Corporations
and Native Americans in Rural
DRAFT
by
Sandra
Faiman-Silva, Ph. D.
Professor
of Anthropology
Sociology
and Anthropology Department
(508)
531-2369
email:
sfaimansilva@bridgew.edu
Rural
United States communities are like their counterparts around the globe:
reservoirs of opportunity for entrepreneurial development. The U.S. South is particularly appealing with
its cheap, exploitable--often ethnic minority--populations, and its historic
resistance to unionization movements (see Colclough 1988:75-76; Flora et al.
1992:37-38, 136-37). The rural
southeastern Oklahoma Choctaw Nation is just such a strategic hinterland region
for two multinational industries: Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and Tyson Foods,
Inc., who each entered the region seeking cheap labor, readily-available raw
materials, and favorable business opportunities.
This
ten and one-half county region was formerly home to the Choctaw Tribe, who were
relocated from their ancient Mississippi homeland to Indian Territory in the
1830 Trail of Tears. Choctaws settled on
a 6.8 million acre estate which they called the Choctaw Nation, an
environmentally diverse region bordered by the Arkansas River to the north and
Red River to the south. The tribal
estate included rich bottomland where some Choctaws developed large homesteads
and ranching operations, some using slaves who accompanied Choctaw settlers on
their westward trek. Other Choctaws
settled in the rural hilly Kiamichi Mountains, where they established small
subsistence farms, replicating their traditional lifestyles brought from
Mississippi. In addition to growing
corn, beans, sweet potatoes, cotton and squash, rural Choctaws hunted, fished,
raised cattle, and foraged in the abundant hardwood and pine Kiamichi
forests.
The
new Choctaw homeland by the late 19th Century, was again being overrun by
whites, who entered Indian Territory to trade, extract natural
resources--mainly coal, stone, and timber--and not infrequently to conduct
illegal activities. By 1890 the approximately 10,000 Choctaws were far
outnumbered, with more than 28,000 whites and 4,400 blacks living in the
Choctaw Nation. Choctaws experienced the
devastating effects of tribal allotment in the early twentieth century, with
passage of the Dawes Severalty or General Allotment Act in 1887. They were soon transformed from a
semi-sovereign tribal nation into a rural ethnic minority, depleted of their
land and tribal sovereignty (See Faiman-Silva 1997).
Today
Southeastern Oklahoma's rural main streets in Idabel, Talihina, and Wright
City, bear the face of rural poverty: dusty streets and empty storefronts. A century ago the Choctaws numbered eighty
percent of the region's population, whereas today they are fewer than fifteen
percent, with Euro-Americans about eighty percent and African Americans about
five percent regionally (U.S. Census Bureau 1990).
Economics
of Rural Decline
Southeast
Oklahoma between 1925 and 1970 experienced trends typical of rural America
generally: population declines, farm consolidation, and increased welfare and
public sector dependence (See Dillman and Hobbs 1982:62-63; Snipp and Summers
1991:82-83; Cornell 1988: 60-62; Flora and
Depopulation
was prompted by a combination of push and pull factors, including declining
agricultural employment opportunitiets, coupled with federally sponsored Indian
relocation programs during the 1950s. Since 1960 the trend began to reverse, as
many Chocatws returned to take advantage of U.S. Housing and Urban
Development-sponsored "mutual help housing" programs, instituted in
1969, which provided low cost housing to eligible Native American
families. Between 1960 and 1980
Southeast Oklahoma's Choctaw population doubled, to about sixteen thousand,
about ten percent of the region's population (Faiman-Silva 1997:107).
Southeast
Oklahoma's economy since the Depression has been typical of hinterland
economies globally and the rural U.S.
generally: part-time, intermittent employment opportunities, a
preponderance of unskilled, low-paid jobs, and ever-increasing state subsidies
through public-sector employment with notable increases in service and
government jobs (See Coppedge and Davis 1977; Jorgensen 1978; Hall 1995). Overall employment in McCurtain and
Pushmataha Counties declined by nearly fifty percent from 1940 to 1960, mainly
due to dramatic declines in agricultural and forestry jobs sectors. During the same period government jobs--a
sector that employed far few workers than did agriculture--increased by fifty
percent (Peach and Poole n.d.; Faiman-Silva 1997:110-111).
