Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (13 page)

“It most definitely is. I can see that bastard’s beard from here,” says Mike.

“Well, get the fuck down, then,” says Sean, “Turkeys can see better than you can. What is this, a Mille Lacs ambush?”

Since neither Sean nor his brothers have ever hunted turkey before, there has been lots of opinion thrown around for hours—about hunting methods, patterns, and species habits and habitat. Most of the information has come through hearsay and somewhat directed searches online between checking nets and watching Bonnie’s flat screen. In terms of the ratio of meat to money spent there aren’t many activities more expensive than hunting turkey. Blessed with keen eyesight, excellent hearing, vast intelligence, and a suspicious nature (not unlike Sean’s mother-in-law), turkeys require a stealthy approach. They also require a lot of gear. Calls (mouth calls, box calls, slate), camouflage (gilly suits, face masks, and gloves), guns (twelve-gauge loaded with four-shot), and decoys are all considered required.

In years past game wardens in this area might have prevented Mille Lacs Indians from hunting. Now the two white game wardens employed by the tribe from whom Sean and his brothers purchased their permits were helping. Avid turkey hunters themselves, the wardens told Sean, Mike, and Marc that they’d seen turkeys roosting by the powwow grounds and had seen at least two flocks over at “the 3600.” They advised Sean how to set up his decoys and they seemed generally excited that Sean and his brothers might be the first Mille Lacs hunters to get a turkey. How times change.

We’d hunted all afternoon with no luck—we saw lots of tracks pressed into the frozen clay and a few callbacks and one approach across a cornfield, but nothing had come close. But then, as we’re walking back to the truck we see them step out of the woods 400 yards distant. Marc and Mike weren’t so sure at first, so they just stood in the middle of the road. But Sean whispered and yelled, and Marc, Mike, Sean, and I hunkered down in the ditch. We stuck our hands out and staked down our decoys where the turkeys could see them. Marc and Sean began using their calls.

We didn’t seem to have any effect at first. We could barely see the turkeys over the ditch grass but they just seemed to mill and peck at the ground, oblivious of the calls. But then one stuck up its head. And then the rest. After five minutes they began moving closer. And closer. The flock came all the way down the middle of the road, drawn by the sound. When they got 100 yards away they really came into focus. The late afternoon sun hit the one in front—a large tom with an eleven-inch beard. Behind him were at least twenty hens and a few jakes. They wanted the tom—the Mille Lacs Band and the state of Minnesota allow only the harvest of toms, in order to preserve the population. Marc rubbed his box call gently. The tom stood tall and began prancing sideways toward us, and then he turned to the other side. His chest feathers were puffed out and trapped the sun. They were beautiful—streaked with bronze, copper, and gold. His tail was fanned out completely, and he seemed to fill the entire road. His caruncle was puffed out and bloodred. As Marc rubbed his call the tom pranced, lifting his legs high enough so we could see his spurs, and strutted, switching from side to side. It was one of the most beautiful and exciting things I have ever seen.

When he closed to forty yards, then thirty, Marc began whispering, “Shoot, Mike. Take him. Take him, goddamn it. Shoot, shoot!” Mike paused and then shot. The covey jumped. Birds were flying in every direction around us. Mike shot again and the tom flopped down to the edge of the water in the ditch.

“Holy shit! You got him,” shouted Sean. “You got him! You got him!”

The brothers ran forward and collected the turkey from the ground. They all took turns holding it, turning its body this way and that, examining the beard and the tail feathers, the shrinking caruncle. They looked at each other and smiled and high-fived one another. After a quick smoke we set off into the setting sun, down the road back to the truck, to go once again out on the cold water of
Lake Mille Lacs and pull plenty from the deep.

Judge Margaret Seelye Treuer in robes.

Courtesy Anton Treuer

3

It is minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit when my mother and I pull into the Tribal Court building at Bois Forte Reservation in far northeastern Minnesota. It’s hard to tell, but sober business goes on inside the low-slung, graceless structure. We walk in. Everyone looks serious: the tribal cop at the entrance, the staff in the office, the Indians waiting in chairs and standing around in the cramped hallway. They are all serious. And they are all deferential toward my mother. It’s understandable. She’s the judge.

