Local races in your counties-What is important.

I am not out there to solve the world. Whining does come once in awhile but I really dislike negative campaigning against a person politically or in day to day life - it really does not accomplish much but a reflection on yourself.

My thought today is about our local political races. So many individuals say, I hate politics, they are not including this or that, my life is politically free.

Well - for me - I do think we are political in all we do and say from how you say hello in your community or to what you do in community.

Inclusiveness/exclusiveness is rampant in small communities and you can see it in large cities but far more understood but not necessary correct.

Local elections are important. From your County Board, City Council races, Sheriff's, Prosecutors, Judges and even that Auditor.

The cost of incarceration of a person in our local jails is about $29,000.00 minimally and United States is the number one country incarcerating people in the world.

To me this shocking. Yet - for those populations victimized by the powers to be they are the least informed about the electorial politics and the most informed frankly control the elections.

In my mind, we are in deep deep mud in this country but the least we can do is get informed, vote and yes - we all have a table full fo bills, mouths to feed, more than one job or none at all but lets grab that opportunity and cast the vote.

INFORUM | Fargo, ND

INFORUM | Fargo, ND

A 2010 Spring Moment

The announcements for northern Minnesota came out for political runs in local and state races. The political system is a difficult one with decisions being made that never make all happy. We would not have things different in America.

The difficult piece of it all is my time is spent with others that are on the "bottom of the barrel" some would call this. I would say this is the backbone of this country that "bottom of the barrel"!

I spend my time with the poor, the working poor who struggle each day to pay their bills, buy what they can for their children and watch the telly to be told what life is suppose to be.

This is America. It has been this way since Chris landed his boat here in 1492 with a dream of being rich. This seems to be many people's dreams - to be rich, have vacations and relax golfing every day....

I am not angry - I just wonder why the people in the country do not revolt. I wonder why people just give up and accept life as it is handed out to them.

With revolution there is sacrifice to change the direction of a country. Why are we not doing this now? We watch our water, our living beings that are dying in the oil that will destroy so much - we shake our heads and say this is so sad or just sit around and watch. What can we do? We can stand up - direct action not by a few but by many....just a thought for a spring moment in the year 2010.

Treaty of 1855 - May 14, 2010 event in Bemidji, MN

I have little idea of the firm plan for the treaty 1855 events plans other than a solid brat roast at Diamond Point on May 14, 2010.

There is some discussion of people who will try to fish out of season off reservation to challenge the fact that nothing was ceded but land in the treaty of 1855.

If the DNR does give citations for those who are going against the state law this is what I understand a person may do.

1. Pay the citation fine
2. Go to County Court (county your received the citation)
3. Represent yourself or locate an attorney make a plea (Guilty,not guilty, request dismissed)
4. I personally can not instruct you what to do legally. As a White Earth member if I decide to fish on May 14, 2010 I plan on representing myself and ask the Beltrami County Court (if I decide to fish on May 14 this is the county I will do it in) to transfer my citation to tribal court or request Beltrami County Court to have it dismissed.
5. If they do not dismiss the citation or move it to tribal court I will then plead not guilty.

I then will seek assistance from Native Defense, or Anishinabe Legal Services and or any attorney that will handle the case to have it dismissed and hope for no costs.

After that is all completed, and my case is not dismissed I am going to contact ACLU-MN (they consider cases after the criminal case is completed) or National Lawyers Guild (do not know their process) or an attorney who is interested in treaty law to argue my case to have is dismissed or moved on the docket for arguement.

I will appeal anything that will place me in a position for having to pay a fine or plead guilty.

This is the only process I know personally. I am not an attorney just a person. "Ya know" this is new ground for this part of the country and who knows how this will all pan out (smile). My believe we have the right to hunt and fish anywhere. I do not believe we ceded those rights.

This is a partial story written about my friend, Elaine Fleming who resides in Cass Lake, MN. It was written August 27, 2003 and printed in the Minnesota Women's Press (Changing the Universe through Women's Stories) written by another friend of mine, Winona LaDuke.

Since this article was printed - Elaine Fleming lost one of her twin daughters of a serious illness in 2009.

Native stories take the stage

"It started with a class that I taught about storytelling," Fleming explained. "And we put on a play. There were theater classes at the college, and we opened it up to the community. There was a man who told me. "Indians are not going to act, not going to get up and perform.' But they have never been given a chance." So she started a program at the Leech Lake Tribal College, and the Native community came to the classes and came to the stage. The community had a chance to tell stories. "At one of the shows, we had people in the audience crying, we had people on stage crying," Fleming recalled.

