From the roads, from behind buildings, from Ick's Place liquor store, they come. The street people of Browning emerge, hoods up, shields for an April wind that stings.
They walk toward the bright red Toyota Corolla, parked behind the liquor store. A woman waits there, standing next to a rubble of rocks, bent pipes and an empty vodka bottle.
Then Zita Bremner pops her trunk to share her lunch hour with them, just as she does on every Wednesday. They open their hands and Bremner squirts lime-green sanitizer into each pair. She reaches into her trunk with black cotton gloves and gives each person a brown paper bag with a hot dog and granola tucked inside. Then she grabs the ladle from a steaming tin, and pours vegetable soup into Styrofoam cups.
Most of the people here are intoxicated, she says. Most cannot stand straight, most cannot talk straight. Of the 20 people she serves under the sun in Browning on this cold April afternoon, many ask for two bags and two cups of soup. These might be the Blackfeet Reservation’s most downtrodden people, but they’re Bremner’s people too.
“For most of them, this is one of the only meals that they will eat this week,” she says.
To the last woman she serves, she gives two bags and two cups, and instructs her to put the bags in her torn black Oakland Raider’s coat, and to be careful with the hot vegetable broth.
Before the woman wearily walks away, she asks a question that has been often repeated from the hungry people today: Where is Sandra?
The question is only a small moment but serves to reinforce the significance of Sandra Calf Boss Ribs’ deeds and spirit in the parking lot behind Ick’s Place, where the pavement glistens with glass shrapnel. Every Wednesday for a year, Calf Boss Ribs has taken a half-hour lunch break from her job as a counselor at the Crystal Creek Lodge Treatment Center and made the three-minute drive to Ick’s to deliver promise to their lives, stock to their stomachs.
On the day Browning’s hungry yearn for her, Calf Boss Ribs is in Great Falls on business representing the Crystal Creek Lodge, but she is also there to lobby the local food bank for additional aid in order to expand her project — which has grown to include volunteers helping serve on Mondays and Saturdays.
Estimates in this Blackfeet town of 3,500 souls are that at least one in three suffers from alcohol and drug addiction, and 70 percent are unemployed. If only there was more room at the Crystal Creek Lodge.
•••
In 1994, Sandra Calf Boss Ribs underwent treatment for substance abuse at the Crystal Creek Lodge. She battled her addiction for more than 30 days that fall and stayed past her treatment period so that she could help cook Thanksgiving dinner.
For Calf Boss Ribs, it wasn’t the treatment that guided her to this field of substance abuse counseling. It was the recognition of the two distinct spheres that exist on the Blackfeet Reservation: the environment in which residents are engulfed in alcohol, and the environment in which folks find the gumption to help. Calf Boss Ribs has been at Crystal Creek for seven years, and is the unit tech supervisor for the in-house patients. She is a professed “24-7” employee.
There were numerous treatment centers on the reservation 15 years ago: the Margie Kennedy Center, the Pikuni Family Healing Center for women and children, and a halfway house in Heart Butte, where Calf Boss Ribs began her career as an addiction counselor. By 2005, all three had succumbed to a lack of funds.
Only the Crystal Creek Lodge remains. It is the only accredited Native American substance abuse treatment center in Montana, serving members of all seven reservations and annually treating a small number of West Coast Indians from as far away as California.
Crystal Creek resides in the old Browning hospital building, an ancient and diminutive facility compared to the modern Blackfeet Community Hospital abutting it. A wing connects the two buildings; patients must undergo detoxification at the IHS-run hospital before being transplanted down the hallway into the Crystal Creek Lodge. Detox is the most grueling part of the process, normally a three-day stint during which patients are hooked to “banana bags,” IV’s full of nutrients to neutralize alcohol and narcotics if necessary, and to restore the body’s chemical balance. In recent years, opiate and narcotic abuse has spiked on the reservation and the personnel at Crystal Creek say these patients are often more volatile than alcoholics, who comprise 77 percent of their clientele.
The treatment center operates much like a disciplined academy: patients are up and showered by 6:30 a.m., and breakfast, meditation and chores occur every morning. There are morning and afternoon lectures, on topics ranging from gender to culture to anger management. Every night at 7, alcohol and narcotics anonymous groups meet, and before bed, patients work on assigned reading and writing from the day’s lectures. There are walks outside the facility every night, there are visits to Browning sweat lodges every week. Patients, counselors report, often walk out due to the demands of the routine.
But does it work for those who stay? Calf Boss Ribs offered a guess—a wild one, she says—that the success rate of patients leaving the program and remaining sober is at “1 or 2 percent.” The success rate of sobriety is scattered across months and, making estimates even more difficult, the center often loses touch with patients. An April 2008 result chart showed that of 35 follow-ups that spring of those recently discharged, only 20 could be contacted. Eight reported staying sober.
A long list of Blackfeet await admission to the 17-bed Crystal Creek Lodge, which is legally bound to treat court-ordered patients first. Last year, 44 patients checked themselves into treatment, while judges sent 34 to the lodge as part of sentencing.
It is that ratio that renders the struggle of Crystal Creek so difficult: it is a small facility and can only provide services to a small number of those who need them. The $1.3 million the federal government spends to keep the lodge running dictates the number of beds. In February, when two officials from the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities inspected the facility and its practices, Crystal Creek Lodge received a new three-year accreditation. But the officials recommended Crystal Creek maintain its level of service, rather than expand it.
Other Montana reservations like the Crow and Northern Cheyenne have tried to combat alcohol abuse by banning the substance, but prohibition has proved nearly impossible to enforce and the $50 fine the tribes levy against those who violate the law does little to discourage drinking.
