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Wisconsin Residents Illegally Held Hostage In Their Homes By Native American Tribe 


BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | MARCH 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/02/wisconsin-residents-illegally-held-hostage-in-their-homes-by-native-american-tribe/

Tribe roads blockade
The land dispute highlights why Native Americans need true sovereignty, not federal dependency.

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In a plot line that seems ripped right out of the hit Paramount series “Yellowstone,” some 65 Wisconsin families are currently being held hostage by the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The tribe has erected illegal barricades on the only roads that lead to their homes, preventing residents from entering and leaving. The only way out of the reservation is over frozen lakes that are quickly melting with the coming spring. 

The yellow barricades and chained-together concrete blocks were set up 31 days ago over a bitter land dispute among two non-tribal title companies, the town of Lac du Flambeau, and the tribe. Meanwhile, racial tensions are rising, and many fear violence in a standoff that’s also shining a long-needed spotlight on the dysfunctional arrangement between Indian tribes and the U.S. federal government. 

To open the roads for only 15 years, Tribal President John Johnson is demanding $20 million. It’s an amount Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany describes as tantamount to “extortion.” Tiffany also says it’s unlawful since all four roads in question receive federal funding through the Tribal Transportation Program. According to Tiffany, the tribe has received a total of $218 million in federal funds since 2013. 

“I’m paying taxes to be illegally blockaded on my private land,” said Marsha Panfil. Panfil and her partner Mike Hornbostel own and run Hornwinkels Bear Stube, a historic bar and restaurant in the area. The pair has been considering closing their doors ever since they were blockaded because the only way in and out of their home is by crossing a frozen lake. 

“I have to rent another house now so that I can continue to run my business,” said Hornbostel. “Crossing a [frozen] lake with the hours that we keep just isn’t conducive to sanity,” added Panfil. 

Many of the blockaded homes are over 20 miles from the nearest grocery store and their residents’ jobs. Denny Pearson, another blockaded resident, crosses Ross Allen Lake every day to get to work, but he won’t be able to for much longer. “When the ice goes out, there’ll be no way to get to and from work,” Pearson told The Federalist. According to Pearson, it will likely only be safe to cross the lake for another two weeks before the ice becomes too thin. That’s when locals fear tensions will reach a breaking point. 

The Dispute 

When developers built homes for non-members of the tribe, they obtained right-of-way easements for parts of the roads that pass tribal land, but the easements expired more than a decade ago. 

No one is denying that the tribe owns portions of the roads it’s barricading. “I think that the tribe has a legitimate position. They want to be compensated,” said Jeff Lang, a blockaded resident.

The question is whether the easements are worth $20 million. Interestingly, the tribe has barred anyone from viewing the roads’ rights-of-way appraisals. Tribal President Johnson claims the title companies could have paid much less had they “negotiate[d] in good faith” years ago. The attorney representing the non-tribal residents, however, says the tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) were slow in responding and negotiating for years.

According to the residents’ attorney, “the Landowners have made two good faith settlement offers and two good faith requests to meet to resolve these road issues,” but have received no “substantive response from the Tribe.” The Federalist reached out to Johnson but did not hear back. 

Law Enforcement Refuses to Act

Some of the residents knew that the easement to their property was expiring, while others had no idea there even was an easement. All the residents, however, were guaranteed by the town and the title companies that they would have access to and from their homes. 

Hornbostel told The Federalist it’s the duty of the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Police Chief TJ Bill to remove the unlawful barricades. Bill has refused, though, and Hornbostel believes the chief is taking orders from Johnson. The Federalist reached out to Bill and asked why he hasn’t removed the illegal barriers but did not hear back. 

“I’ve worked my entire life to buy a beautiful home on a lake, and now it’s worth zero,” said Hornbostel. “I can’t live there. I can’t sell it. It’s worth nothing. And that’s because the government won’t do anything, law enforcement will not enforce the laws, and our town is inept.”

Pawns on a Chessboard

The residents behind the barricades are, as Lang says, “pawns on a chessboard,” and they’re suffering. Don Pollard and his wife, who are both 88 years old, along with the other residents were given less than 24-hour notice that the roads were closing. The couple’s son had fallen through the ice a couple of years ago, and though he survived, they did not want to rely on crossing the frozen lake. The Pollards have consequently had to move in with their daughter in southern Wisconsin. Other elderly residents do not have anywhere else to go and remain behind the barricades. 

