The high school sits just past the compound on the other side of the creek. It is a large, modern affair, built with bonded state and federal money in the early 1990s. Despite all the troubles that plague the reservation—crime, gangs, unemployment, suicide, and low graduation rates—the whole community is very proud, especially proud, of this school. It is the most important, most central, most conspicuous building on the reservation.
To an outsider Red Lake could look like a great nothing. But what appears as a great nothing, an economic disaster, is linked to a particular Red Lake phenomenon of independence. The “nothing” is the result of character and leadership stretching back over 150 years. Red Lake Reservation, unlike nearly every other reservation in the United States, is a closed reservation. No one can live, work, travel, or fish anywhere within the reservation boundaries without the tribe’s blessing. Mueller and his son-in-law were fishing on the wrong side of the rez.
When Terry Maddy said that the Indians at Red Lake were used to having their cake and eating it, too, the “cake” he was referring to was sovereignty, and it had been baking for more than 400 years before Jerry Mueller’s boat was confiscated by the sovereign nation of Red Lake. There is probably no aspect of Indian life more misunderstood by Indians and non-Indians alike than sovereignty.
Sovereignty in the Western sense—the supreme independent authority over a land or territory vested in a people or a government—predated the conquest of America. So when tribes began making treaties with colonial powers and later with the U.S. government, sovereignty, as a concept, was well in place. It was out of this concept that reservations were, in large part, born. There were ad hoc arrangements that resembled, to some extent, modern reservations, dating back to the early seventeenth century. The Delaware from New Jersey, for example, had one such arrangement. The Delaware were also the beneficiaries of what could be considered the first “reservations” in the United States, when, in the early 1700s, they were promised land that would exist under their authority in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The Province of Maryland created a 5,000-acre reservation for the Nanticoke Indians in 1698, and created another reservation of 3,000 acres in 1711. The first and last reservation in the state of New Jersey was created for 200 Brotherton Delaware on August 29, 1758, in Evesham Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. Despite the reservation created for them in New Jersey, the Brotherton Delaware became one of the most nomadic tribes of all time. The Brotherton Reservation fell into decline almost immediately after it was created, mostly because the community’s benefactor, John Brainerd, became ill and left in 1777. The Oneida of upstate New York invited the Brotherton Delaware to live with them in 1796. The Brotherton agreed. They had no power or protection in New Jersey. Instead of growing, their numbers had shrunk from 200 in 1758 to a mere 85 in 1796. They sold the reservation to New Jersey and moved to New York in 1802. The stay with the Oneida in New York was short. Some of the Oneida planned a move to Wisconsin—having lost land, rights, and villages during and after the rampages of the Revolutionary War. The Oneida, having sided with the Americans, returned to their villages to find them burned and looted by the British, the Americans, and even some of their own Indian allies. And this after the Oneida men had carried 600 bushels of corn on their backs to relieve the famine at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–1778. An Oneida woman named Polly Cooper accompanied the men and showed the soldiers how to prepare the corn by soaking it in lye and rolling it into hominy. So grateful were Washington and his troops that Martha Washington personally presented Polly Cooper with a bonnet and shawl. That gratitude was short-lived. After the war the Oneida suffered and sought better conditions out west. The Brotherton Indians accompanied them. Other Delaware moved to Indian territories in present-day Oklahoma. Still others fled to Canada.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up to the Revolutionary War, there were a series of arrangements, trade relationships, and antiaggression treaties between many tribes and the many European colonial powers in North America, chief among them the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. These relationships varied among tribes and colonists, with some tribes playing both sides because they could. In many instances, as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Indian tribes controlled the natural resources, the routes of travel, and the technology to effectively control large areas of North America. The Indians in the Great Lakes region showed they were powerful enough to make any colonial power in North America think long and hard about how to deal with Indians. Nowhere was this more clear than during the Seven Years’ War. When that war began in Europe in 1756, it involved every major European and colonial power, making it what some call the first world war. Great Britain and its allies (including Prussia) fought against France, Austria, Saxony, and Sweden. When the war was done, between 900,000 and 1.4 million were dead. The major clashes between Great Britain and France had been far from their own homelands; these took place in America during the French and Indian War, which was really the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War but was so vast, long, and bloody that many people have come to think of it as a separate conflict. The very name of the war can be confusing—the conflict was not between the French and the Indians but rather between the French and their Indian allies and the British in North America. At the outset of the war in 1754 the British maintained a strong presence on the eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Maine, whereas the French occupied the territories farther north and west. Mixed in with the French and British colonies were many Indian tribes—Seneca, Mohawk, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Hurons, Delaware, Shawnee, Winnebago, and others—whose territories often overlapped those of the French and the British. Most of the Indian tribes sided with the French, who were, by colonial standards, somewhat decent neighbors and trading partners. Some tribes, notably the majority of the Iroquois Confederacy (which comprised the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora but in this case was minus the Seneca), joined the British. The war—brutal and total—lasted from 1754 until 1763, when France gave up most of its New World possessions at the Treaty of Paris, though it left its citizens and traders in their former holdings.
When, under the leadership of General Jeffrey Amherst, the British took possession of the French territories around the Great Lakes, they made a number of mistakes. They understaffed the forts and shortchanged their new Indian trading partners. Most of these errors resulted from Amherst’s low opinion of Natives. He thought them disorganized, weak, and worthless. Whereas the French treated the Indians as allies and urged, through diplomacy and trade, the creation of mutually beneficial alliances, the British treated Indians as a defeated people. They did away with the symbolic and quasi-religious gifting ceremonies the French had observed, during which village chiefs were presented with blankets, guns, and trade goods. Amherst’s general approach was desultory and his attitude derisive; he cut rations and instructed traders not to sell gunpowder to the Indians. Few French colonists made inroads into Indian territories, but the British came in waves. And finally, the great tribes of the East had enough.
An alliance was forged between three different tribal regions: the Great Lakes tribes, consisting of the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Huron, and Potawatomi; the tribes from Illinois country to the west, made up of Miamis, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Weas, and Piankashaws; and the tribes from the Ohio country, including Mingos, Shawnee, Wyandots, and Delaware. These came together largely under the leadership of the Ottawa chief Pontiac and Kiywasuta, a Seneca leader. The Seneca, having long supported the British, were disaffected. They threw in their lot, and their many warriors, with the tribes allied against the British. When fighting started at Fort Detroit in the spring of 1763 and lasted until late 1764, the Indians used every strategy they had. They sneaked in concealed weapons, pretending to want to have a council. The leader of Fort Miami was lured out of the fort by his Indian mistress and killed by Miami warriors lying in wait. The most daring method of capture was used when the Ojibwe and Sac staged a lacrosse game outside the gates of