this customer, a builder, who said to the Potawatomi band in Wisconsin, a hundred and fifty miles away, he said, ‘I will build you a bingo hall, for free. You don’t have to pay me a red cent. You just pay me out of cash flow when you get it up and running. I will finance it for ten percent annually on the outstanding balance and give you a ten-year loan. I will take all the risk. All of it.’ Well, we lent him the money to do it, and we lent it to him at eight percent. Going rate for commercial loans was six. So everybody’s set up to make good money. Right?” He surveyed the room. “Potawatomi win, builder wins, bank wins.”
He studied them, a hand in his pocket, and went on to describe how hard the builder had to fight to get the permit because the local community was up in arms over the idea of Indians and gambling. There were political battles at the planning commission over a variance they needed for a new access road. The builder went through real heartache—expensive delays, his windshield damaged, his tires slashed—but the resort owners came to the rescue after JW visited the town. He simply made the point that the band wasn’t building a hotel, just a bingo hall, and people would need places to stay.
JW pushed off the desk and watched his audience’s reaction. “So a year later, he finally got it built. Band had a grand opening, and you know how long it took them to pay it off? Three months. Three months to pay off the entire construction loan. Potawatomi won on that one. Now they got a hundred-and-forty room hotel.”
He stood silently, watching them. Sipped his coffee. “Do they sound like deadbeats?” He paused and looked at the pudgy playboy, who shrugged. “Please avoid all the old chestnuts about race. I’m not interested in grinding whatever prejudices or opinions people may have about Native Americans, however valid or invalid they may be. This is about business. I’m strictly looking at banking risk, specific to lending to Native Americans living on a reservation.”
He walked back to his laptop, where he underlined the words risk and on a reservation with his forefinger. Two yellow streaks arched across the projected slide behind him. He waited, but no one else seemed ready to engage.
“The risk,” he said, “is the reservation itself. Let me give you another example.” He began walking, and then he looked up at his audience. “About a year ago, a fellow walked into my bank in North Lake, a Native fellow, Ojibwe, named Johnny Eagle. Tall, thin guy, good shape. Clean, well put together. Italian shoes, thousand-dollar suit. Turns out he’d been in there before to see my loan officer, Sam Schmeaker. Sam had turned him down for a loan, so he asked to see me. Ordinarily I don’t second-guess my loan officers’ decisions, you know how that goes, but he was Native. So it’s a riskier situation. Right? You know this.”
Several bankers nodded and some shifted. Many of them managed banks near Indian reservations, and they knew the risks he was describing. EEOC risk. Compliance risk. The story was beginning to work its magic.
“Receptionist showed him in, we shook hands, he sat down, and right off the bat, as I open the file, he says, ‘It’s a creditworthy application.’ So I knew he had some sort of banking knowledge, right? I found his credit report, high seven hundreds. He had good credit. This was starting to look like a problem for us. Then he told me, ‘I happen to know that my band has several million dollars on deposit with your bank, and yet you barely make any loans to us. Why is that?’ He was watching me closely, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chess game. This was getting dangerous from a regulatory point of view, I thought, and this guy could be setting me up, so I had to be careful. He might be accusing me of a crime.”
“I looked him straight in the eye and I told him we love to make loans to his band. Love them. That’s how a bank makes money, I said, is on the spread between loan interest and deposit interest. He held up a hand and sat back in his chair. He told me I didn’t need to educate him about banking. He was talking about loans to his people, he said, not the band.”
JW walked back along the front of the table. He leaned back against the desk.
“He said to me, ‘Look, Mr. White, I’ll give it to you straight. Have you ever heard of an Indian car competition?’ And so I’ll ask you now. Have you?” JW paused and watched the audience, the sudden silence a sound all its own. No one raised a hand. “Come on, you people bank in Indian country!” He looked at the woman in front. “You?” She shook her head and looked down.
He launched off the soapstone counter and walked back around the desk, clicking the slide advancer. “I hadn’t either,” he said. Towering over him was a slide of a jalopy cobbled together from different cars of different sizes, makes, and colors. Its front fender was blue, a door was red, and the hood green. A supercharger emerged through a hole in the hood, its air scoop made out of an old tuba. It had a spoked wheel in front and a truck wheel in back, and a rear spoiler made out of two-by-sixes. An Indian in glasses was grinning from the driver’s seat and waving a trophy out the window. The overall effect was comical, and some of the audience laughed. Others sat back in their chairs, two fingers on their cheeks or their arms folded, unsure what was permitted or expected of them. Fifteen minutes in and he had them.
“This is the winner of an Indian car competition.” He said this with a straight face, but his wry tone carried an expectation of mirth, and more people laughed. Even the woman in front was smiling up at the grin on the Native American’s face. “Johnny Eagle told me they have them at powwows and on some of the reservations,” he said. “An Indian car is a car that’s been pieced together from the parts of other junked cars, and sometimes other stuff. They have competitions to see who can have the craziest, silliest-looking one that still runs. This guy obviously has a creative flair.” The audience laughed again.
“So Eagle described some of them, smiling the whole time, but as soon as I laughed like you are he slapped his hand on my desk!” JW slapped his hand on the table loudly. Half of the audience jumped. He was scowling, feigning anger.
“‘You don’t have the right to laugh,’ he told me, even though they’re supposed to be funny. Imagine that. Here he had coaxed me into laughing at something even he thought was funny, then he criticized me for laughing at it because I’m white.” He looked at them. “That’s racist. Yet science tells us that there’s no appreciable difference between the races, that the concept of race is a social construct.” He looked at the woman in front again, pointed to her. “You laughed. Why do you think he wouldn’t like that?”
She blanched. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you think you were being racist?”
“No.”
He nodded. “You weren’t. You were the victim of a setup, comedic or otherwise. He said that Indians do it to make light of a bad situation: They can’t get loans because they have no credit, and they have no credit because they can’t get loans, and that’s wrong, wouldn’t I agree? ‘A bank that did that,’ he said, ‘that took Indian deposits and still refused to lend, should be put out of business,’ would I not agree.”
JW pointed an accusing finger at his audience, still in character. Then he calmed. The air conditioning turned off and the window blinds fell back. It was the halfway point, where the arguments turned and began to get complicated and dangerous. He walked again, and his Nordic bearing returned as their eyes followed him.
“So you can see the danger,” he said. “The man wasn’t there to plead his case, he was there to plead his people’s case. He was on the verge of accusing me, my colleague Sam Schmeaker, and the whole bank, of racism and redlining—in short, of a crime. All because Schmeaker had rejected his loan app and I had laughed at a situation that he had portrayed as amusing. So now the customer isn’t the customer anymore, is he? He’s become the enemy. Let’s be honest, we’ve all seen this.” JW continued walking, and he began to gesture with each new example. “There’s the woman, no offense to the women in the room, who left the bank claiming sexual harassment that nobody else had seen, and demanded six figures or she would sue. Or the minority employee who, when fired for a documented cause, filed an EEOC complaint, claiming discrimination, and demanded a six-figure settlement. The Muslim who sued because there was no special room set aside to pray five times a day at work. The custodian