Fleming has written and produced several plays at Bemidji's Paul Bunyan Playhouse, including Don't Dust My Wood Pile, KREZ Public Radio and Niwiijiwaagan (The One Who Walks With Me). I walked into the theater for an opening act to see my cousin Shirley LaDuke (a stunning woman in her sixties) dancing romantically at center stage, humming, "I want a man with a slow handŠ" The play was Niwiijiwaagan. And my cousin was dancing sensuously on her own, in front of the whole audience. It was amazing: all that residual Catholic stuff was nowhere to be found and somewhere I could sense that a whole audience of Native people was letting go and getting a little freedom to express themselves.

Playwriting became a collaboration. Fleming and her friends would gather to talk about what experiences they wanted to share. Some of the biggest challenges were a reflection of Native intimacy. "It was really different to write a love story. We struggled to find what love was, we had all experienced things, but we had a hard time with that," Fleming said.

Then there was the play about diabetes and the commodities. "We were going to have a female lead who went to prison," Fleming remembered. "Not because of alcohol, or because of abuse, but because she did something right. In this case, she had to heist the commodity food truck to do something about diabetes."

Audrey Thayer, who played the heroine in Niwiijiwaagan, has been in most of Fleming's plays. There is amazing relationship between Fleming and Thayer, a Green Party leader in Minnesota and a White Earth tribal member. She has twice run for Beltrami County Commissioner and is beginning, more than anyone, to bring out the Native vote in Cass Lake and Bemidji. Though Thayer wasn't elected commissioner, her efforts inspired her friend Fleming to try the political stage.

"I hated politics because my dad was in politics," Fleming recalled. "I always figured there was another way to get things done."

Then things changed.

"Last summer ŠI wrote this story about this Indian woman who was going to be in politics," Fleming said. "She went in front of the Chewakaegon store, she stood out there on her soap box and started telling the truth. Then Audrey Thayer ran for county commissioner up here. I thought that at this point in my life I could spend some time doing this."
In November 2002, Fleming became the first Green Party mayor in Minnesota.

Terror and hope

Fleming spoke at an anti-war rally in Bemidji organized by Audrey Thayer, 300 came out to march and listen to the speakers this winter. While George Bush talked about the war against terrorism, Fleming's words rang more clearly in the north country. She spoke out against the violence at home and the terror of living with toxic pollution. "This is terrorism, this is terrorism in our communities, and we will struggle against it," she said.

"The way I feel about the town is that that stuff is there, but there's really good people in that town, and that Indians are doing some phenomenal things about healing," Fleming said. "After Heather Casey and Faye Littlewolf died, we had a big walk. We walked right by that house where they found her, and the trailer house Faye was found in. I'm writing a play for the young woman. And we are going to have the young women work on it. And then we are dedicating a garden to the young women of our community in memory of Heather Casey. We want people to remember Heather Casey and we want those people in that house [to know] that we won't ever forget."

As for the Superfund site, the hearing process is underway, as are remediation plans. "I don't want to be a mayor who spends my time on people's water bills and street clean-up. I want to make a difference," Fleming said. That won't be easy. The only Native woman on the city council, Fleming often finds herself at odds with the non-Native business people on the council. "Their land and their businesses are on the other side of town. They get really angry with me," she said.

There are no easy answers in the north country. On June l7, Audrey Thayer's son, Cheyenne Devlin, fell to his death off the third story of the old Georgia Pacific site on the south side of Bemidji, another leftover from Paul Bunyan and the old logging industry; another tribute to environmental and social injustice. Devlin and his brother had been hired, along with other Native and poor boys, to tear down the building, which Fleming says had been declared another Superfund site. The employers provided none of the laborers with either harnesses or hard hats. Poor and Indian. Their mothers and their community are full of sorrow, but Fleming and her friend Thayer are organizing from the depths of that sorrow.

