Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (34 page)

Meanwhile my friend’s son was drinking and drugging. He got the clap at age sixteen. He said he is suicidal. The boy is an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe at Leech Lake. However, father and son live 500 yards outside the reservation boundary. They get no chemical dependency counseling, no foster care, no psychological or CD assessment. This is much less sexy than the fate of freed slaves or per capita payments or rich Indians. It’s less sexy, less interesting, but more important—what little safety is provided by social services is desperately needed by the most vulnerable, the poorest, the most disenfranchised Indians. Interestingly, as part of the tribal constitution all the elected officials must live on the reservation to hold office. So those making decisions (such as the decision to deal with the counties) aren’t making choices that could hurt them directly. They’ve sold out hard-earned ICWA rights. To put it another way, they’ve sold out our children. My friend’s son will be emancipated in a year and a half. He figures he’s got one last chance to turn his son’s life around before he’s lost. He feels that the tribe doesn’t care about him or his children.

Less final but perhaps as damning is the identity war that plagues Indian communities on and off the reservation. Being “from the rez” has become a kind of marker of authenticity for many Indians—more important and more telling than being enrolled or being full-blood, quarter-blood, or whatever else. You’ll hear it said of someone, “Oh, yeah, he’s Indian, I guess, but he’s not from the rez.” In that is a kind of commentary on the authenticity, the degree of Indianness, that someone does or doesn’t possess. Unlike the criterion applied to Brooke, this degree of Indianness can’t be measured, but it is as final as the kinds of comments made about someone who is African American by blood but lacks the social credentials that make him or her “really black.” Such is the thinking, anyway. But the problem of Indian identity is far more complicated than the terms of such identity wars would suggest.

For instance, Ryan Haasch could be considered about as “rezzy” as the next guy. He was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and moved with his parents at age two to a modest split-level on the Leech Lake Reservation. That is where he grew up, in the small enclave (you can’t really call it a village anymore) of Mission, just north of Cass Lake. Ryan’s father worked for the Leech Lake Reservation vocational training program and his mother is a teacher at the Alternative Learning Center (ALC), a school within the Cass Lake Schools for at-risk or troubled kids. Most of her students are Indian. Ryan is a good man: thirty years old, of medium height, a teacher like his mother. He plays in softball leagues and is a drummer and songwriter for a punk band he started with friends in Minneapolis. But Ryan has no Indian blood to speak of: he is white. Because of the Dawes Act and the Nelson Act and the economic superiority of non-Indians for the last 100 years, Ryan’s family is one of many non-Indian families that live on reservations like Leech Lake. The stunning fact of life for many reservations is that there are more white people living there than Indian people.

Even though he was raised on a reservation, he never really gave it much thought while growing up.
“I mean, I just lived there. Grew up there. I didn’t go around thinking: ‘I live on a reservation.’ When I told people in college where I was from, where I lived, they were baffled.”

Most people are. Most people assume that only Indians live on reservations, or that if white people live there it is only by special permission. As good a guy as Ryan is, he grew up on land that was taken from Indians around the turn of the century by way of the Dawes Act, either illegally or immorally or both. The land inside the external boundaries of the reservation that passed from Indian control to private, state, or county ownership creates some strange problems and even stranger jurisdictional complications. Much of the land inside the reservation boundary is not reservation land

As for Ryan, the only really noticeable effect of living on the reservation was that he was one of just three white kids on the school bus that brought them back and forth to school off the reservation in Bemidji. “The rest were Indian. It was a rough bus. These big kids sat in back. Corey Kingbird was one of them. He died in a police chase on Mission road. Gordon Fineday was another. I think he’s still around. Corey would tell us these stories. He showed me his pinkie finger which was all bent and broken and he told us that he had to break his own pinkie as a gang initiation. I don’t know if it was true, but when he told us that it
seemed
true. Anyway, these other kids would shoot spitballs at the back of my head and call me ‘fucking white boy.
’
”

The other two white kids on the bus—Tommy Erickson (who was Indian by blood but blond and didn’t himself identify as Indian) and Chris Rutledge—are dead. Chris overdosed on morphine patches and Tommy died when he fell asleep at the wheel of the car he was driving on his way back to school in North Dakota.

