I got a call from Nashua.
I'd examined and discarded the Kucinich campaign in September. The Maine campaign was headed by two people who never really worked a campaign, all the technology was either in Hollywood (and optimized for broadband) or in Cleveland (and a mystery), and the Native American contact was a non-Indian living in a hay-bale house on the Rosebud with weakness for "spirituals". My cost of entry "inside" the campaign, doing my State, doing technology, doing NDN policy and/or outreach, was simply too great. It was too much. I worked hard to make Dennis' entre into the blogosphere memorable, and the result was worth it. Dennis wrote Lights out on Deregulation. That was real, and obviously, Dennis worked harder.
I had another responsibility. The historic opportunity of transforming a modern State's governor's adverse record towards an Indian community with no out-of-state hooks, no Federal protection, into a political issue in the Democratic primaries -- putting the political futures of the "Indian fighters" who've risen through the ranks of the Demcratic Party in Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, New York, ... at risk. On January 11th and January 18th, my work made ABC's The Note. The acknowldegement of the 11th was an endorsement of a competing campaign (Clark's) by the Mississquoi (Vermont Abenaki) Tribal Council. The acknowledgement on the 18th (AfterNote) was even better. Campaigns were doing paid-calls in Iowa on the Vermont Abenaki record. That's issue advocacy success. The one good thing dating the Clark campaign got me was a line of poetry. Paula Gunn Allen wrote me, and I read her poem "Hoopdancer".
... soft stepping feet
praise water from the skies ...
Thats "pray for rain" in Laguna. True thirst. It is foreign now, here in the water-wealthy east.
My call came from someone I trust. Someone who got "inside" and saw and heard what I needed to see and hear . I asked "red-diaper babies, grown up?" The reply was "yes". I asked "in for the whole cycle?" The reply was "yes". So I've work to do.
My caller found her real thing in July in Senator Edwards. There is no one single real thing. Perhaps the most important thing is that members of that set play well with each other, and ourselves.
we want what is real, we want what is real
do not deceive us.
That was a good song. I'm glad my grandfather sang it.
Posted by at January 28, 2004 12:53 PM
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I am glad you guys found your real things. As I discovered long ago there are two risks in finding the real thing. One is losing. The other is winning.
Posted by: Dwight Meredith at January 28, 2004 04:04 PMGreat post and great blog. My first time here and
I'm already impressed. I live in Pennsylvania
where the debate is raging about legalizing
slot machines (as a $1 billion source of revenue
to reduce property taxes). One of the proposals
would license an Indian gaming facility. I am
appalled at the racist statements that have been
made by some of the opponents about Native
Americans. If their remarks had been made about
Blacks or Jews or Muslims, they would have been
chastised for being so prejudiced by the press.
But these Republican white men have basically
said, "Saddle up and circle the wagons, them
Injuns are comin'..." and gotten away without a
word of reproach. Sad. Very sad.
Ah. Class II gaming in Pennsylvania, proposed by two Deleware polities, relocated to Oklahoma in the early 19th century.
Gov. Ed Rendell errors, or profoundly misleads the state's voters, a la Gov. Howard Dean, when asserting a land claim as a precondition to (nuance) any form of Indian Gaming.
Nuance 1. Penn could, like Maine just did, referend or legislate one or more gaming operations under state law, possibly incorporating by reference, as Maine's referenda did, a Gaming Compact brought under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), establishing one or more Federally Regognized Indian Tribes as the gaming operator. The referendum in Maine failed, which is neither here nor there. The point is, while this looks "Indian", it really is a State action under State law.
Nuance 2. Penn could request that the DOI transfer some land from the state's jurisdicion into trust, and compact with the tribes under the IGRA. The point is, this really is a Federal action, to which the state need not be adverse, and in fact could initiate, in exchange for something.
The "he opposes the tribes' gaming plans and says they have to win a land claim in court before he negotiates with them" line is simply retarded, and if we didn't have the Dean campaign to prove otherwise, politically unimaginable.
It is profoundly unfortunate that opposition to class II and class III gaming is "justified" if and only if the proposed operator is a Tribe. States and Tribes can work better than this, as California and the California Tribes did after Gov. Pete Wilson was replaced by Gov. Gray Davis.
Posted by: Eric at January 28, 2004 11:34 PM