Facing
more constrained job opportunities, many Choctaws worked for timber companies
and in other industries, providing cheap, unskilled and semi-skilled labor,
often part-time. Some Choctaw families
migrated to Texas to pick cotton during the depression and World War II; while
others did odd jobs for white families or cut and stripped timber posts in the
local timber industry. Families
supplemented meager cash earnings with gardening, foraging, and the raising of
chickens and hogs. Choctaws also
weathered hard times by selling allotted land, which by 1960 had been reduced
to a mere 144,000 acres. By the early
1980s most timber region Choctaw families owned fewer than five acres, all that
remained of early twentieth century allotments (see Faiman-Silva 1997:109ff;
Debo 1951:4-5; author's interviews 1980-82).
Southeast
Oklahoma's poverty and unemployment woes persisted in the 1980s and 1990s with
the highest unemployment rates state-wide in 1981, about ten percent, while the
state averaged 4.8 percent unemployed.
Local minority unemployment in 1981 was the highest in Oklahoma, 18.6
percent (Oklahoma IMPACT 1981:31). In
1987 Choctaw timber region unemployment was an alarming 37 percent (Bishinik [Durant, OK] 5/87:2). In 1990 Native Americans in both McCurtain
and Pushmataha Counties continued to show high unemployment rates, with
McCurtain County unemployment 13.3 percent and Pushmataha County, 14 percent. White unemployment was 10.5 and 11 percent
respectively in those counties (U.S. Census Bureau 1990; Faiman-Silva
1997:110-111).
Choctaws
and their Euro- and African-American neighbors, many lacking both structures
and opportunities for economic self-sufficiency, were exploited in the region’s
"secondary labor market" as cheap labor for an increasingly hegemonic
U.S. economy (See Hall 1987:9, 11-13; 1988; Castile 1993:273; Flora et.al.
1992:42-43), dominated locally by two multinational giants: Weyerhaeuser Timber
Company and Tyson Foods. Choctaws and other minority and unskilled local
workers provided substantial value, both in the actual wage work they performed
and as semiproletarians (see Giminez
1990), whose mixed-subsistence
production strategy used unpaid household labor to perform essential household
maintenance tasks, thereby subsidizing inadequate wages. A study of fifty rural Choctaw households
conducted by the author in the early 1980s found that nearly 85 percent of
Choctaw householders sampled worked only part-time, mainly in chicken
processing and timber work, earning wages that could not sustain their families
(See Faiman-Silva 1997:160).
Rural
timber region Choctaws, as they did historically, depended on a “mixed
subsistence” survival strategy, combining wage labor with hunting, foraging,
gardening, craft and commodity production, resource-sharing, and other
extra-wage laboring activities, to meet their livelihood needs. More than fifty percent of households
surveyed in the early 1980s participated in some household non-wage subsistence
activities, including cutting timber for home heating, fishing, hunting,
foraging, quilt-making, and the raising of chickens and hogs (Faiman-Silva
1997:151). Choctaws also relied on
public sector and tribal benefits, particulary food stamps, social security
payments, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), and tribal assistance
programs. Another common subsistence
stratetgy was to share housing space.
Younger nuclear families frequently moved in with parents for extended
stays, while working as seasonal tree-planters or in the chicken processing
industry, relying on parents for child care and other household resources.
Increasingly
Choctaws and their rural neighbors turned to public welfare to subsidize
inadquate wages. Between 1950 and 1963
public assistance payments in McCurtain County rose by sixty percent and in
Pushmataha County by one-third (Peach and Poole n.d. chart 16). In 1980 nearly half of Pushmataha's
population, 45.4 percent lived below federally-established poverty levels, and
in McCurtain County the rate was 37.1 percent, while the overall state average
was 18.8 percent (Oklahoma IMPACT 1981; Faiman-Silva 1997:112).
Corporate
Development; Hinterland Underdevelopment
As
in peripheral or hinterland economies globally, corporations like Weyerhaeuser
and Tyson Foods, among the top Fortune 500 U.S. companies, find Southeast
Oklahoma highly attractive both for its cheap labor and its abundant natural
resources. Although the region does
benefit materially from the multinational corporate presence in jobs, wages,
tax revenues, and other corporate "percs," symptoms of economic
malaise caused by unemployment, underemployment, and an inadequate tax
base--common byproducts of global hinterland development--are evident in
poorly-maintained housing, boarded-up urban buildings, and other signs of
infrastructural decay. Corporations use
shrewd business practices to maximize profits and minimize costs locally, and
it is frequently local workers and the communities where they live that bear
the hidden costs of entrepreneurial success.
