Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (22 page)

But is the problem just the drugs? Is it just that? If we can get the drugs out, will everything return to normal?

“The gangs keep to themselves, in a way. They mostly hurt one another, fighting for distribution. These are criminal enterprises and all the talk about safety and family and all that is crap. They’re here to make money.” The real problem, according to Hagenah, is the increasing acceptance of violence among the community as a whole. “It started way back. But the last generation told their stories about who did time and who beat up who. These were funny stories, rez stories. Everyone looked up to your uncle Bumsy, for instance: how he did thirty for robbing that jewelry store down in the Cities. And these kids grew up hearing that. Violence is just part of things. That’s what they’re taught. So you have an acceptance of violence, violence is OK, and add youth to that (and young equals stupid) and some chemical fuel, and you’ve got a problem.” Steve seems to be right. The last three homicides in Cass Lake have been beating deaths. “Not just beating deaths. But three or four guys beating on a single guy. Stomping him in the head. Hitting him all over the body till he’s totally broken.”

This was true of Michael Littlewolf. He had belonged to an Indian gang in Cass Lake called the Third Avenue Killers. To outsiders the jokes come easy; it seems a little out of scale to call yourself the Third Avenue Killers in a town with only four avenues. Michael Littlewolf wanted to get out. He quit the gang and was taking steps to join the marines. But his gang friends caught up with him, beat him unconscious, and then burned and cut the tattoos off his body before leaving him by the side of the road. Michael died of his injuries. The gang members who tortured and murdered Michael told Hagenah, “You can get out, you just got to leave some of yourself behind.” For many kids rez life is nasty, brutal, and short. And most people long, just long, for the good old days when a fight was a fight and you could get by. Charley Grolla, the former cop and conservation officer from Red Lake, believes that violence has always been a part of Indian life. “That’s why we’re here. The only reason there’s any Indians at all is because we’re fighters. We have a violent attitude. It’s helped us, but it hurts us, too.” The late Tom Stillday, who was a spiritual leader from Ponemah, saw it much the same way. “That’s why we have so many Bear Clan and Marten Clan people at Red Lake,” he mused. “Those were warrior clans. And we had a lot of warriors here. This was the last frontier, the final stop before the Sioux and the Great Plains. So there were lots of warriors.” That kind of violence—in defense of home and place, rather than against home and place—might be why we’re here. But it’s not often on display anymore.

“And you know,” adds Steve, “families are all broken up. It’s always been this way, sort of. Kids floating from a parent to a cousin’s house, to the grandma’s place. Sometimes when I’ve got to interview someone, a witness or whatever, I’ve got to go to three or four, sometimes five places before I find who I am looking for. Kids are floating all over the place and their own families don’t know where they are. ‘Where’s little Tommy?’ No one knows. These kids are like motor pool cars: no one takes care of them until they’re broken. And then it’s too late.

“They say it takes a village. You know the saying: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ But I think that if the village is watching the child, then no one is watching the kid. The kid doesn’t have to be responsible to anyone. I think what it takes is at least one responsible parent, one parent who knows, who knows what’s going on for the kid twenty-four-seven. Someone the kid has to answer to and come home to. Without that . . .” Steve shrugs, hands open. “They graduate into the exciting and dangerous. They graduate into violence and gangs and whatnot. By the time I see them, these kids fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, it’s way too late. They’re animals.” By that time, these kids are in the system, whether the social welfare system or the criminal justice system or, increasingly, a blend of both.

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The number of Indian children in “the system” is staggering. Indian children in Minnesota make up 1.5 percent of the population under eighteen years of age; that is, there are roughly 20,000 Indian kids in the state. But of the 10,000 cases of child mistreatment, 7 percent involved Indian kids. That means that one in every twenty-four Indian children is in the system. These children have been assessed and treated and, in two-thirds of the cases, removed from the home. One in twenty-four doesn’t sound that bad at first, but it does when you compare the figure with the prospects for white children. Only one white kid in 206 will be in the system, and fewer than half of those in the system will wind up in foster care. To look at this another way, at least one Indian kid in every classroom is not living with his or her family, whereas only one white kid in every five classrooms is eating supper with strangers. These figures don’t include the vast number of Indian children who aren’t living with their parents and instead bunk with aunts, uncles, or grandparents. Fifty percent of all Indian kids in Beltrami County, the ones who are not in foster care, don’t live with their parents.
The staff at the Boys and Girls Club in Cass Lake estimates that more than 75 percent of the kids who come to the club don’t live with their parents.

