strategic orientation

Honoring Nations: Elizabeth Woody: Environment and Natural Resources

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

Elizabeth Woody:

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring Nations: Stephen Cornell: Achieving Good Governance: Lessons from the Harvard Project & Honoring Nations

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development Stephen Cornell offers a review of how the Honoring Nations program evolved out of the nation-building movement and successes among Native nations.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Cornell, Stephen. "Achieving Good Governance: Lessons from the Harvard Project & Honoring Nations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Now I'd like to turn the microphone over to Professor Steve Cornell, the co-founder of the Harvard Project and the current Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. And the talk that he's going to talk about is 'Achieving Good Governance: Lessons from the Harvard Project and the Honoring Nations Awards Program."

Stephen Cornell:

"Thank you very much, Andrew. It's really a great pleasure to be here and to join Chief [Oren] Lyons and the other members of the board of the Honoring Nations Program, to join all of you who have come to attend this symposium, and in particular to be here with representatives of these award-winning programs. I have to tell you that when Joe Kalt and I started the Harvard Project 15 years ago, we had no idea of where it was going to lead. And I find myself astonished and humbled and thrilled by what has developed over the years, thanks to the efforts of an enormous number of people from what, in our own minds, I think, were very modest beginnings.

We're here this morning to talk about good governance in Indian Country and to hear from Indian nations who are making government work. Before we get very deeply into that we thought it would be useful to review how we got here. Where did this program come from? In fact, why even have a program called 'Honoring Contributions in the Governance of American Indian Nations'? My job this morning is to say something about why good governance is something that should be honored and achieved in Indian Country and in doing so, to tell you something about the origins of this program. So I want you to...I want to take you back 15 years to Harvard University in the mid-1980s. A couple of nerd academics, Joe Kalt and me, are sitting around puzzling over something.

If you looked around Indian Country in the 1980s, one of the things that would have struck you rather powerfully is this. For whatever reason, some Indigenous nations in this country were doing much better than others economically. For example, on the one hand, you had Cochiti Pueblo with an unemployment rate between 10 and 20 percent in late 1980s. On the other hand, you have the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota with Oglala Sioux Tribe at unemployment rates probably over 90 percent unemployment. On the one hand you have the Crow Tribe of Montana rolling in natural resources -- from coal to grazing to water to timber -- but locked in poverty, unable to turn all that wealth of material into viable tribal enterprises and to improve the welfare for their people. And on the other hand, you have the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona that was running the most productive saw mill -- Indian or non-Indian -- in the western United States, a profitable commercial hunting operation, a profitable skiing operation and assorted other tribal enterprises. On the one hand, you have the Northern Cheyenne Tribe with an economy generating almost no dollars at all other than those that came in through federal transfer payments, just about the ultimate in economic dependency. And on the other hand you have the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who were starting to import non-Indian labor because they were creating so many jobs there weren't enough Choctaws to fill them. So you have black and white workers driving onto Choctaw lands every day to take jobs in Choctaw-owned and -operated enterprises.

We could give you other examples, which offer stark differences between on the one hand, nations often characterized by deep poverty, frustration, hopelessness, on the other hand, nations that were seizing control of their future, were building sustainable economies, were reshaping their futures to meet their own designs. And bear in mind, this is before the impact of gaming. We weren't yet seeing what that was going to do in Indian Country. These were enterprises that had nothing to do with that. These were nations, which in a very difficult time were in essence saying, 'We're going to reshape the future to meet our designs,' and they were doing it. What was it we wondered that determined which path any given nation took? Why does one nation move forward, another seems to run in place or slip backward? How would we account for these differences? And the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development was born out of those questions.

We approached Norm Collins at the Ford Foundation and told him we wanted to try to find out the answers to these questions, not just because we were inquisitive nerd academics -- sure, we found these questions kind of interesting -- but because we were convinced that the answers to these kinds of questions might be useful to all of Indian Country and maybe beyond Indian Country. Maybe Indian Country was doing things that the rest of the world ought to be paying attention to, because the real question lying behind all of this has to do with the keys to successful nations, nations that control their own affairs, improve the welfare of their people and take care of the things that they most value in their lives. Well, Norm Collins agreed and the major work of the Harvard Project got under way.

What did we do over the next few years? Accumulating colleagues, Manley Begay who joined us first and is still here and now direct the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona, and eventually a host of others. We went around talking to Indian nations trying to understand what were they doing, what was working, why was it working, what could we learn from it, what could other nations learn from what was happening in Indian Country? Now of course we weren't the first ones to ask this question. The basic question was why? Why are some doing better than others? There were other answers out there. A lot of people thought they knew why. Nations with lots of natural resources would be doing better than those without. Nations with good education would be doing better than those without. Geographic location would matter, capital would matter, etc. As we talked to people and we began to look at this data, it turned out that while some of these things were important -- sure, you'd rather have good resources than not and good education than not -- and in fact, they didn't do a very good job of explaining the pattern of development that we saw out there.

We saw tribes with great natural resources and high education that were doing poorly. We saw tribes such as Mississippi Choctaw with no significant natural resources to speak of and below average education for Indian Country that were doing wonderfully well. We saw tribes with strong leaders who were in trouble and tribes where the leadership turned over every year like Cochiti Pueblo who were doing very well indeed. So it was clear that these things helped. It was also clear that they weren't the keys to economic development. They didn't in and of themselves lead to sustainable, self-determined economic development in Indian Country. So what did those keys turn out to be? I'm going to point to five of them that emerged from our research. In some ways this has become what my colleague Joe Kalt describes as the Harvard Project mantra.

The keys to economic development in Indian country, based on 15 years now of work with Indian nations. First, sovereignty matters. Indian nations have to be in the driver's seat if we're going to see sustainable community and economic development in Indian Country. Why do they have to be in the driver's seat? It puts the economic development and community development agenda in Indian hands. It links decisions and their consequences -- those who are making the decisions reap the benefits of those decisions and pay the price when they make bad decisions. We cannot find a case in all these years of sustained economic development in Indian Country where someone other than the Indigenous nation is calling the shots, determining how resources are used, determining strategic direction, shaping the internal affairs of the nation, controlling its relationships with other governments. If you think about that, it's got a pretty potent policy message. In a century of federal efforts to end reservation poverty, it turns out that self-determination is the only federal policy to have a sustained impact in Indian Country, a sustained impact on poverty. The evidence from our research is tribal sovereignty is the only anti-poverty program that works. That's a very positive thing to say from the view of Indian Country but it's based on research. We can show you the data.

Second though, it turns out sovereignty isn't the only thing that matters. Being in the driver's seat isn't enough to create sustainable, self-determined, economic development. You've got to be able to get where you want to go. What does this include? It includes basic issues and concepts of good government. It means stability in government. Not stability in the people who are governing, stability in the rules by which they govern. It means getting politics out of business management. It means having courts or other dispute resolution mechanisms that are depoliticized where how you're treated doesn't depend on who you are, who your relatives are, who you voted for and so forth. It means having a bureaucracy that can get things done. What happens when you do these things? You create an environment in which individuals, tribal members, and others want to invest time, energy, ideas, money, their talent. What this does is it pulls in talent; it reduces the brain drain. It encourages young people to stay and others to come home. It focuses your human resources not on fighting over the pie, the economic pie, but in making it bigger and on designing it to meet the real needs of the people.

So the first two keys were sovereignty and good governing institutions. The third key we came up with, culture matters. It turns out that the most successful governing institutions that we see across Indian Country have found ways to work with Indigenous conceptions of how authority ought to be organized and exercised. They don't just pull institutions off the shelf that someone else invented or that the federal government came up and said, 'Here's what you need to govern yourselves.' They looked to their own traditions and retooled those traditions to meet the current contemporary demands and in doing so made those institutions win the support of their people. It's no accident that two of the most successful tribes in the group that we've worked with and studied have radically different governing institutions. Cochiti Pueblo where the spiritual leaders are the ultimate authority in the tribe and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation whose governing institutions look like they came out of my high school civics textbook. They're both wonderfully successful because they found institutions that are their institutions that resonate with their people.

Fourth, it turns out a strategic orientation matters. We all know how tough it is to govern in Indian Country, the pressures on tribal leadership, the crises that come up, the obstacles thrown in your path by the federal government and others. But that strategy that is just band-aids and firefighting and opportunism turns out to be far less effective than a long-term strategy that asks what kind of society are we trying to build, what is it we're trying to protect, what are we trying to change, what do we want to preserve and then makes contemporary immediate decisions in the context of those ideas.

And finally, yes, turns out, leadership matters. But it's not just a question of picking the right men or women to fill particular positions in government. It's really about finding those individuals or groups who are willing to take responsibility for the future of the nation, who are willing to break with established ways of doing things, have a vision for the future, understand what kind of change is necessary to realize that vision. And what we found is that that kind of leadership can be found in all kinds of places, not just among elected officials. You might find it in one village. You might find it happening in your schools. You might find it happening in an enterprise, in a program, on the council. Leadership it turns out has more to do with what you do than with what position you're in.

So what did we conclude? Other assets are helpful but when Indian nations are in the driver's seat, when they effective and culturally appropriate governing institutions, when they make decisions for the long run, when they have leadership that is less interested in distributing goodies than in rebuilding the nation, then other assets, the things we started out wondering what part they played, then those assets begin to pay off. In other words -- and Andrew already said this -- successful Indian nations assert their sovereign powers, build effective governing institutions that match their cultures, identify strategic objectives, and support the leadership that is willing and able to get them there.

