Cultural Affairs

Jeff Corntassel: Sustainable Self-Determination: Re-envisioning Indigenous Governance, Leadership and Resurgence

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University of Arizona
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Scholar Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee) lays out his comprehensive explanation for what sustainable self-determination entails for Indigenous peoples in the 21st century, and provides examples of some of the ways that he and others are engaging in small and large acts of resurgence that contribute to the process of sustainable self-determination.

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Citation

Corntassel, Jeff. "Sustainable Self-Determination: Re-envisioning Indigenous Governance, Leadership and Resurgence." Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholars Series. American Indian Studies, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 16, 2014. Presentation.

Jeff Corntassel:

"[Cherokee language]. So my name is Jeff Corntassel, I'm from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and from the Wolf Clan. And it's a real honor to be here on Tohono O'odham territory and also where the Pascua Yaqui peoples are. Thank you all so much for making me feel at home, back at home. Manley Begay, April, Matt, also Jonathan, Gavin's over here, Ann did a lot of the work as well, and so I wanted to pay tribute to all the people that made this possible and to really make me feel at home over the last couple of days. I think I'm going to start as well by honoring my partner Tina Matthew and the territory where she comes from, Secwepemc'ulecw and Simpcw First Nation and her family as well. I've come a long way to be here and it's really awesome to be back in this beautiful territory and to visit with you all. Thank you for coming out tonight.

I thought I'd start off really talking a little bit about Vine Deloria, Jr. since this is named after him and I said purposely when these guys asked me I said, ‘I'm not going to do a PowerPoint because Vine hated PowerPoints.' So I said, ‘All right, I'm not going to do that.' And to tell you a little bit about how he's influenced some of the work that I've done and then kind of segue into the sustainable self-determination work that I've been doing more lately.

Well, Vine Deloria, Jr. affected us all I think in different ways and he really started to get at my political consciousness, especially with Custer Died for Your Sins. And that book still holds up if you read it and one of the phrases that came out of that for me was, ‘What we need is a 'cultural leave-us-alone agreement' in spirit and in fact.' And I always look back at that quote and say, ‘What does that mean? What does that look like, a cultural leave-us-alone agreement?' And so I thought about that over the years, especially while I was here in grad school at the University of Arizona in political science, and I missed Vine Deloria by one year. So he'd already left for University of Colorado by the time I got here, but I really got Vine through a couple of folks that worked closely with him so David Wilkins from Lumbee Nation and Tom Holm -- who's a mentor as well -- from Cherokee and Creek. And so these two folks really influenced a lot of the work that I did. They actually kept me sane in political science. As we know, these places can be hostile, these places can be contentious, especially for Indigenous scholars so these are folks that took me out, got me out to sweats and got me...kept my focus on what was important, especially from my nation's perspective, from my family perspective.

Well, Vine, I heard lots of stories about Vine when I got here and all of them are true. Dan McCool tells a story, he was in a couple of years before I came out, of a story of getting Vine out to happy hour and the grad students all wanted to get Vine out and Vine was notorious, he was also known as ‘Wine' Deloria in some circles. Vine was notorious for whooping it up sometimes. And so they finally got him out to happy hour and Vine drank an entire vase that looked like a gallon of coffee. And they're saying, ‘Well, what are you doing? We're here to drink alcohol.' And Vine said, ‘Well, unlike the rest of you jokers, I'm going to actually go home and write after this is done.' So it gives you a sense of Vine's commitment. He was always writing, he was always thinking about his next project.

The other thing that influenced me a lot with Vine Deloria is he was really...I started going to the Western Social Sciences Association meeting because he was going. And so I started going to that meeting to see what this was all about. Who is this guy and what does he have to say? And so I remember the first time I went in 1996 in Colorado. I went to the panel and Vine wasn't there and so they started the panel and they said, ‘Oh, we'll just stop it when Vine gets here.' And sure enough, Vine comes walking in, he's got white slippers on, looks like he's slept in his car. Comes walking in and he just starts talking and everyone's silent, just listens as he engages the audience and that's the kind of effect he had on people. He really motivated folks, he was a really powerful speaker and a real, I think, strong mentor to a lot of different people.

In 2002, Vine gave a really impassioned kind of discussion and lecture about, ‘Where's the academy going?' And at the time I was at Virginia Tech and I was wondering, ‘Where am I going in this academy? What am I doing here at the university?' At that time we were fighting to get a Native Studies program going and getting a lot of negative feedback on that and I was thinking, ‘If this is all there is, I don't know if I want to stay in this kind of environment.' There wasn't much support for other Indigenous faculty. There were only about three of us at the time and we had a hard time kind of mobilizing folks towards change.

And so I went to this 2002 talk that Vine gave and he just laid it out. I think he'd already retired at that point, but he basically called academics out, said, ‘You're all a bunch of cowards.' He said, ‘Academics are fearful. They're fearful of new ideas.' So he kind of said the things that I needed to hear at that time about what is the responsibility of a scholar, especially Indigenous scholar, in this field and in this area. What are our responsibilities? He said, ‘We have to earn our exalted status. We have to show folks that the work we're doing is relatable to community.' In other words, we have responsibilities that run far beyond the confines of this space. And so those words stuck with me and that actually caused me to leave Virginia Tech and go all the way up to Canada, up to British Columbia, to Lekwungen Territory --otherwise known as Victoria -- and took up a position there with the Indigenous Governance Program.

So Vine had an impact on my thinking, but also where I wanted to be, where I wanted to situate myself. I wanted to situate myself where I felt that that community ethic, that notion of responsibility was honored and so I found that to this point in the Indigenous Governance Program. And my colleague Taiaiake Alfred, who's a Mohawk scholar, has written pretty extensively on leadership and other questions of Indigenous resurgence. So Vine had that impact on me. He also had written Tai's, our program director's...he had written an evaluation of our program and so we have a link to Vine through the program as well. I'll just read the quote from his letter.

‘The Indigenous Governance Program is attracting increasingly positive response to its programs and perspectives and promises to become an international center from which a variety of new ideas will issue forth. Alfred would be a highly recruited scholar in the U.S. if people even suspected that he would be convinced to move to the U.S. His loyalty to the Canadian peoples make it inevitable that people from many nations will seek out the program. The University is a place where more can be accomplished. The next step certainly at the University is to sponsor a variety of international consultations to enhance the work already being done.'

And as Manley pointed out, we've tried to do just that. Vine had that, I guess that vision for our program and so we've been reaching out to lately...well, we started with Hawaiians, Kanaka Maoli people and set up a partnership with them that has been really...I'd say really rewarding but also has really set up deeper relationships in terms of restoring some of the land based practices and water based practices that occur on their territory as well as in Victoria. And more recently, got back from Aotearoa from Māori territory and Māori country and basically trying to set up an exchange with them.

