That night they went on the rampage. High on drugs, the teenagers lit flaming torches and ran through the Indian reservation setting light to everything. What they couldn't burn they vandalised: spray painting the community centre walls, smashing windows, tearing up the ground. Ground that had been so hard fought for.
Then someone suggested they head for the ceremonial tepee.
For more generations than living memory could recall, the tepee had held their sacred bundle - a symbolic representation of the tribe's past. Its life-blood. But the kids didn't care. With whoops of drug-induced delight they took their flaming torches to the tepee. And watched it burn. Watched the history of the Kickapoo people vanish into fire and smoke.
Suddenly the youngest of the kids broke away from the pack. He began running: running with the speed of drugged madness. He crossed several fields, before climbing a fence and making towards a small bungalow, where he knocked on the door. For a long time there was no answer. In the darkness the boy reached into his jacket and pulled out a butcher's knife.
Finally, a light came on and an old Indian woman, wearing a white cotton nightdress, appeared at the door. She looked at the young boy before her, with an expression of concern: "What's the matter, baby?" she asked. "It's very late you know." Without a word the boy launched himself at the woman, slashing her with the knife. The blade fell again and again, until the old woman collapsed on to the floor.
Only then did the boy run off, back into the darkness. The woman who lay bleeding on the floor was called Nakai. She had given her whole life to the Kickapoo people.
A Cherokee Indian by birth, she had been adopted by a white couple and grew up learning the customs of Confederate America. But her red skin and accent meant that she was always aware of being different to others in the Texan border town of Eagle Pass where she lived.
Nakai was only 12 years old when she met her first Kickapoo: "I was on the way to school when I saw this old couple, both with long black hair. They seemed kind of familiar so I followed them down the street and watched them knocking on someone's door.
"A housewife answered and the old woman started making small circular movements with her left hand over a clenched right fist, like she was grinding something.
"I realised that it was the Indian sign for coffee. When the door slammed shut in their faces I asked them what they wanted using the sign language. They told me food and coffee because they were hungry."
Now 70 years old, Nakai - or River Rose as her Indian name translates - still remembers this small incident with absolute clarity.
"I took them to my house and put some coffee on to boil. They were cold and tired so I moved their chairs near to the fire. I just felt so sorry for them. They were like grandparents but without any family.
"I don't know why, but I promised myself that I'd look after them. I wanted to help because they looked like me and somehow I felt responsible."
Nakai's silent pledge was not the whimsical promise of a child, however. That oath she made to herself as a 12-year-old was to influence the rest of her life.
The following day the old couple came back to her house and, using sign language, asked if she would like to see their home. They took her to the outskirts of Eagle Pass, to a bridge that linked the US with Mexico. Beneath it was a cardboard city, populated by Indians. Nakai had never seen people so poor, filthy or diseased. The couple took her into their igloo-shaped house made from wicker, canvas and card.
"They told me I was always welcome there," she recollects. "I could visit them whenever I wanted." So every day Nakai went after school.
At first she visited only the old couple, doing odd jobs to help them. Sometimes she brought food, other times she chopped firewood. As the weeks passed by, the elderly Indians introduced her to other Kickapoo and Nakai began spending more time at the camp.
"They were all so poor that the only way I could really help was to drop out of school and get a job. All the money I made went straight to the tribe. It paid for food or bought medicine. There was no one else to help them so I did what I thought was right."
Her adopted mother became angry and said she was throwing her life away. But Nakai didn't care. At the end of a day scrubbing clothes and waiting tables, she would visit the Indians under the bridge. The elders called her Beaver because she was small, fast and always busy. They taught her how to deliver babies, how to cut the umbilical cord and wipe the newborn's eyes with lemon. And they instructed her on the mysteries of Indian medicine.
By the time she got married at 19, the tribe had come to rely on her entirely. "I was their only contact with the outside world," she says. "No one else could write letters in English or speak to the town's doctors. There was only me."
Despite having her own young family to feed on nothing more than her husband's ranch-hand wage, Nakai never deserted her adopted tribe.
"They would turn up at my house in the middle of the night, hungry, sick or in trouble with the police. I would sort everything out. I paid their fines and bought their children clothes to go to school in.
"They went from crisis to crisis and sometimes it was a struggle for us to make ends meet. But I couldn't break my promise."
Nakai continued working with the Kickapoo as an unpaid volunteer for decades. She came to regard the tribe of 600 as an extension of her own family. As she learnt their language, ways and customs, the elders began to invest her with more responsibilities.
