by David Treuer
But the same could not be said for their neighbors, Sierra’s tribe of the “landless Indians of Montana,” some of whom lived in tent encampments into the 1950s and 1960s. Without a land base, without some kind of center—no matter how corrupted or reduced it might be—there was not much the Little Shell people could do except hold on somehow. Their religion was in jeopardy, their ceremonies lost and forgotten. “I don’t know what their religion was when they left Turtle Mountain. My grandma would probably know those things more. I’ve asked her those sorts of questions and she never really said anything about those things to me. They had dances, but it was sort of a mix. It was a mix of fiddling with Native dancing. She’s told me about going to those dances. I’m away from where most of our people are. And it’s not like people just hang out at the cultural center. It’s not like the gas station where all the old men drink coffee. There’s no real getting together and talking with other Little Shell people. We have no place to gather. But social media is how we do it. I mean—the tribe’s Facebook page has been really great for us. It sounds stupid but it helps. But if there was a lot of things like ceremony going on I didn’t know about them growing up.”
Even though reservations have been characterized by Indians and non-Indians alike as places where hope goes to die, as a kind of final resting place for Indian lives and cultures, they are clearly much more than that. They have functioned as a home base, as a home, for Indians and have preserved—in ways both positive and negative—a kind of togetherness that has been vital to the continued existence of Native people. All of this was painfully obvious in the 1940s and 1950s, but the government did its best to unsee it. Instead, with Arthur Watkins as a passionate supporter, the federal government decided that termination was what was best for Indian people. And at the top of its list of those to terminate were the Menominee of Wisconsin.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the Menominee (who refer to themselves as Mamaceqtaw, or “The People”) occupied more than ten million acres in what is now eastern Wisconsin and northwestern Michigan. They are the only Indian tribe in present-day Wisconsin who have always lived in the state. As noted in part 2, their homeland was rich beyond compare. It was covered in hardwoods and pine, studded with lakes, and fronted by Lake Michigan to the east, which produced enormous amounts of fish for the tribe. The climate of their homeland was balmy in comparison to others farther north, and the wild rice from which the name “Menominee” derives (manoominiig means “people of the wild rice”) was plentiful. It was, as homelands go, paradise. And they had been there for a long, long time. Unlike other Algonquian people of the Great Lakes, including the Ojibwe, they were not migrants to the region. They were descended from the Old Copper and Hopewell cultures and had lived in the area for at least a thousand years before the arrival of Europeans.
The first European to meet them was the French explorer Jean Nicolet in 1634. A group of Ho-Chunk had gathered on the shore at Red Banks, near present-day Green Bay. The Indians watched the explorer approach in a canoe. As he got closer, Nicolet put on a silk Chinese robe, stood athwart the canoe, and fired two pistols in the air. After this colorful landing Nicolet traveled inland, where he met the Menominee. The explorer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix wrote about coming upon the Menominee in 1721: “After we had advanced five or six leagues, we found ourselves abreast of a little island, which lies near the western side of the bay, and which concealed from our view, the mouth of a river, on which stands the village of the Malhomines Indians. . . . The whole nation consists only of this village, and that too not very numerous. ’Tis really great pity, they being the finest and handsomest men in all Canada. They are even of a larger stature than the Poutewatamies.” The Menominee were much more numerous than he gave them credit for, despite having been decimated by smallpox some years earlier. After the fur trade got into full swing and wars between Algonquians and Iroquoians of the Great Lakes—with the French and British mixed in—raged across the lakes and through the Ohio valley and eastern Wisconsin (Green Bay in particular became something of a refugee center), the Menominee clung to their homelands, and there they stayed.
It has been said that the Menominee believe that their world, our world, is a middle ground between the lower and upper worlds and forms a kind of barrier between the two. The upper world is a good world, filled with good spirits. The lower world is where evil dwells. But beginning in the nineteenth century, it probably felt to the tribe as if the middle and lower worlds had been switched. They supported the British during the War of 1812 and paid dearly afterward, when settlers began streaming into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin as the timber boom got under way. As we have seen, the U.S. government did little to protect Menominee interests, much less to honor the treaties they signed with them. As they prepared for Wisconsin statehood, the federal government tried to relocate the Menominee to points much farther west, in the manner of the Cherokee and other tribes that had been removed from the American Southeast. But the Menominee would not be moved and managed to prevent it by agreeing to settle a very small reservation near the Wolf River, where they remained until the mid–twentieth century. In 1854, shortly after the reservation was established near the Wolf River, the Menominee bought a sawmill, and it was there that they developed their very successful—and sustainable—timber industry, fighting off allotment, attempts to grab their land, and efforts to impose damaging clear-cutting methods. It must have been maddening: despite their excellent self-government, their entrepreneurship, their willingness to enter into sustained trade relationships with the American economy, the blind paternalism of the government made all of that impossible. The U.S. government insisted on overseeing Menominee logging. They wouldn’t let the Menominee cut their own timber and instead hired non-Native logging companies to cut on Menominee land. These contractors engaged in rampant illegal cutting (some profits of which flowed back to the Indian agent). Still, by 1871 the Menominee were harvesting and milling thousands of board feet of lumber a day. Sustainably. In 1872 they got temporary permission to continue harvesting. They purchased a shingle mill and a lathe mill. Their success, despite the efforts of the government, helped them resist allotment under the Dawes Act.
