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

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Lawrence is unapologetic. "We're an advocacy newspaper. People know that. But at least we're independent." He points out that a vast majority of Indian newspapers are owned outright by the tribes, and that results in muted criticism. "I don't recognize them as newspapers. They're company papers. They're just gonna print what they're told to print." And if he sometimes bends the rules, or violates journalistic decorum, so be it. There are open-meeting laws and Freedom of Information acts in place to protect mainstream reporters. Those covering tribal governments have no such guarantees. "I'm dealing with 11 governments that deny people basic rights, so I have to get in an advocacy role," Lawrence argues. "No one else gets the information. No one else will write the stories we write."

Former U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug kept a close eye on Lawrence's paper while investigating tribal corruption PHOTO BY GEOFFREY P. KROLL

Since childhood, Bill Lawrence has been both insider and outsider, moving back and forth between vastly different worlds: Indian and white; jock and student; military man and civilian; political candidate and activist publisher. The youngest of Joseph and Stella Lawrence's five children, he was born in 1939 on the Red Lake Reservation, in north central Minnesota. Today Red Lake remains the most independent--and, to many minds, most sovereign--of the state's 11 reservations, one of just two "closed" reservations in the country. (This peculiar legal status derives from the historic refusal of the tribe's 19th-century leaders to submit to the federal government's policy of distributing tribal lands to individual Indians; as a result, the land is still held communally and, unlike the other reservations in the state, has retained its original boundaries.)

When Lawrence was a toddler, his father Joseph, a onetime semipro baseball player then in his 40s, suffered a heart attack while playing town ball. He never fully recovered, so, come Bill's fourth birthday, the family moved to Bemidji, some 30 miles away. Ostensibly, they made the move so Joseph would have access to better medical care. But Bill says his father had also become pessimistic about life on Red Lake. One of Joseph's brothers had died under mysterious circumstances on the reservation and, while the death was ruled a suicide, the family suspected foul play. Joseph said he wanted more for his children. "On his deathbed, my dad told my mom, 'Keep the boys off the reservation, and see that they get an education,'" Bill recalls. Shortly after the family moved to Bemidji, Joseph passed away, and Stella honored her late husband's wishes. "Too proud to accept welfare," according to Bill, she supported the family as a waitress and cook. And although Bill returned to the reservation for regular vacations and visits with relatives, he came of age in Bemidji.

At the time there were only a handful of Indian families in town, and the color line was still bright. Until 1953 Indians couldn't even buy a beer at a town tavern. But Lawrence quickly found a way to fit in. Following in the footsteps of his two brothers, Bill put his energy into sports. Football, basketball, baseball, he loved them all, and did well. R.A. "Jim" Randall, a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals who is now a friend and ideological ally of Lawrence's, remembers watching him play in the state basketball tournament in 1956, when Bemidji High School took the title. "He was one of the most prominent high school athletes of the Fifties," Randall recalls. "If you followed sports in the state, you knew about him, and you knew about his brothers." By his senior year, Lawrence was All-State in three sports.

Out of high school, Lawrence accepted a football scholarship to the University of Minnesota. He didn't care for the Twin Cities, though, and after injuring an arm playing freshman football he left school and signed a contract with the Detroit Tigers baseball team. He pitched through two spring trainings and one full season in the minors. "I think I had a chance to make it," Lawrence says. "But I had trouble with my arm. I could feel it wasn't right." He went back to college, this time to Bemidji State, where he got a degree in business administration. After graduation, Lawrence wanted adventure and enlisted in the Marines, where he eventually worked his way up to the rank of captain. In 1962, on summer leave, he married Judy Hagburg, a white woman from Bemidji with whom he would have three children. (The two divorced several years ago.) In 1965, while stationed in California, he signed on for another tour of duty. Two weeks later he was given orders to report to Vietnam. "My biggest objective was to get my ass out of there in one piece. After a month or two, you could see the futility. Not just the waste of life, but the tremendous waste of resources," he says of the experience.