Residents can’t work, buy groceries, receive mail, or vote unless they cross the lake. The tribe agreed to remove the barricades for doctor appointments and ambulances only. Residents say it can sometimes take the police department almost an hour to open the roads, which has become a major safety concern.

“There are people up here that are living with high degrees of stress and emotional stress,” said blockaded resident Dave Kievet. “I talked to one gentleman yesterday who’s a Vietnam veteran, [and] he said, ‘Dave, my stress level in Vietnam was at a 10. I’m at a 9.9 right now.’”

Nicole Beer, a trapped resident, says that once the ice melts, she and her husband will have no choice but to remove the barricades themselves. “We have lives and businesses,” she said. “I should have the freedom and the liberty to drive and get my own groceries and to have the garbage service that I pay for come in and pick up my garbage.”

Racial tensions are also growing. “It’s escalating very, very quickly to violence,” said Panhil. “Somebody threatened to burn all the [blockaded] houses down yesterday,” she revealed. “I sleep with a 95-pound lab and a 12 gauge shotgun now,” stated Hornbostel. “They threaten to burn our houses. They threatened our business. What am I supposed to do? I’m going to protect what’s mine.” 

The situation is so combustible that The New York Times covered the story, but its reporting has only made things worse. The Times said the tribe is “on solid legal ground” but failed to mention that the barricades were illegally erected on publicly funded roads. The Times also reported that the tribe has “promised to allow ambulances and other emergency services to pass through if needed” but did not report how slow the process has been for law enforcement to remove the barricades when needed. 

“With all due respect to The New York Times, I’m not sure they really understand the situation,” said Lang. “It’s a local problem,” he continued, warning against “extreme voices” inhibiting resolution. 

Is It Stolen Land? 

Non-tribal residents live on the reservation thanks to the 1887 Dawes Act, which broke up communally run reservations, allotting plots of land to each head of an Indian family. Since then, parts of the reservation have fallen into non-tribal ownership via sale, foreclosure, or enforcement of tax liens.

Many residents said they believe the tribe’s barricades are part of the native “#LandBack Movement,” in which natives try to recapture reservation land owned by whites to reassert their sovereignty. 

Tribal member Melissa Christensen told The Federalist that while she sympathizes with the residents behind the barricades, they “shouldn’t have been able to buy [reservation] property to begin with.” But is the Lac du Flambeau reservation really the tribe’s land? After all, the Sioux Indians occupied the area until the Chippewa Indian ancestors of the Lac du Flambeau tribe fought a bloody war against the Sioux and forced them off their land. 

“If they don’t want us on their roads, are they entitled to our roads?” asked Pollard. “They’re supposed to be another country, but doggonit, are they really another country? And if they are, do they want us to treat them like another country?” asked Pollard, referencing the millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that flow into the tribe each year. 

The System Is Broken

Blame for everything can ultimately be placed on the U.S. federal government and the defective, paternalistic tribal system it created. In the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia ruling, Chief Justice John Marshall stated that Native “relations to the United States resemble that of a ward to his guardian.” As a result, the U.S. government holds tribal lands in trust, managing them allegedly for the well-being of American Indians.

In reality, the regulations and bureaucracy inflicted on the reservations stifle American Indian innovation and prosperity. According to Tribal President Johnson, part of why the negotiations have taken so long is that the BIA ignored tribal leader questions and showed an “utter lack of recognition” of the tribe’s sovereignty.

But as Pollard suggested, the tribe isn’t really sovereign. Natives born on the reservations are born with American citizenship (and are eligible for Social Security, Medicare, welfare, and other benefits) because they are born on United States soil.

If the tribe were truly independent, tribal members would not be U.S. citizens, the reservations would receive no federal funding, the BIA wouldn’t exist, and the Lac du Flambeau tribe’s blockades would not be illegal. Since the tribe does receive federal funds and is demanding more and more every year, it is not sovereign and its decision to blockade its non-tribal neighbors is unlawful.

For the residents behind the barricades, their predicament is deeply complicated because the trust system is broken. The problems they face are not unique. More easements are set to expire in the area. As racial tensions and talk of reparations in America heat up, this combustible land-rights issue will also affect other reservations and non-Native Americans who live on tribal lands. 

