Throughline - A Tale of Two Tribal Nations

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

The word "reservation" implies "reserved" – as in, this land is reserved for Native Americans. But most reservation land actually isn't owned by tribes. Instead it's checkerboarded into private farmland, federal forests, summer camps, even resorts. That's true for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, where the tribe owns just a tiny fraction of its reservation land. But just northwest of Leech Lake is Red Lake: one of the only reservations in the country where the tribe owns all of its land. So what happened? In this episode, we take a road trip through Leech Lake and Red Lake to tell a tale of two tribal nations, the moments of choice that led them down very different paths, and what the future looks like from where they are nowLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Roger Jourdain wasn't someone who shied away from a fight, especially when that fight involved his home. Home was a reservation called Red Lake,

located in a remote part of northern Minnesota that carves out an area about the size of Rhode Island. And from the time he was a kid growing up in the 1920s, Roger had a sense it was a special place. Not just because it was the same place his father, his father's father, and generations of Ojibwe before them had lived, but also because his tribe, the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, owned the land. All of it. They had a level of independence that was almost unparalleled. A fact he would make sure to share every chance he got once he became the first elected tribal chairman of Red Lake. He held that post for three decades.

And he had to steward Red Lake through a lot of big changes and constant pressures on their land. He'd often travel to the state capitol, and sometimes to the nation's capital, to fight back against those pressures. And he would intentionally, instead of going down Highway 10 corridor, he would have them drive across the Leech Lake Reservation. Leech Lake sits southeast of Red Lake and is home to the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. As they pass Leech Lake, Roger would pull over. They'd stop, and he'd say to his driver,

Get out. Get out. And he's really a gruff guy, the way he talked. Get out. You know, so they would get out. Look around. What do you see? And they're like, I don't know, I see beautiful water, trees,

I see sailboats and some nice houses. He's like, no. I see white people. There's white people everywhere. Look, those are white sailboats. Those are white houses. There's white people living here for generations now. They think they own the place and in a sense

they do because leach lakers own less than five percent of their reservation for roger jordain they were a cautionary tale a reminder of what could have happened to red lake and what could still happen they're always coming after us they'll always be coming after us coming after us. They'll always be coming after us. Coming after our land. Coming after our resources. And someone's always going to have to fight for us. Now get back in

our car and drive me to the cities. He did that every time. A few months ago, ThruLine producer Anya Steinberg and NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo brought us this story about these two Native American communities in Minnesota, Red Lake and Leech Lake. It felt like a mystery because we wondered how two tribal nations just down the road from one another end up in such different places. The story we often hear about how the United States expanded westward is a story of military conquest, of soldiers in blue uniforms killing buffalo and burning villages. There is a lot of truth to that. Manifest Destiny was violent and brutal. But there's another side to that story, a slower and more insidious one, a legal assault on Native people, treaties and rules that slowly

stripped away land and independence, all under the veneer of the rule of law. This is that story. Anya and Sequoia will tell it from here. Hi, I'm Sequoia. And I'm Anya. So I came to this story pretty recently, but Anya, I know you grew up in Minnesota. You were a few hours south of Leech Lake, right?

Yeah. It's not a secret to people that I am a proud Minnesotan because famously Minnesotans do not shut up about where we're from. So I grew up a few hours south of Leech Lake, but I actually spent most summers of my life going to a summer camp that was on the reservation. And I remember when you first told me that, I found it really surprising. But did that ever feel weird to you when you first told me that, I found it really surprising. But did that ever feel weird to you when you were a kid going to the camp? Honestly, no. I mean, when I was growing up, I just didn't think much about it. I started going to this camp when I was a toddler, so it became very normal to me to drive onto the reservation, see that welcome sign in Ojibwe, and just feel excitement

