The buff stubs of the last hay crop are visible above a light dusting of snow. The irrigation wheels are still parked along the south fence line. Behind the fence, in the dark cover of pines and junipers, you can find the occasional beer cans and liquor bottles - testimony that children still drink in the woods.
Across the field to the north, the tribal subdivision known as Pache is much the same; families have come and gone, but the neighborhood is still a place where some families succeed admirably and others fail miserably.
None.
Maybe two years isn't much to shout about. But every day that the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes distance themselves from the field west of Ronan is a small victory.
“I don't know if people think about that every day, but it's never far from your mind,” said James Steele Jr., who was a new member of the tribal council two years ago and is now its chairman. “Never very far.”
The boys, Frankie Nicolai and Justin Benoist, skipped out of school on a Friday afternoon, the 27th of February 2004. They were in the sixth grade. They'd made arrangements to meet another boy, and they'd also gotten a half-gallon bottle of vodka from a person known to provide children with liquor.
The three boys walked south out of Pache, crossed a brushy ditch and traversed the field into the trees. They drank for a while, then the third boy left because Justin wouldn't let him have any more vodka. By the time Justin and Frankie headed for home - no one knows precisely when that was, but the best estimate is some time Friday evening - they were extremely intoxicated. Frankie went down first, and Justin appeared to have knelt down in the snow to try to rouse his friend.
When Frankie wouldn't get up, Justin stumbled on. He didn't make it far before he, too, collapsed.
When the boys didn't come home, their families began a maddening search that encompassed much of the reservation. Authorities quickly joined the search, but the boys weren't found until Monday, March 1.
They'd been dead since Friday. Justin's blood-alcohol content was over 0.2, and he died of both alcohol consumption and exposure. Frankie's blood alcohol was a mind-bending 0.5, a level that likely would have killed someone twice his size.
The questions raised by the boys' deaths cut to the very heart of life on the reservation. They reverberated in the halls of tribal government, in schools, at church. People took to the streets, some demanding action from government, some just to say no more.
Before the discussion got too far, another boy, 15-year-old Joey DuMontier, died from drinking at a home outside Ronan. DuMontier was the son of a well-known reservation family, and his death rippled through communities already shattered by the previous deaths.
In all, four boys had died from alcohol-related incidents over a six-month period, starting with the death of Justin Benoist's 14-year-old brother Tyler in late 2003. Tyler Benoist died in a trailer fire in Pablo after a night of drinking.
James Steele had been in office for two months when Frankie and Justin were found dead. At a community meeting in Arlee, not long after their deaths, he seemed to experience a shock beyond what many others felt, primarily because he now had a responsibility he'd never had before. But he'd also worked with Tyler Benoist at the Ronan school, and felt something of a personal responsibility, too.
“This is something the tribes are going to have to deal with head-on,” he told a reporter that night. “This is so big that people are going to demand some action.”
Historically speaking, that's an atypical response in Indian Country, he knew.
“For a long time, I think that Indian people would have viewed this sort of thing as a community responsibility,” Steele said last week. “We watched out for ourselves. Now that our governmental structure is more European, one of the impulses is to demand action from the government. The community still feels that responsibility, I think, but people also have an expectation that government is going to do something to solve their problems.”
The reservation did respond as a community, with meetings up and down Highway 93 and a fascinating mix of people getting to work on solutions to the problem of alcohol abuse by young people.
And there was considerable discussion about personal responsibility, not so much on the part of young people as their families.
Still, most of the focus remained on what government - from the tribes to schools to the county sheriff - could do to cut into the problem.
“There was a pressure on both the council and on all of us as citizens to make the realization that we all needed to do something,” Steele said. “I do think it made us realize that we might need more partnerships between people and their governments. I also think the council felt that if there were things the government had done that failed these people, then we needed to fix that.”
By the time the boys died, the tribes were already in the process of studying how they could improve their child protective services program.
Part of that was a change that put the focus on children instead of on the rights of adults in child welfare situations, Teresa Wall-McDonald, who heads the tribes' Department of Human Resources and Development, said in an earlier interview.
“Our first thing there is to make sure if we err, we err on the side of children,” she said.
Child protective services was also moved from the health department to Wall-McDonald's department, and she has received high marks for running the program, Steele said.
“From the governmental perspective, this is something we've had to address across almost all of our departments,” he said. There are so many departments that might intersect with these problems, and we have to make sure that they are ready to respond. They also have to be communicating with one another so we know what's happening with families we're dealing with.”
The effort to better protect children also spilled over the tight confines of tribal government. The larger towns of Lake County got together with the tribes and the county to enact a countywide curfew for children, a move that Sheriff Bill Barron said made enforcement much more consistent.
“Before this happened, the cities had curfews, but the kids just knew they could go into the county and our officers couldn't do anything about it,” Barron said. “Just as important, I think, was the fact that these different jurisdictions came together to work on a common problem. I think that helped all of us in terms of communication.”
Barron and Steele both said they've seen something of a change in attitude in parents, too. Barron said his evidence for such a change is anecdotal, but he has some numbers that make his point.
“The year this happened, we had about eight runaway calls,” he said. “The next year we had 40 and the next year we had 80. What that tells me is that parents who once just sort of let their children roam are now paying attention to their whereabouts. That's a good thing.”
Of course, changes in the way governments deal with alcohol and children aren't the ultimate solution. Children are still drinking, and likely always will be. They still show up in the emergency rooms of Lake County with dangerous amounts of alcohol in their systems.
“We've brought the awareness level up, got the curfews, and we're doing some good things in the schools with our school resource officers, but this problem isn't going to go away overnight,” Barron said. “It's always going to be a major thing for us.”
Steele said the tribes have to keep their focus on problems they can solve.
“As government, we can do what we do, but government can't be the only answer to a complicated problem like this,” he said. “We're part of the solution, but we're not the entire solution.”
That responsibility falls across the spectrum - government, communities, schools, churches and citizens, he and Barron said.
“All of us have to think about what we can do personally,” Steele said. “I think that's where it starts.”
When James Steele thinks about the boys who died, he sees the face of a young relative who sometimes comes to live with him. That boy, who has grown up in a tragic family situation, could be one of the dead.
“That's part of what makes this very personal for me,” he said, wiping away a tear. “I have to make sure that never happens to him. When you think about it that way, it's a very, very personal thing.”
Thinking that way, Steele said, gives you ownership of a problem.
“You really shouldn't be able to look away when it could be happening right there in your own home,” he said.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com
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