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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In Nevada, A Corrupt Cash-For-Votes Scheme Is Hiding In Plain Sight


Reported by John Daniel Davidson NOVEMBER 18, 2020

In Nevada, A Corrupt Cash-For-Votes Scheme Is Hiding In Plain Sight

It should surprise no one that Nevada has problems with election security and voter fraud, especially after the state mailed an absentee ballot to every registered voter this year whether he requested one or not, then received back more than eight times as many mail-in ballots as they did in 2016. That’s part of the reason Republicans in Nevada filed another lawsuit on Tuesday alleging widespread voter fraud and irregularities.

The mass mailing of unsolicited ballots is of course a recipe for fraud, even more so in a state where the voter rolls contain tens of thousands of people who haven’t voted or updated their records in more than a decade. This is how you get dead people voting, as we reported here at The Federalist and as Tucker Carlson noted last week.

But there’s another, less sensational but perhaps more consequential election scandal in Nevada that hasn’t yet made headlines, even though it’s been hiding in plain sight for weeks now. Under the guise of supposedly nonprofit, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, Native American voter advocacy groups in Nevada handed out gift cards, electronics, clothing, and other items to voters in tribal areas, in many cases documenting the exchange of ballots for “prizes” on their own Facebook pages, sometimes even while wearing official Joe Biden campaign gear.

Simply put, this is illegal. Offering voters anything of value in exchange for their vote is a violation of federal election law, and in some cases punishable by up to two years in prison and as much as $10,000 in fines. That includes raffles, free food, free T-shirts, and so on.

The GOTV Effort In Nevada Was Blatantly Criminal

Yet the Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page contains post after post of voters receiving something of value in exchange for proof they cast a vote or handed over an absentee ballot. In one post, two men display $25 Visa gift cards they received after dropping off absentee ballots, presumably to someone who works for the Nevada Native Vote Project.

In another Facebook post, a spokeswoman for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Bethany Sam, appears on video inside a polling place offering T-shirts, stickers, jewelry, and thousands of dollars in gift cards to voters. Some of these items appear to be part of a raffle, which Sam says voters can enter in person or by emailing or texting a picture of their absentee ballot, while other items are offered to anyone who shows up in person and votes.

Sam appears in another video wearing a Biden-Harris campaign mask with the Biden campaign bus behind her, talking about how important Native votes are to “swing” Washoe County (Biden won the county, which includes Reno, by less than 12,000 votes). In another video, she tells viewers about “Biden swag” available at a GOTV event, along with free Biden cookies. All these videos appear on the official Facebook page of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. (I called Sam to ask about this, and about the illegal raffles, but she never called me back.)

Raffling off gift cards—the equivalent of a cash giveaway—appears to have been widespread among Native American communities in Nevada. The Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page lists dozens of gift card winners by name, all of them rewarded simply for their vote, as well as advertisements for the raffles and information on how to enter.

In addition to the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, other Native groups throughout Nevada—Elko Indian Colony, Walker River Paiute Tribe, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Moapa Band of Paiute—hosted voter raffles of some sort, all of them sponsored by the Nevada Native Vote Project.

Others, like the Las Vegas Tribal Community, simply gave away “free stuff” to voters.

Following The (Taxpayer) Money

All of this raises some fairly obvious questions. Where did all these gift cards and prizes come from? Who paid for them? How much “free stuff” was given away? Who’s really behind this so-called GOTV effort?

The Nevada Native Vote Project is a nonprofit group, and its voter advocacy is supposed to be nonpartisan and politically unbiased. Yet the group’s Facebook page includes a post from a group called Native Organizers Alliance about the importance of voting, “because we live in places of political upheaval where the rightwing operates quite openly.” The post includes a political map of Nevada and Wisconsin, with arrows pointing to blue, Democrat-voting areas that say, “Natives live here.”

Funding for the Nevada Native Vote Projects appears to come from an umbrella group called Native Vote that’s an initiative of the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI. The connections between such groups are not always obvious, but the logos on the T-shirts the Nevada Native Vote Project was handing out at polling places is the same logo on the Native Vote website (see screenshots below).

So where does NCAI get its funding? From a lot of places, including Native tribal groups, charitable foundations, and major corporations. It also gets millions in funding from the federal government. More than a half-dozen government “partners” are listed on NCAI’s supporters page, including the Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. In 2018, these federal agencies provided a total of more than $3 million to NCAI, according to the group’s own disclosures.

