by David Treuer
The government, again working in direct contradiction of its own stated ideology of “civilization” (weren’t Indians supposed to learn “I” and not “we,” and the value of buying and selling?), quickly put a stop to Menominee logging in 1861. They were in operation again from 1871 until 1876, when logging was halted. Again. In the government’s view, land was to be cleared of trees and then planted. This was the path to civilization. It was also a path to disenfranchisement: the timber barons in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota wanted to sell the timber themselves and reap the profits. It was a cynical business. When allotment arrived in 1887, the Menominee recognized that it would forever destroy their sustainable harvest practices and fought it fiercely. In large part, they won. Menominee lands remained unallotted. And in 1890 the Menominee won a victory in Congress that allowed them to harvest twenty million board feet of their own timber. This, however, did not stop business interests with strong ties to state government from trying to take their timber as well. The aptly named Senator Sawyer from Wisconsin introduced a bill to allow private (white) companies to cut Menominee timber, but it was blocked by Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.
La Follette, known as “Fighting Bob” and blessed with a great pre-Elvis pompadour, was a passionate advocate for progressive values and fought hard—as a member of the House, a senator, and the governor of Wisconsin—against railroad trusts, big business, overseas interventionism, and the League of Nations. He fought for women’s suffrage, unions, and the rights of the disempowered and downtrodden. In 1908, while filibustering for more than sixteen hours straight, he asked for a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk with raw eggs in it in order to keep going. The kitchen staff, annoyed they had to work through the night, in protest dropped into the milk two eggs that had turned. Fighting Bob took one sip and noticed the mixture was off; he didn’t drink the rest, but he began sweating uncontrollably and was forced to step down two hours later, having stood and talked for eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes. In 1917, while filibustering to prevent the merchant marine from arming its ships against the Germans, he yelled, “I will continue on this floor until I complete my statement unless somebody carries me off, and I should like to see the man who will do it!” In a 1982 survey of historians who were asked to name the most important senator in the history of the United States, La Follette tied with Henry Clay.
Clearly, La Follette was a great ally for the Menominee. The La Follette bill allowed the tribe to cut and process timber under the selective cutting system they favored, which harvested only fully mature trees. Appropriate specimens would be marked by forestry service specialists, and Menominee would process them under expert supervision and with the help of a sawmill, kiln, planing mill, and machine shop on the reservation at Neopit. Still, the tribe had to file suit after suit in court when the “experts” and outside interests continually ignored or violated the terms of the legislation. But because of that legislation the Menominee kept control of their forest, and eventually they won damages against businesses and the government. And after 125 years of logging and more than two billion board feet of timber harvested, they have more board feet of northern hardwoods standing on Menominee land than they started with.
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IF THE FOUR HUNDRED YEARS of contact with Europeans showed anything, it wasn’t merely the rapaciousness of Europeans and European colonization or the terrible effectiveness of European diseases. Rather, it showed the supreme adaptability and endurance of Indian tribes across the continent. This adaptability and toughness served Indians well in the years between 1890 and 1934, when the assaults on Indians and Indian homelands were perhaps at their most creative, if not their bloodiest. It was a new kind of Indian war, fought not by the sudden attack of cavalry or by teams of buffalo hunters. These years were more of a siege. The government’s weapons were cupidity and fraud. Indians resisted. They resisted assaults on their sovereignty, assaults often made (as in the case of the Friends of the Indian and other organizations) by their own allies. But they also resisted with help offered by real allies like La Follette. What General Devers said of the French after the close of World War II is just as apt when thinking of Indian–white relationships during this period: “For many months we have fought together—often on the same side!”
