Chapter 1 – The ‘South Boundary’

The road from the town of Redlake to the south boundary line of the diminishing reservation was paved and straightened in the 1960s. It runs parallel to the lakeshore for about a mile west from town: down the hill and across the creek and past St. Mary’s Mission, and then turns south, blazoned with distinctive blue signs identifying it as Minnesota State Highway 89.

It’s a bit more than seven miles from the junction to the boundary monument erected by the State Highway Department in the 1980s to replace the crumbling remnants of the old WPA boundary-marker known locally as “the Arches.” In addition to the stone monument, there are signs advising northbound travelers that they’ve entered Red Lake Indian Reservation. The signs have changed over the years, but for as long as I can remember there have always been at least two, and sometimes several.

Southbound travelers see the blank backside of the state’s boundary monument, often a car or two pulled off the highway on the gravel road that runs along the reservation side of the line, and perhaps a few Indian men clustered near their cars visiting or, standing with their backs to the highway, urinating ‘at the line.’ Neither the state nor the reservation tribal council has ever posted a sign demarcating re-entry into Minnesota jurisdiction.

In the aftermath of the May 29^th revolution in 1979, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) police set up a roadblock on Highway 89, stopping and searching cars coming onto the reservation. Images of the roadblock and of the town of Redlake burning played briefly on network television, and lingered in print media for a few days. News of the roadblock quickly circulated on the moccasin telegraph, and most people – including the revolutionaries and their sympathizers – circumvented the roadblock and drove the back roads onto the reservation.

Tribal council chairman Roger Jourdain and B.I.A. chief administrator Francis “Chunky” Brun were among those whose houses burned during the revolution. Roger and Chunky moved to the off-reservation town of Bemidji, about 38 miles south of Redlake. The tribal council held its meetings at the Holiday Inn in Bemidji for a while, and Roger sued the federal government for property loss and other damages incurred as a result of the revolution.[4] They also refused to pay state income taxes on the grounds that their move to Bemidji was involuntary and they were still “domiciled” on the reservation (and won on appeal).[5] Chunky and his family eventually moved back onto the reservation, but “chairman-for-life” Roger ruled the reservation from his Bemidji home on Calihan Avenue (near Bemidji State University) until he was ousted by a vigorous grassroots movement – and a newly founded newspaper – in the 1988 elections. He lived out his retirement in the modest ranch-style home on Calihan until he died thirteen years later, at the age of 89.

In the mid-1980s, perhaps spurred by a $10,000 federal grant to the tribal council for “crystalline repository” site studies[6] – preliminary surveys for long term storage of high-level radioactive waste – Roger vigorously asserted “tribal sovereignty” exempting the reservation from state environmental regulation. He had a “Passports Required” sign posted at the south boundary on Highway 89. News of the crystalline repository site study leaked into the community. Wub-e-ke-niew circulated his written commentary recommending that the names of radioactive storage proponents be memorialized on a monument,[7] Richard Rossback sent a letter to the Prime Minister of Canada advising that Red Lake was near the headwaters of the Red River of the North and radioactive waste storage would be a threat to downstream Winnipeg, and resort owners collaborated with backwoods activists and hippies who ‘came back to the land’ in the 1970s and homesteaded in the woods near the off-reservation town of Northome to organize a protest movement against the proposed nuclear waste repository.

The U.S. and Canada came to an agreement that the U.S. would not store its high-level radioactive waste upstream from Canada, and Roger retrenched and imported a few truckloads of hazardous waste from Kummer’s landfill in Bemidji. When reservation activists got word of Roger’s new project, they met Kummer’s truck at the Redlake dump ground, tore up the truck driver’s almost-new “passport,” and sent him back to Bemidji with his load of hazardous waste and the admonition that they would shoot him if he returned. The “passports required” sign disappeared one night, and was never replaced.

For decades, a person sitting along Highway 89 would see a regular procession of southbound logging trucks, despite the episodically defunct B.I.A.-run sawmill in Redby (about five miles east of Redlake). The trucks carried a steady stream of pine logs off-reservation, and when the pine had been mostly logged out, they hauled “popple” (aspen) “pulp sticks” to the railroad yard in Bemidji and the Potlatch plant just south of there. Over the years, those logging trucks have worn discernable ruts in the southbound lane of the asphalt-paved highway.

Redlake artist Johnson Loud painted an eloquent billboard of Ojibwe culture-hero and trickster Nanaboozhoo beating up iconic ecoterrorist Paul Bunyan with a walleye pike. The billboard graced the west side of the boundary on Highway 89 until vandals toppled it with chainsaws. Someone propped the billboard back up; the next time the vandals cut it down they burned it.

In preparation for their Fourth of July Pow-wow in 1989, the tribal council put up a sign advising people driving onto the reservation of the “1889 – Centennial – 1989. Welcome to Red Lake Indian Reservation, Homeland of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa where sovereignty traditions and heritage are preserved.”[8] The Minnesota Chippewa Commission’s “negotiations” at Red Lake during July 1889 involved the coerced “cession” of about three million acres of land at Red Lake, and were the prelude to the formation of the Red Lake General Council by translator-turned-chief Peter Graves, under the control of the U.S. government. When Wub-e-ke-niew pointed out that the tribal council’s centennial celebration was an overt admission of their Johnny-come-lately postcolonial status, the “centennial” sign was taken down.

Wub-e-ke-niew had been writing regularly about indigenous Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway government of his people’s Dodems (totemic patrilineages). Johnson Loud put together a “flag” including seven[9] of the Dodems – including Wub-e-ke-niew’s Bear. The tribal council replaced the Plains “war-bonnet” on reservation license plates and their “Red Lake – Home of the famous Walleye” slogan on their letterhead with the design from Johnson’s flag, periodically includes it on a boundary sign, and when high-stakes gambling came to Indian country they christened their gambling enterprises the “Seven Clans Casinos.”

Wub-e-ke-niew pointed out that since Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems are patrilineal, the Métis people on the tribal council don’t have any Dodems. The tribal council responded by making seven different license plates, each featuring one of the totemic animals,[10] and advising people to “pick their clan” when they got their license plates.

There have been a few houses overlooking Highway 89 near ‘the line,’ ever since the highway was built. The reservation scuttlebutt used to be that some of the people living in certain of those houses would spend their days sitting by their window, watching the traffic and telephoning ‘the Bureau’ (the B.I.A.) with the news of people’s movements – at that time at Red Lake a person’s car was as individually recognizable as one’s face.

Among the changes at Red Lake since 1998 is a new “Operation Walking Shield”[11] housing development just north of the line on both sides of the highway. U.S. Army reservists moved more than sixty surplus houses from Grand Forks Air Force Base to Red Lake, and in conjunction with military training exercises, installed them along the gravel road (now paved through the Walking Shield ‘village’) that runs parallel to the south boundary line, on both sides of the highway. Indian housing.

In the late afternoon on school days, parents and grandparents who chose to bus their kids to school in Bemidji rather than enroll them in the bottom-ranked Red Lake schools used to park along the highway and on the gravel road, visiting while they waited for the school bus to bring the students as far as the reservation line.

Times have changed. I don’t know where they park now.

Chapter 2 – May 26, 1998

When winter storms sweep across the northland and the roads are slick with black ice or obscured by blowing snow, it can take a long time to drive the eight miles from Redlake to the south boundary on Highway 89, especially in an old vehicle with worn ball joints and consequently somewhat capricious steering.

On a clear day when the roads are dry, it takes less than fifteen minutes.

I don’t remember whether or not the sun was shining on May 26, 1998. The roads were dry, I think, and the buds of the deciduous trees must have been opening into a delicate haze of spring green sweeping through the woods, because that’s how it always was in late May at Red Lake. North of the continental divide, just a few miles downstream from the headwaters of the Hudson’s Bay watershed, Spring came late and tender garden annuals planted before the second week of June risked frostbite.

It was “jacket weather” that morning, and I wore the black leather motorcycle jacket that Wub-e-ke-niew had bought for me at a garage sale the previous Summer.

I’d worn that jacket that fall … on October 17^th, when I helped to dig Wub-e-ke-niew’s grave and buried him under a certain old oak tree – where he’d told me he wanted to be buried, “the old way,” wrapped in a blanket, with his head to the North and his feet to the South. I wore it as I “kept fire” for four days and nights after we buried him, they say “to light the way to the next world,” mostly staying awake through those four days and nights, occasionally napping on the frosty ground next to the fire, wrapped in just in a thin blanket so that when the fire got low the cold would wake me in time to add more wood and keep the fire burning.

I was wearing that jacket on the evening of October 22^nd, when they threw me out of the house Wub-e-ke-niew and I had built together thirteen and a half years earlier. They threw me out with the clothes on my back, and since I’d been wearing that jacket I still had it.

A bit more than six months later, about mid-day on May 26^th, I stood in the parking lot outside the Red Lake law enforcement center. Since then, a new multi-million dollar law enforcement center and jail has been built at Red Lake, although there are a number of problems, including inadequate plumbing, with the over-budget project and the building isn’t in use.[12] At that time, in the Spring of 1998, the law enforcement center-jail-courthouse was on the south side of the road toward the east end of town, a white-painted building surrounded by chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, across the road from the old B.I.A. Agency. That building had been in use as a law enforcement center since shortly after the 1979 revolution, when the revolutionaries let all the prisoners out of jail, then burned the old law enforcement center and all of the police cars parked there.

Almost exactly nineteen years after the revolution, I stood in the parking lot wearing the black leather jacket Wub-e-ke-niew had given me. I was talking – more-or-less chatting – with the policeman who had escorted me out of the courtroom where the tribal court was proceeding with something they called an “Indian probate.” The only people who’d been in the courtroom when they took me out were Bruce Graves as associate judge, Negoni Neadeau as clerk of courts, Valerie Blake as petitioner, and my friend Mary Harding, who’d come to court with me as a witness.

The policeman asked me where my car was, and I said that I’d left my car parked off the reservation and rode to Redlake with my friend Mary. He asked me about my property. “I have a list,” I said, gesturing with the sheaf of papers in my hand but not really showing them to him nor giving them to him, “but there are jurisdictional problems.” I was telling him that, in my understanding, the property was not under the jurisdiction of the Red Lake tribal courts – or the Red Lake police. He understood what I was saying, and changed the subject.

We talked about Wub-e-ke-niew. “He’s my relative,” the policeman said, adding that his mother was a Downwind (Wub-e-ke-niew’s mother was related to the Downwinds).

The policeman and I conversed a little while longer, and then Mary walked out of the building. “They said it was a ‘closed hearing,’ and asked me to leave,” she told me.

I shrugged and said that we might as well go. We walked toward Mary’s pickup truck, a brown Chevy Ranger, unlocked it, got in, started the engine. The policeman walked over to his patrol car. Mary drove out of the parking lot and onto the highway, heading west toward the junction with Highway 89. The police car followed us, staying just slightly closer behind us than a courteous rural following distance.

Mary drove through the town of Redlake, past St. Mary’s Mission, and turned south on Highway 89. The speed limit’s 55 miles an hour along that stretch of rural highway, and I think she was driving just slightly slower than that. Even though the sun might have been shining, in my memory that day seems unremittingly overcast and gray. Along with the property list, I held in my hands the “order of removal” that the policeman had handed me just before he escorted me out of the tribal court proceedings.

Lifetime exile, unless revoked by the tribal council, that piece of paper proclaimed. By order of the tribal council chairman, Bobby Whitefeather.[13]

Mary drove south on Highway 89, staying just below the speed limit: seven miles, at about 54 miles an hour, to the south boundary. What must have been about eight minutes seemed frozen-time through leaden gray space, the patrol car staying that same precise distance behind us, the moments of each second and each bit of highway congealed in nascent shock. I did not look with long lingering glances at each familiar landmark, savoring every last glimpse of that beloved place, seeing intensely in the light of future memories. I sat, instead, in the passenger side of Mary’s pickup truck, tense, numb, stunned, the reality of my exile not yet fully apprehended.

Finally, after some incalculable time, we crossed ‘the line.’ The patrol car followed us until we were on the “state” side of the line, then spun around in a U-turn on the reservation side of the boundary, and went back north.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have just walked out of the courtroom, when they asked me to leave,” Mary said to me. I told her I thought what she did was fine, that resistance – even fine-fettle passive resistance – wouldn’t have made any difference, that they would have just delayed the proceedings until she was removed from the courtroom.

Mary was a cherished best-friend, and my anguish on that interminable forty-five mile trip to her place along a curve of the Mississippi River southeast of Bemidji was as much for her as for myself. Having a friend share the one’s experience of being exiled is a terrible thing to do to the friend.

The possibility of exile hadn’t even crossed my mind as I prepared to make what lawyers describe as a “special appearance” at the Red Lake tribal court that morning. My intention had been to object to the tribal court – technically, a “Court of Indian Offenses” – asserting probate jurisdiction over my deceased husband’s estate, since he had renounced his tribal membership[14] and was thus legally a non-Indian and not subject to Indian court jurisdiction.

The argument I was prepared to make, the jurisdictional objections in support of which I had filed thousands of pages of documentation along with my “notice of special appearance,” was the argument that Wub-e-ke-niew had been consistently making during the seven years prior to his death. I believed him to be legally correct, and was also well aware of the tribal council’s opposition to his stance.

At Red Lake, the tribal court was widely perceived as a “kangaroo court,” a politicized un-court that often did not make even a bare pretense of fairness. I went to the courtroom intending to make a legally solid but likely-to-be-ignored objection to the tribal court’s assertion of jurisdiction, a principled stand on behalf of my deceased husband. I was prepared to be arrested, had made arrangements for bail if necessary, and had considered and accepted the possibility of spending several weeks in the Red Lake jail while writs of habeas corpus wended their way through the federal courts.

Exile hadn’t occurred to me

Chapter 3 – “Race”

Wub-e-ke-niew met the world with, as he put it, an “Aboriginal Indigenous perspective”: what he focused on in perceiving, as well as the conceptual, linguistic, and cultural frameworks within which he understood his perceptions, were Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. A brilliant man whose ancestors had resisted colonial pressures for centuries, Wub-e-ke-niew stood clearly and honestly with his understandings of the world and of himself as an “unconquered” human being.

After decades of working to “make positive change within the system,”[15] including through the Democratic Party, the American Indian Movement, and in tribal politics, Wub-e-ke-niew critically re-assessed the structures within which he was working, then rejected what came to understand as a colonially-imposed and ‘artificial’ identity as an “Indian”:

I struggled for years with the Indian identity. When I walked away from the artificial persona of Indian and reclaimed my real identity as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, it was a rebirth and homecoming. I had always known that there was something wrong with the Indian identity, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I did the research and understood what had been done, I formally notified the Honorable Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court that I am not an Indian, and sent Justice Marshall my Federal Indian identification papers. An enormous weight lifted.[16]

Wub-e-ke-niew’s intention to divest himself of the encumbrances of colonially imposed identity was clear. As he wrote to the Secretary of the Interior,

This is to inform you that I want my name removed from the basic membership, identification and enrollment lists of your “Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians.” I will no longer be identified by your racist term of “Indian.” I am not an “Indian,” I am not a “Chippewa,” and I am not a “Native American.” These words are all European terms using Crooked English. I am Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. … If I continue to allow myself to be falsely identified as “Indian” I am guilty of complacency and conspiracy; I want no part whatsoever of the fraudulent Indians that the United States Government is still using to destroy the legitimate Aboriginal Indigenous people of these two Continents.[17]

He explained that he had sent his “Indian Identity Card” by certified mail to the U.S. Supreme Court – that he was “turning it in as a false document issued with felonious and genocidal intent by the United States Government in collusion with their colonial Indian Reorganization Act ‘Tribal Councils.’”[18]

For the last seven years of his life, Wub-e-ke-niew repeatedly[19] included the announcement, “I am not an Indian,” in his newspaper columns and other writing, and when he introduced himself, explained that he was not an Indian in the same breath as his name.

But, can a man really quit being an “Indian”?

“Race” and internalization of colonial identity

For those whose worldview derives from the western European colonizers, the notion of “race” often seems a patently obvious aspect of natural order. Whether couched in the “red and yellow, black and white” terms of the children’s Sunday-school rhyme[20] — a schema incorporated into contemporary Indian religion and presented as human beings representing the “sacred four directions” — or more “scientifically” chronicled with terminology like “Caucasian” and “Amerind,” the apparent “fact” of race is commonsensical and, heavily laden with socially constructed meanings, incorporated into most people’s understanding of self.

But, the apparent naturalness of race is in reality culturally constructed, a “mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation.”[21] Is not supported by biological reality,[22] even though after hundreds of years of imposed reification by the dominating society, socially-constructed notions of “race” are both pervasive and potent.

“Indian-ness” is recursively embedded in western concepts of “race,” a perverse sort of self-definition rooted in constructs engineered by the colonizing “other.”

Like many such apparently foundational terms, the meanings of “being Indian” are ambiguous and contradictory.

What / who is an “Indian”? Ongoing redefinition of this socially-constructed identity is continually ‘negotiated’ in several milieux, although to a great extent the parameters, terms, and media have been historically manipulated and have ultimately remained under the control of the colonizers.

Uncolonized constructs of self and identity are, more than five hundred years post-colonization, relatively inaccessible. The reality of Aboriginal Indigenous self in contexts untouched by the colonizers is perhaps-imaginable, but there is no place on this planet where human understandings of being – individually and as community – can be wholly isolated from knowledge of the colonizing “other.”

For “American Indian” communities, present identity rests in intense colonial legacy, external group definition by European ‘explorers’ beginning with Columbus’s misnaming of “Indians,” but also including legal and other external definitions of aboriginal indigenous groups by scholars and government, including in “Indian treaties” and subsequent redefinitions accompanying forcible relocation onto reservations. Indians’ historical experience includes at least fifty years (1885 – 1935) of the United States Government’s intense efforts at destruction of indigenous community, language, religion, epistemology, and personal identity.

For most U.S. “Indians,” such efforts included three generations of the federal government’s genocidal[23] separation of children from family and community, compulsory education in federal and church boarding schools, forcible transformation of physical relationship to the land, including settlement patterns, land tenure and subsistence, Christianization, supplanting indigenous forms of government with federally-established chieftainships and councils, and even federally-imposed name changes. Subsequent understandings of Indian-ness are, inevitably and for both ‘Indians’ and non-Indians, saturated with the pervasive realities of colonizer and colonized, the inescapable contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ as well as with the legacy of deliberate cultural and societal transformations imposed by the colonizer.

Personal and community understandings of identity are, for “Indians,” confounded by the extensive and deeply entrenched system of federal bureaucracy and federally subsidized Indian programs and potentially lucrative gambling monopolies for federally recognized “Indian tribes.” These, combined with “Indian preference” in hiring, make it potentially lucrative for middle-class Métis to remain as a part of the federally-sanctioned Indian “establishment.”

Wub-e-ke-niew asked, “The question is, ‘How many Chippewa Indians would there be if the U.S. Government didn’t pay them to be Indians, subsidizing their housing, education, and sometimes giving them jobs?’”[24] Potential motivations for extensive federal subsidy of “Indians” are interesting, although beyond the scope of this paper.

Contemporary Indian identity is also strongly affected by the romanticization of some aspects of Indian-ness and consequent “wanna-be’s” who have enthusiastically embraced (the colonizers’ stereotypical) mystique of Indians and wanna-be an Indian, as well as by the historical detritus from centuries of colonizing portrayals of indigenous people.

“Race” and legal status: American apartheid?

For federally-recognized Indian people whose identity – and in many instances income – depends on politically certified tribal enrollment and Indian “blood quantum,” government-sanctioned pedigrees, and in some instances emerging technologies of DNA analysis underwriting certain claims to “Indian-ness,” notions of biological “race” might easily seem to be a bedrock aspect of reality, and in fact “racializing” of tribal identities is at the threshold of becoming a very “hot” issue for Indian people.[25]

“Race” as understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists was instrumental in forming federal “Indian” policy. For example, most Indian people in Minnesota are aware of the arrogant use of “white blood” as a defining characteristic of legal competence in the Clapp amendment.[26] This legislation underlay U.S. Courts’ presumption of white racial supremacy and acceptance of “the competency of the white man and the incompetency of the Indians” and thus white judges’ “reasonable” assumption “in making a classification based on blood to include in the competent class all who have more than one-half white blood and in the incompetent class all who have more than one-half Indian blood.”[27]

The purported potency of “white blood” in engendering “competent” people was stretched even further in 1914, in United States v. First National Bank of Detroit, Minnesota.[28] In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any “Chippewa Indian having an identifiable admixture of white blood, however small, is a ‘mixed-blood’ Indian within the meaning of the Clapp amendment,” and thus “legally competent.”

At issue in the lawsuits leading to U.S. v. First National Bank of Detroit [Lakes] was determination of which - and how many - Indians were “competent to handle their own affairs” by selling their allotments to the land speculators and swindlers who flocked to the reservations. By “removing restrictions imposed by the [allotment] act of February 8, 1887, upon alienation of Chippewa allotments as to mixed bloods apply to mixed bloods of all degrees and not only to those of half or more than half white blood,” the Supreme Court facilitated the wholesale alienation of the land that had been allotted to individual Indians, particularly on two of Minnesota’s largest reservations: by 1985 only 8% of White Earth Reservation and 4% of Leech Lake reservation remained in Indian ownership.[29]

Apartheid based on “race,” “racialized” identity, and the importance of “degree of Indian blood” in determining a person’s legal status before the Supreme Court’s decision in 1914 (and the similar importance of a person’s genealogy afterward) impelled some vigorous research efforts, particularly at White Earth. Albert E. Jenks, anthropologist (and somewhat discomfiting founder of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota) was among those measuring peoples’ noses and skulls, indexing their skin pigmentation, and examining their teeth as a means of “scientifically” determining who had how much “Indian blood”[30] – and who was thus “legally competent” to sell ‘their’ allotted land to the speculators who came to the reservations as “trust” protections began to expire. Even less credible measurements of purported “race” included direct examination of people’s blood, according to White Earth oral history. Ojibwe author and historian Ignatia Broker told this writer about anthropologists coming to the boarding schools and “testing” Indian children’s blood on microscope slides to determine official “blood quantum.” According to those tests, “children who were “full brother and sister had different blood quantums,” Ignatia added in disdain.

Jenks and his cohorts’ research was grounded in the theories of eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientists who set out to ‘scientifically’ catalogue and classify the world that their political leaders had claimed. Plants as well as people, rocks, and animals were measured, named, and, amid sometimes-vigorous academic dispute about the whichness of what, categorized into “taxonomies.”

“Race” and eugenics

While ‘natural scientists’ were busy quantifying and cataloguing the world, the politicians were expounding rhetoric to justify slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism. Among these was “manifest destiny.” United States Senator Albert Beveridge spoke for the ‘white’ mainstream when he spoke to Congress on January 9, 1900:

We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work ... with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world ... this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible for man.[31]

Perhaps it is not surprising that such demagoguery was combined with notions of “survival of the fittest” into the ethically dubious ‘science’ of eugenics. While the U.S. Supreme Court was pondering legal fictions like the astonishing potency of a single “drop of white blood” to engender “legal competence” and Albert Jenks was busy measuring and cataloguing Chippewa Indians on northern Minnesota reservations, certain “intellectuals” were penning scholarly works like Eugenics, a little book on a great subject (1912)[32] and meeting at the National Conference on Race Betterment.

German National Socialists’ embracing precepts of eugenics and their fairly systematic application of “Rassenbiologie und Rassenhygiene” [racial biology and racial hygiene] in the 1930s and 1940s ended up discrediting eugenics as a “science,” even though it had adherents on both sides of the Atlantic. Eugenics advocate Charles Fremont Dight, for example, published Call for a New Social Order in Minneapolis in 1936, and the London Eugenics Society was still holding symposia on subjects like “Biological aspects of social problems” in 1965.[33]

The American Anthropological Association and “Race”

The notion of “race” is still a forceful one, and its development in conjunction with the past five hundred years of colonialism has engendered a socially constructed reality deeply woven into American (and European) culture, language, and thought. Further, the resurgence of “white supremacist” ideologies, combined with burgeoning technical data from the Human Genome Project and other research, has set the stage for new permutations of the old eugenics.

In the American Anthropological Association’s May 17, 1998 “Statement on ‘Race,’” the intellectual heirs of the nineteenth century anthropologists who laid the foundations for “scientific” classification and study of “race” rejected the scientific validity of “race,” writing:

“Race” is “a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into ‘racial’ categories,” wrote the American Anthropological Association. “Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.”[34]

And yet, “race” remains deeply embedded in U.S. policy and law, particularly for “Indians.”

“Race” and legal jurisdiction

Apartheid is the intersection of “race” as a socially constructed category of hereditary hierarchy, and enforcement of societal values through forcible sanctions that include imprisonment and even death. The Oxford English Dictionary defines apartheid:

Name given in South Africa to the segregation of the inhabitants of European descent from the non-European (Coloured or mixed, Bantu, Indian, etc.); applied also to any similar movement elsewhere; also, to other forms of racial separation (social, educational, etc.).

Beyond questions as to the realities underlying concepts of “race” and the nuanced legalisms distinguishing “Indian” as a post-colonial political category – resting on membership in federally recognized “tribes” rather than “race” – it is clear that the United States “Indian” system, as a federally-established and federally-funded system asserting jurisdiction over “Indians,” ‘separate’ and ‘not equal,’ is a de facto form of apartheid.

Tallying the listings posted online by the National Tribal Justice Resource Center,[35] there were about 488 Indian tribal courts and Courts of Indian Offenses on U.S. Indian reservations and in ‘native villages’ and ‘Indian communities’[36] in the spring of 2004.

There are two kinds of “Indian Courts.” Indian “tribal courts” are funded by the U.S. Congress under the premise that their authority derives from “Indian sovereignty” predating the U.S. Constitution. Courts of Indian Offenses are federal instrumentalities operated by the Department of the Interior pursuant to the federal regulations in 25 CFR § 11. Such courts are not authorized by the U.S. Constitution (and could thus be construed as unconstitutional under the ninth and tenth amendments), [37] but their existence was upheld by federal courts in U.S. v. Clapox, 35 Fed 573, 577 (1888), on grounds including that:

the government of the United States is endeavoring to improve and elevate the condition of these dependent tribes to whom it sustains the relation of guardian. In fact, the reservation itself is in the nature of a school, and the Indians are gathered there, under the charge of an agent, for the purpose of acquiring the habits, ideas, and aspirations which distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized man.

The criminal, and to some extent civil jurisdiction of both Indian tribal courts and Courts of Indian Offenses is generally limited to “Indians,” and the conflation of purported biological category – “race” – and legal definition – “duly enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe” [38] – into popular understandings of the meaning of the word, “Indian,” has engendered a peculiar sort of apartheid in “Indian country.” Ambiguous and potentially “racial” delineation of “Indian tribal” jurisdiction has become imbued with increasingly significant import as an aspect of “tribal sovereignty” in Indian tribal governments’ push for increased political power, including expanded civil and criminal jurisdiction.

United States v. Billy Jo Lara, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 19, 2004, is the most recent of a series of Supreme Court cases addressing the parameters of tribal court jurisdiction.[39]

Billy Jo Lara, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, was married to a Spirit Lake (North Dakota) tribal member and resided there until he was banished. After a drunken altercation on June 13, 2001,[40] Lara pled guilty in the Spirit Lake tribal court to “violence to a policeman” for striking the B.I.A. policeman arresting him when he returned home after having been banished (presumably by the tribal chairman or tribal council) from the Spirit Lake reservation. Lara served the tribal court’s sentence of 90 days in jail. The federal government subsequently prosecuted Lara for “assaulting a federal officer” – i.e., for the same act of striking the B.I.A. policeman that Lara had already been sentenced for in tribal court, and for which he had already spent 90 days in jail.

Lara challenged federal prosecution several grounds, including that the federal government’s filing charges against him after he had already served the tribal court’s sentence for the same crime violated the Double Jeopardy Clause of the 5^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,[41] and “that Congress’ use of the words ‘all Indians,’ in the statutory phrase[42] ‘inherent power . . . to exercise criminal jurisdiction over all Indians,’ violates the Equal Protection Clause” of the 14^th Amendment.[43]

Reasoning that the Spirit Lake tribal court was exercising its “inherent power” to “prosecute non-member Indians,” and that its authority to do so rests on Congress’ “relax[ing] the restrictions imposed by the political branches on the tribes’ inherent prosecutorial authority” rather than delegating federal power, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Lara’s prosecution for the same crime twice, holding that “the Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar successive prosecutions brought by separate sovereigns.”

