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DAN OLSON: And then for you later on, boarding school?

JIM NORTHRUP: Yes, I went away to boarding school, and our only way of communicating was by letter. There were no phones. So at first, I'd have other people write my letters until I learned how to do it myself. And then I would write these long, detailed, rambling letters to my folks and let them know what I was seeing, what I was experiencing.

DAN OLSON: Were the boarding school teachers-- did they notice your skill, your talent for writing? Or was there no real recognition, appreciation, and encouragement of writing?

JIM NORTHRUP: Not in the boarding schools. I was also a compulsive reader at the time, so the teachers did encourage me to read.

DAN OLSON: Now, when you go around and talk to young people about writing, what do you tell them to do, keep a journal, turn off the TV? What?

JIM NORTHRUP: Well, actually, I try to give them the idea that writing is something that you really have to work at if you want to be good at it. And the most important rule about writing that I pass on is to believe what you have to say is important. Once you have that belief, then the rest of it falls into place, the grammar, the editing, the spelling.

DAN OLSON: Where did your self-confidence come from about what you had to say was important?

JIM NORTHRUP: I think a lot of it was from Vietnam. If I can survive Vietnam, I can survive anything. If I can survive the peace after Vietnam, I can do anything. The fact that my grandfather was a writer was a big help. That gave me the courage because I grew up hearing the stories about him and his writing. So I knew, if he could do it when it was really tough to be an Anishinaabe back in the 1920s, I could do it in the 1970s and the '80s.

DAN OLSON: I haven't read much about you, but this is new to me. I didn't know about your grandfather and about his writing. Tell me a little bit more. What did he write, and did you know him a lot?

JIM NORTHRUP: I knew him, but just as a child. He was quite a remarkable man. He went to Carlisle, one of the original boarding schools for us in Pennsylvania. He was there for a while, and he was thrown out of there. There's the most recent clipping in the National Archives about him, says, Minnesota Indian goes West in irons. So he had to pay for his trip-- train trip back and also the guard that accompanied him.

DAN OLSON: Your father was apparently in the parlance probably of the people of the time, a nonconformist, your grandfather.

JIM NORTHRUP: Yeah, the grandfather. I like to think that he was maybe 70 years ahead of his time for his attitudes. He thought the main purpose of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was to hold us down, and he wrote about them.

His most famous piece of writing was a story called "Wawina," like the little town in Northern Minnesota. It is set in a time of the coming of the Black Robes, which would be about 1650, 1680, when the Jesuit priests first came to the Anishinaabe, when we were still fighting the Dakota people. So it was kind of a tragic Romeo, Juliet kind of a story, but it was filled with a lot of detail. So.

DAN OLSON: This, I suppose, is something white people don't know a lot about, since we think of the American Indian tradition as mostly an oral tradition. And obviously, we're finding out that, of course, there's a written tradition, too.

JIM NORTHRUP: Well, there is an oral tradition, specifically the family history. I can tell you who my father is, my grandfather, my great grandfather, my great, great grandfather, great, great, great, great, going back to about 1740. And it gets kind of hazy before that. But I know in 1740, one of my ancestors named Mikinaak was walking around. That means Snapping Turtle. Then in the 1800s, there was another man whose name was-- he speaks with a deep voice. So I come by my voice honestly.

DAN OLSON: How would you describe your use of humor in writing. Your lukewarm water has a hard life sometimes, but his journey is always leavened with some humor. Why do you do it that way?

JIM NORTHRUP: I think it's a true reflection of life. Humor is a big part of the Anishinaabe life I know. Any time you see more than two Indians together, one of them is laughing. And so I think we use humor as a survival tool. Sometimes, things are so bad, all you can do is laugh at it or make a joke.

My great Aunt Lucy died, and we were feeling pretty sad about that. And so the hearse that was carrying her casket to the cemetery started to back up the hill to the cemetery, and he couldn't make it. And so he went down to the bottom, and he got a run at it. And he went roaring up the hill, and he was bouncing and swaying. And he still couldn't make it.

So he went down again, and he tried again. He went a little further. And this time, he was really cruising backwards up that hill. And the hearse was bouncing. The casket was bouncing, and we were just watching it.

And then my brother said, gee, Aunt Lucy's last ride on Earth got to be a death ride. And that immediately took away the tension and took away our sadness because then we started telling stories about Lucy and about the good things she did or the funny things she said. Or even other funerals were funny. Things have happened.

DAN OLSON: Has this been a strange time for you? Because I think I recall reading about you. You observed the traditional ways. You practiced the traditional ways. But now here we are on the seventh floor in the middle of a city. You're now an actor in your newest life on stage. So is that a-- is that a pull to-- is it compromising traditional ways?

JIM NORTHRUP: No, we're done with the sugarbush for the year. We had a very good return for our investment, as they say in the white world. In other words, we got enough syrup for all the work we did.

And our next big season is birchbark basket making. And so I've started on that. When I go home, when I'm not down here in the city, I've started making the frames for the baskets. We expect to make about 45 baskets this year.

DAN OLSON: I'm wondering about the tug and pull for young people on the reservation, or off the reservation, who look at the way you live your life. And you think-- and may be thinking, you know, that Northrup really has it figured out. But I don't know if I could make a living doing that.

JIM NORTHRUP: Yeah, it's difficult to do, and it's difficult to study because my rewards are not a paycheck. My rewards are teaching my grandson, my sons what I've learned so they have something to teach their children. So I don't see how we can compete, because we're not playing the same game.

DAN OLSON: I guess I would just end our conversation here. I have only gotten to page 54, and I have my own favorites. One of my favorites in here is "death two," I think is the title of the poem because it's Highway 2. And everybody who grew up in Northern Minnesota, as I did, remembers Highway 2. And of course, your description of the grain trucks and trying to pass is-- do you have a favorite?

JIM NORTHRUP: The first poem-- I think you're familiar with that one. It's called "Shrinking Away."

"Survived the war but was having trouble surviving the piece,

Couldn't sleep more than two hours,

Was scared to be without a gun.

Nightmares, daymares,

Guilt and remorse,

Wanted to stay drunk all the time,

1966 and the VA said, Vietnam wasn't a war,

They couldn't help but did give me a copy of the yellow pages,

Picked a shrink off the list, 50 bucks an hour,

I was making $125 a week,

We spent six sessions establishing rapport,

I heard about his military life,

His homosexuality,

His fights with his mother,

And anything else he wanted to talk about,

At this rate, we would have got to me in 1999,

Gave up on that shrink,

Couldn't afford him,

Wasn't doing me any good,

Six weeks later, my shrink killed himself-- great,

Not only guilt about the war,

But new guilt about my dead shrink,

If only I had a better job,

I could have kept on seeing him,

I thought we were making real progress,

Maybe in another six sessions,

I could have helped him,

I realized then surviving the peace was up to me."