Deep Island:

Contents • 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12

Sprout House was surrounded on all sides by Ojibwe people and history. To the east was Little Earth, a housing project for urban Indians; to the south the Red Lake reservation’s embassy; to the west an Anishinaabe elders’ home;¹ and to the north the Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC), the Many Rivers housing development, Powwow Grounds Coffee, All My Relations Gallery, the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe offices, and Ancient Traders Market, all strung along Franklin Avenue, the crucible in which the American Indian Movement coalesced in 1968.

Yet it took me a long time to actually start talking to any Ojibwe people. I read about them, sure; I learned about the central role of wild rice in their food economy, the seasonal rounds they made each year from sugarbush to winter hunting camp. Talking with the same guy who grows his food on a chinampa, I learned that long ago, before “the cutover” when the entire Northwoods was logged, you could still see visual proof that the Anishinaabeg had tended the forest like a garden: anomalous clusters of pine clumped amid the mixed hardwood forest, marking former village sites that got taken over by pines once the people were forced out of them, contrasting against the rest of the forest where stone pines, oaks, and maples, among others, showed how carefully they cultivated their favorite trees. All fascinating facts. But I wanted to learn this stuff straight from the people themselves, not secondhand from white people and white people’s books. I wanted to start learning the language, like I’d decided I would before I came. And I wasn’t doing any of that yet.

The problem was simple: I didn’t know any Ojibwe people. Our neighborhoods occupied nearly the same geographical area. But I was part of the very recent wave of middle-class young people returning to the inner city for the cheap rent prices—let’s put it bluntly: gentrifiers—and they were part of a totally different neighborhood. In The City & the City, China Miéville invents two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, that are geographically shuffled together, but distinguished by language, style of dress, even gait; showing any conscious awareness whatsoever of the city you’re not currently in is punishable by mysterious, peremptorily absolute measures.² When I read that book after living in South Minneapolis, it felt awfully familiar. I didn’t risk getting disappeared if I tried to start a conversation with someone from Little Earth, but what could I possibly ask them? “So, you’re Indian, huh?” I kept to myself on the sidewalks.

But once I’d lived in Minneapolis nearly two years, I finally decided it was time to get over that. So I looked around, and eventually through a housemate I found a flyer for an Ojibwe language table at MAIC. I grabbed a binder and a notebook and one afternoon I walked through MAIC’s big wooden doors into a different place, Minneapolis yet not Minneapolis, not quite the city I’d been living in for the last couple years.

It might be just as well that before I moved to Minneapolis, I spent a year and a half being a stranger in a series of strange places. I had spent several days at an anarchist squat in Barcelona, on the recommendation of some guy on the street in Munich (I got in by simply knocking on the front door). I had stayed overnight with a family a few hours west of Moscow when the father gave me a ride and then invited me to stay over and have borscht so I wouldn’t have to camp out. I had stayed a week in a small town near the Gulf Coast of Mexico because I got dropped off there while hitching elsewhere, and a guy shouted to me in English before I made it back to the highway from the internet cafe. So it wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling when I walked into MAIC’s lobby, redolent with the vibrations of dozens or hundreds of powwows gone by, and found my way into a room where I was the only non-Ojibwe person.

A funny thing happened then: nothing in particular. I nervously introduced myself, making sure to mention I’m not Ojibwe. Someone asked, out of curiosity, how I came to be there, and I told a little of my story, and I sat down. And then the teacher passed around some handouts about animate-intransitive verbs, and we all buckled in to learn some Ojibwemowin: a rich, rambling tongue full of mellifluous polysyllables, heritage of a people who had kept it alive through four centuries of dealing with Euro-American culture and were doing their damnedest to keep it alive for another four and more besides. There were five or ten of us, and we talked a little during breaks or when we practiced verbs on each other, and after an hour or so we all went home.

