Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (30 page)

Life changed dramatically for many Indians, such as the Mdewakanton Dakota, living near large urban centers. The Cabazon Band, with only twenty-eight members, is beyond rich. It’s been said that every band member has his or her own private golf course, but I couldn’t verify this. And neither they nor the Mdewakanton were too keen on being interviewed about their wealth. In an ironic twist, celebrities go to Palm Springs to detox at treatment centers on the reservation. White people going to a reservation to dry out—no one saw that coming. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Pequots, and Mdewakanton Dakota are rich. But they are the exceptions. Many reservations have no gambling at all, and many that do have gambling, such as mine, barely break even. As of 2006, 12 percent of Indian casinos generated 65 percent of all casino revenue.

Of those that do have casinos, only a small fraction see much profit, and a small fraction of those make enough to give per capita payments to their members as the Mdewakanton Dakota do. Red Cliff Reservation, on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, has a casino. It has never really produced much profit. It struggled on, but when tribes to the south at Flambeau, LCO, Fond du Lac, and St. Croix opened casinos much closer to Minneapolis and Duluth, there was no reason to go to Red Cliff. Now the tribe—one of the poorest in the state—is wrestling with a new decision: expand casino operations by building one on the site of their campground and marina (cherished by many band members) or stay poor? Casinos are something that tribes do not just gamble in but also gamble on. This is especially true since the recession of 2008; Indian gaming revenues are down 40 percent. The tribes who branched out—like Mille Lacs—are doing OK. They discussed suspending per capita payments but are now offering these at a slightly lower level—about $8,000 per year. Tribes like Leech Lake, which did not branch out much, are dangerously close to losing what they have. Some cynics think casino money hasn’t changed anything. “Yeah,” one told me, “Mille Lacs is the richest slum in the country. And everyone still crashes their cars into trees, the only difference is that they crash newer cars.” There is some truth to this. Mille Lacs might have a clinic built with casino money, but Indians are still going there for drug overdoses, car wrecks, diabetes, and overall poor health.

Some say this isn’t fair—some Indians get rich while others still don’t have a pot to piss in. But in this, Indian country mirrors America nicely: a shrinking middle class, a large underclass, and an elite that controls most of the wealth. So while they may be eating Kobe beef in Mdewakanton and Palm Springs, on most Indian reservations, even those with casinos, they are not. Some reservations have made just enough to provide some employment, pave some roads, build new government offices and new schools—enough to edge toward the middle class. This in itself is a huge accomplishment.

The ramifications of Indian gambling are only now unfolding. Tribes have discovered that they can control their lives more than at any other period in the last 300 years. It is only a matter of time before tribes realize that the logic and precedent that enable Indian gaming might also enable other enterprises. Tribes could begin a banking industry to rival offshore banking. They needn’t be bound by U.S. banking laws. Tribes might very well begin data farming. They might offer corporate tax shelters. There might be no reason for pharmaceutical companies to plant themselves in far-off Puerto Rico. Much is possible. It is not clear what role the state would play in operations such as banking. The tribes might have to enter compacts to run banks, just as they have to sign compacts for gaming. But whatever states regulate is open for negotiation on reservations.

So the next time you’re asked how come Indians get to have casinos, or if you’re asked why Indians own Paul McCartney’s guitar, the answer is: because of
Worcester v. Georgia,
because of a $147 tax bill on a trailer at Squaw Lake, and because a few tribes and a few people did the hard thing and fought and won.

2

Our last day. We decided to eat brunch at the Pechanga clubhouse before driving back to the airport. I saw a guy who looked awfully familiar. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Ojibwe Veterans’ Powwow, Red Lake, 2005.” I looked hard, and I said, “Rocky, is that you?” It was. Rocky Cook, from Red Lake Reservation, just up the road from me. He was with his wife, Lorena, also from Red Lake. They have both known my parents since the 1960s, and both knew my siblings. I had gone to high school and graduated with their daughter Holly. I wasn’t totally surprised: I knew that Holly had married Mark Macarro, the Pechanga chairman. I knew also that Holly was expecting a baby, so it must have come.

We talked about Holly and my siblings and parents. The usual home stuff. They asked me what I was doing out there, and I said I was researching a piece on Indian casinos.

