constitutional reform

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Frank Ettawageshik (Part 2)

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Native Nations Institute
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Frank Ettawageshik, former chairman of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (LTBBO), discusses the critical role that intergovernmental relationship building plays in the practical exercise of sovereignty and the rebuilding of Native nations. He shares several compelling examples of how LTBBO built such relationships in order to achieve their strategic priorities.

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Ettawageshik, Frank. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow (Part 2)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 13, 2010. Interview.

Ian Record:

"So we're back with Frank Ettawageshik. This is a continuation of the interview from April 6th. Today is April 13th and we're going to pick up where we left off, which was talking about constitutions. And I want to essentially go back to the very beginning on this topic and ask you for your definition of what a constitution is."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"The constitution is the method by which the people inform their government how they want the government to serve them and the government is a tool of the people to achieve what they need to achieve in terms of relations to other governments, in terms of relation to how things are going to work internally. The people themselves maintain the complete power. And then they can either give or take back certain powers to the government through the constitution. The constitution also establishes the mechanism for how the tribal government, the tribal nation will deal with other nations. It sets up the parameters for how you are going to do that, "˜which branch of government has which authority?' and all of those types of things. To me the constitution is a tool of the people for how they are going to manage their government."

Ian Record:

"What key ingredients do you feel constitutions need to have in order to be effective?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, constitutions...to me, there's a legislative function, there's a judicial function, and an executive function, and these need to be acknowledged and then the interplay between them is what the constitution does. Some tribal nations have constitutions where all of those powers are wrapped up into one body. Others have clear separations of powers, but even ones that have separation of powers the balance of those changes from one to another. So really those are important functions, I think another thing needs to be clearly you have to have an amendment clause on how you are going to amend it. You need to have some basic statements. I believe that it is extremely important to have like a bill of rights built into it. I think that's very important because those things need to be part of what our people come to expect in terms of how they are going to relate with their government. And when the people are telling the government how it's going to function they need to reserve for themselves certain rights, certain ways to protect themselves. I look at a constitution in a way as the people trying to protect themselves from their own government and I think that not only does it say how it's going to function, but it also limits how it's going to function, and guides it so that it will...constitutions that are poorly conceived or poorly written or ones that the community, the tribal nation has grown beyond, they can hamper how things will function. They can be difficult. For instance, constitutions do not require, nor does federal law require that they be adopted by secretarial election. Nor do they require that amendments be done by secretarial election, yet many constitutions throughout Indian Country require secretarial election by their own words, and so I think an important function there would be to not have that in your constitution. To me, you are either sovereign or you aren't, you are not part sovereign. And as a nation, tribal nations, sovereign tribal nations are constantly negotiating the exercise of that sovereignty with the other sovereigns around them. We may be with another tribe, another tribal nation close by, having some disputes about whose territories is whose or what...in economic development, there's room for competition and some issues. There could even be citizen issues regarding membership or citizenship. And we need to...the documents need to sort of deal with those things that are coming up."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up on something you said. You talked about a number of Native nations growing beyond their constitutions. We hear that sort of refrain, particularly in the discussions of tribes who have Indian Reorganization Act systems of government that were adopted in the 1930s. They had a very different conception of the scope of self-governance, if you will. Is that something you've seen in your line of work, working with tribes both as chairman and now as executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Every tribe has its own constitution or its own, either written or not written, in terms of how the government's going to function. Most of the tribes I've worked with have written constitutions and they're all different and they have...there are clearly times when you move beyond something. The United States has amended its constitution a number of times, and not always successfully. Witness Prohibition for instance, and the fact that there's one amendment that brings it in and another one that takes it out. So the fact that a government might need to amend its constitution is not unusual. Some amendments may be more far ranging than others. Some amendments are a sentence here, or two. Other amendments might be more drastic than that, but I would think that, think of it rather that the constitution is an organic document that is evolving as the nation evolves."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to pick up on a specific aspect of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians' constitution, which was adopted in 2005, and it gets at this issue that you mentioned in the outset when defining constitutions, which is international or diplomatic relations. And explicit in your constitution is an acknowledgment of other sovereign nations and their inherent powers presuming that those sovereign nations, in turn, recognize and respect the sovereignty of your nation. Can you summarize what that clause says and give an overview of perhaps why your tribe felt it necessary to include that?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, when you, like I said, when you acknowledge that sovereignty in yourself and in others then you have to exercise or negotiate that sovereignty with your neighbors. So what I think is here is that you're constantly working with those other sovereigns, but you need to figure out how to decide who you are dealing with and who you aren't. And so the most basic way of that is that if somebody else acknowledges you, well you can acknowledge them, but you have to have some sort of a process for that. What this clause in our constitution does is it establishes a basis for some office, or staff person, or somebody that would be akin to a state department for instance, where there's an international relations office that deals with negotiations with other sovereigns and those types of things. Those negotiations, those other sovereigns might well be the United States and the laws that they are passing could have an effect on the way we exercise our sovereignty, but the fact that, for the most part, what we have done in Indian country is that we have federally recognized tribes deal with federally recognized tribes and I think what that does is that sort of...we're letting the United States decide who we're going to have diplomatic relations with, and I don't think that is a good idea. But we have the right to make that decision ourselves, but then along with that right comes the responsibility to do it in a way that you are doing it reasonably. So then what do we do? Do we have a whole acknowledgement process, each one of us? How do we go about doing that if we're not going to sort of let someone else vet the potential list of people with whom we'll have relations. I think the whole federal acknowledgement process doesn't grant sovereignty to those tribes that make it through, instead it acknowledges that they have it and that's what it's all about. So what that means is that the non-recognized tribes also are sovereign, and the state recognized tribes are sovereign, and the federally recognized tribes are sovereign. Tribal governments have inherent sovereignty and no one gives it to them. They have it because it comes through being in this creation. Well, you still have the responsibility to do it, to do it wisely because not everyone who claims to be a tribe is a tribe and that's the difficult thing. There are examples of people who have formed...recently, there have been some prosecutions here across the United States of people who have had various money, get-rich schemes, that involve pretending to be a tribe and issuing cards and charging people for it. Those are things we have to look out for, but then that's the responsibility of a sovereign nation is to not just look inward, but look outward because threats come from outside as well as potential good things come from outside and we have to be able to recognize them and deal with them."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned or we've been discussing the constitutional mandate within your tribe's constitution to essentially engage in international relations. It places a high value on that process. Since the 1980s, there's been an incredible growth in intergovernmental relations between Native nations and various other governments and I'm curious to learn from you, what do you think is driving this growth?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"A recognition that we need to look outside ourselves and work together. I mean if you look at what has happened across the world in this time, the European Union is formed and variety of very nationalistic individualistic nations realized the value of working together. While they still have their independence and unique in their own countries, at the same time, they have a centralized currency and other things that make for a good sense. Tribes have the same kind of thing. We know that there is strength in numbers and as a matter of fact back there in the revolutionary time here in the United States, many of our leaders spoke to the Continental Congress and to the early [U.S.] Congress about the strength of working together. As a matter of fact, there is a famous speech about 13 fires being stronger than one that was given and these are the kinds of things that come from us and our understanding and we often formed alliances of some sorts with us coming together, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for instance is one, the Three Fires Confederacy is another, and there are others all across the country where different tribes have worked together. So what kind of things have we done?

One of the examples of working together is the formation of the National Congress of American Indians back in the '40s. It was formed to combat the national trend towards not recognizing the tribes, tribal governments or saying, "˜alright the tribal governments have progressed far enough, now we can terminate our relationship with them.' And so the whole Termination era came through and NCAI, that was one of the big pushes for NCAI. One of the things that we found as we were doing some studying and I still have more to do on this, but not only was there the non-profit corporation created that is the National Congress of American Indians, but at the same time there was also a treaty written and was signed by a number of the nations that acknowledged each others' sovereignty. I mean, it's a very...it showed and demonstrated in writing, the understanding of the tribal nations that they were and still are independent sovereigns and no matter what other people may think about it. And so, I think that that was one example, NCAI.

Other examples of working together I'm going to put up, more recently, we in the Great Lakes signed an agreement called the Tribal and First Nation Great Lakes Water Accord. This was done because the states and provinces were working on the issues of bulk ground water and diversion of water from the Great Lakes and how are they going to work together to deal with those issues as they came up and there had been a succession of agreements, finally one where they would agree and create binding agreements and then it was in the creation of these binding agreements that they started work and we got wind of the things. They talked to us a little, but they always talked to us as stakeholders and we felt that that wasn't correct. They needed to talk to us as sovereign governments within the region because we had court-adjudicated rights within that region. We were the only government with government-to-government relationship through treaties and that was important that we be apart of it, so when we weren't part of it and they did treat us as stakeholders we went out and called a meeting of all of the tribes and first nations in the Great Lakes Basin. There is about 185, some are together and some are not, and so when I say about there is a couple different ways of looking at it, but it's over 180 tribes and First Nations in the Great Lakes. We ended up having representatives -- either individually or either through consortia -- we ended up with representatives of 120 tribes and First Nations at a meeting with just a few weeks notice, which we negotiated and signed this water accord. Within one day, we were at the table, invited to the table to negotiate with the states and the provinces and what they planned on signing at about a month, it took actually almost a year before it was ready to go and we managed to strengthen those documents in a way that they will help protect the environment and the waters because we plugged holes that were there that were wide open because tribes and First Nations weren't there. We also took offending language out; they managed to negotiate language to come out of these documents that didn't acknowledge tribal property rights or tribal treaty rights. So in the end there's an interstate compact that's agreed [to] by all of the governors signed it with the tribes had to agree. And then the governors all had to get the state legislature in each of eight states to pass the identical wording which was no easy trick and they got that done and it went to the U.S. Congress where there was a lobby to push this through. If the interstate compact is approved by Congress it becomes law of the land and it's a provision within the U.S. Constitution that allows it.

So this interstate compact, there was a strong lobby trying to fight it because they thought it didn't go far enough. One of the key things it didn't do is it didn't bottle water in containers, 5 gallons and less is considered a consumptive use as opposed to a diversion. A lot of people felt that it should have been a diversion if that water was bottled and shipped outside of the Great Lakes aquifers. And so nevertheless it ended up passing at the U.S. Congress and it became law, then it was an international agreement that was signed between the eight states and the two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec. With parallel language, but the two provinces weren't able to sign onto the interstate compact so they created this other document that has that in it. It at least deals with issues when there is a permit for a withdrawal of a lot of water from the ground that will be vetted through a process. The tribes and First Nations agreed that we would have a parallel process to the states, rather that all be a part of one process. So we are still working on how that is going to be set up, but nevertheless we've all agreed to it. Since that was signed there have been another 30 nations sign on, tribal nations and we now have about 150-160 that have signed out of the 185. So that is an example of an international agreement working between the tribes and working across what the United States calls an international border between it and Canada. And there are others, League of Indigenous Nations is another way we're working with, not only First Nations and tribes, but also with the Maori and the Aborigines, potentially with the Indigenous folks throughout Mexico and Latin America and other places. So we're looking at what kind of things are there that we all have in common. And Indigenous intellectual property rights, our medicines and stories for instance...issues of climate change and there's substantial things that we all have in common, trade relations with each other, the ability to trade not just in goods perhaps, but to trade in ideas and thoughts. Those are things that are important."

Ian Record:

"You've been discussing international relations primarily between tribal peoples, between tribal nations. Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians has also been very active in the arena of intergovernmental relations between your band and other local governments, state governments and that sort of thing. I'm wondering if you could discuss in what areas is your nation currently engaged in that arena? I know, for instance, you have cross-deputization agreements with two counties. Maybe talk a little bit more about what your tribe is doing in that area."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"And we've come a long way from the point...quite a long time ago as the chair, I received a letter from a local prosecutor who indicated that our police were impersonating police officers and they couldn't be on the roads with their lights and they couldn't have car with emblems and most importantly they couldn't have radios with those little chips in them that allowed them to pick up police frequencies and that I had 10 days to deliver them to them. So we wrote them a letter back and said "˜You know where those cars are, you are welcome to takes those anytime you want, but as soon as you do be prepared for a visit from the U.S. Attorney.' So we called the U.S. Attorney and had a nice chat and that same person ended up signing off on a limited deputization agreement within about a year and a half after that and then we have full deputization that has been signed since then with two different counties. We worked on trying to have seamless public safety within the community. We didn't want to be a haven for people who were breaking the law on one side of a line and then crossing the other and then thumbing their nose at the police or things like that. So we worked hard to make sure that when there's a search and rescue for instance that is going on, our officers are trained and a part of the team and can help. And the public safety of the community is enhanced because they have this additional training. In addition to that, we have crowd control issues. Our officers have worked on part of the security detail for the governor when the government does the Mackinac Bridge Walk every year. And every year it's a five-mile span. Every year on Labor Day we walk the bridge. It's a huge crowd and frankly, they pull in different local people and our officers as well. We also work closely with the county and state police. One of the stories from this inter-cooperative agreement kind of thing that we've been able to do: we had the U.S. attorney general come to visit at Little Traverse. And we had all kinds of security things and there's all kind of things you have to do. We, of course, had to have a bomb dog to sweep the whole building and they have this and that and all kind of things. And as he was leaving after this meeting, and he was meeting with all the tribes in Michigan, and after he was leaving, he pulled out from our grounds and drove by Little Bear Cave and saw that there was a state trooper, country sheriff, a city policeman, and tribal police all standing together chatting right there. And we got a call from the FBI in the car with him. He got a question, 'How did we do that?' But that was part of what we tried to do, we tried to build that relationship. We also, if they come on our territory unannounced, we're not against making sure that they know that they're not supposed to do it. So if we had an investigation going on and they forgot to call us or something, we'd let them know. But likewise, if we did something that they didn't like, they'd let us know, so we developed, what we did is we built in safety valves in our relationships so that they were there if there was an issue, we had a way to deal with it right away. And so it's been a cooperative venture when the sheriff of both counties and his deputies show up and they stood before me as the tribal chairman and took an oath to uphold the tribal constitution and all of our laws, that was a pretty big step."

Ian Record:

"This case is interesting because it calls to mind this perspective or mindset you used to see more in Indian Country than you do now, but the idea that, well if you enter an agreement or develop a formal relationship with a local municipality just off the reservation, or a county or a township or something like that, you're somehow relinquishing your sovereignty because those are minor-league governments and we're sovereign nations. That -- from what I can gather -- that perspective is being replaced gradually by the perspective that when a tribe chooses to engage those other governments, in whatever way they see fit, that it's actually an exercise of sovereignty. How do you see what your tribe's been doing in that area?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, that's exactly the way I'd put it, it is an exercise of sovereignty. An example of an exercise of sovereignty working locally is if you have someone slip and fall at your casino and they hurt themselves and they sue you, of course you've got the insurance company, but if the insurance company turns around and claims sovereign immunity every time somebody sues what are you paying the insurance for? So an exercise of sovereignty, one that helps us protect us and our customers would be [what we did] is to waive our sovereign immunity up to the limits of our insurance policy so that someone could sue and be taken care of if they needed to be, therefore getting what we were paying for when we bought our insurance. Well, that's an example of an exercise of sovereignty that works well. And governments waive sovereignty on a regular basis for things. I mean they waive their immunity but never waive sovereignty, let me correct myself there. And that exercising your sovereignty through a waiver of immunity is a responsible thing for a government to do towards its own citizens and towards the citizens of other nations with which we deal: our customers at the casino, our guests at the gas station, the customers coming by, and we have a hotel and we have conferences there, we have lots of people coming through. We have to deal with the issues of...I mean, one of the issues we ran into was within Indian Country it was illegal for anyone to carry a firearm unless there was some law that was passed that allowed it. So in the absence of it, it's illegal to have it. Well we had guests; we had the outdoor writers coming as an association. They were coming to our hotel and one of the things they were going to do was a rabbit hunt and they had all brought their guns and it was going to be illegal for them to have them in their room, to have them in their car in the parking lot, and so we had to pass a law that allowed how this set up, how this was going to happen. It was one of those responsibilities of being a sovereign that it became important to work on."

Ian Record:

"And so what you're saying is it's not just international relations, it's not just a sovereign challenge involving other governments, but involving individuals who are citizens of those governments, individuals like these sports writers and the casino patrons and so forth."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, ultimately it actually is dealing with the other sovereign, it's just that the other sovereign has citizens. And so as you interact with those citizens, you're interacting with that other sovereign government and you have to figure out how that's going to be done. So those are just some examples of things that we had to do that I felt are important. And ultimately, these things were things that our tribal council passed as laws and our tribal courts have worked to enforce and for the police and the courts to go through this. And so this is our tribal government at work in the process of making laws, being responsible, and exercising sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up a little bit more on intergovernmental relations. And obviously the water accord that your nation participated in is one example of many that your tribe's been engaged in developing over the course of the last several decades. And I'm curious to get your thoughts about taking collectively all those relationships that you developed, all those formal agreements you forged, how do those collectively work to advance your nation's rebuilding efforts."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, the prior administration to me, actually it was a four-year time period when I was not in office and during that time period, our tribe was one of the tribes that worked with the governor of the state in a tribal-state accord in which the State of Michigan acknowledged sovereignty of the tribes, pledged to work together and establish certain things that they would do. We...I came back in office, we were preparing to have, I think one of the first meetings where we'd all get together following that. And as we were preparing for that meeting, I just don't like to go to meetings where the outcome of the meeting is, "˜Well, we'll have another meeting.' I'd really like to actually have a product from the meeting. And I spoke about that and wanted to do that, other people agreed, and as a collective we developed a water accord with the State of Michigan. So this was how the tribes and the state would deal with the collective, our collective interest in the waters of the state. And the accord itself was one that's right about...it's on the heels of our tribal and First Nations water accord and it's all this, this time period is all sort of involved in the same effort. But with this one, instead of the tribes pledging to work together, we pledged to work together with the state and establish twice-yearly meetings, staff-level meetings, not elected-level, but staff-level meetings where we would deal with the issues of what came up relative to water. And of course water is part of the environment, so certain environmental things started coming in. Subsequent to that, we came up with another agreement that we put together creating an accord on economic development. And then we came up with an addendum to that, creating, establishing an agreement to do and economic development fellows program that would say, half state, half tribal –- state folks and tribal folks –- that would work say, over a couple-year period to get a cohort of participants on the same page relative to the issues of economic development in Indian Country. Well this has been a little slower to take, but it's been one that's been brewing and we have a meeting coming up in just a couple weeks from the day we're doing this interview that, where we're going to be furthering some of those issues with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

Well, those are some of the things that we did and then, we also have signed a climate action, climate accord, dealing with climate change issues, also establishing twice-yearly meetings. I served on the Michigan Climate Action Council. I was appointed by the governor to be part of that council that helped create the plan for the reduction of the emission of greenhouse gasses and all the different issues surround climate change. And we turned in a report to the governor, and part of that report recommended that the tribe, that the state negotiate and sign with the tribes a climate accord. And the reason for that is because tribes are not political subdivisions of the state and it made, it would've been really difficult to incorporate us into the state's plan, but part of the state's plan was to sign an accord with us to work out common issues. And also part of the state's plan was to work with tribal organizations to further the issues. So for instance, they send a rep to the National Congress of American Indians' meetings relative to climate change, and to NTEC, the National Tribal Environmental Council, other meetings to make sure that they're, the state is sort of on sync with those things. So that's part of how we do with that accord. So when you look at each one of these accords, you put all this together, the tribal-state accord and the water, the economic development, the climate accord, you put all that together in terms of how we've related to the state, we've...I guess I should mention a couple of other things.

We also signed a tax agreement with the state. The state realized that we probably could go to court, which other tribes had done and that it was going to cost both of us millions of dollars and the outcome was uncertain. The uncertainty was there enough for the state that they felt that it was worthwhile trying to find a way to negotiate. So we ended up with a tribal-state tax agreement that is negotiated as a whole, then signed individually with the tribes and there's slight variations in each of them, but they're all pretty much set up...the system and then that also establishes an annual meeting where we get together to talk about the issues related to the taxes in the state. And sometimes our meetings, we've actually had a couple meetings that were over in 20 minutes. We had the meeting, we all got there, and we said, "˜Boy, it's really nice not to have anything to talk about.' So we chat with each other a little bit, reacquaint ourselves and eat a donut or two and we're done. Other times, we are actually in very long discussions and I've been in both of those kind [of meetings]. But the tax agreement was basically how the state is not going to collect taxes that it can't collect and what the mechanism is going to be for that. Well, these are other things that helped establish things. So we did this without having to go to court over the issue. And we believe that we got things that we wouldn't have gotten had we gone to court, but we also perhaps didn't get some things we might have gotten. So the question is, the state, both of us benefitted and we think that it furthered our interest by doing this."

Ian Record:

"I mean, I guess overall, overall from what you're saying, is that by consistently, continuously engaging in these sorts of efforts, you send a very clear message to the outside world -- whether it's the feds, the states, local neighboring communities to the reservation -- that, "˜We're big league governments. We're sovereign nations for real.' And then there's the message that you send to your own citizens. Isn't there a strong message that these sort of actions can send to your own people?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yeah. Well they, I think that and one of the other agreements that we did was we settled U.S. v. Michigan fishing rights case and as we worked on that the original case had been filed years ago and then it was bifurcated. The inland portion was sort of put on idle and the Great Lakes portion proceeded through court and we won the right in court and there have been a 15-year and then a 20-year consent decree that have been negotiated on how we are going to exercise that right on the Great Lakes and so we continue to work with the five tribes in the state that are involved in that. Well, the inland portion eventually got to the point where it eventually where it was heating up and looked like it was getting ready to go to trial and we actually hired our witnesses and expert witnesses and we had done depositions and we were moving towards court, but we at the same time worked and a couple opportunities came up and we moved ahead in some negotiations and we thought we try to negotiate. We successfully negotiated a settlement in the inland portion of the U.S. v. Michigan fishing, hunting and gathering rights case. Unprecedented. I believe it's an exceptional agreement in that the tribes gave up things that we surely would have won had gone to court, but those are things that we already were not likely to want to exercise ourselves and one of them was commercialization of inland harvest and also putting gillnets in inland streams and rivers. Both of those were things that we didn't think were too wise, but we could have won those rights and probably would have if gone to court.

However, the state stipulated without going to trial that our treaty right existed perpetually. It's a permanent consent decree and so this was a big deal to us. The second thing was is that they ended up agreeing that we could exercise that right on property that the tribe owned whether they had just purchased it or whether it had been purchased years before and or whether it was a part of the reservation, whatever. They also agreed to do this on private lands with permission and this is way more than we would have won had we gone to court. So we think that we got a lot of things that are very important to us and gave up things, while they are important, they also were worth it in the deal and this is without spending millions of dollars and continuing to spend. It would have been appealed; it would have been a 10-year case by the time it went on. This was a success.

Well, what did that do in the end? At the end when we got this agreement, together we had the state DNR [Departemtn of Natural Resources] touting the agreement and holding classes and seminars around the state to let their citizens know about this agreement and to say why it was such a great idea and we had tribes doing the same thing, but on top of that we also had the various sportsmen associations and the lake owners' associations that had been advising the state on the case and had been working with the state and they called it, the term was "˜litigating amicae,' which I understand is a term that the judge may have made up, I don't know at the time, but they were parties to the case and to that extent -- not parties, but they were amicae. Well, we had these groups, the Michigan United Conservation Club, the lake owners' association, and they were all promoting this so that instead of...result of this and in other states have had to call out the National Guard when they were dealing with this issue when they have really potential dangerous things going on and in Michigan when we got this settlement, everybody realized that it was going to protect the resources and it worked with minor exceptions here and there. I mean there were some tribal members that were upset and there were others. I mean we had some folks just as soon die on the sword, they would just as soon fight and lose rather than negotiate. There was more honor in that. And to me, I look at it, I wasn't worried about my honor or I was worried about that, what I was worried about is the long term. What are our great-great grandchildren going to be doing? And now in Michigan, they're going to be exercising treaty rights."

Ian Record:

"That's a great story and we're seeing more and more of those kind of stories across Indian Country because, I guess, this realization that negotiation, if done right and if done for the right reasons, can bring you much greater outcomes in both in the present and in the future than litigation. Because litigation, even if you win the case, there's this issue of enforcement can be very costly and then there's this issue of litigation begets more litigation. And then, on the flipside though, I mean you have negotiation where it sounds to me like this served as a springboard from improving relations between traditional adversaries, improving relations or perhaps dampening hostilities that had long been there. And, I mean, do you foresee this consent decree as perhaps serving as a springboard for other forms of cooperation in other areas."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, it's important that we sort of keep it alive. One of the things there is from this is there's an annual meeting, executive council, where all of the parties come together to deal with issues. And we have issues; we have issues. We'll have members who push things a little bit. We'll have state game wardens push things the wrong way a little bit and then we'll have to, we have to work through all those things. We'll have disputes about what actually was meant by a sentence and there will be differing views on that and those are things that have to be worked out. But in the process of doing that, we have regular relations; we worked hard and we developed a level of respect for each other and trust that we could achieve, that we were working together on an issue. It wasn't just working against each other. There are times, believe me, out of these...these were tough negotiations, these were not easy. I mean every one of us at the table, every one of the tribes, the state, I mean everybody at the table at some point or another was the one who walked away, and then came back, but everybody got upset. You don't have forty-some people negotiating every three or four or five weeks or two or three days at a time...that takes a long time. So some of those days were long days. We had some 10-12 hour days we were doing this. And so it was tough, but in the end we got something good, and these kind of agreements, building these relationships help because our tribal citizens...I'm a member of Farm Bureau for instance and I look at...we have other people that are members of Trout Unlimited and all the other groups. We have people, lake front owners that are part of lake owners' associations. So our citizens are actually a part of all these other groups with whom we were dealing and we need to strengthen those things. We need to let people know. So now when we do a fish assessments, it's just as common to have the tribes and the state out working doing the assessment fishing on a lake all together because the state's in a budget crunch and so are we, we have our equipment, when we all work together we have enough to do a big job, but just by ourselves none of us really could do that big job all by ourselves. So when we're doing the shock boat and the fish assessing and trying to explain to people that we're not killing the fish, the mortality rate is less than one percent with a shock boat that we have, those are good things and it's good to be working together on this stuff. In the end, what we're doing is we're all working toward similar goals. We aren't always going to agree, but then that's part of governance. In fact, if everybody agreed, that's a little dangerous. You need to have that, a little bit of tension in there to make sure you're doing things right."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned the hard work that's involved with establishing, cultivating and maintaining these relationships. I'm curious, based upon your extensive experience in this area, what advice would you give to Native nations and leaders for how to build effective, sustainable governmental relationships?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Patience. One of the, probably the biggest thing I learned and one of the things that guided me is that eventually, eventually comes and that you need to work towards things. You need to be willing to work a little piece at a time. You need to have a sort of longer-term vision about where things are. I was out walking the other day on a path, and I was, I was looking up at the mountains and to my detriment, I tripped on something right in front of me. But if you look in front of you all the time, you never see the mountains, you never see the other things around you because you're paying so much attention right in front of you. You have to -- without endangering yourself -- have to be looking up as well as in front of you. I think that that's a part of the whole thing about this patience. You have to have a longer-term vision and the government itself needs to work through and think about those longer-term visions."

