leadership advice

Indigenous Governance Speaker Series: A Message for Indigenous Women Leaders with Cecilia Fire Thunder (Oglala Sioux/Lakota)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The first woman to successfully run for president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Cecilia Fire Thunder shares valuable insight on being an impactful leader.

Her wisdom includes stories about working with local and national governments and lobbying congressional leaders. She reflects on why and how she became president and the challenge of meeting the numerous and constant demands of leadership. She notes that successful leaders must constantly educate themselves, knowing not only yourself and your ancestry, but also tribal history and other basic facts about your tribe, including everything from basic demographic data to the cost of health care.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Indigenous Governance Speaker Series: A Message for Indigenous Women Leaders with Cecilia Fire Thunder (Oglala Sioux/Lakota)". Native Nations Instititue, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 24, 2022.

Herminia Frias: Native Women in Governance

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Herminia “Minnie” Frias, Councilwoman, Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council. Councilwoman Frias shares her journey of being a Native woman leader, drawing from her experience in serving on her Nation’s Tribal Council both as a Chairwoman, and as a Council Member. Frias was the youngest person and first woman to be elected as Tribal Chair of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. 

In addition to her tenure in Tribal government, she also ran the non-profit Native Images, Inc., serving as Executive Director; and has served as an International Advisory Council Member for Native Nations Institute, and a Bush Foundation Partnership Manager. Herminia carries a wealth of knowledge in the area of Native Nation Building but also adds valuable experience as a leading Native woman in her community, navigating the many facets of indigenous governance that are necessary to create effective leadership. 

This speech was recorded as part of the Native Women in Governance Speaker Series presented by the Native Nations Institute’s Indigenous Governance Program in collaboration with the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Herminia Frias: Native Women in Governance" Native Women In Governance Speaker Series. Tucson, Arizona. January 23, 2019

 

Transcript available upon request. Please email: nni@email.arizona.edu

Sophie Pierre: Enacting Self-Determination and Self-Governance at Ktunaxa

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Sophie Pierre, longtime chief of the Ktunaxa Nation, discusses Ktunaxa's ongoing effort to reclaim and redesign their system of governance through British Columbia's treaty process, specifically Ktunaxa's citizen-led process to develop a new constitution that reflects and advance Ktunaxa cultural values and its priorities for the future.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pierre, Sophie. "Enacting Self-Determination and Self-Governance at Ktunaxa." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona. October 21, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. I’m your host, Ian Record. Today, I am honored to welcome to the program Sophie Pierre, who for the past 26 years has served as chief of the St. Mary’s Indian Band in British Columbia. She also serves as the chairperson of the Ktunaxa Nation Council, an organization formed in 1970 to promote the political and social development of its five member bands, which includes St. Mary’s. She is the past co-chair of the First Nation Summit and a recipient of the Order of British Columbia. Last but certainly not least, Chief Pierre also serves as co-chair of the International Advisory Council for the Native Nations Institute. Welcome, Sophie and thank you for joining us today.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Thank you very much, Ian. It’s a pleasure to be here.”

Ian Record:

“Sophie, I’d like to start with a question that I ask all of the guests on this program and that is how do you define sovereignty and what does it really mean for Native nations?”

Sophie Pierre:

“I think that what it really means was explained by chief who’s since left, his name was Joe Mathias, he was chief of Squamish and he always said that sovereign, that exercising sovereignty was that the people who are going to live with the results of a decision are the people who make the decision and to me that’s what sovereignty has always meant is that we are responsible for our own lives, we make our decisions and we’re the people that suffer the consequences of those decisions.”

Ian Record:

“Okay. As a follow-up to that, how do you define a healthy Native community? What does that look like at Ktunaxa?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, we’re, I think that the healthy Native community is something that I can actually see coming into fruition and that’s a community where the decisions that are going to affect that community are being made right at the community level and that they’re being involved or everyone in the community is being involved in those decisions. The treaty process that we’ve been going through has allowed us, I think, that opportunity to engage our citizens in many aspects of life, not just the social programs that used to be the norm. Now we’re talking about making land-use decisions and far reaching planning for development and those are all at the community level, at the citizen level that those decisions are being made and that’s really where I see a healthy community is where the citizenry are engaged and they’re making, they’re charting their own course for the future.”

Ian Record:

“So essentially, regaining ownership in their own future and in the government that’s going to make that future happen.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s that regaining of ownership and it’s that recognition that the decisions that you make, that they’re, it’s the people who are going to live with the consequences that make those decisions.”

Ian Record:

“You are the chief, as I mentioned, of the St. Mary’s Indian Band and also Chair of the Ktunaxa Nation Council. Can you tell us a bit about the St. Mary’s Band, the Ktunaxa Nation, and their relationship to one another?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, the Ktunaxa Nation is the Canadian relative of our nation, which is like many Indian nations in North America, was divided when the 49th Parallel was put in and the two countries were created of Canada and the United States, because we have Ktunaxa speaking people in Montana, Idaho and in British Columbia. So we are the Canadian group of Ktunaxa and the St. Mary’s Indian Band is similar to the other four bands within our nation. Those were created by the federal government when they were creating the Indian reservations just after the country of Canada became the Dominion of Canada. And so the St. Mary’s Indian Band is one of five Indian bands within our nation council and we have, our Indian reserve lands are held in trust by the government for our use and benefit as are all Indian reserve lands in Canada.”

Ian Record:

“The Ktunaxa Nation and I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, ”

Sophie Pierre:

“Yes, you are.”

Ian Record:

“, or pretty closely anyway, works to advance the strategic priorities of its member bands through what it calls the 'Four Pillars.'“

Sophie Pierre:

“That’s right.”

Ian Record:

“What are these pillars and how does the Ktunaxa Nation support or advance those pillars?”

Sophie Pierre:

“The Four Pillars are lands, first and foremost, are our lands and our resources, that determines who we are as Ktunaxa and we know where our lands are because it’s in those, that territory where we have place names and when I’m describing our lands, that’s, I can give the place names, sort of the boundaries of it. And it’s our people, always, it’s the people of Ktunaxa ancestry, Ktunaxa speaking people and it’s our governance and then it’s our, the sort of overall what holds us together in terms of our, I’m wanting to talk about our social programs, but I don’t want to call it social programs. It’s the umbrella that provides services to the people. So it would be like our administrative side. So those are the four main pillars. And we determined that through about two years of discussion, of conversation with our people as we started to create our vision statement and that’s where that came from because we talk about strong, healthy people speaking our language and living in our traditional territory and sharing our resources and in a self-governing manner. That is our mission statement and it encompasses the four pillars.”

Ian Record:

“The Ktunaxa Nation, on behalf of its five member bands, has for several years now been engaged in comprehensive constitutional reform and governmental reform as well, which is very different in not only process but also terminology from constitutional reform by Native nations in the United States. What does the constitutional reform process entail for First Nations in Canada and what does it really look like?”

Sophie Pierre:

“It’s different in different parts of Canada. What we’re involved in in British Columbia through the treaty-making process has made it more, has made it, I think a little bit easier for us to actually get into the constitutional reform and to, maybe not so much constitutional reform as building a constitution, rebuilding our constitutions and that’s the discussion that I talked about earlier where I related that to sovereignty where there’s an engagement of your whole citizenry in order to develop that. So now we see, as we form our, build our constitution that that is being brought back to our citizens on a regular basis so they have real input into that. And what it’s going to be at the end of the day is, well, like what constitutions are, they’re the basis, they form the basis of our government and we are looking at recreating, rebuilding the governing structures that we had as Ktunaxa before contact. We, as an Indian band, of course, have been affected by the Department of Indian Affairs and their legislation called the Indian Act. We have, and I have served as such, the Indian Act-elected Leadership. And so you had mentioned that I’ve served 26 years as a chief, that’s something that I’m very grateful for having had that opportunity, but it was through the Indian Act process where we have elections. My grandfather was the last non-elected chief in our community and he stepped away from his position and passed it on in the traditional manner in 1953, but the Indian agent came in and said that the people had to do a vote according to the Indian Act, that that wasn’t, the way that we used to do it wasn’t considered democratic or whatever. So they changed it and now we’ve been having these Indian Act elections. So the, it’s sort of a melding of the way we did things traditionally to the way that we see us being able to move forward and it’s taking the 'Four Pillars' that have been developed by our people in our mission statement and determining a way that we can bring life to that mission statement so it’s not just on a piece of paper hanging on a wall -- it’s something that we live every day.”

Ian Record:

“So what compelled the Ktunaxa Nation to undertake not just constitutional reform, but as you say, but essentially rebuilding the constitution from the ground up? So, what compelled the nation to chart that course and what have been the major outcomes thus far?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, the, I keep mentioning the treaty process that we’re in and that really was sort of the trigger. I think that we may have been involved in this kind of discussion anyway, but probably at a lot slower pace and probably with not as much engagement of our total citizens as we have been able to through the treaty process. I think the most exciting outcome that this, that we’ve seen is the understanding and the, I don’t want to use the word 'buy-in,' but I can’t think of what else to call it, but people really believe that whether or not we sign a treaty with the other levels of government, the federal and the provincial governments, that what we have, that what we’ve recreated for ourselves, what we’ve regenerated in terms of our own governing structure, that that is really meaningful to our people and you can speak to people just on the street and they know when we talk about constitution rebuilding, we talk about recreating our government, we talk about just governance in general, people know what we’re talking about and I find that, ”

Ian Record:

“So that part of it’s taken on a life of its own, essentially.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely, yeah. And so, I mean, that’s a really positive outcome for us. And I wonder whether or not we would have been able to have that kind of an outcome if we weren’t involved, engaged in this particular negotiation with the government, but I do make that point that we may or may not reach a treaty. In fact, our American cousins tell us, ‘Why do you want to sign a treaty with the governments? They never live up to them, so why are you engaged in this?’ But for us, it’s been a really good process for our own people of engaging ourselves.”

Ian Record:

“In past conversations, you have pointed to the act of defining citizenship or more appropriately redefining citizenship as a critical first step in the Ktunaxa Nation forging a vibrant future of its own design. How so?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, I think that the, one of the key elements or one of our key pillars of course are our people, and our people embody our language and culture and you don’t have a choice what you’re going to be born as. Any of our people, when they’re born, we’re Ktunaxa, just as Italians are Italians and it doesn’t matter if they marry a Chinese [person], it doesn’t change them from being Italian. Well, same thing with us. And there’s been so much interference from government in terms of our own Aboriginal identity, Indigenous identity -- and I’m talking about all governments, not just in Canada -- that I think that one of the key elements of rebuilding nations is to take back ownership of the recognition of our own people. And I know that it creates difficulty because there’s a lot of, there’s very few pure blood as you would imagine, as you could say in this day and age just because of all the interaction that we’ve had with the rest of the world. But that doesn’t take away from someone who can trace their ancestry, if you can trace your ancestry to being Ktunaxa, then you’re accepted as Ktunaxa. I’ve mentioned before that our language and culture is very important and in the Ktunaxa language the word for our ancestors is '[Ktunaxa language]' and the root word of that '[Ktunaxa language]' comes from '[Ktunaxa language],' which is a root. You talk about the roots of a tree and any kind of a plant it’s '[Ktunaxa language]' and for, when you put those two words together '[Ktunaxa language],' meaning 'our roots.' And so if you can trace your ancestry to being Ktunaxa, then that’s who you are and you’re accepted as such. So that it’s not a matter of again the government interference saying that there are certain percentages or if you’re, like we had in the Indian Act. For a while, if you’re an Indian woman and you marry someone who’s not a status Indian, then you lose your status. That’s fine, that status was determined by the federal government to begin with, but it never ever changed the fact that that Indian woman is and always will be an Indian and so will her children.”

Ian Record:

“So has that taken some getting used to among some community members, ”

Sophie Pierre:

“Sure it has.”

Ian Record:

“, who have for so long relied on that blood quantum?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely, yeah. And I expect that it will affect probably all of our people in that way wherever there’s been government interference in terms of determining who the people are. So again it goes back to your original question, what is sovereignty? Sovereignty is being able to determine who your own people are and welcoming all people that are of your blood, whether they’re full blood or one-sixteenth. If they can trace their ancestry, that’s what that word means '[Ktunaxa language],' you can trace your ancestry, you can trace your roots to whatever nationality and I think that it would be the same if you’re English or German. If you can trace your roots, there’s sort of this Pan-Canadian or Pan-American, like what is that? They really should, everyone has roots from somewhere else other than the Indigenous people. We’re the ones that have roots here.”

Ian Record:

“And in some way doesn’t that entail at least some level of cultural engagement? So what you’re saying is you have to be able to trace your roots. It’s very hard to do that unless you’re participating in that culture, right?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Exactly, that’s right. Yes. Yeah, we’re going to have Ktunaxa people that probably will never become, will never come home, will never be part of our activity of our government, of our communities, simply because they don’t choose to. Maybe they’re part Irish and that’s the roots that, that’s the [Ktunaxa language] they’ve chosen to follow. That’s fine. What I’m saying is that when a person chooses to follow their Ktunaxa [Ktunaxa language], then we have a responsibility to that person, to that individual.”

Ian Record:

“The how of constitutional reform, of government reform is as important as the what. That’s been our experience at the Native Nations Institute and research we’ve done. What process has your nation employed to ensure that the governmental reform that you’re undertaking proceeds the way you envisioned and what have been the keys to that success thus far?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, I think that we’ve had the fortune, we’ve been fortunate to have the acquaintance of such people as Stephen Cornell and Joe Kalt and Manley Begay. I remember that when we first started talking about this that Stephen and Manley came and spent some time with our leaders, and it was really interesting because all of our leaders and particularly the older people who maybe didn’t speak English as well, but they were all saying the same thing and they could really connect with the discussions that we were having around the necessity of the definition of our governance being formalized if you will into a constitution. Like other Indigenous people, we come from an oral culture. So when we talk about and when we have a good understanding, and particularly when we use the Ktunaxa language, it’s all in an oral manner, but you take that to the next level and you start putting that down into a constitution and it makes sense to people when you do that.”

Ian Record:

“So if you can give us a little bit more specifics about the process that Ktunaxa Nation has employed to engage in governmental reform and what is really key to the success thus far, because it’s a very difficult process. It’s confronting a lot of colonial legacies that a lot of people would just as soon not confront.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely. The main activity that we’ve done is that all of our discussions have been open and these go back again to the negotiations that we have with the other two levels of government. We chose that ours would be called a citizen-led process. Unfortunately, some of the Indian nations in British Columbia that are involved in treaty go behind closed doors and it’s their lawyers that are negotiating and then they bring something back to the people later. We knew that that’s not what we wanted, that wouldn’t work for us. It might work for other people, but it wouldn’t work for us. So we started with a citizen-driven process right from day one and so it was that engagement of our citizens from the beginning. And I’ll tell you, that wasn’t easy because the first reaction we got was, ‘Yeah, right. You’re going to ask us a bunch of questions, but then it’s going to sit on a shelf somewhere. Our input is never meaningful, our input never gets into the final action,’ but I think that the, well, not I think, I know that our citizens are very pleased when they see their own thoughts, their ideas, they see themselves as we move forward in the final documents that are coming out that are reaching fruition now and people can see the input that they’ve had. And so then of course it’s more meaningful for them.”

Ian Record:

“The Ktunaxa Nation has made a concerted effort to get its young people heavily involved in governance and governmental reform. Why is this so critical?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Because they’re the ones that are going to live with the consequences and of course that underlies this whole thing -- is they’re the ones that are going to live with the consequences. I’m going to be long gone and it’s going to be the younger people that are going to have to put this into fruition for us and for their children and their grandchildren. But I think that how we’ve done that is maybe as important, it goes back again to when you engage people to actually make them feel that their engagement is worthwhile. So that it’s young people that we’ve had out there that have been leading the meetings, they’re the liaisons that go into the community, that sit at the kitchen tables and talk with people or go into Band meetings or make presentations at nation meetings. You don’t always have the old-timers like myself up there speaking. No, it’s, the presentations are made by the people that are actually out there gathering the information.”

Ian Record:

“And how have perhaps the older generations responded? Are they inspired by the eagerness of the youth?”

Sophie Pierre:

“I think as a whole, yes, and of course there’s always some old curmudgeon that sits somewhere thinking that, ‘These kids should be listening as opposed to talking,’ but I think that you learn by doing and I think that the majority of people recognize that.”

Ian Record:

“One of the great success stories of the Ktunaxa Nation is the St. Eugene Mission Resort, which I know you’re very proud of.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“Can you tell us in a nutshell the story of St. Eugene and how what is now the resort and a major economic development engine for your people, how that story is emblematic of the Ktuxana Nation’s effort to reclaim their culture, their identity and their future?”

