Michael K. Mitchell, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 2)

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Native Nations Institute
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In part two of his Indigenous Leadership Fellow interview, Grand Chief Michael Mitchell of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne touches on a wide range of nation-building topics, notably the importance of clearly defining the distinct roles and responsibilities of leaders and administrators working on behalf of Native nation governments, and the need for leaders to refrain from micromanaging the day-to-day activities of Native nation administration. He also discusses the need for Native nations to invest in the education of their people, and then to provide them opportunities to contribute to those nations onc they have completed their education.

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Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 2)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

"This is our second interview with Chief Michael Mitchell, the first Indigenous Leadership Fellow of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. What I'd like to ask you about next is this question about defining moments. We see across Indian Country in the work that the Native Nations Institute does these defining moments where Native nations essentially say, "˜Enough is enough. We're tired of the federal government or the state or whoever, whatever external force it might be dictating to us how we're going to run our nation, how we're going to determine our future and we're going to take charge.' And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about when that moment came for Akwesasne and what that moment was."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"It wasn't long after I had become Grand Chief that I began to notice that the [Canadian] government has their hands in everything. Anything you want to know about education, health, social, housing, you had to ask somebody from government. That's how it was set up. And they had a system in place and the reporting system was directly...the final say always came from them. The other thing I noticed is there was a huge deficit within the community because they didn't have control of their budget. They couldn't forecast to the way that would be to the satisfaction of the community.

So probably within the first month, I got a pretty good reading and I went and secured a meeting with the Minister of Indian Affairs and I told him, "˜In my opinion, the people are not involved in the governance.' In theory, in literature, in all the stuff they write, governance for the people, but the way their system works, everything is going back to them. So the big thing for him was this, "˜How do you deal with this deficit?' Because the day that I got elected they sent in a guy from Indian Affairs to come down to Akwesasne and he said he had two mandates. One was to run the election because it was...elections were run under the Indian Act and Indian Affairs conducted the elections. The second was...he says, "˜I really came down to lock up your administration buildings because of this humongous deficit.' So this is what the Minister and I were talking about. He looked directly at me and he says, "˜How are you going to deal with that deficit?' I said, "˜I'm going to deal with it by setting up a whole new management regime. And in this regime, I'm going to separate the politics from the administration. And the second really depends on you, Mr. Minister. I want you to recall all your people and I want to hire my own people from the community that have the skills to do the administration. We'll set up a transparent governance system.' And I guess it kind of surprised him because he says, "˜You think my people are responsible for your deficit?' I says, "˜Yeah, you are. You don't give a damn how funds are allocated and if it's...they're always short of their goal. They never realize that there's no satisfaction then people don't care. People that come down from Indian Affairs to service the community, they don't care. It's not their house, it's not their school, it's not their roads.' I says, "˜You need to involve people in governance who are going to have a direct involvement in impact, they're going to be impacted by what you do.' And curiosity they say killed the cat, but this man says, "˜I never had that question posed in that way before.'

So he gave me a year. He gave me a year to put all these things in place. We're considered a large reservation and once he gave the go-ahead and pulled his people out, then the rest was up to us to try to find people to come home. They were either working in Washington or Syracuse or Ottawa or Toronto, Albany, New York City, but I had a list of people and I started phoning them up and, 'I'd like you all to consider coming home and let's do something for this community.' And it was a challenge. I made a plea to find the right people and they all came back. They left their jobs and they took time off and they moved home and we had a team, I'd say a core team of about 20 that head up all the different departments and in a team meeting you ask, "˜What is it that we have to do that hasn't been done before?' Well, for one, the people don't get information on what council's doing. They don't know your deficit. So we set up to give quarterly reports and at the end of the year an annual report, very carefully put together that deals with almost every aspect of governance, with stories that went along with it. But in the beginning, we also asked people to, from the community, to get involved in the governance and help us. So they got on various boards from the health board to legislative to justice, police commission. These were all things that weren't there before so they were new. That's what the adventure's about. Not dealing with the government, but dealing with your community because the authorities came from external. You have to look at what has to be done to get people interested in their governance and we thought of different ways.

Within the first few months, we made a community flag for Akwesasne and we put that in all the schools, just to put our identity in the community. And there already was in existence a nation flag for the whole Iroquois Nation. So we made a community flag to fly alongside the nation flag and beside Canada's flag. And this is when I went to the customs and all the government buildings and I said, "˜I want this flag flying alongside.' And it did a lot to stir up involvement, interest, pride and along the way, very early, we started changing the name of the St. Regis Band Council, and as I said a while ago, we... everything was "˜band.' And it was done for a purpose, not many people think about it. They say, "˜I'm from the Ottawa Band' and 'I'm from the Chippewa Band.' Over here they all say tribe, it's the equivalent, but it's a government terminology. But they forbid you to say nation and in my meetings I says, "˜Whatever happened, we were once nations. We belong to a nation.' So I started using that and nation thinking and in the community people, even the chiefs along the table that were veterans, "˜We don't talk like that.' I said, "˜I know, because the government trained you not to talk like that.' Anyhow, we made a game of it. We decided that we're not going to use the word "˜band' in the community anymore and had nothing to do with our finances but it had everything to do with pride. And so there was no more 'band office,' there's no more band programs,' there's no more 'band administrator.' Everything...it went around the table, everybody kicked in with ideas and I says, "˜Well, that's...all these things is what we're not going to say. We're going to give new names.' "˜Well, what about the St. Regis Band?' "˜Well, we're going to change that. Our traditional name is Akwesasne and we're a territory, we're not a reserve, we're not a reservation.' So with everybody's help it became the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne. It just grew.

Some of the older ones on council that had been in the system for a long time, they didn't kind of like go along with this right away and it's hard to deal with a mentality that has been there and they left it up to me. They says, "˜Look, you've got to find a way that we all go in the same direction.' Well, I wasn't about to tell somebody older that, "˜You're saying things wrong, your terminology is wrong.' So we made a game. Put a coffee cup in the middle of the table and said, "˜In our council meetings, anybody that refers to anything in the community about Band, if you say that, you're going to drop a quarter in here.' And they said, "˜Why?' I says, "˜That's just to remind you not to say it.' So when it became a game, it removed the tension, it removed the threat of direct authority. "˜Okay, let's do that.' Pretty soon, even when I'm not there, they were watching each other and months later they all had it, but I didn't realize that it influenced the program and service department and so they did the same thing and they're catching each other and everybody's laughing. Nobody's saying, "˜You can't tell me that.' And then they said, "˜Well, when government people come to see us, they better address us the right way.' Now they're growing in confidence and so whenever we had to meet with external governments, Department of Indian Affairs and provincial governments, authorities, etc., they sat at the table, we explained to them, "˜We don't want to hear that anymore and so if you say that, you're going to start donating.' And to everybody else on the table, "˜Yeah, [you] better do this.' And we would catch them. But attitude changed. The mindset changed. You start looking at your community differently. And that was the positive part. But trying to pull everything together that the staff would think different, that your council would adopt a different attitude, you've got to think community. So that was some of the initial things. It's still going on 20 some years later, just introduce new council members and they tell them, "˜These are certain things we want to watch out for in terminology. They're going to...external government's going to come and talk to you, you better watch for these things,' and all. So I'm noticing...and then it affected community members at large. Nobody says "˜band' anymore in the territory. If they do, if you say it inadvertently, somebody will catch you. That got everybody pretty well thinking on a collective basis.

Now going back to the governance part, we started having more public meetings, put out a newsletter to report on council activities and in the first year, any issue that was controversial, "˜Okay, let's go have a public meeting.' And mostly it was me going to the community saying, "˜This is what you need to know.' There was a big turnaround and leadership; Indigenous leadership goes in different format. Some are accustomed to doing things in a closed manner. The secret to success is you start opening up and report what you can. And as I... I'm explaining this because there are some things like let's say social welfare. Well, you don't have a public meeting about somebody... what they're going to get for welfare, if they're going to get a social job of some sort. So there's a need to keep confidential and we tell them, "˜There's things that we can't tell you but there's things we can.' And people understood that. After a while they would ask questions because in a community you're wide open, they'll ask you anything and that's why a lot of councils don't like to have public meetings. We have a radio station in Akwesasne and I make full use of it. Any kind of announcements, put it on the radio. Want to report something about a meeting, get on the radio. Get that information out there. And soon after it became settled in, that that's what leadership was about. It's subtle, it's not any secret or it's not any formula that's magic, it's just common sense and you see the turnaround in the community when they recognize the sincere efforts leadership is making."

Ian Record:

"Well, I think too, from what you're saying, they get on board, they jump on board that nation-building train when they feel like they have stake in it. Finally, after all these years of having no voice in governance, they have a voice again and the leadership is working with them to make sure that that voice is heard."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, in the training I can offer this. There's always opposition, you always have opposition no matter whether you're well off or you're the poorest, and once they get an opportunity, people in the community, that they have a voice, you're always going to have a few that's going to be at every one of your meetings and they're going to grill you, and I've seen a lot of that happen. Most of the time you'll see people that all of a sudden, "˜Geez, I can ask questions. I'm going to come to the next meeting.' So in the leadership training, you have to know how you're going to address them but always make time for those people who come to the meetings who didn't get a chance to ask a question, because if it comes up that they feel somewhat of elitist themselves, they start hammering the council members and that's what a lot of council members are afraid of is, "˜I don't want to get hammered like that. I don't want to get insulted like that. I don't want to have a shouting match.' Well, you don't have to and now it's ingrained in leadership that you owe it to report your activities as a leader and they're not going to go back to any more closed-door sessions. And that's what separates good leaders from bad leaders is their willingness to say, "˜This is the way it's going to be.' And for young chiefs, young leaders coming in, sometimes they say, "˜I got elected to have more housing here and that's what I'm going to do.' "˜Well, I'm sorry, but there's 20 other things that also has to be done for this. We've got to worry about the roads, we got a lobby to our new facilities, there's a lot of other areas of responsibility.' "˜But I got elected on...I made that promise I would improve that.' You're always going to run into that.

So how you get people on side back home...it was sort of a tradition with the Head Chief that everybody went to him. Well, on council we have 12 district chiefs. Everybody was assigned a portfolio. If I'm going to go look for money and I take a portfolio with me, whether it's education or housing or economic development or justice, policing, whatever it may be, is that I don't have to take the whole council. I'll take the portfolio holder, I might take the staff, I might take an elder from the community and we'll go out for a few days to deal with the meetings. We bring a report back of those meetings, the results of those meetings, and then council deliberates it. And everybody has always to be ready to go out. So public speaking becomes a requirement. You can't just sit on the table and say, "˜Well, let him speak.' You have to learn how to present; very important to be a leader that you can stand up and make a report, deliberate, talk to government, be a public person. If you weren't that when you got on council and you're only going to do that one thing, you better think different. And that's what makes for good teamwork because now you're part of a team. And in the council makeup, they all have to think like that. This is a team and it's not just the council that's a team. Your team extends to your administration, to your staff. It also extends out to people in the community, that you're going to see that they're going to be able to...that we're part of this layers and layers of team and we're in there somewhere. They all have to be able to have an avenue to talk to leadership and that's why you have meetings and different portfolios. Anyway, it's...a lot of it was common sense. A lot of it was based on tradition.

One of the things that really didn't work for us, and it wasn't working when I became chief, was the term; we had two-year terms. And most tribal councils, chiefs, councils both in the States and in Canada, you'd be surprised, they still operate that way, two-year terms. And then you hear them, "˜I just got used to how I'm going to be developing, how I'm going to contribute to council, I have an understanding...' Boom. Time to have a...go back on the campaign trail. 'I've got to make a lot of promises, I've got to spend council's money.' How do you maintain a certain level of responsibility? How do you keep a level of your target that you want to hit, not this year, but you've planned that for three years, five years down the road, because you're going to have to have a joining of other ideas, other funding sources, so it doesn't happen right away. So what we did is we wanted to get out of Indian Affairs-controlled election, and so very early we opted out to develop a custom community election. And for the most part of that first term they went door to door and sat with people. And they had a discussion and I told them why a two-year term is not working under the Indian Act and if we opted out, do you want to see a three-year term or four-year term, a five-year term and also you had all that, people were commenting and at the end they settled on three years. And if the leadership is good, we can always go back, because now it's ours, if we want to extend that to four years the community will decide that. So we kept telling them, "˜It's your decision.' And then we had a massive vote after the first term and they brought it home.

Now back home there's a traditional side and they don't vote. So we got a letter from their council, the traditional council, that they liked the idea that we would bring an elected code, election code back home that would belong to the people, no longer controlled by government. And so those people who are always protecting, filing injunctions, "˜I want to go to court. I should have won. I want somebody to hear this. That guy cheated,' whatever it is, fine. We now have our own court, file with them. Matters will be decided here. If the community sees that you're way out of line, you'll also know about it. And so this is how our justice system became important to us, our courts became in handling these kind of situations. Now all of that is important. There's no one magic formula. It takes a combination of ideas to get people involved and that was some of the things that was done back home."

Ian Record:

"The title of this program is 'Leadership for Native Nation Building.' If you had say 10 minutes sitting down with newly elected leaders or young people, young Native people who are thinking about getting into a leadership position somewhere down the road in their lives, contributing to the nation building efforts of their own nations, if you had 10 minutes with them, what would you tell them about how to be an effective leader?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I would tell them that language is very important. We've had two generations of external forces telling us we've got to get an education. "˜Your language and culture, tradition is not important.' So we're the end product. Young people now don't speak the language anymore so they're not aware of the traditions and then there's elders and there's community and there's people that all has steps. If you're going to be a leader, always support the culture and tradition of your community. And the wisdom that comes from the elders in the community, when they give you support and they recognize that you're going to be respectful of your traditions, then support comes and follows after that. And don't be a person who is going to talk it, but don't walk it. You have to show community...and you do it by a number of ways. If you don't speak the language, then try to say the most important things. In my language it's [Mohawk language]. "˜Hello, how are you, how are things going?' And you learn the basics and let people know that those are the first things that you're going to offer back is culture, tradition, language. Know the history of your community, know the history of your nation, because you're expected to know that if you're going to be a leader. Know it well. If there are things you haven't learned from the dances to the history to the songs, then support it. They don't have to be all that instant, but it certainly helps to support things that are Native. And there are times when you have to speak out, learn how to speak well. And if you can't speak in your own language to your own elders, you're going to hit a bump right off the road, so communication. And the most important part isn't coming from Harvard or some other place and come home, "˜Now I'm going to be a chief because I got a degree.' The most important thing is what's in here, what's in your heart, what's in your mind, because that's what's going to go out. And within six months, people will know what kind of leader you're going to be. If you're dedicated...

The chief that got elected for saying, "˜I'm going to get more housing,' there's a set thing in place that's already pre-decided what you're going to get. Unless you have a magic wand or you've got a lot of money you can throw to the community and say, "˜Here,' it requires teamwork. On any issue it requires teamwork. So you have to work with different people, you have to work with your staff. Don't bully the staff. They know what they're doing and you're going to need their help to pull things together, to plan, to write a proposal, to write a report, to prepare a strategy of what you're going to say when you get out there. Don't be ashamed to take your staff with you when you have to travel somewhere, you have to negotiate something or you have to sell something. And that teamwork is very important. We had a leadership course just a few days ago and I heard one example after another, staff's not respected, they don't listen, and then they're polarized. Secret for success for new chiefs: recognize the abilities of people that are there.

And the other thing that's always important, especially for the younger ones, for some reason reservations right across the country, territories on the Canadian side, small or large, we all have our enemies, we all have people we don't like, so don't take that with you if you're going to be a leader. You have to serve all the people. You have to let them know by your decisions that you have looked all over and you have served them well. It might not reflect right away but people will know that you're going to be a leader that's going to be for the community. Not just your family, not just your friends, not just the faction that you belong to or the people that say, "˜We got you in.' But when you're in that spot, make sure you're speaking for the whole community and expressing thoughts of the whole nation with respect. You don't go to school for that. They'll teach you...elders will teach you to have that kind of respect and so always have respect for your elders. Know the way to the temple of your nation, how far the way things are going because you can spot them. You don't have to be a politician to know there's factions, there are Hatfields and McCoys almost in every reservation and as soon as you get on, make sure that you pronounce yourself, "˜I'm here for the community.' And they might not like it, but by your decisions people will have respect for you.

The ones that say, "˜I've got a certain thing I've got to do here and that's all I'm going to do,' most times they will last one term, maybe two terms and that'll be it. Or they'll leave, they'll exhaust it because a lot of frustration, if you're going to look at things in an individual basis. See, everything with us is a collective. We're a collectivity. I don't know if that's proper English, but that's how I look at it. Sometimes I make up my own words in English, but our treaties have to benefit the collectivity of the nation. Our rights are for all of us, not just an individual, not for you to say, "˜I'm going to make money off my right,' because I see a lot of that happen in my time. You have to ensure that the benefits are equal. That's on any given subject -- opportunities for education, opportunities for employment, a vision for education, for a school, for an arena, for recreation, for elders -- but it's the collectivity and that's the mark of a young leader when he sees that, that's the nation I'm thinking about."

Ian Record:

"You've talked...you mentioned this chief from your own nation who kind of came in on this campaign platform of housing, "˜I've got to get housing for the people,' and was kind of taking that narrow view of what his job was essentially. In the work that the Native Nations Institute does cross Indian Country, we see...we see this mentality that often incoming councilors have, incoming chiefs have, of "˜I've been elected by the people to make decisions.' And that's kind of the extent to which they view their job and when it's really much more than about, "˜I've got to make all the decisions, I've got to have my hand in everything.' From what you've been saying in terms of what's really powered nation building at Akwesasne, it's a much broader view and a much more multi-faceted view of leadership in terms of what leaders have to be in order to serve their people and their nation."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Don't be ashamed to say, "˜I got stuff to learn to be a politician and I might take the first six months and learn my leadership craft well. I need to consult with more established leaders, I need to talk to the staff, I need to go seek feedback from community people, from elders.' You spread yourself out there and tell them you're not here to make decisions right away, because if you don't know what kind of decisions you have to make and you're making decisions, it's liable to be wrong, it's liable to be selfish and it'll come back on you. So give yourself a little bit of time to know what people...what things are in place and what people are feeling, what's on their mind. And for a good leader, he'll always go around the first six months of his term and listen. And it's not a crime to stand up and say, "˜I've got a little bit to learn here and I see some chiefs here that have been here for awhile. I know some people here that used to serve on council and I'm going to make sure I learn my craft well.' You get a lot of respect in the community if you can say that. On the other hand, yeah, I've seen the ones that pounded the table, say, "˜I'm here, I was elected, I'm going to make decisions.' "˜Well, you go out there and you look for money then.' "˜Well, the staff should be doing that. I'm going to tell them to go.' It doesn't make for that teamwork building that you're going to do. You might be mean, you might be tough, but six months down the line, people can't stand you. So what do you do after that? You're always on the outside because now you isolated yourself. So be a team player when you come into leadership, the most important thing."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned earlier this issue of when...essentially the crux of the defining moment of when Akwesasne really went down this nation-building path was when first of all you took control. You said, "˜We're not going to let these external forces dictate to us how we're going to lead our lives,' but then you did this important institutional step, which is you said, "˜We're going to separate politics from the administration of our governance.' And essentially what you're talking about and it relates back to this point of leadership, which is leaders can't micromanage. It's not an effective way to do things and achieve our priorities and our goals and objectives. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit more about first of all the importance of that, separating the politics out of the administration of tribal government. And then second, what kind of message that sent to the community."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"You know, the sad truth that sometime in the history of leadership, could be any community, you're going to have leaders around the table who have come from the staff, who have come from some program, who have come from school and have moved back home and that now they think they know what it's going to take and when they sit around the table, that's when you start hearing, "˜I'm going to go over there and I'm going to do this. I'm going to make sure that I'm watching that guy. I think that's not being done right, I'm going to be going over there and making sure that gets done right.' You're not a leader anymore and the word is micromanaging when you do that. If you catch yourself and you say, "˜I shouldn't be doing that because if I'm going to be a leader, those people can report. I can ask for a report to come in, I can look at it, as a council we can look at it, see how things are going,' but if I'm going to stand over the shoulder of somebody who's going to say, "˜I want to see what you're doing,' that's micromanaging. If there's programs that you have an expertise and that could be in any capacity, finance, you're over at the finance every other day watching. "˜I'm going to be watching how you're spending money.' That's not what you're elected for. People want to see you make decisions and they want to see you do things that are going to benefit the community at-large. Read those reports, look at and be able to write reports, make sure those reports are going to be going out in some way that's going to reach the community. But when I meet leaders, that's the biggest complaint, members of council, somebody's always in there, running over there and it's sad, but we have to appreciate in all walks of life you've got people coming back either from a job outside and they're home a little bit, they run for council and because they don't like something or they come home from school and they say, "˜I want to get on council here because now I have an education, I'm better, I know more than anybody. I got a degree, I got something.' And that usually triggers off the wrong message and certainly you don't intend to be a micromanaging chief, but ask yourself six months down the line.

