Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (16 page)

In the 1950s and 1960s as places like Ball Club got to make their own rules about how their children were administered to and as the people of Rice Lake at White Earth came to see they had the power to change their own lives, the grip of the BIA began to loosen in communities on reservations across the country. One skilled fighter confronting the BIA was Roger Jourdain, the first elected chairman of Red Lake Reservation. Just before my father worked for the BIA he found employment at Red Lake through the Community Action Program (CAP), which was funded in part by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and was one of the more controversial aspects of Johnson’s plan. It was a huge program designed to tackle local poverty problems with a cocktail of federal funds, foundation support, and local investment. The controversial aspects were the scale, speed, and unique features of the program that mandated local staffing and control. Jourdain, at Red Lake, was keen to get his hands on the CAP money, and so he and a few other leaders and my father submitted an application for funds through CAP. Their application was denied. The reason: not enough local buy-in. My father and three others got some money from the Minnesota Chippewa tribe and flew to Washington on the red-eye to see what they could do. They landed at six in the morning and spent what remaining cash they had on cab fare from the airport to the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which oversaw the CAP program. They were too early. They went for breakfast, came back, and were told rather curtly by an administrator that there was nothing that could be done.

“Well,” said one of the Red Lake representatives, “what next?” They had no money and little by way of encouragement.

“Why don’t we walk down to the vice president’s office?” suggested my father. “He’s from Minnesota.” Since they couldn’t afford cab fare they walked from OEO all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue and announced themselves to the staff at Hubert Humphrey’s office as a delegation from Red Lake Reservation. “We were met by some functionary,” remembers my father. He came out and took one look at us and asked, ‘What can I do for you?’—though it was clear he didn’t want to do anything. He didn’t even take us into an office to sit down or offer us water or anything. ‘We came to see about our application for CAP money. We were denied and we want Humphrey to do something about it.’

“
‘What seems to be the problem?’

“
‘We applied. We have need. But we’re too fucking poor to qualify. Is that what the War on Poverty is supposed to be like? You have to be rich to qualify?’

“That got his attention. He disappeared into the back. In a little bit Hubert Humphrey came out. We knew each other from his campaigning days in northern Minnesota. And he said, ‘So what can I do for you?’ And I said, ‘We applied for CAP money. But we were told we were too poor to qualify—we can’t afford the local buy-in because there’s no damn money up there.’ He looked at us and looked at his assistant and said to him, ‘Do something about this, will you?’

“By that afternoon our application had been approved and we were on our way back to Red Lake. Just having CAP funded at Red Lake was a big deal. It meant health care and housing and social services. But it meant something much more, too,” remembers my father. “For the first time there was a community program on the rez not funded by the BIA. Even the proceeds from fishing or timber sales were kept in trust by the BIA. But they had no part in CAP money. And the band got to hire its own staff, its own outreach workers, its own administration. That, too, was in part how the BIA stopped being the sole power and supreme controller of the purse strings on the rez.”

In the town of Bemidji, Minnesota, many people are afraid of Red Lakers. Bemidji is the largest town in the area, with a population of 12,000. It is the county seat and the shopping and banking destination for most of the county. Indians live in Bemidji,
and many of us go there either to shop or to appear in court or both. The next nearest town that is bigger is Duluth, 155 miles to the east. At one time Bemidji was
the
going concern. It sat at the junction of rail lines running north-south between Winnipeg and Minneapolis and lines that ran east-west between Grand Forks and Duluth. All the grain and timber passing through the north passed through Bemidji. And it is surrounded by Indians, literally—White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake reservations form the points of a triangle in which Bemidji sits at the center, and the combined reservation populations outnumber the population of Bemidji two to one. Bemidji still has a “circle the wagons” kind of feel to it.

