 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Sonny Smart
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
If I were at home, I would say Bojou. Enwo myhoemenu nehuse
emowuene asawuea ene Wausau cdu minua ugeba edebe Bad River yigideu edigeyen.
What I was saying is that in my language, if asked who I am,
josauaniqua would be my spiritual name, which is a name that all children are
given when they are born. I’m from the Fish Clan, that’s where I was born
and that’s the clan I was born into. It’s the clan of my father and his
father, and the father of his father, etc. It goes back to what we say, maweja,
a long time ago. My sons are all Fish Clan too.
I’m from the Bad River Reservation, which is the northern part of
Wisconsin right on Lake Superior, which is one of the Ojibwe bands of Anishanabe
people. There are a number of different Ojibwe bands: Bad River, Red Cliff, Lac
du Flambeau, and Mole Lake. I’m
from Bad River, which is where I was born. Both my parents are from Bad River,
and my grandparents live there. My grandparents moved to Odena, which is a town
on the Bad River Reservation where I was born.
We pretty much lived by a reservation earlier in our lives; we lived there
for about five or six years, then we moved out of the reservation. There used to
be a program called relocation. If you look at history, the government has been
trying to assimilate Indian people. One
of the ways to help them assimilate was basically to remove them from
reservations to big cities. The hope was that the melting pot theory would take
place, and the Indians would kind of melt into the cities. The federal
government’s goal was in a way to get rid of the Indian people, which has been
the policy for about 150 years now. So, we were a part of one of those policies,
specifically relocation. We went to Cleveland, then Chicago, and we finally went
to Milwaukee. And that’s where I spent some of my earlier years. In Milwaukee,
I went to a missionary boarding school on a reservation. The federal government
also had boarding schools to educate or assimilate the tribal peoples. The
missionary schools were run by various Christian organizations, and the one that
I went to was a Catholic school, called Saint Mary’s. I went to school there
for about a year. When I was 18, I went into the service, which I was in for
three years. Then I got out and decided I wanted to go to school again. So I
decided I would go into nursing, because I was a field medic. I went to Vietnam,
Germany, and different parts of the United States. So that’s what I went to
school for. Then, I changed courses and went into social work, sociology mainly,
and that’s where I had my training and worked with the tribe. That’s also
where I met my wife. She grew up here, and I relocated down here. That’s where
I started teaching at the University here in November of 1990. We have three
sons. Our oldest son Gary has a spiritual name of minogesiac, which means good
sky or good day. Our second son is David, and wabegagogesiac is his spiritual
name. Then our youngest boy’s spiritual name is limosetgisigum. David’s name
wabegagogesiac means early morning spirit, and our youngest boys name means sky
walker. They’re also from the Fish Clan.
Do you ever visit your reservation? Can you tell us a little about it?
I’m a tribal judge at Bad River, so I’m probably up on the reservation anywhere from once a month to maybe four or five times a month depending on what’s going on. There are sometimes different occasions or ceremonies going on. So I’m probably up there, back and forth, at least a dozen times in the course of the year. My relatives are there as well. I’ve been a tribal judge for about 20 years now; I first became a tribal judge in ’85. It’s a tribal court, but it only hears cases on the tribal reservation, it doesn’t have to do with state court. Then I participate in ceremonies or cultural activities that I go up there for.
Could you give us some background about your nation?
The nation is Ojibwe, which is actually pronounced Anishinabe. It’s like
German people or French people referring to themselves, so for Ojibwe people its
just Anishinabe. It means we’re the first people or the original people. So
when I say Ojibwe Anishinabe, that’s who I am. The Ojibwe people are a large
group, probably one of the largest in the United States. Navajos are the
largest, but Ojibwe people are probably one of the largest groups here if you
include their relatives in Canada. They cover basically from lower Michigan to
the upper peninsula or northern part of Wisconsin, northern part of Minnesota,
Ontario, and into Mantoba. So, it’s a very large area of tribal people. And again, they’re part of what they call the Three Fire
Society. The Three Fire Confederacy
was basically the Ojibwe people, the Potawatomi people, and the Ottawa people.
All three of the groups were from one group.
All three of them referred to themselves as Anishinabe.
But when the French came here, they ran into the Potawatomi. Their job was called the fire keepers. And so they thought—that’s their tribe––the
Potawatomi. They just called them
Potawatomi, and that’s how they recorded them down.
Then, they ran into the Ottawa. They
couldn’t pronounce Odawa, so they just ended up with Ottawa. And the Odawa are what they called the traders.
And so actually those three tribes were one group at one time, but today
they’re all separate. But they were basically one group of people.
And that’s the nation where I’m from, and it’s a large group of
people.
What is your opinion of the word “Indian” versus “Native American”?
Oh, when I was growing up, everybody just said that we were American Indian.
You know, that’s how it is in the history books.
You were just Indian, just American Indian or Indian.
And then in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, where there was a lot of
cultural awareness, a lot of the younger individuals at that time started using
the word Native American, because they didn’t like American Indian.
So they said we were native to this country, you know, we were indigenous
to this country. So they said we
really should be called Native Americans – rather than American Indian –
because we were natives to this continent.