because I knew that meant that I was close to this place that I loved going to. And it wasn't until I was in college that I actually started to reflect on that and wonder, you know, I'm not a native person. Why was I even allowed to go to summer camp on a reservation? And the idea of who belongs on a reservation, who owns the land, who occupies the land, the more you dive into it, the more at least I realized how little I knew. Even though I've been hearing about stories from Indian country my whole life, my dad's American Indian and he used to work in tribal communities often while I was growing up. And it wasn't until I started to seek out stories around Indian country

for NPR that I realized a lot of communities don't own their own land. There was a moment when I was on the Standing Rock Reservation about a year ago where we were eating lunch around a work site and everyone kept saying, remember to pay rent, remember to pay rent. And we were in the middle of like miles and miles of empty land. And I kept thinking, who owned this land if it's not the tribal members I'm sitting with? And I think a lot of people think that. They think reservation land is owned by Native people. But that's mostly not true. Instead, it's checkerboarded into federal forests, private farmland, resorts, and summer camps like mine.

And Red Lake, like you heard in the intro, is actually the exception. There are so many moments in history where we wonder what could have happened if things had gone just a little bit differently. This is the rare story where we get to find out. We're taking a road trip through Leech Lake, where the Leech Lake Band owns almost none of their land, and Red Lake, where the Red Lake Band owns all of theirs. It's a story of what-ifs, about hard choices, the very different paths they lead us down, and how we think about the future once we're on them. Coming up, we turn up the radio and get on the road. Tune in to nonstop DJing, mixing, and music. Night, give to me night. Friday night, press 1.

Friday night, press 1. Hi, my name is Kevin Dillon from Cicero, Indiana, and you're listening to ThruLine via NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com.

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Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. and then also an alien with a peace sign. This is so my father, it's ridiculous. Yeah, you heard that right. We're driving through a small town on Leech Lake Reservation, and we just saw a giant wooden cutout of Bigfoot and some aliens. I said it reminds me of my dad, but really it's just reminding me of home, of a place that's been lived in for a really long time, that's collected all the odd bits of a person's quirks and personalities. It took us about three hours to drive from Minneapolis up to Leech

Lake and now we're officially here in a place people refer to as the Northwoods. Leech Lake Reservation shares nearly 2,000 miles of boundary with Chippewa National Forest. It's known for its big lakes and big pines. Nearly 40% of it lies within the reservation. So we're driving past lake after lake and resort after resort. It is beautiful here. It's just endless blue skies and trees. It's very relaxing.

Which is probably why it's a hotbed for tourism. But we're not here to talk to tourists. We're here to understand why they're here, vacationing on this reservation. The story goes back over a thousand years, to how Ojibwe people first came to the Great Lakes region. And it's a story that also begins with a trip. Only this one was by canoe. Our guide on the canoe trip, Anton Troyer. I'm professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. And I grew up on and near the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.

For Anton, the story of how Ojibwe people ended up calling these lakes and pines home is a personal one. It feels different when your family has been buried in the same place longer than America has been a country. At one point in time, just a couple thousand years ago, we lived on the east coast, Atlantic Coast, which was a land abundant in small game, big game, well-suited for indigenous agriculture, lots of fish in the sea, lots of fish in inland lakes. We can track the beginning of Ojibwe people to Algonquian language tribes from the east coast. We had prophets who appeared and said, move west to the land where food grows on water. It was a reference to the wild rice.

And there was a long migration. And it was a long, slow process. For centuries, Ojibwe people kept moving. And as a result, we ended up spanning a huge geography, thousands of miles. Until they made it to the Great Lakes region. But even then, movement was still a part of life. Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence,

someone else was usually moving down the river and saying, they're not my chief. So Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do. There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity. So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation. There was no such thing as the Leech Lake Nation. And there was no such thing as the Red Lake Nation. For decades, Ojibwe people lived in small communities across the region.

