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109 c h a p t e r 6  The Drum Keeper rosemary berens (ojibwe) “When I was really little, I used to walk on this dirt road to my cousin’s house and look up a long, sloping hill. It was just a big field all full of grass and trails going across. There’d be clouds going by and looked like they were at the top of the horizon. I used to think, if I go up there, I’ll fall off, because that’s the edge of the earth. I’ll never be able to get back on. That’s what I thought the world was, the village I lived in and the people I lived with.” In ways, Rose Tennant Berens never ranged far from the northern Minnesota Bois Forte Reservation that encompassed her childhood. She is a member of the Bois Forte band of Ojibwe, sometimes known as Chippewa, and inherited the region’s accent, her o’s in words such as go or throw seeming to come from a well. Rose stands about five feet, three inches, looks petite despite the flannels and Polartec she favors, and at fifty-six has unlined dark skin and a turnedup nose. When she twists her long brown hair into a knot above her bangs, she is somehow as adorable as a child. Her lineage includes part French from her Ojibwe mother and part Scots-Irish from her Ojibwe father. She lives with her third husband, Mike Berens, a rugged white man who acts besotted with her. When they met, at a local bar, where she was celebrating her sister’s birthday, he did not believe in anything religious, but “evolved,” as Rose put it. “I took the time to explain things to him. First time we went hunting and got an animal . . . I always carry a little plastic thing with water. I offered water and tobacco, then had to explain to him why I was doing that”—the water is to quench the thirst of the animal’s spirit, the tobacco is to thank the CH006.qxd 12/14/10 8:09 AM Page 109 Creator—“and what I said, and translated. He said, ‘It all makes so much sense, the way you do things.’” Mike is now a pipe carrier in the Bois Forte band, an honor reflecting his respect for Ojibwe ways. “He’s not discriminated against because he’s not Native. I don’t even know if people know that he’s not.” The marriage is the third for him too; both say three’s a charm. On weekends , they care for their sled dogs, hunt, fish, make wine from strawberries or rhubarb, go to powwows, or, depending on the season, ride snowmobiles or Harley-Davidsons. Their wedding rings are tattoos based on the Harley shield. His says “Rose,” hers, “Mike.” This was Mike’s idea, after Rose feared losing the diamond ring he offered to buy. Rose needs her diversions. As manager of the Bois Forte Heritage Center and Cultural Museum, a round modern building (“Everything is round with us”) set within an embrace of birch trees, one of her major responsibilities is the daunting work called repatriation. The word “repatriation,” as part of the acronym NAGPRA, generally draws blank looks from non-Natives I have queried and emotions close to tears from Natives. NAGPRA, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,1 requires U.S. museums to send tribes a list of objects that might be from that tribe, and gives tribes the impetus and clout to reclaim—to repatriate—them. “It’s not as easy as it sounds.” Rose made the grand understatement one weekend afternoon in the staff meeting room. Repatriation is “a really long process, and it can take two or three years, even longer, to get stuff back.” When I visited, she was negotiating with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for nineteen items—she pushed her granny glasses down her nose and consulted her notes—including “birch bark scrolls, two rattles, a fawn-skin bag. The fawn-skin is something they will keep their midewinin medicines in.” According to an Ojibwe-English dictionary Rose consulted, midewinin means “grand medicine.” The phrase indicated the translation’s limits. Negotiations get stuck in cultural divides. “When we first went to Denver, one of the items they had was a net for catching fish. It was made by one of the band members who was still alive...

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