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SPEAKER: We're a bunch of happy Indians around here. I got my uncles and my nephews here, and we're having a lot of fun. All Indians leave this reservation, they always come back here, you see, because we're born and raised here. This is our home. And we got no place else to go.

They send us out on relocation. We go up there, different places. We get good jobs. We leave our jobs. We're lonesome for our people.

SPEAKER: The Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, Our Home Town, one in a series of programs exploring the values and character of life in small communities, produced by Minnesota Public Radio station KCCM, with funds provided by the North Dakota Committee for the Humanities and Public Issues.

While not a town, the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation is home to the people who live in the area in the center of the northern border of North Dakota. In today's program, you'll hear about the traditional Indian religion from Francis Cree. And other residents will describe the nature of the Michif or mixed French, Canadian, and Indian culture. The interviewer is John Ydstie.

SPEAKER: I know I am raised on Turtle Mountain Reservation. I'm a Chippewa Indian. That's all I have to know. Running around, hollering who am I and this and, that as far as knowing, I don't know what they mean by who am I.

SPEAKER: I think we do know who we are. I think we know where we came from. And we know what we have to face. And we have to learn how to face our problems.

GROUP: [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

SPEAKER: I'm from right here in the Turtle Mountains. I was born here, and I lived here all my life. And I love it.

JOHN YDSTIE: You do? What do you like about it? Why do you like it here?

SPEAKER: I don't know. It's not just the idea of living on-- being an Indian and living on an Indian reservation, but it's what you put into it that you really like about it. And that's try to go Indian all the way. [LAUGHS]

JOHN YDSTIE: Do you have a special attachment to this area?

SPEAKER: Not to this one area, but I like-- I want to live here just about all my life. I want my kids to grow up here the way I grew up here, too. I want to keep letting the generations go on and on in Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.

JOHN YDSTIE: What do you see for a future here?

SPEAKER: Well, I think it's going to change. So I really can't see what's going to be in the future. But it's changing now, and it will keep on changing probably for the better.

JOHN YDSTIE: Would do you guys miss Belcourt if you had to live somewhere else?

SPEAKER: Uh-uh.

SPEAKER: No, no, no way.

JOHN YDSTIE: Why not?

SPEAKER: Because who likes to live in the dumps?

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER: There's nothing to do around here.

JOHN YDSTIE: What do you think is unique about this area in terms of people and culture and as compared to the rest of the state?

SPEAKER: I'd say the duke's mixture, every nationality in the world here. The other towns you go, you find little Norwegians here and little Germans here. And they're kind of separate. But here, they're all in the pot.

SPEAKER: I was over I think six months and the guy said, hey, you're a good fella. How about going to work for me? And I said, crazy. I'm like, I'm crazy-- I'm not crazy about work. But I know I need to. OK, I'll take it.

And I think that's the thing I appreciated most about this community, was the fact that they didn't say to me, you're an ex-convict so you can't work.

SPEAKER: If you're going to live here, you got to have your feet on the ground. And you're going to be faced with a lot of problems, a lot of hurts, and learning to have to recognize a lot of the shortcomings that you are faced with here. I don't think this community is any different than any other community, where you have a pocket of poverty.

But I do feel that living here and trying to work in this area has made us all better people because we've been faced with a lot more problems than people perhaps of a middle or upper middle class society has ever been faced with. We know what it feels to hurt, to go without, and to be unemployed.

And I think we can recognize these as some of the symptoms that the people are faced with. And we are not critical of the people like we would be if we had grown up on the outside in a middle class society. I think we have more feelings for the people because we understand, we've lived with, and are more aware of the problems that people are faced with.

SPEAKER: If you go someplace else, you'll feel out of place. [CHUCKLES]

SPEAKER: And strange.

SPEAKER: Because it's smaller here, and if you go to a big city or something, you're going to feel uncomfortable and you will not know anything--

SPEAKER: You mostly know everybody around here.

SPEAKER: She knows everybody's big gossip.

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER: Well, we've been raised French mostly, all of us that have been raised around here. We've been raised French. We haven't been raised Indian. We're different from the Sioux. They're all Indian down there. They really know their culture and stuff.

And we don't. Most of our culture is French. Our language is half Cree and half French, half Indian and half French. And so it's pretty confusing. And a lot of our parents, they mostly identify with the French side. They'll say they're Indian. But that's fine. But that's as far as it goes.

