St. Paul Pioneer Press

RED LAKE, Minn. – When the victims, the culprit and an alleged co-conspirator are related – as is the case in the Red Lake shooting deaths – mourning and everyday tribal life can be complicated by the reservation’s interwoven family ties.

Among the nine people he killed, Jeff Weise, 16, shot his grandfather and at least one cousin. Federal prosecutors allege another cousin, Louis Jourdain, 16, conspired with Weise to carry out the attack.

Weise and Jourdain are the great-grandsons of Patrick Jourdain and Elizabeth May Jourdain. Not everyone on the reservation of 5,000 knows the four-generation link, but members know Louis Jourdain’s father, Floyd Jourdain Jr., as their leader – chairman of the tribe.

While angered and saddened by the shootings, tribal members also found their emotions are in conflict.

Before Weise’s funeral Monday, the same day news of Jourdain’s arrest stunned the community, several members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa asked their priest for advice.

Many callers have close ties to the families of Weise, Jourdain and the victims. The Rev. Pat Sullivan said the callers felt conflicting emotions about going to Weise’s service.

Sullivan, the priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Red Lake, conducted five of the 10 funerals of those who died in the March 21 shootings, including Weise’s.

“People called and asked, “We want to pay our respects. Is that OK for us do?”‘ he said Thursday. “Immediate family in most situations go to the funeral out of respect for the loved one who died. A good number of others go to the funeral out of respect for the family.”

Amid the struggle over how to feel about Weise, whose role as gunman is certain, and about Jourdain, whose alleged role as plotter is denied by his father, outward signs of anger are hard to find.

That’s in contrast to the Columbine High School community’s reaction after two teenagers killed 13 people and themselves at the school in 1999 in Littleton, Colo.

“As a person and families go through grief, my experience has been it’s very similar to (other tragedies) but more complicated because of how we know one another. So many are interrelated and connected,” Sullivan said. “We are all sad. We are confused. We are all angry. We are all thankful for the sun that rose today,” he said.

“In a reservation community, we are not separated by families, we are united by families,” Walter Fleming, head of Native American Studies at Montana State University-Bozeman, said Thursday in an interview. “Here there may be a collective guilt. The community may have felt responsible – “This was one of our own. We should have raised our child better.’ I don’t know if that exists in non-native families.”

Weise’s funeral was well attended by the community despite his actions, Sullivan said. Weise’s first victim was his paternal grandfather, Daryl Lussier, 58, who was killed at his home along with his longtime companion, Michelle Sigana, 32.

At Red Lake Senior High School, where the other shootings took place, victim Chase Lussier was Weise’s cousin, according to Lussier’s family. Roseanne Spears, Lussier’s mother, said she would try to attend Weise’s wake. Victim Alicia White’s grandmother, Alberta Spike, said her niece is married to Floyd Jourdain Jr.

Tribal members have set up a memorial to the victims outside Red Lake’s middle and high schools – a wall of bright flowers, handmade posters, balloons, photos of the victims and personal, handwritten notes. Most are dedicated to the nine people shot by Weise, but some extended their prayers and thoughts to the shooter as well. Few if any contain harsh words against Weise.

That’s quite different from a makeshift memorial set up after the 1999 Columbine shooting. According to a Denver Post article at the time, one sign read: “These flowers and prayers are for the innocent victims and their families. Not for the two monsters that committed these selfish and violent acts.”

An Illinois carpenter made 15 crosses for the people who died in the 1999 Columbine shootings, including two for the gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Their crosses were torn down.

The same man who made the crosses for the Columbine victims brought nine crosses to Red Lake last week. He decided not to put one up for Weise because of his Colorado experience.

“As you can imagine, grief comes in different stages,” said Principal Chris Dunshee of parents and high school students. “People are moving through those stages at different times. There’s a feeling out there to show understanding and forgiveness (toward Weise), and others are angered.”

Fleming, the American Indian scholar who also is a member of the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, said kin relations among tribes “extend farther out than the nuclear family in Euro-American culture.”

“You may have first cousins raised as brothers. You may have a young man raised by an uncle who he considers like a father,” Fleming said of the American Indian culture.

“That makes what happened up there all the more tragic. It’s someone I, as a tribe member, have a certain responsibly for communally raising,” said Fleming, who specializes in the culture and history of Northern Plains and woodland tribes.

U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, who has responsibility for prosecuting crimes on the reservation, declined to speak specifically Thursday about the relationship between Weise and Louis Jourdain.

“It would be almost impossible to find a family on the Red Lake reservation that didn’t have at least one relative or in-law killed March 21,” he said. “One should not assume relationships between individuals is unusual. It’s not like Minneapolis or St. Paul. It’s a community where people have lived for generations, and there are broad family relationships.”

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