Returning to the States a year later, Lawrence settled in Bemidji, dividing his time between starting a family, attending law school at the University of North Dakota, and making a living. In 1968, after working construction at a taconite mine on the Iron Range, Lawrence landed a job as industrial-development specialist at Red Lake. Lawrence figures he was one of the first Red Lakers to return to the reservation with a college degree. And at the time, he was certain he could make a difference. Gerald Vizenor, a former reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune and professor of Native American Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, met Lawrence in the late Sixties and chronicled his efforts to bring economic development to the reservation in his book The Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People. "Bill persuaded the tribal government to support the development of services on the reservation, simple things like a Laundromat, gas station, grocery stores. Before that, all the money left the reservation," says Vizenor, who has since forged a lasting friendship with Lawrence.

In 1970 Lawrence tried his hand at politics for the first time, running for the office of tribal chairman against 12-year incumbent Roger Jourdain. Jourdain, who held Red Lake's highest office for three tumultuous decades, remains a legendary figure in Indian politics. He is renowned for his skills in bringing federal dollars to Red Lake, for his close political ties to Hubert Humphrey's DFL establishment, and, in the eyes of critics and admirers alike, for his willingness to run the reservation with the savvy of a big-city party boss. Jourdain was also Lawrence's godfather, but the kinship belied harsh differences that emerged during Lawrence's year and a half as a tribal employee.

When the votes were tallied, Jourdain was once again victorious. Lawrence, who says he heard rumors of disappearing ballots, was convinced the election was stolen. On and off for the next two decades, Lawrence feuded with Jourdain, denouncing his regime as corrupt, inept, and overly dependent on federal subsidies. Ultimately, Lawrence's falling-out with his powerful godfather would send him into the newspaper business.

Reporter Clara NiiSka admires her boss's commitment to the cause PHOTO BY GEOFFREY P. KROLL

After his first electoral defeat, Lawrence spent 18 years bouncing between Indian country and the private sector. In the Seventies he worked as a business manager for a small California tribe. Then he took a job in Arizona as an agency superintendent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the agency that administers federal funding for reservation governments. Among the first generation of administrators hired under Indian preference rules, Lawrence thought the BIA, notorious for its poor management and outright corruption, could be reformed. At the time, his mother discouraged him. "She said, 'You don't want to work for that dirty, rotten, filthy outfit,'" Lawrence says. As was the case with his stints in the military and at Red Lake, Lawrence became disillusioned during his time at the BIA. He says management of the agency did not improve, and boondoggles were more the rule than the exception. In 1982, Lawrence decided to move with his wife and three school-age children back to Minnesota, landing a job in Honeywell's military avionics division.

Once again Lawrence was paying attention to the happenings on Red Lake, when an unexpected opportunity presented itself. In 1987 Roger Jourdain and the Red Lake tribal council had decided to provide backing for a newspaper on the reservation. Tim Giago, a well-known Lakota journalist, was recruited to run the operation. The paper, dubbed the Red Lake Times, quickly ran into trouble. According to Lawrence, Giago and Jourdain quickly locked horns over story choice and staff. In less than a year, Giago left town and the paper went belly-up.

In short order, two of the former staffers at the Red Lake Times, looking for financial backing, contacted Lawrence to fill the vacuum. "I thought, What the hell?" Lawrence remembers. "I figured I had a decent group of guys to put the paper out, and I could provide some financing and some good management." From the outset, the Ojibwe News was an in-your-face publication--or, more accurate, an in-Roger Jourdain's-face publication. The first issue, published in May of 1988, led with an exposé of financial shenanigans at Red Lake. Subsequent editions featured similar stories, along with stinging editorials authored by Lawrence denouncing everyone from the "dictatorial" Jourdain (and "his ten little Indians" on the tribal council) to the bureaucrats at the BIA, his old employer.

