Teton Saltes has cut the rope from the neck of a young man his grandmother was holding up after sprinting through night-shrouded woods toward her screams for help.

He has heard the shotgun blast as he and his grandmother sprinted through a home's front door, knowing they were seconds too late to prevent another young man on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation from dying by suicide.

Saltes, 21, grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation, a 2.1-million-acre expanse in the southwest corner of South Dakota, where the unemployment rate is more than 80%, the poverty rate is the highest in the country and the suicide rate for young men is four to five times the national average, according to statistics from the Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation and the National Suicide Prevention Center.

This home of nearly 20,000 residents is a place where hope quietly fades into despair.

“If it were anywhere else in the country, it would be a big epidemic going on; we would have major news coverage,” said Laticia DeCory, Saltes’ mother. “Three or four people dying from one family because of suicide — that would be up everywhere. But because of where we’re at, we really don’t have a lot of news coverage.”

Saltes is a 6-foot-6, 284-pound junior guard on the University of New Mexico’s football team. He’s getting ready to play on the biggest stage of his life Saturday, when the Lobos (1-0) visit seventh-ranked Notre Dame (1-0) in a nationally televised (NBC) game.

He is also dedicated to making sure the 40,000 or so members of the Oglala Tribe who live in and around Pine Ridge are not forgotten. To give them a better education, improved health care, secure sources of food and roofs over their heads.

According to the American Indian Humanitarian Foundation, more than half of all homes on the Pine Ridge reservation — one of nine in South Dakota for the tribes that make up the Sioux Nation — lack water, electricity, adequate insulation and sewage systems.

“It’s a hard place to live, it really is. For young people, for old people, for our elders,” Saltes said at Mountain West media days in late July. “I’ve gone to their homes. I’ve had to cut ropes off of people from the age of 8 all the way to 67.”

His grandmother, Yvonne “Tiny” DeCory, has made suicide prevention on the reservation her life’s work. She has trained Teton Saltes and his older brother, Adonis, a former college basketball player, to help whenever they’re home.

A cellphone shared by DeCoury, 67, and another woman, Eileen Janis, serves as the suicide prevention hotline for the entire reservation.

Calls come at all hours, Tiny said, and she and Janis respond immediately.

“I’ve been with my grandma — imagine, she’s 64 or 65 years old — and parents called her screaming, crying,” Teton Saltes said. “They’re saying, ‘I can’t find my child. He ran off into the woods.’"

He found his grandmother holding the boy up, preventing his self-made noose from tightening around his neck. By the time Teton cut the rope and carried the boy to safety, she'd been holding him for hours.

“I’ve been with her when we walked into the home of a child and, right as we walked in, we hear a gunshot,” Teton said.

The tragedy he stepped into on that night, like numerous other nights, left an indelible mark on his soul.

“The amount of death he’s been around and seen; that’s just not normal,” Laticia said.

Laticia, Tiny’s daughter, is a health care administrator working at Pine Ridge to improve the quality of care and resources available through the Indian Health Service. Far too many Native Americans living on reservations, she said, suffer and die from ailments that can easily be treated at emergency rooms elsewhere.

The emergency room at Pine Ridge’s hospital isn't equipped to treat the needs of many of its patients, who often face air-ambulance trips to to hospitals hours away in Rapid City, Sioux Falls, or Scottsbluff, Nebraska.The most serious cases can require 300-plus mile flights to Denver.

Laticia was once one of those patients, airlifted to a Rapid City hospital when she went into labor with Teton more than a month early.

For all its problems, Pine Ridge was a wonderful place to raise children, Laticia said. There were horses everywhere that belonged to the entire tribe. Anybody could ride them. There are wide-open spaces on the plains, not all that different from where her ancestors of the Oglala tribe and other tribes of the Lakota People grew crops and hunted buffalo hundreds of years earlier.

“As poor as we are, we’re really rich in culture, and we’re big on family and everybody takes care of everybody," Laticia said. "Nobody’s ever really homeless; everyone’s always opening their door for you. Everyone always has food for you. They give even when they don’t have it. And so, to me, it was amazing.”

The high school graduation rate on the reservation is 50 percent, however, and half of those who graduate struggle to read at a fourth-grade level, she said.

Laticia wanted her boys to get a better education and experience a different environment.

She moved them to Phoenix when Adonis and Teton were in grade school. Laticia earned a medical degree at a small, private college and later moved the family to Farmington, New Mexico, with her new husband, Eric Sampson. Laticia took a job working for the Indian Health Service at a medical center in Shiprock on the vast Navajo Nation Reservation that stretches into southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona.

