19 July 2003

Last week, in 1881, the Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. He had been off the reservation, on the run for five years. Since the great victory on the Little Big Horn on the 25th of June, 1876. You will remember the Last Stand, though it didn't happen that way, when the serenely confident George Armstrong Custer got his. I felt some kinship for the boyish General, since I got a milder version of what he got last week. It was pretty interesting, and made me a little uncomfortable until it was all explained to me. But I will get to that in a minute. It has taken me an unseemly long time to come to grips with the trip to Indian Country. In the normal course of things I would have written this yesterday, or the day before. To my surprise, I have discovered that I am no longer 29 years old. I have increasingly been curious about the old man who peers back at me from the mirror, but on this last road trip to Minnesota I discovered that the stamina that the young squander so generously is something that I need to husband. After the trip I needed to rest, and to reflect.

The trip was made to provide ostensible Departmental "senior leadership" from Washington to the Region Five Tribal Consultations. We are trying to listen to the Tribes. The Secretary thinks it is important, and I agree with him. There are over 550 recognized Indian tribes and they are arrayed in the ten regions decreed by the Department. That is many voices to hear, and it was my turn to be the willing ear.

I flew out of Dulles on Thursday morning. I normally request an aisle seat, something about feeling not as cooped up as I do in an interior seat. But Carlson-Wagonlit, our government contractor, had put be on the window. I relaxed, having ensured that I used the rest room prior to boarding and looked out the window.

Dulles is almost to horse country and the Shenandoah. Beyond are the thin green ribs of West Virginia, and then Pennsylvania and suddenly we were skirting the southern edge of Lake Erie, pale blue and however it used to look like down by Cleveland, the environmental cleanup of the last few years has rendered the lower of the Lakes majestic. From 33,000 feet, anyway. Which is also the best way to look at Detroit. From there you can imagine it

is still alive, the way I remember it as a kid.

Our flight path carved across Ford's Rouge River Assembly Complex, once the Arsenal of Democracy. Then on over the lush green and sparkling lakes of the lower tier of Michigan, my old home. I peered at the lakes and trees and the roads I drove when I first got my license. We followed the path of I-96, generally west by north, and passed the old-brick city of Grand Rapids and out over Lake Michigan over Grand Haven. The skies were cloudless and the enormity of Lake Michigan was a physical revelation. At the midpoint I could see the east and west shores. I was on the left side of the airplane. Chicago was lost in the haze to the south and I could not see how far north the view extended from this Airbus perch in the heavens. I wondered if Leelanau was distinguishable, or the Little Traverse Bay further north. I have seen them both from on high, heading out to Tokyo, and their beauty is breathtaking. It is God's country.

The vastness of the Lake always humbles me, all that fresh water. We made landfall just north of Milwaukee and continued our arc over lakes and lush greenery. Water everywhere, water you can drink if you are daring. The heritage of the Upper Midwest is entwined with the water, the expressways of the original residents and the first explorers and trappers. The names are an amalgam of native and foreign, based on French misinterpretation of the

Dakota language. The "M" sound is actually a consonant "B" sound, I read. Accordingly, the plane was settling down on final approach for landing above "The Land of the Cloudy River." Minneapolis is near the confluence of several great rivers, the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and to the east is the St. Croix. From the air the sun reflects silver and gold from them, a wealth of water in languid oxbows and strands and oval lakes. In the Dakota tongue, Mdo-Te (pronounced Bdoh Tay) means the mouth of a river or a meeting of waters. In the case of the water below our settling wings it is the Mdo-TE of the Wakpa (River) Mni-sota (less than clear or smoky water).

The French explorer Joseph Nicollet visited this region in the late 1830's. Nicollet was told by Dakota Elders at that time that the area around Mendota was considered by the Mdewakanton (Bday- wah kahn toon) Dakota People to be the middle of all things and the exact center of the earth. Nicollet now has a downtown mall named for him, and an island and a county downstate. The Dakota have a casino that at night is lit by a vast circle of spotlights that point to a spot high above the complex that evokes the image of a gigantic tee-pee.

