Story by Jacob Baynham
Photos by Adam Sings In The Timber
These hills were made for hiding
From the Wolf Mountains to the southern Montana sky, they roll across the Crow Reservation in sheets of sage and silver. They roll from the banks of the Bighorn River to the asphalt of Interstate 90, which throbs through them like a loaded vein. The pavement thumps with traffic blinking south in the sun. The beat of its pulse is measured in truckers and tourists, in day-trippers and drug dealers.
The hills once hid Sioux and Cheyenne warriors when they mounted their greatest victory over the U.S. Army, in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Today, 130 years later, they still hide.
They hid Mary, in her days of addiction, when she lost consciousness after “slamming” methamphetamine into her veins for days. She came to, finding herself lying in a bathtub in someone else’s house in Hardin. She was wearing nothing but a T-shirt. The shower was running. Piled on the floor were the remains of her knee-length hair, which she must have cut. Beside that were her clothes. They were covered in blood.
They hid Lenny too, not long ago, when it was raining, and he sat alone in a leaky, abandoned house, darkened but for a single flame, silent but for the persistent “chick,” “chick” of his lighter, lifeless but for the hot white vapor ripping through his lungs.
And they continue to hide Anna when, after being awake and high on meth for as long as 17 days, she crashes in her house shuttered by blankets slung over the windows and doors. Anna has no job and lives on a $420 monthly welfare check. She buys food for her children with whatever she doesn’t spend on her addiction. Recently she went a year without electricity because she couldn’t afford both her drug and her bills. When she’s coming down from a high, her head feels like it will crack open. Her damaged body aches. She sees bugs and worms crawling around her and faces that aren’t really there.
And more than anything, she hates – she hates – what she has become.
The tawny hills of the Crow Indian Reservation in southcentral Montana are alive with the secrets of a rampant methamphetamine addiction. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has joined with other law enforcement agencies to combat the problem on this reservation of 7,900 people, but lacks both the money and the manpower to make all but the slightest difference.
Called ice, crystal, crank or “devil’s dandruff,” meth is a relatively cheap stimulant derived from common household chemicals and medications. When smoked, snorted, injected or ingested, it floods the brain with dopamine, the brain’s natural pleasure chemical. But in doing so, it also kills a person’s ability to experience pleasure when sober. Consequently, the addiction is powerful and often instant.
Once a common prescription drug for weight loss and lethargy, meth stimulates the nervous system, allowing a user to go without food and sleep for days. When it was criminalized in 1970, motorcycle gangs took to trafficking it from Mexico. It got the name “crank” from the crankcases of their bikes in which it was smuggled.
Now the recipe is on the Internet. Most of the chemicals are in any hardware store. You can make the drug on your kitchen stove. It smells like cat urine.
According to several addicts – they’re called “geekers” here – meth began to appear on the Crow Reservation 15 years ago. Early on, before the purchase of pseudoephedrine – an essential ingredient of the drug found in common cold medications – was restricted, meth was made in small house labs on the reservation. But now most of it is brought in from metropolitan centers, like Denver and Salt Lake City. Today, drug enforcement officials think the majority of meth in Montana is made in “superlabs” along the Mexican border.
On the reservation it’s sold by the “bindle,” $30 for an amount equal to a packet of Sweet n’ Low. Or by the “’teener,” one-sixteenth of an ounce. Or by the “eight ball,” one-eighth of an ounce and enough to get a dozen light users high.
Now some addicts on the Crow Reservation claim that more adults are on meth in their communities than are off it. There is even a native name by which to call the drug: “baachialiche,” or “white stuff.”
Traffickers target the reservation on the 1st and the 15th of the month, when welfare checks arrive, and also at the times when the small quarterly per-capita checks from the tribe’s revenue are distributed.
Across America, Native Americans are twice as likely as Caucasians to use meth. The susceptibility to addiction in Indian Country is no secret to drug dealers. Some say the Sinaloan Cowboys, a gang that runs drugs for the Mexican Sinaloan Cartel, is bringing meth to the reservation, tapping into its easy access and scarce law enforcement for a steep profit. Others say powerful street gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha (MS 13) are pushing the drug into the reservations.
