Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (19 page)

When he was finished my mother asked him, “Were you mad at those people? Did you have it in for them or were you just having fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah mad or yeah having fun?”

“Yeah, your honor, just having fun.”

She perused his case file and looked down at him seriously from the bench.

“It says here you get A’s and B’s in school.”

“Yes, your honor.”

She sentenced him to $150 fine and fifteen days in jail but suspended the sentence and gave him ten hours of community service.

“And I want you to keep getting A’s and B’s in school. I want you to do something with your life. Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, your honor.”

“Good. I know your grandma. I know she looks after you. I don’t want her to pay for what you did. I don’t want you to be a burden and make her life harder. OK? You’re smart. Do something with your life.”

Visibly relieved, he thanked the court and left with his grandmother beside him.

By the time she heard the last case it was growing dark. Night comes early so far north in the middle of winter. Spring was still a few months away. I drove all the way back to Leech Lake while my mother ate sunflower seeds and drank coffee. There is a part of her that very much likes having a chauffeur.

As I drove between the pine-covered rock outcroppings and frozen creeks with nothing to light our way except our own weak headlights, I thought about my own transgressions as a teenager. I thought about how my brother, my cousins, and I not only “egged” houses but egged the church, the bar, the grocery store, and the priest’s house—pretty much every significant structure in Bena with the exception of the post office. My cousin Delbert was much more daring than we were; he actually flung open the door of the Bena bar and hurled eggs inside. I remember seeing him standing in the rectangle of light that spilled from the open doorway. I was a way off but I heard shouts and I heard Delbert shout back, something like a war whoop, as he chucked the eggs in. He was always braver than I was. I was the one who threw the eggs at the rectory and somehow managed to break the front window there. We took off howling into the night. Later, having run out of eggs, we sat on the steps of the boarded-up community hall. After a while we saw someone stagger out of the bar down the street. He made his way into the middle of the highway and, using the dividing line, began walking toward us. He was very drunk. We began teasing him. “You old drunk!” shouted Dell. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as tough as he was, “yeah, you old drunk.” We thought this was pretty funny. When he drew even with us he paused and turned to look at us. It was my grandfather. “What are you kids looking at?” We ran.

The ride home was quiet. My mother and I were lost in our separate thoughts. I asked her, “How did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“I don’t know. How’d you manage not to buy in to all the bullshit? All that Indian shame. All that shame your generation felt about being Indian. You never seemed to feel that and you raised us not to feel that way. How’d you do it?”

I was thinking of my own children.

She was quiet for a few minutes.

“Because I was the queen of Bena. I was the damn queen of Bena!” And then she laughed. “That’s what everyone called me. I don’t know why.”

Dustin Burnette at Bemidji State University

Courtesy Anton Treuer

4

When my brother Tony and I were kids we had two fishing buddies, Reagan and Patrick Morgan. They seemed a lot older than we were, though Reagan couldn’t have been more than sixteen. There was no telling how old Patrick was. They were Leech Lake Indians, like us, but also not like us. Reagan was huge, stout, his body strong and soft at the same time. He had big hands and a big head, black hair parted in the middle and feathered back, thick tinted glasses, and bad acne. Patrick was the opposite: skinny, with a sharp face and short hair that always, no matter the season, tufted out from his head at odd angles. Patrick was handicapped. To this day I don’t know what he suffered from, but he dragged one leg and his right hand curled up like a bird’s wing against his chest. We never asked what was wrong with him and never teased him.

We rarely saw them at school. We never went over to their house. They never came to ours. But in the summer Tony and I would bike to the end of our dirt road and Reagan and Patrick would be waiting on their bikes, turning circles in the middle of the highway, and then we would all set off for the dam. Once we got there, Reagan, Tony, and I would fish. Reagan showed a lot of patience with Patrick, who usually did not fish with us for long. Patrick’s attention would wander and then Patrick wandered after it.

Reagan always got his hands on contraband. He had candy, Cokes,
and Snickers bars. Reagan always shared. There was a place on the river-
bank near the fence where the riprapped stones had tumbled just so, creating a cave of sorts. It wasn’t a real cave—it was no more than a foot in diameter and just slightly more than arm-deep. But you could hide things there. You could reach back with your hand and feel the cool damp stones. It was cold and slimy but all the same we were tempted to leave something of value in our cave to create the thrill of future discovery. So Reagan took one of his Cokes and placed it in the cave, and we covered the entrance with dead grass and a stick or two and left it there when we biked home in the afternoon. It was there the next day. No one ever found the things we left: lures, Cokes, a chocolate bar inside a ziplock bag.

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 wan
dered 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.