They brokered deals with the neighboring Dakota people, as well as the French, the British, and after the American Revolution, the U.S. government. The United States do engage to guarantee to the aforesaid nation of Delaware's and their heirs all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner, 1778. And that's when things began to change in a big way. Because the more U.S. settlers and business leaders encroached on Ojibwe homelands, the more some leaders felt they had to act as a single entity. It's important to note that that was a new

development, and it naturally met with a lot of resistance. But still, the idea of an Ojibwe nation was fast becoming an appealing tool for negotiating with the U.S. government. And perhaps no one saw that more clearly than the chief of the Mississippi Band of Ojibwe, Bago Nogijig, or as he was known in English, Hole in the Day. He was distinguished for his eloquence, wisdom, and force of argument. The young men of his tribe acknowledged him as a leader. Missionary Alfred Brunson. Hole in the Day had big dreams to lead the Ojibwe people, and his ideas were starting to work. People were drawn to him. One day, after drinking a little too much whiskey with

some fur traders, he fell off his wagon in a stupor and was crushed. It seemed like the end of his great vision for the Ojibwe people. But as he lay dying, he summoned his son. And with his last breath, he said, Take the tribe by the hand. Show them how to walk. His 19-year-old son took his name and became Hole in the Day the Younger. He vowed to make his father's dream come true and promised to usher in a new era of one Ojibwe nation. Hall in the Day was quite brash.

He sometimes inflamed other Ojibwe leaders when he would claim to be chief of them all or chief of an entire region that included multiple villages, many of which had their own chiefs. Hall in the Day was young, he was cocky, and he was ready to make his mark. And he made that obvious at his first treaty negotiation in 1847. His father had just passed away, and there might have been 200 other Ojibwe leaders from around the region there. And he said, he came a day late, And then he said, stop what you're doing. Now, if I say sell, we sell. And if I say no, we don't.

You have called together all the chiefs and headmen of the nation. That was useless. For they do not own the land. It belongs to me. My father, by his bravery, took it from the Sioux. He died a few moons ago, and what belonged to him became mine. He, by his courage and perseverance, became head chief. And when he died, I took his place, and am consequently chief over all the nation. Which was ridiculous, and probably offensive, but really impressed the Americans. Here were powerful chiefs, some of them 70 or 80 years old, who before his coming spoke sneeringly of him as a boy who could have no voice in the council, saying there was no use in waiting

for him. But when he appeared, they became his most submissive and obedient subjects. And this in a treaty in which a million acres of land were ceded. The terms of the treaty were concluded between the commissioners and young Hole-in-the-Day alone. The move was a big gamble, but it paid off. Hole-in-the-Day the Younger quickly ascended to power. He took the helm at a moment when Native land across North America was being lost at an alarming rate. He was one of the most effective and knowledgeable Ojibwe leaders of his time. He had traveled to Washington, D.C. many times.

He was not a passive leader just waiting to see what would happen to the people. He refused to cede land without putting up a fight for what he thought was best for the Ojibwe people. Though it may cost me my liberty, it is my duty, and I will continue to speak and act also, till the wrongs of my people shall be righted. And he was not afraid of the personal consequences. Certainly it is true that Hole in the Day had very strong and powerful friends and very strong and powerful enemies. People tended to either love him or hate him. The U.S. government, for its part,

was more than happy to have just one single Ojibwe leader to negotiate with. Hole in the Day plays a heavy hand, and he was very, very effective. But the game was rigged. He had just come from Washington, D.C. It was 1868. The previous year, Holnaday had negotiated another very controversial treaty that was trying to consolidate all Ojibwe people onto one single reservation. It was a hard deal to swallow. He had some really telling things that he told his people. He said, look, these are heartbreaking times for our people.

At the time, westward migration was at a fever pitch. The government had just purchased Alaska, and the idea of Manifest Destiny, the God-given right of white Americans to expand across the entire continent, was being realized. Holnaday saw all this and adapted his strategies. He told his people, I would love to say that there's a way to get all the white people to leave us alone and to leave our lands and let us live as we always have. But I don't think there's a way to go back in time. But there is a way forward.

