One woman’s reservation removal odyssey

By Jeff Armstrong

Widow of Wub-e-ke-niew fights for dignity

While striving to carry on the legacy of her deceased husband as a writer for this paper, Clara NiiSka is also waging an intensely personal legal struggle to vindicate the late columnist and author Wub-e-ke-niew's (a.k.a. Francis Blake)Ahnishinahbeojibway beliefs.
 

When he died in 1997, Red Lake tribal officials took their revenge, according to NiiSka. One week later, Wub-e-ke-niew's daughter, Valerie Blake, and two other individuals forced NiiSka from her home and seized their joint and her personal belongings--from their van and years worth of painstaking research papers down to her undergarments. They also commandeered Wub-e-ke-niew's death certificate by threatening to exhume the writer's body from the grave to prove his race.
 

This they legitimized through a Red Lake tribal probate court, which relied for its jurisdiction on the death certificate describing Francis Blake, Jr. (Wub-e-ke-niew's son) as an Indian. Subsequent to the preliminary hearings, which appointed Valerie Blake "administrator" of the estate, the tribal council posthumously re-enrolled Wub-e-ke-niew in Red Lake, again in his son's name. When NiiSka appeared at a tribal probate court hearing May 26, 1998 to contest the jurisdiction of the court and validate her 1984 marriage, she was removed from the courtroom and exiled from the reservation.
 

NiiSka continued to attempt to amend the state death certificate to reflect her marriage to Wub-e-ke-niew, but was thwarted by tribal officials who enlisted the support of state Sen. Linda Berglin. Berglin's intervention was apparently an attempt to deny NiiSka, a graduate student, access to her research papers with which to complete an allegedly "genocidal" doctoral thesis.
 

In a case currently pending in the state Court of Appeals, NiiSka is attempting to overturn a ruling by Beltrami County trial court judge Paul Benshoof that her marriage was not legally valid under state or tribal law. NiiSka contends the ruling was based largely upon a defunct 1947 Red Lake General Council enactment and a Tribal Council resolution from 1990, six years after the couple wed. The former resolution was faxed by Red Lake officials to the court just days before the judge filed his decision, which he made prior to a deadline he had issued for NiiSka to present evidence to the court.
 

NiiSka, however, argues in an impressive 112-page brief that her marriage was valid under the Mide religion and that the Ahnishinahbeojibway never ceded civil jurisdiction to Red Lake or the State of Minnesota. While Wub-e-ke-niew was demonstrably not an Indian, she maintains, even if the tribal council would have had jurisdiction, there was no applicable marriage law at the time of their wedding in 1984.
 

While seeking primarily to gain recognition of her own marriage, NiiSka makes a compelling case for the unconstitionality of decades of legal precedents--arguments which the court will find difficult to refute:
 

"The inconsistency of 'Indian Law' is exacerbated by the contested confusion over what, precisely, defines a person as being an 'Indian' subject to the separate--and not-equal--jurisdiction of, for example, Federally-regulated Courts of Indian Offenses. And, the disparity between 'Indian' jurisdiction and other jurisdictions is such that if the term 'Indian' designates a 'race,' or is contingent on 'race,' then much of 'Indian law' is blatantly apartheid, and, subsequent to Brown v. Board of Education, unconstitutional," NiiSka writes.

Furthermore, NiiSka argues:

"The quarter century between 1864 and 1889 was marked by what was euphemistically termed 'Grant's peace policy':

Indians who did not go willingly to the reservations would either be driven there by force or exterminated in the process.

Overt genocide marked both U.S. and State of Minnesota policy during this period--and the Holocaust continued well beyond 1928, i.e., the year Wub-e-ke-niew was born. Genocide became explicitly illegal under International Law with the signing of the 'Charter of the International Military Tribunal' at Nuremberg, as well as by the unanimous adoption of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. Genocide is also illegal under U.S. law, at least since the Senate's ratification of the Genocide convention on November 4, 1989. Thus, the severe depopulation of the Ahnishinahbeojibway engendered by genocide cannot reasonably be construed to have extinguished Ahnishinahbeojibway civil jurisdiction," NiiSka maintains.

(The case is entitled In Re: Application of Paul Bunyan Rural Telephone Cooperative Under Rule 67.02 MRCP, MN Appellate Court Case Number C9-00-1569.)