Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Eulogies

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary

Stories about life on reservations in the 1950s and 1960s are often tales of hardship. In 1938, anthropologist M. Inez Hilger did a survey on White Earth Reservation and found that about half of the nearly 250 homes she visited “were merely tar paper shacks” (122). Few had wooden shingles. Only one had a foundation. The shacks were damp, cold, and made of highly flammable materials. Some had toilets, but without any walls for privacy.

Larger, better-connected tribes got money from Housing and Urban Development (HUD), while smaller tribes were frequently overlooked. However, HUD initiated a program to build housing tracts on reservations across the country in the 1960s. The homes looked like those in white suburbs. Instead of streets and alleys, there were cul-de-sacs. This planning model, it was believed, would discourage crime from presumed outsiders. Families signed up for housing as soon as they could, which they received in order of application, through a lottery system, and through nepotism. Some paid a small rental free, while others had free housing. The houses had heating, running water, a bathroom, electricity, and a sturdy roof. What HUD ignored was that they placed families from different tribes, some of whom had rivalries, beside each other as neighbors. Also, the contractors put marginal effort into these homes, resulting in many of them being poorly built. Many Indigenous people today are still waiting on HUD housing. Currently, over 40% of Indigenous people on tribal lands live in what HUD would consider “substandard” housing.

In 1996, the Navajo tribe declared a state of emergency because over 80% of homes on their reservation lacked electricity, running water, and telephones, while over “20,000 Navajo had no homes at all” (124). The federal government estimated that around 100,000 Indigenous people across the United States were awaiting HUD housing in the 1990s. Housing loans are an impossibility for too many people, due to high rates of unemployment and the lack of collateral. Any tribal land that one might possess “is held in trust and can’t be mortgaged” (124).

In the late 19th century, Leech Lake Reservation was closed to non-Indigenous people. However, the reservation held “vast timber resources” (129). Businessmen from Bemidji convinced the federal government to issue an executive order opening up the reservation for timber exploration. In turn, this opened up Leech Lake to white settlement. The loggers then wanted to run a rail line through the reservation. The effort was blocked by Chief Zhookaa-giizhig, who was the first person to log on Leech Lake and, in 1891, float logs down to Minneapolis to be milled. White loggers ended his enterprise. In 1894, Zhookaa-giizhig, who did not drink, was found “drunk” on railroad tracks and was run over by a train. After that, and with the dual effects of the Dawes and Nelson acts, the reservation was opened up. After all the trees were cut down, Cass Lake became a resort town. Now, Cass Lake is dangerous, largely due to the impacts of methamphetamine and oxycodone. Moreover, many of the Indigenous children there—one in every 24—are wards of the state.

Treuer writes that Indigenous children “have been drifting away from their families for decades” (143). In both the United States and Canada, separating children from parents was federal policy. In Canada, the policy continued until the 1970s. The purpose was to “civilize the Indian and bring him into the mainstream as a productive member of society” (143). The term “Indian problem” was popularized by Chester A. Arthur, 21st president of the United States. Arthur saw a dual problem: inefficient government administration and the failure of Indigenous tribes to give up their “savage” ways and join the white American mainstream. Arthur’s policies were attempts to destroy Indigenous life and cultures while seizing “trade, minerals, lumber, and land for settlement” (143). He organized two legislative actions: ending the federal government’s responsibility to Indigenous tribes by instituting more control over at the state and territorial level, and setting up boarding schools for Indigenous children.

Boarding schools were usually operated by religious orders, particularly Catholics and evangelicals, but they were funded by the government. Enrolled students had to cut their hair and burn their traditional clothes upon arrival. If they spoke in their native languages, they were beaten. Sexual abuse was rampant. In Canada, where the schools were called “residential schools,” conditions were so bad that Pope John Paul II issued an apology, and the Canadian government provided 10,000 dollars in recompense for those who suffered sexual abuse within the schools, plus an additional 3,000 for every year spent in the schools past the first.

Attendance at boarding schools was mandatory and government officials used threats, withheld rations, and told parents that if they did not send their children to the school, they risked never seeing them again. All tactics were employed to ensure that parents complied.

