A8
FROM PAGE ONE
East Oregonian
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Belles:
Continued from Page A1
transport ship that was part
of a convoy moving Allied
troops off the coast of north-
ern Africa.
According to an account
by the Naval Histor y
and Heritage Command,
Ger mans attacked the
convoy on Nov. 25, 1943,
and again the next day, using
new Hs-293 radio-controlled,
rocket boosted glide bombs.
Forty one of them missed
their mark, thwarted by
smoke, radio jamming and
extensive anti-aircraft fire.
But one was a direct hit.
“The bomb hit Rohna’s
port side, penetrated deep
into the ship on delayed-fuse,
and blew holes in the star-
board side, quickly causing
the ship to list to starboard,”
the account states.
Most lifeboats were
destroyed or trapped under
debris. Others made it into
the water but were quickly
swamped by troops and
sunk. As neighboring ships
attempted to rescue soldiers
hanging on to debris on
rough seas in the dark, some
were sucked under ships or
were unable to survive the
exposure for the hours it took
to be rescued.
Jack Ballo/Contributed Photo
The sinking of the HMS Rohna, pictured here, is the subject of the “Rohna: Classified” docu-
mentary. A Hermiston man, Kermit Belles, was one of the more than 1,000 American troops
who lost their lives on the ship on Nov. 26, 1943.
Altogether, by the U.S.
government’s count, 1,050
U.S. soldiers and more than
100 Allied troops from other
countries were killed in the
sinking or died from their
wounds afterward. The
exact number of survivors
is unknown, but thought to
be somewhere between 900
and 1,000.
Not wanting the Germans
Services:
Continued from Page A1
room today was overwhelming,”
said county Commissioner John
Shafer.
Mental health at
Yellowhawk
The meeting began with
comments from Wyden, who said he
recently received calls from officials
across rural Oregon about a “dire
shortage” of mental health services
the pandemic has exacerbated.
Mental health representatives
from Yellowhawk Tribal Health
Center on the Umatilla Indian
Reservation quickly chimed in on
how the pandemic has impacted
students countywide. Clinton
Kittrell, a counselor with Yellow-
hawk, said the health center has seen
an increase in anxiety disorders as a
result of the pandemic, and students’
grades have suffered.
“We really struggled with, ‘What
are we going to do to help them?’”
Kittrell said. “It’s been a challenge.
Cindy Cecil, a mental health
manager at Yellowhawk, said the
health center sees high turnover
rates as a result of burnout.
“We preface self-care as best we
can,” Cecil said. “That’s hard when
you have such a high population and
only a few clinicians to serve that
population.”
Representatives from the Athe-
na-Weston School District and the
Umatilla School District spoke
about the challenges their students
have faced.
Cameron Sipe, a counselor in the
Athena-Weston School District, said
of the 29 children receiving counsel-
ing at the school, only four receive
additional counseling. She empha-
sized the need for telemedicine and
the like.
“When you have students in
a high-poverty area and no local
mental health care you have a
perfect storm of problems,” said
Ann Vescio, middle school princi-
pal for the Athena-Weston School
District.
CAHOOTS
The discussion then delved into
mental health and policing.
As chair of the Senate Finance
Committee, Wyden has been
pushing Congress to pass the
CAHOOTS Act — Crisis Assis-
tance Helping Out On The Streets
— a bill modeled off a Eugene
program where a two-person team
of medics and mental health profes-
sionals respond to calls regard-
ing mental illness, addiction and
people experiencing homelessness.
The legislation would fund part-
nerships between law enforcement
and mental health professionals
to form joint 24/7 crisis response
teams.
One billion dollars in seed money
for a CAHOOTS-like program
reimbursed through Medicaid
was included in the American
Rescue Plan. And now that local
officials have voiced interest in
the CAHOOTS model, Wyden is
seeking to promote such programs
in rural areas, such as Umatilla
County.
“I believe that can be done in
rural areas just like it can in urban
areas,” he said. “I’m not saying the
CAHOOTS model needs to have a
cookie cutter and you plant it every-
to know that their new radio-
guided missile technology
had worked, the Army clas-
sified the entire event indefi-
nitely, ordering survivors and
rescuers to stay quiet under
threat of court martial. Gold
Star families such as the
Belles were simply told their
loved one was missing in
action.
