by David Treuer
In the fall Howard took the kids out of school and they went ricing as a family. When Bobby was eleven years old, wild rice sold for thirty-five cents a pound. They sold some and they kept some for themselves. “We were raised on rice and rabbits and meat and potatoes. Some of it legal, some of it not. We’d take, oh, between five and seven deer a year. Five teenagers can eat a lot of chow. And we’d eat them deer up, from head to hoof. Howard always had something going. Rice. Cones. Trapping. Logging. He fed us off the land. And we got the benefit of that. We got to trap and fish and net and camp. We got to know the woods.”
Whatever Bobby learned in the woods stayed there, at least for a while. When he was eighteen he and his cousins broke into summer cabins, mostly for the whiskey and beer. At one such cabin, Bobby grabbed an old shotgun on his way out. He got caught and got four years’ probation. Then Bobby fell in with his uncle Billy. “I started in robbing banks and liquor stores and things like that.” The cops knew with certainty who was knocking off the banks and stores but couldn’t catch them. “We were real careful. We wore gloves and moccasins. Moccasins are quiet and they don’t leave no tread.” Finally, thwarted by lack of evidence, the investigator asked Bobby’s parole officer to violate him. Bobby served three years, and then he went right back to what he was doing with Billy.
“I was a safecracker. I used to be able to open a safe pretty fast. There wasn’t a safe I couldn’t open except for those with round doors, but we’d drill them. I could open any safe with a hammer and chisel and punches. Hit the dial straight on with a sledgehammer and—pop!—knock it right off. That exposed the pin and then you put a big drift punch on the pin and hit it with a hammer and then the pin falls out and all the tumblers fall right back in and you open the safe. If that don’t work you set up in the corner and knock a hinge off. And then start peeling back the plating. That’s three-eighths-inch steel plating, but when you peel it back it exposes that fire brick. Pretty soon you get the skin off and then the firebrick out and knock out the tumblers that way. It was exciting. An exciting life. One time we were in North Dakota. There was four of us. It was a bar. Uncle Bill was sitting at the bar drinking. He always drank Sno Shoe grog from a pint flask. I was in the back opening the safe. Bruce was supposed to be outside. Ron was supposed to be in the other side of the building watching out the door.
“Anyway, needless to say, these guys decided to look around while I was opening the safe behind the bar. So I’m getting the safe open and here comes Bruce, running up to the bar and he says, ‘We’re surrounded.’ And I said, ‘Where the hell were you?’ And he said, ‘I was in the back looking around.’ Needless to say, I lost it. I said, ‘You dumb sonofabitch.’ And I walk over to the door and I looked out the shade and there were cars all over out in the street and people behind them with guns. And I thought, ‘Holy fuck.’ And I had a thirty-eight and Bruce had a thirty-eight revolver that sometimes would shoot and sometimes would click. And Billy says, ‘What the fuck,’ and he took his punch and put it in his back pocket along with his Sno Shoe grog. And I says, ‘Gimme that grog,’ and I took a drink. And I said to Bruce, I said, ‘I tell you what, when I holler you open that door. Gimme your gun.’ And when he opened the fucking door I started hollering and shooting in the air—boom boom boom boom—and everybody dove and I run right through the fucking cars where all the people were. People diving everywhere. My car was parked about six blocks from there. I had a beautiful yellow ’sixty-five Pontiac, brand-new. I was running like a fucker and Billy was right behind me. We got to our car and there was a cop leaning on it. Holy fuck. ‘What the fuck now, Bill?’ I says. ‘Wait a minute, Bobby,’ he says. And he took out his Sno Shoe and took a drink and then spilled some on him and took off walking. He walked by the cop and the cop goes, ‘Hey, where you going?’ Billy says, ‘Oh umm uh going home.’ And he smelled like Sno Shoe grog! The cop walked up to him. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘come here a minute,’ and he grabbed Billy Boy and when he did Billy Boy hit him with that punch. Down he went. ‘Come on, Bobby,’ he said. I run in there and fired that fucker up—whom! whom!—it had big pipes on the back. I headed downtown and Billy said, ‘Where the fuck are you going?’ And I said, ‘Billy, I’m gonna go get them fucking guys.’ And they heard me coming. I went around the back side of that bar and they come running out and we jumped in and we drove right straight out of town and right across the state of North Dakota with the lights off. They never did catch us. Never even got our license plates. We had them camouflaged with white hairnets, like women wear!”