“Yeah, my school friends were scared to ride the bus with me. Chris Claypool and Mike Blodgett. Those were the names of my friends. They were too scared to ride the bus to my house. Mike’s mom would drive them out so they could sleep over.”

Living on the reservation didn’t really affect Ryan one way or the other, except for having to endure a bus ride with bullies.

“We’d bike all over the place. We’d bike to Cass Lake. Once or twice we got chased around Cass Lake by a bunch of Indian kids who wanted to beat us up. But that was about it.”

Ryan and his buddies, however, were scared to go into the Plantation, a notoriously rough housing tract near the old village site, the Mission, about four miles from Ryan’s house.

“When we’d go stay at Tommy Erickson’s house—you know he lived in that place just off the highway near the Plantation—well, we’d just stick close to his house, in his yard. One time we saw some kids a ways away and they were yelling stuff at us, looking to fight. But we didn’t go over there.”

What Ryan described was a kind of continuum. He felt like a member of a minority on the bus, but not around his neighborhood (if the scattered houses set back from the highway in the woods can be described as a “neighborhood”). Most of his near neighbors were white, but many were not. There were the kids on the bus and Kevin Northbird, whom Ryan and his friends called “Guitar Man.” However, just three miles down the road were the housing tracts called Plantation, Mission, and Macaroni Flats, where Ryan felt uncomfortable going. These tracts were coded as “Indian” zones.

There was a store just around the corner from Ryan’s house called Midway Store (since it was midway between Bemidji and Cass Lake). It was owned by Guitar Man’s father, Ron Northbird. Ryan and his friends called the Midway Store the Niij Store. “Niijii” is Ojibwe for “friend.”

“We tried to shoplift at the Niij Store, but never could pull it off. Ron Northbird was too sharp. He had this way of watching us. It was very casual, but you could feel his eyes on you. We called him Eagle Eyes.” It is a strange irony that white kids were trying to shoplift in an Indian-owned store on a reservation. But these were the contours of Ryan’s life.

Maybe Ryan felt comfortable on the reservation because his parents worked there and because they were good people, like their son. They were respectful of Indians and Indian ways and didn’t tolerate racism in their house.

“My dad was working on the rez for the vocational program. They’d be in the woods or something and he’d pull something off a tree to show his students, just rip it off the tree, and one of the guys in the program would say: ‘You might want to put down some tobacco when you take something from a tree or from nature.’ And my dad listened and he shared that stuff with us, the things he learned from his Indian students. I got a lot of credit for being my parents’ son. One more story: when I was in high school, working at Wendy’s in Bemidji, my coworker Z-Mark was a little older. He’d buy us beer and stuff. He was going out with a girl from Bena. Anyway, I was at a party at Z-Mark’s little apartment in Bemidji and Darryl Stangel was there. He was from Bena, too. ‘You’re Patty’s son,’ he said. ‘You should party with us. We’re heading to Bena. Don’t worry. No one will mess with you. Everyone’ll be cool with you because you’re Patty’s son.
’
”

When asked what he sees when he thinks of “the reservation,” Ryan says, “I think of Guitar Man. One time we heard this really loud guitar sound coming through the woods. I mean it was this loud, awesome, feedbacked guitar solo. We got on our bikes and rode around and we went by the Northbirds’ house and there was Kevin on the deck. Guitar Man. This was the 1980s. And he had on some black concert T-shirt, AC/DC or something. And short bright orange running shorts and white high-top sneakers, the ones they had in the 1980s with big tongues and laces. And Guitar Man had all this hair, loads of it, and it was curly and wavy. And he’s on the deck with his guitar and amp just jamming, letting it rip out in the middle of the woods. It was awesome.” But Ryan, even though he was “rez-raised” and grew up with many of the same markers of authentic Indianness as his neighbors like Guitar Man, such as brushes with the law, the violent deaths of close friends, and even violence in his own life, he lacks Indian blood—and so, despite everything, no one considers him Indian.

