St. Marks won't call council meeting

Ken Blatt St. Marks, chair of the Chippewa Cree Business Committee, won't call a committee meeting for this morning.

Committee members ordered St. Marks to convene the session so they could decide whether or not to remove him from office.

St. Marks said Rocky Boy police delivered a letter to him last week signed by five people listed as tribal council members.

But St. Marks, in a letter delivered to the members over the weekend, said only three of those who signed are validly elected board members. The others are holdover members because a tribal judge invalidated results of the November election for new council members because one person voted in violation of election rules.

In addition, St. Marks said the meeting they wanted held today could not be closed to the public, as the five had insisted.

“The meeting would need to be a public meeting so that the governed would be able to peaceably assemble to seek redress against their government," St. Marks wrote.

In their letter to St. Marks, the five people said tribal council held a meeting Feb. 23 in which they filed 15 charges against St. Marks.

St. Marks said he never called such a meeting and wasn't informed of the meeting, "so no valid Business Committee action could have occurred on that date."

The charges against St. Marks accused him of violating tribal policies, financial irregularities, verbal abuse of employees and making inappropriate sexual advances against him.

St. Marks says this and numerous other efforts to oust him from power were initiated by tribal leaders because he is helping federal prosecutors in their effort to weed out corruption between some reservation leaders and their off-reservation cohorts. More than a dozen people have been indicted so far.

Three times St. Marks has won elections, but he was removed from office the first two times.

The tribal government has sued him and his company, Arrow Construction, for what they say are infractions of tribal policy.

The U.S. Interior Department has ruled that the tribe is illegally retaliating against St. Marks for working with prosecutors. The Interior Department could order that he be reinstated, be given back pay or be granted compensatory damages, but the department hasn't made a decision yet.