“We understand that this government gives its subjects the freedom of worshipping as he chooses and we cannot understand why we are deprived of this privilege.”
Nodin Wind
They called him many things: grand medicine, healer, spiritual leader, chief, Ponemah pagan, Red Lake patriot, Wind. To the people of Ponemah he was simply Noodinoons (Little Wind) and no other word could encompass what he meant to them. He always introduced himself as Noodinoons to government officials, including President William Howard Taft (whom he met in 1909). Officials wrote his name down as Nodin (with a short “o” and without the diminutive -oons). When pressed for his last name by government officials, he simply gave them a rough English translation—Wind. That was the form his name took on government correspondence, letters addressed to him by the Office of Indian Affairs, and even his tribal enrollment at Red Lake. Because Noodinoons means Little Wind, he sometimes added Junior to the end of his name, even though he was not a junior in its English understanding and use. Nodin Wind Jr. is a name still widely remembered across the Red Lake reservation today and throughout Ojibwe country.1
In Ojibwe tribal communities Wind is best remembered for his spiritual service to the people. He ran the medicine dance in Ponemah. He was one of the first spiritual leaders in Ojibwe country to regularly travel and help people in communities other than his own. This is common practice for Ojibwe spiritual leaders today, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, local spiritual leaders served their communities and there was both no need to look elsewhere and a fear of offending local elders if one did. But Wind was an exceptional healer and speaker, called upon to perform life ceremonies and officiate at funerals for hereditary chiefs and tribal citizens in Mille Lacs and elsewhere in Minnesota and Wisconsin.2
Nodin Wind lived a long life, from 1874 to 1981. His children Reuben, Maude, and Dorothy were born in wigwams, and he continued to live in a wigwam until well after World War I. He never attended school and never learned to read or write in English, but through translators he wrote some of the most compelling letters and political statements by any leader from Red Lake. His longevity, service, and status afforded him deep respect throughout Indian country and in the nonnative world. Among other accolades, he was named grand marshal for the Fourth of July parade in Bemidji in 1976. At the age of 102, he had lived through more than half of the American nation’s two-hundred-year history.3
What people at Red Lake might not know or fully appreciate is the indelible mark Wind made on the tribe’s political evolution. He was from Ponemah, and Ponemah is a very special place. Even today the people there claim to have a 100 percent traditional Ojibwe religious belief and funeral practice. No church or missionary movement succeeded there in spite of numerous efforts.
Anna C. Gibbs, who today has inherited Wind’s position as Ponemah’s primary spiritual leader, says that the missionaries failed “because it was simply not meant to be.” But Gibbs has no doubt that it was Nodin Wind and the rest of the stalwarts at Ponemah who most consistently exhibited Red Lake’s warrior spirit. Their efforts are what kept the traditions alive in spite of repeated missionary efforts to eradicate their customs. It was warriors from Ponemah who defeated the Dakota at Battle River to secure the lakes for the Ojibwe; and it was warriors from Ponemah who chased away the missionaries. The community had greater control of the school, blocked numerous assimilation efforts, and even drove off army recruiters at gunpoint. Today they bury their dead in their front yards as they have for generations—for longer than the United States has been a country. The people of Ponemah are also often extremely distrustful of outside influences and the outsiders who bring them.4
Ponemah chiefs boycotted the Old Crossing Treaty negotiations in 1863. Most Ponemah chiefs stayed away from the Nelson Act councils in 1889 and the Thief River land-cession councils in 1902 and 1903. The people of Ponemah usually did not trust the government, and for good reason. They often saw themselves as separate from the white world rather than inextricably linked to it. And before Nodin Wind assumed political leadership in Ponemah, they usually saw themselves as separate from the native nation growing out of the villages on the south shore of Red Lake. Nodin Wind was a healer, a bridge builder, and a relentless warrior. He led Ponemah’s successful resistance to the war on Ojibwe culture, and at the same time he united Ponemah with the other villages on the reservation as part of a common tribal nation.
People from Christian faith communities today often look at missionaries as self-sacrificing humanitarians, hardworking, dedicated idealists who gave up everything to help distressed populations around the world. The missionaries usually saw themselves in exactly the same way. But human beings do not see the world as it is, but as they are. To the people of Red Lake, the arrival of missionaries presented a complicated mix of cultural attack, language erosion, political intervention, new ideas and technology, and economic opportunity. Further complicating matters, the missionaries may have believed deeply in their work but often did not get along with one another. In fact, various Catholic, Episcopalian, and other Protestant factions openly argued, fought, and undermined one another’s efforts. The feud over converts at Red Lake between Henry B. Whipple (Episcopalian) and Ignaz Tomazin (Catholic) was especially long and often mean-spirited. No wonder, then, that the people of Red Lake had such varied responses to the missionaries. Some individuals and even entire communities embraced them, while some resisted every attempt at conversion.5
In addition to the struggles between traditional Ojibwe people and missionaries and between the various denominations themselves, there were often clashes with politicians, some of whom supported the missionaries and others who countermanded or even forbade some of their work. At the outset of early missionary activity at Red Lake, such a conflict immediately shaped the landscape of mission efforts for years to come. Alexander Ramsey, the governor of Minnesota Territory from 1849 to 1853, was at odds with missionaries over Indian education policy. The missionaries wanted to educate Minnesota Indians, teach them English, convert them, and convince them to abandon their ancient ways and beliefs. They saw such efforts as progress and truly believed that through conversion, assimilation, and education Indians could be afforded greater economic opportunity. Ramsey was not opposed to the conversion of Indians. On the contrary, he saw their conversion and religious assimilation as a path to their pacification. But he did not believe that Indians should be provided equal economic opportunities. He did not believe Indians were capable or worthy of a place in American society. The missionaries supported academic education. Ramsey opposed academics for Indians and wanted only education that would train them for manual labor.6
In 1852, when the people of Red Lake still controlled more than 20 million acres of unceded land and only the first few waves of missionaries had visited them, Ramsey ordered all Minnesota Indian mission schools closed. If they wouldn’t educate the Indians his way, they would not educate them at all. Indian agent D. B. Herriman supported Ramsey: “Let books be a secondary consideration except to those who are too young to handle tools.” Ramsey left the territorial governorship in 1853, but he returned after statehood as the second governor of Minnesota, from 1860 to 1863. He was then continually reelected as U.S. senator from 1863 to 1875. For more than twenty years, he was in a powerful position to influence Indian policy in Minnesota. When it came to educating Indians, Ramsey did not always get his way, but he slowed and stymied academic educational efforts for Indians at their very genesis. The missionaries eventually found ways to work around Ramsey. That’s when their efforts and the conflicts began in earnest.7
There is a diversity of faith traditions at Red Lake today, but the denominational breakdown of the communities shows striking disparities. All current differences are directly connected to missionary successes and failures in the 1800s. Today, although Ponemah remains a traditional Ojibwe religious community, in the villages of Little Rock and Red Lake, around 90 percent of the people are Catholic and five percent are Episcopalian. In Redby, about 15 percent of the population are Episcopalian and roughly 80 percent are Catholic. There are members of various Protestant denominations on the south shore of Red Lake as well and a small but growing number of people who hang on to or have reconnected with their ancient traditional Ojibwe religion. The Catholics, Episcopalians, and other Protestants on the south shore of Red Lake are quick to point out that religion and customs are not the same thing. They still take great pride in their native identity, hunting practices, music, and dance.8
The story of Catholicism in Ojibwe country is complicated. There are more than 250,000 Ojibwe people in the United States and Canada today. Although in many areas the tribal population predominately follows traditional Ojibwe religious beliefs, where Ojibwe people are Christian, they are most often Catholic. The French had a long, sustained relationship with the Ojibwe from 1600 to 1763. They intentionally sent only men into Ojibwe country and as a matter of policy directed them to marry and make babies with Ojibwe women. Thousands of mixed French–Ojibwe children were produced by this policy. After the French and Indian War (1754–63), the French government severed ties with the Ojibwe, but it left all French people behind (French-speaking Quebecois in Canada, French-speaking Creoles in Louisiana, and Métis and French-speaking mixed bloods everywhere else). From 1763 to 1812, the British hired the largely mixed French–Ojibwe population as traders, and once the Americans came to Ojibwe country and pushed out the British, they hired the very same people.
The French were Catholic. In 1627, they passed an ordinance allowing Indians who converted to Catholicism to be citizens of the realm. They insisted that the offspring of their marriages with Ojibwe women be baptized Catholic. They often sent their boys to France for Catholic education. They arranged marriages for their girls to advance their trade and political goals. The role of patriarchy and sexism in the evolving French trade empire among the Ojibwe is well documented in Sylvia Van Kirk’s book Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society.9
When the fur trade imploded in the middle of the 1800s, some of the mixed French–Ojibwe Catholics left and eventually assimilated into mainstream nonnative communities. Some French–Ojibwe Catholics forged an entirely new identity as Métis, spoke a hybrid French–Ojibwe language called Michif, and vied for political independence in Canada during the Louis Riel Rebellion in 1869–70. Many more mixed French–Ojibwe Catholics stayed in native communities such as Red Lake.10
Such was the case for Paul H. Beaulieu (1889–1955)—a descendant of French royalty and Red Lake Ojibwe warriors. The French Beaulieus had been Catholics for fifteen hundred years; and most of the Beaulieus with Ojibwe blood had been Catholic for generations before coming to Red Lake. Paul H. Beaulieu was an ardent Catholic and a Red Lake tribal patriot. Even today, the population of Red Lake is dominated by French surnames like Jourdain, Beaulieu, Lussier, Gurneau, Bellanger, Nedeau, Bedeau, DeFoe, and DesJarlait. The Catholics had a head start long before missionaries ever made it to Red Lake.
