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Cow Creek Umpqua Indian Tribal Chairman Sue Shaffer, Cow Creek's indomitable force, has resurrected the Tribe and forged a vision for the 1,050 member Tribe.
Known nationally for her advocacy of tribal rights, Sue Shaffer, chairwoman of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, has forged a vision for the 1,050 member Oregon tribe. "I used to say there were the sowers and the reapers," says former Sen. Mark 0. Hatfield, R-Ore. “I don't think there will be any way to evaluate the kind of seed-sowing that Sue Shaffer has performed."
Cow Creek’s indomitable force
Sue Shaffer worked her way from Canyonville to Congress to restore her 1,050-member band
By Courtenay Thompson
CANYONVILLE--Three years ago, the red sports car carrying the 77 year-old matriarch of the Cow Creek Indians slid into the back of a truck on the way to the Eugene airport. The air bag exploded into Sue Shaffer's chest, and shattered glass sprayed her upswept, graying, beehive hairdo.
The tribal chairwoman stepped out of the crumpled car and started looking for a ride. She had an important national conference to make in Washington, D.C., and wasn't going to let a car accident stop her.
"She said, 'We have a half hour. We could still make the airplane,’ " recalls Carol McKinney, Shaffer's assistant and driver that icy winter day in 1996. "She shakes the glass out of her hair, dusts herself off and flags someone down to take her to the airport."
Sue Shaffer made the flight.
She rarely misses anything.
Shaffer, who just turned 77, is a determined, focused and persistent dynamo of a tribal leader who has swayed everyone from her neighbors in tiny Canyonville to Congress.
She's been as outspoken on Native American rights as on the needs of her 1,050-member band, descendants of seven tribal families in the South Umpqua River 'watershed who refused to give up their tribal identity and organization in of spite of more than a century of federal indifference.
Under her leadership for 13 years, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians has experienced a remarkable reversal of fortune.
Seventeen years ago, the federal government did not recognize the tribe. Its members were scattered throughout the Northwest, and the band was held together by family picnics and summertime gatherings at a traditional huckleberry patch on the Umpqua.
Today, the Cow Creek Tribe is recognized as a sovereign tribal nation, with a casino in Canyonville, a growing land base and services to its members--from health insurance and a clinic to scholarships and housing assistance.
The tribe is diversifying, planning a manufactured-home plant and pushing ahead with a project to build motorcycles after a deal to gain the Indian Motorcycle trademark fell through last year.
It's a tribal transformation that many say is due to the drive, passion and sharply honed political and business savvy of one woman who had a dream of rebuilding the tribe of her mother's ancestors.
"If it hadn't been for her, our tribe wouldn't be what we are today," said Buster Rondeau, vice chairman of the Cow Creek's elected board of directors and a childhood friend of Shaffer.
"She's a scrapper. When she gets her mind set on something, she's going to get it."
Shaffer has tried to build a tribal government with a vision forged during the Great Depression: that hard work, not handouts, is the key to success. Her own job history is filled with long hours and sweat.
She's a former office manager for the makers of Spam, a free-lance bookkeeper and a small-business woman who once made her living running home-style restaurants, taverns for miners and loggers, and a jeans store in Canyonville.
Although a Democrat, she is forcefully conservative.
She has angered some tribal members who want a cash cut of casino profits, which Shaffer opposes. Instead, she's advocated reinvesting gambling revenue in scholarships, land, health care and a diversified business portfolio.
"She is at the forefront of the voice of Indian Country," said Matt Braunstein, senior legislative aide to Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., co-founder of the Native American Caucus in Congress.
He said Kennedy counts Shaffer among his most valued advisors on tribal affairs; she also served as tribal liaison to President Clinton's special assistant on intergovernmental affairs during his first administration.
"She leads by example," Braunstein said. "If I wanted to show a member of Congress what tribes are doing with their resources, I would send them there."
A history of firsts
Sue Shaffer, grandmother of two, stands 5 feet tall, not counting her 2 1/2-inch heels. She walks quickly, sometimes so fast her daughter, Sherri, the tribe's chief executive officer, says she has a hard time keeping up.
Sue Shaffer's penchant for saving has helped the tribe from the start. She organized the effort to persuade Oregon's congressional delegation to support tribal restoration in 1982. She brought mounds of evidence, including minutes of tribal meetings that she and her mother had recorded.
