Slade Gorton: The Last Indian Fighter

For years, environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest have referred to Senator Slade Gorton, the Republican from Washington, as "Senator Skeletor." But in Indian country he's known as the "Custer of the Senate." And with reason. For the past 25 years Gorton has been bashing Indians as relentlessly as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms have race-baited blacks.

Gorton's noxious rhetoric often turned out to be just that--rhetoric. For much of his career he has lacked the influence to back up his overheated chest-pounding. But now as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's powerful subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies (including the Bureau of Indian Affairs) Gorton is in a position of tremendous power over the 554 federally-recognized Indian tribes, fully capable of turning his perverse obsession with punishing some of the poorest people on the continent into legislation. Since 1995, Gorton has moved against Native Americans on a myriad of fronts by attempting to slash federal support for Indian health care and schools, restrict salmon fishing rights, exert control over tribal housing developments, and tax casino profits. In 1998, Gorton led the ultimately unsuccessful fight to strip Indian reservations of their sovereignty and institute means testing for federal aid to tribes.

Back in Reagantime, the vile James Watt, the Gipper's hapless Interior Secretary, grabbed headlines by denouncing Indian reservations as "the last bastion of communism." Watt was ridiculed by political pundits as a right-wing, born-again Christian bigot. But over the last couple of decades Watt's cause has been sedulously carried on by Gorton, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Watt. While the press savaged Watt, Gorton tends to be treated by the media as a more serious character, often described as "studious," "brilliant," and "mercurial."

There are better descriptions for Gorton: cranky, peevish, rueful, petulant, and vindictive. "He has brusque, prosecutorial manner and the demeanor of a coroner," says a longtime staffer for a Republican senator. "He likes to bully people, even fellow senators, into taking his side."

Part of Gorton's animus towards Indians appears to be personal, the result of a quarter-century-long grudge. In the early 1970s, the Lummi Nation won a landmark court case, known as the Boldt decision, giving the tribes rights to half of the steelhead and salmon returning to their spawning grounds in the Puget Sound basin. Gorton, then attorney general for the State of Washington, was outraged by the decision, and mounted two appeals to the Supreme Court. Gorton suffered stinging rebukes in both cases. Longtime Gorton watchers say the loss soured Gorton and that he has been on a vendetta ever since.

In 1979, a year after the final Supreme Court ruling on the fishing rights case, Gorton filed an amicus brief with the Court on another case, Oliphant v. Suquamash Tribe, even though the state of Washington wasn't a party to the lawsuit. The case involved whether tribes have jurisdiction over non-Indians who reside on reservation land. Gorton argued, again in a losing effort, that the court should curtail the power of the tribes.

Gorton rode into the Senate in 1980 on the heels of the Reagan landslide, defeating that old liberal warhorse, Warren Magnuson. It was a nasty campaign, highlighted by Gorton's smearing Magnuson as being too enfeebled to be reelected. Upon taking office, Gorton moved swiftly to settle his old scores with the tribes. In 1981 he introduced a bill that would have overturned Indian treaty rights to steelhead trout fisheries in Washington State.

Gorton's first term in the Senate was by all accounts uninspired and in 1986 he lost his seat to Brock Adams, largely because Adams enjoyed the support of Washington's growing environmental vote. Embittered, Gorton vowed revenge. In 1987, he registered as a lobbyist for the Non-Indian Negotiating Group, a coalition of corporations and white landowners seeking to weaken the sovereignty of the tribes.

In 1988 Gorton was back on the political scene. Campaigning as a full-fledged right-winger, Gorton was narrowly elected again to the Senate. Until 1994 the two moderate Republicans from the Northwest, Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood, largely held Gorton on a tight leash. When they left the Senate, Gorton emerged out of the shadows as a true Visigoth.