Those are the lessons of the Harvard Project and the objectives of the Honoring Nation program really reflect those findings. Its purpose is to identify, recognize and celebrate examples of good governance in Indian Country. That's why the program's not called 'Honoring Contributions in Social Programs' or 'Honoring Contributions in Economic Development' or 'Honoring Contributions in Education' or something like that, although we find ourselves repeatedly honoring exactly those things. It's called 'Honoring Contributions in the Governance of American Indian Nations' because it is in part in their capacity to act as nations, to assert their sovereign powers, to exercise that sovereignty effectively, to build an environment that can persuade talented, energetic, resourceful tribal members and non-members to bet on the tribal future, to bet on it here and not there. In other words, it's in their capacity to govern well that Indian nations like other nations around the world can best shape their own futures according to their own designs.

I think today you're going to hear from and about many of the Honoring Nations awardees and you'll see in their stories most of these themes because the award-winning programs are themselves examples of tribal sovereignty in action, of Indian nations that are tackling difficult problems in their own ways, are building institutions and tribal programs that can deal with those problems effective, are drawing on their own cultures as they do so, weaving their own values and views into their solutions and initiatives, thinking for the long run, rebuilding nations that work, nations that will last, and of course these award-winning programs are themselves examples of leadership. These are Indigenous initiatives that in a difficult time and as Chief Lyons said, 'We're in a difficult time,' offer enormous promise not only to their own nations but to all of us.

The big lesson of the Honoring Nations program is that tribal government works. We see a wave of innovation rolling across Indian Country. It's an innovation that draws on the past, responds to the challenges of the present, is building a much better and stronger future for Indian nations. It has worked and lessons to teach us all, and again we honor those programs for what you're doing and for what you offer to us."

Honoring Nations: Miriam Jorgensen: Achieving Good Governance: Cross-Cutting Themes

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Miriam Jorgensen, Director of Research for the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, shares the cross-cutting themes of good governance that exist among the Honoring Nations award-winning programs.

Resource Type
Citation

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Achieving Good Governance: Cross-Cutting Themes." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Now I'd like to introduce my colleague Miriam Jorgensen, who's going to talk about some cross cutting themes of Honoring Nations winners. I think one of the unique things that's happened in this room that I'm not sure if any of you have had the chance to afford to do is sit next to somebody who's work is just entirely different than yours but you share some things in common. And we want to use this opportunity to talk about some of those things that you do share in common and Miriam Jorgensen has thought quite a bit about this issue. She's actually so well liked, so well respected that she splits her time. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Harvard University is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the University of Arizona is in Arizona, obviously, and she has an appointment with both of us. And we just think the world of her and I'm looking forward to hearing some of what these great Honoring Nations winners have in common. Miriam, the microphone is yours and after this we can go upstairs and there's a reception that we're going to end on."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"I appreciated getting to be a fly on the wall during the discussions that took place earlier today when you broke out into groups. And I think that most of you probably hit on a lot of the themes that I'm going to talk about today. And in fact, I probably won't get to all the different ways that these programs have themes in common. But what I wanted to talk about a little bit are, what are some of the underlying elements that show how winning programs have achieved their success? What are those cross-cutting elements? What approaches underlie their positive progress that are shared across programs? And turn that also into, what are some of the lessons that all of this universe of 32 winners from the two years of the program, so far? What are the lessons that they bring to Indian Country and really to the rest of the world, to governments around the world? And what are some of those lessons?

I think one of the first and really outstanding lessons to all this is that programs that have achieved good governance have an ability to measure and track their progress. I think it's certainly clear that we look, as an evaluating team and as the advisory board looks at things, they look for evidence of success and progress but it's... I want to take this farther and say it's not just evidence of your success but looking at measures of progress, looking at measures of success, assessing programs is part of what actually makes programs better. And I think as you think about the work that you do and the work that you've heard your colleagues in excellence do, you see that one of the things they're doing is figuring out how to see that they're meeting their goals and that they're using that information to become even better programs. Let me give you a couple of examples that come from the winners in this room and potentially from some who weren't able to be with us today.

On the purely numeric side -- and you can imagine that there are ways of tracking progress that are quantitative and qualitative and I'll try to give some examples of each -- but on the purely numeric side, I will give you the example of the White Earth Suicide Intervention Team. Now, they are very consciously a suicide intervention team. They don't put the goal out there to prevent suicide, even though they have managed probably to prevent quite a few, but they look for data that says, ‘How is it that we can measure how well we're moving toward this goal of suicide intervention,' and they look for something that would be appropriate that would say, ‘What is it that's really telling us that we're going out there, meeting that mark that we care about of suicide intervention?' Well, it turns out that one of the things they decided to track was 72-hour holds. In the early 1990s, as the team was just forming and beginning its work, about six percent of the individuals who had attempted suicide and they were rushed to emergency rooms or hospital, only six percent were held in the hospital for 72 hours for observation and holding. This is a common intervention procedure, a prevention procedure but only six percent of the members of the White Earth Tribe who had attempted suicide were being held. As the team began its work and tracked its innovations, it tracked its progress on trying to increase the number of 72-hour holds. This was really fantastic progress because you have to understand, White Earth doesn't have a hospital. All the hospitals that it's dealing with are non-native hospitals, off reservation or within the reservation but are not controlled by the tribe. So it's working with outside entities to make them live up to their responsibility to their native patients. By the late 1990s over 70 percent, up to about 77 percent of the individuals from White Earth who had attempted suicide and were then placed in emergency rooms in hospitals were on 72-hour holds. So they used this data as a tool, they said, ‘Here's something that's going to track our progress, that can measure our success, that shows us where we're going,' and they used it to set the bar and to set the mark and track their progress in that way. And their goal of course is to try to have 100 percent. So you can see how they used data to measure their success, move toward it and to challenge themselves to do even better.

Now it doesn't have to be that it's just numeric data that is the kind of assessment tool that you can use to measure progress. I think a number of the programs in this room are looking at what they do and they say, ‘Look, yeah, we also use information and data to assess our progress that's not necessarily quantitative. It can be more qualitative.' One example is the Grand Traverse Planning and Development Department. One of the things that they've done is say, ‘Hey, are we doing what we said we'd do? Are we making progress? Are we achieving our goals?' Let's create a list of very achievable goals, much of it generated from community input in a very innovative way, and they sit down and they deliberately track their progress toward meeting those goals. So that's a more qualitative approach of using information and data, of improving their programs. So those are just a couple of examples to show you that one of the cross-cutting themes, one of the things that we see all successful programs doing, all the winners sitting in this room is that they use assessment information to track their progress, measure their progress toward their goals and to challenge themselves to do better and I think that's something that all the programs do.

Another thing that I think all the programs do is that they've achieved good governance oftentimes by tackling really hard problems, and using those hard programs as motivators, and using their success with having tackled those programs or problems as further motivation. Now what do I mean by this? What are some examples we see out there? Think to yourself about all the situations you see in Indian Country and beyond where governments and citizens allow themselves to be sort of beat down by how hard the problems are that they face, whether or not it's like a White Earth suicide problem or the challenges of implementing technology that can help them or the negotiation kinds of problems that we've heard about. Those can be really difficult problems to face. They can be immobilizing in the face of that difficulty. But one thing we see across all the winning programs, a common strand, is a willingness to take up those challenges, to not see a hard problem as something to just bend over in front of but rather to say, ‘What can we do about this?' and then to use that as motivation.

One of the really exciting and incredible hard problems that one of our winners has tackled was the Louden Tribe of Alaska and their Yukaana Development Corporation. Now Yukaana doesn't have a lot of control over the land that the U.S. Air Force had polluted, but they decided that because it was their traditional territory they really wanted to do something about it and this was a mandate from the community that they try to do something about it. They said, ‘Look, this is a huge challenge. It's something that in a sense we don't even have authority and control over but we're going to use that as motivation to try to do something about it.' And they did, with the formation of YDC, the Yukaana Development Corporation, they were able to clean up over 12,000 50-gallon drums of petroleum waste and 3,200 barrels of tar out of that area. They trained hundreds of people in their workforce to solve problems in their area and beyond. They were able to take this really hard challenge and say, ‘We can do something about it.' And in fact, in reflecting on their success with that, it's also been a motivator to even greater work for that organization. So that's one of the things I mean about when you look across these programs, one of the things that they evidence is an ability to take up those hard challenges, to not just say, ‘We can't do something about it,' but to use the difficulty as a motivator to move forward and then also to use the success, once they've achieved that, as further motivation. So good government is achieved as leaders and program directors accept big challenges and use them for inspiration.

I think it's also clear again, as we look across the universe of programs, that programs that have achieved good governance as were spoken about in the presentations earlier as well, they create distinctly Native approaches for local solutions and by doing so this has distinct benefits. What do I mean? Well, I think that it's important to understand that, for instance, self-determination, that's just not about Indian people managing programs for other Indian people. It's about creating special programs that are uniquely native that have uniquely local approaches embedded in them and that definitely has benefits. One of the benefits that we see is that by creating programs of this sort, it's often the case that those solutions are much more workable, are better solutions than externally imposed style solutions.

One of the best examples of this I think from the universal winners is the Navajo Child Special Advocacy Project. This is a program that addresses again a really hard problem, child sexual abuse on the Navajo reservation and they've said, ‘We're not just going to do our therapy and our interventions in a western style. We're going to wholly integrate Navajo approaches into our treatment and into our program development.' And in so doing, they're able to create a more holistic program, a program that serves more of the child's needs to bring in both the western approaches and the Navajo approaches, to address it within the cultural context of harmony and critically they also then serve whole families which many programs of this sort do not do. So therefore they're able to be a more successful, better and improved program as a result of the fact that they've integrated these cultural approaches.

