by David Treuer
One of the strangest and most fascinating instances of the question “Who is and who isn’t Indian?” is the case of the Cherokee Freedmen.
The forced removal of Cherokee and the other four members of the Five Civilized Tribes from their lands in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina in the 1820s and 1830s to the Indian Territories on what was known as the Trail of Tears has become a symbolic moment in American history. The Trail of Tears has come to signify American injustice, Indian-hating presidents, paternalistic Supreme Court justices, and the Indians’ plight in general. It has been written about, sung about, painted, reenacted. The Trail of Tears was brutal. Of the 15,000 Indians who were forced to march to Indian Territory in the dead of winter, 4,000 died along the way—from starvation, hypothermia, typhus, or pneumonia. One can envision the long line of the downtrodden and disposed staggering through blizzards and fording icy rivers. The Cherokee and allied tribes were forced to march because they had been dispossessed. Their 5,000 black slaves were forced to march because they were the personal property of the Indians. Once they reached Oklahoma, the black slaves continued to be slaves until emancipation. During the Civil War the Cherokee Nation was divided. Some Cherokee sided with the Union, others with the Confederacy. After the Union victory the Cherokee Nation was forced to the negotiating table, largely as punishment for supporting the Confederacy, and forced to sign a treaty. One stipulation of the treaty of 1866 was that former Cherokee slaves, known as Freedmen, were to be given full citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. As members of the Cherokee Nation, the Freedmen would be entitled to all the rights and benefits of Cherokee citizens, such as allotments, the right to vote in tribal elections, the right to stand for office, and receipt of annuities.
A little over 100 years later the Cherokee Nation wanted to remove the descendants of the Freedmen from the rolls and deprive them of tribal membership. This meant that these descendants—who considered themselves culturally (if not completely racially) Cherokee, who had lived and worked on Cherokee lands, who had the same values and language as the Cherokee—would no longer be eligible to vote, hold office, receive federal housing assistance, or receive whatever casino profits might come their way. One can smell divisive greed in the air again, though one senses something else, too: the Cherokee in Oklahoma have long had one of the most welcoming, inclusive, and progressive enrollment policies. Unlike the St. Croix Band of Ojibwe in Wisconsin, the Cherokee Nation requires only proof of descent from the “Dawes rolls,” a list of Cherokee and other Civilized Tribe members compiled in 1893 and closed in 1907 for the purpose of allotment. The Dawes rolls had included a few categories of tribal membership: by blood; by marriage; and, specifically, Freedmen or descendants of Freedmen, and Delaware Indians adopted into the Cherokee Nation. There is no minimum blood quantum requirement. Such a policy has been a blessing and a curse to the Cherokee. With more than 250,000 enrolled members living in almost every state in the Union, they have remarkable power of presence and numbers and a much more flexible understanding than any other tribe of what it might mean to be Indian. They also suffer from encroachment and the constant threat of cultural dissolution through acculturation—many who want to be Indian claim to be Cherokee, not because they are but because it’s easy. Hence the popular refrain we all hear at parties: my grandmother was a Cherokee princess. (No one seriously claims to be descended from a Hopi princess, a Dakota princess, or an Inuit princess.)
In the late 1980s the Cherokee Nation tried to disenroll the descendants of the Freedmen. The case went to federal court, which ruled in Nero v. Cherokee Nation that tribes had the right to determine the criteria of their own tribal membership. This ran counter to a century of policy that said tribes could determine the criteria for membership but only in “consultation” with the BIA. Many members of the Cherokee Nation were (and are) divided over the issue, and in 2006 the Cherokee Nation Judicial Appeals Tribunal maintained that the Freedmen were potentially eligible for enrollment. The Cherokee Nation put the issue to a referendum, and as a result a constitutional amendment was passed in 2007 that limited membership in the Cherokee Nation to those who were Cherokee, Shawnee, or Delaware by blood, listed on the Dawes rolls.
