IT AIN'T EASY BEING AN NDN
Tribulations of an NDN

Dakota means “Friendly People” or “Allies.” Their were seven bands of Dakota Indian who called themselves the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council fires). They occupied territory from present day western Wisconsin to the Missouri River in present day South Dakota.

When the French first came to the Minnesota region they asked a group of Chippewa’s what those people were called pointing to a group of Dakota Indians.

The Chippewa said, “Nadowessi” which meant Snake.

The French added oux to Nadowessi(oux) and later shorted it to Sioux. The Dakota, a.k.a., the Sioux, and the Chippewa’s Indians were mortal enemies. No one today remembers what the original “sin” was that caused them to be mortal enemies. It could have been a territorial dispute or over a women.

In 1832 my great-great grandfather Ohiya (which means Victor) was killed in a Chippewa ambush near present day Little Falls Minnesota.

Later, in 1918 my uncle was killed in the first world war fighting the Germans, and my brother was killed in 1968 fighting the North Vietnamese.

I guess it’s in my bloodline to be fighting someone.

What is interesting about Dakota Indian culture and beliefs is that besides warfare the ultimate aim of Dakota life was simple.

One must obey kinship rules - one must be a good relative.

In the final analysis every other consideration was secondary - property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life it self.

The modern day Chippewa Indian, German, or North Vietnamese haven’t been my worst enemy.

The “Friendly People,“ “Allies,“ Dakota Indian have been. Let me tell you about it.

I was born in 1943 and entered the first grade in 1949. Head Start and kindergarten weren‘t invented yet. Every six year old American kid, ready or not, entered the first grade.

It makes you wonder if those fairly new American educational inventions are really necessary and do they really work. I am almost certain that it didn’t make any difference if I went to Head Start or Kindergarten.

My guess is that an Indian child becomes aware of their racial identity when they enter the first grade.

It must be different for an Indian child who only went to an all Indian federal boarding school, or to one of the BIA Day Schools. It would be my guess that if an Indian child goes to school with only Indian children they look at the world differently then those of us Indian kids who went to integrated public schools.

That is not to say there was a lot of racial problems going on in public school that I went to. I did not experience much racial hatred that some Indians speak of. I knew it was out there, but it is how you personally dealt with it at the time; and that goes back to how well your parents raised you.

Despite one’s poverty, if your parents raised you to believe that your human worth wasn’t dependent on how much money you had, that simple belief changed the whole way you thought about the world and yourself.

You are sitting in class with other white and Indians kids and you can’t help but notice that your white classmates are better dressed and maybe not as dirty. I don’t care how well your parents raised you. But, us Indian kids had an equalizer, so to speak, a lot of the white farm kids after morning chores came to school smelling like manure, so in our young minds we weren’t on the bottom of the economic shit heap.

We lived in the small town of Bumduck during the 1940’s and 50‘s but we did not have indoor plumbing until the late 1950‘s, so we did not go to school with brushed teeth and a clean set of clothes everyday.

Living on and near an Indian reservation usually meant there were two different races co-existing. There were no Blacks, Asians, or Hispanics to speak of in those days. We made no distinction between our German, Norwegian, Polish, and Irish neighbors, white was white.

The biggest difference was not related to your race but rather to your economic situation.

Reservation unemployment must have been ninety percent or more. No job, no money.

No nice school clothes, or nice homes - simple observable, small town, reservation economics.

If there was a source of racial superiority that existed in Bumduck it had to do with the amount of money your parents had. White people generally had more jobs opportunities and more money to buy their kids nice school clothes so there always was some white kid who thought they were better then other poor white and Indian kids.

Good old brute force is a good racial equalizer.

If a poor dirty Indian kid could kick your clean wealthy white ass how could you be racially superior?

Reservation life was by no means a racial or economic utopia but it wasn’t as bad as Mississippi, and the best one could expect was begrudging respect. Even at a young age, although I wasn’t able to articulate it, I always knew that begrudging respect is better then no respect.

One thing I have noticed today is that modern Indians don’t give white people enough credit.

Most white people are not bigots, they got their own set of problems and don’t spend their time hating their neighbors of color.

