Rez Life. David Treuer

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СКАЧАТЬ drunk. Dale said, ‘You can stay if you want. You got to do what you’ve been doing, work hard, work around the house, take care of yourselves.’ So I went out and told my mom I was going to stay. She said OK, and I didn’t see her again for three or four months, maybe.” Grolla went back to his biological family at Nett Lake later, but life was much the same. More chaos. More drinking. “My mom had been drinking and stuff. I was fourteen. The uncle I was going to stay with, my favorite uncle Ike Leecy, he happened to do some time in jail. I was going to stay with him but I couldn’t. So I hitchhiked back to Red Lake. A couple of weeks later the social workers came over. I told them I’m not going to go back. I gotta live my life, too. So I showed up at court and told them why I didn’t want to live with her. It was a good life at Red Lake. A forest life. Set nets, did sugarbush, picked blueberries. And that’s where my Ojibwe stuff started, with my grandmother Fannie Johns. When I first learned my trees I learned them in Ojibwe. I didn’t even know the English words for the trees. Birds, too. There’s that one, she called it ‘manoominikenshiinh.’ It runs on the water in the rice. I still don’t know what it is in English.” So Charley grew up with a prominent Red Lake family, living a Red Lake life. He got married to a member of the Red Lake Band and they lived there and raised their kids there. But when he and his wife divorced, he couldn’t live at Red Lake anymore. He is engaged now to a Red Lake tribal member.

      While non–band members can’t, as a rule, live on the rez, there is an exception, which has led to perhaps the strangest sight in the village: the Compound. Situated alongside the main highway, number 1, the Compound houses the Indian Health Services Hospital, the Jourdain Perpich Extended Care Facility, and all the “foreign” workers—government officials, doctors, teachers, and so on—who have jobs on Red Lake but are not band members. Some of the houses, known as “Walking Shield” houses, were moved here from an abandoned air force base in North Dakota. There are two batches of them, and after they were moved from North Dakota all of them had to be stripped and abated because they were insulated with asbestos. Some of the other houses were built on site. The HUD planners who designed the arrangement were smitten with the winding streets and culs-de-sac of American suburbia, and they let their love show: the Compound’s ramblers and split-levels grace curving streets with curbs and streetlights, but no sidewalks. And until recently the whole thing was encased in an eight-foot-high Cyclone fence. Some people joke that the fence was there to keep Indians out. (And this is possible. When the old agency building and hospital were on the other side of the creek, they too were enclosed in a fence and referred to as “the compound”; but when the hospital and other facilities moved to where they are now, the old compound became known as “Pill Hill” because that’s where everyone used to go to get medical care.) Clearly, outsiders have a complicated stake in Red Lake.

      The high school sits just past the compound on the other side of the creek. It is a large, modern affair, built with bonded state and federal money in the early 1990s. Despite all the troubles that plague the reservation—crime, gangs, unemployment, suicide, and low graduation rates—the whole community is very proud, especially proud, of this school. It is the most important, most central, most conspicuous building on the reservation.

      To an outsider Red Lake could look like a great nothing. But what appears as a great nothing, an economic disaster, is linked to a particular Red Lake phenomenon of independence. The “nothing” is the result of character and leadership stretching back over 150 years. Red Lake Reservation, unlike nearly every other reservation in the United States, is a closed reservation. No one can live, work, travel, or fish anywhere within the reservation boundaries without the tribe’s blessing. Mueller and his son-in-law were fishing on the wrong side of the rez.

      When Terry Maddy said that the Indians at Red Lake were used to having their cake and eating it, too, the “cake” he was referring to was sovereignty, and it had been baking for more than 400 years before Jerry Mueller’s boat was confiscated by the sovereign nation of Red Lake. There is probably no aspect of Indian life more misunderstood by Indians and non-Indians alike than sovereignty.

      Sovereignty in the Western sense—the supreme independent authority over a land or territory vested in a people or a ­government—predated the conquest of America. So when tribes began making treaties with colonial powers and later with the U.S. government, sovereignty, as a concept, was well in place. It was out of this concept that reservations were, in large part, born. There were ad hoc arrangements that resembled, to some extent, modern reservations, dating back to the early seventeenth century. The Delaware from New Jersey, for example, had one such arrangement. The Delaware were also the beneficiaries of what could be considered the first “reservations” in the United States, when, in the early 1700s, they were promised land that would exist under their authority in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The Province of Maryland created a 5,000-acre reservation for the Nanticoke Indians in 1698, and created another reservation of 3,000 acres in 1711. The first and last reservation in the state of New Jersey was created for 200 Brotherton Delaware on August 29, 1758, in Evesham Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. Despite the reservation created for them in New Jersey, the Brotherton Delaware became one of the most nomadic tribes of all time. The Brotherton Reservation fell into decline almost immediately after it was created, mostly because the community’s benefactor, John Brainerd, became ill and left in 1777. The Oneida of upstate New York invited the Brotherton Delaware to live with them in 1796. The Brotherton agreed. They had no power or protection in New Jersey. Instead of growing, their numbers had shrunk from 200 in 1758 to a mere 85 in 1796. They sold the reservation to New Jersey and moved to New York in 1802. The stay with the Oneida in New York was short. Some of the Oneida planned a move to Wisconsin—having lost land, rights, and villages during and after the rampages of the Revolutionary War. The Oneida, having sided with the Americans, returned to their villages to find them burned and looted by the British, the Americans, and even some of their own Indian allies. And this after the Oneida men had carried 600 bushels of corn on their backs to relieve the famine at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–1778. An Oneida woman named Polly Cooper accompanied the men and showed the soldiers how to prepare the corn by soaking it in lye and rolling it into hominy. So grateful were Washington and his troops that Martha Washington personally presented Polly Cooper with a bonnet and shawl. That gratitude was short-lived. After the war the Oneida suffered and sought better conditions out west. The Brotherton Indians accompanied them. Other Delaware moved to Indian territories in present-day Oklahoma. Still others fled to Canada.

      During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up to the Revolutionary War, there were a series of arrangements, trade relationships, and antiaggression treaties between many tribes and the many European colonial powers in North America, chief among them the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. These relationships varied among tribes and colonists, with some tribes playing both sides because they could. In many instances, as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Indian tribes controlled the natural resources, the routes of travel, and the technology to effectively control large areas of North America. The Indians in the Great Lakes region showed they were powerful enough to make any colonial power in North America think long and hard about how to deal with Indians. Nowhere was this more clear than during the Seven Years’ War. When that war began in Europe in 1756, it involved every major European and colonial power, making it what some call the first world war. Great Britain and its allies (including Prussia) fought against France, Austria, Saxony, and Sweden. When the war was done, between 900,000 and 1.4 million were dead. The major clashes between Great Britain and France had been far from their own homelands; these took place in America during the French and Indian War, which was really the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War but was so vast, long, and bloody that many people have come to think of it as a separate conflict. The very name of the war can be confusing—the conflict was not between the French and the Indians but rather between the French and their Indian allies and the British in North America. At the outset of the war in 1754 the British maintained a strong presence on the eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Maine, whereas the French occupied the territories farther north and west. Mixed in with the French and British colonies were many Indian tribes—Seneca, Mohawk, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Hurons, Delaware, Shawnee, Winnebago, and others—whose territories often overlapped those of the French and the British. Most of the Indian tribes СКАЧАТЬ