civic responsibilities

Indigenized Communication During COVID-19

Producer
Native Governance Center
Year

During times of crisis, the messages we send to our stakeholders matter more than ever. Tribal governments and Native organizations are on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic and are making important decisions to protect the health and safety of their people. 

As Indigenous people, we believe that our methods and modes of communication should reflect our values. We’ve put together a list of some of the values that guide our approach to nation building and corresponding tips for Indigenized communication during COVID-19. We designed these tips first and foremost for Tribal leaders; we hope that others working to communicate thoughtfully about COVID-19 will find them useful as well. 

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a challenge for all of us. While the situation has already tested our strength and resiliency, it’s also a major opportunity for our communities. We have the chance to come together and build the Indigenized future we want to see. The strategies we use to communicate about our goals and visions during this time are just the beginning.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Native Governance Center. 2020. "Indigenized Communication During COVID-19." Webinar. (https://nativegov.org/resources/indigenized-communication-during-covid-19/, accessed on July 24, 2023)

Carlos Hisa and Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Carlos Hisa and Zeke Garcia from Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP) field questions about YDSP's current community-based effort to redefine its criteria for citizenship, and they provide additional detail about the great lengths to which YDSP has gone in order to document the origins and history of their current criterion for citizenship (blood quantum) in order to make an informed decision about whether/how to change it.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Garcia, Esequiel. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Q&A session.

Hisa, Carlos. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Q&A session.

Ian Record:

"We have about 10 to 15 minutes for question and answers before we break for lunch and we have microphones set up here on the...just in front of the panelists here and then there's also one... Steve's got a running mic there in the back. He's quite swift, so here we go, Terry."

Terry Janis:

"Yeah, I'm Terry Janis working with the White Earth Nation on these issues for the last year. First of all, I commend you on getting the information to your tribal members. That's huge if you're going to make a solid decision on this and be a part of it. Two basic questions: one is [audio cuts out for a few seconds] ...conversation that is more about limited resources, right? We have limited resources. If we double the population, will the system take more away from us? How much of that is a part of the conversation and how do you resolve it? And then the second question is have you started thinking about the verbiage of the language of how this phase is going to be laid out? Is it just going to be straight moving to descendency or is there going to be more of a process as was discussed earlier of dislocation, engagement and involvement on the part of being enrolled into citizenship?"

Carlos Hisa:

"To your first question about whether it's a concern about the services we're providing and the cost-benefit or will we really need to adjust, like Zeke said, we did send out a survey and I was astonished with the responses. The descendants don't want to be a burden. They want to do what they need to do for the Pueblo. They want to do their part. We have mentioned to the community that the biggest impact is going to be in health care because in the other areas we have been providing for descendants as we recognize them when it comes to education, when it comes to other things. It's just health care that's going to be the big one and in my conversations to the youth, the descendants out there, they're willing to give that up, for our elders, for those that really need it. So it's not...the discussions haven't really been focused on the benefits we're going to receive by the federal government to more as, 'We're Tigua now, we're going to be recognized as such.' So that's something that...it's unbelievable to me because that's the way I was raised, and for a period of time I thought that was fading away, but it's obviously there. We planted that seed and it's still there. The second question..."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"What was the second question?"

Terry Janis:

"It's more about what sort of language are you going to utilize to define citizenship, just straight lineal descendancy language or is there going to be more language on involvement, participation, understanding of community, etc.?"

Carlos Hisa:

"That is the beauty of getting the community involved and having this board because the board consists of elders, people that have been there before in council, individuals that are outsiders that live out of town, descendants. So it's a good group of different aspects. So when the discussions are coming, those questions are brought up. What is a Tigua? To me -- and that's what I always tell my daughters, 'No document that's out there, no blood quantum requirement is going to identify who you are as Tigua.' I said, ‘It's what you do for the community. Your involvement spiritually, emotionally and physically is what identifies you as such.' But that's just me, the way I was raised. We need to hear from everybody.

But those conversations are being held when we have our meetings as a board. I, in the beginning, stepped away and said, ‘I want this board to function on its own.' But I was quickly dragged back into it because it is a sensitive issue and there's a lot of opinions and very...people are very passionate about it, so they're wanting to go out there and implement these type of things. If you want to be a Tigua, this is going to be your responsibility. Like I said, we don't have a constitution. We are governed by oral tradition and the way it's been taught to us in the past is we don't want to put it in writing per se because if you want to know it, you've got to live it. If you want to stay away, well, stay away and once you become...you come, we're always going to embrace you, come over, the doors are always open. But when you start living this way of life and understanding, you understand the essence of what we have in place, you'll feel it, you'll know it. But again, that's just me. That's the just the way I've been taught.

Things have changed, but those conversations are being held, and together as a community I know we're going to come up with something strong, something that's going to stay there for a long time. At the same time, it's not going to be sketched in stone. If there's something that we need to change and learn from, it's all going to...we're going to be able to have that flexibility, but again it's going to have to involve the entire community as a whole. I hope I answered your questions there."

Audience member:

"...And how do you...what are some of the strategies to meet that goal and to say it's the will of our people so that we need to make this decision?"

Carlos Hisa:

"I see the point. What we're trying to...what we're doing, we're in the process of doing is getting all the information together. First, what our people see as identity like he said, one of the things we had on there. Okay, we're going to identify who we are. These components identify who we are as a people. Those are being identified. The survey we have, we're getting that information on there. That's being put together. We don't have the complete report; hopefully by the end of this month we'll have it. The other thing is looking at...showing the community as a whole what the impact's going to be financially. We want to get all that information together and create a...I guess a final decision...resolution to be able to present to the community and say, ‘After all the research that we've done, this is what we see as a council [is] the right way to go,' and present it to the community. And like Zeke said, we have quarterly meetings, and you call them like town halls, where we invite the entire community to come and make decisions on things like this. We will present the information and make a couple of, I guess, suggestions on how we can move about and we'll allow the community to vote on that decision. Again, that's something that we're going to put together and recommend to the community once we have all the information in place."

Ian Record:

"If there's no other questions at the ready, I had a question and it's sort of a leading question because I've been involved with this effort in a very peripheral way, but...and it really speaks to what John [Borrows] was bringing up with basically imploring folks to think about your own histories as you engage this issue. And what I was really struck by in working with Ysleta del Sur last summer is the lengths to which you guys have gone to capture the history of this issue in your community. The number of interviews that you guys have done with the people who are in the decision making roles within your nations back when that blood quantum requirement was first initiated and the sorts of pressures that were being exerted upon the Pueblo at that time because...and I think that's very important and I was just hoping you could speak to that because one of the things we often see as we work with communities, particularly on this issue, is there's a feeling I think, and often I think it's misplaced, that we own this, that this criteria that we're currently using is somehow ours, it's somehow cultural when if, when you go back and do the history like you guys have done, you realize often very quickly that it never was cultural."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"When we were doing the research, we had to go back and realize that our presence in El Paso, Texas, was in existence in 1682. There was no blood quantum back then, there was no enrollment number, no enrollment card issued or anything like that. And we had to go back that far to understand where we want to be at. Right now, because of federal monies, enrollment cards are required. Some tribes require a blood quantum as a requirement and we needed to let our community know that, ‘Okay, the ball is in our court. What do you want? Do you want a blood quantum? Do you not want a blood quantum? Do you want to just go through descendency?' And this because of the 1984 act, a lot of our way of thinking was that that was the norm, our blood quantum and some of our tribal members kind of...we kind of accepted that and we felt that we need to continue that. That's why initially we were just reducing our blood quantum and we came to a point when we said, ‘Well, does really a blood quantum determine if you're Tigua?' And that's one of the things that we're facing with right now and our community members are becoming aware. The ball's in our court. What do we want to do? Do we want to continue with that, do we want to change it? And that's where we're at."

Carlos Hisa:

"And in addition to that we...our history is well documented. We have a set of archives and we realize that there was a census back then. We have enrollment documents that date back to the 1800s that have family members from the past on there. But again, there is no blood quantum on there. It just says that they're Tigua, they are part of the community and they kept a list. So a census I think is something that we do need, but it shouldn't be restricted is what we're saying."

Ian Record:

"So I think we have time for one more."

Audience member:

"...I think it's interesting to see the level of...go into the engine that's giving you the...in this conversation. One of the experiences we had in Pueblo Laguna, a couple years ago....constitution...on enrollment was prior to engaging the community about the most substantive issues of what...who is a tribal member, we had to first have a conversation of shifting the thinking of how should we think about this issue because easily these decisions can lead to resources, the lack of resources, power and how we're going to be stretching our resources thin but we realized that as we had this conversation, what is the core values of our people? Are we inclusive or are we exclusive, because our elders didn't have...they hadn't seen the impacts of blood quantum for whatever reason for generations out. Well, we're seeing the impacts of grandchildren who are participants in the culture but they did not have the blood quantum...that door of blood quantum of the tribe or another...down the road. So how to engage the conversation then...first question, how do we...this? We have clans that...Certainly that blood quantum was the issue there and certainly our people didn't...So it's a constant reminder when we had to engage the community in this discussion of let's shift our thinking first and set the foundation of how we're going to think about this. We have to be inclusive of people. That is our way, that is our values and we have to go forward with this citizen discussion with that mindset. So I think that was critical for us to engage the community because it was when we decided to go that direction of monetary resources, well, if we have more people, this is going to mean we get less per capita, whatever. But there was the second...is that are we pushing away the prosperity of people if...close the doors, are we closing off the blessings...responsibilities? So I think it's important to ...that level and focus it as shifting the mindset of how..."

Carlos Hisa:

"I agree. That was something that we were afraid was going to happen so we did the impact study, we did all this research on everything and we still need to present that information to the community we feel, but our community is leaning more towards being Tigua and what we need to do to continue to exist. The real battles I think were back in the day. Right now our battles are not as devastating as they were back then, but this is a battle that we have to face and it's going to determine our future and who we are as a people. And again, and I tell my daughters, I said -- and this is something that's been implemented in my family is where, 'When the Pueblo is good, you do your part. When the Pueblo is struggling, you have to sacrifice, you do more.' And that's what I'm seeing is still something that's very, very strong in our community and it makes me very proud and happy at the same time and gives me just more encouragement to keep pushing forward to get this done. But I agree with what you had to say. Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, let's do one last round of applause to our panelists. I think we've learned a lot."

Carlos Hisa and Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Carlos Hisa and Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia from Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP) provide an overview of the approach that YDSP is following as it works to redefine its criteria for citizenship through community-based decision-making. They also share the negative impacts that adherence to blood quantum as the main criterion for citizenship has had on the Tigua community.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Garcia, Esequiel. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

Hisa, Carlos. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

Carlos Hisa:

"[Pueblo language]. Good morning, everyone. Like they said, my name is Carlos Hisa. I'm the Lieutenant Governor for Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. I've been sitting in this role for 14 years, started when I was 12. But our issue didn't really start off as a citizenship issue. It started off more as an enrollment and blood quantum issue. I guess I can start by giving you a little bit of a history of where we come from and who we are as a people. Back in...we're Pueblo people. We're originally from the Albuquerque area. We're one of the furthest of the Pueblos [from] Albuquerque and New Mexico.

Back in 1680 there was a huge revolt. It's called Ysleta...Pueblo Revolt, where the Pueblos united and fought against the Spaniards. During that battle we were relocated to what is known as El Paso, Texas right now. It wasn't by choice, but we were captured and we were relocated down there so our Pueblo has been there since the 1680s. Throughout that time, a lot of different things have happened. I'm not going to go into a huge history, every tribe has their history. I'm just going to touch on the points on why we are where we're at today. The State of Texas became a Confederate state, so during that time the feds were not allowed to come and check on us and see how we were doing so they wrote us off as being extinct, that we weren't in existence anymore. But our people thrived. We were still in the location; we were still being a community, being a tribe, and living our way of life. Because we were identified as extinct, we had to fight for our tribe to get recognized again. In 1968, we were federally recognized, but the trust responsibility was given to the State of Texas. The State of Texas was struggling financially. So in 1987, they went ahead and passed us back to the federal government. The responsibility was shifted from the state back to the federal government. But throughout that time, the State of Texas learned a thing or two about working with tribes and in our case dealing with us.

In order for us to get recognized -- and this is something I believe through the stories that I've been told through my family and other past leaders -- is that the state forced us to get recognized, but with certain limitations and requirements, two big ones. Gaming, we cannot engage in gaming was put in our restoration act. So when we were recognized as a tribe in [1987], we were forced to agree not to have gaming in our lands. Second one was a blood quantum requirement of one-eighth. Our leadership at that time accepted that and we went ahead and operated under that criteria for many years, but soon after this was forced upon us, our leaders realized that the blood quantum was just a way of sort of pushing us out of existence. It wasn't going to work for us so they started many efforts throughout the years to try to change this law by lowering...

The solution back then was lowering the blood quantum one-eighth to one-sixteenth. When I came into office the struggles were...and I was familiar with the struggles because I was involved. I've had different roles in the community. I've always been there so I knew what the issues were. When I came in these efforts were continued and became a priority to the tribal council that I was working with back then. So we pushed the same language that was created back there to lower the blood quantum from one-eighth to one-sixteenth. You've got to remember, El Paso grew around us and so we were...our blood quantum was fading away pretty fast. So when these efforts were being pushed we weren't successful, but one day for some reason me and a tribal attorney got together and said, ‘Why are we asking for one-sixteenth? Why don't we push it to the limit? And we need to be a sovereign nation, we need to practice our rights as a government and let us determine who should be a Tigua. What is going to be that criteria?'

So the language changed from...changing it from one-eighth to one-sixteenth to letting the Pueblo determine who is going to be Tigua and what we're going to set in place to determine who's going to be Tigua. In 2012, President [Barack] Obama...well, we managed to pass it and in 2012, Obama signed the bill where it allowed us to go ahead and determine who our citizens are going to be. We were getting calls from everywhere. The pressure was mounting on council because people thought that as soon as that bill passed that they could come in and be part of the community and be recognized as Tigua. But we sat down as a council and said, ‘We've got to do this the right way.' We have a history of enrollment issues, even from enrolling individuals that weren't tribal. We had to come back and disenroll them and those individuals became part of the family already so we didn't want to go through those struggles anymore. So council said, ‘Let's do this the right way. We want community involvement. We want this to...we want to hear from them to see how far they want to lower the blood quantum, what are going to be the responsibilities of being Tigua, what are responsibilities of the community to the people?' So it became a whole project of identifying citizenship now and determine that criteria. So that's where we're at right now.

When we look at the blood quantum and in my generation and what was going on, we created different classes, a division amongst ourselves, and it was terrible. I'm just going to give an example. I've got three daughters. I started when I was 12 as well. I have a 20-year-old right now, a 16- and a nine-year-old. All three of my daughters have always been involved. They are proud to be Tigua. They're there with me. I think they've done a lot more for the community at their young age than some of the elders that have more of a blood quantum recognized by the federal government, but yet my daughters refuse to take part in the summer programs that we have available to the community, after-school programs, Easter giveaways and stuff like that because the individuals in their age bracket would always tell them that they weren't Tigua because they didn't have the blood quantum, they didn't meet the blood quantum requirements. So that forced my children to stay away. And that wasn't just with my children, that was something that was going on within the community. So it's something we needed to address and end and stop because that's not who we are. As a people, as a community, we need to embrace everybody and provide for everybody and not have that separation. So that motivated us more to try to get this bill passed and it became more of a priority and then to have this change implemented.

So as a council, we got together and we decided to go ahead and have the community involved in this. We also wanted to make this a community decision. We didn't want it to be a tribal council decision, because we hear the stories about individuals being disenrolled from their tribes because of political reasons, per capita reasons, that type of stuff and it's scary and it's out there and exists. So as a council, we decided to make this a community decision. We're going to have a vote. We need to hear what they want, how they want it done and we need to let the community vote because we believe that the council shouldn't have this power to go in there and determine and make changes on the rolls overnight. It needs to be brought back to the community and we need to make changes. So that's what our goal is and that's what we're trying to do.

This is where Zeke [Esequiel Garcia] was tasked with the responsibility of this project that he named Project Tiwahu, and he'll show a slide of where he goes and everything else. And we asked him to go out there and get feedback from the community to see where the tribal council needs to go out and make the changes so we can start enrolling our tribal members. And when this project was assigned to Zeke, he came back to me and said, ‘One of the things we need to identify is what is going to be...who's going to be a citizen. What are the roles of a Tigua?' So it changed more from enrollment criteria, from a blood quantum thing, to more of a citizenship. Where are we going to go from this? What does the community want? And he has started the process. We're moving along. [I'm pretty sure...did I move too fast? How much time do I have? Five minutes. Okay, well I'll donate them to Zeke.] So this is where I'm going to introduce Zeke and let him take over so he can show you what we've been working on, how we're doing it to get the input from the community so we can move forward on there. But, Zeke, the floor is yours. Thank you very much."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"Good morning. Our efforts down at the Pueblo, as the Lieutenant Governor was saying, in 1984 we did...we're not a constitutional tribe, we're oral tradition, but in 1984 when they restored our federal recognition we did inherit some very restrictive language that was within that restoration act and it had to do with enrollment. Soon after...for many years we had been submitting bills. In 2011, when we submitted HR 1560, which is the bill that was enacted in August of 2012, the council called me into their office and they said, ‘We need a plan of action. We need to have a way of how we're going to proceed from here forward.' So we put a plan of action, it's not my plan. It's a plan that's inclusive of our council. The first order of business that we ended up doing was -- and it's in your packet -- we passed a tribal council resolution. And in that resolution we set objectives, specifically what Project Tiwahu -- even being sensitive to our culture termed it with a cultural name -- and we set those objectives, what we were setting out to do.

One of the objectives was to establish a board. It wasn't an appointed board, although there were some appointed members, but we did go to the community. We sent out a letter to community members living on res as well as out of the state, and we got a good response and some of those community members were selected.

The second objective was to, of course, knowing that the enactment of HR 1560 and doing away with the blood quantum, we knew we had to do revision to our enrollment policy so that was another objective that we put in our resolution. Most importantly -- as the lieutenant governor was saying right now -- was to garner community input. This wasn't going to be my decision -- although the responsibility fell on the enrollment office or tribal records office, it didn't fall under the tribal council office as well -- but it needed to be a community decision and that was one of the biggest things that we set out to do.

Not because the lieutenant governor is sitting next to me do I want to score brownie points, but one of the things that I really admire about our current council, as well as previous councils, is that in no way did they relinquish power, authority by handing this over to the community and making a decision. If anything, they incorporated a team effort or inclusive in reaching out to the community. So that's one of the things that I really admire about our leadership.

The other thing was...the other objective that we set out was to assess our tribal programs. As he was mentioning earlier, we receive federal monies and those federal monies are there to serve an enrolled population and we have a descendant population of course, those that were less than the one-eighth. For many years we have...our office has been tracking that information. Our Pueblo has this practice on an annual basis for our enrolled members to come and update. When they do their update, we give them a questionnaire and we get information: education, financial, household compositions -- we just get a lot of information from them and what we lacked was the descendants. So in 2010, even before our bill was passed, it blew me away, our leadership sent out an executive memorandum to my office and said, ‘You need to start issuing out descendant ID cards to our descendant members.' And with that, that was our way to capture the information on our descendant members.

So in assessing our tribal programs, we need to determine what needs were out there, what services we were providing to our descendants, what services we weren't able to provide because of restrictions within those federal monies to an enrolled population. And we...actually not we, I wasn't even...well, my office indirectly was a big part of it in providing the information that I was collecting, but Linda Austin and her efforts and the council put together a budget impact and that budget impact is also on your packets there. And what we were able to determine there is if we were to project the numbers that we had on our descendants and we were to enroll them and begin providing services, what impact would be on our budget, our current monies for each of our programs. So that was very instrumental, that budget impact. It really opened up our eyes; it opened up...it gave us a better understanding of our descendant population. For instance, we were able to determine that we had a younger population within the descendants as opposed to enrolled members, which were much older.

The other objective that we resolved on the resolution was a citizenship campaign, and because we were dealing with descendants -- that as the lieutenant governor mentioned that had distanced themselves, even those living within the res, those that were living out of state were much more disconnected because of course maybe annual visits, they would come to the reservation during our feast days. We had to do a...our board and the facilitators that were helping me out, we understood that we had to have some kind of citizenship campaign, an awareness, an educational component to it to where we would give them information.

One of the results from that was this informational guide. I believe this informational guide is in your packet. And through this guide we were able to educate both our enrolled members as well as our descendant members, what this whole citizenship...the process that we were going to take. We were able to give them historical information regarding the tribe, how we came to be if you will, and also a portion of the budget impact was also given out. We wanted to give them the statistics on our blood quantum, how many numbers, how we were being reduced, and all that good information.

Within that citizenship campaign, we also conducted internal research -- the facilitators, myself, Linda and another intern that we have within the tribe. We were able to conduct interviews to have a better understanding of what had transpired in our enrollment office, what resolutions had been passed since the restoration act, what issues our enrollment was faced with and that was a very eye opening experience for us. As we conducted interviews with key individuals that were involved with the federal recognition or restoration, we would hear the same things from each one in a different perspective and it really opened up our eyes to better understand again, we're looking at making a decision for our future, we need to understand what we did in the past and that was a great thing that...that was very important and instrumental and now that as we go forward and we're looking at making these decisions, it gives us a better understanding on how to proceed.

The other thing that came with those interviews was an internal report. It's not in your packet. Like Ian [Record] was saying, it's kind of lengthy, but that internal report was...Linda and myself were able to work on that and that was more of a historical...as the lieutenant governor was giving you the story, we also felt we needed to put it on paper and more or less educate our membership as to our history, how we came to be since the early years of 1682 that we got established there in Ysleta, Texas.

These are some of the steps. Where are we at right now? This past December, we issued out a Pueblo-wide questionnaire, a survey, and this is where we're getting the input from the community. Right now currently, we're in the process of analyzing those results, but that survey, of course it's not in your packet because it's a lengthy survey, but it's a very...these are basic questions. We have four parts to it. The first one was identity. How do our tribal members identify themselves as Tigua? Is it the services that we rendered or is it something...your culture, your practices, if that's what it makes them.

