Honoring Nations Symposia

Honoring Nations: Elizabeth Woody: Environment and Natural Resources

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Elizabeth Woody reports back to her fellow Honoring Nations symposium attendees the consensus from the environment and natural resources breakout session participants, synthesizing their deliberations into four key elements for nation-building success in the environmental and natural resource management arena.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Woody, Elizabeth. "Environment and Natural Resources." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 9, 2002. Presentation.

Elizabeth Woody:

"My name is Elizabeth Woody and I'm born from the Bitterwater Clan on my maternal side. My people come from the Hot Springs, a place where [unintelligible] vacation resort is now and Wyampum, which has been submerged, which means the Echo of Water Upon Rocks and [unintelligible], which is the is the Place Where Water Turns to Blue on the Willamette River.

In our group, the four pieces that we came up with that seemed to be central was the recognition of tribe's ability in sovereignty, and this meant having confidence in your staff, having confidence in your position and footing with other agencies in the state, which ties into sovereignty. We felt that this also meant that people were strong in their historical and cultural identity and that they valued the tribal conception of science along with good science and biology. We recognized the culture and identity of our tribe is from a land-based knowledge and from all of this we have our rootedness, meaning we're not going anywhere.

The second part was the infrastructure was in place, meaning that the people who administer these programs or are directing these programs already had an infrastructure in place, they were able to build upon them, find out the missing pieces, design missing pieces to fit in there, and that these structures also gave them the formal authority in leadership that was described earlier.

Three, support from tribal and community leadership. Again that goes to the spiritual aspects of the leadership that comes from election and your leadership that comes from lineage. Also underneath of this was the listening and communication piece, meaning that they had the ability to listen to their constituency, they were able to listen to, for example, the ranchers making compliment to the tribe saying, 'We had a stream, the water hasn't ran here for 15 years. What did you do?' And she was able to say, 'Well, hmm, there was a benefit to what we did, which extends beyond the boundaries of the tribal reservation,' for these benefits are measurable and definitely something of value to the communities that surround them.

And then the fourth piece that was significant was the strategic critical thinking; this includes long-range planning and implementation. It also includes -- that's the forward piece -- and the backward piece it was just the traditional knowledge and subsistence that's been handed down from time immemorial by the Creator's law or recognition of medicinal plants and our companionship with them and our relationship with them that's been since the beginning of time. So those are the four pieces and there were a lot more to it, but it all boils down basically to these elements."

Honoring Nations: Rick Hill: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Oneida Nation Business Committee Chairman Rick Hill offers his perspectives on sovereignty today through the lens of the challenges facing his nation and the strategies theyr employing to achieve their nation-building goals. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Hill, Rick. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"Well, good afternoon to you all. I'm glad you're still awake here. This kind of reminds me of the Mo [Morris] Udall statement, 'Everything's been said, but not said by everyone.' So, here we are. I think if you get a copy of this book, it has a great explanation about the Oneida Farms and it's very well written. It's basically my speech, so you guys can read that on your own time and I will do some other things here.

I really enjoyed the humor today. It kind of kept me awake. The teepee creeper story, the other lady that was, the co-mingling thing here, and I say, 'More warriors, more warriors, more warriors.' So I thought that was good -- that we're a dying race of people. And I liked the other thing that our friend, Manley, said about being at Harvard. Indians gathering at Harvard, we should all run. Manley, I enjoyed that, I thought that was good and I'll borrow that. And then when I walked in I seen the commander. I was like, 'who in the hell's the commander? What's this about?' So then I walked through the halls here and I see it's George Washington and he's the commander. And so it made me think about what my elders taught me about the history.

Basically -- and Oren [Lyons] knows this story better than I do -- but they know that Oneidas gave George Washington and the Continental Army -- we were the first allies of George Washington. And a lot of us went to Canada, decided not to be in the war, and others stuck around and were the first allies of George Washington, if you didn't know that. And fed his army at Valley Forge [because] the colonists couldn't afford to give them their little bit of food that they had. So it was a matter of survival. And so the Oneidas brought 500 bushels of corn, as the story goes. And they taught them how to make cornbread and corn soup, [because] those guys were just gobbling it up when they received it and their stomachs swelled up -- they were just looking for something to eat. And so that was the staple that was the turning point in the war. Otherwise, we'd all be speaking French. That would really be the case. But somehow those chapters are left out of our American history, and that whole big chapter about genocide that happens to be missing in the curriculum, [because] actually, it was to start out to wipe us all out, right? That was the whole thing. It went from our people, to the buffalo, to whatever staple we had to build our economies, to feed our people, was to the first issuing of the small pox blanket, was the first form of chemical genocide, right?

That was all strategically done. We started out in the War Department [because] they were trying to kill us all off and figure ways to do that: exterminate us. And then we ended up in the Interior Department -- no coincidence there, right, because it was about the land, and then it's about all the resources. And then the history goes on about the policy. So that's what we're up against, in terms of our communities, when we exercise sovereignty. We were always running against the grain relative to those policies. So I used to do the gaming speech and I always went back to like, we've been reduced to gaming. We owned all this territory and all these resources. They had the weapons -- that was the whole thing. They had superior weaponry. It was our families against military force. And so here we fast forward to gaming and the dollars that gaming gives us for economic development that allow us to do a lot of the things that we can do today. So that's based on demographics and hopefully the other Indian communities and nations will have some form of economic development, less a tax base, to run your governments. So I always like when we can all get together, because it's sharing ideas and sharing resources and getting new ideas to bring home to advance your community and to protect your inherent sovereignty and all that. So that takes a lot of infrastructure to do all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to put that out there.

The other thing that I came here is, I was like, 'Wow, I'm in Boston.' And then I thought about our senator friend Kennedy who just passed on, Ted Kennedy. And several years ago, I had the opportunity to meet the Senator. And so we flew here and then we went to a reception where all the other mucky mucks here and we waited and we waited and we waited and we waited. So he worked the whole room and then he finally came over to say hello to us and we were all happy that it was our time. And then he started telling a story about Bobby Kennedy. Their family always wanted to help the less fortunate or the different races of people and they have a legacy of that. And so he just shared the story about how him and Bobby had a conversation one day and he actually asked him to help the Indian folks out. And so I guess some history would speak to that, I don't really know that in detail, but Indian education and health reform and all these other things and he had a hand in it and he had us in mind to pass some of those kind of things. I thought that was kind of an interesting moment for me personally. And then later on to meet his son Patrick, I think that's a good thing. I think Patrick's a solid guy and I feel for the family and all that stuff.

But there's always the Kennedy jokes, right, the Kennedy stuff. Like, a guy will walk into a bar, a regular old guy will walk into a bar and see a woman sitting on a stool and say, 'Why?' Then Ted Kennedy walks into a bar and sees a woman sitting on a stool and he says, 'Why not?' Or it was so quiet in the room you could hear a Kennedy's pants drop. I always like that one, yeah. So we'll save the late show for later. I have to get the mood of the crowd here. Oh, wait one more. I can't escape this. How about, John Kennedy should be in heaven because any man that would share Marilyn Monroe with his brother Bobby should be in heaven. So there, I had to get that off my chest.

There's a legacy there and who's going to take this spot? Who's going to fill this void up on Capitol Hill? So everybody will be vetting for this new senator position, but who's going to lay on the tracks for the Indians? So we have to go and develop and educate. And my buddy Tim Wapato -- he's passed on -- he says, 'When we educate white folks, it's a lifetime commitment. And then it's your kid's lifetime commitment.' And that's what we're up against. [Because] if they don't live next door to Indians or have these disputes with our communities -- these local units of government and county governments and state governments -- they don't have an idea, but yet they're going to vote on major pieces of legislation -- the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act or education act comes up, or you want to resolve your land claims, that kind of stuff. That's all. We need to develop friends and new friends and it's a continuous process.

So I see Oren -- and I think about land claims a lot of times when I see Oren. And the Haudenosaunee had a certain position, we had our position on land claims but yet, there was over 27 million acres of land. And that conversation, after 200 years is still occurring. So in terms of exercising sovereignty we're still in that conversation. Who knows how it's going to come out, but yet that's still pending after 200 years. So for us to have the staying power to stay in these conversations is important as we develop our communities and our educational systems, and teaching about sovereignty and the importance of inherent sovereignty, that this fight goes on and on and on and on and on.

My traditional chief told me -- when I was recruited to run for chairman last, I was in office a year, we have three-year terms. So I started when I was 23, I'm 56 now. So I've seen different leaders through time. I was happy to see my father Norbert, Purcell Powless, Roger Jourdain, Wendell Chino, Oren and a lot of folks. I was really blessed with seeing how these guys protect sovereignty and the fire and brimstone routine that Chairman Chino used to represent. It was all about sovereignty and his territory and 'you'd be damned if you do something in my territory, over my dead body,' it was like that. And now I think I kind of feel like that's kind of missing. I don't feel the fire in people's belly anymore. I feel a little bit here when I hear some of the speakers, but I don't oftentimes feel it.

And then as I go back home, we have 16,000 members, we have 3,000 employees, and we have a large general tribal council, which is the ultimate body. And so with that -- $100 a meeting for our members to come to the meeting -- we get anywhere from 1,500 to over 2,000 people at a meeting, but they all left because of relocation programs and survival reasons. So like a generation and a half, they're back home, so to speak. And so when they drive up, the infrastructure's there, the casino's there, the bank's there, the industrial park's there, all these kinds of things are there. So they didn't have any sweat equity into building this, so they have a different mindset about what that's all about.

But I have a fond appreciation, [because] when we had our debate about the per capita issue more recently, they were going to issue, they emptied the coffers at one time -- like you said, the other council -- but the other general tribal council took the position that they were going to pay themselves first. And so they emptied about $89 million out of the coffers that took us generations to build. And then more recently, we had a conversation [because] there was another petition for another $160 million for our 16,000 members. And so I asked if they would suspend the rules. And so as the meeting went on, they eventually suspended the rules. We had great testimony then [because] they knew -- when we talked early on at this conference here about traditional values and way of discussing and consensus building, that's what we ended up doing. So we had a lot of testimony about [that] land was important, health care was important, educational resources are important and all these kinds of things were more important than the dollars as an individual member. So it was nation first and then let's talk about, 'Can we afford the per capita later on?'

And so that was important in terms of – [Because] in 1934 we went through, you guys understand the Allotment Act. And we lost most of our land and we went down to a few hundred acres. And with the advent of gaming we were able to buy land back, and tobacco sales, we were able to buy a lot of our land back. So that builds more the foundation of what we do in the community and the institutions we put into our community. The importance of nation building, to get everybody on the same page in terms of the allocation of resources for certain priorities for the nation, and that's the challenge that we have now. What does that look like? What are the priorities? There's only so many resources. And how do you allocate them on priorities?

So when I got into the office a year ago or so, we had a 100-day plan, and it evolved to the 200-day plan, [because] there was so much to vet, in terms of what we're going to do. So we established three standing committees on quality of life and economic development, commerce and land development. I think was another subcommittee. So I think we got a way to funnel our issues in and they're vetted and then they're brought as recommendations to the committee later on. So we've been able to at least go in that direction.