Sophie Pierre:

“You’re right, we are very, very proud of the St. Eugene Resort and because, I think the most important reason is that we chose to take something that was so negative in our past and turn it into something positive for our future. I say it that way because it really was a choice. When the residential school was shut down in 1970, the oblates, the priests who ran the school, the priests from the Catholic Church who ran the school, they turned over the property to the federal government with the understanding that the federal government would then turn it over to our tribal council. And when that was done, we were a bit unsure on what we were going to do. It’s a huge building and we could have turned it into like another school or health facility, some social-type program that would always be needing an infusion of cash; [we] chose instead to turn it into a business. And so we needed to have the approval of our people to do that and there were some people that told us that we should just knock it down. They said like that was such a horrible place, they suffered so much in that building that they wanted to see it just flattened, take it off the face of the earth. However, there were a greater number of people that understood what we were saying about turning it into something positive instead of knocking it down. So we made that choice rather than knocking it down to turn it around, and it was not easy and in fact it was very, very challenging. But we persevered and we were successful and we now have two other First Nations partners, Samson Cree Nation from Alberta and M’Chigeeng First Nation from Ontario, and it’s doing very well.”

Ian Record:

“So has that decision that you talked about, has that helped at least in some measure the community to begin healing from the experiences that took place there?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Very much so. I think a lot more so than if we had just knocked the building down. I think that actually seeing what it’s become and knowing that we did that ourselves, knowing that we made that decision and that choice to do that ourselves, I think that’s just been phenomenal and it really has had an impact. And what you see now is the younger generations refer to that as the resort. It’s only my generation that refers to it as the former school. It’s something positive and that’s what we wanted to do.”

Ian Record:

“So for younger generations and those to come it’s going to mean something a whole lot different then.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. For them it means a place to work, it means a place to go and recreate and it just means so much more and it’s so different from what it meant to us, to my generation.”

Ian Record:

“So you’ve been a leader for quite a long time, probably even longer than you were a leader in an elected capacity, I would imagine in my interactions with you. Pretend that I am a newly elected tribal leader who has been chosen to serve his nation for the first time. Drawing on your extensive experience as I’ve talked about, what advice would you share with me to help me empower my nation?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Talk to people, always just go around and meet with your citizens and talk with them. From elders, you’re going to learn so much from the elders, you’re going to learn from people who’ve served on council and you’re going to learn what people need when you talk to the younger generations so that’s what I, when I, the other piece of advice that I always give is that being elected is a privilege and it’s something that you have to, you are taking on a responsibility and it’s not, it’s not a position of power, it’s a position of serving your people. That’s what being elected means and you can only do that well if you know what it is your people need and assuming that your people need one thing when you haven’t gone out and talked to them about it is not a good thing to do.”

Ian Record:

“That’s interesting you mention this kind of axis between power and responsibility because we hear that so often among tribal leaders of nations who are really breaking away as we like to say, who are really finding success with their efforts to rebuild their nations in a way that they see fit and not perhaps a way that outsiders see fit -- we see that axis kind of, that axis pivoting on this issue of clearly defining your roles and responsibilities and that the conversation around leaders, it’s about responsibility and not so much power is when those roles are clearly defined. When they’re not clearly defined, it’s very hard to get away from the power issue because there’s nothing to keep you from overstepping your bounds.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Yeah, exactly and I think that that’s where it’s the process that we’ve gone through just in this last little while, because things are changing for us, and we are starting to see more financial resources coming into our communities for example, financial resources which are not grants from government, these are our own revenues, our own source of revenues, and it’s imperative that we’re ready for that and that those decisions have been made on how those resources are going to be shared among everyone before it actually starts to flow and how everybody is going to be able to benefit from it. So having that kind of responsibility and understanding that kind of responsibility as opposed to seeing it as power and using it over people -- we’ve seen the results of that. I don’t want to take any community, but you’ve seen the results of that. It’s not a good place to be.”

Ian Record:

“You kind of stole my thunder with this next question already on the advice question I asked you, but one of the things you and I have talked about in the past is this issue of effective leaders not just being decision-makers but effective leaders being good educators and good listeners and really what we’re talking about, we’ve talked about is this issue of citizen engagement, that it’s not enough just to engage your citizens come election time, but that to be an effective, empowered leader you have to be engaging your citizens all the time and that comes in the form of one-on-one personal interaction to getting the word out on the internet, whatever it might be. Can you just discuss your perspective on this issue of leaders as educators, leaders as listeners and how that plays out in your community?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, I think that it’s important that when a person is in a position of leadership that you also recognize the, not just the responsibility but the onus that is on you to ensure that people feel confident that you’re going to be able to represent what they need both within the community and also on the outside. So I think that that’s another very important part of leadership is to be able to go into the wider society and talk about the issues that are important to you like say some of the land development that’s going on and I would think [is] affecting all Indian nations. I was listening to that, the presentation just a little while ago from Ak-Chin and how they’re taking on the development that’s going on around them and getting, and their leadership made sure that the community that has infringed all the way around them is aware that, what the outside community is doing is going to affect life in their community and I think that that is a very important part of leadership. So there’s the leadership within the community and you’re absolutely right about, that you need to have input and you need to be able to listen to everybody’s point of view. And half the time, they’re not going to agree with what you’ve said and that’s okay. You engage in those discussions and eventually come to an agreement where that everybody can live with. So you engage your own citizens internally, but then you also have to engage the people that live around you and you have to do it in such a way that it’s respectful, but it’s also forceful so that people will listen.”

Ian Record:

“So really what you’re talking about in terms of leaders as educator,s it’s not just a challenge to educate your own citizens but there’s this kind of constant challenge of having to educate those people outside of your nation that are making decisions that are going to impact your nation’s future.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely, yes. And I think that that is becoming more and more a very important part of leadership. I think it probably always has been but it has not really, it hasn’t played as prominent a role, but I think that nowadays you cannot be a leader in your community without being able to communicate with the wider society about what it is that your nation or your community is involved in, and I think that one of the very important messages to make, too, is how much our communities are part of the larger community so to speak in terms of, even just in terms of economics when you figure how much money is actually spent in the local town of Cranbrook, for example, by people from my community and how much the businesses rely on that and what would happen if we were to suddenly not support Cranbrook business anymore. I think that it’s those, that kind of being real players in the whole life of the region. I think it’s very important.”

Ian Record:

“One of your neighboring nations, the Osoyoos Indian Band, shares this, at least their leadership shares this perspective about the importance of their nation going out and educating again these outside decision-makers whose decisions impact the nation. They made a concerted effort to do that, particularly around economic development as you mentioned and the incredible ripple effect that takes place when economic development takes place in Aboriginal communities.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely. That’s the point that I always make is that when we’ve got any financial resources coming into our community, we don’t squirrel it away in some Swiss bank. We go and spend it in the local community so it’s, it makes a big difference.”

Ian Record:

“We call it the 'Walmart effect' down here in the United States.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Yeah.”

Ian Record:

“It was interesting, in preparing for this interview I happened to Google your name and one of the first links that popped up was YouTube, and I had occasion to review a video that was recently posted on YouTube about the Farnham Blockade. Can you tell us a bit about the background to that story and why you felt it so important to take part in the blockade?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, it’s a major development, major tourism development on a very fragile glacier and the whole development itself from the get-go has been of great concern to us because we see that it’s, the development is of such a magnitude that it’s going to have impacts not only on the environment, which it’ll have a very detrimental impact, but on the wildlife and on the people that live there. It’s going to affect us in every way possible. So we’ve always been concerned about that and we have not been able to find any reason from the studies that have been done and everything that has been given to us, we haven’t been able to find any reason to support that level of development. And the provincial government has been kind of interesting in the position that they’ve taken here, because on the one hand they say that people in the local region should be the ones to make a decision because they’re the ones that are going to be impacted by the development. But on the other hand, they do these kind of, it’s almost underhanded actions that they take, where we found out in terms of the Farnham Incident, we found out that the provincial, one of the provincial ministries had actually transferred a license that they had given to a non-profit, Olympic ski organization that trains Olympic skiers, they had transferred that tenure from this non-profit to the development, to the profit-oriented group and in a very major way they transferred this tenure and hadn’t told anyone. And so when my colleagues brought this up, the response from the ministry was, ‘Oops, I guess we forgot to tell you.’ It was just very, very irresponsible kind of actions. So I think that the government really need, the provincial government in this case, they really need to put their own actions in what they say that they’re going to do. If it’s important for local citizens to make the decisions about the areas that they live in, then they should be allowed to do so and not have the provincial government step in and decide what’s going to be in our best interest. I think we’re beyond those days, I would certainly hope that we are anyway.”

Ian Record:

“So what do you see for the future of this issue?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Well, right now I think that we’re going to have to continue to fight it, quite frankly. I don’t see a whole lot of support coming from the province, I don’t see a lot of leadership coming from the province and the local people, I think at the last count and they do it fairly regularly, it’s like 85 or 90 percent opposition by our local citizens and I’m not talking just about the Aboriginal people of which our tribal council has had a formal position that we are very concerned with the proposed development because of its size. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, as they say, to figure out that our environment is in real dire straits and you take a look at that poor glacier. It is just ravaged and they’re talking about building a resort on it so that people can ski on it in the summertime. At some point, rational thought has got to start kicking in.”

Ian Record:

“Do you feel your nation and others have a leadership role to play in that regard?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Oh, absolutely, and we are very, we very much step up to the plate with that one.”

Ian Record:

“What do you see for the future of First Nations in Canada when it comes to self-determination and specifically governance?”

Sophie Pierre:

“That’s an interesting question because the, on the one hand, our Canadian government would probably say that there’s a very large, there’s a big move towards self-determination and governance. In fact, they’ve got programs called 'Self-Determination' and 'Self-Governance.' And of course that is the exact opposite of self-determination and self-governance. However, I think that there’s a couple things that are at play that will support self-determination and self-governance. In British Columbia, we have the treaty process, which some of us are taking advantage of in that way to re-establish our own governments but then there’s, we’ve also been fortunate in some of the court decisions that have been made, the legal cases that have been made that have led the government to actually vacate areas that they assumed that they had some say, and so we’ve been able to enforce Aboriginal title, Aboriginal rights in that way so yeah, I think that that’s, that’s been sort of an interesting outcome of some of the court decisions.”

Ian Record:

“So what about your nation specifically? You mentioned earlier on in the interview about...that strategic planning has been a key for you as you’ve moved towards governmental reform for instance, you’ve got a strategic plan in place or a strategic vision of where you want to head. What does the future look like for Ktunaxa Nation and how is the nation today working to get there?”

Sophie Pierre:

“It’s our mission statement. I’ve mentioned that it covers all aspects, it covers the Four Pillars that are the Bible for us, so to speak. And so for our organizations, our governments, our elected leadership, we know that that is our path and so if the government comes along with a new program, we measure it by our mission statement. Does it fit with our mission? If it doesn’t, carry on, move on to somebody else, leave us alone. We have our path, we’ve set our sights on what our nation is going to look like and it’s going to be the embodiment of that mission statement and if other people’s actions don’t fit in with that, then we don’t become involved.”

Ian Record:

“So what you’re saying is that this mission statement, which is essentially as you’re talking about your strategic plan, it’s where you want to head long-term.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“It gives you a basis upon which to decide matters that are before you, day to day.”

Sophie Pierre:

“Exactly, yes.”

Ian Record:

“And that essentially, does that not really empower you as a leader?”

Sophie Pierre:

“Absolutely and well, yeah, it’s actually, it makes it a lot easier I think to start, when you start juggling things and particularly as we’ve come to this place where we’re at and we’ve had to depend so much on other governments to...and other sources of resources coming into our communities, whether they’re financial resources or whatever to keep our communities moving, we’ve always had to react to somebody else’s agenda and it’s been so empowering to say, ‘We don’t have to do that anymore. We know what it is we want: strong, healthy citizens speaking our language and practicing our culture in our homelands in a self-governing manner and looking after our own lands and resources.’ It covers all those areas and so if something comes along that doesn’t fit in there, then like I said, I don’t have to worry about it. As chief, I don’t have to worry about it. And the next administration, they will find that it’s going to be a lot simpler just to follow that plan.”

Ian Record:

“Well, Sophie, I’d like to thank you very much for taking the time to join us today. I’ve certainly learned a great deal and I’m sure our audience has as well. That’s all for today’s program of Leading Native Nations, produced by the Native Nations Institute and Arizona Public Media at the University of Arizona. To learn more about this program and Sophie Pierre and the Ktunaxa Nation, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at www.nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2008. Arizona Board of Regents."

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Jamie Fullmer (Part 2)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Jamie Fullmer, former chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, shares what he wished he knew before he first took office, and offers some advice to up-and-coming leaders on how to prepare to tackle their leadership roles. He also discusses what he sees as some keys to Native nations developing diversified, self-sufficient economies that can be sustained over time.  

Ian Record:

"So, Jamie, you served two terms as chairman of your nation. I was wondering if you could share with us what you wish that you knew before you took office that first time."

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a great question. There's a lot of things I wished I knew before I took office, but when it gets right down to it I think that politics is a unique and challenging role, because in essence you're a public servant to the community, but you also have responsibilities as a public figure. And so I think one of the initial challenges was not recognizing how much of both of those things took of my time and my life and so had I known that before I would have been able to prepare for it before getting into office. But it consumes you rather quickly and your time becomes very precious because you have few moments of time to yourself and you have few moments of time when you're not expected to be in the public setting. And so with that said, I think that's the first thing I wish I had known before taking office. I think the other thing is, having never been involved in politics, not really knowing the process of any of the formal processes of running government, and so it was kind of a 'learn and lead at the same time' process, and if I would have been able to know initially what kind of steps I could have taken I might have been able to do some homework and really have a good feel of how to move the legislative process forward, how to take advantage of team building opportunities early on, and then also I think learn more about how to better enhance the institutional framework of information sharing. Not only being able to have access to it, but having everybody else have access to it so that we were on the same page when we were dealing with political issues or community issues or economic development issues in that sense."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned time management and we've heard this from other tribal leaders that that's one thing that you just...you can't anticipate in many respects coming into the job. I remember Peterson Zah, former chairman and president of the Navajo Nation, said once that that really puts the onus on you as the tribal leader to first prioritize your work and then in those places where you can, delegate your work to those people that are within the administration of government who've been hired to do those sorts of things."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The delegation issue is sometimes challenging, because even in the delegation process you have to meet and learn and get to know the staff and they may not be staff that you've chosen. And some political systems have a system where a new leader comes in and they're able to choose their executive team. Our system wasn't like that. The executive team that's in place is what you work with and it's really a council decision to choose those folks. Of course the chairman has a say, but if there are people already in existing positions you'd like to hope...especially in my case, I believed that the chairman before me had good sense of who they wanted. And so if they felt it was good for the nation, I respected that I could keep that same frame of thought. That challenging part though is getting to know who has the skill sets in different areas. They might have a certain title, but they might have skill sets in other areas that are a good fit for delegation of duties. And I think the other process in that is that there's the time management issue, it's also important to have good support staff to help manage the front end, the telephones, the documentation that comes in in stacks daily, and kind of arranging a schedule that helps you to meet not only your daily priorities, but also to address any of the community issues that come up where members want to have some time with the chairman in the office, and then arranging that with the travel that's necessary to do business on behalf of the tribe. So you live in a suitcase part of the time and then when you're home, you're really relying on others to keep you on track and on task."

Ian Record:

"What advice would you give them? It's somebody that's never served in an elected office before -- what advice would you give them as somebody who's either considering running for office or say they do get elected and are getting set to take office, what advice would you provide?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think the best advice I would give in starting out is [to] remember the promises that you make you have a responsibility to keep. And so I believe that part of the political process is one of the challenges we face, because there's so many promises made in the pursuit of getting elected -- both in Indian Country and we've seen a lot of promises going on right now during the election season at large -- but when you get into office you are only a part of something that's much bigger than one individual and you can play an important part and you can play a very important role in the advancement of your nation, but the advice I would give them is, "˜Be aware and take the time to learn what the struggles are, take the time to learn what the system needs to help it move forward, and before you make any promises to the community, take the time to learn if those promises can be met.' And I think that's an ongoing challenge, so that I thin, that's an important part. It's also valuable and what I would tell the person is, be ready to commit your time. You're raising your hand and swearing an oath to your people, to your nation, and to God that you're going to follow through to the best of your abilities and it's a challenge to give the best of your abilities all the time. And so I think you need to figure out at the front end how you deal with your down time and how you deal with your low moments so that you can keep a good presence about you as a leader."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned the fact that keeping promises is really important once you take office, the promises that you make maybe on a campaign trail or as part of your platform to get elected, and you began to touch on this. Doesn't that make it your job to be very careful about what promises you make and really think strategically about the promises in terms of are they promises to maybe just a certain portion of the citizenry or are they promises to the entire nation, because as an elected official are you not representing the entire nation?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a challenging question, because I think that obviously you serve your entire nation, but many tribes are organized where there are clans and there are familial priorities that take place, there might be village priorities, and so you may be really wanting to get in to address those issues. And depending on if it's a council position, that might be your role as a district councilor or as a village councilor, and so you do go in on those points that you're prioritizing. So with that said, I think the way that I reached out to the community was through goals. I had set goals based on what I had heard that the community wanted and that I felt like could be achieved in the period of time of the term in office or at least get some headway on historical processes that had gone on that hadn't been completed. And so there were some things that were challenges that I felt that I had the skills to help address and to put closure to that other leaders and other councils long before me had established and put into place and then there were other issues that had been initiated over time that I felt like needed to be at least started to being addressed. And so, rather than making promises because it's too difficult to make a promise, it was goals that I had set for myself and for our nation that if I were elected I would work on those goals."

