Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

[BIRD CALLING] BO DEVAULT: He got 'em.

JOHN BIEWIN: For Bo Devault, a barefoot four-year-old chasing chickens in the dirt outside his family's trailer on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation is a favorite pastime. He catches a hen in his arms and squeezes it, smiling proudly before letting it go.

BO DEVAULT: Let's get that one way.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bo is tireless, despite the 90-degree heat. He scrambles onto what's left of an old truck sitting in the yard, just its hood propped up at an angle, which he uses as a slide.

[BIRD CHIRPING]

BO DEVAULT: [GROANS]

WILLIAM JACKSON: Watch where you're going.

JOHN BIEWIN: That's Bo's cousin, William Jackson, on a bicycle. William, who is 5, lives with his mother in a house just 50 yards or so from the Devaults' trailer. Altogether, there are half a dozen small houses and trailers clustered around a looped gravel road in this clearing in the woods a few miles outside the reservation village of Inger. Bob and Beverly Devault and their four children live at the end of the loop in an old trailer with a plywood addition on one side and a large TV antenna rising from the roof.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: Well, my grandma and grandpa moved here first. My dad moved them from Inger. There was nothing out here. He owned it for a long time, and we finally moved out here in 1967.

JOHN BIEWIN: Beverly Devault, Bo's mother, is 36. She's one of five sisters who live on this plot of land with their parents. The land was allotted to the Jackson family by the reservation around the turn of the century. The Devaults' trailer is the center of activity for the extended family. Beverly's sisters and their children come in and out freely and frequently.

The trailer is furnished with a long couch and an assortment of kitchen chairs, all very well worn. The ceiling is patched with a large piece of white Styrofoam, where the gas stove started a fire last winter. The walls are covered with a couple different varieties of plywood paneling and hung with oil paintings by Bob Devault and a number of Bo's crayon drawings from last year's Head Start classes.

[FAN HUMMING]

With a fan humming nearby, Beverly, a tall, large-boned woman with calm, dark eyes, sits at the small kitchen table and runs her fingers over a plate of wild rice, picking out hulls missed in the parching process.

BEVERLY DUVALL: The way everyone around here does it is, they parch it on a fire day. They have a big cast iron kettle. That's what my ma uses. And they build a fire on it, and then it's sideways. It's sitting sideways, and then they use a paddle and just turn it and turn it and turn it till they know when it's done. That's what they call parching it. And then they thrash it, and it gets all this stuff out here, but it doesn't get it all out.

JOHN BIEWIN: Native Americans on reservations are reputed to be mistrustful and reticent toward outsiders, but I find the Devaults gracious and open. Teenagers Roberta and Penny, who are 16 and 13, are quick to get out their jingle dresses to show me how they dance at powwows.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: I can do it better when you, Scarlett. I don't want to start it. You start it.

[JINGLING]

Go ahead. Go ahead.

[JINGLING]

JOHN BIEWIN: The satin dresses, one purple, the other, brown, have hundreds of jingles, pieces of tin cans or snuff covers rolled into cones and sewn on to the dresses in rows. Roberta, who goes by Bobby, says there's a powwow every weekend in the summer. She suggests the dancing is not for evoking the past, but rather says a lot about who she is.

ROBERTA DEVAULT: You're Indian if you go to a powwow and stuff like that. But if you don't, they'll say, oh, you're acting all white and everything.

[JINGLING]

And it's really important to the Indian [INAUDIBLE].

JOHN BIEWIN: The Devaults are among the 5,000 Chippewa who live on Leech Lake, but they admit they are not in every way typical. They are carving out a life on the reservation, a life that is at least partly Indian. But at the same time, they are fighting to avoid the problems that devastate so many of their people. The word pride is spoken often in the Devaults' house, or sometimes it's just hinted at, like when Bobby talks about always trying to dance well.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: You have to-- when you're dancing to the music and stuff, you have to make sure it sounds right. And it's really hard when you're dancing by someone that doesn't dance too good. And if they dance off beat, you could hear the dress, you know? And it's really hard to-- you end up starting to dance like them, but it's really hard to keep dancing good when someone else is dancing on their feet by you.

[JINGLING]

[ENGINE STUTTERS]

[ENGINE REVS]

BOB DEVAULT: Go back [INAUDIBLE].

