Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (21 page)

Cass Lake, so everyone says, used to be a nice town, even if it did have a bloody start. In the late 1800s Leech Lake Reservation was closed to non-Natives; unless you were Indian you couldn’t live there, and this was fine for most people. But there were two problems: there were vast timber resources still standing on the reservation and the reservation itself blocked east-west and north-south rail lines between Duluth and Grand Forks and Winnipeg and Minneapolis. Two things happened as a result. First, as the story goes, in the middle of the night, with the help of the railroads, businessmen from Bemidji, fourteen miles away, skidded half a dozen buildings from the small whistle-stop town of Rosby onto the present-day site of Cass Lake. They persuaded the president to issue an executive order that officially opened the reservation boundary. The town stayed. This was how Leech Lake Reservation was originally broken open for settlement and set up for white control.

The second thing that happened had to do with the bigger impediment to logging: the lack of rail lines through the reservation. These had been effectively blocked by Chief Zhookaa-giizhig (Dipping Sky) of the Winnibigoshish Band who had his own logging concern on the north shore of Lake Winnibigoshish. Zhookaa-giizhig was the first man to log on Leech Lake, and in 1891 he was the first to float logs down to Minneapolis, where they were milled. But white loggers wanted their share, and in 1894 Zhookaa-giizhig, who was known never to drink, was found “drunk” on the railroad tracks at Deer River, where the line ended. He had, evidently, laid his head down on the tracks and been run over by a train. After that, and with the help of the Nelson Act and the Dawes Act, the reservation opened wide.

My great-great-grandfather Charles Seelye was the direct beneficiary of Zhookaa-giizhig’s death. Charles had come from Portland, Maine, a son of Scottish loggers who had cut mast timber for the king’s navy going back to the 1700s. In Brainerd, Minnesota, he met and married Margaret Aspinwall, the daughter of Bill Aspinwall, the head of a family of mixed-blood traders and agents. In 1896 Charles moved to the reservation and logged Zhookaa-giizhig’s allotments at Cut Foot Sioux and Pigeon lakes. But he could not get paid in advance for his timber and so could not pay his Indian workers, and he went bankrupt on March 12, 1900. His son Walter (my great-grandfather) continued the logging tradition. One outfitter said of my great-grandfather: “That Walt Seelye is all whalebone and rawhide.” And up through the 1970s he was remembered for wearing a black bowler hat year-round, even in the bitter cold. According to Jim Quinn, the owner of a lumber camp, my great-grandfather defied the cold, going without ear warmers or even earflaps.

The town of Cass Lake had the same hardiness. It was a logging and rail center at one time. But after all the trees were cut down and logging slowed, it found new life as a resort town. It had a thriving main street—lined with stores such as the five-and-dime, Neises Sporting Goods, Red Owl Foods, the high school, the Big Tap Bar and Grill, the municipal liquor store, two hotels, and a few cafés. The outskirts of Cass Lake were interspersed with modest resorts. The town had everything small American towns were supposed to have: parades, festivals, a small park. The largest town on Leech Lake Reservation, it once housed a population of 1,200. That has dwindled to 860. The stores are mostly gone. A few restaurants and bars are hanging on for dear life. The streets of Cass Lake, both in the tracts and in the city itself, are dangerous these days. Trouble seems to spill out of everywhere, and nowhere. Many people, like Steve Hagenah, attribute this change to drugs. Drinking is one thing. Pot is something else. But meth, oxy, and other such drugs—“chemical fuel,” as Hagenah calls them—change the game. Paranoia, violence, and pure craziness emerge. As these dangerous drugs become cheaper, life becomes cheaper.

For instance, in November 2002 (a few months after Heather Casey’s boyfriend was trying to shove her body into his trunk), Louie Bisson was out walking his dog. Bisson, forty-eight, was thin and balding, part Indian but albino, and he was legally blind. He lived a few doors down from his mother’s house and found work fixing decks and building sheds. He was single, and his only real hobby was walking, which he did almost every night with his dog, Little O, around the darkened streets of Cass Lake. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans and had put on long johns under his pants as a defense against the cold November night. He also carried an ax handle to scare off other dogs and kids if need be; he’d been harassed before.

