Chief agenda: She means business Story-Date: 04:52 a.m. PST Sunday , November 9, 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------ CHIEF AGENDA: SHE MEANS BUSINESS WITH THE OUTSIDER'S COOL EYE, JOYCE DUGAN IS LEADING THE EASTERN CHEROKEE INTO THE AGE OF GAMBLING By MARK PRICE Staff Writer CHEROKEE--The first woman elected chief of the Eastern Cherokee Indians wastes little thought and even less breath talking about the man who made her childhood miserable. The one who made her skin white. "I only know that he was from Tennessee," says Joyce Dugan. That, and the fact that when he abandoned a full-blooded Cherokee housemaid named Lucy Queen, he left behind a sandy-haired, light-skinned baby. Dugan is 49 now, and couldn't pass for Cherokee if someone stuck her in a feathered headdress and stood her in front of a souvenir shop. "I was the `white Indian.' Shunned," recalls Dugan. "They called me `white trash.' " She is the last person anybody expected to end up chief, and at such a pivotal moment in the tribe's history. On Thursday, an $82 million resort casino opens its doors on the reservation, bringing with it the promise of 1,100 full-time jobs and annual tribal profits exceeding $50 million. Every member of the tribe will get a check for a share of the annual profits. One of the poorest Indian tribes in the country is about to get rich -- and in the process will likely exchange the rags of tradition for the riches of mainstream America. At risk is the very essence of an Indian culture forged in centuries of struggle. One woman stands in the way: Lucy Queen's white-trash daughter, Joyce Dugan. Keeping in your place There's one barbershop on the Cherokee Reservation, and after 34 years it's still not in the phone book. You have to ask to find it. "We did that on purpose," explains co-owner Gilbert Crowe, "so we wouldn't be aggravated by the phone." This is the man that Joyce Dugan often thinks of first when asked how she got elected in 1995. He didn't vote for her, and told her so to her face. It's a matter of keeping in your place, the same lesson Dugan has struggled with since grade school. "There's no meanness intended," says Crowe, 59, who runs the shop with his brother, Gene. "I just don't think a woman ought to be running things." Particularly a woman like Joyce Dugan. She was a political nobody: A wife, mother and teacher with a squeaky clean reputation who had been appointed in 1991 to head the Cherokee school system. It would have been tough to find a more startling contrast to Jonathan "Ed" Taylor, a two-term incumbent bent on re-election whether or not the tribal council made good its threat to impeach him for misuse of power. Taylor appeared unbeatable, which is exactly why Dugan gave in to the pleas of friends and co-workers and entered the primary. She remembers the exact moment. "I was home washing dishes one day and it was like it came upon me that I had to do this," recalls Dugan. "My husband was in the living room and I almost got sick from feeling this was something I had to do, almost against my will. It was that sense of obligation. I think a greater power than me helped make that decision." Dugan won the primary, then went on to beat Taylor 2 to 1 in a run off. Seventy-two percent of eligible voters went to the polls. "Joyce was so far out of the norm," says Hilary Osborn, vice chairman of the tribe's gaming commission. "She was nonpolitical, and she faced someone who had been in politics for 30 years and had helped people all along the way. It would seem impossible that he could be defeated, yet he was. The tribe had truly given a mandate: Change." Maybe so, Gilbert Crowe says between haircuts. She isn't doing such a bad job, he reckons, but he still wouldn't vote for her. He would still vote for Taylor, who was impeached two weeks before Dugan took office. Quiet authority If the Cherokee people sought change, all 11,700 are getting a bellyful. Grumbling among the ranks began immediately, when the new chief instituted a policy that anyone who wanted to see her had to make an appointment. The former chief let anybody walk through the door any time, and it endeared him to the people -- like a kind of Cherokee Evita Peron. By contrast, Dugan comes across with the quiet authority of an elementary school principal: cool headed, conservative and careful of the words she chooses. "It's a big deal because ... one of the things she ran on was an open door policy, and I guess if they have to make an appointment, it's not really open door," says Joseph Martin, editor of the tribal-run newspaper Cherokee One Feather. The disgruntled include some members of the 12-member tribal counsel, eight of whom were sworn in last month. Since Dugan took office, the budget has tripled to $40 million and the number of tribal employees has increased from 401 to 542, including a building inspector and a human resources manager. Council members want to know if all the increases are justified. They wonder if that's the best way to use the millions generated by a temporary casino built on the reservation in 1995. Dugan says the changes are long overdue. Using skills honed while heading the school system, she has completely restructured the tribal government, set tougher standards for financial accountability and begun work on a tribal constitution. The chief brags she's done it without making deals. "She has done a professional job of reorganizing, and there is no question about her honesty," says tribal council member Bob Blankenship, who ran against Dugan for chief. "This is just a whole lot more budget than