Ian Record:

"And doesn't that involve educating citizens because leaders? As you've often said, leaders are transitory, they come and go, and some of these efforts are multi-year, if not multi-decade to get the outcome that you've been seeking at the beginning and doesn't that require, I guess, a certain level of understanding and approval by your own people that this is a priority of the nation?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes. I mean, it's really important for people to understand what...like I said in the beginning when we looked at the constitution and I said the constitution is the method by which the people inform their government how they want it to work. The people need to always be aware of and remember that that is what that is and that they...so they need to understand where those things are when you have a constitution that has a focus on international relations. They need to...when you have your budget hearings, there need to be...someone needs to stand up and speak up and support that budget line item that's going to involve some international travel, some travel that needs to be done. When you have...you have to have...people need to be aware of how things work to know how to allocate resources and how to support that or detriment. One of the issues that I see across Indian Country that I think is...it's a big issue and that is that leaders who do a lot of this international work with other tribes or that are working in a basis across the country often are away from home a fair amount and that needs to be supported. But too often people think that those of us who are traveling are wasting tribal resources, that we are out having a good time, that we're enjoying things at the tribe's expense and that there is no need to be doing this anyway. And so when people are traveling often there is quite a pressure or a candidate becomes vulnerable because of being gone and traveling. So you have to balance that domestic program within your nation with the international program and you have to find out how to balance that, but with the people themselves, there needs to be an acceptance. I was recently -- after I had left the chairmanship -- I attended a conference and elected leaders were taking it on the chin pretty high at the conference over the days because most of them...there were very few elected leaders at this conference. It was almost all other folks: individual activists and former elected leaders, but lots of people were very involved in working on environmental issues, but...and so I, towards the end of the conference I got up and set my regular program aside and I said, 'Listen. You've been...you're sort of upset because elected leaders aren't here.' I said, "˜When's the last time you ever thanked your leader for attending a national meeting like this. When the last time you went to a budget hearing and demanded they put more money in there in the line item for travel so that the leaders could afford to go? When's the last time you wrote a letter or stood up and supported this outside external activity at a community meeting or in conversations in your family or things? You need constantly, if you want leaders to do those things, you can't complain because they don't. You need to actually support them when you do, that way it becomes a priority and if that's really the priority for our nations to make sure that we have this balance between domestic programs and international programs.' We have to have a populace that actually understands and supports why that is necessary, and it becomes necessary. Going to Washington, D.C. is critical for leaders because the U.S. Congress passes laws that effect...while they can't, their laws don't limit our tribal sovereignty, they certainly can limit how we exercise our sovereignty. They limit how Health and Human Services can deal with us. They can limit how the justice system deals with us. And so because of that, it's important for us to pay attention to those laws and it's important for us to know what's going on and to have the relationships necessary there that when we speak, we're not going just to build a relationship. We're going and we already are known so that we can carry through on the issues that support us. And there are plenty of people that are going there on a regular basis who are detractors of tribal sovereignty and don't support tribal sovereignty and who want to do everything they can to do away with it or limit it or whatever. And so we have to constantly be on target and work on these things and that's a very important part of that international because we're dealing with tribal nations to the United States, that's an international arrangement. We have to be very careful on how it works. So it's essential to do that kind of stuff. We also have to do that with our state government because a lot of the funding that tribes get comes from federal government, but it's funneled through the states, even though we'd like them to all have set-asides and deal directly with...so that the tribes deal directly with the feds on those things. There's a number of programs that go through the state and the manner in which the state chooses to set up its programs, how they choose to write their programs or write their proposals and their agreements with the feds can limit how they deal with tribes. So you're constantly having to pay attention to that. And you have people who, once again, would be supporters and other people who wouldn't, but for the most part you also have people that just don't know. And so it's constantly our responsibility to make sure that they do. And whatever mechanism, whether it's the tribal leader going or whether there's an ambassador, I think that we could... I think there's a time coming as we're evolving our tribal governments that we're going to actually have people that ambassadorial function may well be through an ambassador at large. Some of the tribes already have these. And I believe that this relationship with the other governments with whom we deal, we need to have staff people that can deal with that. I use an example, the recent arms treaty signed, where the presidents of Russia and the United States were together to sign the treaty. You know that the two of them did not sit down and hammer that treaty out. They had staff that were working for years on this to work together how to deal with it and may have met a couple times to iron out a point or two, but for the most part, their major thing was to have the photo op of them signing it and shaking hands to sign the treaty and that was the top of the executive functions there. And then of course it's got to be ratified, yet. Well, these are...our governments function in the same way. We have those same kind of interplay of things and...but we need to make sure that we have built in the ability to deal with other governments and that it's a very important role for our tribal nations."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to switch gears, one last question before we wrap up this interview, to tribal justice systems and specifically ask you a question about the Odawa Youth Health to Wellness Court, which your tribe established several years ago, which by all accounts has proven quite successful. I'm curious to learn more about why did the tribe establish this program? How is it structured? And how has it benefitted your community?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, we clearly have a problem that other communities have, other tribal nations have. As to why we have it, I guess that's another whole other story, but the fact that we actually have this problem with drugs and we have problem with the youth and there are individuals who just don't seem to be able to respond to parental controls and/or other societal controls and end up being in the court system; and the court system is basically a win/lose kind of system. We've tried to develop other systems that are options and this is an option and can be chosen by someone who is before the court, by the youth and this particular thing is based around that wrap around concept where we have staff from a lot of different departments. I think there's 10 different departments, but they are all working with one youth and their parents and all focused on one case. There's responsibilities on all their parts by bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to this wrap around concept we're able to see success with individuals we had not been able to see success with other programs. This has gotten so successful that we have actually had offenders that are before the local county court who they've offered the option of coming to our program and actually people who they didn't have to assign to the program at all, the local judges have sent people to our program and has been because they recognize the success of it. So this is another way of building an intergovernmental relationship, building community relations with various institutions with whom you have to deal in the community."

Ian Record:

"And this, from what I understand, this health to wellness court is not so much focused on punishment, but on restoring health and harmony not only to the individual defender, but also to their family, to their community at large. Is that true?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes. And I think that that part of the approach, restoring balance is important. And I think that's true in a lot of our programs, that's one of the things we try to focus on. And we have, when you follow our traditional teachings, that whole thing of being in balance is your goal, it's the center, it's what you try to achieve, where you're not at any one extreme. No matter how that extreme may seem, as you move towards that, you're pulling away from being in balance and so something else gets out of balance. So the whole goal is to try to maintain that calm center in order to achieve that. In our traditional ways, that's one of the teachings. And so when we apply those teachings to, trying to apply them to court systems, trying to apply them to our various other social programs, frankly I'm working on how we apply the teachings of the medicine wheel to our budgets. How do we take a budget and determine whether that budget is in balance? And I think that the way we spend our money, the way we allocate our resources, can be just as out of balance as any other thing and it can be symptomatic of we might be having problems in our tribal community that are inexplicable to us. And it could be because the way we're choosing to allocate our resources is out of balance. And so, to me, this is something I'm working on and particularly now that I'm no longer the tribal chair, but I have time to reflect on these things. I want to work on that issue and try to see how that can be, that idea can be furthered."

Ian Record:

"Well Frank, I really appreciate your time today. I've learned quite a bit and I'm sure our listeners and viewers have as well."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, that's it for today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website: nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."

Robert Hershey: The Legal Process of Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Robert Hershey, Professor of Law and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, provides an overview of what Native nations need to consider when it comes to the legal process involved with reforming their constitutions, and dispels some of the misconceptions that people have about the right the federal government has to interfere in what changes Native nations make to their constitutions.

Resource Type
Citation

Hershey, Robert. "The Legal Process of Constitutional Reform." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

Robert Hershey:

"Let me just introduce myself just a little bit. I'm Robert Hershey; I was born and raised in Hollywood, California, born on Sunset Blvd. in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to...yes? I went to Hollywood High School for typing in summer school. I went to John Marshall High School, and the reason we had such a lousy football team is because our mascot was the Barristers. So I don't know if I was destined to become an attorney from the start. However, I skateboarded down the Avenue of the Stars before there were Avenue of the Stars. It was still concrete at that time and growing up in Hollywood as a young kid -- and you might think I'm only 39 with prematurely moonstruck hair -- but really I was born in the late '40s. It was a magnificent time to grow up and to be totally involved in a fantasy world that was very, very difficult to have any concept of racial hatred and discrimination, except when the African-American community decided that they certainly were not getting a fair share of things.

The Indians in my world were all portrayed on television and in movies and it's very important to consider the imagery of American Indian policy, how interwoven it is, because the idea of an Indian is a white construct. We use the term 'Indian and non-Indians' all the time, but at the same time it is something that is just made up. You didn't refer to yourself, ‘I'm Indian.' You referred to yourself by your name, you referred to yourself by your kinship, your family relationships, the nation you belonged to, the societies you were part of, but there's this whole fantasy thing that still dictates today American Indian policy and it paints Indian people with one long, broad brush. Every time there's legislation in Congress it's usually, it's a panoramic landscape of which it paints everybody with the same ideas.

So you come from Hollywood, California, and you find yourself going to big movie theaters that are 10 times the size of houses and you get a really different kind of view of where you were going to be. My grandparents had to leave Europe, they were chased out of Europe because they were Jewish. Fortunately it was before the Holocaust. They went to Cleveland, Ohio, then they came out to California. My parents met there and I was raised there. I went to college at the University of California at Irvine. I studied pre-med. Got tired of memorizing molecules and wound up in law school. I came here to the University of Arizona. When I graduated college at the University of Arizona from law school, I got a job on the Navajo Indian Reservation. How many Navajo speakers are here? Uh oh. I'm in trouble. I was hoping there wasn't going to be any, but we can share mutton together. My mutton story is that where I would go eat mutton every day, one day I was backing up to go back to work and I backed my car into a telephone pole and I still have the muscle spasm from that and that's from 40 years ago. That's my second mutton story. I worked for Diné be'iiná NáhiiÅ‚na be Agha'diit'ahii. So-so? How did I do? I did all right. Thank you. D.N.A. Legal Services, so I was a legal aid attorney there.

And my first experience, and I'd never been on a reservation before, but my first experience, because I was a part of the outdoor life my whole life, and my first experience on the reservation was I rented a house, actually rented a cabin. It was a one-room cabin -- no water, no electricity -- way back in a canyon off the road and the mud chinking was missing. When the wind blew my curtains on the inside of the cabin would blow. I had a two-burner wood stove. I'd fire that thing up, get that stove pipe going red hot, open the front door to a snow storm and I was absolutely in heaven. But when I first went there, my Navajo landlady, my landlord Bertha Harvey, she was about 70 years old, still riding her horses, still chopping her wood and she asked me one day, she said, ‘Robert' -- because she lived much closer to the highway and I lived about a mile and a half back in the canyon -- and she said, ‘Robert, would you...' She called me 'Shinaaí­' and, ‘would you mind taking my goats back to the pen that's next to your place?' Being from Hollywood, what am I going to say, I'm going to say I don't know how to do goats. I didn't know how to do goats, but anyway I said, ‘Sure, I'll do that.' And this one black goat who was the leader of the pack, his name was Skunk and he wore this big bill on him and he took off, he took the whole flock up into the hills and I chased after them and chased after them and chased after them and finally I couldn't get them to come back with me. So I slowly slinked back down the hill after about two hours and I told [her], I said, ‘Bertha, I am so sorry. I lost your goats.' And all she did was start laughing at me. And she says, ‘They know where to go!' So I go back to my house, walk back another mile and a half back and they're in the pen where they're supposed to be. I'm supposed to talk to you today about legal process. My first question, was that legal what she did to me? Then when I worked with the Apaches, they're real good jokesters and they do these joking imitations of the white man. Oh, when I left the Navajo Indian Reservation one of my Navajo friends, she put a thunderbird around my neck, a beaded thunderbird and she said, ‘This will bring you luck in your whole, white life.' And I said, ‘Okay, I got that.'

So I have been very fortunate and I'm absolutely amazed and in wonderment and as I said yesterday, I said, I'm so honored to be with people that care so much and it's been a 40-year commitment on my part to work with and be honored by and in this situation and watch the success of Native peoples. You may get discouraged at times, but look around you, look at the success of Native nations. I am astounded and so happy to be part of that and have based my career on being a participant in that. So thank you very, very much for allowing me that opportunity. So what's legal? Give me a concept. What is legal? Go ahead. I need a mic to give to this young man here. Yes, sir. What's legal?"

Audience member:

"It would be an activity permissible or sanctioned by the people."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. Who else has an idea about legality? What's legal? Because we talk about legal process, we know...we heard so much about law, but I want to know what's legal. You basically said, ‘It's sanctioned by the community.' It's an agreement. It's an agreement. Who else has an idea of what's legal? Go ahead."

Audience member:

"Like a binding contract between two people."

Robert Hershey:

"A binding contract between...again, an agreement. Right? In reality, [it's] an agreement. Yes, sir."

Audience member:

"A treaty."

Robert Hershey:

"A treaty. A binding contract between two people. Anybody else? You've been talking about reformation of constitutions. You've been learning a lot about constitutions. This is something that you heard before; I'll reiterate. This is nothing that gets fixed in stone. This process of amendments you hear and you hear about, ‘Can we amend our constitution, can we keep it moving forward, can we start a constitution?' It just keeps rolling forward. It's as dynamic as your culture and as your culture rolls and rolls and rolls into contemporary societies that you've created, the constitution supports that and it gives you a greater understanding. Later on I'm going to tell you what I consider also different conceptions of what a constitution might look like. There was one comment that was made to me yesterday by a man who said that, ‘The treaty gave us rights,' and, ‘What about our treaty rights?' Let me tell you, I view things a little differently. Native peoples enjoy all the inherent attributes of sovereignty. Think of it as a big pie. You are inherently sovereign. You inherently control your own destiny. Treaties took away parts of that right. Court decisions take away those rights. Congressional statutes take away those rights. What's left is your inherent ability in addition to your traditionally inherent and aboriginal abilities to govern yourself. That's what's left.

When you hear the word 'sovereign', 'You're sovereign. You have rights of sovereignty,' do you know where that comes from? This is not going to be a federal Indian law lecture, but very, very briefly, in the early 1800s there was a series of three cases. The first case legitimized the Doctrine of Discovery. It basically says that the colonizing power of the United States could go ahead and be unapologetic about subjecting you into their dominion and control. They had plenary authority. The second case basically called you dependent...domestic dependent sovereigns. That's where that term 'sovereignty' came from, which over the years has also been my coin of the turn domestic dependent abuse at times or domestic dependent violence, but that's where that word sovereignty comes from. The third case involves, ‘Well, wait a second, if you are domestic dependent sovereign, then we must have some sort of a guardian/ward relation over you, therefore we have the trust responsibility.'

So since the 1800s, the early 1800s, that kind of relationship has been established and the United States then has taken away lands, it's allotted your lands to take away more lands and then, by the 1930s, that's when it passed the Indian Reorganization Act and those are the types of constitutions that we're talking about now. In addition to the Indian Reorganization Act, there's the Oklahoma tribes' organizing documents, there's other specific statutes for tribes that have organized in constitutional format. Is it all voluntary? And why isn't it voluntary? Because there was not equal bargaining power, there was a conquest, there was a power here and there was subterfuge and there was deceitfulness and dishonesty and saddled you with certain systems of government that you're still fighting against or rallying against today.

Now let me ask you this, and this is something that I would like some participation in, when we talk about the Secretary [of Interior] approving constitutions and having that kind of authority over you, there are a great deal of pressures that the Secretary of the Interior and the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and through the superintendents in the different agencies they exert over you. I would like you to share some of those stories before I go into what the secretarial process is all about. There have been cases where the Secretary, the agency personnel, they basically say, ‘If you want to go ahead and change your constitution to remove the authority of the Secretary to approve your actions, then you will either lose federal recognition or you will no longer be a participant to the benefits and advantages of the Indian Reorganization Act governments. You will lose that government-to-government relationship,' those kind of threats. In addition, financial pressures, can you say no to them? Are you strong enough economically to say no to them and carry on by yourself? I would like to hear some of you talk about the things that the BIA and the Secretary and the agencies have disclosed to you or have said to you when you've discussed with them the remodeling or the amendment or the reformation of your constitutions. Can somebody tell me some of the stories? Red Lake has its own history. Red Lake was not an IRA tribe. Navajos have no constitution. They've tried. Yes, please. Because I think it's important for us to share at this time the experiences that everyone's had with the Bureau before I get into the scope of what I think their powers are. Thank you."

Audience member:

"In the 1980s when I was tribal chairman, one of the things we became very much aware of was how ineffective and how not responsive to our needs the BIA was. We discovered some of the same things that Elouise Cobell wrote about and we made the BIA rectify those. When we saw how they were dealing with our land and how the land transactions weren't being carried out to the full extent that they are supposed to be, we decided to do something about it. And we didn't follow the same process you're talking about here today. We didn't follow like this very highly democratic process, but what the tribal council did was identify what we needed to do and that was to take away the authorities that the BIA had over us and take over the governance of the tribe ourselves because we knew that we had people who were much more capable than the individuals who were working for the BIA. We came up with the ideas or with the reforms that we needed, and one of the things that we figured we needed to do was to claim jurisdiction over all people in all lands within the exterior boundaries of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. And then we gave the authority to carry out those jurisdictions to the tribal business council. And we also went for a name change because the Three Affiliated Tribes was what we called...colonial appellation; it was given to us by the BIA. So we wanted to use our own tribal name. We wanted to call ourselves the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. After they drafted... after the legal department drafted those up for us, we went to every community, every district and showed it to them, we explained it to them. And I know you kind of poo-pooed that idea a little while ago, but it worked for us."

Robert Hershey:

"What was that?"

Audience member:

"Where we wrote out what we wanted, we took it to the community, they gave us our... to the communities, they gave us our blessing. They gave us their blessing and...we answered all their questions, we were honest with them and to me, I think the whole issue at hand was one of trust. Did our people trust us enough to let us do this reform? And by being open with them and honest with them and letting them know what we were doing and why we were doing it, when it came time to vote, they voted overwhelmingly for the changes. And that has helped us immensely down the road. After that we took over all the services that the BIA had. We took over the realty department because they were not doing a good job with realty and we knew that. It worked. These amendments worked out very well for us. I was wondering this morning when you were talking about that Violence Against Women Act and you were saying people need to change their tribal constitutions. Is there something within that Act that says we have to proceed in a certain way or if we already claim jurisdiction over all people and all lands are we okay with that already? That's just kind of an aside I was wondering about. But anyway, when it came down to actually running that Secretarial election, there were other things we wanted to do at the time, but the BIA told us that the people in Washington did not want us to have more than three amendments presented to our people because they thought it might confuse them. So we went along with that and later on we did another secretarial election to get other things done that we wanted to do."

Robert Hershey:

"And is your constitution still, the amendment process still subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior? If you wanted to amend your constitution again, do you have to have another..."

Audience member:

"We still have to have the Secretarial election. We were encouraged to leave that in there. One of the things I just want to mention that we found later on is that our...a number of our people, if things didn't go just the way they wanted them to, they kind of longed for the BIA again. And we found that kind of interesting because if they couldn't get their way with the tribe they thought maybe the BIA, if they still had control of the tribe maybe they would have let them have this, that or whatever."

Robert Hershey:

"Thank you for sharing that 'cause I do want to talk a little..."

Audience member:

"I have one other thing I want to say, too. If you're going to do this, you have...the tribe has to be the one to push on these. The BIA is very lax. They don't...they're not going to push things forward for you. We had a young man who was one of our tribal members, Ray Cross, and we had another legal counsel, Kip Quail. But Ray Cross, one of our own tribal members was very, very aggressive and he just...he pushed everything. It was always, ‘Okay, when is our next meeting? All right, when are we going to meet next?' And he was telling the BIA not...he was telling the BIA what to do. We didn't let them tell us what to do."

Robert Hershey:

"Absolutely. Thank you. You brought up a question that many of you might be thinking about. The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and also the Violence Against Women Act. They require certain constitutional rights, United States constitutional rights like the presence of a counsel, in order to go ahead and have increased sentencing authority or to assume jurisdiction over non-Indians in domestic violence cases on the reservation they have to be afforded United State constitutional rights, not just Indian Civil Rights Act cases. So if your constitutions have a provision in there where you have adopted the Indian Civil Rights Act and made that part of your constitution and that has old sentencing authority in it, it does not provide...it may be a limitation and that may be something you have to amend to go ahead to keep in pace with the jurisdictional advantage and the punishment that can be meted out under these two new acts, so that may be something. Yes. Thank you."

Audience member:

"Thank you."

Robert Hershey:

"Anybody else? How about somebody who has a good story about the BIA? Raise your hands. There's a young man over there who's got a good story about the BIA."

Audience member:

"I am not a young man, but thank you. We had trouble in our reservation and some buildings burned and tribal council moved their meetings off the reservation under the Roger Jourdain regime. And I had a friend that worked for the BIA in Minneapolis and she called me and told me to come down. And so I went down to the BIA in Minneapolis and she showed me an order from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At the time, there was a lot of mineral concerns that are still going on right now, but this was like in the 1970s, late 1970s and the directive from the Bureau of Indian Affairs was to allow oil companies and people that...companies that were looking for minerals to allow them to do that without informing the tribal council that the Bureau, local bureaus on each reservation throughout the United States, giving them the authority to go ahead and allow illegal coring and other matters that was going on. And it did happen in many Midwestern states. So I took that directive and I took it to Roger. Roger got mad at me. He said, ‘Where the hell did you get this?' I said, ‘Well, it doesn't matter where I got this. What matters is the directive from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.' I said, ‘This is what I'm giving you.' And it wasn't too long after that the superintendent of Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Red Lake Nation was booted out and Roger informed other tribal councils about that directive from the Bureau undermining tribal governments. And so that's a story I have about them."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. Thank you. Someone back here too. Because what I'm getting at here is that there are some sentiments on the reservations that the BIA there is to protect some people from actions of tribal councils and they do appreciate that oversight, as much as they do interfere with the tribes exercising their own self-determination. So there is that kind of split...

...Not only is there dependence on this bureaucracy, but some people are advantaged because of this bureaucracy. And so when you adopt the BIA constitutions, how many people are living today that have not been a part of a BIA constitution from a government, especially if your nation was there from the 1930s and adopted that constitution? So these are very powerful institutions, so that your leaders that are part of the IRA government, tribal council, they wear the clothes of power by virtue of these forms of government. So you're trying to change that, too. Now I've worked with a number of nations in constitutional reformation. One tribe has been trying to amend its constitution since 1975 and they've appointed a committee, a constitutional committee, but we heard yesterday too there's some fatigue that sets in and that fatigue...and so you have attrition, you have people falling out. And I've been at council meetings where there's been a call to the audience, ‘Who wants to be on the constitutional committee now? Who wants to be there?' And maybe one person might step up and give it a go. But we've advised these constitutional committees and some of these constitutional committees think that they are in effect a shadow government. I don't know if that's been an experience there where they think that they should have the power. They say, ‘The council's not doing this, this, this so we're going to change the constitution to make sure that they don't do this, this and this.' There [are] other people that I've worked with that have been trying to amend their constitution since 1990. This is a long, arduous process. Please don't feel that you have to get this done within any quick period of time. Before I continue...Yes, councilman.

Audience member:

"Just kind of a question, if you can discuss or point out the state of the organizations for example like the BIA and their role is changing, but they have some changes that are going on like some generational differences that are being felt and also I've heard that -- Ben pointed out at the legislative level -- where younger leadership is coming in and they're met with these older...at the state level it's become evident as well. There's just a generational gap in the organizations. And how is that changing and where do we see that going because I...one of the things, the good things I was going to say about the BIA is that they just got emails maybe about five years ago, which I thought was remarkable. They've come a long way."

Robert Hershey:

"I talked to some of my students...I've had two students that got a job a year-and-a-half ago at the solicitor's office. They were...I'm very proud of them. They were chosen out of about 1,000 people, there were four jobs open, two of our students from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy got jobs in the solicitors and I called them to ask them these types of things. There's still a climate of kind of hush-hush. There's still the politics going on there. Most of your experiences with the BIA are going to be at the agency level and so those experiences are not necessarily resonate all the way up to the central powers in Washington where you're going to get like a consultation policy from the Secretary of the Interior. Well, it looks really nice. They've done a fairly good job, but like all consultation policies, they're usually adopted before they consult with the tribes as to what a consultation policy should look like. And I'm going to come back to that in a little bit, but there may be a generational issue. But being youthful does not guarantee that you're going to have dramatic success. The youthful people on the Navajo Reservation in the 1920s are the ones that wanted to go ahead and start this process of exploration of shale oil development. But again, it's going to be your own individual experiences. Usually it's the agency superintendent levels that are going to determine...and those relationships I've seen have changed a bit to where they've been more supportive. But let me go on and talk about still how they make their determinations. Go ahead."

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"We can't retire. I'm sorry. We can't. You would all have that experience. One second, sir. I want to get to one other thing. They've given me a sign there and I've got about six hours of material to get through. How many people do not have an IRA constitution here? Navajo, Red Lake does not. Sorry?"

Audience Member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"It looks like it, but it's not under the IRA, am I correct?"

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"So you still went ahead and had the Secretarial approval. So there are those kinds of constitutions that have not been adopted under 25 USC Section 460, which is the Indian Reorganization Act, but you've put the Secretarial approval language in your constitution, so you're still bound by the Secretarial approval. Yes?"

Audience member:

"With our committee here one of the things we were looking at is to...striking that out of our new constitution and..."

Robert Hershey:

"You want to know the consequences."

Audience member:

"Under the law, and maybe international law, would it still be recognized in international law because it was signed off, our original one was signed off by the government."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. I'm going to get to that in a minute, the consequences of removing the approval process by the Secretary of the Interior."

Audience member:

"Does that include Red Lake's unique status?"

Robert Hershey:

"That would include Red Lake's unique status as well because it basically...excuse me. Was it by statute or was it by just an inclusion that you put in there?"

Audience member:

"Inclusion."

Robert Hershey:

"Inclusion. You may get some backlash from the Secretary on that; however, you can get it done. There's been some threats that I've been made aware of where the Secretary would basically say, ‘Well, you're no longer going to be federally recognized.' Those of you that have succumbed to those kind of threats, that is not true. You cannot lose your federal recognition under the acknowledgement process by virtue of removing the Secretarial language. What will happen is if you remove the Secretarial approval language, like I said yesterday, in one sense, in one sense that you could remove the language that's filtered through all the language of the constitution that they have approval: attorneys, they have to approve mining, they have to approve leases, things...you can get rid of all that language. It's only when you go ahead and try to remove the Secretarial approval clause, ‘amending the constitution,' if you already have it in the constitution, that then you would no longer become an IRA tribe. It does not mean you lose your federal recognition. Yes, ma'am."

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"Well, it is related to the trust responsibility and here's how, and that's a reason why some of the BIAs, how they view whether you can go ahead and amend their constitution or not. They're basically saying, ‘We have to support our trust responsibility to you, therefore we have to have oversight.'

Now, for the Secretary to...first of all, in the materials you have are the statutes, the Code of Federal Regulations that talk about the process of what you have to do to go ahead and have an amendment. How many people have...if you've had no constitution whatsoever and you want to become an IRA constitutional tribe, then you have to have 60 percent of the members that are on your reservation petition the Secretary of the Interior to have an election. If you already have, then you get together the people that want to go ahead and have an amendment to the constitution or a revocation of the constitution and then you have to go through a process where you tell the Secretary, the Secretary has 90 days to go ahead and look at your amendments, give you suggestions and advice under the trust responsibility, approve or disprove and then you have to...if they disprove, then you have to decide whether you're going to go ahead with the election or not; I'll tell you the grounds in just a minute. And then, once the election is had, 30 percent of your voting, the eligible voters must show up at the election, a majority of which then determines whether those amendments pass. The Secretary then, if they pass, the Secretary then has 45 days within which to approve or disprove of those amendments. If they don't make a decision within 45 days, they automatically become an amendment to the constitution.