So we asked those questions. We asked questions about enrollment, whether we wanted to keep a blood quantum, whether we wanted to get rid of a blood quantum, whether we wanted to reduce a blood quantum. In 1984, a very important issue, when the base roll was created, there were some people that were left out and now this day and age how do we want to deal with that issue? Do we want to extend enrollment to them? And this is what we need to...the kind of feedback that we need from our tribal community. That survey is very instrumental. It also...because of if we do extend enrollment to descendants that means that our population would double. Right now our enrolled population at Ysleta del Sur is 1,732 and our descendant population is just right there. There's just an eight different...and they're out there. I know they're out there because for whatever reason they haven't made their way into our office. So I can more or less estimate about another 200 individuals that are out there.

So our descendant population has already surpassed our enrolled population. And how are we going to proceed? If we do enroll these people, if we do enroll our descendants that would mean that we have more people. According to the bill that was signed, we were in agreement that we're not going to receive any extra funding from the federal government to provide services, so how do we manage that? And this is what the community needs to know as well. We that work within the tribal government, we have a good grasp of what it entails, but our average tribal member out there, they may have an idea, a slight idea, or they may not have it. We want to make sure that we convey that information to them because ultimately it does impact us that are enrolled and it impacts those that would be enrolled as well.

Those are our efforts that we're doing right now at Ysleta del Sur. I'm very pumped with this whole issue. I have seen nothing but support both from our council and from our community members. You have to keep in mind that this topic has been a big issue since our restoration back in 1984 and people, our tribal members, are willing to talk about it. When we have our quarterly Pueblo juntas that we come together as...a town hall meeting, if you will, and we come together as a community, we've talked about those issues and now that this bill was filed and now that we have this Project Tiwahu underway, tribal members are...you see them more giving their input and wanting to share and it's a hot topic right now within our tribe and we just look forward to coming to some resolution by this year. If not, we're in no rush. That's one other thing is that the bill was enacted in 2012; we're in 2014. The whole thing here is that we're going back to the community, we're informing them, we're letting them know what's going on and whenever our grandfathers feel that it's a good time to make the decision, we'll make that decision and we'll proceed."

Robert Innes: Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Maintaining Sovereignty Through Identity and Culture

Producer
American Indian Studies Program
Year

Robert Innes, a citizen of the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, discusses how traditional Cowessess kinship systems and practices continue to structure and inform the individual and collective identities of Cowessess people today, and how those traditional systems and practices are serving as a strong source of practical sovereignty for the Cowessess First Nation. 

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Innes, Robert. "Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Maintaining Sovereignty Through Identity and Culture." Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholars Series, American Indian Studies Program, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. February 19, 2014. Presentation.

Manley Begay:

"Years ago as a young man, I read just about every book that Vine Deloria Jr. wrote and was just fascinated by this gentleman. And the more I read, the more I gained some insight into his thoughts and ideas and concepts about Indian life and Native ways. And some were controversial, some were absolutely interesting, made me laugh, made me cry, it made me happy, made me sad. And I always thought to myself, ‘I sure want to meet this guy one of these days.’ Lo and behold, I did. I not only met him, I ended up spending time with him. He became a good friend of mine. We served on the Board of Trustees for the National Museum of the American Indian for many years and then after that we became plaintiffs along with five other folks against the Pro Football, Inc. [NFL] and we were engaged in a 17-year long legal case basically fighting stereotypical imaging of Native people in the world of sports entertainment.

And during this time I saw him as a younger person to becoming sort of this elder scholar. And he carried himself in a very modest way and it was demonstrated by his love of wearing denim jeans. You would, I don’t think I ever saw him wearing khakis or dress pants. He always wore denim jeans. And he spoke with great conviction about his ideas and thoughts and everybody listened. And he would become one of the most important authors and scholars of our time in American Indian Studies. And the Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Scholar Series was created in 2008 by the American Indian Studies Program and this series assembles a series of lectures featuring writers, activists, Indigenous leaders and scholars to discuss the issues that Vine felt were so important to Indigenous Country. As such, this series is an event that speaks to the core mission of the American Indian Studies Program by spreading the voices and visions of Indigenous scholars to the greater public. We were hoping that his wife Barbara Deloria would be here. Unfortunately, Barbara will not be with us. Hopefully she’ll be here in April I think, when our third speaker is here.

So this brings me to our guest this evening. Our guest is Professor Robert Alexander Innes. He’s Assistant Professor and Graduate Chair at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s a Plains Cree member of the Cowessess First Nation and actually he’s, his second home is Tucson. He spent a lot of years here working on his doctorate and he finished his dissertation in 2007. His dissertation was titled The Importance of Kinship Ties to Members of the Cowessess First Nation and in January 2007 he was appointed as Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Science, specifically the Department of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Before that time, he was a pre-doctoral fellow in the American Indian Studies Program at Michigan State University. He completed his M.A. [degree] at the University of Saskatchewan in 2000 and his thesis was titled The Socio Political Influence of the Second World War Saskatchewan Aboriginal Veterans 1945-1960. He earned his BA at the University of Toronto with a major in History and a double minor in Aboriginal Studies and English and a transitional year program at the University of Toronto in 1996. His research interest is around factors that lead to successful Aboriginal institutions, contemporary kinship roles and responsibilities and Indigenous masculinities. He has numerous articles published in a variety of journals and he recently published his book titled Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation and it’s being published by the University of Manitoba Press. And he’s also currently co-editing a book titled Indigenous Men and Masculinities, Legacies, Identities, Regeneration. Tonight Professor Innes’s talk is titled "Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Maintaining Sovereignty Through Identity and Culture." So with that, it gives me great pleasure to present to you Professor Robert Alexander Innes.

[applause]

Robert Innes:

Hello. Hello. Thank you for the prayer. That was a great way to start open prayer with that. I’d like to thank Manley Begay and John and Gavin and the American Indian Studies Program for inviting me to this very prestigious talk, this series of talks. When I was here going in the program, I was fortunate enough to be around when Vine Deloria was teaching some classes. I was unfortunate, though, because I didn’t actually get to take any classes from him. But I was lucky enough to be able to sit in on a couple of classes that one year that he taught when I was here. It was interesting because it was a course on, I don’t even know what the course was called, but I imagine it had to do with treaties, sovereignty, but it was through the Indigenous Law Program and there were three AIS [American Indian Studies] students: Ferlin Clark and Kevin Wall and...who were Ph.D. students at the time, and Ray Cardinal, who was an M.A. student. They were taking the class. So they had those three AIS students and the Indigenous Law students and I remember sitting there and first of all being kind of in awe because it’s Vine Deloria, right? But what was interesting I guess for me was to see how cutting he was to people who didn’t respond the way he thought they should respond and how funny he was in the way he cut them up. And I remember the law students, I don’t know if there’s any law students here from that program, hopefully this is all friendly here -- AIS students and faculty and stuff -- but what I found was interesting was that the AIS students, those three AIS students were the ones who were really carrying the load and later after the class one of the law students says, he was, I guess he had taken kind of a beating in that class from Vine Deloria and he says, ‘Boy, that guy is sure into context.’ And so the three AIS students turned to him, ‘Of course he’s into context.’ But I guess for the law students they weren’t used to that.

It’s an honor and a privilege to be part of this series. I like most people were heavily influenced by Vine Deloria when I first started reading and going to university and also the fact that the footprint that he left for this program in help starting this program and the legacy he’s left not only for American Indians and Indigenous people worldwide and Native studies worldwide, but for this particular program is pretty significant and to be included in the series with the illustrious speakers that have come before and that are coming this year, it’s quite an honor and also because well, this is my program. I went through here. I was down here for two years and I feel really humbled to be asked to be part of this program or this series.

This talk I’m going to be, what I’m going to be talking about is the research that I conducted while I was a Ph.D. student here in the American Indian Studies program and what I was looking at was the importance of kinship to kin-type Cowessess members. And the reason why I was, that was an idea that I had for research was it had to do with my personal history with the reserve. I, like a lot of people with Cowessess, was an urban member and I’ll talk a little bit about that in the paper and also was up to the 19, late ‘80s, not a band member at all, not even federally recognized or as we call a 'status Indian.' And after I received my status and became a band member, I was a little bit nervous about interacting with the band. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I grew up in Winnipeg and with a lot of Native people we were living in Winnipeg. Winnipeg has probably one of the largest Aboriginal populations in definitely in Canada maybe as well as the United States and so I wasn’t afraid about Native people. It was just when the law was changed to allow people to get reinstated and get their status back, there was a lot of tension, and what I found with Cowessess, that wasn’t the case. When I was doing my research on Aboriginal veterans, I went to Cowessess and interviewed some veterans and one of the veterans I interviewed was my grandfather’s cousin and while I was there I talked to, I was talking with his daughter who is my mom’s second cousin. And at that point my aunt had moved back to the area, didn’t move on to the reserve, but she lived in the town next to the reserve. And she had had a difficult time in the residential schools and had a difficult adulthood and as a result she was not mentally...good. She was a little bit delusional. She was known affectionately in town as 'the bag lady' because she always had the bundled buggy and the ...and heavy jacket no matter what the temperature was. But everyone liked her, she was friendly. And so I told her that that was my aunt and that we were, that we were from part of Cowessess and she knew, she didn’t know who she was by name, but I said, ‘The bag lady.’ And she’s, ‘Oh, the bag lady,’ and then she realized that that was her second cousin. So then she turned to her son and said, ‘Next time you meet her, you shake her hand because she’s your relative.’ And this was the first time I met her. It was the first time I met her. And then I realized there was something to this, about why is that she reacted that way and why was it that all the Cowessess people that I had met up to that point and since had talked about and talked to me as an urban member and talked about other urban members in a way in which defied or didn’t go fit the norm and way in which people were supposed to have interacted with new, newly regained status people. So this is why I decided I wanted to do this research.

So with that I’ll begin. I just want to say that the talk is 'sovereignty,' and although that’s not really a term we use much in Canada, that’s really associated more with Quebec and independence of Quebec so we don’t really use this. I mean, it’s used, but it’s not a lot, not a lot for Aboriginal people. People talk about self-government or self-determination, but I’m not there, I’m here, so I’m using that term here. But just so you know, that’s not really our term that we use, although some people do use it. The main argument I wanted to make here is that the way in which Cowessess people exercise their contemporary kinship is, has been a way for them to assert their sovereignty, to assert their self-governance.

Raymond DeMallie has argued that kinship studies are a significant, but often ignored area of research within American Indian studies, suggesting that AIS scholars’ aversion to kinship research has been due to the latter’s close association with anthropology. According to DeMallie, kinship studies, with their evolutionary and cultural relativist theories, abstract taxonomy, and endless charts, seem far removed from and irrelevant to AIS and to Native communities. Yet, in pointing to examples of the negative impact of kinship breakdown on the Grassy Narrow Ojibwe and the possibility for positive change with the revitalization of the Pine Ridge Lakota kinship unit, or tiyospaye, DeMallie states that kinship is ‘fundamental to every aspect of Native American Studies.’ Accordingly, he challenged AIS scholars to ‘explore the richness of the Native American social heritage and find creative ways to build on it for the future.’ For my Ph.D. research, I took up DeMallie’s challenge by examining the importance of kinship relations in the maintenance and affirmation of individual and collective identity for members of Cowessess First Nation located in southeastern Saskatchewan. How many people know where Saskatchewan is? Come on. Okay, how many people know where Montana is? Okay, look up, right up!

Specifically in my study, I examined how Cowessess band members’ continued adherence to principles of traditional law regulating kinship has undermined the imposition of Indian defined in Canada by the Indian Act. By acknowledging kinship relations to band members who either had not been federally recognized as Indians prior to 1985 -- when the Indian Act membership ‘changed’ -- or were urban members disconnected from the reserve, this acknowledgment defies the general perception that First Nations people have internalized the legal definition of 'Indian' and in the process rendered traditional kinship meaningless. It also questions the accepted idea that conflict is the only possible outcome of any relationship between old members and newly recognized Indians. The importance of kinship to Cowessess band members blurs the boundaries (as defined by the Indian Act) among status Indians, Bill C-31s -- that was the bill that changed the membership quotes -- Métis, and non-status Indians, thus highlighting the artificiality of those boundaries.

I argue in my book or in my research, well, in my book too, which was recently published -- did I tell you? No? -- I argued that the attitude of older Cowessess band members toward new members stems from kinship practices that are historically rooted in the traditional law of the people that predates the reserve era and that have persisted since at least the nineteenth century. In the pre-reserve era, Aboriginal bands in the northern plains were relatively small, kin-based communities that relied on the unity of their members for survival. Band membership was fluid flexible, and inclusive. There were a variety of ways that individuals or groups of people could become members of a band, but what was important, what was of particular importance was that these new members assumed some sort of kinship role with its associated responsibilities.

For Cowessess people, these roles were behaviors that were carefully encoded in the traditional stories of the Cree cultural hero [Cree Language], or Elder Brother. Our Elder Brother stories were the law of the people that outlined, among other things, peoples’ social interaction including the incorporation of individuals into a band. Incorporating new band members served to strengthen social, economic, and military alliances with other bands of the same cultural group. However, many bands in the northern plains were multicultural in nature, so the creation and maintenance of alliances cut across cultural and linguistic lines. Cowessess First Nation is an example of a multicultural band because its pre-reserve composition comprised of five major cultural groups: the Plains Cree, Saulteaux, Métis, Assiniboine, and English half-breeds. The total band membership of the contemporary band is just over 4,000 people, with over 80 percent living off reserve. So 80 percent of the 4,000 live off reserve. This represents the third largest of the 75 First Nations in Saskatchewan and the largest in southern Saskatchewan. Band members live throughout the province and in every province and territory in the country, and in particular in many of the urban centers -- Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto. However, over 1,000 band members reside in the provincial capital of Regina, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive west of the reserve. Band members also have relocated to several foreign countries. Many of these off-reserve members are men and women and their descendants who first left the reserve in the 1950s in search of employment and education. A significant number are also what is called 'C-31s.' These are, that is women who left the reserve to find employment and/or married non-status Indians and therefore lost their status, but then regained their status with the passing of Bill C-31. So once they regained their status, their children also gained status, which is what happened to me. My mom lost her status and when she was able, when the Bill C-31 was passed, she regained her status and I gained status, although it wasn’t that easy, you had to apply for it and there was red tape.

So for Cowessess then, people started to leave Cowessess by the 1950s. Men, so there were, there have been many, multiple generations of people through Cowessess who have never lost their status, but who had never lived on the reserve. These are, so there were people who lost their status, there was also multiple generations who had become disconnected from the reserve who were also impacted by the way their interaction with the reserve. My study describes how kinship for contemporary Cowessess band members -- in spite of the historical, scholarly, and legal classifications of Aboriginal people created and imposed by outsiders -- persists to define community identity and interaction based on principles outlined in the Elder Brother stories. Classifying Aboriginal people has had a profound impact on the ways that non-Aboriginal people view Aboriginal people and on how some Aboriginal people view themselves. Cowessess members’ interpretations become of great significance in order to understand how contemporary First Nations put into practice their beliefs about kinship roles and responsibilities and demonstrate that these practices and beliefs are rooted in historical cultural values.

The legal systems of pre-contact Aboriginal people, as James Zion points out, were based upon the idea of maintaining harmony in the family, the camp and the community. The failure to follow prescribed regulations could --according to what happens to Elder Brother in the stories -- result in severe negative consequences. Conversely, adhering to the positive behaviors that Elder Brother displays was seen as the ideal that all should strive to attain. An understanding of the stories facilitates an understanding of the incorporation of members into Cowessess band in the pre- and post-reserve period. The stories are also helpful in gaining insight into contemporary peoples’ ability to maintain certain aspects of their kinship roles and responsibilities. Now I’m not going to talk about the way in which Cowessess people incorporated people into their band in the pre- and post-reserve period. However, I will just note that incorporating people into bands was important for maintaining, as I said, creating and maintaining alliances with people, economic and military alliances, and this didn’t matter what culture group a person was from or even what racial group. In the early 1900s, there is evidence that at least seven white children were adopted into the,  people went from Cowessess to Winnipeg, which is about a three-hour drive or so, four-hour drive, east, and adopted seven white children. This would have been the early 1900s. So this is after post-reserve period. So not only were they incorporating people into their reserve pre-reserve, but also post-reserve.

Traditionally, stories acted to impart the philosophical ideals upon which Aboriginal societies should function. As Robert Williams notes, ‘The stories socialize children and reminded adults of their roles and place within the universe, Indians have long practiced the belief that stories have the power to sustain the many important connections of tribal life.’ The telling of stories, such as those of Elder Brother, was a means by which to convey Aboriginal philosophical meanings to the people. Elder Brother was a paradox. He could be very generous and kind, yet he also could be selfish and cruel. In the stories when he is kind, he is usually met with success; when he is cruel, he often meets a disastrous and sometimes funny, sometimes humorous end. His adventures and misadventures acted to guide the peoples’ social interaction, and because of this he is highly regarded. As Basil Johnston states about the esteem the Ojibwe have of Nanabush, ‘For his attributes, strong and weak, the Anishinaabeg came to love and understand Nanabush. They saw in him themselves. In his conduct were reflected the characters of men and women, young and old. From Nanabush, although he was a paradox, physical and spiritual being, doing good and unable to attain it, the Anishinaabeg learned.’ Niigaan James Sinclair further states, ‘Now as before, stories reflect the experiences, thoughts and knowledge important to the Anishinaabeg and collectively map the creative and critical relationships and maintain relations with each other and the world around us and when shared, cause us to reflect, to learn, to grow as families, communities and a people. Stories also indicate where we are in the universe, how we got there is not a simple one-dimensional act, but a complex historical, social and political process embedded in the containments of our collective presence, knowledge and peoplehood.’ Elder Brother stories conveyed Cowessess traditional law to the people and thus functioned as a legal institution. While this institution was unlike those in other parts of the world, it functioned in the same way. As Zion and Robert Yazzie explain, ‘When a legal institution articulates a norm or validates a custom, that is ‘law.’’ The Elder Brother stories explained the rules and expectations for normative behavior. These ideals were enshrined in the peoples’ notion of themselves, with each retelling of Elder Brother stories and with each act that could be attributed to those stories.

A number of legal scholars have linked the traditional narratives of Aboriginal peoples, whether stories, songs or prayers, to their traditional legal systems. For example, Williams points out that ‘stories are told in tribal life to educate and direct the young, to maintain the cohesiveness of the group, and to pass on traditional knowledge about the Creator, the seasons, the earth, plants, life, death, and every other subject that is important to the perpetuation of the tribe.’ John Borrows states that the traditional tribal customary principles are ‘enunciated in the rich stories, ceremonies, and traditions within First Nations. Stories express the law in Aboriginal communities, since they represent the accumulated wisdom and experience of First Nations conflict resolution.’ Donald Auger asserts that ‘the knowledge gained by individuals from storytelling was that of relationships and the importance of maintaining balance and harmony.’ Elder Brother stories reflect the moral normative behaviors that Cowessess band members were expected to follow. Through these stories, as Johnston notes, their sense of justice and fairness was promoted. While I was doing my research, in looking at Elder Brother stories, I was fortunate to stumble across a collection of stories by Alanson Skinner. Alanson Skinner was an anthropologist and in the early 1900s he travelled to Southern Manitoba and Southern Saskatchewan and he made a stop at Cowessess and collected a number of Elder Brother stories. What becomes evident in the stories that I saw from those stories that he collected was that there were these, this is where I found that the embedded codes or laws within for the people.

There was one story for example that he recorded had to do with Elder Brother being adopted into a family of wolves and although with the stories that were collected from Cowessess it’s unclear whether the wolves were already related to him or not, but what does become interesting, what does become apparent was that Elder Brother was adopted into this family and when it got time for him to leave, the father wolf said, ‘Okay, why don’t you take my son with you. You can adopt my son.’ So he took his son as his nephew and they went on the journey which is what the Elder Brother does, he journeys around a lot. And he told his nephew, ‘Make sure you don’t go by the water.’ But he did. He ended up being captured and killed by the Great Lynx, water lynx. And what we see is Elder Brother in the story rescuing his nephew and the way in which he rescues his nephew combines ingenuity, responsibility to family and these are kind of the way in which these values were passed on were through these stories and how Elder Brother would act. This is one of those stories where Elder Brother did what was good. He doesn’t always do what’s good. There’s a lot of stories he doesn’t do what’s good, but in this story he did good. He was able to rescue his nephew, bring him back to life and then move on their way, which leads to another story about a big flood. But what was important is that story outlines a number of the prescribed behaviors required in the maintenance of respectful kinship relations with Cowessess people. It shows Elder Brother demonstrating positive qualities to which people should aspire. The story highlights the value of inclusion by certain facts. Although Elder Brother was not related to wolves, although that might be disputed, he was adopted into the pack and considered a relative. The younger wolves were expected to address and treat him as an older relative and he assumed the roles and responsibility expected of a relative. In the same way he was adopted by the wolves, Elder Brother is permitted to adopt a younger wolf that Elder Brother calls nephew. However, it is when Elder Brother and the young wolf were on their travels that the kinship roles and responsibilities become more explicit. Elder Brother is responsible for the well being of the young wolf. When the young wolf goes to the water, against the instruction of Elder Brother, the listener learns that there are negative consequences for not heeding the words of elders. In searching for and rescuing his nephew, Elder Brother fulfills his responsibility not only to the young wolf but also to his other relatives, the old wolf. By entering the White Lynx village, Elder Brother exhibits characteristics like bravery, daring and ingenuity, which are all important for young males to internalize. These qualities were central tenets towards societies whose primary duty was to protect and provide for the people. In this story, Elder Brother exhibits positive characteristics with a positive outcome.