In the 1940s, the government set up the position of county nurse, who acted as a local social worker to foster interracial adoption. It was the county nurse who decided if a parent was too “unfit” to look after their children. If the nurse did not approve of the Indigenous parent, the child was sent to live with a white family. The federal government supported the adoption project, which was funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the US Children’s Bureau. The project lasted from 1958 to 1967. In Minnesota, one quarter of all Indigenous infants were displaced from their homes and sent into foster care or adopted by white families. They lost “their tribe, their [treaty] rights, and their heritage” in the process (146). To redress damage from forced adoptions and assimilationist efforts in boarding schools, the federal government passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 to keep Indigenous children in Indigenous families.

Chapter 5 Summary

Treuer visits the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa, which sits within “the foothills of the Coachella Valley north and west of Palm Springs” (154). It is one of numerous successful Indigenous-run casinos in the United States. In 2006, “Indian gaming brought in $25 billion dollars […] compared with the $12 billion generated in Las Vegas” (154).

Casinos, however, are not the only means by which Indigenous tribes have amassed wealth. The Osage, after being relocated to non-arable land in present-day Oklahoma, discovered in 1894 that large quantities of oil bubbled beneath their land. The petroleum speculator Henry Foster received exclusive mineral and oil rights in exchange for paying all enrolled Osage tribal members a 10% royalty on oil sales. Within several years, the Osage were among the world’s wealthiest Indigenous people. Soon, white speculators were marrying Osage women to get hold of their royalty rights. One speculator, Ernest Burkhart, married an Osage woman and plotted to murder her and her family to claim all of her royalties.

In 1897, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development “identified about a dozen reasons why life on the rez was virtually synonymous with a life of poverty” (155). Chief among them was a lack of access to capital caused by unfair lending practices. Also, Indigenous people had difficulty “collateralizing assets held in trust by the U.S. government”—namely property, which is a key instrument in Americans’ entry into the middle-class (155). Additional impediments to advancement cited by the Harvard Project include poor infrastructure, lack of access to natural resources, living too far from markets, and “a lack of entrepreneurial skill” (156).

Treuer cites Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as exemplary of the Harvard Project’s findings. Although it is the eighth largest reservation in the United States with an area “larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined,” the reservation, with a population of 15,000 in 2000, has an 80% unemployment rate. There are a few individually-owned businesses and a few owned by the tribe, but there are no other enterprises. Most of the industries that the tribe initiated—a moccasin factory, a fishing tackle business, and a meatpacking plant—all failed. On the other hand, the Prairie Wind Casino, opened in 1994, has provided hundreds of jobs, mostly to Indigenous people who live on the reservation. Still, poverty blights Pine Ridge.

Similarly, the Cabazon Mission Band, which owns the Morongo Resort and Casino, was very poor in the early 1980s. Theirs is a tiny reservation that they share with other bands of Southern California Cahuilla Indians. In the 1950s, the Cahuilla tribe was not doing well, though nearby Palm Springs had become synonymous with wealth and celebrity. The Agua Caliente tribe has a reservation which exists partly within the city limits of Palm Springs. While their white neighbors lived in palatial ranch homes, they lived “in huts and shacks” (157).

The Cabazon Band is small. In the past half century, the number of enrolled tribal members fluctuated between only 30 and 40. Due to their small numbers, they have had difficulty obtaining social services, including education, housing, and roads. The band didn’t begin to shift its ill fortune until the 1960s. During the Johnson presidency, educated Indigenous peoples became involved in government, particularly the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Nixon administration appropriated millions of dollars for the Indian Financing Act of 1974, which “went into insurance, loan, land, and business projects” (159). With this availability of funds, band members sold tax-free cigarettes in a smoke shop. Other tribes, particularly the Seminole, Seneca, and Oneida, were doing the same thing. With the proceeds from tobacco, they ventured into gambling.

