CERA President Elaine Willman Speaks on Federal Indian Policy
Speaker at Tea Party forum decries federal policies for Indians
By Joel Stottrup

Except for a written note during the question-and-answer part of the latest Mille Lacs County Tea Party public forum Thursday in Princeton that equated speaker Elaine Willman with Adolph Hitler, it seemed the crowd of about 135 was supportive of Willman’s speech. 

The event was the second of three forums the Mille Lacs Tea Party is hosting in August and September. 

Tea Party publicity said the forums are to help educate citizens about the issues surrounding Mille Lacs County’s lawsuit against the leaders of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, in which the county seeks legal clarification as to the continued existence of the 1855 Mille Lacs Indian Reservation. 

Another purpose has been to give the audience a chance to be introduced to candidates for county offices and ask them questions. After the speech various candidates gave presentations on themselves and then answered questions from the audience. 

The first of the three speaker forums was at Milaca High School the evening of Aug. 22 and featured speaker Darrel Smith from Mobridge, S.D. 

Last Thursday’s forum was in the Princeton Middle School. The third will be Sept. 19 at 7 p .m. at the Isle High School auditorium and will feature Len Terisinski, who the Tea Party describes as the president of the village of Hobart, Wis. 

All three speakers live within or on an Indian reservation. Willman, the speaker at Princeton, lives in Toppenish, Wash., within Yakima County. Her residence is within the Yakama Indian Reservation. 

Willman is executive director of a committee called Citizens Standup! which she calls a grassroots organization that addresses jurisdictional difficulties and conflicts regarding federal Indian policy. She also chairs the Advisory Committee for United Property Owners of Washington. 

Willman is working on a doctoral degree in public policy and her developing dissertation probes federal Indian policy. 

While decrying what she indicated was belittlement by some members of the Yakama Indian Reservation, such as being referred to as “white girl,” not getting phone calls returned and enduring hours of “haranguing about what the white men did to the Indians,” Willman did interject one noticeable generalization into her speech. 

Early in her speech she said she thinks the words “intelligent Californian” are an oxymoron. She stated that while telling about an “intelligent Californian” warning her to make sure she was “politically correct.” 

But she did point out that she didn’t blame Indian tribes for pursuing certain policies that many like her oppose, instead blaming the federal government. 

Tribal governments are only taking advantage of the policies that Congress and the federal agencies hold to, she said. 

She also used many examples as points to support her viewpoints, including having the Yakama Reservation as her business client at one time and then losing them. 

She began her speech of more than one hour by declaring: “I am a citizen of the United States. That little statement lives within the core of me. For most of my years, I have not given citizenship much conscious thought. But times have seriously changed. 

“I know now that being a citizen of the United States is my most fundamental foundational identity. It is more important to me than my gender, religion, marital status, family, career and friendship linkages. Think about that.” 

She explained that she came out of dormancy as an American citizen when she came to feel like an “outcast in my own country, like the skunk at the dinner party among my very own elected officials who’d rather I didn’t speak about federal Indian policy. I’m one of those odd non-enrolled persons that lives on or near an Indian reservation. I’m not special. I’m not even equal. I’m just supposed to go away.” 

Willman descended from Cherokee ancestry on her mother’s and father’s sides and said she “deeply treasures” and respects that. But she added that the ancestry does not supersede her American citizenship. “My Cherokee ancestry gives me absolutely zero superiority to any other American citizen,” she said. “We are all created equal by our creator, and we are all to be treated equally by the government ordained within our U.S. constitution.” 

Willman expressed a distaste for the thought someone once expressed to her that Willman should not speak of “equal treatment” or “equal protection” around Washington, D.C., as it would be considered hate language. Willman also said the same person told her that Indian policy is “extra constitutional” and that’s just what everyone should accept as reality, so Willman should therefore not mention the word “constitution” while in the heart of the nation either. 

Willman added that the great increase in Indian casinos in California and the “new aboriginal tribes” there are good in that it is stirring an outrage on the West Coast. 

Willman said there are 568 federally recognized tribes in 38 of the United States and, according to the 2000 census, half of one percent of the U.S. population is enrolled as tribal members. 

Willman declared that half percent “financially and politically overwhelms the voice of 99.5 percent of American citizens who go unheard and unattended by their representatives in Congress and most state legislatures.” 

Willman continued that federal policy likens tribal governments to being political entities and not racial entities, and that it is how the federal government “circumvents equality, equal protection and the 14th Amendment.” 

She said she could go along with the tribes being political entities but that she could be both critical of them as being such while still maintaining her lifelong respect for Native American ancestry and culture. “Government is not culture,” Willman said. 

Willman spoke of issues varying with location. The issue in California, said Willman, is the explosion of newly recognized tribes, all with Hispanic surnames and which are called rancherias, each bringing at least one casino online. 

In northeastern states such as New York and Connecticut the major issues are Indian gambling and “overt and excessive land claims,” according to Willman. 

