How can we make a difference?

Sometimes the brambled racial borderland of my youth seems as impenetrable as it ever was.

Indians remain imagined more than they are understood. Public and political backlash against Indian casinos and treaty rights is still obvious.

Indians are still often used as mascots for sports teams, with broad resistance to change or a lack of understanding of the impact of that resistance on native people.

Problems persist in Indian country, and with the types of drugs and ease of access found in the modern world, things like substance abuse seem even worse.

But looks can be deceiving. Last spring I brought my van to Kenny’s Clark Station in Bemidji, Minnesota, to get new tires. I have known the owners, the Merschmans, most of my life, and I like to support family businesses in our area. They have always been kind and respectful to me, and they know how to fix cars.

Paying for new tires is a painful experience for a penny-pincher like me, but I was amazed when I settled my bill to hear owner Alan Merschman tell me, “Miigwech. Giga-waabamin miinawaa.” My white mechanic spoke to me in the Ojibwe language. My language. This had never happened to me before. And this would not have been possible just a few years earlier. Something was changing in the borderland.

I live near the town of Bemidji in northern Minnesota, right between the three largest Indian reservations in the state. About a third of the population there is native, but about half of the shopping population is native. Bemidji was not always a friendly place for Indians. In 1967, local resort owner and Beltrami county commissioner Robert Kohl gave a live radio broadcast on KBUN in which he went on a racial rant, declaring that Indians were all drunks and leeches on the government.

Kohl said that Indians “are so low on the human scale that it is doubtful they will ever climb upward . . . Perhaps we should have let nature take her course, let disease and malnutrition disrupt the reproductive process and weed out those at the very bottom of the heap.”1 The fact that Indians did half of the shopping in Bemidji and had none of the jobs was hard enough, but this was intolerable.

Red Lake tribal chairman Roger Jourdain led a boycott of Bemidji area businesses in 1967, soon joined by Leech Lake and White Earth. The Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce tried to apologize on Robert Kohl’s behalf, but the boycott continued until Kohl himself apologized. Realizing the importance of his native patrons, Joseph Lueken, owner of the local grocery chain, instituted an affirmative action employment policy after the boycott as well.

The boycott was a big step forward in my community, but the Indian and non-Indian worlds still rarely interacted unless they had to. When interactions were unavoidable, they were often negative. Indians had to deal with nonnative police, lawyers, judges, teachers, and bankers. They often perceived their treatment to be racially biased.

Some of that perception was based on a misplaced assumption that all nonnative people in positions of educational, political, and financial power were prejudiced against Indians (because so many of them had been in the past). But some of that perception was accurate. Independent studies of law enforcement in Bemidji have indicated a real issue with racial profiling in particular. Many white educators, bankers, and lawyers had negative attitudes about Indians, but many more wanted to get along with Native Americans. However, they were so terrified of offending angry Indians that they found it safer not to teach about them or take perceived risks by doing business with them.

How did we get from that dynamic to Alan Merschman engaging me in my tribal language with no outside pressure or formal training? Enter Michael Meuers, Rachelle Houle, and Noemi Ayelsworth. Together, these three nonnative people envisioned and carried out an ambitious initiative as part of Bemidji’s anti-racism organization, Shared Vision.

Michael Meuers was the primary advocate for tribal language proliferation in Bemidji. He wanted welcome signs for local businesses and informational signs about bathrooms to be presented bilingually in the local tribal language (Ojibwe) and in English. When you travel to Hawaii, everyone knows what aloha means, and everyone in northern Minnesota should know what boozhoo means.

Local heritage and language is part of what makes every place special. The idea of bilingual signage was also to present nonnative storeowners with a safe way to reach out to Indian communities around Bemidji. Rachelle Houle joined him, going door to door to convince area businesses to post their signs bilingually. Noemi Ayelsworth, owner of the Cabin Coffee House, was the first businessperson to post bilingual signs and join the effort.

Soon, Eugene Stillday, a tribal elder and fluent speaker from Ponemah on the Red Lake Reservation, and I joined a list of resource people to translate phrases, words, and signs. I worked with fellow staff at Bemidji State University to develop instructional materials for free access online. With no money, this grassroots effort soon convinced over 120 area businesses to put up their signs bilingually in Ojibwe and English, and the initiative continues to grow.

The university, hospital, area schools, and regional events center all have bilingual signs, and Ojibwe language is proliferating throughout the community. It is now common to hear cashiers at Target engage tribal elders in Ojibwe. Alan Merschman is not alone.

Indians feel welcomed in places where they never did before. Shop owners feel there is a safe way to reach out to native clientele.

Bilingual signage does not solve all the big problems. But it does enlarge the safe space in which we can all talk about those big problems, and that’s a huge start. And that huge start began through the advocacy of three nonnative people.

There are many ways to get involved. In Hawaii, a grassroots language revitalization effort pushed the number of fluent speakers from five hundred to around fifteen thousand, and a few thousand of those speakers are white. Most were working in schools with Native Hawaiians and picked up the language as part of the effort to preserve and revitalize native culture and language. Their involvement has been welcomed.

In economic development, political networking and advocacy, education, health care, and many other fields, there is a role for native and nonnative people. Indians are a tiny percentage of the population in this country, but in Minnesota and many other places they comprise 20 percent of the homeless population. We need help with everything from education to grant writing to advocacy. If you are not part of the solution, you might be part of the problem. Teachers too afraid to teach about Indians are likely perpetuating stereotypes of Indians or erroneous versions of the Christopher Columbus story, alienating Indians without even realizing they are doing it.

It can be very frustrating for nonnative people to know how best to reach out to Indians or to help address the problems in Indian country. Most human beings are terrified of offending others or being accused of racism. Sometimes it seems safer and easier not to teach about Indians, not to learn more and more deeply about Indians, and not to advocate for change. But Edmund Burke had it right: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

So don’t imagine Indians, understand them. Keep asking questions, reading, listening, and advocating for change. Don’t tolerate stereotypes, and don’t be afraid to ask everything you wanted to know about Indians. And if you’re native, give a meaningful response to those questions rather than an angry rebuke. It really does make a difference. In the words of my white mechanic, Alan Merschman, “Miigwech. Giga-waabamin miinawaa.”

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The above is an excerpt from Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer. Dr. Treuer is the Executive Director of the American Indian Resource Center, and was kind enough to agree to share his perspective with Socratics.

In his book, Dr. Treuer answers other questions, such as What is the real story of Columbus? Why do Indians have long hair? Why are tribal languages important to Indians? and Why are Indians so often imagined rather than understood?