When Javon Montes found out she was pregnant with twins at age 19 she had nowhere to turn but to her parents.

Although James and Lydia Montes’ home in Box Elder on Montana’s Rocky Boy’s Reservation was already full with Javon and three younger siblings, they didn’t hesitate to add two more infants to the household.

Identical twins Jeremiah and Stephon came to a home already shared by an infant cousin, born to Javon’s sister LeAnn just a month before Javon realized she was pregnant.

James and Lydia Montes were not happy that their teenage daughters found themselves single mothers. But they make it clear immediately that they would help in whatever ways they could.

"I just assured her that I would support her and that I loved her, and I trusted that gave her a peace of mind," Lydia Montes says.

The birth rate for Native American women ages 15 through 19 in Montana is more than three times that of white teenagers in the state.

And while parents and health educators say teen pregnancies are certainly not encouraged, they emphasize that in Indian families all children are welcome children. Often grandparents play a major role in these extended families.

Indians consider all life "a borrowed gift from God," says Pauline Standing Rock, a bilingual Head Start teacher in Box Elder. Regardless of the situation, families give all the support and love they can, and that extends to teen pregnancies, she says.

Marilyn Sutherland, a social worker at Rocky Boy’s since 1975, says she has seen a change in attitudes toward young mothers.

"Children are a blessing," she says. "I don’t think anyone thinks that they are ever bad. People may not like it if their young daughter gets pregnant, but you do what you can do."

What’s more, if a mother finds herself too overwhelmed to properly raise a child, relatives are almost always willing to step in.

"In all my years that I’ve worked here, as long as you know they’re your blood, you’re gonna do whatever you can to keep them," Sutherland explains.

Indeed, abortion is far less frequent among pregnant Indian teens than among their white counterparts. For every seven births to Indian teenage mothers in Montana, there is one reported abortion. For white teens in the state, however, the ratio is close to one abortion for every two live births.

And adoptions—influenced in some measure by the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives strong preferences to Indian adoptive families when Indian children are involved—are usually to relatives of the child.

Javon never thought of giving up her boys because she knew she would have her parents to lean on.

She lived with them in the year after the twins were born and, with their encouragement and support, returned to Stone Child College at Rocky Boy’s Agency, where she had completed her first year, to finish an associate of arts degree.

Today Javon is married to Ivan, the father of the twins, and working toward a degree in English at the University of Montana. Without the aid of her parents Javon’s return to school would have been impossible. Her parents watched the boys when she attended class and helped her in ways big and small. Their assistance was both emotional and financial. For example, they had her retire her two-door pickup and gave her their new four-door Mazda. In Missoula she also finds support from sisters LeAnn, a Lady Griz basketball player who is married and raising 4-year-old Dominique, and from Aimee, a freshman at UM who also plays basketball.

Javon, Ivan and the rambunctious identical twins recently moved from married student housing to an apartment in Missoula’s South Hills near where LeAnn lives.

She says her relationship with her sisters has helped her succeed where others faced with the same circumstances have floundered.

LeAnn and Javon depend on one another for help with their kids. "We’re definitely each other’s babysitters," LeAnn says.

During the basketball season Javon often takes care of Dominique during practice. When the games take LeAnn away for several days, Dominique often stays with Javon. Although LeAnn is married, her husband attends UM and also works, so knowing Javon can watch Dominique eases her parents’ minds.

"Always having to depend on each other, it’s made us build a stronger relationship towards one another," LeAnn says.

The sisters spend as much shared time as they can and always try to cook a big family meal together once a week. And their getaways to Wal-Mart let them feel like college students combing for bargains more than mothers trying to juggle many balls.

The Montes family has always pulled together. The success of having two daughters play college ball is one measure. And for every home game, James and Lydia pile Colton, Jamie and, frequently, the children’s grandmother into a car for the five-hour drive to Missoula. The family’s Flathead-area relatives also make the trip. At the motel grandpa James likes to frolic in the pool with Jeremiah and Stephon under his arms and Dominique on his back.

Yet, despite all the support that Javon receives from family, revealing her pregnancy was emotionally taxing.

"I wasn’t exactly scared of my mom’s wrath coming down on me, it was more like I’d be a disappointment to my parents," Javon says.

Her father had always encouraged her to do her best, be it on the basketball court or in the classroom. But like his wife he accepted the fact with calm and helped his daughter prepare for the birth in whatever ways he could.

Nearly half the children born in Hill County, which includes Havre, the Rocky Boy’s Reservation and a half-dozen small towns along U.S. Highway 2, were born to unwed mothers, according to 2000 census figures.

So while the birthrate for Native American females is higher than that for whites, it’s obvious the fact many unmarried women are having children is not an Indian phenomenon. However, some Indian health educators say one reason for the high birth rate is that contraception is not in keeping with old customs. But neither, they say, were children out of marriage.

"In the old days you couldn't have a child out of wedlock; it was taboo," says Alberta St. Pierre, a nurse who has worked at Rocky Boy’s Indian Health for 25 years. But that taboo didn’t mean Indians embraced modern methods of contraception.

"The less Indian you are the more likely it is that you will use contraception," St. Pierre says.

Javon says she wrestled with her religious beliefs before she got pregnant.

"I wanted to get on birth control, but it was more a moral issue," she explains. "I wanted to get on it because I didn’t want to get pregnant, but I knew it wasn’t right, that I shouldn't be having sex at all, but while I was in the middle of all that I got pregnant."

Even with her parents’ emotional support when they learned of her pregnancy, Javon says she lost a lot of self-esteem and confidence.

"I was really scared to get back out there," she recalls. "I wondered, how will I do this, how will I face my classmates?"

But she made herself meet the challenge. She made herself be strong.

"When the boys were born, just seeing their faces and hearing them cry, it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before," Javon says.

"The fact that I wasn’t only living for myself anymore, and taking care of just my needs, doing what I wanted to do, now I had two little guys that depend on me more than anything else."

And taking the step to register for school helped her regain her confidence.

"It was like a light bulb lit up," her mother says. "I could see a whole different her and I was really happy."

Not long after, Javon was ready to move to Missoula with her boys to enroll at UM, but even with the progress she had made, life as a university student with twin sons is not easy. Though LeAnn was there to help, Javon was a single mother and getting everything done was exhausting.

Now with Ivan’s help her routine is a little less hectic.

She starts her day by reading scriptures, praying and writing in her journal. When she and Ivan rouse the boys, the twins pull the covers over their heads and dig in, but their protests don’t last long. They pull matching tees and hooded sweatshirts over their heads and their dark, buzz-cut hair pops through first, framing soft, brown eyes. The boys look identical but Javon says they don’t act the same. Stephon is the bigger of the two, and Javon calls him the daddy’s boy. Jeremiah is smaller and constantly gives Javon hugs and kisses and tells her that he loves her.

Religious faith is strong in the Montes family. They use scriptures as a guide and their Pentecostal beliefs are their anchor. Lydia Montes also taught Sunday school at the Assembly of God on Rocky Boy’s Reservation for 12 years.

"I always encouraged the girls to trust in Him," Lydia says. Javon says she focused on spirituality to overcome her depression after finding she was pregnant.

"You find yourself stuck in the worst situation and you don’t know where to turn, and the only way you can turn is spiritually, and within yourself," Javon says. "That’s what I did, I checked myself spiritually and said, "OK, where am I going now?"’

Still today Javon calls Lydia when she feels she needs spiritual guidance and they look up scriptures over the phone.

It’s that support and love that allows Javon to succeed.

"I know that if I wasn’t in the family that I’m in and the support and love … I don’t know where I’d be," she says.

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