PLAGUED BY DRUGS, TRIBES REVIVE ANCIENT PENALTY

BELLINGHAM, Wash. - For generations the Noland family has led a
troubled life on the Lummi Indian reservation here. The Nolands have
struggled with alcohol, painkillers and, more recently, crack. Seven
family members are now jailed, several for dealing drugs, on and off
tribal land. Their experience has been repeated hundreds of times on
this sprawling, desperately poor reservation of 2,000 Lummi, where
addiction and crime have become pervasive. It is the reason that the
Lummi tribe has turned as a last resort to a severe and bygone
punishment, seeking to banish five of the young men in jail and
another recently released. It is also the reason for evicting Yevonne
Noland, 48, the matriarch of the Noland clan, from her modest blue
house on the reservation, because her son, a convicted drug dealer,
was listed on the lease.

Banishment once turned unwanted members of a tribe into a caste of the
"walking dead," and some people criticize it as excessive and
inhumane, more extreme than the punishments meted out by the world
outside and a betrayal of an already fragile culture.

But a growing number of tribes across the country, grappling with a
rise in drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have
used banishment in varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders
see this ancient response, which reflects Indian respect for
community, as a painful but necessary deterrent.

"We need to go back to our old ways," said Darrell Hillaire, chairman
of the Lummi Tribal Council, shortly before an early morning meeting
on the reservation recently about the tribe's new campaign against
drugs. "We had to say enough is enough."

While the Lummi use banishment to root out drug dealers, other tribes,
like the Chippewa of Grand Portage, Minn., are using it to rid the
reservation of the worst troublemakers and to preserve what they say
is a shared set of core values.

Being banished can mean losing health, housing and education benefits,
tribal rights to fishing and hunting, burial rights, even the cash
payments made to members of tribes earning hefty casino profits.
Recently, the Lummi have begun evicting the residents of households in
which someone is charged with any drug-related crime. That is what
happened to Ms. Noland, who said she had never been arrested yet was
evicted from her home on the reservation because of her son's
conviction for selling painkillers outside the reservation. She is now
awaiting a ruling from the tribal court on her appeal of that decision.

Although banishment was not being used when Ms. Noland's nephews and
her son Robert Zamora committed their crimes, she acknowledged that
the threat might have deterred them. Still, she said, the punishment
is too brutal. "Spiritually, it's going to take your insides and turn
them inside out." She worries for her nephews and son. "They don't
have an education," she said. "What are they going to do when they get
out there? And what is the white man going to do, with the tribe
kicking us all off our own reservation? Can't they see this is a
catastrophe in waiting?" Even within the Lummi Tribal Council, there
is debate about how far the nation should go in its war on drugs,
particularly around the eviction policy. "Would we propose taking
someone's food or water?" said Perry Adams, vice chairman of the
council. "It is a human right, and for us to turn housing into a form
of policing, I think we've gone too far. I think we had good
intentions, but does the tribe really have the right to take away
membership in the nation?"

Tribal leaders estimate that at least 500 Indians on the reservation
are addicted to painkillers or heroin and scores of others to alcohol.
Guns and violence plague some neighborhoods. Babies are born addicted
to drugs. Ms. Noland's 15-month-old grand-niece died two years ago of
an overdose after eating an OxyContin pill that was dropped on the
ground. The loss of that baby was the turning point - when the tribe
hit rock-bottom, leaders said. It came as an exploding number of drug-
and alcohol-related deaths were filling the Lummi cemetery, along a
winding road that hugs Bellingham Bay and is lined with fliers and
flowers marking the spots where drunken drivers crashed and died.

There had long been a severe alcohol problem on the reservation, a
scourge throughout Indian country. But things took a terrible turn in
the late 1990's, when OxyContin made its way to the reservation at a
time when the tribe's long history of living well off the land and
water had virtually come to an end.

Bellingham Bay and the surrounding waters once brimmed with salmon,
holding the riches that made the Lummi, known as People of the Sea,
one of the most successful fishing tribes. Many of those fishermen,
with the salmon population shrinking and the unemployment rate on the
reservation skyrocketing, have turned to dealing drugs.