Now here's where the trust responsibility comes in, because prior to 1988 when the Indian Reorganization Act was amended, the Secretary was insinuating itself in all manner of decisions as to whether or not it could approve or disprove your constitutional amendment provisions. And they...basically for any reason whatsoever, and the tribes were really getting hung up. As a result of the 1988 amendments, the Secretary only has the authority to disprove your...if your proposed amendments are in violation of federal laws, congressional statutes, court cases. What the Secretary is also doing is they say that they have the authority to insinuate themselves into the approval process if your proposed amendments violate federal policy. And this is where that trust responsibility comes in because there's no standards that talk about the violation of what the policies are. They can bring anything up. Now this is especially acute in membership issues, when you're trying to amend the constitution in terms of...the regulations are given in your materials under one of the numbers. You can read through that. So it is still unclear and it is not demarcated exactly what the authority is. The BIA Handbook of 1987 is still in use. There are working drafts of later, of 2009 handbooks, copies that I've seen and they're really hard to find, this handbook how the BIA determines whether or not it's going to go ahead and rule whether or not something is approved or not. For the most part the BIA has been approving. The consequences of not being an IRA tribe; if you remove that language, what are those? What else do you have in place at that time? There are communities that want that certitude, that they have the United States government exercising its trust responsibility through the Secretary of the Interior and steadfastly saying that, ‘We have the supremacy of the United States government behind us because they approve what we do.' The Secretary has no authority to approve your ordinances or resolutions, statutes, providing you have not given them that authority in your constitution. It's only in terms of the amendment process.

Now I want to move on because I have a few things to show you here. Somebody asked about the United States, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, some of the international law documents. I'm not going to run through all of it here but please, all of you should have a copy of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in your council rooms, in your attorney's offices because these laws are binding. Now there's no real teeth in them, it's not that if the United States Office of the Solicitor or the United States government in itself violates any of these principles, that you can then sue them, take them to task, but you can incorporate these principles within your constitution should you choose to do so -- I'm sorry these are not well written. I'm going to buzz through these because they're different -- but you have the right to determine your own members, you have the right to control your own lands, you have the right to make decisions about just about anything and no state government, United States -- and when I say state governments, nation states -- can go ahead and interfere with those rights as long as you continue to assert them through this process.

Now, the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation; if some of you are involved in sacred sites litigation, holy place litigation, the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation -- I'm sorry you can't see these -- just put a clause in there, it just came out last month that they're supporting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples within their advisory council materials. This is an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] policy. This is just for draft. It says, ‘Do not cite or quote.' Too bad. There's another provision in the EPA draft that basically says, ‘that we support the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.' This is the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Rights; this is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, one of the international law documents, the International Labor Organization Convention 169. Your attorney should be well versed in this. In fact, on April 19th at ASU, the Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples Human Rights is part of a symposium at Arizona State University on incorporating these Indigenous international law principles into the domestic discourse. Native peoples, Native societies and nations in this country have been reluctant to embrace this because they've held so fast to the trust responsibility. This is the frontier. This is the inclusion of the Indigenous Peoples Rights in the new constitution of Nepal. You will see this. And in Bolivia you will see this. This is the National Congress of American Indians. They have a draft.

Now, I want to think about something other than what you've been talking about, these kind of documents that you try to embrace within a written, English language written structure and whether or not there are other concepts of how you formulate government. How many people have conversations about plants, about place names, about a certain site, about a mountain? What's the story there, how does that envision, how does that help you then translate into what's appropriate to be written rules of conduct? The O'odham here, they basically teach their children, or at least traditionally, they taught their children, they waited until bedtime and when the child was just about ready to go to sleep they would tell them in their dream so they could dream about what was appropriate behavior or when they would wake up.

There's different ways of expressing what a constitution may be -- a land management plan. This is the Poplar River First Nation in Manitoba and what they have done is that they've organized together, they've mapped out their lands, they have a vision statement, which you might consider like a preamble to the constitution. One of the speakers just before me was talking about land management, comprehensive land management. The constitution reformation does not have to come before a comprehensive land management [plan]. One may inform the other. And in the process of developing comprehensive land management strategies, I suggest that you map your intergenerational memories. You probably already have done that. You've taken the statements of your elders. You've archived them. You've protected privileged knowledge. You've put them in your archives, you've created maps, you've created place names, you've gathered stories. These are important not just for whether or not you're going to go into aboriginal title litigation or whether you're going to design a constitution, but whether there's preservation of language because all those stories inform custom and tradition that can be used by your tribal courts in establishing common law.

So what they've done here is they have the vision statement, they spent 10 years working on this comprehensive land use plan. As a consequence, shortly after this they worked in concert with the government of Manitoba. The government of Manitoba passed Bill 6 and Bill 6 basically set aside most of the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba as conservation area joining the traditional lands of the Poplar River First Nation. You can get there. Go on their website and download this plan. It's magnificent. This is the constitution, according to my colleague Ray Austin, Professor Ray Austin, former Navajo Supreme Court Justice. He's one of our professors. He's a distinguished juris in residence at our college in our program. This is his constitution of the Navajo Nation. ‘Mother Earth and Father Sky and the rights and responsibilities and the protections afford each.' He says he can go ahead and talk about the whole Navajo system of government through this. He incorporates the terms hozho, hozho k'e, nayee, other concepts here.

Emory Sekaquaptewa, magnificent Hopi elder, Chief Judge of the Hopi Court of Appeals, one of my most significant mentors, wrote about Hopi songs and ritual dances as being constitutions, as being the stories. So when we think of a written constitution, we ask our self, ‘Who's it for or to? Is it to show to the external world? Is it for our selves internally? Are there other ways that we can go ahead and express ourselves by virtue of mapping, by singing?' These are all constitutions. These are all rules of conduct. The Maya Atlas, the Toledo Mayo in Belize put together an atlas. I would have you look at their...this is something called 'Dreaming New Mexico' and it's not a very good rendition. A project in New Mexico that got together all the stakeholders, the Native peoples, the Pueblo peoples, the food peoples, the people that were bringing food in, the energy inputs, the ranchers, the farmers, people...all your community, all your neighbors and they visualized and mapped something different because we're all talking about ecological sustainability here in addition to the promotion of self-determination and sustainability of Native identity within your community. So you have neighbors out there as well. I'd like to hear if any of you have any other questions that I might be able to answer or comments. I would love to hear from you please. Kevin? No. Yes, sir."

Audience member:

"This has to do with citizenship. If you were born on a reservation, your allegiance is to that piece of land where you were born, correct?"

Robert Hershey:

"I would hope so."

Audience member:

"And so if you were born off the reservation then your allegiance is to the United States? Is that part of..."

Robert Hershey:

"Me?"

Audience member:

"Yes."

Robert Hershey:

"Am I allegiance to the United States?"

Audience member:

"Yeah. Do you have allegiance...? When you're born in Hollywood...?"

Robert Hershey:

"That gets...that's a political thing. I don't want to go ahead and cast a disparaging comment about the United States government in front of this illustrious audience, but I will if you want me to. I'm much more comfortable with Native politicians than I am with Anglo politicians. That might answer your question there. I've had many more positive experiences on reservations and working with Native peoples. It's been my whole career except for surfing and skateboarding. Thanks. Anybody else before...yes, I knew you'd come back here, Kevin. Give that man a microphone, please."

Kevin:

"One of the questions I have is all the IRA governments, when you get sworn into office, you have an oath to the United States government...when you swear into office, does anybody swear an oath to the United States government? That's one of the issues with the IRA for some of us. So when we swear an oath, even though I was elected in with my own people, I swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States because it's part of our constitution. That, in turn, we become a body politic of the United States government in one form or another. I want to talk about an issue with White Earth, but it involves the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe about the issue with the BIA or Secretary Interior. In our constitution, if we wanted to remove somebody from office, we have a process called Article X. And if Article X isn't heard by or acted upon by the reservation business committee, our tribal council or the tribal executive committee, then it in turn goes to the Secretary of the Interior for review. For the last 22 years, the four petitions that went to the Secretary of the Interior have all came back and said, ‘It's an intratribal matter, deal with it yourself.' In the issue that happened with White Earth years ago on a removal process, the BIA stepped in and let a person sit office early at the tribal executive committee with only two members to run a reservation. So the BIA stepped in and told that person they were able to do that by violating the tribal executive committee and everything that existed under the constitution. So I don't know if that...everybody else in here has to deal with them kind of issues, but we as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, that's what we have to deal with. By the BIA stepping in sometimes and setting precedence or telling us, ‘No, we're not going to deal with it even though trust responsibility is ours, we're not going to deal with it, you deal with it.'"

Robert Hershey:

"Some of the things that they say they have authority to do is stepping on electoral matters."

Kevin:

"Exactly."

Robert Hershey:

"They do and they still...and I've seen cases of that right now. And they're very reluctant to do [it] in membership issues, which is striking because the Pala Band of Mission Indians, this case that just came out, it's a horrible, horrible case of disenrollment and the Federal District Court dismissed the lawsuit and basically said the tribe is sovereign, too. They had a sovereign immunity clause there. One other thing, if you go to the BIA website right now and you scroll down in their general thing and they have a pattern constitution you can click onto, just about the same as it ever was. So I suggest that all of you take over the BIA, start writing new constitutions and let's do it right. So thank you very much. I appreciate your time."

Ruben Santiesteban and Joni Theobald: Choosing Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership: The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Ruben Santiesteban and Joni Theobald of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians provide an overview of how Lac du Flambeau developed a new approach to cultivating and then selecting quality leaders to lead the Band to a brighter future.

Resource Type
Citation

Santiesteban, Ruben and Joni Theobald. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: Lac du Flambeau." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

Joni Theobald:

"Again, my name's Joni Theobald. I'm the Education [Lac du Flambeau language] and Workforce Development Director. Part of my work with the tribe and with the constitution started about three years ago, actually a little longer than that, but really more intensely with...a lot with our tribe and my role...I guess I'm pretty direct, I'm pretty...for me, it's all about process and that's kind of my fit with the constitution, the policy, and the tribal council. So with the Education and Workforce Development, our goal, our mission, one of the first things that...I brought my slides and I'm going to probably jump around a little bit just to kind of give you an idea of the background, but also what is the process and how we came about where we are today.

When I came home maybe a couple years ago, actually I had grew up in Lac du Flambeau, went off to college, spent some time in different capacities, work capacities before coming back. Our tribe was going through a lot of difficult time and it was kind of a synchronized I guess of what had happened. There was an opening, the Education Director. There was a takeover within our tribe. There was a lot of turmoil, but it was kind of a new term for the tribe where I moved in the director, new council members came on board, and it was still some existing council members as well, but what we came into is...along with interestingly enough was the Native Nations Institute kind of was a couple of years ago coming around, they were in Lac du Flambeau. So again all these synchronized things happening with our tribe. We brought into the light for us the constitutional reform and someone again, in some of the tribes I know we all face is communication, transparency and just basically engaging and looking for solution-based...

So back to my real direct and one of the main things that I was brought in to along with and asked to help was just kind of organizing and creating a process for change. Change in a sense that was very task- and action-oriented, I guess you would say. Again, my background is when I look at trying to take a lot of what was going on and how do we look at communication, how do we look at making informed decisions, this kind of led to the path of where we started creating a process, whether it was developing and maintaining our leaders through education or it was developing and trying to make change in mindset or if it was a change in our constitution, it really followed what I say and some of the documents I put in here kind of represent that change and that's where I wanted to kind of focus my...what I would talk about today.

So I'm just going to go through. One of the things that...well, just to back up a little bit. One of the main things when I started...I have family on the council, many of us do, started getting calls about how do we create change and how can we bring an educational piece? My background also was that as Director of Indian [Education] on Madison, Wisconsin before moving home for a while. And so there was...just coming back and forth some of my family members and some council are reaching out and talking to me about, "˜What can we do to bring this type of training and understanding as we go throughout reform? We've got to make sure we bring along our tribal members in understanding preamble all the way to the different options for membership.' So one of the things we talked about was, how do we communicate, how do we create [a] classroom situation, but how do we look at what do we look like today and then where are we trying to go? One of the things that our tribe maybe some that we weren't doing and some of you may be already involved in it is looking and collecting data, really looking at, 'What do we look like?' And then from there, really having really great discussions about who do we want to be and then how do we get there.

So one of the things we decided...we're in a...we're a per cap tribe, but one of the things we haven't done was on per cap we really haven't had a way of collecting data or opinions or what are some of the ideas of what our tribal membership was thinking about. But as a baseline, one of the first things, I was moving home and it happened to be the Education Director job opened up in our community, was to take a look at who are our tribal members, who were they, how old were they? And so I'm not going to go and talk through all the tribes, but I just wanted to give an idea because I think really giving the council a good understanding of who we are and what were our ages and what we represent was the first for us. We do have the census, but again it wasn't...it wasn't -- sometimes it's skewed. It really didn't break apart some of the off rez/on rez of what we were looking at. So housing again I know with a lot of tribes is always...it generates a lot of discussion and interest. One of the unique things about having our survey, it was...we also -- which Ruben will talk about a little later -- is we created a youth council. We strategically set that up because what we're doing, we thought about our youth in about 10 years according to our criteria could run for council. We have a large learning curve and there's so many things you need to know. Let's start, let's create a council that looks at tribal governance but also is uniquely involved in this process of informed decisions and looking for solutions to different issues that we have. So they were instrumental in the data collection, the formulation of questions, what's a valid question, and it was just a learning process for all of us. So I'm just going to go through a few of the slides that we created.

So we looked at employment and I'm just going to...and mainly for me coming as education [director], there really wasn't a strategic purpose to our department. It was all about give out the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] grants. So we really expanded, worked on a strategic plan of our department of what was the purpose of our education and workforce? Workforce came about six months later underneath the education department along with Head Start. So I have the full gambit from the pre-K to senior college that we have in place. So it was really neat to see the patterns and to watch as we develop and leaders as we started our pre-K was does a leader look like, what does it want...where do we...what do want our leaders to be, what are the characteristics and what do we have in place in our systems, whether it's governance, whether it's schools, whether it's just ethics? So again back to our survey, it's looking at our educational levels.

One of the triggers as well, we had...at the same time that I was moved into our Education Director position our tribal administration position was up as we...I don't recall, but we were looking for a replacement and it was vacant. We had three tribal members apply for tribal administrator and one of the policies that we have is a tribal member needs to be the tribal administrator. Well, we had three candidates, but only one candidate had the educational criteria to take the job and at the time the candidate wasn't the preferred choice given our turmoil, things going on. So that kind of also...we looked at...again, but the education, what we found out of our 4,000-member tribe, we had about 60 tribal members with bachelor's degrees, maybe I think 30 with master's, and about seven with a Ph.D. Of those, as many of you may have experienced, is most of them didn't live on the reservation, kind of had a disconnect and weren't home and again, strategically with our department we were looking to groom and develop leaders who were going to stay home and help us in the trenches. You can feel free to...I think they have these all on...if you would like to take these. I know some of your copies are hard to read.

Again, one of the key things that we looked at is, as we think about developing leaders we think about someone, we think about culture and languages always out on our strategic plan that we started implementing as language revitalization was key and very important to a leader. So having this data and having these, so council can make informed decisions on budget and on programs, was real critical. This wasn't a process that was in place, looking and collecting data. Internet access, I think...we talk about...this is looking at our distance learning, bringing college to the reservation. That was really important as well. Again, we broke it off to on- and off-reservation. But again, that was kind of our key, our start, and later on I can talk more about our candidate and our training and educational programming. As you look in your binder, we started creating and prioritizing what were key topical areas, areas of need in tribal governance and in employment that we were looking to train and develop leaders, managers for our projects. So that led into more of our really formalizing and structuring the educational programs that met the needs, what we looked for, addressing barriers of place-based education as free as possible. I pitched that to many colleges, they didn't buy it, but they at least gave us a discount and we had collective contracted classes.

One of the main things is though is the mindset of the council and the newly formed was really education always was critical in importance and so they supported and backed and invested in developing our capacity. That was instrumental in getting off the ground and moving this into a real formalized educational process. One of the documents we have is the resolution for council and that was a key of making college in the workday for all tribal members' employment. We are the largest employers in our region and the tribe employs...almost half of our employees or actually 60 percent are tribal members, so we created college in the workplace where it reduced travel, the barrier. Our closest college was an hour away. We developed our broadband fiber system so we could have distance learning in real time, kind of what we are watching here today. We had the same issues with the real time. And also the cost factor -- so we wanted to make it very affordable because one thing we talked about is many of our tribal members are very knowledgeable. Had they had the opportunity to build college within and make it applicable to work they could have easily in 30 years had their master's or doctorate degree and we wanted to find a way and create that opportunity at home. I'm sure we'll have questions about it, but I'm going to give some time to Ruben. Again, this is...he's going to speak about how this transition, how we strategically pulled in the youth in this process as well."

Ruben Santiesteban:

"Thank you. I just want to thank everybody. [Lac du Flambeau language]. My English name is Ruben Santiesteban and my Indian name is '[Lac du Flambeau language].' It means 'King Bird' and '[Lac du Flambeau language]' is 'Lac du Flambeau.' I just want to say [Lac du Flambeau language] to all our veterans and elders here and I'm just really thankful and grateful to be speaking to you today.

How do we choose our leaders and maintain quality leadership? What an excellent session to be a part of. Our constitution criteria, blood quantum if you have the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, you have to be at least 25 years of age, quarter blood, 25 signatures from the community, and at least living on the reservation for one year. There really isn't a lot of criteria there, but it's what we have. You can change some of those things through your election code, just to give you an idea of where you can kind of make those changes. Now in Indian Country, what we see that's trending always and you all know this, last names in family members. When it comes time to vote, who do you vote for? Well, if you don't know who you're voting for, who do you vote for? We don't have many voters out there, but we do have some and when they do go to the polls, if they don't know anything about anybody, who do they vote for? You can assume that they'll vote for a cousin, uncle, auntie, grandpa, grandmother. That's the way it goes in any country. That's just the way it is. I wanted to speak about that because one of the greatest things about being a leader in any country on your reservation is that we all have the same issues, we all are facing the same things on each reservation with our people.

I'm one of the youngest leaders ever voted to council and I had the highest vote count in Lac du Flambeau history and part of that was from the candidate endorsement training. That training gave candidates the opportunity to state their positions in current affairs and what they hoped to accomplish in their term in office. And we don't get to see that in Indian Country. We need to do that. How do you know who you're voting for? I'm Ruben Santiesteban, definitely don't have the strong name on our reservation, but through the candidate endorsement training [it] really gave me an opportunity to state who I am, where my family comes from. So it was...if you have any questions about that, we'll be available to you. You should do that, implement that on your reservation if you have a constitution and you choose your leaders the same way in which we do in Lac du Flambeau.

Now to move on to talk about the Waswagoning Youth Council is also part of UNITY. This young group of leaders has been such a positive force in our community. They have a unique understanding of treaty rights and tribal governance. The youth council travels state and nationwide networking with new youth groups and tribal leaders in Indian Country to help rebuild Native communities. This leadership team consists of youth between the ages of 12 and 24, because at 25 you can run for council. They attack issues like youth engagement, teen suicide, and substance abuse among teens and I'm truly honored to be mentoring our future-generation leaders. If you want to make change in your community, start promoting things like youth councils, immersion, community events, after school programs, leadership conferences, cultural activities we do need to promote in our communities. It's vital to our family asset building and I hope all of you are doing that and if you're not get to it.

I want to talk about the Expo, it's in your binder there and the [Lac du Flambeau language], which stands for "˜We Are All Doing This Together.' It was named by one of our spiritual leaders in the reservation that gave us [Lac du Flambeau language] to help me build this Expo. Now the parents knew the Connections Expo was an opportunity for our community to meet and greet with their tribal service providers, local area service providers and potential employers, college and recreational opportunities. This Expo also gives our tribal service providers a chance to build their brand awareness. We all know that we need that in our community. We know that we have the resources and the tools, but we need to get together. Most importantly these opportunities allow program managers and team members to network with each other and possibly collaborate on future projects. What do we know in Indian Country? We use our resources up all the time. Some of us have a lot of programs. In our case we have over 91 programs, and of those 91 programs I can tell you right now that a lot of them have the same goals, to make Waswagoning a better place. So to get together and collaborate and pull those resources together can be very beneficial to your change. There's some key components to the Expo and one of them was community development, building program awareness, networking, and also building capacity in the community. The Expo, in its second year this year, had the most families together in our history. That's important to me.

They had asked me to kind of talk about my story a little bit and I didn't kind of want to do that, but to talk about my upbringing. I grew up in both Lac du Flambeau and Milwaukee and it gave me a unique insight on small-town and big-city communities. My childhood was full of adventure and ups and downs, but encouragement to succeed from family members was everlasting on me. I'm sitting here in front of you and I'm going to tell you that I was an at-risk youth and I was going to be a nobody. I was told I wasn't going to make it, told I wasn't going to be able to make any change in my community, I was going to be in jail for the rest of my life, and really had no direction. And I persevered, just like Indian people have for the last 10,000 years. I was not going to put up with that and I created a new chapter in my career and it has been nothing short of the greatest moments of my life and I get to do things like this and speak in front of you, in front of tribal leaders, and I just really appreciate that. My whole life I've been a dreamer, but this time where I sit before you today, I get to live this dream.

To move on and try to move through quickly, I wanted to talk to you about personal branding and what that means. We all have a brand. People are making assumptions and perceptions of who we are and today it's going to be about your tribe, your reputation and actions that you take in your community. That's your brand, that's who you represent. My personal brand and how I carry myself, and hopefully I've left an everlasting impression on you today. I'm going to say a quote from someone who's been a real good mentor to me. His name is Brian Jackson. He's the President of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association: "˜What is good education? Is getting a good education mean getting good grades, or is it making sure students are motivated to learn? Education comes in all forms. We just have to learn to achieve the goals and help students be motivated for higher education after high school.' I think about that all the time and I think it's just positive and being where I come from and the upbringing and the struggles that I've had to face -- just like many of you have -- that it feels good to have words like that to be told to me.

I will speak a little bit on leadership. Communication, the fight against the silo effect...my biggest fear, we talked about this yesterday is we have council sometimes that rescind the things that we've done. That's a fear of mine. The work that you're doing, will it matter if we don't communicate better with each other when new councils come in, will they change what you've done? And will 10, 15 years later your great idea that you had will come back again and it'll seem new and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but we need to get out of that silo effect and that's part of leadership. When it comes to leadership we have to challenge the myth that it's about position and power. The truth is leadership is an observable set of skills and abilities. Leadership is learned. We don't just get to wake up one day and become the greatest leaders in the world or the greatest leaders in Indian Country. Learning to lead is about discovering what you care about and value, the kind of things we talked about. In Ojibwe country, we have the seven grandfather teachings and we have the clan systems, which we abide by. Those are the governing systems that we used before the 1934 constitution came and that's who we are. And as we become leaders, we're faced with some difficult questions and the one that I ask myself all the time is, 'Am I the right person to lead at this very moment, is it me, and why?' You have to remember, you can't lead others until you've first led yourself through struggle and opposing values. And I'm definitely not telling you anything that's new, but I will sit here and remind you of why you're here, of who you are, the choices that you make that represent your nation and your people. The most critical knowledge for all of us and for leaders especially turns out to be self-knowledge or personal brand and the most powerful leaders encourage others to lead. As we encourage youth to come and come lead our nation, are we going to be ready to hand off those leadership roles to them? Because that's exactly...the hardest thing we have to do is being able to let others lead.

Now I have a minute left. I want to make sure that we...I give a shout out to the Native Nations Institute and [the] Continuing Education and Certificate in Indigenous Governance. I was a part of that and I think it was fantastic. And I just want to say in Lac du Flambeau, the actions that we take today isn't just for tomorrow, it's for the next 30 years and that we are...we do have a sovereign attitude and we also are building education for capable institutions in our cultural match and using our seven grandfather teachings and instilling that culture into our people. I would like to end today by saying that leadership is in the moment and after speaking with Steve Cornell yesterday, I have a quote or a statement for you that I want you to remember: "˜Successful nation building starts with our greatest asset: our children, the youth. What are we doing to protect what we have built? Education and language revitalization are key components to the foundation of the survival of our community in improving the lives of our people.' With that being said, I just want to say miigwetch and hope I have a chance to speak with you more after we're done."

Honoring Nations: Jeanette Clark Cassa: San Carlos Apache Elders Cultural Advisory Council

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Jeanette Cassa (1929-2004), Coordinator of the San Carlos Apache Elders Cultural Advisory Council (ECAC), discusses ECAC's work and the traditional Apache core values that its member elders work to instill in the younger generations of Apache people. She also stresses the importance of tribal leaders living by those values and listening to their people.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Cassa, Jeanette Clark. "San Carlos Apache Elders Cultural Advisory Council." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Jeanette Clark Cassa:

"[Apache language] Good evening and we had a good day today and may it all be well today. My name is Jeanette Cassa and I'll try to do like the Navajos do. My name is Jeanette Cassa [Apache language]. The [Apache language] is very almost extinct now. There's just a few people [Apache anguage] probably extended out to the Navajo countries. But this is what I am.

I have an outline here and I'm going to try to make it short. I'm not quite used to speaking out in public. I'm used to being on top of the mountains looking for herbs, looking for plants, and naming the animals in Apache and birds out there for the education, the school. It says here that I'm going to talk about the past. Well, my...I was born in 1929 just when my father and my mother, we were beginning to realize that there is another world that they have to get in the trend of. And my great grandmother had been a prisoner of war, my paternal grandmother. She used to tell us stories about the prisons and it was very sad out there. They were roaming in the mountains but they came back, they were settled down in the valley and they...from there my father was born and then I came in.

Just when tribal council in 1934 -- I was about five years old when they developed the constitution. And the constitution took place then, so it was developed. And the tribal council was called the administrators at first and they advised people, they worked with the people real good and they never sat...they have some letters yet that they have written and it says there that not...it doesn't say 'I' and the chairman doesn't say, 'I.' He says, 'This council' and then he signs his name last while the councils, the district councils signed their names first. In those days they prayed and they got together and they prayed as they were developing the constitution. I believe that's why it still holds today. Only about one or two was amended in 1954.

But since I had gotten out of school I've been with the, helping out the council all the time and I felt that they were my relatives because I was an orphan. I had relatives in Mescalero, but there was quite a distance. So I grew up helping out the council. In those days the cultural principles of the...they gave advices on that according to the principles of life and whatever. Those things are gone today when you look at it, they're gone. They're gone and even in the English language, way back when Moses came there was a law put forth like the 10 Commandments. Do you ever stop to look at that? We had something like that. Don't do this or don't do that, but do this.

In the mornings when you got up you started out with your right foot, your right hand, whatever you were going to do. You were told to start with the right hand, your right foot so everything will go well with you for the day. They used to do that and then they say, 'Don't beg for things. Let it come to you or hunt for it, work for it yourself. Look for it.' Like when our people were in mountains those days they looked for food. They were constantly scratching around for food or looking, searching for food to eat so they were busy during the day. The men were out hunting, the women were at home or roasting agaves or looking for nuts and whatever they can eat. So they were constantly busy like the ants and that kept them slim in those days. And the food that they ate kept them healthy because they were natural foods.

