Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (2 page)

BOOK: Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life
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We are known for making beautiful things, too. We evolved the birch bark canoe, a true engineering feat: a 300-pound canoe that was thirty feet long could carry twelve men and 3,000 pounds of cargo. During the fur trade it did, all the way from the far end of Lake Superior to Montreal, loaded with bales of beaver furs. In addition to canoes we made and make snowshoes and porcupine quill designs on leather and birch bark. We even figured out how to cook over open fires without metal or ceramics.

Even though we haven’t become as much a part of the public consciousness as, say, the Sioux or the Iroquois, our language has. Once listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the most difficult language to learn, the Ojibwe language has given English the words “moccasin,” “toboggan,” “wigwam,” “moose,” “totem,” and “muskeg.” We’ve even met on middle ground. We provided “musk” from “mashkiig,” or swamp, English provided “rat” and together we built the word for a swamp-dwelling rodent that looks an awful lot like a rat—muskrat. If that’s not a fine example of cultural exchange I don’t know what is. Through years of trade we imported only two words from the French—
couchon,
which became “kookoosh”; and
bonjour,
which was transformed into a greeting, “boozhoo.” Hello.

And, on top of all of that, we’re funny. We really are. I should state, however, that I am among some of the less funny Ojibwe people. John Buckanaga (which means “He Wins,” another perplexing Ojibwe name), from White Earth Reservation, is funny. John Buck was at a seniors all-Indian golf tournament at Fond du Lac Reservation near Duluth and someone was trying to get him to mess up his tee shot by asking him,
Hey, John, so you’re getting older—do you use Viagra?
And John Buck said,
Yeah. Sure I do. Well,
does it work? I guess so. At least I don’t piss all over my shoes anymore.
And then he drove his ball 220 yards down the fairway.

Which brings us to stoicism. Ojibwe are not usually described as stoic. We’re not usually described at all. This is just fine with most of us. We have been called some choice names in the past, though. “These people are a wild, barbarous, and benighted race, and are, perhaps more than any other people under the influence of the chiefs, head men, and Prophets,” suggested one writer. I would have to disagree.

2

On August 3, 2007, I drove past one of the signs on the southern edge of my reservation on my way back to Bena, our ancestral village. My grandfather had killed himself earlier that day. Eugene William Seelye, an eighty-three-year-old veteran of
D-day and the Battle of the Bulge—a man who left the reservation only once in his life and made a promise never to leave again, an Indian man who dodged thousands of bullets—shot himself in the head and died alone on his bedroom floor.

My grandfather was not an easy man. He was not one of those sweet, somewhat bashful elderly Indians you see at powwows or feasts or at the clinic, willing to talk and tell dirty jokes; not the kind of traditional elder that a lot of younger people seek out for approval and advice; not the kind of woodsy Indian man who will take you hunting and explain, patiently, how to lead on ducks or where to find the best mushrooms. When we were kids and my cousins and I came into the house from playing, more often than not he would say, “Get the hell out.” He was, and everyone will tell you this, a hard-ass.

His looks reinforced this impression. He was thin and rangy. He wasn’t especially tall, but he
seemed
tall. He never changed his hairstyle. His full head of hair, black, then gray, and finally all white, was cut longish and combed back and held in an Elvis-type pompadour with Brylcreem. In many pictures he poses without a shirt on. He was tough. He was the only person I knew who had a sword hanging on his wall. The family story was that it was a Nazi officer’s sword and that he took it off a German corpse. Once, when I was a teenager, I got up the nerve to ask him if he had gotten it from a German during the war.
Hell no
, he said
. That’s a Knights of Columbus sword. It ain’t a real sword
. I asked him where he got it.
I traded a Luger for it
. I asked him where he got that.
Where you think, boy? I shot a German and took it
.

