Pit River Membership issues parallels Pechanga

Editor:
http://pitriverpeople.org/Template-Admin/LtrEditor8-14-07.html

Thank you for covering the Pit River Tribe Membership Meeting in your newspaper. Please allow me to clarify one point: Those who came to the Membership meeting that are being 'challenged' on Tribal enrollment, did not vote. The votes were only from legal registered voters from within the Tribe.
The 'Silent No More' group is quickly growing and opposes this current Tribal Council that is controlled by one family and their supporters. It has turned into a Council that operates for its own benefit, not the benefit of Tribal Members. Council meetings are called several days a week and Council Members get paid for each meeting so this has become the main income source of several people at the expense of the Tribe. People were recently asked or ordered to sign a loyalty oath, one of the first steps a dictator uses to maintain absolute power. Any Member questioning this group is disenrolled, or threatened with disenrollment.
This current struggle has many parallels to the Pechanga Band which has been in many headlines recently as a corrupt Tribal Council attempts to whittle down the number of Tribal Members to increase their per capita which sometimes runs as high as $20,000 per month. What I find almost incomprehensible in the case of the Pit River Tribe is that we have very few assets. Our per capita runs in the hundreds of dollars per year. This struggle is over power and an attempt to divert Tribal assets into favored families and hang onto what has become a full time income source.
Democracy is new to the Tribe. In the old days, a leader who got too greedy or steered the Tribe on a path that was detrimental, was simply shunned and we followed someone else. The BIA and local governments insist on recognizing only the formal entity which is the Tribal Council, although the BIA is finally beginning to recognize this Council is not representative of the Membership. So we must change this Council in a formal way according to our constitution. That is why two Membership meetings have now voted to seat our duly elected Chairperson and Secretary and make other changes, all of which have been ignored by the current Council.