It was the shiny paint job that drew my eye to the floor, where it lay under a wooden end table that displayed several imported resin figurines of scowling Indian chiefs and yearningly pensive maidens. The stone tomahawk, like the fanciful figures of imaginary Indians, had been bypassed by seekers of genuine Indian art and artifacts, who likely thought it a Boy Scout craft project.
And it was the shiny paint job that caused me to kneel there, on the floor of the old warehouse converted to specialty and antique shops, for a closer look. Attached to the handle, a 10- to 12-inch length cut from a poplar branch, was an irregular oval rock the size of my fist, painted with red and yellow geometrical designs, secured to the handle by a length of basswood fiber wrapped back and forth around the rock and handle in a figure eight. The entire piece had been shellacked; except for a little dust and that the wrap had become dried out and somewhat loose, it looked tourist-shop new. And, although I had not seen it before, familiar to me.
I have many times heard my father and my uncles talk about the tomahawks and war clubs they used to make to sell as souvenirs at their father's Indian tourist stand, decades ago, on the Grand Portage reservation. We have a photograph of my grandmother and aunt assembling and painting tomahawks at their kitchen table in Duluth and packing them in a cardboard box to bring up to the reservation.
Could this possibly be one of the pieces that they made for tourist trade, I wondered, and should I bring my dad downtown to see it?
My father is an Ojibwe Elder. He was born in 1929, just months after the Merriam Report was released and Indian children began to return to their families from the federal boarding schools that most Indian children were sent to between 1880-1935.
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He was born five years before Congress, by way of the Indian Reorganization Act, established the tribal governments that we know today. He married and raised his children during the federal government's Termination Era policies, those decades between 1950-80 during which tribal sovereignty (and our birthright, and our identity as Indian people) was under siege. He has witnessed decades of changing federal Indian policies and governmental attempts to solve the "Indian problem" that our ancestors inadvertently created by existing. During those decades our very large extended family has survived, and often thrived.
Should I bring him to the antique mall? Indian family histories are collective and complex, walked by ghosts of past, present and future bearing forged chains that can rattle and clank painfully when shaken, sometimes by what might appear outside of Indian Country to be the most innocuous of questions. Should I ask if he would like to see the stone tomahawk?
I thought about it for a couple of days, then stopped by for coffee and asked.
He wanted to go.
At the antique mall he lifted the stone tomahawk from the floor with two hands and looked down at it for a good minute without saying anything while I waited, touching and peering at the resin chiefs and princesses, a dried and cracking birchbark basket, the grimy gilt frame around a print of The End of the Trail.
I cleared my throat.
"The wrap is a little loose," I said.
"That's easy to fix; a little glue would fix it, right underneath; see, right there." He looked down again, past the rock, poplar handle, paint, shellack and spruce root, through more than half a century. I looked, too, wishing that I could see what he saw.
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"I'm going to buy this," he said.
Linda LeGarde Grover is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Grover writes once a month for the Budgeteer.