So Vine's had a huge impact on my work and my scholarship and I think the question becomes, ‘How do we recognize that accomplishment? How do we recognize his contribution to the current-day scholarship?' Because it's not always seen, you don't hear people citing Deloria as much as they used to, but really I think Deloria, because of how prolific he was, but also I guess how generous he was with his time, he opened a lot of doors I think for a lot of us to do deeper engagement and deeper scholarship, to be able to challenge the Bering Strait theory, otherwise known as the 'BS theory,' to be able to challenge us at a deeper level. We can rely on Red Earth, White Lies, we can rely on some of that work to open up new and perhaps deeper engagements with these topics and to challenge some of the so-called findings that are coming from the academy.

So I think he -- near the end of his life -- was disappointed with scholars, especially Indigenous scholars, for not taking enough of a stand. So I stand with that as well, that challenge is still there and what are we doing to in a sense empower or to strengthen our communities? And are we building as he asked in one of his later editorials, ‘Are we building nations or are we dissolving communities?' These are powerful questions and I think Vine wasn't one to beat around the bush. He was one to give it straight to you and I appreciate that perspective.

So that's kind of my tribute to Vine in terms of how he's impacted my work, but also my work is influenced by other people, by my family, by my relatives and all those things give it meaning, they give it a deeper meaning and a deeper sense that this is for something. This is for something that we might call resurgence, we might call Indigenous nationhood, we might call it by different names, but this is for something deeper that goes beyond the academy, goes beyond the halls of these institutions.

I start with a question or a couple of questions just to challenge you just like I challenge myself with these questions. How will your ancestors recognize you as Indigenous or if you're not Indigenous how will they recognize you by that, whether it's a cultural identity by that group that you identify with, how will they recognize you? How would you be recognizable? I'm not looking for an answer from you, but I pose that to you because that's been a motivating question for me as I've thought about some of these questions of sustainability. How will they be recognizing you? Is it by the way you dress? Is it by the way you carry yourself? Is it by the language that you speak? Is it by how you look? Is it by how you participate in ceremony? How will you be recognizable? And by that same token, looking at our ancestors, how will you be recognized by future generations? How will you be recognized? Will it be your contributions? Will it be the stance that you took for your community? How will you be recognized? So I use these as motivational questions, but also to guide my work as a constant feedback. We have to constantly question ourselves in terms of what we're doing and so this has been... These are some key questions for me as I move forward. Well, I called this 'sustainable self-determination' and it sounds like a fancy title, fancy words and I'll give you kind of the reasoning behind putting those words together.

It started with a challenge. Tai and myself started work with a group...with a nation -- Akwesasne Mohawks -- and they had basically one of the most polluted rivers on Turtle Island. The St. Lawrence Seaway is one of the most polluted rivers ever. And it's a result of waste from Alcoa, the aluminum company, and also from GM, the car company. Fifty years of waste, 50 years of toxins that have been dumped into that water and so this became a Superfund cleanup [site]. And the question for me became, ‘Where do we start? How do you reclaim territory that's poisoned? How do you reclaim traditional practices, whether it's gathering medicines or even eating the fish from the river when they're telling you not to even consume anything from that water? How do we hunt when the deer are eating...or drinking toxic water? What are the risks?' And so this began with an impossible question and I still haven't felt like I've answered it satisfactorily, but I'll tell you what we did.

So we were told that we had to demonstrate cultural harm and so kind of an impossible situation, right? How do you demonstrate cultural harm? What is harm? So we kind of did what I think a lot of folks would do, we talked to elders, we talked to folks who lived on the land and continue to live on the land and we said, ‘Kind of establish a baseline. How are these areas used and how can they be continued to be used?' And we started to look at different areas where they have been interrupted. You can think of hunting and fishing as being interrupted, basket weaving, gathering medicines, all these different areas. So we started to develop a larger picture of how this harm had taken place and also how this had been interrupted throughout generations. When you don't go out and gather the medicines, you may not be transmitting that information to your younger ones, you may not be speaking the language as much relating to those medicines so how do you convey that sense of loss, but also how do you restore it or reclaim it?

And so we kind of developed...in the meantime, everyone wanted us to set kind of a monetary amount to value the land and the water, as if anyone can do that. In other words to say, put a price on it. And we didn't do that. We refused to do that. Instead we said, ‘We're going to put a price on the relationships that were damaged and the cost that would accrue to restore and regain those relationships at a base level.' So we asked for millions of dollars and in order to restore these relationships and what we did is we put the value on the organizations that were doing this work, whether it's language revitalization, whether it's elders who were going out and hunting and fishing, elders who were gathering those medicines, and that's where our effort was going to be and the effort was going to be in that teaching process, getting a master-apprenticeship program going again where we prepare folks to take on this role and responsibility as a teacher. It's hard. You think about the difficulty and the time it takes to bring yourself up to speed to take on three or four people or maybe more and have the patience to deal with, just like a lot of elders have had the patience to deal with me and my stupid questions over the years, have the patience to deal with someone who's starting from ground zero. So a lot of the money was going into preparing these elders to take on apprentices and also to develop priorities for that community and for Akwesasne.

And so I'm proud to say that Akwesasne is now putting this into practice and it's just starting up. Actually the first round of apprentices are starting up this fall and so I'll keep you posted. But it's a work in progress like so many of these restoration projects that we have. These are huge challenges and the water still isn't totally safe. A lot of folks have made the conscious decision to eat fish from that water even though it may damage them in the long run. Why? As I said, it's too important to let go. These fish nurture us and so a lot of folks have begun to fish and to restore that relationship with the water. I say this to say as well, we didn't get the money that we were hoping for from Alcoa or GM and classic colonial maneuvering, if you could have...I wish I could have recorded that phone call, I would have played it right now. Imagine GM execs and their lawyers and Alcoa execs and their lawyers and then the Attorney General of New York all having this conversation and everyone saying, ‘Oh, we don't understand this study that you're doing.' GM said, ‘Basically what happened before, that was the old GM. We're the new GM. So we're not responsible for what the old GM did.' These are classic techniques that happen. Alcoa was saying, ‘Well, we weren't responsible for all this pollution so prove which aspects of the pollution where we're responsible for.' Also kind of impossible to do. How do you...there's not a stream that says, ‘Alcoa.' So again, not the kind of money that we were hoping for, but it's a start and I think it's also a good lesson to think about how do we frame these questions especially that are imposed on us? We're dealing with it in the best way possible, but with constraints. We're dealing with a Superfund cleanup, we're dealing with environmental protection and we're dealing with basically the reclamation of these territories and these waters.