The other thing I think it's important to mention, at least I think it is, is about what Oren kind of alluded to early on in his open remarks. And there's an urgency about all this subject matter we're talking about here. There is an urgency to get things in place and to find the best talent to protect your inherent sovereignty. And a lot of it is related to the climate changes and stuff like that, and then it relates back to health of the community. And I think on the climate change issue, I don't know who this group of people is, but I heard about a group of elders and medicine people one time who were discussing that. And we need to demand to get into that conversation [because] they probably can help position us with that message and how we should prepare for that time. And then I look at our farm thing and I was thinking about that too. And our farm is to have more of a traditional way of agriculture. And then you look at, I go to my health center, and if you want to campaign, you'll see everybody at the health center. We have a huge health center, but you'll see everybody there, right? We've got heart issues, diabetic issues, we're a sick people. We are. And the only cure for that is really, good eating and a healthier lifestyle. The other subgroup we have is called the Quality of Life, so we're trying to look at the quality of life for our people. Although we have this great farm, not everybody uses the farm [because] it's a lot easier going to Walmart to pick up your frozen food, right? So to me it's about, food is the medicine, the fresher the better. And if we can, like I said, the farmers' market should be right next to the health center. So people can get their medicine or more traditional forms of medicine should be in the health center. So these kinds of things, we've got to breath more healthier lifestyle into our people and if you have strong individuals then you've got stronger families then you've got a stronger community and those kinds of things. So I think in terms of what the message Oren was talking about -- the climate and the health of the people in the community -- it starts on the ground. And we need to really make a bigger push urgently to try to get that done. I think that's an important thing to advance here.

I had a lot of other Kennedy jokes to share with you. However, my time is limited and they're really for late night. The other thing that we're doing, we know we don't have resources to do the things, [because] we don't have tax bases as governments, so we're in the process of really working with our corporations to try to monetize what we're doing within our corporations. And then some of you asked me a question about the silos in the communities, and we're bringing groups together to break down the silos and collaborate to really have a stronger more vibrant economy. And more recently we started businesses in the environmental arena, and it does environmental engineering, construction and management services. We were able to buy a golf course that was bankrupt and to expand our hospitality business, to go along with our casino and other things we do well. We're looking at the biomass projects, and [I] was happy to work with Chief [James] Gray here [because] he's the present Chief of the Consortium of Renewable Energy Nations. So I wanted to put that out there. If you're interested in that, we can get you information. By us coming together to define the organization and to address the federal legislation on citing and permitting, and get some of these federal citing and permitting issues, impediments lifted, have some kind of one-stop-shopping thing. Because on the investment side, we've got to be competitive with the commercial side -- no one's going to invest in our renewable energy projects. So we've got to work hard on that legislative piece and we all need to come together to help do that.

One last thing is our committee decided to address Public Law 280 and retrocede [jurisdiction] from the State of Wisconsin. And that happened when I was 23. Now they're going to revisit that folder and try to build a plan to move towards that. And I think that's a good thing in terms of what are we doing to address sovereign issues and exercising our own sovereignty. So that's really important that we get all of our infrastructure. So we're really looking at our judicial system and giving them more authority and more power and those kinds of things. The other thing that's kind of a thorn in their side and John -- [I] was happy to see John after many years -- after the gaming wars, to come to our community and talk about these anti-Indian groups that are rearing their ugly heads again. We should all be aware of that. I think up north in northern Wisconsin there's actually billboards from the...from the fishing wars to more sophisticated ways of campaigning to change federal Indian law and Indian policy. They're more sophisticated in their messaging and their networking. They have more expertise to try to disrupt Indian tribal governments, as we want to exercise our sovereignty. So they don't like land into trust. They don't like you to have jurisdiction. And all these battles go on, so we need to all pull together.

In Wisconsin, we're working with the 11 nations there to organize and do something that John has done in the past, that have proven to be successful, some public service announcements regarding our communities and what we're capable of and what we can do. But we need to be aware of that, because that's just an ongoing battle. I guess they figured they job ain't done. They didn't exterminate us yet, so they're going to figure to try to change Indian federal law and policy to thwart our governing authorities, our inherent rights. So be aware of that, if you haven't noticed it. But that's something that will affect all of us -- if they can change Indian federal law and policy, that's going to affect all of our communities. So they'll be trying to find a court case that they can advance and the courts. My dad always told me, 'It's really hard for an Indian to get a fair trial on a court that sits on stolen land.' So there's enough case law to support that theory my dad was trying to teach me when I was much younger. You can't get a fair trial in a court that sits on stolen land.

So we need to be careful about when they think it's a controversy and they want to raise it up to the area and raise it higher. We got a case that was about condemnation in our community and we thought we had the set of facts on our side. And we usually do when we want to advance something, and only to have Judge Griesbach look the other way and be political and say they could condemn our fee land. So we stopped there [because] it affects us, but we couldn't advance that [because] then it'll affect everybody else, right? So even when you've got the facts on your side, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a fair day, so be conscious of that as we get challenged by these rednecks to get us into a court situation. As Charlie would say, 'You should never judge a man by the color of his neck.'

All right, so I guess these remarks didn't do me any good today, but I wanted to put that energy out there and hopefully get your attention on some things here. And I appreciate the good work of my niece here, Megan Hill, and all of your good work. Don't take no prisoners, and don't become one. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: James R. Gray, Rick Hill and John McCoy: Sovereignty Today (Q&A)

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Native leaders John McCoy, James R. Gray, and Rick Hill discuss the importance of Native nations joining forces to engage in economic development, and also why it is so important for Native nations and people to buy from their own.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Sovereignty Today (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

Jarvis Williams:

"Hi, my name is Jarvis Williams, I'm with the Kayenta Township. My question is for, I guess it could be for any one of the members, but probably more directed to Mr. McCoy. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago, the Arizona Rural Development Conference, and one of the things that they brought out was the Hispanic purchasing power it has in the State of Arizona. And how if they could market, or tap into that market, that the businesses in Arizona they could actually pull themselves out of the recession. So I'm wondering, since you just made mention about how many economic development studies you guys do, I'm wondering -- and this would probably be addressed to all the panel members -- if you guys had any, read anything about the purchasing power of tribes, of Native people in general. I know from the area that I come from, it's two hours to the nearest place, but all the border towns are doing very well, even during the recession. Construction growth stopped, it slowed, but retail sales kept pace. And a lot of that's probably attributed to a lot of our dollars being leaked off to the border towns. And so I'm wondering if you guys had any insight into that."

John McCoy:

"Retail is tough. We've been successful there at Tulalip. One of the things, during the normal day of the week, we at Tulalip get over 30,000 visitors. During the weekend and holidays, we exceed over 50,000 a day. And most of this is retail and, naturally, gaming. The question was asked earlier about the buying power of tribes. No one tribe has the power to make that happen. We'd have to create a consortium of tribes to work together, almost like the Alaska corporations. A number of them pulled together to create some buying power. That's what we need to take a look at, and we need a number of tribes to be able to pull together to create a joint corporation if you will in order to get the buying power to drive these costs down. [Because] if one tribe does it, they don't have the buying power. And what we need to do to be successful, we've got to be another Walmart -- that big -- in order to get those prices so that we can use the product. So that's how I see it."

James Gray:

"At the Osage Nation we had, we were looking for a way to kind of manage exactly how big of an economic footprint that we have in our community. And we had searched high and low and looked for the person that could actually pull it together that had the right level of expertise, that had a great sense of depth in Indian Country, knowledge from an economic standpoint. And we couldn't find anybody, so we settled for Jonathan Taylor to actually do it. That went over better than the Kennedy jokes. So Jonathan Taylor walks into a bar...! No. We had a really good analysis done, because not only were we able to calculate the royalties that the Osages received from their oil and gas revenues, we also were able to calculate the economic functions of our casinos. We had five casinos at the time, now we have seven. And we also calculated the multiplier factor of the employees that work for the tribe and their expenditures in the economy. And then we also were able to do the direct purchases that the tribe makes in contracting and subcontracting out for a variety of goods and services. So collectively, some really important achievements were made in that report, which was that the total economic impact that the nation had generated was -- this is direct economic impact -- it was $222 million a year. We have also, were able to identify that the nation employed 1,400 people and those individuals -- some lived on reservation, some didn't, so we had to figure that into it -- the royalties that the Osage shareholders received that year was in the neighborhood of like $56 million a year and the purchasing power of the Osage Nation was measured at like $78 million a year. Now if you don't have the context, that doesn't help you much. So what we tried to do, and this is what I think was pretty effective in what Jonathan did in his report, is that he measured us against other large employers in the state's economy. One of the largest employers in the state's economy, in the private world, is Devon Energy, which is a publicly traded company based in Oklahoma City. Also was K-Mart or Target, I think it was. And so in a way, it made it possible for us to not only have empirical information that we could share with others like editorial boards -- the Tulsa World or the Daily Oklahoman -- it also allowed us to have conversation with industry, financial institutions to talk about ways in which we could compete, they could compete for our business -- other goods and contractors that actually delved into a new organization that resulted in a meeting that we have once a year called the Osage Business Owners Conference. And we were trying to build entrepreneurship and try to get people to start their own companies, form under the LLC [limited liability corporation], work with the LLC, form corporations, joint partnerships, but also basically effectively compete for the dollar that the Osage Nation is spending anyway every year.

It spun off a lot of different things. Personnel wise, it gave people a sense that you're working for an organization that's really going somewhere. And it really did charge them up because we went from 200 employees in 2002 to 1,400 in 2007. Now we're like at 1,700 now and that's a lot of, that's covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time. So if you -- but it starts with having that study done and being able to make sure all the records are available to Jonathan, otherwise he will never leave you alone. It took awhile to get it all together, but once we did he was able to plug the numbers, do the analysis and do the reports and present the material for us and it's been extremely well received by everyone in the non-Indian community, as well as our own folks."

Rick Hill:

"On John's remark, it went back to the last panel about the purchasing power thing, that's what needs to happen. They do that in Vegas on the Strip. Everybody buys from one vendor, they get pricing. We're stupid if we don't do it. That's the way that is. I think on the local side, the policy like John says, we write the rules, so Norbert used to do these speeches. When we play in your playground we play by your rules, when you come in our territory and our playground, we need some rules. And part of it's policy. And as the Asian community would say, everything joint venture. Everything, joint venture. So every service and good that purchased needs to have an Indian component. If they don't have that, next. They'll get an Indian division or hire or train or whatever, but to leverage your purchasing power then they can play by your rules. And then measurables on the council side, every quarter it's a certain percentage that's realistic, and then bring your purchasing agents in front of the council and say, 'Did you meet the threshold, if so, you did. If not, why not and what are you going to do to correct that, 'cause we've got to go that extra mile.' I should do these speeches on Indians should act more Jewish. That's one thing they do. They use their own people. If they're going to buy a table or chair or go to a service, they're going to look to their own people first. They're not going to go into another community and use those people. That's what I mean. That's a good thing. We need to use our own people and have confidence in them. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: John McCoy: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Now-former Quil Ceda Village Director John McCoy talks about how and why the Tulalip Tribes established Quil Ceda Village, and also reflects on his tenure serving in the State of Washington Legislature.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

McCoy, John. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"Good afternoon. So you're all ready? I'm the last speaker. You can't wait to get out the door, right? I can't disagree with anything that was said today. It was all very important, to the point, and very informational. A lot of these conversations have triggered some more thoughts for me, and as some of my friends here say, 'That's dangerous,' because then I go off and do something. But anyway, you gave me a tough assignment; Harvard gave me a tough assignment. They want me to talk about Quil Ceda Village, which I can talk eight hours on. And then they want me to talk about my life in the state legislature, which is another eight hours. And you want me to condense it in 15 minutes. So, I will do the best I can to get all this done in 15 minutes.