Then, after pushing a decades old land claim through Congress, she persuaded the tribal council to keep the $1.5 million settlement in an endowment, rather than divide it among tribal members.
After Congress approved the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, Shaffer was the first tribal leader in Oregon to negotiate a gambling compact with the governor and opened the state's first high-stakes bingo hall in 1992 on the site of a crumbling Canyonville motel just off Interstate 5.
The tribe steadily expanded, adding casino-style slot machines and table games, a restaurant, a four-story hotel and a 1,500-seat convention center.
Using revenue from the casino to back up blue-chip bonds, the tribe has aggressively sought new business ventures, including the purchase of 871 acres. In 1996 alone, the tribe bought 65 acres along Interstate 5 between Roseburg and Canyonville, including two motels, a mini-storage business, a jerky business, a truck stop and a 35-acre parcel on which to build manufactured homes.
The tribe employs 872 people, nearly all non-tribal members, making it one of Douglas County's largest employers. The tribe's charitable foundation, funded by gambling profits, gives about $800,000 a year to local groups.
"She is very influential in our county” said Dan Hern, Roseburg city counselor. If she wants something done, it gets done”.
Ron Allen, a Washington state tribal leader and head of the National Congress of American Indians, the country’s largest tribal organization, says Shaffer is unafraid of taking on federal officials whether it's Sen. Slade Gorton, R- Wash., who oversees U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs or Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit.
When Gorton proposed restricting federal aid to economically successful tribes despite treaties and federal laws " she got right in his face and did not back off one bit and made clear her outrage," Allen said. “She is not intimidated by people of this nature…
“She is one of the ones who sit in the front row. She is not a wallflower.”
Her mother’s fire
Sue Shaffer climbs from the car and looks out over the South Umpqua River as it flows through the ranch where she grew up.
It's a hot day and she points down to the cool blue-green rapids that froth past several large flat rocks on the riverbank.
“That’s a wonderful fishing hole there, and it is where the fish were dried on the rocks,” Shaffer says. “Then this way right up the curve of the river”—she spins on her white pumps and points upriver—“there was a natural salt lick, so it was a deer crossing.”
With the abundant fish, deer, otter and mink, her ancestors once made this place their winter camp. Shaffer’s parents bough this ranch in the 1920’s to protect what had long been an important place for the Umpqua Indians, with archeological sites going back 5,000 to 6,000 years.
Shaffer is proud of the heritage of both her Umpqua Indian mother and her Irish/Scottish father. Those who know her best say she draws her fire from her mother, Ellen Furlong Crispen, a modern frontierswoman who kept the tribe together during years when the federal government denied the Cow Creek’s existence and refused to settle long-standing land claims.
The Cow Creek signed a treaty with the U.S. government in 1853, but the federal government ignored it after the Rogue River Indian wars. The tribe received no federal assistance and was formally terminated in the 1950s.
But Shaffer's mother, as well as her grandmother, Mary Thomason Furlong, kept alive the dream of federal recognition--even reading legal texts at night in their ranch home east of Canyonville.
Although the tribe has created a significant number of jobs, few of its members work for it. That's because most adult tribal members have long been an their own, building lives and careers, Shaffer says. With no residential reservation only half the tribe lives within the seven county area around Roseburg.
Despite being scattered, the Cow Creek band is tightly bound by family. To enroll in the tribe, a person must prove being a direct descendent of one of the original seven families who make up the Cow Creek band—the “Seven Feathers” of the tribe’s Seven Feathers Casino.
Shaffer is plotting a future for a tribe that is mostly young. Only 38 members are older than age 65, and nearly half—498 of the 1,050 members--are under age 18.
Education is her top priority. Earlier this year, she retired from 17 years on the board of the Umpqua Community College, where she was its first woman chairman.
She has encouraged the tribe to develop scholarship programs for people of all ages, and the tribe also sponsors scholarships for a select number of high school seniors who are not tribal members.
Shaffer’s aggressive vision once fostered opposition to her leadership within the tribe.
Stan Speaks, area director for the BIA in Portland, said Shaffer weathered the turmoil a decade ago because she was able to show one success after another.
“She was able to do that constantly,” he said.
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