Willman said an issue in the Northwest and Midwest is what she calls land claim by default. She then said it would be “lovely” if the dispute in the area near reservations were only over hunting, fishing and gathering rights. 

But added to that, she said, are the issues of “air quality, control of water, questionable if not spurious land and reservation claims, infrastructure, energy and utilities, Indian taxation of nonmembers, the loud continuous sound of local disposable income flushing down Indian slot machines and the political and financial highjacking of our elective process in states and in Congress … [and] more.” 

She then told of the “sovereignty protection initiative” that the National Congress of American Indians is proposing for Congress to approve. According to Willman it would undo all Supreme Court rulings that she says have “rightfully restricted tribal self-determination and jurisdiction to tribal members and tribal properties. 

Willman said the initiative has received two preliminary hearings before the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee and more hearings will be coming. 

According to Willman the initiative proposes a “reservation-based, territorial approach to tribal jurisdiction that will include all persons residing within exterior reservation boundaries.” 

She said it would mean all living within those boundaries would be answerable to tribal government. In her case, it would mean her county, state and country would no longer be her government and she would be forced to relocate, something she said would be the legislation’s intent. 

Willman told something about her area. She said the city of Toppenish is one of three municipalities that sit like “little islands” within the Yakama Reservation of 40,000 people. Its makeup is 75 percent Hispanic settled and seasonal farm workers, 20 percent anglo American and five percent Native American. 

She described the locale as beautiful and consisting of “farmers and Indians and seasonal workers and cattlemen and real cowboys.” 

She moved to Toppenish in early 1992 to become the city’s community development director. Through her research she learned Toppenish and the other two cities in the Yakama Reservation were granted by Congress in 1907 to be separate from the reservation. 

She told of the people of various walks of life within the exterior boundaries of that reservation working side by side through most of the 1900s and with its cultural diversity it was “rural America at its best.” Together they brought in the railroad and irrigation and helped each other, according to Willman. 

But sometime after the Yakama Tribe received federal recognition in the late 1950s and set up per-capita systems and benefits for members,” fewer and fewer Indians were working side by side with their neighbors,” though the “habits and customs of being good neighbors continued,” she said. 

Willman said the tribe was her client for community planning work for such things as grant applications and facilitating a conflict-resolution conference with federal Housing and Urban Development officials, as well as preparing a tribal annual report. 

But that working relationship changed sometime after the spring of 2000 when the tribe proposed to ban alcohol from the reservation, she said. 

She said an alcohol ban on Yakama reservation would imperil 47 businesses in that wine country and that the tribe’s proposed ban was not about alcoholism or alcohol. She said such a ban would have made it a federal offense punishable in federal court if a non-Indian were caught with just a can of beer in a home or backyard barbecue. 

She began serious soul searching after the Yakama Tribe announced what she said was a plan to acquire “our electricity.” Willman said she had seen all the tribal businesses there fail except for the casino and worried about what the electrical rates might be for the poor, those needing medical machinery and senior citizens. 

It was then, she said, that she formed the Citizens Standup! Committee. From it she concluded that the problems she was seeing there were originating with federal policy. 

Through her committee work, she lost the tribe as her client but did not lose the friendship of many of the tribe’s members who she said “do not have the protection of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” nor enjoy due process nor right to notice or warning.” 

She described an example of that by telling of a case on the reservation where a tribal member had not gotten a tribal business permit for his convenience store. Without a warning to do so, she said, he was handcuffed in the middle of his work day at the store and jailed and tribal police confiscated his money, records, modem and computer data and inventory and changed the locks on his building. She said it took him several days and many thousands of dollars to get tribal leaders to cause the tribal police and court to allow him to secure the permit. 

Willman’s theme was that the federal government needs to change its laws if Indians and non-Indians are to both enjoy the rights under the U.S. Constitution. 

She charged that a big money lobby has been a factor in federal policy that is causing the problems she described. 

Willman said some federal people are beginning to listen to what people like her are saying. 

During the question-and- answer period, someone asked if she would name people in Congress who are trying to fight some of the federal policies she says are wrong. She said she wouldn’t because she felt powerful forces would then work against those people. 

She urged her listeners to “be brave” and stop using “politically correct language.” 

One question was how Minnesota could affect federal Indian policy. Willman answered that networking with elected officials is a way. 

When it was asked why someone would not want to be known just as an American rather than a Native American, Willman answered, “God bless you. If ever there is a time to be a cohesive people, … to be one American, it is now.” 

Fielding a question on honoring ancestry, Willman said there is nothing wrong with that, but that it is wrong for one person to impose their will on another. 

When one of the written questions asked if she had not taken on a role similar to that of the infamous German Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler, she answered that her rationale is not based upon race or “white supremacy crap.” Her philosophy, she said, is that no human being or ethnicity is better than another and it is because Americans have the Constitution. 

“We’re just equal,” she said, and added that it is where she thinks she and “Adolph Hitler are a little different.”



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