Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (32 page)

Within a few months Dan, who knew no life other than his Indian life, began to think of his Indian life as a shameful impediment, and looked on with longing at the lives the white kids around him were encouraged to lead.

Dan and his brother Dennis were kept together, so at least they had that, but they were separated from their older brothers and sister who were already there.

While still in kindergarten Dan, who had never been hit in his life, started getting beaten, as a matter of school policy. “He’d come up with a strap or a paddle, and he’d call our names. The teacher would say, are you Dan? Yes, I am. Did you—and he’d read something off a piece of paper. I couldn’t really understand him so I’d say, ‘Yes, yes I did.’ ‘Well, you’re going to get the strap.’ And they showed me the paddle and the belt and asked me which one I wanted. I didn’t even know what the paddle was for, but I knew a belt could be useful, you could keep your pants up with one of those, so I said, ‘The belt, please.’ And they pulled my pants down and had me bend over and they started to hit me with that. I don’t know what I was doing wrong. I think it was because I was using Ojibwe, Anishinaabemowin.”

Even some of the older boys would torture Dan and Dennis. One boy from the reserve near theirs told Dan and Dennis that their parents had died and they would never get to go home. Dan and Dennis had no way to know if this was true or not.

“The loneliness was overwhelming,” says Dan. “Not just a month at a time. But two, three, months. I quit counting days. It was unbearable. I remember shaking and thinking to myself that I got no resources, no one to turn to, and all those feelings stayed with me a long time. I didn’t realize how deep those feelings ran until I started having kids of my own.”

In the second year that Dan and Dennis were there, things got worse. Around that time the school administration changed. The school hired Indian administrators, trying to make residential boarding school more culturally sensitive. It also hired a “boys’ keeper” who oversaw the boys’ dorm on the weekends. “His name was Gerry Red Sky,” says Dan, “and I was glad that he was there. A Native role model. Someone I could look up to who would understand me. He was from Kenora, near Kenora.” Dan’s joy soured quickly.

“Gerry Red Sky would visit me in bed. The first time I woke up and he was penetrating me. I was scared. I didn’t understand. I said I had to go to the bathroom and I hid in there. A few times I fell asleep in the bathroom because I was so scared to come out. He kept trying. He got me once and I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and blood came out. I couldn’t understand why I was bleeding. I was spilling blood all over the place. I was six years old. In talking to my sister Shirley, my older sister, later in life, I never knew that she knew. But she did. She’d gone and offered herself to Gerry so that he would leave me and Dennis alone. And so he was violating her, and not honoring his agreement with her to leave us alone.” Gerry Red Sky anally raped Dan and most likely many others until he stopped working there after six months. Evidently Dennis, as an adult, went looking for him, to settle the score. Gerry Red Sky was homeless on the streets of Kenora.

Dan and Dennis emerged from boarding school in awful shape. They drank, smoked dope, and fought. They have a typical Ojibwe build: short, stocky, wide-shouldered, thick-waisted, with strong legs and hands. They have dark skin and black hair that is now turning gray. They are cheerful, funny, and hardworking. It is hard for me to imagine them back in their wild days. But once I was walking down the road at Seine River Indian Reserve with Dennis and his wife. A man was walking toward us. When he recognized Dennis he walked across the road and passed us on the other side and then switched back. I asked what that was all about. Dennis said he didn’t know. His wife, Lorraine, said,
Oh, Bouncy
[Dennis’s nickname]
beat him up once
. He did?
We were at a party up the road and he insulted me, called me names. Bouncy beat him up in the kitchen and then threw him down the front steps.
Lorraine laughed and stroked Dennis’s neck. I could tell Dennis was embarrassed.
You were just sticking up for me, you tough guy, you
. And she laughed. I would think twice about fighting either one of them.

But both Dennis and Dan turned their lives around. By age nineteen Dan quit drinking. Dennis quit soon thereafter. They went to college and got their teaching degrees. Both have children and both teach children and college students the Ojibwe language they grew up with, the language the Canadian government couldn’t quite beat out of them. Both brothers credit the language, their culture, and the time spent with their parents trapping, fishing, and living Indian lives as the forces that helped them endure and eventually overcome the residential school experience. Both men happily live lives of meaning, helping others recover from trauma.

