by David Treuer
In 1881, when Crow Dog murdered Spotted Tail, many tribes already had Indian police—sometimes staffed by tribal members and funded by Congress pursuant to treaty—but tribes soon had courts as well, as clunky, corrupt, and guided by bad principle (like the Court of Indian Offenses at Red lake) as these were. “Indian offenses” is a concept fairly far off the mark of “Indian justice.”
The justice system created by the Indian Major Crimes Act and the Court of Indian Offenses, which was hardly just, persisted more or less unchallenged until the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, which created constitutional governments with elected officials on many Indian reservations. Along with constitutions and elected officials came the sense that some sort of judiciary was necessary. Some tribes began to break away from the model of the Court of Indian Offenses and created their own courts, as difficult as that was. Smaller tribes, however, could not afford to start and administer their own courts and retained the services of the Court of Indian Offenses (more than twenty tribes still have CFR courts today). But change came slowly after 1934 and through the 1950s—it came as slowly as shifts in government policy came quickly. The Wheeler-Howard Act, part of the “Indian New Deal,” was replaced in the 1950s with the policy of termination. The government was trying to rid itself of its responsibility to Indians once again.
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It is easy to understand the animosity many Indians have toward cops, and why they feel they will never get a fair day in court. When my father worked for the BIA in the 1960s he saw a lot of brutality firsthand. As he went about his work at Leech Lake he began to hear stories about chronic abuse at the hands of law enforcement: beatings, rapes. “I talked to people and began to learn what was going on. Well, there was some obscure federal regulation or law that allowed government employees to register complaints directly with the Department of Justice; you didn’t have to go through all the usual channels. So I collected affidavits. I interviewed people. By the time I was done I had twenty-four affidavits and I submitted a formal complaint to the DOJ. The one that sticks out in my mind is one older lady who was picked up for public drunkenness and brought back to the police station. According to her testimony she was bent over a squad car and raped with a billy club.”
When the complaint landed at the Department of Justice, FBI agents were dispatched to Leech Lake. When their plane landed in Bemidji they radioed the sheriff’s department (in Walker, seventeen miles south of Cass Lake) and asked the staff to find and collect all the officers named in the complaint.
“By the time the FBI agents made it to Walker,” remembers my father bitterly, “every single one of the complaintants who signed affidavits had been found and threatened. They told them, ‘The FBI is only going to be here a few days and when they leave we’ll still be here.’ All recanted except one or two of them. Next thing I knew I was called into the BIA area director’s office. Mittelholtz was his name. He said, ‘Paul Winslow, the acting area director in Minneapolis, called saying the U.S. attorney general wants to talk to you.’ So I did what I was told. I went down to Minneapolis and met with Winslow. He said, ‘Judge Miles Lord wants to talk to you.’ So I met with Lord. He said, ‘You’re just doing this because you’ve got a personal grudge against the Cass Lake police for picking up one of your sons for reckless driving.’ I told him, ‘I’ve got no grudge whatsoever. My kid was driving recklessly and they arrested him and I agreed it was a good thing. That’s why I let him sit in jail and didn’t bail him out.’ Lord paused. ‘What will make all this go away?’ That’s how they did things then. So we made a deal. Judge Rollette, the county court judge for the reservation, was removed. He was a famous racist. He was famous for saying each and every time an Indian stood before him: ‘You. You are lower than the dung of whales.’ So they removed him. And they removed two of the three police officers named in the complaints. The two worst ones. The third retired. And then they fired me.”
Before that, when my father moved to an abandoned farm on the edge of Leech Lake Reservation in 1953, he didn’t know any Indians and hadn’t given Indians much thought. Nor did he think about them very much when, after living in Milwaukee and Sheboygan while working for the AFL-CIO, he visited his in-laws (from his first marriage) on the north side of Cass Lake, on the Leech Lake Reservation. He fell in love with the place, with the land. “I loved the sand hills. The river channels. The feel of the land and the woods. The one piece of art my family had in Vienna, the one original piece of art, was a pastel of a river with trees. It hung in my bedroom and I stared at it every day and every night all through my childhood. All through those war years. The land up here, around Leech Lake, reminded me of that, of that painting. Maybe that’s why I love this place so much. Anyway, I fell in love with the place. I was facing a transfer from Sheboygan to Detroit. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to live up here. I was running from everything. From conflict. I found the property, bought it for two thousand dollars, which was all the money we had. And I got my teaching degree in Bemidji. But I couldn’t get a job. Finally, after a lot of looking I started teaching high school English on the rez.”
While he taught at Cass Lake he came to know many Indian families. The majority of his students were Indian. He was shocked by the attitudes of many of the teachers, the police, and the other powers that be in a small town like Cass Lake. The town itself, in the middle of the reservation, was very mixed, but all the stores and all the positions of power were occupied by white people. “I was appalled at conditions and attitudes and so I wrote an ill-considered, heated letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs, Philleo Nash.”
