by David Treuer
The day burns on and on. In the afternoon the sound of fireworks—many and large—can be heard nearby. There’s a field on the edge of Boom City set aside for setting them off. Just as fireworks can be sold on the rez but not in the state, so, too, can they be exploded on the rez. And Boom City is happy to provide the space. It’s a free-for-all. Rockets, mortars, roman candles, spinners. They all go off at once and continuously. A haze settles over the lot like the haze over a battlefield. Periodically the security guards call a halt to the explosions, but this is only to make room for even larger explosions: tribal members—and this seems to be a uniquely cultural thing—will light off upward of a thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks as a “memorial” for someone in their family who has passed on. They are remembered with an exploding wall of sound.
Ideas aren’t quietly laid to rest here either. Having explored the possibility of teaming up with the Lummi to start a pharmaceutical company, and having met with resistance there as well, Les has recently taken the project back. Political power, political clout waxes and wanes, and as the dynamics on the council shifted, Les, visionary and dogged, has brought the idea of a pharmaceutical company back to Tulalip. This time he has more support.
I wander back to Eddy’s dazed by the fireworks and by everything else I’ve seen at Tulalip. This reservation—created in 1855—really seems to have been born in the past forty years. It has come alive and done exactly what federalists have always wanted: become a self-sufficient, self-supporting, entrepreneurial, relatively rich version of the American Dream—a people, a community that works hard and makes things work and gets ahead. Pretty much every reason for underperformance offered by other tribes—lack of access to education, lack of infrastructure, intergenerational sexual abuse, boarding schools, forced religious conversion, historical trauma, exploitation and loss of natural resources—has been experienced at Tulalip. And yet. What I have seen at Tulalip isn’t just what a tribe could be (though there was that, too) but what America might be. If only. Tulalip is a conglomeration of separate tribes that came together (by choice, circumstance, and under pressure) to form a nation. It has suffered its own internal divisions and traumas. It has endured natural and civic disasters, gone through recession and poverty and joblessness. But it has found a way to provide free health care for all its citizens, free education for those who want it, free (excellent) childcare for working parents, a safe and comfortable retirement option for its elders, and a robust safety net woven from per capita payments that, while barely enough to support a single person and not enough to fully support a family, are enough to encourage its citizens to venture into enterprises small and large. The nation provides for its most vulnerable citizens—the young and the old. And it provides enough security for the people in between life’s beginnings and ends so that they can really see what they might become.
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THIS IS TULALIP. This could also be America if only the country would pay attention. It seems antithetical, even nonsensical, to consider that in order to find America you need to look at Indian communities and reservations. But it’s true. The questions posed by America’s founding documents and early history—What is the reach of the federal government? What should it be? How to balance the rights of the individual against those of the collective? What is, at the end of the day, the proper role of the federal government in our social structures and lives? How to balance the demands of community and modernity? How to preserve, protect, and foster the middle class?—are answered by looking at Indians, at our communities, and our history.
It’s truly dark now. The moon is up but it is bloodied by the smoke of explosions over the field. The rockets arc up over where cedar once grew, and the mortars thump in a way that lodges in your chest. There is a sudden commotion. After lighting off a package of mortars, a kid runs out to check on them because he doesn’t think they’ve all gone off. He tips the tube to look in it, and the last mortar comes out and explodes in his face. He is rushed off to the emergency room. I later learn he will be just fine: he is cut but okay.
There is no feeling of repose among the people or the tribe. You can feel it on the docks and at Boom City and in the push to make something more out of cannabis than a storefront buck. There is a seething, a yearning for more that is not quite satisfied and probably never will be. I suppose that’s the other part of the American Dream—a kind of striving that might breed wealth but also just breeds more striving. The wants create a want. Eddy is calmer about it. “We’ve got corruption and waste and all the issues that every other tribe has. But we’ve got something else here. We’ve found a way to make it work. The thing is, we hold ourselves back from really achieving what we could achieve when we don’t do things right.” And that reminds me of a story Eddy told me when we were digging clams: how the people at Tulalip were created as salmon and used the power of a good mind to become human. Being human was not a natural thing; they had to work for it.
But what is left to achieve beyond what they’ve already got? Americans were forever trying to create Indians in their own image. And in some ways they’ve done it. At least they might have gotten Indians to buy into the American Dream. But it is quite possible that Indians dream differently. The American Indian Dream is as much about looking back and bringing the culture along with it as it is about looking ahead. The Tulalip are far from achieving that dream: fewer than a dozen first-language speakers of Lushootseed remain (but activists and educators are aggressively offering language classes in the area), and the old lifeways tied to the sea are as endangered as the sea itself. But they are dreaming, they are trying nonetheless.
The lights are bright between the stalls and white and black and brown people walk and talk excitedly, their eyes gleaming and taking in everything their money can buy.
Eddy watches and pauses. “Just because we are successful doesn’t mean we don’t have all sorts of problems. We’ve got a lot of money. More than most. But we still die young. We’ve got a bad heroin problem. We still have a lot of domestic abuse and sex abuse. Money hasn’t changed that, not yet. But if we don’t get a handle on those things”—he raises and opens his hands—“all our wealth could disappear.” It could. But it hasn’t yet. It’s rising up in the sky and—boom—it goes and then the ash drifts down to settle on our upturned faces.
