The plan has worked out well, as far as David and the tribal leadership can see. Indeed, this kind of diversification no doubt has the potential to insulate the tribe from the economic and political ups and downs of gaming. But it also is not a panacea.
Congress has been scrutinizing the 8(a) provisions for Native populations. The preferences have been widely used by Alaskan Native Corporations. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri wrote a letter to the Small Business Administration in the summer of 2014 questioning the widespread use of this provision. “Many ANCs have grown to the multi-million dollar corporations that are among the largest federal contractors. In 2009, I held a hearing that highlighted my concerns about ANCs’ participation in the 8(a) program, including a lack of oversight by SBA, the use of ANCs to circumvent the federal contracting process, and that the benefits were not reaching disadvantaged Alaskan natives.”4 Certainly non-Native companies like Boeing (headquartered in Missouri) have complained that they’re losing federal contracts to companies that are hardly disadvantaged (even if the ancestors of the people at their helm were historically subject to discrimination).
Ultimately, David sees these kinds of government preferences shrinking, which is why he’s trying to increase the number of jobs that Seneca takes through competitive bidding processes. In the meantime, though, he’s also on the lookout for the next sovereign advantage.
David is doubtless a smart investor, and Senecas are lucky to have him and his brother looking out for the tribe’s long-term financial future. But their strategy is also creating problems for the tribe itself. Many people here are bitter. Every time one of these “sovereign advantages” disappears, the men and women of the Seneca Nation feel as if the state of New York or the federal government has just screwed them over again.
Justin Schapp, a special assistant to the treasurer for the Seneca Nation, sums up this attitude: “Before any Native nation can deal with any of their community issues in their midst, they have to go under the microscope that is the U.S. federal government or the state telling them that they want to share the pie – often it’s the lion’s share.”
Schapp continues, “They extract from us even today. It’s extraction, extraction, extraction. You work, and we own you.” He asks me, “You want to get down to the brass tacks of what my personal feelings are? I feel like I am owned. When I say I’m Seneca, then I am owned by either the state or federal government.”
And Schapp, who’s college-educated and employed at a high level by the nation, probably has a better idea than most people do of the history of the tribe’s economic strategies. In some way, he probably understands that the tribe’s leaders have tried to find loopholes in federal and state law that they can exploit to gain a financial step up. Perhaps he feels that the least the U.S. government can do after treating Indians so badly for so long is look the other way when Indian leaders use these strategies.
But he and other Senecas I’ve spoken to see this history through a particular lens, something like this: First the white people took our lands; then they ran our convenience stores out of business; now they’ve brought in competition to kill our casinos. Pretty soon, we won’t have our advantage in federal contracting. What’s left?
The problem with the strategy of rent-seeking to achieve economic growth isn’t that it won’t work in the short term. Indeed, the Seneca people will probably have a hefty pile of cash at their disposal for the foreseeable future. But for individual members of the nation, the tribal government’s strategy can prove deeply disheartening. Why start a business when the federal government is just going to swoop in and take away your profits? If there’s a reason besides the annuities that’s keeping members of the Seneca Nation from visiting Brooks and asking for a loan from SNIEDC, it’s probably this: they simply feel beaten by the system.
David Kimelberg argues, though, that strengthening the hand of the tribe was his first priority when he came to this position a few years ago. To explain why, David takes me back to the 1960s, when his great-uncle was president and the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build a dam to the south of the Allegany territory. The city of Pittsburgh was flooding along the Allegheny River, and so, over Seneca objections, President Kennedy approved construction of the Kinzua Dam in 1961. It was completed in 1965, but in the process, 10,000 acres of the Allegany territory were condemned and more than 700 Senecas were displaced.5
David and many of his fellow Senecas are still rightfully angry about what happened. “The nation had no resources, back then,” he recalls. “We got some lawyers pro bono and some reassurances from President Kennedy.” His uncle even went on national television to discuss it. But ultimately, they were “steamrolled” – “they set people’s houses on fire and then flooded the whole area. It was incredibly traumatic.”
That, says David, “would not happen today. If someone said they wanted to put our territory under water today, there would be so many lawyers and congressmen here.” He’s right. The Seneca have amassed enough cash and influence now that it’d be very hard for the government to do anything to their land without their permission. In addition, of course, the environmental and political movements protecting Indian lands have gotten significantly stronger in the intervening decades. Any actions would be tied up in court indefinitely.
Though it’s ultimately more important that Senecas “have a good standard of living and mortality rates that are lower than the general population,” David says, you won’t get those things when you have a federal or state government running roughshod over you.
