Читать книгу Rez Life - David Treuer - Страница 13

2

“Just dump it in,” Sean is saying to his brothers Marc and Mike. The light is fading, and the wind is coming strong off the big lake: Lake Mille Lacs. It’s April, and the ice has retreated from the shore but the water is soupy with it. When the wind pushes the crushed ice up against the larger unbroken plates out in deeper water, it makes a raspy tinkling sound.

Sean is tall, with large hands, perfect for gripping nets. He was a basketball star in high school, joined the navy, and worked as an air traffic controller on an aircraft carrier. I don’t know if the job was good for him. “You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. My shit was squared away A-1 tight. I was correct. Everything in place. Not like now.” Not like now. His hands shake (“Goddamn allergies,” he says). He is nervous (“Goddamn steroids, they really fuck me up”). He is a little high-strung (“PTSD is a bitch, man, a real bitch”). He also talks a lot, more than most people and certainly more than most Indians. In a rush, his words tumble over themselves, each one apparently anxious to reach the finish line—your ears—before the next. He’s an excellent ricer, and can fillet a walleye faster than anyone else I know. (“Talk to a Chippewa and you’ll end up talking about two things: fish and beaver.”) Be that as it may, Sean’s the only Indian I know who is conversant on topics ranging from storytelling to how to tap a maple tree, the meaning of life, how to hit an alternator with a hatchet so it works, the design of the National Museum of the American Indian, Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet, ancient Greek warfare, what’s wrong with Indians today, string theory, how to tell the best “drunk story,” and Genghis Khan. I think the idea of not knowing something hasn’t occurred to him yet. When you talk to Sean the conversation always finds its way back to Sean. He is, however, generous with his time and energy. Life is much better with him in it—and that’s not something you can say about everyone. Once I bought a decrepit Airstream in Wisconsin. He helped me load it onto the back of a twenty-foot beavertail trailer. We got it strapped down and he looked at me sideways: “You’ll never make it back to Minnesota alone. I’m going with you.”

“How are you gonna get home?”

“Fuck if I know. Just let me run home and grab some underwear and I’m good to go.”

He was right—I couldn’t have done it without him.

Sean can find something funny in just about every encounter, and he has an agile mind. He’s just over forty and his hair is receding a little and is peppered with gray. His laugh comes easily except when he’s “in a mood,” at which time he’ll say, “Don’t fucking talk to me, I’m in a mood.” And so you don’t.

“Fuck no, not yet. Got to fix this little bastard. Little bastard bounced off on the way over here. Little bastard. Fucking transducer.” That’s Mike, Sean’s brother, as he tries to fix the fish-finder on the stern of his sixteen-foot Lund. “Little bastard” is his favorite phrase and he is free with it; he’ll call everyone—white and Indian alike—a “little bastard” as often as he uses it to refer to fish and motors.

The wind pushes its way through our clothes. We’re on Indian Point, on the west side of Lake Mille Lacs. It’s getting dark but if I squint I can see the floats attached to other nets bouncing on the waves. No one else is setting, and the only light comes from the headlights of the reservation game warden’s truck, staffed by two non-Indian reservation conservation officers, making sure we obey the letter of the law as spelled out in the agreement between the Mille Lacs Band and the state of Minnesota at the end of a decade-long legal battle. They are also protecting us from non-Indians who, until very recently, gathered at boat landings like this one and heckled Indians, spit on us, and held up signs that read “Save a Walleye, Spear an Indian” and—one of my favorites—“Indians Go Home.”

The transducer on the fish-finder and depth gauge has broken off and Mike is still trying to rig it up right. His brother Marc, a large man with large strong hands wearing a SpongeBob stocking hat, leans out the door of his Ford F350. The Cummins diesel throbs under the hood. He takes his foot off the brake and the dually tires in the back inch down the ramp toward the lake.

“Just ditch the boat in the lake and let’s go,” says Marc. “It’s getting dark.”

“Yeah, fuck it, we don’t need it. The water’s like, what, six feet? We’ll just go by the other floats,” offers Sean.

“I installed this little bastard so we could be exact,” says Mike. “I mean, like, exact. I didn’t hump around and do all this shit just to guess. I want some fucking walleye. I want to get some of those slimy bastards in the net for sure.”