As the French empire collapsed and its Catholic subjects and progeny adapted to their new reality in divergent ways, the Catholic church was not content to leave the fate of their religion to chance. It made sustained efforts to support Catholics throughout Ojibwe country and to convert those who were not members of the faith. That brought lots of Catholic missionaries to Red Lake.11
Red Lake was an Ojibwe stronghold in the 1800s. In spite of the long French–Ojibwe connection and the presence of some Catholics at Red Lake, the missionary movement took decades to get established, first swirling around the edges of Red Lake’s territory and then slowly establishing a foothold on the south shore.
Because Red Lake was politically and militarily impregnable in the early 1800s, Catholic missionaries had greater success at first developing connections with Catholic Métis in Manitoba and the Red River trade routes and using that as a base of operations to expand into more traditional Ojibwe communities. Counterintuitive though it may appear, that brought the Catholics to Red Lake from west to east. Fathers Severe Joseph Nicolas Dumoulin and Joseph Norbert Provencher made it to Pembina in 1818. They built the St. Boniface Catholic mission at Pembina, which is located at the present-day intersection of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Manitoba, on the banks of the Red River. They mainly focused on white and Métis traders and settlers, but Pembina was a crossroads for Red Lakers who came there regularly to hunt buffalo. In 1831, Father George Anthony Belcourt came to Pembina. By 1848, he was busy trying to muster political and financial support for the mission, writing to Henry H. Sibley and others. Father Joseph Goiffon arrived in 1856 and further strengthened the efforts at Pembina. Belcourt and Goiffon reinforced the effort in Pembina and frequently corresponded about the “wild” Indians from Red Lake who came through Pembina, often to attack the Dakota at Sisseton and to hunt buffalo. Eventually, they convinced the church to try a mission directly at Red Lake.12
Far to the east of Red Lake, Father Frederic Baraga influenced the eventual mission at Red Lake as well. In 1835, Baraga was stationed at La Pointe (Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin). In 1836, he met with Father Francis Pierz at Fond du Lac. The Catholics had a steady feud going with Reverend Benjamin Taylor Kavanaugh and other Methodist missionaries over territory and converts. They strategized about a move to Red Lake. Pierz was greatly influenced by Baraga, who had a Catholic conversion plan for all of Ojibwe territory. Pierz and Baraga conducted most of their correspondence and conversations in German, another shared affinity between them. Once the church began thinking about Red Lake in response to the Pembina missionary advocacy, it was Pierz who engineered the first attempt.13
In 1852, Pierz was transferred to Crow Wing in central Minnesota. He had his hands full competing with Episcopal missionaries, navigating Ramsey’s ban on academic education of Indians, and dealing with Ojibwe leaders during the height of treaty politics, land-cession treaties, and tribal community upheaval. In 1858, Pierz and Father Lawrence Lautischar left Crow Wing, arriving in the village of Red Lake on August 15. They had great initial success. Pierz had a deep knowledge of homeopathic remedies for common illnesses, which he shared with anyone who wanted them. His openness and the effect of his tinctures and herbs provided a perfect segue to spiritual influence. The population at Red Lake relied heavily on traditional Ojibwe medicine. Pierz’s work with healing had as much effect as anything else he did to win people’s trust. In a few short months Pierz and Lautischar built a church and mission and developed plans for a school. They called it St. Mary’s. There were still some Catholics at Red Lake from the old French connections. Pierz and Lautischar won many early converts and the mission was off to a promising start.
Pierz took a trip that fall to check on other Catholic efforts in the state and Lautischar was left in charge. He was thirty-eight years old, young and ambitious. He desperately wanted to prove his worth to the mission and to Pierz. At great risk, he traveled to Ponemah in December. There were no roads to Ponemah at that time. Access was possible only by boat in the summer or across the ice in the winter. He made it to Ponemah but had little success and got a cool reception from the local residents, who were steadfast in their adherence to traditional Ojibwe religion. As he left for the return walk to Red Lake village, the northwestern winds whipped across the lake, driving through his robes and sapping his strength. Eventually, a rescue party found his lifeless body. Pierz was devastated. He wrote to Baraga:
Father Lautischar … made his way alone, fasting and praying, over twelve miles of difficult traveling to the other side of Red Lake to visit a sick heathen. Deceived by the mildness of the morning’s weather, too lightly clad, he intended to make the journey to and back in one day, praying uninterruptedly and putting forth every physical effort. He would take neither a companion, nor a dog, nor more clothing and food. On his return journey, the wind, which had been from the south, changed, and, during the night, a stormy wind swept over the lake with piercing cold. The servant of God succumbed to this. Many traces of his having knelt on the snow which covered the ice on Red Lake on the journey out and back evidenced.14
After Lautischar died, the mission at Red Lake was temporarily abandoned. Pierz was overextended and had nobody to staff it. He came to Red Lake sporadically from 1858 to 1867. His efforts did maintain a base of converts in the three villages on the south shore of Red Lake—Little Rock, Red Lake, and Redby.15
In 1862, during the U.S.–Dakota War, the Red Lake chiefs refused Hole in the Day’s request to go to war with the whites. They were never afraid of a fight, but there had to be a compelling reason for them to make such a bold move. Pierz believed that the influence of the Catholic Ojibwe at Red Lake did much to dissuade Red Lake participation in the violence.16
In 1863, desperate for more clergy, Pierz traveled to Europe to recruit, and he brought back with him Joseph F. Buh and Ignaz Tomazin. Pierz sent Buh to White Earth, but put him in charge of the Red Lake mission, which Buh administered and where he had extended stays from 1867 to 1875. Tomazin took over that responsibility in 1875 and eventually moved to Red Lake to staff the mission himself from 1879 to 1883. That marked the permanent establishment of nonnative Catholic clergy at Red Lake. Aloysius Hermanutz assumed leadership of the Catholic mission from 1883 to 1888, and he brought visitors from the church who would leverage an even bigger expansion of Catholicism on the reservation.
In 1887, Katharine, Louise, and Elizabeth Drexel, all biological sisters and nuns from Philadelphia, visited Red Lake. They were astounded at the poverty they saw, and immediately recommended the posting of permanent missionaries and nuns to Red Lake. The church responded and St. Mary’s Mission was established.17
In 1888, Thomas Borgerding and Father Simon Lampe arrived at Red Lake with two monks and the first two nuns. They acquired the old American Fur Company store building and opened a Catholic mission school there. The first student was the daughter of Rising Sky (Ombi-giizhig). In 1889, the Red Lake chiefs approved a land grant to the Catholic church. St. Mary’s Mission now began the construction of a new mission, school, and church campus, most of which still stands today. The first building went up in 1889, and many more were added over subsequent years. A boarding school opened in 1889 in the old American Fur Company building and then moved into a larger log building later that year. By 1900, it had more than eighty students. The school soon became a contract school, funded, albeit erratically at times, by the federal government until 1940. In spite of a policy of separation of church and state, the federal government often funded religious schools, especially in Indian communities. When the government stopped subsidizing the school, the General Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians financially supported the Catholic school. The main church was constructed in 1893 and remodeled in 1956. Two buildings burned in 1904 and 1905 but were rebuilt in 1916.
Father Borgerding spent the next fifty years at Red Lake. He died on November 28, 1956, at age ninety-five, the oldest priest in the United States at the time. He recruited many different priests to serve on the reservation during his tenure there: Felix Nelles (1898–1900), Julius Locnikar (1906–07), Florian Locnikar (1915–41), Egbert Goeb (1940–55), Leo Hoppe (1941–47), Benno Watrin (1947–52), Omer Maus (1952–54), Columban Kremer (1952–56), Albin Fruth (1955), and Cassian Osendorf (1956). Roger Jourdain was impressed with Father Florian Locnikar, who smoked cigars and played tennis with the school kids, taking on two kids at a time.18
The Catholics didn’t try to convert anyone in Ponemah between 1858 and 1941. Physical access was difficult, and, more important, the residents were never interested. In 1941, Florian Locnikar, unable to get permission from local residents for a land grant to build a church there, tried holding mass at the private residences of Tom Cain Sr. and Rod Henry. Cain and Henry were polite hosts, but not Catholics. The effect was the same. Again, they had no success gaining converts in Ponemah.19
Although Catholics dominate the Christian experience at Red Lake, they by no means monopolize it. Catholics have been converting Ojibwe people for four hundred years, and they had the influence of the French colonial regime on their side. The other denominations that came to Red Lake have been at it for around 150 years. They too had an impact.