Tribal leaders estimate the value of the annual drug trade on the
reservation is now $2 million, easily surpassing fishing industry
profits. Mr. Hillaire, 49, and several others on the 11-member Lummi
Tribal Council have made the fight against drugs and alcoholism a
focus over the past few years. He emphasized that the battle involves
not just punishment but also education, prevention programs and
treatment, including intensely spiritual healing rituals for addicts.

Some Indians say banishment, while seemingly harsh, must be studied
through the prism of tradition: It avoids bloodshed and reflects
tribes' community values. "It's out of desperation," said Doug
George-Kanentiio, who is a journalist for News From Indian Country, a
national newspaper, and a member of the six nations of Iroquois, some
of which imposed banishments. "They could either reinforce the
ancestral discipline, or they go the American route, which has proven
to be a failure."

Even in places like Grand Portage, where violence and drugs are
relatively rare, Chippewa leaders have turned to banishment. The
tribal lands are policed by county law enforcement officers, but when
a crowd got out of hand last summer, people on the reservation
demanded more than an arrest by the sheriff, more than criminal
charges from a county prosecutor. "We see ourselves here as kind of a
big family, and so we needed to be part of the solution," said Norman
W. Deschampe, the tribal council chairman. Just 350 members of this
Chippewa band live on the banks of Lake Superior, in trailers and
duplexes along roads rarely crossed in the winter except by tourists
headed to the casino and truckers hauling loads south to Duluth. Life
is mostly quiet. Front doors of homes are left unlocked, car keys are
left in ignitions.

But one Saturday night in July, a group of people drove up to nearby
Mount Maude and wound up talking and drinking and fighting. Along the
way, some pulled knives, vandalized cars and made death threats.
Within days, another crowd packed into the ordinarily empty tribal
council meeting, demanding change. No banishment provision existed in
Grand Portage, but that night the council unanimously voted to remove
a mother, her two grown sons and a family friend in connection with
the fight, and began writing a long resolution adding "exclusion" to
the band's rules.

If the legendary version of the Indian punishment seemed simple and
stark, this one was complicated: legalistic and 12 pages long. On the
list of failings that can lead to banishment are being in a gang,
selling drugs, harming the band's cultural items, disrupting a
religious ceremony, unauthorized hunting or fishing and being banished
from another reservation. Still, the people of Grand Portage and
Bellingham see banishment as a painful, last option. Both the Lummi
and the Chippewa have tried or are considering other actions,
including drug education and treatment, curfews for young people and
seminars about gangs.

In Grand Portage, there have been no additional banishments since the
tribe adopted the notion in October, and even Halloween on the
reservation - usually a time for egg-tossing and joy riding - went by
without its usual harmless mischief.

John Morrin, a member of the tribal council, said he struggled over
the banishments. He had always leaned, he said, toward counseling and
repair, not rejection. "This was a hard thing to do if you care about
people," said Mr. Morrin, who ultimately voted to banish the woman and
her family, even though he said he was related to them.

The woman, Jacquelyn Jackson, now lives wherever she can. She
sometimes sleeps on a cot in an elderly friend's shabby apartment near
downtown Duluth. Other times, she stays in a pile of blankets inside a
tent in a dark basement of a relative's girlfriend's house.

Ms. Jackson, 43, acknowledged that she behaved terribly that summer
night. She was drunk and violent and wrong, she said on a bitterly
cold recent morning in Duluth.

But she said the punishment was too severe: losing her subsidized
duplex on the reservation, losing her friends, losing her way of life
in an isolated, quiet place. "That's my land, too," Ms. Jackson said.
"I've never been homeless in my life. I'm never homeless. But I guess
I am." In her furious moments, she said tribal politics left her
banished while others - those with friends or family members on the
tribal council - did wrong but were not sent away.

In sadder moments, she wondered aloud about what was happening back in
Grand Portage. What were her friends doing? What had become of the
grill, microwave and fans she left in her house and was too afraid and
embarrassed to go back for?

"I cry every night because I want to go home," she said. "I miss that
place so bad."