Now what do chiefs do then? If you let the staff do the administration part and let the people do the finance part, they know the system, you direct that to say, "˜We will expect a report on this,' and you'll have it, but you no longer have to be running over there, chasing after people, looking over somebody's shoulders. You now have time to look at the politics of your community and start doing...analyzing the reports that are coming in, do some forecasts, do some three, five years, 10 years, 20 years. Where do you want your community to be in 20 years? That's a good leadership question. And how are we going to get there, what is it going to take for us to get there? What kind of population would we have then? So what kind of infrastructure are we going to require down that line? Because we have to start planning. Community planning is very important. So there's enough to do for political leadership not to be running over there. There's always people on every council that's going to be like, unfortunately, but that's a fact of life. And the more that people can be groomed and told and kind of guided and given responsibility, it slowly turns around. Sometimes the chief, the veteran chiefs will say, "˜What in the hell's the matter with you? Get down away from there.' Or it could be them that's always going over there, but the general council has to be aware that good planning requires good teamwork and good planning will get you down that line when you have a vision that you can look further down the road where you want your people to go. Because if you only got about 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, then work with your staff that's going to say, "˜Where are we going to be forecasting 10, 20 years down the road?' Then you can start planning.

We've got things that affect us from the outside. It could be anything from the state, it could be from the town, from the municipalities. You could be trying to create good relations with them, it could be defending a land claim and how are we going to use that. There's an endless amount of things for good leaders to sit around and say, "˜Boy, we've got a lot of work to do.' You don't have time to be micromanaging. Unfortunately, though, it's very particular...I guess it impacts most councils, because I hear it a lot and on one hand it's sad and on another hand it's a fact of life and so when you can recognize it, if it's you, if it's your council, all you've got to say is, "˜Let's not go there. Let's not get into that rut that we know is going to happen.' But unfortunately, somebody comes from a teaching background and they're going to be on council, so right away they say, "˜I'm here to make sure that those education...it's going to change over there. I'm going to be going over there and I'm going to be watching them,' or some other. You've just got no time for that. Good leaders start from the day one and they ask, "˜What are the things that we have to be concerned about?' And teamwork works best."

Ian Record:

"You and I both know that the governance challenges facing Native nations seem to get more and more complex from one day to the next. And what it sounds like you're saying is that teambuilding as you've mentioned several times is not just a goal, should not just be a goal, it's in fact a necessity if a nation's going to really move forward in an effective way. The idea that essentially councilors can't do it all by themselves anymore."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I tell you why I like the word 'nation building.' You live on the reservation, you could be Lakota, Sioux, you could be Cheyenne, whatever nation you belong to, but there's seven, eight other communities that you belong to the same nation further recognizing you're not the nation. So you look at that and say, "˜But if I'm in a nation-building mood,' and I would always consider the whole nation first, 'I will impact for your benefit the nation. I will do things and make efforts to bring goodness and pride to everything that we're going to do.' Selfish thinking is, "˜Well, what do I want to get out of this in my time? What can I do for myself?' So nation building prepares you right off the bat that if you're going to be a nation leader, you have to think of everybody and the decisions that you're going to make has to impact for their benefit.

Leadership on a nation basis is that collective thing that I was talking about, it impacts the general benefit and it's the general interest of everyone out there. And it's not easy because nowadays we're like this: Some people have a casino, they've got good revenues coming in, good streams of revenues, they lease land, they've got good income and capacity building. You can have that very important ingredient in between that calls for good leadership mind, that's good planning. But let's say you don't have any of those things and you don't know where all your money's going to come from. Can you still have good leaders? So we're here and we're here. Yes, you can. And I think the true test of a leader is when you don't have all those things and you set those goals, you set those targets and along the way you find, yeah, there's something over there, there's a little bit over there and there's a little bit over there and as you collect them and as you develop teamwork, all of a sudden things start to move. But if you're a council that's going to be arguing all the time and those arrows are flying back and forth and sometimes it lands on your back, most cases it might happen, it could come from your community, it could come from your council, it could come from your staff, but the true test of a leader is to consider the farther, greater majority and do some community planning.

If you're shortsighted and it's that same guy that's going to say, "˜I was elected to do this,' well, it isn't going to happen. And we've seen it too many times in past events that they come and go. But there'll always be a spot for people like that and it's up to the other council members to influence them and say, "˜Here, we've got a lot of things, you're welcome to come and work with us and let's share some of this responsibility,' because portfolio, you may be the head of education, but other chiefs may come and help you with that. You may be the head of justice, but you can have another group that's going to work with you. It's not a one-man operation. Nor is the...sometimes you call them the Grand Chief or the Head Chief, the 'big chief,' whatever people would be referring to, it's just a man, it's just a woman and got a lot of responsibilities and for the Head Chief, he's got to hold everything together, he's got to make sure he's not the king, he's not the queen. It's a responsibility that is shared and that's the secret to good success."

Ian Record:

"From what you've been saying, Mike, one of the keys to Akwesasne's success over the past 25 years or so has been instilling transparency and accountability in government where none essentially existed before. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the importance of transparency and accountability to empowering a nation's leaders to do their jobs well."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Sometimes a chief will feel he's got to do everything so that he can get the credit for it and he'll want to have hands on personal charge of something. The secret to good leadership, if...let's say you are that person that can do it well, you can speak well, you can write well, you can articulate, then pull other people in with you. And the staff, there's got to be somebody in that particular area that you're talking about that will fit. You introduce the topic and allow for other chiefs to contribute, allow an elder or a staff person to be part of that team, because if you want to do everything yourself and you think that's the only way it's going to get done -- unfortunately that's very true with a lot of our people -- it doesn't always work because your own team will begin to feel like, "˜Eh, he's a big show-off. He's a know-it-all. He's the only one that can do it.' You're not part of that team and sometimes we don't see that. You go home thinking, "˜Boy, I sure gave it to them. I sure made a good speech. Boy, they must have liked me for things that I was able to say,' while in reality they probably said, "˜That guys was hogging the whole...wasn't a team player and he spoke way too long and he's very selfish in his attitude,' etcetera. So you have to analyze the situation and put yourself in the place where what do you want to do with the gift that you have.

The elders will say when you're born and as they've been watching you grow up and they put their hand on you and they say, "˜I saw you dance, you're going to be a good dancer. I heard you speak.' And as you're growing up, they'll say, "˜You're a good hunter. You have a gift.' And as you grow up a little bit more they'll say, "˜You're a good speaker. You'll be a good leader someday.' Use those abilities well. They didn't tell you that you're going to be the only one speaking. They didn't tell you you're going to be the only one singing because it requires everybody to sit together to make good music. It requires you to speak well and blend and carry people and work with them and that will resonate, that will have strength. In Iroquois teachings, when the Peacemaker came to the Mohawks and when they were doubting his message, he gave them one arrow and he says, "˜Break it.' So that Band councilman, he just crunches it and throws it back at him, show him how strong he is. He turned around and he took five arrows in a bunch and he says, "˜Now break this one.' So he's there trying to break it and it wouldn't break. The message that he was telling him was when you have people working together, when you have nations working together, the restraints there and it won't break. So these are things that are taught to us to say it's far better to concern yourself in working on a collective basis, working together, achieve your goal and if the nation has to fight on issues, it's better if we're all on the same side and going the same way. If we can't settle that, then we don't go fight. We manage to settle it at home. Make sure that by the time we get done we're going to go in a certain direction. So those are all important things to know."

Ian Record:

"How important an asset has an educated community been for Akwesasne as it's moved down the nation-building path?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"What's that?"

Ian Record:

"How important an asset has an educated community, an involved community, been as Akwesasne has moved down this nation-building path?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, we covered it a while ago. It's easy to regress. When leaders...you have to allow for leadership to change. In my 25 years there were times when I left and made room for others to try it. Some will last a year, maybe they won't even complete their term but they will say, "˜That's a tough job.' But you always room for people to learn. Some are members of council. "˜I'm going to try that.' And then you appreciate how difficult it is because it's not that it's so difficult, it's what you do with it when you're there and how do you involve people and get them working together because if you don't do that, then those micromanaging minds come back again. And so with us it goes up, it goes down, it goes up. And when you have people that are fairly new, you're always going to have that problem because they're going to look at what they do well. And they will always say, "˜We need a lot of training. We need to know the issues.' But some will say, "˜We can't, we can't, we can't let people know we don't know a whole lot so we're not going to invite anybody. We're just going to drift in and we'll watch the house.' So nobody goes lobbying, nobody goes to meetings, nobody negotiates, nobody takes on the hard issues and you get to the end of the term, boy, the community says, "˜Geez, they didn't do anything here.' "˜We didn't have a crisis, we didn't get into any trouble.' "˜Yeah.' "˜We didn't go too far either.' So there's another change. So to me, it's always nice to see a blend of experienced people, new people coming in, elders, young people coming in, and with that blend you can do a lot. So I'm not going to say...and the reason I was a little stunned by your question, we're not in any degree in Akwesasne up here. It goes up and down and you learn as you go along.

I'll talk a little bit about my community. This long table, if you separate it in half, that's Akwesasne. This side is the United States, this side is Canada, and you separate what's on the Canadian side to two-thirds is in Quebec, one-third is in Ontario so that's five jurisdictions on the outside. Then you have a tribal council for the American side, then you have Mohawk council elected government on both sides. You have a nation traditional council that governs in a traditional way. So there's three governments and five governments, that's eight governments. I always think of the community, do they understand everything that goes on? And try to get as much information out. So it goes up and down and we have our share of crises because of all those borders, it's inviting for criminal organizations to say, "˜Ah...' There's the St. Lawrence River -- let me clarify -- right in the middle of our territory and for policing authorities, it's a "˜no-go' zone because these borders, the international border zigzags around islands so the law enforcement is virtually impossible on the river and people hear about that and so they take advantage of it. And people come and entice our young people to say, "˜Take things across for me and you'll make some money.' So it's always a battle to have a law-and-order society. It's always a battle to keep your young people on line.

Educated? Young kids will say, "˜Why the hell should I get an education, I'm making $5,000 a week?' Years ago, it's still going on, the greatest pride was for a high steel worker. "˜I work in New York City, I work in Philadelphia, I work in San Francisco.' Anywhere there's a big building going up, there's Mohawks on there. That's our skill. And we all aspire when we're young that that's, 'I want to be like my uncle, like my father, like my brother.' So that's the thing that's still ongoing. But now this new thing has come in that has influenced and it's not just cigarettes any longer. There's drugs going across, there's guns going across, and so it's becoming a real dynamic criminal activity and there's major players on both sides. So leadership is hard. It's hard to stabilize; it's an ongoing battle. Having said that, then knowing all that then you say, "˜Okay, well, what makes for a good leader, then?' It's all those things that you have to apply. And people go in and they say, "˜Well, that guy that got elected to look after the housing issue?' There's guys that went up on council to look after the smugglers, protect them or some other issue, and he winds up on council.

So it's...leadership is tough and it's as best as everybody else is going to work together and keep things moving. And it might be that someday be down or it could be just as hard for other leaders on other reservations, it's never easy. Historical, current, future leadership, Native Americans, never easy; but what you do in your time to be a leader, you leave a mark and if you want to leave your mark and if you've been on council a long time, how do you want that people to make their mark? It's nice for them after you've left council, people come up to you and shake your hand and say, "˜I'm really grateful that you've come home and dedicated your time and there's things that we see here that you've contributed to,' and you feel good inside. Or you can be selfish and say, "˜Well, I did my thing. I got some houses there. I did my thing and that's it,' and you have this empty feeling. So it's a lot of work, it's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes there's hardly any pay or very little of it so devotion as a commitment comes into play."

Ian Record:

"Your discussion just now brought to my mind a comment that one of your colleagues, Chief Helen Ben of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, once said. She said that, "˜My job as a leader is to make myself indispensable.' I'm sorry, "˜To make myself...my job as a leader is to make myself dispensable.' And really what she was referring to is how important it is for leaders to govern beyond their own term in office or their own potential terms down the road, however many terms that might be, to really govern for the long term. And you've talked about that. I was wondering if you'd talk a little bit more about that and how that should be foremost in a leader's mind."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, when you work with your staff and figure out where you're going to be in 10 years, 20 years down the line and you start planning for it and you say, "˜Our population is going to double in that time and so we need infrastructure, we have to build new roads and all, we've got to allot some land, we've got to have a community center expand, our school programs, our buildings are going to have to expand so we have to work for those things.' After you leave, whether it's one term or 10 terms, but those are the kind of things that people will be grateful for, that you've had that wisdom and you'd had that long sight to say, "˜We've got to look at the future as well.' It is so important for leaders to gauge the present and where they came from, to where they are, to where you need to go. And if you're in a community where you have neighboring reservations and you can work together on something, not compete with each other, but whether it's solving a land claim, having an arena you can share, or a justice system you can share and the more things that you do, it extends beyond where you live. If your cousin, relatives are close by, there's eight reservations and you're all the same nation, then do that long planning, "˜What could we all do together?' Because maybe as a result that the collectivity of all those territories, it might be 40,000 and then in your planning you say, "˜Well, what do we need for 40,000 now?' So maybe we need a judge that's going to be trained or a number of them that'll be able to go around and hear cases for all of us and then we can all have a justice system, we can all have our court system, we can all have those laws that'll be for our people to provide for that law and order. But on my own, "˜I've only got 800. I can't afford to do that. But if we all chip in, what could we do?' So when somebody says, "˜I dispense myself to this community and to around,' that's what I see, the ability to well, work on issues from your community to your own region, your own area to national and international because you can go to a national chiefs meetings, National Congress of American Indians to Assembly of First Nations and you get to know the issues. It's always time well spent. What are the national issues that are affecting us? And to have that experience, to know it well and before you go, what are they talking about over there. So I'll just do a little bit of reading to know what's all the stats in regards to education, what are the funding, what are the national housing dollars, health situations and if you don't have it when you go up there, make sure you go around and you ask for that information so you can bring it home. Knowing data, have information on the national trend. Even if it's how many of our people make up the prison population? How many of our own people are dropping out of school, suicide rates? A leader needs that information because wherever you're going to go talk, you have to be able to quote statistics. You have to be able to know how we're impacted. Know the other side, too. A lot of our people are now going to school and graduating. A lot of people are now coming home. They're our doctors, they're our lawyers. Well, how many is that? How many from our area? What's the national trend? Those are things that leaders have to know, it's good to know to have in your pocket so that when you're talking to a government person on the side and he says something, there's no greater satisfaction if you can put him in his place with statistics. But if you know what you're doing, it'll certainly help."

Ian Record:

"So essentially what you're saying is it's critical as a leader to know your community and not just know it well and systematically, so you know for instance what problems and challenges your community faces -- whether it's drug use, alcohol use, whatever it might be -- but also on the flip side knowing what your assets are, knowing how well educated your community is, who those recent graduates as you said are. That can be critical as you try to apply those resources towards what your goals are."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"That long-term planning is knowing how many of your children are going to be coming back from college, university, having...all this time, how many are in a certain level and their career planning and you reach out to them. "˜Don't forget, we'll have something in place you can come home to.' The saddest part for all of us is that we have nothing to offer them when they get an education and the other sad story is that they graduate and they keep going and they say, "˜Well, there's nothing for me at home. So I'm going to marry off the reservation, I'm going to live off the reservation and I'll still maintain...I'll come home once in awhile,' and you get disconnected. So maybe not here, but maybe that other reservation needs a doctor, needs a lawyer, they need something. That's why I'm saying, make sure that on a collective basis you know what your stats are, what your numbers are, and where people are going and what they're learning and amongst yourselves create that team. The team isn't just around the council, isn't just around your community, it's your whole nation and even beyond and knowing the organizations that are out there. Could our children land in some institution, some organization that they could work for that would still benefit us, because they're always just a little jump to come back home."

Ian Record:

"Really what you're describing, and we see this in so many Native communities on both sides of the border, is this issue of brain drain, where your best and brightest young people go off, get their educations and then when they finish there's no opportunity for them. And what we've seen is where leaders, where nations do the due diligence of creating stability in their nation, stability in their governing systems, it tends to foster those opportunities where those young people can then come back and become a part of the community again and not drift away."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Yep. Let me point a few things out from experience. This is for young leaders and I'm thinking, "˜Well, I want to be a good leader, what should I do?' You get on council, get a list of all your students that are out there in college, universities that are far away from home. Write to them, tell them you're on council and get their thoughts, get their opinions. Tell them, "˜Your council would like to know and they'd like to keep in touch.' You don't know how it impacts a student that's far away, that's going to keep going unless somebody goes out and say, "˜Hey, I care and we're thinking of you and we're hoping that when you get an education, we hope during that time you're getting an education that you're going to maintain contact with us.' And it's never a bad idea for leaders to go and visit the schools where their students are going to school. Activities. Those students will probably have, if there's a bunch of them, will have some kind of a Native student activity going on. Leaders should go to those things. We only look at the statistics. How many people we lose, not dying, not suicide, not drugs. We lose our nation members because when they get outside and they learn and they don't want to come home because we haven't maintained contact with them, we haven't kept in touch with them, we haven't told them we care about what they do. And so they marry off, they marry somebody in the city and then they come back home and they say, "˜Hey, you're not one of us anymore.' And all those other things start coming into play. So the wisdom of a leader is gauged not just what goes on in his community, but with the youth and what is going to impact them down the line and that connection part. Sometimes we only concern ourselves when a person comes home and they're married to a non-Native. And it's, "˜Ah, damn it, they have no rights here. They just want our gaming revenue, they just want our education fund, they want our status.' And nobody maintained any contact and that's not exactly a welcome home. There's elders around and we haven't made that connection. So there's all kinds of reasons, pros and cons, but isn't it better to be proactive and maintain contact and tell them...your young people you care and give them that traditional and cultural and spiritual support so that they value who they are and they know who they are and that they will come home?"

