Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (25 page)

I had to set out the taps alone. My older brother is expecting another child. My younger brother and sister are busy working. My mother lost a lung to cancer and so it’s hard for her to get around in the woods the way she used to. My father no longer sugars at all. He’s eighty-one. So I rounded up all the pails and buckets; washed them; organized the taps and plastic tubing, my auger, and a hatchet; and set off for the sugar bush. It’s only two miles from the house, and I was in a hurry, so I dumped everything into the back of the truck and took off. Right at the reservation boundary a gust came up and blew one ice-cream pail from the back of the truck, but I kept on, figuring I’d pick it up on my way home.

It was sunny, maybe fifty degrees. The snow was still deep and I slogged through it from tree to tree. The sugar bush is nice because it seems like the kind of place where nothing happens. There were no animal tracks—no deer trails, no rabbit trails, no fox, wolf, coyote, fisher, or marten tracks at all. Just the soughing of the trees, the knackering of branches. I was still working close to the road when a white sedan with Leech Lake Reservation plates pulled up next to my truck. The horn honked.

“Excuse me! Excuse me, sir!” someone called.

I looked up.

“This’s got to be your bucket. I found it on the road.”

An arm waved out the car window, holding my ice-cream pail.

I slogged over to the car and said thanks.

The man was about my age. A lot bigger. Dark. He had on fashionable wire-rimmed glasses and wore his hair in a loose ponytail.

“You must have to eat a ton of ice cream to get enough buckets for this.”

“We all do our part,” I agreed.

We didn’t have much else to say

“Thanks for finding my bucket,” I said.

“No problem. No problem at all.” And he drove away.

And just when he put the car in gear and pulled out into the road I recognized him. It was Reagan Morgan. It had to be. I hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years, so I couldn’t be sure. But it was the same round, open, friendly face. The same full cheeks. The same eyes. His hair was longer and his complexion a lot clearer. His glasses were better, too.

It was weird. I had been writing about him just that morning. And wondering, too. Wondering if he was doing OK. Wondering if his life was what he wanted it to be. My sister, who gets out a lot more than I do, says she sees him once in a while at Moose-A-Brew, a coffee shop in Bemidji. He games there a lot, she says. I also wonder if he remembers me and my brother, and remembers fishing with us. The man in the white car seemed healthy and happy. Solid. And he did me a good turn by bringing my bucket over.

I trotted back to my taps and began tapping again: drilling the holes and fitting the spigots in. The sap will start running any day now. And every morning when I go to check, my buckets will feel like Christmas, with a surprise (How much? How full?) in every bucket.

I thought about those past summers as I tapped. I thought about the afternoon after Reagan showed me his
Hustler
. We eventually landed a huge nort
hern pike. I don’t remember who did it—probably my brother Tony, who was always luckier than I was. We decided to hide the
Hustler
in our cave and to come back for it the next day—daring fate or chance or the college kids who prowled the dam drinking beer. We wrapped it in plastic we found on the riverbank and put the magazine back in the small hole as far as Reagan’s longer arms could reach. And then we put the northern pike on a yellow nylon stringer, wrapped the stringer around my handlebars, and all took off for home together.

The magazine was there when we returned the next day. It was damp, wavy with moisture. The cheap magazine stock showed the text through the photos, proving that those are magazines you can read. But it was damaged, harder to enjoy somehow because the wavy paper, the leaking ink, made it impossible to pretend that we were looking at something other than a cast-off magazine, cheap, filled with cheap thrills.

But before that, as we biked home, with the northern pike banging against my bare legs all the way there, leaving slime down my thighs and grinning and turning its dead eye toward me; with Anton, Reagan, and Patrick; with the sun on our backs as we pedaled east—it felt good to be alive. We owned the whole road. Reagan and Patrick kept on toward their house. We turned right onto our road. And still we swerved and stood and pumped the pedals and swerved some more, the dead fish banging against my legs. And all the while I thought about that magazine, sleeping in its cave, and the tangled mysteries it contained, and the hope that someday it would all make sense.

