Activists Criticize ‘Anti-Indian’ Alliance Group Says Challenges To Tribal Authority Not Rooted In Racism

Despite their objection to being labeled anti-Indian, members of the North Central Idaho Jurisdictional Alliance were portrayed as the bad guys at a Tuesday meeting of human rights activists.

It’s true that the alliance and similar organizations don’t use the same kind of hate rhetoric as the Ku Klux Klan, researcher Robert Crawford said. Instead, he said, they use a language of equality to attack treaty rights.

“They say, `Everyone in the United States should be under the same law.’ What this means is that the tribal government should be done away with,” said Crawford, who works for the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity. “It’s a form of forced assimilation - to do away with the means by which tribal culture is protected.”

Racism, Crawford said, isn’t defined only by slurs.

“If white folks were to mobilize to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act … they could rightly be described as racist.”

The jurisdictional alliance is a group of 23 local governments and taxing districts that organized in 1996 to challenge the authority of the Nez Perce Tribe. They believe the tribe’s rights to govern have been dissolved by other laws since treaties designated the tribal homeland.

This spring, the group endorsed an essay that said bloodshed is inevitable if the tribe does not stop enforcing regulations on what it calls the “former reservation.” That essay galvanized the decision to hold Tuesday’s meeting, organizer Eric Ward said.

Dan Johnson, executive director of the jurisdictional alliance, issued a statement complaining that his group had not been invited to participate.

“We recognize there are significant issues involved in dealing with tribal government and tribal members, in Idaho and elsewhere, but we vigorously dispute any claim that there is widespread “Anti-Indian Bigotry in Idaho,”’ he wrote.

Johnson said the alliance was troubled that one of the five workshop sessions was designated “native only.” Two Native Americans who attended it also expressed disappointment.

“I didn’t care for this segregation of Indian and non-Indian. We solve these problems by working together,” said Elliott Moffett, a Nez Perce and area superintendent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Organizer Leah Henry-Slaney, a Nez Perce Indian and board member of the Coalition for Human Dignity, explained that she was trying to make native people more comfortable by giving them one forum filled with similar faces.

Non-Indians weren’t barred from the workshop. One who attended was Denise Rosen, an attorney who works part time for the Clearwater County prosecutor’s office. That county belongs to the jurisdictional alliance.

About half of the 50 people who attended were Native American. They praised the organizers for starting to pay attention to anti-Indian sentiment. That’s been slow in coming, Moffett said. He said he quit the Northwest Coalition board in the late 1980s because it was reluctant to tackle the issue, just as it was reluctant to champion gay rights.

All four Idaho tribes were represented at the meeting. Speakers included Samuel Penney, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee; Norma Peone, vice chairman of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe; and Louise Dixie of the Shoshone-Bannocks. Velma Bahe, chairman of the Kootenai Tribe, attended.

Besides the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity, the event was hosted by the Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene tribes, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, University of Idaho Native American Student Association, and United Vision for Idaho.