His Home and Native Land-Red Lake is like Cuba:

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2115289/

His Home and Native Land
Red Lake is like Cuba: proud, poor, troubled, and independent.
By David Treuer

Posted Friday, March 25, 2005, at 8:44 AM PT

Bloodshed puts Red Lake on the map—again

Bloodshed puts Red Lake on the map—again
On Monday, Jeff Weise, a 16-year-old Red Lake Indian band member, shot and killed 10 people, including himself, on foreign soil in the middle of the United States. Strange as it may seem, the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota is a foreign country, even if the violence there is all too familiar. The reservation, slightly larger than 880 square miles, is mostly water. The land there is a thin strip of swamp and lowland that cups lower Red Lake.

Bloodshed is what put Red Lake on the map. When my Ojibwe (Chippewa) ancestors arrived in Red Lake in the mid-18th century, the area was occupied by the Dakota. The Ojibwe orchestrated a surprise attack on a flotilla of Dakota canoes heading into the lake from a small tributary. The Ojibwe fired from the steep banks onto the canoes below. The Dakota fell into the water and swam for shore, but none of them made it. There were so many dead that their blood stained the water red far out into the lake, and the Ojibwe named the river Battle River and the lake Red Lake: Miskwaagamiwizaga'iganing.

The recent school shooting at Red Lake High School is another kind of violence at another time, and once again bloodshed is putting Red Lake on the map—as a modern nation with a distinctly modern problem. This time the violence was intratribal: Weise killed his own people along with, one must imagine, his own demons.......

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1. Thanks for this..I hadn't really

known much about it..and the history was interesting. But, it's really sad why the kid would do this.