From the Yakima to the Oneida
Had you asked Elaine Willman a few years ago where she would end up, she wouldn’t have been able to answer “Hobart,” since she had never been to Hobart.
“I sort of filled a niche for the Village of Hobart,” says Willman, the village’s community development and tribal affairs director. “I was not on a career track when I accepted Hobart’s offer. I was 65 years old, and everything I built up the past few years was in Washington state.”
Willman is a Cherokee Indian, married to a Shoshone Indian who is a descendant of Sacajawea, who lived on the Yakima Indian Reservation for 15 years. And yet Willman is the author of Going to Pieces: The Dismantling of the United States of America, a nationwide chronicle of “tribalism expansion” that, according to the book’s jacket, is “claiming vast waters, lands, and natural resources — undermining the tax base of urban and small communities through the proliferation of congressionally protected, tax-free casinos and other tribal enterprises.”
Willman’s book is about communities that are located within the boundaries of Indian reservations, and tribal efforts to control land and activities within the reservation boundaries — regulation without representation, so to speak.
“There are 1,061 Hobarts in this country,” she says. “You have this second government overlaid.”
Willman, formerly the community development director and an alderman for the City of Toppenish, Wash., was a consultant for 14 Washington towns and the Yakima tribe when the tribe tried to take control of Toppenish’s dam, ban alcohol and tax the city’s utilities.
“I had to make sort of a professional and personal decision — the tribe had no authority to govern and tax me — and when I said that publicly, the Yakima tribe stopped calling me,” she says.
Willman and videographer Kamie Christensen Biehl, a Paiute Indian, traveled 6,000 miles, from Washington to New York, to write Wittman’s book and film a video, about 17 communities and “the unelected governments that are very different from one another” — the tribes.
Hobart trustees invited Willman to speak to them. Shortly after that, they offered her a job — or, more accurately, two jobs.
“The reason I came here is I have a lot of respect for the Oneida,” she says. “They’re one of the best and brightest tribes in the country. Likewise, these five [village] trustees are the first I’ve had that rose up and said we’re not going to be bullied anymore. We have to find a model that will allow these two governments to live cooperatively.”
Willman was hired to run two village departments, community development and tribal affairs. Her first day, however, the village administrator quit, so Willman took that job too.
“They allowed me to hire an assistant, and that was Andrew” Vickers, a UW–Milwaukee graduate, says Willman. “He came in and he’s been crackerjack — he knows what he’s doing, and he is on a career path, and we needed to offload, so I started to offload administrative responsibilities. So after a year, we made him the administrator. I was his employer, and now he’s mine.”
Hobart has a contentious relationship with the Oneidas. The village built a boulevard to its industrial park, only to have the tribe purchase 75 percent of the industrial park’s land in 2005, effectively ending development there. The tribe owns about one-fourth of village land, almost 2,000 acres of village land is tax-exempt, and the tribe has applied to make another 3,000 acres tax-exempt. The tribe also owns Thornberry Creek golf course.
“This is land dropping out of the property tax base in the village that absolutely relies on property values,” says Willman. “They were grabbing land, obstructing what the village wanted to do.”
The village then purchased land for what became the Centennial Centre project, only to have the tribe purchase a small piece of land to prevent the village from extending its water and sewer to the project. The village then moved to get an easement through eminent domain, the tribe sued the village, and the village won in U.S. District Court in March 2008.
“You try to work cooperatively, and this board and this village did, to their credit,” says Willman. “But all that neighborliness got [Hobart] further and further behind.”
Hobart is the only municipality that does not have a shared services agreement with the tribe, and is the only municipality that doesn’t receive Payments in Lieu of Taxes from the tribe. As a result, village residents have to pay for municipal services for tribal property within village boundaries.
Willman says “there’s a better live-and-let-live relationship now than there used to be” with the tribe.
