by David Treuer
I think Mike had much to do with it, too. After he arrived at Tulalip, he pushed to establish a court system and tribal police. He pushed for retrocession from Public Law 280, which gave the state courts jurisdiction over civil matters but which the states often used to extend their jurisdiction well beyond its appropriate bounds. “I pushed for our own police department. Tulalip used to be a very dangerous place. It is less so now. I mean, back then, Boom City was like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. You know that people are sexually attracted to explosions? It’s true! People used to come from New Jersey to buy bombs at Boom City. So the U.S. attorney came here and wanted to shut it down. And we used that! We told him, ‘You support retrocession from PL 280 and we’ll control Boom City.’ We got the bombs out of there. We got it internally regulated. Tulalip is now a safer, more productive place. They key to growth is stability, accountability, and separation of powers. We’ve got all that here now.”
Mike Taylor, and people like him, have shaped tribes the country over. And it’s a testament to the Tulalip tribes that Mike has been allowed to do the work he has. But that work often depends on agitation from within the tribe but outside the political structure. At Tulalip that agitator is eighty-four-year-old battler Ray Sheldon.
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RAY IS NOT HARD TO find. His home and business are located on Tulalip’s main drag. All you have to look for is a large fiberglass chicken on a pole (the tribe has designated it a hazard and wants Ray to fix it) and the sign for smoked fish, with its ever-changing digs at tribal officials. (Today it says: DID THE BOARD GET A BIG PAY RAISE? and below it: BOARD SAID NO TO PAY INCREASE FOR ELDERS, WHY?) Oh, and there’s also the cell tower Ray leases, which rises above the trees and can be seen for miles around. It’s hard to know where on the property to find him. There is a jumble of buildings—a shop for selling the fish, a machine shop, a house, a few more outbuildings I can’t quite identify, and heavy equipment and building materials stacked here and there like a kind of mortar holding the buildings together. To some it might look like a mess, but to me it looks like money. I finally locate the office, and Ray meets me at the door.
One son, Tony, is asleep on the couch after a couple hard days crabbing. His other son, Greg, busies himself with paperwork while Ray and I talk. “Try this,” Ray says, handing me a package of smoked salmon. I say I will. “You got to eat that right now. Not later.” So I do. He watches me and doesn’t seem to relax until I’m done. “I got to get my hearing aid,” he says, though I’m not sure why because he does most of the talking. He is clearly not short on opinions. There is no preamble, no getting to know each other, no feeling out. There is just drive, about as pure as it comes.
“Okay,” he begins, “one thing the government did to poorer Indians, not us, but like the Navajos, poor Indians out in the sticks, they didn’t put enough into Indian enterprises but they gave them Indian agents money to set up shop.” Ray isn’t wrong. From the beginning, reservations were staffed and administered by non-Indian agents whose degree of graft and greed was almost unparalleled in government operations. They gobbled up leases and sold them to friends and benefactors. They withheld annuity payments of cloth and food in order to get tribes—nominally sovereign—to vote the way the government wanted them to vote. Even in the best cases, the BIA exerted a paternalistic kind of care over Indian affairs. They acted as though Indians were too feeble to administer their own affairs effectively. Their tribes were too small, too big, lacked infrastructure. They had not enough education, too much dysfunction. They were unstable, emotional, unreasonable. And so on. After World War II, when many took control of their own affairs, the tribal officials who replaced the Indian agents were often as crooked and greedy as the agents they replaced. All of this was overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which earned its reputation as the most mismanaged and corrupt of federal agencies. Between 1973 and 1992 alone, audits show that the BIA stole or lost more than $2.4 billion of Indian money—from oil, gas, timber, and grazing leases. And that’s for just nineteen of the roughly 150 years that the BIA has been managing Indian money.
In that kind of climate, starting any kind of tribal or private business is dicey. But it didn’t deter Ray. And by the end of the day I’m not sure if anything could deter him.