“Yeah,” said Lorena (a quick wit). “They get mad at us for being poor, and then when some folks do all right, they get mad at us for being rich.” Not that Red Lake, where she and Rocky are from, is a well-off place. But what Lorena expressed is something many Indians ponder: the complicated disdain many people have for Indian poverty and the rare instances of Indian wealth.

Indians are famous for a few things—for a kind of off-brand environmentalism, Sitting Bull, and broken English, and most of all for being poor. Poverty is, for many, synonymous with the very idea of Indians and Indian reservations. This thought stuck with me as we loaded up the BMW, drove back to LAX, flew back to Minneapolis, and drove north in my pickup back to Leech Lake.

Leech Lake is a big reservation—forty miles by forty miles, peppered with lakes large and small, and broken in half by the slow, shallow course of the northern Mississippi River. We passed two of our casinos (we have three) on the drive to my house on the northwestern edge of the reservation. We don’t have good steak. We don’t raise our own cattle. We don’t own any famous person’s shoes. Many people on Leech Lake don’t even own their own shoes. My reservation will be poor for a long time, maybe forever.

Indian gaming has changed very little on my reservation—it has generated some money for infrastructure and jobs, but not much. Whereas twenty years ago we had little in the way of business, now we have a tribally owned gas station–convenience store, a mill, and three casinos. Unemployment at Leech Lake has gone from 50 percent to 22 percent after the casino, though this change certainly isn’t solely because of casino employment. Gaming at Leech Lake has generated a lot more fighting and squabbling and severe politics than it has opportunity. The median household income at Leech Lake is $21,000, less than half of the median U.S. household income. More than half our kids do not live with their parents. At Leech Lake, we’re poor—but we’ve worked very hard at it and come by our poverty honestly.

And even though Indian gaming began at Leech Lake with a $147 tax bill, perhaps we contribute something a little harder to measure. When I asked people in Florida and Pechanga and Morongo what they wanted most, what they worried most about not having, they all responded: culture and language; our ways. And at Leech Lake at least we have that. Other folks from other reservations might laugh at this next comment, but when I tell people where I am from, they often raise their eyebrows in both surprise and appreciation—surprise that I come from a place so rough, and appreciation because they are sometimes awed or humbled and even a little envious that I come from a place where our language is still spoken, a place that doesn’t feel like the rest of America, even though it is, only more so. So, while I am proud of what other tribes have accomplished, I wonder whether (and hope that) they are proud of us, too.

When I drew near my house, I passed our first casino, the Palace Casino and Hotel. I decided, just for comparison’s sake, to stop in. It was now 2 a.m. The place was mostly deserted. The Memorial Day crowd had left. Fishing opener was a few weeks behind us. Some regulars sat at keno machines smoking and hoping their numbers would come up. Half a dozen or so blackjack players tapped the baize table and shook their heads. The air was smoky and heavy. Everyone seemed depressed and I got a little depressed. There was no spa. No steak. No golf. No bad beat jackpot. The Palace isn’t the loneliest casino in America (that honor, I think, goes to Isle Vista at Red Cliff Reservation), but it’s pretty damn close. Our problems—unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of access to education and employment—are as they’ve always been. But the riches at Mdewakanton and Mille Lacs have done little to change those problems on their reservations. Even though I heard that some people at Shakopee wear their shoes only once and then just throw them away, they are poor in many things—overall health being one of them. Their poverty might be a new kind but ours is old.

Even so, the Palace is homey. Built in 1988, it’s an ancestor of the larger, happier places in California, Connecticut, and Florida. And it’s home.

I used to spend a lot of time at the Palace. I won my first hand of blackjack there. It was where my uncle Sonny (now deceased) scored $4,000 on a keno machine. Where my aunt Barb (now deceased) used to work. Where a medicine man sitting next to my mother said, “Give me the eight of hearts,” and the dealer did, and my mother said, “Adam, that’s not fair!” Where I met, way back when, a wonderful, wonderful girlfriend. Behind the casino is the veterans’ center, built with casino profits, where we held the funeral ceremonies for not a few good friends. And behind that are the powwow grounds, also built with casino profits, where I sang for the first time.

The Palace Casino and Hotel was built while I was away at college (back then, it was the Palace Bingo and Casino, sans hotel). In the fall of my freshman year, in a fit of loneliness, I once called home (never mind the long-distance charges that ate up a few hours of work).

“You OK?” asked my mother.

“Yeah. Homesick. Wish I were back there.”