But they don’t know her as I do. They don’t see the disorder of her bedside table or the way she can never locate the lids for her many dozens of travel mugs. They didn’t see the look of excitement—or was it predatory glee?—when, during our drive to Bois Forte, a partridge wandered onto the frozen road to peck at salt. “Swerve, Dave! Hit him and we’ll be eating partridge tonight!”
They don’t see the worry that attends her thoughts about her remaining siblings, and the sorrow that clings to her memories of Barb, Sonny, her cousin Mikey, and her father, all of whom died too soon, and not in peace. They didn’t hear her fussing over me when I was in high school and college and began drinking and smoking pot: “Barb said that when she smoked marijuana she could feel her soul leaving her body. It just left and never came back. That’s what happens. You’ll lose yourself. You’ll lose yourself completely.” What they do see is a formidable woman. A formidable Indian woman who will sit in judgment over them and hear their crimes.

Once inside the building she goes to her chambers (the term makes the space sound grander than it is—just a room directly across from the main entrance with two desks and lots of files scattered about) and I go to the courtroom to wait. The courtroom is small. (So is the reservation, which is one of the smallest in Minnesota.) There are vinyl-covered brown chairs and wood-paneled walls that make the courtroom look, to me, like someone’s basement den from the 1970s. I half expect to see a recliner, a wet bar, and a disused foosball table against the far wall. The American flag and the Bois Forte Reservation flag stand, exhausted, in the corner. The bench is slightly raised. Everyone is quiet, dressed in work clothes, jeans, parkas, and Caterpillar and Sorel pac boots. Lucille, the court administrator, who cooks lunch every day there’s court, says, “Caps, caps! Take off your caps.” The people pull them off in a hurry and stuff them into their pockets.

“All rise,” she says. And my mother wafts into the room from a back door and takes her place at the bench. It is a strange thing to doff my cap and rise when my mother enters the room. And I get the feeling that every time she walked into my bedroom or the kitchen or the living room or wherever, I should have been standing with hat in hand, a supplicant before her. The bailiff brings the papers over and while he goes over the docket with my mother, Lucille squints at the huddle of Indians in the gallery, leans back, leans forward again, and says:

“You there. Is your hair blue?”

“Yes, ma’am. I colored it for fun,” says a teenage boy who, later, will appear before the bench to face charges.

She laughs. “Oh, I wasn’t sure. But I thought it was blue. Or purple. You know, purple for the Minnesota Vikings.”

“No, ma’am. I am a Packers fan.”

With the docket sorted out, my mother reads everyone’s rights en masse. It must give her some pleasure to do so. For most of the people facing charges and for most Indians everywhere, it wasn’t until recently that we felt as though we had any rights to speak of. Certainly not rights administered in an Indian court presided over by an Indian judge, or defended by Indian lawyers and prosecuted by Indian lawyers, or facilitated by an Indian bailiff. One of the things I am only now beginning to realize is how deeply any one law, any congressional act, or any Supreme Court ruling can affect everything else. As common as the Bois Forte Tribal Court seems, as down-home (if not homey) as it might be, there is a seething mass of history that props it up—the legacy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Major Crimes Act, the policy of allotment, and the Dawes Act—and sets the act and the actors in motion. Tribal law is notoriously tricky; each thread is tied to another and to another and it seems almost impossible to figure out sometimes. But one thing uniting all the disparate forces that come together in my mother’s tribal court is the issue of power and powerlessness.