Ian Record:

"And also creating the opportunities for them to come home, to follow those careers that they went off..."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"You want to be a good leader? Well, let's see. Let's build another school, a higher level. We need teachers now. What about our health institutions? We need our own nurses. We need our own doctors. That's the challenge of being a leader is what institutions can be facilitated and be homegrown and communications with your young. If you trained for this, there's something for you at home. And then when you do those things, well, then somebody's got to build those schools, somebody that's good with their hands has to build those schools so there's jobs at home, so a lot of community development."

Ian Record:

"Where we've seen this issue of brain drain really rear its ugly head is when you have a high level of political instability, meaning one administration replaces the previous administration and the new administration fires everybody and they put their own people in and very soon the message is clear to everyone in the community that -- and particularly those that have gone off to get their education -- if they've come back, they've invested their education, their skills in the community and suddenly they're out of a job. They say, "˜Why am I going to stick around for this?' We see that so many places and I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. You're starting to laugh I see."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Man, I've seen enough of those. I guess I could cry. You feel bad about seeing those things. I've seen them at home. Fortunately, it's recent past and as we develop more, there's less and less of it happening, but it still happens and attitudes like that. And so nowadays you always have to have a balance from the youth and family and elders in the community that is going to have to say, "˜We need good leaders.' It is who you put in, because the ones that get on and unfortunately somebody has an idea, he might either buy his way on, he'll garner the votes, he'll get on and he'll take the community to a certain direction. I look at it say, "˜Well, it goes on, it's like that all over the world. You have leaders of nations that are like that but why do we have to be like that?' And I guess it's just dialoguing, it's just communicating. When you give an example like that, you tend to turn around and say, "˜Not my community, we're not like that.' And you get home and you say, "˜Well, we were like that five years ago. This council's like that but do we want to be that way.' It's a lot of thinking, a lot of soul searching and when you hear of things like this, you tend to think of your home community right away. "˜What are we like over there? How much of this nation thinking goes on at home?' And that's the most important message. And it's controlled a lot by the people that don't even have that recognition or the thought that, "˜We're the ones that are in power here.' And we could take them out of power if they don't behave. But they don't go vote, they don't want to get involved. They're sick of the way the leaders are, but they don't do anything. So it's a society thing. But those thoughts have to be transmitted and I always try to go to the younger ones that are saying, "˜You can impact it. You can go home and...' "˜Well, there's nothing to go home to.' They say, "˜You ought to see my leaders where I come from.' Well, then, how about changing it. So I've heard all the different views, I've seen a lot of situations like that and sometimes I'm asked to sit with them and just by communicating they kind of recognize where they're at. You see them at national meetings, where a guy's up there and he's talking about how sovereign he is and then he goes home and he does his BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] thing. He falls into the system. How do you get out of that system? Nation building allows you to think on a broader scale. When you're thinking of the whole nation, you're thinking of the young people and the elders and the families, you're thinking of your community, you're thinking of your nation and then the challenge goes on from there. Man, there's lots to do for a leader without having to micromanage, without having to have bad feelings against one person or another or a group or to represent just a few. But let's face it, in reality it's like that."

Ian Record:

"Really what you're speaking to is that while it is really important to elect good people that have, as you said, in their heart the entire community in mind when they make decisions, it's also jobs...the job of effective governments to put in place those rules that either discourage or punish those bad leaders for acting in ways that only advance their own interests and not the nation's."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"In about our second term, we started recognizing that that might be a situation with certain leaders coming down, whether they're on council now, or we've seen this happen or you'll say, "˜We don't want it to happen.' So we put together a code of ethics for chief and council, how they're going to behave. One of the things that you don't do, and if you do, what does the community have to empower to take you out or discipline you or suspend you or remove you from office? And we went out in the community and got all that feedback and then they put it together. So when you are installed into office and you sign a commitment to the community, your pledge, you also sign a code of ethics that you're going to be a good leader. That's what I was saying a while ago that we've seen it and we learn from experience. If we don't want to go down that road, put things in place in your community so that when you have situations like that and all that is based on something that may have happened before, you see it, or you even have a fear that you don't want to go down there and you put things in place. And when leaders go into office, they will make a commitment that "˜this is how I'm going to serve.' They won't be embarrassed to say, "˜Yes, I will sign a pledge, I will sign a commitment, I will sign a code of ethics how my conduct will be while I'm in office,' and I've seen a few people taken out of office when they violate that, but that's the rule. And if there's communities that need to work on things like that, involve the community, they'll give you a lot of good ideas."

Ian Record:

"What would be your advice to nations, Native nations both in the United States and Canada who, for example, have been operating under either Indian Reorganization Act governments or Indian Act governments where it's essentially created this system where outsiders are calling the shots, where they're kind of stuck in this dependency mode and are searching for a way out or searching to begin to rebuild their nations as nations. What would be your advice to them in terms of where they might begin?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Sometimes you are impressed by something you've heard out there, it could be a national chiefs' meeting, it could be a regional meeting, it could be out there or another tribe that's, groups that have made a presentation and you bring it home. I guess the first point of contact is if you find people out there, bring them and introduce them to your council. If you have a thought that you say, "˜Geez, that's different thinking. They talk of different ways than we're doing,' invite them. And it's that thought that it's not just you because it's frustrating when you're the only leader that wants to change and everybody else is locked in. We call that the Indian agent mentality or the mode. If you find people that have these ideas or you've learned of some community that has done things a certain way, invite them or go visit them. Take a delegation, go visit them and bring that information back. It's productive. It can do wonders because a change in attitude, sometimes they don't know and they've got consultants, they've got lawyers running their business. There's nothing more adventurous and more satisfying than to have a community try something or leadership try something and say, "˜It'll get us far better results. Tradition, we haven't been doing that. We haven't gone down that way.' Well, there's always room for leadership to try something. If you've got an idea, bring it to council and if it's something that you can try...nation building is, sad to say, is still new. People are engrained in a certain mentality, locked in a certain way that they're going to do business. It's hard to change them. And as younger people come on and the more they see the outside and they have a broader perspective of things, those are the ones that will say, "˜We'll try it.' How do you change it? I guess we just have to try to advance more people out there, spread the word more. But there's...yeah, I know what you mean. There's a lot of councils out there that are still locked in and it's very unfortunate, but I get a lot of letters from chiefs across Canada asking about the same thing. "˜Can you direct us somewhere or somebody could come you can recommend?' And I recommend a lot."

Ian Record:

"So really what you're saying is, it's learn as much as you can about what other nations are doing in nation-building ways so you can then start a dialogue within your own community, because it's not going to happen overnight."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"As we were developing, in the first couple terms in Akwesasne, I started signing agreements with First Nations and they weren't just Iroquois communities. West Bank in British Columbia, that's at the other end of the country, we signed an agreement with them to exchange information, to share resources, to exchange thoughts on leadership, on issues, land claims, nation-building ideas, and as far as we have been separated we're always exchanging ideas. And they're one of the very few communities in Canada that have settled a self-government process with Canada and they created a constitution, a charter that was drafted by the community and now they're trying to, understand this isn't easy, with all kinds of things in here that are accountability factors that we haven't done before. Sometimes they'll say, "˜Can you fly up here and talk to our community?' Or if they're in Ottawa and I invite them to come and visit us. And they're not the only ones. There are others.

We had a trade treaty with Mayans in Guatemala. I heard what was going on with a tribe over there and they had finished a 30-year war and when they got home they got about a tenth of their original territory, they had no economy, but they're in a warm climate, they had access to coffee. We flew down there and said, "˜We'll buy coffee from you.' But I went to the government and I told them, "˜We're buying coffee from them. We don't want you to come in here and say I'm going to take the percentage off because I want to do this treaty with them that's going to say fair market.' And it ran about five years and it went quite well. A lesson we learned is, when is the proper time to take something like that and turn it over to a private entrepreneur and let him take that off? You've created the opportunity, but our council was saying, "˜Gee, that's our idea. We control that.' Well, it was up there, a lot of nice things being said and everything, then it came crashing down because as leaders changed they don't know what's going on, they're not so committed to it anymore. It was a wonderful idea. I advocate trade amongst First Nations, among Native American tribes and it was a longstanding tradition. It's like that for all of us. What could we do to improve our economies? What could we do for our youth to have, secure good employment? So it's something that's not on the table, but I would advocate to any nation-building group to think of those things because you share resources, you develop resources, you develop good nation people and they'll stay home, you create opportunities. I just throw that in there because that's something that's starting to scratch the surface.

I went through the Supreme Court in Canada on trade. All they asked me, the government in Canada, "˜Can you prove that you have an aboriginal right to trade by some treaty or some Aboriginal right? If you can prove in a Canadian court, we'll accommodate you, we'll implement it, and we'll negotiate the exercise of that right.' So we set up a test case. Four or five years later, it finally gets to court and I win everything. The government is so thrown back. I says, "˜You asked. This is a test case and now you have it recognized in a Canadian court.' Well, six years later, ministers have changed, government people have changed, your justice people are paranoid to no end. "˜We've got to appeal. We didn't think you were going to win here.' Well, it went to the next level. I won there, too. So now a new government is in place and they don't like it. "˜Well, we don't know who made that commitment,' but isn't it typical of our history? "˜Oh, that group made that treaty with you. We're no longer responsible for that.' So they went to the Supreme Court and then they altered, restructured the argument. So I lost on a 'no' decision. They didn't take the right away that we could cross back and forth, they didn't take the right away that we could cross with our own goods duty free, tax free. The only thing we were concerned about was the trade, with that decision you could threaten the sovereignty of Canada. With that decision you could threaten the financial institutions of our country because you could set up all the reservations with goods crossing back and forth. I says, "˜That's not what the argument was about. The argument was about the right for Native Americans to conduct trade amongst themselves. It can be regulated. It can be controlled. We can do it across the table from you but we have that right.'

So I got gypped, as all the lawyers in Canada would say, "˜You got robbed.' So I took them to the International Court and we've had the hearing, we're waiting for a decision so the adventure goes on. It's always a good fight. It don't have to be with spears and bows and arrows or AK-47s. The fight continues when you have spirit to advance those things, but the most important part, what can be done in Aboriginal trade that would really benefit our nations? It's unknown territory and yet we haven't realized we have a lot of resources, we have a lot of potential and that's the next frontier. So we can stay in a socially deprived, in social conditions or we can say, "˜We've got to do some nation building here and we've got to take that challenge up.' And I give that message to all the young leaders that want to build. It don't necessarily have to be right from home, but you look at layers and layers of processes of nation building and it's a lot of satisfaction. If you're going to be a good leader you'll last a long time because there's so many challenges out there for leaders to think about."

Ian Record:

"So the moral of the story is think outside and work outside of those many boxes that the colonial forces have created for Native nations and begin to forge your own boxes and your own opportunities."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I had an elders' council advising me most of my time on council. And I would always ask them what did they think of something because sometimes they [slap], "˜That's bad for us.' "˜All right, well, let's talk about it,' and we'd get a bigger discussion going. And all of a sudden, "˜Well, it's bad for us now. What do you want to do with it?' "˜Well, I don't know. I think we should build an arena to have a place for our youth to gather rather than hanging around the streets.' Pretty soon other people join in and discussions flow and the next thing you know it turns into a better idea, but you have to be able to discuss the pros and cons of anything I guess, but I always liked the idea of taking matters to elders and running it by them. And after a while, anything new I would always go to them and say, "˜What do you think of us?' and get that feedback. And sometimes they'll say, "˜Well, wait a minute. This is an issue that our daughters, the women folk should know about. This is something that the men should know about.' So we'd call a men's meeting and get that feedback, especially if it means you want to build something and you know they're going to say, "˜Well, there's employment there,' but there's also unions and there's also these other things. So it's better to have that support if you're going to go out there and say, "˜I want that employment for my people in my reservation, I want the most, I want to be able to identify how much of that can best be turned around and have our people employed.' You're never wrong if you go back to your people and say, "˜What are your ideas and what's the feedback?' And when they understand it, they'll give you a good decision."

Ian Record:

"Well thanks, Mike, for this very informative discussion. It's been very enlightening for me and I'm sure for Native nations and Native leaders across North America."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"[Mohawk language]." 

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 1)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Grand Chief Michael Mitchell of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne provides an overview of the nation-building work his nation has engaged in over the past four decades, from its decision to move away from the Indian Act to its systematic development of capable governing institutions designed to exercise true self-determination and self-governance.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 1)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 1, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Well, we're here with Chief Michael Mitchell, the former Grand Chief of the Akwesasne...Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and Mike is our first ever Indigenous Leadership Fellow of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. Mike, if we could just have you start off by introducing yourself. I'm sure you can do a much better job than I just did."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"My English name is Mike Mitchell. My Mohawk name is Kanentakeron. I belong to the Wolf Clan. I'm a faith keeper in the Longhouse on the traditional side. I was born in Akwesasne, which is located on the New York State-Ontario-Quebec border. Half, half the reservation is in the [United] States, the other half is in Canada, and two-thirds of what's in Canada is in Quebec and the other part is in Ontario. So we have...if it's anything like this, it's five jurisdictions on the outside and in the territory on the Canadian side is the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, on the American side is another elected government called the St. Regis Tribal Council and historically we have our traditional Mohawk Nation Council. So there's three internal Mohawk governments. And the population, probably right now, it's closer to 17-18,000 and 10,000 are registered as resident Mohawks on the Canadian side of Akwesasne."

Ian Record:

"So that makes for a pretty complex governing situation, doesn't it?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Yes, it was, it still is, but it's...we've been able to resolve a lot of the issues, complex issues by taking over a lot of the authorities, programs and services and run it, operate it ourselves."

Ian Record:

"You've been involved with your nation's self governance for more than two decades now. I was wondering if you could provide just a general overview of nation-building efforts at Akwesasne since you became involved."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"The first time I got on Council for what was known back then as the St. Regis Band Council was in 1970, and I had just returned back from Alcatraz and just to start a few things back home, we started taking over islands on the St. Lawrence River. That kind of got people talking, "˜Maybe you should run on council.' So I served one term in 1970, but it was difficult because I was going to school at the time, ironically, film school at the National Film Board. We had our own Native Indian film crew that was doing documentary work. So it was really in 1984, well, I ran and got elected as a district chief in 1982, served two years and figured out that there's just too many outside government interference. Council was in a drastic deficit, probably half their budget of $5 million they were in a deficit and everything was controlled from the outside, which led to a lot of personality clashes within council. We're governed by the Indian Act in Canada, so we have to adhere to a lot of their regulations, codes, etc. All authorities were dictated from Ottawa through the Department of Indian Affairs. So that was sort of like an introduction. I didn't like it, I didn't want to run again, but the fact that I survived it and they were saying, "˜You should run for the top spot,' which was the Head Chief of the St. Regis Band Council.

Back then, the people didn't really elect the chiefs. You all got elected from your districts of which there are three. There's Snye, St. Regis, which is in Quebec side, and Ontario side is Cornwell Island, and each elect four chiefs they have a total... they had a total of 12. And among the 12, they would elect amongst themselves one head chief. So I had figured out, well, obviously you have to run not as yourself but you have to run with a party enough that you would control council and then make sure you have enough votes if you want to run for the head chief, which is what we did in 1984 and the person that I replaced had been head chief for about 16 years, so this wasn't easy. He had pretty well control of the community, the Council and ran it the way he wanted, the way he saw it. A lot had to do with the way the government ran things, too. So there was a very narrow causeway in terms of accessing information back to community. But regardless, we had the election in 1984 and I won by a vote of seven to five. So it wasn't expected; people were surprised. I was young back then, but I thought...ready for a change. I went about in the community and introduced myself as the new head chief and a little bit of surprise in the attitude in the community. They said, "˜You're only head chief of the council members that elected you. We didn't elect you.' And that stayed with me.

Then I ran smack into Indian Act regulations, how you run and service a community. You always had to ask for permission from the Department of Indian Affairs. So I took about less than three, four months before I recognized that we have people to bow to on every issue, on health, education, housing, economic development, and a lot of people are on welfare. People didn't have a high regard for council and it was stagnant. So I figured the only way out of this is you better cut a fine line as to where you're going to make your stand and proceed to make some changes. Right after I got on council, the person I replaced filed an appeal, went to court, and because it was a Canadian federal legislation, the Indian Act, there's many loopholes. It's pretty old. It was put in place in 1867 with very little changes. So if one wanted to mess around with it, there's a lot of legal things you can do with it. And there wasn't a whole lot of honor in the council system the way it was set up because it was controlled so much by the Canadian government. And about 10 years had gone by since the Indian agent had left because he used to run everything. So all this was fairly new. When I said it stuck in my mind when people were saying, "˜We didn't elect you,' and considering that I had to go through a Canadian court just to retain the chieftainship because being that it was so controlled I had pretty well said in my mind, "˜We've got to get out of this Canadian-controlled election process.'

I also found out I'm not supposed to release minutes of the meetings, so the community weren't really appraised that there was so much deficit in the council. Strangely enough, the Department of Indian Affairs, they came and chaired the meeting when I became...counted the votes to be elected chief, was the same person that came back a couple weeks later and he said, "˜We were about to lock up all your offices and put your community under third-party management because of your growing deficit.' So that wasn't a real good introduction. It seemed like every other week my office was occupied by my opposition. Where I lived was on Cornwell Island, Ontario and to get to St. Regis I had to go through the American side and once I'm in the village, if I want to go to Snye, I've got to go back through the American side to get back into the Canadian side of Snye. So we cross the border about 20 times a day just to service our people. Well, all those factors came into play rather fast and they had been operating this way, I would say about 50 years that they had been controlled. They had a system, delegated authority they called it, and everything that we were to do we had to ask for permission, "˜Can council do this, can council do that?'

Being that I was more used to blocking bridges and taking over islands, I took all that energy and started studying what had to be done in the community. We started doing house-to-house survey asking the community members would they like to see an election code that would be developed by the community, for the community and let's opt out of that Indian Act so that they would be the ones that would control it. And we started working out the mechanics after getting the feedback. So in that one term of two years, and that was the other thing I was upset about because I found out that two years is a very short time for elected leadership and a lot of things can happen in that two years and council members, if they want to get anything done they'll take the first year to learn the ropes. By the time the second year comes around, you're already getting pressured to provide money for such and such a person, for housing or more money for education and it's really money that set the limit, budget. Anyway, if you're going to make changes, it had to be done.

