The Rake Magazine

Author: Jon Lurie

  • The Voyage of the Heath Ledger

    On June 17, 2006, we quietly paddled the Heath Ledger across the Canadian border. We hadn’t exactly planned to sneak into Canada. Joe and I were on a mission—to reach Hudson Bay by canoe, still hundreds of miles to the northeast—and as we approached the border we realized that interactions with government officials might endanger that mission. For one thing, we were unsure whether the guards would let Joe, with his extensive juvenile record, into the country. We also carried a 12-gauge shotgun (for protection against the polar bears we expected to meet downriver), which authorities in firearms-phobic Canada would seize if declared. So we chose the path of least resistance across the frontier, paddling through swirling waters into shimmering twilight.

    We could hear the distant rumblings of semis, and between silhouettes of weeping willows, we saw the glow from floodlights at the Pembina/Emerson border post a mile beyond the muddy banks. But on the Red River there was no customs station, no sign of welcome to “Friendly Manitoba.” The border here was marked only by a black trestle of crisscrossed girders without so much as a single red maple leaf. As we slipped under the railroad span, floating illegally into the country, we were pushed along by a welcome rush of current, the first significant natural flow we’d seen since the trip began on June 4, four hundred river miles south at Wahpeton, North Dakota—the headwaters of the Red.

    Already we had been interrogated by officials from five different law enforcement agencies in the U.S. They seemed to think we were either terrorists, immigrant smugglers, or perverted lovers: a big sick white guy with a lip ring and his skinny younger Puerto Rican/Lakota boy-toy acting out a canoe version of Brokeback Mountain. The movie had come out a few months earlier and now it seemed that two men couldn’t go camping together without the assumption that they were gay. In response, we named the canoe after one of the film’s stars.

    They all asked the same questions:
    How do you two know each other?
    Where are you going?
    How long do you expect that to take?
    How did you get time off for such a long trip?
    How will you know where you’re going?
    What are you going to do for food?
    Why are you doing this?

    I insisted on taking charge of these conversations after watching Joe lose his cool at the sight of uniformed authority figures. He would start running at the mouth, each jittery falsetto utterance sounding more sketchy and full-of-shit than the last.

    My responses were cautiously worded to prevent the cop, sheriff, ICE official, game warden, or forest ranger from opening new lines of inquiry. If they had hauled us in for questioning they might have connected Joe to the recent Frogtown incident.

    So I always told them the truth, albeit a painstakingly tailored version. Nevertheless, the cop, sheriff, ICE official, forest ranger, or game warden would nod suspiciously at what must have sounded, to their post-9/11 ears, like a hastily manufactured cover story: I was Joe’s mentor. We had met five years earlier at New Voices, a Minneapolis-based journalism program for American Indian youth. We expected our trip on the Red, Nelson, Echimamish and Hayes Rivers to take roughly two months. Joe’s employer, Pawn America, had granted him a leave of absence for the summer. I was a teacher, so I got summers off. We were navigating with topographical maps, compasses, and a Global Positioning System receiver; for sustenance we had freeze-dried camping food and the occasional gas station or restaurant meal.

    I was careful not to mention that this trip was Joe’s way of lying low for the summer. My nineteen-year-old paddling partner had recently been mixed up in a street incident involving a sawed-off shotgun and a crack dealer named Sonic. Luckily, no one was hurt. But word in Frogtown was that Sonic was seeking swift retribution. Joe left with me days after the episode without telling anyone where he was going—not his older brother D, his closest friend and confidant, not even his mother.

    Nor did I volunteer the intimate details of my life: I was a single father of four, an unemployed writer with no certain job prospects to return to, and no goal in life except to make it to Hudson Bay with Joe or die trying. I had embarked on this journey to try to stave off a nervous breakdown, having spent much of the previous six months alternating between dizzying waves of anxiety and fits of uncontrolled sobbing, symptoms of a depression resulting from a series of deaths and personal losses that began with my divorce in 2003.

    Each time the police ran our names for warrants, there was an increasing fear that the law had caught up with Joe, and that this trip would end for us not at the sea, but in the penitentiary. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were an unusual pair of travelers heading toward an international border in an age of terrorism hysteria; or perhaps it stemmed from the kind of extralegal scrutiny many dark-skinned people in America endure every day. Either way, it seemed our trip was being viewed by government officials as a criminal act. In Grand Forks, we were issued a trespass warning after we spent the night camped atop a flood dike. In the tiny Red River Valley town of Climax, Minnesota, we stopped one night for cheese curds and beer at the Corner Bar and were questioned by a patrolman who said he had received “reports of two men with backpacks.” Thirty miles north of Drayton, North Dakota, a pair of game wardens in a speedboat approached cautiously after scrutinizing us through binoculars; they then grilled us at length about fishing regulations, even though we weren’t fishing.

    The trickiest part of these interrogations was inventing answers the authorities would believe in response to that last question: Why? They demanded to know what was motivating this odd couple to travel over water and land from the heart of the Great Plains to the far edge of the continent, an endeavor that, judging from their uniformly dubious expressions, no sane person would undertake without sinister motive.

    There was no innocent-sounding answer, so I again went with a clipped rendition of the truth. This trip was about physical and spiritual renewal. That’s what I told them: physical and spiritual renewal.

