Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  “What you have done is to share with us part of the sad and tragic chapter of the relationship between the United States and Indian nations,” continued the senator. “It is not a happy chapter. It is a chapter of deceit and deception, it is a chapter of promises and broken promises. The committee is well aware of that, and we are going to do our best to undo the damage that was wrought in those years past. It might be well that we remind ourselves at this juncture that this proud nation who maintains publicly that we keep our promises and our commitments, as President Bush so eloquently stated at the joint session of Congress, has not been honest in its dealings with the Indian nations. Throughout the years, we have had eight hundred treaties with Indian nations, treaties entered into between sovereign nations, the United States and Indian nations. They are sovereign. As such, the U.S. Senate, our predecessors, had the responsibility of studying these treaties and acting upon them to either accept or reject. Of the eight hundred treaties, the record will show that the U.S. Senate just ignored four hundred thirty of them. . . . However, we called upon the Indian nations to live up to their promises in the treaties. The U.S. Senate did ratify three hundred seventy of them, and of the three hundred seventy treaties that this Senate, our predecessors, ratified, the United States government violated provisions in every one of them. It is a very sad chapter, and as one senator, as chairman of this committee, I can assure you that we will do our best to see that no further violations are carried out in this country.”

  In late 1992, following another dozen trips to Washington, and dozens more hearings, a joint committee of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate agreed to award the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota a sum of $149.2 million for the unjust taking of their reservation by an illegal act of Congress in 1949. The only remaining hitch was the mechanics of the actual funding. Bill or no bill, Congress was still handcuffed by a self-imposed spending freeze. Where would all that money come from?

  “[North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad was a real profile in courage on this,” says Foley. “He was taking a lot of heat from his Norwegian constituents back home, who didn’t want to see this resolved in the Indians’ favor.

  “You think you’re so smart,” says Foley, “you get these things through committee, and then reality hits you. ‘Now, how are you going to find the money to pay for all this?’ Remember, we were running huge deficits at the time, and Bush’s people at Interior had already told us their man would kill it on sight.”

  Ignoring that threat as best he could, Foley pressed ahead and consulted with his connections on the Senate Finance Committee. He remembers sitting around in Senator Conrad’s office one evening as he, Raymond, and the senator mulled over various ways to creatively finesse the financing package. Foley’s years of experience suddenly gave him an idea, one he had never thought of before. Like most brilliant insights, this one was deceptively simple and ingeniously creative. Foley hit upon a “double accounting” scheme that, when sketched out on paper, looked like it just might work. Congress could grow the funds for a compensation package by siphoning off surplus funds that were generated each year by power receipts from Garrison Dam. The resulting trust fund, established at the Department of the Treasury for the Three Affiliated Tribes, would generate annual interest in perpetuity. The scheme was perfectly legal, but it effectively raised the money without debiting funds from the treasury. By stretching the plan out over six years, the total deposits would reach their target of $149.2 million.

  “Double accounting was the answer,” says Foley. “It allowed us to explain to congressmen who had no idea of what we were talking about that the reason for the taking—the dam—would ultimately provide the solution in the compensation package. Then, by ‘booting the payments over the horizon,’ by putting the payoff out there beyond the five-year accounting period for the government, nobody cared whether it broke the spending freeze. It didn’t take money away from any existing project or create more red ink in the current budget. Revenues from the dam would simply be counted twice by the treasury, once as receipts for power, and a second time when those surplus funds were deposited into the account for the tribes. It was poetry.”

  A week before the bill was to come up for a vote in early 1992, Department of the Interior deputy counsel and Bush appointee Pam Summers called Foley at his office. Summers and Foley had known each other for a long time. Summers was well informed about Senate Bill 168, which had just been sent to the full Senate by a unanimous vote in Senator Inouye’s committee. Summers was calling with bad news, a professional courtesy. Foley should know going in that President Bush would never let this bill through.