Bobby’s run in this line of work lasted seven and a half months. By then he’d had enough. He got work as a concrete finisher, more work as a carpenter. He quickly moved up to being a crew boss and ran crews that built some of the first housing tracts on Leech Lake Reservation. He moved to Alaska and worked as a roofer. “I hooked iron on the IDS and the Fed Reserve in Minneapolis. Worked for U.S. Steel and ran a crew of Bena boys out in North Dakota to build fences around missile silos. They jerked me around and I had words with the foreman. I had a hard time working for anyone. Got in a car crash in Alaska and came back to Minneapolis right when leeching was going big in the early 1980s. At the time I was selling weed—I’d run it from the cities up north, a trunkful of it. We’d do all sorts of things—night ricing (illegal), night trapping (illegal), and that was only the half of it. And finally, well, I turned to Julie [his wife] and I said to her, ‘I think I can make more money on the straight and narrow leeching than I can doing all this other stuff.’ And I quit all of it and started leeching.”
After about half an hour, Bobby and I have picked a little less than a bushel of pinecones. We stand and stretch and separate to look for more. I find the white tail feather of an eagle, a fox skull, some partridge feathers, and, finally, a scattering of cones, maybe a fifth of a bushel. We meet back at the truck. Bobby dumps all the cones in a tub. “One even bushel. That’s thirty bucks, Dave. Not bad for an hour’s work.” I mention that, with driving time, it’s more like two hours’ work. “Yep. Two hours, two guys, and maybe twenty dollars in gas. We broke even. But if you really get into the cones and you pick steady all day, a guy can clear maybe fifty to eighty dollars, depending on the type of cone. Spruce are paying thirty. Norway pine and white pine a little less. Black spruce—but they won’t be ready till late fall—they pay around fifty.” The U.S. Forest Service had been buying acorns the previous year. “You ever try to find a bunch of acorns underneath all the leaves and brush and whatnot? It’s not easy, Dave! And so I said to Julie, ‘Come on, this is a waste of time,’ and I drove over to the cemetery and found the caretaker and I says to him, ‘Hey! Let me borrow your rake.’ ‘What for?’ he says. ‘I’m gonna rake your cemetery for you,’ I tell him. You know the nice thing about cemeteries? Let me tell you: no leaves! We made between five hundred and a thousand dollars per day doing that. We made, I’d have to check my books to say exactly how much, but I think last year we made about five thousand dollars on acorns alone.”
It’s hard to say how many people live like Bobby Matthews does—hunting, trapping, and harvesting his way through the year—because the work is so seasonal and records are not kept for all of the activities. Late summer and early fall harvests like pinecones and wild rice give way to trapping and hunting, which stretch into winter. Once the lakes ice over and snow covers the ground, trapping continues in earnest, but that is also the easiest time to harvest cranberry bark. With spring comes maple sugaring, fishing, and, later, the bait harvest. Berries are ripe by midsummer. Then it is back to ricing and pinecones. Some of these harvests are for consumption only. It has been against the law to sell wild game since the early nineteenth century, and commercial fishing is restricted, but black markets exist for both game and fish. (One of my fondest memories from childhood is of coming home to find the hindquarter and loin of a deer being butchered on the kitchen counter by my mother, and one of my uncles driving away with beer money.) Everything else is officially for
sale.
What evidence there is suggests that for most, these activities are part-time gigs done for pocket money, in periods of unemployment, or as a family activity on a sunny afternoon in the woods. There are probably no more than a few hundred who spend most of their time living off the land, and only a very proud few like Bobby Matthews who do it exclusively. The number of wild rice licenses sold decreased from about 10,000 per year in 1957, when the licenses were first required, to 1,300 in 2002, and more than half of those went to people over the age of fifty. Only 2 percent of those with licenses harvest more than two thousand pounds. Those who don’t participate cite a lack of know-how and time. In Minnesota, harvesting wild rice is arguably the most efficient way to stock your larder with a supremely nutritious source of food, yet the art and practice is dying out. Less than half of the roughly ten thousand people who buy a trapping license every year reported trapping any animals, and only a few hundred reported any real profit. Only a few hundred buy bait harvest licenses, and there are no statistics on how much bait they take. The other subsistence activities of the northwoods—cutting balsam and cedar boughs for wreaths, harvesting pinecones and cranberry bark—are unregulated, so the evidence is mostly anecdotal.