“I thought you said you were never coming back to the rez.”

“I was wrong.”

“Hey, this is exciting,” she said, trying to cheer me up. “We’re getting a casino.”

“A what?”

“You know. Bingo. Blackjack. Slots. A casino. For gambling.”

“I wonder if that’ll change anything.”

And then, the understatement of the decade: “Who the hell knows, Dave. But at least we’ll finally get good prime rib on the rez.”

Dan and Dennis Jones bass fishing on Rainy Lake, August 2008

6

I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. Our reservations aren’t supposed to exist either; they were supposed to be temporary in many ways, and, under assault by the Dawes Act in the nineteenth century and by termination policy during the Eisenhower era in the twentieth century, they were supposed to disappear, too.

But I am not dead after all, and neither is rez life despite the coldest wishes of a republic since two centuries before I was born. We stubbornly continue to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native Americans alive at the dawn of the twentieth century; as of the 2000 census, we number more than 2 million. If you discount population growth by immigration, we are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. But even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear, is dying: our cultures.

Among my fellow Indians, this is not a popular thing to say. Most of us immediately sneer at warnings of cultural death, calling the very idea further proof that “the man” is still trying to kill us, but now with attitudes and arguments rather than discrimination and guns. Any Indian caught worrying that we might indeed vanish can expect to be grouped with the self-haters. While many things go into making a culture—kinship, history, religion, place—the disappearance of our languages suggests that our cultures, in total, may not be here for much longer.

For now, many Native American languages still exist, but most of them just barely, with only a very few living speakers, all of them old. On January 21, 2008, Marie Smith Jones, the last living fluent speaker of
Eyak, one of about twenty remaining Native Alaskan languages, died at the age of eighty-nine. Linguists estimate that when
Europeans first came to North America, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken here. Today, there are only about 150. Of those languages, only twenty are spoken by children. Only three languages—Dakota, Dene, and Ojibwe—have a vibrant community of speakers. Within a century, if nothing is done, hardly any Native languages will remain, though the surviving ones will include my language, Ojibwe.

Cultures change, of course. Sometimes they change slowly, in response to such factors as warming temperatures, differences in food sources, or new migration patterns. At other times, cultural changes are swift—the result of colonialism, famine, migration, or war. But at some point (which no one is anxious to identify exactly), a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an ethnicity—that is, it changes from a life system that develops its own terms into one that borrows, almost completely, someone else’s.

To claim that Indian cultures can continue without Indian languages only hastens our end, even if it makes us feel better about ourselves. Our cultures and our languages—as unique, identifiable, and particular entities—are linked to our sovereignty. If we allow our own wishful thinking and complacency to finish what George Armstrong Custer began, we will lose what we’ve managed to retain: our languages, land, laws, institutions, ceremonies, and, finally, ourselves. Cultural death matters because if the culture dies, we will have lost the chance not only to live on our own terms (something for which our ancestors fought long and hard) but also to live in our own terms.

If my language dies, our word for bear, “makwa,” will disappear, and with it the understanding that “makwa” is derived from the word for box, “makak” (because black bears box themselves up, sleeping, for the winter). So too will the word for namesake, “niiyawen’enh.” Every child who gets an Ojibwe name has namesakes, sometimes as many as six or eight of them. Throughout a child’s life, his or her namesakes function somewhat like godparents, giving advice and help, good for a dollar to buy an Indian taco at a powwow. But they offer something more too. The term for “my body,” “niiyaw” (a possessive noun: ni- = “I/mine”; -iiyaw = “body/soul”), is incorporated into the word for a namesake because the idea (contained by the word and vice versa) is that when you take part in a naming, you are giving a part of your soul, your body, to the person being named. So, to say “my namesake,” niiyawen’enh, is to say “my fellow body, myself.” If these words are lost, much will happen, but also very little will happen. We will be able to go to Starbucks, GameStop, Walmart, and Home Depot. We will still use Crest Whitestrips. Some of us will still do our taxes. Some of us still won’t. The mechanics of life as it is lived by modern Ojibwes will remain, for the most part, unchanged. The languages we lose, when we lose them, are always replaced by other languages. And all languages can get the job of life done. But something else might be lost and there might be more to the job of life than simply living it.

