PO BOX 1318 MS 2269
Sacramento, CA 95812
+1 (650) 268-5229
jacinda.janelle@berkeley.edu
#mmipcrisis, #indiangaming, #drugabuse, #domesticviolence
Summary: Murdered and Missing Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) has become a crisis because tribal councils are neglecting to treat their peoples’ mental health conditions to stay in power even though colonization, which many blame as the problem, is outdated, and tribal councils only use these casinos to exasperate their peoples’ mental health conditions like drug abuse. These casinos are often used as a drug trafficking hub, from which tribal councils profit. Instead of spending these profits on mental health care and the MMIP crisis, tribal councils are frivolously spending tribal money on the very culprit of the crisis – drugs, causing drug addictions. Addiction leads to domestic violence that often results in the very pandemic of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. Yet, colonists still cannot admit that Native psychology is far superior than their white-washed philosophical worldview to treat Native mental health problems with trained psychologists in Western medical schools.
Biography: Jacinda Chan has the equivalent of a US PhD in International Criminal Justice with over 15 years as a freelance journalist, uncovering human rights abuses and international humanitarian law violations even as a Russian troll around the world. She has written for The Diplomatic Courier, Peace Data, Truth Out, Mic, and other various local papers.
With the recent approval of Scotts Valley in Vallejo, California for the Pomo Indian Tribe to build a casino on the land, how will this decision reinforce the genocide of Native culture? The controversy is that the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation wants to preserve the natural beauty, but the Pomo Tribe argues that a casino to bring in money for their conquered tribe would be more beneficial.
Yet, Salvador Frease argues that these casinos’ profits need to be used wisely. His 17-year-old daughter, Ileanna Frease Ofelem of the Elem Pomo Indian Tribe, was callously murdered by her “uncle,” Joe Boggs, Jr., —a family member of the tribal council near Robinson Rancheria Resort and Casino where Ileanna’s body was found overdosed with fentanyl and alcohol.
Courtesy of Salvador Frease (left): Ileanna Frease Ofelem (right) of the Elem Pomo Indian Tribe was an ambitious young woman with big dreams. She planned to go to Paul Mitchell School to work in cosmetology and loved participating in cultural events and dancing in traditional ceremonies.
Natives around the world face a disproportionately higher rate of kidnappings, rapes, and murders particularly among their females and transgendered peoples—two-spirited people—known as the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples (MMIP) crisis attributed to the drug epidemic in Indian country.
Frease advocates that tribal councils need to spend their profits from selling natural resources to the US government and gambling on a taskforce to solve murders and find missing people and better mental health care to address their drug addiction, instead of the charade for awareness events, and Frease is exactly right.
Oklahoma State University recently launched a program to recruit, train, and retain osteopathic physicians to serve Native communities that has proved to improve Native health. Tribal councils could do the same from selling their natural resources and gambling to fund training programs in traditional Native psychotherapy at Western university psychological degrees.
Studies have shown that traditional Native psychological techniques of observing, internalizing, and doing, like Western Christian practice teaches, strengthens resilience by giving people a sense of purpose so that Natives can end these cycles of drug addiction and domestic violence. The profits from these businesses could be used to cover these training programs.
Frease explains how tribes make a lot of profits from selling natural resources like water, oil, and coal to the US government and more than a million dollars from casinos like the very ones the Pomo Tribe wants to build in Vallejo as they did with Robinson Rancheria Resort and Casino in Lake County.
But Frease speculates that tribal councils traffick drugs into their communities to stay in power at the expense of neglecting the welfare of their people.
He rationalizes, “If 80% of your membership [is] on drugs without making coherent decisions and 20% are coherent, voting for those council members to stay in [power], the council members are benefitting off their people not being well, but high. There’s no accountability.”
International History Professor at the University of Sheffield, Caroline Pennock, explains how Natives throughout the world needed this power to assert their cultural identity via a rigid structure at a time when everyone was trying to rule over everyone else, especially when colonists took over their lands.
He argues, “If there are going to be gaming and reservations with a population of tribal members, they need to have sovereign, public safety in order, and it should be at their forefront.”
Yet, the tribal council refuses to put these profits to mental health treatments because nothing is done to stop these drug traffickers.
With Trump entering office, this claim to land only reinforces the colonialist destruction of Natives by stripping them from their culture.
