Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

Eugene William Seelye was David’s grandfather and Margaret Treuer’s father. At 83 years old, he died by suicide on August 3, 2007 by gunshot at his home. He was a World War II veteran who fought in D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. He had a scar on his shoulder that was the result of a landmine exploding and blowing his shoulder apart. He left the Leech Lake Reservation only once in his life. He had spent 80 of his 83 years in Bena, and 60 of them in the home in which he had died. When he was offered a job eight miles away from the reservation, he refused to take it, despite the great salary and offer of a fully furnished company-owned house, because he did not want to leave the reservation. There, he was married to Treuer’s grandmother and had four children, all of whom lived in a two-room shack in Bena.

Treuer describes his grandfather as a difficult man. Ironically, he was also sentimental and held on to old things, such as his father’s logging gear. Seelye “was thin and rangy” and seemed taller than he actually was (15). He had a full head of hair that turned while, which he wore “in an Elvis-type pompadour” (15). Treuer had never been close to his grandfather growing up and often felt afraid of him. Seelye was often angry and dissatisfied. In town, however, Seelye had a different reputation. Treuer recounts his surprise after hearing a bank teller refer to Seelye as a sweet man. He was also notoriously cheap, seldom spending money even on necessities. He was particular about his cars, however, and usually drove new trucks. Seelye was Catholic and had a funeral according to the Catholic tradition.

Matthews was Treuer’s maternal grandmother’s father. He owned the two bars that once existed in Bena. Harris was “[a] full-blooded Scot from Chicago” who moved to Bena in the early 20th century. He worked in logging camps before buying and selling the Wigwam Bar. He then bought a garden across the street and married Treuer’s great-grandmother, an Indigenous woman. During the 1930s and 1940s, when it was illegal to sell alcohol to Native Americans, Matthews sold whiskey and beer out of the back door of his house. According to family lore, Matthews was an unkind man who didn’t much like the town in which he had settled.

Jesse is Treuer’s maternal cousin. He was unable to attend their grandfather’s funeral because he was incarcerated. Earlier in the summer of 2007, Jesse overdosed on methadone and ended up in the ICU, where Treuer and his brother Anton visited him. In 2006, he was hit by a train while in his car. Treuer describes Jesse as “a big likable guy” (21). Jesse’s girlfriend also struggled with addiction and had gone into rehabilitation. Jesse is one of the main people whom Treuer thinks about in the wake of his grandfather’s death, when thinking about the complexity of Indigenous Americans’ lives on reservations—lives that are marked by poverty and pain, but also thriving communities.

Officer Grolla is an Ojibwe who works for the Red Lake tribal conservation police. Treuer describes him as a large man who can seem intimidating to those who do not know him. He is jolly and weighs almost 400 pounds. He claims that he eats a lot due to stress. Grolla’s Ojibwe name is Ogimaa-giizhig (literally “Head of the Sky” or “Head Thunderbird”). He is a member of the Caribou Clan, like his great-great-great-grandfather, the Ojibwe war chief Waabojiig. The Caribou Clan comes from a small northeastern Minnesota community near Nett Lake. He ended up at Nett Lake after being informally adopted by Dale and Sandy Johns. He is the grandson of Fannie Johns, an indigenous woman who told him stories of how she and her family were terrorized when they left the reservation. Grolla briefly returned to Nett Lake when he was a teen, but his family life there was too dysfunctional, largely due to his mother’s alcoholism, and he returned to Red Lake. There, he married a member of the Red Lake Band. He settled at Red Lake and raised his children there. Grolla had been on the Red Lake police force but switched to conservation to spend more time outdoors.

Sean is a tall 40-year-old man with large hands, which are effective for gripping fishing nets. He is a member of the Mille Lacs Band, along with his two brothers—Marc, who owns a construction company in Colorado Springs, and Mike, a mason. Sean has five other siblings: John, Dawn, Denise, Dana, and Jay. He lives in Wisconsin but like his siblings was raised mostly at White Earth Reservation. He was a star basketball player in high school before joining the US Navy and working on an aircraft carrier as an air traffic controller on an aircraft carrier. In the mid-1990s, he was cultural coordinator for the Northwest Juvenile Center.

Sean is canny, erudite, talkative, moody, and high-strung due to a combination of allergies, steroids, and PTSD. He is skilled at building, rice harvesting, and filleting a walleye.