The wheels on the bus go round and round. The Black Congressional Caucus got involved. It saw the exclusion of the Cherokee Freedmen as an instance of exclusion based on race. As the case worked its way through the courts, Representative Diane Watson of California introduced legislation that would block $300 million in federal funding and annul all gaming compacts between the Cherokee and the state of Oklahoma until the Cherokee Nation reinstated the Freedmen. The basis for the legislation is about as potent an irony as exists in the history of Indian-white relations: the Cherokee were being punished for breaking a treaty they made in “good faith” with the United States!
The U.S. government and the state government of Oklahoma don’t want to be too hasty or too autocratic in dealing with the Cherokee Nation—if only because the Cherokee suffered so much, before, during, and after the Trail of Tears. But haven’t the Cherokee Freedmen—not just disposed, but the dehumanized property of the dispossessed—suffered more? In 1828, leading up to the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee had standing in U.S. courts. Their slaves did not. Tribal enrollment has been, from the beginning, a way of determining who can claim economic benefits that devolve from treaties. From the start, enrollment and Indian citizenship have been institutions created by the U.S. government as a way of limiting its responsibility toward Indians and eventually getting out of the “Indian business.” But it couldn’t always control the ways in which tribes sought to define themselves. Blood quantum was supposed to be a way out for the government. But this has been tricky. The Dawes rolls (and this fact seems to have been lost) were created as a means of fractionalizing collective Cherokee landholdings and opening up the Indian Territories for white settlement. When the white bureaucrats made the rolls, they listed people who looked Cherokee as Cherokee, and those who looked black (even if these were mixed black and Cherokee) as black. The Dawes rolls were based on blood, but only on how blood “looked” (and here we remember the anthropologists scratching the chests of White Earth Indians and measuring their skulls). From the beginning, the rolls were flawed and were designed to cheat Indians. One wonders: why rely on them now for any purpose? Enrollment has become a kind of signifier for Indians that says (or is believed to say) what someone’s degree of Indianness is. But this is a relatively recent development. One wonders: by fighting about enrollment at all, aren’t we just adopting a system of exclusion that helps the U.S. government but doesn’t help us? And couldn’t the Cherokee have won a little something from everyone had they thought of the problems of race, identity, and enrollment differently? After all, very few nations in the world base citizenship on race. It can be based on many things—such as language, a naturalization process, an oath, residency, or all of the above. Couldn’t the Cherokee Nation say: since we were slaveholders, we have a moral debt to the descendants of the people we wrongly enslaved? Couldn’t the Cherokee say: in order to pay that debt we will allow the Freedmen to remain on the rolls as citizens of the Cherokee Nation (or even limited citizens, nonvoting citizens, or whatever), though they are not racially Cherokee? This way the Cherokee would have sacrificed some autonomy and spread some resources a little thinner but would have made right a historical wrong and emerged as the moral victors in the enrollment issue.
Many Indian tribes, many reservations, are stronger than they have ever been before. Gaming has something to do with that. So do numbers. But we are not so strong that we can afford to waste our people. We are not so strong that we can keep excluding one another. But that’s exactly what tribes often do. At Leech Lake, for example, we are undoing, in exchange for very little, a lot of the hard work done by those who have come before.
Being enrolled at Leech Lake gives you a few advantages—treaty rights, health care, housing, education ass
istance, and access to a host of social service networks. But even being enrolled might not be enough. In 2007 Leech Lake Reservation signed a new compact with the Minnesota Department of Human Services regarding the care of enrolled children at Leech Lake. The compact clearly protects the sovereign right of Leech Lake to maintain jurisdiction over its kids on and off the rez but makes counties responsible for funding court orders regarding child welfare. This was an apparent win for the tribes, plus the financial bonus of direct funding for their own social security programs. But the compact also absolves the tribes of any financial responsibilities for paying the costs of Relative Care Assistance, MFIP, TANF, and other related social security programs. So the tribe can and now customarily does decide not to pay for anything other than its own court costs. Thus, the request to have the tribe provide a chemical dependency evaluation of the son of a friend of mine would have cost the tribe $150 and an hour of someone’s time. But, since the tribe is empowered by the compact to require counties to be financially responsible, it said: we can’t help you. That doesn’t matter in any real way, except that the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe recently made a deal with the state of Minnesota and the counties that overlap the reservation. The deal (as part of the Indian Child Welfare Act and other agreements with the state) was that Leech Lake would release the counties (Hubbard, Cass, Itasca, and Beltrami) and the state from the responsibility of providing social services to Indian young people (fought for and won by the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act) in exchange for $1 million a year. The counties and the state were thrilled. The $1 million was a small price to pay. They were spending much more than that serving the hundreds, if not thousands, of Leech Lake children who live off the reservation. Most Leech Lakers don’t live on the rez. Only about one-fourth of the enrolled population lives there. So three-fourths of the tribe (even if they live within sight of the reservation boundary) don’t get the benefits that are theirs by treaty and congressional act.
