By any objective measure, American Indians have caught some 10% more grief than American Blacks have. I see the trouble some of them have on the reservations and I look at that the way white folks ought to be looking at Black folks: as the canary in the coal mine.

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — For generations the Noland family has led a troubled life on the Lummi Indian reservation here. The Nolands have struggled with alcohol, painkillers and, more recently, crack. Seven family members are now jailed, several for dealing drugs, on and off tribal land.

Their experience has been repeated hundreds of times on this sprawling, desperately poor reservation of 2,000 Lummi, where addiction and crime have become pervasive. It is the reason that the Lummi tribe has turned as a last resort to a severe and bygone punishment, seeking to banish five of the young men in jail and another recently released. It is also the reason for evicting Yevonne Noland, 48, the matriarch of the Noland clan, from her modest blue house on the reservation, because her son, a convicted drug dealer, was listed on the lease.

Banishment once turned unwanted members of a tribe into a caste of the "walking dead," and some people criticize it as excessive and inhumane, more extreme than the punishments meted out by the world outside and a betrayal of an already fragile culture.

But a growing number of tribes across the country, desperate to slow the wounds of drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have used banishment in varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders see this ancient response, which reflects Indian respect for community, as a painful but necessary deterrent.

"We need to go back to our old ways," said Darrell Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Tribal Council, shortly before an early morning meeting on the reservation recently about the tribe's new campaign against drugs. "We had to say enough is enough."

While the Lummi use banishment to root out drug dealers, other tribes, like the Chippewa of Grand Portage, Minn., are using it to rid the reservation of the worst troublemakers and to preserve what they say is a shared set of core values. The Grand Portage banishments, which can be imposed on Indians and non-Indians who visit the reservation, may last as long as the tribal council deems fit, even for life.

Being banished can mean losing health, housing and education benefits, tribal rights to fishing and hunting, burial rights, even the cash payments made to members of tribes earning hefty casino profits.