    Joe, on the other hand, would puff out his chest and bluster righteously, Vacation! The word sounded suspect coming out of his mouth—anyone familiar with the Red River knows it is one of the most hellacious, unforgiving American waterways to paddle—but it, too, was partially true. Joe would often say life on the river, however difficult, was a cakewalk compared with his day-to-day in the city. The torture of paddling ten or twelve hours a day to make thirty or forty miles, eating and sleeping on riverbanks that were essentially mud pits, baking under the withering sun, and freezing through frequent cloudbursts, was, to us both, a welcome respite from the heartache and stress that had come to dominate our lives in St. Paul. There was an aspect of our days on the river that was similar to self-mutilation; the physical pain relieved our suffering hearts.

    Crossing the border without incident, Joe expressed relief by mocking me for having intended to report to customs. It had been his idea from the start to steal across the border under cover of night. “Fuck them border bitches,” he laughed. “Them bitches can’t touch us out here.”

    I realized how absurd some of my assumptions about the river had been. Even though we had seen a total of only five other boats in the past fourteen days, I half-expected to find a fully functioning customs station on this all-but-abandoned river. But since I was relying for guidance on Canoeing with the Cree, a book chronicling a 1925 expedition from Fort Snelling to Hudson Bay, I was bound to be wrong once in a while.

  • Magical Thinker

    Any good businessperson knows that if you want to cultivate a certain type of clientele, you meet with them on their own turf. Jodi Livon, a psychic medium who has counseled movers and shakers in the corporate world for the past twenty-five years, offices not in some shabby storefront, but at The Atria, a plush office building in Plymouth. She focuses her practice on powerful people, she says, because their actions are likely to affect many others. On this bright June afternoon, she trained her intuitive powers on me. Put together like an attorney in a smart Ann Taylor black dress, pearls, and stylish pumps, she asked me to state my full name and the address of my workplace, and to hand her a copy of this magazine. As she proceeded to describe in vague terms the kinds of dynamics and issues that could apply to many workplaces, I maintained a healthy journalistic skepticism. But then she delved into personal matters—intimate details about my children, former girlfriends, and my long-ago past—that she couldn’t have possibly ascertained through Google (or even, for that matter, through a really good private investigator). In the following interview, Livon’s first, the corporate psychic discusses life, death, and getting along with your boss.

    Why isn’t your name listed on the door?
    Many of my clients wouldn’t feel comfortable if others saw them walking through a door that said, “Jodi Livon, Intuitive Coach,” which is what I call myself.

    Why do you focus on corporate types?
    The office setting is where people in positions of power feel comfortable. I want to reach as many people as I can. Whether it’s two people or a thousand, when you run a business you are affecting many others; you are in a position to raise the energy vibration for everybody.

    So you want to touch large numbers of people through their bosses. Who are some of these powerful people you’ve worked with?
    I have more conservative white-collar clients than you would expect: a lot of well-known attorneys, judges, and physicians, people who work for Fortune 500 companies. Also many small-business owners—massage therapists, people who own hair salons.

    Do people ask you very specific money questions, such as what the stock market is going to do tomorrow?
    I would never tell them.

    Do you know?
    I don’t want to know. I don’t gamble; that’s not what this is for. That’s such an abuse. I would never give that information out.

    What are some of the challenges people bring to you?
    A big complaint is “I don’t like my boss. I don’t think he sees who I am, and what I have to offer.” They’re focusing on this and guess what happens: The boss doesn’t see them, and doesn’t recognize what they have to offer. I suggest that people focus on the positive things their bosses do, and then those things get bigger. I tell them to take the emotion out of it. It isn’t about who likes who. It’s about getting the job done.

    That sounds close to what one might hear from a job counselor or self-help book. But what do you do as a psychic to help people in their careers?
    I teach people to trust their gut, to use their intuition as they make decisions. One client was a physician. Everything about the tests he had performed on a pregnant patient seemed to point to a normal birth. But he told me he had this funny feeling that led him to the decision to perform a C-section. It turned out that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the child’s neck so many times that with a vaginal birth that child might not have made it. Naturally, this doctor backed it up before going ahead with the surgery, but the course of action he chose began with an intuitive feeling.

    Are you familiar with The Secret, the best-seller that advocates using the power of thought to get what you want?
    I am, and I think there are some pieces dangerously missing from it. Intuition shouldn’t be about manifesting things; it’s about manifesting peacefulness.

    When did you first realize you had these intuitive abilities?
    When I was twelve I started to see that not everybody could sense other people’s energy the way that I did. I could feel energies of people who had crossed over—it just creeped me out.

    How did you experience that?
    I saw dead relatives in front of me.

    People you knew?
    Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I didn’t understand it. I would hear something one of these dead relatives said, and I would repeat it out loud, and my parents would freak out and say, “How did you know that?”

    Do you see dead people as ghosts or as human beings?
    It’s almost like a clear cutout, a mist. I can hear them, I can smell them, and I can feel them.

    Should we fear death?
    Not at all. It’s peaceful. In all the years I’ve been doing readings, I’ve never had anybody come over from the other side and say it’s horrible over there.

    Did you have other types of paranormal experiences as a child?
    I tried the Ouija board and it went completely crazy. People always wanted to do the Ouija board with me, but I stopped. It didn’t feel right because it was pulling from dark energy. Stay away from Ouija boards.

    Have you had any particularly scary experiences?
    I was in my first apartment—I was just eighteen —and all of a sudden I found myself on the ceiling and I saw someone else walking in my body below. I knew the energy in my body was male and was dead. After that I realized I needed to do some very serious work; I was too open and vulnerable.

    What did he do while he was in your body?
    He was enjoying being able to walk around. He seemed to be looking for some coffee or booze.

    You must have had liberal hippie parents, right?
    No [laughs]. I grew up in a very conservative family. In a very conservative neighborhood.