[ENGINE REVVING]

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob Devault drives the reservation's gravel roads in search of birch and basswood for the Indian crafts he and his family make for their summer livelihood. The average household income for Leech Lake Indians is about $7,500 a year. The Devaults may be slightly better off than that, but not much. So the family makes do with old things, used things that Bob fixes up, like the 15-year-old Mazda pickup he bought for $250.

[ENGINE RUMBLING]

[UNDERBRUSH CRACKING UNDERFOOT]

In the woods, thick with mosquitoes, Devault breaks branches off small basswood trees. He wears jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt on his lean frame.

[UNDERBRUSH CRACKING UNDERFOOT]

BOB DEVAULT: Here it goes.

[UNDERBRUSH CRACKING UNDERFOOT]

JOHN BIEWIN: The bark from the branches will be peeled and cut in strips, then used as thread or [? wegeb ?] to sew birch bark baskets together. The crafts the Devaults make are ultimately sold in East Coast stores.

BOB DEVAULT: The old Indian people still respect the land and what it has to offer, the way they see it.

[SAWING]

I respect it because it's a resource.

JOHN BIEWIN: But Bob says though he makes birch bark crafts using traditional Indian techniques, the work doesn't have the spiritual meaning for him that it does for some Native Americans. birch bark, he says, is just his way of making a living.

[BIRDS SINGING]

Back at the Devaults' trailer, Bob explains that the birch bark work earned his family about $5,000 last summer, enough to keep them off welfare for nearly half the year. He hopes, eventually, to find a way to store more bark through the winter to make it a year-round job.

BOB DEVAULT: Well, I started about six years ago. Seven? I started out with the simple things my mother-in-law showed me. Then I noticed all this attention these white guys were getting for building canoes. They were in the magazines, sports magazines. I got thinking, why isn't the Indian building his own canoe and getting some of the recognition? It takes a white man to build a birch bark canoe. Indians should build their own canoes.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob says he settled on craft work as a way to get a new start in life after years of drinking. Alcoholism is epidemic on the reservation. People in Inger say the village of 200 people has only a few adults who are not alcoholic. Bob Devault says most in his generation were raised by parents who drank, and he was no exception.

BOB DEVAULT: And my mom died. My dad turned to drinking after a few years. He was lonely and what have you. He had a stack of bills. He had a rough time, so we didn't get no attention or guidance from my father. And I started drinking at 14 years old, fighting.

I hated school. I'd miss half a year of the school year. I flunked two years in a row that one time. I turned 18 in ninth grade. The other kids would go to A&W. I'd go to the 3-2 beer joint and drink beer and go back to class, fall asleep on the desk.

And they told me I should just quit, so I just up and quit one day. I tried to get a job for a while, and I couldn't keep that, either. I kept getting in trouble. And I didn't have much choice than to join the Marine Corps. And that's what kind of saved me.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob says his stint in Vietnam with the Marines taught him the discipline to get his drinking under control, which he finally did about six years ago. Beverly Devault's parents never drank and she doesn't, either. Bob and Beverly suggest that being free of the bottle makes them outsiders in their community, with only a few other sober Indians to associate with.

EARL ROBINSON: I don't know what's wrong with the people here. They just don't-- they just don't care. And in another way, I don't blame them, you know? Because there's nothing to look forward to. No jobs.

JOHN BIEWIN: Earl Robinson, who is 72, is a respected elder in the village. He says in his childhood, people in Inger spoke Chippewa, got their sustenance mainly by hunting and fishing, and lived in tar paper shacks with no electricity or running water.

EARL ROBINSON: But they weren't poor. I don't think-- I never did see, really, a poor, poor Indian. I think the Indians are worse off today than they were back then. Some people are. And this village itself really has been going downhill, really, for the last 40 years.

JOHN BIEWIN: Robinson sits at a picnic table in his yard, wearing work clothes and a baseball cap. He remembers when there were few limits enforced on hunting or fishing and when families could make substantial money harvesting wild rice. That was before paddy-grown rice drove prices way down in those days, Robinson says the Ojibwe were more self-sufficient. And he says the drinking wasn't so bad then. Inger used to have enough sober and healthy young men to field an amateur baseball team.

EARL ROBINSON: And we had some real good teams, and we played some good teams. Well, we were the only Indian team, and we were all Indian. So the teams used to really go out for us. They wanted to knock us down flat. '53 and '54, we won the state tournament. And we beat everybody by a good game, like, one run, two runs, or something like that all summer long. It was fun, but we all took a drum along with us. So we'd have a powwow after every ballgame, win or lose.