In part, impatience with the sometimes self-serving identity politics is what motivates language-immersion activists such as Keller Paap. They feel that if they are able to bring language back to the center of our sense of ourselves, all the other complicated politics of self, all the other markers of authenticity, will fall away. They feel that the government’s attempt at assimilation created the destructive, diseased social fabric in which we are wrapped today. And so the work that Keller Paap, Lisa LaRonge, David Bisonette, Adrian Liberty, Leslie Harper, and others are doing to bring the Ojibwe language back is, essentially, an antiassimilationist movement. In many ways it turns around what AIM started. (One of AIM’s cries was “Indian pride”—and AIMsters didn’t style themselves as BIA bureaucrats with short hair and bolo ties.) The renewed interest in tribal cultures and tribal language runs against hundreds of years of government policy. It also runs directly against the thoughts of many Indians.

In the late nineteenth century many powerful Indians—Dr. Charles Eastman, William Warren, George Copway, and others—were pro-assimilation. They had witnessed the gradual encroachment of whites, the power of the U.S. government, the advantages of technology, and even the advantages of Western medicine and agrarianism and made up their own minds: assimilation was the only way Indians would live. It was assimilate or die. Assimilation wasn’t always a grand ideological choice—it was a physical one. In contrast, traditionals (in places such as Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota) couldn’t live the way they had lived but didn’t know how to live on their newly created reservations. One could either watch one’s children die from disease or warfare or see them survive—with short hair, speaking English, and practicing Catholicism. Many of the graduates of boarding schools found themselves with an education, skills, social networks, clothes, food, and employment. Many of them did just fine in boarding school and they couldn’t help seeing assimilation as the best course. In contrast to suffering, starving, and dying, assimilation was a logical, realist, practical choice.

There were a few Indian activists who took assimilation to its fullest in the early twentieth century. One of these was the “fiery Apache,” Carlos Montezuma. A Yavapai Indian (it is unclear why he became known as the “fiery Apache”) from Arizona, named Wassaja in the Pima language, he was captured by Pima Indians in 1871 when he was five years old and sold to Carlo Gentile, a traveling photographer, for thirty dollars. Shortly before his death, Gentile said to an interviewer from a Chicago paper (with Montezuma listening in) that this purchase was “the best investment I ever made in my life.” Carlo Gentile named the boy Carlos Montezuma and raised him in the East. Gentile speculated in various businesses, lost everything, and, upon their return to Chicago, committed suicide. The young Montezuma was placed in the American Baptist Home Mission where he got a good education—good enough so that the young Yavapai was admitted to the University of Illinois. He graduated in 1884 and soon afterward received his medical degree from Chicago Medical College. Montezuma opened a private practice and became an Indian activist after meeting and befriending Captain Pratt at Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania. His work as a doctor brought him to North Dakota, Montana, and the Colville Agency in Washington. He saw, firsthand, reservation conditions and the brutal war between traditional life and “modern life.” Not only did Montezuma believe in assimilation, as did Pratt; he came to believe that in order to save Indians, every vestige of tribal life should be wiped away. Reservations, dance, language, customs, religion—all of it should be stamped out. He felt that other assimilationists, such as Pratt and Charles Eastman, were soft. The incremental approach they advocated was not enough. Half measures were not measures at all. He helped found the Society of American Indians, an exclusive Indian organization devoted to the idea of assimilation, in 1911. Montezuma began publishing a journal. He needed a forum for his extremist views and, since there wasn’t one, he made one.

However, when Montezuma reached middle age he traveled back to the land of his people and a switch occurred. He came to believe in tribal life. Instead of fighting to abolish reservations and rez life he sought to protect them and it. When the U.S. government tried to relocate the Yavapai he fought their removal from their reservation with all his considerable power. He tried to become an enrolled member of the tribe. In 1922, dying of tuberculosis, he moved to Fort McDowell Reservation. He lived there in a traditional Yavapai grass hut until he died in 1923. He is buried on the reservation.

Keller Paap and the others working for language preservation believe in antiassimilation as strongly as the “fiery Apache” believed in assimilation, and for the same reasons—they are trying to save a people, and to have lives that are full of meaning. David Bisonette has been a part of Waadookodaading since the beginning and shares many of Keller’s and Lisa’s beliefs.