    What were you like as a teenager?
    I was sort of a freak at Golden Valley High. I was teased mercilessly because I had big, fat, frizzy hair, and I did my own thing.

    Do your children share your abilities?
    They are very psychic, which is really a handful to deal with. One is eight, one is seven, and one is four, and they talk about dead people. They say Mommy, I know people live again. And Mommy, when I knew you before…, and Mommy, when I come back….

    Do you ever have a client come in for a reading who ends up saying, “I think you’re full of shit”?
    Yeah, people have. They don’t do it so much anymore because I’ve become so comfortable with my abilities. I’ll just look at them like this [she gives a cold, steady glare] and they shut up.

  • The World’s Toughest Indian

    When Sherman Alexie came to town last month to promote
    Flight    , a novel in which a teenager nicknamed Zits is driven to the verge of committing mass murder, one of his intentions was to continue his fight with author and University of Minnesota English professor David Treuer. Alexie’s smile was ever-present throughout our interview in the lobby of the Millenium Hotel, even (perhaps especially) as the subject of Treuer’s criticism was broached. I had feared—needlessly—that Alexie would be sensitive about responding to the disparagement that appeared in Treuer’s recent book, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. Treuer, a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, compared Alexie’s Reservation Blues to one of the most despised books ever written about Indians, Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, and argues that the popularity of Alexie, Erdrich, and other Native American writers rests not on their skills, but on readers’ assumptions that their tales are accurate depictions of Indian life. Alexie clearly relished the opportunity to respond to the charges on Treuer’s home turf.

    How do you see the Twin Cities area in terms of its status in Native America?
    It is the capital of Indian USA. It’s the center of Native American indigenous urban life.

    What makes it so?
    Sheer population, the number of tribes that are represented in the city, and the rowdiness. I feel more Indian in Minneapolis than I do on my own damn reservation. I feel more appreciated here. And as rowdy as I can be, and as competitive, it’s still nice to be appreciated.

    One criticism I often hear about your work is that it’s not political.
    Isn’t political? Everything is political.

    Right, I know, but you’re not Dennis Banks.
    Fuck Dennis Banks. Thank god. I wake up every morning thanking god I’m not Dennis Banks; I say that because of his willingness to pick up the gun. No FBI agents are going to die as a result of my books. No Indians are going to die as a result of my books.

    In what way is Flight political?
    It’s political when the character Zits says, “How do you tell the difference between the good and the bad guys when they say the same things?”

    You clearly understand the psychology of someone who could perpetrate mass murder. How did you come to that?
    I’ve felt that rage. I’ve been that mad, growing up on the rez, being bullied, being frustrated, having all sorts of fantasies about killing people. If I’d had a more fragile mental state or less supportive parents, who knows?

    Can you extend that understanding to those who commit terrorist acts like 9/11?
    Oh yeah. It’s narcissistic adolescent male rage. It gets me so mad when liberals say the terrorists were “freedom fighters. They were reacting to oppressive conditions.” Bullshit. They were upper-class, college-educated, cosmopolitan world travelers. How do you think they blended into Europe and the United States? They were spoiled-brat rich kids who were frustrated for various penis-related reasons; they were flying dicks is what they were. I understand their narcissism. I am afflicted with a minor league version of it myself.

    Native people have been living a subsistence lifestyle for centuries. Now that you don’t need to live that way, how does that history play out in your life?
    Was it Dolly Parton—no, it was Mae West who said, “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” I do not romanticize poverty whatsoever. Not even remotely. I was there and it’s a miserable, terrifying existence. I am tattooed by my poverty, and so even now that I’m upper-class it is a part of who I am.

    Is there an aspect of the poverty you grew up with that you’re now thankful for?
    Thankful for? Oh god, no. If I had a time machine I’d go back to 1972 with thirty-thousand dollars and invest it wisely.

    What about people you’ve met along the way who’ve never been poor? There must be things that you know that they’ll never understand.
    I’ll take their problems. That’s going to be my sons. You know, they’re brand-new Indians. They have never seen an Indian take so much as a sip of alcohol.

    Are you bringing them up in any sense in a traditional way?
    No.

    Do you plan to teach them their Native language?
    No.

    Why not?
    Nostalgia is terminal. Whatever language they decide to learn and use, that’s their decision. I’m teaching them mine, English.

    When you go around you must talk to a lot of people like me who ask stupid questions. What are some of the stupidest questions people ask you?
    You haven’t yet, but oh god! This fog of privilege that surrounds me has blinded people to the fact that I’m still Indian, so they ask these theoretical questions that have to do with Indians as if it’s two non-Indians in the discussion, as if I don’t deal with these issues every day. My brother works at the casino; my sister works for Indian Health Service. They all live in that same HUD house that I grew up in.

    That’s like me saying—and I grew up Jewish— I’m poor now so I’m no longer Jewish.
    Yeah. [Laughs.] Yeah, so that’s been sort of the tone. But this book in particular has caused stupid questions.

    Can you share any of them?
    It might be the way we promoted the book; the cover says Flight is my first novel in ten years, which is true. But I was in a bookstore in Iowa, and the owner, who I’ve known for years, said “Well, you dropped off the map.” And I said, “You mean the three books of poems, two books of short stories, and two movies I’ve made since Indian Killer is dropping off the map? You mean, being named one of the New Yorker’s Writers for the Twenty-First Century doesn’t count? You mean the three stories in The New Yorker, the essays in Time magazine, Men’s Journal, The New York Times, the
    LA Times    , the hundreds of appearances I’ve given. What the fuck are you talking about?”

