by David Treuer
Because of the boarding schools of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century and the ease with which Indian children were snatched from their homes by social workers and county nurses between the 1940s and the 1970s, Indian children were especially vulnerable. Many parents did not have the opportunity to save their children—unlike the chief in William Warren’s account or George Copway. In Minnesota, one in four Indian children under the age of one was removed from his or her home and either placed in foster care or adopted by a non-Indian couple. Twenty-five percent of Indian children lost their tribe, their rights, and their heritage. The problem of Indian children drifting away from home and tribe was so acute that the U.S. government passed legislation in 1978 for the special protection of Indian children. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 was the first step in recognizing the disastrous results of boarding schools and zealous foster care programs. Its main goal was to keep Indian children in Indian families. The ICWA was not based on race; it is based on the political affiliation of Indian children with a specific federally recognized tribe or reservation.
The ICWA is dry stuff, dry reading, that is. But in Indian country, it seems everyone is a lawyer; everyone has a vested interest in the exact letter of the law and nowhere else does one feel the direct pressure or pleasure of laws, statutes, Supreme Court decisions, or shifts in federal policy. The act reads:
Recognizing the special relationship between the United States and the Indian tribes and their members and the Federal responsibility to Indian people, the Congress finds:
Congress, through statutes, treaties, and the general course of dealing with Indian tribes, has assumed the responsibility for the protection and preservation of Indian tribes and their resources; that there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children and that the United States has a direct interest, as trustee, in protecting Indian children who are members of or are eligible for membership in an Indian tribe; that an alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by non-tribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions; and that the States, exercising their recognized jurisdiction over Indian child custody proceedings through administrative and judicial bodies, have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families.
And with that, jurisdiction over the placement of enrolled tribal members became a federal matter and no longer a state or county matter, though all these jurisdictions overlap and feed into one another in practice.
In Beltrami County one in four children lives in poverty; this is the highest rate in the state. At Red Lake, 47 percent of children live in poverty. In 2005 the high school graduation rate was 57 percent. Only 25 percent of ninth-graders at Red Lake high school lived with both their parents. In an anonymous survey 81 percent of ninth-grade girls in Red Lake said they had thought about killing themselves. Clearly, something is out of control. Clearly, many Indians have not had control of their own lives or their own resources. But what I wonder about is the difference between someone like Jeff Weise—who seems to have had no hope at all, who had largely given up on, well, as sentimental as it sounds, love—and all the other kids who’ve had it rough on the rez.
2
Even if Jeffrey Weise didn’t feel that he had a reason for living, there are reasons, and they are growing each and every day, or so it seems when I stop by the Boys and Girls Club of Leech Lake. The club is located in the old high school in downtown Cass Lake, where my mother, uncles, aunt, and second cousins went. The new high school sits on the edge of town, away from the Super Fund Site that is downtown Cass Lake. The streets of Cass Lake, so dangerous for so many people, don’t seem that bad with the lights blazing from the windows of the club. The old school hums with the voices of kids. About eighty kids between the ages of six and twelve show up after school and leave at five-thirty, when the teenagers take their turn. On each and every school night at least sixty Cass Lake teenagers, almost all Indian, walk through the doors to play basketball and video games, go on MySpace and Facebook, eat, joke around, and tease one another. It is loud: loud in the old classrooms, loud in the hallways, loud in the bathrooms. The kids cluster around the workers and hammer them with requests and questions. And the things they talk about—who’s pregnant and who left for North Dakota and who is coming back and when can they go on the computer and so-and-so has been on longer than everyone else—suggest they are alive and excited about being alive. Well, for lack of a better phrase, they sound like kids.