So that started the, I guess, started me thinking along the lines of what is sustainability from an Indigenous perspective? And we've seen the discourse on self-determination and it's pretty rich, it's pretty long, but at the end of the day these are political or these are framed often as political and legal rights, and the rights discourse from my perspective can only take us so far. As important as the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is that was adopted in 2007, despite the objections by -- I always have to point this out -- the objections by the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, who voted against it, and they have since rescinded their original objections and so in 2010 I think the U.S. adopted it and same year for Canada as well and same year for New Zealand. So they've since overturned their original objections. But in doing so, they've only endorsed it. In fact Canada, if you read Canada's endorsement of it, they said, ‘We endorse the spirit of this act. We endorse the spirit of the declaration. However, we don't agree with especially the parts about land reclamation, we don't agree with that part.' So they've selectively taken parts of it and have chosen which aspects to look at.

So self-determination, it was/is probably one of the most contentious phrases on the planet, especially if you're a nation state. Self-determination is deemed as a challenge to existing states by the U.S., by Canada; why? Why would it be deemed a challenge to existing states? There's that notion that all peoples have the right to self-determination. Why is that a challenge? Any guesses? This is the interactive part of the talk by the way. Yes?"

Audience member:

"...Why would I challenge you?"

Jeff Corntassel:

"What's that?"

Audience member:

"I'm here in your country, why would I challenge you?"

Jeff Corntassel:

"Why would you challenge me? Yeah? So why would you challenge me? Because you might think that I'm a threat. There you go. So a threat, it's deemed a threat. And what is the threat of Indigenous nationhood to states? What's the threat? Any sense? Yeah.

Audience Member:

"There's nothing to fear but fear itself."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Okay. There's fear. And what's the fear? What's the underriding fear of recognition of Indigenous peoples as nations?"

Audience member:

"They lose the power over the land."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Lose the power over the land. They lose power over the water. They lose the power over the air. It's that fear of claims on the land that the state itself will not recognize. In fact, Article 46 kind of gives it away. Article 46, if you ever read the U.N. Declaration, basically says, ‘Self-determination,' I'm paraphrasing. ‘Self-determination is a right. However, it cannot legally impair or break up an existing state.' So anything that's threatening to break up an existing state is not deemed a legitimate act of self-determination. So I say that just so you understand and you probably already know this, but rights have limitations, rights are ultimately granted by the state, the very state that on a daily basis tries to erase our histories, tries to destroy us as Indigenous nations. So these rights are subjective in a lot of cases and we can say all we want that we have inherent rights and I agree. I think as Indigenous peoples we have inherent rights, we have self-determining authority, but the rub comes with the recognition. Who's going to recognize that?

Glen Coulthard has written some really good work, a Dene scholar, has written some really good work on the politics of that recognition. The moment we submit to state authority and say, ‘Recognize us,' we automatically change the nature of that relationship.' If we're talking about self-determining authority, we need to assert that right. If we're talking about that as a responsibility we have to our land and to our people, we need to practice that, not ask for it. And so from that standpoint, self-determination is something that is asserted, it's not something that's gifted. It's something that you have to take, it's something that you have to practice. Otherwise, that sense of self-determination atrophies, that sense of self-determination gets smaller and smaller. And I would say that the rights discourse compartmentalizes all these things. Self-determination is much more than self-governance. Self-determination is much more than economic development. It's all of those things. It's all those things that our communities need to survive.

And so for this reason, I started to think about, what if we put sustainability next to self-determination, because it's not enough just to have that right recognized, it's more about sustaining these relationships that have kept us as nations for thousands of years. It's about sustaining these responsibilities we have to the land. It's about sustaining our families. So sustainability becomes kind of an interesting term to throw in there. I know it's kind of a buzz word and sustainability comes with its problems as a term. That initial 1987 report that talks about sustainability is all about basically...I'll just read the quote. ‘Meeting needs of present generations without compromising the needs of future generations.' Well, I would argue that it's more than needs. These are responsibilities. So needs are different.

And it's also about having a different sense of time. Which future generations? Are we talking about one generation or are we talking about seven generations? So I started thinking more deeply about some of these notions of sustainability and from a Cherokee perspective there's a term, [Cherokee language]. Basically we will continue on, we will persist despite hardship. We're going to continue, even if we lose someone, even if someone in our community is lost or if we lose people, we're going to persist as nations. [Cherokee language]. And then I started thinking about this notion of [Cherokee language], which is on the surface it's translated as 'peace,' but if you look at it more deeply, it's more about living in healthy, harmonious relationships. It's about having...it's about following the natural process of things. So it's much deeper than a sense of peace. It's about living healthy relationships.

And for this reason, I look to folks like the late Patricia Monture who talks about self-determination is about relationships. Communities cannot be self-governing unless members of those communities are well and living in a responsible way. We start to get at the notion of health and well-being. We have to go far beyond just this notion of political/legal rights. We have to start thinking more deeply about the health and wellbeing of our communities, but also this different sense of time that we have in relation to the state.

It may surprise you to know, or may not surprise you to know, that about 70 percent of the states in the existing system, over 200 states, are less than 75 years old. They're our grandparents' age. States are fairly young for the most part. If you think about when the state system started 1648, it's really not that long ago. States in the bigger scheme of things are not these age-old institutions. In fact, corporations are actually much older, but we'll get into that later. States have a different timeline and it doesn't mean that this is the only way to live. I would argue that if we have 5,000 to 8,000 Indigenous nations throughout the world, those are 5,000 to 8,000 different ways that we live as Indigenous people, as those are 5,000 to 8,000 different alternatives to the existing state system, whether we're talking about Indigenous economies, whether we're talking about Indigenous systems of trade, whether we're talking about treaty relationships. Those are different perspectives on how to live and how to live in a good way.

The other person that inspired me a lot in this discussion was Winona LaDuke, an Anishinaabe scholar. And she said at one point, she said, ‘If you can't feed yourself, I don't know if you can be a sovereign again.' That's pretty powerful. ‘If you can't feed yourself, I don't know if you can be a sovereign again.' Wow! How many of us as communities can feed ourselves? I think of Cherokee Nation. We're 330,000 people that are part of the nation and we're living...I'd say about 60 percent live outside the territory, live outside the Oklahoma boundaries of those 14 counties. How many can feed ourselves? And I'm not just talking about going to the grocery store. I'm talking about sustaining ourselves on our original foods, on our traditional foods. If you're from Cheam First Nation for example in British Columbia, you can't live without the salmon. You can't be the salmon people without the salmon. You can't be the corn people without the corn. So if you can't feed yourselves, can you be a sovereign? So this stuck with me, this was a big challenge. What does it mean to be a sovereign? What does it mean to be a self-determining authority if you can't actually feed yourself, if you can't sustain yourself?

