Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (7 page)

Although Barrett didn’t show up, Doug Lindgren did. He raised the issue and got into a shouting match with the Red Lake Nation tribal historian and tribal secretary Kathryn “Jodi” Beaulieu, who called Lindgren and his position racist.

Other Republicans present tried to backpedal and distance themselves from Barrett and Lindgren. “He went about it in the same way Mike is going about everything—head down and head first, like a bull in a china shop,” said the chairwoman of the Beltrami County Republicans, Kath Molitor. Mark Kennedy of the U.S. House of Representatives was surprised by the hubbub and didn’t know how to answer questions about Red Lake’s sovereignty. He said he’d never been to Red Lake but would love to visit. This gave the fiery Red Lake treasurer, Darrell Seki, the opening he needed. Seki is from Ponemah, is a fluent speaker of both English and Ojibwe, and is not known, generally, for holding his tongue or for keeping his opinions to himself. He’s a fighter, not a diplomat—and with his severe face, shaded glasses, and glossy hair, he cuts an imposing figure. “Any non-members are welcome to come to our lake,” he said in response to Kennedy, “and I hope they bring their equipment, because our DNR [Department of Natural Resources] needs equipment. Tell the non-members to come to our lake—we’ll arrest them. We’ll take their equipment, too.” He concluded by saying, “It’s our lake, it will stay our lake. We, as a Tribal Council, will protect our lake and our people. All the lands are ours and we are going to protect them.” One got the feeling that Seki had stopped just short of saying “by any means necessary.” What was clear was that Lindgren and Barrett, under the mask of favoring “fairness” and opposing “special rights,” were trying to turn Red Lake into a campaign issue. Red Lake Reservation, with nearly 10,000 members, is a huge voting bloc in the region and has the highest voter turnout in the entire county: according to some statistics, more than 90 percent of Red Lakers go to the polls. Of these, 90 percent vote Democratic. Reservations, after all, are covered by congressional districts, county districts, and sometimes local government as well. And while enrolled band members of tribes can vote in tribal elections, they are also U.S. citizens and can vote in the same elections as their non-Indian neighbors.

As these campaign issues raged, there were other elections under way that summer. Buck Jourdain was running for a second term as tribal chairman against the tribal secretary Judy Roy. On July 19, 2006, Jourdain defeated Roy by a margin of seventy-one votes. Shortly thereafter, a Red Lake tribal member, Archie King, filed a complaint with the General Election Board alleging that Jourdain had bought votes and had used tribal funds for his campaign. The board agreed and ruled that a new runoff between the candidates was in order. Jourdain not only denied the allegations but said that the General Election Board did not have the right to call a new election. As for the complaint, Jourdain said that the “election was fair and my campaign was conducted in accordance with all election laws.” Furthermore, he argued, “According to the Red Lake election code . . . all challenges must be submitted and received within five days of the public posting [of election results] by the General Election Board.” The election issue was covered in the local paper, in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
and in the
New York Times
. Ultimately, the candidates squared off again. Jourdain won.

What is clear is that, taken together—the mismanagement of the lake and the fish, problems with the police force, election disputes—all missteps and even the perception of incompetence, let alone corruption, do threaten the sovereignty of a place like Red Lake. Whenever something does go wrong—and things go wrong all the time—someone raises the issue of sovereignty and suggests it should be done away with. But then again, all nations make mistakes. During the lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff, the Enron affair, Iran-contra, Teapot Dome, and the Whiskey Ring, to name a few, no one said, “Well, clearly the Americans can’t manage their own affairs; it would be best if the United States reverted to British control and became, once again, part of the British Empire.” And people often forget: the only reason there were fish to overfish in the first place (and the only reason the fish have been able to come back so strongly) is that since Red Lake is a closed reservation, there is no development on most of its shoreline—there are no sewage treatment plants, no resorts, no houses perched along the shore, no vacationers pulling up the bulrushes and cattails, no fertilized and pesticide-drenched lawns. Everyone has Red Lake and its leadership to thank for that.

No wonder that Mueller was not cut any slack: the boat was taken, he was summoned, and Red Lake stood its ground. Reflecting back on the case, Grolla seems proud to serve Red Lake and the community he calls his own. “We’ve got a mind-set, you know. It stretches all the way back to when we fought the U.S. government, when we fought the Sioux. We’re used to warfare. We’re used to fighting. That’s who we are. People talk about how we’re a gentle people, you know. How we respect everything. We do, but we’ve had to fight for it. It’s kind of a curse sometimes, you know. I mean, hypothetically, let’s say a girl gets raped Back of Town [a neighborhood in the village of Red Lake] and then her brothers take after the guys who did it, beat them up, burn their house down. Then the perp’s family comes after the girl’s family and on and on it goes. They fight until people are in the ground and nothing is left standing unless you catch them and arrest them and stop it before it really gets going. That attitude, that fighting attitude, goes back to Chief Bagonegiizhig and Changing Feather, back to those guys. Maybe it needs to change. But it’s kept us alive, too. We’re alive because we don’t back down. There’s a message in that, maybe.”