So that's how their life was in those days and as we became...when the constitution came in, in those days we became a ward of the government. And then I went back to the reservation and as soon as I got home the council put me on the election committee so I had been with that until 1990. In 1954, I have seen two chairmen that were running who shake hands when one of them won. There [were] no harsh words; no criticizing one another, but they shook hands and that was good in 1954. After that it got out of hand. So that's where we are at today.

And the modern things that we learned that take place; I'm not as good as what Andrew [Lee]...but I do try to help anywhere, everywhere you help out. Your parents, your great grandmother told you, 'If you help out, it will come back to you in a thousand folds' is that they taught us. If you are a leader, don't hoard everything, give until you are the last one, take the last one or whatever you gave you got the smaller one and gave the bigger one away. It is not like this anymore.

There are a lot of words and teachings that have gone out of our lives everywhere, not just San Carlos. I believe it's with every tribe and even the modern world, the cities, everywhere. I had some experience in the earlier days, in 1950s the council decided that they needed to send people off the reservation to get work out there, to get a job, find a job and you were supposed to be out there and be educated. In other words, they told us, 'Be civilized' or assimilate with the public out there. So they sent us out. I have been there. I have been to San Jose, California and I've been to Dallas, Texas, but one day I decided that I needed to come home. I didn't have very many relatives at home, but I don't know why I came home, but someone told me that maybe you were meant to go home and help out. So all this time I've been doing it.

In 1990, when the NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] came in, my partner Seth [Pilsk] came out to me when I had retired from teaching at Globe High School, the Apache language, and I had retired and came home and I was sitting there. One morning he came up to me and said, 'Will you go to work with me?' I said, 'I retired'. He said, 'It's just for 18 months.' And it has gone...it has gone beyond that. It's almost 10 years, 10 years is coming up. But I went to work with him. We have worked on a lot trying to...we even worked with the [Northern Arizona University] with a science or something there was supposed to be taught in the school and we're still on that. And we're working on place names, putting every Apache name on a place where it...where the Apaches had been. So our map is just covered with black dots all over and on the side there because we couldn't put the whole name in there we just put it on the side.

That's where I am and the tribe today, the council today like here, they're here. I don't see any of my council member or maybe they're a little jealous of me, I don't know. But they do work with us. 1993 we presented a resolution. One reason we realized that we need a resolution to bring the elders council is that there are things, there are sacred things, there are traditions that are sacred, and we need permission from the elders in the community, the medicine men. So in order to work well with them we presented the resolution and they approved it. So we've been working under that. And that's what we've been doing all this time.

We do work with other companies like ADOT [Arizona Department of Transportation]. We receive letters, even from the arch science and the archaeologists that come in, but now we have Vernelda [Grant] on board as an archaeologist. So we send all those to her. And that's the reason why some other people haven't heard from us. But we've been called out everywhere and today I would say that I need to take speech lessons. I'm not as well...I'd rather be out there on the mountain and we do take people out. We have our elders' meeting and you've got to be patient with them. You have a meeting with them as a group like this, but you go over it again and visit them individually.

There's one thing we don't know anymore too and that is enduring things -- the cold, the heat, and other things -- we cannot sit still long enough. I notice that in the children as I try to bring these back, the other day. Our children are not working much anymore, too. So one forester has developed a thing where he can train the younger boys for the firefighters. So he asked me to come out there and talk to them and I did and I try to think about what I should say, but their attention span is short. So I try to make it short. I told them little stories. Like one day the firefighters got on the bus. A long time ago in the '50s the truck used to go up and down and they would honk the horn and then the men hears that whether they're drinking or not they go stand out there; some of them were drunk. But they got on the truck and they'd jump on the truck because they were able-bodied men. They were men that knew how to work. So they got on the bus. When the truck brought them to the bus they got on there, they threw the bottle away. It was time to put that bottle away and go. They got on the bus and got to wherever they were going and when they got there they fixed their bedding and they went to sleep right away, as soon as they got there. And the next morning they got up early and started work. They left the bottle behind and the job was a job and they went and did it. That's what I told the boys. It's time to put something away and get to work. There are a lot of other stories like that that I told to the boys.

But it's true about everything else. You people have... I listen to you talk and you have brought everything out, everything and maybe somebody wrote it down and everything that is needed as being a leader or working with the people. You brought everything out and mentioned it but there's one thing, when you become a leader, you kind of get tempted with things. And there's a little pool, maybe money or maybe something or maybe travel like this, you get tempted by that, and you spend more time out there and the work is back there. Nobody mentioned that one. But remember, you have to think twice before you can make a move. What's going to happen to me if I do this? There was one thing that I told the boys about that was; there was an elderly man that talked to us when I was working for the CAP office. He said, 'At 25...' He was telling us a story and he said, 'When you're away, somebody calls you and say your wife is out there or your husband is out there doing this. And you think is she really or is she home? And it gets in your way in your work and pretty soon it becomes a monster and you rush home and most likely you'll find your wife at home safe, doing all the work.' That was one...that's what this old man told me and that has been with me all this time. I thought about that. 'You'll get infatuated with someone at one time or other, but if you follow it, you're going to make a fool of yourself. You're going to lose everything and you'll just be out there all alone.' That's what he said. And so I remembered it and that's been with me all these years. I lost my husband to cancer two years ago, but that kept me straight. Things like that, the elderlies tell you.

Another one was...another one was that...he said...he said something else; stories like that. The women, my elders are full of them...will tell you a lot of things. He goes and visit the community. He involves with the community. He visits the people. So that's who we are, the elders. Today we're going to try to, no matter how hard it is, we're going to try to work, bring in the students, the young boys that are dropouts; we're going to try to work with them. We're going to try to work with the councilmen. We already do advise them, but when somebody wants, a leader wants something real bad, he will persuade someone or persuade the group to go along with him. And how do you go about that? You have to sit down and think it out and try it, getting it out there. So that's what we're trying to do. And I don't know how long it's going to last, how long NAGPRA's going to last. We do a lot of things. My secretary is Seth Pilsk. We'll think about it, we'll say about it, but he's going to write it down. We'll tell him and we'll read it over and say, 'This is not right.' Sometimes he gets angry and writes his own words, but we tell him, 'Don't do that.' So he's our secretary and he helps us, he's willing to help us. And he'll laugh and erase it out. So that's why he's with us and he's a botanist and I work with him. We have so many jobs. We've done a lot of ethnohistory with the Carlota Mines, Payson. Pretty soon we're going to Aravaipa and Winkelman. That's what we're doing and we'll be busy out there again.

We do need your help also in solving this problem about our leaders. How do we get them to work? How do we get them to listen? Will you listen to me, will you remember what it said or will you just ignore it? I said to Andrew, I said, 'The chairs are empty, go ahead and put me on.' But that's what we live by, the wisdom of the elders. There are a lot of good things what to do and what not to do. They used to say, 'Don't envy someone because it's no good.' There are a lot of things and probably your tribe is like that also. That's what we're trying to...trying to bring in and make it and work with the modern things, the modern teachings. That's what we're trying to do. I'm sorry that I'm just...like I said, I'm not used to making speech, but I can really holler and yell out there in the forest. Thank you."

Jill Doerfler: "No Easy Answer": Citizenship Requirements

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Anishinaabe scholar Jill Doerfler discusses the process that the White Earth Nation followed to arrive at their new constitution, and details the evolving debate at White Earth about which citizenship criteria it would incorporate into this new governing document.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Doerfler, Jill. "'No Easy Answer': Citizenship Requirements." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2013. Presentation.

"It's wonderful to be here. As I mentioned, had the privilege of being here last year, thrilled to be back this year. For the sake of time we're just going to sort of roll right into it. My presentation today is "'No Easy Answer': Citizenship Requirements," because it's a difficult topic for us. Basically I'm going to talk about a sort of case study of the White Earth Nation and focus on citizenship and how, over a number of years, we talked about citizenship and came to a decision on what we wanted. I identified four basic keys that helped us that you may find useful as well. We had an inclusive and open process, we talked a lot about the history of tribal citizenship, both how citizenship or identity was regulated prior to the Indian Reorganization Act, post-Indian Reorganization Act, and then when we came to a blood quantum in 1963. We worked really hard to integrate and practice our Anishinaabe culture and values within the governance structure and within citizenship. And then finally, perhaps most importantly, patience and perseverance. As I said, it's not going to be an easy task and as Carole [Goldberg] said, there are many, many different options and things to be weighed and considered and yet it's worth it in the end. So I'll elaborate on all of these.

I'll say briefly that White Earth is currently part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT), which is an umbrella structure that has six nations. You'll see White Earth located furthest west there. White Earth has been very interested in creating our own constitution. We've had several different efforts for constitutional reform that have gone on for about 30 years. So it has definitely been a long process. What I'm going to focus on is our efforts from 2007 forward. In her 2007 State of the Nation address, Chairwoman Dr. Erma Vizenor noted that among the issues she wanted to address in the upcoming year was constitutional reform. Vizenor noted that a clear separation of powers of tribal government should be considered as well as requirements for citizenship stating, 'As tribal membership continues to decline under the present one-fourth blood quantum requirement, we must decide eligibility for enrollment.' She went on to note that 'White Earth members must decide these issues by referendum vote.' So she put it up right away, establishing from the outset that it has to be up to the citizens to make this decision. Tribal government isn't going to be the one to make it.

For me personally, I was elated. I had been studying tribal citizenship for several years and was in 2007 preparing to defend my dissertation, which examined citizenship regulations and cultural values among the White Earth Anishinaabe. So after the State of the Nation address, I contacted Vizenor's office and asked how I could be of assistance. We agreed that I would write a series of newspaper articles for our tribal newspaper called the Anishinaabe Today based upon my dissertation research. In the articles I delineated the ways in which Anishinaabe got White Earth conceptualized identity during the early 1900s, then I shared the history of blood quantum and then discussed the changes in tribal citizenship that had occurred within the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. What we hoped is that the articles would both provide information, as well as encourage White Earth citizens to get involved in what was the newest effort for constitutional reform. Some people were a bit wary of having been involved for several years at this point, but we wanted to sort of revitalize them.

So basically citizens were invited to serve as constitutional delegates. There was an application process. Everyone that applied was accepted. We had the first of what would be four constitutional conventions beginning on October 19th and 20th, 2007. The convention was an open public process. Anyone who was interested could come. It wasn't delegates only, but anyone who wanted to come could. At the first convention, Chairwoman Vizenor discussed the need for reform and gave a brief history of the different attempts for change. The delegates were provided draft copies of different constitutions both a draft that had been generated in the late 1990s at White Earth, another draft, and then the current Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Constitution that we were under -- that we still are under -- at that time. There was both an air of excitement and nervousness that day when the process began. We got right into it with the topic of citizenship on the agenda. I was instructed to give a presentation to start things rolling -- I did. I gave a brief presentation about the history of tribal citizenship, explained how blood quantum came to be, the requirement for citizenship in 1963. Part of my goal was to integrate Anishinaabe values and cultural practices so I asked delegates to keep in mind the concept of mino-binaadiziwin. Mino-binaadiziwin translates as 'live well, have good health; lead a good life.' It's a concept that's not about just physical survival, but about a world view in which individuals and groups work actively together to create what we think of as a rewarding, ethical and nourishing life. So it's kind of a whole worldview outlook. In conclusion I asked that we work to restore mino-binaadiziwin in our families, our communities, and our nation at all the different levels and I noted that by working together we could create a strong nation that would both echo our traditions and create a positive future.

After my presentation, delegates were divided into small groups to discuss citizenship. The use of small groups was really effective. It allowed everyone time to share their ideas and concerns. The small groups then, after a period, reported back to the whole group. Several of the groups agreed that blood quantum was not an effective or appropriate way to regulate tribal citizenship, but at that time they found it difficult to decide what the best requirement would be. Many people noted that they had at least some children or grandchildren who could not enroll because of the blood quantum requirement. One group stated that they were confident that a strong effort to maintain our culture and language would ensure that using lineal descent would not water us down, which is something we may be familiar with, the idea that it might be a problem if we used lineal descent. There were some delegates who voiced their desire to continue to use blood quantum. So at that time we agreed that the issue of tribal citizenship would require further discussion. Delegates were encouraged to discuss the issue with their families and their communities and to go home and continue to think about these things. We weren't going to rush to come to any decision that day or anything. The convention went on, we talked about other wide range of issues, separation of powers especially. Ultimately the convention ended with optimism and a real push for positive change for the future. So we'll continue rolling.

A second convention was held January 4th and 5th, 2008. Constitutional delegates had expressed a desire for the White Earth constitution to reflect Anishinaabe values; not surprisingly, that's the main reason a lot of people were there. So we began that first evening with a presentation by White Earth citizen Natalie MacArthur and she talked about the ways in which values could be applied to and implemented within constitutions. She stressed that a constitution must reflect a society's values. So delegates were asked to write down four of their own personal core values and then a correlating belief statement: how do you put that into practice? They discussed these personal values in small groups and then reported back the common values they had identified together. Many of the values, not surprisingly, related to respect, love, truth, honesty, family and compassion. One delegate noted that 'everything we do, all the hard work, love, respect, etc., should be pointed towards future generations. Core values should be used to take care of future generations.' The core values and sentiments discussed closely parallel the Anishinaabe seven grandfather teachings, which emphasize the importance of courage, truth, respect, love, honesty, wisdom and humility as the guiding principles of Anishinaabe life, to live the good life.

Then I was up again to give a presentation. I talked about the history of blood quantum, the concept -- where it came from, the European origins -- and then how it came to be used for tribal citizenship. I explained that while blood quantum was at one time considered science in the 19th century maybe into the 20th century a little bit, today we know that it doesn't exist as a real thing. It's used kind of metaphorically, but it's not real. Blood quantum was not a requirement for tribal citizenship as I said until 1963. And I wanted delegates to have clear and concise information about how the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe came to use this one-fourth Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. I summarized resolutions passed by the MCT in the 1930s and '40s that required lineal descent for tribal citizenship and explained that these resolutions were rejected by the Secretary of the Interior, not surprisingly. The Secretary of the Interior was not interested in those and therefore were not made part of the constitution and the Secretary sent many letters back saying blood quantum would be great, residency would be great, you guys need to keep thinking about this. I also used a variety of examples to show that elected leaders of the MCT fought really hard against blood quantum because they knew that someday their descendants would not qualify to become tribal citizens. The records on this are just absolutely spectacular -- people getting up giving long speeches about the importance of family. So I was able to quote extensively from those. I hoped that this information would empower delegates to redefine citizenship in a way that both enacted Anishinaabe values and emphasized relationships, which was something that many people had talked about wanting. I ended the presentation by acknowledging that tribal citizenship was a difficult and controversial issue, but I also emphasized that it was an opportunity to put our values into action. I suggested the delegates consider how the core values that we had discussed earlier that evening might translate into citizenship requirements. How could we put those values into action in the constitution itself? So we had that discussion.

And then the next morning we had... turning it again to the topic of tribal citizenship. We weren't coming to any conclusions just yet. Delegates were asked to examine a list of options and you see them here on the slide. I'm not going to read all of them, but basically the 1990s effort for reform constitution had created a list of citizenship options because they couldn't decide at that time exactly either. And so delegates were asked to look at that list and you see them here. Lineal descent is one option and then the other options are each based on a variety of blood calculations, some of which get kind of complicated. At that time the Chairwoman Vizenor instructed delegates to narrow down the list to one or two options. However, before that happened, one group said, 'Actually we have another option to add to this list. We're not going to narrow it down just yet.' So their idea was that, 'All those who are currently enrolled be made full bloods.' This eventually became known to us as the 'Four-Fourths Band-Aid,' which I think does sum it up. So delegates discussed this at length and then reported back to the group. Basically they reported back saying that they really felt strongly that it was a difficult issue. Some people said, 'Yes, we favor the Four-Fourths Band-Aid because basically what it would mean is that everyone who is currently enrolled is going to be able to have his or her grandchildren enrolled.' So it'll go a certain step so far. So some delegates were ready for change to some extent, but they were uncomfortable making maybe a permanent decision regarding change. They were unwilling or maybe unable to completely let go of blood quantum. They kind of wanted to manipulate and still find a way to maybe use that. As the discussion continued, the issue of family surfaced on many time and again with the delegates' comments. One delegate noted that he favored the use of lineal descent because it includes all family members and was a way of taking care of our families, so enacting some of our values. It was also noted that lineal descendants would go on forever and that if blood quantum were to continue, White Earth -- our sovereignty could potentially be in jeopardy; the Nation might not always exist. However, some delegates were apprehensive that more citizens would put an increased strain on already limited resources. Another delegate stated pretty succinctly, 'No one is happy with blood quantum,' but that person just was unsure about how White Earth should regulate citizenship, how we could move forward. So ultimately the wide diversity of comments and opinions reflect both a desire for change as well as trepidation about what change might really mean. Even though the delegates could easily identify core values, some were having a difficult time conceptualizing how to practice those values in citizenship requirements. Again, delegates were unable to come to a clear conclusion about what the best requirement would be and so, once again, we agreed that the topic would be revisited at a later date. Again, go home, keep thinking about it; keep talking about it.

We came back several months later for what would be the third convention, October 24th and 25th, 2008, focusing here again on citizenship. During my presentation, I noted that delegates had discussed values at the last convention and suggested that a good way to think about core values is to think about the things that we were taught as children or the things that we teach our children or emphasize to our children or grandchildren today. And I turned to stories for this. Stories are one of the primary ways that we teach our children their place in the family, community, nation, and even within the world. Stories also delineate proper and improper behavior. Anishinaabe scholar John Borrows argues that stories contain core Anishinaabe legal principles and traditions that continue to be important as Anishinaabe nations create legal codes and judicial systems today. So I wanted to tie constitutional reform to cultural revitalization in a very concrete way and I thought story, for us as Anishinaabe people, would be a good way to do that. I talked about our story of [Anishinaabe language]. I thought this would be a good story because it offers some interesting possibilities for interpretation with regard to core values and the constitution. So I summarized the story for the delegates and then I gave an allegorical interpretation that related to citizenship based on that story. I invited delegates to consider how to create citizenship requirements based on the positive values expressed the previous convention and in the story about [Anishinaabe language]. I ended my presentation by advocating the themes and story, which were sovereignty, resiliency, persistence, respect and [Anishinaabe language]. I thought these would be useful to consider as we moved forward with constitutional reform.

When we reconvened the next morning, we had a wonderful presentation by Dr. David Wilkins. We saw a little clip of him earlier today. He gave a great presentation on tribal governments and kinship and how kinship can be used to create responsibilities within nations, how it functioned historically and could be used today as well. Then I gave a presentation entitled "Evaluating the Options for Tribal Citizenship," so we moved back to our list and we said, 'We've got to kind of work through these.' What I did was tell the delegates what we need to do is take a closer look at each of these requirements on our list and we're going to ask this set of questions and go through item by item and think about how can we evaluate this and how can we come to a decision. So you can see the questions here that we went through. So we were going through this process. Most delegates were listening intently, weighing the options and yet you could start to feel some tensions rising in the room. Some people were unhappy, some people began talking really loudly to each other and being really disruptive. At that point one delegate was frustrated and she stood up and she said, 'Can I make a motion?' And Chairman Vizenor said, 'Yes, you can.' And so the motion was made that no options for tribal citizenship that require blood quantum be discussed any further. The motion passed. There was only one option on our list that doesn't include any type of blood quantum, which was the lineal descendancy option. Consequently the issue of citizenship was decided. It was kind of surprisingly quick in a certain way even though we had been talking about it for a long time. It was the culmination of numerous discussions on citizenship that had occurred at the previous conventions as well as conversations that delegates had had with their family outside of the conventions. At that time, I simply ended my presentation early; we were done discussing the issue.

After that convention, Chairwoman Vizenor designated a constitutional proposal team to draft a constitution based on the three conventions that we had had. She asked constitutional delegate Gerald Vizenor, who was a very well known scholar and author from White Earth, to be the principle writer for the document. I was also a member of the team and as agreed upon by the delegates, during the process, lineal descent is the sole requirement for citizenship within the constitution. So we know then that the constitution of the White Earth Nation was created through a grassroots process of open discussion and compromise. Delegate Gerald Vizenor did an incredible job of writing the document. He did a nice job of astutely balancing a wide range of viewpoints and his attention to detail was crucial for the mechanics of the constitution. The constitution is a unique reflection of the White Earth Nation. Most importantly it reflects and enacts Anishinaabe values and incorporates enduring cultural traditions while envisioning a certain future. The constitutional proposal team was satisfied with the document. We presented it to constitutional delegates in April 2009. The delegates did make some changes to the document at that time, not to citizenship. They voted in favor of ratification and so the document was complete at that time. Chairwoman Vizenor was happy with the process and reminded delegates that we would...that the delegates were done with their work, but that the document would still go out for referendum vote.

Ultimately, the ratified constitution of the White Earth Nation echoes Anishinaabe traditions and envisions a perpetual future of promise. Today, what we're doing, we're in the process of preparing for a citizen engagement and education effort, which will culminate in a referendum vote on the constitution, which will hopefully be in September or October at the very latest. So we're working on that. Ultimately, in conclusion, as I said, I think four keys that basically worked for us is: really digging into our history -- thinking about how Anishinaabe people thought about identity and citizenship in historical times; looking at our cultural values: how they could be implemented; having these open respectful discussions; and focusing on the future -- what would be best for future generations as delegates often emphasized? Miigwetch."

Jamie Fullmer, Rebecca Miles and Darrin Old Coyote: Our Leadership Experiences, Challenges, and Advice

Producer
Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

Jamie Fullmer (former Chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation), Rebecca Miles (Executive Director and former Chairwoman of the Nez Perce Tribe) and Darrin Old Coyote (Chairman of the Crow Tribe) share what they wished they knew before they took office, the greatest leadership challenges they have faced, and their advice for newly elected and aspiring tribal leaders.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Bush Foundation.

Resource Type
Citation

Fullmer, Jamie, Rebecca Miles and Darrin Old Coyote. "Our Leadership Experiences, Challenges, and Advice." Nation-Building Strategies: A Seminar for Newly Elected Tribal Leaders. Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Mystic Lake, Minnesota. January 31, 2013. Presentation.

June Noronha:

"So we have a very, very, very prestigious group here. Two of them former Chairs, one a current Chair. So what we're going to do is when we invited them to come we asked them to respond to three questions and these are the questions. We said, ‘We want you to tell everybody what you wish you had known before you took office.' So they will all answer that question. Then we're going to ask them to say, ‘What was the most interesting or the toughest situation you found yourself in as tribal Chair.' And the third question is, ‘What advice do you have for new tribal council members.' So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take each question and have them respond to it as opposed to have you talk through all of it. Is that all right with everybody? So the first thing I'm going to ask is, ‘What do you wish you had known before you took office?' So I'm going to have Chairman Old Coyote first speak."

Darrin Old Coyote:

"Thank you, June. First off, thanks to the Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for inviting me. The first question if I had known that it was going to be this tough I don't think I'd be chairman. No, just kidding.

One thing, the amount of work that goes into the hours you put in as the tribal chairman. You're on the clock 24 hours and that's one area because a lot of my...I used to like to sing, I used to like to run racehorses and now I can't even do both so my kids are doing that. But that's one of the toughest. One thing I've...when I took office, one of the areas that if I had known that are basically the life we had before now belongs to the Crow people. That's one area that's been king of hard for me but at the same time it's been rewarding because a lot of people have enjoyed some of the things we've done so far.

I was first elected in 2004, I was 31 at the time. The late Chairman Van was the one that asked me to join his team. I was teaching high school and they took me out of teaching high school and brought me over as the cultural director in 2000. And 2000 to 2004 I was the cultural director; one of the advisors to the chairman from 2002 to 2004 and then from there they more or less groomed me to be part of the government. And prior to all of this I was...in 1997 just two hours from here, Moorhead, Minnesota, I was going to school there and the best view of my home was from far way. I saw all the problems. When I was back home, I didn't know that our language was being lost, our culture was being lost. I didn't know that there was a problem with drugs and alcohol, there was...I didn't see all that until basically...it was day in, day out I saw the same things and I thought it was normal until I moved away from there and from Moorhead, Minnesota, I viewed back home and I saw the best view of home was from far away and I seen all the problems. I was lonesome, I couldn't speak Crow, I couldn't practice the traditions, the culture so from that it kind of made me...from then I understood what I was to do, to come back and preserve and perpetuate the Apsalooke way of life, the Crow way of life to start changing things in our community.

And one thing I took on just about four of us, we wanted to change the constitution because we saw all the infighting, the things that happen and for a long time. I've worked with Nation Building and one of the areas that we wanted to do was bring in Nation Building to teach the Crow people and a lot of them didn't want to, they didn't want to change things but we brought in...about four of us started in 2000 to try to change the constitution and we had to go to the elders and have them buy into the idea. They also saw the problems that this constitution created with the infighting and the turmoil and so from there we...they did...the majority ruled to change the constitution. So in 2001 we changed our constitution where there was more stability, more continuity and now we have a three branch government, whereas before the chairman was...he controlled the tribal courts, he controlled...and it was... Our old constitution, they had councils every three months and anybody 18 and over could be part of this council. They would literally walk through the line and the chairman would be standing there. If you were a director of some program or if you were a tribal employee, if you went against the agenda that the chairman set up, then you were basically thrown out of there and they'd go through the line right in front of the tribal chairman and that system was in place. And the first month when the decision was made they'd gather numbers for the next council and they would do away with whatever was proposed three months ago. And every three months things were changing and there was no progress, there was no continuity, there was no stability and so from then we changed the constitution. And if we were still in the old constitution I wouldn't be sitting here as chairman because today we have a system that gives us more continuity, more stability and even the people that are...things that were passed in 2001, they're still going and business has continued and we're starting to...it's a new constitution but there's...we're changing things and we're moving forward so that's...I'd like to share that before we go any further."

Rebecca Miles:

Well, it's certainly an honor to be here with all of you and congratulations if you are a newly elected leader. Jamie and I are recovering tribal leaders so we're here to relive it all. So it certainly is an honor to speak before all of you.

A couple of things that I think I wish I would have known prior to deciding to run is I wasn't prepared for the fighting, the infighting of our people. I was raised on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation my entire life. My parents...I don't know if they ever even voted in the tribal election. We never attended general council. My parents were not politically active. We led a very strict life growing up and my parents were alcohol, drug and alcohol free. And [I] grew up of course in very bad poverty but to me it was a very great life. And so I wasn't raised to talk to people that way.

And so the very first meeting that I had we had a person come in and just chew us all out. That's the...it's almost like you're walking through like a doorway and no matter where you know your heart is you become them now. You become the beast so to speak and you're part of the problem. Tribal council leaders are always scratching their own backs and they're doing favors for their family and friends. And every decision you ever make will be scrutinized by somebody; every single decision. And so I was young, I wasn't prepared for that. I was a young mom at the time and I was not necessarily prepared for that. A seminar like this is fantastic because...I wish we had something like that when I was first starting as a leader.

The other thing that I recognize that I wish I had known as well being a woman and being a young woman for a tribe that predominantly has male leadership, there are always a few women on council, but prepared for the way that women treated women and it was absolutely terrible. So I made it a really personal passion of my own. I serve on a national organization called Vision 20/20 that works to...will work to have equality for women by the year 2020. I was nominated by the governor, the former Governor Kulongoski of Oregon, the State of Oregon, and that organization really works not just for equality in pay for women but it really works on women who become leaders and how other women treat women. We study a lot, one of my idols, is Hillary Clinton and what has happened to her in her leadership. She's criticized for the way she looks, for whatever she's wearing or for her hair and that's very irrelevant to...but it's an entirely different standard to what male tribal leaders go through on tribal council. I was not prepared for that, I can tell you that.