Now when I was reading these stories and I was at the same time I was conducting a literature review and I was thinking, ‘Wait a second, there’s something not right here. There’s something not right in the literature.’ The literature, the history and ethnography of Aboriginal people in Saskatchewan were all tribally based. There’s always a Plains Cree histories, Saulteaux histories, there were Assiniboine ethnographies and histories, but that didn’t reflect the experiences that I had and didn’t to me reflect the realities of Cowessess. The experiences of Cowessess First Nation members do not reflect scholars’ interpretation of Saskatchewan Aboriginal people. Scholars have emphasized tribal histories that highlight intertribal contact and relations, but nonetheless maintained distinct tribal boundaries. Tribal history approach masks the importance of kinship in band formation and maintenance. This approach is useful for understanding general historical trends of specific cultural and linguistic groups and provides the context for multi-cultural and mixed bands. However, it does not quite acknowledge that most Aboriginal groups on the northern plains of Saskatchewan were multi-cultural in composition. Why were they multi-cultural and why have scholars failed to convey their multi-culturalism was one of the things I was really thinking about when I was approaching my research.

Multi-culturalism for First Nations, for Aboriginal groups on the northern plains was important for survival, was important for military survival and economic survival. The customary kinship practices of the Cowessess people and other groups were spelled out in the Elder Brother stories. However, many scholars have not recognized or understood or simply ignored the law of the people. Without this fundamental understanding of Aboriginal cultures, many scholars have had to resort to extrapolating relations at the band level to relations at a tribal level, thereby distorting a view of Aboriginal societies. The tribal history approach ignores the importance that kinship played in band formation and maintenance. Extrapolating band-level relations from those at the tribal level has presented a confounded view of Aboriginal societies.

As a doctoral student, Neal McCloud, a member of James Smith First Nation, which is just located a couple hours north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He wanted to write a history of the Plains Cree. James Smith is a Plains Cree reserve. He soon relates however that his project would not be as straightforward as he first thought. ‘I had always assumed that my reserve, James Smith, was part of the Plains Cree Nation because that’s how my family identified. However, as I began to talk to various old people from reserve, I became very aware of the contingency of the label 'Plains Cree.' I became aware of the ambiguous genealogies that permeated my family tree as well as the narrative ironies that emerge when one tried to create a national discourse. In addition to the discovery of my own family tree, I became increasingly aware that the situation on James Smith was widespread and the assertion of a pure essentialized Cree identity or even a Plains Cree identity was extremely misleading and limiting.’ McCloud began to realize that the people of his reserve, like many in Saskatchewan, were of mixed ancestry. He found that ‘the reserve system solidified, localized and de-simplified the linguistic diversity and therefore the cultural diversity, which once existed in Western Canada.’ McCloud discovered that members of James Smith were descendents of Plains Cree, Saulteaux, Métis, and Dene people. The tribal specific approach fails to explain the existence of multi-cultural bands such as Cowessess and James Smith in the pre-treaty period. Contrary to tribal view, most Aboriginal bands on the northern plains in Saskatchewan were kin based and multi-cultural. Plains Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Métis individuals shared similar cultural kinship practices that allowed them to integrate into other bands.

Now to be clear, mutli-cultural bands like Cowessess did not form singular hybridized cultures, but rather were able to maintain multiple cultures. That is, this is not to suggest however that cultural sharing did not occur, but that there were significant numbers of various cultures within bands that allowed these individuals to be incorporated into the band without having their culture, without having to acculturate into one specific cultural group. So when Alanson Skinner published some of his findings, he talked about clans. He talked about clan systems with the Saulteaux. Now I should mention, the Saulteaux are what we call 'Saulteaux' are Plains Ojibwe. Those are Anishinaabe people. So he was talking about the clans of the Saulteaux people. And so on Cowessess, he found that there were two clans, the Eagle clan and the Blue Jay clan. Now what was interesting is that there were no clans for Cree people. Cree people didn’t have clans. So the only clans that were on Cowessess in the early 1900s were these two clans for Saulteaux people. So 30 years after settling on reserves, Saulteaux members of Cowessess were still known to belong to their clan. So they had lived on the reserve together for over 30 years but still had maintained their clans. Skinner also collected, these stories that he collected, another thing was interesting. He collected these stories, these Elder Brother stories, and he published them in 1913. But what he did when he published them, the title of the article that he published it under were Plains Cree Stories. He published them as Plains Cree Stories with a footnote saying that these stories were the same with the Plains Cree and the Saulteaux people and the Saulteaux people instead didn’t use the term [Ojibwe language], they used the Nanabush. So we see how the essentializing of their cultures are beginning with what Skinner, but other factors are at play here as well.

There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that there was some culture sharing between Plains Cree and Saulteaux band members. One elder once told me that the old people like my grandfather spoke what she called a 'half-breed Cree.' Now when she said half-breed Cree, I was thinking she meant Michif, which is the Métis language, a mixture of French and Cree or English and Cree so there’s a Michif language. But that is not what she meant. She said it wasn’t, that wasn’t what they spoke. They spoke a Cree/Saulteaux language. So there was a mixture of Cree and Saulteaux. Their languages would start to become mixed. So I asked her if she could understand that language and she said 'no,' she couldn’t understand that language because for her she was Assiniboine and that wasn’t her language. And so she was still identifying as an Assiniboine woman who spoke or at least could understand Assiniboine, but could not understand half-breed Cree, as she called it.

Individuals from various cultures were able to coexist in the same band because they shared similar cultural attributes. A central cultural trait was the way in which kinship was practiced. They all followed the same kind of kinship rules. They all followed the same kinship rules. It didn’t matter if they were Assiniboine or Cree or Saulteaux or Métis and what’s important is that the Cree and Saulteaux are very similar linguistically and culturally they’re very similar. Assiniboine, they’re Siouxs, those are Sioux people, very different language, but they also follow the same kinship practices and so did the Métis. And the Métis are very important when considering the fact that they are supposed to be and they usually are described as being both culturally and significantly racially distinct from First Nations people. But if they were that distinct racially and culturally distinct, why was it there are so many Métis people in the bands pre-reserve? And I do talk a little bit about that, well, talk a lot about that in my dissertation.

In 1985, when Bill C-31 amended the Indian Act and altered band membership codes, many First Nation people voiced their displeasure. The new membership codes allowed those who had lost their status and their children to regain their status. The majority of them were women but there was also a mechanism in place for men to voluntarily give up their status and usually they had to meet certain criteria to enfranchise, what’s called enfranchise. But the majority of people who had lost their status was women when they married non-Indians. As reported in the media, these tensions, and there was tension between, there was lots of tension between those who had status and those who didn’t. As reported in the media, these tensions were due to competition over resources and issues of authenticity and governance that were probably too complex to capture the mainstream, the attention of most Canadians. Bill C-31 and the complex set of policies and legislation implemented by the Canadian government to define federal Indian status and band membership engendered issues of authenticity, government funding for First Nations and influenced individual and collective responses to the new members. The legal debate couched in terms such as tradition, culture, self-government and colonial oppression made it clear that many First Nation people had either internalized the imposed definition of 'Indian,' had employed these definitions for their own benefit or had political reasons for supporting the continued if temporary use of the definitions.

Cowessess First Nation’s political leaders were not a part of this national debate over Bill C-31. In the interviews I conducted with Cowessess people showed that in contrast to positions of most First Nations leaders, Cowessess band members had a relatively high tolerance for members who had regained their status through Bill C-31. These feelings are consistent with the cultural values expressed by band members, which placed importance on maintaining family ties and which are consistent with the values of kinship found in the law of the people. Many responded, mentioned that they felt that it was wrong that First Nations women had lost their status when they married non-Indian people and believed that women were entitled to being reinstated. Others stated that Bill C-31 didn’t go far enough because there are still many relatives who are not eligible to be reinstated. This is not to say that all were in agreement with Bill C-31. However, the overwhelming majority of people I interviewed formally and talked to informally felt that Bill C-31 was a positive for the band.

In fact, this one quote, this one interviewee that I had summed it up best and here’s a quote: ‘It never really made much of a difference, Bill C-31. Other reserves were different than Cowessess in their treatment to Bill C-31 where most of their members, the other reserve band members, stay on reserve and for them bringing in people who were Bill C-31s created a bit of jealousy. So many other bands made a rule that Bill C-31s weren’t band members. Cowessess did not do that, probably because we are more open than that in that most of our people live off reserve. Our people have been marrying other people for a long time, white people included, for generations by now. In that sense it -- including Bill C-31 band members -- is nothing new to us. We are a small reserve. They’re all Indians. On our reserve, 80 percent of our people leave and marry other people so in that sense when Bill C-31 came along, you had two extremes where one was very strict about who were Indians, the other extreme maybe people wouldn’t want to be inclusive of the members they bring in. So Cowessess would be more on the other extreme of being more accepting. There are some Cowessess people who have a hard view, but the majority don’t.’ So this explanation acknowledged their historical marriage practices of Cowessess people how that acted to incorporate people into the band and it also recognized the fact that Cowessess people understand that marriage practice, this kind of marriage practice was a cultural trait. Though there were some who viewed Bill C-31 as having negative impact, most saw it as having a positive, as a positive for the band. Many were, they were happy that their relatives were able to regain their status. Many respondents however also stated that Bill C-31 didn’t go far enough. Nonetheless, in the interviews it became clear that unlike other bands Bill C-31 members were welcome in the band.

In 1992, another event happened that demonstrates the way in which Cowessess people viewed kinship and the impact it has on their social and political situation. In 1992, Canada and the province of Saskatchewan signed an agreement with 22 Saskatchewan First Nations. This was the Treaty Land Entitlement Framework Agreement. Now this framework agreement, what it was, it provided the mechanism by which First Nations would be able to gain the land that they were entitled to through treaty, but had not up to that point. Cowessess made a claim to be a part of that group, but their claim had not been validated. To have a claim validated, a First Nation had to demonstrate that the original band census that was used to survey the reserve was incorrect. The stumbling block for Cowesses was that the federal government had insisted that the band members, the original band members census for Cowessess had been 470, which was 130 more than the reserve was surveyed for. However, Cowessess had argued in fact it was much greater than that. One of the stipulations to get the TLE [Treaty Land Entitlement] claim validated was that an individual’s name had to appear on a band’s annuity pay list in two consecutive years to be counted towards the claim. Cowessess couldn’t prove that. Cowessess negotiators had noticed that there were many people who had accepted annuities one year, but who then never again appeared on the pay list. Cowessess argued that these people did not appear the second time because they had died. Indian Affairs argued that the people might have gone to other bands, taken Métis scrip or left Canada entirely to join relatives on American reservations in Montana or North Dakota. Cowessess researchers determined that the people in question did not appear on any other band list in Canada or United States nor in the scrip records. They also found no trace of them in the records of the Hudson Bay Company, which would have been an important source of income. Cowessess then argued that these people be included in the claim by linking their disappearance from historical records to Edgar Dewdney’s 1880s starvation policy. What’s that you say? I’ll tell you.

In the 1880s, the Canadian government under the orders of Dewdney who was at that time the Lieutenant Governor of Northwest Territories, implemented a starvation policy in order to persuade 3,000 to 5,000 Indians, First Nations people to leave the Cyprus Hills region of Saskatchewan, which is in southwestern Saskatchewan. He considers his policy a success. ‘I look upon the removal of some 3,000 Indians from Cyprus Hills and scattering them through the country as a solution to one of our main difficulties as it was found impossible at times to have such control as was desirable over such a large number of worthless and lazy Indians, the concourse of malcontents and reckless Indians from all the bands in the territories. Indians already on the reserves will now be more settled as no place of rendezvous will be found where food can be had without a return of work being extracted.’ Terrence Pelchat, the Treaty Land Entitlement Manager for Cowessess during the time of the negotiations, linked Cowessess's position regarding the pay list to Dewdney’s policies. ‘Cowessess claimed that these persons died on the prairies during the year between treaty payments. It was the federal government policy at that time to withhold food and rations to certain Indians and Cowessess's claim was that Indians starved on the Plains because of it. We argued that the federal government should not benefit in that case because it was their policy, their own policy that killed them and they can’t benefit now by not paying Cowessess land benefits because Cowessess members were dead and couldn’t show up for the pay list counts.’ The federal government has never acknowledged a starvation policy or its devastating affects on Cowessess people. The government was reluctant for a discussion of this issue to enter into the public realm so Indian Affairs decided not to challenge Cowessess on the issue. They agreed to include these people on Cowessess though each name had to be reviewed individually and verified to see if they could be included.

So what happened with Cowessess is that they got up, when they got up to about 810 names, or sorry, they got up to about 700 names. They got up to about 700 names and Cowessess said, ‘How many more names do you have?’ They said about 300. The negotiators said they couldn’t go that high. They cannot, every name that they presented was getting verified, was getting included, but they knew, the negotiators knew they couldn’t go that high so they decided that what they could do is, they can reach a negotiated number. Now the down side was that they didn’t get the claim that they should have got but they may never have gotten that claim because the federal government wouldn’t have paid the money or at least that’s what the negotiator, the federal negotiator said. So they ended up with a number of 810 negotiated. So the only band in Saskatchewan with a title claim that doesn’t have a hard number with their figure, but they have a negotiated number 810. But what that says, although they know they have a good 190 more names. So they went from 470 to 800, but they know they had 1,000. Those people that were not included were all people that died as a fact, they claim that died of starvation due to the starvation policy and that was from one band. That was from one band. So the importance of the TLE to Cowessess then in terms of asserting their culture identity is summed up by this, to the question, do you think there was any kind of connection between the TLE and the importance of family?

This participant responded by saying that TLE, sort of tying TLE to treaty rights, maintenance of family and the social dislocation of band members. This is his answer. ‘Yeah, you look at what we didn’t have. We were entitled to this [certain amount of land] and we didn’t get it. What did we miss because of the result of that? We have 3,080,’ at this time, ‘We have 3,000 people. 80 percent of them live off reserve. Well, could it be because we didn’t have half our land? Could it be that the half that we didn’t get, we lost a quarter?’ They lost another quarter, so they didn’t get a whole bunch of land through TLE, but they also lost a quarter of their land was alienated illegally through fraud. So they lost another part of their land. ‘Could it be we lost a quarter of it through government fraud? What happens when people leave? They no longer have the support of the community. They have to take their children somewhere else and they raise their family without the support of back home, without the support of the reserve. If you don’t have the reserve to live on, where are you? Where are you going to go? I guess that is why Cowessess has such a big membership leap. That’s why so many people left the reserve by the 1950s. That’s why we have so many people who have left. So to me, that is what TLE means. When you look at it from a treaty rights point of view and it wasn’t until we got $46 million, it was only then that I realized how valuable our treaty right was and that TLE is a treaty right and that treaty right was supposed to somehow guarantee the security of Cowessess people and if we never got that, then that’s what happened. Our people lost security. So that’s what happens to Indians when they don’t have their land. Indians lost their status of the reserve. Indians without land are nothing. So that is what TLE is. It represents what happened historically. It answers why there are so many off the reserve. It answers why the social conditions are the way they are. It also offers some kind of hope for the future now that we can reconnect with the land. We know what the land represents to us, how we can use that to our benefit. I think we have a hell of a future. Maybe I won’t see it, but I know my family will. So TLE in terms of land, I think we just don’t know how important it is to us. To me, that’s what I think. I think that the treaty right to land can be fulfilled. I think what would happen if all of our treaty rights were fulfilled. We don’t know what we have until we see it’s gone. When we get $46 million, you know what you were missing before and you know what the treaty right was that you were fighting for. Nobody knew that I don’t think. We had our past leaders, they understood the importance. If they didn’t fight for it, we would have,  what would we have?’ So the TLE for this band member represents hope, but it also represents the fulfillment of treaty. It represents the connection to family. It also represented, he also mentioned that it also represents the sacrifice of the ancestors. Their ancestors provided a legacy. Even though they were not originally not counted as being a part of the band, they were part of the band and the $47 million, that’s how much Cowessess received in their claim. As a result of the TLE was the legacy of those band members who starved to death on the plains as a result of the Canadian government.

Traditional stories help us to understand how Aboriginal people view and practice their kinship relations. This is perceived by many as being what differentiates them from mainstream Canadians. It is of little wonder then that DeMallie has implored Native Studies scholars to be creative in their approach to recognize and gain a better understanding of the importance of Native kinship patterns. Kinship patterns do not exist in a vacuum. They interact with the social environment that surrounds the people who exercise them. Like other cultural aspects of the band, kinship practices of Cowessess have changed considerably since members have settled on the reserve. Some of these changes were forcibly imposed on them while others were adapted by members to meet the challenges of the new era. What may be surprising to many is the degree to which contemporary kinship practices, whether customary or new adaptations, still observe the principles found within the law of the people. Elder Brother stories help to explain Cowessess kinship practice of the pre- and early reserve period when people were easily incorporated to the band including the adoption of white people, as I mentioned earlier. The Canadian government’s assimilations policies however sought to undermine the law of the people including the regulation guiding kinship practices. These attempts were in many respects successful, yet for many Cowessess people, the notion of kinship -- as epitomized in Elder Brother’s behavior -- continue to obtain demonstrating the ideals of the traditional law of the people remain implicitly central to principles guiding band member’s social interaction. The extent to which current Cowessess members tell the stories or even know the story is not certain. What is apparent however is that the values encoded in those stories have persisted. These valued didn’t just come from anywhere, they came from these stories and from pre-reserve and early reserve periods to the present. Unfortunately, scholars have not taken Elder Brother stories into account when describing historical northern plains Aboriginal societies, even though many Cowessess members may not have heard any of the Elder Brother stories,

So in conclusion, the way in which Cowessess people have interacted and continue to interact and practice their cultural kinship has allowed them to make certain arguments that, political arguments like with the Treaty Land Entitlement, like the way in which they have incorporated Bill C-31 members, that have, and we don’t know to what extent the other bands could have benefited by using this approach, but what we do know is that by incorporating their kinship practices that they have been able to maintain over the years has helped them in putting forth political argument that will in the end strengthen their sovereignty and provide for a better future for them. Thank you.

[applause]

Manley Begay:

Thank you, Rob. Like I said, listening to Rob makes me think of north of the 49th parallel, it’s just so close and there are a lot of interactions between First Nation peoples up in Canada as well as those down south. For instance, my people, I’m Navajo and we have relatives all the way up into the northern part of Canada, the Dene people. We’re very close relatives. We speak the same language. And so as Rob was talking about his First Nation I was thinking about, it’s really a story of love because of interrelationships and intermarriages that went on and about the federal government’s meddling in the affairs of Native people leading to some misconstrued policies that really screwed things up. It’s about some sense of regaining strength, losing strength and regaining strength once again and providing a sense of hope for what could be the future. So these are sort of things that came out at me and ultimately, I was thinking about love again because of the interrelationships that went on and how do you move a society forward. So those are things that I sort of thought of as Rob was talking. A couple questions, by the way we have food next door in 332. So if you go out the door here, just turn right and just follow the arrows and there’s food and refreshments there as well. Rob might want to field some questions. No questions? Okay, let’s go eat. Questions please.

Robert Innes:

It’s good for me.

Nance Parezo:

I’ll ask him something.

Robert Innes:

Sure.

Nancy Parezo:

Somebody did listen. We all listened. Rob, there’s a lot of groups like I was thinking of St. Regis with the Iroquoian groups. Do you think if people started redoing the histories on a lot of the groups that are going back you’d find the same type of things going on that you’re finding up here? It’s kind of a unit-of-analysis question back to your dissertation days. And how can we think, if we’re doing more history, how can we keep it being so isolationist like it was in Skinner’s day? These are little, these are communities that are like floating in time and space and that was never reality. So what do you think we can do?

Robert Innes:

Well, I think that, yes, I think that for most communities, I don’t know about all communities but I always think that generally speaking that most communities you would see that there are, the makeup of communities are much more complex than we think. I would think so and that most communities had mechanism to incorporate people without making them give up or inculturate, assimilate into the group that they’re, but it all depends though, there are, in Saskatchewan there were the young dogs who were Cree-Assiniboine, sorry, yeah, they’re Cree-Assiniboine that did develop a hybridized Cree-Assiniboine culture. So it does happen that the people do come together and create a new culture or if individuals go into a group, they may assimilate, but it depends on how many people are going into the group. So for Cowessess, there were significant numbers of each of these groups that they were able to maintain their culture or distinct culture, distinct identities.

Nancy Parezo:

I was thinking like the...too who are going both through time with alliances with the Crow sometime and then Blackfeet and that’s just,

Robert Innes:

And we don’t know, even on Cowessess with Saulteaux and Cree, because they were already fairly close culturally and linguistically and they were starting to become hybridized with the language, but the Assiniboine weren’t. So that was kind of interesting. It might have something to do with the degree of difference of the culture that people are interacting with.

Manley Begay:

More questions?

Audience member:

It’s really interesting to think about populations being these very dynamic things and how, and I know nothing about Canadian politics, but in the U.S. the policies have all been created around the homogeneity and stagnant nature of the populations so that now what you start to see as people do move off their reservations and live and love and marry in urban settings and more and more children are not full blood one tribe, you see tribes now trying to address do they have to lower their quantum. It’s almost like it’s inevitable with the structure that’s in place that the federal government can make it so that there is no one who is American Indian anymore.

Robert Innes:

Well, that’s where it becomes I think falling into the categories that are being placed out by the colonizer. So what I see with Cowessess is that there were, to be a Cowessess band member you could have been part Assiniboine, part Cree. My mom, my grandmother was Métis, my grandfather spoke a Cree-Saulteaux language, but still we’re Cowessess people. But most people would identify as Cree or they would identify as Saulteaux so they essentialize their identity. And when I ask people, ‘What kind of reserve is this? What’s this reserve? Would you say it’s Cree or Saulteaux or what, ’ Some would say Cree, some would say, but a lot of people said mixed. But when we take on the definition that you have to be three quarters or whatever Cheyenne to be a part of this band or this tribe, well, chances are there was never any, it’s been a long time since there was a full-blooded Cheyenne. Not to say they weren’t full-blooded Indians, but I would guess that prior to the reservation, settling on the reservation that they were culturally mixed. But because we accepted and we have to accept or we don’t, but people have, this definition that well you have to be three quarters Cheyenne, now, and the clock starts fresh from Dawes Act on, I guess. So yeah, I think that’s how we, by following that way then that’s when you can tell that the kinship practices are being undermined.

Manley Begay:

Any other questions?

Audience member:

Do you speak your language?

