Is The Celebration of Columbus Day a Bigger Issue Than The Washington Redskins? Is ONEIDA Nation Bullying?

We have had a poll up on the Washington Redskins nickname controversy on our sidebar, but would a more proper target be what our children are learning about Columbus?   What do you Think??



Susan Bradford has her own view of the ONEIDA nation’s bullying of the Redskins Organization

More stuff on Christopher Columbus your teachers never told you:


1. On a 1493 voyage, Columbus' ship Santa Maria was shipwrecked in the area now called The Bahamas. He found the native people the 'Lucayans' friendly, healthy, helpful and generous. They freed his ship. In return, he kidnapped 25 of them. Only 7 survived the journey back to Spain. 

2. Columbus told the queen the Lucayans wore gold and had many riches, but were so passive it would take only 50 men to overtake the entire island, rule them and steal their riches. The queen complied giving Columbus 17 ships, 1500 men and an arsenal of weapons. 

3. When Columbus returned he demanded food, gold and women to be used as sex slaves for all his men. When anyone refused him, Columbus had their ears and nose chopped off. He sent these disfigured offenders back to their villagers to tell the people what had happened and to fear Columbus. 

4. Sooner or later, the Lucayans revolted. They had no weapons other than rocks and primitive spears and Columbus' troops were well armed. The war ended quickly. Eye witnesses report fallen Lucayans were fed alive to hungry dogs as they screamed. 

5. Columbus still did not have the gold he promised the queen, but he returned to Spain with a gift of 500 Lucayan slaves. Of those, 300 survived the journey. 

6. Another 500 slaves were captured and forced to carry Columbus' men around on their backs, feed them, and care for them. Escaped slaves were hunted down and fed to the dogs. 

7. Any villager who was stopped and asked for gold had to produce some immediately. If a villager surrendered gold, they were given a token, sort of a 'free pass' to not have to produce gold to the next one of Columbus' men that asked. However, if a native did not have a token and could not produce gold to hand over, Columbus had the man's hand chopped off and forced him to wear it around his neck. 

8. Columbus finally got all the gold he wanted. His lieutenants were rewarded with sex slaves and girls of nine and ten years old were most prized. Why is it important to know this? Because it is the truth. 

Susan Bradford: Indian Country Today Lobbying Arm of Oneida Nation

Our friend Susan Brandford has a story up on her website about ICT. She's not too enthralled about how they flavor their articles. Of course, we've seen that with Pechanga Chairman Macarro's cousin's site Pechanga.net, which has spiked some bad news about tribal issues in the past.

In recent months, Indian Country Today has taken to reporting blatant untruths about Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff while serving a useful public relations service for his tormenter, lobbyist Tom Rodgersof Carlyle Consulting who coached witnesses to lie in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on behalf of tribal casino interests. The ensuing federal corruption probe may well have been more compromised than that which downed Sen. Ted Stevens’ career.

In addition to uncritically parroting Rodgers’ false narrative about Abramoff, which contradicts supporting evidence, witness testimony, and paperwork, the newspaper produced a glowing article about an empathy scholarship Rodgers launched in an apparent effort to rehabilitate this lobbyist’s image.

Recently, Rodgers attempted to ambush and embarrass Abramoff at a National Press Club event in Washington, DC. At that event, Rodgers was flanked by representatives of the Oneida Nation and Mark Razenberger, a reporter for the Morning Sun, which reiterated the falsehoods purported by Bernie Sprague, a Rodgers-coached witness who appeared in the hearings.

At that event, Rodgers read a long, meandering statement in which he accused Abramoff on being corrupt since he paid reporters to write about conservative policies they supported. Indian Country Today reported that the audience “gasped” in horror (I was at the event, and the audience neither gasped nor was horrified) at Abramoff’s disclosure that he woud have loved to have owned his own newspaper.

What Rodgers failed to disclose is that the newspaper running factually inaccurate, slanderous articles against Abramoff and glowing reviews of himself is owned by Oneida Nations Enterprises, a business arm of the Onedia Nation, a client Carlyle Consulting represents alongside Akin Gump, a firm affiliated with Sen. John McCain which pushed the false narrative against Abramoff.

Among the Akin Gump lobbyists representing the tribe are Michael Rossetti, an attorney for Secretary of Interior Gale Norton who testified against Deputy Secretary Stephen Griles in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

In 2011, Oneida Nation paid Akin Gump and Carlyle Consulting $300,000 and $150,000 in lobbying fees respectively.

