by David Treuer
I am not sure exactly how much he makes a year from leeching, mostly because he won’t tell me. I know that in 2012, he trapped thirty-six hundred pounds of leeches, which he sold for twelve dollars per pound—and 2012 was, by his account, a terrible year for leeches: unseasonal temperatures, sudden storms, low water. Plainly, what he makes by leeching is more than enough on which to live, and to live well. Bobby owns his home on the Leech Lake Reservation outright. His trucks and cars, too. He employs a dozen people, and he hasn’t had a “day job” in years. What Bobby has is a business, but it didn’t start that way.
Leeching started as a gold rush, and a certain wildness came along with it. When the market exploded in the 1980s, leeches were relatively easy to trap. Lakes close to the road were claimed first. And as they were played out—in the same manner in which veins of gold or seams of coal play out—leechers moved deeper and deeper into the swamps and woods. There is no official leeching season or leeching rights that you can buy, so lakes are taken on a first-come-first-served basis. Traps were tampered with or raided. Landings were booby-trapped. There were threats and fistfights and the occasional shot fired at the competition. Bobby took to installing motion-activated cameras at his landings. In short, the challenge of figuring out Mother Nature and the challenge posed by other humans made leeching the kind of work for which he was designed.
“So me and my partner, Ernie, have been setting this one lake off the reservation. And you know, David, I don’t like to hit a lake too hard. You take all the leeches out of a lake and you kill that lake. No leeches left there to reproduce, and then what the hell am I going to do? God or whatever isn’t going to plop any more leeches down there, so I usually hit a lake for a few days then lay off for a few. Mother Nature takes care of me, and I take care of her. So anyways, David, we’re headed back to this one lake and there’s three guys setting traps there. Everyone knows that this is Bobby Matthews’s lake. So Ernie starts getting mad. He’s a great big guy. Great big dark Indian guy from Red Lake. And he says, ‘Well, goddammit, someone’s going to get a bitch beating.’ And I says, ‘Hold on, Ernie, no one’s going to get a bitch beating. Let’s just see what happens here.’ And he says to me: ‘If a guy’s gonna act like a bitch he’s gonna get beat like a bitch.’ And so I start talking to these guys and I tell them it’s my lake and they say it doesn’t have my name on it and why don’t I go back and trap on the reservation.’ And well, goddammit, David, I said, ‘Go ahead, you put your traps out there and we’ll see whose lake it is.’ And so they had, well, I don’t know, a couple of hundred traps out there. By evening I had two thousand traps to their two hundred. Some people have white floats on their traps. Some have green. Yellow. Orange. I experimented with all of them. But then I started using pink. Bright, fluorescent pink. Anyway, I turned that whole lake pink, goddammit. I didn’t touch their traps. I didn’t even go near them. I just stuck in ten for every one of theirs. They gave up after a week. It cost me time and it cost me money. But now everyone knows not to fuck with Bobby Matthews. Now people see pink traps and they know it’s me and they drive on by. People try to talk all sorts of shit. Give me a hard time about my pink floats. But I roll pink, man! And don’t care!”
But the Wild West gave way to industry, and these days, lakes are harder to come by, and there aren’t as many leeches in them. In order to hit the mother lode you have to travel farther and farther away and work longer and longer hours. And as with any supply/demand market, the season has a taper to it. Fishermen want bigger leeches, because they think that bigger leeches catch bigger fish, so everyone buys those first. By the end of June, all the big leeches, the jumbos, are gone, and the lakes are producing only mediums and smalls, which take longer to strip and sort. Instead of an 80 count or 100 count, trappers are selling 120 counts and getting bottom dollar (eight dollars per pound rather than twelve). But Bobby has solved this problem, too. “I catch all kinds—smalls, mediums, larges, jumbos. They are all different when they go in my tanks. But then, check this out, I grow them. I can turn all my leeches into larges. I got a special mix I feed them. I watch the water—temperature, hardness, clarity—real close. And by July I am the only guy around with larges. In May I sell my leeches for twelve dollars a pound. In July I sell my leeches for twelve dollars a pound. And you know how much they go for in August? Twelve dollars. No one else does this. No one else can do this. I just experiment. I read dissertations from the U of Minnesota. I call people. I study my black books. I study Mother Nature. And if someone’s figured something out, I study them. I ask questions. I get curious. You gotta work hard, you gotta stick to it. But you gotta stay open, too. You gotta innovate. Sometimes, David, I think the old-fashioned way of doing things is the best way. I do. I don’t think that the space age is necessarily better, but sometimes it is. And by god I love the space age. Anything that works I use it.”