Gorton has enjoyed a cozy relationship with the fanatically anti-Indian Citizens Equal Rights Alliance, a coalition of nearly 500 groups that is pushing to end the tribes' right to self-government on reservation lands. Among CERA's objectives two stand out: "Ensure the right to own private property on or near Indian reservations" and "Ensure the fair administration of natural resources on public lands for the general welfare." Thus, it's not surprising that more than 50% of CERA's member organizations have an interest in mining, industrial recreation, timber, oil, and gas, and that the organization itself is closely affiliated with the anti-environmental Wise Use movement. Since the 1990s CERA worked closely with Gorton and his staff on a range of anti-Indian measures, most of them unsuccessful.

In 1994, the Spokane Indian Nation challenged officials with the state of Washington by importing slot machines to the tribe's Two Rivers casino. Gorton was miffed and fired off a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno demanding that she shut down the machines. Reno refused.

In 1995, Gorton introduced a rider bill directing that any tribe be denied at least 50% of self-governance funds if they fail to accommodate non-Indian water claims on Indian reservations: the measure, a kind of senatorial blackmail, was largely aimed at his old enemies, the Lummi Tribe. In 1997, the small Shoalwater Tribe purchased 160 acres of land outside of Vancouver, WA, where it planned to build town houses and some light manufacturing plants. The Shoalwaters asked the BIA to make that land part of their "trust lands," thereby exempting it from local zoning ordinances and county property taxes. But Gorton moved quickly, inserting language in the appropriations bill preventing BIA from acting until the local county governments approved the project.

In 1998, Gorton introduced CERA's dream bill, the cynically titled "American Indian Justice Act." It was offered as a kind of political extortion: surrender self-rule or lose millions in federal money. Gorton's bill, which passed the Senate but was rejected by the House, would have required all tribes to surrender their tribal sovereignty in order to receive federal funds and for all tribes getting federal money to be means tested. Ada Deer, a member of the Menominee Tribe and former assistant secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs, called the measure "termination by appropriation."

Gorton tends to portray the federal payments to tribes as if they were a form of welfare. But of course the so-called Tribal Priority Allocation isn't a handout. It's a treaty obligation, a payment for the millions of acres of tribal lands seized by whites and the federal government.

Last year Gorton was able to sneak through a provision that allows the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs to reallocate $70 million of money from the richest to the poorest tribes. Gorton said that the measure was intended to address "funding inequities," but tribal leaders charge that it's a back door assault on the federal government's treaty obligations to pay tribes regardless of their financial condition.

"They haven't done an analysis of who's rich and who's poor," says Wayne Shammel, an attorney for the Cow Creek Bank of the Umpqua Tribe in southern Oregon. "So how can they redistribute a substantial portion of our priority allocations based on someone's unilateral choice on which tribes are wealthy and which aren't?"

But this is Gorton's first step. The Senator also wants to force the tribes to begin opening up their financial books, using a divide and conquer strategy designed to pit the tribes against each other.

In 1998 the tribes formed a PAC, called First American Education Project, that began raising money for a media campaign aimed at toppling Gorton. The Project intends to buy nearly $2 million worth of ads against the Senator.

The first ads are now beginning to air in Washington. They won't directly address Indian issues, mainly because that might backfire on the tribes. Gorton's race-mongering tends to play well in the rural West, where white attitudes towards Indians remains less than enlightened.

Of course, Gorton is a shrewd politician and he has deftly exploited the tribe's ads to portray himself as a victim in order to drum up even more financial aid. The ploy has worked. Gorton's campaign coffers are bloated with corporate cash. As of June 30, he has pocketed more than $3.8 million and that figure is likely to double before the election.

Still, the tribes have let the Senator know that he's in for a fight. "We want to make a statement that if you attack the tribes there will be consequences," says Ron Allen, a member of the Jamestown S'Klallam tribe of Washington and vice-president of the National Congress of American Indians. "Now we're able to bite back. If you ask Indian leaders who is the enemy, Gorton's would be the first name and the last name."