The witness seemed so perfectly at ease, so very much at home. You might not have known that she is an outsider now, content to have exited the capital’s often provincial ways and the glacial movements of the U.S. Congress.
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A journey to the obscure brought me to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, a panel so far off the radar screen of Washington prestige you need Pentagon satellite imagery to locate it. Its concern, after all, is Native Americans who, as victims of historical exploitation and racism, provoke a mere smattering of interest among politicians and media.
It was all the worse last week, of course, as the ravenous Pack, led by the cable “news” channels, were engrossed by the grade-B soap opera involving a missing intern and a California congressman. The calculation was clear: congressman had affair with intern, intern disappears, thus less-than-cooperative congressman must have played some role in her disappearance.
And, because the cable guys and gals increasingly set the agenda for CNN-addicted newspaper editors, most of whom should know better, copycatitis ran amok. The story generated more and more coverage, and more de facto legitimacy, as if it represented some startling new window on the perils of youth, power and libido.
Crystal clear, isn’t it?
It really wasn’t. But neither is the life’s journey of Elizabeth Furse.
She was identified on the witness list as “director, Institute of Tribal Government, Portland State University, Portland, Ore.” But she was accorded a deference befitting someone who was once a member of the club.
Indeed, Furse was in Congress for three terms as a Democrat representing the Portland area, before deciding not to run again in 1998. Hers was an uncommon decision, but in sync with an uncommon personal odyssey.
She was born to a Canadian mother and a British naval officer in Kenya during those heady pre-Beatles, colonial days when sun had not yet set on the British Empire. The mom had ditched her first husband, also a Brit, and the family moved to Cape Town, just in time for the start of World War II.
Her politics were fashioned by revulsion with apartheid, as were those of the mother. Furse moved to work for an airline in London, where she met an American doctor and landed in Los Angeles, where she was a housewife with two children.
In 1961 she was 25 and pregnant with their third child but learned it might be born with severe brain damage. In a pre-Roe vs. Wade era, the alternatives were few. If you decided on an abortion, but didn’t want to leave the country, the possibilities included convincing a hospital that the mother’s own life was endangered by the pregnancy.
Because she only had one kidney, a hospital panel said it would approve an abortion only if she had a hysterectomy too. She did.
As the years passed, she became a liberal activist on a range of topics, including farm worker rights, Native American issues and a smaller military budget. She also divorced the doctor and married an attorney, settling in the Portland area and starting a small vineyard as she juggled involvement in those other concerns.
Furse had never seriously considered elective office, but when the longtime incumbent in her congressional district ran for Senate in 1992, she was urged to try. With impressive grass-roots support, she won.
She became associated with successful efforts to deal with domestic violence and pare fat from the Pentagon budget, as well as pushing for tribal rights, starting a Diabetes Caucus and seeking Medicare coverage for blood tests and self-management training for the disease.
She was, by all accounts, dutiful and hard-working; willing to be flexible ideologically to protect certain interests back home, like the salmon and maritime industries; and a more cosmopolitan presence than many colleagues, some of whom probably still do not have passports.
For sure, there were those she really liked (and made sure to see last week) and a sense that important matters were engaged in. And there were perks, like traveling with Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Clinton to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration, ending her own 30-year boycott of her native South Africa.
But she was getting uneasy.
She admits that the historic 1994 Republican congressional victories, giving the GOP control of the House, played a part. “I did find minority status difficult,” she said last week, referring to the diminished status and clout.
But she also saw good men and women trapped in a system in which incrementalism ruled. Little got done on issues important to her, notably the environment. There was, and remains, much running down halls to get into the House chamber for votes which, well, really don’t amount to much at all.
(A curious theory she holds, concerning low public esteem for Congress, involves C-Span’s airing of all House sessions in the chamber. “America sees all that drivel and posturing. It trivializes the process. Members wouldn’t be doing a lot of that posturing if the cameras weren’t there.”)
“Once in a while you score,” she said. “But most of the time you don’t. And I’m an activist who needs a sense of real accomplishment. I’m not like those in Congress who stay there for a long time, knowing they can eventually get stuff accomplished if they work for many years, build up seniority and credibility among colleagues.”
And then there was separation from family and the numbing coast-to-coast traveling, usually flying all the way in from Portland on Tuesday to partake in evening votes and departing either late Thursday, usually to run to some 8 p.m. community gathering in the district, or perhaps Friday.
So she called it quits, after three terms. A 1992 term limits referendum, passed in Oregon, had been struck down as unconstitutional. But she felt the people had spoken. For sure, she had barely won two of her three elections, despite outspending her opponents, but she likely would have won a fourth term.
Her first year away did not bring much solace, only an autoimmune disease that left her stuck at home. She recovered and returned to her winery, which produces a modest 3,000 cases a year of pinot noir, pinot gris and chardonnay, and the development of the new institute at Portland State, assisted by a five-year, $1.8 million federal grant that reflects the upside of having been an insider.
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The key engineers include a friend, Chicago-area Republican John Porter, who retired this year, but not before using his clout on a key appropriations committee to get that grant.
The institute’s aim is to assist elected tribal leaders (often an older generation with little formal education) in dealing with local, state and federal government, as well as educating government agencies on how to deal with the tribes. Bureaucrats may not even know where and who to call, a problem when issues, such as fishing and hunting rights, can be the jurisdiction of nine federal agencies.
So Furse, 64, travels regularly to reservations around the Pacific Northwest, while trying to expand her winery and spending time at a home in the Lot region of France. There is a new grandchild, five sisters scattered about the world and her mom, now 103, back in Canada.
It might seem an odd melange of the effete and the distinctly populist, the chardonnay-maker dealing with the systemic poverty and racism afflicting Native Americans. Then, again, who said a reformer had to live in a hovel and find nourishment in stacks of Budweiser?
“I am not discouraged by government,” she said last week, sitting outside in a bistro after her testimony was over. “It still is the only way to deal with the really big issues. But I just felt as if I was never accomplishing as much as I desired.”
So now she spends the majority of her time building up the first institute of its kind, including overseeing a videotape archive of the oral histories of that older generation of tribal leaders. It’s all part and parcel of trying to somehow improve what has been the often-woeful state of leadership and governance on reservations nationwide.
She is impatient but, these days, has “a real sense of accomplishment, the sort that is rare in Congress.”
Pinot gris or Bud, you can drink to that.