Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

“We are thought of in terms of what we have lost or what we have survived.”

Treuer seeks to paint a more complex portrait of Indigenous Americans’ lives. He eschews the one-dimensional narrative of their being simply an impoverished and disenfranchised people who have survived centuries of disease, displacement, and wars. While all of that is part of their story, it is only a fraction of it.

“The average life expectancy for Indian men is sixty-four. When white people turn sixty-five they, on average, retire. Indians are lucky to live long enough to see retirement. The average household income on my reservation is $21,000. On some reservations in the Dakotas the median income hovers just above $10,000; for the rest of America, median income is $52,029, as of 2008. Life is hard for many on the rez.”

Treuer illustrates the racial wealth gap between Indigenous communities and white communities. His statistic about the life expectancy for Indigenous American men is particularly jarring. It reveals how much more difficult their lives are compared to their white peers, a fact that is inextricable from a legacy of poverty and isolation.

“And what is this place—this rez, these reservations? What are these places that kill us every day but that we’d die to protect and are like no place else on earth? And what can we find here behind the signs that announce us?”

Treuer uses these rhetorical questions to generate interest in the reader about an aspect of American life that may seem foreign. Nevertheless, it exists within American borders. He uses the abbreviation “rez,” which is common to those who live on reservations, to build familiarity and make the reader feel a part of the experience that he will proceed to narrate.

“To an outsider Red Lake could look like a great nothing. But what appears as a great nothing, an economic disaster, is linked to a particular Red Lake phenomenon of independence. The ‘nothing’ is the result of character and leadership stretching back over 150 years. Red Lake Reservation, unlike nearly every other reservation in the United States is a closed reservation. No one can live, work, travel, or fish anywhere within the reservation boundaries without the tribe’s blessing.”

Red Lake Reservation is exemplary of Indigenous American sovereignty. Sovereignty and tribal rights are major themes which emerge throughout the book. Despite the poverty of those who live on the reservation, those who live within it are autonomous and rely on their own natural resources to survive.

“Whereas the French treated the Indians as allies and urged, through diplomacy and trade, the creation of mutually beneficial alliances, the British treated Indians as a defeated people.”

Treuer explains the difference between how French and British colonialists treated Indigenous tribes. While the French approached Indigenous nations as they would any other sovereign nations, the British adopted an imperialist posture. What has lasted, unfortunately, is the British model, due to most American colonists being descendants of those who migrated from Britain.

“One of the most serious misconceptions about reservations is that they were a kind of moral payment: that the U.S. government, motivated by pity and guilt, ‘gave’ reservations to Indians along with treaty rights, which functioned as a kind of proto-welfare program. This is not the case. Reservations and treaty rights were concessions negotiated for the right to settle and develop new land […] It would be useful for most Americans to keep in mind that after they pass those mountains they are living, driving, eating, breathing, and walking on land that at one time or another was negotiated for, not fought for.”

Treuer establishes with the reader the understanding that reservations and treaty rights are key elements of Indigenous Americans’ sovereignty and acknowledgement of their rights over their own land. The conventional view, as Treuer depicts it, reinforces a white supremacist myth, however inadvertently, by suggesting that the land was always there for white citizens to give and take. The truth, however, is much more complicated.

“The story of relations between Indians and whites in the Midwest and West during the early nineteenth century is a story of war: armed conflict, forced removals, and death marches […] during the twentieth century the warfare waged between Indians and whites was of a quieter kind—instead of guns the combatants carried petitions; instead of scalps, people held aloft legal briefs.”

Treuer explains how white supremacist tactics changed over the centuries from those of explicit violence to those of legal barriers. In the 20th century, white people had institutional means to deny Indigenous American rights and access to capital. This statement shows how instruments of power operated to secure white supremacy in the United States.

“To cast treaty rights as ‘special rights’ is to suggest that they are in some sense an expression of pity or a payment for wrongs done or a welfare system for Stone Age people. But treaty rights were not ‘given’ to Indian people because of past cruel treatment or because of special racial status. Nor were treaty rights ‘given’ to Indians in exchange for land […] Rather, when Indian bands signed treaties (and no new treaties have been signed since the end of the treaty period in the 1870s), they reserved land, which became reservations, and they reserved rights. Treaty rights are rights that the Indians who signed treaties always had, rights they explicitly reserved when they signed their treaties.”

Treuer reiterates a point made in an earlier chapter about what treaty rights are. He compels readers, many of whom are not Indigenous, to understand the sovereignty of his community. This is one of numerous instances in the book in which Treuer utilizes repetition to solidify an idea.

