by David Treuer
And yet—behind the cowboy songs and the belt buckles and the stories of mischief—there is a kind of sorrow in him. I can feel it. Part of it may be that he still hears the floodwaters of Birch Creek. Or the stream of cars in Compton in 1968, or his father’s voice telling him to stand at attention. Or it could be that David—together with many, many other Indians—still feels the effects of termination and relocation in his body and in his mind. Federal policy isn’t abstract unless you’re rich. If you’re not, it is something that affects your life and your blood and your bones. “I don’t have nothing up in Montana. I don’t have any land. I don’t have a job. I don’t know anybody. Some relatives I get along with. Some I don’t.” His voice trails off and then starts up again. “I was up there in May 2005. I was in my truck near East Glacier watching the mountains and I heard this horrible screaming and then . . . nothing. I drove down to the Palomino Bar in East Glacier and there were all sorts of trucks there. I asked what was happening and they said a park ranger had gone walking and never came back. I went home and went back the next day and there was a helicopter and crime tape and I saw this woman on her knees praying and crying. I went down to the bar and asked a buddy of mine what happened. This grizzly sow and two cubs attacked that ranger and ate her. Nothing of her left but her skull and her shoes. To this day I think I hear her screaming. I hear that in my head, in my sleep I hear that. Haunts the shit out of me. I’m trying to get away from that sound. That’s one of the reasons I don’t go back. There’s a sound of horror in someone’s voice. I’ve never been able to get that out of my head.”
PART 5
Becoming Indian: 1970–1990
Welcome to my office!” Bob Matthews shouts with a smile, his arms raised to include the white spruce towering over our heads near Rabideau Lake just off the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. That smile is many things: part prelude to something crazy, part friendly, part that of someone who’s won the game you didn’t know you were playing. It’s late August and the pinecones are coming in. We are each carrying a five-gallon bucket, a shallow white Tupperware tray, leather gloves with the fingers cut off, and a tube of Goop. We are looking for white spruce cones. Bobby is about to say something else, but then we hear the sound of a pickup rumbling over the washboard road. Bobby squints, as if that will clarify the sound somehow. “Get in the woods! We don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to!” And he dives into the trees.
The northern Minnesota woods into which we dive, once virgin white pine with an understory of spruce and birch, have been logged many times since the timber boom of the late nineteenth century. In place of the lonely majesty of old growth is a wild patchwork of poplar, spruce, jack pine, birch, and Norway pine in the uplands and ironwood, sugar maple, tag alder, basswood, ash, and elm in the lowlands. The whole region is scrubby, dense, at times impenetrable, united by vast swamps and slow-draining creeks, rivers, and lakes. The land—desolate in the winter and indescribably uncomfortable and nigh impassable in the summer—is easy enough to love in the abstract and from a distance. But up close there is a texture to it, a roughness if not a majesty. The spruce grow close together and block out the sun. The forest floor is dun-colored and the roots, varicose, stick up out of the soil. I, for one, love our woods. I love the complications, the puzzle of it. Once Bobby finds cones—green, gummy, crescent-shaped cones about an inch and a half long, he drops to his knees and begins picking them off the ground and putting them on his tray with astonishing speed. “Here—take a bucket, a tray, and the Goop. The Goop’s so the cones won’t stick to your fingers and slow you down. You ever try to pick a bushel of them sumbitches with cones stuck all over your hands? Won’t happen. That tray there, that’s for speed, too. That way you don’t have to lift your arm so high every time you get two or three cones in your hand. Just fill up the tray and then dump it in. I’m telling you, David! It’s faster that way!” Bobby picks fast. The cones rattle in his tray till it’s full, and then he dumps them into his bucket. They rattle as they fall in. To me it is a pleasant sound. To Bobby it sounds like money.
In the years after the financial crisis of 2008, the nation staggered under a 10 percent unemployment rate. Housing prices dropped. Economic growth stagnated. To read the news was to feel like you stumbled onto the chronicle of some bereaved monk in Siena in the year 1348: Death. Death. Death. All the bad luck felt like proof of some greater sin, with no way to atone. As the economic crisis deepened, there was a rise in back-to-the-land narratives, in which, typically, a bobo protagonist left sterile urban life to retrieve a direct, uncorrupted relationship with the animals and plants that sustain us. In some versions the back-to-the-lander became a farmer or rancher, but in its most primal form the fantasy was (and is) of becoming a hunter-gatherer who makes sunrise treks up mountains to bag an elk—with words of thanks to the beast for the sacrifice of its life—and spends nights in an off-the-grid cabin, with larch crackling in the fireplace.
