THE FOUNDATION WE WERE GIVEN

By Troy Littledeer | @kituwahpunk

“We, as Council, have failed you.”

Not “they.” Not the Treasurer. Not one office. He said “we,” because he was standing in the wreckage same as they were, and he wasn’t going to pretend it belonged to somebody else.

That’s what accountability sounds like.

This Band wasn’t built by people who agreed on everything. It was built around kitchen tables, in churches, at stomp grounds, by people who believed what belonged to all of us mattered more than what belonged to any one of us. Thirty-two furloughed employees were counting on that when they showed up to work every day, expecting a government that kept its books straight.

It didn’t.

Twenty-nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars sits unreconciled. Sixteen million, six hundred thousand is the number the Band is chasing just to get back to zero. Comptroller Meosha Rambo took roughly 10,000 unposted accounting entries and got them down to about 1,100.

According to a source granted anonymity, weekly transfers of $60,000 to $100,000 moved out of restricted grant accounts and into the General Fund to cover payroll, at times covering $120,000 to $150,000 of a $250,000 payroll. A second source, also anonymous, described open legal invoices as high as $800,000, with additional spending going toward travel, and named the General Fund as where that money came from. No ledger or invoice has been produced to confirm the second account.

Treasurer Sonja Gourd faces five articles of impeachment over it, with a hearing set for Aug. 14. At the June 6 Council meeting, Chief Jeff Wacoche told her the problems had been going on for six years. He asked how long the Band had gone without drawing down money it was owed.

He’s held the answer to that question the entire time he’s been asking it.

By-Laws Article I, Section 1 makes the chief the chairman of the Council. He presides at every meeting. He holds general supervision of the Council’s affairs. Article III, Section 2 lets him call a special meeting whenever he decides to, no vote, no permission, no waiting on anybody. Four years as assistant chief, then chief since Jan. 4, 2025. The same six years he named at that table are the six years he had the gavel in his hand.

He didn’t need a camera to ask a single one of these questions. He waited for one anyway.

A Member’s own representative tried to ask questions in that same meeting. The chairman didn’t answer him either. Adair raised Members’ concerns about travel spending — who approves it, what it costs, where the reports are. Wacoche cut him off. Told him “we get your point.” Sent him to Facebook posts and email summaries instead of a number.

Band travel runs on Band money. A Member who can’t get a straight answer can’t see where that money went. For a household deciding between the light bill and the gas tank, that’s not a small question.

Four properties purchased during Wacoche’s tenure carry a similar gap. County deed records list only nominal consideration; the purchase amounts come from the documentary stamp tax paid on each recorded deed. On three of the four, Wacoche personally signed a sworn affidavit stating he was authorized to bind the Band to the deal. Tribal law requires Corporate Board approval for any single expenditure over $10,000 from the fund used. Wacoche sits on that board himself, as a nonvoting member by virtue of holding the chief’s office. No Corporate Board resolution and no Council resolution approving price or terms has been produced for any of the four.

Five weeks after the June 6 meeting, Wacoche and Adair were face to face again, this time outside a meeting of the furloughed employees Adair had just apologized to. According to Adair’s sworn petition and three witnesses, Wacoche confronted him, directed profanity at him, and challenged him outside before Lighthorse officers stepped in. Adair filed for a protective order that day. A judge denied the motion to dismiss it and took the matter under advisement. Whether the court grants that order is the court’s to decide.

Inside the Council, the story’s already being denied. Not by name. Not on record. Just denied.

But Members don’t need a judge to see the pattern. The man asking why nobody answered for six years is the same man who wouldn’t answer a district representative’s questions in the same room, who spent Band money without the sign-off his own tribal law requires, and who showed up in another representative’s face weeks later instead of answering for any of it.

That’s leadership avoiding accountability while it points at everybody else.

Our grandparents didn’t build this Band so one office could hold all the power and none of the answers. They built a government where the chairman’s job was to make sure the questions got asked and the answers got given, not to decide which ones he felt like hearing.

The filing period is open now, through Aug. 14. If this Council isn’t going to hold its own leadership to the standard it demands of everyone else, Members have the power to build a new one. Run, or vote for someone who will.

Troy Littledeer is a Member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma and a 2025 Indigenous Journalists Association Tim Giago Free Press Award recipient. He has covered tribal governance, sovereignty, and regional affairs in Adair County and across Indian Country for more than two decades.