Grieving Red Lake Turns Inward

In the immediate aftermath of the school shooting at the Red Lake Reservation, the tribal elders made a quick decision: This was the time to close ranks.

There would be no clamoring for sound bites from bereaved parents as there was after the Columbine shootings in suburban Denver six years ago. This was, after all, their land and their laws. So the Red Lake Band of the Chippewa has cloistered itself from the outside world to mourn in private.

Those who know the Red Lake Chippewa, who live in the northwest reaches of Minnesota, were not surprised. The tribe functions as an independent nation, even though Minnesota state land surrounds the huge reservation. They have their own government, courts, police force (for all but major crimes) and schools, and even their own license plates.

They can determine who comes and goes, and have a long history of guarding against interlopers. They once required reservation-issued passports for non-Indians to do business there. So it was no great leap for the elders to seal off Red Lakers from outsiders, primarily journalists, and order the police to escort violators off the reservation.

Moreover, the Chippewa had experience to guide them. The reservation is so isolated that only bad news seems to find its way into the headlines.

“For all of us up here, but particularly those who live on the reservation, it’s frustrating because nobody pays any attention unless something goes screwy,” said Steven Hirsh, the executive director of the Center for Reducing Rural Violence, in the nearby town of Bemidji, who has done extensive work with the tribe.

At one point this week, a group of frustrated journalists angrily demanded to be told why they weren’t being allowed access to the people of the reservation, particularly those whose children and been killed or wounded by 16-year-old Jeff Weise, who went on his rampage Monday, killing nine people, then himself.

“This is Indian land. You are our guests,” said Floyd Jourdain Jr., chairman of the Red Lake Nation council. “We have our own way of doing things. We are a unique tribe.”

There is much to bolster that statement. The tribe has managed to hold together a reservation roughly the size of Rhode Island, despite efforts by the federal government to divide it into individual parcels as has been done in other tribes.

“We consider ourselves to be another country,” said Jourdain. “The tribes in America over history were reduced in their land base. We have to be appreciative of what we have.”

The overall picture of the Red Lake Reservation, though, is hardly ideal. Unemployment is above the 50% mark. Drug use is rampant, as is alcohol abuse. School test scores are among the lowest in Minnesota.

It boasts new medical, judicial and school facilities, many of them financed by the three small casinos on the reservation. But there is not enough revenue from them to pay individual dividends to tribe members, as there is on other reservations throughout the country.

Still, there is a sense of unity on the reservation.

“It’s very closely knit,” said Hirsh. “It’s apparent the minute you come into the community. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s bad. But people are not in denial that there are some issues in the community.”

It was into that community that Weise stepped, a young man taunted because of his weight and his penchant for black clothing, whose father committed suicide in 1997 during a police standoff on the reservation. In 1999, his mother suffered severe brain damage in a car accident. Having spent his early years in Minneapolis-St. Paul, he found himself living with his grandmother at the isolated Red Lake Reservation.

In his Internet postings, Weise described not only his admiration for Hitler but also his distaste for reservation life, which he described as a nightmare. “This place never changes, it never will,” he wrote on one website.

Charles Brill , in the 1992 preface to his book “Red Lake Nation,” begins by quoting an elderly Chippewa whose source of pride is that “the Red Lake Nation is one small dot on the map of the U.S. that has never been owned by the white government or settlers.”

The land has never been ceded to the U.S. government, then set aside as a reservation, as was true in almost all other cases. Instead, the Chippewa lay claim to the land by right of conquest. No tribal leader of the Red Lake Nation has allowed their land to be broken up or sold to outsiders.

In a series of laws around the turn of the 20th century, Congress declared that reservations should be broken up into plots or allotments that would be turned over to individual Indians. Almost every tribe in the United States went through this process, often only to have the individuals sell the land or be duped out of it.

The Red Lakers refused to go along, eventually negotiating the present-day reservation with virtually no strings attached. It includes more than 200 lakes, plus some of the best hunting in the Midwest. And because of that, the Red Lakers were able to maintain their traditional lifestyles well into the 20th century.

Beltrami County Commissioner Quentin Fairbanks grew up on the reservation and also spent much of his life outside it, first as a Minnesota highway patrolman and then as a businessman.

He speaks fondly of growing up on the reservation and warms when he explains that the often foreign-sounding last names of the people who live there derive from the early French trappers who roamed the land and the mission schools that arbitrarily assigned them new last names. He said the tribe was poor, but he didn’t know it growing up.

“If you’re rich and everyone else around you is rich, then you’re not rich,” he said. “If you’re poor and everyone else around you is poor, then you’re not poor. We shared everything. We never locked the door.”

But it also was a place of tar-paper shacks, where plumbing and septic systems were limited to the homes and offices of Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, who Fairbanks said “treated us like children.”

After many years away, Fairbanks returned to northern Minnesota and took a job on the reservation as a business planner. The reservation of today is distinctly different from how it was when he grew up there -- in good ways and bad. Though there are still tar-paper shacks, many of the homes are well-tended and brightly colored.

The profit from the casinos has been put back into the community. But Fairbanks worries a great deal about the fact that the reservation can be a crutch for those who could have more productive lives living off it.

“They can go out and fail and still come back to the reservation,” he said. “We have to get away from that.”

Over the last 30 years, the reservation has had its share of violence. In 1979, in a battle over tribal leadership, five armed dissidents captured the reservation’s police station. In the ensuing drunken rampage by dozens of tribal members, two teenagers were killed and a number of buildings were burned to the ground.

In 1986, Tribal Judge George Sumner was shot to death by Gregory Good, a tribe member who had accused the judge of civil rights violations. A federal jury, after hearing testimony that Sumner had chased and beaten Good before the fatal shooting, decided that Good had acted in self-defense.

A day after the high school shooting, Jourdain was talking about the closeness of the tribe, of how it was impossible not to know everyone in a community of 5,000 people -- especially the children.

“We’ve all been to their school plays and watched their sporting events and been with them at community banquets,” he said. “We’ve all had contact with one another.”

He said one irony was that the reservation high school had installed metal detectors after an altercation at the school, long before Columbine had occurred.

“It was just a safety precaution,” he said. “We were trying to be proactive rather than waiting for something to happen.”

The security system did nothing to stop Weise, who killed the security guard monitoring the metal detector with one of the three weapons Weise used on his rampage through the school.

Fairbanks is firm in his belief that the school shooting had nothing to do with living on a reservation -- that it could have happened anywhere.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if something like this happens in Los Angeles,” he said. “The reservation had nothing to do with it. It had to do with an individual with access to guns who had a problem.”