Rick Baird, owner of Cass Lake Tree Seed, tells me he buys cones from around fifty different pickers each season, most of whom are Indian. “Some people come in with half a bushel. I write them a check for fifteen dollars,” he tells me. “Bob Matthews is one of the best pickers. I don’t write him many fifteen-dollar checks. He brings in five hundred dollars’ worth of cones at a time. No one knows the woods like Bobby. No one. Maybe it’s because he keeps such good notes. He could tell you where he picked twenty bushels of white pine five years ago, and they go on a five-year cycle so he knows where they’ll be this year. Most people don’t know things like that. And most pickers don’t work as hard as he does. It’s hard work. And he’ll pick from dawn till dusk every day of the week.” A lot of the cone pickers do it with their kids for pocket money. “Usually I get a lot of white spruce cones because they come in first. And I’ll pay out fifty or sixty dollars and they tell me that’s money for school clothes for their kids. One guy came in just last week with six bushels of jack pine. He told me, ‘This here is brown gold.’ He picked those six bushels in three hours. That’s a pretty good hourly wage. Sixty dollars an hour. Though he might go out the next day, burn through a tank of gas, and come back with only one bushel.” Baird buys around five hundred bushels of all species, total, for the year. He could buy more. “We have special seed stock up here. This is the only Zone 4 climate in the United States. It gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter and our seeds are especially hardy. Everyone wants them.” He confirms that a skilled picker can make around five thousand dollars for the season, and there’s room for more. “If a guy wanted to start picking he might get skunked in the beginning—he wouldn’t know where to go, or what was in season—but after he got the hang of it he could make fifty dollars a day without working too hard.”
After he pays for the cones, Baird dries them in a kiln and then spins the seeds off the cones. They are then tumbled so that the husk is removed. The seeds are sold to nurseries across the northern tier of the United States and the southern tier of Canada, and the empty cones are sold to craft supply chains like Michaels. Baird’s cash outlay is around $15,000 for the cones, and he makes around $45,000 from that investment, not taking into consideration the cost and upkeep of his kiln, forklift, propane, shop, and temporary workers. “When all is said and done, I pretty much double my investment,” he says.
After we’re back in the truck Bobby and I go to Rabideau Landing to check on how the wild rice is coming along. The heads are nowhere near full. Bobby lights up a joint. He gets contemplative. “You know, Dave,” he says, “the Creator or God or whatever you call it made the universe and all the beings in it and put this tree here and that bush there and he made the beavers and the deer and the plants that are good to eat and the ones that are good for medicine. He made all of it and it is beautiful! Abso-fucking-lutely beautiful. And I look out over that creation and sometimes I don’t see it like other people do. I look out at all of it and what I see is money. And by God I am going to find a way to liberate it out of there.”
AIM at Pine Ridge
In the winter of 1972, an Oglala Sioux named Raymond Yellow Thunder was murdered in Gordon, Nebraska. Yellow Thunder was a grandson of the famous Lakota war chief and progressive reformer American Horse. He had grown up near Kyle, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of seven children. His family was poor, and since they had no car he and his siblings rode their horses to school in Kyle. A great athlete and a gifted artist whom fellow students described as “rough and tumble,” he dropped out of school to work as a ranch hand—fencing, breaking horses, hauling hay, mucking out stalls. He worked hard during the week and spent the weekends binge drinking in Gordon. A marriage dissolved over the drinking, but on the whole it was a life that seemed to suit him. On weekends when he didn’t drink, he’d stock up on groceries and make the rounds among his siblings, distributing food along with gifts for his nephews and nieces. Often, when very drunk, he would bring himself to the police station in Gordon and ask for a cot, and the cops would oblige him. He never fought, and his manner wasn’t belligerent. He was a hard worker and a hard drinker but a gentle, mellow man.