As Roberts (1989:671) noted, "Corporations operating in a world
strategy have no strong commitment to place, relocating different divisions
according to the most cost effective strategy--where certain types of labor are
cheaper, are more available, or where favorable tax or other concessions are
obtained."
Corporate
profit-maximizing strategies include vertical and horizontal integration;
product diversification; sometimes ruthless management and labor practices;
exploitation of cheap, relatively abundant labor; and various forms of
corporate "welfare." These
strategies constitute the core of corporate entrepreneurial practices,
strategies which both Weyerhaeuser and Tyson Foods employ locally and
regionally.
For
example, Weyerhaeuser since it entered Southeast Oklahoma in 1969 has increased
corporate efficiency and profit-making through several forms of what Flora,
et.al. (1992:37-38) call "corporate restructuring." First, Weyerhaeuser in 1969 bought the land
holdings of a smaller regionally-based company, Dierks Forests, Inc., in what
was the largest land purchase in the history of the U.S. timber industry. This purchase 1.5 million acres eliminated
competition and monopolizing the regional asset base.
Secondly,
the company introduced highly capital-intensive technological innovations to
streamline production and reduce labor costs. Weyerhaeuser in 1972 opened a
pulp and paper mill in Valliant, Oklahoma, which coverts woodchips into paper
and paperboard products. This mill
requires the labor of only six men who operate the entire mill's sophisticated
assembly line from a single control panel (Pulp
and Paper 1972:43). Also, the
corporation has diversified its production regionally and nationally into other
entrepreneurial areas, maximizing product and by-product use. Among its diversified activities include
product research and development, acquaculture, home financing, and real estate
development enterprises (See Faiman-Silva 1997). Third, Weyerhaeuser has increasingly relied on cheaper
production strategies, such as labor sub-contracting, whereby essential timber
cutting, maintenance and harvesting tasks are performed by sub-contracted
crews. Labor sub-contracting,
increasingly prevalent in the highly competitive industrial arena of the 1990s,
reduces corporate labor force maintenance costs and turns over to the workers
themselves many costs to maintain and reproduce the local labor force (See
Roberts 1989:678ff; Flora et.al. 1992:42-43).
Weyerhaeuser's
sub-contracting of timber cutting, harvesting, and tree maintenance tasks, the
heart of its local industrial enterprise, epitomizes how the industry exploits
and marginalizes laborers to achieve maximum economic advantage and accrue
profits while paying little attention to the human costs to workers. This corporate profitmaking strategy leaves
to the public sector welfare state and workers themselves the task of
subsidizing inadequate salaries and benefits.
This hidden form of "corporate welfare" is not unique to the
Choctaw Nation, but is replicated throughout rural U.S. communities, where
underemployed inadequately paid workers turn to public assistance programs to
subsidize inferior wages.
Labor
subcontracting has become big business in Southeast Oklahoma. Currently only
about twelve percent of timber brought to Weyerhaeuser's Wright City plant is
carried by company trucks; the rest by contractors. An estimated two hundred men work for
independent tree cutting crews, one hundred in chipping operations, and about
forty to sixty in seasonal tree planting.
Weyerhaeuser has also contracted road and mill maintenance jobs as well,
further eroding its unionized work force (author's interviews, Woodworkers W15
Local President, 1/25/90, 6/8/93).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Weyerhaeuser has increased its use of
contracted labor to harvest timber, plant and maintain stands, while slashing its
unionized workforce dramatically, a strategy designed to reduce corporate costs
and increase its competitive edge.
Local
Choctaws work as part‑time timber cutters, loggers, tree planters and in
tree maintenance crews, hired by labor contractors to perform essential
timber-related tasks. The head
contractor, or crew boss, obtains work contracts directly from Weyerhaeuser
through competitive bidding and then hires his own crew for a particular job.
Working as a contractor, crew member, or as an independent logger is a highly
competitive, cyclical business dependent on Weyerhaeuser's demand for
timber. The head contractor typically
supplies all heavy equipment, while timber cutters supply their own chainsaws.