Russell Bryan and Helen (Bryan) Johnson near their home in Squaw Lake, 1981

Courtesy Helen (Bryan) Johnson

5

We saw the new Morongo Casino, Resort, and Spa rise up like a monolith, like the Colossus of Rhodes, from the foothills of the Coachella Valley north and west of Palm Springs. It was visible from fifteen miles away, a solid, angular, basalt-colored spire jutting from the valley scree, looking more like an ancient artifact than a new luxury destination. It’s not often that casinos can be described as beautiful or impressive in a “not Vegas” way, but the Morongo Tower was. Even though its architectural elements blend in with the desert, we found ourselves wondering how it got there. Some conspiracy theorists believe that space aliens may have built the pyramids at Giza, and the same feeling attends the spectacle of the Morongo Tower rising from the Palm Springs desert. Casinos like this—though perhaps not quite as nice—rise all across the American landscape. They rise from swamps, suburbs, deserts, and forests. They perch on cliffs and look out over lakes.

The presence of the Morongo Tower is even more amazing when you remember that, historically at least, Indian reservations are a great place to be poor if you are Indian—and a fantastic place to get rich if you’re not. It is only recently that this pattern is being reversed. For centuries, privateers, government officials, railroad barons, timber magnates, prospectors, and mining companies have made a mint exploiting Native land and resources while the Indians for whom reservations were created have gotten poorer and poorer.

After we’d checked in, and with a weird kind of pride of ownership (the Morongo Band of Mission Indians who own the Morongo casino aren’t my tribe, after all), I said to the valet, as I would say to a butler in my own mansion, “The bags, please.”

As the elevator gushed up toward the seventeenth floor and the desert dwindled below us, I looked at my wife, who resembles a Native American Gwen Stefani with smoky eyes and a tongue ring and tattoos, and I marveled that we (Indians, that is) actually own all this—not my wife, of course, but this casino. We own it when we are really expected to be only two things, dead or poor. But gaming has become big news—if not
the
news—about Indians in the last decade and a half: Indian gaming brought in $25 billion dollars in 2006, compared with the $12 billion generated in Las Vegas. I thought to myself as I settled into our room, which was as beautiful as the tower that encased it, “I just might win after all.”

It is odd to think you can strike it rich at an Indian casino and that Indian casinos have made a few (not many) Indians rich themselves. This is especially odd because, originally, the reservations were more or less set up to be poor—and if that wasn’t the intent, it surely was the effect. While the Delaware might have gotten a reservation in exchange for fighting the British, and the Dakota because they defeated the U.S. Army during the Red Cloud Wars, and the Ojibwe through negotiations in present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota, most reservations were not created with such noble principles or because of such strength in bargaining. Rather, in the nineteenth century, the U.S. government thought reservations were a promise it would never have to keep. In most people’s estimation Indians would be gone—carried away by disease or intermarriage—within a generation or two. The reservations, in other words, were promises that no one thought would need to be kept for more than a couple of decades. Few counted on Indians living and loving and making so many new Indians. And no one counted on the resources that did exist within the boundaries of some reservations and that eventually became very important to the United States. The white pine timber in Wisconsin and Minnesota was suddenly close and valuable to Chicago, which needed the pine to build itself and then rebuild itself after it burned down. No one imagined that uranium deposits in Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo country would mean so much to national security. And no one knew how much oil was hidden under Osage lands.

The Osage, after more than a century of fighting, were relocated to the Indian Territories (now Oklahoma) and given what was, more or less, worthless farmland. However, in 1894 large quantities of oil were discovered beneath Osage land. Henry Foster, a petroleum speculator, was granted exclusive oil and mineral rights provided he pay to all the enrolled Osage a 10 percent royalty on all the oil sold. Within a few years, the Osage were among the richest people in the world. When royalties peaked in 1925 one family of five, all of whom were enrolled, earned about $65,000, or approximately $800,000 in today’s currency. The ugliness that follows money like stink on shit found its way to Osage territory: white speculators married Osage women to get their royalty rights, and one man, Ernest Burkhart, married an Osage woman and conspired to kill her and her family so he would receive her royalties.

