Montanans packed Native Americans into horrifying makeshift camp before big rodeo: lawsuit
[IMAGE: Man looks out through a chain link fence]
A lawsuit filed by a group of Native American plaintiffs in Wolf Point, Montana alleges that city officials and highly placed tribal elders conspired together to sweep the town’s streets of Native Americans ahead of an annual rodeo.
The Daily Beast reported Thursday on the suit, filed in the Great Falls division of the U.S. District Court for Montana, which says that Native American homeless people and vagabonds were rounded up in a wave of spurious arrests and held in an open-air detention area to make the town appear “whiter” to tourists.
Each year, Wolf Point hosts the Wild Horse Stampede, the largest and oldest rodeo in the state. Thousands of rodeo enthusiasts flock to the sleepy town of 3,000, where the population in normal times is about 40 percent white and 50 percent Native American.
The plaintiffs in the civil suit — including members of the Assiniboine and Oceti Sakowin Nations — allege that they were targeted as undesirables in the arrest raids, which police called the “Wino Roundup.” They say their rights to due process, Miranda rights and other liberties were abridged. The authorities, they say, often refer to impoverished locals as “Homeless, Winos, Street People, Tree People, Drug Addicts, Alcoholics, and other derogatory slurs.”
The annual rodeo is “largely a white Anglo-Saxon event,” the suit says, and in order to present a sanitized version of life in Wolf Point to visitors, city officials launched the “Wino Roundup” on July 12, 2013.
Police — some of whom reportedly wore strips of masking tape over their name tags to hide their identities — “removed 30 to 50 individuals to curb the American Indian presence.”
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