Citizen Potawatomi Nation, leader work to 'get back on par' with rest of US

Shawnee, Okla. — The hand-painted signs above the doors of some businesses in his hometown of Shawnee angered John "Rocky" Barrett, chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, when he was a teenager.

"No dogs or Indians. I grew up with signs like that. That's the way it was in the 1950s and '60s," Barrett, 79, said.

That's the way it was 100 years after his tribe and others were relocated to the so-called Indian territory by the federal government following the Civil War. Overt and subtle discrimination was a part of life for generations.

Still, there were plenty of fair people, too, including a newcomer to Shawnee in the 1950s named Mel Pourchot, who had two sons, Rick and Phil, about the age of Barrett.

"Mel started a little company called Central Plastics that manufactured plastic fittings," Barrett said. "The plastics business was new to the town."

Barrett was impressed at how fast the business grew thanks to innovations related to PVC and then high density polyethylene, a material that offered durability, flexibility and stability.

"One patent and fitting, in particular, ended up being on every natural gas meter in the country. I believe it was a conductivity breaker," Barrett said.

The success of the business, now GF Central Plastics, struck Barrett early on. He still marvels at how it expanded its products and services for the gas, water and energy sectors with HDPE pipe, conventional fusion and electrofusion fittings, natural gas meter sets and risers, flange insulation products and factory certified installer training programs.

Phil Pourchot went on to run the company and later sold it to Georg Fischer, which put the GF in front of Central Plastics.

In his youth, Barrett experienced discrimination, but he saw opportunities he seized, too. He focused on the latter and now oversees a tribe with a $650 million annual budget as he strives to live up to his Potawatomi name, Kiweoge, which means "He Leads Them Home."

After Barrett graduated from Shawnee High School in 1962, he wasn't sure he would be back for any great length of time. He attended Princeton University for a year but had to take a leave of absence. He went back home and transferred to the University of Oklahoma. He got married and then enrolled at Oklahoma City University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in business and took classes toward an MBA.

Barrett then took a sales job with the now-defunct U.S. Plywood Corp. The position meant travel and work stints to other states at a time of civil unrest.

The plywood company served the building materials, paper and packaging markets. Barrett's sales territory included Tennessee and Mississippi when the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan was very active with burnings, bombings and murder.

Barrett said he found himself calling upon the Choctaw Housing Authority in Neshoba County, Miss., about 18 months after the dead bodies of three tortured civil rights workers — James Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were Jewish — were found nearby in June 1964.

The county was the base for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a federally recognized tribe, and the site of a crime that unleashed the national outrage to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Barrett also was working in Memphis, Tenn., for an architectural specification job in April 1968 — two days before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel.

"I could see that hotel from where I was," Barrett said. "A lot of disruption followed the shooting with marches and curfews."

Returning to Shawnee "wasn't a hard decision at the time," Barrett said.

Barrett was working in an oil field when he got word that his grandmother wanted to talk.

"She was 4 feet, 11 inches, and I was scared to death of her," Barrett said of Ozetta Peltier.

"She was a wonderful, gentle person, but a woman of very few words. She told me heard about issues at the tribe and that I needed to help. I said, 'Grandma, I have a career. I've got a degree. I have a family.' Her answer was silence. She wasn't going to repeat herself. So that's how I ended up here."

Barrett got a directive he couldn't refuse. He was on a path to become an eighth-generation tribal leader.

A political vacancy on the executive branch of CPN's tribal council led to a shuffling of officials that moved Barret's uncle, Raymond Peltier, from vice chairman to chairman, making him responsible for general supervision of day-to-day operations and of the business committee.

Peltier appointed Barrett to serve as vice chairman until the next election. Barrett then ran for the open seat in 1975 and won.

CPN had set up a headquarters base in an abandoned trailer originally used by the Army Corps of Engineers for a creek project.

"The agency was going to tear it down, and we said we don't have a building for our tribal HQ, so they gave it to us," Barrett said. "It was fiber board siding soaked with water and mildew. But it was the tribal HQ."

The CPN coffers were in rough shape, too.

"We started out with really nothing — $550 in the bank and 2½ acres of land. The first day I spent $200 on an air conditioner and we cooled that trailer off so we could sit in it. Then we got a phone."

Daunting challenges lie ahead.

Still, it was an exciting time. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self Determination Act, which allocated funds directly to tribes. Native Americans could control their own welfare following decades of forced assimilation and the termination of dozens of tribal governments.

In the 1980s, CPN began a bingo business and opened a golf course, smoke shops, FireLake Casino and banks.

Barrett served as a tribal administrator from 1982-85 and then he was elected chairman. He took office with hopes to improve the tribe's finances and services, reorganize the government and restore cultural pride and activities.

"The whole idea to me of an Indian tribe, the way I was brought up, is we're not supposed to create dependency; we're supposed to create an opportunity," Barrett said. "Four generations of Potawatomi lost everything they had except what they could carry on their back. They lost access to protein. They lost land. They lost all of their belongings — everything they had — for four straight generations. There was no inherited wealth. There was no access to education. We were treated just like wild animals. I'm trying to get us back on a par with the rest of the country."

In 1979, after the Seminole Indians opened a successful bingo parlor in Florida, gaming became a popular money-maker for tribes.

CPN has two casinos that are its main sources of income along with four grocery stores, a ready-mix concrete business, a sod farm, an events arena, seven restaurants, nine banks and two radio stations.

