Eagles slaughtered for cherished parts
By Maureen O'Hagan
Seattle Times staff reporter
KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES
NORTH VANCOUVER, B.C. — Amy Marie George just couldn't catch her breath.
She had walked this short trail near her house hundreds of times, but on this afternoon in February she had to send her grandchildren ahead to get an old asthma inhaler she hadn't used in more than a year.
"I heard my granddaughter say, 'There's an eagle here,' " recalled George, an elder with the Tsleil-Waututh (SLAY wa-tuth) Nation. "I got such a bad feeling."
Then her grandson Jonas called out. "There's one here!
"And another one here!"
In all, there were 14 dead eagles strewn about the dirt. And it was no accident.
"They have no feet!" George recalls 10-year-old Jonas saying. Their wings were lopped off, too.
Under the trees that have stood over this land for generations, where George lived simply but felt rich walking among the sacred living things all around, she and the children began to cry.
Jonas, who believed that wherever he went an eagle was watching him, sobbed until his uncle brushed him with sage and sang an eagle song. George prayed. "You didn't deserve this," she said.
George and her grandchildren had stumbled upon evidence of an international black market, one that fuels the illegal slaughter of an estimated 500 eagles each year in southwest British Columbia alone, and an unknown number in Washington state.
Their discovery brought to at least 50 the total number of dead eagles found between February and March in and around the Tsleil-Wautuths' tiny Indian reserve.
The black market begins around the salmon runs, where gorging eagles are easy prey for poachers; it arrives in the U.S. tucked in the suitcases of smugglers; and it fans out across America, where investigators sometimes refer to eagles as "flying $1,000 bills."
Because of the large number of eagles in British Columbia, Washington state has been a key entry point for smugglers.
According to wildlife officials in Canada and the U.S., the parts find their way to uses ranging from high-end artwork to wiccan ceremonies. But officials say the biggest demand is at Native American powwows, where feathered regalia can help competitive dancers win thousands of dollars in prizes.
To George, it was simple.
"This," she said, "is murder."
But catching the culprits has proven to be no easy task.
Shrouded investigations
Paul Weyland likes to keep a low profile.
As a U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent who investigates organized poaching rings, he works in an unmarked office building in a bland business strip on the outskirts of Bellingham.
Official correspondence carries a P.O. Box address, rather than the street address, ever since Weyland got a vaguely threatening letter from a disgruntled hunter. He carries a holstered gun even though much of his work is at a desk.
For the past few months, Weyland has been investigating possible stateside links to the B.C. eagle case.
U.S. law prohibits killing eagles, or possessing any eagle part — even just a feather — without a permit. Selling them is also prohibited, as is transporting them across the border. Canadian law is similar, but some important differences may make Weyland the key to bringing the B.C. eagle killers to justice.
Canadian officials are unsure whether a law which protects the right of First Nations people to harvest wildlife that they've traditionally harvested can be applied to eagles. As a result, they're not even certain how they would charge a suspect in the eagle-slaying case.
While Fish and Wildlife agents sometimes don't get the respect of, say, FBI agents, they believe their job is sometimes tougher. For example, they don't have the luxury of security-camera videotapes, like the FBI does in bank-robbery cases. And they can't exactly interview a victim's family to retrace his steps.
"You can't go back and say, 'When was the last time you saw Mr. Eagle?' " Weyland said, having some fun.
There usually are no witnesses to wildlife crimes, "except a deer or an elk, and they're not much help," he added.
So how do they catch these criminals? Kevin Ellis, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent who's handled a number of eagle cases, says undercover investigations are often the only option.
"There's a huge underground network, and people are connected from British Columbia clear into Florida," he said.
The market is driven largely by the tremendous popularity of Native American powwows. At these large social gatherings, dancing and drumming are the focus, and performers compete in elaborate traditional dress.
Ellis takes pains to point out that not all powwow dancers get their feathers illegally, and that the vast majority of Native Americans think it's wrong to kill eagles and sell their parts.
Nonetheless, he said, in the past few decades, powwows have grown so popular that some performers make a living competing on the circuit. At the biggest powwow, as much as $100,000 is given out in prizes.
That kind of money has spurred a demand that a limited supply of lawful eagle parts can't fill.
A sacred bird
What is it about eagles?