“I got where I am because I worked,” he says in his age-thickened voice. “I started in logging, and then fishing. Then I joined the Marines in Korea. I worked in logistics and supply because I had a year and a half of college going in. After the war I studied on the GI Bill—there were more veterans than everyone else in school. I got my BA in business! I went on to operating heavy machinery, grading, gravel, excavating. I opened my store in 1985 with a loan from the bank. I didn’t get one from the tribe.”
Ray has had firsthand experience of how the paternalism of the federal government and the Indian service seems to have been inherited by and live on through tribal government. He took on the general manager of Quil Ceda Village over a social issue and gave him a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing in an open meeting. Soon thereafter, Ray’s son Greg was fired from his job managing the tribally owned gas station. Ray wonders if his son was railroaded by the tribe. His case went in front of tribal court, consisting of judges appointed by the very organization that had terminated him.
I spoke to Greg’s lawyer about the case: “We were winning, and you know what happened next? They changed the tribal codes so that Greg couldn’t bring in his own counsel. That’s how they do things sometimes.” For example: In 2008 a family who had fractional interest in a fifty-six-acre parcel of land they had received from their grandmother next to the outlet mall formed a corporation to develop the land. They were doing exactly what one hopes people do with their property: securing and developing it for future generations, to make the land work for them. However, the tribe blocked them. The corporation took the tribe to court, but in the meantime the tribe denied them access to sewerage and water even though it is surrounded, literally, by excellent new sewer and water systems from the outlet mall and casino. The price of the land plummeted, and the tribe was able to persuade many of the part owners to sell. Once the tribe had a majority share they sold it to themselves at a discount. Two of the original members of the corporation held out but could not sustain their opposition to the sale and eventually sold. Why would the tribe do this? “Yeah, why would they?” ponders Gabe Galanda, the attorney for the plaintiffs. “Maybe they thought they’d open up a hotel, or another retail center, and it would take business away from tribal operations. Maybe they thought it would ruin the aesthetics of the tribal operations, whatever they built would be an eyesore.” Such actions are sound capitalistic logic—reduce competition, increase market share. This is good capitalism, but it’s not necessarily good tribalism. “Maybe it makes sense for them to do that,” muses Galanda. “But why get in the way of a frybread stand or an espresso shop? Why would you suffocate a smoked salmon business by diming them for their fiberglass chicken on a pole? I think there’s a fundamental distrust on the part of tribal government of their members’ ability to do it right.” It’s hard not to see such actions as an extension of the paternalism of the oppressors.
“I’m always on their case,” says Ray Sheldon. “I don’t give a goddamn what they think. What annoys me is when people in high echelon forget who they are. They say one thing one day and the next day they do the opposite.” According to Ray, the contracts for building Cabela’s went to a non-Indian contractor when Ray and his family had hoped to get it. Construction bills ran to $21 million. Ray wonders about insider deals. “One thing that really bothers me,” he says after naming many other things that bother him, “I’ve been fighting for children for quite a while. One of the biggest things the tribe is being confronted with is sex abuse. Women getting sex abused. Kids getting sex abused. They aren’t putting enough money or time into that program. Nothing is really being done about it.” He has a way of being fiercely disgrunt
led about tribal matters while he clearly loves and cares very deeply for his community. It also seems to me that the tribal government at Tulalip is, overall, pretty good, pretty healthy, even though some tribal members (like Ray) feel it could be better.
