Citizen Potawatomi Nation

"Modern Tribal Governments, Constitutions, and Sovereignty" Session at NCAI's Annual Convention

Producer
National Congress on American Indians
Year

This session, convened by NCAI at its 2014 Annual Convention, chronicled the growing movement by tribal nations to reform and strengthen their constitutions in order to reflect and preserve their distinct cultures and ways of life, more effectively address their contemporary challenges, and achieve their long-term priorities. It shared the constitutional stories of four tribal nations who have either reformed their constitutions or currently are in the process of doing so.

The session includes 5 presentations from prominent Native nation leaders and scholars:

  1. Sherry Salway Black and Ian Record provide a brief overview of tribal constitutionalism and the current movement among tribal nations to engage in constitutional reform.
  2. John “Rocky” Barrett, longtime chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, shares how the Citizen Potawatomi Nation long struggled with an imposed system of governance and how it turned to constitutional reform to reshape and stabilize that system so that it is capable of helping the nation achieve its strategic priorities.
  3. Erma Vizenor, former Chairwoman of the White Earth Nation, provides a detailed history of White Earth’s Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) system of governance, and why and how White Earth decided to create an entirely new constitution in order to make its system of governance more culturally appropriate and functionally effective.
  4. Richard Luarkie, former Governor of the Pueblo of Laguna, offers a detailed chronology of the Pueblo’s constitutional and governmental odyssey over the past few centuries, and how the Pueblo is in the process of reforming its constitution to fully exercise its sovereignty and make its system of governance more culturally appropriate.
  5. Justin Beaulieu, Coordinator of the Constitution Reform Initiative for the Red Lake Nation, describes the process that Red Lake designed to engage Red Lake citizens about the nation’s current constitution and what they would like to see in a new constitution.

 

 

Resource Type
Citation

“Modern Tribal Governments, Constitutions and Sovereignty”. (October 2014). Presentation. National Congress on American Indians's Partnership for Tribal Governance. Atlanta, GA. Retreived from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBjQrzrj0Iyu5miLAFGEg9VS6BhS_JS58

Transcripts for all videos are available by request. Please email us: nni@arizona.edu.

Potawatomi Leadership Program

Year

Proud of the increasing number of citizens pursuing college degrees, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation (CPN) leaders became concerned that their talented students were not getting enough education in what it means to be Citizen Potawatomi. To nurture the nations’ future political leadership, the tribe launched the Potawatomi Leadership Program, which gives students an unforgettable “crash course” in CPN government, economy, and culture. In doing so, program graduates are armed withthe cultural and political knowledge they need to become the leaders they were born to be.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

"Potawatomi Leadership Program." Honoring Nations: 2014 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2011. Report.

Honoring Nations All-Stars Profile: Constitutional Reform Citizen Potawatomi Nation

Year
Forced relocations, loss of lands, and the economic necessity of moving away from home and community are common histories in Indian Country. Yet, despite these tragic circumstances, tribes continue to assert their sovereignty in order to improve the lives of their people. One of these remarkable stories comes from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation (CPN). In 2007, tired of bandaging a failing constitution that did not meet the cultural needs of the Nation, CPN citizens ratified a new governing document that resulted in a significant transfer of power and realigned the constitution to Citizen Potawatomi culture. The Nation moved from a five-member business committee with representatives only from Oklahoma to a sixteen-member legislative body with regional representatives for all CPN citizens, wherever they reside. In addition, it established checks and balances and further clarified roles and responsibilities within the governing system. Perhaps most important of all, it strengthened the Nation’s self-governance by removing the clause that required the US Secretary of the Interior to approve future changes to CPN’s constitution.
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Honoring Nations All-Stars Profile: Constitutional Reform Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2013.

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Constitution

Year

Citizen Potawatomi Nation is located in Oklahoma with a population of 29,000 people. The constitution was enacted in 1938 and amended in 1985 and 2007.

Preamble: We, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, sometimes designated as the Potawatomi Tribe of Oklahoma, in furtherance of our inherent powers of self-government in order to take advantage of the opportunities for economic independence and social advancement offered by the Thomas- Rogers Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of June 26, 1936, (49 Stat. 1976), do hereby adopt this Constitution pursuant to the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of June 26, 1936 (49 Stat. 1967) which shall supersede the constitution approved by the Secretary of the Interior on October 17, 1938, and ratified on December 12, 1938, and amended on September 27, 1956, December 27, I960, April 24, 1961, September 21, 1970, April 20, 1983, and April 8, 1996, with ratification.  

Native Nations
Topics
Citation

Citizen Potawatomi Nation. 2007. "Constitution of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation." Shawnee, OK.

