• Tribe looks inward for the way out
• Alcoholism stalks tribes, factors in high death rates
• 1996 deaths related to alcohol

When Mary Sappier, left, started the Pleasant Point Ambulance Service in 1979, she was making two or three alcohol-related runs per day. That rate has fallen, but Sappier says the majority of calls still involve drinking. Philip Farrell, right, came aboard three years ago as a volunteer. He has worked as an emergency medical technician since April, often treating his former drinking buddies. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Before she took her first breath as a Passamaquoddy, Mary Sappier floated in a womb saturated in alcohol.

The day she was born, her mother was too drunk to push her baby girl from her belly.

''The doctors had to push me out,'' Sappier says. ''I was taken around to all the wet-nursing mothers on the tribe, who fed me. My mother wasn't able to.''

Her voice dropping to a whisper, Sappier adds: ''My mother was so diseased with alcohol.''

Her father was an alcoholic too, she says. Most often, her parents were unable to care for their seven children. As a child, Sappier remembers raw hunger and pain.

''We were always starving,'' she says. ''I was tied to the bed, abused.''

She and her siblings were eventually taken away from their parents and put in homes off the reservation with white families.

Once she became a young woman she returned to the reservation to find her parents. ''After I found out about them, how sick they were, I wanted to go help my people,'' she says.

She got her nursing degree and struggled through the classes.

''It wasn't easy to do,'' she says. The alcohol she was exposed to in the womb left her with a short attention span and learning difficulties. ''Everything was a lot harder for me to do but I overcame it,'' she says.

She returned to the reservation in 1979 and decided to start an ambulance service to assist people with their alcohol and drug problems and ferry them to the nearest hospital 20 miles away in Calais.

''There were people getting into car crashes, falling, fights, lacerations, suicides, gunshot wounds, children beaten up, families drinking, kids with malnutrition, broken legs,'' she says, spitting out the words in one long breath.

''I came back because I understand my diseased brothers and sisters,'' she says.

''It made me cry inside to see what these people were doing to themselves.''

When Sappier picks up a chronic drinker, she isn't shy about telling him or her: ''You have a problem.''

''Sometimes, they pour their heart out to you. I try to refer them to get help.''

Philip Farrell is one of the tribal members Sappier has helped heal.

On his 21st birthday, the day he entered his manhood, Farrell stumbled around the reservation in a drunken stupor. He wandered ceremonial grounds, searching for a way to kill himself.

''I was in a blackout,'' he says.

The night was like many others in Farrell's short life. He'd spent much of his teen-age years drinking, dropping acid and popping pills. His friends drank plenty and didn't seem to have a care in the world. So Farrell drank too.

By the time Farrell had reached his 21st birthday, many in his family had lost hope for him. But his older cousin, Mary Sappier, wasn't willing to give up on Farrell. She'd seen alcohol put too many young Passamaquoddy men in an early grave.

''That night, I could see the pain in his eyes,'' Sappier says. ''People said let him go. Let him kill himself. But I couldn't.''

Sappier tried to talk to Farrell but he was too intoxicated to hear her words. Finally, she had the police arrest him and convinced him to get help.

Farrell stayed sober for a while, but he was drawn back to the parties and the booze.

During one gathering, he and a friend drank into the morning. It was a Friday night, he remembers. Early the next morning at 4:30 a.m., his friend shot himself in the head.

''Half an hour after he left me, he blew his head off,'' Farrell says, his brown eyes wide with the memory of it. ''That made me wake up and realize I had to face things.''

Farrell went into rehab for 60 days. ''I've fallen once but I've picked myself back up,'' he says. For the most part, he's been sober for the past three years. During that time, he's sought Sappier's help and guidance. He's taken emergency medical technician courses and has made Sappier his mentor.

''She's taught me everything I know,'' he says, looking with fondness at this short, dark-haired woman who saved his life.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons Sappier has taught Farrell is to not pass judgment on tribal members who drink themselves sick, who fall down again and again, who brawl and break their bones.

''They're so diseased,'' Sappier says. ''The alcohol eats and eats at them. I tell my workers they must treat them as they would want to be treated.''

Though Sappier has succeeded in making her 12-member ambulance crew sympathetic, there are others who aren't as understanding, she says. ''There are people at the Calais emergency room that make me so mad,'' she says. ''They'll say things like, 'There goes another drunken Indian.' ''

Furrowing her brow in anger, she adds: ''I just want to make these people better. I try and tell them at the hospital, help us. Don't knock us down.''

On this September morning, Sappier and Farrell sit in their cramped office in the tribe's police station. The room can barely fit four people standing. Medicine, bandages and needles are crammed into a wall shelf. Sappier speaks in rapid, clipped sentences, as if she's in a rush to do something else, be in another place, race off to another emergency. ''Things have gotten better here,'' she says. ''Ten years ago, we used to get a lot more calls. Sometimes two or three a day.

''Now, they may get six to a dozen during the week.''

Still, Sappier admits, the majority of calls involve alcohol. Pulling a folder from her file cabinet, she describes a few recent nights on the reservation.

''Last Saturday, Sept. 7, we had a stabbing,'' she says. ''A young man at a party was stabbed in the abdomen.''

''Sept. 7, same Saturday night, we had a girl that was bitten on her thighs. She was at an alcohol party.''

The next morning, at 4 a.m., a woman beat up another woman.

''Sept. 10, a 19-year-old girl complained about acute abdomen pain,'' Sappier says. ''She was drinking Jack Daniels and vodka. She was pretty drunk. There were also some sexual problems there.''

Often, sometimes as frequently as once a month, Sappier says that she picks up young or underage Passamaquoddy girls who are intoxicated and have been either gang-raped or had sex with several partners at parties.

''Sometimes these girls get drunk and they have sex with a few people and they're hurt or they're dumped on the side of the road,'' Sappier says.

Reviewing more files, she continues: ''Here's a girl that was drinking, she's 34, and was kicked in the back. Here Sept. 11, 10 a.m., a child drank diesel gasoline while his mother was partying. We had to notify child welfare on that one.''

Snapping her file folder shut, she sighs and adds: ''That's a week's activities.''

''It is a lot of alcohol but we are getting better,'' she says, heading for her ambulance. ''All we can do is pray to the Great Spirit to come with us on our rides to the hospital and ask him for guidance.''