Robert Innes:

No, I don’t. No. The language on our reserve is, there’s only a few speakers left. There’s only a few speakers left. Part of that I think, it was interesting because I was talking to, they’re teaching it in the schools, teaching Cree in the schools, which is interesting because she was from another part of the province which is a predominately Cree community, very little intermarriage with other groups. She was saying that the language that she hears people talk, they have this ‘shhhh’ sound she says and she was attributing it to Michif because she’s saying that’s Michif, but I’m thinking, ‘No, that’s not Michif. I think that’s Ojibwe. That’s Anishinaabe and that’s the way they speak.’ So that’s part of the, I think that’s where that comes from, but yeah, the language is almost gone with the fluent speakers, although they’re introducing it in the schools.

Audience member:

How are they reintroducing it then, because if there’s only several or a few fluent speakers, then how is it, ?

Robert Innes:

What they’re introducing is Cree. They’re not introducing the language that my grandfather spoke or they’re not introducing Assiniboine or even Saulteaux. They’re introducing Cree. So this is part of the essentializing of the identity because they see themselves as Cree or Saulteaux, but they’re not going to be introducing this mixed language.

Audience member:

So what’s your thought process on the other nations now that are starting to lose their languages?

Robert Innes:

Well, that’s, one of the things you hear a lot is that if you don’t have your language, you’re no longer Indian. How can you be Indian if you don’t understand the language, you don’t understand the concepts that are in the language? And I don’t quite agree with that, I can’t. But I see the importance of the language and the importance of reclaiming the language. However, I think what happens is that people -- when they think of culture and think about Indian culture --they think of the more public displays of culture, the language, traditional ceremonies, powwows. They think of those public displays, but they very seldom think of the everyday things that you do that comes from your culture and that really defines you as who you are, and that to me is how you interact with your relatives and who you consider to be a relative. So when there’s someone sick at the hospital and 40 people show up and they’re told, ‘Well, this is only for immediate family,’ and you say, ‘Well, this is only like a third of us.’ And Native people are like, ‘What’s wrong with this,’ because everyone’s thinking, ‘This is the way everyone is.’ But reality, no, no one’s, not everyone’s like that. And so although I think that language is important and those other public displays of culture are important in defining and asserting and creating and maintaining culture, but they’re also the more difficult. It’s a lot more difficult. A friend of mine, he wanted to learn how to speak Ojibwe and he’s done a pretty good job in doing it, too, as an adult and we were living in Toronto at the time. He went to an Ojibwe language class. There were 35 people there. There were about 10 or 11 white people, the rest were Ojibwe. About three weeks later, four weeks later, there was still the 10 or 11 white people there, but only one Ojibwe because it’s not easy. It’s not easy. But maintaining your kinship is much easier. I’m not saying that you should do one over the other. If you can do both, you should do both, but I think to acknowledge the importance that kinship plays and how it is culturally rooted is I think important.

Manley Begay:

Clearly culture is very complex, culture is ever evolving, culture is not static, and I think Rob has given us a lot to think about. So with that we’ll conclude, but let’s give him another round of applause.

Robert Innes:

Thank you.

[applause]

Patricia Riggs: The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story

Producer
National Congress of American Indians
Year

Patricia Riggs, Director of Economic Development for Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP), discusses how YDSP has spent the past decade developing and fine-tuning its comprehensive approach to engaging its citizens in order to identify and then achieve its nation-building priorities.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the National Congress of American IndiansThe "Rebuilding the Tigua Nation" film shown in this video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Riggs, Patricia. "The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story." 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace, National Congress of American Indians. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 15, 2013. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"So I'll turn the floor over to Patricia Riggs. Again, she's the economic development director with the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and as she told me today, she's sort of their de facto chief of citizen engagement for their pueblo. Anytime they face a challenge in this arena, they tend to turn to her because she's done so much wonderful work in this area. Did you want to start with the video or with your presentation?"

Patricia Riggs:

"It's a little long. If you want to start it and then kind of go through middle and then restart it again."

Ian Record:

"So again, this is a video that Pat was involved with putting together. It's called 'Rebuilding the Tigua Nation.' Tigua is another name that refers to her nation and this again I think...think of this not just in terms of what it shares with you, but think of this as a viable tool of citizen education and engagement. We're seeing more and more nations do things like this. These videos that instruct not just their own citizens, but outsiders about who the nation is and what they're doing and why."

[VIDEO]

Patricia Riggs:

"Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. As Ian stated, my name is Pat Riggs and I'm the Director of Economic Development at Ysleta del Sur [Pueblo]. We started community engagement back in 2006. Of course at the Pueblo, there's always been some form of community engagement, but we had a very significant event that took place. If you paid attention closely to the film, we talked about the casino being closed down. In 1987, we were federally restored and there was one little clause in our restoration act that said, "˜The tribe shall not have gaming that is illegal in Texas.' So when the State of Texas started bingo and lottery, we decided that there was gaming in Texas so we opened our casino and they sued us and the courts held that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act didn't apply to the tribe, that the language in our restoration act superseded that. So we operated gaming from around 1992 to 2002. It was open for about 10 years and it first started as a bingo hall and then later on to Class 2 gaming. So when the casino actually did end up closed, we had invested quite a bit in infrastructure and the tribe had done a lot of good things with our funding or our revenues that we got for the tribe, but we were basically at a...we were in shock. There was this economic turmoil that was taking place that we didn't realize was actually going to take place. We thought that there was no way that we would lose the case, but we ended up losing the case.

So citizen engagement started out of the need to really find out what the community needed. What we started doing is really looking at different groups and seeing what their needs are and really trying to identify with the tribe and what they needed. This is just a picture of what we call "˜listening to our ancestors,' because everything that we do really does come from our history and who we are as a people and where we've been so just the fact that in spite of everything that's happened to us, it seems like...sometimes they call us the 'Bad Luck Tribe' because if something can go wrong, it happens to us. We got left out of the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1861 so we weren't recognized with the other pueblos. We ended up on the Confederate side of the line. Just things throughout history ended up happening.

Really a lot what was happening, too, was our own mindset and the way we thought as a community, so when the casino was closed we kind of stood at a standstill, we didn't know what to do, we were in shock. And I had been working at another location. I'd been working in the City of El Paso and the tribe asked me to come back and I was like, "˜Economic Development, hmm.' So I really didn't know anything about economic development, but I said, "˜I'll give it a try.' But when I came back, one of the things that I started doing is really listening and trying to figure out what was happening in the community. And so I heard in the video that Ian played before from Native Nations Institute, someone said that some of the challenges or the biggest challenges for the tribe come from within. So I'm really about training and trying to figure out what the community wants and so they started asking me to train different departments. And so I started paying attention to what the community was actually saying and to what some of our employees were saying and these are actual...their quotes, their statements that were actually said and they're things like, "˜Tiguas don't want to learn.' Everything was always blamed on tribal council and we all know that there's problems with councils sometimes, but sometimes I think we exaggerate those things because we don't want to move forward or we don't...we try to rationalize what we are or what we're not doing in our departments. So it was always about, "˜We can't do that because tribal council won't allow it,' "˜It doesn't matter.' Some of our non-tribal employees were saying that we couldn't do particular, they wouldn't do particular things because the tribal members would go tell council what they were doing and it was just, it was ridiculous, really. When you really sat down and listened to it and you put all the statements together, it was ridiculous.

So basically...so what we determined that we needed to do is really engage our community in education and try to really figure out who the community was because we know who we are as a people, we know our culture, we knew traditions, but we don't really know the community in terms of what needs do they...are out there, what are the poverty levels, what are the education levels, who's employed, who's not employed, what kind of skills do they have? And as far as doing a needs assessment we needed that, but we also needed to take an inventory of what we have or had in order to move forward. So we started doing different things to try and get the community engaged. And so this is what it looks like if you do the 'flyer method' and it just doesn't work. You send all these beautiful flyers out there and just get ready for everybody to come and they don't show up. So it was like, "˜Well, what am I doing wrong here?' And we were actually, at one point we even brought Native Nations Institute and we had a very small crowd there. So we thought about what we could actually do to get the community more involved.

So what we found is actually working with groups and even within the reservation there are special interest groups. We all have little things that...or subjects that we're interested in and what we found is to look for those core champions in your communities. And there's people who are really just very traditional and that's what they want to discuss and that's what they want to do in terms of who they are so we asked them, "˜Okay, how do you think that we can infuse tradition into the things that we're doing?' We also started working with youth. The thing about youth is if you work with youth and you train them and you honor them and you show their parents what they're doing, then the parents come, too. So we started figuring out how to get parents engaged as well. And then we did different things with leadership, with elders. One of the things that we did learn is that we really need to figure out how to work with each group and how to...and so through the little groups we got the whole.

The big thing here is you can't expect people to just come to you. As I showed the meetings with the flyers, it just didn't work. We had to find different ways to actually go out into community and to seek input. So we went to the elders. And I mentioned earlier that our casino had closed, but it's actually operating now as a sweepstakes center. So it's kind of we have... they look like terminals, but they're actually all hooked up into one network. So there are signs all over the place that say you're donating to the tribe and you're donating to our health, to our education. So we just got creative on ways to do things. It's not quite as revenue generating as it was before, but there's still funding coming in. One of the times I went to the elders and I wanted to do a survey with them and so they said, "˜Oh, no, we don't have time for your survey.' And I'm like, "˜But I have 'Free Play'.' And they, "˜Oh, Free Play, okay. Sit down.' So we started talking to them and then they found out some of the things that we're doing and they were engaged in that, actually came to where they actually wanted to participate in some of the events that we were having. And so they started making the food and sometimes we could pay them and sometimes we couldn't, but they were okay with that and they started assisting us in our events.

So then we also, one of the things that we did is in order to engage the community...there is no greater engagement than actually serving the community, so we started an AmeriCorp program and the AmeriCorp program, they work with the elders, they work in the cultural center, they work in emergency management, in environmental. So they're kind of our ambassadors for community engagement in different areas. The other thing is we do a lot of data collection and we do a lot of surveys, but when we do it we work with focus groups or we work with all the other little core groups and we educate them about why we're trying to collect the information. So we educate them first and then they are kind of our core champions or leaders so they go out into their groups and they tell either the other elders or youth or whoever it is that we're working with why it is important. So we educate them on how to educate the community on getting that information and we've been very successful in gathering information for our tribe in order to determine what it is that we're going to focus on, whether it's health or whether it's economic development. I'll show you a little bit more in a minute about the successes with data collection and also the projects that we're working on.

I know that one of the first times that Joe Kalt went to Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, I had been working in writing grants not just for the tribe, but also for the City of El Paso and I wanted a model, I wanted a matrix and I was like, "˜Well, do you have a matrix?' and it's like, "˜No.' So I realized, I think I really like to visualize what it is that we're trying to accomplish, but I kind of think very methodical. So I have to figure out what exactly it is that we're going to tackle, but I also realize that those kind of models and theories, they're for other communities, they're not really for us. We can't take somebody's methodology and use it at our tribe. So I started to look back and thinking like what is it exactly that we're doing, and this is what I came up with.

Well, one of the things is we have a purpose. No matter what it is that we're trying to tackle, whether it's constitutional reform or building entrepreneurs, there's a purpose there. So you find that purpose and there's also...but with that purpose, there's always passion and I'm so passionate about what I do. That's all I do. I have to have people drag me away from it sometimes, but there's other people in your communities with that passion. So look for the passionate people and then harvest the information. You really do have to harvest information and gather that input from your community, because that's who you're working for and that's who really is driving you to do what it is that you do.

The other thing is...so you visualize and then you assess and you plan. And I know it's kind of theory-like, but when it comes to your community, what is it that you're visualizing? Like for us, one of the things that we're working on is a land use plan and land acquisition. So when we're visualizing, I'm not doing this theory of visualizing, we're actually looking at the community and thinking about the things that we lost and the things that we need for ceremony and where...the places that it's going to come from, from the land and how are we going to be able to redevelop our lands and preserve our lands as they once were and then also rebuild our community as a village because we're used to living as a village and that was taken away from us. So when we're visualizing, that's...we're visualizing how we want to live. It's about how the entire...what the entire community sees. So then of course we can work, work, work, work, but at the end of the day we really do have to have something to show for it. So you do have to measure those impacts and the outcomes of what it is that you're doing because...and then you take it back to the community and show your successes and so you report the results.

And then here's basically the same thing with a little bigger snapshot, but in the end it really is about community, whether you're trying to figure out what the community wants, you start at the community; whether you're trying to figure out the data, you're getting it from community, you're trying to draw a picture of what your community really is, and then in the end you report those results back to the community and then you also try to determine what is driving the community and those are things such as the ceremonies and traditions and culture and just living together as a Tigua society for us. So we look at the core values and we reaffirm them by asking different people in the community and also about what is the best way to apply the things in a manner that...that will work in a manner that is fair to the entire tribe and to every sector of the tribal population.

So this is a little bit of our timeline and as far as our economy is concerned...so really what was happening to us, we had basically lost all our lands. We were living in a small part of El Paso in a little, basically it was a neighborhood. It really wasn't a reservation and we had, there were small adobe houses, most of them were one room. It was during the termination policy, so we really didn't have any hope of having a better life. We were just happy to be able to still be there and still be living as a community and still, even though we weren't federally recognized, we still held tribal elections, we still had our ceremonies every year, we still had people in charge of dong the things that...the doings that needed to be done for us to continue to survive as a Pueblo the best that we could. So of course the civil rights movement took place later and that's when people started to gain more confidence and to start asserting their rights.

So what happened in the 1960s is we were basically losing our few homes that we had left to tax foreclosure because it was the City of El Paso now and throughout there's a couple pictures that you'll see the entire, what our Pueblo used to look like, and because we weren't on federal trust land. And one of the important reasons that we start that film where we're crossing the highway and the tribal police are directing traffic for us is because that one spot is where our Pueblo used to be and we had stacked adobe homes. And the City of El Paso -- because we weren't federally recognized or had trust status -- they decided to have condemnation proceedings against our Pueblo because they needed that one spot that's a highway and they needed it to extend the highway. So they had condemnation proceedings and they condemned the Pueblo basically. So that is the center of our tribe and that's why we decided to start the film there.

So land acquisition and development and regaining and putting land into trust is very important for us so basically there was a lawyer by the name of Tom Diamond that helped us to get federally restored or federally recognized in 1969, but we were basically terminated on the same day because the State of Texas had a Texas Indian Commission, so they turned over the trust responsibility to the Texas Indian Commission. Well, there were some good things that happened out of that. We did get some new housing out of it and there was a few more jobs and some economic development took place. So in the "˜60s, basically our unemployment rate was 75 percent. By the "˜70s it went to about 50 percent and we went from a fifth-grade education to about a 10th-grade education. So then in '87 we were federally restored and the casino was thriving and our unemployment rate basically went down to three percent. We went from 68 acres of land that were transferred over during the time of restoration to 75,000 acres of land that we invested in with our casino revenues and then we also built a lot more housing. I think you saw in the film where the housing was. And then we...but then the casino closed because we were sued. So basically, we were really at odds, we didn't know what we were going to do.

So we started off by doing projections on our funding and what we had in reserves and we determined was that if we continued to operate in the same manner we would run out of money in seven years. So we had to decide what it is that we were going to do, so that's when we started this nation-building process and we started investing money in a development corporation, which is now doing federal contracting and we're located in probably at least five places throughout the country: Washington D.C., Virginia, California, Colorado Springs. And that also took forming a board and separation of business and politics and having a committee that turned into...later to the board. And so this education process, we're educating different people in the community.

One of the things we did is we educated the board on how to operate as a board, which started as an economic development committee and then they ended up the board. So now this... we reassigned the economic development committee and now they're being trained as how to operate as a nonprofit board so then we're going to replace them and they're going to become probably another board. So we just keep getting small groups and keep educating so that they can build the capacity to do other things. But in order to do this we really, really needed to know what our state was as far as a community is concerned. So we were able to really determine what our... who we were, where our people were located at, what the rates of unemployment were and poverty levels, household levels, individual household levels.

The other thing that happened to us in our restoration act is that the language in there said that the tribe shall consist of membership that is on the base roll and people descending from that base roll up to one-eighth blood quantum. They said that in 1987. So we quickly realized that in a few years we'd no longer exist as a tribe because we would lose that blood quantum. So the tribe decided that they were going...we went to Congress and it took us 10 years of introducing different bills, but we ended up just recently having the blood quantum bill passed. So in order to do this, we really needed to figure out who we were as a people because we needed to take that information to Congress. So this is what our community looks like now and we also studied the people that live outside the service area, our tribal members that live outside the service area as well, and what we're finding is really they left before economic opportunity because they're a little bit better off in terms of education and household income.

I talked a little bit about cooperative education and so what we're also doing in order to engage our citizens and get this information -- because we collect that information every single year from tribal members and we've been successful as far as getting the information -- but we also make sure that we give it back to them and that when we compile any sort of information that we give them the reports back, like whether it's health and if there's a diabetes report or whatever it is. But the other thing is we all come to these conferences because we work as professionals, but your average tribal citizen doesn't have that opportunity to learn the things like we're learning today, what's happening in the federal courts and what's happening as far as policy is concerned and even what happened with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and so we take that education to them. We make sure that there's money in the budget to educate our tribal members and we do everything from Indian law to nation building to...we have other people even come and do community engagement to let them know how important it is. We have financial literacy training, but we also do like board training. And so if there's a subject that we think is important for us to learn and what's on the agenda here and at other conferences, we make sure that we find a way to take it back to the community and to be able to train them so that they know. And even when we work with our departments who of course...there has to be some professional training there, a lot of times some of our tribal members don't have the capacity to be in those higher positions of directors, so we tell our directors, "˜We're going to put this training out for you, but you need to pick a tribal member and it doesn't matter if it's a secretary or a maintenance person or whatever it is, you need to bring them to this training also and you need to figure out how you're going to get that information back to your department as well.'

As far as community engagement and what it's done for us as far as impacts are concerned, these are some of the projects that we've worked on that have really made an impact in our community. One of the things is we did this huge comprehensive strategy and that's where we determined that we were going to do things like the Tigua, Inc. Development Corporation, we were going to do workforce development, land use plan, land acquisition plan. All those things were outlined in this strategy and there was focus groups and surveys that were on our website. And if you actually look at our website all the reports are on there as far as the information that the community provided to us and what we compiled and gave back to the community. So this comprehensive strategy, a lot of strategies and plans just end up on the bookshelf, but as you can see it didn't. We like to say that you need to plan your work and you need to work your plan.

The other thing is Tigua, Inc., the tribe provided the seed money for that and now they have really just taken off over the last couple years and getting significant contracts and they're doing a lot of building maintenance all over the country. They just recently got awarded the Wyler Building in California, which is the second largest government facility in the country to do maintenance. This is the Tigua Business Center that we just recently moved into about a year and a half ago and it also incubates Tigua, Inc., but it also serves as headquarters for our department, Economic Development, and we're also just now building another extension to it, which is going to be to incubate tribal member businesses, and we also have, because we really truly believe in educating the tribe and we're not quite there yet as far as having a college. We're building the Tigua Technology Center there, which is also going to help to provide the software that some of our tribal members need to get their business done like the costing and pricing for construction companies and for auto mechanics and CAD and those things that are really expensive that they can't afford as far as software is concerned.

And then also our tax code, this was one of the things that also came out of the comprehensive economic development strategy. For some reason, the tribe had decided that it was going to adopt the State of Texas tax code, which made no sense whatsoever. It was 200 pages long and we couldn't enforce it. And so what we did is we took a look at what would best serve our needs and we went from 200 pages to 20 pages and in less than a year we went from $58,000 a year to $1.2 million in tax collections. The allocation also is divided up for different programming. But I'm able to support our department because we get 30 percent of tax allocation and that's how I am able to turn that into some of the programming that we're doing.

Here's the feedback and it's really a snapshot of the feedback that we got back from the community and the things that they were concerned with in land use. So they were, the community of course was concerned with things like cultural preservation and being able to maintain our traditional practices, having land for residential use, commercial needs and agriculture, as well as transportation. So we determined what the best use of lands would be and through community engagement we also took an inventory of our lands and created a database that had all the criteria of our lands, as well as GIS mapping, whatever, if there were environmental assessments. And so we have a really defined database of all our lands and then we created a master plan and an acquisition plan. The acquisition plan isn't quite finished yet, but this timeline that we looked at started with the need to preserve our lands and we have these milestones where we want to have our master plan and do energy development and make sure that everybody has housing and those things. But then at the end it ends with cultural preservation, too, because it demonstrates 100 years from now that we're still here and our land is preserved.

And then also on one side we have all the modern and things we need to survive today, but we also have all the things that are important to us historically and culturally. When we started writing a master plan through community engagement, we had these and we had these maps of the land...of our land in big sheets and we had the community write what certain places of what they wanted the land to look like.

And also they put places like by the river, like for example, that is still important to us today but that...we have ceremonies at the river that we can't just go to the river anymore. We border Mexico, so everybody knows about the big fence at the river. So we actually have to go ask the Border Patrol to let us go to the river to do our ceremonies. So part of our master planning is to take over the acequias or the irrigation system or the canal system that we actually created 300 years ago. So we created this cultural life cycle that we would incorporate into our land use and master plan and it talks about where we are at birth and how we're being nurtured and the lessons we're learning and how we learn about our culture and then how as elders our roles change and that then we become teachers and we pass on this tradition and culture. So in our land use plan we...that bar that intersects across there talks about the different places that we're going to create to make sure those things happen. So we have things like a nation-building hub and also an elder center and places for teens to meet as well.

So these are...see those are pictures of maps that we used where the community actually drew what they wanted the community to look like, and these are statements that the community provided back. And then we also had different criteria as far as what the community wanted to see and graphed and charted what the community best wanted for our lands. So these are also places that we don't own yet, but they're what we used to own. And so in our land acquisition process, we want to buy these locations back and this is what we could do with them as far as economic development is concerned. And it seems like way out there, but in reality it really isn't. When you think about we just had 68 acres in 1987 and we have 75,000 acres now, it's attainable. And then so this is what our acquisition process is going to look like and how we mapped it. Everything that is in yellow is what we own and what's in the darker colors is our long-term acquisition. We know that we can't buy everything, but we do...those are the gaps that we want to fill in. I talked a little bit about our enrollment ordinance. Well, we're working on an enrollment ordinance, a new citizen engagement [process] because of the blood quantum bill that just passed last year. So I had thought that that was going to go to somebody else, but I just was told last week that that citizen engagement process would actually come to our department so that's something that we're working on now. This was just a little conversation that the team had last week and these are questions that we're really thinking about what we need to ask the community. It'll be much more comprehensive, but just basic things like what does citizenship mean to you and how did you learn how to be a good citizen from your parents and your community, and so that's the way we usually start with just the basic questions and then we move into real comprehensive model.

