Tara on the edge

The sun was setting as a car pulled into the dirt driveway at Tara Hare's house on Tract 33 on the edge of Cass Lake. Tara, 16, walked slowly out to meet it. Her voice was small and she looked at the ground as she spoke to the people in the car. She had invited them to come that night last May to celebrate her mother's 43rd birthday. But now, she said, the party was canceled. Her mother was drunk again. Passed out, inside.

Tara's friend Duane Carmona swaggered over. Loudly, he announced that he was wasted on Bacardi 151, which he was drinking from a plastic mug. He bragged that he had just beaten up another boy.

Tara's 18-year-old sister, Kari, giddily proclaimed that she, too, was drunk. Moments later, she started crying about something her boyfriend had said. He staggered in the street and yelled.

Duane yelled for him to shut up, or he would beat him up, too.

Tara asked the people in the car to come back the next day. She didn't want them to see any more.

Despite the chaos around her, Tara was sober and quiet. That had not always been the case. Like many children on northern Minnesota's Leech Lake Indian Reservation, she's had a tough life already, teetering between two futures.

She is one of many who grow up in dysfunctional homes, often with no father present, or an alcoholic parent, and few good role models. They might crave a life without their parents' problems, but they have a hard time rising above them. Some beat the odds -- finish school, get a job, and prosper.

In her years on Tract 33, she has assaulted other kids and been assaulted herself. She has been suspended from school for pushing a teacher. She has run away at least 10 times. She has been in treatment three times for alcohol and marijuana use, the first time when she was 14.

But something in Tara still craves safety and order. Watching Duane, she said, "When I see him like that, it makes me want to stay sober."

She talks about leaving the reservation, going to college and becoming a chemical dependency counselor. She dreams of sharing an apartment with her little sister, Franny, who wants to become a chef.

Tara's other possible future is the life of addiction and poverty that has claimed most of her relatives. It's a life that Ojibwe people have fallen into for generations.

High rates of substance abuse, poverty, family dysfunction and crime on the Leech Lake Reservation have produced some of the state's most troubled youth.

But the reservation also has many more children like Tara. She's not in foster care, but her mother's drinking has turned their house upside down.

Tara is often forced to be the responsible one, helping her unsteady mother to bed, tucking her in. At age 11, she learned to drive so she could ferry her drunken mother around. Sometimes, she said, she drives a whole carload of adult relatives who want to cruise and drink.

Positive role models are scarce in Tara's family. In the past year, two counties had outstanding arrest warrants for her father, Stanley Hare, 46. He has a record of driving offenses, domestic abuse and probation violations -- almost all alcohol-related. He declined to be interviewed.

Tara's mother, Linda Fisherman, said he often beat her over the 10 years they were together. He broke her toes once, her wrist three times, her arm once and her nose twice, she said. Much of this violence occurred in front of the children. He went on to do the same to at least one other girlfriend, court records show.

Everywhere Tara looks, she is surrounded by people using drugs, drinking too much, heading to prison. She sees her nephews sent to foster homes -- sometimes because their parents neglected them, other times because a parent was sent to jail.

Tara's big sister, Kari, has been smoking marijuana and drinking for years. A judge sent her to treatment, and for a while she lived in a foster home and then with her grandmother, Nancy Whitebird.

Kari went back to school and graduated last spring, with plans to attend Fond du Lac Community College in Cloquet. Her graduation inspired Tara, who said she hoped to follow Kari to Fond du Lac.

But first, she had to run the gantlet of two more years of high school -- and two more years of the booze, drugs, violence, and craziness on Tract 33 and in her own home.

"Tara is so on the edge," said Patti Haasch, director of the Area Learning Center, where Tara and Kari have gone to school. "She's hanging by a thread, and most of our children are like that."

The reservation has other housing projects -- Tooterville, Strawberry Fields, Macaroni Flats. But none matches the infamy of Tract 33, with its drug deals, drive-by shootings, arsons, rapes and murders.

Its network of tarred streets, shabby homes and weedy yards is a refuge of last resort for many of the reservation's poorest and most addicted people.

Here, illegal drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine and abused prescription drugs such as OxyContin are sold at parties and across kitchen tables. Here, near the center of northern Minnesota, a quarter-mile from the intersection of highways to Minneapolis, Duluth and Grand Forks, Tract 33 has become a crossroads in the region's illegal drug trade and the gang activity that comes with it, according to police.

