Red Lake Shootings

Ponemah, Minn. (AP) ― Floyd "Buck" Jourdain Jr. had a big agenda when he took over as chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. But that was before a teenager went on a shooting rampage on the Indian reservation that left 10 people dead and plunged Jourdain into a painful year of crisis management.

Now, Jourdain is running for re-election against a field of three that includes the father of one of the dead.

In March 2005, seven months after Jourdain took office, Jeff Weise, 16, killed nine people -- including five students, a security guard and a teacher at the reservation's Red Lake High School -- before committing suicide.

Then, a week after the attack, Jourdain's 16-year-old son, Louis, was arrested as a possible conspirator. The boy ultimately pleaded guilty in federal court to a far less serious charge of exchanging threatening messages with Weise over the Internet.

The tribal chairman is seeking to convince voters that he managed a difficult situation well and deserves more time to lead.

"I feel like I really never had a chance to get off the ground," Jourdain, 41, said at a recent candidates' forum ahead of Wednesday's election.

Though some victims' families were angry at Jourdain for saying little during the long, secretive federal investigation of his son, his challengers have been reluctant to criticize Jourdain for his handling of the situation.

Even Francis "Chunky" Brun, whose 28-year-old son Derrick, a school security guard, was killed at the rampage, has steered away from making the attack an issue, even though he has acknowledged that his son's death played a part in his decision to run.

"I think as time goes on and people reflect on the events of 3-21, they realize that there isn't anybody without some responsibility," said longtime tribal member Lee Cook, director of the American Indian Resource Center at nearby Bemidji State University. "Once you start pointing fingers, you've got three fingers pointing back at yourself."

Even if some voters consider the election a referendum on Jourdain's handling of the shootings, Cook said he figures Jourdain should fare pretty well. Cook said Jourdain "kept his wits about him" after the attack.

But Bill Lawrence, a tribal member and frequent critic of Jourdain, said the chairman set a bad example for the tribe long before the shootings.

"Buck inherited some of the problems, but the educational system has gotten worse and the finances have gotten worse," said Lawrence, who publishes an Indian newspaper in Bemidji. "If you want to talk about the tragedy, he hasn't been forthright with the people on what he knows about it."

The Red Lake reservation is in remote northwestern Minnesota, about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities. About 31 percent of households on the reservation are on public assistance. The unemployment rate was estimated in the 2000 census at 40 percent, though Jourdain's challengers say it is more like 65 percent.

Jourdain took office pledging to tighten spending, pay down tribal debt and deal with unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and poverty. He claims to have cut wasteful spending and reduced favoritism in tribal politics.

Even before the rampage, many of the 5,000 tribal members on the reservation guarded their privacy fiercely and were reluctant to discuss their problems with outsiders.

The tribe has nearly 7,300 members eligible to vote, many of them in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

"I would just like to see the same leadership stay in place and move on with the tragedy that happened with the school shootings," said William Boswell, 40, who cast his ballot this week in Minneapolis. "It's time to move on. Pick up and move on."

Lisa Skjefty, 23, a Minneapolis resident and recent University of Minnesota graduate, would not say who she voted for. But she said she wanted to see more youth programs both on and off the reservation.

"With the events that happened in Red Lake in the past year, I think it just made us realize, all of us, that we need to just start paying more attention and caring about who we vote for and who is running," she said.

(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)