The White Earth Indian Reservation (or Gaa-waabaabiganikaag (lit. "Where there is white clay") in the Ojibwe language) is the home to the White Earth Band, located in northwestern Minnesota. It is the largest Indian reservation in that state by land area. The reservation includes all of Mahnomen County, plus parts of Becker and Clearwater counties in the northwest part of the state, along the Wild Rice and White Earth rivers. It is about 225 miles (362 km) from Minneapolis-St. Paul and roughly 65 miles (105 km) from Fargo-Moorhead.
Community members often prefer to identify as Anishinaabe (in their language) rather than Ojibwe or Chippewa, terms that came to be used by European settlers to refer to them. The reservation's land area is 1,093 sq mi (2,831 km²), and its population was 9,192 as of the 2000 census. The White Earth Indian Reservation is one of six bands that make up the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, their governing body for major administrative needs. The Band issues its own reservation license plates to vehicles.
The White Earth Reservation was created on March 19, 1867, during a treaty signing in Washington, DC. Ten Chippewa Indian chiefs met with President Andrew Johnson at the White House to negotiate the treaty. The chiefs Wabanquot (White Cloud), a Gull Lake Mississippi Chippewa, and Fine Day, of the Removable Mille Lacs Indians, were among the first to move with their followers to White Earth in 1868.
The reservation originally covered 1,300 square miles (3,400 km²). Much of the community's land was improperly sold or seized by outside interests, including the U.S. federal government, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. According to the Dawes Act of 1887, the communal land was to be allotted to individual households recorded in tribal rolls, for cultivation in subsistence farming. Under the act, the remainder was declared surplus and available for sale to non-Native Americans. The Nelson Act of 1889 was a corollary law that enabled the land to be divided and sold to non-Natives. In the latter half of the 20th century, the federal government arranged for the transfer of state and county land to the reservation in compensation for other property that had been lost.
In 1989, Winona LaDuke formed the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which has slowly been pushing for the recovery of more land. The project claims that only 10% of the land within the reservation boundaries is owned by tribal members.
The White Earth Band operates the Shooting Star Casino and Hotel in Mahnomen, Minnesota. It is said to be the largest employer in the region.
Read more about White Earth Indian Reservation: History, Communities, Demographics, Economy, Topography, Climate
Famous quotes containing the words white, earth, indian and/or reservation:
“If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth, and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented, nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They can not tell me.”
—Chief Joseph (c. 1840–1904)
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“Music is so much a part of their daily lives that if an Indian visits another reservation one of the first questions asked on his return is: “What new songs did you learn?””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)