Poverty, addiction and crime hang over some of the homes like dark clouds.

Just down the street from Tara's was one house with walls pocked by holes from fists and shoes. Garbage was piled against one wall of the kitchen. A leaking toilet ran continuously into the crawl space below, rotting the plywood floor.

Last winter, someone kicked the front door off its hinges. Rather than fix it, the family propped the broken door in its frame and left it for weeks.

In August 2002, his son Cheyenne, 20, got in a fight with one of the neighbors across the street and came away with a black eye. That night, after riding around and drinking with friends, he set fire to the neighbor's house as four people slept inside. Three of them escaped, but a houseguest, a 25-year-old mother of a toddler, did not, and she died. Cheyenne was sentenced to 12½ years in prison.

Tara took her first drink when she was 11, from a bottle passed to her by a friend. One of her friends had parents who got drunk a lot, she said, making it easy for the girls to drink.

Tara soon found she liked marijuana even better. By the time she was 14, she and a friend smoked it daily, she said. To pay for it, they sometimes peddled movie videos they had stolen from relatives; they charged $5 for two movies, and that got them two joints.

"When I'd get mad at my mom, I wanted to get high," Tara said. "I liked being high all day."

The chemicals seemed to unleash her rage. She was suspended from school for pushing a teacher. She fought other girls, her sister and her mother. She skipped school. She was defiant and miserable. She said it was her mother's drinking that made her the most miserable.

In January 2001, after Tara -- then 14 -- ran away, a judge ordered her into a monthlong chemical abuse treatment program in Fergus Falls. She came out with new resolve. "I told myself I didn't want to be like my mom," she said.

Like her sister, Tara got back in school through the Area Learning Center's Aateshing program for addicted students. (Aateshing is Ojibwe for "new beginning.") There, they do random drug testing and give individual attention, counseling and support.

Last year, more than half of Cass Lake-Bena High School's graduating class of 51 students needed help from the learning center to graduate.

Tara said that by the end of 2002, she was staying sober for weeks at a time. She hoped to do even better in 2003. But the year got off to a rocky start -- on New Year's Eve.

Tara's mom had decided to ring in the New Year by hosting a drinking party for her friends and family -- including her children. Kari and most of Tara's friends planned to drink. Some of them dared Tara to fall off the wagon, and her resolve began to weaken. She didn't want to be the only sober one.

She said Linda agreed: "It was our idea -- me and my mom's. She didn't care if I was drinking. She let the rules go."

Linda knew it was a crime to buy for minors. She denied that she bought a bottle for Tara, but she admitted that she let Tara drink that night.

"They were going to drink anyway," Linda said. "This way, at least they were doing it at home."

In the dead of Cass Lake's long winter, on a February Tuesday, Tara and a couple of friends caught a ride to a weekly Narcotics Anonymous meeting, where they joined a half-dozen other teens.

Ashamed of New Year's Eve, Tara was doing her best to stay away from drugs and alcohol.

"I went to a party but didn't drink," a boy began. "I saw how I used to act. I saw some of the smartest kids in school get all messed up."

Pat O'Neal, the school system's chemical abuse counselor, started the meetings four years ago with two teens. Now, as many as 16 come.

"You need a higher power," he said to the kids. "I choose to call mine God, but it's not religion. It's spirituality. Without it, I'd be dead. There aren't that many 60-year-old addicts."

Tara sat silently in the dark. She didn't speak, but she was there. From her point of view, that was a minor victory: Every hour she spent at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting was an hour she wasn't getting high.

At school, Tara wrote a letter to herself for a class assignment.

As winter wore on, Tara went days, sometimes weeks, without drinking or using drugs. But now and again, she'd relapse.

Twice, in the spring, she checked herself into treatment centers. The first time, Mark Kuleta, her Aateshing teacher, drove her 120 miles to Sawyer to a program culturally tailored for Indians. But Tara hated the way counselors and fellow patients confronted her on her thinking and behavior. She wanted them to be nicer, more understanding. She also felt intensely homesick, as she did almost every time she left the reservation.

After two days she called her mother and begged to come home. Fisherman sent Kari to pick her up.

"She was crying," Fisherman said later. "I wasn't going to leave her there crying."