Nowadays, however, the circling of the wagons has more to do with the service-sector economy gutting local businesses. Most of the stores now hem the town instead of filling it out. At the city center or what’s left of it, enormous cement statues of Paul and Babe stand facing west as they have done since 1937 at the carnival grounds, and just across the main street, at Morrell’s Chippewa Trading Post, is an equally large iron statue of an Indian wearing buckskin breeches but no shirt. His hair is pulled back in two long iron braids and one arm is raised with palm out, in the old “How” pose so familiar to most Americans. For many years Morrell’s iron Indian was the only Indian in town.

It’s hard to say who’s more savage: the Indian statue or Paul Bunyan. The Indian looks stoic (definitely not Ojibwe) but gentle, somehow, in his iron pose, wearing his iron pants, flexing his iron washboard stomach. The struggle between “the civilized” and “the savage” has been raging in Bemidji for many years. On October 25, 1966, Robert Kohl, a radio announcer on KBUN, Bemidji’s only radio station, read an editorial about life on Red Lake Reservation. He described one particularly run-down home and said:

The scene is typical of many a welfare home . . . dirt and filth, cats and dogs and flies, lots of kids . . . some retarded, some with emotional problems of a serious nature, but more in proportion than any families off the reservation . . . human irresponsibility at its zenith and it staggers the imagination to discover that we are trying to help these people with welfare money. . . .

Perhaps that is where the welfare laws could be re-written . . . to help only those who are salvageable. . . . Perhaps we should never have lowered our sights to this level, perhaps we should have let nature take her course, let disease and malnutrition disrupt the reproductive process and weed out those at the very bottom of the heap. . . .

They are so low on the human scale that it is doubtful they will ever climb upward. Their satisfaction level is so low that it corresponds to that of the most primitive of the earth’s animals . . . food, comfort, and a place to reproduce . . . those are the three . . . and with our welfare dollars we provide a little food in the belly, some kind of primitive shelter, and a place to reproduce, and this is all that is wanted, all that is needed, all that is desired.

They are satisfied . . . but who takes care of the offspring, including those with tortured and twisted minds raised in this environment? Is it really Christian, really human, to meddle with lives so primitive and basic? And what’s the alternative? Spend thirty or forty thousand dollars per child to remove him from the element, educate him, only to look back and see the child population gaining on you through irresponsible procreation?

Is it any less heartless to sacrifice physically and mentally healthy young men in Vietnam or Korea to make the world safe for our political philosophy than it is to sacrifice these hopelessly morally and mentally indigent for our economic philosophy?

Ignoring the fact that not a few men from Leech Lake, White Earth, and Red Lake were at that moment serving in Vietnam, Kohl’s comments were shocking for an entirely different reason. What is amazing is the extent of the belief that Indians don’t read or listen to the radio. Comments about our lives float around us on the air and in print and it comes as a surprise that, in addition to being stoic and riding horses and skinning beavers, we read and we listen. Indians are compulsive newspaper consumers. So it was no surprise that the Red Lake tribal council heard that radio broadcast in 1966, recorded it, and played it at a regularly scheduled council meeting, which happened to be held that same day. At the time Red Lake was governed by an elected tribal council, led by Roger Jourdain, and backed by a council of hereditary chiefs, representing the original seven clans that made up the band. This was a powerful mix. And it was no accident that the joint council decided to fight; by far the largest clan on Red Lake is the Bear Clan. Since Red Lake had existed on the very western frontier of Ojibwe territory for so long, and was so long involved
in wars and skirmishes with the Sioux, most of the Red Lake Band belonged to this warrior clan, the Bear Clan. By unanimous decision they decided to boycott businesses in the Bemidji area until Kohl was fired, and until the radio station broadcast a public apology. Leech Lake and White Earth reservations joined the boycott the following day.

