Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (35 page)

“We’re headed down a dark road,” he tells me. We’re in Hayward, just off LCO reservation, sitting at a picnic table by Shue’s Pond. Hayward is a notoriously racist town, a center of the anti-treaty protests that occurred during the walleye wars of the 1980s.
David is a man of mystery. He is short and powerfully built. He laughs a lot and loudly and seems pretty much unafraid of anything. Sometimes he disappears into the American Southwest for weeks at a time. I’ve never seen him without a baseball cap on. He is a gifted visual artist, and an expert with a walleye spear. When I asked to see his driver’s license, just for grins, he said, “Fuck you.” And then he laughed. When he talks his narrative bounces all over the place. But there is real thought behind all of it. “We’re headed down a dark road. People are unwilling to talk about the most important stuff that affects us. No one talks about acculturation. No one, I mean no one, wants to talk about that. Of course, if we do talk about it and write about it, then the dominant society can use that against us. But it’s like the emperor’s new clothes. I think that like ninety-eight percent of Indian people think powwow and having an enrollment card make them Indian.”

He added, “Even at Navajo and Hopi. They think they’re safe. They think they’re not becoming acculturated. But they’re close. It’s a dangerous time.”

David’s been around, and he’s been around a lot of different Indian communities.

“I’d been living out east. I’d done that. Lived in Rhode Island. I was almost killed on my bike. Hit by a car. I’ve done this. I want to go home. I was always interested in language and history. All my grandparents were church people. Because, well, my dad’s parents, my one grandpa belonged to three Big Drum societies. But something happened. It was a time, in the 1950s. It was hard. I had two uncles killed within months of one another. One died of a war injury. The other was murdered in Chicago. It must have been in the fall, before they died. They were hunting—my grandfather and my father were hunting and saw some deer. My grandfather was a great shot and these deer ran in front of him and he missed. He never missed. He turned and told my dad, ‘Something’s going to happen.’ Sure enough—two of his sons died. So they left LCO, they closed up shop. Maybe we’ll do what everyone else is doing. It was impossible, an impossible situation they found themselves in. So maybe that’s why they left.

“People don’t remember how Indians were treated. People don’t remember how hard it was. No one remembers how they had to go in the back door, never the front. My grandpa never went in the front door of a store. He always went in the back. It was OK if he spent his money there but no one wanted to see him. When you’re dealing with that kind of thing, maybe leaving is the best option. Maybe letting your Indianness go is the answer. Trying to pass was about trying to make your life a little easier. Talking about that kind of thing hits a nerve.”

David has strong opinions. One of them is that as hard as times are now, they aren’t as hard now as they were back in the day. “It’s easier now. Not easy, but easier. But people still want to blame the white man. They don’t want to think about the choices they make. Like enrollment. If I got to decide how people would be enrolled, I’d say there’d have to be a language requirement. I mean, they did it in Estonia. They did it in Moldovia. Why can’t we do that? Blood quantum doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s culture.”

Brian Bisonette—David’s older brother, the secretary-treasurer of the LCO Tribe—backs this up, to an extent: “You won’t believe this, but two of the worst anti-treaty hecklers, the worst racists there ever were at those boat landings in the 1980s . . . they are enrolled members now. They checked out their history, found out they are Indian from here, and got enrolled. Now they spear! They spear fish—just because it’s fun, not because they care about treaty rights or the community.”

“Boarding schools,” muses David, “changed us into Americans. But schools and blood quantum and all that stuff turned us into the worst kind of Americans. The worst thing that happened to us was that we became Americans. They trained us to become the worst kind of Americans and then blamed us for it. That’s why language and culture are so important. By stressing those things we can stop being what they want us to be, bad Americans. But it took one hundred years to get to this point. It will take one hundred years to get us back.”

David Bisonette, Keller Paap, Lisa LaRonge, and Alex Decoteau all believe in language and culture for the same reasons the “fiery Apache” changed his name back to his tribal name, Wassaja, and lived with his people—that reservations are a homeland, a community, islands of Indian majorities in a vast America that doesn’t care about Indians.

