Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (5 page)

Treaties—between tribes and European colonial powers, and between tribes and the newly formed U.S. government, had long been the “law of the land,” but it wasn’t until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 that the modern Indian reservation was born. At the time the U.S. government was in a quandary. It felt it needed room for the country to grow—and except for overseas colonial expansion, the only direction in which the country could grow was west—but Indians were in the way. All-out war with the tribes would be too costly, and the outcome—given the strength and position of many Indian tribes—would be far from certain. The U.S. government wanted to avoid the kind of conflict that had hurt the British so badly during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War. To repeat, then: frontier wars were costly and bloody, and their outcome (since they are fought against shifting tribal alliances of Indians who knew and controlled the terrain, with extended supply lines, and with so many unprotected settlers at risk) was unclear. Until 1851 the U.S. government had used two conflicting policies—assimilation and removal. But with the Appropriations Act, the policy became removal and containment. Instead of large tracts of land positioned in the way of western expansion, smaller, contained parcels of Indian land were seen as the answer. The Indian Appropriations Act, the first step in this process, empowered the U.S. government to enter into treaties with Indian tribes and to set aside land, money, and supplies for their establishment.

Following the passage of the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 the United States embarked on an almost compulsive policy of making treaties with tribes, most of whom wanted some certainty of their continued existence and some autonomy in the face of increasing pressure from white settlers. From Texas to Minnesota and from Lake Michigan to the Pacific, tribes great and small found themselves at the negotiating table with the United States. The usual formula, if not the result, was quite simple: Indian tribes relinquished title to some of their lands and reserved the remainder for themselves. These remaining portions were called “reservations.” In Ojibwe the word for “reservation” is “ishkonigan,” which means, rather sardonically, “leftovers.” In addition to the reserved land, where Indians were supposed to be able to live unmolested and on their own terms, the treaties usually had other provisions involving what are known as “treaty rights.” These rights—to hunt, fish, gather, harvest timber—were many and usually extended to the territories outside the reservation that the tribe used to control, known as ceded territories.

Reservations sprang up from Oklahoma to Neah Bay, in the remote northwest corner of Washington state. Some of them were established in the ancestral homelands of the tribe in question. The Sioux of Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River live, more or less, where they always did, in portions of their original homeland. The Pueblo still occupy the pueblos they have lived in for thousands of years. In fact, one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in North America is Acoma Pueblo; people have been living there nonstop since the twelfth century. But some reservations were established hundreds of miles away and the tribe, as part of the treaty, agreed to move to its new land.

This is what happened to some of the Ho-Chunk, formerly called the Winnebago. They were once the dominant force on the western shores of Lake Michigan, but their population plummeted from about 20,000 in 1620 to about 1,000 in 1820. Beginning in the nineteenth century many, but not all, Ho-Chunk were moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota, from there to South Dakota, then to Iowa, and finally to Nebraska. Many did not like their new reservation and, traveling at night, walked back to Wisconsin. In all, the Ho-Chunk were subjected to nine removal orders, and their survival and expansion in the twentieth century are a heartening story of toughness, tenacity, and courage. Likewise, some Seneca from upstate New York were removed to Oklahoma. Sac and Fox from Wisconsin wound up in Iowa, Oklahoma, and even Mexico. Apache were sent from the southwest to Florida. Seminole were removed from Florida and sent to Oklahoma. Connections to place and culture were compromised and sometimes totally destroyed.

The early to mid-nineteenth century was dark for Indian tribes. White encroachment continued. The newly formed reservations mostly were run under the auspices of an Indian agent, commissioned under the Department of War. The Indian agent hired tribal police, administered annuities and other treaty payments, and was responsible for economic development. More often than not Indian agents were drawn from unscrupulous people. Fraud, cronyism, nepotism, double-dealing, skimming, and outright murder were common.

