We Have The Right To Exist

Written by                     Marion Simonis

Field Producer/
Videographer   A.J. Fossen

Narrator                        Ron Johnson

Introduction—Host:  We’re glad you could join us for this edition of Viewpoints North.  I’m your host, Ann Ward.  Coming up in the next half hour ... A little later, we’ll visit with Francis Blake, Junior, as he discusses his book entitled, We Have The Right To Exist.  But first, ...

                        [segment on radio controlled model
                airplanes]

Narrator:  Now is the time to set the record straight, says Francis Blake, Junior, or Wub-e-ke-niew, an aboriginal indigenous to the Red Lake area and the author of We Have the Right to Exist, published this year by New York’s Black Thistle Press.

 Wub-e-ke-niew:  Well, I was born in a log house, down in Ba-kwa-kwan, which is a mile west of Red Lake—the town of Redlake.  And, my grandfather, ah—I was very much involved with my grandfather who, you know, who, well, because of the earlier years here, and the alcohol, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of disruption in the community, and destroying the community.

Narrator:  His grandfather never drank, he never raised his hand in violence, and he never raised his voice in anger.  It was this man to whom he turned as a child for affection, sustenance and guidance.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  When he died, then, when I was seven, I was put into the boarding school, at the Mission School, and there, we were taught to ...  We were going to be Americans, we were to assimilate, we were to leave our savage and dirty ways ... you know, we were not to ... We couldn’t even mention our grandparents, or our family, we were taught  English and Latin, and, you know, how to serve Mass and be a good Christian, and that type of thing.

Narrator:  After spending nine years at St. Mary’s Mission, at the Catholic boarding school  in Redlake, he worked in the farm fields of North Dakota.  When he was eighteen, he joined the Army and was sent overseas.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  I got to see another conquered people over there, you know, and how they behaved.  There is no word for war, or peace, in our language; there are no swear words.  But in the Chippewa language, there is swear words, and there is words for war and peace.  It’s a hierarchical language, just like English.  But ours was egalitarian, and everybody had a say in the life: the female, and the male, and the young ones.  All took care of the ecosystem.  That’s why it was so beautiful, because it was a male and female language.

Narrator:  Language always fascinated him, and especially the way words are used.  He honestly believes that the language of a culture controls that culture’s way of thinking.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  Well, I write about in the book, about the devil, you know.  The Prefect at the boarding school was always chasing, chasing the devil out, and, you know, that dichotomy of the God and the Devil does not exist in our culture, but is in theirs.  And so, I was always looking for the Devil, and what was Satan, you know, or whoever he was, he was always chasing him.  And, I could never see him, but he could see it, in his mind, you know.  So, this was the abstract, and I had to learn about that.  Why did they use the abstract, and why it is that their mythologies are so real to them, when ours — you see a tree out there, that’s it, you know, everything’s real.  We don’t have the mythologies.  The Ahnishinahbæótjibway here, which means “We the People,” are a different group of people than the Chippewa Indians, which were created in 1889 for the ... in Minnesota ...  The Aboriginal people here, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway, have a Dodem, Indodemian, which means Family, and the Chippewa Indians are created from the outside, external forces, who are, ah ... It was the scheme of things.  They have a band, and they have chiefs, and they have warriors, and all of this other ... you know, that’s a Hollywood, you know, Hollywood.  And, they get a lot of their cues from Hollywood, you know, their pow-wows have nothing to do with what the Aboriginal people that were here, you know.  This is a ... how the ... the differences, you know. ... One is selling land, the other one[s] are ... The Aboriginal cannot sell land, because this is what gives you life, you know, gives you the Grandmother Earth, and this is part of the Midé, the religion, you know.  The Midé  ... the Midé is Grandfather and Grandmother Earth, is where we ... the origin of man, how do we ...  This is how we come about.

Narrator:  Which he feels is real.  After all the time that has passed through the ages, when he reaches down into the soil, he knows that his ancestors are there.  Yet between the Church and the Government, not only was he punished as a child for speaking his own native language, but they took away his name, a name that was a vital part of his religion.  They  did everything they could to crush his aboriginal culture.  Within the language of the land, he did not exist.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  What I’m saying is the United States Government is the greatest human rights violator in the world, and the Western European man being here—says it, you know.  But they’re telling the world, you know, “democracy and the land of the free,” but that’s ... you know, that’s an illusion.

Narrator:  In 1981, when he came back, a beloved brother died, he started drinking, and it was Clara, who was to become his wife, who helped him to heal.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  We got together, and, she was calling me an Indian, and those were ... You know, that was running into conflict with me, because I’m not an Indian, and I told her, that we’re ... that there’s another group of people in here, Aboriginals.  We’re not Indians, and so ... she was telling me, that, you know, about the spirituality and the Indian  ... was the way to go, the red road and all that.  And I said, “that’s not my  ... it’s not my culture.”

Narrator:  Much of this story comes from the oral tradition, stories passed on over the generations, but a lot of the factual information comes out of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  He and Clara acquired copies proving genealogy and enrollments from 1889, as well as treaties and other records from when this Territory became the State of Minnesota.  It took them ten years to get the book done.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  It’s so deeply embedded in the people here, that the Indian is the Aboriginal—and he’s not.  He’s the scheme of things, you know, he’s part of the land theft, the treaties.

A.J. Fossen:  How many Ahnishinahbæótjibway are there?

Wub-e-ke-niew:  Well, I give an inflated figure of two hundred, here, but I hate to look.  It’s ... They really destroyed us.  They destroyed our language, they destroyed the culture, it’s gone.  The longhouses that we had, the birchbark longhouses, they burnt those ... they took up the scrolls, and they burnt up everything.  “The work of the Grand Medicine,” they called it, and “the work of the Devil,” and all that.  We didn’t even have a Devil here, but that’s a projection, what they call you.  And so, they created the Indian, and the pow-wows, and all that, it’s all a circus, a three-ring circus.  How do we go on to make something better?  If they took it, you know, why not change your language, too, you know?   You took my language, which was a beautiful language, and now your language has to change, too.  You’re here, you know.  You have to become a human being.

Narrator:  That’s what he hopes this book will do.  Somewhere, man has to be responsible for his actions.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  It’s a history and a genealogy, and it shows that ... that they were destroying the families of the Dodems, and that they were ... that they had a new ... a direction of world conquest, the western European man going around the world and Christianizing everyone, and bringing his language, the English language, in there, and destroying the other languages ... Because Chippewa, the Chippewa language is a hierarchical language, it belongs to the western European man.

Narrator:  He’s quite certain that the same thing that happened to his people, happened to other Aboriginals across the country.

Wub-e-ke-niew:  But, this is ... what I would like to convey, you know:  ... is that there is another history in here, and that there were another group of people in here, and this is why the title, it says, “exist,” because within the language, I don’t exist, but my resources do.  The land and the water, you know.  People are so used to being, ah, romanticizing the Indians, you know, and saying ... this promoting the Indian, rather than looking at the reality, you know, rather than looking at the mythology of the Indian—they’re not teaching them anything.  They’re segregating them, calling them “sovereign.”