It's a cool spring day, the wind alive and running, the sky a gaudy blue above the headquarters of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. One by one, almost in a hush, the children say their names, then tell their stories.
"My family was affected by alcohol," they say, over and over.
"I miss all of them," another says.
Off to the side stands Frank Nicolai. His head is down, his dark hair under a baseball cap. He cries while the kids talk.
Frank's boy, Frankie, is part of the reason everyone's gathered on the lawn this day. He died from drinking vodka on Feb. 28. He was 11 years old.
This meeting is about hope, but hope here is never distanced from grief. Hope is what you cling to when nothing else works.
"We all have a responsibility to stand up and help one another," says Pat Pierre, a tribal elder from Duck Lake. "Don't ever be afraid to use that word, love. Let it come through your eyes. Let it come through your heart."
Pierre lost three sons to alcohol.
His love came through his heart, but it couldn't save his boys.
"I don't want to see that happen again," he says.
And yet it keeps happening.
Tyler Benoist.
Frankie Nicolai.
Justin Benoist.
Joey DuMontier.
"The blame is on ourselves for being quiet when we should be talking," Pierre says.
People are talking now.
"The biggest tragedy of all is if we don't do something," says Fred Matt, chairman of the tribal council.
The question is what?
On another spring evening, a handful of teenagers sits around a table at Ronan High School and talks with a DJ from a local radio station, Aaron Traylor, his colleague, Jami Daniels, and a newspaper reporter.
The evening's topic, indirectly, is alcohol abuse, but Traylor starts the discussion by asking the teens what there is to do on an evening in Ronan or Pablo.
"Nothin'," says Alicia Talamantes, who is 14.
With some prodding from Daniels and Traylor, the group finally outlines a list of possible things to do: the movies, play video games, go to the bowling alley. Maybe they'd go to the skate park, but it's out of commission.
The Boys and Girls Club? Boring.
Traylor tries hard to engage the kids, but they're only mildly interested. They'd rather talk about who said what about whom. "Like, can you believe they said that?"
Traylor moves on to ask about the rediscovered notion of a reservation-wide curfew for children. Good idea?
"What curfew?" the kids ask.
"I don't think that would make anyone go in," said 16-year-old Shayla Finley. "I mean, why would it? It's not like the cops are gonna come find you."
Yeah, everyone says, it's easy to hide from the cops.
Finally, it's down to the reason everyone's gathered at the school on a Friday night. Daniels, who lived for a while on the Tualip reservation in Washington, takes the first step: "So, who here drinks?"
The kids range in age from 13 to 16, so for just a moment, the fact that no one raises a hand creates a flicker of hope. No one says anything for a second, then a handsome boy spinning a football in his hands speaks up.
"Well, I got in a lot of trouble when I drank," he says. "I was 0.28, so I didn't really know too much about what was happening."
That opens the gates.
"Remember that time when all those boys were trashed so bad?" Finley asks a friend from Elmo. "I didn't think anybody was gonna get home."
The kids throw out a handful of stories troubling enough to curl a parent's hair. The stories have an air of boastfulness, a "Hey, look at me" essence that often defines the teenage years. But in the wake of so much death, they also sound reckless, almost disassociated from too much truth.
Finley had her own bout with the bottle, she said, but tragedy stopped her cold. She was a cousin to Tyler and Justin Benoist. Tyler's death put her off the booze, and she says that's forever.
Even so, the deaths seem nearly routine for the children. They've simply seen too much. They are no longer awed by death because it's become a dark and all-to-frequent visitor.
They're also still kids. They have hopes and dreams. One wants to be a singer; her friends say she is dynamite. Another girl wants to dance. They all want to go to college.
If we followed them home, we asked, would we find them drinking? Some sly smiles, a toss of the hair over the shoulder.
"You've been out there in Pache," one says. "You know how it goes."
Pache is the tribal subdivision where the Benoist boys lived.
This notion of hope started in anger, disgust that 11-year-old boys could drink themselves to death right under our noses.
