|
August 30, 2002
|
||||||
By Larry Adams Bemahdizewin, or “Living The Good Life,” took part on August 10, 2002, on a day when it seemed that Mother Earth didn’t know whether to shine the sun or obscure it with Her clouds. With a staff of ten and a cast of 30 youth fresh from the “Mni,” (Minneapolis) as it tends to be known around Miskwa-gami wizaga iganing, the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation in northern Minnesota or “the rez,” the rendezvous point was the “cut-off” on the southwestern part of Lower Red Lake. There, Darwin Sumner, one of the counselors, albeit a little late yet right on time as far as “Anishinaabe Time” is concerned, (that is, 15 minutes to an hour later, depending on where you are on Turtle Island at any given point in time). The caravan of staff and Native youth from the Twin Cities consisted of 30 teens from White Earth, Red Lake, Fond du Lac and some who also reside in Minneapolis as well, spent the night before at Red Lake’s Thief River Falls Seven Clans Casino swimming and carousing, included White Earth’s Earl and Kathy Hoagland, Mike Neumann and a host of other counselors, who met up and followed us to the village of Red Lake. SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Bemahdizewin is funded by a grant in the amount of $25,000 through the McKnight Foundation by the Indigenous People’s Task Force out of Minneapolis and is headed by Sharon Day, who is originally from Nett Lake. Also, this joint effort received funding from a $15,000 EPA grant from the Independent School District 196 out of Rosemont. The purpose of Bemahdizewin “is to strengthen individual identity and community by practicing traditional values and sustainable development technologies that reestablish our relationship with the earth” according to Bemahdizewin’s mission statement. With Red Lake’s waves rising and falling rather roughly along the trip to the village and the sun shining suggestively, everyone eventually got to Tom Lussier’s house. Lussier came out of the house as greetings and salutations were the order of the day. From there, Lussier took us back behind the house. He stood by a machine not used anymore, which was used to process wild rice and proceeded to give a demonstration to the kids and counselors. “There’s not much to it now, but it took me quite a few years to find people who were willing to let loose of this stuff,” Lussier noted. “This one (a shaker) came out of Cass Lake. I have the old one over there, the old style, the big barrel over there, right behind there, you got to hook that to a car. You take the wheel off the car and you hook it straight to the car. Then you use the same transmission to run it. It’s kinda dangerous, especially with kids around there. This one here, I can just stand right here and watch, you know. If they’re (kids) are around here, then they’re in trouble. It is dangerous, because this thing is going pretty fast. I have an electric cord I hook to my dryer vent, it’s back here. It’s goes out to the house and stuff. Boy, here we go. Here’s where you put your rice in and you go like this here,” explained Lussier as he held a birch basket in his hands, lifting the basket up and down with a vigorous motion. “You got to do it right. You do it wrong and your rice ends up all on the ground and you got all the hulls in here. This is authentic, a brand new one (referring to the birch basket). The other one was getting pretty old but my brother-in-law had that for years, I got that in the house. I’m kind of saving that for show and tell, you know. But it’s getting cracked up and after a while, this birch bark gets old and dry, like everything else, I suppose. That’s where you put your rice in, like if you take it right out of there and put it in here. Almost like when you’re ricing, you got to have that wrist action and you knock your rice right in the boat. Any of you guys ever rice? Ever go ricing? That’s a lot of work, isn’t it? They give you a buck a pound. I give a buck a pound now, you get it over here and I can finish it. But I don’t really do it for the money. I guess all my family depends on wild rice now, grandpa, you know, that’s where they get their wild rice, from me. I try to teach my boy, he’s 22 years old. I’m hoping yet. Pretty soon, I won’t be able to come out, you know, and show him how to do it.” Referring to the gray barrel with a small door attached to it, Lussier continued, “You got to have everything, you need to time this. On this one here, in second gear, about 20 minutes. Take it out, it’ll be ready. There might be a couple of hulls in there but usually the wild rice, when you eat it, it’s got little black things, that’s when the hulls haven’t come off, you got to take them off before you feed it to your good company, your family company,” quipped Lussier with a chuckle. There were concerns about the disappearance of wild rice around Red Lake. “Paddy rice and the stuff the white men are doing now, they’re kind of stealing our good idea,” Lussier denoted. “Well, they’re stealing that now and they’re making paddy rice, it’s not any good. I tried some of that and tried to parch it in here (pointing to the barrel), it’s still black and gummy. This stuff here, when you cook it, it just puffs right up, if you did it right. . . . Same way with our wild rice now, they’re trying to get it out of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota, they’re trying to get a hybrid rice. They’ve been trying that for years, I talked to the people in Clearbrook, you know, all of the rice paddies that are there. Then they dumped all of their chemicals. We had