We were the first people here. So
they started using Native American at that time.
And then they kind of changed it a little bit to - well, then people
started saying that anybody who was born in America is a Native American because
they were born here, so that would include everybody.
So some of them didn’t like the term Native American, so they moved the
term to First Nation People, indigenous people.
Most people now, they use a version of American Indian, Native American
or First Nation. A lot of them talk
about Nation - like the Oneida Nation or the Menominee Nation, Ojibwa Nation,
Lakota Nation, or the Navaho Nation. That’s
pretty much how they all refer to themselves today.
So it probably depends upon the era that you grew up in. It doesn’t
really matter to me. If they call
it American Indian, that’s fine; Native American, that’s fine; Tribal
Person, that’s fine; First Nation Person, that’s fine.
I don’t really have an opinion. I
don’t have an issue about either one.
Were there any key events in your nation’s history that you can tell us about?
We could probably sit here for about fifteen
hours and you’d get a little peek. You
know, I teach a whole course on the big events that happened.
But probably – historical events?
Well, I guess the ones that have an effect today, key events, I would
probably say what I mentioned before, which would be the boarding school era.
You know, that’s where a lot of individuals were sent off the
reservation to these boarding schools. And
it’s not like the boarding schools you would think of, like prep schools that
you would see today. If you think
of boarding schools today, you think of prep schools.
People go away to these schools to stay and they’re prep schools. But these types of schools were not prep schools.
These schools were built basically to strip you of your language and
strip you of your culture. That’s what they were built for.
They had nothing to do with preparing you for going to college or
anything. And besides that, at that
point in time, they didn’t believe that Indian people were smart enough to go
to college. They were just trained
to go to work on a farm or do manual labor, and that’s basically all they
would do. It was primarily to
strip you of your native language and your culture and assimilate you into
mainstream society. So well over
half the population went to boarding schools.
Most of the schools at that time were rough and much like corporal
punishment. Just a lot of things
would go on there. It wouldn’t be
like today, but in those days it was everyday behavior.
You know, corporal punishment was standard, such as hitting, pulling your
hair, kicking, slapping you, you know. Whatever
they wanted to do, basically they could do to get you to change.
So, a lot of people went to boarding schools in those days.
The second event that I think I mentioned earlier was relocation, which
started right after World War II. It
went into over half the Indian population, and as I mentioned before, people
were relocated to large urban areas like Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. They
had a large agency called the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a large federal beurocracy
that has the overall trust responsibility for the tribes. Since the BIA was responsible for this relocation of tribal
people, they set up all these sort of educational centers throughout the
country. And that’s where they
would send tribal people to. You’d
get there and you’d meet the BIA agent and then he would find a place for you
to stay and give you some temporary money to live on for about six months, and
they would come help with your rent and they would try to find you a job as
either a welder or a mechanic, but nothing college educated.
They still didn’t think Indian people should go to college or do
anything in that area. And then the
hope was that you would stay in the city and then sort of assimilate.
You would never go back to the reservation again, and that would be the
end of it. But cultural identity is
very, very strong. So what Indian people did is that once they got to the city,
they just sort of found each other and created their own urban centers and
cultural centers. So when I grew up
in these relocation places, there were other Indian families all around.
And they were around each other, and there were a lot of kids from
different tribes. But everybody
knew who they were. That was
something -that even though we moved there, we never really forgot who we were.
Then people would go back to the reservation anyway.
You know, they would go back there to visit.
We’d always go back there every summer, and during various fall
activities or for spring. We would
always make a trip up to Bad River on a regular basis.
All of my relatives still live there, my grandmother, they still live up
there. So we go up there on a
regular basis. But relocation was
probably another big event that happened at that time.
And probably the newest event is when they reaffirmed the treaty rights in
the late 1980’s, which was a real difficult time, because it was when they
made treaties with the federal government.
See, at one time, all this land in Wisconsin, for example, was owned by
the tribes here in Wisconsin. And
like any land contracts, we’d make an agreement with land.
If I’d buy land from you, then I agreed to give you something for it.
And so the stakes involved, you know, we’ll buy this land from you and
then we’ll give you in return a certain number of dollars but also the right
to hunt – not the right, but to retain your right to hunt, fish and gather
animal resources here. It’s
something that you had before; we are not taking it away, so you just retained
that right.
Well, a lot of people – the State kind of came in and said many people
didn’t exercise that right, and they took that to the Federal Court and it
finally went to the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court ruled that these treaties, in fact, gave them the right to hunt
and fish and it was built into the treaty.
So for example, if you bought some land over here from someone outside of
Wausau, and you sold them the land, you could put in the provision, also as part
of my agreement I get to say you had a pond there, I can come there and fish
once a year. So you could go there and fish every year because you put that into
the contract and they can’t break that, if they break it they are going to
have to compensate you for it. So, in order for you to sell the land, you need
to keep that provision in that contract. And that was part of the treaty, a part
of the agreement, that they have the right to be able to do that.