But these were accidental grants of wealth. Reservations in general —far from urban centers, lacking infrastructure, without strong government, with no strong representation to speak of, with little ability to protect or exploit natural resources, and far from shipping and transportation networks—were poor. Poverty kills. Indians were supposed to be dead.

The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, begun in 1987 and designed to address economic inequality and development, identified about a dozen reasons why life on the rez was virtually synonymous with a life of poverty. Lack of access to capital was a significant roadblock. “Unfair lending practices, the difficulty of collateralizing assets held in trust by the U.S. government, and low penetration of banking facilities continue to limit the supply of capital in Indian country.” This is a polite way of saying that, for at least three reasons, no one wants to lend to Indians. (1) They are Indian. (2) Since most Indian land, what there is left of it, is held in common and in trust, it is not generally possible to use this land as collateral for loans; thus Indian individuals and communities are deprived of the number one asset with which most Americans strive toward the middle class—the houses they live in. (3) There simply weren’t many banks on the rez until casinos were established. The nearest banks were off-reservation and owned, operated, or staffed by non-Indians who were not always keen on acquiring Indian accounts.

The Harvard Project also suggested that the lack of human capital (education, skills, technical expertise) and the means to develop it was also a problem. “The need for skilled employees in all aspects of economic activity is critical,” the report says. “Because of high rates of unemployment, ‘work until the grant runs out’ experience, and common incidences of political nepotism, a large segment of the reservation workforce typically has been unable to develop consistent workplace experience and a career path. For years, the U.S. government has underwritten job training skills and education programs for adults and children. But without related economic opportunities, these efforts have either been wasted or led to ‘brain drains,’ in which new or newly trained talent flows off-reservation.”

The Harvard Project went on to list other impediments to economic development: lack of infrastructure, of effective planning, of access to natural resources, or of control over the available resources; distance from markets; the high cost of transportation; corruption; factionalism; the instability of reservation government; and a lack of entrepreneurial skill.

This is nowhere more true than on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Pine Ridge is the eighth largest reservation in the United States—larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined—and has an Indian population of about 15,000, as of the 2000 census. Unemployment is at about 80 percent, so only one in five people has steady employment, though this is not for lack of trying. The result? Half of all the Indians on Pine Ridge live below the poverty level. While there are a few small businesses owned by individuals and also a few owned by the tribe, there is little else. The tribe began a moccasin factory, a meatpacking plant, and a fishing tackle business. All of them failed. In contrast, it opened the Prairie Wind Casino in 1994 in three double-wide trailers, and by 2007 this casino was successful enough that the tribe opened a $20 million upgrade with hotel and restaurant. It provides hundreds of jobs, mostly to Indians from Pine Ridge. Despite the casino, which is far away from any urban center and doesn’t generate the kind of revenues one sees at Foxwoods or Morongo Casino and Spa, Pine Ridge is still crushingly poor, like most reservations.

Like Pine Ridge, the Cabazon Mission Band of Indians, the owners of the Morongo Resort and Casino, were desperately poor in the early 1980s. The Cabazon Mission Band has a tiny reservation along with eight other bands of Cahuilla Indians in Southern California. Located in the arid Coachella Valley, bounded by the San Bernardino, San Jacinto, Santa Rosa, and Little San Bernardino Mountain ranges, the homeland of the Cahuilla Indians is dry, nearly unfarmable if not for the Coachella Canal, which was completed in 1948 and brings the troubled waters of the Colorado River into the valley to support fruit farming. As of 2006, 100,000 acres of the valley were irrigated and farmed, bringing in revenues of $576 million, or almost $12,000 per acre. Ninety-five percent of all the dates grown in the United States are grown in the Coachella Valley, but aside from the date trees, which are almost all owned by whites, there was little to recommend the valley or the reservation except for Palm Springs.

