Rez Life

by David Treuer

  “Just ditch the boat in the lake and let’s go,” says Marc. “It’s getting dark.”

  “Yeah, fuck it, we don’t need it. The water’s like, what, six feet? We’ll just go by the other floats,” offers Sean.

  “I installed this little bastard so we could be exact,” says Mike. “I mean, like, exact. I didn’t hump around and do all this shit just to guess. I want some fucking walleye. I want to get some of those slimy bastards in the net for sure.”

  Finally Mike fixes the transducer and hooks the fish locator up to the battery and they’re ready: Marc slips his truck between the rocky banks and slams the brakes so the boat goes skipping off the trailer while Sean holds the bowline. The tires of the Ford churn rock and gravel as it climbs away from the landing, earth that has been churned by Indian tires and Indian feet for years with the same goal as the three brothers have: to net some walleye and feed their families. Marc walks back down from the truck and he and Sean and I get into the boat while Mike tries to push us off. But Marc must weigh at least 240 pounds and Sean 210, and the addition of my 170 pounds means that the small aluminum skiff is grounding out. Mike jumps into the lake up to his knees, heaves, and the boat is free, Marc yanks the engine to life and within minutes they are yelling and swearing and giving each other shit as they drop in their 100-foot net. The three ­brothers—all colorful speakers, all amazingly gifted with fine mechanical ability (Mike, a mason, can mentally calculate, down to the block, the number of cement blocks for the basements he builds, and Sean is a mean stonewright in his own way, too)—have gathered to net fish. Marc drove all the way from Colorado. He owns his own construction company, based in Colorado Springs. He comes back to Mille Lacs every spring to net walleye with his brothers and, this year, to hunt in the first Mille Lacs turkey season. The birds have made a comeback. He’s brought along half a dozen calls, camo, inflatable decoys, and his shotguns—all brand new. Mike’s come over from Brainerd, and Sean from Wisconsin. They are all Mille Lacs enrollees and they are back on the reservation none of them grew up on to net the fish that is theirs. “Why bother?” I ask as we’re idling back near shore. “Why go to all the trouble for a few fish?”

  “Well,” Sean drawls, as he thinks it over, smoking, resting after the rush to get the net into the water: “Let me answer your question with another question: Why does a dog lick his dick?”

  2

  As the fish gather every spring, so does Sean’s family—to visit, to hang out, to argue and fight, and to exercise their treaty rights. As I drove down to Mille Lacs to meet them it was hard not to notice how the place has changed since casinos. The roads were nice, and the houses tucked back into stands of old-growth maple and oak were spacious. The cars parked in the yards were quite new, tending toward Buicks and Chryslers. I made a wrong turn, missing the road to Sean’s mother’s house. Instead, I turned by the Vineland Indian Chapel, just below the water tower, emblazoned with the seal of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians—the state of Minnesota in outline, with an arrow passing through the heart of it, which is exactly where Mille Lacs is: a little bit north and west of Minneapolis. A few old shacks clung to the hilltop in the shadow of the water tower. They were falling in, the roof boards were rotted out, and tar paper was waving in the wind. All of them were small, none bigger than sixteen by twenty feet. I was surprised no one had burned them down. Maybe the tribe kept them standing to remind themselves of the hardships it had faced during the past century. Until recently the tribe had experienced the kind of Indian existence one usually thinks of, but worse.

  Once I’d straightened myself out, I found myself on long, winding, suburban-feeling roads (with curbs and fire hydrants) that snaked back amid the maples. The new houses are enormous—three bedrooms, two baths, double attached garages—with vinyl siding and landscaping. All the streets have Ojibwe names: Noopiming Drive, Ziigwan Lane. The elders on Mille Lacs get their houses free. So do veterans, and there are many veterans at Mille Lacs.

  Bonnie’s house is creamy yellow, the second house on the right on a small cul-de-sac ending in a large swamp. Sean said I would see a small boat on a trailer in the driveway and another big boat parked out front. The big boat is a twenty-two-foot Bayliner with a waterskiing deck, a berth, and a sporty white canvas cover over the wheelhouse. Marc drove it up from Colorado, and since they had nothing else they used it to net the year before.