And as a young woman I certainly...you certainly all of a sudden feel alone, you got elected by a lot of people, everybody's excited and I remember my family threw a big party for me and just right out of the gate, we all have family whether they drink or they're on drugs, every one of us have them. And I remember the very first...the Saturday night I was elected my family threw this big party. Well, of course I have some drunk cousins and uncles that came over and they wanted to congratulate and it was just a very good time. And it was at my mother's home. My mother doesn't drink and she's never allowed alcohol in her home and she made this really...it was a Mother's Day cake because Mother's Day was the next day. Well, it ended up being a celebration for me. Well, it turned out that I had this keg, not cake and it just...you're just not prepared for that. And so knowing that kind of going in give you the armor...you kind of have the armor that it's going to come and you don't know where it's going to come, but to not let that shake you from what's inside and why you chose to run and why you chose to be a leader for your tribe. Because very, very important decisions are yet to be made and there are very difficult things that are going to come your way and so you have to be strong. You can't let those things sway you because you have to be prepared for the real important things, the real battles. And I wish I had known that prior to."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Thank you. As Rebecca had pointed out, as a recovering...I think I'm in complete recovery now from tribal leadership. As the former chairman of Yavapai Apache Nation... by the way, [Apache Language] to you leaders here.

At home, when I first became chairman, it was definitely not on my list of what am I going to do. I went back home to work for the tribe and contribute to the community as the Health and Human Services Director. I have a master's degree in social work but I also have a bachelor's degree in business. And the idea behind that was that we needed some help in building an infrastructure for our social services. We had just built a brand new building, a health center building, and it was empty and so I had come home. I told the chairman at the time, I said, ‘I can get that running if you would like me to.' It wasn't a boastful thing, it's just I had a background. I did administration and had just come from running a major mental health intensive outpatient treatment center in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I'd gotten my master's degree. And so I went home to contribute back to my community. My family all lives there, my mom and my brothers and my aunts and uncles and so it was, for me it was wanting to be around family but also just to contribute back to the community. And honestly it was also because the tribe had paid for my education to get my master's degree and I felt like it was a give back.

And so that was my whole purpose for going home but lo and behold, fast forward from that position a few years into it, my grandfather who was the former chairman and he's passed away since but he was a great leader in our community. He had said, ‘I think we're going to get you in as chairman.' I said, ‘Well, it's a great honor and I don't know if I'm ready.' He said, ‘I think we're going to get you in as chairman.' ‘It's a great honor but I don't know if I'm ready.' He said, ‘I don't think you heard me. I think we're going to get you in as chairman.' So the elders had already met about it and had decided that I was going to be chairman. So lo and behold I was elected as chairman. What I did not know then, and like Rebecca, seeing the community, I saw a lot of the challenges in the community but wasn't real involved in the politics. Unless they called me into council, I didn't go up there. If you get called into council chambers, something good or something bad is going to happen and so you try to avoid that whole, as an employee try to avoid that process altogether. At least that was the way we did it at home.

So what I wish I would have known before I took office was, a lot has been mentioned already by the leaders at this table, but what I wish I would have known is not to personalize the politics of the day because it is just business. And it's so hard because it's the business of our life, it's the business of our sovereignty, it's the business of our future, it's the business of respecting the ancestors and the predecessors. But it is at the end of the day just business and if you carry it home, it will eat you up. And I say that with the idea that you as tribal leaders, either new or reinvigorated new into office that we always says 24/7, 24/7. I used to always hear the leaders at home say that, ‘I'm here for my people 24/7.' Within that 24/7 one of those people has to be you and so that balancing act of taking time for yourself to find a balance in your own life and lifestyle and respecting and protecting your family is an important part of that process.

With that said, the great Windell Chino, Apache leader, a legend in our world said, ‘You can tell a true Indian leader because they have bullets in the front and arrows in the back,' and I took that to heart because as Rebecca said, you go in and you don't really...you know you're going to get it from the outside world but you don't expect it that you're going to get it from the inside world and you definitely don't expect you're going to get it from your blood tied inside world but sometimes that's the worst battles. I remember one of my aunties had done a recall on me for...at least once, one of the recall tries, one of the recall attempts. And then later on after I'd gotten out of office a couple years ago she goes, ‘Well it made you stronger, didn't it?' I said, ‘Yeah, but I didn't need you to even make the effort in the first place.'

So I guess to that point is that another point that I wanted to make is that I think that it's so important to respect as leaders...I had my own vision and mission and direction from prayer and from commitment and felt like that was the right way and I was young at the time when I was elected. I was 30. And one of the things that I wish I would have known beforehand is to respect and listen and learn what other peoples' ideas of sovereignty was because I had my own image of what sovereignty was and what I was willing to stand for on behalf of the people, what I was willing to fight for. And I didn't at that time, as I look back historically, I didn't necessarily take the time to listen to what was the elder's perspective of sovereignty, what was the younger generation's perspective of sovereignty, what were my colleagues at the tables perspective of sovereignty because I knew what my image was in standing as a sovereign nation. And yet you have to thread those altogether as a leader.

So I think hindsight, seven years ago, six years ago, hindsight that I wish I would have known at the beginning was not to personalize it because I did personalize a lot of it and you know what happens when you personalize things, you're ready to fight. And sometimes those are fights you can't win. It was brought up earlier by the leader over there, she brought up the idea of how and when to be a diplomat. Learning that diplomacy comes from not personalizing it.

And then the other thing as a closing piece to that, which I wish I would have known was the other thing is the loudest voice is usually the smallest group. And so you had people that come and say, ‘My people want this and my people want that.' If I would have known at the beginning, cause everybody gets kind of riled up and stirred up and ‘We've got to do something right now. We have to act on this.' And it wasn't until my second term in office and I'd say, ‘Well, bring those people in. Let me hear from them. I'm their representative. Well, then why did they elect this body?' So the loudest voice is usually the smallest group. That's why they say the silent majority. Now when those people that I never saw before were coming into the office and were stirred up, then I knew something was wrong because that was the silent majority, the people that like Rebecca's family that didn't get involved in politics, that didn't have their faction or their personal or family interest to sway. And so when I saw those folks coming through the door I'd say, this wasn't until second term, ‘These are the majority. These are the...once they get stirred up, we have to deal with this right away. That means something is really wrong.' So just some...that's the closing piece I had is the loudest voice, at least in my community, was usually the smallest group and yet our council would be jumping and moving to try and create some kind of change because of what they heard."

June Noronha:

"So I think we'll... Thank you. So let's go to the second question. The second question is, ‘What was the most...maybe I'll say the toughest situation or the most interesting situation you found yourself in or you find yourself in as tribal chair?'"

Darrin Old Coyote:

"For myself the toughest situation I found myself in was a lot of times family...basically a lot of the toughest situations I had involved my immediate family or my extended, like my mom's family or my dad's family. I'll just give you an example. There was a federal program where one of my cousin's had the qualifications and he was kind of running...he was the assistant to the director and he'd been there years and then we did, because it was a federal program we did a drug test and my cousin he ran out the door when drug tests came around and he came and said, ‘You need to get rid of that policy, the drug policy.' And so that's one of the toughest situations is your own family will try to have you waive everything just so that they can benefit and you're in there for the whole tribe, not just your family or one individual. So that's one of the toughest situations. You have to be open minded, look at the whole picture and he was suspended for not doing the drug testing and then his sister and his family, they started saying, ‘We're going to get rid of you. Next election we're going to remove you,' and this is my own aunt doing that and my own cousins doing this. But in the long run people saw that I wanted accountability and I wanted things done right and so they, after awhile it kind of died down from there. But that's the toughest situation I've been in is our own immediate family.

And then another situation would be the most interesting. I don't know if you're all familiar with the Pentecostals. We have a lot of Pentecostals in our tribe and there was one, Speaker of the House, a few years back I was presenting the budget to the legislative branch because they're the ones that approve yes or no voting on budget so I brought in the budget. And I was standing, the Speaker of the House was behind me because the podium was...and he was saying, ‘The executive branch did this, did that.' He was starting to point fingers and he was going off and there was a whole bunch of people, a lot of the council, the whole membership, a lot of them were there and he was just pointing fingers, going off on how their belief, the Pentecostal belief they say, ‘If you don't do this, if you don't do that you're going to go to hell.' And he kept doing that to me and he was pointing down on me and he said, ‘If you don't do this, if you don't do that,' and finally at the end he said, ‘If you don't like me, you're not going to go to heaven.' That's what he said. But this guy was my clan father. In the Crow way we have our clan system, he was my clan father and whenever your clan father says something that...to...you can buy...whatever they said, you could buy that right. So I turned around and I gave him five bucks and I said, ‘I'm going to buy what you just said.' I said, ‘If you don't like me, you're not going to go to heaven.' So I turned this around on him after him putting me down and saying, ‘If you don't like me, you're not going to go to heaven.' I turned it around. Using our culture I turned it around and I said, ‘If you don't like me, you're not going to go to heaven,' and I pass the budget. So that's one thing.

There's different cultures, the culture, the religions, belief ways, there's different groups. Some want you to do...jump through hoops. They say, you don't like us because you don't go to this church or that church or you don't...maybe Native American church or Sundance. Different religions they tend to try to pinpoint that you're not a part of them and so they try to push you aside but if you're open minded, let them all be equal. That's the only way you're going to survive the next election basically. But that's what I used, using my culture I turned it around on him because he was using his religion to kind of put me down so I turned it around on him and I said, ‘If you don't like me, you're not going to go to heaven.' So that whole getting on his soapbox and putting down people, I wiped that all away and then passed the budget because everybody started laughing after awhile and then I told them the important parts of the budget. But that was one area that was interesting and I thought...I was in a tough situation basically, you have to think, ‘How am I going to turn this thing around?' And that's one situation that really helped me then because it took about a whole 15 minutes to get to his point and he just kept blasting and putting down the executive branch. We hear it all the time now but now every time I walk in he's nice to me because he's scared he might not go to heaven."

Rebecca Miles:

"Well, just moving on from those comments, when I got on council in '04, I didn't have any ambition or any idea of becoming any of the ranked leaders let alone the chair. It just had never crossed my mind and when I was elected in '04, one week later they had released terms to the Snake River Basin adjudication in principle meaning we were just getting ready to consider settling our water claims in the Snake Basin. That had started when I think I was about an eighth grader or ninth grader and I think we formally filed when I was a sophomore in high school. And I happened to...that's one of the things I wish I would have known before that that would be the biggest decision the tribe would face in its treaty time and it was a very tough time.

When I say toughest situation, when I got on council, you looked to even senior leaders...there's nine of us on the council, I was the only woman. You looked to see what's been going on and we had a couple members that served 20 years so they knew...they had to have known all about this. The people did not know about the settlement because it was ordered to be in executive session, any discussions because to protect all sovereigns. And the sovereigns were us, the State of Idaho and the United States.

So the very first meeting I remember thinking a week later, ‘I'll never vote for this. This will never happen as long as I'm a leader.' And as I began to...the thing that we did is we put all our non-Indian attorneys out in front of our people. And when you mentioned people coming out of the woodwork that are not your loud minority and you have your silent majority there screaming at you, that was a difficult time. My mother was even in the audience and she was so angry. And you could see this train wreck about to happen because one, we were talking about something very near and dear to us, our treaty rights, and we're having our non-Indian attorneys tell us how we're going to settle these claims and that didn't fly well. That's really when my education really came into really sitting down and figuring out a good orator, somebody who can explain something to somebody really well and so that meant I had to learn everything I could about this settlement.

So the next nine months the three sovereigns had to decide and all eyes were on...it was a very big deal and Crow was a few years after us but it was a very big deal. And we went on 18 hearings all over our reservation. And the thing that really surprised me is I was the freshman member, no experience whatsoever, and none of the leaders who had made decisions, there were several resolutions that got to this point, even led one meeting, not a single one, not ever got up and said, ‘This is why we did this, this is why we...this is where we're at.' Not a single one. And so I had to start from ground zero. We created a PowerPoint. I gave the presentations, never allowed our attorneys to have to be there. They're just staff, they're not going to vote on this. And they have been directed to do these things all these years so it certainly couldn't be passed off to them. And so after the nine months we took the settlement, very difficult, because it could have gone either way. Had we not taken the settlement we would have lost all our water claims. We would have been up against Idaho Supreme Court and then eventually a very volatile Supreme Court, United States Supreme Court. That was my very first year on council and I was ready to resign and I told my family, I said, ‘I've never quit at anything,' and I was ready to resign.

Well, two weeks later after I gave them that speech, we had our elections and our tribal chair did not get reelected and it just happened in literally like the snap of a finger. An all male council except for me elected me the first woman chair and I just think about it now because Jamie Pinkham's uncle Scotty was on council then and he sat back smiling when the vote was over. He said, ‘You just got elected by an all male council. People are focusing on the fact you're the first woman but...' And he said, ‘It wasn't because you're a woman. It had nothing to do... It was because of the work on such a critical, critical decision.' And that still hangs onto me and people say, ‘Well, you sold our water rights out,' and they don't even think of all the leaders over 20 years that built up to the decision. And I'm fine with that because I know that we protected our water claims. That was by far the toughest thing.

Nothing...I remember...a lot of leaders, brand new leaders come to me, come to my office and they'll be upset or they'll want advice and I always think, nothing can be tougher than when you're making a decision that will affect all your people. So anything outside of that, you can handle. And so it makes me to be a very good confidante for a lot of leaders that are just in your position, just brand new. And so that will never...I don't think and I hope...the kind of decisions tribes make for your people, you hope you don't have to make those decisions ever again and I hope our tribe will never have to face those. We're not like the United States where we can make always good decisions. It seems like we're always trying to protect resources that are diminishing and we're in competition with. The mention of the Missouri River, I thought that was very interesting. That's our fight too is constantly keep our seat at the table and we have a right here. They're not fun decisions to make but they have to be made so I just think that's by far, hands down the toughest thing. There'll never be a tougher thing ever."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I don't know if I can even talk that tough. That's tough. I'm just trying to think, I didn't have it that bad I guess. No, actually, the leaders have brought up some things that I think are important to this and that is, as I try and piece my thoughts together because I had some simple thing and I'm like, ‘Wow, I have to get a little bit more focused here.' But I think that the toughest or the biggest, I guess interesting and tough, because it did involve our community and the bigger community was we were trying to put lands into trust and it was during a time when no lands were being entrusted.

We have a housing shortage at home, which most tribes do and we had lands that we had purchased over the years that the two chairmen before me had tried to get it entrusted and could not or did not or it didn't go through. And so I decided again, if I would have known before hand how tough it was going to be to move through, I thought, ‘Well, it's clear as day that it passes all the scrutiny.' I had our lawyers come in and give me good advice, ‘You passed all the tests; adjacent, ancestral homelands, next to existing tribal trust lands.' And I thought, ‘Well, this is a no brainer. I just need to help push it through.' And that was in my first term in office. When I first came into office I took that on. I said, ‘I'll take this on as one of my top priorities.' And it wasn't until, just to fast forward, it took me all of my first term and all of my second term, so it took a total of six years to get those lands into trust, 2,000 acres on behalf of my people. And the challenges that...you recognize that we...at that point when I started, I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be an easy movement.' But that was complete ignorance going into there just thinking of the statesmanship that I would use and moving through the landscape but not recognizing our place as a sovereign and the neighbors around us and their impact on our decision making, whether it would go through or not. Because when I first went out to Washington, D.C., the senator there, John Kyl and John McCain and the House of Representatives, Rick Ramsey. At the time they said, ‘Well, what do your neighbors say about it?' And I'm like, ‘I didn't even think about the neighbors. I don't care what the neighbors said.' In my mind I was thinking that we're sovereign. And they said, ‘Well, that's the first thing that has to be dealt with is if your neighbors are in opposition to this lands into trust, do you think we as public officials that represent your neighbors can actually support this getting into trust?'

So I had to go back and clean slate my whole thinking of, ‘Oh, my gosh, we are part of a bigger neighborhood and we have to present ourselves, we have to share who we are.' We're private people. The Yavapai Apache Nation, just our culture is very private. We hold some things sacred that we don't share as I'm sure you all do as well and yet we had to open that door up to settle the concerns of the neighbors. Because of our private nature there's always that distrust of the history of our landscape there from both sides. It was...now it took on a whole new light and a whole new element of over the years. Year one, I'm going to reach out to all of the neighbors and my council getting mad at me, ‘You can't go out and talk to these neighbors. We've always been...they've always been our enemies, they've always been against us.' And I said, ‘Well, you know, these are people that are opposing our lands getting into trust.' After going through the records, it was the people in the towns around us and the towns themselves that were opposed to us getting our lands into trust and so the challenge with that is there was like seven, there's seven little towns around us. And so going and reaching out to all of these seven little towns, they're like, ‘Why are you here? You guys have never been interested in presenting to us.' The balance of respecting and protecting sovereignty and being a good neighbor and I know all of you deal with this because it's impossible not to in our Indian world today. But in order to move the ball forward, the diplomacy that was needed there was a whole new lesson for me and that was tough because I was more hard driven. I'm more like the bull in the china cabinet or whatever at that time. I was more, ‘We'll aggress our way forward.' And aggression was not the way to move forward. So taking guidance from the elders and respecting what they didn't want shared, taking guidance from our experts that we had hired to help us with the process and saying what needed to be shared, and then meeting with our leaders to find out what they'd be willing to support me standing for on behalf of our people because they had to report to their own constituents about what we were doing. As you know, as councilors, you represent a certain constituent group, either your family or clan or a district or a combination of those things.

So the toughest situation wasn't necessarily going up to Washington, D.C. to deal with the federal government because I knew the relationship there, it's clear as day, government-to-government. It's this way, in my mind. I wasn't going there asking permission. I was going there telling them what we as a sovereign wanted and needed and felt like that the United States was obligated to do. But at the local level, at the municipal level that's a whole different relationship. They don't...they had no idea about sovereignty and what it meant at that government to government relationship. They really just saw us as this kind of vacuumized neighborhood within the region that nobody had any interaction with. And so I think the toughest piece of that was opening the door enough to share and shed light on who we were as a society and as a people and trying to normalize the situation. I would go into these towns and say, ‘Look, we want the same things as you. We want our kids to be educated. We want our elders to be safe. We want to have healthcare for our people when it's needed. We want to be able to have homes to live in. So everything that you want as a people, we want. But there are some things that are different because we have a different relationship to the landscape here.' And then the doubters inside, ‘You can't get this done.' Maybe historic or political leaders that had tried before and hadn't done it and you're thinking that they would be aligned in wanting to get it done but seeing that maybe they didn't necessarily want to see it get done, by me anyway.

And I do want to say that it was a team effort. It was definitely getting our council to support that process which gave me the, I guess the courage to go and deal with those issues because it wasn't just me dealing with it, it was me on behalf of my people and my community doing it. If it was just me, I probably would have pulled the plug on dealing with it. But standing for the people takes on a whole new level of security and courage."

June Noronha:

"Before we go into the question and answer session, what we're going to do is we asked each of the chairs at the table to tell you what would be their advice to you. So what advice do they have for the new tribal council members? So we're going to do that and then we're going to open it up for questions and answers."

Darrin Old Coyote:

"My advice to new tribal council members is, there's always people coming and like there's a problem and they want you to solve their problem and one thing I've kind of used, I used an analogy and this could be suicide prevention, drug prevention, diabetes prevention, all the areas. They give you so much funding, federal funding, whether it be 638 or federal funding, you've got to think outside the box. One thing is, I'll just use an analogy here. Say they were going to give you some money for suicide or say there's a cliff there and kids were jumping off that cliff and you had funding available and the federal government wanted you to do basically an ambulance at the bottom to haul off people that are jumping off that cliff. Why can't we use that money to build a fence so that people don't jump off, that's prevention. And that's one area that I know a lot of people will say, ‘Let's build a dialysis center.' Why don't we build a wellness center? You've got to think prevention and everything you do, think prevention.

Another is build bridges whether it be local communities, the county or state and national. Build bridges, don't burn bridges and it helps you. Diplomacy goes a long way when you work with whatever happened historically that's been in the past, put it in the past, put it in history books. Build bridges, don't burn bridges. When you burn bridges, it doesn't go anywhere. You don't achieve anything. So I'd recommend that you build bridges with the county or the state.

And then another one is, I always used the vision of one of our last traditional Crow chiefs, Plenty Coups. He had a vision of forests and there was a storm that came and wiped out all the trees in this forest but there was only one tree still standing and there it was the home of the chickadee and the chickadee would learn what all these other birds were doing and he would learn from them, he would learn from all these birds and the things they did and what they did right and what they did wrong and he would use that. And at the end when that whole storm wiped out all these trees that...the home of the chickadee was still standing in his vision and so from that day forward he said, ‘Whatever we do, don't go against that storm.' And that storm is, whether it be the White people or the federal government and today that tree, the home of the chickadee, he says that's the home of the Crow because he learned from other tribes what they didn't do or did do and then he used that to survive. Basically it's about survival. But diplomacy is key and then unity, unifying your tribe.

One quote I always use is, ‘There's no other Crow tribe. You can't jump on a plane and go find another Crow tribe, we're it. We've got to do this right. If we don't do it, no one else is going to do it for us.' And we take on that challenge. It's up to us. We're elected, in here, it's up to us in here. We're the ones elected, we can't go and find anybody else to do it for us. It's up to us. Once you use that in every meeting, all the tribal leaders are...they look around. It's us. Well, you're elected to do a job and if you use that saying, ‘Our people are depending on us.' There's no other Crow tribe and there's no other whatever tribe you're from. If we don't do it, no one else can do it for us. And that's when you bring them in, part of the team and unifying them and going after whatever the task is. But unifying your council, that's one way to do it, and it's helped me for the last few years as vice secretary now as chairman. It's helped me kind of making them feel that they're part of the process in resolving the problems and I will say, ‘You can't jump on a plane and go find another Crow tribe.' There's no other tribe like us, there's no language...this language I'm speaking, there's no other language like it,' and I'm speaking Crow to all of them. ‘No other culture like this and let's tackle this.' Because a lot of times tribal leaders are looking for somebody to help them whether it be an attorney or whether it be another tribal leader, have him do it. But it's up to us. You're elected and it's up to you to make a difference and unifying your council would be key."

Rebecca Miles:

"Following that I have I think about three things just quickly as advice to all of you. One of the things I learned is to rely on your staff whether they're your attorneys or your experts in the field. Brian Gunn gave an excellent PowerPoint of what the United States leaders do and about their staff. They've been working in that field a long time and all of a sudden you recognize...it really becomes a team. I used to call...there used to be two Daves in my office; Dave Johnson who's still there, our Fisheries Manager, and Dave Cummings. And I lead a lot of fisheries issues, natural resource issues and we'd go to the White House administration two or three times a year and I'd say, ‘Okay, Dream Team, it's time to go.' I felt very honored to be with these guys who the respect was given to me but it was work that they had spent 20 years doing on behalf of your people. And so I called them my Dream Team because they really were...they really earned us a lot of respect. Your staff are really looking for that guidance and they really are, they're looking to serve you. And if they're not, if they're looking there to make you look bad then perhaps your policies need to be improved.

The second thing is relationships whether they're...and starting just with your other people on the council. A lot of times election will happen and you think a person's elected that may have been your archenemy or they have made your life hell while you were on council and a lot of times they can be your very best friend. It's issue by issue. You don't always agree on things but don't lock yourself in a box to have the reputation of not working with anybody. You really lose...you can really lose sight. And so one of the things...in high school even I always hated cliques. We just had our 20 year reunion and I was friends with everybody in our class and it felt really good seeing everybody again and there were the same clicks, locked in as grown women or men not talking. It was a small community and I just was really blessed to be able to not just follow one... One person wrote in my yearbook, ‘She was friends with everybody, the nerds, everybody, the sport...the guys, everybody.' And so that's how I carried my relationship in life. There were people that may have not liked me and they got on council and it just became, we're all here for one reason, for our people. And so it behooves you to work together and everything is relationships, whether you're amongst yourselves. If you're fighting, then your people are hurting, I promise you that. It's just like parents. If your parents aren't doing well, the kids are hurting and it's exactly the same way on tribal council. But relationships are everything, even in Congress. The staffers, even though they may seem like they just got out of high school, you really got to...they really are sophisticated in a lot of ways and that leads to my third piece of advice I have.

You know 40, 50, 60 years ago when our constitution was being formed and our government was being established as a formal government, tribal leaders really had to know a lot about very little and that was treaty rights, history, knowing that they have to educate people in Congress or in the administration about our place and to protect our sovereignty. And then today's tribal leader is really the exact opposite. Because Congress or the administration has more then quadrupled in 30, 40 years so has...and as tribes have developed. You now have to know a little about a lot of topics as opposed to what your leaders did 50 years ago and so it's a very different shift in the work you kind of do and that's where it goes back to staff; being a good study, being a good study of capturing the main points on a lot of issues. Brian Gunn hit the top issues across Indian Country but you as individual tribes now have your own top issues aside from what is facing Indian Country. And the reason why I say that and being concise is so correct because your leadership in Congress have already heard...they already know your treaty rights in a lot of ways. They have their staff do the research and everything. They want specifics, they want details. They don't want you to just go in and demand treaty rights. They want a specific ask and so that helps when as a tribal leader you study the issues. You don't have to be a professor. A lot of times your people think you have to go in being very smart and actually the best tribal leader is one who is going to sit and listen and not know a lot about things, somebody who's going to be open minded.

I just think those are things that are very valuable and make you actually a well rounded leader because you learn so much, there's just so much you learn, good and bad, on tribal council and you're in that place to make that decision. I really appreciated the PowerPoint because I wish I had that ahead of time because a lot of times people think you do need to be that expert in the field and maybe you were elected because you either teach the language or you know something, some trait. But when you come on council, I don't know about your council, but ours is we all vote equally on the same issue and so it just is very...a lot of times you're not the one leading the issue. Your counterpart is leading that issue. Not everybody can be in the healthcare field. And when you recognize that what your job is on council, some people get on council because just to be honest they want to maybe fire staff or they want to have retribution. They have an agenda. Not having an agenda is actually the best thing because there is so much work for you to do and if you actually just went into one policy arena which I found myself accidentally leading natural resources, which is another story in itself. The men automatically pushed me towards health, being on the health board and that's all great but my life prepared me and I didn't realize it for natural resources and to lead natural resources. If you just take salmon recovery, there is more than enough work for one tribal leader to do. And so if you're spending your time focusing on negative things or things that are not the council's role, then you're not doing your job because the amount of work Indian Country has to do in any one policy arena is just...the levels of bureaucracy and red tape you've got to get through is just tremendous and that's your job. So there's a lot of work to be done so focus on those things. Thank you."

Jamie Fullmer:

"A couple of points. The first one is the one does not outweigh the all in the tribal system. The one individual...hiring the one individual that is incapable to do the job does not outweigh all of the individuals that that individual can impact in their particular role. You hire a director that is incapable to do their job, then they affect everybody who's in that system. Education is a perfect example. So when you say, ‘Well, we're hiring that person cause they're a tribal member or they're a relative or whatever,' just keep in mind, the one does not outweigh the all. And the other thing is they've always talked about, and I don't know who they are, maybe it was we.

