Indian Lands

At first, the townspeople were curious. Then they were alarmed. Large diesel rigs hauling canvas-covered trailers were rumbling through this small community with disturbing regularity. They were headed for a landfill on the outskirts of town that only years earlier had been a desert plateau distinguished by little more than sagebrush and dust devils.

Elouise Cobell, the treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe who tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans out of more than a century's worth of royalties, resulting in a record $3.4-billion settlement, has died. She was 65. Cobell died Sunday at a hospital in Great Falls, Mont., of complications from cancer, her spokesman Bill McAllister announced. Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, Cobell often heard her parents and neighbors wonder why they weren't being paid for allowing others to use their land, she later recalled.

History is made, and its meaning debated, not only in the eye of network television but also in quiet, unobtrusive places like the hills and hidden valleys of this corner of western Connecticut. At first glance, this is the United States at its quietest and whitest, seemingly immune to the raging arguments about multiculturalism and political correctness that seize headlines when they take place at Stanford or the Smithsonian.

The paint has barely dried on the Dodgers' new spring training digs in Glendale, Ariz., and another new venue is making its debut in Arizona's Cactus League. Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, the third new ballpark in Arizona's spring circuit in the last three years, is the new spring home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies. The first Major League facility to be built on Native American land, it's on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community bordering Scottsdale.

A U.S. senator who is an expert on American Indian affairs told tribal leaders and Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Rancho San Diego) on Tuesday that any attempt by California to dictate environmental regulations for toxic dumps and landfills proposed on Indian reservations is doomed. Sen. Daniel K.

American Indian tribes, individual Indians and taxpayers have lost billions of dollars because of improper federal enforcement of mineral rights on reservations, the Arizona Republic reported. The newspaper said misfeasance deprived Indians and the government of up to $5.7 billion from oil drained from beneath Indian lands and said individual Indians have lost millions of dollars when government attorneys sided with oil producers.

Investigators told a special Senate committee today that a Wichita, Kan., company has been stealing oil from Indian lands for at least the last three years. Documents subpoenaed from Koch Industries show that the company consistently ended the year with hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil than it paid for, investigators told a special panel of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. Although measurement difficulties make it normal for oil companies to pay for less oil than they actually take--even up to 12,000 barrels a year--Koch documents showed that the firm ended 1986 with 803,874 excess barrels, 1987 with 671,144 excess barrels and 1988 with 474,281 more barrels than it paid for, witnesses said.

Senate investigators first secretly taped a major Indian leader seeking payments from a businessman holding contracts on his reservation. Then, in preparation for a second phase of hearings into problems confronting Native Americans, the investigators hid themselves on remote sections of some reservations to observe oil company employees who monitor the flow of billions of gallons of petroleum from Indian lands. Today, members of a special Senate subcommittee on Indian affairs will open that second phase of hearings with charges that a number of petroleum companies are cheating tribes out of millions of dollars a year in royalties.

The Times urges voters to support Proposition 5, the statewide initiative on Indian lands gambling on the Nov. 3 ballot. That's because Proposition 5 is a logical step in a process that could settle the contentious issue of how to allow tribes to rise from poverty while maintaining the rights of states. Congress thought that it had found a solution in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, but it was flawed.

Re "Lungren Says Indians Can't Attend Session on Policing," Dec. 6: The membership of the Tribal Alliance of Northern California (TANC) is deeply concerned about Atty. Gen. Lungren's decision to exclude representatives of Native American tribes from his law enforcement "summit" on Indian gaming. Gov. Pete Wilson and Lungren have consistently refused to pursue compact negotiations with Indian gaming tribes. Instead, Lungren chooses to focus attention on isolated instances of violence by citing them as examples of the evil he believes is integral to gaming on Indian lands.

Brazil's Supreme Court sided with Amazonian Indians in a land dispute that turned violent last year when authorities tried to evict rice farmers from a government-decreed reservation. The court ruling upholds the 4.2-million-acre Raposa Serra do Sol reservation for 18,000 Indians who lay claim to their ancestral land, despite a few large-scale farmers who also occupy the territory in the northernmost reaches of the Amazon jungle bordering Venezuela.

A federal inspection of three large trailer parks on the Torres Martinez reservation in Riverside County has found numerous health and safety violations, including faulty electrical systems and open sewage that threaten the health of park residents. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Indian Affairs did the inspections last August at Oasis Mobile Home Park, D & D Mobile Home Park and an unnamed park adjacent to Oasis.

THERMAL, Calif. -- A team of state and federal inspectors moved through the hot, narrow alleys of two large trailer parks housing thousands of migrant farmworkers Monday after receiving reports of health and safety violations inside. The parks are on the Torres Martinez reservation, which also houses Desert Mobile Home Park, known as Duroville, which is now being targeted for possible closure. The parks inspected Monday are not yet in the bad shape of Duroville, federal officials said.

Dozens of trained searchers continued to look by air and on the ground for two young brothers who disappeared from the remote Red Lake Indian Reservation. Alicia White -- mother of Tristan Anthony White, 4, and Avery Lee Stately, 2 -- appealed for anyone who knew or had seen anything to come forward. FBI Special Agent Paul McCabe said authorities were trying to determine whether the boys wandered off or whether foul play was involved. They disappeared Wednesday.

Southern California Edison Co. is close to reaching a deal with two Indian tribes and the world's largest coal company that would bolster the utility's effort to keep open a Nevada power plant that provides cheap electricity to Southern California -- but is a major source of air pollution. Closed-door talks among Edison, the Hopi and Navajo tribes of northern Arizona and mining giant Peabody Energy Corp.

Backers of an initiative to authorize slot machines at card clubs and race tracks plan to meet today to consider suspending their campaign, which is lagging badly in public and private polls despite a multimillion-dollar ad blitz. A decision to stop pushing Proposition 68 would be a significant victory for Indian tribes, which have been campaigning against it to protect their monopoly on slot machines, and for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also opposes the initiative.

Brazilian Indians have won new constitutional guarantees to thousands of square miles of territory, but preservation of those tribal lands is still far from assured, Indian rights advocates say. "It is going to be a struggle," predicted Ailton Krenak, a spokesman for the Union of Indigenous Nations. The union, the umbrella group for Brazil's 180 Indian tribes, led lobbying in the Brazilian Congress for the constitutional guarantees, which were approved June 1.

A Brazilian indigenous tribe Friday freed nine journalists it had held hostage for three days in a bid to pressure the government to hand over land it had promised last year, officials said. Although they released the hostages, some 100 members of the Terena Indian tribe from west-central Mato Gross state remained in negotiations with officials over the land.

San Diego County led the state in hotel development last year, producing almost one-fourth of the 8,236 new rooms in California, according to a new report. It was the second year in a row that San Diego saw the most new rooms, at 1,895, and the county will probably lead the state again in 2004, the report by Atlas Hospitality Group, a Costa Mesa hotel broker and consulting firm, said. "San Diego is the juggernaut driving hotel development in California," Atlas President Alan Reay said.

In North Dakota, a $100-million oil refinery is planned on the Three Affiliated Tribes reservation. In Washington state, the Tulalip Tribes are looking at building a plant that would produce electricity from cattle waste. And in Colorado, the Southern Ute tribe will pay each tribal elder $55,000 this year, largely from the money it makes from gas drilling. From the Northern Plains to the Pacific, tribes are increasingly getting into the energy business.