Category:

FEAST DAY

CHAPTER ONE

The season's first shiver comes on Thanksgiving morning, five days before the election.

It's a passing shudder when I leave for work and see the dead leaves and pine needles standing defiantly through the soft snow that blankets the Passage Rouge Indian Reservation. The shudder becomes a shake as I scrape the frost glaze off my windshield and fumble with my car keys. I try to keep it together when I drive through what's left of the Old Village, where my grandparents and ancestors once survived the harsh winters, but when I pass the blind corner outside the Chippewa Super, where ten years ago my mother eased her car onto Highway 92 and into the path of four high school kids with a handle of E&J brandy and a stolen 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix, the shiver is chattering my teeth together. But then it's gone and I'm standing in the parking lot looking up at the log cabin facade of the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, briefcase in hand, confused and thinking of a question my mother might have asked me had she lived to see this: Mitch Caddo, what, exactly, are you doing here?

I'm thirty years old, the youngest-ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, a tribe of about five thousand enrolled members. Our reservation is in the north woods of Wisconsin, nestled within a confluence of picturesque lakes and lush forest that has drawn the chimokomonaag, the whites, and their money for more than three centuries. We're not huge like the Navajo nation, but we're bigger than our neighbors in Bad River and Menominee, and we have federal recognition and a sovereign constitutional government. Its bureaucracy—legal, business development, education, safety, enrollment, health and family services, et al.—answers to me, and I'm also the chief operations officer of Passage Rouge Golden Eagle Enterprises, the limited- liability corporation that manages the day-to-day operations at the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, the economic center of the reservation that rakes in $25 million a year, home of the loosest slots in the state.

I'm the suit and tie, the short haircut, the white-passing face of Passage Rouge when we have business with the chimokomonaag. On the top floor of the Golden Eagle, though, inside the Migizi Suite, presides the man I put up there just two years ago, Mack Beck, tribal president. While I take meetings with the state reps looking for outfield chatter for whatever Indian Country bills they're moving through the legislature, or knuckle down with the governor's office to discuss the compacts regulating our gaming operations, Mack Beck is the name at the top of the ticket, the ursine face smiling from the billboards and campaign signs staked along the highway. He represented us in the intertribal delegation to DC, where he grip-and-grinned with the president in the East Room of the White House, while I stayed in Passage Rouge for budget meetings, steering and development committees, and the granular minutiae that Mack Beck can't be bothered with. He's ceremonial in all senses of the word. He is the look. I'm the substance.

Does the unequal workload make me bitter? Not in the least. I'm a pragmatist. I'm too much of an outsider, a suburban Indian, to pull enough Passage Rouge votes to get anywhere near the council. Mack doesn't have that problem. He looks the part and says the right words. Neither of us got here alone, and together we wield power not normally afforded to kids like us.

But what good is power if you can't keep it? That's the other part of my job. Over the last three months, I've handed over the bulk of my duties to the ancient order of aunties who run the tribal government so I can figure out how to get Mack reelected to another two-year term. In less than a week, the people of Passage Rouge will come down to the William R. Paulson Tribal Government Center on Peace Pipe Road to cast ballots for tribal president and council. Our election is too small for anything resembling scientific polling, but if you take the angry, misspelled all-caps posts on Facebook and the picketers loitering outside the Government Center as indicators of how our campaign is going, you might come to the reasonable conclusion that the president's reelection prospects are in trouble. Or, in the words of our great orator and chief, straight-up fucked.

Is this the source of this morning's shiver? The very real prospect of defeat? Nobody thinks that's fun. And "fall guy" is in the unwritten job description of the operations director. I take the blame when everything goes wrong. His failure is my failure, and that's the way it's been from the jump.

But as I get myself correct in the lobby of the Eagle and swipe at the permanent sleeplessness in my reddened eyes, I suspect that this November shiver is bigger than just next week's election. It's an existential shiver. After all the sacrifices I've made, people I've disappointed, laws we may have broken, and maybe a lost election, is this all there is? Just what did I trade in my meager decency for?

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