Judge Treuer is David Treuer’s mother and the judge in the Tribal Court building at Bois Forte Reservation in northeastern Minnesota. Nicknamed “the queen of Bena” when she was growing up, Judge Treuer is the eldest of five siblings. She was raised in a rundown cabin with no running water or heat, aside from a barrel stove, about 15 miles from Squaw Lake on the Leech Lake Reservation. She grew up in Bena in the 1940s and briefly ended up in foster care while her father was fighting in World War II and her mother was working in a Jolly Green Giant green bean factory in Austin, Minnesota. She attended Catholic University Law School. Before entering law, she was a nurse. Treuer interned at the Leech Lake Reservation Legal Services Project, which had taken up the case of Helen and Russell Bryan who challenged Public Law 280.

Dustin Burnette is a native of Leech Lake who was raised near Tract 33, outside Cass Lake. The tract was a notoriously crime-ridden neighborhood, known to the public “as the roughest, hardest, toughest, meanest, and worst of them all,” mainly due to a pink HUD house nicknamed the Pink Palace (127). Drugs were usually sold from the Pink Palace, which was also shelter for runaways and young people from troubled homes. Opioids were particularly popular there.

Burnette has an older sister and a younger brother. They were raised by his mother after their father left the family. When he was 16, his mother died of an aneurysm. He was left to the care of his grandmother, whom he hardly knew. Treuer describes Burnette as “very light-skinned, with a round friendly face and sandy brown hair” (137). He believes that he got only the bad qualities that people associate with being Indigenous—“the bad teeth and the instability and the alcoholism” (137). He was a troubled youth who shoplifted and ate junk food to feel better about his life. He gained 80 pounds in three months. Despite his troubles, he did well in school. While hanging out at the Indian education department, he met Sean Fahrlander who became his mentor, teaching Burnette about his history and his treaty rights. Fahrlander also got Burnette a scholarship to College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. Burnette graduated from the school in 2009 and returned to Leech Lake, where he teaches the Ojibwe language at the Ojibwe-language immersion school run by the tribe.

Charles Seelye was Treuer’s maternal great-great grandfather. Treuer notes that Seelye directly benefited from Chief Zhookaa-giizhig’s homicide. Seelye came from Portland, Maine and a line of Scottish loggers who had cut timber for the Royal Navy as early as the 1700s. He met and married Margaret Aspinwall in Brainerd, Minnesota. Margaret was the daughter of Bill Aspinwall, “the head of a family of mixed-blood traders and agents” (130). In 1896, Seelye moved to Leech Lake “and logged Zhookaa-giizhig’s allotments at Cut Foot Sioux and Pigeon lakes” (130). He went bankrupt on March 12, 1900 due to his inability to get paid in advance for his timber, which rendered him unable to pay his Indigenous workers. His son, Walter, who had a reputation for being a tough and hardy man, continued the logging tradition.

By telling these stories, Treuer illustrates the various strains within his family tree. While he is descended from the disenfranchised, he is also someone who is descended from those who benefited from and exploited white supremacy.

Helen and Russell Bryan are a married couple who were based in the small village of Squaw Lake on Leech Lake Reservation. A tax dispute over their two-bedroom trailer, which sat on tribal land, inadvertently helped establish the legal basis for Indigenous-run casinos.

Helen spent her entire life in Squaw Lake, where she grew up in poverty. She and her husband Russell are Ojibwe, though he comes from White Earth Reservation. During the time when they fought their landmark case, Helen was 31 and worked for the Leech Lake Head Start program. Russell was unemployed. They had six children together. Their conflict with the state of Minnesota began when someone from the county—probably a surveyor—began measuring their trailer house. They then received a bill for $29.85 for the final two months of 1971. Their tax bill for 1972 was $118.10.

The court case that they filed—first with Anishinaabe Legal Services, then with the New York-based lawyer Bernie Becker—ended up at the US Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Bryans on June 14, 1976. Russell died in 1994. After his death, the tribe had offered to pay for Russell’s funeral and headstone. The tribe also marked Russell’s headstone in commemoration of the couple’s legal victory: “Russell Bryan vs. Itasca County—Victory.” Helen remarried Korean War veteran Bob Johnson. She notes in the narrative that life has not changed much for her despite the ruling—that is, she remains poor.

Dan and Dennis are twin brothers who were born in northwest Ontario, just north of the Minnesota border. Due to the Indian agent on their reservation being unable to say their father’s Ojibwe name, the agent renamed him Johnny Jones. The Jones brothers were raised in a beautiful, rural village “in the traditional Ojibwe manner” (193). They are two of eight children who were born to Johnny and his wife, Nancy. Dan was sent to a boarding school in nearby Kenora. Nancy was pressured into sending her children to boarding school voluntarily. If she did not, she was warned, the children would be taken from her and she might never see them again.