I think one of the other things that having a more cultural local approach does is that it actually generates positive results for Native culture as well. To me, one of the examples here is that it's frequent for us to hear, maybe it's not Indians, maybe it's even detractors within the Indian community saying, ‘Well, if you pursue that kind of highly high-tech solution or if you pursue that really highly institutionalized organized bureaucratic approach you're losing your 'Native-ness'; you're not going to be Indian anymore if you do it that way.' But I think there's strong evidence that says there are ways to do even really progressive, innovative, interesting modern programs that promote and preserve culture. A couple of examples of those are like the Mille Lacs and Ojibwe language programs, where they're using modern approaches like rap music and computer technology to promote and improve language learning within that culture. Here's a place where technology has been controlled by the tribe instead of having it denigrate culture it's building up culture.

Another thing is that it's also the case that it's possible to use highly organized, very capable institutions to promote culture and I think this is one of the examples that we see from one of the speakers this afternoon of the Poeh Culture Center. Here's a case where you've got this very technologically innovative advanced idea of saying, ‘Let's have our construction services firm support our artists and we're going to have a bureaucratic structure, which allows them to have a place to do their work and to sell their art.' Now that means we've got this highly capable institution, helping move forward the culture. It's not drawing the culture down. It's not eliminated the culture. It's moving it forward. So again, good government is achieved as tribal governments use and expand local and cultural knowledge as they carry out their programs because it makes the programs better and it also promotes the culture of that community.

I think the last thing I want to say, and this is really inspired. I thought about this one a little bit less but it's inspired by listening to the conversations this afternoon and talking to members of the advisory board who have been engaged on these issues as well. I think it's really clear that programs that have achieved good governance are administered in ways that promote sovereignty. I think that in a sense not enough can be said about this point. As we all reflect on the conversations of this afternoon and on the work that you've done, that you can see that the programs that you carry out have achieved good governance because they are promoting sovereignty. I think they do this in two different ways. One is through institutional capability. Charlie O'Hara mentioned this a little bit just a little bit ago where he talked about when you have the technical expertise, the institutional expertise, it's very hard for outsiders to look at you and say, ‘Hey, you can't do that. You're not capable of running that program.' So by having strong institutional capacity, as they do at the Swinomish Cooperative Land Use Program, as they do at the Jicarilla Fisheries and Wildlife Program at the White Mountain Outdoor Recreation Program. These have strong institutional capacity that prove to outsiders that native nations are highly capable of managing programs and taking control of that sovereignty.

I think one of the other ways they do it is that programs like yours have been very strategic in figuring out ways to promote sovereignty of the nation through programs operations. This is clear in the work that, say, Justin does at Grand Ronde through the Grand Ronde Intergovernmental Relations Department, strategically following paths that expand the sovereignty of the nation. So that would be the point on which I conclude, that I think as we look across the universal programs, one of the other things that's a common denominator and a common strand is that good governance is achieved as programs promote and underwrite the sovereignty of their nations.

So those are the reflections that I had as I thought about the work that you're doing. I didn't mention all 32 programs in the room, but I think these elements and strands are reflective of the work that you all do, which is commendable and I'm very pleased to have learned from you and I'm excited to share these lessons with other nations both Indian Country and beyond."

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "What Effective Bureaucracies Need"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders offer their perspectives on the key characteristics that Native nation bureaucracies need to possess in order to be effective.

Native Nations
Citation

Brown, Eddie. "Tribal Service Delivery: Meeting Citizens' Needs" (Episode 7). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Ducheneaux, Wayne. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 11, 2012. Interview.

LaPlante, Jr., Leroy. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. August 12, 2010. Interview.

Luarkie, Richard. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 1, 2012. Interview.

Penney, Sam. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. August 20, 2010. Interview.

Leroy LaPlante, Jr.:

"You know, when you have a strategy in terms of where, and a vision of where you want the tribe to be, you know, generations from now, everything works toward that end. And so people -- it does give program managers more focus and it does...but you know, that example being set by elected officials is so critical, 'cause if they're setting that example, then it trickles down to your administrative personnel, it trickles down to your program managers, it trickles down to your tribal employees. That there's this conscientiousness that what we're doing is really for the betterment of the people not just here today, but further down the road."

Sam Penney:

"With most bureaucracies, there needs to be roles and responsibilities, there needs to be clear lines of authority, policies and procedures need to be in place. That can save a lot of time over the long run. I think what was important for our tribe is when we adopted our strategic management plan that goes to all levels throughout the tribe, and that communication/coordination among the tribal departments and programs can always be improved. We are a pretty large entity, and I think that just by simply adopting a strategic management plan that is tribal council-approved goes a long ways in providing the day-to-day direction for your staff."

Wayne Ducheneaux:

"I think it all falls back to a solid policies and procedures, something that...a handbook, a guideline that everybody can look at and distribute equitability amongst everybody. It really helps to have the support of your elected officials when you're carrying out the day to day. That's one of the things that I've found has really been cool about my job is of the 15 tribal council people, I've had every one in my office come in and visit with me, ask for advice. I've asked them for advice and what we need to help keep that going is the trust from elected officials, but a clear policy to follow so we make sure everything's fair."

Eddie Brown:

"It's building a good solid foundation of making sure that you have your regulations in place. When we talk about foster care programs or child welfare programs, they have a lot of rules and regulations and standards to ensure the protection of the child as well as the parents. Those kind of things -- having good regulations in place, hiring competent staff, providing training for those staff, pulling together management information systems that allow them to track and to evaluate the kind of program or the impact of the programs that they're having. I think all of this -- it's a tremendous challenge for an administrator today at a tribal level, because there are so many things that need to be done with limited dollars, and a growing expectation of tribal members toward the tribal council to begin to act in a full essence of what a government is, and that is a government's role is to care for the wellbeing of its citizens."

Richard Luarkie:

"For Laguna, I believe what makes our system work well, our bureaucracy work well is the ability to authorize those that are in decision-making roles -- like directors and supervisors -- to make certain levels of decisions. That way everything is not coming to the governor's office, everything's not coming to the chief of operations, and so when you can begin to build quality staff, great systems, the system will take care of itself and you don't have to sign off on every little document. So having that type of environment in place is very critical and I think definitely helps with the bureaucracy. On the tribal side, same thing with the...on the tribal government side, same scenario where the tribal council has delegated to the governor's office and to our staff officer level certain signing authority so we don't have to take everything into tribal council. As an example, we just had a request for filming. There's a movie that's going to be filmed at Laguna and starring Jennifer Aniston and they wanted to come and film for two days and it was two hours per day. So as opposed to taking that into council, that's something that the governor's office can just sign off on. So it allows the council to focus on the big issues and not have to worry about, do we authorize somebody to come film for two hours and we end up debating that for two hours. So it becomes critical when you can begin to delegate certain responsibilities out and so that helps in our bureaucracy."

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "Strategic Clarity"

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI Executive Director Joan Timeche stresses the importance of Native nations having strategic clarity in the development and operation of effective bureaucracies.

Native Nations
Citation

Timeche, Joan. "Strategic Clarity." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy. University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2013. Lecture.

"Some of the key considerations that you need to look into. One of them is...the first one is strategic clarity and this all goes back to you as an individual citizen of your nation, of your community, and wondering, 'I'm a citizen of this nation, but what's ahead [on] the road for our nation?' It's tribal governments assuming that responsibility to figure out 'What do I want, what kind of a society do I want for my grandchildren, for my great grandchildren?' And if you're young enough, for myself, 'Is this the community that I want to come live and work and play in? Or...as soon as I finish a degree I'm going to jump ship and I'm going to go off the reservation. What do I want...what kinds of things do I want to change within my community that I wish would be there, to what kinds of things [do] I want to...want to make sure I protect?' Like for Hopi, it's things like our culture, our religion, our language are these kinds of things that we want to still be in place. Last summer we were working with some youth from...Native youth from New Mexico, and what you heard from them most when we asked them this question is they wanted to have a safe community within...wherever it is, wherever they lived. They wanted to be able to...one example is, and it's done out of Hopi and I know it's done a lot in the Pueblo communities is, as you're driving across the rez, usually you'll wave to people. You may not know them personally or may not recognize that person who's zipping by you, but you wave to the person to recognize that you're a part of the community and they're a part of the community, too. You want to be able to have this home environment that we're all a part of this group, and this is something that we want. They wanted to feel safe within the community.

Some of the things that can happen if you don't have that strategic clarity is you're gonna...what you'll end up having are employees who don't know, who have a lack of direction, who don't know where their program should be headed, who don't know why, what their role, what their job is supposed to be doing or even why they come to work. I know a lot of people that did that at my tribe and I know people today too, not just at the tribal government but anywhere, people who just come to work, clock in, do the work, hang around, do some work, end of the day right at five o'clock, clock out and they're gone. To them it's just a job, it's just a paycheck. But what you want to do is be able to make sure that those people coming in clearly understand what it is that you're about, understanding what role they play, even down to the secretary. The other is if you don't have this strategic clarity about where you're headed as a nation, then you're going to continue to support that kind of behavior. One example of this is with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. What they did is they said, 'We are going to make it mandatory for every single employee who comes to work for us, whether they're Cherokee or not, to go through a 40-hour course and it's equivalent to a college course,' and they learn all about Cherokee history from its beginning to its dealings with the federal government, all of their treaty making and so on, but they have to also pass this course 'cause what they're wanting to do is make sure that every individual knows the history, all the trials that the nation had to go through, understands why it made the decisions it did in the past to where it is that they're moving towards, because they want to have every employee on board with them as they move and work towards their future. They share with them not only the history, but also the present. What are our future goals and what are our expectations of you as a citizen of the nation as well as an employee of ours? So that if you're a non-tribal citizen and you're working for them and you go and meet with others on our behalf as our employee, we want you to be as well versed as any one of our citizens, because you're representing us out there in the community. And all of you will have to do that...all of us have to do that at one point or another. When we work for someone else, we have to be able to know enough about our employer and about its purpose, its goals, to be able to do our job effectively and we should want to know those kinds of things as well."