And for the kids, their identity only came in really strong when AIM came, AIM got involved with the Indian Movement. They started identifying with that. So now they're not identifying so much with the French but the Indian. They're identifying more with the Indian.

In the high school, I see more kids dancing. We don't have that many dances around the Turtle Mountains as a tribe.

SPEAKER: I don't think we've ever felt that we were anything but Indian. And hopefully our grandchildren will carry on with the same feeling because I think this is one of the biggest areas of frustration amongst our people, is trying to be something that they aren't. You have to know who you are, what you are, and appreciate what you are in order to be content with it.

SPEAKER: Years back, well, if you were from the Reservation, you weren't looked upon too well for a job. And a lot of these people were mixed bloods. So a lot of them could pass as French.

They wouldn't say they were from here. They'd say they were from Rolla. They wouldn't say from Elkhart and little things like that. But you don't find that too much today. But there's still some.

SPEAKER: Of course, if you read the textbooks that we grew up with-- and there's changes are just now coming about-- the Indians were made out to be savages and everything else. So people would go to school and they'd look at their ancestry and say, jeez, I don't want to be one of those.

They were savage. They were uncivilized. They tortured the whites and all this. And actually, they became I think prejudiced against themselves as a result of their educational learning.

Fine, you can see yourself as an Indian. You have a good self-image. So you don't care who knows you're Indian and you feel great about it. So I think in that respect, it's a state of mind. And I heard people say, well, I want to be an Indian. And I'll ask the question, well, what is an Indian? And actually, what is an Indian?

I see myself as an Indian. Maybe somebody else wouldn't see me that way. But I feel I'm an Indian. I-- I'm just an Indian. Some people say, well, you don't think like an Indian. Well, how does an Indian think, because what is an Indian?

SPEAKER: An Indian does have a different point of view. And as you know, most Indians are humble towards one another. And they don't really go around sticking their nose up in the air and think they're real proud. I think an Indian has-- definitely has a different point of view.

We share with everything we have, our groceries. We share gas and stuff like that. I think it's valuable. And the powwow, the celebrations, the Indians are very patriotic to America. And we are proud of our land.

If you've noticed the dancers, there's quite a few of the dancers that have the red, white, and blue. If there's a veteran dancing in the crowd, you'll know he's a veteran because he's wearing red, white, and blue. Like me, I'm not a veteran. But I'm very proud of this land.

And I wear a flag when I dance. It hangs on my right side. Essentially, being Indian is being yourself, to try and do the best you could in school or at work or at home.

SPEAKER: Indian people quit their jobs to go powwowing. And we don't have two weeks out of the year where we go on vacation. That's a white man's trip. When we feel like leaving, we'll go. And that's mostly in the summertime.

And we go and we meet our relatives. And we meet friends at powwows. And we meet Indians from all over the country and stuff there. And it's just-- well, it's in our blood. It's part of our culture.

There's a lot of people just can't stay away from powwows no matter what. It's really neat. So that's what they're for. It's just to have a good time and to dance.

The traditional dance now, that's the old way of dancing. The old time way of dancing, the men's dance. And I really dig it. And the women's traditionals, where the women just stand in one place and bounce up and down in time to the drumbeat, the fancy dance, that's just come in.

And when I first saw that, the women's fancy dance, I was really shocked because-- and there's a lot of old people around here, too. A lot of them, they'll say, we never dance like that. That's shameful, and stuff like that, because it really looked like a boogaloo almost.

It's a lot of fun. And really, like I said, it gets in your blood. But the fancy dance is something new. And it's something the older Indians right now, the more traditional Indians, really frown upon.

The men, there's a way they go down. They're supposed to be telling a story with their dance. A lot of that meaning is lost. And I've never had anyone explain that to me. I've just had explained by an old Indian woman that that's what they do, is tell a story with their dance.

GROUP: [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

SPEAKER: The Chippewa religion, they had this what they call Medieval Society. Then they had-- they also had another religion, what they call the Bear [? Sweathouse ?] religion. And they also had another religion, what they call the Smokehouse, Smoke Teepee religion.

And also, they had the Sundance religion. Now, the Sundance religion would take part on the dawn, early spring, early in the summer in June. Now, this here was the family people would promise god that they fulfill in good through torture, and sacrifice themselves and torture and then through fasting, different things for the hardship that they go through, the healing, and so forth.

This was the Sundance. Then they worshiped different gods, many different gods-- stone and the moon and the sun and stars and everything just about you can name it, many gods. They had great respect and what I mean, real respect.