First of all, we created Quil Ceda Village in 2001, but the seed of the village was planted in the summer of '94. What happened, I was recruited by my tribe, my own tribe, to come back home to be the business manager, do economic development. So I came back and the attorney that we have now was actually hired before me -- but he didn't get to work until a month after I started -- and that's Mike Taylor and a number of you know Mike. So I know my mission and I get Mike's office set up and all that jazz. And then that summer, I went to Mike and I said, ‘Mike, we -- you and I -- are charged with economic development. You the legal side, me figuring out what we're going to do. How are we going to get at the taxes?' And those of you who know Mike, you know that little smirk he gets across his face, ‘Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Here you are, John McCoy, we've been fighting this issue for 500 years, and you think you're going to solve it.' I said, ‘Well, Mike, I just had to ask the question.' And so we talked about it for a couple hours and then I had to go off and do some work. And then later in the summer I came back and I said, ‘Mike, what are we going to do about the taxes, I want to talk about this some more.' And he said, ‘I've already done something.' Mike at the time was a professor at the UW [University of Washington] Law School, and he made it a class project. How can Indians get at the taxes? And he told the class to go all the way back to the very first case and follow it all the way up to present time. So law school's three years, right? We're patient, right? We're all patient. So I patiently waited. And then Mike came in and he says, ‘Okay, we got it done, got the report here.' And I said, ‘I don't want to read it because I know it's all in legalize. I wouldn't understand it, so give me the thumbnail.' And he said, ‘Geez.' And I said, ‘Yeah, just give me the thumbnail.' And it's quite simple, 'cause most of you practice it already. All it is, to get at the taxes: one, it's got to be on trust land; two, you need to use your own money to put in the infrastructure; and three, it's got to be managed by an Indian. That simple. It is that simple. It's getting there that's not so simple, because then you have to have the resources to put in the infrastructure -- water pipes, sewer pipes, roads, street lights, traffic lights, law enforcement, court system -- you have to build all those. And there have been conversations around this all day long.

And so we embarked, and one of the, we started that project and then Mike came to me and he said, ‘Okay, now that we've kicked economic development off, now it's time to retrocede.' And I said, ‘Retrocede?' So he had to explain [Public Law] 280 to me. I said, ‘Oh. So now I've got to go down to Olympia to convince all those yahoos about Indian law and why they've got to retrocede.' And we did it. It took us two years, but we did it. We moved on. Our biggest problem was the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. They didn't want to have to sign off on it, because they didn't want to have to fund it. They were quite open. ‘If we sign this, then we've got to fund it.' And we said, ‘No, we're going to fund it ourselves. We told you that and we put it in writing.' But they said, ‘But you could come back to us and demand that we fund it.' We said, ‘Well, that isn't our intent.' Well, anyway, they finally signed off on it. So we got the retrocession. We start creating our police department and it's in place now. It's got 29 officers. This week we're installing our own E911 system. As you heard, the court system is up and running and doing quite well. We're getting a lot of folks coming in. We've had people from Afghanistan come in to look at our court system, from Iraq and a few other countries, just to come in and look at our court system. So it's doing quite well.

To finish off the Quil Ceda Village story, we had the BIA saying, ‘Nah.' Excuse me -- I need to back up a little more. We created the paperwork to create a federal city -- and as you know, back then there was only one in existence and that was Washington, D.C. Navajo has a city, but it was chartered for a totally different reason. So the Navajo were the first one to incorporate a city within their, under their tribe. It's their political subdivision. We went the extra step and we had to get BIA approval, well, [U.S. Department of the] Interior and IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and the Justice Department to get them to sign off. Well, we got Justice and IRS to sign off but the BIA just wouldn't do it. God, we argued with them, we fought with them, made many trips back. They just didn't want to do it. So Mike -- he's a great attorney -- he started looking at the structure of the BIA and what, primarily what was delegated down to the area and the regional offices. Guess what? Signing off on the city was delegated all the way down to Puget Sound Agency and she signed it. Not too long after that, that authority was revoked [and] sent all the way back up to central office. So I'm sorry, folks, you'll have the longer row to hoe.

So I set about putting in our infrastructure and the first thing I had to worry about was sewer systems. Well, I was negotiating with the City of Marysville and that was painful. That was really painful [because] that council -- they had five members -- four out of the five were purely anti-Indian. It was obvious. So I tried negotiating with them, negotiating, negotiating and I said, ‘Well, what would it take?' And their lead negotiator said, ‘Okay, you have to pay for 75 percent of the upgrades and we won't guarantee capacity.' 'Then why would I want to do that? I might as well build my own plant!' So that's what we did. We went and built our own state-of-the-art plant. I'm serious. It's state-of-the-art. This is membrane technology. The UW, University of Washington and Western Washington University, just issued draft reports we commissioned, but the output of our plant exceeds federal drinking water standards. That means you can drink it, but you can't get over the thought where it came from. So what we're doing, we're injecting it into the ground. We're irrigating with it and now, because of these reports, once we make them final and we get them filed with EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], we'll be able to discharge directly into wetlands and streams and rivers because we do no harm.

The reports show that this technology takes out all pharmaceuticals, including disruptors -- disruptors are birth control pills. Now a lot of folks say, ‘Well, tell everybody to quit throwing away their pharmaceuticals down the sewer.' That isn't the problem. Everybody has to pee. Pharmaceuticals do not break down in the human body. They just pass through. So we have to get it cleaned up. Because of this technology and what we've been able to do there at Tulalip, the City of Seattle changed their major bright water project over to that technology. We have cities in and around us that are changing over to that technology -- Jamestown S'Klallam, Ron Allen -- they're going to that technology and it's starting to pop up all over the U.S. We need to have more of it. We need to get technologies that we can put into individual septic tanks so that can get cleaned up so we're not putting it into the streams and rivers along with nitrates and a number of other things. That's an all-day subject by itself, if you want to know. And I've got five minutes to talk about my legislative life. Quil Ceda is doing great. We did all the work ourselves, paid it all. And those contractors that would not agree to our TERO [Tribal Employments Rights Office], we kicked them off the res. So you can do that. If they don't want to do TERO, tell them to take a hike. Then you go to the next lowest bidder. You get to write the rules, just follow the rules once you've written them.

So, my life in the state legislature. Everybody asks, ‘What's your toughest job?' My toughest job is serving two sovereigns and if, at the end of the day, if I did no harm to either, I've had a great day. I've had a great day. Now, the politics of the res and the politics down in Olympia -- my tribal elected and my fellow citizens, they ask me, ‘How is it down in Olympia?' I say, ‘Hell, I go down there to rest and kick back and relax.' They say, ‘What?' I said, ‘The worst politics is here at home. That's family politics. That gets nasty. And everybody remembers what your great grandmother did to so-and-so's great grandmother and it won't go away. But down in Olympia, who I'm arguing with right now, five minutes later he probably needs my vote on another issue. So he don't want to piss me off and I don't want to piss him off, or her.'

Going down there -- we have three Native Americans in the Washington State Legislature: myself, Senator Claudia Coffman -- a lot of you know, Nez Perce -- and the other one is Jeff Morris, he's an Alaskan. We had a fourth, but he lost his election last time. He uttered the hateful words, ‘I believe in personal income tax,' and it killed him. I've been successful. People like to label me the representative from Indian Country. I think I've proven [to] them that I represent all the citizens within my district. Within my district, Native Americans, the voting population is less than one percent, so I've got a whole lot of non-Indians to convince I'm the right guy for the job and I've been able to do that. I'm in the fourth term, my seventh year. Hopefully next cycle I will be unopposed so I can do something else.

I've been successful in getting a number of pieces of legislation passed -- tribal law enforcement, tribal history and culture, language, achievement gap study -- and now there's an implementation plan being developed and built on that. One of my peers last session, she sent me an email and said, ‘Look up bill so-and-so and tell me what's wrong with it.' So I pulled it up and looked at it and I said, ‘You're right, it sucks.' And she said, ‘Well, what's wrong with it?' And I said, ‘One sovereign is trying to tell another sovereign what to do and you can't do that. You can negotiate, but you can't tell them what to do.' And this was over fire district and what services were going to be provided and at how much. And what they wanted to put in the bill was the formula that the tribe was going to pay. And I said, ‘No, you just put in there that they will negotiate.' So that's what I do. I make sure no harm is done to either side. That's the toughest job.

I do have another sidebar job. I'm chairman of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators. It was started by Senator Fred Haney from Oklahoma back in '92. He took it for a few years and it kind of faded out because of lack of funding. Well, we started it back up in 2003 with money from Kellogg. When we restarted there were 23 Native American legislators. Today we're just short of 80. We have about 25 to 30 that are active in the National Caucus. Our annual meeting is next week in Scottsdale. There we exchange ideas on how to get bills passed or ideas for bills. And I'm also working with the National Hispanic Caucus, the National Black Caucus, and the Asian Pacific Islanders. We're talking about having a collaboration between the four of us in that, when we have a common interest piece of legislation, that all four of us walk up arm-in-arm on the capitol hill and say, ‘Hey, this is an issue, we need to take care of it.'

I still love working in the legislature. It was just kind of a natural thing. I was a tribal lobbyist and doing economic development and I just kind of fell into it. But I'm having fun and I love coming here and meeting, re-meeting all my friends here. Some of you guys -- the rest of you don't know -- Tulalip likes to do economic development studies. Well, Joe Kalt, Miriam [Jorgensen], Jonathon Taylor and a few others here have had to sign confidentiality statements with Tulalip because they know as much as I do and that's dangerous. So we do a lot of economic development studies and you need to also. If you're going to educate the public about you and what you're doing, you have to let them know what you're doing, because they'll sit back there and believe the lies and the untruths. So you have to educate them. Ready for your questions."

Honoring Nations: James R. Gray: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Osage Nation Principal Chief James R. Gray discusses what sovereignty means today through the lens of his first term in office under his nation's new system of government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Gray, James R. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium, Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"This is difficult having to follow what an excellent presentation you just heard. And I'm going to kind of steer not down that same road but try to talk to you more on a personal level -- what I think exercising your sovereignty is like as a tribal leader in the environment that we're in today -- and basically, just kind of maybe go through what basically a week in my life is like. I think this might give you some illustrations about how the exercise of tribal sovereignty is measured in moments, windows of opportunities, certain conversations you have with certain individuals, different institutions you interact with, your internal conversations -- with your staff, your departments, your programs, your employees -- your conversations you have with other institutions -- like our enterprises and our Congress and the Minerals Council. In all these capacities, whether you're doing this or not, you find yourself always wearing that hat. That you realize at some point during the course of your term -- the election's over, the confetti's already been swept away -- and you've now got that look on your face that Robert Redford had in the movie 'The Candidate,' where he looks at that guy at the end of the movie and goes -- he just won the Senate seat in California -- he looks up and he goes, 'Now what?' And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about is what happens after that moment. And realizing that I can draw upon from a lot of different experiences, just because I went through four years under a very federalized paternal kind of structure, to a transition of more of a modern tribal government exercising sovereignty in a way that's been very foreign to our own tribe for the last 100 years.

And so to illustrate that, my period as Chief of the 31st Tribal Council -- basically I had a ceremonial role. I cut a lot of ribbons, I made a lot of speeches, and I did a lot of 'grip-and-grins' -- as they call them in the newspaper business -- and occasionally I'll get to run the council meetings. Now the leadership that is expected of you in those meetings is that you have to understand Robert's Rules of Order and you have to run the meetings appropriately. The council that came in, came in basically attacking the previous chief. And I came in personally attacking the previous chief running for that position. After the election was over, we had the biggest wipeout in the history of Osage tribal government under that 1906 structure. And so I had eight people who were mad at me that just recently got elected. Even though it wasn't personal -- it wasn't mad at me personally -- they were mad at what the previous chief had done. And so they wanted to make darn sure that that wasn't going to happen under their watch.

