Rez Life. David Treuer

      In 1902 government representatives traveled to Mille Lacs to negotiate an agreement with the Mille Lacs Band for damages done to the reservation and its citizens during the timber grabs over the preceding fifty years. The negotiations were a disaster. Many from Mille Lacs emerged from the meetings convinced that the government would never give them justice. Disgusted, they moved their families to White Earth. But a few, led by chiefs Migizi, Shabashkung, and Wadena, held on and refused to move. They paid the price: in 1901 a posse lead by the local sheriff attacked the village at Mille Lacs, burned all the shacks and wigwams to the ground, rounded up all the villagers, and chased them out so a developer could claim the land. It took another three years for Chief Migizi to get promises of redress (in the form of forty-acre lots for the band members) from Congress, and another twelve years for the lots to be assigned. By then Congress decided that forty-acre lots were too big. Most of the Indians who stayed in Mille Lacs got five-acre land patents instead.

      And there they remained: penniless, without support, without the hope of fair treatment. While the lake itself became a destination for vacationers from Minneapolis and Chicago, the Mille Lacs Band members who had endured broken promises, and every sort of indignity and violence, hid and huddled in the woods nearby.

      A newspaper article in the Minnesota Star dated Monday, March 27, 1939 (alongside a dire front-page article about the Germans), shows that the twentieth century hadn’t been kind to Mille Lacs. “A century ago the Chippewa Indians roamed the plains and forests of Minnesota lord of all he surveyed. Today, in a squalid settlement near Isle, Minn., near Lake Mille Lacs, 60 members of that once famed tribe attempt to eke out an existence on a rocky, 40-acre hillside unfit for cultivation. Their settlement consists of 11 tarpaper shacks, many of them floorless. Most of them cook, eat and sleep in the same room. Their total income is about $414 a month, or around $7 apiece.” Within two years twenty-five Mille Lacs Indians would be serving in every theater of World War II—Guam, Iwo Jima, North Africa, Italy, and later Normandy and Belgium—while at home their families were starving. By contrast, though life was hardly easy for them, the Indians who agreed to move to White Earth Reservation (from reservations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) had schools, businesses, homesteads, and their own newspaper. But that door closed in the 1920s—even if they’d wanted to, those from Mille Lacs and elsewhere couldn’t have moved to White Earth any longer and received any kind of allotments or assistance. Even so, fifty years later the move to White Earth seemed to many to be not that bad an idea.

      Sean’s family bears the mark of each and every one of the cataclysmic shifts that make up the story of Mille Lacs Reservation. In the 1880s, during the allotment period when Mille Lacs Indians were encouraged to move to the newly established White Earth Reservation, many left. There were promises of homesteads, farming equipment, seeds, blacksmith shops, schools, and churches. All of these were fine incentives. White Earth also provided a fresh start. Sean’s great-grandfather John Shingobee (southern Ojibwe for spruce) didn’t leave Mille Lacs, but John’s brother Tom did. “Some say there was an argument about a trapline,” explained Sean. “They say Tom might have killed a man. Others say it was over a woman. Maybe you should just say ‘There were reasons to leave’ and leave it at that.” Tom’s daughter Josephine was Sean’s grandmother. Tom Hill was the first chief at Mille Lacs elected under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government in 1934. He was hit by a train on the way to a ceremony at Lake Lena. By the time Sean’s mother, Bonnie, was born to Frank Shingobee and Josephine Hill, times were tough. Josephine was left to raise her children on her own. She drank a lot. The county nurse and missionaries interceded, took Bonnie away from her, and moved to White Earth to start a mission. So even though that branch of the family didn’t relocate, Bonnie ended up at White Earth anyway. And it was there at White Earth, and Minneapolis and Duluth, that she raised her eight children—John, Dawn, Denise, Dana, Jay, Marc, Sean, and Mike. Bonnie didn’t live at Mille Lacs until she came there to work at the casino in the late 1990s. Her children grew up mostly at White Earth.