Kent Nerburn

The media frenzy is subsiding. They heard the explosion, came running, found little to photograph and few with whom to speak, and now are moving on. Somewhere another explosion is being heard. And now, ever so slowly, Red Lake is left to the long task of healing.

You have done the right thing, Red Lake. You have closed your doors. This was not an issue requiring national scrutiny, like a war carried on in all our names. This is a private issue, a private mourning, a deeply personal grieving. No one, news media or otherwise, has a right to intrude upon it.

Grief does not have a common shape. It is private for each of us, taking us where it will and demanding of us what it must. The good and honorable among us must bear distant witness, offering solace when it is needed, assistance when it is asked.

The media cannot do this, no matter how goodhearted the individuals who carry on their lives within it may be.

You owed them nothing. And you gave them nothing.

But they did not understand.

There is nowhere else in this land, save several other closed reservations, where they would not have had the right to demand access. Anywhere else they could have knocked on doors, camped out in neighbors’ yards, set up cameras on nearby rooftops. But you confined them to a single state road — the only place on which they had the right to drive on the reservation — and you allowed your people to grieve in private, free from their intrusion.

And they went crazy. They combed the shops and the malls and the college campuses and social service agencies in nearby Bemidji for anyone who had ever been on the rez or had an ounce of Indian blood or was willing to speak in any capacity whatsoever on the tragedy they had come to cover and which you so rightly chose to keep from view. “Give us a story,” they said. “We need a story.”

Well, here’s a story. In 1863, near Red Lake Falls 60 miles away, with soldiers camped around them on the hillsides and winter coming on, your great grandfathers’ grandfathers were forced to sell away a large portion of your land or risk being hanged.

In 1889, alongside the small creek running in the draw between the tribal offices and the trading post, just down the road from your school that now is filled with bloodstains and bulletholes and the echoes of screams, your grandfather’s grandfathers were forced to sign away much of what was left.

But your grandfathers perservered, and your fathers and mothers perservered, and they refused to give up any more of your land. And they resisted allotment, the practice of dividing up the reservation into individual plots of land for individual families, so their reservation was never carved up into “40 acres and a mule” pieces that could be cajoled and purchased and threatened away by white people seeking to own the land for their own.

And now it has come down to you, the parents and children, whole and
undisturbed, a private place of sanctuary and solace, where all who
have their roots here can always return.

It is owned by all, shared by all, kept in sacred trust for all.

And one cannot help but wonder if the ancestors who fought so hard to keep this expanse of forest and lakes free for their you and your children did not have some dim presentiment that the time would come when the land would once again need to protect and nourish you.

That time is now.

You, unlike the rest of us, can close your doors to share your grief. You can take the healing rituals, kept alive by the tribal elders and practiced so often before at the funerals of family and friends, and use them to heal the whole community.

You can bring the children who have sat at their grandmothers’ knees making jingle dresses for the powwows, you can take the young boys who stand longingly around the powwow drum while their older brothers sing the haunted ululations that have been taught to them by the elders, and you can embrace these children in a healing circle that reaches across the great Red Lake and through the forests and into every home that sits on this land that was given you as your own.

And, no, you reporters cannot go in. You would see the eagle flying overhead and see it as a symbol or a metaphor, not a message from the spirit world that someone is watching. You would see the people placing cigarettes in a plate at the wakes and understand it as a quaint ritual, not as the gift of the earth that when lit, rises up to the heavens.

You would become the observer, and in so doing, make them become the
observed. They do not need to be observed now. They need to enter into the rituals, only half understood, only partly believed, and turn to them for healing.

They need to embrace each other, to find a way to make the family of the shooter one with the family of the victims. They need to take the remnant that is their people, and make it whole.

They cannot simply move away to another place if the grief is too
great, not without losing something of who they are. For they are of this piece of land, and always will be.

Now that land is stained with blood. They must be allowed to find a way to heal and hallow that bloodstained earth. It is where they are, it is who they are, it is who they always will be. That is the gift that was given them by their ancestors, and that is the burden they now bear.

It is not ours to watch. It is not ours to understand. It is only ours to respect and bear silent witness, and to pray in our own way that this dark crime of children killing children will not be soon be visited upon any of us again.

A blogger named Trey Jackson captures news video clips for his blog called Jackson’s Junction.

Earlier today, he posted about a segment from ‘Inside the Blogs’ — a regular feature of CNN’s Inside Politics — in which they checked around the blogosphere for reactions to, among other stories, the Red Lake shootings. Kent’s blog is one of those mentioned towards the end of segment, starting at the 2 minute 45 second mark.