So I paid for the sins of the previous chief by having a lot of my duties restricted. And so basically I was relegated to a very, very limited role in the tribal government, and realizing that the first thing they did was cut the salary of the chief -- who had a $70,000 year salary -- to getting paid $100 a day for running the meeting; and realizing that that was a huge hit to my family's income. I walked in the office one day about six months into my term and I said, 'You know, I used to run a newspaper and I still have an interest in it. And I'd sure hate to go back to writing news articles just in order to make a living. Because all I know is what's going on here at the Osage Tribe and boy, I'd hate to think that I had to spend all my time writing stories about my own tribe and about all of you nice people on the council if I end up having to make a living.' That next cycle, I got a $50,000 a year raise.

And then I started finding that there were opportunities where I could exercise a limited amount of my authority, given the formal and informal role that I had. The formal role not so much, but the informal role was that, as the person who got to run the council meetings, I was able to make a legitimate decision on who I would recognize to speak. And oftentimes I would have conversations with members of the council before the meeting would start about certain issues and topics that were important to them and things that I was sharing with them that were important to me; and recognizing that during the course of a meeting, like a conductor of a symphony, you can bring different elements of the conversation into ultimately leading to a decision without sacrificing any responsibilities that these individuals had. But just by sheer, the nature of the relationships that I had to build with these individuals -- because let's face it, I was the youngest chief the tribe had ever elected and everybody on the council was way older than me. And so first off, 'What's this young pup doing in here trying to run this tribe?' And then it was, 'You know, it's probably good. We needed some youth in the tribal government to kind of speak to some of the issues that are facing the younger folks.' And then it was like, 'You know, we really need somebody who can actually speak directly to the folks and start engaging the community in a way that none of us had ever done before.' This was...all this was going on while we were trying to get our legislation passed. And so over time there was a transition building.

In the last two years of my office in the 31st Council, I was able to orchestrate enough informal influence with the council that they started to follow my lead on very, very important matters. And as a result I had to bend a little bit, I had to bend a lot in some cases, on involvement of the tribal council in day-to-day operations of the tribe. I had to involve myself, let myself, just kind of, not get mad permanently over certain decisions that they wanted to make because they had their own agendas that they had to pursue. But eventually, I kind of relegated to myself to just standing firm on two issues. And these two issues I would not back off of, I would fight for every chance I got and I would use the power of the bully pulpit that the chief has to exercise enough influence within the Nation to be able to exact change. And I was willing to fall on my sword. Everyone who is ever in this position knows that there's a give and take that goes on in this business, but eventually you're going to have to have some bedrock principles you're not going to back off of. And in my case, one was government reform that I felt like was necessary. A promise was made. We had a mandate of change and we were going to see it through. And I was going to make sure that that was never off our radar screen the entire time I was in office. The second thing was to do everything I could in my power to insure that the Osages got a fair and just settlement in our tribal claims that we had against the United States for mismanagement of billions of dollars of trust funds from the tribe that was developed over the years from oil and gas proceeds. And so those were the two main issues that I really would not bargain on, I would not back off of. I just asserted myself in the middle of those two issues to the highest degree that I could. Because of that, a lot of all the other issues I was able to work with the council on. And eventually they all took control over issues like health and education and economic development and things of that nature and we developed a kind of working relationship as a group.

And unfortunately, what I'm speaking to is that, this was a federalized system of government that we had to endure that was imposed on us, like Hepsi [Barnett] said. It was not something that we chose. We did not choose to govern ourselves...historically we never governed ourselves this way. Yet we had to adapt, over a period of 100 years, that the personalities of the principal chief had everything to do with how effective they were; it wasn't because they had any formal authority, it wasn't because they were granted any kind of legislative authority or judicial powers. We had all three branches of government contained in the tribal council and I was the figure head that represented the Nation. And so imagine how happy we were when President [George W.] Bush signed that bill into law in December of 2004. And within 60 days I had a big party, invited the entire Nation. We had Osages that flew in from Egypt to be a part of that big celebration. At that particular moment, we issued out medals to all the members of the tribal council who had fought for this and who had lobbied with me on Capitol Hill to make sure that we got this legislation passed. It was a great day for the tribe. It was a great day for the Osage Nation because in that moment, we embarked on the process of government reform, which is when Hepsi arrived.

And so what I'm saying is that the period of time, where I actually held the title of Principal Chief of the Osage Nation from 2002 to 2006, was an experience that was just nerve-wracking, because you never knew when that rug was going to get pulled out from under you by the council at any moment. And any decision that council made was subject to having the rug pulled out from under them by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. At any moment, our world was coming to collapse at any given time. So it was this very nervous period of time. So in the process of building the constitution -- getting it ratified, having elections under it and swearing everybody in -- one of the more dramatic things that I experienced in that period of time was the oath of office I took in 2002, which believe it or not was the Federal Employees Oath of Office. That was the oath of office I took when I was elected in 2002. In 2006, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the Osage Nation and in that oath -- that was drafted by Osages, voted on by Osages and written by Osages -- and it was delivered to me by an Osage judge.

So a day in the life of an Osage tribal leader under this government is like -- I started my week on a Monday having a quick briefing with Hepsi, talking about the legislative agenda for Congress, preparing to deal with a daily response that we had committed ourselves to giving every morning no matter what happened so that we would always be on, not only just on the front end fighting issues, but we were defending ourselves against other issues that was taking place. Before noon we had broken out of that meeting and discussed how we were going to do that.

Then we went back and I had to sign a stack of documents about this tall -- contracts, travel requests, various other transition issues that place between the government and countries. And all these different things that's taking place that on a day-to-day basis comes before my desk for my signature. After a very short period of time of that, I sit down and visit with my scheduler for about half an hour, who goes over all the things I'm supposed to be doing this week. And she makes sure that if I want to change it, this is the time to do it because she's going to call everyone back. After that I go grab a quick lunch -- usually it's with my staff -- and we go over what happened in the morning.

After that I go back to the office and I realize that I have to be down in Tulsa because the Gaming Enterprise Board is meeting and they need me to help them go over one particular piece of their gaming plan of operation that they're going to present to Congress. So I run down there and I visit with them for a little while about it. We talk with the attorneys that works for the enterprises and then I go and have a quick meeting with the Gaming Commission, which is the regulatory body and I said, 'Are you guys satisfied with the plans? And they said, 'Well, we have some issues.' So I bring them all together and we sit down and we hash out the issues. They make the necessary amendments that everyone seems to be onboard. I leave that meeting.

I go to a meeting with our CEO of our Osage LLC and we talk about the new energy projects that are coming down from the federal government. I get on the phone with Tracy LeBeau, the executive director of Indian Country Renewable Energy Consortium. She gives me an idea about some of the things that's going on in Washington, D.C. We make a quick plan on how we're going to do it. She talks to me about the new meeting that we're going to be attending in Washington. We go over the details of that with my scheduler. I come back to the office, which is about an hour's drive from Tulsa.

I come back in the office; I've got a crisis on my hands. Congress is passing some crazy legislation that we have to fight them on. So we get busy and we craft a response and we give it back to our wordsmiths and me and Hepsi put the final touches on at the end of the day. Then I run upstairs and I talk to accounting because they're having problems with something that they can't do unless I give them the authority to do it. So I have to sit down with the treasurer and talk to him about getting it written.

By the time I come back downstairs to my office, it's the Associated Press calling because they want to do a story about a recent mound purchase we did in St. Louis. We bought one of our ancient historic mounds that had been left relatively undisturbed over the last 500 years -- or last 200 years since the Osages left St. Louis -- and they wanted to do a full-blown interview on that.

So when I get done with that I've got some Minerals Council people in my office wanting to know, 'How come you're not helping us with this election that they want to hold next year?' So I have to get in the middle of that issue and really kind of explain to them that, 'You don't have to have the Bureau run your elections anymore. Our election board is going to run your elections.' 'But we don't want the election board. We don't want Hepsi Barnett involved in it. And we don't want this. And...' And they all start going around and making crazy accusations and then I have to calm them down and spend some time with them. And realize that I'm not going to get resolution to this today. 'So it's just going to have to wait and you guys are just going to go beat yourself up against the wall and go run up to the BIA. And they're going to tell you that they can't do it because you're a sovereign government and you can run your own elections.' Well, they found that out yesterday.

And so while I was up here I was laughing at Hepsi. I said, 'You know, some of these issues, they take a while to percolate, but when they do, they hit the wall and then we're sitting here ready to help them.' But sometimes when they're not listening, they're just too angry and the passion runs high, reason runs low -- you know the whole thing -- it becomes real obvious that the idea of running that symphony that I talked about with the tribal council, I'm doing it with federal government, state governments, our own institutions of governance, our business interests, our legal interests, our employee issues. And just realizing that if you're going to try to manage, to operate a $200 million operation on a day-to-day basis, you better have some good people with you. You've got to have good people who are going to go to bat and bust through walls for you but, at the same time, you've got to be able to pull back and let issues come to you. That's the push/pull strategy of running a tribal government today, exercising the sovereignty; that without that, you'd be back there getting permission from the BIA to order toilet paper for your restrooms. And that's how far we've come in just a very short period of time. I know my time's up, so I'm just going to turn the mic over to everyone else, and thank you very much." 

Honoring Nations: Gabriel Lopez and Shannon Martin: Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Gabriel Lopez and Shannon Martin field questions from the audience about their nations' Honoring Nations award-winning programs.

Resource Type
Citation

Lopez, Gabriel. "Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

Martin, Shannon. "Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Vice chairman Lopez, I'd like to ask you a question. We of course talked a minute and heard your stories. Does anyone not get along with you anymore? It seems like you're able to strike MOUs [Memoranda of Understanding] with the city, with the private developers. Where are you still having trouble, where are your current battle lines drawn?"

Gabriel Lopez:

"I think it's educating. We have a lot of non-Natives that move into the area. We had, in Arizona we had our dove season. Many times what happens is we have new people that come into the area, don't know where the reservation starts. We posted signs, tribal, state, federal laws, trespassing signs. I can go back out, I usually ride, I'm an avid horseback rider and I ride out there after the season's over and I'll find cuts. People will come in, ATVs will go into washes, will come in and try to ride all over. And we try to discuss that with the city and let them know [because] they have their own city website to voice our concerns. And by a joint venture we're starting to work on that now. But also with other developers that are coming into the area and trying to educate them and having them come to the -- as a consultation with the community -- to voice our concerns and what we want. And like I said, we really don't want to hamper growth, we know it's coming and we have to handle it, we have to deal with it. But bring us to the table so we can voice our concerns. I think maybe that's what -- and I think that's what's working. But there's still a lot to be done.

For instance, Roman and I were over at federal EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] when the presentation was done back in Arizona, we were still on the battlegrounds fighting with the EPA there. It's an ongoing process, and we just need to stay up on top of that. And as tribal leaders, because when there's only a five-member council, we can't possibly get to all of them, so a lot of times we kind of rely on our staff. We'll hear about it and that's how the task force came out."

Audience member:

[inaudible]

Duane Champagne:

"Oh, back there."

Charlie O'Hara:

"...remarks about, particularly about the EPA and I think the EPA has this stovepipe kind of funding by media, which is totally inappropriate for tribes. For, I don't know how many, 15 years we've been capacity building under GAP [General Assistance Program], but there's no mechanisms for implementation. It's a really outdated system and it has to be changed."

Duane Champagne:

"There's a question in the back."

Audience member:

"I do have a question but I do have a comment as well. You want to talk about how to take over and utilize your natural liberty to enforce your -- a watershed council is a good example of retaking responsibility for your environment and just doing what you need to do. It's a great example. I'm glad that Pat's here.

