Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (9 page)

When the conflict was over, between 400 and 800 whites were dead, along with many more Dakota. It was the largest loss of civilian life as the result of a “foreign attack” on U.S. soil until the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Three hundred Dakota warriors were sentenced to death. Eventually thirty-eight were hanged at Mankato, in what was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. In the wake of the conflict the U.S. government abrogated all of its treaty obligations to the Dakota in Minnesota, and a conflict that began because of hardship led the Dakota to a century of the most abject living conditions on the margins of American life during a time of unprecedented prosperity among their white neighbors. Some of the Mdewakanton Dakota near Shakopee who hadn’t been removed and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe seemed to fare well: during subsequent rounds of treaties they were each given assurances of their continued existence and land as a payment for their noninvolvement in the violence of the preceding year. As for Little Crow,
he was shot by a white farmer near Hutchinson, Minnesota, on July 3,
1863, while picking raspberries. His skeleton and scalp were put on public display in St. Paul, Minnesota, until 1971, when they were repatriated to his grandson.

But the assurances and land that both bands received were short-lived. Business as usual resumed shortly. The Department of the Interior authorized private companies to cut timber on Mille Lacs Reservation, against the terms of the treaty Mille Lacs had signed with the U.S. government. Five years later they were still cutting, and white settlers had begun farming the areas that had been cut over. Mille Lacs Band members complained to the government, to no avail. This tension continued until the Nelson Act turned land held in common by many tribes into smaller parcels allotted to individual band members, with the “extra” parcels given to white lumber companies and farmers. Many Indians lost their allotments because they were not educated about such things as loans and tax forfeiture. Many from Mille Lacs were removed to the newly established White Earth Reservation to the west.

The story of relations between Indians and whites in the Midwest and West during the early nineteenth century is a story of war: armed conflict, forced removals, and death marches. Whatever lessons the federal government might have gleaned from the Seven Years’ War and the French and Indian War—that Indian tribes were powerful and could mount powerful resistance to white encroachment, and that even if weak, they were better dealt with at the negotiating table—seemed to have been forgotten. But as bloody as Indian history was in nineteenth century, during the twentieth century the warfare waged between Indians and whites was of a quieter kind—instead of guns the combatants carried petitions; instead of scalps, people held aloft legal briefs.

In 1902 government representatives traveled to Mille Lacs to negotiate an agreement with the Mille Lacs Band for damages done to the reservation and its citizens during the timber grabs over the preceding fifty years. The negotiations were a disaster. Many from Mille Lacs emerged from the meetings convinced that the government would never give them justice. Disgusted, they moved their families to White Earth. But a few, led by chiefs Migizi, Shabashkung, and Wadena, held on and refused to move. They paid the price: in 1901 a posse lead by the local sheriff attacked the village at Mille Lacs, burned all the shacks and wigwams to the ground, rounded up all the villagers, and chased them out so a developer could claim the land. It took another three years for Chief Migizi to get promises of redress (in the form of forty-acre lots for the band members) from Congress, and another twelve years for the lots to be assigned. By then Congress decided that forty-acre lots were too big. Most of the Indians who stayed in Mille Lacs got five-acre land patents instead.

And there they remained: penniless, without support, without the hope of fair treatment. While the lake itself became a destination for vacationers from Minneapolis and Chicago, the Mille Lacs Band members who had endured broken promises, and every sort of indignity and violence, hid and huddled in the woods nearby.

A newspaper article in the
Minnesota Star
dated Monday, March 27, 1939 (alongside a dire front-page article about the Germans), shows that the twentieth century hadn’t been kind to Mille Lacs. “A century ago the Chippewa Indians roamed the plains and forests of Minnesota lord of all he surveyed. Today, in a squalid settlement near Isle, Minn., near Lake Mille Lacs, 60 members of that once famed tribe attempt to eke out an existence on a rocky, 40-acre hillside unfit for cultivation. Their settlement consists of 11 tarpaper shacks, many of them floorless. Most of them cook, eat and sleep in the same room. Their total income is about $414 a month, or around $7 apiece.” Within two years twenty-five Mille Lacs Indians would be serving in every theater of World War II—Guam, Iwo Jima, North Africa, Italy, and later Normandy and Belgium—while at home their families were starving. By contrast, though life was hardly easy for them, the Indians who agreed to move to White Earth Reservation (from reservations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) had schools, businesses, homesteads, and their own newspaper. But that door closed in the 1920s—even if they’d wanted to, those from Mille Lacs and elsewhere couldn’t have moved to White Earth any longer and received any kind of allotments or assistance. Even so, fifty years later the move to White Earth seemed to many to be not that bad an idea.

