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LEIF ENGER: The morning of October 25, 1966, Bemidji writer and teacher Bob Troyer got into his car and headed for the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he then worked. Troyer is white. He is married to a Chippewa, the chief judge for the Red Lake tribal court. He remembers that morning as cool and dreary, a normal fall morning, until he leaned forward and snapped on his car radio.

SPEAKER 2: And here comes the pundit tones of Bob Cole. Regular editorial commentator on what was then the only radio station in Bemidji, Minnesota.

BOB COLE: The bottom line was then to spend money for welfare for Indians was a waste, and it shouldn't be done. And let the lowest of the low die.

LEIF ENGER: It was a broadcast few Indians here have forgotten. Commentator Bob Cole characterized Indians on welfare as, quote, "so low on the human scale, it is doubtful they will ever climb upward" and suggested that welfare laws be rewritten to help only those who are salvageable, letting disease and hunger wipe out the rest. By the time Troyer arrived at work, most of the Red Lake tribal council had heard the broadcast. He remembers that morning's council meeting.

BOB TROYER: the silence that followed their hearing of the Bob Cole broadcast, you could sense taste, the bitter gall. So this is what they think about us. That was the reaction.

LEIF ENGER: What finally came out of that tribal headquarters was a decision to launch an immediate boycott of Bemidji businesses. The council reasoned it was the merchants who supported Bob Cole on the radio. Let the merchants pay the price. Led by tribal chairman Roger Jourdain, the Red Lake Chippewa band asked its members to spend no money in Bemidji. The White Earth and Leech Lake bands quickly joined the boycott.

BOB TROYER: general attitude of Bemidji up and down Main Street was, ho, ho, ho, these Indians are going to boycott Bemidji big deal. But then the shopping weekend was over. And for the first time since Bemidji had been built on hitherto Indian lands, there wasn't a single Indian to be seen shopping in Bemidji.

EARL SARGENT: It didn't take too long before that almighty dollar started making its effects felt here in the city.

LEIF ENGER: Earl Sargent was one of relatively few Indians living in Bemidji proper in 1966.

EARL SARGENT: My wife and I just agreed that we would not-- we wouldn't shop in town here. We went out of town to shop. We joined right in with the boycott, even though we lived here. And I know several other people in town did the same thing. They do their shopping in Cass Lake or Blackduck and so forth.

LEIF ENGER: But Sargent says the radio editorial, though inflammatory, couldn't have triggered the boycott all by itself. Instead, it was the last straw, the articulation of an attitude that had developed in Bemidji over decades. Bob Troyer.

BOB TROYER: an Indian is off the reservation, if he lives in town, has a town job, is middle class, upwardly mobile, then he is a good Indian. Remember, it was in the Downtown streets of Bemidji and Cass Lake that at the time of the last Indian uprising 1898, there were sandbagged gun emplacements dug on the courthouse lawn and so on. That whole Wild West thing isn't all that old around here.

LEIF ENGER: Just days into the boycott, Troyer says the city's composure began to crack. The loss of Indian customers was noticed on Main Street. Local resorters worried the bad publicity would have an effect on the tourist trade. A group of Bemidji clergy met with Red Lake leaders and asked them unsuccessfully to end the boycott.

When Indian officials took the next step and threatened to withdraw tribal funds from local banks, it became clear the boycott had to end. First National Bank board Chairman Joe Welle remembers being a young loan officer at the time.

JOE WELLE: All of a sudden, a person that's been very good customer of yours, has been very personal relationship with them, are they going to come in to the bank, or are you going to meet them on the street and is a relationship still going to exist? The leadership was very concerned.

LEIF ENGER: The boycott came to an end on November 4 after a long noisy meeting in Red Lake that included the leadership of Bemidji, Beltrami County, the reservation, and KBUN radio which broadcast the editorial. Bob Cole resigned his position as commentator and also stepped down from his publicist job at the Chamber of Commerce, and a new group was created-- the community Relations Commission, whose job it was to build opportunities for Indians and smooth over the bad feelings.

Now, the epilogue. Bob Cole, who delivered the commentary, has retired to Utah, where his hobbies include archeology and the relics of ancient peoples. Contacted by telephone, he maintained that all he did in 1966 was to tell the truth. He says he was misunderstood.

BOB COLE: What I was trying to point out was that maybe in the long run, for their sake, and this was a bad choice of words, of course, that we should have let natural forces take over. And this included such things as starvation and hunger and so on. But we have to remember that a lot of these people up there at Red Lake, in effect, were out of the bush, so to speak, for only a couple of hundred years. And so our idea of civilization was a little bit more advanced.

LEIF ENGER: Cole left Bemidji in 1980 and was given a 200-guest farewell banquet by the Chamber of Commerce. Red Lake tribal chairman Roger Jourdain, who led the boycott and remains at the heart of Indian white relations in Northern Minnesota, refused to be interviewed for this story. So did several other Indian leaders who were instrumental in the boycott.

The summation then is left to a white man, writer Bob Troyer, who keeps a thick file on the boycott, but never needs to look at it to tell the story.

BOB TROYER: think it symbolized a quantum shift in power. Indians may have lost their land base, but this was a statement, and they made it stick that we may be small in numbers. We may have only a very little land left, but we still are and we will be recognized as such.

LEIF ENGER: Bemidji writer, Bob Troyer. This is Leif Enger.