On February 12, 1972, Yellow Thunder was drinking in Gordon. At some point he crossed paths with Leslie and Melvin Hare and their friends Bernard Lutter and Robert Bayliss. According to court documents, Leslie Hare told Bayliss, who was driving, to stop the car. He got out and shoved and pushed Yellow Thunder and jumped back in the car. They had been drinking, too. Later, still joyriding around Gordon, they saw Yellow Thunder enter Borman’s used-car lot. They “found him in an old pickup truck and opened the door, causing Yellow Thunder to fall to the ground.” They then hit and kicked him while he was on the ground. Leslie, wearing heavy work boots, grabbed the stock rail of the pickup and jumped up and down on Yellow Thunder as he lay on the ground. The men paused and then took off Yellow Thunder’s pants and shoved him in the trunk of their car and drove him around for forty-five minutes before stopping at the American Legion Club. They got Yellow Thunder out of the trunk and shoved him into the hall and allegedly told him to do some Indian dances for everyone there. Some of the patrons came to Raymond’s aid, and the bartender asked if he needed any help, but Raymond waved them away. Naked from the waist down, he staggered into the frigid winter night, headed back to Borman’s used-car lot. The temperature was twenty-two degrees. Later the men found him again. They picked him up and drove him back to the lot, where they retrieved his clothes for him. It’s unclear whether they helped him dress. They kidnapped him again and left him at a laundromat. They threw his pants inside and then left.
The next day a Lakota boy named Ghost Dog saw him and asked him what had happened. Yellow Thunder said he’d been jumped by some white guys. That was the last time anyone saw him alive. On Sunday his boss, Harold Rucker, became alarmed when Raymond wasn’t at the spot where Rucker usually picked him up on Sunday evenings; he’d always been punctual. Eight days later he was found frozen to death in the cab of the truck in the lot where his attackers had first found him. An autopsy showed he had died of a subdural hematoma caused by blunt-force trauma above his right eye. The Hares, Bayliss, and Lutter were picked up quickly: many people had seen them in the company of Yellow Thunder that night. They were charged with manslaughter and false imprisonment. As the police developed their case, rumors began to circulate that Yellow Thunder had been castrated and tortured before his death.
Yellow Thunder’s nephew Severt Young Bear thought AIM could help. He took up a collection from friends to finance a drive to Omaha, where AIM was meeting. He told them about what had happened to Yellow Thunder. AIM mobilized their membership. By the end of the week, more than fourteen hundred Indians from over eighty differen
t tribes descended on Gordon in a righteous rage. AIM organized protests and a boycott of Gordon’s businesses and assembled a tribunal that it said would deliver real justice if the authorities failed to. The Pine Ridge Reservation began transferring its program monies out of Gordon banks to other holding companies. The pressure worked, after a fashion. City officials agreed to convene a human rights commission. A police officer notorious for mistreating Indians in the Gordon jail was suspended. The Nebraska state legislature instructed the state’s attorney general to conduct an inquiry, and the governor sent a representative to meet with the protesters. The Hares, Bayliss, Lutter, and one other man were charged with manslaughter and released on fairly low bail. Sheridan County attorney Michael Smith characterized the incident as a “cruel practical joke” that had gotten out of hand.
Yellow Thunder’s family was outraged by the insufficiency of the charges and the dismissiveness of the response, and the rumors of castration and torture that continued to circulate. A second autopsy, conducted because of AIM’s interference, showed that Yellow Thunder hadn’t been castrated or tortured, which reduced tensions to some degree. But the undeniable truth was that an innocent Indian man had been killed because of white drinking, white bigotry, and white violence. In the end Leslie and Melvin Hare were found guilty of manslaughter. Leslie was sentenced to six years and Melvin to two, though Leslie was paroled after two years and Melvin after nine months. Raymond Yellow Thunder died in a truck in a used-car lot at age fifty-one from a traumatic injury. One of his assailants, Bernard Lutter, died in 1991 at age seventy-seven from natural causes.