“You know what they say about cream rising to the top?” says Todd Hoyhtya. “Well, the cream doesn’t say, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m on top.’” He is talking about Bobby, naturally. Todd himself started trapping and raising bait back in the early 1980s. “We were just looking for markets. We drove around to all the bait shops and asked them what they needed and how much and then we went out and got them what they needed and how much. Pretty soon I was buying from other trappers. And when leeches hit the market we really went big.” Now Todd does it all. “We raise, trap, and buy minnows, leeches, worms, maggots, angleworms, you name it.” His operation supplies everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius of McGrath, where he lives. They have five trucks and employ three people full-time and three part-time. They have a pecking order of trappers they buy from, determined by dependability. “If I can count on you week after week, then you’re my guy. If not, not. It’s a job. A hard job. You’ve got to eat, sleep, and shit bait to make it work.”
Todd, however, sees an end to the business. “I don’t see the bait business lasting another twenty years. All the suppliers, like Bobby, are aging. No youngsters want to do this. Nature won’t come to you, that’s part of the problem. You go to work at Walmart, they tell you what you need to know. They’ve got a check waiting for you. But the bait business—you have to go to it. You have to want it and try and try and try. And you might have a good day here and there. But you have to keep producing or you don’t get a check.” But Todd thinks the problem might be more than simply generational. “The supply is down—something has changed in the leech chain and the minnow chain. Something in the water is killing production. Urban sprawl doesn’t help. All these wetlands and little lakes get filled in, and in these big subdivisions they might keep some of the wetlands but then they dump a bunch of pan fish in there, a bunch of bullheads so the kiddies can go down there with a cane pole—that’s the fantasy, right?—and it kills all the minnows and leeches.” Demand is down, too. According to Todd, there aren’t as many people interested in fishing. Resorts are going out of business. Kids would rather play video games than go out on the lake. “We are the fur traders of today. Used to be, the fur trade was huge, big global business. But then fashion changed, and the supply changed, and the fur trade died. The way I see it, that’s where bait is headed.”
Leeching is still alive for now, though, as long as leechers have access to land. Places like Minnesota provide a lot of it. A full 10 percent of the land area is covered by water, and wetlands amount to more than ten million acres. There are more than eleven thousand lakes and six thousand rivers and streams that stretch for more than sixty-nine thousand miles across the state. And almost all lakes and navigable waters can be accessed by anyone. More important, however, is land access. Twenty-five percent of Minnesota’s land area is public land. The heavily farmed southern half of the state resembles much of the rest of the Midwest with most of the land fenced in, tilled, farmed, grazed, or otherwise used and controlled by farmers, private owners, and corporations. Most of that public land is in northern Minnesota, which provides a unique opportunity to li
ve off the land. So when Bobby Matthews tells me to “step into my office,” he is referring to land that is owned by the public, and a relationship that is subsidized by the federal government. This runs counter to the usual mythology: The “state of nature” is paid for by the state of man. It’s a uniquely American arrangement: When the colonists first came to America, the land they claimed—and what grew on it—was considered the property of the king of England. But here in northern Minnesota, for now, public land still benefits the people.
Bobby Matthews makes it all seem logical, easy somehow. Something any of us could do if we just tried hard enough. But maybe not. DM, like Bobby Matthews, has worked a lot of jobs: carpenter, logger, sawmill operator. He is Ojibwe from Michigan and has lived in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Montana, where he worked in a taco shop. When he returned to his reservation in northern Michigan, he opened a bait shop in his front yard. His house is small—more of a cabin than a house. Fiberglass insulation covered with three-mil plastic sheeting bulges from the ceiling. When I visited in the spring of 2012, the regulator on his gas range had gone out and the stove stood in the middle of the kitchen. He and his wife were cooking for their two children on a Coleman camp stove set up on the countertop. DM is tall and thin, with his hair—most of it anyway—pulled back in a ponytail. His hands are large and knobby and strong-looking. He is funny and self-deprecating and likable.
“I’ve been all over,” DM tells me. “I used to hitchhike back in the early eighties. It was okay then. You got rides. The cops were okay. People were friendly. I was in my early twenties then. I picked up basic carpentry skills when I was twenty-one. That’s what carried me through life. I could always bend a nail and hit my thumb and get paid for it.” He grew up far away from his reservation, on the outskirts of Detroit. “I’d come home, but I was really tired of the cities. So I moved up north. I lived all over the North for a while. Finally I got a job at a wood mill. Everything in the U.P. is wood related. Pulp, lumber, wood fences. We were green-chaining and I stacked it. The guy with the saw would cut it to dimension and the beams came off this big conveyor chain and I’d pull it off. I’d stack it. It was hard work. And we all got laid off a week before Christmas from that mill. We hit hard times.”