Dan and Dennis were housed in a residential school, but they attended public school with white children. Thus, there was no official boarding school, like Carlisle, but a partnership with the local public school system to assimilate Indigenous children. Within a few months, Dan began to associate his Indigenous upbringing with shame. He envied the white children who were able to return to their parents at the end of the day. Dan and Dennis were allowed to remain together, but they were separated from their older siblings, who were also at the residence. Dan, while still in kindergarten, began to receive beatings. By their second year, he and Dennis were getting raped by a “boys’ keeper” who worked in the dormitories over the weekend. They were six. Their older sister, Shirley, offered herself to the keeper, whose name was Gerry Red Sky, so that he would leave her younger brothers alone. The boys’ sexual abuse continued for six months until Gerry stopped working at the dormitory.

Predictably, Dan and Dennis emerged from the boarding school troubled. They abused alcohol and got into fights. Both stopped drinking by age 19. They also went to college and earned degrees. Treuer describes them as “short, stocky, wide-shouldered, [and] thick-waisted, with strong legs and hands” (196). They also “have dark skin and black hair” that is going gray (196). Both now have children whom they teach the Ojibwe language. They also work to help others heal from trauma.

Former military leader and US president Andrew Jackson has the reputation of being the most despised American president among Indigenous peoples. Jackson was born three weeks after his father died in an accident. At age 13, he became a courier in the Revolutionary War. When a British officer cut his hand and head with a sword after Jackson refused to shine his boots, Jackson developed a scalding hatred of the British. He entered politics and landowning, which made him a slave owner. He was especially successful in the military, where he put down Tecumseh’s rebellions in 1812 and 1813 and, most infamously, when he worked to remove the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Southern Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—to Oklahoma Territory. He also helped convince Spain to relinquish its claim on Florida.

Richard Henry Pratt was a Union soldier during the Civil War. After the war, he led the Tenth Cavalry Regiment—otherwise known as the “buffalo soldiers,” a group of freed Black men who joined the Union Army. After the Red River War, Captain Pratt and the buffalo soldiers took 78 Indigenous people from the Southwest to Fort Marion, a prison in St. Augustine, Florida. Concerned with the welfare of the prisoners, he worked to improve their diet and shelter. White missionaries who vacationed in St. Augustine took interest in Pratt’s efforts. They believed that the imprisonment presented an opportunity to “civilize” the captives. They volunteered to teach the Indigenous prisoners English. They taught the captives arithmetic, history, and how to read and write.

The missionaries’ success encouraged Pratt to continue his mission of “cultural immersion.” He called upon friends in politics to help him fund what became Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle, which came to epitomize assimilationist boarding schools, had students from 140 nations. The students’ hair was cut when they arrived, they were given new names, and they were forbidden to speak their tribal languages. Abuse was also common. Pratt compared his mission of “civilizing” Indigenous people to “his domestication of wild turkeys” (193).

Brooke Mosay Ammann was born in 1975 to Dora Mosay and Tony Ammann. Her father is a white man of Swiss descent. Dora, an Ojibwe, is the daughter of the “spiritual chief” Archie Mosay, who was born in 1901 near Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. Archie Mosay was instrumental in stalling relocation. As punishment, those who resisted being relocated to Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation were refused food, housing, and annuities by the federal government. Archie’s father, Mike, “was a spiritual leader for the entire region and ran the […] Great Medicine Lodge” until he was over 100 (197-98). When Mike died in the 1970s, Archie took over his father’s duties as chief of the Grand Medicine Lodge seven years later.

Due to Archie Mosay’s wife being listed as having a white grandfather, Ammann is regarded as a bit less than half-blood. She did not grow up on the reservation but in a town called Richmond. On weekends, she spent time with her grandfather and extended Indigenous family. They and the St. Croix Band of Ojibwe encouraged her to apply to Dartmouth University. She was accepted. After graduating, she moved to New Mexico then back to the reservation, where she worked as St. Croix’s education director from 2002 to 2004. She then took leave to earn her Master of Arts at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She returned to her job at St. Croix and remained there until 2010.

Despite being the granddaughter of the 20th century’s most important Ojibwe ceremonial chief, having an important administrative position with the tribe, and being raised among the Ojibwe, neither the federal government nor the tribe recognize Ammann as a member. Treuer uses Ammann’s story to illustrate the problem of “blood quantum”—that is, a tribe determining membership based on how much Indigenous blood one has, while ignoring other factors, such as language and cultural affiliations. Due to her lack of tribal membership, Ammann is not allowed to run for tribal office and cannot receive $1,000-per month per capita payments from the tribe’s casino. She also cannot live in tribal housing and was ineligible for the federal financial aid granted to Indigenous tribes. Due to her boldness and willingness to question the actions of the tribal council, Ammann was fired from her job as educational director in the winter of 2010. She has two sons named Tecumseh and Osceola, for the famous chiefs of the Shawnee and Seminole peoples, respectively.