Contractors generally provide only legally‑mandated worker benefits, such
as workmens' compensation, and workers often do not receive family health
insurance benefits nor are they paid for layoffs, holidays or sick days. Non-unionized, sub-contracted workers
generally receive lower wages and more unstable hours of employment.
Tree
planting and tree maintenance, including thinning and insect control, are also
performed by part‑time crews hired through private contractors. Contractors hiring tree planting crews afford
their workers even less job security and lower pay than do logging contractors,
since the tree planting season is only about four and one‑half months
long, from January through mid‑May.
Workers reported that they planted from 1,000 to 1,500 trees per day,
with women planting fewer than men and novice workers planting more slowly than
experienced workers. Tree planting is
physically rigorous, entailing trekking through recently clearcut acreage rough
with deep grooves and stumpage where seedlings must be set. Approximately half the tree planters are
females and older workers who take advantage of the seasonally available
work. Workers are told that if trees are
planted too far apart or if the stand does not take, they must return to the
site to replant, the cost of which is taken out of their wages (author's
interviews, 1981-1982, 1993; reported in Faiman-Silva 1997).
Weyerhaeuser's
tree harvesting practices have made unionized timbermen a truly dying breed in
Southeastern Oklahoma. A single
Weyerhaeuser logging crew of twelve men, the last remnants of what in 1978 was
a company logging force of 278, has been threatened with elimination if it
cannot remain competitive with contracted loggers. This followed corporate field assessments by
a management team sent from Tacoma, Washington, which determined that company
logging operations were not cost effective (author's interview, 6/9/93). This logging crew is also the most ethnically
diverse of Weyerhaeuser's workforce, with five Native American and seven
EuroAmerican
Weyerhaeuser's
contract labor system benefits the corporation by substantially reducing or
eliminating various production costs which are borne instead by workers and
contractors, such as costly equipment like skidders and limbers[1]
and worker transport costs to widely scattered worksites on their estimated
890,000 acres of active timberland in the region. Also, the company does not
bear costs to maintain permanent workers who may not be profitably used
throughout the year; nor must it provide costly workers benefits such as health
insurance, vacation pay, and other employee benefits, further eroding already
sub-standard wages. Workforce
sub-contracting and other down-sizing measures have reduced Weyerhaeuser's
local unionized workforce by nearly one half since the late 1970s, from a high
of 2,800 to 1,525 in 1993 (author's interview, Woodworkers W15 Local President,
6/8/93). "We have had to get lean
and mean and competitive, and more profitable," said Weyerhaeuser's Public
Wright City Relations Officer (author's interview, 6/2/82).
The
Woodworkers Local W15 representing
Weyerhaeuser's unionized workers, has vocally opposed Weyerhaeuser's use of
contract labor throughout the 1980s and 1990s not only for its exploitation of
local workers but also because it erodes full time jobs and brings in outside
contracting crews, taking jobs away from the local community (author's
interviews, McCurtain County, OK, Grannis, AR 6/5/82, 6/8-6/9/93). Called by one worker "a snake without a
head" for its ruthless treatment of its rank and file workers both in the
field and at the bargaining table, the company has persistently refused to
entertain unionization of its contract workers.
Chicken
Processing, Minorities and Women
Like
Weyerhaeuser, Tyson Foods, Inc., with a regional workforce of approximately
1,600, is a fast-growing company, which relies on product diversification,
cheap labor, and technological innovations to process locally 1.3 million
chickens a week. Tyson Foods, Inc., opened a processing plant in Broken Bow,
Oklahoma, in 1969, where its approximately 1,200 workers processes 100,000
chickens an hour. Tyson also supports
approximately five hundred chicken breeder and broiler houses, some corporate
owned (author's telephone interview, 8/2/95).
A particularly attractive job option for local
unskilled minorities and women, fifty-seven percent of Tyson's local workforce
is female, and seventy percent of workers are minorities: twenty-five percent
Native American, thirty percent African American, and fifteen percent
Hispanic.
Tyson
Foods, like its neighbor, Weyerhaeuser, uses a variety of highly successful
entrepreneurial strategies to maximize profits and minimize costs. It recently purchased Louis Rich Foods, a
Phillip Morris-owed subsidiary. In 1992
it bought Louis Kemp Seafood and Arctic Alaska Fisheries, Inc., to diversify
its food production enterprises. Also in
1992 Tyson Foods expanded its operations in Mexico, by linking with Mexican
poultry producer, Trasgo SA Company (Wall Street Journal, 6/24/92, B,4;
8/28/92, B,4; 6/11/93, B,3; 3/2/92, B,4).
