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COVER STORY . VOL 22 #1072 . PUBLISHED 6/20/01

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For 13 years publisher Bill Lawrence has specialized in tales of graft and greed on the rez. He knows it's a dirty job, but no one else is doing it.

Photo by Geoffrey P. Kroll

That the Native American Press has endured for so long is, Lawrence acknowledges, something of a minor miracle. For most of its history, the eight-page broadsheet, with a circulation of about 8,000, has teetered on the edge of insolvency. A few years ago, Lawrence mortgaged his home to keep the paper afloat. "It's been a struggle. Up and down," he shrugs. "Of course, we haven't gotten much help from the tribes." That's not surprising. In both his editorials and news stories, Lawrence has consistently criticized, often in highly acerbic tones, the tribal governments on Minnesota's 11 Indian reservations. "Somebody's got to stir the pot," he says, chewing on an unlit cigar. "It's the only way we can effect change. And that's why we live in this country. So people can stir the pot." Lawrence's demeanor stands in contrast to his maverick sensibilities and sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. Now 61 years old, he seldom raises his voice, instead offering his complaints as though he were reading a grocery list aloud.

Swinging through the Minneapolis suburb of Maple Grove, Lawrence stops to pick up one of his paper's regular contributors, Jeff Armstrong. The scruffy, laconic 35-year-old squeezes into the back seat, beside Lawrence's dog, an impish Pekinese named Bea, and they set out on the two-hour drive north to the Mille Lacs reservation. For Armstrong, the trip constitutes a return to the scene of one of his more peculiar reportorial adventures. For Lawrence, it's another opportunity to stir the pot.

In October of 1997, Lawrence dispatched Armstrong to Mille Lacs to cover a meeting of the executive committee of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. As a representative of the Native American Press, Armstrong had grown accustomed to getting the cold shoulder from tribal officials. "They generally won't talk to me at all," he says now. Still, he guessed he could sit through the meeting and file a story on the executive committee's deliberations over a controversial land settlement with the federal government. He was wrong. A tribal leader named Norman Deschampe, then the president of the committee, asked all non-Indians to leave the meeting. When Armstrong refused, he was placed under arrest by tribal police, cuffed, and hauled off to the Mille Lacs County Jail, where he was held until the meeting adjourned four hours later. Incensed, Lawrence and Armstrong filed suit in U.S. District Court in Duluth, charging the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, its police force, and the county with violating Armstrong's civil rights. Last year U.S. Magistrate Raymond Erickson ruled that Armstrong and Lawrence would have to take their case to tribal court before pressing a federal claim. So, in November, Lawrence filed an identical suit in Mille Lacs Tribal Court.

As they take their seats in the small, well-appointed courtroom at the band's newly built government center, Lawrence and Armstrong make for an odd couple. Lawrence is dressed formally: blue blazer, tie, white button-down shirt, and neatly pressed gray slacks. His hair is short and carefully combed. As he plucks a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, lays out a blank legal pad on the burnished wood table, and begins poring over paperwork, he looks positively corporate. Armstrong looks like he might be headed for a Phish concert. He wears jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Free All Political Prisoners and featuring a drawing of Leonard Peltier, the celebrated American Indian Movement (AIM) activist who is serving a life sentence for the shootings of two FBI agents in 1975.

After a few minutes, Joe Marshall, a Twin Cities attorney representing the band, enters the courtroom and greets Lawrence. "How things going with the newspaper?" asks Marshall. "I got more than I can handle," Lawrence answers. There is some awkward small talk. Marshall asks Lawrence, who graduated from law school at the University of North Dakota but didn't pass the bar, whether he has considered taking the exam again. If the remark is meant as a dig, Lawrence doesn't seem to care. "Well," he deadpans, "there's 25,000 lawyers in Minnesota, but only one Indian newspaper publisher."