Towering above them is Keenan Goodfellow, a Samoan. He grew up and lived in the tough neighborhood of north Minneapolis. Round-faced and round-headed, he has a build that the kids have to respect: broad, with arms slabbed with muscle, about as big around as my legs, a football lineman’s arms. He wears a white fitted baseball cap backward, cargo pants, and flip-flops, and he makes the best ribs you’ll ever eat. When I visit Keenan for the first time, he has the kids doing a writing assignment in order to earn computer time. They come up with half-filled pages. He glances at the pages and whips them back: “Get real.” “Not good enough.” “You’ve got to be kidding. This? No way.” The kids groan and complain and get back to it.
Keenan estimates that 80 percent of the kids who come to the club don’t live with their parents. All of them come from poverty. Vanessa Budreau is an example. Vanessa is a sharp, funny, sassy girl in the eighth grade. She has a classic Ojibwe face—round, with deep brown eyes and small level teeth. As I talked to her she kept up our conversation, teased a boy making faces through the glass door, and exchanged quips with Keenan. As part of an assignment, she wrote: “I think the reservation is an improving town. I mean around 2000–2005 it was probably one of the most ugliest, savviest, sad, poor, broke towns I have ever seen. But in 2007 the board start having meetings that actually worked and our town is looking a little better. Every day I see a bum with sad, poor kids with no education. Someone with an education wasting it with liquor and drugs. That someone is my mom she was a good mom until I turned 9 and knew what her day off from kids day was. Which were her day of drinking days. I always wondered why she would be so sick in the mornings. Everything was going good until my grandma died in 06 that was the year my dad left my mom and went all the way to North Dakota without telling anybody.”
Vanessa has certainly seen a lot. I ask her what she means when she says Cass Lake is getting better. “Well,” she said, “it’s got lights—you know, street lights—now. And new streets. And sidewalks. Stuff like that.” Her days are getting better, too. After her mother hit the skids Vanessa went to live with her grandfather, whom she clearly loves. She and her siblings and many of her cousins and their babies all landed there until there were fourteen people living in a trailer meant for three. But they got a house on a housing tract south of Cass Lake. They have four bedrooms. Seven members of her family moved out, so there are only seven of them in a house twice the size of the one they had before. She has her own room. Her little brother doesn’t eat her homework anymore. School is going well. She’s decided that she doesn’t want to drink or use drugs. Her friends have decided the same thing. And it’s strange to hear twelve-year-olds say they’ve sworn off meds, pot, and booze. Stacy, one of the other workers of the Boys and Girls Club, tells me that kids as young as nine, with world-weary wisdom, have decided to “get clean” because of the club. “They can tell me what the numbers and letters on pills mean—which ones are Darvocet and which ones are Oxy. I don’t know the difference. But they do.” The tribal government sometimes does what it can, and often doesn’t do all that it can. There are Boys and Girls Clubs in all the major communities on Leech Lake Reservation and other chapters at Red Lake and Bemidji.
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Vanessa has come up hard, as hard as it gets. She’s lost her parents. She’s poor. She’s Indian in a town full of poor, parentless Indians. It is much easier to get drugs and to sell them than it is to get into college. Before joining the club she had never been to a restaurant other than a fast-food place or a buffet. As part of SMART Girls, a program attached to the Boys and Girls Club, preteen and teenage girls who qualified because of good grades got to eat out at a restaurant of their choice. They chose Taco Bell. Stacy, the coordinator, told them to think big. They chose Wendy’s. Finally, after some coaxing, she persuaded them to try a local chain, Green Mill. The girls were stunned by the stonework and the wood-paneled booths. When the server came to their table the girls reared back and looked her up and down; they thought she was “stepping.” Stacy explained that the server was there to take their order, that she would bring their food to them—they didn’t have to get it themselves. Just that short trip to the Green Mill in Bemidji was eye-opening for many of them.