I didn’t really make any friends that day because I was far too busy being anxious; I just listened and learned. If nothing else, I could certainly pay attention to grammar patterns. I had done a little preliminary studying—actually I had scoured Louise Erdrich’s bookstore for language textbooks, and devoured all I could from them—and finally hearing these words come off the page and into the air was something like magic for this hopeless language geek. I usually found myself a little ahead of the class as far as actual knowledge of grammar (being probably the only person in the classroom with a college linguistics concentration), but much of the value in coming wasn’t in learning new patterns but in actually using them, face to face, with other human beings. None of us were fluent, usually including even the teacher. But we were all there and earnestly trying, and we all kept coming back all on our own accord, because we loved it.

Pretty soon I started recognizing faces and making friends. I also heard about other events—ceremonies, powwows—and went to them to learn more. Here and there I picked up bits of traditions. I learned that it’s standard to offer tobacco before asking for something, whether spiritual teachings from a human or a basketful of raspberries from the Earth. I learned that tobacco is one of the four sacred medicines, with cedar, sweetgrass, and sage. I heard about people holding sweat lodges and other ceremonies I’d never heard of. It all hinted at a deep well of very lived-in practices, at first alien to me with its strange wood-and-stone rituals, yet soon somehow very homely. People talked now and then about spirits. One evening we paused learning the language for a moment to talk about possible experiences people had had with the Memegwesiwag, little hairy-faced creatures that live in the banks of rivers and lakes and come out to make friends with children and occasionally move your things around while you’re not looking. Some of what I learned puzzled me. Some of it seemed instantly obvious. All of it gave me a strange feeling of living inside of myths. On the one hand, I was in a ground-floor room in the American Indian Center with plate-glass doors and a whiteboard up front. On the other hand, people were talking matter-of-factly about spirits like Bagwaji-inini, the ‘wild man’, sometimes translated as Bigfoot, as though they were simply talking about old friends they sometimes visited when they went out to the forest. If a mainstream American had told me the same things, I would have suspected schizophrenia. But these day-to-day stories tied in with a far-reaching body of myth, and something made me figure that they weren’t to be understood in quite the same way as when my childhood neighbor tried to convince my dad that the C.I.A. had sent fighter jets over the neighborhood park to shoot down his kite because it had a design that looked a little like the Japanese flag. This seemed, possibly, to be something subtler and deeper. Despite myself, I wanted to learn more.

In fact I wanted to learn more about all of it. I wanted to go take part in all the rituals, learn from all the elders, hunt with all the hunters and go gather herbs with all the medicine keepers. And so I had to confront something that I had known, at some level, since I came up with the idea to learn any native language. I wasn’t just doing this because I wanted to learn land practices, or even because I wanted to find out what philosophical lessons I might be able to glean from acquaintance with a very different and very land-centered culture. Actually, I was there because I suspected I might be on the track of a way to fill the vast sucking hole I felt where my own culture was supposed to be.

I’ve quoted Wendell Berry before to explain this, and I’ll quote him again:

One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on.³

Which is to say, very few new arrivals to America have actually learned to be American, in any sense that matters. We have never felt comfortable where we are, always itching to move on to the next place. Those who buck this trend and dare to envision that the land they’re on may be used by generations of their descendants are looked on with suspicion; they are “rednecks” or “hillbillies” or “hayseeds”. All the more ironic, because those ignorant hicks were responsible for some of the only truly American flowerings of culture to emerge among the descendants of newcomers to this continent. Think of Huck Finn; think of black Baptist gospel choirs. But of course, Americans have seldom realized that even though we fancy our country something new under the sun, where we have refined, high-octane freedom and anything goes, what we actually consider culturally acceptable is a pretty narrow range of possible human experience defined by what European culture considered acceptable back in the days it was emitting its overflow population onto our shores. Even art so benignly outside those norms as Twain and gospel still has an aura of the transgressive about it.