It’s unclear whether taxpayer dollars went directly into Native Vote’s GOTV efforts or to purchase gift cards and other “prizes” for Native American voters, but the NCAI logo does appear on Facebook posts advertising illegal Election Day cash raffles in Nevada.

What’s clear, however, is that the GOTV efforts of Native Vote aren’t nonpartisan. Native Vote and NCAI have partnered in the past with a Native advocacy group called Four Directions, jointly producing a voter guide in 2012 and last year partnering with Four Directions to co-host a presidential forum focused on Native American issues.

This year, back in January, Four Directions co-hosted a presidential forum in Las Vegas with Nevada Tribal Nations. The “donate” page for that forum, and indeed for Four Directions’ own website, goes through ActBlue, an online giving platform that funneled nearly $1.6 billion to Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms and has since become a powerful fundraising tool for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations like Black Lives Matter.

This Is Widespread, And Corporate Media Won’t Report It

There are about 60,000 eligible Native American voters in Nevada who make up about 3 percent of the state’s total voting population. That’s almost twice the current margin of Biden’s current lead over President Trump in Nevada. So the Native American vote really does matter, it could even be decisive. It therefore matters how many Native American votes were influenced by an illegal cash-for-votes scheme, especially if funding for it came from American taxpayers via the NCAI.

It also matters because this didn’t just happen in Nevada. Organizers there might have been more obvious about what they were doing, but there’s evidence that similar efforts, including gift card and electronics giveaways, were undertaken in Native communities in South Dakota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, Idaho, Minnesota, and Texas.

All of this coordinated illegal activity, clearly designed to churn out votes for Biden and Democrats in tribal areas all across the country, is completely out in the open. You don’t need special access or some secret source to find out about it. You just have be curious, look around, and report it.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are not curious and refuse to report on any of this stuff. What’s described above is an egregious and totally transparent vote-buying scheme in Nevada that was likely undertaken on a similar scale across nearly a dozen other states, but you won’t read about it in The New York Times, or hear about it on CNN.

That’s not because the story is unimportant, but because, for the media establishment, it’s inconvenient. No wonder these groups didn’t try to hide what they were doing.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
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Bombshell: WaPo Issues Nathan Phillips Correction, Says Never Served in Vietnam


Reported By Ben Marquis | January 22, 2019 at 5:13pm

After an incident involving Covington Catholic High School students following Friday’s March for Life in Washington D.C., an Native American activist and black supremacist protesters became emblematic of “fake news” complaints that have been lodged against the establishment media for decades.

Starting with a short snippet of video featuring the Native American activist — identified as Omaha tribe elder and Marine Corps veteran Nathan Phillips — banging a drum and chanting while locked in a standoff with a smiling young teen wearing a red MAGA hat, the media ran wild with accusations of racism and harassment against the elder by the students who had purportedly approached and surrounded him in an intimidating display of white privilege and social oppression.

Except, having rushed to judgment without waiting for all of the facts, much of the media was forced to walk back their initial reports by Sunday after other, longer videos emerged that painted an entirely different picture. It was the boys who had been harassed by the black supremacists and approached by Phillips, not the other way around, as had been implied at first.

The media had sought to demonize the students and portray Phillips as a victim, and countless outlets — including The Washington Post — reported that the abuse from the boys was extra terrible in light of the fact that Phillips was a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.  Except, the media has had to walk back that claim as well, as it has now been revealed that Phillips never served in Vietnam, though it is still maintained that he served as a Marine during the same time period.

The Washington Post issued a correction on Tuesday about Phillips to the hit piece against the MAGA hat-wearing boys that was first posted on Sunday morning. That correction reads: “Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips served in the U.S. Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was never deployed to Vietnam.”

This is yet another huge factual error within the larger array of mistakes in the story that the media got wrong at first glance. It doesn’t appear that Phillips ever specifically described himself as a combat veteran — though he certainly remains fair game for criticism for his distorted version of events in several interviews following the incident. Yet, despite Phillips having never specifically said he was a combat veteran of the Vietnam era, that was most definitely insinuated — both implicitly and explicitly by some — in countless reports and tweets from media outlets and reporters.

CNN transcripts from their interview with Nathan Phillips say that he said he was a Vietnam War veteran, but the video interview shows him saying he is a “Vietnam times veteran.”