Susan Bradford is the author of Lynched! The Shocking Story of How the Political Establishment Manufactured a Scandal to Have Republican Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff Removed from Power.

© 2012 Susan Bradford

Oneida Nation Lobbying Fees for 2011

Oneida Indian Nation’s connection to Indian Country Today:

Susan Bradford: Federal Government Rewards Substance Abuse on Indian Reservations.

Federal Government Rewards Substance Abuse on Indian Reservations

By Susan Bradford


Saginaw Chippewa Indians have reported drug trafficking on their reservation, but the shipments never seem to stop nor have they successfully enlisted the federal government to investigate and eliminate the nefarious trade from their community. Some tribal whistleblowers have even taken to filming the drug-filled crates in transit only to report that FBI agents have responded by taking their videos and destroying them. In the meantime, the drug trade continues and even flourishes here.

Drugs are allegedly being brought onto the Mt. Pleasant, Michigan reservation by black helicopters which descend onto a makeshift landing strip in the dark of night. “The planes hardly make any noise and are nearly invisible to the naked eye, and so we can't seem to capture them on film,” said one tribal source, who believes the drugs are being shipped in from Canada.

Drug trafficking and related criminal activity were especially prevalent during the Administration of Chief Fred Cantu. One former tribal public affairs spokesman, Joe Somwick, who has been arrested for DUI at least half a dozen times, was caught on film retrieving what appears to be a small plastic bag filled with white substance from a tree on church grounds. Somwick circulated lies about Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and later served jail time, tribal records reveal.

The average tribal member, who is unable to live on his roughly $80,000 tax-free, per capita annual income, is more likely to abuse pot while the tribal elite, who never seem short of disposable income, freely indulge in cocaine. Much to the disgust of tribal members, Council leaders usher controlled substances onto the Indian reservation and then turn around and appeal to the federal government for money to combat the drug epidemic. Former Saginaw Chippewa SubChief Bernie Sprague, Sen. John McCain's lead witness against Abramoff, openly throws wild cocaine parties at his palatial mansion and has been known to physically assault those who show up uninvited.

Did John McCain Help Mutual of Omaha Acquire Business with Abramoff Client?

Our friend Susan Bradford continues to raise questions on John McCain's actions against Jack Abramoff. Was McCain acting in concert with his contributors?  Here's Susan Bradfords post:

By Susan Bradford
Recently, members of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan have come forward with complaints that they were pressured into purchasing life insurance from the Mutual of Omaha, a company with ostensible ties to Sen. John McCain.

In the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which McCain convened in 2004, the Senator called Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to task for, among other things, offering life insurance to tribal elders in the form of an Elder Legacy Program, which was created and promoted by his employer, Greenberg Traurig.

On November 15, 2006, Abramoff commenced his prison sentence after pleading guilty to trumped up corruption charges stemming from Florida and Washington, DC. The scandal had its roots in Indian Country, and among Abramoff’s biggest critics was Saginaw Chippewa SubChief Bernie Sprague, a McCain ally who nursed a personal grudge against the lobbyist who nearly nixed his uncle’s plan to acquire a casino for the Gun Lake tribe.

As tribal members have alleged, and paperwork seems to confirm, McCain interrogated Abramoff’s ally, Deputy Secretary of Interior Steven Griles, about whether he tried to block Gun Lake’s casino aspirations, as a personal favor to Sprague.

On December 20, 2006, just a month after Abramoff’s incarceration, Sprague, who was serving on Tribal Council, motioned for his tribe “to gather membership data from the Tribal Clerk’s Office in regards to the possibility of Life Insurance coverage for Tribal Members.”

Bringing a life insurance carrier on board was a slow process. In September of 2007, a request was filed with the Saginaw Chippewa’s Tribal Council “to approve the Group Life insurance coverage,” but the plan was tabled for further review by the tribe’s Finance Committee.

Finally, in 2009, the Tribal Council agreed to pay $251,203.25 to Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company per month for the group insurance plan. Funding for the plan was slated to come from the Gaming Trust in the form of a monthly wire transfer, Tribal Minutes report.

On November 2, the Tribal Council unveiled a group life insurance product underwritten by Mutual of Omaha Life Insurance for the tribal membership, which was to take effect January 1, 2010. Tribal members were given the option of purchasing as much as $150,000 in life insurance for as much as $76.50 per month.

Susan Bradford: John McCain Beholden to Abramoff Witness?

