This story could be retold again and again in our communities. It is a story of land speculation, greed, and unconscionable contracts, and it exemplifies the process by which native peoples were dispossessed of their land. The White Earth Reservation lost two hundred and fifty thousand acres to the state of Minnesota because of unpaid taxes. And this was done to native peoples across the country: on a national average reservations lost a full two- thirds of their land this way.
By 1920, 99 percent of original White Earth Reservation lands was in non-Indian hands. By 1930 many of our people had died from tuberculosis and other diseases, and half of our remaining population lived off-reservation. Three generations of our people were forced into poverty, were forced off our land and made refugees in this society. Now a lot of our people live in Minneapolis. Of twenty thousand tribal members only four or five thousand live on reservation. That's because we're refugees, not unlike other people in this society.
Our struggle is to get our land back. That's what we've been trying to do for a hundred years. By 1980, 93 percent of our reservation was still held by non-Indians. That's the circumstance we are in today. We have exhausted all legal recourse for getting back our land. If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a papal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. The implication for native people is that we have no legal right to our land in the United States or in Canada. The only legal recourse we have in the United States is the Indian Claims Commission, which pays you for land; it doesn't return land to you. It compensates you at the 1910 market value for land that was seized. The Black Hills Settlement is one example; it's lauded as a big settlement, with all this money going to the Indians, but it's only a hundred and six million dollars for five states. That's the full legal recourse for Indian people.
In the case of our own reservation we had the same problem. The Supreme Court ruled that to regain their land Indian people had to have filed a lawsuit within seven years of the original time of taking. Now, legally we are all people who are wards of the federal government. I have a federal enrollment number. Anything having to do with the internal matters of Indian governments is subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior. So the federal government, which is legally responsible for our land, watched its mismanagement and did not file any lawsuits on our behalf. The Courts are now declaring that the statute of limitations has expired for the Indian people, who, when their land was taken, could not read or write English, had no money or access to attorneys to file suit, and were the legal wards of the state. We have therefore, the courts claim, exhausted our legal recourse and have no legal standing in the court system. That is what has happened in this country with regard to Indian land issues.
We have fought federal legislation for a decade without success. Yet we look at the situation on our reservation and realize that we must get our land back. We do not really have any other place to go. That's why we started the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
The federal, state, and county governments are the largest landholders on the reservation. It is good land still, rich in many things; however, when you do not control your land, you do not control your destiny. That's our experience. What has happened is that two-thirds of the deer taken on our reservation are taken by non-Indians, mostly by sports hunters from Minneapolis. In the Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge nine times as many deer are taken by non-Indians as by Indians because that's where sports hunters from Minneapolis come to hunt. Ninety percent of the fish taken on our reservation is taken by white people, and most of them are taken by people from Minneapolis who come to their summer cabins and fish on our reservation. Each year in our region about ten thousand acres are being clear-cut for paper and pulp in one county alone, mostly by the Potlatch Timber Company. We are watching the destruction of our ecosystem and the theft of our resources; in not controlling our land we are unable to control what is happening to our ecosystem. So we are struggling to regain control through the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
Our project is like several other projects in Indian communities. We are not trying to displace people who have settled there. A third of our land is held by the federal, state, and county governments. That land should just be returned to us. It certainly would not displace anyone. And then we have to ask the question about absentee land ownership. It is an ethical question which should be asked in this country. A third of the privately held land on our reservation is held by absentee landholders who do not see that land, do not know it, do not even know where it is. We ask these people how they feel about owning land on a reservation, hoping we can persuade them to return it.
Approximately sixty years ago in India the Gramdan movement dealt with similar issues. Some million acres were placed in village trust as a result of the moral influence of Vinoba Bhave. The whole issue of absentee land ownership needs to be addressed--particularly in America, where the idea of private property is so sacred, where somehow it is ethical to hold land that you never see. As Vinoba said, "It is highly inconsistent that those who possess land should not till it themselves, and those who cultivate should possess no land to do so."
