NMH Magazine : Fall 2006

Bright Star Rising

Tribal chief Lorraine White ’87 is on a mission to improve life on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation—and this driven young lawyer is making it happen.

Angry and testosterone-charged, members of the Mohawk Warrior Society were packed into the small conference room, eager for battle with the tribal council. At issue was whether the federal government had the right to oversee Mohawk businesses—and whether the council was catering to the government. Their voices carried to Chief Lorraine White ’87, who’d left the meeting briefly to nurse her one-month-old daughter Avery in a nearby room.

White wasn’t intimidated by this militant group, which had skirmished, sometimes violently, with the US and Canadian governments for decades. She knew what to do: she returned to the noisy conference room cradling her infant, a visible reminder of their responsibility to future generations. “Isn’t this what it’s all about?” she asked.

The big, tough Mohawk warriors softened, the meeting quieted down, and productive talking began. Afterward one of the warriors groused, “Chief White played the baby card.”

When White tells this story, she laughs. In fact, White laughs often. Yet make no mistake, this is an articulate, driven woman who is serious about dramatically improving conditions on the reservation.

A lawyer and mother of three, White is a tribal chief of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, which straddles New York State and Canada. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council, made up of three elected chiefs and three subchiefs, is the federally recognized government for the American side of the reservation, which includes 8,000 tribe members. The chiefs serve as all three branches of the tribe’s government, navigating the reservation’s tangled politics.

She took office in June 2005 at the age of 37, making her the youngest female chief to ever serve on the US side of the reservation. She hit the ground running, and now the tribe may be only months away from government approval for a $600 million casino at the Monticello Raceway in the Catskills, 90 minutes from New York City. The casino could earn $80 million to $100 million a year, nearly double the tribe’s current annual budget of around $56 million. However, powerful forces—including those opposed to gambling—may still derail the plan, and legislation is being pushed in Congress to close the tribe’s window of opportunity.

White grew up on St. Regis (also known by its Mohawk name, Akwesasne) surrounded by family. Given the Indian name Teiotsis Tokwate, or Bright Star, by her grandmother, she loved playing lacrosse and fishing with her grandfather on the St. Lawrence River, which forms the border that splits the reservation in two. On the southern side is upper state New York; on the northern side Ontario and Quebec. The New York reservation contains 14,000 acres, with vast stretches of open country punctuated by mountains. When the wind blows in winter, it howls.

White’s mother pushed her to leave the reservation to attend four years at Northfield Mount Hermon. Now she knows NMH was her mother’s greatest gift—but when she first left, she wasn’t so sure. Back then, it was rare for a Mohawk to attend NMH, much less go there for four years. “I was all of thirteen, first time off the reservation. When my parents brought me down and dropped me off, I was in culture shock.”

At first she was so shy she could barely talk to the strangers who surrounded her. There were no other Mohawks. Joining the school’s lacrosse team helped her gain confidence; over time she found her voice at NMH and resolved to become a lawyer who’d fight for Indian rights and serve her tribe.

While attending Connecticut College, she met her husband, an Irish-American named Daniel Doran. In 1998 White graduated from UConn law school and began working as legal counsel for other tribes. Pregnant with their first child, Aidan, in 2000, White returned to the reservation with Doran. Their initial idea was to make sure their child was born among her family, but one thing led to another, and White became the tribe’s first Mohawk legal counsel in 2001.

White thought she might someday serve as a chief, maybe in her 50s, after she’d become more seasoned. Being the tribe’s legal counsel, however, changed that: she was face to face with her people’s problems, and waiting was no longer an option. She quit as the tribe’s attorney in 2003 to make her first run at becoming chief, tying her opponent in a heated contest, only to lose the runoff by a wide margins.

Why the loss? As the tribe’s attorney, she’d negotiated frequently with the state and federal governments. Mohawks bristle at the notion of outside interference, and her dealings with government agencies made her suspect.

After her defeat, White spent the next two years closing her gap with the community. She sat in on the first tribal council meeting after the election and continued to attend. As legal counsel, she’d remained in the background, but it was time to make her political feelings known. “In our community, the only way to really get a message across is to sit across the coffee table and spend time talking to the people, and I did that for months.”

Attempting to strike a more balanced approach during the second election, White aligned herself with an older subchief who, unlike her, was fluent in the Mohawk language. She won the election and immediately joined forces with Chief Barbara Lazore, the more experienced chief who’d defeated her earlier. Within weeks of White taking office, the two women scuttled a deal with Harrah’s—one of the world’s largest casino companies—because it had stalled its plans to build a casino on the reservation. Instead they revived plans for a different site.

“We’re not shrinking violets, I’ll tell you that,” says White as she sits inside Sunflower East, a reservation restaurant where coffee flows freely and breakfasts are delicious, cheap, and huge. Sitting nearby is Bill Sears, owner of Sunflower East and other reservation buildings, many plastered with signs blaring defiance at the federal government and “Governor Pataxi.”

