Prof: Tribal poverty affects politics

from The Billings Gazette

By The Associated Press

CASPER - Rampant poverty tends to depress participation by Wind River Indian Reservation residents in Fremont County politics, a University of Wyoming professor said in the first day of testimony in a federal civil trial challenging the county's system of electing county commissioners.

The lawsuit claims the at-large system violates the voting rights of residents of the reservation, which covers a large part of Fremont County.

County residents Patricia Bergie, Pete Calhoun, Gary Collins, James E. Large and Emma Lucille McAdams - all members of either the Eastern Shoshone or Northern Arapaho tribes - say that not having commissioners represent certain areas of the county dilutes American Indians' voting strength.

The county has maintained that the dispute centers not on race, which would bring the Voting Rights Act into play, but on a variety issues related to the history of American Indians.

The U.S. District Court bench trial is expected to take two weeks.

Garth Massey, a UW sociologist, was among several experts called by the plaintiffs Monday. Massey said not even casino gambling would help the reservation's conditions much in the long run.

"I'm not optimistic that the socioeconomic (conditions) on the reservation will change dramatically in the next decade," Massey said.

He said living conditions push many Indians into feelings of powerlessness and cause lack of participation in the political process.

Massey was questioned by one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Laughlin McDonald, of the Atlanta office of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Inc.

Massey said he oversaw interviews of about 95 percent of the households on the reservation in 1998. He said he found that 57 percent of households had incomes below the federal poverty rate, compared with a nationwide poverty rate of about 13 percent.

Many houses are substandard and 20 percent are uninhabitable, he said, while 40 percent do not have telephone lines.

He also said the unemployment rate is about 10 times the national average and three to four times higher than most depressed rural areas.

He said that by age 55, 61 percent of reservation residents have health problems requiring medical intervention, including diabetes, heart disease and nutritional deficiencies.

But an attorney for Fremont County, Scott Detamore with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, took Massey to task for not interviewing nonreservation Indians about their economic conditions. Detamore said many of those people are successful.

Detamore also said that while participation in Fremont County politics might be low, Massey did not ask reservation Indians about their participation in Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribal elections.

Another witness for the plaintiffs, demographer William Cooper, said he drew two possible single-member districts based on the geography and populations in Fremont County.

Research psychologist Steven Cole also testified for the plaintiffs. He said he analyzed voting data to determine whether Indians are politically cohesive and could elect their preferred candidates. He said he found that white voters were able to defeat most county commission candidates preferred by Indians.