He compares Seneca territory to the state of Israel. “People want to bomb you out of existence, and you just need to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It’s an interesting analogy. It’s tempting to dismiss the idea that the U.S. government is actively trying to destroy Seneca lands in the same way, say, that Syria is trying to destroy Israel. But the creation of the dam has clearly made a deep impression on Seneca leaders and members. If the territory can be taken away at the stroke of a presidential pen, then surely anything is possible.
Even granting the idea that Senecas have to be worried about their survival, one wonders whether trying to strengthen the hand of the nation from the top down without really improving the lives of individual citizens is the right strategy. After all, Israel has managed to do both. Its citizens somehow manage to lead 21st-century lives, with the latest technology and many other luxuries. They pursue education, earn money, and raise stable families, all while trying to ensure that their country survives. Some might argue that their country’s ability to survive is tied inextricably to the strength of its citizens, not just the size of its treasury.
Though Senecas have financial advantages that other American Indians don’t, they haven’t let go of the idea that their problems can be solved from the top down. So, for instance, in order to encourage members to open small businesses, the nation commissioned a survey of businesses within a certain distance of the territory. This, says Michael A. John, “allows us to show the saturation market for business opportunity.” Thanks to this survey, when people come to the tribal leadership saying they want to open up a pizza business, “we can say there happen to be x amount of pizza businesses in the area. When you figure out all of your expenses and all of your payments and finances, you’re making 3 cents on the dollar, so would it be profitable for you to do a pizza business?” On the other hand, they found that there was potential in the area of “outdoor recreation, maintenance, landscaping, and professional massage.”
John and his colleagues are trying to be helpful, but telling citizens when there’s room for another pizza business and how much of a profit they’d need to turn to make it worthwhile isn’t how thriving economies are developed. What if someone had a cheaper way of making pizza, or what if they made better pizza and customers preferred them to the competition? These questions don’t seem to occur to the people running the tribal government. And why would they? Nor is the government very good at figuring ou
t who’d be good at landscaping or whether there’s a workable economic model for a professional masseuse nearby.
You don’t need to travel to Beijing to see central planning at work. It’s everywhere on reservations.
For the Seneca tribe, though – unlike, say, the Sioux or the Northern Cheyenne – the problem isn’t finding employment for its members. There are about 8,000 enrolled members. About 2,000 of them work for the tribal government in some capacity, and 3,000 work for the casinos. Even assuming that there’ll be fewer casino jobs in the future, it does seem as though the Seneca Nation has insulated itself from economic downturn. It has a lot of money in its coffers, and there are still relatively few enrolled members (though thanks to the high birthrate and the fact that joining the tribe can get you a share of the annuities, enrollment has been growing). Indeed, rather than turning into Israel, Senecas have created in upstate New York a kind of oil-rich sheikhdom like Saudi Arabia.
Although this kind of wealth – which goes directly into the public coffers and is doled out in small amounts to citizens – can provide societies with a safety net, protecting them from the deepest kinds of poverty, it can also hamper development. In a 2001 paper for the journal World Politics, UCLA professor Michael Ross argues that oil revenues have actually hampered the development of democracy in Arab states.6 These governments use low tax rates and patronage jobs to dampen opposition to them. The “no representation without taxation” stance now has significant support among scholars of political science, who observe that although in most cases economic development hastens democratic participation (because governments must be accountable to the people who pay for them), governments whose money comes from natural resources are in a different position.
This is not to say that democracy doesn’t exist in Seneca territory, but there are both a lot of patronage jobs to be had and a seemingly great deal of dissatisfaction among the members. Relatively recently, in 1995, there was actually a shootout on the reservation between two rival factions, each claiming the tribal presidency. Three people were killed, and one was wounded. The president at the time had been accused of buying votes and proceeding with negotiations over the casino even after a tribal referendum had rejected it.7
As John Mohawk, a teacher in the American studies program at the State University at Buffalo and a reservation resident, told the New York Times, “Then there were accusations of wrongdoing again and again, and meetings increasingly closed to the public, and very frustrated people without anything to do because there were no rules with teeth in them. That led to the pushing, the punches, the kicks, the rock-throwing, and eventually led to the gunfire.”8
Today, things are much calmer. But although people like the Kimelberg brothers have stable long-term jobs, most of the government service positions vary depending on who the president of the nation is. There’s not really a significant “civil service.” Every two years, the entire administration of the nation switches between two locations – one on the Allegany and one on the Cattaraugus territory. And the president can’t serve two consecutive terms.
Whether through the casino or the government, most of the jobs held by folks on the territories are publicly funded. Although the telecom company is helping install a high-speed wireless network throughout the Cattaraugus territory and is doing some work in the Niagara Falls area as well, Seneca Holdings doesn’t contribute much to the employment of nation members, because most of the jobs aren’t local and because most enrolled members of the Seneca Nation don’t have the skills to perform these jobs anyway.
