Rock bottom happened amid yet another physical altercation. This time, Milanii Engavo Sojos said, she was in the middle of two men — one the father of her daughters, the other a new love interest. The men were fighting, punching, pulling at her, almost in a tug-of-war. There was nothing playful about it.
There had been many fights before this; Sojos has the long, purple scars to show for them. This time, however, something shifted internally. Afterwards, when the cops had cleared out and she had sobered up, she felt immensely tired of the chaos and rudderlessness of her life.
“It was just like, ‘My kids don’t need this. I can’t keep doing this,’” she remembers thinking. “I’m not old enough, but I feel old for how much stuff I’ve been through.”
The trouble didn’t magically end there. There was more partying, more brawling, more booze-fueled tumult on the Wind River Indian Reservation. But that inflection point tipped Sojos, who is Eastern Shoshone, to think about a different future for her two young daughters.
And in the last year, Sojos, who is 23, has pursued those options through a hardheaded commitment. She passed her high school equivalency exam, moved to Gillette where she earned her certified nursing assistant certification and, with the help of the nonprofit organization Climb Wyoming, found a job as a home health aide. She enrolled in criminal justice classes this fall at Gillette College and has been working to stay sober with the help of her fiancé.
“My heart is elated that she’s changed her life,” said her mom, behavioral health specialist Erin Engavo, who lives in Fort Washakie and also studied nursing and criminal justice in college. After years of worry over her daughter, she said, “I’m just so proud of her.”
It hasn’t been easy or seamless, Sojos said. For others who want to break out of the cycles of violence and dead ends that she found herself washing through for years, she said, it takes accountability and patience. Change doesn’t happen overnight.
“It’s gonna be on you at the end of the day,” Sojos said from Gillette. “It’s gonna be on you to get up and make that change for yourself or others.”
In the ring
Sojos was born on a Navy base in Virginia, where her parents were stationed. They split up when Sojos was very young, and her mom moved back to Fort Washakie when she was a toddler. Her mom married her stepfather and the family moved around a lot, but Sojos and her siblings would return to the reservation every summer to visit grandparents and cousins.
She was in seventh grade in Billings, Montana, when she got into her first fight, she said. It was a stupid beef over misplaced jealousy, but a crowd showed up outside the school and someone caught the scrum on video. It circulated through the school, and her reputation as a formidable fighter began.
More fights followed. Brawls in the alley, in the hallways, in locker rooms. Sojos never turned down an opponent, even older girls. It was around this time that she discovered her biological father had died, and in retrospect, she said, she had a lot of anger and grief over never knowing him.
Someone suggested she try boxing, and she started training in her friend’s garage gym. Though she was only 14, Sojos was aggressive and athletic, and she excelled in the ring. In a short period of time, she won a city boxing match, then a state tournament in Butte, then a national amateur tournament in Independence, Missouri.
Her boxing career was cut short, however. Her grandma, Thelma Engavo, started having health problems. Sojos moved to Fort Washakie to be closer to her, and ringside opportunities faded.
Transitioning to living full-time on the reservation was difficult, she said. In Billings, she had been singled out for being native, but at her new school in Fort Washakie, classmates called her “white girl.” It didn’t help that she had a big mouth and a stubborn streak, she said, and she didn’t know all the cultural norms.
She did meet a boy, however. They began an on-again, off-again relationship that would last years. But it was toxic, Sojos said, and would help fuel the tumult that defined the rest of her teens.
Troubled times
Sojos entered a troubled patch. She dropped out of high school around age 15, and with her boyfriend, got caught up in a swirl of binge drinking and violence on the reservation.
“We started getting drunk with each other, partying, trying to get enough money to find the next bottle,” she said.
There were fights at parties, brawls involving bricks. Sojos’ grandfather came home one day to find her outnumbered and scrapping in the yard; he broke it up. Even her relationship became violent, she said.
Once, after breaking it off with her boyfriend, Sojos flew to the East Coast to visit her paternal relatives. While there, she made up with her ex, who had moved to Denver. And instead of flying home to Riverton, Sojos didn’t make her connection.
“I ended up jumping off in Denver, and he got me,” she said. They lived in motels and strung jobs together as their relationship continued its wild rollercoaster.
At some point, Sojos’ mom came to retrieve her, bringing her back to Fort Washakie. A couple weeks before her 18th birthday, Sojos found out she was pregnant.
That led to another reconciliation with her ex, who also returned to Wyoming, moving in with Sojos and her mom. But the birth of their daughter did not mark the end of the chaos, the seesawing of the relationship. And within a year, she had another daughter.
Another thing that didn’t stop was the fighting. There was a fight at the Shoshone Rose Casino with a neighbor. Cops were called after a hostile mob showed up at her house late one night. Another breakup led to custody battles. She fell back into drinking with some cousins and friends. This time, it got bad, she said.
“We weren’t eating nothing, we were just drinking, partying, finding the next house party, or whoever had bottles or could come join us,” she said. “My mom was pretty mad that I was doing that to my kids, my family.”
She moved out of her mom’s house and in with her aunt, promising to get her life on track. “But I wasn’t going anywhere,” she said. She ended up in jail a couple times. It was around that time that the tug-of-war incident happened with her ex. During the scuffle, her daughters were outside in a truck. When she realized afterwards that they had been out there alone for a couple hours, Sojos said, some clarity began to set in about how bad things had gotten. But it wasn’t until yet another fight that took place in the presence of her older daughter and left her with 20 stitches that she started to firm up her mind.
“Reality kind of set in some more,” she said. “I was like, ‘this ain’t the life I want for me or my kids.’”
She was not quite 21 years old.
The turnaround
There was a period of aborted attempts at settling down. Then Sojos rekindled a relationship with a guy from her past. He had also been in trouble, including serving prison time, and he also wanted to change his life.
After he moved to Gillette to work on oil rigs, he told her that he would pay for her to get her high school equivalency through the Penn Foster program. The education provider is entirely online and flexible; there are no set class times or rigid deadlines. It relies on self-motivation.
Sojos had made many half-hearted attempts to get her high school equivalency through the HiSET program offered by Central Wyoming College, but she never finished. With her boyfriend’s offer to pay, she said, there was more at stake.
“I was like, ‘I need to actually put some ambition into this,’” she said. She finished in about five weeks, she said, earning her diploma in December.
After that, things started to change fast. She moved to Gillette and got a job at an Amazon warehouse. She learned about and applied for Climb Wyoming, which offers free job training and other support services for single moms through a 12-week program. Climb Wyoming helped her enroll in a CNA program at Gillette College. When she passed her nursing boards in May, she became the first in her cohort to earn her license. Climb then helped connect her to job resources; a week after getting her license, she was hired as a home health aide at Kindred Souls.
Sojos was very clear about her goals and desires, said Climb Wyoming’s Gillette Program Manager Dane Josyln.
“Milanii is very well-spoken, very articulate,” she said. Sojos had a bit of skepticism when it came to trusting the process at Climb, Joslyn said, but what became clear is that “she has this very strong propensity to learn.”
Currently, Sojos is juggling the home health aide work with parenting her girls, who just started Head Start early childhood education. She’s enrolled in Gillette College for more courses this fall; she wants to pursue an education in criminal justice with the ultimate goal of becoming a probation officer.
When she went into the CNA program, she said, she felt like she needed a new adventure to keep her sober. These days, she stays plenty busy with work, school and raising her daughters. Her boyfriend, who is now her fiancé, continues to be a positive influence. And, of course, the hardheaded nature that in the past got her into trouble is now leading her in a better direction.
“Now I’m trying to settle down,” she said.
