‘Our own rules, our own ways’ define Red Lake

Does Red Lake’s closely guarded status as a sovereign nation help or hinder the reservation’s recovery from the school shootings of March 21?

 

By Chuck Haga
Star Tribune

 

RED LAKE, MINN. - A man in a federal agency truck zipped through Red Lake, and Floyd (Buck) Jourdain broke off a conversation to give chase.

"Your first stop is my office," the tribal chairman told the federal man politely but firmly, when he caught him. "You have to let us know you're here."

When journalists and other outsiders stormed onto the remote northern Minnesota reservation on March 21, after Jeffrey Weise's bloody stroll through the high school, Jourdain met the visitors with a welcome that was part warning.

"This is Indian land," he said. "It is, in our opinion, some of the last Indian land on Earth. We have our own rules, our own ways of doing things."

It is land never ceded or surrendered by the Red Lake Ojibwe, never carved into privately-owned allotments that could be lost, sold or stolen. The Ojibwe claim it by right of conquest, and they rely on a sometimes flimsy shield -- tribal sovereignty -- to protect traditional ways, values and rights.

They rely on it now to guide their recovery from March 21.

"Sovereignty is the foundation of everything here," Jourdain said. "Without that, we have no existence."

To outsiders, the sovereignty of the Red Lake Nation can seem as thin as a wild rice shoot in spring. U.S. law applies on the reservation, felony crimes are prosecuted in federal courts and federal money fuels most reservation services.

But while it is surrounded by the state of Minnesota, Red Lake is apart. Break a rule, offend a tribal leader, and tribal police may escort you to the border. It is against the law, as it is anywhere in Minnesota, to steal, exceed speed limits or punch someone in the face -- but at Red Lake those are violations of Red Lake law.

The band ceded 3.2 million acres to the United States in 1889, but Chief May-dway-gwa-no-rind (He Who Is Spoken To) drew the line there. The old chief is revered today, his words on display at the Tribal Council chambers.

"I wish to lay out a reservation here," he said, "where we can remain ... forever."

He preserved 407,730 acres of pine and aspen forest, plus 229,300 acres of surface water on Upper and Lower Red Lake. Hundreds of smaller lakes dot the reservation. Most of its more than 5,000 people live in the small towns of Red Lake, Redby, Ponemah and Little Rock.

Visitors focus on crime, poverty and other problems, Jourdain said, and overlook the great strides Red Lake has made from the tarpaper shacks and abject poverty of a generation ago.

"Our lifestyle here may seem simple," he said, "but people are content with their surroundings and having control over their lives."

U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger sees Red Lake's unique status as "both help and hindrance" in moving on. His office investigates major crimes on the reservation, including the March 21 shootings in which 16-year-old Weise killed nine people, then himself. Heffelfinger prosecuted Buck Jourdain's son on charges relating to the shooting. In a Nov. 29 plea agreement, Louis Jourdain, 17, admitted to transmitting threatening communications. He awaits sentencing.

In October, Heffelfinger joined tribal leaders to open a family advocacy center in Bemidji that will serve northern Minnesota, including Red Lake and other reservations. "The people of Red Lake are very tight," he said then. "Traditions are strong, the elders are strong, and all those strengths have been mobilized since the shooting.

"The hindrance is in Red Lake's isolation, small population and poverty."

The old chairman's vision

It was a high honor when Jordan Paiz, 4, received his first Ojibwe dance regalia a few years ago.

Quewesance -- Little Boy -- his great-uncle Roger Jourdain had called him, passing on the Ojibwe name Jourdain had taken 80 years earlier. And in the traditional outfit, young Quewesance danced proudly through his grandmother's house and out the door.

But there he stopped. He grew silent as he stood scanning the yard and beyond, as if looking for someone.

"Where's Uncle?" he asked his grandmother, Jody Beaulieu, Jourdain's niece and Red Lake's tribal archivist.

"He is everywhere," she told him. "He's in the trees. He's here beside you."

"Is he in Heaven?"

"Yes. He's everywhere."

Jourdain, a distant relative of Chairman Buck Jourdain, led the political revolution at Red Lake nearly 50 years ago that replaced hereditary chiefs with a tribal constitution and an elected chairman and council.

He ruled as the first elected chairman from 1959 to 1990. When he died in 2002 at the age of 89, he was not universally loved or admired. But he had done more than anyone to proclaim and preserve the closed, sovereign status of the Red Lake Nation, virtually unique among American Indian reservations.

In 1974, under his guidance, Red Lake was the first reservation in the country to issue its own vehicle license plates. For a time, Jourdain required reservation visitors to obtain passports.

Sovereignty at Red Lake goes beyond symbols and rules. It is attitude and style, a blueprint for keeping Red Lake "red" -- unlike Blackduck or Bemidji, a place where Indian people will never sense themselves a minority.

Because the land is held in common, the tribe assigns lots to members who want to build or buy a house. It may be the individual's house, but the land remains communal land.

"Look at the neighboring reservations," says Robert Treuer, a non-Indian who lives on a tree farm outside Bemidji. He knew and admired Roger Jourdain and credits him with lifting Red Lake out of the 19th century.

"At Leech Lake, about 12 percent of the land is in Indian ownership," Treuer said. "White Earth is a similar story. But not Red Lake."