Finally Mike fixes the transducer and hooks the fish locator up to the battery and they’re ready: Marc slips his truck between the rocky banks and slams the brakes so the boat goes skipping off the trailer while Sean holds the bowline. The tires of the Ford churn rock and gravel as it climbs away from the landing, earth that has been churned by Indian tires and Indian feet for years with the same goal as the three brothers have: to net some walleye and feed their families. Marc walks back down from the truck and he and Sean and I get into the boat while Mike tries to push us off. But Marc must weigh at least 240 pounds and Sean 210, and the addition of my 170 pounds means that the small aluminum skiff is grounding out. Mike jumps into the lake up to his knees, heaves, and the boat is free, Marc yanks the engine to life and within minutes they are yelling and swearing and giving each other shit as they drop in their 100-foot net. The three ­brothers—all colorful speakers, all amazingly gifted with fine mechanical ability (Mike, a mason, can mentally calculate, down to the block, the number of cement blocks for the basements he builds, and Sean is a mean stonewright in his own way, too)—have gathered to net fish. Marc drove all the way from Colorado. He owns his own construction company, based in Colorado Springs. He comes back to Mille Lacs every spring to net walleye with his brothers and, this year, to hunt in the first Mille Lacs turkey season. The birds have made a comeback. He’s brought along half a dozen calls, camo, inflatable decoys, and his shotguns—all brand new. Mike’s come over from Brainerd, and Sean from Wisconsin. They are all Mille Lacs enrollees and they are back on the reservation none of them grew up on to net the fish that is theirs. “Why bother?” I ask as we’re idling back near shore. “Why go to all the trouble for a few fish?”

“Well,” Sean drawls, as he thinks it over, smoking, resting after the rush to get the net into the water: “Let me answer your question with another question: Why does a dog lick his dick?”

2

As the fish gather every spring, so does Sean’s family—to visit, to hang out, to argue and fight, and to exercise their treaty rights. As I drove down to Mille Lacs to meet them it was hard not to notice how the place has changed since casinos. The roads were nice, and the houses tucked back into stands of old-growth maple and oak were spacious. The cars parked in the yards were quite new, tending toward Buicks and Chryslers. I made a wrong turn, missing the road to Sean’s mother’s house. Instead, I turned by the Vineland Indian Chapel, just below the water tower, emblazoned with the seal of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians—the state of Minnesota in outline, with an arrow passing through the heart of it, which is exactly where Mille Lacs is: a little bit north and west of Minneapolis. A few old shacks clung to the hilltop in the shadow of the water tower. They were falling in, the roof boards were rotted out, and tar paper was waving in the wind. All of them were small, none bigger than sixteen by twenty feet. I was surprised no one had burned them down. Maybe the tribe kept them standing to remind themselves of the hardships it had faced during the past century. Until recently the tribe had experienced the kind of Indian existence one usually thinks of, but worse.

Once I’d straightened myself out, I found myself on long, winding, suburban-feeling roads (with curbs and fire hydrants) that snaked back amid the maples. The new houses are enormous—three bedrooms, two baths, double attached garages—with vinyl siding and landscaping. All the streets have Ojibwe names: Noopiming Drive, Ziigwan Lane. The elders on Mille Lacs get their houses free. So do veterans, and there are many veterans at Mille Lacs.

Bonnie’s house is creamy yellow, the second house on the right on a small cul-de-sac ending in a large swamp. Sean said I would see a small boat on a trailer in the driveway and another big boat parked out front. The big boat is a twenty-two-foot Bayliner with a waterskiing deck, a berth, and a sporty white canvas cover over the wheelhouse. Marc drove it up from Colorado, and since they had nothing else they used it to net the year before.

When I’d walked in the door I saw Sean and Marc wrestling on the living room floor. Marc outweighed Sean by at least forty pounds and had him on his back. Mike and their other brother, Jay; Marc’s wife, Holly; and their mother, Bonnie, half-watched the wrestling match and half-watched Ghost Rider. The flames from Nicolas Cage’s digitized skull licked Bonnie’s enormous flat-screen TV. Bonnie barely seemed to notice that her sons, all in their forties, were trying to rub each other’s faces in the carpet until finally Sean said, “I give! I give!” Marc wouldn’t get off him till Bonnie said, “Let him up, Marc. You’re hurting my little boy.” Holly, pregnant, went into the kitchen to make some lunch.

