understand who my father was, what he did every day, and what had been his life.
Over the course of the next week, we culled several cases from the corpus of his work. During this time, which was the last week of school, my mother was unable to leave her room. My father brought her food. I sat with her in the evenings and read to her from The Family Album of Favorite Poems until she slept. It was an old maroon book with a ripped cover picturing happy white people reading poems in church, to their children at bedtime, whispering into a sweetheart’s ear. She would not let me read anything inspirational. I had to read the endless story poems with their ornate words and clunking rhythms. “Ben Bolt,” “The Highwayman,” “The Leak in the Dike,” and so on. As soon as her breathing evened out, I slunk away, relieved. She slept and slept, like she was sleeping for a sleeping marathon. She ate little. Wept often, a grinding and monotonous weeping that she tried to muffle with pillows but which vibrated through the bedroom door. I’d go downstairs, into the study, with my father, and continue reading through the files.
We read with a concentrated intensity. My father had become convinced that somewhere within his bench briefs, memos, summaries, and decisions lay the identity of the man whose act had nearly severed my mother’s spirit from her body.
August 16, 1987
Durlin Peace, Plaintiff
v.
The Bingo Palace, Lyman Lamartine, Defendants
Durlin Peace is a janitor at the Bingo Palace and Casino, and reports directly to Lyman Lamartine. He was fired on July 5, 1987, two days after an argument with his boss. A witness testified that the argument was overheard by several other employees and involved a woman dated by both men.
On July 4, the employee cookout was held in the back courtyard patio of the Bingo Palace. During this cookout, Durlin Peace, who had been repairing some equipment earlier that day, walked off the premises. He was stopped by Lyman Lamartine and asked to empty his pockets. In one pocket, six washers were found, worth about 15 cents apiece. Lyman Lamartine then accused Durlin Peace of attempting to steal company property, and fired him.
Durlin Peace said that the washers belonged to him. As there were no distinguishing marks on the washers, which were examined by Judge Coutts, there was no proof that the washers belonged to the Bingo Palace. As there was no valid basis upon which Durlin Peace could be fired, it was ordered that he be reinstated at the Bingo Palace.
Washers? I said.
What about them? said my father.
I looked back down at the file.
Although this was not one of the cases we marked out as important, I remember it well. Here it was. The weighty matters on which my father spent his time and his life. I had, of course, been in court when he handled these sorts of cases. But I’d thought I was being excluded from weightier matters, upsetting or violent or too complex, because of my age. I had imagined that my father decided great questions of the law, that he worked on treaty rights, land restoration, that he looked murderers in the eye, that he frowned while witnesses stuttered and silenced clever lawyers with a slice of irony. I said nothing, but as I read on I was flooded by a slow leak of dismay. For what had Felix S. Cohen written his Handbook? Where was the greatness? the drama? the respect? All of the cases that my father judged were nearly as small, as ridiculous, as petty. Though a few were heartbreaking, or a combination of sad and idiotic, like that of Marilyn Shigaag, who stole five gas station hot dogs and ate them all in the gas station bathroom, none rose to the grandeur I had pictured. My father was punishing hot dog thieves and examining washers—not even washing machines—just washers worth 15 cents apiece.
December 8, 1976
Before Chief Judge Antone Coutts, also Justice Rose Chenois and Associate Justice Mervin “Tubby” Ma’ingan.
Tommy Thomas et al., Plaintiffs
v.
Vinland Super Mart et al., Defendants
Tommy Thomas and the other plaintiffs in this case were Chippewa tribal members, and Vinland was and is a non-Indian-owned gas and grocery business, which, though located primarily on fee (former purchased allotment) land, is surrounded by tribal trust land. The plaintiffs alleged that during commercial transactions occurring at Vinland Super Mart a 20% surcharge was added to transactions involving tribal members showing signs of age-related dementia, innocence of extreme youth, mental preoccupation, inebriation, or general confusion.
The owners, George and Grace Lark, did not deny that on some occasions a 20% surcharge had been added to cash register receipts. They defended their action by insisting it was a way to recoup losses from shoplifting. The defendants claimed that the Tribal Court did not have personal jurisdiction over them or subject matter jurisdiction over the transactions, which were the basis for the plaintiffs’ complaint.
The Court found that although the gas station building itself was located on allotment #122093, the parking lot, garbage Dumpster, sidewalk, pumps, fire hydrants, sewage system, leach field, concrete parking barriers, outside picnic tables, and decorative flower planters were all located on tribal trust land, and that in order to enter the Vinland Super Mart, customers, 86% of whom were tribal members, had to drive and then to walk across tribal trust land.
This court claimed jurisdiction over the case and as there was no evidence presented to deny the surcharge had taken place found in favor of the plaintiffs.
My father had kept this one aside.
It seems like an ordinary enough case, I said. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
I was able in that case to claim limited jurisdiction over a non-Indian-owned business, said my father. The case held up on appeal. There was some pride in his voice.
That was satisfying, he went on, but that is not the reason I’ve pulled the case. I’ve marked it out to examine it further because of the people involved.
I looked back at the file.
Tommy Thomas et al. or the Larks?
The Larks, though Grace and George are dead. Linda survives. And their son, Linden, who is not mentioned or involved here, but who figures in another action, one more emotionally complicated. The Larks are the sort of people who trot out their relationships with “good Indians,” whom they secretly despise and openly patronize, in order to prove their general love for Indians, whom they are engaged in cheating. The Larks were bumbling entrepreneurs and petty thieves, but they were also self-deceived. While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance. The Larks, in fact, were shrill opponents of abortion. Yet at the birth of their twins, they had been willing to put to death the weaker and (as they thought at the time) deformed member, a baby girl. The whole reservation knew
