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.