By the early 1880s—just 100 years since the Treaty of Fort Pitt and three decades since the Indian Appropriations Act had ushered in the modern reservation period—almost everyone recognized that the reservation system was a failure. The policy of containment and control funded by the Indian Appropriations Act hadn’t really done away with Indians as hoped—the Dakota Wars in the 1870s were costly proof of that. And as far as Indians were concerned, the reservation was not what they expected, either: a place to live unmolested and on their own terms. A new policy of
“allotment” was put in place with the help of the Dawes Act of 1887. The act authorized the United States to survey and divide lands held in common by Indian tribes and allot them to Indian individuals. Any “extra” land was to return to the U.S. government, which could then give it to settlers, lumber companies, mining companies, and railroads. On some reservations Indian agents became the largest landholders in the region. Reservations, once places for Indians and Indians only, became a checkerboard of Indian land, white farms, and federal lands. As of today, on Leech Lake, like many other reservations, the tribe owns roughly 4 percent of the land within the reservation boundaries. The rest of the land is divided among county, state, federal, corporate, and private owners.

One of the most serious misconceptions about reservations is that they were a kind of moral payment: that the U.S. government, motivated by pity and guilt, “gave” reservations to Indians along with treaty rights, which functioned as a kind of proto-welfare program. This is not the case. Reservations and treaty rights were concessions negotiated for the right to settle and develop new land. People like Jerry Mueller and Citizens for Truth in Government don’t like this arrangement. I think most Indians would be glad to abrogate our treaties. We will “give up” our reservations and our treaty rights, and all the non-Natives can move east of the Appalachians. Or if they don’t want to move they can pay rent. It would be useful for most Americans to keep in mind that after they pass those mountains they are living, driving, eating, breathing, and walking on land that at one time or another was negotiated for, not fought for. More so than wars, agreements opened the part of America from the Appalachia to the Pacific to non-Indians. Reservations and their sovereignty are the remaining small result of those agreements.

All of this explains and yet does
not
quite explain Red Lake and why a white trespasser was arrested and fined by Red Lake Reservation conservation officers. Unlike most other reservations in the United States, Red Lake was not created by treaty. The government officially stopped making treaties with Indians in 1871. Red Lake Reservation was established in 1889 by a congressional act. In the years before—as tribes were encouraged and sometimes forced to the treaty table, reservations were established, and communities were moved—the Red Lake Ojibwe watched. They witnessed the treaties of 1825 (Prairie du Chien); 1836 (Michigan
); 1837, 1842, and 1854 (Wisconsin and Minnesota); and 1855, 1863, and 1864 (Mississippi and Pillager Bands in Minnesota)—and they watched as the provisions of those treaties were ignored. They watched as faith was broken. Red Lake was forced to the treaty table in 1863 but was in a position of relative strength. The Red Lake people ceded some territory but retained their land around both Upper and Lower Red Lake. The treaty of 1863 did not create the Red Lake Reservation. What it did was reduce the size of the Red Lake Band’s territory. When the U.S
. government quit making treaties with Indians in 1871, Red Lake still retained title to more than 3 million acres in northern Minnesota, and when the “allotment” provided by the Nelson Act was pressed on tribes to the south in 1889, Red Lake knew better than to agree to it. The Red Lake leaders rejected the proposition (though they ceded some acreage) and maintained that all land on the reservation should be held in common. One story has it that the old war chief Medwe-ganoonind (aptly, “He Who Is Heard Talking”
) was firmly against allotment. As the story goes, during a council meeting he slammed his war club (a club that he had used to kill not a few of his enemies) on the table and said,
If you think this is such a good idea, fine. If you want to vote for it, fine. But you’ve got to fight me first. If you win, you can vote yes
. No one wanted to fight him. Red Lake voted against allotment. This may be a legend, but what is not legend is that during the days when the federal commissioners were at Red Lake to push for allotment, the council ended up voting against the provision three times. Each time the council
voted it down, the commissioners begged for a recess, during which time they threatened, cajoled, baited, and bribed the council members. Each time the issue came to a vote the council turned it down again.

In the early twentieth century, when the federal government once again tried to dissolve and diminish Indian control of Indian land, this time through a law that gave states criminal and civil jurisdiction on the reservation, Red Lake said no—even though that meant they could lose much of their funding for schools, hospitals, roads, and police protection. The reservation then built its own schools, paved its own roads, and built its own court, police station, and hospitals without state or county support and with little help from the BIA.