So I went to Ottawa and asked for a meeting with the Minister of Indian Affairs and I told him, I says, "˜Listen, this system that you have in place isn't working and we're going to have to make some drastic changes if the community is ever going to come out of a deficit and learn to govern themselves and look after themselves.' And the Minister's name was David Cromby. He got very interested. He said, "˜Well, you know, you have a lot of audacity to come in here and say we want to make some changes.' He said, "˜There's a system in place,' but he says, "˜I do worry about the deficit because it's not just your community, there's many other communities in the same situation.' He says, "˜What do you want to do?' And I says, "˜To improve the attitude and the atmosphere of our community, we want more of our people to take over the administration of programs and services. We want to change the election law so that we can govern ourselves and put the election process through under our own authority.' I said, "˜There's a whole history here in Akwesasne of every time somebody loses an election, you're in court, either Indian Affairs is in court as well as the council.' So he listened tentatively and he says, "˜Well, what about the deficit?' I says, "˜I'll do a deficit retirement plan, but I'll do a separate management plan and we'll wipe out that deficit within five years, but you have to agree to let us run our community.' So he went, left the meeting for awhile, he came back, talked to some people and he said, "˜They say that I can't do that, that we have a system in place,' he says, "˜But I say, we should let you try it.' He said, "˜The only other alternative is I've got to send more people, pay more money, put more money into the community and for what? There's always going to be a deficit, there's going to bad attitude.' He says, "˜I want to try this experiment.' So that was a start.

If you want to get education dollars, the ultimate authority was somebody in Indian Affairs, if you want to build a house and you need housing dollars, somebody's going to come down and take, do papers for you, applications, etc., social services, welfare, the same thing. So I asked for all these people to be sent back to Ottawa, sent home and we hired our own people. I went around and got a list of nominees...they were already working somewhere, either Ottawa, Washington, Syracuse, Albany, Toronto and we needed an administrator, manager, program directors and whoever had the qualifications, we called them, talked with them and told them what we had in mind and I said, "˜I'd like to see more people return home. You'll have a job. Bring your senior experience, your management skills and help your community because we're going to turn this around.' For some reason it caught on and people started coming back and we put together a management team to take care of the administration and I had one policy. I didn't think we had any business running the administration side -- we're politicians. So I had discussion with council saying, "˜Let's do our politics and we hire these people, let them do their administration.' So separating administration and politics was one of the first objectives and it worked. We set out a goal to analyze the political situation and carved out a period of time that we would achieve this.

And the other thing, you had to stabilize the community. The internal politics had to be taken care of so we did, it was done Mohawk style. Obviously the man that I had replaced...we had to find a way to stop the occupation. If I went to work on the American side, chances are they would cut me off over there and punch me out a few times. But there was a great hope riding on this thing about taking over. The community dealt with him. They had to settle it the Mohawk way, going out and have a little fistfight and the winner came out and they said, "˜Okay, Mike's going to have the opportunity to run this community.' And so I had that opportunity, but the greatest strength...the way I was brought up, because this is my introduction to elected system; I was brought up on the traditional side. And maybe I should take a few minutes just to acquaint everyone that on the traditional side, the women put up the leaders. And it was said that the women knew who the leaders were from the time that they crawl on the ground to when they walk to when they hunt to when they marry and have a family -- the women already knew who's going to be a good leader, who will be a good provider, who has integrity, who has good characteristics. So among the various clans of which in the Mohawks we have three major ones: Wolf, Turtle and Bear. I'm a Wolf clan, remember. My mother's a clan mother in that system. My brother's a wampum keeper in that system. So that's the family I come from. My grandfather's a faith keeper. So this whole idea of being involved in a modern, elected tribal system was new and you didn't have much authority, so if you're going to establish yourself under certain principles, I borrowed a lot of that from our traditional custom.

I found out very early that the community was ready to make changes. You raise up the optimism, people wanted to feel good about themselves and it seemed that it wasn't...it hadn't happened for awhile. I'm trying to be very polite when I talk about the Indian Act, but it is so...to me it is so evil, so dictatorial and delegated that they didn't serve our interests because we were used to perhaps more of an honor system. Do things and people looked at you for it so I borrowed that. And I says, "˜We're going to have to fight for our jurisdiction. We're going to have to fight to have our authority and if we can't convince the government that we should be controlling more services, more programs and more jurisdiction, then we have to fight them.'

Well it was only weeks away, there was some men at my office as I got to work; this is months down the line. They were fishermen and they had their boat confiscated and their nets and the motor by provincial conservation authorities. So I listened to them and I apologized to them that I had to have appointments made for me, but they were standing on the outside so I just invited them in. And this is on my way to work. Anyhow, I identified with how they fed their family. They're high steel workers and they take time off for a month and they would fish for their families and then they would fillet it and put them in the freezer and part of the traditions; people always did that. So when you have an outside government intrude on your tradition, what are you going to do? So I told them, I says, "˜Well, tomorrow I'm going to get some people together, we're going to go out on the river and if we find this conservation officer, I will talk to him.' And that sort of raised the interest of people saying, "˜You know what he's going to do? He's going to go out there on the river and see what might transpire.' So when I got out there, there was boats there already. They were ready to guide me and find this conservation officer and it didn't take more than about a half hour they spotted him leaving Cornwall [Island].

So we met in the middle of the river, right on the international boundary and we cut him off and we stopped his boat and I asked him very politely where the seizure took place. And as we're floating on the St. Lawrence River in our boats and we're talking, I said, "˜You know, around here, one minute you're in the States, the next minute you're in Canada, you're in Ontario, you're in New York State, you're back in Quebec.' I said, "˜The way the international boundary zigzags, I doubt very much if this matter was going to go to court that your charges, the seizure would hold up. So I'm going to ask you real nice if ya'll might want to just think about returning this boat to them.' And he was kind of mean. He says, "˜There's no way.' So I tried another way. I says, "˜Well, we don't need an Ontario fishing license to fish in our own waters. We have an aboriginal right, we have a treaty right, and it always says we don't need to have that when we're fishing in our territory.' He didn't buy that either. He says, "˜There's been changes.' So this went on for awhile, then my blood pressure started to come up a little bit and I told him, I says, "˜Well, in that case, sir, since you took their boats I'm going to take your boat.' And his jaw just dropped down. He says, "˜You're going to what?' I says, "˜We're going to seize your boat and I'm just going to keep it until I get their boats back.' Well, you should have saw the cheering from these guys. They said, "˜Well, let us help you.' So we dragged his boat, with him in it, back to the village. And once I got down there, we tied up at the dock and I went to the police station and I phoned Toronto, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and told them what had happened. So the rest of that day phone calls were going back and forth and as we were, higher departments, higher authorities kept calling back saying, "˜What's going on down there?' And it got to the point where the last phone call was one of their regional heads who said, "˜This could turn into an international crisis.' I says, "˜Yes, it could.'

And there had just been elections in Ontario, a new government had gotten in, and it usually doesn't work for us, but in this case it sort of did because the Premiere got on, the new Premiere of Ontario, Bob Rae. He got on and he says, "˜Listen, I know you people don't need provincial licenses to fish'. And he says, "˜But I'm more concerned about that officer that you have. Is he a hostage? Is he...what condition is he in?' I says, "˜Oh, he's sitting right here.' "˜Is he a hostage?' I says, "˜No, sir, he's not and he's welcome to go home, but he ain't got no boat so he can't go anywhere.' So he laughed. He says, "˜I see where this is going.' He says, "˜Well, let's get down to the brass tacks.' He says, "˜What do you need?' I says, "˜I need them boats back that your government confiscated from my people.' So we talked for awhile. He says, "˜You're right. I'll go look for them.' He called an hour back and he said, "˜Those boats are in Toronto.' I said, "˜Sir, that's four hours away. I want them boats back by 9:00 in the morning.' So there was a little bit of discussion at their end but the long story... short end of the long story he says, "˜Well, we'll have it back'. I said, "˜And I want that man that confiscated... this officer here to bring them back tomorrow morning.' He says, "˜I'll send somebody with him.' So they dispatched an official from the Premiere's office. Sure enough, next morning -- and I had no reason to hold this guy so they took him, allowed him to go home with his boat. But I realized early that the only language that a non-Native government understands is something drastic like that, where you have to really stand up to them and that was only the beginning.

The next morning they brought the boats back, the fishermen analyzed it, their nets, their boat, motor, oars, everything was all in there so they were happy, but that got me thinking, 'There's all these non-Native police on our waters. So how come our police aren't patrolling on the water?' 'Well, they're under the authority of the Ontario Provincial Police and so there's...work is confined to the mainland, patrolling the speed zone and accidents, etc.' 'Well, who patrols the water?' 'Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Provincial Police.' 'Well, what about that conservation officer?' 'Well, he's under our jurisdiction, under our...as well.' So it only took a few weeks for me to ask our police and they said, "˜Well, that's the way it's always been.' I says, "˜You know, we should have our own conservation officer out there patrolling, looking after our environment, the fish, the river life, the safety on the waters.' They said, "˜Well, that's never occurred to us that we should be doing that.' So diplomatically again I asked Ontario if they would consider training some of our people to be conservation officers and they said, "˜No way.' So then I turned around and I thought, "˜Well, maybe if I ask Quebec.' They said, "˜No.' Then I asked Indian Affairs and they said, "˜No. Criminal Court of Canada applies and it's the federal police.' They had no mindset that we would be out there exercising our jurisdiction and authority.

Well, it didn't stop there because being that our reservation is half in the States and half in Canada I had one other option. I phoned Albany, New York at the State Trooper Police Academy and they had a conservation program there. I says, "˜Would that be open to Mohawks from Akwesasne?' And he said, "˜I don't see why not.' So I asked for the course that I needed and sure enough they had a very thorough course. I says, "˜Can we send some guys down there?' He said, "˜Yep.' Well, six months later the two candidates we sent down there returned home. They're wearing a Stetson hat, nine-millimeter pistols; they're in uniform. They wore the uniform of where they trained. So it's very much unlike what they wear in Canada because they're used to those taxi cab hats. There was a district Ontario Provincial Police supervisor and he really took offense to their style of dress. He wanted to arrest them right there so we had a few words.

Now the time that they were away in the six months, we put together a conservation law. Again, in that six months, Indian Affairs just wouldn't hear about it. They said, "˜You're asking your community to control your water, to control enforcement.' I said, "˜That's right.' They said, "˜It's under the Indian Act. You don't have the authority to do that.' I says, "˜Then we're going to seize it.' Seven times we send, modified, and pretty soon we stripped all authority away from them. They still wouldn't pass it. So I took it all back, reformatted it and I went to the nation council and I said, "˜We're trying to claim back some jurisdiction here and under inherent right we used to control and take care of our wildlife, water life and all the animal life. We don't do that anymore. We're going to start doing it again.' So I gave a presentation, and this is an elected leader now meeting with the traditional leaders and they had always been at odds, never got along, and I explained to them, I says, "˜Well, you send me over there to create better relations of our own people in the community. Here's what I'm going to need.' Anyway, they took it to the Grand Council and they liked the idea of reclaiming jurisdiction back and they passed it as a community law for Akwesasne. Nothing to do with Canada or the United States, but it's a nation law on conservation and environment. So when the two conservation guys got home they had a law and at the same time we developed our Mohawk court.

Now we had judges under the Indian Act, very limited authority, but they were already in place. So we again started adding more, giving them more authority to hear cases higher, 'cause all they were doing is dog catcher's law, little municipal type things, so everybody was ready for it and they says, "˜Do it.' Well, it all fell into place. Community had watched the way the direction this activity was going to go. When they got home, we had bought them a boat and they started patrolling our waters, start advising our residents safety measures and there was hunting and fishing licenses by the Mohawk Nation. They went out, started telling the non-Natives who were fishing in our territory that "˜You need to have a Mohawk Nation fishing license if you're going to fish in our waters.' Well, that started an avalanche of protests, members of parliament in Ottawa start calling the Department of Indian Affairs, "˜They can't do this.' And our two young conservation officers wouldn't take no for an answer, "˜cause if you didn't have one, you were arrested and brought to our court and that's what they were doing. They were just bringing people in and our court got very active.

When they came in they said that, "˜This is a kangaroo court. It has no authority. It has no recognition.' And one of the things I had done in dressing up our courtroom, making the changes, is that we had a Mohawk community flag and we had a Iroquois Nation flag in the backdrop. Carpenters had done some work setting up -- you know how the judges kind of sit in a high place -- and they did some woodwork and got a principal's desk. I used to like to take my kids to flea market and I found some church pews, about half a dozen of them. So by the time they walk in there they saw an official courtroom and our lawyers that were acting for our land claims and adjudicating outside, brought them home and said, "˜This is your court now. This is where you enforce our law.' So there was a prosecutor and there was also a lawyer to represent them. So all this they saw when they walked in the courtroom and it dawned on them, "˜There's laws here.' There's a courtroom, the charges were read and they paid the fine. And on their way out, if they didn't have a fishing license from the Nation, they bought one. Two years passed. We knew at some point we would have to fight this in the Canadian court and as much as they were kicking and screaming, nobody ever challenged us because they knew that everything was done in proper order.

Well, anyway, the conservation officers made quite a name for themselves in the community. They were champions because things are now changing and I looked at our police force and realized they also had to change, first their attitude. They were referred to by the outside police forces as "˜window dressing cops.' "˜You look like a policeman but you don't act like one. You only enforce their laws.' So we started making more laws by taking provincial highway traffic laws and then we adopted them and we modified them to fit our community. So these things were going on and the provincial police dressed a certain way, so do the Mounties, and so our police force were dressed the same way as the Ontario Provincial Police. So I asked them, "˜Why don't we change that?' So we did a few more consultation meetings in the community with elders and with families and they gave us a lot of good ideas.

As it turned out, the community wanted them to be their police force but they saw them as, excuse the expression, "˜scouts for the cavalry,' spies for the outside police. They just were not theirs. So we were talking about what would it take to be a Mohawk police force? They had a lot of discussion, they made up a list. The style of dress, the police cars, the laws they would enforce, let them know that they're working for community. And when they changed that Ontario Provincial Police headgear, they ordered all their equipment from the United States and so they got themselves nice Stetson hats, shoulder flashes that says Akwesasne, emblems, badges that were their own, cars were set up a certain way. So it was distinctively for the territory. This was all going up very fast, changes were going and while all this was going on, community activity, we were changing that election code through our surveys, we were getting more ideas coming back. Anyway, at the end of the activity, we had encounters with the provincial police because they were saying, "˜We tell you what to do not...don't listen to that chief, he's got no authority.' I said, "˜It's not my authority, it's the community's authority. This is where they want to go.' So we had a few clashes along the way. The OPP [Ontario Provincial Police] arrested the conservation officers and confiscated their guns, so we went to court and we showed them everything that they had been trained for. The judge looked at it and he said, "˜They're well-qualified to enforce their laws because they trained for it. Give them back their guns.' So sometimes you have to fight through the system, through the courts or direct confrontation to keep advancing, so we were doing all this pretty active. And the Ontario Provincial Police appealed to a higher court. We won that one, too. So they says, "˜Well, here's your guns.'

Anyhow, the police started their program and they had their uniform changes and they started showing the community that they were community police, serving the nation, and the whole attitude started to change and that flag that I was telling you about started hanging out in the schools and in public places and in our institutions. And then I went to the Canadian Customs Building and I says, "˜Put this flag right next to your Canadian and American flag.' They weren't going to do it the first time around, so we went and put it up there. Then we went to the Seaway Building and said, "˜Put up this flag to fly alongside the Canadian flag.' They weren't going to do it, so we bought our own and put it next to theirs and dared them to try to take it down. It was Mohawk diplomacy more or less. So those changes were going on, but the community could see, they could see these changes were going on and it was for the better -- confidence building. So people had a different attitude and it didn't take long before they reflected in that law for elections because this went very fast.

Two years was up. I figured that's all I had to do was change the course because they had asked me, "˜We only want you to run one term.' And the strange part about it was, although I was from the traditional side, they don't vote in elections. So in order for me to become chief I had to be voted by the elective Christian side. For some reason they did because I was well known in the community to begin with and knowing that I would be very active in things and so they wanted to see what was going to happen. It was an interest thing for them, but they started liking when they see all these changes coming about.

The attitude changed in the community and they put that election code through with a lot of input. It became an Akwesasne election code. If you wanted to oppose or take action, you didn't like the way the turnout, you had a chance to appeal, but you appeal to our Mohawk court, not to a Canadian court or Canadian government or an institution out there, it was all settled inside. All this time the Minister of Indian Affairs was watching the way things were going and of all the skirmishes and things that would happen, he was happy because we were running our community by ourselves, we took responsibility for our finances, the administration, our programs and had a transparent operation. We started reporting to community by way of annual, semi-annual, quarterly reports, releasing minutes, giving an activity report of where monies were being spent, how they had...how they were coming in. And while this was going on I knew we needed more dollars. So I applied other skills, in this case it was lobbying skills, looking for the dollars and so we set up a portfolio system. I says, "˜this council has to change. The head chief should not be the one who is going to run everything. The head chief is the facilitator; he's a servant of the community. So the rest of you chiefs have to take far greater responsibility, because I'm going to go and start looking for opportunities out there, I'm going to do the fights out there, you look after the community.' So we decided to develop a portfolio system. This chief took care of the justice, education, health; everybody had responsibilities, and the community started to understand that they no longer had to wait to talk to the head chief. They talked to any of those chiefs, whatever problem you had you could see them and he will know and act on and convene meetings and try to solve any problems. So it took on a greater interest and a greater authority. Now prior to that, chiefs that served on council they called them councilors; we changed that. I says, "˜You're not councilors, you're chiefs. You're elected by the community. You're chief for your district.' So other than just the word, we gave them a higher level of importance and with that a job description of what they will do when they're on council and that was incorporated into the election code, Code of Conduct for Chiefs -- that was in there. If he done something wrong, you could take a chief out of office, if he violated the code of ethics -- that was borrowed from the traditional side.

We changed the name. We didn't like the name St. Regis Band. As a matter of fact I hated that because there was a band program, band council, band administrator, everything was "˜band.' I know the Canadian government had this as a mindset for us, to think of ourselves as a lesser people, because we don't mention anything about 'nation' anymore. The only ones that were always saying "˜nation' were on the traditional side and they had... they were in the minority, the government didn't pay any attention to them. So this whole idea of changing, we got rid of the word 'reserve.' You've got 'reservation' on the American side, but you've got 'reserve' on the Canadian side, and I didn't like either term so we said, "˜We're a territory. This is a Mohawk Nation Territory. We're not St. Regis, we're Akwesasne.' So again, we had a pooling of ideas, got feedback and started passing council resolution saying, "˜We're no longer going to refer ourselves as the St. Regis Band. So we became the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. We became the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne. There's no more band office; it's administration. And all those administration offices became Administration 1, Administration 2 and that language fit well in the community. And around the council table, some of these chiefs had been in office maybe two or three terms, four terms, some of them maybe even 10 terms, two-year terms. That new election code that we were now discussing says we needed three years because if you're making promises on your second year, you're up for election, chances are you're never going to control the deficit, you're never going to deal with it because you're forever spending more money. Took it to the community, they said, "˜That makes a lot of sense,' and so we revised it.