Memories of the kind of powerlessness that Indians felt in the face of the law run close to the surface for her and for many other Indians. My mother remembers very clearly, and narrates with a force of anger surprising because the subject itself is both so old and so commonplace for Indians of her generation, how the state game warden confiscated her family’s rice one fall. At Leech Lake, the Indian children started school in late September, after participating in the wild rice harvest. The area schools hated this arrangement, of course, because their funding was based, in part, on their average daily membership (ADM), which was compiled at the start of the regular school year. Wild rice—which grows naturally in shallow streams and along lake edges—ripens in late August and mid-September. There are about three good weeks when it is possible to harvest it. This is usually a family affair. Everyone, from young children to the old, gathers at boat landings and campgrounds and shoves whatever kinds of homemade boats are available—duck boats, canoes (if people are wealthy enough to own any), flat-bottomed boats made of plywood—into the rice. One person pushes the boat or canoe through the rice with a long tamarack or cedar pole tipped with a Y-shaped tree fork or (again, if people are rich) a metal duckbill. The person doing the pushing is like a gondolier. The ricer in the bow bends the rice stalks over the gunwales of the boat with one wooden knocker and hits or “knocks” the rice with the other one. The ripe rice kernels drop into the bottom of the canoe; the unripe rice stays on the stalks, and when it is ready you can rice the same area again. The knocker alternates between the left and right sides. Meanwhile the poler slowly pushes the canoe along through the rice beds—if the boat goes too fast, the knocker won’t have a chance to reach out and bend the stalks; if it’s too slow, you won’t get much rice in the boat. If the crop is a good one and if you stay at it all day, a two-person team can expect to harvest about 200 pounds of green rice—sometimes a lot more, sometimes a lot less. Most people keep some rice for themselves, either finishing it the old-fashioned way (by roasting it over a fire and dancing on the parched rice to loosen the hulls and then winnowing it) or sending it to a rice finisher who does the same thing but with a wood-fired mechanical parcher and winnower. Most of the rice is sold. In the 1950s, when my mother was growing up, this was, for many, the single major source of cash income for the year. If not the only source, it was certainly the largest. In the 1950s green rice (rice that was knocked and sacked but not parched or winnowed) fetched around one dollar per pound. This was a lot of money. My grandfather, grandmother, mother, aunt Barb, uncle Sonny, and uncle Davey could make $600 a day if the rice was good. A rice season could yield a few thousand dollars—the cash needed to buy clothes, shoes, kerosene, flour, lard, bullets, roofing material, everything they needed to stay dry, warm, and fed for the winter. Ricing was a big deal. The harvest mattered more than any other. The rice mattered more than fish, more than furs, more than farming. It was the one tribal resource, in Ojibwe country at least, that was controlled and protected throughout the centuries when other treaty rights languished. By the 1950s, however, ricing, too, had eroded and the state had illegally assumed control of the rice beds.

One fall Dinah Stangel, her parents, my great-uncle Diddy Matthews, my mother, and some others drove around to the northwestern corner of Lake Winnie to rice on Raven’s Point and Rabbit Lake. There was no good way to get to the spot, because the wind was blowing hard and kicking up waves that would have swamped their canoes and boats, so they drove down an old tote road and dragged their boats through the trees and across bogs to get to the rice. They got a lot of it. But by four in the afternoon the wind had not let up. It was blowing out of the south and waves as high as four feet were crashing into Raven’s Bay from the main lake. My mother and her ricing partner Dinah Stangel were fourteen years old and both skinny as snakes. They were almost finished when the ricing pole broke. They had one oar and began using that to get back to the landing, and then that broke. Their homemade flat-bottomed duck boat was not intended for open water or for use in that kind of weather.

“I don’t know how we did it,” my mother remembers. “I totally thought we were going to die. We were lost in the rice. We were both so short we couldn’t see over it. We didn’t know which direction to go. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.”

Somehow they met up with Dinah’s parents and my mother’s uncle and aunt, and together they ventured out into the big lake and crept along the shore until they reached a public landing, West Winnie Landing. It was deserted except for one old white man camping out in an Airstream trailer. It was well past fishing season and all the tourists had gone home. The man saw them come in off the lake, saw what kind of shape they were in, and invited all six of them in. He turned up the heat and gave them all soup.