DM has been back on the reservation for seven years now. “If I was a flower, it’s kind of like I didn’t even begin to bloom till I came back here. Back here, up north, I finally felt like I could breathe. I don’t want to make it sound romantic, it was really difficult. It’s still really hard.” He tried to get hired working for the tribe but found the process corrupt and riddled with favoritism. “How it works is that you’ve got to pay homage to the king around here.” The same was true of getting access to tribal housing. “All the things I had to do—kiss ass, sell myself, and at the end of the day it was a no-go.” Frozen out of a tribal job, and frozen out of tribal housing, DM began selling bait and working for a man up the road who had a regular job working for the tribe but dabbled in carpentry and logging on the side. He showed DM how to work with a chainsaw, how to fell a tree, to tell the difference between the trees. They cut firewood and sold that on and off the rez. DM sits back on his couch, contemplative. “Basically,” he says finally, “the outlaws rescued me. You look at all these guys—these trappers and woodsmen, these hunter-gatherers: they are all outlaws. They don’t live by the rules. No matter what you’re doing—whether you’re logging or cutting firewood or getting bait or whatever—you need start-up money. You need support. No one’s supporting them, no one’s giving them loans for that stuff. So all these guys gotta be outlaws. And that guy down the road, he gave me a chance and taught me stuff.”
Eventually, DM’s partner brought him into the bait business. They set minnow traps and leeched a couple of lakes, and DM set up the shop just down the road from his house. From May through July they sell minnows for five dollars a scoop and leeches for five dollars a dozen. When I asked him how much he made in net profits from the bait, he wasn’t sure. Maybe fifty to seventy-five dollars a day for a three-week stretch in the spring. The rest of fishing season is hit or miss. Overall DM seems to be hanging by a thread. If moving back to his reservation was the defining moment of his life, there seem to be many smaller moments that have blurred that definition. The network of relationships that sustain a subsistence life—the buyers, trappers, store owners, licensing bureaus, suppliers, and clients that buttress it—is tough to break into. Without access to the people, access to the land is unfeasible, and vice versa. For every Bobby, working deep in the woods, there’s someone like DM trying to find his way in, and it’s grueling and depressing to be rebuffed again and again and again.
And Bobby is the rare exception in living solely off the land. “You know,” says DM, getting reflective again, “all those guys who hunt and trap and collect. All those guys do a lot of other things, too. All of them sell weed. Nothing harder than that. Nothing more damaging than that. But they do it.” Returnees like him aren’t all that different from Bobby Matthews’s grandfather, who came to the reservation from Chicago and tried to make a go of it trapping and hunting and harvesting wild rice, selling liquor on the side, until he gave the rest up and turned to bootlegging full-time. “I see the reality, the economic reality of things here. And if I were a brain surgeon, a world-class brain surgeon, they’d already have one who lived here. The people are getting left behind.” From what I can tell, DM has it right. Tribes could support subsistence living through co-ops (for pinecone pickers and bait harvesters and ricers) and could create better access to markets (with trucks and warehouses to transport and store the goods). It could be a boon for historically depressed economies, but they don’t seem interested in committing the resources, even though the demand is there. All of the buyers I talked to told me the same thing: that the market will bear a lot more product. There is room for more pinecone pickers and bait collectors and bough pickers. There just aren’t that many people bringing it in. That may be just fine, for the most part, with the people who are already living the subsistence life and not eager for more competition, but it makes it tough for the DMs of the world who want to make the leap from marginal participants to hunting and gathering as a way of life. For them, the problem isn’t Mother Nature; the problem is people. And the problems they face don’t seem all that different from those that plague what we think of as the regular economy: control by the few, with success determined not only by natural ability but also by privilege, access, and connections. For hunter-gathers, as for the majority of Americans, to exist is to be a part of the service economy. Still, when all is said and done, I think I would rather share Bobby Matthews’s office and DM’s struggle than staff the checkout at Costco.
Jumping Bull
By the mid-1970s, AIM had been largely dismantled as a force for change. It still existed (and still does to this day), but it had been done in largely by infighting, violence, FBI meddling, and perhaps by its own insistence on “warrior affect.” But it emitted one last violent gasp heard around the world in 1975, when AIMsters got in a firefight with FBI agents that left one Indian and two agents dead in a pasture near the Jumping Bull compound at the Pine Ridge Reservation.
It’s hard to say how the fight started (much less what, exactly, happened). But in the summer of 1975, things at Pine Ridge were as bad as they had been before and during the occupation of Wounded Knee two years earlier, if not worse. Dick Wilson’s GOONs were, in effect, terrorizing the reservation. Between 1973 and 1976 there were more than fifty homicides at Pine Ridge, many never investigated. Leo Wilcox, a tribal councilman, was found burned to death in his car under suspicious circumstances. Buddy Lamont was shot at a roadblock in 1973. John S. Moore was found with stab wounds in his neck, but his death was ruled a suicide. A young girl was raped and killed and left in a cluster of trees. A young man was found dead inside a trash barrel. No one was brought to justice, any kind of justice, for these and many other horrific crimes. It seems clear that
after Wounded Knee, the FBI, working closely with the established tribal government led by Dick Wilson, wasn’t as interested in solving them, or even in reducing the violence at Pine Ridge as much as it was in “law and order” of a variety that helped the security of the state.
