Coyote Warrior
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Copyright © 2004 by Paul VanDevelder
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: July 2004
Maps designed by Jeffrey Ward
ISBN: 978-0-316-03068-7
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter I: Heart of the World
Chapter II: Savages and Infidels
Chapter III: Miracle at Horse Creek
Chapter IV: Great White Fathers
Chapter V: Hell and High Water
Chapter VI: Leaving Elbowoods
Chapter VII: Hitting Bottom On Top
Chapter VIII: Return of the Natives
Chapter IX: The Last Train to Yuma
Chapter X: Into the Storm
Appendix A: Indian Law: an Evolutionary Time Line
Appendix B: Elbowoods, North Dakota: Final Roll Call of Relocation and Dispossession—1953
Appendix C: 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie(Horse Creek)
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
for the dancers
gone and yet to come
“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart, and in our own despair,
against our will, comes wisdom to
us by the awful grace of God.”
AESCHYLUS
coyote: a mythical, spiritual, or human being living on the geographic and social fringe of a community, whose role within that community is to use humor, shock, cunning, and surprise to assist individuals in “waking up,” and to prevent the community from developing self-destructive modes of behavior
warrior: a protector of the people, a high distinction earned through fidelity to truth, common sense, physical and mental prowess, and personal integrity
Introduction
We are a comet without a tail, streaking across the desert at one hundred five miles per hour in a rented Buick. The Mojave, a vast and silvery landscape, slipstreams by in a whisper. Ours are the only headlights we have seen for many miles. Tom Goldtooth, the national director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, glows like a Buddha in the dash lights.
“A black guy, an Indian, and a white guy arrive at the pearly gates,” he begins. “Saint Peter says, ‘Welcome to heaven. This is your lucky day. You get to pick the heaven of your dreams.’ So the black guy goes first. ‘I want to be in heaven with lots of brothers and sisters and great music.’ Saint Peter says, ‘No problem, that’s exactly what you’ll find behind door number one.’ Next, the Indian steps up. ‘What do you want heaven to be?’ The old Indian doesn’t hesitate. ‘I want heaven to have beautiful mountain streams and deep forests and plenty of food to eat.’ Saint Peter says, ‘No problem, Chief, that’s exactly what you’ll find behind door number three.’ Then the white guy steps up and Saint Peter says, ‘What do you want heaven to look like?’ And the white guy says, ‘Where did that Indian go?’”
Ever since Hernán Cortés waded ashore in Mexico in 1519, white guys in funny hats have been asking, “Where did that Indian go?” For Goldtooth, this question carries as much freight today as it did five centuries ago. Indians comprise less than 1 percent of the population, yet they own 40 percent of the nation’s coal reserves. Indians also own 65 percent of the uranium reserves in the United States, untold ounces of gold, silver, cadmium, and manganese, and billions of board feet of timber, all still in the ground or standing on the stump. They own oil, billions of cubic feet of natural gas, and an unopened treasure chest of copper and zinc. They guard the door to 20 percent of the nation’s freshwater and millions of acres of pristine real estate. A recent commentary in Forbes magazine observed: “Now, at a time when the United States seems to be running out of practically everything, Indian reservations constitute one of the least-known repositories of natural resources on the continent.” They might have added, “and the largest.”
The pressure on tribal governments to begin selling off these resources has never been greater. State and federal politicians, industrial tycoons, and international mineral conglomerates are not easily discouraged. In their world every commodity has a price. But a new generation of Indian leaders has arisen. These coyote warriors, as they are known, have resisted the seductions of the global marketplace. To that end, the coyotes have declared much of Indian Country off-limits to mineral and resource development. From the hardwood forests of Wisconsin to the panoramic mesas of the Southwest, Indian Country’s crystalline rivers and virgin forests, its gold-bearing hills and fresh, clean air, are not for sale.
In the late 1980s many young Native American biologists, hydrologists, atmospheric chemists, and lawyers began returning to their reservations of origin and reconnecting with their ancestral traditions. Foremost among those traditions was the Sacred Trust, or what the Sioux call wouncage, the guiding ethic of conducting the life of the individual and the tribe in a state of reverence and balance with the natural world. For many throughout the indigenous world, wouncage is the enlightened state of living in harmony and balance with the “great mysterious.”
Back on the res, these young leaders banded together to find new economic and political solutions to long-standing ailments. More often than not, that meant working independently of tribal institutions with vested interests in the status quo. The coyote warriors were soon to learn that their interests had not been served either by tribal institutions or by the federal agencies assigned by Congress to safeguard tribal resources. The long-overdue accounting of a century of thievery and malfeasance finally came to a boil in August 1999. Ruling from his federal district court in Washington, D.C., Judge Royce Lamberth found the federal government guilty of swindling thousand of Indians out of $10 billion in mineral royalties, a practice that went unchecked for more than a century. Reliable information from government ledgers was such a scarce commodity throughout the three-year trial that Judge Lamberth has since cited two secretaries of the interior with contempt for bureaucratic foot-dragging and repeated failures to produce subpoenaed evidence. Any figure the court settled on, said the Price Waterhouse accountants who crunched the numbers, should be viewed as a gift to the thief from his victims. When the government appealed the decision in August 2002, attorneys for the plaintiffs estimated the true value of the missing funds at $50 billion.
