Aid To Nw Tribes Varies Dramatically Income-Reporting Plan Suggested By Gorton Seeks Bia Funding According To Need

Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest as a whole fare better than most nationally in terms of per capita federal aid, but wide disparities exist from reservation to reservation within the region.

The Colville Confederated Tribes led the nation among major tribes with $1,399 per person while members of the the Spokane Tribe of Indians received $419.

At the top of the list is the Squaxin Island Tribe, which is receiving $2,460 in payments from the Bureau of Indian Affairs this year for every one of its 515 members living on the reservation in Shelton, Wash., and the Coquille Indian Tribe, which gets $2,006 for each of its 346 members on the reservation in Coos Bay, Ore.

At the other extreme, Oregon’s Umatillas receive per capita payments of only $110 and Washington’s Puyallups only $53.

There are many reasons for the discrepancies, from timber and fisheries management responsibilities tribes handle for the federal and state governments to congressional lobbying that helps secure special additional funding.

Nevertheless, tribes at the lower end of the scale “complain bitterly about it,” said Nick Longley, a budget analyst for the BIA area office in Portland.

“We have been dealing with rifts between - I wouldn’t say the haves and have-nots, maybe the have-nots and the have-less-yet,” he said.

An Associated Press analysis found tribes in the Pacific Northwest receive nearly twice the amount per capita that tribes in the Dakotas get on average and nearly eight times the share for the Cherokee and other tribes in eastern Oklahoma.

The Senate is set to debate legislation as early as this week that could lead to some of the wealthier tribes being cut off the federal dole.

“All tribes have needs but the tribes with the greatest needs and poorest situations should be, at the least, given some level of preference,” said Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the interior with jurisdiction over the BIA’s budget.

Gorton inserted a provision in the Interior Department’s appropriation that would require tribes to begin reporting their income to the BIA. It’s a first step toward requiring the BIA to fund tribes according to need.

When the BIA first started funding tribes in the 1930s, the money was apportioned according to population. That started to change in the 1960s and 1970s, BIA officials say.

Tribes with influential representatives in Congress, such as the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, D-Wash., got more money. So did tribes that took over management of BIA services or won rights to water and other natural resources and needed federal money to enforce them.

That money subsequently was built into the tribe’s annual funding base regardless of how the tribe’s needs might change.

John McCoy of the Tulalip tribe in Marysville, Wash., is among tribal leaders headed to Washington, D.C., this week to lobby against Gorton’s proposal. His tribe, with 4,549 members living on the reservation, receives one of the smallest per-capita payments in the region, $60 this year.

“Our allocation is low now. We are struggling to make ends meet,” McCoy said today.

Ron Allen, president of the National Congress of American Indians and chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Council in Sequim, Wash., says the per capita figures are misleading.

Allen, another loud critic of Gorton’s efforts, said tribes in the Northwest have been more aggressive about managing resources and taking on responsibilities for law enforcement and other services the federal government provided in the past. They receive federal money to provide their own services.

“Tribes shouldn’t be penalized because of their successes,” said Allen, whose tribe is near the top in Washington state with per capita payments of $1,864 - $1.2 million in aid divided among the 641 members living on the reservation.

“You can’t come in and fix a problem like this overnight in such a blatant and callous way. It’s fundamentally wrong,” he said.

In many cases, the size of the payments in the Northwest is larger than other places because of federal court rulings finding tribes have treaty rights to fisheries.

“Those are unique,” Longley said. “Other tribes have water and fish but absent those court decisions, there isn’t a legal mandate to them.”

“Because of those fisheries decisions, federal dollars are provided to make good on those fishing rights,” he said.

The Colville Confederated Tribes based in Nespelem, Wash., with a per capita payment of $1,399, manage 1 million acres of timber land.

The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation in Warm Springs, Ore., with a per capita payment of $1,237, has timber operations on 348,000 of its 644,000-acre reservation.

“The bulk of our revenue comes from timber and leases on dams,” said Nat Shaw, a spokesman for the Warm Springs tribes. The tribes’ first timber sale dates to 1942. They took over full operation of local mills in 1967.

Bob Whitener, executive director of the Squaxin Island Tribal Council, said his tribe saves the government money even with the large per capita payments.

That’s largely because it has picked up the federal responsibility for managing shellfish and marine fisheries in the area.

“We pay for everything from hatcheries to biologists, statisticians, model preparations, the U.S.-Canada salmon treaty,” Whitener said.

“We are extremely efficient. We spend far less doing the work than the states or the feds do,” he said.

Law enforcement is another area where the Squaxin Island Tribe incurs costs other tribes don’t, he said.

“We manage an area from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge south to the southern points of Puget Sound - hundreds of miles of shoreline,” he said.

He also said that some smaller tribes’ per capita figures are artificially high because they can’t take advantage of economies of scale. For example, he said it takes a minimum amount to provide a small tribe with one water quality official, one law officer, one social services agent, etc.

Whitener said a more appropriate comparison is federal spending on Indians versus non-Indians. He said a recent study of nondefense spending by the Congressional Budget Office showed that non-Indians cost the government about $3,500 per person, while Indians cost about $2,500 per person.