On one side of my family I am in fact descended from a line of West Virginia hillbillies, dating back not just to when it was still Virginia but to before the Revolutionary War, even to the Mayflower. Some of them probably even felt unselfconsciously at home in their hollers in the mountains, their hides crusted with Appalachian clay just the way they wanted. But though I spent my summers in the hills and waters of Doddridge County as a kid, I didn’t grow up there, and my kin there are mostly strangers to me: the chain has been broken. Just as it has been for increasing numbers of the children of the few backwaters in the U.S. where people actually had been taking root, relating to their land, and so beginning to cultivate a culture.

A place is, after all, the soil from which a culture grows. We often take cultures as givens: there are a certain number of world cultures that have existed since time immemorial, and the important thing is to preserve them from the homogenizing force of globalization. But cultures have beginnings, of course, just as they have ends; much like species, they evolve into being from something previous, they flourish, and they die or evolve into something else. And their beginnings happen wherever a group of people comes together to live in a place they’ve never lived before. Word gets out that war has made a great deal of Iowa prairie available to those hardy enough to homestead it and resist the returns of the Meskwaki it was taken from; a number of people tired of living on the Eastern seaboard come to seek their fortune in farming; they gather in little towns and at farmhouse potlucks to help each other learn how to live together in this weird new place; a culture takes its first toddling steps. Without the place—without sharing the totality of life, including what moderns are tempted to think of as the unimportant challenges of geography and subsistence—you don’t get a culture. You just get what we have in today’s rootless America: anomie, aimlessness, anxiety, self-destruction. Even the most famous geographically diffuse cultures have places in their own ways. The Romani are unified by wagon life and wagon camps. Jews are tied back to Israel even at a distance of three thousand years by their texts, still written in the language of that time and evoking the life in that place. Depression-era hoboes gathered in insistently communal “jungles” next to switchyards to make mulligan stew and swap tales of their other shared home, the rails.

In this sense, American colonialism has had no winners. The original inhabitants of the land have of course been decimated martially, had their land taken, and suffered initiatives of the conquerors explicitly intended to destroy their cultures. The Great Plains are empty of bison in large part because the U.S. Army spent the decades after the Civil War killing all of them in order to deprive Plains nations of their most important food and cultural symbol.⁴ But the rank and file of the colonizing culture are, despite living in the richest country in the world⁵ and consuming several times as much energy as people in most other countries,⁶ still one of the most unhappy and antidepressant-consuming⁷ citizenries in the world. This holds equally, if not doubly, for America’s rich, who on the whole have proven themselves more interested in becoming yet richer, and in exotic drugs and other escapist pleasures, than in self-actualization, let alone in making the world a better place with their wealth.

It’s a culture’s job to keep this kind of tragedy from happening. A culture is nothing more or less than a body of knowledge that helps people who adhere to it deal with all the problems and joys of life, from “What do I do if my spouse is unfaithful?” on up to “What is the meaning of life?” Not all cultures rise to these problems equally effectively, and accordingly people are happy and unhappy to different degrees in different parts of the world. But today in the U.S. what we see is what results when nascent cultures have been plowed under repeatedly as seedlings.

And then had McDonald’s built on top of them. Once companies found that they could profitably supply for money what culture always used to supply for free, our culture became commercialism. Nowadays farmers’ markets are far outnumbered by supermarkets; fraternal orders’ emergency funds for members have been replaced by insurance companies; traveling circuses and Chautauquas have been replaced by TV; even just walking next door and visiting has been replaced by Facebook. Commercial culture has even found that it doesn’t have to stop at fulfilling all our needs, but can create brand new needs and lead people to pursue them at the cost of utter personal ruin. In Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Vance reports that poor people where he comes from in Kentucky now destroy their families by buying cars and TVs they can’t afford under the delusion that these prove they’re successful.⁸ Of course the solution to the depression that results is also for sale, in the form of Budweiser and prescription opioids.