This drug epidemic started when colonists would kidnap Native children, taking them to Catholic boarding schools to “white wash” them. The men would drink from a sense of failure to protect their communities and pass down the physical, sexual, and drug abuse from generation to generation known as intergenerational trauma.
Nowadays, the cultural destruction comes from not having the law back up their cultural practice of community support for teen parents. Native religion of Shamanism encourages females to bear children in their teen years, but colonists forbid the provision of teen parents receiving community support, as Tribal Judge of the Hoopa Valley Reservation, Tolowa Reservation, and Redding Rancheria, Richard Blake explains in an interview. Without the community support Natives would traditionally provide for their teen parents, the physical, sexual, and drug abuse simply continues and causes uncontrollable drug addiction.
Natives cannot even work and are forced into dire poverty, which prevents funding for adequate mental health treatment for their unique conditions, which continues to spiral down the drain.
So, they must rely on outside help from Western doctors, who do not know how to treat their conditions. They throw “white” treatments at them like narcotics and self-centered psychotherapy as the only known treatment for addiction.
Yet, narcotics trigger domestic violence when populations genetically predisposed to schizophrenia like them are prescribed these drugs to break their addiction.
The OxyContin that Purdue Pharma marketed as a safe schizophrenic treatment, only causes more manic episodes in Natives, particularly when they are forced into isolation because Western psychologists condemn their communitarian values.
As a result, the economy is so underdeveloped that Vice Chairman of the Colville Business Council, Andrew Joseph, Jr, explains, “It’s hard to get people…to live here [where] we’re isolated. They can make money and have more luxuries of this modern lifestyle in the big city.”
These revolving cycles of abuse and poverty puts a bull’s eye on Natives for foreigners to traffick drugs in and through Indian country, of which tribal leaders reap the profits to stay in power.
The Times explains how tribal leaders do not want restrictions on marijuana because they profit off it, and Mendocino County Sheriff, Matthew Kendall, adds in an interview, “Marijuana has built a silk road for other narcotics to show up.”
Tribal leaders have no incentive to stop foreigners from trafficking drugs through their lands.
He states, “The statistics I’ve seen on someone who’s been murdered or someone who’s been stolen are tied to some type of narcotics.”
Judge Richard Blake adds, “The belief [is] that everything migrates north….in what are called ‘known drug houses’ that have been identified in the [Native] community.”
The US Department of Justice says that the drugs are coming from Latin America and Asia through Canada where everyone vies for scarce resources by profiting off each others’ struggles to control territory, including tribal leaders.
Chinese are now coming through the US-Mexican because of easy access to Latin American cartels, according to multiple Guatemalan locals from Villa Nueva near Guatemala City.
Cecil Palone—adopted son of former tribal judge and then-Chief of the Quechan Tribe in Southern California on the border of Mexico, Claudette White—describes how border tribes traffick drugs in an interview: “Claudette [could open] the borders [by] all [the tribal council members] stick[ing] together [to cover up the trafficking and embezzlement. For example,] Charles Montague is getting almost half a million as CEO of the casinos[, and] we haven’t been getting per capita or anything these past 10, maybe 13 years.”
Mr. Montague denied all accusations in a phone call, arguing, “I’m not aware of any of [these allegations]. Claudette White did not have any jurisdiction over [opening and closing the borders. All profits from the casino] get transferred to the tribe. They have a revenue allocation plan [where] National Indian Gaming gets a copy.”
Yet, Cecil proved otherwise with a counter pattern of behavior of Montague. His baby mamma, related to a tribal council member, severely neglected their daughter, Aubrey, to protect the family business in drug trafficking because Cecil wanted out.
Aubrey even remembers a tribal council member pointing a gun at her and her father when she tried to speak out about her abuse.
Courtesy of Pascha Nierenhausen, Cecil Palone’s girlfriend (right): She, Aubrey Palone (middle), and Cecil Palone (left) at Abundant Life Church in Winter Haven, California fighting to end the MMIP crisis.
In another drug-related double homicide of Native American, Angela McConnell, and her non-Native boyfriend, Michael Bingham, Jr, his father, Mike Bingham, believes that tribal councils are cohorting with local police to traffic drugs.