Its kind of stupid to be a racist.

I hear people all the time say, “We have a Black President.” I don’t look at our President as Black, I look at him as half white.

When you think about it, maybe his white blood is the reason that he is a bad black president.

When I was old enough to understand current events my parents and their friends were still talking about WWII and the Korean War. Almost everyone had a son, brother, uncle, or nephew in the military during those wars.

I knew about Hirohito, Hitler, and Syngman Rhee before I knew anything about Wabasha, Inkpaduta, and Little Crow.

There were seven of us in our family, mom, dad, four boys, and one girl. Our sister was the baby of the family and my dad favored her over the rest of us.

When we were growing up in 1950’s a new product was introduced, maybe some of you are old enough to remember Tang - an instant orange drink. We couldn’t touch baby sister’s Tang, the “Old Man” promised to beat us with his stick or belt if we did. Mom and Dad also keep us in line with the threat to send us to a government boarding school.

Reservation life wasn’t that bad, especially if your were a “rich” Indians like us. By Indian standards and because my Mom was a registered nurse at the Indian hospital. She graduated from the Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the late 1930‘s. She was a good student at the Genoa Indian Boarding school located in northeastern Nebraska and received a full scholarship from the Pennsylvania Dutch Reform Church.

Part Two

One time I took a peek at her pay stub and noted that she made seventy-five cents an hour as a registered nurse. That is only thirty dollars a week, but that was twenty-nine dollars more then ninety-eight percent of the what other reservation Indians made. What that translated to was our shack was just slightly better then the other Indian shacks. And, we did not have to go to government boarding school, but rather were enrolled in the Bumduck Public School System.

My mother knew that the federal government had provided federal impact aid money to public school districts that educated Indian children. Few Indians knew of the Johnson O’Malley federal law, but somehow my mother knew, and when my older brother got kicked out of school for some minor infraction she reminded the school superintendent of this federal money. Boy, was he pissed when my mother reminded him that this federal money was to help Indian children succeed in the school system.

My grades weren’t great, if there were a hundred of us in my class, I might have been the 98th in class standing, but, and this is a big but, I never for a second thought I was a dummy.

Sometimes peer pressure is a greater force then good Indian parents and God.

My mother noticed that I was headed toward being just another negative Indian statistic so she sent to an Episcopal boarding school on the Rosebud Reservation.

Bishop Hare School had a religious strict environment, but without that religious influence at that time in my life I would have never graduated from high school in 1961.
I had planned on enrolling at the Haskell Institute, an Indian vocational school in Lawrence Kansas in the fall of 1961. I wanted to study a two year clerical administration course they called Commercial.

I had several uncles who were low-level Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats and I wanted to be like them. I admired their white shirts and shiny foreheads when they went to work. That to me epitomized Indian success.

Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s an Indian had three choices if they were lucky enough to graduate from high school.

He or she could go to Haskell, they could go into the military, or they could get a one way ticket, compliments of the BIA, to a major city such as Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, or Dallas. The BIA called this program Relocation and they would pay the rent and give you a small stipend until you found a minimum wage job.

A fast talking Army recruiter took advantage of this young naïve Indian and talked me into joining the Army in July 1961.

An Episcopal minister at Bishop Hare School said if you join the Army get into something easy, best advice I ever took. I signed up to be a clerk-typist in the Army for three years.

I came back to the Nawizi Reservation in 1964 and there still weren’t any employment opportunities so I hitchhiked to Chicago and got hired as a Sears Roebuck warehouseman for two dollars an hour. After a couple of months I quit that job for a better paying job loading cargo-trailers with a new company called United Parcel Service. It was mindless work but it paid four bucks a hour. More money to booze on.

I would work all week and drink all weekend. Tiring of that lifestyle I joined the Navy in November 1965.

I went to boot camp at Great Lakes Illinois, just up the road from where we lived, and I was trained as a hospital corpsman.

Since the United States Marine Corps does not have medical personnel they draft navy corpsmen to serve with their combat units. It was a very dangerous job - six hundred and ninety-two corpsman lost their lives while serving with the Marines in Vietnam.

By a series of minor miracles I survived Vietnam. I came back to the Nawizi Reservation in November 1967.

