Rez Life

by David Treuer

  The isolation and desperation of life on the reservation, largely aided and abetted by the BIA, still, fifty years later, bring tears to my father’s eyes. But these conditions also brought joy. “Much of my life I was rejected. As a Jew. As a puny kid. A refugee in England. A refugee in Ireland. A refugee in the United States—and only a few years later I find myself working for good causes in the Indian community. It was a love affair. I was adopted, with tobacco and don’t let anyone tell you different. I was at home, enfolded. I was at home in the Indian community not through some sort of James Fenimore Cooper romanticism but because I found people who loved me, and whom I loved. At first they respected my work. And it grew from there.”

  2

  I suppose it’s strange to find a Jew on a reservation. It’s even stranger to consider that more white people than Indians live on the Leech Lake Reservation. This is true of many reservations. It is one of the lasting and most damning effects of the U.S. government policy of allotment, which began with the Dawes Act in 1887 and the amendments in 1891 and 1906. The Dawes Act was the enabling federal legislation, and the Nelson Act fueled the actual allotment of reservations in Minnesota. Section 1 of the Dawes Act authorized the president to divide collective tribal lands into individual sections. Each head of a household was to be granted a 160-acre parcel if the land was arable or a 320-acre parcel if the land was suitable only for grazing. Single individuals and orphans were granted eighty acres each and all other “single individuals” (minors, not women) were to be given forty acres each. The parcels of land distributed to Indian individuals were, under the act, to be held in trust for twenty-five years, during which time they were not able to sell it. Devastatingly, the “surplus” land (that is, the land “left over” after all the individuals in a tribe were given their parcels) was opened up for sale to non-Natives. So even as early as the 1890s, large reservations with Indian populations decimated by disease and warfare suddenly found their lands gone, and their near neighbors were the people who benefited from the dispossession. In all, during the forty-seven years the Dawes Act was on the books (the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, officially stopped allotment but did not formally rescind the policy), Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of tribal lands, about two-thirds of the lands held by Indians when the Dawes Act was passed; Indians lost, roughly, land that equals the size of the state of California. Ninety thousand Native Americans were left landless and largely homeless. The problems of this kind of landlessness were felt well into the 1970s and are still felt today. During that time, many Indian families were found to be living in cars, under porches, and crammed eight and sometimes ten to a room in dilapidated shacks across the country.

  To make matters worse, the Burke Amendment in 1906 took even more land out of Indian control. It instituted a process known as “forced patenting.” Indians deemed “competent and capable” were given a patent in fee simple for their land. That is, the land was taken out of trust and they were given title, were now subject to taxation, and could sell their land. Those deemed “incapable and incompetent” had their lands automatically leased out at the discretion of the secretary of the interior. The processes by which Indians were deemed “capable” or “incapable” were largely subjective. In many cases (and land disputes at White Earth Reservation were often settled this way) government agents relied on the emergent field of eugenics to help them make a determination as to competence. Full-bloods were often deemed incompetent because they were full-bloods, whereas mixed-bloods were thought to have enough white blood to make them intelligent enough to understand the ins and outs of land ownership. But how to tell if someone was or was not a full-blood in an especially complicated community like White Earth Reservation whose population had been sourced from North Dakota, Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and Fond du Lac? The secretary of the interior turned to two anthropologists: Dr. Alex Hrdlicka, director of anthropology at the Smithsonian, and Dr. Albert E. Jenks of the University of Minnesota. To determine full-blood status, Hrdlicka and Jenks had devised certain criteria: skull shape, distance between the eyes, color of teeth, nails, and gums. Their most interesting hypothesis was that if you scratched your fingernail across the chest of a mixed-blood it would redden (hyperaemia) more than if you scratched the chest of a full-blood. The effects of this policy and the determinations about full-blood, half-blood, and quarter-blood that were made in the 1920s are still felt today. Most of the “blood” statistics for White Earth were wrong then and were never corrected, and so thousands if not tens of thousands of White Earth Indians today cannot be enrolled and do not receive any of the benefits of enrollment. There were so many claims that land was illegally appropriated from White Earth tribal members that the White Earth Land Settlement Act (WELSA) was passed in 1986. According to WELSA, “The White Earth allotments and land claims controversy involved the individual property rights of Indian people who had received allotments (tracts) of land to be held ‘in trust’ by the United States government. The White Earth land claims involved over 1900 individual allotments and titles to over 100,000 acres of land, which were illegally transferred during the 1900s. The illegal transfers were accomplished through the use of mass quantities of liquor, falsified affidavits, mortgages on grocery bills, sales by minor children, and illegal tax forfeitures. Many of those illegal transfers were uncovered during a federal investigation during the 1980s. After the extent of the land claims [was] discovered and political pressure from the current landowners was applied, the federal government chose to pursue a negotiated political settlement to the land claims controversy. The White Earth Land Settlement Act (WELSA) was passed in 1986 extinguishing the White Earth land claims by retroactively approving the illegal land transfers. In exchange, WELSA provided that the allottees or their heirs would be compensated financially. The mone­tary compensation is to be based on the fair market value of the land at the time of taking, minus any money received by the allottee at the time, plus interest to date.” But with many heirs (sometimes more than twenty) claiming the same parcels of land, what payments were made were so small as to change very little.