After the Catholics, the Episcopal missionaries had the most influence at Red Lake. The first Episcopalians arrived in 1861: Henry B. Whipple and E. Steele Peake. It took another fifteen years for them to open the first Episcopal mission. In 1876, Joseph Alexander Gilfillan brought an Episcopal delegation from White Earth, including Reverends Samuel Madison, Fred W. Smith, Joseph Charette, and George Johnson. In Red Lake village, they converted an old log house to church use and started the mission in 1877. Madison and Smith officiated. Madison died that year and Smith left the following year. They were replaced by Reverend Mark Hart in 1879. In 1880, they built a new church out of rough-hewn logs and named it St. John-in-the-Wilderness. Today it is the oldest standing building on the reservation. Reverends Charles T. Wright, Frederick Willis, Heman F. Parshall, and Thomas Phillips successively kept St. John-in-the-Wilderness going. In 1896, the Episcopal church in Red Lake housed one of America’s twelve Sybil Carter Indian Mission and Lace Industry Association charters, employing ten local Red Lake women.20
St. John-in-the-Wilderness Episcopal Church, about 1895. Minnesota Historical Society.
In 1877, thrilled with their success at establishing the Episcopal mission in Red Lake, Frederick Smith, George Smith, and Joseph A. Gilfillan came to Ponemah to establish a new mission among the “pagans.” Like Catholic missionaries before him, Gilfillan heard about Ponemah on the other side of the lake and the absence of any Christian influence there and decided to try his luck at converting the residents. The missionaries were so thoroughly and consistently rejected by the local population in Ponemah that they abandoned the thought of successfully converting anyone, boarded their boats, and started out across the lake to Red Lake. As the group departed, they were caught in a wicked storm and windblown for more than twelve miles, eventually landing in Redby. Seeking shelter in the bur oaks on the shoreline, they wondered if the experience was a sign from God.21
They reached out to the local chief at Redby—none other than He Who Is Spoken To, the venerable seventy-one-year-old stalwart who had refused to give his consent for the 1863 Old Crossing Treaty—and requested permission to build the Church of St. Antipas and an Episcopal mission. The village of Redby, which had the best landing on the lake and would eventually be home to the sawmill, the timber boom docks, and the commercial fishery, also became the center of the Episcopal effort at Red Lake.
The chief agreed to convert—a major coup for the Episcopalians. He Who Is Spoken To accepted baptism and confirmation. Whipple came to Red Lake to perform the chief’s baptismal rite. The chief was more than a convert. He told Whipple, “I want your religion for my people.” Whipple had two young clergymen, Frederick Smith and Samuel Nabicum, work with the chief to get more conversions.22
Whipple came back to Redby to perform a new round of confirmations. Eleven young men from Redby lined up to participate in the ceremony. Whipple wrote of the event: “When I called the candidates forward Madwaganonint came first and stood at one end of the chancel rail. I was surprised for the moment, thinking the dear man had not understood that confirmation was not to be repeated. But as the candidates came forward, the chief counted them on his fingers, and when all had come he bowed to me and reverently took his seat. As their chief, he considered it his duty to see that the young men fulfilled their promises. He more truly represented the patriarchal chieftain and counselor than any Indian I have known.”23
Afterward, the chief frequently walked through the village with a bell, summoning the people to mass. The chief’s efforts to help Whipple gain converts earned him the bishop’s lifetime friendship.
Whipple consecrated the cemetery in Redby. He Who Is Spoken To was deeply appreciative. Whipple also advocated justice for the Red Lake Ojibwe in their treatment by the government, again earning great respect from the chief. It made Whipple’s role as government agent for the Northwest Indian Commission, negotiating for land cessions from Red Lake in 1886, all the more painful. The chief had to stand up to his friend and religious mentor to fight for the people and their land.
St. Antipas Episcopal Church and congregation, about 1900. Minnesota Historical Society.
The log church built in Redby burned down in 1910 and was replaced with the help of a private donation from Whipple’s wife. It is still used today. The clergy in Redby included over the years Reverends Julius Brown, H. O. Danielson, William Hanks, Clifford Walin, Clyde Benner, Albert Wilson, and Thomas Phillips. By the 1920s, the Episcopal effort focused on Redby more than on Red Lake. In 1957, there were around a hundred Episcopal converts in Red Lake village and another 250 in Redby.24
Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans also tried to set up missions in Red Lake. Most struggled to gain converts. Those open to Christianity were already saturated with missionaries, and the Ponemah residents just weren’t interested. But the missionaries were persistent.
Frederick Ayer, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher and missionary, was the primary impetus for the first formal mission at Red Lake. After the Wisconsin Ojibwe ceded most of northern Wisconsin to the U.S. government in 1842, Leech Lake and Red Lake became the largest Ojibwe communities in the United States without a mission and with relative safety from Dakota attack. This was a major concern for missionaries because in 1841 the Dakota attacked the Ojibwe village at Pokegama Lake (between Lake Lena and Mille Lacs). Casualties were high and the Ojibwe survivors abandoned the village for more than a year. Presbyterian missionaries were present during the attack and found the killing of their converts, their own safety concerns, and the expense and practicality of running a mission with no Indians very distressing. Ayer partnered with Sherman Hall, Edmund F. Ely, and William T. Boutwell to create the Western Evangelical Missionary Society for the purpose of establishing missions at Leech Lake and Red Lake and then extending their work westward from there. William E. Bigglestone called Ayer “a conquistador after souls.”25
At Red Lake village, near the mouth of Pike Creek, Ayer established the first Presbyterian mission on Red Lake and kept at it from 1842 to 1857. He put David Brainerd Spencer in charge. Alonzo Barnard and Sela G. Wright arrived on August 14, 1843. Wright kept excellent records and made the earliest grammatical sketch of the Ojibwe-language dialects at Red Lake, all archived now as the Sela G. Wright Papers at Oberlin College. In the fall of 1843, Reverend Sherman Hall opened a mission school in Red Lake. There is no way to know the substance of the many conversations between the missionaries and Red Lake leaders in the early years of the missionary effort. It does seem clear that some of the chiefs had a great deal of skepticism about the promises being made. One of Red Lake’s chiefs told Ayer, Spencer, and Hall that if after four years’ time everything they promised came true, he would protect them. The chief’s parting words were: “Gaa-ikidoyaan, ningii-ikid.” It translates as “I meant what I said.” They recorded it as his name.26
The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions administered the school from 1843 to 1845. In 1845, the Congregationalist American Missionary Association took charge of the school and mission in a special agreement with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. In 1847, Barnard and Spencer moved to Leech Lake to establish a new mission on the high ground between Buck Lake and Cass Lake (the site of present-day Camp Chippewa), also operating Minnesota’s first printing press. In 1848, the Western Evangelical Missionary Society, which was the organization used to start the mission, was absorbed by the American Missionary Association.27
On May 31, 1851, John P. Bardwell reported for the American Missionary Association to Luke Lea, the commissioner of Indian affairs: “At Red Lake a school has been taught 9 months, the number of scholars registered is 21; average attendance is 9. Many of the children enter the school almost, and some entirely, in a state of nudity, and we are obliged to furnish them clothing.” In 1852, Bardwell said that the school at Red Lake was showing progress. In 1853, one of the Indian agents, D. B. Herriman, reported that most Red Lakers were dressing like whites.28
In 1852, Bardwell made plans for a mission to Ponemah as well: “A new station has been commenced on the north side of Red Lake, at a place called by the Indians, Uebashingie, a strait or place the wind blows through. Our missionaries are now erecting buildings at that place, but will not be able to commence a school before another season.”29
The initial success of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists in launching Red Lake’s first mission school came to an abrupt halt when Ramsey forbade academic education of Indians in 1852. The school limped along for a few more years, but most of the staff relocated by 1855, and the school was abandoned. The Congregationalists had administrative oversight of the school until 1857, but operations had already stopped for a couple of years by the time that officially ended. The missionaries at Red Lake struggled with the arduous travel to and from the mission. Some of them got cholera. Alonzo Barnard’s wife died from illness. David Spencer’s wife died from a stray Dakota bullet in a raid. Internal support for the mission waned at the same time that external pressure was brought to bear on the school. The Western Evangelical Society and the American Missionary Association spent more than $50,000 on mission and school operations by the time they closed. They had converted twenty people at Red Lake in sixteen years.30
It was fifteen years later, in 1871, when the American Missionary Association returned to Red Lake. Sela G. Wright reestablished the school with a focus on manual labor training in order to appease political opponents. In 1875, Reverend Francis Spees was stationed at Red Lake. In spite of the renewed effort, the Protestants never got as many converts as the Catholics and Episcopalians. Hoping to grow their church in “untilled soil,” they once again set their sights on Ponemah.31
Ponemah was not just the most isolated of the villages around Red Lake; it was the most traditional. The medicine dance thrived there. As the missionaries descended on Red Lake and Redby in the 1800s, several of the traditional families from those communities migrated to Ponemah so they could be in their own faith community without constant pressure from missionaries and neighbors to convert. The people of Ponemah were inherently resistant to religious assimilation.32
In 1928, Alrich Olson and Ernest Pearson traveled to Ponemah to establish what they hoped would be the first successful mission there. Mission activity had little success, other than getting local kids to play basketball. In 1954, Reverend Samuel A. Fast obtained permission from the General Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and funds from the Northern Gospel Mission to move a government school building to Ponemah and renovate it as the Wah-Bun Bible Chapel.33
Wah-Bun stood for more than fifty years—long enough for Erwin F. Mittelholtz to get a picture and call it Ponemah’s first permanent Christian church. The tribal council repeatedly approved a lease to the Northern Gospel Mission to maintain the facility. On Christmas Eve the church provided food and gifts for children, and locals attended once in a while. Eugene and Alfreda Stillday were married there in 1956. Neither converted to Christianity, but the facility served their needs. In the end, the mission never accomplished its mission—nobody from Ponemah converted to Christianity. In 1982, an arsonist burned the church to the ground. Up in flames was how all the missionary efforts ended at Ponemah. Nobody has tried to sway the population toward Christianity since.34
Since 1874, Nodin Wind had watched many of the missionaries come to Ponemah and leave. But he was more than a passive observer of history. As an emerging leader, he played a central role in Ponemah’s resistance to the war on culture. The people of Ponemah, derisively referred to as pagans by the Office of Indian Affairs, missionaries, and sometimes their cousins on the south shore of Lower Red Lake, were steadfast in resisting every political, educational, religious, and cultural intrusion.