So these are ways to challenge my thinking and maybe deepen our thinking about sustainability, but there's a dark side to sustainability as we know. We can talk about sustainable campuses and we talk about that a lot, going green, we can talk about recycling, but these are just surface things. There's another...if you start looking at the etymology of sustainability, this scholar Medavoy who wrote this article basically about sustainability and the origin of that term, you see that it has a darker kind of deeper meaning. You can, for example, sustain an injury or withstand an injury. So if you sustain an injury, what do you do? What do you do? Yeah. I like the visual. That's good. So if we think of a state, a country, as sustaining an injury, what does that mean? How can we bring that metaphor back to the state or back to a country, a country's relationship let's say with Indigenous peoples? Yeah."

Audience member:

"Sustaining an injury would be like suffering from injury or having to deal with it."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Okay. Having to deal with it. Tolerating it. ‘I'm tolerating this injury. I'm tolerating this threat to my self-determining authority. I'm tolerating these nations that are actually making claims on my territory.' So in that sense this notion of sustainability has a different meaning. It means sustaining capitalism. It means sustaining the market system at all costs. So we can think of sustainability as kind of running the full...think of the environmental aspect of sustainability, but you can also think of the other side of that continuum that it's about sustaining a market system that doesn't relate to an Indigenous economy, that doesn't relate to our localized ethic of living on the land and living with the land.

So with all these things in mind, I started to put together this notion of sustainable self-determination and... I was going to say an example that I use on this darker notion of sustainability is right at University of Victoria. So Goldcorp... incidentally, 70 percent of the mining companies throughout the world are in Canada. Seventy percent of the mining companies are in Canada. So Goldcorp is one of those mining companies. It's based in Vancouver and Goldcorp is responsible for some pretty severe human rights violations around the world, especially against Indigenous nations. So in Guatemala for example, the Marlin Mine is one of the most toxic environments in the country, in Guatemala. The water is simply unusable. It may be unusable for...for 100, maybe 150 years. There is cyanide in the pit. So there's cyanide leaching into the land and leaching into food products. And a lot of folks, a lot of Mayans who have challenged the presence of that mine have been targeted for assassination, targeted for...basically for police actions by the state and by the corporation.

So Goldcorp made a donation to the University of Victoria in 2013, $500,000, which is small change for them, but to the School of Business. And what was the program that they funded for the School of Business? The Center for Social and Sustainable Innovation. So here's a company that is...it's akin to money laundering, that is putting money that was used to exploit Indigenous peoples into a program on sustainability. And so that's just another example. They funded several other projects at universities, but it's just another example of how that term sustainability can be co-opted or used in very negative ways.

So sustainable self-determination, what are some Indigenous approaches to sustainability. I mentioned [Cherokee language], that's a Cherokee perspective. There was a salmon nation study in 2008 undertaken by David Hall and he looked at some of the Indigenous approaches to sustainability, especially on the West Coast. And kind of the findings ranged from living from the land without spoiling it to one of the definitions or perspectives that I really like, sustaining the fullness of health that needs to be there for us to thrive and for everyone else to thrive. This notion that it's not just about our human relationships. It's about the natural world in terms of thriving. Giving back more than you take. And at the core of a lot of these things were concepts of renewal, renewing that responsibility, renewing that relationship to the land. Reciprocity, respect and humility.

So for me, sustainable self-determination, it's not going to be an end-all to understanding how we work in the world as Indigenous nations, but it's a way to maybe think more deeply about those relationships. It's about evolving Indigenous livelihoods, food security, community governance, relationships to our homelands and waterways, ceremonial lives practiced both locally land regionally, that enable the transmission of these values and practices to future generations. And that's where a lot of my focus has been lately.

I mentioned that master apprenticeship program and I have a seven-year-old daughter named Leila and I think about how am I transmitting these values and principles to my seven year old? How are we transmitting these things to future generations? Are we doing it on a computer program? Are we doing it on Twitter? Which I recently cut off by the way. I'm a recovering Twitter addict. How are we transmitting these values? Are we doing it in a face-to-face way? Are we doing it in a more indirect way? How are we transmitting these values and principles? And what do they look like? We know that our cultures, our traditions evolve so what do these things look like in today's practice? Are they being taught in English, are they being taught in the Indigenous language of your community? Are they being taught on the land or are they being taught in a classroom?

So I began to think more fully about the transmission and how these values and principles are transmitted to future generations. And in doing this I think it's safe to say that the process by which we engage in sustainable self-determination is just as important as the outcome. The outcome may not be satisfactory to a lot of us, just like it's not satisfactory to the Akwesasne of Mohawk. That is not enough to say, ‘We can pay $20 million and restore this master-apprenticeship program and begin to restore land-based and water-based practices.' That's not enough. It's got to go much deeper than that. It's got to go much further for several generations. 50 years of interrupting that means at least 50 years of reintegrating those practices, at least. We can't talk about these things seriously unless we're talking about it in a truly sustainable way.

The process is just as important as the outcome, because it tells us how we're going to govern as Indigenous peoples. That process is governance, that process is how we realign our roles and responsibilities with the urgency of protecting our territories, with the urgency of enhancing our lives as Indigenous peoples, as Indigenous nations.

I like...one of the...this takes shape in a lot of different ways. One of the artists that I really like and look up to is Shan Goshorn who's Eastern Cherokee, but she does a lot of work in Western Cherokee as well. And Shan is...one of the things that she's undertaken is basket making. So Jonathan, there's probably, how many folks do you know of that make those double-walled baskets? There's probably only a handful, right? Not many, right? I'd say probably 12 or so, maybe 15 people that make these double-walled baskets. So very few people are able to engage in this kind of what we'd call traditional basket making. Shan basically relearned how to make the double-walled basket by talking to elders, but also looking at some of the baskets that were made over time.

And she also took it one step further. She made it with different materials. Rather than use honeysuckle or some of these other materials, she used strips of paper. Strips of paper actually have the names of all the students from the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. So here she was, she was tying historical events, tying great trauma that's happened in our communities from the boarding schools and tying it to a contemporary practice of basket making. That's the kind of thing that I'm talking about when I talk about sustainable self-determination in the sense of...the core of those ceremonies, the core of that basket making is still there and we're using different materials now.

Just like we can think of some of Dan Wildcat's work on Red Alert!. We can use new materials but we can still...we can still draw on those old village sites to decide how we're going to live and how we're going to be clustered. We don't want plain old suburbs. We want to talk about how can we live as Indigenous peoples in a different way and it doesn't mean that we can't use new methods or new materials. Again, it shows the continuity but it also shows the adaptation.

Well, we have...we know that despite all these best efforts when we talk about sustainable self-determination, we're up against a lot of politics of distraction, what Graham Smith would call the politics of distraction. We have things that get in our way, things that distract us. In Canada, I mentioned rights earlier and I would kind of put next to rights we have responsibilities. Responsibilities are at the core of what we're talking about when we talk about rights. And along those same lines, when we have reconciliation, we're also talking about resurgence.