My question though is for Shannon. How did -- what was the strategy or the argument when people would come to you from the educated side, academia, and maybe try to pressure you that you didn't know what you were doing because you didn't have the letters behind your name?"

Shannon Martin:

"Well, we continue to nurture, first and foremost, those professionals that do have the letters behind their name and keeping those as close to us as we can through consultative relationships. Our curator William Johnson and I, again we were subjected to some serious scrutiny during, throughout the whole course of this process. And that, because we didn't have the scholarship behind us -- as far as best practice in anthropology, archaeology, 'any-ology' -- our concerns and our process in working through those ideas and those methods with our tribal community council and elders, they were at various points dismissed by city officials, by the Genesee County Land Bank, [because] we continued to advise them throughout this process as to what they needed to do to mitigate. We even provided legwork in giving them two bids for archaeological consulting crews -- to come in and take care of the damage -- with the tribe overseeing and monitoring. But again all of that, of course, was dismissed because of lack of funding from the City of Flint and from the Genesee County Land Bank.

The unfortunate situation with HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] -- who has been a friend to tribes across this country in providing adequate funding -- is that HUD was slippery in this situation. They were at the negotiating tables within the first couple of meetings of this disturbance, but then soon realized that once the tribal council had imposed a cease-and-desist order -- that was going to be adhered to by the city officials and the Genesee County Land Bank, the landowners -- HUD pulled out of the project. They slipped out of it on a technicality, stating that the funding that was earmarked for this project, which was essentially the pouring of the basements, the cement basements, because that part of the agreement had not been reached, they then pulled their funding from the project. So in doing so there were these, City of Flint and Genesee County Land Bank didn't have to comply with historic preservation laws. So the court -- the tribe had no recourse to count on national NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] for their support, but more importantly, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation [ACHP] -- the Section 106 Law, which would directly implicate this process -- and HUD would have to provide funding to mitigate.

So the onus of all this coordination fell squarely upon the shoulders of the tribe. And an unfortunate situation is resulting in an unfortunate precedent-setting event. Because in doing so, and us addressing and putting together this proposal based on all of these individuals' tribal and archaeology consultants, and then the tribe bearing the responsibility to provide the funding for the mitigation, that precedence has been set in which -- we weighed that heavily throughout the process because we knew that on one scale was this precedence. On the other end of the scale was making sure we were respecting and doing what was culturally appropriate to take care of these ancestors at our cost. So now there are going to be some scholarly articles written on this, because the situation was just layered in complexity.

And we're fearful now, really, as a tribe that they're going to be private landholders. And if there is a federal undertaking that they're going to pull out of the project if there's an overt discovery. And who are they going to turn to be responsible to mitigate and to come up with a proposal to recover and rebury? The local tribe. And if that tribe doesn't have the resources that -- the Saginaw Chippewa fortunately has the resources to do this work -- that local tribe is going to have to possibly stand by and watch it just get bulldozed back in, without any respect or due process for the ancestral remains."

Josh Weston:

"Good afternoon everybody. My name's Josh Weston. I'm the chairman or the president for Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe who we started out the session with. I had one general comment to make and then I've got a question for the cultural portion of it.

I just wanted to add a little bit about the educating the public, the being able and willing to work with your local governments both tribal and city, state and federal has been and is continuing, I'm sure for most tribes, an uphill battle. And as far as I'm concerned we continue to try to address some of those problems and work through our differences of opinion. We're kind of at a head road with our project. Our chief is leaving us; he's the only one of two, well, three now. One of our members finally made it onto the tribal police department and he's leaving to better himself. So it's going to be an interesting discussion on how we continue forward. And we hope that both communities can come to some agreement on how we can make that transition, one way or another.

The second part of the comment or the question I wanted to ask was, in our area we have a tribe to the south of us that is having, has had problems with non-members into burial sites and taking artifacts and removing of the remains and that sort, in that area. And part of the problem is that they can't do anything about it. They can't hold when they report. It's kind of in an area where there's a [Army] Corps of Engineers and there's that no man's jurisdiction -- the tribe doesn't have jurisdiction, the state really doesn't have any jurisdiction, the U.S. attorneys don't want to prosecute it because nobody's gotten hurt to a certain extent. So they kind of fall into that huge void of, 'Yeah, we have to protect these people without hurting them and letting them take our remains away from those sites,' and then trying to go after them afterwards for bringing them home. So I was just wondering, had you had any experience with any type of that jurisdictional problem when it comes to -- do you have any -- was there any federal land in there where you kind of had some of these problems? And maybe if you could talk about that a little bit."

Shannon Martin:

"Not in relationship to burial site desecration on federal or state land, but we are currently addressing a sacred site that is state land. Because like many other states in the union, Michigan is [experiencing a] lack of resources and capital to maintain certain state parks. And there is a state park that is managed by three agencies, that's the Department of History, Arts and Libraries, the Michigan Museum Association and the Department of Natural Resources. The sacred site is the Sanilac Petroglyphs and it falls within the historic territory of the tribe. We have been carefully and diligently monitoring the site because it has fallen into neglect. Individuals are making their way into this petroglyph site that at one time contained over 300 distinct teachings or cultural etchings in our language, we call it [Anishinaabe language], which is 'teachings on stone.' These petroglyph carvings have been altered, they've been literally bore out of the sandstone site, out of the rock itself, and have been taken away. And we've been beginning to more urgently address this issue and insert ourselves, to call these agencies together and meet with us in tribal council, to place on the table, a management plan and/or a plan for them to turn this 274 acres, that contains the site, over to the tribe if need be. So we've been trying to compel them to, 'Let us manage it, let us take care of it. We have the resources -- and/or sell it to us at a fair price. Let's buy it and take care of it.' So that's one issue that we're currently working on because the site is so significant to the cultural and collective history of the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region. And the tribe is taking -- through our work at the Ziibiwing Center -- these proactive measures to begin calling together these different agencies and really trying to compel them to turn the management over.

And we're beginning to, we are going to work with Dr. Sonya Atalay, an Ojibway archaeologist out of Indiana University through a program, a project, a grant project called IPINCH, which is the Intellectual Property Issues and Cultural Heritage project, and it's an international multi-disciplinary grant that is being administered through Simon Frasier University in British Columbia. And our project specifically addresses the long-term plan and management of the Sanilac Petroglyphs, so that we can protect it and we can monitor it so that it doesn't fall under disrespect, vandalism and neglect. But as far as desecration of burial sites, that's something we haven't encountered on federal or state land, just private land."

Duane Champagne:

"Do we have any more comments? Here. Oren, in front here."

Oren Lyons:

"I want to make a comment on your opening statement about the wampum and protocol and governance. Rick Hill, from Tuscarora, has been doing a research project and is now into three volumes of transactions using wampum, the first 400 years here. And just to add some information to you that First Continental Congress, John Hancock, one of his first duties was to make a wampum belt. And that was the belt that he used for peace and neutrality. As they were getting ready to fight one another, we being the Six Nation Iroquois said, 'Well, look, we know your father and we know you.' And, 'Look at this as a fight, the father and son.' And, 'We don't think it's appropriate for us to be in on one side or the other.' And they said, 'Thank you, because that was going to be our second request. If you don't fight with us, don't fight against us.' And so that belt was made by John Hancock, as one of his first duties as president of the Continental Congress. And later George Washington also made a belt, 1794 Canandaigua Treaty, called the George Washington Covenant, is about a six-foot wampum belt with the thirteen colonies; and also...from our position, peasant from his position. And I just want to add that on because, just, if you think about it, here we are -- 1794, well into the new United States -- and they are still using wampum as protocol."

Duane Champagne:

"Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Duane Champagne: Government-to-Government Relations

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

UCLA American Indian Studies Professor Duane Champagne briefly discusses the history and importance of intergovernmental relationships for Native nations, spotlighting th Flandreau Police Department as a striking contemporary example.

Resource Type
Citation

Champagne, Duane. "Government-to-Government Relations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"One of the advantages of being on the Honoring Nations Board of Governors is that you get to choose to visit some of the sites as part of the evaluation process. And at one point in particular I and my wife Carole Goldberg, we were doing research on policing in Indian Country and there was a case that we had before the Honoring Nations Board, which was Flandreau, South Dakota. And it was an extraordinary case in [intergovernmental] relations, and I just want to give you a little brief overview of that as a segue into this topic.

Flandreau is [on the] Santee Sioux reservation, I think many of the Christian Indians from Nebraska migrated there sometime probably in the late 1800s and they established themselves in a town, which is now Flandreau, and the reservation and the town merged together over time. And the town was relatively small, as well as the tribe, and both the tribe and the town didn't have enough resources to actually form a police department. And the county of course had police, but the police in the county didn't do arrests or trafficking or any of those kinds of things. They spent a lot of time delivering various kinds of court orders and things like that. So that there was a big vacuum both in the city and in the reservation for police coverage and safety. And so what happened in this situation was that both the police and the reservation, a rather unusual alliance, decided to get together and organize a police department. What was rather unique about this was that the community was quite conscious -- the Flandreau community was quite conscious -- that the reservation had its own jurisdiction, had its own government, and so this became a government-to-government agreement. It was an agreement for a certain amount of period of time. The tribe could get out of it if it felt that it was not serving its purposes, but together they joined together to make a small police department, which in fact...one of the previous speakers actually -- Ken James is the chief of police there and actually was one of the Honoring Nations honorees from a previous time. I can't remember if it was 2006 or something like that.

And so I had the privilege of actually visiting and actually seeing this in action and seeing the relationships between the two governments and the respect that the police officers had for the jurisdiction for the tribe. If a person was in pursuit, if a police officer was in pursuit of someone -- a traffic violation or a crime -- and if the person moved into a tribal jurisdiction and the arrest was made in a tribal jurisdiction, then that case went to the tribal courts and vice versa. And so I find that as an extraordinary example that this seemed to be very cooperative, very efficient. It created certain synergies between both communities. Both communities got better police service, they combined their resources, they collaborated, and they respected both of their jurisdictions so that no sovereignty was given up by the tribe in this arrangement, but at the same time they got efficient service. And so I think that those are some of the assets of [intergovernmental] relations. It is efficiency, it's collaboration, it's honoring and strengthening sovereignty, because in these agreements you're recognized as a government and you establish that relationship. And once you establish a relationship like this police department, you can establish other relationships, not only with that government but with some of the other local governments. So we found that a very promising story.

Now, I'd like to say that those are all good reasons to establish government-to-government relations, but I'd also like to say that government-to-government relations are not new things in Indian Country, that these have been done probably thousands of years before the Europeans ever came, and there are all kinds of agreements and treaties of friendship that are made between tribes. And when the Europeans first came, the relationship that the Europeans have to the Indians is largely through treaties of friendship, that there's a very large number of these treaties, thousands of them that were negotiated in the early period. And what was really remarkable about these treaties was that they were negotiated under tribal etiquette, that the rules of negotiation were in fact done in Indian manner.

And in fact, some of those things, just to give you a little vignette, some of the features of those negotiations have actually become part of American culture now. So if you ever watch C-Span and you see a [U.S.] Senate committee or even the open Congressional seating and someone will get up and say, 'Well, the Senator from Nebraska has five minutes,' or sometimes they'll say, 'Oh, I'll give three minutes to the Senator from North Dakota.' And so that rule is derived from the colonial period. It derives from the idea that if a person is speaking, no one else interrupts them. Now that's Indian protocol in the negotiation of a treaty. The rules were that if a person's speaking, even now in Indian Country, no one else speaks while that one person is speaking. Now if you ever watch C-Span again and ever watch sort of like the British Parliament, there's a very funny but very interesting session where the Prime Minister takes questions. And there's a lot of hooting and hollering and all kinds of stuff that goes on. It's actually kind of funny and it's kind of raucous, but it's not the protocol that emerged from the way the tribal communities do it and in fact it has become the American tradition.