After boycotting land-cession negotiations in 1863, 1889, 1902, and 1903, the Ponemah Ojibwe continued to fight the construction of schools and missions with astounding consistency and vigor. And through it all, Ponemah showed its greatest strength in voicing not what its people were against, but what they were for. In the face of incredible adversity, they kept the language and the culture alive.
The pressure exerted on the people of Ponemah to convert, move, or assimilate was tremendous. For Nodin Wind and many other Ponemah residents, it simply strengthened their resolve. In 1879, Father Ignaz Tomazin broke up a ceremonial dance at Little Rock. According to Father Thomas Borgerding, “The Indians were beating a big drum. Impulsively he drew his knife and cut the drumhead so they could no longer use it.” While many Red Lakers retreated from ceremonial life in response to persecution, Ponemah residents moved their drum ceremonies to secluded locations and kept them going. When a white photographer named Roland Reed came to Ponemah in 1907, King Bird chased him off and told him to “get out at once and not come back.” When U.S. army recruiters came to Ponemah during World War I, John Greenleaf’s mother barricaded her son in their house and stuck a shotgun through the boards on the window. The recruiters turned around and left.35
Chasing off army recruiters was easy enough, but the war on culture was just taking shape at Ponemah in the early 1900s. In 1916, Walter F. Dickens, the agency superintendent, wrote to two of the Ponemah chiefs—Lone Feather (Nezhikegwaneb) and Pelican Sky (Azhede-giizhig):
My friends, it has been reported to me that you have been taking a very active part in the dances recently held on the “point” and that it was necessary for Mr. Breckner and Mr. Stanard to direct you not to dance anymore, also that you made excuses to the effect that the government had reference to the Squaw Dances and not to the medicine dances when they requested that you discontinue your foolish abuse and over indulgence in dancing last winter. In this connection your attention is called to the law regarding the practice of Indian Medicine Men on the reservation, and a further violation of this law will be properly punished by me…. It is unlawful for you to continue in these medicine dances and I trust that you will assist me in suppressing these dances and follow the laws as outlined for your direction by the Honorable Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the government at Washington.36
Nodin Wind, Ponemah’s well-respected spiritual leader and an emerging political force, rallied to the defense of Ponemah culture. He answered Dickens with a petition signed by eighty Ponemah residents:
We Indians living in the vicinity of Ponemah, on the Red Lake Reservation, Minnesota, protest against the ruling of the Indian Department at Washington, D.C., prohibiting the ancient Indian ceremony, known to the white man as the “Grand Medicine Dance.” We base our protest on the following grounds.
The so called Grand Medicine Dance is not a dance in any sense of the term. It is simply a gathering of Men, Women, and children for the purpose of giving praise to the Great Spirit, thanking him for the manifold blessings bestowed upon the tribe and praying for continued health, happiness and long life.
The beating of the drum is simply an accompaniment to the songs of praise, uttered by the congregation. As in every church of the white man, piano or organ is found for the purpose.
There is no medicine present at this ceremony and nothing that is supposed to be medicine: it is strictly a religious ceremony and nothing else.
To illustrate, let us say that an Indian has been sick for some time and eventually recovers: the members of his family and friends will give the so called Grand Medicine Dance as a token of respect and thanks to the Great Spirit, in other words, to God, for his recovery. On the other hand, should he die, the same ceremony will be performed, changed of course to deep regrets, instead of rejoicing.
Among the whites the minister is called to administer salvation to the sick or dying and after death the minister is again called for the same purpose.
We understand that this government gives its subjects the freedom of worshipping as he chooses and we cannot understand why we are deprived of this privilege.37
This exchange was part of a long and painful story. In 1883, the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs created a “Code of Indian Offenses” and used it to persecute tribal religious practice. Until 1933, the Office of Indian Affairs used circulars to direct Indian agents to suppress tribal ceremonies. Circular 1665 instructed Indian agents to ban and break up tribal dances, religious ceremonies, and giveaways, even after Indians became U.S. citizens in 1924. On February 24, 1923, Charles H. Burke, commissioner of Indian affairs, issued an order prohibiting powwows at Red Lake. The order was disseminated directly to tribal members with a message that read, “You do yourselves and your families great injustice when at dances you give away money or other property, perhaps clothing, a cow, a horse or a team and a wagon.” The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was insufficient to provide for the religious freedom of Indians the way it did for Americans of other races.38
Dance at Red Lake, about 1915. Minnesota Historical Society.
At Ponemah, suppression of the medicine dance was especially onerous. The Office of Indian Affairs even required permits for Ponemah Indians to visit other reservations, fearing that their “pagan ways” would influence other Ojibwe people. In 1917, Minnesota governor Joseph A. A. Burnquist defended government suppression of the medicine dance at Ponemah, saying simply that it was, “the only thing to do.” The commissioner of Indian affairs wrote of the Ponemah medicine dance in 1917, “The old and harmful practices of the Indians, which are clearly detrimental to their progress and welfare, cannot be tolerated even under the guise of religious ceremony.” Ponemah resident Peter Martin was incarcerated that year for participating in the medicine dance and his treaty payments were withheld by the Office of Indian Affairs.39
In 1926, Ponemah resident Still Day (Obizaani-giizhig) testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs: “I have been told that they are going to stop my religion, so I will have no religion at all. The religion has been given to me. That is the reason I have a religion, because it has been given to me. God has given me this religion…. He was going to stop my religion; that is, the grand medicine. I never ask anybody or try to induce anybody to join the grand medicine lodge.”40
The pressure on the medicine dance at Ponemah eased somewhat in 1934 when commissioner of Indian affairs John Collier retracted Circular 1665. Traditional Ojibwe on the reservation still chafed under the yoke of unfair treatment. It wasn’t until 1978 that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act formally extended protection from religious persecution to Indians.41
Nodin Wind and the people of Ponemah hung on through many hard years. The medicine dance used to draw crowds of non-lodge members as observers. After the war on culture, they performed the medicine dance in secret. The access roads to ceremony locations were not marked, and they remain that way even today. The ceremony was truncated as well, so that it was over by the time someone might arrive to shut it down. That too is an entrenched part of the custom in Ponemah today.42
In Ponemah, traditional wake services last two nights and the funeral services begin in the morning of the day of the funeral because the feast and ceremony are time consuming and elaborate. After the government began to persecute traditional ceremonies, formal obituaries and funeral announcements in Ponemah always carried the same format. The wake was secretly conducted on the first night with no public announcement. No religion was mentioned, but simply, “Services in the Indian Custom.” And the start time listed in every Ponemah obituary and funeral notice was 2 PM on the day of the funeral. That was the time when the main ceremony was over and all that was left was interment of the body. That too was an intentional decision made by culture keepers to protect their ways from outside interference by keeping ceremonial doings secret. Most of the Ponemah funerals in the 1990s still formally listed a start time after their conclusion, although since then more of the notices are providing accurate start times and open invites to wake and funeral services. Active suppression of tribal religion by the government and missionary interference with traditional religious practices only served to heighten Ponemah’s cultural isolation.
