On my first morning back on the reservation, I met Mark Fox in his office. He was not as wiry as when I had last seen him, but he looked about the same in a pressed collared shirt and glasses. A new poster hung on his wall: Never underestimate the power of stupid people in a large group. “The gold rush mentality has hurt us greatly,” he said. “You know that T-shirt people wear sometimes? We treat this planet like we have another one to go to? Well, we treat this reservation like we have another one to go to.”
In the months since we had last spoken, Mark had cast himself as a populist and amassed a fervent following. He was campaigning on the promise to “slow the boom,” which seemed to resonate with voters. He believed the tribe should levy a higher tax on oil producers, and he promised to lobby the Department of Interior to grant drilling permits less hastily and to consider environmental impacts more seriously. If the tribe had been more prepared for the boom, Mark argued, it would not have put so many lives at risk or wasted so much money. The council had spent haphazardly on infrastructure to keep up with development and on glamorous projects that did little to serve people’s needs, he believed. Due in part to the rising rates of addiction, life expectancy on the reservation was fifty-seven, more than twenty years below the national average. Mark would allocate more money to law enforcement and drug treatment and make sure every tribal member had health insurance. “You think about, in the history of our people, how many of our ancestors died and bled and suffered to have what little we have left today,” he said. “Suffered for hundreds of years! And now, in a matter of a few short years, our people are leaving, giving up our land, moving away. How crazy is that? Why? I’ll be straight up. Greed. Money, money, money. That’s where Mark Fox is saying, Oh shit. We’re going to slow this down so that we’ll have somewhere to live.”
After I left his office, I wondered how realistic Mark was being. What was there to do after more than a thousand oil wells had been drilled—after the boom was practically done? Still, I had been struck by how Mark and other tribal members now spoke of the boom. Before, I had sensed a reticence to curse it—a fear, I supposed, of sounding ungrateful for their fortune. Now that reticence was gone. Many tribal members were still careful, and when I asked them about Tex Hall, they rolled their eyes or spoke to me in whispers. But the words they used—corruption, greed—made clear to me that something had tipped the scales to bring them home to vote. I believed that something was the Clarke and Carlile murders. People had come home to see how these crimes had happened, and what they saw unsettled them. What they saw gave them reason to admit their discontent.
* * *
—
IN PAST ELECTION years, the month prior to voting day had been somewhat uneventful, but in 2014, on account of contributions from wealthy families, as well as a sense among the electorate that the stakes, this time, were particularly high, October would seem a never-ending run of campaign dinners and debates. Mark Fox and Damon Williams each planned a dinner in every segment of the reservation and together would meet for four debates, in Bismarck, White Shield, New Town, and Fargo.
While there were no political parties on the reservation, there were other more nuanced divisions within the tribe that influenced how citizens cast their votes. The clearest division could be traced to 1870, when a Hidatsa band led by Crow Flies High left the reservation over a disagreement and settled farther west until 1894, when soldiers returned them to Fort Berthold. When the descendants of this band later voted in opposition to their tribe’s constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act, they became known as the “No’s.” After that, the IRA hardened divisions within the tribe between those who viewed the new system of governance as a step toward self-determination and those who saw it as a vessel for federal interest and would distrust any program the tribe administered. If the No’s now aligned with a candidate, it was with Damon Williams.
Still, there was little difference between the candidates’ platforms. Both claimed the tribe had lost control of the boom and promised to rein it in, and both blamed this loss on the chairman and councilmen, whom they believed the boom endowed with too much power. Among the solutions they proposed was constitutional reform. Ed Hall, the elderly man I had dined with on my first visit to the reservation, was already working on a blueprint for a new constitution. Damon had incorporated the plan into his platform, and Mark was suggesting similar changes. Since federal laws had undermined and displaced traditional ways of governance, tribal members had few ways to keep their council in check, nor did the constitution they adopted in 1936 offer a separation and balance of power. In 1975, when a new law allowed tribes to directly manage reservation services, many members saw this as a positive change, having long been victims of federal overstep or neglect. But others believed the act transferred a pattern of dependency fostered by federal agencies to the council while failing to restore or strengthen tribal institutions, lending councilmen unfair leverage over citizens. When Mark mentioned the problems with the constitution, he invoked The Lord of the Rings. “There’s too much centralization of power,” he told me. “People change when they put on that ring: Suddenly everyone’s coming to them, and they say, ‘This is cool. I’ve got all this power.’ ” Mark would be like the hobbit Frodo, he said, an unlikely hero who destroys the ring.
“The chairman is only as powerful as his council lets him be,” Judy Brugh told me one day in her office. The most senior member of the council, she was dressed in an elegant wool sweater. “That’s where we went wrong,” she explained. “We let him have too much power. It’s sad, because he had a lot going for him.” She paused, as if wondering if she had meant it. “He’s a really good speaker,” she said.
I had dropped by tribal headquarters looking for Tex, but no one knew where he was. His press secretary would not return my messages, and when I went by her office, I found it locked and dark. I had asked another secretary, but she averted her eyes. It seemed Mark was the only one who had seen Tex recently—weeks earlier, at an event in Bismarck. Tex had told Mark he was doing “all right.” He had been in Arizona, where he and Tiffiany owned another house, and where Tex often went to play basketball.
