GANG VIOLENCE GROWS ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION

PINE RIDGE, S.D. -- Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least
five of his "homeboys" in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a
Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.

One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot
himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by
the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of
the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

"We all got drunk after Gaylord's burial, and I started rapping," said
Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. "But I teared up
and couldn't finish."

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe
involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft,
violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in
other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in
the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of
roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned
buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from
broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson's, offering
brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and
self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of
dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight
rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with
semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted
siblings and partners in his mother's ramshackle house, without
running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye.
"It's just like living in a ghetto," he said. "Someone's getting beat
up every other night."

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on
reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling
them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that
is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs
and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the
national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style
themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive
force in some of the country's poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge
reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults
- -- including sexual assaults -- and rising property crime over the
last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly
fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car
windows are routinely smashed out.

"Tenants are calling in and saying 'I'm scared,' " Paul Iron Cloud,
executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told
the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on
the increase of gang activity.

"It seems that every day we're getting more violence," Mr. Iron Cloud
said.

Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with
cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called
"commod-squadding."

As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade,
the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to
20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island,
said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe's judiciary committee.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in
money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting
rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.

Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid
City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and
federal agencies, has noted the "marked increase in gang activity,
particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the
Southwest" over the last five to seven years.

The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang
units, up from 75 in 1997.

One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the
Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with
hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons
trafficking, Mr. Grant said.

Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started
by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off
the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies
and records.

Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their
best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.

"We're trying to give an identity back to our youth," said Melvyn
Young Bear, the tribe's appointed cultural liaison. "They're into the
subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and
they have a lot to be proud of."

Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals,
including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head
Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.

Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had
initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying
sweat lodges, "I was able to turn myself around." He is emerging as a
tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native
traditions.

Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations
found that the approach might be helping.

Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not
learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about
his own future.

"I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to,"
he said.

His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot
get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is
to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard
Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and
says he wants to go to college.

But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party
any chance he got -- "for the rush, the thrill." As he spoke, he was
dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his
tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the
megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in "Scarface," and he wore a
black bandanna.

He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu
performance.

Ever since birth

I been waitin' for death ...