"I didn't get into it with the intent that I would own it for any length of time. We really just started the paper with the intent of getting rid of Jourdain," Lawrence says. Behind the scenes, Lawrence had a financial and ideological falling-out with his original partners. Following their parting, Lawrence found himself assuming a larger role. He wrote stories at night after coming home from his day job at Honeywell, and he hired college students from Bemidji State to handle day-to-day editorial duties. Still, the paper was losing money. For a spell, Lawrence switched to a biweekly schedule. Then, less than two years after the paper's founding, the neophyte publisher got a major psychological boost. Roger Jourdain was defeated as tribal chairman. One of the paper's missions had been fulfilled. (At the time, Lawrence editorialized that Jourdain "didn't cheat enough to win.")

"After that, the paper just kind of took on a life of its own," Lawrence reminisces. "Initially, it was just a Red Lake paper, but then people from other reservations came to us, saying, 'We've got so much corruption here, you've got to help us.'" Two years later, Lawrence resigned from his job at Honeywell and turned to muckraking full time. (In the years since, Lawrence and Jourdain have reconciled. "We buried the hatchet a long time ago. Why fight? He's my godfather," says Lawrence. And Jourdain professes nothing but admiration for his godson: "Of course he irritates people from time to time, especially on the tribal councils, but I've got a lot of respect for him.")

In 1991, looking to expand his market by appealing to Indians living in the Twin Cities, Lawrence started a second paper, the Native American Press. A year later Lawrence merged the two papers into the Native American Press/Ojibwe News. For most of the decade, Lawrence published the combined paper in Bemidji. Two years ago, he moved the operation to St. Paul, figuring he could keep a closer eye on the state's legislature and courts. The change in locale, however, didn't have much bearing on the paper's content. Lawrence and his writers continue to hammer away at the usual themes.

Through the years, the paper has also pounced on stories that the mainstream press has ignored, from Lawrence's own experiences in tribal court to sordid domestic crimes to detailed accounts of graft. "Sometimes you end up hurting people," Lawrence says, acknowledging he has occasional regrets about stories he has published. "Look at [Skip] Finn. He has a wife and kids. You feel sorry for them. But there are a lot of people who get hurt when the system is abused. What about the people of Leech Lake? They are out a lot of money. You have to feel sorry for them, too."

For all the criticism he has taken from tribal officials and other members of the Indian establishment, Lawrence has also won the respect--sometimes grudging, sometimes effusive--of dissidents and skeptics, both on and off the reservation. Minnesota Appeals Court Judge Jim Randall, who still remembers Lawrence as a high school athlete, finally met the publisher face-to-face in 1996, after he published a dissent in Cohen v. Little Six. In the opinion, Randall argued that Sylvia Cohen, a nonnative patron at Mystic Lake Casino, should be allowed to pursue a personal-injury case against the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota tribe. The majority of the court ruled that Cohen, who had fallen out of a chair at the casino, should be required to exhaust her remedies in the tribe's court. In the 69-page dissent, beginning with a quote from the 19th-century Oglala Lakota warrior chief Red Cloud, Randall tartly declared tribal sovereignty "more illusion than real, a Potemkin Village, and a throwback to the separate but equal doctrine."

Awed by the dissent, which he would publish verbatim in his paper, Lawrence marched up to the state courthouse from his Robert Street office and straight into the judge's chambers. It was a vintage moment. "He stuck his hand out and said, 'I'm Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Native American Press, and I've been waiting for your opinion for 28 years,'" Randall recalls. The admiration was mutual. Randall soon discovered he had lots in common with Lawrence. They shared the same birthday, they are both ex-Marines, both love sports, and both had concluded the notion of tribal sovereignty was a sham: "The more I learned about what he's doing, how he feels, the more I became convinced he was on the right track," Randall says. "And he has the clearest mind of any writer working today on what are the problems in Indian country."

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