And then the Medieval Society, worship was practiced medicine. Bad medicines, they were exorcise bad medicines, which is what they call today-- white man calls this witchcraft, where witchcraft was practiced. Powerful medicine, powerful witchcraft, I believe it falls in the same line like seances and things like that, comes about in that same category.

And the Bear Sweathouse also was a purifying, purifying the body, and also a worship. And here, there was worship the Bear god. The Bear god was worshipped. That was a real torture. It was a real torture.

They use stones, so many stones, about 80 stones. And it was covered up, made like a hut, about 8-foot long and about 4 to 5-feet wide, about 3-- 3 and 1/2 feet high. It was covered up good and tight. You couldn't get out until it was all over with.

You just go in there, just the shorts, and stand all the heat in there. I suppose the heat must have been in there close to 300 because I almost cooked a lot of times in there.

And these other ones was the same. They'd sing all night what they call the Smokehouse. They'd sing all night. And they'd smoke there. And they talk to gods. And they sing different types of worship songs, different spirits-- calling and talking to different spirits. This was another worship. So these are the worships the Chippewas that they had here in the Turtle Mountains.

SPEAKER: So Mother Earth was always given a present. If you took a root or anything from the ground, your mother, you gave a present in return because out of the Earth, your body came. That's the Indian belief.

And then they worshiped the sun. And the sun was worshiped because without the sun, there would be no life. So it was like a father-mother arrangement. Without either one, there would be no Indian. There would be no animal. So that's why they worshiped that.

And then the moon regulated the seasons. But that's why they worshiped, because there was that belief that the sun was the giver of life. And the mother was the womb, the Earth.

SPEAKER: I was just starting to realize that-- how beautiful the Indian person was in the old days. They're just getting acquainted with some of the heroes of the various Indian tribes. No person is 100% whatever.

All Indian ideals were Indian ideals. They were something that a person wanted to live by to the best of his ability. And there's no reason that a person can become aware of-- first of all, I have to become aware of what was an Indian's ideal. What did he think was important?

I don't need to live in a teepee to understand or to try to be a better person, OK? My idea of being Indian is being a better person. I guess one of the things that I personally, as a person of dual cultures, has had to try to accept both sides of himself as I'm OK.

I don't give a damn what anybody says. But I have to feel OK about myself. If I'm part white and I'm part Indian, I have to accept those. And I don't know that there is anywhere where people live Indian

To what my understanding of Indian is because I think Indian was not a poor person. He was not a confused person. He was in tune with his environment. He was in tune with nature. He was a beautiful person who knows how to survive in the woods.

I can't think of a person who can go back here in the woods and live and spend a year around here in 30-below weather and survive. Many, many Indian people did that.

SPEAKER: There's so many things religion that has lost. The spirituality is lost. There's so many things about women not wearing eagle feathers or going through a ceremony of it, those things are lost. Otherwise, being Indian to me culturally, it's dancing. It's knowing your language. It's being proud of being Indian.

If anyone comes up and tells me they're Indian, I accept them. Because if they believe it, then that's fantastic. I accept that totally.

JOHN YDSTIE: In the Turtle Mountains, there's also a Michif culture. Are they separate cultures or is it kind of all mixed?

SPEAKER: Oh, the Métis culture is quite different. It's from the French-Canadian side. It started back in the 1800s when the French trappers came over. And they met the Indian woman. And they married. And that made a Métis, a halfbreed.

And they are different. I think the Métis culture in this reservation, they have the tendency to go out and get an education. I think that's got a tremendous influence in this Turtle Mountain Reservation.

The Métis culture have what they call a violin dance, square dance and stuff. The majority of people living in this reservation know how to play an instrument of some kind.

[STRUMMING]

SPEAKER: One of the things on the old time fiddle players they used to do around here, they used to use their feet a lot when they play. This was their background for their music. And a lot of these old timers are still-- they have monster feet. And in fact, a lot of the guys, hell, their feet sound better than their fiddle playing.

[LAUGHTER]

I'll show you an example what it is when you get the feet going on.

[UPBEAT STRUMMING]

[RHYTHMIC STOMPING]

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER: Until recently, it wasn't preferred to be Indian. And this affected many of our people because many of them are mixed blood. Many of them are half Indian and half French. Very few of them are half Anglo.

