July 22, 2021 An Old Raven Story

 
THE RAVEN history stories we printed and published in Palmville for 24 years proved very popular segments of our issues, particularly if they were about Roseau County. Readers often remembered certain individuals from their past or knew place names. The late Merle Jesme asked me to do some research on the Civil War veteran Edwin Evans, who died in 1920 and is buried in the Palmville Cemetery. The reader remembered Edwin in family photos as an old man, who wore knee high boots and a wide-brimmed hat and who, he was told, became indignant when others disrespected the flag on the Fourth of July.

It was Edwin’s obituary that furthered my education about, not only the Civil War, but the Indian Wars of the 1860s. His story took me from Fort Donelson, Tennessee, into Minnesota and onto western North Dakota and the Battle of the Killdeer Mountains, detailed in a diary written by an infantryman in Brackett’s Battalion, that Evans was in as part of the General Alfred Sully Expedition of 1864.

During the early 1990s, I had the occasion to periodically visit the backroads of northeast South Dakota through the historic Coteaus de Prairies, west of Sisseton. I visited Fort Sisseton long after the summer tourists were gone, discovering Brackett’s Battalion soldiers names and initials carved in its limestone walls. Learning of the book, “Through Dakota Eyes,” about the Dakota Uprising of 1862 and written from the viewpoint of the warriors who participated, I retraced the Minnesota River Valley from west to east, drifting along the Minnesota River Valley, thinking spirits lingered there yet. I was often alone at those sites, walking slowly through the unmown grass and reading historical markers that identified the exposed foundations that outlined the now non-existent buildings. The setting sun reached far back across the storied landscape, little yellowish insects spiraled lazily, illuminated in the waning light.  

One early fall trip, returning from Iowa through southern Minnesota, I stopped at the Jeffers Petrogylphs after the park’s closing. I saw a car in the parking lot, with feathers hanging from its rearview mirror and far beyond, a silhouette of one lone individual standing amid the sacred scribed stones, perhaps in thought or prayer.

A story of the Metis cemetery at Emerson was in the Grand Forks Herald several years ago and stirred my interest. The article lead to a RAVEN roadtrip there and to the museum at Pembina, North Dakota, as it is an excellent resource about the Metis culture.

I listened to CBC radio for years as it was the only station I could get on my truck’s AM radio. Some of their programs included conversations about First Nations people and their history, and so continued to underpin my interest about a culture other than that of my own experience. They featured contemporary First Nations humorists and musicians too, and thus provided me with a fresh look and sound of an old culture that was alive and vibrant in my midst.

In about 1991, I was atop a huge stone outcropping on the American side of the Rainy River, at Manitou Rapids, when I heard my very first Native pow wow drum.  It was getting near dark and I saw some stadium lights go on across the river and cars driving into a ball field or something. I had never heard Native drum and singing before, but knew what it was in an instant and let my imagination run away out over the storied river. I got strangely teary-eyed listening to it.

In 2000, I met a Anishinaabe woman and her family, who lived along Midge Lake west of Cass Lake, Minnesota. “Nita” and I had long talks about her culture. She told me about her mother and the tragic, life-changing effect that the White Earth Boarding School had on her mother’s life, her own life, and others of her family. We also talked about allotments and the cheating aspect of it through which many of her people lost their reservation landholdings.

In 2002, I became reacquainted with college sweetheart Jackie Helms and in the years that passed, learned more of her and her children’s Native ancestry, the irony of which begs the question as to why elements of this culture are drawn to me and me to them, “What’s the connection?”

In 2008, Jackie and I participated in a walk with ox and cart, with the Orlin Ostby family from Gatzke, Minnesota, from Pembina North Dakota to Saint Paul, Minnesota, a distance of over 400 miles. We walked much of it, dressed resembling the Metis ox cart drivers who drove miles-long trains of two-wheeled wooden ox carts from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1840-1870.

At the Minnesota State Fair, a young Native man stopped Jackie, and asked her what she was doing wearing such things. She explained to him she was doing it with respect; that her heritage is French and Mi'kmaq. She told him her grandfather’s name was LeBlanc and he had come down from Canada to Ashland, Wisconsin. He listened to her, nodded and walked away.

Before I retired, I'd listen to CBC radio on my way home late at night. It was then that I learned of Canada’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission that was initiated in 2008, and finished in 2015. CBC radio featured many programs about the stories of Canada’s First Nations residential schools and the horrifying effects that affected generations of First Nations people, whose experiences are similar to the Native people of the United States.