Ian Record:

"And those two different terms send very different messages to your citizens, to your constituents don't they?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so because the goal is something you work toward, a promise is something that you try and keep."

Ian Record:

"Yeah. And you also mentioned this approach that you took when you took office which was continuing the priorities and the initiatives of previous administrations and that's not an approach that every tribal elected official takes. In fact, we've seen many that take the exact opposite approach. And I was wondering if you could talk about the difficulties you ran into with that or if it made your job easier, the fact that you were building on the momentum that had been generated before you came along."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think there's a point that's important. Really for me it wasn't about having the credit for getting anything, it was having our nation have the credit. And so my role was as the chairman, in my opinion, was to go in and assess our government, assess our enterprises, assess our community, assess our programming and look for areas that I could help strengthen it. And it didn't matter whether I was to start it or if it had been started by somebody else. It was obviously a priority to the community if it was already in place. And so maybe those needed to be updated or changed or some of the structures needed to be adjusted, but the idea wasn't to do any of that with the intent of getting credit for it. It was doing that because it needed to be done and accepting on the challenges that the community had set upon me about getting...there were certain priorities that they wanted addressed and so I felt it important to address those that I could."

Ian Record:

"You've been working with a number of tribes across the country, particularly in the Southwest and Pacific regions, on diversifying their economies. In that capacity -- in working with other tribes and also based on your experience with your own nation -- I was wondering if you could paint a picture for us of what you believe a full-fledged Native nation economy looks like."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. One of the challenges, the initial challenge that I see is that people have a different viewpoint of what 'economy' means. There's a lot of different arenas that are placed around the idea of an economy, but from a governmental perspective and from a societal perspective, that economy is a tumbling effect whereby, when revenues come into the system, those revenues advance themselves throughout the system. And I'll give an example: money generated from gaming comes to run the government. There should be something...then the government pays its employees and then those employees use that money to buy goods and services or pay bills. And so from an economic point of view, your ambition is to keep the money that's generated in a nation in that nation as long as possible. And so from that point of view, the economies are built to create more opportunity and generate more cash flow and protect the money that has come into the nation and keep it there for awhile. With that said, economic development is the process by which tribes create those kinds of business enterprises that will generate that opportunity.

And a lot of times, what gets confused there is the idea of economy has taken on, at times, the viewpoint of small business development. And I am definitely for small business development, I think it's a central part of an economy, but there are also other ways that generate economy, like creating infrastructure creates a baseline to build small businesses on, building housing creates opportunities for people to stay in the community so that they can pay and live in the community, which creates another set of economic values. You also bring in your, you keep your talent pool localized when you have job and work opportunities for those folks; they don't have to move away to go get a decent job. And so there are a lot of things tied to economy but I think the...my idea as a strategist and what I do with my company is we really focus on where the tribe's at and its structure, because economies are really tied to strong structures and institutionalized systems. They're really planned out and thought because there's a lot of money at stake in any type of venture -- business venture, enterprise development venture, acquiring businesses -- and so government is usually a reactive type of system, most bureaucracies are reactive in nature because they're political and business is more proactive in nature because it's usually driven by goals and end-production processes. You want to reach a certain budget, you want to reach a certain level of profit, you want to reach a certain level of job creation. And so with that said, there's more planning that takes place at the front end.

So from a tribal perspective and looking at tribes as nations, as sovereigns with the ability to create whatever they'd like, economic development to me takes on a number of scenarios. One is developing a strong government of laws, which include economic development, commercial laws, corporate laws, zoning laws, taxing laws, any other kind of law that can benefit the nation as a government. With that said, then you also have to have the legal system that can enforce those laws. A solid legal system is another key component to a strong economy. Another piece to that as well as that is the ability to create opportunities for individual members within the tribe to build business and so creating programming that will raise the initiative to have small business and entrepreneurship in the community. Those are other opportunities. And the government itself being proactive in supporting and promoting business within the community really takes on another level of public relations and commitment to helping to share information about the tribe and the tribe's capabilities and abilities, because many times when tribes are trying to develop an economy they want income and finances from other places to come in to generate more income locally. And so if you're looking for investors or partners or joint venture opportunities, it's very important for a tribe to recognize that they're going to be scrutinized by outsiders if they choose to take that path."

Ian Record:

"So really what you're...within this discussion of laws and institutions and structures and infrastructure, you're really describing essentially an environment-based approach to economic development and not just a venture-based approach to economic development, where you as a tribal council are trying to figure out, "˜Well, what business are we going to get into?' But really what you're saying is that tribal leaders need to be focusing on, "˜Let's create this environment for economic opportunity, whatever that opportunity might encompass.'"

Jamie Fullmer:

"You are exactly right with that point of view, because the environment is where the government has the most control, creating the laws, creating the systems, creating the policies that guide the direction. With that proper environment, the tribe or its members or private investors who come in to do business in the tribe have an opportunity to actually be successful because the environment is an environment of success. And so with that thoughtful planning at that -- in the environmental process -- it allows your economic development arm or your planning arm or whatever a tribe calls it, some call them 'authorities' and some call them 'enterprises' or 'boards,' it allows that arm to really do a good and effective job, because first of all they have something that they can go and promote and secondly, it challenges them to stay strategic in their thinking. If you have a specific zone where commerce can happen, you know the limits and the boundaries of where to do the commerce. It's just one example."

Ian Record:

"I also wanted to follow up on another point from what you were just talking about and that is you were describing this tumbling effect that you should be building towards in terms of how you structure your economy and you mentioned this point where the tribal government, for instance, or the nation raises revenues through gaming or whatever other enterprises it may have. It may, for instance, collect taxes on sales by citizen-owned businesses, whatever the form of revenue might be, comes in the tribal government, it funds that government, it pays the salaries to those tribal employees and then you mentioned those employees go out and buy goods and services. And this is where the research shows, this is where that tumbling effect tends to stop in so many nations because there aren't places on reservation to spend money on goods and services. Isn't that really one of the biggest challenges that Native nations face is creating those on-reservation outlets for consumer spending?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"There is that challenge, but I think in that challenge there's also a broader challenge that we many times in Indian Country all over America don't view the value of us buying from each other, doing business with one another, purchasing goods and services from tribal members or Indian-owned businesses, because that's part of a larger economy, the Indian Country economy. And I believe that when Indian Country comes to terms with adding that type of value and seeing the value in really committing to ourselves and our own success that we will have the ability to create a very powerful economy, sub-economy in the United States. But breaking that down to the individual level and the individual tribe, if the money that is made from whatever enterprise the tribe has only comes in and it goes directly out, it only benefits the tribe in that one sense. If that money were to come in, for example...an example that's challenging, but that some tribes have done would be a valuable one is a bank where people, where the money's made and then they store their money in the tribal bank. Well, now the tribe has access to use that money to do other kinds of investment and lending and create another revenue stream. A mall that has groceries and services that the community and the employees of the tribe would use is another way because you create...the money stays in the community, people spend it there, and you create more jobs with the same original money that was brought in, but it has now doubled its value. And so the ambition of a tribe should always be to see how they can vertically integrate the economy so that it will...there's an opportunity for it to stay there and it can be broken down in a number of arenas. Tribes buy all kinds of different products and goods and services. It would seem reasonable that they are able to create business opportunities for themselves as a tribal government owning enterprises or for membership and buying and selling those goods and services from individual Indian tribal members or other tribal enterprises or their own tribal enterprise."

Ian Record:

"You're working with the American Indian Business Network, which is an initiative of the National Indian Gaming Association on this issue of Native nations and Native citizens 'buying Native,' and really on a more macro level where you're talking about an Indian country-wide proposition, where it's not just Native nations and people buying internally within their own nation but actually buying from other nations. So I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about the motivation behind that project and how it's taking shape so far."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. I'm real proud of National Indian Gaming Association's commitment to developing the American Indian Business Network firstly because they are very close to a very powerful economic tool for Indian Country -- which is gaming -- and they see the value in tribes diversifying their economies. With that said, the American Indian Business Network was created by NIGA as a separate entity owned and operated by NIGA to develop a network whereby tribes could partner and do business with one another, that they could promote and establish a way to sell their own products and services of their tribal-owned businesses that they have and then also to look at partnering with other Indian businesses and also really for the small business owner or the entrepreneur that tribes would consider purchasing goods and services from those Indian-owned businesses. And with that said, with all of those levels of involvement and investment, we're really ultimately helping Indian Country, all of Indian Country by doing that because all along that chain, that food chain, Indian households and Native American families are being fed. And so we're really being more self-serving and self-sufficient, but not only that, we're also able to help the non-Indian economy because many of our employees are non-Indians, many of the businesses that we have are in partnership with non-Indians, there's a lot of non-Indian investment in Indian Country, and so the idea is not to exclude people or to make it exclusive, but to make it inclusive where Indian tribes, their enterprises, their buying power and their selling power gives a value to sharing resources across the country in one form or another, which could lead to a number of different opportunities. But just the concept is a very powerful one where we're not just looking, we're not just saying, "˜I want to take care of my tribe.' We're saying, "˜We want to take care of all tribes,' not by saying we're going to have to spend all of our money on other tribes, but by saying that we're willing to commit to buying Indian goods and services when they're at the same quality and level of the non-Indian goods and services."

Ian Record:

"So it sounds like a rather immense, untapped economic opportunity that will have kind of transcendent benefits not just for Native nations, but for the larger economy."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so, yes."

Ian Record:

"I would like to talk about another topic, broach another topic that's rather sensitive in a lot of Native communities, particularly among those who have experienced this newfound wealth and prosperity through gaming, and that's the issue of per capita distributions of tribal revenues. Yavapai-Apache Nation has a per capita distribution policy where it distributes a certain portion of its revenues to individual citizens, I believe on an annual basis, is that right?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Yeah, that's correct."

Ian Record:

"On an annual basis. And I was wondering if you could talk about how Yavapai-Apache Nation went about developing the policy, what it took into account when developing that policy, and how the policy and how the process of distribution actually takes place."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The per capita distribution and obviously the tribe's process of distribution was created for the membership -- and I won't get into any details to that because it's not my place or my authority -- but the distribution process was established because the community itself, as shareholders of the casino enterprise, felt as though there should be some distributions of that wealth. And the leaders over time had made commitments to doing that. When I got into office, it was very apparent that that was one of the things that was a priority to the people to get done. And so I made it one of my top and I think it was my first major initiative to move forward in office. The idea behind it was is that if we viewed the tribal membership as owners or shareholders of a corporation or a major enterprise -- which they are -- we viewed it much like a stock program in a private corporation whereby every year when business enterprises do well they might give their shareholders a revenue, a dividend, where they're sharing the dividend and that's how we really viewed it, that there's a percentage taken from the casino revenues and distributed to members each year at the end of the year based on the profit. And so with that said, I think the challenges; there were a number of challenges.

The first one is that when we put it together, there's the challenge of going through the process with BIA, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs takes its time in approving these kind of things, and so that was a challenge. And then internally the debate was, "˜How do we treat the dollars with respect to the individuals? Do we just give it to the adult members, do we give it to all members, is there any parameters that we want to put around the money?' Because it's not a lot of money. The council members at the time said, "˜We'd like to get the program started and we'd like for it to be shared and provided to all members.' With that said, we had to create a minors' trust program and so in that trust, there's an accountability of the money that comes in each year and how it's preserved for the individuals until they turn 18, which is the age that we gave and those dollars are accounted for by a separate accounting system. And I think the protections that we put into place or the monies don't come in through the tribal government, they go directly from the casino to the per capita account and then the money is distributed from there. And so that is helpful, too, to protect the integrity of the separation because it was approved, it was agreed on in our revenue allocation plan with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and so we really stay steadfast to that. And at the time, when we rolled it out, I think the challenge was is the people I'm sure wished that it was more than what it was and then I think the next challenge is that as we moved along we learned more about it because we would say, we would just...when we started, we wanted to get it out. And then along the way over the years we would kind of adjust it as needed, but the first year, the first issue was, "˜What if you turn 18 in the middle of the year? Do you get the money at the end of the year or do you have to wait?' And so that was one challenge. And then the next...so we had to set some timeframes on. If you turn 18 by a certain time during the year you are eligible for the dollars at the end of the year. So that was one challenge.

And I think another challenge was in dealing with elderly issues, that it might affect their Social Security benefits, and so we did try and find ways to manage that as well. But because it's young -- I think it's only been in place around four years or so now, maybe five -- but it was, we knew that we would have to work out some kinks and I think when it will be an impactful decision making down the road will be for those very young people that were maybe not even born or born when we started it that they'll have 18 years worth of revenue saved for them and at that point they may want to start considering some...putting in some safeguards for the individual, some requirements for them to get their money and those kind of things. But I think all in all, there's a lot of different positions on whether per capita is good or whether it's not good. I think in our case, because we viewed it as a distribution based on a shareholding, we had a little different viewpoint on it. Our ambition wasn't to subsidize the individual's life, it was to share in the overall profit of the, in our case, the casino. And so my own self, I have my own mixed emotions about whether it's good or bad, because I'm more in line with that the funds could be better spent providing programming, but I also recognize that the whole idea of gaming was to create an opportunity for quality of life of members. And so as you know and as we all know, every little bit counts, especially these days with everything being so expensive. And so if we create job opportunities, we create education opportunities, we provide social programming, and we are able to give distributions to help enhance the quality of life, then it's a positive thing."

Ian Record:

"You touched on a couple of the issues that the Native Nations Institute -- which recently published a policy paper on per caps and what Native nations needs to be thinking about as they develop their policies -- you touched on a couple of these critical issues. One of which is, when you issue a per capita distribution -- for instance particularly one that may fluctuate based upon the performance of the businesses or the enterprises from which the revenue for those distributions is coming from -- you have to be careful about what that's going to do to the eligibility of certain of your citizens for programs that they rely very heavily upon like Social Security."

Jamie Fullmer:

"The other challenge to that is if you expect...if you receive this much the year before and you only receive this much the following year, nobody's really happy about that. So one of the challenges as well is just growth, population growth. If you have a set percentage that you give and even if you make more revenues, if you have more births or enrollments in the year, it's still going to decrease the total payout. And so sometimes people assume that we are making less money when in fact, we're making more money, but we're growing faster than the money's growing."

Ian Record:

"Yeah and that's...I believe Native Americans are the fastest-growing population in the United States. That's going to be a huge challenge for those nations that issue per capita distributions moving forward, is it not?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I would think so, and I'm not real privy to any other distributions and values, but I would think that just that natural growth, something's got to give. If you've got a limited amount and you're growing here, well, something's got to give, whether it's programming or actual dollar distributions or both. It really depends on how well the tribe is planning for the future and that growth."

Ian Record:

"And it really gets back to this issue that we talked about earlier in our discussion about citizen education really, that you have to...because these issues like per capita distributions, these governing decisions that you have to make or at least lead in as elective leaders that you have to educate the citizens about what exactly all of this means. For instance, why is the per capita distribution amount down this year, or what does it mean when we're doing a performance based per cap or a profit based per cap based on a percentage of the revenue versus a flat amount every year?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That is again another struggle area because not everybody understands money, especially in the context of being one piece of a percentage. And it's challenging for those that understand money and so it's even more challenging for those that don't, and I'm talking about the percentages and how the common person in their thinking, they think about themselves and, "˜Hey, my check's less than it was last year. We must be making less.' That's the common sense approach to things, but when you look at the bigger picture and you realize and recognize that, as you said, if it's performance based, if the performance isn't as good, it's going to go down. If the performance is as good and you've grown and your membership has outgrown the dollar amount, it's still going to go down and so there might be two reasons that it's going down, two very different reasons. One is maybe a not so good of a reason, the other one is a good reason. Having great performance and growing as a nation is what we hope to do. So again that leads into the whole idea of diversifying where tribes should be considering, how do they create other opportunities, not just for per capita, but if the tribe itself is growing and continuing to grow then all of the programming is going to be effected: the education programming, the health care programming, the social programming, how the governments are staffed, staffing issues, the space allocations, the building sizes. You can go on down the list all the way down to the size of the pipes for sewage and water and it's not a bad thing to grow, but it's an expensive thing to grow and I believe that's one of the challenges, getting back to the challenge of the finances, is the common citizen doesn't take that into account. And sometimes when you lay it out there and it is statistically done and drawn out, it's hard for people to really connect to how those statistics affect the future growth."