The Dakota may have seen this place as the center of the universe, but Washington didn't. After he bought the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River, and Lt. Zebulon Pike up the Mississippi to survey what had been purchased. Lt. Pike negotiated a treaty in 1805 with the Dakota for the establishment of military posts. And with the establishment of Fort Snelling on the bluff above the river began

the interaction of the United States and the Dakota people. An Indian Agency was established outside the fort and the traders from the American Fur Company set up headquarters across the river at Mendota. Pike went west on further adventures, to Colorado, his Peak being the sort of monument a junior officer could aspire to in those days. Of course the native people had other names for the mountain, but we remember it for Zebulon, at least as long as our Republic stands.

This was the beginning of the white man's history of the area. According to the Dakota, most of the traders, agency employees and military personnel took their women as wives. This was the beginning of the kinship ties that bind the people of the land to the newcomers with the pale eyes and hair. Later came the railways and the hardy Norwegians that Garrison Keillor talks about. I think Lake Woebegon is out to the west of here someplace, where the trees thin and the prairie looms. If you had asked fifty years ago, the locals would have told you the Indians had pretty much been assimilated by white society.

Now the sons and daughters of the Norwegians are working in the parking lot of the Indian casino, which I think is only fair. It really is a hoot.

The airport has abuts the reconstruction of Fort Snelling's limestone walls now, with part of it is preserved as a historic site and attraction. Coming in to land passed over the parade ground to land at Minneapolis with just enough time to make the drive from North West Airline's new Lindbergh Terminal to the convention center at Mystic Lake. Construction was brutal, as it always is in the northland, where frost and freezing limit the season for building. I briefly wondered if I would make it on time, jammed up on the Interstate near the four-million square foot Mall of America. Winter being what it is here, all the water turning solid, they have an affection for indoor activities. More traffic on the feeder road that sprouted off and meandered to the southwest toward Prior Lake. I found the Casino at the end of a county road. It is on reservation land, established by treaty between the sovereign governments of the Shakopee Mdewakanton (Bday- wah kahn toon) Sioux nation and the young United States. The Dakota traded 24 million acres of land in exchange for the eternal protection of the United States, and ultimately, the right to build a mixed-use residential area of jumbo homes and trim double-wides on the tribal property adjacent to the Casino.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton are a gaming tribe, and their crown jewel is the Mystic Lake Casino, conveniently located for the gamblers of the Twin Cities about 25 minutes southwest of Minneapolis. According to the information in my package, the complex includes an impressive 125,000 square feet of twenty-four hour, alcohol-free gambling. The dry part is a little disconcerting. Here, the gamblers practice their vice sober, but they seem to smoke more cigarettes (also a bargain at reservation prices) to make up for it. Sort of like AA meetings, I understand. The complex boasts a luxury hotel (they appreciate your not bring liquor to your room), convention facilities and a bingo hall. Mystic Lake has 3300 slot machines, and 88 blackjack tables. The high stakes Bingo Palace seats 1200 people. Live entertainment is scheduled regularly in the Celebrity Palace. Peter Frampton is apparently still alive, since the posters advertise his return. And Sammy Haggar is gong to be there too, later this summer. As I pulled into the lot, cluttered with construction vehicles, the retiree in the orange reflective vest directed me to the hotel side. He was of Norwegian descent, judging by the look of him, great-grandson of the hardy Europeans who brought this rich soil under the plow and flowed west with the railroads.

Their web page says the Mdewakanton Dakota Community is a place of acceptance, understanding, and learning. They go on to say it is a place that provides the orphaned Dakota a formal place to gather. Here they share precious knowledge with future generations so they may also know their past, enjoy their present, and preserve their Dakota future. I think it is all that. But the controversy about the Open Door is one that makes me wonder. Or at least it lets me know I don't all the nuances in Indian Country.