The Supreme Court also reviewed Lara’s objections to the Spirit Lake tribal court’s apparently apartheid criminal jurisdiction, i.e. only over “Indians.” Lara’s attorneys argued that, “insofar as the words include nonmember Indians within the statute’s scope (while excluding all non-Indians) the statute is race-based and without justification.”

A part of what was at issue in the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Lara case was the “Duro fix” amendment[44] to the Indian Civil Rights Act (I.C.R.A.),[45] in which Congress extended criminal jurisdiction by tribal courts to include “all Indians” – by amending the I.C.R.A.’s definition of “powers of self government” to include Congressional recognition of “the inherent power of Indian tribes” to “exercise criminal jurisdiction over all Indians.”[46] That amendment was enacted after the Supreme Court held in Duro v. Reina[47] that, “An Indian tribe may not assert criminal jurisdiction over a nonmember Indian.”[48]

Among the issues considered as the Duro case wended its way through the appellate courts was the question of whether, as the Federal District Court held, “assertion of jurisdiction by the Tribe over a nonmember Indian would constitute discrimination based on race in violation of the equal protection guarantees of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, since, in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191, non-Indians are exempt from tribal courts’ criminal jurisdiction,” or, as the Federal Court of Appeals held in its review of the case:

the distinction drawn between a Tribe’s members and nonmembers throughout United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313 - which, in upholding tribal criminal jurisdiction over tribe members, stated that tribes do not possess criminal jurisdiction over “nonmembers” - was “indiscriminate” and should be given little weight. Finding the historical record “equivocal,” the court held that the applicable federal criminal statutes supported the view that the tribes retain jurisdiction over minor crimes committed by Indians against other Indians without regard to tribal membership. It also rejected Duro’s equal protection claim, finding that his significant contacts with the prosecuting Tribe - such as residing with a Tribe member on the reservation and working for the Tribe’s construction company - justified the exercise of the Tribe’s jurisdiction. Finally, it found that the failure to recognize tribal jurisdiction over Duro would create a jurisdictional void, since the relevant federal criminal statute would not apply to this charge, and since the State had made no attempt, and might lack the authority, to prosecute him.[49]

The Supreme Court had not addressed the issue of “racial” jurisdiction squarely in the Duro case, instead finding that tribal courts’ jurisdiction was limited by “constitutional limits even on the ability of Congress to subject citizens to criminal proceedings before a tribunal, such as a tribal court, that does not provide constitutional protections as a matter of right,” and that

retained jurisdiction over [tribal] members is accepted by the Court’s precedents and justified by the voluntary character of tribal membership and the concomitant right of participation in a tribal government. Duro’s enrollment in one Tribe says little about his consent to the exercise of authority over him by another Tribe[50]

The “voluntary” nature of tribal enrollment – and thus of legal definitions of Indian-ness [i.e., subject to ‘Indian courts’ jurisdiction] was crucial to the U.S. Supreme Court’s determination that ‘Indian courts’ are legal within the parameters of the U.S. constitution and the civil rights of all U.S. citizens (including ‘Indians’).

Wub-e-ke-niew’s 1990 renunciation of his tribal enrollment was in his deliberate awareness of the “voluntary” nature of tribal membership, distinguished by the U.S. Supreme Court in its Duro decision. Despite this, in the legal nightmare after Wub-e-ke-niew’s death, Minnesota courts upheld the tribal courts’ assertion of “Indian” jurisdiction based on alleged “race” as recorded on a contested Minnesota death certificate – as well as upholding State courts’ acceptance of determinations made in tribal court proceedings wholly lacking in any semblance of due process.

The U.S. Supreme court declined the case on a technicality.

As of this writing (May 1, 2004), the “apartheid” issue has not been fully confronted by the federal courts. In Lara, the Supreme Court sidestepped the constitutional protections sought by Billy Jo Lara, found that a Congress could “constitutionally” transfer judicial power to Indian tribal governments by “removing restrictions on the tribes’ inherent authority,” and then declined to consider Lara’s claims that his constitutional rights had been violated on the grounds that they were “simply beside the point.”[51]

Chapter 4 - Apartheid at Red Lake

“Indian Tribal Courts” and “Courts of Indian Offenses” are both “forums” – to use the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ terminology – in which fines, jail time, and other ‘legal sanctions’ can be brought against “Indians” (and others who more-or-less voluntarily submit to the ‘Indian Courts’ jurisdiction). Courts of Indian Offenses were established by the B.I.A. in the 1880s, and are technically ‘educational institutions’[52] rather than ‘courts of law,’ since according to the U.S. Constitution the Department of the Interior (Executive Branch) cannot establish courts of law. Title 25 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter I, Part 11,[53] lists Courts of Indian Offenses – the “Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians (Minnesota)” is the first on the list[54] — and details the federal regulations by which those ‘Indian courts’ are presumably bound.

The legitimacy of Indian tribal courts as “forums” is presumed under federal law to rest on the putative ‘sovereignty’ of federally-recognized tribal governments.[55] However, under the federal regulations governing ‘law and order’ on Indian reservations,[56] in order to establish an Indian ‘tribal court,’ the federally-recognized tribal government must establish “that it was organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (I.R.A.), 25 U.S.C. §§ 461-479, and that it has adopted its own law and order code in accordance with its constitution and bylaws.”[57] Under the boilerplate Indian Reorganization Act constitutions implemented by the B.I.A. on most U.S. Indian reservations, the ‘sovereignty’ is clearly held by the United States Government, specifically the “Secretary of the Interior or his duly authorized representative.”[58] Reservation tribal governments are locked into the I.R.A. structure with clauses like that in the “Corporate Charter of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe,” which provides that “This Charter shall not be revoked or surrendered except by Act of Congress.”[59]

Until November 1987, the “tribal court” at Red Lake was unambiguously a “Court of Indian Offenses” – and was fairly widely perceived as a beset with serious problems in its administration of injustice to the Indian people subject to Indian court jurisdiction.

At that time — more than sixty years after Congress granted “citizenship” to Indians in 1924 — both the B.I.A. and ‘tribal government’ persistently violated Indians’ civil rights on reservations including Red Lake. In its May 1990 confidential draft report, Enforcement of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968,[60] the United States Commission on Civil Rights chronicled some of the public concerns about the Red Lake Indian Court during the preceding eighteen years:

… to understand more clearly the Department of Interior’s role with respect to the rights of reservation residents vis-à-vis tribal governments, the [Civil Rights] Commission continued to draw upon the Bureau [of Indian Affairs’] recent handling of matters involving the Red Lake Tribe [i.e., Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians].[61]

1972: A law review article appeared criticizing the tribal courts at Red Lake[62]

1977: The Department of Justice prepared to sue the Red Lake Tribe regarding the tribal law requiring attorneys to be members of the tribe. The suit was dropped when the Martinez decision came down.[63], [64]

1979: The council removed the tribal treasurer. ... This sparked an uprising which resulted in the burning of Red Lake Chairman Roger Jourdain’s house along with other property. [The U.S. Commission in Civil Rights narrator] believe[s] about 13 buildings were burned and, unfortunately, two deaths occurred.[65]

1980: The Red Lake Council passed a resolution barring the news media from the reservation.[66]

1982: Another resolution barring the news media was passed.[67] Also in 1982, a B.I.A. consultant reported, “The Red Lake court has never had a jury trial and juries were not being provided, even when requested by parties.”[68] Around that time, an Interior Department attorney advised B.I.A. officials that the court’s practice of not providing a jury trial violated rights secured by the Indian Civil Rights Act.[69]

1985: Senator Boschwitz and Representative Stangeland requested the U.S. Comptroller General to investigate the Red Lake system, which they never did, as [the U.S. Civil Commission on Civil Rights narrator] understand[s] it.[70]

May 1985: Two prisoners were released by a Federal district judge on the grounds that they had been denied counsel, bail, and the right to a trial by jury.[71]

August 1985: The Red Lake Council began requiring that attorneys be members of the Red Lake Tribe, understand Chippewa, and be a resident of the reservation.[72] In 1985 also, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune brought a Freedom of Information action against the Department of the Interior seeking the Red Lake court records.[73]

August 1985: The court records were seized by the Red Lake Tribe [i.e., tribal council]. Suit had been brought by the U.S. Government to recover those records on the grounds that the records are “Agency records” of the B.I.A.. The U.S. District Court for Minnesota and the Eight Circuit have ruled in favor of the U.S. Government. The tribe has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari review.[74]

September 1985: Suit was filed in the federal district court against the Department of the Interior on behalf of three Indians seeking termination of Federal funds to the Red Lake court until court reforms are achieved. The suit was dismissed on the grounds that the federal court does not have the authority under the Indian Civil Rights Act in light of the Martinez decision.[75]

November 1985: The B.I.A. issued a directive requiring the court to allow retained counsel into court.[76]

November 1987: The Red Lake CFR court was changed from a CFR court to a tribal court under a contract with the Bureau for judicial services.[77]

Whether or not the legal status of the Red Lake “CFR Court” – also known as the Red Lake “Court of Indian Offenses” – actually changed to a “tribal court” is questionable: in 2002 the Bureau of Indian Affairs was still funding the Red Lake court as a part of the federal bureaucracy (i.e. as a “Court of Indian Offenses”), and in May 2004, Red Lake reservation was still listed in the Code of Federal Regulations (25 CFR § 11.11) as having a Court of Indian Offenses, rather than a ‘tribal court.’

The distinction between a “tribal court” and a “Court of Indian Offenses” is relevant to the longstanding abuses at the Red Lake Indian court, specifically including that the federal government is potentially liable for the actions of a “Court of Indian Offenses” (CFR Court), while the tribal council – generally immune from being sued in federal court – would likely hold (unenforceable) legal responsibility for abuses by a “tribal court.”

The federal authority for Indian tribal councils’ establishment of “tribal courts” is apparently derived from the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit delineated the situation in 1987,[78] in a case deriving from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune’s Freedom of Information Act requests for Red Lake court records:

The United States argues that the tribal court is a “C.F.R. court” organized under the B.I.A. and governed by 25 C.F.R. Pt. 11. Part 11 establishes “Courts of Indian Offenses” on designated reservations for the purpose of providing “adequate machinery of law enforcement for those Indian tribes in which traditional agencies for the enforcement of tribal law and custom have broken down for which no adequate substitute has been provided under Federal or State law.” 25 C.F.R. § 11.1(b). The Red Lake Reservation is among those reservations specifically designated in the regulation. Id. § 11.1(a)(6).

… Designated tribal courts are presumptively C.F.R. courts. A C.F.R. court may, however, exempt itself from B.I.A. regulation and be reclassified as an independent tribal court if the tribe establishes that it was organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (I.R.A.), 25 U.S.C. §§ 461-479, and that it has adopted its own law and order code in accordance with its constitution and bylaws. 25 C.F.R. § 11.1(d).

… Red Lake did not offer evidence establishing the necessary elements for exemption under § 11.1(d) at the summary judgment stage. Red Lake merely stated then, as it does now, that it does not know whether the tribe is organized under the I.R.A. or whether the tribe has adopted a law and order code that effectively supplants agency regulation.

Because it was not clear that the tribal government of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians was organized under the Indian Reorganization Act, the federal Eighth Circuit court ruled, the Red Lake tribal court records were federal records subject to federal law, including the Star and Tribune’s Freedom of Information Act request. Red Lake officials burned the “tribal archives,” where most of the court records since mid-1979 were reportedly stored, rather than surrendering them to the federal government (and the investigative reporters writing for the Minneapolis newspaper). The court records prior to May 1979 were presumably destroyed during the revolution, when the law enforcement center was burned.

The I.R.A. and tribal courts

Through federal regulation and administration of agency policy – including widespread adoption of “boilerplate” Indian Reorganization Act “tribal constitutions” and ensuing reconstitution of “tribal government” – and “tribal membership” – in accordance with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s interpretations of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and subsequent legislation, the federal government has cut a wide swath across indigenous sovereignty. In conjunction with I.R.A. tribal governments’ administration of federal programs under federal contracts pursuant to the Indian Self-Determination Act (PL 93-638), and federal courts’ interpretations of “tribal sovereignty,” the federal government has also effectively insulated itself from liability for administration of federal Indian policy through the “tribal councils” it established.

The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, codified as Title 25, Section 476 of the U.S. Code, provides for “the Organization of Indian tribes; constitution and by-laws and amendment thereof.” The I.R.A. details the processes by which an “Indian tribe” may be “organized” under U.S. Law, and requires that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior approve the constitutions of tribes organized under the I.R.A. It also mandates that such Indian tribal constitutions not be contrary to “applicable laws.”

The I.R.A. delineates the powers of an “Indian tribe or tribal council” ‘federally-recognized’ by the U.S. government: in addition to all powers

vested in any Indian tribe or tribal council by existing law, the constitution adopted by said tribe shall also vest in such tribe or its tribal council the following rights and powers: To employ legal counsel; to prevent the sale, disposition, lease, or encumbrance of tribal lands, interests in lands, or other tribal assets without the consent of the tribe; and to negotiate with the Federal, State, and local governments.

The wording of the I.R.A. does not specifically legitimate Courts of Indian offenses, nor does it enumerate the establishment of Indian tribal courts as among the powers of an “Indian tribe or tribal council.”

Standardized ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ I.R.A. tribal constitutions written by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were adopted on most Indian reservations, in some instances after extensive ‘community organization’ and other pressure by the B.I.A. In We Have The Right To Exist,[79] Wub-e-ke-niew drew heavily on Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway oral history as well as federal records to chronicle the B.I.A.’s quarter century of efforts to ‘reorganize’ the general council at Red Lake under the I.R.A. – and along with many other indigenous people, vigorously rejected the legitimacy of “tribal” governments that he understood to be “puppets” of the U.S. government:

One story, which circulated at Red Lake, is that “a ‘yes’ vote meant a ‘no’ vote.” According to this story, the B.I.A. said, “we will do it in a democratic way, and let the people [sic] decide.” The people voted “no,” rejecting the Indian Reorganization Act. The bill went back to the United States Congress, which attached a rider saying that “a ‘no’ vote meant a vote for the I.R.A.” Then, the I.R.A. went back to the Reservation, and it “passed” unanimously, that is, everybody voted “no.” This story is a metaphor for the B.I.A.’s use of proxy votes under trusteeship.[80]

The strength of Red Lake opposition to the I.R.A. is hinted at in a letter from the Assistant Secretary to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in August 1958, shortly before the elections adopting the “revised” constitution of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa:

In the current effort, the Red Lake people again voiced their opposition to organization under the Indian Reorganization Act. An attempt, therefore, was made to offer them a proposed form of constitution outside the provisions of this Act. The Assistant Solicitor on reviewing the proposed draft constitution submitted by the Tribal Constitutional Committee held on July 18, 1958, that it is not possible for a tribe which has accepted the Indian Reorganization Act to amend a former constitution, from which recognition has been withdrawn, without complying with established legal criterion for obtaining the Secretary’s approval of a new organic document.

In view of the strong tribal feeling, the proposed constitution and bylaws now before you, although it contains all the requirements of an I.R.A.-document, dare not directly refer to that act if we are to obtain tribal acceptance of the proposed document. We recommend, therefore, that the proposed election order receive your early favorable consideration.[81]

In the understanding of many Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake, the “tribal council” proposed in 1958 was but the most recent of a series of “federal instrumentalities”[82] – purported “tribal governments” comprised of “Indians” supporting the agenda of the colonizing nation – at Red Lake dating back to certain (British-recognized) “Red Lake Chiefs” signing the Selkirk Treaty in 1817.[83]

The 1958 Red Lake Constitution supplanted a 1917 Constitution that, although not recognized as legitimate by the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, was tolerated as not capable of doing much harm: the 1917 General Council’s authority was constitutionally limited to not recognizing the “General Council of the Minnesota Chippewas, as a medium for the transaction of [Red Lake] tribal property business and affairs,” deciding “in disputes as to Chiefs,” and to “respect and give proper consideration to petitions that may be placed before them by any member of the Red Lake Band” [but not actually acting on those petitions].

The 1958 I.R.A. Constitution, on the other hand, granted fairly extensive power to the “tribal council” that the B.I.A. used it to establish[84] – including “administration of justice by establishing a police force and a tribal court.” That “tribal” power, however, is very clearly subject to the overarching sovereignty of the United States, “existing Federal laws,” and “subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, or his duly authorized representative.”

On September 11, 1990 and after years of increasing concern about the blatant unconstitutionality of the 1952 “Law and Order Provisions” used by the B.I.A. in its “Court of Indian Offenses,”[85] the Red Lake tribal council adopted a “recommended changes to the Tribal Law and Order Code.”[86] Vigorously objecting to the new ‘revised’ code’s extension of “United States Government trusteeship, illegally applied to Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway property” – which has never been ceded – and to the new ‘revised’ code’s referring to “Indians” as “non-persons,[87] in accordance with the precedent set in the U.S. Constitution,”[88] Wub-e-ke-niew renounced his “tribal membership” and reasserted his unextinguished Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway sovereignty. In the letter accompanying his “Indian Identity Card,” which Wub-e-ke-niew returned to the U.S. Supreme Court “as a false document issued with felonious and genocidal intent by the United States Government in collusion with their colonial Indian Reorganization Act ‘Tribal Councils’,” Wub-e-ke-niew explained to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall:

The Red Lake “Tribal” Code, obviously written either by a Philadelphia Lawyer or by an old Nazi in the Department of the Interior, makes this clear in the Definition Section about “Persons or Indians.” Indians are defined as non-persons; they are an invention of the Indo-Europeans and are under Indo-European sovereignty; owned by them. Maybe the reason that Indians are not recognized as human beings by the Indo-Europeans is that the Indo-Europeans created their identity and has been using them to commit genocide. No matter what, they are human being—but they are definitely Indo-European human beings.[89], [90]

Although some changes were made in the wording of the ‘tribal code’ after Wub-e-ke-niew’s persistent criticism of its B.I.A. authors’ use of language like “person or Indian,” the July 25, 2001 revisions to the ‘tribal code’ still defined “person,” for example in § 600.191, subd.5, as “every natural person, including Indians, who are not members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians …”[91]

               In 2004, the Red Lake “Indian Court” remained a “Court of Indian Offenses,” listed in 25 CFR §11.100(a) as such a court and therefore subject to federal regulations – with the clarifying statement that,

(c) The regulations in this part shall continue to apply to tribes listed under Sec. 11.100(a) until … the name of the tribe has been deleted from the listing of Courts of Indian Offenses under Sec. 11.100(a)[92]

The Red Lake tribal council asserted that it really had a “tribal court” operating from its own “sovereignty” rather than a “court of Indian offenses” subject to the U.S. Constitution, federal law, and federal regulations. The tribal council’s “tribal court” just happened to be named “The Red Lake Court of Indian Offenses,” tribal attorneys explained.

Underneath this deliberate ambiguity is the unceded land at Red Lake, and the United States lack of legitimate authority for jurisdiction over land or Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway (Wub-e-ke-niew contended that the Métis (‘Indians’) ‘settled’ at Red Lake by the U.S. government remained under U.S. jurisdiction, and that federal conflation of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and Métis did not actually confer unextinguished Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway sovereignty or property rights on ‘the White man’s Indians.’

Indian court jurisdiction

Whether a “tribal court” or a “court of Indian offenses,” reservation Indian court jurisdiction has been generally limited to “Indians,” with the precise parameters of those jurisdictional limits delineated, case by case, by the U.S. Supreme Court and, in the instance of the “Duro fix” discussed above, by Congress.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s chronicles its demarcation of the boundaries of “tribal court” jurisdiction in, for example, its decision in the 2001 case Nevada v. Hicks,[93] in which that court ruled that state officials cannot be sued in tribal court for executing a search warrant, on tribal land, “against a tribal member suspected of violating state law outside reservation.” Justice Scalia began the legal analysis underlying the Court’s opinion,

The principle of Indian law central to this aspect of the case is our holding in Strate v. A-1 Contractors, 520 U.S. 438, 453 (1997): “As to nonmembers . . . a tribe’s adjudicative jurisdiction does not exceed its legislative jurisdiction . . . .” That formulation leaves open the question whether a tribe’s adjudicative jurisdiction over nonmember defendants equals its legislative jurisdiction.[94] We will not have to answer that open question if we determine that the Tribes in any event lack legislative jurisdiction in this case. We first inquire, therefore, whether the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribes – either as an exercise of their inherent sovereignty, or under grant of federal authority – can regulate state wardens executing a search warrant for evidence of an off-reservation crime.

Indian tribes’ regulatory authority over nonmembers is governed by the principles set forth in Montana v. United States, 450 U.S. 544, 67 L. Ed. 2d 493, 101 S. Ct. 1245 (1981),[95] which we have called the “pathmarking case” on the subject, Strate, supra, at 445. In deciding whether the Crow Tribe could regulate hunting and fishing by nonmembers on land held in fee simple by nonmembers, Montana observed that, under our decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Tribe, 435 U.S. 191, 55 L. Ed. 2d 209, 98 S. Ct. 1011 (1978), tribes lack criminal jurisdiction over nonmembers. Although, it continued, “Oliphant only determined inherent tribal authority in criminal matters, the principles on which it relied support the general proposition that the inherent sovereign powers of an Indian tribe do not extend to the activities of nonmembers of the tribe.” 450 U.S. at 565 [footnote omitted]. Where nonmembers are concerned, the “exercise of tribal power beyond what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal relations is inconsistent with the dependent status of the tribes, and so cannot survive without express congressional delegation.” Id. at 564 [emphasis added].[96] …

As detailed in its footnotes, the criteria that the Supreme Court has used to determine whether a person who is not an enrolled tribal member – in the wake of its decision in U.S. v. Lara, only “non-Indians” – is subject to tribal court jurisdiction on any particular Indian reservation include whether or not that “non-Indian” has voluntarily entered “consensual relationships with the tribe or its members, through commercial dealing, contracts, leases, or other arrangements.”[97]

‘Indian’ people at Red Lake – and on other Indian reservations – live with the Supreme Court’s hair-splitting jurisdictional distinctions as a part of the unavoidable social landscape of daily life, and think about jurisdiction. Some play games with ‘jurisdiction,’ perhaps even with a kind of prison camp machismo akin to that of Vietnam War P.O.W.s playing ‘russian roulette.’ “Nothing else to do,” I’ve heard reservation Indians say with studied casualness … “might as well.” Thus, for example, Donald Rossbach, Jr.,

standing inside the border of the Red Lake Indian Reservation, fired a number of shots with a high powered rifle across the boundary line into Clearwater County at a deputy sheriff who had just arrested an acquaintance of [Rossbach’s] in Clearwater County on a felony warrant.”[98]

The State of Minnesota – apparently considering the legal ramifications for seven months after accusing Rossback of ‘aggravated assault’ – eventually tried Rossbach in Minnesota court on the grounds that, “at common law, the general rule was that a defendant could be tried in the jurisdiction where the shots took effect.”[99] On appeal, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected Rossbach’s claim that the state’s exercise of jurisdiction “over a completely extraterritorial fact situation involving conduct occurring entirely outside of Minnesota” was unconstitutional.[100]

The notions of ‘ Indian jurisdiction’ and ‘sovereignty’ have acquired a sort of mystique; symbolically become the ‘Indian side’ of a quasi-palpable ‘boundary’ against which activists can push in ‘opposition’ to ongoing colonial occupation. But, that symbolism and the ‘Indian activism’ based on it, belies the reality of ‘tribal sovereignty’ as a colonizing façade, held by tribal governments that are, in actuality, federal instrumentalities. Thus, both “the problems” [overlaying and obscuring the fundamental issues of colonial occupation, forcible assimilation and genocide] and potential paths of “resistance” are prescribed within overarching systems created by the colonizer.

Within the strictures of the colonially engendered systems, would-be indigenous activists are presented with a panoply of options – all of which ultimately entrench the colonizers hegemonic systems of assimilation and control.

Among the important aspects of maintaining the illusion of potentially substantive transformation within the system, are the discourses through which community understanding is directed and formed.

The apparent complexity of “Indian law” – a maze of legal cases that, in the aggregate, demarcate still-contested ‘boundaries’ between the state, federal, and ‘tribal’ jurisdiction – is among these. “Indian law” as a legal sub-specialty is sufficiently complex that general-practice attorneys hesitate to venture into its arcane turf. The mystique, specialized language and arcane case law [like the “Marshall trilogy”] and the supersaturated symbolism of “tribal rights” obscure both the on-the-ground lived reality of indigenous people, and the ‘tails I win, heads you lose’ dualism of federal “Indian law” as perceived from the vantages of aboriginal indigenous people.

Longstanding and persistent abuses of indigenous people by the federal government remain masked behind the apparently progressive rhetoric advocating advancement of contemporary “Indian Nations,” settling longstanding “Indian claims,” and promoting legislation like the “Indian Tribal Justice and Legal Assistance Act” and “Tribal Self-Determination.” In very brief summary, federal “Indian law” takes rights, sovereignty, and property away from the relatively few surviving aboriginal indigenous people, and – without compensation or even acknowledgment of the reality – vests control in federally created, federally recognized, federally controlled, and relatively unaccountable “Indian tribes” insulated from legal liability by U.S. court-created doctrines of “tribal sovereignty.”

Although insulated from liability by the “Indian sovereignty” of its tribal governments, the United States has claimed for itself the “legal title” to the “Indian land” and other indigenous assets as delineated under U.S. ‘Indian law’ – at least twice.

The first of those claims rests in part on the notion of the Euro-Christian supremacy promulgated by Medieval papacy, granting to European royals “by the sprinkling of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ” the rights:

to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.[101]

More than three hundred years after the pontiffs of the Holy Roman Empire sought to partition the world among Catholic royalty, the United States Supreme Court incorporated categorical disregard of indigenous people’s rights to our own land into U.S. law. The vehicle was a lawsuit over property rights, Johnson v. M’Intosh, decided in 1823, one of the “Marshall trilogy” that continue to be perceived as key in the foundation of contemporary “Indian law.” The U.S. Supreme Court wrote:[102]

The subjection [of Indians by the United States] proceeds from their residence within our territory and jurisdiction [as negotiated between European sovereigns]. It is unnecessary to show, that they are not citizens in the ordinary sense of that term, since they are destitute of the most essential rights which belong to that character. They are of that class who are said by jurists not to be citizens, but perpetual inhabitants with diminutive rights.[103] The statutes of Virginia, and of all the other colonies, and of the United States, treat them as an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government.

Johnson v. M’Intosh is perceived as establishing both the unilateral dispossession of indigenous people inherent in “Indian title,” and laying the groundwork for the colonial doctrine of “trusteeship.” Among the more interesting aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision, however, are the few sentences just after one of the sections often cited in support of “federal trusteeship”:[104]

… if it be admitted that they are now independent and foreign states, the title of the plaintiffs would be invalid: as grantees from the Indians, they must take according to their laws of property, and as Indian subjects. The law of every dominion affects all persons and property situate within it;[105] and the Indians never had any idea of individual property in lands. It cannot be said that the lands conveyed were disjoined from their dominion; because the grantees could not take the sovereignty and eminent domain to themselves.[106]

Early nineteenth-century writing often has a remarkable ‘transparency’ to it – at least in some aspects: in an era when almost all of those who were literate were, if not of the privileged elite and their bourgeois collaborators, at least white male ‘citizens,’ it seems that there was less perceived need to ‘spin’ the hegemonic intents of the ruling class into simulacra of equal-opportunity participatory democracy and “freedom.”

And, there it is, in black-and-white handset type on slave-grown cotton paper in the limited-circulation media of a property-title ruling from the U.S. Supreme court in 1823: the very crux of centuries of annihilation of indigenous people, of forcible assimilation focused on obliterating every shred of evidence that egalitarian indigenous societies ever existed:

… the grantees could not take the sovereignty and eminent domain to themselves.

