style="font-size:15px;"> Regardless of the wisdom of this assertion, I couldn’t overcome the crippling pain that wretched spring. And then one night I received a phone call around 3:00 a.m.
I didn’t get the details immediately—José was frantic, talking a mile a minute—but later I put together what had happened. José had been at Regions Hospital, where his girlfriend, Joan, was giving birth. Joan is Anishinaabe, and José is Lakota and Puerto Rican. When the baby was born black, José was the last person in the room to realize he couldn’t possibly be the father. After he cut the umbilical cord, a nurse grabbed his wrist and snipped off the hospital bracelet. No one in the delivery room had the compassion to stop him as he ran out in a state of shock, determined to murder the crack dealer who had likely impregnated Joan.
I immediately agreed to take José in. Neither of us slept that first night, but we were out the door by 9:00 a.m. It was a bleak morning in early April, and we drove the labyrinth of one-way streets in downtown Saint Paul, a pair of zombies looking for the Ramsey County Vital Records office.
José’s grandmother had charged him with filing a series of documents enjoining their Mahpiya Zi (Yellow Cloud) clan to a lawsuit related to the US-Dakota War of 1862. There were casino fortunes at stake for Dakota people who could prove their ancestors’ loyalty to the United States during the war. And so a century and a half after the Dakota were rounded up by Colonel Henry Sibley’s army, imprisoned at Fort Snelling, loaded onto Mississippi steamboats in Saint Paul, and forcibly exiled from Minnesota, José had until midnight to register a claim.
Contrary to the gist of the documents, however, José’s great-grandfather could hardly be called a loyalist. In fact, he was among the 38 Dakota men hanged along the banks of the Minnesota River for defending his people. José knew his family’s claim to loyalty was fraudulent and he was disgusted by it. But he also understood their desire for reparations. After all, the Dakota had been treated unjustly for generations.
“My great-grandfather was convicted of killing white settlers, so hell no, we ain’t loyal. I’d rather have my history than some bullshit casino money. But the rest of the family don’t give a fuck,” he sniffed.
I pulled to the curb outside the building that housed the Vital Records office. José stepped out of the car and blazed a Cool Menthol in the raw morning air. He looked at me through the window opening. “I’m gonna kill that fucking whore and that nigger crackhead.”
I was used to José throwing the term “nigga” around. Where I was from any variation of the n-word meant the same thing, and its use was strictly taboo. But over time I had come to understand that “nigga” was used on the streets the same way a middle-class white kid might say dude, buddy, or homeboy. When José finished the word with the hard r in this case, however, I knew it meant something else altogether. This was racial, hateful, and ugly.
I made a feeble attempt to admonish him: “The color of his skin had nothing to do with it.” But the words sounded absurd in the face of his rage, and José turned away dismissively.
Just two weeks before the demoralizing revelation in the maternity ward, José had asked me to curtail the late-night calls for help. “Look,” he murmured with gentle authority during one of the last such exchanges, “we’re winding down around here. Just got the boy to bed, and I have to work in the morning.” Joan and her first child had moved into José’s basement apartment in Henry Sibley Manor, the notorious housing projects off West 7th Street in Saint Paul. He was planning to marry her and adopt the two-year-old as his son.
José emerged from the Vital Records office minutes later, gripping his birth certificate. He slumped onto the passenger seat and folded the paper, then placed it inside an envelope containing his family members’ tribal documents and a blank family tree.
We drove to a taqueria and ordered burritos. I filled in the empty branches on the family tree while José scratched his head and recalled what he knew of his family’s story.
His grandparents, his mother, and her five sisters were from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. José spent his early years in Chicago, where the family had settled in the early seventies as part of a government relocation program. His father was a Puerto Rican gang member, a Dragon Disciple, who died from a cocaine overdose when José was 15 years old, the same year I met him at The Circle.
José’s mother met his father on the streets of Chicago’s West Side. José learned at a very young age not to mess with her. “My mom used to do armed robberies for the Latin Queens,” he once told me. “She was homicidal, bro.” Unlike many of his cousins, who endured painful initiations as teens, José was born into gang life.
In the early eighties, José’s family migrated north to Saint Paul in an effort to escape the violence that was spiraling out of control in Chicago. It was a time when many men of his father’s generation were claimed by violence, drugs, alcohol, and the criminal justice system.
By the time he was a freshman in high school, José was doing his best to feed his six brothers and sisters. He bought his first eight-ball of crack (3.5 grams) at 14, and started selling it on the streets of Saint Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, which was known in those days as Cracktown.
José squirted red sauce from packets onto his tortilla, then switched the subject from his family history to a budding scheme to murder Joan and Sonic. I assumed he meant it, and intended to keep him under wing until his sleep-deprived delirium subsided. Grinding his teeth and gazing out at the cars passing on Snelling Avenue, he added, “I think I’m going to fucking explode if I don’t cry. I haven’t been able to since my dad died. I just wish I could cry.”
I shuttled José to my bank to get his documents notarized, then across town to the post office at the airport. I drove slowly and took the long way, down Shepherd Road, along the high bluffs of the Mississippi River Gorge, and across the bridge connecting Saint Paul to Minneapolis at Historic Fort Snelling, a US Army post originally constructed in the 1830s. As we crossed the bridge, I looked down to the glistening intersection of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers at Pike Island, the very spot where Eric Sevareid and Walter Port had set out on their epic journey to Hudson Bay on June 17, 1930. This area, known to the Dakota as Bdote, is a sacred site, the setting for one of their creation stories.
I had long thought of that opening in the forest canopy as a secret passageway out of my life. Since discovering Canoeing with the Cree in college, I had dreamed of replicating the 2250-mile route. As they often did when I drove across that span, the specters of Sevareid and Port swung their 18-foot canvas canoe around the tip of Pike Island and headed into the languorous current of the Minnesota River. I imagined myself down there with them now, in the stern of the Sans Souci, paddling so hard the ache began to drain from my chest.
Lost in this reverie, I almost veered off the bridge. José barely flinched, raising an eyebrow under the cocked rim of his black-on-black Minnesota Twins cap.
I had never mentioned Sevareid and Port’s journey to José. I suppose I didn’t think he would be interested in the exploits of a couple of white kids. Nor did I see him as the kind of guy who would undertake a canoe expedition. And in any case, it all seemed trivial compared to what he was going through.
I called José’s attention to the river bottoms beneath Fort Snelling, pointing out the swamp that once contained a concentration camp where more than 1700 of his Dakota ancestors—men, women, and children—spent the miserable winter of 1862–1863. Over the course of that one harsh season, some 300 Dakota died from malnutrition, disease, and exposure.
It had always bothered me that this ghastly chapter in Minnesota’s history is not noted in Sevareid’s account,