But as real and disastrous as it is that this country lacks anything worth calling a culture, that all just made it harder for me to admit to myself that I went to Ojibwe table looking for a way to remedy that problem. Because for as long as there have been colonizer-Americans who knew they were missing something, some of them have been turning to Native Americans in the hopes of finding that something. “The land!” wrote William Carlos Williams in 1925, “don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it make you want to lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to find—as if it must be clinging to their corpses—some authenticity?”⁹ And what’s more presumptuous than going to the descendants of a people from whom your people have taken virtually everything, and asking, “Hey, you know those last few scraps of culture you managed to save? Can I have that too?”

Here I was, not only a stranger, but a white-American stranger, descended matrilineally from a twelve-child family that lived on farms hewn from South Dakota prairie, right next to two different reservations, almost as soon as the Dakota were penned onto them; and patrilineally from a family who probably formed an unbroken bloc of Trump votes in 2016. I grew up in the heartland of white culture, Ohio, a land whose white people speak with an accent that’s considered the most standard, boring, normal accent in the country. I ate Thanksgiving dinners and made yearly lists of Christmas loot I wanted. The most Native American part of my childhood was the day my mom rented Smoke Signals on VHS.

And to boot, I was an anthropology major, and let’s say anthropologists have some history of not being the most understanding and helpful observers. Once of the more famous pieces of ethnographic literature is Napoleon Chagnon’s study of the Yanomamö, The Fierce People, in which he reports that the Yanomamö participated in more or less constant, pointless war between tribal divisions, a pursuit that took most of their time and energy as well as many lives. This thesis is rather undercut when you find out that he singlehandedly started the wars by motorboating up to his field base and embarking on what Christopher Ryan calls “a surrealist anthropology project”,¹⁰ building a detailed genealogy of a people for whom naming the dead is one of the strongest taboos, and playing one village against another to get his information by hook or by crook, creating and inflaming deadly vendettas between them. His interventions probably led to the deaths of at least ten people. Ryan reports that “the word anthro has entered the vocabulary of the Yanomami. It signifies ‘a powerful nonhuman with deeply disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricites.’ ”¹¹ It wasn’t that I was afraid people would hear I was an anthropologist and want nothing to do with me. I was afraid I would say something that confirmed for me that my training had spoiled my ability to relate to people as equals; afraid that I might only ever be able to see the people at language table as ethnographical subjects.

I was treading on delicate and fresh scar tissue here. I realized I couldn’t even say with any confidence that it was okay for me to learn any of this. I had walked into the classroom that first day knowing just that I wanted to learn; I hadn’t formulated a full sociological critique of what I was doing. Each step I took felt both rewarding and also risky. Somewhere out there was a whole Kandinsky canvas of lines that I was about to cross.

If I had a giant hole left to me by my ancestors and their countrymen, certainly the Ojibwe people were under no obligation to fill it. No one ruined America but Americans. If I wanted that problem solved, I could look elsewhere. I could reach back through my ancestry to look for a tradition that satisfied me—be it some more palatable form of Christianity, or Appalachian hoodoo-making, or devotion to Wotan. But those chains had all been broken. They didn’t call to me. I knew, somehow, that for me it would be a much more vivid and satisfying life pledging allegiance to the ground I stood on than to the dusty memory of my ancestry distant in time and space. To judge from the history of Americans seeking guidance and authenticity from medicine keepers, many of them have felt the same way. But though the last four hundred years have presented the Ojibwe with many problems, one of them is not a requirement to make white people feel self-fulfillment in life.

Yet here I was, and they were teaching me anyhow. They were teaching everybody. The Ojibwe language table flyer said the whole community was welcome. If limits needed to be imposed on how far I could go, either I hadn’t reached them yet, or it was up to me to figure out where they were. I could learn about Ojibwe traditions, sure. Could I practice them? Well, in some classes a container of tobacco and a birchbark basket would be passed around, and each student would hold a little tobacco in their left hand, focus some thought on a little prayer, and then put the tobacco in the basket. I’d been not just invited but more or less expected to take part in that. If I were invited to a sweat, could I ethically go? What I wanted to know was, where do I cross over the line into cultural appropriation?