PART 7
Digital Indians: 1990–2018
On June 26, 1992, replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María docked in New York City after a three-hundred-day voyage retracing Columbus’s route from Spain to the Caribbean. Created by the Spanish government to celebrate Columbus and “the friendship of the Spanish people,” the boats were met by well-wishers. For five dollars you could tour the ships, and for nine dollars you could buy a reproduction of Columbus’s log—presumably a highly expurgated version that made no mention of rape, torture, or slavery. The boats were also met by a handful of people protesting Columbus, colonization, genocide, and the very idea of the discovery of the New World. New York’s mayor at the time, David Dinkins, brushed the protest aside, saying, “We can sometimes get so caught up with what’s behind us that we fail to look ahead.” The statement managed to ignore that the reality Indians faced in 1992 had been shaped by Columbus and everything he represented. The future would be shaped in the same manner.
But not only in the same manner. As much of the country celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus’s discovery that fall, Indians were celebrating everything they had survived and everything they had overcome. Columbus might have discovered the New World for Europe, but in 1992, Indians were discovering themselves for themselves, and the quincentenary was a chance to take stock. It might have surprised many Americans that there were Indians left to think about that fateful first contact at all. And yet there were—more and more, in fact. In the 1990 census nearly 2 million people identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native, a 38 percent increase since 1980. Birth rates in these groups were
climbing, but not that fast, and not that high: more and more people were simply identifying as Indian, because what being Indian meant had changed as dramatically as our conditions had.
The Reagan and George H. W. Bush years were drawing to a close. It was a period in which the country had tried to shrug off the ghosts of Vietnam, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the oil crisis, and the last vestiges of the Cold War. But ghosts are not so easily dislodged. In 1958, more than 75 percent of Americans had trusted the government to do what was right most of the time. In 1980, only 27 percent felt that way. The number climbed again through the 1980s, but it never reached the same heights. And in the 1990s, public trust eroded again with the outbreak of the First Iraq War, which entered the national consciousness, if not the national mythology, as an imperial war—a war for oil. It began to erode the resurgent sense of American exceptionalism that has been instrumental to America’s self-promotion.
The beating of Rodney King at the hands of Los Angeles police, and the riots that followed the officers’ acquittal, among other things, may have taken a toll on the self-regard with which Americans had long viewed themselves as well. And if the fall of the Soviet Union had at first been cast as the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism and communism (never mind that the United States had won the Cold War more on the depth of its pockets than on the strength of its convictions), these new developments at home and abroad planted a doubt: The enemy wasn’t necessarily or only “out there”—there was a darkness within that must be contended with. With the Soviet Union gone, America’s mixture of idealism and dirty tricks, nobility and culpability, democracy and suppression, was much easier to see. And once it was seen, the public discourse against the presumed rightness of the American way became heated. It was one thing for John Winthrop to proclaim to his congregation in 1630 that the Massachusetts Bay Colony should “consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” It was another to remember that the colony had made room for what is now Boston by setting the palisaded village of the Pequot Indians on fire in 1637 and killing the men, women, and children when they tried to flee out the exits of the fort. And it is again another thing to remember that Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic Indians fought alongside the colonists as they extirpated the Pequot. The past might very well be a foreign country. It is also much more complicated than we would have it. So, too, the present and the future.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, American Indian, African American, and other activists and historians and writers and students had joined forces to make America remember that its “goodness,” its success, its very existence had been facilitated by the contributions of other, non-Anglo Americans and that often, despite their contributions, it continued to exist and to grow at their expense. Multiculturalism was a movement that sought to recognize these truths, which were often elided.
So 1992 was not just a time for Indians to take stock. It was a time for America to do the same. And the reflections it saw weren’t entirely pleasing. African Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and immigrants of long standing in the United States had reason, along with Indians, to ask what, exactly, we were celebrating—and what we should be celebrating—in 1992, five hundred years since Europeans brought with them disease, religion, colonialism, and the slave trade to our shores, along with representative democracy and religious tolerance.
Christopher Columbus had always been a convenient myth for America’s boosters, although he never set foot on the American mainland and didn’t in fact usher in New World colonialism. Nevertheless, his story had helped focus the story of American transcendence. But by 1992, the myth began to have the opposite effect: it was a reminder, for many, of the wrongs that had been perpetrated in the New World.
The federal government had long planned a Quincentenary Jubilee to kick off 1992, to end with its own replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María sailing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. But corporate sponsors retreated and the jubilee never happened. A parade and celebration in Washington, D.C., were hastily canceled when Indian activists threatened to show up in force. Parades and celebrations in Los Angeles and Denver suffered the same fate. Protesters dumped red dye in the Fox River in Chicago to protest the genocide of Native Americans, and the city of Berkeley rebranded Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. In 1994, the United Nations declared August 9 as the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Times were changing. And it wasn’t just the public conscious that was changing, the real lives of Indians across the country were changing, too. It was almost as if the Indian population—larger by a factor of a hundred than it was a century before—was finally waking up from a collective nightmare. Not only had Indians survived beyond all expectation. We had begun, with the generation coming of age in the 1990s, to heal the wounds inflicted upon the bodies of previous generations.