  When I’d walked in the door I saw Sean and Marc wrestling on the living room floor. Marc outweighed Sean by at least forty pounds and had him on his back. Mike and their other brother, Jay; Marc’s wife, Holly; and their mother, Bonnie, half-watched the wrestling match and half-watched Ghost Rider. The flames from Nicolas Cage’s digitized skull licked Bonnie’s enormous flat-screen TV. Bonnie barely seemed to notice that her sons, all in their forties, were trying to rub each other’s faces in the carpet until finally Sean said, “I give! I give!” Marc wouldn’t get off him till Bonnie said, “Let him up, Marc. You’re hurting my little boy.” Holly, pregnant, went into the kitchen to make some lunch.

  Everything is big at Mille Lacs, except the reservation itself. A smattering of small parcels scattered over east central Minnesota, Mille Lacs is close to, but shies away from, Minneapolis and its crawling, clawing suburbs, which are eating up the nearby farmland. Mille Lacs Lake is huge: covering about 132,000 acres or 206 square miles, it is the second largest in the state and one of the largest in the United States. The Ojibwe name for the lake is Mizizaga’igan, “It Spreads All Over.” The Sioux who lived there before the Ojibwe called it Mde Wakan, “Spirit Lake,” and this is what the Dakota of Minnesota still call themselves, the Mdewakanton Sioux.

  The lake was settled and contested, lost and won, many times before the Dakota and then the Ojibwe settled there. It has been continually inhabited for at least 9,000 years, a fact attested to by huge archaeological sites and a particularly impressive and perplexing altar composed of more than fifty bear skulls, uncovered during a highway expansion project.

  The first European to see Lake Mille Lacs was a Franciscan priest, Father Louis Hennepin. In 1680 he was traveling, mapping, and baptizing his way through the region when he was taken captive by the Dakota. He spent five months as a captive at Mille Lacs. During that time he described the lifestyle of and the region inhabited by his captors. He was struck by the wealth of the land and the people. One thing he noticed was that the Dakota, rather than living in tepees, built earthen lodges like those the Arikara and Mandan later adopted in the West.

  Two hundred years later it was still possible to see what attracted the Dakota and why they fought so hard to keep the lake to themselves. The lake “lies imbedded in deep forests,” wrote the Ojibwe historian William Warren in 1885. “Its picturesque shores are skirted with immense groves of valuable sugar maple, and the soil on which they grow is not to be surpassed in richness by any section of country in the northwest. The lake is nearly circular in form, though indented with deep bays, and the view over its waters broken here and there by bold promontories. It is about twenty miles across from shore to shore, and a person standing on its pebbly beach on a clear calm day, can but discern the blue outlines of the opposite side, especially as the country surrounding it is comparatively low and level. Its waters are clear and pure as the waters of Lake Superior, and fish of the finest species are found to abound therein. Connected with it is a string of marshy, or mud-bottomed, lakes in which the water is but a few feet deep, and wherein the wild rice of the north grows luxuriantly, and in the greatest abundance. Possessing these and other advantages, there is not a spot in the northwest which an Indian would sooner chose as a home and dwelling place, than Mille Lacs.”