Citizen Potawatomi Nation: Citizenship Excerpt

Year

ARTICLE 3 — MEMBERSHIP OF TRIBE
Section 1. The membership of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation shall consist of the following persons:
(a) All persons of Indian blood who were bona fide members of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and who were enrolled or were entitled to be enrolled on the official census roll of the Band on January 1, 1937.
(b) Each child of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Indian blood born since the date of said roll whose parents is, or was, a member of the Tribe.
(c) Each child of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Indian blood of a marriage between a member of the Tribe and any other person.
(d) As used in this Article, the term “a member of the Tribe" means a member of the Tribe at the time of the child’s birth, or, in the case of a posthumous child, if membership rights are claimed through the deceased parent, the parent was a member of the Tribe at the time of death.
(e) The burden of proof as to eligibility for membership in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation will be on the claimant for membership in each case.
(f) The Business Committee shall have power to prescribe rules and regulations covering future membership including adoptions and the loss of membership, subject to confirmation by a majority of the votes cast for a General Council referendum containing such rules and regulations in a regular or special election.
(g) No member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation may hold membership in any other Indian tribe.

Native Nations
Topics
Citation

Citizen Potawatomi Nation. 2007. "Constitution of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation." Shawnee, OK.

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Constitutional Reform

Year

Tribal governments across the United States work tirelessly to provide their citizens with effective systems of governance. After years of failed assimilation attempts, the federal government imposed blanket political systems upon almost all tribes regardless of those systems’ effectiveness or cultural suitability. Given such misdirection, it is little wonder that many tribal governments find it difficult to meet the demands of the 21st century now that they have greater business dealings, substantial legal jurisdiction, more control over service delivery to tribal citizens, and increasingly mobile populations. In response to these pressures, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma began a radical constitutional reform process designed to make its government more responsive, stable, and predictable. The task was daunting. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the following decades saw the nation’s citizens scatter to all parts of the United States. The desire to reach out to and involve every citizen has now created a unique tribal legislature, with simulcast meetings and participation from across the country. These political changes are vitally linked to strengthening the nation’s identity, developing the nation’s economy, and celebrating the nation’s culture.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Citizen Potawatomi Nation Constitutional Reform." Honoring Nations: 2010 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2011. Report.

Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation

Year

Viewed as a one-stop shop for lending services, the Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation provides holistic community development through business and employee loans, business development trainings, and financial literacy education. Demonstrating that the connection between sovereignty and economic self-reliance is essential, the CPCDC assists citizens in building their assets as a long-term solution to poverty. With the foresight to create their own lending institution, the CPN is reiterating the business savvy demonstrated by its people at the height of the fur trading era in the 1600’s.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation." Honoring Nation: 2006 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007. Report.

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

John 'Rocky' Barrett: Blood Quantum's Impact on the Citizen Potawatomi Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this short excerpt from his 2009 interview with NNI, Citizen Potawatomi Nation Chairman John "Rocky" Barrett discusses the devastating impacts that blood quantum exacted on the Citizen Potawatomi people before the nation did away with blood quantum as its main criteria for citizenship through constitutional amendments in the mid-1980s.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

John "Rocky" Barrett, Chairman, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, "Constitutional Reform and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's Path to Self-Determination," Interview, "Leading Native Nations" interview series, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, March 28, 2009.

"It was a period of time where the...my realization that there was...the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] was asking us to give them advice on the agency budget. And then when we would, they would ignore us as far as the advice. And there were...almost at every stop there was some deliberate statement of policy that the United States government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs' job was to represent the interests of individual Indians, and not tribes or tribal governments. And that had certainly been manifested almost entirely in the 1948 Indian Claims Commission settlements. And it had forced us into a situation of closing our rolls in 1962 except for some arbitrary blood-degree cutoff. The concept of blood degree was foreign to our culture, and we did away with blood-degree determinations in constitutional amendments in the mid-1980s. But that period of time between '62 and '80 disenfranchised an awful lot of people and led to a -- on the whole -- a great deal of the separation that the people felt from the tribe and its culture. It became all about splitting up this poof money that was coming from the government, these little payments, and less about the fact that here we are, a people with its own language and art and history and culture and territory and government that had been there for thousands of years, and suddenly we placed these arbitrary stops in our system over a $450 check. In retrospect, it seems insane, and it was. Truthfully, it was."

John "Rocky" Barrett: The Origins of Blood Quantum Among the Citizen Potawatomi

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this excerpt from his presentation at NNI's "Emerging leaders" seminar in 2012, Citizen Potawatomi Nation Chairman John "Rocky" Barrett provides an overview of how the U.S. government -- specifically the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- imposed blood quantum on the Citizen Potawatomi people, and how the nation has worked to reclaim and exercise its right to determine citizenship according to its own criteria.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

"Citizenship. We knew we could amend our constitution because they told us that the only way we were going to get this payment from the 1948 Indian Claims Commission -- the 80 percent of the settlement that had been tied up since 1948 -- in 1969 is we had to have a tribal roll and the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] told us that the only way you could be on the tribal roll was to prove that you were one-eighth or more Citizen Potawatomi. Now the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi were derivatives of one guy from the government in a log cabin in Sugar Creek, Kansas in 1861 who was told to do a census of the Potawatomi, the Prairie Potawatomi and the Citizen Potawatomi. And he told everyone that they had to appear. And as they came in the door, he assigned a blood degree based on what color their skin was in his opinion, and full brothers and sisters got different blood degrees, children got more blood degree than their parents 'cause they'd been outside that summer and those were the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi.