In the 1950s the Cahuilla Indians of the Coachella Valley weren’t doing well. Not that you would know it by looking at the non-Natives who lived in the valley. Nearby, in Palm Springs, located at the northern end of the valley, Frank Sinatra was entertaining his brat pack friends in bungalows named after his hits. (You could stay in “New York, New York” or “My Way” or, if you came with a lover, the “Tender Trap” was open to you.) Albert Frey and John Lautner were designing houses for Bob Hope, Robert Mitchum, Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, and Charlie Chaplin. Meanwhile the Agua Caliente Indians, half of whose reservation is within the city limits of Palm Springs, were living in huts and shacks. Joseph Benito, a Chemehuevi tribal member who grew up near Indio and who served for many years as the spokesperson for the Cabazon Band, remembers: “Life was pretty primitive in those days. There wasn’t much on the reservation except sagebrush and rabbits. We didn’t even have electricity until the 1950s. Housing was limited to makeshift quarters. . . . There was no running water. We walked two miles to school every day, even in the summer heat, and thought nothing about it. . . . A highlight of our lives was the monthly trip to Torres-Martinez Reservation where the Indian Agency handed out rations for our food allotment. We always could count on a good meal after that.”

The total number of members of the Cahuilla Tribe was around 800 as of the 1990 census, and the Cabazon Band of the Cahuilla is tiny. In the last fifty years the number of enrolled Cabazon Indians has fluctuated between thirty and forty. By comparison, the Cherokee have more than 100,000 enrolled members. There are also Cahuilla Indians living in the Coachella Valley—the Augustine Band of Mission Indians. The Augustine Band is the nation’s smallest federally recognized tribe, with an enrollment of eight. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, such low enrollment numbers were a drawback for a tribe that wanted to make its lot better. Some populations were smaller than many family Thanksgiving parties. The first Thanksgiving, celebrated in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was actually three times larger than the entire population of the Cabazon Mission Band.

With such a small population the Cabazon Band had tremendous difficulty in obtaining basic social services, let alone coercing an unwilling government into honoring treaty obligations, such as providing housing, education, roads, and annuities. It sometimes paid to be a big tribe, either warlike (such as the Dakota) or more conciliatory (such as the Cherokee). In 1852 and again in 1877 both the state of California and the federal government unilaterally refused to ratify existing treaties or simply rewrote the treaties without the input of the Cabazon. The government was more interested in courting prospectors and railroad developers. Both groups wanted something from the valley—the railroads wanted to go through it and the miners wanted to go under it. There was nothing to compel the government to act; nothing about the geographic position or political insignificance of the Cabazon encouraged the government to even remember them.

For instance, in 1967 the Cabazon Mission Band submitted a budget for the fiscal year to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The budget totaled $350: $200 for committee expenses, $100 for telephone charges, and $50 for miscellaneous expenses. The band then realized that actual expenses exceeded those reported and submitted a revised budget for $1,500. The budget resolution was returned to the Cabazon Band on July 3, 1967. The accompanying letter from the BIA stated: “The resolution is not in good form, because the Resolved clause does not state who is to be paid. However, if you have telephone bills which are marked Paid, and if you can determine the bills were paid by Mr. Joseph Benitez, Chairman, you could accept the resolution as authority to reimburse the Chairman. If you do not obligate FY 1967 tribal funds by submitting MOR document to OS in Albuquerque, it appears that you will have to delay payment until FY 1968 budget has been approved, and until funds have been allotted. The original resolution is returned herewith.”

This is a classic example of the “death by bureaucracy” that plagued Indian reservations across the country; uneducated and unsavvy tribal officials who were trying simply to have the needs of their communities met were stonewalled by a corrupt, clumsy, inept, and uncaring BIA.

The late 1960s—filled with the furor and success of the civil rights movement, Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM)—gave way to the 1970s. And while tribal councils watched as grassroots organizations fought for justice and as a cadre of educated Indians took positions and gained experience in Johnson’s Great Society (in the BIA; in the Office of Economic Opportunity; in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and as administrators for CAP), the 1970s turned out to be pretty good years for Indian tribes. Nixon’s administration turned out to be a good one for Indians—millions of dollars were appropriated for the Indian Financing Act of 1974 and the money went into insurance, loan, land, and business projects.