Authors Comment Worthy of Front Page

From: Juli Pionk
Bill Lawrence was a Native American as well as the editor and owner of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News. He believed that tribal members who opposed the corruption within their leadership and had no voice in their tribally owned newspaper needed a place where they could speak out and he provided that through publishing their voice in his newspaper.

During the course of his career Mr. Lawrence unearthed many wrong doings including corruption among tribal leaders. His journalism investigations helped send several corrupt tribal leaders to jail in spite of Tribal Sovereignty, but only by exposing their part in violating a federal law much like our own tribal police chief did.

In an excerpt from his final editorial before his death last March Mr. Lawrence wrote about members of a tribe that collected signatures and presented a lawful petition for the removal of their tribal officials. Mr. Lawrence stated: “Federal policy upholding Tribal sovereignty required petitioners to present the petition to the very officials they wanted to remove from office. Those officials accepted the petition and immediately, by majority vote declared it was without merit.”

Well now, doesn’t this sound familiar to the oppressed members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe?

The only ones that are protected by our “Tribal Sovereignty” are the corrupt leaders of our tribe until they are exposed in the violation of a federal law.

It seems to me since our tribal civil rights are not protected by any governing body on the face of this earth that we are at a crossroad. Members who have knowledge about our leadership that meets the criteria of federal law violation need to speak out to the proper authorities, such as the FBI or we will have to continue trying each election to replace our corrupt leaders and chance electing, as Charles Forgrave stated in a previous post, political light weight thinkers with no governing education or experience who are easily lead and who, I might add, instead of reporting to the membership about the proceedings of the elected board, choose to tell the membership a story of no relevance and actually get paid to do it.

Our voices need to not only be heard, but to also be listened to.