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Red Lake redemption

Stay or go? In an area reeling from school shootings, two young people weigh how best to escape the sorrow engulfing their tender yet aimless reservation community.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published June 20, 2005

	[Times photos: Douglas Clifford]
	Single father Andy Auginash, 24, carries son, Ian, 2, across a creek while seeking a fishing spot on the Red Lake River in Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation. Auginash, who wants to become a teacher, often supplements his income by selling fish dinners.
	Ashley Lussier, 18, dons her cap and gown moments before leaving for her graduation from Red Lake High School on the reservation. Lussier, the first in her family to make it through high school without quitting, is planning to attend nursing school.

RED LAKE, Minn. - The morning of her high school graduation, Ashley Lussier pulls on a black skirt and a matching blouse with sequined flowers at the hem. She decides against nylons, then changes her mind. She gathers her hair in a loose ponytail.

Her scarlet gown hangs near the stairs. She tries on the mortarboard, fiddles with the tassel.

"Does it go on this side?" she asks. "I don't even know which side it goes on!"

In March, a kid at her school killed nine people before turning a gun on himself. But on this gray, rainy Saturday in late May, Ashley and 91 other students at Red Lake High School are taking part in a rite of passage.

For Ashley, the diploma is a way out of Red Lake, away from the nieces and cousins she's been babysitting since she was 12, the listless afternoons spent watching TV or riding around with friends. She's the first in her family to make it through high school without quitting.

Across the reservation, Andy Auginash, 24, sits on his living room couch, a worn Bible on his knees. Like Ashley, he wants to break free of the reservation's ills, but he wants to do it here in Red Lake, on the land that has sheltered his people for more than 200 years. He hopes to teach English or geography someday, maybe at Red Lake High School.

"My heart's with these kids," Andy says. "I don't want to just get my degree and bail out on these people like so many do."

Red Lake is alluring and forbidding, bountiful and desolate, and Ashley and Andy are as contradictory as the place they call home. They love their families but don't want to repeat their parents' mistakes. They are grateful for the fellowship of Red Lake, yet wary of the pain and aimlessness that haunt the reservation. Here, tenderness and violence are two sides of a coin.

Red Lake nurtures and protects young people like Andy and Ashley. How do they make sure it doesn't destroy them?

* * *

Andy draws strength from the hardwood forests and the silent water. He will brave the taunts of acquaintances, the temptations of drugs and drink, so long as he can wake up on Indian ground and take his son fishing on the Red Lake River.

"It's rough some days," he says.

It's been almost exactly three months since 16-year-old Jeff Weise walked into the high school and started shooting. Andy found his 14-year-old brother Ryan in the hospital, his nose and mouth hidden beneath an oxygen mask. Ryan had been shot in the lung; he waved weakly. Kids lay around with blood on their faces.

When Andy thinks about it, he buries his head in his hands. He's a giant of a man - 6 foot 6, 280 pounds - and when he cries his whole body shakes.

The shooting stole Andy's taste for alcohol. He took his first drink at 12 and started drinking heavily at 14, but lately he has been trying to straighten out. A methamphetamine overdose in December almost killed him. He looked at his son Ian, a wan 2-year-old who runs around barefoot in nothing but a diaper, and decided he had seen enough friends die violently and spent enough grocery money on fines and bail.

"If I didn't have that kid there, I'd be a different person," he says. "I'd probably be dead."

Andy's mother raised him in Red Lake. Kids teased him because he was poor and because he didn't have a dad, although that isn't unusual on the reservation. He grew up thinking his father didn't want him. He didn't see the man until he was in his casket. Andy was 22; he searched the dead man's face for something familiar.

He graduated from Red Lake High and went to Bemidji State University 30 miles away, but he wasn't prepared for the classes, and his GPA plummeted. He worked for a while at the casino in Red Lake, a dark, cavernous place where the slot machines have names like whispered promises: Mr. Cashman, Queen of Sheba, Helen of Troy.

He bagged groceries at a store in Bemidji until someone asked him if he could count. He quit even though he needed the money.

This spring, he got a community college certificate in forestry. He plans to go back to Bemidji State in the fall. On a recent morning, he sat in his living room, listening to a bearded minister from Duluth talk about Adam and Eve. Ian lay under the coffee table, playing with a stuffed dog.

The minister was talking about blame and rejection. He charted the expulsion from Eden on a chalkboard. Andy wants to counsel troubled kids, and he thinks this informal, homegrown ministry class will help.

"Somebody rejects me, I pull out a gun and shoot him," Bob Loubek of Foundations International Ministries in Duluth told Andy. "We don't know how to deal with it, so we murder each other."

Andy gazed down at the Bible. The first missionaries came to Red Lake more than 150 years ago, but Christianity, especially the evangelical kind, is still controversial here. To some, it is an outsider religion, the faith of boarding schools where, from late 19th century through the 1970s, Indian children were taught to forget their language and culture, and often abused.

The minister asked if Andy was a victim of rejection.