Ray is, again, right—about corruption and about sexual abuse. And as different as those things seem, they are united in a way: both bespeak a malformed social and political structure, stunted, shortsighted, and inward-turning. Both have at their root the abuse of power. When people are abused, they often turn into abusers. Perhaps when whole peoples have been abused, they often do the same. And yet, despite Ray’s permanent, proud disgruntlement, the Tulalip have done something to intervene in this cycle. The tribe took back power from the state over its civil matters. It managed, with Taylor’s help, to separate—maybe not enough—governance from business so there is a tribal council that tends to the needs of the people and there is a business council that runs Quil Ceda Village, which generates income for the tribe. With strong leadership, the tribe flexed its muscle and bent the local economy in its own direction. Instead of having the economic zone of Quil Ceda Village annexed by Marysville, they brought the chamber of commerce to Quil Ceda. Along the way, they empowered their own citizens—in governance and law (80 percent of Tulalip’s legal team is Indian) and enforcement. Now Tulalip has secured a federal highway project to rebuild an overpass and on-ramps on the north end of the reservation. The tribe is currently negotiating with the State of Washington and looks likely to be awarded a big chunk of the $16 billion earmarked for roadwork in the region. Teri Gobin, the director of the TERO program at Tulalip, makes a good point. “They’re having booms in other places—like the oil fields in North Dakota—and a lot of Indians are getting in on it and doing good business. But we are trying to create stability, develop skills. The tribal vocational skills program is the only tribal accredited vocational training program in the country. It’s free,” says Teri. “It’s free for any Natives from any community, and it’s free for their spouses, too. We’ve even built houses for the homeless in Seattle.” That’s a turn-around if I’ve ever seen one: instead of begging HUD for funding for tribal housing (which is in very short supply around the country), they are building houses for their neighbors.
“It all comes back to the casino,” says Greg from across Ray’s office. “The success of the tribe centers around the casino. It brings in a lot of money. That money that comes in gets distributed in many ways. It gets distributed as projects. These projects create jobs and opportunities. The money flows everywhere. In the 1980s the tribe was, in terms of workforce, a tenth of the size it is now. The casino created high salaries, more jobs, and that’s where everyone started to look for opportunity. To get into construction. Stuff like that. The casino and the per cap creates a cushion. It was like perfect timing. We got a little money in our pocket. Our government structure improved. We got more stable. . . . It all came together.”
So what does it take to follow Tulalip’s success story? Because, caveats aside, it is a success. Well: Location. Leadership. Separation. Structure. Opportunity. And hustle. It takes people like Teri Gobin and her father, Stan Jones. It takes young people who’ve paid their dues and want to do good, like Eddy Pablo. It takes a kind of vision like Les’s and it takes an active and vocal conscience like that of Ray Sheldon. Even the thing he’s most concerned about is finally beginning to be addressed: Tulalip just amended their criminal code so that there is no statute of limitations on charges of sexual abuse.
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IN 1994, I MOVED BACK to Leech Lake Reservation, the place I had hoped to escape when I graduated from high school in 1988. It was an important return for me. I had found graduate school both stressful and sterile. And the connection I felt to my tribe was tenuous, or felt tenuous. If any of the rest of life’s efforts was going to make any sense or mean anything at all, it had to, for me, make sense in relation to my tribe and my culture. I moved home and began working for a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening Ojibwe language and culture. I wrote educational grants to fund language immersion programs with an eye toward establishing an Ojibwe language immersion school at White Earth Reservation to the west of Leech Lake.
It was hard work. When a community is whole, language grows out of the web of relationships that make that community; it is a by-product of intergenerational togetherness. However, at White Earth (and other Indian communities) it was hard to find that wholeness. There was intergenerational abuse—physical, domestic, sexual, substance. There was a pronounced lack of continuity between people and institutions. It felt like everything was a mess. My coworkers and I puzzled over the basic hurdle to our efforts to regrow and grow the Ojibwe language: it wasn’t important to that many people. Young people were especially uninterested. I pondered. We had to, in some way, make language and culture cool. And if we could do that, the rest would likely fall into place. Language work felt crucial to us. Some carriers of culture are or can be extralingual, of course: kinship, politics, lifeways, traditional activities. But while culture contains these things, or is contained in them, language has a special role as a carrier of culture. More than that: our Ojibwe religion is vested in the language. It cannot be practiced in English. The death of our language would likely be the death of us, certainly the death of our ceremonial life.