As far as those chiefs that were on council, sometimes they would say "˜band council' inadvertently. I said, "˜We've got to cut this out because we have to show an example to the community how we're going to refer ourselves and if we're going to change our attitude we have to change the way we refer to each other. You're a chief and we don't want to mention this band word anymore.' So I says, "˜Here's what we're going to do. I put a coffee cup in our meetings and anybody that says band for any purpose will have to donate a quarter into our coffee fund.' Again, it was non-threatening. It became a game and they all looked at each other, laughed and says, "˜Okay.' So, yeah, every other meeting somebody would get caught and put a quarter in there; pretty soon, we had a big jug and it caught on with the stuff. This is a whole different idea, it don't cost a lot of money, but to have you think of yourselves differently, to have you think of your community differently, your people differently we had to incorporate some things like that. So now you had the flag, you have a new council name, your community is under a different mentality. To get back to the election code now. We had finished it, we had a model and the community voted on it. Well, the government came back and said, "˜Geez, you need 51 percent of your total membership.' Mind you, families are out working in different places; we're never going to reach that. So I went back to the Minister and I says, "˜Well, I'll tell you what, would you be satisfied with a letter from the nation council because they don't vote, they don't get involved in these things and you're counting their numbers. So if they give you a letter saying we represent 800 people, that's traditional and we like what the Mohawk Council is doing, we like the idea that they bring their election law back to their community, would that be enough?' And he said, "˜Yeah. I could see that.' And that's how we got around it, just a little bit of innovative thinking. Next election it was under the control of the Mohawk community.

I thought my job was finished back then because I had started these things. They said, "˜No, now you have to run because it's no longer the Head Chief, it's no longer the St. Regis Band Council, it's now the Grand Chief...' And the idea, the first time, the first week I went around when the community people were telling me, "˜We didn't elect you,' I pulled that Grand Chief position, I says, "˜The Grand Chief is now going to be elected by the community at-large, not by these 12 district chiefs or councilors.' That was the one significant thing and that's how the community know that we're going in the right direction. We empowered them. Anybody could run from the community for Grand Chief, but you had to be elected by the community. Well, my opposition, 'That man's crazy. He's from the traditional side, "˜They're not going to vote.'' So we had another one of those famous runoffs and I ran and I won again and council was strengthened even more.

We kept on the path for governance, for representation, for change. A lot of the changes that were going on were really back to our traditions, not necessarily changing so much on the outside. The Department of Indian Affairs stopped being my enemies because now they're taking lessons on accountability, transparency and they would come back and I noticed that every time we had a representative from Indian Affairs, he would try to sneak out our reports to the community, put them in their briefcase. Finally I just asked them, "˜Why don't you just ask us, we'll give you a whole batch,' because now they're taking it to other reservations, showing them, "˜See what they're doing over there, they're giving reports to their community membership.' And so they stopped fighting with me and we became partners in governance. I would give them ideas and say, "˜This is what we want to do.' And most of that time, mind you there were a few other bad apples over there, but for most of that time they knew that we were trying to survive in a community that's divided up into jurisdictions, into puzzles and it was hard to bring it back together. So that was a little adventure into Mohawk politics. It's still on a course, sometimes it slows down, sometimes it's on a crash course somewhere. I shut down ships because we're right on the St. Lawrence river, when I didn't like something that was going on or shut down the bridge, international bridge traffic, and pretty soon I didn't have to do those things. And I'm getting a little older now and people say, "˜You mellowed, you're not a militant anymore.' But all these things, when you have respect, you can sit at a table and negotiate solutions. The challenge doesn't stop. We did a lot of other things that brought us up, but the idea was for most of the leaders, have respect for the culture and tradition of your people, have respect for the language. When we were small, we all spoke the language and as we had children and they grew up, the mentality was if you're going to succeed get an education. That language is not going to help you out there, nobody speaks Mohawk in the States or in Canada. So that was the mindset. In the "˜80s we turned that around and said, "˜Our culture and language is important.'

And for all the hard time that I had coming from the traditional side, something had happened in my second term in 1984 when I became Grand Chief. The Pope came to Canada and he wanted to experience a Native ceremony. I don't know what he was thinking, but he had asked the bishops in Canada, the Catholic Church of Canada to say, "˜This is what I want to experience.' And years before that he had already known that the churches would bring out so many Indians and they would dress them up, put the western war bonnet on a Mi'kmaq or a Mohawk out east, put them on horses, dress them up the way you would see a Native American on cowboy and Indian and the Pope was, he says, "˜I know all that. And I know if I'm going to go to eastern Canada I don't want to see you dress up your Natives that way. I want to see what they're really like. I want to see the spiritual side and I want you to organize it.' So the priests from our territory wrote back, says, "˜Well, they just elected a traditional...' well, they referred to me as a pagan, but more diplomatic is, "˜There's a traditional Mohawk here, he's now the Grand Chief and he goes to the Longhouse, he goes to ceremonies, he's a faith keeper in that Longhouse.' So it didn't take long before they wrote back. They says, "˜Would you put on a ceremony for the Pope?' And I had a lot of difficulty from the very strong Christian side of the community. It was always a test. So I went back to the Longhouse and I told them, I says, "˜Listen, this has been an offer, an invitation has been given to me to do this and do you think it's a good idea?' They talked about it and the conclusion of their discussion was this, "˜Maybe it would lead to better relations between ourselves, us traditionals and Christians. So we're going to send you, but we're going to send a clan mother, an elder and singers to help you.' So that's how...this was 1984, kind of still fairly new back then and given a hard time by the Christian side and often be referred to as a pagan, the attitude was, "˜You look down on your traditional brother.' The Pope came to Canada, we put him through that ceremony, and he was so affected by it because I work with Ojibwe and Cree nations to put this on, but a healing ceremony consisted of smudging, they use sage and sweetgrass. I brought my sacred tobacco and put everything together, put him through the ceremony. One of our elders did the blessing with the eagle. But all along there they explained to him what we were doing and when the words and the songs were put to him as he was going through, I could see a tear coming down and he was totally committed to this experience.

Anyway, when it was over and he read his prepared speech, that man can say greetings in about 20 different languages so that took a bit of time and then he gave his address. It was broadcast all over the world. There was probably an audience of about 80,000 in this...if you can think about what a Woodstock concert would have been like, it was pretty well the same set-up; speakers all over, screens so that they would project all over the field. And then he digressed from his prepared text and from here he told them, he says, "˜The Church assumed when we came to the Americas that the Native Americans were godless and soulless people.' He said, "˜That's wrong. They have a very beautiful culture and traditions and thanks to us we've taken that away from them.' He says, "˜What I've experienced today, I will remember it and I want to thank the elders and the people who put this ceremony together and my message to all of you is I want to apologize on behalf of the church for what we've done, the damage that we have done.' So his message to his followers was, "˜Don't be ashamed of who you are. Don't be ashamed of your tradition, your culture, your traditional beliefs. Incorporate them into your church activities.' That was a big turnaround. It certainly led to my being more accepted in the total community and within a short while after this was all over we had all been home, my community, in the church they started burning sweetgrass and offering traditional chants, singing and dancing, even dress. And so they saw themselves as [Mohawk language] Mohawks and they were proud of it whereas before they had been taught to be ashamed of it. That was a stark difference. So situations happened in my early term that helped the path that I was pursuing. It was well appreciated. I was invited to speak to other churches. I went and spoke in their churches, something that was very new for me and it helped with a lot of the changes that were coming about."

Ian Record:

"You talked about the laws and the codes and the court system that you set up, and early on you found yourself right in the middle of it because one of your family members was one of the first violators of I believe it was your conservation code or one of those, right? I wonder if you'd tell us that story."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Man, I went all the way around not to go near that story. Yeah. The conservation officers, as new as they were, but the uniform was very distinctive, their presence was distinctive and the support of the community, they were champions because now they're out there exercising authority on behalf of the community. So everywhere they went the elders singled them out, shook their hand. So one day I'm meeting in the village with elders, we're talking about building a new nursing home and they walk in. This is just probably a few weeks after they had come from their training in Albany. And they said, "˜Chief, we need to speak with you,' and they got cut off. The elders just got all around them and they give them coffee and tea and cookies and all, made a...so they had to make a little speech and they were just adored by the elders.

So when they got a chance one of them cut away and he says, "˜We're here on official business. We need to talk to you, Grand Chief.' I says, "˜Really? What's it about?' He said, "˜There's been a murder on the island and your...somebody in your family might be involved in it.' Well, it hits you right here, huh? I says, "˜Well, excuse me.' I took them outside for a briefing. At their suggestion went outside and with stern faces they looked at me and looked at their report and they said, "˜There's been a murder up the hill where you live.' And I'm studying their face to see if this is some kind of a trick or humor. I couldn't find anything. Then I started getting scared. I says, "˜Well, what happened? Does it involve my family?' He said, "˜Yes, it does.' They looked at each other and then they said, "˜A pig was killed up the hill, farmer called in and it had piglets and they were all killed, too. And those piglets were traced down the hill to your farm. So the murderer, the culprit of this murder, is your dog, your Alaskan Malamute.' Well, then it started...I didn't feel as bad, because now I knew that this is their way of impressing how important their work is and their investigation. So I challenged them. I said, "˜Well, how do you know it's my dog? There's about three or four other houses that have Alaskan Malamutes.' They were just waiting for that. They pulled pictures out. "˜Behind your barn there's a whole, there's piglet parts in there. There's your dog, blood stains on his face and on his chest, and there's a trail down the hill, and so we know, we have proof, everything's documented. Grand Chief, you're under arrest.'

Now they scared me. I didn't know how to react so I went with them and they charged me. I'm the first one to get charged on a conservation law that our people put together and in the authority they carry, they singled the Grand Chief. So this created a lot of discussion in the community because I didn't have to go to court for two weeks and to prepare whether I'm going to argue it or offer a plea. So anyway, the charge was given to me. People either laughed about it or there certainly was a lot of discussion. To the elders they said, "˜Well, it's the Grand Chief's the one that's trying to find the money for this program. He sent them to school, he found a place for them to be trained.' Pigs die, even the farmer up the hill when he found out it was my dog he was trying to drop the charge. It was going both ways. My opposition says, "˜Well, is he going to pull strings and get out of this?' Two weeks came up, I went to court. I paid the fine. And people wondered, 'What was the result, what happened?' And I said, "˜I paid it.' And I guess it tells me that we all have to follow the law, and I just want to say the conservation officers did a thorough job investigating the murder on Cornwall Island.

And that was the result of the story. But weeks later, then I started getting some feedback. Apparently a lot of people in our community were watching to see how this was going to turn out and are we going to have respect for our own nation law. And if the Grand Chief is the highest authority, is he going to pull some kind of strings to get out of this or have the case dismissed or find a technical way to deal with it? And I didn't realize that there was such an interest in how this was going to turn out. But the law, the nation law applies to everybody and it all turned out well. It was a little embarrassing for me. I had to swallow a few times, too, but the bottom line is if you make a nation law, you better abide by it. It's not just for the non-Natives; it's also for us, too. And that was a little story about how the law applies and how you treat and respect the enforcement of law and justice in your community."

Ian Record:

"It's an interesting story. I think leadership is in many ways leading by example and that citizens of a nation are going to take their cues about what's going to be tolerated and what's not going to be tolerated in terms of behavior by how their own leaders behave."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"It was an example to the degree that there was interest generated and people knew that I could have it dismissed like that and it was just a thing that they were saying, "˜Well, how is this going to...?' And it led to everybody having respect for our program, respect for the nation law, respect for the police authorities, because it wasn't just the conservation. It applied to police in general and so it became a healthier thing. It was a good example to everyone and it taught us a lesson, because there were times when you had to stand up to the authorities on the outside, you might even have to disagree with them about how law is applied. That's how I looked at it. If you have to stack that up against your own laws or your own beliefs, if you violated a custom, tradition, that you want to defend it, sometimes you go to jail on principle. And it was those principles that became very important in our community. But at the same time, in your traditions there's also law, there's also justice and you better respect it. It doesn't mean that we can just do anything. That border that we lived on was inviting for a lot of criminal organizations and in my time, two or three elections later, it became a thing for smuggling of contraband going back across.

Let me try to see if I can demonstrate something here. There's three islands here: Barnhart Island, Cornwall Island and St. Regis Island. Here's the St. Lawrence River. Whoever set the boundary line back in the 1700s and 1812 must have been drinking somewhere because here's how it goes. Barnhart Island, New York State, it goes around this way and then there's Cornwall Island, Ontario and then it goes around, St. Regis Island, Quebec. You would think they would just go one way. Of course the water goes straight down. That's why I said one minute you're in Canada, the next minute you're in the state, you're in New York, you're in Quebec, you're in Ontario because that's how the international boundary line was zigzagging. And so the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigations] and the state troopers and the Canadian Mounted Police and the Provincial Police all said, "˜We'll never get a conviction on the water, so we'll just stay on the mainland and we'll catch whoever we catch on the mainland.' So this whole area became this, what they call this gray zone, and it didn't take long for criminal organizations to hear about Akwesasne, how it's easier to transport stuff back across. And it became very hard because they were enticing a lot of our people to say, "˜Run this across the river for me, boxes.' Well, it didn't take long for those cigarettes to turn into drugs, guns and when 9/11 happened, on CNN and NBC, ABC, CBS, we were watching and they had a map of Akwesasne and the first few weeks they were looking at saying, "˜Those terrorists must have had... come through Akwesasne.' We're getting to be famous for the wrong reason, but that's the scenario and that's what they thought happened. It took a couple of weeks to kind of find out that they didn't come through Akwesasne, that they were already in the country, but who do you blame first when something like this happens? Who do you point fingers to when criminal activities are going on? Both sides, they were blaming the people who live there and the customs security cracked down. They were checking every car, but they were checking the cars of the grandmother and the mother trying to get her kids to school going back and forth so they were very hard times for us.

There was another thing that I was instructed to do was challenge Canada on our border crossing rights. They loaded up my truck with food and furniture, household goods, stacked them way high and I came across the international bridge. Everybody walked with me alongside the truck, about 1,000 of our community residents, got through Canadian Customs and I declared everything that I had with me and then I says, "˜I want to exercise my aboriginal right, I'm not paying the duties and the taxes,' which amounted up to maybe $370 some dollars. They wanted to arrest me right then and there and they...Customs verbally arrested me, but I kept going. Second line was the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and they pulled me out, put me in their car and the women of our community went over there and pulled me back out, put me back in the truck and said, "˜Keep driving.' So somehow or another we got on this 401 that went to [Mohawk language], which is another Mohawk community further west and we gave the goods to them as a historic right of trade. And it went to court, it went all the way to the Supreme Court, because I was told in these meetings by high level government authorities, "˜Chief, if you believe your people have a treaty right, an aboriginal right to cross the border with your own proper goods, you have to win in a Canadian court. If you win in Canadian court, we will be prepared to negotiate how to implement, how to exercise that right.' So this was a test case that I was invited to participate. When I came home and I reported that, they said, "˜Let's do it.' And so this was the whole precedent setting thing that occurred.

Years later we finally hear the case and I win everything. So Canada was totally unprepared for how it was going to be done and the people that made those promises that I had to win in a Canadian court were no longer there, it was a new government there. They said, "˜We didn't make those promises, so we're going to appeal.' So it went to a higher level, they lost again. So a different Minister now getting really concerned because now their federal prosecutors are telling them, "˜You know, the Mohawks could bankrupt the financial institutions of this country, they could threaten the sovereignty of this country. Look at the decision what was awarded to them.' And we weren't asking for a lot, just to bring across our own community goods, our food, products, furniture, anything for the nation and to trade with another nation. That was the other thing that we had invoked. Anyhow, what happened was they said, "˜We're going to go to the Supreme Court.' I says, "˜You didn't say that. You said we would negotiate how to implement this right.' Anyway, they went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court heard the case and they altered the argument, restructured it and gave a decision, a 'no' decision.

So after all that time, this is about 10 years for this battle of recognition of inherent right, aboriginal right, treaty right. I wasn't satisfied the way we had been treated. The lawyers in Canada started holding sessions on how this was played with and there's a code...there's a code of honor among lawyers and legal institutions that there's some things you don't do, and this is what happened because they were so paranoid. I got home and I thought, "˜Well, I've been to the highest court of this country, it wasn't exactly...turned out the way I wanted to see it turn out, gave it my best shot and I was just going to proceed to do other things. And then somebody came to see me and they said, "˜You should try to take Canada to the International Court because what they done to you should have never happened and if that's the last resort, that's the last course, then you should submit it to the Human Rights Commission. There's no guarantee they're going to hear it though.' So that's the next thing that we did is we submitted to them and we asked for more documentation, they looked at it and here's a team of lawyers from Canada saying, "˜Don't hear it. It's been settled.' They examined everything and they said, "˜We're going to hear it.' It was heard last February and we expect a decision sometime in the next few months. It'll be the first of its kind, but when Canada holds itself up as a defender of justice, of human rights, this happened in their backyard and so I didn't want to do this, but you forced the issue; you're promised something and then they take it away. So that was one of the last things that I was...challenges that I faced because by now those two years turned into 25 years on council. I would take a break, but always the next term they say, "˜We want to bring you back.' So that was one of the last fights I had with Canada."

Ian Record:

"What I've been hearing a lot in your discussion thus far is essentially you moved, Akwesasne moved from a position under the Indian Act where your system of government really had no transparency and no accountability to a system where you're striving very hard towards and you're institutionally building towards a system predicated on transparency and accountability, not only within the government but also accountability of the citizens to the nation. I was wondering if you'd talk a little bit about that."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"In the early "˜80s, middle "˜80s, when the government controlled the purse, we were barely getting by with the monies we had to service the community. When we took over and we had a better grasp of what's needed, we were able to lobby for more dollars and by reporting the results of the expenditures and the programs that we had implemented we also had our own actual figures of what's needed. I'll give you an example in health. We took everything over -- the administration of it, started putting some policies of our own, hired our own people in-house -- it became a big regime. And so much so that Canada started referring to it as a living example of what would happen if First Nations took over like taking it from a self-governing position. I never lost sight of the fact that the only thing that we were doing is removing those government people away and putting our own people, designing our health schemes, putting accountability factors, implementing programs and services in the community the way they want to see it and then built in involvement from the community to give direction where the health programs will go and as a result we qualified for more dollars. The institutions that were built is the same for education, it's the same thing for other programs, and pretty soon when we started from $5 million, when I left in 2006 they had a budget of $76 million to administer and service the community. In between that, people had a chance to return home, have a skill and bring it home and find employment. But that wasn't the end all. There were other factors now that were available so it was more promising than from the time of the Indian agent or when the council was controlled by the Department of Indian Affairs. So the movement...what's indicative was the attitude change in the community. When you think better of yourself, you're more aware of your nation culture and traditions, you take pride in your community. Those are all factors that were crucial. They didn't cost a whole lot of money, because at the time when we were in a deficit I laid these things down and had a path to pursue. We didn't have a whole lot of money to spend, we couldn't make a whole lot of promises, "˜I'm going to do this,' but we did some confidence building, pride development and slowly the attitude started to fall in.