The European royal “sovereigns” and their colonial derivatives, having spent the preceding thousand years conquering Europe and solidifying social-cultural-religious-symbolic-narrative-political-economic-geographic systems in which their exclusive rights to ‘sovereignty and eminent domain’ were relatively unchallenged, reasonably understood it as imperative to retain – as a class – the imperviousness of hold over land [“eminent domain”] and ‘god-given’ supreme political power [“sovereignty”].

The legal foundation of Marshall Court’s opinion that “the grantees could not take the sovereignty and eminent domain to themselves” is not cited, it just-is, written as though an unquestionable natural law, and thus without any necessity for justification.

In Johnson v. M’Intosh, the U.S. Supreme Court rather clearly delineates the legal philosophy underlying colonialism – phrased “proprietary rights of civilized nations on this continent” – as assertion of eminent domain,

derived from discovery and conquest, [and] can rest on no other basis; and all existing titles depend on the fundamental title of the crown by discovery.[107]

Chief Justice John Marshall and his colleagues are quite open about the inflexibility of their own role in affirming the often brutal dispossession of indigenous people by the United States:

We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturalists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits. Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim which has been successfully asserted. [108]

In their 62 page opinion in a case involving the validity of a land title, the Supreme Court Justices also muse on their role as apologists for the conqueror:

… Although we do not mean to engage in the defense of those principles which Europeans have applied to Indian title, they may, we think, find some excuse, if not justification, in the character and habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them.

Seven years before U.S. Congress’s passage of the Indian Removal Act of May 28, 1830[109] (which U.S. President Andrew Jackson described as arising from his “friendly feeling” toward indigenous people, and justified as “attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people”[110]) and the resultant holocaust of Cherokee and other ‘civilized’ Indians in the ‘Trail of Tears’ and other atrocities, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote:

The title by conquest is acquired and maintained by force. The conqueror prescribes its limits. Humanity, however, acting on public opinion, has established, as a general rule, that the conquered shall not be wantonly oppressed, and that their condition shall remain as eligible as is compatible with the objects of the conquest. Most usually, they are incorporated with the victorious nation, and become subjects or citizens of the government with which they are connected. The new and old members of the society mingle with each other; the distinction between them is gradually lost, and they make one people. …

When the conquest is complete, and the conquered inhabitants can be blended with the conquerors, or safely governed as a distinct people, public opinion, which not even the conqueror can disregard; imposes these restraints upon him; and he cannot neglect them without injury to his fame, and hazard to his power.

But, the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages … to leave them in possession in their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible, because they were as brave and as high spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence …

That law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered, was incapable of application under such circumstances. The resort to some new and different rule, better adapted to the actual state of things, was unavoidable. Every rule which can be suggested will be found to be attended with great difficulty.[111]

Faced with the irreconcilable chasms between their own racism and their principled understandings of humanitarian justice, U.S. Supreme Court – acknowledging that their categorical denial of indigenous peoples’ rights to their own land “may be opposed to natural right, and to the usages of civilized nations”[112] – nonetheless ruled that:

… the Indian inhabitants are to be considered merely as occupants, to be protected, indeed, while in peace, in the possession of their lands, but to be deemed incapable of transferring the absolute title to others …[113]

“Round two” came with ‘treaties’ in which federally-engendered ‘Indian Chiefs’ friendly to the U.S. agenda – generally not the people to whom the ‘ceded’ land actually belonged – were empowered by the U.S. in the context of the coercively scripted prostration and submission known as ‘treaty negotiations,’ alienating vast expanses of indigenous peoples’ lands, and subsequent forcible relocation of both Métis and indigenous people to the reservations.

“Round three” of the systemic and categorical dispossession of indigenous people came with the B.I.A.’s implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act in the 1930s – and was promoted by ‘friends of the Indians’ as addressing Indian impoverishment resulting from extensive alienation of land and resources after allotment. The residual, unsold, and tax-forfeited – and generally least-desirable – reservation lands were “restored” to “tribal ownership” under the control of the “tribal councils” established pursuant to the I.R.A., although the land title and unextinguished rights are held by the United States “in trust” for the federally-created and ‘recognized’ “tribe.” Detailing how the current “tribal” system is structured by the colonizer to destroy indigenous community and eventually eliminate identifiable indigenous people is beyond the scope of the present paper. Wub-e-ke-niew observed in 1993:

INDIAN GIVER: The White man gives with one hand, and then he takes back with the other. There never has been any such thing as “Indian land.” How many Indian still have the land from the Land Scrip issued under the Indian Treaties? How many Indians, under the Dawes Act, still have their allotment? The U.S. Indian policy was designed to steal the land from the Aboriginal Indigenous People, and then blame the Indians for “losing the land.” Under the “land settlements” and the 1934 I.R.A., the United States may say that they gave some land “back” to the Tribes they created, but the U.S. put this land under “trust,” and this fake land title is retained by the United States. If that’s not stealing and being an “Indian Giver,” I don’t know what is.[114]

Dead “Indians”

The July 25, 2001 Red Lake “Tribal Code” asserts Indian court jurisdiction as broadly as possible, for example in § 900.02 defining probate jurisdiction as extending to all “affairs and estates of deceased persons who are domiciled on the Red Lake Indian Reservation and to the property of non-resident deceased persons which property is located within the Red Lake Indian Reservation,” although § 900.01 subd. 2 of that Code limits its definition of a “person” – for the purposes of probate – to “any Indian.”[115] Since that code retains the language “person or Indian” in some other sections, it is, perhaps, arguable that in the federal government’s colonial schema, deceased ‘Indians’ attain ‘personhood.’

Similarly, Title 25 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which governs the ‘Indian court’ at Red Lake,[116] limits probate jurisdiction to “the estate of a deceased Indian who, at the time of his or her death, was domiciled or owned real or personal property situated within the Indian country under the jurisdiction of the court to the extent that such estate consists of property which does not come within the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior.”[117]

Most contemporary federal and “tribal” definitions of “Indian” limit the “Indian” status to ‘duly enrolled members of federally-recognized Indian tribes.’ The ‘constitutionality’[118] of “Indian preference” in hiring, ‘Indian’ tribal courts, and a plethora of other segregated ‘Indian’ institutions depend on federal “Indian” status being a voluntary association rather than “race,” it would seem obvious that Wub-e-ke-niew’s ‘walking away from’ “the artificial personal of Indian”[119] would unquestionably remove him from the jurisdiction of the Red Lake ‘Indian’ court.

Wub-e-ke-niew and “race”

Some of the philosophy underlying Wub-e-ke-niew’s renunciation of “Indian” identity was published in his newspaper column on October 15, 1993, exactly four years before his death:

I am not an Indian, and I do not belong to the Chippewa Tribal structure created by the United States Government. The B.I.A. listed me on their “Chippewa Indian Rolls” without my knowledge or consent, and I sent my resignation as a Chippewa Indian to then-Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, in respect of the procedure described in the U.S. Constitution for one Sovereign dealing with another. Justice Marshall accepted my resignation, and these papers are now in the Library of Congress. I explained to Thurgood Marshall about the dishonest identity of “Indian,” and that I have my own Aboriginal Indigenous identity. I am a Sovereign Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway on my own land, and British Indian common law, United States law, and the Chippewa Indian Tribal Code do not have jurisdiction over the Sovereigns of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation. We are on our own land, and have been here for millennia, long before the White man, the Pillager Indians, the French Métis, and the Chippewa Indians got here. We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have a right to continue existing on our own land, without the wanna-be Chippewa Indians trying to steal our identity and our traditions, abetting the Whites in trying to steal our land and resources, and covering up the genocide.[120]

In the same column, he sharply criticized the federal government’s “tribal” administration for trying “to use and abuse my Aboriginal Indigenous Sovereignty to get out of paying taxes on money you made plundering my resources and destroying my forests,” and published the challenge:

Try to kick me off of my land, which has belonged to the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, including my family and my Dodem, for more than the last hundred thousand years—we’ll see who leaves.[121]

The “tribal” establishment responded with pleas, death threats, and proffered ‘buyouts’ – at one point I watched Wub-e-ke-niew turn down $109 billion ($109,000,000,000.00) from an international consortium he believed to be backed by the C.I.A. “It’s against my religion to sell land,” Wub-e-ke-niew explained to the German intermediary who outlined the proposed deal.

And, despite their threats, neither the tribal council nor the U.S. government made any move toward removing Wub-e-ke-niew from the land that his ancestors had, in fact, never ceded.

Chapter 5 – Exile

There are innumerable facets to exile.

One narrative is of the personal saga. What is it like to be stripped of community, of intimate family, of personal possessions, and after exile, to have one’s reputation smeared with malicious lies in a post facto attempt at justification by those who believed they stood to gain?

Exile is not well clarified by cultural narratives in the United States. Except for the lacunae in constitutionally-protected rights beneath the shadow of contemporary “tribal sovereignty,” exile is illegal, defined in a small body of case law as “cruel and unusual punishment,”[122] unconstitutional, and in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “a fate universally decried by civilized people.”[123]

Even though some form of exile was the impetus behind the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic voyages made by the ancestors of many Americans, the history of those involuntary journeys has either been ignored – many families’ stories of their own histories begin at the Atlantic seaboard and are glossed in generic terms like “Scotch-Irish” in reference to the “old country” – or are recast in heroic generalities. Most European-Americans describe their forcibly uprooted ancestors as “seeking liberty,” descendants eight generations removed from that stormy crossing in reeking ship-holds tell their grandchildren, or perhaps more grandly, they are memorialized as valiantly upholding the “true faith,” or passionately motivated by luminescent political ideals.

The exiles named in popular Euro-American culture are mostly romantically cast political idealists, passionately discussing revolutionary theories and drinking coffee on the Parisian left bank with fellow expatriates, or vanquished generals like Napoleon, who are memorialized with well-manicured battlefields, pastries, and palindromes,[124] rather than broadly-circulated diaries.

And, although some indigenous peoples may have used banishment as the most extreme of all possible social sanctions, a ‘social death penalty,’ Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway did not.[125]

Without cultural archetypes as touchstones of “meaning,” weaving a narrative of cohesive understanding involves a dynamic synthesis of personal and community perceptions and interpretations. “Meaning” cannot be stripped of its context and remain intact – and exile by its very nature removes the one exiled from the societal contexts within which one might seek coherent meaning, strips away identity and severs friendships, pares a person to the surprisingly slender thread of “self” without community.

Along with contemporary meanings ranging around “enforced removal” according to an edict or sentence, “penal expatriation or banishment; the state or condition of being penally banished,” etc., the Oxford English Dictionary includes among its definitions of “exile”:

∙ Waste or devastation of property; ruin, utter impoverishment. to put in exile [OF. metre a essil]: to ravage (a country), ruin (a person). Obs. [usage citations spanning the years 1267 to 1618]

∙ slender, shrunken, thin, diminutive, with the “primary sense” of one potential derivation “being assumed to have been ‘disemboweled’ [usage 1420-1611].

The obsolete meanings in Oxford reflect understandings of “exile” in medieval Europe, at a time when the practice had not yet been “universally decried” as cruel beyond the bounds of ‘civilized’ practice, and thus become so unusual as to have almost no cultural referent.

I did not think to read Oxford’s etymologies and obsolete meanings until the spring of 2004, after nearly six years of exile. And yet, I had written to a friend in 2001-2002:

… Spent an unexpected chunk of the day with another woman who was banished [in consequence of her courageous and honorable actions[126] on another Indian reservation] about the same time I was: she wanted someone with her when she went to talk to her attorney, “what next” after having a lower court ‘win’ overturned on appeal. Knowing her, talking with her now-and-then, has been a real gift ... someone else walking a similar path of terrible solitude, social death, disemboweled identity ... in some ways she’s a very different person from me, but the personal impact of banishment / exile has been in other ways eerily similar …

And:

After Wub-e-ke-niew died ... after I got thrown out of my house and caught up in a bureaucratic and legal morass ... after I was banished ... one of the few ‘threads’ remaining of my unraveled being was my personal “integrity,” an almost pure-faith belief that in my making some difficult decisions as ethically as I could, somehow things would eventually become ‘okay’ again.

“Ethics” ... “integrity” ... on some levels they’re abstract words, with referents in “ideal” domains, whether the rarefied philosophical heritage of Lislakh[127] civilization or the teachings of Aboriginal Indigenous ways-of-being. But in either - perhaps ‘both’ - it seems like ethics and integrity are, in part, like guiding “signposts” through life’s sometimes difficult terrain ...

… As I walked - as a woman I encountered at Kinko’s a few years back described it (in understandings distilled from her own anguished odyssey [in other milieux]), “UNDER the [Biblical-referent] ‘valley’ [of death]” - through those first years of exile, struggling to transcend my pain and rage and woundedness, my own sense of “ethics” and “personal integrity” was one of the few shards of my shattered life I saw to hold onto: for guidance through difficult decisions, as something with which I might begin rebuilding my life and myself.

Narratives of exile

What and where are the threads with which one might begin weaving narratives of exile, reconstructing the fabric of one’s life? A part of the story can be told chronologically.

I did not stay and talk with Mary for very long, when we reached her house after that interminable drive into exile on May 29^th.

Mary, cherished friend, had sat with me through the first nightlong vigil after my husband died. Wub-e-ke-niew still lay on the bed, and his spirit was a palpable presence filling the room. I had straightened his legs so that he would be … more comfortable … but had not been able to make myself cover his face, not yet. Mary and I sat in our coats, deliberately leaving the house cold so that Wub-e-ke-niew’s body – he had been adamantly opposed to embalming – would “keep.” We poured the last of the still-warm coffee that Wub-e-ke-niew had made from its thermos, then brewed another pot, smoked cigarettes, and our quiet conversation wove through the backwoods silence. We talked of moments remembered, of the profoundly beautiful man Wub-e-ke-niew had been, and occasionally lapsing into the present, began to touch on the details of his funeral … how to fulfill his clearly-expressed desires to be buried “the old way.” That night was sometimes painful, filled with deep sadness, but there was also a kind of serenity as we sat with my deceased husband. Death is a natural part of life, and even when death comes too young, there is an inexplicable harmony in the cycles of life-and-death.

The day that I was exiled was different, unnatural, rent asunder by the unnamable. After that interminable drive from Red Lake, we sat in Mary’s kitchen and drank coffee, and neither of us had words for what had just happened. “Thank you for coming with me,” I said, and then did not know what else to say.

I drove from Mary’s to the Bemidji offices of the Ojibwe News, the weekly newspaper that Wub-e-ke-niew had written for since it was founded in 1988. The publisher Bill Lawrence’s road-worn little red Honda was parked in front, and I went inside. “They banished me,” I told him, in unprefaced continuation of the conversation we’d had a couple of days earlier about the upcoming tribal court proceedings.

“Who did?”

“Bobby Whitefeather.” I showed Bill the order of exile signed by the tribal chairman. I’m one of those people who are usually tightly focused and practical in a crisis, but I felt like a rapidly deflating balloon whizzing around in the newspaper office, bouncing off of the walls, starting to succumb to the as-yet incomprehensible reality of being exiled.

Guided by Bill’s questions, I explained to him what had happened. “Write it,” he said.

The Ojibwe News is a weekly newspaper, that goes to press on Thursdays. I made arrangements to buy a secondhand computer from a friend-of-a-friend with my good name as credit security, and retreated to Mary’s guesthouse, a one-room pine-paneled cottage perched at the edge of the Mississippi riverbank. Fueled by the shocky adrenaline of freshly imposed exile, coffee, cigarettes, and the meals that Mary insisted I eat, I wrote.

For about forty hours, I gazed out across the river as the sun set and rose, and set and rose again, smoked pack after pack of unfiltered cigarettes, brewed pot after pot of strong coffee, and struggled to write a coherent – and professional-quality, journalistically fair – news story in the third person. I left a blank line after the attribution for tribal court judge Bruce Grave’s comments, since Bill knew him personally. Although all too common at Red Lake and other reservations, exile is still “news” in Indian country.

Early Thursday morning, I put the story on a diskette, made a printout, and drove to the newspaper’s offices. I showed Bill the blank space for Bruce Graves’s comments, and suggested that he’d be more likely to talk if Bill called him. Then, I handed the printout and a red pen to Bill, and went outside with a mug of the newspaper’s staple black coffee. I stood there smoking, watching the traffic drive by on a perfectly ordinary-seeming day in Bemidji, waiting for the publisher to decide what to do with what had become, during forty hours of writing, a long newspaper story.

Bill made a few edits, called Graves, and when I came back inside, handed me the lightly-marked printout, told me what Graves had said, and pointed me to a computer. I made the changes, added the quote from Graves, saved the file for the typesetter, made a photocopy of Whitefeather’s exile order, finished my coffee, and left. “On deadline,” there’s no time to spend in casual conversation at a newspaper.

From the newspaper, I drove to the Anishinabe Legal Services legal aid office in Cass Lake, looking for a lawyer, and then the finality of exile started to hit me. Hard. I called Mary, told her I was going to be gone for a few days – she’d given me an invitation to stay as long as I liked in her guesthouse – and started driving, northeast to where the upper Red Lake extends off the reservation. It’s a fairly long drive from Bemidji to Washkish, and then northwards on the rough gravel roads that run nearest the lakeshore. When I finally got to the lake, in unsettled lands near the north shore, I sat at the water’s edge until late night, crying deep wracking screams of anguish into the chilly starlit wilderness, mourning the loss of my husband, my home, the land and the lake that are one with my spirit …

I slept in my car that night, and through the next few days drove slowly around the external boundary of the reservation, counterclockwise, sleeping in my car and in the woods, crying and sometimes screaming into the backwoods silence. In the checkerboarded patchwork of land ownership of the “ceded lands” north of the reservation, I hid my car on a trail where the most recent tracks were blurred by time, and lay for many hours in the woods an isolated parcel of ‘reservation land’ where Wub-e-ke-niew and I had come to pick blueberries, facedown against the sandy bosom of Grandmother Earth, crying, seeking solace, asking for help in healing from wounds I did not yet fully comprehend.

Finally, I drove south, back to Bemidji. The article I’d written was printed in the newspaper, page one …

Talking to those friends who were off-reservation was painful, awkward, we didn’t know what to say – and I learned that exile is shameful as well as painful, and shied from seeing anyone from Red Lake who’d come ‘to town’ in Bemidji.

I went to the Cities, two hundred miles south, and tried – for a long time unsuccessfully – to focus on schoolwork. I looked everywhere I knew to look for an attorney to represent me in the legal mess launched by disagreement with Valerie Blake – Wub-e-ke-niew’s ex-wife’s oldest daughter – over Wub-e-ke-niew’s death certificate, and inflamed into chaos by the tribal court’s attempted probate and my being exiled. To the best of my extensively researched knowledge, there is no such lawyer, at least not one willing to represent a client stripped of her assets by a tribal government, and so I bought a copy of the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure, spent a lot of time in law libraries, and tried to represent myself. And lost, floundering in alien discourse, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where my certiorari briefs got “thrown out” by a clerk on a technicality. For years, whenever I happened to about that principled legal battle, it was still a defeat in which the pain radiated, raw and red from an aching heart.

That’s one piece of a still-unwoven narrative of exile.

The other pieces, without the threads of time to bind them together into some apparently coherent chronology, remain fragmentary:

One of my professors and thesis advisors, a wise woman with a profound and deep understanding of humanity, explaining exile as being “a refugee without community.”

Someone I’ve known for many years, and worked with in the 1970s, turning away from me as though I’m an evil spirit bringing plague. “I heard about you,” he said, “at the tribal court.”

Explaining to a friend what it felt like, about a year after being exiled: “it’s like someone has cut me open (gesturing upwards along the centerline, the length of my torso), pulled my guts out onto the ground, and stomped on them.”

Two years after exile, the image of myself as a crumbling skeleton, collapsed on the ground only half out of the grave, the scattered shards of my spirit rustling in the wind.

A friend whose grandmother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, the only one of her family who survived, telling me, almost ferociously, “even impossible journeys are made one step at a time,” and then hugging me with an understanding that transcends words.

Old friends in whose memory the beauty and the dreams that Wub-e-ke-niew and I built together at Red Lake have not died, old friends who remember the person I once was and have faith in who I can become, loyal friends whose trust in their own perceptions of the world transcends the official – and unofficial – censure …

New friends whose insight extends beyond my masks of pride and ‘rez-tough’ endurance, who see the wounds underneath those masks with compassion but not pity, but who also see the human being – and her possibilities – at the core, and have encouraged me to rebuild my strength, to understand exile not as an “end” but rather as a transition to something new.

And … the people from Red Lake who have had the courage to say, “It was wrong, what they did.” Given the political situation at Red Lake, it took a great deal of courage for them to say that.

Chapter 6 – Context

Why would a special appearance to object to a court’s assertion of jurisdiction – a relatively common legal procedure – result in the extreme sanction of exile?

At the surface is reiteration of an explanation for absence of due process in the Red Lake Courts of Indian Offenses published in 1972 in the North Dakota Law Review,[128] detailing some of the legal, jurisdictional and procedural problems adhering to the Red Lake court, including that Indian court’s practice of ensuring a ‘favorable’ outcome to cases by notifying only one party of pending proceedings. After I was removed from the tribal courtroom by exile, the only party present at that ‘Indian’ probate hearing was the Valerie Blake, who – backed by the Red Lake Métis elite[129] and despite Wub-e-ke-niew’s feelings, strongly expressed through years of published writing – sought the jurisdiction of the Red Lake Indian court by petitioning for probate there.[130]

I filed a statement formally objecting to Indian probate jurisdiction with the Red Lake ‘court’ in November 1997. A copy of that statement circulated through the Indian community and was published in the Native American Press about a month later. My statement of objection to any assertion of probate jurisdiction by the Red Lake ‘tribal’ court included my mailing address and telephone number, and the documents filed with that Indian court by Valerie Blake[131] included the name of Bemidji attorney Paul Kief, who, by that point, I had retained to represent me. I was not, however, notified of the pending Indian probate hearing by either Red Lake or Valerie Blake.

Wub-e-ke-niew was a public figure in the Bemidji area, and the news that the adamantly not “Indian” Wub-e-ke-niew was going to have his estate probated at the ‘tribal’ court, circulated through the regional legal community until reaching Mr. Kief, who notified me of the pending hearing.

During the eight years between the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ confidential draft report on Enforcement of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968,[132] sent to then-chairman Roger Jourdain on May 30, 1990, and the “Indian probate” attempted by the Red Lake ‘tribal’ court in May 1998, the tribal council had licensed a short list of attorneys to practice at Red Lake. Paul Kief was not on that list of about a dozen attorneys, so I contacted all but one[133] of the attorneys approved by the tribal council. None were willing to represent me, and more than one expressed concern about the possibility of the tribal council’s rescinding their license to practice at Red Lake in retaliation for representing me in opposition to the tribal council.

“You understand, don’t you,” one attorney asked me after we discussed my case. “Of course,” I said. In 1998, Bemidji was still the sort of small town where maintaining harmonious social relationships was important, so I acknowledged that retaining the Red Lake tribal council’s license to practice law meant that the attorney would be able to help ‘lots of people who really need it,’ instead of just me.

One attorney offered to help in the only way s/he perceived as feasible: by unobtrusively ‘hanging out’ at the Red Lake law enforcement center, and on my behalf paying attention to the pre-trial backroom proceedings.

The Indian probate hearing was originally scheduled on May 22^nd. I arrived with Mary Harding, who had agreed to be a ‘witness’ to the proceedings, filed a “Notice of Special Appearance” objecting to the Indian court’s assertion of jurisdiction, and got a receipt from the Clerk of Courts. I chatted briefly with a longtime friend and police officer who worked at the law enforcement center, who greeted me cheerfully, asked me how I was doing, and then answered his own question with a gentle smile, “pretty good – under the circumstances.” I smiled back. “Yeah,” I said, “pretty good, under the circumstances.”

On that Friday, Mary and I then waited for two and a half hours in the foyer outside the courtroom. Occasionally one of us would go outside for a cigarette, and I visited briefly with some of the other people waiting to be called into the courtroom.

After a couple of hours, the attorney who had offered to ‘hang out’ in the backrooms walked into the foyer, glanced at me, and then walked outside. I followed. “I have to get home,” the attorney apologized, and then, speaking quietly, added that s/he had overheard Valerie Blake and the Red Lake Indian Court’s Chief Judge Wanda Lyons discussing the possibility of jailing me as a way of keeping me out of the courtroom. I thanked the attorney for coming, and assured them that I had already made arrangements for bail – the Red Lake Indian court had been a highly politicized ‘kangaroo court’ for decades,[134] and the possibility of being arrested on fabricated charges was one I had weighed as a part of my decision to object to its assertion of Indian probate jurisdiction.

After the attorney left, I asked Mary to come outside and ‘have a smoke’ with me. I quickly sketched what was happening, told her who had agreed to help me with bail if that was needed, and asked her to hold onto my wallet and other possessions, retaining only a $5 bill and my driver’s license in my pocket. We walked back into the courtroom foyer. I peeked into the still-empty courtroom, and then we sat back down to wait awhile longer.

About two and a half hours after the hearing was scheduled, Valerie Blake walked through the foyer, smiling as though she was very pleased about something, and, a little while later, Mary and I were called into the courtroom. Wanda Lyons, the chief judge at the Red Lake ‘tribal’ court, told us that the hearing was being postponed until 9:00 a.m. on May 26^th, the Tuesday after the Memorial Day weekend. She added that she was re-assigning the case to Bruce Graves, because Lyons had helped Valerie Blake “prepare the case.”

On May 26^th, Mary and I returned to the Red Lake law enforcement center for the rescheduled hearing. I filed a second ‘Notice of Special Appearance’ and supporting documentation, mostly to ensure that it was unambiguously clear that I was not consenting to the Indian court’s assertion of jurisdiction, and asked the Clerk of Courts for another receipt.

Bearing witness to the proceedings, Mary Harding logged events as they unfolded:

Arrived at 9 a.m., May 26 in accordance w/ the direction of Judge Wanda Lyons from the original court date of May 22. The hearing was postponed after 2½ hours of waiting (& back room negotiations) at that time.

May 26: The judge (Bruce Graves) entered the courtroom at 9:45 to go thru the box of evidence. (Note: apparently Valerie has been here for some time – we haven’t seen her yet.)

10:20: Officer appears w/ order of removal from the Res.

10:20: Judge opened hearing –
asked Val about Francis Blake’s [Wub-e-ke-niew] name
Birthday / Age
Valerie – requests removal of Clara – based on no relation & doesn’t want to hear anything she may have to say
Asked about the issues today -
Valerie responded Beltr. Elect. Credits
Paul Bunyan redits
Val protests Clara’s presence re: removal order
Judge ordered 5 min. recess –
Removal Order entered nto the Court by the Judge – Clara removed

Judge asks my name & business w/ court. I respond that I’m a friend to Wub & Clara. He states that it’s a closed hearing & asks athat I leave.

10:30 a.m. [signed] Mary C. Harding[135]

The right of habeas corpus – Constitutional protection against illegal confinement – is the only civil right enforceable against ‘tribal’ governments in federal court,[136] and if I had been jailed instead of exiled, the right of habeas corpus would have given me a likely sustainable entrée into the federal court system. More than six years later, I still don’t know who made the decision to exile me, or on what alleged grounds – but at about 10:25 a.m., central daylight savings time, on May 26, 1998, I was forcibly removed from the courtroom, and banished from the reservation, so that there would be no objections to the U.S. government, through its ‘tribal council,’[137] asserting jurisdiction over the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land that Wub-e-ke-niew’s ancestors had never ceded.

The “Order of Removal,” dated Tuesday, May 26, 1998 and signed by Bobby Whitefeather, who was tribal council chairman at that time, asserts that:

This order of Removal shall remain in full force and effect until revoked in writing by the Tribal Chairman or by Resolutions of the Tribal Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians.[138]

Lifetime exile, unless there is a substantial change in Red Lake ‘Indian’ politics.

The Red Lake ‘tribal court’ awarded all of my personal property[139] – as well as Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my joint property, his property, etc. – to Valerie Blake. To the best of my knowledge in the absence of any factual evidence, the ‘Indian court’ decided that she was Wub-e-ke-niew’s “biological daughter,” and ex post facto applied the September 1990 ‘tribal code’ to ‘invalidate’ Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my 1984 Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Midé marriage.

Chapter 7 - Background

Only Bobby Whitefeather, then tribal council chairman, knows what he was really thinking when he signed the executive order to exile me.