Every aspect of pre-reservation life at Red Lake was conducive to excellent health. The traditional diet included fish, moose, elk, caribou, deer, and small game—boiled, not fried. Abundant berries, tubers, and mushrooms provided nutrition. Wild rice, which was less prolific on Red Lake proper, abounded in the smaller lakes and rivers throughout the region, and proved a critical staple. People were always active, as a necessary means of survival, so they were physically fit. Reading through treaty logs, signature pages, and scattered archival references, it is stunning to note the number of Red Lake citizens described as very old—not just Nodin Wind, who died at 106, but the entire body of tribal citizens who enjoyed a life that was by many measures much longer and healthier than what most Red Lakers experience today.43
Diet and lifestyle explain much of what has changed. When the people of Red Lake ceded land, they ceded access to critical healthy food resources. The gap between what was available and what was needed was filled any way possible. People continued to harvest traditional foods, just less of them. As partial payment for the land sold, the government sent not just cash, but food annuities—flour and lard. So people figured out how to make fry bread and started to fry their fish and wild game. People became much more sedentary as well, because they were restricted and discouraged from travel on land that no longer belonged to them.
Besides diet and lifestyle changes, the health of people at Red Lake was also compromised by the introduction of diseases previously not experienced and unknown. Smallpox and then tuberculosis ravaged the population. Red Lake’s isolation from continual exposure to the European germ pool ended with the beginning of the missionary period. The tribal population had little natural immunity to many foreign diseases, which hit the people very hard. As the pace of white settlement around Red Lake increased, so did the frequency of new outbreaks. Ancient knowledge of medicines and healing was well suited for what the Ojibwe had experienced prior to contact, but they struggled at least as much as Europeans did in trying to cure smallpox. Government officials had no faith in indigenous remedies and would never just leave Red Lake alone. The people had to forge a new way forward.44
The Office of Indian Affairs started staffing doctors at the Indian agency in 1865, which is when Dr. V. P. Kennedy was assigned to Red Lake. He was followed by many others: C. P. Allen (1873–79), H. W. Brent (1881), J. R. Hollowbrush (1885), Wallace E. Belt (1889), George S. Lescher (1889), G. S. Davidson (1896–1900), Julius Silverstein (1900), and a Dr. Schneider (1901). The doctors tended to the sick, but they had limited tools to deal with smallpox. There is no cure for smallpox. Vaccinations had been developed as early as the late 1700s, but little effort was made to inoculate Red Lakers before 1900. The global push to eradicate the disease by vaccination didn’t begin until 1967. It was not until the early 1970s that Red Lake, like the rest of the country, didn’t have to worry about the disease, which was eradicated by 1980.45
The arrival of Western medical help at Red Lake was limited to one field doctor who was sporadically available while tending to a widely scattered tribal population. There was no emergency triage or ambulance service. At the same time that service was emerging and very limited, the practice of Western medicine served to further undermine the status of traditional Ojibwe healers and erode tribal culture and ceremony.
All the while, the people really suffered. In 1901, a smallpox epidemic broke out in Ponemah. Students were quarantined at the school and were eventually vaccinated. Care was never consistent. In 1905, the government boarding schools at Red Lake and Ponemah had to open hospitals to treat students with tuberculosis and other illnesses. Disease spread quickly in the schools’ tight quarters.46
In 1912, E. B. Merritt, who was contracted to do fieldwork at Red Lake for the Office of Indian Affairs, wrote a scathing report of medical conditions at the schools and sent it to William H. Bishop, superintendent for Red Lake Indian School, as well as to several prominent lawmakers. Merritt’s letter noted that only three boys and three girls were vaccinated at the Ponemah school. He also reported: “The bathing facilities in the Cross Lake [Ponemah] School consist of one bath tub, used by both boys and girls at different hours. The matron states that she bathes two pupils in a tub at once. She also states that on occasions of low water as many as eight pupils have been bathed in the same water.” Water shortages were common because the school had a shallow well and high demand. Poor hygiene caused trachoma and other eye problems. Merritt reported: “infections of the eye resulting in ulcerations and leaving corneal scars appear to be more serious … 10.9% of the entire enrollment here have permanent defective vision fully developed as the result of eye infection.”47
In 1914, Red Lake was one of the first reservations in the United States to open an Indian hospital. This created emergency-room service capability for the south shore of Red Lake. There was still no ambulance service and the facility was small and understaffed in comparison to the need.48
The influenza epidemic in 1918, which killed 675,000 Americans, hit Red Lake hard. Red Lake children in residential boarding schools suffered disproportionately. Children who died at far-off boarding schools in Haskell, Kansas, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were buried in the schools’ cemeteries. For the people of Red Lake, losing children to disease was horrible, but not to get their bodies back for burial was unbearable. And for traditional families, not having any authority to decide the religious choices over the funerals was even worse. Although influenza was especially terrible in 1918, tuberculosis probably claimed more lives than influenza and smallpox in subsequent years. Again, the crowded conditions in boarding schools exacerbated the spread of the disease.49
In 1955, the Indian hospital was remodeled and the following year converted to administration by the U.S. Public Health Service, as it remains today. The hospital had a field physician for several more years before moving to on-site outpatient service only.
Missionary and health practices at Red Lake significantly changed the cultural landscape. More and more Red Lakers were going to church than to the lodge. More and more were going to the hospital than to traditional healers. In the early 1900s, Dr. Thomas Rodwell reported, “The Indians under my professional charge have now almost entirely given up their grand medicine ideas and are availing themselves of the professional services and remedies of Agency physician.” But the war on culture had just begun.50
“Schools are less expensive than war. It costs less to educate an Indian than it does to shoot him.” Reverend Lyman Abbott, the Congregationalist missionary who uttered these words, was one of many voices advocating for the education of native children. He, and others like him, were not simply evil men trying to hurt Indians. They thought their ideas were in the best interests of the Indian people. As their Indian education practices enveloped Red Lake, many Red Lakers must have felt that with friends like these, they didn’t need enemies.51
After the Red Lake Presbyterian mission school closed, some of the church personnel picked up work at the government schools as they were slowly established over the next twenty years. In fact, most government day schools and boarding schools for Indians actually required church attendance and infused Christian teaching (usually Protestant) into the curriculum and protocol of the schools.52
The Red Lake people had mixed feelings about education. Nodin Wind and most of the Ponemah population remained exceptionally distrustful of educators because they were self-proclaimed assimilators. Wind would never embrace a war on his own culture. But in Red Lake village, the growing Catholic population saw more opportunity than betrayal in embracing education.
Some openly advocated for the government to build them a school. Captain Hassler reported in 1869, “They are a sober, industrious, and well-behaved tribe…. They have made earnest and repeated requests for a school.” In 1870, Lieutenant George Atcheson wrote, “Of late years the educational interests of these people have been entirely neglected. No provision is made by the government for this purpose, and no religious association has assumed the burden of sustaining schools or missions at this point.” Ramsey’s plan to limit Indian education to preparation for manual labor seemed to be working.53
Atcheson’s report got traction with President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870. Grant successfully rearranged assignments and responsibilities in the Office of Indian Affairs. Military officers would no longer be the reporting and administrative agents to the tribes. All such managerial responsibilities shifted to Indian agents administered by the Office of Indian Affairs. In addition, Grant encouraged missionary activities and church-sponsored schools in Indian country. He was trying in part to depoliticize treaty work and administration, but also to save money in a tough budget environment by getting more work and infrastructure development out of religious groups and the private sector. Catholic, Episcopal, and Congregationalist mission work at Red Lake immediately accelerated.
In 1873, the U.S. government appropriated funds for a government school in Red Lake. Funding was too limited to make the school residential right away, so a tiny green day school was built. In 1877, the government expanded the facility to a boarding school with capacity for fifty students. Such schools usually operated on the contract model, with federal funding support to pay private, religious, or public entities to run the schools. In 1879, there was a big change at Red Lake. Under the auspices of the U.S. government’s new Indian boarding-school policy and funding model, the school would now be administered directly by the Office of Indian Affairs, which no longer provided funding to a third party, but ran the school itself. The facility was soon overloaded to fifty-eight, although average attendance was fifty-two. Operations expanded further in 1885, when the government attached and opened a day school with capacity for twenty students. Monthly attendance averaged sixty-eight, with a high one month of 123. The campus was expanded in 1896.54
That same year, Robert M. Allen reported that many Red Lake families sent their children to the government and mission schools voluntarily. Enrollment at the government boarding school was fifty-four students, and seventy more at St. Mary’s. In spite of the growing support that many Red Lakers were showing for the school, the commissioner of Indian affairs implemented a new attendance policy at Red Lake. Attendance was now compulsory and parents who failed to comply would be fined or imprisoned. This policy was part of a nationwide effort to use education as a means to eradicate tribal culture.55
Inside the schools, nothing was being taught and no method of teaching was being used that did anything to strengthen the identity of native children. The schools were run in English with physical punishment for anyone caught speaking Ojibwe. The schools were residential, cutting children off from their homes and families, even on weekends, no matter how close they might be to the school. The students received little nurturing, more discipline, and a steady barrage of attacks on tribal beliefs and customs. Most of the teachers and administrators were white, although there were some notable exceptions. Francis Blake described his experience at St. Mary’s in Red Lake:
There was a trough, with a pipe with holes drilled in it, for the water. We washed in cold water….