For language activists, the language is the key to everything else—identity, life and lifestyle, home and homeland. Most language activists are also traditional Indians, but very modern traditional Indians, as likely to attend a ceremony as they are to have smartphones on which they record language material and Indian ceremonial music they are trying to learn. This new traditionalism is not a turning back of the clock, but a response to it; modernism (and modern, global capitalism) is a great obliterator of cultural difference and a great infuser of a new kind of class difference, and language activism is one way Indians are not only protecting themselves and their rights but also creating meaning in their lives. For Keller Paap and his family, this means tapping maple trees, ricing, hunting, collecting wild leeks, blasting Hendrix and Chris Whitley from the tinny speakers of their VW Westy van, and competing every year in the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race held in Hayward, Wisconsin. It means choosing to live their modern lives, with all those modern contradictions, in the Ojibwe language—to choose Ojibwe over English, whether for ceremony or for karaoke.

My older brother Anton and I, among many others, have for the last two years been working on a grant to record, transcribe, and translate Ojibwe speech in order to compile what will be the first (and only) practical Ojibwe-language grammar. During that time, we have traveled once, sometimes twice, a week from our homes on the western edge of Leech Lake to the east, to small communities such as Inger, Onigum, Bena, and Ball Club, where we record Ojibwe-speakers. We’ve also taken longer trips, north to Red Lake Reservation and south to Mille Lacs. Recording Ojibwe speech in Minnesota, where the average age of fluent Ojibwe-speakers is fifty-five, means recording old people. My brother, at thirty-eight, is very good at this, much better than I am. For starters, he is much more fluent. And he looks like a handsomer version of Tonto: lean, of medium height, with clear eyes, a smooth face, very black shiny braids, and very white shiny teeth. This helps. He has made this kind of activity his life work; it is what he does.

Right after college, he apprenticed himself to Archie Mosay. When my brother met Archie in 1991, Archie was ninety-one years old. He had been born in a wigwam, apprenticed under his father to be a ceremonial chief, and earned an eagle feather when he was only fourteen by saving a woman who was being attacked by her husband (Archie was stabbed six times). Archie and my brother were friends. During the time of high ceremonies my brother worked for him, sang for him, helped him into and out of his wheelchair, translated for him, and listened to him—every day for at least fourteen hours a day, for weeks on end. Deep affection, respect, and tenderness ran in both directions. And it changed my brother’s life. He had direct access to and deep involvement with a man out of our time and the satisfaction of friendship and affection and the deeper satisfaction that he was helping people, that his life had meaning.

It does something to a person. Arguably, Anton’s best friend, all through the 1990s, was a man who had come of age in 1914 and who had spent most of his time with his own father (Mike Mosay, born in 1869) and grandfather (born when the Cherokee were being removed from Georgia to Oklahoma). While AIM might have made a name for itself standing in roads and occupying buildings, Anton, Keller, Adrian, Leslie, Lisa, and scores of others are making names for themselves standing next to old people, cooking for them, driving them to the store, and joking with them. It not only does something to a person but does something to a community as well. Fifty years ago many Indians believed what they were told—that they were best off learning how to nail two-by-fours together, perfecting their penmanship, and acquiring skills like tilling or accounting. The great shift is that on reservations around the country (many of them controlled by tribal councils that still believe in penmanship, accounting, the IRA, the BIA, and school-bonding bills more than anything else), Indians like Keller, Lisa, and David believe in the practical as well as the traditional. (Actually, the traditional is proving to be much more practical than anything the BIA and the U.S. government tried to shove down our throats. The students at the Waadookodaading Immersion School not only speak Ojibwe but test higher than the children their age in reservation and public schools around the state.)