  Legend has it (and it probably is only a legend) that the Dakota were driven from Mille Lacs because of a lovers’ quarrel. Sometime in the 1600s a Dakota man and an Ojibwe man liked the same Dakota girl. The Dakota and Ojibwe had been fighting off and on for centuries, but during
the time of this love triangle these tribes had been enjoying a lasting, if uneasy, peace. The girl chose the Ojibwe man, and the jealous Dakota lover killed him. This in itself didn’t lead to war; as William Warren suggests, “it only reminded the warriors of the two tribes that they had once been enemies.” Not long afterward, an Ojibwe chief from Fond du Lac, to the north, allowed his four sons to travel to the Dakota village at Mille Lacs to visit their Dakota friends. On their way back, one son was murdered. The remaining three brothers asked if they could go and visit again, and the father said yes: most likely, their brother had been killed by mistake. But another brother was killed on the second trip. They visited again. A third was killed. Only one brother was left, and he wanted to go again, despite the murders of his brothers. The weary father said sure, the three brothers had probably all been killed by mistake. Off went the fourth brother. He never returned. The father, overcome by grief, said to all who would listen, “An Ojibwe warrior never throws away his tears.” He planned and plotted his revenge and two years later led a huge war party against the Dakota. The Ojibwe wiped out a number of small villages and the few Dakota survivors retreated to the main village on the big lake. The Ojibwe attacked again and instead of simply relying on the few guns they had and their bows and war clubs, they threw bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes in the Dakota lodges. Many hundreds of Dakota burned to death. The surviving Dakota gave up the lake and retreated west and south. However, it would be another 100 years before all the Dakota left northern and central Minnesota. The lake is as beautiful and rich today as it was when the lovers’ quarrel set off that chain of events.

  Mille Lacs is drained by the Rum River, named by early explorers with a sense of humor but still earlier known as Wakha’ or “Spirit River.” Many people now think of the name “Rum” as a pretty bad joke. Bogus Brook, a tributary of the Rum (which eventually flows into the Mississippi), is reputed to have been a backwater hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition. Many of the tourists who come to Mille Lacs in the summer are from Chicago. It is said that Al Capone had a house on Mille Lacs, and that he also had a hideout in Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin and at Leech Lake, north of Mille Lacs. It is also said that he had an Indian mistress with whom he was very much in love; some say she was from Mille Lacs, others say she was from Lac Courte Oreilles, and still others say she was from Leech Lake. Everyone wants to claim Al Capone. The casino at Mille Lacs is called Grand Casino, and it is indeed big.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of natural resources Mille Lacs was almost a reservation that wasn’t. In 1825, when representatives from Mille Lacs signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien (along with about 1,000 other delegates from the Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Dakota, Iowa, and others), they were a force to be reckoned with. The meeting had been organized by the United States and was primarily a treaty not between it and the tribes but rather among the tribes themselves. The United States, having gained control of the area after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, no longer had to contend with the British. Now it had to deal with Indians. And at the time, Indians controlled the whole region. Trade and settlement were hampered by constant aggression between the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes along the Minnesota River, the dividing line between their territories. They fought over hunting and trapping rights—each anxious to control more resources than the other. The U.S. government was caught in the middle and feared that continued intertribal warfare would jeopardize the fur trade in the region and the trade routes through it. The United States was the supplicant; the Indian tribes were the power in place. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established an uneasy peace between the warring tribes.

  Circumstances, however, changed quickly on the frontier. By 1837 the fur trade was wobbling and about to crash. Animals such as the beaver, muskrat, and otter had been trapped to near-extinction within the domain of the Ojibwe in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Ojibwe, still strong, still a powerful military force, looked east and saw more and more white settlers. They looked west and saw that the Dakota had adopted the horse, had colonized the plains, and were growing stronger. They were being squeezed, and there was nowhere the Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes region could expand their land base. Also, there were no caches of natural resources outside their control that they could bring under their control—no additional rice beds, maple groves, cranberry swamps, or untapped trapping grounds. Starvation was, for many, only a season away. The Ojibwe saw this, and when the United States wanted them to come to the treaty table again in 1837 they said yes. Chiefs from Leech Lake, Gull Lake, Swan River, St. Croix River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac de Flambeau, La Pointe, Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, Snake River, Fond du Lac, and Red Lake all traveled to the town of St. Peter in present-day Minnesota. It was an impressive array of personalities and power. Present were the chiefs Flat Mouth, Elder Brother, Young Buffalo, Rabbit, Big Cloud, Hole in the Day, Strong Ground, White Fisher, Bear’s Heart, Buffalo, Wet Mouth, Coming Home Hollering, Cut Ear, Wood Pecker, White Crow, Knee, The Dandy, White Thunder, Two Lodges Meeting, Rat’s Liver, First Day, Both Ends of the Sky, Sparrow, Bad Boy, Big Frenchman, Spunk, Little Six, Lone Man, Loons Foot, and Murdering Yell. All of them were decked out in their finest attire and sported the scalps they’d won in battle and eagle feathers notched or colored depending on how they’d killed the enemy (bludgeoned, split down the middle, or stabbed). They brought warriors with them, armed with bows, guns, scalping knives, and war clubs. They entered singing. The white representatives brought maps, whiskey, and money and started talking.

