Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being

Lawrence W. Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472417343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317180722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Very few studies have examined the worldview of the Anishinaabeg from within the culture itself and none have explored the Anishinaabe worldview in relation to their efforts to maintain their culture in the present-day world. This book fills that gap. Focusing mainly on the Minnesota Anishinaabeg, Lawrence Gross explores how their worldview works to create a holistic way of living. However, as Gross also argues, the Anishinaabeg saw the end of their world early in the 20th century and experienced what he calls 'postapocalypse stress syndrome.' As such, the book further explores how the values engendered by the worldview of the Anishinaabeg are finding expression in the modern world as they seek to rebuild their society.

PART I
The Anishinaabe Apocalypse

Chapter 1
Encounter with Apocalypse

Louise Erdrich begins her novel Tracks by writing “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.”¹ This sentence in itself and the novel as a whole capture the apocalypse the Anishinaabeg suffered in the early 1900s.² The suffering endured by the people at that time is almost beyond comprehension at this late date. It is also almost beyond comprehension that such a horrible event could actually have happened. But happen it did. I have seen with my own eyes the evidence of the apocalypse the Anishinaabeg on the White Earth reservation went through, and it is an experience I will never forget. In order to make clear the issues being discussed in this book, I would like to start off with a discussion of the Anishinaabe apocalypse on the White Earth reservation based on my encounter with it. There are several ways I could do this. From the point of view of scholarly research and academic writing, I should provide a thoroughly researched and fully footnoted explication of the historical events that transpired at the time period in question. But I prefer to not take that approach for several reasons. First, and most importantly, Melissa Meyer already wrote a thoroughly researched and fully footnoted account of the sad history of the White Earth Anishinaabeg in the early 1900s, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920.³ I would recommend that any readers interested in the topic consult Meyer’s excellent study. Second, as stated above, I would like to provide some sense of what it means for a modern-day Anishinaabe to have an encounter with the apocalypse that brought our world to an end. This can best be accomplished by drawing on the oral tradition of Anishinaabe culture to tell my own story. This chapter, then, will be my story, my encounter with apocalypse and how I eventually wound up writing a book on the worldview of the Anishinaabeg. I have a few excerpts from Meyer’s book I would like to add at the end of my story simply because they also capture well the full effect of the Anishinaabe apocalypse. The last word in this chapter will be provided by one of my elders, Tom Shingobe, an important Anishinaabe spiritual leader for the Anishinaabe community in Minneapolis in the 1970s who was from the White Earth reservation.

In 1978, when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, a team of lawyers representing the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe hired me and several other Anishinaabe undergraduates to help conduct legal research for a lawsuit initiated by the Tribe concerning illegal land transactions on the White Earth reservation in the early 1900s.

The site for our research was the basement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Bemidji, Minnesota, which is located in northern Minnesota not too far from three Anishinaabe reservations, White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Lake. I remember going into the basement. There were two rooms. One room was smaller, about the size of a medium to large bedroom. Beyond that front room was a much larger room that occupied most of the basement. As I recall, it was about 50 feet by 90 feet, in other words, encompassing a large portion of the footprint of the building. Along one of the long walls was a row of filing cabinets that had records on just about every Anishinaabeg from the White Earth reservation. The row of cabinets itself was about 40 feet long, as might be imagined since there were literally thousands of files.

Our job was to go through the files one by one looking for illegal land transactions. In order to understand the nature of our research, it is important to have some historical background on the White Earth reservation and the Allotment Act of 1887. As is well known, in the wake of the Allotment Act, reservations around the country were divided into allotments that were then parceled out to individual Indians. Depending on the respective reservation and the status of the Indian, different size allotments were granted. On the White Earth reservation, most of the allotments were 160 acres. The allotments were to be held in trust by the federal government for the individual Indians for 25 years, after which time the Indians could dispose of their land as they saw fit. In the meantime, allotments were not to be sold and, since they were federal trust land, they were not to be subject to any type of property taxes, especially county taxes. The idea was the land would be held in trust until the Indians were competent enough to handle their own affairs.