Ian Record:

"So it seems to be two things that jump out of what you're saying about trying to meet that challenge or fight that struggle is strategic thinking and planning first of all: anticipating what the demands are going to be on tribal governance and tribal administration moving forward with the rapidly growing population, the strains that's going to put on programs, services, infrastructure, etc. And then it's the issue of not just citizen education, but education in laymen's terms, that most every citizen can understand."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Financial education is a very important next step for Indian Country, well, the whole country, but when we focus on Indian Country, that's a great next step because tribes have gone from over the last several decades, many of them were very poor and there was a lot of poverty. There still is a lot of poverty. I don't want to take away from that, but for those tribes that have been able to climb out of poverty, now they have to learn how to protect their wealth. It's not just a matter of generating it, but how do we protect it once we've generated it because it is very easy to spend. They always say, the more money you make, the more money you spend. It's very easy to spend the money when it comes in because there are always needs and there are always wants that people believe are needs and so there's a never-ending demand for services and programming and opportunities for members. But at some level, the institution, the government, the Native nation government needs to look at how do we prepare for our future growth. So they have to do some trending, they have to investigate their current size, they have to investigate their future needs, whether it's land needs or water needs or space needs, they have to look at the need for civic buildings and growth in that area and then they need to look at what kind of enterprises do we need to do. A couple of things: bring in more revenue to the tribe itself and bring in more opportunity for the tribal members. And so that isn't just increasing per capita, it's increasing the quality of life per individual. And that's I believe most of our goals as leaders is our ambition is to create a quality of life for our people that is comparable to what's around us."

Ian Record:

"And ultimately, as a nation, it's really about promoting independence and self-sufficiency not just as the collective, but among individuals."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. I think there's a little bit of I guess it would be backlash at times when a tribe becomes wealthy, people get angry about that. And it's really challenging in America that's supposed to be a country that is proud that people can go from poverty to wealth and they promote it in every other major arena and every other major setting, but when Indian tribes become wealthy, there seems to be a backlash that we don't deserve to be as wealthy as the other individuals that have wealth. I think that's another challenge that we face is we're still viewed as...that we may still carry on some of this second-class citizen status when we're well beyond that in the 21st century."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to wrap up with...first of all, I want to get your response to a quote and this is a quote that we heard first from, we've heard it from several tribal leaders, but we heard it from one in particular, Chief Helen Ben from the Meadow Lake Tribal Council up in Saskatchewan, and this really gets it back to this issue of governing institutions and she said, "˜My job as a leader is to make myself dispensable.' And really what she was getting at is, "˜My job as a leader,' and she expounded upon this, "˜is to put our nation in a situation where we have that infrastructure,' that you've been talking about, 'that environment in place of rules and policies and codes where when I leave office not everything falls apart.' There's a sense of stability and continuity there. And I was wondering if you could address that issue with respect to your own nation and what's going on in that respect."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think that my nation has been around for a long time, and there's been a lot of strong leaders and it's traditionally and culturally appropriate for us to have strong leaders. I think there's a balance between leadership and having a strong institution. Ultimately, I believe you need both because you can have a great institution, but if there isn't leadership steering it and keeping it moving and accepting the challenges that come up, then it can also stagnate. So I don't think that leadership is ever indispensable in my opinion. I think that leadership is a necessary part of everything that we do. With that said, a strong institution sure makes it a heck of a lot easier to be a strong leader and because you know what it is that you're wanting to accomplish and you know how to put to work the institution so that it can bring about the changes that the people want and need. And I think finally -- in my own nation as I said -- my ambition as the chairman was just to be a part of the growth, the ongoing growth, and I've never seen myself as anything more than that, never wanted to be more than that. That if I could say in my life that I contributed to my nation's growth in some way, then I feel like I have done my responsibility, and that holds true throughout my life. I feel like I can offer those same kinds of contributions to Indian Country as a whole and that's why I do what I do as the owner of Blue Stone Strategy Group. But back to the whole point of, I do believe that you have to have leadership, but I also believe that if you have a capable institution that you can plug folks into leadership roles, and as long as they have the necessary skills and ambition that there can be successes."

Ian Record:

"So in a nutshell what you're saying is that good governing institutions essentially empower the leaders to be effective."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so. And there are those magnanimous figures out there that can, they don't need all of that around them to make it tick, but most of the people that sure does empower them to make wise and thoughtful decisions as opposed to reactive and crisis-oriented decisions."

Ian Record:

"Well, Jamie, we really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with us. I've certainly learned a lot and I think Native nations and leaders across Indian Country will learn a lot from your thoughts and perspectives on not only what your own nation has been doing, but what's going on in Indian Country. We'd like to thank Jamie Fullmer for joining us today on this episode of Leading Native Nations, a program, a radio program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit our website: nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us." 

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."

Gerald Clarke, Jr.: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Cahuilla Band of Indians Council Member Gerald Clarke, Jr. shares his thoughts about what he wished he knew before taking office as an elected leader of his nation.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Clarke, Jr., Gerald. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 20, 2012. Presentation.

"Thank you very much. I just want to start by saying I'm really honored to be here amongst you. At various times you're asked to speak at various events or what have you and this one to me really matters. So I am very honored to be here and to speak with you. How many of you heard your community in the previous presentation? Raise your hand. Yeah, me too. Me too. My tribe went through what's called the GANN [Governance Analysis for Native Nations] with the [Native Nations] Institute back in April and the whole time they're going through this standard approach I'm shaking my head. Sometimes I'm laughing, sometimes I'm crying. But that's us. Right? So one of the things I would stress is you're not alone. There's a lot of us that are in a similar situation.

Just a little bit about me is I was a college professor for about ten years. I left reservation, went to college. I come from a long line of alcoholics and it was very hard for both my sister and I to stay home and to be around that and so we left and went off to college and then we got teaching jobs, both of us, at different colleges. Again, we worked; I was in Oklahoma for about ten years. And we kept our ties back to the reservation, we came home every summer, but it was just really painful for us to live there full-time and that's why we didn't. My dad was an only son and so he ran the family's ranch and when he passed away in 2003 I quit my job and moved home [because] it was always just understood that as the only son that's what I was going to do. And so that's what brought me back to the reservation back in 2003.

And so I'm going to be painfully honest with you this morning. I think there's power in truth, in being honest about the current situation. And so you can, once we get the questions, feel free to ask me just about anything. Okay, so a little bit about my tribe. In the introduction, it was near Palm Springs. It is not Palm Springs. It's 40 miles southeast up in the mountains, even farther economically. Our reservation was set up in 1875 as an agricultural reservation. The Cahuilla people, there's a variety of Cahuilla bands. We're some of the first cowboys in California. As the Spaniards settled, did the missions, they needed someone to work the livestock and that's what we've kind of done for the last couple hundred years. We have approximately 240 adult members and we have monthly general membership meetings of which between 30 and 40 people show up. That's where most of the decisions get made. We are not traditionally democratic. And that was one of the things, when I experienced this session back in April, was does your governing system match your culture? And we were not traditionally democratic. We had an inherent line of leaders called 'the net,' and that actually wouldn't have been my lineage, but what they said went. I'm very culturally involved and I like reading the old records and talking to people. One of the things that I've found that was very striking is that when the net said something, you just did it, you didn't question it or anything like that. Today, if tribal council says something, you get laughter. There's not nearly that respect that there was back in the day and so it makes me wonder. Sonny and I just met this morning, we were talking about how in America we stress that this democratically elected governing system is the system and we criticize all nations in the world who are not democratic, but I can't help but wonder if that system really fits my tribe or not. We may be looking for something different in the future.

So back in the 1910s, actually, what happened was my great grandpa Pio [Lubo] and five other men were involved with the murder of the superintendent of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] on our reservation and they were all sent to prison. The real issue was the BIA not wanting to recognize the net and wanting to recognize their own person. And it ended up in this murder of the superintendent. They sent these men to prison and really kind of broke the chain really well that way. My great grandpa Pio actually died in prison; he never got to come back. But after that event, they imposed this Roberts Rules of Orders and this IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] kind of system. So we have five tribal council members that are elected -- chairman, vice chairman, secretary and two at-large members. These are non-paid positions. So each one of us has a job where we pay our bills and support our families, which is another hurdle I think that we struggle with. I think sometimes people think being on tribal council 20-30 years ago is the same as it is today, and there's just so much going on. I feel like I'm that guy --remember on the old like Johnny Carson [show] or whatever, spinning the plates and then you have to run back and keep them going? That's how I feel most of the time.

We have no constitution. We are a customs and traditions tribe, and that is something that is being looked at. It seems to me that we have a membership who likes to call on their customs and traditions when it's convenientand not necessarily consistently, and that has been a problem. All major decisions are made in these general membership meetings. The tribal council presents the issue, the grant opportunity, the resolution -- what have you -- and it's the membership who vote on approving that or not. Again, I said, 30 to 40 members actually show up to these meetings. So it's actually a small portion of the total voting membership who make these decisions. And I often talk about a silent majority. Our tribe I think has a silent majority who -- and this is part of the brain drain that was spoken of earlier -- we have a number of educated people within our tribe who, starting like in the 70s and the 80s, they went, got educated, they came back, they did kind of what I'm doing, got fed up and now they're off doing their own things with law firms or what have you. And so there's a silent majority who doesn't come to the meetings who has certain ideas, but it's this core 30 or 40 people who really end up making a lot of the decisions.

We could spend all day on this: ‘What I wish I knew before I became a tribal leader.' Accounting: it's important to rely on -- and I made this presentation specifically for the emerging tribal leaders -- you have to rely on your experts, your professionals trained in your field. We have a CFO [chief financial officer] and they are in charge of doing...bring an outside audit firm come in annually. They're in charge of overseeing the monthly financials. I wish I knew more about accounting, because just because they say something doesn't mean it's true. And when I got in office I found out that we were like four years behind on our annual audits and this is something that wasn't really relayed. They were saying, ‘Oh, yeah, it's going, it's in the works,' and just kind of pacified the membership, but it wasn't happening. So I wish I knew more about accounting.

Law. Tribal law. What a mess, huh? Nothing is black and white; everything is gray. It will be applied in some cases where it's convenient. And I'm not talking tribally; I'm talking the state or the feds even. And then if it's going to get kind of messy for them, they don't want to deal with it, they don't have the resources, they just don't apply it. There's no consistency at all.

Public safety. One of the things my sister and I -- whose also on council -- we tried to bring in our own tribal police and tried to get some grants to get that going, because I'm a firm believer that stability, safety, those things are core things that need to be done. In a way it's economic development, too. Who wants to come and invest in your tribe if there's no stability, if there's no safety?

ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act]. I heard an ICWA person earlier, I forget who it was. Okay, over here. Wow! ICWA is kind of its own entity. My sister, in addition to be on council, she's our domestic violence advocate for a consortium of four tribes in our area. And when we first got in that, my belief -- okay, so you have a husband and spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend, they're beating each other up. We'll split them up, that sounds good to me. There's kids in every one of these cases, just about. What do you do with the kids? And so this ICWA thing is very, is going to be, for those of you who are just now getting on council, this is going to be something you're going to have to deal with. Hopefully some of you have your own social services programs. We don't. So the tribe really has to educate itself. We have a five-council team, so my sister has kind of picked up that ball and said, ‘Okay, I'm going to do what I can to study up and learn all about ICWA.' [Audience question] Indian Child Welfare Act, it has to do with custody, traditional tribal adoptions, all these kinds of things. It's very complicated. And the other thing -- and some of you in this room know this -- you're going to spend a lot of time educating other people about these things. The county, the state social workers, half of them don't even know what ICWA is either, and so you having to educate them.

I'm a rancher and I recently got involved with the National Conservation Resource Service about trying to get some grants for range improvements and things like that. And so I met with their tribal liaison and apparently I guess his credentials were he watched Dances With Wolves once or something, I don't know. He had no clue about tribes at all. He's the tribal liaison, so here I am teaching the tribal liaison. I went through a two-year process of trying to get my ranch registered and in the end he said, ‘Okay, all we've got to do is get a copy of your deed and we'll send it in.' And I'm like, ‘Wait a minute.' I said, ‘We don't have deeds. We're assigned on the reservation, not even allotments, assignments.' And he didn't even know anything about that, what to do. So that caused me another two years of going through all these systems, going to national conventions, and meeting with the USDA. And so a lot of time is spent educating other people.

IGRA [Indian Gaming Regulatory Act], gaming is big. I'm not a fan of gaming at all and so I allow another member of our tribal council to be more up on those things. But it's good to know. It's good to know your rights if you are thinking about gaming or getting into gaming.

Environmental protection. The important things to know... these are the things that I just brainstormed all the things that I deal with.

Taxation. Recently the Board of Equalization in California notified our tribe and asked us to give them a list of all the businesses on the rez so they could tax them. Pretty alarming when you think about sovereignty and such. And so we didn't participate. But it's good to know what your rights are in tax law.

Budgeting, making budgets. It's a constant thing that you have to deal with. Emergency management is something that is becoming more and more...you hear it more and more within tribal governments. Working with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] is a complete headache as well. You see on the news, oh, they're helping this community and that community and it's not nearly as streamlined as they try to make it. It's not nearly as, really as helpful. They're coming from a national office, coming to your community trying to tell you what your community needs or what have you and it doesn't work.

State legislature and federal legislature. I'd never been to the state capitol until I got on tribal council; we've gone and met with representatives, been to Washington D.C. as well. I will say that one of the battles we have within our tribe is that some people want to get all tied up in the little local family disputes that are happening on the reservation and don't really understand you've got to go to your state legislature if you want to promote certain laws or you want to get certain help getting certain projects accomplished. You've got to start...you've got to get to know these people. In California, we have term limits which means every two years we get to re-educate all the new people and so that again is another...I remember, ‘Get these career politicians out of there.' At the time I was like, ‘Okay, that sounds okay.' But now that I'm in politics myself, I see it's just a constant having to go back and teach them about sovereignty, about taxation issues, about gaming issues or what have you.

When I first got on council or before I got on council, I just saw, I would sit in these general membership meetings and I was like, 'Man, is anybody doing anything?' It just didn't seem like anybody was really doing anything. Once I got in office, I realized everybody's trying to do everything, and we've lost a lot of good personnel in our accounting department, tribal administrator, because you've got too many people trying to tell the employees what to do and it's really been a nightmare. And as far as a tribal leader goes, I think you have to have strength to say, ‘No, I'm not going to get involved with that. That's not my duty.' Recently, in the past year, we developed an economic development corporation, an LLC [limited liability corporation], and they elected a board of tribal members. And they're the ones that are involved with overseeing the management of the tribal business enterprises. So this is new just within the last year, and I can tell you that we have tribal council members who don't like it and who are constantly wanting to interfere with those enterprises. We do have a small gaming facility and the tribe has benefited almost nothing from that gaming facility, because when that passed and gaming came into California, a lot of unscrupulous backers swooped into Indian Country and a lot of tribes were taken advantage of and I feel like our tribe was one of those. And so this gaming facility is still open. I'm surprised with the downturn it's even still open because we are in a very rural area. It stands on this hill right where everybody can see it. It's almost a beacon of our failure. And Steve talked about [it], it's bad enough when outside people think you're incompetent, but it's when your own people think you're incompetent that it's really sad. We hope to turn that around.

And part of, I think, the turnaround is to get away from micromanagement. Let the businesses run themselves, allow your professionals to do their job. We had a tribal member who was doing a mulching project and there was some trash mixed in with the mulch and so tribal members were concerned, and they should be. We have an environmental program. We have our director who's a highly educated and trained professional. He went over there, he did a site visit, he did tests, he sent off samples for testing and he brought it back and he said that it was even cleaner than what they were claiming to begin with. The membership didn't like that answer so they...and it's like, if you have professionals, let them do their job and trust that they're doing their job. This micromanagement, it becomes very politicized. And Steve was talking about that earlier where, ‘Let's get rid of this person and let's get one of my cousins in there,' what have you. It takes strength as a tribal leader to tell your cousin, ‘No, you're not qualified. Maybe go to school and then we'll put you in there.'

It's not just a job, it's an adventure. Before I took office, I knew I'd have to go to meetings and I do think I've put on the 20 pounds, the tribal council 20 pounds, [because] I'm sitting all day in these meetings. But what I didn't know is I would be woke up at three in the morning with a car flipped over in the middle of the road or a domestic violence incident or a shooting or what have you. You can be a council member, but I think there's a difference between a council member and a tribal leader and it's all encompassing. You have to walk the walk to try to get these things done. But it's a lot more than simply going to these meetings.

Self-determination. I just put it down exactly how I believe. I should say my dad was full blood and my mom was a redhead from Texas and their marriage lasted about three years -- long enough for me and my sister -- but everything that could go wrong, miscommunication culturally or whatever. And my mom would say, ‘Those Indians,' which is a bad way to start. ‘They have all this land and they're just letting it lay and doing nothing with it.' I don't think she ever understood it's kind of nice that way, too. But one of the things...I heard all of that -- that we were lazy, that we never did anything for ourselves, we're waiting for the handout. But I've read Cahuilla people are very self-determined people or at least we used to be and when the reservation was formed, the only thing that the Cahuilla people wanted from the federal government was a paper defining the four corners of the reservation. We didn't want free housing, we didn't want any of that stuff. And my dad was the chairman in 1970 and he was trying to bring these free houses in through HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], or whatever program it was back then, and it got voted down. And his mom -- my grandma -- voted against it. And he was all mad [because] he was trying to help his people. But I don't think, I think the older people understood that you help yourself. And that's been a really tough struggle for me, is when is it helping your people and when is it enabling your people? That's a very hard thing to deal with. And so I heard that a lot, that we wouldn't do things for ourselves. Now that I'm in there and I'm trying to get some things going, the BIA, other federal agencies, the state, they don't want you to do any of this stuff for yourself, they really don't. This is my perspective.

