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Chapter 7 - Background

a bit of personal description
                “the rez”
            A statistical description: population
            Several Vantages
                Politics and land
            Colonial transformations and genocide

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.”[1]

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.”[2]

               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,[3] 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  …[4]

 

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.”[5]

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,[6] 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,[7] 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.”[8]^,[9] 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.’[10]  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;[11] total enrollment in the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in 2001 was 9,610.[12]

               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.”[13]  The Northwest Area Foundation, in their compilation of regional reservation census statistics,[14] 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.[15]

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).[16]

               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,[17] the per capita income at Red Lake had dropped from $10,016 in 1979,[18] to $7,876 in 1999:[19] 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.’[20]

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.”[21]  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.[22]

 

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.[23]  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),[24] 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[25] 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”[26] 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.[27]  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. [28]

 

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.[29]

 

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.[30]

 

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.”[31]  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?[32]

 

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.[33]

            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 re-consider 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.”[34]  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’[35] 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.[36]  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.[37]

 

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.[38]

 

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.”[39]  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.[40]

 

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, [41] 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[42] – 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.[43]  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.[44]

 

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.”[45]

            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.[46]

 

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.[47]