Poverty-stricken tribe seeks path out of poverty

from The Kansas City Star

By Peter Hecht

KLAMATH, Calif. - The Yuroks have faced far greater challenges over the years than the opposition of some rich Southern California tribes to the financial terms of a tiny roadside casino.

More than half of the reservation residents of California's largest and poorest tribe live without electricity or phone service on ancestral lands hugging steep canyons of the Lower Klamath River in far Northern California.

Tribal timber and salmon fishing industries are nearly decimated. And ecological threats - such as a 2002 fish kill from low river flows that sent 33,000 salmon gurgling to the surface - test the soul of a proud people that has endured for centuries.

"There is a fear among the elders that the year the fish don't come back, the Yurok will cease to exist," says tribal member Georgiana Myers, 23.

Now the poverty, environment and isolation of the 4,900-member tribe is getting unusual attention at the state Capitol as the Yuroks push on in a two-year fight to open a modest casino near U.S. Highway 101.

They hope to earn $1 million to $3 million a year from 79 slot machines at a planned tribal lodge and 20 more slots at a gas station mini-market. In California's $7 billion Indian gaming industry, that is barely pocket change.

But the Yuroks, and their plight, are drawing notice because some of California's most politically powerful tribes chose to wage a concerted campaign against their gambling bid.

For much of 2005 and 2006, key wealthy tribes resisted the Yuroks' gambling compact because they didn't like the deal the Yuroks negotiated with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians near San Bernardino, which in 2005 took in $450 million in net slot machine winnings, wrote that the terms of the Yurok compact "betray the voters of California ... and the sovereignty of tribes."

The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians in Temecula, which took in $425 million from its slots, said labor concessions in the Yurok compact "show contempt for ... tribal economic development."

And the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs, which reaped $234 million from its casino machines, said revenue sharing payments the Yurok promised the state constitute "an illegal tax."

"It's a travesty the state's largest and poorest tribe can't get 99 slot machines," said state Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, a Democrat. He blames opposition from "the big boys" for blocking the Yurok casino and vows the tribe will fare better in this year's legislative session.

Now the "big boys" are also on board, sheepishly insisting they always had the Yuroks' best interests at heart. They say they support the Yuroks' casino development efforts due to changes the tribe negotiated in its casino compact last year.

The wealthy tribes also concede they were initially worried the Yurok compact language - including state revenue-sharing and labor concessions - could be imposed as a template for their own gambling agreements.

Five major Southern California tribes - including San Manuel, Agua Caliente and Pechanga - later negotiated and signed their own compacts. The accords, pending in the Legislature, stand to reward them with 3,000 to 5,500 new slot machines each.

Their anxieties about the Yuroks' tiny casino faded away.

"We have removed those objections," said Richard Milanovich, chairman of the Agua Caliente tribe, saying he supports the Yurok bid. "We understand their needs. We understand that the electricity ends a mile into their reservation. ... We're not picking on them. We wish them success."

On the wildlands of the Yurok reservation, which spans 56,000 acres and extends 44 miles along both sides of the Klamath River, people intuitively know that a blooming dogwood tree means the sturgeon are running. They know that when sea gulls fly up the river there's eel to catch.

And they believe that when wealthy casino tribes gang up on a poor tribe's economic development effort, something's wrong.

"It's disheartening," said Yurok Tribal Council Member Richard Myers, who remains mystified why the other tribes ever made an issue out of the Yuroks' gambling compact.

"In the Indian way, it's not good to be stingy. If another brother is in need, you're supposed to help out. But greed steps in. People are so damn greedy."

Reweti Wiki, the Yuroks' deputy executive director, said the tribe's planned casino was never viewed as anything more than another means to provide the most basic of services.

The tribe, which employs 200 people for police, fire and other services, takes in $13 million in federal grants. Much of the money is used for restoring beleaguered fisheries and the endangered Klamath watershed.

With its main highway mostly a single-lane dirt path - plus a precariously unsteady river bridge - the tribe estimates it needs $620 million in road improvements alone. It says it has unfunded costs of $24 million for tribal health care and needs another $5.2 million to provide electricity for the 1,000 tribal members who live on the reservation.

Twenty percent of reservation residents live in poverty, and many grapple with alcoholism, drug use and diabetes.

The harsh life is illustrated by "Fish Camp Bill" Wilson, 45, a subsistence fisherman and woodcarver. Inside a chilly, 16-by-20 foot plasterboard and scrap wood house his father built 40 years ago, he gets by at night by the light of a kerosene lamp.

Wilson can't read. He dropped out of school in the seventh grade.

Yet with a whiskey bottle in his breast pocket, he looks proudly around his home and its trophies of the wild. He points out a mountain lion head on a stick, bear claws and teeth, otter pelts and dried woodpeckers - the latter for a tribal dance to ward off evil spirits.

"My life is what's hanging on the wall," he says. "That's all I can say."

For years, tribal member Lenny "Butch" Reed, 48, found a livelihood in junk cars he hauled onto his property and alongside a mountain stream. "People came from all over to buy parts from me," he says.

But the tribe, hoping to remove mounds of debris from its cultural lands, used federal grant money to haul off Reed's entire fleet - 130 cars in all - and other unsightly scrap heaps.

In 2005, the Yuroks opened a new transitional school, Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, in response to poor high school graduation and achievement rates. Only six percent of Yuroks finish school eligible for college.

Partly funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it helps about two dozen Yurok students earn credits to attend a university. The students include Amber Gensaw, 14, who has spent her young life on the banks of the Klamath.

And house by modest house, starting with tribal elders, the Yuroks struggle to turn the lights on.

The tribe spent $5,000 on a system that uses mountain stream water to power turbines and heavy duty batteries so that 90-year-old Georgiana Trull can have electricity.

After suffering a heart attack and a stroke, Trull was twice airlifted by helicopter to the hospital because her house was too remote to be reached in time by car.

Trull, who has severe breathing difficulties, is among the last surviving speakers of the Yurok language. She is considered so valuable to preserving Yurok culture that family members pack her up - oxygen tank and all - and drive her to teach Yurok to tribal children.

"This tribe is tied to this homeland," said tribal Chairwoman Maria Tripp, who vows that no casino, tiny or otherwise, will change the Yuroks' cultural character. "We want to survive as who we are."

Last year, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which took in $367 million from casino slots in 2005, sent representatives to meet the Yuroks. They conversed over salmon and biscuits. And, during a bitterly cold snowstorm, they took a drive past searing poverty and over treacherous Yurok roads.

The Riverside County tribe then promptly dropped its opposition to the Yurok casino.

"I was just awestruck that people still live like that," said John Muncy, a member of the Morongo tribal council. "It was an epiphany, an eye-opener. I felt, `This isn't the Third World. This is Northern California.' And people are living like this.

"It really helped change how I felt about tribes in California that don't have the success we do."