At six-thirty, we were lined up and marched to Mass, which was celebrated in Latin….
The Nuns and the Prefect carried a clipboard with all our names on it, and during the day they kept track of all of our infractions of school rules, including saying a single word of Ahnishinahbæótjibway. We had to be in bed by ten o’clock at night. The lights were turned off, and then in a few minutes, they were turned on again. The Prefect would go down the rows of beds in the dormitory. We never knew at whose bed he was going to stop. He would turn down the blanket, and take his strap to us as we lay in our beds, and beat us…. Other discipline included “running the gauntlet,” in which the child to be punished had to go between two lines of children, and the children in the lines had to kick and hit the child who was running. If the Prefect thought that the child had not been hit enough, they would make them run through again, or single out those of us who had not hit and kicked, and make us beat on them. The discipline at the U.S. Government and Mission Schools also included chloroforming children. The smell of chloroform and ether still haunt me.56
The use of education to wage war on tribal culture at Red Lake deepened over time. In 1899, the Indian Appropriation Act included a set-aside of $35,000 for construction of a new school plant at Red Lake plus $20,000 for three smaller schools in Minnesota at Bena, Cass Lake, and Ponemah. Construction began immediately in Red Lake, but not in Ponemah. Dan Needham Sr. reflected on the school construction effort in Ponemah: “The government wanted to start a school over there in Ponemah in the early 1900’s. The Indians didn’t want no school yet. They’d say, ‘Go on and tell them we’ll meet them Baanimaa.’ ‘Baanimaa’ means ‘after a while.’ But you know, they’re bound to change the words. These delegates wanted to convince the Indians to have a school, so they’d say, ‘Well, let’s go to Ponemah.’ They thought that was the name of the town. That’s where it got its name.”57
Many Ponemah residents today have stories and jokes about the origin of the town’s name. Often, they revolve around the corruption of the Ojibwe word baanimaa and resistance to schools, missionaries, treaties, and marriage proposals to outsiders. Although that’s not likely the true linguistic origin of the word, there can be no doubt that for the people there assimilation would have to come baanimaa, always. In Ojibwe, Ponemah Point is called Obaashiing, but the village itself is called Aazhooding, meaning Cross Lake. The word Ponemah has always been the dominant reference to the village in English for government officials, missionaries, and local residents, but early government documents in particular have also interchangeably used Cross Lake as the village name.58
The school was built quickly in Red Lake, but in Ponemah it was not so simple. In Ponemah they had Nodin Wind. He was twenty-six years old now and starting a family of his own. He thought all the time about the world his children would live in. The government planned to build the new school at the traditional village site at Ponemah, on existing recent burial spots and Ojibwe home sites. Nodin Wind and the rest of the local population were furious. The residents were also very much opposed to the idea of any effort to assimilate their children through education. They promised to burn to the ground any building constructed and threatened violence if the plan proceeded. Captain William A. Mercer was acting agent for the Leech Lake Agency, which had oversight of Red Lake still in 1900. Mercer had Howell Morgan and Watson C. Randolph, the clerk and assistant clerk, develop a plan for construction of the school at Ponemah. Peter Graves was working for the Office of Indian Affairs at this time.
Mercer wrote: “There is a band of Indians known as the Cross Lakers, who live on the opposite side of the lake from the Government school, and who are not only uneducated but are uncivilized and are undoubtedly thoroughly wild Indians.” Ignoring all warnings, Mercer sent contractors to Ponemah to start on the construction, but they were prohibited from doing their work by Nodin Wind and a large group of Ponemah men who threatened immediate bloodshed if they proceeded. Peter Graves explained to Mercer that the Red Lake village residents were not of the same opinion as those in Ponemah about the construction of schools, but that if trouble started, they would be more likely to stand by their brothers from across the lake than with the government.59
Mercer had no choice but to go to Ponemah and try to defuse the situation himself. He commissioned twenty-seven Red Lake residents as “special policemen” and had them hide in the hold of his boat as they approached the landing at Ponemah, where they saw a still sizable group of men keeping watch to prevent work on the school. The special policemen were Stands Forever as captain, Joseph Weaver as lieutenant, Joseph Thunder, Stands Quick (Gezhiiboogaabaw), Little Beard (Miishiidoons), Lone Cut (Nezhekiishkang), Stone Man (Asiniiwinini), Starting Ax (Maajii-waagaakwad), James Shears, Light of the Sky (Waase-giizhig), Fast Feather (Gegizhiigwaned), Flys Up and Around (Bebaa-ombii), Crosses the Sky (Mishagaame-giizhig), Reaching Over the Hill (Dedaakamaajiwind), Little Buck, Bazile Thunder, Baptiste Lawrence, Joseph Nah-gou-ub, James Fisher, John B. Pemberton, George Brunette, Joseph Martin, Joseph Bellanger, George Bonga, Joseph Sky, William Douglass, and James Anoka. The Ponemah Indians held their ground even against a well-armed police force, insisting that they would not tolerate the construction of a school to assimilate their children. Fearing immediate bloodshed or that his police would be overwhelmed by the more numerous village residents, Mercer threatened to call for a troop deployment to force the issue.60
Nodin Wind and the elderly chiefs in Ponemah held council three days later and offered a compromise. They would allow the construction of the school if the Office of Indian Affairs agreed to their terms. The Ponemah chiefs would choose the location of the school. The principal at the school had to be an Indian. The Ponemah chiefs had sole authority to appoint the principal. The construction of the school could not involve any land grants to the government or outside agencies as had happened in Red Lake for the construction of missions and schools. All the land and the school building itself would belong to the people of Ponemah and future decisions about the structure would be dictated by the chiefs of Ponemah.
Fearing a major bloody incident, Mercer acquiesced to all the demands of the council in order to keep the peace and build the school. And he followed through on the promises he made. The government built the school where the chiefs directed, on the north shore of Lower Red Lake, away from burial and home sites, and five miles from where most Ponemah families lived at the point. (Ponemah town demographics shifted to their present form slowly between 1900 and 1945.) The people of Ponemah owned the school. The chiefs appointed John G. Morrison Jr. as principal. And the school was run in a completely secular fashion, unlike most government schools, which included substantial cultural and curricular efforts to indoctrinate the children into Christian beliefs.
Construction proceeded quickly after that, and the new school opened on January 10, 1901. The influence of the Ponemah chiefs continued, and many of the largest Ponemah families were among the school’s first employees: William Bonga (teacher), Margaret Nason (teacher), Josette Lawrence (seamstress), Mary Brun (cook), and Susan Sayers (laundress). By 1902, there were forty-two kids boarded at the school in Ponemah and more who attended school there during the day. By 1905, the school was boarding fifty-six children.61
By 1900, the Indian agents at Red Lake and Leech Lake were increasingly responding to the national Indian education policy. Many of the children on the Red Lake reservation were going to boarding schools in Ponemah and Red Lake. But many others were now being shipped across the country to other schools run by the Office of Indian Affairs at White Earth and Morris in Minnesota and Vermilion, Pierre, and Chamberlin in South Dakota. Most Red Lakers were sent to Carlisle (Pennsylvania), Haskell (Kansas), Tomah (Wisconsin), and Flandreau (South Dakota). The government also subcontracted with and paid for nine mission schools to run its assimilation program, a clear violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Various churches also paid for and ran another forty-five Indian mission boarding schools. Almost all of them were run by the Catholic church, although the Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denominations were all active in the Indian education business. St. Mary’s was operated by the Catholic church under U.S. government contract.62
The Office of Indian Affairs and the missionaries focused their activities on the villages at Little Rock, Red Lake, Redby, and Ponemah. But there were still many Ojibwe living in enclaves at Warroad and the Northwest Angle and scattered across the ceded lands between Lake of the Woods and Red Lake. Some of those families pursued traditional lifeways. Others voluntarily worked to assimilate with the settler population so they could stay where they were and seek prosperity in the new agriculture and timber economies. The government relentlessly pursued their children for inclusion in the residential school roundups. It didn’t matter if the children were monolingual Ojibwe speakers or monolingual English speakers, if they wore buckskin or woolen dresses, if they looked white or very brown. If they were Indians and the government knew it, they were heading to residential boarding school. Such was the case for Lutiant LaVoye, a light-complexioned Red Lake girl living on a settlement farm with her family on ceded land at Roseau, Minnesota. Despite her high degree of integration into white society, her native roots eventually landed her at the Haskell Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas.63
All across the reservation, the people struggled financially. The superintendent of Indian schools claimed that the education for assimilation program was working to civilize the Indians and bring them financial prosperity. In his 1900 report, he wrote, “76 percent of the pupils who attend school were classified as excellent, poor, or medium, and but 24 percent as bad or worthless. This speaks volumes for a system of education, which can in so short a time, develop from an uncivilized race 76 percent of men and women capable of taking their places in the body politic of this Republic.”64
The success of the education was questionable. But even more important, the opportunity to economically advance was denied to Indians because of their race. Mercer wrote: “It may be interesting to the public to know how Indians manage to live during the cold winter months at a place where no rations are furnished … and where no working is going on by which they can be kept in employment…. Fish is their principal food and wild rice is next, while maple sugar and syrup are made by most of the families in sufficient quantities to last them nearly half the year. Some of them raise a few potatoes and a small quantity of vegetables. Berries are abundant in the summer months.” The Red Lake Ojibwe actually had 275 acres of land under cultivation in 1900, raising more than 14,000 bushels of vegetables. But the primary source of food still came from the lakes. In spite of all efforts, the Red Lake Ojibwe were living by their own means in the same way their ancestors always had. They were just doing it on less of their original land and with more pressure on their land and resources.65
At the government school in Red Lake, enrollment continued to grow. By 1902, they had seventy-seven children boarded and sixteen in the day school, and total attendance increased to 111 by 1909. Some of the local residents were having better success at picking up jobs in the schools as well. A. Alvin Bear was hired as a teacher, Mary C. Brunette as an assistant matron, and Jane Saice as the cook. The government school soon eclipsed St. Mary’s residential boarding school in Red Lake, which leveled off enrollment at around ninety children in 1909. With land loss and the declining access to natural resources, people had to look for jobs, alter their diet, and think about all available opportunities for feeding their children, even if it meant sending them to boarding schools.
