What You See in Clear Water by Geoffrey O'Gara

Author:Geoffrey O'Gara [O’Gara, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76645-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

The business councils were not a natural outgrowth of either Arapaho or Shoshone political culture. The system was imposed by the federal agents, so they would have a discernible governing body to deal with during the allotment period, when many tracts of reservation land were moving into non-Indian ownership. Before that, traditional government in both tribes was densely layered, with spiritual leaders like the Arapaho’s Water-Sprinkling Old Men keeping a steady but mysteriously still hand on the helm while younger leaders acted and spoke for them. This ancient hierarchy began fading in the twentieth century, and few Indians today could tell you whether they belong to the Mountain People or the Nose Diggers (Shoshone clans), or the Kit Fox Men or Crazy Lodge (Arapaho).

Well into modern times, though, the traditional people still pulled the strings, while keeping their distance from whites by often using lighter-skinned tribal members of mixed blood such as Bob Harris as middle men. Anthropologist Loretta Fowler, in her book Arapaho Politics, 1851–1978 proposed that the tribe has taken the new council system and, while appearing to accept a non-Indian model, slyly adapted it to their old ways. I’m not so sure. Sometimes, these days, it doesn’t work.

The business councils, six-member bodies elected every two years, are not the topmost governmental branch of the tribes. Over them rule the General Councils, a legislature that includes every member of the tribe. “It’s government by town meeting, the sort of thing Ross Perot advocated when he was running for president,” said Dave Allison, a former BIA superintendent at Wind River. He used to attend General Council meetings, reporting from the federal government and sometimes wielding the gavel. He chuckled at the memory. “Obviously, Perot never sat in on a General Council meeting.”

Neither have I, but I’ve interviewed participants and read some transcripts. In recent years, General Council meetings have sometimes become the stage for personal vendettas and political sparring among powerful reservation families. One group shows up to get a tribal employee fired because he disciplined a relative; another may try to throw out an entire elected business council. Many people vote strictly according to familial alliances. General Councils are held at irregular intervals and can extend for days, allowing organized factions to wait until tired opponents head for home before calling for a vote. Attendance has declined, whether from frustration or boredom. Members of both tribes tell me they simply don’t go anymore, and the Shoshone have failed repeatedly in recent years to get a General Council quorum.

The mayhem at General Council meetings stems, according to some, from the decline of the traditional order, when elders quietly let the people know what was best for the tribe and the council followed their advice. With so few private jobs on the reservation, the government is now the biggest patronage operation in the valley, and family groups angle for control, demanding a piece of the action and sometimes using the General Council to bring down the officials who stand in their way.

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