An incredible testament to the integrity of national politics in America,
the moral degeneracy of the Democratic party, and a prime example of why
none but the rich can be serious players. Read this and pass it on.....
The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com Boston Globe Online / Nation | World
Modern promises, old betrayal
Poverty-stricken tribe put faith, money into politics
By Michael Grunwald, Globe Staff, 01/18/98
[INLINE] ONCHO, Okla. - The Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe first learned
about the American way in 1864, at a Colorado camp called Sand Creek.
They had signed an American treaty, trading millions of acres of land
for protection by the US Army. They were flying an American flag. They
were relying on American promises.
Then one chilly November dawn, while the tribe's young men were out
hunting buffalo, Colonel John Chivington led 900 American troops on a
rampage through Sand Creek. They slaughtered and dismembered 163
Indians, mostly women and children, then strung up their scalps at the
Denver Opera House. ''I have come to kill Indians and believe it is
right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill
Indians,'' Chivington explained.
Today, 134 years after the massacre, the Cheyenne and Arapaho are
learning new lessons about the American way - the way of mixing money
and politics. The tribe is the unlikeliest of players in the
high-stakes game of campaign finance, saddled with 62 percent
unemployment and a 77 percent alcoholism rate. But in 1996, it donated
its entire welfare fund - the tribe's savings for emergency needs - to
the Democratic National Committee, $107,671.74 to be exact.
The campaign cash got tribal leaders into a White House luncheon with
President Clinton, and into a luxury box at the Democratic convention
in Chicago. But it also got them into a Senate hearing on campaign
finance abuses. And it has not persuaded Clinton to return 7,000
mineral-rich acres of disputed land to the tribe, the point of the
donation in the first place.
''The white man has oppressed us for years, but it's a white man's
world, so we have to play the white man's game,'' said Archie Hoffman,
or Flying Hawk, the tribe's former secretary. ''I don't know if it
will work. But nothing else has worked.''
The saga of the once-mighty Cheyenne and Arapaho is the most pitiful
of the campaign finance scandals of 1996. Here was a tribe with
two-thirds of its members on public assistance, yet Democratic
fund-raisers hounded its leaders like they were Fortune 500 CEOs. The
DNC even called after the election to request $25,000 for Clinton's
inaugural, and then another $250,000 to arrange an Oklahoma visit by
Vice President Al Gore.
But the deeper tragedy is the mess the Beltway operatives left behind
here in the desolate western Oklahoma flatlands. The tribe is now at
war with itself; Hoffman and two other leaders involved with the
donation have been ousted from power. Its future remains bleak, with a
72 percent dropout rate and an incarceration rate six times the local
average. And the elusive 7,000 acres, seized in 1883 by President
Chester A. Arthur, are still the property of the American government.
''We've had a bad history in the white world, and that's not our
fault,'' said Imogene Hadley, a 79-year-old tribal member whose four
children all drank themselves to death. ''Somehow, though, I think we
lost ourselves somewhere along the way.''
Third World conditions
In the years before Sand Creek, before the relentless march of white
expansion in the name of ''manifest destiny,'' it would have been
impossible to imagine the Cheyenne and Arapaho so desperate for a mere
7,000 acres. The two related tribes once ranged across 51 million
acres in the middle of the country, hunting and farming, performing
the Sun Dance and the Gourd Dance, trying to live in harmony with the
land.
But beginning in 1851, they were roped into a series of lopsided
treaties, punctuated by massacres like the one at Sand Creek. They
were driven south and herded onto reservations, where they were banned
from hunting buffalo, speaking native languages, or performing
traditional ceremonies. Then they were forced off the reservations,
and scattered in dusty farm towns. Today, few of the members are
familiar with traditional customs, and only 10,400 acres remain in the
tribe's control.
The Cheyenne and Arapaho now live in Third World conditions, with an
average income of $6,000 a year, an average age of death younger than
any town's in America, and one-third of all adults suffering from
diabetes.
In the tiny hamlet of Hammon, Kenneth Kauley, 56, supports two
children and three grandchildren on $900-a-month disability checks he
gets for his diabetes. His walls are crumbling, patched with plywood,
decorated only with family pictures and a cigarette company calendar.
There is no phone, no electricity.
Kauley once worked as a butcher at a Main Street grocery. Today, the
store is shuttered, and so is most of Main Street - the bank,
pharmacy, theater, cafe. ''This place is dying, and so are our
people,'' he said. ''We're falling by the wayside.''
Meanwhile, Congress has slashed funds from the scandal-ridden Bureau
of Indian Affairs; the tribe gets only $4 million in federal money for
its 10,000 members. So while it offers a job training program, it has
three times more applicants than slots. It offers a food program, but
has only two delivery men to cover 6,900 square miles. Worst of all,
the tribe has just one 12-bed substance abuse center, in a building
condemned by the state.
