How to handle bad behavior?

[Guest guest]

How tribes dealt with " bad behavior " (re: Fast Runner). This is really

interesting to me because of the latest discussion about

Libertarianism. How DO you handle those few people who really,

really, foul up your society?

-- Heidi

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/national/18BANI.html?hp

Plagued by Drugs, Tribes Revive Ancient Penalty

Their experience has been repeated hundreds of times on this sprawling,

desperately poor reservation of 2,000 Lummi, where addiction and crime have

become pervasive. It is the reason that the Lummi tribe has turned as a last

resort to a severe and bygone punishment, seeking to banish five of the young

men in jail and another recently released. It is also the reason for evicting

Yevonne Noland, 48, the matriarch of the Noland clan, from her modest blue house

on the reservation, because her son, a convicted drug dealer, was listed on the

lease.

Banishment once turned unwanted members of a tribe into a caste of the " walking

dead, " and some people criticize it as excessive and inhumane, more extreme than

the punishments meted out by the world outside and a betrayal of an already

fragile culture.

But a growing number of tribes across the country, grappling with a rise in drug

and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have used banishment in

varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders see this ancient response,

which reflects Indian respect for community, as a painful but necessary

deterrent.

" We need to go back to our old ways, " said Darrell Hillaire, chairman of the

Lummi Tribal Council, shortly before an early morning meeting on the reservation

recently about the tribe's new campaign against drugs. " We had to say enough is

enough. "