2

At Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion School at Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Reservation in Wisconsin, people are doing something about this. You drive past a lot of natural beauty between Hayward and the school—a lot of maple and pine; deep, clear lakes—most of it owned by whites. At the school, in two yellow modular buildings built with tribal funds in what used to be the corner of the school parking lot, a cultural revival is occurring. On the hot day in May when I visited the school I saw silhouettes of students drawn in chalk on the wooden decking that connects the buildings. The third and fourth grades were studying solar movement as part of their science curriculum, all done in Ojibwe, and done only here. Inside, the classroom walls are covered with signs in the Ojibwe language. A smartboard, linked to the teacher’s laptop, provides state-of-the-art learning opportunities.

One of the teachers who helped start the immersion program is a lanky, tall, excitable man named Keller Paap. When these teachers started the school in 2000 they had only a few students in kindergarten. Now, there are about twenty students in the program between kindergarten and fourth grade. After greeting the fourth-grade students in the classroom, Keller brings them to the music room in the main school building, where they all sing along with Keller’s guitar playing to welcome the new day. They speak, sing, argue, and flirt with each other in Ojibwe at a level that eludes most adults at LCO and every other Ojibwe reservation across the United States. After the morning singing they head back to the classroom and begin working on their science unit. “Ahaw,” asks Keller. “Awegonesh ge-ayaayambam da-agawaateyaag?” [So. What do all you need to make a shadow?]

One girl says, shyly, “Andaatewin.”

“Mii gwayak,” says Keller. “Awegonesh gaye? Giizis ina?”

“Ahaw,” says a playful boy, without a hint of shame or bashfulness.

“Mii go gaye apiichaawin,” says another kid, in a spurt of intuition.

This classroom is light-years ahead of most tribal language programs, which are still stuck on “bezhig, niizh, niswi,” and “makwa, waabooz, waagosh” (“one, two, three” and “bear, rabbit, fox”). They aren’t listing things in Ojibwe at Waadookodaading; they are thinking in Ojibwe.

Keller; his wife, Lisa LaRonge; Alex Decoteau; and the other teachers at Waadookodaading are, together, saving Ojibwe culture. Keller Paap is one of a few activists who have devoted their lives to saving the Ojibwe language. He is an unlikely hero. Raised in a suburb of Minneapolis, college-educated, a recovering rock star (he is an accomplished guitarist), he has given up all financial security, all his other possible prospects, everything, in order to move to LCO to open an Ojibwe-language immersion school. He is a new kind of activist for a new kind of reservation community.

Indian activism used to be a tough guy’s game. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the American Indian Movement (AIM) rose from urban Indian populations across the country. Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles had been destinations for Indians relocated during the 1950s, and they became the seed plots for a surge of Indian activism. Relocation, a government-sponsored program, yet another switchback in the U.S. government’s long road toward freeing itself of Indians and of all responsibility toward us, was a policy that sought to integrate Indians into the mainstream workforce by severing their relationship to their reservation communities. The relocation program promised jobs, education, and housing in up-and-coming American cities. Very little of this was forthcoming. Instead, Indians were crowded into ghettos, fought for work, fought for education, and suffered. It should be said that many Indians flourished in cities in the 1950s and many still flourish there today; more than half of all Indians live in urban areas. Still, the common notion that reservations are prisons should be revised; it was the city that became a prison for many Indians. They were stuck in a city and could not get out. They hadn’t the money to move back to the reservation and yet they had little reason to stay. Franklin Avenue, Gowanus Canal, Chicago’s
South Side—these became signifiers of rough life as important as the reservations the Indians had come from. Out of this situation, which was supposed to gradually make Indians as Indians “disappear,” came AIM.

Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Herb Powless, among others, founded AIM in 1968. Its rationale and goals were: the U.S. government has never had the interests of American Indians in mind or at heart, and any attempt to work within the system or with the system is bound to fail. Unlike the black civil rights movement, AIM had no great strength of numbers, economic capital, or visibility to use in getting its point across. The answer: bold, graphic takeovers and marches. Within seven years AIM had marched on and taken over Alcatraz Island (more accurately, a group of Bay Area Indians took over Alcatraz and some of the high-profile AIM leadership came toward the end of the takeover); the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington, D.C.; Mount Rushmore; and a replica of the
Mayflower
. At each event the AIMsters dressed in cowboy boots, tight jeans, buckskin jackets, and headbands and issued passionate, even poetic, statements about the continued mistreatment of American Indians. Often, light-skinned Indians were told they couldn’t belong to AIM or had to march in the back. AIM was always concerned with its image. Its activism was a kind of art—street theater that was visual and often violent and that conveyed clear messages about the mistreatment of Indians.