  In the 1950s and 1960s as places like Ball Club got to make their own rules about how their children were administered to and as the people of Rice Lake at White Earth came to see they had the power to change their own lives, the grip of the BIA began to loosen in communities on reservations across the country. One skilled fighter confronting the BIA was Roger Jourdain, the first elected chairman of Red Lake Reservation. Just before my father worked for the BIA he found employment at Red Lake through the Community Action Program (CAP), which was funded in part by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and was one of the more controversial aspects of Johnson’s plan. It was a huge program designed to tackle local poverty problems with a cocktail of federal funds, foundation support, and local investment. The controversial aspects were the scale, speed, and unique features of the program that mandated local staffing and control. Jourdain, at Red Lake, was keen to get his hands on the CAP money, and so he and a few other leaders and my father submitted an application for funds through CAP. Their application was denied. The reason: not enough local buy-in. My father and three others got some money from the Minnesota Chippewa tribe and flew to Washington on the red-eye to see what they could do. They landed at six in the morning and spent what remaining cash they had on cab fare from the airport to the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which oversaw the CAP program. They were too early. They went for breakfast, came back, and were told rather curtly by an administrator that there was nothing that could be done.

  “Well,” said one of the Red Lake representatives, “what next?” They had no money and little by way of encouragement.

  “Why don’t we walk down to the vice president’s office?” suggested my father. “He’s from Minnesota.” Since they couldn’t afford cab fare they walked from OEO all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue and announced themselves to the staff at Hubert Humphrey’s office as
a delegation from Red Lake Reservation. “We were met by some functionary,” remembers my father. He came out and took one look at us and asked, ‘What can I do for you?’—though it was clear he didn’t want to do anything. He didn’t even take us into an office to sit down or offer us water or anything. ‘We came to see about our application for CAP money. We were denied and we want Humphrey to do something about it.’

  “‘What seems to be the problem?’

  “‘We applied. We have need. But we’re too fucking poor to qualify. Is that what the War on Poverty is supposed to be like? You have to be rich to qualify?’

  “That got his attention. He disappeared into the back. In a little bit Hubert Humphrey came out. We knew each other from his campaigning days in northern Minnesota. And he said, ‘So what can I do for you?’ And I said, ‘We applied for CAP money. But we were told we were too poor to qualify—we can’t afford the local buy-in because there’s no damn money up there.’ He looked at us and looked at his assistant and said to him, ‘Do something about this, will you?’