“An interesting blog that’s quick to note here, Kent Nerburn, he’s a blogger who was actually a teacher at that reservation, at that high school. He offers on his weblog many interesting insights into the community, it’s definitely worth checking out, Kentnerburn.com.”

Watch the video.

And so it begins. The grieving people at Red Lake have closed the town and shut out the media, and the reporters and camera people are now stuck in a small northern Minnesota town desperate for copy. It is an unseemly reality, but it is part of the lethal truth of an omnivorous news culture.

One of these reporters — a man well-aware of the avaricious nature of the media beast — saw my commentary in one of the papers in which it has run, and he contacted me asking what he needed to know to do this right.

I have no good answers about how to do it right, but I know how to do it wrong. So I told him.

Here are the thoughts. I think they bear reflection
Read the rest of this entry »

I know that many of you signed up on the assumption that you would receive no more than one email notification per week about new posts to my weblog. Normally, I try to honor that (well, maybe writing one post every month is more than honoring it).

But these are unusual times. I think I have something important to contribute about a tragic and difficult situation, so I’m taking the liberty of imposing upon you more often.

I hope you don’t mind.

On Point is a public radio live evening news program, produced by WBUR in Boston. Kent recorded a “radio diary” as part of tonight’s show on the Red Lake tragedy. “In the radio diary, Kent Nerburn shares a piece of advice to all Americans who are watching news coverage of the Native American tribe he knows so intimately.” Kent’s radio diary, a reading of his They are all our children blog post, is towards the end of the show at the 42 minute/45 second mark.

There are places where the world holds its breath and has a strange cast of spirit. We’ve all encountered them — prisons, concentration camps, the Bear’s Paw surrender site where I’ve just spent so many hours in my research on the Nez Perce. They are hallowed in some dark fashion by the events that have transpired there.

Red Lake has a place that the elders know, called “Silent City.” It is just a field in a vast expanse of bracken — too ordinary to be called “meadow” or “prairie”– dotted by the occasional oak and alive in the summer with the buzzing of insects and the soft murmurs of the wind.

I remember when I took students to talk to the elders, how they told of hearing voices crying in that field. And they were the voices, the elders said, of the Sioux, not the Ojibwe. For it is that field that a battle was fought between the two peoples, and the Ojibwe emerged victorious.

But still, the voices remain.

Will the voices remain at the high school? Will there for generations be screams echoing in those halls?

One of the great strengths of Indian people is the power of their healing rituals. They have, after all, been forced to do much healing over the years. The elders still have authority; some of the medicine people still have power.

Analyze it as you will — and analyze it we do — there is, nonetheless, a healing force that a community like Red Lake can call upon. I know that they are calling on it now, and I know that the rituals, seen by so many outsiders as curiosities, are being invoked to call forth that healing.

Perhaps the old ways have lain dormant for so many years, waiting for just such a moment as this. Perhaps this is the moment when the old truths take root in the hearts of the young.

There is no good in murder and death, but we must lean toward the light as best we can. Perhaps the light that shines through this tragedy is the light of a past that has gone too dim, called forth now when it is the only light shining in a darkness to bleak to bear.

Kent’s They are all our children post has been published in several print and online publications, including the Mpls Star Tribune, the Des Moines Register, the Pacific News Service, and the San Jose Mercury News.

Dear Friends,

This is a rare and strange opportunity for me to do something of value in a time of crisis. As most of you know, Red Lake is the reservation where I have spent my time. That school was where I worked with my students. The teacher who is being quoted about getting her children on the floor took my old job. That might be my old classroom. This tragedy strikes right to my heart.

I am very concerned about how it will be put forth in the media –”reservation poverty breeds culture of despair,” “Alienated goth student runs amok,” “tragedy in the heartland,” and so forth. The journalists can’t be faulted; they aren’t close enough to the event in time and culture to do any more. But maybe I can, because I know the people and the place.

So what I am offering you is something that I wrote several years ago when one of my students died. It will bring you closer to that reservation — both its poverty and its spirituality — than anything else you are likely to read. I have always wondered how it would see the light of day. Perhaps it was written just for this moment.

I don’t usually ask people to do this. But in this instance I’d like you to pass this on to others. For this brief moment people are looking at Indian reality. This entry will allow them the glimpse they need to see.
Read the rest of this entry »

I know I just wrote on this, but it is bothering me deeply. So I penned off an editorial to the New York Times. I doubt they will use it, but I thought I would share it with you. And if any of you have local papers that would like to use it, feel free to pass it on to them. I recognize that it would need editing to suit local conditions.