    Do you have any guilty literary pleasures?
    Why would I feel guilty about enjoying something? That’s the kind of question you ask John Updike. And John Updike’s more than happy to answer it. But, I mean, I’m a kid from the rez. I still eat potted meat product.

    Gross.
    You know. I still like Funyuns. I pour Tabasco sauce on my French fries. I feel highly sacred and traditional when I’m reading westerns and murder mysteries, because that was my dad. Oh, you know what I get a guilty pleasure from? I love bad reviews—of me.

    Really?
    David Treuer’s book that just hammers on me, reading that really feels like reading porn. We’ve been having an email exchange since he trashed me.

    What’s been the tone of your exchange with Treuer?
    Oh, I just give him shit.

    Does he respond?
    He quit responding.

    Was he surprised to hear from you?
    No, because we were friendly over the years. I, in fact, wrote him letters of recommendation when his first book got sent out; publishers called me to ask me if he was real. At one point, when his major publishing career wasn’t going well, I helped him contact my agent. I’m saying this stuff because this is where he lives and I want the world to know this: He wrote a book to show off for white folks, and we Indians were giggling at him.

    What’s his problem with you?
    He’s insecure about his Indian identity because he’s blond and short. But, as I told him, “David, no matter what you write, it’s autobiography. And you’ve said so much about yourself, more than you realize.” When David and other Native scholars criticize me, it’s like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and David and his ilk are like the Neanderthals with bone clubs and I’m the monolith [laughs].

    You just like mixing it up.
    I’m competitive and I love it. I told him, “David, you can intellectualize, you can go sentence by sentence, you can pull my bad sentences out of my books—there are plenty of them—you can say this fails or that fails, you can point out bad reviews or whatever. But in the end, when I get up in front of people, when people read my books, they connect in an inexplicable way. They always have. And I don’t know what it is, you don’t know what it is, but there’s something."

     


    Click To Play Interview Clip

    Alexie discusses Zits, the teenage narrator of his new novel.

  • The Mystery of the Girl Who Didn’t Care

    I raised three daughters who spent their childhoods reading Harry Potter. So I had never encountered the Nancy Drew mysteries until Malcolm, my seven-year-old son, received a copy of one in a bookstore earlier this year. Apparently, Nancy Drew wasn’t selling, so to spark interest the store was giving away The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book in the series, with purchase of any two children’s books. The story, to me, was rather predictable, and Nancy Drew, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do attorney, was so wholesome as to be unbelievable. But my son loved the book.

    Malcolm got hooked on Nancy Drew mysteries; before two months passed he had burned through five of them and was begging for number six. Now any time we go to a library or bookstore, he bolts for the Nancy Drew section, which is easy to locate: The original fifty-six titles, with their bright yellow spines, blaze a four-foot stripe across the shelves of the children’s section. But even though the series has been in print continuously since 1930, having sold more than eighty million volumes worldwide, these days the once popular collection’s bright hue has been dulled by the dust of disinterest.

    According to Carol Dosse, a children’s librarian at the Minneapolis Central Library, girls—the books’ primary readership—are no longer captivated by the teen sleuth. “Girls are savvier now than when Nancy Drew was written, and they’re looking for something more contemporary to their world.”

    Nancy Drew was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, a book publisher who originally conceived the series to appeal to young adult readers. But as years passed, children apparently became more sophisticated; today, seven-year-olds like Malcolm can easily consume the 180-some-page novels. It’s not surprising, then, that teenage girls have lost interest in Nancy Drew.
    What’s popular today is R-rated fiction like the Gossip Girls series, by Cecily von Ziegesar, which Dosse said is “big with girls as young as fifth grade.” Gossip Girls are affluent teens who “live in gorgeous apartments, go to exclusive private schools, and make Manhattan their own personal playground,” as the jacket copy says. Here’s a taste from the opening pages of You Know You Love Me: A Gossip Girl Novel.

     

    “To my Blair Bear,” Mr. Harold Waldorf, Esq. said, raising his glass of champagne to clink it against Blair’s. “You’re still my little girl even though you wear leather pants and have a hunky boyfriend.” He flashed a suntanned smile at Nate Archibald, who was seated beside Blair at the small restaurant table … Blair Waldorf reached under the tablecloth and squeezed Nate’s knee. The candlelight was making her horny. If only Daddy knew what we’re planning to do after this, she thought giddily. She clinked glasses with her father and took a giant gulp of champagne.

     

    What does it say about girl culture today that young women are shunning the long-popular Nancy Drew and pushing sales of books like Gossip Girls through the roof?

     

    Julie Schumacher has cracked the bindings on her teenaged daughters’ books and, given the choice, would prefer them to read fiction with “unsexualized” characters like Nancy Drew. A creative writing professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of three young adult novels, Schumacher believes that pop culture is feeding a particularly insidious message to girls: “‘I can act like an idiot, I can dress like a slut, but I can still have self-worth and be an admirable person,’” as she sums it up. “It’s a recipe that doesn’t sit well with me.”

    Andrew Fleming agrees—which is, in large part, why the screenwriter and director’s latest movie is a new adaptation of a Nancy Drew tale (in theaters June 15). “I’m troubled by the princess culture I see among girls,” he says. “There’s this idea that if you put on a provocative outfit then you’re entitled to act like a diva. There’s a lack of politeness, kindness, and consideration. I don’t think girls are given credit for being smart, brave, and strong. Nancy Drew was all of these.”