Tyson,
and its predecessor Lane Chicken Company, notorious for their anti-union views
and union-busting practices, have persistently resisted unionization efforts
throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s. One
worker at a local chicken plant told that employee efforts to unionize a shop
in Idabel, Oklahoma, in 1978 resulted in termination of about thirty workers. She quit as a result and was rehired only
after she pledged to refrain from further unionization activities. She said, "I didn't want to go back
there but I had no choice. There was no
place else to work" (author's interview 2/23/81). On-going efforts to unionize the Broken Bow,
Oklahoma, plant have met with intimidation and threats by Tyson management, and
so far have been unsuccessful.
Tyson
has not been reluctant to use illegal labor and marketing practices. In 1993 the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) found Tyson guilty of illegal labor practices at an Arkansas poultry
plant; and court decisions in 1992 gave chicken growers rights to organize,
efforts Tyson and other chicken processing companies actively resisted (Wall
Street Journal 8/12/92, B,6; author's interviews, 6/93).
The
regional economy dominated by these MNCs has given rise to a racially and
gender-stratified job opportunity structure, where women and minorities are
over-represented in the more poorly paid, labor intensive chicken processing
and unskilled tree-planting and tree maintenance occupations, while white males
dominate the skilled occupations.
Woodworkers Union data show that of its approximately fifteen hundred
unionized workers, eleven hundred are white, eighty are Native American
(>5%), three hundred African American (20%), and twelve Hispanic. Long-time Choctaw workers claim that they
have been overlooked in promotions to supervisory jobs for which they were
qualified, and no Native Americans worked at the company's Wright City
corporate headquarters in the 1980s.
Contractors, on the other hand, hire women, minorities, and even illegal
aliens, often exploiting them with sub-minimum wages paid under the table to do
intermittent and dangerous work, such as insect control and tree limbing
(author's interviews, 6/8-6/9/93). As earlier noted, women are over-represented
in lower-paid chicken processing jobs and under-represented in better-paid
timber industry jobs. Weyerhaeuser's
local unionized workforce is currently only about 15 percent female, while
women comprise 57 percent of Tyson's local non-unionized workforce (author's
telephone interviews, 8/17/96, 8/2/95).
Choctaw
Workers and MNCs
Choctaw
workers, unlike fully proletarianized urban workers, are not wholly submerged
in the wage sector as landless workers, but are semiproletarians (see Giminez 1990), relying on wagework combined
with domestic subsistence activities. By supplementing wages with hunting,
fishing, foraging, and craft production, along with public and tribal
assistance programs, and otherwise "making do," Choctaw householders
shoulder many of the costs to reproduce their own labor force, reducing
corporate costs. Furthermore, the
community (and its workers), rather than Weyerhaeuser or other private
employers, bear the costs of low wages and seasonally available work, because
workers collect unemployment or public assistance or resort to other
subsistence strategies, such as gardening, hunting, odd jobs, even collecting
aluminum cans, to compensate for low or erratic wages (See also Hedley 1993;
Collins and Gimenez, Eds. 1990). In the
gender stratified rural households, women's informal unpaid subsistence
activitites, commodity production, and resource sharing subsidize underemployed
and poorly-paid male timber workers, adding value to household wages (See also
Shelton and Agger 1993:39; Ward 1990; Collins and Gimenez, Eds. 1990). These
hidden forms of "corporate welfare" bring added profits to corporate
owners in this poorly-understood and frequently-overlooked cycle of underemployment
and labor marginalization.
Corporations,
like Weyerhaeuser and Tyson Foods, do benefit local communities through
"trickle down" effects of jobs creation, tax payments, and other
operating incentives. However, these benefits
mask the ways in which local communities subsidize corporate profit-making and
are themseves exploited as a cheap, secondary labor force. In the arena of corporate profit-making,
publics--both individuals and communities--are subverted, indeed mystified--by
entrepreneurial enticements, while they shoulder the effects of peripheral
economic exploitation.
Choctaws
in the early 1980s were divided in their opinions of Weyerhaeuser's economic
impact on them and their communities.
