After enjoying the first full night of sleep in weeks, we started the day full of energy to meet the people of White Earth Reservation. Our first destination of the day was our hosts‚ work place, the office of the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP). The organization is led by Winona LaDuke and is devoted to recovering reservation land from non-tribal members and restoring the culture of the reservation. Among other things, the organization revives tribal culture and community by helping members of the tribe in the production and sale of products such as maple syrup, wild rice, traditional arts and crafts, and jams from wild fruits.
We met our supervisors for our day of volunteer work, Margaret and Ronnie. Margaret is an elderly tribal woman (87 years old) who organizes monthly deliveries of healthy, traditional foods to 200 diabetic Native people. Ronnie is a good humored soul who organizes the tapping of maple trees during the spring and the processing of wild rice after the harvest in the fall. He also has been involved in the construction of a couple of wind turbines on the reservation and is in the planning stages of a large 750 kilo-watt turbine to help power the communities on the reservations.
Ronnie gave us a tour of the rice shed, the place where WELRP workers process wild rice harvested by community members. Individuals and families harvest wild rice from the reservation's many lakes every autumn and sell the rice to WELRP to process. Last year, the organization processed 50,000 pounds of rice.
Ronnie showed us all the equipment used to get the rice ready for market including a wood fired parcher for drying and roasting the rice, a thrasher for beating off the hulls, and a series of machines for separating chaff and broken grains from whole grains.
After touring the rice shed, we split the group up to spend the afternoon doing volunteer work for WELRP. Chris, Ryan and Dave headed into the sugarbush with Ronnie to help set up for the quickly approaching maple syrup season. Emily and Dana spent the afternoon with Margaret delivering sacks of food to 41 homes throughout the reservation. The sacks contained frozen buffalo meat, wild rice, hominy corn, black beans, apples, maple syrup, and homemade jelly as well as a variety of packaged foods from a food shelf. Emily drove WELRP's van and Margaret gave careful directions as we navigated the back roads of the reservation. Margaret showed us a bald eagle's nest with two eagles sitting in it in a tree along side the road.
Margaret was having back pain, so she waited in the van while we carried the food into each home. It was remarkable to be able to visit the homes of so many people. The walls of one home, owned by an elderly man recovering from a stroke, was completely decorated with fantastic dreamcatchers. We delivered some of the sacks to people living in an assisted living apartment building that was thoroughly decorated with native arts and crafts. Many of the residents had placed bumper stickers proclaiming their native pride on their apartment doors. I was intrigued by how people expressed their cultural identity in their homes‚ decorations.
So Dave, Ryan, and Chris (I) went into the sugarbush of Jerry, Ronnie's brother. We came upon Mike, who drove us to the back of the forest through snow-covered roads which our van would not be able to manage. We met the rest of the crew and began the work of the day. We had joined the crew late in the morning since we had toured the grounds of WERLP. So shortly after beginning to work, we had to break for lunch. We talked to Jerry about his 80 acres of land, which he had originally used for livestock. Beautiful shaggy cows called Northern Highlanders. Jerry was busy fixing the evaporator used to boil down the sap to make it into maple syrup. WERLP had volunteered its energy to help local people start tapping their own sugarbushes if they were interested. He was one of the people that had expressed interest at a local interest meeting that WERLP had held. After lunch, we started working again in the bush to place taps in the tree with hammers after the trees had holes drilled in them by the other workers and then bags or tin buckets were connected to the taps for the collection of the sap.
During one moment in which we had breaked, we were told of the bear that has a cave on Jerry's property. Luckily, the bear was hibernating at the time. When they first noticed the bear a few years back in its cave, they unknowingly awakened it. It chased the workers around so they called in the DNR to attempt to cage the bear. After unsuccessful attempts in capturing the bear, the DNR told Jerry to just kill the bear. However the workers decided to work around it instead. Fascinating how they learned to live with the bear rather than destroying it as would be the first instinct of most people who thought wildlife had become a nuisance.
After work, we stopped at the Native Harvest store, which sells most of the products produced by WERLP and other artisans in the community. We met Winona Laduke there. She was homeschooling her son and her nephew. As we enjoyed some delicious maple syrup candy and beverages offered to us by Brent, one of the store managers, Winona gave her children a powerful lecture about the unfair nature of the taxation policies of the U.S. government as well as the structure of the economy. The passion of the lecture was the same passion that she had displayed during her speeches to protest the injustices of the world.
After a long days work, we headed back to our home to enjoy a long delicious meal next to a warm fire. The perfect ending to a beautiful day.
