Three allotments, three brothers

back to that real estate problem

There were three allotments issued in 1905 to Red Lake Reservation Indians on Lake of the Woods, even though the reservation was exempt from the General Allotment Act. The third allotment went to Kakaygeesick.

Now there is a Seven Clans Casino there.

How, I wondered, did that happen?

Looking at maps of Red Lake Reservation, I noticed it shrank in size in 1899 and again in 1904. My great-grandparents moved north to Lake of the Woods in 1903. What the maps can’t show me is what happened when these lines were redrawn.

It meant thousands and thousands of acres of Red Lake Reservation land in northern Minnesota — with the exception of these three allotments around Muskeg Bay on Lake of the Woods — were homesteaded or sold off to non-natives. Especially to the Minnesota timber industry. That’s a lot of real estate.

By 1911, the northern boundary of Red Lake Reservation lay more than 60 miles south of Warroad at the top of Upper Red Lake.

[1911 map of Red Lake Reservation, University of Minnesota Libraries, John R. Borchert Map Library.]

I have failed to determine exactly how it came to be that these three allotments were made by the US federal government. But I have found out who received them.

The three sons of Chief Ay Ash Wash each received an allotment: Nay-may-poke (Sturgeon), Animekeese (Little Thunder) and Kakaygeesick (Everlasting Sky).

The first allotment went to Nay-may-poke, who replaced his father as chief of this band of Ojibway Indians on Lake of the Woods.

Allotment #1 is where the City of Warroad is today.

After receiving the federal document allotting him land where white settlers had already established businesses, residences and farms, Nay-may-poke decided in 1907 to return Allotment #1 to the white citizens of Warroad. This unusual act required Minnesota Congressman Knute Nelson seek permission from the Committee on Indian Affairs at the United States Department of Interior.

The second allotment to brother Animekeese lies north of Warroad, partly in Manitoba, Buffalo Point First Nation, and partly in the Northwest Angle where today 70 percent of the land remains held in trust by Red Lake Nation. This tract of land is where Treaty #3 and the pipe were forged.

[Chief Ay Ash Wash brought this pipe to Treaty #3 negotiations in 1873.]

The third allotment went to Kakaygeesick. His great-grandson Don Kakaygeesick lived on the land with his mother, Florence, until 2012 when they were forcibly removed in order for construction to begin on the new casino.

Follow me in the weeks ahead as I untangle the complicated history of Kakaygeesick’s Allotment #3, which is entangled with my history as the great-granddaughter of an immigrant homesteader.