I should note that is their name for it. It was one of the terms I had resolved never to utter, for fear it would be considered politically incorrect. But the oppressed by definition cannot be incorrect, so there the term stands. In their parlance, their pride, I was officially in Indian Country.

I arrived in the ballroom and was issued my attractive black-and-red tote-bag with the Department logo on the side and the zipper pocket on the side for valuable or keys. Right after lunch we were to brief the tribal leaders and then take their summary comments on the previous two days of discussions. They were not altogether interested in hearing from us. I understand they think they get enough of that already. They were interested in making us listen to them, which is what they think consultations are about. We settled in to the executive session in the afternoon. The Federal folks all gave their little speeches, and I gave some remarks about preparing to combat bio-terror, noting that Osama bin Laden has had his people here since 1983. I told them we were unprepared to deal with mass casualties, either in the city or in more rural conditions on the Reservation. The Tribal Leaders thanked us for our interest and then we left the rostrum and a panel of Tribal Leaders took over from there.

The first up was Robert, who was chosen as the spokesman for all Region Five Indians. He had a long pony tail and an upbeat, slightly ironic manner. He looked at our circular table of Washington Indians, Regional African-Americans and the two white guys. He said there were six words to remember when we went home. Six. He wanted us to write them down. He spoke them slowly and with deliberation: "Make no decision about us, without us."

I counted the words and realized he was, too. "Seven words," he corrected. Then he said it again. "Make no decision about us, without us." There was a scattering of applause. I dutifully wrote down the words and agreed with them. But it was harder than it sounded. There are 565 recognized tribes. Making no decision without full consultation was going to mean a lot of talking. And essentially, talk being what it is, no decision at all. That seemed to be fine with them.

I got a call on my cell phone as they were switching speakers and ducked out to the hall to answer. I poured got a cup of coffee in a generous brown mug and when I returned there was a tribal leader named Ray at the podium. He was apologetic about being late due to a personal situation and regretted that he did not have prepared remarks. I should have known what was coming. Based on his lack of preparedness for the situation at issue, he gave the speech he knew by heart. The Buffalo Speech.

It was explained to me later by , the Deputy Chief of Staff, who was passing on the wisdom of the Indians who work for the Department. He had been bushwhacked before, and he explained that this was a mechanism to use my remarks about bio-terror as a platform for all the Indian grievances against the last two centuries. He derided the Secretary and the President for not personally attending the consultations with the sovereign tribes, as co-equal heads of state. That was an affront to sovereignty. He also took the issue of bio-terror personally, he said, since the first act of bio-terror was conducted against the Indian people. And he agreed that the enemy was here. He said it was the United States.

I disagreed with the last part since the incident he was talking about preceded the declaration of Independence. I knew what he was talking about, though. The French and Indian War ended with the death of Montcalme in the snow on the Plains of Abraham at Montreal in 1760. The French laissez-faire relation with the Indians that extended from Montreal through the Great Lakes region and northwest to Lake Winnipeg ended abruptly. There was a fundamental difference between the French and British Colonial systems. The French had never desired occupation. They desired trade. The British came to the Upper Lakes with haughty manner and strict regulation. The French relinquished the stockades at the Straits to the British in 1761 and paddled away forever. The Ottawa and Chippewa in the region were accustomed to deferential treatment by the French, and the stiff British manner irritated them. In 1763, as part of Pontiac's Rebellion, a group of Chippewa men staged a lacrosse game outside the stockade at Fort Michilimackinac. It is a lovely place where Lakes Michigan and Huron swirl together. The British garrison watched the game with interest, other amusements being scarce in those parts. The ball happened to fly over the stockade wall, and the Indians gained entrance to the post and scalped and killed most of the British occupants.