“I don’t know what that old-timer put in his soup, but it was the best damn soup I’ve ever tasted. Ever then. Ever since. Anyway, since it was such a long way around by boat to get the cars the men decided to walk around and get them and drive them down to the landing. It took them a couple of hours. When they got back they had the game warden with them. The way they used to do it, they’d open a lake for ricing for a couple of days and then close it, and open it again or open another one. So every day you’d hear where it was open and where it wasn’t. Well, Winnie was closed that day. And this state warden says, ‘Lake’s closed today. I’m going to have to take that rice.’ And we’d gotten a lot of it. It had been a real good day. So he took something like ten or twelve sacks of rice. He couldn’t even close the trunk of his car. And he drove off and we had nothing. Fucking asshole.”

It was more than fifty years ago and she’s still mad about it.

“Damn right I’m mad. That was our life. It was our life he put in his trunk and drove over to the rice buyer and sold.”

“He sold it?”

“Of course! What the hell else was he going to do? We didn’t know our rights then. We didn’t know, nobody knew, that a state warden has got no jurisdiction over Indians on their reservations. Back then they thought they were the law. And no one knew any better. We didn’t know any better. I almost died getting that rice and then he took it.”

My mother’s experiences of powerlessness as a young Indian woman aren’t far from her mind as the first case is called. A skinny middle-aged woman stood before the bench, practically buried in her parka, which she hadn’t taken off, either because in her nervousness she’d forgotten to or because she was still cold. She faced five charges, all of them alcohol-related. She pleaded guilty to all the charges. My mother glanced down at the papers in front of her and then back at the defendant. “Did you complete treatment?” “Yes, your honor.” “Looks like you did. You look better. Seems like you’re doing something right.” She suspended the jail time and the fines and ordered the defendant to complete community service. When it was over the woman’s lawyer leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Good job.”

The second case involved a girl who shoplifted from the convenience store on the reservation. The next case was related to the one before. Evidently the two young women took eight dollars’ worth of hamburger from the freezer. After stealing the hamburger they’d gone home and gotten into a fistfight with their mother and when the cops showed up they kicked and punched the squad car. The girls were charged with disorderly conduct, shoplifting, and domestic abuse.

After the charges were listed my mother paused again and looked straight at the defendant. “Did you apologize to your mother?” “Yes.” “Are you on good terms now?” “Yes. Yes, your honor.” “Have you been to treatment?” “Yeah, October. I did it in October.” “Did you go on your own or did someone make you? Were you ordered to?” “I went on my own.” “You look better now. Have you been staying away from booze?” “Yes, your honor.” She pleaded guilty. The fines and jail time were suspended and she was ordered to complete another evaluation and to stay away from all parties and bars. My mother rarely suspends fines. Instead she requires defendants to do community service to pay off the debt.

Of the eleven cases that day, every case save one was, in one way or another, related to alcohol or drug abuse. One of the first cases my mother tried at Bois Forte involved a few men who were terrorizing one of their acquaintances. According to testimony, they forced a man to shave his face “dry”—without shaving cream or water. Purely sadistic and mean. She gave them all the maximum. And she told them, “I’m going to give you the maximum.” The maximum penalty she can impose in her court under U.S. law is one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. Considering that some of the people appearing before her are so poor they steal eight dollars’ worth of hamburger from a convenience store freezer, $5,000 is a lot of money. On that first day many at Bois Forte began referring to the new judge as “Maximum Margaret.” Tribal courts such as Bois Forte, while limited in the kind of punishment they can dish out and also limited in what kinds of cases can be tried there, have fairly creative sentencing guidelines. She knows the price Indian communities and Indian people pay for the ravages of drugs and alcohol. She’s lost several dearly loved relatives to alcohol and drugs. Despite the fact that my mother wears a black robe and sits on a raised bench and the other Indians appear before her—despite the fact that it would appear that she has the power and they don’t—she has much more in common with them than I do. They seem baffled by life, somewhat defeated by it, confused by it. What “crimes” they’ve committed stem largely from this confusion. Just as confusing, just as baffling as the Indian lives that Indian trial courts are supposed to administer to and help, are the history and reach of the courts themselves. The complicated issue of tribal justice alone is enough to drive someone to drink.