In an April 2001 interview, Whitefeather told Northern Minnesota Public Radio journalist Tom Robertson that his action was justified to protect what he described as “the tranquility of the reservation.”[140]

She was removed because she was creating dissension amongst other people here. She was creating a problem. As a sovereign nation, we have the authority and the ability to establish the parameters of the rights of our people

Whitefeather told Northern Minnesota Public Radio Journalist Tom Robertson during a Spring 2001 interview for the MPR series, “Tribal Justice – But Not For All.”[141]

Was I “creating a problem” by filing a legal statement objecting to the Red Lake Indian court’s assertion of jurisdiction – on the grounds that ‘court’ did not, in accordance with the tribal council’s own ‘tribal code’ (and the laws and regulations of the U.S. federal government that funds that ‘court’), have probate jurisdiction over the adamantly non-Indian Wub-e-ke-niew? Perhaps: whether or not something is a “problem” is a matter of personal perception. I would not have filed those objections had I not believed that my doing so was both ethically necessary and legally sustainable.

In a June 2002 interview published in the Native American Press/Ojibwe News,[142] Whitefeather asserted that Indian Reorganization Act constitution for the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians authorizes “the executive power of the chairman” to remove ‘somebody from a courtroom without bothering to find out what’s happening,’ and acknowledged that “some vagueness in our constitution … actually presents itself for some opportunities for abuse.” He also blamed Valerie Blake:

Press/ON: … to my knowledge you have removed four or five people during your tenure as chairman, and most of them – at least two other people besides myself – were involved in court processes, and what you did is simply remove the dissenting factor, dissenting people [from a courtroom]

Whitefeather: The constitution requires me to ensure the safety, the health, and the well-being of the tribal member. If there is a group of tribal members that come to me and say, this person, who is not a member of the tribe, is interfering in our well-being, can you do, do something about it. So, I explain to them that there is a process that takes place, and if all else fails, and no negotiation takes place, and no acceptance of any terms, and my responsibility is to tribal members, the protection of our homeland. And, if it requires removing someone that a family – it’s not me that makes a declaration of undesirability, it’s the tribal members that come to me and say, ‘we do not want this person on our homeland.’ My obligation, my legal obligation is to the tribal members, and that’s what I actually do.

Press/ON: Okay, in my own case, to my knowledge, I had no idea that there was any complaint against me … and I simply went to [probate] court and was handed this order of removal, no trial, no nothing, no questions asked, nobody ever even asked me what my side of the story was. And I would say that that, in my understanding, is a fairly clear example of abuse of power.

Whitefeather: But it wasn’t my abuse. If there was any abuse that you allege take place, it was perhaps the family [i.e., Valerie Blake] not allowing you your forum. And, legally, according to the constitution, you have no legal standing …[143]

Bobby Whitefeather did not mention that his sister, Donna Whitefeather, had signed a forged “enrollment certificate” – using the name of Wub-e-ke-niew’s son, a “junior” who had remained enrolled as a Red Lake Indian – in an effort to justify the tribal council’s actions. He also did not mention that the tribal council’s chief judge, Wanda Lyons, had helped Valerie Blake “prepare the case” for probate court, nor that Valerie Blake was hired by the tribal council as a court employee shortly after I was exiled, as well as – as the ‘personal representative’ of Wub-e-ke-niew’s estate, receiving quite a few thousand dollars in “Indian money” that Wub-e-ke-niew would have pointedly rejected, including a per capita payment on an Indian Court of Claims ‘settlement’ arising from the 1889 Nelson Act and subsequent deforestation, which Wub-e-ke-niew as “rapacious hypocrisy.”[144]

Bobby Whitefeather could have done something other than signing an executive order for lifetime exile based on unsubstantiated allegations: made without even informing me that a “complaint” had been made, without any opportunity to defend myself.

Associate Indian court judge Bruce Graves could have done something other than delay the hearing until I was removed from the courtroom – unless, of course, the intended purpose of that exile was, at least in part, to nullify my objections by removing the person making them.

A bit of personal description

Although I would not define myself as a political “radical,” issues of social justice are philosophically and personally important to me. In addition to a moderately successful career as a photojournalist, I have worked for a number of organizations oriented toward addressing societal problems,[145] including as a grant-writer for the St. Paul American Indian Movement (A.I.M.). I do not now identify myself in primarily terms of A.I.M., but what I have done is there, a part of my past that in some circles might give me impeccable credentials, but in others could be construed as irrevocably demolishing my credibility.

In the late 1970s, after having oscillated between the Twin Cities urban Indian community and Red Lake reservation, I moved fairly permanently to the reservation. It is relevant that the people with whom I associated most closely there were not among the politically powerful Métis elite—and that almost all of those people are now dead.

“The rez”

According to the quasi-official Red Lake Net News,[146] the territory encompassed by Red Lake Indian Reservation includes 637,030 acres (about a thousand square miles) remaining within unceded “diminished” reservation, in addition to outlying checkerboarded areas of “ceded lands” restored under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.

In We Have The Right To Exist, Wub-e-ke-niew writes that “Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway own about 24,500 square miles of land and lakes on the U.S. side of the border, according to the lines drawn by Western European immigrants.”[147]^,[148]He details the grounds for his understanding that land is still unceded Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land, throughout his book.

A statistical description: population

Federal statistics are expressed in terms of the “diminished Red Lake Reservation,” and according to the U.S. Census, in the year 2000 there were 5,162 people residing on Red Lake reservation, self-identified as: 61 whites, 5 Blacks, 2 Asians, 5,071 ‘American Indian/Alaska Natives,’ and 20 people of ‘mixed race.’[149] Total reservation population over the age of 18 was 2,790, of whom 2,714 – more than 92% – described themselves as “Indian.”

According to B.I.A. “enrollment and total resident” figures, there were 9,038 Indians with ¼ or more ‘Indian blood quantum’ and thus eligible for B.I.A. services, living on Red Lake reservation and in nearby off-reservation communities like Bemidji;[150] total enrollment in the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in 2001 was 9,610.[151]

Ten years previously, U.S. Census enumerators counted 75 whites, 0 Blacks, 3,499 Indians, and 12 Asians at “Lower Red Lake,” and 23 Whites and 6 Indians at “Upper Red Lake.”[152] The Northwest Area Foundation, in their compilation of regional reservation census statistics,[153] reports 2,823 Indians at Red Lake in 1980; 3,602 in 1990; and 5,071 in 2000, for a “40.8 percent” increase in population in the decade between 1990 and 2000.[154]

The 40.8 % increase reported by the Northwest Area Foundation reflects high birthrates and death rates, an expanding population, and people moving away from the reservation and then returning half a generation later: in 1980, 24% of Indian people in Minnesota lived on-reservation; in 1990, 24.7%; and in 2000, 31%.

About 2,842 of the Indians enumerated in 1990 at Red Lake would have been over the age of eighteen in the year 2000, when 2,714 Indians over the age of eighteen were counted. In part due to persistently low life expectancies for “Indians,” the age of the American Indian population at Red Lake has remained young through the decades: nearly half of the population was under the age of eighteen, and less than 5% over the age of 65.

Relative age of population, Red Lake reservation

Relative age of population, Minnesota generally

Financial statistics

The two decades between 1979 and 1999 reflect ongoing transformations in the economy at Red Lake, which in 1979 was based on logging and commercial fishing supplemented by government transfer payments (welfare, social security, veterans pensions) and federally-subsidized ‘poverty programs.’ By 1999, the walleye pike in the lakes were depleted, almost all of the second-growth forests had been clearcut, and the reservation economy rested far more heavily on various ‘economic development’ programs operated by the tribal council and other federal subsidies, and on the three casinos owned by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa (operating with a debt load of more than $27 million due to over-expansion and other problems).[155]

Despite federal expenditures of more than $24,670,636 in fiscal year 1999 and $32,610,980 in fiscal year 2000 for on-reservation program funding,[156] the per capita income at Red Lake had dropped from $10,016 in 1979,[157] to $7,876 in 1999:[158] about 45% of income levels for whites in the surrounding Beltrami County, and only a third of Whites’ per capita income in the Minnesota in 1999.

Income, 1999

	Total Reservation income	White alone population: Per capita income in 1999	Total population: Per capita income in 1999	‘American Indian and Alaska Native alone’ population: Per capita income in 1999	‘Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone’ population: Per capita income in 1999	‘Some other race alone’ population: Per capita income in 1999	‘Two or more races’ population: Per capita income in 1999
Minnesota		$24,351	$23,198	$13,040	$16,948	$11,387	$11,190
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota (Six component reservations); MCT trust land, MN	$965,888	$22,678	$16,122	$15,092	$0	$0	$0
Bois Forte Band (Nett Lake)	$5,101,680	$14,434	$11,790	$10,995	$0	$0	$3,378
Fond du Lac Band	$17,114,097	$17,840	$15,551	$12,649	$0	$2,171	$8,855
Grand Portage Band	$4,785,886	$19,933	$15,782	$14,863	$0	$6,000	$8,925
Leech Lake Band	$37,308,980	$17,562	$13,103	$8,180	$9,325	$13,367	$9,050
Mille Lacs Band	$11,464,090	$17,725	$15,880	$9,790	$30,650	$7,350	$7,771
White Earth Band	$30,831,006	$15,749	$12,786	$9,127	$7,924	$9,590	$9,194
Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, Minnesota	$39,939,196	$12,775	$7,957	$7,876	$0	$2,663	$8,687

Audited federal program funding, 1999-2000	Federal Single Audits – government	Federal Single Audits – housing authority	Federal Single Audits – government	Federal Single Audits – housing authority	Tribal College	Federal funding per Indian over age 18 in FY 2000	Total Population
Minnesota	1999	1999	2000
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota (Six component reservations); MCT trust land, MN	$2,981,587		$2,790,611			$47,298	78
Bois Forte Band (Nett Lake)	$9,547,654		$8,113,212			$18,651	657
Fond du Lac Band	$16,665,570		$18,198,394			$7,210	3,728
Grand Portage Band	$2,679,960		$2,442,280			$6,015	557
Leech Lake Band	$18,352,753	$2,750,943	$16,248,636	$3,910,420	$764,930	$3,007	10,205
Mille Lacs Band	$10,069,973	$909,410	$13,064,878	$1,118,234		$4,167	4,704
White Earth Band	$13,102,549	$1,870,379	$14,250,345	$3,106,067		$2,763	9,192
Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, Minnesota	$22,287,807	$2,382,829	$27,112,358	$5,486,938		$11,684	5,162

Median Household Income, 1999	Households with a householder who is American Indian	Households	Households with a householder who is ‘Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander’	Households with a householder who is ‘Some other race alone’	Households with a householder who is ‘Two or more races’
Minnesota	$28,533	$47,111	$48,214	$34,081	$34,227
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota (Six component reservations); MCT trust land, MN	$40,625	$36,667	$2,499	$0	$0
Bois Forte Band (Nett Lake)	$23,281	$28,214	$0	$0	$5,000
Fond du Lac Band	$30,139	$38,190	$0	$0	$35,000
Grand Portage Band	$28,229	$30,326	$0	$6,250	$16,250
Leech Lake Band	$22,269	$28,137	$31,250	$32,361	$27,500
Mille Lacs Band	$22,396	$30,422	$151,027	$28,750	$20,625
White Earth Band	$22,794	$28,488	$31,563	$17,083	$30,000
Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, Minnesota	$22,596	$22,813	$0	$0	$43,333

Despite federally-supported “Indian preference,” state and federal subsidies for Indian-owned businesses, and the tribal government’s near-total control over the reservation economy, there remains a substantial disparity between White and Indian incomes on Red Lake reservation. Whites were only 1.2% of total reservation population, yet White per capita incomes were 162% of Indians’ incomes.

Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my annual per-capita income in mid-1990s was around $3,900 – and my ‘sense’ was that we were about in the middle of the income-spectrum for the non-élite. At that time, most of the tribal council members were being paid for two or three administrative jobs apiece, along with federally-subsidized housing and health care, ‘tribal’ cars, and other ‘perks’ including access to sometimes casually accounted-for cash from the casino and ‘program funds.’[159]

The reality of “poverty” is complex.

Considered through the ‘lens’ of Euro-American economic analysis, despite nearly forty years of federal anti-poverty programs, Red Lake reservation has all of the problems associated with U.S. rural poverty, as well as those more specifically afflicting many U.S. Indian reservations. Federal “Indian” program funding going directly to the Red Lake tribal council and housing authority was more than $11,684 for every adult Indian in Fiscal Year 2000 – about $3,800 more than the average per capita income for Indians at Red Lake. Additional thousands, per capita, are spent on federal program administration through several levels of bureaucracy, as well on costs of ‘direct services’ like health care through the Indian Health Service.

From the vantage of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake, the federal government’s multibillion-dollar “Indian” expenditures are a facet of U.S. colonialism, subsidizing ‘Indian’ people who have been “brought into Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land by the United States Government as an occupation force.”[160] Those billions of dollars also underwrite an extensive federal bureaucracy. According to Wub-e-ke-niew,

In 1970, A.I.M. calculated that there were 18 U.S. Government bureaucrats directly involved in Indian Affairs for every Indian. I knew the Bureau keeps meticulous track of every Federally Recognized Indian, and uses their Indians as well as White bureaucrats to watch Aboriginal Indigenous people.[161]

What’s really happening at Red Lake? It is significant that even seemingly straightforward demographic figures, like how many people live on there, is highly politicized and emphatically disputed.

Underneath the arguments, however, it is undeniable that the economic system at Red Lake depends heavily on external funding: government jobs, Social Security and veterans’ pensions, federal and other funding administered by the Tribal Council, various “poverty” program subsidies and other “transfer payments.” Comparatively little additional income comes from the sale of diminishing and in some instances nearly depleted resources, specifically including aspen ‘pulp sticks’ and (mostly black market) walleye pike, and from Casino revenues. There are a handful of small businesses (grocery stores, gas stations, and other consumer-oriented enterprises) on the reservation. Most are operated by the Tribal Council, some are owned by white families who have long-standing connections to Red Lake, and a few are owned by Métis Indians.

Part of a recent Indian Claims settlement was been invested by the Tribal Council in economic development, including the expansion of the casino on Chief Moose Dung’s old ‘reservation’ at Thief River Falls.[162] Per-capita income and other economic indexes vary by source and are disputed. Among some there is visible wealth, and among others readily apparent poverty.

Several Vantages

There are a number of distinct (although intermarried) groups living on, and associated with Red Lake reservation. The social cleavages run along several parameters, the most salient in the present context being derived from centuries of colonial processes and the relocation, intermarriage and redefinitions of ethnicity stemming from colonization and U.S. administration. There is more than one set of local terms used by members of each these groups to refer to the others, some couched in piquantly derogatory language, some reflecting internalization of U.S. “blood quantum” and “enrollment” classifications, and some indexing fairly large kinship groups by a dominant family’s surname. Group boundaries, designation of characteristics, and delineation of who is ‘central’ and who is marginal depend on both context and the positionality of the person who is doing the defining. Who has what kind of connection to Red Lake Indian reservation and the significant demarcations of “legitimate” identity, are arguable—and argued.

Even governmental structure at Red Lake is debatable, as are the sources of governmental authority. The most immediately visible governmental entity is the “Tribal Council,” which in its present incarnation was established under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1958, or, assert others, operates under an earlier constitution that was revised by the October 15, 1958 constitution, but was established in 1889 (in the context of federal “recognition” as a part of negotiations with the Minnesota Chippewa Commission),[163] or under the constitution of April 13, 1918 as Peter Graves’s “General Council.” There are those who claim that the Tribal Council is the legitimate government of a “Sovereign Indian Nation,” but there are others who emphatically state that the Tribal Council is a “puppet” of the United States, or that it has no legitimacy at all. The Tribal Council is a democracy ... the Tribal Council is a neocolonial dictatorship, “worse than Hitler” ... the Tribal Council is a Potemkin government comprised of sellout Indians lining their pockets at the expense of those whom they claim as a “constituency” ... there are many things said about the Tribal Council.

The other obvious government at Red Lake is the United States federal government, which, through several distinct bureaucracies, exercises a disputed but significant degree of direct, and indirect power. The sources from which the U.S. derives the authority it exercises at Red Lake are controversial, although the de facto reality includes millions of dollars annually in federal funding.

The State of Minnesota, and the governments of the several counties mapped onto reservation lands have very limited jurisdiction on the reservation. Beltrami County collected property taxes on the few parcels of fee patent land in the town of Redby[164] that remain in private ownership, but does not generally provide County services within the external boundaries of the reservation, with the significant exception of welfare administered by Beltrami County through a special “Red Lake office,” despite an appellate court decision that Red Lake Indians are not Beltrami County residents for the purposes of welfare.

As briefly discussed above, there have been a number of appellate cases addressing various facets of allocating jurisdiction between the state, federal, and tribal council governments at Red Lake. Other aspects of governmental jurisdiction are either subject to formal or ad hoc agreements, and/or continue to be contested.

Significant political influence exerted through overlapping “Good Ol’ Boys” networks, specifically including the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor) party, defense contractors who some claim are connected to the CIA, and corporate natural resources interests.

In the 1980s and 1990s a small group of indigenous people who state that the United States has no legitimate grounds for its claims to either land or jurisdiction at Red Lake, and that the Tribal Council is also illegitimate, since it was unilaterally established by the U.S. on unceded indigenous land. These people recognize only their spiritually grounded totemic patrilineages – the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems – and are emphatically egalitarian.

There is also a larger, fairly loosely organized group (or set of groups) who use some of the same terminology and who claim some of the same species of totemic beings (e.g. bears) in reference to their religiously-based clan system; one of the ‘medicine men’ from this latter group, Tommy Stillday, has played a fairly public role in both the Tribal Council and as a “medicine man” for the State legislature.

The politics and processes of political discourse at Red Lake are vigorously contested, and – perhaps in part because the tightly centralized ‘tribal government’ engendered by the B.I.A. has almost no ‘checks’ and balances’ – sometimes vitriolically personal.

What the B.I.A. has characterized as “volatile”[165] Indian politics on many reservations is exacerbated on the Red Lake reservation by a number of historical and situational particulars, and at stake are billions and perhaps trillions of dollars worth of land and resources, millions of dollars in annual federal funding, and extremely valuable cultural and symbolic assets, especially, in the wake of Wub-e-ke-niew’s challenges, including the purported ‘legitimacy’ of U.S. “Indian” identity. I have personally known people who have been threatened with death, physically assaulted, shot, and have friends who have died under suspicious circumstances—in connection with Red Lake politics.

Politics and land

To me, the place encompassed by the Red Lake reservation is profoundly beautiful. I have lived and worked on three continents, and I love that land like nowhere else in the world. Some others have described her as remote, harsh of climate, and even godforsaken. But to me, she is beautiful.

I do not know all that brings a person to love a certain place in the world – home – like no other, nor what makes one’s heart sing with joy at the crest of the last rise in the road homewards. Some of it’s the personal and family memories that are ‘held’ by the ‘natural environment,’ the intimate details of the landscape an inextricable part of the fabric of decades.

In a land still alive with indigenous ways of being, as Red Lake was until very recently, a part of the love of home is also the resonance of harmoniously living communities of plant, animal, spirit, and other beings who are the landscape, who have lived in concert with the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway near the shores of the Red Lakes since the last retreat of the glaciers about four hundred generations past.[166] The continuity of those vast and magnificently complex ancient communities is still sketched across the landscape: in the clearly human-influenced distributions of certain kinds of perennial plants, sugar-tap scars deep in the heartwood of ancient maple trees (Wub-e-ke-niew and I counted more than two thousand years of growth-rings in one such maple who had died some years previously, and that he finally cut for wood), similar scars discernable in the grain of antique maple furniture, deer-trails in isolated and relatively undisturbed swamp areas worn more than a foot into the earth, and the wordless but eloquent testimony given by local strains of garden crops like the two varieties of ‘Red Lake corn’ that were maintained by elderly gardeners into the 1980s, and which Wub-e-ke-niew and I continued to grow in our own gardens.

Wub-e-ke-niew described love as being at the foundation of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway social structure and personal identity,

We were totally secure with our identity as ourselves, as human beings, and of our being loved and belonging within the constellation of our relatives; within the context of our kinship-oriented society—we did not need external definitions of ourselves. [167]

Explicit kinship and love are also the bases for Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway interrelationships with the land. As Wub-e-ke-niew put it, we

showed our patriotism and our nationalism, our love for Grandmother Earth, in our forests, which we had kept beautiful, and our water, which was pristine and pure. Both the Europeans and their “Indians” have no respect for the land. It looks like a war zone here.[168]

The loving interrelationship between aboriginal indigenous people and ‘the land’ – those ancient communities of sentient beings nurtured and cherished through the millennia by people in whose language even the rocks are alive – was mutual.

In the context of life with the land, within the relatively unbroken circle of indigenous ways-of-being in that sliver of relatively untrammeled forest on the south shore of lower Red Lake, associating mostly with the few other surviving Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway elders and other like-minded friends, the depth of our interconnectedness with the land was at the very foundation of our being, like air and sunlight and the velvet darkness of night and gravity.

When he woke, early in the morning, no matter what the weather, Wub-e-ke-niew would go outside and breathe deeply. “Aah! It is a beautiful day,” he would say, and he meant it wholeheartedly – even when the temperature plunged below -50° and the wind-chill plunged to triple digits below zero.

Through the course of every day, there were countless moments when the beauty of some particular aspect of life resonated with joy to the very center of my spirit: the delicate chiming of winter-brittle snow crystals in the wind on the coldest of midwinter nights, the resplendent fatness of the toad who lived under our front steps and feasted on the insects who were attracted to our lights, the delicate beauty of the mayflowers and bloodroot and other perennials flowering across the forest floor in the early spring, the chiding of the swallow who nested in our outhouse and who would sit on the branches of a nearby tree urging anyone who (in her opinion) took ‘too long’ to hurry up…

Even the workaday aspects of our lives, like the physically demanding and potentially dangerous work of commercial fishing, were saturated with beauty:

The big lake had been glassy-smooth, occasional shreds of mist hovering near the surface of the water in the gray pre-dawn light. The nets were pulled from the water with the outboard motor shut off: as we pulled the nets into the boat, our efforts also moved the boat along the line of nets. The air was cool but not frosty, and breathing was inhaling a potent tonic for the spirit. The fish caught in the nets were still alive, and they shone like fire opals in liquid silver as they were pulled from the water in that pre-dawn light. As we worked our way along the line of nets in the still, early morning, the sky was transformed by the still-unseen sun into luminescent pink, and then into a vast golden-glowing dome, counterpointed by the silhouettes of great blue herons against the eastern sky, by the wheeling crying sea gulls, by the stately figures of pelicans floating behind the boat hoping for a handout. The mirrored surface of the water echoed the blazing symphony of the sky, and the sky resounded with the water, until it seemed as though we were working in the midst of a vast crescendo of living, singing light. The morning song of the lake climaxed when the great golden ball of the sun climbed above the horizon, sending rivers of molten fire in torrents across the water, turning the wispy patches of mist into golden streamers, igniting the heavens in the glory of a new day.[169]

I thought that I knew the real value of what we had and appreciated it fully, for example coming home after Wub-e-ke-niew and I had given a conference workshop at Itasca State Park to simply sit in the woods, cherishing the vibrant living spirit of our land (in contrast to the oppressively managed forest-exhibit at Lake Itasca).

But, there’s a poignant truth to the lyrics, “you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone.”[170] Deeply rooted at home, intentionally holding onto Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway ways-of-being and my Red Lake ‘center’ despite my weekly commute to the University of Minnesota during the last year and a half of Wub-e-ke-niew’s life, I did not fully see the full depth of the beauty which infused our lives at Red Lake until after I was exiled, until my life was forced into another frame of reference, re-rooted in land where Grandmother Earth’s vibrant indigenous spirit has been “conquered.”

Wub-e-ke-niew’s writing includes some sharply worded criticism of Euroamerican interrelationships with the land, for example,

Euro-American culture has never been in touch with reality, and the rape, plunder, and theft on these two Continents goes on. .... What kind of man would steal from his own grand-child? and leave piles of poisonous filth where the water once ran pristine and pure through magnificent forests? To me, it seems like only A*holes blinded by the mental illness of greed, would do what is being done. When what the Aboriginal Indigenous People have maintained for a hundred millennia on these two Continents is gone, there won’t be any more—anywhere. “You are here,” and what are your grandchildren going to do, move to the moon and breathe vacuum?[171]

But, I did not really comprehend the full extent of the damage to almost all of the vast stretches of this continent, until compelled by exile to call that plundered land “home.”

I have returned to Red Lake twice, since exile. The first time was a year after Wub-e-ke-niew’s death, to invite his friends and relatives to the memorial feast that is, by tradition, held a year after someone’s death. A friend, quick-witted and fast on his feet, drove me around to the homes of people whom I knew no other way of contacting. I figured that the traditional sanctity of memorial feasts was strong enough that the tribal establishment would not arrest me (but sat low in the passenger seat anyway). We were not stopped during the several hours it took to ‘make the rounds’ to the homes of those elders to whom Wub-e-ke-niew, in my understanding, would have wanted to extend a personal invitation.

The second return was in September of 1992. Danish journalist Michael von Bülow, at that time writing for what he described as “the oldest continuously published newspaper in the world,” Berlingske Tidende, had come to Minnesota in the course of researching a project he titled “Contemporary life and self-perceptions of Native Americans living in the U.S.,” and asked me to ‘guide’ him through several northern Minnesota reservations.[172]

In a rented car, accompanied by the international press: I discussed the ‘exile’ situation with von Bülow, said that there was a slight risk of my getting shot for “resisting arrest” but that his presence as a Danish journalist made that very unlikely, and urged him to reconsider his proposed four-reservation itinerary in terms of the relative vastness of this continent (Minnesota is more than five times the size of Denmark).

Von Bülow and I came to Red Lake from the west, driving from White Earth to the casino at Thief River Falls, and then along Highway 1 to the western boundary of the diminished reservation. I asked von Bülow to stop at the boundary-line, and – briefly because of the journalist waiting in his rented van – stood near the roadside, put out tobacco and said a small prayer.

The spirits of the land rose to greet me as we drove along that highway, that road that I’d driven countless times in the preceding decades, across the swamps and through the stands of scrubby second-growth oak, past the pine plantations and clear-cut and expanses of fire-blasted aspen. With the familiar gentle contours of one long-beloved, and a fiercely powerful love that I had not even imagined as possible, the spirits of the land embraced me, welcomed me.

I rode in the passenger-seat of the Danish journalist’s rented van, chronicling local history and pointing out examples of ‘forestry’ practices and narrating other bits and pieces that I thought von Bülow would be interested in … and tried not to cry.

Only after long absence of exile, did I realize the degree to which “love of the land” is a mutual relationship.

Colonial transformations and genocide

“The story” of anywhere, at least from an egalitarian indigenous vantage, is a chronicle woven of many voices across space and time, a balanced blend of personal narrative and the potent legendary archetypes that are the “language that creates the world.”[173] The stories of Red Lake include the myriad narratives of colonization, among these the would-be ‘heroic’ faerie-tales of the colonizers ‘conquering’ the ‘wilderness’ and ‘vanquishing’ the ‘savages’[174] as told by the colonizers.

The stories of Red Lake include the complex set of ‘histories’ of the Métis: the genesis of a ‘new people’ transcending their paternal legacy of oppression and often involuntary departure from their mostly Mediterranean fatherlands; the melding of language and tradition and ways-of-being in the crucibles of chaotic change wrought by ‘European contact’; and the processes of federal redefinition that have transformed “Métis” and “half-breed” and “French-and-Indian” people into the majority of the “Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians,” sometimes proclaimed as the “Red Lake Ojibwe Nation.”

There are numerous and eloquent regional Métis Ojibwe authors, among them Edward Benton-Benai, Walter Bresette, Ignatia Broker, Maria Campbell, Brenda Child, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Basil Johnson, Bill Lawrence, Maude Kegg, Jim Northrup, Thomas Peacock, Sun Bear, Anton Treuer, Gerald Vizenor, and William Warren, and they have spun the threads of their own people’s story from diverse understandings and vantages.

Beyond those more recent narratives, the story of Red Lake begins in “the beginning of human time,” with the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.[175] And, severing the continuity of aboriginal indigenous being rooted in the very dawn of humanity: genocide.

