Eugene Richardson was born on the Ojibwe reservation near Leech Lake, in Minnesota. Wild rice grows in that region, and Richardson remembers gathering, parching, and husking the rice. His mother died when he was three. At the age of four, he was sent to the Pipestone Indian School, where he remained until he was in the seventh grade. His path from that time to the present has been an extraordinary spiritual journey.

I started drinking when I was about ten. There were older boys in the Pipestone School who worked in the bakery, and they drank lemon extract because it had alcohol in it. We younger boys looked up to them as friends, and we started drinking, too. That's how I got started.

Two or three times when I was drunk in the dormitory, I got caught. My punishment was to go through a "hot line," where about 20 of the bigger boys got in two lines and spanked me with paddles or belts as I ran between them.

I left school when I was 12 and joined my dad and my brothers, who were working as lumberjacks in northern Minnesota, in Little Fork. We did logging for pulp mills. When I was 14, my dad died. When I was logging with my brothers, they often went to town and left me alone. They drank a lot and were often put in jail. Now and again I was in jail for drinking, too. For a while I went to Cass Lake Public School, but I quit when I was 15.

I tried to join the Marines at 16, but they wouldn't let me. When I turned 17, my brothers co-signed for me. I was in the Marines for three years. I spent a year and a half in Japan. I got drunk a lot and was given KP duty, mostly peeling potatoes. I made friends with the Japanese garbage haulers by sometimes giving them chicken or turkey. They invited me to their homes, where we drank sake and beer. I didn't have any other friends.

After I'd been out of the Marines for quite a while, I worked in Minneapolis on a construction crew. We fixed a lot of the gutters and sidewalks around there. One day it was raining really hard, and the other workers got in their cars and went home. I didn't have a car. I walked into a shop that had its door open. It was a Christian Science Reading Room. I walked in and went into the back room, where I sat down and read.

I don't know exactly what it was I read, but it was about God. I stayed in there for quite a while. Then I looked up and saw that it was nice out. So I came out of the back room, and the woman sitting there asked me if I thought there was any good reading material back there. I said, "Whatever I was reading back there was sure good. It was even in Technicolor." (It was as though the words in there were talking to me, and they were in Technicolor. That's hard to forget. It stuck with me.) I went to the Reading Room several times. And I went to a few Christian Science church services.

The woman in the Reading Room gave me a Science and Health and a Bible. I still have them. When I went to the church services, I stayed dry for a year.

But I was still cold and hungry all the time. I didn't want to spend my unemployment check on anything other than necessities, so I kept reading Science and Health and every once in a while the Bible. They didn't always make sense to me, but I kept on reading and reading. After a couple of months, my eyes were puffed. But I kept on reading anyway—night and day. I didn't want to start drinking again, and the reading helped me not to.

By the following spring, I was still not drinking, but everyone around me at work was trying to get me to start again. One man was doing that to get my job. I was setting concrete forms. The foreman said I was the best form setter and that I was making him a lot of money. I got extra pay to teach others to set forms. This man who wanted my job tried to get me to start drinking again so he could have my job. And he got it, because I did start drinking again—soon I was missing work, had some accidents and fights, and got fired.

Later I was living under a loading dock alongside two or three other men. I was drinking, and I was really sick at that time. We'd crawl out of there and go to the soup lines. By April my bank account had gone way down because of my drinking. All I had left was the Bible, the Science and Health, my underclothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a towel.

I went to the general hospital many times. Once they said I'd had a stroke. When I got sick one time, I literally crawled up to the hospital. The receptionist said, "Here comes another of those dirty injuns." That was hard to take. They couldn't help me at all because their X-ray machine was broken down, so they gave me a slip to come back. That really got to me. I threw it on the floor and started making my way back to the railroad tracks. I knew I was dying because my muscle system was going out all the time, and I couldn't stand up properly at all. Sometimes I was unable to see, for minutes at a time.

I went about a mile down the railroad tracks and lay on a grassy mound. It was quiet there. I felt bad. I thought I was dying and I wanted to be near someone, so I sat on some railway ties that were between the 15 lines of different tracks—where there was a lot of noise from the switchmen. When I looked around, I could see little flies, and a beetle that had landed in the grass. I never liked beetles, but this one was beautiful with all its colors.

Then I heard a voice hollering at me—a really loud voice—above the noise of the brakemen, who were down there hollering, clanging, banging. The voice roared, "Just look at you! Just look at you! Nobody wants you. Where are all your own people? Your own people don't want you. Your wife doesn't want you. Your children don't want you. You had an honorable discharge from the United States Marines. They don't want you because you're an alcoholic. Where are all the people you made rich—the foreman in Minneapolis? They don't want you. Don't you blame no one. You're the one who put you in that situation. Listen to me."

As the voice said, "Listen to me," my whole life flashed around as if it were in a circle. It showed the life I was living—drinking and going to jail, sick all the time, and all that involvement in useless activity. "Don't you blame no one. Listen to me."

And then I said, "Listen to me. This moment, I stop drinking."

I'd been reading Science and Health all this time but not understanding it. I kept on affirming, "This moment, I stop drinking," and keeping my mind from thinking about drinking all the time. There was the temptation to think about where the next drink was going to come from. But I kept repeating, "This moment, I stop drinking." I read those books night and day, and when I wasn't reading, I kept repeating to myself that "this second" I wasn't drinking alcohol.

People who lived down by the tracks started offering me food. But I didn't take it because they also had booze with the food. I didn't want that.

I got off alcohol right away. I kept reading and affirming that I was finished with drinking. I started going to the Christian Science church more frequently. And I understood Science and Health. That was 27 years ago.