My sister and I wanted to have our own tribal law enforcement and we have got nothing but criticism and friction from our county sheriff who has that coverage area. A tribal member, who is actually a cousin of mine, pulled a gun on me and my uncle in front of my house and I was able to diffuse the situation but my wife called the sheriff. Anyway, I went to bed by the time a thousand lights pull up, and I had to get up and he said, ‘Okay, we had a call about a gun.' I was just like, really? I could have been out there dead. We don't get service. We wanted to serve ourselves. And think, with the state budget crises throughout the nation, the more the tribes do for themselves the less the state, the less the federal government has to do. But they don't want it. It's easier to keep the status quo. I'm also in the process of starting our own fire department and again through Cal Fire, again in California, nothing but hurdles thrown at me to start this up because if we start answering our own fire calls on our reservation then Cal Fire can't answer them. So their call volume goes down, guess what, they get less money from the state for that station. So I go to these meetings and they're talking about reimbursements and budgets and things and I'm like what about health and safety? So keep that in mind that just because you want to do it doesn't necessarily mean that other people want you to do it.

It really has...I don't want to present myself as I have all the answers. Really, it's been a struggle and the age thing I think is also...I see some younger people in here. It's strange -- I just turned 45 years old and it's strange to call myself a tribal leader. I was always raised to respect the people older than me, the elders, and it even is spelled out in our creation beliefs. But at the same time, and this is part of that truth element, I've seen some older people who are making decisions not based on the benefit of the tribe or the whole, the community. And I'm ashamed to say that and I feel guilty for saying that -- again for how I was raised -- but I see that and I want to put that out there because it's a conflict for me in these meetings to have to go against people that are older than me. But it's something that as a tribal leader you have to deal with. Again, my dad passed away, he was my go-to guy and then another elder who was my go-to person passed away a couple years ago. So right now I'm kind of looking for that guidance a little bit. And if it's not there, you've just got to go with your gut instinct of what you feel is right I think.

Another issue is tribal time is not the same as state legislative time; it's not the same as county budget time. Our creation story tells us about the creation and nothing happens overnight, everything takes time. And when I got on council, ‘Ah, I'm gung ho, I want to get this done and get that done.' And now I see I've got to slow down and really think about things and plan and try to do what I can while I'm in there. And what I found, another thing I found is it's all about, what is it about? It's all about communication. I've sat in general membership meetings where there's like two factions fighting, but it's obvious that they both agree, they're both on the same page. Yeah, okay. But neither side kind of understands that they're both agreeing and I'm just like, wow, this is... Communication. What a rare skill, to really be able to get your point across and to have other people understand. Our meetings are horribly long and a lot of it is just lack of communication. I think it could be cut in half if it was a little more efficient and people had that ability. And it's tough; it's definitely an art. Keep it simple. Keep it concise. That sounds funny, to rehearse, but I rehearse a lot before I go into my meetings so I can present it in a way that's understandable. Because you're in the mix, you're the expert in that issue because you're the one fighting with the county or working with the BIA or whatever. And then these people come in once a month so you've got to be able to relay that.

So there's that tribal time, you've got to have patience even if you don't get something accomplished. And like the police [force] that my sister and I were trying to do, it was voted down I think [because] some people thought we were trying to be Big Brother or something as opposed to just public safety. But maybe you introduce the idea first. Maybe it gets shot down. Maybe next year, okay, let's relook at that or what have you. And if you can kind of get the current going maybe eventually it'll happen.

This was some advice that was given to me back when I was teaching in Oklahoma from a man who I respect a lot. ‘Do not expect the same of others that you would expect of yourself.' I'm not a very good delegator because I don't trust anybody to do as good of a job as I could do. But what ends up happening is I get overwhelmed and overloaded and then it doesn't get done very well or at the last minute. So trust the people around you. If you expect the same out of them as you expect out of yourself, you're going to be disappointed for the rest of your life I think. So you've just got to check your expectations a little bit, do your best, absolutely but don't expect that out of others. I think that's all I've got. I appreciate the time and I guess we'll have questions later, so I'll be happy to answer anything."

Cynthia Manuel: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tohono O'odham Nation Legislative Council Member Cynthia Manuel discusses some of the challenges she has faced as an elected leader of her nation, and stresses the importance of leaders taking care of themselves physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Manuel, Cynthia. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 20, 2012. Presentation.

"Good morning. My name is Cynthia Manuel and I'm from the Tohono O'odham Nation. I live in Santa Rosa, which is the Gu Achi District and that's who I represent on the Legislative Council. Our tribe has a three-branch government: the legislative, the executive and the judicial. The executive has the tribal chairman and the executive department. And we're legislative and we have 22 members. We have 11 districts within the nation and we have 22 members, two representatives from each district. And we serve four years when we get elected and then every two years we have an election. So every two years -- it's staggered. And that's really good for me because we learn from the ones that were there before. And I want to recognize two of our members that are here, is Edward Manuel who is Vice Chair of our Legislative Council and he's sitting over here. He represents the Pisinemo District. And we also have Pamela Anghill over here, who represents Gu Vo District. And as I said, I represent Gu Achi and this is my second term. I've been there six years now and it seems like forever. I'm okay with it. This is our full-time position so we're paid to be on council. We have a salary, an annual salary, and this is what we do daily. Within the legislative branch, we have our staff and our chairman who wasn't able to be here. That's why I'm here [because] he couldn't make it and so he asked me and I said, ‘Yeah, I will do that.' His name is Timothy Joaquin and he comes from the same district I come from. He's taught me a lot.

Next May, we'll have our elections and my term will be up but he'll keep going, my colleague. And then two years after that his term will be up. So we have staggered terms and we each represent our own, we get elected by own people within our district. I ran in 2005. Before that I worked at the health department for 15 years. I did everything. I started what is our HOP program now, the Healthy O'odham Prevention program, which is a diabetes program. Me and my brother Isidro, he just got out of the service then, and he took the exercise portion of it and I took the diet portion of it. We started the program; now it's growing. We have a site almost in every district to work on our diabetes rates. Our diabetes rates are really high in the nation. So we started that and [I'm] glad it's still going. When we started it was just us two, the staff and now we have probably a staff of about 50 people.

Then I went to work at our nursing home. It was mentioned on the screen that we do have our skilled nursing facility. We have...long ago, we always talked about as far as I can remember that our elders want to come home and recuperate on the reservation. So when they started the nursing facility we do our own traditional foods, we do our own activities, whether it be our traditional dancing or just the modern exercise. And a lot of the staff that are there, I believe 95 percent, are tribal members and then they serve the elders there. So they speak the language and can communicate. They like to sit outside and outside the backyard is the desert, so they really like it there. We have, I believe, it's 63 beds and right now we're starting to build housing for those that can be on their own and they just need a little help. The groundbreaking was last Sunday to start that [because] we would like to take a lot more elders in that are in the hospitals here in Tucson and in Phoenix, because a lot of times they don't, some of the care facilities here, they don't understand our O'odham when they speak [because] some don't speak no English. So it's really good that we do have it. But they also take others that are younger that need help in whatever they're going through.

I worked there as the activities manager and then I decided to run for council in '05 and I won my seat. I won my opponent by 65 percent. It was really good and before then I looked at the constitution and what a legislative department and what our jobs will be and I liked what it said and that's what I recommend. If you have a constitution or whatever your job description is [because] that's our job description, what it says on there, that's what we do. But I first talked to my family. I have a family of eight brothers and sisters, my mom and my dad and my aunts. I always say that I was raised by a village or by a community, because that's how it was within my own community, my aunts and my uncles, my grandparents. So I talked with them and I think that's the most important [thing] because you have to have the family support in that, whether it be your sister, your brother, your uncles. You have to have that support. My own family, my husband, my son -- I have one child, my son. He's 18. Well, he just turned 19 and I have a grandson who is two years old. I talked to them and what I think this job will mean, a lot of time away from home. And because when I worked with the health department, I also went to a lot of the diabetes workshops all over and I remember I used to call home and my son would say, ‘Mom, just come through the phone, come home.' So I had to tell him this is how it's going to be, but by then he was older so he was okay with it. So I had to talk to them and my mom and my brothers and my sister and tell them what I was going to do and they supported me. So I did that and I won my seat then.

Then when I started there it was kind of scary [because] you're just getting into like this whole world of, like it's a different, you're going to be representing the nation here. And when I first got on...we have in our legislative department we have 11 committees that we each serve on three of those committees except the chairman and the vice chair. So when I first got in, they put me on the Rules Committee, which oversees like the constitution and things that happen within; and the Domestic Affairs Committee, which is the law enforcement and the border issues; and the Health and Human Services Committee, which is health and human services. Those are some of the biggest committees and then they asked me, then they elected me to be chair on two of them and vice chair and I was like, ‘I don't know if I can do that. I just now got here. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.' Then my brother, he was on council before and he was saying, ‘Don't say that, act like you know what you're doing.' I said, ‘Okay.' But I was real fortunate. I have an older brother who served in council for four years and he was the vice chair of council and then he became, right after he left his term there, he became the chairman of our district. Then I have another brother who is three years younger than me who also served after my oldest brother's four years; he served his four years but he had moved to another district so he was serving for that district. Then when he ended, a year later he became my vice chair of our nation. So I had those, they taught me a lot. I said, ‘Okay, I'll accept the chair's position and the vice chair.'

And it was really a lot, because at that time with domestic affairs we were going through the SORNA [Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act], it was a whole different change with the Adam Walsh [Act]. And we were going with the sex offender notification registry, the SORNA. And also the cards, I can't remember. I was trying to think of the cards, the tribal cards that we need to use like to cross over because, as our vice chair mentioned, we have membership on the Mexican side of the border and we have from what I understand last two years ago we had 11 communities that still have our membership in Mexico. And our land actually extended all the way to Mexico City and then this way to the ocean. And so we still have membership on that side. And so at the time that's what we were working on because we also have a big celebration on October 4th in Magdalena, Mexico and so we needed to make sure that our members were able to cross over and back. And so we were working on that at that time and so I knew that it was going to be a big challenge to be on the committee.

And then on the other committee that I served on at the time, the same time, was the Health and Human Services Committee and at that time we were working on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and even that was a big issue. So I was really overwhelmed by so much but I just did my best. Also asking for like direct funding, that's what we pushed for instead of our funding going to the state and then down to the tribal level and then it ends up with us and it's nothing, hardly anything. And so we were working on direct funding.

So I was on those committees and it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I think I really learned fast. I remember when we were working on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act because when I got on health I was also selected by our tribe to sit on the National Indian Health Board. And then at the National Indian Health Board I was elected to serve as the secretary. So it was really an eye-opening [experience]. I remember when we were working on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act we were at the NIHB, National Indian Health Board office, and they called it the war room. And we were, as they were talking on the floor and trying to pass the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, we were sitting in this room and I think we sat in there for two days and as whatever was going to be passed. And if somebody spoke that we knew that we could reach the representatives, when they spoke and then we would call them and try to change their mind so they could vote for it or not change or add amendments that they were doing at the time. I remember they said, ‘Arizona, Arizona, Kyl and McCain, call them, call them and tell them why they should vote for that amendment.' And I was just like, ‘Wow, me?' ‘Yeah, call.' And so I did and then they, then Kyl wanted to meet -- I don't think he knew we were in D.C. -- and he wanted to meet face to face with me and ask me questions why he should vote for these amendments. And so at the time there was a youth group meeting at the Indian Museum, Native American Museum. And so one of the people there, anyway, she works part with NIHB. They were saying, we should go down there and get the youth and get to Kyl's office before he goes back on the floor. And so we walked. And at that time taxi cabs were on strike so we were walking. I had comfortable shoes, she had to take off her shoes, and we went and got the youth and within that time when we got there we had to educate them why, what we were going to talk to Senator Kyl about. And so we walked over there and we did what we needed to do and went back. And I was so happy that those youth were there and it really changed his mind I guess, Senator Kyl and how he was going to vote. So that was really an experience and I then I thought at the time, this is probably about three months into my, when I first got on council and I thought, ‘Wow, I think I'm going to like this after everything that just happened.' And I always tell my family, [because] they used to ask me, ‘How do you know all this?' -- my son. And I said, ‘Oh, I just wing it, I just wing it, I just get up there.' But I told him, ‘I pray about it, I pray every time, I'm always in prayer and whatever happens that's what is supposed to happen and I don't go back and say, 'Oh, I should have done this because you're going to be stuck back there.'' I always tell him that.

And even with our elders, whoever, I always feel that whoever voted you in, whether they voted for you or not but they're from your community, your district, that you listen to their needs. I know when I first got on council, one of my aunts came and she said, ‘I listened,' [because] we have a radio station too, KOHN 91.9 FM, the Voice of the Tohono O'odham Nation, that's the radio station. And she said, ‘I listen to you guys on the radio, but I don't even know what you guys are talking about.' And she didn't speak any English and so she said, ‘It would be really good if you guys talk in O'odham, our language.' And I said, ‘Okay.' So when we had session again the next time I spoke in O'odham [because] I am fluent and I spoke my language. And so now a lot of the elders will say, will ask me questions, ‘What was that about or what were you guys talking about?' And my aunt told me, she said, ‘Now I know what you guys are talking about and I'm really happy that you speak in O'odham when you sit there because then we can understand what you guys are talking about.' And so I try to listen in that way so they can understand them and get at their level, whoever it is, whether it's the youth or whomever, get at their level and speak their language. I know, there was a job announcement out for a youth advisor and so I put my name in it and I got an interview from our youth council and I got selected to be a youth advisor for our youth council. So I'm trying to teach them a lot on that, too, because they're upcoming leaders. We have two of our youth that are ambassadors at the national level and they go to meet with national leaders and so I'm trying to help them out.

But it's been, it's really been good. I learned from a lot of people. I think it was an eye-opening [experience] when I got on. But even though I knew, kind of knew before what it was all about. I had two of my grandparents who sat on council and kind of taught me back then, too. And I was like 18 when I was our tribal queen and I traveled and had to travel with a lot of the legislators; they were my chaperones. And then I thought, ‘Oh, some day I want to do this,' and so that was one of my goals. So I'm here. But one thing that I wanted to mention is be you, be yourself and also rest and relax [because] I know when you're a tribal leader everybody wants you here, there, even if it's at a dinner or a function, they always say to us, ‘Well, you weren't there. We had this and that and we didn't even see no tribal leaders there.' So you're just pulled every which way at the national level and in your own community. Even just at Head Start graduation they want you there, they want to see tribal leadership there, just everywhere, at elder's gathering, youth gathering. But it's okay to say ‘no' or ‘not yet' or ‘not today,' because sometimes it's really a lot to be everywhere. And I know that firsthand because you need to relax and rest.

On May 28 -- I remember this day -- I was the vice chair for the Budget and Finance Committee. We see over 136 budgets yearly that we go through. And so the chair, she wasn't going to be there so she asked me if I would do the meeting and I said, ‘Okay.' And I always try to do my homework ahead of time. I go through all that stuff so I know what questions to ask if I don't understand it. I start adding it to make sure everything comes out okay. So she said she wasn't going to be there and I said, ‘Okay, I can do it.' So I was really anxious. I got up early, I got up at...so for like the last two days before I was reading my stuff and so I got up early that morning at four. I told my husband, 'I'm going to be there early, set everything out and be ready for our meeting.' I got up at four. So I jumped out of bed when the alarm rang [because] I didn't want to be late. I jumped out and our meetings are not until nine but I wanted to be early. So I jumped out of bed, my side of the bed, the window's right there. So I stood up and I had my fingers there and I held on and then all of a sudden this side just gave in and I fell. And so my husband got out of bed and he got me and he set me on the bed and I laid down for awhile. And then I told him, ‘I'm going to get in the shower.' So I sat up and I fell again when I stood up and I was like... and he said, ‘Are you okay?' And I said, ‘I think so. I think I'm just nervous or anxious or something.' And so he said, ‘I'm going to call the ambulance.' And I said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, I'm going to go in the shower first.' So I went in the shower and I came back out and I was okay. And I sat on the bed and he said, ‘I already called the ambulance.' And I said, ‘Okay.' And so the ambulance came and they asked me, ‘Can you walk...' [because] we have steps. They said, ‘Can you walk out? Then, we'll put you on the stretcher.' And I said, ‘Okay.'