Sean’s family bears the mark of each and every one of the cataclysmic shifts that make up the story of Mille Lacs Reservation. In the 1880s, during the allotment period when Mille Lacs Indians were encouraged to move to the newly established White Earth Reservation, many left. There were promises of homesteads, farming equipment, seeds, blacksmith shops, schools, and churches. All of these were fine incentives. White Earth also provided a fresh start. Sean’s great-grandfather John Shingobee (southern Ojibwe for spruce) didn’t leave Mille Lacs, but John’s brother Tom did. “Some say there was an argument about a trapline,” explained Sean. “They say Tom might have killed a man. Others say it was over a woman. Maybe you should just say ‘There were reasons to leave’ and leave it at that.” Tom’s daughter Josephine was Sean’s grandmother. Tom Hill was the first chief at Mille Lacs elected under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government in 1934. He was hit by a train on the way to a ceremony at Lake Lena. By the time Sean’s mother, Bonnie, was born to Frank Shingobee and Josephine Hill, times were tough. Josephine was left to raise her children on her own. She drank a lot. The county nurse and missionaries interceded, took Bonnie away from her, and moved to White Earth to start a mission. So even though that branch of the family didn’t
relocate, Bonnie ended up at White Earth anyway. And it was there at White Earth, and Minneapolis and Duluth, that she raised her eight children—John, Dawn, Denise, Dana, Jay, Marc, Sean, and Mike. Bonnie didn’t live at Mille Lacs until she came there to work at the casino in the late 1990s. Her children grew up mostly at White Earth.

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It’s fair to say that most Indians didn’t know about the treaty rights they had for the first half of the twentieth century. Until 1934 most reservations were still controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (
BIA), Indian agents, and missions. Tribal government was often a matter of coping with unilateral federal policy—gradual, democratic change was a luxury that most tribal governments didn’t have. On many reservations that had been allotted and fractured by the Nelson Act and the Dawes Act and opened up to white business interests, such as logging and mining, Indians struggled to survive. With Indian boarding schools in place, Indian parents didn’t even have control over the destiny of their children, much less an understanding of or energy to fight for their treaty rights. Nor did Indians even have their own lawyers. The county nurse, social workers, missionaries, and Indian agents occupied their attention, as did the constant search for food on a dwindling land base. Life was largely an issue of mean survival until 1934.

With the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1934, constitutional government came to many reservations. The IRA, also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, is considered by some to be the most significant piece of legislation for Indians in the twentieth century. It signaled and made concrete a major shift in Indian policy. Its primary architects were John Collier and Felix Cohen.
When the borderline socialist Collier was appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, things began to change, if only temporarily, for Indians. He had strong pro-Indian opinions, formed after visiting Taos pueblo in 1920; he referred to it as a “Red Atlantis” because of the ways in which the individual was served and meshed with the political structure. It was a happy, perfect place in Collier’s mind. Collier wrote passionately about his plans for Indian renewal:

In all our colorful American life there is no group around which there so steadfastly persists an aura compounded of glamour, suspicion, and romance as the Indian. For generations the Indian has been, and is today, the center of an amazing series of wonderings, fears, legends, hopes.

Yet those who have worked with Indians know that they are neither the cruel, warlike, irreligious savages imagined by some, nor are they the “fortunate children of nature’s bounty” described by tourists who see them for an hour at some glowing ceremonial. We find the Indians, in all the basic forces and forms of life, human beings like ourselves. . . . Just as we yearn to live out our own lives in our own ways, so, too, do the Indians, in their ways.

For nearly 300 years white Americans, in our zeal to carve out a nation made to order, have dealt with the Indians on the erroneous, yet tragic, assumption that the Indians were a dying race—to be liquidated. We took away their best lands; broke treaties, promises; tossed them the most nearly worthless scraps of a continent that had once been wholly theirs. But we did not liquidate their spirit. The vital spark which kept them alive was hardy. So hardy, indeed, that we now face an astounding, heartening fact. . . . No longer can we, with even the most generous intentions, pour millions of dollars and vast reservoirs of energy, sympathy, and effort into any unproductive attempts at some single, artificial permanent solution of the Indian problem. No longer can we naively talk of or think of the “Indian problem.” Our task is to help Indians meet the myriad of complex, interrelated, mutually dependent situations which develop among them according to the very best light we can get on those happenings—much as we deal with our own perplexities and opportunities.

We, therefore, define our Indian policy somewhat as follows: So productively to use the moneys appropriated by the Congress for Indians as to enable them, on good, adequate lands of their own, to earn decent livelihoods and lead self-respecting, organized lives in harmony with their own aims and ideals, as an integral part of American life. Under such a policy, the ideal end result will be the ultimate disappearance of any need for government aid or supervision. This will not happen tomorrow; perhaps not in our lifetime. . . .