And the white teams used to join right with us. They'd be out there, dancing just like we did, [LAUGHS] drinking beer and having a good time. Nobody got ever riled up. Or there were never any fights. We got along good with the people that we played with and teams that played against us. You don't see that anymore.

The thing that ruins the ball teams here is drinking. They try to have a ball game, a ball team last summer, and they got thrown out of the league because they didn't show up because they were drunk. I used to like to go to ball games. I used to like to go to these ball games that went from here. I'd follow them all over the place and just watch them.

But after the last few years, I wouldn't go near them at all, not that I'm ashamed of them, but I know what's going to happen. I hate to see them get out there and make fools of themselves. That's what they're doing.

JOHN BIEWIN: Robinson says the educational opportunities for Native Americans are greater than ever. Three of his own children have graduated from college and have good jobs, but he says they are in a small minority. Most Indian kids, if they do finish high school, go no further.

The problem, according to Earl Robinson, is in the families, which he says have been undermined by the absence of jobs, of hope, of pride.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN BIEWIN: The Devaults would never admit to being special. But in a place where so many people manage to find community only in drunkenness and despair, the Devaults are clearly determined to be among the healthy ones, to dance on beat, despite the struggles of those around them.

It's about 9:30 PM at the Devaults' place. Beverly and her sister, Sarah Jackson, are making supper, seasoned wild rice and fry bread, a fritter-like food that the kids eat with peanut butter.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: [LAUGHS] I got generic peanut butter this time.

SARAH DEVAULT: Where's the Skippy? Don't you love us?

[LAUGHTER]

BEVERLY DEVAULT: Not much. That's too much.

SARAH DEVAULT: I'll put it in.

JOHN BIEWIN: After supper, Beverly rubs ointment all over her youngest, Bo, who's gotten dozens of new mosquito bites during the day.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: Behind your back, it's just all chewed up.

JOHN BIEWIN: The older girls have gone to their grandmother's house. That's where they sleep now that their former bedroom in the trailer's addition has been turned into a workshop for birch barking. Daniel, the seven-year-old, sleeps soundly on the couch. He and Bo will be carried later to the bedroom in the back of the trailer that they share with their parents.

At 11:30, while Bob sweeps up in the workshop, Beverly finally gets to the dishes. I asked to talk with her about her children.

It's sort of an understatement. It's sort of obvious, but it seems like you care a lot about them.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: [LAUGHS] I do, a lot. Everything revolves around our kids. Everything we do is for our kids.

[WATER SPLASHING]

We figure after they're grown up, then we could do what we want to do, then. OK. They have a good start in. It seems like that's all they would need.

[BROOM SWEEPING]

Daniel, let's a-- [LAUGHS] you're never going to get used to it till you just get down then, OK?

DANIEL DUVAULT: No, no.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: I'll take you.

DANIEL DUVAULT: No, no.

BEVERLY DEVAULT: I'll take you there anyway.

JOHN BIEWIN: Another summer day on Leech Lake. Bobby and Penny try to coax their little brother, Daniel, into the cold water of Bowstring Lake, about a mile from their home. The temperature's in the 90s again, and the four Devault children and two of their cousins have come to the lake to cool off.

[WATER SPLASHING]

BEVERLY DEVAULT: [LAUGHS] Hey, look. You can stand.

[LAUGHTER]

walk them out there on your back.

[WATER SPLASHING]

JOHN BIEWIN: It's the end of the long 4th of July weekend. A ways out on the lake, several fishing boats are anchored. The people in them sit motionless, watching their lines. A pair of ducks flies away as a powerboat from a nearby resort roars past, pulling two water skiers. The children pay no attention.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JOHN BIEWIN: Outside the Devaults' trailer, Bob has arranged a makeshift grill by laying an oven shelf across some cinder blocks. Some friends, the Wilkinsons, a white, middle-aged couple who live in the woods not far away, have come over for a 4th of July cookout.

[SIZZLING]

BOB DEVAULT: I believe these are done. What about hamburgers, bro?

SPEAKER 1: Yeah.

BOB DEVAULT: I can't eat but one of them, Kenny.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, I can eat about three.

BOB DEVAULT: You skinny guys are all like that.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob Devault says as far as he's concerned, this gathering isn't really a celebration of America's independence, which, as he puts it, didn't do the Indian any good.