One reason this is a hard question to answer is that no one seems to quite agree on what cultural appropriation is. I was first introduced to the concept in a sociology class, where I learned that it means something like taking elements from a culture you’re not a part of and reusing them for your own good with no regard to their original meaning. Like those dreamcatcher earrings you saw at the thrift store, which started out as a sacred symbol, but in this incarnation originated when a gewgaw company’s purchasing manager wrote an order to a factory in China. Depending on who you ask, though, it might not be disregard for something’s original meaning that makes it appropriative to use it. Cultural appopriation might mean taking something from another culture and treating it as your own even if you are trying earnestly to understand the traditions behind it; recently I was part of a conversation where someone new to meditating wanted to know if meditation was cultural appropriation if you don’t come from Asia. (A guy from India was there and, to his credit, seemed not even to understand what this white person was being anxious about.) To others, cultural appropriation means borrowing anything from a culture with less global power than yours has. Or it might mean borrowing from a culture that yours has a history of oppressing, even if the two are on a more equal footing now.

Whatever it is, white people in America (especially liberal ones) tend to get very sensitive and alarmed if they smell that there’s a chance of it happening. Aside from a few pre-approved exceptions such as yoga studios and meditation centers, these white people are often very careful not to say, do, or make anything that would make it appear they’re borrowing from another culture.

And it’s probably good to exercise an abundance of caution here, really. The whole reason we talk about cultural appropriation and condemn it as bad is that it has negative effects on real people who live real lives. However we define cultural appropriation, I believe we can all agree that schools with football teams called the Indians, the Braves, the Warriors, the Chiefs, are doing it—to say nothing of the NFL team that many Indians I know will only call “the Washington team”. Psychologists have looked into this particular matter extensively and are quite confident that Native American kids who live with mascots like Chief Wahoo around are more depressed and have less belief in their ability to achieve anything.¹² The research has accumulated to such a depth that the American Psychological Association felt moved to make an official statement recommending the retirement of such mascots.¹³

Looking at it with no historical perspective whatsoever, a naive observer might think the whole matter’s a little silly: so what if some sports team names itself after some tribe? No one seems to care about the Fighting Irish. But here I have to say that I think the people who believe the harm in cultural appropriation comes about when there’s a power imbalance are at least on to something, even if that’s not the whole story. A power imbalance is always there ready to skew every relationship, sicken every interaction. If I’m sitting around talking about spiritual matters with some Ojibwe friends of mine at some family event, and I make some little comment that calls into question some minor point, even if it leads to healthy debate among all of us, it could stick in the mind of a teenager listening from the sidelines, and lead them to chew it over for months, and contribute fatally to a picture they constantly get from the dominant culture, in which their own culture is an irrelevant anachronism. After all, that white guy who seemed smart made my culture sound stupid. It’s a little thing in the moment, but if you’re from the dominant culture, every action you take and every word you say has the power to be magnified manifold according to your perceived status in the social hierarchy of the country. It’s wise to tread carefully.

But that doesn’t mean that there should be a moratorium on white people learning anything from other cultures. A certain kind of P.C. police would, if you’re white, have you never, ever do something that wasn’t done by someone in your ancestry or invented out of whole cloth by you yourself. And what a lonely fucking world that would be, and how depressing if the only thing white people can ever be is the kind of white we’ve been in the past or a kind of white we have to painstakingly create. That would mean no jazz or rock, and come to think of it almost no music made since 1955; you’re not allowed to make gumbo or pad Thai or anything else that a medieval European peasant wouldn’t recognize; all Buddhist practice is immediately limited to East Asians; and you can only French-kiss if you can prove you have some French ancestry. If this makes you sad, remember you’re not allowed to assuage the grief with vodka unless you’re of Russian descent. It goes without saying that you have three religious choices: Catholic, Protestant, or None.

