I just read your article on the Citizens for Equal Rights Alliance with great interest and gratitude (“Why don’t anti-Indian groups count as hate groups?” HCN, 11/26/18). I’d be interested regardless, but I am a landowner in Sanders County, Montana, and have been bombarded by the oddest, most addled, acerbic and confusing series of votes on the irrigation district — the Flathead Water Compact — over the years. My takeaway from your article is: Of course; I should have guessed. All the communications have been so melodramatic that I could make neither heads nor tails of them, but I now realize that this is hate-group agitation, using symbolism I am unfamiliar with.
I have to interact with everyone as an individual, and I do not seek disengagement. The designation of the people who believe the CERA spin — who are, as you point out, susceptible to latching onto horrid stereotyping and the “getting things for free” discourse — as hate-group sympathizers will only polarize and invigorate more. Yet to me, this discussion provides clarity and understanding. I await the results of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s analysis and wonder how CERA will compare nationally with other groups. It will require of the SPLC, perhaps, a novel framework in order to account for the relationship of Native American culture to land and water.
Sarah Rogers
Boulder, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Hate-group agitation.
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