These are just a couple, I guess, pointers to just make sure that you try to identify what your tribe needs and also...and then as far as when you're working within your community just know that everything that you're doing is either going to impact your tribe either positively or negatively. And what the work [is] that you're doing, how is that going to actually help your tribe or not help your tribe because sometimes we're afraid to move forward and to change, but in order to change you really need to know what it is that your community wants and to respect what their thoughts are and what they want for the future. Thank you."

Richard Luarkie: The Pueblo of Laguna: A Constitutional History

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Laguna Governor Richard Luarkie provides a detailed overview of what prompted the Pueblo of Laguna to first develop a written constitution in 1908, and what led it to amend the constitution on numerous occasions in the century since. He also discusses the reasons Laguna is currently engaging in another effort to reform its constitution.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Luarkie, Richard. "The Pueblo of Laguna: A Constitutional History." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program we are honored to have with us Richard Luarkie. Since January 2011, Richard has served as Governor of his nation, the Pueblo of Laguna. He previously served as First Lieutenant Governor of Laguna and as a village officer for several terms and he is also a former small business owner. Governor, welcome and good to have you with us.

Richard Luarkie:

“Thank you.

Ian Record:

“You and I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and talk in the past on a number of nation building topics. I wanted to sit down with you today and have a conversation about another topic that we haven’t really touched base on yet and that is Native nation constitutionalism and constitutional reform and specifically the Pueblo of Laguna’s current constitution, how it came to be, and how it is changing. And I figured it would be beneficial if we start at the very beginning. What did the Pueblo of Laguna’s 'traditional,' unwritten constitution, if you will, look like before colonization and what core governance principles and institutions did it rely upon?

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, thank you for allowing me to be here again. For the Pueblo of Laguna, like many other tribes, our governance was based on traditional models, traditional teachings. Our creation story tells us that at the time of creation when our Mother created all entities -- deities, the world, the earth, the sun, the moon, the spiritual beings as well as the humans -- there was always leadership and there was always governance. And that governance, though, was fueled and inspired by values of love, of respect, of compassion, of responsibility, of obligation -- not necessarily rights, but responsibility and obligation to do our part. And so leadership was responsible for the caretaking of that and so that’s how I saw our governance systems run prior to any formal government system that came into play like constitutions. So like many other tribes the inspiration of tradition, the inspiration of spirituality, the inspiration of a way of being, in our language we say '[Pueblo language],' our way of life, is really how we governed ourselves. So that’s how we were structured as a government.

Ian Record:

“So in 1908 Laguna became one of the first Native nations to actually develop a written constitution and I’m curious, what prompted Laguna to take that step when it did and how did that written constitution compare to what you just laid out, basically the unwritten way of life that you relied upon for so long in terms of, during that time prior to colonization when that was the sole guide for how the Laguna people lived. How did, what prompted the Laguna to develop that constitution and how did it compare and contrast to that traditional way of life?

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, when the 1908 constitution came along, it was probably a result of a culmination of events, of issues. Laguna like any other tribe had its issues. During the 1800s, there was a lot of divisiveness going on, there was a lot of infiltration from different factions, there was the attempt to hold onto our traditional way of life, our traditional governance systems, but you had Protestant and Presbyterian and Catholic and still some influence from maybe even the Mexican influence and of course the federal government. So you had all this dynamic going on. But you also have now, the inclusion of Bureau [of Indian Affairs] schools, the Carlisle Indian School, the Albuquerque Indian School and all the other schools across the country that took our young kids away when they were small in the 1800s and now come the late 1800s, early 1900s these kids are home and they’re now adults and they’ve been groomed in a manner of how is it that we should govern ourselves. So they’ve learned a whole new system so they began to utilize those teachings. What was also maybe, I don’t think it’s unique to Laguna because I know other tribes and in particular other pueblos this has happened to, but we had three Anglo governors during the end of the 1800s that were married into the tribe. They were Presbyterian and that became a strong influence during that time period and that’s what helped to architect that first constitution.

Understandably though, our local community saw that as looking at it maybe constructively...also recognized that the federal government through the recognition by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 when he recognized the 19 Pueblos by granting us a cane recognizing our sovereign authority. They recognized that acknowledgment. And so as a way to maybe better communicate with the federal government, they saw this as a tool. So it was then adopted by our council and when you read through the 1908 constitution, there’s still remnants of the time before where you had a leader and that leader was, it literally says in the 1908 constitution, ‘The governor is the supreme ruler,’ because prior to that the religious orders are what they call our caciques at the time, they were the ones that appointed the leadership and the leadership then had full authority. But when the constitution came in that changed and so, to a certain degree, and so you began to see remnants still sticking there within the constitution, but I really believe that it was for the purpose of trying to find compromise, trying to find a way to hold on to our traditional way of being, but also prepare for how is the future moving and how do we communicate with those other forms of government in the future.

Ian Record:

“So in part it was to enable outsiders such as the federal government to make sense of who Laguna was and what they wanted to preserve perhaps?

Richard Luarkie:

“I believe it was a way to make sense of who Laguna was, but also I think very, I think intelligently a way for Laguna to protect what it had and using the government’s tools to do that.

Ian Record:

“So that was in 1908 and we’re sitting here in 2014. So you have now 106 years as a Pueblo with a written constitution and I’m curious, how has that 1908 constitution evolved over the past now century plus?

Richard Luarkie:

“It’s real interesting because you begin to see, we’ve had four constitutional amendments since 1908. So you begin to see a shift from authority of one person to the authority being given to the council. You also begin to see a watering down, if you will, of maybe the practice of core values to more formality in how governance is done. And so what I mean by that is the 1908 constitution was in place for almost 50 years.

The first amendment took place in 1949 and so in 1949 that amendment took place for two pieces. The first one was to adopt the IRA because we now became an Indian Reorganization Act tribe. We adopted that. Even though it was not required, the government, the leadership at the time of the Pueblo felt that this was a way to enhance our ability to continue to work with the government. So we became an IRA tribe. They adopted that. They also adopted the membership process. So as a part of the 1940 census they wrote that in. So we began to see membership. But at that time membership was based on residency, it wasn’t based on blood quantum or anything like that. It was based on residency and it also demonstrated core values because if you were helping, you were taking care of your family, you were being part of the community, even if you were not from there, you applied for membership, you were considered for that membership and in many times given membership. So we have individuals that were from another tribe married in at Laguna applied for membership during that timeframe and on paper are four fourths Laguna. So those are things that happened during that time period.

Then we saw a short nine years later we saw the constitution amendment take place again in 1958 and we saw that core value practice begin to shrink and the driver in the 1959 constitution was revenue because now we went from having almost no revenue to having millions and the reason that happened was because of the discovery of uranium on our reservation. So in a short nine years the constitution had a major change. So we implemented blood quantum at that time period. So we went from a value of being a part of the community to defining who’s going be a member based on blood driven by dollars.

And so the other piece that also came in that was very critical during that time period was our tribal court system. So our tribal court system was adopted in the 1958 constitution. So we went from again that membership of being half Indian to half Laguna, tribal courts and per capita. So now we have those three things now being implemented into the constitution. And we began to see that the governor from the 1908 to the 1949 to the 1958 constitution, we’re beginning to see a shift of authority being given to, from the 1908 to the 1949 to the staff officers, away from the governor and in the 1959 constitution, ’58 constitution we begin to see more authority be given to the council, so from the governor to the staff now to the council.

And so now jumping to 1984 we saw another amendment. And so in 1984, the amendment that took place that was most significant there was again related to blood quantum and we reduced the blood quantum requirement from one half to one fourth and the driver for that is we were seeing more, we were seeing a declination in people being enrolled because nobody was meeting that blood quantum anymore. So that was a driver. The other piece of it was that it was an effort to make parents or grandparents, guardians, whoever more responsible for getting their children enrolled. So what also went into that constitutional amendment was that from the time a child is born, the parent, guardian, grandparent, whoever, they have two years to enroll their child. If they miss that two years, they’re out of luck. They can’t become a member, even if they’re four fourths. So that happened in 1984.

So in 2012, we did another constitutional amendment and the constitutional amendment was for two specific things: to remove secretarial approval and to remove the two-year restriction. So the secretarial approval one was pretty straightforward and so that we began to move down that path of being responsible for our own way of governing. The removal of the two-year restriction was an effort to try to get back to that core value because we constantly remind and we tell our people, ‘Love one another, respect one another, be good to one another, be inclusive,’ but if you’re not one fourth, you can’t be a part of us. That’s not consistent with that teaching so we, and if you miss that two-year timeframe, you’re out of luck. And so we removed that so that we can begin the process in that, and so the two-year restriction was removed. And the reason we shared with people is that it makes sense, there’s nothing wrong with people being made responsible to get their children enrolled, but what about those children that didn’t have a chance, that got adopted out. They never had a chance because they didn’t have a parent, they didn’t have a grandparent, they didn’t have anybody and it’s not fair to them.

So what about those people that traditionally, there in our part of the country when a male marries a female, he goes with her family land if she’s not from our Pueblo, obviously he leaves our Pueblo and back in the ‘40s, ‘50s, prior to that, they actually relinquished their rights and went with that other tribe. So if they did the right thing, life happens, maybe the spouse passes on, then this person, because of that two-year restriction is now out of luck, but this now gives them the opportunity to come back to the Pueblo. So those were the drivers behind those amendments and so we’re now beginning dialogue as a directive by the tribal council to now go to that next step of looking at blood quantum and so we’re preparing for that discussion this year with our community, which will probably, if they want to change that, lead to another constitutional amendment.

Ian Record:

“I was going to ask about these 2012 amendments. You and I have had this conversation in the past, but I think it would be helpful to go into a little more detail, because I remember you saying that one of the reasons why you guys tackled that first was to remove the consideration of the feds, of an external actor, if you will, from the deliberations about how do we want to constitute ourselves moving forward? What do we want our constitution to look like where we can basically base it solely on what’s in our best interest and not so much what will the feds approve or not approve of? Can you talk a little bit more about the mindset behind saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to deal with that first. We’re going to get that out of the way and then we can sort of focus on these huge constitutional challenges we face like blood quantum?

Richard Luarkie:

“Right. For our Pueblo we’ve done a lot of, taken a lot of time to look back at history and the implications of policy, federal, all the way back to the Spanish period and the church, the Catholic Church, the Protestants, all those implications, what’s happened. We’ve had also the great fortune to hear individuals like Mr. Jim Anaya and individuals talk about those areas of Indigenous rights and the areas of non-recognition to recognition to now the responsibility of that recognition.

So for Laguna, it was really embracing the ideology of the responsibility for that recognition and in order for us to be responsible, we have to make our decisions in the manner that best fits us, not only on paper and in constitutions, but here and here. It has to make sense to us. And when you have an external body saying, ‘Well, that doesn’t conform with this code or this whatever,’ that’s inconsistent. And so it was a significant driver for us to be able to remove that so that we can then move forward and make these much larger decisions because even things as simple as ‘Indian.’ When you look at the 25 CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] they have ‘Indian’ defined this way. When you look at ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act], it’s defined this way. When you look at housing, it’s defined this way. So we’re defined for convenience. We needed to take that out of the way and we need to define who we are. And so those were our drivers.

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting, Laguna’s not the only one that’s taken that approach. There’s a growing number of other nations that have basically come to that same realization that, ‘if we are serious about taking full ownership in our governance again and understanding the often insidious forces that were at play, external forces that led us to have the system we have now that is not perhaps true to who we are, we’ve got to get that other actor out of the equation, that Secretary of Interior out of the equation.’ But you still had to go through a secretarial election, right, to get that out and I’m curious. We’re spending part of the conference this afternoon talking about that very topic of secretarial elections and removing the Secretary of Interior approval clause and you guys just recently went through the secretarial election and that’s often a very scary proposition for tribes is to think, ‘Oh, not only do we have to reform our constitution internally, but then we’ve got to go through this bureaucratic sort of often drawn-out process at the federal end and I was wondering if you can perhaps paint a brief picture of what it was like for Laguna, what some of the challenges were in that secretarial election process, perhaps any advice you could give other nations for navigating that process effectively so they can actually get through that election process and then perhaps return to the more important matter at hand.

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, for Laguna, one of the things that was beneficial for us is the relationship we had with the Bureau in our area and them understanding the whys -- why we want to do this -- and the whole purpose behind it and educating them on that. Once we had that piece, and it wasn’t a challenge for us. We’re fortunate we’ve had a good relationship so that wasn’t a big challenge. What was interesting to me and where the challenge fell was with our elders and the older population because their pushback was, ‘Well, if we remove secretarial approval, then we’re relieving the federal government of their trust responsibility,’ and we’re saying, ‘No. No, that’s not right.’ And so what it caused us to do was go through this whole process of educating and reeducating our community and reeducating and so it took us, we started this, gosh, [in] 2005. So it didn’t happen just overnight, but it took some iteration and most important, the most important ingredient was the education. So we still have, to this day we still have some elders saying, ‘That was not right because you relieved the federal government of their trust responsibility.’ You have the other end of the spectrum, our younger people jumping for joy saying, ‘It’s about time. Why are we letting the government do this to us?’ So it’s a growing pain and I think we need to even after the process has taken place, we need to continually educate of what does this policy mean and what are the implications and what does it mean to be a sovereign tribe, a sovereign nation.

Ian Record:

“So I’m glad you touched on citizen education because I wanted to ask you some more questions about that. You mentioned that just around this issue of these two amendments that you passed in 2012, that there was a several-year education process that went into place and I would imagine that that as you said continues on with some of the conversations you want to continue to have around the constitution, whether it’s blood quantum or something else. What approaches have you taken to that task of citizen education, of citizen engagement? What’s worked, what hasn’t? I would assume you’ve learned quite a bit from the citizen interaction you’ve had around this topic over the last several years and that you plan to apply to continuing the conversation with them now.

Richard Luarkie:

“One of the things that has been helpful is consistency and what I mean by that is we’ve, in particular to our constitutional review and amendments, we’ve established a Constitution Review Committee. Since our last amendment we’ve disbanded it, but over those years, once the council decided and the community decided that we need to do a constitutional change, that committee’s been consistent so from administration to administration, whether I’ve been the governor or not, we’ve not changed that committee. So the consistency has been there.

The other pieces that we started the conversation with the community, asking them, ‘What do you think needs to change? Here are the things we’re suggesting and here’s why.’ And so having their input was critical. The other piece is educating the council because if the council doesn’t understand and they’re being asked and it contradicts what you’re telling people, it creates a whole fireworks of assumptions and, ‘Well, he said, she said,’ kind of things and so making sure the council understands what’s happening.

And so I think those are really important things and making sure that there was clarity. And obviously with a larger community it’s more difficult to manage that communication, but I think those pockets are real important. And in our community, we have six villages so in our council meetings...every Thursday we have village meetings so that’s communicated to the villages so the villages have the opportunity to ask questions and pose comments or what not to get back to the council for consideration. And so those are the communication streams that we used. And so the point I’m trying to make is that communication was probably the key element in this constitutional amendment.

Ian Record:

“So you mentioned earlier that revisiting the blood quantum as a prime criteria for determining who can be a part of us and who can’t is something that you’re revisiting. Are there other areas of the constitution or other things that people are talking about integrating into the constitution? I guess I’m trying to get a better handle on what sort of constitutional issues will Laguna be tackling in the near future?

Richard Luarkie:

“That’s probably going to be the biggest one right now. The other piece of it, our offices,  we have a tribal secretary and we have a tribal interpreter and we have a tribal treasurer that are elected officials, but in the constitution it says that they have no governing authority. They’re basically elected administrators. So the question in the community has been, ‘Do we need to elect those positions or just hire full-time with people that have the background to fulfill those particular roles?’ What it’s going to cause is really the requirement to go do a whole job description and those kinds of things because right now in the constitution their job description is as an example tribal secretary, keep the meeting minutes, that kind of stuff and that’s it. So those kind of minor things I think we’ll see addressed in the future, but I think right now the focus really is going to be on this larger element of blood quantum and how do we maintain our tribe, how do we maintain identity as well as protecting our sovereignty going forward. And it’s a, I think it’s going to be a much larger conversation than just blood quantum because when I think about sovereignty, in my mind sovereignty isn’t a definition, of course they’re out there in a dictionary or whatever, but to me sovereignty starts here. Sovereignty is a community thing and I think that is going to be part of what’s going to be woven into this whole conversation of moving forward on blood quantum because it’s going to touch a lot of other areas.

Ian Record:

"Governor, we really appreciate you taking some time to sit down and share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us."

Richard Luarkie:

"Yes. sir. You're welcome."

Shannon Douma: Cultivating Good Leadership: The Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Shannon Douma (Pueblo of Laguna) provides a detailed overview of how the Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy works to develop Pueblo youth to ably take the leadership reins of their nations through a rigorous curriculum designed to build up their sense of cultural identity and personal self-confidence and self-esteem.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Douma, Shannon. "Cultivating Good Leadership: The Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Presentation.

"Good morning everyone. My name is Shannon Douma. I'm from the Pueblo of Laguna -- I'm also Hopi/Tiwa -- and for the past couple years I've been serving as the Director of the Summer Policy Academy, which is a program out of the Santa Fe Indian School. I also serve as the... I share a couple hats at the Native American Community Academy. It's an urban charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it's our eighth year as a school and we serve primarily urban Native students in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I serve as the Enrollment Director, Out of School Time Learning Director.

Today I wanted to share with you though a program that has been in existence for...since 1997 called the Summer Policy Academy. So there are some key questions that I wanted to touch upon in my slide in reference to some of the things that are...you'll want to consider in your constitutions, consider when working with young people. This is a program, it's for Pueblo students and I wanted to draw your attention to how we start our program. We select about 25 Pueblo students from across New Mexico and one of the big...one of our key components of our program is really focused on identity development, understanding self as an individual. We have students that come in from many different parts of our communities, some students that live in urban settings, some students that are born and raised on the reservation. It's important that we identify the students that our Pueblo communities represent, but I wanted to draw your attention to this.

When we work with our students, we start off with an understanding of self, their core values, how they relate to the world. So in terms of who am I as an individual, my inherent qualities, the skills that I have and all of us possess these qualities whether it's our personality, the skills that we posses, our ability to live those core values, the ability to get along with people. In terms of if you think about this as you as a whole person, all of us are individuals that come from families, whether we're a sister, a brother, uncle, auntie, there are very important roles that we have in our communities and how we interact with each other, but also our young people. And so in terms of as individuals, how we live out these responsibilities as brothers and sisters or aunties and uncles is a really important thing that we share with our students because we want to know their role in preserving families within their own communities.

Then, if you think about our self in relation to our communities, how we...what are our roles and responsibilities in our communities? Think about...my community, we have very specific roles and responsibilities that we have as community members and how we live together in our village. In terms of myself, I've been raised as the oldest daughter; I have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to things that happen in our communities around our feast days, around our ceremonies. Being the oldest daughter, I was taught at a very young age to learn how to cook, to clean, to take care of my family. So those are things that have been instilled in me that I now possess and now am passing onto my children.

So in terms of our self in relation to the global world, we want our students to understand that when they leave our communities, they go outside of our communities, they're interacting with people who know little about them, little about who we are as Native people and sometimes there are stereotypes, sometimes there's misperceptions about who we are and it's important that our students know how they relate to the world outside their communities, how does the world see them and how do they maneuver in and out of that world as they go to college, as they seek work in the workforce outside of our communities and then as they come back home.

So all of us possess an understanding of ourselves in many different ways based on our experiences, our backgrounds, our relationships with our families, how we grow as individuals into adulthood. And so this is where...when we talk with our students, this is where we start; it's from an understanding of their core and who they are and how they relate to every aspect of their lives. When we start our work with our students, we start from our core values. Our core value...it's not...all of us have these core values that we possess, that we learned from our families, from our communities –- love -- being able to show the love and compassion to each other and it's something that we want to model to our students when they come and they work with us throughout the time that they're with us how we want to relate to one another. If you think about respect, sometimes respect in a sense is we have an understanding of it, but how do we practice it? Do our students understand what respect is and how they live that through their daily lives? Of course there's a lot of core values that I think resonate with all of us and we possess all those core values and this is a foundation, this is how we advocate for a better future, a desirable future for our students.

And then if you think about...the other side is our...the gifts of our Creator: the ability to learn, our education, the ability to think forwardly, the ability to be innovative and creative and then...so all of these things on the other side are basically things that are inherently given to us by the Creator, whether it's the land, our culture and resources, our families and how we take care of them. And then also governance: how we live our lives and how we govern ourselves, what are those specific responsibilities that we have within our own villages is really important as to how we raise our children, how we develop their most desirable future for our communities.

So when we work with our students, this is the foundation that we start from. We start from our core values. It's a really important place and I think all of us can see that this is what drives how we want to create a better community for our communities. And so this is what we start off with our students. When I move forward, I'm talking about our Summer Policy Academy. So the Summer Policy Academy is a project out of the Leadership Institute of the Santa Fe Indian School and we have 12 programs under that program. And I want to acknowledge my colleagues that have been working on this, the leadership Institute for the past probably 15 years plus.

The program started in 1997 and it was a forum to bring Pueblo people together to talk about important issues like education, like family, like law, health, these important issues that are impacting our communities. This is a picture of our students that have participated in our program. Our Summer Policy Academy is for incoming juniors and seniors representing the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico. Our mission is to grow leaders, youth as critical thinkers, conscious critical thinkers. Just sitting here this past couple of days, a lot of these issues that we talk about, whether it's law, governance, education, health, they're very challenging issues, issues that impact our communities. And so throughout this process that our students are going through, through a two-week process we're engaging them in critical thinking, asking those critical questions of each other, but also our leaders, our faculty that serve in our program. We want students to understand public policy.