It sounds absurd, and it is absurd, because cultures have been blending ever since there have been cultures. It’s one of the main ways they grow. Buddhism as practiced in much of Asia is full of gods borrowed from Hinduism, and Rome borrowed Greece’s pantheon wholesale and just gave them new togas and different names. Germans pronounce the letter r like the French apparently just because they thought French sounded nice. The Dakota had no horses until the Spaniards brought some, and look at them now. Italy had never seen a tomato before traders brought the first one from the New World, nor had Thailand ever seen a hot pepper. I’m positive a close enough analysis of European cave paintings would reveal different cultures influencing each other over thousands of years. No one can argue seriously that cultures should never borrow from each other; the exercise would be as pointless as arguing that people of different heritages shouldn’t intermarry: it’s going to happen anyhow.

All the same, that doesn’t give me license to borrow whatever I darn well please from Ojibwe culture and, if I’m questioned on it, smile and say, “Syncretism!” For one thing, if I’m going to borrow anything, I’d better be quite sure I’m not borrowing it without understanding it, because then I haven’t borrowed a tradition at all, I’ve made something up out of my own wishful thinking and started calling it traditional. And I’d better know I have permission, too. It does no one any favors if I find some shady character on the internet who’ll sell me a traditional pipe, and then I start holding rituals with it. Then I’ve taken a longstanding and very sacred tradition and checked off all the appropriation boxes by misunderstanding it, commodifying it, failing to be real with the people, and on top of all that not waiting to be told that it’s time for me to become a pipe carrier.

The bottom line, I think, is that anything I do should never weaken the Ojibwe culture, and wherever possible, should strengthen it too. This may seem simple to stick to, but it’s of course impossible to know all the effects your actions will have, and even an innocent stray comment can reverberate years down the line. But it seemed like a good baseline to start from as, I interacted with another culture with much less worldwide clout than the money-bandying one I grew up in. I didn’t develop it into an explicit list of rules to follow, but took it as a general guide, and came to some rules as I went along. I would go only where invited, or to events open to all. I wouldn’t take a spot if spots for something were limited and I might take one away from an Ojibwe person it would be important to. I wouldn’t try to steer anything, just listen. I would be humble and acknowledge my lack of knowledge. I would try to give as much as I received.

One day a guy I didn’t know showed up at the language table—one of those guys about whom people say, “He has a presence.” Maybe it was his cello-quartet voice, or his salt-and-pepper braids. When the teacher, Memegwesi, asked the newcomer how he would say such-and-so, I realized this guy was a first-language speaker of Ojibwe: I’d never actually met one before; all of us second-language learners were just doing our best teaching each other. The guy’s name was Pebaamibines, and in fact he was a professor, just retired from twenty-five years of teaching Ojibwe language and culture at the University of Minnesota. And furthermore, he was starting up his own language table. I went to the first one, and he taught with the strength of experience and a textbook he’d written himself, supplemented by a nonstop barrage of corny jokes. I came back every week.

It was in late winter at the beginning of 2017 that he announced to the people at his table that everyone was invited to come that spring to Porky’s Sugarbush, a traditional Ojibwe maple syrup camp run by a friend of his. Here my learning about the culture would get out of the classroom and onto the actual land; here stories would be told and ceremonies held. Here I would have the opportunity, if I so chose, to look for spirits—not just the spirits that reside in a language, which are fairly easy to cast into rational terms, but the stranger, wilder spirits supposed to inhabit worlds well beyond language’s frontiers. I’d picked up glancing references, during language tables and my background reading, to some of the spirits reckoned to inhabit the Northwoods: wiindigoog, the insatiable giants; animikiig, the thunderbirds; Mishibizhiw, the water spirit, manifest as a giant, horned lynx. But it’s one thing to learn about these spirits in the colorlessness of a classroom or from a book, and agree abstractly that those certainly sound like components of a fully functioning body of myth. It’s another to go out into the same woods they supposedly inhabit and hear stories of them there.

---

• Contents
• Back to Deep Island, pt. 4: Spirit Peeks In
• On to Deep Island, pt. 6: Around the Kettles