Kevin Washburn, seemingly tireless on our second lap of the golf course, mused about this resilience. “One of the things the regulations regarding tribal acknowledgment required was that the tribe show continuity from 1900 to the present through public sources, such as local newspapers and county records and such. But quite a few tribes approached me and said the regulations were unfair! They told me there were no public sources. ‘We went underground. We went into hiding. We hid, we went in the swamps, the mountains. . . . Remember, 1900 was only ten years after the massacre at Wounded Knee. People were really out to murder us. We weren’t very visible on purpose, so don’t make us show you newspaper articles, because at the time we were trying to do the opposite: we were trying to show folks that we didn’t exist.’” Washburn smiled. “That made sense. So we changed the rule.” Today a tribe seeking recognition from the federal government has much more flexibility in how it proves its historical existence. It is too soon to tell how tribes will use this newfound latitude, but no doubt they will be as creative as the tribes’ strategies for survival have always been.
One fascinating side effect of the attempts to crush tribes and tribal solidarity was manifest in homesteading itself. The first Homestead Act, passed in 1862, was meant to pave the way for a new generation of yeoman farmers in the Jeffersonian mold. Initially it was supported by the Free Soil Party, and later by the Republican Party (it was opposed by Democrats, who feared that immigrants and poor southern whites would gobble up most of the land). The second Homestead Act was passed in 1866 and amended seemingly every few years after. In 1865, tribes in Wisconsin were allowed to claim homesteads, improve the land, file for a patent after five years, and thereby gain citizenship. Many of them did. The Cherokee and other members of the Five Civilized Tribes were given the same opportunity in the early 1900s, and they quickly realized that the government considered Indian business anything but stable, and figured they would fare better if they functioned, politically anyway, as Americans rather than Indians.
Hundreds and eventually thousands of Cherokee and Seminole and Creek and Choctaw and Chickasaw families fanned out from Oklahoma into Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, the first wave of a vast diaspora of Indian families into Indian homelands originally not their own. They put down roots and dug up the real roots of the prairie states and made lives for themselves as Americans. And while they might have renounced some kind of daily participation in the polity of their tribes, they brought—in their culture and their understandings of themselves and community in its most general terms—their tribes with them. The graduates of the Indian boarding schools did much the same: they brought their experiences of their tribes to school, mingled with and met other tribal people, and if they returned to their tribes, they brought all of that with them along with the academic and practical skills that would be invaluable in the conflicts ahead.
“I am a strong believer in self-determination,” Washburn says, reflecting on his outlook as assistant secretary. “It’s funny, but I remember something George W. Bush said. Someone asked him what qualities you needed to be the president. He said, ‘You’ve got to have principles. People have to know what kinds of decisions you’re going to make.’ I remember hearing him say that. I thought, ‘That’s wrong!’ I thought to myself, ‘You just have to do justice. You just have to be just in each instance.’ But then I became assistant secretary, faced many policy decisions each day, and I realized George Bush was right about something. Shocking. You do have to have principles. And mine are based in tribal self-determination; tribes know what’s best for their tribe and they have the abilities and the experience to make their own decisions. Any issue that t
ribes brought to me I treated that way. Tribal self-determination was and is my principle.” It was so clear—on that sunny spring day in Albuquerque—that the BIA had changed (as institutions do), but it had changed in many ways because the Indians it was supposed to serve and the Indians who were sometimes in charge of it (Ely Parker, Ada Deer, Kevin Washburn, and others) had been born into tribes and raised in tribal homelands that had survived decades of crushing control and had the outlook and skills to change it themselves. But more than that, despite the government’s three-pronged assault on Indian communities and people (boarding schools, allotment, and the law), Indian tribes not only clung to the old ways but also found in them a strength that would see them through this awful middle passage. They not only clung but also strategized and fought and talked and met and thought and worked to preserve what remained, on their own terms and for themselves.
