Sgt. Dawn White removes an open bottle of whiskey from a vehicle while searching for drugs during a traffic stop in New Town. The driver, not a Native American, was detained on charges of driving under the influence and a suspended driver’s license while White waited for a deputy sheriff to make the arrest.

“I put the uniform on,” White said, “I have no family. I have no friends.”

Before she sets out on patrol, she lights the end of braided sweet grass, a tradition of the Plains Indians to drive away bad spirits. White, a mother of three, places it on her dashboard for protection.

White also carries a set of pink handcuffs, a personal signature that she says represents “girl power.” One night last year, White slapped the cuffs on one of her relatives, Rachelle Baker, a 29-year-old former Fort Berthold teacher who became addicted to heroin shortly after it arrived on the Bakken.

“I was in the back of her cruiser, cussing her out, telling her to get away from me, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing,’ ” Baker said in a recent interview. “I was bawling my eyes out. I was sweating, my hair was sticking to my face. She took my hair and pushed it back and she said, ‘Rachelle, I don’t want to see you like this anymore. I don’t want to see you live like this. You need to get better for your kids, Rachelle.’ And she closed the door.”

Three years ago, Baker’s boyfriend at the time got heroin from an oil rig worker who had brought it with him from Boston. “That was the first time in my life I ever saw it,” Baker said.

Soon, she was hooked on heroin, buying from a dealer who came from Minneapolis and shooting up, along with her friends, on a reservation where she said “there’s no other recreation.”

“There’s not a movie theater here,” Baker said. “There’s not a swimming pool. There’s nothing. There’s nothing to do here.”

She became pregnant and was using when she had her baby boy.

“I just couldn’t stop,” Baker said. She shot up so many times that she couldn’t find an easy vein and inserted needles into her neck, legs, ankles and toes. One time, she shot up in her forehead.