I became one of Indian America’s first “militants.“ That is what I was called by both the white and Indian people. My political activism scared them both, they didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

It was unheard of and therefore scary that an Indian would actually challenge the oppressive reservation system. Since I had just spent the past year fighting for the freedom of people in Southeast Asia I thought it would be nice to have a little bit of that same freedom back on the Nawizi Reservation.

Reservation unemployment must have still been running at the seventy to eighty percent level.

Alcoholism was rampant and almost everyone was receiving some kind of welfare money.

In 1964 President Johnson had declared the war on poverty. This federal initiative helped tribal governments get on their feet. At that time there was very little reservation economic development. Basically the War on Poverty came down to what tribe could submit the best proposal to get federal discretionary funds for a myriad of social service type programs.

The U.S. government’s War on Poverty was rapidly changing the economic and employment landscape on the reservation.

The Nawizi Tribe hired several educated white men and they become very adapt at writing proposals, using the negative reservation poverty statistics to get more federal money, and unwittingly creating a new class of Indians on the reservation - the “Poverty Pimps.”

In 1970 I was hired to be the director of the tribes alcoholism program. The federal money for this program came from the Center for Disease Control. The money was suppose to address the nutritional needs of the reservation, however, the Kunsi’s or grandmothers who were instrumental in getting the federal money convinced CDC that alcoholism was a greater problem.

I was the director for two years and then I decided that I needed to take advantage of the G.I. Bill before my benefits expired, so I went back to college and earned an easy college degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Later that same year I was hired by Indian Health Service Hospital in Bumduck and became the hospital’s Health Educator.

I quit all my bad habits and got married and we had four children.

All was going well until 1984 when the director of the regional Indian Health Service office, an alcoholic Indian lady, arbitrarily transferred six Indian Health Service employees. I refused to accept the transfer and I involuntarily resigned. I was out of the federal government for forty-two months.

To survive I got a job as the Nawizi Tribe’s Business Manager. I also became involved in the tribal government and was elected to serve as one of the Nawizi Tribe’s fifteen councilman. If that wasn’t enough to keep me busy three other Indian fellows and myself started a lumber yard business.

Part Three

The Nawizi Tribe applied for and received millions of federal discretionary dollars for every kind of social program under the South Dakota sun, and consequently spent millions of dollars purchasing building materials. My partners and I had this brilliant idea to cash in on the building boom on the reservation.

The Nawizi Tribe also professed to have an tribal member preference program. My partners and I quickly found out that there were tribal members who worked in tribe government that had become accustomed to buying from the local white owned lumber yards, and even though I cannot prove it there may have been “kickbacks” to them, so when we came along all of a sudden our new Indian owned lumberyard had to bid for every nail and door.

Tribal member preference turned out to be a meaningless phrase.

There were also several tribal member contractors hoping to cash in on the building boom. Many of them were building contractors only in name, and of course, their tribal membership. Most of them did not possess the trade or business skills to run a successful business.

One of those companies was the ABC Construction Company. They were awarded the construction contract to build the Nawizi Tribe’s first bingo hall. My partners successfully bid on providing the building material for the project. At the end of the building project ABC Construction left over one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid vendor bills. We got stuck with seventy-five thousand dollars.

We took ABC Construction to tribal court, but like they say, you can’t get blood out of a broke ass Indian.

We borrowed the money to capitalize lumber business from the Bureau of Indian Affair’s Revolving Loan Program. It was a good program, but if a contractor or vendor did not repay their short term loans, the program could fall like a house of cards. This is what happened. ABC Construction did not pay us for our building material and we could not repay the revolving loan program.

We went out of business, our accounts receivables was staggering by reservation standards - one hundred thousand dollars.

Several years after we went out of business the Nawizi Tribe took us to tribal court to collect the Revolving Loan debt. However, tribal law had a two year statute of limitations. The Revolving Loan debt wasn’t a federal issue so the Tribe could not take us to federal court. So, where did they take us? They filed their claim in South Dakota State Court!

All of the construction and building supply business took place on Indian land so the state judge threw it out because the State of South Dakota had no jurisdiction on tribal land.