And this program began and also our Leadership Institute began because we saw the need to have more people represented in our state government, to be people who are making laws, people who are advocating on behalf of our communities. At that time, there was less people that were representing our communities, our Pueblo communities, so we wanted to advocate and start early to get students to start thinking about these tough issues that sometimes we don't know about until we're in tribal leadership positions and we're in places of leadership in our communities where we start learning about governance, start learning about family issues, about all of the public policies that have been developed over time that have impacted our communities and specifically our Pueblo communities.

Also our program focuses a lot on community and service. We want students to give back, we want students to contribute back to our community, we want students to come back home to our Pueblo communities and serve in key roles in our communities, whether it's program planners, program developers, village roles, tribal leadership. And then of course leadership is an important skill for anyone to have, the ability to problem solve, the ability to speak in public, the ability to problem solve and make decisions so those are all key areas that we focus on with our program.

Our curriculum is designed so that students consider Indigenous issues from a world perspective. I'm going to start from the local tribal perspective. There's issues in our community that our students are studying, in our villages, things that come to the table when it comes to, for instance, health. What's the status of health in our communities? What's the status of health among our Pueblo communities in regards to Native youth? And then looking at our state and tribal governmental relations, we take our students to the New Mexico "Roundhouse," the legislature. They participate in a mock legislative session with our co-director, Mr. Regis Pecos.

And we also study national issues. What is our relationship with the federal government? And so that's important for our students to understand the relationship and how when we advocate and we go to Washington, D.C. We're going to learn about our programs that we have an understanding of what those national issues are and how they impact our communities.

And then globally, what are those Indigenous issues that are happening in places like New Zealand, in Africa, in Australia. We have a key area that we focus on with our students when it comes to understanding that there's communities across the world that are experiencing the same issues that we are as Native people here in the United States.

So our program is a four-week program. It's two weeks on campus at the Santa Fe Indian School. Our students stay in the dormitory there. And our topics focus around those 10 areas that I mentioned in the couple of slides, the gifts of the Creator. And those topics came about through the community institutes that have been happening since 1997, Pueblo people saying health is an important issue, education is an important issue. So those topics are areas that we focus on with our program.

Another part of our program focuses on health and wellness. We want students to know that being healthy and well is important. So part of that is...one part of it is starting every morning with positive affirmations, taking care of their body physically, understanding emotional health, social and emotional health and wellness.

And one part that we do is a talking circle that happens in the evening time where students are pretty much talking about issues that are important to them. What's, maybe, their own personal issues that they want to bring to the table?

Another part is project planning. We want our students to know the essential ingredients to put together a plan and a project when they go home so that they have something to go off when they're implementing their projects.

Team building is important. We have our students for two weeks so we want them to know one another; we want them to reinforce the core values of family, of brothers and sisters. And so that's a key component of our program is being able to be together when it comes to living together and growing together throughout the two weeks that they're with us.

A creative writing component: our students are developing creative writing, free verse poetry, and so we have individuals that come in and share with our students how to do that. And then art is a piece that we just added to our program. We spend a couple days with Pueblo artists. This past year we spent...the past two years, we've spent the week with Robert Tenorio who's a Pueblo potter from Kewa Pueblo. And so he's really instrumental in reinforcing and encouraging students to be involved in...to grow their interest in art and to also display their art and be advocates for people in the community that are wanting to be artists.

Following our program, we have a two-week timeframe where students go back home to their communities, they initiate a service project, and then after the two weeks they come back and they present it at a graduation banquet that they share their project with their peers, their family, the community, tribal leaders.

How do we choose our leaders? Basically, it's a reflection of our community in our communities and our Pueblo communities, any of us can be called upon to serve in key roles in our communities, and so we want our students to reflect our communities. So we don't choose students who are doing well academically only. We want our students who have that leadership potential and so how we recruit students is by recommendation.

I, for the last, since I started the program have served as a recruiter, and so I seek recommendations from our faculty, from community leaders, people that know the students in the schools that can recommend those students, and then understanding that we have different leadership styles and that we...

All of us possess different styles and so we have our students go through an exercise to understand what their leadership styles are. We've graduated seven to eight classes over the...since 2007. We have 150 youth leadership fellows. We have students that are now entering adulthood and moving toward college and career development. I'm going to go through these slides because my time is almost up.

One of the things I wanted to emphasize is the support from our community institutes. Our adult and Pueblo leaders serve as leaders and mentors to our students and Governor [Richard] Luarkie and my brother, Casey Douma, they serve as our faculty. So Governor Luarkie has shared with our students a presentation on governance and what that means and how it's displayed in our community, how it works in our communities, our Pueblo communities and then also with Casey talking about law and what that means. So it's really, really important that we look to our own people because we're the ones that have the expertise, we're the ones that possess those skills and talent and education. So we rely a lot on our community members to contribute back to the community and to our young people.

We're also encouraging adult and youth partnerships, adult and youth relationships, whether it's a parent and child, teacher and student, advisor and a student. We want to encourage that students can seek out an adult for support. And so throughout our entire time that our students are with us, they have the ability to make contact with an individual that they can rely on and trust. I'm going to finish up with a couple of slides.

We're beginning to have the conversation about role of women in leadership and in April 2012 we had a Pueblo Convocation that brought together about 400 people from all the 19 Pueblo communities to focus on the 10 topic areas that I had mentioned. And from this we started understanding the opportunity to bring in women because for the most part women are not involved with the political aspects of our communities. And so we started having the conversation from the public convocation, which led into a Pueblo Women's Convocation, Pueblo Institute for Women, which came from the Brave Girls Project at the Santa Fe Indian School. And so it's a program that we are focusing on in terms of how do we engage women in dialogue and discourse about key issues with our governance in our communities. So this is a three-year process.

We have our SPA One program we spend at the Santa Fe Indian School. We have SPA Two program where we travel to and study at Princeton University. Our students are matched up with a team leader where they research key issues that are pending legislation in Congress. And so our students are studying these issues at Princeton and then eventually travel to Washington, D.C. where they present these issues. We also have an SPA Three program that's an internship program where the students are actually serving in key roles, whether it's in legislator's office, program offices, libraries. We have students at my school that are serving as interns.

I think it's important to understand that when our students commit to our program, we invest the time in them. We invest the time from the time that we meet them with their families to the time they go through our program. And so time is really important when it comes to young people because their times is valuable and they need that investment.

The communication is building our network. How do we build our network of young people? And we've seen through the experiences of SPA that our network has been growing because our students having a deep interest in these issues, but also having the opportunity to network across the Pueblos with each other. We have a conscious investment in our curriculum. We tweak it; we tailor it to see what's worked.

We've tried many programs, many different I guess opportunities when it comes to partnerships. And so we kind of welcome new opportunities, but we also notice when we need to tailor our program to meet the needs of our new audience of students. I guess an opportunity to be open to partnerships.

We have a lot of partnerships through like UNM [University of New Mexico] law school, UNM medical school where we take our students and expose them to law, to health, just for an example. So we want them to pursue career interests in these areas and come back home and support our people.

We have a key component around youth involvement and contribution. So we have students that are developing service projects over the two week time that they're in their communities. But also we have students that serve as representatives at the United Nations Permanent Forum. So we have students that are participating in the youth caucus there, but also internships, that they...of their interests.

And then lastly -- this is the last slide I want to share with you -- is what we have learned and it's something I wanted to pass on to you because we talk a lot about involving young people, we talk a lot about investing in young people early. There were comments about, 'We need to do this in schools,' and so what we've learned is that we need to value youth voice. And we say that young people are important, that young people are our future, that young people are going to be in positions that we are in, that we have to value their voice, we have to engage them in conversation. And then finding money, channeling money to youth initiatives that are going to benefit young people so that we're putting our money where our mouth is really. We're talking about our future; we have to invest in our young people.

Encouraging collaboration among our community tribal programs to support youth. There's a lot of programs in our communities. How do they collaborate to leverage resources to bring ideas together to support youth? And then also identifying real youth advocates in our communities who are invested in youth and support them. There's a lot of things happen in our tribal communities that we may not know about because there's a lot of grassroots organizing that happens with young people. They see an issue, they want to be involved. How do we get them involved and how do we support them?

So the last thing is we always leave our students with this question. What will be your contribution? What is it that you're going to give back to your community? And so throughout the whole entire process when our students are going through this, we notice that young people are eager to be involved. They want to be involved and so our job is to connect them with the resources. And so I just wanted to leave this question with you all so that you can think about what will be your contribution to your communities, whether it's your individual contribution, your family contribution or your community contribution to what happens in your community. I think that's all the time I have, but if you have any questions I'm here." 

Shannon Douma and Richard Luarkie: How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Shannon Douma and Richard Luarkie (Pueblo of Laguna) field questions from seminar participants about how the Pueblo and also the Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy groom Pueblo youth to take over the reins of leadership of their nations.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Douma, Shannon. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Q&A session.

Luarkie, Richard. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Q&A session.

Casey Douma:

"If you think about it in the context of that analogy of farming, you have to clear the land and plow the field and get it ready for irrigation. Get intentional rather than just take some seeds and throwing out there and hoping something grows, and from that crop becomes the people you select for leadership. We're very intentional in providing the environment for our children so that when they grow with the proper care and attention, that as they grow and the care is given to them, that when it comes time to select the leaders, that we have individuals like Governor [Richard] Luarkie who have been instilled with those types of values, and that when it comes time for harvest, the individuals possess the values and attributes of leadership that we hope for. And we know that that doesn't just happen on its own, it's very intentional in the communities.

So emphasizing the work with youth is so critical because we have to keep thinking of the next generation of leaders: who will be our caretakers, who will sustain us into the future? So in the efforts to think about leadership and leadership development, when it comes time to elections, when it comes time to get leadership in place, you think about who are our choices of people, what types of attributes do they have? And if they lack in those attributes, how do we instill that so that in the future we're not going to just let up, take the best of the worst and just take the whoevers? So as a part of growing leadership to...because so much of the stuff that we talked about for the past two days it comes back to how do we make this happen, how do we get things moving or how do we have a constructive conversation regarding constitutions, about governance, about laws and about our judicial systems? It takes a mindset of critical thinkers, of people who are eager to contribute to their communities. And that doesn't happen naturally. We have to be intentional in our approach.

So I'd like to just add that...commend both Shannon [Douma] and Governor Luarkie of our people for providing that respect. That as youth develop, it is so important because we were blessed by the...we were blessed with...we have leadership like Governor Luarkie, others who are products of the community, that are able to effectively govern and lead."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"Are there other comments or questions? Thank you very much, Casey."

Terry Janis:

"As far as your leadership strategies that you're engaging in in the youth program, speak a little bit more about how you're thinking about the critical nature of service and core values in particular. I ask you for a couple reasons. One is I'm constantly impressed by the Pueblos in the role of service in so many parts of governance and community and everything else. And I was wondering if you could speak more about that kind of balance between service and core values in your curriculum, your pedagogy, and how you think about them."

Shannon Douma:

"I just wanted to touch upon that. I think with the Summer Policy Academy we recognize that we have to establish a strong foundation for our people, for our young people, to instill and reinforce the core values of our people. Our students come in with an understanding...our students come in from a variety of places. They come in with a lot of knowledge about their communities. They've been involved in their communities, they've been raised to know what those values are. And then we have students that have lived outside of the communities that are Pueblo communities... they're Pueblo students, they've lived in places like Colorado Springs or in Albuquerque that maybe don't have as much exposure to their communities, and so we understand that our students come in with a variety of experiences.

So going back to talking about being intentional, we have to be intentional about how we work with our students because they're not learning it in the schools. We know that. They're not learning our history, our knowledge, and our experiences in the school settings. So how do we instill these values with our students to understand service, to understand reciprocity? We want our students to come back home and help our communities and that's something that I think...with all of us...I think for myself, being able to go away and experience college outside of my community and to know that there was always an opportunity to come home and serve my community and in what capacity, but to understand that we serve our communities in many different capacities. Some of us are in direct positions, some of us are working from afar, but to understand that it looks different for all of us and to recognize that.

And I think one of the things that I wanted to mention is that the core values advocate to achieve a higher standard for ourselves and families and our leaders. I think once the expectations are established we begin to reinforce those in our communities, with our families, with our leaders and we start holding each other accountable and so that's what we notice in our students is they start an understanding of how we're supposed to function, how we're supposed to live in terms of through this experience of understanding the history, the culture of our people. There's a real intention that students have in like, 'What can I do to give back? I've learned how my people have gone through this policy with boarding schools.' We've also learned about self-determination. 'How can I now give back to my community?' and it happens in many different ways. It happens through individual service, in groups, it happens within the schools that they go to school at. We have students that, in our school, we have some students from Laguna Pueblo that came to our program this past year and there was three students, they said, 'I didn't learn about this. I'm not learning about this in my school at all. How can I bring back the language and culture to our communities?' And so through that is a process of how we provide them with the tools, but also how we support them along the way.

So I think one of the things that we learn is that our students have the need to give back and they support one another and they help one another and I think they're eager to stay involved. And how we keep them involved is devoting our time to them, real intention of how we support them throughout the process. We don't just say, 'Come to our conference, hang out for a little bit and then go home.' We want them to understand that we're all a network now, we're a community now. So how do we support one another to serve our community because we're all representing those communities of the Pueblo people. Was that helpful?"

Miriam Jorgensen:

"We have one more question and then it's going to be our last question because I want to make sure we have a chance for a brief break and then we also have time for a very exciting pre-lunch panel as well. So sir, you've got the mic for the last question."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"I've got a question for both panelists. The Institute, does it incorporate anything like an internship where the youth is paired up with a council member and actually gets hands on experience? And then the question for the Governor, for incoming tribal council members is there any type of...in y'all's setting in your Pueblo...any type of like orientation or how they...any type of orientation to make them aware of what their role is and how they should go about practicing their position as a leader?"

Shannon Douma:

"I think in terms of like an internship with the governor's office or in...I think that's possible. We haven't had a student that was interested in that particular internship. So that's an idea that I think it's something that we can explore. Our internships span across many different areas and we rely a lot on our faculty. Like for instance, the UNM [University of New Mexico] Law School, we have Professor Christine Zuni Cruz who has interns work with her, understanding how it all works with the law school programs, services provided. And so basically students have a certain interest area that they'll pursue and they'll ask us if they can have an internship there, but we haven't had anybody right now that has had an interest in being in the governor's office. I'm sure that would be a great experience for our students, but...so I think that's an idea that we'll explore when it comes to our internships for the coming years. But thank you."

Richard Luarkie:

"Thank you for the question, sir. As far as incoming council members, those officials, we don't...we have a process as I explained earlier where you're kind of groomed from the town crier to the mayordomo to the council. So that's kind of the longer version of our orientation preparing them for those offices. When an individual is then eventually put into office on January 1st when we have our installation ceremony, it's the opportunity for the people to encourage and remind the officials of what their role is. So it's the people that provide that first level of orientation. 'Here's what your responsibility is. Here's your reminders. Here's what the priorities are that we set forward, continue with this.'

When we get into the council environment, when we convene as a council at the beginning of the year, we normally have...we go through what we call our council policy, just our conduct, how we conduct ourselves, our responsibilities. As an example, council members...in council members with the exception of the staff officials, the cane-bearing officers, the only time our council members have authority is when a council meeting is convened. When the council meeting ends, they're regular Joe Blow. They can't go out in the community and say, 'Council said this or I have the authority.' They don't have that authority unless we delegate them. So those kind of things are done to orientate.

Now as far as an internship in the governor's office or the treasurer or the secretary's office, I don't see that those are impossible because we have the Government Affairs Office that's a part of the governor's office. But again, back to our teachings, we're taught, 'Don't chase these positions,' [Pueblo language]. They remind, 'Don't put your hand where you're not ready yet.' So they're very reminding that you don't chase them. When the people think they're ready, then they'll start putting you into these positions and that's kind of your flag that they're probably -- as Casey mentioned -- they're intentional about beginning you down that process. So that's probably a reason from the traditional side we've not necessarily had internships in those offices, but that doesn't mean that the other functions we can't create it now. Even I think in this modern day and age, I don't think that that's something that's unattainable. As a matter of fact, I think it'll be a really cool project that we can develop something like that to help our students, help our students with."

Richard Luarkie: How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: The Pueblo of Laguna

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Pueblo of Laguna Governor Richard Luarkie provides a brief overview of how Laguna citizens gradually and systematically ascend up the leadership ranks within the Pueblo through their adherence to and practice of Pueblo core values.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Luarkie, Richard. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: The Pueblo of Laguna." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Presentation.

"Good morning everyone. Good to see all of you here. Thank you to the University of Arizona for inviting me down to have some time with you today and Shannon [Douma] did a great presentation this morning on focusing on the development of youth. I'm going to talk a little bit more on the...what she's building for on the tribal leadership side and those elements.

And many of you are currently serving in different roles or have served in roles or you support even those that served in roles, but I guess the perspective I want to take with you is pretty basic. We're taught in all our different communities about who we are and where we come from and all those critical pieces of education. In Laguna, we're taught about our creation story and how we came to be as Native people.

And [Pueblo language], our mother, the Creator, created everything. As Shannon mentioned, we all have roles. So she created first the moon, the sun, the stars, the earth, [Pueblo language], the sage singers. And she gave them [what their] roles and responsibilities would be and what their responsibility was to be; talked to them day in and day out. The sun as we all know comes up every morning from the east, goes across the [Pueblo language], protects us, gives us light, gives us guidance, [Pueblo language]. The moon, the sun, they come out or the moon, the stars then it's their turn. They take turns watching over us. So we're never in the dark because there's always some light on us. That's their role.

Then the spiritual beings were created and their role, as we all know, we start most every day, in your own particular teachings, but we're taught you carry your pouch, you carry your corn meal. We start every day with prayer, ask for that guidance, extend your appreciation for the day, for the life that you've been given. [Pueblo language], it's only borrowed. It's [Pueblo language], the breath we breathe, the heart we have; it's only borrowed. We thank for that every day that we have an opportunity again for a new day. We thank the spirits for that. We ask for her strength for guidance to live a good life.

Then the last creation was us, [Pueblo language], the people. But we were bestowed responsibility as well. [Pueblo language] she bestowed us [Pueblo language], love one another. [Pueblo language], respect one another, [Pueblo language], be careful with one another's heart, don't hurt each other, take care of yourself. [Pueblo language], as we grow, have the ability to learn. [Pueblo language], to be obedient. [Pueblo language], to be disciplined in your thought process. Those are the responsibilities we were given.

So I start in that manner because when you look at leadership, when you look at governance, it's not about your degree, it's not about how good you can write policy or how good you interpret the law. It's how do you take care of the people right? When I talk to young kids, I tell them your most important education is what she talked about; what does grandma teach you, what grandma teaches you, what mom and dad teach you, what the community teaches you. That's your most important education. And I'm not saying a degree is not important because it is, but it's a tool. You can have masters and have a law degree, a PhD, a medical degree, but if you're a jerk it doesn't matter. You need to be a good person. You need to be a good person.

And so those are really important things I think that we need to keep in mind when we think about the earth because when you come into leadership, in Laguna as an example, we're taught, and Shannon and Casey [Douma] can verify results with me. When we're preparing for leadership, we start our leadership in the community. You're responsible for, 'Go help your grandpa, go help your grandma, go cut weeds, go help with everything.' That's where it starts. Not to punish you, not to penalize you, but to teach you responsibility, and paying the price up front first before you go play. Nothing wrong with that.

When we looked at our offices that we had in the Pueblo, we have positions that...what we call the town crier, that's kind of your entry-level position. It's the guy that goes around and he lets the community know that there's going to be a village meeting, there's going to be ditch work, there's going to be grave digging or whatever, keeps the buildings clean and that kind of stuff. Then we have the next officer, which is our mayordomos or ditch bosses, those that are responsible for the land, the irrigation, the land issues, those kind of things. Then you have the council member. The council member obviously serves in our tribal council. Then you have a staff officer. We have six villages and so each village has a staff officer and that staff officer is kind of like the mayor of the village so he's the head of that village. And then we have the governor, secretary, treasurer, interpreter, those positions, the at-large positions.

So in our way, you should normally start as the town crier because you get to know who's in the community, you get to know your community. Then once you finish that maybe you can go to the middle, then you start being a little bit more involved with the direct family issues and your community issues, land issues. Then you can go to a council member once you've completed here, then you can be a council member because now let's assume you've learned your community just a little bit more, you've understood the foundation. Then you can go to the staff position, kind of the head of the village. And then if the people think of you otherwise, then maybe they might consider you for the governor position or the other positions. And that's an important process because it teaches you...it teaches you patience, it teaches you how to learn about your community, but also about yourself.

The other piece of our process is that we don't have a process or a system that allows for declaration of candidacy nor can you campaign. As a matter of fact, if you do those you're disqualified. It's up to the people to decide who is ready for these positions. Then they put your name in for consideration, the people will do the nominating as to who's going to go on the ballot. But even at that point, that teaching, again that starts to what Shannon was talking about, that starts in the home. That teaching also teaches you about [Pueblo language], permission.

When I got nominated for the governor position, I could have just said, 'Alright, I got nominated.' That's not what you're supposed to do. I have to go home now and tell my wife and get her permission and say, 'They nominated us,' not just me. Do I have your permission to accept because it's not just me?' And if she said no, then that's as far as we get. We go to the village and say, 'Thank you for your consideration.' But in this case she allowed it. So you need permission. That's what we're taught in our community, the males, what we get from the female, so we can't just do as we please or we shouldn't anyway. Unfortunately there's a lot of inconsistency with that, but that's our teaching. The clans and all those things we get from our mother. But what that teaches you as well is that humility and serving and being there to carry out the responsibility of the office and the policies and the rules and everything.

