by David Treuer
Reagan also got his hands on other, more adult items. One day—it must have been in midsummer—Reagan and Patrick showed up at the dam. Tony and I were already fishing on the bank near our cave, under the shade of the willow and tag alder that sprouted from between the rocks. It was hot, but the spray from the river and the shade and the water that seeped from the riverbank kept us cool. Patrick wandered off to play somewhere else, alone. Reagan set up his pole, cast an unweighted twister tail into the water, and sat down between me and Tony.
You guys want to see something? he asked mysteriously. Check this out.
He reached into his thin nylon backpack and took out a magazine. His fingers fumbled a bit and tapped nervously on the cover. It was a Hustler. I was nine, maybe ten years old.
Reagan’s jaw was a little slack, and he used both hands when he held the magazine. His eyes were far away, thinking on some other place.
This has it all. Everything’s in here, he said. Everything you need is right here.
We fished and took turns reading the Hustler. At one point, with his rod braced against a willow and his line unfurling in the water, Reagan accordioned the centerfold and held it up. The sun came from behind the paper and I saw the river—the water spilling over the dam, the shadows of the diamond willow—through the woman’s figure (which on the previous page was involved in weird ways with a clear plastic cane).
Hey, Dave. So let me ask you something. What’s your favorite part?
I said nothing.
I mean, what’s your favorite? Upstairs or downstairs?
A lot seemed to rest on my answer. I looked upstairs—pillowy, soft, full. I looked downstairs: confusing and vaguely dangerous. After some time, I said, Upstairs. I like upstairs the best. All the way.
Reagan snickered. I figured, he said disdainfully. I like downstairs. There’s nothing like downstairs. Nothing in this world.
Reagan closed the magazine. We fished for a while longer, but nothing was biting, so we packed up our gear and biked back toward home, spread out along the highway from shoulder to shoulder, again with the sun at our backs. We parted at the intersection of our dirt road and Power Dam Road.
Tony and I pedaled south, parallel to the reservation boundary, until we got home, and if the boundary were in some way visually obvious, we would have been able to see it from the dining room window, where we would eat dinner with our younger brother and sister and our parents and then practice piano, play games, build a fort, or read, until it was time for bed. Reagan and Patrick pedaled straight toward the boundary sign, where they turned left to go to their house. I don’t know what they did when they got there. I am certain they didn’t practice piano. Reagan and Patrick did not, at that time, live with their family. I think they were foster kids in a white family. They might have been formally adopted. I don’t know how long they had been there by that time or how long they stayed or even what brought them there.
2
Not far from where Reagan and Patrick and my siblings and I grew up was a place that welcomed lonely children and too often destroyed them. On the outskirts of Cass Lake, on the edge of the what some say is the worst housing tract in all of Indian country, sat a forlorn HUD house, no different in construction from all the others except that it is was painted pink. It’s gone now, burned down. But while it stood it was known as the Pink Palace. The Pink Palace was a fairy-tale place, but twisted and grotesque, a place where you could go and get your heart’s desire but forfeit your life. It was there that Heather Casey, a fifteen-year-old Indian girl, overdosed on drugs (mostly Klonopin, an antianxiety prescription drug), was raped while she was unconscious, died, and then was placed, naked, in a bathtub under cold water. She was then removed, was stuffed into the trunk of a car (she wouldn’t fit, because rigor mortis had set in), and was driven to the IHS clinic a few blocks away where the police became involved. “She was,” says the investigator in charge of solving her murder, “about the cutest little dead girl you’ve ever seen.”