Forced assimilation in the form of allotment and boarding schools had terrible effects on reservation life and Indian lives. But as bad as the U.S. government has been in its treatment of Indians, sometimes Indians are as bad or even worse to one another. One really fucked-up aspect of Indian life is that, unlike any other minority, Indians have rules, based on genetics and “blood quantum,” that determine whether or not someone is
officially
an Indian. Brooke Mosay Ammann is one of the people on the wrong side of that determination. She is, as far as her tribe and the BIA and the U.S. government are concerned, not really an Indian.

Born in 1975 to Dora Mosay and Tony Ammann, Brooke is about as Indian as they come. Brooke’s father, Tony, is a broad-shouldered, balding, white man of Swiss descent, a marine (once a marine, always a marine) who has been a union sheet-metal worker for his entire adult life since he got out of the service. Tony fell in love with and married Dora Mosay, the daughter of the spiritual chief Archie Mosay. Archie (who was given that name by an employer who found his Ojibwe name, Nibaa-giizhig, unpronounceable) was born in 1901 near Balsam Lake, Wisconsin, in a small village of wigwams. This village was one of the few that had resisted removal to Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation.
“There were Indians all over, living on nothing,” says Brooke. “When they came around with the IRA boilerplate constitutions, the plan was that all the St. Croix people would move to Hertel. And all these Indians around these little towns like Luck, Balsam Lake, Milltown, Round Lake. My grandfather was part of making sure people didn’t move. He didn’t want to leave his old village at Balsam Lake. That was his life’s work—to stay there.” As a result they got nothing from the government: no housing, no annuities, no food. Their poverty forced them to live as their ancestors had lived for generations: in bark-covered wigwams made of bent maple and ironwood saplings. They hauled their water from a natural spring; slept on bulrush mats; killed deer, ducks, and fish; and harvested wild rice. Archie’s father, Mike Mosay, was a spiritual leader for the entire region and ran the much-protected and secret Grand Medicine Lodge until he was well over 100. Archie and his brothers served as messengers, or oshkaabewisag, for their father, a coveted and important ceremonial position. Archie, since he was the second-born, was the second or number two messenger. His brother was niigane-oshkaabewis, number one. The only change in this order occurred when Archie’s brother went away to fight in World War I, during which time Archie assumed his duties. When the war was over and his brother came back, Archie was bumped back down to number two.

Archie grew up and worked for the county road crew (a job he held for life). He never went to school and never lived anywhere other than the village where he was born. He had his own children, nine of them. His first wife and one son died during the flu epidemic of 1918. All his children were born in wigwams or tar paper shacks and lived in the village of their father’s birth. When Archie’s father, Mike, died in the 1970s Archie waited seven years, then took over his duties as the chief of the Grand Medicine Lodge. His daughter Dora held the ceremonial position of boss lady, equal to the boss or chief, a position she still holds.

Dora, a full-blooded Ojibwe, with a wrinkled face and carefully cut and set salt-and-pepper hair, could illustrate an encyclopedia entry for “Ojibwe woman.” She, in her late sixties, still scrubs her floors on hands and knees. She can’t abide a mess. She sometimes sneaks cigarettes. She always wears a bandanna or kerchief tied over her hair when she goes out in the woods. She is rigid but soft-spoken. When she decides to be funny she can be devastating. Her voice is a dead ringer for that of Marge Simpson.

Since Brooke’s father is white and her mother is a full-blood, Brooke is, technically, half Indian by blood (though you can’t measure culture by percentages of blood). The fractions, in her case, are straightforward. But there is some dispute at the tribal level; for some reason Archie Mosay’s wife is listed as having a white grandfather, and so Archie’s children are considered slightly less than full-blood and Brooke is considered slightly less than half-blood.

“There are old animosities,” says Brooke. “He fought removal to Hertel during the 1930s. People were jealous of his ceremonial position. Jealousy—that’s a big symptom of rez life, let me tell you.” As a result of this animosity, Brooke, on paper at least, has slightly less than one-half Indian blood.

“We didn’t live on ‘the rez.’ I mean, I didn’t grow up in the village of Round Lake or Maple Plain or Danbury or wherever. I grew up in New Richmond. I spent every weekend when I was a kid with my grandfather and my extended family. We were connected, you know? He didn’t, technically, live on the rez either. He lived in a place that predated the reservation.” Connected to her Indian family, and encouraged by the educational director of the St. Croix Band of Ojibwe, Brooke applied to and was accepted at Dartmouth. After Dartmouth she moved to New Mexico and then eventually back to St. Croix, where she worked as the education director from 2002 to 2004. She took a leave to attend Harvard and got her MA at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She came back and held her job at St. Croix until 2010. “I lost my uncle Wayne and my aunt Betsy. I wanted to be home. Everyone, all those old people, were passing, and I wanted to be home. I wanted to help people.”