We talked about nepotism and the discussion around nepotism but in a tribal system we're all related. And if you develop policy and you follow that policy and you hire based on talent and skills, it doesn't matter if they're your cousin, brother, sister, nephew, uncle, niece. It doesn't matter. But that was a hard challenge, especially the smaller the community. Everybody's related at some level, clan relative or blood relative or whatever and so that was a battle that we faced a lot was this whole nepotism battle. And so the way we overcame that was by developing policy for hiring that was based on skills. It didn't matter if they were somebody's brother, sister, relative, whatever. If the criteria was there and they were...met the criteria threshold, then they were eligible to be hired. But that really helped elevate the bar rather than lowering the bar to meet the standard of the people. Elevate the bar and have people work up to it but you need to provide the programming to help them do that.

Just a final point about this advisement; create a plan and follow through. There's always that honeymoon period. You have a great meeting, you have a great session, you're real enthused and you get back in the office, you still have the stacks there, you still have the phone calls coming in, you still have the demands of daily life, you still have to follow those. Define the issues as was brought up and respect and recognize the cultural priorities and the chairman brought up a cultural story of a vision that tied very much into the here and now. We have a lot of answers in our own stories, in our own histories and songs and part of our heritage ways that will teach us how to run our governments as well. It doesn't always have to be the western philosophy, although most of the tribal governments in the modern world are built around a democratic system, a republic system actually.

And then budget where the priorities are established. If you say, ‘Culture is our number one priority,' and yet it has the smallest budget in your government, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. That's so important. You can't just build all these priorities and then run business as usual. The budget has to match those priorities. You say, ‘Education is a priority,' and it's only two percent of the budget, it doesn't really connect.

Learning from past mistakes and successes. Let your...as was said, you come in with an open slate and saying, ‘I'm not aligned with one or the other but what have we done in the past that's worked. What have we done in the past that could be done differently to change it?' I remember, real quickly, my grandfather, he'd come in, he says, ‘Oh, we tried that in '72 or we tried that in '84,' and I'm thinking, I was thinking I'm coming up with these great, bright ideas and cutting edge and he's like, ‘Oh, yeah, we were too small back then or we didn't have enough money then, this'll probably work now.' So learning from those historical figures in your community.

Finding out what you all as council members want. Each of you might have, this was brought up, an agenda, what is that? Is there some things that you can align on? You should fight... We used to always say that the strongest debate makes the greatest answers. But there are some things that you should be aligned on. If healthcare is an alignment issue, then put all the argument aside and say, ‘What do we need to do to actually move forward with it,' and then defining how much money is actually available. It's one thing to have your wish list, it's another thing to have down there how much do we actually have to get this done.

And then finally, listen to your people. Listen whether it's your constituents or it's other...your fellow council members. Listen to your people. They'll tell you what they want. They maybe not necessarily will tell you what they need but they'll always tell you what they want and at some point you'll be able to drill down into what they need. We want to have our kids be happy and healthy. Well, in order to do that we need to have food in the house, lights on, education, safe homes with no abuse and neglect. So those are the tidbits of advice of a has-been leader."

Richard Jack: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Lac du Flambeau Story

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Native Nations Institute
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Richard Jack, Chairman of the Constitution Committee of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, discusses some of the struggles that he and his fellow committee members have encountered as they engage the Lac du Flambeau people on the topic of constitutional reform and the need to regain true ownership of the nation's governance.

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Citation

Jack, Richard. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Lac du Flambeau Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 11, 2012. Presentation.

Richard Jack:

"It's been really engaging for me to be part of a process that's so dynamic and so exciting. We did a lot of research on where we needed to go as a nation. We did a lot of research on the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Ho-Chunk Inc., a whole slug of models that were actually introduced by the Native Nations people and so we began this whole process of adopting and adapting. When we first started engaging, we got into a whole series of bad investments that pretty much bankrupted our tribe and there were some...people wanted accountability, they wanted retribution is what they wanted because things got bad. But we're here now and so we had to take a real hard look at what got us there and start exploring some ideas on where we were going to head as a nation. Well, we needed constitutional reform in the worst way because there was a lot of gray areas and things that weren't addressed. Our tribal council still today has not adopted any formal rules of procedure but we have a stable government. That is critical to moving the conversation forward and that was a process. It was a very challenging process and it took a lot of community activism to get it rolling. People were very concerned about our children, our future and 'How are we going to pay for it all? All our money's gone.'

Some of our tribal leaders wanted to hire out the process of reform to some lawyers and we as the constitution committee took offense to that. We needed to be the owners of our future. We needed to be the owners of our destiny. So when we took a hard look at sovereignty and...these guys were pricey, too. They don't come cheap. And they told us straight up to our face, with the council in attendance, that, 'We'll write the document for you and if you want to do community education that's fine, but essentially we'll just do it for you and we'll go on and we'll figure out some other ways that you can pay us to develop your judicial system and your legislative system.' And so they were kind of happy with kind of the way things were moving. And then some other things had hit the scene and we stepped back and we started engaging our council in some real engaging conversations about just taking that ownership. So we were granted leave to conduct a series of educational forums at our convention center twice a month, three to four hours long. And like many processes, how do you encourage that? So we got kind of a little creative and so we said, 'Well, we're going to do a little free play along with the whole scenario but you won't be able to utilize that until after a three- or four-hour session.' So that was real successful. So we began.

And one of the things that had happened, over time when we actually got through actually the fourth article of our constitution, and some other things that occurred in between, some more crises were developing within the tribe. So we had to spend a couple sessions educating the community. By our own law we had...our kids were being shipped all over the country, dysfunctional family systems, a whole series of things that we're all aware of as Native people -- drugs, alcohol. They have an impact on our community. So we had this educational process and by our own law we had to adjust our ordinances so that ICW [Act, Indian Child Welfare Act] could...but we had to educate a whole lot of people. We had to educate our council on all the processes that were involved and it was pretty successful. So we developed an ordinance that now ensures that our descendents will be taken care of. We will assume jurisdiction over them as a nation, as a people.

So that started a whole new discussion when we got back to the work of constitutional reform. We were about five months into the process and my uncle, he passed on, and he was...he just kind of absent-mindedly wanted to question -- because we have all these strategy sessions and we have all these think-tank sessions discussing this, that and the other thing on how best to proceed. And he asked the question of the audience and there were three council members in attendance at the time. And the question was, 'How many of you believe you are wards of the government?' And we had a couple hundred people in attendance at that particular session. And over 300...over three-quarters of the audience raised their hand, all three council members also. So we just kind of looked at each other and, 'Where do we go from here?' So we kind of continued on with our discussion about one function of the government or another and continued that process. But we had to go back to the drawing board. We had to start with the fundamentals all over again and how do we do that. So those are some of the things that I kind of mentioned yesterday about the paradigms that we have to challenge, entitlement, the victim, the ward and what are the good ways to do that.

At the same time that we were going through this economic turmoil, we also had a rise in gang issues in the community and so the discussion now moved to, 'What are we going to do about the youth?' I see one of our young people here from Red Cliff who's deeply engaged. This is kind of what we did. We combined it with that purpose for 'why do we have government?' and we encouraged that discussion of a thought process that extends far beyond our lifetime and the foundations that we need to ensure them a future. So aside from the economic discussion, now we were entering into coalitions that were so meaningful. I didn't realize it. A gentleman had approached me a year ago to be part of our Tribal AmeriCorp program and I got interviewed for like two days. And I was saying, 'I'm up to my ears in what I'm doing right now. How am I going to do what you want me to do?' He said, 'You're pretty much doing whatever this job requires and our focus is prevention.' And I have a document back here, been worked on for about a year now through the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council and it's about prevention. And one of the things that's encouraged in this book is culture. It's essential to what nation rebuilding is all about. And that whole document, it centers on culture. Culture is prevention. That's where that's at and the tribe, we got the tribe to buy a facility, an eight-bedroom facility and also another facility to start an elder-guided youth camp all summer long. We're just on the threshold of this. But it took a long time to convince it because we were losing a lot of kids. There were emergency meetings in our communities, death, a lot of deaths, wrongful deaths. So it kind of moved things along and in terms of reform. A lot of community involvement. We had to outsource to a specialist to help come and guide us.

So it began a whole new look at how we approach community development. And one of the things that really came to light was the two approaches that one's working and one doesn't, kind of like the format Stephen uses. And one was called the needs-based approach and one was called the asset-based approach. And when we took a look at it, a hard look and looked at the economics of our local community we found that we had at that time about $20 million that were flowing through our community dealing with people's deficiencies. Now some of our analysis of our community, we had a community that already has about $300 million that flows through it and I mean flows through it -- it doesn't stay. So when we were taking a look at that whole picture, I said, 'What's wrong with this? We've almost got 50 percent people that still are living under endemic poverty. This is a seriously bad-looking picture.' So we had to start taking that picture apart. We have a school budget that's about $120 million. Our planning department that works for three tribes pulls in another $120 million. Our tribal casino and tribal operations and the grant sources about another $80 million. But none of our people were qualified. We have an unskilled job force. We have to outsource all our upper management people. It was pretty discouraging when we started to take a hard look at the picture.

So we had a referendum vote, we had a new council come into office, every two years we have a turnover in our council. So they forced a referendum on us to see whether or not we want to go ahead and go forth with the constitutional restructuring. They had it on a Sunday. There were no public hearings, there were no mailings like we were promised to get all this good stuff out, so it took us...and it made us think, 'What are some of the things that we could do immediately to help our government meet the needs of its people.' So where we encouraged take a hard look at policy and procedure and possibly looking at enacting it into some kind of legislative process. We don't have yet an independent judiciary so we're looking at that whole process on how that could be set up. Our current thing is we got in touch with the Bureau [of Indian Affairs], they have to operate under a whole new set of [regulations] now and they have to render technical assistance to you. So we found a one-time funding opportunity through [Public Law 93-] 638 dollars that allows us to have a constitutional analysis done and I really like the use of lawyers. They seem to have a profound effect on councils and just...it's like their word is 'God's law' and it just...so we educate the lawyers and they come...they go in there and tell them exactly what they hear from us. But it's magic, it works. So we use them to the best of our ability.

There was one other anomaly that we kind of looked at and I know you all experienced this at some point in your career in Indian Country and this happened not too long ago, maybe eight, nine years ago. We had a young gentleman who worked for the tribe most of his life but he was running the roads department. He needed some vehicles so he got the three estimates that he needed, got himself on the agenda, went to the tribal council and was turned down flat. But he's been a longtime guy and he lived in the community a long time. He's a great observer. So he goes back to work, gets this white guy that works for him, dresses him in a suit and tie, gives him the very same three estimates, gets back on the agenda. Not only did he get the two vehicles, they wanted to know what more they could do for his program. We have a lot of discussions. I talk to a lot of educators, psychologists and anybody I can to help me with this whole process, to understand human behavior, to understand a lot of things and as a strategist I suppose I said, 'Well, how do we use this to our advantage? It's important that these things get accomplished and do the ends justify the means?' So I took it upon myself to encourage my committee to...'Well, let's get a white guy to be the head of our community economic development department and begin the discussion. We'll feed him all the information, he'll feed it to the council.' And by god, it happened. It happened exactly that way.

So these are some of the things that we need to challenge as Native people and it has to happen through an education process. We have to understand terms like "internalized superiority," "internalized oppression," those things we use on our own people that we've learned from a colonial presence here. These things impact us in ways we are beginning to understand. They impact our children. We were talking the other night about, 'We don't really have history in our public schools.' What we are engaged in as a community, and it takes a lot of people, is we now have maybe nine teaching lodges, seven sweat lodges; we have fasting camps. So the rebirth, it's not rebirth because people have been doing this all along and now we're trying to bring them together to have more of an impact on our youth. As Mr. [John] Barrett was sharing some of the ancient history of our people, we tried to bring those people here to share with our youth. Much of our culture came from, the dreams of what we practice in our culture, came from the dreams of children and that's interesting. So when we were looking at the neuroscience of human biology, we find that children have these extraordinary number of neurons in their brain and the more connections that you make with them at an early age, the more that sticks with them. This is an extraordinary thing.

We had a new person in our education director, our education over...since we began this whole reform thing has like expanded exponentially into a crazy, crazy, crazy thing. So we're...we've got a workforce development now. I think we have 120 students. It just...we have the first time in three years we passed a budget and this goes back to the accountability thing. After people started waking up to the fact that they really do have some power over their people that they put in there to represent the community's interest, a lot of accountability things. We've had record numbers of people that are running for council. We've had extraordinary participation in council meetings reminding our people why they were put there and why we need them to be stronger and more focused on what our Nation needs. So we're exploring.

Now the latest development and it's probably the most exciting thing is we separated business from politics. We copied the Citizen [Potawatomi] people. We adopted and we adapted a successful model and we're moving forward with that. We've got an all Indian board but now we're utilizing real world people like J.P. Morgan, like anybody else who can come in and educate our people on how to do these things with best practices. And the model is, once we're successful, all this money's going to go back to fund your 501(c) 3's, your community things, all these things that your community needs to move forward, the educational processes. It's just exciting.

I want to thank the Native Nations people because it gave for me a road map putting this together. It gave me a way to understand without all the emotion and without all the anger to look at a real solid way of proceeding. And it doesn't have to be all done that way. What I've learned is that education has to go in hand, tandem with whatever changes that you want to move forward on. These are the things that I encourage and it's not easy for me because I want things to happen quickly. It can't happen fast enough. But I'm more accepting of the process that education needs to have its flow, the way it needs to flow out and creating the environments for our youth to experience a meaningful dialogue, a meaningful experience in how we're going to look forward and make these things happen for our people. So I guess I got the sign. But I want to thank the Native Nations Institute for allowing me to be part of this and I...they do so much and we...Stephen [Cornell] invited us down to some of the constitutional things and it's had an extraordinary impact. People know now that these are some solid things that we can move on. Let's do it. [Anishinaabe language]. That's the word we use, let's do this. [Anishinaabe language]."

Stephen Cornell: Governance, Enterprises, and Rebuilding Native Economies

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development Co-Director Stephen Cornell discusses the two basic approaches Native nations typically take as they work to build and sustain nation-owned enterprises, and shares a number of examples from across Indian Country.

Resource Type
Citation

Cornell, Stephen. "Governance, Enterprises, and Rebuilding Native Economies." Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 29, 2007. Presentation.

Stephen Cornell:

"Well, good morning and thanks to all of you for being here. We've been looking forward to this. This is an experiment on our part. It's the first of a series, we hope, of focused seminars like this. A lot of the work that we do in executive education is very comprehensive. We spend two days with the tribal council, with the senior leadership of a Nation going through nation building from sort of A to Z, talking about constitutional reform, talking about policy, talking about strategic planning as well as economic development. But as Joan [Timeche] said this morning, we thought we've had enough interest from people in spending some focused time on nation-owned enterprises and we decided maybe we should think about doing some more narrowly focused seminars. And this is actually our first shot at it -- so you're all guinea pigs in this experiment -- and if this works I think we'll be doing more of this kind of thing. We've got one coming up in May, May 14. We're going to be doing a seminar; it's not an open one. It's a little bit different, but the focus is on sovereign immunity issues that a lot of nations are wrestling with. And we want to do one -- we've been asked by the National Congress of American Indians to do one on per capita distributions. A lot of you have probably dealt with those kinds of issues. A lot of nations are trying to think about how to handle the revenues that they're beginning to generate from the sorts of enterprises we're talking about today. So there's a number of opportunities to try to provide hands-on experience, research results, information to people on some of these narrow topics, narrower topics.

So this is the first effort at that. And I'm the guy we have to get through before you get to the meat of this, because what we're really pleased to have this morning is the panel that comes next, because we were able to persuade -- as Vern [Bachiu] said, it was tough persuading those from Saskatchewan to come to Tucson in March -- but we were able to persuade four nations to come here today and talk simply about their experience. These are all nations, and we've got the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, the Gila River Indian Community, the Tulalip Tribes, the Osoyoos Indian Band -- all four of whom have done interesting things, encountered all the problems, come up in some cases with solutions, in some cases maybe are still wrestling about some of those problems, but we wanted to ask those four nations to come and say a little bit about, 'Here's what we tried to do: here's what's worked, here's where we are today and where we're going,' and kind of tap into their experience. So I'm looking forward to that part of this and also there's time in the agenda to have some dialogue about asking them, ‘Well, how did you handle this?' or ‘what happened? Did you encounter this problem that we're having? How did you deal with it?' That sort of thing. And then this afternoon we've got a second panel that looks thematically at some of the nuts and bolts of organizing nation-owned enterprises and it's kind of an information exchange. We expect to learn something out of this as much as anyone in the room.

The Native Nations Institute, we're a vacuum cleaner for information and we spend a lot of our time listening to what people are doing. We don't see ourselves as an organization with answers, we see ourselves as an organization that helps communicate what Indigenous nations are doing that works. That's where the answers are coming from. The answers are coming from nations out there encountering these issues, solving them. What we do is try to learn, ‘Oh, you did that? Great, we can tell other people how you solved that, maybe that'll help them.' So that's what this is really about. My job in the next 40 minutes or so is to try to give you a little context for how we think about this issue, for some of what we've learned and kind of set the stage. As we've...as Joan said, this work at the Native Nations Institute goes back now for more than 20 years, back to the founding of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. And over those years we've begun to learn a lot of stuff and I've tried to put some of it together this morning in this presentation.

One of the things of course that's apparent is that all across North America and elsewhere -- we've recently been doing some work in Australia and New Zealand. And that wasn't our idea to go do work there but Manley Begay and I -- Manley would be here and sends his apologies -- but Manley Begay and I got a request from some Aboriginal Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand saying, ‘We hear so much about what's happening in North America -- what Indigenous nations are doing there -- we want to learn from what they're doing. We understand you gather some of those stories. Can you come tell those stories?' And what's been interesting to us is when we hear about the problems they're facing, they're similar to the problems Indigenous nations here are facing. The politics are different, the legal situations are different, but here are Indigenous peoples trying to reclaim their place at the table, trying to reclaim control over their lands, trying to figure out how to solve the tough problems that they face. One of the tough problems faced everywhere is the economic problem and we tend to think of it as a set of challenges that Indigenous nations are facing. How do we reduce -- we hear this a lot -- how do we reduce our dependence on outsiders, federal governments and others who are paying the bills, often? How do we reduce that? How do we get in a situation where we're in the driver's seat? We don't have to ask permission from somebody because it's our money, it's the product of our work, we're in control, we can shape our communities the way we want to. There's that challenge of how do you provide opportunities for your citizens to live productive, satisfying lives.

[I was] talking once with Chief Phillip Martin from Mississippi Choctaw. Many of you may be familiar with what's happened at the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, but they've transformed their economy over the last 20 years. And when you ask Chief Martin ‘What's the benefit of it?' He says, ‘Well, in the 1970s everybody was leaving, now they're all coming home.' Because what they've done is create an opportunity for their own citizens to live productive, satisfying lives on Choctaw land and to him that was the goal in part, to be able to do that. And you're also trying to create the means of supporting your own governing processes. If Indigenous nations are serious about reclaiming control, then they've got to find ways to support Indigenous governance where it's not dependent on somebody else saying, ‘Well, we'll pay for this but we won't pay for that.' Well, who's in the driver's seat when that happens? [I was] talking with Brian Titus from Osoyoos Indian Band and Chief Clarence Louie up there, and one of the key goals in their whole development effort has been ‘how do we get to the point where we can do what we want to do, support our own government, support our own priorities?' So those challenges are out there and we think those challenges lie behind this effort by Indigenous nations to create enterprises that are under their control and use those enterprises to produce new sources of revenue. Well, we've been looking at this for a while and I thought we'd begin with two real quick stories about some enterprises from our research files because they show, we think, some of the differences in approaches that we've seen over the last 20 years. And I think the last 20-30 years have been years of learning for Indigenous nations. But here are some of the ways that things get done.

I won't tell you what enterprise or nation this is but here's a quick capsule. This is Enterprise A -- and we came across this sometime in the early 1990s -- it's a tribally owned business. This tribe has a large forest on its lands. This enterprise cuts trees on the nation's forest and turns them into fence posts, sells them to a national broker who markets them across the United States. I say it does this, it doesn't actually exist anymore -- the enterprise -- but it was doing this. The manager is hired by and reports to the tribal council. Councilors repeatedly interfere in hiring and firing decisions by, for example, calling up the manager and saying, ‘You need to hire more people from our district.' When we were up there doing research and talked to this manager, he said, 'oh,' he said, ‘We've got a...,' I don't know, can't remember. I think it was a seven-member tribal council. He said, ‘I've got seven bosses. There's not a week that goes by that someone doesn't call me up and say, ‘I've got a personnel issue we need to talk about or my cousin's moving back here after ten years, moving back to the rez, needs a job, I want you to hire him.'' The manager says, ‘I'm running an employment service; my labor costs keep rising. Soon I'll have the most expensive fence posts in the country.' And that was exactly what he ended up with. And the result was he couldn't compete in the tough market because of the rising labor costs. Eventually the enterprise, which was being subsidized by the nation, eventually folded, end of all the job opportunities, etcetera. So that's Enterprise A, and that's a story which I think...you all have worked in this business longer than I have, or a lot of you have, it's not an unfamiliar story of how some things happen.

Enterprise B: this is an Indian nation, which in the early 90s was one of the early casino builders, became dependent largely on its own casino revenues. As one councilman said, ‘We've gone from dependent on the feds to being dependent on the casino.' But it has...then it started to face competition because the state it was in liberalized gaming law and pretty soon a couple of new casinos were opening up -- non-Native casinos -- located right between this tribe and its primary market. So its revenues looked like they were going to fall as these casinos came online. They were going to start losing jobs and losing resources so the nation established a tribally owned corporation, wholly tribally owned corporation, and directed it to diversify the nation's economy. That's its goal and they said, ‘We want you to make profits that we can use, you can use to get us into, get us out of our dependence on gaming. We don't want to leave gaming -- that's a core activity -- we want to be doing other things,' and insulated this new corporation from tribal politics and hired top quality managers. The chairman of the tribe said, ‘One thing we've learned in our experience is that politics and business decision-making are a bad mix. So we're going to set this thing up in a way that insulates, tries to manage that,' tough challenge in small nations. But in five years, the corporation is generating substantial profits and jobs from multiple businesses. They succeeded in diversifying the economy dramatically and today they're, in a sense, much more dependent on the multiple businesses that that corporation is running than they are on their original casino operation. And in fact, the casino revenues have fallen because these other casinos have been successful.

Now, one way that we look at these two enterprises is we look at very different ways to organize things. Enterprise A fits in our book under what we sometimes call the council-run model of a nation-owned enterprise and you can see it diagrammed up there. You've got the council, the CEO reports to the council, employees supposedly report to the CEO, there may be a board of directors but it's actually an advisory board. That may not be the original idea, but in fact the council is running things. And elected leaders are basically making the business decisions, political considerations loom large, employees have figured out where the power lies and realize, well, the way to get a complaint dealt with is you go around the CEO. Why talk to the board, they don't have any power; you just go straight to the council. So the council's become the personnel grievance process, the complaint department and everything else in that situation. Enterprise B -- the one I talked about responding to the casino challenge -- they've got a very different structure. They've got a council, they've got a board that reports to the council, the CEO reports to the board and employees can't go around. They've got a personnel grievance system that is built into their corporate structure. So if you have a complaint, there's a way to deal with it within the business structure. The council's job is to think about where are we going? What's the strategy here? Do we want to be in this kind of business? How should we use this chunk of land? What should we do with this windfall land selling? The big issues the council is dealing with, but then the council has appointed a board of talented, skilled people with integrity and said, ‘Here's our strategy, you guys execute it. If you depart from the strategy, we'll pull you in but you do the day-to-day execution of it.' Now this isn't the whole story of those two enterprises. As anybody in this room knows, there's a lot more going on than this, but to us this illustrates the point -- which came out very clearly in our research -- which is that how you organize the business and how you organize the business development process is at least important as what business you're in. The guys in Nation B, when they faced this casino challenge and they created that corporation and said, ‘Go make money, diversify our economy,' we talked with the people who were involved in those council meetings and one of them said to us, ‘You know, we never talked about what business to get into.' He said, ‘We didn't spend those meetings saying, ‘I think we ought to do something in transportation. I think we ought to get into retail. I've got a great idea, I know a guy who could get us into X.'' He said, ‘The discussion was all about how do we organize a structure that's capable of supporting and sustaining business, whatever the business is? We didn't really talk about what business to be in, that was the corporation's job: where are the golden opportunities?'

So I thought I'd just look for a moment at what the old days, the approach to business development. And this is a bit of a caricature of it, but this is kind of the way for a long time I think a lot of nations approached business development. It's being left in the dust by what many of you in this room are doing today, which is a very different approach, but this is what it used to look like I think. Whose job was development? It was the planner. You hired a planner, you told them economic development, ‘We need economic development here, go find something we should do.' It was the planner's job. I remember in the late '80s arriving at one reservation saying we wanted to talk to someone about their economic development strategy: ‘This is Joe Kalt.' And he said, ‘Oh, economic development? Down the hall, third office on the right.' You know, this was a councilor. It was if, ‘Oh, that's their job. We hired a guy. He's supposed to do economic development. We've got other things.' It's the planner's job. What's the strategy? Pick a winner, the home-run syndrome. This young lady is from, came from Pine Ridge, right? From Albuquerque. Somebody here though...well, there was a fellow up there when we were up there about three years ago and he said, ‘One of our problems is we've got the Messiah complex.' I said, ‘What's the Messiah complex?' He said, ‘it's the belief that someday the Ford Motor Company's going to roll in here with 500 jobs and save us all.' And he said, ‘We finally realized, no one's going to save us. We've got to do it ourselves.' Picking the winner, finding that home-run project that's going to solve all the problems is not what economic development is about, but it's often the way it used to be done. Pick a winner, get a grant, or -- the more sophisticated approach -- do an asset analysis, then pick a winner and get a grant. Either way the strategy focuses on what we can persuade funders to fund.

How is the effort organized, sort of as a branch of tribal administration? Businesses are often run like tribal departments or social programs, the relationship of business to tribal government, the council controls the business, makes the decisions on hiring and firing, decides how the revenues are going to be spent, etc., essentially they're the business operator. What role does political and legal infrastructure play? Not much. Nobody pays a whole lot of attention to it. The authority rests with the council and maybe with the funders who told you, ‘Here's how you have to use the money we just gave you.' There are few consistent rules about how you do things, there's little effort to keep politics out of business decisions. What role does financial management capacity play? Pretty modest. Businesses are dependent on grants, they're run like programs, you fill out the grant application, show where the money goes and you're pretty much done. Not a lot of investment in building financial management capacity on the ground. Key tasks: hire a planner, get a grant, start a business and employ as many people as possible -- the old approach. What does the process look like? This comes out of talking with a number of tribes about how these things happen. There's a tribal election, new leadership comes in, they look around and say, ‘We need to get something going around here. Anybody got any ideas? We better hire a planner; you hire a planner. Okay, let's get a grant; you get a grant. Start a business, any business, whatever you get a grant for, that's fine. Hand out the jobs to your relatives and supporters.' So the business gets going, not much money comes in, but as long as the grant holds out, the jobs hold out. Then there's another election, a new group of leaders comes in, they look around at the business and they say, ‘Whoa, those jobs ought to be ours. Let's fire everybody and put our people in there.' Six months later, ‘We're short of cash. We need some money. That business is bringing in money, let's take the money from that and solve our problem.' Three more months the business is in trouble. ‘Quick, get another grant. Get another grant.' Six months more it's going down, ‘Run for cover.' Everybody splits. ‘Fire the planner. What happened to the jobs? Aren't there anymore grants? The chief's an idiot. Vote him out. Elect me,' etc. So the business dies, next election, another elected set of leaders comes in promising to build a sound economy. Look around, ‘Boy,' they say, ‘those guys sure made a mess of things. Good thing we got elected. Now let's get something going,' and here we go again. ‘Anybody got any ideas, etc.?' And the outcomes of this approach tended to be failed enterprises, few profits, few jobs, a discouraged community that wonders, man, when is something going to really stick.

