A good photograph is “an exchange of information,” according to Dale Kakkak (B.A. ’89). “It makes you sit down and think. Or it makes you feel something.”

Kakkak is a professional photographer and a member of the northeast Wisconsin Menominee Nation. The things he wants his audience to think and feel through his photos concern the experiences of Indigenous people.

“That’s why I got into photography, because there weren’t many Native photographers in the 1980s,” he explains. “And thus, there weren’t that many images produced by Indigenous artists that would help people understand our views and our culture.”

The misrepresentation of American Indian culture is no mere abstraction for Kakkak. Like many of his generation, he was born at the tail end of an era when American Indian children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in residential boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.”

Kakkak attended a reservation Catholic school, the same one his mother was forced to attend as a boarding student. When he attended the school no longer boarded students, but not much else had changed, he recalls.

“The nuns would say, ‘You gotta forget about being Indian or you’re gonna burn in hell.’ I remember that clearly,” he says.

Like his mother, Kakkak was forbidden to speak Menominee at school. “That was taken away from us, language especially,” he says.

In the late 1960s, during Kakkak’s teenage years, a pan-Indigenous movement was gaining ground to reclaim sovereignty and cultural traditions. In the U.S., this groundswell centered on the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was founded in Minneapolis in 1968.

In 1974, Kakkak and some friends attended an AIM gathering in northwest Wisconsin, where he participated in his first ceremonial sweat lodge.

“That’s where I started finding my way back to myself,” he says. “I said, ‘Oh, these ways are alive. This is real. We are real.’”

A start at the U of M

Fueled by a desire to help represent Indigenous viewpoints, Kakkak enrolled at the U of M, where he credits photography teacher Joe Benson with setting him on the path to being a photojournalist. After graduating with a journalism degree, he found a place for his work at The Circle, a monthly newspaper covering news in the American Indian community. Founded in 1980 in Minneapolis, it gained national prominence as a voice for American Indians and is still published today.

As a staff photographer, Kakkak traveled widely. He embedded with Ojibwe fishermen during the explosive battles over spearfishing on Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau reservation. A federal court had backed the tribe’s treaty rights, but white protesters brought slurs and signs, rocks, and even bullets to the boat landings. As an American Indian journalist, Kakkak was targeted, along with the local Ojibwe.

“I was traumatized up there,” Kakkak recalls. “[There were] 1,500 people yelling at you, ‘You dirty Red n—! Go back where you came from!’ Getting spat on and having rocks thrown at you. Our lives being threatened, right to our faces. It was ugly.”

Working for the Menominee Nation

In the mid-1990s, the tribal chair of the Menominee reservation invited Kakkak to help build a communications strategy for the Menominee Indian Tribe. Kakkak was an early advocate for using videography to help further document and share information.

In his work—and later for the College of Menominee Nation, a land grant institution founded on the reservation in 1993—Kakkak advocated for Native voices, but his work shifted toward sustainability, a primary focus of the college.

One of his first briefs was organizing an international conference on sustainability. That led to a series of regional summits exploring issues of food sovereignty, health and nutrition, and traditional American Indian foods.

Like language and culture, food and nutrition need to be viewed in their historical context, Kakkak says. In past years, American Indians were stripped of their traditional foodways and forced into dependance on the federal government. By the 1970s, this took the form of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR)—notorious for its low-quality “commodities.” The food sovereignty movement seeks to replace FDPIR with locally organized networks of Native producers.

“Today they’re contracting with Indigenous food suppliers and incorporating Indigenous foods into our diet,” Kakkak explains. Instead of sugary canned fruits and “government cheese,” the program distributes walleye caught in Red Lake, wild harvested berries, organic grass-fed bison, and Native-farmed vegetables.

“Things are moving along in a good way with tribal food systems,” Kakkak says. “Nourishment is important.”

Along the way, in the early 1990s, Kakkak shot photography for two books, The Sacred Harvest: Ojibway Wild Rice Gathering, written by Gordon Regguinti, and Ininatig’s Gift of Sugar: Traditional Native Sugarmaking by Laura Waterman Wittstock.

Although Kakkak has now officially retired, he’s still deeply committed to documenting and preserving Menominee cultural heritage. This year, when the maple sap started to flow, he came out of retirement to help tend the fire at a local sugar bush, a practice with deep significance in Menominee history and oral history.

Joe Hart is a freelance writer in the Twin Cities.

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