Super Chief Essay

883 Words2 Pages

In the class, we watched the documentary film called “Super Chief,” which documented mainly the election process of the new leadership for the Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota, covering multiple aspects of how the tribe’s life was, such as their political, social and economic workings. As of now, there are seven reservations, or communities, for American Indians in Minnesota and one of them happens to be the Ojibwe tribe. Each reservation was actually not the land that was given by the U.S. federal government. Those segments of land belonged to American Indians, or tribes, because they had lived there before the Europeans came to colonize the American continent. There are hundreds of these kinds of reservations in 35 states in the U.S., and there …show more content…

Chip Wadena was the former chief of the Ojibwe tribe and he ruled the reservations for more than 20 years. Life in the Ojibwe tribe’s reservation is not quite great. Many people there have to live in mobile homes and they have limited access to electricity and internet. People in the reservation are mostly isolated from the rest of the United States. Since their reservation has boundaries from the U.S., the U.S. government has no control over their land. Therefore, everything was built by their own people on the reservation including hospitals and vital …show more content…

The casino was built on the reservation, which is one of the poorest areas in Minnesota. The casino was established for the sake of creating more jobs and bringing money to the area. However, most of the jobs in the casino were taken by Americans and only a small amount of the Ojibwe tribe people on the reservation were hired at the Casino, and most of them just got a part time job with minimum wages. Therefore, for the people of the Ojibwe Tribe, the casino was not as beneficial as they thought. Another reason why the casino was built on the reservation was that the casino in the reservation did not have to pay state tax since the reservation was outside of the U.S. federal government’s control. The only one who received all the benefits from building Casino was the former chief, Chip Wadena. He was basically a dictator in the reservation. People in the Ojibwe tribe reservation were not only living in poor conditions, but also, they were not given

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