Many kids have it rough; they are mistreated, abused, and neglected, and that is the main reason why they are removed from their homes. The state breaks down “child maltreatment” into five main categories: emotional abuse, medical neglect, neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse.
Of all the children in the system, 20 percent suffered from physical abuse, 10 percent were subjected to sexual abuse, and 73 percent were victims of neglect.

Jeffrey James Weise, a sixteen-year-old boy who killed his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend, a security guard, a teacher, and five fellow students on Red Lake Reservation in 2005 before killing himself, wrote that he often felt neglected and abused. Weise was born August 8, 1988, and his life was hard from the start: he was a victim of neglect. After a standoff with the police in July 1997, his father, Darryl Lussier Jr. (known as Baby Dash), committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Two years later his mother, Joanne Weise, went out drinking, crashed her car into a tree, and suffered massive brain damage. With a directness that was typical of how Jeff wrote, he e-mailed to an Internet friend this account of his mother’s accident: “My mom got drunk one night and wrecked her car and had to relearn how to tie her shoes, I was too young to fight back or too young to stick up for myself without getting struck down when this was happening.” Life before that, during the two years when he lived with his mother after his father’s death, had hardly been ideal: “My mom used to abuse me alot when I was little. She would hit me with anything she could get her hands on, she used to drink excessively too. She would tell me I was a mistake, and she would say so many things that its hard to deal with them or think of them without crying.”

Shortly after his mother’s car accident Jeff moved back to Red Lake to live with his grandfather. Weise was on Prozac. He hated school. School, it seemed, also hated him. He wore eyeliner and teased his hair up into devil horns. He was pulled from school and tutored at home.
On his MSN.com profile, he listed “planning, waiting, hating” as his hobbies. He tried to commit suicide with a box cutter. A feeling of neglect oozes through his Internet postings: “So fucking naive man, so fucking naive. Always expecting change when I know nothing ever changes. I’ve seen mothers choose their man over their own flesh and blood, I’ve seen others choose alcohol over friendship. I sacrifice no more for others, part of me has fucking died, and I hate this shit. I’m living every mans nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass, I really must be fucking worthless. This place never changes, it never will. Fuck it all.”

Jeffrey Weise tried to starve himself to death for four days in March, 2005. He ended his fast by killing his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend and driving to school, where he killed Derek Brun, Neva Winnecoup Rogers, and five students and then killed himself.

Like Jeffrey Weise,
Dustin Burnette, a Leech Lake Indian, came up hard. He and his older sister and younger brother were raised by his mother just south of Cass Lake after their father more or less left them. The father would come around once in a while, but for all intents and purposes he was gone. “That’s where I grew up,” Dustin says, pointing to a little house sandwiched between the Sand Trap golf course on one side and a lumber mill on the other. The house is 100 yards to the south of the city limits of Cass Lake. There are a dozen or so other houses in the neighborhood. “There were two murders on this block,” says Dustin. “But that was after I left”—after his life fell apart.

Dustin grew up Indian, but it was an empty Indianness. “We didn’t hear any Ojibwe language or ceremony. It was just powwow, alcohol, violence, and work.” Dustin is very light-skinned, with a round friendly face and sandy brown hair. “Yeah, I got all the bad stuff about being Indian and none of the good. I got the bad teeth and the instability and the alcoholism and all that. I didn’t get anything else growing up. That’s what being Indian and being on the rez meant to us.”

