Reservations

I first met Dennis Banks two years ago, at a gallery opening featuring the work of Dick Bancroft, a local photographer who specializes in chronicling the American Indian Movement (AIM) and father of the famous polar explorer, Ann Bancroft.

We were at Ancient Traders Gallery, on Franklin, and Banks was dressed that night in feathers and skins, his long hair loose, eyes tired but warm. Someone mentioned I was a food writer and suddenly Banks chimed in, saying he’d recently started a natural foods company up on the Leech Lake Indian reservation. He was selling native foods, such as chokecherry syrup and wild rice. Was I interested?

I was. My editor at the time was not. Dennis Banks was old news, he told me. But I was dogged: I’d read Larry Oakes’s terrific 2004 series on the Leech Lake reservation in the Star Tribune. I knew about the soaring rates of obesity and diabetes on Indian reservations nationwide. Later that year, when I visited Pine Ridge, a woman whom I met told me all her granddaughter’s teeth were pulled when the child was three, because the Coca-Cola in her baby bottles had destroyed them. We were in Kyle, a town of just under 1,000 families. She took me to the area’s only “store” — a shack that sold mostly Doritos, white bread, cigarettes, and bottled soda pop.

I never forgot that meeting with Banks. And when I got a new food-writing job with a different editor, I called him and asked if he was still willing to talk.

He was silent for a long time. I expected him to say no. In my mind, I was already going through the list of other people I could call. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Sure I remember you. How about tonight? I have to go down to the Cities anyway.”

Originally, he chose the buffet at Mystic Lake Casino for our dinner. And I have to admit, I paused. It’s my policy to go wherever my guest chooses, but I never expected this: the lights, the noises, the sheer quantity of food — not to mention my ambivalence about state-sanctioned gambling. But I swallowed and said, certainly, I’d meet him there.

Three hours later, when I called him to confirm, he told me his plans had changed. There was a barbecue being held in his honor and I should meet him there. “Won’t the host mind?” I asked. Again, Banks was silent for a time.

“Nah,” he finally said, then gave me the address. “I have to go; I’m supposed to pick someone up at the airport in three and a half hours.” He was still in Leech Lake, about four hours away.

I took this into account and showed up at the barbecue roughly half an hour late, ready to slink away if the owner seemed miffed. The address led me along winding roads to a rambling wooden structure on a treed lot in Plymouth. Inside the garage, four dark-haired young people were preparing mountains of food: burgers, grilled chicken, a gargantuan bowl of macaroni salad of which Mystic Lake would be proud.

“I’m here to interview Dennis Banks,” I said.

“He’s not here yet,” said a man in his 20s. Then he grinned. “But there’s a bunch of Indian guys inside. Pick someone else.”

He wasn’t kidding. Sitting in a screened porch, decorated with dream catchers and strings of white lights that hung like shards of broken glass, were Vernon Bellecourt, Bill Means, and Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman.

I explained to Syd Beane, the owner of the house: I’d been invited by Banks, whom I hoped to interview.

“Welcome!” he said. “We have plenty of food.” He introduced me to everyone seated on the porch; each of the elders rose to shake my hand. “Now sit,” said Beane. “We were just discussing some of the issues we face as Native Americans. Our agenda.”

“What is your agenda?” I asked.

“The protection of sacred sites.” It was Westerman’s voice, a low sound that unfurled like smoke. “Better media to advance our causes. A treaty for all indigenous people. Also,” his face barely changed, “we build canoes to send Europeans back to their native land.” Everyone laughed. Even Westerman smiled, like a baby does, pleased but surprised.

I was convinced we’d met before, and we might have crossed passed once or twice. But the real reason this man seemed so familiar was that I’d seen and heard him at least a dozen times: as the shaman in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, “One Who Waits” on Northern Exposure, and Albert Hosteen on the X-Files. He rose with a bowl and a sheaf of herbs to perform a smudging ceremony before the meal, and I felt as if this were something I knew. Westerman recited a prayer that sounded like a song. He purified the room and the people in it with the burning sage. Then he walked to a tree I hadn’t noticed before — the porch is built around it, with a hole cut in the ceiling that allows it to grow upward — and blessed it, patting the bark all around, as if it were a brother.

Then it was time to eat. We trouped to the garage, all but the elders — Bellecourt, Means, Westerman, and Beane — whose plates were filled and brought to them by Beane’s three 20-something daughters. The burgers were fat, juicy, cooked medium rare at most; in a word, perfect. The macaroni salad, which one of the daughters proudly told me was made with a whole jar of mayonnaise, contained crunchy bits of apple and celery. But it was the homemade baked beans, spiked with sorghum, that tasted like every summer barbecue should: sweet, smoky, wholesome, chewy.