Casper – More harm than good would be done to American Indian-white relations by having Fremont County’s five commissioners each represent a district, one of those commissioners said during a trial challenging the Wyoming county’s at-large system of electing commissioners.
“I’m worried this lawsuit will take us back 10 years in Fremont County in race relations,” Commissioner Keja Whiteman, who is Indian, said Wednesday.
Five members of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation, which covers a large part of Fremont County, filed the lawsuit. They say the at-large system causes discrimination by diluting Indian voting strength.
They want the U.S. District Court to require the county to have districts. One of those districts would be the reservation land.
Attorneys for Fremont County have responded that the dispute centers not on race as required by the Voting Rights Act but on myriad issues related to the history of American Indians.
Scott Detamore, an attorney for the county with the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, called Whiteman to testify.
Whiteman is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and is the first American Indian elected to the Fremont County Commission.
