Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (15 page)

It wasn’t until the 1990s that an Indian, the Menominee activist Ada Deer, was put in charge of the BIA. And after her, there was the Ojibwe entrepreneur Dave Anderson (owner of the Famous Dave’s BBQ chain). In the 1950s, remembers my father, the BIA controlled everything. “You couldn’t get anything done without their approval,” he says. “They controlled everything. They controlled the land and collected rents. All fees were paid to them. And they paid out the money. All leases, all business deals, all disputes. . . . It went through them. Even the tribal council meetings were controlled by them. The tribal council wasn’t allowed to meet unless they had BIA approval. And even then they controlled the agenda because they were in charge of giving out gas and meal vouchers and a small per diem for the tribal council members. The tribal council was made up of poor reservation people. They couldn’t make meetings if they didn’t get a little money for gas and for lunch. And so the BIA made damn sure that their agenda was on the table and they got the vote they wanted. Or no gas. No lunch. No meeting. It was like that. They were smooth and polished and sophisticated. It was a sophisticated kind of control. But it was control.”

Enter my father. He was the least likely person for the job: he came from a family of socialists and was a borderline socialist himself. He worked for years as a labor organizer in Wisconsin. He was not BIA material as far as control and paternalism were concerned. But he was Philleo Nash’s protégé. He had the ear of the commissioner of Indian affairs. And so the area superintendent, Mittelholtz, generally left my father alone; he might lose his job if he stood up to Nash.

One of my father’s first jobs for the BIA was to do a kind of census in the reservation village of Ball Club. There was a nationwide program dedicated to making sure the elderly were signed up for the newly created Social Security benefits. Not a lot of seniors knew what they were entitled to receive from the government in their retirement, least of all Indians, and a program was launched to find tribal elders and give them information. What my father found deep in the woods around the reservation shocked him. “I expected to see the poverty and the disease and all that. But what I found was a totally atomized society. Scattered. Old couples living off by themselves in the woods with no water and no food and no money. Their kids gone. Gone away to the cities or to boarding schools or just lost. There was no one looking after them. All this talk about community, community, community you hear around and about Indian country. It wasn’t there. There was little community to speak of. Community and family systems had been destroyed—as a matter of policy by government and church—so there were just scattered people all over the place.”

Such was my father’s impression of Ball Club and other small villages and settlements on Leech Lake, White Earth, and Red Lake. But villagers remember it differently; Bena, Ball Club, Inger, Ponemah, Oak Point—these places were still cohesive and functional. Bena, for instance, was the only district on Leech Lake that voted against the Indian Reorganization Act back in 1934 even though it was accepted by a majority of the council.

A little while later Ball Club was once again on my father’s radar. There was a complicated program in place to deal with malnutrition. Ball Club was a village of a few hundred people, all Indian, at the eastern edge of Leech Lake Reservation. There was a school lunch program in place, but it was manifestly unfair. As my father remembers it, the children whose families lived on trust land (tribal land) got the free lunch. But those who did not live on tribal land did not get the free lunch. It was creating a weird kind of class conflict in a community where every member was poorer than dirt. This division was tearing the community apart.

“My plan was very simple. It came from my union days. You get all the parties involved in one place—the BIA, the county, the reservation leadership, the state board of education—and that way when one of them passes the buck they have to pass it to someone else in the room. And you bring a tape recorder so it’s all on tape. Someone will hang for it and someone will have to eventually take responsibility. The all-Indian parents’ organization asked the usual questions and the usual nonanswers were given. But they kept asking and the official people kept passing the buck. One of them, the one from the state, got mad and pounded the table with his fist. And one of the parents—I think her name was Dora—said, ‘Hey. When you pound on the table like that you’re hurting my tape recorder.’ And then they realized that they wouldn’t be able to leave until the problem got fixed. It got fixed. And the parent groups! They looked up and looked at each other and they were thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve got power.
We
did this.
’
”

It was a small thing: making sure all the kids in one school got the same benefits. But it was a start, breaking the BIA’s stranglehold on reservation life. My father’s work brought him to all of the Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota, but most of his work occurred at the two biggest, Leech Lake and White Earth reservations. Leech Lake was bad, but White Earth was brutal.