  “By that afternoon our application had been approved and we were on our way back to Red Lake. Just having CAP funded at Red Lake was a big deal. It meant health care and housing and social services. But it meant something much more, too,” remembers my father. “For the first time there was a community program on the rez not funded by the BIA. Even the proceeds from fishing or timber sales were kept in trust by the BIA. But they had no part in CAP money. And the band got to hire its own staff, its own outreach workers, its own administration. That, too, was in part how the BIA stopped being the sole power and supreme controller of the purse strings on the rez.”

  In the town of Bemidji, Minnesota, many people are afraid of Red Lakers. Bemidji is the largest town in the area, with a population of 12,000. It is the county seat and the shopping and banking destination for most of the county. Indians live in Bemidji, and many of us go there either to shop or to appear in court or both. The next nearest town that is bigger is Duluth, 155 miles to the east. At one time Bemidji was the going concern. It sat at the junction of rail lines running north-south between Winnipeg and Minneapolis and lines that ran east-west between Grand Forks and Duluth. All the grain and timber passing through the north passed through Bemidji. And it is surrounded by Indians, literally—White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake reservations form the points of a triangle in which Bemidji sits at the center, and the combined reservation populations outnumber the population of Bemidji two to one. Bemidji still has a “circle the wagons” kind of feel to it.

  Nowadays, however, the circling of the wagons has more to do with the service-sector economy gutting local businesses. Most of the stores now hem the town instead of filling it out. At the city center or what’s left of it, enormous cement statues of Paul and Babe stand facing west as they have done since 1937 at the carnival grounds, and just across the main street, at Morrell’s Chippewa Trading Post, is an equally large iron statue of an Indian wearing buckskin breeches but no shirt. His hair is pulled back in two long iron braids and one arm is raised with palm out, in the old “How” pose so familiar to most Americans. For many years Morrell’s iron Indian was the only Indian in town.

  It’s hard to say who’s more savage: the Indian statue or Paul Bunyan. The Indian looks stoic (definitely not Ojibwe) but gentle, somehow, in his iron pose, wearing his iron pants, flexing his iron washboard stomach. The struggle between “the civilized” and “the savage” has been raging in Bemidji for many years. On October 25, 1966, Robert Kohl, a radio announcer on KBUN, Bemidji’s only radio station, read an editorial about life on Red Lake Reservation. He described one particularly run-down home and said:

  The scene is typical of many a welfare home . . . dirt and filth, cats and dogs and flies, lots of kids . . . some retarded, some with emotional problems of a serious nature, but more in proportion than any families off the reservation . . . human irresponsibility at its zenith and it staggers the imagination to discover that we are trying to help these people with welfare money. . . .

  Perhaps that is where the welfare laws could be re-written . . . to help only those who are salvageable. . . . Perhaps we should never have lowered our sights to this level, perhaps we should have let nature take her course, let disease and malnutrition disrupt the reproductive process and weed out those at the very bottom of the heap. . . .

  They are so low on the human scale that it is doubtful they will ever climb upward. Their satisfaction level is so low that it corresponds to that of the most primitive of the earth’s animals . . . food, comfort, and a place to reproduce . . . those are the three . . . and with our welfare dollars we provide a little food in the belly, some kind of primitive shelter, and a place to reproduce, and this is all that is wanted, all that is needed, all that is desired.

  They are satisfied . . . but who takes care of the offspring, including those with tortured and twisted minds raised in this environment? Is it really Christian, really human, to meddle with lives so primitive and basic? And what’s the alternative? Spend thirty or forty thousand dollars per child to remove him from the element, educate him, only to look back and see the child population gaining on you through irresponsible procreation?

  Is it any less heartless to sacrifice physically and mentally healthy young men in Vietnam or Korea to make the world safe for our political philosophy than it is to sacrifice these hopelessly morally and mentally indigent for our economic philosophy?