In the end, Jourdain was reelected, the Republicans lost their elections, and the Democrats won (largely because of the support they received from Indians in northern Minnesota). There was no flotilla of angry fishermen. Citizens for Truth in Government has not been able to persuade the state of Minnesota or the federal government to change its attitude to Red Lake, which still exists on a government-to-government basis, as all sovereign nations relate to one another. Jerry Mueller appeared in Red Lake Tribal Court in October 2006. He probably felt the way Indians on the rez feel all the time: surrounded, outnumbered, and unloved by people different from himself. He argued his case, and his defense was based on “Officer, I didn’t know and I’m sorry.” He lost. He paid his fine, and if he has fished on Red Lake since then, he has probably stayed far away from the reservation boundary. Terry Maddy was wrong. Red Lake can have its fish and eat it, too.

Sean Fahrlander and his son Aatwe, 2009

Courtesy Brooke Mosay Ammann

2

“Just dump it in,” Sean is saying to his brothers Marc and Mike. The light is fading, and the wind is coming strong off the big lake: Lake Mille Lacs. It’s April, and the ice has retreated from the shore but the water is soupy with it. When the wind pushes the crushed ice up against the larger unbroken plates out in deeper water, it makes a raspy tinkling sound.

Sean is tall, with large hands, perfect for gripping nets. He was a basketball star in high school, joined the navy, and worked as an air traffic controller on an aircraft carrier. I don’t know if the job was good for him. “You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. My shit was squared away A-1 tight. I was
correct
. Everything in place. Not like now.” Not like now. His hands shake (“Goddamn allergies,” he says). He is nervous (“Goddamn steroids, they really fuck me up”). He is a little high-strung (“PTSD is a bitch, man, a real bitch”). He also talks a lot, more than most people and certainly more than most Indians. In a rush, his words tumble over themselves, each one apparently anxious to reach the finish line—your ears—before the next. He’s an excellent ricer, and can fillet a walleye faster than anyone else I know. (“Talk to a Chippewa and you’ll end up talking about two things: fish and beaver.”) Be that as it may, Sean’s the only Indian I know who is conversant on topics ranging from storytelling to how to tap a maple tree, the meaning of life, how to hit an alternator with a hatchet so it works, the design of the National Museum of the American Indian,
Meerkat Manor
on Animal Planet, ancient Greek warfare, what’s wrong with Indians today, string theory, how to tell the best “drunk story,” and Genghis Khan. I think the idea of
not
knowing something hasn’t occurred to him yet. When you talk to Sean the conversation always finds its way back to Sean. He is, however, generous with his time and energy. Life is much better with him in it—and that’s not something you can say about everyone. Once I bought a decrepit Airstream in Wisconsin. He helped me load it onto the back of a twenty-foot beavertail trailer. We got it strapped down and he looked at me sideways: “You’ll never make it back to Minnesota alone. I’m going with you.”

“How are you gonna get home?”

“Fuck if I know. Just let me run home and grab some underwear and I’m good to go.”

He was right—I couldn’t have done it without him.

Sean can find something funny in just about every encounter, and he has an agile mind. He’s just over forty and his hair is receding a little and is peppered with gray. His laugh comes easily except when he’s “in a mood,” at which time he’ll say, “Don’t fucking talk to me, I’m in a mood.” And so you don’t.

“Fuck no, not yet. Got to fix this little bastard. Little bastard bounced off on the way over here. Little bastard. Fucking transducer.” That’s Mike, Sean’s brother, as he tries to fix the fish-finder on the stern of his sixteen-foot Lund. “Little bastard” is his favorite phrase and he is free with it; he’ll call everyone—white and Indian alike—a “little bastard” as often as he uses it to refer to fish and motors.

The wind pushes its way through our clothes. We’re on Indian Point, on the west side of Lake Mille Lacs. It’s getting dark but if I squint I can see the floats attached to other nets bouncing on the waves. No one else is setting, and the only light comes from the headlights of the reservation game warden’s truck, staffed by two non-Indian reservation conservation officers, making sure we obey the letter of the law as spelled out in the agreement between the Mille Lacs Band and the state of Minnesota at the end of a decade-long legal battle. They are also protecting us from non-Indians who, until very recently, gathered at boat landings like this one and heckled Indians, spit on us, and held up signs that read “Save a Walleye, Spear an Indian” and—one of my favorites—“Indians Go Home.”