There was a full-time, five-person staff at the central office of the BIA in Washington, D.C. who did nothing more than Citizen Potawatomi blood-degree appeals, about 3,000 of the blood-degree appeals when I first took office. When I became chairman, it had grown to 4,000 or 5,000 and I was in the room when a guy named Joe Delaware said, ‘I have a solution to the Potawatomi blood degree problem. We'll resolve all this. The first mention in any document, church, federal government, anywhere, anyhow that mentions this Indian with a non-Potawatomi language name, he's a half.' Well, they were dunking Potawatomis and giving them Christian names in 1702, full-blooded ones. If you were dealing with the white man, you used your white name and if you were dealing with the Indians you used your Indian name, like everybody else was doing. And so it was an absurd solution. I told him, I said, ‘That's nuts. That's just crazy. You're going to get another 5,000 blood-degree appeals over this.' He said, ‘Well, that's the way it's going to be.' Well, that was the impetus for our coming back and establishing, ‘What are the conditions of citizenship?' And we stopped calling our folks 'members' like a club. They're 'citizens.' And it finally dawned on us that being a Citizen Potawatomi Indian is not racial. It's legal and political.

If they...according to the United States government, if a federally recognized Indian tribe issues you a certificate of citizenship based on rules they make, you are an American Indian, you are a member of that tribe. And you're not part one, not a leg or an ear or your nose but not the rest. You're not part Citizen Potawatomi, you're all Citizen Potawatomi. The business of blood degree was invented so that at some point that the government established, tribes would breed themselves out of existence and the government wouldn't be obligated to honor their treaties anymore. That's the whole idea! That's the whole idea of blood degree and we're playing into it all over this country now over divvying up the gaming money. But I'm not going to get into that. But the business of blood degree, the 10 largest tribes in the United States, nine of them enrolled by descendency and that includes us. We changed it from blood degree to descendency, which was the only reasonable way to do it because we had no way to tell because of this guy in the log cabin in Sugar Creek was what we had.

And then we had permutations of that over the next eight generations that became even more absurd and Potawatomis had a propensity...we're only 40 families and all 31,000 of us had a tendency to marry each other. So when one Potawatomi would marry another Potawatomi -- I'm not saying brothers and sisters or first cousins -- but when they'd marry another Potawatomi then you got into who was what and it was...and this business of the certified degree of Indian blood was ruled to be unlawful, to discriminate against American Indians in the provision of federal services based on CDIB. It's supposed to be based on tribal membership, not the BIA issuing you a certified degree of Indian blood card. A full-blooded Indian who is a member of eight different tribes, whose family comes from eight different tribes, not any white blood, would not be eligible to be enrolled in many tribes. They had absolutely no European blood, would not be eligible simply because he was enrolled in multiple tribes."

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

John "Rocky" Barrett: Citizen Potawatomi's Inclusive Approach to Citizenship

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

A 3-minute clip of an interview with Chairman Barrett describing how Citizen Potawatomi Nation created a government structure and constitution that worked for the nation's large and very dispersed population.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Barrett, John "Rocky." "Constitutional Reform and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's Path to Self-Determination." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 28, 2009. Interview.

"We had to make some extraordinary efforts to bring our people back into involvement in the tribal government because we had some extraordinary historical events that dispersed our people, and there was a detachment from the tribal culture of 27,000 members. Nine thousand of them, basically 9,500, of them are in Oklahoma. The remaining are in eight, sort of, enclaves around the United States in California and Kansas and...well, here in Arizona there are about 1,500 in this immediate area. Where there are these groups of folks who have been two and three generations removed from Oklahoma, bringing them back into the culture and making the tribal governments something of value to those people that would make them -- or make them want to -- reassert their culture become a part of it. The tribe has to make itself of value to its people. And to accomplish that, you have to reach them first. And so this structure of government that we have now and that we have been evolving into since 1985 is unique in that it was, that was required because of the, this distribution of people of where our membership is located...The 2007 Constitution created a legislative body of sixteen, eight from inside of Oklahoma where we have approximately 9500 members -- a third of our population, but all of the tribes' territory, all of the tribes' assets, all of the tribes' revenues, and all of the areas, the territory over which it exerts governmental jurisdiction. And then two-thirds of our population are outside of Oklahoma, where we have for a 25-year period had a form of tribal consultation that we have promised would eventually be represented in the tribal legislative body, and have some input on funding and how the tribe performs its services. The concern on writing the constitution was how do you balance this territory, and assets, and jurisdiction with this population issue? The compromise was to put eight in the legislature from Oklahoma, eight in the legislature from outside of Oklahoma, and force a deadlock if the two can't come to a meeting of the minds. And that's basically what we have is a mandatory compromise between the interest of the larger portion of the population, and where the larger portion of the assets and the revenue is."