Sioux resistance in South Dakota

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

WSJ, Oct. 31, 2002

Indian vs. White Politics
Roils Quiet Dakota County

Bearing the Brunt of Police Initiatives,
Sioux Try to Unseat Local Incumbents
By PATRICIA CALLAHAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MARTIN, S.D. -- Three years ago, the Bennett County Commission issued an
order to its new sheriff: Reduce the backlog of arrest warrants.

"Our jail has been full ever since," Sheriff Russel Waterbury says.

Full mostly of Native Americans. By his own reckoning, Sheriff Waterbury
says, about 90% of the 2,000 warrants were for Sioux living on nearby
tribal lands, where he has no jurisdiction. To serve those warrants, the
sheriff says, he and his deputies pulled people over for minor traffic
offenses. If they found any outstanding warrants, they made arrests --
of people often too poor to pay a $5 fine, which meant spending time in
jail.

Sheriff Waterbury, 43 years old, says he has simply been doing his job.
But to many of the Native Americans who make up 52% of the 3,574 people
in this county, the sheriff has waged a campaign of harassment rooted in
racism. "They know the reservation license plates, and they make up
probable cause" for traffic stops, says 37-year-old Sandy Flye, who
lives on Sioux tribal land.

Now the Sioux, who for years had remained culturally apart and
politically quiescent, have mobilized to fight the sheriff's campaign,
challenging the county's white leadership. That has prompted an angry
white backlash, setting the stage for the most contentious elections
around here in years.

Early this year, three Indians entered the Democratic primary. After a
big voter-registration drive on tribal lands in the county, they
defeated the three white incumbents who had planned to seek re-election
to the five-seat Bennett County Commission on Nov. 5. An Indian also
stepped in to run for Sheriff Waterbury's job. "When the sheriff started
harassing people, it opened a lot of people's eyes that we could get out
and vote and change that," says Albert Sharp, one of the Indian
candidates for a commission seat.

Bennett County, surrounded on three sides by the Pine Ridge and Rosebud
Indian reservations, has long been dominated by Democrats -- white
Democrats. Shocked by the Indian incursion, the party's local leaders
have recruited a slate of white independents to run against the Indians.
Even Gary Dean Nelson, chairman of the county Democratic Party for 23
years, plans to vote for the independents.

"These activists have made it an Indian/white vote," says Mr. Nelson.

Native Americans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. population,
and though their concentrations are significant in many counties and
some Western states, their participation in the electoral process often
is even less than that of the general population. With a critical U.S.
Senate seat up for grabs in South Dakota, voter registration efforts
among Indians, who make up 8% of the state's population, have been so
successful that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state
authorities are investigating allegations of voter-registration fraud on
or near reservations, including Bennett County.

The white establishment in Bennett County argues that the issue is less
about race than about representation without taxation. The three Native
American victors in the Democratic primary -- Mr. Sharp, Francis "Sonny"
Ruff and Gerald Bettelyoun -- and many of their would-be constituents
live on one of the parcels of Sioux trust land that encompasses 28% of
Bennett County. People who live on Indian trust land don't pay county
property tax.

"If they're going to use your roads and use your schools, they should
pay taxes," says Ed Risse, one of the three county commissioners who
lost to the Indians. He says he pays annual taxes of about $12,000 on
his 5,000-acre ranch.

Whites worry even more that an Indian-dominated commission would remove
taxable land from the county tax rolls. Under federal law, Indian owners
of private land near reservations can seek to place the land in trust,
exempting it from property taxes. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs
ultimately rules on such requests, but the county commission can weigh
in on the matter, and the commission always has voted to oppose the
applications. In recent years, the BIA has usually agreed with the
commission.

The Indian candidates for county commission say they would support
requests to convert private Sioux land into trusts. "If I can't make a
decent living, and I've got this chunk of land out there that's not in
trust, maybe I have to take something off my table to get that tax
paid," says Mr. Ruff, an Indian who won in the primary.

Federal Money

Mr. Sharp, another Indian candidate, notes that the county's schools
receive federal money to offset the impact of Indian land. "At most
we're talking about $10,000 to $20,000 of tax income they're going to
lose," Mr. Sharp says of potential conversions of Bennett County land to
trust status. Property taxes make up nearly 60% of the county's $1.9
million annual budget. The increase in fine collections under Sheriff
Waterbury has been more than offset by fees for court-appointed
attorneys and court costs.

