American Indian actor to be guest speaker at Red Lake youth conference

RED LAKE - Adam Beach, an American Indian actor who appeared in last year's Cowboys & Aliens movie, will be the keynote speaker Thursday at the Red Lake Youth Leadership conference.

Beach is scheduled to speak at 9:30 a.m. at the high school and plans to address drug and alcohol use.

He is a Canadian Saulteaux actor raised on the Dog Creek First Nations Reserve. As a child, Beach saw his mother killed by a drunken driver and an alcoholic father drowned a few weeks later.

Beach and two brothers then lived with their grandmother, and later with an uncle and aunt in Winnipeg, where he joined drama classes and began acting in local theatre productions.

Beach has appeared in more than 60 TV and film roles, including in the Academy Award nominated Flags of our Fathers.

He also played Ira Hayes, a Pima Native American Marine and one of the six to raise the American flag on Iwo Jima. Hayes later found the fame hard to handle and drank excessively.

Beach has headlined the cast in the Walt Disney production Squanto: A Warrior's Tale (1994), acted in Four Brothers (2005) and starred with Harrison Ford and 'Daniel Craig' in the science fiction-western smash hit Cowboys & Aliens (2011).