The White Earth reservation was unique, though, in that an exception was made to the 25-year trust period. Two congresspeople from Minnesota, Senator Moses Clapp and Congressman Halvor Steenerson, worked to get a series of riders passed to the yearly Indian Appropriations Act. In 1904, they sponsored separate actions. The Clapp Rider of 1904 allowed the Minnesota Chippewa to sell their timber; the Steenerson Act provided more allotments for the White Earth Anishinaabeg.⁴ In 1906, they worked together again to get another rider attached to the Indian Appropriations Act, the Clapp Rider. It allowed adult mixed-blood Indians to sell their allotted land on the White Earth reservation without having to wait for the 25-year trust period to end. The reasoning was that as long they had white blood flowing through their veins, the Indians were competent enough to handle their own affairs, and so could voluntarily sell their land and have it removed from trust status.⁵ However, it should be made clear, these two congresspeople were not acting with the best interests of the White Earth Anishinaabeg in mind. Instead, they were after the timber resources on the reservation. For example, the Steenerson Act merely provided more timberland to the Anishinaabeg to be swindled away by white people.⁶

As might be expected, the Clapp Rider of 1906 set off a land rush of sorts on the White Earth reservation, especially by various timber companies. Indians were induced to sell their land through every means imaginable. Now, again, it helps to understand the particular circumstances of the White Earth reservation. It is located in northwestern Minnesota to the immediate west of Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River. The geography is quite unique. Three separate biomes come together in the area. The grasslands of the plains push in from the west; the remnants of the great boreal forests of Canada come down from the north; and the hardwood forests of the East Coast penetrate from the south, so it is a startlingly rich mixture of biological diversity. The reservation also straddles the top of the Red River Valley, which has some of the richest farmland in the world. So the reservation is bisected, in a manner of speaking. About one-third of the western part of the reservation lies within the influence of the Red River Valley and so has good topsoil. Traveling toward the east, the landscape transitions into a mixture of conifer and hardwood forests, with some open grassland.

In speaking with my Uncle John Beaulieu about the allotments on the White Earth reservation, he had questions about the nature of the allotment process. He had seen a map with the location of the different allotments on the White Earth reservation. According to him, all the allotments were not on the west side of the reservation where the rich topsoil of the Red River Valley is located. Instead, as he put it, they were all located in “swamp lands.” One would think that since the goal of the Allotment Act was to turn tribal Indians into individual farmers, the government would have allotted the best farmland on the reservation to the Indians. Instead, the Indians got the swamp land while the so-called excess land, that is, the best farmland on the west side of the reservation, was sold off to white farmers.

It should be noted, however, that the Anishinaabeg came into possession of “swamp land,” which was really the forested areas in the eastern two-thirds of the reservation, through a variety of ways.⁷ Many of the Anishinaabeg actually chose forested land for their allotments. They were, after all, woodland Indians for whom the forests were a much more comfortable place to live. They knew how to make a living from the forests, but not in the grassy areas. So, why should they abandon their forests to take up a way of life with which they were not familiar in favor of a lifestyle that had maintained them from the beginning of time?

However, not all the allotments were conferred by individual choice. My grandmother, Christine Beaulieu (née Fairbanks) is a good case in point. She was born in 1899, which was very fortuitous. In order to receive an allotment, one had to be born before 1900, so she just made the cutoff date. However, being a young girl at the time of the allotment process, she did not have any say in where her allotment would be located. Needless to say, she did not receive an allotment on the west side of the reservation. Instead, she, along with so many other Indians who did not have a say in the location of their allotment, received land in the forested area of the reservation. My grandmother lived most of her adult life on her allotment where she and my grandfather worked hard to eke out a living from the thick clay soil that dominated her land, and for which White Earth received its name. (Literally translated, the name for White Earth in the Anishinaabe language means, “the place where there is a lot of white clay.”) So, even though my grandparents made their living by farming, they really could not engage in the profitable farming found on the west side of the reservation. Instead, they made what money they could by running a small dairy operation and operating other businesses on the side. For example, my grandfather, John “Sonny” Beaulieu, had a motorized wood splitter, so he sold firewood. He also worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression.