This is why Red Lake can and does retain complete control over its lands and its rights, and why officers Grolla and Nelson were within their rights and acting in accordance with the spirit of tough independence particular to Red Lake when they uncased their assault rifles, confiscated Jerry Mueller’s boat, and fined Mueller. This wasn’t the first time the Red Lake Nation had fined a trespasser. In winter of 2002 a man landed his floatplane on Lower Red Lake, within the reservation boundary, and began fishing. The tribe confiscated the plane, and the pilot had to pay more than $4,000 in fines and fees to get it back. When Officer Grolla cited Jerry Mueller, Mueller was cooperative at first, as Grolla remembers it. But later, when he appeared in Red Lake tribal court to argue his case, he was belligerent and hostile. “If a Red Lake boat crossed the line and wasn’t licensed through the state, it would be the same thing,” remembers Grolla. “Just the other way around. But they act like we’re terrorizing them. What they don’t understand is that the reservation is the only place Indians feel safe. There’s a story that my grandma Fannie Johns used to tell. That story still makes me mad. She used to tell this story how they were coming from Thief River in a wagon. It was Fanny and her grandma and her uncle. Her grandma was alive during the Dakota Wars, that’s how old her grandma was. She didn’t have an English name. Her Ojibwe name was Ikwezens. And her uncle’s name was Me’asewab. They were coming from Thief River; they went over there by wagon to get supplies. They couldn’t make it back to the rez. There was kind of a rule that Indians couldn’t be off the reservation after dark. They went every month to buy stuff like flour and whatnot, to sell blueberries. They were coming back and they couldn’t make the reservation. They ended up parking alongside this trail, this wagon trail. They made a fire and made some soup. They saw these lights coming from far away. They watched those lights for hours as they got closer. They kept watching and these three white guys show up in a Model A Ford. And these white guys started in giving them shit. ‘Hey, you want to sell your women,’ saying things like that. Giving them shit about being off the reservation. Her uncle started getting pissed. He pulled out a lever-action rifle and said if they didn’t leave he’d kill them all. These guys took off. Fannie and her grandpa tried to sleep but her uncle stayed up all night, keeping watch, on the lookout for the white guys. I just hated that. I hated it that my grandma got terrorized just for being Indian and being off the reservation. When it got light they packed up and drove the wagon as fast as they could back to the rez. And guys like Mueller and other guys like that are telling me that Indians are terrorizing
them
. It pisses me off that they cry around about stuff like that.”

There still exists a lot of hostility between Indians and whites in northern Minnesota—especially between Red Lake and its white neighbors. But the waters Mueller was fishing on were troubled for other reasons, too—related to Red Lake’s sovereignty. Sovereignty means that you can determine your own lives, but it has a downside: you also have the latitude to destroy them. The one industry that Red Lake could claim in an otherwise economically depressed region was the commercial fishing of walleye pike. The walleye pike is unique to North American waters. It is the Minnesota state fish, and by the 1990s Red Lake was the last remaining natural fishery for walleye in the United States. The Red Lake Band had overfished the lake, and the effect was catastrophic, both economically and culturally. Until that point, the walleye was the principal resource of Red Lake and its dominant cultural icon. Much of Red Lake’s material and social culture was based on the harvesting and use of walleye. This continued slowly until the fishery collapsed and was shut down in 1997.

A distinctly New World species, walleye are found throughout Canadian and northern American waters. They can be found in lakes and rivers in cold northern areas and get the name “walleye” because of the way their eyes reflect light, like the eyes of cat. They school during the spring spawning, which usually occurs in late April or early May in Minnesota, and a little later in colder waters farther north in Canada. The rest of the year they hunt alone, though groups of walleye will congregate in productive habitat like sandbars, rock piles, and the edges of weed beds: places where small bait fish congregate. Their eyes allow them to see in cloudy or disturbed water, giving them an advantage over their prey. They are not fussy fish, like brook trout or brown trout. You don’t need to be an analyst to catch them, worrying over presentation, lure color, or insect. They are, however, excellent fighters and are considered by many to be the best-tasting freshwater fish on the continent. Moreover, they don’t grow to an impressive size and aren’t even really a “pike.” Walleye belong to the Percidae family—technically, this makes them perch. They live, on average, nine years and grow to a weight of about five to seven pounds and a length of twenty-four to twenty-eight inches. The largest walleye ever caught was forty-two inches long and weighed twenty-five pounds. The oldest walleye on record (age is determined by measuring the layers of bone—like the layers of a pearl—on a special bone in their head called an otolith) was twenty-nine years old at the time of its capture.