Tribes charter jet for media tour
Story-Date: 04:35 p.m. PST Thursday , April 9, 1998

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Tribes charter jet for media tour


By Philip Brasher
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- American Indian tribes are looking overseas for some
help in their battles with Congress and states to limit their powers.

A group of tribes is chartering a 737 airliner next week to whisk
Washington-based correspondents for foreign media on a five-day tour of
reservations around the country. The aim is to call attention to various
battles tribes are having, including an effort in Congress to end their
immunity to lawsuits.

"We'd like to shine a little sunshine on what's happening in the United
States with its indigenous people as they're battling for their sovereign
rights," said Steve Feldman, a spokesman for the National Inter-Trial
Network, an ad hoc group sponsoring the trip.

At least 15 foreign newspapers and broadcasting companies have signed up
for the trip, including France's Le Monde newspaper, the British
Broadcasting Corp., Austria's Die Presse, Germany's ADR television network
and news agencies from Japan and Russia.

The tour will include a cross-section of economically successful tribes,
starting with the Connecticut's Mashantucket Pequot Nation, and several
that are involved in struggles with state governments, such as Minnesota's
Prairie Island Community, a small tribe located near a nuclear power plant.

The tribe says the state misled it 25 years ago into believing that the
plant would not be a nuclear facility. Now its owner, Northern States Power
Co., has been struggling to find a place to move the plant's waste.

The journalists also will visit the Mississippi Choctaws, who have
developed a wide array of businesses; Washington's Lummi Nation, which has
been embroiled in local fights over water and fishing rights; and
California's Chemehuevi tribe, which is fighting a nuclear waste dump that
would be put on what the tribe claims is sacred land.

Tribes face legislative battles on several fronts in Congress.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., would subject tribes to a
variety of lawsuits, including actions by states to force the collection of
taxes and suits by people who think they've been harmed by tribal
governments or businesses.



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