Native American Wasteland

The second part of Sarah Kershaw's remarkable "Tribal Underworld" is featured in today's New York Times. Kershaw profiles Eugenia Phair, a Lummi Indian who developed a lucrative trade illegally selling painkillers. She shows how Phair took advantage of desperately poor people living amid dizzying casino wealth and lax law enforcement on the Indian reservations. In the first part of the story, which ran Sunday, Kershaw traces the violent wave of drug trafficking that has surged in reservations across the country and the damage it has caused. Kershaw uses court records and interviews with more than 50 tribe members, law enforcement officials and prosecutors to give us powerful examples of how the drug trade has invaded Indian country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/national/20gena.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th