That same night three teenagers—Jessie Tapio, George Boswell, and Darryl Johnson—were also walking around the streets of Cass Lake. All of them had been in trouble over the past few years. All of them had been in the foster care system, juvenile detention centers, or both. All of them had mothers who drank and did drugs. According to the reporter Larry Oakes, Jessie had fetal alcohol syndrome, George had brain damage from lead poisoning, and Darryl had been damaged somehow after falling out of a second-story window as a toddler. The boys had spent the afternoon drugging, and in the evening they sold some pot to a young woman, Ruth Bellanger, who agreed, in return, to get the boys some booze, which she did after taking a run to Safari Liquors next to the supermarket just off the highway. The evening passed with Southern Comfort and raspberry vodka in Darryl’s bedroom, where the walls were covered with posters of Tupac Shakur. Eventually they headed out into the night. It was after eleven when they saw Louie Bisson.

According to testimony and eyewitness accounts the boys were jumpy, paranoid, aggressive. Earlier that evening they’d gone to the house of an acquaintance and threatened him, his father, and his sister. When they saw Louie and his dog they started running toward him. Bisson turned, tried to flee, and got as far as half a block from the police station when the boys took his ax handle and beat him with it. His skull was crushed. When the police arrived on the scene they saw the clear print of a basketball sneaker on Bisson’s cheek. In the score of homicides in Cass Lake over the last ten years the most prevalent cause of death is beating. Many people, my mother included, long for the good old days. And even if it is a false nostalgia for days that were hardly good, it’s easy to see why they seem better.

Steve Hagenah, the investigator with the BCA, remembers those days, too. Steve is tall, mustached, with large hands and gray eyes. He has a friendly, craggy face. After working in law enforcement on and near the reservation for thirty-five years, he has perfected a hard stare that, I imagine, isn’t so nice to see across from you in an interrogation room. Steve was raised on the rez, and though he wasn’t Indian by blood he came up with Indians—Gabby Headbird, my uncle Sonny. Steve was prom king in 1969 opposite my cousin Lynette, who was prom queen. Steve’s family tree is complex and improbable. His mother, Beverly, was the daughter of Bessie Cooper, a white girl from Minneapolis, and Lester Young, the jazz tenor sax master. Bessie died in childbirth and Steve’s mother was taken in by a Romanian Jewish family in north Minneapolis. After marrying Steve’s dad and living in Fargo, North Dakota for a few years, she divorced and returned to north Minneapolis. Steve and his sister lived with their grandmother north of Cass Lake for a few years until his dad moved there and took up residence. Steve was raised in Cass Lake and roamed the town with his Indian friends, some of whom became his stepbrother and stepsisters when his father married an Indian woman. When his mother died, the minister asked Steve what kind of service he wanted for her. “Oh, you know,” he said, “just your standard Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist kind of thing. Just like you’d normally have.”

The good old days, according to Steve, weren’t so good. “My dad was real physical. Mean,” he said. “He beat on me. He beat on my sister. I grew up raising a lot of hell.” So, too, did the guys Steve was friends with into high school. Randy Headbird, Sonny Seelye, Johnny Jones. They were all into and out of trouble. But sometime during those high school years, Steve split from those friends. “The Cantys and the Stangels, and the Matthews, and all that whole crew, they all came to Cass Lake High School. So we all hung out together, palled around together, fought together. As a kid growing up—you know the ‘Stand By Me’ days when you go around and catch frogs and all that—we were in it together. But take Randy Headbird. And Johnny Jones. At some point someone said, ‘Hey, you guys are Indian, you shouldn’t be hanging around that white kid.’ Their friends were giving them shit. We were the best of friends, we didn’t get in trouble together, but we fished and swam and palled around together. But then someone would say, ‘Why are you hanging around with that fucking white kid?’ I still kind of hung out with those kids, but it became kind of an issue. What it was, was friends and family saying you should hang out with someone else. Guys were dropping out of school and going to jail. But the football team, it was one-third Native and two-thirds not. We were pals. That kind of thing brought people back together. It was never overt, just implied—you should stop hanging out. There was racism both ways. And you felt ostracized by the people you grew up with. All of a sudden I wasn’t Steve Hagenah, the pal from school. I was the fucking white kid.” After graduating from Cass Lake in 1969, Steve went into law enforcement. Many of his friends went the other way. In 1972 Steve came back to the reservation and worked as a city cop for the town of Cass Lake.