The way Holden the day saw it, if the U.S. government was hell-bent on putting his people onto a single reservation, then it needed to build the infrastructure that would set them up for success. And so he said, I want them to build a house for every single one of you. I want them to build a grist mill and a sawmill so that we can adopt these modern enterprises and have good homes. And to make sure they actually got these things, Hole in the Day had a plan. They would all stay put until the reservation was built.

Don't go anywhere. If you go, we will lose our leverage to get those things, which are promised to us in this treaty. But times were really tough, and some people left in search of a better life. It also became clear that the Americans were not living up to their side of the bargain. And Holmland Day said, well, if they're not going to work with me, we might have to do this a different way. And he said, I'm going to go back to Washington, D.C. He set out on a late June day in 1868. But on his way, he was accosted by assassins, pulled off of his carriage, stabbed multiple times, shot and killed.

The impact of this death was immediate. It was devastating for many of his people. And it was devastating for generations. Hole in the Day's death created a power vacuum that resulted in the loss of more and more Ojibwe land. You had lots of white settlement that immediately flowed after his death. And so, you know, it was devastating for his friends

and it was devastating for his enemies in the long run. The vision Holnday had for his people would never be. Instead, his death opened up the floodgates and left the nation vulnerable to the violent tides of the time. From the building of dams that flooded Ojibwe homes, to the growth of the timber industry, all the way to the process of allotment. Allotment was a federal policy that divided reservation land into privately owned parcels. These parcels were then allotted to tribal members. We're standing outside Brenda Child's cabin,

and it's a little wooden house with a sloped roof. It's almost on the shores of the lake. There we go. This land was sold to settlers on this part of Lake Bemidji after 1889. So that's the post-allotment era. Brenda Child is an Ojibwe historian and professor at the University of Minnesota. And while she lives near Leech Lake... I am Red Lake Ojibwe. I was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation.

Allotment entirely transformed the ownership and stewardship of Native lands. Before, most land had been owned in common. And what that really means is tribes collectively owned all their land. Brenda knows firsthand how allotment changed everything for Ojibwe people. She says that the moment surrounding Hole in theay's death was a major inflection point. This is the big era of cultural assimilation. So tremendous pressure put on Indian people to assimilate. And in the United States, there was kind of consensus that Indian people needed to change. Kill the Indian, save the man would soon be a common refrain.

The idea was to get rid of all Native culture at any cost. There were people around the United States and in Washington and in kind of reform circles who believed at that time that Indian people were people of the past, right? That they weren't really going to kind of continue into the future as tribal people. So if Indian people can't survive as tribal people, maybe they can just survive. And so they can become citizens of the United States eventually. They can speak English. They can become Christians. They can Americanize. And then they can move into the mainstream of American society. An allotment was seen as a way to accelerate that process of Americanization.

They've got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. There is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. It's funny because a policy like the Allotment Act of 1887, when you look at it and you read it, it's very technical. And in some ways it sounds like it's going to protect Indians. It was seen as so progressive. And the most progressive of Indian reformers favored the allotment of reservations.

The idea was that Native families would own their own land. They could farm it and build generational wealth just like white Americans. They, too, could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But from the beginning, the system was flawed. There was a lot of corruption that accompanied it. The Nelson Act, which brought allotment here to Leech Lake Reservation, explicitly ensured that the most valuable land would be auctioned off or sold to settlers. The law also made it so that Ojibwe people would eventually have to pay property taxes on their own land.

You know, sometimes there's a word that people don't like to use called conspiracy. Politicians and timber companies and banks in Minnesota conspired with one another to dispossess Indians of their land. Individual families were left to the mercy of businessmen who did whatever it took to snatch up land, parcel by parcel. Now, more than 100 years later, it's easy to see what allotment changed at Leech Lake. As we drive around, we're struck by how many tourists are milling about,

swimming and fishing in the lakes, just feeling very at home on this land. Ojibwe people do still live here. But in spite of the million-dollar tourist economy swirling around us, around 40% of the Leech Lake Band members live below the poverty line. And that's not the only problem allotment brought. The tribal government has limited power over their own reservation. They don't always have control of the pipelines on their land. They don't profit off most of the resorts.