  “This thing is getting killed on sight,” she told him. “There is no way the White House is signing off on this thing.”

  Foley thanked Summers for the tip, then hung up the phone. For long, pensive moments he retreated into his mind and gazed out his office window at the distant dome of the Capitol. He had not acquired this scarred-up psyche, this battered heart and soul from years of ruthless infighting and power wars just to roll over and let five years of work vanish with the stroke of President Bush’s pen. No, he could not let it go down that easily. This thing was bigger than George Bush and Lee Foley. There were things about this bill that were far more important than winning, more important than power and balance sheets and kudos from colleagues and ten inches of front-page copy above the fold in the local newspaper. This fell beyond the petty skirmishes of frightened politicians and the flimsy platitudes of presidents running scared for reelection.

  In the years since Lone Fight and Cross stepped into his office, Foley and Raymond had spent hundreds of hours in each other’s company. Over the past three years, he and his partners had contributed more than half a million dollars of their own resources to get this bill to the floor of the Senate, and they would do it again. No, Foley had labored for too many years on the Hill, walked too many miles in the catacombs, not to have kept one trump card in reserve for just such an impasse. He reached for the phone and dialed the number for Raymond Cross’s hotel room.

  “Raymond, Lee here. Meet me at Congressman Miller’s office, fifteen minutes.”

  For many years, California congressman George Miller had been ranked among the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. As the longtime chairman of the powerful House Resources Committee, Miller had ruled with political integrity and an even hand. This uncompromising environmentalist was feared, particularly by his fellow congressmen in the West, because he could spot a pork-barrel water project from across the country. The fact that he ruled the Resources Committee, the committee that held the purse strings for the Bureau of Reclamation, made him a king maker. As each election approached, dozens of political careers, on both sides of the aisle, would suddenly be riding on the backs of bills that were scheduled to come out of Miller’s committee.

  As Lee Foley’s luck would have it, the early winter months of 1992 happened to be one of those times when congressmen were closely watching every item that appeared on the docket of Miller’s committee. Foley and Cross had been working the Senate side of the aisle, where they had a powerful ally in Senator Kent Conrad. But with Bush promising to veto the Compensation Act, Senator Conrad’s steadfast allegiance might mollify the folks back home, but it would not be enough legislative muscle in the Senate to override a presidential veto. Since their bill had few friends on the House side, the Senate had been the logical place to set up camp. Nevertheless, Foley had been quietly keeping an eye on Miller’s docket. He knew something big was in the works. After making a few inquiries, he was told that Miller’s committee was about to vote on the long-awaited Bureau of Reclamation Reform Act, an enormous bill that had taken years to work into final shape. This was a bill that held dozens of political careers hostage to final passage. Careers were on the line again. For many western politicians, passage was a must. It also just so happened that this was a presidential election year, and everyone knew that George Bush needed those western states to have any h
ope of winning. For Foley, a tight election was as good as a personal guarantee from the president that he would sign this bill into law as soon as it reached his desk. Once it hit the floor of both houses, the bill coming out of Miller’s committee was a slam dunk.

  Foley and Cross met in the hallway outside Miller’s office. He told Cross about Summers’s phone call, about her promise of a veto of a “just compensation” bill for the tribes. Then, in a manner of speaking, he showed him his hidden trump card, and they strolled into Miller’s office together.

  “Maybe it was the way the moon and the stars were lined up,” says Foley. “They showed us into his office right away. That never ever happens.”

  Congressman Miller stood up and greeted them, shaking their hands, then invited them to sit down.

  “Congressman Miller,” began Foley, “we need a favor from you.” He then gave the congressman an overview of Senate Bill 168, explained the double-accounting method of financing that he had concocted with Senator Conrad, and then gave him a copy of Inouye’s remarks on broken treaties. “Congressman Miller, all we’re asking is for you to be a hero today. We’re here to ask you to attach the Three Affiliated Tribes Just Compensation Act to your Bureau of Reclamation Reform bill.”