So, one way or another, the Anishinaabeg on White Earth were mainly allotted forested land. That put them right in the crosshairs of the timber industry after the allotments had been made. Keep in mind that the forests in northern Minnesota in the early 1900s are not like the forests to be found there today. In the early twentieth century, the wooded areas of northern Minnesota were still old growth forests. As such, the trees were much bigger than anything to be found in northern Minnesota today. In his newspaper column, Jim Northrup talked about being out in the woods and seeing the stumps from the trees that were cut down in the early 1900s.⁸ The great white pine and other trees were so huge, it would take three men to encircle the tree with their arms spread out. When one goes to northern Minnesota now, most of the trees are so small any grown adult can encircle any given tree. The majority of the trees are first growth trees as well, trees that are the first to occupy an area after it has been cleared in whatever manner, whether it be by fire or clear-cutting. So the trees are mainly poplars and jack pines, which could be referred to as “weed trees.” In that respect, it could be said the forests of northern Minnesota have gone to weed.

But that was not the case in the early 1900s. There was a huge appetite in the rapidly growing cities all across the eastern United States for building material. Of course, the most common, cheapest, and, we should add, best building material was lumber products from the great woodlands of the north and east. I say best building material because the wood was, after all, from old growth trees. As such, the grain on the wood was tight and strong. If one ever has the chance to go into a house in the Midwest built in the early 1900s that has unpainted woodwork, one should take a close look at the wood. What one will see is a small sliver of the old growth forests that used to dominate the northern woods. One will also see how exquisite that wood actually was, especially in comparison to the pressed plywood and loose-grain wood that passes for building material nowadays.

So the nation wanted wood, and the Anishinaabeg on the White Earth reservation had it. The problem was, of course, that as federal trust land, the timber companies could not buy the land, that is, until Clapp and Steenerson got their rider passed. Once that occurred, there was a no-holds-barred rush to obtain timberland from the Anishinaabeg. The Anishinaabeg on White Earth still have stories about how they lost their land. My second cousin Duane Goodwin talked about how land was sold for an old Singer sewing machine. Most of the land was sold, though, from the wrong side of a whiskey transaction. However, once the signature was secured, the authorities had no desire to determine how that signature was acquired.

Unfortunately, not all the land sales were legal, and that is where our research team comes into the story. Our job was to go through the records of every single file on the Anishinaabeg from the White Earth reservation looking for illegal land transactions. There were three kinds of illegal land transactions we were looking for. First, land could not be sold by a full-blood Indian. Again, as explained above, the Clapp Rider of 1906 was written so that mixed-blood Indians on the White Earth reservation were considered competent; full-blood Indians, however, were not. So, land sales within the 25-year trust period by full-blood Indians were illegal. The second type of illegal land transaction we were looking for was the sale of trust land that belonged to a minor. That is, a parent might sell the land of his or her child. The parents were not supposed to sell land that belonged to their children, and so these types of land transactions were illegal as well. The third type of illegal land transaction involved tax forfeiture by the county for unpaid county property taxes. However, trust land was not supposed to be subject to any type of taxation, especially county property taxes. County officials taxed the land anyhow, and if an Indian did not pay the taxes, the land was seized and sold at auction for tax forfeiture. This, of course, was also illegal. So our research team was given its directives, pointed in the direction of the filing cabinets, and told to go to it, which we did.

Of course, the first file I checked was my own. Yes, I had a file in the Bemidji office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There in my file was a letter I had written to the Bureau of Indian Affairs when I was in the sixth grade. In my sixth-grade handwriting, the letter asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs to please send me the genealogy of my Indian heritage. After that bit of fun, the next file I looked at was my grandmother’s. Much to my surprise and dismay, there was information that my grandmother had almost lost her land to tax forfeiture in the late 1930s. The paperwork indicated the county had initiated proceedings for tax forfeiture b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Anishinaabe Apocalypse
• Part II The Foundations of the Anishinaabe Worldview
• Part III The Anishinaabe Mind
• Part IV The Anishinaabe Heart
• Part V The Anishinaabe Spirit
• Part VI Beyond Postapocalypse Stress Syndrome
• Bibliography
• Index