ISLANDS OF JURISDICTION

Town of Browning, Montana

Pockets of jurisdiction and the necessary dividing lines are always problematic.  When I was an animal control officer, even a dog knew that if he stood on his own lawn, we could not “catch” him.  It was a headache to keep track of several small subdivisions that refused to contract with us to enforce their dog laws, then agreed, and maybe a few years later again refused.

When I first came to the rez in 1961, there was a town police force and judge that enforced town ordinances -- mostly public drunkenness.  This was the result of post WWII chaos and the legalization of booze on the rez, which triggered many burglaries and much violence, mostly Indian-on-Indian.  The town businessmen (mostly white) taxed themselves to pay for law enforcement separate from the inadequate reservation police guided by the Indian Service and sort of semi-governed by the tribe and the usually uninterested FBI.  (There was no Indian Power movement at the time.)  Bob Scriver was the town magistrate, so as his sidekick I was a witness to a lot of things, both social patterns and the difficulty of managing a sovereign entity (the town) in the middle of the reservation.  Some enrolled members put their land back into trust with the federal government, and that land became an island of the reservation in the middle of the island of jurisdiction that was the town.  As always, patterns of race mixed with patterns of space.  Bob put drunks into the jail; the tribal council -- who ran the jail -- released them.  Unless they were enemies, in which case, good luck.  

I’m not clear about what started the movement to end town sovereignty.  The man who was supposed to close down the Browning town police was named Suarez and I’m also unclear about what his source of authority was, except that it was federal.  He wore a puffy down coat all the time because he was always cold.  I remember him as being from Cuba, but that doesn’t seem possible.  There was one big showdown meeting, VERY intense, in which the town argued for its right to hire police (as many universities and shopping malls do today) and Suarez resisted.  In the end he won.  

At the time I was writing a column in the Glacier Reporter called “The Merry Scribbler.”  It began as natural history and soon turned political, but Mike Mansfield did not read it into the Congressional Record since it was not about funny Indian drunks, the way John Tatsey’s columns were about the same time.  I was okay so long as Milo Fields was the editor, since he was an old-fashioned journalist, but he left.  When I wrote about the mayor running the city waterline outside the town boundaries in order to supply his newly built motel, The Warbonnet, my columnist days and Bob’s magistrate days were ended.  Bob kept being re-elected as a Justice of the Peace, but always declined because by that time the sculpture business was taking off.  As I write, the motel building is being torn down.  I still think of it as “new,” but it doesn’t even compare to the actual “new” motel attached to the casino. 

The Warbonnet -- state of the art in 1972.

We've reached a new flashpoint.  Everything moves on, the pattern changes.  What was once taken for granted becomes intolerable and what was once regulated comes undone.  The results are very mixed.  The basic underlying causes are always economic, and that always comes back to two kinds of “turf,” one virtual and the other actual.  It is the dividing lines between two turfs that either make trouble, prevent trouble, generate profit, or prevent profit.

There is an entire academic field called “border studies.”  There’s much theory, mostly about relations between nations.  New York journalists are fascinated by the border between the Pine Ridge Reservation and its vampire town “White Earth” which is based on the blood quantum of beer.  Rez towns are generally federal. (Maybe what doomed the Browning “island of jurisdiction” was that it was an intrusion of the state into a territory the feds wanted ultimate control over.  The tribe makes an effective red herring.)  The tribe would need to protect its umbilical cord to Washington DC more than it would need the mid-level governance of the state, though it did finally accept some child and family services, the schools, the public county library -- non-threatening services with little profit.  

But blocking state laws on the reservation had a lot of advantages: think building codes, business law, distribution networks, fireworks, tobacco, etc.  All this worked a lot better in some ways when the population was thinner.  Certainly it worked better before tribal members got more sophisticated.   

Sovereignty (who gets to be the king) is an issue so enflamed with emotion that it’s very hard to reason out causes and consequences.  Emotion always trumps obvious solutions, if someone finds the right hot button.  The Blackfeet never had kings.  There was a lot of rhetoric and sometimes quarrels, but the bands were small and the prairie was wide -- a person could move on.  Or just kill the enemy.

Hugh Dempsey tells about how it was managed when the Kalispell or Flatheads wanted to come to Blackfeet territory to hunt buffalo.  The hunting group would stay hidden while they sent the most persuasive among them to sit on a hill overlooking the camp and wait to be spotted.  If the band were in a mood to parlay, someone would go up and bring down the diplomat.  Sitting in a circle smoking “three bowls of tobacco,” the important men would get used to this visitor: his smell, the way he dressed, how well he handled the pipe when it was his turn, whether they remembered him, who he reminded them of, and so on.  Eventually he would tell them how much his group needed to hunt and how good buffalo would taste.  After enjoying the suspense as long as it was interesting, the men would agree and the hunters could cross the land.

But if tempers were running hot and patience was worn thin, if maybe a war party had killed an admired person, someone just went out and, while the envoy sat on the hill, simply shot the man.  Definitive.  Finito.  There were crying children in the lodges on the other side of the Rockies.

http://nativenews.jour.umt.edu/2013/?page_id=30

I don’t have a dog in this fight.  Except that I would like to see all deliberation in thinking through this everlasting human problem of turf.  Perhaps the way is to think of what the ultimate goal might be, like no crying children, and no more games of King of the Hill.  Sometimes I think the real reconfiguration needs to start with the United States, maybe breaking them into ecosystems: west coast, prairie, midwest, east coast, south.  

Most people would agree that there are too many counties in this state, due to some entrepreneur in the past who made a lot of money by organizing new counties.  Maybe instead of gerrymandering voting districts, the thing to do is to reconfigure all the counties, beginning by making each reservation match its boundaries to the county line, so that it WAS a county.  I don’t know what to do about the Federal presence now that they have the mighty crowbar of Homeland Security in their hands.  The FBI is only one among the many law enforcers now.  And there is the problem that due to borrowing, much reservation land has slipped into non-Indian ownership.

Most countries have indigenous peoples and are putting pressure on them.  I include the Romany.  Once a caravan of gypsies came through Browning and we all went outside to watch them slowly drive through town.  Ordinary trailers, but with canary cages and geranium pots, and a police escort because they psyched out the cops.  The Romany pay a high price to keep their culture, but they do it without any land base at all.  Kings of the road.