And they don't have the resources to build tribal housing or medical clinics. So that's what happened here. But what if it hadn't? What if Hole in the Day's vision for the Ojibwe people had come true? Coming up, we take you further north to Red Lake Nation, where the history of the Ojibwe people splintered into a different future. Hi, this is Erica Doudro from Bellingham, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. And if you want to hear about how we made this episode, we'll have a bonus episode

coming out on Monday just for our ThruLine Plus supporters, where our producers chat about what it was like to report on the ground on Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations. To listen to that and all of our other behind-the-scenes episodes, come join ThruLine Plus. It's also a great way to support our work at NPR. Check it out at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. If you take a drive through Red Lake, you will notice that, you know, they have their own justice center. They have their own police force. Tribal government complex. They have their own radio station. We were big fans of WRLN.

A lot of the road signs on the reservation are in Ojibwe first and English second. And at the gas station, Ojibwe is all over the walls, welcoming us in. There's even a fishery that uses traditional Indigenous techniques. We actually got to see it and smell it in action. He just showed me the machine to descscale. It's very, very cool. In some parts of the reservation, people bury their dead in the front yard. They have spirit houses where people are buried. And stepping out the door to your house, there's mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, generation upon generation. And that is very different than you'll find in most parts of America.

Even if it's only 40 minutes away from Leech Lake, Red Lake Reservation feels like a different country. The reason Red Lake is so different from Leech Lake, and from pretty much any reservation I've been to before is because of events that happened in the decades after Hole in the Day's assassination. We were very concerned about holding onto our land base because everybody could see what was happening around them and the loss of land, the agreements.

And for Red Lake, the strategy of our political ancestors was to kind of not throw our lot in with the rest of the Ojibwe people. In 1889, our hereditary chiefs, who were still in positions of leadership, and the United States came together to make an agreement. It's June 29, 1889. Red Lake's seven hereditary chiefs are gathered in a tiny government school building to meet with a commission sent by the United States. Out of the seven of them, there body that I think I have ever seen. He was a man six feet and four inches in height. His unerring judgment infallibly picked out the true path among so many misleading ones and followed it. Straight as an arrow with flashing eyes.

He was no orator, but when he did say a few words, that ended the matter. His name was Medway Gnonand. Medway Gnonand, or he who is spoken to, as he was known in English, was often described by settlers as the head chief at Red Lake. And he was familiar with how the United States did business. He'd been there when Red Lake negotiated its first treaty with the U.S. government, nearly 30 years earlier. In that initial treaty, Red Lake ceded around 11 million acres of land.

That's like two New Jerseys. And they ceded that land in the hopes that they could hold on to what was left and protect their way of life. Medway Gnodin had strongly opposed that first treaty and actually walked out of the negotiations without signing. When he arrived at the 1889 negotiations he was 82 years old and he carried with him a lifetime of loss and upheaval, a lifetime of dealing with Americans. We wish that any land we possess should be not only for our own benefit, but for our grandchildren hereafter. We think that we should own in common everything that pertains

to us. He's facing off against the U.S. Chippewa Commission, a group of three men. One, a missionary. Two, a surgeon. And last but not least, their leader, Henry Rice. All that is desired by the government is that you will agree to what is best for yourselves. Henry Rice was a well-known early Minnesota politician, and he was deeply involved in the Indian business. Henry Rice had made his name as a prominent fur trader, and he'd learned to speak some

Ojibwe along the way. He had served as a representative of the territory of Minnesota, and later as a senator, after he'd helped make Minnesota an official state. Rice had also negotiated treaties with groups of Ojibwe across Minnesota. And here he was, in 1889, to get the job done once again. Red Lakers still held more than 3 million acres of land, while most tribes in Minnesota held less than 100,000. But powerful interests were setting their sights on it. Timber barons wanted access to the virgin pine forests.