So reconciliation in Canada as it's been framed, has been framed in a real narrow way. It's been framed in a way that is limiting land claims. It's framed in a way that is actually limiting the claims of survivors of residential school, which we're talking about the forcible relocation of Indigenous peoples from their homes and from their communities into these residential schools beginning in the late 1800s and going all the way up until 1996 was when the last residential school closed. Reconciliation is framed in a very narrow way through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where you have a common experience payment that you apply for, $10,000. So your time in residential school is actually monetized. $10,000 for the first year and $4,000 for each year after. And you actually have to file an application. The application is now over, that deadline is already passed, but you can see this is a very narrow vision of reconciliation. If we think of reconciliation from the perspective of Canada, it's more or less moving on from the past. This sense of...in fact when you read the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] mandate they say, ‘We need to put the past behind us and move onto a new chapter.' This notion of forgive and forget, this notion that we need to turn a page of history.

Well, reconciliation I'd say goes much further from an Indigenous perspective. Reconciliation means -- as one person's put it -- not having to say you're sorry twice. It means it stops. It also means that there has to be massive restitution for the crimes and for the injustices that were committed. So we can't just speak about residential school survivors. We also have to speak about the land, we have to speak about the families that were disrupted. We have to speak about it in its entirety. We can't just focus and selectively focus on particular aspects of reconciliation. And so the TRC, which is going to wrap up its work next year, and I just bring that up in case you aren't aware, it's doing some interesting work. I think it's doing some important work on some levels, but it's limited in terms of what it can actually accomplish and I would say that really what we have and what we're talking about as Indigenous peoples is resurgence. Resurgence is kind of the alternative to reconciliation. Resurgence is about retaking our territories.

How many of you heard about Idle No More that happened about a year ago, a couple years ago. Idle No More swept through a lot of folks' communities and we had the Round Dance Revolution, we had a lot of things going on. What led to Idle No More? What led to that movement? Any sense?"

Audience member:

"Hunger strike."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Hunger strike, okay. It actually came after, but yeah. But yeah, Theresa Spence, Chief Spence's hunger strike was part of that. What led to that movement, that widespread Indigenous movement? Yeah."

Audience member:

"The legislation that would have removed a lot of protection of various waterways."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Exactly. It was about legislation, Bill C-45 and some of the other subsequent legislation that was now removing water as a protected resource and was also removing Indigenous voices from having a say in terms of what would be done with that water. So it prompted people to action. But Idle No More isn't some anomaly. We've been resisting in different ways over the centuries. And so I would argue that Idle No More is just one of many spikes along the way of Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous resistance. And so Idle No More at this point has kind of fizzled out, for the same reasons that a lot of movements kind of lose their steam. Too many people taking credit for what happened and also trying to over-determine how future protests will take place. So setting up chapter members who will sanction whether or not it's an Idle No More event. You have to get the label. That and a little thing like trying to trademark the name Idle No More. So all these things led to I think what you'd say is maybe a fizzling out of Idle No More, but we know that there are lots of other movements out there that are taking place on a daily basis in order to fight for the land.

Another, I guess, movement that relates to this is in Hawaii. And so a book you all should take a look at, it just came out recently. It's called The Seeds we Planted by Noelani Goodyear. Basically Noelani Goodyear started a charter school, Hawaiian charter school, Hālau Kū Māna and basically this charter school is to develop land-based literacy for the students there. So it's developed-land based and water-based practices through experiential knowledge and functions unlike most schools in the sense that you actually spend time out on the loi, which is basically the taro fields. And Taro, if you haven't been to Hawaii or don't have a sense of that, Taro is basically like the elder brother of the Kanaka Maoli. So they trace their genealogy from the Taro or the Kalo. And so it's about reinvigorating that relationship by claiming park lands. So actually claiming park land and reintegrating that into a taro field. Taro fields require a lot of water. It's kind of like a rice paddy. And so these students now are working to rebuild the taro fields, rebuild the loi and they do that as part of their time at the school and they rotate through several...there's basically a water-based aspect of learning to navigate. So navigation skills and...I forgot there's another land-based or medicine aspect. So building new schools that look unlike the schools that we think about.

The Zapatistas actually have a school, a living school of liberty and built on this kind of same function, experiential knowledge and also a place to come together, to strategize about important things that are confronting communities. So we have to think more differently, we have to think more creatively about ways we can contend with the state, but also ways that we can resurge our communities.

And we also have to think about our relationships. Dr. Begay mentioned Kituwah Mound, which is a sacred place for us as Cherokees and this is where we kept that sacred fire. This is where people came from miles away to take the embers from the center of that mound back to their clan towns. Kituwah Mound, that relationship was disrupted right around the 1770s. And I say disrupted in the sense that Cherokee presence was erased from it by actually killing Cherokees and preventing them from being on that land. It was interrupted, but that relationship continued on because people even up until the 1980s were bringing fire...bringing ashes from their own personal fireplaces and bringing them to the mound. So it doesn't look like it used to, we're not necessarily talking about clan towns, but bringing them from their own personal fireplaces and bringing dirt back from Kituwah. That continuity is still there. That relationship is still there and it's still being honored.

Another thing that happened in Victoria or another kind of ongoing project that relates to relationship building is something called the Community Tool Shed. And so I mentioned that we live on Lekwungen Territory. So Cheryl Bryce and her family have been managing something called camas or kwetlal for thousands of years. Well, it turns out a lot of their territory has been taken over by park lands. So how do you manage this food that's been a staple for your community, been a staple for trade and a staple for sustaining your people for thousands of years? How do you manage it when it's no longer on your 'reserve'? How do you manage that?

Well, she started a Community Tool Shed, and basically called for Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks to come together and begin reclaiming traditional places and traditional place names like Meegan, which is another word for Beacon Hill Park. So we go to Meegan and we actually remove invasive species. So you actually take, probably the most invasive is Scottish Broom, you take those species out and you put them in a big pile and you put them in the parking lot. You take them off the land and sure, you get challenged, you get challenged by people walking through the park saying, ‘Hey, this is my park. What are you doing removing these daffodils? which are also invasive, ‘what are you doing disrupting my enjoyment of this park?' Well, through this Community Tool Shed that she started in 2011, it's starting to build a larger awareness but it's also...she's building in kind of people that will act in solidarity because she's been chased off lots of parks. She's been chased off of her own territory so she said, ‘Enough is enough. I have to get help. I have to seek out ways for people to tap into this, but also to show that they have a responsibility to this land as well.' And the last I saw, the camas was coming back stronger than ever in some of these places where we've pulled out the broom. So it's a regeneration of this...of the kwetlal, of the camas, but it's also a regeneration of our food, of traditional food for Cheryl and her family so they hold pit cooks and they cook up this...it's a bulb, it's kind of like a starchy bulb like potato. It's potato mixed with a garlic is kind of the nearest...and an onion, those three things somehow mixed together. But these are traditional foods. So getting back to Winona LaDuke's question, ‘If you can't feed yourself, how can you be a sovereign?' So Cheryl's answering that question. She's asserting herself, determining authority, but she's also saying, ‘This is our road back. This is our way back to reinvigorating this relationship.'