“Back then, every night was Saturday night. And I was busting the guys I went to high school with.” There were big fights all the time. Villages were pitted against each other—Bena versus Onigum or Ball Club versus Inger. My mother remembers that every Saturday night the Bena boys would fight the Ball Club boys. “It was routine,” she says, like weekly softball games. “And they still do it,” she says.

These village rivalries were a part of life going back decades, if not centuries. There are at least a dozen small villages, from a few houses to a few hundred, scattered within the boundaries of Leech Lake Reservation; each has its own feel, and each is boosted by local pride. In 1920 the
Cass Lake Times
reported:

Veterans from around Bena, Remer, Ball Club, Boy River and Federal Dam will celebrate at Federal Dam and the warriors are planning the biggest day in the history of that section. Following is the day’s program: Parade of Veterans of all wars in uniform with bugle and drum corps. Patriotic Speeches. Wounded Men’s Race. 100 yard dash. 3-leg race. Obstacle race. Flag race. Sack race. Egg race. Balloon ascension (via the blanket). Kangaroo Court and Belt Line (if necessary). Pup tent pitching Competition. Wall Scaling competition. Drill Competition between squads from Federal Dam and Boy River. Football game between Federal Dam and Boy River. Minstrel and vaudeville show by Federal Dam and Boy River posts. Real Old Time Dance in the evening. (November 4, 1920).

And this from 1947: “The Battling Bena Bombadiers will play the Cass Lake Independents next week, December 17, 1947. The game of last week was one of the best ever played on the Cass Lake floor, and the game next week promises to be another spectators’ game from the first to the final whistle.”

But by the time Steve Hagenah started patrolling the rez in the early 1970s, these friendly rivalries had changed from ball games to fistfights. Steve remembers that when he was on patrol and a fight broke out at the municipal liquor store the officer at the station would shine a spotlight on the water tower. The tower, painted silver, glowed. “It was our bat signal.” And Steve would drive down to the liquor store, leave the gun in the car, open the back door, and spray the place down with Mace. “I’d go through a quart of Mace in a month. Not everyone liked it. Once I took on your uncle Diddy and Shirley and Larry McClemek. Shirley did the most damage. After she was cuffed and stuffed I took a look at myself. I was all torn up, like I’d just walked through barbed wire.”

Steve left the rez to work undercover for the BCA in 1977. (“It was easy. A monkey could do it. I bought a hundred thousand hits of LSD and all I had to do was walk up to some dealers and say ‘Hey man, can I get some drugs from you guys?’ and they sold it to me!”) He returned to the area in 1987.

By the mid-1980s the violence—bar fights, domestics, and burglary—had changed; a different beast had emerged. Crack cocaine was making its way up from the Twin Cities, and with it came more extreme violence and gangs. Crack gave way to heroin and methamphetamine. In many states, such as Minnesota and Washington, deaths from prescription drug abuse are higher than deaths from heroin, meth, and cocaine combined. Although the rates of alcohol consumption and illicit drug use among Native American young people are not significantly higher than the national averages, the rate of binge drinking and prescription drug abuse is. According to Hagenah, most of the violence that he investigates is drug-related, perpetrated by users looking to score. And most of the deaths he’s called to witness are the result of overdoses—almost always involving abuse of prescription drugs. Such was the case with Heather Casey. “Well, the number one drug of choice is stuff like oxycodone. This comes in pill form, and it’s time-released when you take it that way. But these kids will smash it up and inject it, and so the drug comes as a big rush, and it suppresses the nervous system. The body can’t handle it. And it’s all over.

“As for meth, it really messes you up. You take some meth and then you’re up, no sleep, for three, four, five days. You crash, and wake up, and all you want is meth. You get paranoid. Everyone’s after you. And you need meth to make it stop. One guy, Mike Spaulding from Bemidji—you know he owned that dealership Spaulding Motors. He got hooked on meth and he lost millions. He lost the dealership. It didn’t take six years or whatever. The place was gone in six months. He’s got nothing now.” Steve is a tough guy. He’s had to see and do some tough things—lock up his friends, bury his friends, and watch a place he has a lot of affection for destroy itself. And while he talks, with a cop’s verbal swagger, there is something else behind his voice, something more tender, sadder.