The elders provided the greatest support. They knew that this was their community and wanted to see a strong, healthy community. Now mind you, that didn't mean that we didn't get hit with a lot of modern problems. I mentioned smuggling a while ago. A lot of things that were going in and out would also stay. So drugs became prevalent, social issues became very prominent and hard to deal with, but we set ourselves with a way to deal with it because our programs were there and we could add anything that came, but we're able to deal with modern-day problems. Now that generation from the "˜80s and into now, the product, language has become very important, the curriculum in education systems have become very important, more involvement and teaching of Native culture and history and traditions, more language programs. We have some schools that are total immersion, Mohawk and all the subjects. Nobody would have thought back then that we could have done and built institutions like that. Our relations with the tribe, that had been our enemies in the past, now they sit together in council. They now recognize the Mohawk Nation "˜cause very early in my term, probably within the second year, we passed a resolution recognizing the Mohawk Nation council as our historic national government. We're a community government; they're a nation government. So now we're trying to find our way, how do we get everybody working together. The mindset was, and the trick from the outside is, get people fighting amongst themselves, make one side seem lower in stature than the other. You're the good guy, they're the bad guy, they're the pagans, you're this and that. Well, now everybody's saying, "˜Wait a minute. We're all traditional now and we're all proud to be Mohawks and that's going to affect the next generation. So we can withstand all the modern problems and difficulties that will come, we'll try to find a way to resolve them because those problems are great, they're coming at you from all directions. But now you've built your institutions, you've built your programs to service your people, you've also developed a character that will withstand all the negative, and also from the outside governments that try to influence them so you don't have that. You have it in your heart and your spirit to fight for those things. Your children will grow up fighting for the same thing. So it's been a worthwhile experience. I look back now and I say, "˜That was a good term. You learned something.'"

Ian Record:

"The last question I have is this issue of governing institutions, which you've talked about in detail. The extensive research of both the Native Nations Institute and also the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development have showed that across Indian Country in the United States, across Canada, Native nations are aggressively pushing for sovereignty, for self-governance, but has chronicled case after case where when nations do not back up that assertion of sovereignty with the building of capable governing institutions, they really can find themselves in the sorts of battles that they can't afford to lose. And I was wondering if you could just comment in maybe more general terms about the importance of reinforcing that push for sovereignty with those capable governing institutions."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"There's a very historic wampum belt that we all grew up with in all our Iroquois communities that we're taught, and this belt has two lines, two purple lines. And one line they say is a ship and on the other line is a canoe and the blue line represents a body of water. And they said on that ship is the non-Natives, the European newcomers, settlers and in 1664 they sat down in Albany and they talked about this, making an agreement. And from that experience between the Dutch and the Iroquois, later the English and the Iroquois, they had this discussion and on a piece of paper when they said, "˜My king will be your father and we're going to have a relationship here and we're going to do business in this manner,' is that they left that day and the Iroquois said, "˜We're going to come back the next day with our response.'

The next day they came back, they said, "˜We have made this belt. First our answer to you is we can't have a relationship because you're telling us the king will be the father and we're going to be the children. A father will always tell his son what to do. Our answer is we'll be brothers, equal.' And so they come to these two rows. They says, "˜On this one row will be your ship that you came from across the salt waters and from what you're telling us, you couldn't practice your religion over there. You didn't have a fair system of government over there. You get penalized for doing these little things and so you want to be free over here. On this ship we're going to allow you to have your own government. You're going to have your traditions, your culture, your language, your governance. It'll all be on this ship. In our canoe, we're going to maintain our traditions, our culture, our language, our governance, our jurisdiction. And we're going to go down the river of life together. Whenever you need help, we'll come over and help you, but we'll never interfere in internal relations of your people.'

So that was a solemn pledge they made to each other and they did help each other down the course, because when the settler governments first got to the Americas, everything was new for them. They weren't knowledgeable of the medicines that the Native people knew. They knew nothing of corn and beans and squash, pumpkin, maple syrup and the list goes on that we take for granted every day now as edible foods. That was all new, even tomatoes, beans. So in helping them with the foods that were grown in this world, Turtle Island, when I said they helped each other along the way, this is how they would help each other. We also were not privy to a lot of the diseases that Europeans brought over so they would help us in the other way. That was the relationship. My point is sovereignty began with us from day one when a clear line of understanding in the relationship the way it was supposed to go. And it's in our heart, it's in our spirit as we look after our people. Unfortunately, that was a traditional practice. So when they brainwash you into a modern elected system, you didn't believe any of that stuff anymore. One of our jobs was to go back to our traditional ways and bring that out and say, "˜Listen, we're Mohawks, we're Iroquois and that is our belief, that is our principles.' So now both...everyone adheres and abides by these principles whenever we talk to outside authorities and governments. That's the basis.

Now I'll tell you one thing in Canada, you can't say sovereignty. They just freak out when we talk about our sovereignty. Not that we don't ever stop. We just listen with interest because they're so concerned about Quebec separating from Canada and they call it separatists. And the Quebec people start talking about their sovereignty of their nation, which is Quebec. And so they've had a couple of showdowns, referendums. One time they come by one percent that they were going to leave. We never really concerned ourselves with it because three quarters of Quebec is Cree and the other part is Iroquois and so we would have just had a referendum of our own and say, "˜We're going to separate from Quebec,' and come back to our own nation. At least that's what we told them and they always freaked out when we told them more or less embarrassing them.

The idea of nationhood is now growing, finding it's way back to the nations in Canada, and I know as I travel around in the States they're always talking about sovereignty. As a matter of fact, I kind of get disillusioned at times because I see so many of our leaders go to a national chiefs' convention, stand up there, talk about sovereignty then go home and do their due diligence with programs and services that are administered from the outside, the social conditions are bad, they haven't moved their community, so it has become rhetoric more or less. So you see when people are really strong it's not particularly the leaders, it's the community that has to grow. They have to have the confidence and they have to have the ability to say, "˜We are who we are. We are a nation. We want to do this. We're strong in our traditions, in our culture, in our language.' And when you're strong there, you become strong in other areas because now you're not afraid to get an education, you're not afraid to get an occupation or train for something because you know who you are. That's the result of the residential schools, that's the result of the churches, it's the result of people that have changed our minds. So we want to go home. So my interpretation of sovereignty is strictly being...knowing who you are, what nation you belong to, the roots that you have, that's your tradition and culture, and you'll be a strong nation. The problem is that many of us have been educated to the degree then admitting to something else that we believe that we no longer have those roots of our nations. And back home that root took place and embedded. So I feel kind of confident in the next generation that we'll continue to have the fighters going in the same direction. I didn't quite answer you the same way as you'd expect somebody to talk about sovereignty in that way, but that's how we look at it." 

Michael K. Mitchell: A History of the Akwesasne Mohawk

Producer
Native Nation Building: Governance and Development undergraduate course
Year

Grand Chief Michael Mitchell of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne offers students a broad overview of the governance history of the Akwesasne Mohawk and the efforts his people have made during his time in office to exercise true self-governance and rebuild their nation.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "A History of the Akwesasne Mohawk." Native Nation Building: Governance and Development undergraduate course (faculty: Dr. Ian Record). American Indian Studies program, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 31, 2008. Presentation.

Michael K. Mitchell:

"[Mohawk language] What I said in my language is it's an honor to be here and I'm very nervous anytime I stand before a class that seem to be at the university level that have garnered so much knowledge from books that I don't quite know how I could relate, but I'm going to try.

I come from a territory that got dissected by the U.S./Canadian border. Half of Akwesasne is located in upstate New York and the other half is in Canada. Three quarters of what's in Canada is in the Province of Quebec and a quarter of it is in the Province of Ontario. So we have five jurisdictions on the outside perimeters of our reservation.

As I'm going along, I may be asking you some questions because I'm working on almost like an autobiography of my upbringing and political experience and a question I have is if any of you already know, what year did the American war of Independence end? Does anybody know? I should have you on Jay Leno. In the late 1700s, right? Because later on, it lead into the War of 1812, but around that time was when they put the international border. And for some reason it split our Mohawk community in half. So part of us became Americans and the other part Canadians. So you have brothers and sisters, one's American and one's Canadian at least by the standards on the outside.

We always consider ourselves to be nation members and citizens of the Mohawk Nation. And I don't know how much you would learn about the Iroquois in your American Indian studies but the Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations. And the nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy are the Mohawk, the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Senecas and Tuscaroras. At the time, what we called the 13 Fires or the 13 Colonies, when Europeans were starting to settle in North America [want to break for a minute?] they met and got permission from the Iroquois Confederacy and established relationships with the Haudenosaunee as to where European settlers would take up residence. It started with the Dutch, Germans and later the English and each group that came, each group of settlers that came made treaties with the Iroquois.

Now in making these agreements there was one particular agreement that we know very well that was made in Albany, New York. It was called the two-row wampum because our people recorded our history in wampum belts. And this is a story that our people talk about in our earliest relations with European settlers. There was a belt that had two rows and our elders said that at that time it signified two ships, two vessels. One was a ship and one was a canoe and what they told the European settlers is that, "˜On this ship you came to this land to escape from religious prosecution, from not being able to practice your governments the way you would want to be represented and so in this land we're going to give you that freedom to do so, speak your language, practice your traditions, your culture, everything that you would like to be as a people will remain on that ship and in our canoe will be the same thing. Our governance, systems of government, our languages, our cultures, our traditions, our ceremonies, our religious beliefs will be in our canoe and they will go down the river of life together in parallel. I will never make laws, my nation will never make laws for your people and you will never do the same with us.' So it was that kind of a relationship. "˜But throughout time, we'll always be there to help you.' And as it was in the earliest times, Europeans were not aware of their surroundings, they were not aware of the many types of foods that they could cultivate and eat. So the Native Americans were the first ones to show them, the first time that they would ever have experienced squash, pumpkin, corn, beans and down the line, as well as medicines. In this exchange, Europeans showed them how to hunt, utensils, farming equipment, etc., so there was this exchange.

Anyway, in those days where they came from they told a story about being ruled by kings and queens, nobles, barons and peasants, religious prosecutions. So one of the earliest historical leaders in this country was Benjamin Franklin and in his earliest writings he talked about sitting at the council fire of the Iroquois and he watched how they governed their people, for it was something drastically different than what he was accustomed to and he invited others to come and observe when nations got together and talked about governance.

Their leaders were called [Mohawk language], chiefs. And contrary to the way politics are run today for both of us, because I'm an elected leader, usually have a term of three to five years. But in those days a Native American chief would be put up by the women of his nation. We all had our own clans. I belong to the Wolf clan. Among the Mohawks there's three major clans, the Wolf, Turtle and Bear. And so it would be the women of that nation is was said that would watch men form the time they crawl on the ground to the time they walk to the time they hunt to the time they marry, the women of that nation would know and judge the character of a man; how he provides, how he related, how he conducted himself as a human being, as a family person. If he was a good hunter, if he was a good speaker, if he knew ceremonial, cultural things that belonged to his nation, then they knew he would be a good leader. And so he didn't have to make promises to say, "˜I want to be a chief.' The women already had made up their mind that he would be a good leader.

And so when they picked a man to be the chief, the women had a fair notion what would make for a good leader and in them days, and we still have that system of governance today, a man had three chances in his lifetime, in his adult life, in his leadership life to be a good leader. If he did something against what would harm the people of his nation, the women would come to see him three times and straighten it out. He would have three chances to retain his chieftainship. And on the third time, they would have a head warrior with them to take his title away. It was considered a disgrace if a chief ever had to have his title taken away.

And with our tradition, a man who was a chief was given a headdress that had deer antlers and he carried that, he wore that in council meetings and in ceremonies and important events when they met with other nations. And so that symbol of office, if there ever came a time that he would be removed from office, there was a term called "˜de-horning a chief.' They would take his title away by taking his antlers away from him. He would never be recognized as a leader again ever in his lifetime. And so that was the system of governance for us. Then European governments came and said, "˜We have a better system.' And I'm going to talk about my experiences on the Canadian side, but there's parallels on both sides.

In Canada in 1867, they created a federal legislation called the Indian Act. It had three major objectives or principles. One was to Christianize the Indian nations, make farmers out of them, and educate them; what they call educating the Indian-ness out of them, make them non-Indians. And so they set up these residential schools. They would round up all the Native kids off their territories, send them hundreds of miles away in a church-run school and those kids wouldn't see their parents until eight, ten years later they would be allowed to come home. That was a system that ran and stopped probably around 1971, '73, they started closing off the so-called residential schools in Canada.

Did it work? Many times it did, for our people returned home strangers, no language any longer, no awareness of their customs and traditions, cultural values, can't speak the language, but they were educated. And the thing that happened with many is that they were lost. They couldn't mingle with their people, associate with them, but they couldn't survive in the cities, outside the reservations because now they had lost something very important, their spirit as Native Americans. So for many to get home, they had to relearn or get re-educated as to who they were. The churches played a strong part de-Indianizing of our people because all these schools were run by religious institutions.

Some significant things that happened is that when they started catching on as to the effects of residential schools in that just under a hundred years in Canada, is that suicide rates, social conditions prevailed on the majority of people who came out of residential schools. Suicide rates are high. In Canada there's 30 million people, population in the country. We form the majority of the prison populations in Canada because one other factor that was crucially important, alcohol wasn't meant for our people to touch. In the time that they drank they became...they lost their memory, they committed a crime, they killed somebody, they robbed something that would land them in prison, lifetime, 20 years. And so that became a big social impact in our development, progress as people.

We are now starting to realize the consequences because the values that we were taught as Native Americans, as Mohawks in nation for us, the virtue of what makes for a good person was in our cultural teachings, and when they took that away from us and tried to make us into something else, we couldn't adjust there, either. And so in Akwesasne, those that are on the Canadian side wound up in a school strange enough called 'Spanish.' On the American side they wound up in a residential school, which escapes me for the minute. Anybody ever hear of Jim Thorpe? What school did he go to? Carlisle [Indian School], that was the school where they sent our people on the American side, and a lot of our elders went to school with Jim Thorpe.

So they would return home. Now there are some people that use their education and they did make something of themselves but in between that was a sad story. So those of us that got an education within our community, there was a fight all the way through. I was raised by my grandparents and they gave me the cultural teachings, the language, ceremonial songs, what makes for a good person. Many of the stories of the nations that I find myself now being an elder in a community of sorts and as strange as it is, the governance that I told you a little earlier about how people get put up, my mother is a clan mother and they are the ones who put up leaders. And so I would say from the time I was small being raised that I had retained all these teachings that I was going to be a traditional chief, where the women would put you in office.

In the 1970s to "˜80s in our community, there was always turmoil between the elected leaders and the traditional people. And then for us there was elected leaders on the Canadian side and there's elected leaders on the American side and there was the Mohawk Nation traditional chiefs. So if it wasn't bad enough to have five governments on the outside, we had three inside the reservation. And like the Hatfields and McCoys, the elected leaders were usually the Christian leaders and the traditional chiefs were people who they called them the Long House people. They were the people who maintained the ceremonies, the language and the customs and traditions and they adhere to a traditional form of governance as I had told you.

Anyway, as in any society when they don't get along there would be skirmishes. So the nation people said, "˜We want to find a way to exchange our cultures in the event that maybe we could make for a better world in the next generation. So we're going to exchange some of our people.' So they send me over to the elected side and in 1982 I became, I was elected as a chief in the elected system and at that time I was probably the first one. We were referred to as pagans because we weren't Christian and the church taught them that if you're not a Christian you must be a pagan. So that was a very catchy name on council by my peers, to have a pagan chief. Not that I really knew much about it, so it didn't really bother me. But as I later found out, some cruel things. The priest in our reservation was a Mohawk from another reservation and so when you get somebody believing in something really hard, they espoused a lot of hatred and that existed in my time growing up. If you weren't a Christian Mohawk, then you were something of a lower class. My duty and responsibility was not only to be a good leader, but to change that whole image and that whole attitude of what makes for a good Mohawk person.

So two years later...they've only got two-year terms; we had another election. In that time, I looked at our elected governance, chief and council, the way they conducted their business. They didn't have any public meetings, they didn't show the community any of the minutes of their meetings so they know how much education dollars, how much housing dollars and welfare and house...so it was all like a big mystery. And usually it's a favorite; some people get catered to. If you elect a person and you represent so many of a large family, you're looked after. If they didn't think that you were supporting particular people on council, you didn't kind of work your way up the ladder.

So it was that kind of governance I wasn't really used to. So I started taking minutes of our meetings and I would show them around. Finally I did a small newspaper, I would ship them out into the community. I became very well versed on information that had to get into the community. So I took it upon myself -- because that was my tradition -- to take this information and provide it to the community. Now for some reason, the community liked having this information even though I was traditional and the next year they wanted me to become the Grand Chief of the reservation.

Now I'm going to go back a little bit. The first time I went for elections and I was put up, our traditional people don't vote. So I had to get elected by the other side. I still don't know how that happened, but it did and I got in. So the second time around when I competed for the Grand Chief position, a Grand Chief is elected among the general populace. A District Chief is elected from his own area. So I thought I was safe there. And to jump in that short time was a little difficult...and it was rough for somebody that came from the traditional side of the community. I got beat up going to work. The office that I had was occupied by protestors who didn't believe that the Grand Chief should be traditional. My life was threatened. And so it didn't kind of work out at the beginning, but if you have a thing in your mind that you want to try to govern, I had to mix my upbringing into my politics. So I found different avenues, different venues where I would get information to the community, "˜This is our situation.' And as I'm trying to fight off my opponents, I also had to fight off the governments on the outside. So I got together with the chiefs and we had some sessions, normally like you would anywhere else where you decide to get everything out in the open. And I convinced them that we're here for the same reasons -- to have effective governance.

Don't forget about the Indian Act that I told you, because not that long ago in our community the Indian agent ran everything. He controlled the chief and council, told them how to vote, what is the important issues and how they should govern, how they should make decisions. When I was coming out of high school was the last few days of the Indian agent was around in our reservation but the effects, government policy, everything was decided in Ottawa. If the chief and council made a decision about something, whether it's a school or a health facility, anything that would benefit the community, you had to ask for permission through the Department of Indian Affairs and they would let you know if you could do it. I was very much opposed to not having the community be the ones who decide on issues and I advocated that the people had to get involved.

Now we live on a reservation as I told you that's half in Canada, half in the States. For me to come from Cornwall Island, Ontario, I have to cross through the customs to the American side of the reservation to get to St. Regis, Quebec. If I have to go to Snye, I have to go back to the American side and get back into Quebec. So every day I'm going through borders. And when we had problems crossing borders, I convinced the community that we should stand up for ourselves. After a few meetings we got people worked up, we shut down the international bridge; fifty of us went to jail. But that was the first time in "˜70s that in Canada people started, Native people started organizing themselves, speaking up for themselves, and that was the time that changes started to happen. Then we started getting in touch with our brothers on the American side.

One of the things that happened, we affected government policy. I convinced Ottawa to allow us to hire our own people because they had non-Native coming on the reservation to be our education director, to take notes in terms of social programs, to take health information back and statistics that they kept and nobody really was comfortable with that kind of relationship. In the space of two years, I was able to convince the governments on the outside to allow young people who were coming out of colleges and universities to come home and work for us, stay home. They became our administrators, they became our teachers, they became our police people, our conservation, environment...we had jobs of all kinds, but they weren't really our people that were working there. So that was the changes that came about in the "˜80s. As the changes started to happen, confidence came back to our people, that confidence and tradition.