    When Fleming criticizes the way girls behave in 2007, he is also criticizing himself. In the early ’90s, he wrote and directed The Craft, a film about four teen social outcasts who realize their innate feminine power through the practice of witchcraft. While using both magic and sexuality to manipulate their schoolmates and drive boys insane with desire, they also transform their wardrobes, from Catholic school uniforms to miniskirts, thigh-highs, and see-through blouses.

    For Fleming, those characters were a way to liberate girls who, at the time, he says “were being kept in a cultural box and told, ‘This is the way you’re supposed to behave.’” Eleven years after The Craft, Fleming sees some of the worst aspects of his characters playing out in the mainstream, and he’s resurrected Nancy Drew to confront them. Rather than reinvent the young sleuth for twenty-first-century moviegoers, Fleming opted to pluck the original version out of the 1930s and plunk her down in modern-day Los Angeles.

    “What if Nancy Drew existed in the present? How would she fit in? Because she dresses demurely, and she’s organized, polite, and an achiever, she would seem like a freak. I think it’s time to reconsider how girls—and boys, really—have no rules anymore. Ultimately, there’s such a focus on style, how you roll, and what you wear—Nancy doesn’t really care about that stuff. She’s focused on helping people and getting to the bottom of the mystery,” Fleming said.

     


    Click To Play


    Andrew Fleming describes Nancy Drew

     

    Once I started reading Nancy Drew to my son I began noticing her everywhere: a new computer game on the shelves at Target; Nancy Drew websites; collectors posting on eBay for rare editions of the books; a trailer for the new movie on the internet. Somehow, for an archaic character, she remains very popular. But having read more than a handful of Nancy Drew mysteries, something in the trailer disturbed me about the way she was portrayed by actress Emma Roberts: This Nancy Drew seemed uncertain, unintelligent, and boy-crazy—qualities opposite to those the original Nancy Drew possessed.

    According to Fleming, the trailer for his movie is deceiving. If Nancy appeared ditzy and boy-crazy, he said, it was due to clever editing by the studio’s marketing department. Fleming said he met with “every girl in Hollywood” and chose Emma Roberts (Julia Roberts’s niece), because she “is very intelligent, and Nancy is very intelligent, and you can’t fake that.” Even so, Fleming’s studio bosses felt that girls would be more attracted to a movie with a stupid, sexualized Nancy Drew than a smart, modest one.

  • Dakota Diaspora

    Twenty-eight-year-old identical twins Kate and Carly Beane share similarly striking features—demure brown eyes and hair, high cheek bones, and quick smiles that precede regular bouts of easy, endearing laughter. Both say they are now content with their lives, a state of being that had eluded them until a few years ago, when they decided to end their family’s exile from Minnesota—almost a century and a half after their ancestors were uprooted from Cloudman’s Village at Lake Calhoun.

    In the spring of 2003 the Beane twins gathered with their parents and older sister Sydney around the dining table of their home near Berkeley, California, and reached a consensus: The time had come to return home.

    “Kate had just pulled herself out of an unhealthy relationship, my mom had just lost her job because of budget cuts in the Oakland School District, and the Center for Community Change office where our dad worked was closing,” Carly said. “The family needed a fresh start. We held a meeting and decided to move to Minnesota. We thought of it as home even though most of us had never spent time there.”

    Following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people throughout southern Minnesota were rounded up, imprisoned at Fort Snelling, and eventually forced onto steamboats and exiled from the state. Many Dakota ended up where thousands still remain—on the barren prairie reservations of South Dakota and Nebraska. Many others, like the Beane family, wandered from place to place searching for somewhere to call home.

    The Beane twins were born in Phoenix, moved to Lincoln, Nebraska at age four, and moved again to the San Francisco Bay Area at fourteen. “We just didn’t feel we belonged anywhere,” said Carly, who, along with Kate, dropped out of Berkeley High at age sixteen.

    The twins had long been frustrated with school, which never matched the rigor of the lessons they received at home. By the time Kate and Carly were twelve, their parents had them reading radical philosophers like Saul Alinsky and their great-great uncle’s books about growing up in what is now Minneapolis. As a result, they can rattle off family lore like memorized prayers, quickly filling in details when the other hesitates. “…Seth Eastman was a famous painter, and a lieutenant in the army. His daughter, Winona, married Many Lightnings. They raised several kids, including Charles Eastman, the author of Indian Boyhood, and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, and one of the first Indian doctors … ”

    “When I dropped out of school I told my dad, ‘I’ll just be a waitress. I’ll be fine.’ But I was not fine,” Kate said.

    “One day in 1998,” Carly interjected, “Kate’s boyfriend pulled up in his pickup; she jumped in and was gone for five years.”

    “I moved to Tennessee, Atlanta, back to Phoenix. My boyfriend was a carpenter and I waited tables. I didn’t realize at the time that I was looking for home. In 2003, I ended up in Chicago and had to get away quick because my boyfriend had a drug problem and had gone off the deep end. I called my sister in the middle of the night and told her I was afraid and needed to get out. She sent me a plane ticket and I went back to California. I had to change.”

    Six months later the Beanes were on the road to Minnesota. The first thing they wanted to do, upon arriving in Minneapolis, was see Lake Calhoun. “We thought, that’s our lake; let’s go see it. So we drove around it and were shocked. I guess I was picturing it to look like a Seth Eastman painting. He depicted scenes of traditional Dakota life with tipis, lodges, women cooking, trees, kids playing and lots of dogs.”

    “It was the middle of summer,” Carly said, “and Lake Calhoun was packed—people rollerblading, tons of traffic, mansions everywhere. All we knew was that this lake was where our people came from, and that it was sacred.”

