Cherokees Campaign in ‘Hot Race’ : Politics: Candidates for principal chief and other offices will visit southeast Los Angeles to line up absentee ballots for the June 17 election.

Residents of Bell Gardens and surrounding areas have an opportunity this week to take an up-close look at a growing phenomenon: American Indian power politics in action.

Eight of the 10 candidates for principal chief of the 167,000-member Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma will be barnstorming through California, chasing an estimated 4,000 absentee voters in the tribe’s June 17 election. Joined by at least six people running for deputy chief and several seeking seats on the legislative Tribal Council, they will make speeches, shake hands at powwows and debate issues.

“This is a real hot race for us,” said Sallie Cuaresma of Gardena, a Cherokee and an area director for the Southern California Indian Center. All eight have promised to appear at the group’s forum at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Indian Revival Center, 5602 E. Gage Ave., Bell Gardens. The Indian Revival Center is centrally located in Southern California’s thriving Native American community 1,300 miles west of the Cherokee capital at Tahlequah, Okla.

The scramble for votes was touched off when Chief Wilma P. Mankiller, 49, opted out of a reelection race after 10 years in office. At stake is a bully pulpit for Native American issues and the helm of a multimillion-dollar organization with hospitals, medical clinics, schools, judicial offices and bingo halls sprawling over 14 counties in northeast Oklahoma.

The latest census figures show that there are 43,000 Native Americans in Los Angeles County. Colleen J. Colson, a Cherokee and American Indian liaison with the Los Angeles County Health Department, estimated that several thousand are of Cherokee heritage, with many living in the Southeast area.

Enrolled tribal members who are eligible to vote generally have a working-class background, said Billie Nave Masters, a Cherokee and adjunct professor of Native American studies at Cal State Long Beach.

Local interest in the elections mirrors not only a reverence for the tribe’s rich heritage but concerns over hard money issues such as maintaining free health care at tribal facilities in Oklahoma and higher education grants that finance college educations.

Those services are directly related to the financial condition of the tribe, thus the keen interest in who is in charge back in Oklahoma. The candidates--of whom nine live in Oklahoma and one lives in Nevada--promise to keep their California constituents better informed, and they all have plans to keep the tribe in sound financial condition.

Money issues are very much on the minds of voters, such as Anita Panther, an office worker at the American Indian Clinic in Bellflower. With two children in high school who are hoping for tribal college scholarships, she will be interested in what the candidates have to offer Southern Californians.

“I’ll be hungry for information. I’m going to take a big, fat note pad,” she said.

The candidates will be facing an audience with high expectations because Mankiller will be a tough act to follow. The retiring chief is a popular figure who won reelection four years ago with 83% of the votes. “But we will be looking for someone who is going to have that charisma,” Cuaresma said.

An outspoken feminist who was once Ms. magazine’s woman of the year, Mankiller likes to joke that her tribal surname is a well-earned nickname. Running for office in a state full of good old boys, she admittedly encountered skepticism--even ridicule at first--but she worked hard to win over her detractors.

“There is no question that Wilma has done an extraordinary job,” said candidate Chadwick Smith, a 44-year-old Tulsa attorney who is making his second tour of the state in recent weeks. “As a woman, she found a niche in the media that brought a lot of attention to lobby for the advancement of the tribe.”

She has reaped many federal programs, which this year account for half of the tribe’s $144-million budget. Her rural and largely low-income constituents back home have risen to what she said is a standard of living comparable to the average Oklahoman, while she has worked to increase employment, open medical facilities, build training centers and extend water lines to her rural constituents.

Now, foreseeing big federal cuts, she is backing George Bearpaw, 45, who has run the tribe’s accounting, business development, real estate, environmental operations and community development for 15 years. “He knows the way to respond to what’s coming down in Washington. And what it is is plain old meanness. . . . Mean-spiritedness to poor people.

“The whole issue is how the tribe is going to turn out . . . after a machete is taken to tribal funding,” Mankiller said.

In response, the tribe needs to broaden its economic base, Mankiller said. It recently bought a furniture company and plans are in the works to develop a line of Cherokee-style furniture. Also planned is a brand of Cherokee-label bottled water that taps into the pride that members of the tribe have in their heritage.

The Cherokee people’s story is one in which the cycle of tragedy and renewal has been played out several times since they were forced off their land in the Carolinas in the 1830s and marched west to Oklahoma by the U.S. Army on what is called the “trail of tears.”

Reservation land was later dissolved, divided and granted to families in tracts known as allotments. Cherokees were scattered again in the federal relocation program of the 1950s to move Indians into urban centers. That program accounts for many of the Cherokees in California and helps to explain why the candidates are out here to press the flesh.

The tribe’s finances seem to have raised interest in the race, because “voting is the only way for a lot of people to participate in what goes on here,” said tribal Public Affairs Director Lynn Howard in Tahlequah.

Promises by candidates to stay in closer contact with California Cherokees have come in response to grumbling that the tribal government only cares about them at election time.

“We have lost touch with some of our communities,” said Bearpaw. “There is a lot we still can do to re-establish ties with the people outside (Oklahoma).”

Another candidate, Tribal Council member Joe Byrd, 40, suggests that the tribe establish campgrounds and recreational vehicle parks for Californians who return to Tahlequah over the Labor Day weekend, the traditional “Cherokee holiday.”

Byrd also calls for regular visits to California by Tribal Council members. “We just haven’t done a good job of communicating to the people out there.” He and the others call for increased historical and cultural education of young Cherokees.

Reflecting more practical concerns of many Californians is Virginia Carey of Glendale, a retired music industry quality-control technician who often returns to her hometown of Tahlequah. She said the hospital there, where Cherokees are entitled to free treatment, is often overcrowded.

“I might move back there someday,” she said. “But the elderly are complaining that they have to sit in a waiting room all day long. I’m concerned with good health care and education for our kids.”

Voters must apply for absentee ballots by May 19. If none of the candidates receives a majority, the two top vote-getters will meet in a July 29 runoff.