We did not feel alone in our work. Even scattered on reservations and cities in six states and three Canadian provinces, and in tribes across the country, the Ojibwe displayed a marked shift in not only attitude but direction. In the 1960s and 1970s, AIM and the Red Power movements, looking outward, used occupations, armed conflict, and street theater to direct the national gaze toward the ongoing problems in Indian country. This was new and important and vital. But for them and the moment and their movements, Indian country remained a problem to be solved, a problem with which to confront America. This shifted in the 1980s and 1990s. My brother Anton, who worked with me on the language project, put it this way: “The U.S. government spent two hundred years trying to kill us, trying to take our land, language, and culture away from us. Why would we look to them to fix it? We must look to ourselves to do that.” Across Indian country a new generation of activists were turning their attention and energy inward and working hard to strengthen their communities from the inside.
A number of factors precipitated this sea change. Many younger Indians now had educational opportunities long denied previous generations. They had the ability to travel and some kind of economic security that gave them the freedom to return to their culture. They also, like so many Americans of all origins, wanted something more from their lives and their country than simply the chance to get rich. They, like the rest of the new generation of Americans, wanted their lives to mean something more than could be reflected in entrepreneurial success. But for Indians, this movement was also a product of the sovereignty wars of the 1970s and 1980s: the aura of dignity conferred by seeing oneself as belonging to a sovereign people, as having rights that adhered to and derived not from the largesse of the government but from continuation of their cultures, community, and polity.
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MY TIME AT TULALIP ENDED where modern Tulalip entrepreneurship began: at Boom City. Boom City is exactly how it sounds. For two weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, the largest fireworks bazaar west of the Mississippi rises from the gravel on a vacant lot near the casino. Plywood shanties are trucked to the site and arranged in neat rows. The awnings are opened and the sale begins. Each of the 139 stands is stuffed with fireworks. All of the stands are Native-owned, and the action is administered by a board of directors, which in turn is administered by the tribe. All of the stands are painted brightly, and many bear equally colorful names: Up in Smoke, One Night Stand, Boom Boom Long Time, Porno for Pyro, Titty Titty Bang Bang. Others bespeak proud ownership: Mikey’s, Eddy’s, Junior’s.
It’s slow when I arrive at Eddy’s stand, but
even so there is a lot of money changing hands. Fireworks—like gaming and, to a lesser extent, tobacco—are regulated by the state. And as sovereign nations, Indian tribes in states like Washington where fireworks are illegal enjoy a monopoly on their sale. I find Eddy deep in his stand, trying to avoid the sun. “The weather’s keeping people away. Too hot.” He also tells me business is slow because someone was caught earlier that day selling illegal fireworks nearby. He will be fined and unable to reopen for a day or two, but the incident has made customers skittish. “By Friday the cars will be backed up to the highway,” Eddy assures me. “If you’re the last man standing with a full load of fireworks on the last day you can sell it all.” I wonder how much “all” means. “You can make fifteen to twenty-five thousand for the season. More if you’re smart.” The wholesalers set up shop on the outskirts of Boom City and circle around taking orders for the vendors. There are two espresso stands and a few food stands. Someone has lined the back of their pickup with a tarp and filled it with water, and five kids cavort and splash in it. Other kids, as young as four or five, walk through the stands chirping Iced tea! Pop! Gatorade! in a miniature mimic of the men and women selling fireworks, who have perfected the banter of bazaar merchants the world over: the taunting, teasing, aggressive talk designed to get people to stop and buy something. “That stops ’em, too,” says Eddy, nodding at the carpet in front of his stand. “Walking around on that gravel all day hurts your feet. And then they walk on this. It’s a little thing, but the little things add up to business.” I can’t help noticing the carpet is salmon-colored. I stop a girl no older than four wearing a sandwich board advertising iced tea and order one. She scampers back to the concession stands. A few minutes later she returns and hands over the iced tea and says, “Three dollars, please.” I do the math. That’s a quarter for the tea and $2.75 for the cute kid to bring it to me.
