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

Themes

Perceptions of Reservation Life Versus the Realities of Reservation Life

Much of Treuer’s motivation in writing Rez Life was to dispel stereotypes about life on the reservation. The conventional view is that reservations are often poor, blighted by broken families and alcoholism, and are generally places in which surviving Indigenous people welter in despair. While poverty, addiction, and crime are realities on reservations, as they are in other sectors of society and among every race, this is not the only story. Some nations, like the Mdewakanton Dakota, are extraordinarily wealthy. Others, such as the Ojibwe, are thriving despite their problems. Treuer illustrates how reservations are microcosms of American life. The problems that exist on reservations are reflections of the nation and its history.

Treuer’s use of reportage helps to personalize life on reservations. Through the eyes of Sean Fahrlander, Dustin Burnette, Brooke Mosay Ammann, Officer Charley Grolla, and his mother Judge Margaret Seelye Treuer, Treuer explores the diverse nature of reservation life. Through Officer Grolla, Fahrlander and Burnette, Treuer depicts how cultural and land preservation are key to perpetuating tribal life for future generations. The difficulties of young people like Burnette are inextricable from a legacy of disenfranchisement and the internalization of racism, which Fahrlander, as a mentor, worked to undo in Burnette. On the other hand, Ammann’s experience reveals the shortcomings of reservation life. Tribes still struggle with self-determination, which often leads them to exclude people who culturally identify as Indigenous, despite not looking the part. In this regard, many tribes have adopted, however inadvertently, the racial classification system that had been used to oppress them in the 19th century. Ammann’s disagreements with the tribal council, she argues, were also partly motivated by sexism and possibly, classism. Ammann is the only figure in the book other than Treuer who has an Ivy League education.

Judge Margaret Seelye Treuer helps both her son and the reader understand how law enforcement has been used to oppress Indigenous peoples. In her position as a tribal judge, she uses the tribe’s sovereignty to get help to people who, in a non-tribal court, would normally be criminalized and swallowed into the prison system. Efforts to undue tribal justice, particularly with the institution of Public Law 280 (PL 280), were yet another attempt by the federal government to usurp control over tribes in the interest of dismantling them and robbing them of their treaty rights.

Judge Treuer’s early experience with a game warden who robbed her family of their rice harvest—a key method of survival for many Ojibwe—motivates her sense of tribal justice. The anger of knowing that a white person, particularly one who worked for the government, could do anything to an Indigenous person and get away with it, motivated many Indigenous people to pursue careers in law. Previously, tribal judges did not have any education in law. This aspect of sovereignty unfortunately remains contested, giving tribal governance less authority in dealing with non-Indigenous people who commit crimes against the Indigenous on reservation lands. While intra-racial crime is as common on reservations as it is anywhere, these criminal acts are especially common on reservations and overwhelmingly impact Indigenous women, who suffer higher incidents of sexual assault than white women.

Thus, life on reservations is as marred by the inequities, social struggles, and interpersonal conflicts that exist anywhere else in the nation. Reservations are both separate from mainstream life, which is key to their self-preservation, and intertwined with it through tribes’ relationships to governments and non-Indigenous neighbors.

The Fight for Treaty Rights and Sovereignty

Treaty rights, which are frequently misunderstood—if not altogether unknown by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples—are key aspects of tribal identity and sovereignty. Loosely defined, treaty rights are rights that an Indigenous nation established with the federal government recognizing the tribe’s original rights to the land and its resources. Treaty rights were established during the era when the federal government had to acknowledge the rights of tribes due to their power in numbers. They eroded over the 19th century, as tribes dwindled. Assimilationist efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries worked to dismantle many Indigenous people’s sense of identity, which included their understanding of treaty rights. For young Dustin Burnette, Sean Fahrlander’s explanation of treaty rights helps him reassess his identity as an Indigenous person. Fahrlander’s guidance on the matter helps to instill him with pride, which leads to his pursuit of an education and a productive life.

White conservatives—particularly in Minnesota where treaty rights interfered with the lucrative commercial trade of the rare walleye fish—have attempted to confuse treaty rights with “special rights,” a nebulous phrase that has been used to trigger resentment among the general public. The implication is that the tribe is being given special considerations only because they are Indigenous—not because, as is true, the land originally belonged to them, and the state of Minnesota would not exist without their willingness to cooperate with white colonization.