It surfaced first in Arlee, where parents, teachers, tribal officials, students and others gathered on a wind-driven night to fashion something more than a promise to never let such a thing happen again.
"We do have a serious problem, and the problem has been here a long time," said Arlee High School teacher Willie Wright. "We know what the problem is, so let's hash it out."
Three months later, they're still hashing it out. In town meetings, at the tribal council, in the school districts, in the offices of law enforcement up and down the reservation.
They've produced list after list of ways to fight back; some broad and overarching, some that would come at the issue of alcohol abuse one household at a time.
"We need to think as broadly as we can here, because this is not a problem with an easy solution," Barb Monaco, head of juvenile probation for Lake County, said at a May meeting in Polson. "We need to come up with ideas about schools, about homes, about the justice system. This is no one person's responsibility. This is all of our responsibility."
The reservation and its towns now have a synchronized curfew for kids. An old horn used to warn folks that a reservoir dam had burst now tells the kids of Ronan that they need to get home.
Schools are taking a more aggressive approach, looking to intervene more quickly at any sign of trouble.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are working toward a more comprehensive system of providing social services, from housing to public assistance. They've also tried to make sure that when one hand of the Tribe grabs hold of a child or family in trouble, the other hand knows what's happening.
The tribal child-protection service has been transferred from one department to another, and the head of the department that now governs CPS is so concerned about failure under her watch that she sees success as her only option.
The days of looking the other direction when adults buy liquor for children is over, too. Adults already have been charged with buying the alcohol that helped kill Joey DuMontier and Tyler Benoist, and a suspect has been identified in the deaths of Justin Benoist and Frankie Nicolai.
"That's probably been the most concrete change we've made," Lake County Sheriff Bill Barron said recently. "We are going to have no tolerance for that. I'd say before that we usually focused on the youth, but now we're looking across the spectrum. It's not just the kid - they got the liquor from somebody."
And still there is fear.
Fear of the idle nights of summer, for the children with too much time on their hands and too little guidance at home.
Fear that tribal service programs reach many, but not all.
Fear that curfews and bells are symbols more than solutions.
Fear that arresting people is fine and good, but it's always after the fact.
Fear that the problem of alcohol abuse simply can't be solved.
"This isn't going to be easy," said Tony Incashola, director of the Salish Cultural Committee. "We are dealing with generations of alcohol abuse. Even if we implement every possible solution this week, something bad will still happen. Maybe this is the start, but we're a long way from the finish."
The meetings across the reservation and the internal review undertaken by tribal departments have, not surprisingly, focused heavily on the fact that children were dying from drinking. That attention is appropriate, but some in tribal government know that the real enemy is widespread alcohol abuse.
Even when it doesn't kill, alcohol tears families apart with higher rates of domestic violence, child abuse, neglect and unemployment. Children generally do worse at school when they live with someone abusing alcohol, and low self-esteem is a chronic problem in drinking households.
The tribal health department has all manner of alcohol programs in its addiction services division, but most of the work done there is reactive.
"We have a full plate of services," said addiction services' Kim Azure, "but we are dealing with acute situations usually, mostly people in crisis."
In fact, acute care for both alcohol problems and general health issues eats up most of the health department's budget.
"When you are dealing with alcohol, one of the best measures is prevention, and that's something we don't do very well, with alcohol or health in general," health director Kevin Howlett said. "We spend almost all our time and money on acute crises, and that is not a very good way to come at a problem like this."
Part of that is because the issue is not as simple as one person's drinking problem. Howlett knows that and every researcher who's ever studied Indian alcohol use knows it.
"Alcohol use on reservations has come to be accepted although still not approved of," researcher Fred Beauvais, who works at the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research at Colorado State University, wrote in one study. "In a sense, alcoholism has become a way of life and in many places it has come to be a valid expression of 'Indianness' Š When the lack of personal responsibility is combined with a belief in the inevitability of alcoholism, there develops a sense of fatalism that may defy treatment efforts."
