I will mine what is mine, what I mind. On this, my acreage of bewilderment. My job it is to sift the detritus of verbiage that never pretended to try very hard.

This talking that I soaked in from my earliest unknowing. A child doesn’t ask what “the folks” were doing there or why this particular language for existence. There they had planted themselves, supplanting those others. Their implied pastlessness was all my before. Weren’t we in a world called “new.” There they would plant potatoes as they made a stab at naming. Didn’t feel a need to squander much imagination on it. Often, they made do with tattered scraps of what they supposed those others to be saying. Thinking this would make them sort of people of this place. They scarcely worried about it. They had a crop to coddle. Babies to birth and pancakes to fry. The place name “Bemidji” is an example, crudely fashioned from an Ojibwe word that sounds almost nothing like Bemidji, supposedly meaning water running crosswise through the lake. When I was a youngster on a far rainy coast, Minnesota was all my background and my legend and a music that rang to me of soda cracker, poetics of genocide, what you ate with a lunchtime bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. Mni Sota Makoce, the land of cloudy waters.

It remains an open question why a gaggle of interlopers wanted to let their everyday tongue point sideways to those others, the ones who knew a thing or two about the earth. The ones from before they plumped themselves down and set to yanking stumps out of hardly friendly soil. Not an easy job, by the way. My grandmother’s people had “taken up” land. It was bandied about that her skin tone was “dark”: not dark-dark, but with a definite olive tint. Her eyes were dark, her beautiful hair was dark. So he called her his “Indian princess,” a tender joke by way of a verbal caress, though not so tender to those actual others, he was proud of her looks and also he was deflecting the impudence of neighbors who couldn’t resist remarking that a white someone in that northern region looked a little extra sun-kissed.

They wandered in the wilderness of what they were up to. I wander in it still. How they’d come this far over multiple centuries. Entire histories of heart-wrecking effort plowed into uprooting those others from what would later be known as “flyover country.” Along the way they languaged the continent poorly. At four, at five, I understood already: the state where they halted was my actual heritage. Such a flat white place. The mighty engine of the railroad. The mighty engine of the University. “Rah rah rah for Ski-U-Mah,” I learned to belt out, though nobody in my family cared that much for football. A lifetime gone, I think to look it up. Yes, we’d been singing the Golden Gophers’ fight song, the Gophers being the U. of M. team aligned with the power of public education to hoist my family’s fortunes. And “Ski-U-Mah”? It turns out to be another scrap of fake indigenous language (this time extra-fake). Wikipedia says that in 1884, as the football team was being organized, its captains wanted a cheer “that would have ‘a characteristic Minnesota flavor.’” They hit on the phrase “ski-oo!” which they claimed to have heard from Indigenous youngsters racing canoes on a big Wisconsin lake. One of the captains “incorrectly interpreted that phrase as the Dakota word for victory… and suggested it as a cheer for the university rugby team. His co-captain…added the ‘mah’ to make it rhyme with ‘rah,’ thus creating ‘Ski-U-Mah!’” According to Dakota-Lakota language experts, “ski-oo” is meaningless in Dakota.

So what would be a word, in Dakota or in English, for this yen to remember while not remembering by pasting twisted language, stolen language, or fake language on a map or a football field? Meanwhile, what has happened to those others, the people pointed to and blanked out with these misshapen syllables? Yes they are still around, probably, but we won’t get into that because we’re not required to. The whole south and middle of the state had been successfully ethnically cleansed about a century before. The Dakota intifada of 1862 (called by the settlers of the time the “Sioux Uprising” and blamed by a great-great-uncle of mine on instigation by Confederate subversives) prompted a white revenge that triumphantly collapsed participants and abstainers, combatants and civilians. The victors seized remaining tribal territories, expelling the starving bands beyond the borders of the state.

Occupying a small brick house in St. Paul, my grandmother clung to the “pioneer” badge. A pioneer is an agent of betterment. But how was it better? Still, it was us or them, allegedly. Would you want your lineage never to have existed? Your country not to star on the global stage? She called the memory book I helped her print, which made her semi-famous in her nursing home, Twentieth Century Pioneer. She thought first of calling it Jack Pine Savage, after a joking comment from an uncle when her parents first moved them to the farm in Bemidji. He hailed the children as “jack pine savages” after a local species that was being made to yield so that progress might erupt. Forest and Civilization do not rhyme in the Western imagination. In the end, she rejected that title, perhaps reflecting that jack pine is not a highly valued tree, nor savagery a status she wanted to claim, even in jest. In fact, jokes like these were one of the favorite ways they skirted actually speaking about those others, the people of the land they occupied: this joking naming of their own as savages and Indian princesses, to emphasize the us-them gap that they ostensibly took for granted (how could the offspring of Protestant farmers possibly be else than civilized) and yet felt the need to underscore. (Their life was pretty raw. They knew they lacked the finer things.)

I’m struck above all by the shoddiness of this language. How it seems like a lazy bandage barely competent to wrap around the wound. Famously hard workers in other areas, now they couldn’t be bothered. They’d “taken up land,” created facts on the ground, those facts did the heavy lifting. They were riding in some conveyance, however dilapidated, while those others sat by the roadside selling berries. They planted, those others gathered. It came down to that. But still, some scraps of language were requisitioned and haphazardly affixed. My grandmother, whom I loved and admired (the savage/pioneer/princess), remembered how the “chief” rode into town, “his” women seated behind him in the wagon. She called them by a name that white people used: the N word for “Indian” women, quite the opposite of princess. At this point, we’d been hard at work “settling” for a number of centuries and still hadn’t crafted a credible idiom or had cobbled this scabrous pidgin because a deficient lingo was actually more effective. Nothing to see here it shouted. Nothing much going on. Look instead at the marvels we have inserted. “By the shore of Gitche-Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water,” here where those others have handily “vanished,” behold our felled timber, faulty farms, mad roads. Our art a hulking effigy of Paul Bunyan, forest-slayer. (Go ahead, install your thin myth, erect what monuments you choose--but why is your patron saint eradication’s avatar?) Let us sow and reap the debauched prosody that cloaks what can be covered up and laughs about the rest. They settled nothing up north. Not with their lingo and not with their labor. I keep saying “they” as if it hadn’t occurred to me that the third person plural is another kind of bandage. We settled nothing up north. This is all my acreage.

Notes

For information on the derivation/meaning of the name Bemidji, see the Minnesota Historical Society’s MNopedia site. For the Ojibwe original, see The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary.

Mni Sota Makoce: “Mni Sota Makoce, the land of cloudy waters, has been the homeland of the Daokota for hundreds of years,” according to MNopedia.

“By the shore of Gitche-Gumee,/By the shining Big-Sea-Water”: Opening lines of “Hiawatha’s Departure,” a portion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “Song of Hiawatha.”

Paul Bunyan is a mythical lumberjack whose image was used for commercial purposes in the early 20th century. “1937: An eighteen-foot-tall Paul Bunyan statue is erected on the shore of Lake Bemidji to bolster tourism in the northern Minnesota community.”