Rapid City Police officer Lisa White Face’s most important missions. It is her job, certainly, but it’s also a passion that drives her life—and its roots go way back three decades ago to the Pine Ridge Reservation where she grew up.
“It’s sad to say this but many of the kids I grew up with are either dead from the effects of alcohol or suicide, or in prison. Most of the kids I started school with didn’t even make it to graduation,” Lisa says.
Lisa was born in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Lakota parents Lenora Apple and Barny White Face. Her mother, originally from Kyle, was a teacher, and her dad, from Porcupine, was chief of police. “I had three older sisters and one younger brother, then when my dad remarried there were eleven of us,” she says.
Among Lisa’s favorite memories of her childhood was time spent at her grandma’s house. “We would go stay with my grandma’s and sleep under the stars. I loved it there,” she recalls. A typical day there would include all-day play and fishing—and for young Lisa, who had an early aptitude for all things mechanical, it often meant taking something apart and putting it back together again. “I remember we had this toy tractor and I was always fixing it,” she says, with a grin.
(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)
