McCain had complicated relationship with Indian Country
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — John McCain hadn’t been elected to the U.S. Senate when a fellow veteran and friend spotted him at the annual Navajo Nation Fair.
“Someone should tell this representative that he’s only a representative ... this is not even his district,” former Navajo Chairman and President Peterson Zah recalls his dad jokingly telling McCain.
That began Zah’s friendship with the late McCain, who served one term in the U.S. House before becoming one of Arizona’s longest-serving senators.
The Republican McCain helped usher through Congress some of the most pivotal legislation in Indian Country, including the right for tribes to open casinos. That legacy also includes criticism for seemingly favoring corporate interests over tribes.
At a memorial service in Phoenix days after McCain died from a brain tumor last month, tribal leaders from around Arizona gathered to pay their respects. A Navajo flutist was among the musical performers.
“There are a few that really advance the cause of Native Americans,” said Delbert Ray, president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. “But I’d have to say he’s the bus driver.”
Fresh to Washington, D.C., McCain relied on the late Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona and Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, both Democrats, to familiarize himself with Native American issues. Inouye later asked McCain to join him as vice chairman on what is now the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. McCain went on to serve twice as the panel’s chairman.
McCain and Inouye believed solutions for long-standing problems in Indian Country didn’t lie in the nation’s capital, but rather with tribes, said Eric Eberhard, who worked for McCain for six years. McCain saw treaties with tribes as proof that the U.S. hadn’t lived up to its ideals.
“He spent considerable capital trying to correct that when there was no political reward for it,” Eberhard said.
In his last speech to the National Congress of American Indians, McCain said: “We must listen more to you, and get out of the way of tribal authority.”
McCain helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that established a legal framework for tribes to operate casinos on their reservations after a U.S. Supreme Court decision cleared the way.
Now, nearly 240 tribes operate casinos in more than half of U.S. states, generating more than $31 billion a year in gross revenue.
McCain, Inouye and Udall also teamed up to enact the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act to ensure human remains and funerary items are returned to tribes. He worked on legislation to strengthen tribal self-determination and self-governance. More recently, he championed a bill to expand a child abduction alert system into Indian Country.
Zah introduced many other Native American leaders to McCain over the years, emphasizing his reputation and ability to work across party lines.
“In basketball, if the score is 90-90 with five seconds left, who do you go to?” Zah said. “The Indian people went to Sen. McCain.”
Wendsler Nosie Sr., a former San Carlos Apache chairman, said McCain also missed opportunities to do right by Indian Country and is hopeful others in Congress can learn from that.
Nosie was flying back from Washington, D.C., in late 2014 when he heard McCain had slipped a provision into the national defense bill to give land Apaches considered sacred to a copper mining company.
McCain touted the jobs it would bring, while Nosie and others decried the environmental and psychological damage they said it would cause.