To Leonard George, a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and the son of the late actor Chief Dan George, when you see an eagle, "no matter what nationality you are, you almost feel blessed. You feel a little bit better than you did before."
For many Indians, these grand birds are sacred because they fly high and carry messages to the Creator. Some compare the symbolic importance of the eagle in Indian religions to the cross in Christianity.
Their sacred status means their parts are often needed for religious ceremonies. Indians traditionally killed the birds sparingly, accompanied by prayer and thanks and elaborate rituals. And for years, this wasn't a problem. Eagles were plentiful.
But as the continent was developed, the great bird's population dwindled. Pesticides were the main culprit, and at one point, the birds nearly disappeared from the lower 48 states.
In 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Act to outlaw the killing, possession or sale of eagles. Later, Congress added golden eagles to the act.
The population has made a comeback, with about 6,000 nesting pairs counted in the lower 48 in 2000, although they are still on the list of threatened species.
Native Americans, however, were given some leeway under the Act: They may possess eagle parts that have been handed down through the generations, and they may get new eagles through a federal repository, where dead eagles from zoos or those found in the wild are sent for distribution to tribes.
There's just one problem: There are thousands of Native Americans who want parts, but not enough repository eagles to go around. Sometimes it takes as long as four years to get a bird.
Federal judges, ruling in cases where Native Americans used their religion as a justification for eagle offenses, have found the repository system "utterly offensive and ultimately ineffectual."
Waiting lists that essentially prevent Native Americans from getting religious objects, they have repeatedly ruled, substantially interfere with their religious rights. Although the vast majority of Native Americans are appalled by what happened in British Columbia, they say the repository system just doesn't work.
"The U.S. Constitution affords protection for religion, but when it comes to Native Americans, they find every loophole not to be accommodating to us," said Wilson Wewa Jr., a Paiute Indian.
Justice proves elusive
It's telling that while eagle poaching is said to be common, few cases have been prosecuted.
One eagle poacher was nabbed in Oregon after a tipster reported he had an off-season deer in his truck. Responding officers found bags of still-warm birds, as well. Nathan Jim Jr. pleaded guilty to eagle possession, but told the judge he was only doing what his elders had asked of him — gathering eagle feathers to use in burial ceremonies.
"I end up breaking this government's law for my religious rights as a human being," Jim told a judge, referring to the federal permit system.
Some tribal members, however, suspected he was selling the eagle parts.
One of the biggest black-market eagle dealers prosecuted in the U.S. was done in by a Sam's Club phone card.
According to court documents, it was the winter of 1999 and Rosa Linda Burton was sick and tired of the smell coming from a storage area adjacent to her residence in Duncan, B.C., just outside of Victoria.
She also was tired of waiting for her boyfriend, Terry Antoine, to come back. He had left the area the previous fall.
When the Canadian authorities opened the storage area they found parts from 124 eagles, some of them rotting and putrid, according to court records. They also found a receipt for a storage unit in Fife, Pierce County, where U.S. officials discovered parts from about 30 more eagles.
As Burton later explained to a federal jury in Seattle, she accompanied Antoine on a long road trip in 1998 with a duffel bag he packed with eagle parts. They stopped in Tacoma, where Antoine took the bag into a bead store.
They made their way to Grand Coulee Dam and Montana, California and Arizona, stopping at powwows where Antoine met with fellow Indians. By the time they returned home, the duffel bag was empty.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Tom Chisdock learned that Antoine, a member of the Cowichan Band, obtained his eagles in Canada, giving acquaintances $25 to $50 per bird. Then he sold or traded them in the U.S., mainly along the powwow trail, for approximately $250 to $400 a part.
But other than the eagles themselves, the hard evidence was scattershot: hearsay from an angry ex-girlfriend with a criminal record, hand-written notes that might be sales records, receipts from U.S. businesses.
It took three years for Chisdock to put together a case. But he still had to find Antoine, who seemed to have simply vanished.
Then investigators had an idea. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Micki Brunner, who would prosecute Antoine, they began tracing calls Antoine made on his Sam's Club phone card.
"We had it narrowed down to about three phone booths," Brunner explained.
Antoine was arrested in May 2001 outside a bagel shop in Hollywood, Fla. When his case was heard by a Seattle jury later that year, it was almost as if the whole system was on trial.