Some scholars, as Treuer points out, believe that the US government only entered into treaties with Indigenous nations to placate them until tribes were either assimilated in the near future or were made extinct through a combination of conventional warfare, biological warfare, and the harsh conditions of displacement. Either way, the federal government, state governments, and private enterprises were forced to deal with tribes as they dealt with other nations—on an equal basis—if they wanted to gain access to rich deposits of timber and minerals and to create farms and homesteads for white people.

Treaty agreements with the Ojibwe and the Puyallup revolved around hunting, fishing, gathering, water rights, and travel. The Ojibwe, which include the Mille Lacs and Red Lake bands, signed treaties with the US government as early as 1837, trading land for money. However, by the 1840s, the federal government led by President Zachary Taylor opted for forced removal to the West instead, to gain access to rich ore deposits underneath Ojibwe land. The Puyallup have been fighting for their treaty rights since the 1950s and have been foiled by a concerted conspiracy lodged by the state of Washington to limit their access to the lucrative salmon trade. In the minds of those who protest both the Red Lake Band and the Puyallup’s less restricted access to their respective fisheries, the problem is resentment over Indigenous people having more access to a lucrative resource. What these protestors do not understand, at Treuer notes, is that access to fishing, hunting, and gathering is not a right but a privilege that one often pays for in the form of licenses. The tendency of white protestors to overlook this fact for its convenience is a display of white privilege—in this instance, a willful ignorance about history and laws to suit the white establishment’s own needs and interests—that only reifies the need to protect treaty rights.

Assimilationist Tactics and the Endurance of Indigenous Identities

Assimilationist tactics, rooted in the efforts of Christian missions to convert “heathenish” tribes to Christ, go back to the Age of Exploration and the first European settlements in what the early colonists believed was the New World. The concept of the Americas as virgin land meant that the early settlers could disregard any sense that those who clearly inhabited the continents had cultures, histories, religions, and methods of justice uniquely their own. While early European settlers, particularly the French fur traders, dealt with tribes more along lines of reciprocity, this did not mean that they respected their hosts.

Everything about life among many tribes was at odds with the kind of culture that European colonists wanted to develop in what would become the United States. For example, many tribes believed in collective property ownership, which contradicted the values of white colonists. Migration to the American colonies was largely motivated by the promise of individually-owned farmland.

To discourage collective ownership among tribes, the federal government passed the Dawes Act, which divided tribal land into parcels without the consent of tribes, in an attempt to encourage individual land ownership among tribes. If this were not enough, Indigenous people were both disenfranchised and forced to integrate with white society on their own land when the Nelson Act was passed, giving “surplus” land—meaning, land left over after allotment—to white settlers. Both laws were enacted to dissolve tribal membership and reinforce in future generations the notion that private ownership was preferable to collective ownership.

Boarding schools and forced adoptions were more insidious means of assimilating Indigenous people into white American life. Both policies strongly implied that Indigenous parents were incapable of raising their children, while also reinforcing the notion that only the white American middle-class model of living was suitable. At boarding schools, Indigenous children were forced to cut their hair, burn their traditional clothing, and stop speaking their tribal languages. Parents were coerced into handing their children over, out of fear of losing rations or never seeing their children again. Thus, both law enforcement and much-needed benefits, due to so many tribes living in poverty, were used against tribal members to force compliance.

The stories of twin brothers Dan and Dennis Jones offers anecdotal evidence of what many Indigenous youths in the US and Canada suffered during the era of the boarding school, which lasted in Canada until the 1970s. At age six, both boys were removed from their families and idyllic lives in rural Canada and forced into a dormitory where they were routinely abused by a weekend minder. During the week, they attended public school with white children and watched their classmates go home to their parents. This sight encouraged Dan to internalize racism—that is, to believe that his status as an Indigenous person made him less worthy of parental love and support.

Although the Catholic Church has offered apologies for its development of boarding schools and Canada has provided reparations to those who survived abuses within them, the long-term psychological and cultural effects of such institutions are immeasurable. Despite these attempts at institutional erasure, several Indigenous tribes, particularly the Ojibwe, have worked to recover lost aspects of their cultural identities, particularly language. The erasure of language is a key tool of oppressors in destroying both identity and one’s connection to history. By starting Ojibwe language immersion schools, members of the tribe are reclaiming their cultural narratives and connecting to their histories. They are also ensuring the survival of their tribal identity, despite persistent pressure from the mainstream to assimilate into whiteness, which remains both the marker of social belonging and economic success.