by David Treuer
When I ran Bobby’s account by my mother, she laughed. He said Uncle Howard took us swimming in the afternoon? That’s crazy. There was no swimming. Just picking. We picked all day long. And we’d walk back to Huffman’s with those damn packs on our backs and we’d be so hot we would sit down in the springs by the side of the railroad tracks—clothes, shoes, packs, and all—just to cool off. And then we’d start walking again and you’d be bone dry in five minutes. It was awful. Harvesting rice was awful, too, in her memory. They sold most of it to buy school clothes, flour, lard, and kerosene. They got thirty-five cents a pound for wild rice in the 1950s. My mother never wanted to do any of that stuff again. So when she was a senior in high school, she decided to continue on to nursing school. When she told her father, he scoffed and sneered. Who the hell did she think she was? Nevertheless, my mother went to nursing school in Duluth and worked in Saint Cloud for a year before returning to Leech Lake. And shortly after that, she returned to Leech Lake and got the CAP job working on health care where she met my father. They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1968.
I didn’t know anything! my mother said. There were riots all over the city. But I’d never lived in a city and I thought that’s just the way the city was. I was walking down the street near Georgetown and I saw a shopping cart on the sidewalk so I figured I’d use it. I walked along with that cart window-shopping. There was trash everywhere. Windows broken. Stuff was on fire. A black lady looked at me and said, “You’d better get out of here! It’s not safe!” But I didn’t know! After my older brother, Anton, and I were born, my mother wanted something more. My father asked her, If you could do anything, what would it be? She demurred. But he was nothing if not persistent. Just say it, we’re just talking. What would you do? No limits. Reluctantly she said she’d like to be a lawyer because no one had stuck up for her and her family when she was a kid. No one stood up against the cops and the courts and the government.
My father cajoled her into applying to Catholic University in Washington. She was admitted provisionally, since she didn’t have a four-year degree. Three years later, juggling four kids by that time, she received her law degree. She had interned with the Native American Rights Fund in D.C. and had sat in on Supreme Court hearings for Bryan v. Itasca County. In 1979 we moved back to the reservation, and she and Paul Day, another young Leech Lake Indian who’d gone into law, opened their law offices in the town of Cass Lake, kitty-corner from the high school that had been of the opinion that my mother and people like her wouldn’t go very far.
In the fall she made us go ricing, as she had as a girl (though without the pressure to earn). In the summer we picked berries. In the fall she took us hunting. In the early winter she taught us how to hang snares for rabbits. In the spring the family tapped maple trees and boiled the sap into syrup and finished it into sugar. My mother still hated ricing, and so did I—it was itchy and uncomfortable work—but my father loved it. She’d sit and watch us jig the rice in a shallow pit dug in the yard and lined with a tarp, separating the husks from the grains. She didn’t jig much, but she offered lots of pointers from the vantage of her lawn chair. I shied away from sugaring, too—the fumes from the boiling sap gave me headaches. My parents thought I was shirking. I probably was. These weren’t fun-filled moments of family togetherness, at least for me. They were tense and dank, freighted with all our problems, spoken and unspoken.
Much later I asked my mother why she’d had us do all that stuff anyway. Why bother? I was going to make sure you did well and got into college and went on to find a good job, she explained. But I was also going to make sure you knew how we lived, how we lived off the land. That way, no matter what happened out there in the bigger world, you’d know how to take care of yourself back here, on the rez. You’d be able to feed yourself. Still later, looking back, I see in my mother’s actions and attitudes something I surely didn’t see then—one of the less visible effects of Indian empowerment and sovereignty in the 1970s and 1980s, which came to fruition in the 1990s. Sovereignty isn’t only a legal attitude or a political reality; it has a social dimension as well. The idea and practice of sovereignty carries with it a kind of dignity—a way of relating to the self, to others, to the past, and to the future that is dimensionally distinct. As such, for my mother, being Indian wasn’t a condition to be cured or a past to be escaped and even improved upon. To be sure, her early struggles and the continuing struggles of Indian people across the country exist alongside, and are bound up in, what it means to be Indian. But to be Indian is not to be poor or to struggle. To believe in sovereignty, to let it inform and define not only one’s political and legal existence but also one’s community, to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: it is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously.
