After brother’s suicide, Blackfeet sisters are creating a horse-based alternative to talk therapy

Montana Free Press by Nora Mabie, December 18, 2025

Their community faces persistently high rates of suicide. To counter this, a scholar and a clinical social worker are blending new research with old traditions.

BLACKFEET RESERVATION — The air was getting colder, winds were picking up, the barn windows needed sealing, and Lynn Mad Plume was at a breaking point.

Her brother Wyatt had taken his own life less than two years before at age 29.

For about a year, Lynn and her younger sister, Erika Mad Plume, had been trying to turn their grief into something concrete and purposeful. Specifically, they wanted to provide free mental health resources to community members in the company of horses, animals their brother had loved. Local men in particular, Lynn and Erika said, tend to resist talk therapy. And many were grappling with compounded grief like their brother. Between age 11 to 29, Wyatt lost eight close family members or friends, including five to suicide, murder or addiction.

They hoped an alternative, informed by a blend of emerging mental health research and longstanding cultural traditions, might help reduce the likelihood of a death like their brother’s. They were eager to make a dent in daunting statistics that no one had figured out how to crack.

Montana has one of the highest suicide mortality rates in the country, and the crisis is particularly severe in tribal communities. From 2005 to 2014, Native Americans in Montana had the highest suicide rate compared to other demographics, and Native youth, ages 11 to 24, had a suicide rate almost three times higher than that of their white peers.

On the Blackfeet Reservation, nestled beneath the Rocky Mountain Front in northwest Montana, residents say suicide can seem ubiquitous. A 2017 survey of 479 reservation residents — some of the most recent publicly available data — found that one in three adults surveyed said they felt depressed or sad most days, a risk factor for suicide. More than 40% of eighth-graders at Browning Middle School, about 14 miles north of the Mad Plume sisters’ home on the reservation, reported having suicidal thoughts, and one in three said they had attempted suicide, according to the same 2017 community survey. Lynn and Erika’s goal was to keep their community’s children alive.

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