Martin, the seat of Bennett County, is a law-and-order town. The code
department is quick to send letters to homeowners whose grass is too
tall or too weedy. In this one-stoplight community, the American Legion
Hall and city and county offices are the dominant buildings in the
three-block-long commercial strip on Main Street.

The surrounding countryside is a patchwork of two cultures. Hay bales
and farm buildings dot rolling hills of green and brown pasture. On
tribal land nearby, gravel roads with potholes the size of wheelbarrows
cut through tightly packed clusters of squat, drab homes in the
federally subsidized Sunrise Housing development.

The Sioux, like many other tribes, have remained outside the mainstream
of American culture, even after the U.S. government's efforts to force
them to assimilate. In the early part of the 20th century, for example,
the federal government shipped Indian children to boarding schools where
they were given Western names and beaten if they spoke their native
language.

In Bennett County, Indians and whites do business with each other and
sometimes marry, but for the most part, they are divided by culture, as
well as by economics. Some 39% of Bennett County residents live below
the federal poverty level. On the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation, the proportion is 67%, and on Rosebud, 51%.

A few years ago, county commissioners grew troubled that Sheriff Martin
Leeper spent more time warning schoolchildren about the dangers of drugs
than serving warrants on miscreants who failed to appear in traffic
court. County residents "had developed an attitude under Leeper's term
in office that it didn't matter what they did because they weren't going
to get picked up anyway," says County Commission Chairman Gary Nies, who
lost in the primary. "If we didn't have him serve the warrants, we've
got no law."

When a 1999 state audit found improper bookkeeping in the sheriff's
office, the commissioners pressured Mr. Leeper to resign. They replaced
him with Mr. Waterbury, a former Bennett County deputy who had entered
law enforcement in his 30s, after the closing of the slaughterhouse
where he had worked.

The commission then gave him the order to start executing some of those
roughly 2,000 warrants. The commission wasn't seeking to quell any
serious crime wave. Misdemeanor warrants -- for offenses such as failure
to pay fines or appear in court -- outnumbered felonies eight-to-one,
Mr. Waterbury says, and they dated back as far as the 1970s.

Suddenly, Indians who ventured off the reservation found themselves
pulled over for the smallest offenses -- a broken tail light, a dark
license-plate light, a bauble dangling from a rearview mirror. Once a
car was stopped, Mr. Waterbury and his deputies would run warrant checks
on everyone inside. An unpaid fine from years earlier could mean a trip
to jail. In that case, Sheriff Waterbury says, "they came in and sat
until somebody had five bucks."

Arrested or not, nearly everyone resented the traffic stops, which
didn't let up even as the sheriff cut the number of outstanding warrants
in half. "Sure if you're breaking the law, you should pull someone
over," says Charlie Cummings, a former tribal officer who is running
against Sheriff Waterbury. "But if you're not doing anything, the
sheriff shouldn't harass you."

Mr. Cummings says a deputy stopped his wife this summer and told her he
thought one of her children wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The kids had
buckled up, Mr. Cummings says, but the deputy still ran a warrant check.

Some Indians asked commissioners to tell Sheriff Waterbury and his
deputies to ease up. That didn't work, so in April last year, Ms. Flye
and about a dozen others formed a Sioux-rights group and took their
complaints en masse to a meeting with the commission, accusing the
sheriff of stopping cars and searching Indians without cause. (In South
Dakota, numeric prefixes on license plates signify a driver's county of
residence.)

Ms. Flye complained that a deputy stopped her in the fall of 2000, but
didn't cite a probable cause, saying only that he thought there was a
warrant for her arrest. He found none. Later that year, another deputy
pulled her over as she was driving from her night job on the Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation to her home in Sunrise Housing. He ran a warrant
check on her and let her go, she said.

The sheriff said that in the second stop, Ms. Flye had crossed the
center line, and that the deputy -- not knowing she was tired -- thought
she might be drunk. The sheriff says he has no records of any other stops.

The commissioners -- including Wayne Livermont, the lone Indian member
-- told the crowd that the sheriff had probable cause for his actions.

At a subsequent commission meeting, some white business owners
complained that the sheriff's efforts were driving Indian customers
away. But as Pamela Ireland, the county's prosecutor, put it: "If you
are breaking the law, you should pay," according to minutes of the meeting.

Sheriff Waterbury knows that many Indians despise him. "They say I'm the
reincarnation of Custer," he says. He insists that he pulls over anyone
who breaks the law, regardless of skin color. And he notes that his wife
and one-year-old daughter are registered members of the Sioux tribe. "We
don't just pick out natives," he says.