So I went out and they got me on the stretcher and went to Casa Grande Regional, which is about 45 miles. I got there and then we were in there and the doctor was talking to my husband. And then he came in and he said, ‘They're going to send you to Phoenix Heart Hospital.' And I was like, ‘Why?' And he said, ‘I don't know, they'll tell you and he's going to be in here to tell you.' And I said, ‘Okay.' And so I was laying there and then he came and he said, ‘We're going to send you to the Heart Hospital, they're going to need to do more tests.' And I said, ‘Okay.' And I said, ‘Was there something wrong with me ‘cause I don't feel any way right now?' And they said, ‘Well, they'll talk to you over there.' So I said, ‘Okay.' So when I got to the Heart Hospital, one of the doctors came in and he said, ‘Oh...' and I said, ‘What happened?' And he said, ‘Oh, did you know you had a stroke?' And I said, ‘No.' And he said, ‘It's all this...what do you do?' So he sat down and I went over my schedule, ‘I go in at five to work ‘cause I get like a stack this high of paper every day. I think we use like so many reams.' And so I said, ‘And I go through all my stuff, I get like over hundreds of emails. I sit down, I go through all them, delete and save what I need to. And then at  nine o'clock is our meeting and depends on how long it lasts and I stay there till like six, seven, eight, nine just to go through all that and fix everything and be ready for the next time ‘cause I'm not one to just not know the issue.' And so he said, ‘Well, that's what it is. You're too stressed out. You're really stressed out.' So he said, ‘I want you to slow down.' He said, ‘You have a clot in the back of your ear and...but we can't do anything right now. It's too hard to get into there so what we're going to do is try to flush it out, give you all these fluids and try to flush it out for it to move or go out.' And I said, ‘Okay.' And so I stayed there for like I think a month and they said it wouldn't move, it wouldn't do nothing, so they were going to let me go home but I had to promise them that I won't go into work at five, that I would wait till my meeting time, which is nine. And he said, ‘You can do stuff at your house. You can print it and bring it home so you can rest when you need to.' So I said, ‘Okay.'

And so since then, it's been, it's been kind of slow for me but I've learned to adjust. We have, I'm glad in our office we have, each of us have individual offices. I can close the door and now I lay down at noon and I rest. If I go in at five I take an hour break before my meeting at nine and I lay down. I have my blankets there, I have my cot there and I rest. And in the evening I rest before I go home because I have my grandson too and I play with him when I get home. So I think that it's really important that you rest. I know it's hard to do because you have so many, a tough schedule daily but I think you really need to rest because it's hard being in a position like that [because] having a stroke just slows you down. I'm still weak on my left side but I manage to do...I texted my husband this morning and I put, ‘I sure miss you,' [because] he helps me out in the morning. But it's okay. I get by. But it's just rest, rest and if you feel like you...only you know your body and what your body can take, nobody else knows your body, so when your body's telling you to rest, you rest. I try to use like the handicap door button because I can't...I don't like want to really push, push, push. And people look at me. And when I go shopping I use one of those carts [because] I know my body, only I know my body and how I feel. If I want to do that that day, then I will do that and it's okay because nobody else knows your story but you. That's okay to do that. Thank you."

Ben Nuvamsa: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Chairman of the Hopi Tribe Ben Nuvamsa speaks about his tenure as the elected chief executive of his nation, and how the governance issues he and his nation have experienced in recent years offer important lessons to other Native nations.  

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Nuvamsa, Ben. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 24, 2010. Presentation.

"What I have for you is basically a Reader's Digest version of what happened at Hopi. Manley Begay did a great precursor of the presentation that I'm going to make. I'm going to talk a little bit about the situation I got into, walked into and what happened. And I'm going to show you an example of really what happened. We talk about separation of powers, we talk about balance of powers, we talk about sovereignty and those kinds of things and I'm going to actually tell you really what happened. It's a lesson learned, and I think that's the intent of this session is to teach you how to, tell you how we can learn from this experience. With that...Manley we're 'Nation A,' Hopi Tribe, in Manley's case study. We had all the resources, we had the tribal membership and so on, but there was no strategic direction and so on and a lot of the faults that Manley spoke of for Nation A.

Let me tell a little bit about the situation that I walked into. Our former chairman was removed by the tribal council for I'll just say conduct unbecoming, and so that...he was like eight months into his term and so that required a special election. So I had really actually thought maybe not running that time but maybe the next term, but then I kind of got recruited, kind of like what the chairman here did. I kind of got recruited into it. In fact several emails and phone calls and constant barrage of these requests and I finally decided, 'Okay, let me do it,' so we did. So there was actually the national limelight on Hopi even on the Jay Leno Show. Some of you have seen that possibly, perhaps. And so the people were wanting to rebuild that credibility, the integrity of the Hopi Tribe. Because after all, we were the most traditional tribe in North America, we're supposed to be the peaceful people and all that. And there was great expectations of that new chairman, whoever that might be, to pick up the pieces and get us back on the road. So I thought that maybe with my education, my experience, and the vigor I had to step up to the plate -- not that I was going to be the solution, but I knew it was going to be very, very tough because all the dynamics that are happening in tribal politics. So that was the situation.

There was a great expectation by the Hopi people of getting this new administration, getting back and regaining the status and the integrity of the tribe. As you all know, Indian politics is cutthroat politics, but I really didn't fully grasp that we've always had this problem of the 'us against them' kind of feeling between the tribal council, the villages and the people, but I didn't realize that it was such a big division there. You also need to know that the Hopi Tribe is composed of 12 traditional villages, autonomous villages, and our constitution says they're self governing villages. So typically in any kind of government, you'll have three separate functions; you'll have the executive, the legislative and the judicial. At Hopi, we also have one important component and those are the villages. And so we've always had that conflict between the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act]-type constitution and our traditional governments. And I admire the brother, the sister tribes of New Mexico -- the Pueblos -- and how they're able to merge and incorporate their traditions in with their modern ways and the religion there, but at Hopi it was quite different.

I didn't also realize that the role of the tribal attorney played quite...it was just so significant and major that perhaps part of the problems we are encountering right now is because that attorney played a real significant role in basically shaping how the council operates and the advice that the attorney gave to the tribal council. And then there's the role of the outside interests and you keep that in mind because we talk about economic development, there are going to be companies out there, corporations out there -- and I think that as the Chairwoman [Karen Diver] talked about is -- that they're going to want that piece of the action. Well, in the case of Hopi, it was even deeper than that and it is even deeper than that and that is they're trying to regulate how you govern. And I'll talk a little bit about that later, but it was just so influential that it almost seemed to be that our council, some of our council members are kind of like puppets to these corporations and to the attorneys. And we talked, and Manley talked a little bit about that self-rule; you call the shots.

We always had our own separation of powers and balance of powers that we had, because one society would oversee the other. For example, I'm Bear Clan. At Hopi [Hopi language], which is the village leader, usually come or do come from the Bear Clan. And we don't go and appoint ourselves to be the village leader. Somebody else in another society picks that person. The One Horn Society picks that person and there is a process, a ceremony and process that then the person is then ordained, is given certain duties and responsibilities by this One Horn Society. And if that person is not functioning according to what they had prescribed to him, they will bring him down to the kiva and basically have like a performance evaluation, tell him this is how he's supposed to be. And that leader is supposed to be a humble leader. And there's a story that goes the Creator or at least the keeper of this world has this...gave this -- Joan's [Hopi language] said that he gave the people a planting stick and a bag of seeds. That's all that he gave them. What does that mean? Those are really powerful words that you go and you have to live a simple life. You can survive by what I gave you, the know-how. So that's the...and then we have certain other societies at Hopi, the kiva chiefs and so on. Their names are appointed or designated in a traditional process.

The IRA constitution was something very, very outside of our normal process and today, even today we are having problems with that. In my experience as chairman, if there's a final analysis of my experience as chairman, it would be, one of them would be the constitution and the form of government that we have, in which we have to incorporate our cultural, tribal values into those principles, in those provisions in our constitution. And I guess...so where we're at with what happened is if you don't have this balance, and if you have leaders that are sitting on the council don't have that appreciation and the need to be truly self-governing and to be truly looking out for tribal members and the long-term vision of Hopi, of the tribe, you're going to have an ineffective government. And you're also going to see how it impacts the traditional side, and it has, because the role of the [Hopi language] has been compromised, because he's supposed to be a sacred person, a religious person. Well, he's now...he has now been brought into the political circle and is appointing tribal council members to the council, which is not his responsibility and the constitution does not provide for that. And it's now filtered into the kivas, into the ceremonies and so on, where we now have conflicts and so on. It has broken apart or at least [caused] some conflicts within families and so on. And so that's really unfortunate. But those are the kinds of things that are happening.

Where is Hopi now? I think we're in a transition. We have to look at now what, who we are and where we need to be. We're at a kind of a transition happening or needs to happen from this form of IRA-type constitution that we've been living with since 1936 -- that's when the tribe adopted the constitution -- up [until] today. And look at the experiences that we gained, we've lived through and be able to fix that, so that it can be more meaningful to us in how we can operate, because I think that that's one of the real -- the things that I know that the Udall Foundation talks about and the [Harvard University] Kennedy School of Government which I've worked with before, helped out in certain projects -- is that we need to fix our institutions. We need to really look at what is our institution that we would govern ourselves, our constitutions, our codes and so on? We have to take a look at that and make sure that it's meaningful to us in how we are as a tribe. Not every tribe is the same. Therefore the IRA was this cookie-cutter thing that didn't work. It perhaps served the purposes for the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], but it certainly created a lot of problems for tribes. So it all goes back down to governance and that's what Manley talked about. We have to fix our constitution, our institutions, so that it goes back to how we govern ourselves. What happens at Hopi and the lessons that we learned from this experience is going to define our future, and I think that's what we need to be looking at and how we need to be looking at this unfortunate situation.

The importance of separation of powers -- and I have a case study later on -- but separation of powers is this political doctrine that says that the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government are supposed to be kept distinct to prevent abuse of power. So that is why it's so important that as I try to explain to you that in our traditional way there is no, there was no abuse of power because we had our checks and balances, we had this society looking over that society and we had a village chief [Hopi language] that's supposed to be a humble religious man and didn't go out and expound on what he has accomplished and so on, but a very simple man. That was his role. I guess I'll get to the case study at the end.

Basically we have learned -- if there's any one accomplishment in my administration -- we have basically learned that there is some deep, deep problems in our government and that we can learn from that and that we can shape our future from those lessons learned. In a typical democracy, the central institutions for interpreting and creating laws that are the three branches of the government, the impartial judiciary -- and you'll see what happened at Hopi -- a democratic legislature -- those are real good things, right? -- and an accountable executive. Those are kind of the principles that we have with the separation of powers and there should be a system of checks and balances, but you will see that all that went by the wayside.

The other thing is that it's so important on the rule of law that the rule of law is there. It is the most basic, in its most basic sense, the rule of law is a system that attempts to protect the rights of the citizens from arbitrary and abusive use of governmental power. I brought lawsuits after lawsuit against the tribal council. I won every case. On appeal also, I won those. But you know what, so what? They didn't care. So that's why it's really important that the rule of law needs to be complied with, because it's supposed to apply to everybody. No one is above the law.

The role of the tribal courts; it is so important. That to me is the most fundamental or the core of our sovereignty is to be able to have a court system that can interpret your laws and settle these controversies because if you have a tribal court system that is so corrupt and compromised, you're not... just basically your sovereignty is going to be wasted. And so fortunately at Hopi we had a great court system and that's continuing on. I think back in 350 B.C., Aristotle said, 'The rule of law is better than the rule of any individual,' and that's true. It's really important that you have a good court system that makes the right decisions or interprets your tribal laws the right way and make sure that the tribal council, everybody in your tribal government, complies with it. And I think that that's, to me, is the most important thing. And even though we have those decisions our people are still not complying with it. I just want to also quote that President [Barack] Obama said back when he had just gotten elected, he said, 'Transparency and the rule of law will be the touch tones of this administration.'

The other things that I think that I probably should have really honed, boned up on, is parliamentary procedures. It is so important. When you're chairman, when you're presiding over a council meeting -- you can picture this -- 22 council members all hate you, most of them hate you. And there's tribal members out there, they're probably supporting you, but they basically, they can't really say much. And these people are going to have what I call parliamentary trickery. They have an agenda and they're going to do whatever they can to trick you, parliamentary trickery. And so it is important, and you are in charge, you are in charge, know your rules. You have meeting rules, study them. Robert's Rules are only guides, but there are some good things in there that you can use. Robert's Rules are meant to protect the minority. You saw what happened on CNN just a few days ago. All these parliamentary procedures, effective use of them, and the Speaker of the House or the presiding officer right there just controlling the process as it goes through. I wish every tribal council meeting could be conducted that way so that we have some fairness. It is so...I don't know how many of you have presided over council meetings, but you have to look at body language. That person is doing some signs or they may just really hate what you said or they're sending notes or maybe nowadays texting back and forth. But you have to be so aware of all of those. So parliamentary procedures is so really important.

The art of conducting meetings, understanding group dynamics; you look at where they come from, what village they come from. At Hopi, everybody's related or maybe in Indian Country everybody's related. I'm Bear Clan and in our culture I'm a parent or father to everybody, even you. You're my children. So you have to keep those in perspective. Anticipate what the other side's going to do. Learn how to be able to strategize. Okay, this person has this objective or this person has this agenda and so on. Talk to them, say what you're proposing is going to be good for them and then maybe try to convince them. What I usually do is I have little meetings before the upcoming council meetings and try and get support. Have a legislative strategy, have a legislative agenda and that way you're not all over the place. You talk about strategic planning, that's part of it. And the chairman just said here, was it planning to plan or lack of planning is planning for failure.

I'm going to jump to some of the other things. Some of the lessons learned from this is that there is significant influence from the outside. You have to know who you're dealing with, hope America is out there. You've got your natural resources, you've got your oil, you've got gas, coal, water, land, now solar, and everybody's going to want that and they'll do whatever they can to get that, even through the state legislature or federal legislation and that's what we have at Hopi. Water rights -- it is so important to be able to have your water rights and be able to say, 'This is mine,' because it's going to be leverage you're going to use in negotiations. At Hopi, some of you know about the Peabody Coal, our vast coal resources. Our neighbors from Navajo, probably the country's richest coal deposits -- the highest quality, the low sulfur coal, very little what they call 'the cover.' So it's easily accessible for open-pit mining. Well, we are at the...we hold the cards to energy production in Arizona, California and Nevada. And so the State of Arizona plays a big role, the state governor plays a big role, Salt River Project plays a big role, the owners of the Navajo generating station play a big role including...that goes into California. The federal government, Office of Surface Mining, Minerals Mining and Bureau of Reclamation, the State of California, State of Nevada and the Navajo Nation. Know who you're dealing with and it always goes back to...some of you heard about this term economic sovereignty. What does that mean to you? It goes back to what Manley says, be able to call the shots. Talk about and protect that sovereignty but be able to say, 'This is my resource, this is my water, this is my coal, I'm going to make the decisions.' Don't let somebody else make those decisions for you.

We just recently won a major lawsuit against the Office of Surface Mining. Not as the tribe, we as the citizens. After I left office, we filed suit against the Office of Surface Mining for this life-of-mine permit that they were going to give Peabody Coal Company. The life-of-mine permit, because they were burning about 8.5 million tons of coal up in Navajo generating station, and the coal deposits were close to 800 million tons or a little over that, so that means Peabody would have access to our coal for over 100 years. That basically says to us, 'You're not going to have any kind of diversified economy, you're not going to be able to set and regulate the prices, you're not going to be able to determine how that coal is going to be mined and what's going to be manufactured from that,' and all of that. Well, Navajo was able to tax and back in 2005 figures were able to collect $20 million a year from Peabody Coal, the State of Arizona did the same, but Hopi did not. They didn't have an ordinance so we were getting no dollars. Part of economic sovereignty is going to be able to say, tax.

The other things is everything is a process, you have to go through the process and make sure that...sometimes you have to walk away from some of the battles. Choose your battles, but never lose sight of the big war that you're going to be fighting and the big picture. Be futuristic, look at the longer, some people say seven generations. Be visionary and think holistically, think and look at the big picture. And be very strategic, because if you're not strategic, a lot of things are going to or you're going to be doing things independently on your own. Take charge, you're the top elected official, but also exercise your responsibility, your authority responsibly and in the Indian way have respect, [Hopi language], for everybody.

One of the things that I think really, the teachings I had in my upbringing is what really kind of helped me survive is having a really solid foundation as a Hopi person. But my work is not done; it will continue. One more comment before I quit. In the Hopi way, our knowledge, our philosophy about a leader, a [Hopi language], is his path is like a sharp blade of a knife and you walk that real fine line; it's really sharp. If you veer one way, you're going to get hurt, you're going to get cut; if you veer the other way, the same thing. So as you're walking down that fine line, that path, you look back and make sure that your children are still following you, your people are still following you. If they are still following you, you're on the right path. But if you look back and your children are fighting and they're not there, then you have to assess yourself. 'What is wrong? Do I need to correct myself? Do I need to do certain things, or do I need to step down?' That is the teachings we have in Hopi and it goes back to management and leader, and that is you cannot -- the chairman here just talked about that -- you cannot take sides. You have to look at the big picture. So that concludes my statement, and if you want to take a look at my case study, come here at lunch time and I'll have more time to talk to you about it. [Hopi language]."