Some noted that young adults could find only the most undesirable jobs,
such as seasional tree planting or chicken processing, which paid only at or
slightly above minimum wages. Others,
however, argued that Weyerhaeuser had made employment prospects more stable and
jobs more reliable, particularly for those willing to travel the seventy-five
or more miles to its Wright City timber processing plants. Tribal and Durant city officials --and
Weyerhaeuser spokespeople themselves--touted Weyerhaeuser's contributions to
local communities, such as school scholarships, which amounted to $50,000
annually.
Older
retired workers voiced the underlying contradictions of the private
enterprise/welfare-subsidized economy, when they pointed out that their own
lives actually improved only after they stopped working. Said one man in his mid‑sixties,
Living
improved after I stopped working. Now I
have a steady income from my VA pension.
When I worked I earned six dollars per day on the average doing odd jobs. I was
laid off a lot. My kids missed school
because I was laid off and I couldn't afford to send them. We went to
Some recognized that it was not better
job opportunities but enhanced public sector benefits which had improved their
living conditions, along with the so-called "mutual help housing"
program, instituted in 1969 under the U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD),
which provided much-needed low-cost housing to rural Choctaw families. Public Assistance benefits, mutual‑help
housing, and reliance on domestic subsistence provide most households with
sufficient cash and material resources to meet their basic necessities, albeit
below federally recognized poverty levels.
Several individuals pointed out how the housing program had dramatically
changed their lives. One said,
Life
has definitely changed for us for the better.
We lived in a two‑room house growing up. We had no running water, an outdoor
privy. If it weren't for the housing
deal, we never would have been able to buy a home (
Little
more than a decade later, sentiments have changed drastically, particularly for
Weyerhaeuser's full-time timber workers who have seen their comrades disappear
into the ranks of non-unionized contract workers with corporate downsizing and
the move to contract labor. Fearing the
loss of their own jobs, they sullenly talk of Weyerhaeuser production quotas,
speed-ups, watchful bosses, and the likelihood that today's paycheck will be
their last (author’s interviews,
6/8-6/9/93).
Many
workers, however, do not link their strained financial cirucmstances to
corporate production strategies.
Individually focussed, some value the freedom and independence part time
work affords. Others did not blame
Weyerhaeuser for hiring them only part‑time or seasonally, since most did
not actually work directly for Weyerhaeuser, but for their own kinsmen.
Meillassoux
(1981:128) illuminates why semiproletarian workers like the Choctaws do not
perceive themselves as truly exploited.
The wage laborer who leaves the domestic sector to participate in wage
labor, "...has access to cash which is scarce and 'dear' in the domestic
sector...[and] the prospect of a relatively higher income compared to that
which is possible for him using the same labour power within the domestic mode
of production." Even though the
wage laborer in the capitalist sector is underpaid, "...his immediate
income is nevertheless raised, because, on average, the productivity of his
labor has been increased" (1981:128).
The wage earner, however, must contend with exploitation, lack of job
security and inadequate wages (See also McGuire and Woodsong 1990).
The
Enclave Political Economy: "Corporate Welfare" in County
Assessment
and Taxation Policies
If
the more obvious effects of corporate development lie in local labor force
exploitation, corporate profit-making strategies also involve indirect methods
of book keeping, land assessment, and capital investment, not so readily
comprehensible to outside observers.
These strategies further deplete local resources and return vast profits
to corporate producers, often unbeknownst to the local communities where
production and profit making occur.
Local
communities penetrated by MNCs rely on property and sales taxes revenues, which
often entice local citizens to welcome corporate development schemes in their
communities. Local property and sales
tax and land assessments--the heart of the local revenue base--often favor
corporate land‑owners, undermining revenues returned to local communities
(See Flora, et.al. 1992:131ff). This
process is particularly evident in the Choctaw Nation timber industry at the
county level.
Weyerhaeuser
is the single largest property tax payer in Pushmataha and McCurtain Counties,
where the majority of its Oklahoma timberland is located. Evidence shows, however, that Weyerhaeuser
has not paid its fair share of the county property tax burden, because
appraisal methods assure that its property tax rates are extremely low when
compared with the land's actual market value.
For instance, Weyerhaeuser's timberland in both counties, amounting to
about 808,600 acres, is assessed in a category similar to agricultural land, to
compensate for periods of non‑productivity. But in fact, Weyerhaeuser paid a property tax
rate of only $6.50 per acre in 1981, while agricultural producers in McCurtain
County paid $17 to $25 per acre. Weyerhaeuser's timberland was assessed at
little more than two percent of its fair market value (assuming that timberland
was worth a mere $300 per acre).