The Menominee formed their own modern tribal government six years in advance of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. They filed a suit against the government in 1934 for damages resulting from illegal cutting by white timber companies and damage caused by the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to clear-cut the reservation after a big blowdown in 1905. It took twenty years for the suit to be settled, but the tribe was eventually awarded $8.5 million in federal court. By then, the Menominee logging operation employed several hundred predominantly Indian workers, funded a school and hospital, and paid the salaries of two doctors, eight nurses, and an orthodontist, as well as four policemen, six night watchmen, a truant officer, a game warden, and a welfare administrator. It also supported a tribal loan fund of nearly $500,000 and paid a yearly stumpage dividend to each of the twenty-nine hundred tribal members. By any measure, the Menominee were everything the government said it wanted them to be, with the exception that they did everything their own way: in common. Hence they were at the very top of the list for termination.
In 1953, shortly after the Termination Act was passed, Watkins visited the Menominee personally, since one of the stipulations of the act was that tribes had to buy into it. Watkins had come to Wisconsin to secure that agreement through coercion. He told the Menominee that if they wanted to see the $8.5 million settlement they had won in the Court of Claims, they would have to agree to termination. This was a failure of justice and of imagination. A settlement that was recompense for previous federal and private mismanagement and unlawful seizure of land and the assets on it was now recast as a reward to be granted for submission or withheld for insubordination. This failure of imagination is more pervasive and insidious than has generally been recognized, and it is shared by Indians and non-Indians
alike. Such concessions made to the tribes in recognition of the horrors and tribulations of the nineteenth century, or colonialism more generally, are not pity payments or proto-welfare. Treaty rights and all of the benefits that accrue from them arise from the treaties themselves—according to the U.S. Constitution, they are the “supreme law of the land” and the tacit recognition of the inherent rights Indians possessed long before the coming of the white man. The Menominee had the right to exist, the right to government, the right to social services not because they had suffered but because some of those rights were inherent long before they were brought to the treaty table—and because others were received from the Americans in exchange for the right to settle Menominee homelands.
Had those rights been honored, the Menominee could have become the most fabulously successful tribe in the history of the world and the U.S. government would still have been obligated—by international law, by precedent, by its own founding documents, and by the treaties it signed—to honor the provisions in those agreements. Indeed, the Menominee were not uniformly or even mostly interested in termination. However, being able to control the $8.5 million settlement was crucial to their well-being, and the thinking was that it was better to agree to termination than to lose the money. They agreed to undergo termination, with a grace period of four years to get their affairs in order, a deadline that was extended for two more years. In 1961, the Menominee Reservation and the Menominee tribe, such as it was, ceased to exist. All reservation lands and tribal property were transferred to Menominee Enterprises, Inc. (MEI), a private business. Four Indians sat on the board of trustees along with three non-Indians. What had been the reservation was converted into Menominee County.
There was trouble from the start. Menominee County, since most of it was corporate-owned now, lacked a tax base. Basic services such as police, waste management, firefighting, and road construction ate up the tribe’s savings. The sawmill needed renovations, and MEI couldn’t afford them. The hospital funded in part by the Menominee and in part by the federal government had to close for lack of funds. Schools, utilities, and other services either closed or were cut to the bone. When Congress passed the Menominee Termination Act in 1954, the Menominee had cash assets of more than $10 million (not counting the settlement). By 1964 they had only $300,000. The tribe was so cash-strapped that the white-controlled MEI board voted to sell lake lots for summer homes (rather than log the land) in an effort to increase the tax base. Tribal members, told simply that they were voting on an “economic plan,” voted for the development; when it had been approved, MEI created a huge artificial lake and sold thousands of lake lots, diminishing what land and small amount of tribal control remained.
There was a silver lining, however. The process of termination took so long that those slated for it had the opportunity to see what a disaster it had been for the Menominee. It was, clearly, a disaster. Other tribes watched and learned and fought. And after years of struggle, the Menominee themselves were reconstituted, termination was undone, and they got their reservation back in the 1970s. But this was decades away. Termination rolled on.
Relocation
Solutions for the “Indian problem” seem only to have generated more problems for the government, not to mention for Indian people themselves. When termination became the face of federal policy, the question became: What to do with the Indians? In 1940, 56 percent of Americans lived in cities, but only 6 percent of American Indians did. In 1939, the average white worker earned twice what an Indian could expect to earn. Indians with jobs could expect to bring in, on average, twelve dollars a week. As far as Washington was concerned, the next move seemed clear: now that termination was set to take care of reservations, what was needed was an extra push to get Indians to leave their disappearing homelands and move to the city. So in the 1950s another round of legislative problem-solving erupted.