But even though she is the granddaughter of the most important Ojibwe ceremonial chief of the twentieth century, even though she has spent the better part of her life living her Indian ways and participating in ceremony, even though she is now the educational director for the tribe—despite all that, Brooke is, as far as the tribe and the federal government are concerned, not Indian. The St. Croix tribe requires at least one-half Indian blood and descent from the St. Croix Band for membership. This means that Brooke can’t run for tribal office. She doesn’t receive per capita payments. (The tribe is very small and has a large casino; until recently per capita payments were $1,000 a month.) She doesn’t qualify for health care from the Indian Health Service (IHS, one of the many provisions of treaties signed by Ojibwe bands and the U.S. government). She cannot live in tribal housing. She didn’t get federal financial aid for college, available to most enrolled Indians as part of their treaty rights. She cannot get anything from her tribe or the government; nor—and this is more alarming for her people—can she give as much as she could.

“It factors. Enrollment matters,” says Brooke. In her years working for her tribe Brooke focused on how to create supportive policy for incorporating Ojibwe language and culture into school culture; on second-language teaching and learning; and on, in her words, “decolonizing school policy.” She applied for and received an Administration for Native American Native Language Revitalization grant. But, as Brooke says ruefully, “This work was my downfall. Doing language work in a Native community opens you up to all sorts of criticism. Add that I was Ivy League–educated, a Mosay, and not enrolled in the tribe, practiced our ceremonies, and I dared ask questions of the tribal council and questioned their actions as I would question the supposed leaders of any nation. Add all that up and you have a threatening woman on your hands.” So much so that Brooke was fired in the winter of 2010.

“We’re breeding ourselves out of existence. And that’s what the government wants. It’s used to divide people—those who are in and those who aren’t. At the bottom of it, I think it’s chauvinism. I really do. We’ve adopted those harmful attitudes because of colonialism. We’ve bought in to all that us-them stuff. It’s symptomatic. And when there’s power to be had, who suffers most? Women. If you want to gauge the health of a community, of a nation, look to the women. If they are suffering from threats of violence, fear, poor health in any form—physical, mental, spiritual—lack access to education—both traditional and academic—then there is something wrong with your nation. There is something wrong with ours and there is something wrong with America. I am an underemployed feminist super Indian. But I can’t get enrolled and I can’t keep my job because of all that tribal jealousy and fighting and dysfunction. Let me tell you this, since I don’t have to worry about my job any more: tribal council is where good ideas go to die. And that’s the truth. The other truth is that we need to enlist the aid of all the people for success. We need the help of others, even non-Natives, even the marginalized. We have to work together. Sometimes I think—ah, the hell with you Indians. I tried, I did my time. I worked for the tribe for eight years, a good run. But then I remember my grandfather. He never gave up.”

Sure, it would be nice if Brooke were officially Indian. It means something to Indians to be enrolled and it means something else not to be. Since Brooke is not enrolled, she enjoys none of the treaty rights her family fought so hard to maintain. She gets no per capita payments from the casino, no health care from the tribe or IHS, no housing. She can’t hunt, gather, or fish on the reserved lands. “I had to suffer through the treaty wars,” she says, “I was threatened and abused along with my fellow Indians but share in none of the bounty. I have to buy a permit like any white person to harvest my sacred food, the wild rice. And I can’t do it on my reservation because that is reserved for enrollees.” But Brooke will be OK. She is educated, ambitious, and hardworking and remains committed to her Indian life. Having managed all this, she is, by any standard, a success. She is an Indian success and she is also an American success—proof that you can rise up; you can go from humble origins to success with humility; you can go from having a tenuous hold on the American fabric to being wrapped up in it in just a generation. The greater loss is to her tribe. It could use her. It would, I think, benefit from her inclusion. She knows this, even if the tribe doesn’t. Proof: her two sons are named Tecumseh and Osceola. The historical Tecumseh led a pan-Indian effort to overthrow the U.S. government in the early 1800s. Osceola was the Seminole war chief who fought the Americans to a standstill during the Second Seminole War. He was captured through deceit—lured out of hiding with promises that the Americans would capitulate.