by David Treuer
My grandmother asked me to clean up the room where he shot himself, and I did. He died without giving me the answers I thought I needed. And his death was also some kind of question rather than an answer. That day, however, I took the time to look for his discharge papers, his service record, some kind of record of his life as a soldier. As though whatever paper he kept after the war could tell me something he couldn’t. I didn’t find anything.
Five years after his death I petitioned the National Personnel Records Center, and after a few months, they sent me his file. It was incomplete and as haphazardly put together as he had been. He was inducted at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, on January 21, 1943, a month before his nineteenth birthday. At the time of his induction he was healthy. He stood five-foot-ten and weighed 155 pounds. He listed his race as white. He had attended eight years of grammar school and one year of high school. He received “morality and sex education training” and immunizations. He received desert training near Yuma, Arizona, and reached the rank of T/5, or corporal, before he shipped out, but by the time he embarked for the European theater he was once again a private. Most of his file is taken up with medical documents concerning his shoulder injury. But it’s hard to tell when and how the injury occurred. One physician notes that according to my grandfather he hurt it throwing a rope over a truck while logging with his father in 1941. In other documents he states he hurt it while boxing in Yuma, or “roughhousing” with another soldier. Nowhere does it say he received his wound in combat. According to hospital records he was not in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He was in Indiana, where he received an operation on his shoulder on June 16.
I didn’t know what to make of any of this. He left for the ETO on September 4, 1944. He was in France by September 15. He entered Belgium on October 24. By December 27, 1944, he was in England and had shoulder surgery again. He was returned to duty and entered Germany on March 6, 1945, five days after his twentieth birthday. He was awarded a good conduct ribbon, and one battle star for the campaign in Belgium, but not a Purple Heart.
After he got back to the states he went AWOL twice. They confined him to base and docked his pay. As of September 8, 1945, he was honorably discharged. There wasn’t much to learn from his service record. Paper lies. So do people. And there is no way to crack open some other truth, some greater truth, as though buried there waiting to be found by me. I told my father—who served in the same war, in the Pacific—about what I found. Look, Dave, he said, it’s enough to know he was there. He was in it. He was a part of that. It will remain something I don’t understand. Except that the war stories he told were of the beauty of the land, the look and feel of it. That and how miserable and scared he was. How much he hated his war.
Entering the Cage
I was sitting around one night listening to the radio,” says Sam. “And this advertisement came on for First Blood Ultimate Wrestling at the Lion’s Den in Fridley. The ad said, ‘Local fighters wanted,’ and there was a number to call and so I called the number. I went down there to talk to the guy on Thursday and I fought my first fight on Saturday. I didn’t know anything. I just showed up with a nut cup and a mouth guard. I was scared. I didn’t know what to expect. The Lion’s Den was just this little underground place and they threw a cage up in the middle of it and packed a few hundred people in there and then put two guys in the cage and let ’em go. Didn’t even matter if they were matched up good or even the same size or anything. I was about a hundred and sixty-five pounds and my opponent was a hundred and ninety-five. A lot of mismatches that day. It was pretty wild.”
From the start, mixed martial arts, or MMA, was about two things—spectacle and money. It came to the United States in 1993 as the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), held in Denver at the McNichols Sports Arena. There were no weight classes, and fights were one round, with no time limits, arranged tournament style—single-elimination rounds, leading up to a final. The logic of the spectacle was in part that of mismatching: Could a boxer beat a wrestler, a wrestler a kickboxer? What about kung fu and tae kwon do? What is jiujitsu and what is Brazilian jiujitsu? How would a 170-pound street fighter fare against a 400-pound sumo wrestler? It advertised itself as having one rule: There are no rules!
One way promoters and agents have of developing talent is to sacrifice new blood to the old, giving their guy a better record and more experience with little risk. The new fighters sometimes don’t fall under the bus as much as they are placed there. This, in part, is what happened to Sam. He lost the first fight that Saturday in March. He took the guy down and got the full mount (straddled his opponent’s chest). “I threw him down and got in some nice shots. But he was already an experienced guy and he threw me off. I didn’t know anything and I got excited and lost my advantage. The other guy got me down and mounted me, softened me up with some punches and then he managed to get my back and submitted me with a rear naked choke. I didn’t feel too bad about it. After that I learned you don’t just walk in there. You have to train a little bit.” He fought a month later but lost because the doctor stopped the fight when Sam caught an uppercut that closed his eye. “I asked him to keep going but the doctor called the fight.” It wasn’t until his third fight that Sam won. “I fought Jerry ‘The Bomber’ Lucker. I went three rounds with him. He was the first guy I fought who was actually in my weight class. He was a tough dude. That’s when I felt, ‘This is for me. I can beat these guys.’” Sam quit his job and moved down to Moline, where his father was living. Pat Miletich, a former UFC champion, had opened an MMA gym in Bettendorf, on the Iowa side of the Mississippi. Sam trained there for two months and learned the basics. He didn’t feel like an outsider. He knew he could hang with the other guys, not a few of whom were or would be world champions. And then he got thrown under the bus when his agent put him up against Dave Menne at the Anoka County Fair. “I don’t know what I was thinking. He was the best at that time. Maybe I was thinking about the $2,000 purse or something. The fight only lasted two rounds.” The next day Sam went up against an Olympic-level wrestler who was already a well-trained MMA fighter. “I was a little bit out of my league right away with them two guys,” he recalls. Then Sam stood up for himself. “I told my agent, ‘I did you a favor with those fights. But I’m not doing any more.’”