We had never been close while I was growing up. He scared me. We didn’t have much to say to each another. I wasn’t the only one who felt small next to his anger, his rage, his perpetual dissatisfaction. He didn’t have a lot to say to anyone. When, as a girl, my mother saw him working without a shirt on and saw the scar that circled his shoulder, she’d asked him what happened.
Got shot
was all he said. He didn’t say that after surviving D-day and the Battle of the Bulge and many other battles in France and Belgium, he and his patrol had crossed into Germany near Aachen (not half a mile from where Charlemagne had reigned as emperor). He did not say that the man in front of him, a guy named Van Winkle from Arkansas, stepped on a land mine. The mine blew off Van Winkle’s legs and blew apart my grandfather’s shoulder. He told us nothing about any of this.

In the 1950s he was living with my grandmother and their four children in a small two-room shack in the small village of Bena on the Leech Lake Reservation. The shack had been built around the turn of the century and at that time it was the only house with walls and a ceiling in the village—the rest of the dwellings were wigwams made from bent poles and covered with bark. All six members of the family lived in this run-down thing. No running water, no bathroom, a woodstove on which to cook. The family was terribly poor. My mother remembers one winter when they had only thirty-five cents to their name. My grandfather took the thirty-five cents and bought a plaque that read: “The Lord Shall Provide.” That night at dinner my grandmother served the four kids, but instead of serving him she put the plaque on his plate.
If he’s going to provide and you’re not, then eat that. See how good it tastes.

He was offered a job eight miles away—still on the reservation, only eight miles down the highway—that included a good salary; a fully furnished house with plumbing, electricity, and heat; and a beautiful view of Leech Lake itself. My grandfather turned it down.

It’s only eight miles away, Gene. Eight miles.

I made a promise to God that if I made it home I’d never leave again. This is home. I plan to keep my promise. I’m not fucking leaving
. He never moved away from Bena and never traveled off the reservation if he could help it.

Our small ancestral town of Bena has a population of around 140 and a bad reputation. Even though it sits on a major highway and a lot of people drive through it, it is really known for only two things: a cool-looking gas station that’s on the national register of historic places, and the number of outlaws who call it home. Gerald Vizenor once called Bena “Little Chicago” because of the rough handling outsiders sometimes get there. Vizenor has not been forgiven for that. He doesn’t go to Bena much. It’s got, in addition to the gas station, a bar and a post office. It used to have three gas stations, two hardware stores, two grocery stores, seven hotels, and two bars. My grandmother’s father—known to everyone as Grandpa Harris—owned both bars during his life. A full-blooded Scot from Chicago, he had somehow ended up in Bena in the early part of the century. After spending most of his young life in logging camps, he eventually bought the Wigwam Bar, sold it, and then bought the Gitigan (Ojibwe for “garden”) across the street. He married my great-grandmother, an Indian. An irony for you: at the time my
grandmother’s father, Harris, owned the Wigwam Bar, my grandfather’s grandmother still lived in a real wigwam made of bent willow saplings and tar paper across the sandy street a hundred yards down the road. During the 1930s and 1940s, it was illegal to serve liquor to Indians. So Harris Matthews sold whisky and beer to his in-laws out the back door and they drank back there but came in the front to dance. Harris was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole. Once he was fixing the roof of the Gitigan and someone walked by and asked
,
What are you building, Harris? A whorehouse?
He replied,
If I was building a whorehouse I’d have to put a roof over the whole fucking town.

I got the news that my grandfather had shot himself on the morning of August 3. I was in Bena by early evening. I passed the “big house,” which is what everyone calls (without irony) the house my grandfather lived in. It isn’t actually big, just bigger than most of the other houses in Bena. His new Chevy Silverado was in the yard. I pulled to a stop at my grandmother’s trailer, just down the hill.

Cars huddled around my grandmother’s trailer and I heard voices coming from the porch, the deck, and inside. It was packed. Some people were already drinking beer; most were not. My favorite uncle was staggering around the living room without his shirt on and gave me a hug. My grandmother sat on the couch with my mother. My grandmother was the one who had found him. Other relatives—my uncle Diddy and aunts JoAnne and Kay, and friends Rocky Tibbets and his brother Buddy—milled around on the deck. Buddy had the sideways look in his eyes that he seems to get when he’s been drinking all day. Some of my first cousins were already there—Nate, Josh, and Justin. Sam was driving in from South Dakota. Jesse was back in jail and wouldn’t make it. The trailer was warm and well lit, and I felt folded into the soupy, complicated, and comforting trouble of family almost immediately.