Wub-e-ke-niew and I did not come easily to fully apprehending the magnitude of that genocide, to relinquishing hope for future possibilities to the extent that he wrote, two months before his death:

I am among the last of my people. All of my relatives of my Dodems were massacred in the genocide against my people. They are gone. To label my remembrance of my relatives who were killed in the continent-wide holocaust of half a millennium, as “racism” is bad manners and no respect, as well as being active complicity in the cover-up of the White man’s perverted philosophy of “my brother’s keeper” which is an euphemism for genocide. When I reach down into the soil, when I touch Grandmother Earth, the bones of my ancestors for hundreds of millennia are right here. My Indodemian may be dead, but I am not alone. I am still connected to the Earth here.[176]

In the early chapters of We Have The Right To Exist, officially published in early 1995 and written as more-or-less final draft through the preceding three years, Wub-e-ke-niew expressed hope for the “generations yet to come” in terms of his own youthful embodiment of that hope for the indigenous elders of his grandfather’s generation in the late 1920s and early 1930s:

… some of the elders held me too tightly on their laps, and cried—for what had happened and all that they had lost, but also because a few Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway children were still alive, and there was hope for the generations yet to come.[177]

In the conclusion to We Have The Right To Exist, written a few months before the book’s publication and a lifetime after the deaths of those elderly Holocaust survivors who held young Wub-e-ke-niew “too tightly on their laps” and cried in remembrance and in hope, Wub-e-ke-niew foresaw only the iffy possibility of human survival,

If there is to be hope for anybody in the future, we have to work together to recreate a network of harmonious societies which provide for all people. More than a hundred years ago, Bishop Whipple said, “this is a crisis in your history; there are two paths before you, the one path leads to life and the other path leads to death.”[178] The Western Europeans and other civilized peoples are standing at that place now, where two very different paths are before them. Their decision is no longer up to them alone, because the consequences affect everybody. We must all find a way to work harmoniously together, to create a balanced world for the generations yet to come.[179]

Wub-e-ke-niew and I had hoped that publication of We Have The Right To Exist would bring public awareness of what was really happening at Red Lake, as well as catalyzing at least the beginnings of the public’s interest in indigenous understanding and in working toward harmonious cooperative efforts in, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it, creating “a balanced world for the generations yet to come.”

Since Wub-e-ke-niew’s death, some chapters from We Have The Right To Exist have become fairly widely used as a text in “Native American Philosophy” courses, but despite our fervent hopes, in the years right after the book’s publication there was no voicing of contemporary Euroamerican outrage about the genocide against Aboriginal Indigenous peoples or even about the political and economic oppression on Indian reservations. There were a few reviews of the book[180] – both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the regional Bemidji Pioneer declined to review it – and the northcountry public television station produced and aired an interview with Wub-e-ke-niew as a part of their locally produced ViewPoints North series.[181] But, for the most part, We Have The Right To Exist was met with resounding silence.

Wub-e-ke-niew was not surprised at the non-responsive silence with which the vast majority of the dominating society met We Have The Right To Exist. As he’d written detailing “Two World Views” in that book,

The hierarchical world-view of Western Civilization has survived, been refined, sophisticated and expanded over the past six thousand years. The imaginary and symbolic worlds of its purported reality are remarkably consistent in internal structure. Nearly every possible loophole through which a person might catch a glimpse of what the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other non-hierarchical peoples understand as reality has been blocked by diversionary tactics, re-interpretation, automatic mind-blocking processes of denial, and emotionally-laden stereotypes. Because of this culturally-imposed blocking of information which is threatening to the hierarchy, I would be greatly surprised if even one percent of the people who read this understand what I am writing. I am not questioning that the people who are reading this are intelligent people. I am simply observing that the boxes of compartmentalized thinking into which the heirs of Western Civilization are forced by their culture, are extremely difficult to escape. Regimentation is an important part of any hierarchical culture, and even brilliant trained observers have a mental block, buttressed by several millennia of hierarchical cultural and linguistic evolution.[182]

Wub-e-ke-niew was quite clearly aware of the reality that the present generations, “children growing up now … do not have any understanding” of the foundations of aboriginal indigenous being, for example of “what a real forest means.”[183]

He understood far more deeply than most formally accredited social scientists, that indigenous peoples’ culture and society are greater by orders of magnitude, than the sum of individuals’ personal knowledge, as well as the devastating degree to which

Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems / extended family, language and culture have been destroyed—the people of my grandfather’s generation were the last of my people who experienced anything resembling an intact society, and even in my grandfather’s youth our people were under heavy genocidal attack. As a child I spoke my native language with my grandfather and other older relatives, and came to understand my Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway heritage through my grandfather; but what remained of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in my childhood was shattered fragments of a people and a culture, many who were the last of their Dodem, survivors of a holocaust who would take the living Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language with them to their graves.[184]

Near the end of his life, he came to the undeniable understanding that the next generation, even his own children, were no longer Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway – we, the people. He stood at edge not only of his own grave, but also at the very end of his people’s history, the threshold of extinction, and wrote:

After being confronted with undeniable documentary evidence of the extent of the destruction wrought upon my people, I have finally come to terms with the harsh reality that I tried to deny for most of my life: the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, which interpreted into English means “We, the People,” are gone; our culture has been destroyed. Those few of us who survive as individuals and tattered shreds of Dodems have some understanding our identity; a tiny percentage of our Aboriginal Indigenous land—ravaged and plundered by the Westerners, her ecology wrecked or teetering on the brink of collapse; we have our Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway perspective and memories of the time when our language lived. We are no longer “We, the People” living in what seemed the eternal and infinite harmony of our Dodems; we are extinct in terms of the culture and people who we once were. What we have lost is almost beyond comprehension, but there comes a time to let go of the distinctly non-Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway emotion of anger, and live in harmony with reality, in accordance with the non-violent values of my people.

What remains for me to do is to offer what I know to all of the people who are here now (I won’t say “black” or “white” or “yellow” because everybody has been mongrelized by centuries of Western war-and-peace). The history of Western Civilization has come full circle upon itself, and they are coming to the end of their paradigm. The descendants of the immigrants and invaders are here, and probably have no place else to go. The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway tradition is a part of this land; our spirit and our ghosts are inseparable from this living part of Grandmother Earth. The time has come for the newcomers to learn how to address the violence which is an inherent part of their culture; to treat other people as human beings rather than exploiting them, and to live in harmony with this land and with themselves.[185]

Chapter 8 – Acknowledging reality

We began working on a comprehensive genealogy of Red Lake somewhat unintentionally. I was compiling a family history for my children, and in the process of doing this, I asked the B.I.A. Red Lake Agency Office for the birthdates of my great-grandfather and grandfather. I knew who my ancestors were, and approximately when they were born, but did not have the exact date. The Bureau told me, “Oh, we don’t have those records. They burned up in a fire.” Shortly thereafter, my wife had to go to the East Coast, and I asked her if she would visit the National Archives, and look for these records. She returned with several thousand pages of copies of archival documents, and the rest is, as they say, history.

– Wub-e-ke-niew[186]

Wub-e-ke-niew came home from that visit to the B.I.A. Red Lake Agency Office, outraged: the Superintendent had also told him that even if the B.I.A. still had those records, they would be “confidential.” How can they possibly claim “that information about my own ancestors is ‘confidential,’” he fumed.

That evening, as we were sitting at home drinking after-dinner coffee and conversing softly by kerosene lamplight, immersed in the gentle sentient silence of the forests, in which one could sometimes hear the voices of the ancestors since time immemorial, Wub-e-ke-niew turned to me with sudden insight. “You know,” he said, “the Government keeps their records in triplicate.”

Archival research and B.I.A. documents

The Internet has transformed the processes of doing research. In the mid-1980s, the Internet was in its very early stages of development, mostly experimental networks among military and academic computers. Libraries were just beginning the process of computerizing their card catalogs, and researchers still relied mostly on printed volumes cataloguing the highlights of exceptional library collections. If a person wanted to know about the holdings of the Minnesota Historical Society or any major regional library, one physically went to the library and looked through the card catalog.

Easily accessible online research catalogs, for example the National Archives web pages detailing the Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1793 – 1989,[187] were non-existent. Relying mostly on public ‘library privileges’ at Bemidji State University library and inter-library loan through the Bemidji Public Library, Wub-e-ke-niew and I had access to specialized research resources like Edward E. Hill’s Preliminary inventory of the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,[188] and the B.S.U. library had a solid “Indian” collection and a fairly complete set of late-nineteenth century Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.[189] We started looking for those allegedly “confidential” records.

Wub-e-ke-niew had a fairly clear sense of the kinds of records the B.I.A. generated: from his encyclopedic knowledge of Red Lake oral history, his observations of the government operations, and from his spending time during A.I.M.’s takeover of the B.I.A.’s Washington, D.C. headquarters in November 1972 “studying the colonizer”: in the ‘file rooms’ of the occupied building, reading the B.I.A.’s internal records.

B.I.A. documents, 1972

Some of those B.I.A. documents created a firestorm when the Washington Post’s syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, lauded as “the last of the old-fashioned muckrakers” on his retirement in July 2004,[190] published a series of columns detailing the abuses they chronicled.

Jack Anderson described those columns, mostly published in December 1972:[191]

Day after day we published stories pieced together from these documents—columns which told of Indian murders that went uninvestigated; of white trading posts that swindled the Indians with impunity; of Indian land leased out by the government to corporations and left strewn with timber wastes, its earth torn up, its waters polluted with mining poisons; of how the government, instead of giving special protection to tribal lands, removed them from the ordinary safeguards of the National Environmental Protection Act; of treaties which had guaranteed millions of acres of land but which delivered only thousands; of protected white interests at this moment illegally draining off the life-giving water of tribes in various parts of the country … despoiled of their water under the eyes of a government which systematically washes on its commitments.[192]

One of those columns, headlined “Slaying of Youth Angers Chippewas,”[193] involves the death of Wub-e-ke-niew’s nephew,[194] Brian Desjarlait, who was killed by B.I.A. police. That column also touched on other longstanding problems at Red Lake, including more than 40% unemployment and “median family income … a stark $1,300”; environmental devastation; a “bleak” lack of decent housing, roads, public transportation, and other infrastructure despite “several decades of federal ‘help’”; and charges of exploitation by federally-licensed “trading posts.”

A detailed comparison of conditions at Red Lake as reported by Anderson in 1972 and present conditions is beyond the scope of this paper. The short summary is that some problems have gotten better (for example, there are more paved roads, and more Euroamerican-standard housing, not all of it well-built or adequately maintained); some problems are far worse (for example, the “rich … timber [and] fish” mentioned by Anderson are depleted); some problems, like reservation violence, continue unabated or worsened; and much of the responsibility – and liability – for reservation problems has been transferred from the B.I.A. to the tribal council through the council’s administration of federal programs.[195]

The abuses at Red Lake chronicled in Jack Anderson’s nationally syndicated column included environmental destruction, which Anderson characterized as “attempts to help” that had “more often than not, wound up hindering the Indians.”[196] Anderson wrote it in 1972:

“About 15 years ago,” reports one study, “the federal government undertook a dredging operation of the channel of the Red Lake River. [It] destroyed one of the great natural habiutats for fish and wildlife plus one of the best nesting grounds for ducks in the United States. It also put many Chippewas out of the hunting and trapping business.[197]

Despite critical exposure in Anderson’s nationally syndicated column, the B.I.A.’s policy of environmental destruction continued, including further destruction in Red Lake River area advocated in the B.I.A.’s 1979 “development” proposal,[198] much of which was carried out under the supervision of the tribal council’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Wub-e-ke-niew was sharply critical of what he understood as ecocide[199] and deliberate efforts by the United States at further ‘starvation into submission’ by destruction of indigenous permaculture, including that detailed in the B.I.A.’s 1979 economic development plans:

This plan, written under contract with the B.I.A., and endorsed by the [Red Lake] I.R.A. Tribal Council, recommends degradation of our environment … The plan endorses blasting duck nesting sites “with ammonia nitrate”[200], and recommends clear-cut “land clearing” with mechanical shearing blades[201], along with “machine scalping” of the land, application of 2-4D, 2-4-5T and other poisons[202], and elimination of “mature stands,”[203] meaning wholesale destruction of balanced Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway forests, in order to make “tree farms.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs writes, “Despite conflicting opinions, stand conversion [i.e., demolishing intact forests] will occur.”[204] The White planners also note “such a program will necessitate changes in certain activities and attitudes that may not be entirely acceptable to tribal members [Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway].”[205] It may need to be reiterated here that the B.I.A.’s Indians are not the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and in fact that the Bureau’s Indian élite expects to make money from this ecological devastation.

An August 2004 Internet search[206] indicates that the Red Lake tribal council’s DNR remains oriented toward “management” that, from an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway perspective, is ecologically devastating.

National media and ‘hot’ documents

I spoke with Jack Anderson’s investigative reporter, Les Whitten, by telephone on August 21, 2004. I had written a few paragraphs about the “Broken Treaty Papers,” based mostly on what Wub-e-ke-niew had told me, mentioning Whitten’s involvement with the B.I.A. documents accessed by activists during their occupation of the B.I.A. I called Whitten, now retired, to invite his comments on what I had written – the kind of phone call that a reporter routinely makes when working on a news story: “this is my understanding of what happened, this is what so-and-so quoted you as saying ... your comments?” Whitten generously talked with me for more than an hour, and his insights and reminiscences add a whole new dimension to the narrative below.[207]

In the fall of 1972, the American Indian Movement joined with other activist Indian organizations in a transcontinental Caravan that became known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. In what Wub-e-ke-niew believed was a deliberate ‘set-up’ leading to the takeover and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the visible leadership of A.I.M., Caravan organizers had neglected to make adequate accommodations for the hundreds of Indians[208] arriving in Washington, D.C. On November 3^rd, several hundred protestors, according to Wub-e-ke-niew directed by Caravan organizers to “go ask the B.I.A. for help,” stormed and took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, on C Street between 18^th and 19^th Streets N.W. Wub-e-ke-niew described how drum songs were broadcast over loudspeakers, and how deeply moved he was to hear the drum again “where it had not been heard for more than a century.”

Richard Milhouse Nixon was re-elected as president of the United States on November 7, 1972.

A.I.M. occupation of the B.I.A. ended two days after the election, on November 9^th. According to Les Whitten, the President’s special counsel, Leonard Garment, negotiated with A.I.M. representatives, including Hank Adams,[209] who has described himself as Assiniboine-Sioux (Ft. Peck).[210] “It was agreed that the Indians – I’ll just go back to those times and call them what they were called then,” Whitten said after musing about the nuanced meanings of ‘Indian’ and ‘Native American’ and the identity politics that has become entwined with such names.

According to Wub-e-ke-niew, the National Guard arrived en masse, with shields and armored riot gear, intending to storm the building and drive the Indians out. The militant Indians had lined up I.B.M. Selectric typewriters and other heavy objects on the rooftop parapet, ready to drop on the National Guardsmen’s heads as they approached the building’s doors. I.B.M. Selectric Typewriters, the ultimate American Imperial office machine of the late 1960s and early 1970s, were manufactured with ‘decorator colors’ and the ubiquitous aerodynamic design of the early ‘space age,’ they weighed nearly forty-five pounds.[211] “The Guardsmen were wearing helmets,” Wub-e-ke-niew said, “but they looked up and saw all those typewriters” – and retreated. He chuckled, and added, “The typewriter is mightier than the sword!”

Whitten credited the serious threats by A.I.M. leaders – including Russell Means and the brothers Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt – with forcing the Nixon administration to negotiate towards a peaceful withdrawal from the B.I.A. building.

According to Les Whitten, the Bellecourt brothers and Russell Means, said to Nixon’s people, “well if you don’t commit, if you don’t make some sort of compromise to make up for what you did, then we’re going to stay here and if you attack us, the children will die.”

“Nixon didn’t want that to happen,” Whitten continued, so “they got an agreement that all the Indians would be allowed to leave the building. They were escorted by the F.B.I. and the Metropolitan Police. Little did the F.B.I. know that they had spirited out – maybe it was a ton [of documents] – they spirited those papers out and the F.B.I. and the police didn’t know that the papers were going out with the Indians: they were under blankets in cars and busses, they were in the trunks of cars, they were everywhere. We called them the ‘Broken Treaty Papers,’ they were searching all over America for them.”

“Every reporter wanted to get hold of those papers, and they knew that those papers would make good news stories and legal cases,” Whitten reminisced. The Indian occupation of the B.I.A. headquarters had been front-page news, the F.B.I. had organized a nationwide paper chase, and “every reporter was looking for those papers.”

Les Whitten had a loyal national audience with the Jack Anderson column, an impressive portfolio of civil rights advocacy, a reputation for tenacious investigative reporting, and personal integrity. As Whitten put it, “I had written more Indian stuff in my column than any other [investigative] reporter … Russell [Means] and the Bellecourt brothers and I guess your husband and Hank Adams[212] all decided that the person to give the papers to was me.”

The route he took to get the papers was circuitous. Hank Adams called Les Whitten and they set up a meeting in Tempe, Arizona. “I went to Tempe. I got on the airplane and flew that night, the very same night that I got the call from Hank.” He flew “down to Phoenix and either I got a car or somebody met me, and took me to Tempe. “That’s where Russell was, and Russell’s brother. Hank was out of the picture, he set it up for me, Hank was a great negotiator but he had no real power” inside the American Indian Movement, “he had a small organization called … something like ‘Survival of American Indian.’ I went down there [to Arizona] because the real custodian of the papers was A.I.M.”

“Russell had us in a bowling alley because it was so noisy in the bowling alley that the bugs that the government had at that time wouldn’t pick [our conversation] up, and that’s where we made arrangements.”

Russell asked Whitten, “‘what can you do?’ and I said, ‘well, I can do a series of columns on them, if I can get the papers,’ and Russell said, ‘we can get the papers, make them available to you.’”

“I had my credit card, and Jack [Anderson] gave me a couple of hundred dollar bills, so I got on the airplane with Russell’s brother and another man … and we flew up there [to Minneapolis-St. Paul]. Russell’s brother drank a good deal … so I’m buying drinks for the two Indians and I’m thinking that, ‘I don’t think that this is going to come to anything.’”

“We got to Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Russell’s brother and the other Indian were sober enough to make contact with Clyde and, I think, Vernon,” who met them at the airport. “Clyde had a carbine.” Whitten explained to me that carbines were used during World War II, they “are smaller than a rifle, they were carried by second lieutenants … And, he’d filed down a part to make the thing into an automatic, it was a small but very good weapon … he had it in the trunk of his car. I thought ‘Oh my god, we’re going to get in a gunfight and somebody’s going to get killed, maybe me.’” Whitten paused, remembering. “By the way I paid all of the airfare.”

“We went to a motel, and when we got there, Vernon or Clyde said, ‘I’m going to give you some of these papers and we’re going to go out and get some beer.’ I had a portable typewriter with me.”

Whitten, an experienced newsman and self-described fast writer, “worked hard on that story, and I really felt that it was going to be a great scoop.” He was familiar with the issues, “and also I’d fought hard for Indian rights, when I was with Hearst,”[213] but, Whitten added, while writing for the Washington Post he’d focused more on what, at that time, were called “Black rights” – as an important issue in the community where he lived and worked.

Whitten mused about the difficulties of writing about Indian issues. “Every story took more time than it was worth,” he said. “If there are 600,000 Indians, then there might as well be “600,000 tribes, nobody could agree on anything.”

During that August 2004 telephone conversation, Whitten and I chatted for a little while about Indian politics and journalism, and then Whitten returned to his recollections of that winter night in a Minneapolis motel, with a pile of purloined papers for which the F.B.I. was conducting a nationwide search, hard-drinking militant hosts, and his portable typewriter, writing news stories for Jack Anderson’s nationally syndicated column.

“I got one of them done before they went out, and they said ‘Oh, that’s fine.’ I had written … very rapidly but well, I’m very fast writer, and a very biased writer because I was in favor of the Indians.”

After he had skimmed through the stack of documents and written the first news story, Whitten said, “‘If you think I’ll write these stories, and if you think that I’m worthy to write these stories,’ I said, ‘why don’t I go out and drink beer with you?’ And one of them said, ‘Oh, no, we know how you white men are with firewater.’ It was one of the funniest things I’d ever experienced.”

“So, they liked the story,” but wanted to go out drinking. “So out they went, and that was the last I saw of them. I wrote two more stories and finally went to sleep, and then they didn’t come back, they didn’t come back that night and they didn’t come back in the morning, and I didn’t know where they were. So, I called up A.I.M. headquarters and I don’t know who answered the phone, and I said, ‘where are those papers?’ and he said, ‘They’re in an old Victrola case,’ and I said ‘Where are they?’ and he said, ‘I can’t cut ‘em loose until we get permission from Russell Means’ brother or Vernon or Clyde.’”

“I said, “Goddammit those papers are supposed to be here, get those papers over here if you expect to have me to write about them,’” and whoever answered the phone said, “‘I’ve got to get permission.’”

Wub-e-ke-niew had been at the A.I.M. office when Les Whitten called. He decided to bring the documents to the motel where Whitten was staying.

“He did show me all of those papers, a huge amount” Whitten remembered, “and I told him, ‘I can’t take all of those papers.’ I went through them hurriedly – I was used to reading stolen documents. I didn’t need a lot of land records about who stole which land,” he said, but instead wanted to focus on policy and broader patterns, “how the Indians were tricked out of it.”

As Les Whitten sorted through the stacks of papers, selecting what he thought to be “the best of them,” Wub-e-ke-niew took the ones he’d chosen, and went out to photocopy them.

After he had returned from one photocopying trip, Whitten commented that Wub-e-ke-niew hadn’t been gone very long, “the papers were newly Xeroxed, still warm.” Whitten asked him where he was making all those photocopies. Wub-e-ke-niew, as national treasurer of A.I.M., had a certain ‘celebrity’ status even though he – as he put it – “kept a low profile.” He had, as he told Whitten, walked down the street to the B.I.A.’s Minneapolis Area Office, and asked to use their photocopy machine.

According to Wub-e-ke-niew, Les Whitten “lay back on the hotel-room bed where he had been sitting, reading those documents,” consumed with laughter. “‘The F.B.I. is looking’ all over for those documents, he laughed, ‘and you …’”

“That’s exactly what I said,” Whitten acknowledged when I read the quote back to him during our telephone conversation thirty-two years later, “it tickled me no end that Jack and I had gotten a hold of those documents by flying all the way to Tempe and back to St. Paul and manipulated things so that they were there, and the F.B.I. was screwing around all over the country, they had hundreds of people looking for those papers.”

As soon as he had photocopies of the documents he wanted, Whitten went back to Washington. “I wasn’t going to screw around with Vernon and Clyde and those guys with hangovers.”

Les Whitten brought those hundreds of pages of documents back to Washington “in a suitcase. … I was afraid that somebody would see them at the airport and all my work would be in vain.”[214]

“I got on the airplane and brought ‘em back,” Whitten recalled. Even in an era of spectacular leaks of government secrets – including the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, the “Broken Treaty Papers” were ‘hot.’ In addition to the columns Whitten wrote on his portable typewriter in the Minneapolis motel room – “Jack re-wrote everything, he was much peppier” – Jack Anderson and Les Whitten “wrote eleven straight columns called the Trail of Broken Treaties columns, and we wrote one after the other and it fried the asses of the F.B.I., and we got the papers mainly because Hank Adams trusted me and he had every reason to.”

. The contents of those documents were deadly serious. As Jack Anderson wrote:

Day after day we published stories pieced together from these documents-columns which told of Indian murders that went uninvestigated; of white trading posts that swindled the Indians with impunity; of Indian land strewn with timber wastes, its earth torn up, its waters polluted with mining poisons. . . . I occasionally yielded to the temptation to make sport of the tribulations of the FBI, whose agents were tripping over their nightsticks in a dozen states, and had gotten no closer to the Indian documents than the quotations they read in our column.[215]

The B.I.A.’s documents were subsequently returned to the federal government, many of them with Hank Adams as an intermediary.

The F.B.I. finally ‘caught’ Les Whitten and Hank Adams, as they were in the process of returning a batch of documents. As Whitten remembers it, “by that time, the American Indian Movement had been infiltrated: a young Chicano infiltrated,” claiming he was an Apache. “This guy was posing as an Apache militant and I got arrested with the papers: me, Hank Adams, and an Indian woman named Anita Collins … and we got put in jail for the day.”

In the 1980s, Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my research uncovered additional abuses by the federal government – including clear documentation of deliberate genocide. After considering it at some length, Wub-e-ke-niew telephoned Les Whitten, and asked him if he would be interested in doing further news coverage. Whitten told him that he couldn’t.

I had been sitting next to Wub-e-ke-niew as he talked with Whitten on the telephone, and saw his clear disappointment.

Wub-e-ke-niew had heard that after publication of the Jack Anderson columns detailing some of the most damning of the documents ‘borrowed’ from the B.I.A. in 1972, Les Whitten had been arrested and, according to the stories circulating on the ‘moccasin telegraph’ at that time, jailed for refusing to reveal his sources. Wub-e-ke-niew had also heard that Whitten was beaten by police while in custody, and suffered permanent injuries in consequence. (Wub-e-ke-niew, like almost every other “Indian” man of his generation, had been arrested more than once for simply ‘being Indian,’[216] and police brutality was something he had experienced firsthand.)

“His back,” Wub-e-ke-niew said, believing he understood the reason for Whitten’s turn-down and envisioning the pain he was still enduring on behalf of the people whose identities he had refused to reveal. “His back.”

When I read my draft paragraph about that phone conversation to Les Whitten, nearly twenty years later, he told me, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.” I described the conversation as I’d heard it, sitting next to Wub-e-ke-niew, and detailed some of the context, including the contents of some of the documents that Wub-e-ke-niew wanted Whitten to write about, and Wub-e-ke-niew’s belief that Whitten had been permanently injured, beaten by police while protecting his sources.

“He went to his grave, thinking that!” Whitten said. “They never touched me, except to put on the handcuffs.”

He did not remember the specifics of that particular telephone conversation with Wub-e-ke-niew, Whitten told me, but, “my guess it that I didn’t ‘get it,’ that what he told me was not explicit enough for me to write in a popular column, but that’s going back 17 years, and I can’t remember” the details. “My guess is, and this is just a guess, that I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me, that he thought proved the genocide … I was not convinced that he had any proof that the federal government was killing off Indian leaders.”

“Criminal possession” of information?

The January 31, 1973[217] arrest of syndicated columnist Jack Anderson’s associate, Les Whitten, was in the context of then-president Richard Nixon’s longstanding general antagonism toward the news media, as well as in retaliation for Anderson’s publication of “all kinds of embarrassing – and classified – secrets about Vietnam”[218] and detailed information about the building Watergate scandal, as well as other “damaging”[219] information.

Whitten was arrested as a part of much broader efforts by the Nixon administration’s efforts to intimidate journalists, including Jack Anderson and his staff – including federal agents’ discussion of “options” like “drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, staging a fatal mugging,”[220] according Anderson biographer Mark Feldstein.[221]

The American Civil Liberties Union, in an October 1973 pamphlet quoting the Declaration of Independence[222] and urging the impeachment of Richard Nixon, describes the administration’s Watergate-era climate of intimidation:

Threats of criminal prosecution were made against The New York Times and The Washington Post following publication of the Pentagon Papers and against The New York Times again in the fall of 1972 when it published an anti-Nixon advertisement. Les Whitten of columnist Jack Anderson’s staff was arrested following the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Tom Oliphant of The Boston Globe was arrested while covering the occupation of Wounded Knee. Charges against Whitten and Oliphant were subsequently dropped.[223]

Although Les Whitten assured me, in our August 2004 telephone conversation, that he was not beaten by police, he did spend a day in jail, “the bastards put me in with a couple of murderous drug addicts, and those guys told me how awful the press was …”

Federal prosecutors were, as Whitten put it, “ready to give me heavy time,” ten years imprisonment for “for possession of government property with intent to convert it” to his own use.[224] He was pressured to reveal the names of the people who had given him the documents:

Before the Grand Jury, through my lawyer, I was told that I gave them my sources they would drop the charges against me. My lawyer came to me and said that they would drop charges, and I said ‘I can’t do that.’ I was scared to death that I would have to jail, but I still didn’t do it.[225]

Les Whitten, Hank Adams, and Anita Collins had some compelling evidence that they were, in fact, caught in the process of returning documents to the federal government. Adams had made a well-documented appointment with officials at the B.I.A. to receive the documents, as well as keeping receipts from the F.B.I. for his previous return of other batches of documents and other property.[226]

Then, according to Whitten, “two F.B.I. agents who were to the right of Tamerlane, one was a supervisor: one of those F.B.I. agents found a note at the B.I.A. saying that Hank was coming over that morning but not specifying why. Also, Hank had written the address of the F.B.I. agent handling the case on the boxes. … These two men said that they were not going to lie, so I was free then, because … there were two agents who were willing to tell the truth.”[227]

Through his attorney, Whitten reached an agreement with the government that “whatever I testified to it would not reveal my sources, and the prosecutor was not going to ask me any questions” that would require him to reveal his sources. “They had me before the Grand Jury,” he said, “and they returned something like an ‘ignoramus,’ meaning ‘we are going to ignore the charges’ against me.”