Our project also acquires land. It owns about nine hundred acres right now. We bought some land as a site for a roundhouse, a building that holds one of our ceremonial drums. We bought back our burial grounds, which were on private land, because we believe that we should hold the land our ancestors lived on. These are all small parcels of land. We also just bought a farm, a fifty-eight-acre organic raspberry farm. In a couple of years we hope to get past the "You Pick" stage into jam production. It is a very slow process, but our strategy is based on this recovery of the land and also on the recovery of our cultural and economic practices.
We are a poor community. People look at our reservation and comment on the 85 percent unemployment--they do not realize what we do with our time. They have no way of valuing our cultural practices. For instance, 85 percent of our people hunt, taking at least one or two deer annually, probably in violation of federal game laws; 75 percent of our people hunt for small game and geese; 50 percent of our people fish by net; 50 percent of our people sugarbush and garden on our reservation. About the same percentage harvest wild rice, not just for themselves; they harvest it to sell. About half of our people produce handcrafts. There is no way to quantify this in America. It is called the "invisible economy" or the "domestic economy." Society views us as unemployed Indians who need wage jobs. That is not how we view ourselves. Our work is about strengthening and restoring our traditional economy. I have seen our people trained and retrained for off-reservation jobs that do not exist. I don't know how many Indians have gone through three or four carpenter and plumber training programs. It doesn't do any good, if after the third or fourth time you still don't have a job.
Our strategy is to strengthen our own traditional economy, thereby strengthening our traditional culture as well, so that we can produce 50 percent or more of our own food independently, and can eventually produce enough surplus to sell. In our case most of our surplus is in wild rice. We are rich in terms of wild rice. The Creator, Gitchi Manitu, gave us wild rice--said we should eat it, said we should share it; we have traded it for thousands of years. A lot of our political struggle is, I am absolutely sure, due to the fact that Gitchi Manitu did not give wild rice to Uncle Ben to grow in California. Commercial wild rice is totally different from the rice we harvest, and it decreases the value of our rice when marketed as authentic wild rice.
We've been working for several years now to increase the price of the rice we gather from fifty cents per pound to a dollar per pound, green. We are trying to market our rice ourselves. We try to capture the "value added" in our community by selling it ourselves. We went from about five thousand pounds of production on our reservation to about fifty thousand pounds last year. This is our strategy for economic recovery.
Other parts of our strategy include language immersion programs to restore our language and the revival of drum ceremonies to restore our cultural practices. These are part of an integrated restoration process that is focused on the full human being.
In the larger picture, in Wisconsin and Minnesota our community is working hard to exercise specific treaty rights. Under the 1847 treaty we have reserved-use rights to a much larger area than just our reservations. These are called extra-territorial treaty rights. We didn't say we were going to live there, we only said we wanted to keep the right to use that land in our usual and accustomed ways. This has led us to a larger political strategy, for although our harvesting practices are sustainable, they require an almost pristine ecosystem in order to take as much fish and grow as much rice as we need. To achieve this, the tribes are entering into a co-management agreement in northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota to prevent further environmental degradation as a first step toward preserving an extra-territorial area in accordance with treaty rights.
There are many similar stories all across North America. A lot can be learned from these stories, and we can share a great deal in terms of your strategies and what you're trying to do in your own communities. I see this as a relationship among people who share common issues, common ground, and common agendas. It is absolutely crucial, however, that our struggle for territorial integrity as well as economic and political control of our lands not be regarded as a threat by this society. Deep-set in settler minds I know there's fear of the Indian having control. I've seen it on my own reservation: white people who live there are deathly afraid of our gaining control over half our land base, which is all we're trying to do. I'm sure they are afraid we will treat them as badly as they have treated us.