I don't include French as Anglos because they're a little darker skinned anyway. And that's one reason why the French were so acceptable to our tribe back 200 years ago, is because they were different than the white-- what do you call them-- settlers and other people that were moving West.

So they moved right into our society. And they, instead of telling the Indian people that they were doing things wrong, that they should do it this way, the French adapted the Indian lifestyle. And they married the Indian women.

And as time went on, the Michif was-- Michif culture was formed. But we were still Indian. We may not be the-- I'm not talking about the whole Turtle Mountain tribe because there are some traditional Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indians.

Most of the people who live here are not traditional in the sense they don't practice Indian religion. Well, the Catholic religion has been here. And that is the dominant religion here. And it's been here 200, 300 years with our people. So you're not talking about changing back to a traditional Indian religion that has been absent for only 50 or 60 years, like some of the other Southwest tribes.

And you're talking about a religion that's been absent for 200, 300 years. So as far as religion, we are not traditional. However, I think in our value systems and our family systems, we are very traditional. In fact, I think we are traditional more so than some other tribes around the country.

JOHN YDSTIE: When you're dealing with your heritage here in Turtle Mountain, do you try to teach the local heritage, the Michif culture?

SPEAKER: Very much. So we have a Michif language, of course, which is recognized tentatively anyway, recognized by the State Department. We teach the Michif way of life, whatever that is. It's, like you say, the value system, and the family system.

We don't go into the traditional religious system. But we do study the Ojibwe and the Algonquin religious systems that were prevalent years ago and are disappearing now. It's hard to get literature on those type of religious customs because they were unrecorded. And we depend on a lot of the older people. And there are some around to give us that information.

SPEAKER: The people are generally jolly people. They're fun people. They like to have fun and are all easy to laugh. I'm sure you've noticed that, everybody ready to-- everything's funny. They can have a ball.

And yet they can get mad so easily. I don't know if that comes from the French or whatever, probably. They don't hold their emotions. If they're mad, you'll know it. And if they're happy, you'll know it. This is just the way that people are.

You'll still hear-- if some guy's a real good fighter, you'll still hear a lot of the other guys brag about him, boy. I wouldn't mess with him. He's a real tough guy, boy. And they brag him up and. I don't think this probably has a lot to do. So he's got a reputation to live up to after that.

And of course, everybody else is going to have to try to knock him down and say, well, I-- maybe I can whip him. And then I'll be the big guy. But again, there, I don't think this is as true now as it was before because most people, they're not interested in having that kind of a reputation.

I think people that have a good education or a college degree, that are looked up to by most-- although, there are some people that are jealous of people that have a college degree, we've got those segment of the people that's-- jealousy has probably done more damage on this reservation than anything.

And you'll see this where this is one of the things that still pretty deep where there's a lot of people that are jealous of others. One person gets something. The other one's jealous. They don't pat them on the back and say, gee, that's great. I'm glad to see you got this. Instead, they resent that the other individual-- I don't know why this is. But I see it.

SPEAKER: Just about every night of the week, you could go to a dance. I don't care what it was.

SPEAKER: They keep-- we keep having dances. They'd have what they call a bouquet dance. And they'd bake a cake and they'd have a bouquet.

SPEAKER: Whoever put the dance on would just walk around in there and all of a sudden, you'd be sitting there and he'd hand it to you. And it was up to you to put the next dance on. And you would have to give a time and date to where you're going to have it and put one on.

So I really used to have fun in those dances. And there used to be-- it used to be a lot of fun. Square dancing was a big thing-- square dancing, waltzes, foxtrots, two steps. And of course, our traditional Red River Jig was all everybody had to see who was the best to stop the other one.

And of course, that part of it, still going on. But the square dancing seems to have died out. You see it very seldom that-- and if it is, it's usually the older people, I suppose. I say, older people our age--

[LAUGHTER]

--that are doing this. Most of them don't do this. Of course, they've got all these wild dances that they're doing now. And that's about what most of the young people are following. And they are getting away from our own traditions from Reservation.

[UPBEAT STRUMMING]

SPEAKER: The Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, Our Home Town, one in a series of sound self-portraits, illustrating the attitudes and character of life in small communities, produced by Minnesota Public Radio station, KCCM, with funds provided by the North Dakota Committee for the Humanities and Public Issues.

Producers of the series are John Ydstie, Dennis Hamilton, and Bill Siemering. You may purchase a cassette copy of this program by contacting KCCM, Concordia College. Moorhead, Minnesota. 56560.