When Dustin was sixteen his mother died of an aneurysm. She had a terrible headache, and the next day she was dead. “I didn’t drink much before Mom died. Maybe once. I remember she died on the ides of March. I remember because I was Caesar in our English class play of
Julius Caesar
the month before. My roommate still laughs about that. He played Brutus. I love it. Ironic, right? My mom was pissed right, because I used one of her sheets for a costume, and they marked it all up with red marker for blood. My roommate stabbed me in the back. It was great. But it was sad when she died. I mean, people die, the world turns, but I was sad because she spent her last moments scared and in a lot of pain and wondering how we were going to make it.”

His grandmother did the best to take care of Dustin and his brother (his sister had been kicked out) after his mother died. “I’d seen her twice in sixteen years before that. She’d quarreled with my mom, you know. It really kicked her in the teeth—she’d been too proud to patch things up with my mom and then she died and she’s trying to take care of me and brother.” Dustin, who usually breaks into laughter or tries to say something shocking, gets quiet when he talks about his brother. “He’s doing OK now—he’s not hurting himself or anyone else. So I’m happy, completely. He’s out in New Town, North Dakota. He’s a night manager at a grocery store. He works and smokes himself silly and stays out of trouble. So I say: little brother, I’m happy for you. He had it worse, you know. Everyone bailed on him. He was fourteen when Mom died. I left him when he was sixteen to go to college. Grandma bailed on him. It was rough for him.”

Dustin describes himself as a mama’s boy. After his mother died, his stepfather left with his stepbrother. “Everything was different. Different people. Different cars. Different food. You know when you’re a little baby and your folks are watching a movie late at night and you’re watching with them? And now as an adult you remember watching it with them but you don’t remember anything about it? That’s how my old life is before my mom died. A feeling but no memory of everything. Everything was different after she died. You never deal with death before and then your mom dies in a minute. I don’t know if I was manic-depressive or what. But life was surreal. Nothing mattered. School was different. My friends were different. Everyone treated me different. I’d walk up to strangers and slap them in the face and think it was OK. I didn’t give a shit. No one would mess with me. I had nothing to lose. I stopped going to school. I started stealing—DVDs and stuff. If my brother and me wanted to go to a movie we’d go steal something so we could get tickets to a show. Just from retail. We never stole from people, not that that’s any better.”

All in all life was going down. Dustin gained weight—he ate to feel better. “I’d eat nachos. Ice cream. I mean a huge bowl of ice cream with a candy bar on top of it. Every night. It was sad, dude.” He went from 165 pounds to 245 in three months. He would go to school but just to hang out, just for someplace to be. Still, he was smart. He scored twenty-nine on the ACT (in the 85th percentile). He had straight A’s. He had only two classes and a lot of free time. He started to hang around the Indian education department in the high school because you could hang out there and no one expected you to be doing anything.

Then a new Indian counselor showed up at the school: Sean Fahrlander. “I could hear him talking through those paper-thin walls. But I wouldn’t talk to him or nothing. He was, and I’m serious, the ugliest, meanest Indian sonofabitch I’d ever seen in my life. He looked horrible, man. I was terrified. Everyone was trying to get me to talk to him. So I went into his office one day. I stood in the doorway. He said, ‘It’s about time.’ He got up and came around and closed the door. And then he broke me down. He said: ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, you little piece of shit? You’re walking around here like you’ve got a big cock. You’re nothing.’

“I’d never been talked to like that. I went home and cried in my bed. I cried forever. But I came back the next day and he said, ‘Well, boy. You feel better?’ The thing is, I did. I did feel better. I felt great. ‘Good,’ said Sean. ‘That’s what I call knocking you off your high horse. Now let’s get started.’ It’s no bullshit! It was all him. I went in there to play a game of chess. I didn’t expect any of that. Just that one little ear beating was all I needed. Someone to hold me accountable. It meant a lot to me. He told me that I was Indian even if I didn’t look it. We hung out every day. He told me about Indian shit, beyond the stuff I knew. He talked to me about my treaty rights and stuff. My rights. I didn’t know anything about those things. No one ever talked to me about this stuff. I never pursued it.”

Sean went farther. Toward the end of the year he slipped Dustin a pamphlet with a picture castle on it.