Honoring Nations: Manley Begay: So You Have a Great Program...Now What?!

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

"Forward-thinking" is often used to describe innovative programs. In remarks designed to frame the symposium session "So You Have a Great Program...Now What?!", Manley A. Begay, Jr. talks about strategic orientation, planning, and implementation as critical to sustaining the success of tribal programs, including how they stay financially healthy, how they deal with changing missions and needs, and how they maintain their effectiveness.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Begay, Jr., Manley A. "So You Have a Great Program...Now What?!" Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 11, 2004. Presentation.

Amy Besaw Medford:

"To start the session off we'll have Manley Begay come up again, the co-director of the Harvard Project and also the director of the Native Nations Institute. Manley is a great friend and I hope that you learn a lot from his words."

Manley Begay:

"This is the second-to-the-last session and the session is called "So You Have a Great Program, Now What?" [Laughter] And my wife would say, 'whatever.' [Laughter] I wanted to just once again say hello to each of you and also just acknowledge Amy Besaw and Andrew Lee and Carmen Lopez and the staff, Liz Hill outside and also Liza Bemis, and am I forgetting anybody? And the fine work that they're doing, so we should give them a round of applause. [Applause] They're wonderful people and in the past 16 years or so that I've been working with the Harvard Project, I've come across many wonderful people and each time we connected with these individuals we held onto them pretty tightly.

Originally back around 1987, Joe Kalt was actually wrestling with an economics question and Joe was puzzled by the fact that as he was studying the U.S. Forest Service land in central and eastern Arizona he was puzzled by the fact that right next door was the White Mountain Apache tribal forest area and as all good economists, you know, he's running numbers and trying to figure things out sort of numerically and so forth and what he was trying to figure out was why is it that all of a sudden in this work he ran across the fact that White Mountain Apache Tribe was managing their forest land better than the U.S. Forest Service was managing theirs. So he was faced with this question and he couldn't figure it out. And Joe began to think well, 'I guess economists really don't rule the world' [Laughter], or they like to think they do and he said, 'I've got to find something else about what's going on here.' He said, 'There's got to be somebody here at Harvard that knows something about Indians.'

So he starts looking through the phone book and asking people questions, 'Who here at Harvard knows about Indians, besides the anthropologists?' [Laughter] And lo and behold he runs across Steve Cornell. Steve was in the Sociology Department at that time and lo and behold Steve was working on a book and I think just finished a book called The Return of the Native. So the two of them have lunch and Joe poses his question and lo and behold, the Harvard Project was born. A short time later, a year or so later, I arrived here at Harvard to work on a doctorate at the Graduate School of Education and I answered a work study ad, it was on the bulletin board at the Harvard [University] Native American Program office and so I went to go see Joe Kalt at the Kennedy School. So I sat down with him and we talk for, gee, it seemed like two, three hours, so I figured I was hired, you know? [Laughter] And became one of the first research assistants for the Harvard Project. And there was another guy that was working there at that time with Joe and Steve, a gentleman named Karl Eschbach. Carl has a wide range of interests from baseball to English tea. Interesting fellow, Carl, wonderful guy, was there working with Joe and Steve. And then Carl and I shared an office and had many good conversations and fast got to know Carl as a wonderful human being. And a short time later, Steve actually was here for maybe another year or two and then went off to University of California-San Diego and then I was fast promoted to the executive director position, which is what Andrew holds at the current time, and began to work with the Harvard Project. So for the next 15 years or so, I was here. Finished my doctorate, received a position at the Graduate School of Education, and became one of the [Harvard Project] co-directors along with Joe and Steve.

And in the course of the 15 years or so that the Harvard Project has been around and working in Indian Country, many wonderful individuals came our way and I think many of them stayed with us. And they've formed their own careers and formed their own interests about the work of nation building in Indian Country. Among these individuals are Jonathan Taylor, Kenny Grant, Eric Henson, Miriam Jorgenson, Elise Adams, and Harry Nelson. Harry is currently at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and I was thinking about this today and those individuals I just mentioned were all students here at Harvard. Many of them were at the Kennedy School of Government. And we've not only become fast colleagues in this work, but have become good friends and individuals that you know you can trust and respect. So this is sort of the team that has formed the Harvard Project.

And a short time later, after Andrew graduated from the Kennedy School of Government and was working at the Ford Foundation, Andrew called and wanted to return back to Harvard and see about finding a place within the Harvard Project. So he brought along with him this idea of the Honoring Nations program, which I believe he and Michael Lipsky had talked about for quite some time. So Andrew came and joined the Harvard Project again and Andrew for the longest time single-handedly put the Honoring Nations program together and I think if there's anybody to be touted as the father of the Honoring Nations program, it is Andrew Lee. [Applause]

And it's wonderful to see that Carmen Lopez is doing a great job with the Harvard University Native American Program. And Carmen has a little known distinction probably among all of us -- except for me--  that she's a fantastic volleyball player. And she and my daughter played volleyball at Dartmouth College and I always admired Carmen when she played high school volleyball. That's when I first noticed her, and Carmen is doing a wonderful job here at Harvard and it's good to see her once again.

I wanted to just make a brief statement about 'So You Have a Great Program Now, Whatever.' [LAUGHTER] But what I want to talk about is sort of forward thinking. I want to talk about strategic orientation, long-term planning and thinking, about sort of setting the context for my brother Lenny Foster and also, who else is speaking? I forget who else is speaking. I know it's not Don Sampson. Rick George will come up after me. But I want to talk about, 'Okay, so now what? Where do we go with all of this? What do we do? How do we begin to think about the future?'

And I think strategic orientation really is a shift from reactive thinking to proactive thinking. It's not just responding to crisis but trying to gain some control over the future. Trying to gain some control over the future, try to figure out where are we headed, what are we all about. And it's about a shift from short-term thinking to long-term thinking. Twenty-five years, 50 years from now, what kind of society do you want? What kind of society do you want to create? It's a shift from opportunistic thinking to systemic thinking, focusing not on what can be funded, but how each option fits the society you're trying to build. It's a shift from a narrow, problem focus to a broader focus on the community. Fixing not just the problems, but societies. Very much like what is going on throughout the world.

I think Joe at his opening address talked about our trip to Poland, and while in Poland you can tell they're working on trying to fix the society after colonization had occurred, first with Germany and then with the Russians. And in some of my trips abroad to places like Australia and New Zealand and South Africa you know that these countries are facing some tremendous problems and issues, not unlike Indian Country. South Africa faces problems with law enforcement. Russia is facing problems with law enforcement. And you go to places like Australia, where Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are essentially commonwealth countries and still wrestling with some basic issues that we've somewhat resolved here in the U.S., like land, human rights, justice. Not that we don't continue to fight for those things, but the issues in many of these countries are some 50, maybe even 100 years back, from what we're dealing with here in the U.S. And in Indian Country today, we're faced with some key strategic questions. You know, what kind of society are we trying to build, what kind of society are you trying to build? What do you hope will be different 25, 50 years from now? What do you hope will be the same? What do you wish to protect? What are you willing to change? What assets do you have to work with and what makes sense to the community at large? And this is all in the context of a hard-nosed look at the reality requirements of your situation.

So essentially it's our job as leaders and you as leaders from your respective nations to begin to think about, how do you want your kids to live or their kids to live 100 years from now? What kind of clothes will they be wearing, what language will they be speaking, where will they be living, what kind of home will they have, how will they worship, where will they go to school, how much education will they have, what about cultural education? And these are all very tough and, I think, thought-provoking set of questions. And it's really about determining nationhood, determining what shall we look like 100 years from now. And then how will we be remembered as leaders? What sort of legacy are we going to leave? Those -- and I talked a bit about this the other day -- those that are yet unborn, what are they going to be saying about us? 'Oh, that guy, that person, did this and to this day we live in this fashion and this manner.' What kind of legacy are you going to leave? I think it's a question we must all wrestle with because life is short. Life is very short and we don't have much time to waste because there's a lot of work to be done.

And I think answering those questions requires a tremendous amount of leadership, and I'm just deeply honored to be in your presence because you're working hard, you're doing things that need to be done, and as leaders we have a tremendous amount of responsibility because leaders create or destroy a climate in which success can occur. They set a vision or not of where the nation is headed. They create or undermine institutions capable of effectively implementing a national vision. They create or abuse the rules of the game. They send signals that decisions will or will not be made by the rules and their fair interpretation. So in short, leaders make choices and their choices matter. And as all of us are leaders in one form or fashion. The choices we make matter and effective nation building depends on those good choices that we make. Thanks. [Applause]"

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "The Strategic Approach to Leadership"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders discuss why it is important for Native nation leaders to take a strategic approach to leadership, stressing that the decisions they make must be made with the culture and values of their people and the next seven generations in mind. 

Native Nations
Citation

Briggs, Eileen. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. December 1, 2011. Presentation.