Many Showdowns

The April 2001 meeting was the first of many showdowns between
disenchanted Indians and county officials. The Sioux group asked U.S.
Justice Department mediators for help. But in meeting after meeting --
some of them involving federal officials -- whites and Indians walked
away frustrated. Some commissioners thought the Indians were wasting
everyone's time. "It was the same complaint over and over again, and
nothing got accomplished," Mr. Nies says.

Many Indians wanted to launch a boycott of white businesses. But Alice
Two Bulls Young, a 68-year-old Lakota language instructor and Ms. Flye's
mother, didn't think the group should punish white store owners, already
fearful of losing business, for something they had no control over. "I
couldn't see making them pay for what the sheriff and his deputies were
doing," the tribal elder says. Out of respect for her, the group tabled
the boycott idea.

Then came a more radical one: vote.

In the 2000 primary, turnout barely reached 23% of registered voters in
the county's two largely Indian precincts, compared with 43% in the
other seven precincts. And only one Indian in recent years had shown any
interest in joining the county commission: Mr. Livermont, who owns an
8,000-acre ranch and supports the sheriff's actions.

Mr. Sharp, Mr. Ruff and Mr. Bettelyoun decided to run for the
commission. A paperwork snafu kept Mr. Cummings from seeking the
Democratic nomination for sheriff, so he entered the race as an independent.

White leaders in Bennett County paid little attention to the Indian
candidates. "We weren't particularly concerned because they had never
got out in numbers and voted before," says Commissioner Nies.

And even if they did, mismanagement has plagued the neighboring Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation, so white leaders figured few would support a
Sioux campaign to run the county. "Indians -- they're not known to be
able to run anything," says Commissioner Risse, who notes that he has
grandchildren who are part Indian.

But under the leadership of 45-year-old Jesse Clausen, the Sioux ran a
very effective primary campaign. Mr. Clausen is an ex-convict -- he
pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1993 -- who launched a construction
business that he says had revenue last year of $1.2 million, most of it
from jobs on tribal land. He says he got involved with the campaign
because sheriff's deputies searched his home while he was in the
hospital last year.


"If you've ever had your house searched, it's a creepy, ugly feeling,"
he says.

Mr. Waterbury says nobody searched Mr. Clausen's home. The sheriff says
one of his deputies found Mr. Clausen's dog wandering around the
neighborhood, saw that Mr. Clausen's door was open and left a note
inside that the dog had been taken to the pound.

To sign up voters, the Sioux group checked a list of tribal members
against a list of registered voters, noting each Indian who wasn't
registered. Then they went door-to-door, held dinners, sent letters,
spoke on the local radio station.

On primary day, June 4, Mr. Clausen and his volunteers visited Indian
homes, urging everyone to vote and offering transportation to polling
places. Mrs. Two Bulls Young and another tribal elder sat in a polling
place, sending volunteers to the homes of those who didn't show up.

In the county's two largely Indian precincts, the number of voters
casting ballots jumped to 406 this year from 169 in the 2000 primary.
The three Indian commissioners each received at least 300 votes. The
nearest white incumbent, Mr. Risse, had 273.

The white community was shocked. The incumbents who had ordered Sheriff
Waterbury to act on the warrants knew from the outset that most were for
Indians, but they hadn't expected any political consequences. "We were
maybe asleep or doubting they would get that well-organized," says
Commissioner Nies.

Commissioner Risse blames the outcome on political opportunism. "The
people that are running are probably not even half Indian," says the
rancher. "They want to be called that to get the benefits the government
pays." The candidates are registered tribal members and more than half
Indian.

Local white Democrats immediately asked the Office of Special Counsel in
Washington to intervene under the Hatch Act, which prohibits most
federal employees from holding public office. That forced two of the
Indian candidates, Mr. Ruff and Mr. Bettelyoun, to choose between their
jobs at the federal Indian Health Service and the commission seats. Mr.
Ruff dropped out of the election on Oct. 22. The next day, Mr.
Bettelyoun, a construction inspector for the IHS for 27 years, quit his
job to stay in the race.

"I committed myself to this, and I want to stick it out," Mr. Bettelyoun
says. "I run to make sure the commissioners are at least listening to
the native people."

With only two Indian candidates remaining, the Sioux rights group is
campaigning for Tom Hammond, a white Republican with an Indian wife who
lives on Indian trust land, as a candidate for the third seat.

Mr. Nelson, the local Democratic Party chairman, and other white
Democratic leaders plan to mimic the Indian tactics to get out the vote
on Nov. 5. Mr. Nies says: "The wakeup call has already been sounded."


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