My father knew Philleo Nash from his labor union days in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Wisconsin. Nash was an interesting man. He came from a well-to-do Wisconsin farming family (they farmed cranberries near Wisconsin Rapids), was trained as an anthropologist, and found his way to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, he was deeply concerned about racial problems in America. While in Washington he and his wife, Edith, founded the Georgetown Day School, one of the first integrated schools there. When Nash received my father’s manifesto, he telephoned. “Well, you think the BIA could do things better?” he asked. “Yes, I do.” “OK, then. The ball is in your court. I’ll hire you and see what you can do about things.”
It would have been hard for anyone to change the BIA at that time. Created in the 1800s to deal with the “Indian problem,” the BIA was, tellingly, under the auspices of the War Department. It was in charge of treating with tribes, administering allotments, dispersing funds, settling disputes, and overseeing day-to-day operations at reservations and forts across the American West. It had been, since its start, notoriously corrupt. Eventually the BIA was transferred over to the Department of the Interior, but it couldn’t shed much of its reputation as a powerful and damning (if not evil) force. As of 2010, Congress was considering a settlement for claims brought against the Department of the Interior and the BIA. The settlement under consideration is for $3.4 billion—a small amount, considering the alleged $150 billion the Department of the Interior and the BIA illegally withheld from Indians over the last ninety-five years. The money withheld is for timber, oil, and land leases. “Over the past 100 years, government record systems lost track of more than 40 million acres and who owns them. The records simply vanished. Meanwhile, documents were lost in fires and floods, buried in salt mines or found in an Albuquerque storage facility covered by rat feces and a deadly hantavirus. Government officials exploited computer systems with no audit trails to turn Indian proceeds into slush funds but maintain plausible deniability,” suggests a recent article in the Atlantic.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that an Indian, the Menominee activist Ada Deer, was put in charge of the BIA. And after her, there was the Ojibwe entrepreneur Dave Anderson (owner of the Famous Dave’s BBQ chain). In the 1950s, remembers my father, the
BIA controlled everything. “You couldn’t get anything done without their approval,” he says. “They controlled everything. They controlled the land and collected rents. All fees were paid to them. And they paid out the money. All leases, all business deals, all disputes. . . . It went through them. Even the tribal council meetings were controlled by them. The tribal council wasn’t allowed to meet unless they had BIA approval. And even then they controlled the agenda because they were in charge of giving out gas and meal vouchers and a small per diem for the tribal council members. The tribal council was made up of poor reservation people. They couldn’t make meetings if they didn’t get a little money for gas and for lunch. And so the BIA made damn sure that their agenda was on the table and they got the vote they wanted. Or no gas. No lunch. No meeting. It was like that. They were smooth and polished and sophisticated. It was a sophisticated kind of control. But it was control.”
Enter my father. He was the least likely person for the job: he came from a family of socialists and was a borderline socialist himself. He worked for years as a labor organizer in Wisconsin. He was not BIA material as far as control and paternalism were concerned. But he was Philleo Nash’s protégé. He had the ear of the commissioner of Indian affairs. And so the area superintendent, Mittelholtz, generally left my father alone; he might lose his job if he stood up to Nash.
One of my father’s first jobs for the BIA was to do a kind of census in the reservation village of Ball Club. There was a nationwide program dedicated to making sure the elderly were signed up for the newly created Social Security benefits. Not a lot of seniors knew what they were entitled to receive from the government in their retirement, least of all Indians, and a program was launched to find tribal elders and give them information. What my father found deep in the woods around the reservation shocked him. “I expected to see the poverty and the disease and all that. But what I found was a totally atomized society. Scattered. Old couples living off by themselves in the woods with no water and no food and no money. Their kids gone. Gone away to the cities or to boarding schools or just lost. There was no one looking after them. All this talk about community, community, community you hear around and about Indian country. It wasn’t there. There was little community to speak of. Community and family systems had been destroyed—as a matter of policy by government and church—so there were just scattered people all over the place.”
Such was my father’s impression of Ball Club and other small villages and settlements on Leech Lake, White Earth, and Red Lake. But villagers remember it differently; Bena, Ball Club, Inger, Ponemah, Oak Point—these places were still cohesive and functional. Bena, for instance, was the only district on Leech Lake that voted against the Indian Reorganization Act back in 1934 even though it was accepted by a majority of the council.
A little while later Ball Club was once again on my father’s radar. There was a complicated program in place to deal with malnutrition. Ball Club was a village of a few hundred people, all Indian, at the eastern edge of Leech Lake Reservation. There was a school lunch program in place, but it was manifestly unfair. As my father remembers it, the children whose families lived on trust land (tribal land) got the free lunch. But those who did not live on tribal land did not get the free lunch. It was creating a weird kind of class conflict in a community where every member was poorer than dirt. This division was tearing the community apart.