a big fish kill out here in the lake a few years ago too, it came out of the Tamarack River, they dumped all of their wild rice paddy water into the river, it killed a lot of fish. Yeah, the Tamarack River up by Waskish. Yeah, they’ve got a bunch of rice paddies up that way, north of the lake. Everything comes into the lake, we only have one outlet, west of here. One outlet, the rest of them (the rivers) all come in. So whatever Blackduck is doing or over toward Turtle River that way, they got all these rivers, they come in. This river down here, it used to have trout. So what do they do, they go put a dump ground up on the hill there, up on Barton’s Camp.” “So the commercial rice paddies, that’s another threat to the water, the environment and the natural wild rice beds their selves?” Darwin Sumner asked. “Yup, and all of the Shinnobs (slang for Anishinaabe) that eat the wild rice. Anybody that has had any dealings with [paddy] rice, the longer you cook that paddy rice, the gummier it gets,” concluded Lussier After a thorough explanation of the old-school technique of “ricing” to the attentive yet very quiet youth, who took in all of the information, it was on to the Good Lake area of Lower Red Lake, with the plan being to go out and plant wild rice in the area. All of the kids got in the vehicles and Sumner led the way to that particular area of the rez. Taking Highway 1 in Red Lake, Sumner took us on a series of twisting, turning dirt roads until at last, we reached our target area. Again, the kids piled out of the vans. Then the kids proceeded to go down in the ditches and grabbed several cattails, tearing them off their stems. The cattails were then hoisted skyward proudly by a few of those who took them. From there, the counselors got rain jackets out for the kids, as it drizzled slightly but not enough to actually rain on us. It was there that the clay was broken out as well as a few bags of wild rice. Mike Neumann took some of the clay, formed a bowl out of two pieces, put wild rice in between the two pieces and closed the two pieces of clay around the wild rice, forming a ball. The kids then took the initiative and began making their own rice balls, which they put on the ground. The rice balls then became known as “dinosaur eggs” by Sean Farlander, one of the Bemahdizewin counselors, who took digital pictures of the kids standing by their creations. From there, Sean and I took a canoe trip to the area that we were going to reseed. The canoes had two concave, rounded indentations for a person’s buns to sit in. What will they think of next? Although reluctant to bring it, the 35 mm camera was brought along anyway. Fortunately, the camera, as well as Sean and I, were fortunate enough not to tip over in the water. We found our spot, then took a jaunt over to the other side of the pond. Our canoe almost go hung up once in the middle of the pond because the water was so shallow there, however, we made it to the other side and rowed a counter-clockwise circle in the deeper water back to where the rest of the counselors and youth were waiting for us. Once Sean and I made it there, I got out as the kids began getting into the canoes, three at a time. The bags of rice balls were loaded onto the canoes as well. Intently watching all the activity about a half a mile away was a migizi or an eagle. I immediately asked Earl Hoagland for a pinch of tobacco, since I was going to be videotaping the eagle, however, not without asking permission by putting some tobacco down first. Some of the kids had found something and were gathered in a circle around whatever it was that they had found. It turned out to be a crayfish, which was rather green. Unfortunately, the crayfish was killed by one of the kids. As the elders remind us, I told that kid that he shouldn’t have killed that crayfish and that killing an animal for no reason could come back to him. As if on cue, the spirits made their displeasure known as I dropped two batteries for the flash and couldn’t find them. Then, the kids were playing the radio in one of the vehicles, which killed the battery of the SUV. Earl had to go and get a battery jumper to start the car. Then, to add injury to insult, while videotaping the rice planting, one of the canoes tipped over as two of the young girls got soaked pretty good but the counselor didn’t get too wet. Eventually, the kid who killed the crayfish put tobacco out for the animal he had killed. It was as if the spirits wanted to teach that youth a lesson about killing an animal for no reason, as things went wrong and didn’t seem or feel right until he put his tobacco out. We left the area to go fishing near the outlet of Lower Red Lake. There, of course, the rods and reels came out, most of the teens grabbed a rod while the propane grill was warmed up for barbecued steaks and potatoes as the ladies prepared the food. None of the kids had caught anything at first. At one point, it seemed that the kids were going to give up fishing altogether. Then a young girl caught the first fish, which was a small sheepshead and all of the kids who left their fishing poles immediately grabbed them and started fishing again. After a while, the kids started landing northerns and even a Red Lake walleye was caught but had to be thrown back, according to the walleye moratorium on Lower Red Lake. After a good day on the rez, I finally decided that I had to leave to get back home. I shook hands with all of the counselors and got a ride back to my car. However, the fish had started to bite for the kids as I was leaving, that would be just my luck, as it turns out. |
||||||