The folks over at a veteran-focused blog known as This Ain’t Hell took a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the media’s portrayal of the self-described “Vietnam times veteran.”

Without Phillips’ military service records to verify — that have been requested — the blog nevertheless proceeded to display several screenshots of media chyrons and tweets announcing Phillips as a war vet, again clearly implying that he had served in the conflict.

The blog further dug into several interviews of Phillips and even looked into old media accounts of Phillips from prior incidents over the years and found no evidence that he had ever described himself as a combat veteran, but did find several instances where potentially “over-zealous” reporters had assigned that specific honor to him.

On top of that, the blog also looked closely at his age — reported to be 64 — and compared that to the actual timeline of the Vietnam War. Phillips would have turned 18 right around the tail-end of the war in 1972/73, so there is only an exceptionally small window with little margin for error to account for his having graduated from high school, enlisting in the Marines, as well as graduating from basic training and additional training schools prior to being immediately shipped off to the war zone, were he to have actually served in the war.

Again, without his actual service records to provide verification, there is really no way to know for sure, but odds are Phillips served in the Marines during what is called the Vietnam era — which officially ended in 1975 — without having served in the combat zone.

To be sure, we here at Conservative Tribune are not knocking Phillips for his military service. Indeed, we commend him for his service and sacrifice to the nation, regardless of whether he served overseas or at home, during a time of war or peace.

Instead, we are throwing a sharp elbow in the direction of the mainstream media — especially The Washington Post — and all of the reporters who perpetuated the implication that he was a Vietnam War veteran who had actually fought in the war, which appears to have not been the case at all.

This was a story made huge by the media in large part because it was deceptively framed to fit the preconceived notions of liberals by portraying a Native American activist as an oppressed victim and a bunch of white, MAGA hat-wearing Catholic school boys as privileged aggressors, which was pretty much the opposite of what actually happened. The media should be ashamed of themselves, and minor corrections and half-hearted apologies aren’t going to cut it in making things right this time.

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Ben Marquis
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Writer and researcher. Constitutional conservatarian with a strong focus on protecting the Second and First Amendments.

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Actual Descendant of Pocahontas Speaks Out on Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test – ‘I Feel Betrayed’


Reported By Steven Beyer | October 17, 2018 at 10:20am

A descendant of the famed 17th-century Powhatan princess Pocahontas spoke out against Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test results Tuesday on Fox News “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” saying she felt “betrayed” by the senator’s claims of Native American ancestry.

Host Carlson asked Debbie White Dove Porreco about the Massachusetts Democrat’s test results, saying, “You’ve watched Elizabeth Warren, once again, put herself at the head of the ‘Me Sioux’ movement, and come out with this DNA test which you called for. Now that we have the results, what’s your response?”

“Well, first of all, I’m so glad she ended up taking one,” Porrecco said, “and it did prove that she wasn’t the Cherokee Indian that she’s been claiming to be for so long.”

“How did that make you feel as a descendant of Pocahontas?” Carlson asked. “Cultural appropriation is often in the news. Do you think she’s guilty of it?”

Porrecco replied, “Well, I think she’s guilty of claiming she’s been American Indian but (has) no proof, and using it for applications, for college, for political reasons.

“And that was all wrong, that she did that this whole time.”

Carlson then asked her how she felt about Warren being called the “first female faculty member of color” at Harvard.

“I feel betrayed,” Porrecco said, “because she wasn’t. She was using the name, trying to be American Indian just to rise above.”

She went on to say that Warren’s claim of being American Indian took away “benefits” from the American Indians that belonged to them.

Carlson asked Porrecco if other Native Americans felt the same way she did.

She responded, “I do. I think they feel betrayed. They feel disappointed, you know. I think at this point, she needs to come back and apologize to everybody for what she’s done.”

“Yes,” Carlson said, “I think that’s right.”

Porrecco, however, isn’t the only Native American to speak out after Warren released her DNA test results on Monday. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, said in a statement Monday that “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

Additionally, Hoskin said, “A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.”

Using a DNA test to prove that you have a connection to the Cherokee or any other tribal nation, Hoskin noted, is “inappropriate and wrong.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Steven Beyer
Steven is a husband, father, and follower of Jesus. You can find him enjoying listening to or playing jazz piano, enjoying the Disney parks, or hiking the Arizona landscape.

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