According to the Rohna
where. There are clearly differences.
But I do feel that the core values
associated with the new communi-
cation that comes about with mental
people talking to law enforcement
people is a keeper anywhere in the
country.”
Some county law enforcement
have recently voiced interest in
such a program, saying officers are
spending more and more time on
calls they are not specifically trained
to handle.
“I think we’re all fairly familiar
that police are not the solution to
mental health crises, but we need a
seat at the table obviously because
we also are going to be dealing
with it too,” Pendleton Police Chief
Chuck Byram said.
Wyden said he plans to take the
input from the county officials to
form “planning grants” and awards
for county mobile crisis teams. He
added he has received support and
interest from Republican senators
who think the CAHOOTS model is
a “terrific idea.”
“What we’re going to show on
CAHOOTS is that this is an area
that brings Democrats and Repub-
licans together,” he said. “And I have
seen that so far. I have not seen an
ounce of partisanship so far.”
New care provider
The meeting came just days after
the county awarded a contract to
Community Counseling Solutions
to be its new mental health and
addiction services provider over
the county’s previous mental health
provider, Lifeways.
Byram said in the meeting too
often Lifeways was unable to
provide help after his officers made
an arrest, describing it as a “chal-
lenge and a frustration.”
Officials in the meeting said the
closure of county mental health
facilities only increased burdens
on law enforcement as well as other
county entities.
Pendleton Mayor John Turner
emphasized the need to renovate the
county jail so people suffering from
a mental health or addiction crisis
have somewhere to recover, an effort
that officials have been pushing for
in the Legislature for years.
“When somebody’s under arrest
and they’re not a vicious killer or
anything, we put people with mental
health issues in the general jail
population because we don’t have
any place else to put them,” Turner
said.
In addition, the closure of Aspen
Springs as a psychiatric hospital in
Hermiston has left a gap in services,
officials said. The acute care facil-
ity was open for just seven months
before it closed due to staffing chal-
lenges made worse by the pandemic.
“It has left the region again with
this great big black hole and noth-
ing on the horizon,” said Kimberly
Lindsay, executive director for CCS.
She requested assistance from offi-
cials in the meeting “to find another
opportunity or resource for acute
care.”
In closing, Karen Wheeler, chief
executive officer of Greater Oregon
Behavioral Health Inc., spoke about
the need for housing services and
having mental health workers in the
community helping people experi-
encing homelessness.
“It’s impossible,” Wheeler said,
“for people to recover thinking
about the roof over their head that
they don’t have.”
Survivors Memorial Associa-
tion, a few survivors began to
start sharing the story of the
Rohna with their local news-
papers in the early 1990s. It
gained wider public attention
in 1993, when CBS commen-
tator Charles Osgood shared
the story on his nationally
syndicated radio program,
“The Osgood File.”
People who heard the
Tribes:
Continued from Page A1
ceded some 6.4-million acres to
the United States government
with the promise of a 520,000-
acre homeland in Easter n
Oregon.
A subsequent government
survey reduced the reservation
by almost half, to 265,000 acres.
The Slater Act of 1885,
specific to Oregon, and the
General Allotment Act of 1887,
reduced the reservation to
172,000 acres.
In addition to making the
reservation smaller, these two
acts also led to the land, which
had previously been used
communally, being split up into
individual allotments.
The U.S. government gave
CT U IR males 160 acres,
women 80 acres and children 40
acres. The rest was considered
“excess” and sold to the white
immigrants coming west, creat-
ing a checkerboard of Indian and
non-Indian ownership across
the reservation.
Indian-owned land has been
divided into two types: fee and
trust.
The United States govern-
ment holds tribal lands in trust
for the use of a tribe. The U.S.
holds the legal title, and the
tribe holds the beneficial inter-
est. This is the largest category
of Indian land. Tribal trust land
is held communally by the tribe
and is managed by the tribal
government.
Fee land is reservation land
no longer in trust or subject to
restriction. Sometimes a tribe,
or individual tribal members,
has land in fee. The term refers
to the “fee patent” document
issued to the individual Indian
landowner.