Meanwhile, at Leech Lake and on other reservations like it, there was no crisis, or rather, the crisis was ongoing. While the rest of the world tried to starve itself back into shape, Leech Lake was coasting along with at least a 30 percent unemployment rate, little to no infrastructure, few entitlements, a safety net that never was, no industry to speak of, a housing crisis that had been dire not for five years but since the reservation’s founding. And the hunter-gatherer, who was supposed to have died out in North America along with the buffalo, continued to live on—just not as in the romantic Anglo fantasy. Wanting to know what that looks like, I’d come back to Leech Lake to find Bobby Matthews. You’d hear Bobby’s name whispered a lot when I was growing up. Who had the best rice? Bobby Matthews. Who had the most rice? Bobby Matthews. Who knew where the best boughs were for picking? Bobby Matthews. Who was the damnedest trapper in northern Minnesota? Bobby Matthews. At funerals and picnics and feasts and Memorial Day services at the cemetery—wherever you went on Leech Lake Reservation and even across northern Minnesota—when talk would turn to hunting or trapping or general woodsiness, his was the name that was always the one mentioned.
Bobby is not that tall—maybe five-foot-eight—but he has the arms and shoulders of a much larger man. His hair is thinning and gray and pulled back in a ponytail. He shaves once a year, on his birthday. His eyes are powerful, deep-set, searching. His voice, calm in one moment, will rise to a shout in the next. He speaks rapidly and has the rare habit of always using your name when he speaks to you. On the phone: Hey, it’s Dave. Response: How’s David doing? Many of his comments begin with So I says, “Look here . . .” One conversation: “So Dave, so the guy says to me, ‘Where’d you get all those leeches, Bob?’ And Dave, I says to him, I say, ‘Well, look here, goddamn it, I got ’em in the getting place, that’s where.’ So I says, ‘Does it look like I have STUPID written across my forehead? Why would I tell you where I got my leeches?’ Can you believe it, David? Can you believe it?” Bobby is excited and excitable, and he laughs a lot. There is, under all his energy and excitement, the persistent threat of violence. Not directed at me or even at any other person, necessarily. It is the deep violence of the tribe—ready to erupt if necessary but usually held in check. Whatever happens, Bobby’s going to go all the way. And often he’s going to do it in the third person. There is something about him that remains thoroughly undomesticated. I can’t imagine him doing anything as civilized or pointless as playing golf or going to the casino. He has the aspect of the wild animals he’s spent his life pursuing. But there is something else in there, too, something finer—a profound and ultimately beautiful curiosity about the environment he inhabits. He is plagued by wonder.
He has spent much of his life on the question of how nature fits together and how it can serve him. “I begin each day like this, Dave. I get up at four-thirty and I turn on the coffee and I throw one of those rice bags you get at the drugstore in the micro, and when the coffee and the rice bag are done, I sit in my chair and drink my coff
ee and heat up my back a little and smoke a joint and look at my books. I look at my books, Dave, going back five, ten, fifteen years. I keep notes on everything I see. The temperature. The barometric pressure. Where is the wind coming from? What little flowers—I don’t even know what they’re called—are in bloom and how many leaves are on the trees. I keep track of all this stuff, Dave. I keep track of all of it in my books. So I can know the patterns. So I can compare one year to the next. No one sees my books, Dave. No one. Not ever. I told Julie [his wife] that when I die all my books go with me or she can burn ’em. When I’m done smoking, I head out and get to work. I’m out the door by five-thirty.”
Bobby’s life follows a rigid seasonal cycle. And the cycle revolves around money: he collects, harvests, and traps, and sells what he gets for profit. In the spring and early summer, he traps leeches for bait. Late summer, he begins picking pinecones and then stops to harvest wild rice. When the wild rice harvest is done he goes back to pinecones. After cones comes hunting, trapping, and more hunting. After the ground is frozen hard, he goes out in the swamps to cut cranberry bark, which will be sold as a natural remedy for menstrual cramps. By the time that’s all done, he starts leeching again. When the zombie apocalypse comes, I am certain that I want to be with Bobby. I am in awe of him.
Bobby was born in the 1940s and grew up in Bena, my family’s ancestral village. Like my mother, he is an Indian baby boomer, though they and their siblings and cousins and friends did not, as a rule, enjoy the benefits of America’s “imperial century” the way their mainstream peers did, especially where termination and relocation had reversed the gains of the New Deal and Collier’s “Indian New Deal.” Still, some of ascendant America’s success trickled down. Thousands of Indians who served in World War II and Korea made use of the GI Bill. Cars became more plentiful. A by-product of the shared experience and common language instilled, however brutally, by the boarding schools was the development of an intertribal sense of identity with shared historical experiences. Members of different tribes not only met and married and befriended one another; when they returned to their own tribal communities they brought with them a social network that often extended well beyond the borders of their community or tribe or language group. The same dynamic persisted into relocation and the new era of self-government under the Indian Reorganization Act. Many Indians now had family and kinship ties across ever greater distances. When they moved to cities, they often lived in almost exclusively Indian enclaves in places like Oklahoma City, Chicago, New York City, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Cincinnati, and Seattle—but those enclaves were composed of Indians of many tribes. And when they returned to the reservation they no longer experienced it as such a sequestered place. Rather than eradicate Indians as Indians and reservations as Indian places, termination allowed Indians to understand themselves as part of a much larger historical process. They pooled their knowledge and brought it with them wherever they went. It is safe to say that “the Indian” probably didn’t think of him- or herself as such until after 1950.
