Hey, I Used To Live There

From the WSJ:
DUNSEITH, N.D.—Few mothers are likely to get more cards, flowers and phone calls this Sunday than Joyce Dumont.
Mrs. Dumont, 77 years old, a Native American of the Chippewa tribe, is at the root of a family tree so tangled that it seems more like a forest. By her reckoning, she has had 69 kids—including six through childbirth, five stepchildren, 11 who were adopted, several dozen foster children and a few who simply moved in when they had no better place to go.
Her latest three were adopted by Mrs. Dumont and her husband, Buddy, also 77, over the past few years. They range in age from 7 to 10. "They're really rambunctious," she told a recent visitor to her home near the Canadian border, where a washing machine chugged and a chubby Chihuahua named Peewee scoured the floor for Cheerios.
Social workers say Mrs. Dumont is exceptional in terms of the number of children she has nurtured over six decades. Chuck Johnson, president of the National Council for Adoption, a nonprofit group in Alexandria, Va., knows of people who have fostered scores of children but said such cases are rare.
"Everybody knew they could count on Joyce," said Andrea Olson, who arranges adoptions through the AASK Adoption Program in Grand Forks, N.D.
In a poor rural area of central North Dakota, social workers regularly called on her to take foster children; she volunteered to shelter others after hearing they were in trouble. Some just showed up. A high-school buddy of one of Mrs. Dumont's stepsons was invited for a sleepover in the late 1970s—and ended up staying two years.   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324744104578471503624865878.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsFifth
And these are soooo good: At the very least, visitors to Mrs. Dumont's house are expected to stay for a meal, often what she calls "Indian tacos," made from deep-fried bread dough, hamburger, sour cream, raw onions, tomatoes and black olives. During one such feast last month, Mr. Dumont interrupted his wife as she reminisced about her children. "Honey," he said quietly, "we better eat before the food gets stale."
If you ever get a chance, stop by a Indian restaurant in Belcourt, ND, which is probably where Dumont lives and get an Indian taco, they are one of the best foods on the planet.
Having said that, when I lived in Dunseith, Belcourt was a cess pool.  It was the major city on a small Indian reservation of the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation of the Chippewas.
I got along with individuals of the tribe and had some good friends there.  But I also saw the evil side, especially when I was a volunteer firefighter with Dunseith fire department.  We covered a lot of Indian land and the Indians would start fires just of the heck of it.  In a year, we would respond to over 300 fire calls, mostly on Indian land and most were arson.  If a family member didn't like the house they were living in, burn it down and the tribe would build them another one.
Start a grass fire, hey it was fun, until the time it over ran a trailer home with a mom passed out drunk inside. As the trailer was burning, an 11 year old went back inside to save her passed out mom and both died in the fire.  Their burnt to a crisp bodies with bones sticking out of their skin still haunt me to this day.
A year or two after I left, some Indian youths burned down their school- high school, middle school and elementary school.  That school had the best equipment and best facility that money could buy but it didn't stop the Indian kids from dropping out of school or going on to college because they would be perceived as being too white.
It is one of the most beautiful areas of the country, the Turtle Mountains and have the best summer weather, anywhere in the United States.  It's just a shame that the tribe ruins much of the area.
But I digress, thanks to Mrs Dumont, she has help some kids who otherwise would have been discarded and allowed to live in shacks with drunks and druggies who were supposed parents of these kids.