Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (11 page)

Sean stated his theories about racism in a nutshell, a coconut shell: “It was subtle like that in the military, too. It was the strangest thing: when I got on board, there’s five thousand guys. And I’m working with this other air traffic controller, his name was Mike Jenkins. Strangest fucking thing: here we are halfway around the world, on a boat, working the same job. And he’s from Deer River and I’m from Cass Lake. He’s Indian. I’m Indian. Both his parents spoke Ojibwe. We grew up thirty miles apart but never knew each other. They called him Little Chief, which pissed him off. They started calling me Big Chippewa. That lasted about two hours. And then they noticed I didn’t give a shit so they stopped. It wasn’t any fun. I told them: there’s a boundary you can’t cross. I just ain’t going to put up with any shit. I told them: I’ll follow the rules and report your shit to the superior officer. We can do it that way. Or, if not, I won’t follow the rules and it’ll be just me and you and we can deal with it that way. Your choice. This was around the time that that one Indian guy, a marine, sold secrets to the Russians. You remember that?”

I did not. I checked it out. And just in case you think Sean was making stuff up:
Clayton Lonetree, Winnebago and Navajo, was a U.S. Marine stationed in Moscow at the American embassy. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1980 and entered the Marine Corps Security Battalion Guard school, a rigorous, elite training program in which he was instructed in espionage and counterespionage techniques. Lonetree was given top secret security clearance and was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1984. While working as an embassy guard he was entrapped by a Soviet officer named Violetta Seina, whose cover was that of a translator and secretary in the embassy. Sources interviewed later acknowledged that she was a “presence”—five foot nine, with gray eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. They began dating and Seina introduced Lonetree to her “uncle Sasha,” who persuaded Lonetree to become a friend of the Soviet Union. He gave the Soviets detailed blueprints of the embassy and a burn bag containing more than 100 documents about U.S. arms reductions in Western Europe. Eventually he turned himself in. He was tried and sentenced to twenty-five years. The sentence was reduced to fifteen years of which he served nine. He was released in 1996.

“Anyway,” continued Sean as though he had absolutely nothing to do that day, that week, or that month, “his lawyer mounted a really stupid defense. Like: he did it because of what the government did to his people. I mean, that’s stupid. It was more like: for the first time in his life he’s getting some nice, slick, grade-A, white pussy. So this was going on, and when you’re at sea there’s not much to do, like I said, so you sit around and do a lot of philosophizing with the guys. And they asked me about this and I said, ‘A man does what a man does.’ And then they say, ‘What about the government? What about what it did to your people?’ I was raised by Warren Tibbetts, remember, a tried and true AIMster. And so I told them
all
about the treaties. I told them it really pisses me off. I told them about 1854 and 1837 and the Nelson Act and the Dawes Act. I told them it was illegal to practice our religion until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. An Indian couldn’t even buy a drink, legally, until 1953. We weren’t even citizens till a bunch of Indians fought in World War I and were given medals by the French and nothing by their own country and because of that they passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924.”

Once again, Sean had his facts right. Until 1924 Indians existed in a kind of official limbo. Some Indian women had become American citizens by marrying white men. Others had been naturalized through military service in World War I. Still others had become American citizens as part of treaty agreements or special statutes. But the majority of Indians were not American citizens and were not allowed to become naturalized in the same manner as immigrants to America were. Doctor Joseph K. Dixon, a proponent of assimilation, wrote: “The Indian, though a man without a country, the Indian who has suffered a thousand wrongs considered the white man’s burden and from mountains, plains and divides, the Indian threw himself into the struggle to help throttle the unthinkable tyranny of the Hun. The Indian helped to free Belgium, helped to free all the small nations, helped to give victory to the Stars and Stripes. The Indian went to France to help avenge the ravages of autocracy. Now, shall we not redeem ourselves by redeeming all the tribes?”

The Indian Citizenship Act was passed in 1924, in part because
so many Indians had served in the armed services during World War I, a
nd in part because of U.S. assimilationist policy. Indians were now American citizens and tribal citizens—one did not preclude the other; they belonged to the U.S. nation and their respective tribal nations, too, one identity overlapping the other. Citizenship in the United States is a questionable kind of “redemption,” made for questionable reasons.