About ten years earlier, a young Navajo biologist named Lori Goodman stunned the mainstream environmental community when her grassroots coalition, Diné CARE, succeeded in halting the construction of a nuclear-waste incinerator at Dilkon, Arizona. For two years, Goodman and her loyal volunteers went from hogan to hogan, patiently building their case against their tribal leaders and the federal government. This was new. Until then, native political activists had been viewed in the mainstream as a ragtag group of marginalized hotheads. In the 1970s members of AIM, the American Indian Movement, were persecuted and jailed along with militant Black Panthers and more radical revolutionaries in the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. After these tumultuous years, AIM fizzled for want of effective leadership. Its leaders could force a siege at Wounded Knee, but they could not organize a car wash if their bail bondsman was holding the hose. Goodman’s Diné CARE was a bold departure. When the contest of rh
etoric and wills was finally put to Navajo voters, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) waved a white flag, and the tribal chairman was sent to federal prison for embezzlement.
Demonstrating a familiarity with “the real world,” Goodman and Diné CARE were victorious at Dilkon, signaling a maturing of tactics and organization—proof that the coyotes were a force to be reckoned with. In order to capitalize on the publicity that followed, visionaries such as Goodman, Winona LaDuke, Gail Small, and Walt Bressette formed the Indigenous Environmental Network, a group dedicated to carrying the work to the 100 million acres of Indian Country that stretched from the tropics to the tundra. When Goldtooth opened the IEN for business in the spring of 1990, the greatest challenge was deciding where to begin. Like the cavalry of another century, the machinery of the industrialized world was camped out on every horizon. By the mid-1990s, the IEN had evolved into an international cyber network connecting Inuit coyotes to their counterparts in Minnesota, Panama, Nigeria, and New Zealand.
“In the old days we used bows and arrows to protect our land, our families, our resources,” Goldtooth recently told one of his many audiences. “But that wasn’t very effective, so a hundred years later we exchanged our bows and arrows for science and law. Science and law, combined with sovereignty, work much better. They can be very persuasive.”
Dateline: Isleta, New Mexico. As the city of Albuquerque grew by leaps and bounds in the 1990s, the Rio Grande became so foul with untreated sewage that the Isleta Pueblo tribe’s young governor, Verna Teller, had no choice but to challenge the city. With help from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Teller invoked a little-known provision in the federal Clean Water Act to assert her tribe’s right to establish its own water-quality standards. The city of Albuquerque filed suit to prevent the Isleta standards from taking force. The city lost. In the final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998, the tribe’s right to establish its own water-quality standards was upheld. From Maine to California, dozens of tribes have since followed the Isleta’s lead.
Dateline: Hanford, Washington. Visionary architect William McDonough met with a team of DOE engineers to explore long-term storage solutions for nuclear waste. While in Hanford, he was invited to attend a powwow hosted by the nearby Yakima tribe. Over dinner the tribal chairman inquired about the nature of the project. McDonough explained that his team was looking for a fail-safe way to tell people ten thousand years from now that the nuclear waste at Hanford was extremely dangerous. “That’s what all this is about?” said the chairman. “Don’t worry, we’ll tell them.”
Whether at Isleta, Hanford, Dilkon, or a dozen other hot spots, the particulars in these cases are window dressing that often conceal much larger issues. Strip away the clams and oysters, remove the copper, gold, and fishing rods, and what lurks behind the details are battles over self-determination and cultural survival, the ownership of natural resources, and the challenge of living in fidelity with the promises and contracts of generations long gone.
In the decade or so since their victory at Dilkon, the coyotes have won dozens of landmark courtroom battles by successfully coupling science with the law. When combined, these seemingly disparate disciplines have forged for the coyotes a powerful new weapon in the defense of treaty-protected rights and resources. In the difficult and often discouraging process of erecting those defenses, they have also learned that politics and economics are simply weather, the thunderstorm in the foreground. Law, on the other hand, is the ground beneath their feet. The new social contract presumes that the courts will steer them toward reckonings with the shoals of principle that few politicians have the courage, or vision, to navigate.