The tribal population across Minnesota experienced a rapidly declining standard of living during the early settlement period. It is not the case that Indians were always poor and never climbed out of poverty. Indians were healthy and, by their own terms, wealthy until whites took the land and resources. Their children and subsequent generations paid the price and suffered the consequences. Poverty became pervasive.
In the 1930s, the Ojibwe at White Earth were destitute and sent a truckload of their children from White Earth to Red Lake, many crying with hunger, hoping that the people at Red Lake would better feed them. They were folded into the boarding schools at Red Lake before anyone at White Earth knew that the student dormitories at Red Lake were mere tarpaper shacks. Some of the White Earth parents learned this months or even years later.66
The residential boarding-school experience dominated education for Red Lake’s children for generations. Change came slowly at first, but Red Lake was able to move from the residential model to day schools before most reservations did. The change began in 1907 with the establishment of a public day school at Redby. A lot of white families lived on the reservation, working for the Office of Indian Affairs, logging companies, and missions. The first school was designed to serve them, but also provided a welcome segue for the Red Lake kids, whose parents were eager to have them live at home. The Redby school was part of the Beltrami County school district system—Unorganized School District 118. William B. Stewart supervised school operations, and Stella Minton was the teacher for the inaugural class of twenty students. This was the first public school district on the Red Lake reservation. The new facility was completed in 1908. In 1924, Benjamin Bredeson of Bemidji was awarded a contract to build an expansion to the school at Redby. The work was completed by 1926.67
In 1926, the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs conducted an investigation of Ojibwe land and timber issues in Minnesota and held hearings at Red Lake and other communities for several days. Red Lake and the other Ojibwe groups petitioned the Senate for redress of many issues, including education policy. Especially disturbing was the government’s diversion of tribal trust funds, intended for distribution to tribal members as partial payment for land and timber sales, to pay tuition for Indian children attending public schools. All children were to receive free public education. Indian children across the country had extra guarantees for their free education stipulated in many treaties, widely understood as an inherent part of their sovereign status. Yet the government was charging them for their imposed assimilation. The petition did not bring an immediate remedy, although some of the issues were incorporated into later litigation for successful redress.68
In 1912, Red Lake followed Redby’s lead in the shift to public education. It established Unorganized School District 119. The government boarding school in Red Lake continued to operate, but the public school took over day-school operations, using one of the rooms in the same facility. The rest of the campus for the government boarding school was converted to use for the public school in 1923. A new two-room structure was built for the public school in 1922–23. Federal funds were appropriated to cover the cost.69
The children of the many white families living in the Red Lake area were sent to school at Red Lake with the Indian kids. Under Ethelyn Hall, the school employed some Indian teachers in the early years, including Vera May, Mildred Dickinson, and Helen Sather. An elementary school and a gymnasium were built at Red Lake in 1927. In 1934, the remainder of the campus for the Red Lake government boarding school was completely converted to day-school use. This marked the official end of federal government boarding-school operations in Red Lake. The Office of Indian Affairs built a new high school in Red Lake in 1935 and turned it over to Beltrami County for administration. In 1937, Red Lake graduated its first high-school seniors: Katherine Lou Bailey, Louis R. Caswell, Orvin Nelson, Alphid S. Selvog, and Kella H. Selvog.70
The public high school at Red Lake operated as a day school, but the curriculum was still designed for assimilation. The teaching was scripted to track the children of Red Lake to manual labor, domestic service work, or farming. In 1937, an overhaul of curriculum created three programs for students: industrial arts, home economics, and agriculture. Most of the teachers were white and lived at the school. When the high school and gymnasium burned down in 1940, they had to hold classes in the old boarding-school dorm, which now housed the teachers, an awkward arrangement that persisted until 1949 when a new facility was finally built. The delay persisted because most federal appropriations were diverted to the war effort in the 1940s.71
It took a long time for attitudes about Indian education to change. Criticism from Francis Ellington Leupp, commissioner of Indian affairs in 1907, and the Meriam Report, in 1928, brought greater awareness of the damage caused by Indian education policy. In the early 1930s, John Collier, the new commissioner of Indian affairs, was able to make major changes. At Red Lake, those changes accelerated in 1934, as the government boarding schools were converted to day schools. As they were folded into the county school district administration, the federal government divested itself of moral and financial responsibility. Like Redby, Ponemah and Red Lake developed public day schools. For the people of Red Lake, it meant that most of their kids were now living at home—a welcome change.72
Katherine Lou Bailey, one of the first graduates from Red Lake High School. Red Lake Tribal Archives.
In 1936, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) started to dismantle the residential boarding-school system nationally. The OIA contracted the state of Minnesota to assume management of all schools serving native communities except for Pipestone and mission schools. At Red Lake, the change brought consolidation of schools on the reservation. In 1936, the Redby school district, which had been independent since 1907, was subsumed by the Red Lake school district. The new entity was now Red Lake School District 119, and they shared one superintendent.
The evolution of public schools in Ponemah lagged behind the other communities because of entrenched resistance to assimilation efforts. In 1917, a public elementary school was built in Ponemah. It was expanded in 1921. Joseph Jourdain did most of the construction work. In 1936, when the Redby public school was subsumed by the Red Lake district, the school in Ponemah, still operated by the OIA, was also put under the administrative jurisdiction of Red Lake public schools. The schools at Redby and Ponemah now ran elementary education through grade six. Red Lake ran grades seven through twelve for the entire reservation. This brought some financial and administrative efficiency to the public education system at Red Lake, but also made for longer bus rides and less direct community control of the schools that served reservation high-school children.73
Local governance of the schools at Red Lake was enabled in 1942, when the system at Red Lake converted from “unorganized” to “organized,” which meant local elections for school-board positions. Although many people from Red Lake had worked at the schools, they were administered through federal, state, or county auspices. Now the people of Red Lake would elect their own people to school-board positions. Tribal members serving on the school-board successfully influenced the focus of the school to move from agriculture, industrial education, and home economics to a more diversified curricular approach with the addition of instruction in music, fine arts, and business as early as 1950.
The public school infrastructure on the reservation underwent several waves of improvement. The school at Ponemah was expanded and modernized in 1941, burned to the ground in 1951, and was rebuilt in 1953. The high school in Red Lake was expanded and modernized in 1950–51 and again in 1954–55. The Red Lake and Redby elementary schools were also consolidated in 1955. The General Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians approved a quitclaim deed for nineteen acres for the school in Red Lake in 1955. The land grant to the school made it possible to get impact aid dollars designated for educational agencies financially burdened by federal activities from the legislature after 1950. Special appropriations outside of impact aid were not politically feasible at that time, so the General Council conceded the land grant to get the school.74
Unidentified schoolroom at Red Lake, 1941. National Archives, Kansas City, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Red Lake Agency (1964), (NARA-285702).
In 1956, a new apartment complex was built for nonnative people working at Red Lake. Throughout its history and to the present day Red Lake schools have employed an almost entirely nonnative teaching team. Now there is desire to hire Indians at the reservation schools, but the legacy of education for assimilation produces poor high-school and college graduation rates and low motivation among graduates to pursue teaching careers. Today, Red Lake residents call the house and apartment area for nonnative teachers and hospital workers “The Compound.”
Most of the infrastructure improvements at Red Lake had to come from special legislative appropriation or the federal government—the Office of Indian Affairs, renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947. Because the land at Red Lake is not individually owned, bonding bills and special tax assessments could not be used to drive school repairs or expansions. The special treaty status of Red Lake and the trust responsibility of the federal government to Indians for education still requires the government’s responsible and timely response to school needs on the reservation today.
Because of his long life, Nodin Wind witnessed nearly every major phase in the political development of Red Lake. The constant evolution of Red Lake’s political landscape was heartrending at times, exhilarating at others, but always instructive. Steeped in Ojibwe tradition, Wind was a deep listener, cautious, and always intentional when it came time to act.