But the Seneca tribe’s efforts to exploit its sovereign advantage – and the problems that result from that advantage – beg the most important question: what exactly do we mean when we talk about the sovereign status of Indian nations? The tribal government exists in a kind of netherworld where, for instance, there can be signs on government buildings naming Jesus Christ the Lord because constitutional protections against the establishment of religion don’t apply. And the machinations of tribal government, unlike most federal and state governing institutions, often take place behind closed doors, with little transparency. Many newspapers on reservations are funded by the tribal government and, as such, are subject to tribal leaders’ whims. Meanwhile reporters at independent newspapers have trouble getting access to government proceedings. In the spring of 2015, the tribal council at Pine Ridge requested that local businesses stop selling the Rapid City Journal because tribal leaders disliked an article it ran.9
After President Obama visited the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, the Grand Forks Herald editorialized that if the president were serious about fixing the problems that plague reservations, guaranteeing freedom of the press would be a good start.10
Cases like that of Peter MacDonald in the 1980s, the so-called Navajo Watergate, drew attention to the problem of corruption in tribal governments and to the fact that it was unclear whether a tribal council could oust a leader who accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks. Matters have improved somewhat since then, but the truth is that when it came to helping the tribes set up a governing structure, this country left American Indians somewhere before Enlightenment Europe.
How much power tribal governments have is a matter of continued dispute. The word “sovereignty” is thrown around on reservations like it’s going out of style, but no one’s quite sure what it means these days.
As you enter reservations across the country, you’ll find ominous signs warning that you’re subject to the laws of the tribe and the territory. Are you no longer then subject to the laws of the state? Or the federal government? Are you no longer entitled to the protections you enjoy as a citizen of the United States? Maybe these seem like esoteric questions, but such issues are regularly tested in our courts, and no consistent answers have been arrived at.
When I asked Schapp, assistant to the treasurer of the Seneca Nation, about sovereignty, he told me that he dreamed of a time when his nation would be seen the way they are when playing lacrosse at the World Games – that is, as a nation separate from the United States and respected as its own independent national entity in a “globalized world.”
Tribal leaders can continue to claim that tribes are nations apart, but no legal authority takes seriously the idea that the relationship between any Indian community and Washington is the same as the one between Washington and Paris, for example. And if tribal authorities were serious about it, they’d stop accepting payments from the federal government, for one thing. As far as we know, the United States isn’t subsidizing housing in the south of France.
The battle over tribal sovereignty isn’t simply a semantic one. The ambiguity of the relationship between tribal leaders and the federal government has created a situation whereby Indians demand more autonomy but instead are offered more money – like candy to appease a crying toddler. Indeed, the trust authority has created a relationship whereby Indians will forever be treated as children, incapable of standing on their own two feet. The time for grandstanding is over. The American government does have a responsibility to Indians, but it’s not to send them checks while pretending to engage in international diplomacy.
Is there a different path for American Indians? A way out of the loophole economy and the dependence engendered by the false promise of sovereignty? A trip to North Carolina gives a clue.
Robeson County, North Carolina – which in 1993 briefly gained infamy as the place where basketball legend Michael Jordan’s father was murdered in a carjacking – is the poorest in the state. Close to half the children here live below the poverty line. Approximately 44 percent of the households with dependent children are headed by single mothers.11
I interviewed one woman outside her trailer home. As her dog barked at me threateningly, she described how she had been caring for the combined five children of both her brother and her sister, who were both in prison (one for failing to appear in court, the other for stealing checks from mailboxes). She herself had lost custody of
the children temporarily when her electricity was shut off after she failed to pay the bill for several months. The family was in the news in 2010 when the now-jailed sister left her 3-year-old unattended and the boy drowned in a nearby drainage ditch.12
But grinding poverty and dysfunction aren’t the only story here. There’s significant economic activity in the area, as well as stretches of middle-class homes. Thanks to haphazard zoning laws, you can often see trailer parks between well-kept split ranch homes. And some of the real estate is even nicer – new two-story colonial or restored Victorian.
This doesn’t look like a reservation, at least not the kind you’ll find in Montana or South Dakota. But it is the home of the Lumbee Indians. Although the Lumbees gained recognition from the federal government in 1956, they weren’t given any particular parcel of land on which to live. Nor have they been given many of the protections or financial benefits that come with being of Indian descent.
In part, this odd limbo is the result of confusion about Lumbee ancestry. Historical accounts suggest that the Lumbees lived in the swampy lowlands of North Carolina at least as far back as the early 18th century. Settlers encountered people they described as “light-skinned Indians” and “a mixt Crew, a lawless people,” some of whom bore the name Locklear, still among the most common Lumbee surnames today.13
The New Trail of Tears Page 8