Well, I'll start closing up. I've gone on long enough. But the way I've started to think about these things is it's kind of a large almost abstract way when you think about it is concepts like sustainable self-determination. So for me it makes more sense when you break it down into every day acts of resurgence. What are the things that we might do every day? What are things you do every day to make your life meaningful and to relate to the struggles of Indigenous nations or to your own nation? What are the things that you do on a day to day basis? Beyond kind of this notion of making the campus cleaner, beyond this notion of the State of Arizona, but what are you doing in response to the needs of Indigenous nations that are from this territory? Localize it.

In addition, what are you doing for your own community, every day acts of resurgence and I think of that...you think about these are every day acts of renewal, whether we're saying a prayer just like Jonathan said that blessing to start us off right and really appreciate that. We do our prayers, we speak our language, even if it's just one or two words, we're able to give life to these...to our language, we're able to give life to these actions. Every day acts kind of break down the larger picture and give us some tangible things that we can do. What are some tangible things that you can do to honor those relationships you have with your community?

Another future strategy is decolonizing your diet. And it sounds incredibly difficult, but how are you...how can you challenge yourself in terms of what you eat? We know that 'traditional diets'...there's all sorts of... University of Michigan is actually running a ‘decolonize your diet' challenge. We know this is incredibly difficult. There's the 100 miles kind of radius that folks are focusing on, local food movements and all these other things. But what does it mean to actually decolonize your diet? I use that as a way to challenge myself, but you as well. What does that mean if we're talking about decolonizing our diets? It means we have to change our eating habits, but also it means we have to change the way we relate to the earth. I've taken up moose hunting since I've been up in Canada and I have some crazy moose hunting stories I'll share another time maybe, but moose are pretty damn big, but a moose can sustain a family for a long time, just one moose. And so there's a difference between hunting something and going to the grocery store. There's a huge difference there in terms of how you relate to that food, but also how you relate to the land.

If you think about stuff you've grown before...the Cherokee Nation has this Cherokee Heirloom Seed Project and so they actually send you two different strands of traditional plants, whether it's corn, you can grow tobacco, you can grow rattlesnake beans, you can grow all these different types of plants. Even though that's small scale, because a lot of us are living in the city these days, even those that's small scale, it's still significant. It's changing the way we relate to the land. It's changing the way we relate to our food. And the goal of the Heirloom Seed Project is really to further enhance the seed bank. So the goal is, you're not going to be able to sustain yourself on the 20 corn seeds that you get in the mail, but you are able to send back seeds to reinvigorate that seed bank. So it's just as much about giving back as it is about growing that for your own I guess diets or for your own health.

Leanne Simpson, if you haven't read anything by Leanne Simpson, you've got to read it. She is...I think she's kind of a pivotal writer in terms of the Indigenous resurgence paradigm. Her along with Taiaiake Alfred and Glen Coulthard and several other folks, if you want to read up on more of this stuff. But Leanne Simpson talks a lot about reawakening our ancient treaty relationships. What is she talking about when she talks about reawakening these treaty relationships? She's not just talking about human to human relationships. She's talking about our relationships to salmon, she's talking about our relationships as Cherokee to the deer, to the corn. These are treaty relationships as well. And I always envision...Vine Deloria always called for more treaties between Indigenous nations and I always envision that happened. I used to envision that on a grander scale, but now I envision it happening between families, I envision it happening between families from different nations, confederacies of families, new confederacies of families that set up new trade networks, that set up new forms of resistance to the market system, that set up new forms of resistance to the grocery store. They set up new forms of ways that we can revitalize ourselves.

Finally, we have this concept ‘one warrior at a time,' and something that Tai and I have talked about for awhile now and I think it's true that change happens one warrior at a time. It's your individual kind of vision for how things need to be different. And it's consistent with a Cherokee notion of leadership because a Cherokee notion of leadership begins with the individual. You have a dream or you have a vision for how things should be and then the challenge is not to tell other people what to do, the challenge is now to live it. That's why I put a lot of this stuff out there because it's a challenge to me just as much as it is to you. I have to live this vision or this dream that I have for sustainability. I have to live it. Then only later do you make it relatable to other people.

This is where we fail as academics a lot of time. We don't make it relatable. We don't make it understandable. We use theory, we use concepts, we use a lot of big words. You have to make it relatable to other people and only then do you organize people, mobilize people towards change. It doesn't always happen in that kind of sequence, but sometimes it's collapsed, happens simultaneously, but it's this general idea that you don't start by organizing people, you start with yourself and you radiate outwards. What Leanne Simpson calls ‘radiating responsibilities.' Start with yourself and you begin taking those responsibilities for yourself as well as for other people.

Well, it comes back to what steps are you willing to take and what does resurgence mean to you. But at the end of the day it comes back to how will your ancestors recognize you and how will future generations recognize you? Is it by your actions? Is it by the things that you say? Is it by how you carry yourself? So I'll leave you with that. [Cherokee language]. Thank you."

Manley Begay:

"I think we have time for a couple questions."

Jeff Corntassel:

"I went on way too long. Yikes."

Audience member:

"So I am a...I recently just came back to the area, moved back here. I'm studying urban planning and one of the things I'm trying to do is incorporate sort of different ways of conceiving the land and finishing my thesis. And I'm really struggling with how Indigenous rights sort of...their position towards either Spanish or Mexican claims on land because that's another struggle that happened within the territory of colonial regimes. They're still in New Mexico. There are still Spanish land grants that became vested and so forth. So how do Indigenous rights balance with new colonial settlers that feel they have a right...see where I'm going with that?"

Jeff Corntassel:

"Yeah, I see where you're going. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and we use a term in our program to be provocative, we say 'settlers.' We use the word 'settlers' and you could think of different kind of versions of settlers, people that have come onto the land later, that have encroached onto Indigenous lands. You can think of settlers who have been there for several generations and you could think of folks who have just arrived, and then you could think of settlers of color, that's another term that's kind of emerging in the discourse. And my view is that I think we have a responsibility to...I use the example of Australia. Indigenous peoples there are issuing passports to settlers, to immigrants to the country, to Australia and bypassing the Australian state. Basically saying, ‘You have a passport to visit our territory and to live on our territory, but that comes with this set of responsibilities. And so you've got to protect the land just like we do and you've got to, if called on you've got to stand with us.' And so I think...I don't have a great answer for you in terms of resolving this, but I think as long as we get into this mindset that's not putting the impetus on Indigenous peoples to adjust to settlers because we know the settler presence is there, but it's putting the emphasis on settler people to adjust and to understand the Indigenous relationship to the land. And I say that...here's how I tied that in.

