Lightning Strike Learnings

 

Disclosure: Your colum- Disclosure: Your columnist is descended from Aldens and Aldriches who took part in “cleansing” New England of Native Americans, beginning soon after 1620 and 1631. I did not learn that in history classes. And a family genealogy reports that George Aldrich was one of the 1660’s founders of Mendon, Mass. No mention is made of the first armed Native response to New England expansion occurring at Mendon, emptying it of white settlers for three years. The novels of William Kent Krueger have encouraged reconsideration of those issues. This column is part of completing our American history.

Most readers of this column have probably already ready some or all of Krueger’s novels. For the uninitiated, Krueger writes tight, engaging thrillers, good stories with important messages, not mere historical recitations.

Lightning Strike is the backstory to novels set in current time. Set in 1963, Liam Corcoran is Sheriff amongst deep distrust of white power structure by Ojibwe folk in the area. The tense story is full of Arrowhead issues involving white and Indian folk. I commend it to you. Two examples here: I had not heard of either the Pipestone (Minnesota) Indian Training School or the Relocation Act of 1956. That is despite growing up in Minnesota, visiting the Pipestone National Monument, and being a regular news reader. Here are some learnings and wisdom in Lightning Strike:

His Grandma Dilsey: “‘When I die, and the other elders, too, the language dies with us. And there will go everything we’ve ever been as a people.’ Which always made Cork feel guilty, but not enough that he’d knuckled down yet to learn a language his father had complained was the second most difficult on earth behind Mandarin Chinese.”

“In the days when so many Native children were wrested from their families and forced into government run boarding school, Big John had resisted. He’d run away many times from the Pipestone Indian Training School, and always they’d come to the rez and hauled him back. Until the last time he escaped.” (Age 12 years then.)

“Like so many other Ojibwe families, the Downwinds had abandoned the reservation because of the Relocation Act of 1956, … an act of Congress that funded relocation of Native families from reservations to certain designated cities. The government paid for the move, promised to help each family find housing, and offered to foot the bill for vocational training, if necessary. On the surface it seemed like a pretty sweet deal.

But Grandma Dilsey had said that it was simply another attempt to eradicate the Native Cultures.

‘They tried blankets tainted with smallpox. They tried guns. They tried boarding schools. Now they’re trying this. It’s all to separate us from one another; to wring out of us what makes who we are: Anishinaabe, Navaho, Dakota, Blackfeet. We are the legacy of our ancestors. We are the vessels of all their leaning., all that they held sacred.’”

“No one tries to drive Ireland out of the Irish who’ve come here…. He understood her point. If you were white, it didn’t matter where you came from, eventually you were accepted.”

“With Cork at his side, Liam made his way through the gathering, his spine rigid. The looks of those he passed covered a broad range of responses to the presence of a white lawman in their midst, even one they all knew well.”

Dilsey: “Legally.” Do you know what that word is? An insult to The People. Legally our land was stripped from us. Legally we were marched off to boarding schools. Legally the reservations have been emptied and our people dispersed to the four winds.”

An October 12, 2016, Atlantic article brought the issues closer to home. “Minneapolis was one of the first cities chosen for the federal relocation program.” www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/native-americans-minneapolis/503441/. Little Earth of United Tribes in Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis was a product of those “voluntary” relocations.

An Internet to learn when the (Indian) Relocation Act of 1956 was repealed or amended gave no clear answer. Dates I found for the end of the Relocation program ranged from 1965 to the 1970’s.

Wikipedia says, “By the early 1960s, some federal leaders began opposing the implementation of any more termination measures, although the administration of President John F. Kennedy did oversee some of the last terminations…. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon changed federal policy, encouraging Indian self-determination instead of termination.

Some tribes resisted termination by filing civil lawsuits. The litigation lasted until 1980, when the issue made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.” (I am glad that our United Churches of Christ in Minnesota helped fund some of the Minnesota treaty rights litigation.)

“Activism in the 1960s led to the founding of several Native American rights organizations, such as the American Indian Movement (AIM) … that helped protect the rights of Indians and their land. In 1975, Congress implicitly rejected the termination policy by passing the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which increased tribal control over reservations and helped with funding to build schools closer to reservations.” On January 24, 1983, President Ronald Reagan supported explicit repudiation of the termination policy.

It seems likely that the development of Indian owned casinos is a cheap substitute for reparations. “Cheap” in that no tax money is used. The regular folks who frequent the one-armed bandits, including our Canadian neighbors, provide the money. The wealthy who benefitted from past Indian subjugations are spared.

For more background, try Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Add a long article going back to the 1830 Indian Removal Act which led to the forced relocation of the Cherokee to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears. www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/11/01/uprooted-the-1950s-plan-to-erase- indian-country. That Trail has been reported on in mainstream press more than the 1956 Act. It was passed while what many call the Greatest Generation was in charge. That generation included many Indian soldiers who remain proud veterans while having fought for a government that betrayed them repeatedly. See the many veterans proclaimed at the Chippewa Cemetery across from St. Francis Xavier Church east of Grand Marais.

Perhaps more of us will want to fill out the histories of our families. We are not guilty for what our ancestors did. We are responsible for what we do and our grandchildren learn.