The Ojibwe News / Native American Press (Bemidji, Minnesota), 1998-01-30

              Uncertainty about White Earth's future
grows after bitter censure hearing
By Gary Blair
Controversy on the White Earth reservation continues to center on the
Reservation's Business Committee
(RBC), four of whose members stand
accused of holding office illegally,
while the fifth is reportedly under
federal investigation.
Last week, that turmoil became apparent when 14 tribal enrollees were
banned from attending a RBC meeting held at the Shooting Star Casino
located at Mahnomen. The group was
accused of being "disruptive and disrespectful."
The meeting was held to act upon
the recent censure of the White Earth
chairman, Eugene "Bugger"
McArthur, by his colleagues on the
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe's Tribal
Executive Committee (TEC), an organization for which he formerly
worked. The TEC is the governing
body for six constituent northern Minnesota reservations whose membership is made up of two executive officials from each reservation.
White Earth enrollees PRESS/ON
spoke with say the censure came as a
surprise, since McArthur had already
been sworn-in by the TEC as a member in Oct. 1996. The condemnation
alleges that McArthur had illegally
taken office earlyand not within the
time-frame prescribed by the
reservation's election ordinance.
McArthur claimed at the time that
his actions were in response to the
criminal convictions of three former
White Earth RBC members.
The Jan. 23 meeting was a required
response to the TEC censure, which
carried the possible penalty of
McArthur's removal from office by
other RBC members.
McArthur opened the hotly debated
one hour meeting, then promptly
turned the forum over to secretary/
Censure/to pg 6
1894 allotment act diminished Yankton
reservation, Supreme Court finds
WASHINGTON (AP) — An area of
South Dakota that was part of an Indian reservation created during the
1850s for the Yankton Sioux tribe can
no longer be considered Indian country, the Supreme Court ruled today.
The court's unanimous decision said
about 168,000 acres the tribe sold to
non-Indians under an 1894 federal law
are no longer Indian land.
Therefore, the justices said the state
has control over a waste site built on
the land sold by the tribe at the end of
the 19th century.
The Yankton Sioux reservation was
created in an 1858 treaty with the U.S.
government, under which the tribe exchanged 11 million acres for cash and
a 430,000-acre reservation in southern South Dakota.
Under an 1894 federal law, the government paid the tribe $600,000 for
about 168,000 acres, which was to be
sold to settlers. The rest of the reservation land was allotted to individual
tribe members, and most of that land
has since been sold to non-Indians.
The 1894 law also said provisions of
the 1858 treaty that created the reservation were to remain in force.
But Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
wrote for the court, "The 1894 act at
issue here ... bears the hallmarks of
congressional intent to diminish a reservation."
She said the court's ruling applied
only to the land ceded by the tribe in
1894, adding that the court was not
deciding whether Congress intended
to terminate the reservation altogether.
State officials had exercised civil and
criminal jurisdiction over the land for
about the past 100 years.
But a dispute arose over the land's
reservation status after a regional
waste management district, formed in
Report harsh on Chiapas pol
The report, presented to Congress on
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Police remained "passive" while a massacre
took place that claimed the lives of 45
peasants in Mexico's strife-torn southern state of Chiapas, a prosecutor's
report has found.
A preliminary report by the Attorney
General's Office also accused police
of losing evidence linked to the massacre, although the report stops short
of implicating state police in a cover-
up of the Dec. 22 attack.
Friday, noted that one officer was
charged with allowing pro-government villagers to carry guns and two
police commanders are under investigation for possible involvement in the
killings.
The report also says that the presence
of sympathizers of leftist Zapatista
rebels was responsible for the region's
increase in violence.
All victims are believed to have been
sympathizers of the Zapatistas, a
1992, sought to build a landfill in,
Charles Mix County. The land, owned
by a non-Indian, was among the land
sold by the tribe in 1894.
The tribe sued the waste district in
federal court to stop construction. The
state joined the case to argue that the
tribe had no authority over the land
sold in 1894.
A federal judge ruled that the 1894
law did not end the land's reservation
status, and that the landfill could be
built if it met federal standards. The
8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
agreed.
But the South Dakota Supreme Court
later ruled in an unrelated case that the
1894 law ended the Yankton Sioux
reservation status.
Today, the Supreme Court said the
8th Circuit court was wrong.
The case is South Dakota vs.
Yankton Sioux Tribe, 96-1581.
ice
largely Indian rebel group that staged
a brief armed uprising in January
1994. Most of the alleged killers were
sympathizers of Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
"Since the Zapatista National Liberation Army established itself (in a
nearby town) ... robberies, evictions,
threats, kidnappings and killings became more serious and more frequent," according to the report.