“When a white person dies the children inherit whatever their parent left them. Money. Houses. Investments and retirement money the parent didn’t get a chance to spend. Well, they didn’t earn that, did they? I mean, their parent earned that. Well, our treaty rights are like that. Our grandparents and great-grandparents worked to keep our land and our rights and we get to benefit from that. That’s just how it works.”

Sean Fahrlander explains how capital is passed from one generation to the next. In communities of color, particularly Indigenous American communities, there is little capital, but there are treaty rights—the right to maintain one’s land and resources. This is one of the greatest sources of wealth among tribes. Fahrlander’s juxtaposition of treaty rights with estate laws helps to illustrate this entitlement in the context of property rights.

“Allotment made our land a checkerboard and as a result we lack complete control of the land; so, too, we lack complete control of our rights and our lives.”

The Dawes Act parceled tribes’ land to encourage private ownership. Whatever land that the government determined to be “surplus” was given over to white homesteaders. Thus, allotment was a tool to accomplish two tasks: the dissolution of tribal sovereignty and assimilation into white America.

“For many kids rez life is nasty, brutal, and short. And most people long, just long, for the good old days when a fight was a fight and you could get by.”

Treuer explains how poverty and drug addiction have made life on reservations as dangerous as it is in other poor communities. These conditions have given youth on reservations less hope and less regard for human life. The youths are also nostalgic for an era they never experienced themselves.

“Those who were obsessed with what was often called the ‘Indian problem’ recognized that the bond of family, the connection between parents and their children and, sometimes even more importantly, between grandparents and grandchildren, was the most significant and strongest bond linking a person to his or her identity, tribe, and reservation. If this bond could be broken, Indians would disappear as Indians, and the ‘Indian problem’ would be solved.”

Treuer explains the rationale behind the creation of boarding schools—a key facet of assimilationist efforts. Heritage is linked to family. By destroying family connections, as white Americans did to enslaved Black people in the antebellum era, they believed that they could terminate Indigenous American history and identity.

“For centuries, privateers, government officials, railroad barons, timber magnates, prospectors, and mining companies have made a mint exploiting Native land and resources while the Indians for whom reservations were created have gotten poorer and poorer.”

Treuer illustrates how a great deal of American wealth and industry was built by pillaging land and resources that Indigenous Americans previously held. Even after some tribes moved to reservations, those territories were also sometimes subjected to exploitation, if it was found out that the tribe was inhabiting land rich in minerals or timber. With few exceptions, there was little interest or effort in compensating the tribes.

“Being poor, being from a community where everyone was poor, was different from being broke in a community that was not. Game wardens took their rice. They were denied loans. Their houses were searched for game such as venison and ducks. Whatever the sheriff, the social worker, and the cops wanted, they got.”

Margaret Seelye Treuer explains to Bernie Becker how PL 280 has worked against Indigenous people. Most Indigenous people had more of a problem with law enforcement than law enforcement had with them. In this passage, she depicts the systemic injustices that Indigenous tribes often faced from various facets of society, including areas that supposedly existed to care for their needs.

“Tribes made up of fractional descendants (1/64 or 1/128 Indian blood) with no culture, land, community, or language but with plenty of lawyers have been springing up across the county. No one could have foreseen so many people wanting to be Indian after 500 years of trying to kill us and 200 years of trying not to be Indian.”

Treuer explains how some people, usually white, used small claims of Indigenous heritage to claim tribal membership and receive treaty rights. He points out the irony of this, as whiteness has traditionally been the category of exclusive racial privilege, while Indigenous tribes had been regarded as contemptibly savage. Treuer later distinguishes between these paltry claims and the legitimate claims of those who fight against the principle of blood quantum. Treuer insists that tribal membership is not merely about determining racial factors; it is about cultural and communal affiliations.

“Indians are famous for a few things—for a kind of off-brand environmentalism, Sitting Bull, and broken English, and most of all for being poor. Poverty is, for many, synonymous with the very idea of Indians and Indian reservations.”

Treuer condenses the stereotypes about Indigenous people into a few sensory tropes. He references their reputation as stewards of the land, an image that was popularized by the “crying Indian” of a 1970s anti-littering commercial. The Lakota leader Sitting Bull has become a metonym for Indigenous resistance, particularly in the West. While there is truth to notions of these legacies of environmental conservation and resistance, the stereotype about “broken English” reinforces primitivist myths. The generalization about poverty overlooks the abundant wealth that some tribes have managed to secure, particularly through casinos.

“I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. Our reservations aren’t supposed to exist either; they were supposed to be temporary in many ways, and, under assault by the Dawes Act in the nineteenth century and by termination policy during the Eisenhower era in the twentieth century, they were supposed to disappear, too.”