Les Whitten’s attorney, Herbert “Jack” Miller,[228] is still practicing law in Washington, D.C. “He was an absolutely wonderful man,” Whitten told me, “Oftentimes on the anniversary of my release, I’ve called up Jack and thanked him again: they were ready to give me heavy time, they were serious about putting me in jail.”

“It was on the basis of my refusing to give out my sources that the Iroquois made me blood brother.”

B.I.A. documents, mid 1980s

In the kerosene lamplight of our backwoods cabin, Wub-e-ke-niew and I discussed Red Lake oral history, federal government policy, Wub-e-ke-niew’s knowledge of government bureaucracy and operations, and – beyond the “eighteen bureaucrats for every Indian”[229] and the oppressive “surveillance” of the B.I.A., the kinds of records that the government kept that were likely to be publicly accessible. We scrutinized the bibliographies in books and articles, studying where documents similar to the ones sought, were archived. We wrote Freedom of Information Act letters. Financially constrained by our embeddedness in the ‘subsistence’ reservation economy where real unemployment hovered around 90% and gas to Bemidji and a few dollars for photocopying made substantial inroads into our monthly budget, we also wrote innumerable letters seeking research funding.

And finally, with the gift of an airline ticket, a thousand dollars in inheritance from my grandmother, a letter of “reference” from the Catholic priest at Red Lake,[230] a black leather “city jacket” that a family member thought would help me “pass” relatively inconspicuously among the capitol city bourgeoisie, and the enduring friendship of a college roommate who lived in the Washington D.C. area, and who fed me, and gave me a place to sleep during the hours the National Archives, Smithsonian, and Library of Congress were closed to researchers, I set off for Washington, D.C. with a prioritized “wish list.” The first item on our list: the purportedly “confidential” birth dates of Wub-e-ke-niew’s grandfather Bah-wah-we-nind and great-grandfather Bah-se-nos.

In the mid-1980s, a would-be researcher entered the National Archives building through the ‘research entrance,’ on Pennsylvania Avenue between 9^th and 7^th Streets. I showed the guards my Minnesota drivers license and the letter of recommendation from St. Mary’s Catholic Mission, applied for a Researcher Identification Card, and made an appointment with a staff member to discuss my research interests and obtain institutional approval to examine specific archival documents.

I no longer have the “wish list” I took to the National Archives – all of Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my records were seized a week after he died. But, it was a fairly short list, beginning with documentation of Wub-e-ke-niew’s ancestors, and including the “1889 Census” and other records relating to the 1889 negotiations with the Minnesota Chippewa Commission (which resulted in the federal government’s taking about three million acres of land, forests and lake from the Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway), documentation of the ecologically devastating federal ‘forestry’ policy [logging] at Red Lake, documentation of the federal government’s involvement in writing the 1958 Constitution and subsequent transfer of power to Roger Jourdain’s “tribal council,” and records detailing policies and practices at the Catholic and federal “Indian schools” at Red Lake.

On the advice of the National Archives’ staffer working with researchers interested in “Record Group 75”[231] – Bureau of Indian Affairs records held by the National Archives (N.A.R.A.) – I began by reading through the “Indian Census Rolls.” Those year-by-year listings of the people over whom the B.I.A. claimed jurisdiction as Indians ‘belonging’ on a particular Indian reservation were maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, according to N.A.R.A. staff, “as required by an act of July 4, 1884 (23 Stat. 98).[232]^, [233] The B.I.A. began maintaining “Indian Rolls” for every Indian reservation under federal jurisdiction in 1885, and these rolls were, as I discovered at the Archives, published on microfilm by the National Archives. Despite the Red Lake B.I.A.’s claims that information was “confidential,” the 1885 – 1938 Indian Census Rolls were indisputably public information.[234]

I began with the 1907 Red Lake roll because that was the oldest one listed by the National Archives for “Red Lake” and – despite my insistence that the oral history recording the 1889 “first enrollment” was indisputably accurate – the archivist insisted that older enrollment records did not exist for Red Lake. The 1907 rolls were typed, but apart from people being grouped into families, the names were not listed in any apparent order. After several hours of searching through the B.I.A.’s erratically spelled “Indian names,” I decided that my limited research time in Washington, D.C. was more valuable than the cost of photocopying, so I spent $400 on rolls of dimes and quarters, and started feeding them into the photocopy machines in the Microfilm Reading Room. I eventually found the 1899 and 1900 Red Lake rolls among the records for Leech Lake reservation – Red Lake reservation had been administered from the B.I.A. agency at Cass Lake, on the Leech Lake reservation (about fifty miles to the south) from 1899 – 1906.[235]

I then spent more than a week skimming through box after acid-free archival box of the B.I.A.’s “central classified files” relating to the administration of Red Lake Indian reservation, specifically looking for documents detailing federal forestry administration and the roles that the U.S. had played between the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and adoption of an I.R.A. constitution at Red Lake in 1958. Reading through documents chronicling the B.I.A.’s perspective – and involvement with – events that I knew mostly from elders’ descriptions was fascinating, and in some instances wrenching.

I looked through file after file of old documents, and poured my grandmother’s legacy, dime by dime, into the National Archives photocopy machines. The National Archives catalogued their records by the linear foot,[236] and even speed-reading, skimming, it was impossible to look at it all. In the lunchroom, I visited with a team of Japanese researchers who had been studying the records at the National Archives, they told me, since the end of World War II. I took a break from the B.I.A.’s records and spent a couple of days doing research at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and a day looking for maps and land records in a records depository in suburban Maryland, then returned to the ornate National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I found and photocopied documents chronicling the United States government’s behind-the-scenes machinations in community events during the quarter of a century between Congressional enactment of the Indian Reorganization Act on June 18,1934, and ‘adoption’ of an I.R.A. Constitution at Red Lake by special election on October 14, 1958.[237]^, [238] There were more records to read – at the National Archives there are always more records to read – but I felt I had solid documentation of key events, as well as overall process.

Hoping to make the best use of my limited time and research funds, I turned to the next item on the “wish list” I’d brought from Red Lake: “schools.” I telephoned the staff archivist to make an appointment to discuss researching the school records held by the National Archives in Washington. Between 1885 and 1935, three generations of indigenous children at Red Lake had been subjected to brutal compulsory education. The explicit intent was to “kill the Indian”[239]: forcible assimilation, even genocide. The stories of older people, those who had attended school before World War II, were only quietly and occasionally mentioned, but we all were on intimate terms with the impact of early childhood brutality experienced in boarding school and written across the lives of deeply wounded survivors:

Party afternoons began with an offering to the spirits, a capful of liquor or a bit of beer, and progressed with a good buzz, cheerful conversation and laughter. After alcohol numbed the painful inhibitions of boarding-school beatings, the older folks would begin speaking in Ojibwe, telling stories, and “singing Indian” while drumming on a metal chair or on the table and encouraging the toddlers to “dance pow-wow.” The bottles and the joints would be passed with the same reverence some give to the pipe, mixed with joking reminders not to “play pig” or “nigger-lip” the joint.

There was a genuine warmth in these early evenings, a sense of sharing and community and a feeling that this warm glow was a part of what it really means to be Indian... that going “straight” would mean yielding to the White man, working endlessly for empty material things, turning aside from the exciting potential for adventure that “going on a good drunk” could be. …

[But,] as the evenings wore on, the tone of the party shifted. … The music, perhaps a single worn Rolling Stones tape played repeatedly on a cheap portable stereo, got louder, and the conversation harsher. About midnight, the fights would start over grievances remembered or imagined, scuffling and wrestling around the prone figures of those already passed out. As the euphoria faded, the alcohol would temporarily dissolve the psychological barriers to the pain. It surfaced in screaming threats of suicide, in blackout-masked violence of fists and sometimes kitchen knives, in broken furniture and beaten women, in crying jags silently begun in the trenches of World War II or in the dormitories of the boarding schools.[240]

A part of what Wub-e-ke-niew and I intended to do with the school records was use them to validate the long-repressed memories of survivors, and thereby, we hoped, to catalyze community healing.

With my research “wish list” and a notebook in hand, and confidence borne of a week and a half of intensive research, I set off to talk with Archives staff about accessing the Red Lake school records. At that time, the archivists supervising the Bureau of Indian Affairs records (and old military records) had their offices in Suite 13E, so I took the 1930s-style painted metal utility “back elevator” to the thirteenth floor and walked the narrow hallway through the low-ceilinged Archival “stacks,” where row after row of shelves laden with boxes of documents stretched off into the distance, screened from public access with the kind of woven wire fencing also used to enclose back-country chicken-yards.

“I’d like to look at the Red Lake school records,” I told the archivist. Wub-e-ke-niew believed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs kept track of who was researching what, in their archived records, there certainly had been plenty of time for phone calls between Washington, D.C. and Red Lake during the time I’d been at the National Archives, and I’d practiced the calm even tones of my request to access those records.

The archivist looked at me. “We found that 1889 census,” he said.

The 1889 census was chronicled in Red Lake oral tradition as “the first enrollment,” made in the context of ‘negotiations’ with the Minnesota Chippewa Commission and the taking of about the of the land remaining to Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at that time. Looking back now, I see the magnitude of the choice I made as I sat in that Archivist’s small office with a clarity that I did not have then. I thanked the archivist for finding the 1889 census, and asked for advance permission to photocopy any of the documents in those boxes of records from the Minnesota Chippewa Commission.

The main reading room at the National Archives is a stately, high-ceilinged old room on the second floor, with tall windows and wonderful natural light. There were brass reading lamps on researchers’ long tables, and even in the 1980s there was an armed guard at the back of the room near the door – some historical documents have substantial “market value,” for example Abraham Lincoln’s signature on a letter of no other historical significance sells for about $18,500;[241] Washington’s signature $45,000[242] and up. The reading room was a “clean room,” meaning that researchers could bring in nothing but a pencil, change for the photocopy machines, and a few pages of research notes, each page rubber-stamped by Archives staff as belonging to the researcher. Bringing a camera into the research room required advance written authorization, and case-by-case approval for photographing documents.

There was an old-fashioned leather couch in the hallway outside the main reading room, where researchers could congregate to smoke and discuss their research. I sat on that hallway couch after giving staff in the reading room the forms the archivist had signed authorizing me to read and photocopy documents from

RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Irregularly Shaped Papers, Item 104, Report of the Chippewa Commission, 1889-90,

and

Item 105, Chippewa Census Rolls, 1889-94.

It took awhile for archives staff to retrieve requested records from among their millions[243] of government documents, so I sat on that massive old couch in the hallway, wearing my new-to-me black leather “city jacket” and a fancy silk scarf I’d bought at a thrift shop in preparation for the trip to Washington, smoking a home-rolled cigarette and contemplating government records and the history that lay behind them.

The “irregularly shaped papers” of the Minnesota Chippewa Commission had been archived in two gray boxes made from acid-free cardboard, one containing onionskin[244] duplicates of the transcripts of the Minnesota Chippewa Commission’s negotiations during the summer and fall of 1889, a smattering of the federal government’s letters relating to the Commission and other documents, a few maps, and the “signature rolls” of the “Chippewa Indians” purportedly agreeing to the provisions of the Nelson Act of January 14, 1889. The other box contained the census taken by the Chippewa Commission in accordance with the mandate of the Nelson Act,[245] additions and deletions from that census, and a few official letters. I looked through the negotiation transcripts. More than ninety years previously, someone had marked them for the Government Printing Office and the now-forgotten typesetters who handset the tiny pieces of movable metal type for the published version of the transcripts subsequently submitted to Congress.[246] The Archives’ transcripts also included the ancillary documents in the published version, beginning with the “Message from the President of the United States, transmitting a communication from the Secretary of the Interior relative to the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota.” Wub-e-ke-niew had found and photocopied the Chippewa Commission’s published Report in the Minneapolis Public Library.

Reading room rules required that researchers have only one document out of the archival boxes at a time, so I carefully replaced the flimsy onionskin carbon copies in their proper spot – the National Archives provided special paper ‘tabs’ to help ensure that documents remained in their originally-archived order – and gently pulled the next set of records out of the box.

The names on the “signature rolls” were mostly written in the smooth, even penmanship of professional secretaries in the late nineteenth century, followed by x-marks and a handwritten “SEAL.” The ink had scarcely faded, and the paper was heavy, cream-colored, slightly brittle after almost a century but still beautiful paper.

Wub-e-ke-niew and I had studied the names on those “signature rolls” as they had been published in the Report of the Minnesota Chippewa Commission: read through them, discussed them, given photocopies of those four printed pages to numerous other people in the community, discussed the insulting mis-translations of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway names made by the Métis translators including P.H. Beaulieu, H.H. Beaulieu, M.C. English, and John English.

I knew without looking that Wub-e-ke-niew’s grandfather Bah-wah-we-nind was listed as number 8 among those recorded as “signing,” his name mis-recorded as “Yaw waw we nind” and mistranslated as “The one that is mentioned,” and his great-grandfather Bah-se-nos was listed as number 14, his name incorrectly recorded as “Pah se nos,” with the perhaps deliberately insulting mistranslation, “Slapping off flies” – even though neither man would have ever agreed to the provisions of the purported “treaty”[247] despite coercion by the United States Government and its Chippewa Commission, including threats to continue burning Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway forests at Red Lake until the “agreement” was signed.[248] So, I sat in the National Archives reading room one afternoon in early December, with my eyes closed, holding those old documents in my hands and envisioning how they might have been written nearly a hundred years previously, at the Old Red Lake Agency on July 8, 1889.

As soon as I started reading the ‘signature rolls,” I did a double take, looked at them more carefully. Shaken, I set the documents down on the table in front of me and walked to the tall windows that ran along one side of that elegant room, looked out at the Capitol cityscape without really seeing it, then walked over to the guards by the door and, showing them my empty hands, told them that I was going out to smoke a cigarette.

In mid-childhood I had been fascinated by Graphoanalysis, a kind of handwriting analysis that its adherents have described as “the scientific study of handwriting to determine character and personality of an individual.”[249] My interest faded when I received a letter from the International Graphoanalysis Society courteously informing me that the author to whom I had written an enthusiastic fan letter had been dead for many years [he had seemed vibrantly alive on the pages of a library book he had authored], but I knew enough about handwriting analysis to be certain that page after page of the “x-marks” on the Minnesota Chippewa Commission’s “signature rolls” had all been written by the same well-schooled hand. The implications stunned me.

“They’re forgeries,” I said to another researcher who had come out into the hallway for a cigarette. “I’m certain that they’re forgeries.”

The researcher, a gentleman old enough that he could have been searching for the historical records corresponding to his mid-life memories, did not seem to understand why I would be surprised at such historical chicanery.

I was shocked that anyone would even try to take more than three million acres of land with such an obvious forgery. But, as Wub-e-ke-niew later wrote, “From the way their records are put together, it also looks like what they assumed is that there would be no Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who would survive to question …”[250]

I smoked another cigarette before I went back into the reading room and made an appointment to use the “bulk copy machines” – fragile historical documents still had to be carefully placed, page by page, in the copy machine, but a researcher did not need to get item-by-item approval for photocopying and could work uninterrupted for at least an hour, perhaps longer if the next-scheduled researcher did not show up for his or her scheduled appointment. Then, mindful of the quickly passing days of research time, I returned to skimming through folder after folder of old government records, selecting documents to photocopy, making occasional notes …

Research ‘on the rez’

Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my research focused on the census rolls, on federal taking of Red Lake land, and on U.S.-implemented transformations of indigenous government and community. We were also concerned about Red Lake resources and U.S. “trust” exploitation of those resources, and I photocopied those records when I came across them, although I did not deliberately search them out. I also photocopied some relatively trivial records that I thought would be of personal interest to Wub-e-ke-niew, or the other people with whom we were working most closely. My philosophical orientation was not all that different from Wub-e-ke-niew’s, and that, along with the focusing on what I thought would be interesting to people at home, had an effect on what I thought was important.

I was looking for the B.I.A.’s story about what they had done. I was not deliberately seeking out documents for the purpose of humiliating either the B.I.A. or the Tribal Council. But, the records that I photocopied—as well as the records that I did not photocopy—were a devastating chronicle. The B.I.A. planned, acted, and recorded some of their actions in official documents from perspectives within which deliberate destruction of the indigenous community and covert manipulation of indigenous people at Red Lake and elsewhere, were deemed to be appropriate and even necessary. When read from the perspective of the people whom the B.I.A. deliberately acted to destroy, almost every single piece of paper in those files was damning. As Wub-e-ke-niew put it, “It’s obvious that the U.S. Government planned on exterminating all of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. In their racism and arrogance, they never once thought that any Aboriginal Indigenous people would survive, much less understand Crooked English as well as their own language, and would be scrutinizing the U.S. ‘Indian’ records.”[251]

The path which led us to the National Archives was not mine alone, although if I had sat in intellectual solitude, charting individual research derived solely from my own academic orientation, I doubt that I would have decided to spend an inheritance on photocopies (although I do not regret having done so). The directions that scholarly work takes are usually formed through personal as well as academic influences, patterned by what Jean Houston has called the “fractals” of a person’s life.[252] In Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my case, the fractals were those of the two of us as a team.

Compartmentalization of “personal” and “professional” life can be seen as a form of dissociation from that which the worker does not own in Euroamerican society; in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway context that we deliberately nurtured and maintained, my husband and I worked jointly and did not attempt to break the integration of our work with the rest of our lives. Our marriage and collaboration influenced our positionality, enhanced our capabilities and extended each of us beyond what we could have been alone.

Although we perhaps did not fully realize it at that time, the cat was out of the bag, the genie was out of the bottle, Pandora’s box was opened, the die were cast, et cetera, before we ever explicitly decided to do research and write. When Wub-e-ke-niew first acknowledged that he was interested romantically in me, and touched me tentatively and with apparent casualness, my heart leaped, sparks flew, and I responded inwardly with an explosion of surprisingly strong feelings that had apparently flourished during the months we had been sharing intense conversations over coffee.

But, battle-scarred by a previous relationship lost to alcohol, I said some incoherent words about being “just friends,” and literally ran out of the house in Redby where he was house-sitting for his cousin. I had an intuition that Wub-e-ke-niew and I were at the brink of something big, probably lifelong and personally transformative. One evening three weeks later I returned, and knocked quietly on the door. Wub-e-ke-niew invited me inside. With an amused but disarming smile, he said that he had been expecting me. Within months, we were married and building a home together.

Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my intellectual synergy was augmented by our intimate relationship and personal commitments to each other. My own mind hovers incompletely measured, off the top of certain scales, and I had spent most of my life downplaying my intellectual gifts and trying to be inconspicuous. Wub-e-ke-niew’s brilliance surpassed my own, and he was an intellectually lively, intensely committed visionary who had melded his deep Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway understanding, astute perceptiveness, and decades of social activism into profound wisdom. Wub-e-ke-niew’s interests, values and social concerns meshed with my own. What is it like to—finally—find a partner who not only understands the unabridged text of one’s inner discourse, but who has thought about the same issues, and has astutely brilliant insights of his own to add? There are many forms of ecstasy, and the joys of our intellectual partnership are among the inestimably rare and valuable ones.

A part of what I brought to our relationship was serious scholarship, research skills, and the ethics inherent in both journalistic and scholarly writing.

Accurate documentation is important to me. Wub-e-ke-niew, whose firsthand experience with the power of unassailable documentation included the “Broken Treaty Papers,” concurred. Our work melded my husband’s deep indigenous knowledge, our mutual activist orientation and concern for broader community, and my academic and journalistic training. We wrote, substantiated what we said with cited documentation, attributed accurately, and did not misquote.

We debated the grammar of the English language – Wub-e-ke-niew asserted that since the English language had been forced on him he could use it any way he wanted to. His argument was irrefutable, but he learned the details of “proper” grammar and then he flouted conventional English language usage when he felt that it constrained or distorted his intended meaning or discursive strategies.

The initial decision to give away photocopies of historical documents was Wub-e-ke-niew’s. I cringed inwardly as he first did so, and after the visitor to whom he had given the documents left, we talked about it. We discussed it in conversations woven throughout several days, and I delved deeply into my implicitly arrogant academic values and unexamined assumptions, trying to explain my discomfort at giving “raw data” to ... the team with whom we were working.

Wub-e-ke-niew was utterly and profoundly egalitarian. He refused to be a “leader”—his was a generations-long vision of deep-structural transformation, and he worked by being who he was, through consensus, and by encouraging others to claim their birthright of egalitarian self-empowerment.

Wub-e-ke-niew did not give speeches about what should be done; he simply did what needed doing. He did not tell others what to think, he gave them information, talked with them, and respected their ability to come to their own understandings. Some of the people with whom we were working were well-educated, and some had almost no formal education, but they were intimately acquainted with the circumstances and in many instances had lived through the events to which the documents referred. They were people whose lives had been affected on a deep personal level by the events detailed in those documents, and who understood their futures to be inseparable from Red Lake community

The records Wub-e-ke-niew was giving away referred to Red Lake history, people, politics, and community – information to which everyone in the community should have already had access. Wub-e-ke-niew encouraged me to ask myself what gave me the right to “interpret” from a position of controlling privileged information, instead of enabling anyone interested, to see the ‘raw data’ for themselves, to come to their own understanding, form their own conclusions? My image of a scholar working alone was an illusion, anyway, Wub-e-ke-niew asserted; everybody who wrote had a trusted collaborator to “bounce their ideas off of.”

He described some of the importance of Indigenous peoples’ unimpeded access to photocopies of the full historical record in We Have The Right To Exist:

A person outside of Aboriginal Indigenous traditions might not realize the deep significance of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway having access to historical documents–which should have always been available. History and genealogy are a part of our traditional oral culture, but because of the Métis and other Indians who have been packed on top of our community by the U.S. Government, it has been absolutely crucial to have this information in documentary form. Every community, and for that matter every individual, should be able to get information about their genealogy and their history, but the Bureau has consistently told Aboriginal Indigenous people that this information was confidential, or that the records had been burned.

The information which has been so vital to the community has also been kept away from the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in the past through financial engineering. In the lower socio-economic strata into which Aboriginal Indigenous people are channeled, there has not been the kind of money necessary to do extensive archival research. The U.S. Government has supported itself for two centuries by appropriating Aboriginal Indigenous peoples’ resources and land–why would they fund the very people from whom they’ve been stealing, doing research to uncover the details of their crimes?[253]

Over the course of our decades of research, we gave away tens of thousands of pages of photocopies, photographs, and computer printouts. And, in a potent affirmation of indigenous values, after Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my property – including the archives we had amassed – was seized after his death, both crucial documents and cherish photographs were given back to me.

Chapter 9 – Red Lake retrospective

Wub-e-ke-niew lived with personal integrity at the center of his being as an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man of the Bear Dodem at Red Lake. He understood “Indian identity” as colonially imposed, internalized subjugation, and wrote:

My father was brainwashed, tortured in school, and was caught up in the Indian stereotype. Although he was Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, he was traumatized into being an Indian. The same kind of brainwashing was still done in the schools when I was compelled to go into boarding school in 1937. I struggled for years with the Indian identity. When I walked away from the artificial persona of Indian and reclaimed my real identity as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, it was a rebirth and homecoming. I had always known that there was something wrong with the Indian identity, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I did the research and understood what had been done, I formally notified the Honorable Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court that I am not an Indian, and sent Justice Marshall my Federal Indian identification papers. An enormous weight lifted.[254]

Wub-e-ke-niew and I deliberately lived Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway ways-of-being, not by ‘preserving traditions’ as isolated elements of ‘culture,’ but instead by deliberately and mindfully being Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway … doing our best to nurture Aboriginal Indigenous community infrastructure, and with the entirety of our lives to maintain the unbroken continuity of harmonious Aboriginal Indigenous existence as human beings throughout the full spectrum of what it means to be Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

This included asserting Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway ‘economic discourse’: we gave away venison when we had a deer, and meat returned to us when we needed it. We gave away vehicle parts, and other parts came back. We gave away documents, although I (sometimes unsuccessfully) tried to ensure that what we gave away was not our only copy. Other documents were given to us.

In the context in which Wub-e-ke-niew and I lived and worked, in the community to which we had given our lifelong commitment, it is my understanding that to have not been open about what we were doing, to have not given away documents, to have spoken unilaterally and authoritatively “for” people instead of interactively with others - and from an egalitarian platform - would have been unethical. A part of Wub-e-ke-niew’s explicit openness was also in deliberate contrast to the B.I.A. and Tribal Council’s refusal to release even those documents that were public information, as well as their use of misinformation and planted gossip as tools of Machiavellian political domination.

What I came to understand as the reign of colonially-fostered secrecy by government officials at Red Lake sometimes reached absurd levels, e.g. the B.I.A.’s insistence that one of Wub-e-ke-niew’s cousins was born two years later than both our records and oral history indicated he was (thus giving a poignancy to his frequent laments, “I’m really feeling old today,” as well as depriving him of two years worth of Social Security ‘back pay’). It also included the tribal council’s refusal to release court records pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, despite court orders mandating their release.[255] The ‘tribal archives,’ according to general community knowledge housing most of those records, burned shortly before the tribal elections in the spring of 1988 – according to a community watch posted by the Red Lake Peoples Council to forestall violence, by arsonists allied with the incumbent tribal council.[256]

Detailing the scope and societal consequences of excessive administrative secrecy is beyond the purview of the present paper. But, in example of real-life and personal consequences: Wub-e-ke-niew had an older half brother, whom he met once, when his mother died of tuberculosis in 1932. Throughout his life, he’d looked for his mother’s oldest son – raised by maternal relatives on White Earth reservation – and was consistently told by the B.I.A. that they had ‘no information.’ In the mid-1980s and also after a lifetime of searching, he finally found his mother’s grave, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where she had been buried by her father. I waited in the car while Wub-e-ke-niew went to visit her grave: she had died when he was very young and my sense was that he needed to be alone with her spirit.

Wub-e-ke-niew returned to the car with an indescribable expression on his face. “Someone is taking care of her grave,” he said. His understanding from that lovingly tended grave: that he had close relatives at White Earth who were still alive. A few months later, I took an elder, enrolled at White Earth, to the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Headquarters to get an “Indian enrollment” card. Wub-e-ke-niew asked me to see if I could get information about his brother while I was there.

This was shortly after Congressional enactment of the White Earth Reservation Land Settlement Act of 1985,[257] and the WELSA staff genealogist, Virginia Rogers, was an enthusiastic historian who generously shared genealogical information with those who had a legitimate interest. I accompanied Virginia to a records room lined with card files, the wooden drawer-fronts a dark old-fashioned varnish. She bent over to search through a drawer of index cards. “Here he is,” she told me, extracting a card and showing it to me. “Francis Blake … deceased.”

“He’d better not be deceased!” I said, “he was fine when I left home this morning.”

“His mother’s maiden name was Delia Lufkins,” I added, “born on January 8, 1902.” Virginia resumed her search through the card files, and in a few minutes extracted another card. Harold Rahm, still living in Detroit Lakes. “I can’t guarantee that this is a current address,” she said, as she wrote down the information for me. I thanked her. “He has been looking his whole life, for his brother.”

As Wub-e-ke-niew and I became more deeply involved with genealogical research, I met several times with Virginia Rogers, exchanging information, discussing history, and just visiting. As she told me during one of those later visits, one of the things she found most rewarding about her work (documenting heirship for those White Earth allotments subject to WELSA) was the opportunity to help ‘lost’ relatives re-connect with each other.

