No Apology Can Repair GOP Candidate’s ‘Old Racist Stereotypes’: Crow Tribal Chief

For 5 days, Republican Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy has stored silent as a rising variety of Montana tribal leaders have come ahead to sentence the racist remarks he made about members of the Crow Tribe and demand an apology.

However Levi Black Eagle, secretary of the Crow Tribe, certainly one of largest Native American tribes in Montana, advised HuffPost that an apology would do little good at this level.

“I think the time for an apology may have passed,” Black Eagle mentioned in an interview Thursday. “Any apology now from him, I don’t think it would be sincere. I think it would just be optics, mainly, and a lot of lip service. I don’t think it would justify what he said. It’d help, but would it fix it? No. He perpetuated old racist stereotypes. There’s really no excuse or room for that.”

Sheehy, a multimillionaire businessman and ex-Navy SEAL who’s polling forward of three-term Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, peddled a longstanding racist trope about Native Individuals and alcoholism throughout two personal fundraising occasions in November 2023. Audio recordings of the occasions have been first obtained by Char-Koosta Information, the official publication of the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Amongst different issues, Sheehy, who owns a ranch and cattle operation, mentioned that roping and branding cattle on the Crow Reservation was a “great way to bond with all the Indians out there, while they’re drunk at 8 a.m.” and that “every heel shot you miss you get a Coors Light can upside the head.”

In a second recording, Sheehy boasted of getting ridden a horse in a parade on the 2023 Crow Truthful, an annual cultural celebration on the Crow Reservation in southeast Montana. He referred to as it a “tough crowd” and once more claimed that tribal members hurled beer cans at him.

“They let you know whether they like you or not. There’s Coors Light cans flying by your head as you’re riding by,” he mentioned.

Black Eagle referred to as Sheehy’s feedback “appalling,” “disheartening,” “disturbing” and “disgusting.”

Black Eagle remembers seeing Sheehy on the 2023 honest, using a horse with a marketing campaign signal connected to its saddle, however didn’t actually know a lot about him on the time aside from that he was working for the U.S. Senate.

“He didn’t look distressed,” he recalled. “He didn’t look like he just dodged a couple of cans.”

Black Eagle mentioned the Crow are typically modest people who find themselves not flamboyant or fast to brag. However the Crow Truthful, which the tribe has placed on for greater than 100 years, is a time for Crow Tribe members to “show the best versions of themselves,” he mentioned.

“If there’s ever a time where we’re allowed to be proud of who we are and to put it on display, it’s during a parade,” he mentioned. “That’s the spirit of what our parade is: To share with the world, all the spectators, this is who I am, this is what I have and I’m proud of it.”

In the course of the honest’s day by day parades, tribal members, most using horseback, don their most dazzling regalia, together with feathered headpieces and complex beaded clothes and jewellery, and have fun their members of the family. Crow beadwork is “symbolic of how loved we are,” Black Eagle mentioned.

“It’s all in a spirit of recognition … to share the goodness with the community,” he mentioned. “We’re proud to have people come and see that because there is really nothing quite like it. To have it tarnished in such light, it’s really, boy, it’s really disappointing. We’re better than that. Our parade is better than that. And to have a negative connotation like that with it is just, there are no words.”

Sheehy’s campaign has not responded to HuffPost’s numerous requests for comment since Wednesday.

Footage of the Aug. 19, 2023, Crow Fair parade shows Sheehy and Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, both on horseback and wearing white cowboy hats, near each other at the front of the event. No beer cans are thrown.

Black Eagle said candidates for political office often participate in the annual festivities, and the tribe is always accommodating.

“We’re always welcoming of our guests and like to think that we treat our guests really well,” he said, adding that Sheehy’s account doesn’t make sense.

In comments to the Daily Montanan last year, Sheehy said he tries to attend the fair every year with his family. “These are the first Montanans, you know, so it’s great to connect with them,” he told the publication.

Just three months later, during campaign events far from the Crow Reservation, Sheehy would cast the Crow people as alcoholics and their annual cultural event as little more than a rowdy, drunken affair.

Black Eagle said Sheehy’s words have left many tribal members outraged.

“That old adage of ‘all Indians are drunks’-type rhetoric has been around since I was a kid. I feel like we’ve always made strides to rectify that,” he said. “We feel that that’s not representative of who we are as a nation or as a people.”

Black Eagle described Crow ranchers as hardworking people with strong family values. For Sheehy to brush that aside and suggest that they all start their day with beer misrepresents and disrespects tribal ranching and farming families, he said.

“It’s a dangerous rhetoric to try and spread that we’re all just a bunch of drunks,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing to happen.”

The longstanding “drunken Indian” stereotype has not solely negatively affected Indigenous communities, it additionally has been totally debunked.

For Black Eagle, Sheehy’s trope sounded like an outsider trying to fit in and not knowing how to do it.

“What he thought he could do is, ‘OK, I’m with a bunch of cowboys, and I’m going to be cowboys against Indians. I’m going to make these Indians the butt of this joke,’” he said.

“I think any real Montanan probably would know better not to say it,” Black Eagle added. “We have a lot of non-tribal friends. We’re a big melting pot here in Montana. We’re very neighborly. We’re not rude. And what he said was just rude and beyond the pale.”

Whatever his motivations, Sheehy risks ostracizing a significant voting bloc in Montana — and, so far, has not apologized for it. Six percent of Montana residents are Indigenous. The state is home to 12 tribal nations and seven reservations.

Native Americans are the largest minority group in Montana, Black Eagle noted.

“We’re not going to be the end-all, be-all deciding vote, but we do have the ability to move the needle one way or another,” he said.

Sheehy, originally from Minnesota, moved to Montana in 2014 after retiring from the Navy. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who chairs the powerful National Republican Senatorial Committee, was among the Republicans who courted Sheehy to run against Tester, in part because of his ability to self-finance a campaign.

A statewide ballot released Thursday shows Sheehy leading Tester by 8 percentage points, 49% to 41%, with 5% of voters supporting a third-party candidate.