Sevareid graduated from the University of Minnesota, and went on to become one of Edward R. Murrow’s courageous correspondents, the first to report on the fall of Paris to Nazi forces in June 1940. When I learned that Sevareid had been denied the editor in chief position at the Daily following a controversial column he’d written in 1934, my admiration for him was boundless. And according to Lorinser, Canoeing with the Cree was his first published work.
I pumped Lorinser for details of Sevareid and Port’s route, astonished that there was a passage by waterway from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. But it had been years since he read the memoir, and he couldn’t recall much more than he’d told me already.
Animated by the exchange, Lorinser and I searched the Sevareid Library for a copy of Canoeing with the Cree. According to the card catalog, the book should have been shelved and available. But apparently I wasn’t the only one interested in this audacious trip.
We queried a librarian, who smiled unexpectedly. She called the book “a regional classic” and “Minnesota’s version of Huck Finn,” before apologizing sheepishly for the missing volume. “Some people forget to sign it out,” she explained, and then suggested that I check the university bookstore.
I hurried across campus and found a short stack of tan paperbacks on the “Minnesota Interest” table, surrounded by books on Vikings football greats, classic hot dish recipes, and the Twin Cities’ best fishing holes. The cover featured a photograph of a strapping Sevareid wearing baggy pants tucked into knee-high boots and a button-up khaki shirt, posing jauntily with hands on his hips. He could have passed for a Mountie, and he appeared to be at least 30 years old.
At the time, I was living in a dingy apartment above the CC Club. Every night the seedy Uptown tavern was crowded with punks, hipsters, and blue-collar regulars drinking Grain Belt from plastic pitchers and listening to the jukebox—a catalog of the thriving punk scene that pulsed on the streets of Minneapolis’s south side. Many of the musicians playing on these records were CC regulars: Grant Hart from Hüsker Dü, Bob Stinson from the Replacements, members of Soul Asylum, Blue Hippos, Run Westy Run, and Babes in Toyland.
I was generally seething at the state of the world, and when the jukebox rumbled with livid punk rock, crackling the linoleum tile on the kitchen floor until well after midnight, it resonated like the beat of my heart. But on the cool October night when I returned home from campus with a copy of Canoeing with the Cree, I longed for silence.
Had I judged the book by its cover, or by its opening lines, I would have rejected Canoeing with the Cree immediately. While I was just a few weeks into my first Native American studies class and my awareness of the history and culture of Minnesota’s indigenous people was still embryonic, I knew enough to dismiss the cover copy’s assertion that Sevareid and Port were the first to paddle from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. Given the long history of Native peoples and voyageurs traversing the vast system of waterways extending from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes, I was confident that this journey had been undertaken long before Sevareid and Port. Nor was I particularly impressed by the citation from Kipling that begins the first chapter, with its reference to “Red Gods making their medicine.”
As I turned the pages of Canoeing with the Cree that first time, however, I suspended judgment on the book’s grandiose claims, and on the racist attitude of its author. After all, when Sevareid and Port made their journey in 1930, indigenous people had only been granted American citizenship for six years (the Indian Citizenship Act having passed in 1924), their religious practices were strictly outlawed, and their culture had been decimated by government policies that forced thousands of Native children into boarding schools, where they were held away from their families, made to dress like white people, and severely punished for speaking their languages.
Instead, I read Canoeing with the Cree that first time as an adventure story. I burned to know the boys’ route. After launching at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in Saint Paul, they had paddled up the Minnesota River and its tributary, the Little Minnesota River, to Browns Valley, Minnesota. From there, the boys portaged over the Laurentian Divide to Lake Traverse and descended the Bois des Sioux River to the Red River of the North, which led to Lake Winnipeg. Then they had paddled down the Nelson River, across a series of small lakes and portages to Gods River, and down the Hayes River to York Factory on Hudson Bay.
Canoeing with the Cree supplied me with something I had never experienced: a homegrown mythology. Theirs was not the tale of 17th-century voyageurs paddling 600-pound Montreal freighter canoes on the Great Lakes, nor the Anishinaabe’s sacred migration from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence through the Great Lakes to the land where food grows on the water. Sevareid and Port had grown up in a neighborhood less than five miles from my own and sought adventure in a used canvas canoe. They had embraced an ambitious vision and found the nerve to follow the water.
When I turned the last page of this extraordinary tale, the floor pulsing beneath me, I silently declared my intention to retrace their path to Hudson Bay as soon as possible. Little did I know that it would be 15 years before I realized this dream.
The spring of 2002 was brutal. I had lost my editorial job in Alaska, and it was obvious that my marriage of 13 years was swirling down the drain. I was 34 years old, and I decided to return to Minneapolis to write for the Native newspaper where my career in journalism had begun a decade before.
Over the course of the previous decade, my work for The Circle, Indian Country Today, the Sicangu Sun-Times, and other Native publications had led me to places and provided me with experiences accessible to few white people. I had met and befriended Native elders and philosophers, professors and activists, medicine men and political leaders. I had participated in Lakota ceremonies and learned from ordinary tribal citizens in cities and on reservations, from Rosebud to Pine Ridge, and from Arctic Village to White Earth, Upper and Lower Sioux, Isleta Pueblo, Bad River, and many others. These experiences had taken me far from my upbringing in a conservative Jewish household in Minneapolis, fulfilling in many ways what I longed for as a young man: to live a deeply meaningful life connected with the land of my birth. I had also come to understand the extent to which mainstream Americans were beneficiaries of the genocide of indigenous peoples, and it didn’t sit well with me. It never had, even when I was too young to know why.
In addition to reporting, The Circle had hired me to teach in their youth journalism program. I met José on the first day of the summer session, at The Circle’s office in south Minneapolis. He was sitting at a desk with two other interns, eyeing me suspiciously from beneath a powder-blue baseball cap. The program director introduced me, running down a list of my accomplishments: several hundred published articles in over two dozen papers and magazines, three nonfiction children’s books, 12 years reporting in Native American communities, and a brief tenure as the editor in chief of Alaska’s second-largest newspaper.
José kicked his Adidas up onto the table and leaned back in his chair. He yanked at a silver pistol that hung from a chain around his neck, and raised his hand as if saluting the Führer.
“Yes?” I nodded.
“Got just one question. Why they had to get some Nazi up in here to mess with our writing? You ever read New Voices? It says right there on the cover, The Voice of Native Youth. By the looks of things, you ain’t knowing a damn thing about Native youth.”
José’s hostility didn’t surprise me. I used his charge as an opening.
“I’m no Nazi,” I replied. “I’m a Jew. The only reason I’m in this country is because Hitler tried to kill my people in