The HUD houses, like the one where Heather Casey died, and the neighborhoods made up of them, were conceived as part of Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched in the 1960s. They brought twentieth-century housing to reservations across the country. Until that time most Indians on most reservations lived as best they could. Some had decent homes with running water and electricity. Most did not. Most Indians on the reservation lived in shacks or cabins made of whatever was at hand—tar paper, corrugated tin, logs, scavenged lumber. Running water and electricity were rare. To listen to the stories of Indians who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s is to hear of hardships that almost seem fun in retrospect. Rene Gurneau of Red Lake remembers trying to fall asleep by counting the stars through the slits of the roof boards in her family’s small cabin there. My mother, the eldest of five siblings, remembers sleeping two kids to a bed and having to take turns bathing in a galvanized washtub, the water turning brown and browner as each child stepped in, washed, and stepped out. Stories about winter trips to the outhouse belong to their own genre. “Oh,” remembers my mother, “everyone had an outhouse. That wasn’t special. Ours was a bad one, though. My dad never fixed anything. Not anything ever except for cars and then watch out, walk carefully! So the outhouse was missing slats in the door and the walls. When it was minus thirty you only went to the outhouse when you had to and you didn’t take your sweet time. And of course the ground was frozen for half the year and with two adults and five kids . . . I mean, it was gross. It got pretty full. My grandma Izzie had the nicest outhouse in Bena: a two-seater and a third, lower seat, so kids could use it. All in tip-top shape.” Helen Bryan, of Squaw Lake on the northern edge of Leech Lake, grew up much the same way—in a cabin with no insulation and no running water, built by her grandfather. When the anthropologist M. Inez Hilger conducted a survey on White Earth Reservation in Minnesota in 1938, she found that of the roughly 250 households she visited, well over half were merely tar paper shacks: rough stud walls covered in slab that was in turn covered with tar paper. Only eight of the shacks she looked at had wooden roof shingles; the rest used tar paper for the roof as well. Only one of the houses had a foundation (a log buried in dirt). The rest of the shacks were built directly on the ground. “A typical tar-paper shack as found on the White Earth Reservation,” she wrote, “consisted of a one-story framework of studding, the exterior of which was covered with rough one-inch boards of various widths. The cheapest lumber was usually gotten for covering, many times the first slats in the cutting of lumber being used. In several cases wooden boxes, used in shipping groceries and other supplies, were broken down and utilized. The boards, after being nailed to the studding, were covered with tar-paper, the latter being securely fastened with narrow slats of wood, or disks of tin. The extent to which wind and rain were kept from penetrating depended on the condition of the paper.” The shacks were wet in the summer, cold in the winter, and made entirely of highly flammable materials. Dysentery, flu, pneumonia, and house fires were common. And this was how most people lived on most reservations from the turn of the century well into the 1960s. “You want to hear something really stupid?” asked my mother. “Someone got some grant from someone on Leech Lake. A grant for indoor plumbing, so they put toilets in about twenty shacks in Inger. No money for anything else. No money for things like interior walls. So they slapped toilets in the corners of these one-room shacks. This was in the 1960s. What did they think? Indians don’t like privacy? No one used them, except for shelves. You’d visit someone and they’d have this toilet in the corner, piled high with magazines or papers or whatever. And everyone still used the outhouses.” Although HUD tried to change all this, to change the way Indians lived, it only partially succeeded.
Armed with the latest research and outside experts, HUD built housing tracts (pronounced “tracks” by residents of these neighborhoods) on reservations across the country beginning in the 1960s. Larger tribes with more clout and better
connections got more of the HUD funding. Small tribes were often overlooked. This new housing was the first step, for many Indian families, into the twentieth century. It came in the form of planned neighborhoods consisting, mostly, of split-level or rambler-style homes, arranged in either square grids or meandering culs-de-sac. It was believed that the suburban bioscape was the one most conducive to success and happiness. After World War II the logic was that communities built in culs-de-sac, with winding roads and no alleys, would reduce automobile traffic and so also reduce noise. Instead of a grid with streets and alleys (and lots of places for hoodlums to lurk) culs-de-sac and suburban developments would make it harder for crime to flourish because no one would simply be passing through; rather, anyone who was there would be there for a reason. This ignores the fact that crimes in a given place are often perpetrated by those who live there. The same planning logic that created the suburbs created the late-twentieth-century reservation housing tract across Indian reservations.