Lyons, Oren. "Rebuilding Healthy Nations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Makil, Ivan. Nation Building seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 6, 2005. Presentation.

Pico, Anthony. Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project for American Indian Economic Development, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 2004. Presentation.

Russell, Angela. "Leadership and Strategic Thinking" (Episode 9). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Oren Lyons:

"From our directions and from the instructions given to the leaders of the Haudenosaunee when they say -- among many other instructions -- we are reminded and the words are direct, 'When you sit and you counsel for the welfare of your people, think not of your children, think not of yourself, think not of your family, not even your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of seven generations coming.' Now that's an instruction on responsibility, a very serious instruction on responsibility. Peacemaker said that, I don't know, a thousand, maybe two thousand years ago. It resonates today. Today it resonates. Be concerned about the seven generations and how we are going to survive and we survive by doing on a daily basis."

Anthony Pico:

"The strategic question the Viejas council engages should not be 'who runs the mailroom?' but what kind of society are we trying to build? What are our priorities as a community? What uses should we make of our resources? What relationships with outsiders are appropriate and necessary? Who can we trust? What do we need to protect? And what are we willing to give up?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think that there's a general receptiveness to the new ideas that come. I think the biggest challenge for ourselves is how we listen to each other, say what about, what have we forgotten. Because that's where our biggest challenge...and I have to say I don't know if the word is fight or struggle maybe, is that you have people coming in and saying, 'You have forgotten who you are because this is, look at how you're running this meeting. Look at how this is getting done.' And it's important that that auntie stands up and sort of reminds us and maybe scolds us about, 'Look at, look at the way things used to be done. And look at this.' And that's what, I think in my analogy, that's the message she's giving us, is remember who you are. What were and are the values you were raised with? And look at how we're behaving now and how we're getting this done, how we're approaching something, what we're open to, what can we bring to this, and not just swallow this idea from the outside, whole, and say, 'Hey, we've been successful. Because that's this idea -- we did the thing.' Did we do that at the compromise of ourselves? Have we stepped back and given ourselves time to say, 'Does that fit us? Is this right for us? Is how we're doing this work for us?'"

Angela Russell:

"Well, among our people, when we say leader we say '[Crow term],' which means a good person or a good man, and I think leadership is extremely important to all of our nations, and it's important not only for the leader to have a vision for his people, but as citizens of a particular nation, we need to be very supportive to our leader, but we also need to be participatory in a sense that we need to give some direction, we need to give support, we need to give encouragement. I think too many times it's easy to be very critical and to not look ahead toward the vision. You have to have goals, you have to have reachable goals, whether they're short-term or long-term. So leadership is very important, but it's a very, very difficult thing, because in the past our leaders were usually men who had many deeds, many accomplishments and that's how they became a leader. They were supported by the community, and today it's a whole different role, different dynamics, a different society we live in -- lots of challenges ahead for leaders."

Ivan Makil:

"And as leaders, that is one of the responsibilities you have, is to have that vision and to help to define a vision for you people so that there's going to be several paths that you can take but you want to define something that provides the kinds of things that your people need, the kinds of things that your people are looking for, the kinds of things that are consistent with the lifestyle and those values that are important to your people, the kinds of things that I call seven-generation thinking. Seven-generation thinking meaning very simply that when we make decisions -- and this is a traditional concept as well -- that we think about the impacts of our decision on the next seven generations. Our ancestors in the Phoenix valley two thousand years ago built a canal system and they did it with a lot of vision. They did it with a lot of thought. But interestingly enough, two thousand years later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the settlers came in here with all their technology and their engineers and they're going to lay out, map out this whole new system of irrigation for the valley so there could be growth and opportunity in the valley for Phoenix. So they started mapping this area out and you know what was so interesting? The areas they laid out for the canal system for the Phoenix valley were a direct overlay over the traditional hand dug canals that our ancestors built two thousand years ago, because it made sense, because it was seven-generation thinking, it was thinking about the impact on the next seven generations. And although that's a concept, just think: that system lasted for more than seven generations." 

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "Why are Some Native Nations More Successful than Others?"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders offer their perspectives on why some Native nations have proven more successful than others in achieving their economic and community development goals.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Barrett, John "Rocky". Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 28, 2009. Interview.

Ninham-Hoeft, Patricia. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Interview.

Nuvamsa, Ben. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Interview.  

Pierre, Sophie. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona. October 21, 2008. Interview. 

Sampsel, Roy. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. August 31, 2010. Tucson, Arizona. Interview.

Ben Nuvamsa:

"We have this long history and teachings and so on. And if we hang onto those beliefs, core values, and so on, that really is the foundation from which we can build. So in successful nations, tribal nations, we're able to do that; to define who they are, understanding who they are, but also have a plan. A plan that's looking down, some people say seven generations. We don't just plan for ourselves, for tomorrow or next five years but long-term. We have to have a global vision of where we want to be. And if we can define that, then we can reduce that down to something that's gonna be achievable. And I think that economic development, economic success, goes back to having a good strategic direction where you want to be. The same way with us as communities and so on and to be able to build our healthy communities so that...it's the same kind of thing. What do we want to achieve? Who are we? And at Hopi, for example, it's just going back to the values of who we are as Hopi and Tewa people and defining our communities that way...and then setting our governance accordingly."

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft:

"I think it starts with short-term and long-term vision. That those tribes that are successful have a vision for what they think they're community should look like a hundred, two hundred years from today. And they've taken the time to make steps backwards to map out how to achieve that vision and then they start working on it together. And that they explain that vision to the entire community so that everyone is on the same page and they can help. And I think part of getting to that place of success means that we, as individuals in our community, have to change our mindset that we have to stop being the victim. We have to stop blaming our history for why we're not successful and we have to start living and defining our future as it is today. So values and ideas that worked for us in the past, they probably still work for us today, but it's the way we express them, the form that we use to live our daily lives has changed and we have to get with that. And when we do that when we start defining and taking charge of our own future then we'll start realizing our vision."

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Common attributes, I think, of successful nation building are stable governments, expanded representation, lawful behavior, and something that lends itself to consistent performance. All those go back to constitutional forms but they also... those are really accomplished by diminishing nepotism which is, you know, since everyone is related in an Indian tribe, that is an issue. Financial accountability is a huge one; separation of powers seems to be a common attribute; and most importantly to make all that fall within a cultural relevance that means something to the culture of the tribe and the people."

Sophie Pierre:

"There's lots of reasons why...I think that for our case, the fact that we have made it a priority, that we listen to our people, that we, and that we ensure that we're engaging our people, our Ktunaxa people, with every aspect as we move forward I think that that's really what has really helped us to be successful."

Roy Sampsel:

"Where you have a strong sense of history, a strong cultural sense, it allows for that to be the foundational building blocks on which nations can then advance as they begin to take on either the political, social or economic needs of their tribes are. [...] A piece of it, I think, is individual history that the tribes have gone through and whether or not they have been able to sustain leadership continuity over time. I don't want to over emphasize that because it doesn't mean that young, new leaders don't emerge and make tremendous leaders. But if there is a cycle in which this isn't able to be built upon, and if everything has to start new, then what you end up is the lack of the foundational building blocks that allow for success to take place over time."

Denny Hurtado: Addressing Tough Governance Issues

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Skokomish Tribal Nation Chairman Denny Hurtado discusses how he, his fellow leaders and his nation exercised its sovereignty in order to navigate past some tough governance challenges to fund their government, restore their land base, and protect their natural resources.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hurtado, Denny. "Addressing Tough Governance Issues." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Presentation.

"Good morning. I'll tell a joke at the end too [because] that's part of who we are as people -- humor. I see people I know too, people from Washington. I see people from the Chehalis Tribe back there and they're close to me and close to us. We're only like 30 miles apart. When I go speak, education is my passion [because] I think that's a key thing that as tribal people that we need to really focus on that, but I'll talk a little bit about that later.

But I'd like to introduce myself. My Indian name is [Skokomish language] and the short definition of that is that when you come out of a hot house into the cold air you see that breathe of air. And that's kind of what the definition of my name means, [Skokomish language]. I got it from my great-uncle Dr. Charlie. My cousins like to think it's hot air and I like to think it's fresh air. And so we go back and forth, back and forth about that all the time.

But I'd like to talk about two things. One is the fish tax issue, when I first started becoming involved with the tribe. And the other one is about a lawsuit that we filed against the City of Tacoma for first damming our river, and then diverting the whole water out of the north fork of the watershed. Those are the two things I want to talk about real quick [because] we only have 20 minutes. But I'm also a recovering tribal chairman. And it's kind of like that [because] there's a lot of demands on you and your life and it's a hard job to deal with. Especially with us, when we started. 

Our small tribe -- it's a small tribe in Washington State, population of 900 people, small land base of 5,000 acres in God's country, a beautiful place. And when the Boldt Decision passed in Washington State, [it] was a big issue. The tribes were fighting for their right to fish in their usual and accustomed fishing grounds and the fishing business in Washington State was big business. And so of course the state didn't want us to have that right. And so we went to court and fought for that right and won that right. And the right guaranteed us 50% of the fish in our usual and  accustomed  fishing grounds, which meant on and off reservation. And so that was the beginning of the fish wars and a lot of racism came out. There was bumper stickers that said ‘Save a Salmon, Kill an Indian.' And it just happened recently, too, when the Makah's got their whale. There was bumper stickers up there, they were saying ‘Save a Whale, Kill a Makah.' And so we have to deal with these issues all the time of racism and ignorance. So once that passed then our people started going fishing off the reservation, buying big boats, making big money [because] fishing is big money, especially salmon.