She was their spokeswoman. Whenever people wanted something from the Kickapoo they went to her.
That's why the man in the slick suit and cowboy boots came looking for Nakai.
It was 1975 and the city council had some bad news for the Kickapoo.
"He'd been walking around for quite a while," recalls Nakai, "and I think the smell had gotten to him because he was feeling sick. There was no proper sanitation in the camp so it was always a shock if you weren't used to it.
"He asked me to show him round camp. I knew he was from the authorities so I thought he might be trying to improve conditions for the Kickapoo."
In the decades since Nakai had first visited the old couple, the camp beneath the bridge had changed. Eagle Pass's city limits had crept up on the once isolated community. Now it was surrounded by urbanisation, with no green land left - only mud. Every last tree had been hacked down for firewood. Blackened earth and ash littered the site, as did a veritable landscape of rubbish: car bonnets, crates and streams of old newspaper. A combination of Texan humidity and rotting food attracted huge clouds of flies.
The man walked around the camp, fighting his nausea, measuring and writing as he went. Finally he turned to her and in a clear Texan drawl said: "The city wants these Indians off our land. This camp's disgusting. A real eyesore. We want to encourage border tourism between here and Mexico. And right now these squatters are putting everybody off."
He snapped open his briefcase, pulled out an eviction letter and stalked off. The tribe had just 30 days: 30 days to get off the land. Otherwise the bulldozers would move in. The trouble was, the Kickapoo had nowhere to go.
Originally from present-day Wisconsin, wars with white pioneers had pushed the Kickapoo further and further south until they settled in Texas and Mexico. Not recognising the newly established borders, the tribe regularly migrated between the two countries.
Then in 1880, the Mexican government asked the Kickapoo to fight marauding Apache warriors on their behalf. No friend of the Apache, the tribe agreed and eventually triumphed over their rivals, routing them back into North America. As a reward, the Mexican government gave the Kickapoo some land.
This deal, however, was used against the Kickapoo when the US government later recognised their duty to compensate native American Indians for land taken by the early settlers. The authorities claimed the Kickapoo were not actually US citizens and therefore not entitled to any land. Across the border, Mexican industrialists had taken over the territory the tribe had won in the 19th century.
And so the Kickapoo were left squatting beneath the international bridge: neither US citizens nor Mexicans, with no land or rights - not even a country.
To qualify for a reservation of some kind, it was essential for the tribe to be recognised as US citizens. But such a fight, Nakai soon realised, could not be fought alone. She contacted the Native American Rights Fund, and a fellow Indian - a lawyer called Kurt Blue Dog - came to visit her in Eagle Pass. She took Blue Dog to visit the Kickapoo elders.
"You've got a case," Blue Dog told them, "but it'll be long and difficult. It could take years to fight and a lot of money. At the end of it you might lose everything. But if you want we can do it together. And take this battle all the way to Washington."
It took six long years of evidence-gathering before Washington's politicians were convinced the Kickapoo had a case. Throughout, Nakai campaigned for her tribe's cause.
She befriended Texan senators, travelling regularly to Austin, the state capital. She convinced do-gooding Hollywood celebrities to hold benefit-raising parties for the Kickapoo's fighting fund. And she even corresponded with the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa, who sent her numerous letters of support.
It was a six-year non-stop crusade. Everything else came second place to the fight. "I was a stubborn thing," she says. "Some people might say I was rude. But I was possessed. I had to give those poor Kickapoo a chance." In October 1981, Nakai got her opportunity.
She and a group of tribal elders were summoned to Washington, DC. The occasion demanded her best ceremonial clothes and a new pair of moccasins on which she beaded the US flag.
That morning, the uneducated girl, who had dropped out of school before she was even a teenager, took centre stage in the House of Representatives. She nervously straightened the pages of her speech as she waited for the room to fall silent. Then Nakai began: "It has taken me years to come before you today, but I stand here not only as an American, but also as an Indian. And I want justice for my fellows.
"My dream as a young girl was to help the Kickapoo. The best way I can do that now is by imploring you to give them the same opportunities that we have. They want to be US citizens. They want to be your brothers and sisters. Please recognise them as American people."
As she continued, Nakai's intractable belief in the rights of her adopted tribe rose to the surface. This was her only chance to convince those with the power to help the Kickapoo and she mustn't squander it. She spoke of the poverty and neglect they had suffered; of the terrible living conditions they had to endure and their treatment by the local white community. And as she spoke, Nakai became more sure of herself. Her diminutive figure seemed to grow in stature; her voice filled the wood-panelled room - until the politicians stopped shuffling their paperwork and concentrated solely on the impassioned speaker before them.
