Today, much of the world is focusing on Red Lake. Tomorrow, the world will move on. We understand that, but it's too bad. There is so much more for the world to know about the place and others like it, and so much need for sustained attention -- attention that was deserved before this shooting happened and is even more deserved now.

Red Lake is not like Littleton, Colo., or any of the other scenes of school shootings, places you can assume were fairly ordinary except for the warped thinking of an individual with a gun.

Red Lake is an isolated, beautiful but dirt-poor place where hope is hard to come by. It is a place where too many kids drift in and out of school as they choose. Where alcoholism and suicide and diabetes and unemployment gnaw at the soul. Where, despite the best efforts of many good people, it is difficult to sustain in young people a vision of the good life they might have by hard work and study. Not that some don't make it; they do. But too many don't.

We're not saying any of this explains the actions of Jeff Weise. We are saying that Red Lake and its sister reservations have about them an aura of hopelessness and pathos and need that cried out for attention before the world ever heard of Weise. When 10 people get gunned down by a crazed teenager, it's a news story. But Red Lake should have been a running news story for a very long time. Yes, it's a sovereign nation, which complicates matters, but it is embedded in a much more powerful and wealthy sovereign nation. When you sleep with an elephant, you are likely to get rolled on. Red Lake has been frequently rolled on.

We don't want Red Lake to follow the path of Pine Ridge. In the 1970s, the world couldn't get enough coverage of the confrontations there between federal agents and members of the American Indian Movement -- all of which resulted in fewer deaths than Red Lake has now suffered.

But when the excitement died, the world moved on, and Pine Ridge today is as bereft of prosperity and hope as it was when AIM arrived. Pine Ridge is literally the poorest place in the entire nation.

So please, satisfy your curiosity about the shootings at Red Lake. But consider the lives of all those who live there. Understand that they need help to ease the poverty and related plagues visited upon their community -- for just one example of such help, the income that could be provided by Gov. Tim Pawlenty's proposed metro-area casino in which Red Lake, White Earth and Leech Lake would be partners.

Would more money, on its own, have prevented the carnage at Red Lake High School? Probably not. But, surely, measures that offer some prosperity and hope would be a fitting response to the horrific blow the Red Lake Ojibwe have suffered.

 Published March 23, 2005 


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