BOB DEVAULT: It don't have much significance, other than everybody has a barbecue or something. I do it, too. Christmas, you buy the kids presents. Well, the same thing. I don't practice religion. I don't-- but when the kids go to school, other kids get presents. Their parents might tell them about religion. But I do it just because those other kids get gifts, too, and they talk about what they get.

Other than that, I probably wouldn't celebrate Christmas, either. So I'm kind of stuck between two cultures. I choose not to believe in either one of them, but just the better points in each one of them.

JOHN BIEWIN: Many reservation Indians, unlike Bob Devault, make a clear choice between the cultures.

[CHANTING, DRUM BEATING]

That night, about 1,000 people, mostly Indians with a few whites mixed in, attend the 4th of July powwow some 50 miles from the Devaults' home on the outskirts of Cass Lake. The thinnest slice of moon hangs in the sky over the sacred circle, which is illuminated by stadium lights. A few hundred people in traditional dress move around the grass in small, bouncing steps. Many more sit in the grandstands surrounding the circle or mill about behind the bleachers, where food and beverage stands are set up.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you. We'll go right back up to the top, Dan.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bobby and Penny Devault are here, but they're in jeans and blouses, having decided not to dance tonight. They run off to find some friends. The atmosphere behind the grandstands reminds me of a county fair or a high school football game, where people socialize and perhaps boys meet girls. The Ojibwe's slang term for that, I'm told, is snagging. But there's more going on here than just socializing.

SANDRA GOOD SKY: When you think about a spiritual life, this is it.

JOHN BIEWIN: Sandra Good Sky says she grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation and now works for the schools in Duluth.

SANDRA GOOD SKY: And when I dance out there, sometimes the drum will be beating just like my heart beat, and it's a real spiritual connection. And at times, I get really emotional, because it's so intense in a real spiritual way.

JOHN BIEWIN: Good Sky says after several generations in which the white society actively tried to strip Native Americans of their traditions, there's now a resurgence of Indian culture.

SANDRA GOOD SKY: And I think in the '70s, when I was living in the cities, you would see a lot of the people coming back with the drum and the powwows. And it's just gotten bigger and better and stronger. And I think it's going to get a lot stronger.

[NON-ENGLISH CHANTING, PERCUSSIVE MUSIC]

SPEAKER 3: 500, H.

PAT SAJAK (ON TV): Yes, one H.

[BEEP]

Getting close to $4,000 now.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN BIEWIN: The balancing of cultures continues the next day at the Devaults'. Wheel of Fortune is on in the living room, keeping Beverly company while she cleans house. Meanwhile, in the workshop, Beverly's sister, Sarah Jackson, sews a thin willow branch around the rim of a small birch bark basket.

SARAH JACKSON: My mom used to do birch bark before, but she'd only do it in the summer. They'd make different things.

SPEAKER 4: I know he does that, too.

SARAH JACKSON: Sand dishes, birdhouses, boats, or canoes. Whatever.

JOHN BIEWIN: Sarah Jackson is 41. She doesn't know her family's history more than a couple generations back. History books say the Ojibwe came to what is now Minnesota in the 1700s, pushed here from the East Coast by white settlers. They'd gotten firearms from trading with whites and used them to drive the Dakota or Sioux out of the area. The treaty establishing the Leech Lake Reservation, one of seven Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota, was signed in 1855. Sarah Jackson.

SARAH JACKSON: What my dad said is, the Indians always lived on this continent. They said that-- from what they tell us, they made people, and they put them in different places and gave them their own religion and values and stuff, like the Caucasians across the ocean and the Black people down in South America, I guess you'd call it. And Indians here in North America.

And other people, like in Japan and the Chinese, they were all-- because they have a legend where-- I don't know how it goes, but that's basically what I figured it out to be.

JOHN BIEWIN: So then, when white people came here--

SARAH JACKSON: Yeah, it kind of mixed it up. [LAUGHS] [INAUDIBLE] I don't know.

JOHN BIEWIN: The children playing nearby are Sarah's five-year-old son, William, whose father, she says, lives down the road, and her two-year-old grandson, Jordan. Jordan is the son of Sarah's daughter, who's in her early 20s.

SARAH JACKSON: She thought it was fun to have a baby. Just because she used to babysit William once in a while, she thought it was easy.

JORDAN DUVAULT: How come you didn't put it tight, Mom?

JOHN BIEWIN: Sarah says she's been raising Jordan since he was 10 days old, when her daughter declared that she couldn't take care of the child and left the state.

SARAH JACKSON: It was hard. I was mad at her for a long time, but then I figured, well, if she would have kept him, maybe she would abuse him or something. So I figured I saved him from being hit or whatever.

