by David Treuer
“It changed all of us,” Shaye tells me as she begins to take the curlers out of Jordan’s hair. “We all changed when my dad died. But my mom changed more than anyone. It affected her the most. It’s been five years since he died. I’m not mad at that guy anymore. I’m not mad. Not as mad as my bros and sisters.”
Shalah and her family have lived in that house at the end of Tract 34 since she was ten. Before that they lived at Tom’s Resort, where Warren was a caretaker, fix-it man, fishing guide, and all-around help. His sister was married to the owner. After they lived at Tom’s they lived in downtown Cass Lake. “At Tom’s we played in the pool and went fishing and went swimming. Kids on track said, ‘How come you get to do all that?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know.’ We had all sorts of friends—white friends, Indian friends. My friends were my friends, you know.”
Warren had been wild in his early days. Sometimes he would take off. He would walk out the door and then, just as suddenly, walk in months later. No one knew where he went. By the time Shalah was growing up he’d largely quit those disappearing acts. Shaye’s love for him is still very evident. “Other kids would say to me, ‘You’re so lucky. Your dad is so nice. He gives you stuff. He’s around.’ Stuff like that. No matter what they always stuck it out, toughed it out. They got sober after Delores was born. Before that they were still living large. My dad finally got sober when I was fifteen.”
Everyone knew Warren and knew his house on the tract. It was a destination.
“People still come up to me,” says Shaye. “Oh, I remember you. Maybe I cooked for them or something when they were doing ceremony with my dad.”
Shaye has a measured attitude about life on track. When she hears people talk about how bad it is, how rough, she laughs. “It’s rough, sure. But it can’t be no rougher than how those kids have it in Africa. Or the kids in South America. It can’t be any rougher than that. Or kids in Vietnam who live on top of big garbage piles. People don’t put the whole world in perspective. They say, ‘Oh, those poor Indians.’ Don’t pity me. We got it good. We got it better than most people. Don’t feel bad for me. Feel bad for somebody else because, well, I don’t need pity. Even my husband, he says I’m white. ‘What?’ I said, ‘I’m not white.’ ‘Sure you are,’ he says. ‘You’re from America.’”
Shaye shows me a cigarette lighter with a beaded case. Worked into the beaded pattern are the words “100% REZ GIRL.”
I wish I had Shaye’s equanimity. I try to imagine my father bleeding to death on my floor in front of my little sister and cousin, and that’s something I can’t imagine recovering from. I simply can’t imagine it. But Shaye insists that life on track isn’t bad—not as bad as people think.
“It’s pretty rough,” admits Shaye. “But people choose to live that life. Maybe they’re not choosing a good life. Maybe those people haven’t gotten a chance to better their life. Maybe no one was there to teach them, no one to encourage them. My dad always told me, ‘Do your best. Do your best and you’ll be happy.’ So I’ve done my best and I guess I’m happy.”
Warren could be convincing. Once some church people came to the house on a conversion mission. They told Warren that they thought the kids should be going to church. “‘Oh, come on in here and let’s talk about it,’ he said. They came in and started talking to my dad and pretty soon they want to go in the sweat lodge, they want to have an Indian ceremony. There were lots of white people who came here and wanted to be Native. My dad was nice to everybody. We had lots of characters in and out of my door, I’m telling you.”
So the family, making good choices, but staying on track, stayed close. The kids always had bikes and took care of one another. They’d ride all around track on their bikes, down to the convenience store, and down to the lake where they would go swimming. It was a good childhood on track—a normal one, more or less—until Warren was killed. What’s life like? All the girls shrug. Life was life. Gradually they filter out of the house in their prom dresses, stepping over the threshold where Warren died, but where they still enter and exit as they go about their lives.
Tract 33, however, has captured the public imagination as the roughest, hardest, toughest, meanest, and worst of them all. The Pink Palace has a lot to do with that.