The British response was implacable. As a sort of bio-terror response to terror, the British Commander in North America, Lord Jeff Amherst, provided sleeping rugs infected with smallpox to Indians surrounding Fort Pitt. They sickened and died. It appears the tactic was followed in Michigan as well. For his exploits, Lord Jeff was honored in a china pattern featuring a British Horseman chasing an Indian that was popular right up until the 1970s. The biologic response to Pontiac's rising is not the precise cause of the decline of the Native peoples. But is close enough describes what happened as the diseases of Europe swept through populations without resistance to them. Harold Napoleon, of the University of Alaska, makes the case that the epidemics caused a form of "post-traumatic stress disorder and social collapse." He summed it up this way:

Meanwhile, Ray was up on the podium, thundering: "Mr. Socotra asserts that we are not ready to take mass casualties, and that the enemy is among us. Mr. Socotra, I tell you that the enemy is here, but it is the United States that is the enemy. The Indian people have already taken our mass-casualties!"

There was a smattering of applause when he was done, a bit desultory considering the incendiary nature of his comments. I flushed a little in embarrassment. After all, I agreed with Ray, since much of what he said was demonstrably true. Lord Jeff once wrote a friend suggesting the use of dogs to hunt the Indians, advocating what he called the "Spaniard's Method" for dealing with the indigenous peoples. Amherst could not implement the method because he couldn't find enough dogs. Not that the scalping and beheading that came before it on the Chippewa side helped anything, but this is a symbiotic situation, after all. There was plenty of cruelty to go around, but the lust for land by the British whites was a new factor in the region. I still felt bad that Ray had teed on the remarks, since what I had come to talk about was preventing the nightmare from happening again. The Deputy Chief of Staff leaned over after Ray gathered he notes and returned to his seat. "Don't feel bad" he said. "Ray didn't have any prepared remarks, so he just gave the one speech he knows. The one about righteous indignation. The one they call The Buffalo Speech, that life was better before the white men came and the buffalo roamed free.

"Don't take it personally," he whispered. "Everybody gets to hear it once in a while. Just don't respond. It isn't considered polite."

The rest of the panel chose not to dwell on old injustices, preferring to address newer ones. And I was interested to discover that the rest of the issues weren't so much about the legacy of war as the legacy of love. Vince of the Oneidas rose to take issue with the Open Door policy. He launched a heartfelt protest against what is called The Open Door decision something that had Region Five in an uproar. Apparently a Director of the Indian Health Service in the Clinton Administration had issued an edict to the Tribes, an awful one, which started out something like 'Dear Tribal Health Director,' and then got steadily more directive. Without fanfare or coordination, the memo mandated that all Indian Health Service facilities would henceforth be open to all Indians needing health care, regardless if they were of the tribe on whose reservation the facility was located.

An innocuous little letter causing so much discontent! It was clearly a violation of sovereignty. Who was Washington to tell the Tribes who could or could not be treated in clinics on Indian land? What's more, who was Washington to tell them. This conference was about resources, of course. The direction to open the clinics had the effect of diverting resources allocated by the Indian Health Service to the recognized tribes to non-members. And therein was the real problem. The problem of exactly who is an Indian.

The rhetoric can be confusing. One piece of literature quotes history like this: "In the old world, the Dakota people and settlers worked together peacefully to understand each other." In the newer world, we are banding together to ban the ubiquitous old Indian word "squaw." Apparently it did not actually mean "woman" or "wife" or "significant other." If I understand properly, the word refers negatively to a woman's private parts, with a significant negative connotation. We wouldn't say the word in polite society, and there is a new movement to strike the term from place names all over the country.

But I am normally willing to believe two impossible things before breakfast. One of the impossible things I was to believe was the consistency of the panel of tribal leaders who were to address us. Most of it wasn't hard. Of the seven speakers, five of the speakers were clearly Native Americans. The other two- well, I had to scratch my head. They looked a lot like the bureaucrats at the head table. It seemed to me that they were White Indians, and it made the whole thing a bit surreal. I have met the White Indians before, in solemn consultation with the leaders of the great and famous tribes like the Navaho, the Apache and the Choctaws. The leaders of those bands had sharp features, rich skin color. Some wore crew-cuts and some traditional braids. Both either way, they were as unmistakable and authentic as Iron Eyes Cody. The other ones looked a lot like me, only more European. The races have entwined through the centuries. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not. But mingle they did, the explorers and the settlers and the Indians. Humans are an untidy species but remarkably adept at spreading their genetic material..