In the Southwest, the Navajo-Hopi Law funded a jobs-training program for Navajo and Hopi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona and provided money to relocate them to Denver, Salt Lake, and Los Angeles. The program was expanded by the Department of the Interior in 1951 to include other tribes and other cities in Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico and expanded again in the years to come to yet more Indians and yet more cities: Cleveland, San Francisco, St. Louis, San Jose, Seattle, Tulsa, and Minneapolis. The piecemeal legislation, budget lines, and policies coalesced into Public Law 959, passed in 1956:
In order to help adult Indians who reside on or near Indian reservations to obtain reasonable and satisfactory employment, the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to undertake a program of vocational training that provides for vocational counseling or guidance, institutional training in any recognized vocation or trade, apprenticeship, and on the job training, for periods that do not exceed twenty-four months, transportation to the place of training, and subsistence during the course of training. The program shall be available primarily to Indians who are not less than eighteen and not more than thirty-five years of age and who reside on or near an Indian reservation, and the program shall be conducted under such rules and regulations as the Secretary may prescribe. For the purposes of this program the Secretary is authorized to enter into contracts or agreements with any Federal, State, or local governmental agency, or with any private school which has a recognized reputation in the field of vocational education and has successfully obtained employment for its graduates in their respective fields of training, or with any corporation or association which has an existing apprenticeship or on-the-job training program which is recognized by industry and labor as leading to skilled employment.
Indian agents on reservations across the country hawked the benefits of urban living with the same fervor with which land speculators enticed city dwellers to come west and homestead a century before. Flyers and posters were made. Attractive brochures were handed out. And many Indians signed up. One of the families whom agents reached was that of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s uncle David Schildt, Red Hall’s cousin.
“I’m from Birch Creek, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation,” David tells me at a Starbucks in San Rafael, California. “We barely survived the Birch Creek flood, my brothers Pat and Cal were with me. We missed that water by about thirty seconds. Oh shit, it was bad.” He smiles but it’s not a real smile. David is handsome in that way Indian men who’ve put on a lot of miles are handsome. He’s generous and kind, and yet there is a hardness and a diffuse pain that hovers over him like a massive sustain, a sound that just won’t die. “Birch Creek dam. June 8, 1964. That was when that flood broke. Swift Dam Reservoir, Birch Creek, Montana. Our neighbors who lived upstream, hell, maybe three hundred yards—three of them died. Practically everyone below us died. I don’t know why we didn’t.”
The flood David can’t get out of his mind was the worst in Montana history. Heavy snow had piled up in the mountains all winter—up to 75 percent higher than average—and with a cool spring hadn’t melted much as of early summer. Daytime highs didn’t reach seventy degrees until Memorial Day weekend. Snowpack alone hadn’t caused serious flooding in Montana before. But in early June it began to rain. Moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collided with a western upper-level low-pressure system and freakishly high surface pressure caused by cold air sliding down the mountains. What this meant was rain: warm, heavy rain. The rain fell at a rate of one inch an hour, all of June 7 and into the early-morning hours of the eighth. By June 9 as much as sixteen inches of rain had fallen near Blackfoot, Montana. The yearly average for nearby Great Falls, Montana, was just over fourteen inches. It was too much for the earthen dam on Birch Creek above the Schildt homestead. David’s grandmother told him to go down to the creek to have a look. A rock they used to jump from, normally ten feet above the water, was now so far submerged you couldn’t even see it. “She’s like, ‘Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Grab your coat and we gonna walk up to the top of the hill and sit up there for a while.’” The “hill” was more of a cut bank a
bout 150 to 200 feet high. “It was all basically mud because of the rain at that time. We’s walking toward the hill and then my uncle come running through the brush. ‘Run for the hill,’ he says, ‘the dam broke!’ . . . So we took off and we were clawing and scraping. And we got to the top and my gram got help from my grandfather and uncle. And just when we got up there the water came, and it took everything.” Estimates vary, but a wall of water at least forty feet high came barreling down the creek bottom, taking everything in its path. “It was the most goddamn horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Like a big mass of water that went rumbling by. It chewed up everything. We saw the earth chewed up before our eyes.”
David pauses. The Christmas music in Starbucks continues unabated. “I’ve had nightmares most of my life. Little houses along the river, mostly country folk, all of it gone. My cousin who lived before us, downstream, he lost seven kids in the flood. And his wife. He used to be the guy who watched the irrigation ditch gauge. His job was to watch that gauge to see how much water was going down that ditch.” Their home destroyed, David and his brothers and sisters and other surviving relatives climbed in a truck and headed for Heart Butte—another village on the reservation but on higher ground. “We were all in the back of this truck. Neighbor kids too. We tried to get to Heart Butte. The bridge was washing out. The water was blasting over the bridge. It was usually a little creek but now it was a river. Seven of those older guys went to check the bridge. They told my grandfather that to cross it you got to get to the center and gas it. Otherwise you’re not gonna make it. There were seven or eight kids hanging on the back of the truck. We made it. Barely. We went to my uncle Dave’s house. There must have been twenty or thirty people stranded at his house. People crying and sobbing about people in their families that had drowned. We were cut off. No bridges anywhere. The navy flew in medical supplies and food in a helicopter. I remember the day they flew in, we hid because we was told they was giving typhoid shots, and so we went and hid under this pine tree. We wouldn’t come back after they were done. But we got shots anyway.”