Everything is big at Mille Lacs, except the reservation itself. A smattering of small parcels scattered over east central Minnesota, Mille Lacs is close to, but shies away from, Minneapolis and its crawling, clawing suburbs, which are eating up the nearby farmland. Mille Lacs Lake is huge: covering about 132,000 acres or 206 square miles, it is the second largest in the state and one of the largest in the United States. The Ojibwe name for the lake is Mizizaga’igan, “It Spreads All Over.” The Sioux who lived there before the Ojibwe called it Mde Wakan, “Spirit Lake,” and this is what the Dakota of Minnesota still call themselves, the Mdewakanton Sioux.

The lake was settled and contested, lost and won, many times before the Dakota and then the Ojibwe settled there. It has been continually inhabited for at least 9,000 years, a fact attested to by huge archaeological sites and a particularly impressive and perplexing altar composed of more than fifty bear skulls, uncovered during a highway expansion project.

The first European to see Lake Mille Lacs was a Franciscan priest, Father Louis Hennepin. In 1680 he was traveling, mapping, and baptizing his way through the region when he was taken captive by the Dakota. He spent five months as a captive at Mille Lacs. During that time he described the lifestyle of and the region inhabited by his captors. He was struck by the wealth of the land and the people. One thing he noticed was that the Dakota, rather than living in tepees, built earthen lodges like those the Arikara and Mandan later adopted in the West.

Two hundred years later it was still possible to see what attracted the Dakota and why they fought so hard to keep the lake to themselves. The lake “lies imbedded in deep forests,” wrote the Ojibwe historian William Warren in 1885. “Its picturesque shores are skirted with immense groves of valuable sugar maple, and the soil on which they grow is not to be surpassed in richness by any section of country in the northwest. The lake is nearly circular in form, though indented with deep bays, and the view over its waters broken here and there by bold promontories. It is about twenty miles across from shore to shore, and a person standing on its pebbly beach on a clear calm day, can but discern the blue outlines of the opposite side, especially as the country surrounding it is comparatively low and level. Its waters are clear and pure as the waters of Lake Superior, and fish of the finest species are found to abound therein. Connected with it is a string of marshy, or mud-bottomed, lakes in which the water is but a few feet deep, and wherein the wild rice of the north grows luxuriantly, and in the greatest abundance. Possessing these and other advantages, there is not a spot in the northwest which an Indian would sooner chose as a home and dwelling place, than Mille Lacs.”

Legend has it (and it probably is only a legend) that the Dakota were driven from Mille Lacs because of a lovers’ quarrel. Sometime in the 1600s a Dakota man and an Ojibwe man liked the same Dakota girl. The Dakota and Ojibwe had been fighting off and on for centuries, but during the time of this love triangle these tribes had been enjoying a lasting, if uneasy, peace. The girl chose the Ojibwe man, and the jealous Dakota lover killed him. This in itself didn’t lead to war; as William Warren suggests, “it only reminded the warriors of the two tribes that they had once been enemies.” Not long afterward, an Ojibwe chief from Fond du Lac, to the north, allowed his four sons to travel to the Dakota village at Mille Lacs to visit their Dakota friends. On their way back, one son was murdered. The remaining three brothers asked if they could go and visit again, and the father said yes: most likely, their brother had been killed by mistake. But another brother was killed on the second trip. They visited again. A third was killed. Only one brother was left, and he wanted to go again, despite the murders of his brothers. The weary father said sure, the three brothers had probably all been killed by mistake. Off went the fourth brother. He never returned. The father, overcome by grief, said to all who would listen, “An Ojibwe warrior never throws away his tears.” He planned and plotted his revenge and two years later led a huge war party against the Dakota. The Ojibwe wiped out a number of small villages and the few Dakota survivors retreated to the main village on the big lake. The Ojibwe attacked again and instead of simply relying on the few guns they had and their bows and war clubs, they threw bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes in the Dakota lodges. Many hundreds of Dakota burned to death. The surviving Dakota gave up the lake and retreated west and south. However, it would be another 100 years before all the Dakota left northern and central Minnesota. The lake is as beautiful and rich today as it was when the lovers’ quarrel set off that chain of events.

