Red Lake

Washington Post:

RED LAKE, Minn., March 24 -- In the months before he killed his grandfather, his classmates and himself, Jeff Weise painted an utterly nihilistic -- and often eloquent -- word portrait of life here on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

He described the reservation in Internet postings as a place where people "choose alcohol over friendship," where women neglect "their own flesh and blood" for relationships with men, where he could not escape "the grave I'm continually digging for myself."

In his dark and self-pitying depictions of life on the reservation, Weise appears to have drawn from his troubled personal history: When he was 8, his father committed suicide on the reservation after a standoff with police. About four months later, his mother suffered severe brain damage in an alcohol-related car accident. ...

Still, Weise was not all wrong in his assessment of Red Lake. Like many Indian reservations, especially the poor and isolated ones in and around the Great Plains, this can be a dangerous, soul-crushing place to grow up.

Compared with the tidy Denver suburb where two teenage boys went on a well-armed rampage at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and then themselves in 1999, Red Lake exists in a distant and exponentially more dismal dimension of the American experience. ...

Compared with other reservations in Minnesota and across the country, Red Lake appears to have had an especially toxic history of violence, drug problems and gang activity. The curriculum now includes courses in anti-gang training, anti-bullying training, drug and alcohol abuse prevention, and instruction in fetal alcohol syndrome. ...

The tribe's geographic isolation here in the northwest corner of Minnesota has been exacerbated by a long tradition of self-enforced isolation. For more than a century, the tribe has resisted federal programs that would open up the reservation to private land ownership. "We have just not ever been too crazy about white people coming around the reservation," said Lee Cook, a former member of the tribal council.