PART 3
Fighting Life: 1914–1945
I saw many things at the Northern Lights Casino on Leech Lake Reservation on March 17, 2012. I saw Josh Maudrie, fighting out of Brainerd, Minnesota, TKO Josh Alder while his coach yelled, “DO YOUR JOB! DO YOUR JOB!” Afterward Maudrie said, almost in tears, “I did it, Coach, I did it. I did my job.” I saw Tim Bebeau, an Indian, TKO Keegan Osborn, while the same coach from Brainerd yelled, “DO YOUR JOB! DO YOUR JOB!” and Osborn didn’t. I saw Tory Nelson defeat my cousin Tony Tibbetts after throwing a dozen illegal elbows, enough so Tony couldn’t breathe after the second round. I saw a lot of Indian fighters—Tony Tibbetts and Nate Seelye and Tim Bebeau and Josh Thompson and Dave Smith. I saw some of them win and some of them lose. I saw, for the first time, Indians beating up white people in front of a sold-out crowd and I heard the crowd roar. I saw a forty-seven-year-old from the reservation town of Ball Club whose gym was called the “Den of Raging Mayhem” manage to beat my unbeatable cousin Nate Seelye. Another fighter was introduced as fighting for “Team Crazy.” From the looks of him he was. As instructed, I gave a big round of applause to the King of the Cage Ring Girl and Maxim “Hometown Hottie” Shannon Ihrke from Walker, Minnesota. I watched my nephew tune out the fights and tune into Skrillex and my mother check her watch to see if she was missing Law & Order. I saw two, maybe three ex-girlfriends and my cousins Nate, Josh, Jason, Delbert, Tammie, Amber, and my uncles Jerry, Davey, and Lanny. I saw a sea of baseball caps and braids and Indians and whites and the good people of Leech Lake and Walker, Indian and white, get up and cheer along with me as we watched the fighters—many of them unprepared but willing, all of them brave in their own way—step into the cage and fight.
And as I watched the fighters and watched the crowd, it was clear we couldn’t be further from the UFC. There were no sponsors and no scouts, no prepublicity or small purses, and an almost total lack of the industry of blood that has propped up boxing for the last sixty years and MMA for the last twenty. We were in the middle of the reservation in northern Minnesota and everyone had a day job or needed one. Instead of glamour we had hometown boys (and girls) who brought out the pleasure of speculation as much as of spectacle: How would I do in there? Could I do it? Could you? It was easy to feel, even if it wasn’t true, that little if anything separated us from those in the cage except a willingness to be there. It was like the wrestling matches of old, where promoters mixed hometown talent with professionals and everyone had a role to play: the up-and-comer, the dandy, the rascal, the workingman, the prodigy, the returning hero, the snake, the all-American. There were all the body types, too: the farm boy, the athlete, the wrestler, the tattooed—colorful tribal tattoos, and also a lot of tattoos that suffered from what can only be called bad penmanship.
Roland Barthes might as well have been thinking about MMA on the Leech Lake Reservation when he wrote, “There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.” And that the “primary virtue of the spectacle, is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.” Maybe. But on the reservation, if not in the wrestling halls of France, there are plenty of reasons why a man might step into the cage. And there are consequences that derive from our suffering. And something, surely, other than the chain link, separates us from the combatants; something must separate us from them and also separates Indians and whites, other than our blood. Oh, I saw a lot in Walker, Minnesota, at the Northern Lights Casino on March 17, 2012. But what I didn’t see was what I had largely come there to witness: my cousin Sam Cleveland was supposed to fight his last professional fight. But he didn’t.
What happened to Sam? Better: What didn’t? Sam is thirty-eight, on the far side of fighting age but not over it yet, not by a long shot. “I’m thirty-eight but I still got a lot of power, still got a six-pack—how many other thirty-eight-year-olds around here can you say that about?” he mused as we sat at the Bemidji State University recreation center where Sammy had gone to run and lift until he lost the final four pounds he needed to, two days before weigh-in. He was scheduled to fight the main event in the King of the Cage Winter Warriors Showdown. He had gone from 175 pounds down to 161 in three weeks of dieting and running, and his body looked hard and lean. He still had the strong square hands, the wide shoulders and powerful legs. His face showed the strain a little—that and not a few scars from years of fighting. He might have the body of a thirty-year-old, but he has the face of a fighter who has taken his share of abuse.