"We all are," Andy said.

He wants a better life for his two infant daughters, who live with the girlfriend he hopes to marry someday. Ian's mother is a different woman who rarely visits. Andy cradles Ian when he's sick and shops for Pampers, Matchbox cars and ice cream. He wishes he could help Ryan, the little brother who always wanted to be just like him.

After the shooting, Ryan wanted his mother with him every second. Now he's out on his four-wheeler all the time, and she has to go looking for him.

Andy watches, worries. He knows he hasn't set the best example. As recently as a month ago, he yelled at a police officer and ended up in jail for disorderly conduct.

Sometimes, he wants to leave the reservation. But he belongs here. He knows he can help.

So he loads up his truc k and heads out to the river with Ian . He baits a hook, drops the line. Sometimes, on the quiet water, he prays.

* * *

Like Andy, Ashley grew up without a father. Red and white balloons hang from the Adopt-A-Highway sign at the top of the driveway that bears his name. A drunken driver killed Brian Lee Johnson as he walked along this road one night in 1997. Ashley's mother says Johnson was drunk that night, too.

Last year, Ashley had her father's name tattooed on her right ankle: Brian inside a heart, with a rose behind it. In the pink bedroom she shares with her 14-year-old sister Kaylee Johnson, there's a small shrine: a crucifix strung with rosary beads, photographs of him, a framed label from a bottle of Jack Daniels, his favorite drink.

Ashley's family didn't come to graduation. Her mother was too busy worrying about the party. Her older sister Kristen was watching kids and cooking. Her brother Scott was out riding around with his cousin. Kaylee slept in.

Ashley wants to go to nursing school this fall in Thief River Falls 70 miles away.

"My sister has too many kids. My brother likes getting in trouble too much," she says. "Mostly everyone's drinking, and they start things. I guess people have things built up inside of them. I guess that's the way some people are up here."

Ashley has the will to build a life elsewhere, but she doesn't have her driver's license yet, and the reservation is seductive. If you have the right bloodlines, you can rent a three-bedroom house for under $300 a month. Everyone is related, so if you fall on hard times, there's always someone to call.

Ashley's whole family is here. Her mother lives next door to the house where she grew up. Her sister is raising her children just up the road.

There are other temptations here too. Ashley drinks Bacardi and Captain Morgan on weekends. Her mother tells her not to smoke marijuana, but two days after getting her diploma, she allowed herself a few drags on a shared joint while folding laundry.

In her yearbook, two pages are devoted to the shooting victims. Their pictures are all there, except the killer's, surrounding a Langston Hughes poem:

I loved my friend

He went away from me

There's nothing more to say.

One of Kaylee's friends smiles down from the bedroom wall. The girl would have graduated with Ashley, but she hanged herself when she was 16.

Ask Kaylee how many of her friends have died and she thinks for a minute. "Really a lot," she says.

She knew the shooting victims better than Ashley did. One of them, 15-year-old Chase Lussier, was a friend's boyfriend. He left behind an infant son.

After the shooting, nearly half the school's 220 students stopped showing up for class. The tribal chairman's 16-year-old son remains in federal custody, suspected of helping plan the attack. Students have been questioned in front of a grand jury.

In her notebook, Kaylee listed the shooting victims' names. The good die young 03-21-05, she wrote. Why. Why you?

She has a broad brow, honey-colored hair and an open smile. She wants to be on the honor roll, to graduate like Ashley, in a shimmery gown with a white cake with her photo emblazoned on frosting. She'd like to be a police officer someday, or maybe a beautician.

In her bedroom, she pulls an inch-thick folder of disciplinary reports (some came before the shooting, some after) from a desk drawer. She swore and broke a window at school. She got in a fight with another girl, and it took six security guards to break them up. They sent Kaylee home for the rest of the year.

After the shooting, she wrote:

Yes the reason

I wanna Die

to be with chu

I hate living

like this I feel

like s--- I hate

living it aint

worth nothin

all I wanna do

is just to be

wit you

* * *

After the graduation, Ashley changes into jeans and sneakers. Trays of baked beans, salads and burgers cover a long table under the trees. A red banner hangs near the food, plastered with pictures of Ashley as a baby, as a girl in traditional Indian beads. There's an eagle in the center.

"Ashley, this is the day you spread your wings and soar," the banner says. "May the Great Spirit watch over you through your new journey in life."

Under a white tent, a DJ from the Twin Cities spins Eminem and Tim McGraw. Ashley and her boyfriend, Frank Skinaway, flip through his boxes of CDs, lifting out albums by Nelly and New Orleans rapper Juvenile. Ashley picks up the DJ's microphone.

"Are you going to talk on that later?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm going to congratulate you."

Frank asks how high the volume goes. Higher than this, the DJ says.

"So they can hear it all the way down there?" Ashley asks, pointing down the road that leads out of Red Lake. "'Cause that's how loud I want it."

--Times researchers Caryn Baird and Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

[Last modified June 20, 2005, 01:36:07]