Mining interests wanted iron ore. And settlers saw potential in the fertile soil. In 1889, they were facing the first major pressure for allotment, relocation. And the U.S. government asked Henry Rice to get all of those things. They wanted everybody living at Red Lake to cede all of their land. And if they couldn't get them to do that? At least get them to take allotment. Congress had passed the Dawes Act, which implemented allotment, in 1887, two years before this meeting.

So the policy of allotment has already become law across the nation, and reservations around the country were already being allotted. But the commission was ordered to go to Red Lake and get the tribe's consent before they started the process. Because even though the U.S. wanted the land, they also wanted to be able to say it was freely given, and it belonged to them fair and square. So none of the commission members want to go back to their boss, the President of the United States, without getting Red Lake to sign on to the United States' demands. Third Council at Red Lake. Wednesday, July 3rd, 1889. This is perhaps the most important hour of your existence. You occupy today a position in which you are to choose whether you go down or whether you rise to a better life.

Medway Good-Knonen said, look, I wish to lay out a reservation here where we can remain with our bands forever. We don't want to give up anything. And he knew that there was no way for them to avoid giving up something. But they would not give up everything. I do not look with favor on the allotment plan. I will never consent to the allotment plan. As the negotiations dragged on,

Henry Rice began to understand that Red Lake wasn't budging. Fourth Council at Red Lake, July 4th, 1889. Every day you are getting poorer. If you don't sign this agreement, there is no help for you. If I should stand in the midst of money, of the value of what had been stolen from us, it would go over my head. That is the reason I don't want to accept your propositions. They were not going to get Red Lakers to move off this land.

They were not even going to get them to accept the allotment plan. Sixth Council at Red Lake, July 6th, 1889. The best he could obtain from them was the establishment of a reservation and some land session outside of the reservation. You must not expect to keep all your reservation. And so that's where the negotiation ended up focusing. You cannot keep your bread and eat it at the same time. It is not greediness that influences us. And they actually had a map laid out on the table

and the tribal members drew lines around the lake. And they articulated in the agreement that all of the land around both Upper and Lower Red Lake and a mile of land around the lakeshore on all sides would be part of the reservation. So that was the understanding. 7th Council at Red Lake, July 6th, 1889 The only doubt we have is as to whether the government of the United States will approve of our yielding so much But we will do the best we can We will now give you an opportunity to sign the paper They deposed people who were present at the 1889 Nelson Act negotiations at Red Lake just a couple of

decades later. And they all described the scene where Henry Rice stood up and was made to open both of his palms and face the east and say, yes, I promise, I promise you will keep all of Lower Red Lake and all of Upper Red Lake as long as grasses grow and rivers flow. They said, okay, turn to the next direction. So he turns to the south. I promise, holds up his hands, he says the same thing to each of the cardinal directions. All of Lower Red Lake, I promise, and all case, we can agree. And then they lined up, spent a day checking X's and signing off on the Nelson Act. The Nelson Act agreement was the fork in the road.

It's where Red Lake's path diverges from Leech Lake in the vast majority of reservations in the United States. But as the ink dried on the agreement between the hereditary chiefs and the U.S. Chippewa Commission, Red Lakers didn't necessarily know how things would turn out. We have heard your proposition, and we think we can perhaps change the line so as to give you all you want and very much more than you will have use for. What happened next, we don't have great documentation for. But afterwards, Henry Rice took off. He left Red Lake with the signed

agreement and the map in hand. Eventually made his way to Washington, D.C., and there was a map submitted. And so it's unclear. Either Henry Rice took the map he had in front of the natives, ripped it up, and submitted a different map, or submitted the map that was agreed to, and somebody else came in and swapped it out. A corner was sliced off the reservation map. Whether or not it was by accident, we'll never know.