Heather Casey, the girl who died at the Pink Palace, had it rough, much rougher than Shaye, and not all of her agony was of her own construction. Her mother, Toni, a heroin addict, used regularly throughout Heather’s childhood. So did her father, George Whipple Jr. When she was twelve her father shacked up with her aunt, Toni’s sister, Sam. Heather went to live with her grandparents in the housing tract nicknamed Tooterville. Sam, sort of a second mother and aunt to Heather, sold drugs to support her habit. She sold them from the Pink Palace—the pink HUD house across the street from the tribal offices owned by Mike Newago. Sam introduced Heather to Newago’s grandson Joe Potter—a handsome, powerful boy five years older than Heather. On August 18, 2004—which was cold and windy for August—Heather put her grandmother to bed and then sneaked out of the house to meet Potter. According to Steve Hagenah, the investigator for the Minnesota State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA): “And he picked her up, and they partied. And he gave her Klonopin. I think they’d been doing some drinking and the drugs, too. They were having sex off and on. And at some point she died. She went into respiratory distress, from the drugs. He woke up with a cold, stiff, dead body next to him in bed. He dragged her in the bathroom and put her in the shower and sprayed cold water on her like that’s going to revive somebody who’s dead and already in rigor. He freaked out and everybody else in the house freaked out. They got her dressed and were trying to stuff her in the car and some people drove by. And remember, she was in rigor, her arms and legs were sticking out. And so then they ended up taking her to the IHS clinic and we get called. I was the first one there and got the story. The story is that this crazy girl showed up at the house and wanted to use the bathroom. Went into the bathroom and after ten or fifteen minutes we went to check on her and we found her in the bathroom, dead. But when I examined the body I saw that she was in full rigor and that this must have happened six or eight hours before. After a while I pieced it all together.” Hagenah shook his head. “God she was a cute girl.”
Mike Newago, Joe Potter’s grandfather, was, on paper at least, the legal owner of the Pink Palace. In his sixties, suffering from diabetes and a host of other ailments, Newago had a legitimate supply of prescription drugs—scrips, as everyone in the know calls them—that he kept in a small desk safe: Oxycontin, Klonopin, Demerol. The problem was that everyone knew the combination to the safe and would dip into Newago’s drugs, or so he said when he protested his innocence. In 2000 agents raided Newago’s house and found prescription narcotics, both legally and illegally obtained. A few kids, teenagers, interviewed during the raid admitted that they had sold Newago’s scrips. Drugs were routinely sold from and used in the Pink Palace. It had been the target of two raids. And yet until it was burned down, the Pink Palace was a destination for runaways and kids who needed some place that wasn’t home. The Pink Palace became a combination drug house, brothel, and runaway shelter. Kids would go there when they had no other place to go and in exchange for sex they were given drugs and a place to crash. Reservation kids being processed at the Boys and Girls Club of Leech Lake often told workers that they were living at the Pink Palace because they couldn’t go home. Other kids, like Heather Casey, simply floated into and out of the Pink Palace, tied to it through a family member—a mother, aunt, father, stepfather, boyfriend—involved in selling and using drugs. You have to wonder what home is like if the Pink Palace seems like a safe place to be.
Cass Lake, so everyone says, used to be a nice town, even if it did have a bloody start. In the late 1800s Leech Lake Reservation was closed to non-Natives; unless you were Indian you couldn’t live there, and this was fine for most people. But there were two problems: there were vast
timber resources still standing on the reservation and the reservation itself blocked east-west and north-south rail lines between Duluth and Grand Forks and Winnipeg and Minneapolis. Two things happened as a result. First, as the story goes, in the middle of the night, with the help of the railroads, businessmen from Bemidji, fourteen miles away, skidded half a dozen buildings from the small whistle-stop town of Rosby onto the present-day site of Cass Lake. They persuaded the president to issue an executive order that officially opened the reservation boundary. The town stayed. This was how Leech Lake Reservation was originally broken open for settlement and set up for white control.