The most shocking and visible moment for AIM, and the moment that marked its decline, was its standoff with the federal government at the Jumping Bull Compound on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which left two federal agents dead. Leonard Peltier was charged with and convicted of murder and is still serving a sentence at Leavenworth. Afterward, marked by vicious infighting and infiltrated by the FBI, AIM became, in the opinion of many, aimless. And not everyone had approved of AIM in the first place. During the 1970s anger at the Red Lake Reservation chairman, Roger Jourdain, at his policies, and at embezzlement by other employees fueled riots at Red Lake. Jourdain’s house was burned down and cars were shot through with bullets. AIM tried to muscle in on the unrest and was rebuffed. The traditional community of Ponemah took a stand against AIM. As Eugene Stillday recounts, a number of veterans (of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam) from Ponemah gathered at The Cut—a narrow place in the road, bordered by the lake on one side and a large swamp on the other. They barricaded the road, built sandbag bunkers, and kept constant guard, armed with deer rifles and shotguns. Carloads of AIMsters drove up the road, were stopped, and after looking at the faces of the Ponemah veterans chose to turn around and go elsewhere.

This was what passed for activism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Keller Paap, on the other hand, is an unlikely activist. He was raised in a comfortable suburb: White Bear Lake, on the north side of St. Paul. His mother is from Red Cliff Reservation in Wisconsin; his father is of German ancestry. After graduating from high school in White Bear Lake he started college, stopped, and devoted himself to becoming a rock and roller. Keller
looks
like a rock star. He’s tallish (six feet and change), thin, and bony, with long black hair, wide cheekbones and lips, and long tapered fingers that were made to hold a guitar and to play it well. When someone is talking to him about the Ojibwe language, the glazed look that comes over his eyes must be the same look he had during a guitar solo. It is not difficult to imagine him wearing a bandanna, like Steven Van Zandt, or the same purse-lipped expression when he is focused on his guitar. During the day the kids sometimes start spacing out during their lessons and Keller jumps up, thumbs his iPod while gushing at the kids in Ojibwe, finds Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” and gets his kids to kick off their shoes and try to do the “robot,” the “scarecrow,” and “the moon walk.” During the early 1980s Keller spent a lot of time practicing his break-dancing moves. Later, he and his friends followed the Grateful Dead.

I first met Paap in 1994 at the University of Minnesota, where he was finishing his undergraduate degree. He was a student in the Ojibwe-language class offered through the department of American Indian Studies. At the time he didn’t seem all that interested in the language.

“Back then I thought it was sort of cool,” he says. “I was Ojibwe, my people were from Red Cliff, and this was our language, and it felt good to study it.”

That good feeling quickly became a passion.

“It all started with hanging out with Dennis Jones, the Ojibwe-language instructor at the U. I traveled around with him and recorded his mom and worked on translating her stories. And, man! The intricacy! The crazy complexity of the language totally got me. I mean, hanging out with Nancy, and Rose Tainter, and Delores Wakefield—all those elders, sitting around the kitchen table drinking Red Rose tea and talking—it felt comfortable, like it was with my uncles and cousins and relatives up at Red Cliff when I was a kid. Even more than music, even more than the guitar, the complexity and music of the language and the feeling of belonging to something totally caught me.”

Catch him it did. Soon after graduating he worked as a teaching assistant for the language program. He met his wife there. Lisa LaRonge is from LCO Reservation, due south of Red Cliff. Like Keller she is tall, with long brown hair. Like Keller, she has gone through many
incarnations before devoting herself to the language. They moved to Lisa’s reservation in 1998 and, with a few others, opened an Ojibwe-language immersion school—Waadookodaading (“we help each other”). Waadookodaading has been in operation for ten years now,
as one of only a few schools generating fluent speakers of the Ojibwe language. Strangely, many other Ojibwe-language activists have some kind of artistic pedigree. Leslie Harper—who along with her sister Laurie, Adrian Liberty, and elders like Johnny Mitchell founded the Niigaane Immersion program at Leech Lake—is a writer and a former Miss Indian Minneapolis. Liberty is a drummer—his band Powermad was featured in David Lynch’s
Wild at Heart
.