Magewick and Onan and the hereditary chiefs left the negotiation thinking they had kept the most important parts of their land, Upper and Lower Red Lake, and the forest surrounding it. By the time they found out it had been stolen, it was too late. It's hard to imagine today when you can use Google Street View to see any corner of the earth. But this was a world where everything was getting officially plotted and surveyed for the first time. We're talking about vast swaths of wilderness that few Americans had ever been to. It was easy in the scramble for land, the messiness of surveying,

for people to take advantage of that, for corners to get fudged is the tribe's Department of Natural Resources. It's in a dark brown building in the center of town. Inside, we talk to a handful of folks. Hello. Hi. And in every conversation, we end up in front of a map. You know, lands in red, those are up there behind you. And the blue stuff is our land that we're trying to get back.

This is Al Pemberton, director of the Red Lake DNR and tribal council member. And the map he's pointing at is the kind of map somebody would pull down from the ceiling in your history classroom. You can see the vast lands that Red Lake used to occupy, and the millions of acres they ceded. But you can also see what the chiefs were able to preserve, an unallotted, continuous reservation that is the lifeblood of Red Lake today. And then, there's that last corner. Even when I am dead, I will haunt the shores of these waters. Since the moment Red Lakes leaders discovered the fraud, they've been adamant about getting it back.

My spirit will never be at rest until all of the lake is back in the hands of my people. Peter Graves. They made it right in their mind. but in our minds, they stole it, and that's our part of the lake. My great-grandpa, Peter Graves, was going to get it back. Peter Graves was founder of Red Lakes Tribal Council and one of the authors of their original constitution. And here we are at the Red Lake DNR sitting across from his great-grandson, Al Pemberton. Al tells us he hasn't forgotten his great-grandfather's promise. It's a thorn in our side, let's say.

And, you know, as Indian people, you know, we don't, Red Lake especially, we don't like being stepped on. Coming up, we meet some of the people from Red Lake and Leech Lake who are unsettling their future. This is Danny Holton calling from Chiayi City, Taiwan. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. In the Jinatawagink, the place where it grows. So there was a non-Indian person who was going to go ice fishing.

It's January 2002. Two cousins get in their plane, a tiny Cessna 172, and fly towards the frozen lake where they're going to set up for the day. They landed in Redby on the lake and started fishing. They landed on Lower Red Lake, a lake that's completely within the boundaries of Red Lake Reservation, and a lake where only members of the band can fish. And so that was illegal. And we're coming between Red Lake and Redby, and I said, what the hell is that? There was a plane on the back of a trailer.

And so the way Red Lake handled it was to confiscate his airplane. The airplane for a while was sitting in front of the police station in Red Lake. Upper Red Lake, the part that many Red Lakers consider stolen land, is known as one of Minnesota's top walleye fishing destinations. So naturally, sports fishing forums were full of debates over whether Red Lakers should have the right to exclude people from fishing on any part of the lake. Local papers raised doubts about how fair it was for the tribe to punish the fishermen if they just didn't know the rules. Brenda and Al were skeptical. I think he must have known where he was. You know, and you can't just come on here and do whatever you want. After weeks of negotiations, Red Lake ended up giving the plane back

and serving the fishermen with thousands of dollars in fines. I think we should have kept that plane. And if we would have, I would have been a pilot now. This is one way that allotment's effects have rippled forward to today. Even though Red Lake is considered a closed reservation and non-band members can't live there, this kind of thing still happens, which is one reason why some Ojibwe people are trying to think more creatively about the future. Well, we can still step out here a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're at Mud Lake Dam with Frank Bebo. He's a tribal attorney who lives on the Leech Lake Reservation. Hundreds of years ago, Frank says this was a sort of water highway for Ojibwe canoes on their way to the Mississippi River and other important waterways. Today, there's a tiny dam there and a boat landing. You know, so it's a funny deal.

