INTERESTING TIMES ON THE REZ BORDER

We have an “interesting” situation here on the interface 3-way interface (rez/county/fed) with the Blackfeet reservation but before I address it I want to tell two stories.

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/041121.gilkey.shtml

The first one is from “Shantung Compound” by Langdon Gilkey, one of my most brilliant and inspirational professors at the U of C Div School.  Gilkey was a colorful guy who wore a necklace and bandanna instead of a tie and ran class by sitting on his desk, inviting us to suggest a topic on which he could riff.  He wrote quite a few books, but “Shantung Compound” was about being interned by the Japanese at the beginning of WWII.  He was a young man at that point, not quite as young as in the movie, “Empire of the Sun”.  Most of the Westerners who had been rounded up were missionaries, and some of the stories were about the conflict between the different styles and assumptions.  His fav group was the Trappist monks, whose worst suffering came from being unable to achieve solitude in the camp, but whose strength was their solidarity.  If the Japanese demanded that offenders step forward, the whole group would step forward to accept punishment.  Because they tended to be big guys in identical robes with full beards and long hair, the Japanese couldn’t tell them apart, so this foiled all attempts to divide and conquer.

The conservative Protestants were interned as family units and the often aggressive parents put their family well-being ahead of even their Christian principles.  The camp was ruled by a committee of intern representatives, one of whose duties was the allocation of resources.  The most precious of these was space.  At some point it became necessary to shrink the spaces allotted to the families, but the policy was so ferociously opposed that the committee could not make the families comply.  In the end they had to resort to getting the Japanese guards to come with guns to force the families to obey.

The second story was told to me by the daughter of a white Browning school administrator deep in the past. I ran into her in Portland twenty years ago, so I may have the details wrong. In those days the administrators (principals and superintendent, both white and enrolled) did their drinking in Valier, which had bars then.  They were adult male entitled people who drank together to show solidarity.  It’s a status marker, a way to be seen publicly as a unit and to blow off steam in enough of a group to be relatively safe. Like a cop bar.

But the father of the woman who told me this story didn’t like to drink, didn’t want to be out at night, and liked time with his family.  So he refused to join the group.  They didn’t like this, so after they got pretty well lubricated, they piled into a car and went up to this administrator’s house to make him come drink with them.  He wouldn’t even open the door.  So they began to pelt the house with rocks, eventually smashing the big picture window in front.  That sobered them up enough to scatter.  How this was finally resolved is unknown to me, but it stayed in my head as a good example of pack behavior.  I know the people involved, and they are decent human beings.  But they didn’t like anyone getting out of line.

So now let’s talk about Shannon Augare.  I don’t know Shannon.  I knew Calvin Augare, who might be his uncle, and who was Bob Scriver’s hunting buddy, the man who saved Bob from going blind by forcing IHS to look at Bob’s enflamed eye and then driving him to Great Falls to a specialist.  He was a man of principle who insisted on results, so that’s the way I think of Shannon.  The deal was that a Cut Bank cop followed Shannon from a bar to  the reservation, pulled him over, accused him of being drunk, argued and reached into the car for the keys, which caused Augare to drive off.  He was served a citation the next day.

We’ve got several “third-rail” issues in this situation:  one is drunk driving and another is law enforcement on reservations.  People die in car accidents a LOT -- often by colliding with livestock.  There are also many violent incidents on the rez, often against women or even children.  The FBI sort of waves the cases on.  The newspaper stories -- which always have a sensationalist tilt anyway -- testify that this is a place and time that is having a hard time re-aligning laws, perps and victims.  Shannon is both a state senator and on the tribal council, which means in some minds he is presumed to have too much power.  An enduring Blackfeet sin is “getting the big head.”  Montana feels that way, too, except for recent immigrants.

Shannon Augare had previously been involved in one of those strategy blockades in the state senate, foiling a planned vote by not showing up.  (He’s a D, Cut Bank is R.  He's either culprit or rescuer, depending on which side you favor.)  I went to look at the drinking “hole” in Cut Bank, which is in the middle of town and newly redecorated, probably benefitting from the renewed oil-drilling action, maybe a half-mile from the rez -- the dividing river is at the edge of town.  It is not a big town.   I did a walk-through before business started because the last time I was in a Cut Bank bar was 1962, the height of oil-drilling action, and it was a very unpleasant experience.  Cut Bank is an oil town and a reservation vampire.  They are not friendly to reservation law enforcement and would love to see some fancy Blackfeet “suits” brought down to what might be considered their proper status, according to Texas immigrants with images of John Wayne dancing in their heads.  I don’t suppose the rez cops are very fond of oil roughnecks.

