National Native News Special Features

As policies and fades with the green of the leaves mixed feelings well up inside. You see I've been on the power circuit now for two years. I'm what's called a trader hocking arts and crafts. Each weekend for the past two summers I've had to decide which Pollock to go to. Usually there are at least three to choose from. Once decided it meant packing up the camper sometimes the kids and setting up shop amid the elements. This part I don't think I'll miss much. But the actual event is another matter. If you haven't been to Apollo you really can't call yourself a north lander. It would be like going to San Francisco without visiting Fisherman's Wharf. And like the ads used to say about Alaska. Once you've been there it's hard to come all the way back. For me a news hound It's been a weekend without news without serious side effects. The ambiance has ancient roots. Some say a spiritual connectedness. A friend described a moment's meditation. When I close my eyes she said. The drumbeat created a vision of a natural connection with the earth as though the beat itself was drying up.

Earth forces. And those forces would come up through the drum like smoke and waft over the singers dancers and all the others who were part of the circle. Not everyone reaches that point or at least not many of the folks I've talked with. But there is something special. Others have called it a peace festival a social gathering an Indian Folk Fest with the atmosphere of a faire and a carnival. For some it's another world. But for most of us it's simply a time to dance and sing and talk and eat and make eyes at each other. On the surface it has basic elements. Drums dancers and colorful outfits. Food and crafts stands a master of ceremonies complete with a poor sound system. Paolo groupies hulking security in an increasing amount of plastic porta potties. A portable village where even the observers become part of the event. It goes from Thursday night til Monday morning for some of us. For instance at the recent namea one

gathering in Duluth all that was left by Monday noon when I left was the cleanup crew which included seagulls. There is very much more happening as these basic elements interact. And the more often you go the more you see the more you hear the more you feel. This year it's been the children. They've cut my ion captured my heart and drawn water on my aging cynicism. It's not just that the young ones are all dressed up. Most kids can get pretty cute pretty quick. It's how they carry themselves and how the nature of the Powell automatically includes them as it does everyone else. For the dancers it's not a performance but a simple act of life sort of like Snoopy going into unconscious delight. But with the kids it's a freedom we rarely see a celebratory moment difficult to find outside the powwow arena. Take these same kids and ask them to perform. And many would turn into fidgeting jellyfish take them and put them in a different setting. Say a teen dance

and they become self-conscious and shy. Or worse yet at the power they seem to have little worry. Secure in their first dance steps and joyous when their head and heart leap in unison with the drum beat. A thousand counselors cannot capture what I've seen the drum set free. This I think will miss me which. Watching the kids run from the truck Jim's bat costume floating in whipping as he ran Justin's grinning face glowing with iridescent paint. I tried to get into the mood of begging for candy with threats of mischief. We had followed the link winding around its many crews stopping at homes bright with Halloween pumpkins and festive lights past moccasin trail over the paved roads and down toward the shore. I couldn't seem to get my grampa out of my mind. I did 28 years. He seemed to sit beside me

edging into my consciousness with a half glare half sad face as we rounded a curve. I realized that we were at the very place where he had lived where I had wondered a child's wonder at his little wood shack where he sold candy and pop here on the lake was where he acted out a living charging ten cents to swim on his beach the finest big lake. The only other attraction was the deer he had bottle fed after its mother had been killed by poachers. Everyone loved Pete as we called him and we made him wear a bright red color with sleigh bells attached so no one would shoot him. It didn't work though. A man and his wife broke Pete's back with an ax scratch that memory and let's get into Halloween. As I watched a woman came to the door and laughingly gave my two monsters a treat. This place should be mine I thought. This home is built exactly on the spot where grandpa's log cabin stood. I glanced toward the lake and could just make out the path that I used to walk.

It's still zig zag the way it always had. Fighting the lump from my throat I gripped the wheel thinking of how I could get even take my little freeloader bats to their home every Halloween and get reimbursement for their stealing our land. But I heard my grampa say we still have our treaties. Should I dislike these people because of what they have done to me and mine. Or because of their color. Or should we remember that they don't understand that we have a few different rights and they because we gave up the land they live on in return for those rights. Following the road I resisted the temptation to swear at the blacktop. I've hated this road since it was tarred. It's almost as if someone wanted to cover up even our moccasin prints that wore the road smooth. Maybe there are some that wish to have everything we have. Culture tradition medicine knowledge but do not want us. A few years after people killed his pet deer and stole his land. My

Grampa died of a broken heart. The treaty that was supposed to protect us didn't. But I would go back to the old place anyway even though his log cabin had been moved out. His hand pump was still there. I would sit by that old pump talking to him in my own way telling him of Honor's other news and griefs. One night I couldn't wait until dark as was my habit and arrived at dusk sitting beside the pump. I talked overseen by a huge no trespassing sign. Some of the lot owners came out to look at me and one even asked if I had a lot around there. I have a whole lot around here I answered. Well said she we want to keep all those people out of here. The next time I came to talk to my grandfather the pump was gone. Comas CONUS shrieked my grandson breaking my reverie. That man said he didn't have any candy so he said he'd give us the next best thing.