Also, the casinos came too, that also gave them the right to. The tribe is
like a 51st state. The state basically can, every state can have gambling if
they choose to do it. And so, since the tribes are like the 51st state, the
tribes are a part of federal land, it’s not state land. So the state has no
jurisdiction on federal land. So, for example, if you go down to Fort McCoy or
Camp Phillips, and commit a crime, you wouldn’t be charged in state court, you
would be charged in federal court. If
you were punished you wouldn’t be sent to a state prison, you would be sent to
federal prison. So it’s a federal crime if you go on federal land and commit a
crime. It’s the same thing with
reservations, it’s federal so what happens there is not under the jurisdiction
of the State. So what that does, it allows the tribes to be like a separate
nation, and they can decide if they want to have gambling or not.
They can make the choice to do that.
Almost all of the tribes did do that, and the reason they did do that is
because it’s very economically beneficial for them. Most of the tribes are out
in real rural areas, there’s not a lot of economical development, and there
are no jobs. This is something that
helps them with education, health, housing, their government, and it pays for
all of those things, too. So that’s where mostly all of their resources go
into. That has changed a lot of life on the reservations. Also, now they got
used to dealing with money, whereas before they were very social-natured and
everybody shared with everybody. Now when you bring in money and gambling, everybody’s all
of a sudden like, where’s mine? How come you seem to get more and I get less?
Now people are arguing about money where before they never really got
into money. Before it wasn’t a big deal, and it wasn’t a part of their
values. It was there, but it wasn’t a real high value. But in the American
society, we are a very capitalist society, money is very very important. You
know it makes everybody want more money, people go to school for money.
Everybody wants to be rich, and everybody wants power. So that’s what
drives people. That has gone on to the reservation, and has caused conflict
within the tribe. You know, it’s a double-edged sword - one end provides
economical benefits but it also creates that change in value system that
wasn’t there before. That’s now causing some conflict too. Those are
probably the events I would summarize, there’s more but those are some of the
bigger events that affect the tribes today.
Can you share some Ojibwe legends or creation stories with us?
The Ojibwa people came to what they call Turtle Island. Turtle Island is
actually North America. Actually if you look on a map, North America looks like
a turtle. The Ojibwa people that came here used to talk about it in early
stories, that they actually came through Wisconsin while traveling to where the
sunrise was. They came to a great
salt lake and that’s where they decided to live. There’s more to it, but
they lived there for a while. Then this cultural hero came to them in their
dreams, and talked to them about people who were coming their way, so they
should probably move inward because things were going to happen to them. People
were going to come across this great salt lake, what they called the Atlantic
Ocean, and were going to cause a lot of destruction and pain.
In that story there are seven stopping places along the way, and they
start the migration in the late 1400’s and they start to move eastward. And
there are seven stopping points. They kind of follow the Saint Lawrence to the
Great Lakes, up to Mackinaw Island, and then they kept going west. Part of the
prophecy was that they finally come to a place where food grows on water. And
that was one of their final stopping places. So they got there and they found
wild rice in the northern part of Wisconsin and Minnesota, so that was where
they started to settle. One of their big islands was Madeline Island. So that
was part of what brought them this far from the Ojibwa people. I guess if you
take a look at more creation stories, there’s a number of different variations
on the stories of the creator.
How is your band different from other Ojibwa nations?
It probably depends on where you are located, and we’re located on Bad River
so there are a lot of rivers, swamps, and wild rice there.
Other nations, like Flambeau, have a lot of inland lakes so they don’t
have a lot of wild rice there. That’s probably about the only difference. It
just depends on where they are located, whether it's right on a lake or inland.
But they are pretty much about the same, there isn’t a whole lot of difference
because they are all one people. They used to just all live in northern
Wisconsin. It’s the federal government that kind of, basically, split them up.
They all lived in the same community, and they were just sort of put in
different places and that’s where they had the reservations developed, so
there’s no big difference really.
Any last words?
As I mentioned in the beginning, josauaniqua is my spiritual name, and that means yellow cloud. What it loosely translates as is that just before a storm, there’s a yellow cloud that comes. I’m also called a sonny, and the reason for that is that my mother’s older brother's name was sonny memosh. He went to war as a Marine in 1945 and landed on Iwojima in the Pacific. He was killed there when he was 18 years old. So when they came back, the old people at the reservation had to tell my grandmother that her son had died. The old man saw in the future that there was going to be a grandson born shortly. They told my grandmother that they wanted her to come to the ceremony because that grandson was going to go west like her son did They said he was going to go over the ocean like your son, he was going to go to a war like your son, and he was going to do it at about the same age. They told my grandmother about that, and my family members knew, so they started to call me sonny, because I was the first one born after that. Although, my grandma never called me sonny because her sonny got killed in Iwojima. So she always called me by my name, James or Jimmy. The prophecy did become true, because when I turned 18, Uncle Sam flew me to Washington state, and from there he flew me to Vietnam. And that’s part of who I am too, the prophecy. And I guess, for last comments, you know, one of the most important things is education and coming to an understanding. What you learn in history books doesn't always tell you everything. They just selectively pick things out and then selectively read things out too, so you never really hear about various groups of people, their contributions, or what the federal government doesn’t want to say anything about. Because of that, people have a lot of ignorance about what goes on around us; for example gaming, or treaties.