MONTANA FREEDOM CAMPAIGN REPORT CARD

Looks good from my point of view -- just turn it upside down.

Of course, it was stupid and self-deceiving for Augare to think that he could step out of line in any way, even if his mother was with him, which she was.  And it was stupid of the local cop to pursue and attempt to detain Augare in a way that could easily have escalated into tragedy.  The cop had a partner with him and a video cam running which may have given him an exaggerated sense of authority.  But my guess is that he just wanted to nail Augare.  Every person on the scene was offending, enabling, and persecuting.  Very mixed.  

Then came the FBI, rubbing its hands together in anticipation.  It appears Carl Pepion called them in, setting up a competing triangle of motives and roles.  Essentially, he brought in guards to use their fire power to force compliance to what he considers the “right thing.”  (Carl is the Tribal Chief Prosecutor.)  Sharp, the tribal council chair, is sticking to the principle of sovereignty.  A body cannot be sovereign if it has to resort to the FBI, which originally was limited to ten major crimes (murder, rape, and others) but has managed to wiggle into many situations without really being on the scene: armchair analysts playing a long game with no skin in the game.  (see footnote)

I’m in Valier, adjacent to the rez.  We’re involved in all sorts of three-handed games, but so far the FBI has stayed out, though there is other Federal pressure.  Mostly we’re wrestling with infrastructure erosion versus economic issues, which are less violent but sometimes seem equally insoluble.  Water rights, for instance, are as much a sovereignty interface problem as who gets to pull over whom for drunk driving.  At least it’s not likely there will be a massacre like a hundred years ago when the cavalry was called in to show who was boss.  At least I hope not.  I don’t want to see blood, no matter the source or kind.

FOOTNOTE:

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/may-2012/indian-country-and-the-tribal-law-and-order-act-of-2010

Indian Country and the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010By Michael J. Bulzomi, J.D.

“In 1885, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act to address the resolution of cases in which a crime involving two Native American parties occurs in Indian country. This Act established federal jurisdiction over seven crimes committed in these instances. The original seven covered by the Act include murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny. Subsequent amendments to the Act have added seven more offenses: kidnapping, incest, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault resulting in serious bodily injury, assault with intent to commit rape, robbery, and felonious sexual molestation of a minor. “

This whole document is worth reading in regard to the Shannon Augare incident and the general background.

DOES SOVEREIGNTY EQUAL SEQUESTRATION?

The most common reaction I hear from non-rez people when rez people demand control of their own affairs and concerns is,  “Well, fine.  Then let them pay for their own education, law enforcement, roads and housing!”  Of course, this is pretty hypocritical when it comes to ag folks who depend on national subsidies or counties and small towns who ask for infrastructure or law enforcement grants.  Much “national security” money is disguised local law and order subsidies.

These matters used to be settled in “Game of Thrones” fashion:  sword against sword, which at least made for population control.  Now we’re more subtle, particularly when it comes to “out groups” like sex workers or HIV sufferers.  (More like “Madmen.”) It used to be that lepers were sequestered, put on an island if possible.  And now at least one activist has suggested that priests who molest children be put on islands where they could devote their lives to repentance.  Nowadays we’ve figured out how to monetize sequestration, so there is even more motivation to capture and incarcerate needy people who are too ready to declare themselves powerful, even if they have to use a gun to do it.  They may face extreme sequestration:  solitary confinement for decades.  We’re talking criminal sequestration or possibly war captives.

If sovereignty triggers sequestration, as it did with Native American literature (only Indians can write about Indians), the risk is that transactions that depend upon open borders can’t happen.  Native American literature at first seemed to benefit by “owning” all the NA books, but pretty soon what had become a point of principle (let ethnic people gain the profits derived from their lives) turned into a battle and then a no-one’s-land, because it was just too much trouble.  The readers and publishers sequestered it.  This had not happened when colonial explorers sent back excited reports or anthropologists had worked out cultural patterns for an academic audience.  Those were markers for entitled knowledge among the readers.  Now they feel guilty.