The next day was beautiful. It was early August but it was sunny and crisp and clear. My cousin Sam had arrived in the night with his girlfriend and they were tangled up on the couch. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; this is obviously a family trait (one I don’t share). They woke up and we talked a bit and then they left for the café to get some breakfast. I talked my grieving mother into going down to the café, too. After breakfast we drove back up to my grandmother’s trailer and I asked her if there was anything I could do. There’s always something to do. That’s one nice thing about Indian funerals whether Catholic, traditional, or a mixture of both. There’s always something—gathering sage, cooking, digging the grave, getting tar paper to cover the mound of dirt until a gravehouse can be built, building the rough box, carving and shaping the clan marker, getting drunk. I actually like digging the grave. It’s mindless and communal.

My grandmother asked me to do two things. Would I be willing to write a eulogy to read at the service? And would I go up to the big house and take care of the bedroom? Clean it up.
We want to make it look nice in there,
she said. She was shaky. Her eyes watered constantly.
We just want to make it look nice. And your uncles, well, you know; they just can’t go in there.
She asked me to do this not because I had been close to my grandfather but because, compared with the rest of the family, I hadn’t been.

It felt strange to be in the big house without my grandfather there. He had spent eighty of his eighty-three years in Bena. Sixty of those years had been spent in that house. Whenever I came over to visit him I’d find him sitting in his chair by the window, the police scanner on—with the scanner, he could often follow the progress the police were making tracking down our relatives. He’d smoke and drink coffee. If he was lucky he’d have peanut brittle or beans to eat.

A stack of books and the Bible rested to the left of the chair on the small end table laden with all sorts of other things: two broken watches, glasses, a screwdriver, long and unreadable information about his medication. The chair was empty now. But his cigarettes and lighter were on the table, as though he were about to smoke. Someone had written “Dads” on a Post-it and stuck it on the pack. Without the possessive it made me think of fathers. Dads. Parents and mothers and cousins and brothers and sisters and all of us and how we could have ended up like this. I sat at the table across from the chair and smoked one of my own cigarettes. When I was finished I walked back to his bedroom.

A narrow iron-frame bed. A dresser stuffed with socks, mostly the nonslip hospital kind, and T-shirts. A drawer full of medical supplies. A large oak table mounded with clothes and the weird effluvia that are a product of living in the same place for a long time; a broken printer, two dusty bedspreads, a boom box, and a portrait of my mother as a high school student, painted by his brother-in-law while he was in prison. A small safe served as his night table. When I opened it I found a few bundles of one-dollar bills, banded into stacks of 100, some rolls of quarters and silver dollars, and my cousin Vanessa’s cheap gold necklace. This was the necklace she had been wearing when she got into an argument at a party and drove across two yards, up a ditch, and onto the highway, where she was struck by a passing motor home.

I looked down at my feet. A small throw rug was turned at a funny angle. What looked like grape juice had blotted through it in places. When I lifted it I found the blood.

And then I got to work.

I emptied the dresser, removed the drawers, and bagged the clothes on the oak table and the contents of the safe. I lifted the safe out of the room and lugged the mattress through the narrow door. I saw that, unbeknownst to anyone, my grandfather’s dog had been waging war against him by shitting under his bed. That dog’s turds, no bigger than those of a cat, were hard, preserved, nested in the humus of hair, dust, and dead skin that had collected there. I choked on the dust. The whole room smelled like my grandfather. Especially the blood—it didn’t smell like “death.” It smelled like him; sweet, smoky, thick.

I took a break and wandered through the house until my older brother Anton arrived. I was glad he was there. He has the right personality for such jobs—calm, seemingly unperturbed.

Anton and I lifted out the heavy furniture until all that was left was the small rectangle of a room and the smaller, more potent, more significant rectangle of the braided throw rug that covered what was left of my grandfather’s brain. We weren’t doing a great job and neither was the rug. It tugged at the feet, and carrying furniture while stepping over it was hard, and in short time the rug had been stepped on and flipped over and bunched up. Quite a lot of blood showed through. We tried not to notice.

BOOK: Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life
8.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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