The January 9 CSPOA “Save Our Sheriffs” rally in Puyallup, Washington, displayed an under-examined aspect of CSPOA politics – that is, the strong place of anti-Indian politics in its networks.
In addition to GOP state leader and speaker Jim Walsh belonging to the anti-Indian Save Our Sequim Facebook group, event celebrity and Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank also recently mingled with a regional anti-Indian figure. Swank’s activities also presented an example of how anti-Indian activists in such networks often run alongside proponents of radical attacks on federally protected civil and voting rights.
In November, Sheriff Swank was scheduled to appear at the Liberty First Summit in Gig Harbor, Washington. Another announced speaker at the event was Glen Morgan of We the Governed. Morgan has a history of anti-Indian organizing. While at the Freedom Foundation, Morgan opposed the inherent sovereign right of the Chehalis Tribe to develop tribal properties free from county taxation. And through the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights, where he serves as Executive Director, Morgan built a close relationship with Elaine Willman of the Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA), an organization long dedicated to the outright termination of Indian tribal sovereignty and abrogation of treaties signed between tribes and the U.S. government.
The Gig Harbor event was also slated to feature KrisAnne Hall, a sometimes CSPOA trainer who holds that the 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are unconstitutional.
During the press conference preceding the January 9 CSPOA event, far-right congressional candidate Jerrod Sessler asked a question implicating a call for sheriffs to step in to suppress the treaty and fishing rights of Indian nations. Sessler asked,
“So, um, general question to you again, it’s kind of the same thing. I’m an engineer. I want to know what are the steps are that we can solve or fix this problem or stop it from happening. I recently did a documentary on the Klamath River Dam removals that happened in Oregon and California. And one of the one of the questions I asked, they removed four dams down there. One of the questions I asked them is, where were the sheriffs? Why did the sheriffs not stop him from blowing up these dams?”
Mike Flynn answered by discussing sheriffs’ power, but never specifically answered the question, instead saying, “Every state constitution actually has the authority to secede if they want,” and that he did not want that.
Michael Flynn at CSPOA “Save Our Sheriffs” rally
As for Sessler’s “documentaries,” his treatment of tribes, while at times acknowledging the existence of tribal treaty rights, is, to be very generous, superficial – and, at times, echoes the long-held language of anti-Indian activists about tribal domination of non-Indians.
While Sessler claims that a 1957 agreement “equitably splits water for states, tribes, farms and fish,” the combination of dams, water withdrawal, and other environmental impacts across the years has led to significant declines in tribal fisheries.[1]
Sessler later declared that a rancher and facilitator for the Klamath Working Group, a step along the way to addressing issues in the basin, “brings in untouchable tribes, the Yurok, the Karuk, and the Klamath, with treaty rights. Of course, they demanded dam removal for salmon. My understanding is that the Shasta tribe refused dam removal.”[2]
The idea that tribes are somehow “untouchable” echoes the language of Indian power in anti-Indianism – an accompaniment to false claims of tribal domination. In a similar fashion, and making a reference to the television show Yellowstone, Sessler draws the lesson that “No one dares speak against the tribes, even if what is happening completely violates the rights of other citizens.” [3]
Another Sessler video continues this theme, featuring an interview arguing that the facilitator sought “bribe them [tribes] into coming in, getting involved, saying we’re going to give you power we’re going to give you authority- they had to supersede the rights of the people who owned the water rights up there.”[4]
Sessler also mobilizes the idea of blood quantum to undermine Shasta claims to lands inundated by the dams. He claims, based on an interview with a local opponent of dam removal, that the government enticed Shasta cooperation by “offering a person that has a 16th of her bloodline back to one of the tribes rights to certain land in order to get their support to remove the dams and subjugate water use to prioritize fish.”[5]
While tribes confront real issues in grappling with the effect of blood quantum measurements on their nations – not, incidentally, an idea drawn from American policies and not tribes – as displayed here, Sessler follows the suit of opponents of tribal rights who often make such claims.