And so when Boldt was decided the feds gave us money to help us manage our fishery. However, they never give us enough money to succeed. They only give us enough money to fail. And so we had to start thinking about ways to supplement what little money we got from the federal government. And so we started talking about, ‘Well, let's pass a fish tax.' And oh boy, that was no fun at all. [Because] Indians back then, probably still today, say, ‘We're Indians, we don't have to pay taxes. Why do we have to pay taxes and act like Europeans?' We're thinking, well, we're having these problems out there because it expanded our territory immensely. Because before we had to fish on the reservation, now we can go in our usual and accustomed fishing grounds, which meant we had to cover a larger territory to enforce our regulations that we put out for our tribal members. And then we started hearing issues about, ‘Oh, yeah, everybody's outlawing out there,' which means they're fishing illegally -- they're fishing out of season and what not. And so we're saying, ‘Hey, if we don't control our fishery, then that'll give the government a right to come in and say, ‘See, we told you people. You guys can't manage your fishery. We need to really rethink this and maybe go back and do something different.''

And so as the council, we started talking about imposing this fish tax. So we developed this ordinance which was a five percent fish tax, wasn't really much, but it was a lot of money [because] people were making a lot of money. So we figure well, we can make some money to help supplement our fishery program. So people were just complaining and I'd get threats. Back then, this was in the late '70s and Boldt was decided in 1975. And back then, like you said, it was different. We would go party and that's who we were and it wasn't a good thing. But one time I walked into this bar, and there's this little old lady, God bless her soul, she's gone now. She's like 4 foot 10, but she was one of the most radical people in our tribe. And she came up to me and she goes, ‘I'm going to kill you.' And I'm like, ‘Well, okay. If you do, my mom's going to kill you.' And people feared her because she had killed two of her husbands. And I actually feared her, but I had to stand up and say, 'Be strong.'

So then everybody refused to pay the tax. Not one person paid the tax. But before that, I think a key element of trying to get ordinance passed on your reservations is that you have to educate people why you want to do something and what is the purpose and what is the goal. And so I started thinking about it. 'Well, okay, we need to really start educating our members about what are we going to use this five percent of money we're going to get for?' So we developed this plan, and it was like 50 percent would go directly to fisheries department for whatever they wanted to do, enhancement or whatever. And then 25 percent would go to enforcement because we needed to hire another law enforcement officer so they can go out and make sure that our people weren't outlawing. And then the other 25 percent, and we did a...we had a general council meeting and we're asking what is important to our people. And so always education and elders come at the top and goes like that -- treaty rights. And so I figure, well, 'Why don't we dedicate 25 percent of this money to education and elders?' So like 25 percent of that went to the education, for education purposes and for elders, supporting elders' program. And it was still, people were okay with that, ‘Yeah, okay. That's good. We can kind of support that.' But in the end, when it came time -- looking at all the people fishing, and the majority of our people are fishermen -- nobody paid the tax. I'm like, well, okay. Well, let's just wait until next fishing season.

Next fishing season came rolling around. They came to fisheries to get their permit, tribal fishing card. And so we said, ‘Okay.' First one came we said, ‘Oh, you owe, $2,800 before you can get your fishing permit.' And they're like, ‘What?! Nah, we ain't...' ‘Well, don't pay it then. Next.' And it went like that, and pretty soon everybody realized that they had to get this permit and pay their tax first in order to get their permit so they could exercise their fishing right. And that's kind of how it went down. Everybody paid their tax 'cause there was a lot of money to be made, but they couldn't make that money unless they got their fishing permit. And it was a big issue. It was a big step for us, because we're so engrained in not wanting to pay taxes and not wanting to be like Europeans and not this and that. But I think that in order to supplement your tribal governments, you have to take bold stands and go forward and look at it in a different way. But it was challenging, it was scary, but you have to stand your ground and that's how things get done.

The other issue I'm going to talk about is what's called the Cushman case. I dedicated about 25 years of my life to this suit. Cushman was a suit about the north fork of our river. The City of Tacoma in the 1920s had went in there and completely dammed the north fork of the river and diverted all of the water out of the river down these big pipes so they could generate power at the powerhouse. And it was just, their whole focus was just power generation. What that did to our reservation was that because of the flows that that north fork created in the river, over time the riverbed rose like 10-15 feet and then our reservation started getting flooded, our septic systems were becoming corrupted. And so we thought, 'Well, we really need to focus on doing something about this.'

When we started this process, it was like David and Goliath. Here's Skokomish, this little tribe with very little money and very little political clout fighting Goliath, which was the City of Tacoma, which had deep pockets, which were connected to all the politicians -- Norm Dicks being one of them, now the chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

When we were pursuing this suit, we realized that we really had to make sure that we did all the science. What I've learned from this suit, I've learned more from being involved in this suit than going to college for seven years, because you're so immersed in it and you learn about hydrology, anthropology, economics; all this stuff was wrapped up into this one suit.

I thought, 'Well, how am I going to sell this to the council and to the people more importantly, the general council.' So what I decided, I thought, 'Well, the more you get people involved in the process, the better off you are because that way you're more accountable and you're more transparent.' Those are two key things that as tribal leaders we need to make sure we do, that we're accountable and that we're transparent so that the membership can see exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it. [Because] that's when a lot of rumors start to boil up and if they don't know what we're doing, then they start saying, ‘Oh, they're just going to get the money and do whatever they want with it and not listen to us.'

So I had planned to start this what's called the 'Rights Protection Committee.' And the way that committee was designed was that we would get members from key families on the reservation to be part of this committee. That way everybody and everyone of their families had someone in there to represent their issues and concerns. And it was great for a while and then that was like 15-17 years. And then I got married and I decided, 'Well, I'm going to come off council and dedicate my time to my wife. So after a couple years, after that then the Rights Protection Committee kind of went away. In the meantime, we were ordered [into] court mediation to try and resolve this issue out of court.

And so just recently, last few months ago, we came up with a settlement package to settle this suit that lasted 80 years. I really never thought I would see the day when we would settle it. I didn't think it was going to happen, and it wasn't going to happen because we had a general council meeting and I started hearing rumors, ‘Well, the council over there, we don't trust them,' and you know how it goes. I'm speaking to the choir and they don't always trust us. And so there was going to be a vote at the general council meeting to not accept the proposal. I was looking at the proposal and we wanted, of course we always want more. But as leaders we need to figure out, 'Well, is it worth it to take that crap shoot and go to court and might not get much or less, or you might get more?,' you just never know. But in looking at the settlement package, part of it was getting 1,400 acres of prime land back to our reservation. And that really, to me, that was the main thing for me. The money I could live without, but I could use it too, but that wasn't really the purpose of our suit. The purpose of our suit was to get the water back into the river and that was a big part of our suit and we've always stayed that course.

And so I think you have to be resilient and persistent and stay your course all the way to the very end. [Because] in the midst of all this, we had another meeting like ten years ago with Tacoma and they were trying to buy us off with peanuts. 'Here, $10 million,' but not in cash but in other little different ways, in fisheries and what not. And we're like, 'No, this is not about money for us [because] our elders told us that we just want the water back in the river.' And so part of that settlement is that we do get the water back in the river and the 1,400 acres. But tribal people, a lot of people, this is bad times right now so people do need money and I understand that, but we stayed the course. This is about bringing the water back to our river.

So at this meeting all these rumblings came up, ‘Well, we're going to vote it down. We're going to vote it down.' I'm like, ‘Ah, geez.' I'm not on council anymore, but I'm on the budget committee. And if you're not on council, the best committee to be on is the budget committee [because] that's where you see where everything goes and how everything works. And so I was thinking, 'Well, okay.' I got up and I did this speech about how our elders wanted the water back in the river and our focus wasn't about money and we need to be united in our effort in this [because] if Tacoma sees that we're divided then they're going to use it against us. And so I said, ‘Okay, I recommend that we reinstate the Rights Protection Committee, that we have members from each family on the reservation be on this committee to represent them, we have two council members from the council to be on this Rights Protection Committee, we have two youth -- I think as council people we need to start mentoring our young people to be the leaders so we need to involve more of our kids in the stuff we do at the tribal level -- and then we have two elders to be part of that committee.' And that's kind of what sold the vote.

So then I just said, ‘I call for a vote. Let's vote on this. We're either going to do it or we're not going to do it.' And it ended up being unanimous; we accepted the settlement. In the end it was $46 million. That's more money than we've ever had in our history and we got our water back. We're getting our water back and we're reinstituting the fish runs in that river. We had a sockeye run that went up so we have a plan to reinstitute sockeye back into our fisheries. And so it benefits all our tribal members, but the only way it got through was involving this Rights Protection Committee. And I think that that's a good venue to use because then they have a voice and they feel like they're being heard and they can give input and what not. And if you don't have that then they're going to fight you every inch of the way. I see those things really work well. There are still problems, but at least we got the vote through and we seen light at the end of the tunnel.

I always, the only thing that I regret being a chairman was that it took so much time away from my family. That's the main thing that I regretted. We all deal with that, but that's just the nature of the beast. But that's the main thing that I regret about being on tribal council was that it took so much time away from my family and my friends. But somebody's got to do it, because we've got to make sure we govern our tribes in a good way.

So now we do have some money to work with, we have our water back, we have prime land; we got 300 acres of tidelands, we got the salt water park right next to the dam, we got 500 acres of land up at Lake Cushman. These are real prime properties that were ours originally anyway, but now at least we have them back to put them back into our reservation. So I'm going to close with a joke. Don't get offended 'cause it's just a joke. How are politicians and diapers alike? They both need to be changed and for the same reason. That's what I have to offer and thank you for listening to me."

