Sean Fahrlander and his son Aatwe, 2009
Courtesy Brooke Mosay Ammann
2
“Just dump it in,” Sean is saying to his brothers Marc and Mike. The light is fading, and the wind is coming strong off the big lake: Lake Mille Lacs. It’s April, and the ice has retreated from the shore but the water is soupy with it. When the wind pushes the crushed ice up against the larger unbroken plates out in deeper water, it makes a raspy tinkling sound.
Sean is tall, with large hands, perfect for gripping nets. He was a basketball star in high school, joined the navy, and worked as an air traffic controller on an aircraft carrier. I don’t know if the job was good for him. “You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. My shit was squared away A-1 tight. I was correct. Everything in place. Not like now.” Not like now. His hands shake (“Goddamn allergies,” he says). He is nervous (“Goddamn steroids, they really fuck me up”). He is a little high-strung (“PTSD is a bitch, man, a real bitch”). He also talks a lot, more than most people and certainly more than most Indians. In a rush, his words tumble over themselves, each one apparently anxious to reach the finish line—your ears—before the next. He’s an excellent ricer, and can fillet a walleye faster than anyone else I know. (“Talk to a Chippewa and you’ll end up talking about two things: fish and beaver.”) Be that as it may, Sean’s the only Indian I know who is conversant on topics ranging from storytelling to how to tap a maple tree, the meaning of life, how to hit an alternator with a hatchet so it works, the design of the National Museum of the American Indian, Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet, ancient Greek warfare, what’s wrong with Indians today, string theory, how to tell the best “drunk story,” and Genghis Khan. I think the idea of not knowing something hasn’t occurred to him yet. When you talk to Sean the conversation always finds its way back to Sean. He is, however, generous with his time and energy. Life is much better with him in it—and that’s not something you can say about everyone. Once I bought a decrepit Airstream in Wisconsin. He helped me load it onto the back of a twenty-foot beavertail trailer. We got it strapped down and he looked at me sideways: “You’ll never make it back to Minnesota alone. I’m going with you.”
“How are you gonna get home?”
“Fuck if I know. Just let me run home and grab some underwear and I’m good to go.”
He was right—I couldn’t have done it without him.
Sean can find something funny in just about every encounter, and he has an agile mind. He’s just over forty and his hair is receding a little and is peppered with gray. His laugh comes easily except when he’s “in a mood,” at which time he’ll say, “Don’t fucking talk to me, I’m in a mood.” And so you don’t.
“Fuck no, not yet. Got to fix this little bastard. Little bastard bounced off on the way over here. Little bastard. Fucking transducer.” That’s Mike, Sean’s brother, as he tries to fix the fish-finder on the stern of his sixteen-foot Lund. “Little bastard” is his favorite phrase and he is free with it; he’ll call everyone—white and Indian alike—a “little bastard” as often as he uses it to refer to fish and motors.
The wind pushes its way through our clothes. We’re on Indian Point, on the west side of Lake Mille Lacs. It’s getting dark but if I squint I can see the floats attached to other nets bouncing on the waves. No one else is setting, and the only light comes from the headlights of the reservation game warden’s truck, staffed by two non-Indian reservation conservation officers, making sure we obey the letter of the law as spelled out in the agreement between the Mille Lacs Band and the state of Minnesota at the end of a decade-long legal battle. They are also protecting us from non-Indians who, until very recently, gathered at boat landings like this one and heckled Indians, spit on us, and held up signs that read “Save a Walleye, Spear an Indian” and—one of my favorites—“Indians Go Home.”
The transducer on the fish-finder and depth gauge has broken off and Mike is still trying to rig it up right. His brother Marc, a large man with large strong hands wearing a SpongeBob stocking hat, leans out the door of his Ford F350. The Cummins diesel throbs under the hood. He takes his foot off the brake and the dually tires in the back inch down the ramp toward the lake.
“Just ditch the boat in the lake and let’s go,” says Marc. “It’s getting dark.”
“Yeah, fuck it, we don’t need it. The water’s like, what, six feet? We’ll just go by the other floats,” offers Sean.
“I installed this little bastard so we could be exact,” says Mike. “I mean, like, exact. I didn’t hump around and do all this shit just to guess. I want some fucking walleye. I want to get some of those slimy bastards in the net for sure.”
Finally Mike fixes the transducer and hooks the fish locator up to the battery and they’re ready: Marc slips his truck between the rocky banks and slams the brakes so the boat goes skipping off the trailer while Sean holds the bowline. The tires of the Ford churn rock and gravel as it climbs away from the landing, earth that has been churned by Indian tires and Indian feet for years with the same goal as the three brothers have: to net some walleye and feed their families. Marc walks back down from the truck and he and Sean and I get into the boat while Mike tries to push us off. But Marc must weigh at least 240 pounds and Sean 210, and the addition of my 170 pounds means that the small aluminum skiff is grounding out. Mike jumps into the lake up to his knees, heaves, and the boat is free, Marc yanks the engine to life and within minutes they are yelling and swearing and giving each other shit as they drop in their 100-foot net. The three brothers—all colorful speakers, all amazingly gifted with fine mechanical ability (Mike, a mason, can mentally calculate, down to the block, the number of cement blocks for the basements he builds, and Sean is a mean stonewright in his own way, too)—have gathered to net fish. Marc drove all the way from Colorado. He owns his own construction company, based in Colorado Springs. He comes back to Mille Lacs every spring to net walleye with his brothers and, this year, to hunt in the first Mille Lacs turkey season. The birds have made a comeback. He’s brought along half a dozen calls, camo, inflatable decoys, and his shotguns—all brand new. Mike’s come over from Brainerd, and Sean from Wisconsin. They are all Mille Lacs enrollees and they are back on the reservation none of them grew up on to net the fish that is theirs. “Why bother?” I ask as we’re idling back near shore. “Why go to all the trouble for a few fish?”
“Well,” Sean drawls, as he thinks it over, smoking, resting after the rush to get the net into the water: “Let me answer your question with another question: Why does a dog lick his dick?”
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As the fish gather every spring, so does Sean’s family—to visit, to hang out, to argue and fight, and to exercise their treaty rights. As I drove down to Mille Lacs to meet them it was hard not to notice how the place has changed since casinos. The roads were nice, and the houses tucked back into stands of old-growth maple and oak were spacious. The cars parked in the yards were quite new, tending toward Buicks and Chryslers. I made a wrong turn, missing the road to Sean’s mother’s house. Instead, I turned by the Vineland Indian Chapel, just below the water tower, emblazoned with the seal of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians—the state of Minnesota in outline, with an arrow passing through the heart of it, which is exactly where Mille Lacs is: a little bit north and west of Minneapolis. A few old shacks clung to the hilltop in the shadow of the water tower. They were falling in, the roof boards were rotted out, and tar paper was waving in the wind. All of them were small, none bigger than sixteen by twenty feet. I was surprised no one had burned them down. Maybe the tribe kept them standing to remind themselves of the hardships it had faced during the past century. Until recently the tribe had experienced the kind of Indian existence one usually thinks of, but worse.
Once I’d straightened myself out, I found myself on long, winding, suburban-feeling roads (with curbs and fire hydrants) that snaked back amid the maples. The new houses are enormous—three bedrooms, two baths, double attached garages—with vinyl siding and landscaping. All the streets have Ojibwe names: Noopiming Drive, Ziigwan Lane. The elders on Mille Lacs get their houses free. So do veterans, and there are many veterans