E. DONALD TWO-RIVERS: 1945-2008

E. Donald Two-Rivers, an Ojibwa Indian who left Canada at 16 and settled in Chicago’s then rough-and-tumble Uptown neighborhood, took up writing while behind bars for robbery.

He went on to win a national award for short stories, start a Native American theater group, write plays, a newspaper column and poems that he read in dramatic fashion at poetry slams in Chicago and across the country.

Mr. Two-Rivers, 63, whose given name was Edmund D. Broeffle, died of complications from lung cancer Sunday, Dec. 28, at his home in Green Bay, said his daughter Vanessa Broeffle. He left Chicago for Green Bay in 2002.

Mr. Two-Rivers’ poetry and short stories covered the gamut of his life experiences as a Native American activist, inmate, machinist and family man.

He ridiculed American Indian stereotypes in works like “I’m not Tonto,” but was also deeply immersed in his culture. His mother was a medicine woman and he performed for a time with the Blackhawk Native American Dance Troupe. Among his collections was “Pow wows, Fat Cats and Other Indian Tales.”

A regular and manic performer at the poetry slams at the Green Mill tavern in Uptown, “He’d move up and down the aisles, back and forth, always moving,” and usually nicely dressed in a suit, writer and friend Mark LaRoque said. “He would get loud.”

His collection of short stories “Survivor’s Medicine” won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1999. For several years around 1990, he wrote a weekly column called “Life in Albany Park,” about doings in the neighborhood where he lived, for a North Side newspaper chain.

Mr. Two-Rivers started the Red Path Theater in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and as its artistic director through 2002 produced a series of plays rooted in the Native American experience.

He grew up on the Seine River reserve in Ontario. Prone to trouble, he spent three years in a reform school before moving to Chicago, where his sister lived, in about 1961.

Uptown at the time was teeming with transplanted Native Americans and Appalachians, many of whom had trouble adjusting to urban life. Amid various youthful adventures that included traversing much of the U.S. and Mexico, sometimes by hitching rides, Mr. Two-Rivers found himself once more on the wrong side of authority.

Imprisoned for robbery, he got to know Paul Crump, a convicted murderer who wrote the book “Burn, Killer, Burn!,” and started to write. He continued to write after his release and found it transformative.

“It was an outlet. It was his therapy, really,” his daughter said.

Mr. Two-Rivers, who worked as a laborer for many years before becoming a journeyman machinist, participated in the symbolic occupation by Native Americans of the Belmont Harbor missile site in Chicago in 1971 and in the 1990s worked with the American Indian Business Association and as an organizer with the American Indian Economic Development Association.

In 2002, Mr. Two-Rivers sold his house and moved to northern Wisconsin. Before leaving, he joined other poets and gave a last reading at the Springman Studio in River North, an event covered by the Tribune.

“I’m moving back to the country, going to be a bush Indian,” he said with a chuckle.

Mr. Two-Rivers had two children during a first marriage that ended in divorce. He was also divorced from his second wife, Laureen Broeffle.

Survivors also include his former longtime companion, Beverly Moeser; three sons, Edmund Jr., Michael, Quentin and George; three daughters, Leslie Mejia, Annabelle and Nadine; and six grandchildren.

A service will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. Saturday in the American Indian Center, 1630 W. Wilson Ave., Chicago.

———-

ttjensen@tribune.com

Originally Published: January 8, 2009 at 1:00 AM CST