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Date Posted: 16:55:00 07/27/01 Fri
Big money at stake over Indian ancestry
Friday, July 27, 2001
ANDY GRIMM
THE SAGINAW NEWS
http://sa.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/20010727schippewas.frm
For more than 60 years, disputes over who is and who is not a Saginaw Chippewa have fractured politics on the Mount Pleasant reservation.
Big money hangs in the balance, and tribal leaders' most recent effort to resolve the membership dilemma has again divided the tribe with now-familiar accusations of favoritism and fraud.
A panel made up of seven members appointed by Chief Phillip Peters Sr.'s Tribal Council has begun formal hearings intended to weed out members with no ancestral link to the group.
Opponents of the move say the panel is targeting council critics and members who have aligned themselves with Peters' rivals - and they even claim the lineage of the chief and other high-ranking officials is suspect.
If stripped of tribal status, each member stands to lose $52,000 a year in profit-sharing from the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort, as well as eligibility for tribal housing and federal health and educational benefits.
The panel will rule on individual cases "in a reasonable amount of time," said Frank J. Cloutier, a tribal spokesman.
Members may appeal the panel's decision in tribal court.
"We're not going to put these people out on the street and kick them to the curb," Cloutier said. "That's not how things are done in Indian Country. We're a very family-oriented people."
Families feud
Members of rival families that have long dominated Chippewa politics have privately sneered at the lineage of their opponents, said Ben Hinmon, a member of a tribal council ousted by Peters' group in 1999. However, formal challenges seldom occurred until after the tribe began paying members shares of the lucrative profits - now more than $300 million a year - from the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort in 1993.
Hinmon agrees weeding out members is necessary, but said that with the enrollment advisory committee - as well as tribal judges - appointed by the council, candidates for disenrollment have little hope of getting a fair hearing.
"The checks and balances available to every other citizen in America are not available to Indian nations," said Hinmon, whose family was the first to face an enrollment hearing.
Hinmon, a former tribal secretary, is now chairman of the Saginaw Ojibwe Heritage Fund, a group that plans to mount legal challenges over the disenrollment measures.
Hinmon and a group led by Kevin Chamberlain rose to power in 1996, when members overwhelmingly voted to recall a Peters-led council shortly after Peters attempted to prevent 480 members from receiving casino profits until they proved their tribal descent.
The Chamberlain council also began a membership review with the aid of genealogy consultants that resulted in a half-dozen people losing their membership, Hinmon said.
Now, Hinmon and about 50 of his relatives stand to lose their member status, and he estimates the council may cut as many as 500 others from the rolls.
Jackpot
For the 2,700-member tribe, removing even a small number of members can boost per-capita payments, said Norman Fowler, a tribal member who faces an enrollment hearing later this month.
"Until the casino was up and running and going pretty good, there was no push for disenrollment," he said. "The only reason this is being questioned is these 500 people are getting $1,000 a week."
Tribal leaders in November mailed letters to Hinmon, Fowler and an undisclosed number of other members.
The letters, many of them addressed to long-dead ancestors - Hinmon's letter was marked for a grandmother who died in 1997 - informed the recipients of problems tracing their roots to one of four base rolls.
The lists were compiled, often sloppily, by the tribes and federal officials during the late 1880s, said genealogy expert James McClerken.
"By disenrolling a dead person they are destroying lineal descent so they can disenroll their descendants," said McClerken, who has worked as a consultant for the tribe under both the Chamberlain and Peters administrations.
"I've never seen anything like this."
The letters, and subsequent hearing, have not explained what limbs are missing from the Hinmon family tree.
"We've never received anything in writing" explaining why the family is under review, Hinmon said. "We asked (the Enrollment Advisory Committee), 'What evidence do we have to refute?' and they said they had none.
"It puts us in an odd position because we don't know what they need."
Hinmon said officials recorded the proceedings, but refused to allow his attorney and a stenographer to attend the hearing, which will make appeals difficult.
Tracing roots
Elderly and uneducated members have no idea how to perform the research necessary to support their membership in the hearings, said Joan Meyers.
Meyers' grandparents moved to St. Charles in the 1920s, hoping to leave behind the grinding poverty on the Chippewa's Isabella County reservation.
Members who moved off the reservation often dropped off official membership rolls maintained by the tribe. Another base roll created when the tribe adopted a constitutional government in 1937 further tangled matters.
The federal government in the early 1980s required Chippewa leaders to extend membership to any person with one quarter Indian blood who could trace his or her roots to one of four Chippewa membership lists.
Meyers was one of nearly 3,000 who applied for membership, and many of those who joined during the "open window" are now disputed by the tribe.
Meyers' enrollment documentation was accepted by the tribe and even bears Peters' signature. She said leaders have targeted her because of her outspoken criticism of both regimes.
Meyers moved to an apartment on the reservation and has spent much of her time researching her lineage and helping others to trace their roots.
"They are not going to take our heritage away from us," she said. "We have elders who don't know what to do. They don't know how to trace their tree."
Meyers said her research shows that members of Peters' family do not meet membership criteria, and that other tribal leaders falsified documents in order to maintain their member status.
Cloutier refused to discuss individual cases, but said the tribal council created an Enrollment Department with trained staff to help members research their claims.
Attorneys and other advocates are allowed to attend only if they represent minors or members judged infirm, a measure the council adopted to allow the hearings to proceed quickly, Cloutier said.
The review process is more fair and deliberate than any previously undertaken by the tribe, Cloutier said, adding that the Chamberlain council used ongoing membership disputes to invalidate three unfavorable tribal elections.
Members have demanded that leaders resolve the membership dilemma, and even launched yet another recall effort when the Peters council appeared to drag its feet, Cloutier said.
A survey of tribal members showed a majority favored the membership review, Cloutier said.
Hinmon and others dispute the survey, and maintain that members overwhelmingly voted to allow all present members to remain, but to reform the rules for adding new members.
Tribal Council member Ronald Jackson, who represents most of the off-reservation members who will face review, said he has recommended such a plan "on several occasions" but was rebuffed. He refused to comment on the current enrollment review, but called it "the will of the people."
"Most of the researchers have come up with the same names," Jackson said. "You hear the same names over and over again, and there has to be something to it." t
Andy Grimm is a staff writer for The Saginaw News. You may reach him at 776-9688.
Copyright 2001 Michigan Live Inc.
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Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. Full copyright retained by the original publication.
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