Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (24 page)

Attendance at boarding school was mandatory, and government officials, Indian agents, priests, and county workers used whatever means necessary to force families to comply. Rations guaranteed by treaty were withheld. Jobs were dangled. Military and police actions were threatened and used. Parents were faced with impossible, terroristic choices—one woman I know was told that she had to choose: voluntarily send all her kids to boarding school for most of the year or never see them again. She chose to let her kids go. The mother of a girlfriend of mine from Coochiching First Nation in Ontario was lucky. Her parents did not want to let her and her siblings go and so whenever the Indian agent came to the reserve she and her siblings were hidden—under mattresses, in flour bins, rolled in hides tucked in the rafters—until the agent was gone. He would sit in their house, with children hiding all around him like mice, drinking tea with her parents, who told him with sad faces that all the children had died. It worked. Others, like my grandmother, were not so lucky. My grandmother’s mother, Izzie, had applied to the BIA for food. Her husband was gone and she couldn’t feed the kids. The BIA denied her request. It wouldn’t give her any flour, lard, bacon, or any other food. But the agent told her that the kids would be fed at boarding school if she consented to let them go. It wasn’t much of a choice. So my grandmother, at age six, was taken to a boarding school in Tomah, Wisconsin. She traveled to the school with her siblings Tommy, Millie, Howard, and Vern, but they were all separated from one another once they arrived. She did not return until she was ten years old. When she did come home four years later she knew she should cry but she could not. Instead, she stuck her fingers in her eyes so as not to offend her mother.

Boarding schools were the first step in breaking the bond between parents and children. The second step came later, in the 1940s, in the form of the county nurse, who as many say had more power than anyone else over the destiny of Indian kids and Indian families. If a county nurse or a social worker declared that a parent was “unfit,” then there was little the parent could do. The child was taken and, in almost all the cases, sent to live with a non-Native family far from the reservation. Young Indian mothers were encouraged and often forced to put their children up for adoption. There was a thriving market in Indian children. One of my mother’s cousins was, in effect, given to two spinsters from Minneapolis in the early 1940s; they paid his family and took the boy. And my mother herself wound up in foster care in south-central Minnesota while my grandfather was away fighting in World War II and my grandmother was working at the Jolly Green Giant green bean factory in Austin, Minnesota. She stayed there until one summer day when, while she was playing in the yard, a black 1930s sedan drove up, the door opened, and her uncle Howard leaned over the seat and said, “Let’s go.” She climbed in and never went back. She did say, though, the woman who had kept her was kind and caring and sent her a card every year on her birthday with a dollar or two, and on her high school graduation and when she graduated from nursing school.

Like boarding schools, the widespread removal of Indian children from Indian homes in the middle of the twentieth century was federal policy. Administered by the Child Welfare League of America and funded by a federal contract from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the Indian Adoption Project lasted from 1958 through 1967. The goal of the adoption project was to systematically remove Indian children from Indian homes and place them with non-Native families. Since enrolled Indian children belong to sovereign Indian nations, adoption and foster care in which the Indian child is placed in a white family functions as both transracial and transnational. The project director, Arnold Lyslo, thought he was doing a good thing. And he viewed the adoption project as a success. “One can no longer say that the Indian child is the ‘forgotten child,
’
” he said at the project’s completion.

Because of the boarding schools of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century and the ease with which Indian children were snatched from their homes by social workers and county nurses between the 1940s and the 1970s, Indian children were especially vulnerable. Many parents did not have the opportunity to save their children—unlike the chief in William Warren’s account or George Copway. In Minnesota, one in four Indian children under the age of one was removed from his or her home and either placed in foster care or adopted by a non-Indian couple. Twenty-five percent of Indian children lost their tribe, their rights, and their heritage. The problem of Indian children drifting away from home and tribe was so acute that the U.S. government passed legislation in 1978 for the special protection of Indian children. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 was the first step in recognizing the disastrous results of boarding schools and zealous foster care programs. Its main goal was to keep Indian children in Indian families. The ICWA was not based on race; it is based on the political affiliation of Indian children with a specific federally recognized tribe or reservation.

The ICWA is dry stuff, dry reading, that is. But in Indian country, it seems everyone is a lawyer; everyone has a vested interest in the exact letter of the law and nowhere else does one feel the direct pressure or pleasure of laws, statutes, Supreme Court decisions, or shifts in federal policy. The act reads:

Recognizing the special relationship between the United States and the Indian tribes and their members and the Federal responsibility to Indian people, the Congress finds:

Congress, through statutes, treaties, and the general course of dealing with Indian tribes, has assumed the responsibility for the protection and preservation of Indian tribes and their resources; that
there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children
and that the United States has a direct interest, as trustee, in protecting Indian children who are members of or are eligible for membership in an Indian tribe; that an alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by non-tribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions; and that the States, exercising their recognized jurisdiction over Indian child custody proceedings through administrative and judicial bodies, have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families.

And with that, jurisdiction over the placement of enrolled tribal members became a federal matter and no longer a state or county matter, though all these jurisdictions overlap and feed into one another in practice.

In Beltrami County one in four children lives in poverty; this is the highest rate in the state. At Red Lake, 47 percent of children live in poverty. In 2005 the high school graduation rate was 57 percent. Only 25 percent of ninth-graders at Red Lake high school lived with both their parents. In an anonymous survey 81 percent of ninth-grade girls in Red Lake said they had thought about killing themselves. Clearly, something is out of control. Clearly, many Indians have not had control of their own lives or their own resources. But what I wonder about is the difference between someone like Jeff Weise—who seems to have had no hope at all, who had largely given up on, well, as sentimental as it sounds, love—and all the other kids who’ve had it rough on the rez.