Even the disastrous land grabs that occurred as a result of allotment had their collateral benefits. While many millions of acres passed out of Indian control and into the hands of white farmers, homesteaders, businesses, and developers, Indians learned (the hard way) how landownership worked in the context of American capitalism: fee-simple patenting, real estate taxes, land values, leases, rents, mortgages, liens. They needed this knowledge when new tribal governments were formed in the 1930s. And they needed it again when the government tried to shove termination down their throats; it helped them to fight the policy long enough that it died before their communities did. Allotment also meant that Indians suddenly had a lot of white neighbors, and many millions of Americans had Indian neighbors, too. They met and married and mingled and went to the same schools and (when there was work) worked at the same places. Contact with white people changed Indian culture, but contact with Indians and Indian cultures changed the white people who came to live among them as well.
By the time Bobby Matthews was a teenager in the 1960s, half of all Indians lived in cities and towns, and that half was in close and constant contact with the half that remained on reservations. His father, Howard, had been one of the first tribal leaders to exercise power under the IRA constitution that came to Leech Lake in the 1930s. Although Bobby was around the same age as the activists who came up in the 1960s and 1970s, he didn’t have much to do with them or their movements. When I asked him if he knew Dennis Banks (the American Indian Movement leader from Leech Lake who eventually resettled on the reservation), he said, Don’t know the man. Can’t say I ever met him. Yet, at least to me, he has a similar kind of wildness, a similar intensity. And to my mind he took his own path toward the activists’ goals of becoming Indian and reminding America of its promises to us—not through protest and politics, but through learning to live a life on the land, an Indian life. In the 1960s and 1970s, Indians were growing in numbers and in strength. And they were growing to be more “of America” and not merely “in America.” So it should have come as no surprise that the civil rights movement that was beginning to rock the country had a counterpart that rocked Indian communities and would grow, by the 1970s, to capture the attention of the entire country.
The Rise of Red Power
Like the mass migration of Indian people from reservations to cities, the rise of Red Power, and on its heels the American Indian Movement, reflected both federal Indian policy and larger demographic shifts. After World War II, many African American veterans and ordinary citizens looked at what the fight for world freedom had given them and found America wanting: they saw a considerable gap between how America saw itself and the policies it practiced. For African Americans, segregation in housing and education, high rates of unemployment, and other forms of unequal treatment meant that they lacked the means to get ahead.
Beginning in Ohio in the 1940s and spreading to the South and East, many African Americans and their allies used the principle of direct action to bring their grievances to the forefront of American consciousness. Despite Truman’s integration of the armed forces in 1948, among other measures, by the beginning of the 1950s, segregation was increasing. White people were fleeing to the new suburbs ringing American cities, helped by the government’s getting into the lending industry. Guidelines issued by the National Association of Realtors to their representatives in 1950 admonished them that they “should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will be clearly detrimental to property values in a neighborhood.” While the NAACP, founded in 1909, stood true to its mission to “ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination” via lobbying, publicity, and lawsuits, progress was piecemeal and slow. In the spring of 1951, black students at Moton High School in Virginia protested the effects of radically unequal segregation and demanded better conditions for themselves. The NAACP joined their fight and four other cases of school segregation, efforts that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This was a key victory, but such methods were still too gradualist for many African Americans. While the NAACP and other organizations like it continued their steady work, many citizens began to take part in boycotts, sit-ins, marches, public demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience, often in coordination with other social justice organizations.
American Indians had been organizing similarly. In 1944, scores of delegates from fifty tribes met in Denver to form the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Their goal was to unite in force to stop the federal policy of termination, to work together to resist bad federal policy, and, in response to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, to strengthen the ties between tribal governments. The Denver congress was led largely by men who had worked in the Office of Indian Affairs, but by the
time of the second congress a year later, many delegates were women, and people who worked directly for the federal government were deemed ineligible for leadership positions because of possible conflicts of interest. Yet whereas the NAACP and other African American organizations and movements had a clear common goal of equal rights under the law, as members of sovereign nations Indians had a somewhat different stance. The NCAI therefore fought for equal rights and equal protection, but it also lobbied for the restoration of treaty rights, the reclamation of land, and respect for cultural and tribal religious practices. It was, and is, a very effective organization. Among other victories, it overcame federal job discrimination against Indians, stopped a ban on reservations in the founding documents for Alaskan statehood, limited state jurisdiction over Indian civil and criminal cases, and addressed in a consistent and effective manner broad issues of health care, employment, and education. However, the NCAI had a strict policy against the kind of direct action that was proving so effective in the battles for racial equality springing up across America. Unlike the NAACP, which initially urged the students at Moton High School not to protest but then joined them, the NCAI made no such common cause with groups engaged in direct action, a resistance that earned it a reputation as being gradualist to the point of collaboration. Just as direct action for African American civil rights grew alongside more gradualist approaches initially supported by the NAACP, so, too, direct action among Indian activists and students grew up alongside the NCAI.