Courtesy of Tammy Carpenter: Angela McConnel (27) had her whole life ahead of her with aspirations of becoming a political journalist. She was so passionate about music that she combined her dreams of being a journalist with her love of music as an intern at the local radio station. On her tombstone reads Tammy’s favorite poem Angela wrote: “Music is my sweet life. Together as one against all others. Until the Lord calls me home, May I always be in [H]is good graces. So[,] may it be the best years always. The neverending story of Ang. <3″
Mike Bingham rationalizes, “All these [tribal elders] appear [to be] moving marijuana, heroin, and everything else[, and the Redding police department] got people on [there] that used to be pretty hard in drug deals. They stonewalled [my son’s] case hard. They didn’t investigate anything.”
Angela’s mother, Tammy Carpenter, confers her suspicions on tribal involvement. She believes that Angela’s father—a Hoopa Valley tribal emergency transporter, according to Mike Bingham and the official Hoopa Valley website—was involved in Angela’s murder because he used to do drugs in his past.
Angela’s father even admitted on a phone call to being the couple’s transporter for drug stops.
Frease and the rest of the Pomo community where Ileanna was overdosed near Robinson Rancheria also believe that the tribal council works to cover up drug trafficking on tribal lands. They accuse Joe’s uncle, Jaime Boggs—a tribal council member—of harboring Joe even though he had the power to excommunicate Joe under the Zero Tolerance Policy.
Hoopa Valley Police Chief Rolando Ramos explains how easy it would be to cover up drug trafficking and domestic violence because “most officers grew up [in the same tribe] and know most of the people.”
Residents cannot escape intimidation, and the US government cannot protect these people either.
Under the Controlled Substance Act, the US government has no jurisdiction to stop drug trafficking within tribal lands. Tribes are responsible for dictating and executing their own drug policies as long as they do not sell it to anyone outside their borders.
For example, Lake County Sergeant Jeffrey Mora, currently investigating Ileanna’s case, told me, “[The Zero Tolerance Policy] is just something the tribe came up with internally to enforce zero drugs on the rancheria.”
It can be enforced by tribal sheriffs only if tribal residents report sightings of traffickers, says Judge Blake. But tribal residents cannot always report crimes if someone might intimidate them and cover it up.
These complicated jurisdictional laws where nobody really knows who is responsible for what forces tribes into a purgatorial balance where they must administer their own laws without the resources to do so.
In an exclusive interview, Jaime Boggs explains, “We [he and Joe were] on two totally different spectrums of the earth,” but even if he had known Joe’s activities and whereabouts, nothing could have been done.
California is a Public Law (PL) 280 state. “[So, tribes] cannot operate outside local, state, and federal law. [A judicial system with a full police] has to be funded, established, and implemented,” advocates Jaime.
After witnessing local law enforcement retreating when tribal councils ordered them off tribal lands, Frease is adamant that tribal councils must be taking advantage of PL 280 to neglect the drug epidemic.
As Judge Blake says in his twenty years on the bench, “[The MMIP crisis] is truly substance-abuse related.”
Even Director of Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas in Mexico, Laura Hernandez, testifies that drug problems cause kidnappings, rapes, and murders throughout the world in every Native community that has been colonized from the Oceanic countries to Asia and the Latin American countries.
As such, tribal councils need to make mental health a priority to protect the very sovereignty that they are fighting for at the expense of the well-being of their people, especially drug abuse. At the same time, colonialists need to get over themselves and accept Native psychology practices to stop this pandemic of murdered and missing Indigenous peoples.
From article: “These casinos are often used as a drug trafficking hub, from which tribal councils profit. Instead of spending these profits on mental health care and the MMIP crisis, tribal councils are frivolously spending tribal money on the very culprit of the crisis – drugs, causing drug addictions. Addiction leads to domestic violence that often results in the very pandemic of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. Yet, colonists still cannot admit that Native psychology is far superior than their white-washed philosophical worldview to treat Native mental health problems with trained psychologists in Western medical schools.”
“The controversy is that the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation wants to preserve the natural beauty, but the Pomo Tribe argues that a casino to bring in money for their conquered tribe would be more beneficial.”
Are you kidding me? The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation is the same tribe that owns Cache Creek Casino! How did THAT casino preserve the “natural beauty” of THAT area? And you have the nerve to speak of “native psychology” being superior than that of the “colonists”? Are “colonists” the ones creating these casinos?