2
It’s March now, just a few weeks shy of the second anniversary of the shooting at the school in Red Lake. I like March. Winter is on its way out and my family is busy maple sugaring. We had a very warm spell last week and so we had to get our buckets and taps ready in a hurry. Our family has been sugaring in the same place for the last thirty years—just past the reservation boundary on Highway 12, just past the dam where I used to fish, just past the house where Reagan and Patrick used to live. Sugaring is nice work—it’s not too hard, compared with ricing, netting, trapping, or hunting. The weather is usually nice. And with the fire going and tea made from Lipton’s bags steeped in hot maple sap, and the smell of jack pine slab, it’s a relief after the winter. In the lakes nearby the walleye are schooling and getting ready to run back up the river to thrash once again at the foot of the dam before they drop their eggs and swim back down to the lakes.
I had to set out the taps alone. My older brother is expecting another child. My younger brother and sister are busy working. My mother lost a lung to cancer and so it’s hard for her to get around in the woods the way she used to. My father no longer sugars at all. He’s eighty-one. So I rounded up all the pails and buckets; washed them; organized the taps and plastic tubing, my auger, and a hatchet; and set off for the sugar bush. It’s only two miles from the house, and I was in a hurry, so I dumped everything into the back of the truck and took off. Right at the reservation boundary a gust came up and blew one ice-cream pail from the back of the truck, but I kept on, figuring I’d pick it up on my way home.
It was sunny, maybe fifty degrees. The snow was still deep and I slogged through it from tree to tree. The sugar bush is nice because it seems like the kind of place where nothing happens. There were no animal tracks—no deer trails, no rabbit trails, no fox, wolf, coyote, fisher, or marten tracks at all. Just the soughing of the trees, the knackering of branches. I was still working close to the road when a white sedan with Leech Lake Reservation plates pulled up next to my truck. The horn honked.
“Excuse me! Excuse me, sir!” someone called.
I looked up.
“This’s got to be your bucket. I found it on the road.”
An arm waved out the car window, holding my ice-cream pail.
I slogged over to the car and said thanks.
The man was about my age. A lot bigger. Dark. He had on fashionable wire-rimmed glasses and wore his hair in a loose ponytail.
“You must have to eat a ton of ice cream to get enough buckets for this.”
“We all do our part,” I agreed.
We didn’t have much else to say
“Thanks for finding my bucket,” I said.
“No problem. No problem at all.” And he drove away.
And just when he put the car in gear and pulled out into the road I recognized him. It was Reagan Morgan. It had to be. I hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years, so I couldn’t be sure. But it was the same round, open, friendly face. The same full cheeks. The same eyes. His hair was longer and his complexion a lot clearer. His glasses were better, too.
It was weird. I had been writing about him just that morning. And wondering, too. Wondering if he was doing OK. Wondering if his life was what he wanted it to be. My sister, who gets out a lot more than I do, says she sees him once in a while at Moose-A-Brew, a coffee shop in Bemidji. He games there a lot, she says. I also wonder if he remembers me and my brother, and remembers fishing with us. The man in the white car seemed healthy and happy. Solid. And he did me a good turn by bringing my bucket over.
I trotted back to my taps and began tapping again: drilling the holes and fitting the spigots in. The sap will start running any day now. And every morning when I go to check, my buckets will feel like Christmas, with a surprise (How much? How full?) in every bucket.
I thought about those past summers as I tapped. I thought about the afternoon after Reagan showed me his Hustler. We eventually landed a huge northern pike. I don’t remember who did it—probably my brother Tony, who was always luckier than I was. We decided to hide the Hustler in our cave and to come back for it the next day—daring fate or chance or the college kids who prowled the dam drinking beer. We wrapped it in plastic we found on the riverbank and put the magazine back in the small hole as far as Reagan’s longer arms could reach. And then we put the northern pike on a yellow nylon stringer, wrapped the stringer around my handlebars, and all took off for home together.
The magazine was there when we returned the next day. It was damp, wavy with moisture. The cheap magazine stock showed the text through the photos, proving that those are magazines you can read. But it was damaged, harder to enjoy somehow because the wavy paper, the leaking ink, made it impossible to pretend that we were looking at something other than a cast-off magazine, cheap, filled with cheap thrills.