A Cherokee word for settler is [Cherokee language], and that means 'white' literally but it also connotes kind of movement of foam on the water and then it sticks to land, it grabs land when it sticks to it. So we have all sorts of Indigenous words for 'settler' depending on where you're at. I guess Tohono O'odham, I'm sure there's a word for settler that relates to folks that encroach onto the territory. So the goal for a settler is to understand that word and the full meaning of that word and to make a change in the relationship. If it means the hungry people, you've got to act in a way that doesn't make you so hungry that you're consuming everything in your path. You've got to act in a way in order to not cling onto land in such a way that's threatening to Indigenous people. So I try to use the language as a way to say, ‘Hey, we have experiences with people that have encroached onto our land. These are the words that we have for them. [Dakota language], the fat-takers for Dakota. Your goal is to change that relationship so that a new word has to be created to describe the relationship that you live in and also to understand the existing treaty relationships that exist in that territory and where those treaties aren't signed like in some parts, well, lots of Mexico. You don't have that same pattern of treaty making to understand I guess the needs of the community in order to protect their land, culture and community.

So yeah, I wish I had a better answer for you, but I think there's a huge educational component that has to take place and ultimately to make people uncomfortable who aren't from this territory, including myself, to make us uncomfortable in the sense that through that discomfort we can work through maybe some issues of maybe we shouldn't be so comfortable on someone else's land. Maybe we should be uncomfortable and try to find what our responsibilities might be."

Manley Begay:

"Another question? You've wowed them."

Jeff Corntassel:

"I've...I think this guy's got one."

Audience member:

"I was wondering if Native people on their land accept immigrants from other countries to bypass immigration laws."

Jeff Corntassel:

"That's what they did in Australia. I actually think that's a pretty cool idea. And so Australia was actually denying, let's say, they were folks from Sri Lanka and some other immigrants, they're denying them entry into the country and so Indigenous folks said, ‘Here's a passport, you're coming to our territory.' So it was a way of bypassing it. I think that's a great idea. I don't know...I haven't been there, so I don't know how that's actually worked in practice. There's been some honorary passports that have been given and stuff like that, but there's actually a passport signing ceremony and you make a formal commitment to stand with the Indigenous peoples of that area. So interesting idea. Yeah."

Audience member:

"I just wanted to say thank you for being here, but also for explaining that we should use not just theories and methodologies, but some language that everyone can understand. We all learn the theories, we all learn methodologies, but then sometimes when we start talking about them people think we're talking Greek. So I appreciate that very much."

Jeff Corntassel:

"Thank you. [Cherokee Language]."

Manley Begay:

"One more question."

Audience member:

"I'm going to jump back to what you were saying about education. I guess I hold to this idea that one of the problems that we have with communicating with each other is that we don't educate non-Natives on ways of the Native people of the land they're on. It's this big mass of miscommunication, and so if there was a way to educate on that do you think that would help some of these sovereignty issues or something like that?"

Jeff Corntassel:

"Yeah. The question is how to do it on such a large scale. I always wish...I had this dream where I could just give one lecture to the entire world or how about Indigenous Global Resurgence Day where it's transmitted to everyone, whether you want it or not. But yeah, there's that and then there's the question...so there's ignorance. I've always thought about it in this way, there's ignorance, I didn't know. So that's easy to resolve, you say, ‘Well, this is actually...this is my history. Now you know so you're accountable to that now.' And then there's willful ignorance where you say, ‘I don't really want to know and I don't care to know.' So how do you deal with folks who are willfully ignorant who don't...? And I can't put too much attention on folks who don't want to learn, but I think the folks who have never heard this before, like residential school, like boarding school, there's a starting point there and I think there's a lot of positive work that can be done just in those areas.

I talk about...I've played around with this term 'insurgent education' and I don't know where that's going to go but this kind of idea of making people uncomfortable, use it like a pedagogy of discomfort. So making people uncomfortable and through that discomfort you invite a conversation and I'm not talking about in a classroom setting. So I'm talking about taking it out of the classroom. There's a guy, Jeff Marley, who does 'We Are Still Here' posters and he puts them all over public sites and he writes it in Cherokee as well. And so that's a way of making people uncomfortable. ‘Oh, you're still here, what does that mean? I don't know what to do with that.' You could think about it more forcefully as, what's another good example? Well, I think you could think of it more forcefully with art, other forms of art. Edgar Heap of Birds has this great installation of art where it says, ‘This space sponsored by Tohono O'odham,' and so you're on Tohono O'odham land. So finding innovative or creative ways to express the relationship we have with the land and inviting the conversation from it.

It's hard to imagine that on a big scale but yeah, I think we need...that's why I look to artists and others. There's a group called Post Commodity that does some cool stuff. They had a repellant balloon. So you know those repellant balloons you have to scare critters out of your garden? They created a 100-foot one and put it over Phoenix and they said, ‘We're going to try to repel all the settlers out of the territory.' So just things like that that can create engagement, but also make people say, ‘What is this?' So I've looked to artists lately."

Mariah Gover:

"[Unintelligible] I liked this concept because we did with Tom [Holm] and some people who have been a big part of what we do and the concept of education and what she's talking about in terms of how do we get that information out? And what you started with was how do you think about yourself? How would your ancestors know you or how will your heirs know you? How is that going to...because in my mind, I'm thinking here comes that whole question about blood quantum and citizenship and that kind of stuff, but that...let's just put that aside, because that's whole other ball of wax. But in education and that knowledge and that conversation that we've done, how many of us really know all of the aspects of say for the O'odham himdag? How many of us really know that because whatever reason, it's part of the language. Our line and language, which you're talking about as being key and also you're talking about who's going to share it and will they? So before we can even get to the settlers we're talking about a whole other really messy morass of finding a way to express that and like you said, you make an excellent point in how artists and it reminds me of ceremony, that circle, the whole thing that these ceremonies didn't change, but they did even if it was in the difference of the singer, if it was in the aging of the rattle, how that happened, it will happen, change will occur. And like your Cherokee artist who took something old and made it into something new. I'm wondering -- especially since you haven't been here and you've been somewhere else for awhile -- how has that played into your overall understanding and conversation with yourself and with people there about that?"

Jeff Corntassel:

"That's great. That's a great question. See, I can trust Mariah to challenge me. We used to work together at Red Ink, one of the Native magazines out here and so awesome, awesome question. I think for me, it's always I didn't really do enough when I was here. I was so focused on meeting up with other Cherokees and thinking about some of the things that consume you in grad school that I didn't do enough. And so for me it's about, I guess, being honest and saying that we have to go a lot...  have to challenge myself to go a lot further. I'm involved in the Community Tool Shed. So to give a short response, I'm involved in the Community Tool Shed in Victoria partly because of what I perceive as so little that I did here. I kind of said, ‘I'm going to make a change in the sense of I'm not living on my own territory so I have a responsibility to seek out ways that I can help the Indigenous peoples of that area.' And so pulling invasive species and things like that, even if it's on a monthly basis, I have that responsibility. That's what I've taken up for myself. But for each person it's going to be different.

