The once-bustling basketball court near the old elementary school in Fort Yates is often empty now thanks to the prevalent drug trade. Thosh Collins

Basketball is still beloved here, a mainstay of reservation culture, but the game isn’t alive in the streets they way it used to be. Instead, roads and lanes are peppered with evidence addictions to meth, heroin and other opiates. Houses where drug busts have taken place are boarded up. Many addicts roam the town, visibly ill, with teeth destroyed, jaws twitching.

“Meth is so noticeable here,” said Chad Harrison, another resident of Fort Yates, who was elected last month to his first term on the Tribal Council. “It’s a very thinly veiled problem because people are physically affected. It’s that emaciated look. You see it everywhere.”

Drug problems have surpassed alcoholism as the primary local substance abuse issue in Standing Rock, he said. It’s so common, he added, that people make light of it.

“If somebody loses weight just trying to be healthy, the joke is, ‘Oh, you must be on meth,’” he said.

To fight the drugs ravaging the Standing Rock community, this summer the Tribal Council passed a resolution stating an intent to banish convicted drug traffickers and dealers from the reservation. If banished, a person would be escorted by law enforcement officers to the reservation’s borders and would risk arrest upon re-entry.

Standing Rock is not the only tribe in the Great Plains that has turned to the penal tradition of banishment as a way to address struggles with narcotics. The Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe of North Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana have all recently passed similar resolutions.