But one addict says the central issue is the drug’s presence, not its origin.
“It comes from everywhere, it comes from nowhere, I don’t know where it comes from,” he says.
Wherever it came from, Mary was one woman with an uncanny ability to find it. Mary started slamming meth when she was 16 years old. She’s now 26 and determined to live a life free of the drug. It’s taken her 10 years to quit.
Mary sits at her kitchen table chopping potatoes for dinner in a trailer home under the shadow of the rusting grain elevators on the outskirts of Hardin.
“The first time I did it, I knew I was going to be an addict,” she remembers. “There was no hope. I didn’t even give myself a chance.
“I still crave it.”
Mary liked the relief she felt when she was high and the energy it gave her. One night, after shooting a hit of meth, Mary sat down and made two traditional intricate elk-tooth dresses before the sun came up.
“I was like a miracle worker,” she says. “It’s the perfect single- mother’s drug.”
But productivity aside, Mary also knows the cold hopelessness of hitting rock bottom. When she was at her worst, making money by cutting bindles of meth with Epsom salts to swindle her buyers, Mary hoped she would sell to a narcotics officer and be caught. She would slam in the church parking lot, before and after services. She would slam in her car outside the Crow Mercantile, with the windows open. She pulled her 4-year-old daughter out of Head Start to look after her younger children.
When she regained consciousness that day in Hardin, in the bathtub of a house she had broken into, Mary was vomiting blood. She was coming off a three-week binge, during which she had seared her veins with a gram of meth every four hours. She hadn’t slept. She had lived on water and candy. By the end of it she had injected four and a half ounces of the drug.
Mary was fortunate to have escaped with her life. Now, sitting in her house, she cradles in her arms the month-old baby boy the doctors told her she couldn’t have. Hanging from the porch outside are five pairs of blue jeans, in the different sizes of her family. In the distance, above the grain elevators, eyelashes of rain sink down to the earth from a blinking purple sky.
“I should’ve been dead,” Mary says. “You’re waiting for death to walk in and say, ‘It’s time to go,’ and at the same time you’re scared shitless.”
But the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in conjunction with the Crow Tribal Council, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is hoping it’s an officer from a new joint-agency drug task force who will walk in first to save others who are in Mary’s position.
Inscribed on the wall of BIA special agent Matthew Pryor’s Billings office is an indicative statement. “Don’t bring me problems,” it reads, “bring me solutions.” Pryor, the director of BIA law enforcement on reservations in Montana and five other states, has heard the questions about meth. Now he’s looking for the answers.
Tangled jurisdictions have always been a problem in Indian Country, and last August, Pryor and the other cooperating agencies decided to pool resources to create the Crow/Northern Cheyenne Safe Trails Task Force, specifically to target meth trafficking on the two reservations. The task force is made up of six undercover agents, one from the FBI, one from the DEA, one from the Colstrip Police Department, one from the Crow Reservation and two from the Northern Cheyenne. With escalating addiction and an unprecedented influx of meth, these six agents are up to their elbows in investigations.
Since its formation, agents say the task force has knocked down the doors of 12 suspected meth dealers on the Crow Reservation and had only one dry run. In one high-profile case in January, they arrested Jose Angel Torres, a Billings resident but not a U.S. citizen, in a sting operation in which an undercover BIA agent allegedly bought from him $2,500 worth of meth.
But with the addiction spanning generations and engulfing communities, the task force has its hands full. The group has an operations budget of about $100,000 but only six agents on the job. The work can be fervent.
“I would like to see us double (the number of agents) we have right now,” says Pryor.
But understaffing has been a problem for reservation law enforcement for a while, he says. He realizes it’s a problem for law agencies everywhere, but compares it with staffing levels off the reservation in Billings, where he lives.