Mille Lacs is drained by the Rum River, named by early explorers with a sense of humor but still earlier known as Wakha’ or “Spirit River.” Many people now think of the name “Rum” as a pretty bad joke. Bogus Brook, a tributary of the Rum (which eventually flows into the Mississippi), is reputed to have been a backwater hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition. Many of the tourists who come to Mille Lacs in the summer are from Chicago. It is said that Al Capone had a house on Mille Lacs, and that he also had a hideout in Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin and at Leech Lake, north of Mille Lacs. It is also said that he had an Indian mistress with whom he was very much in love; some say she was from Mille Lacs, others say she was from Lac Courte Oreilles, and still others say she was from Leech Lake. Everyone wants to claim Al Capone. The casino at Mille Lacs is called Grand Casino, and it is indeed big.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of natural resources Mille Lacs was almost a reservation that wasn’t. In 1825, when representatives from Mille Lacs signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien (along with about 1,000 other delegates from the Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Dakota, Iowa, and others), they were a force to be reckoned with. The meeting had been organized by the United States and was primarily a treaty not between it and the tribes but rather among the tribes themselves. The United States, having gained control of the area after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, no longer had to contend with the British. Now it had to deal with Indians. And at the time, Indians controlled the whole region. Trade and settlement were hampered by constant aggression between the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes along the Minnesota River, the dividing line between their territories. They fought over hunting and trapping rights—each anxious to control more resources than the other. The U.S. government was caught in the middle and feared that continued intertribal warfare would jeopardize the fur trade in the region and the trade routes through it. The United States was the supplicant; the Indian tribes were the power in place. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established an uneasy peace between the warring tribes.

Circumstances, however, changed quickly on the frontier. By 1837 the fur trade was wobbling and about to crash. Animals such as the beaver, muskrat, and otter had been trapped to near-extinction within the domain of the Ojibwe in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Ojibwe, still strong, still a powerful military force, looked east and saw more and more white settlers. They looked west and saw that the Dakota had adopted the horse, had colonized the plains, and were growing stronger. They were being squeezed, and there was nowhere the Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes region could expand their land base. Also, there were no caches of natural resources outside their control that they could bring under their control—no additional rice beds, maple groves, cranberry swamps, or untapped trapping grounds. Starvation was, for many, only a season away. The Ojibwe saw this, and when the United States wanted them to come to the treaty table again in 1837 they said yes. Chiefs from Leech Lake, Gull Lake, Swan River, St. Croix River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac de Flambeau, La Pointe, Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, Snake River, Fond du Lac, and Red Lake all traveled to the town of St. Peter in present-day Minnesota. It was an impressive array of personalities and power. Present were the chiefs Flat Mouth, Elder Brother, Young Buffalo, Rabbit, Big Cloud, Hole in the Day, Strong Ground, White Fisher, Bear’s Heart, Buffalo, Wet Mouth, Coming Home Hollering, Cut Ear, Wood Pecker, White Crow, Knee, The Dandy, White Thunder, Two Lodges Meeting, Rat’s Liver, First Day, Both Ends of the Sky, Sparrow, Bad Boy, Big Frenchman, Spunk, Little Six, Lone Man, Loons Foot, and Murdering Yell. All of them were decked out in their finest attire and sported the scalps they’d won in battle and eagle feathers notched or colored depending on how they’d killed the enemy (bludgeoned, split down the middle, or stabbed). They brought warriors with them, armed with bows, guns, scalping knives, and war clubs. They entered singing. The white representatives brought maps, whiskey, and money and started talking.

The U.S. government presented its case: it would trade land for money. So while the bands who signed the treaty would give up, on paper, the right to establish villages or homes in large tracts of land including half of present-day Wisconsin and part of central Minnesota, they would retain the right to live in the region and hunt, fish, and trap within and to the entire extent of their former homelands. In addition the government promised to pay the bands the following, every year for twenty years:

$9,500, to be paid in money.

$19,000, to be delivered in goods.

$3,000 for establishing three blacksmith shops, supporting the blacksmiths, and furnishing them with iron and steel.

$1,000 for farmers, and for supplying them and the Indians with implements of labor, with grain or seed, and with whatever else might be necessary to enable them to carry on their agricultural pursuits.

$500 in tobacco.

This didn’t seem like a bad deal as far as the chiefs were concerned. First, and most important to them, they were assured that they could hunt, fish, and trap as they had been doing, without interference or restriction. From the perspective of the chiefs it didn’t seem that they were losing much of anything: they could still live, work, and travel within their homeland, and there was a financial bonus of twenty years during which they wouldn’t want for much. This seemed to quell any concerns they had about the encroachment of whites from the east and the hard border with the Dakota tribes to the west. It seemed like a win-win for the Ojibwe, and they signed the treaty without being able to see the full ramifications of what they’d done. No mention was made of logging in the treaty. Little did they know that they would lose much and wouldn’t regain much of it until more than 150 years later, by which time (according to the logic of the U.S. government) all the Indians should have been either assimilated or dead.