Weyerhaeuser acknowledged this shrewd business advantage in its own
corporate literature: "This massive asset [approximately 11 billion cubic
feet of timber located on nearly 6 million acres] is valued on our books at
only $614 million, its historic costs of acquisition, planting and growing,
which is only a fraction of current market value" (Weyerhaeuser Annual
Report 1982:8).
Since
1969, Weyerhaeuser's average annual timberland growth rates have doubled due to
intensive technological innovations in clearcutting and reforestation with
genetically‑improved fast‑growing species (Weyerhaeuser Annual
Report 1988). Weyerhaeuser's own
calculations show that their timber and timberland are undervalued by more than
two and one‑half times when the value of assets is adjusted for changes
in the purchasing power of the United States dollar (Weyerhaeuser Annual
Report 1981:47).
Attempts
were made in 1982 to alter Pushmataha County's tax structure to bring in added
revenue, because as one local newspaper claimed, "Pushmataha County is
going broke" (Talihina [Oklahoma] American 4/8/82). One proposed solution was to increase all
county land values to a uniform flat rate, a move which would have hit
Weyerhaeuser hard. This solution,
according to news accounts, "hit a snag called politics," since
everyone was related and no one wants a greater share of the tax burden than
his neighbor (Talihina American 4/8/82).
An alternative proposal, a two cents sales tax, was more popular,
although this regressive taxation policy burdens wage‑earners as
consumers, while the corporate landowners remain largely unaffected.
In
1987 the Pushmataha County tax assessor appealed to County and State
Equalization Boards to revise how the county's managed timber is assessed,
based on scientifically determined categories of soil type. The tax assessor sought to increase the
assessed value of managed timberland to $10.45 per acre. Weyerhaeuser, along with Nakoosa Paper
Company, filed suit in District Court in 1990 challenging Pushmataha County's
land reassessment efforts, and out‑of‑court settlement was reached
temporarily setting the value of managed timberland at $8.69 per acre. The Court subsequently ruled in
Weyerhaeuser's favor when it determined that the asset be classified as
"waste timber" rather than in a higher "managed timber"
category, a move which County spokespeople describe as "very
unfair."
Pushmataha
County is the only one of five counties where Weyerhaeuser owns managed
timberland that is addressing the problem of land assessment equalization based
on scientifically determined categories of evaluation, to more equitably
distribute tax liabilities. Since 1990
Weyerhaeuser has sold off more than half of its Pushmataha County timber
holdings, over 100,000 acres, to
These
profit-maximizing strategies reflect the power and influence of private
entrepreneurs, at the expense not only of the local community's labor force but
also of the community at large.
Weyerhaeuser can drastically undervalue its timber resources for tax
purposes, a practice which is simply one manifestation of the systematic
exploitation of satellite economies by metropolitan‑based
corporations. In the long run, local
populations are deprived of revenues from their input both as a labor force and
as a supplier of basic raw materials, while the wealth extracted from the
community accrues to the corporate owners.
Fighting
Back: Tribal Development Strategies and
Bingo!
Since
the mid-1980s the Choctaws have devised various economic strategies to solve
the tribe's persistent poverty and underemployment woes, in response to federal
government initiatives during the Nixon era "New Federalism"
initiatives aimed to increase tribal self-determined economic development (see
Snipp and Summers 1991:170-171). Under
the 1975 Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act (PL93-638) and
the 1988 Indian Gaming and Regulatory Act (US Title 25, S441), federally
recognized tribes including the Choctaws were encouraged to undertake
entrepreneurial ventures as a way of building more viable, self-sustaining
tribal local economies. The Choctaws,
under these so-called "New Federalism" mandates, developed a variety
of new economic initiatives. In 1985 the
tribe took over administration of the 52-bed Talihina Indian Hospital, renamed
the Choctaw Nation Indian Hospital, and three outlying health clinics, which
together employed over two hundred people.
The tribe in 1998 received federal funds to expand the hospital
complex. A second tribal initiative was
acquisition in 1986 of the 256-acre Arrowhead Lodge, located in the northern
Choctaw Nation, which was renovated to provide beach accommodations,
amphithetre, and a 12,000-square-foot convention center (Bishinik 5/87:2; 2/92:1).