In 2016, Jackie and I watched a 2005 Dakota history video called, “Dakota 38+2.” (38+2 indicates the thirty-eight Dakota men who were chosen by President Lincoln to hang for the atrocities of the Dakota Uprising of 1862, and the two Dakota men who were kidnapped from Canada, brought to Minnesota and hung in 1864.) The 330 mile horseback trail ride undertaken in December from Crow Creek, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota is to commemorate the Dakota warriors who were hung on December 26, 1862.

Crow Creek was where the Mdewakanton Dakota Tribe of south and central Minnesota, who were defeated in the Dakota Uprising of 1862 were exiled. These were same people who had been held in a stockaded concentration camp in the Minnesota River bottoms at Fort Snelling for over two years in insufferable conditions, where close to 300 people died of disease before being literally shipped out of the state, on steam boats via the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers all the way to and from St. Louis. Crow Creek was where more than 1,300 more people died of malnutrition and exposure over a three-year period in the 1860s following their arrival to this reservation.

The late Jim Miller, a Mdewakanton Dakota descendant of one of the Dakota 38, and Vietnam War army veteran, who was the main organizer of the ride, described over the course of the ride how his boarding school days and PTSD kicked-in during the ride and how he had to deal with them both, poignantly paralleling the two as equal evils. “We can’t blame the wasichus anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. We’re selling drugs. We’re killing our own people. That’s what this ride is about, is healing.”

At 55:25 in the video, a Crow Creek Marine veteran talks about when during a particularly negative time on the reservation, he asked an elder, “Why do these bad things always happen to us? Why do we do bad things to each other?”

And at long length, she replied in Lakota, “[We suffer] a deep embedded genetic depression.” [“Intergenerational Trauma: Understanding Natives’ Inherited Pain” By Mary Annette Pember.]

Four years ago, I sat on the step outside our rural farmhouse in Roseau County, next to our seven year old Anishinaabe grandson, whose long dark hair reaches his waist and whose skin grows darker under a summer sun. Ozaawaa has been a invaluable catalyst of my education into his culture since his birth in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Ozaawaa, little lithe Ozaawaa, a Native boy of the 21st Century, straddles the constraints of the future and the restraints of past, on his two muscular legs. As are all children, he’s history in the making.

You learn quickly, on his home rez, that if you’re out with Ozaawaa, that everybody knows him by name. Now it may be through his large extended family, his parents, or by his life-long participation in pow wows and community events, or his random natural adolescent behavior, but the kid is seemingly a legend in his own right.

I’ll bet everybody knows a child like that, someone whom you are hopeful will do well in whatever time it takes, whether it’s tomorrow or in the next few years; but however long it takes, that they accomplish it intact, retaining the promise we see in them as youth despite the probable difficulties they may face. Life is a challenge, especially if you’re negotiating racial disparity as a Native. As a non-Native, learning that fact has been, and is yet, a real education.  

Ozaawaa looked up at me and asked, “Grandpa, are you Native?”
And I thoughtfully replied,
“No, I’m not. I’m not Native.”

“What are you then?” he implored, thinking of the possibilities.
“I’m  . . .,” I said slowly, looking out over the tree tops, suspicious that some unfortunate racial incident had provoked his inquiry, and regretting what now I would have to say, I said, wincing,
“I’m a ‘Euro-American,’ a white man.”

“You’re an American?” Ozaawaa replied, almost happily, with a quizzical look on his face. “I met an American in Bayfield one day.”

I smiled at him, chuckling over the little joke someone had played on him, thinking it was maybe a friend of  the family, as they all employ that Native humor so freely.

“You’re an American too, Ozaawaa,” I said, trying to hook a Frisbee with the toe of my boot and flip it over. “You were born here in America. Me, you, and Grandma, we’re all Americans.”

Ozaawaa knew me as an old balding man with wrinkly skin, and long dark-brown hair past my shoulders that I often wear in a ponytail. From an infant, he’d always been fascinated with my graying beard and mustache that looked somewhat like his dad, John’s.

He became quiet, and looking down at the Frisbee that I rolled between my hands, he said,
“Grandpa, I really want you to be Native. Maybe you’re Native and your mother never told you.”
“I’m sorry Ozaawaa, but I think I’m as faraway from being a Native as I can get,” I said dejectedly, my shoulders fallen, the wind almost knocked out of me in my admission.

Jumping to his feet, Ozaawaa snatched the Frisbee from my hands and whipped it across the big yard, then shouted,“ You shoulda caught that! I threw it right to you!”