As Red Rooster goes, so goes the country
A Monday reflection on the quieting of the USA settler countryside
Since I can’t eat lunch without doing something else, I decided to Google over my sandwich today this little rural Minnesota town we used to drive through every so often when I was a kid. It was our regular 4.5 hour migration route between Flandreau, South Dakota (Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe reservation) and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We’d drive it every few months minimum. My mom moved from small-town South Dakota to the Twin Cities in 1976 for a job. She was a single-mother of four, but not quite “single” since my grandmothers also helped raise us. In the 1970s in Minneapolis and St. Paul there were a lot of urban Native institutions popping up on the heels of American Indian Movement (AIM) activism. My mom had a talent for writing and research and she was politicized by the global anti-colonial social movements of the 1960s. She was in her mid 20s when she moved to Minneapolis to work as a grant writer for urban Native organizations such as the Minneapolis Indian Center, the Little Earth Housing project, and Red School House, an AIM-founded “survival school.” These are all iconic urban Native organizations. It was a fascinating historical moment in which to be a kid.
However, I was a grandma’s girl and very much a country kid when my mom made the move. Whether by choice or necessity, my next younger sister and I mostly stayed with our great-grandmother back in South Dakota, while my mom and our two youngest siblings moved together to the Twin Cities. But we all did a lot of traveling back and forth for visits and family events.
On the drives between city and reservation, we’d regularly take a break at a truck stop on the main drag of one of the small towns we’d pass through on that two-lane country highway in southwest Minnesota. The Red Rooster was the name of the truck stop and diner. Often we’d stop only for gas, a bathroom break, and to buy snacks before Mom would herd the four of us back into the car. I recall her owning decent used cars: a silver with red vinyl interior 1976 Cutlass Supreme (so cool until my four-year-old brother took a fork and poked holes in the vinyl seats), a light blue 1978 Chrysler Cordoba (powerful), and the infamous blue van with CB radio and a bed in back. I can’t remember the make of that one. It was ugly and I was uninterested in it. But it was practical for trips with four kids to grandma’s house, pow wows, maple sugar camps and ceremonies up in Ontario.
I Googled the Red Rooster today because I remembered on one stop when we actually went into the diner instead of just taking a quick break. Mom decided we should eat dinner since it would be too late when we got to my great-grandmother’s house, another two hours down the road. I remember the middle-aged “white lady” (the word I used at the time) in her waitress hair net looking out the window of the swinging kitchen doors. She looked at us and then back into the kitchen. She walked away from the window and stayed in the kitchen. Customers at their tables—all white—looked up and stared at us. When I was growing up in rural South Dakota and Minnesota, whites often had this curious habit of looking at you in the same manner as cows in a field will look at you. Just stone cold look at you, their heads slowly following you until they go back to eating and chewing. Do these humans not realize it’s rude to stare? Cows I can cut some slack on the staring, but humans should know better. Anyway, we just stood there in that all-white diner waiting to be seated. This little town was two hours from the reservation and two hours from Minneapolis, and it was 99.9% white in those rural Minnesota towns back then. It’s changed a bit now with the influx of migrant farmworkers.
That waitress probably thought she could just stay in the kitchen. We four kids knew what was coming though. LeeAnn doesn’t stand down from a fight. My mom waited, and started audibly calling people racist. Finally the waitress came out of the kitchen and my mom let her have it. Back then it was hard on us kids to withstand these encounters every so often. I’m glad now, of course, that we were given this example. We never did get served dinner. We went back to our car with Mom giving everyone a piece of her mind with lots of swearing and analysis of their racism involved. She was probably flipping off all the patrons staring out the windows over their dinners of overdone steak and baked potatoes. I wish we had phone cameras and Twitter back then. There’d be historical video of my mom all over social media giving white people a piece of her mind.
When we arrived at Granny’s , I’m sure she had plenty of food for us and we no doubt sat around her kitchen table in our PJs in the semi-dark. We would eat and all of us tell her what had happened at the Red Rooster truck stop. Granny no doubt sighed and said something to the effect of “LeeAnn, you don’t always have to take up the fight.” But she would have said it with a little smile on her face.
When I Googled the Red Rooster today, the small town news said it closed down in 2015, and there are pictures of it being demolished in 2019. In small towns, this stuff makes the news. The Dairy Queen closed in the last few years too. Main streets all over the rural midwest have been dying for a few decades. One person being interviewed about the Red Rooster demolition recalled “eating pie and ice cream after the ballgames as well as going out for pancakes for breakfast after church — like everybody else.” Yeah, like everybody else. The news article called demolition day “bittersweet.” I too have bittersweet memories of the Red Rooster.
The sweet part for me includes its actual and symbolic demolition, and the quieting of these rural settler towns that were made possible by the elimination of Native peoples. Our ancestors’ societies and ways of life were eliminated and replaced with these small towns and their “American” mythological stories of apple pie, baseball, and God. Someday when the settlers’ experiment has failed, the prairies will return. It’s a beautiful vision.