“Roundup Ready” alfalfa and wheat is genomically altered so that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the herbicide) won’t hurt it.  The idea is that the weeds won’t have this gene, so they’ll die easier.  And the assumption was that genes are safely sequestered inside the cells of the wheat.  It was a shock when the weeds quickly grabbed that gene for themselves.  Now we have “roundup ready” weeds.  What’s worse is that the altered genes have made the wheat different enough to disturb human digestion of the grain: celiac disease.  The lesson is that SEQUESTRATION IS NEVER POSSIBLE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/earth/looking-for-ways-to-beat-the-weeds.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

People who want to treat people with HIV as lepers think that they can SEE HIV and thereby shut them off socially, avoid them, isolate them.  But they can’t.  If it were possible, there would be no lepers by now, but they still exist in spite of being obviously mutilated at later stages.  Life is a participation, a constant interchange of energy.  If participation is blocked completely, there is death and that’s what happened with HIV at first, frightening everyone until the persons who seemed most at risk, gay men who were “out,” seized sovereignty as surely as the Indians on Alcatraz.  Now they were “roundup ready.” 

The management of boundaries is an important factor in the constant process of exchange that is life.  From cell walls to no-fly lists, all these filters change everything -- not just one gene, one herbicide, one crop.  When law enforcement can’t keep order on a rez, people move to the nearby small towns.  Where the chickens go, the foxes soon follow.  Or maybe they are already there and grinning. 

Some boundaries are closed from the inside and others are imposed from the outside.  The folks who want their borders closed, ending immigration, must feel insecure, unable to handle any differences, any change.  They have not realized that illegal immigration is a long-standing phenomenon, economically entwined.  A soft version of it is the family that cocoons, as was common among homesteaders and small town people who had only themselves and nearest neighbors to help.  Of course, when times change the children break out and grow wings.  This has happened to plenty of younger Indians who flew the rez.

Gerrymandering is an artificial boundary-drawing which proposes to be promoting equity but is in fact oligarchic, serving those who are already rich and powerful.  Organic natural edges of populations are overlain with surveyors’ lines.  When a voting bloc is interrupted by the Rocky Mountains, only to make voters conform to certain types, the lines through the mountains are impossible to find, but there are too few people worried about it for the powerful to care so long as it prevents their opposition from gathering force.  Lines become irrational and unjust. 

A default line is covertly drawn between those who can afford HIV drugs and have lives orderly enough to self-administer properly and those others who either can’t afford them, can’t get their heads together enough, don't live in one place (like not under a bridge) long enough to take drugs properly, or who risk deportation or incarceration if they ask for help.  Tricks are the vectors who break the line, carrying the virus home to their families and lovers.  Not just the virus, but the attitude, the secrecy.  Part of the reason they do it is that they WANT to break the line, be dangerous, like white men who want to go live on the rez where they feel they can be violent alcoholics without interference.  Just now the law forbidding violence against tribal women by white men has been approved.  A line protecting white men who abuse Indian women has been erased.  The white men protest that they themselves aren’t safe now.  So?

So a line can be a law, a boundary, a social category, a chemical category, or any other concept grouping that our brains can grasp.  But then thinking must struggle to keep up with the implications.  Like teenagers who don’t know where the boundaries are, we want to be in charge of everything inside our walled community but soon discover this will cause us to be isolated.  So then we try to simply associate with “people like us” and watch the “guy on the left and the guy on the right.”  Most of the time that works, until we run into someone who’s not at all like us.  Esp. if it takes a while to figure out just how different.  How different is a gray hoodie?

So Shannon Augare, a handsome Democratic Blackfeet State Representative was drinking in Cut Bank one evening -- with his mother, Marla.  Only a short distance across the river that marks the edge of the reservation he was pulled over by a Glacier County sheriff’s deputy.  After a short discussion Augare simply drove off because the deputy had no jurisdiction.  The sheriff’s office contacted the Blackfeet Tribal police who found Augare parked and his mother in the driver’s seat.  Those officers drove the pair home.  No alcohol tests.  The Glacier County sheriff issued citations and there will be a trial.  Of course, the trial by society is already underway.  And somehow the FBI has stepped in.  Cue the music.  This is a discussion we need and Augare, with his lawyer Tom McKay, are eloquent.

You know what outcome might be interesting?  If Glacier County were redrawn to match the Blackfeet Reservation boundaries.  It’s been suggested before.  Cut Bank bar owners would be put out of business.  But maybe the rez is now “roundup ready.”