Wub-e-ke-niew was unsurprised at the news that he was “already dead” in the B.I.A.’s records, and commented with biting irony about his alleged death in several letters to the B.I.A. and other government agencies.

As soon as we could, we went back to Detroit Lakes, Wub-e-ke-niew’s hopes surging against his stoic realism – perhaps we wouldn’t find his brother, after all. We stopped at a pay phone on the outskirts of town – a glassed-in phone booth in an era when such were still commonplace in small towns. Wub-e-ke-niew joked that he would like to get a phone booth like that, put it next to our house, “and keep a Superman costume in it.”

Someone answered at the phone number Virginia Rogers had given us. After a brief conversation, Wub-e-ke-niew emerged from the phone booth. “I’m too late,” he said. “He’s already dead.”

We wrote to Harold’s widow, sent her a few pictures. She sent a snapshot of Wub-e-ke-niew’s brother Harold – ‘everyone called him “Ding”,’ she said – and had a ‘copy negative’ made from an old-fashioned portrait of Wub-e-ke-niew’s mother, as a young woman in the early 1920s. That was the first and only photograph Wub-e-ke-niew ever had of his mother. Wub-e-ke-niew bought a frame and put the photo next to his oldest grandson. After awhile, he had 8x10 enlargements made for his children.

A few years later, Wub-e-ke-niew met a backwoods trader, Dick Anderson, who had worked with Ding years previously, fur-trading. “He would keep looking for you, too,” Dick Anderson told Wub-e-ke-niew, “but they always told him you were dead.”

The ‘Red Lake genealogies’

Computerizing our genealogical research marked a turning point in our research. In 1987, a retired engineer gave us his old Tandy 1000 computer, which used 5 ¼ inch floppy disks, and which the engineer had modified with two external hard drives. Wub-e-ke-niew built a desk to put it on, and we contemplated it: the electric current from the gasoline generator that we used when we needed 110 volt electricity was too “spiky” for the computer’s fragile electronic circuitry, and we were red-lined – Wub-e-ke-niew sometimes said ‘white-lined’ – by the Beltrami Rural Electric Cooperative’s requiring a “land use permit” issued by the tribal council as a prerequisite for installing power lines. We couldn’t get a permit from the tribal council, and so we contemplated that computer for more than a year. At that time, computers were still a rarity on the reservation, and we could have well been the only non-white household with a computer.

By the time we finally got connected to line electricity, we had spent several years compiling the Red Lake genealogies. We had accumulated more than thirty thousand pages of photocopied genealogical documents, as well as quite a few hours of audiotape in several languages, and stacks of notes in my idiosyncratic shorthand. As Wub-e-ke-niew suggested, we started compiling those records beginning with that “first enrollment,” made by the Minnesota Chippewa Commission in 1889, then worked “in both directions,” cutting and pasting photocopies on pages organized in three-ring binders, taking notes as elders talked about family history and had sometimes vigorous discussions about genealogy.

Friend and supporter Dr. Joy Craddick wrote of her visit in August 1992:

This cozy one room “long house” that I have been sharing for the past few days is crammed with books, research papers, computer, microfilm reader, filing cabinets, and copy machine. In this same space we sleep, talk, and share delicious meals from the organic garden and other local resources such as fish from Red Lake (you haven’t lived until you’ve had sucker patties, hominy, and maple syrup from the sugar bush behind the house!) Francis [Wub-e-ke-niew] and Clara have electricity but no running water. We drive 12 miles up the road to fill plastic jugs from a wonderful, clear spring, and wash up in rainwater heated on the gas stove. People come driving in at any time of day or night to talk to Francis, who is a revered elder of the Ojibway community as well as an outspoken advocate of the rights of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway nation.

The days have passed quickly. Francis drives me around the lake pointing out the clearcutting of the forests, the effects of lake pollution, the senseless destruction of old maple trees that once provided maple syrup for the Ojibway [sic] economy. We encounter bear, eagles, falcons and blue heron. We cruise the reservation grocery stores (the only ones within a 30 mile radius) where the major items on the shelf are sugar and white flour junk foods and aisle after aisle of pop. This despite the fact that almost three out of four people here are afflicted with diabetes.[258]

Our days were joyful and full – working in the garden and the sugarbush, canning, cutting and splitting firewood, setting nets and cleaning fish to freeze for winter use, skinning and cutting apart deer and rabbits and ducks and grouse, making bread and jam and pickles, hauling water and cooking and cleaning and the seemingly endless mechanical work necessary to coax the last bit of life from our well-used cars and pickup trucks and chainsaws and other small engines. I often worked late at night on computerizing the genealogies, until Wub-e-ke-niew called me gently from our bed, “come on, Clara … come to bed.”

The Tandy 1000 ran at around five megahertz on DOS, it took a long time to scroll through a forty page document as text spooled between the retired engineer’s onetime high-performance 640 K operating memory and the hard drives, and I was continually moving data back and forth between the limited capacity hard drives and 5 ¼ inch 360 K floppies.

That slow and sometimes cantankerous workhorse of a computer was a powerful tool in unscrambling the deliberate obfuscation of B.I.A. record-keepers. As Wub-e-ke-niew wrote, “The 19th-Century record-keepers never dreamed that a multi-lingual Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway person would be going through their records with a computer!”[259]

In our Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway household, a computer was also a potent political statement, and we encountered resistance not only from the reservation political élite and the DFL[260]-Indian ‘establishment’ that backed them, but also from white liberal ‘friends of the Indians.’ For example, Charles Brill, at that time head of the Photojournalism Department at Kent State University and author of the photographic book, Indian and Free: a contemporary portrait of life on a Chippewa Reservation [Red Lake],[261] visited us in the summer of 1990, while at Red Lake working on an update, published in 1992 as Red Lake Nation: portraits of Ojibway life.[262] Brill was accompanied by one of the staff from the tribal council’s archives. We asked them in for coffee, offered to show them some of the work we were doing, and Wub-e-ke-niew invited Brill to discuss the premises underlying the title of his book, still in print,[263] Indian and Free. Wub-e-ke-niew believed that Brill,

… should have been honest about the Métis and Euro-Indians who comprise most of his book. These Indians are not free. They are occupied peoples who are wards of the U.S. Government under trusteeship.[264]

We discussed these issues with Dr. Brill. His response was, “you have to have a Ph.D. to do this kind of research,” and besides which “your computer’s obsolete.” He did not deign to look at the genealogical data which we were discussing with him.[265]

Hoping to regain a bit of tangible ‘personal history’ after Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my property was seized, after his death, I telephoned Charles Brill and asked him if I could get a copy of one of the photographs he’d taken of Wub-e-ke-niew and me at Red Lake. Brill declined, and when I briefly described the circumstances – hoping to convey to him how meaningful such a photograph would be – Brill told me that he needed to maintain a “good working relationship” with “the people” at Red Lake.

Brill was far from unique in his prejudices against Indigenous people who did not ‘fit’ within the parameters of his own notions of Indians. Extensive exploration of deeply embedded patterns of interaction between ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ is beyond the scope of this paper, although Wub-e-ke-niew explored the many relationships among colonialism, colonially-fostered identities, and racist stereotypes throughout the corpus of his writing.

The Kent State professor was not the only author who actively resisted Wub-e-ke-niew’s explicit assertion of his own identity, values, and interpretations of his cultural legacy and contemporary ways-of-being – including his using a computer to write in English.

In his newspaper column Wub-e-ke-niew described an encounter with the co-author of the fourth edition of the authoritative Indians in Minnesota,[266] who contacted Wub-e-ke-niew in the context of her working on a fifth edition:

A “Traditionalist,” as told by Chippewa Indians, is embodying the White man’s definition of what an Indian is supposed to be: Hollywood stereotypes, racist anthropology, and other vicious scapegoat-projections. This abusive nonsense of the White man about what a “Real Indian” is supposed to be and do, comprises insults that I have heard many times. About a month ago, I talked to a White woman who was working on the new edition of the League of Women Voters’ book, “Indians in Minnesota,” which on the surface seems to be a thoroughly researched and objective book, but the last edition of which promotes and re-creates the White man’s artificial Indians. This woman’s latent racism came out when she saw that I use a computer to write this column. She said, “I thought you Indians used tom-toms and smoke signals” to communicate. Then, she said, “you should be saving the Indian culture, and teaching the young all about being Indian.” I answered, “I’m not an Indian, and I am not about to promote your artificial, White Indian culture for you. You White people have deliberately destroyed much of my Aboriginal culture, and killed most of my Dodem,” meaning my family. The Indian culture curriculum taught in the schools is both institutional child abuse and a human rights violation. I told the League woman that the schools should teach the children chemistry and math, and “better yet, teach them English” instead of Chippewa. I am not going to stand by silently while anybody’s children are taught to self-destruct with Indian stereotypes and are programmed to be the White man’s scapegoat. Examples of the racism which I have experienced my whole life include the name-calling, stereotyping and scape-goating which are a necessary part of the pseudo-male Euro-American English trade-language.[267]

Those academics’ derisive comments about our using a computer – in conflict with their definitions of “traditional” – are racist and unreasonable. They were also beside the point, a diversionary tactic to avoid discussing Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my research.

A part of what we were pointing out to the visiting scholars was that (like many other B.I.A. records), the Minnesota Chippewa Commission’s “enrollment” was a fraudulent document, “packed” with people like Pierre Bottineau, a Métis guide and translator[268] who showed up at Red Lake with five of his sons[269] just long enough to be counted as among the “Chippewa Indians of Minnesota” who were in “agreement” with federal expropriation of most of the land at Red Lake.

Careful scrutiny of the B.I.A.’s tribal rolls, in conjunction with community oral history, also clearly shows the federal government’s extensive ‘resettlement’ of non-indigenous people on Red Lake reservation. Wub-e-ke-niew described such concentration of people onto a comparatively small area of reserved land:

“Indian Reservation” is a word for concentration camp. The Indian policy of the United States, during the 1870’s and early 1880’s, was the concentration of both Métis and Aboriginal Indigenous people into Reservations, enforced by a kill-on-sight policy outside of the concentration camps, and accompanied by social engineering within what were euphemistically called Reservation communities. This was the implementation of President Grant’s peace policy. [270]

Indians who did not go willingly to the Reservations would be either driven there by force or exterminated in the process. Once on the Reservation, the Christian agents and teachers could help them assimilate the white man’s culture. [271]

Wub-e-ke-niew’s paternal ancestors were among those Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who where the Aboriginal Indigenous people of Red Lake.

Wave after wave of people were brought onto Wub-e-ke-niew’s ancestors’ land at Red Lake, after the 1863-64 ‘treaty’ and the U.S. Civil War, federal concentration camp infrastructure came with them: not just military administration and ‘rations,’ but also disease and – according to Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway elders – violence, particularly among the Métis. Federal administrators acknowledged the problem

Actual experience demonstrates the impracticability of ‘consolidating’ tribes of Indians, although in theory it looks well; and, if we seek to gratify the wishes of heartless white men, it can be made a complete success, as the weaker tribes are exterminated by the stronger, despite all efforts of agents to protect them. No people are more ambitious for power, nor exercise it with more tyranny, than do Indians. [272]

And, also according to Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway elders, the B.I.A. tacitly encouraged violence committed by Métis people against the Aboriginal Indigenous people, in part because the Métis cultural traditions retained much from their European roots.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, B.I.A. agents’ institutionally evaluated success was, at least in part, determined by their apparent success in ‘assimilating’ reservation Indians into European-derived “civilization.” The Métis were – as Wub-e-ke-niew pointed out, “already assimilated,”[273] and thus favored by the B.I.A.

Compiling genealogical information

Wub-e-ke-niew and I, along with others who were also deeply interested in Red Lake history and genealogy, worked countless hours over the years, scrutinizing the records and integrating them with the oral history, talking kinship, and reminiscing. Wub-e-ke-niew carried a phenomenal amount of genealogical information in his head, as did the others with whom we worked most closely.

The Dodems are the foundation of social organization for Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake, deep connections to the land meant that geography was closely associated with identity, indigenous incest prohibitions were broad and extremely important, and extended family continued to be socially relevant. Like many other indigenous societies, kinship formed the matrix of social interrelationship, and thus extensively remembered genealogy was very deeply a part of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway cultural tradition.

Even among many of those who were not Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, there was considerable interest in the genealogical research that Wub-e-ke-niew and I were doing, for several reasons including ongoing land title litigation and cash “settlements” under the White Earth Reservation Land Settlement Act (WELSA) – many Red Lake residents had family ties on White Earth reservation. WELSA settlements included heirship determinations as well as disputed assessments of “Indian blood quantum,” and considerable sums of money were sometimes at stake, more than $100,000 for some allotments.

The genealogies involved with federal administrative adjudication of WELSA settlements also affected tribal enrollments and thus legitimization of Indian identity.[274] The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe requires “at least one quarter ¼ degree Minnesota Chippewa Indian blood” for people born after July 3, 1961.[275] The tribal council resolutions governing “enrollment” in the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in the 1980s and 1990s reflected similar requirements for “1/4 blood quantum,” and for many ‘Indians,’ federally-recognized ‘tribal enrollment’ is an important aspect of their internalized identity, as well as their legal status and eligibility for federal Indian programs and for per capita shares in the “payments” arising from cases then pending in the Indian Court of Claims.

The people who worked with us on the genealogy were older people who had grown up in a face-to-face community where everybody knew who everybody else was, and they enjoyed talking about it. We gave people copies of information we had about their families, many let us copy documents which they had collected, and, when asked, we helped with their research relating to WELSA settlements. Some of the people whom I accompanied to county courthouses to help them get official documentation for their land claims subsequently developed their own passion for local history and genealogy.[276]

There is a detailed description of the genealogical work that Wub-e-ke-niew and I did in We Have The Right To Exist.[277] At its core is a compiled genealogy of everyone on the Red Lake ‘Indian Rolls’ who had lived beyond mid-childhood, comprehensive over what Wub-e-ke-niew understood to be the most crucial fifty years (1885 – 1938). On the advice of anthropologist and Minnesota Historical Society researcher Alan Woolworth, who had worked on Indian claims cases, I was meticulous about documentation of my sources. I continued to work on that genealogy, reaching the capacity of the database program I was using, getting a new and more powerful computer[278] and an updated version of the genealogy program,[279] then entering every byte of information that the updated program could handle. The last set of off-site backups which I made, about a month before my husband’s death, contain almost forty million bytes of genealogical text.

It is one thing to know oral history, to know the origins of families brought onto Red Lake reservation by the U.S. government, mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to remember the names of those who are gone. But, computerizing that information into a comprehensive genealogical database including all of the people on the Red Lake ‘tribal rolls,’ put my husband’s knowledge into a different structure, name after name, person after person, family after family. The total picture came together fairly slowly, an enormous jigsaw puzzle. I doubt that it could have been done without the extensive knowledge of oral history that it incorporated, nor without understanding of the several languages from which peoples’ recorded names derived. Some crucial pieces of information were in old church records, recorded in Latin, which I could decipher. Most of the documentary information was from public records, but some of it was not. The computerized database included documents which came from the personal files of people at Red Lake: some was doubtless archived but would have been difficult to find, some (like voter registration lists) would have been public information almost anywhere but Red Lake Indian reservation, and one key document[280] was brought to our door one night on short-term loan after we had told several people we were looking for a it; and included information which the B.I.A. had unequivocally indicated would not be released. Some information was given to us by now-deceased genealogist Virginia Rogers, who had access to the B.I.A.’s records through her work on WELSA land-title litigation, and who privately distributed the compilations of several chiefs’ descendencies that she had made out of her own passion for genealogy.[281] Anthropologist and researcher Alan Woolworth let us photocopy documents from his personal files.

I spent many thousands of hours entering data into the computer, in our one-room house in the woods on the south shore of lower Red Lake. When I needed clarification, colloquial translations of Ojibwe names, and other details, Wub-e-ke-niew and frequently other people with whom we were working were right there, and as interested in the research as I was.

Wub-e-ke-niew, after scrutinizing the B.I.A.’s records, was convinced that “the Bureau” had intentionally scrambled them. I concur—and the data-handling capabilities of a computer, in conjunction with community knowledge, made it possible to unscramble them. What came into clearly documented focus, what Wub-e-ke-niew had said his people “had always known but couldn’t prove,” can be written in one word. Genocide.

Genocide

The documentary evidence was of genocide at Red Lake undeniable, and the holocaust was worse than either one of us had wanted to believe. Historically the death rates at Red Lake have been disproportionately high since the mid-nineteenth century, and they remain so.[282]

Wub-e-ke-niew was well aware of his people’s history, had been writing about genocide in terms of the overall conditions for years.[283] Masked by the ways in which ethnicity was officially defined in terms of “blood quantum Indians,” and obscured by the formats in which government records were made and kept, was another story, all-but invisible without the kind of painstakingly detailed genealogy which we had compiled.

Wub-e-ke-niew’s people, the Aboriginal Indigenous people at Red Lake, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems, had been almost totally annihilated. Knowing something, piecemeal and in terms of the broad general picture, is different from knowing the same thing assembled into detailed totality. For Wub-e-ke-niew it was excruciating: the people who had been exterminated were his own—his family, his relatives, almost every single individual of his once-numerous people. Name by name and document after document, we assembled the whole.

The details of the transformation of the communities at Red Lake were amplified by the intentions inscribed in U.S. government records, using ‘code words’ like “good Indian,” “pagans,” “savage,” “Christian,” and “assimilate.” Over the course of about a century, the population of the Métis people brought to Red Lake by the U.S. government had increased more than tenfold, while the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems were exterminated. Name by name, the people whom Wub-e-ke-niew remembered from his childhood: dead, gone, families without a single survivor.

Name by name: Wub-e-ke-niew had known since childhood that they had died, and usually knew where, how and approximately when—but the whole picture was qualitatively different than the sum of its parts. The immensity of what had happened, and the implications, took awhile to fully comprehend. “I must have slipped through the cracks somehow,” my husband said one day, still stunned.

Wub-e-ke-niew spent an entire summer in deep mourning, coming to terms with the reality which he had known but not fully apprehended: he was among the very last of his people. In my memory there is an indelible image of him standing near the long-broken metate we kept near our house, the late afternoon summer sunlight shining through his graying hair, feeling the anguish of his own people’s annihilation, racked with grief to the core of his spirit. I was powerless to console him. Wub-e-ke-niew indicated the two pieces of the metate, a well-crafted granite implement weighing at least sixty pounds. “It took a lot of work to break that,” he said, “... they tried to destroy everything.” There was nothing I could say. I knew that he was right, I had read the documents and discussed them, I had listened to the oral histories, and I knew the genealogies.

After months, Wub-e-ke-niew emerged from his mourning, ready to resume working with a rekindled enthusiasm. The immigrant peoples are here, he told me, “and we can’t send them back. ... My people are gone,” he said, but the land of this Continent is still Aboriginal Indigenous land. “We have to help the immigrants learn to live in harmony with this land.” The focus of our work shifted.

To make a charge of genocide is a grave and terrible thing, and to do it lightly would trivialize the murder of millions. To ask if the genealogy we compiled is utterly accurate, is a legitimate question. The short answer is yes, absolutely. There is a longer answer, involving an as-yet unwritten and book-length analysis of the interwoven discourses of Euro-American colonial legacies, federal policies, government documents and Red Lake reservation, but the conclusion is still yes, the genealogical work that we did is solid, valid, and accurate. Genocide of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake was really committed by the United States. It is real, and name by name, the people are dead. The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway were deliberately exterminated.

Wub-e-ke-niew and I were aware of some of the genocide before we began work on the genealogy, and we had previously used other sources and a different kind of analysis to document it. We are not the only ones who have written about the genocide committed against the indigenous peoples of this continent.[284]

We approached our genealogical work from an indigenous positionality, and we believed the oral histories and genealogical knowledge of the people with whom we worked (not all of whom were indigenous people) to be potentially credible sources. If, for example, a particular government record claimed that the So-and-so’s came from “Minnesota,”[285] but according to the oral histories the So-and-so’s came from elsewhere, we kept looking—and, more often than not, found records from that elsewhere which validated the oral history.

We paid attention to indigenous understandings of interrelationship, family, and identity, specifically including the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems, and did a certain amount of translating: indigenous kinship structure into the (Latter Day Saints’) understandings of kinship that are embedded in the structure of the Personal Ancestral File database programs we used. But, the same patterns of selective annihilation of indigenous patrilines (and those whom the U.S. government had inaccurately identified as being such) are also apparent in Virginia Rogers’ genealogical compilations tracing the descendants of non-indigenous but on-the-books ‘fullblood’ Indian chiefs.[286] She was working from a quite different positionality, structuring her data to address other issues, and was focusing on other criteria, but consistent patterns of elimination of aboriginal indigenous (and on-the-books “fullblood”) patrilines remain.

Neither Wub-e-ke-niew nor I fully anticipated the extent of the holocaust that we uncovered. We expected genocide—many of the policies of the United States had for many years been overtly genocidal, in direct violation of subsequently codified international genocide conventions What we found was near-total annihilation.

United States policy-makers were clearly aware that overt genocide had been committed against the indigenous peoples of this continent. After belated U.S. ratification of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – thirty-seven years after it was introduced in the U.S. Senate – Wub-e-ke-niew wrote a letter to Senator William Proxmire,[287] “commending him for his persistence in getting the United States to accept this important international policy.”[288] Senator Proxmire, the leading proponent of U.S. ratification of the Genocide Convention, had “vowed to speak every day on the need to ratify the Convention until the Senate took action,”[289] and had made over 3,000 statements on the Senate floor urging ratification of the Convention.[290] Wub-e-ke-niew also asked Senator Proxmire for a copy of the newly ratified Convention against genocide. Proxmire mailed us a copy of the document, along with a letter advising us that it was “not retroactive.”[291]

Chapter 10 – The hidden Holocaust

Wub-e-ke-niew was a survivor of institutional practices and conditions created by genocidal U.S. policies; he had scars. He understood U.S. genocide against the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway his own personal experience, as well as from what his grandfather and others had told him. Wub-e-ke-niew remembered the names the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake who had been killed, had often known them personally. He was all-too aware that only a handful of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway survived.

The discursive strategies employed by the B.I.A. and the “Indian” elite, including extremely restricted access to information, politicized contestation of available information, and identity categorization using parameters which obscure the existence (and present non-existence) of indigenous people, are effective ones. Wub-e-ke-niew knew of only a few Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who were over the age of fifty, most of them worked with us closely or were people with whom we were in contact, almost none of them are still alive today—and more than one of their Dodems went completely extinct when they died. Wub-e-ke-niew had known the people at Red Lake for a lifetime, he recognized every name on the 1930-39 B.I.A. censes (and many from far earlier censes), and he not only knew who these people were, but had personal reminiscences and stories about almost everyone.

Nonetheless, as the patterns of our compiled data emerged, the stark realization that he knew every single Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway whom there was to know, was both exceedingly painful and emotionally unanticipated: it was far easier to hold onto the relatively unexamined belief that there were at least a few more surviving Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway … somewhere. The clarification of B.I.A. policy and practices he gained through studying their documents fit together and confirmed from another perspective what he knew from other sources including his personal experience. The reality was undeniable. Genocide.

What is it like to read documents specifying the plans and processes intended to destroy one’s own people? What is like to confront, in exhaustive detail, the near-total accomplishment of that annihilation? What is it like to stand among the ghosts of millions, in the terrible solitude of the survivor? I was the witness of my husband’s standing there. I have not yet fully discerned the balance between his privacy and what must be said publicly. What has been written cannot be reliably recalled, and so for the time being what I shall write about it is this: the mere fact that any human being should have ever stood in that devastating place is an obscenity beyond words. Genocide is wrong.

About a week after my husband died, I talked at great length with a man who is one of the very few of the next generations of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. “Wub-e-ke-niew was the last” of his generation, we acknowledged to each other, struggling to come to terms with his death. What he and I had inherited is an awful responsibility.

Four million “Indians”[292]

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there were 4,119,301 “American Indian and Alaska Native” people in the United States, and 5,087 ‘Indians’ at Red Lake Reservation.[293] Wub-e-ke-niew was adamant that he was “not an Indian,” [294] and he pointedly refused to be enumerated in previous censes on the grounds that the U.S. did not have the jurisdiction to count him as a U.S. resident – on his unceded land.

In 1988, now-deceased elder and World War II combat veteran G.W. sat at my kitchen table and looked me straight in the eyes. “I am not an Indian,” he told me. He indicated Wub-e-ke-niew with a glance and reiterated, ‘We are not Chippewas and we are not Indians. We are Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and we are a different people than the Chippewa Indians. Ah-nish-i-nah-bæ-o-^tchi-bway means ‘We, the People.’ That is who we are.’

Wub-e-ke-niew agreed, ‘The people who call themselves Indians are descendants of Europeans and Africans who were ‘packed onto’ the Reservation by the White man. When I was young, I was told that they were not indigenous to this land. Indians are not our people. ‘Indian’ is not who we are. We are Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway—our patrilineal Dodems are an essential part of our identity, and this is our aboriginal indigenous land.’

Later, Wub-e-ke-niew added, “‘Indian’ is a projection of the Western Europeans. It is a stereotype and an invention of the White hierarchy that has been internalized by the Lislakh[295] Creole [Métis] people who are calling themselves Indian. Indian is not a real identity. The Indians were invented by the White man, and are presently used by him to hide the land theft and the massive genocide of the Aboriginal Indigenous people here.” He explained,

The ‘Indians’ are used as a buffer and a go-between. The White men uses them to create an illusion, because the ‘Indians’ are violent and get angry like the White men do. Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway were egalitarian and non-violent people. Anger and hate are man-made, juvenile and pathological emotions and behaviors that the Western Culture uses to control people. The Western patriarchy could not afford to let his subject people come into contact with the aboriginal people—we are living proof that a harmonious egalitarian society works, and by the very existence of our ancient culture, we destroy the mythology necessary to maintain the White man’s hierarchy.

The Indians are a sacrificial goat. The Indians have no place for redress of grievances, as long as they take on the ‘Indian’ identity. They are used as political pawns by the White establishment to maintain their position and their slave-society.

Up into the 1930’s, the Indian was the ‘Vanishing American,’ but then Hitler made genocide—which was an acceptable thing for the European—look bad. Now, the good ol’ boys are marketing and promoting the Indian for all he’s worth. They point all around the world and accuse everybody else of ‘human rights violations,’ but, look what they are doing to their own people, giving them the identity of Indian. The Indians are not the Aboriginal people here—they are from Europe and Africa. If they did ‘a DNA’ on them, the White man would find that the Indians have the same bloodline as he does; most of the Indians do not have any Aboriginal blood in them. There are only a very few people here who have much Aboriginal ancestry at all.

Many of the people who publicly play the role of Indians are aware of their own ethnic identity, particularly those whose understanding of self was formed before World War II. Wub-e-ke-niew wrote in 1994:

When I was growing up in the late 30’s and early 40’s, one of the luxuries we had on the Rez was “going to the show.” We never went “to the movies,” and there was no place called a “movie theater” at Redlake, but anybody who had the price of admission (ten cents) went to the show—at the Show Hall. Those of us who did not have ten cents sat outside, and listened to the movie through the thin walls of the theater.

At that time, politicians had already realized the power of propaganda in the mass media. Most of the movies at Redlake were Grade B Westerns—the archetypal Cowboy-and-Indian movies (“shows”). The plot was always the same: in the early part of the movie, Hollywood Indians in grease paint rode out of the barren hills with war whoops, terrorized White “pioneer” women and children, burned the wagon train and drank up the whiskey. (They never attacked the Chinese railroad laborers or the Black slaves.) The climax of all these Western movies was the Cavalry charge on horseback, coming to the rescue in a cloud of flying dust, with bugles blowing and horses running, then the U.S. Army would slaughter the “merciless savage” Indians: every man, woman and child. The French Métis children would stand up on their benches in the Show Hall, clapping their hands and cheering loudly for the Cavalry as they mercilessly killed the Indians, shooting them in the back and scalping them.