Some in tribal government believe the mechanism and programs are in place to deal with the alcohol problem. Others disagree, arguing that the tribes, hamstrung by federal appropriations, have put a Band-Aid on a mortar wound.
Some critics of the tribal council, like SuSan Dowdall of Polson, don't believe the council has the political will or know-how to deal with the problem.
"Too many people on the council are too worried about themselves and their friends," said Dowdall, who works in the Polson school district. "I think this is something that is too hard and too much work. I don't think they have the political will to make anything good happen."
Council chairman Matt doesn't believe the issue is one of the council's political will. While a firm advocate of the tribes' many programs that intervene in crises such as homelessness, poverty and substance abuse, Matt believes the tribes will never succeed if the burden of success falls solely on government.
"I take responsibility for the fact that we need to be part of the remedy," Matt said. "But I don't think the tribal council can do it all, just like I don't think the schools or the police can do it all. There's a part of success that has to take place one person at a time."
Matt understands the historic pervasiveness of alcohol in Indian cultures, but he finds it almost beside the point to spend time blaming the past. He looks no further than his own experience with alcohol for guidance.
"It didn't do me any good to say that my mom and dad were responsible for my drinking, or that the white man was responsible," Matt said. "That didn't get me anywhere. To say that I was a poor Indian kid from the wrong side of town and my parents didn't want me is true, but that didn't do me any good. I finally had to realize that I had the key and that I may not have been fully responsible for all that had happened, but I was fully responsible for myself. I could fix myself."
That sense of personal responsibility is at the heart of discussion on the Flathead Reservation.
Nearly every agency that has anything to do with alcohol abuse - from police to the mental health profession - came together at KwaTaqNuk in early May for a brainstorming session.
Name a possible solution, and someone probably tossed it out that day. Tougher laws, better treatment, education, more love, everything was on the table.
But so was the burdensome truth that almost every response proposed was reactive and after-the-fact. It's the same truth that became apparent that first night in Arlee, when those gathered reeled from the deaths of the 11-year-old boys, Frankie Nicolai and Justin Benoist.
"The problem here, and this is always going to be the problem, is that the people we are trying to reach are never going to be at meetings like this," SuSan Dowdall said that night. "They're at home or they're out drinking. What we have to do is find a way to reach those people."
Some of those people won't be reached. Some will live out their lives yoked to alcohol and all its attendant horrors. But sometimes, even in the worst, darkest places, hope flourishes.
In mid-May, about 200 people walked from Ronan to Pablo to draw attention to the problem of deadly alcohol use by children.
Afterward, when a handful of adults had spoken, two children took the stage. They told a similar story of how their parents, particularly their mothers, chose alcohol over them.
Both kids, teenagers from St. Ignatuis, cried as they spoke, but their message was one of strength, not defeat.
Their names are Lynsey Inmee and Steven Hernandez.
Steven was good friends with Joey DuMontier, who died from drinking in May. They were going to be in a band together; Joey would play the drums, Steven would learn to sing.
But now Joey is gone. Steven lives with his grandmother. He's 15 years old and already has lost his mom and one of his best friends to alcohol.
He's got reason enough to drink. But he says he won't. He knows the cost, and it's far too high.
Lynsey Inmee knows the unfathomable cost, too - what price a loss?
"It's pretty heartbreaking to come home and have your mother not want you," she said that day. "She loved alcohol more than she loved her kids and now she doesn't take care of us anymore. She lost us."
Somehow Lynsey's heartbreak, as crushing as it was, charted her future course, a path that doesn't include alcohol.
"Choose the right path," she said that day. "You want to be able to come back and see your family again."
But four boys didn't come home. They're remembered now, as smiling boys, as brothers, as shimmering lights in their parents' bleakest hours.
"We can't let them go like this," the elder Pat Pierre told his nation on that cool spring day. "We have to make their deaths mean something. They need to be the last boys to leave us this way. We have to make that happen."
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or mmoore@missoulian.com
To read previous installments of the "Lost Boys of the Flathead" series, visit http://www.missoulian.com/specials/lostboys/
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)