“I don’t think anyone in my neighborhood would sleep comfortably if they knew only four cops were on,” Pryor says. “It’s going to take a long time to reach parity with mainstream America.
“Our folks work way too much. They get so committed to it that it’s like trying to get a dog off something it wants – you have to stick a water hose down their throat just to get them to let go.”
Letting go, however, is sometimes the only option for Clayvin Herrera, one of only 17 police officers on the Crow Reservation. One recent Sunday, he was the sole officer on duty to patrol an area nearly twice the size of Delaware.
“I don’t let it get to me,” he says. “If I come across something, I’ll be glad. I like to be proactive. I like to stir things up.”
Herrera is one of eight officers paid by the tribe at a starting wage of $12.50 an hour. The remaining nine on the force are paid by the BIA, netting salaries that are often double those of the tribal officers. Herrera says that understaffing is not a problem unique to the new meth task force.
“We gotta go as fast as we can,” he says. “That’s probably our biggest complaint, is response time.”
Herrera is a burly man, with a coy smile and a plastic rosary that dangles from his rearview mirror – for protection in the spiritual realm. Beside him is an AR-15 assault rifle and strapped to the roof is a shotgun, for more palpable protection in the physical.
He pulls his BIA-supplied Ford Expedition out of the Crow Agency headquarters, a small building on the edge of town that was meant to be a bank, and points it south to Lodge Grass, a community 22 miles south that he says is spiraling into crime.
“That’s where I find meth,” he says. “Some of the officers, they avoid this place like the plague. They won’t come here alone.
“There’s a lot of meth here in this town and we can’t pinpoint anyone. The only way we find it here is we get lucky.”
When he coasts into town, he smirks as cars suddenly start obeying traffic rules. He knows the names and the histories of most of the people walking down the road. Several are his relatives. He says it’s been awkward when he’s had to arrest them.
Herrera drives down the dusty roads, past disintegrating trailer houses and rust-riddled pickups resting on blocks. Groups of teenagers stand in their yards, staring at him icily. A dog darts out into the road and barks at the tires of his car. Another lies dead on the edge of the pavement, paws up in rigor mortis and covered in flies.
Herrera removes his seatbelt.
“They won’t all fight ya,” he says, tipping his chin coolly at the teens. “These kids like to run. In Lodge Grass you gotta be ready to run.”
He drives by a tin shack that says “Tire Repair Shop” on one side and “Fuck it” on another. It is bolted shut. Farther on is a deserted lot where children play atop a pile of dirt next to a frilly umbrella and a plastic Santa figurine lying on its side.
Suddenly Herrera spots a teen pocketing an illegal bottle of booze. He pulls over the car and jumps out. The kid bolts. Herrera chases, closes in and tackles him in a field behind the houses.
Breathless, he brings the bottle – vodka, Fleishmann’s – and a handcuffed Wahmbli Nomee, 18, back to the squad car. Nomee has seen the back seat of it several times before. What does he think about the police on the reservation?
“They’re shitty, man. Look what they just did to me.”
Crow Police Chief Ed Eastman, meanwhile, can only wish there were more of those officers.
“The reservation is so huge, it’s a logistical nightmare,” he says, sitting in a darkened office listening to Pipestone hand drum music on his laptop because it soothes him.
Eastman calculates that he needs at least 26 officers – nine more than he has – before he can think about calling his force sufficient. He has asked for more money and men from the BIA but has heard little in response.
“We can request all we want. Whether we get it or not is another question,” he says.
Eastman says his force is left to scrape for resources the government is reluctant to dole out. The BIA is not entirely to blame, he says. Congress has to approve the money and if it’s not there, it’s just not there.
Eastman cracks his knuckles, puts his fingers to his eyes, and then removes them.
“You can’t squeeze water from a turnip,” he says.
Nor should you have to, says Crow Tribal Chairman Carl Venne. The BIA is simply not putting forward enough resources to stop a problem as big as meth, he says. Venne knows this from a personal experience. His only son was killed four years ago in a meth-related car accident.