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THE CANNABIS INDUSTRY has started modestly at Tulalip. It is unclear what it will bring or where it will end. Some, like Eddy, think that pot shouldn’t necessarily be a tribal enterprise but rather something tribal individuals can participate in, another small business arrow in the quiver of ventures and seasonal harvests that can make up an income. But how the tribe will exploit the cannabis market collectively is an open question, dependent not only on the unique politics at Tulalip but also on the way tribes do business in general.
Les Parks, the former tribal vice chairman of the Tulalip and currently the treasurer, has been at the forefront in trying to get the tribe into the business. While he was still serving as vice chairman, he put together the “pot summit.” But after the summit and a subsequent election, Les stepped down, having “shot his bolt” on the whole issue, according to him, and having failed to overrule those who opposed the idea. As on most other reservations, tribal enterprise at Tulalip is controlled by a small group of people who have grown up together in a very small community. A small village council can control millions on millions of dollars, and so big decisions are often, at their core, made for very personal reasons. The Tulalip Tribes are governed by a board of directors consisting of seven members chosen through a general election who serve three-year overlapping terms, with no term limits. After each election cycle, the board votes to determine officers. This group of seven is, according to Les, in charge of seventy-two departments, from the Montessori school to a halfway house to, more significantly, the board of Quil Ceda Village—which controls the Quil Ceda Village economic zone, including the casino, an outlet mall, and a commercial district. Within that kind of political structure, governed by a tiny minority of the population, any personal conflicts are, in the old phrase, extremely political. But if the marijuana business at Tulalip is a success, it will be Les Parks, the treasurer of the tribe, who will support it.
I’m met by Les, in bolo tie, boots, and a very large, very new pickup truck. He is a busy man, and so I get in the truck and he drives me around the rez in what I can only call an effort to roll out the salmon-colored carpet. We begin at the casino—with its Four Diamond award–winning hotel, twelve stories, 370 rooms, nearly 192,000 square feet of gaming space, and seven restaurants. Then we drive the winding, oddly suburban roads of Quil Ceda Village, the only federal municipality in the United States other than Washington, D.C., and the only city with a permanent population of zero; instead it contains 131 outlet stores, a Cabela’s, a Walmart, and a Home Depot. I hear from Les about George Vancouver claiming the sound for King George. Then we zig and zag past more recognizable reservation socialscapes, like the cedar-clad youth center with a $400,000 skate park under construction next to the old longhouse, and I hear about the modest origins of the reservation itself. Then past the tribal offices, a $32 million (according to Les) glass-and-cedar beauty that is the modernist administrative equivalent of the Overlook Hotel, where Les tells me about Stan Jones and other early leaders. Then past the salmon stocking ponds netted over against the birds, the Early Learning Academy for k
ids through age five, and the museum. Tulalip is very much like many of the other 325 (the BIA says there are “approximately” 325) reservations in America in that, instead of the cinematic desuetude that is the popular notion of rez life, it is a patchwork of business, Indian homes, non-Indian homes, trees, and land. What’s different is that Tulalip seems shinier somehow, richer.
Les is proud of his community, and he has obviously given this tour many times. It feels both practiced and sincere. When I ask how much Quil Ceda Village makes (or the casino, or the fisheries, or anything, for that matter), he is evasive. “Oh, we do okay. It’s a matter of public record we have a case in the courts that will determine if Quil Ceda Village should collect sales taxes. Right now we give it all to the city of Marysville, Snohomish County, and the State of Washington. Every year we send sixty-two million dollars in taxes to Olympia. That should give you an idea.” It’s understandable that a wildly successful tribe like the Tulalip don’t want to say how much they’re pulling in: the federal government has treaty obligations to the Tulalip to provide for housing and services, among other things, obligations that, when all is going well, the government is only too happy to let slide. So the fiscal rhetoric of reservations, if not the social rhetoric, is always one of want and need.