The Blackfeet will, in all likelihood, never become an alcohol-free reservation, though that’s occasionally been proposed. And without halfway houses and transitional centers for patients to ease back into the community, Crystal Creek counselors say, the task of staying sober remains a ruthless one.
“We serve a lot of people here,” says Crystal Creek director Pat Calf Looking. “But if they go back to an environment where people are still using, it’s really difficult for them.”
More than 30 employees work at Crystal Creek and with a few exceptions, all have had bouts with alcohol and drug abuse. That includes Calf Looking, a former Marine who found work in the rehabilitation field after working as a bartender and bar manager and losing several wars inside treatment centers before becoming sober. He still considers himself an addict, but the rehabilitation service has become his life’s calling. He is also working as a consultant to the Wyoming-Montana Tribal Leaders Council to erect a treatment center in Sheridan, Wyo.
Four employees of the lodge have been through treatment at Crystal Creek, and Calf Looking has established a strict zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy. This winter he fired an employee who failed a drug test. For counselors and patients alike, staying sober is a constant struggle.
•••
The lodge’s greatest liability is having former addicts run its program. But it is also its greatest advantage. And even among the workers at Crystal Creek, there are horrific addiction stories.
When Herman Whitegrass sits potential patients down in his office, he can read if they are serious about getting clean or sober. He knows because he’s been there.
Much of his addictive past sits on the 35-mile stretch of Highway 2 that leads out of Browning and snakes through the hills to Cut Bank. White Grass says he often drives that road, but never with his mind free of the possibilities.
“It’s just like a gun pointing straight at you,” he says. “A car that’s coming in your direction, I always think, I hope that this person isn’t drunk or drugged up or isn’t suicidal, saying, ‘The next car I’m taking somebody with me and I’m going to do myself in.’ That’s a reality.”
The 68-year-old Whitegrass used to do it, used to drive that stretch as a young man drunk, telling his friends that if he had to die that he was going to take someone with him. They would all laugh at him.
Before he became one of Crystal Creek Lodge’s longest tenured and most respected cultural healing leaders, he was elbow deep into addiction. It started one summer day in Browning, when he was 8 or 9 and working a fencing job on the prairie with his brother. They forgot their water jug and an older worker shared his six-pack of beer with them.
It followed him to the jungles of Vietnam, where he was deployed with the Army in 1965. It followed him back to Browning, where for a decade he considered himself one of Browning’s street people, living on bedroom floors and, when it was warm enough, in abandoned cars. Beer, weed, cocaine, sometimes he says he didn’t know what he was on. What he did know was that he was enraged from psychological problems that descended on him during his tour of Vietnam.
In 1979, after countless attempts at recovery in rehab centers in Wyoming and Canada, Whitegrass found volunteer work at the Medicine Pine Lodge in his native Browning under Margie Kennedy, a tough customer who ran Browning’s detoxification unit throughout that era. His cravings were relentless for five or six years, but White Grass says that his purification came from spiritual healing from the elders of the Blackfeet Tribe.
At the Crystal Creek Lodge, where Whitegrass has served as an in-patient counselor for a quarter century, he uses his own life experiences to educate his patients. He speaks to families about his former street life and how he will always be an addict, even though he hasn’t drank or drugged in nearly three decades.
“I attempt to teach people that recovery goes on for a lifetime,” Whitegrass says. “It goes on until you die. We can’t make you stop drinking, but we can show you how it’s done.”
All these years later, it still follows him. He is a big man, with linebacker shoulders, a belly and a clear complexion. He has diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems. His daughter Amy is in jail in California due to what he says are alcohol and drug-related problems, and he is raising her 4-year-old son in Browning.
He lost his son Shawn to alcoholism in February 2008.
Whitegrass didn’t know his 36-year old son had a drinking problem. And by the time he got on Highway 2 and made his way along Interstate15 toward the hospital in Great Falls, Shawn was in a coma. A week later he was gone.
•••
Behind the steel doors, deep in the bowels of Crystal Creek Lodge, the patients rest late on a Friday afternoon.
The menacing uncertainties that face the program’s future — the questions of funding, efficiency, and halfway houses — are muted today. Some women lie in their dorm rooms, while across the hallway in a run-down conference room, the aroma from a traditional smudge ceremony still lingers.
A group of five young men sits in the foyer down the hall, playing Jenga. Sandra Calf Boss Ribs watches them from her desk.
She was there 16 years ago. They all have different reasons for being here, Calf Boss Ribs, Calf Looking, Whitegrass. If Calf Boss Ribs’ wild guess is correct, that only 2 percent of the patients remain sober after leaving the facility in Browning, then it’s that 2 percent that keeps the Crystal Creek Lodge going. The lodge’s workers see earlier versions of themselves in the patients. That’s why Whitegrass tells families of patients his story of resilience, why Calf Looking is helping to establish a treatment center in Wyoming. It’s why Calf Boss Ribs started the lunch program in the parking lot behind Ick’s, and has inspired people like Zita Bremner to help her.
The patients are allowed a trip to one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting outside the facility per week, and this week it’s in Cut Bank, where the patients will get pizza before their meeting. Outside, a white van backs up near the Crystal Creek Lodge. Soon the patients will board, then head down the highway to Cut Bank.
The Jenga tower collapses on the table and the patients yell and laugh. There is a contentedness in the room, maybe because this is one of the safest, securest Friday nights that one could have on the Blackfeet Reservation.
“I know what their needs are, I see what their needs are,” says Calf Boss Ribs. “I can see it from both sides.”