An excerpt from a letter from Tony Bender, President of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, to the Grand Forks Herald:

BISMARCK - When Rob Port of Minot was banished from the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation for his column that called for eliminating the reservation system, it did more to discredit the tribal council than it did to discredit Port.

“Port’s article stirred outrage among many members of the tribe because of his description of squalid living conditions and people living ‘selfish lives full of self-gratification and little achievement while the government subsidizes them,’” the Minot Daily News reported. It’s easy to see why Port’s column created hard feelings, but his views are not the first in that vein and won’t be the last. There may even be members of the tribe who have similar feelings.

Provocative language can be unpleasant, and it can be miles off base. But a knee-jerk reaction such as the tribe offered can be misconstrued, too. . . .

Banishment may keep Port out, but it won’t keep opinions such as his from circulating. Of course, the reservation has problems, and maybe there are no easy answers - but debate will move things forward. Stifling opinions won’t.

Debate often makes us wiser and sometimes changes hearts and minds. In this case, the tribal council ought to consider changing theirs. They have the floor if they so choose. We would like to hear what they have to say.

That’s exactly right, I think.  It’s nice to have some support in all this.

Was my original column provocative?  Absolutely.  But that was on purpose.  I wanted to be blunt in my assessment of the situation on North Dakota’s Indian reservations.  I wanted people to get angry about it.  What I didn’t expect, though, was that people would get angry at me for talking about these problems rather than angry at the laws, regulations, tribal leaders and politicians who have all had a hand in letting things get this bad.

I’m not the problem on the reservations.  And while I may or may not be right in my criticism of the status quo on North Dakota’s reservations (I, naturally, think I am right), banning me isn’t going to solve the problems they face.

Because as I’ve pointed out before, 73% of Rolette County, North Dakota (which encompasses the Turtle Mountain reservation) is Indian, and that county has an unemployment rate 20% higher than the national average.

27% of North Dakota’s TANF (welfare) caseload is in Rolette County, yet the citizens of that county make up only 2% of the state’s population.

In 2005 Rolette County’s unemployment rate was 9.5%.  The rest of the state was at 3.4%.

According to HUD, unemployment on the Turtle Mountain Reservation exceeds 30%.  According to the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, the average unemployment rate for all of North Dakota’s Indian reservations is 63%.

According to the National Insitute of Justice, which conducted a nationwide study of crime on Indian reservations that included North Dakota’s Forth Berthold reservation, crime on the reservations “ is likely to be between double and triple the national average” and that “comparable communities would be large urban areas with high violent crime rates.”

These are the things we should be talking about.  The symptoms of these things are what I described so “provocatively” (to use Mr. Bender’s word) in my column.

The question we should be asking is not “Is Rob Port a racist jerk.” It’s “What are we going to do about the multitudes of people living in poverty and misery on the reservation?”