These burnt stumps[296] grew older, and guess what. Times have changed, and now these very same French Métis people who applauded the Cavalry, along with their descendants, have replaced the dead Indians who were massacred every week on Hollywood’s movie sets. They are now running around with beads and feathers and pow-wow paint, telling gullible White people that they are “Real Indians” who are experts on Indian culture; Indian Medicine Men practicing White Christian shamanism in what they claim are “sacred sweats” for big White bucks; hiding a heinous and despicable Holocaust—the genocide and “ethnic cleansing” of the Aboriginal people here, exploiting the rotten residue of Manifest Destiny and playing the White man’s burden of guilt for all it’s worth; parading in the mass media and acting like damn’ fools. Before World War II, these Métis spoke Creole French, and had lively French dances with expert French jiggers and fiddle-players. The highlight of these French dances was a raucous drunken fist-fight, which kept the local gossips busy until the next week’s dance. I often wonder what happened to their Traditional Cajun culture (did the English take it away from them as a part of the French-and-Indian wars?). I also wonder why they reject their own roots for the shallow pretense of mythological Indians. Could it be they fell for the second oldest dirty trick in the books, that carrot-on-a-stick of “payment” and “land money.”

Politically correct people have claimed this manufactured phenomenon of [mythological] Indians is a “Diversity of Culture,” but on closer examination, it’s an self-serving illusion of White culture that’s really out of focus, out of kilter and way out of balance.

To promote the Johnny-come-lately Indian culture on this Continent, the formerly French Indians create jobs for themselves, using phony “Indian preference” as “equal opportunity” to hire their relatives. These Indian fakers and con artists should be in jail for fraud and abuse of hard-earned taxpayers’ money and pigging out at the public trough [“salt pork”]. The people who claim to be “Indians” are nothing more than dark-skinned southern Europeans. Also participating in the Indian scam, are the lighter-skinned low-class Whites who are trying to get their share of the plundered resources here. The “me-too” grabbers include Squaw-Men who have become instant Indian experts because they fathered “Real Traditional full-blood Indians,” although they know nothing about the Aboriginal culture or values. Squaw Men have a vested interest in promoting Indian programs for their so-called Indian children, and some, like Schoolcraft, have written much nonsense about how to be a Real Indian. Instead of supporting their children in their own society like everybody else does, the Squaw Men are pretending that they did great service by making Indians, who can take advantage of Indian college tuition subsidies, Indian health care, and other “Indian” programs paid for with Aboriginal resources and taxpayer dollars. These parasitic Squaw Men are not only complicit in hiding the genocide of the Aboriginal people of these Continents, they are also vital to the perpetration of the American Indian fraud, which makes a pathological liar out of everyone who claims to be an “Indian.” The only Indians who have ever lived on either one of these Continents are people from India.[297]

Wub-e-ke-niew’s scathing critique of the “formerly French Indians” was written from his cultural context, in which public shaming was a potent form of social sanction, and the older Métis at Red Lake understood exactly what he was saying. Wub-e-ke-niew may have underestimated, however, the degree to which the Métis have been penetrated by the colonizers’ externally imposed identities, and entrapped by the federal “Indian” system.

Contemporary Indians’ internalization – and reification – of federally-recognized ‘Indian-ness’ has involved fairly complex and nuanced processes, reinterpreting past realities to legitimize and even celebrate the annihilation of indigenous world-views, and the roles that the Métis historically played in the expropriation of indigenous people. Thus, although the hierarchical concept of royalty is antithetical to egalitarian aboriginal society, many Indians claim eighteenth-century “Indian princesses” or “Chiefs” on their matriline. And, in remarkable ‘rewrites’ of history as perceived from an aboriginal indigenous vantage, the Métis signing-away of millions of acres of land that did not belong to them, for example, has been re-scripted as somehow affirming the “inherent sovereignty and self-determination”[298] of the very indigenous people they helped destroy. They also retain private family traditions tracing their patriliny back to the Mayflower (at least three White patrilinies at Red Lake), to Scottish fur traders of the 1700’s, or to French, or French-Canadian progenitors. The Métis’ historical acknowledgement of their dual heritage is documented by Kohl[299]

I met one half-breed, a man tolerably well off, who had engraved both his French coat of arms and his Indian totem (an otter) on his seal-ring.

Because of the political, cultural and economic pressure to be Indian, their public role is frequently quite different than their private one.

Our genealogical research changed, to some degree, peoples’ acknowledgement of their ancestry, at least within the Red Lake community. In the course of compiling the genealogy, for example, one of the elders we were working with, M.P., said to an older woman from one of the old Métis families, “I heard you were descended from the Mayflower.” She replied, “How the hell did you find that out?” Other people at Red Lake, some enrolled as “fullbloods,” admitted—almost as a confession—to European patrilineal heritage. For example V.K. quietly acknowledged, as I was showing her the computerized database, “my great-great-grandfather [the father of the nineteenth-century patriarch of one of the big “fullblood” families in Ponemah] was a White trader.”

“Highly emotionally charged” … vigorous ‘denial’

With Wub-e-ke-niew’s encouragement, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Minnesota in 1996, a bit more than a year before his death. Among the academic papers I wrote with Wub-e-ke-niew’s collaboration, during that last year of his life, was an anthropology paper addressing issues of “Indian identity” at some length:

… the issue is not lineage. The crux of it is group identity, and, in a deeper sense, American historical archetypes and mythology. I find the implications wrenching: if most of those people whom the U.S. Government recognizes as Indians are in fact descended from immigrants, just like the mainstream Euro-Americans and African-Americans, then where are the descendants of the indigenous aboriginal people? Honestly confronting a cultural heritage of genocide, in its full extent, may be neither easy nor pleasant, although I believe it is necessary. Indians are firmly at the core of what present-day Americans think about their history and their identity as Americans. It is an issue that is highly emotionally charged—and about which therefore it may be difficult to penetrate the mystique and consider the facts clearly.

In this paper, I will present some of the factors which lead me to give credence to what Wub-e-ke-niew and other Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are saying: that the vast majority of the people identified as “Indians” are in fact people of European heritage, culture and descent, and that to consider them as representative of the aboriginal indigenous people of this continent is to do the indigenous people, the so-called Indians, and the facts of history a great disservice. Wub-e-ke-niew adds that controlling subject people by distorting their identity and that of leaders “appointed, bought and paid for” by the colonizing power is a standard strategy of Western European “democracy.”[300]

That academic paper, along with all the rest of my academic work, was in Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my house when he died, and was, therefore, seized when I was forcibly removed from our home a week later. (Wub-e-ke-niew and I maintained off-site backups of our computer data.)

‘Hot’ documents

On May 26, 1998, Indian court judge Bruce Graves sat in the Red Lake courtroom with me for about half an hour, waiting for petitioner-for-probate to show up – about two and a half hours after the hearing was scheduled to begin. The Red Lake policeman with the Order to exile me was right behind her, although Graves “denied foreknowledge of the Order of Removal” to the Native American Press.[301]

As we waited, Graves and I conversed: one of those testy conversations bound by courtesy, in which there is much only alluded-to (it did not occur to me to discuss the upcoming hearing with the judge before the hearing was formally convened). Graves mentioned We Have The Right To Exist, and said that he was considering writing his own book. I acknowledged that he doubtless had some interesting experiences to write about, and said that if he wanted to write his memoirs, of course he should do so. Graves mentioned Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my genealogical databases. I told him that we’d kept off-site backups of our computer data and other critical documents.

“Oh,” Graves said, and then sat silently. My sense was that he, like on-the-books “fullblood” and tribal council chairman Bobby Whitefeather, was personally concerned about Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my documentation of his Mediterranean ancestry, as well as about the documentation underlying We Have The Right To Exist more generally, and perhaps also about the directions that my academic work might take.

After I was exiled, the Leech Lake resort where I was an off-season tenant was destroyed by arson. When I emerged from ‘underground’ (after keeping a very low profile in a friend’s basement for several months) and rented openly again, I was summarily evicted by a Bemidji landlord – with overt connections to the ‘Red Lake establishment’ – who seized my papers, destroyed my computer, and gave away much of my other personal property to a tenant he moved into my place while I was in Minneapolis for a few days.

An employee of the Red Lake courts contacted the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Anthropology at the University and urged him to throw me out of school, and remarkable rumors about my being an “evil” person circulated at Red Lake. One of the “Indian medicine men” who had been affronted by Wub-e-ke-niew’s writing, accepted a ‘commission’ to kill me with witchcraft. State Senator Linda Berglin, chair of the legislative committee that oversees the Minnesota Department of Health’s budget and heavily involved in ‘Indian politics,’ wrote to Health Commissioner Anne Barry, advising her of apparently serious ‘concerns’ that “Ms. NiiSka … will publish works for her PhD which will continue the genocide to the twenty or so indigenous persons still residing in Red Lake.”[302]

An “an issue that is highly emotionally charged—and about which therefore it may be difficult to penetrate the mystique and consider the facts clearly”?[303] Perhaps I under-estimated.

Who Are The “Indians”?

By 1938, which was one of the baseline years that Wub-e-ke-niew and I used for the genealogical database, there were a number of fairly distinct groups of people on the Red Lake reservation. In a 1996 academic paper written with Wub-e-ke-niew’s collaboration, I detailed these:

· “White Indians,” who are described by the Métis as “taking off their feathers at the reservation line.” Including the generation born just prior to 1940, many are patrilineally descended from the literate, frequently Scottish, Whites who managed the fur trade posts after the War of 1812; some are descended from notable political figures in early Minnesota history. Many of these people have only token non-White ancestry. As one Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway put it, “if he was bit by a mosquito, he’d lose his Indian blood.” Many of the “professional Indians” employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in middle-class jobs come from this group of people.

· The Métis, including at least two subgroups:

· The people referred to before World War II as “French Canadian” or “French-and-Indian.” Many Métis people born before the turn of the twentieth century spoke French, and a high percentage of those born before 1940 have retained their French or Quebeçois surnames, and are patrilineally (usually on several branches of their family tree) descended from the Quebeçois involved in the fur trade.

· The people often referred to as “Chippewa Indians” or “Ojibwe,” or, more recently as Anishinaabeg. Although many of these people are enrolled in the United States’ federally-organized and federally-recognized “tribes” as “fullbloods,” the oral history (often both their own and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway’s) retains their non-indigenous patriliny and frequently the places from which their family migrated. The ancestry of these people is often a mixture of Northern European, Mediterranean, and sub-Saharan African, and the “Indian names” in their genealogies often have such revealing meanings as “Soldier,” “Voyageur’s Woman,” “Blonde Hair,” “English Man,” “Big Far-away,” and “Big Black.” Many of these people born prior to 1940 spoke the creole Chippewa language, and their surnames at Red Lake are an eclectic mixture of “Indian-sounding” English-language names, anglicized Chippewa names, and nondescript generic “American” names like Smith.

· “Mixed bloods” who are descendants of recently (after about 1890) in-married (or transient) White men, some of whom are referred to by the Métis as “lumberjack bastards.” Many of these ‘mixed bloods’ have married outside of the Red Lake community, assimilating over the generations into the mainstream American culture; others have married back into their own subgroup or into the “White Indian” and/or Métis communities.

· The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, presently a very small minority of those on the United States Government’s Red Lake “tribal enrollments.” Several of the older Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, now deceased, have commented that the ‘White man has succeeded in his genocide. We are an extinct group of people.’ Their children and grandchildren have been assimilated as “Indians,” and although they may have a Dodem—the patrilineal group identification essential to Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway identity—most of generations born after World War II are no longer ensconced in the network of Dodems which comprised the deep structure of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway society. Those Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway elders expressed an opinion, did not expect their aboriginal indigenous ways-of-being to survive beyond their personal deaths.

Chapter 11 - Indians are not the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway

Images of Indians as pre-contact “natives” are so thoroughly ingrained in Western society that the significant differences between the vast majority of people officially recognized as Red Lake Chippewa Indians by the United States Government, and the tiny minority who identify themselves as the autochthonous Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are blurred. However, these differences encompass a wide range, including: history, genealogy, culture, language, religion, ecological infrastructure, and patterns of interaction with the Western European colonizers.

Wub-e-ke-niew repeatedly emphasized that, “Indians are not the indigenous people of this continent.” The existence of these two distinct groups is so important that I address it here at length:

History

The Métis

Ultimately, Westerners use history as a political interpretation of process and a linearly organized description of selected events; but in the context of holistic non-linear Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway time,[304] it is inseparable in countless ways from present reality, and has neither beginning nor end. In this sense, the history of the people who became identified as Chippewa Indians at Red Lake is closely connected to the abstract languages, hierarchical social structures, specialized priesthoods and ecological destruction which has been associated with Western Civilization since its inception.

One of the characteristic patterns of Western society has been an episodic hot-house flowering of “High Civilization” based on exploitation of the ecological infrastructure, resulting in environmental degradation, resource shortages and pressure for penetration into and colonization of “virgin” territory. In support of this, Western society has embedded within its languages, mythology, archetypes and culture-variants a series of fractals and ideologies which provide the boilerplate for this process: gaining entree (and establishing a base population of mixed-blood people rooted in colonial economies and values) through trade; disrupting the homeostatic balance of the indigenous permaculture through introduction of aggressive alien plants, more lethal-at-a-distance hunting technology, ecologically destructive agricultural practices and domesticated animals; introduction of alien and virulent plagues and germ warfare; disruption of the social structure of the indigenous population and encouraging the formation of factions (including through agent provocateurs); dehumanization and demonization of the indigenous population in the eyes of those colonizing through stereotypes and mythology; military attack accompanied by rape of indigenous women and economic marginalization and/or enslavement of the surviving men; colonization of the occupied territory by upwardly mobile men from the old center of civilization (a few of whom marry indigenous women and more of whom marry the mixed-blood daughters of traders and military men) and their entourages; and then the flowering of a new center of Western civilization.

Colonizing processes are ‘justified’ by religious dogma rationalizing genocide, i.e. “we are God’s chosen people,” and an “instrument of Divine Will.” “God promised us this land,” is as old as the Bible and more current than Manifest Destiny, but consideration of who was already living on the “promised land” is rarely within Western paradigms.

Western civilization has depended on maintaining their people’s allegiance to a corporate body other than the grassroots community and the extended family (eg. the Church, the Brethren and the Nation-State); a mythological structure celebrating conflict, violently heroic masculine archetypes, rugged individualism, disconnection from the land in an aboriginal sense; and shifting gender balance toward inherently violent male domination. The “world religions” of Western Civilization reflect this imbalance in religious dogma from which women have been almost eliminated, and in which the female lines of descent serve mainly to segregate colonizer from colonized, ineradicably [‘racially’] marking the colonized as among the “subject” classes. “Racism” and most ‘identity politics’ serve as powerful forces in creating and maintaining colonial ‘caste’ systems and reducing hegemonic efforts necessary to retain colonial and post-colonial domination.

The social structure of western civilization is hierarchical—which over time has led to an artificially created, endogamous upper class and disruption of the exogamous marriage links between communities of peoples consigned to the lower classes. The structure is maintained by what Wub-e-ke-niew called “man-made behaviors and emotions” of anger, hatred and violence. He explains, “It has to have chaos in it. When it starts becoming stable, the status quo becomes alarmed, and so they have to send their agents and fifth columnists in there to destabilize it again. Non-violence is like the devil to them.”

By 1500, the expansion of ‘Western Civilization’ had reached its limits in Eurasia and North Africa: the conflicts of the Middle Ages were internecine conflicts on previously colonized territory. As Wub-e-ke-niew, who spent the end of World War II in Germany, tersely put it, “The ecology was a mess, plundered to the bedrock.” Columbus’ voyages presented the opportunity for a reiteration of old patterns of Western expansion into previously unexploited land. As Wub-e-ke-niew described it, “It was the plunder, sacking and destroying of what was a paradise. Now, our continent is becoming like old Europe—you can’t drink the water here anymore. They’re doing the same thing here that they did over there.”

The people who eventually became the Red Lake Métis were mostly coerced and quasi-voluntary emigrants from France; personae non grata shanghaied from the lower social classes, and included those of visibly Moorish descent. Both men and women were exported into the serf and servant classes of seventeenth-century Quebec, and their descendants were recruited as voyageurs and other laborers in the hinterland of the fur trade, many of them settling in proximity to the fur posts. As J. Peterson writes,

By the 1790’s, trading hamlets housing from a single extended family to several hundred persons had been established at Peoria, Cahokia, Chicago, Fort Wayne, Ouiatanon, Parc aux Vahes, Riviere Raisin, Sault Ste. Marie, Petit Kaukalin, Portage, La Pointe and elsewhere. Perceived but dimly by the seaboard world, and largely ignored between 1763 and 1816, the inhabitants of these towns, like those of La Baye, were, as it happens, people of primarily mixed race — Métis.[305]

The popular mythology is that mixed-blood Indians were generated from liaisons between European men and indigenous women, but the indigenous population both male and female was decimated by European diseases in the 1500’s and 1600’s. After a handful of aboriginal women married Europeans during the first generations of European occupation, most of the “White-Indian” intermarriages were with mixed-blood women, either from the Métis villages or from among those described as “native women” from “adjacent band villages.”[306] These so-called Indian, Tribal and Band settlements associated with the explicitly Métis villages were distinct from the aboriginal villages quite early in the history of Euro-American colonization, and received a continual influx of White patriliny through “Young Métis males and ‘White’ newcomers to the trade [who] had ... usually ephemeral encounters with native women.”[307] According to Wub-e-ke-niew,[308] the Métis also incorporated runaways from the European expeditions and settlements: Spanish draftees, indentured servants and transportees from the British settlements, black slaves, and the dissatisfied from every walk of life. Just as significant populations of feral four-legged European imports: Equus asini, cattle, etc., established themselves in the interior of the continent, so did the Eurasian/African varieties of Homo sapiens.

The history of the Métis includes the history of those William W. Warren called “Ojibway,” who he describes as coming from “the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, about the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River.”[309] Among them were the professional hunters and courier du bois of the fur trade. According to Warren “In the early part of the century ... [they] had already commenced the custom of yearly visiting Quebec, and afterwards Montreal, taking with them packs of beaver skins, and returning with the fire-arms, blankets, trinkets, and firewater of the Whites.”[310]

The European colonization of this continent, and the associated fur trade, was an intensely and often violently competitive business, extending the wars of the European nation-state into their colonies. The nearly four hundred years of “Indian Wars” which characterized early American history were in fact European and Métis wars. Some of them were specifically fur trade conflicts, like that described by Wheeler-Vogelin and Hickerson (citing Tanner) as the

Conflict between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Company. [Tanner] was present in the interest of [the] former company when its employees seized the latter’s trading fort at Pembina in June, 1816. Tanner states, “In forty days after we left Rainy Lake, we arrived at Red River, and took the fort at the mouth of the Pembinah, without any difficulty, there being few or no persons there, except squaws and children, and a few old Frenchmen ...[311]

They also quote Tanner in his discussion of the “Danger of attack by North-West [Fur] Company employees, disguised as Indians.”[312] This Euro-American tactic in intra-immigrant conflict also was used in the Boston Tea Party and some of the raids on the nineteenth-century wagon trains: people of European heritage dressing up as Indians to displace responsibility for their actions onto Indian scapegoats.[313] In other cases, there is question as to whether or not the “wars” actually occurred. As Wub-e-ke-niew points out, “They talk about wars, but they don’t talk about the cemeteries. Where are the bodies buried?”

When France lost their colonial empire to England in the French and Indian Wars, the French Métis’ political and commercial superstructure was supplanted by the British and American fur empires that took over the French ones, in the case of Hudson’s Bay Company with a royal charter granting semi-sovereign status. Métis people continued to participate in the British and American fur trade until it declined because of the near-extermination of the fur-bearing animals, habitat destruction by logging companies, and agricultural settlement by northern Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century. But, for more than half a century, United States administration of the “Louisiana Purchase” was through the infrastructure established by the fur companies, and was largely directed toward the French and Métis who remained in the area. Aboriginal Indigenous people like the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway remained mostly beyond Euro-American paradigms.

As detailed above, so-called Indian Treaties were founded on the “doctrine of discovery,” and rested on Western European concepts of property ownership and eminent domain. Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “The Indian Treaties were a European concept, and had nothing to do with the aboriginal indigenous people.” The Treaties were negotiated through the aegis of the United States military and the fur post superintendents of the era, at Red Lake including C.H. Beaulieu and William Aitkin, in the English and pidgin Chippewa languages, but not in Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my genealogical research backed up his assertions that that the Indian Chiefs whose X-marks appear to be forged on the original treaty documents at the National Archives were Métis; some of them were professional Indians who were recorded as having agreed to treaty after treaty. They were not Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. [314] As Wub-e-ke-niew puts in 1996, “Selling land, selling the bones of our ancestors, was not something we would do. Signing treaties is a part of the Western European paradigm, it is not part of the aboriginal paradigm.”

Louis Riel’s 1869-70 Rebellion among the Canadian Métis coincided with the forcible relocation of both Métis and aboriginal people onto Indian reservations in the United States. On both sides of the border, the Métis became more explicitly defined as conquered and occupied peoples, their lives more tightly constricted by increasing Northern European logging and settlement in the area, and by Euro-American (including Anglo-Canadian) political administration. In Northern Minnesota, some Métis merged with the White population, some formed enclaves (such as those near Red Lake Falls) in the midst of northern European immigrants’ settlements, and many became re-defined as Indians.

“Tribe” and “Band” are Western European terms of social organization, and have no connection to indigenous Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway social structure, which was egalitarian and based on Dodems. However, the United States Government used and continues to use their imposed tribal and band organization as the structural basis for their administration of Indian, and for Public Law 638 “Indian Self Determination” administration through federally-established tribal councils.

Formal tribal definition began, from the top down, with White descriptions of territory within clearly delineated borders, and continued with trading posts, missionization and with the Indian treaty and annuity-payment process. Official tribal designation was at times capricious—in some cases, for example instances where one brother was officially classified as a “Sioux” while another was a “Chippewa.”[315]

On January 14, 1889, the United States Congress passed the “Act for the Relief and Civilization of the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota” (‘Nelson Act’), which redefined the “tribal” boundaries in the Treaties of 1837 and 1863 to conform to Minnesota state boundaries as established at statehood in 1858, and created a new entity, now federally recognized as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Among the consequences of that 1889 legislation was the taking of more than three million acres of land at Red Lake, and extensive logging. The Nelson Act also mandated allotment:

Sec. 3. … all of said Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota, except those on the Red Lake Reservation, shall, under the direction of said commissioners, be removed to and take up their residence on the White Earth Reservation, and thereupon there shall, as soon as practicable, under the direction of said commissioners, be allotted lands in severalty to the Red Lake Indians on Red Lake Reservation, and to all the other of said Indians on White Earth Reservation …”

In consequence of Indian allotment and subsequent land sales, White French Canadians, Scots, Irishmen, and Scandinavians became incorporated into the Métis communities that comprised the majority of those defined by the Whites as Chippewa Indians in Minnesota – even when enumerated by the Minnesota Chippewa Commission in 1889.

The Ahnishinahbæótjibway

The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and other aboriginal indigenous people closely associated with them, were the autochthonous people in the Great Lakes watershed area, and in the headwaters regions of the Mississippi River and Red River of the North. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the vast network of navigable waterways in this area were the primary means of transportation for everybody, and influenced both aboriginal people’s and immigrants’ trade routes and settlement patterns. One of main reasons that the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake survived was that Red Lake is at the headwaters. From an aboriginal perspective,[316] it is at the “crossroads” of the three principal watersheds of this continent; but from the coastally oriented European perspective, it is upstream from everywhere and thus remote.

Wub-e-ke-niew, referring to the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway ideographic documents on birchbark, wood, parchment, and stone, writes, “According to our written traditions, this has been our land since human beings first existed—through four ice ages and at least 36,000 generations. The bones of our ancestors, the living beings upon the earth, and the earth itself are all one, inseparable ... I put my hands into the Earth, and understand, ‘this is where I come from, and this is where I will return.’”[317]

For many millennia, the history of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway was one of egalitarian and harmonious co-existence with other, inter-related aboriginal indigenous peoples and with Grandmother Earth. The ecological infrastructure was a sustainable permacultural one, and aboriginal indigenous societal archetypes were not one of expansion and migration, but of dynamic equilibrium centered around the ancestral lands of the patrilineal Dodems, within the extensive network of kinship inter-relationships generated by Dodems and seventh-generation exogamy. Like other species in the complex mature ecosystems at the foundation of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway permacultural subsistence, the focus was on maintaining vibrant harmony rather than aggressive competition. Genuinely understanding the pre-Columbian history of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway necessitates a paradigm shift, a redefinition of “history” beyond the Western European historical orientation toward hierarchical leaders and violent conflict, kings and wars.

Shortly after Europeans in significant numbers made landfall on the continental mainland, Eurasian/African epidemics began raging through the indigenous population. Violent Eurasian societal patterns engendered the kinds of unbalanced host populations that were favorable for the development of aggressive plagues. There was also a degree of selective adaptation and even co-evolution of the Eurasian populations and social structures with these virulent diseases. Reasonably high percentages of the Europeans survived measles, tuberculosis and even smallpox and the bubonic plague. The aboriginal indigenous peoples of this continent, on the other hand, had developed an ecological and sociological infrastructure that did not readily provide vectors for sustained epidemics of virulent Eurasian diseases, consequently had neither immunity nor plagues of their own to give the Europeans, and were decimated.

The population crash due to epidemics between the late fifteenth century and the mid-sixteenth century has been estimated by some authors, including Wub-e-ke-niew[318] and Kirkpatrick Sale,[319] to have exceeded 99%. Because the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other similar peoples had acephalous egalitarian societies, the devastation from these epidemics did not create the degree of social deconstruction that an analogous crash would have in hierarchical Eurasian societies, but it still had a profound impact on the surviving indigenous people here, whose communities were reeling from the impacts of devastating plagues, when they were first confronted by people who behaved in inconceivably violent ways.

Contact between European and indigenous people was frequently characterized by violence on the part of the Europeans. Early European records contain casual references to nearly random killings of non-violent indigenous peoples. The deeper structural violence of Western Civilization is not usually recorded by the European chroniclers, because it was part of the “background” of their culture, but this pervasive background of violence made a profound impact on the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. For example, Wub-e-ke-niew describes his youthful reaction to the ubiquitous Catholic images of crucifixion as “traumatic and profound.”[320]

One of the principal strategies of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to the influx of the peoples of Western Civilization, which was also adopted by some Métis in response to the nineteenth-century influx of Anglo-Americans and their cohorts, for example, as described by Ignatia Broker in Night Flying Woman,[321] was avoidance.

In his historical retrospective of Catholic missionary activities at Red Lake, the Rev. Alban Fruth describes many hundreds of people “in the woods” near Red Lake in 1879.[322] As is apparent from a comparison of the 1879 Annuity records with the 1885 Indian Census, most of these people had “disappeared” by the time the United States Government policy began shifting away from the bounty-hunting mentality of the mid-nineteenth century and toward the more subtle genocide of compulsory education: forced acculturation and differential policies in bureaucratic administration.[323]

The period between 1885 and the early twentieth century was one of military occupation of what Wub-e-ke-niew refers to as “concentration camps called Indian reservations.” Métis, who were considered by both themselves and the Anglo-Americans to be “conquered “people, as well as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, who had never gone to war and were not conquered, were confined to the reservations, although the Métis were more likely to be able to get a “pass” from the Indian agent for travel and to search for a spouse to whom one was not ‘too closely related.’.

Genocide of the remaining aboriginal people continued: including through murder. One of Wub-e-ke-niew’s great aunts, Ah-zhe-day-be-nais-eke, was beaten to death. That murder was recorded in the early twentieth-century Beltrami County death records as a “forest death”; through bureaucratic policies that used the demographics and cultural traits of the Métis to encourage their survival at the expense of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway; and through the forcible removal of children from their parents as a part of the boarding school system established on all reservations by the 1890s.

By 1996, there remained only a few individuals with an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodem, and most of them had some Métis ancestry on their matriline. The community structure, the culture as a living culture, the language spoken as a native language of everyday life, and the extended families of these aboriginal indigenous people are gone. Although there are a handful of children who still have a Dodem, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it during the spring of 1996: “Because of [our seven-generation avoidance of] incest, they do not have anybody to marry in the Dodems. We are an extinct people. The White man said he was going to exterminate us, and he has succeeded. He is using his Indians to hide his genocide of my people.” From an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway perspective, the Métis/Indians and other European invaders who preceded the Anglo-American ones were pioneers in the military sense of the word, as well as being agents of genocide and complicit in the cover-up of that holocaust.

Introduction