The allotment system further
diminished the amount of Indi-
an-owned land when allottees
sold their parcels, which were
often too small to earn a living
from and too large to maintain.
In 1920, Poker Jim, a head-
man for the Walla Walla Tribe,
in a statement published in the
East Oregonian, explained why
the Walla Wallas were send-
ing a delegate — his son — to
Washington, D.C., to speak with
Cato Sells, the commissioner of
Indian Affairs from 1913-1921,
about the allotment deal.
“We do not want these allot-
ments and do not want patents
(gover nment grant) here,”
proclaimed Poker Jim. “The
game and fish is pretty nearly all
gone from this country now and
if you let the Indians get patents
and sell off their lands pretty
soon there will be no more home
for the Indians here.”
Poke r Ji m’s st at e me nt
appealed to Sells to help educate
young men who, as soon as they
got their allotment, would “sell
their land and then they do not
have any land and do not have
any money because the money
is soon spent and drawn, and
the Indians are left without any
home or any land to live on.
Pretty soon, if you let them go
on this way, the old Indians will
be dead, and the young Indians
will be beggars, because they
broadcast began to wonder
if that was what happened to
their relative, and slowly an
unofficial database of survi-
vors and victims began to
take shape. In October 2000,
Congress passed a resolution
publicly acknowledging the
sinking of the HMS Rohna.
The resolution stated that the
men who died on the Rohna
had been “largely forgotten
by the Nation” and acknowl-
edged that “many families
still do not know the circum-
stances of the deaths of loved
ones who died as a result of
the attack.”
Sutton said after he found
out, it was strange to real-
ize his uncle had been killed
by Nazis and not Japanese
soldiers as he had grown up
believing.
He is trying to keep
Kermit Belles memory alive,
and recently submitted infor-
mation about Belles to film-
maker Jack Ballo, who has
teamed up with historian
Michael Walsh to create the
documentary “Rhona: Clas-
sified.”
In the documentary’s
trailer, one woman says she
never knew her husband was
a survivor until he started
crying one day while watch-
ing a scene in a tv show
where a ship was sinking.
“He told me the whole
will waste their land and money
if they get patents.”
Despite Poker Jim’s request,
non-Indians were allowed to
purchase lands across the reser-
vation.
Umatilla innovation
A strategy meeting in 1989
included representatives from
the CTUIR, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and land experts, includ-
ing Cris Stainbrook, who is now
president of the Indian Land
Tenure Foundation headquar-
tered in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dave Tovey (Bill Tovey’s
brother), a CTUIR planner at the
time, wrote a 50-year plan that
envisioned the tribes directly
owning or managing 40% of
the reservation land by the year
2040. That’s a little over 100,000
acres of the land within the orig-
inal 265,000-acre treaty bound-
aries — about six times more
acreage than the CTUIR owned
in 1990.
Stainbrook was working at the
time with First Nations Devel-
opment Institute, a nonprofit
organization that assists Native
A mer ican com mu nities in
economic development, when he
met with CTUIR leaders. He’s
watched the tribes grow over the
last three decades.
“I was always impressed with
Umatilla,” says Stainbrook.
“Over the years I’ve been watch-
ing the progress. When the Tovey
boys showed up things started to
move.” Dave is now the director
of Nixyaawii Community Finan-
cial Services; Bill is the direc-
tor of the CTUIR Department
of Economic and Community
Development; and Al manages
Wildhorse Casino.
“Over the years I’d put them in
the top five tribes in the country
for aggressively regaining lands
as well as using the land for tribal
economic development.”
Getting fair market value
In the mid-’90s the CTUIR
created its land acquisition
program. It initially purchased
land using money from mitiga-
tion funding to tribes for the loss
of land, including wildlife habitat,
caused by dams on the Columbia
River, and the Bonneville Power
Administration for salmon recov-
ery. A percent of gaming revenues
from Wildhorse Resort & Casino
as well as bank financing and
contract sales has also been dedi-
cated for land purchases.