  Ignoring the fact that not a few men from Leech Lake, White Earth, and Red Lake were at that moment serving in Vietnam, Kohl’s comments were shocking for an entirely different reason. What is amazing is the extent of the belief that Indians don’t read or listen to the radio. Comments about our lives float around us on the air and in print and it comes as a surprise that, in addition to being stoic and riding horses and skinning beavers, we read and we listen. Indians are compulsive newspaper consumers. So it was no surprise that the Red Lake tribal council heard that radio broadcast in 1966, recorded it, and played it at a regularly scheduled council meeting, which happened to be held that same day. At the time Red Lake was governed by an elected tribal council, led by Roger Jourdain, and backed by a council of hereditary chiefs, representing the original seven clans that made up the band. This was a powerful mix. And it was no accident that the joint council decided to fight; by far the largest clan on Red Lake is the Bear Clan. Since Red Lake had existed on the very western frontier of Ojibwe territory for so long, and was so long involved in wars and skirmishes with the Sioux, most of the Red Lake Band belonged to this warrior clan, the Bear Clan. By unanimous decision they decided to boycott businesses in the Bemidji area until Kohl was fired, and until the radio station broadcast a public apology. Leech Lake and White Earth reser­vations joined the boycott the following day.

  The response to the boycott was predictable even if the effects were not. Some area residents came out in support of Indians: Elizabeth Rogers of Guthrie, just south of Bemidji, praised the “wisdom and courage of the Red Lake Tribal Council.” Some did not: David E. Umhauer of Bemidji wrote, “I hope those Indians offended by the broadcast do boycott Bemidji. If they do, it will be a cleaner town.” Cleaner or not, it was, almost immediately, poorer. “The boycott has been so effective and so thorough that over the week, for the first time since Bemidji became a community, Bemidji’s streets have been practically devoid of Indians,” reported the Bemidji Pioneer. No Indians spent any of their money in Bemidji. No one bought groceries, clothes, or equipment. Indians went elsewhere for construction supplies, heating oil, and gasoline. Tribal government offices on all three reservations refused to buy office supplies and business equipment. Many people canceled their insurance policies held by Bemidji brokers. Red Lake and the other reservations threatened to withdraw all tribal funds—obtained by government contracts, logging, and the profits from the Red Lake commercial fishery—from Bemidji’s banks. Since Indians were universally a
cknowledged as being the poorest of the poor, marginal, without any clout to speak of, no one in Bemidji was concerned at first. But the tribal funds banked in Bemidji amounted to $2 million rather than the $500,000 that had previously been estimated. Local businesses, which had haughtily made Indians wait by the back door ever since Bemidji incorporated in 1896, began to feel the pinch immediately. And the pinch hurt more than they cared to admit.

  Roger Jourdain also liked to write letters. As a child he had been sent to an Indian boarding school at Flandreau, South Dakota. He had worked as an operator of heavy machiney during World War II on the Alcan Highway. He was not afraid of a fight. And he was not afraid to write. He wrote hundreds of letters to local, regional, and national political figures. Each letter contained a statement about the radio broadcasts and a transcript of Kohl’s editorial. And each and every envelope was hand-addressed by Jourdain himself in his neat boarding-school script.

  Dear Sir,

  The people of Red Lake Reservation have sought over the years to improve the economic and educational structure of the Reservation. Great strides have been made and particularly so in the last few years.

  It is more than disappointing therefore when broadcasts are made reviving the ancient prejudices, resorting to the name calling of Indians, ignoring the good efforts of the many for the possible faults of the few.

  We attach a transcript of a broadcast made over Bemidji Radio station KBUN on Tuesday, October 25, 1966, and ask for your careful examination of this. We do not consider ourselves as “sub-human, as animal like, or morally and mentally indigent.” We trust you do not think of us in this fashion either. We will appreciate anything you, your office, and associates can do to persuade the management of a 20th century enterprise to outgrow the 19th century hate-the-Indian complex. This should be a time for working and building together, not a time for inflaming ancient racial prejudices.