Non-Indians frequently have strange ideas about American Indian reservations. They tend to find it hard to conceptualize a group of people having been assigned a location in which to be.

The first thing to be noted is that a reservation is a place where people live.

People do have homes on reservations, and for the most part have a strong sense of identification with the place, whether they live there full time or not.

Therefore it is a wound to community, to identity, to place, to home when something such as methamphetamine moves onto a reservation. It's a frightening presence for many native communities. Also receiving attention recently has been the problem on reservations of wildfires set by people.

The Tribune covered a discussion at United Tribes Technical College at which officials from more than one tribal unit in North Dakota asked for more money to be spent on law enforcement on reservations and treatment for tribal members who are in the grip of meth.

On the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, there are supposed to be 10 officers patroling an area the size of Connecticut, according to tribal Chairman Ron His Horse Is Thunder, speaking at the UTTC conference. He said there are only six patrol officers at times.

There are jurisdictional problems over nontribal members caught dealing drugs on reservations. And drug cartels have targeted reservation populations.

The jurisdictional issue should be resolved as soon as possible. Outsiders are cancers if they're bringing drugs into a reservation.

The scope of problems facing tribal councils on reservations is overwhelming. Law enforcement always is at issue. It's an unenviable responsibility. It's held for the most part by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA has found it necessary to set up special wildfire prevention and investigation teams because of a problem on reservations, that so many wildfires evidently are intentionally set.

The Associated Press quoted a BIA source as saying that, in the past year, there were 8,034 fires on American Indian reservations, 6,561 of them "human caused." Not all were arson, but way too many of them seemed to be.

Once again, tribal authorities need resources - whether the problem is meth or fires - to empower them to deal with their own reservation problems.

The striking irony is that each year so many tribal members from North Dakota ship out to go all over the country, throughout the West in particular, to fight wildfires.

It must be a peculiar feeling to be fighting a wildfire in California and to hear that, back home on the reservation, a fire is consuming grass and trees.

No more disheartening, however, than knowing that back home, meth dealers are feeding their greed by destroying lives with the poison they sell.

There are no simple remedies.

In trying to solve reservation troubles, tribal chairmen and tribal council have a large share of responsibility. But they need tools to fight such problems as meth.

America can afford many things. At least, our spending would seem to say so. We shouldn't be parsimonious when it comes to cooperating with tribal authorities to secure the tools they need.