There's something important I left out, an event that happened in 1984, which was just as I was starting my second term, my first term as Grand Chief. The Pope came to Canada and he had asked the bishops that... he was tired of the churches in U.S. and Canada every time a figure like that would come around they would dress up the Indians, put the war bonnets on and put them on horses just the way you see them in cowboy and Indian movies. That was the perception. So as easterners we were not very much aware of the prairie Indians, they still would put western headdresses on our elders and parade them around. Well, the Pope that we had passed away just a few years ago, Pope John Paul. He didn't want that. He said, "˜I want to see real people. I want to see them how they do their spiritual practices, I want to experience it.' So the priests on my reservation wrote to them and said, "˜We just elected a pagan over here so I'll send his name up.' And I got a call from the Vatican and they said, "˜Would you be interested in putting a ceremony on for the Pope?' And I agreed. I went back to the Long House and I told them what had been requested and in their wisdom they said, "˜Maybe it would make for better relations because as long as they don't understand they've got hatred in their hearts.' And so we put together a small group. We went to Midland, Ontario to do this ceremony for the Pope.

When I got there, just imagine what it must have been in Woodstock when they had this great big celebration over there, change it around, the Pope was the main attraction but there were about I'd say 70,000, 80,000 people in these foothills, cameras, everything was broadcast worldwide. And this event that he was trying to pursue was one that he was pushing for all religions to have greater tolerance and understanding of each other. And this one mission that he had in North America was to understand the Native spiritual practices better. And so I worked with the Ojibwes and the Crees in Canada with the Mohawks to put together this ceremony. And we put together a healing ceremony that consisted of smudging, sweet grass, sage and tobacco, the three main things that we use to conduct our ceremonies. I'm a singer. I sang with a group of other young guys. And so the whole event was televised and when it come up to putting the words to him and singing and putting him through the ceremonies, the Pope started to have tears come down. And when we got done and everything was translated to him what we were saying, I knew that it had a profound effect on him.

So when it was over, and by the way about 500 perhaps maybe more than that of the same people that called us down and called us pagans were in the audience out there somewhere. I know because I put buses on to get them there and I paid for their gas as chief so I know somewhere they're out there. And it was slightly uncomfortable because they said, "˜Well, now that we've got a pagan chief we know we have to go out there. The previous chief would have given us money.' Well, I did give them money and I put buses on and I helped them get there so I knew somewhere they were in the audience.

But what happened that day was, the speech that he gave at the end of the ceremony where he said, "˜The European people that came across the salt waters, the religious, the churches that came across believed that the Native Americans in this country were godless, soulless people and ever since then we have advocated to everyone that the only one way they would be human beings if they became Christians.' Then he put down his papers and he looked right at them and he said, "˜That was wrong. For I have experienced a religious experience from these people that I want to talk about.' He proceeded to lay everything out for them saying, "˜The churches have been wrong. The White man has been wrong,' he says, "˜to even have thinking that you've got to be like us.' Then he talked about the residential schools, talked about the education systems. By the time he got done, he offered an apology on behalf of the Church. And then he told everybody, he said, "˜I know there were ways that you have shown the distaste of your own practices. I'm going to ask you to go home, incorporate your traditional teachings in the Church.' And from that time on for me life became easier because the protest, the occupations, the beating have stopped and I was given a chance to govern.

We went to the churches, me for the first time, to give talks like this about peace and brotherhood, because for me in my upbringing we also had a spiritual leader. He had a name, referred to as [Mohawk language] but we only refer to him as the Peacemaker because with him he came to our people like close to a thousand years ago at a time when there was warfare going on between nations. And he advocated the great peace, the Great Law of Peace where people would put away their weapons and always find a way in whatever you do advocate a more peaceful way to live. Now you also had in the Great Law of Peace the constitution and that constitution advocated fairness in representation, fairness in governance. The people were the ones who made decisions and put their leaders up more to be like servants and so [Mohawk language], a chief was really a person who followed the wishes of his Nation. And this is when I was telling about women wound up being the ones who elected their leaders. Very interesting concept: five nations in unity governing on the basis of peace on the law that was known as the Great Law of Peace.

This was the meetings that Benjamin Franklin sat in and he brought his people along to say, "˜Look at these people making decisions and look at the way they govern and the way they advocate their governance, is that they would find a way to speak, counsel, make decisions all on the basis of peace.' And so they influenced the Constitution of the United States. I offer you these tidbits of information because I know you're going to go back and check, where did this all occur. Well, today it's pretty well a foregone conclusion that these events did happen and that there were these early influences, but with us when governments met and they came to a decision, nations would have to all unanimously agree. That's something that Benjamin Franklin said, "˜My people cannot ever do.' So they opted out for majority decision. So that was the difference in our lifestyle back home in governance.

In my time, I tried to cooperate a combination of our traditional cultural practices in a modern elected governance system. And that law called the Indian Act in Canada, I opted out of the provisions of that so that I could replace it with some strong, Mohawk-flavored governance models; giving the power back to the people. That's why in 1982, '84 I was asked by the elders to consider being a chief maybe for a term or two just so that they could turn things around and maybe politics would get a little better. And as I said a while ago, in 2006 the second time that I retired, people kept putting me back in office and they always said, "˜For one more term, until we can find and develop new leaders that will take your place.' And I began to find myself stuck to a position that I was only supposed to be there on a temporary basis. Now mind you, the excitement of governing, the challenge of representing and serving your people is a fire that is always going to be ignited inside you if you're a leader. And so I agreed to keep going.

Now I serve on the advisory board for the Native Nations Institute, but I also serve in advisory capacity to many other developments, both American and Canadian, Native American leaders. Offer them advice based on many years of experience. I wasn't...I'm not going to lie to you, it wasn't always a peaceful leadership style based on peace. When I talked about shutting down international roads and bridges, took over islands but just to get people involved in a non-violent way without guns, without clubs, but simply assert yourself. And so I started doing this across Canada and people rose and life is better when you can speak for yourself and nations can speak out. And that was a time for us that led up to 2006 when I finally made my decision to pursue a private life, more or less. Elections are coming around back home next year and they said, "˜You had enough rest. You should consider coming back.'

Well, presently I'm working on my book. Basically I made a very fast cut through of my experiences but in more greater detail of events that happened in the United States with Indian Country, events that happened in Canada, because I offer certain parallels that are very distinguishable. But my survival in politics led to my knowing my traditions and my culture and my language, taking the best of the non-Native world and combining it, pushed education a lot but the social conditions in our community has improved. But being on that border, we got famous for something else. I don't know if you can guess at it but whenever there's a border there, what's likely to happen? Anybody take a guess? Smuggling took place and in a big way because we've got 100 miles of the St. Lawrence River of islands and in the dark of night, our people know that territory inside out. And so it started with cigarettes. Canadian companies, cigarette manufacturers would reroute their cigarettes from Buffalo, New York to Pennsylvania to New Jersey to Boston and make a big circle and then would bring them back in and they were using our people to bring them across the border. It wasn't long before people caught on and they started doing their own smuggling. It's still going on. So I had that to contend with. Pretty soon motorcycle gangs called the Hells Angels in Montreal started, "˜Hey, there's a profit to be made here,' so they started enticing people to bring drugs across. And then when that started, some of that drug stayed in the community. So for us it was always an ongoing battle.

When 9/11 happened, and if some of you have a good memory CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC all had giant screens with a map of Akwesasne saying, "˜Those terrorists came through that Indian reservation.' For two weeks that was going on. They were reporting that it had to be this complicated, unique Native community where they might have come through. The more they talked about it, the more they convinced themselves that that in fact happened. It wasn't until maybe two, three weeks later that they found out they didn't come through there, that they were in fact in the country. I was Grand Chief at the time and you will not know your gut, the heart, what it felt like thinking they crossed and killed so many people because of this border. And it's a border that much unlike...I went to visit the Tohono O'odham Nation here. Their reservation is the same way. Part of it is in the United States, part of it is in Mexico and they've got 85 miles of nation territory they have to watch over. People are coming over, but not to the extreme or as dangerous as people coming from Canada into the States because they have one thing in mind, smuggle something over. So now our concerns is explosives, guns, terrorism types, finding a way through our reservation.

So that became the greatest concern. So we made up our own border patrol program. We added to our police force. Now we work with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs, State Troopers and it's a program called IBET [Integrated Border Enforcement Teams], integrated policing. And that's becoming another big part of our reputation, coincide with the smuggling concern.

But all in all, you advocate to your young people, "˜Go to school, get an education, seek something out that you want to be but come back home.' And that thing that started in the 1980s is still going on today. And so I've just given you a very fast run-through of what life is like for where I come from. I don't know how much of it you can digest in a short time, but you invited me here to talk a little bit about where you're from and what you do or what you were doing and that's the story of Akwesasne. By the way, Akwesasne in Mohawk means "˜land where the partridge drums,' and at the earliest times along the St. Lawrence you still see quite a few, I guess you call them grouse, partridges, from that family, very prevalent on the St. Lawrence. And they call our place the home of the partridges. Anyway, that's my story."

Ian Record:

"I've got a question about...you mentioned just now the jurisdictional agreements you have around law enforcement to try to control the smuggling and all that. I've had conversations with you before where you talked about the kind of early origins of when Akwesasne started really asserting their jurisdiction back over their own territory and I wonder if you could talk about that, because at least originally Canada and the provinces and even the states weren't too approving of that, were they?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"That's right. On the Canadian side the Mounties enforce...Royal Canadian Mounted Police enforce the federal law and the Provincial Police, Ontario Provincial Police and the Quebec Provincial Police enforce the provincial laws. That was on the river and on the mainland. And they enforced the Criminal Code of Canada. And so as complicated as our territory is there was no room...we had a Native police force but they weren't giving them any respect. As a matter of fact there's a term I still remember. They called them "˜window dressing cops.' If they won't let you do anything but they were still complaining that they weren't arresting our people on driving intoxicated or speeding. They didn't keep up their quota so they had a very narrow definition of what makes for a good peacekeeper. And when I became chief, I wanted to see that change. But I found nowhere where that would happen. They had everything cornered off.

As a matter of fact, the time that I became chief our people were being arrested on the river for fishing, traditional fishing whenever they would net and have enough for their families, put away... The laws on the outside said, "˜You can't do that anymore.' So they started taking the boats, the motors, the nets, confiscating, making seizures. So when I became chief, our people came to me and said, "˜What has changed so much that we can't practice our traditions any longer?'

Well, I went to see the person who was the...the officer who was making these seizures on the river, in the middle of the river. I stopped him with a few other boats that were traveling with me, let's put it that way, and as nicely as I was talking to him asking him, "˜We don't need provincial, federal license to fish. It's in our treaties.' He says, "˜That's in the past. From now on you will learn to get a provincial license.' So I says, "˜But we don't have to.' And I was diplomatically I was trying to be...he was just squashing, didn't care about it. So I took it to the next level and I said, "˜Look, sir, if you don't tell us where the boats are that I can go get them, I might have to take your boat.' He just laughed. As soon as I give the signal, our guys are waiting, they shut the motor off and took his equipment out, tied a rope and we towed his boat back to St. Regis to the police station and we seized the conservation officer's boat.

When I got back, then I phoned Toronto, the main office of the Ministry of Natural Resources and told them what I had done and actually they said, "˜This could be an international situation, crisis of sorts so what can we do?' I said, "˜I guess we have to negotiate the release of our boats, half a dozen of them.' They just had elections in Ontario so there was new people there and they said, "˜Well, that man, the officer, is he a hostage, are you holding him in a hostage situation?' I said, "˜No. I'm holding his boat hostage.' "˜Well, is he allowed to go home?' I said, "˜Yep. If he can walk or swim, he can get back across the river, but the current is very strong, so he's going to stay here until we get our boat back.' So pretty well half the night we're negotiating back and forth. The Premiere gets on the phone, he says, "˜I want to put an end to this. I know you don't need fishing licenses to fish in your traditional territories. I'm well aware of that.' He says, "˜So I've got people looking for your boat.' As it wound up it was in Toronto. So he says, "˜We'll have them back by 9:00 in the morning.' So they returned all the boats. Naturally it helped my leadership because I was able to resolve the situation without any violence of sorts. And the same man that made these seizures was the same man that was made to bring them back the next day.

I wanted to see our own people become Conservation Officers so I went back to Quebec federal government in Ontario. "˜Nobody,' he says, "˜We never heard of that before.' Being an international community I picked up the phone, I phoned Albany, New York. They had a state troopers, conservation police training. I said, "˜Can I send some people down to be trained to become Conservation Officers?' They called back and said, "˜I don't see why not. These are dual citizens, you can do that.' So I sent two. Six months later they got home. They had the state trooper Stetson hats, 'Dirty Harry'-type .9 mm pistols, everything that's totally legally in Canada that's...they came back and they're certified police force and they hit the waters to start patrolling.

By that time we had set up our Mohawk Justice Court, we had laws that I had registered with the nation council and they started executing. And that raised in the community a perception that we could take care of ourselves, that we could have law and order and it could be done with our own people. And the attitude on the outside changed too. We didn't always have to be fighting each other. The right people came and the relationship led to us having more police under our jurisdiction, having our own justice, having our own courts and because I was able to diplomatically negotiate these things, it became a much better environment for us, on the river and on land.

I like being, talking about being a good strong advocate, a good leader, but some funny things happened along the way. Those two conservation officers that returned home, within that same week they were on patrol, they got a call from the island I was from and an incident had taken place. I'm in the main village with elders. We were talking about how we could build a new seniors' home for them and they walk in. So all the elders made a big fuss over them. "˜These are the people we've heard about. They've trained and now they're out there on the river, they're looking after our people and are giving out licenses for non-Natives and they're making them buy licenses from us. What a change! And they give them cookies and milk and everything.' They said, "˜We're really here to talk to the grand chief.' So I went over and said, "˜What's up?' He said, "˜Sir, there's been a murder on the island where you're from. We've investigated and found out that somebody in your family is involved and we need to talk to you outside.'

Geez, when you get news like that the first thing you do is boom, it hits you right here. Did somebody die in my family? Did something happen? Did somebody in my family do something? I went outside and he said, "˜There's a farmer up there who called us. We got there and found out that his pig had been killed. And the pig had piglets, six of them. They were all killed too.' And he said, "˜Chief, it was your dog that killed them. You're under arrest.' I said, "˜What?!' The first person on the reservation when they got back from training that was arrested was me and I tried to dispute it. I said, "˜Well, you got no evidence.' They had pictures. There was a trail of piglet parts down to my house, to my farm. Around the house, where he had dug up, there were piglet parts. I was raising an Alaskan malamute. So he was laying there, he had blood on his face; he had blood on his chest. They took pictures, a very thorough investigation. I had nothing I could say but the whole reservation was laughing up and down. "˜There's your conservation officers.' So they marched me across the street to the Justice and charged me and I had to go back for my hearing two weeks later.

In those two weeks, there was a lot of commotion, a lot of discussion "˜cause all I had to do was say, "˜Drop it,' or the elders would say, "˜Don't go there because how hard he's worked to get this program this far.' And people were either for or against. I went to court, I paid the fine and it was done. I said, "˜We have a very efficient peacekeeper and we all have to follow the law regardless who it is.' So that's how the law and order picked up in our community.

I just don't like telling this story but he heard it once and he always asks me about it. Anyway, thank you very much." 

Michael K. Mitchell: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Mohawk Council of Akwesasne Grand Chief Michael K. Mitchell reflects on his role as a modern elected leader of his nation. Mitchell encourages small changes in terminology and ideology that in turn will change the community's mindset about nation rebuilding and what is possible.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2009. Presentation.

"First, I want to start by offering my congratulations for each and every new member of council, chief or council member or administrator. I imagine that's the purpose that you're all here. What can we learn from one another? I try to make my presentation simple. He was talking about a book that I'm working on. I took some notes from there and it's been passed around. You'll see it. It says 'My Introduction to Akwesasne Politics.' I want to go back to being a chief in Canada. And along the way that I'm telling my story, I want you to think about what commonalities that we have on reservations in the [United] States, reservation politics and reserve politics in Canada. A while ago it was mentioned that we are governed by federal legislation in Canada called the Indian Act. I guess the closest thing that comes to it in the States is the Indian Reorganization [Act] law. My story that I want to share with you pertains to, a lot to people that raised me. My greatest influence was my grandfather and grandmother and how they raised me. They taught me the traditions, the spiritual life at a very young age growing up, the language; and I was groomed to be a leader in the Longhouse, in the traditional governance. And somewhere along the way, life took a detour because I didn't wind up being a traditional chief; I wound up being an elected chief for over 20 years. And that's the story that I want to share with you.

You see, in every Native American community -- large or small, medium, close to urban or way off isolated area -- we have our politics. And when election comes around, there's different groups that make up the society. You're either poor, or there's a casino or revenue base of some kind, and it controls the lifestyle of the people. You're either in or out. Religion: you're either very traditional or very Christian. Very seldom is there a group that's kind of like both. So from 30, 40, 50 years ago, 100 years to recent years, that has been the trend. Well, my grandfather was a strong traditional. He hated the elected system. And his followers, and his people that he's part of in the Longhouse, dead set against the elected system of governance. And so they belong to a traditional governance of the Iroquois Confederacy, which is the Mohawks, the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and later the Tuscaroras. And that union, as ancient as it was, followed a very traditional form of governance. The women actually put up the leaders. And according to the clans, if they were not good leaders, the women would take you out of office. And so those were the principles of governance, as compared to a modern elected system. And in Akwesasne we were governed under the Indian Act, a federal national legislation.

You would run for office for two years, depending on what is in place, economically and the mood. Basically, in Akwesasne, you get in office as a councilor and 12 chiefs sat around the table. And out of the 12 they would elect a head chief out of the 12 who would become the head chief. But it's a system that was in place for a long time. Well, I was elected in that system. And the story that I want to share with you is, "˜How did I get involved in the elected system?' Well, over the last hundred years in Akwesasne, about every ten years we'd have a war of some kind between the elected system on the Canadian side and the tribal elected system on the American side and the traditional leaders. Three governments; two elected and one traditional. And it seems like we have a crisis every ten years of some kind internally. And there's deep-seated hatred and mistrust among the leadership of the three governments. As it went on, in my time I saw three major ones where we're pointing guns at each other, Native Americans pointing guns at each other. It was a time when the elders said, "˜We've got to stop this. And we've got to try to send some of our people who are on the traditional side to run in an elected system and see if we can change the mindset of the other half.'

You see, in Canada we were educated, the majority, by what we call the Indian residential school system. The other part was the reserve day system. Church had a lot to do with it; government had a lot to do with it. And how you grew up in the Native community depended on what you were taught. And so one group said, "˜We're the Christian side; we're a lot better than the pagan side.' And so that internal difference started from the day that you were born. So there could be no peace. Well, in my time, I ran a cultural center in the community. And I didn't make any difference in treating people whether they were traditional or elected followers or Christian. My purpose was to serve everyone. And when wars started we always stayed neutral. So this idea of finding a person to run, with the traditional side saying, "˜We ought to try to get Mike to get into that elected system and see if he can turn things around'; this is after one of our wars. Well, after a lot of discussions, a lot of thinking, 'What was the idea behind this?,' I agreed to run. And the story that's in those documents that we passed around was my adventure in being a modern-day elected leader. It's pretty rough.