He knew that white folk wanted the land, the timber, and the very souls of his people. The Office of Indian Affairs was the tool they used to get it. The OIA was created in 1832 and housed in the Department of War. In 1849, it was moved to the Department of the Interior.
Nodin Wind saw the government’s deliberate undermining of hereditary chiefs at Red Lake. The OIA created Red Lake’s Court of Indian Offenses in 1884 and formalized its structure in 1890. Red Lake’s first judges were appointed by B. P. Schuler, Indian agent: Joseph Charette, William V. Warren, and John G. Morrison Sr. They served at Red Lake and at White Earth. Through these courts, the Indian agents began to take over responsibilities that had been reserved exclusively for the chiefs. They became the law of the reservation. The Indian agents operated on directives or “circulars” from the OIA, some of which instructed agents to prohibit tribal members from participation in ceremony. The agents used the courts to try to convict people for anything from assault to participating in giveaways or ceremonial dances. Some Red Lake residents served long sentences for participation in the medicine dance.75
Indian agents had a lot of power at Red Lake in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They managed the Indian police and the Court of Indian Offenses, and they were the conduit between the chiefs and business interests. Often, powerful or ambitious businessmen became Indian agents because they were able to advance their own economic interests most successfully from inside the Office of Indian Affairs. George A. Morrison, for example, was Indian agent at the Red Lake subagency in 1899, but he also operated a hotel, a store, and timber businesses at Red Lake.
In 1905, an Indian police force was organized for Ponemah for the first time. Over the next fifty years, many of Ponemah’s biggest families had people serve in the Indian police. It was one of the few paying jobs in the community, even though compensation was very low. The Indian police force in Red Lake village was even larger. Although getting a job with the Indian police meant money to feed one’s children, it also meant enforcing the directives of the Indian agent on other tribal members. Often, it drove wedges between individuals and families in ways never seen before.76
Nodin Wind watched with mounting horror as the true effects of the Nelson Act, the fraudulent surveys, the timber boom, and the pace of white settlement encroached on Ponemah. The chiefs from his community had never agreed to a single land cession, had capitulated to no missionary, had remained steadfast and strong. But still they were enveloped by white settlers. White lumbermen harvested the big trees on Ponemah Point. White houses were going up at Waskish on the shore of Upper Red Lake. And nobody at Ponemah had agreed to any of it. Being strong, resistant, and isolated would not be enough to save Ponemah. The warriors of Ponemah had to fight back in the war on culture, but the new fight could not be won by military force. Victory required political power.
On the south shore of Red Lake, the chiefs worked hard to validate their positions and advocate for their people. On many other reservations, chiefs had been so thoroughly deposed and undermined that many tribal members didn’t even know who they were. At Red Lake, the chieftainships were universally known and the chiefs successfully asserted themselves in challenging situations. In many ways, sovereignty was what they made of it.
In 1909, the chiefs decided to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Paul H. Beaulieu, at only twenty years of age, was asked by the chiefs to travel with them to Washington to interpret and advise. Beaulieu had made a living working for the government and in private business. He had the blood of French royalty and fur traders in his veins. But he was just as native as he was white, with a brown skin, a native family, and a heart that beat for the people of Red Lake. He was not a chief, but he was a leader at Red Lake, someone who led through influence.
Traveling with Beaulieu were the chiefs of Red Lake. Sufficient Sky (Debi-giizhig) was the head chief for the delegation. The other chiefs were Joseph Mason (Migiziins, or Little Eagle), Bazile Lawrence, Alexander Jourdain Jr. (Alex-eaince), Rattler (Zhenaawishkang), George Highlanding (Bebaami-giizhigoweshkang, or He Who Treads Across the Sky), and John English. Many of the delegates were chiefs or at least signatories to the Nelson Act, including Joseph Mason and Bazile Lawrence. None of them were from Ponemah.
Nodin Wind was at a crossroads. At thirty-four years old, he was still relatively young, but he had proven his worth in the ceremonial community at Ponemah. He showed grit in the face of conflict over construction of the school, on missionary visits, and in political discourse with the OIA. His influence was remarkable. Wind probably would have been content to live out his life in Ponemah without political ambition, but the whites would not leave Ponemah alone.77
Something was happening at Red Lake that had been building for many decades. The three villages on the south shore of the lake and many of the scattered families from Thief River Falls, Warroad, and elsewhere in the allotted or ceded lands were coming together. White Thunderbird, the Dakota boy adopted at Ponemah, symbolized and sparked political change that reverberated across the region. Moose Dung, from Thief River, was a tribal strategist who spread the changing culture of Red Lake across their territory. He Who Is Spoken To was a nation builder, pulling on the shared culture of the Red Lake people, navigating treaty negotiations and land cessions, fighting for the lake—north and south shore alike. A nation was rising—a native nation, a warrior nation. And Ponemah, while sharing the same culture in many respects and tied inextricably to the fate of their cousins across the lake, had stayed out of the formal political transformation. But going forward, Ponemah would never be left in isolation, and there was too much at stake to stubbornly pretend that they could weather the war on culture alone.
Nodin Wind must have gone through a lot of tobacco as he parlayed with the chiefs in Ponemah. He humbly shared his observations and fears—that they would do what they always did—stay away. But they were swayed by his passion and concern and they respected his position as an emerging leader in ceremony and community life. They gave their blessing for Nodin Wind to represent the village. He was one of the chiefs now.78
Nodin Wind put on his best shirt and beaded vest. He grabbed his otter-skin turban and porcupine-hair head roach, adorned with a long hawk feather and several small eagle feathers, every one of them earned by an act of service for the people. Then he paddled across the lake to Red Lake to join the 1909 delegation of chiefs for the Red Lake Nation. When warriors go into battle, they need allies.
Wind’s influence rippled throughout Ponemah as he left. Every Wind (Endaso-onding) caught up with him to help represent Ponemah. King Bird, a reputable spiritual leader and by nature especially distrustful of people outside of Ponemah, was swayed by Wind’s initiative and joined the delegation as well.
The last official Red Lake delegation to Washington DC, 1909. Seated: George Highlanding, Peter Everwind, John English, Nodin Wind. Top row: Joseph Mason, Paul H. Beaulieu, King Bird (Ogimaa-bines), Bazile Lawrence, attorney John Gibbons, Alex Jourdain Jr., Waiting Day (Baabii-giizhig), Curved Feather Man (Emiiwigwanaabe). Beltrami County Historical Society (BCHS 403).
The delegation got few concessions in Washington in 1909. Most important, the section of land on Upper Red Lake that was illegally taken after the 1889 Nelson Act was not returned. But in the internal dynamics of Red Lake’s polity, something significant was happening. As Wind traveled with Paul H. Beaulieu and Sufficient Sky, devout Catholics, he was building bridges across the lake, transcending religion, and finding shared culture and common political goals.
In 1918, Wind extended his effort to keep Ponemah part of the new nation at Red Lake. The General Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians was created by Peter Graves and Paul H. Beaulieu that year. It was a move of political genius that formalized the Red Lake national identity and developed the first modern representative tribal government in the United States at the same time that it preserved the roles and functions of the hereditary chiefs. Nodin Wind was there, acknowledged by the entire reservation. He was not just a chief from Ponemah. He was now one of the seven formally acknowledged chiefs of the entire Red Lake Nation.
The war on culture was far from over. By some measures, it had really just begun. But something fundamental changed as Nodin Wind led Ponemah’s defense. Ponemah was united with the villages on the south shore of Red Lake as equal partners in the growing Red Lake national identity and political culture. Chiefs from Ponemah have served on the General Council and in the contemporary council of hereditary chiefs ever since. Citizens from Ponemah have also been consistently elected as representatives in Red Lake’s democratic elections, including to the top post of tribal chairman. Ponemah became, just as much as Little Rock, Red Lake, and Redby, a cornerstone of the common tribal nation.79
Nodin Wind lived for another seventy-two years after serving on the 1909 delegation. He kept horses at his family plot in Ponemah. He worked as a commercial fisherman and joined the Red Lake Fisheries Association, which put him in sustained business relationships with people from across the reservation. He continued his political representation of Ponemah and deepened his work as a spiritual leader for the region. Just before turning one hundred, he publicly retired from officiating medicine dances and funerals owing to the strain of the work and his advanced years. He pushed Dan Raincloud up as his successor and until age 106 still regularly attended ceremonies to support Raincloud, Leonard Hawk, and Thomas Stillday Jr., arranging for transportation during the last few years of his life when he moved to an elder care facility in Blackduck. Through his often-emulated example, the ethos of his status as a spiritual leader, the logos of his political disposition, and the deep pathos he displayed as a passionate Red Lake patriot, Nodin Wind also changed the culture of Ponemah. He didn’t just put Ponemah into the Red Lake Nation; he put the Red Lake Nation into the hearts of the people of Ponemah.
Peter Graves, 1953. Jerome Liebling Photography.