“If I had to grade them one through 10, they’d probably be a one,” Venne says from a couch in his office, which used to be the delivery room of a hospital and still smells of injections and disinfectant.
“They don’t do a damned thing as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “The BIA has managed everything and I’m telling you the BIA can’t manage nothin’. They’ve managed this tribe for the past 120 years and what have they done? They’ve about given it all away.”
Venne mentions tiredly that Congress recently allotted $40 million to protect the wild mustangs of the Pryor Mountain range just west of the southern section of the reservation.
“It’s totally senseless,” he says. “We don’t ride ’em and we don’t eat ’em. So what’s wrong in this country? They forgot their obligation. The U.S. government forgot their obligation.”
Venne says the meth epidemic that has struck his reservation over the past years is really only a symptom of greater maladies. The treaty in which the Crow exchanged the resources of the Powder River Basin for education and health care has been forgotten, he says. Indian health care struggles to operate on a paltry budget. Every school on the reservation failed the guidelines for the No Child Left Behind Act. Almost half of the Crow population is unemployed. Nearly 60 percent live below the poverty line. Basic infrastructure like clean water, sewers and houses are nonexistent or in disrepair.
“Do I need another Kevin Costner to do another ‘Dances With Wolves’ to bring up Indian problems in this country?” Venne asks, leaning forward in his seat, exasperation spreading across his face.
“If this country had a 47 percent unemployment rate, there’d be riots in the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Washington, everywhere.
“We’re probably the forgotten race in the United States.”
Lenny, who like other addicts, asked that his real name not be used, knows a little about the problems of Indian Country himself. He’s a 30-year-old father of eight and is struggling through one of the greatest trials he’s come up against: a meth addiction that he’s unable to kick.
With hands plunged deep into a jacket zipped to his chin, despite the sunny weather, he clenches his teeth, shuffles his feet and looks around.
“For me, fellas, it’ll be there forever,” he says of meth. “It’ll be right there walking next to me every day of my life. I know this.”
You can’t see much of Lenny’s face for his camouflage hat and dark sunglasses. He sports a skeletal moustache and goatee. His mother will say that she enjoys the softness of his eyes, but is now sometimes frightened to talk to him.
“I know what I don’t ask,” she says, after the service in the cool chapel of First Crow Baptist in Lodge Grass. “Sometimes I’m afraid to call and just say, ‘I love you.’”
Soft or not, Lenny now hides his eyes behind a pair of Oakleys. He fidgets when he speaks. His trust for the world is a thin currency, devalued more each day by the paranoia induced by the drug he can’t shake.
Lenny points to a lack of opportunities and the reservation’s stifling economic conditions for setting many Crow up for lives of addiction.
“In this little cheese box we live in, make no mistake, people don’t live here, people survive here,” he says. “Where I’m from, a person’s in trouble the moment they step out the door. And it’s all up to you how much trouble to get into that day.”
Young people should be worried about their grades, he says, and how to make the most of their education at the time that their lives open up before them. The realities on the reservation are much different.
“There’s too many kids where I’m from thinking more along the lines of this: ‘How can I make a dollar out of 15 cents’ in order to put a little bit of food on his table or to get diapers for his kid, you know what I mean?” he asks. “Why is that?”
Lenny knows he steals a little more of his son’s self-confidence every time he walks out the door to do drugs. He knows what he has to do. But he still doesn’t use the word “quit.” He can’t yet. He tries to stay clean, but when he comes down, he comes down hard. He pumps his fist into his palm when he talks about the rush of the moment right before the hit. When he’s in that state, he has no limits.
“I just ride it till the wheels come off, smoke it till it’s gone,” he says. He left his house two years ago “for the streets” and didn’t see his children from Thanksgiving until Easter.
Suddenly there are tears behind Lenny’s shades and he stands up and walks to the window.
“I read somewhere that you can be anything you want in this life, but you can only be that once,” he says. “Well I used some of mine up, fellas, but the story’s not over yet. I’m going to turn the page and start a new chapter in my life and call it the comeback.”