So as I stand here as governor with you, it's interesting because at the beginning of the term when the people that's holding office, they give you the canes. We've got canes that represent the symbol of our authority. We have a cane that goes back to the 1600s when the Spanish recognized the Pueblo's right to self-govern. We have a Mexican cane from the 1800s. We have from Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln gave us pueblos in the 1800s, 1863, 1864. So the governor carries the Abraham Lincoln cane. The First Lieutenant carries the Spanish and the Second Lieutenant carries the Mexican. So we still have those and every term or administration, we hand those over to the next official. And when they hand those over, they give us the offices then of course we have to speak to the people and let them know our elections and so on and so forth.

There was one year when we went through that process and one of our officials, they gave us the canes and he got up to make his comments and he said, 'You know, I'm willing to serve and willing to take care of our responsibilities, now you've given me the power to make decisions, I have the power to do this, I have the power to do that.' And he finished his comments. So it got to my turn. I got up to speak, made my comments, but I also touched on what he said about power and I believe this to this day. As the governor, I have no power. All I have is responsibility and authority, that's it. And it's defined for me in the constitution, the policies and the bylaws that we have ordinances. I have no power. The minute I believe I have power, I've lost touch because it then becomes about me and there are people that are very adamant about [Pueblo language], it's not about you. [Pueblo language], literally means 'don't puff your chest, don't show off, don't brag. It's not about you. The people are behind you.' The power resides [Pueblo language] our people [Pueblo language] with our Creator. That's the only place that has power. I have none.

So in that regard, going back to the creation story, the start of it, the little tidbit, Twitter of our creation story. If you don't have that piece, it's very easy to get caught up in all this other stuff. It's very important you start your day in prayer, however it is you pray. Keep your faith. Don't be jumping from this way to this way to that way. Keep your faith, whatever it is. And I think as we go forward in the development of leadership those are things that where at the point of time you need to be aligned with one another.

As parents now, a lot of times...I remember growing up in the Pueblo there and when my...grandpa and grandma raised me. If grandmother had something on the table, if I didn't like it, guess what, I didn't eat. But now sometimes I see parents going and trying to figure out, 'What do I feed my kid who doesn't like what I serve?' We need to get away from that, we need to be able to get our kids to be responsible, to be faithful. You want them all to grow up and be appreciative of what's provided. Whatever little bit, maybe not lobster, but if it's fried potatoes a couple nights in a row, to me that's a feast. Those are feelings that you need to be reminded because when you come into leadership role, those are the things that will help guide and help you make sound decisions, the simplicity.

And as I close here, whether you're a leader for this tribe or that tribe or whatever tribe, whether you're working in a particular program or whatever, know that the people have value; everybody has value. We're in a situation in our communities that I'm seeing now as we go across the country and go to different meetings and what not where we see, well, maybe a person committed murder, maybe a person did this, did that, and we're saying, 'Get rid of that person.' It's a difficult conversation that we're having to have now because in Native communities, we don't have the right to pull a weed and just throw it. As a leader, I don't have the choice to pick and choose whoever. I have to accept and love all of you regardless of what you've done. Granted, there's laws, there's passion, there's safety, responsibility -- all these things we need to balance. But going back to the creation story, our Creator didn't say, 'Leaders, you only need them and them. You only love them and them.' That's not our teaching, but we're embracing that. Then we're willing to fight with our own. Everybody has value.

So I want to encourage you that we find that way...we find a way to recognize that value in one another. The elders, I know a lot of times...like I said, my grandparents raised me. My grandmother was born in 1903. When I came around she was already in her 60s, when I was born. She died in the '90s, she was 88. But, you know, grandparents are so very, very special and those of you that are grandparents know that you're loved, know that you're loved. You are teachers, you are caretakers, you are guides, you are protection and you are angels. You never know if you're going to...these are all elements I intentionally bounced because in our Native communities we don't have a written document that states, 'Here's how you need to live.' All these things contribute. Back to my point: everyone has value. Grandparents, I love you because my grandparents raised me. I have a special tie to them as grandparents.

So with that, I hope that I've been able to contribute here. Just on the comical side, a couple years ago, my daughter, she was about eight years old and she said, 'Dad, help me with this science problem.' 'Sure.' And it was on sugars and all those kinds of things and when I started college I so I was like a biology major and chemistry minor so I learned about carbons and sugars and all that kind of stuff. So I took off and was [sharing] my knowledge and my wisdom. So I went into talking about the structure of sugars and all that kind of stuff and she was sitting there really listening intensely. So after I finished she goes, 'Wow, Dad.' And I thought she was going to say, 'Wow, you're the smartest guy in the world.' And she goes, 'Wow, Dad, you have a lot of useless information.' Thank you very much."

Luann Leonard, Stephen Roe Lewis and Walter Phelps: Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders

Producer
Native American Student Affairs
Year

Luann Leonard (Hopi), Stephen Roe Lewis (Gila River Indian Community), and Walter Phelps (Navajo) discuss how their personal approaches to leadership have been and continue to be informed by their Native nations' distinct cultures and core values and those keepers of the culture in their communities. 

Resource Type
Citation

Leonard, Luann. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Lewis, Stephen Roe. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Phelps, Walter. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Aresta La Russo:

"So to begin the program the Native American Student Affairs of the University of Arizona, they're presenting "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Our panelists are Native leaders. What I will do is they will introduce themselves and then we will begin.

I want to introduce myself. My name is Aresta La Russo. I'm a member of the Navajo Nation and my clans are [Navajo language]. I am a student here at the University and I'm over in the American Indian Studies Program. I'm a Ph.D. student there. [Navajo language].

So today our speakers are Lieutenant Governor of Gila River Indian Community, Stephen Roe Lewis; Walter Phelps, Navajo Nation Council Delegate; LuAnn Leonard, Arizona Board of Regents and member of the Hopi Tribe. [Applause] So if you could introduce yourselves panelists, that would be great."

Walter Phelps:

"Good evening. It's an honor and a privilege to be here this evening to be with you. My name is Walter Phelps. [Navajo language]. I represent...out of 110 chapters on Navajo, I represent five chapters, which is Leupp Chapter, Birdsprings Chapter, Tolani Lake Chapter, Cameron Chapter and Coalmine Chapter, so those are the chapters I represent in Western Agency in Coconino County."

LuAnn Leonard:

"Thank you. It is also an honor to be here. My name is LuAnn Leonard. I'm a member of the Arizona Board of Regents and I'm also the Executive Director of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. I'm Hopi and Tohono O'odham. My village is Sichomovi Village up on the Hopi Reservation and my father's from a little village on the T.O. Reservation of [village name], almost near the border of Mexico. But I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, but I've been out on Hopi for about 29 years. And my daughter Nicole is here, she's up here in the front and I have a nephew who's also here. So U of A [University of Arizona] is a very special place.

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"[O'odham language]. My name is Lt. Governor Stephen Roe Lewis and I am from the Gila River Indian Community. We're over 20,000 members and we just...as you know, we're right off the I-10 just south of Phoenix and I grew up in Sacaton, pretty much the home spot and the seat of power for the Gila River Indian Community. We have seven districts and we have 17 council members. Please don't hold that against me, I graduated from ASU. I told my council I'm coming down to enemy territory and if I'm not back by midnight to send out a search party. But I'm really honored to be here, especially with this...real honorable fellow guests here as well, representing both the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Tribe and as a tribal leader we work together, all the tribes in Arizona. Our paths cross and we work very respectfully as tribe to tribe, nation to nation tribes. Thank you."

Aresta La Russo:

"I want to say thank you for being here. Your presence here means a lot to our young students here who are getting their education to help their people back home. And I also want to say thank you...I want to acknowledge Karen Francis-Begay from the Office of the President, Tribal Relations for that office, and also our Native American Student Affairs Director Steve Martin -- thank you -- and also the students who have organized these events for the Native American Heritage Month, which is the month of November.

So to begin, we have 60 minutes allotted for the questions and they are structured and you have two minutes each to answer the questions. After the one-hour session for questioning, we're going to have questions and answers from the audience also. The first question: As a leader in the community, how have you handled times of criticism, opposition or failure? And give us examples of how well or not well you handled being in such situations. So if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"With a two-minute deadline I feel like I'm a pageant member or something. Thank you for that and as a...really as an elected tribal leader you really carry the hopes, dreams and values of your community, of your tribal community. We at Gila River, we're home to two tribes, both the Akimel O'odham and the Pee-Posh peoples. As tribal leaders, we are held to the highest standard and we are supposed to represent -- even though we're human beings -- in other words, we represent the best values of our community. And one of these values is that we respect the elders. That's a traditional teaching, a traditional behavioral control, societal, where the elders, their wisdom is something that you respect completely. And when you, if you're out during a tribal council meeting, you're out at a district meeting or any meeting or if an elder...with their teaching moments, when they lecture you...lecture, that also comes from our value, which is what the Akimel O'odham call our Himdag, which is our culture, our values, who we are. When those elders or who the society views as elders, when they lecture you, you take it, you listen and you respectfully take those words of wisdom. At times you're criticized and at times you may not even totally agree with them, but because of that value we place, because of those societal values that we place on our elders, you take that as a positive, you take that as a learning experience, especially as a leader. Even though you're a leader, you always have to respect your elders and there have been many times that I've been lectured and criticized and you take that in stride, you take that with dignity and then you...afterwards you try to understand why that occurred. So at least with that specific I'll lead off the discussion. Thank you."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"Thank you. Being a woman and working and living on the Hopi Reservation has been challenging. As I stated, I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, so I'm an urban Indian by the way I grew up, but I'm a reverse transplant I always say, because usually the trend is you come from the reservation to the urban area and you stay, but I did the opposite, which is a little different. When I...in regards to the question, when I graduated from Northern Arizona University in 1983, I worked for the Phoenix Indian Center for a couple years and then I went to the Hopi Tribe, very young. I think I was 23 years old, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, wanting to help my people. I got my first job as a college graduate and I believe I made $6.25 an hour, which was a lot at that time. So I'm working at the Hopi Tribe and I was working with parents and students and I'll give you this example of what can happen.

We had a situation with two students who -- it was during a summer program. So I sat them down, they were causing trouble because of their relationship, talked to them in a firm voice. Later that evening, one of the aunts of one of the students was very concerned and she was upset and so she called me. And I don't know if you've ever been on the phone with somebody who's yelling at you and you can't get a word in. All you can do is listen. But this woman was saying things like, "˜I know you're from the city. I know you're only going to be out here for one year, you're going to use our people and then you're going to leave. You're going to make money and make a name and then you're going to leave,' among many other things. And I was just this young kid about the age of some of you here, and all I could do was listen and at the end I was in tears, but all I could tell her was, "˜Thank you.' You grow really tough from things like that, but I see those as times when you grow. You have to accept that kind of criticism and thank them. It only makes you stronger and now, 29 years later, and I think I've done a lot of good things for not only our people, but people across Arizona. When I run into that woman, I always smile at her and she knows that what she said was wrong, but it only makes you stronger. And so I accept criticism, it's easier because of that; it's easier to accept criticism than it is to accept praise for me. It's kind of a little psychological thing."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. Walter Phelps."

Walter Phelps:

"Thank you and thank you for that question. Recently I came across a comment by a lady who said that, "˜As leaders your destiny, you become your destiny and you become the backbone.' She said, "˜As a leader who has become a leader, you are the backbone.' And then she said, "˜But you also have to grow your own funny bone and your wishbone.' I thought that was a very insightful statement because I think that all of us have different backgrounds, all of us have different personalities and I get the privilege to watch my colleagues, to observe my colleagues. We have 24 council members on the Navajo Nation Council and I can see the unique personalities, the strengths and the unique personalities of each individual, each leader that's there. So it's really a privilege to see that and especially to observe that, this being my first term in office.

But I think that as a leader, you have constituents. Our people always say that we have 300,000 Navajo constituents and with the five chapters that I represent, we have a certain percentage of people and people come from all walks of life. You have to anticipate that you will get people that will support you and that will be there to cheer you on and to encourage you and tell you, "˜We're praying for you,' but on the other hand, you also will come across people that will just basically try to express their views or their issues to you in their own unique way, which may not seem like a very friendly way or a very diplomatic way, but at the same time, what I've learned to do is just try to listen, try to listen.

What is it that they are trying to say? What is it that they really are trying to express? And the other thing you have to also remember also is that voice that you're hearing, no matter how harsh and how unkind it may seem, it represents a percentage of your people. It represents a percentage of the views of certain peoples and what you try to do is you try to process that. What you don't do is take it personally and that can be a challenge. But I think that being able to listen, being able to treat them respectfully, that's all that they expect. That's all that's required."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. And thank you for your leadership and thank you for all you do. The second question: I'm sure this second question -- it's about advice -- and I'm sure you have received many advice from elders, maybe your constituents. But the question is, what advice did an elder give to you to help you as a leader and probably maybe one that stands out the most? So if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Thank you and this is my, going on my...well, I just completed my second year in my term, my three-year term. Shortly after I was elected, a veteran tribal leader from Arizona, we were talking and although he's retired now, but he...one of the words that or the pieces of wisdom that he passed on to me as a tribal leader, especially when you're in a position where you're faced with...you're always in an imperfect position where you don't have as much information as you might need or there's a lack of time where you're being pushed because of a certain issue that it appears or a situation that appears needs to have action. And what he told me is that there's no situation where you as a tribal leader, that you feel that you need to be pushed into making a decision right then and there. That's what he found in his many years as being a tribal leader. He said, "˜Never get pushed into or pressured into making a decision before you're ready.' He goes, "˜They can...most...99 percent of the situations that come up can at least be decided tomorrow, at least by the next day.' And so never...and I thought of that, too, and I've applied that as well because as a tribal leader, like I said, sometimes you...there are more than one side, two sides or three sides to an issue and I think that was probably...there's a reason why some of our most thoughtful tribal leaders thought about things. And although sometimes from the outside they're wondering, "˜How come they act so slow sometimes within the deliberative process of tribal governments?' But I think that was...from how...I've taken that and applied that from a day-to-day perspective as a tribal leader. I think that piece of wisdom that passed down to me, that's really served me well."

LuAnn Leonard:

"What I've learned or what I was told was in this day and age we want things instantly, especially the younger folks, but I've always been told by elders that there's a reason why things take time. And I know there's a lot of kidding about Indian time and all of that, but this really played out true and I'll give you an example.

I had a nonprofit where we...the Hopi Tribe gave us $10 million, which we have invested and it -- right now it's valued at about $21 million -- but we were changing investment houses around 2008 and what was going on around 2008? The big recession. And we were going to change from Charles Schwab to Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch is this giant and here we are the little Hopi Tribe. We were trying to get our agreement signed and it took months. It took months and the reason was Merrill Lynch wanted the Hopi Tribe to change our legislation, which meant changing a law which would allow them, if we went to court, we would go to state court versus tribal court and we stood our ground. And eventually after about six months, we came up with wording and we were able to -- that was agreeable to both sides. And so the Hopi Tribe, it was like David and Goliath or the giant and the little man, but we stuck with it and they...we didn't have to change our law and they accommodated us, which was great.

But the beauty of it was, all that time that...2008 hit, remember stocks plummeted, everyone was losing money. You hear about these big endowment funds that lost millions of dollars. Non-profits were hit hard, but all our money stayed in bonds, which did decent during that period. And so I've really learned from something like that. We survived that area without a big hit like a lot of these non-profits did. But it's true, there's a reason why things take time and I think something was watching over us at that period. It's really hard because, my daughter will tell you, I'm not the most patient person in the world, but there is a reason why things take time."

Walter Phelps:

"I spent about maybe a total of eight years in South Dakota. My wife and her family live near the Rosebud Reservation and we worked with this organization, basically a ministry organization and they...after several years, after a few years they wanted me to, I guess, learn the administrative part and also the leadership part. So they gave me a title, it said Learning Vice President and I liked that title. But anyway, one day, we had a big warehouse like this, it was about this, maybe a little bigger than this room here and one big garage door on one side. And we would have distributions come and people would unload stuff and when you stood in the front of that garage door there was piles of material and supplies all over. There was no organization. It was just completely packed and full.

One day, our president came and led us to that doorway and he wanted us to start organizing and cleaning it. We stood there and looked at that and just looking at it was discouraging and he said, "˜How do you eat an elephant?' I had never heard that before. And he said, "˜One bite at a time.' So I never forgot that because looking back on that, there's a lot of wisdom there because every challenge in life may seem overwhelming, it may seem very big, but you just take it a step at a time, a bite at a time and I think that there's a lot to be learned. There's patience there that can be learned. Through time you begin to understand certain things.

Recently, you'll hear this during election season. Next year is election season and I've already heard some individuals say that, "˜You know, we thought that these new leaders that came into office were going to really make some huge changes.' They said, "˜Nothing has changed. Nothing's changed. Everything's still the same.' But when you look at it from the governance level, governance is a huge ship. It doesn't alter course quickly. So once you begin to appreciate that, it's...creating systemic change, creating change that could be positive and noticeable, it comes...it'll come eventually. You have to lay the groundwork for it. I'll probably never forget that piece of wisdom that was given to me."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. And so what I heard was, don't be easily persuaded when making big decisions, there's a reason why things take time and basically, one step at a time. So thank you. Your answers to these questions, for the students here, these are advices they are also taking, listening and taking with them throughout life. The third question: Being members of an Indian nation, give examples of how your cultural and traditional teachings have motivated your success. And if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor again."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, again, thank you for that question. And like I said in the beginning, as tribal leaders we are...we try to not necessarily epitomize, but we have to, at some point in our lives, demonstrate those values of what makes up our tribal communities.

For the Gila River Indian Community, and specifically the Akimel O'odham, we were historically agricultural. And when you live in the desert and you're agricultural, there's a way of cooperation, cooperation for the common good. And those...always cooperating with one another whether it's in your family, whether it's in your village, whether it's in your clan, your extended family, it's that respect, mutual respect and cooperation. And also because of our agricultural heritage, it's self-sufficiency, it's making sure that you're a productive part of your community and that you have a role to play. Because of that self-sufficiency, you have a responsibility and a role to give back and to enrich your community. And when you try to...it's good that Mr. Phelps, Councilman Phelps was talking about, "˜Come election time...' and again, election time always comes. And there's really, there's a big difference between governance and governments on a large level and especially as a leader, your leadership skills, you have to guide your people through...there are technical challenges and there are adaptive challenges. Technical challenges, those you can read a book, there are specific skill sets that you can bring in, you can look to financial advisers, you can look to public policy experts, you can look to economists, but it's those adaptive problems where your tribe, you're going on new ground, you're trying to bring your people along, slowly bring your people along to surface an issue, surface a problem.

With our community, we have...we're looking at exactly what does culture play in our community? We have a declining percentage of those people who speak, who are fluent speakers and so you have that criticism, "˜How come it's not being spoken? How come it's not being spoken in the family? How come it's not being taught more productively as part of cultural curriculums in our schools on the reservation?' And so you wonder why, you wonder why there's that gap between what those values are and what the reality really is and as a leader you've got to bridge those. You've got to look at exactly...as your people are adapting to these new changes, you've got to realize as a leader, what are the most important bedrock principles of what your culture is, what has sustained you, what has made you survive as a people all these years and use those. Use those as tools, use those as touchstones when you try to communicate to your people and you bring them along as a tribal leader. I think that's really what true leadership is.

And of course there's leadership versus authority. Your authority as a tribal leader, you have a role that's really demarcated whether it's in your bylaws or whether it's in your tribal constitution. Sometimes leadership though, sometimes you have to go beyond that role of your authority. You have to go beyond sometimes to really...if you want, if your people are stuck on some issue or stuck on some social problem, you're wondering why there are high incidences of drug abuse, those societal problems, those social problems, and how you can use those cultural touchstones, reach back into your culture, how you can use those tools to reawaken your people, to how you can use those tools as a call to action to start to focus on some of those issues. As a leader, you have to, at times, light the fire under the people. Sometimes...and you have to really gauge whether they're ready, you have to gauge how you're going to do it and in what type of a language and I'm not really necessarily talking about your traditional language or the English language, but the type of language, the type of words you use. Those can really...that's when you're really out there, when you're really, as what sometimes referred to as a leader, when you're on the line, when you're on the firing line there. You really are exercising leadership at that point. Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"The Hopi Education Endowment Fund is a nonprofit of the Hopi Tribe that...where we raise money for the scholarships and grants for our Hopi students to go to schools across the United States. So some of the Hopi students here receive our money. When we created the fund, the tribe gave the first give of $10 million, which was huge because they really put their money where their mouth was. All tribal councils say education is important, but we were so proud the Hopi Tribe did that 11 years ago or 12 years ago.

So we had, I was...came in as the first director and I had an opportunity, I had $10 million, I had no staff, no office, no computer, anything at all, but I had this $10 million, which some of it I could use for a budget. And I could have put...created our office and opened it up here in Tucson, Washington D.C., someplace where rich people live and start our new office. But I felt strongly that this organization must be for Hopi, by Hopi. I wanted to create jobs on the reservation for staff, Hopi staff to run this office and be able to be productive, but also make a good wage and be able to participate in culture. And so I brought on three college-educated employees and we began the Hopi Education Endowment Fund.

We deal with culture every day as we run our non-profit. A non-profit like Make A Wish, Big Brothers Big Sisters, stuff like that, they all have different approaches toward fundraising and fundraising was a new concept for Hopi and I'm sure for Native people. But what we've done over the years, people call it, they say we 'Hopi-fy' it. For example, death is not a, not something that a lot of us talk about, but in fundraising people leave money in their wills and things like that. So what we did with us, we really don't...you don't plan for your death, but in our way and I'm sure some of you can relate is you plan your grandparent's and your parent's plan who's going to take over the house, who's going to take over the field, who's going to take over the cattle. They leave things like that and there's a concept called \ˈnō-ə\ in our traditions on Hopi. And so we created a \ˈnō-ə\ Society and we... so we use our culture, we kind of modernize it in different causes, but we...being Hopi and running a Hopi organization, we know how far we can go without abusing it and that's the beauty of that.