This is one of several instances in the book in which Treuer places himself and the story of his own family within a broader historical narrative about Indigenous peoples. His assertion is rooted in efforts to kill Indigenous peoples through war and purposeful viral infections. It is also rooted in efforts to kill them culturally through boarding schools, the Dawes Act, termination, and relocation.

“Cultural death matters because if the culture dies, we will have lost the chance not only to live on our own terms (something for which our ancestors fought long and hard) but also to live in our own terms.”

In this section, Treuer describes the importance of tribes holding onto their traditional language. He focuses on the creation of Ojibwe schools within his own community. To live “on” one’s own terms is to maintain a way of life protected by hard-won treaty rights, while living “in” one’s own terms is about having the ability to describe one’s way of life through one’s own language.

“Relocation, a government-sponsored program, yet another switchback in the U.S. government’s long road toward freeing itself of Indians and of all responsibility toward us, was a policy that sought to integrate Indians into the mainstream workforce by severing their relationship to their reservation communities. The relocation program promised jobs, education, and housing in up-and-coming American cities. Very little of this was forthcoming. Instead, Indians were crowded into ghettos, fought for work, fought for education, and suffered.”

Treuer argues that relocation was a post-World War II effort that, like the creation of urban public housing for Black Americans, backfired and led to cyclical poverty and disconnection. Like its policies toward African Americans, the federal government failed to account for unique conditions caused by a legacy of racist oppression. It also failed to account for Indigenous tribes’ unique affiliations and traditions.

“Later my kindergarten teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everybody said fireman, lawyer, stuff like that. I said I wanted to be white when I grew up, because, to me, being white meant you had privilege, you got to go home to your parents, you had all these things.”

Dan Jones describes his experience of attending a boarding school far away from his parents—a common experience for many Indigenous North Americans from the early to mid-part of the 20th century. The isolation and the separation from one’s family and identity led Jones to associate his Indigenous identity with a stigma that had to be eradicated. He wanted to be white because being white meant that he would feel senses of belonging and safety. Although he did not realize it at the time, this was the underlying intention of the boarding schools: to assimilate Indigenous Americans into white supremacy through negative reinforcement.

“‘Blood quantum’ is a strange way to determine who is and who is not officially Indian […] There have been blood quantum laws on the books since the eighteenth century, most notably in Virginia, where it was illegal to mix with Indians and blacks. Ironically, ‘one drop’ laws (one drop of black blood made you black) were reversed for Indians: they had to prove they had a certain fraction of Indian blood in order to qualify for enrollment and membership and to receive their treaty rights.”

Treuer explains how Indigenous tribes typically determine membership. The principle of “blood quantum,” as he and Brooke Mosay Ammann argue, reinforces the racism that subordinated, undermined, and destroyed many Indigenous lives. Treuer and Ammann believe that this principle, which became a means to protect Indigenous lives and identities, works against tribal communities, particularly by causing them to overlook their diversity and key aspects of that history, which included interracial adoptions.

“Who gets to be an official Indian and who is an unofficial Indian is sometimes a matter of identity and insecurity about that identity. Sometimes it is a matter of economics and greed. In both instances tribal enrollment confuses race (descent) and culture (environment). Being enrolled won’t necessarily make you more culturally Indian. And not being enrolled won’t make you less so. But enrollment and nonenrollment [sic] can make you more or less poor and can determine where and how you live.”

Treuer connects tribal membership to access to capital. Some tribes, such as the Mdewakanton Sioux, use tribal membership to withhold casino profits from eligible members. The principle behind blood quantum, however, makes race and certain phenotypical markers predeterminants for tribal membership. While race is certainly a factor in tribal membership—cultural membership in marginalized communities is often determined by factors outside of one’s control, such as deprivation caused by racism and a legacy of oppression—it is not a sole factor.

“One wonders: by fighting about enrollment at all, aren’t we just adopting a system of exclusion that helps the U.S. government but doesn’t help us? And couldn’t the Cherokee have won a little something from everyone had they thought of the problems of race, identity, and enrollment differently? After all, very few nations in the world base citizenship on race. It can be based on many things—such as language, a naturalization process, an oath, residency, or all of the above.”

Treuer approaches the controversy over enrollment rhetorically. He reiterates a previous point about blood quantum playing into the hands of white supremacists by reinforcing the myth that race is rooted in biology. He uses the controversy around the Cherokee Nation, which have made the Cherokee both oppressors and victims of oppression, to illuminate the problem. The Cherokee Nation is comprised of mixed-race people—a fact with which they struggle as they seek to determine who they are and how to allocate resources within the community. Treuer suggests that the Cherokee Nation look to other countries, such as those in Europe, which have found other ways to absorb multicultural identities into their social fabrics.