Beaulieu makes the point in her usual direct way: "When you come to Red Lake, you know damn well you're on Indian land. And it is aboriginal land. Nobody, no U.S. government, gave us this land and said, 'Here you are, little Chippewas, this is your home.' "

Roger Jourdain knew that his absolutist position on the sovereignty of Red Lake "was a fragile thing and depended on the whim of Congress," Treuer said. "So he was adamant that Red Lake be politically aware and active" -- ever alert, never missing an opportunity to assert its special status.

Like Buck Jourdain, Treuer said that outsiders too often see only the poverty, crime and other negatives.

"There's a wonderful Indian world there that a lot of whites know nothing about," he said. "And it's not all feathers and beads. It's in the way they show affection, with a lot of touching. It's in the way they 'sit fire' for a four-day funeral."

Sovereignty, Red Lakers say, means sheltering traditions not as museum pieces for tourists but as living expressions of what it means to be Indian.

It does not mean the band is self-sufficient or independent. The heavy presence of the FBI after March 21 underscored that. Also, tribal government receives most of its operating funds -- more than $31 million in 2004 -- through "self-governance compacts" with the federal government.

Jourdain and others bristle at the suggestion, heard often from people off the reservation, that the federal money is welfare. It is compensation, they say, promised in treaties for resources taken from them.

The band also has $60 million in a trust fund, a settlement paid by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for decades of BIA mismanagement of Red Lake forest. Interest is earmarked for a tribal greenhouse and reseeding program.

The settlement included onetime payments to individual band members. When she received her share, about $1,100, Beaulieu took it to her off-reservation credit union.

"I went to the cashier and told her, 'I want to set up a trust fund for my grandson with this blood money,' " she said. "I gave her a history lesson whether she wanted one or not."

Double-edged sword

Each July, the people of Red Lake prepare for Independence Day.

There will be drums and songs, a powwow and a feast of walleye and wild rice. U.S. flags will be raised and Ojibwe veterans of America's wars will be honored.

But not on July 4. Independence Day at Red Lake is July 6, the anniversary of the 1889 treaty signing that preserved the closed reservation.

Red Lake's jealously enforced sovereignty girds an economic protectionism that can thwart development, such as a fabrics plant proposed recently in Redby.

The band had a $500,000 state development grant to help the non-Indian company with the start-up, Beaulieu said, but the manufacturer wanted hiring control. The tribal council refused to surrender that authority, and the grant was used instead for several smaller start-ups, including an automotive garage and a floral shop.

Such small enterprises help to keep money on the reservation, but they create few jobs. Estimates of reservation unemployment range from 30 percent to well above 50 percent.

Vince Beyl, director of Indian education at Bemidji High School, is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. "They've prided themselves for many years on their sovereignty," he said. "But sovereignty is a double-edged sword. It's harder to bring viable economic development to a closed reservation."

Some members would allow outside development, "but they are a minority," Jourdain said. "You can have a person struggling to feed his family through a long, hard winter, no job, and he will still insist that we maintain sovereignty. An opportunity to make money is not as attractive to them as maintaining Indian land under Indian control."

Some dismiss sovereignty as a cover for incompetence.

"Sovereignty maintains a status quo of unemployment, poverty, civil rights abuses and social dysfunction," said Bill Lawrence, 66, a Red Lake member and editor of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News.

"The tribal government is inept. They ... hide behind sovereignty. The social problems -- drugs, alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome, shootings, the kids not going to school -- people don't know what to do about them."

Lee Cook, a Red Laker and director of the American Indian Resource Center at Bemidji State University, agrees that tribes have been plagued by corruption.

"The problem isn't with sovereignty but with the style of governance," he said. "What most tribal leaders learned from the BIA was how to be oppressive and manipulating.

"Buck is not like the old chairman that way. But when you live under oppressive government as long as we have, people take a long time to learn how to take care of themselves. You take the chains off, but we still carry them around with us -- the feeling that we are not efficient, not self-reliant, that we have no work ethic."

The great tragedy, Cook said, is that "our kids carry it, too," despite the rise of "Indian pride" inspired by such events as the 1973 American Indian Movement-led occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., in which Jody Beaulieu and other Red Lakers took part.

"Our community has never been allowed to grieve," Cook said. "We lost most of our land, our way of life. We buried ourselves in alcohol and despair. That's why Wounded Knee was important. We had to raise some hell, break things and let people know how we feel."

Now Indian leaders must "do more to prove that we care about our kids," he said. "We have to start with little kids, building their self-esteem. Expect more from them and show them that without dreams they won't go anywhere."

Too many funerals

As midnight approached on a chilly fall night, Buck Jourdain stood outside the Red Lake Cultural Center, waiting for the start of a distance run to call attention to one of Indian country's most vexing problems: teen suicide.

Inside, tribal elder Frannie Miller danced in a healing circle with other jingle dancers. Men sang and drew deep, resonant beats from drums.

When the singers finished, Miller took a microphone to plead with young Indians not to look for answers in drugs, alcohol or suicide.

"The answer is in the drums," she said. "The answer is in the circle."

Sober for 22 years, Buck Jourdain, 41, mentored youth before becoming chairman in 2004.

"My best friend hung himself at 15," he said softly, yet urgently. "I attended more funerals by age 15 than most people attend all their lives. I was tired of seeing my friends die."

Young Red Lakers gathered nearby as he talked, planning to join him for the first miles of a run that would go from the Ojibwe communities of Minnesota to Lakota communities in North and South Dakota.

"When all the agencies and crisis counselors go away, we're going to be left here," Jourdain said. "Our best bet is our own native brothers and sisters will be here with us."