Jaime Pinkham: How Do You Hit the Ground Running?: Strategies for Handling the Load and Forging Ahead

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Nez Perce Tribal Treasurer Jaime Pinkham speaks about his experience as a leader of his nation and what it takes to "hit the ground running" when one assumes a leadership role.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pinkham, Jaime. "How Do You Hit the Ground Running?: Handling the Load and Forging Ahead." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"I'm not sure I'm the one who can really give this presentation when you've got such talent in this room like Peterson Zah. I noticed my friends from the north, colleagues on the Native Nations Institute board -- Mike Mitchell and Sophie Pierre --and they're some true leaders who have really carried a lot of weight for all of Indian Country. And I'm always excited to have a chance to come and work with NNI because of the quality of work that they do in providing, taking the lessons, taking your stories and converting them into positive lessons to take back and share with tribal communities to build stronger Native nations. And actually they asked me to talk about 'how you hit the ground running?' And for me that really depends on what kind of tribal leader you want to be. If you're someone that just wants fame and fortune, believe me, you're in the wrong business. And for those of you that may think this is a great job, post-retirement job, well I hope you have charm and good looks in your political survival kit, because it's not a position for retirement and I learned that. But what I found out is if you really want to make a difference in life that there's probably no better job that suits you than to be on tribal council.

Tribal politics to me it embraces a full challenge -- there's no recesses. When I was on tribal council, it's a full-time tribal council, and a recess for us was a chance to go out hunting with my father on a weekend. My constituencies were right there and you live amongst them each and every day. And I think that's what sets us apart from other forms of government, if you look at Congress or state legislatures who work out of Washington, D.C. or state capitols. Tribal politics to me was about where rubber really meets the road. Nowhere else I think you can find where tribal citizens, or any citizens of any government actually, have such direct access to their elected tribal leaders. They're members of your very same community. And so with that blessing of having that direct access and relationship with your constituents, that also to me brings one of the cornerstones of the challenges that we face as tribal leaders, because it becomes a test of your time, of your endurance, your patience, your enthusiasm -- and as I found out -- it's the test of the strength of your family.

When I got out of college I had a forestry degree from Oregon State [University]. And I was out laying out clear-cuts and building logging roads, but something triggered me inside, that it was time to move back home to Indian Country and work for the tribe. And fortunately when I moved home to manage the tribe's natural resource department, that was like political prep school to me because of the things that I learned while I was there. And the reason I ran for council really was because I was watching things rise and fall under the scrutiny of tribal politics. And I realized that if I really wanted to make a difference in a tribal community I could do it from the inside being on tribal council than from the outside. And so I ran and was elected to two terms on the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee. And in all those years I kept the position as the tribal treasurer. So I'm guilty, I did think that once I would run for tribal council after I retired but truly I knew that my time was to do it now. And it was the best job I ever had, but quite honestly it did come with a high price. I was having the time of my life running the Nez Perce Tribe's marathon and we were doing things like bringing wolves home to Idaho, regaining ancestral lands in Oregon -- and I was packing and repacking my suitcase and just racking up the frequent flyer miles -- and then we were building two casinos, we got gaming launched, and we were fighting for salmon, water rights and Native sovereignty and we were doing it all it seemed like. We were financing and investing and buying and selling and building and always expanding and indeed, we were gambling. At the same time we were testifying and negotiating, collaborating and mitigating, commiserating and celebrating and, when it was important to us, we were litigating.

But then I lost my balance and I had learned that if you want to play blind ambition on a political treadmill your membership dues come at a pretty high cost. And so my greatest losses I learned were not the political or professional ones. My greatest losses were personal ones. Those are the ones that sting the most. And unfortunately after a divorce I learned that tribal politics was too expensive of a hobby for me to carry on and so I decided it was time to take a break. But it was as I said earlier, it was the best job that I ever had as I said because that's where tribal communities, we understand that tribal politics is where the rubber does meet the road. You look at state and federal governments and they may take months and even years to pass some sort of an action -- then after that you have to worry about rule-making processes and different tiers of government to get those actions implemented -- but in tribal governments it can be altogether different. Tribal governments have the unique role of being more responsive to their constituents and to their citizens. But this is I think where we do meet the challenge is that we must remain leaders of an entire tribal, an entire Native nation, but at the same time we're conscious of those people who put us into those positions. And it can become very difficult and time consuming if we spend our time trying to be a leader one voter at a time.

Like I said, I had what I thought was the good fortune, my political prep school, to be a tribal departmental manager for about six years before I ran for tribal council. And what that allowed me to determine was just to observe the tribal government, the infrastructure and the capacity of the tribe. And I learned who were really the go-to people when you were in a pinch to get something done in a tribal bureaucracy. I also learned who those employees were that weren't afraid to lift any additional weight. And also I learned who were the people who could make the organization functional as well as dysfunctional. And those were all lessons that served me well, but one of the most important lessons I felt I learned as a tribal manager, before coming onto council is, I learned just what tribal councils do to make the staff mad.

There were many things that I saw when I was a tribal departmental manager that was really kind of frustrating at times. It seems like there were times that I'd always have to...I'd be instructed by a tribal council member to write a report or do an analysis or conduct some kind of an interview or set up a meeting for them or write their remarks for some kind of a public presentation. And then sometimes they didn't use it or they failed to show up for the meeting. And so at times I used to think, 'Well, maybe they're just asking me to do that just because they have the simple power to make me do that. But I remembered each and every one of those people who sent me on a wild goose chase. And so I promised myself that if I ever became an elected tribal leader, I'd never send the staff on wild goose chases because I know that they would remember who I was. And my background was in natural resources, but when I was elected to tribal council what I wanted to focus on was the tribal budget and that's why I became the treasurer, which meant it was budgets and audits, government operations, tribal enterprises.

When you're elected, your IQ level doesn't automatically just go up. So there's a lot of learning that I needed to do. And so I formed a personal core team, which for me as tribal treasurer meant the finance manager, the tribal executive director as well as the enterprise manager. And for me, it was important for us to develop this common understanding and a deep sense of trust. I knew that my operation, really my survival as a treasurer, really depended on their ability to get the job done. And I made certain that that feeling was mutual, that their survival was dependent on me as well. And over time we became trusted confidantes who I could just bounce ideas off of, or when you needed that private confidential discussion and someone to vent on, they were the people to go to. And it was pretty important for me I think to maintain a sense of sanity to have people like that that I knew I could trust.

On tribal council when we ran -- as natural resource manager, I was watching that we were very heavily dependent on our natural resources to fund tribal governmental programs. And it was predominantly timber revenues and agriculture revenues plus some mining revenues. And we had this very limited natural resource funding base, but at the same time we watched the tribal programs growing and expanding and more needs being pressed against our community. And for sure we were destined to outgrow our capacity to rely on our natural resource base to fund the growing tribal programs. And that was one of the things that compelled me to run is we needed to diversify the tribal revenue base. And right after I was elected we opened up two casinos back to back on the reservation. And at the same time we found ourselves in negotiation over some damage claims to our fisheries caused by two utilities within the reservation. And part of the settlement of the damage claims brought in additional money; it was a financial settlement in part. And all of a sudden we had gaming revenues and two financial settlements and all this money started pouring into the tribe.

And one would think that would make your job easier, but as a treasurer it doesn't make your job easier. Actually it complicates your job even more, because with this new resource coming in and this new source of revenue and this feeling that we had the riches, comes with it is the pressures of what to do with that money and also who should get a piece of it and just how much. And so we were embroiled in a lot of debates over how the investments like Manley and Peterson Zah shared with you earlier and how to sock money away and where we needed to focus in on the future. And those were very difficult decisions to make, but at times we also found that even the best-laid plans can hit a bump in the road, an obstacle and when you have very...our tribal community at the time, there were segments of our community that were still living on the front lines of human despair and their needs were immediate. And how do you provide for their needs while trying to also set money aside for the long-term future? And I had this saying on my office when we had all this money coming in and it said, 'No one is more on trial than in moments of good fortune,' and that is so true.

As tribal leaders what I learned is that we have the power to make a difference and the decisions that we take and make at the tribal council table not only characterize what our communities are going to be like in the future but also it helps define the character of our neighbors. We can try to reinvigorate the world, we can try to help the world act on its own behalf, but we can also bring it harm with the best and the worst of intentions. I found that some people like to measure political decisions. The best political decisions are those that make you popular with over 50 percent of the registered voters, but regardless the best political decisions can be the tough-love decisions that really show you how the natural world works or how the economic world works. And those are the kind of decisions you make that are based on substance and not solely based on your image. And during debates I learned that some people like to come in and they like to bloat issues with guilt and melodrama. They like to personalize them and moralize them. And granted this can be pretty seductive, but our job as tribal leaders is to take those issues, to clarify them and to act fairly and firmly. And our communities continue to demand that we continue to gather the right information free of prejudice and have us weigh those diverse perspectives carefully. We also must be willing to answer to the critical public debate and the scrutiny that goes on within our community. I learned in reading a book by Colin Powell that one must learn never to put their ego on the table along with your position because in a vote if your position goes down, your ego goes with it.

The other thing I want to stress is as a former manager who turned into a tribal politician is be kind to the staff, make them feel appreciated and respected. And kindness, believe me, kindness accomplishes a lot more than brutal strength and anger and it makes the staff be more responsive and actually it's more encouraging for them to come back to the tribal council chambers time and again. And as I learned, well a couple of my colleagues learned this the hard way is that tribal staff have extended families and make for pretty damn big voting blocks. So a couple of my colleagues learned that when they were up for re-election and lost their bid. And so we need to promote that understanding and that appreciation of the people who support us, the tribal staff.