At that, B.J. Jones, an Ojibwe judge from North Dakota, strides into the room and court is called to order. As Lawrence predicted, it is a boring hearing, resulting in a long list of motions and deadlines stretching into August. Afterward, Lawrence and Armstrong head off for coffee at the nearby Grand Casino. Armstrong figures it was a minor victory for the paper. "At least we didn't get thrown out today," he says. As Lawrence sees it, the suit may not stand much of a chance in tribal court. But he figures he'll be able to appeal any decision in federal court, where he likes the odds. "If they were smart, they would try and settle this thing. They've got a lot to lose," he says. "Their lawyers ought to be concerned that if I'm a horse's ass enough to make an issue out of this all the way up the line, we can beat 'em."

Lawrence says he wouldn't mind an out-of-court cash settlement. But a federal-court victory would be gratifying, as well. Lawrence applauds the minimization of tribal authority. In his view, tribal sovereignty--the notion that reservations ought to be treated as mini-nations, immune from many federal and state laws--is at the root of what troubles Indian country today: bureaucratic graft, civil-rights abuses, staggeringly high rates of unemployment, widespread poverty, educational failures, social dysfunction. "Sovereignty is what maintains the status quo," Lawrence says.

To most fellow journalists, tribal leaders, and treaty-rights activists, Lawrence's position is veritable heresy. Since the Sixties, the Indian establishment has pushed for greater autonomy. And to a large extent, they have been successful, with tribes coast to coast taking hold of everything from education to law enforcement. In Lawrence's view, this has served only to hold back his fellow Indians. Even casinos--the much celebrated "new buffalo," and the most tangible product of expanded Indian sovereignty in the past decade--rankle the publisher. "I think if we had an unbiased study of the effects of gambling, it would show a net negative," he opines. Then he cracks a wry smile. "That's why nobody's done it."

Casual Monday: Bill Lawrence kicks up his feet before another week of muckraking PHOTO BY GEOFFREY P. KROLL

In 1994 David Lillehaug, who had just been sworn in as Minnesota's U.S. Attorney, got a call from Bill Lawrence. The publisher wanted a meeting, and Lillehaug, who came to his new job with a keen interest in Indian affairs, obliged. "[Lawrence] came into my office and said, 'I'm here to tell you there's a serious problem with corruption on Indian reservations in Minnesota, and that I and my publication hope and expect that you will make that a high priority. And if you don't, we will point that out,'" Lillehaug recalls. "He was very forward. There was no genuflecting to the U.S. Attorney. But he didn't come in with a grudge or assuming that he wouldn't be listened to. We hit it off pretty well." It didn't take long for Lillehaug to find out that more than a few high-ranking, state tribal officials didn't share his affinity for Lawrence: "I attended one tribal council meeting--I won't say which--and the chair of the band took the first 20 minutes to explain what a scurrilous creature this Bill Lawrence was for having the audacity to bring up an uncomfortable issue. Whenever his name came up, there would be verbal fireworks."

As it turned out, Lillehaug didn't disappoint Lawrence. During his tenure as U.S. Attorney, he presided over the most aggressive prosecution of tribal malfeasance in state history. In the end, his office sent nine tribal officials to prison, including high-profile figures, such as former White Earth chairman Darryl "Chip" Wadena, Leech Lake chairman Alfred "Tig" Pemberton, and former Leech Lake attorney and then-state Senator Harold "Skip" Finn. The scandals, which Lawrence dubbed "Chippygate" and "Finngate," respectively, were tailor-made for the Native American Press. To Lawrence's way of thinking, they confirmed his guiding thesis that because tribal governments lack checks and balances, they are especially susceptible to corruption.

But Lawrence had another reason to be gratified: He'd been chasing Finn for years. Like many of his investigative pieces, the story started rolling when he received an anonymous tip. "Word on the rez was that [Finn] was ripping the tribe off. I'd had several calls about it," Lawrence recalls. "Finally, someone sent me a packet of documents that gave me some leads as to where to start digging." Lawrence would run dozens of stories on Finn, pillory him on the editorial page, and, in 1995, confront the senator on the steps of the state Capitol and publicly call for his resignation. When Finn finally went on trial, Lawrence even coughed up $50 in bus fare to ensure that a prosecution witness from the Leech Lake Reservation would be able to testify. In the end Finn was convicted of masterminding an insurance-fraud scheme that soaked the Leech Lake band for more than a million dollars, and he was sent to federal prison for three years.

