Native American Press/Ojibwe News

Paul’s legacy

November 1, 2002
This is the last issue of Press/ON before election day next Tuesday. With the tragic death of Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter, and his staff and plane crew, it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm and interest in the election.

Wellstone served twelve years on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. We know that he was extremely interested in Indian issues and Indian affairs, and a dedicated and sincere advocate. Wellstone was deeply concerned about the issues, and devoted both his own energy and that of his staff toward what he felt were the best interests of the Indian community.

At my first meeting with Wellstone, shortly after he was elected in 1990, I told him along with other ethnic newspaper publishers in St. Paul, that there were two things that he could do for the Indian community: to get us a means of enforcing financial accountability and civil rights in dealing with our tribal governments. I don’t think that he really understood the issues yet, so he gave a somewhat noncommittal response but said that he would ‘look into it.’

Wellstone was a ‘liberal’ in the classic sense, and his heart was in it. He asked me one day, “do you think tribal sovereignty is a myth?” I answered, “yes.” Wellstone didn’t pursue the issue of tribal sovereignty in that conversation, but said that change for the Indian community had to “come from within” the Indian community. I responded that I felt that the system itself had to change, and that I didn’t know if it was possible to create change from within, or if the system could change itself, because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The system governing almost every aspect of life on Indian reservations was created outside the Indian community, and is maintained by billions of dollars in federal and state funds.

Wellstone was a tireless advocate for the causes he believed in, and he was formidable foe for those with whom he disagreed. He passionately championed certain causes which he believed would help the ‘underdog,’ and it often seemed for him the issues were black-and-white and there wasn’t any ‘gray.’ For example, he marched with AIM in their demonstrations against the use of the Washington Redskins’ logo, but he refused to participate in other Indian community activists’ advocacy for our rights, for example the “Minnesota Accountability” demonstrations for accountability in Indian gaming and Indian civil rights at the Minnesota Indian Gaming conference in Minneapolis almost exactly nine years ago on Thursday, October 28th, 1993.

I didn’t always agree with Paul on issues affecting the Indian community, and in fact I asked him to resign from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee about six years ago because I felt he wasn’t accomplishing anything significant. Wellstone wrote me back and gave me a list of things he thought he had achieved, which I thought were mostly material things: money for housing and other social programs, which did not change the structure that is generating the problems in the first place. Obviously Wellstone didn’t resign from the Senate committee, and in his third run for the Senate he was getting substantial backing from the tribal establishment.

Press/ON had an interview scheduled with Wellstone this week …

He will be missed by almost all of us in the community, including those of us who didn’t always agree with him. A number of people have told me how Wellstone had helped them, and I know his wife Sheila was an honorary member of the women’s shelter at Red Lake. The Wellstones often put their money where their mouth was, and they had donated some of their personal funds to help the Red Lake women’s shelter.

Not to be critical, but to be fair: are we better off today because of Wellstone’s service for twelve years on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee? It’s an interesting question, and given the changes that high-stakes gambling has brought to Indian country, a question that may be impossible to answer. We see a mixed legacy, not unlike that of another powerful politician who died recently, Roger Jourdain.

I’ve never been a person who thinks eulogies should blur the truth, nor should a person become greater in death than he or she was in life. Press/ON would like to publish readers’ letters about Wellstone’s legacy.