The tribes weren’t able to see the full scope and importance of logging in their ceded territories, and there was no mention of it in the treaty. But the virgin white pine forests of the upper Mississippi would fuel the growth of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago for the next fifty years. And the United States wanted not just some of the pine but all of it.

Another point that the tribes involved didn’t understand was a small but key phrase written into the treaty: “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded is guarantied to the Indians, during the pleasure [emphasis added] of the President of the United States.” The president whose pleasure was in question was Martin Van Buren, and as regards the treaty he left well enough alone. But presidents (and their pleasure) change. In 1850 Zachary Taylor canceled the clause in the treaty of 1837 by presidential order. Taylor had spent forty years in the military and seemed to quite like fighting and killing Indians. During the War of 1812 he defended a fort from an attack by Tecumseh. He fought Indians again during the Black Hawk War and was the one who accepted Chief Black Hawk’s surrender. He fought Indians again in Florida during the Seminole Wars. It’s hard to judge such matters, but it seems he had a low regard for life—he spent most of his own life taking away the lives of others. So it’s no wonder he tried to do away with what few rights remained with the Mille Lacs Band.

The effect was disastrous. The Indians of the upper Mississippi, who had been living in relative security, suddenly saw the land drop away from them on all sides. It was as if they were now living on islands. They were told they had no rights to hunt, fish, or gather off their reservations. The vast forests of the northern United States were disappearing day by day. These were desperate times.

In the 1840s, on the heels of the 1837 treaty, the U.S. government tried to do to the Ojibwe north and east of Mille Lacs along Lake Superior what had been done to the Cherokee in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama in the 1820s and 1830s: removal. And this was done for the same reasons. Large and valuable mineral deposits, mostly of copper and iron ore, had been discovered in the Lake Superior watershed, and the government wanted them. In 1850 President Zachary Taylor ordered the removal of the Ojibwe living near the ore deposits to new homes in the West. The ostensible reasons for removal were to prevent “injurious contact” between Indians and whites, to move the Indians out of the reach of whiskey traders, and try to concentrate the Ojibwe into one or two small areas so as to better “civilize” them.

Chief Buffalo and others tried to enable the Ojibwe to stay in their homeland and cited the treaty of 1842, which guaranteed them access to their land and the right to stay. In a cruel move, the governor of Minnesota Territory and the subagent for Indian affairs for northern Wisconsin moved the site for annuity payments and services (these included food, blankets, traps, and money) from La Pointe (present-day Madeline Island near Bayfield, Wisconsin) to Sandy Lake (just north of Mille Lacs). They did not provide any way for the Ojibwe of Wisconsin to get to Sandy Lake, a distance of 300 to 500 miles from Ojibwe settlements in the disputed area. Faced with starvation or death, the Ojibwe of Wisconsin paddled and walked to Sandy Lake, where the promised payments failed to appear. More than 630 Ojibwe men, women, and children starved, froze, and died of disease at Sandy Lake in the winter of 1851.

In part because of the callousness of this maneuver and also because of hard lobbying by various chiefs, the removal order was suspended. And in 1852 Chief Buffalo, then over ninety years old, led a delegation to Washington, D.C. He traveled by canoe and train for months until he reached Washington, where he presented President Millard Fillmore with a list of grievances. Fillmore had become president after Taylor died of gastroenteritis; the best thing that ever happened to the Wisconsin Ojibwe might be that Taylor died of stomach flu—a fitting disease after so many Indians had suffered similar deaths. Fillmore, who grew up in poverty, the second of nine children, was much more sympathetic to Indians than Taylor had been. He agreed with Chief Buffalo’s claims, and promised that annuities would be paid in Wisconsin rather than at Sandy Lake. Chief Buffalo would not agree to Fillmore’s terms until permanent reservations had been established in Wisconsin for his people. Fillmore agreed. Permanent reservations were made for the Mississippi and Lake Superior Ojibwe bands. Other rights were included in the treaty as well—these bands would have the right to hunt, fish, and gather up to 100 percent of the available resources in order to maintain a modest standard of living within the treaty area. This, in effect, gave them an easement to all the land of northwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota, regardless of what happened to that land later. Fillmore’s last words before dying—directed at his soup—were the same sentiments expressed by the Ojibwe chiefs he treated with so fairly: “The nourishment is palatable.”