    “It’s not as if we were expecting Cloudman’s Village to still be here,” Kate added. “We knew things would be different. But we saw Lake Calhoun with our hearts; we saw how it used to be, because that was the last time our family was all together, living in our homeland, and in peace.”

    Realizing the incongruity between their vision of traditional Dakota life and the reality of modern-day Minnesota was one of the most disappointing experiences of their lives. And the Beane twins soon learned Lake Calhoun was not the only place that had been significantly altered in the past 140 years. Many of the cultural sites of which they had long heard—such as the Dakota mounds on the bluffs of the Minnesota River—were buried under the city’s concrete footprint.

    It took some time for the twins to realize that coming home was right for them. The sisters eventually found jobs at Louise Erdrich’s Birch Bark Books, enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s Dakota language program, and discovered that the Dakota community, which seemed to have evaporated like a dream upon waking, was still here.

    “It’s in the people. It’s in the language. You see it everywhere in the names of places like Wabasha, Chaska, Winona, Shakopee, Minnetonka, and Minnewashta,” Kate said.

    Today the twins’ lives are deeply engrained in Dakota culture. They teach Dakota classes to preschoolers and kindergartners at the Wicoie Nandagikendan (Learning Language) Early Childhood Urban Immersion Project, and are working with the legislature on measures to protect Minnesota’s native languages from extinction.

    “In the boarding schools our people were punished for speaking Dakota,” said Carly, who recently lobbied state legislators in support of the establishment of a Minnesota Office of Indigenous Language. “When I speak to these politicians, I’m not just speaking for myself. It can be daunting. But when you speak for your ancestors, that’s a beautiful thing.”

  • Sherman Alexie

    Sherman Alexie was born hydrocephalic, and doctors predicted he would suffer severe retardation. However, the very opposite occurred; he showed signs of prodigy, devouring novels by age five. Still, he endured effects of his condition—seizures and bed-wetting—and was subject to bullying on the Spokane Reservation where he grew up. In his new novel Flight (Alexie’s first in ten years), the celebrated author of Indian Killer and Reservation Blues seems to channel that ostracism into a fifteen-year-old protagonist whose acne is so bad he’s known simply as “Zits.” Today more glitterati than geek, Alexie is known for acerbic wit that causes his audience to laugh while their hearts break. Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church, 2020 West Lake of the Isles Pkwy., Minneapolis; 612-374-4023.

  • Ben Gibbard

    Critics have called him a nauseatingly romantic wuss, a badge-of-honor Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard has worn through three Grammy nominations, six critically acclaimed albums, and a performance on Saturday Night Live. Everything this soft-spoken, melodic alt-rocker has touched in the ten years since he founded Death Cab, including his side project The Postal Service, has turned gold. This is a rare opportunity for Gibbard fans to check out the singer/songwriter performing solo and acoustic—no better way to hear the depressing yet soulful and ironically titled hit “SuchGreat Heights.” First Avenue, 612-332-1775.

  • A Room of His Own

    “Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question,” author and relationship guru Andrew Cohen said in a 1996 interview.

    Another American writer, Sam Martin, would update Cohen’s quote by tacking on an additional two words: “until now.”

    “Men have been wandering in the wilderness a long time,” Martin says. “Women have asserted themselves into traditionally male roles, and men have been forced to look elsewhere to find their maleness. But thirty-five years after the onset of the women’s liberation movement, we’re seeing guys becoming comfortable with who they are. Guys are saying: ‘I’m not going to be a type anymore. I’m going to be whatever I’m going to be and I’m going to create a space to do it in.’ ”

    Martin’s latest book, Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory (Tauton Press, 2000), is one of two recently released volumes (along with James Twitchell’s Where Men Hide, Columbia University Press, 2006) that chronicle the emerging trend of manspaces, areas within and around homes that are designed by men for a rich variety of purposes.

    In his lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome, Martin profiles guys from across the country whose combined expression through their spaces, he contends, ultimately challenges the stereotypes of what it means to be a modern man: Tony Izzo turned his Connecticut basement into a boutique winery; former bantamweight world WBC champion Wayne “Pocket Rocket” McCullough converted his Las Vegas garage into a boxing gym with a standard-size ring; photographer Matthew Benson restored a nineteenth-century horse barn on his property outside New York City for use as a studio and darkroom; Mike Gilliland installed a three-story climbing wall in the atrium of his Colorado home; another man converted his attic into a traditional Japanese teahouse.

    What these widely varied spaces have in common is that they are all places where men can express themselves free of negotiation with their female partners.

    “Having a room of your own is really a control issue,” Martin says. “Women aren’t necessarily threatened by guys being in their space, but for some reason men are threatened by women being in their space.”

    The root of this defensiveness, says Dr. Dan Reidenberg, Minneapolis-based chair of the American Psychotherapy Association, is that men, more than ever before, are grappling with identity issues.

    “As men struggle to find their place, they need to figure out what works for them—not just in terms of their personal space, but in how they dress, how they wear their hair, the things they say, and the ways they interact. All of these things have changed over the past three decades. I think the effort to design a space in their house is all part of this identity crisis,” Reidenberg says.
    If men feel the need to fashion personal spaces, according to Reidenberg, it’s important for them to do so. “When men lose their identity it creates problems. They can experience a lack of focus, a lack of direction, a sense of dysphoria. They feel confused; sometimes they develop a low-grade depression. So when I’m consulting with men I tell them: Realize your needs are just as important as the other people’s in your life.”