Massacre/to Pg. 3
Explosion damages Leech Lake school
BEMIDJI, Minn. (AP) — The state
fire marshal's office is investigating
an explosion that damaged the Bug-
O-Nay-Gee-Shig High School on the
Leech Lake Indian Reservation.
No one was hurt in Sunday night's
blast, which happened between the
wood shop and welding shop in the
building about 15 miles east of Cass
Lake.
"We're lucky there was nobody
close to this explosion," said Lymon
Losh, head of the school's operations
and maintenance department.' 'If this
had happened during school hours the
students definitely would have been
in danger."
A janitor smelled gas in the shop area
at about noon Sunday, but it disappeared after the doors were opened.
The janitor called maintenance three
hours later when the smell returned,
but it again dissipated.
The explosion, which probably happened at 9:35 p.m., may have been
triggered by a small leak in the
school's propane heating system,
Losh said.
However, gas pipes tested Monday
afternoon found no leaks, said Principal Scott Anderson.
Damage could take at least two
months to repair, Losh said. And depending on the extent of damage, it
might be easier to build a new one,
Anderson said.
Until then, the 90 students in grades
9-12 will attend classes in two gymnasium buildings.
Administration shelves plan to assume
reservation police duties
STEPHAN, S.D. (AP) — The
Clinton administration has rejected
for this year a Justice Department
plan to take over law enforcement on
the nation's Indian reservations.
The Interior Department's Bureau
of Indian Affairs will keep its police
functions, but President Clinton's
1999 budget proposal will include a
sharp increase in funding to provide
more officers and services, according
to Interior officials touring the Crow
Creek Reservation on Thursday.
The Justice Department plan could
be resurrected if the BIA does not
curb reservation crime, said Kevin
Gover, the Interior Department's
assistant secretary for Indian affairs.
"A 0.1 percent decrease isn't good
enough. It has to be a drop that people
will see in their lives," he said. "I
think we'll know when people are
starting to feel safer."
Tribes have been sharply divided
over whether the Justice Department
could do a better job of law
enforcement.
Supporters of the takeover said the
Justice Department could get more
money from Congress than the BIA
can.
Opponents say the BIA has a trust
responsibility to tribes to provide them
with police.
"To non-Indians that sounds arcane,
but to Indian people it's a real
concern," said Cy Maus, tribal
manager for the Lower Brule Sioux.
The homicide rate on Indian lands has
soared 87 percent over the past five
years, even as it has dropped 22
percent nationwide. Indian
communities receive less than half
the police protection that non-Indian
rural communities do, according to a
Clinton administration study.
Clinton's 1999 proposed budget is to
be unveiled next month.
Administration wants huge increase in
Indian law enforcment
at a time when "serious and violent
WASHINGTON (AP) — The
Clinton administration wants to hire
hundreds of additional police officers,
investigators and prosecutors to deal
with a surge of violent crime on the
nation's Indian reservations.
President Clinton's 1999 budget
would boost spending on reservation
law enforcement by 140 percent, from
$ 130 million thisyear to $312 million.
The budget won't be released until
next week, but the numbers are
crime is rising signficantly,'' the letter
said. A copy of the letter was obtained
by The Associated Press.
In addition to the extra personnel, the
spending increase also would fund a
crash program for building badly
needed jails.
The homicide rate on Indian lands
has soared 87 percent over the past
five years, even as it dropped 22
percent nationwide.
There are 1,600 BIA and tribal
contained in a Jan. 20 letter to the officers patrolling 56 million acres of for the BIA to hire additional
White House from Attorney General Indian land, or 1.3 officers for every investigators and meet other needs,
Janet Reno and Interior Secretary 1,000 residents, compared with 2.9 said a   Justice Department official,
Bruce Babbitt. police officers per 1,000 residents in who spoke Tuesday on condition of
Reservation law enforcement "often rural non-Indian communities. .
failstomeetbasicpublicsafetyneeds" Reno and Babbitt recommended that L3W/tO pg. 3
Uncertainty about WE's future grows after hearing
Reporter challenges state jurisdiction in arrest
1894 allotment act diminished Yankton reservation
Explosion damages Leech Lake school
Hunting amendment moves ahead/ page 3
-i97MprBsson@liji.nBt
The
Fifty Cents
Ojibwe
Hews
Hatm
American
Press
Wo Support Equal Opportunity For All People
Founded to 1888
Volume 10 Issue lfi
A weekly publication.
Copy ripjit Native American Press, 1888
PRESS/ON file photo
Leech Lake District Representatives confer with their lawyers on recall of Chairman Eli Hunt. Chairman Hunt is
'*t>i't/ing tn the recall elections.