Commentary - July 3, 2009 on the Greater MN Racial Justice Project

Continued: Wally Hilke: A patriotism that prejudice cannot deny
Featured comment: Minneapolis Star Tribune July 03, 2009
That's what this country means
Wally Hilke: A patriotism that
prejudice cannot deny

Many have noted that the modern
observance of Independence Day is not
much about independence from Great
Britain. July 4th celebrations do not feature
the burning of the Union Jack; the hanging of
King George in effigy; the marching of
shame-faced, shackled Redcoat reenactors
in parades, or the chanting of anti-British
slogans. One might argue that independence
never was the most important outcome of
the Revolution. It is what our forefathers did
with that independence that matters. Given
the same options available to all nation-
builders since 1776, they chose to found a
country based on the consent of the
governed and the promise of individual civil
liberties. They left it to future generations to
deliver on that promise.

This spring I was struck by a curious sight as
I drove through the White Earth reservation
in west central Minnesota. We passed a
Native American cemetery that had flagpoles.
Lots of flagpoles. In fact, many graves had
personal flagpoles installed beside them. My
navigator, White Earth member Audrey
Thayer, told me that the flagpoles are placed
next to veterans' graves so their families can
fly their loved ones' U.S. flag above them on

civic holidays. Thayer tells me that this same
pride of military service extends to White
Earth powwows. At the beginning of these
gatherings, members of the White Earth Band
of Ojibwe play four veterans' songs, talk
about their families' military service and fly
their veterans' flags. All veterans are invited
to dance in the grand entry, whether or not
they are Native American. So too the other
bands in the Bemidji area, Leech Lake and
Red Earth, play veterans' songs and fly
veterans' flags during their powwows.

The patriotism displayed in the forest of
flagpoles was a bit ironic, given my reason
for visiting White Earth. I had come to tribal
headquarters as president of the ACLU-MN
board to discuss the work of our Greater
Minnesota Racial Justice Project, founded in
2004 because Native Americans were not
receiving equal treatment in the Bemidji-area
criminal justice system. Indeed, when our
project started, Native Americans were four
times likelier than Caucasians to be
incarcerated in the Beltrami County jail with
similar ratios in neighboring counties. The
same citizens who take such pride in their
service to our country were being denied the
very rights for which they fought.

Things have improved some after five years
of concerted effort by our Bemidji staff and
dozens of volunteers led by Thayer, our
project coordinator. Our work has included
hundreds of meetings with judges,
prosecutors, community leaders and law
enforcement officials; thousands of hours of
courtroom observation, and hundreds of
monitored police encounters with Native
Americans. Yet, in the first quarter of 2009,
Native Americans still were twice as likely as
Caucasians to reside in the Beltrami County
jail. Other measures of justice confirm that
we face a steep climb ahead. The February
2009 Bemidji Study on Race Relations
published by St. Paul's Wilder Foundation
found that more than two-thirds of the
Native Americans surveyed reported that
they had experienced racial discrimination by
law enforcement in the past year.

Native American pride in serving our country
perseveres despite the lack of equal
treatment before the law. Native Americans
continue to enlist in the U.S. military at rates
higher than any other race. This tradition
goes back to World War I, when they served
at twice the rate of the general population
even though as many as one-third of the
enlistees were not considered U.S. citizens
and could not vote. During World War II, the
Saturday Evening Post opined that the
Selective Service would not be necessary "if
all volunteered like Indians." Various

Minnesota bands have flag-festooned
veterans' floats that they enter in community
parades, even though they do not always
receive a warm reception. Three years ago
some parade-watchers jeered the Mille Lacs
Band veterans' float, gave it the thumbs-
down sign and reportedly spat at it during
the Isle Days Parade in Mille Lacs County.
Undeterred, the Mille Lacs Band veterans
continue to appear in parades to celebrate
their service and their country.

Americans rightly thank all of our veterans
for their inestimable contribution to our
freedom and liberty. At home we best honor
their service by guarding the civil liberties
that they have defended abroad. Each of us
has a role in fulfilling our founders' promise
of civil liberties and equal justice. Please join
me this July 4th in identifying some action,
however small, to help ensure that
Minnesota's Native Americans receive the
same measure of civil liberties that the
majority of us enjoy as our endowment
flowing from the American Revolution.

Wally Hilke is president of ACLU-MN.

Audrey Thayer - Women's Press

Justice for all
Activist Audrey Thayer’s grief fuels her battle against racism in “Birmingham of the North”

Elizabeth Noll
Assistant Editor


Thayer has traveled to Cuba and Mexico for the social justice group Witness for Peace. Courtesy of Audrey Thayer.
Audrey Thayer’s smile is wry and her brown eyes are warm. She looks comfortable, familiar and friendly. Her turquoise bracelet shines and her shell earrings flash in her short amber hair.