    That doesn’t mean women are unwelcome to visit manspaces—when invited. “The stereotype is that there’s no girls allowed,” Martin asserts, “but men tend to want women to come into their space. And most of the women I spoke with for the book are happy that their boyfriends or husbands have these spaces, and they’re all very happy to hang out in them.”

    And why not? Most of the manspaces Martin presents are of the haut-monde variety: clean, well-lit, comfortable, high-budget affairs put together by men who clearly have a strong sense of design and the resources to carry out their unique visions.

    While men’s spaces seem to be increasingly important to the couples she serves, local realtor Emma Faris says the off-the-rack sort found in most Twin Cities homes are not terribly glamorous. According to Faris, she and her home-peddling colleagues refer to these cobwebby corners where women fear to tread as “man-dens.” Men and women share an equal interest in the man-den, Faris contends, but for very different reasons.

    “The women want a space where all that crappy bachelor furniture can be put out of sight, a place in the home where their men can entertain friends. Hopefully, for her sake, the man-den will include a toilet, sink, and shower. Because then, when his friends come over, they won’t stink up the real bathroom.”

    In terms of self-expression (of the type illustrated in Martin’s book), in Faris’ opinion the common man is not nearly so ambitious; he fantasizes about installing a pool table, “which he rarely ends up buying because he’s already spent everything on the house.” Most of the man-dens Faris sees have as much character as a Bud Light commercial. “What men usually create is a basement with a horrible-looking wood-paneled bar and a giant television.

    “Garages used to be the man-dens,” according to Faris. “These days, men seem to be coming back into the house. It could be that garages tend to be cold and uninviting places to entertain friends. It could be that men in their thirties and forties are connecting with friends, whereas their fathers were connecting with the tool bench.”

    But some men—thirty-six-year-old Eden Gartner of Northeast Minneapolis, for example—still carry out their notions of manhood within the chilly confines of the garage. The tool bench remains in Gartner’s garage, but the tools have been replaced with a CD player, strings of colorful lights, and memorabilia from his career in the indie rock band Rust. Where his father might have stored the chainsaw and snowblower, Gartner has a ragged couch, a beer cooler, and a few tables bearing candles and space heaters. A gruesome Indonesian mask, a collectible Elvis doll, and an electronic dartboard highlight the décor.

    Gartner, a professional sign-maker by trade, says he realized the importance of manspace after the birth of his daughter Savanna, now three years old. He began to feel restless and isolated and was looking for a way to maintain connections to his social circle. “My friends knew my girlfriend worked nights and I had to stay at home with my daughter, so they’d swing over on their way to the bar. I’d grab the baby monitor, and we’d go out to the garage and light up a cigarette and have a couple beers. Eventually I brought my stereo out there and created the space as a way to bring the bar home to me.”

    On an average Friday, Gartner might host several friends in his manspace, but instead of moving on to other venues, they’ll stay all night. “It just becomes my own little scene out there.”

    While populist versions of manspace may lack the sexiness of their well-funded brethren, men who live in small houses and apartments can only dream of lording over drafty garages or dank basement kingdoms. These space-deprived fellows, whose need for self-expression is as great as any other, must make do with whatever odd bit of vacant real estate they can claim.

    Cynthia, a recently married thirty-year-old Minneapolis woman who lives with her thirty-one-year-old husband Paul in a two-bedroom condominium, notes that Paul has claimed a closet in the baby’s room as his “tech area,” and the narrow space between his side of the bed and the wall as his “mantrench.”

    The floor of the mantrench, Cynthia reports, “is covered with books, dirty clothes, empty water bottles, pieces of paper that were in his pocket, torn-up magazines, dirty clothes, and various detritus: old plastic things and crap like that.”

    The mound of stuff in her husband’s mantrench—which is on the far side of the bed from the door—rarely reaches bed level, so Cynthia would have no reason to complain about it, except, she says, “Paul’s usually sleeping when I’m leaving for work, so I have to walk through the trench to say goodbye. I have to kick a water bottle or something to get through and I’m standing on, like, two books that are crooked so I’m about to fall over.”

    Cynthia says the couple occasionally argues about the mantrench, but that it appears to be a permanent feature of the landscape that she’s going to have to accept.

    The soft-spoken Paul appears bemused by his wife’s consternation. Asked for his take on the mantrench controversy, he replies matter-of-factly: “A man’s got to have his space.”

