original and abstract signature totems. My brother created totems as a painter in almost the same way the first totems were imagined by native storiers, by vision, by artistry, but not by the tricky politics of shamans and warriors. The first totems were painted on hide, wood, birch bark, and stone.
The priest would never associate with the creation of native totems. Nature was a separation not an inspiration of holy faith or godly associations. The priest glanced at the blue ravens and then turned away in silence. He seemed to regard the personal creative expressions of my brother as a private and necessary confession or sacrament of penance.
Augustus, our favorite uncle, celebrated the visions of a thirteen year old, or any totemic vision that provoked the priest, and hired us to paint blue ravens and other totems on the outside of the tiny newspaper building. His praise was conditional, as usual, so we returned with our own strategies and agreed to paint the building if he would hire us to sell his newspapers. Our uncle paused to consider our adolescent tactics, and then consented but with more conditions. He would pay only a penny a copy for the newspapers we sold, and we must find new customers and ways to increase the circulation of the reservation weekly.
We painted the newspaper building white a few days later but not decorated with blue ravens. The paint was thick and lumpy, not an impressive cover. The next day we started our first positions as newspaper hawkers, news salesmen with a commission. No one, not even our younger cousins, would work for only a penny a newspaper. The venture, however, was worth much more than the mere penny income.
Augustus was a heavy drinker, at times, and that was both a problem and an advantage. He was more critical of the federal agent when he had been drinking, and that troubled Father Aloysius. Our uncle was always generous when he drank alone or with others, but he seldom remembered promises. One night we easily persuaded our feisty publisher to pay the cost of two train tickets to promote the weekly newspaper at every Soo Line Railroad station between Ogema and the Milwaukee Road Depot in faraway Minneapolis.
The Tomahawk sold for about three cents a copy by annual subscription, and everyone on the reservation who wanted the paper had already subscribed, so we decided to hawk the newspaper to strangers on the train at the Ogema Station. The trains arrived twice a day and we earned about ten cents in a day.
Hawking the Tomahawk was easy because there were no other newspapers published in the area, and because we were directly related to the publisher. I tried to read every issue of the newspaper and to memorize a few paragraphs of the main stories, enough weekly content to shout out the significance of the news stories.
I actually learned how to write by reading the newspapers we sold, by memory of selected descriptive scenes, and by imitation of the standard style of journalism at the time. I learned how to create scenes in words, and to imagine the colors of words, and my brother painted abstract scenes of blue ravens. Most students at our school had learned how to mimic teachers, to recount government scenes, federal agents, and native police, but we were the only students who hawked newspapers with national stories and learned how to write at the same time.
The Progress was the first newspaper published on the White Earth Reservation, and the news was mostly local, including a special personal section on the recent travels, experiences, and events of reservation families. The newspaper reported that our grandmother, for instance, traveled by horse and wagon to visit relatives in the town of Beaulieu. The Progress published reservation news and critical editorials about the ineptitude of federal agents and policies of the federal government.
Major Timothy Sheehan, the federal agent, and native police confiscated the very first edition of the Progress, the newsprint and the actual press, and ordered my relatives to leave the reservation. Agent Sheehan must have thought he was the deputy of a colonial monarchy. Augustus was publisher of the Progress and Theodore Hudon Beaulieu was the editor and printer at the time. The first edition of the Progress, critical of the federal agent and the policies of reservation land allotment, was published on March 25, 1886.
Our relatives refused to leave their homes and newspaper business by the order of a corrupt political agent, and instead sought sanctuary at Saint Benedict’s Mission. Father Aloysius Hermanutz, the mission priest, provided a secure refuge for some of our relatives, and protection from the arbitrary authority of the federal agent. The Episcopal Church had been active in the selection of the agent and dominant in the administration of federal reservation policies. The native police had refused to arrest or remove our relatives from the reservation.
The obvious constitutional issue of freedom of the press was decided a year later by a federal court. The court ruled in favor of my relatives, who had a right to publish a newspaper on the reservation, or anywhere in the country, without the consent of a federal agent. The native and constitutional rights of my relatives and other citizens were restored on the White Earth Reservation. The second edition of the Progress was published on October 8, 1887.
Augustus Beaulieu changed the name of the weekly newspaper to the Tomahawk in the early nineteen hundreds, and the content of the newspaper changed, along with the name, from local reservation stories and editorials to national and international news reports. The readers must have wondered what happened to the local stories, and at the same time marveled at the publication of national news stories. Straightaway the reservation became a new cosmopolitan culture of national and international news.
White Earth became a cosmopolitan community.
The readers of the Tomahawk could not understand how the publisher was able to gather so much news from around the world every week. The national news was seldom timely, never daily, but the readers were not concerned because most stories on the reservation were seasonal. Sometimes national stories were read a month or two later as current events, and in this way national news was always current on the reservation. The sense of time was created by native stories, not in the urgent political reports of newspapers. Later, the Tomahawk published on the first page regular editorial and news stories and by Carlos Montezuma, or Wassaja, one of the first native medical doctors.
We learned much later that natives on the reservation were more literate than the general population of new immigrants, and natives read more newspapers because the federal government established schools on reservations. Federal assimilation policies forced most native children to learn how to read and write long before national compulsory education. We were required to attend the government school on the reservation, and too many native students were sent away to boarding schools.
Augustus subscribed to preprinted or patent inside newspaper pages, the actual pages were printed somewhere else and delivered to the reservation for publication. Theodore Beaulieu, once the actual printer and editor of the Progress, was superseded by the patent inside pages of the Tomahawk. Many newspapers were published around the country with the same patent stories of national and international news reports and advertisements. The pages of the patent inside were selected editorial tours of world news, not local native issues or reservation rumors, but a parcel of disaster reports and other stories from obscure and marvelous places.
“Everyone knows the strange old stories of the reservation,” our uncle declared. “The Tomahawk needs new strange stories, and the newer and stranger the outside stories the better for reservation readers.”
Augustus was right, but in time we became better at creating our own strange native stories of the reservation than hawking the content of some faraway story by a writer who constructed the news of the world for hundreds of weekly newspapers. The patent inside pages displayed national advertisements. Mostly the advertisements were for fast medicine cures. Some blank sections of the newspaper were reserved for local promotions.
“Paxtine Toilet Antiseptic for Women” was a regular patent advertisement in the Tomahawk, but the use of a douche remained a mystery. We were callow about the need and the actual usage, so we never hawked the douche promotion to women at the Ogema Station. We were not hesitant, however, to declare the news, wave our newspapers, and shout out about other advertisements.
“Ladies can wear shoes one size smaller after using Allen’s Footease, a certain cure for swollen, sweating, hot, aching feet.” We never sold one paper