Damages
Is it Hoopa v. Yurok, Hoopa + Yurok or none of our damned business?
(Feb. 14, 2008) “We’re looking for the smoking gun. I think Ross Swimmer had a lot to do with it. I also think there might be a Klamath connection. But that’s all pure speculation.”
— Clifford Lyle Marshall,
Hoopa Valley Tribe Chairman
The trouble with you non-Indian people — especially the media — says the Hupa man on the phone who doesn’t want to be identified because he’s tired — tired — of politics at the moment, is we always want to stir things up between his people — Indians — for our entertainment.
And what we don’t seem to get is that the battle between the Hoopa Valley Tribe and the Yurok Tribe over a settlement fund that, since 1988, hung in limbo accruing massive interest until it was awarded last March entirely to the Yurok Tribe, has been a “long and very painful issue for many people on the river.” The ire — over land, over money, over ancestral rights — between two tribes whose people intermarry and share tribal ceremonies has infected generations. And it’s neither tribe’s fault, he says.
That’s why he’s got nothing to say about the lawsuit his tribe’s council just flung at the feds over the fund distribution.
“This is just another sad chapter of how the federal government has let tribal people down,” he says. “And the unfortunate part is, I’ve talked with a lot of non-Indian people who think all California Indians are rich off gaming. But that’s not the case for us. Gaming has made very little difference for many tribes, especially in the north. We’re not a gaming tribe, we’re not wealthy, and we’re talking about a lot of people living below the poverty level.”
So why get everyone yammering at each other again, up in the Hoopa Valley and down along the Klamath River? It’s a large landscape, but “we’re like a small town,” he says.
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