Susan Bradford continues to ask questions from her new book  LYNCHED:
The Shocking Story of How the Political Establishment Manufactured a Scandal to Have Republican Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff Removed from Power.




Was McCain Beholden to Witness Who Testified Against Abramoff?

By Susan Bradford

A confidential memo written by a relative of Saginaw Chippewa SubChief Bernie Sprague, whom Sen. John McCain freely allowed to make false allegations against Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee indicates that the Senator may have been beholden to the lead witness.

A little over a week before the hearings got underway on September 29, 2004, the relative wrote to the membership of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan that “It’s been discovered that Bernie Sprague is secretly planning to avoid the members (sic) vote “NO” on Proposal B/Secretarial Election and any other future vote of the membership by traveling to Washington, DC on this day to meet with Senator McCain in an attempt to grandfather membership into the tribe by passing a bill into Congress.”

This statement seems to indicate that McCain may have been knowledgeable, if not complicit, in tribal membership fraud and that he might have been willing to take officials on behalf of a witness against Abramoff. Sprague has been a longstanding defender of efforts of a coalition of Saginaw Chippewa tribal members, whose Native credentials are in dispute, to dominate the tribe’s government and businesses.

“Evidently Bernie from his previous Council powers helped Senator McCain get into office and now Bernie feels Senator McCain owes him a huge personal favor,” the relative continued in her statement.

Among the favors McCain evidently doled out to Sprague was to interrogate Deputy Secretary Steven Griles, Abramoff’s chief contact at Interior, about any actions the agency might have taken to obstruct a casino for the Gun Lake tribe, which is chaired by Sprague’s uncle.

Susan Bradford is the author of Lynched: The Shocking Story of How the Political Establishment Manufactured a Scandal to Have Republican Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff Removed from Power.

(Book is available here: https://www.createspace.com/3494997)

Susan Bradford on Ietan Consulting: A connection to Fake Indians and Tribal Councils?

Our friend Susan Bradford continues to explore the relationship with Ietan Consulting, lobbyist for many Indian Tribes including the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.  A principal for Ietan is Holly Cook Macarro, who just happens to be married to Pechanga chairman Mark Macarro, who led the tribal council that destroyed the citizenship of hundreds of longtime tribal members.   Ietan has links to Jack Abramoff.

One of the nation’s leading tribal lobbyists, Larry Rosenthal of Ietan Consulting, which enjoys a “strategic alliance” with the McCain-affiliated Akin Gump, became the inspiration behind both the Congressional Automotive Caucus and the Native American Caucus, which coordinate legislative action on behalf of both special interest groups and which his mentor, Congressman Dale Kildee Chairs.
The future lobbyist would acquire influence within Indian Country such that by 2006, Rosenthal had visited over 100 reservations in over 28 states. As Chief of Staff for the NIGC, Rosenthal became liaison to the White House, Department of Interior, and Congress. As lobbyist, he represented the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), which lobbies the federal government and Congress on gaming-related matters.

Tribes have essentially become conduits for money laundering, fund raising, single source contracts for the industrialists, which they can justify by claiming minority preference. The stimulus funds President Barack Obama directed to tribes for development, infrastructure, skating parks, among other things essentially allowed the recipients of tax money to enjoy tax-advantaged and unsupervised use of the money. As Elaine Devary Willman writes in Going to Pieces: The Dismantling of the United States of America, only 19 percent of the hundreds of millions of dollars granted to federal tribal governments has been accounted to, reinforcing the perception among tribal members that “the money just disappears.”

Ietan Consulting’s tribal clients are rife with tribal memberships issues with its principals unerringly championing the interests of the non-Indian infiltrators. With federally recognized tribes bursting at the seams with hundreds of thousands of pseudo-Natives and many more seeking admission, it’s time to re-evaluate what it means to be Indian and to put a stop to the looting of the national treasury. Once the faux Indians gain entree into tribes, they acquire per capita payments, which are generated from businesses, built on capital reserved for Natives. They are provided subsidies and other benefits for housing, health care, education which are denied the taxpayers who support them. These individuals often acquired their membership through fraud, which is running up a significant tab at a time of looming deficits. While Natives and hardworking taxpayers are receiving the short end of the stick, General Motors, which received a federal bailout in 2008, has gone on to make record profits in China, which owns the U.S. debt. GM is rapidly acquiring a monopoly in this vast market, as the leader of automobile sales there. The nation’s industrialist elite and the bankers who finance them continue to realize a boon into their fortunes as the solidify their plutocracy at the expense of free enterprise and the honest, hardworking American taxpayer.