Where once there had been fallow fields or deep woods there were, suddenly, clusters of houses set cheek to jowl, with paved streets and gutters, but no curbs. Families signed up for housing and were assigned a house on the basis of a combination of first come, first served; lottery; and nepotism. Sometimes residents had to pay a small monthly rent; in other instances housing was free. Mostly the tribe was responsible for construction and upkeep. The good news was that for many families, the new houses were filled with luxuries—if not central air- conditioning, then at least constant heat, running water, a dedicated bathroom, electricity, and a roof that didn’t leak. The bad news was that on large reservations, such as Leech Lake and White Earth (and this was true for large reservations across the country) that had many small villages located within their boundaries, the age-old structure of these communities—the geographical manifestation of family ties, old rivalries, kinship, and warring factions—was completely ignored. Families who had little to do with one another and who came from very different villages were suddenly neighbors. Sometimes this was fine. Sometimes it was not. And the houses were often poorly built. Foundations were poured after and above the frost. Paint was hard to come by. Contractors skimmed. Sheetrock isn’t always the best surface to put in houses for people who aren’t used to it. At one time, most people who’d never been to a reservation imagined that Indians lived in tepees or wigwams. That idea gave way to the image of tar paper shacks and tin roofs. And now there is an image of HUD houses: decrepit ramblers with peeling paint, a dead car in the yard, kids in diapers running in the middle of the street without an adult in sight, weeds lining the road (instead of grass, flowers, or gardens), clotheslines sifted over with dust. This is the stereotype, anyway, of HUD housing on Indian reservations—one that is sometimes true.
Many Indians today are still waiting for HUD housing. In 1995, after thirty or more years of HUD housing (and the disasters that attend those housing tracts), more than 40 percent of Indians in tribal areas live in what HUD calls “substandard” houses. “Substandard” is a euphemism for anything ranging from a plywood box (like the one Thelma Moses calls home on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation in Washington) to a house with no bathroom. In 1996 the Navajo Nation declared a state of emergency. At the time, more than 80 percent of the existing homes on the Navajo reservation lacked running water, electricity, and telephones and more than 20,000 Navajo had no homes at all. Government estimates from the 1990s suggest that about 100,000 Indians across the country were waiting for HUD houses. And it’s not that Indians across the country are waiting for handouts. Many Indians can’t get loans—because of unemployment, which runs as high as 80 percent on some reservations, and also because they have nothing to offer as collateral; tribal land is held in trust and can’t be mortgaged.
So Indians are still waiting for housing. The images of HUD housing, of life on a “track,” are largely accurate with regard to many housing tracts on my reservation. From Tracts 33 and 34, just north of Cass Lake, to the more colorfully named tracts Mac Flats, Tooterville, Fox Creek, and Porcupine Flats, life can be rough. But not all, not even most, Indians on my reservation live on tract. Many still live in their families’ traditional villages—Onigum, Inger, Squaw Lake, Ball Club, Bena, Mission, Oak Point, Boy River, Federal Dam, and Sugar Point. Many don’t live in villages at all but have, instead, built their own homes on dirt roads and long driveways in the deep woods both on and off the reservation. However, “track” has come to be the most recognizable portrait of rez life for most outsiders. Think of the long, moving color shots accompanied by “lonesome” sound tracks in movies such as Thunderheart, Dance Me Outside, and Smoke Signals. Indians who live or grew up on a tract have developed their own mythology about the place, a mythology based on violence. Dustin Burnette, a Leech Laker who grew up near Tract 33, remembers, “Yeah, I’d take friends to track in the summer, roll down the windows, and start blasting country music—you know Garth Brooks or something. And my friends would be like, ‘Knock it off, man! You’re going to get us killed!’ And they’d duck way down in their seats and I’d whoop and holler and shit. It was fun.” Country music does seem out of place on a track. But then again, so do Indians, in a way. If you squint hard enough to block out the trees and grass or the snow, you end up with a vision not of the north woods but of East LA, an East LA drawn from the movies. Colorfully painted houses falling into the ground, trash, burned-out cars. Track is hard. Even so, outsiders often don’t feel, don’t even recognize (no matter how often you tell them otherwise) that they are on the rez until we drive through a track. I once brought a reporter to the rez and she kept asking, Are we on the rez yet? Are we there yet? I kept telling her that yes, we were, but she didn’t really believe me—until we drove through Tract 33 outside Cass Lake, and she was both scared and relieved that the rez was finally recognizable to her.