The response to the boycott was predictable even if the effects were not. Some area residents
came out in support of Indians: Elizabeth Rogers of Guthrie, just south of Bemidji, praised the “wisdom and courage of the Red Lake Tribal Council.” Some did not: David E. Umhauer of Bemidji wrote, “I hope those Indians offended by the broadcast do boycott Bemidji. If they do, it will be a cleaner town.” Cleaner or not, it was, almost immediately, poorer. “The boycott has been so effective and so thorough that over the week, for the first time since Bemidji became a community, Bemidji’s streets have been practically devoid of Indians,” reported the
Bemidji Pioneer
. No Indians spent any of their money in Bemidji. No one bought groceries, clothes, or equipment. Indians went elsewhere for construction supplies, heating oil, and gasoline. Tribal government offices on all three reservations refused to buy office supplies and business equipment. Many people canceled their insurance policies held by Bemidji brokers. Red Lake and the other reservations threatened to withdraw all tribal funds—obtained by government contracts, logging, and the profits from the Red Lake commercial fishery—from Bemidji
’s banks. Since Indians were universally acknowledged as being the poorest of the poor, marginal, without any clout to speak of, no one in Bemidji was concerned at first. But the tribal funds banked in Bemidji amounted to $2 million rather than the $500,000 that had previously been estimated. Local businesses, which had haughtily made Indians wait by the back door ever since Bemidji incorporated in 1896, began to feel the pinch immediately. And the pinch hurt more than they cared to admit.

Roger Jourdain also liked to write letters. As a child he had been sent to an Indian boarding school at Flandreau, South Dakota. He had worked as an operator of heavy machiney during World War II on the Alcan Highway. He was not afraid of a fight. And he was not afraid to write. He wrote hundreds of letters to local, regional, and national political figures. Each letter contained a statement about the radio broadcasts and a transcript of Kohl’s editorial. And each and every envelope was hand-addressed by Jourdain himself in his neat boarding-school script.

Dear Sir,

The people of Red Lake Reservation have sought over the years to improve the economic and educational structure of the Reservation. Great strides have been made and particularly so in the last few years.

It is more than disappointing therefore when broadcasts are made reviving the ancient prejudices, resorting to the name calling of Indians, ignoring the good efforts of the many for the possible faults of the few.

We attach a transcript of a broadcast made over Bemidji Radio station KBUN on Tuesday, October 25, 1966, and ask for your careful examination of this. We do not consider ourselves as “sub-human, as animal like, or morally and mentally indigent.” We trust you do not think of us in this fashion either. We will appreciate anything you, your office, and associates can do to persuade the management of a 20th century enterprise to outgrow the 19th century hate-the-Indian complex. This should be a time for working and building together, not a time for inflaming ancient racial prejudices.

It is unfortunate that such a broadcast would be made; it would be even more unfortunate if it were allowed to pass unchallenged. This broadcast is contrary to the mainstream American effort and the American struggle to build even better relationships between people. A healthy nation can not tolerate the singling out of one minority for abuse. We seek to enlist your support in our struggle.

The letters, written the day after the broadcast, were sent to senators Walter F. Mondale and Eugene McCarthy, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mayor Howard Menge of Bemidji, and the president of the chamber of commerce, Carl Olsen. Later, identical letters were sent to dozens of state officials and legislators, local clergymen, business leaders, and anyone else Jourdain thought might be of help.

Within days the Brahmins of Bemidji were trekking up to Red Lake, where they met with the tribal council. Within a week they were begging Red Lake and the other reservations, Leech Lake and White Earth, to bring their business back. Within two weeks the radio announcer was fired and a public apology was made in print and over the air, and with it came the promise of fifty jobs for Indians in Bemidji. At that point no visible Indians (but a few invisible ones—Indians who were mixed enough to pass as white) worked in town. None. Not in government jobs, not in business, not even as checkout clerks at Luekens Village Foods or John’s Super Valu, the two grocery stores. Red Lake changed that for all of us. Within two years 100 Indians were working in Bemidji.

Forty years later, everyone at Red Lake, Leech Lake, and White Earth remembers the days of the boycott. And though to an outsider it might matter little or seem like one small click of the wheel of social justice, it was the first time anyone could remember white people publicly apologizing to Indians not because they wanted to (well-meaning liberals have been apologizing to Indians for close to 500 years) but because they had to.