Sammy is my first cousin. Like me, he grew up at Leech Lake, but, as he put it, much more “in the mix.” He is a favorite fighter of many around the reservation and even around the state. He was a star wrestler in high school, as his father had been. Back then he’d been a cheerful guy, all things considered. He’d grown up poor but not destitute. Had been popular in high school. Like me, he suffered a particular kind of racism as a red-haired, fair-skinned Indian on the rez. Which is to say, no one ever let him forget what he was or what he wasn’t. But he weathered it well.
Sam was, by any standard, a success. He graduated from high school (Native students are almost four times more likely to drop out than whites), and so far he’s avoided jail (Indian men are twice as likely to end up there). In Minnesota in 2002, Indians, who made up only 1 percent of the state population, were 6 percent of the prison population. After graduation, in 1992, he joined the army and became part of the elite Army Scouts, Second Battalion, Thirty-fifth Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He loved it. “I really liked the army side of things. It was an elite unit, and that suited me. Always something interesting to do. But it was far from home and that was hard.” Back at Leech Lake, the unemployment rate was 46 percent; the median household income was less than $20,000 a year. Yet Sam missed the reservation and the network of family and friends and the landscape of northern Minnesota, where the boreal forest meets the oak savanna and also where whites and Indians have been meeting and mixing since the early seventeenth century, often to fight but also to trade, bargain, fuck, and marry. “I was three years into my tour and I was so far away. And then Nessa [his sister Vanessa] died the last year of my tour, and it really made me miserable and I wasn’t interested in reenlisting.” Nessa was one of just three female cousins in a group of about twenty or thirty male first and second cousins, all of the same generation. She had a sharp kind of face, was thin and pretty, and generally, no matter where, learned early on to tear up the scenery. She grew up scrappy and lippy. She had left a party and driven through two yards and onto Highway 2 just outside Bena, where an RV hit her.
Sam called our grandfather once a week. “I took it pretty hard. Me and Nessa weren’t on the best of terms; we were fighting. The weird point is that she’d stole my girlfriend from me, that’s why I was so mad. I mean, who does that?” Sammy laughed—sad, rueful. Vanessa did things like that.
Suddenly, all that separated Sam from everyone else (graduation, a job, a life) disappeared. It’s one thing to be borne aloft on the spume of the American Dream—safety-netted by college, by working parents, by a scrim of wealth or entitlement, or even the illusion that what we do, our work, our effort, counts for something, matters in some way—and another to feel, as many Indians do, totally powerless. That’s how Sam felt. He didn’t reenlist. Instead, he came back to Leech Lake Reservation. “I got really angry after Nessa died. I drank a lot. I’d fought a little before that. But then after Nessa died I wanted to fight every time I went somewhere. I probably got into a couple hundred street fights. Brawls, you know.”
I remember seeing Sam in those years—during holidays or around town. It seemed like every time I saw him he had one fewer teeth, or a new cast on his hand, or a new scar. Back when we were kids, he’d had a round, open, cheerful face, always ready to laugh, always laughing. But that boy’s face, the face I’d known as well as my own growing up, disappeared. And in its place was the hard face of a man who liked to fight, who, not to put too fine a point on it, liked hurting people. “I couldn’t change anything. Nothing I could do could change anything about Nessa, or my mom, who really fell apart. But I could fight.” And that’s when Sam became a lot like the rest of our tribemates: he had physical talent and he had mental talent, and none of it mattered. Or none of it felt like it mattered. None of it was of any use. Even cynicism was a luxury he couldn’t afford. You need perspective to be cynical, and perspectives are sometimes a luxury purchased at a remove from the fray. He was a good street fighter, though. “There were a few guys who’d work me over when I tangled with them, but not many. I won most of those fights. I don’t know if that got me into the cage or not. But I got a taste for fighting.” A taste for violence, if not for fighting, runs deep in Sam’s veins and throughout Indian country.