Herminia Frias: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Herminia Frias, former Chairwoman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, discusses the citizen engagement challenges she encountered when she took office as an elected leader of her nation, and shares some effective strategies that she used to engage her constituents and mobilize their participation in and support for moving the nation forward.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Frias, Herminia. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 24, 2011. Presentation.

"Thank you, Cheryl, for your kind introduction. And like she said, my name is Herminia Frias, but most people know me as Minnie. And in fact, I ran for council at a younger age and I was elected to be on tribal council as the first woman, the first chairwoman and also the youngest chair of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Most of the community knew me as Minnie and most people know me as Minnie. And it was kind of funny because I had two kind of campaign slogans that I used to run for council. One of them that I used was I created an acronym LAW and I said, ‘LAW stands for Listen, Advocate and Work. That's what I'm going to do for you.' And then I did all my campaign information and everything around LAW and then wrote everything that I planned on doing, and it really was what I did for the whole time and believe me, people held me to that. ‘You said you were going to listen,' and it's very important to listen. But the other thing that I did is I did a little campaign slogan that said, ‘Don't be a weenie, vote for Minnie.' So I don't know which one got me elected. But either way, it was really an honor to serve the nation for as long as I did and I had a great opportunity to meet so many wonderful people and to really take what I had learned and to be able to help the nation move forward. But a lot of people knew me because I was a social butterfly. If there was issues going on in the community, I wanted to know about it. I was out there talking to everybody. So I was engaged in the community. If I didn't like something that was going on, I'd ask questions and I'd figure out how to get things done.

And I started my career working with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe as a social worker. So I really got to experience what was going on at the community level and some of the hardships and some of the poverty and some of the struggles that our community members were dealing with. And I realized that in order to solve these problems, it wasn't about being just the social worker and helping them to get by day by day, but it was really looking at it at a systems level and taking a step back and looking at our tribe, looking at our nation and thinking about what do we need to do as a nation to help our people move up. There's all these individuals that I was working with that suffered from serious mental disorders that were kind of lost and I was out there working that system for them. I knew every program within the tribe and outside of the tribe because I needed to find those resources for them. And I thought, ‘There's something here that has to be improved,' and that really inspired me to get into policy, to run for council, and to really pay attention to what's going on and to think about the community as a whole and how we move forward. It wasn't about me wanting to be chair. That wasn't even my intention. I just wanted to be on council so I could help. But it was really about how do I help the citizens of our community move forward? They've got a lot to say. And I didn't like people speaking on our behalf. I had gone to Washington on a few trips with my tribal council before I was on tribal council, and it just irked me to see our lawyers speaking on our behalf. I worked for a congressman, Congressman Tom Udall from New Mexico, and I would see lots of tribes from New Mexico come in and their attorneys did the speaking for them. So I made sure that when I was on council I was doing the talking. As the chairwoman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, I was doing the talking. Sure, I'd have my attorney there for all the technical stuff, but you needed to tell me. I read so much and said, ‘Teach me what I need to know because I'm going to do the talking. This is why the people elected me.' And the same with the rest of the council members; we went up and we represented the tribe. It wasn't about someone else. But that's just a little bit about the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and my background and how I got involved in politics as a community member.

And one of the things that, for my tribe, we're a tribe of 14,000 and we're located here in Tucson, Arizona, the reservation. But just to give you a little bit more history is we're a federally recognized tribe, so we don't have a treaty with the United States. But we went through this whole federal recognition process. Before I was even born it started. So it was past leaders that started this federal recognition process and they knew that it was an important process, that it was important for us to be federally recognized. We were Indigenous people, we had our culture, we had our system, but we had all moved to all different parts of Arizona. So we had a group of people that kind of understood what was going on. We had another group of people that maybe understood it a little bit better. And then we had other people that really didn't know what was going on and we had all these different communities located throughout Arizona. And many of you are not from Arizona, but here in Tucson we had one community that said...we have three communities here in Tucson. The reservation, we have a community in...actually we have four communities. We have a community in South Tucson, which is a little pocket in Tucson, in the middle of Tucson. We have another community, Old Pascua, which is within Tucson and then we have another community in Marana, which is [north] of Tucson -- it got incorporated a few years back, Marana did. And we have a community up near Phoenix, our Guadalupe Community, and then we have another one in Scottsdale, our Penjamo Community.

Now all these communities had been established long before the reservation was established. So when we were going through our federal recognition process, they decided to give us a piece of land way on the southwest side of town and said, ‘Here, go ahead and start moving all your tribal members over there. This is going to be your land, so everybody start moving.' So the people who were actually going through the process of getting this done started going to all the communities and telling them, ‘Pack your stuff, we're moving to the reservation.' Sound familiar? And the problem was not just people telling you to move, but the fact that we had already had ceremony on that land; that was our community now, we had built a community there. And once people, your own people, started telling you, ‘Pack your stuff, we're moving to the reservation,' and not even understanding what a reservation was. ‘Are we going to be wards of the federal government? Can we leave the reservation? Are we going to be fenced in? Is there going to be barbed wire?' There were just so many unknowns and yet the communication isn't like it is today. We didn't have internet. Not everyone had phones. It was about traveling back and forth and letting people know this is what's going on. So there was a lot of resentment and people decided not to go and said, ‘You can have your reservation and go ahead and move, start your reservation over there. We're staying in our communities.' And they did. They stayed.

Now these are not formally recognized communities as far as the municipalities are concerned or the federal government, but these are communities that we recognize as a tribe. So what ended up happening, and I share this story because I share it as a way of a learning experience about what not to do or not how to do it and it's not necessarily because they had bad intentions, the intentions were good, it's just the process that they took was not the best. And what ended up happening was there was distrust. Not all that information was shared. ‘Who are they to tell us, I don't even know him. He's related to me I think, I don't know, but they're telling me to move.' That distrust, there was anger, resentment. Those are the feelings that we felt, but when you think about it now and you think about all of the different things when you talk to your communities as tribal leaders and you say, ‘Trust in the government.' What is that? Knock on the door, ‘I'm here from the government, I'm here to help.' Yeah, right. People develop apathy. You've heard this throughout the presentations in the past few days, like, ‘Nothing's ever going to change, things stay the same. They say they're going to do one thing and they don't.' And in our case it also created these fractionated communities because we had communities that stayed in their own place and initially were not recognized. But later, 10 years later when we actually wrote our constitution, which is far from perfect, at least one thing that is in there is the recognition of our traditional tribal communities. So as a result of that change and that force to move these were the types of feelings, emotions that our community felt and hopelessness. You hear that a lot but that...I'm not here to depress you. These are just the facts. This is what happened.

Now again I use that as an example of how things have happened and how not to do things [because] I've learned things the hard way, kind of hard knock, how not to do things because I did it and I said, ‘Ah, I should have done it a different way.' But like I said, I was very involved in the community and I learned that it is extremely important to involve your community. It is extremely important to involve your citizens because your citizens are the nation. We talk about governance, we talk about government's role, and a lot of times meeting with different people, different tribes, people begin to believe that the tribe is the government and it's not. The government is just a system set up to govern. It's not the nation. How can a tribal council govern if it has no people? The nation is the people and that often gets confused in a lot of nations, or a lot of people that feel, ‘Well, the government's not doing this, I just leave it to the government, I just...' They're not the nation. So it's very important to know that. And the people, the citizens must believe in what the vision of the tribe is, of that nation is. So it's important to engage them to have them understand, ‘This is where we're going, this is why we're going there. What is our vision so that we can all get there together?' If we all understood the vision back then about why we wanted to be federally recognized, it probably would have been a little bit easier process but we all didn't know. There was a vision, but we just didn't know what it was. You need the citizens, because they're going to be the ones to determine sustainability and success.

As a chair for a tribe and even as a social worker, what good are your programs and services if people aren't going to use them? If there is a really good program out there like a cultural preservation program that the people want, you want them to advocate for that in the next budget. You want them to keep that program going. If you don't have enough money to sustain that program, you want people to take the time to volunteer to be able to continue to have these programs. It's not just about having the government give you everything and provide for you, but it really is going back to that sense of civic responsibility, your sense to your tribe. Not the government, not that leadership, but to your nation, what your responsibility is to each other. And then what I learned too is that -- I was young when I became chair, I was 31 -- is that perspective. I didn't have nearly the experience that many of the former tribal chairs that I served with had. They were there in 1960; I wasn't. They were there working on the cause for years and years and years before I even entered kindergarten. So it was so important for me to talk to them and to engage them. Not just the former leadership but the people in the past. There are so many beautiful stories that I heard in my life by just talking to some of the elders and listening to them and just thinking, ‘Wow! It is amazing.' And not just the leaders, but even in my work as social work to listen to those stories of the challenges that people had and to see how they have lived their lives and worked very hard. It's inspiring. And those were the kinds of stories that kept me going and kept me thinking. Hearing about people who have had...we've heard some of the tribes talk about suicide. That is a very painful and heart-wrenching experience for a family and a community as a whole, but to see the resilience is really inspiring. And those are the kinds of stories that kept me going and that's why it was so important for me to listen to what other people were talking about, to listen to other people's experiences because I hadn't experienced all that stuff. I had my own stories to share, but they weren't the same. I can only speak from my perspective. It was so important to hear from other people so that we can move the tribe, our nation forward.

And another reason it's important to get your citizens involved is to build that mutual relationship. I kind of hit on that a little bit earlier that it's not about your expectations of your tribe but your expectations to your nation, to your own citizens, to each other as a family. We talked a little bit earlier about conflict of interest and about familial relationships. Well, that goes far but it goes even further when you talk about ceremonial relationships. We had a judge that had to, she had to, she couldn't hear any cases because it wasn't that she was related to everybody in the tribe but she was ceremonially. So these are things that go beyond that you are a big family and as a family there are so many opportunities to help each other move up. But it's important to get the citizens engaged so you have that mutual relationships that it's not just, ‘You do this and you do that,' but we both do it and we all move forward. And it also helps with that reduced entitlement and give-me attitude when you have that mutual expectation.

When I used to get community members, I had this one elder, he was 90 years old and he was running for council but he was all full of energy, he still is. And I remember he was running for tribal council and somebody in his 30s came up to him and said, ‘What are you going to do for me? What are you going to do for me when you run for council?' And he says, ‘Well, what do you want?' And he's like, ‘Well, do you have kids?' He says, ‘Yeah.' ‘Well, what do you want?' ‘Well, I want to go to school and I want to do this and I want to do that.' And he says, ‘Well, then why don't you?' And he's like, ‘Well, aren't you going to help me?' He says, ‘Well, I'll tell you right now you missed the bus.' And that guy was like, ‘What?' ‘You missed the bus. You need to start doing these things right now. You have a family you have to raise. It's not just about you anymore. Now not only do you have to help yourself, now you've got to raise your family. You missed the bus.' So we started telling that to all these young kids, ‘Don't miss the bus. You don't want to be older and start asking for tribal council for all this stuff. Get on that bus and do what you need to do to get it together the first time around while you still can. And then help the rest of your nation move forward.' But it's really about reducing that entitlement and that give-me attitude. And at first I had ‘eliminate' but I didn't put that because ‘eliminate' is extreme; it's really about progress. We want to get it down and eventually eliminate it, but it doesn't happen overnight and it's attitude change. But at least we can start chipping away at it and start reducing it until it doesn't even exist.

So some of the...how do you do this? How do you engage your community? The toughest thing is to earn that trust back. That is tough. Because like I said, you go knocking on the door, ‘I'm here from the government, I'm here to help,' you've got to show them that you're there. You've got to prove that as a leader, you're there to help your community members, your citizens be productive, be proactive, be engaged. The citizens need to have respect for the government and at least believe that the government is legitimate. It's not this, what Rob Williams was talking about yesterday, kangaroo [court] city. It's not a joke, it's not a Mickey Mouse tribal council, it's not ‘just forget about it, I'm not even going to bother asking for anything [because] I'm not related to an important person, my family's not on the council, I'm on the blacklist.' It's really about fairness, equity and not who's who. And it happens everywhere, but as a nation, as your own nation, there's so many opportunities to build it the way you want to build it, not the way it's been built necessarily, but the way that really reflects who you are as a nation, who you are; matches your culture, what's important to you, your values, your tradition. It's an awesome opportunity. And that was one of the things that really excited me about when I was on tribal council. I was like, ‘Wow! Where do you get this kind of opportunity?' Even though it was hard and I took a lot of hits, it was still, ‘Wow! What an opportunity!' I wasn't always this happy. Sometimes I'd be like, "Uh! What a challenge.' But, when you really take the time to look back it's just like, ‘Wow! When do you get an opportunity or a chance to look at your nation and say how do we do this better. How do we create a thriving nation? A thriving nation, not just let's get to tomorrow, but let's get to tomorrow and think about the future. How do we get there?'

So some of the strategies about...some of the strategies to do this and to get your community engaged, there are many, and I'm sure and in a minute we'll share some of those that you may have done, but some of the strategies that I put together is really about transparency within your government, sharing with the people what is going on. Yesterday we talked about one of the tribes that published their budget. I did that at an employee meeting before we passed the budget, put it on a big PowerPoint, ‘This is where all our money's going. These are perpetual funds. This is how much your program costs. This is this and that. These are our capital projects that we have for the next five years.' And people were shocked. ‘Wait, what are you doing?' And I had a council member tell me, ‘Be careful what information you give them because they're going to expect more.' It did make my job tougher and they said, ‘Benevolent dictatorship, that's what it is, benevolent dictator. It's for their own good, just as long as you know you're doing the right thing.' Sure benevolent dictatorship is a whole lot easier, but it doesn't mean it's right. It sure made my job a lot tougher, but I knew that I had to do my homework and I had to be up to par when it came to that budget. I had to know where everything was going.

But I shared that and I also shared our plans. When we had a big project coming up like, for example, there's a big hotel going up, it was important to share that with the community and let them know what the economic impact was going to be of that hotel, let them know that if it's going to have an impact on government services, how much that loan is going to be, how long we're going to pay for that loan. Let them know what the return on investment is going to be in the long run. And also, I always saw it as, if we're going to invest in economic development, we've also got to invest in the community and education. It's really about a balance. You can't just put all your eggs in one basket but you've got to...people want to see something, too. They can't just say, ‘Well, we got a really nice casino and an awesome hotel but I'm still part of the crappy school system. I'm not getting what I need for me in the future.' So it's got to be that balance. You've got to think about how you're going to help your nation as a whole and not just think about it as one way. Really, you've got to think about it in the bigger picture. But there's opportunities for you to share this information and also opportunities for you to engage the community by having committees, having boards, advisory boards For my tribal council when I was there that was very tough to do, very tough because as Steve [Cornell] was talking about earlier a lot of the thought was, ‘We're the tribal council, we're supposed to do everything.' But I thought, ‘Wow, there's so many other people that are not politicians that could do a much better job on an education board or a cultural committee or a youth council or advising on healthcare or social services or substance...' There are so many opportunities you can look at within your community to develop these types of advisory boards, committees, councils. It doesn't all have to be tribal council. There is more opportunities for the rest of the community to get involved. Also improve communication, share information that's going on, publish your tribal council minutes in the newspaper, share on the radio if you have a radio station. If you don't, work on maybe establishing one or using the internet. It just depends on the type of environment that you're in. You may be able to use this, you may not, but these are just some things to think about. And you may not be able to use it today but you may be able to use it in the future.

Another thing that we've seen a lot and we did within our school on the reservation is incorporate the nation's history in the education curriculum. Have them teach tribal history not only to the students but also to your employees so they understand what their role is, so they have pride every day when they go to work and say, in our case, 'I work for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.' I used to meet with my employees once a month, last Friday of the month with all of the employees and just give them a ‘this is what we're doing,' and always thank them -- tribal member or non-tribal member -- for the work that they did for our nation and always try to help them understand that the work they were doing was important. You have opportunities to help these non-tribal members or even tribal members that maybe don't know that much about their own history by sharing that with them, in orientation. We'd have an orientation. It was only...ours was short, it was only about two hours, but some tribes have ongoing orientations, classes, certificates, that people who work for the tribe have to pass. That's not a bad idea. That's pretty neat. Wish we would have done something like that. It doesn't mean we can't. But these are just ideas of what you can do and also with the students -- identify and create civil responsibilities. What is your role in the community as a citizen?

When I was working for a non-profit I was working with a lot of youth who...it was a substance abuse, HIV/AIDS prevention program but one of the things that we made sure that the youth did -- they got counseling and services and field trips and stuff like that -- but one of the important things that we did is we engaged them in the community. Service learning, we called it. They had to volunteer. We'd take them to these fairs [and] they were the ones giving out the questionnaires, they were the ones doing all the stuff and they really took ownership of that program. They were our...they could target that audience better than I could as a peer, as a young 13-14 year old, they could go talk to somebody about substance abuse, about HIV/AIDS where...at first I thought, ‘I wonder if these kids are going to want to do it.' And they did it, they loved it, they wanted to be involved. And these are young people. You can do that within your community.