Macaroni and Cheese. Thanksgiving Day is the national holiday that means to many of us a turkey dinner a celebration of family and friends a time to be thankful for all that we've been blessed with and in some of our schools. Time to rehash that old story about the Pilgrims and their sidekicks the friendly Indians make them construction paper Indian headbands and generally reinforce some of those old stereotypes. When all this is done then it will be time to forget about Indian people for the rest of the year. I wonder how many majority people have gone through school and are going through life thinking that Indian people only exist during November of each year that Indian men wear only construction paper breech cloths even when it's snowing outside and that Indian people consider it a great honor to be acknowledged in history as the man who came to dinner. There is some historical accuracy to the Thanksgiving story. Indeed there was a to

Squanto the Patuxent man who was kidnapped by British merchants early in the seventeenth century returned to his land years later to find that his people had all died of smallpox and who having nowhere to go and being a decent man helped a small settlement of religious refugees to survive a hard year. There is evidence that to squander some other displaced Indian people and the pilgrims celebrated the end of that year with a feast no doubt they were thankful to be sheltered fed and alive. This year two things gave me hope that there is some change coming. The principal at my children's school told me that she encourages teachers to make Indian Studies a part of the curriculum all school year. And my little girl's teacher is now focusing on a theme of thankfulness and sharing for the coming holiday. One of the most important values in Ojibwe culture is thankfulness appreciation of what we have and what we are. Gratitude to the Great Spirit for creating us gratitude to Mother Earth for giving us what we need to live

in the language of our Ojibwe people make which means thank you. On the fourth Thursday of this month many of us will sit down with our family and friends to a dinner of Thanksgiving on a day when regardless of what we learned in school and with hope for our children's future we will save me which for all that we have been blessed with. I consider myself fortunate to have taken classes in junior high school from one of the last of the old time English teachers Miss Lindbergh was a single woman near retirement whose dedication to teaching was like that of a missionary. We were miners and loggers kids second generation English speaking from our immigrant or native forebears because of Mr. Lindbergh. We could quote Shakespeare Wordsworth Hardy or Goldsmith in the years that followed. Schools abandoned the classic English writers to those presumably relevant

to modern American students. I think some of these classic writers should be reinstated in the curriculum. And I'll tell you why. Last summer my wife Lynn took my daughter on a drive to Montana. They took the northern route Highway 2 from Fargo to Wolf Point and on to the Rockies for a linnet weather return. Twenty years earlier she had driven the route to be with her father working at Glacier National Park. What was different now she said with the abandonment of the land empty storefronts closed schools junk yards of farm implements with no buyers. The drought was evident but what had happened was a disaster in slow motion and in eggs a real decline that had gone on for a decade. Failed government programs failed policies failed farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The farm crisis moved slowly to one farm at a time. Perhaps if it moves slowly enough people

won't notice someday that nobody is growing the food. Lynn commented that it was like the English clearances. During the clearances in the 17th century crafters were driven off the land so that industrialized agriculture and centralized wealth could fuel the industrial revolution. After generations on the land tenant farmers and villagers were displaced. They wanted the roadways clogging the industrial cities to become the rootless Landless Workers of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. I can see in my memory Miss Lindbergh taking a leather bound book down from the shelf the deserted village by Oliver Goldsmith Goldsmith mourned Sweet Auburn the loveliest village of the plain crumbling into ruin because the people had been effected for sheep raising and industrialization helped along by battalions of red coats. Sweet Auburn he wrote shrinking from the spoiler's hand far far

away. The children leave the land. Goldsmith continued. Ill Fares the Land to hasten ills a prey where wealth accumulates and men decay and a bold peasantry their country's pride when once destroyed can never be supplied even now the devastation is begun and half the business of destruction done even now as powerless here I stand. I see the rural virtues leave the land. Goldsmith was telling us about Wolf's point and grandad and Hackensack and poplar and Rice Lake and Marshall. Perhaps neither goldsmith or Mr. Limbert could fix that. But they can remind us that there is and will be a human and ecological cost as farms go under a.