The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

36 | ‘Dump Slade 2000’
EARLy on they hAd duBBed hiM “the new General Custer,” vowing
that sooner or later he’d meet his Little Bighorn. When the slot
machines started jingling they had many more arrows in their
quiver.
From the banks of the Columbia to Narragansett Bay, where Gorton’s
famished forefathers were befriended by the natives in the 1600s, the
tribes were once independent nations. “They say they are sovereigns, but
the courts call them quasi-sovereigns,” Gorton said in 1997, italics his.
“They’re nations within a nation.” Ultimate authority still rested with the
Great White Father, the senator said, and Congress still helped distribute
the beads. Gorton’s subcommittee chairmanship gave him wide latitude
over appropriations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 1
The tribes’ long-festering grudge against Gorton became flat-out war
when he cut their federal assistance by 28 percent in 1995 as part of the
Republican deficit-reduction plan. He also took up the complaints of non-
Indians living on reservations, saying it was fundamentally unfair for “a
closed, ethnic group” to have immunity from lawsuits. Inholders on the
Lummi reservation near Bellingham told Gorton their wells were virtually
dry because the tribe was hogging the ground water aquifer. Pointing
to a treaty signed in 1855, the Lummis maintained they had senior status
in the water rights dispute. Nevertheless, they said they were attempting
to reach an equitable settlement. Gorton threatened to slash half of the
tribe’s federal assistance if it persisted in restricting water use by non-
Indians, who comprised nearly half of the reservation’s population. 2
Conrad Burns, Gorton’s Republican colleague from Montana, joined
the fray that year when the Crow Tribe, in a delicious turn of events, levied
a 4 percent B&O tax on businesses catering to tourists visiting the Custer
battlefield. “Taxation without representation!” cried the non-Indian businesses,
refusing to pay. Some 40 percent of the reservation was owned by
non-Indians. Much of Indian Country in both states was a checkerboard
of Indian and non-Indian ownerships. 3
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