And so of course as time has gone on, the rules of the game, the relationships across the Indian communities in the very early period, in the 1600s, were in a position of power. And many of these treaties and things are actually recorded in the wampum belts say, of the Iroquois and other methods among many of the other communities, wampum belts as well as birch bark writings and things. So there is this long tradition, and I think in the beginning the rules are sort of Native rules, but over time those have changed in the world now, is that we're sort of working in the context of American negotiation, American rules. But I think that that's something that we should look at, because when we go to the negotiation table we should see that we are representing a certain culture, a certain point of view. And that may be alien to the negotiators, but I think that that's all part of the story of who we are. And I think that efficiency and cooperation are very important, but at the same time we want to sort of do it in a way that is compatible with our own culture. That making these agreements in fact is an old cultural way of managing relationships with other people, with other nations. But I would also like to say that and the reality is that it's not so easy to make some of these agreements and in many places it is very difficult.

Take the example of California, where the tribes have been very unsuccessful trying to make cross-deputization agreements with county and state governments. This probably has a lot to do with the history of California. I understand that North Dakota the same thing, even though it's a federal government, tribal government, often the outside police, the county and state police don't recognize the tribal police and that is in fact certainly non-recognition of sovereignty. And so California is a P.L. [Public Law] 280 state and so there's also controversy about who has authority. So that these negotiations -- I think people still continue to work on them and try to achieve them -- are not easy to do. And so whenever we do get agreements that actually work, I think it is quite remarkable.

And so I think we have a panel here today of people who've been able to make these kinds of agreements, and so we should pay particular attention because I think there's great benefit in making these relationships. I think it's also culturally something that is deep in Native culture, to have respectful and consensual relationships with other communities, and I think that may not be the context of the only reason to make the agreements now, there may be of course other reasons -- efficiency and things like that, and the Americans sort of have their own vision of how to make those arrangements -- but that's all to be negotiated and I think that's all part of the way that our communities have worked for many years."

Honoring Nations: Shannon Martin: Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways Director Shannon Martin presents a history of the Ziibiwing Center and discusses the work it has been engaged in since it won an Honoring Nations award in 2006.

Resource Type
Citation

Martin, Shannon. "Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"[Anishinaabe language]. I'd like to acknowledge, first and foremost, this land and the tribes that reside here and the ancestors of those tribes as we gather here and we bring all of our hopes and our blood memories and our ancestral peoples here to this symposium -- this wonderful opportunity that was provided to us by the Honoring Nations and Harvard Project staff.

So with that, my name is Shannon Martin and I'm the current Director of the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways. We are a tribally owned and operated cultural center and museum that belongs to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. Our project started through a grassroots initiative that was based upon addressing the newly enacted Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA]. And through that grassroots effort, a small cultural society was formed by those originating members. That cultural society was termed the Ziibiwing Cultural Society. Ziibiwing in our language means 'by or near the water.' And it was named to represent a historical gathering place of the Saginaw Chippewa of the region, there in central Michigan.

But through that work, the Ziibiwing Cultural Society began to identify repositories of tribal proceedings and treaties and other historical documents that were languishing in the basements and attics of former tribal council members and chiefs and leaders. So congruently, the work to address the stacks of inventories and of information of, items of cultural patrimony; those summaries were stacking up in the tribal government offices. The Ziibiwing Cultural Society began to address those inventories and [came] up with a plan to begin working towards bringing home ancestors through repatriation and disposition, and then also distinguishing that place to be the repository for the tribal archives and the tribal collections and treasures.

So from that humble grassroots beginning, the Ziibiwing Cultural Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways emerged and we opened our doors in May of 2004. So we have a short term of being a tribal museum. And we learned from some other established tribal museums and acknowledging their work and their reciprocity in sharing their information with us. In doing this work, Honoring Nations again provided us with those opportunities to create tools so that we can in turn be reciprocal and redistribute the information that we've acquired and best practice and what we've learned. So in that way, [Anishinaabe Language], the Harvard Project and Honoring Nations, for the privilege of being here today. In this presentation, I would like to focus on the work that we have been doing post-honors award.

At this exact moment, there's members of the Ziibiwing Center team who are mitigating the desecration of an ancestral burial ground in downtown Flint, Michigan. This sacred site was disturbed by construction activity in January of 2008. So this unfortunate situation has been complex at every turn -- from January 2008 when the [inadvertent] discovery took place -- we have come to find out. Through a series of meetings with the landholders -- who are a non-profit organization, an urban rehabilitation housing organization called the Genesee County Land Bank. We've been present at these meetings since that discovery with their representatives as well as the City of Flint -- because they were working in concert with the City of Flint. So we're sitting through a series of meetings, from January 2008 until this past spring, trying to come up with a mitigation plan and a resolution to the situation.

So in working through those complexities, our team discovered that there was negligence at many levels -- negligence that was taking place from the first assessment of the site, in which -- historic preservation letters are supposed to be sent to all of the federally recognized and state historic tribes in Michigan. These letters never made it to our offices. So there was some negligence going on between the federal agency, who is HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development]. They were providing some funding towards this rehabilitation project. They designated the City of Flint to be the federal designee and to do the work and be the contact. So between the City of Flint and the Genesee County Land Bank, fingers were being pointed at each other as to the mystery of where these historic preservation letters somehow vanished to. So with that, we came in at that point when the damage had already been done. And then the following consequences of that were that essentially, the Genesee Count Land Bank and the City of Flint expressed that they do not have, did not have the funding to mitigate the situation.

So these talks have been continuing since then and finally, this summer we have come to a proposal and a resolution. But the tribal council from the Saginaw Chippewa tribe has been actively involved in this situation since the get go. They supported the Ziibiwing Center team in letting us go down there to assess the situation when it first happened. And in an unprecedented event in their tribal history, the tribal council issued a cease-and-desist order that they presented to the Genesee County Land Bank in the City of Flint and which -- they honored that cease-and-desist order even though the tribe had no jurisdiction there. It was within the tribal historic territory but, with no jurisdiction, they still honored that cease-and-desist order to stop all construction activity at that site as we were having these talks, meetings and negotiations to mitigate the situation.

So on June 2, 2009, the Genesee County Land Bank and the tribe agreed to a mitigation proposal. That proposal essentially stated that the tribe would assume responsibility of coordinating this recovery and reburial effort, including incurring the cost to do this. So it was, the tribe was at these discussions, these negotiation tables, and the Genesee County Land Bank just wanted to bulldoze all of the dirt piles back into the ground and cover it up and reseed it. But through our assessment we just couldn't let that happen. Our team met with tribal attorneys, we met with the tribal council, we sought advisement from tribal elders. Because of the state of the situation, splintered ancestral remains and fragments were scattered throughout all of this dirt that was pulled from the earth. So mixed in with that, with our ancestors, was modern day garbage, trash, broken glass, old housing debris from the original structures that they raised and just an assortment of, what we've coined at the site as, 'Euro-trash.' So in doing that we didn't want to, we couldn't allow them to push the earth back in. So in that instance, we jumped into action and began to outline that proposal to mitigate the situation and tribal council voted on June 2 to advance that mitigation proposal. The Genesee County Land Bank and the City of Flint agreed to the proposal and we began to put into place, through a short time frame, a window of opportunity, the Ziibiwing Center was tasked, by the tribal council, to coordinate this effort.

So we began the recovery process on August 13. And through that recovery effort we are doing it at a low cost as possible; it's powered by volunteers, who are coming to the site daily to assist us. And then we have consultants on site; so we do have a credentialed archaeologist who's working with us on site to monitor the work and to provide the basic archaeological skill sets to begin sifting, for volunteers to sift, through the dirt. So we're looking at over 76,000 cubic feet of dirt that was pulled from the earth in four dugout basement sites; so it spans a city block. But there are four sites that we need to address. Splintered ancestral remains were, we have assessed that they're in every dirt pile, so we have to carefully sift through those piles and respectfully separate those ancestors from the rest of the unassociated debris. So the monitoring by the archaeologists and by field supervisors -- these individuals have stepped forward to provide that necessary expertise to us. They've been working in concert with us since this discovery and they are foregoing some of their own family and personal and professional obligations to help us and being at that site about six days a week that we are currently operating this recovery effort.

So in doing our work at the Ziibiwing Center, it can best be summed up by this quote. It's a quote from over 100 years ago that really resonates with our team. And this was penned by a journalist who was in Chicago by the name of Finley Peter Dunn when describing the purpose of newspapers. He said, 'In that work we must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' And at Ziibiwing we love to afflict the comfortable. The Flint ancestral recovery effort is doing just that. We are shaking the hallowed halls of various academies throughout Michigan, and I'm sure throughout the Great Lakes region, because this effort is beginning to attract statewide and national attention.

So in that, we are kind of being a lightning rod for unsolicited criticism and paternalistic overtures of assistance from professionals in the field -- archaeologists who would just love to come in and provide the necessary monitoring consultations with the end result that they get to take the goods home, the goods back to their university. So we're not letting that happen. Then the criticism comes and they're telling their colleagues in the 'Academy' that they should just bulldoze it back in. So that's their recommendation, since they can't be there to do the work the way that we want the work to be done. Now they're saying, on the flip side, that it should just be bulldozed back in with all the associated debris and contents. So in that work we're dealing with the criticisms and trying to shield as well the archaeologists and the graduate students who are working with us. One of the graduate students in a Saginaw Chippewa tribal member and he's at Michigan State University -- and his wife Nicole is also a graduate student there, too -- and they're our primary field supervisors. But they are catching a lot of flack, as well as the archaeologists; there's three archaeologists working with us. The Academy is criticizing their work; they're rogues. All sorts of attachments have been given to them and now they're seemingly being outcast within their own profession. And some of their colleagues have even called them up and said, 'Being a part of this project and working with the Saginaw Chippewa you are essentially ruining your professional reputation.' So we're working through those issues as well.

The Genesee County Land Bank, upon this mitigation proposal when we've completed what we need to do there, they would like to donate this land to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. So once we've recovered the ancestors -- reburied them and restored the land to meet our needs or to suit our protocols -- the tribe can then oversee and manage the land and take title of it so that that area can never be disturbed again.

And finally, the project is contributing to the tribal community in accomplishing cultural capacity and kinship building. Tribal members are being drawn to the site and are assisting daily. Many of whom expressed that they felt a need to be there, they just had to be there, they said. All ages of tribal members are working with us on this project. And this is the first time that many of them have expressed that they have wanted to be actively engaged within their own community, their own tribal community. One grandma who travels with us -- our staff -- almost daily, she said that she never really felt like she fit in her tribal community until this project. She works in the elements and in the hot sun with us carefully sifting and finding and recovering our ancestors.

I also have to acknowledge clients. We have -- the Ziibiwing Center has a strong relationship with the residential treatment center and the behavior health program. We've developed some curriculum based on the permanent exhibition within the center and we work with those clients once a week. Well, now that work has taken new life through this project. In that, the residential treatment center clients travel down to the Flint site about twice a week to assist in this effort. And they have said that working there, taking care of the ancestors, doing the physical labor, practicing spiritual protocols at the site has strengthened their road to recovery and has provided them with more spiritual connection to one another and to their own heritage.