Meanwhile my friend’s son was drinking and drugging. He got the clap at age sixteen. He said he is suicidal. The boy is an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe at Leech Lake. However, father and son live 500 yards outside the reservation boundary. They get no chemical dependency counseling, no foster care, no psychological or CD assessment. This is much less sexy than the fate of freed slaves or per capita payments or rich Indians. It’s less sexy, less interesting, but more important—what little safety is provided by social services is desperately needed by the most vulnerable, the poorest, the most disenfranchised Indians. Interestingly, as part of the tribal constitution all the elected officials must live on the reservation to hold office. So those making decisions (such as the decision to deal with the counties) aren’t making choices that could hurt them directly. They’ve sold out hard-earned ICWA rights. To put it another way, they’ve sold out our children. My friend’s son will be emancipated in a year and a half. He figures he’s got one last chance to turn his son’s life around before he’s lost. He feels that the tribe doesn’t care about him or his children.
Less final but perhaps as damning is the identity war that plagues Indian communities on and off the reservation. Being “from the rez” has become a kind of marker of authenticity for many Indians—more important and more telling than being enrolled or being full-blood, quarter-blood, or whatever else. You’ll hear it said of someone, “Oh, yeah, he’s Indian, I guess, but he’s not from the rez.” In that is a kind of commentary on the authenticity, the degree of Indianness, that someone does or doesn’t possess. Unlike the criterion applied to Brooke, this degree of Indianness can’t be measured, but it is as final as the kinds of comments made about someone who is African American by blood but lacks the social credentials that make him or her “really black.” Such is the thinking, anyway. But the problem of Indian identity is far more complicated than the terms of such identity wars would suggest.
For instance, Ryan Haasch could be considered about as “rezzy” as the next guy. He was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and moved with his parents at age two to a modest split-level on the Leech Lake Reservation. That is where he grew up, in the small enclave (you can’t really call it a village anymore) of Mission, just north of Cass Lake. Ryan’s father worked for the Leech Lake Reservation vocational training program and his mother is a teacher at the Alternative Learning Center (ALC), a school within the Cass Lake Schools for at-risk or troubled kids. Most of her students are Indian. Ryan is a good man: thirty years old, of medium height, a teacher like his mother. He plays in softball leagues and is a drummer and songwriter for a punk band he started with friends in Minneapolis. But Ryan has no Indian blood to speak of: he is white. Because of the Dawes Act and the Nelson Act and the economic superiority of non-Indians for the last 100 years, Ryan’s family is one of many non-Indian families that live on reservations like Leech Lake. The stunning fact of life for many reservations is that there are more white people living there than Indian people.
Even though he was raised on a reservation, he never really gave it much thought while growing up. “I mean, I just lived there. Grew up there. I didn’t go around thinking: ‘I live on a reservation.’ When I told people in college where I was from, where I lived, they were baffled.”