They are all our children

I awoke this morning to the leafy richness of an Oxford University spring day, far from the cold confines of my northern Minnesota home. I am here across the pond with a group of students from a small Minnesota university who are having their lives changed by a series of brilliant lectures and a city of timeless civility.

But as I sit here another group of students from the Red Lake reservation near my home town in Bemidji, Minnesota are also having their lives changed. But those changes are coming at the hand of a student who walked through the hallways of a high school where I once taught and aimed a gun at the teachers with whom I once worked and the children of parents with whom I have shared tables and friendship.

It is a sad and tragic and story, made all the more poignant by my knowledge of the people, the reservation, and the land on which this all took place. I wish there was something I could do.

But I cannot reach across to my friends; I cannot share the grief of the Red Lake community that I have grown to know and love. What I can do is reach out to those of you in your cities and homes and commuter trains and ask you to watch.

Watch as the journalists and t.v. reporters fly out from their home cities, land in Minneapolis, catch a commuter flight to the small airport in the forests of Bemidji, and drive their rental cars thirty miles north through the pine and popple to the Red Lake Reservation. Watch them as they go to the small convenience store, interview a few folks, and push their way as near as possible to the school building that sits on the gravel parking area near the edge of the great northern lake that gives the reservation its name.

Watch them go into the tribal offices, try to interview the tribal chairman, a young man with a dream of making his reservation a better place, and then scurry back on the dark country roads to their hotels in Bemidji and where they can issue dispatches about a student caught in a culture of poverty and hopelessness on a rural reservation.

It will all be quite earnest and at least partially true. But it will not get to the heart of the matter. It will not show the love and sense of family that is at the core of the reservation. Nor will it will reveal the unique sense of grief that fills a culture where the drum is the metaphor for community — when the drumhead is struck in one place, the whole membrane shudders and the sound reverberates everywhere.

What it will do, I’m afraid, is reduce this tragedy to a sociological event. “Rural reservation” is carte blanche for journalistic speculation about social problems and cultural hopelessness.

So watch to see if that is what this story becomes. And wonder why the same story in the wealthy suburbs of Denver did not immediately become fallow ground for sociological speculation about wealth, anomie, and fundamentalist Christianity gone awry.

This Red Lake story is hidden beneath two layers of mythology and misunderstanding that pervade contemporary American culture: “rural” and “Indian reservation.” In each lies a series of expectations and misconceptions that obscures the truth of events and makes what takes place there something “other” than the workaday affairs of our urban and suburban lives.

Watch, now, and see if that mythology and misunderstanding obscures the truth. I know Red Lake. I know those kids. They are just like my students asleep in their beds here in Oxford, just like your children brushing their teeth and packing up their books down the hall from where you are sitting reading this paper.

It was Sitting Bull, the great Lakota chief, who said it best: “Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of life we can create for our children.”

Those children in Red Lake are your children. Hear their cries and the cries of their parents as if they were your own.

Kent Nerburn
Author, “Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder”
Founder and past director of Project Preserve at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Reservation

I got up early today, hoping to answer a few inquiries from those of you who have asked about the Chief Joseph book. Then I open my email and find that the reservation where I first began my journey into Native American issues has been the scene of a school massacre.

I know that school. I know the teachers. I may even have known some of the kids, or, at least, their parents. A quick online check and the outlines of the story revealed themselves. What I saw was what I expected: news channels and papers reducing the carnage to “School Shootings on Rural Reservation.” But for me it is a tragedy among people I know and love.

What am I to make of such a thing? I can’t yet quite fathom this event. But I see what is happening. It is now time for the “parachute” journalists to begin making generalizations about drugs, poverty, and hopelessness on the reservation. And there will be some modicum of truth in those generalizations. But there will also be something false and almost pathologically disingenuous in this spate of sociological analysis. Were there instant reports out of Columbine about wealth, anomie, and Christian fundamentalism gone awry?

Keep an eye to this hard time. See if the search for the human is obscured by the search for the sociological. Then, think of what the deep implications are, and if there is indeed some separate standard. It is almost cruelly analytical to think this way, but I know too well the free reign that “rural reservation” gives to the news media, and it is quite different from what they allow themselves about “wealthy suburb of Denver.”

People are dead — perhaps friends. I do not wish to see them reduced to sociological ciphers.

More on Joseph next blog.