we've ever had to work with before and there's a feeling that it shouldn't be that much." Coincidentally, Blankenship was the only candidate in the 1995 tribal election to push for Dugan's success in the primary. "I knew if she made it past the primary with me, I'd beat her because she was a woman." She made it all right. He didn't. '50s flavor gone forever All hell is about to break loose on this remote reservation, which for 50 years has been a two-lane tourist trap of tacky souvenir shops, cheap wooden tomahawks and red men in yellow feathers. On Thursday, the Harrah's Cherokee Casino opens, with 1,800 video gambling machines, three restaurants, an entertainment arena and 1,100 year-round jobs, many held by Cherokee. The change will be jolting for a tourist town that stalled in the '50s. Here, you find no outlet malls, no amusement parks and no mini wedding chapels. Instead, Cherokee remained true to its mission of hustling America's long-standing curiosity about Indians. Pottery. Feathered headdresses. Beads and rubber tom-toms. The Eastern Band of Cherokee traces its history to 1838, when some Indians escaped the federal government's roundup of the Cherokee. Nearly 17,000 Indians were marched to Oklahoma under a treaty that gave their land to white settlers. Four thousand Indians died along the way. Those who escaped the Trail of Tears settled in the N.C. mountains, keeping intact some semblance of their language, traditions and art forms. It has never been an easy life. In the off-season, unemployment can be as high as 50 percent on the reservation, more than enough reason to explain why few stores cater to the Indians and even fewer banks will grant them loans. A lot of people here figure the hard times are over. That's the scary part, says Tim Giago, editor and publisher of the national weekly newspaper Indian Country Today. Who's to say that tribe won't lose its identity in the sudden flow of wealth? "We're talking about the G-word: greed," says Giago, noting other tribes have been pushed by gambling into a quagmire of lawsuits, corruption and cultural bankruptcy. "I fear what is happening in some places in Indian country. I see the changing faces of reservations, where tribes that were agricultural suddenly have huge casinos that bring in millions. The people are changing with this. "You have kids with no ambition to do anything because they don't have to." Joyce Dugan says that won't happen with the Cherokee. Only half the annual profits from gaming will be divided among members, who are so numerous that no one expects annual checks for individuals to exceed $5,000. (Last year, they were $1,600.) The rest of the money is going into tribal government and investments in such projects as a tribal bank and a water bottling facility. "The thing that worries me most is that gaming may be short lived for Indian country," says Dugan. "Federal and state laws can change. We have to make sure we plan effectively and save a portion in the event that gaming is cut out from under us." In the balance are people like Sampson Lossiah, a grumbling, wrinkled old man in a feathered headdress, who survives on the dollars tourists pay to be photographed at his side. He knows nothing of banks and bottling plants, only that per-capita checks mean eating in the winter. "People feel good about gambling, as long as they keep them checks coming," says his wife, Virginia, who stands on the sidewalk collecting the tips. "If not, they won't like it." Fighting among members There's an old story on the reservation of two crab hunters who pass each other on a beach. One hops miserably along, chasing crabs who jump from his bucket, while the other walks at ease with crabs who are content to sit still. "What kind of crabs you got in there?" asks the breathless crabber. "Indian crabs," replies the other man. "Every time one tries to get out, the others grab him and pull him back." Fighting among themselves is something Indians do well, says Jim Farras, a Cherokee who serves as academic adviser for American Indians students at Western Carolina University. "If the Indians had been able to unite, the whites wouldn't have been able to get a foothold on this continent," says Farras. "Joyce Dugan came in and cleaned house and got rid of people the old chief has spent 20 years putting into positions: brothers-in-law, sisters and cousins. ... The fastest way to get in trouble here is to right a wrong." Dugan knows she's a target and doesn't care. So far, nothing has been easy in her 49 years. She was raised in a one-room house with no electricity or plumbing, got her first job at age 12 giving tours, and put herself through college while raising three children. >From her beginnings as the daughter of a dirt-poor housemaid, she felt at odds with her people: Not because she was poor, but because she was the fair-skinned daughter of a tour bus driver who stopped just long enough to conceive a child. Everything changed when a Methodist church sent her on scholarship to a white boarding school in Georgia. There, white students accepted her without question as an Indian, and teachers challenged her to excel. She chose to be an educator knowing there were other children like her, who only needed a chance to prove themselves. "The prejudice is no longer there, but I still feel the inferiority: that feeling with my own people that I don't look Indian enough," says Dugan. Only now, the ones who shunned her as a child are waiting in the lobby, complaining they can't get in without an appointment. ------------------------------------------------------------