Most people are. Most people assume that only Indians live on reservations, or that if white people live there it is only by special permission. As good a guy as Ryan is, he grew up on land that was taken from Indians around the turn of the century by way of the Dawes Act, either illegally or immorally or both. The land inside the external boundaries of the reservation that passed from Indian control to private, state, or county ownership creates some strange problems and even stranger jurisdictional complications. Much of the land inside the reservation boundary is not reservation land
As for Ryan, the only really noticeable effect of living on the reservation was that he was one of just three white kids on the school bus that brought them back and forth to school off the reservation in Bemidji. “The rest were Indian. It was a rough bus. These big kids sat in back. Corey Kingbird was one of them. He died in a police chase on Mission road. Gordon Fineday was another. I think he’s still around. Corey would tell us these stories. He showed me his pinkie finger which was all bent and broken and he told us that he had to break his own pinkie as a gang initiation. I don’t know if it was true, but when he told us that it seemed true. Anyway, these other kids would shoot spitballs at the back of my head and call me ‘fucking white boy.’”
The other two white kids on the bus—Tommy Erickson (who was Indian by blood but blond and didn’t himself identify as Indian) and Chris Rutledge—are dead. Chris overdosed on morphine patches and Tommy died when he fell asleep at the wheel of the car he was driving on his way back to school in North Dakota.
“Yeah, my school friends were scared to ride the bus with me. Chris Claypool and Mike Blodgett. Those were the names of my friends. They were too scared to ride the bus to my house. Mike’s mom would drive them out so they could sleep over.”
Living on the reservation didn’t really affect Ryan one way or the other, except for having to endure a bus ride with bullies.
“We’d bike all over the place. We’d bike to Cass Lake. Once or twice we got chased around Cass Lake by a bunch of Indian kids who wanted to beat us up. But that was about it.”
Ryan and his buddies, however, were scared to go into the Plantation, a notoriously rough housing tract near the old village site, the Mission, about four miles from Ryan’s house.
“When we’d go stay at Tommy Erickson’s house—you know he lived in that place just off the highway near the Plantation—well, we’d just stick close to his house, in his yard. One time we saw some kids a ways away and they were yelling stuff at us, looking to fight. But we didn’t go over there.”
What Ryan described was a kind of continuum. He felt like a member of a minority on the bus, but not around his neighborhood (if the scattered houses set
back from the highway in the woods can be described as a “neighborhood”). Most of his near neighbors were white, but many were not. There were the kids on the bus and Kevin Northbird, whom Ryan and his friends called “Guitar Man.” However, just three miles down the road were the housing tracts called Plantation, Mission, and Macaroni Flats, where Ryan felt uncomfortable going. These tracts were coded as “Indian” zones.
There was a store just around the corner from Ryan’s house called Midway Store (since it was midway between Bemidji and Cass Lake). It was owned by Guitar Man’s father, Ron Northbird. Ryan and his friends called the Midway Store the Niij Store. “Niijii” is Ojibwe for “friend.”
“We tried to shoplift at the Niij Store, but never could pull it off. Ron Northbird was too sharp. He had this way of watching us. It was very casual, but you could feel his eyes on you. We called him Eagle Eyes.” It is a strange irony that white kids were trying to shoplift in an Indian-owned store on a reservation. But these were the contours of Ryan’s life.
Maybe Ryan felt comfortable on the reservation because his parents worked there and because they were good people, like their son. They were respectful of Indians and Indian ways and didn’t tolerate racism in their house.
“My dad was working on the rez for the vocational program. They’d be in the woods or something and he’d pull something off a tree to show his students, just rip it off the tree, and one of the guys in the program would say: ‘You might want to put down some tobacco when you take something from a tree or from nature.’ And my dad listened and he shared that stuff with us, the things he learned from his Indian students. I got a lot of credit for being my parents’ son. One more story: when I was in high school, working at Wendy’s in Bemidji, my coworker Z-Mark was a little older. He’d buy us beer and stuff. He was going out with a girl from Bena. Anyway, I was at a party at Z-Mark’s little apartment in Bemidji and Darryl Stangel was there. He was from Bena, too. ‘You’re Patty’s son,’ he said. ‘You should party with us. We’re heading to Bena. Don’t worry. No one will mess with you. Everyone’ll be cool with you because you’re Patty’s son.’”