The proposal to set up five districts for electing Fremont County commissioners would do far more damage to white-Indian relations than the present at-large system, Native American and commissioner Keja Whiteman said Wednesday.

"A single-member (system) would divide the county more than it already is," Whiteman said during the eighth day of a federal voting rights lawsuit being tried in federal court in Casper.

"I'm worried this lawsuit will take us back 10 years in Fremont County in race relations," she said.

The five Indians, who are members of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Indian Reservation, claim the at-large or countywide system results in discrimination by diluting Indians' voting strength, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in October 2005.

They want the federal court to pressure the county to create single-member districts, one of which would include the reservation.

However, 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.

She is the first American Indian - enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa - ever elected to the Fremont County Commission. Her husband and three children are enrolled members of the Northern Arapaho tribe. She who grew up around the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, attended several colleges and earned her master's degree at the University of Wyoming.

While living in Montana, Whiteman worked as a circulation librarian for a tribal college, served as a liaison for the tribes with the governor's office and the Legislature, and worked as a lobbyist.

When she moved to Fremont County, she was elected in 2002 to the St. Stephens Indian School board, worked on her family's ranch, and socialized on the reservation.

Whiteman also felt the brunt of racism and poverty in Montana, and racism in Fremont County, she told Laughlin McDonald, an attorney for the five Indian plaintiffs and director of the Atlanta office of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Inc.

For example, she once bought a CD at Wal-Mart, opened the case in the parking lot and found the disc was missing, she said.

When she went to the customer service desk, the clerk told her "'you people are always trying to do stuff like this.'"

The parents of a schoolmate forbade their daughter from playing with her daughter, Whiteman said.

Those kinds of experiences affect Whiteman's behavior by hampering her ability to initiate a conversation with a non-Indian in a store, she said.

Whiteman also decried the federal and state governments' actions towards Indians: placing enemy tribes on the same reservation so they would commit genocide on each other; performing forced sterilizations on women at some Indian health clinics; using the tribal enrollment system to encourage fighting over limited government resources; shortchanging schools; and fostering a cycle of poverty.

She successfully won the Democratic primary in August and then the general election in November by campaigning to represent Indian interests and countywide matters such as economic development and public safety, she said.

"I was running to unify the county," she said.

While the voting rights lawsuit was filed in October 2005, Whiteman said she didn't give it much thought until after the primary.

She came to see the wisdom in the at-large system because it pushed her to consider the needs of all county residents, municipalities and rural areas, she said.

From another perspective, Whiteman said a single-member system with a reservation-based commissioner would further isolate Indians, foster resentment among other commissioners and county residents, and reduce influence in commission decisions.

While she would not admit the 2002 redrawing the boundaries of House District 33 on the reservation marked a step backward in race relations, she said the election of Rep. Pat Goggles, D-Ethete, has raised accusations among non-Indians of gerrymandering.

In earlier testimony on Wednesday, Fremont County Commission Chairman Doug Thompson complimented Whiteman for her countywide race. "She was a classic candidate and she won."

Thompson, too, told the court the at-large system makes commissioners aware of the needs of the entire county, diminishes adversarial relationships among commissioners, and acts to thwart the inertia of incumbency.

"Candidates in single-member districts have not sensitivity to other parts of the county," Thompson said under questioning by Detamore.

The same holds true for the single-member system of electing state House and Senate members after the voting rights lawsuit in the early 1990s, which fractured Fremont County's presence in Cheyenne, he said. "As a county, we need to present our needs collectively."

He has supported projects for development on the reservation, and has denied other project applications that were incomplete, he said.

Thompson acknowledged racial discrimination exists in Fremont County, but said some disputes such as water rights are matters of jurisdictional rather than discrimination, he said.

But under cross examination, McDonald probed Thompson's apparent conflicting answers about the existence of racial discrimination; his estimate in his earlier deposition that Indians comprised between 8 percent and 10 percent of the county's residents when they in fact comprise about 17 percent; and his lack of awareness of lower income levels and life expectancy on the reservation.

Detamore repeatedly objected to McDonald's line of questioning especially about Thompson's understanding of racial discrimination in the county.

But McDonald told U.S. District Court Judge Alan Johnson that Thompson's views were important.

"This witness as an elected official has no knowledge of racial discrimination," McDonald said. "And this goes to the heart of the matter (of this case)."