Dateline: Missoula, Montana. It is late winter, 2000, and a federal commission convened by the Army Corps of Engineers has come to this railroad and logging town of seventy thousand citizens to find out what people think about salmon, the Snake River dams, and the economic future of this vast region of the American outback. Missoula is one of ten stops for the commission. At every venue thus far they have drawn angry, standing-room-only crowds. Apart and alone, a man with short cropped hair and penetrating black eyes sits quietly at the back of the room. With his legs crossed, fingertips pressed together, he measures the milling crowd. Mandan attorney and law professor Raymond Cross finds himself at the center of the national debate over how to rescue twelve endangered stocks of native salmon, and the tribal people who have depended on that resource for millennia, from extinction. Born fifty-two years earlier in the village of Elbowoods, North Dakota, he has made a longer journey than anyone else has to get here. Raymond Cross knows that there are distances across the American landscape that cannot be measured in miles.
But Raymond Cross’s story does not begin with that journey, or even with his birth in 1948—the youngest of ten children born to tribal chairman Martin Cross and his wife, Dorothy, the daughter of Norwegian homesteaders. It begins in October of 1804, at the mouth of the Knife River, in what is known today as central North Dakota. Here, Raymond Cross’s ancestors welcomed Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the leaders of Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery, to the five Mandan and Hidatsa Villages. This constellation of semipermanent enclaves sat at the hub of a trade network connecting the Cree of Nova Scotia, in the far northeast, to the Pueblo and Comanche of the desert southwest. Dozens of European traders, entrepreneurs, and explorers preceded Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery to the Mandan Villages at the Heart and Knife Rivers, some by as much as eighty years. The first American expedition was in fact the last chapter in the Age of Exploration of the Upper Missouri and the American West.
In his seminal work, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, historian James Rhonda observed that the Americans were sailing out of their depth as they approached the Knife River. “The simplistic diplomatic model Lewis and Clark brought with them sought to reduce the highly complex social and economic structure of intertribal relations . . . into one of childlike servility to the Great White Fathers, a model that served neither the Indians nor the whites in future dealings.” Yet the Mandan set aside their doubts about the Americans. They saw them safely through the winter of 1805 and helped them prepare for the journey ahead. “No set of men that ever I associated with have better hearts than the Mandan,” wrote the artist George Catlin, when he lived among the Mandan in the 1830s, “and no man in any country keeps his word, and guards his honor, more closely.”
From the moment of “first contact,” the Cross family story is spun from the same thread that binds together the larger story of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people. Across the next two centuries, their tragedies and triumphs would lay bare the cultural and legal paradoxes that were already at work, shaping the America we live in today. Conflicts and contradictions built into the nation’s foundational charter would lead inevitably to a legal high noon in the final decade of the twentieth century. When that day arrived, Raymond Cross would be standing at its center.
In the twelfth century, the Mandan people were establishing their first permanent settlements on the Upper Missouri River. Simultaneously, the Papal See was asserting its “divine prerogative” to send crusading armies to the Holy Lands in order to confiscate land from Muslim “heathens and infidels.” These papal prerogatives were formally incorporated into canon law by Popes Innocent III and IV, and would continue to evolve through discovery-era Spain, through the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in England, and, finally, through the U.S. Supreme Court—becoming Chief Justice John Marshall’s reckoning with the Doctrine of Discovery, and its offspring, eminent domain.
This was the evolutionary lineage of the laws that Congress would invoke midway through the twentieth century to forcibly remove the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people from their homelands of prehistory to make way for a giant dam at the Mandan Bluffs on the Upper Missouri River. While the tribes claimed an absolute right to protect their ancestral lands from being inundated by the dam, the Republic of the United States asserted a countervailing prerogative t
o trump the tribes’ aboriginal title by claiming a superior right—under eminent domain—to take that land away. Twice threatened with extinction in the previous two centuries, the descendants of the tribes that saved Lewis and Clark were once again face-to-face with their own demise. The ensuing struggle for survival would span five decades.
“How these paradoxes play out in real people’s lives is not simply a story about Indians,” says Raymond Cross. “It is the story of America, about all of us. How we resolve those great paradoxes is our own Age of Discovery, one that asks all Americans, ‘After the storms, who are we?’”
On the Yellowstone, 2003
CHAPTER I
Heart of the World
“The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and the soil. He is still troubled with primitive fears. In the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested. Men must be formed of the dust of their forefather’s bones.”
STANDING BEAR, OGLALA
For twenty years after the spaceships landed in the pintail tulies and gooseberry woods on the floodplain, downstream from Elbowoods, Phyllis Old Dog Cross was afraid to look at the moon. A lifetime later, on a June evening in 2002, an unexpected glimpse of the prairie moonrise still sends shivers up her spine. She laughs self-consciously, then turns away and settles into a ladder-back chair at the kitchen table. The opening in the wall beside the table seems less like a window than a picture frame, one that corrals an intimidating sweep of purple sky and a bright yellow coin, balanced edgewise on a bruised horizon. Cowlicked and wind-scoured, the silver swells of storied landscape framed by this window have sustained members of the Cross family for dozens of generations. At the end of a life spent in other places, Phyllis has come back to the only home she has ever known.