I could think of one councilman who might lead me to the chairman, but when I found him at the Northern Lights building in New Town one day, he also shook his head. He was seated at a table in the lobby, at a celebration for a boy who had qualified to compete in the Indian National Finals Rodeo. The councilman was not in the mood to talk and suggested I interview his legislative assistant, a younger man who had previously worked for a senator. “I’m concerned about the shift we have to make in conscious thought from survival economics to long, sustaining economic planning,” the man said. “We do want to promote entrepreneurial endeavors. It’s unfortunate that money is just flowing by us. But our leaders should be stewards of it, rather than participants in it. I think you have to be a government official or a private citizen. There aren’t enough safeguards to be both.”
Another man dressed in coveralls emblazoned with the Petro-Hunt logo joined us at the table. “Where’s Tex at?” he said.
The councilman laughed. “Good question! He didn’t come to the last meeting. Is that a sore loser or not?”
“I think he’s embarrassed,” the man replied.
Later that day, I interviewed a woman at the table who asked not to be named. “It was foolish for Tex to think he could get away with it,” she said. “Three thousand to four thousand people get royalties, but everyone has to put up with the traffic, the crime, the violence. Then you see Tex’s helicopter flying by. We’ve always been oppressed by the government, but when it’s your own who do it to you; it’s a double slam. There’s a lot of anger. Tex is done. This is his legacy. This is what he has to live with, because people won’t remember the good things he did in the beginning of his run. People are only going to remember what he did in the end.”
Nearly everyone I interviewed impl
ied that Tex had done something wrong, but what exactly he had done was unclear. Many seemed to believe he was involved in the murders or, at the very least, guilty by association, but there was no evidence that, aside from Lissa’s attempts to tell him, Tex had been aware of the violence, nor would such evidence emerge. The true nature of his relationship with James continued to elude me as well, and since I could not ask Tex myself, I had no way to confirm the rumors I heard. I had only what the public had—a copy of the report—which, apart from some email correspondence, contained little evidence. Tex’s most obvious mistake, aside from enriching an alleged murderer, was soliciting payment from an oil company while urging the Bureau to delay the same company’s drilling permit. Some tribal members were lobbying the Department of Justice to press charges, but when I asked a department spokesman if Tex was being investigated, he declined to comment, and when I asked a former U.S. attorney of North Dakota, he hedged. If it were his decision, he said, he would spend his limited resources on prosecuting the reservation’s lengthening roster of violent and sexual crimes.
I had taken to asking tribal members what crimes they believed the chairman committed; answers varied. Charles Hudson, the son of the woman whose house I stayed in and who had come from Portland, Oregon, to vote, said that while he hoped Tex would be prosecuted, he believed the crimes alleged in the report were “pedestrian.” What Tex did legally was more serious: By pushing the idea that the tribe could become “sovereign by the barrel,” he had threatened what was guaranteed to tribes by treaty. “He did that without attending to the fact that the federal government took things from Native people and will always owe something in return,” Hudson told me. “So to say ‘we don’t need appropriations’ I think is highly irresponsible”—especially when because of and in spite of the boom, the tribe was short on police, teachers, doctors, and basic infrastructure.
Some went further to suggest that Tex’s greatest sin was the boom itself. Indeed, it was Tex who had courted one of the first oil companies to lease reservation minerals; who lobbied Congress and federal agencies to rush the approval of drilling permits; who eschewed federal oversight when the tribe had few environmental codes of its own and limited means of enforcement; who bought a yacht before investing in public services. It was Tex who consorted with violent criminals. All this was true, so I understood the anger, though I also understood that the boom was not wholly his. Tex was not the only one who had gone door-to-door soliciting his relatives to lease land. “Think about it,” Mark Fox said. “The oil companies knew what the value of that land was when they paid fifty bucks an acre, but at some point in time, to get it done, a tribal member had to say, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the tribe. I care about myself. I’ll help you get that acreage. And when we flip it, we make millions.’ ”
* * *
—
I SUSPECTED MARK was referring to someone in particular—to the casino manager, Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., who had leased a third of the reservation for fifty dollars an acre before flipping his acres to a larger oil company for two hundred times that amount. But I also knew Mark was speaking generally about the way colonization works. After the massacres, the boarding schools, the outright stealing of land, what lasted was the violence that got under a person’s skin, inside a person’s head. Shame became violence toward oneself and then violence toward one’s own community. I don’t give a fuck about the tribe. Greed was human nature, but it was hard not to see the taking advantage that went on within the tribe during the boom as the legacy of a centuries-old design.