  Without hesitation, Representative George Miller reached across his desk to shake Raymond’s hand. “Mr. Cross, it would be my honor.”

  Ten years after Congressman George Miller made good on his handshake with Raymond Cross, the double-accounting scheme that Lee Foley devised to establish a perpetual trust fund for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people is working precisely according to design. Every year, interest on the “corpus” of the fund is made available to the Tribal Council. The funds are deposited as a credit in the tribes’ account at the Department of the Treasury. Years before the first JTAC funds arrived, in 1998, tribespeople and councilmen began arguing over how to spend the money. It is human nature, perhaps, to argue over money, to quarrel over how it should be spent, particularly when it is held in common. Properly managed, those divisions can lead to healthy struggles that help the tribes to define their common interests. As a fellow tribesman, Raymond Cross knows that those divisions can just as easily, just as quickly, turn inward and whip through a tribe like the devil’s wind, destroying clans and communities from the inside out.

  “After so many years of abuse, bad court decisions, cultural disintegration, and the systemic dysfunction of both societies, white and Indian, our tribal governments have evolved into Indian Country surrogates for these television survival shows that just seem to go on and on,” says Raymond. “For my people, I worry that our modern-day version of the smallpox epidemic is the JTAC money. The trick for the tribal leaders will be to turn the viral qualities of money into a positive inoculation. My greatest fear is the tribe will miss this opportunity to re-create itself.”

  As for the farmers of North Dakota, fifty years after their grandfathers threw their political weight behind the Pick-Sloan project, they are still waiting. While water released through the power tunnels of Garrison Dam has kept barges floating between St. Louis and Sioux City, South Dakota, for more than fifty years, not a drop of water has moved down the McClusky Canal. Of the 1 million acres of irrigation promised by Sloan’s original plan, fewer than 9,000 have been irrigated, yet the federal government has spent more than $20 billion, ten times the original estimate, on Pick-Sloan projects. After drought-stricken farmers on the Great Plains watched millions of acre-feet of water flow out of Garrison Dam to fill shipping channels on the lower river, in January of 2004 the state of North Dakota appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to bring the fifty years of economic and environmental devastation that have resulted from Pick-Sloan to a merciful end.

  “You want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt,” says North Dakota chief justice VandeWalle. “I’m afraid it’s [Pick-Sloan’s] all been one huge scam, an economic and environmental disaster, from beginning to end.”

  Raymond’s brothers and sisters make it a point to return to the shores of Lake Sakakawea as often as possible. It is a beautiful day in late spring of 2002, and Bucky is standing beside a small, meandering stream called the Knife River, about a mile northeast of the small county seat of Stanton, North Dakota. Bucky has found the spot, the very spot, where George Catlin was standing when he painted one of his famous landscapes of the Hidatsa Village, with the Knife River in the foreground. On that same piece of muddy bank, beneath the overhanging limbs of the sheltering oaks, Catlin struggled with brush and pen to capture the scene before him for posterity before it had vanished entirely.

  “There are dwellings all about me, and they are purely unique,” wrote Catlin, when he lived at the Knife River Villages in 1832. “They are all covered with dirt, the people are all red, and yet distinct from all other red folks I have seen. The horses are wild, every dog is a wolf, the whole moving mass are strangers to me, and the living, in everything, carry an air of intractable wildness about them, and the dead are not buried, but dried upon scaffolds. . . . The groups of lodges around me present a very curious and pleasing appearance, resembling in shape so many potash kettles inverted, and on the tops of these are to be seen groups standing and reclining, whose wild and picturesque appearance it would be difficult to describe. . . . stern warriors, like statues, standing in dignified groups, wrapped in their painted quills of the war eagle, extending their long arms to the east or to the west, pointing to the scenes of their battles, which they are recounting to each other . . .”