Tucked away in a cinderblock room at the Crow Agency basketball court, Anna, a meth addict for 14 years, is quietly plotting a renewal of her own. As sounds of squeaking sneakers and the booming announcer of the first Meth Free Crow Basketball Classic slip in through the cracks of the door, Anna, 35, visibly pines for the drug as she talks about it – even though it takes three-quarters of her monthly welfare check, has killed four children in her womb and continues to drain the ebbing trust of her 17-year-old son.
“When you take that first hit, oh it tastes good,” she says, looking vacantly at her 5-year-old daughter playing at her feet. “It makes you want to gag and throw up, but that’s a good thing…. When it hits me … the back of my head tingles, and I feel real good, like relaxed and no worries.”
Anna smokes $300 of meth a month from small glass tubes called “lokers,” or by tapping off the metal end of a light bulb and using it as a pipe. She has high blood pressure. One of her teeth is missing and the others are rotten.
Sometimes she spends so much on her addiction that there is not enough to eat. She lets her children eat first and tries to make up the rest with trips to the food bank. She’s deathly afraid of the police.
“I don’t want my kids taken away from me,” Anna says, looking up from her corduroy shoes. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
Anna is crying now, and her daughter looks up to her face, frightened.
“I don’t want it any more,” Anna spits out. “I hate it, I hate this life, I hate it, I hate – I don’t know what else to say, I just hate it.”
Anna can’t change her own light bulbs these days, for fear of the craving they bring. The sight of needles gives her the same longing. She has no mirrors in her house.
“You’re scared to look at yourself,” she says. “There’s no one in those eyes. There’s no one looking back at you.”
If she ever comes clean completely, Anna wants to be an accountant and a counselor. She wants to guide others away from a drug she calls “nothing but evil.” Easter is coming, and she wants to get her kids baskets and have their pictures taken. She’s starting to take down the blankets from her windows, and open her door to let in the clean slate of spring.
But cutting away a reputation is easier said than done in a tightly knit community like the Crow. And as soon as people start talking about her, Anna just wants to go get high again.
“I hate that,” she says, in tears again, “when they do that, when they say you shouldn’t do it and they don’t know. They don’t know where you’re coming from. They don’t.”
April Flores is one person who does know, however. The coordinator of a group called the Meth Free Crow Nation, Flores has seen the dark corners of addiction and walked out of them with new purpose. Now Flores is trying to set right her eight years on the drug by educating the community in schools and open meetings about the damage meth causes. She goes to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress and meet with the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
“We haven’t wiped out anything yet, just put the awareness out there,” she says. “We’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg.”
Flores had to leave her husband after trying for 14 years to help him quit his addiction.
“This drug is so seductive,” she says. “It wasn’t me competing with another woman. It was me competing with something with no heart and no soul.”
Now on the other side of the fence, Flores lives, speaks and works meth. Everywhere she goes she encourages new people, young and old, to get involved in the fight against meth on the reservation.
The challenges are persistent and plentiful. Is the law enforcement on the reservation sufficient?
“Heck no,” Flores says. “Even without meth they don’t have enough men to police our reservation.”
And the drug is indiscriminate. Old and young, rich and poor it latches onto people tenaciously. Crow children are growing up with meth as an unshakable daily reality.
“They go to bed, there’s drugs on the coffee table, they wake up, there’s drugs on the coffee table,” Flores says.
One of these kids was Lenny’s daughter Randa. On a gusty afternoon in the Crow Agency park she quietly tells her story beneath the bony limbs of the cottonwoods and a denim-blue sky. Her smile is shy, but her attitude capable and resolute.
It should be. Now 13, Randa’s been looking after her siblings since she was 5, when her parents were too strung out on meth to take care of them. Randa is now part of the Meth Free Crow Youth, and talks to her classmates and at other schools about growing up with meth as her parent.
“I tell them not to do it,” she says softly, as rain-laden clouds darken behind her. “You do it, and there’s nowhere but down to go.”