Some Indigenous people have casinos while others are less likely to have them. For example, the Cherokee have been a powerful tribe since the mid-1700s. The British dealt with them on a nation-to-nation basis, and many Cherokee individuals ran Southern plantations on which they held enslaved Black people. The notion of many African Americans having Cherokee blood, which is often true, is not the result of Cherokee and Black people having amicable relations but because Cherokee masters, like their white counterparts, often raped and impregnated enslaved Black women. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia in 1828, US government policy toward them changed. Thus, all Cherokee territories became part of Georgia.

In 1830, George Tassels, a Cherokee man, killed another Cherokee man on Cherokee territory. Georgia arrested Tassels and tried him in their courts. When Chief John Ross sought to petition the US government, arguing that the Cherokee had the right to try Tassels themselves, Georgia ignored the tribe, and the federal government did nothing. The Supreme Court had previously upheld tribal sovereignty, arguing that states could not affect it, but Georgia ignored the ruling. Tassels was hanged on Christmas Eve of that year.

Important political figures in the Republican Party supported Chief John Ross, including Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. Ross filed a case against Georgia with the Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee were a “dependent nation.” Justice John Marshall wrote the decision, which decreed that “neither Georgia nor the federal government had jurisdiction over the matter [with Tassels] because the Cherokee nation and other Indian tribes [were] denominated domestic dependent nations” (161). It was not until Worcester v. Georgia that the federal government recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokee. Still, Georgia ignored the ruling and had the support of the executive power in the form of President Andrew Jackson, who is “the least-liked president in Indian country” (161), writes Treuer. In further rebellion of Chief Justice Marshall’s ruling, Jackson worked with General Winfield Scott to round up, with the help of 7,000 soldiers, members of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes—otherwise known as the Five Civilized Tribes—and proceeded to move them to Indian Territory out West. Over 4,000 Cherokee died during the journey.

Despite the suffering of the Cherokee and others, the language of the Supreme Court’s precedent stood. The ruling, along with tribal rights, led to small tribes “[opening] gaming operations in the deserts, swamps, and cornfields of America in the mid-twentieth century” (162). The Cabazon Band opened a poker room in 1980. When the Indio police raided it, the tribe’s case went from state court to the US Supreme Court. The matter was resolved by 1987, giving the tribe and others the right to open gaming houses.

Treuer goes on to write about Helen and Russell Bryan who were unjustly taxed for a trailer home they owned on tribal land. They refused to pay the bill and sought the help of Anishinaabe Legal Services to deal with the issue. The case then went to Bernie Becker, an attorney from New York City. Becker, who ended up taking the case to the Supreme Court in 1976, argued that PL 280, which had been used as an excuse to tax the Bryans, “had been passed to combat lawlessness, not to regulate or tax Indians” (166). Moreover, if the purpose of PL 280 was “to fix the problem of lawlessness on Indian reservations,” it was then designed “to give Indians better access to justice” (166).

However, C.H. Luther, Becker’s opponent, claimed that PL 280 “was a termination act” (169). This interpretation worked in Becker’s favor. He countered that, due to PL 280’s unclear language, the law was not meant to destroy tribes but to assist them. Also, Becker argued, if the true purpose of the law was termination, “it would have been aimed at tribes with strong governments that resisted assimilation, such as Red Lake, and not at tribes already close to capitulation, such as Leech Lake” (169). On June 14, 1976, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly ruled in favor the Bryans.

Several years after the Bryans won their case, the Cabazon Mission Band and the Seminole were “in court defending their fledgling gambling operations” (173). The Cabazon relied heavily on the Bryan v. Itasca County ruling. Some states in which tribes opened casinos demanded a share of profits in the form of taxes. Some tribes, including the Seminole and the Pequots in Connecticut who opened Foxwoods in 1992, were so successful at gaming that they “[became] the largest employers in their respective regions” (173). From 2004 to 2005, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty tried to handle a budget crisis not with new taxes but by “threatening to open up gambling statewide unless casino tribes forked over money to the state” (174).

Casino profits have been key in the expansion of Indigenous peoples’ wealth. The Mdewakanton Dakota Sioux, a tribe with fewer than 300 members, is growing. Over half of the households within the tribe earn over $200,000 per year. Their incomes and home sizes are growing rapidly, but their high school and college graduation rates are not. All members of the tribe receive housing. Tribal members receive around $84,000 per month, as long as they are enrolled members. The tribe pays federal income tax, but not state income tax.