2

Even if Jeffrey Weise didn’t feel that he had a reason for living, there are reasons, and they are growing each and every day, or so it seems when I stop by the Boys and Girls Club of Leech Lake.
The club is located in the old high school in downtown Cass Lake, where my mother, uncles, aunt, and second cousins went. The new high school sits on the edge of town, away from the Super Fund Site that is downtown Cass Lake. The streets of Cass Lake, so dangerous for so many people, don’t seem that bad with the lights blazing from the windows of the club. The old school hums with the voices of kids. About eighty kids between the ages of six and twelve show up after school and leave at five-thirty, when the teenagers take their turn. On each and every school night at least sixty Cass Lake teenagers, almost all Indian, walk through the doors to play basketball and video games, go on MySpace and Facebook, eat, joke around, and tease one another. It is loud: loud in the old classrooms, loud in the hallways, loud in the bathrooms. The kids cluster around the workers and hammer them with requests and questions. And the things they talk about—who’s pregnant and who left for North Dakota and who is coming back and when can they go on the computer and so-and-so has been on longer than everyone else—suggest they are alive and excited about being alive. Well, for lack of a better phrase, they sound like kids.

Towering above them is Keenan Goodfellow, a Samoan. He grew up and lived in the tough neighborhood of north Minneapolis. Round-faced and round-headed, he has a build that the kids have to respect: broad, with arms slabbed with muscle, about as big around as my legs, a football lineman’s arms. He wears a white fitted baseball cap backward, cargo pants, and flip-flops, and he makes the best ribs you’ll ever eat. When I visit Keenan for the first time, he has the kids doing a writing assignment in order to earn computer time. They come up with half-filled pages. He glances at the pages and whips them back: “Get real.” “Not good enough.” “You’ve got to be kidding. This? No way.” The kids groan and complain and get back to it.

Keenan estimates that 80 percent of the kids who come to the club don’t live with their parents. All of them come from poverty. Vanessa Budreau is an example. Vanessa is a sharp, funny, sassy girl in the eighth grade. She has a classic Ojibwe face—round, with deep brown eyes and small level teeth. As I talked to her she kept up our conversation, teased a boy making faces through the glass door, and exchanged quips with Keenan. As part of an assignment, she wrote: “I think the reservation is an improving town. I mean around 2000–2005 it was probably one of the most ugliest, savviest, sad, poor, broke towns I have ever seen. But in 2007 the board start having meetings that actually worked and our town is looking a little better. Every day I see a bum with sad, poor kids with no education. Someone with an education wasting it with liquor and drugs. That someone is my mom she was a good mom until I turned 9 and knew what her day off from kids day was. Which were her day of drinking days. I always wondered why she would be so sick in the mornings. Everything was going good until my grandma died in 06 that was the year my dad left my mom and went all the way to North Dakota without telling anybody.”

Vanessa has certainly seen a lot. I ask her what she means when she says Cass Lake is getting better. “Well,” she said, “it’s got lights—you know, street lights—now. And new streets. And sidewalks. Stuff like that.” Her days are getting better, too. After her mother hit the skids Vanessa went to live with her grandfather, whom she clearly loves. She and her siblings and many of her cousins and their babies all landed there until there were fourteen people living in a trailer meant for three. But they got a house on a housing tract south of Cass Lake. They have four bedrooms. Seven members of her family moved out, so there are only seven of them in a house twice the size of the one they had before. She has her own room. Her little brother doesn’t eat her homework anymore. School is going well. She’s decided that she doesn’t want to drink or use drugs. Her friends have decided the same thing. And it’s strange to hear twelve-year-olds say they’ve sworn off meds, pot, and booze. Stacy, one of the other workers of the Boys and Girls Club, tells me that kids as young as nine, with world-weary wisdom, have decided to “get clean” because of the club. “They can tell me what the numbers and letters on pills mean—which ones are Darvocet and which ones are Oxy. I don’t know the difference. But they do.” The tribal government sometimes does what it can, and often doesn’t do all that it can. There are Boys and Girls Clubs in all the major communities on Leech Lake Reservation and other chapters at Red Lake and Bemidji.

Vanessa has come up hard, as hard as it gets. She’s lost her parents. She’s poor. She’s Indian in a town full of poor, parentless Indians. It is much easier to get drugs and to sell them than it is to get into college. Before joining the club she had never been to a restaurant other than a fast-food place or a buffet. As part of SMART Girls, a program attached to the Boys and Girls Club, preteen and teenage girls who qualified because of good grades got to eat out at a restaurant of their choice. They chose Taco Bell. Stacy, the coordinator, told them to think big. They chose Wendy’s. Finally, after some coaxing, she persuaded them to try a local chain, Green Mill. The girls were stunned by the stonework and the wood-paneled booths. When the server came to their table the girls reared back and looked her up and down; they thought she was “stepping.” Stacy explained that the server was there to take their order, that she would bring their food to them—they didn’t have to get it themselves. Just that short trip to the Green Mill in Bemidji was eye-opening for many of them.

2

It’s March now, just a few weeks shy of the second anniversary of the shooting at the school in Red Lake. I like March. Winter is on its way out and my family is busy maple sugaring. We had a very warm spell last week and so we had to get our buckets and taps ready in a hurry. Our family has been sugaring in the same place for the last thirty years—just past the reservation boundary on Highway 12, just past the dam where I used to fish, just past the house where Reagan and Patrick used to live. Sugaring is nice work—it’s not too hard, compared with ricing, netting, trapping, or hunting. The weather is usually nice. And with the fire going and tea made from Lipton’s bags steeped in hot maple sap, and the smell of jack pine slab, it’s a relief after the winter. In the lakes nearby the walleye are schooling and getting ready to run back up the river to thrash once again at the foot of the dam before they drop their eggs and swim back down to the lakes.