The tour turns personal, and so does the talk, when Les veers down a long, narrow road that ends near a creek feeding into the sound. This is where his family’s original allotment was. “My great-great-grandfather must have been important because this was a good place to live, right next to the creek. It would have been full of salmon.” But Les has suffered like so many Indians have suffered: he lost his mother to a drunk driver, his father wasn’t around very much. The house he grew up in, long gone—rotted or burned or pulled down—was of rough-cut lumber and tar paper. He had a lot of brothers and sisters. There wasn’t much to go around. Many of the people I talked to had similar stories—fathers and brothers lost to the sea, heavy drinking, absentee parents, poor living conditions. Here as elsewhere, survival was the principal challenge for Indians for well over a century. And from Les’s story, like others, it’s clear that a certain tolerance for conflict, pain, and uncertainty—a kind of wild and unpredictable daily drama—has been necessary to that survival. What, then, allows growth? What are the ingredients necessary for a community not only to make money but to grow real wealth? Les seemed torn as he responds.
“My sister-in-law got Parkinson’s disease. It was horrible to watch. Pot helped her. It helped her pain a lot.” But Les doesn’t want the tribe to sell pot. Or to only sell it. “I want us to use our sovereignty to fast-track clinical trials for the uses of marijuana extracts. We could do it faster and better than any of the pharmaceutical companies out there. We’re already talking to Bastyr University. That’s where I want us to go. There are a lot of uses for extracts and there is no pharmaceutical company in North America that is looking in that direction. We could be the first.” He looks off over the sound. “There’s even some research that suggests cannabis extracts can be used to cure type-two diabetes. Think about that. Think about an Indian company, a tribal pharmaceutical company, that could cure the greatest threat to our health.”
Fifteen percent of American Indians have diabetes, and in some communities in the Southwest, the rate is as high as 22 percent. And diabetes is only part of the problem. Along with high dropout and unemployment and poverty rates, Indians have a mortality rate from accidental death that is twice the national average. (The only thing it seems we have going for us is that we beat everyone out on the cancer scale. For some reason we don’t get it as often.) Life, for many of us, is not merely bleak: it’s short, poor, painful, unhealthy, and tumultuous. All of which makes Les’s dream and the reality of Tulalip the more remarkable.
His own journey has been remarkable, too. Out of high school he took part in a federally funded vocational training program and studied to become an electrician. He parlayed that into a job with the tribe. From there he started his own construction company. Along the way he did what a lot of the people at Tulalip seem to do, which is to say a bit of everything: fishing, fish wholesaling, selling fireworks, buying land, and eventually running for office. There is a steady arc to his life that resembles the one that was supposed to move Americans from being poor into the middle class from the post–World War II years through the 1970s. For most Americans that arc collapsed in the 1980s, but it still seems available to at least some of the people at Tulalip. Just as Les moved from poverty to relative comfort in about thirty years, so, too, has the tribe: the original tribal offices, a small clapboard house near the marina built in 1935, could fit inside the $32 million tribal offices up on the hill many times over. That’s a long way to go in a relatively short amount of time. According to the Tribal Employment Rights Organization (TERO), there are 62 registered small businesses owned and operated by Indians on the Tulalip Reservation right now, but since businesses register annually, that swells to more than 160 when there’s a big project on the books. And that figure doesn’t seem to include fishermen (there were by my count more than twenty boats in the fleet) or the 139 tribally owned and operated fireworks stands at Boom City, or tribal businesses in areas that are, technically at least, off the reservation. When I add all that up, I figure at least a few hundred Indians are in on the hustle—no different, in their way, from the many who sell crafts on Etsy, auction game on eBay, plow driveways, and make T-shirts on the side. There is, despite historical oppression and in contrast to the received stereotypes about Indians, an active and thriving entrepreneurial class at Tulalip.