I also want to make particular note of our non-Indian staff. At Nez Perce, we don't have all the expertise to fill all the critical positions within our tribal government and so we are heavily dependent on outside expertise within our...attorneys, some of our biologists, some of our financial managers. And at times, I know it seems like they get singled out and I often thought of why would these people want to come and work for an Indian tribe because quite honestly, sometimes they're put under the spotlight that has this racial tilt to it where they get scrutinized because they are non-Indians. I came to understand working with some of them is why would they work for a low paying job out in a rural community. Well, I think in some cases where else can they go and apply their trade where they can work with a heart. The kind of things that they encounter day in and day out takes a lot of heart and patience to get those things accomplished. So I think they're inspired by the ability to work with Indian tribes.

And don't be shy about offering the emails or the thank you notes when somebody does a job well done. Actually when I was a manager I kept those notes and I remembered those people that sent them to me. And I was never shy to put in a little extra effort to lend them a hand if they ever called upon me. There was great mileage that I even got when I started sending out those kind of notes. And I also learned from a supervisor of mine years ago the value in, I could call it, the 'how's life?' walk. There were times on council when I just felt I needed to get up and decompress, unwind and just get out of my office and wander down the halls. And I'd walk down to the different program departments and walk in and just walk up to one of the staff people and say, 'How's life?' It's amazing what they'll share with you. They'll share about the latest project that's going on or they'll share with you something about their family. I think what they really enjoyed was the fact that somebody was willing to listen and somebody cared. It wasn't about becoming popular with them. It was not a popularity contest, but really it's the fact that they do want to be heard, they do want to know that their tribal leadership cares about them because really what popularity is, if you really want to be popular by both your allies and your adversaries, this is how you become popular: you be fair, you be honest, and you be consistent. That's what really wins popularity contests I feel on tribal council.

Believe me, those of you out there know this better than I do, that it's not easy and there's more that we need to do. Half the challenge is just winning at something. The other half of the challenge is protecting it once we win it. And still today I worry about the fate of our communities. I was at Portland State University -- I sit on the NNI Board and Portland State University has the Institute for Tribal Government, a similar board to what NNI does -- and I was asked to talk about the work that NNI is doing. And I was sharing with them -- and if you've ever read Charles Wilkinson's book, Blood Struggle, some of the people that Charles highlights in his book sits around the Portland State table -- and we were talking about some of the research work that NNI is doing about per capita distributions, about constitutional reform and blood quantum levels and enrollment policies and so forth. And as the discussion unfolded, we began to talk about how these are becoming wedge issues within our very own tribal communities. If you remember in our past, our struggles were against the colonials, the cavalry, the states and the provinces. But in the coming generations, the blood struggles that Charles Wilkinson once wrote about might be the ones we fight in our very own communities as these wedge issues become very divisive if we don't get control of them.

The other thing I learned is just how we go about measuring our success as tribal leaders. When I was a forester, my success was board feet and stumpage values and that was the language of the trade that I spoke. But when I look back on the things that we accomplished at Nez Perce, they meant more than that. Everything we accomplished didn't have a purpose you could find on a spreadsheet. Building casinos wasn't just about gaming revenues, it was also about a clear expression of tribal sovereignty and to engage our tribal members so they could have jobs to safeguard their families. When we brought wolves back to Idaho, that had nothing to do with wildlife biology. That was all about restoring a tribal voice to the land. And when we regained those lands in northeast Oregon, that wasn't just about wildlife mitigation. That was about rebuilding a Native homeland. And just recently we've gone back to hunting bison in Wyoming and in Montana. And doing that wasn't just about the exercise of a treaty right but it was about renewing, for our youth to renew an allegiance to the future. And for me today in the salmon restoration work I do, that has nothing to do with science. Well, it has some to do with science but really it's about a strong will to preserve a culture. So everything that we did, if you look back, everything we did on tribal council was about saving a homeland and building strong Native nations.

And among the challenges that will face you as tribal leaders, remember there's also the joy of life. My divorce taught me that I was probably doing more to help other people's families than I was spending trying to help my own. So I ask you that you take care of your families and take care of yourselves and taking care of yourselves means that we take care of ourselves physically and spiritually. The Nez Perce homeland covers a portion of Idaho. And Idaho is the most Republican state in the union. And life in Idaho is tough if you're an Indian, life is tough if you're salmon, but life is really tough for people like me who are salmon-eating Indian Democrats. But there is a lesson to that; there is a lesson to that. Because what I learned by trying to work with these very conservative state and federally elected leaders was that political relationships, the best political relationships were human relationships. So at any political scale, it was best never to burn a bridge over a single issue because someday, somewhere, you're going to find agreement and you're going to need one another.

I also learned as a tribal leader that people in the outside community also looked at me to be a leader of a larger community. They expected leadership qualities of me that extended beyond, outside the tribal community, especially when we got into debates and arguments over sovereignty. Also when we had some incidences of our youth and violence and dealing of drugs, those are community problems that we all share. So sometimes we need to look at ourselves as being leaders beyond just the tribal boundaries. We can't always go it alone.

And another lesson from Idaho, I found that it was important for us to try to build bridges and to mend those that had weakened because for our communities, our tribal communities to be strong, sometimes we need to look at our neighboring communities and insure that they are strong and they are surviving and thriving. It's what Daniel Kemmis called the 'politics of place.' And we all agree that, hopefully our neighbors agree that, tribes are able partners because we're in this game for the long haul.

Never let a fight become more important than the issue. In a debate, in a fight don't you like a person who's always smiling when you're fighting? I think that shows quite a bit of character on their part. And so in a debate it's always best to seek out the friend or foe with the characteristics of leadership who's willing maybe to debate you today, but tomorrow maybe to stand up with you and help you in collectively solving your problems. The other thing is some people I think they get, they like the D.C. delegations. And Sophie, I guess for you it would be going on the big provincial, or beyond the provincial to the national delegations, and we think that's a very glamorous trip and that's where we should be investing our time. But I also would ask you to make sure that you invest your time at the local level. The school board member, the county commissioner, the mayor is going to be tomorrow's state legislator, who's going to be tomorrow's congressman, who's going to be tomorrow's governor, and with good strong relationships at the local level, those relationships should last as these individuals move along in their political travels.

And the outcome of good decisions do fade if we do make those hasty, comfortable political decisions for the present. I remember we used to get requests to fund a variety of things from a basketball tournament to registration fees. And at the time it was not the highest priority for the expenditures of tribal revenues, but there'd be pretty strong voting blocks coming in asking for these funds. And usually when they would be outside the guidelines of what we should fund, there was always somebody willing to make a motion to make an exception to the rule. That happens quite often I'm afraid. And I remember when he would make the motion to give somebody a $1,000 for example for a basketball tournament, they'd add on to the end of the motion and the treasurer to find the funds. Well, that's me. Where am I going to find the funds? After a while, I got so frustrated I started taking the funds out where I knew it was going to hurt the tribal council the most, take it out of the travel line item. And let's face it: we can't hide from our history. I became a grandfather a couple of years ago and I'm thinking about my granddaughter who someday she's going to have her grandchildren who will be students of my history and I wonder what they're going to learn. Are they going to learn about how we failed to act or how poorly we acted? Or are they going to learn about how we came together as tribal communities to be cohesive with honor and trust and respect to meet the challenges that we faced in our day?

I made three findings when I was on tribal council. One of the first was I found inner strength in prayer and I found myself praying more than ever before. And truly, it helped me cope with some of the issues that we were facing in those days. And second, believe it or not, I found that I gained more patience. I think some people would think you'd lose patience on tribal council, but I think I gained more. And truly, it was a characteristic that I really needed to work on because the easy decisions, they go off to somebody else. The tough decisions come to the tribal council table. And making a difference is rarely accomplished by those people who sit up in the cheap seats, who have never played the game, or who have an obscured view of the playing field. Yet as leaders we cannot...we need a high level of patience to deal with our critics because we cannot cast them aside. Our critics deserve the same kind of leadership that we give to the people who are unable to act on their own behalf or speak on their own behalf. So we need to be leaders of our critics as well. I've been involved in a lot of spirited debates and lengthy deliberations and at times honestly my vote was cast on the losing side, but I learned that you need to accept the loss with the same dignity you accept victory. Pouting over a loss was no different than taunting the defeated when you won. And third, I learned that power alone doesn't make a difference. Political power alone does not make a difference, because if compassion and courage are absent, then our decisions have high likelihood to become reckless and that power becomes useless and our actions become hollow. We can't let politics just be about gaining more power, because power sometimes is possessed by those who have least earned it and is seen as such a supreme value, but if you watch, sometimes power shifts back and forth. You'll have one group of political leadership, a new group come in, and you'll see that political pendulum swinging back and forth. What happens is we see our tribal communities caught in the middle of that. So let's remember that power is not what makes the difference.

And I guess to just kind of wrap things up here is I've learned that we can't do it all in our lifetime, but certainly we give it our best and with age and time I think I've come to learn when the best time of my life is going to be. It's yet to come, because if we truly make a difference and we truly make that lasting difference, the best time of our life is going to come long after we're gone. I think about my granddaughter when she grows up and maybe someday she'll run for tribal council. And I hope the examples that we set for her today are things that she can follow to protect that very sacred place, that sacred place that we call home. Thank you."