“My plan was very simple. It came from my union days. You get all the parties involved in one place—the BIA, the county, the reservation leadership, the state board of education—and that way when one of them passes the buck they have to pass it to someone else in the room. And you bring a tape recorder so it’s all on tape. Someone will hang for it and someone will have to eventually take responsibility. The all-Indian parents’ organization asked the usual questions and the usual nonanswers were given. But they kept asking and the official people kept passing the buck. One of them, the one from the state, got mad and pounded the table with his fist. And one of the parents—I think her name was Dora—said, ‘Hey. When you pound on the table like that you’re hurting my tape recorder.’ And then they realized that they wouldn’t be able to leave until the problem got fixed. It got fixed. And the parent groups! They looked up and looked at each other and they were thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve got power. We did this.’”
It was a small thing: making sure all the kids in one school got the same benefits. But it was a start, breaking the BIA’s stranglehold on reservation life. My father’s work brought him to all of the Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota, but most of his work occurred at the two biggest, Leech Lake and White Earth reservations. Leech Lake was bad, but White Earth was brutal.
In the late 1800s the feds tried to disband Mille Lacs, Fond du Lac, and Leech Lake reservations in Minnesota and Turtle Mountain Reservation in northeastern North Dakota. The Indians from these reservations, numbering in the tens of thousands, were promised farmland, schools, lumber mills, blacksmith shops, churches, seed, hoop iron, plows—in short, everything they would need to reimagine themselves as farmers. If the government had kept its promise, this would have been a good deal. White Earth Reservation is amazing country. The eastern parts near the headwaters of the Mississippi are full of rolling, hilly hardwood forests, and the western edge has rich, loamy soil not unlike the Red River Valley farther to the west (a river valley even more fertile than the Nile). And in the middle of all this are lakes rich in rice and fish. White Earth could have been a paradise. But the promises weren’t kept. There were no lumber mills and no blacksmith shops and there was precious little farming equipment. Or at best there was none of this till sometime later. Meanwhile, the thousands of Indians from reservations all over Minnesota and from Turtle Mountain were left in paradise with nothing to work it. They were allotted their lands, which disappeared from underneath their feet because they defaulted on illegal back taxes or traded their land for enough supplies to get them through their winter. Tom Shingobee has in his possession a grocery receipt totaling seventeen dollars that his father had to settle by signing over his 160-acre farm. During World War I, when many of the men were away fighting in Europe, the timber stands were cut down by large timber outfits. One man remembers coming home to his beloved forests only to find a desert of slash and brush and not a tree in sight for miles.
In the 1950s, even after the Indian Reorganization Act, the “Indian New Deal,” many of the Indian communities in White Earth still had barely anything to call their own. They had no water or phones or electricity. But the white farms on the reservation had been wired for electricity and phones through the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) with funds created by Congress as part of the New Deal. These lines had largely bypassed each and every Indian community in the region. When my father visited the village of Rice Lake, the village leaders pleaded with him to go to the REA office off the reservation in Bagley and get them electricity.
“No,” he said. “I won’t go to REA. You will go. I’ll help you. But you go.”
Rice Lake sent a delegation to the REA offices in Bagley. “I was there with them. And let me tell you, they got the same paternalistic runaround. ‘Oh, we can’t bring the wires in if we don’t know how many of you there are.’ Well, we had a census with us and we handed it over. ‘Oh! There’s that many of you!’ After a lot of hemming and hawing the REA guys said, ‘Well, it costs a lot to clear the right-of-way and we don’t have the funds.’ I asked them: if we clear the right-of-way—it was seven miles of trees and brush—will you wire it? ‘Sure. We can do that.’ But they didn’t think it would ever happen. They had a real low opinion of reservation people. But a few weekends later we had a big potluck in Rice Lake. I got tools—brush hooks and axes and saws—from the BIA. And the whole village turned out. I mean women and men and kids. Absolutely everyone. And they cleared the right-of-way, all seven miles of it, in one weekend. That’s all it took. And this meant a lot. It meant, for the first time, for th
e first time ever: light, toilets, heat. Real sanitation and light and heat for a village of three hundred people.”
The real boon of electricity was the refrigerator. For many families the day an electric fridge arrived is remembered in fond detail, the way VE Day is remembered by many veterans. Refrigerators meant no more spoilage of meager supplies, no more rotten meat.
“This was before the War on Poverty,” says my father. “I didn’t do it. They did it. It was a powerful thing. That’s how it happened: that’s how the reservations broke the BIA, not the other way around. It happened in bits and pieces. Some of it was the civil rights movement. Some of it was a side effect of boarding schools. All those Indians who got sent to boarding schools were supposed to be whitewashed there, but it didn’t always happen like that. A lot of them went back to their reservations and they had skills—as carpenters and accountants and farmers. And a lot of the vets from World War II came back. They knew how to operate heavy machinery. They knew how to organize. And all of this combined with Native grit. It changed things.”
My father hastened to add: “It sure as shit wasn’t AIM that did it. AIM was too polarized and too explosive to build anything. They couldn’t build power lines or consensus or community. They just used people. They were all a bunch of Al Sharptons. And you can quote me on that. Make sure that gets in there.”