After that, Sam’s agent gave him fights with guys at his level and in his weight class and he won five fights over the next year. Everything was looking up until Sam’s mother died after a suicide attempt in the summer of 2005.
When Barb died we all wondered what would happen to Sam. Would he bottom out again as he had when Nessa died? “It’s funny,” muses Sam. “But I was okay. It still bothers me, but I can talk about it. Not like with Vanessa. Vanessa was the first person I lost. My only sister. Since then I’ve lost a lot of people. But when Mom died I had a job, and a family. I was living in South Dakota by then. I had people I was responsible for, maybe that helped.” He stayed in control and he kept his job and he didn’t drift back into the violence that had marked his life for most of his twenties. “I couldn’t change anything when Vanessa died. I couldn’t do anything. Nothing I could do would bring her back. Nothing I could do would change that she was gone. Same with my mom, I guess, but by then, I had a life and a family and I was fighting. I left all my anger in the cage. When I fight, right before I step into the cage, I kind of visualize my opponent as a sickness I’ve got to beat—not that I am hating on the guy or anything, just that I’m not fighting him, I’m fighting some disease. Like my mom’s drug addiction. Or now I think about Grandma’s blindness. I visualize that, and that’s what I am trying to beat. I leave all the rage and anger I’ve got for that.”
Maybe he does. Maybe he does leave it all there. But if he does, he brings something away from the cage as well. “It feels good to win,” he says. “It feels good to win at something you’ve worked hard at, and put your time in at, to win at something you want real bad.” More than anything, that’s what Sam and maybe a lot
of the other Indian fighters bring to fighting in the cage: the desire to be good at something and to have a chance to win on the basis of talent and hard work. It may sound like a small thing. Or it may sound like the very idea—meritocracy—that America is built on. But it is a huge thing for an Indian man to want, a very huge and noble thing to dare to hope that hard work and talent will actually win the day. “Getting buzzed up, getting wasted or high: there’s no thrill there. Not anymore. But fighting in the cage? Giving my friends and family something and someone to cheer for? There’s no better feeling. It doesn’t get better than that. I’ve got maybe a few more fights in me. I might still be competing in five years. I’ll be forty-three then. But if not, that’s okay.” No longer does Sam dream of the UFC, of fighting under the brightest lights there are in the spectacle and sport that MMA has become. (Though some Indian fighters, like the incredibly dedicated and talented Eli Finn from Leech Lake, do nurse ambitions of the UFC, and there’s no reason not to when you are that good.) “Really in a few years I’d like to open a gym. Get the tribe to sponsor an MMA team. It would be great for the kids around here, I think. It would teach them discipline. It would help them not to use drugs or whatever. You can’t fight and drink and stuff at the same time. Not for long.”
In the end, Sam didn’t get to fight on March 17, 2012. His opponent failed to make weight at 160 and wanted to fight at 175 pounds. Sam said no. He wasn’t going to sacrifice himself—not even for us, his family, his friends, his reservation. Not in that way at least. He had too much respect for himself to keep punching that wall. But earlier, in December, I had gotten to see him fight at Northern Lights Casino. He had won against a much larger opponent in the first two minutes of the first round in his trademark style—he took him down, wrapped him up, and then submitted him with strikes. He had seemed unstoppable. God, how he could hit. How could a man like him lose? How could he ever lose? It was unimaginable. Watching him then, I simply couldn’t think of him doing anything other than winning. Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won.
That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms. For some it meant joining the U.S. Army. For others it meant accepting the responsibility to govern and lead. For others still, it meant stepping into a metal cage to beat or be beaten. For my cousin Sam, for three rounds of five minutes he gets to prove that through hard work and natural ability he can determine the outcome of a finite struggle, under the bright, artificial lights that make the firmament at the Northern Lights Casino on the Leech Lake Reservation.