The first, after the elections, I got elected by the 12 chiefs to be the head chief. They said, "˜We'll string him up in a couple weeks.' My office was constantly occupied for six months. And the only way it ended was a Mohawk fighting another Mohawk, in this case fighting the previous chief, before peace prevailed. But following that, what would a person do in a situation like that was tackle the things that affected us from the outside; and that was the Department of Indian Affairs, the way they told us to govern. Mostly through the two years somebody was protesting an election. You could go to court; you could appeal to the government. So in that first six months we had meetings in the community and asked them if we could bring home and let the community make their own election law, devise an election code where things would be settled at home. When we finished that, we had a vote. And when the people voted -- see Longhouse people, traditional people don't vote. So the first act was to get the elected followers to vote on an issue. After that was finished, then I went over to the traditional side and asked them to have clan meetings. And by majority or consensus they would arrive at a decision on a traditional manner. However, both sides agreed that we should control our own elective system. And when they found out that they both agree on a system, they looked at each other and said, "˜Geez, we actually agreed on something.'

Then we tackled membership. Who should be a member of our nation, and does culture and tradition come into it? Does a clan, having a clan have something to do with being a member? Who gets to be a member? Do you have to have both parents be Native? Is there room for a person who's half? And all those questions went out into our discussions in the community. And at the end, another year later, we had another vote. And little by little we started chipping away, taking these authorities away from Ottawa, from the Indian Act, and bringing it home to a community-based process. And in these meetings we invited finally the tribe to sit with us and the Nation council to sit. I brought out agenda items like land claims, tourism, economic development, just to look at it, inviting them for their opinions. What could we do as one people?

Akwesasne, the international borderline runs right through the middle of our territory. One half is in Canada, the other half is in the United States. One half that is in Canada is in Ontario and the other half in Canada is in Quebec. So you can't be more divided than that. And then of course, historically, the mindset of the people is always one of division. Now you learn a great lesson. Being under the Indian Act election only gave you two years. And when I became chief they were in a deficit of over $2.5 million and they only had a $5 million operating budget. That's because on the outside the government controlled everything. The Indian agent had left recently but all his people still controlled...if you want education dollars you have to ask a DIA [Department of Indian Affairs] official to come down and look at your proposal, what you want to do. He'll decide how much money you're going to get. If you want economic development, if you want housing, capital works, it's the same thing. Little by little we trained our people. First they came home, second let's make our own decisions, let's do our own planning and start taking that authority away from Indian Affairs. And it's this little community-based mindset.

I'm going back a little bit. We didn't think like Mohawk Nation. We had no concept of a nation mentality. Over the last hundred years or so, we were engrained in thinking Indian Act way. We were 'Band Indians.' We were the St. Regis Band, we went to the St. Regis Band office, we had a Band administrator; our community was a small Mohawk band of Indians. So the terminology was obvious that the federal government had engrained in us to think less of ourselves. If you said 'Nation,' you were an enemy; you were hostile. Well, my grandfather was a hostile; he was traditional and he said our people are a nation. So that mentality only came from a certain group of people. So I started asking the council to have meetings in the community to throw issues out to the community. You had a lot of public meetings. And in those meetings we raised the issue, 'Why do we consider ourselves to be inferior?' And we went through a change of name from the St. Regis Band to the Mohawks of Akwesasne. Akwesasne is our traditional Mohawk name. That passed. Then we made a flag. That passed. A community flag to fly with our nation flag. Council changed the name from the St. Regis Band Council to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. We're no longer a reserve or a reservation, we were a territory. 'You have entered the Territory of the Mohawk Nation.' And it's just a mentality of the young people thinking differently of themselves. This is a useful education process because the community's in deficit, you ain't going to be able to spend a whole lot of money, so let's look at our mentality. How do we view ourselves, especially the ones that are coming up, the next generation? How does that impact their thinking? And so we did that. We started concentrating on who we are, how do we perceive ourselves as [Mohawk language], as First Nations. And by the time we got done we made a whole mess of changes that was fun.

My council that made up the governance, a lot of the old timers couldn't get away from saying the word 'band.' So we made a game. I put a cup in the middle of the council table and asked all the chiefs, "˜If any of you say 'band' in our meetings anytime in our discussions, I want you to put a quarter in there.' Pretty soon we have to have three cups in there because they kept tripping up. But they voluntarily put in there, "˜I'll get it, I'll get it.' And he'd mess up again, he'd put a couple more dollars in there. Pretty soon we had a big coffee fund set aside. Well, the administration offices heard about this little nation-building game and they started doing that and it afflicted the staff. And people in the community started hearing about this little game and it affected them too, but it affected them in a positive way because now we're all thinking that. Undoing a mindset that was given to us.

I will ask, 'What could I have learned coming into a system, an elected system, a divided community, deep roots in hatred?' Well, I would have probably, as a leader, learned more about the history of the Indian Act and how Indian Affairs does its business because for 20 years it was a game, a chess game of trying to turn things around -- put more tradition, more community values, more awareness, preparing the next generation -- and knowing that you had to go against the stumbling blocks of government interference from the outside. It was a nice battle, counter battles, but that's what I would have really like to have seen is the government saying, "˜You want to take over your governance. You want a representation of your people in getting them involved in your politics. We'll step out of the way.' Eventually they did, but it was always through different battles that we had to go through. But now the people are in a fighting mood.

And I just want to finish off by saying nowadays they find a way to sit together. The tribal council, the Mohawk council, and the Nation council actually sit together and look at the issue that impacts the community. And so there are many things that you always learn and there are many things that you are grateful that you've given to the community and they're nation-minded. They're proud of their Mohawk heritage, it's engrained in them. Governance is an issue that will always be there because one side is American, the other side is Canadian and that international border plays havoc with us.

We are well known in North America as the smuggling capital. We smuggle cigarettes, make a lot of money doing it, too. And so within our community there's a little power struggle. The business community have a lot of influence, have a lot of power underground by the dark-of-night economy. And then you try to create a legitimate economy. So there are always going to be things like that that are going to happen, but we're talking to each other. Drugs is a problem of being stuff that's smuggled across; guns, now aliens, terrorism. When 9/11 happened they thought they came through Akwesasne. CNN had these maps, "˜This Mohawk Nation community here, that's where they came from.' A few weeks later they said, "˜Oh, we might have made a mistake,' but we get blamed right away.

What did I learn, what did the community learn about our politics and the way we do things? Talk to each other, talk to your enemy, talk to your elder, talk to your people in the community. So that's my story."

Michael K. Mitchell: Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Mohawk Council of Akwesasne Grand Chief Michael K. Mitchell discusses the Akwesasne Mohawk's effort to regain control over their own affairs, and offers his advice to leaders who are working to regain jurisdiction over their lands and resources as well as rebuild their nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Mohawk golf club. Guaranteed to go 300-400 yards, no problem. So if you can't hit your drives, I'm selling good sticks. Actually I wanted to come up here and start with this because the game of lacrosse is a contribution of Native American. It's an Indigenous game. We were playing this game when Europeans came to the New World. But if you read your history, it will tell you the Jesuits, the first time they saw Iroquois playing this game against another tribe, they recorded in their history that they were at war because they played the game so intensely. It gives you an idea how far apart -- their view and ours -- because they were really playing this game to honor their Creator. They were playing the game to honor their elders. They were playing the game to get physically fit. And it could be, in them days, close to 100 braves on one side. And if they had a difference of opinion or a difference with different nations, they wouldn't necessarily go to war, but they would agree to have a lacrosse game. And the winner would be accorded the right of whatever differences they had. And I wanted to inject a little culture because I want to donate this stick to our Indigenous golf tournament that we're going to have Friday. Don't you guys get any ideas about using it for a driver, either."

Joan Timeche:

"We will be, I'm not sure if we're going to, we'll probably auction this off at our golf tournament on April 4th here in Tucson. Thank you very much."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"It was a real pleasure to sit in the audience this morning and listen to the presenters share some of our experiences on leadership, Indigenous leaders from different nations. There's a lot of wisdom there. From what I understand, there's quite a few young leaders that are attending this conference. Heed their words, because nation building is a process that you cannot get from books, you certainly can't get it from Washington or Ottawa. These ideas of governance stem right from the heart of our nations, passed on from our elders.

They say in our traditions back home -- among the Mohawk Nation, Haudenosaunee -- our leader is acknowledged from the time he is crawling on the dirt, to when he walks, to when he's a young man and he hunts. And everything he does defines his characteristics. And depending on what clan he belongs to -- because we also, like many nations, have our clans (I belong to the Wolf clan, my Mohawk name is Kanentakeron) -- and so we are defined [by] how we are conducting ourselves within our own society. And from that, back home the women of the clans would select who the leader would be. And they say that he has already proven his leadership from the way he conducts himself, morals, leadership to how he relates to his people, how he takes care of them, how he acknowledges the elders in the families that are in his nation. So the women already knew he was going to be a good leader. And they say that he would be a leader for as long as he demonstrated those qualities. If at any time he wasn't a good leader, that he would fall on something, the women gave him three chances in his lifetime to set it straight; they would set him straight. And so if he went beyond that and he didn't follow the principles of [Mohawk language], a good mind, the women would take you out of office.

Well, back home in Canada, Canada thought they could improve on that kind of leadership and that kind of democracy. And you've been hearing this morning about the Indian Act in Canada. You also heard about the Indian Reorganization Act in the United States. That was Canada's idea of governance for First Nations. I grew up in the longhouse. My mother is a clan mother, my brother is a wampum keeper, and I have a sister who is a very strong Christian -- goes to church just about every day. So for my family, I think we cover all the elements. Now I come from a territory that is located in upstate New York and it's right on the border of Canada/United States. Half the reservation is in the United States side. My brothers -- James Ransom is the tribal chief, he's here; Ron LaFrance, Jr. is a tribal chief, he's also here –- he's one of the younger ones. We were just talking to James a while ago and he's on his third term. They both adhere to those principles and philosophy from the traditional side of our nation. And when you have that in your heart and in your mind, it just about guarantees that you have the nation's heart and mind, that you're going to be a good leader. And so those ideas about all the frustrations that you're going to face in your political lifetime, there's another saying back home, the elders tell you as you're growing up: If you're going to be a leader, you have to have a skin, and in our language that means 'seven thumbs thick,' or sometimes they'll say 'seven skins thick,' because you have to exercise a lot of patience, you have to exercise a good mind and good will. And you will take a lot of abuse. And so you take that home. And how you conduct yourself as a leader that will be judged by the people in your territory, in your community. And so for us, term limits is something that is decided by your nation and that term could be your whole life if you're a good leader. So those people that you saw -- those three people that sat in front of you and gave presentations just before noon -- look at them as very wise leaders who are willing to share their experience with you, because they have demonstrated the type of leadership that our people need and have served our nations well.

I became Grand Chief in 1984 and all I had in knowledge was my traditional upbringing. I didn't realize that under the Indian Act that all the authority comes from Ottawa, comes from the Indian Act, comes from the Department of Indian Affairs. The council that I inherited was in a deficit of close to $2.5 million and all they were responsible for was $5 million. The government was sent to come down and put our administration finances under third-party management. So I came to be a leader at the wrong time. And I studied, talked to people, and I found out that it's pretty well the Indian agent, Indian Affairs, their officials pretty well ran the community -- education, they controlled health, they controlled social, welfare, housing. And it was just like they said this morning; the chiefs that were on council were really just administering the programs. So the head chief was the band administrator. The language that was prevalent; nobody said 'nation.' Nobody spoke of 'nation.' As a matter of fact, our people at that time looked down on nation people. They were the Long House people, traditional people, and they never gave up the idea that we're a nation. They kept that alive. But they were very few because they also followed their own Native American religion. They still had their ceremonies and they kept that going. They kept our tongue alive: [Mohawk language].

We only spoke our language, first language. And so when I got to work in my term, there was some men by the council office and they didn't have an appointment. So they stayed outside because that's the way you met with the chief back in them days and you better have an appointment. So they caught me as I'm going in and they said, "˜We'd like to meet with you. And we don't have an appointment, but it's kind of important. Could you make some time for us?' I said, "˜Come on in.' Sat down, gave them some coffee, spoke in our own language and I said, "˜What seems to be the problem?' And they said, "˜Well, our friends over here were out fishing the other day and a conservation officer stopped them. And he said they didn't have any license to be on the river to be fishing, by the interior government. And so they confiscated our boats and motors and nets. And in the last six months it's been a steady process of having this happen. You're a new chief. We're wondering if you might consider checking into this.' I said, "˜Listen, I'm going to make time tomorrow morning. I'm going to get my boat and I'm going to track down this conservation officer from Ontario and ask them,' because you grow up believing that our waters is ours. And they were making new laws and the government was changing things, creeping more into 'civilizing us' by making us come under their law -- provincial law, state law. And so the Aboriginal right to hunt and fish at that time was slowly being taken over. Anyway, when I told them that I was going to go on the river they said, "˜Well, we'll come with you because we know the river. We know where he's going to come in from.'

So early in the morning we got out on the river. It didn't take long before they found where he was coming from, Cornwall. You have to come around a certain island. And the river current is very fast. So when you come around this one island eastern corner island, St. Regis Island, you have to, you're in United States waters and you're in Quebec waters and he's in Ontario. That's where we were waiting for him. And as soon as he come across that island we came out and we stopped them on the river. And then we shut off the motor and we started talking. He didn't want to hear anything about...I was asking him if he could return the boats. Maybe he didn't understand that we don't need a license. He was aggressive. He was talking down to us like we didn't know anything. So I tried to be very diplomatic, and when it came down to the end -- remember that seven thumbs thick, patience and all that -- I said, "˜Sir, you won't tell us where you took their boats but we want them back. So I have to take your boat.' And his jaw just dropped and he says, "˜You're what?' I said, "˜Yep, I have to take your boat until they get their boats back. You're coming with us.'

We took him down to St. Regis Village police station and then I phoned Toronto, Ministry of Natural Resources and I told them, I said, "˜I have your administrator official here.' Well, it worked up very fast up the chain of command. People were calling. "˜Is he a hostage?' Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada. I said, "˜No, I just want those boats back.' So it didn't take long, maybe a couple hours. Their Premier, Prime Minister of Ontario, he calls. He said, "˜Look, this might be an international crisis situation. I'm sure we can resolve this.' Anyway, we worked it out, they traced; they found those boats in Toronto, which is a four-hour drive from Akwesasne. I said, "˜I want them boats back by 9 o'clock in the morning or I'm going to call a press conference.' So he calls back in half an hour, he says, "˜Those boats are on their way.' You see I learned very fast that you've got to speak their language. That's the only way they'll do business with you. Those boats came back. The same guy that arrested them brought the boats back in the morning -- turned them over, they inspected and everything was there -- the motor, boats.

And then I asked my council and our administrator, "˜Why is it that we don't have any authority on the water? We live by the river. We're on the St. Lawrence and we don't seem to have any authority left.' The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they enforce the federal laws. The Quebec Provincial Police and the Ontario Provincial Police enforce the provincial law. So everybody was an authority out there except us. Anyway, I passed a council resolution. We put together our own conservation law for the water, for the environment, for the wild game, for the river life; sent it to Ottawa. Well see how fast it came back and said, "˜You have no authority under the Indian Act to do this.' Anyway, seven times, diplomatically. Again, they said 'no.' I turned around and I went to the nation chiefs, the traditional leaders at the longhouse and I said, "˜I want to implement a nation law based on our inherent right.' We went to the Iroquois Confederacy Grand Council meeting and passed it as a community law for Akwesasne.

I said, "˜Now, we need our conservation officers.' And Canada says, "˜Nope. Whoever heard of Mohawk conservation officers executing their own law?' Ontario said no. The feds said no. Ontario said no. Don't forget where we live. I called Albany, New York -- New York State Police Academy -- and said, "˜Do you have a conservation course up there?' They said, "˜Yeah.' "˜Can you register some Mohawks to take this program?' "˜Yep.' Six months later they come home wearing uniforms. They had the state trooper headgear, nine-millimeter sidearm -- 'Dirty Harry' guns -- and they hit that water and they started bringing in.

Oh, at the same time, we executed our conservation environment law in the justice program; we set up our courts. Well, that court was nonexistent. We're only doing dog catching and little municipal things. We upgraded our statute [because] we had judges but they just weren't allowed to hear bigger cases. Those conservation officers were bringing in non-Natives who refused to buy our fishing licenses, hunting licenses, safety license and they brought them to our court and they were kicking and screaming saying, "˜This is a kangaroo court. You have no authority. I'm going to contact my member of Parliament.' But when they opened that door, there's a courtroom that had the Mohawk community flag, the Haudenosaunee flag, on the wall. There's a judge sitting up there, there's a prosecutor and there's a lawyer there that would defend you if you needed one. They read the charge, they read the law and they paid the fine. And that's how we started our justice program.

And those, I guess in reflection, is stand up for your nation's rights; putting them back in action. Those conservation officers, the first time they went over to Canada into Cornwall, the Ontario Provincial Police arrested them, confiscated their weapons saying, "˜These are totally illegal in Canada.' They went to court, produced their training from the United States. The judge says, "˜These people are qualified for the work they do. You return them guns.' And so you have to fight the legal system, you have to fight the government system, but after awhile -- oh, the appeal, they lost the appeal, too. Anyway, you have to take control. And then I noticed that on council, the way the programs were running, the Department of Indian Affairs just about ran everything, all the different programs. So I went to see the Minister of Indian Affairs and said, "˜Look, these deficits are going to keep occurring "˜cause your people don't give a damn about how our business is...' (Thank you very much. That wasn't peace; that was two minutes.) Well, to make a long story short, I asked the minister, [because] all these government people that were in authority over us, none of them was [Mohawk language], none of them were Native. So I cut a deal with him. I said, "˜I'll wipe that deficit out within five years but you've got to let us do it our way.' He says, "˜What's that?' I said, "˜A lot of our people are skilled in financing, administration, proposal writing. Why do we have to get authority from you?' So we made a deal. That was kind of a curiosity for him. And I said, "˜You take back all your government people and we'll hire our own to look after the affairs of our people. We'll look after our administration.'

We did wipe all that deficit within five years and our government grew. We established a relationship with the traditional government and passed a resolution recognizing them as our historic national government. We started having meetings with the tribal council on the American side and we started planning for the future. It's just an idea that evolves from your own nation. A lot of other episodes happened like the stories that I'm telling you. I was on a little bit of a roll there. When you're a leader, you require patience but sometimes it's the audacity, shocking the Canadian and American governments to say, "˜Yes, I have that authority and I'm going to do something about it.' You also got to think of your youth and your elders, and I proposed the writing that led us to having our own nursing home, our own arena, looked at development around in the community that needed those programs and our people went after them. So it's out there. For those fights between a tribe and the Long House on our side was an ongoing affair. Today, they sit together and they plan for the whole territory. And that's the kind of story I guess I can leave with you. Don't allow yourselves to fight with one another because the Indian Act, criteria from the American government, state, etc. -- we have that jealousy factor; it don't belong to us but we are so full of it in our communities. The longer vision in nation building, you rise, give knowledge to your young, respect your elders, look after the people in general and fight together. And I guess I could say that to all of you."