  “This was our village,” says Bucky, smiling to himself as he takes in the landscape from the spot where Catlin set his easel. “This is where we come from.”

  On the trip back to Parshall on Old State Road Number Eight, Bucky and Crusoe carry on in the backseat of the van like schoolboys reliving the pranks of summer camp. Marilyn turns off the road to Stanton at Pick City, just west of Sakakawea Park, and drives up onto the crown of the dam. As if on cue, the voices in the van suddenly go quiet, and the cheerful, sibling banter does not resume until the van is skirting past the town of Riverdale, half a mile east of the dam. Marilyn has promised to take Phyllis and Bucky on a quick side trip up to the lake, to a spot called Indian Point. When we arrive at their favorite lookout, it is immediately obvious why they enjoy coming here. Far below, a light breeze has picked up and corrugated the surface of the lake. The high white clouds overhead hurry off toward evening. Spokes of silver light wheel through the western clouds and skip over the moody surface of the inland sea that spreads beneath us for miles in all directions. Bucky lifts his nose to the wind and fills his lungs. A hawk soars overhead, getting a free ride on the steady currents. Crusoe switches his eyeglasses and squints to the far side. Then, he lifts his arm and points.

  “You see where that light’s moving, way over there, in that valley . . . oops, there it went. That was Red Butte. And over there,” he says, swinging his arm fifteen degrees toward the south, “that was Beaver Creek, right between those two low hills.”

  “That spot on the water, look at where the light’s hitting . . .” says Phyllis. She’s pointing at something in the middle of the lake, where a medallion of sunlight has burst across the gray surface.

  “That’s right where our place was,” says Marilyn.

  “That’s what I thought,” says Phyllis.

  “Sure is,” says Bucky. He points, too. “Look, it’s moving right across the horse pasture, up toward the house.”

  The four of them stand there, side by side, and gaze out across the water from this promontory. Tired and cold, Phyllis turns first and heads back to the van, then Marilyn and Crusoe, with Crusoe helping his older sister up onto the seat. Bucky cannot quite tear himself away. “I’ll just be a minute,” he says. Then, after another moment of reflection, Bucky begins talking, as though he is sorting things out by telling himself a story.

  “Our experience of the dam was violent,” he begins. “It tore families apart behind a thousand doors. It had the effect of disass
imilating people from their origin, and ripping up their identities, and tossing them to the winds of fate and misfortune like so much confetti. In Elbowoods, we still had the old relationships that were very much like the villages on the Knife River. And at Nishu and Shell Creek, Red Butte and Independence, these communities were the last connection we had to the Knife River Villages, to a world that was defined by a beautiful web of relationships, of relatedness. Today, when my brothers and sisters and I look out across this lake to where our communities once thrived and sustained us, we don’t only lament the loss of the physical place. Surely, we loved that land more than any other. But what was taken away was more than the land. We look out across that water today and we are reminded that as a people, we were whole once. We sang and we danced. We have to live with that loss every day. What the Allotment Era started in the 1800s, the Garrison Dam finished. Now, it is up to us, to this generation, to start dancing again.”

  If the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations are to begin dancing again, in earnest, Raymond Cross believes the arduous process of re-creation will have to begin with a reaffirmation of the spiritual laws that sustained their ancestors through the mortal trials endured by countless generations. Among the tribes that met 150 years ago at the confluence of the Platte and Horse Creek, this spiritual law was called the wouncage. Translated from Crow, Mandan, or Sioux, wouncage is today known as the Sacred Trust. Put simply, that trust is an expression of the communal reverence shown by the people of a tribe or community for the originating force that makes the wind, that brings the clouds, that carries the rain, that falls to the grass, that feeds the buffalo to nourish the man. For millennia, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of Chile, the native people of the western hemisphere have seen themselves living inside this circle as its guardians, as have all the great spiritual leaders of the world’s great religions. The wouncage tells them that no good has ever come from leaving that circle, or breaking the trust.