New Book on Jack Abramoff by Susan Bradford Shows Relationship to IETAN and Tribal Membership FRAUD

New Book on Abramoff Investigation Gets to the Bottom of Tribal Membership Fraud

Membership disputes have plagued Indian Country for decades now. We have helplessly watched as people who do not trace to Indian tribes falsely claim Native ancestry while our own people are being systematically disenrolled and persecuted on our own reservations. The problem has not only touched the Pechanga tribe, but tribes across the nation. A recently released book written by investigative journalist Susan Bradford reveals that other tribes represented by Ietan Consulting, including the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, have experienced membership disputes similar to ours and that the principals of the lobbying firm facilitated the take over of individuals of questionable tribal legitimacy.

Bradford's Lynched: The Shocking Story of How the Political Establishment Manufactured a Scandal to Have Republican Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff Removed from Power is a must-read for all Natives, especially those concerned with protecting their heritage and restoring integrity to their reservations. While giving particular attention on the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe, which gave birth to the Abramoff scandal, the author documents that tribal governments across the nations were seized by those who do not belong and who are not even Indian.  Pechanga has an adopted member, Russell "Butch" Murphy who worked to eliminate 25% of blood members and keep hundreds OUT of the tribe.

We, in Indian Country, were apparently fed a steady dose of propaganda about the Abramoff investigation – namely that the lobbyist at the center of the scandal, Jack Abramoff, was shaking tribes down for money and defrauding his clients. Larry Rosenthal of Ietan helped fan the flames of discontent against Abramoff, who was apparently championing the interests of Indians and therefore, challenging the status quo. Bradford makes a compelling case for Abramoff's innocence, providing strong evidence that he was essentially set up in an invented scandal which was sold to the American people through the media, with Rosenthal's assistance. You can read about the set up and what really happened to Abramoff in the book.

Suffice to say, the scandal originated at the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, which is experiencing membership issues which mirror our own at Pechanga. In Lynched, Bradford meticulously documents how people who do not belong to this tribe took over the Saginaw Chippewa's government and its casino through fraud and deception. What is fascinating about her account is that she captures all the maneuvering and sleight of hand that facilitated the take over.


During the tribe's hotly contested election of 1999, Rosenthal helped organize a coup d'etat which removed the Chief, Kevin Chamberlain, who was trying to clean up the membership rolls. He was essentially following court orders to ensure that the tribe held a legitimate election at a time when fictitious Indians were running as candidates and casting their ballots.
As Bradford documents in her book, the take over of Indian Country by fictitious Indians began in the 1970's around the time in which federally recognized tribes were anticipating their multi-million dollar settlements from the Indian Claims Commission. Miraculously non-Indians, many of them Caucasian, made bee-lines for Indian tribes and their governments. President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty was then underway, and lawyers were dispatched to tribes, who helped sign fictitious Indians onto the tribal membership rolls so that they could receive federal benefits and eventually per cap payments.

The settlement money served as the seed capital for gaming, and ultimately casinos, which have generated tremendous wealth for Indian Country. Many of these newcomers were backed by the federal government who wanted the fictitious Indians to oversee the profit-generating gaming businesses. In the case of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, gaming was spearheaded by a woman by the name of Josephine, whom public records identify as “white.” Eventually she and her family would add people onto the membership rolls and seize control the government and casino, with the assistance of attorneys and their allies on Capitol Hill.

We have all experienced the pervasive influence of nepotism on Indian reservations. On this particular reservation, one of Rosenthal's chief contacts was Bernie Sprague, who later testified against Abramoff in Sen. John McCain's hearings. While Sprague apparently does trace to the tribe, he married into Josephine's family and was therefore afforded privileges reserved for them.
Once Josephine, her family, and allies staked claim on the tribal government, they rewrote the Constitution to solidify their power and control of the tribe's businesses and revenue. In a pattern all too familiar to us, they then proceeded to add more individuals onto the membership rolls, who would then vote for them to keep them in office in perpetuity and who would also receive per cap, even though many are not even Indian. The lengths that some of them went to acquire membership is truly extraordinary. For example, Josephine's mother, Beatrice, apparently assumed the identify of an Indian male, Jesse Davis, and then altered his birth certificate by changing his name to hers, and reassigning the gender on his paperwork to female. Many official records were altered to give these intruders a paper trail of legitimacy.