Of the tribes’ 43,393 acres of
fee property purchases, 21,688
acres were paid for with miti-
gation funding and 21,705 acres
using tribal money.
Bob Burns, an accredited
rural appraiser, has been working
for more than 50 years as a farm
and ranch appraiser. He’s worked
with the CTUIR staff in the Land
Acquisition Program for several
years.
“They know what they’re doing
and if they don’t they ask direct
questions of the right people,” says
Burns.
Burns noted the tribes try to
purchase land at fair market value
but often face a higher asking
price.
“A lot of people take a run at
them with a price that’s way too
high. They think because the
story, and told me that I could
not repeat it,” she said.
Sutton said Kermit was
one of 10 children in the
Belles family, four of whom
fought in World War II.
Ken was a paratrooper who
jumped into Normandy and
was awarded a Purple Heart.
Tony served in the Army in
the Philippines. And Bob was
in the Navy Seabees.
Sutton, a Marine Corps
veteran, said after seeing
his daughter deployed to the
Middle East, he said he can’t
imagine what his grandpar-
ents went through.
“Imagine having four of
your sons in World War II,
not knowing if they’ll come
back, and getting that tele-
gram,” he said.
The Belles family had
moved from Washington to
a home on Diagonal Road
in Hermiston in 1941, but
Kermit’s registration card
says he enlisted at age 18
in Timentwa, Washington.
Sutton said it is unclear why
Kermit enlisted there instead
of in Hermiston, and none of
Kermit’s siblings are alive to
ask.
He wants people to know
what parts of Kermit Belles’
story he does know, however.
“It’s nice to remember
these guys,” he said. “They
paid a big price.”
tribe has a casino they can ask a
premium,” Burns says. But staff
in the Land Acquisition Program
“talk to people one on one and it
usually comes down to the price of
the appraisal; the real fair market
value is what the tribes do.”
Funding the buy-back
The Land Buy-Back Program
was created as a result of the
settlement in Cobell v. Salazar. In
the late 1990s, Elouise Cobell, a
Blackfeet Indian from Montana,
sued the Bureau of Indian Affairs
for 100 years of inadequate
accounting of compensation
owed Indians for leases.
The trial lasted a dozen years
and Cobell died before she could
see the creation of the Land
Buy-Back Program, which is
funded by a settlement of $3.4
billion.
A total of $1.5 billion is being
distributed to current tribal
member landowners based on the
value of the property and income
that could have been produced
over the last century.
Funded by the other $1.9
billion in the settlement, the
Buy-Back Program set aside
funding for tribes throughout
Indian Country to reduce frac-
tionation — that is, land that
through inheritance is often
owned by hundreds of Indians,
many from different reservations.
The Umatilla tribes received
about $20 million in two allo-
cations as their share of the $1.9
billion but expect to get more,
according to Bill Tovey. This has
helped the tribes purchase almost
13,000 highly fractionated acres
of land within the reservation.
To address fractionation, in
2008 the Umatilla tribes updated
their inheritance code, which
now requires that when a land-
owner dies their land can only
be passed to CTUIR members.
Each year the tribes spend
around $700,000 on land in the
program that has no CTUIR
heirs. Purchasing that property
is no easy task. In some cases,
hundreds of owners — many
from other Northwest reserva-
tions — share in small parcels.
Tovey knew of one parcel of
slightly more than a third of an
acre owned by more than 20 Indi-
ans.
In those instances, the CTUIR
has issued checks for pennies,
especially if the parcel is range-
land, which is valued lower than
productive farmland.
Of the 33,953 acres of trust
land purchases, the tribes have
bought 15,788 acres from will-
ing sellers, 5,495 acres through
probate and 12,670 acres with the
Land Buy-Back Program.
Tovey said the CTUIR is well
on its way to realizing the land
acquisition vision set out by his
brother in 1990.
“The CTUIR has been very
aggressive with land acquisi-
tion,” Tovey said. “The staff
has grown from one in 1990 to
10 people who work on acquisi-
tions, probates, fee to trust, land
management and data collec-
tion. Gaming revenues and miti-
gation funds have helped push
the ball further with the Land
Buy-Back Program giving the
tribes big bursts of funding to
secure lands.”