The Mille Lacs Band went back to the table again in 1855 and signed another treaty with the government, trying to salvage what it could of its rights and sovereignty. The band members were guaranteed 60,000 acres at the southern end of Mille Lacs Lake. But while they were assured a homeland on the southern portion of the lake, the north half was opened to logging—and the loggers weren’t necessarily willing to stop at the reservation boundary. Then 1862 arrived.

To the south of Mille Lacs, along the Minnesota River, the old dividing line between Dakota and Ojibwe tribes, the former enemies of the Ojibwe were experiencing similar difficulties. More and more white settlers were creeping into the fertile Minnesota River valley with the encouragement of the U.S. government. Just as to the north loggers were claiming more and more forest, farmers were squatting in larger numbers in Dakota territory. The Dakota were facing starvation. The promises made by the U.S. government regarding treaty annuities and food had proved empty. There is some disagreement about whether the conflict was a spontaneous development or a strategic decision. Either way, the Dakota, having had enough and realizing that the United States was tied up in a war with the Confederacy, which the Union might very well lose, decided it was time to kick all the whites out of their territories. Such was the situation when, on August 17, 1862, a Dakota foraging party attacked a farm near Acton, Minnesota. Three men and two women were killed.

The Dakota quickly convened their leaders, who decided that the settlers and the U.S. Army would be sure to come down on them. So they went on the offensive, with the Dakota chief Little Crow in the lead. The next day, August 18, a party of Dakota warriors attacked the Lower Sioux Indian Agency near Redwood Falls, killed all those present, and took control of the agency. A relief party had been sent from Fort Ridgely. The Dakota surprised them and killed them all. Attacks continued over the next week. Fort Ridgely was besieged and the settlement of New Ulm was attacked. New Ulm was so badly burned that the residents who survived the attack fled. The Dakota killed all the men they encountered—settlers and soldiers alike—and took the women and children captive. General Sibley sallied forth from Fort Snelling at the head of a contingent of 1,400 soldiers. They chased Little Crow up the Minnesota River and a standoff ensued. Meanwhile, some Ojibwe bands, mostly Pillager Band warriors from Leech Lake, decided to lend support to the Dakota and swept down from the north.

But not all Dakota or Ojibwe thought war was a good idea. Some Dakota near Shakopee didn’t fight, and many protected their white neighbors. Likewise, the Ojibwe at Mille Lacs decided that they would not join the Pillagers. What’s more, they refused to let the Pillagers pass through their territories and sent them back north, thereby protecting their neighbors. The Dakota and Ojibwe who refused to fight might have done so out of neighborliness and out of self-interest, feeling that their relatives would be defeated and judgment would be harsh. They were, and it was.

When the conflict was over, between 400 and 800 whites were dead, along with many more Dakota. It was the largest loss of civilian life as the result of a “foreign attack” on U.S. soil until the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Three hundred Dakota warriors were sentenced to death. Eventually thirty-eight were hanged at Mankato, in what was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. In the wake of the conflict the U.S. government abrogated all of its treaty obligations to the Dakota in Minnesota, and a conflict that began because of hardship led the Dakota to a century of the most abject living conditions on the margins of American life during a time of unprecedented prosperity among their white neighbors. Some of the Mdewakanton Dakota near Shakopee who hadn’t been removed and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe seemed to fare well: during subsequent rounds of treaties they were each given assurances of their continued existence and land as a payment for their noninvolvement in the violence of the preceding year. As for Little Crow, he was shot by a white farmer near Hutchinson, Minnesota, on July 3, 1863, while picking raspberries. His skeleton and scalp were put on public display in St. Paul, Minnesota, until 1971, when they were repatriated to his grandson.

But the assurances and land that both bands received were short-lived. Business as usual resumed shortly. The Department of the Interior authorized private companies to cut timber on Mille Lacs Reservation, against the terms of the treaty Mille Lacs had signed with the U.S. government. Five years later they were still cutting, and white settlers had begun farming the areas that had been cut over. Mille Lacs Band members complained to the government, to no avail. This tension continued until the Nelson Act turned land held in common by many tribes into smaller parcels allotted to individual band members, with the “extra” parcels given to white lumber companies and farmers. Many Indians lost their allotments because they were not educated about such things as loans and tax forfeiture. Many from Mille Lacs were removed to the newly established White Earth Reservation to the west.