Adonis was starting high school, made the varsity basketball team at Farmington High School as a freshman and soon began drawing the attention of college recruiters

Following another move, Adonis became a star player at Valley High School in Albuquerque, earning the state’s Gatorade Boys Basketball Player of the Year honor as a senior and accepting a scholarship to play at Southern Utah.

Teton played basketball and competed in track and field his first two years of high school. He joined the football team during his junior season because he was “bored” waiting for basketball practices to start.

His combination of size and athleticism — former NBA star World B. Free and Olympic gold-medalist distance runner Billy Mills are great uncles — made him an instant hit. Teton had four sacks in his second game and started drawing interest from several major football programs, including Oklahoma, Oregon and Washington.

“I knew if I were to go to one of those programs, coaches probably wouldn’t really take the time to work with me the way that I really needed to,” Teton said. “I’m going into my freshman year of college, and I didn’t know the difference between a guard and a tackle. At New Mexico, they would help me. They would teach me the things that I needed to learn, and I was right about that. They really did.”

Besides, he felt at home in Albuquerque, where there was a large and active Native American population, and New Mexico was at the forefront of establishing programs through its law school for Native Americans. Lobos coach Bob Davie even included the Indian Law Certificate program in his recruiting pitch to Teton.

Teton hopes to play football professionally and make a real difference for the people of Pine Ridge. He hopes to eventually go to law school to “fight for the civil rights of misrepresented or unrepresented people” in the courtroom, which he refers to as today’s “real battleground.”

He’s already active in politics as a student ambassador, representing Native American interests. In his role with the Save The Children organization, Teton lobbied members of Congress during a three-day summit in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer. He meets regularly with the two Native Americans in Congress, Democratic Reps. Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas, to discuss issues related to the health and welfare of children on Indian reservations throughout the country.

Pine Ridge, he said, will always be his home. And he’s determined to make life there better.

“I always go home, and I try to do as much as I can for the community and for my people,” Teton said. “And I always want to show them the other side, a better life. I want them to see that there’s more to life than what we have here.”

That work includes helping his grandmother and Janis with the BEAR (Be Excited About Reading) project, which began as a literacy program in 2000 but now focuses primarily on suicide prevention through life skill and life awareness education, Tiny said.

It’s not exactly a 9-to-5 job, Tiny said. But it's one she'll never stop doing.

"When I see kids, youths that have tried four or five, 12, 13 times, when I see them walking down the street, and they have that big smile on their face and they don't have that look of hopelessness in their eyes; but I see life," she said. "That gives me all the energy that I need. So, at 67, I feel like I’m 20 years old."

Teton, Adnois and Laticia will keep doing their part to improve the lives of people at Pine Ridge, too.

It's who they are and what they do.

"Where I come from, in our native American ways, children are sacred and we truly believe that," Teton said. If we don't do our job to raise children to be strong, to be powerful, we're setting our children up for failure.

"My family, they were doing this kind of work before I was even born, so I was born into it. My grandma, everything she did was all about youth, and she instilled that within my mother who, in turn, instilled it within me. And they still do that work every single day."

Suicide warning signs

Feelings of being a burden, entrapment, unbearable pain

Increased anxiety

Isolation

Increased substance abuse

Looking for access to lethal means

Increased anger or rage

Extreme mood swings

Expressions of hopelessness

Sleeping too little or too much

Talking or posting about wanting to die

Making plans for suicide

How to help someone who is struggling

Ask how they're feeling (don't be afraid to use the word "suicide")

Find out how to keep them safe

Be there for the person

Help them connect with resources

Follow up, even when they seem to be happy

SOURCE: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Help for people in crisis

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or chat: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/

Call 911.

The Trevor Project offers suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386.

SAMHSA’s National Helpline offers referrals for substance abuse and mental health treatment at 1-800-662-4357.

Suicide crisis lines worldwide:

In the UK and Ireland: Call Samaritans UK at 116 123.

In Australia: Call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14.

In Canada: Call Crisis Services Canada at 1-833-456-4566.

In other countries: Find a helpline near you at Befrienders Worldwide, IASP, or International Suicide Hotlines

SummitStone Crisis Stabilization Unit, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: summitstonehealth.org/services/

Poudre Valley Hospital and Medical Center of the Rockies crisis centers: uchealth.org/services/behavioral-health/

Behind our reporting:How the Fort Collins Coloradoan reports ethically on suicide

Kelly Lyell covers CSU and other local sports and sports-related news for the Coloradoan. Follow him at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news and help support the work he and his fellow journalists do in our community by purchasing a subscription at coloradoan.com/subscribe.