Only when she had finished did Nakai's nerves get the better of her: when she sat down her hands were shaking. After the little Indian woman had spoken, the rest of the Kickapoo elders had their say. The next day they flew back to Texas.
The mechanics of democracy are slow. For more than a year neither Nakai nor the Kickapoo heard anything from Washington.
Then, in the winter of 1982, a letter marked with a government seal arrived at Nakai's bungalow. "Congratulations," it read. "We thank you for all your work with the Kickapoo and for enlarging the moral imagination. The tribe's case has helped to remind us all that we are brothers." It was signed George Bush, then vice-president.
A few days later Nakai received a phone call from the President's office itself. The Kickapoo were to be made official US citizens.
It was an emotional day when Nakai and the elders returned to Washington to sign the Texas Band of Kickapoo Act in January 1983. For the first time, this tribe had the same rights as all other North American Indians.
On the steps outside the Capitol Building, Kurt Blue Dog gave Nakai a bow and arrow made from what the Indians call "iron wood". "It's strong," he said, "made for a person who protects their tribe." Nakai had won.
For some perverse reason, the victorious often reject their champions. Those self-sacrificing men and women who are so essential in times of hardship can quickly come to be seen as unnecessary once wrongs are righted. It was a predicament Nakai found herself in after her victory in Washington.
The younger generation of Kickapoo associated her too much with old struggles - struggles they wanted to forget - and as the elders slowly began to die off, so too did Nakai's influence. As new Indians took positions of power within the tribe, they deemed her too old, too out of step to be of any further assistance.
Not long after they returned from Washington, the Kickapoo left the bridge. They moved to a new reservation on the outskirts of Eagle Pass. The authorities built a community centre on the land, along with a clinic for visiting specialists in Indian health care. The children had buses to take them to school and the infirm were given home helps. Money Nakai had raised over the years went to buy caravans for some of the most needy families. Finally it looked as though the tribe's fortunes were turning.
But as federal money poured in, so too did the bureaucracy. Official outreach workers, newly assigned by the state, took over tasks that Nakai had carried out for years as an unpaid volunteer. Outsiders even encouraged the tribe to set up a casino on the reservation. With gambling illegal in many states, Indian land was one of the few legitimate places in the US for casinos. Slowly the traditional ways of life, which had so attracted Nakai as a rootless young girl, were eroded.
"They had new people in charge so it wasn't right for me to go there every day like I used to," she says. "I had to respect their wishes, but of course I missed them because it was like losing family.
"I only saw Kickapoo when they came to visit me or they needed doctoring. But as the years went by, fewer and fewer came. Last year I didn't see any at all." The Kickapoo embraced the US - but it came at a price. With all the hopes and opportunities of US citizenship came all of its ills as well. Despite a generous allowance of federal funds, drug abuse and crime became an upward trend in a community that had a history of neither. And as the Kickapoo soon learnt, no matter what their official citizenship might state, it was the colour of their skin upon which they were judged.
With the old social structures gone and the ancient ways forgotten, disaffection gave way to violence. Violence like that carried out by the bored, drugged-up teenagers who set light to the reservation and stabbed Nakai.
Yet despite the viciousness of the attack, none of the stab wounds proved fatal. Within weeks, Nakai was back in good health - but true to her childhood promise, she refused to identify the boy responsible to the police.
People's lives tend to pivot around a small number of moments: moments that often seem inconsequential at the time. And yet it is these moments that seal our destinies. The obvious irony is that this only becomes apparent with hindsight. If people knew they were about to make a life-altering decision, then perhaps they wouldn't treat it with such casual glibness.
As a 12-year-old girl, Nakai's chance meeting with two old Indians, to whom she gave some coffee and a little sympathy, changed her life for ever. The question is: would she do it again? Looking back, Nakai finds it difficult to say exactly why she helped the Indians. "I guess I felt sorry for them because they looked so hungry and cold. I also realised they were like me. We shared a kinship of skin."
In spite of everything that has happened since her euphoric win in Washington - the rejection of the tribe, the stabbing, and her current confinement among the forgotten - Nakai remains steadfastly certain that, yes, she would do it all again.
"If two young Kickapoo knocked on my door tomorrow begging for coffee of course I'd take them in." Wouldn't she even think about it? She hesitates, but just for a moment. "I'd still do anything for those Indians."