I called the Red Lake High School, late Monday afternoon. I tried to reach a dedicated teacher there, Diane Schwanz, who helps to coordinate the details of our visit to Red Lake each year. I called twice but she did not answer. "I'll try again tomorrow," I thought, locked my office door, and caught the bus to the Bryce Jordan parking lot. Little did I know that a few minutes after 3 pm, about the time I placed my call, a 16-year-old-student walked into the proud home of the Ogichidaag (Warriors) carrying two shotguns and a handgun. The student had just killed his grandfather and companion. Ambling through the security gate at the school's entrance, he shot and killed the unarmed guard. He proceeded down the corridor shooting students at random before entering a classroom and killing five students and a teacher. We've all heard or read the news -- 10 dead, seven injured.

I read the news after arriving home, a brief report of the Red Lake High School shooting. The only name mentioned in this initial press release was the teacher I had been trying to call - Diane Schwanz. The five students who died were all found in the classroom next to Diane's. Hearing the gunfire, she barricaded her classroom door, preventing the gunman from entering, and ordered her students to lie flat on the floor. Unable to enter her classroom, the student turned the gun on himself. I have close connections to the Ojibwe people, to the Red Lake Nation in particular. I grew up there.

Last May and June, a group of students from Penn State traveled with me to the Red Lake, Leech Lake and White Earth Nations. We spent a day at the Red Lake High School, we walked through that security gate, and we sat in those classrooms. We enjoyed the Indian tacos students made us for lunch. But more importantly, we met and learned from those teachers and we met many of those Red Lake students. Strangers in meeting; friends today.

I awoke on Tuesday morning, after a fitful night, to a bright, warm, spring central Pennsylvania day, far from the cold confines of my northern Minnesota childhood home. I wanted to be in or near Red Lake, to be with those families whose hearts were breaking. I made my way to the Penn State campus where students were attending classes in a civil manner, hearing brilliant lectures, going about the business of having their lives changed. As I made my way to my office in the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, I realized the lives of students at the Red Lake High School were also being changed. But change was being forced upon them by a student who walked into the classrooms we had recently visited, aimed a gun at the teachers we met and the students with whom we had shared wild rice, Indian tacos, frybread and friendship.

It is a sad and tragic story, made all the more poignant by my knowledge of the people, the reservation, the land and lakes where it all took place.

I sat most of the day, distracted, calling north, writing e-mails and wishing there was something I could do. I am planning to return to Red Lake in May with another group of fortunate Penn State students, but I cannot be there now. A friend, Darrell Auginash, wrote and asked me to pray for his nephew, airlifted to a Fargo hospital and struggling for his life. Pray. This is something I can do and something I can encourage you to do -- people of all faiths, people of no faith -- no small thing when we do it together.

I can do more. I can also reach out to you in your apartment or home, in your car or on the bus, and ask you to watch. Watch as the journalists and TV reporters fly out from their home cities, land in Minneapolis, catch a commuter flight to the small airport in the forests of Bemidji, and drive their rental cars 30 miles north through the pine and poplar to the Red Lake Reservation. Watch them as they go to the small convenience store, interview a few folks, and push their way close to the school building where it all happened on the shore of the great northern lake that gives the reservation its name.

Watch them go into the tribal offices, try to interview the tribal chairman, a young man with a dream of making his reservation a better place, then scurry back on the dark country roads to their well-lighted hotels in Bemidji, where they can issue dispatches about a student caught in a culture of poverty and hopelessness on a rural reservation.

It will not get to the heart of the matter. It will not show the love and sense of family that is at the core of this small reservation community. You will not hear about the generosity of spirit and love that will flow, like a fall of water, among them. You will not hear about the rich spiritual traditions that will sustain them in their darkness.

You will not hear about the strength that has sustained them against all odds for more than five hundred years of European occupation.

Nor will you hear about the unique sense of grief that fills a culture where all are related, where the drum is the metaphor for community -- when the drumhead is struck in one place, the whole membrane shudders -- and the sound reverberates everywhere.

What it will do, I'm afraid, is reduce this tragedy to a sociological event. "Rural reservation" is carte blanche for journalistic speculation about social problems and cultural hopelessness. So watch to see if that is the story. And wonder why the same story in the wealthy suburbs of Denver did not immediately become fallow ground for sociological speculation about wealth, anomie, and fundamentalist Christianity gone awry.

This Red Lake story is hidden beneath two layers of mythology and misunderstanding that pervade contemporary American culture: "rural" and "Indian reservation." In each lies a series of expectations and misconceptions that obscures the truth of events and makes what takes place there something "other" than the work day affairs of our urban and suburban lives.

Watch, now, and see if that mythology and misunderstanding obscures the truth. I know those kids as one can only know by being himself a Red Lake kid. They are not unlike you, the students I meet every day at Penn State; they are not unlike our own children who brush their teeth, pack their books and catch the bus every morning. It was Sitting Bull, the great Lakota Chief, who said it best: "Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of life we can create for our children." The children of Red Lake, those who died and those who lived, are your children, our children.