Our history of creating debate began in 1979 when we got involved in a  commercial-versus-sports-fishing tourism battle in northern Minnesota.  The early skirmish resulted in the State of Minnesota buying out the walleye quotas of 19 white commercial fishermen on those two lakes. During the three years it took to accomplish the buyout we started reading about the treaty rights lawsuits in Washington State and Wisconsin. Hindsight tells us that the state let us win the buyout of the white netters knowing full well that Treaty Rights were also coming to Minnesota.

As we became increasingly involved over the years we began to learn who the players were at the State Capitol and how the Indians from Red Lake and Leech Lake had powerful partners there. We started studying Federal Indian Policy. It hadn’t taken us long to figure out that we had just won a little skirmish with the buyout of the white netters but that the big battle for the economic soul of  our state and country was just beginning.

We learned about a group that worked with Native Americans in Montana called The Citizens Equal Rights Alliance. We joined the organization in about 1987 and have been on the board of directors ever since. CERA is the only national umbrella organization working to preserve the level economic playing field that our founding fathers envisioned as they wrote the constitution and its guarantee of the equal protection of our laws to all citizens. Our Native American friends living on reservations have no rights or recourse to a court of law when aggrieved by their tribal business councils. They are pawns in a very clever marketing scheme of the rich and powerful soft money crowd that doesn’t believe in laws or constitutions – only greed!

CERA also has a sister organization called the Citizens Equal Rights Foundation. Each year these groups have an annual conference in Washington, D.C.  Each year the Resource Sentinel prepares a campaign to bring issues of importance to our nations leaders in Washington, D.C. 

In this section you will find information about campaigns we have been involved with. In 2001 we ran a massive campaign requesting that our Judiciary Committee, in the exercise of its required oversight functions, investigate the increasing problems of American citizens being deprived of their rights by tribal governments exercising delegated power and authority from corrupt agencies of the United States Government. On this page you’ll also find the letters we sent trying to stop Sen. McCain’s Campaign Finance Reform legislation that left huge Tribal loopholes that created the Abramoff scandals and allows the tribal gaming industry to control D.C.  You’ll also learn about our successful attempts each of the last three years to oppose the creation of an Indian tribe in Hawaii, a bill chiefly sponsored by Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman.

The historical revisionist expansion of Indian Country -- under calls for social justice,   saving the wilderness, human rights, and sustainability -- are all part of the biggest con game in the history of politics. It is no wonder that the largest shareholders of the big corporations that harvest our natural resources are getting ever richer while millions of American citizens are being bankrupted and forced to sell their land for pennies on the dollar. The tribes already control 70 percent of our nation’s resource wealth and now with their gambling friends have billions of dollars of gambling proceeds with which they are buying land and illegally and unconstitutionally taking it off the tax rolls.