In the late 1800s the feds tried to disband Mille Lacs, Fond du Lac, and Leech Lake reservations in Minnesota and Turtle Mountain Reservation in northeastern North Dakota. The Indians from these reservations, numbering in the tens of thousands, were promised farmland, schools, lumber mills, blacksmith shops, churches, seed, hoop iron, plows—in short, everything they would need to reimagine themselves as farmers. If the government had kept its promise, this would have been a good deal. White Earth Reservation is amazing country. The eastern parts near the headwaters of the Mississippi are full of rolling, hilly hardwood forests, and the western edge has rich, loamy soil not unlike the Red River Valley farther to the west (a river valley even more fertile than the Nile). And in the middle of all this are lakes rich in rice and fish. White Earth could have been a paradise. But the promises weren’t kept. There were no lumber mills and no blacksmith shops and there was precious little farming equipment. Or at best there was none of this till sometime later. Meanwhile, the thousands of Indians from reservations all over Minnesota and from Turtle Mountain were left in paradise with nothing to work it. They were allotted their lands, which disappeared from underneath their feet because they defaulted on illegal back taxes or traded their land for enough supplies to get them through their winter. Tom Shingobee has in his possession a grocery receipt totaling seventeen dollars that his father had to settle by signing over his 160-acre farm. During World War I, when many of the men were away fighting in Europe, the timber stands were cut down by large timber outfits. One man remembers coming home to his beloved forests only to find a desert of slash and brush and not a tree in sight for miles.

In the 1950s, even after the Indian Reorganization Act, the “Indian New Deal,” many of the Indian communities in White Earth still had barely anything to call their own. They had no water or phones or electricity. But the white farms on the reservation had been wired for electricity and phones through the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) with funds created by Congress as part of the New Deal. These lines had largely bypassed each and every Indian community in the region. When my father visited the village of Rice Lake, the village leaders pleaded with him to go to the REA office off the reservation in Bagley and get them electricity.

“No,” he said. “I won’t go to REA. You will go. I’ll help you. But you go.”

Rice Lake sent a delegation to the REA offices in Bagley. “I was there with them. And let me tell you, they got the same paternalistic runaround. ‘Oh, we can’t bring the wires in if we don’t know how many of you there are.’ Well, we had a census with us and we handed it over. ‘Oh! There’s that many of you!’ After a lot of hemming and hawing the REA guys said, ‘Well, it costs a lot to clear the right-of-way and we don’t have the funds.’ I asked them: if we clear the right-of-way—it was seven miles of trees and brush—will you wire it? ‘Sure. We can do that.’ But they didn’t think it would ever happen. They had a real low opinion of reservation people. But a few weekends later we had a big potluck in Rice Lake. I got tools—brush hooks and axes and saws—from the BIA. And the whole village turned out. I mean women and men and kids. Absolutely everyone. And they cleared the right-of-way, all seven miles of it, in one weekend. That’s all it took. And this meant a lot. It meant, for the first time, for the first time
ever:
light, toilets, heat. Real sanitation and light and heat for a village of three hundred people.”

The real boon of electricity was the refrigerator. For many families the day an electric fridge arrived is remembered in fond detail, the way VE Day is remembered by many veterans. Refrigerators meant no more spoilage of meager supplies, no more rotten meat.

“This was before the War on Poverty,” says my father. “I didn’t do it. They did it. It was a powerful thing. That’s how it happened: that’s how the reservations broke the BIA, not the other way around. It happened in bits and pieces. Some of it was the civil rights movement. Some of it was a side effect of boarding schools. All those Indians who got sent to boarding schools were supposed to be whitewashed there, but it didn’t always happen like that. A lot of them went back to their reservations and they had skills—as carpenters and accountants and farmers. And a lot of the vets from World War II came back. They knew how to operate heavy machinery. They knew how to organize. And all of this combined with Native grit. It changed things.”

My father hastened to add: “It sure as shit wasn’t AIM that did it. AIM was too polarized and too explosive to build anything. They couldn’t build power lines or consensus or community. They just used people. They were all a bunch of Al Sharptons. And you can quote me on that. Make sure that gets in there.”

The isolation and desperation of life on the reservation, largely aided and abetted by the BIA, still, fifty years later, bring tears to my father’s eyes. But these conditions also brought joy. “Much of my life I was rejected. As a Jew. As a puny kid. A refugee in England. A refugee in Ireland. A refugee in the United States—and only a few years later I find myself working for good causes in the Indian community. It was a love affair. I was adopted, with tobacco and don’t let anyone tell you different. I was at home, enfolded. I was at home in the Indian community not through some sort of James Fenimore Cooper romanticism but because I found people who loved me, and whom I loved. At first they respected my work. And it grew from there.”