Antoine claimed he was a "mask dancer," a position of importance in his culture, and one that involves conducting rituals and blessings using eagle parts. Without the parts, he claimed, he could not practice these religious rites.
Moreover, he claimed, he wasn't selling eagles; he gave them to other Native Americans. The small amounts of money he received were traditional gifts for a weary traveler. He described it as repayment for gas and food, and compared it to the traditional practice of bartering.
"This wasn't like a drug case where he's making lots of money and living the high life," said his attorney, Michael Filipovic. "For him, it was a matter of true belief." Indeed, when Antoine was arrested, he was living in his car.
Prosecutors did not challenge Antoine's religious beliefs. But they argued that money changed hands, which took it out of the realm of religion and made it a commercial operation that the government had a right to bar.
The jury sided with prosecutors, and Antoine was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
While most of the eagles originated in Canada, and charges were filed there, he was never prosecuted in that country. Canadian officials said the Washington conviction was enough.
Even so, the vagaries of Canadian law would have posed difficulties.
Legal right to eagles?
Colin Copland, a British Columbia conservation officer, pulls one heavy plastic bag after another out of a walk-in evidence freezer. Each bag is tagged; one reads:"#10 bald eagle immature, found in pile of five." They are among the 50 or so birds found last winter, some of them by Amy Marie George.
Their down is matted and their feet cut off at the joint, like a Thanksgiving turkey leg. They don't look grand at all.
Officers will store the eagles as evidence until the case concludes. But some observers wonder if there will be a case at all.
B.C.'s Wildlife Act outlaws poaching or trafficking in eagles. Canadian law also bans exporting them, and fines can reach $150,000.
However, another Canadian law may trump those measures. Under the Canadian constitution, First Nations have a right to wildlife they've traditionally harvested. In B.C., they have used this law mainly to protect their traditional fishing grounds, arguing that some regulations would bar their longstanding food-gathering or cultural practices.
But the law has never been sorted out when it comes to eagles. First Nations have always used eagles as part of their culture and ceremonies, but does that mean that they're allowed to sell the parts? And how many eagles may they kill? Canadian officials remain unsure. A team of prosecutors is researching the law and Indian history to see how a suspect might be charged.
Meanwhile, Canadian wildlife authorities announced in April that they'd identified a suspect: a member of a First Nation who lived in British Columbia. They said he acted as a sort of ringleader, paying other people, some of them Indians, to bring him dead eagles.
But instead of arresting the suspect, Canadian officials simply asked him to come forward on his own.
"They were trying to appeal to the guy's conscience," Weyland explained of this unusual tactic. Others are convinced that investigators lacked hard evidence and didn't have many options.
It's unclear at this point whether the suspect has come forward. What is clear is that the Tsleil-Waututh are getting tired of waiting.
Guilt by association
All winter and spring, members of the tiny North Vancouver band taking the bus into town felt like other passengers were pointing and whispering.
"Once they think an Indian did it, every Indian they meet is guilty," said Tsleil-Waututh Chief Leah George-Wilson, a niece of Amy Marie George.
Some see the eagle killers as exploiting legal loopholes to make a quick buck. Other critics say government officials haven't made arrests because they "don't want any waves" with First Nations.
Leonard George has heard it all. As he points out, the Canadian government (like the U.S. government) has a history of abuses against Native people and worked for years to eradicate their culture. Connecting this slaughter in any way with Indian tradition, he said, is wrong.
"This is a criminal act and it doesn't have nothing to do with culture and tradition," he said.
The Tsleil-Waututh, they explained, are just as outraged as anyone — if not more so. To them, killing and dismembering dozens of eagles is wanton slaughter. Dumping them here made it all the more wrong. It felt as if someone had hurt their children or grandmother, said Leonard George, as if someone were "stomping on your spirit."
The band of 397 Indians pulled together $2,000 to contribute to a reward fund for the arrest of the eagle slayer. The reward now totals $12,000.
Amy Marie George, meanwhile, can't shake the image of the 14 dead birds she found months ago. She's hoping to hold a ceremony, inviting people from all over the area, to put the eagles to rest.
"I want to say to them, 'Keep coming back,' " she said.
"Because we're not the ones who hurt you."
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