In looking at the Indian picture as a social whole, we will consider certain broad phases—land use and industrial enterprises, health and education, roads and rehabilitation, political organization —which touch Indian life everywhere, including the 30,000 natives of Alaska for whose health, education, and social and economic advancement the Indian Service is responsible. Lastly, this report will tell wherein the Indian Service, or the government’s effort as a whole for the Indians, still falls short.

So intimately is all of Indian life tied up with the land and its utilization that to think of Indians is to think of land. The two are inseparable. Upon the land and its intelligent use depends the main future of the American Indian. . . . A major aim, then, of the Indian Service is to help the Indians to keep and consolidate what lands they now have and to provide more and better lands upon which they may effectively carry on their lives. Just as important is the task of helping the Indian make such use of his land as will conserve the land, insure Indian self-support, and safeguard or build up the Indian’s social life. . . .

In 1887, the General Allotment Act was passed, providing that after a certain trust period, fee simple title to parcels of land should be given to individual Indians. Individual proprietorship meant loss—a paradox in view of the Indian’s love for the land, yet an inevitable result, when it is understood that the Indian by tradition was not concerned with possession, did not worry about titles or recordings, but regarded the land as a fisherman might regard the sea, as a gift of nature, to be loved and feared, to be fought and revered, and to be drawn on by all as an inexhaustible source of life and strength.

The Indian let the ownership of his allotted lands slip from him. The job of taking the Indian’s lands away, begun by the white man through military expeditions and treaty commissions, was completed by cash purchase—always of course, of the best lands which the Indian had left. In 1887, the Indian had remaining 130 million acres. In 1933, the Indian had left only 49 million acres, much of it waste and desert.

Since 1933, the Indian Service has made a concerted effort—an effort which is as yet but a mere beginning—to help the Indian to build back his landholdings to a point where they will provide an adequate basis for a self-sustaining economy, a self-satisfying social organization.

Collier’s missive was bold and poetic and changed reservations forever. The Wheeler-Howard Act effectively put a stop to the loss of land through allotment and unfair land-sale practices, closed down the boarding school phase of Indian education in the United States, and returned the rule of reservation and tribal life to Indian hands. Called the “Indian New Deal,” the IRA ushered in an era of self-determination and self-rule. As part of the Wheeler-Howard Act, the IRA encouraged the formation of tribal constitutions. Still, the IRA was largely scripted by the BIA. The constitutions adopted by many different tribes (despite large cultural and historical differences) were either provided by the BIA or drafted in response to a list of suggestions provided by the BIA. One hundred eighty-one tribes voted to accept the IRA; 77 voted to reject it. If tribes wished to adopt the IRA they were obligated to let tribal councils employ legal counsel, get a majority vote from the tribe before agreeing to any major land sales, and officially authorize the elected tribal council to deal on a government-to-government basis with local, state, and federal authorities. These new tribal constitutions established a governing council (elected district representatives; basic election rules; the process by which to choose a chairman, secretary, treasurer, etc.) that seems quasi-corporate and quasi-municipal. Many of these constitutions have similar, and tragic, flaws—no separation or balance of powers, no judiciary, nothing resembling a bill of rights. Ironically, the author of the IRA was a passionate advocate of Indian rights, a young lawyer named Felix Cohen, whose book
Handbook of Federal Indian Law
is something akin to a bible among Indian law professionals and students. Cohen recognized that “tribal constitutions, after all, are not an innovation of the New Deal. The history of Indian constitutions goes back at least to the
Gayanashakgowah (Great Binding Law) of the Iroquois Confederacy, which probably dates from the 15th century. . . . So, too, we have the written constitutions of the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Osage nations, printed usually on tribal printing presses, constitutions which were in force during the decades from 1830 to 1900.” Yet, despite his own knowledge, Cohen drafted the IRA and made suggestions for tribal constitutions along the lines of local government. Tribal governments “were to be like town governments, except that they would have federal protection and their special rights.” The political science p
rofessor David Wilkins notes that the bibliography for Felix Cohen’s article on tribal constitution refers more than seventy-five times to matters such as “city planning,” “health and sanitation,” and “licenses.”
No wonder early tribal constitutions have a municipal feel. There is little or no discussion of treaty rights—the very issue that would come to occupy a large part of the discussion of
Indians and reservations in the late twentieth century. Treaty rights lay dormant because they were not a part of the general restructuring of tribal government and because many reservation populations, including those at Mille Lacs, had been treated so poorly for so long that few pressed for their treaty rights. They were certainly not something BIA officials and traders and lumbermen were keen on reminding Indians about, either. But then, after tribal governments began running their own show and deviating from the BIA script in the 1950s, and after the civil rights
movement and the American Indian movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, people began wondering what their rights were, not just as Americans but as Indians.