Center director Michael Toahty, or Singing Man, sees these conditions
as part of a long story of abuse by the federal government, a sequel
to the massacre at Sand Creek. But he also believes the tribe has
played a role in its downfall. ''We act like we've lost hope,'' said
Toahty, a former drug dealer and pimp who has five alcoholic children.
''We were a warrior people, and we're doing nothing to help
ourselves.''
`The Washington way'
It is an article of faith among some tribal leaders that Cheyenne and
Arapaho fortunes would turn around if they could just recover the
7,000-acre parcel known as Fort Reno. They could build a truck stop, a
mall, an Indian cultural center. They could reclaim sacred land,
restore tribal pride, and perhaps profit from the $500 million worth
of oil and gas that may lie underneath the land, although they rarely
mention that.
Today, the parcel Arthur seized for ''military purposes exclusively''
is no longer a fort, but a Department of Agriculture grazing research
station.
In 1994, tribal leaders made several trips to Washington to discuss
Fort Reno, dropping business cards all over Capitol Hill. But Senator
Don Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican, saved the station, insisting its
research was vital to Oklahoma's $2 billion beef industry. ''We
realized we weren't going to get our land back with bows and arrows,''
Hoffman recalled. ''We had to fight the Washington way. If you give
money in that town, people listen.''
The tribe was deep in debt and owed back taxes, but it did have a
welfare fund designed for emergency expenses like burials and fuel for
the indigent. So it raided the fund to hire Michael Turpen, a
Democratic fund-raiser and former Oklahoma attorney general, to help
get its land back. Turpen arranged meetings with DNC moneymen, and the
tribe eventually pledged $100,000.
The DNC denies that tribal leaders were invited to lunch with Clinton
in exchange for money, but the leaders certainly thought so. So did
Philadelphia businessman Peter Buttenweiser, who declined an
invitation to the same affair, writing: ''Luncheon, yes. Luncheon for
a contribution price, no.'' And when tribal lobbyist Tyler Todd and
chairman Charles Surveyor stopped at the DNC before lunch, an aide
asked if they had brought their check.
At the Blue Room lunch, Surveyor told Clinton all about Fort Reno, and
the president said he would see what he could do. But the only
follow-up calls to tribal leaders were from DNC aides, demanding that
they pay up. All they had in the fund was $87,671.74, 18 months of
bingo receipts, so they wired it to the DNC. Yet the calls continued,
insistent requests for payment in full, until the tribe coughed up
$20,000 more to host a simulcast of Clinton's 50th birthday at Radio
City Music Hall.
The calls resumed after Clinton's reelection, but the tribe was
essentially broke. According to Todd, one fund-raiser warned him:
''You were players in '96, but you're not responding in '97.'' But the
tribe has stayed out of the money game.
Meanwhile, it has gotten nowhere with Fort Reno. The Clinton
administration has removed the research station from its closure list;
in fact, it is now slated for a $4 million upgrade. A longtime Gore
associate allegedly threatened to scuttle the tribe's bid for Fort
Reno unless it hired him as a consultant. The DNC had to return its
1996 donations at the request of tribal finance chairman Melvin
Whitebird, who said they were made by leaders ''living in a dream
world with visions of grandeur.'' Now the tribe's battleground has
shifted from national to internal politics; Hoffman and Surveyor have
been swept out of office, and Todd has been fired.
`A desperate people'
There is no politics in the sweat lodge, just heat and noise and
faith. It is a traditional Indian remedy, a simple tent converted into
an outdoor sauna where believers pour out their sweat and songs and
prayers as hard as they can, deep into the night. ''Oh great
Creator!'' wailed James Whitetail, a 56-year-old recovering alcoholic
with two alcoholic children and a grandchild with fetal alcohol
syndrome. ''We are a desperate people, great Creator! Please help us
find our way!''
For now, that way is still tied up in politics. The Fort Reno flap is
sure to resurface this spring, when the House begins hearings on
campaign finance. Meanwhile, some Republicans in Congress are trying
to strip Indian tribes of their sovereignty, and Oklahoma legislators
want to begin taxing tribal bingo halls, smokeshops, and gas stations.
Todd has organized an Indian political action committee, and is trying
to recruit a casino-friendly Democrat to run for governor. Hoffman and
Surveyor are contesting their firings in tribal court.
Otherwise, not much has changed here. The sun still turns the sky red
when it sets over the prairie, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho are still
a desperate people. But some of them still believe that they will
recover Fort Reno, that playing white man's politics will pay in the
end. Hoffman points out that a hawk flew overhead at one of the
tribe's rallies at Fort Reno, a very auspicious sign. And an albino
buffalo was recently born on tribal land, another hint that the
Creator is watching.
''I'm telling you, our future is in politics,'' Todd said. ''We used
to be naive, but now we know how to work the system.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 01/18/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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