That is exactly what many people whose lives are intertwined with Indians say today. My father, after escaping Austria and the Holocaust in 1938, fled to the United States with his parents. After much wandering and one marriage and three children he settled just off the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Here he felt safe for the first time in his life. More than that, he felt he had found, with his new friends and new family, something that had eluded him all the years before. He devoted his life (and still devotes it) to the community he has come to call his own, and is as passionate today about the rights and respect owed to Indians as he was when he moved to Indian country in the 1950s.
A lot of people (this includes Indians and non-Indians) don’t think of the story of rez life as a story of beauty. Most often rez life is associated with tragedy. We are thought of in terms of what we have lost or what we have survived. Life on the rez is usually described as harsh, violent, drug-infested, criminal, poor, and short. White-on-Indian violence occurs at ten times the rate of white-on-white violence. Indian-on-Indian violence is close behind; in 2006, the police department on the Red Lake Reservation received more 911 calls than Beltrami County, which has ten times the population of Red Lake. The small village where my family comes from once had the highest ratio in the state of felons who had done hard time to people who had not been to jail: it has been said one in six residents of Bena (population 140) had done more than ten years in prison. The average life expectancy for Indian men is sixty-four. When white people turn sixty-five they, on average, retire. Indians are lucky to live long enough to see retirement. The average household income on my reservation is $21,000. On some reservations in the Dakotas the median income hovers just above $10,000; for the rest of America, median income is $52,029, as of 2008. Life is hard for many on the rez.
If the usual story we hear of life on the rez is one of hardship, the subplot is about conflict. More often than not, the story of “the Indian” is understood as a story of “Indians versus whites” or “Indians versus everyone.” This notion is further sharpened by the cherished idea (cherished by Indians and whites alike) that the real story of Indian life is “how Indians, quietly going about their business in the New World, were abruptly and violently screwed by white people against whom the Indians had no defenses and gosh it’s really a pity because Indians were a noble people.” Most treatments of the history of Native America can be represented by a running balance sheet with positive Indian values and contributions on one side and white transgression and crimes on the other. Like this:
| Native Americans | Anglo-Americans |
| Provided food and shelter to Pilgrims | Gave Indians blankets saturated |
| with smallpox | |
| Introduced Europeans to corn, | Introduced Indians to “firewater” |
| squash, tomatoes, and chocolate | |
| Love Mother Earth | Hurt Mother Earth |
| Promote community and | Promote capitalism |
| togetherness | |
| Were forced onto reservations | Were forced into the suburbs |
| Signed treaties in good faith | Broke treaties in bad faith |
But this isn’t the whole story. Reservations and the Indians on them are not simply victims of the white juggernaut. And what one finds on reservations is more than scars, tears, blood, and noble sentiment. There is beauty in Indian life, as well as meaning and a long history of interaction. We love our reservations.
My tribe, the Ojibwe, has it good compared with others. We are both vast and underrated. Originally a coastal tribe from the eastern seaboard belonging to the Algonquian language family—which includes Cree, Pequot, Passamaquody, and Delaware, among others—we began a slow migration west before the first white people set foot on this continent. Our language still bears traces of this coastal existence. We have words for “seal,” “whale,” and “bagel,” though these aren’t used very often where we now live. The migration, as it’s called, lasted for many centuries, and according to tribal lore the tribe was following a vision of one member who dreamed that we should move west to where food grows on water. As far as prophecies or directives go, this has to be one of the weirdest. But here we are, in the land of wild rice, where food does grow on water. We occupy the land around the entire Great Lakes, stretching from just east of Toronto westward to Montana and from as far south as Chicago all the way up to the underbelly of Hudson Bay. We are the most populous tribe in North America, though not the most populous in the United States. That would be the Cherokee.
And even though we were ass-kickers and name-takers—having fought and defeated the Iroquois, the Sac and Fox, and the illustrious Sioux—we aren’t really known as such. In fact, the Sioux (perhaps the most famous Indian warriors are Sioux) used to live where we now live—in the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northwestern Ontario. But we pushed them out to the plains, where they made a good living hunting buffalo. And maybe that’s the problem. The Sioux hunt buffalo from horseback and we Ojibwe go out on snowshoes to snare rabbits. The Sioux have cornered the market on Indian cool. This is true for Indian names, too. They had chiefs named Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud. We had chiefs called Moose Dung, Little Frenchman, Flat Mouth, Bad Boy, Yellow Head, and Hole in the Day. But we did have a chief with the name White Cloud, which is almost as cool as Red Cloud. These were tough men, but a guy named Yellow Guts doesn’t sound much like a death-dealer and doesn’t make for good copy. We do have a lot of “wind” and “sky” names, which you might think would be cool. But Big Wind, Downwind, and Fineday (which are names I think of as being among the most beautiful Indian names) don’t compare to Mankiller (Cherokee) or Destroytown (Seneca).
It’s a blessing, I suppose. We have largely avoided being written about by others—who prefer to write about the Apache, Comanche, Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and Sioux. And we have avoided being overrun by wannabes and “culture vultures” because, after all, who wants to be an Indian who doesn’t own horses and lives in a swamp and traps beavers and didn’t evolve striking geometric beading patterns or cool war bonnets? But to the victors go the spoils, as they say, and also to the victors go naming rights. Many other tribes labor under names given to them by us. Sioux is short for “Naadwesiwag” (snakes, a euphemism for enemies). Winnebago comes from the Ojibwe word “Wiinibiigoog” (the “Ones by the Dirty Water”), and Eskimo comes from “Eshkimoog” (“Eaters of Raw Flesh”).
We have reservations in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana. We have “reserves”—as they were called in Canada, though now they are called First Nations—in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Some are tiny and can be walked across in less than an hour. Others, such as Red Lake, are large, larger than Rhode Island. The result is that there is more variation among our people than in most other tribes: from “bush Indians” in Canada living on reserves that are accessible only by floatplane in the summer and by roads across the ice in the winter to large corporate (and comparatively wealthy) entities such as the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in central Minnesota. We have people who know and practice traditional Ojibwe lifeways—trapping, hunting, and fishing for sustenance—who are Catholics, and we have lawyers and lobbyists who follow Ojibwe ceremonial traditions. You can travel for days or weeks and still be in Ojibwe country—the woodlands around the Great Lakes, the boreal forests of central Canada, and the margins of the Great Plains and Canadian high country. We live, I think, in some of the most beautiful places on earth.
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