And I hope, as people, as you get educated and you go back to your reservations and start working for the people, you'll experience the same thing because it's great to be able to have a program like that that you can take great pride in. For example, we never use kachinas in any of our brochures and things like that because we know how far we can take it without being disrespectful. And our people are always there to police us. But one thing, just real quickly, that we ran across was people think philanthropy, fundraising, what is that? But when you think back, who were the first philanthropists, who were the...who was the ones who got those Pilgrims through that first hard winter? It was Native people and we all have this in each of our cultures. We all have different practices and it's our jobs as professionals to pull that out and be able to use that in a new concept. So that's how we use Hopi culture in the everyday workplace."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, thank you. I think this is a great question to try and provide examples that can help motivate...what motivated me, what could motivate maybe somebody else. I guess on one hand, when you're young, when I was young, I wanted to know what my future was, what was in store for my future, what was my purpose for being here. So I remember coming home from, after being away for several years, coming home to my community there at Luepp and we were in a meeting like this and one of our elders said, and he was talking and he said, and he was the leader, he was the council member, council member that represented our community in Window Rock and he was speaking to us and he...I don't remember what all the context of his subject was about, but one statement that he made stuck with my like an arrow. It just like pierced me like an arrow and I walked away with an arrow stuck in me for years to come. And that eventually, it eventually, those words of wisdom eventually brought me down.

But what he said was, '[Navajo language].' In other words, why should you be such a promising person, such a promising person, an individual with such potential and just be that way and not do anything with it? More or less, that was the context of that statement. And I think those words eventually made me realize that there is a purpose, there is a purpose. And if I'm going to succeed one way or another and contribute back to, as to why I'm here, I just have to say, not everybody can be a council member, not everybody is cut out to be a mechanic, not everybody can be a doctor, but if you search for it, if you search for it, pray for it, it'll come to you. I've seen people study for engineering. They spend years in the classrooms in their institutions of learning. They come back to the community. What are they doing? They're doing something totally different. They find their passion in something else.

So what you're doing today may not be what you're going to be doing maybe 20 years from now. It could be something totally different, but I guess the pursuit of that is our privilege as Americans to pursue where we find ourselves and what we find our passion to be and what brings happiness and joy to us. And to me, people ask me, "˜So what is it like? What is it like being a council member?' I said, "˜Well, I enjoy my work. I enjoy my work. It's a challenge to me. I get up every day and I want to get up and do what I'm supposed to do today. It's a joy. It's a joy to me.' I guess it's a path and it's a journey when you find...when you know that you're on the right path, you will find fulfillment and it will be a challenge and you will enjoy doing it."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. [Navajo language]. I think from your speeches, from your comments, basically the principles of your culture of each tribe, we heard the words self-sufficiency, cooperation, philanthropy, giving and also the concept of \ˈnō-É™\ and we're here for a purpose. So that's to sum it up. So thank you. So we're going to go on to our fourth question and I'm sure you all have mentors. So who were your mentors that influenced you? But I guess here if you could mention a couple of them that would be great. And if we could continue on with the same line up with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, I think, as a leader and just as a human being, there's a process of growth, process of maturation and I've had the opportunity to go to school, to go to graduate school and you're exposed to a bunch of different...bunch of ideas, you're exposed to the great works, you're exposed to depending on your study. You can talk about Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Cesar Chavez or you start talking about even our great Native leaders in history and our great leaders within our individual respective tribes and then once you go back to your tribe, at least for me, and really take a leadership position and you start to reflect on your own personal journey.

And for me I guess I've always known this, when you start to think about those lifelong lessons and you start to reflect on, for me, on the people around you who raised you, your parents. I had the opportunity to not only spend some time with my father and my mother, but also my grandparents, your extended family. I know aunts and uncles are very important in tribal traditions as well. I know one of my uncles who was a -- and this is really kind of timely because we just had celebrated Veterans Day -- my uncle who was a Vietnam veteran and really had trouble adjusting always when he came back, but he was in the infantry, he was out there in Vietnam, out there really exposed to the horrors of war. But one thing I learned from him was that he, and from a leadership perspective, he walked point a lot for his infantry, for his platoon and he always surveyed the areas. He always...he listened, he used all of his faculties and smell, hearing, sight, just really developed those skills and tested an environment before you go in.

And I think I really want to apply that as well to leadership. You have to go in, you have to use all of your senses, you have to really understand exactly what the barometer of a situation is if you're going to go in and do problem solving, if you're going to go into a meeting and you have to reveal bad news or challenging news to your community members, to your tribal members, to tell them that there's a shortfall in funds, to tell them that the housing budget has been cut by the council, to tell them that so and so might have been terminated. And so you really...and before that, you have to, you're almost like a scout, which essentially was what my uncle was and you're always measuring what the winds of change or the winds of exactly what's going through your community. What is the pulse of your community out there, the pulse of your environment?

You can't...as a tribal leader sometimes, and I've noticed this, is that when they obtain these positions and thereby the people who put them in there by they separate themselves from their community, they're in their tribal office and where before they might have gone out and were among the people, now they're in meetings in their office and they're traveling a lot, maybe traveling to Washington, D.C. -- and there's no criticism about tribal leaders who go to Washington, D.C., I've been to Washington, D.C. more times than I can remember in the past couple of years -- but you can't lose that tie to your tribal membership. You have to really...an old political axiom is "˜all politics is local' and that does go with tribal politics, at least in my experience. You really have to be attuned to what your tribal people are thinking about. You can't lock yourself up in your office once you get into office.

But I guess, going back to who really influenced me as mentors I would have to say my uncles, my aunts, of course my father and my mother. They were very instrumental. My father was one of the first...in fact, he was the first Native American to pass the bar in Arizona, first Native American to argue and to win a Supreme Court case and it was a tribal taxation case for our tribe back in 1980. And so public service does run in my family. So you have to really reflect what type of legacies run in your family. Of course, probably public service runs in everyone's family, public service extending to veterans. As we know, Native Americans, they've always served the highest percentage of any other group in the United States. Since the war on terror over 50,000 tribal members, 50,000 Native Americans have served and of course I think we all, of course, we have an illustrious history of Native Americans who've served. I think it's obvious for the tribes here represented; they can speak about their rich history. For Gila River, of course it's Ira Hayes. He was one of the flag raisers in Iwo Jima on Mt. Suribachi and really epitomized the sacrifice of all Native Americans. So as...when you're trying to find your way, you're trying to find your call to serve, what's very important and I think what really sustains you is, what is your...the legacies that you've...in your family, in your extended family. What are those legacies that you can continue on and you can bring with you as a leader in whatever position you choose to attain? Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"You will each need a mentor to help you grow professionally. A mentor is not only a friend, but a colleague and a friend who will, who can be brutally honest with you to help you grow and I have two mentors. The first is a U of A grad. His name's Wayne Taylor, Jr., former Chairman of the Hopi Tribe. We were in tribal government about, gosh, 20 years ago when we first met and we had dreams for our people and we were both just younger professionals and we got along very well. And when election time came about, he was the one we wanted to get into office so that we can act on those dreams. And he was a one-term vice chairman, two-term chairman and has done so many successful things. So it's been great growing up with him.

My other mentor is Yoda. I call her Yoda. So picture this. I'm young; I just got my job as the Executive Director of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. No experience in fundraising, philanthropy and that, but I had motivation and I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. There was this lady named Barbara Poley. She's the Director...she was the Executive Director of the Hopi Foundation, which has been on the Hopi Reservation for over 30 years. She's been through it all. She was a friend, but also she was a colleague, and so I call her Yoda because I see her as the Yoda, the master, like the Jedi master. Here I was young Luke Skywalker wanting to do great things and just charging forward. But then Yoda helped pull me back telling me, "˜LuAnn, you've got to hold on. Think about this, this, this before you do this.' We laugh about it nowadays because Yoda is so ugly and everything, but she really is a Yoda and I hope that each of you find that Yoda in your life because you will need it once you get your education and go out there and pursue your dreams."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you."

Walter Phelps:

"Thank you. I think the...my first mentor that will always be somebody that I will remember forever is my father-in-law. My father-in-law perhaps was one of those individuals that I will never forget. We were privileged to get to know him after I got married and not knowing that he had a short life span to live not too long after that because he got cancer and by the time they finally discovered it, it was too late. It had already pretty much eaten up his whole insides and it was too late for treatment. But the man was a leader. If there was a man among men, he was the man. The memories that I have of being with him, being around him, watching him being the leader that he was with all the people that he worked with, he was a leader. He was a great leader. And when he passed away, his funeral was just packed. People came from all over the country; from back east, from Canada, from the west, the east to the west and north to the south, they all came to his funeral. I remember one gentleman, one leader from the Sioux Nation came and he said, "˜He was a pillar. He was a pillar among us.' But when you knew him personally, he was a very humble man, very humble man. He spoke very few words. When he spoke, his words had depth and he did not waste his words. His words were...they were not fancy words or anything, but he was always to the point, very matter of fact, common sense, never an unkind word about anybody, always very respectful of all the people he worked with. It's not to say that he wasn't frustrated or perhaps angry, but he never showed it. He never showed it. And I feel like I have a long ways to go to be like the way he was. He was a very spiritual man and also he was a man who prayed. If there was someone that helped me to become the person that I am, he contributed a lot.

Today, I'm privileged to work not only with the leaders that I now work with, but I also work with former leaders, those that had those positions before me and also have worked with other leaders. And I can think of one gentleman, in fact this past Saturday I held a meeting way out in Black Falls and he just happened to come to the chapter house. He's an elderly now. He's retired and I invited him. I said, "˜Hey, would you like to attend that meeting with me and maybe...I'd be happy to drive you over.' So he said, "˜Oh, yeah. Sure. I'll...' He said, "˜Let me go talk to the war department first,' which was his wife. So he got permission and we left. But he to this day is a mentor. He has so much experience, so much experience in working with leaders, working with people at the community level and I can always rely on people like that that understand people. My father-in-law once told me, he said, "˜You'll find later on in life,' he said, "˜You'll find that it's easy to run heavy equipment, work with machines and equipment,' but he said, "˜the hardest thing to do is to work with people.' He was right. I have to say, he was absolutely right."

Aresta La Russo:

"Okay. Thank you. So the message to me, if I could reiterate, is having mentors and they guide you and as students academically and for your professionally development and someone who's brutally honest with you and who is a friend. Thank you. So we have a little bit of time. I have two more questions that I would like to ask and I believe these are questions that we as Native students have experience or know about or we wonder what are our leaders facing? So the question is, what do you feel or think are the biggest challenges facing Native American leaders?"

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, I think for me as an elected leader and there's my...the governor of our tribe, in fact he's traveling back from Washington, D.C. right now. President Obama held the Tribal Leaders Summit with the White House and that's been going on for the past week and I'm sure all the tribal leaders were there. And of course I have to stay home and I have to make sure the tribe is still running.

But really what I've noticed, especially when we attend either tribal or national meetings like National Congress of American Indians and then you listen on like Indianz.com and you really see...this happened for Gila River, both myself and Governor [Gregory] Mendoza, we're one of the youngest to be elected to these positions. Usually you have senior members of our community who were elected, who served their professional career, who served our community and so really this is sort of a turning point among leadership among my tribal community. And then you start to see that really with other tribal communities as well. You see that up in the Plains, up in the Northwest coast and the Southern Plains, you see these tribal leaders who have...who were landmarks, who have really served in difficult times, in the "˜60s and "˜70s, '80s, and now you have this new generation of younger people, 50s and 40s and even 30s, who are being elected to tribal leadership among different tribes. And so you have this new generation that is slowly -- and it's only natural of course -- slowly assuming tribal leadership. There are new challenges, there are the...there are more sophisticated problems that you deal with. Keeping the pulse of your people is more difficult, making sure that you don't get alienated from your own constituency.

We're in the, really in the first wave of social networking. We have a lot of...I'm just constantly amazed at how many of our community members, how many tribal members, how many Native Americans who are on Facebook and all these other social networking sites. I'm sort of slow to adopt. My son who's just starting high school, he's an expert. In fact he kind of helps me with my own smart phone, making sure that I stay ahead or at least keep up with the technology. And then you...it's kind of interesting because then we even have some of...this really occurred during our last election, a lot of our young community members, tribal members are on Facebook, are on social networking sites and then you start to see a lot of our elder community members who might be homebound, they learn from their own grandchildren how to access those social networking sites too. So you have this virtual community on these social networking sites and so that creates a whole new different dimension to governance, a whole new different dimension to communication as well. So you have all these really...we're sort of really in this important transitional stage I think for tribal leadership.

Especially as well, I think from more of a formal governance perspective I know a lot of tribes are dealing with their constitutions. You have a lot of constitutional reform going on among different tribes as well and you have tribes grappling with do they want to keep their IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] form of government, do they want to reform it to a more progressive form or do they want to also make it hybrid models to incorporate their cultural values into their tribal government. Do you want to include...because most tribes are still on that tribal council, heavy tribal government where most of the express power is with the tribal council and there's not necessarily a separation of powers with the executive or with the judicial. So a lot of tribes are dealing with that, exactly how...making those...the tribal governments, making them accountable to the people, making them valid to the people and the process about going about that. Those are very important complex challenges that I see tribes, not only my tribe, but other tribal communities going through as well."

LuAnn Leonard:

"This one's kind of hard for me because I'm not an elected leader, but I've served elected leaders as staff, assistants and have worked with many of my chairmen of the Hopi people. But just watching them and knowing what they deal with, what I've seen them facing is, it's really hard to balance progress and tradition and this is coming from one of the most traditional people in the Southwest, the Hopi Tribe, where we still have our customs. You could look at the old Edward Curtis pictures and those things are still happening today because we protect them. And balancing how do you protect that without infringing on it, jeopardizing it? That's what I see them having to deal with. There are many opportunities out there for progress for our people. There's land leases with Peabody Coal Mine, just like the Navajo have, our neighbors next to us, power lines, all of this. How do you balance for example bringing a power line in and making sure that you're not near a cultural site that's significant to your people. So having that knowledge, but also having that authority and that power to be able to make the right choices, balancing that. I see them dealing with that.

I also see them dealing with, and we just dealt with this last week, with you students. What we're finding...we had a Laguna gentleman who did his Ph.D., he got his Ph.D. from U of A. He was...his Ph.D. was on how Laguna is using their students. What we're finding...what he found and what's similar with Hopi and probably with others is you're investing a lot of money into students, but what are we doing as a tribe to help bring you guys home? Are we creating jobs with decent wages? Do we have the housing? Do we have the medical facility? I joke, we don't have Starbucks and stuff, but we have so much more to offer and it's so fulfilling to work for your people, even if you have to sacrifice. But you shouldn't have to sacrifice having to live with three families in one home and so the...what we posed by bringing this gentleman in to start the discussion, the dialogue on the Hopi Nation, was what can we do as tribal employees, as leaders of non-profits and community members to make sure our students can come back because we are losing a lot of you and we do need you back. We do want that investment to pay off and I know I have full faith that it will, but we need to have people out there I guess like in the Hopi Education Endowment Fund who's willing to take that step and start that dialogue and get people thinking."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, this is a big question. What are the biggest challenges facing our leaders, our Native leaders? I think that the... what's happening today, what's happening...what started happening a year ago in regards to the sequestration and also the government shutdown, that has brought a lot of things to surface for us. It has, I guess, basically helped us to realize that we are in very unique times of leadership right now. In past administrations perhaps it may have been a lot easier to send more earmarks home to the communities, even from the congressional level. I used to be a congressional staffer so we succeeded with a lot of earmarks, even from the congressional level into our district. This was Congressional District 1. And health care, there's so much to talk about in terms of Obamacare [Affordable Care Act], but I think that...when I really think about this what perhaps is the biggest challenge for the Navajo Nation -- I really can't speak for the other nations, but perhaps this will go across the board as well -- is sustainability and independence. That's I think our biggest challenge. We have to start pushing and working so that we can stand on our own two feet.

I come from a rancher background. My dad had cows, horses, sheep. My brother back here drove me down here, he's been a bull rider and a calf roper, very successful one, and I remember riding my horse one day out there in the field and I came across three cows. The mama cow was standing right here and the other cow was standing right next to it and then another baby calf was standing on this side. The big, probably like a...I don't know if it was a two-year-old... the mama cow's in the middle nursing off of her own two year old cow and then the baby cow feeding off the other one. So in essence there was three cows feeding off of each other, nursing off of each other and when I remember that, I think about what are we doing as a nation?

We have the federal government, tribal government and the state government; each one has resources, very limited now, shrinking every day as we speak. We're trying to feed off of each other to sustain each other. We've got to find a way...we need to find a way so that we don't have to continue down that same road because at some point in time, I don't know when, how much longer it's going to be, but the U.S. government, the last time I knew was 16 and a half trillion dollars in debt, deficit. And so I think the biggest challenge for us is how do we move from here to the next point so that we can move our nation towards more stronger and sustainable nations so that we can truly be independent and exercise our sovereignty."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. So what the challenge is, keeping balance in these transitional times whether it's with technology or within the governmental structure, and also another challenge is losing students not coming home, that's a challenge, and also having Indian nations, tribal nations be sustainable and independent in getting from Point A to Point B. Thank you. So the last question is, as leaders, as community members, as tribal members, what advice would you give to students in their future endeavors as leaders of all sorts, whether within their community, whether within their educational system, whether...? Yes, there's many ways to be leaders."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, thank you and I think this is a question that brings the discussion, the dialogue full circle. And this goes to being the essence of leadership and it doesn't have to be...we have three very important roles of leaders up here. You have an elected leader, you have a leader within a non-profit setting, and also you have also another elected leader as well. Leadership means going back in whatever capacity that...you could be a leader as an engineer; you can be a leader in the medical field. Leader means finding out exactly where your tribal community needs to either adapt to, to grow to. If there's some lack of capacity, as a leader, you could be that catalyst. You could be that catalyst to calling people to action on a certain issue whether it has to do with behavioral health, whether it has to do with diabetes, has to do with crime. There are so many ways that you can be a leader. It doesn't have to...leadership...and I think that's really...

When you talk about authority and leadership I think those are very non -- at least in my opinion -- non-Indian views. As a leader, you don't necessary have to have certain authority. You can go and you can make a change at any different part of your Indian society, of your tribal society. You don't have to be an elected leader, you don't have to be appointed, you don't have to be in a certain position. You can be an ordinary citizen, you can be in any capacity and you can exercise leadership. As students, you can...whatever gifts, natural, intrinsic gifts that you have proclivities to, whatever intellectual study that you're going to get your degree in, there are inherent opportunities to be leaders, to take that knowledge. Just like what was said, we have...and it's not just with the Hopi Tribe, it's with all tribes.

We're experiencing really a massive brain drain in Indian Country because there aren't those jobs for tribal members back home. If you're a molecular biologist, really what sort of job can you get as a molecular biologist back at Gila River, as a nuclear engineer or these very specialized fields? And I think that's why we really, as both as someone who's attaining those degrees, but also as tribal leaders, I think that's exactly where that gap is, where tribes who actually, at least for Gila River, when we are trying to educate our young people, we don't want to lose them to the outside world. We want them to come back, bring that knowledge back and what we found too is that most of our community members, if not all, they want to come back, they want to bring that knowledge back, bring those degrees back and put them to work in the community. So there are...so just...and I hope you just...you don't mix up authority with leadership. You can exercise and be a leader in any capacity within your tribal society."

Luann Leonard:

"I want all of you students to always remember this, that you are the lucky ones. You think about your reservations, you think about your people, you think about your high school classmates who are still there with a lot of kids, no jobs. On the Hopi Reservation, these guys are carving dolls, hoping to sell a doll to buy those diapers. You are lucky and you are privileged to have an opportunity to be at the U of A. Never take that for granted and do the best that you can so that you can use your skills to come back and help our people in some way. Some of you are going to come back and you're going to serve directly your people. Others, like he's talking about, a microbiologist who probably can't come back, but they can do research that can benefit diabetes or something that will help our people. Find a way that you can serve, find a way that you can give back because you are privileged and you are the lucky ones in this world, the reservations that we live in.

And the second thing is, I find it so amazing that in this whole world, the bahanas, white people, they...first man on the moon, first woman Supreme Court Justice, all of these...I call them the 'firsts.' They've been taken up. But in Indian Country, in your own communities, there are so many firsts left. When I was asked to be a Regent, I had to go through a Senate hearing at the State Capitol and they had to vote to allow me to become a Regent. Governor [Janet] Napolitano at that time is the one who appointed me and when they went in to make that vote, I was there and there was a bunch of people there and then they took the vote and the people left and I was thinking, I asked, "˜Why are there so many people here?' And they said, "˜You don't realize, you're the first Native American to ever serve on the Arizona Board of Regents and they have been around for 140 years. So that's...you just became a first.' And I say that with great pride, but I want you...I use it as an example because there are still firsts out there and each of you can find that First. Maybe you're going to be the first doctor in your community. Maybe you're going to be the first woman chairman or chairperson of your tribe. But there are still many firsts out there left for us and we should be thankful for that."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, I want to say thank you for the privilege to be here with you and spend this little quality time with you. I'm sure you have lots of questions as well. There was a statement by someone that said, "˜Why does the bird sing? Why does a bird sing? It's not because he has all the answers, but because he has a song, he has a song.' I think that if you pay attention to little details, it'll take you a long way. Just pay attention to little details. Tie your shoestring. Remember that? Button your shirt. Just do the little things, do the little things. Great people that have become great people paid attention to the little things and I think that that's very...probably the best instruction I was given. So if you see a trash can full of trash, take care of it. Don't let somebody else worry about it. If there's dirty laundry laying around, pick it up. Don't depend on somebody else to do it. That's the path towards greatness.

In my studies, I study some of the great leaders from way, way, way back. This is in the B.C.'s. Some of the greatest leaders that history talks about, you know what they were? They were shepherds, they were sheepherders. And my mom said one time, she said, "˜I used to be so embarrassed because we used to herd sheep with donkeys...' When she was young I guess they used to herd sheep with donkeys.' And she said -- my mom's a Christian -- she said, '...until one day I went to church and they said Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem.' And she said that totally changed her perspective. But what I've noticed is some of the greatest leaders were simply sheepherders and I think there's something magical in sheepherding. There's something magical in it. They're the stubbornest animals there are sometimes, but if you pay attention to them, take care of them, they'll take care of you. That's what we were told. [Navajo language]. It's your livelihood; it will take care of you. So I think that whatever it is, those little simple details in life that can really make a difference."