Natives and Native communities were strong enough in 1992 to do what they had been unable to do in 1492: turn the ships away. In 1492, Indians were defenseless against the ravages of disease and unprepared for extractive colonial subjugation. Moreover, we had not consistently found strength in numbers by building alliances; tribes mostly fought, and perished, alone. But by 1992, Indians were strong enough—not symbolically but really—to resist. This strength was a result of physical adaptability (no longer would disease single us out), political savvy (no longer would we fight alone), and hard-won knowledge of what we were up against. Just as the Lakota, Comanche, Nez Perce, and other Plains tribes had adopted the horse and the gun and made them their own, so, too, did modern Indians take the tools that might have spelled our end (English, technology, Western education, wage labor) and make them ours. As my cousin Scott likes to say, Indians don’t waste what we kill: we use all the parts of the computer.
The distance and distrust between Indian communities and the educational system meant to acculturate us was being bridged. The paternalism and greed of the U.S. government was being challenged in the courts, the streets, and the classroom. The schisms in Indian families that were the result of the boarding school system were being healed. And the separation between reservation Indians and urban Indians was being eradicated. Although it would take years, local tribal knowledge and global modern life began to come together in unlikely places. One of those places is on the plates served by Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef.
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SEAN SHERMAN, the Sioux Chef, is sitting across from me at Jefe, in Minneapolis. He is not eating as I imagine a chef would eat. He does not seem to be sampling and weighing and evaluating, listening to his food the way a musician might listen to a score. Rather, he eats as though this is both his first and last meal. His eyes are a little vacant. The food goes in fast and is gone. The food (Mexican) is awesome, and so is the restaurant. (Jefe is not his restaurant, but he is friends with the chef and is a supporter.) Sean is solidly built, substantial. His hair is long and tucked back behind his ears. He has a wide face, wide jaw, widely set eyes. An Indian face. If I had not seen him in action and tasted his food, I would not be able to guess that Sean is the mastermind of the most surprising food in Minneapolis, and that his efforts at promoting indigenous cuisine are the sharpest spear being thrown into the heart of so-called authenticity across the country.
Outside the restaurant, the summer day is tailing off, dappled with sun and shade. People walk along the Mississippi, the sound of the water going over Saint Anthony Falls in the distance. The old mills along the river have been converted into condos, exposed brick and smoked glass aestheticizing the city’s past. Though only some of the past is fit for commodification and so survives. For example, we are sitting steps from where, in May 1850, the Ojibwe chief Bagone-giizhig once hid from his sworn enemies. That tribal an
imosity between Ojibwe and Dakota has long since faded.
Earlier, Sean, his partner Dana, and I drove out to Wozupi Tribal Gardens near Prior Lake, just south of Minneapolis. Wozupi was the brainchild of a Mdewakanton tribal member who had dreamed of a “sustainable clean food source,” in the words of the employee who greeted us at the farm. The tribe, which owns a very big casino, had the means to make the dream real. Wozupi was established in 2010, on five acres. Six years later, it has grown to sixteen acres, and there are plans to expand further. It produces an incredible array of heirloom, organic, and what can only be called historical indigenous varietals. Cherokee beans. Potawatomi lima. Oneida corn. Arikara yellow squash. Hidatsa shield beans. Lakota squash. Gete-okosimin (Ojibwe “old time” squash). Maple sugar and syrup. Honey. Juneberries. Chokecherries. Wild plums. Apples. Apricots. Plums. Eggs. Tomatoes. As the farm has grown, so has the tribe’s vision for it. The goal now is to get their goods into all the restaurants and casinos the tribe owns, and into private homes as well. It also supplies restaurants like Jefe. Sean left with ten pints of juneberries and a box of elderberry blossoms. “These?” he responded when I asked him what they are for. “I’ll make a sauce out of the berries and freeze it. Juneberries drop so fast. The blossoms I’ll use to make a syrup. It’s got a really unique flavor.”
Sean’s recipes, his whole gestalt, rest on using and combining indigenous ingredients in both old and surprising new ways. “Our philosophy and politics is: indigenous, indigenous-produced, local, organic. In that order.” He isn’t interested in “Indian” food per se (salmon on a cedar plank) or even in dressing up Indian comfort food (frybread or macaroni) in some new way. “I make indigenous food. I don’t use pork or chicken or beef. No sugar or eggs. I try to cook only with the foods historically available to the indigenous people of the area I’m working in. So for me that means Lakota/Dakota and Ojibwe ingredients.” Like? “There’s so much. So much all around us,” he said on the drive to Wozupi. “See that?” He pointed at a brown, sorghumesque weed in the ditch along Highway 13. “Remember what we ate on Monday? Amaranth? That’s amaranth. It grows all over around here. And goosefoot. And sorrel. Not to mention berries, wild rice, squash, and corn.”