I ask you to shake off your fear, because there's something valuable to be learned from our experiences, from the James Bay hydroelectric project in Quebec, for example, and from the Shoshone sisters in Nevada fighting the missile siting. Our stories are about people with a great deal of tenacity and courage, people who have been resisting for centuries. We are sure that if we do not resist, we will not survive. Our resistance will guarantee our children a future. In our society we think ahead to the seventh generation; however, we know that the ability of the seventh generation to sustain itself will be dependent on our ability to resist now.
Another important consideration is that traditional ecological knowledge is unheard knowledge in this country's institutions. Nor is it something an anthropologist can extract by mere research. Traditional ecological knowledge is passed from generation to generation; it is not an appropriate subject for a Ph.D. dissertation. We who live by this knowledge have the intellectual property rights to it, and we have the right to tell our stories ourselves. There is a lot to be learned from our knowledge, but you need us in order to learn it, whether it is the story of my children's grandfather reaching his hand into that beaver house or of the Haida up on the Northwest coast, who make totem poles and plank houses. The Haida say they can take a plank off a tree and still leave the tree standing. If Weyerhaeuser could do that, I might listen to them, but they cannot.
Traditional ecological knowledge is absolutely essential for the future. Crafting a relationship between us is absolutely essential. Native people are not quite at the table in the environmental movement--for example, in the management of the Great Plains. Environmental groups and state governors sat down and talked about how to manage the Great Plains, and nobody asked the Indians to come to the table. Nobody even noticed that there are about fifty million acres of Indian land out there in the middle of the Great Plains, land that according to history and law has never yet had a drink of water--that is, reservations have been denied water all these years because of water diversion projects. When water allocations are being discussed, someone needs to talk about how the tribes need a drink.
One proposal for the Great Plains is a Buffalo Commons, which would include 110 prairie counties that are now financially bankrupt and are continuing to lose people. The intent is to restore these lands ecologically, bringing back the buffalo and bringing back the perennial crops and indigenous prairie grasses that Wes Jackson is experimenting with at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. We need to broaden the idea, though, because I don't think it should be just a Buffalo Commons; it should be an Indigenous Commons. If you look at the present population in the area, you'll find that the majority are indigenous peoples who already hold at least fifty million acres of the land. We know this land of our ancestors, and we should rightly be part of a sustainable future for it.
Another thing I want to touch upon is the necessity of shifting our perception. There is no such thing as sustainable development. Community is the only thing in my experience that is sustainable. We all need to be involved in building sustainable communities. We can each do that in our own way--whether it is European-American communities or Dené communities or Anishinaabeg communities--returning to and restoring the way of life that is based on the land. To achieve this restoration we need to reintegrate with cultural traditions informed by the land. That is something I don't know how to tell you to do, but it is something you're going to need to do. Garrett Hardin and others are saying that the only way you can manage a commons is if you share enough cultural experiences and cultural values so that you can keep your practices in order and in check: minobimaatisiiwin. The reason we have remained sustainable for all these centuries is that we are cohesive communities. A common set of values is needed to live together sustainably on the land.
Finally, I believe the issues deep in this society that need to be addressed are structural issues. This is a society which continues to consume too much of the world's resources. You know, when you consume this much in resources, it means constant intervention in other peoples' land and other peoples' countries, whether it is mine or whether it is the Crees' up in James Bay or whether it is someone else's. It is meaningless to talk about human rights unless you talk about consumption. And that's a structural change we all need to address. It is clear that in order for native communities to live, the dominant society must change, because if this society continues in the direction it is going, our reservations and our way of life will continue to bear the consequences. This society has to be changed! We have to be able to put aside its cultural baggage, which is industrial baggage. Do not be afraid of discarding it. It's not sustainable. That's the only way we're going to make peace between the settler and the native.
Miigwech. I want to thank you for your time. Keewaydahn. It's our way home.
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The pictures, the visions, emanate from our hearts -- it is there we must "listen" in order to see. }:- ❤️ anonemoose monk
All words and no pictures. I like articles with lots of pictures and fewer words. Yes, I know this is a very trivial comment.