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Growth of Gambling on Tribal Land Starts Trek Back Home by Indians
Coming home to Indian country from suburban life after 16 years, Carl Edwards recently lifted his young daughters through a window of their new house on Gunlock Lake, here at the Lac du Flambeau in Wisconsin. and let their little feet prance on the stiffening concrete, leaving symbols of permanence.
"This is your house," Edwards, a Chippewa, told his daughters, who he has promised to teach to hunt on this reservation, and to sprinkle tobacco around the fallen prey, a sign of thanksgiving to the Creator. "These are your woods. That is your lake."
The tribal economy here was lifeless as stone in the early 1980's, when Edwards fled this backwoods pocket of Wisconsin, certain that survival would mean existing on crumbs from the Government.
He joined the Marines for a stint, then settled near Milwaukee, where as a construction worker he earned enough to buy a small house and become familiar with the trappings of middle-class life. But he never quite felt comfortable in the mall-and-traffic rhythms of suburbia.
So the growth of tribal gambling in recent years, which created 120,000 jobs on reservations and an additional 160,000 spin-off jobs, breathing a whisper of prosperity in the nations of Indian country, meant homecomings for people like Edwards.
"I never thought it would be possible to come home," said Edwards, who works at the Lake of the Torches casino here, and just last November finished building a knotty-pine house. "There was nothing here when I left, and there was no reason to think there was ever going to be anything here. So you left."
After more than a century of American Indians leaving reservations for cities and towns, many tribes have started to experience a reversal in the trend, said Tim Giago, a Lakota writer and former publisher of Indian Country Today, the nation's largest American Indian newspaper, with main offices in Rapid City, S.D.
"This is really the biggest story in Indian country," Giago said, "people actually starting to come home for jobs."
Numbers on such homecomings are hard to come by, partly because the trend is so new. Even with gambling, many tribes still struggle mightily with poverty in conditions that are often much worse than those found in the poorest of urban neighborhoods, but there is plenty of reason for rejoicing over the turn of events in Indian country.
Edwards, 34, who earned about $50,000 a year as a construction worker, and is regarded here with awe for his service as a marine in Beirut, also rejoices over his return. "Look at the stars and the moon - it's like daylight," he said, awestruck. His view of the heavens had been obscured for years by the neon and sulphur glow of city lights.
In his new job, which does not pay as much as his old trade, Edwards trains workers at the casino for jobs ranging from card dealer to dishwasher. Some of the workers have reached their late 30's without ever having earned a paycheck.
"I grew up on that hill across the road," Edwards tells the recruits. "I know what life on the reservation can mean."
Growing up on the Lac du Flambeau reservation, Edwards learned to harvest wild rice in the late summer and to dance at the powwow, where his godfather, David Careful, gave him the name Little Fawn. Living just 100 steps from Lake Pokegama, he learned to fish in the darkness with flashlights and nets, to clean walleye, to shoot, gut and dress a deer, and to sprinkle tobacco in thanks.
He also knew the feeling of going to bed hungry. His mother was so sickened with alcoholism that she could not care for a baby. He became a ward of the state and was placed as a foster child in his Aunt Flora's two-bedroom house, a ramshackle place on the hill that was already crowded with eight other people.
The Indian children attended Lakeland Union High School, about 15 miles from the reservation. A majority of the students were white.
"There were people whose houses you knew you didn't go inside," Edwards said. "Some of my friends, you know, they'd be kind of embarrassed and say, 'Sorry, but my parents just don't like Indians.' "
There were plenty of fights. He was short, and not so quick with his fists. So he lost some battles, Edwards said, and at times he was confronted by mobs. He endured black eyes, fat lips, bloody noses and "sore ribs from the boots," Edwards said.
He went to school wearing ill-fitting, throwaway corduroy trousers that were laughably out of style. He never owned a pair of blue jeans. He saw his mother occasionally at family gatherings, depending on how she was feeling. His father, a fishing guide, walked past the boy without a word or a glance because he suspected that Carl's mother had been unfaithful, and so refused to acknowledge him as a son.
"My children will always have a mother and father who love them," said Edwards, as he played with his daughters, Joelle, 5, and Kendra, 1, on a murky December day at the reservation, while his wife, Lisa, 32, fixed a pizza. "And I will never wear a pair of corduroys."
Edwards and his wife, who is not Indian but grew up near the reservation, met in high school and married after he left the Marines.
It was Edwards's father who unknowingly inspired him to join the Marines, where he served in Beirut after the attack on the United States Embassy in 1983. The father was known around the reservation as At Ease, a reference to his long-ago service in the Army.
"I guess I wanted to one-up the old man," Edwards said. His father died a few years ago. And Carl, who had known such cold rejection, drove home anyway to attend the funeral and pay his respects. Some people wondered why.
"He gave me his name," Edwards said.
With his own children, he has many plans. "I'm going to teach them to hunt for deer," he said.
He will also teach them how to cope with people, like an old study hall teacher, who Edwards said showed disrespect for the Chippewa way of hunting and fishing.
Edwards recalled that the teacher had become enraged one morning when he, as a teen-ager, dared to lay his head on his desk in study hall. The teacher stood over the young Carl Edwards and began to bellow in a sarcastic voice, mocking the tribe's method of fishing.
"Go spearing last night?" Edwards said the teacher had asked. "That why you're tired?"
"No," the boy replied truthfully.
"Yes you did," the teacher pressed. "I'll bet you and your father went spearing last night." The taunt cut like glass to a boy who, for all of his 17 years, had longed for a father who would take his son hunting and fishing.
The boy glared back at the teacher, then screamed a profanity. Edwards said he stood up from his desk and challenged the man to a fight.
He was suspended from school for a week.
When Edwards told his employer that he would be moving back to the reservation, his boss asked. "Why on earth?"
"Because it's home," Edwards replied.
Joelle was almost ready to start school. And Edwards did not want his children growing up with stereotypes and falsehoods about his people. More than that, he wanted his daughters to grow up in the culture of their ancestors.
The forebears of Edwards were among the Chippewas who resisted Government efforts to force the tribe to move west. The Chippewas, who would not be starved or frozen into submission, clung to the ancient homelands that circle Lake Superior, a region dotted by thousands of freshwater lakes and forests of quaking aspen and sugar maple, teeming with elk, deer and bear.
As he walks the grounds of the reservation these days, he is likely to see old friends or relatives. The other day, he saw his boyhood pal Hank Schuman.
He gets to see his sisters, Ann, Donna, Patty and Mary, and his brother, Archie.
And one recent Sunday, his mother visited. She has been sober now for nearly 20 years, and her eyes shine like sunrise when she hears Joelle call out to her.
"Grandma," says the little girl, words that make the older
woman grateful.
Edwards was playing with his daughters one recent afternoon.
A smile danced across the face of Joelle, who delighted in pleasing her father. She began to recite words she had learned in her new Ojibwe language class.
"Makwa," she called out, the Chippewa word for bear.
"Say deer," her father urged.
"Waawaashkeshii," she answered.
"Rabbit," he challenged.
"Waaboos," she responded.
Edwards, with the hardened muscles of a man who hauled
180-pound bundles of drywall for a living, swallowed hard and bent to engulf his daughter in his arms.
"You want something so hard, for so long," he said, "and you don't think you're ever going to get there."
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