Despite the multiple claims of tribal domination of water rights, Sessler fails to explain that tribal water rights are established in the same manner for all who live here – by pegging water rights to the date of the first beneficial use of the resource (particularly in the western U.S.), and then creating use order preferences based on that date. The principle in such “prior appropriation” law is that “first in time, first in right.” For example, under U.S. law, tribal water rights can be based on the date that a reservation was created or, frequently for treaty fishing rights, to “time immemorial,” as tribes relied on water for their fisheries long before Europeans stepped on the continent. Often, in keeping with the colonial aspects of federal Indian law, they are based on actions of the federal government, not the simple fact that all tribal water uses pre-dated European and American use.[6]
In the Klamath Basin, for instance, Klamath Tribes’ rights for fisheries-related water date to “time immemorial,” and for other uses to the 1864 treaty with the U.S. government and creation of a reservation. Yurok Tribe water rights date to an 1855 Executive Order creating a reservation, while Hoopa Valley Tribe rights are linked to an 1876 Executive Order doing the same.[7]
Sessler’s “documentaries” have been circulated by Lisa Mott inside the Klamath Basin Crisis Facebook group, of which she is a member and “rising contributor.” Mott is an administrator of the Klamath River & Dam Revoval Facebook group. For its part, Klamath Basin Crisis is a long-time player in far-right mobilizations against tribal rights in the Klamath Basin – even hosting a section of its website titled, “Elaine Willman – Tribal information and Tribal corruption Citizens for Equal Rights/CERA.”[8]
Sessler continues his string of canards by featuring an interview, but not fact-checking it, in which an individual claims that tribal gillnetting had depleted sturgeon stalks – again, a refrain from opponents of tribal fishing rights that was prominent in the tribal fishing struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. [9]
As for Sessler’s videos offering the Shasta Tribe as an example of a tribe opposing the dam removals – leaders of this non-federally recognized tribe celebrated the return by the State of California of some lands once inundated by the dams.[10]
Sessler’s videos are also peppered with references to Agenda 21, the wholly voluntary 1992 United Nations program promoting environmental protection and other goals, primarily in developing countries. In the minds of far rightists, this program often served as evidence of a global conspiracy. In one video, Sessler posits that the
“Post 2001 water crisis reclamation halted farm deliveries for fabricated salmon protection,” while in the 1990s, “Agenda 21 and the Wildlands Project targeted dams for renewing salmon habitat.”[11]
Sessler also features an interviewee who describes that the Obama administration aimed to “ensure, in the intention was to impose environmental conditions on all of the public – is to gain control of the assets of America is a unique place. It is one of the few places in the world, and the UN stated that in Agenda 21, difficulty is one of the few places that private citizens can own natural resources. That’s antithesis to every environmental protocol that the UN stands for and that the US signed on.” [12]
In keeping with attacks on tribal rights, CSPOA event emcee Larry Stickney has assailed Indigenous Peoples’ Day and promoted the variety of historical revisionism that denies the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples with the coming of Christopher Columbus – in 2024, for instance, posting a meme declaring, “Today is Columbus Day, not ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day.’ Columbus was a great man of history who fundamentally reshaped the world we live in today. He accomplished a million times more in his life than all of his modern critics combined.”[13]
For an organization with ties to white nationalists and groups like the Oath Keepers, it is of little surprise that CSPOA also trucks with anti-Indian politics. One more reason that people of goodwill should speak out loudly to condemn their efforts to recruit law enforcement officers into the far right.
NOTES
[1] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath Dams Removal 60 Year Hidden Agenda Exposed, Thousands Affected, No Congressional Approval? YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WiWStbvbZQ&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=4; See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Klamath River Basin: 2009 Report to Congress. NOAA. Arcata, California. http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/klamath2009.pdf; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Klamath River Basin: 2011 Report to Congress. NOAA. Arcata, California. http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/species/klamathriverbasin2011.pdf.
[2] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath Dams Removal 60 Year Hidden Agenda Exposed, Thousands Affected, No Congressional Approval? YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WiWStbvbZQ&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=4
[3] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Destruction Mystery | Faux Salmon Crisis, Native Tribes & War On Water. YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RfVbPtvNjE&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=1
[4] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Destruction Mystery | Faux Salmon Crisis, Native Tribes & War On Water. YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RfVbPtvNjE&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=1
[5] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Destruction Mystery | Faux Salmon Crisis, Native Tribes & War On Water. YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RfVbPtvNjE&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=1
[6] Native American Rightrs Fund. Indian Water Rights 101. A Summary of the Fundamental. Last Updated March 14, 2025. https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/indian-water-rights-101.pdf
[7] Bardeen, Sarah. Exploring the Yurok Tribe’s Management of the Klamath River. Public Policy Institute of California. September 5, 2023. https://www.ppic.org/blog/exploring-the-yurok-tribes-management-of-the-klamath-river/; Native Nations Institutes Constitution Resource Center. Yurok Tribe: Preamble Excerpt. https://nniconstitutions.arizona.edu/yurok-tribe-preamble-excerpt. Accessed January 21, 2026; Oregon Water Resources Department. The Oregon Water Resources Deptarment Completes Klamath River Basin Adjudication (1975-2013). Press Release dated March 7, 2013. Salem, OR; UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA. YUROK TRIBE v. UNITED STATES BUREAU OF RECLAMATION. Civ. No. 4:24-cv-8216-HSG. file:///C:/Users/crorg/Downloads/1677-1.pdf
[8] Klamath Basin Crisis. Elaine Willman – Tribal information and Tribal corruption Citizens for Equal Rights / CERA. http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/AskElaine.htm. Accessed January 21, 2026; Lisa Mott. Klamath Basin Crisis. Facebook. November 18, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1536133236568310/?multi_permalinks=3296903853824564&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen; KLAMATH RIVER & DAM REMOVALS. Facebook. Members. https://www.facebook.com/groups/384246450824754/members. Accesed January 21, 2026.
[9] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Removal Documentary – Video 4 of 4 – Peaceful River Float. YouTube. July 15, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUosj-Cmi3o&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=5
[10] Krol, Debra Utacia. Shasta tribe will reclaim land long buried by a reservoir on the Klamath River. USA Today. June 22, 2024. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/06/22/california-returns-land-shasta-tribe-klamath-river/74169647007/
[11] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Destruction Mystery | Faux Salmon Crisis, Native Tribes & War On Water. YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RfVbPtvNjE&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=1
[12] Jerrod Sessler. Klamath River Dam Destruction Mystery | Faux Salmon Crisis, Native Tribes & War On Water. YouTube. November 17, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RfVbPtvNjE&list=PL6BkucHRE2KQWEm8-wIm9932b7RkrRN2B&index=1
[13] Lawrence Helge Stickney. Facebook. October 14, 2024. https://www.facebook.com/larry.stickney.9/posts/pfbid024pXCpv7NAP7EpyDvYJwRbqKCV1nHdT3dKekwRjE2Y1AzBUcxtHPBc6YxGKV854tPl
