ARYAN NATIONS DEFLATES ‘SOVEREIGNS’ IN MONTANA

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
the federal executive branch, and the
United Nations and Agenda 21 folks, and
the environmental groups and the big
billionaires, and then when they’ve got
566 tribal governments and little reservations
to use as little launch pads, you can
tear up this country pretty quick. So this
Indian policy is but one tool.”
These ideas are not limited to Willman.
For instance, according to reports
last fall by two anti-racist groups, the
Montana Human Rights Network and
the Institute for Research & Education
on Human Rights, another speaker
at the Kalispell conference has been
preaching the conspiracy theory.
Debbie Bacigalupi, a California activist
who gave a presentation on the topic
in Montana, has described Agenda 21 as
“communistic history in the remaking
… [b]ut in America” and “a demonically
inspired dynamic.”
Of Treaties and Race
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai
Tribes, as part of the Hellgate Treaty of
1855 that also created the 1,938-squaremile
Flathead Reservation, was awarded
water rights “for time immemorial” that
included water flowing in from elsewhere.
Since 2001, the state has been in negotiations
with the tribes and others to come
up with a compact that would quantify
just what those water rights guarantee.
According to the anti-racist groups,
the CSKT agreed to serious concessions,
forgoing rights that they had a
strong legal claim to on water from various
“non-irrigation, small groundwater,
and most upstream users.” “That means
that all domestic, commercial, municipal,
industrial, stock, and other nonirrigation
water rights that exist when
and if the compact is ratified will be
entirely protected, both on and off the
reservation,” the Montana Human Rights
Network reported.
While an earlier compact was rejected,
the state legislature and governor
approved the current version in April. If
it also wins approval from the Congress,
the Montana Water Court and the CSKT
Tribal Council, it will become law.
CERA and a number of other groups
have vigorously opposed the compact,
even as they push the idea that there
is nothing racial in their opposition.
Indeed, the agenda for the Kalispell conference
last September — titled “This
Land is our Land … Or IS it?” — was
emblazoned with a quote meant to show
that CERA sought only equality. “There
is only one race … the human race,” it
quoted Edward James Olmos saying.
“There are hundreds of wonderful cultures
but only one race.”
But CERA’s aims are intrinsically radical.
It has sought to end Indian tribal governments,
abrogate treaties signed with
the tribes, and overturn a series of legal
decisions favoring such treaties. The
Montana Human Rights Network, which
has monitored anti-Indian bias for years,
says “the anti-Indian movement is a systematic
effort to deny legally established
rights to a group of people who are identified
on the basis of their shared culture,
history, religion and tradition.
“That makes it racist by definition.”
There were also other signs of the
growing radicalization of the movement.
One local group — the Concerned
Citizens of Western Montana, which
raised the money to pay for Elaine
Willman’s move to the state — recruited
a hydrologist several years ago to use
as an “expert” in lobbying against any
water compact with the CSKT. Whatever
her expertise in water and the law, Dr.
Catherine Vandemoer also has a documented
history as a “birther” who questions
President Obama’s citizenship. And
Vandemoer hosts an online radio show
that affords antigovernment “Patriots”
a place to advocate for a “Second
Constitutional Republic.”
Ancestors of today’s Confederated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes negotiated an 1855 treaty with
the government that guaranteed water rights on
the Flathead Reservation in Montana.
Among others, Vandemoer has
featured on her show Martin “Red”
Beckman, a radical tax protester and
an anti-Semite who wrote The Church
Deceived, in which he asserted that the
Holocaust was God’s punishment of the
Jews for worshipping Satan. Beckman
was long known as the “Father of the
Patriot Movement.”
The radicalization of CERA and others
in the anti-Indian movement comes
in the context of growing antagonism
among radical Patriots toward the federal
government and the federal agencies
that regulate land use, especially in
the rural states of the West and Pacific
Northwest. Most notoriously, Nevada
rancher Cliven Bundy in 2014 faced off
against the Bureau of Land Management,
which was trying to enforce a court
order to seize Bundy’s cattle after he
refused for 20 years to pay grazing fees.
Hundreds of radical militiamen came to
defend Bundy, threatening law enforcement
officials with heavy weapons until
the officials backed down.
The adoption by CERA of the Agenda
21 conspiracy theory, not to mention its
deepening flirtation with the John Birch
Society, makes it clear that large parts of
the anti-Indian movement in America
have increasingly melded with other sectors
of the truly radical right. It remains
to be seen whether or not this radicalization
will finally make the implicit white
nationalism of these groups explicit. ▲
spring 2016 27