The Chilkat Indian Village doesn’t strike out in local politics. It bats one thousand.
The tribe doesn’t play against minor league teams like the Haines Borough, so residents and borough officials witnessed a rare occasion when the village’s big guns put on a batting clinic at Tuesday’s assembly meeting.
Jones Hotch Jr., the village council vice-president, came with a kind smile and the graciousness of an adult in the presence of children.
Apologizing that the village lawyer wasn’t on hand to swat down the Haines Borough Planning Commission decision approving a heliport near the village, Hotch left the lifting to two professional women who calmly led the borough assembly through the calamity of errors made by the commission, citing sections of law and regulation by number, section and verse.
If not for the apparent need to salvage their pride, assembly members could have saved themselves time and surrendered on the spot. It’s clear that this is no battle. The commission has led the borough to its Little Bighorn.
The Chilkat Indian Village not only has wheelbarrows of facts on its side, it has money and cred. The village is a government, just like the Haines Borough. It has the power to write and enforce its own laws. Just like our borough, it has lawyers and a budget of millions of dollars and services it provides to its members.
What some whites in Haines may not understand is that tribes are recognized by our federal government as independent nations within the borders of the United States. That’s the law. As federal entities, tribes play two leagues above municipalities. For the same reason, Canada calls its tribes “First Nations.”
So it’s unusual for the village to bother itself with town politics, but this time the town picked a fight in Klukwan’s neighborhood.
I remember a similar blunder about 30 years ago by Gerald Harper of Geddes Resources, who wanted to open North America’s bigger open-pit copper mine near Dalton Post, then run scores of ore trucks past the village each day.
Joe Hotch, then the village president, phoned me and said he was having a meeting with Geddes officials and that I should come up for the newspaper. When I arrived at the Klukwan office, I met Harper and two other mining officials. Only Joe represented the village and in my naivete, I expected him to be outgunned.
Harper made the usual pitch, about the wonderful jobs his company would provide and that it would be using the latest, clean technologies. When Harper finished, Joe asked, “What about the jake brakes on your trucks coming down Klukwan hill? Won’t they make a lot of noise?”
Harper fielded the question neatly, assuring Joe that the new truck brakes were much quieter than old-style jake breaks. Softly and solemnly, Joe replied: “When a pin drops in the village, it wakes me up.”
Then he said nothing. Harper and the two mining guys sat and looked at Joe. Joe looked back at them. Then, as beads of blood appeared on their foreheads, Joe cracked the faintest of grins and they caught their breaths and laughed nervously.
The exchange was a small and gentle way for Joe to say: “You boys may be big shots in your backyard but on this piece of ground, I am the cat and you are mice. I will watch you and perhaps be entertained by you, but don’t think for a minute you have the upper hand.”
At Tuesday’s assembly meeting, the tribal vice-president spoke softly and politely and the tribe’s representatives addressed the assembly with poise, professionalism and decorum.
This is what they didn’t say, just as loudly and as clearly as Joe Hotch didn’t say it to Gerald Harper 30 years ago: “We have been here 3,000 years. We will be here when your families are passed and forgotten. You are on our land, and you are upsetting us. This may not end well for you.”