As for religion, it had been government policy since the Ghost Dance craze in the nineteenth century to forbid Indian religions. This prohibition, though loosely enforced, was supported by missionaries. Authorities sometimes went so far as to confiscate and destroy religious items, physically disrupt ceremonies, and imprison religious leaders. By the mid-1970s no one seriously stopped Indian ceremonies or religion any longer. But Indian religion was sometimes difficult to practice because sacred sites were on private land or in national parks and it was illegal to possess some religious accoutrements such as eagle feathers, eagle bones, and peyote.
The BIA’s Circular 1665 of 1921, officially in effect until 1933 but unofficially heeded until much later, explicitly forbade the practice of Native American religions: “The Sun Dance, and all other similar dances and so-called religious ceremonies are considered ‘Indian Offences’ under existing regulations and corrective penalties. I regard such restrictions as applicable to any dance which involves . . . the reckless giving away of property . . . frequent and prolonged periods of celebration . . . in fact, any disorderly or plainly excessive performance that promotes superstitions, cruelty, licentiousness, idleness, danger of health, and shiftless indifference of family welfare. In all such instance, the regulations should be enforced.” The circular was amended in 1923. The amendment somewhat “softened” the tone of the original circular: “Indian dances be limited to one day in the midweek and at one center of each district; the months of March, April, June, July and August being exempted (no dances in these months). That none take part in the dances or be present who are under 50 years of age. That a careful propaganda be undertaken to educate public opinion against the (Indian religious) dance.” The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), passed in 1978, formally put a stop to the suppression of Indian religions.

Sean continued: “So I said, ‘How the fuck do you
think
I feel?’ I said, ‘I’m always wondering what the government is going to do to me next.’ And then they ask the obvious question: ‘So what are you doing in the navy? Why are you serving, then?’ And they don’t see it. They didn’t see it till I said it, and I said, ‘Hey. This is still my fucking country. My Turtle Island. Get it?’ And they did. They got it after that.”

In 1999 after Mille Lacs won its case, Sean called his brothers and said: “Man. We got to do this. You got to come down here and do this.” So, despite protesters, anti-treaty rednecks, and the rest, Sean and his brothers began fishing. Still, even after they’d won the case they were nervous about racism, though you’d have to be pretty foolish to take on Sean and Marc and Mike.

“Oh, we didn’t get all that really bad racism about netting like they did in Wisconsin,” Sean assures me. “But that group led by Bud Grant, PERM, they’d show up at the boat landings and take pictures. But they didn’t protest. At that time you couldn’t put in or pull out without a rep from GLIFWC and a state warden and a cop there. It was tense. Nothing overt. But there was that subtle undercurrent of hatred. One time we were pulling out on a landing. We had three nets. A great big tub of fish—me and Marc and Mike. And we see some people coming from some houses nearby; there’s lots of white people living near that landing. And I see they got cameras. And I’m thinking, ‘Ahhhhhhhhh, fuck. Here we go.’ So they come up and the one guy, he’s young, in his twenties. He says, ‘How are you guys doing? Can I take a look? We’ve been living here, our family has, for like fifty years. We’ve seen you putting in here. We recognize the boat. We just wanted to say good luck. Hope you’re doing well. We hope you get a lot of fish and think its pretty cool you’re doing this stuff.’ I about fell out of the boat. No doubt he recognized us: we were using Marc’s boat. The USS fucking
Minnow
—his cabin cruiser. In six feet of water! He’s got those dual props on his inboard, that spin in opposite directions, you know, to reduce cavitation (you know: that’s the forming of air bubbles) and they cost about fifteen hundred apiece. And every year he grinds the props on the rocks. One year he got them refurbished. But a couple of times he had to totally replace them. First time we took that boat out I was standing up there and I started singing:
There once was a sailing ship, a mighty ship was she
. . .”

