“Because of the drugs and the oil boom, it’s not the same as when I was growing up.… Everyone is scared here.”įor Police Chief Johnson, it’s a tragically familiar story of drugs. Reed says she once cashed out $147,000 and blew most of it on meth. Many tribal members receive royalty money - from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars a month. Reed receives oil royalty money from land she inherited on the reservation, and says the monthly checks made it easy for her to drop at least $400 a month for her habit. “I was pregnant and selfish and wouldn’t stop doing it.”
“Now my first son was born with it,” Reed said. Amelia Reed, mother to the youngest, first tried meth nearly five years ago and says she’s addicted to “the devil’s drug.” Their father, Powell’s son Mason Fox, struggles with his meth addiction. Her daughter, Jackie Powell, a robust 47-year-old with a quick smile, was forced to quit her job and become a full-time mom to her two grandsons - ages 1 and 2 - who were born addicted to methamphetamine. “Now everyone is on meth and heroin,” Fox said. Mary Eleanor Fox, a 66-year-old silver-haired matriarch of a large family, said she never thought she’d see the day most of her grandchildren would be addicted to the sort of drugs she’d once only heard about “in the big cities.” When night sets, flames from the oil burning off lick the night sky.
To the east, oil rigs pockmark the landscape to the horizon. The Missouri River, which cuts the reservation in half, can be seen to the west. The road slices through the heart of New Town, a collection of old and frayed one-story buildings that makes up the biggest town on the reservation. The reservation has about 4,000 tribal members, and more than double that number in nonmembers who live and work in the area.ĭuring the day, big rigs and other oil vehicles barrel down state Highway 23, a two-lane road that was never meant to handle so much traffic. The FBI plans to open an office in the region. With the wealth generated by the Bakken oil fields, crime has increased so much in the region that voters just across the state line in Roosevelt County, Mont., recently passed a bond to increase jail space. They are the ones that are the most terrifying.” Just like any ripe feeding ground, they have competition, but obviously they are the big bad wolf. “MS-13 is strong enough and scary enough that I question whether I should speak out at all,” said a former tribal leader who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal. “It was alarming to see people with those tattoos on the reservation,” he said.Īuthorities have not arrested any MS-13 kingpins, but the gang’s presence is palpable and many speak about it in whispers.
One of the experts, Francisco Foppa, said he noticed MS-13 tattoos on people in a Wal-Mart in Minot and the 4 Bears Casino and Lodge at the MHA Nation’s capital in New Town. after many of its members were deported to Central America. Known as MS-13, the Los Angeles-bred gang began proliferating outside the U.S.
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The problem continued to grow and became so urgent that the three tribes flew Guatemalan gang experts to the area in October 2013 to teach local law enforcement officials how to detect members of the notorious Central American gang Mara Salvatrucha. Local and federal officials believe the sellers had ties to Mexican gangs. Smith was indicted with dozens of others in “Operation Winter’s End,” a major FBI effort to quell drug dealing on the reservation. After a two-day standoff, tribal police used a front-loader to demolish the home and get him out. Smith, a Colorado man armed with rifles and a pistol, barricaded himself in a house on the Three Affiliate Tribes reservation. The new criminal scene came into the open in 2012, when Michael J. “This is beyond the capability of our tribes.” There have been at least 15 such cases since. MHA Nation Children and Family Services Department officials said they never had to take custody of children born addicted to opiates until 2010, when child services officials saw their first drug-addicted baby born on the reservation. She said that number is now closer to 90%, and she struggles to keep up.ĭrug-related arrests of tribal members on the reservation have grown from 47 in 2008 to over 800 last year, according to tribal public safety statistics. Johnson said that before the oil bonanza, about 30% of the cases that came to her court were drug-related.