When we rolled into the WELRP office this morning the elders Margaret and Phyllis had a crock-pot of wild rice and hominy soup waiting for us along with a bag of cookies. This rocket fuel helped propel Emily and Dana off to deliver food nearby while the rest of the group remained at the WELRP office.
Like days past, we roamed the reservation today delivering food to diabetic natives. Our (Dana+Emily) first stop was the local school, where we dropped off four bags of food to teachers and staff members there. We discovered the motivation behind Margaret's unusually hurried mode today—every Wednesday, the
school prepares lunch for senior natives, including sandwiches, soups, cottage cheese, and juice. A local store also donates a large selection of bread products, from which the elders can choose as many as they like to take home. We ate lunch and grabbed some St. Patrick's Day decorated donuts to bring to the workers in the sugarbush. We finished our deliveries for the day and headed out to the sugarbush to join the rest of the group.
Back at the office, I (Dave) got two buckets of hot water outside and cleaned out a pale full of metal maple taps. Some of them were gunked up with soggy wood chips from last season. Others needed to be repaired. It felt great to be working with my hands outside on a sunny day. Chris and Ryan set about shucking Bear Island Flint corn, a heritage variety of corn that they grow here and on a nearby farm. WERLP is trying to preserve this ancestral variety, which has not had strict breeding programs or genetic modification done on it. The multicolored kernels have to be shucked off into a box. The adjoined storage room has plenty of extra cobs hanging dried from its rafters to keep them shucking for a long time.
I wandered into the office and met Becky, the development director for WELRP. She explained that WELRP has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years. Demand for Native Harvest products has been growing around 30 percent a year. She
explained the various branches of WELRP: The Alternative Energy Program (which has built a small wind turbine and solar arrays on White Earth), the Food Program (Mino Miijim), Land Acquisition, The Wild Rice Campaign, Sturgeon Reintroduction, and Micro-Enterprise Development. She explained that their annual budget comes from grants, donations, and from Native Harvest revenue. With Native Harvest growing so well, their goal is to become self-sufficient. Becky explained that volunteer hours from groups like us count as "gifts in kind" and can be used to acquire matching funds for the grants she is currently working on.
Around 1 p.m. we drove with Stephanie out to the sugarbush where Ronnie gave us a cursory lesson with a gas powered wood splitter. We split and stacked wood for about two hours, shedding layers in the gentle afternoon air. Ronnie and several others tinkered with the evaporator, trying to get it ready for a test run later in the afternoon.
At 3, we drove over to Steve Roberts' buffalo farm nearby. We unlocked a pair of massive gates and drove alongside a huge fence until we came to a new house built into a small hillside facing a frozen pond. Steve walked with us back out his driveway and pointed through some short trees to several large dark shapes behind the trees. I was seeing my first buffalo!
As they slowly lumbered towards us, Steve began explaining his philosophy of land stewardship: "I don‚t want to abuse the land I have." He tries to interfere with these wild animals as little as possible: "They did well for 100,000 years without any manipulation by anybody." Steve doesn't separate the mothers and babies and has never given his animals a shot or vaccination in his nine years of running a buffalo operation. The big animals emerged from the trees like visitors from an ancient story, mist steaming from their nostrils. As I got closer for a picture Steve cautioned me and explained that they can move extremely quick and can run for longer periods than the best horse. The animals just eyeballed us and occasionally rolled their big bluish tongues out before they slowly plodded back over a nearby hill.
Steve takes pride in how he treats the 30 buffalo on his 300 acres: "It's a shame what's happened to this industry. Most producers try to turn them into cattle by feedlotting them. It's just such a crying shame, it's such a perfect animal." Steve recalled visits to other buffalo operations where the animals were malnourished, overweight, or had their own feces clinging to their bodies.
His buffalo seemed clean and muscular. Most buffalo have been bred with cows at some point and Steve pointed out several cow-like traits in a few of his buffalo. The only herd that has been proven totally uncontaminated by cattle genes are the Yellowstone buffalo.
Steve explained that buffalo can eat snow in the winter whereas cattle must get unfrozen water every day. Buffalo are also much better at grazing and foraging and don't ruin ponds or streams like cattle do when they remain in these areas for extended periods of time. Buffalo can tolerate the dense summer mosquitoes while cattle suffer during these times in northern Minnesota. Steve shoots his buffalo on his own land and then transports them to a slaughterhouse where the meat is packaged. He believes that buffalo become extremely stressed by typical slaughter methods and this negatively affects their meat because it's pumped full of adrenaline: "There's only thing they hate and that's close
confinement." He had read Dan O'Brien's "A Buffalo for the Broken Heart" and many of his philosophies of buffalo management correspond closely with Dan's. Steve was jealous of the more lenient USDA regulations for South Dakota and wished that he were allowed to have his meat inspected on site rather than at a slaughterhouse. Perhaps the humane society can get involved in this, he mused.
Steve's meat is organic but he is constrained by several factors. His land is too small to allow the animals to graze all winter so he feeds them sugar beet grounds that he gets for free. He also provides selenium and protein licks for the animals to help with their muscle growth and birthing abilities. He sells his buffalo to a variety of people interested in organic and slow foods (www.slowfoodusa.org) each year but finds the advertising extremely difficult. His largest customer is Native Harvest where Winona buys his buffalo and uses it for the diabetes food program. We learned that Native Harvest hopes to start their own tribal buffalo herd in the future.
