Article June 2, 2003 Issue

Addiction ended—moment by moment

By Eugene Richardson

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.

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