The second thing that happened had to do with the bigger impediment to logging: the lack of rail lines through the reservation. These had been effectively blocked by Chief Zhookaa-giizhig (Dipping Sky) of the Winnibigoshish Band who had his own logging concern on the north shore of Lake Winnibigoshish. Zhookaa-giizhig was the first man to log on Leech Lake, and in 1891 he was the first to float logs down to Minneapolis, where they were milled. But white loggers wanted their share, and in 1894 Zhookaa-giizhig, who was known never to drink, was found “drunk” on the railroad tracks at Deer River, where the line ended. He had, evidently, laid his head down on the tracks and been run over by a train. After that, and with the help of the Nelson Act and the Dawes Act, the reservation opened wide.
My great-great-grandfather Charles Seelye was the direct beneficiary of Zhookaa-giizhig’s death. Charles had come from Portland, Maine, a son of Scottish loggers who had cut mast timber for the king’s navy going back to the 1700s. In Brainerd, Minnesota, he met and married Margaret Aspinwall, the daughter of Bill Aspinwall, the head of a family of mixed-blood traders and agents. In 1896 Charles moved to the reservation and logged Zhookaa-giizhig’s allotments at Cut Foot Sioux and Pigeon lakes. But he could not get paid in advance for his timber and so could not pay his Indian workers, and he went bankrupt on March 12, 1900. His son Walter (my great-grandfather) continued the logging tradition. One outfitter said of my great-grandfather: “That Walt Seelye is all whalebone and rawhide.” And up through the 1970s he was remembered for wearing a black bowler hat year-round, even in the bitter cold. According to Jim Quinn, the owner of a lumber camp, my great-grandfather defied the cold, going without ear warmers or even earflaps.
The town of Cass Lake had the same hardiness. It was a logging and rail center at one time. But after all the trees were cut down and logging slowed, it found new life as a resort town. It had a thriving main street—lined with stores such as the five-and-dime, Neises Sporting Goods, Red Owl Foods, the high school, the Big Tap Bar and Grill, the municipal liquor store, two hotels, and a few cafés. The outskirts of Cass Lake were interspersed with modest resorts. The town had everything small American towns were supposed to have: parades, festivals, a small park. The largest town on Leech Lake Reservation, it once housed a population of 1,200. That has dwindled to 860. The stores are mostly gone. A few restaurants and bars are hanging on for dear life. The streets of Cass Lake, both in the tracts and in the city itself, are dangerous these days. Trouble seems to spill out of everywhere, and nowhere. Many people, like Steve Hagenah, attribute this change to drugs. Drinking is one thing. Pot is something else. But meth, oxy, and other such drugs—“chemical fuel,” as Hagenah calls them—change the game. Paranoia, violence, and pure craziness emerge. As these dangerous drugs become cheaper, life becomes cheaper.
For instance, in November 2002 (a few months after Heather Casey’s boyfriend was trying to shove her body into his trunk), Louie Bisson was out walking his dog. Bisson, forty-eight, was thin and balding, part Indian but albino, and he was legally blind. He lived a few doors down from his mother’s house and found work fixing decks and building sheds. He was single, and his only real hobby was walking, which he did almost every night with his dog, Little O, around the darkened streets of Cass Lake. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans and had put on long johns under his pants as a defense against the cold November night. He also carried an ax handle to scare off other dogs and kids if need be; he’d been harassed before.
That same night three teenagers—Jessie Tapio, George Boswell, and Darryl Johnson—were also walking around the streets of Cass Lake. All of them had been in trouble over the past few years. All of them had been in the foster care system, juvenile detention centers, or both. All of them had mothers who drank and did drugs. According to the reporter Larry Oakes, Jessie had fetal alcohol syndrome, George had brain damage from lead poisoning, and Darryl had been damaged somehow after falling out of a second-story window as a toddler. The boys had spent the afternoon drugging, and in the evening they sold some pot to a young woman, Ruth Bellanger, who agreed, in return, to get the boys some booze, which she did after taking a run to Safari Liquors next to the supermarket just off the highway. The evening passed with Southern Comfort and raspberry vodka in Darryl’s bedroom, where the walls were covered with posters of Tupac Shakur. Eventually they headed out into the night. It was after eleven when they saw Louie Bisson.