But before that, as we biked home, with the northern pike banging against my bare legs all the way there, leaving slime down my thighs and grinning and turning its dead eye toward me; with Anton, Reagan, and Patrick; with the sun on our backs as we pedaled east—it felt good to be alive. We owned the whole road. Reagan and Patrick kept on toward their house. We turned right onto our road. And still we swerved and stood and pumped the pedals and swerved some more, the dead fish banging against my legs. And all the while I thought about that magazine, sleeping in its cave, and the tangled mysteries it contained, and the hope that someday it would all make sense.
Russell Bryan and Helen (Bryan) Johnson near their home in Squaw Lake, 1981
Courtesy Helen (Bryan) Johnson
5
We saw the new Morongo Casino, Resort, and Spa rise up like a monolith, like the Colossus of Rhodes, from the foothills of the Coachella Valley north and west of Palm Springs. It was visible from fifteen miles away, a solid, angular, basalt-colored spire jutting from the valley scree, looking more like an ancient artifact than a new luxury destination. It’s not often that casinos can be described as beautiful or impressive in a “not Vegas” way, but the Morongo Tower was. Even though its architectural elements blend in with the desert, we found ourselves wondering how it got there. Some conspiracy theorists believe that space aliens may have built the pyramids at Giza, and the same feeling attends the spectacle of the Morongo Tower rising from the Palm Springs desert. Casinos like this—though perhaps not quite as nice—rise all across the American landscape. They rise from swamps, suburbs, deserts, and forests. They perch on cliffs and look out over lakes.
The presence of the Morongo Tower is even more amazing when you remember that, historically at least, Indian reservations are a great place to be poor if you are Indian—and a fantastic place to get rich if you’re not. It is only recently that this pattern is being reversed. For centuries, privateers, government officials, railroad barons, timber magnates, prospectors, and mining companies have made a mint exploiting Native land and resources while the Indians
for whom reservations were created have gotten poorer and poorer.
After we’d checked in, and with a weird kind of pride of ownership (the Morongo Band of Mission Indians who own the Morongo casino aren’t my tribe, after all), I said to the valet, as I would say to a butler in my own mansion, “The bags, please.”
As the elevator gushed up toward the seventeenth floor and the desert dwindled below us, I looked at my wife, who resembles a Native American Gwen Stefani with smoky eyes and a tongue ring and tattoos, and I marveled that we (Indians, that is) actually own all this—not my wife, of course, but this casino. We own it when we are really expected to be only two things, dead or poor. But gaming has become big news—if not the news—about Indians in the last decade and a half: Indian gaming brought in $25 billion dollars in 2006, compared with the $12 billion generated in Las Vegas. I thought to myself as I settled into our room, which was as beautiful as the tower that encased it, “I just might win after all.”
It is odd to think you can strike it rich at an Indian casino and that Indian casinos have made a few (not many) Indians rich themselves. This is especially odd because, originally, the reservations were more or less set up to be poor—and if that wasn’t the intent, it surely was the effect. While the Delaware might have gotten a reservation in exchange for fighting the British, and the Dakota because they defeated the U.S. Army during the Red Cloud Wars, and the Ojibwe through negotiations in present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota, most reservations were not created with such noble principles or because of such strength in bargaining. Rather, in the nineteenth century, the U.S. government thought reservations were a promise it would never have to keep. In most people’s estimation Indians would be gone—carried away by disease or intermarriage—within a generation or two. The reservations, in other words, were promises that no one thought would need to be kept for more than a couple of decades. Few counted on Indians living and loving and making so many new Indians. And no one counted on the resources that did exist within the boundaries of some reservations and that eventually became very important to the United States. The white pine timber in Wisconsin and Minnesota was suddenly close and valuable to Chicago, which needed the pine to build itself and then rebuild itself after it burned down. No one imagined that uranium deposits in Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo country would mean so much to national security. And no one knew how much oil was hidden under Osage lands.