All this activity around “old ways” and “old language” could be seen as an outgrowth of modernity more than a throwback to the past. Casinos have brought a lot of things to a lot of reservations—much more than good roast beef, poker tournaments, per capita payments, and personal wealth. Powwows such as Schemitzun at Foxwoods and the Shakopee powwow in Minnesota, and others largely funded by casino profits, have turned what were previously small social gatherings into a magnet for Indian talent. Dancing and singing competitions aren’t just opportunities to display talent. Now you can win big money. At Schemitzun in 2007 the purse for the winning drum group was
more than $20,000. The winning group, the Battle River Singers from Red Lake Reservation, split the purse ten ways among themselves, sold hundreds if not thousands of their CDs, and guaranteed themselves a place as a host drum (an honor and a financial boon) at powwows around the country. Drum groups and dancers can now make a living singing and dancing, or they can at least supplement their income. That
is exactly what Tito (one of the Battle River Singers) did after Schemitzun. When I saw him at the car wash in Bemidji washing his almost new Buick, I asked, New car?
That there’s my Schemitzun car,
he said.
Hoka hey
. There has been more talent and innovation in Indian singing, beadwork and visual arts, and dancing in the last twenty years than ever before, largely due to casino-sponsored powwows.

At Red Lake, after the fishery crashed and the tribal members brought it back, they found a way to blend their need to create industry and hold on to traditions by launching Red Lake Food Industries. Instead of robbing themselves of their own resources they turned themselves into a retailer of natural foods. The tribe pays members to pick berries (blueberries, cranberries, and the like), rice, and fish. And they create their own jelly and package their own rice, retail them over the Internet, and sell them in grocery stores across the country. Instead of fishing their lake and wholesaling the fish to distributors they have, since 2006, become a distributor in their own right—selling the fish netted on a few reservations in Minnesota and Canada. In doing so they are feeding their people, and their people are feeding a resurgence in tradition.

Last spring, I went spearing with Keller Paap and Dave Bisonette on a lake in their treaty area. Band members fought for and won the right to continue exercising their treaty rights on ceded land, and so they do. One of those rights is to spear and net walleye pike during the spring spawning. It is cold on the water in April, and it was that night. We took the boat across Round Lake to the northeastern shore and into the shallow waters where the fish spawn. One person ran the motor; the other stood in front wearing a headlamp and speared the fish with a long pole. With a few modern modifications, this is something we have done for centuries.

The night was very foggy. Mist skated over the water and billowed up, disturbed, over the gunwales of the boat. We kept close to shore. Round Lake is a resort lake and many of its bays and inlets are packed with houses. (It is rumored that Oprah Winfrey has a house there.) Most of these places were closed up, shuttered, waiting for the tourists to come in for the summer. The docks reached down into the lake as if testing the water but, finding it too cold, drew up halfway on the banks. Yet here and there, lights shone from living room windows. And when a house was perched especially close to the lake, we could see a television glowing ghostly and blue.

It was past ten o’clock. Dave, Keller, and I spoke Ojibwe over the puttering motor and the watery stab of the spear going down into the water and the clang as it came out with a walleye wiggling against the barbs. The pile of fish grew on the bottom of the boat, and they flapped dully, trying to fly against the unforgiving aluminum sky of the boat. A dog barked from shore. I could hear, clearly, Letterman’s “Top Ten List
”
coming from an open window. Fish scales, knocked loose by the tines of the spear, were plastered all over the inside of the boat, and they sparkled like jewels when swept by the lamplight.

If we lose our language and the culture that goes with it, I think, something more will be lost than simply a bouquet of discrete understandings about bears or namesakes, more than an opportunity to speak to my children and friends in public without anyone eavesdropping. If the language dies, we will lose something personal, a degree of understanding that resides, for most fluent speakers, on an unconscious level. We will lose our sense of ourselves and our culture. There are many aspects of culture that are extralinguistic—that is, they exist outside or in spite of language: kinship, legal systems, governance, history, personal identity. But there is very little that is extralinguistic about a story, about language itself. I think what I am trying to say is that we will lose beauty—the beauty of the particular, the beauty of the past and the intricacies of a language tailored for our space in the world. That Native American cultures are imperiled is important and not just to Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. When we lose cultures, we lose American plurality—the productive and lovely discomfort that true difference brings.