Fairness? Land Sakes Alive
If it’s fairness Congress wants in dealing with American Indian tribes, it’s going about it the wrong way, Mary Gaddy of Spokane says.
At issue is a proposal by Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla. The Istook bill would let local governments determine if taxes must be collected from non-Indian buyers of items such as cigarettes when additional lands are placed in trust for the tribes.
Spokane’s Republican congressman, George Nethercutt, a co-sponsor, calls the plan a matter of fairness to off-reservation businesses and to local governments.
Congress could be fair, said Gaddy, by enforcing treaties and restoring the tribes’ land to them.
“Then the tribes wouldn’t have to generate income through tobacco sales and casinos. They could be rich landholders and successful businessmen and women, just like those who came across this country and stole every piece of land in sight with absolutely no regard for the people who already were living there - the Indians.”
A “white person of European descent,” Gaddy said she’s not as interested in solving the local governments’ and off-reservation businesses’ problems as in learning the truth of the nation’s history.
“Without that truth, there will be no equity,” she said. “I challenge Reps. Istook and our own George Nethercutt to seek that truth, too. Shame on you, George.”
Out with the tanks, in with the pitching wedges
As the White House and the current Congress spar over another round of military base closures, Wells Longshore of Spokane favors keeping unneeded installations useful by converting them to non-military uses.
“As the Scripture says, ‘swords into plowshares,”’ he said.
“I like what my friend Leon Panetta (a former California congressman and then President Clinton’s White House chief of staff) did - converted Fort Ord, where I learned to fire an M-1 rifle, into the University of California-Monterey.
“Also, he opened the Presidio in San Francisco to local folks who’d been dying for years to play golf at the Presidio golf course.”
Such creative solutions will provide jobs, might even make money and would spare politicians the constituent anger that accompanies base closures, says Longshore.
Time out
“Bagpipes” is going to take a breather for a couple of weeks. The next column will appear July 10.
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