Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (20 page)

So Indians are still waiting for housing. The images of HUD housing, of life on a “track,” are largely accurate with regard to many housing tracts on my reservation. From Tracts 33 and 34, just north of Cass Lake, to the more colorfully named tracts Mac Flats, Tooterville, Fox Creek, and Porcupine Flats, life can be rough. But not all, not even most, Indians on my reservation live on tract. Many still live in their families’ traditional villages—Onigum, Inger, Squaw Lake, Ball Club, Bena, Mission, Oak Point, Boy River, Federal Dam, and Sugar Point. Many don’t live in villages at all but have, instead, built their own homes on dirt roads and long driveways in the deep woods both on and off the reservation. However, “track” has come to be the most recognizable portrait of rez life for most outsiders. Think of the long, moving color shots accompanied by “lonesome” sound tracks in movies such as
Thunderheart
,
Dance Me Outside
, and
Smoke Signals
. Indians who live or grew up on a tract have developed their own mythology about the place, a mythology based on violence. Dustin Burnette, a Leech Laker who grew up near Tract 33, remembers, “Yeah, I’d take friends to track in the summer, roll down the windows, and start blasting country music—you know Garth Brooks or something. And my friends would be like, ‘Knock it off, man! You’re going to get us killed!’ And they’d duck way down in their seats and I’d whoop and holler and shit. It was fun.” Country music does seem out of place on a track. But then again, so do Indians, in a way. If you squint hard enough to block out the trees and grass or the snow, you end up with a vision not of the north woods but of East LA, an East LA drawn from the movies. Colorfully painted houses falling into the ground, trash, burned-out cars. Track is hard. Even so, outsiders often don’t feel, don’t even recognize (no matter how often you tell them otherwise) that they are on the rez until we drive through a track. I once brought a reporter to the rez and she kept asking,
Are we on the rez yet? Are we there yet
? I kept telling her that yes, we were, but she didn’t really believe me—until we drove through Tract 33 outside Cass Lake, and she was both scared and relieved that the rez was finally recognizable to her.

One resident remembered Tract 33: “I didn’t feel safe in town, you know I was always looking over my shoulder and always when I parked
my vehicle outside I was always checking on it to make sure nothing was happening.” One former chairman of Leech Lake said,
“Tract 33 was bad. . . . At night you can’t sleep around here. There are cars racing up and down the street, and there are gunshots periodically and people coming to my door and knocking and wanting to come in, so I have to stay up and watch my house.” One kid fro
m track s
aid, “I was involved, you know, in a lot of car thefts, just about anything from beatings from fighting to getting in them, starting to sell drugs. . . . Some of the people I grew up with, they are doing prison time for murder and I got other friends sitting in prison for attempted murder and these are the ones I grew up with and called, you know, my brothers. . . . It was a rapid change just from when I was growing up. . . . How bad it picked up. . . . People like me at the time . . . were actually scared.”

There were plenty of reasons to be scared on track, whether you were young or old, passing through and blasting country music, or trying to get some sleep. Warren Tibbetts lived on Tract 34 just north of Tract 33. He had been around the block—twice, three times—and around the country as well. A veteran of Vietnam and an early and active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), he had seen his share of conflict and violence. And he, admittedly, had instigated a lot of it. But he had settled down, quit drinking, quit smoking pot, and gotten his life together. He lived at the end of one of the culs-de-sac, where he raised his family and became an important part of a renaissance in Ojibwe culture and ceremony. Warren was thin and rangy and funny. He would sometimes take off into the bush for days at a time. If people needed a place to crash, to sleep it off, or to recover, he always welcomed them. On September 24, 2005, his neighbor Michael Francis Anthony Wind started things up. He was trying to get his dog to fight Warren’s dog, goading both dogs with a rake or a broom. Warren, wearing his slippers, came out to stop the dogs (he really loved his dog) and to stop Wind. Wind, drunk, attacked him and stabbed him clean through the heart. Warren staggered back into his house and died on the kitchen floor in front of his daughter Dee and his niece Janelle. All of this came out of nowhere, on a typical night.

“It was just another day,” says Shalah, the eldest daughter of Warren and Nancy Tibbetts.
Shalah, twenty-eight years old, and brassy, is “a rez girl through and through till I die,” as she puts it. It is impossible not to like Shaye; she is sharp and funny, and she can find just the right way to tease the people she likes: two parts fun and one part spice, so that you laugh instead of being offended. She is one of the least judgmental people I’ve ever met. She is dark but has freckles. She has a gap between her two front teeth. Her hair is always changing, from pink to red to brown to black and then back to pink. Her hair changes color and style even more often now that she’s been living with her Guatemalan husband in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where she graduated from cosmetology school in 2009. But she’s come home to Tract 34. “It’s lonely out there. I mean, I like my husband’s peeps. But they don’t speak English. Neither does he. The only other Indian I met out there was the Indian from the Village people! It’s true. I was in the UPS store in Asbury Park and this old Mexican guy comes in and the guy at the counter was real nice to him. He left and the guy says to me, ‘You know who that was?’ I say, ‘Ummm, a Mexican?’ ‘No! that was the Indian from the Village People!
’
” Actually, Felipe Ortiz Rose, the Indian from the Village People, is Puerto Rican on his mother’s side and Lakota Sioux on his father’s.

Shaye is back at Tract 34. She and her husband, Pedro, came home from New Jersey because Shaye was pregnant and wanted to have her baby on the rez. I can hear merengue coming from the basement. The TV is on in the living room;
300
is playing. Shaye is doing Jordan Bush’s hair. Janelle, Darlene, and Lindsey are waiting their turn. It’s prom night for some of the schools and they are all getting ready. The table where the girls are getting their hair done is littered with glasses, beading, jewelry projects, makeup, curling irons, straightening paddles, and a magnifying vanity mirror. The girls are already in their prom dresses. We’re all sitting not far from where Warren died on the floor—not more than three feet away—but this place is teeming with life. The girls are excited. They have never looked more beautiful, more queenly. They tease Shaye and she teases them back and they smile into the vanity and perfect their makeup. When people describe families or communities as “close-knit” I think this is what they must mean. I would have to say that none of them can do without the other.

“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 o
f
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.