The tribe has opened a dispensary but hasn’t given up on Les’s bigger vision. “Even if we can’t do it, it should be done,” he says. I can’t help agreeing. Why shouldn’t the tribe, surrounded as it is by Boeing and Microsoft and Amazon, wed tribal enterprise and wealth to technological enterprise and wealth? A pharmaceutical company could be the way to bring Tulalip’s economy out from under the lifestyle economies that have marked, till now, tribal enterprise.
Tribal power is an interesting thing. With a structure like Tulalip’s, power rests in the hands of a very few, and the absence of term limits makes it very easy to keep doing the same thing but very, very hard to do anything new. It takes a kind of doggedness, a kind of patience to keep putting the issue up, not investing too much political capital in doing so, election cycle after election cycle. And yet it also takes visionary leadership and stubbornness. Most tribes are caught this way, between the need for the political and economic stability on which sovereignty depends and the urgent need to change the economic and social climate. Often, doing something about the “tribal quo” means empowering people who work for the tribe but come from outside it.
One person who seems to have helped do something about it is a white corporate lawyer named Mike Taylor. Taylor represents the kind of force—the man behind the man behind the man—who has helped shape Indian country for the better part of more than forty years. If there are angels of doom and angels of mercy, surely Mike Taylor is an angel of effectiveness. He sought me out and pinned me down on my last day at Tulalip. “At Quinault, where I worked for a while,” he says over breakfast, “their sole economic source of income was from the fish house. The first thing we did was to separate business from governance. If the tribe needed something from the fish house they had to ask!” He laughs. But Tulalip was far behind Quinault in the early 1970s. “You have to understand. In the bad old days there was no police here, no court. Embezzlement is what you got. The burdens of being Indian were in some way only mitigated by embezzling from the tribe. Politics was only a way to mitigate your own poverty, not a way to help other people. Tulalip was a dangerous place. There was really no one to call. Women, children, elders: they were all in danger.” A few things, however, came together. The Boldt Decision in 1974, wherein a federal judge awarded 50 percent of Washington state’s annual catch to tribes with treaty fishing rights, was a great boost not only
to individual Indians but to a sense of tribal purpose as well. And then California v. Cabazon helped open up gaming in the 1980s. These court decisions have had a huge impact on tribal enterprise, at Tulalip and elsewhere. Both cases resulted from Indian civil rights cases. We forsake, if not disenroll, individual Indians today, but without them there would be no tribal fishing or gaming economies. Without their sacrifices, modern sovereignty and self-determination would look very different. Until those court decisions, “sovereignty” was mostly rhetoric.
But after the cases were won, sovereignty became real. And bankable. Those decisions affected all tribes, but not all tribes have grown in the way Tulalip has. “At Tulalip,” says Mike, “you can point to the role of Stan Jones as being the important missing piece. He was on tribal council for over forty years and had a unique view of what tribes should aspire to. He had this kind of history: fishing, running his own business. He had plenty of reason to be dyspeptic with white people, because of things that had happened to him. It occasionally surfaced. Here’s an example: We put out bids for the hotel. We got bids from PCL, a big company, and we were negotiating the construction contract with them. We were almost done. All that was left was the clause about dispute resolution. They wanted state court. Stan said tribal court. The president of the company came down and in the meeting he says to us, ‘You have your culture and we have ours. We aren’t going to use tribal court.’ Stan stood up and made a speech, the essence of which was: ‘Fuck you. We’re not doing this.’ And we went to the second bidder, who agreed to arbitrate in tribal court if necessary. They built the casino. Stan was tough but also a smooth operator. He got the Marysville Chamber of Commerce to move onto tribal land. He would do anything that would benefit Tulalip. He felt the people here deserved more than they were accustomed to. Most of the leadership we have now were schooled in the world of Stan Jones.”