Well, the alternative, and we think some of you in this room have been inventing this. We'll hear about some of them this morning and some of you have been doing it that we don't even know about. It's a very different approach to business development. We call it the nation-building approach, but that's just a name for it, but it looks very different. It doesn't go after the home run or look for the quick fix. It basically says, 'We've got to put in place a governance environment that can support and sustain development and we've got to determine our strategic priorities.' What is it we're trying to create here -- that Joan [Timeche] talked about this morning? What kind of community do we hope will be here on this land 50 years from now and what does that mean for the business decisions we make today? Joan and I actually had dinner last night with four representatives of a tribe in the Southwest who are wrestling...and they've been extremely successful, have done a brilliant job of business. And one of them said, ‘We're realizing that while we've become really good at some of these business techniques, we're beginning to lose touch with some of the Indigenous knowledge that we're trying to preserve. So we're at that point of trying to say to ourselves, okay, we've solved this piece of our strategic objective, we're making the money we need to free ourselves, but we haven't yet solved this part of our strategic objective. How do we do both at once and what does that mean for the businesses that we're in?' They're thinking about, 'Hey, have we got the right strategy here?'

Features of the nation-building approach? And some of you who are familiar with our work will be familiar with a lot of this, but it emphasizes who's in the driver's seat, self-rule, Indigenous nations making the decisions, exercising control over their own affairs; backing up that authority with sound governing institutions; matching those institutions to their own Indigenous values, culture, the things that are most important to them; thinking strategically about where they're going, turning tribal government not into this boxing ring where families or factions fight to control the resources but into the engine that carries the nation forward. That's sort of the nation-building approach. But it approaches business development a little differently. Whose job is development? It's too important to be left to the planner. It can't be in the office three doors down. It's what the nation's about. How are we going to free ourselves from that dependence? How are we going to provide our citizens with opportunities? How are we going to support a government? Those are huge challenges. What's the strategy? It thinks about these issues. What kind of community are we trying to build? What do we hope to change? What do we hope to protect and not change, preserve? And given our priorities, our assets, the opportunities in front of us, what should we do? The relationship of business to tribal government, strategic direction is in the hands of the council or other leadership, the day-to-day management is insulated from politics, and there are multiple ways of doing that. We're going to hear about some of them today. Some people do it with independent boards, separate charters, established rules that govern how people deal with their own businesses. But that is a major piece of the task of running successful nation-owned enterprises.

We've looked at this council-run versus separated model, those two diagrams I showed you. We did a running study of 121 tribally owned and operated enterprises on about 30 reservations and we asked people, senior leaders from these nations, which of these models do you fit into? Does the council control everything, hiring, firing, day-to-day business management? Is that essentially council business or is it separated somehow? You have specialists, those who know that side of how to run the enterprise who are doing that. And then we asked them, are you profitable or not? And the interesting thing was 63 of them under the council-run model, percent that are profitable: 49 percent. Odds of profitability: less than even. Under the separated model, 58 of those, 83 percent of them profitable, odds of profitability almost five to one. And this is one of the things that taught us that this issue of how you manage that place where politics and business come together turns out to be a critical piece of whether or not the business succeeds in meeting the objectives of the nation. And we think actually on the left that the situation would be, that that actually overstates the successes, because of course what it doesn't capture is all the businesses that folded because of interference like that timber operation that I started with, which didn't last because it had been turned into an employment service for council."

Audience member:

"Would the 31 also include casinos?"

Stephen Cornell:

"At the time we did this, I would say there are casinos in this list, but I couldn't tell you how many. Some of this was in '91 and '92 and I think in those two groups, those two rounds of this, there were very few casinos but probably there are some in here. A lot of this is non-casino. And actually someone said to us last night, the nation that Joan and I were talking with last night has a very successful casino among other businesses. And this one gentleman said to us, ‘Well, the problem with a casino is if you're making a lot of money, it can cover over a lot of problems.' And he said, ‘What we've discovered is when we get into businesses other than a casino,' at least if you're in a place where casinos are making a lot of money, that is if you're close to a big market, he said, ‘When we get into businesses other than casinos, we find we have to ramp up our management game. It's a whole lot tougher.' He said, ‘We've had to find much better management skills outside the casino business. Running casino you've got to know how to run a casino but,' he said, ‘as a general set of management challenges, if the money flows in, boy, you can cut a lot of corners and still show a healthy profit. In our other businesses, the tolerances are a lot less. We haven't been able to tolerate the mistakes that we often made in our casino biz. We've had to be much more skilled.' So that's an interesting question.

What role does the political and legal infrastructure play? Treat it as a key piece of the puzzle. This is what we've got to solve. It's that nation with the casino challenges, Nation B that I talked about, not talking about what business to be in, but talking about, 'What's the political and legal infrastructure we're going to put in place that can support any business we want to get into?' Without a political and legal infrastructure, laws, codes, separations of powers, roles, etc., that can support development, changes of success are slim. What role does financial management capacity play? Another key piece, putting in place reliable financial systems that are effective, they're enforced, they're transparent, so people trust them. It's not only essential to business success, but this is one of the ways you reassure citizens, partners, funders. There's a fellow named Jason Goodstriker with the Blood Tribe in Alberta. He's a council member there and he said, ‘We used to have all these rumors about what's really happening to the money.' He said, ‘Nobody...we all knew what was happening to the money cause the council got all these reports, but out in the community, ‘Oh, I know what they're really doing with that money, you know where that money came from, I know what's behind that whole thing,' and it seemed like a big rumor mill. We kept talking about how do we control this? And finally someone said, ‘Tell everybody what's happening to the money.' So we simply started publishing the tribal budget in the newspaper every quarter, everything. ‘Here's where it's coming from guys, here's where it's going and we put it in there.'' And he said, ‘Anybody with the patience and the mind for that mind-numbing task of just looking at numbers, could figure out...we made it as clear, as simple as we could.' And he said, ‘Overnight the rumor mill wound down.' It was the lack of knowledge that had made a lot of our own citizens say, ‘I don't know about this, it looks fishy. We made it transparent and the trust level rose.'

What are the key tasks? In this approach, determine strategic priorities. What are we trying to create here, where are we trying to go? Create a governance environment that can sustain the development effort and business success. Invest in financial management capacity. Find talented people and support them. And when we look at the business development process, it's the same four points and probably others that we can talk about. It's very different from that, anybody got any ideas, let's get a grant, let's start whatever we can persuade someone to fund; very different approach.

What are the likely outcomes? Well, our research at least says increase profits, reduce dependency, jobs that last, they don't get tied to political cycles, things like that and resources the nation can use to support its priorities. That's a real quick sort of overview of some of what we think we've seen on this question of nation-owned enterprises, how they work, some different approaches to thinking about them.

Any questions or anything you'd like to raise from all of that?"

Michael Taylor:

"What did you advise the tribal leaders who you had dinner with last night about this issue of maintaining the tribal-ness of these kinds of enterprises? What did you tell them?"

Stephen Cornell:

"Well, this is going to sound like a real slippery answer, but they didn't actually ask us for advice, which I was relieved about. I think Joan and I were sitting there thinking, ‘Boy, this is...' I'll tell you, there were two issues they raised and both of them -- as Joan and I talked about this afterwards -- both of us thought, these are issues we're beginning to hear more and more about and they both were really interesting issues. That was the first one was the question of, 'We're getting really good at this side of this kind of cultural divide, are we losing too much on this side?' And I think if they'd asked for an answer, one of the answers I would have given them from other peers too to talk a little bit about what other tribes are doing. Mississippi Choctaw, they pour profits from their enterprises into things like language retention, into running their own schools. One thing we did ask them was who controls the schools on your rez, are all your kids going off to public schools where you don't have any influence over the curriculum, or have you actually got some influence and they sound like from what they said, one of those nations in the fortunate position of actually exercising control from nursery school to middle school, they run their own school. That's an opportunity to create a curriculum that does at least part of what they're concerned about. At Mississippi Choctaw they put a lot of revenues into language and that sort of thing. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma has launched in the last couple of years a major language revitalization initiative. They did a survey and they discovered that there were no fluent Cherokee speakers on the rez, on their lands, under the age of about 45. And the Chief said, Chad Smith, 'We've got a national emergency here. This is the future of the nation at stake and what we've got to do is make some tough decisions about how we spend our revenues.' They don't have a lot of revenues. They don't have a large casino generating a great deal of money."

Audience member:

"They do."

Stephen Cornell:

"They have some large casinos, but they aren't in the situation of some of these tribes which have a great deal of discretionary income coming in that they can just put into a new program. And what the chief said was, ‘We had to approach some of our programs and say if we're going to invest in language revitalization, we're going to have to take money from some programs that are already established because these are expensive.' They went and found out how do you do language revitalization and the research says you start with the littlest children. You don't do high-school language classes; you go to three- to five-year-olds. And the Native Hawaiians and the Maoris in New Zealand were doing these immersion classrooms for three- to five-year-olds where not a word of English is spoken. So the Cherokees started one of these classrooms. But the director of education said, 'It costs me $90,000 a year to run one of those and I need to run four or five of them. So I've got to find money from other pieces of the tribe to do that.' And the response of the other pieces of the tribe was, 'Of course.' So they're saying, 'Okay, this piece is critical and we've got to make some tough decisions and put some revenue into that.' The second issue they came up with was they said, 'Our economic development arm is very successful and it's drawing talent away from our tribal government piece. Our successful enterprises are soaking up a lot of our talented people and tribal government is having trouble recruiting our own citizens who are talented because the enterprises are doing it. So we're facing sort of a human capital challenge on the governance side.' And that's another issue, which they saw coming out of this type of success."

Michael Taylor:

"Let me give you a couple of ideas that have worked at Colville. I had the opportunity to have a hand in developing one of the early recipients of the Honoring Nations award, which was Colville Tribal Enterprise Corporation and they did...my recollection is they did receive it. It's been a long time. When we drafted the charter of the corporation, it had a provision in it, which required the corporate board to expend time and resources assisting tribal members in developing their own businesses. And that -- after the outside board came in -- the board didn't like that. They tried to get the tribal council to remove that obligation from it. So there was one of those internal political wars over a provision in the corporate charter requiring the corporation to make substantial efforts and show that they were assisting tribal members in developing their own businesses. But the tribal council refused to do that and so still today there's a provision in their charter and a requirement that they, as business managers and as a corporate board, they feel like they suffer under this requirement. But I would argue that the reason Colville Tribal Enterprise Corporation is still in existence today after 23 years is that provision, because they're obligated to go into the community, find people who have ideas, and help them develop those ideas. Another aspect of what we did in developing that corporation was we obligated the corporation to...we subjected the corporation to the TERO requirements of the tribes and that also was a bone of contention with the board of directors. Most tribes have hiring preferences, but when you get into the business the corporate managers always want to hire the most experienced, most productive people. And often, as in the case of Colville, that wasn't the tribal workforce. That may be changing today, but I don't think so. And so subjecting the corporation to the jurisdiction of the tribe's TERO organization also I think is a reason why Colville Tribal Enterprise Corporation is still going strong."

Stephen Cornell:

"Those are interesting. Anybody else have a..."

Alex Yazza:

"Stephen, Alex Yazza with the Gila River Indian Community. Just a question with regards to the tribal communities that you've worked with: have you seen the experiences of maybe a number of those tribes that have made significant changes to possibly their governance structure in building not only their administrative capacity but their financial management capacity in order to become more successful? Was that any part of their strategic outlook and doing so, i.e. government reform, or even reformation of their constitution bylaws? Have you seen that in Indian Country?"

Stephen Cornell:

"Yeah, and I don't want to steal Brian Titus's thunder but -- who'll be on the panel next -- but the Osoyoos Indian Band in British Columbia, when they decided they were going to vigorously pursue economic development. We recently did a case study of what they've done and they actually spent a considerable period of time focused just on what do our financial management procedures look like? Do we have the capacity to account for every dollar, to make intelligent investment decisions? And have we built that? And let's do that first. And actually there's a period of time in the history of their development over the last 15 years where you look and you say, ‘Boy, what's really going on here is building financial management capacity. That's what they're about.' And once they got to that point it began to really show up in what was happening with their businesses. The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan, they went through a period of having some enterprises that certainly had potential but weren't delivering and they read some of the research that we, and others, have done looking at this business-politics mix. And as a result of that they reorganized their...they basically separated their development corporation from their council and it had been one in the same and they pulled those two apart and rethought some of the constitutional issues there. George Bennett and John Petoskey and others up there see that as the point where they really began to see different results. They were at the same time trying to diversify their economy away from gaming so those two kind of went together. But yeah, I think we have seen tribes that have looked at constitutional issues as a critical piece of making economic development work. Rocky Barrett from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, Rocky -- I heard him give a speech at the University of Oklahoma -- and he said, ‘If you're not thinking about constitutional reform, you're not in the economic development ballgame.' That's a line that stuck with me. It was the first time I heard a tribal chairman put constitutions and economic development in the same sentence. And he was reflecting their experience. His feeling was, until we dealt with the constitutional issues, we weren't able to make it happen."

Audience member:

"I have two questions and one is related actually to Rocky Barrett, because there are a number of tribes in Oklahoma where there's a three-party government and the executive branch manages the businesses. Rocky's a good example of that, and it's a little bit different from separated model. I was wondering if you've done any research into that. And the second question is among your separated-model businesses have you looked at the distinction between those that are successful and those that aren't and what are the characteristics of the businesses that are separated but not successful? Because it would be good to know where the pitfalls are if you go that route."

Stephen Cornell:

"Let me mention the second one of those first. The business/politics mix is just one piece of the development puzzle as all of you know. It's not as if solving that suddenly everything takes off. And yeah, we've seen plenty of places where they've succeeded in dealing with that, but it comes back to things like the financial management capacity issues. They may not have got their financial management house in order or they may be in a position where they're very reluctant. I remember up at Yakama, this wasn't so much business, it was the management of wildlife up there, but they had a very strong Yakama preference policy and the wildlife biology guy had said to us, ‘Well, we had to break that policy. We had to go to the council because there wasn't anybody here who knew anything about wildlife biology. And if you're going to manage a mule deer population and do it right, you better know what you're doing.' But he said what they did was when they hired me -- this guy who was the manager, he's a white guy -- he said in your job description is a five-year directive that within five years you will have trained a Yakama to replace you. He said, 'I'll only be successful here if I work myself out of a job.' So those kinds of issues come up as well and the separated model is no panacea, no guarantee. You still have to make intelligent business decisions and as all of you know, that's tough to do even when you're set up perfectly, the number of businesses that fail because of mistakes. So I don't think the separated model, we wouldn't hold it up as a panacea, but we would say that when you don't find a way to effectively manage that mix, you're inviting a lot of difficulties that even if you do the financial management right, even if you do a lot of the other stuff right, you're going to run into problems. On this question of this sort of these different structures, we've not systematically looked at that. What we're I think increasingly aware of is that there are a number of ways to skin this cat, and even within what I call the council-controlled model there are ways to manage politics within that model. You can do it by having very clear roles and rules about what council may and may not do. It's a model that's more susceptible or more dependent on electing the right councilors, because it opens some doors to people who may eventually get elected who don't have the best interest of the nation at heart. But I think what we're becoming aware of is that there are a number of different ways of addressing this political challenge. We've not done systematic research on this sort of executive as the managers separate from the legislative branch but still under tribal government and that's actually a good suggestion. We ought to look systemically at places like Potawatomi that does that."

Mary Thomas:

"Less than 15 years ago we were a very, very poor tribe. We had just a handful of businesses that were struggling. So when we got into the enterprises of entertainment, mainly gaming, that proved to be such a huge success that it was a benchmark and other businesses that followed almost had to strive to be try to reach that same benchmark and that was a hindrance I think. But keeping that up and trying to get as profitable as possible in a quick turnaround time, it has helped. And that's the main thing that I wanted to share with you is that you set a benchmark and then you try to achieve it and that's part of our success. But investing in people at the top when you're successful also helps, because now they're coming back and they're taking over and I just see the brightest future ever with all these bright minds coming in."

Stephen Cornell:

"Thanks. And we're going to hear more from Gila River during the next panel about some of what they've done. Other comments or questions? Yes, Roger."

Roger Willie:

"My question kind of goes back to this cultural aspect. You mentioned that certain tribes are starting with the youth. What about in terms of financial education, starting with the youth, what are tribes doing all the way down to like pre-K, elementary years, and so forth?"

Stephen Cornell:

"Well, I don't know if I've got an answer for you other than I think as many of you know, this issue of financial literacy is a very big issue right now in Indian Country, and there are several major initiatives underway, some by the Oweesta Corporation and First Nations Development Institute. Some of you know Joanna Donovo who is very involved in some of this. The Federal Reserve has been very interested in some of these financial literacy issues. And I think a number of them are focusing on not quite as young as you're talking about Roger, but certainly high school level and how...we hear from a lot of tribal leadership who are working on, thinking about education issues. We hear them saying to each other, ‘Have we thought through what it is we want our kids to learn on both sides of this cultural gap?' And I think some of them are thinking about the sorts of issues you're raising, financial literacy. We had a tribal chairman a couple of years ago who said to us -- no, he wasn't a chairman, he was a councilor -- and he said, ‘You know, my kids know all the latest stuff in popular culture but they don't know what I do. They don't know what it means to be a councilor. They don't know what tribal government is about.' And he said, ‘That's my worry. Thirty years from now who's going to run this place if my own kids...we're not somehow in our high school capturing their imagination with the challenge of nation building and of development and of what we could be doing on this land?' So I think there's a lot of talk about this, but I don't know examples of exactly what you're talking about."

Erma Vizenor: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The White Earth Nation Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

White Earth Nation Chairwoman Erma Vizenor discusses some of the historical factors that eventually compelled her and her nation to undertake constitutional reform, and the issues her nation has encountered as they work to ratify a new constitution and governance system.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Vizenor, Erma. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens: The White Earth Nation Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Presentation.

"Good morning. At home we say, '[Anishinaabe language].' Good morning. I want to thank everyone for being here, and to come to such a beautiful place. I came in late last night, so all I saw as the cab was driving me in was this huge place with all kinds of lights. And I was so anxious to see it this morning and it's gorgeous. Your home, your beautiful home, yes. I'm just sorry I can't stay very long today, but I want to thank my dear friend Manley Begay for inviting me to this seminar. He contacted me at least two-and-a-half, three months ago, and of course I checked off the date and made sure that I had this time open. So Manley and I, way, way back we started our doctoral program together at Harvard. This is kind of funny because this is how things happen but we were just overwhelmed with everything and we were also changing Harvard at the same time, because I know that we worked hard to get the Harvard [University] Native American Program as it is today. So we were overwhelmed with all of our doctoral studies and Manley and I said, we were sitting there and he said, ‘Yeah, we're going to go home in three years. We're going to go back where we belong.' Well, Manley stayed on at Harvard for 12 or 13 years doing good work at the Kennedy School of Government. I went home after three years and I got into a reform movement to oust corruption in my tribe and I did that for five years. All good work, necessary work. We didn't leave as we should. The day that I...or a week after the indictments came against three council members for bid rigging, election fraud, embezzlement theft, all kinds of crimes, a week after that I received a letter from Harvard. The letter said, ‘You come back and finish your dissertation or else by the end of...by the spring of 2006 we're going to drop you.' So I jumped on the plane and went back to Harvard and worked very hard, had to do everything over again, and I didn't write a masterpiece but I finished my dissertation and graduated that spring.

We as Indian people, I just want to say and commend all of you because most of us have to run twice as hard, work twice as hard, run twice as fast to keep up and that's the way it is. I don't think anything comes easy for us. I want to say that I am...say a little bit about the White Earth tribe. We are called; the federal government calls us the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Indians. I have gotten, I have worked hard to get our people -- although when we sign our documents with the federal government I have to use that name -- but amongst ourselves we call ourselves a nation because that's what we are. We always have to remember that we are what we call ourselves. I say to our people back home, ‘A band? My goodness, we're a nation of many bands and we think about a band -- loose, disorganized, small. We're more than that, we're a nation.' And so the White Earth Nation is located in northern Minnesota. We're one of 11 tribes, seven Ojibwe tribes and four Dakota Sioux tribes in the southern half of the state. White Earth is the largest tribe. We have 20,000 members and we're part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, which is White Earth, Leech Lake, Fond du Lac -- and I know Chairwoman Diver was here yesterday -- Grand Portage, Bois Forte and Mille Lacs. We comprise the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, which is an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] structure created in 1936. The Red Lake Nation is not a part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. The Red Lake Nation is Ojibwe -- and we have a good relationship with Red Lake -- but Red Lake is unique. It's a closed reservation because they didn't participate in the Allotment Act, the Dawes Act. They kept all their land in common and didn't allow...didn't participate so the land was not allotted and consequently lost. Wise chiefs in those days.

That did not happen to White Earth. White Earth was allotted all out and White Earth...and Red Lake by the way was the federal government's solution to the Indian problem in Minnesota and created these two large reservations to move all the Indians in Minnesota to the Ojibwe Indians, Chippewa Indians to these two reservations. Relocate the Indians again and get them all together where we can oversee and control them, but that didn't work because our Indian people did not leave their homelands and so we still have our reservations up of Fond du Lac and Mille Lacs and Leech Lake and Bois Forte. People went home again, even if some of them did come to White Earth. So that didn't work, but White Earth is the largest tribe because many of the different Ojibwe people came to White Earth. And the land was allotted out at White Earth and consequently because of that allotment process the land was lost, it was swindled, it was theft, it was lumber companies and farmers and people who were homesteading. So our land was lost. We had...our reservation was established in 1867 and comprised approximately 850,000 acres of land. By the 1900s, we had 50,000 acres of land left. The rest was lost. So land acquisition is a huge priority, large priority for us. Today, when the federal government organized the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, the six reservations together, it put all of our land in common. We have approximately 60,000 acres of land at White Earth out of the 850,000 acres. That's in tribal trust land and it's under the ownership of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe in common. I worked hard to get that back and some of the tribal leaders want to be paid out within the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and I tell them, ‘I don't see your tribe in our treaty.' But that's the federal government creating these problems for us as Indian people.

The governance of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe is an IRA constitution adopted in 1936 and is a very...since 1987...Vernon Bellecourt was a White Earth secretary/treasurer and was a very progressive man. He initiated a resolution that the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe conduct a constitutional convention. I admire Vernon because he was a visionary person. And in 1987, the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe passed that resolution but it never to this day has not held a constitutional convention. Well, we have an IRA constitution and it's very, very difficult for our people -- how many of us read our state constitutions or our United States Constitution and figure out what our rights...how many of us do that? We know it is taught in our schools, but our constitutions are not taught. And so when I came back from Harvard after I finished my classes, we had corruption in our tribe at White Earth, huge corruption. Our elections were fraudulent, we had bid rigging, and so I worked with elders on a grassroots reform movement and I spent the entire summer of 1991 in jail because we had all of this corruption. By 1995, and with the help of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, an investigation was done and indictments were issued and consequently a federal court trial. This grassroots movement really involved a lot of people at home and got them engaged.

When I was at Harvard, I studied the...Manley and I and Colleen Larimore, we did a paper together on community organizing. And so I learned some good skills there and so we engaged, I engaged the community, the reservation, which is a large area. It's a square that's 36 miles on each side and a lot of our people live in Minneapolis/St. Paul and they came up to help. So we had this huge momentum and change had to come and the people were, the people were empowered to make that change. We had to have open meetings every night, every night we had open meetings and it was spiritual because we had our spiritual people there and we always gathered around to pray first and we always said that we need the Creator to help us.

So in 1996 I was appointed the secretary/treasurer, which is the second role in government and I was elected to that position and re-elected in 1998. I lost my election in 2002. I lost it. But I ran on the platform of constitutional reform. Other tribal leaders run on it but don't do anything about it. But I did. I put together a committee and in 1997, '99 the committee drafted a constitution, I took it out to the reservation, to the Minneapolis area, and very few people showed up. It was a very, very difficult constitution to understand because it was...it talked about grand councils and it talked about language that we had never experienced before. And so when I lost the election in 2002, the constitution went off the radar screen, many things went off, went to the bottom of the drawer. I ran for election for the tribal chair in 2004 in the primary and I won the primary, beat the incumbent and constitutional reform was back on the radar screen again. And so we have, I facilitated, I organized and I facilitated all of the constitutional convention process from delegates, kept the entire process totally transparent and we drafted a constitution and we ratified it by the delegates about a year ago.

And then because...I say we're part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe with this IRA constitution, I've gone to the...now I'm at the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe level and I'm getting stalled. Some tribes don't want to change, and I think it's because of the colonization and the institutional oppression that people haven't come out of yet. I really do. Don't see the need to change, don't see the need to. There are some issues that are huge. The blood quantum issue is a huge issue, very controversial. Well, that's one of the most controversial ones is the blood quantum and in our new constitution we...our delegates voted on lineal descent. We are terminating ourselves, people, if we cooperate with the federal government on one-fourth blood quantum. We just need to do the math and pretty soon within...we think of seven generations, by seven generations most of us will be gone. That's a controversial issue and even our tribal members in our constitutional conventions get to the point where they say...they get into ethnic cleansing. We have African...our tribal members have married to African-Americans and look like African-Americans and they don't want them there because they're black. I say, ‘My goodness, ethnic cleansing? I can't believe that.' But that's where we're at sometimes. I want to just...I know I don't have a lot of time, but I want to just stop right now and turn it over. Thank you very much.

John "Rocky" Barrett: A Sovereignty "Audit": A History of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Governance

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Chairman John "Rocky" Barrett shares the history of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and discusses its 40-year effort to strengthen its governance system in order to achieve its goals.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Barrett, John "Rocky." "A Sovereignty 'Audit': A History of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Governance." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 11, 2012. Presentation.

"[Potawatomi language]. It's nice to see all of you emerging tribal leaders. That's wonderful. I like to think of myself as emerging, hopefully on a constant basis. I was first elected to office in 1971 as a 26-year-old whatever I was at the time. I was selected as vice chairman. I was named to finish a term and then I was...the two year terms back then. Then I was elected about seven months later for a two-year term as vice chairman. Vice chairman of what was hard to say at that time. My uncle was the chairman. My mother and her eight brothers and sisters were agency kids. We grew up...they grew up on the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] Agency. My grandfather was the BIA marshal then or the tribal...or the BIA police. And so that area...I am one of the eighth generation of my family consecutively to be chairman of the tribe. Back in those days when that vacancy came up, it came up because my uncle had been named chairman because...he was the vice chairman and the chairman had gotten removed from office for carrying around the tribal checkbook in his hip pocket and writing checks to the grocery store for groceries. And we only $550 in the bank and he used about $100 of it to pay his grocery bill and the feds got him. So he was removed from office and my uncle was made chairman, which created a vacancy in the vice chairman spot and so I was named to it.