Reporter challenges state jurisdiction to
prosecute tribal arrest
(NAP/ON) - A reporter arrested last
October for attempting to cover a
meeting of the Minnesota Chippewa
Tribe entered a not guilty plea today
to state trespassing charges in a brief
challenging the court's jurisdiction to
hear the case.
Reporting for the Native American
Press/Ojibwe News, Jeff Armstrong
disputed the authority of Tribal Executive Committee (TEC) president
Norman Deschampe to expel him
from the Oct. 22 tribal meeting at
Grand Casino Mille Lacs. He was subsequently arrested by reservation police and held in Mille Lacs county jail
until the conclusion of the meeting.
According to the Armstrong's motion for dismissal, the state lacks jurisdiction to apply state trespassing
statutes to conduct occurring at official meetings on reservations.
"Regardless of the outcome of jurisdiction under Public Law 280, the state
has no jurisdiction to consider what
is clearly a tribal matter~who has the
right to attend the meetings of the
TEC," the motion asserts.
Tribal members, he argues, have
struggled for years against corrupt, often fraudulently-elected officials who
have wrongly enjoyed the backing of
state law enforcement.
"The state has historically applied its
trespassing laws in Indian country to
tribal members seeking political reform and constitutional government
(most of which, incidentally, have resulted in dismissal or acquittal) at the
behest of allegedly corrupt and dictatorial officials,"the motion asserts.
"This abuse of authority makes it all
the more imperative that the state take
a more even-handeed approach in this
case, which threatens to cast a chilling effect upon the last bastion of free
speech accessible to most tribal members, an independent press," the brief
argues.
Armstrong maintains that the
charges against him are part of a sustained effort by a tribal governing entity to stifle and criminalize dissent.
The reporter argues that Minnesota
cannot legally enforce tribal orders
contrary to the Indian Civil Rights Act,
a federal law which invalidates tribal
actions found in violation of it.
"While the supreme court has limited the remedies available to enforce
this act against tribal governments, the
state lacks jurisdiction enforce a tribal
order issued in violation of ICRA," the
motion states.
Armstrong also argues that the Minnesota statute establishing the Mille
Lacs tribal police department was illegally enacted by the state, since it
was put into effect without the required consent of tribal members and
the federal government.
"Here, the state has expanded jurisdiction by granting itself concurrent
jurisdiction, including the authority to
prosecute tribal citations for otherwise
inapplicable state civil regulatory
laws. However, the required vote of
adult tribal members was never requested or held, rendering this purported act of cession of tribal jurisdiction invalid."
RBC attempts Hunt recall vote
Hunt responds, pg. 4
Purported resolutions, pg. 8
Babbitt testifies on casino
the Interior Department's Bureau of
Indian Affairs remain in charge of
law enforcement on reservations, but
most of the $182 million increase
would be channeled through the
Justice Department. Justice officials
had proposed to take over the BIA's
police functions, but tribes were
sharply divided over the plan.
The increase includes $54 million in
grants to tribes to hire approximately
500 police officers, $52 million for
construction of jails, and $25 million
WASHINGTON (AP) — Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt today told
Congress politics played no part in
the decision to reject a proposed Indian
gambling casino but acknowledged
he "muddied the waters" by giving
the Senate conflicting accounts of his
involvement.
"The allegations that there was
improper White House or (Democratic
National Committee) influence and
that I was a conduit for that influence
are demonstrably false," Babbitt said
in testimony prepared for delivery to
House hearings. "There is no
connection at either end of the alleged
conduit."
Despite what he told a lobbyist for
the losing tribes, Babbitt says he never
spoke with then-deputy White House
chief of staff Harold Ickes about the
issue. The secretary says he invoked
Ickes' name in "an awkward effort to
terminate an uncomfortable meeting
on a personally sympathetic note."
Babbitt had initially denied making
the comment in a 1996 letter to the
Senate, and last fall acknowledged
the remark in Senate hearings.
Babbitt was the final witness in four
days of House hearings on allegations
that tribes opposing the casino used
promises of large political donations
to pressure the White House to
influence the decision. These tribes
eventually gave $286,000 to the
Democratic National Committee.
Babbitt, accompanied by former
White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler,
told the panel, "I did not direct my
subordinates to reach any particular
decision on this matter." The casino
was rejected because of widespread
local opposition, he said.
"That should end this matter, and I
suppose it would have ended the matter
had I not muddied the waters
somewhat" in letters to the Senate
about a meeting with Paul Eckstein, a
lobbyist for the losing tribes, Babbitt
said.
Two of Babbitt's former top aides
told the House panel Wednesday tha
there was no attempt by the Whi
Babbit/to pg. 3