The story of relations between Indians and whites in the Midwest and West during the early nineteenth century is a story of war: armed conflict, forced removals, and death marches. Whatever lessons the federal government might have gleaned from the Seven Years’ War and the French and Indian War—that Indian tribes were powerful and could mount powerful resistance to white encroachment, and that even if weak, they were better dealt with at the negotiating table—seemed to have been forgotten. But as bloody as Indian history was in nineteenth century, during the twentieth century the warfare waged between Indians and whites was of a quieter kind—instead of guns the combatants carried petitions; instead of scalps, people held aloft legal briefs.

In 1902 government representatives traveled to Mille Lacs to negotiate an agreement with the Mille Lacs Band for damages done to the reservation and its citizens during the timber grabs over the preceding fifty years. The negotiations were a disaster. Many from Mille Lacs emerged from the meetings convinced that the government would never give them justice. Disgusted, they moved their families to White Earth. But a few, led by chiefs Migizi, Shabashkung, and Wadena, held on and refused to move. They paid the price: in 1901 a posse lead by the local sheriff attacked the village at Mille Lacs, burned all the shacks and wigwams to the ground, rounded up all the villagers, and chased them out so a developer could claim the land. It took another three years for Chief Migizi to get promises of redress (in the form of forty-acre lots for the band members) from Congress, and another twelve years for the lots to be assigned. By then Congress decided that forty-acre lots were too big. Most of the Indians who stayed in Mille Lacs got five-acre land patents instead.

And there they remained: penniless, without support, without the hope of fair treatment. While the lake itself became a destination for vacationers from Minneapolis and Chicago, the Mille Lacs Band members who had endured broken promises, and every sort of indignity and violence, hid and huddled in the woods nearby.

A newspaper article in the Minnesota Star dated Monday, March 27, 1939 (alongside a dire front-page article about the Germans), shows that the twentieth century hadn’t been kind to Mille Lacs. “A century ago the Chippewa Indians roamed the plains and forests of Minnesota lord of all he surveyed. Today, in a squalid settlement near Isle, Minn., near Lake Mille Lacs, 60 members of that once famed tribe attempt to eke out an existence on a rocky, 40-acre hillside unfit for cultivation. Their settlement consists of 11 tarpaper shacks, many of them floorless. Most of them cook, eat and sleep in the same room. Their total income is about $414 a month, or around $7 apiece.” Within two years twenty-five Mille Lacs Indians would be serving in every theater of World War II—Guam, Iwo Jima, North Africa, Italy, and later Normandy and Belgium—while at home their families were starving. By contrast, though life was hardly easy for them, the Indians who agreed to move to White Earth Reservation (from reservations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) had schools, businesses, homesteads, and their own newspaper. But that door closed in the 1920s—even if they’d wanted to, those from Mille Lacs and elsewhere couldn’t have moved to White Earth any longer and received any kind of allotments or assistance. Even so, fifty years later the move to White Earth seemed to many to be not that bad an idea.

Sean’s family bears the mark of each and every one of the cataclysmic shifts that make up the story of Mille Lacs Reservation. In the 1880s, during the allotment period when Mille Lacs Indians were encouraged to move to the newly established White Earth Reservation, many left. There were promises of homesteads, farming equipment, seeds, blacksmith shops, schools, and churches. All of these were fine incentives. White Earth also provided a fresh start. Sean’s great-grandfather John Shingobee (southern Ojibwe for spruce) didn’t leave Mille Lacs, but John’s brother Tom did. “Some say there was an argument about a trapline,” explained Sean. “They say Tom might have killed a man. Others say it was over a woman. Maybe you should just say ‘There were reasons to leave’ and leave it at that.” Tom’s daughter Josephine was Sean’s grandmother. Tom Hill was the first chief at Mille Lacs elected under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government in 1934. He was hit by a train on the way to a ceremony at Lake Lena. By the time Sean’s mother, Bonnie, was born to Frank Shingobee and Josephine Hill, times were tough. Josephine was left to raise her children on her own. She drank a lot. The county nurse and missionaries interceded, took Bonnie away from her, and moved to White Earth to start a mission. So even though that branch of the family didn’t relocate, Bonnie ended up at White Earth anyway. And it was there at White Earth, and Minneapolis and Duluth, that she raised her eight children—John, Dawn, Denise, Dana, Jay, Marc, Sean, and Mike. Bonnie didn’t live at Mille Lacs until she came there to work at the casino in the late 1990s. Her children grew up mostly at White Earth.