Most efforts to separate Native people from their land have been elaborate and overt—the breaking of treaties by executive order, the sale of acreage to homesteaders, the taking of children from their families—while others have been subtler. Among the oldest strategies to acquire land and resources in America was marriage to Native people. In Oklahoma, where the Chickasaw Nation resettled after it was forcibly removed from the Southeast, it was so common for white men to marry Native women and for these men to then abandon their wives that the tribe passed laws revoking a white person’s access to land and annuities if that person sought a divorce. In 1876, the tribe tightened its laws, requiring white suitors to reside within its boundaries for two years before marrying a tribal citizen. Still, the laws hardly dispelled the rumor that Native women and land were for the taking. “I understand that your tribe offered an inducement in money and land to good moral white men that would marry your young maidens,” a preacher wrote to a leader of the Choctaw Nation, another tribe forcibly relocated to Oklahoma. Meanwhile, a Texas rancher wrote to the Chickasaw council that he “wanted to marry an Indian girl so he wouldn’t have to pay the permit on a large herd of cattle.” More infamously, in the 1920s, white men married into the Osage Nation and conspired to kill scores of tribal citizens who were beneficiaries of a vast oil fortune.
On the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, many of the largest tribal families bear the names of the first white men who gained property in the region. These men were fur traders, interpreters, farmers, gold diggers, cattle rustlers, ranchers, and Indian agents assigned by the government to oversee the reservation. In the twentieth century, after Congress divided most Indian land into allotments, ranching became the sole industry on reservations across the Great Plains. Landowners leased their allotments to white ranchers if they could not afford the cattle to use the land themselves, so even most land belonging to tribal members was, in function, under white control. There were some exceptions—reservation families who managed not just to use their land but to acquire more of it. On Fort Berthold, it became a matter of conflict that families who fared better economically tended to be “mixed-blood” and have positions in government. As control of the land conferred on these families more wealth and political influence, it stratified the tribe. Before the oil kings of Fort Berthold, there had been cattle kings—descendants both of America’s first people and of its first capitalists.
If colonization had begun the stratification of the reservation, the oil boom was finishing it. Many tribal members I spoke with lamented the widening gap between rich and poor and the sense that most money being earned from the boom was leaving the reservation. The consequences had remained local, while the benefits had dispersed. Corporations were earning the most money; then the men and women who serviced drillers, most of whom would leave when the boom was over. Tex Hall embodied both dilemmas in the eyes of his constituents: He had allowed non-Indians access to Indian resources in the interest of becoming rich himself.
Few seemed to recall that Tex had resisted the boom in its beginning for these very same reasons. I could think of one man who would remember, and that was Steve Kelly, the former lawyer for the tribe who facilitated a majority of the initial leases on the reservation before founding Trustland Oilfield Services, the company for which Kristopher Clarke, James Henrikson, and Sarah Creveling first worked. In the middle of October, I met Steve at his shop on the edge of New Town. The building, though relatively new, appeared to be falling apart. There was a faint smell of diesel inside, the hiss of a welder’s torch. I made my way through a windowless corridor and climbed a set of metal stairs, emerging in a room decorated with three garish paintings—a bear, an eagle, and two white men on horseback pointing over a prairie. Steve was seated at a mission-style desk and offered me a leather chair. He was a corpulent man, with pale skin and a shrill, breathy voice. A television was on, muted.
I had not spoken to Steve since he called me about the story I had written more than a year ago, when he offered to explain the politics of the reservation. Now I wanted to understand how Tex had gone from once standing up to a Canadian oil company to willfully opening the reservation to outside interests.
When Steve took the job with the tribe in 2002, he said, “There was nothing going on” on Fort Berthold. “You could have shot a cannon down Main Street and not hit anything.” So when oil companies approached the tribe in 2005 with
offers to lease land, Steve encouraged Tex to make a deal. Tex had not been interested. He wanted the tribe to drill oil itself and keep more of the profit, as one tribe, the Southern Ute, in Colorado had done. Steve warned Tex against this. “I told him, ‘If the tribe’s going to run something, we’re going to screw it up.’ ” When Steve negotiated the tribe’s first oil deal, “Tex was pissed. Really pissed. I asked him, ‘Tex, what’s the big deal? We needed the money.’
“It’s socialism versus capitalism,” Steve told me. Tex wanted, essentially, to nationalize tribal resources, while Steve thought that by allowing corporations to compete for rights to drill on the reservation, landowners would earn higher bonuses and royalties and other tribal members would have more opportunities to own businesses. Steve believed in the free market. He also distrusted Tex. “Tex wanted control,” Steve said. “You know, ‘If you vote for me, I’ll give you some oil wells. I’ll make you a rich man, but you’ve got to stand behind me.’ ”
When James Henrikson called Steve in the early summer of 2011, Steve had been working privately in the oil fields for more than four years. By that time, Trustland was the most successful business on the reservation in that it employed the most people and ran the most trucks, but Steve insisted it was far from the wealthiest. The companies earning the most money, he said, were those acting as shells, hiring other companies to do the work for them as Maheshu would do with Blackstone. Not long after James and Sarah began working for Trustland, Steve suspected they were going behind his back, arranging work for themselves. Steve ended their contract, and after they joined Maheshu, he considered submitting a complaint against Tex to the Tribal Employment Rights Office but decided against it: “I got to thinking, I know how James is, and I know how Tex is. I’m not going to do anything to break that relationship up. I’ll let those two do each other in.”
Yellow Bird Page 28