Similarly, the Cabazon Band is very wealthy. Rumor has it that each member of the band has their own golf course. These rich tribes are exceptions, however. Of those reservations that have casinos, only a small fraction receive substantial profits. Some tribes face the dilemma of expanding their casino operations on cherished land or remaining poor.

On Leech Lake, gaming has changed very little. The reservation remains poor. Gaming revenues have provided some funds for jobs and infrastructure, but it hasn’t provided much more. The median income at Leech Lake is $21,000.

Chapters 4-5 Analysis

When Housing and Urban Development (HUD) planned homes for Indigenous peoples, they overlooked the unique living arrangements of tribes. Their introduction of cul-de-sacs replicated the isolationist style of white suburbs, which were designed to keep out imagined outsiders, particularly people of other races. Worse, less infrastructural care went into the new homes and there was less incentive to provide housing en masse. These facts reveal the bias that often mars such federal programs. Housing issues and a lack of access to proper federal support exacerbated class differences between the Indigenous people on Cass Lake, who came to suffer from numerous social blights, and the white business owners, patrons, and residents who also occupied the area, due to the murder of Zhookaa-giizhig.

The social and economic decay on reservations provided the supposed moral basis for dismantling Indigenous families. Forced adoptions and boarding schools were both connected to policies of assimilation and termination. The connection between boarding schools and Christian churches was related to ideas that distinguished between Christians and “heathens” and which extended back to the Age of Exploration. Christianity was a foundational aspect of the “civilizing” mission and a key means of making many Indigenous people complicit in colonization. The lack of recognition for Indigenous parenthood further dehumanized Indigenous peoples and subjected their children to numerous abuses, which parents were powerless to report. In sum, it was a concerted effort to destroy Indigenous identity.

The casinos are arguably a testament to many tribes’ resistance and survival. Morongo Casino, however, sprang up in an environment that underscored the chasm between white wealth and the poverty of many Indigenous people. The Cahuilla, who own the casino, suffered poverty while observing the ostentatious wealth of nearby Palm Springs. Coachella would later become famous as a site of a festival popular with supermodels and bourgeois bohemians—or people of upper-middle class backgrounds who espoused aspects of counterculture. In some instances, attendees at Coachella and similar festivals have appropriated aspects of Indigenous dress and culture to mark their supposed separation from standard white American middle-class values.

Treuer also notes how some tribes’ inability to secure the federal benefits they were guaranteed led to their starting casinos. It was an act that epitomized American-style ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. Ironically, tribes have been vilified for adopting the values that have won many white business owners praise. The aversion to casinos from both white civilians and state governments underscores the conspiracy to keep Indigenous Americans in poverty and out of mainstream American life. Suffering these forms of discrimination does not mean that tribes have not exhibited their own discriminatory behaviors, motivated by racism and greed. This has been the case with the Cherokee Nation and its attempts to exclude Black members, descendants of Freedmen, from enrolling. This is a racist exclusionary practice that contributes to the disempowerment of African Americans.

In regard to Public Law 280 (PL 280), Bernie Becker used the language of the law to work in favor of tribes, not against them. A law that had been intended to circumscribe Indigenous peoples’ lives came to benefit both the Bryans and, ultimately, all federally-recognized tribes. PL 280 ultimately reinforced tribal sovereignty. As a result, casinos have created countless jobs and funded investment projects and business ventures. Gaming tribes have also become scapegoats for conservative legislators, such as Governor Pawlenty, who have refused to raise taxes, particularly on wealthy corporations. More personally, casino profits have been used to preserve a key aspect of Ojibwe culture: their language. Gaming has not created vast wealth, as Treuer is careful to point out. The money is concentrated only among tribal enrollees, and tribes retain the right to refuse prospective members, usually as a means to concentrate wealth and other resources among a select few. In this latter regard, as previously pointed out, tribes are guilty of the same greed and favoritism that has worked to oppress them.