She doesn’t look like the enemy—but some white Minnesotans see her that way. She doesn’t look like someone to fear—but those who resist change might find her fearsome.

Thayer’s been an activist all her adult life, but when her 22-year-old son died in a tragic fall three years ago, she walked out of her day job and ultimately took on a project with the American Civil Liberties Union that would have many people quaking in their shoes: she now works to educate racists and eradicate racism in northern Minnesota.

The task is enormous, but it’s nothing compared to what she’s already lost, she said. Her son’s death galvanized her and gave her strength she didn’t know she had. “Women who lose babies—they’re the ones to be fearful of,” she explained.

By babies, Thayer doesn’t mean just diaper-wearing, milk-drinking tots—she means children, teenagers, adults; all of them babies to mothers whose grief can’t be measured. In northern Minnesota, they’re lost with heartbreaking regularity: to suicide, to murder, to abuse, to stupid accidents.

“I could easily be at two to three funerals a week,” said Thayer.

In Thayer’s opinion, the root causes of this tragic pattern are institutional: economic deprivation and racism are endemic, and young Native Americans struggle with being what she calls “bicultural citizens of an occupied nation.”

Thayer, who still has two children and four of her nine grandchildren at home, is doing what she can to change things. “I have to,” she said. “I can’t turn my back. I just can’t. After I saw my son in that coffin, at the young age of 22, who never had an opportunity in life, from a poor Native [American] family … if I can just make an impression on one person, when I die and lay in that coffin, I’ve done what I’m supposed to do.”

A restless spirit

Thayer was born in 1951 in Joliet, Ill., to Gladys Emery, an Ojibwe woman from the White Earth Reservation, and Gail Vernon Schultz, a farmer and labor activist whose parents had immigrated to Canada from Germany. She grew up in Wisconsin, surrounded by nearly 30 first cousins and sharing a home on and off throughout her childhood with the aunts and uncles on her mother’s side.

Thayer first got involved in the civil rights movement in 1968, at the all-black high school she attended in Milwaukee. She had the first of her six children at age 18 and two years later enrolled in college at her dying mother’s request. In 1972, she started working with the American Indian Movement. Over the next 15 years Thayer gave birth to four more children, adopted one and earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. She worked as a health planner and a social worker, living mostly in Wisconsin, on and off the reservations.

Thayer returned to Bemidji in 1989. She took a job as a family therapist with Beltrami County and a year later bought her family their first house. At age 40, Thayer started working with the U.S. Indian Health Service—a job she would hold for more than a decade.

Stability didn’t bring complacency, however. If anything, Thayer became more focused in her activism: she brought to the small northern town a sophisticated ability to organize and the will to get things done. She co-founded a local branch of the Green Party and became co-chair of the party’s state coordinating committee. In 2002, she organized the Bemidji Peace and Justice Coalition to protest the invasion of Iraq and joined the board of the Anishinaabe Peace and Justice Coalition. She helped Winona LaDuke run a national vice-presidential campaign and she ran for local office herself.

Then Thayer’s life was shattered. Her 22-year-old son, Cheyenne Devlin-Staples, died after falling through a rotten roof his first day on a demolition job near Lake Bemidji. Like the rest of the crew, which included his 18-year-old brother, Charlie Thayer, he hadn’t been given any safety gear, even though the vacant wood-processing plant they were working on was three stories high in parts and eight stories high in others.

Wrote Thayer in an email, “According to OSHA standards, anytime an employee is up above six feet of ground a safety net was to be provided [plus] helmets, gloves and harness to hook to the frame of the building in case anyone fell. The only thing the supervisor told the employees [was] to stay away from the edge of the flat roof. They had only a stepladder to get up on the roof that did not reach the top of the roof. They had to pull each other up on the rotten, thin tin roof. No gloves, no safety equipment.”

The day after Cheyenne died (he’d been airlifted to a hospital in Fargo), Thayer and her family returned to Bemidji to find that another crew of young men was already working on the site—none of them with safety gear. Thayer called OSHA: representatives from the agency showed up that day and shut down the site and later filed a lawsuit against the construction company.

The injustice of her son’s death stabbed at Thayer: if he hadn’t been Indian and poor, would the company have paid a few dollars for safety gear that would’ve saved his life?