Lawrence regards the Finn investigation as his paper's best moment, even though the extent to which the Native American Press contributed to Finn's prosecution is uncertain. Lillehaug, citing confidentiality rules, declines to discuss the subject. But he does allow that stories published in the paper were "helpful to the federal government": "When Bill Lawrence was on the mark, he performed an important service."

Finn, who finished serving his sentence last November, is still bitter about the role Lawrence played in his downfall. "Neither Bill nor his staff writers put in anything I had to say or gave a damn about my side," he complains. (Lawrence notes that he regularly left a blank space in the editorial column--an open invitation for Finn to respond.)

Finn is also critical of Lawrence's obsession with uncovering corruption in tribal governments and courts, while more significant abuses take place in Minnesota's court system. "There are horrendous civil-rights violations in that system," Finn opines. "Bill could do the Indian community a better service if he'd go on that crusade, instead of always focusing his attention on, say, Red Lake and the Red Lake tribal courts."

"He just prints untruths about things, speculation, and all of that," seconds Bobby Whitefeather, tribal chairman at the Red Lake Reservation, which is often the focus of Lawrence's harshest critiques. "There are so many things he's twisted, it just wouldn't do justice to name a few. It's just a slam on his own people." Pressed for an example, Whitefeather complains about a factual error in a story the Native American Press wrote about his heart by-pass surgery. Yes, Whitefeather says, he had surgery recently; but it was at the University of Minnesota, not at the Mayo Clinic.

Lawrence's aggressive style has also raised eyebrows among his colleagues in the Indian press, particularly because of the paper's heavy reliance on unnamed sources. "Bill Lawrence is not a journalist, and his paper lacks journalistic standards," argues Mark Anthony Rolo, the executive director of the Minneapolis-based Native American Journalists Association. While Rolo credits Lawrence for scoops scored during the Finn and Wadena investigations, he questions the methods used: "If you look at those stories, I'd venture to say he went about it in a way few journalists would approve. He uses way too much gossip and rumor that he could have in no way known was true." Rolo also argues that Lawrence's philosophic agenda, his push to place new limits on tribal sovereignty, flies in the face of the Indian community's core values. "It's more than muckraking. It's a step beyond that. He's basically saying, 'I'm going to use my pen as a sword to take down tribal government.'"

Paul DeMain, editor of the respected national biweekly News From Indian Country, agrees that when Lawrence uses unnamed sources or relies on single sources without confirmation, he opens himself up to slander and libel claims. "If he ever gets sued and has to go out of business, he'll have no one to blame but himself," says DeMain. The Native American Press has been sued for libel three times. Twice the paper successfully fought off the charge, including a dismissal following a jury trial in which Lawrence acted as his own attorney. In February Lawrence settled out of court with AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt, who had sued Lawrence for publishing a series of letters to the editor charging Bellecourt and his brother Clyde with everything from drug dealing to physical abuse of elders. (Lawrence would not comment on the financial terms, citing a confidentiality agreement. Bellecourt did not return City Pages' repeated calls.)

DeMain's chief misgiving about Lawrence is that he used the newspaper as a springboard for two unsuccessful runs at the Minnesota State Legislature in 1998 and 2000. "As a journalist, I don't care to see that," DeMain says. "When you decide to cross over into politics, I think you should get out of the media." Still, he sees value in the Native American Press: "I don't pick up his paper and read it for pleasure or comfort. And I think he presents an incomplete picture. But the paper serves as a watchdog. People operate knowing that Bill Lawrence isn't afraid to write about and expose scandal. He gives a voice and an ear to the political opposition on reservations. And he serves as a watchdog. It just happens the watchdog is a vicious one."

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