After all these years I am still confounded as to why the Nawizi Tribe took us to South Dakota State Court, which is against everything the tribe purports to believe in.

“We are a sovereign nation, we are a treaty tribe, blah, blah, blah…”

While I was a tribal councilman, my vote was absolutely critical when we decided to go after five million dollars that was awarded to the tribe in a 1972 land settlement case.

After many years of legal wrangling the Tribe was eventually awarded $3.2 million dollars, after attorney fee’s.

A new tribal council was elected and they essentially wasted the $3.2 million dollars, and not one word of gratitude was expressed to those who played a big part in getting this money.

When one door closes another one opens.

One day in 1987 I had a chance meeting the with new director of Indian Health Service and to my surprise he was aware of my involuntary resignation. He actually created a new position for me at the local Indian Hospital. I began work in April 1987 as the Community Health Director. I supervised several programs and eighteen people.

In addition to my federal job, in 1991 I started up a small payday lending business, which I operated out of my home after regular work hours.

I started with only eight hundred dollars.

This small lending business actually turned out to be a good business. I did not take any money from the business, choosing to reinvest it right back into the business.

Things were going quite well until the director of the local Indian hospital, one day in 1996, ordered me to transfer one hundred thousand dollars from the programs I supervised to his hospital budget. This request was impossible to fulfill. My programs had no extra money to give. It was a stupid request so I said no.

For that I was charged with insubordination and eventually fired. In March 1997 the government must have realized they had a weak reason to fire me so they allowed me to resign.

I had twenty-five years of federal and military service under my belt so I took their offer.

I bailed out of the government with sixty-five thousand dollars from my employee savings plan.

I used this money to capitalized my payday lending business and I hit the ground running and never looked back.

By reinvesting my profits, by the year 2003, I was loaning out over a million dollars a year off my original investment of eight hundred dollars! I was netting over a hundred thousand dollars a year. And, was able to hire my son and daughter to help me run the business.

We epitomized Indian economic development.

In 1996, the Nawizi Tribe changed their name to the Oyate Tribe. Oyate means people. The modern Dakota Indian - the “Friendly People, the “Allies, were now the Oyate.”

For some reason they apparently weren’t convinced that they were Indian enough, so they voted to change their name to Oyate/People.

In 2003 the Nawizi Tribe voted to have four year terms for its elected ten officials.

Gaming revenues had now become the new buffalo. The formerly broke, mostly unemployed Indians we elected, once they got into office immediately raised their salary and benefits up to a hundred grand apiece.

They also squandered millions of gaming revenue dollars away on worthless trips, expensive sunglasses, and cowboy hats.

I made the mistake of publicly criticizing the new tribal council for their greed and corruption.

It is truly amazing how a regular Jane and Joe Blow Indian can become so arrogant and greedy when given power and position.

They did not like anyone criticizing their actions so they became hell bent on running me out of my payday lending business.

All ten of the tribal council signed and sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service hoping to trigger an IRS audit on me and my business.

They also contacted the South Dakota State Banking Commission reporting that I did not have a South Dakota payday lenders license. It was true, I did not have a South Dakota license, all those years I was in business I relied on the assumption that my tribal business license was good enough.

My payday lending business relied on tribal and casino worker voluntary employee payroll deductions to secure my loans, so the tribal council cut off that privilege.

It is tough loaning money to Indians without some sort of collateral and taking away the employee payroll deductions killed my business’s best means of collateralizing my loans.

All the while this was going on (2004) I invested in a valuable lakeshore development with my second cousin. He had the land, I had the money.

One day while my partner was watching our development in progress a real estate agent approached him and offered him two million dollars for the property. We thought the seventeen acres of lakeshore property was worth a million dollars or more, so when my cousin got the offer he came to my office and was quite pleased.

We had a fifty-fifty deal to split the profits from the lake shore development project. He went home and told his family the good news and instead of rejoicing with him they questioned whether I was entitled to a million dollars of the two million dollar offer.

My former partner then spent the next seven years attempting to invalidate the deed to the valuable land we jointly owned.