“We haven’t had a good fight up here in, what, fifteen years?” asks Sears, genuine regret in his voice. A big man whose nose has been broken at least once, Sears helped build the World Trade Center as a member of Ironworkers Local 440. When the towers fell during the 2001 terrorist attacks, he was among the ironworkers who returned to help. He also belongs to the Mohawk Warrior Society and freely admits to a history of defiant protest, including the time he crushed government vehicles with heavy equipment during a standoff in Canada.

Leaving the restaurant, White heads for her office, a compact, modern building that looks no different from the seat of government in any medium-size town. Within, Indian art hangs on earth-tone walls.

“I still haven’t moved in,” confesses White as she looks over the mail and frowns at a letter from the tobacco company Phillip Morris, which is threatening to halt sales to the reservation. On the wall are family pictures and a framed article detailing her election. When Avery, her third child, was born this January, White became the first Mohawk chief to give birth while in office. She took a week off, installed a changing table behind her desk, and brought her baby to work for the next two months. “I want to convey to the young women in my community: you can do it all. Don’t set obstacles or limitations for yourself,” she says.

Being chief is more than a full-time job. Besides public monthly council meetings and her daily administrative duties, she often travels to lobby state and federal officials. Recently she spent a week in New York City to speak with bankers. Although she has no interest in diminishing Mohawk sovereignty, she understands the need to balance her tribe’s fierce independence with pragmatism.

A driving tour of the reservation, whose buildings seem more Old West than New England, is next on her agenda. The businesses that line the main artery—gas stations, stores touting cheap cigarettes—are all privately owned and recent additions. So is the IGA, which White says is the biggest in New York State. The tribe owns a large bingo hall and the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino, built in 1999. Because of its remote location, the casino only started to make a profit last year, which is why the tribe wants to build another one within driving distance of New York City.

On most of the reservation’s roads, going from the United States to Canada requires passing through a border check point. However, there are exceptions. While driving northeast through a residential area, White casually says, “At this point, this is all still New York.” After a pause, she adds, “As of now, this is all Quebec.”

There are no checkpoints, no border guards on this point of land, which juts into the St. Lawrence River and Canada. During the summer, scores of boats make the crossing regularly. Some are Mohawks taking shortcuts. Others are smuggling goods, in particular cheap cigarettes into Canada, which has a stiff “sin tax.”

“There are people in our community and elsewhere who’d rather make a quick buck on the river than work a forty-hour work week,” says White, who shares the feds’ concerns when it comes to preventing terrorism and stemming the flow of drugs across the border.

This February the New York Times spotlighted reservations—including St. Regis—in an article that argued “large-scale criminal organizations have found havens and allies” among Indian tribes. According to the paper, investigators estimate that $1 billion in high-grade marijuana and Ecstasy move through the St. Regis reservation annually. While not denying the problem, the Mohawks were outraged because the paper painted the entire tribe with a broad brush, implying widespread tolerance of drug trafficking.

“I’m not saying that everybody in our community is an angel and that a drug problem doesn’t exist here,” says White. “But you have a minority of a minority involved.”

Earlier in her tour, she drove past her ten-acre piece of the reservation, bordered on one side by the St. Regis River and on another by the homes of her aunts, uncles, and cousins. Yet she and her husband, who does marketing and development for a company on the reservation, don’t plan to build a home there. Doran isn’t a Mohawk, and that, in the opinion of some tribal members, creates a problem.

“My husband isn’t comfortable living on the reservation because not everybody supports the idea that nonnatives should be able to reside here,” says White. “Sure, he’s known people now for years and they’re all friends. The bottom line is, though, not all agree that he should actually be living here.”

It’s clearly a sore point, but White dismisses it with a visible shrug. In the meantime, she and the council have bigger fish to fry, like the tribe’s inadequate health care system and two superfund sites that have polluted the reservation. Increasing the tribe’s wealth won’t guarantee solutions to its many challenges, White knows, but it will open the door of opportunity much wider. For this reason alone, she isn’t moved by those who fault the tribe for turning to gambling as a source of income.

“The evils of living in our community were created and forced upon us by others,” she says. “The reservation was not something we all joyously signed up for.”

If the new casino falls through, she says the tribe will find another way. As for White, she’s too focused on the tribe’s immediate needs to look beyond her three-year term. These are heady times, and she knows that the prospect of a stronger Mohawk nation is a cause of worry for some. This delights her.

“As a Mohawk person, you have passion—it’s innate; you were born with it in your gut. Then you become educated, and you have passion and brains. God forbid we Indians have money on top of all that!” White says, laughing. “And a passionate, educated, financially independent, and successful Mohawk woman, forget it!” She laughs even harder.

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