And we went over to the BIA Superintendent's office. Now you've got to understand my uncle grew up on the Agency and the BIA in 1971 was the law. And he didn't believe you could have an official meeting of the tribal government without the Agency superintendent in the room and that the minutes of our meetings were not official unless they were filed with the BIA. So we went over to see the Agency superintendent and he was going to tell the superintendent that we were going...the tribe was going to appoint me as vice chairman. Now why, I don't know. But we go in and the Agency superintendent starts trying to talk him out of it and he finishes up by saying, ‘Now the last thing I want to do is hurt you guys.' And so as we're going out the door, my uncle turns to me and says, ‘That means it's still on the list,' to hurt us.

So I got the drift about then and, but...became the vice chairman and served two terms then I became director of the inter-tribal group. The State of Oklahoma forced all of the tribes -- the federal government forced all the tribes in the ‘70s to create inter-tribal corporations that were chartered C corporations or non-profit corporations in the State of Oklahoma. The federal government would not give money to an Indian tribe back in the start of the old [President] Lyndon Johnson program days. So you had to be given to a corporate entity that was in the state. And the state even tried to take 10 percent off the top of every federal dollar that came to Oklahoma as a condition. The issue back then was whether or not tribes were responsible enough to manage the money and everyone...I was the youngest person on the business committee. I was the only high school graduate; I was one of the three out of five who could read. All of the people on the business committee were smart but they were not educated people, but they had all grown up...of course, I'm not smart enough to know how to operate this damn thing. There we go. I did a good job of that, didn't I? Side to side or up and down? Ah, okay, that was the problem I went... I killed it. No? Ah.

But the Citizen Potawatomi Nation back then was the Citizen Band of Potawatomi Indians of Oklahoma, was the name of our tribe. The 'Band' was something the BIA stuck on us in 1867, actually 1861 when we separated from the Prairie Band when we were all one tribe. We tried to get Band out of our name for almost 75-80 years after that and finally were successful. We still can't get the BIA to stop calling us that even 20 years later. But we're the Citizen Potawatomi Nation; implication being that 'Band' is not a full-blown tribe.

But what's described as this audit of sovereignty -- we weren't that smart. We didn't just all of a sudden one day decide, ‘Oh, we're going to audit our sovereignty. Where are we sovereign? And where are we not sovereign? And here's what we're going to do about it.' We weren't that smart. We really didn't know what sovereignty meant. Remember, everyone on the committee, and this includes me, we were all children of the ‘50s and the ‘60s. Primarily, except me, were children of the ‘40s and ‘50s. You've got to remember what was going on about then. 1959, Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins of Utah chaired the Interior Committee of the Senate...Interior Committee on Indian Affairs and helped shepherd through House and Senate Concurrent Resolution 108 was provided for termination of tribes. The Secretary of Agriculture, who was also from Utah at the time, in the interest of doing something good for Indians, were tremendous proponents of termination and got it done. The McCarthy hearings were on about then and anybody who held things in communal ownership was probably a communist and that included Indian tribes. Yeah. And if you were an Indian leader and you didn't like the way the federal government treated you, it wasn't that you were saying that you didn't love the government, it's when you discovered that your government didn't love you is when all of a sudden things got rough.

And this was a tough period of time and everyone on the business committee, all five of us, were all a product of when self-governance and self-determination, that was the language of termination. Self-determination and self-governance meant termination. That's what they said they were going to do. And in those days you had to prove that you were going to be too broke and too incompetent to run your own affairs to keep from being terminated. If you had a business and you had money and you were conducting your affairs in some semblance of order, then you were eligible for termination and we were on the list. Why? I don't know because we had neither pot nor window. And it was...it was absurd that all the Potawatomis got thrown in there together 'cause we were down to $550 in the bank and two-and-a-half acres of land held in common, in trust, and about 6,000 in individual allotments. We were down to nothing and they were going to terminate us. And my uncle, listening to the Choctaw chief at that time who -- remember, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole chiefs were appointed by the president until some 20 years after that. They were not elected. So the Choctaw chief was a big proponent of termination. He believed that was the right thing to do. My uncle didn't think that we should be terminated but didn't even really know what we were being terminated from 'cause we didn't own the building where we met. It was a trailer that the [Army] Corp of Engineers had abandoned on a piece of land that the BIA had and they were letting us use it. We were pathetic, pitiful people.

And so when they started these hearings on Indian stuff and the outcome of it was Senate Resolution 108 and the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, Turtle Mountain Chippewa and all the tribes in the State of California, New York, Florida and Texas were to be terminated. Now 108 didn't terminate them, but it authorized the termination and then the BIA started working up the list. When I said earlier that the BIA superintendent said, ‘The last thing in the world we want to do is hurt you, but it's still on the list.' So, that was the mindset of our business committee and when I took office of our tribal government. Senator Watkins had the support of Senator Robert S. Kerr, the owner of Kerr-McGee Oil Company, to date the richest man who's ever served in the United States Senate and was the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate and coined the phrase what we call a Kerrism and that's still in use in Oklahoma is that, ‘If I ain't in on it, I'm ‘agin it.' And that's how he got in the uranium business. All that saved us was we sued the government in 1948 under the Indian Claims Commission Act and that lawsuit settlement was pending and tied up in the courts and if it hadn't been for that they would have terminated us 'cause you can't terminate someone who's in court suing the government cause it looks like you're trying to get rid of them to get rid of the lawsuit and that's all that saved us.

Very quickly, we came from Newfoundland down the Saint Lawrence River 1100, 1200 mini-Ice Age, ended up in Michigan, split from the other...the Ojibwa, Odawa, Ottawa people. We were all one tribe called Anishinaabe, we came into Michigan and settled. In the war with the Iroquois over the beaver trade they drove us all the way around the lake until the French armed us and then we drove them back to the east coast. We were in refuge in Wisconsin from the Iroquois attacks when the French, John Nicolet showed up with some priests and we helped unify the Tribes of Wisconsin against the Iroquois invasion and that group was able to drive them back once armed with the French connection. The French connection through a series of alliances, primarily inter-marriages and the inter-married French and Potawatomi became the Mission Potawatomi who became the Citizen Potawatomi.

But this area was an area that we controlled quite a large area, though it didn't show up on the slide, but it was a very large area around the bottom of Lake Michigan and then because we sided with the French against the British, with the British against the colonies, we ended up under the Indian Termination or the Indian Relocation rather, Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act and we got marched to the Osage River Reservation in a march of death along this route and the ones that didn't die on the walk, another fourth of them died that winter. My family survived it on both sides and in 1861 after the Copperhead [U.S.] President Franklin Pierce allowed settlers to come into Kansas on top of the reservations anyway without a treaty. We were on the Kansas/Missouri border. We were part of the Underground Railroad to help hide runaway slaves and transport them up north. And so we were part of the depredations of the Civil War from Missouri, a slave state, into Kansas.

And so we ended up getting out of there, separated from the Prairie Potawatomi in 1861, sold the reservation to the Atchison-Topeka and the Santa Fe Railroad in 1867, took the cash and bought this reservation for gold south of the Canadian River from the Seminole Reservation line to what's called the Indian Meridian that divides the state in half between the North and South Canadian rivers, became our reservation that we purchased. And we took United States citizenship as a body in 1867 in order to protect the ownership of that property as a deed. We were denied access to the courts in removal from Indiana. We had lawyers hired and people trying to stop the removal from Indiana and we were part of the group that was...the ruling was that because we were not United States citizens we could not plead our case in the United States courts. And hence the name Citizen Potawatomi was to defend the purchase of this property.

We came to a place called Sacred Heart. We had the Catholic Church with us and helped them form the first Catholic university and school, settled in Sacred Heart. We had a division over the Ku Klux Klan. We had a Protestant and Catholic business committee. Of course the Klan was as strong in Oklahoma and Indiana as it was in Mississippi and Alabama and it caused a great deal of trouble. The Shawnee Agency government in Shawnee where the Indian Agency was basically after the tribe was able to heal the split, we didn't have a headquarters after we left Sacred Heart. The trailer that you see on the bottom was a...belonged to the Corp of Engineers and it set on a surplus piece of property. I want to get a little larger version of that picture because it's so much fun. Car and Driver Magazine certified the three worst cars in U.S. history were the Ford Pinto, the AMC Gremlin and the Opel Cadet, and all three of them are parked right there. First thing we did was out of the 550 bucks, we spent $100 of it on that air conditioner 'cause it was too hot to sit in this trailer. The guy who got removed for writing those checks got drunk with his brothers and came to whoop us all at the first meeting and the chairman...I mean the guy who was supposed to succeed, because I got appointed he showed up, is how I got appointed. But he showed up to become the first choice appointee and he kicked a hole in the back of it right here 'cause this was the only door to get away from the impending fist fight. But it was mostly conversation, nothing happened. But that was us in '73 on a gravel road. That was all we had.

In 1982, I had left the inter-tribal group and left tribal office and gone back to the oil field and in 1982 my grandmother whose father and grandfather and great grandfather and great-great grandfather had been chairman and my mother's father and my grandfather also on his side had been and my grandmother called me up and told me that I needed to come back and I said, ‘I've already done my piece, grandma. You've got 26 other first cousins. Why don't you get them to do it?' And I got that silent thing and she scared me to death with that so I went back out there in '82, in 1982 because I'd had the previous history in office and as running the inter-tribal group. Became the tribal administrator in '82. I served until I ran for chairman in 1985.

But in 1984 there was a set of tribal statutes that were being promulgated by a now famous Indian lawyer named Browning Pipestem, the late Browning Pipestem. Browning Pipestem and William Rice, Bill Rice, made a presentation to us. Now I was the tribal administrator. The chairman at the time had a reading disorder so the way that business went of our tribe was he would go out in the hall and his wife would read it to him and he would come back in and reconvene the meeting and we would handle that piece of business. This meeting started about 5:30. It was about 1:00 am when Browning Pipestem and William Rice finally got the opportunity to speak. Browning Pipestem was married to a Citizen Potawatomi. He was Otoe Missouri and he started the meeting off, 'cause he'd been cooling his heals out in the hallway for about five or six hours, by saying, ‘I own more land than the Potawatomi tribe. I have more trust land than you do. My children have more trust land than you do. The area over which you govern, my family owns more than you do.' Well, it was kind of an odd thing to say, but I knew Browning was...he was a riveting speaker, and I knew he was going somewhere with this and he said, ‘You guys are known up north as the shee shee Bannock,' the duck people, because we were so good with canoes. Supposedly Potawatomis invented steam bending the keel of a canoe to avoid knocking a hole in the bough on rocks on rivers. ‘You guys are called the duck people by the other tribes 'cause you got around in so much active in trade and so much commerce and you got around so well on the water.' And he said, ‘Well, here's what sovereignty is. If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, it's a duck most likely, and sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty. It's not something that you get, something that you buy or something that someone gives you. It's like your skin. You had it, you are a sovereign, the United States signed treaties with you, 43 of them, all of them broken, the most of any tribe in the United States, the most treaties of any tribe. And they don't sign treaties with individuals and they don't sign treaties with oil field roughnecks. They sign treaties with other governments. You are a sovereign government with the United States and sovereign means the divine right of kings.' Well, he lost us there and he went on to say that...explaining that ‘unless you take on the vestiges of a sovereign government and exercise the authorities of a sovereign and recognize where you can exercise your sovereignty and where you cannot and what it is, then you're not. But if you do, you are.'

Well, for me the lights went on about then because the Thomas-Rogers Act constitutions in the State of Oklahoma, all the tribes in Oklahoma adopted the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act Constitution and it basically...that was back in the days when it was the fad, we all had to be corporations. I'm the chairman of the tribe and we have a vice chairman and a secretary/treasurer and we have members of the business committee, like a board of directors of a corporation. And somehow they thought that our way...best way to govern is that we would all get together in this thing called the general council that would be the supreme governing body of the tribe and that we all got together and everyone had an equal voice, the 18-year-old had an equal voice with the 65-year-old and everyone would get together and democratically design the best thing for the tribe, which is utter nonsense. Absolutely utter nonsense. We never governed that way in our history. If you got up in my day as a young person and had something to say in council, your grandpa would and could and should grab hold of your pants and jerk you back down and apologize for the fact that you spoke at all without asking the permission of your elders.

Of course our government, because it was a meeting...now we didn't have anything, we were broke. We didn't have any land, didn't have money, we didn't have anything but we could meet in the one general council that we had annually on the hottest day of the year and the last Saturday in June at our annual general council that convened about 1:00 and we'd keep going ‘til about 7:00 when the low blood sugar kicked in and it would come to blows. And as a result of that, we couldn't get a 50-person quorum. We had an 11,000-member tribe. We couldn't get 50 people to come to council. We used to have to get in our cars and delay the start of the meeting to go around and force your cousins to get in the car so we could get a quorum so we could convene the general council meeting. No one wanted to come and I don't blame them. I didn't want to go either. If I hadn't been in office, I wouldn't have gone. It wasn't government. It turned into a bad family reunion. That's all it turned into. And so the...what happened out of that, calling that government, was the more acrimonious the meeting became, the less people wanted to come, and the less like government it was. And it wasn't a government. We weren't governing, we weren't sovereign, we weren't anything.

So first thing that came to us is, ‘We've got to change this Thomas-Rogers Act thing.' The supreme governing body of the tribe can't be a meeting, and we could call special meetings of general council with a petition and 25 people could call a petition and you could get another meeting and get 50 people there and 26 of them could change everything that the previous one did. So one family could all get together and we could back and forth have these special general councils and we could reverse this and change this and chaos, utter chaos. So we decided to redefine what the general council was, if that was to be the supreme governing body of the tribe, it had to be the electorate, it had to be the people who were eligible to vote, the adults of the tribe. And so that was the first thing we decided to do, but that evening it ended about 2:00 and we all went home.

But the next few days we started talking about, ‘What does a tribal government do? What are we supposed to be doing here? We're getting a few bucks from the government here and there to try to keep the lights on.' We had $75 a month coming in of revenue and it kept the lights on but, ‘What are we?' So we got it down to three things: the land, the law and citizenship. What land do we govern? What's a law? So it was about three years and I got elected chairman in 1985. I came back in '82, I ran for chairman in '85 and have been in office since then. We've amended our constitution five times since then. One really major one and we have been to the United States Supreme Court three times, to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals seven times. We have been in litigation every year since 1985. We're still in litigation. I'm a lawyer's dream -- not one penny in tribute and millions for defense. That's not my saying.

When we talk about the land, how much land do we govern? Now we had that two-and-a-half acres of land that was held in common, we had about 60 acres that was in fee that was old school land and then we had about 6,000 acres of land that was held in trust that had a whole variety of heirs, very few people living on it. And you could fly over the countryside of Oklahoma on our reservation and here'd be a whole bunch of land that was all in cultivation, people making hay and raising cattle and then there's be an 80-acre piece right in the middle of it that was overgrown with blackjack trees and weeds and trash and no fences and crummy looking un-utilized piece of property and that was a Potawatomi allotment. That's how you could tell because with so many heirs no one actually owned it, no one actually used it. It was in the fourth generation of ownership of a family that was split up to where it wasn't happening. Plus the fact the government at that time, there was a big move that tribes that were allotted tribes that didn't live on Indian Reorganization Act reservations like most of you guys weren't really tribes and really didn't have a definable jurisdiction. That was before the federal definition of Indian Country.

How much land do we govern, what are our boundaries, what authority do we have over our land, can we buy more and will it become subject to the authority of our government and what's the difference between allotted land and tribal trust land? We didn't know that. We didn't know. We didn't know that allotted land was subject to the authority of the tribal government even though the only thing we had were resolutions. We didn't have statutes, we didn't have a code, we didn't have a court, we didn't have police, we didn't have the vestiges of the government, but we had resolutions. That's how we decided what to do and we could do a resolution that would have an impact on tribal trust land if you could survive the political outfall. We didn't know that. We didn't know that our boundaries where we could take land and buy the residual interests in the allotted lands was the original jurisdictional boundary of the reservation, the 900 million acres that we lost. What authority did we have over the land? We didn't know we had authority over anything. Remember, we thought we had to have permission from the Agency to meet. So it was the discovery and the inquiries that we began about what our land base was, what our boundaries were, where could we buy land and get it put into trust; we were told by the Agency superintendent that no individual could put land into trust. And the reason was that you had to be incompetent for them to put individual land into trust. And if you were smart enough to ask to get your land put into trust, you weren't incompetent. Catch 22.

The law. We didn't know we could pass a law. We were passing resolutions; we didn't know they were laws. We have a resolution, ‘We're going to meet next Friday and have a pie supper.' We didn't know that was the law. We didn't know a tribal resolution was law. When we enrolled someone, we didn't know we were behaving lawfully. We knew we had to follow the constitution. We thought the constitution was the only law we had and if it wasn't in there it didn't exist. If it wasn't in the book, in the constitution book, it didn't exist. How we enforced law. We didn't have police. The BIA had police but we didn't have police. We didn't know you could have police. We didn't have a judge for sure. The CFR courts hadn't even been invented.

In CFR, the Court of Federal Regulations, that didn't really start happening until about 1981, '80, in Oklahoma. Can we make white people obey our laws? Can white people come onto our land and shoot game? Can white people lay a pipeline right across our land and not tell us or get permission? Can they run cattle on these allotments which they were doing. Can they produce oil off of those allotments and not pay us? All of those things, we didn't know how to do that. Does the BIA, whose law...do we have any impact on the BIA, do they have to do what we say? Does the State of Oklahoma? And if we have laws is there a Bill of Rights? Can we pass a law that says that my political opponent needs to be put in jail for being a fool and is there an appeal? And worse yet, the big scary one, the word, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the one word nobody wanted to use was can we levy taxes? Whoo hoo hoo. Taxes.

Citizenship. We knew we could amend our constitution because they told us that the only way we were going to get this payment from the 1948 Indian Claims Commission, the 80 percent of the settlement that had been tied up since 1948, in 1969 is we had to have a tribal roll and the BIA told us that the only way you could be on the tribal roll was to prove that you were 1/8th or more Citizen Potawatomi. Now the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi were derivatives of one guy from the government in a log cabin in Sugar Creek, Kansas in 1861 who was told to do a census of the Potawatomi, the Prairie Potawatomi and the Citizen Potawatomi. And he told everyone that they had to appear. And as they came in the door, he assigned a blood degree based on what color their skin was in his opinion and full brothers and sisters got different blood degrees, children got more blood degree than their parents 'cause they'd been outside that summer and those were the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi. There was a full-time, five-person staff at the central office of the BIA in Washington, DC, who did nothing more than Citizen Potawatomi blood-degree appeals, about 3,000 of the blood-degree appeals when I first took office. When I became chairman, it had grown to 4,000 or 5,000 and I was in the room when a guy named Joe Delaware said, ‘I have a solution to the Potawatomi blood degree problem. We'll resolve all this. The first mention in any document, church, federal government, anywhere, anyhow that mentions this Indian with a non-Potawatomi language name, he's a half.' Well, they were dunking Potawatomis and giving them Christian names in 1702, full-blooded ones. If you were dealing with the white man, you used your white name and if you were dealing with the Indians you used your Indian name, like everybody else was doing. And so it was an absurd solution. I told him, I said, ‘That's nuts. That's just crazy. You're going to get another 5,000 blood-degree appeals over this.' He said, ‘Well, that's the way it's going to be.' Well, that was the impetus for our coming back and establishing, ‘What are the conditions of citizenship?' And we stopped called our folks members like a club. They're citizens. And it finally dawned on us that being a Citizen Potawatomi Indian is not racial. It's legal and political. If they...according to the United States government, if a federally recognized Indian tribe issues you a certificate of citizenship based on rules they make, you are an American Indian, you are a member of that tribe. And you're not part one, not a leg or an ear or your nose but not the rest. You're not part Citizen Potawatomi, you're all Citizen Potawatomi. The business of blood degree was invented so that at some point that the government established tribes would breed themselves out of existence and the government wouldn't be obligated to honor their treaties anymore. That's the whole idea. That's the whole idea of blood degree and we're playing into it all over this country, now over divvying up the gaming money. But I'm not going to get into that. But the business of blood degree, the 10 largest tribes in the United States, nine of them enrolled by descendency and that includes us. We changed it from blood degree to descendency, which was the only reasonable way to do it because we had no way to tell because of this guy in the log cabin in Sugar Creek was what we had. And then we had permutations of that over the next eight generations that became even more absurd and Potawatomis had a propensity...we're only 40 families and all 31,000 of us had a tendency to marry each other. So when one Potawatomi would marry another Potawatomi, I'm not saying brothers and sisters or first cousins but when they'd marry another Potawatomi then you got into who was what and it was... And this business of the certified degree of Indian blood was ruled to be unlawful, to discriminate against American Indians in the provision of federal services based on CDIB. It's supposed to be based on tribal membership, not the BIA issuing you a certified degree of Indian blood card. A full-blooded Indian who is a member of eight different tribes, whose family comes from eight different tribes, not any white blood, would not be eligible to be enrolled in many tribes. They had absolutely no European blood, would not be eligible simply because he was enrolled in multiple tribes.

The other thing about citizenship is ‘where do we vote?' The only way you could vote in an election at Citizen Potawatomi was to show up at that stupid meeting, violent meeting, and the guys that were in office would say, ‘Okay, everybody that's for me stand up.' Well, nobody could count that was on the other side so everybody would kind of creep up a little bit so you could count. Well, they counted you 'cause you creeped up a little bit so you voted against yourself. So the incumbent would say, ‘Okay, everybody that's for this guy stand up. I won.' Well, that's not how to elect people. That's not right. Two-thirds of our population lives outside of Oklahoma, one-third of it lives in Oklahoma. Those people are as entitled to vote as anybody in the tribe, so the extension of the right to vote and how we vote and whom we vote [for] and what the qualifications of those people and the residency requirements of those, that was an issue of citizenship that we needed to determine.

So we went through a series of constitutional amendments. We redefined the general council as everyone in the tribe over 18, is the general council and that is the electorate, that's who decides all issues subject to referendum vote. Everyone in the tribe can vote by absentee ballot if they register to vote in an election. We established tribal courts that are independently elected just like the chairman and vice chairman and the members of the tribal legis...and secretary treasurer and the members of the tribal legislature and that the tribal courts have authority over all issues relating to law enforcement. We adopted a set of tribal statutes and we used the ability under the Indian Reorganization Act that we recede the authorities of the IRA in our new constitution to have a tribal corporation in addition to the tribal government, two separate entities. An incorporated entity and the sovereign entity is the Citizen Potawatomi Nation government. Next amendment was to change the name to the Citizen Potawatomi Nation from the Citizen Band Potawatomi. ‘Cause back then when you had Citizen Band, people would say, ‘What's your handle good buddy? 10-4. What's your 20?' Remember all that stuff that went on back in the day with the Citizen Band radios? Or what instrument do you play in the Citizen Band? That was the other one I used to get all the time. We changed our name and we went to descendency citizenship and we enrolled everyone that needed to be enrolled if they were descendents of the original families, 41 families that made up the tribe in 1861.

I issued an executive order that we would hold council meetings in every area, city or metropolitan area with more than 2,000 members of the tribe. And so we began a series of meetings in 1986 in Houston, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Kansas City or Topeka area, Kansas City/Topeka area, Portland, Oregon, alternating with the Seattle/Tacoma, northern California -- the prune-pricker Potawatomis. We met in Sacramento, in southern California -- the oil field Potawatomis. We met in Los Angeles or somewhere, Bakersfield or somewhere down there. And we met in Phoenix, Arizona, for the rich Potawatomis. But we started having these meetings and we started going to hotel rooms and ballrooms like this one and buying a meal ‘cause we had a little money coming in from bingo and selling cigarettes and we started having these meetings and we found out something, that if you have a meeting and you feed Potawatomis, they won't fight with you. So as soon as I started serving food at the general council back home, never another cross word, never had another fight, never any issues of that.

But the revision of 2007...in 1985 was the big one. I almost...I'm out of time. We separated the branches of government with a true separation. There is an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judicial branch. We now have 16 members of the tribal legislature, eight from Oklahoma and eight from outside of Oklahoma. While it's a one-third/two-thirds population, the way we balanced that is that of the eight from Oklahoma three, the chairman, vice chairman and secretary/treasurer, are elected by everyone in the whole United States. So there is a nod or an impetus or balance given to the population outside. The fact that our jurisdiction, that the area over which we govern, our revenue, is all based in Oklahoma on the reservation is recognized by the fact you have to be from Oklahoma to be chairman or vice chairman or secretary/treasurer. Legislative districts. The whole United States is represented. We eliminated the grievance committee. The grievance committee existed because we didn't have a tribal court and the grievance committee created grievances. We had staggered terms of four office...for four-year terms of office, staggered terms of office. The old two-year terms of office where we turned over the majority of the government every 24 months, crazy. The legislature has total appropriation control of the money. But the legislature can't even answer the phone. It speaks and acts by resolution and ordinance only. They can't run the government ‘cause they can't even answer the phone. The legislature speaks and acts by resolution or ordinance. They appropriate the monies for a specific purpose, but the executive branch spends it and runs the tribe. I have a veto, I have 10 votes out of 16 not counting mine so 10 votes out of 15. And the BIA no longer has to approve our constitutional changes. Each of our constitutional changes took the BIA over four years to consider.

So that's where we are, that's the old bingo hall, that's Firelight Grand Casino. It's $120 million operation, we're doing $150 million addition to it now. Everywhere in our tribe we have these symbols of corn plants. Don't eat the seed corn. We do not make per capita distributions. We fund 2,000 college scholarships a semester, we provide free prescriptions to everyone in the tribe over 62 wherever they live, we do home loans for people, we do all of those things based on need, not actual checks. We believe we're like a family. No one comes homes, sits down at the table, brings the kids and wife and sits there and says, ‘Okay, I'm going to divvy up the paycheck.' They don't do that. They pay the bills first, they address the needs of the family first, and then if there's discretionary income they decide whether to save it, invest it or spend it and that's the way we do ours. But we consider the money from gaming to be found money; it's seed corn.

We bought this bank on a gravel parking lot. It was a prefabricated structure and it was failing. We bought it from the FDIC, the first tribe in the United States to buy an operating national bank. It took the government six months to decide whether to let the bank fail and break all of the depositors or let us put a million dollars in it and save it. They finally decided to do that and now First National Bank is the largest tribally owned bank in the country. We have seven banks, seven branches and it's $250 million back from the original $14 million. If you're going into the bank business, be a little more financial healthy than we were ‘cause if the tribal chairman has to go repo boats and cars at night, that's an ugly business. That's no fun. We had a repo guy named One Punch Willie and boy, he was a tough...he could steal a car in 30 seconds and I went with Willie out...Willie Highshaw, went out on the lake with Willie Highshaw, a great guy. We went out and repoed cars at night when people wouldn't pay us.

These are our businesses. We have a $50 million-a-year grocery business; we have a wholesale grocery business. We have Redi-Mix Concrete. We have a number of enterprises of 2,040 employees. These are our government services. We operate the largest rural water district in the area. We are retrofitting all of our facilities to geothermal, ground source heat pumped geothermal with our own business.

This is my advice: press on. Three steps, two steps back is still one step forward so just stay at it. I've been at it a really long time. I love what I do. I'd do it if they didn't pay me. The first 11 years, by the way, they didn't pay me. But plan. And once you get plans, decide. Even if you decide wrong, it sets in motion the mechanics to get something done. But indecision just locks you up. Fix your constitution. Don't try to patch around it. We did it for years. Fix the constitution. If you have problems with not getting process at your tribe and it's because of the structure or because of something that is happening with the government that isn't fair or right or honest, fix the constitution. If you're not in the constitution-fixing business, you're not in economic development, you're not in self-governance, you're not a sovereign. Thank you."