PART 4
Moving On Up—Termination and Relocation: 1945–1970
In the fall of 2014, I drove from Rapid City, South Dakota, to Browning, Montana, home of the Blackfeet Nation. I wanted to know what the postwar years looked like on the Plains. The three decades from 1945 to 1975, sandwiched between World War II and the rise (and quick fall) of the American Indian Movement, have been treated as something of a blank spot on the map of Indian experience: The days of tribal warfare over. The federal assault on Indians, Indian life, and Indian homelands over, too. Reservations established as nothing more or less than basins of suffering, the time of eternal agony begun.
The first leg took me from Rapid City up to Williston. It was the right season for the drive—the crisp, dry, golden time of fall on the Plains when the aspen leaves rattle across the road with a hiss and the wheat stubble catches the light. It was, I suppose, the right season of life, too: I was getting divorced, and like most people who are ending something big, I knew no one had ever felt the way I did. There is nothing like middle age to make you feel like a teenager. The landscape helped. By god, it was some of the most beautiful land I have ever seen, shamelessly beautiful. North of Sturgis I passed Bear Butte—Mato Paha to the Lakota, Noaha-vose to the Cheyenne—where the Cheyenne leader Sweet Medicine received the spiritual gifts around which the tribe took shape. The mountain sits off by itself on the plain, the northernmost outpost of the Black Hills. After gold was discovered in the hills to the south in 1876, it was Bear Butte that served as the landmark to the hordes of speculators and miners who, with the encouragement of the United States government, broke the treaty that had created the Great Sioux Reservation. After that the land flattens out into grassy plains that roll on until they’re broken by a limestone shelf near the North Dakota border.
As soon as I crossed into North Dakota I was buffeted by trucks and heavy equipment. The land—which looked much as I imagined it had before the range was closed, before cattle replaced the bison—began to show signs of wear. The roads were cracked, the fencing was gone, and great gashes in the turf opened up on both sides of the road. Sidings like those next to rail lines began to appear next to the highway. The Bakken oil fields loomed to the north. By the time I reached Williston, oil was all I saw: oil rigs, cleared and graded land, flames off-gassing the methane in the wells. All along the roads there were staging areas for heavy equipment, stacks of pipe, metal fittings, and oil rigs. Whatever trees there had been—Russian olive and willow and poplar planted as windbreaks toward the end of the Dust Bowl era—had been ripped out and burned. At a laundromat in Williston, the management had stuck a sign to the front of the large dryers: “No greasers allowed.” Denny’s was doing a brisk business. All of the truck stops were full of trucks. Somehow all this evidence of rapaciousness seemed more honest to me, though. At least here the land didn’t lie to you like it does everywhere else in the Great Plains. At least here it’s clear there is a war still being fought.
I turned west on what northerners call the Hi-Line—U.S. Highway 2, which stretches from Michigan to Seattle—toward Montana. Some say Montana is a state of mind. It is also a world unto itself. The state of Montana is a big rectangle roughly the size of Norway. It begins flat in the east and gets progressively more crumpled in the west, as though someone dropped it on the narrow end. The Hi-Line followed the old Great Northern Railway line, which was completed in the nineteenth century in order to sluice cattle from the northern Plains onto the killing floors of Chicago. As a result, Highway 2 is a straight shot into the sun, and sooner than you’d think, into the gloom of a western night. The road passed through ghost town after ghost town, small main streets that looked more like picturesque European roadside ruins. Here and there, set back from the road, the frames of farmhouses showed sky and range through their broken windows and even through their roofs. At least two of the gas stations I stopped at had gas but didn’t have people. I paid with my credi
t card, the pump turned on, I pumped my gas, and the pump went off. Most of the towns were empty of people, too, as were the roads.
I drove through Fort Peck and then Fort Belknap; things were different. Indians walked down the road. Indian kids played in the yards. Near Wolf Point, I saw Indian kids who looked like they were floating until I saw that they were launching themselves from a trampoline over the roofline of their house. I don’t remember where I stopped for the night. By nightfall the next day I made it near Browning, the capital, if you will, of the Blackfeet Nation.
I had never been to Browning and I didn’t really know any Blackfeet except by reputation, but I had asked a Facebook friend, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, if he’d set me up with some people to talk to and show me around. When I asked where to stay, he responded, Oh, well, you can stay with me and my sister and her husband and their kid, if that doesn’t bother you. When I got to Browning I called Sterling and asked where we should meet.
Well, he answered, the only place to really meet is the fucking casino. We can meet there.
Cool, I answered.