I'm not sure who this is. While we're standing there, someone pulls up to fish. Someone who Frank doesn't know, with Minnesota state license plates, not Leech Lake plates. It's someone who might be coming from off the reservation to fish this lake. Because of allotment, Leech Lake isn't a closed reservation, which has Frank thinking a lot about what sovereignty means

and what it means to protect your homelands. Allotment to me sometimes is maybe a distraction. It binds you in some ways. And he's one of a handful of tribal attorneys from around the country who have seized on a new concept. Rights of nature. Rights of nature. It's the idea that the natural world should be entitled to the same rights and protections as people. And the legal foothold Frank uses to argue for those rights is based in the treaties Ojibwe people negotiated.

Ojibwe people retain the rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands they ceded to the U.S. And Frank says they should be able to use those rights to protect all their ancestral homelands. To prevent development they don't want, like pipelines or mining projects. Basically to keep the environment intact so they can continue to hunt, fish, and gather the way they always have. Those words are in the treaty, and treaties are the supreme law of the land. Otherwise, we're still in the colonial box of using federal law and state law to try to solve our problems, and they're not set up to try to solve our problems. That's all I've done.

I've used their laws, their legal system, and then I've basically read what it says. Indian people are the masters of strategy, right? Because they've had to deal with a kind of bewildering array of federal policies. That's what they always complain about attorneys for. We always find some stinking loophole to get around. Right, some loophole to get around shit. That's what we do. We will never be exactly what we were in 1491.

We're concerned about other things, especially in the era of global climate change. We think about our water. We think about the waters off the reservation that run into our waters. You know, we think about all kinds of things, perhaps differently than our ancestors did. I think that's okay. Our circumstances, our climate, everything is changing anyways. And I do think that there are ways for us to heal as individuals and communities and to strengthen our sovereignty and see better results and a better standard of living and and healing ecosystems even, through tribal sovereignty.

Nobody's going to look out for us the way we look out for ourselves. But that will be to the benefit of all people, not just Native people. I mean, I'm an education reporter. There was no way we weren't going to end up in a school at some point. Okay, but I'm not even complaining, because it turned out to be such a special stop on our road trip. We spent a whole afternoon at the Ndaji Nitawe Ging School on Red Lake Reservation. It's a K-6 Ojibwe language immersion school. I've reported on other language immersion schools in Indian country,

and I've never seen anything like this place. In their first year, they enrolled almost 90 kids. That's huge. They had the land, they got the funding, and they just did it. They opened their doors. Right now, they're in a temporary space, but a new building is going up across the parking lot. Inside the new building, it's noisy, but the air is cool. So far, it's just a skeleton

of metal studs and wires where the walls will go. The school is circular, and it all centers around a large room with high ceilings that will serve as a cafeteria, assembly room, and ceremony room. At the top is a dome with glass windows where the sunlight filters in. You know, I named this place Ndajinatawigin, the place where it grows. This is Nate Taylor, who co-founded the school with his wife, Sylvia Fred. He invites us to stay for a bit and experience what it's like. And the place where it grows can mean the language, can mean the culture, can mean relationships, can mean all, you can pick and choose what you want to grow when you come here to our school. Red Lake has the potential to become a mecca

for the language and culture in the sense that we have our own small little country. Thank you. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu.

Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Sequoia Carrillo. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Peter Balanon Rosen.

Akshara Ravishankar. Irene Noguchi Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi Sho Fujiwara Anya Mizani

Thank you to Lorena Cook, Pamela May, Sasha Suarez, David Troyer, Dale Green Jr., Amber Ann University, Mankato University Archives, Emily Alvey, Sasha Crawford-Holland, Amir Marshi, Johannes Sturgey, and Anya Grunman. And a special thanks to our funder, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, for helping to support this podcast. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.