American Indians protest their ousting from tribes

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Dozens of American Indians in several states tried to launch a national movement this week as they protested the growing trend of Native Americans being denied profits from tribal casinos following political disputes.

They denounced what they said was tribal corruption in demonstrations outside the Western Indian Gaming Conference here, a meeting already overshadowed by the scandal over Capitol Hill lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty this month to conspiracy to defraud Indians with casino interests of more than $20 million.

Thousands of Indians nationwide — including 4,000 people in California — have been stripped of or denied rightful membership in their tribes, and 75 percent of the California cases involved controversies over casinos, said Laura Wass, founder of the Many Lightnings American Indian Legacy Center in Fresno, Calif.

One of the protesters this week was Donald Wanatee Sr., who lived for nearly all of his 73 years on an Iowa reservation but, in a single day last spring, went from tribal elder to tribal outcast.

His exile followed a struggle over a tribal casino that pitted Indian against Indian within the Sac and Fox Tribe of Mississippi in Iowa. He, his brother and 16 other members of the tribe ultimately lost to a rival faction. Last May, they stopped receiving their share of gaming profits amounting to $2,000 a month each in the 1,300-member nation in central Iowa, Wanatee said.

Disenrollments are often appealed to U.S. courts, but tribal leaders have defeated or deferred the challenges by asserting that Indian nations have sovereignty in determining membership. Tribal councils have defended the removals as legitimate and allowable under their constitutions, with due process given to all.

Anthony Miranda, chairman of the California Nations Indian Gaming Commission that sponsored the gaming conference, said his group didn't involve itself in enrollment disputes, explaining that they were local tribal matters.

"As an association we view that as an internal government issue. You really have to look at that on a tribe-by-tribe basis," Miranda said.

About 1,500 of the disenrollments occurred after an official challenge by another tribe member or leader who questioned a fellow member's blood percentage or alleged that an ancestor left the reservation or tribe's rolls decades ago, voiding descendants' standing, according to protesters here.

In the other cases, Indians were often denied recognition after tribes imposed a moratorium on enrollments, despite the individuals' longstanding ties, said Mark Maslin, a protest organizer.

But the official explanations, protesters said, are a pretext for purging tribe members seen as a threat by a ruling faction, frequently after an argument over a tribal casino.

In Maslin's case, his Indian wife, Carla, and 75 members of her extended family were thrown out of the 295-member Redding Rancheria tribe in northern California in 2004 after a woman elder questioned a maternal lineage of Carla Maslin's grandmother. Each of the 76 lost $3,000 a month in casino profits, Mark Maslin said, and that allowed the remaining members to see payments rise to $5,000 monthly.

At stake is the wealth created by lucrative casinos, granted by government to long-subjugated and impoverished Indian nations since the 1980s to promote economic development and self-sufficiency. In one tribe, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians in Southern California, annual payments to each member exceed $100,000, according to one disenrolled family.

Claiming civil rights violations, protesters demanded a congressional hearing to raise public awareness of the disenrollments, but Andrea Jones, a spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, declined to comment this week.

While fellow protesters burned sage, some even asserted that tribal sovereignty, long a sacred political tenet among Native Americans, was in need of a system of checks and balances.

"The corrupt tribal leadership has been using sovereignty as a personal tool to hurt you," said protester Vicky Schenandoah, 44, disenrolled and fired from her $20,000-a-year job as tribal language teacher in the Oneida Nation in New York in 1995 after she and dozens of other tribe members demonstrated for open meetings on casino operations. At the time, her casino rights paid her $1,500 a month.

"They're doing what the U.S. Calvary, excuse me, tried to do us all — exterminate us," Schenandoah said. "It's a problem becoming bigger. There's many disenfranchised Indians who couldn't make it (to the movement's kickoff), but we traveled over 3,000 miles to support them."

"What's really happening in Indian country, with the weapon of a casino in place, the tribes are using that as a weapon of mass destruction against Indians that oppose them and anybody else," said John Gomez, 57, who was disenrolled from California's Pechanga tribe a few years ago and is now out of more than $100,000 a year in casino profit-sharing.

"They are planning to disenroll us and banish us from the tribe," said Wanatee, who was aligned with a faction that lost a power struggle over how to conduct 2003 council elections and casino operations. The dispute shut down the casino for half of 2003. "They are going to throw us off our land," he said.

A spokesman for Wanatee's tribe declined to comment. In an encounter that illustrated the divisiveness caused by disenrollments, Lorena Foreman-Ackerman, 65, walked across a giant lawn outside the convention center and approached a member of the Redding Rancheria council that ousted her and 75 relatives.

Feeling trepidation at first while wearing a black T-shirt stating "Stop Tribal Disenrollment," Foreman-Ackerman was surprised to receive a hug from the council member, Jason Hayward. Representing the tribe in this week's gaming conference, Hayward has a son by a niece of Foreman-Ackerman's, she said.

Their exchange exuded a warmth resembling a family reunion.

"I never voted for you to be out," Hayward told Foreman-Ackerman. "I should have said something. I think it was wrong."

Foreman-Ackerman, who started the tribe's health clinic years ago, blamed another woman with "such a filthy mouth" for starting rumors that led to the family's banishment. "To me, when somebody knows the truth and doesn't step forward ..." Foreman-Ackerman told Hayward, completing her statement with an expression of exasperation.

But Hayward, approached by a reporter, said only: "I don't want to make speeches."

Afterwards, Foreman-Ackerman and her husband, Roger, 65, blamed greed for the membership purges. "Because of sovereignty, you've basically set up a dictatorship," Roger Foreman-