Soon after, Thayer walked out of her comfortable, well-paid desk job. She wanted to do something more meaningful with her time.

Search for justice

Thayer lives in Bemidji, which sits in Beltrami County, in the heart of Indian country. The town is surrounded on three sides by reservations: Red Lake, Leech Lake and White Earth. In Beltrami, neighboring Cass County and many other rural Minnesota counties, there have long been claims of racial profiling. Data collected in 1999 showed that Native Americans are arrested at a rate that far exceeds their presence in the population: in Cass County, Indians make up 11 percent of the population but nearly 55 percent of the arrests. Twenty-four Minnesota counties had similar records.

In 2004, the year after her son’s death, Thayer took a job at the ACLU’s new Bemidji office to coordinate the Greater Minnesota Racial Justice Project. The goal of the project, according to the website, is to “eliminate racial disparities and injustices in Greater Minnesota” —a tall order for a part of the state that Thayer says some refer to as “Birmingham of the North,” after the Alabama city that was home to some of the most violent civil rights struggles.

Thayer’s job involves three areas: investigating claims of racial profiling by police, teaching both the Indian and white communities about their constitutional rights and educating public schoolchildren about racial profiling.

She says she’s experienced racial profiling firsthand. “[I’m] riding in vehicles that are designated racial profile cars in Bemidji and get pulled over for no traffic violations whatsoever, and then the officers are in shock to see me sitting there,” she said.

Law enforcement officials have denied that such profiling happens: it’s not their fault, they say, that so many Native Americans break the law.

The courts, on the other hand, are trying to improve their system, said Thayer. “The judicial system’s trying desperately to change things around now for us,” she said. “The judges have heard us, they’re seeing it, we have a court monitoring program now, a volunteer court monitoring program within one county, expanding to two others. We’re a presence there, we’re documenting those statistics.”

Thayer’s job also requires her to mingle with the other side: in order to educate white folks about Indians, she has to meet them where they live. In other words, she’s gone to her share of lutefisk dinners. And hockey games. And fundraisers. The world she finds there is shocking, she said.

“The racial overtones up there are very, very terrible,” she said. “They’ll smile at you and look like they’re agreeing with you and then they turn around and right away they’re not associating with anything that is pro-diversity whatsoever. And we’re not just talking racial justice, we’re talking gender issues, we’re talking anything that’s out of the norm of what’s American. It’s a very conservative area up there …. You’ll see a different population of people.”

Thayer’s had her tires punctured and she’s had so many hate calls—many from churches—that she laughs about them. “I’m used to the hate calls,” she said. “The churches will identify themselves and they’ll ask me to leave the area…or they’ll send me to hell.”

On the other hand, she said, some churches have welcomed her and she’s working with them to educate their congregations.

Stronger than before

In the last few years, Thayer has regained much of the momentum she lost when her son died. Though she’s no longer active in the Green Party (as an ACLU worker she’s required to be nonpartisan), she’s found plenty of outlets for her ceaseless energy. She teaches social work part time at Bemidji State University and narrowly lost a bid for a seat on the city council. She was appointed to the city’s parks and recreation commission, started the Bemidji Community Garden Project and has traveled to Cuba and Mexico as a spokesperson for the social justice group Witness for Peace. This year she helped organize a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the White Earth Reservation and the first-ever Northern Minnesota Indigenous Film Festival. In addition, she’s trying to get funding for an Indian center—a place where urban Indians can be, as she puts it, in their comfort zone. Nearly one in five Bemidji residents are Indians, she said, but the town lacks resources to help them.

“So we’re trying to build an Indian center up there so that they have a central base,” she said. “So the elders can go to a senior citizen program and they can have fry bread or they can quilt in a traditional star quilt or a nine-block Native design….”

Thayer’s also carrying on a drawn-out battle with the city for the piece of land where her son died: she wants to make it off-limits to developers and turn it into a community park. For now, the land sits empty, surrounded by a chain-link fence; but Thayer is undeterred. She knows she’s on the right track.

“We have a teaching that they don’t take you till you’ve done what you’re supposed to do in life,” she said. “I’m 55, so something must be right. I must be doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

The profile appears in every issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press. It reflects our founding principle and guiding philosophy that every woman has a story. Readers are welcome to submit suggestions for profile subjects.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Content © 2009 Minnesota Women's Press, Inc.
Software © 1998-2009 1up! Software, All Rights Reserved