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Ojibwe Reporter: Red Lake familiar yet different
Monday, March 28, 2005

"The sense that you are leaving someplace familiar and entering a different world is apparent when you pass the Red Lake Indian Reservation sign on Hwy. 89.

It's all familiar to me. I grew up on the White Earth Reservation, 70 miles south. The small-town feel, the endless mishmash of cheap HUD houses, jumbles of kids' toys and cars in the front yard, roaming dogs, reservation license plates with names like HONEY and LUCYB, familiar faces. Olive skin and dark hair. The young people with wide-set and round faces, the older folks with a darker complexion. They could all be from White Earth.

The faces on the front page this past week could be my relatives. But this isn't the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up. This is a grittier time, more intense. My childhood was painful and frightening, but this bare-knuckles, hip-hop, full-throttle world is not mine.

By comparison, my childhood on White Earth was practically idyllic. That's a ridiculous thought, after the violence, death and corruption that I witnessed growing up, that anything could be worse. But here it is, right in front of me."

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Mark Boswell: Looking like a local, but being an outsider (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 3/27)
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Relevant Links:
Red Lake Net News - http://www.rlnn.com
Red Lake Nation - http://www.redlakenation.org
Red Lake High School - http://www.paulbunyan.net/rlschools/hs.htm

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