It is never comfortable to speak about race, and thankfully I don't have to. It has already been done for me, as part of the process in qualifying for Federal educational programs intended to benefit disadvantaged Indian youth. The tribes themselves have established the criteria for what constitutes a legitimate Native American, and it is not at all what I thought. It varies by Tribe. Some require a full one-quarter for membership, or having a grandparent who was registered as an Indian in census data earlier in the century. This criteria includes some of the famous tribes, like the Shawnee, Cheyenne-Arapaho and the Comanche.

Other tribes are a little less demanding, requiring only one-eighth total Indian heritage, or by calculations, one great-grandparent. That standard includes the Apache, the Caddo and the Sac & Fox Tribe of Missouri. To qualify for membership of the Ft. Sill Apache Band you need to prove only one-sixteenth heritage, or one great-great grandparent. I was only mildly surprised to find that you can become a registered member of the Creek, Ottawa, Wyandotte and the Cherokee Nation with what they term "Any degree-Descendent of tribal member." That means that any documented ancestor of tribal blood makes you eligible for tribal membership. Which is where things start to get pretty muddy.

Our Regional Director, currently an African American, said that his name and some of his features came from a grandparent who was a Choctaw. Interestingly, notion of race seems mutable. If he wanted to change he wouldn't have to prove that it was a grandparent. The Choctaw are among the Tribes which require only documentation proving "Any degree." This per-centing of heritage makes me uncomfortable, like trying to explain to my kids how slavery worked, how Thomas Jefferson came to own the half-sister of his wife, Sally Hemmings. But the whole 'one drop' criteria of race is still around, this time turned on hits head and applied to eligibility for tribal membership and of course, access to Federal programs.

There was a lot of discussion at the convention about the "new tribes," which is of course a non sequitur. There are no new tribes, only ones that are put together again after being blown to pieces by an expanding America. The romance of stories like "The Last of the Mohicans" comes from the melancholy caused in the dominent culture for the wasting away of the folkways, language and culture of entire peoples. But now some of them seem to be coming back, even if some of them seem a little contrived. History is an uncomfortable thing, and when the truth is no longer available, sometimes it is useful to make it up.

During our first break at the meeting I went out front to smoke a cigarette- tobacco being one of the driving forces in the westward expansion and saw one of the tribal leaders getting into his car. He looked a lot like one of the Norwegian retirees who were working in the parking lot, and his wife and granddaughter were both undeniably blonde. Not my place to do anything but observe, of course. It occurred to me that my prospective step-daughter is eligible to become a full member of the Cherokee Nation, based on her great-grandmother. As a prosepctive parent of a Native American, I had to think ofthe consequences. There was more, too. My best friend from High School, scion of a prominent soft-beverage bottling plant in Wichita, Kansas, could have been elected to tribal leadership and been seated on the dais at the conference.

When the conference drew to a close, the Deputy Chief of Staff decided that a steak and a cocktail were in order, only one of which could be had at the reservation. We took the rental car to Minneapolis, past the strip malls and construction. We parked and walked up the Nicollette pedestrian mall and found Manny's, the seventh-best steak house in the entire United States. It is the dark-paneled kind of place where you might see Garrison Keillor. Over a couple cocktails, an excellent bone-in New York Strip, and a phenominal bottle of wine, I remembered why youth has its own imperative. I slept in the car on the ride back to the Reservation. Before I dozed, I thought that my Grandfather was the last one-hundred percent Irishman in the family. I toasted the Deputy Chief of Staff with the revelation. That heritage makes me one-quarter Irish.

I remember going to bed after looking at the gigantic tee-pee of light, thinking that I should go down to the Irish embassy and pick up my passport.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra