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In Native Lights, people in Native communities around Mni Sota Mkoce - a.k.a. Minnesota - tell their stories about finding their gifts and sharing them with the community. These are stories of joy, strength, history, and change from Native people who are shaping the future and honoring those who came before them.
Native Lights is also a weekly, half-hour radio program hosted by Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe members and siblings, Leah Lemm and Cole Premo. Native Lights is a space for people in Native communities.
Native Lights: Where Indigenous Voices Shine is produced by Minnesota Native News and Ampers, Diverse Radio for Minnesota’s Communities with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund. Online at https://minnesotanativenews.org/
[Music element: Native Lights Theme]
Janis A. Fairbanks: Sugar bush babies—that's my grandma. She was born at sugar bush camp, and they were getting sap, doing all the things that you do at sugar bush camp. So her mother just went off and the other women helped. And my grandma was born. They didn't break camp. They just cleaned her up and wrapped her up and went back to work making sugar.
Leah Lemm: Boozhoo, hello. Welcome to Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine. I'm your host Leah Lemm. Miigwech for joining me. Native Lights is more than a podcast and radio show at its core. It's a place for Native folks to tell their stories every week. We have captivating conversations with great guests from a bunch of different backgrounds, educators, community leaders, language warriors, authors, you name it. We have a great mix of passions. So we talk with folks about their gifts and how they share those gifts with their community. And it all centers around the big point of purpose in our lives. And it's another day, another opportunity to amplify Native Voices. And today, I am excited to speak with Janis A. Fairbanks. Janis is a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. She recently released a book called Sugar Bush Babies: Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother, and that's a memoir of lessons learned from her Ojibwe grandmother during the era of Indian Relocation. And we'll definitely talk more about that. Janis is into history, writing and Ojibwe language, and she's currently the chair of the language advisory board for the Fond du Lac band. So please welcome Janis A. Fairbanks. Boozhoo, Janis.
Janis A Fairbanks: Nice to meet you.
Leah Lemm: Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for joining me. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me where you're joining me from?
Janis A. Fairbanks: [Introduces herself in Ojibwe-mowin.] That just means my name is Blue Sky Woman, and I'm from Leech Lake Reservation and Fond du Lac Reservation. [Identifies her clan in Ojibwe-mowin.] I am Eagle Clan. I live in Cloquet, Minnesota. I'm a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Leah Lemm: Great. Thank you so much. And how are you doing? And how is the family doing?
Janis A. Fairbanks: We're going crazy with a puppy. Oh, we were out trying to find a place to get him groomed and get some training. He's only five months old. We did one training ourselves. I mean, we took him to one training, but he is a handful. So, yeah, otherwise, going good.
Leah Lemm: Okay, you have opened a major door here. Janis, so what kind of puppy?
Janis A. Fairbanks: He's mixed.
Leah Lemm: One hundred percent good boy?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yes, yes, he is. I saw pictures of him. There was a litter of five, and I picked him right out of a litter. And then she did some videos, and I picked him out again. Then we went to see him, and I picked him up, and he just came right to me and laid like right across my arm. I said, it's my dog. My husband wanted a different one, but I said, okay, I'll hold them. I'll hold them all. And this one just kept coming back to me. He reminded me of a cross between a raccoon and a bear. He's just a little bear, but he had that little raccoon face, oh, wrinkles all over his forehead and great, big paws. That's what reminded me of a bear. But, yeah, no, he's German Shepherd mix. He weighs about 40 pounds now, and he is strong. He is strong, strong. The vet told us he's going to be 70 pounds.
Leah Lemm: Wow.
Janis A. Fairbanks: We need to get him trained.
Leah Lemm: Yeah. What's his name?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Dutch.
Leah Lemm: Oh, my goodness. The first dog that I had with my husband was named Dutch. He was a basset hound mix. Well, welcome to puppydom. I have a 10-month-old German Short Hair pointer.
Janis A. Fairbanks: Okay.
Leah Lemm: He is 63 pounds right now and is still growing. So good luck.
Janis A. Fairbanks: Thanks.
Leah Lemm: Good luck with the training.
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yeah, we're gonna need it.
Leah Lemm: That's so fun. Oh, so fun. Well, Janis, I know you have some exciting things happening with the release of Sugar Bush Babies, which I have usually, I ask at this point, if there's anything that you are thinking about, mulling over or excited about these days.
Janis A. Fairbanks: The book only covers, I would say, from the time I was born until I was 18 or so. Those years of really high influence and contact that I had with my grandmother, because that book is really, it's a tribute to her. She was a very strong woman, and she had an influence on my life that is still, it continues to this day. She's gone. She left us in 1981. That book says 1986. It wasn't 1986. It was 1981 but she was 86. So that's probably why those two numbers got mixed up. That's my fault. I didn't catch that in when I was proofreading that book.
Leah Lemm: It's beautiful. First of all, like the front is it looks like a lake, probably wild rice, some cat tails, some art in the front, and then photos. Why don't you tell me a bit about the cover of the book?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Well, I don't like that picture of me. That's me when I was 14, I think in the cardigan here, yeah, okay. There weren't very many pictures of me when I was the kid. We had some kind of a camera, I guess, because there are some pictures that I have from that timespan, but not many of me. So when they asked me for a picture when I was in my teens, that was one of them that I gave them. And then there's another one I tried to get them to use, where I look a little neater. It's in the book. I'm wearing a dress and all that. But no, they like that one. So okay, and the other one is my grandma and my mother and my uncles and my grandpa on the cover. That's my grandma when my mom was a little girl.
Leah Lemm: You're listening to Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking with Janis A. Fairbanks, PhD, member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and author of the new book Sugar Bush Babies: Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother. And then can you tell me a bit about the title Sugar Bush Babies?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Sugar bush babies—that's my grandma. She was born at sugar bush camp, and she used to tell me that story quite often. Growing up, I never got tired of it. She was really proud of that story. Her mother was at sugar camp, and they were getting sap, doing all the things that you do at sugar bush camp. And then grandma was born. So her mother just went off, and all the women there, they had the pit and laid it with cedar. And then there was a pole across for my great grandmother to hang on to, and the other women helped. And my grandma was born, and they didn't break camp. They just cleaned her up and wrapped her up and went back to work making sugar. I mean, I have a child, and I can't imagine going, getting up and going back to work after that. They were just a hearty lot. And she said that herself, she was at sugar camp, and "So I was a sugar bush baby," she told me. So, yep, she was a sugar bush baby.
Leah Lemm: That's so lovely. Well, can you tell me a bit about the genesis of the book and your motivation to write it?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Those stories were collected the whole time and written about when I was a kid. I started writing when I was in the second grade, and it started by a classroom show and tell. Because when I went from being a Minnesota, an old Indian village, they called it, I wasn't used to being around non-Natives. All I ever saw was my mom, dad, cousins, brothers, sisters. They all had black hair and brown eyes, and I wasn't used to seeing anybody else. So when we went and they put me in kindergarten, I thought my classmates were robots. For one thing, I thought they were some kind of fancy dolls, because they acted kind of regimented, like they trained them to do, you know, sit there with your hands folded and say—the teacher would say, "Good morning children." And they were all: "Good morning, Miss Smith," or whoever the teacher was. And so I did that too. I said, "Yeah, I can do that." And I just looked around at them. Just all really nice. I had nice classmates. They were, what's the word? Polite? They were very polite to the teacher. But I was the only Native in the class. It was the time of Hollywood Indians, you know, cowboys and Indians. So I started by just the show and tell. It was a chance for me to talk about my life and what I did when I wasn't in school, which was being out in the country. You know, I went to the lake. And oh, I saw a flower. I remember one time telling them I saw pink clouds, or I drew a picture. And they said, "What's that over there?" And I said, "It's clouds." "No, clouds aren't pink." And I just thought, oh, how pitiful that they've never seen pink clouds. And yeah, they're pink. And then the teacher said, "Well, maybe it's an apple orchard in the distance." And I thought, how can she tell them that? After I just got through saying that they are clouds and they are pink? It was a learning experience, because it just told me that teachers don't know everything. And even though she contradicted me, I knew that it was pink clouds because I drew them. I was the artist, and I knew they were pink clouds, so I wasn't gonna give up either. I just said, "Well, they are clouds." But okay.
Leah Lemm: So it's like you telling your own story, your own truth.
Janis A. Fairbanks: And I found out my classmates, they really liked my stories. They got to the point where they would ask me for stories, and they started calling me "ye olde storyteller," and so I just kept up with the stories. And the more I told, the more they wanted. I told them stories about what I did when I was out in the woods, about going and looking for wild blueberries and those little bitty strawberries. There's no comparison between those great big strawberries you see in the supermarket now and the tiny little wild strawberries. There's just no taste comparison there. Good to look at those big ones, but those little ones are really a treat.
Leah Lemm: Your grandmother is central in this book. Can you say a bit more about your relationship with your grandmother?
Janis A. Fairbanks: I remember her coming to Bena, which is on the Leech Lake Reservation, because my dad told me we're going to the train station to pick your grandma up. And that's the first time I really remember seeing her coming, stepping down off the train. And she always carried a shopping bag of some kind. She always had one, and in there she generally had oranges. Well, this time, when she got off the train, she came over, and I was there, and I think maybe my littler, two years younger than me brother was there, maybe one of my sisters. But she greeted us all, but then she gave me an orange. This is for you, she said. And I was used to anything we got, we slice it all up, and all the kids would get one. But that one was for me, and so it made me feel real special. You know, just wanted to walk with her and everything like from the first time. I really remember seeing her, when she treated me special, and I liked it. I used to really look forward to every time they said, "Grandma's coming." And she always had that shopping bag and in there she had something. It might be a cookie or, you know, something she gave me my own. Probably did with the other kids too. She probably had one for each of them, but I remember her giving me one, saying, "This is for you." And I wasn't used to, this is for me. You know, you could have one and break it up and give a piece to your sister and your brother and you know? So, yeah, she just made me feel special.
Leah Lemm: And like the book, I'm making my way through it now. But it's memories. There's recollections and memories throughout. I have a 12-year-old right now, and every once in a while, I'm observing him and wondering, like, what memory is being imprinted for the long term on him? Do you have any reflections on what memories tend to stick with someone?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Well, making somebody feel protected and special, it stuck with me. And so that's what I try to do with I tried to do that with my son, and I was surprised at some of the memories he had that he mentioned later. He had a business as a painter for a while. And when he was a little boy, I like to redecorate. I like my surroundings to change. When I grew up in the country. It was constantly changing. So living in a city, the only thing I could change was the color of the room or the color of the curtains or something. So I changed pretty often the decor, and I did all my own painting. I picked out all my own furnishings. And my son one day, when he was real little, he must have been about six only, "Can I paint something?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, you can paint something." So I taped down the newspaper there, and I gave him a little paintbrush, and I let him paint the trim on the baseboard. After that, he would come when I'm painting, "Can I paint something? Can I paint something else?" I thought, well, you know, this isn't going to hurt, because if he does, goes out the lines or something, I'll just fix it. So I let him paint, and later on, he did meticulous work as a painter. And one of his clients said, "Oh, you do such good work. Where did you learn to paint?" He said, "At my mother's knee." I was so surprised. I said, he credited me with learning to paint? That was surprising. He's very conscious of nature and protecting nature, and I was that way too. I wouldn't let him kill any bugs or mosquitoes or anything, nothing, nothing. I said, "It's alive. It has a right to live. It's got, it's got its own little family waiting for it somewhere. Would you like it if I was just walking along and something stepped on me, and then I wouldn't come home?" And so he must have remembered that. And then one time, we were by the lake and he picked up a stone and he skipped it across the lake. And I said, "Gee, you know how long, ages and ages, it took for that stone to reach the shore? And you just took it and just flipped it back and it's going to start all over again." And I didn't really think anything but, but later on, when he was an adult, he retold that story, and he said how bad it made him feel. He said, "That made me feel so bad, because now that stone had to start all over again." And he wouldn't skip a stone anymore. After that. The things that I said to him. Well, it was what I felt at the time too. I thought, jeez, you know. I would look at the water, and it was clearer when I was growing up. Then. Now it's all covered with reeds and stuff. I guess boats go on the lake and there's no fish. We used to see schools of fish out there and look down, see clear water and the stones underneath there. That's where I look for agates quite often. It's sort of changed now, the pollution and everything. It just makes me sad. And then there's the things where they go and try to recreate the whole lake system, and then put up a dam or something, and then the fish can't get through, and the water doesn't flow and it's stagnant. And I don't think people really think about that. They think they're engineering something great to block off the lake. Oh, we're gonna put a road there, so let's block the lake off. Well, if you, what about the water? The water moves through there. Well, it doesn't anymore.
Leah Lemm: I see it in your bio that you serve on the editorial advisory board for the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. What does that entail?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Well, it's a new press. They did the Thunderbird Review every year, and I used to write for that every year, and my work got accepted every year. So I would go to the book releases for the anthology and read. They got to know me just from that. And one of them came and told me that they had an idea to start a press, and what did I think about it? And would I be willing to be on the editorial advisory board? And I said yes. And so that, we started talking about it. The press only does one book a year. And so far, they didn't start till 2024. So they've done one book. That's the Carl Gawboy book, the history of the Ojibwe. It was really a good book because of all his artwork in there too.
Leah Lemm: Yeah. Well, Janis, it just so happens that mere minutes before I got on the phone with you, I was interviewing Carl Gawboy, and we talked about Fur Trade Nation mere minutes ago. So you were involved in that project as well?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yeah, I was one of the readers for the editing process. As we went through that, I had said a couple things about some of the language they used, but they had Rick Gerritson [sp?] on the teaching board. He taught Ojibwe language for them, so he was on there for that too. But, I mean, I study history, so I was in on some of the history that Carl wrote about. He was really good about bringing out women's roles that a lot of people just kind of skim over. Women haven't been represented well in history, Native women, I think maybe women in general, yeah.
Leah Lemm: Well, and this book of yours is doing the opposite of that. It's like representing women or looking at women more.
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yeah, I thought about that too. That book is about my grandmother. I could probably do something about my mother. She had an interesting background, very strong woman. She was a good role model.
Leah Lemm: You're listening to Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking with Janis A. Fairbanks, PhD, member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and author of the new book Sugar Bush Babies: Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother. Well, can you say a bit about your literary inspiration? Do you have authors or books that have inspired you?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Well, way back when I was reading doing some of my early readings, people would tell me that I remind them of Leslie Marmon Silko. I remind them of her. And yet she is younger than I am. So isn't this interesting that? I never met her. I did like her book. I thought it was interesting, the one that I read. I think I've read every book that Louise Erdrich has written. I like Cash Blackbear series, that's great. I wait for the next one to come out. There's more recent authors that I'm starting to read their work, and then I'm starting to read more of Linda LaGarde, her books. And then I got a couple of my aunt series? Staci Drouillard. Since I've been writing more, I have less time to read. I used to be reading three books at night, and now, because I'm writing this book, I'm working on what's due in December. And then right behind it, I've got another one starting that I'll be editing now. That one's not mine, but I'm really strongly encouraging that one, because that one is written by an 86-year-old woman, and I want her stories to be told. So it's not just my own work. I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about these other women that have stories to tell, that they need to be heard. So I'll write grants for them and try to, you know, help them along as they're getting it done, because they have stories, but they don't know the editing process. Some don't even use a computer, you know, that kind of stuff. And that's just small stuff compared to the importance of their stories.
Leah Lemm: So you have some other projects coming up. Do you have a hint as to your next project of yours?
Janis A. Fairbanks: My next project of mine? I really should get going on this book I've been—it's also about my grandmother. It's a historical thing about what happens to an allotment over time, because we have a family allotment, and she was the sole heir of that. You can't buy it from another owner. And now that's changed, or that was misinformation, but there's just all kinds of anyway. I've got nine chapters already in that book, and I think nine is probably enough. I need to just go back and revisit and flesh those out and get that one ready to go, because that's pretty important. The allotment system was just designed to take land away from Native people, and it's pretty much has done that, and it's a fragmented airship system. A lot of the people that are heirs to the, to my grandmother's land now have never stepped a foot on it and don't even know where it is, and in some cases they've got names listed on there that are not direct descendants of my grandmother. And my cousin and I were talking about that. She said, "She's not an heir. That was on my mother's side," while her mother is not descended from my grandmother. Lot of paper errors. There clerical errors, but it affects everything.
Leah Lemm: Yeah, that sounds like it has a lot of opportunity for story land.
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yeah, that's why it's taken me so long. I think I started that one. What is this? 2025? I started that one, I think, in 2018, something like that. It's been in the works.
Leah Lemm: Great. You know, I'm curious about your writing process. How do you begin? Do you just sit down and do you like to write with, you know, a laptop or a pencil or a typewriter?
Janis A. Fairbanks: I like a regular desktop with the keyboard. I don't even like the touch screen, and I've got some that have touch. I don't like them. I like the feel of the keyboard and my process. Well, I belong to that writer's group, and we bring in our work to share and then the group leader, who, I kind of insist that he be the group leader, because they, you know, they, well, I've done a lot, enough. No, I should not take over. I'm just here. So we come up with assignments for ourselves, and then we bring them in and share them, and then talk about each other's work. So pretty much if they give an assignment, I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll type one word, or I'll look at what the assignment is, and then I just type it. It just, it just comes, whatever, whatever I'm writing about. It just comes. Sometimes I have a dream, and if I have a dream, I will try very hard to write down that dream right away, that sometimes I won't share them. I'll write it down, look at it, and then I'll say, no, that was for me. And then I don't keep it, or I do keep it in a place that is so safe that even I can't find it.
Leah Lemm: For me, sometimes that's right on the top of my desk. So you write, like, word after word after word, or you don't necessarily like, map it out beforehand and then fill it in the blanks?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Like the project I'm working on now, I definitely had to create an outline the first month was orientation and meeting the people that would be on my peer review group, and kind of plotting when our meetings would be. They only have to meet with me four times, and they've met with me three times already, so there's one more meeting and then. But to cover the history of Fond du Lac Reservation and its people, no, I had think about that. And I said, well, you know, I'm in seven months. I'm not going to get everything. So I took a timeline from the Forever Story with Tom Peacock and his ended in 1997. I said, I will start in 1998 and I will cover that. And then I had to look at what have they already got out there, and say, well, how would I analyze that, or use that for analysis of important events? So, yeah, that one was very highly organized.
Leah Lemm: Maybe we could round out our conversation with any advice you might have for up and coming writers?
Janis A. Fairbanks: Yeah, one word: Write. That's it.
[Music element: Native Lights Theme]
Leah Lemm: Thank you very much, Janis Fairbanks, I appreciate our conversation today. Very enlightening. I feel like putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard even more so. Chi-miigwech, Janis Fairbanks, PhD. Janis is a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, author of Sugar Bush Babies: Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother and the chair of the language advisory board for the Fond du Lac band. I'm Leah Lemm. Miigwech for listening. Giga-waabamin. You're listening to Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.