This Native American Life: A Conversation with Beth

We turned, down Peace Pipe Lane.

“Which direction do we go?” I asked my son.

The street, the main one of the Lac du Flambeau reservation of the Ojibwe tribe of northern Wisconsin, was only a few blocks long, and we were looking for the Cultural Center and Museum. As we scanned the new buildings in a little turnout, we saw it.

We’d come to Lac du Flambeau to meet some kids. I’d packed the big plastic heart-covered “Love” bag from the dollar store with yarn and sticks for making protective God’s Eyes, with a roll of brown paper and markers for the kids to draw what they wanted to see in their community, with some red, white and blue paints to let them express what they thought of America. I’d put in a drum and some cups and spoons and other makeshift “instruments” to see if we could work together to find the underlying rhythm of the group, if we could have fun listening to one another, and collaborating.

“Peace Pipe Lane,” I said, smiling. I’d loved Native American culture since I was a kid. I was caught with a smile in the big arms of friendly smiling men when I fell off the lift, and ate delicious Fry Bread Tacos at Sunrise, the Apache reservation where we skied in the White Mountains of Arizona growing up.

When I called the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Campground to book a tent spot, in June, I’d spoken to Beth, or, as she later informed me, Wawasha Bethanne Hawpetoss. I sheepishly told her my reason for coming to the area, to try to work with some kids, to see if it might work to use art to help the kids explore their identities, like I do in Brooklyn. Beth got super excited. She had been a professor of culture and language at the Lac Courte Oreilles Tribal college in Heyward, Wisconsin and in different tribal outreach sites, and she spoke of the attempts by the U.S. government to “terminate” tribes like hers, the Menomonee tribe in Keshena, Wisconsin, and how that felt.

“We lost the sense of ourselves as valuable humans,” she said to me, sadness seeping through her heavy Upper Peninsula accent. “How do we get back that sense of pride?”

Beth and I connected deeply in that conversation, and I knew I had to go meet her. I was excited as my son and I drove from Chicago, through heavy rains, into Wisconsin. We stayed the night at Bass Lake, in Lyndon, and made our way north to Lac du Flambeau the next day just in time to catch Beth before she left for the day. It was like seeing an old friend, even though we’d never laid eyes on one another. We agreed to speak the next morning.

When I arrived at the campground office, Beth suggested I pull up a chair. I noticed a traditional dream catcher behind her and one across the room. I was humbled that this lovely woman was willing to share her story with me, that she was so thrilled to have someone likewise interested in how to help her people.

She spoke of her “pretty well-off” upbringing in Keshena, Wisconsin, how she and her friends went “Pow Wow hopping” in the 80s. Her Dad had been educated off the Menominee reservation where he grew up, and had worked as an ad exec in Chicago (“Pretty good for the time, given that he was a minority,” she said) and then went to law school.

When the U.S. government decided it wanted to terminate the tribe, and there was no money coming in, her father and other professionals who’d left the tribe were asked to return, and assist.

“They looked to find resources within the reservation boundaries, and my Dad stepped in,” she says proudly. “Dad signed the bill not to terminate the Menominees.”

One of the first things he did to help, she said, was to figure what had happened to the kids of the tribe. A high percent of them were not enrolled in school, and had been jailed in large part, she said, “because there was no foster care, no one knew what to do with them.” He used his law degree to help get them out of jail.

She explained that the tribal family structure is often different. “It’s not ‘mom, dad, kids, dog and the picket fence,’” she said. Many Christian missionaries came to the reservations, even starting boarding schools for the children. There was a building nearby the campground that used to be an old missionary boarding school, she told me, right beyond the Casino, before you got to the Family Dollar that went in last winter.

“We have to catch up to today,” she says resignedly of the decision to bring the Family Dollar chain on to reservation land. “They said they’d bring jobs, and it’s the way it has to be. We can’t go back.”

Yes, she said, the tribes have to modernize, “but it has to be in a Native American way, to make sure these things aren’t lost.” She shook her head, and told me about the years she spent living off the land, like natives used to. “It’s really hard living like that,” she said. There is some balance that must be struck between going back and moving forward for Native Americans in this country.

“Living in two worlds is very complicated, but we have to hold on to our culture.”

Beth shook her long dark thick hair and rattled off a variety of the problems the reservation faced with violence, and alcohol and drugs, not dissimilar problems to those that plague other communities all over the U.S. “People are doing better,” she said, “but it takes education to understand…”

I thought of my “love” bag in the car. The people at the new Youth Center were busy, and I hadn’t had the background check they require of volunteers to work with the kids. But Beth and I agreed we’d speak again. There was certainly work to be done to help the kids of Lac du Flambeau feel proud of their culture even as it had to shift and change, even if the world didn’t always seem to understand.

My son and I drove through the neighborhoods and saw the houses, with basketball hoops lining the sidewalks, and trampolines alongside them. There was a beautiful playground, and the school and the Youth Center. There were gorgeous glistening lakes, that the town was named for fishing in by torchlight.

In the museum, we saw the beaded clothes and moccasins made and worn by the tribe, pictures of pow wows like the annual one in town we’d just missed by a few days. We saw the fish decoys carved by locals to use for ice fishing, and the dancing sticks carved for pow wows. We saw God’s Eyes dangling from the ceiling, and I smiled.

Another time, maybe, I will come back and make God’s Eyes with the local kids. They have a beautiful culture to learn about and pass on, like the many other tribes in this country. There are 326 reservations in the U.S, all of them filled with people struggling to find their own way to be Americans.

Thank you, Beth, for the inspiration, and for telling your story, and for you and your family’s work to protect your beautiful culture.

Shalom. Inshallah. Peace be with You.

In love,