2

I suppose it’s strange to find a Jew on a reservation. It’s even stranger to consider that more white people than Indians live on the Leech Lake Reservation. This is true of many reservations. It is one of the lasting and most damning effects of the U.S. government policy of allotment, which began with the Dawes Act in 1887 and the amendments in 1891 and 1906. The Dawes Act was the enabling federal legislation, and the Nelson Act fueled the actual allotment of reservations in Minnesota. Section 1 of the Dawes Act authorized the president to divide collective tribal lands into individual sections. Each head of a household was to be granted a 160-acre parcel if the land was arable or a 320-acre parcel if the land was suitable only for grazing. Single individuals and orphans were granted eighty acres each and all other “single individuals” (minors, not women) were to be given forty acres each. The parcels of land distributed to Indian individuals were, under the act, to be held in trust for twenty-five years, during which time they were not able to sell it. Devastatingly, the “surplus” land (that is, the land “left over” after all the individuals in a tribe were given their parcels) was opened up for sale to non-Natives. So even as early as the 1890s, large reservations with Indian populations decimated by disease and warfare suddenly found their lands gone, and their near neighbors were the people who benefited from the dispossession. In all, during the forty-seven years the Dawes Act was on the books (the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, officially stopped allotment but did not formally rescind the policy), Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of tribal lands, about two-thirds of the lands held by Indians when the Dawes Act was passed; Indians lost, roughly, land that equals the size of the state of California. Ninety thousand Native Americans were left landless and largely homeless. The problems of this kind of landlessness were felt well into the 1970s and are still felt today. During that time, many Indian families were found to be living in cars, under porches, and crammed eight and sometimes ten to a room in dilapidated shacks across the country.

To make matters worse, the Burke Amendment in 1906 took even more land out of Indian control. It instituted a process known as “forced patenting.” Indians deemed “competent and capable” were given a patent in fee simple for their land. That is, the land was taken out of trust and they were given title, were now subject to taxation, and could sell their land. Those deemed “incapable and incompetent” had their lands automatically leased out at the discretion of the secretary of the interior. The processes by which Indians were deemed “capable” or “incapable” were largely subjective. In many cases (and land disputes at White Earth Reservation were often settled this way) government agents relied on the emergent field of eugenics to help them make a determination as to competence. Full-bloods were often deemed incompetent because they were full-bloods, whereas mixed-bloods were thought to have enough white blood to make them intelligent enough to understand the ins and outs of land ownership. But how to tell if someone was or was not a full-blood in an especially complicated community like White Earth Reservation whose population had been sourced from North Dakota, Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and Fond du Lac? The secretary of the interior turned to two anthropologists: Dr. Alex Hrdlicka, director of anthropology at the Smithsonian, and Dr. Albert E. Jenks of the University of Minnesota. To determine full-blood status, Hrdlicka and Jenks had devised certain criteria: skull shape, distance between the eyes, color of teeth, nails, and gums. Their most interesting hypothesis was that if you scratched your fingernail across the chest of a mixed-blood it would redden (hyperaemia) more than if you scratched the chest of a full-blood. The effects of this policy and the determinations about full-blood, half-blood, and quarter-blood that were made in the 1920s are still felt today. Most of the “blood” statistics for White Earth were wrong then and were never corrected, and so thousands if not tens of thousands of White Earth Indians today cannot be enrolled and do not receive any of the benefits of enrollment. There were so many claims that land was illegally appropriated from White Earth tribal members that the White Earth Land Settlement Act (WELSA) was passed in 1986. According to WELSA, “The White Earth allotments and land claims controversy involved the individual property rights of Indian people who had received allotments (tracts) of land to be held ‘in trust’ by the United States government. The White Earth land claims involved over 1900 individual allotments and titles to over 100,000 acres of land, which were illegally transferred during the 1900s. The illegal transfers were accomplished through the use of mass quantities of liquor, falsified affidavits, mortgages on grocery bills, sales by minor children, and illegal tax forfeitures. Many of those illegal transfers were uncovered during a federal investigation during the 1980s. After the extent of the land claims [was] discovered and political pressure from the current landowners was applied, the federal government chose to pursue a negotiated political settlement to the land claims controversy.
The White Earth Land Settlement Act (WELSA) was passed in 1986 extinguishing the White Earth land claims by retroactively approving the illegal land transfers. In exchange, WELSA provided that the allottees or their heirs would be compensated financially. The monetary compensation is to be based on the fair market value of the land at the time of taking, minus any money received by the allottee at the time, plus interest to date.” But with many heirs (sometimes more than twenty) claiming the same parcels of land, what payments were made were so small as to change very little.