Kuleta said he tries not to get too discouraged by such setbacks. "We don't see instant turnarounds," he said. "It might take an entire school year to see any improvement."

"It's almost like everybody is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome," he said. "These kids go to more funerals by age 10 than most people go to in their whole life."

A week after she left the Sawyer treatment center, Tara tried again. This time, O'Neal drove her and a friend to a treatment center in Blaine.

It was part of a busy school year for O'Neal, who did a record 61 chemical dependency assessments of Cass Lake-Bena students. He arranged for 34 kids to go into treatment -- also a record.

Although most of the students' chemical abuse doesn't start until seventh or eighth grade, O'Neal has done assessments on students as early as fifth grade. He doesn't assess students younger than 12 because treatment centers won't take them. The school had 989 fifth- through 12th-graders that year.

Tara lasted only a few days in Blaine before she called home again. This time, her mother refused. But Tara's friend called home, too, and someone came and got them both.

"They have to get well on their own," he said.

Linda never meant for her life to be like this, but it sometimes felt preordained, she said. Just about everyone in her family was a problem drinker.

Her father had been an alcoholic, and so were her two brothers, said her mother, Nancy Whitebird. Nancy herself drank until she was in her 50s. She stopped drinking so she could be a good grandmother.

Grandchildren often are the reason people on the reservation finally quit drinking. Many find they have to take in their grandchildren because the parents are absent or unfit.

Whitebird, now 65, found herself in that position many times. Fisherman had her first child, Darian, at 19, and left him with Nancy most of the time. At various times, Nancy also took in Kari, Tara and their little sister, Franny.

"I drink because I like it," she said. "There's nothing else here. It's what waits at the end of a hard day."

About five years ago, Linda made a deal with herself: She would not stop drinking, but she would drink only at home. Her children would know where she was, she wouldn't be driving drunk, and she'd sleep in a safe place.

Thus began a pattern: She'd get home from her clerical job in the tribal offices, drink away the evening, fall asleep, and repeat the process the next day. Her tolerance for alcohol grew enormous.

"To me, a 12-pack is nothing," she said. "One time a friend and I did two cases. But I can always get up when the alarm rings."

She has concluded that it's too late for her, but she wants her children to follow different paths. She holds out hope that Franny, now 15, will pass through adolescence without getting drunk or high.

The day of Kari's graduation party, May 31, was perfect: blue sky, warm sun, soft breeze wafting off Lost Lake.

Kari's grandmother, Nancy Whitebird, and aunt Dee Fairbanks had planned every detail. Burgers and brats sizzled on the grill. Side dishes covered one picnic table, while another was piled with presents and cards.

A couple dozen relatives talked and laughed as they kept an eye on the children swimming in the lake and peddling the paddleboat.

But two guests were missing: Tara and her mom.

Two hours late, they pulled up in the family car, Tara behind the wheel.

Kari tore through her cards and presents, taking good-natured ribbing from her family and shouting out thank-yous as she went.

It was an accomplishment for her to finish high school; about half of the Indian students at Cass Lake-Bena High drop out.

But Kari's mother missed most of the party. She had moved over to the grass near the patio, and as her daughter opened graduation gifts, Fisherman fell asleep in the shade of a tree.

The hope that Tara would have her own graduation day, that she might break out of her family's pattern, became harder to hold onto as the year wore on.

She was drunk one weekend night last June when two girls jumped her and beat her until she collapsed on one of Tract 33's streets. A knot of people watched, but no one helped, she said.

As summer faded, so did her sister's plans for college. Instead of heading to Fond du Lac, Kari took a job as a blackjack dealer at the Palace Casino.

Tara turned 17 on Sept. 1. She re-enrolled in school but left in November. She said she was dropping out temporarily so she could watch Darian's 2-year-old son for a while.

But a little while turned into two months, and during this period, Tara's hopes sank nearly out of sight. She began to let go of her dream of becoming a chemical dependency counselor.

"I don't want to any more," she said glumly. "I have trouble with the schoolwork. I don't think I can do it."

She preferred to talk about Franny's future. "She's on the B honor roll. She was nominated for junior princess at school. ... She don't do what we do. I think she's headed in a different way."

Meanwhile, Linda moved the family to a new tribal house off Tract 33 in Tooterville, a smaller, quieter housing project.