One resident remembered Tract 33: “I didn’t feel safe in town, you know I was always looking over my shoulder and always when I parked my vehicle outside I was always checking on it to make sure nothing was happening.” One former chairman of Leech Lake said, “Tract 33 was bad. . . . At night you can’t sleep around here. There are cars racing up and down the street, and there are gunshots periodically and people coming to my door and knocking and wanting to come in, so I have to stay up and watch my house.” One kid from track said, “I was involved, you know, in a lot of car thefts, just about anything from beatings from fighting to getting in them, starting to sell drugs. . . . Some of the people I grew up with, they are doing prison time for murder and I got other friends sitting in prison for attempted murder and these are the ones I grew up with and called, you know, my brothers. . . . It was a rapid change just from when I was growing up. . . . How bad it picked up. . . . People like me at the time . . . were actually scared.”
There were plenty of reasons to be scared on track, whether you were young or old, passing through and blasting country music, or trying to get some sleep. Warren Tibbetts lived on Tract 34 just north of Tract 33. He had been around the block—twice, three times—and around the country as well. A veteran of Vietnam and an early and active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), he had seen his share of conflict and violence. And he, admittedly, had instigated a lot of it. But he had settled down, quit drinking, quit smoking pot, and gotten his life together. He lived at the end of one of the culs-de-sac, where he raised his family and became an important part of a renaissance in Ojibwe culture and ceremony. Warren was thin and rangy and funny. He would sometimes take off into the bush for days at a time. If people needed a place to crash, to sleep it off, or to recover, he always welcomed them. On September 24, 2005, his neighbor Michael Francis Anthony Wind started things up. He was trying to get his dog to fight Warren’s dog, goading both dogs with a rake or a broom. Warren, wearing his slippers, came out to stop the dogs (he really loved his dog) and to stop Wind. Wind, drunk, attacked him and stabbed him clean through the heart. Warren staggered back into his house a
nd died on the kitchen floor in front of his daughter Dee and his niece Janelle. All of this came out of nowhere, on a typical night.
“It was just another day,” says Shalah, the eldest daughter of Warren and Nancy Tibbetts. Shalah, twenty-eight years old, and brassy, is “a rez girl through and through till I die,” as she puts it. It is impossible not to like Shaye; she is sharp and funny, and she can find just the right way to tease the people she likes: two parts fun and one part spice, so that you laugh instead of being offended. She is one of the least judgmental people I’ve ever met. She is dark but has freckles. She has a gap between her two front teeth. Her hair is always changing, from pink to red to brown to black and then back to pink. Her hair changes color and style even more often now that she’s been living with her Guatemalan husband in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where she graduated from cosmetology school in 2009. But she’s come home to Tract 34. “It’s lonely out there. I mean, I like my husband’s peeps. But they don’t speak English. Neither does he. The only other Indian I met out there was the Indian from the Village people! It’s true. I was in the UPS store in Asbury Park and this old Mexican guy comes in and the guy at the counter was real nice to him. He left and the guy says to me, ‘You know who that was?’ I say, ‘Ummm, a Mexican?’ ‘No! that was the Indian from the Village People!’” Actually, Felipe Ortiz Rose, the Indian from the Village People, is Puerto Rican on his mother’s side and Lakota Sioux on his father’s.
Shaye is back at Tract 34. She and her husband, Pedro, came home from New Jersey because Shaye was pregnant and wanted to have her baby on the rez. I can hear merengue coming from the basement. The TV is on in the living room; 300 is playing. Shaye is doing Jordan Bush’s hair. Janelle, Darlene, and Lindsey are waiting their turn. It’s prom night for some of the schools and they are all getting ready. The table where the girls are getting their hair done is littered with glasses, beading, jewelry projects, makeup, curling irons, straightening paddles, and a magnifying vanity mirror. The girls are already in their prom dresses. We’re all sitting not far from where Warren died on the floor—not more than three feet away—but this place is teeming with life. The girls are excited. They have never looked more beautiful, more queenly. They tease Shaye and she teases them back and they smile into the vanity and perfect their makeup. When people describe families or communities as “close-knit” I think this is what they must mean. I would have to say that none of them can do without the other.