McCain seizes opportunity to discuss Indian affairs

By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Correspondent, 1/28/2000

HAMPTON, N.H. - Though he campaigned as a ''proud conservative
Republican'' along the New Hampshire seacoast yesterday, Senator John McCain
departed again from his party's mainstream by empathizing with the plight of
American Indians.

It is an issue that McCain embraced early in his congressional career when
he took up Indian causes that other Republicans ignored, and McCain said he
regretted that he was rarely asked about the issue as a presidential candidate.

His chance to discuss Indian affairs came in response to a question at a
Hampton town meeting. McCain responded by calling the treatment of Indians ''one
of the darker chapters of the American people.''

He described a Lakota (Sioux) reservation in South Dakota ''where people
live in the worst conditions of grinding poverty.'' McCain criticized some of
the tribes for imposing their own rigid bureaucratic rules, ''stifling free
enterprise'' on the reservations. In some cases, entrepreneurs are forced to
wait two or three years to start businesses, he said.

Traveling in his campaign bus, McCain was asked to elaborate on his
interest in Indian issues. He described a lonely battle in the ranks of
congressional Republicans.

When he arrived in Congress in 1983, McCain said, he was recruited for a
Republican slot on an Indian affairs subcommittee by Representative Morris K.
Udall, the Democratic chairman of the House Interior Committee.

''The only way I got it was that nobody else wanted it,'' McCain said.
''When I talked to a lot of Republicans'' about taking the Indian affairs post
''they said: `They don't vote and when they vote, they vote for Democrats. Don't
get involved.'''

McCain said he was persuaded to take the job after an ''eloquent speech''
by Udall, a fellow Arizonan who made great strides to support Indian causes.
Though a Democrat, Udall became one of McCain's mentors.

After taking the position, McCain said, he was approached by another
Democrat, Representative Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut, on behalf of ''this
little tribe up in Connecticut that had been having trouble getting
recognized.''

McCain said he looked into the case and discovered ''the Republicans had
been the ones blocking it.'' He determined that the Indians' plea was legitimate
and won recognition for the tribe.

''Know which tribe?'' McCain asked, then answered his own question. ''The
Pequot, now the proud owners of the largest casino in the world.''

McCain's work on behalf of a cause unpopular among Republicans was praised
yesterday by Bob Neuman, a former spokesman for the Democratic National
Committee and longtime aide to Udall, who died in 1998. ''John McCain has been
absolutely spectacular on Indian issues,'' Neuman said.

While discussing his break with Republican doctrine, McCain had kind words
for Bill Bradley - considered something of a renegade among the Senate
Democrats. ''From time to time Bradley took on issues that didn't make him
popular. For example, he was an Eastern senator who got involved on water issues
in the West, on some land issues, on issues where some of his colleagues said:
`This guy ought to stay out of it, it's my state.'''

This story ran on page A27 of the Boston Globe on 1/28/2000.
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UPI STORY:

By Donna R. Bassett and Edward W. Bassett

BOSTON Dec. 10 (UPI) - The New Hampshire presidential primary coincides with the
next forced relocation of American Indians while U.S. troops continue to block
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and the world's largest coal company prepares to
expand its strip mining of American Indian lands, according to published
government documents and leading authorities.

Two presidential candidates, Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican
Sen. John McCain, have stakes in the ethnic cleansing and strip mining issues.
Spokespeople for both have declined to comment on the forcible relocation of
Navajos or say if their candidates have accepted campaign contributions from the
Peabody Coal Co., which calls itself the world's largest coal company and is
already strip mining the Indian lands in northern Arizona. McCain, the Arizona
senator and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee who sponsored the
1996 Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act (Public Law 104-301), urged the use of force to
stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Gore, the leading Democratic candidate, has
written a book, "Earth In The Balance: Ecology And The Human Spirit."

Gore wrote that "Native American religions ... offer a rich tapestry of ideas
about our relationship to the earth" in his chapter on "Environmentalism of the
Spirit." McCain's election campaign Internet page says, "we have a profound duty
to be responsible stewards of the natural treasures that sustain us." He says
that "to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land
will result in undermining (in) the days of our children."

.On February 1, the day of the New Hampshire primary, "321 households"
(approximately 1,200 people) are scheduled to begin forcible relocation,
according to an Oct. 1, 1999, report by the U.S. Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian
Relocation (ONHIR), an executive commission that reports directly to President
Clinton. Already, some 15,000 Navajo Indians have been forcibly relocated.

Asked if President Clinton could call a temporary halt to the relocations, Paul
Tessler, the legal counsel to the ONHIR commission said, "I presume the
president could direct us to do something or not to do something."

Because of the destructive impact of involuntary relocation on people who have
strong religious and cultural ties to the land, "this is a case of ethnic
cleansing," according to California Institute of Technology anthropologist
Thayer Scudder, who has testified before Congress on the Navajo situation and
has been recognized by leading international anthropological organizations for
his 40 years of work in this area.

"It's not intentional ethnic cleansing," he said. "It is due, primarily, to the
ignorance, insensitivity, and arrogance in all three branches of the U.S.
government," going back to 1848 when the U.S. government first took control over
the lands now used for Indian reservations.

Unlike the phenomena in Kosovo, there have been no mass executions that grabbed
international headlines. But a much larger part of the Kosovo situation were the
hundreds of thousands of people forced off of their land.

"Can you imagine," Scudder asked, "any circumstances where 15,000 (white)
Americans living on Indian land would be forcibly relocated? Can you imagine any
circumstances where 15,000 rural black Americans" would be forcibly relocated?"

"The Japanese relocation 1942 was larger," he noted, "but this is the largest
forced relocation in the United States, in a rural area, since the Japanese war
relocation. And it is just as unethical and just as much ethnic cleansing."

Noting that the relocation costs are now "over $350 million," and will probably
escalate "to over $400 million," Scudder said, "imagine how that (money) could
have been used for the joint development of Hopi and Navajo Indians."

Furthermore, a tangled set of laws now lets the U.S. Interior Department's
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) impound Navajo Indian sheep and arrest Navajos
for simply repairing their homes. These laws also allow the government to
bulldoze those repaired homes.

Although U.S. law has established that American Indians are citizens and have
the right to vote, a 1974 U.S. Appeals Court ruling (Healing v. Jones) said that
Hopis and Navajos "only have rights through their tribe," and not as
individuals, according to former ONHIR Executive Director Leon Berger.

Instead of individuals owning property on Navajo and Hopi lands, the two tribal
councils have the authority to lease lands on behalf of tribe members.
Therefore, both tribal councils began to profit from mining leases after an
estimated $10 billion in coal deposits was discovered in the area during the
1950s.

Peabody Coal now is "in a beautiful position because the government" is
relocating the Indians, said Berger, who resigned from the NHIR because he felt
"the commission did not work hard enough to achieve a compromise that the law
made possible." Scudder noted, "it's much easier to mine land where there are no
people."