JOHN BIEWIN: Teenage pregnancies are one more problem on the reservation. Bobby Devault can tick off the names of Indian girls in her high school who've had children. Bobby attends Deer River High School, where most of the students are white. She doesn't like it there.

BOBBY DEVAULT: You know them Indian schools they have, like Flandreau and stuff? I was thinking about going to them. Like, if you really like something, they'll help you with it. I was thinking about going to that next year.

SPEAKER 5: Why do you choose Indian schools?

BOBBY DEVAULT: Because there's Indian kids there, and it's easier to get along, I think.

SPEAKER 5: You're not going to segregate yourself and later life, are you?

BOBBY DEVAULT: No.

SPEAKER 5: Well, why do it when you're getting an education? You don't care care to be the best among all of them?

SPEAKER 6: I went down there.

JOHN BIEWIN: A few miles from their home, Bobby, Daniel, and Bo lead the way along a wooded path to what's called the Turtle Mound, where a prehistoric woodland tribe, thousands of years ago, created a ceremonial carving in the ground. There's now a historical marker and a wooden fence around the site.

BOBBY DEVAULT: They just made it a long time ago. And so it's, like, where a big turtle was or something that's like an imprint or something, I guess.

JOHN BIEWIN: Actually, Bobby doesn't seem to be thinking much about the past these days, but a lot about the future. She wants to be a commercial artist. She says the reason she wants to transfer to a Native American school is that in her public school, Indians are given less help because it's assumed they will fail. She tells of an incident last fall, when she missed some school because of allergies and when she returned, a school administrator had jumped to conclusions about why she'd been absent.

BOBBY DEVAULT: He said, well, Roberta, do you have a chemical problem? We can help you if you have a chemical problem. Does your mom just let you stay home and-- oh, Roberta's mom just lets her do whatever she wants, huh? And I got mad at him. And so I took off from school right after that. And I called my mom, and she came to pick me up, because I was just too mad to stay in school that day.

I mean, to say oh, Roberta, do you have a chemical problem and all this stuff is like, you think all Indians are like that or something?

JOHN BIEWIN: In order to escape prejudice, Bobby suggests she'll have to leave the reservation.

BOBBY DEVAULT: Well, If I move somewhere, it would be in a city, because especially on the West or the East Coast-- because there's all kinds of people, and they're not really that prejudiced. And if I had a kid, I'd want them to know that there's prejudice, but I wouldn't want him to deal with it every day or something or to be stereotyped, or just to-- I don't know. I think when you're stereotyped, you're held back or something.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob Devault worries a lot about the influences his children face and that he faces. It's the last morning of my visit. We talk over several cups of coffee before Bob goes out to collect birch bark. He gets a pained expression when talking about how few Indian friends he has anymore.

BOB DEVAULT: Because you hang around with successful people. That only makes you feel better. It makes you feel like trying more. I don't know if that would bring me down or-- to hang around with them, I'd be socializing with them, drinking. And I might be drinking more and more. And finally, I'd be back to where I was an alcoholic. Oh, I can't even associate with Indians.

JOHN BIEWIN: The smell of bacon finds its way into the workshop. Four-year-old Bo comes in and climbs on his father's lap. I ask Bob what he wants for his children.

BOB DEVAULT: Well, I just hope they'll want to do something on their own. I don't want them be anything but a good person. I want them to have drive and ambition. I want them to have a good life. That's all.

JOHN BIEWIN: Bob and Beverly Devault say it makes no difference to them whether their children choose to live on the reservation or not. What does matter is that the children continue to care, to care about each other and, above all, to care about themselves. If they can only keep dancing to that beat, they will have defeated the odds.

SPEAKER 7: Right here.

JOHN BIEWIN: On the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota, this is John Biewin.

SPEAKER 10: You already you want to come in the water?

[NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE MUSIC]

Bob, do you want to come in the water?

BOB DEVAULT: No.

SPEAKER 10: Why not?

BOB DEVAULT: Because it's too deep.

SPEAKER 10: It's not right here.

[NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE MUSIC]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER 11: Dancing on Beat-- A Portrait of a Reservation Family was written and produced by John Biewin, edited by Kate Moos, research assistants from Susan Helena. Studio engineer, John Gatto. This program is a production of Minnesota Public Radio's Main Street Radio Team.

[NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE MUSIC]

[BIRDS CALLING]