According to testimony and eyewitness accounts the boys were jumpy, paranoid, aggressive. Earlier that evening they’d gone to the house of an acquaintance and threatened him, his father, and his sister. When they saw Louie and his dog they started running toward him. Bisson turned, tried to flee, and got as far as half a block from the police station when the boys took his ax handle and beat him with it. His skull was crushed. When the police arrived on the scene they saw the clear print of a basketball sneaker on Bisson’s cheek. In the score of homicides in Cass Lake over the last ten years the most prevalent cause of death is beating. Many people, my mother included, long for the good old days. And even if it is a false nostalgia for days that were hardly good, it’s easy to see why they seem better.
Steve Hagenah, the investigator with the BCA, remembers those days, too. Steve is tall, mustached, with large hands and gray eyes. He has a friendly, craggy face. After working in law enforcement on and near the reservation for thirty-five years, he has perfected a hard stare that, I imagine, isn’t so nice to see across from you in an interrogation room. Steve was raised on the rez, and though he wasn’t Indian by blood he came up with Indians—Gabby Headbird, my uncle Sonny. Steve was prom king in 1969 opposite my cousin Lynette, who was prom queen. Steve’s family tree is complex and improbable. His mother, Beverly, was the daughter of Bessie Cooper, a white girl from Minneapolis, and Lester Young, the jazz tenor sax master. Bessie died in childbirth and Steve’s mother was taken in by a Romanian Jewish family in north Minneapolis. After marrying Steve’s dad and living in Fargo, North Dakota for a few years, she divorced and returned to north Minneapolis. Steve and his sister lived with their grandmother north of Cass Lake for a few years until his dad moved there and took up residence. Steve was raised in Cass Lake and roamed the town with his Indian friends, some of whom became his stepbrother and stepsisters when his father married an Indian woman. When his mother died, the minister asked Steve what kind of service he wanted for her. “Oh, you know,” he said, “just your standard Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist kind of thing. Just like you’d normally have.”
The good old days, according to Steve, weren’t so good. “My dad was real physical. Mean,” he said. “He beat on me. He beat on my sister. I grew up raising a lot of hell.” So, too, did the guys Steve was friends with into high school. Randy Headbird, Sonny Seelye, Johnny Jones. They were all into and out of trouble. But sometime during those high school years, Steve split from those friends. “The Cantys and the Stangels, and the Matthews, and all that whole crew, they all came to Cass Lake High School. So we all hung out together, palled around together, fought together. As a kid growing up—you know the ‘Stand By Me’ days when you go around and catch frogs and all that—we were in it together. But take Randy Headbird. And Johnny Jones. At some point someone said, ‘Hey, you guys are Indian, you shouldn’t be hanging around that white kid.’ Their friends were giving them shit. We were the best of fr
iends, we didn’t get in trouble together, but we fished and swam and palled around together. But then someone would say, ‘Why are you hanging around with that fucking white kid?’ I still kind of hung out with those kids, but it became kind of an issue. What it was, was friends and family saying you should hang out with someone else. Guys were dropping out of school and going to jail. But the football team, it was one-third Native and two-thirds not. We were pals. That kind of thing brought people back together. It was never overt, just implied—you should stop hanging out. There was racism both ways. And you felt ostracized by the people you grew up with. All of a sudden I wasn’t Steve Hagenah, the pal from school. I was the fucking white kid.” After graduating from Cass Lake in 1969, Steve went into law enforcement. Many of his friends went the other way. In 1972 Steve came back to the reservation and worked as a city cop for the town of Cass Lake.
“Back then, every night was Saturday night. And I was busting the guys I went to high school with.” There were big fights all the time. Villages were pitted against each other—Bena versus Onigum or Ball Club versus Inger. My mother remembers that every Saturday night the Bena boys would fight the Ball Club boys. “It was routine,” she says, like weekly softball games. “And they still do it,” she says.