"We started by buying one little troubled bank operating out of a trailer house. Now we have nine banks and we own the largest native-owned bank in the U.S.," Barrett said. "Tribes that are running great big gaming operations that aren't taking all that money and running it through their own bank and making money with it are missing out."

CPN also has 30 federal contracts that Barrett described as "Indian specific." The contracts are to offer services, such as two local health care clinics, as opposed to multimillion-dollar federal defense contracts.

"We got into the geothermal business when we took a contract from Indian Health Services to drill water wells. That paid for our drilling rig and all the people involved. So, all of our geothermal wells were drilled for free with the rig paid for by water wells," Barrett said.

CPN got into the grocery business after Oklahoma wholesalers boycotted the tribe, according to Barrett.

"We haul everything we sell from Amarillo, Texas, through a forwarding company," he said. "We buy a full truckload of green beans from Amarillo and we give independent grocers between there and Shawnee the opportunity to buy at truckload prices. We usually sell half of it or more. So, we've made a profit by the time the truck pulls into our driveway."

CPN can keep its store prices low enough to rival Walmart.

"The Oklahoma wholesalers shot themselves in the foot," Barrett said. "What they're doing to us just ends up costing them money."

In other situations, CPN got litigious.

Barrett got to see the end of one federal lawsuit that dragged on almost 40 years.

"There was an anti-draft disturbance during World War I and then came a ruling that individual lands could be taken if you were incompetent to handle your affairs," Barrett said, noting that Indians were subject to the draft long before they were allowed to vote in 1926.

CPN members lost land because they were unable to pay mortgage fees. Then, the Great Depression put other families in jeopardy. Some sold property simply to buy food.

"Once the land base eroded, the population of the tribe dwindled," Barrett said. "We sued the government in 1948. My grandfather was part of the tribal government. They finally paid it in 1984."

CPN members were repaid for land illegally taken decades earlier.

The tribe also has been in court many times with the state and city "over some ridiculous things," Barrett said.

"For instance, we had the second-busiest intersection in the city of Shawnee and they wouldn't put a stop light there. And, there were no street lights here until 10 years ago. The reason they didn't do it was because it was Indian land," Barrett said.

"In some ways, Oklahoma did to their Indians what Mississippi did to their Black people — disenfranchised them," Barrett said.

The site of the old trailer HQ now is a cultural museum with exhibits about CPN's long trek to Shawnee.

The tribe's ancestors originally lived in the Great Lakes region, mostly southeastern Michigan and northern Indiana, but also Wisconsin and Ohio. They established a trade center with the Odawa called Mechingan that thrived.

The Potawatomi traded beaver and other pelts for French goods and weapons. They hosted French explorers and intermarried. The tribe's earliest families have surnames of Beaubien, Bergeron, Bourassa, Chevalier, Peltier and Vieux.

During the French and Indian War from 1754-63, the Potawatomi supported the French against the British and Iroquois. Their loss ended France's power in North America.

Reservation treaties followed under the guise that separating Natives and non-Natives would make it easier to settle vast tracks of unoccupied lands.

In 1826, the Mississinewa Treaty ceded Potawatomi land in northern Indiana to build a road.

"Negotiating peace and limiting Natives to a small region were no longer enough for American politicians or the public. They wanted the Native population gone and would use the treaty process, and in some cases violence, to make it happen," one museum exhibit says.

Other treaties arranged for new reservations west of the Mississippi River far from the CPN's ancestral home.

About a decade later, however, CPN members were forced to a new reservation in northeast Kansas.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, federal officials adopted new policies of assimilation and laws that made it easier to strip tribes of authority and ownership of land.

On Feb. 27, 1867, CPN leaders signed a treaty establishing conditions for the tribe's removal from Kansas to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. They paid $119,790 for a tract of land to be the CPN reservation.

"We bought our land in 1867 but didn't move until 1871-72 because we were just too poor," Barrett said. "Once we got here, the government had allowed another tribe to settle on the land we bought and so we had a shooting war. Once that was resolved, the rest of our people came. We have been through some very unsettling things."

However, the last 15 years have been very different and the last five years have brought "amazing change," Barrett said. He pointed to recognition of tribal governmental sovereignty and the ability to assess and collect taxes on sales to non-Indians.

"The city now looks upon us as an asset rather than an adversary," Barrett said.

Like all entrepreneurs, Barrett sees opportunities and risks ahead. For one, he wonders if cellphones or televisions might replace all slot machines.

"One day you'll sit in your lounger and play a slot machine with your channel selector and have the money transfer to your account if you win or lose. When that happens, casinos will have to be places that provide an attractive environment with really good food and entertainment," Barrett said.

On the other hand, the scenario bodes well for Sovereign Pipe Technologies, which plans to produce the polyethylene tubing that houses all the fiberoptic components that make cellular service possible.

"And we're back to talking about plastic pipe and conduit," Barrett said. "Having secure conduit will be a huge thing."

Still, it's drinking water that will be most important to the next generation of Potawatomi leadership, according to the chairman.

"People in the water business that distribute and sell water will be in an extremely advantageous position," he said.

Barrett is proud of the setup of the CPN water district, which is borrowed from a practice he learned from the oil business and also involved cooperation from the state of Oklahoma.

"The water systems we operate are state-licensed entities," Barrett said. "We run them like oil gathering systems rather than water. That way the tribe can own the assets but have an advantage as a state entity in the use of public thoroughfares for the right of way. We came up with something unique."