The transducer on the fish-finder and depth gauge has broken off and Mike is still trying to rig it up right. His brother Marc, a large man with large strong hands wearing a SpongeBob stocking hat, leans out the door of his Ford F350. The Cummins diesel throbs under the hood. He takes his foot off the brake and the dually tires in the back inch down the ramp toward the lake.

“Just ditch the boat in the lake and let’s go,” says Marc. “It’s getting dark.”

“Yeah, fuck it, we don’t need it. The water’s like, what, six feet? We’ll just go by the other floats,” offers Sean.

“I installed this little bastard so we could be exact,” says Mike. “I mean, like, exact. I didn’t hump around and do all this shit just to guess. I want some fucking walleye. I want to get some of those slimy bastards in the net for sure.”

Finally Mike fixes the transducer and hooks the fish locator up to the battery and they’re ready: Marc slips his truck between the rocky banks and slams the brakes so the boat goes skipping off the trailer while Sean holds the bowline. The tires of the Ford churn rock and gravel as it climbs away from the landing, earth that has been churned by Indian tires and Indian feet for years with the same goal as the three brothers have: to net some walleye and feed their families. Marc walks back down from the truck and he and Sean and I get into the boat while Mike tries to push us off. But Marc must weigh at least 240 pounds and Sean 210, and the addition of my 170 pounds means that the small aluminum skiff is grounding out. Mike jumps into the lake up to his knees, heaves, and the boat is free, Marc yanks the engine to life and within minutes they are yelling and swearing and giving each other shit as they drop in their 100-foot net. The three brothers—all colorful speakers, all amazingly gifted with fine mechanical ability (Mike, a mason, can mentally calculate, down to the block, the number of cement blocks for the basements he builds, and Sean is a mean stonewright in his own way, too)—have gathered to net fish. Marc drove all the way from Colorado. He owns his own construction company, based in Colorado Springs. He comes back to Mille Lacs every spring to net walleye with his brothers and, this year, to hunt in the first Mille Lacs turkey season. The birds have made a comeback. He’s brought along half a dozen calls, camo, inflatable decoys, and his shotguns—all brand new. Mike’s come over from Brainerd, and Sean from Wisconsin. They are all Mille Lacs enrollees and they are back on the reservation none of them grew up on to net the fish that is theirs. “Why bother?” I ask as we’re idling back near shore. “Why go to all the trouble for a few fish?”

“Well,” Sean drawls, as he thinks it over, smoking, resting after the rush to get the net into the water: “Let me answer your question with another question: Why does a dog lick his dick?”

2

As the fish gather every spring, so does Sean’s family—to visit, to hang out, to argue and fight, and to exercise their treaty rights. As I drove down to Mille Lacs to meet them it was hard not to notice how the place has changed since casinos. The roads were nice, and the houses tucked back into stands of old-growth maple and oak were spacious. The cars parked in the yards were quite new, tending toward Buicks and Chryslers. I made a wrong turn, missing the road to Sean’s mother’s house. Instead, I turned by the Vineland Indian Chapel, just below the water tower, emblazoned with the seal of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians—the state of Minnesota in outline, with an arrow passing through the heart of it, which is exactly where Mille Lacs is: a little bit north and west of Minneapolis. A few old shacks clung to the hilltop in the shadow of the water tower. They were falling in, the roof boards were rotted out, and tar paper was waving in the wind. All of them were small, none bigger than sixteen by twenty feet. I was surprised no one had burned them down. Maybe the tribe kept them standing to remind themselves of the hardships it had faced during the past century. Until recently the tribe had experienced the kind of Indian existence one usually thinks of, but worse.

Once I’d straightened myself out, I found myself on long, winding, suburban-feeling roads (with curbs and fire hydrants) that snaked back amid the maples. The new houses are enormous—three bedrooms, two baths, double attached garages—with vinyl siding and landscaping. All the streets have Ojibwe names: Noopiming Drive, Ziigwan Lane. The elders on Mille Lacs get their houses free. So do veterans, and there are many veterans at Mille Lacs.

Bonnie’s house is creamy yellow, the second house on the right on a small cul-de-sac ending in a large swamp. Sean said I would see a small boat on a trailer in the driveway and another big boat parked out front. The big boat is a twenty-two-foot Bayliner with a waterskiing deck, a berth, and a sporty white canvas cover over the wheelhouse. Marc drove it up from Colorado, and since they had nothing else they used it to net the year before.