Meanwhile, the Oyate Tribe forced me to close my business. Actually, I choose to close my business on Main Street rather than acquiesce to South Dakota state jurisdiction. I figured that I was an Indian loaning money to Indians on an Indian reservation and I possessed a tribal business license.

I was convinced that tribal sovereignty meant something, even if the tribal “leadership” did not.

That was the second time for me that the Indian politico types threw tribal sovereignty to the wind in favor of their own screwed up agendas.

Part Four

I was in tribal court with the Oyate Tribal Council eight times from 2003 thru 2006, until the voters threw them all out of office in November 2006.

The membership also voted to go back to two year terms. As near as I can estimate they wasted over ten million dollars during their four year term.

The tribal council even attempted to restrict freedom of press on the reservation. Myself and other had to take this fundamental right to court, eventually we prevailed.

I should mention that the Oyate Tribe publishes a weekly newspaper and I had been submitting weekly “Open Letters to the Oyate (People)” for years.

My intent was to keep the Oyate informed, however, the new tribal “leaders” like the old tribal “leaders” did not want the Oyate to be informed.

Truth is an elusive thing on most Indian reservations in America.

I attempted to re-allocate the way the millions of dollars of gaming revenues were distributed with no luck.

In retaliation the tribal council attempted to enact a banishment ordinance specifically directed at me, calling me a predatory lender, and then they tried to manipulate the election ordinance to get themselves re-elected.

I took them to court and the tribal judge ruled in their favor, however, by now the tribal membership had become aware of all their waste, corruption, and stupidity and voted them all out of office.

A new council was installed in January 2007 and they assumed that since the old council received over a hundred thousand dollars in salary and benefits they were also entitled to a like amount.

Others and myself continued to question the actions and motives of the new tribal council. And of course they also didn’t like anyone questioning their actions and motives.

Even though the voters had cut the head off of the former tribal council beast the tribal council’s tail was wagging.

Most Tribal governments in America are a lot like third world governments, Gadhafi, Assad, Kim Ill Jong, Hosni Mubarak have nothing on tribal governments.

The difference is tribal governments don’t kill its members, however, they torture them with their greed, rob them of their hope, and oppress them with their stupidity.

In several of my weekly articles I wrote about the Siouxdoe Community, located near Minneapolis Minnesota, I called them Mdewakanton Imposters. (The Mdewakanton Band is one of the seven bands of Dakota Indians and they were the ones responsible for initiating the War of 1862 that got the other six bands summarily thrown out of Minnesota in 1863 and all of their treaties abrogated).

A Indian lady with a doctorate degree in Anthropologist wrote a book detailing how a small group of thirty-four Indians fooled the Bureau of Indian Affairs into granting them tribal government status in 1969.

Little did anyone know that thirty years later their location would gave them access to the extremely lucrative Minneapolis gaming market. That small group of Mdewakanton imposter is now one of the richest tribes in America.

And, I suggested in the tribal newspaper that the Oyate Tribe, who were indigenous to Minnesota, go visit the Governor of Minnesota, and possibly strike a deal with the State of Minnesota to build a casino in downtown Minneapolis.

Several years prior the Governor of Minnesota attempted to partner with the Northern Chippewa Tribes to build a casino in the Twin Cities area.

For a number of reasons it never happened.

So, I took this idea and presented in to the Oyate Tribal Council in July 2008. The Oyate Tribe owed the Siouxdoe Community over thirty million dollars so they were afraid to pursue the idea, and that’s all it was, an idea.

But, it would have been a heck of an idea if the Governor and the Minnesota Legislature would have went along with it.

I would make an educated guess that the Twin Cities gaming market could generate a billion dollars business a year.

Did I mention that the Oyate Tribe got kicked out of Minnesota in 1862 and all of their remaining land forfeited and their treaties abrogated by the U.S. Government?

At one time the Oyate Tribe and six other bands of Dakota Indian owned half of Minnesota. I tried to convince the Nawizi “leaders” that they had more right to build a casino in Minneapolis then the handful of modern day Siouxdoe “Indians.”

The Siouxdoe Tribe did not want to hear that!

Their reaction to my proposal was astounding.

In August 2008 I received a certified letter from two of their executive officers informing me that I had been permanently banished from their reservation and casino.