Steve's land was "butchered" when he arrived on it. The topsoil is severely degraded and few native grasses grow, although he's been collecting seeds from nearby railroad beds waiting for the right time to reseed his land. Native grasses hold their nutrients in the stalk in the winter, which nourishes buffalo during the winter. Steve also explained how he was advised to use chemicals to restore ducks and other water life to his little pond but instead he and his sons seeded wild rice below the carpet of lily pads and sure enough, the pond is now teaming with life and wild rice. Steve is fighting a losing battle against invasive thistle and wants suggestions on how to combat it without using chemicals.
We drove back to the sugarbush where Ronnie and his crew were still tinkering away on the evaporator, which was now steaming into the cold air. They had identified a few leaks and were calling upon all kinds of mysterious tools and gadgetry to plug them up. We soon had to drive over to the Native Harvest store where we were invited to the Ojibwe Language Table that is held every Wednesday. We were joined by two new Ojibwe language teachers who had moved from Turtle Mountain in North Dakota and their two children. Also at the table were Brent Mitchell, a Mohawk Indian in charge of marketing for Native Harvest, Kim Anderson, a spunky young Ojibwe Culture teacher and her 2-year-old daughter, and Evie Monsroot, a cheerful elder.
We were treated to an absolute feast! There abounded seasoned buffalo burgers, sweet rolls, cole slaw, chips, apple bread, carrots, broccoli, peppers, soda, water, delicious soup, and for dessert oreo cake, cinnamon buns, and cheesecake! Alex began giving us an Ojibwe (Anishnaabe) lesson. The Ojibwe confer respect and equality by always placing the subject of the sentence before the predicate, ("You are seen by me."). Brent chimed in that Mohawk is the same way. Dialects of Anishnaabe are spoken by many different tribes from New York to Montana and Alex assured us that a fluent speaker can understand them as well as a native English speaker understands the various dialects ofEnglish.
Alex sadly recounted that there are only 4 fluent Ojibwe speakers on the Turtle Mountain reservation of 35,000 enrolled members. He learned Ojibwe when he was 28. Brent chimed in that he doesn't know a single male on White Earth who's fluent in Ojibwe (Although Brent clearly had very good Ojibwe skills). Alex told us about his efforts to get Ojibwe back on the radio and to teach young people: "We gotta pull out all the stops or else we're (Ojibwe speakers) gonna die. We got to take the language to the people." You have to learn the culture in order to learn the language. Alex found that after learning Ojibwe, he understood the meaning of the ceremonies better and conversely to understand Ojibwe you must participate in ceremony. "You always gotta be a learner. You got people in all cultures that don't follow the culture. Culture is an understanding of the world. A lot of Indians don't have their culture."
Brent spoke powerfully that Native American ceremonies were illegal until 1976 and that Indians weren't even considered humans by the U.S. until 1820. There was still a law offering $25 for each Indian skull in Virginia until 1963, and similar laws in Minnesota were abolished within the past century. Alex added, "We think of ourselves as being free in the U.S. but no, we're not free. We were free, but now we have a government and a clock." By treaty, Indians do not have to pay taxes but the U.S. taxes Indians anyway.
The Catholic Church has a long history of interference with Indians and Alex bitterly related, "And it's today that we're being discriminated against by the Catholic Church. I wasn't allowed to get married in the traditional way on our reservation!" Alex and Brent later explained that the Catholic sexual abuse scandals have increased participation in native religion. They both know people who were "horribly abused and tortured" and need to begin the process of healing.
Up until the 1970s the Catholic Church in conjunction with the U.S. government made "mission schools" to assimilate the Indians. Children were forced to attend these schools and were even abducted. At the Mission schools natives were beaten if they spoke their native language and a large percentage of students
died by suicide, beatings, or by trying to run away. Kim spoke slowly, "When our people was brought to the mission schools, their culture was beat out of them. They were taught that their way of life was evil. I remember my grandma and grandpa telling me never to go into a sweat lodge because they believed it
was evil. When you have an elder telling you not to do this, you're taught to respect their word. My grandpa knew the language but he wouldn't speak it. To a certain point the oppressed become the oppressor." She told us that even her daughter will feel the repercussions of this cultural genocide and Alex explained the concept of generational trauma, "Trauma gets passed down in your DNA. We need to heal that if we want to make the lives of our children better. That excuse that it's in the past won't get us anywhere."
"I'm not saying that Catholics are evil," Alex said. "Everybody is sacred. God made everybody and you respect them even if you hate them." In ancient times it was more honorable for a skilled warrior to get close enough to touch his opponent and then run away than to kill him, and it was never honorable to kill women and children. "Love is the driving force of the universe because it's the only true power, that is, everything else is manmade. We are the world. You change yourself and you change the world. We‚re not the power behind the ceremony, the Great Spirit is the power. It's God bringing the people together, not me. The word for someone who performs a ceremony in Ojibwe means servant. Spirituality is not the gathering of power, it is the surrendering of power."
Kim doesn't blame all Christians, "Even though there are different paths (Christianity and Native religion), they both lead to the same place." The table was optimistic about the future of native culture. Brent told us how most of White Earth is split up and owned by whites and the State, "Once we can get the land back and our people maintain it things will be better. The environment and land stewardship are tied together." Kim now performs a ceremony every week and makes offerings whenever she is going to disturb a piece of nature. "We think of everything as having a spirit, even a rock has a spirit. Therefore you respect everything. If you need to clear land, you respect it."
It was now 9 p.m. and there was a special feeling in the beautiful wooden Native Harvest building. The conversation had moved from Ojibwe grammar to very serious and emotional matters as we had grown more comfortable with each other. Our hosts piled us down with soup for the road, bread, jam, and individual jugs
of maple syrup. We left in very good spirits, touched by the openness and generosity of these new friends. They invited us to a sweat ceremony this weekend and we all wish we could stay longer on White Earth.