We talked about the roles of tribal council, the role of government, the role of everybody else's role but what about your role, your responsibility to your tribe? And there are ways too to incorporate that into policy, into your constitution. It's not just as part of your enrollment, it's not just about blood quantum, lineal descent, who you are, but what are your responsibilities? And we see that a lot. In my tribe we see that a lot. ‘Well, these people just moved into the reservation, they don't even know what being Yaqui is.' Well, teach them. It's not just about moving on the reservation and getting on the top of the housing list, it's about sharing your culture, your history with each other and feeling [Yaqui language] in our case. So there are ways to do that is to identify ways that you can create that. Having a cultural committee or a council of elders, a steering committee that'll help you create that, incorporate it into an ordinance, a constitution, whatever fits your community or just these are the principles, this is what you'll do.

So how do you ensure an engaged citizenry? Well, it's a process and it is a trust issue, but if you have some of these, some of the infrastructure there, the communication, it boils down to transparency about what you're doing. We heard Chairwoman [Rebecca] Miles yesterday talk about what you do behind closed doors. There are a lot of stuff that's confidential, but you have to explain that to the community so they know why. They have to understand why, otherwise it's just going to be that question mark, ‘Why do they always do that?' But communication is so important and it's so important for you to keep that level of trust. Not everybody's going to trust you, don't get me wrong. I'm not Pollyanna. I know how it works. But it's about getting there. And I think that's my last slide which is my conclusion is about progress. It takes time. Things don't happen overnight. One step, two steps back, a giant leap, a tumble and a fall, but as long as you pick yourself up and you continue to have that vision. And the tribal council can't have that vision without the buy-in from the community. They're the ones that are going to move it forward. When you hear about these stories that you've heard about, one tribal council starts something, another council removes it and starts it all over again or just quashes it, somebody else...If the community had really, there was an opportunity for the community to say, ‘No, you're going to keep that project because it's important to us,' then maybe all of that flip flop wouldn't happen as much. So you need to think about progress as a process, as a long-term process. And believe me, that was a reality [check] because there were so many things that I wanted to get done. People said, ‘Slow down, slow down.' And then I had to realize, ‘Yeah, you know what, I've got to take the time to share what the vision is and to show them the steps of how we're going to get there, because right now I'm just showing them the end-all product, but I'm not really being honest with them by telling them that it's going to require a little bit of sacrifice here, a little blood and sweat and tears here.' You have to share that with the community. It was amazing though once you did start sharing this that people started saying, ‘Wow, nobody ever told me that. If they would have told me that it would have been alright.' But it's a good thing I didn't follow that council member's advice. It did make my job harder by sharing more information, but I'm not on council anymore but a lot of people still ask me, ‘How does the system work, who do I need to talk to, how do I get this done?,' and I have no problem sharing that with them, ‘This is what you need to do, this is who you need to talk to,' because to me it's our tribe.

So just remember progress takes time and as leaders I know that you get inundated with what they call these social ills, ‘I've got to take care of this problem right away, I've got to do this,' but it's so important to think about the long term, the future, and to use your citizens to help the tribe move forward. Really, there's so many opportunities for them to be involved -- I just named a few -- but there's so many opportunities for them to become involved that'll help the nation and they'll be a part of it, a part of the success."

Rebecca Miles: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Nez Perce Tribe Executive Director Rebecca Miles discusses the challenges she faced as the first-ever chairwoman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, and the strategies she used in order to govern effectively and make informed decisions.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Miles, Rebecca. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 23, 2011. Presentation.

"Probably the best thing I love is being a mom and being an assistant basketball coach. And if you heard in the short [presentation] or introduction, I also graduated from Washington State and Gonzaga, where our women will be playing this Saturday in the Sweet Sixteen in Spokane. I will be going for the other team, the Louisville Cardinals where one of my nieces, if you watch basketball, is Shoni Schimmel. And she is a true freshman, a Umatilla tribal member that has taken her team, they beat Xavier last night and [she] scored 33 points. So it's not part of my presentation, but be watching for her. She's a real great...

I kind of went off course because I thought very long and hard, I answered the questions in my outline but just...I'll skip, really, the introduction. It was really quite by accident in a sense of how I got to be in some of the titles I've received. But it was no mistake on what I wanted to do in terms of leadership. And I'll talk to you a little bit about that and why I chose to run for office. I served very young on the General Council Committee and that's the committee who facilitates the tribal meetings where our council gets elected and that type of thing. And I became the General Council Chair at age 27 and I held that position until I actually ran for our council. And I would sit there, meeting after meeting, and I would get very fascinated with our leadership and the types of issues they were involved in. So when I ran for office, it was, I got really excited. I was, I never thought I was really different than anyone else until I got older. And my dad recalls I used to record the State of the Union [address] when I was 12. I still have this speech of Anne Richards at the Democratic National Convention and I might've been 13. And I was so moved at a young age about people making a difference, people in power, and the roles of people. So I understood really quickly who held the power, who holds the power, where effective leadership can happen. So that was a really great thing for me. [Next slide.]

So getting excited at a young age for me and establishing my leadership and recognizing that all the decisions, how I make decisions, how I played on the playground, how I played basketball, how I dealt with tiffs with my girlfriends, all of those things prepare you to be an effective leader or not. You know the classroom bully, a lot of classroom bullies, all they do is grow up and become adult bullies. So [you're] understanding, 'What kind of person are you, and how effectively can you make a difference?' The bullying type, unless you have the majority of them that are bullies on council, are not going to get very far. And so I recognized early that I was a problem solver. I was able to listen at a young age and reflecting on how I did problem solve. How do I get answers? Was I willing to listen to people? Was I willing to change my mind, if it was something that I stood very firmly on? So recognizing my strengths and weaknesses was primary when I got elected. [Next slide.]

The other thing that I thought was very interesting was, how are we different? Our nations are different. Our reasons for running for council are different. For example, we don't have parties like other countries. When I, when we would run... how about all of you guys? When you run, everybody says, "˜We're running for change. I'm running to make change.' Well when you get on there, I mean, what change are you actually talking about? I mean, what was, what change was I trying to accomplish? And everybody, even in the national elections say, they're going to run for change. But when they get in office, the reality is right there in front of you. The reality of the previous administration or the reality of previous tribal leaders, what they were faced with, and a lot of times... [Next slide.]

A lot of times there was this "˜aha!' moment. An "˜aha!' time that says, "˜Wait a minute, now I know what they had to go through.' All of you are tribal leaders to some, most of you. So you know you have to deal with a lot of confidential information. You can't tell your people, so they become very mistrusting of your information. So the one thing that I was listening to the discussion this morning is people, when you get on council, they talk about the council like the big bad beast and you forget, they forget very quickly, when you elect somebody, we elect somebody, we elect them from our peers. We elect them from us. We want to elect somebody just like us. I read a really good book by Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks on leadership. And of course he was met with all this scandal of affairs and all these types of things. And he really talked in that book about...I could relate to a certain extent that he got elected from his peers. They're just like everybody else and they make mistakes. They make mistakes but they can also do well. And so he talked a lot about that, and I see tribal councils do that all the time. The young man, for example, that's very traditional, treats his wife well, is a good father, and then he gets elected and everybody's throwing darts at him and he's the worst person, he needs to go get an education and all of that kind of stuff. So we forget -- almost like you're walking through an orb, and it becomes a rude awakening. And I don't know if you've experienced that, but in 2004 I turned down a very good job at Washington State [University]. It was a job that I would call at a young age, at the age of 30, my dream job. I thought it would be perfect. I had just gotten divorced. I thought, it will be the perfect place. It's still close to home and I can raise my children in a university setting, a school that I loved and a school that loved me. I was able to grow. I can work on a doctorate. And the small part of me said I wanted to run for council. And I did and I was elected. [Next slide.]

So what happened when a very short time...a week into my election, the tribe was facing the biggest decision it had made since the treaty time. And I thought, 'Why in the world does this have to happen when I decide to run for council? Why would this be happening?' And so that was my first major decision, my first facing a big decision, and that's one of the questions we were asked. And right away, you just got elected, your natural thing is you are protecting your tribe's sovereignty, your treaty rights, and nobody's going to tell us what to do. And your instant reaction is always to say, "˜No.' And that's exactly what I said. And it was by...I was the rookie. I was the only woman on council. I was not the chair that year; I had just got elected. And I went down with our chairman to Boise. Dirk Kempthorne, who was our Governor at that time, and Gail Norton -- the great Gail Norton, was the Secretary of Interior -- and they had released the terms of the 17- or 18-year-old water settlement. And anybody knows that, everybody knows that water is our most sacred thing. So dealing with that issue, I remember flying back on this little plane thinking, "˜Who are these...' -- we call them [Nez Perce language] -- "˜white attorneys?' "˜Who are these people working on this settlement for us? Who do they think they are? We will absolutely, this will never happen.' I said, "˜My grandparents would roll over in their grave.' And so when we got back, we held our first meeting and we put our [Nez Perce language] attorneys right up front and told them, "˜You tell our people what this settlement means.' And it went terrible. I mean, my mom -- Jaime [Pinkham] back there, he knows who my mom is -- she's a very small petite woman and she's really nice. It looked like she was going to pop a vein, a blood vessel. I mean it was terrible. And so after our meeting, I thought, "˜Well, why weren't the tribal leaders out there doing a meeting with our people?'

And so I met with our council and I said, "˜Explain this to me.' One of the questions we were asked is financial literacy, stuff like that, what was the big thing, a hurdle? I had to learn everything I knew about this water settlement. I never knew I would know so much about practical irrigable acreage and acre-feet based on...whatever. I never thought I would know that, but I had to because that's what my people elected me to do. So I dove right in and I started leading. No one asked me, no one appointed me, but nobody would do it on council -- not our chair, not our vice chair, not anybody who had been on council for 20-some years -- no one would touch this thing with a 10-foot pole. So I started to get to know our attorneys and I would ask questions over and over. And then I did research. What I can't tell you enough is do your research. What you're going to hear, and you've probably already heard, tribal leaders, let's say the person that you beat to get in office, is going to be at the public meeting and say, "˜You don't know what you're doing and yada, yada...' And I did. I pulled out every resolution and did a timetable of when we got in this settlement. The first question for the first five months was, "˜How did we get here?' Well, I needed to know that and I needed to be telling my people, how did we get here? I looked at every decision that was made and I found every resolution that appointed members of our council to negotiate this settlement. They were appointed as the negotiator. And so I was able to put faces and accountability to the tribe, that it's not just the person who just walks in, this is a bigger deal. And so research is important as well to avoid continuously making mistakes and not being accountable. [Next slide.]

I'll just pause on this and finish on the Snake River Basin Adjudication. That decision came down to the very end. The [U.S.] Congress passed it into law, the [Idaho] State Legislature passed it, and then all eyes were on the Nez Perce Tribe. And you will never in the history of water settlements -- I do not believe -- will see another settlement of that magnitude in Congress, approved by Congress, a water settlement. And the Nez Perce, we're still taking a beating. I personally am. I got calls, I got people saying, I got death threats, I got people calling; my dad would pray for me every night when we were going through this process. And it finally came down to making the vote. And we approved it. And so it was just a few months and the whole year had already passed and I told my parents, "˜I am not cut out for leadership. I am not. I apologize a hundred times over. I never quit anything, but I am not cut out for this and I am either going to resign or I am going to just ride out my time and just do as little as possible and go to conferences and do that kind of thing and never cause any trouble.' And in three weeks, our Chairman was not re-elected and when the elections are over then the nine members of the council actually form a table right in front of everybody and reorganize. And it was just like that, I was nominated to be the chair by the, and made the chair of 2005. And it just happened so fast. My family wasn't even at that meeting. They were just like, "˜Eh.' My family just doesn't get involved. They're like, "˜Oh, just let us know how it's going.' I was driving down the river 60 miles or so and I'm the Chair of the Nez Perce Tribe. It was, it just didn't hit me until...it took me a long time, but there was a moment of gratitude in me. It had nothing to do with being young and it had nothing to do with being a woman. I mean this was an all-male [group] except for me. I had a couple elders on there. Jaime's uncle was on there; he's been on there a long time. They believed in me and all the work that I had put in -- that I thought was going nowhere -- counted. It mattered in the time of need. And so you don't hear it and you don't see it, but that work -- even if the answer is what your people don't want to hear -- that's what you're there to do. That's what you're there to find out. Sovereignty, in that people said you're taking away our sovereignty and all of this. No. Sovereignty is the ability to choose for yourself. We chose yes; we could've chose no. But the government didn't choose that, the state or government. That's your sovereignty. And most of the time, tribes get a block in the road, because the answer for most tribes of sovereignty is no. It's just, "˜No, we're not going to do it because it takes away our sovereignty.' The sovereignty is the very act -- and I've learned this from my elders -- the very act of being able to choose. The very act of being able to participate or say, "˜No, I don't want to.' And so that was something I learned very early on our council.

Moving forward...and I know my time is running short. We talked, you talked about economic development and I wanted to say, one of the things... [Go back to the last one. Go back one.] Know your funding sources. If I could tell you this up front, know what funds your government. Know exactly how your government runs. Know how your staff are being paid for. I've served with people and I think they're...they just sit there thinking, "˜Oh, we'll just pass this and they get paid for that. We'll just make a position and we'll just hire these people to do that," without understanding what the funding source is. In order to govern, make decisions, the council needs to know where that money's coming from. Do you tax as a government? Could you tax if you wanted to? If you're not taxing, you should have your staff look into that [because] a government taxes to operate. Know what economic impact your tribal nation has on the local and regional economy. That's your power. That's your power to say to our neighbor -- our neighbor city is Lewiston, Idaho -- we have to tell them every single year that we are the second or the third largest economic impact in the whole region. And if Potlatch, our mill -- it's now Clearwater Paper -- were to go away, the tribe would be number one. And, you know, this answers all the feelings like, "˜The tribe shouldn't be there. They shouldn't have their own rights, you know. They shouldn't have their own police force." No! If we were to go away, everybody else would be hurting. It would be a very bad economy if we were all to go away. Because -- getting down to knowing your funding sources -- where do you cash your check? Where do you spend your... I know because I'm one of those Indians as well, Walmart© Indians. We keep Walmart© in business. We do. We love a good bargain. You know, you can get everything there, material, everything.

Support your economic development, not just for tribal government, but for your individuals. When I said, "˜Where do you cash your check?' Where do you cash it? Does it go into a bank owned by an Indian, do you go buy your groceries owned by an Indian. You're not...your economic impact is leaving your Indian nation the very minute you cut that check, in most cases. And so, what we're working on is trying to keep that money, not just cash it at an Indian bank or, and then that Indian bank invests in the school gym, but then that also has to turn over another time through another way. That gym should provide a service for something else. And see that dollar turn and turn and turn and then you're going to start to see. A lot of times we get too jealous of tribal council, too jealous of individuals succeeding. And if you do not support them to succeed...America would have a fit if we let the United States government just own all the businesses and we just let the United States and Obama divvy it all up. America would...it would never happen. So why are we allowing it to happen on tribal council? It just can't happen, we've got to see our money...it will just continue to grow. [Next slide.]

Okay. Just real quickly, are your tribal lands zoned? Do you have a plan for them? Do you have a long-term plan for your infrastructure needs? Those are very critical when you get in office. The very first thing, these are things you should be asking for. Otherwise, you can't just say, 'Let's build those apartments over there,' and then the health clinic could've said, "˜We had that land for our sweat house.' And then another group comes in, "˜That's prime property for economic development.' So it takes planning among your competing departments. [Next slide. Is there a next slide?]

It is very much tough but worth it, and I wanted to leave you with one of the hardest but best jobs. It is the best job that I ever had. It is low paying, no appreciation, but by far that job has taken me all over the world by being an effective leader. The hardest thing I had in my job was being a young woman. And I like to say this whenever I can. The rude awakening I had on council was not being treated different by men, but being treated terrible by our own Indian women. And so I work very hard in my young career. I coach young women. I was selected as a visionary delegate to help shape American politics for the future of women and that, I watched very closely how Hillary Clinton was treated in her election. And so I care very much that women keep each other uplifted. Ethics and integrity and attitude are very key. You really don't need a whole lot. The other thing as a women that I regret, that I would do differently, that was asked in our [questionnaire], was I would not have apologized for my success. And I felt, you'll see there are studies about...I was always feeling like sorry, like we just did something great and I would feel real bad because my vice chair had been the chair forever. He was the second-longest chair and I always felt like I was made to feel like that, I should really step back and not be overly excited about it. And women are often...they feel like they have to. Don't apologize for that. And the last slide is this one quote by Anthony Jay. [Next slide. It's the last slide.] "˜The only real training for leadership is leadership.' So thank you very much for your time and it's just definitely an honor to be here among all of you. And I don't think I would do it again, but it was the best job I ever had."