So with that, that's the most pressing work, at this point, that the Ziibiwing Center has been doing since our honors award. I'd like to also mention some other defining moments in our work that includes the successful transfer, which will be taking place of culturally identifiable human remains. That claim was jointly done in May, this past May, with Central Michigan University in Portland, Oregon. So we are going to be bringing home 144 minimum number of individuals and 350 associated funerary objects that will be reburied on tribal land in the ancestral cemetery. We were also awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services, Native American Native Hawaiian Museum Services grant for fiscal year 2010 to develop our disaster and emergency preparedness plan so that we have those systems in place to protect the tribal treasures and to protect our human resources and visitor-ship. And then just a few days ago we were notified that we were awarded an award through the Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums for Institutional Excellence in Museums, which we'll pick that award up next month.

Other work that we're doing on a local level, working again with behavioral health, is that we're going to begin looking at developing curriculum that addresses domestic violence as well as Two Spirit history and identity. Many clients have expressed that their addictions and their struggle in their lifetime is due to identity issues. So we're going to help provide the context for that history and provide curriculum to behavioral health in that effort and we'll start instilling that history and that pride back into the community because of the imposition of, as we know, the colonizer and our views on that today.

I'd like to close by saying Miigwetch, first and foremost, to an old friend who's on staff, Misko Beaudrie. She was able to connect Audrey and I yesterday afternoon to members of staff at the Peabody Museum. And Sandra's here. Audrey and I met with Sandra and Diana this morning to begin talks of repatriation for nine ancestors that are currently housed here at the Peabody and their associated funerary objects so we're going to be putting together that road map and put that in place. We'd like to acknowledge the Peabody staff for making time for us this morning, so that we can begin those relationships here at Harvard and bring home our ancestors from this area that were taken.

So as we work together to repatriate those ancestors, our work still continues on being a place that comforts the afflicted in addressing multi-generational historical trauma, through exercising our cultural and spiritual sovereignty. And our work will also continue in afflicting the comfortable. So presenting our history, presenting our culture, protecting our intellectual and cultural property and infusing it all with our spiritual life ways,  again on our terms -- just seems to really afflict those who like to rewrite our history and tell us how we should be.

So Miigwetch to Honoring Nations for this recognition and this privilege for being here and to spend time with all of you these past few days. Audrey and I have just been commenting and talking about all the inspiring things that we've learned while we've been here. If you can, we have a few copies of this product, which was a direct result of our Honoring Nations award. We were able to publish and distribute a four-year report. In the words of the Video Professor, try my product."

Honoring Nations: Gabriel Lopez: Ak-Chin Community Council Task Force

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Ak-Chin Indian Community Council Member Gabriel Lopez discusses why the Community decided to establish the Ak-Chin Community Council Task Force, and shares how the Task Force works to protect the cultural and environmental integrity of the Ak-Chin community, reservation and surrounding lands.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Lopez, Gabriel. "Ak-Chin Community Council Task Force." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"...I'd like to say my name is Gabriel Lopez and I say good morning -- it's still morning back home. Good afternoon. I am currently the Vice Chairman of Ak-Chin Indian Community. It's a great honor to be here and to tell our story of the work that we're doing back home in our community. Just to give you a brief overview of our community, our community is one of 22 tribal communities within the State of Arizona. We are located approximately 40 miles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona, within Pinal County. Our reservation is composed of 21,840 acres, 14,000 of it is dedicated to [agriculture]. The community is governed by a five-member council. The community has 849 enrolled members. Eighty-five percent of them are still living within the reservation. For numerous years, the community has been located in a rural setting with an agricultural foundation, which continues today and will into the future. The issues impacting our community -- in October of 2003, the town of Maricopa was incorporated as the 88th city within the State of Arizona with a population of approximately 3,500. With this incorporation, progressed to a sudden urbanization due to the vast hyper growth surrounding the Ak-Chin reservation. In 2008, the population increased to 45,571 residents. From 2004 to 2005, there were 26 residential subdivisions that were constructed surrounding the community. Let alone in 2005, there were 17 City of Maricopa planning and zoning cases. Additionally, there were special requests such as improvements to washes, widening of highways, reduction of agricultural land that are beneficial to their development needs upstream and downstream from the community. These improvements would all end at the community boundary. In January of 2006, the community learned through Pinal County Zoning and Planning [department] and also the Central Arizona Association Governments of an additional permit use request to involve construction of a water reclamation facility, Campus Two. The community was not against the construction of the campus, but was opposed to discharge of effluent water within the tributaries -- the Vekol Wash, the Santa Cruz Canal -- which flow through the Ak-Chin Indian reservation. This facility would treat 13 million gallons per day at build out. Along with the wastewater facility, the utility proposed construction of four additional reclamation facilities located south of the Ak-Chin reservation. Campus Five would discharge into Vekol Wash at build out [and] would treat 22 million gallons. Campus Six would discharge into Santa Cruz Wash, Santa Rosa Canal at 21 million gallons of water. Campus Seven would discharge also in the Santa Cruz Wash and would treat 18 million gallons of water per day. Campus Three would discharge into Santa Cruz Wash at build out 50 million gallons. These residential developments and waterways improvement [could] potentially and negatively impact the community culturally, economically and environmentally. Some of the impacts of concern to discharge were the quality of water is stagnant, erosion, cultural impacts, judicial matters, [and] lack of monitoring or enforcement. With all the impacts surrounding the community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community Council in 2006 created a task force to investigate all development. The community council appointed members to sit on a task force. The task force consisted of cultural resources, environmental and planning departments, and at times [the] legal [department] and members of the Ak-Chin Farms board. The task force would review neighboring city and/or Pinal County planning and zoning cases. After review of these cases, the task force would provide recommendation to the council for final decision. The task force periodically would attend planning and zoning meetings in the city and/or state to provide comments verbally or written in various cases. The task force's goal is to protect and preserve the community's resources. Now, the city, county and state, private companies coordinate and communicate with the Community [on] potential impacts. The State of Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has recently changed their surface water quality standards to eliminate all new discharges into washes that transect into the community. The private utility company that proposed to discharge effluent water into our washes didn't. An MOU was signed and now [it] has become a friend of the community. Now the City Council and the Community Council meet on a quarterly basis to discuss upcoming projects and development surrounding the community. I know it's a short and brief presentation, and a lot of times what happens on a quarterly basis, we meet with the Maricopa City Council and our tribal council to discuss developments that may occur. A lot of times we have to go into MOUs because of all of the development that's currently around our community. We have to think about burial agreements, because it's -- what we say is we have boundaries, but it's the boundaries put up by the federal government, but they don't understand about ancestral lands which goes beyond our boundaries. Several years ago, about two years ago, Qwest was running a fiber-optic line from one community to another. It so happens that we have an understanding with the city that our culture resources [department] have monitoring individuals that stay and monitor there, but on that day the two that were monitoring, this trench had to go to training, but the company had their own archaeologist there, and it was about maybe two feet down that they actually kind of chipped, hit what they thought was a pot. So the cultural resources director -- she's female. Back home, what we do is when we deal with stuff like that, it's the men that actually go out and retrieve whatever we need to retrieve. On that day she called me and I got hold of my uncle. We went out to investigate and after further excavation, we found out it was a cremation. So it was still intact, we excavated the cremation, brought it back to the community and safeguarded [it] that way. And that way it worked. We also expressed to the City Council that any development that happens or occurs even with private developers, that we need that burial agreement because of such cases as this and what those mean to us. With this case, as I wrap up my presentation, I'd just like to give a quote as one of the elders had said at one of the hearings is that, 'We value the washes like Vekol Wash, which means 'great-grandfather' to us, it's because it gives us the beginning of our ancestors to provide water when it rains for our crops, for their survival, that's what got us here and that's who we are today.' Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Sarah Hicks: NCAI and the Partnership for Tribal Governance

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former NCAI Policy Research Center Director Sarah Hicks discusses the growth of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and specifically its recent initiatives to support the nation-building and advocacy efforts of Native nations.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hicks, Sarah. "NCAI and the Partnership for Tribal Governance." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"I want to start by just thanking you for allowing me to be here with you. On behalf of NCAI's executive board, our advisory council for the Policy Research Center, and our executive director Jacqueline Johnson Pata, we really appreciate the time that you've given us here today to talk about our work at the National Congress of American Indians, the work of the Policy Research Center, and in particular, a new initiative that I think is very closely related to the work that you're doing here and that I hope there will be some significant opportunity for collaboration on. So that's essentially what I'm going to talk about this afternoon. I've offered to try to shorten my remarks a bit so that I hope we can really get to the interaction. My hope is to present a bit of background information to you, and then to really have a rich discussion about how we might work together to accomplish this goal of our new initiative. So I'll talk a little bit about NCAI, about our Policy Center, and then about the Partnership for Tribal Governance, a new initiative that we're launching.

I know many of you are familiar with NCAI, but for those of you for whom it's new, I thought I would just give a quick thumbnail sketch. The National Congress of American Indians is the oldest, largest and most representative national Indian organization serving the broad interests of American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments. We were established after a national conference in Denver, Colorado in 1944 to serve as a representative congress of Indian nations -- a kind of United Nations of Indian tribes if you will. So we serve as a forum for consensus-based policy making, a place where tribes can come together for discussion and develop an opinion about what's in their best interest. We are the collective voice of Indian tribes. NCAI has a committee structure and we have staff that have expertise in various policy areas and we address a huge range of issues. Our agenda is large -- really everything that tribal leaders prioritize from health, education and child welfare to cultural preservation, natural resources management, economic development -- you name it, we work on it. In our small organization of about 25 people we do a lot of different kinds of work. We advocate on behalf of tribes with the U.S. Congress and administration, we conduct legal and policy analysis, we do research, we develop policy, we educate the public and media and we build tribal capacity through trainings and technical assistance.

Next I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Policy Research Center within NCAI, the center that I direct. But first I wanted to share with you a few quotes that really underscore the reason that our policy center was established. So the first quote is from a former councilman Eddie Tullis, from the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. And he says, 'Outsiders have researched us to death and the research doesn't even benefit us.' A quote from Dr. Stephen Cornell, our friend, director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, 'Data is political.' And finally, Chairman Ron Allen, from the Jamestown S'Klallam tribe in Washington State, says, 'Tribes need data to support their own self-determined agendas.'

So our Policy Research Center was established through the wisdom of our leadership at NCAI. At around the time of our 60th anniversary as a national organization, our leadership reflected on the challenges that they faced in making policy that really benefits Indian people. And they realized that they needed a new resource, a center that would focus on anticipating hot policy issues, that would impact tribes, work with tribes to prioritize those opportunities, and develop the information and data that tribes would need to make informed decisions on behalf of their communities. So our center was established in 2003 as a national tribal policy research center that would focus only on issues facing tribal communities. Our focus is on forward thinking, deliberate, proactive Indian policy development opportunities and the development of timely, credible information to equip tribal leaders to make good decisions for their communities.

When I tell this story about the history of our center, I think about the discussions that our leadership had as they deliberated about this. And it was really striking to hear these powerful leaders, some of whom have been serving their communities for decades, who are talking about the position that they're in to be good stewards of their community, to make good decisions on behalf of their community but without the adequate information to do so. And to hear the stories of people saying, 'We're making these incremental decisions because we're not sure what the impact will be and we're crossing our fingers, or we're praying, that whatever we're doing isn't going to have too bad of an impact.' It was really striking to hear the compelling rationale, the stories, their practical experience about not having the data and information they needed to make those good decisions on behalf of their community -- so feeling that heavy weight, that responsibility of being a steward of protecting your community, of doing things that benefit your community but without the appropriate resources, without the appropriate information and data to do so. So that was really the impetus for our center. The reason for our establishment was to help the tribal leaders to forecast those opportunities for policy development, to gather together the data and information in a credible and timely way, to inform tribal leader decision making, to really equip tribal leaders to make good decisions.