I was dumbfounded as to how I should take this banishment. Should I be proud or pissed off that a multi-million dollar tribe is threatened by one little Indian with an opinion?

It was a dumb thing to do on their part, but when you have millions of dollars of gaming money, after awhile you begin to think your shit doesn’t stink.

Like I said earlier, its amazing how mostly unemployed, uneducated, broke-ass Indians can become so arrogant when you give him or her a little power and position.

Because of the thirty million dollar loan the Oyate Tribe handed over their sovereignty to this handful of imposter “Indians.” In my way of thinking a mere thirty million dollar loan should not be a reason to reject a billion dollar business idea.

I am convinced that tribal sovereignty is a meaningless three syllable word that uneducated Indian politicians like to throw around to impress themselves.

My grandmother on my mother’s side is a full blood Seneca-Cayuga of Oklahoma.

The Seneca-Cayuga’s were originally from New York, they were first deported to Sandusky, Ohio, and then to northeastern Oklahoma in the mid 18th century.

Grandma went to the Carlisle Industrial School in Carlisle Pennsylvania, met and married my grandfather a full blood Omaha Indian from Nebraska.

This makes me 1/4th Seneca-Cayuga, ¼ Omaha, and ½ Dakota Indian.

In 2009 I enrolled with the Seneca-Cayuga’s.

I was also enrolled with the Oyate Tribe of South Dakota.

I committed the Cardinal of all tribal sins. No other indiscretion in the Indian World is more egregious then being dual enrolled. This is a new tribal sin.
In 2006 the Nawizi Tribe had enacted a ban against being dual enrolled. I have heard the reason for this ban is that this dual enrollment constitutes “double dipping.” Apparently “double dipping,” or, receiving money or benefits from more than one tribe is the most serious of all crimes in Indian Country.

The Seneca-Cayuga Tribes try’s to give their elderly members two hundred dollars a month and the Nawizi Tribe gives their elders a one hundred and fifty dollar WalMart coupon every month.

I suppose I can understand this reasoning if I was a member of the Siouxdoe Community (incidentally the Siouxdoe is barred by federal regulation from calling themselves a Tribe) which gives its handful of members over a million dollars a year from their gaming revenues, and say for example, I was also eligible to be a member of the Pequot Indians of Connecticut, which also gives its members huge monthly per capita payments from their gaming revenues.

(Coincidentally, the Pequots are another “Indian” tribe who’s members are posturing as real Indians, most, if not all, are white and black people.

Once again the BIA dropped the ball by recognizing them as an Indian tribe.

In June 2010, a Oyate tribal member reported this to the tribal council. On December 29, 2010 the outgoing Oyate Tribal Council dis-enrolled me from the Oyate Tribe.

A Oyate member can be convicted and sent to prison for raping, robbing, murdering, or molesting another Oyate tribal member but they cannot be dis-enrolled.

I am still a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe. They do not have a dual enrollment prohibition, which begs the question why does one tribe have a prohibition against being dual enrolled and another tribes doesn’t?

I think the answer lies in the fact that some tribes, and some Indians actually practice what they preach and some Indians who get elected to office do not become arrogant, stupid, and greedy once they get elected to office.

You cannot attend a tribal powwow, meeting, or conference, etc., without hearing some leader beginning or ending with the utterance of the phrase:

“Hau, Mitakuyapi Owasin.” “Hello, All My Relatives/Relations.”

In addition to professing that “We Are All related” the Oyate Tribe also professes to embrace the ancient Dakota values of Sharing and Generosity.

Just don’t claim all your relatives and accept all your other relative’s gifts.

I haven’t had much luck being an Indian. I lost several business opportunities, several jobs, and finally my tribal citizenship at the hands of the Dakota; Allies; Friendly People, We are all related, Oyate, Indians.

On the other hand, as a full blood Dakota Indian citizen of the mostly non-Indian cities, counties, and states I have lived in I did okay for myself.

And, never once did I hear the white oyate say they were “All Related,” or, they believed in Sharing and Generosity Values.

A real Indian friend of mine says that “living well is the best revenge.” I am one of only a few non-gaming income Indian millionaires in America.

The end.