39adamstrand:To all outward appearances, Michael Dorris lived an exemplary success story. He rose fr

39adamstrand:To all outward appearances, Michael Dorris lived an exemplary success story. He rose from poverty to international prominence through talent and tenacity. He founded Dartmouth’s Native American Studies program and became one of the first bachelors in the nation to adopt children.Close friends of Mr. Dorris have said that they found it difficult to believe that the generous, brilliant and gregarious man they knew was secretly tormented by depression and thoughts of suicide.“I knew that Michael was suicidal from the second year of our marriage,” his estranged wife Louise Erdrich told the New York Times two weeks after Dorris killed himself in a New Hampshire hotel room on the night of 10 April 1997. He swallowed three bottles of over-the-counter sleeping pills, drank several ounces of vodka and then put a plastic bag over his head.In December 1996, Dorris’ 22-year-old adopted daughter and two of his three biological daughters gave authorities graphic testimony recounting dozens of individual incidents of alleged offensive sexual contact. They also told authorities that they had suffered dozens of separate episodes of physical abuse at their father’s hands. The day he learned of his daughters’ accusations, he called his friend Douglas Foster, former editor of Mother Jones magazine and said, “My life is over.” He made a failed suicide attempt as charges were being prepared.Dorris was to have been honored on 11 April 1997, the 25th anniversary e Native American Studies program that he had founded at Dartmouth, and the same day he was to have been charged by the Hennepin County attorney’s office with criminal sexual child abuse.  His death closed the investigation“Suicide,” Ms. Erdrich said in her Times interview, “It’s a very tangled road, a tangle of paths and dead ends and clear places and it’s gone. He descended inch by inch, fighting all the way.” -- source link

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