The vision of our Policy Research Center is to support Indian Country in shaping its own future. So we're a tribally driven research center, we have a tribally driven agenda. And we've taken seriously the need to forecast those opportunities for policy development, to get ahead of the curve, if you will, to help tribal leaders to think about the issues that are coming down the road in three years, in five years, to frame them in appropriate ways, to help think about scenarios and to inform their decision making with data.

Six years ago, our national advisory council directed us to take on four areas of work. We call them 'buckets of work' because the lines between these activities aren't always clear, sometimes they overlap. And I'm from Alaska so we like to use bucket analogies, but sometimes what's in buckets sloshes out, so it's not always neat and clean, but there are kind of four basic buckets of work that we think about. The first bucket of work is a clearinghouse and this is really about how we organize information, how we make it accessible. So we look at publicly available data, information that's already out there in the public domain, and how we can organize it in ways that allow tribal leaders to access it. So if you're going to testify on the [Capitol] Hill, you're going to a hearing -- there's a hearing next Wednesday about the impact of the 'silent depression' on communities of color. And so our executive director, Jackie Johnson Pata is going to go testify, on behalf of Indian Country. And so we're writing testimony about the impact of the recession -- we need to know about foreclosure rates, we need to know about the impact on small businesses. So where do we go to find this data? How can we put together the data that's kind of out there in the world, together in one place and organize it in a way that's most useful for tribal leaders, that allows them to access the information they need to make decisions locally, about their community on the ground, as well as about national policy? So we do work around this clearinghouse function. We have a web-based clearinghouse now and we're working to expand it continuously. So the intention really, is to make data more accessible.

The second bucket of work is about research support. And this is really support for the design of research and for analysis, for interpretation of data. And so we play a role -- sometimes with mainstream universities, sometimes with tribal colleges, sometimes with various other organizations, sometimes with tribes and tribal organizations -- but to really help support a function around research design and analysis. So to the extent that you have a research question, what are the best ways to answer that question given all kinds of constraints, time and budget and things like that? And once data is gathered, how do we aggregate, how do we analyze, how do we interpret data? So we play a role in research support.

Our third bucket is about tribal capacity building. And this is a really explicit part of what we do. We spend a lot of time at the beginning of research projects thinking about, what is it that we're going to leave in the community when we go? We're invited to a community, we come there to help with a particular project, but from the very beginning we're deliberate in thinking about what kind of skills, what kind of expertise, what kind of equipment, what kind of data and knowledge are we going to leave in the community once we go. So this is really about building the skills, the experience and the infrastructure to help tribes collect and analyze data in whatever ways they think are appropriate.

And then our last core bucket of work is something that we call a 'think tank' -- and I'm not sure that we're entirely happy with the terminology here yet, I think it's kind of confusing -- but the basic idea behind this, as our executive director says, is that we have the conversations that no one else will. And what we mean by that is that we serve as a forum for small groups of tribal leaders to come together to talk about politically sensitive issues that we know have the potential to have a dramatic impact on our communities. So we could think about a number of them right now. We could talk about citizenship. We could talk about per capita distribution policies. We could talk about off reservation gaming. We could talk about genetics research. There are a whole variety of issues that are significant to Indian Country and that tribes may have varying opinions about, varying experiences with, but we don't often have a forum to come together to talk about these sensitive issues in a real way -- to talk with one another intimately about our experiences, about the potential impacts of those issues and about options, policy options for dealing with them in our communities -- because there are many issues where if we don't deal with them ourselves, we know that the federal government will intervene -- where there's a perceived vacuum around policy making, the federal government will intervene to develop policy. And so, if we aren't developing our own policies, if we aren't making sure that county and state and federal governments know about the policies that we're developing, there's a real danger there. So how can we bring people together in a comfortable setting, in a way to have real conversations about these issues that could dramatically impact us, to really think about policy options? So those are the four buckets of work for our Policy Research Center.

Now I'm going to turn to the initiative that I mentioned earlier, our Partnership for Tribal Governance. I want to give you a little bit of detail about this, I'm going to spend a little bit more time on it, but I'm hopeful that at the end of my talk that this is where we can really focus our attention -- that we can have some discussion about this. And in particular, just to kind of give you a warning, I'm really interested in your thoughts, in your sense of how you might be involved in this work. Before I came here, I thought about who was going to be in this room. And I was really thinking, these are people who are on the cutting edge, these are the thought leaders in Indian Country, these are people who are engaged in their community, who are trying new things, who are learning from their experiences. And the question really is, how can this body of work that we're proposing support you, support your efforts? And how can you, in turn, contribute to this?

So Sherry Salway Black is here somewhere. Thank you. Okay, in this front table here, thanks. So I want to acknowledge her. The work that I'm going to talk about is some work that initially came out of our Policy Research Center -- some research that we did in partnership with the Native Nations Institute -- but Sherry is leading this work now. So I'm going to talk a little bit about it and then in time for our discussion, Sherry will come up here and join me so that we can have a fuller conversation about this. So let me tell you a little bit about the history of the project.

The Kellogg Foundation gave us a grant in 2006 to engage tribes by region to talk about their ideas and experiences with governance. And this interest from the Foundation, grew out of their own reflections about the effectiveness of their grant making and desire to know more about the appropriateness of investing in governance -- this foundation, this basis governance -- as opposed to investing in specific programs, various programs at the tribal level. They were really trying to understand the impact of their grant making and think about where they could have the greatest impact, how they could best support tribes. And NCAI, from our perspective, we were really interested in this conversation and were ultimately willing to take on the project because we were simultaneously receiving a groundswell of questions and resources, requests for information from tribal leaders about strategies for strengthening institutions of governance. So it was really this confluence of events. On the one hand, there's this foundation, asking us for information and asking us for our opinion, asking what we think about their grant making focus. And on the other hand we're receiving this demand for information from tribal leaders, who are very interested in what's going on in other communities and how they can learn from it, and what technical assistance providers are out there, what kind of resources are available. So it was really the confluence of these events that led us down this path. And so we took on this project with the goal to visit the various regions of Indian Country and to convene people to have a conversation about a couple of key questions. And the questions that we ultimately chose to talk to people about were these. What does tribal governance mean to you? How is tribal governance different today than it was historically? What do you want institutions of tribal governance in your community to look like in 30 years? And what resources are necessary to support the vision that you have?

So once we'd thought about this large project and began to plan for this work, our first step was really to recruit good partners. And that led us straight to the Native Nations Institute and our colleagues Dr. Stephen Cornell and Miriam Jorgensen -- who are really natural partners for a number of reasons. They have a long history of responsive and responsible research with Native communities, they have a prestigious international advisory council that is actively reflecting about governance challenges, and then also, of course, they have experience convening tribal leaders to talk comparatively about governance and about governance reform. So they were certainly natural partners for us.

(I'm thinking about what I'm going to cut back. So, I was going to tell you a little bit about how we set up the conversations. I think I'll just jump to some of our findings.)

So between September and November of 2006 -- the Policy Research Center, NNI and regional partners -- we partnered with regional intertribal organizations, convened 11 forums to gather information from elected tribal leaders, professional tribal staff, intertribal organizations, elders, youth and native citizens. So it was really a broad audience, broad stakeholder group, that we were trying to bring together. And in total almost 300 people, almost half of which were elected tribal leaders, participated in our forums that we entitled 'Strengthening Tribal Governance.' So as I mentioned, we sought regional perspectives. We were really interested in regional differences. In addition to the regional focus we also focused two sessions specifically on youth. One session was held with our NCAI Youth Commission and there was another session that was held at Arizona State University with college students there.

So our findings from this work -- At the end of our data gathering phase we were really surprised, I would have to say, about the strikingly consistent themes that we heard all over the country. When we traveled to Alaska and talked to folks from rural villages there; when we were in the Great Plains talking to non-profit leaders; when we talked to youth, middle school and high school students at NCAI conferences; it was amazing that the same themes continued to emerge. And there were four primary themes that came out of this work, four areas of focus, if you will, on future activities, so I'll just mention them briefly. There's a strong interest in governing systems reform. And what we mean by this is constitutional reform, code development, court strengthening, those kinds of activities. There's a real interest in citizen engagement, both how do governments engage citizens as well as how citizens approach government. There's a theme around leadership development, both building the skill set of current leaders. So how do we help our current leaders to acquire new skills as well as thinking about our future generations and how we build the capacity for leadership there? And finally there was a theme that, unlike these three first themes -- which are kind of internally focused, things the tribe itself could do -- there was a fourth theme which was complimentary but external to the tribe. There was a strong theme around public education and media education. And so there was a strong sense among tribes that no matter what we're doing in these other three areas internally -- We can be doing really great work, but if the public, if the media aren't educated about tribes' governance, then we're still losing ground on some fronts. So how do we use that intervention point to help strengthen our own work?

So with my three remaining minutes, I'm going to tell you quickly about some of the work that we hope to do in the future, because again I really want to hear from you how you can imagine working with us in this framework. So just to summarize the work of the Partnership for Tribal Governance going forward, I would say that there are three main aspects. The first is something we called investing in the movement. So we see this work to strengthen governance as a movement. We see, it's happening in pockets all over the place, there's more and more enthusiasm, there's more interest in this. So we really are seeing kind of the building of a movement to strengthen governance. And so, when we talk about investing in the movement, we're thinking about financial investments, technical assistance investments, training investments, in tribes themselves, as well as thinking about the array of technical assistance resources necessary to support them. So what role might regional intertribal organizations play? What role might experts like the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project, who've been doing this work for years -- who have a lot of resources already that tribes would benefit from, having more readily available -- [play]? How might we think about the array of resources that we know of, that are already part of our network, as well as reach out to other resources that we may not even necessarily know about yet? So how might we build that field by investing in the movement? The next area of work combines a few components that are really about bringing together policy makers, practitioners, researchers who are focused on aggregating what we already know -- making sense of all the data and information that's already out there -- prioritizing what we still need to know -- so a policy research agenda -- and then building the infrastructure to expand this work.

So I mentioned there are certainly people who are already doing this work. We don't think that we're new to the game here and that we wrote the book on this and this is the be all and end all. Really a lot of this work is about organizing what's already out there, helping tribes to make sense of it, helping them to navigate it, helping them to make good decisions about resources that can really be beneficial to their communities. So we really think about how do we enhance, how do we organize, how do we expand the infrastructure for this work around strengthening tribal governance? And so this would include things like knowledge management, technology platforms and applications, communication, education and training -- so a whole variety of components you can imagine there. And then I'll just mention briefly the learning and evaluation partnership.

So in addition to supporting work on the ground, we are very interested in a more systematic way of gathering information, and making sense of information, about what's really happening. So we've been working with NNI and others to develop, what we call, an action framework. We were strongly advised -- maybe I could say -- not to call it a theory of change, but to call it an action framework. So now we talk about action framework. But we've developed this action framework, which is really a backdrop for a series of tools. We've talked about developing some assessment tools, we've talked about planning tools, and we've talked ultimately about evaluation tools, and we're talking about real time evaluation here. So as tribes are taking steps, as they're implementing pieces of this work, how is it that they're getting feedback about how things are working? How is it they're processing this information, deciding about other appropriate strategies to try? And at the regional and national level, how do we aggregate these experiences in ways that make it easier for other tribes to decide what will work for them and to try to take some of the same steps?

So I think that learning and evaluation partnership is really critical. And so maybe I'll just end with that. I think my time is up so I'll just say [thank you] for having me here. And I'd really love to hear your thoughts and certainly, further questions about what I've shared. I'd invite Sherry to come up here with me in case they're really tough questions. And thank you for your time."