When I’d walked in the door I saw Sean and Marc wrestling on the living room floor. Marc outweighed Sean by at least forty pounds and had him on his back. Mike and their other brother, Jay; Marc’s wife, Holly; and their mother, Bonnie, half-watched the wrestling match and half-watched
Ghost Rider
. The flames from Nicolas Cage’s digitized skull licked Bonnie’s enormous flat-screen TV. Bonnie barely seemed to notice that her sons, all in their forties, were trying to rub each other’s faces in the carpet until finally Sean said, “I give! I give!” Marc wouldn’t get off him till Bonnie said, “Let him up, Marc. You’re hurting my little boy.” Holly, pregnant, went into the kitchen to make some lunch.

Everything is big at Mille Lacs, except the reservation itself. A smattering of small parcels scattered over east central Minnesota, Mille Lacs is close to, but shies away from, Minneapolis and its crawling, clawing suburbs, which are eating up the nearby farmland. Mille Lacs Lake is huge: covering about 132,000 acres or 206 square miles, it is the second largest in the state and one of the largest in the United States.
The Ojibwe name for the lake is Mizizaga’igan, “It Spreads All Over.” The Sioux who lived there before the Ojibwe called it Mde Wakan, “Spirit Lake,” and this is what the Dakota of Minnesota still call themselves, the Mdewakanton Sioux.

The lake was settled and contested, lost and won, many times before the Dakota and then the Ojibwe settled there. It has been continually inhabited for at least 9,000 years, a fact attested to by huge archaeological sites and a particularly impressive and perplexing altar composed of more than fifty bear skulls, uncovered during a highway expansion project.

The first European to see Lake Mille Lacs was a Franciscan priest, Father Louis Hennepin. In 1680 he was traveling, mapping, and baptizing his way through the region when he was taken captive by the Dakota. He spent five months as a captive at Mille Lacs. During that time he described the lifestyle of and the region inhabited by his captors. He was struck by the wealth of the land and the people. One thing he noticed was that the Dakota, rather than living in tepees, built earthen lodges like those the Arikara and Mandan later adopted in the West.

Two hundred years later it was still possible to see what attracted the Dakota and why they fought so hard to keep the lake to themselves. The lake “lies imbedded in deep forests,” wrote the Ojibwe historian William Warren in 1885. “Its picturesque shores are skirted with immense groves of valuable sugar maple, and the soil on which they grow is not to be surpassed in richness by any section of country in the northwest. The lake is nearly circular in form, though indented with deep bays, and the view over its waters broken here and there by bold promontories. It is about twenty miles across from shore to shore, and a person standing on its pebbly beach on a clear calm day, can but discern the blue outlines of the opposite side, especially as the country surrounding it is comparatively low and level. Its waters are clear and pure as the waters of Lake Superior, and fish of the finest species are found to abound therein. Connected with it is a string of marshy, or mud-bottomed, lakes in which the water is but a few feet deep, and wherein the wild rice of the north grows luxuriantly, and in the greatest abundance. Possessing these and other advantages, there is not a spot in the northwest which an Indian would sooner chose as a home and dwelling place, than Mille Lacs.”

Legend has it (and it probably
is
only a legend) that the Dakota were driven from Mille Lacs because of a lovers’ quarrel. Sometime in the 1600s a Dakota man and an Ojibwe man liked the same Dakota girl. The Dakota and Ojibwe had been fighting off and on for centuries, but during the time of this love triangle these tribes had been enjoying a lasting, if uneasy, peace. The girl chose the Ojibwe man, and the jealous Dakota lover killed him. This in itself didn’t lead to war; as William Warren suggests, “it only reminded the warriors of the two tribes that they
had once been enemies
.” Not long afterward, an Ojibwe chief from Fond du Lac, to the north, allowed his four sons to travel to the Dakota village at Mille Lacs to visit their Dakota friends. On their way back, one son was murdered. The remaining three brothers asked if they could go and visit again, and the father said yes: most likely, their brother had been killed by mistake. But another brother was killed on the second trip. They visited again. A third was killed. Only one brother was left, and he wanted to go again, despite the murders of his brothers. The weary father said sure, the three brothers had probably all been killed by mistake. Off went the fourth brother. He never returned. The father, overcome by grief, said to all who would listen, “An Ojibwe warrior never throws away his tears.” He planned and plotted his revenge and two years later led a huge war party against the Dakota. The Ojibwe wiped out a number of small villages and the few Dakota survivors retreated to the main village on the big lake. The Ojibwe attacked again and instead of simply relying on the few guns they had and their bows and war clubs, they threw bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes in the Dakota lodges. Many hundreds of Dakota burned to death. The surviving Dakota gave up the lake and retreated west and south. However, it would be another 100 years before all the Dakota left northern and central Minnesota. The lake is as beautiful and rich today as it was when the lovers’ quarrel set off that chain of events.