  • The Secret Garden

    The St. Paul Cultural Garden, an installation of seven poetry-inscribed sculptures, isn’t easy to find. There is no signage or parking, and it’s on the way to virtually nowhere. The tiny plot of anonymous green space, perched one hundred feet above the Mississippi River atop a municipal parking ramp, is hemmed off from the rest of downtown by a forbidding promontory, the red-brick fortress-like Ramsey County Government Center, the concrete arches of the Robert Street Bridge, and the intimidating-to-pedestrians traffic corridor of Kellogg Boulevard. Given this discreet locale, it’s no wonder most people haven’t heard of this public art treasure.
    Sculptor Cliff Garten and a team of poets (Sandra Benitez, Soyini Guyton, John Minczeski, David Mura, Xeng Sue Yang, and Roberta Hill-Whiteman) unveiled the project in 1996 as a way to honor the various communities that have contributed to St. Paul’s culture and commemorate the 150th anniversary of the city’s naming. (Christened by Father Galtier in 1841 to coincide with the opening of a church of the same name, St. Paul replaced Pig’s Eye, the moniker adopted by early settlers that referred to a blind-in-one-eye distiller whose moonshine shack was the area’s first business establishment.)
    Although tricky to access, the garden is appropriately located near the sites of the metropolis’ founding structures: above the hillside where St. Paul’s Church once stood and the old Fountain Cave where Pig’s Eye long ago built his shack. (Both cave and hill are gone now, having been blasted to make way for the railroad.)
    It is also situated at the center of a bustling transportation corridor—a dramatic continental crossroads through which the Natives and migrants who built The Mighty City on the Mississippi once traveled. From the lofty vantage of a prose-engraved fence, visitors today can experience the combined chorus of almost every form of modern transportation: jets roar toward runways on the flood plain; diesel barges groan and churn in the roiling waters of The Great River; thunderous freight and Amtrak locomotives lumber along the bottoms toward Chicago and Minneapolis; semi-trucks and automobiles scream across the ribbon of I-94 between the grand white bluffs of Chief Kangi Ci-stin-na’s Kaposia village and the Dakota/Hopewell Mounds. The resulting din is a harmonious wash that inspires a sense of otherworldliness similar to what one might feel at a Japanese garden.
    Strolling along the snaking granite paths and archways of Garten’s creation, the interplay of sculpture and verse dictate the pace of movement in ways no ordinary stanza break could achieve. To read Roberta Hill-Whiteman, one spirals on a stonework trail, stopping four times at carved marble chunks, alternately facing the sweeping river valley—where the poet’s Dakota ancestors once prospered—and the forbidding downtown skyline:

    In my voice the wind holds
    onto visions.
    Sorrow grips my heart:
    twelve cents an acre,
    Kangi Ci-stin-na’s tears.
    The old ones speak
    in thunder,
    in the roots of the Great Wood

    This river remembers its
    ancient name,
    Ha-ha wa-kpa.
    Where young and old
    danced in harmony
    before trade became more valuable
    than lives.

  • The Temple is Melting

    If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting.

    Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor ice goes, Mars says, so goes the status of our state as a puck mecca.

    “For years our municipal parks were to hockey what Chicago’s are to inner-city basketball,” says Mars, a red-headed, boy-faced forty-nine-year-old who was a star winger on the Duluth East and Hamilton College hockey teams. “Imagine Michael Jordan without playground basketball. We’re losing our playground hockey,” Mars says. “All of those kids who just want to go out with their skates and stick now have almost no opportunity.”

    Mars recently came up on the losing side of a contentious battle with the Eden Prairie Hockey Association over the use of $3.4 million raised to build an indoor arena (the third for this southwest suburb). He proposed instead spending the money to install up to six refrigerated outdoor rinks in city parks. Among other benefits, he says, that would have opened the sport to hundreds of kids who cannot afford the $1,400 to $1,900 to join a team and purchase equipment.
    The cost of playing hockey has been rising in direct correlation with rising temperatures; as free outdoor ice disappears, teams are forced to shell out the $150 to $200 it takes to rent an hour of indoor ice. Multiply that by twenty or so—the number of practices each team once counted on conducting outdoors—and the outlays grow prohibitive.

    “Minnesota is the state of hockey and we’re telling eighty percent of the kids they aren’t allowed in the club,” Mars says.

    Like many religions, Minnesota hockey is political. According to Eden Prairie hockey parents who insisted on remaining anonymous, the clash between the indoor vs. outdoor ice advocates was often “nasty” and led to several of the children of those involved being cut from teams they deserved to make. Many individuals contacted for this article on both sides of the issue refused to comment, saying only that they wanted to put the ugliness behind them. Jerry Fagerhaug, the Eden Prairie Hockey Association president who backed the indoor arena, did not return multiple phone calls.

    The issues in Eden Prairie are by no means limited to that community. According to Paul Douglas, the WCCO Television weather guru, Minnesotans have no choice but to “adapt to this new, Chicago-like climate.” Douglas says there will still be ice in Minnesota, but it won’t be nearly as reliable as it was a few decades ago. “Skating by mid-November was the norm for much of the twentieth century, but that date is being pushed back into mid- or late December. The skating season will, on average, be shorter by as many as ten to thirty days per winter than it was during the 1970s and early 1980s.”

    That means fewer kids may experience what the late Herb Brooks called “the joy of going to the local park rink and playing pick-up games.” Brooks, who coached the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team to Olympic gold at Lake Placid, proposed the way forward for Minnesota Hockey shortly before his death. The state doesn’t need any more “million-dollar Taj Mahals,” Brooks said in the January 2003 issue of Let’s Play Hockey. “Why do we have all these arenas around town? To give kids the chance to play, right? But they’re expensive! What if we could find a more cost-effective way to get more ice and allow more kids to play? We need to supplement the indoor arenas—artificial outdoor ice is the missing link.”

    “The people who advocate for more indoor ice tend to be people who never experienced the joy of outdoor ice,” Mars says. “They also feel that refrigerated outdoor ice is unreliable. But all they have to do is drive over to the Roseville Oval to see that’s not true.”

    The John Rose Minnesota Oval, the largest refrigerated ice surface in the world, offers four outdoor rinks. The enormous facility is open from the first week in November until the first week in March and remains operational at temperatures up to fifty degrees. Since its establishment in 1993 the skating center has rarely been forced to cancel a session because of weather.

    Steve Mars, who failed in his campaign to convince the Eden Prairie Hockey Association that outdoor refrigerated ice is the only way to preserve the sport in the era of global warming, says he’s glad the conflict has, for the moment, been resolved. But he laments the missed opportunity. “This was our chance to bring hockey back to any child who wanted to play. That’s what makes me lose sleep and lose friends over this. I mean, jeez, come on guys.”