  The U.S. government presented its case: it would trade land for money. So while the bands who signed the treaty would give up, on paper, the right to establish villages or homes in large tracts of land including half of present-day Wisconsin and part of central Minnesota, they would retain the right to live in the region and hunt, fish, and trap within and to the entire extent of their former homelands. In addition the government promised to pay the bands the following, every year for twenty years:

  $9,500, to be paid in money.

  $19,000, to be delivered in goods.

  $3,000 for establishing three blacksmith shops, supporting the blacksmiths, and furnishing them with iron and steel.

  $1,000 for farmers, and for supplying them and the Indians with implements of labor, with grain or seed, and with whatever else might be necessary to enable them to carry on their agricultural pursuits.

  $500 in tobacco.

  This didn’t seem like a bad deal as far as the chiefs were concerned. First, and most important to them, they were assured that they could hunt, fish, and trap as they had been doing, without interference or restriction. From the perspective of the chiefs it didn’t seem that they were losing much of anything: they could still live, work, and travel within their homeland, and there was a financial bonus of twenty years during which they wouldn’t want for much. This seemed to quell any concerns they had about the encroachment of whites from the east and the hard border with the Dakota tribes to the west. It seemed like a win-win for the Ojibwe, and they signed the treaty without being able to see the full ramifications of what they’d done. No mention was made of logging in the treaty. Little did they know that they would lose much and wouldn’t regain much of it until more than 150 years later, by which time (according to the logic of the U.S. government) all the Indians should have been either assimilated or dead.

  The tribes weren’t able to see the full scope and importance of logging in their ceded territories, and there was no mention of it in the treaty. But the virgin white pine forests of the upper Mississippi would fuel the growth of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago for the next fifty years. And the United States wanted not just some of the pine but all of it.

  Another point that the tribes involved didn’t understand was a small but key phrase written into the treaty: “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the terr
itory ceded is guarantied to the Indians, during the pleasure [emphasis added] of the President of the United States.” The president whose pleasure was in question was Martin Van Buren, and as regards the treaty he left well enough alone. But presidents (and their pleasure) change. In 1850 Zachary Taylor canceled the clause in the treaty of 1837 by presidential order. Taylor had spent forty years in the military and seemed to quite like fighting and killing Indians. During the War of 1812 he defended a fort from an attack by Tecumseh. He fought Indians again during the Black Hawk War and was the one who accepted Chief Black Hawk’s surrender. He fought Indians again in Florida during the Seminole Wars. It’s hard to judge such matters, but it seems he had a low regard for life—he spent most of his own life taking away the lives of others. So it’s no wonder he tried to do away with what few rights remained with the Mille Lacs Band.

  The effect was disastrous. The Indians of the upper Mississippi, who had been living in relative security, suddenly saw the land drop away from them on all sides. It was as if they were now living on islands. They were told they had no rights to hunt, fish, or gather off their reservations. The vast forests of the northern United States were disappearing day by day. These were desperate times.

  In the 1840s, on the heels of the 1837 treaty, the U.S. government tried to do to the Ojibwe north and east of Mille Lacs along Lake Superior what had been done to the Cherokee in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama in the 1820s and 1830s: removal. And this was done for the same reasons. Large and valuable mineral deposits, mostly of copper and iron ore, had been discovered in the Lake Superior watershed, and the government wanted them. In 1850 President Zachary Taylor ordered the removal of the Ojibwe living near the ore deposits to new homes in the West. The ostensible reasons for removal were to prevent “injurious contact” between Indians and whites, to move the Indians out of the reach of whiskey traders, and try to concentrate the Ojibwe into one or two small areas so as to better “civilize” them.