of the lake and the fish, problems with the police force, election disputes—all missteps and even the perception of incompetence, let alone corruption, do threaten the sovereignty of a place like Red Lake. Whenever something does go wrong—and things go wrong all the time—someone raises the issue of sovereignty and suggests it should be done away with. But then again, all nations make mistakes. During the lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff, the Enron affair, Iran-contra, Teapot Dome, and the Whiskey Ring, to name a few, no one said, “Well, clearly the Americans can’t manage their own affairs; it would be best if the United States reverted to British control and became, once again, part of the British Empire.” And people often forget: the only reason there were fish to overfish in the first place (and the only reason the fish have been able to come back so strongly) is that since Red Lake is a closed reservation, there is no development on most of its shoreline—there are no sewage treatment plants, no resorts, no houses perched along the shore, no vacationers pulling up the bulrushes and cattails, no fertilized and pesticide-drenched lawns. Everyone has Red Lake and its leadership to thank for that.
No wonder that Mueller was not cut any slack: the boat was taken, he was summoned, and Red Lake stood its ground. Reflecting back on the case, Grolla seems proud to serve Red Lake and the community he calls his own. “We’ve got a mind-set, you know. It stretches all the way back to when we fought the U.S. government, when we fought the Sioux. We’re used to warfare. We’re used to fighting. That’s who we are. People talk about how we’re a gentle people, you know. How we respect everything. We do, but we’ve had to fight for it. It’s kind of a curse sometimes, you know. I mean, hypothetically, let’s say a girl gets raped Back of Town [a neighborhood in the village of Red Lake] and then her brothers take after the guys who did it, beat them up, burn their house down. Then the perp’s family comes after the girl’s family and on and on it goes. They fight until people are in the ground and nothing is left standing unless you catch them and arrest them and stop it before it really gets going. That attitude, that fighting attitude, goes back to Chief Bagonegiizhig and Changing Feather, back to those guys. Maybe it needs to change. But it’s kept us alive, too. We’re alive because we don’t back down. There’s a message in that, maybe.”
In the end, Jourdain was reelected, the Republicans lost their elections, and the Democrats won (largely because of the support they received from Indians in northern Minnesota). There was no flotilla of angry fishermen. Citizens for Truth in Government has not been able to persuade the state of Minnesota or the federal government to change its attitude to Red Lake, which still exists on a government-to-government basis, as all sovereign nations relate to one another. Jerry Mueller appeared in Red Lake Tribal Court in October 2006. He probably felt the way Indians on the rez feel all the time: surrounded, outnumbered, and unloved by people different from himself. He argued his case, and his defense was based on “Officer, I didn’t know and I’m sorry.” He lost. He paid his fine, and if he has fished on Red Lake since then, he has probably stayed far away from the reservation boundary. Terry Maddy was wrong. Red Lake can have its fish and eat it, too.
Sean Fahrlander and his son Aatwe, 2009
Courtesy Brooke Mosay Ammann
2
“Just dump it in,” Sean is saying to his brothers Marc and Mike. The light is fading, and the wind is coming strong off the big lake: Lake Mille Lacs. It’s April, and the ice has retreated from the shore but the water is soupy with it. When the wind pushes the crushed ice up against the larger unbroken plates out in deeper water, it makes a raspy tinkling sound.
Sean is tall, with large hands, perfect for gripping nets. He was a basketball star in high school, joined the navy, and worked as an air traffic controller on an aircraft carrier. I don’t know if the job was good for him. “You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. My shit was squared away A-1 tight. I was correct. Everything in place. Not like now.” Not like now. His hands shake (“Goddamn allergies,” he says). He is nervous (“Goddamn steroids, they really fuck me up”). He is a little high-strung (“PTSD is a bitch, man, a real bitch”). He also talks a lot, more than most people and certainly more than most Indians. In a rush, his words tumble over themselves, each one apparently anxious to reach the finish line—your ears—before the next. He’s an excellent ricer, and can fillet a walleye faster than anyone else I know. (“Talk to a Chippewa and you’ll end up talking about two things: fish and beaver.”) Be that as it may, Sean’s the only Indian I know who is conversant on topics ranging from storytelling to how to tap a maple tree, the meaning of life, how to hit an alternator with a hatchet so it works, the design of the National Museum of the American Indian, Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet, ancient Greek warfare, what’s wrong with Indians today, string theory, how to tell the best “drunk story,” and Genghis Khan. I think the idea of not knowing something hasn’t occurred to him yet. When you talk to Sean the conversation always finds its way back to Sean. He is, however, generous with his time and energy. Life is much better with him in it—and that’s not something you can say about everyone. Once I bought a decrepit Airstream in Wisconsin. He helped me load it onto the back of a twenty-foot beavertail trailer. We got it strapped down and he looked at me sideways: “You’ll never make it back to Minnesota alone. I’m going with you.”
“How are you gonna get home?”
“Fuck if I know. Just let me run home and grab some underwear and I’m good to go.”
He was right—I couldn’t have done it without him.
Sean can find something funny in just about every encounter, and he has an agile mind. He’s just over forty and his hair is receding a little and is peppered with gray. His laugh comes easily except when he’s “in a mood,” at which time he’ll say, “Don’t fucking talk to me, I’m in a mood.” And so you don’t.
“Fuck no, not yet. Got to fix this little bastard. Little bastard bounced off on the way over here. Little bastard. Fucking transducer.” That’s Mike, Sean’s brother, as he tries to fix the fish-finder on the stern of his sixteen-foot Lund. “Little bastard” is his favorite phrase and he is free with it; he’ll call everyone—white and Indian alike—a “little bastard” as often as he uses it to refer to fish and motors.
The wind pushes its way through our clothes. We’re on Indian Point, on the west side of Lake Mille Lacs. It’s getting dark but if I squint I can see the floats attached to other nets bouncing on the waves. No one else is setting, and the only light comes from the headlights of the reservation game warden’s truck, staffed by two non-Indian reservation conservation officers, making sure we obey the letter of the law as spelled out in the agreement between the Mille Lacs Band and the state of Minnesota at the end of a decade-long legal battle. They are also protecting us from non-Indians who, until very recently, gathered at boat landings like this one and heckled Indians, spit on us, and held up signs that read “Save a Walleye, Spear an Indian” and—one of my favorites—“Indians Go Home.”
The transducer on the fish-finder and depth gauge has broken off and Mike is still trying to rig it up right. His brother Marc, a large man with large strong hands wearing a SpongeBob stocking hat, leans out the door of his Ford F350. The Cummins diesel throbs under the hood. He takes his foot off the brake and the dually tires in the back inch down the ramp toward the lake.
“Just ditch the boat in the lake and let’s go,” says Marc. “It’s getting dark.”
“Yeah, fuck it, we don’t need it. The water’s like, what, six feet? We’ll just go by the other floats,” offers Sean.
“I installed this little bastard so we could be exact,” says Mike. “I mean, like, exact. I didn’t hump around and do all this shit just to guess. I want some fucking walleye. I want to get some of those slimy
