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Long before the new traditionalism appeared on the scene, the cantankerous Ojibwe polemicist Wub-e-ke-niew (Francis Blake Jr.) did something remarkable: he disenrolled himself from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. I repeat: he disenrolled himself. Wub-e-ke-niew was a fluent speaker of Ojibwemowin, a member of the Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Lodge), a regular columnist for the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, and the author of We Have the Right to Exist: A Translation of Aboriginal Indigenous Thought, which he advertised as“the first book ever published from an Ahnishinahbæótjibway perspective.”1 In 1991, just before the Columbian quintcentennial, Wub-e-ke-niew ceremoniously sliced up his tribal ID and mailed it to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr., accompanied by an open letter that he also published in his column. “This is to inform you that I want my name removed from your basic membership, identification and enrollment lists of your ‘Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians,’” the letter stated. “I will no longer be identified by your racist term of ‘Indian.’ I am not an ‘Indian,’ I am not a ‘Chippewa,’ and I am not a ‘Native American.’ These words are all European terms . . . I am Ahnishinahbæótjibway.”2 It was a letter of resignation. Wub-e-ke-niew was through. His dramatic assertion of Ahnishinahbæótjibway identity and resignation of tribal membership was premised on two ideas. First, any “American Indian” or even “Chippewa” identity represented by enrollment , your standard tribal ID card, or for that matter the English language , was colonialism pure and simple and thereby illegitimate. Second, Ahnishinahbæótjibway identity was legitimate because it was based on traditions, definitions, language, and people reaching far back in time: C H A P T E R F O U R Resignations 166 R ES I g n At I o n S “My father was Ahnishinahbæótjibway, and all of his patrilineal ancestors were Ahnishinahbæótjibway, going back for hundreds of millennia.” His reference to patrilineal ancestry invoked the Ojibwe clan system, which Wub-e-ke-niew clearly considered to be the sole authentic determinant of Ahnishinahbæótjibway identity, and he insisted that clans had political rights. “The land is held jointly by the Clans of the Midewiwin, and every Aboriginal Indigenous person of the Clans is Sovereign,” Wub-e-ke-niew explained. “The land is not, and never has been, held ‘in common,’ nor has it ever belonged to ‘Indians.’”3 Putting the lie to the Indian identity and asserting a new (that is, old) Aboriginal Indigenous identity in its place, Wub-e-ke-niew did more than talk the usual talk about the importance of traditions and sovereignty. He forcefully asserted them in the face of state power. What was at stake in this display? For Wub-e-ke-niew, most everything important: language, land, culture, religion, identity, the future of the people. The title of his book said it best: We Have the Right to Exist. “Indian” identity was bogus, “fabricated,” and “artificial,” an “abstraction ” designed to subjugate us by colonizing our hearts and minds along with our lands.4 Liberation was possible, but only if one bravely said No to the entire colonizing system outright, a process that Wub-e-ke-niew described autobiographically: “When I turned my back on the Indian identity . . . I became free—again, because I was born free. I could feel the weight lift from my shoulders, and my hands become untied, as I left the shackles of Western European civilization behind me.”5 Wub-e-ke-niew saw identity crisis and political crisis as one and the same. As a writer and a nationalist he embraced modernity and all of its technologies, but as an activist his prescription for the Ojibwe nation was cultural resistance of a common and often problematic sort: a theocracy. Wub-e-ke-niew took the meaning of decolonization literally, and he was apparently punished for that transgression. After his death in October 1997, he was posthumously reenrolled in the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, and his nonenrolled (but Indian) widow, Clara NiiSka, was served with a Red Lake order of removal evicting her from the home she shared with Wub-e-ke-niew for more than thirteen years. “I am not an Indian— kick me off my land,” Wub-e-ke-niew would sometimes taunt during his wranglings with the council.6 It happened after his death...

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