The
boldest and potentially most controversial tribal undertaking was in 1987, when
the Choctaw Indian Bingo Palace opened at Durant, creating about 140 additonal
jobs and now the centerpiece of an invigorated tribal economic development
strategy. The Durant bingo palace
attracts approximately 160,000 people per year, 80 percent from Texas. In its second year of operations bingo netted
more than one million dollars in profits.
Currently the tribe operates bingo concessions in four separate Choctaw
Nation locations. Since opening the
Bingo Palace, the tribe has opened smoke shops in Idabel, Pocala, Hugo,
Arrowhead and Durant, Oklahoma, as well as travel plazas along Highway 69/75
and at other Choctaw Nation locations using bingo concession funds, thereby
diversifying the tribal economy (Bishinik
1/97:8). The Choctaw Nation Indian Bingo
complex now includes two full-service travel centers, each located on opposite
sides of Highway 69/75.
Tribal
economic growth, built largely on highly successful bingo and travel plaza
enterprises, has provided an economic cushion during the 1980s and 1990s when
federal entitlement programs were slashed, allowing the tribe to pick up the
slack where federal and state monies were unavailable. The Choctaw Nation has become in effect a
branch of the U.S. welfare state bureaucracy, channeling substantial profits
into what were previously federally- and state-mandated programs. Indeed, the tribe's entrepreneurial
initiatives have brought significant improvements to the lives of local
Choctaws, through a myriad of tribally sponsored subsidy programs, jobs, housing
and health care. The Choctaw Tribe,
however, like US subsidy programs generally, serve as another form of
"corporate welfare" for the multinationals, subsidizing underpaid and
frequently underemployed workers for local extractive and food processing
industries that rely so heavily on unskilled, readily-available workers. The rural economy gives rise to diverse forms
of "corporate welfare," including tax breaks, labor contracting,
parttime labor use, public sector subsidies, and household subsistence. The Choctaw Nation and Southeast Oklahoma
generally typify the core/periphery relationship, not only in external control
of local strategic resources, particularly timber and natural gas, but also in
the peripheral workplace's reliance on unskilled, underpaid, surplus workers,
often women and minorities, who subsidize their own inadequate wages through
domestic subsistence activities, petty commodity production, and otherwise
"making do." The real winners are the MNCs, whose trickle down
benefits mask real corporate exploitation of local communities and their
citizens.
Rural
non-reservation Native Americans, like the Choctaws, exist in an ambiguous and
tenuous relation to this rural hinterland economy, as they seek to retain
viability culturally, while working to provide a substantial economic base for
their citizens. What hangs in the
balance is Native American cultural integrity.
As the Choctaws win in the new economic frontier of Indian gaming,
entering an economic niche that could enrich them for decades, they face an
uneasy future that pits tribal sovereign rights against not only corporate
entrepreneurial interests but also U.S. definitions of tribal sovereignty and
self determination. The Choctaws have
become in essence another rural ethnic sector vulnerable to the loss of key
features that make Native Americans a unique ethnic minority sector, facing
formidable challenges to their tribal cultural integrity (See Faiman-Silva
1997:22-25, 205--207, 219-224).
Culturally
the Choctaws face new tribal challenges as they redefine what it means to be
Native American in the twenty-first century.
They struggle to accommodate to a rural enclave economy dominated by
external agents, as they seek to preserve cultural integrity in the face of a
tribal life only marginally distinguishable from rural communities
nationwide. Does tribal sovereignty
linked to economic self-sufficiency signal eventual cultural demise for Native
American such as the Choctaws? Dean
Smith (1994) and Cornell and Kalt (1990, 1992a, 1992 b) maintain that it is
just this mix of effective leadership, shrewd business entrepreneurship, and
cultural preservation that spells the formula for Native American cultural and
social persistence. Smith (1994:177),
however, notes the inherent tension in the mix: "Only when the individual tribe
both controls its own resources and sustains its identity as a distinct
civilization does economic development make sense; otherwise the tribe must
choose between cultural integrity and economic development." As they enter the twenty-first century, the
Choctaws' ability to survive as a cultural entity may serve as a benchmark for
an evolving ethnic subcultural reality among Native Americans throughout the
United States and indigenous people globally in the context of nation-states,
multinational corporations, and global communities.
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