After we set the nets we went back to Bonnie’s house and watched movies and smoked in the garage while Mike tried to fix the running lights on his boat. The game wardens worked for the tribe, but if his lights didn’t work he would get fined. They might not even let him back on the lake to gather the nets. Mike’s boat is a small, clunky, sixteen-footer with a twenty-horsepower motor. I stared out the open garage door at Marc’s Bayliner: the USS
Minnow
. “Let’s just use that,” I said.

“We did, man!” said Sean. “Last year. We dropped that fucker in and pulled nets with it and everyone at the landing looked at us like we were fucking crazy.”

“We were fucking crazy,” said Mike. “Crazier than fuck.”

“Yeah. We were bottoming out. We had to use those little ladders for water-skiers attached to the back. We had to hang on to those and pull from there. The boat is so high up you can’t reach the water from the deck. We had that thing full of fish. And it was windier than shit and we were blowing into shallow water. It was fucking nuts.”

We woke up the next morning at four o’clock bleary-eyed and grumpy. Sean, Mike, and Marc stumbled toward the coffee and once everyone had some we got in Marc’s truck and headed back to the lake. There is something magical about being on a big lake before dawn. Everything exists as stored potential. It was cold. The ground was still frozen. Great plates of ice, some of it several feet thick, rubbed against each other out in the lake as though anxious for things to begin. We dumped the boat in. Mike tried to start the motor, cursed, tried again, cursed, and it coughed to life. The brothers were anxious to get their nets in before the northern and muskie started hunting. Since they hunt by sight they tend to move around at dusk and dawn, when the bait fish can’t see as well as they can. No one much wants these fish; they don’t taste as good as walleye and when they hit the net their instinct is to roll rather than twist. A big northern or muskie can rip a hole in a net yards wide, and it can take hours to untangle them.

Mike was in the front and pulled the floating line toward the boat. At first it came up easily, too easily. “Fucking bastards,” he muttered. But then, after a few yards of net were in the boat, Mike began to strain.

“Watch out, boys!” he said. “Here come the slimy bastards now!”

And sure enough, one walleye, two, a cluster of four. Sean stood behind Mike, stripped the net as it came in, and threw the fish into a tub mid-thwart. Marc piloted and was largely silent. By the time we were done with the first net a tub stood in the middle of the boat filled with forty-two walleye, some of them still gasping, others turning their eerie eyes toward the sky. The second net held fifty walleye and one northern. By the time we got back to the landing everyone was cold and excited, looking forward to filleting but dreading it, too: it’s tough work and ninety-two fish are a lot to handle.

Marc turned the boat around and headed back to the landing. The creelers were there—tribal employees who along with the game wardens count and measure the fish, note it against the licenses held by the tribal members, and add it to the overall tally. They want to be very sure that they don’t exceed the quota of fish set jointly by the state and the tribe. In the seventeen years since the Mille Lacs Band began exercising its treaty rights in earnest, it has never once exceeded its quota. The band members are very careful to play by the rules, to take less than what they are licensed to take as a way of avoiding criticism and conflict. Not that it always works.

As it often happens, nets are set in the spring, when there is still ice on the lake. When the wind shifts or a storm comes up, the ice moves in great crushing sheets and rolls right over the tops of the nets, which are pulled from their weights by the force of the ice and deposited sometimes miles away. Such conditions happened in 2007, and ten nets were lost on the west side of Mille Lacs. The subtle racism that Sean talked about wasn’t far behind, though it was mostly confined to online forums—which rednecks seem to like precisely because anonymous online forums don’t require accountability, factual argument, respect, or understanding. One poster (identified as “Chief No Net”) wrote, “Why are Native Americans allowed to net fish? How about hunting buffalo . . . is that still legal?” Zach, from Kansas City, Missouri, wrote, “I believe they should let them keep all the fish they want, after all before the Europeans came they did that. But they should be only allowed to use spears and canoes just like they used before the Europeans came, only fair.” Of course there are Indians online, too. A poster from St. Paul retorted, “Hey, you, wasichun . . . what part of TREATY don’t you understand? The Native people exchanged millions of acres of prime land for the right to fish. Don’t like the deal? Give the land back! Feel free to send the keys to your house to the closed Anishinabeg Tribal council, and don’t let the door hit ya’ on your way out!”