So I think it's acknowledging...and I start with...we always start with acknowledging the territory that we're on, but what does that mean beyond that acknowledgment? If folks from the territory that we're on said, ‘You should leave now Corntassel,' I'm accountable to that. So I'd have to leave in that sense if we're following protocol for following our...if we're honoring that protocol. And so I'm an uninvited guest in a sense. I didn't...so I think I've started...hopefully started to think about these things more deeply so that other folks don't make those same mistakes that I did, but also to say it's going to vary...that's where I say it's going to vary from individual to individual, one warrior at a time is kind of...so creating that awareness in other students now. So as a teacher -- as Wolf Clan, I'm a teacher -- creating that awareness in other students so they don't repeat those same mistakes maybe that I made."

Robert Hershey: Dispelling Stereotypes about the Federal Government's Role in Native Nation Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Robert Hershey, Professor of Law and American Indian Studies at The University of Arizona, dispels some longstanding stereotypes about what the federal government can and will do should a Native nation decide to amend its constitution to remove the Secretary of Interior approval clause or else make their foundational governing document more culturally appropriate in ways that perhaps do not conform to federal bureaucrats' attitudes about how that Native nation should govern itself. He also offers a broad definition of constitutions that encompasses things like Indigenous ceremonies, songs, the knowledge of elders, etc.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hershey, Robert. "Dispelling Stereotypes about the Federal Government's Role in Native Nation Constitutional Reform." Tribal Constitutions Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Presentation.

Robert Hershey:

“Good afternoon everyone and thanks for staying awake after that fabulous meal. I usually have my students interact with me, but Terry [Janis] said something about being older and I want to just get this out of the way. May I ask you what color your hair is?”

Audience member:

“It’s calico.”

Robert Hershey:

“Okay. I wasn’t anticipating that. I like that one. There was a young man over there, I’m looking for people with the same hair color. Calico, I’d never heard that. Robert, what color is your hair?”

Audience member:

[Inaudible]

Robert Hershey:

“All right. My hair color is moonstruck, just so you know that. It’s not silver, it’s not gray, it’s not old. You’re getting a little moonstruck yourself. So let’s talk about that.

The other thing I want to talk about is gravity because I always like to remember, someone was talking about starting the beginning of the day with a prayer. I always like to remember that if it wasn’t for gravity, I would float away and oftentimes I do float away. So I’m pretty attuned to the idea that I like gravity. If you all want to stand up and jump and wake yourself up and feel gravity, you can. No takers?

The other thing that I want to tell you about is that in addition, I’m going to introduce myself a little bit, but I’m a judge for the past 25 years for the Tohono O’odham Nation, and it’s about questions. So I’ll ask you right now, do you have any questions? Now, the reason I’m asking you now is to give you time to think because you know that you’re going to have questions, but you usually take some time to think about your questions. You’re not like us, we stick our hands right up. ‘Us’ meaning me, this face. We take our time to answer, to ask questions.

When I was a judge, there was a removal proceeding of a council member and I’m up there, and it’s almost time for lunch and I said, ‘Are there any questions?’ And being dutifully trained and schooled by many of you individuals in many nations that I’ve worked with, I’m told to wait because people will have questions and so I wait and I wait. I must have waited over five minutes for questions and I said, ‘Okay, we’ll break for lunch and when we come back, we’ll finish this up.’ So I step off the bench and come down and the chairwoman of the legislative council says to me, ‘You didn’t wait long enough.’ So, I know that if you think that I’m going to ask you, ‘are there any questions?’ and you see a pause there, you’ll know ahead of time why I’m pausing.

I was raised in Hollywood, California. I was skateboarding down the Avenue of the Stars before they even laid Avenue of the Stars. I had hair down to here when I went to law school. My crazy aunt said my hair was my antenna to the cosmos and so I kind of thought that description was pretty good. And ultimately I became, went to law school and then I became a legal aid attorney for Dinébe’iiná NáhiiÅ‚na be Agha’diit’ahii (DNA People’s Legal Services). Close? Good. Joe? All right, I did it. It took me three weeks to pronounce it where I worked back in those days.

So when I became a legal aid attorney on the Navajo Reservation, John, this’ll be referencing the trickster idea and this is how Native people have played tricks on me my entire legal career. When I was asked, and I lived way back in a canyon about a mile and a half off the road and my landlady at that time -- who was in her 70s, still riding horses, chopping wood, herding goats -- she said, ‘Will you do me a favor? Will you please take my goats from my house to your house?’ And I figured a mile and a half; a young boy from Hollywood, raised with Charleston Heston, Peter O’Toole, cowboys and Indians movies, thinking that I could do this. And as soon as I started taking the goats, they took off up in the hills and they just went up. And the lead goat was named Skunk and he had this big bell on him that clanked and every time he moved away from me it clanked and I got so pissed off at this goat. And finally I came back after an hour and a half. I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I am so very sorry. I lost your goats.’ And all she did was laugh hysterically, bent over double, laughing and laughing and laughing. She says, ‘Don’t worry. They know where to go.’ And I walked back to where I lived and they were in the pen next to my house. And ever since then I’ve had to have a sense of humor about all the ecological catastrophes that are befalling us, about all the work.

Let me tell you something: in 1969, ‘70, I started this in ‘72, working with Native peoples, the strides that you have made, the things that you have accomplished in that time, the youth, all the programs have been monumental. So you should all know that regardless of the challenges, you are striving in such a positive direction and your attendance here at this [seminar] is a testament to that fortitude and stability that you’ve carried forward for over 500 years. And I appreciate it. I want you to know how honored I am to have had an entire legal career of over 40 years working with Native people. So I thank you too for allowing me this time to be with you.

The ethics of what we do today, the integrity that you mentioned -- humor, respect, integrity -- the ethics of what you do today become the oral tradition 100 years from now. We do not go ahead and live in the past. It’s dynamic. So what we are doing today is what will be thought about 100 years, 200 years from now, because you know you’re still going to be working on this -- as we all are -- 200 years from now. I don’t plan on going anywhere so I hope you’re not. So I want us to remember about that. The ethics of today become the oral history of tomorrow. You’re also saddled with the idea of imagery and American Indian policy because Native peoples are thought to be historical. Non-Native peoples can’t quite grasp the idea there are living dynamic societies in existence today, wrestling with their own problems after all these years of subjugation, if you will.

You mentioned something about trust and trust in constitutional reformation is absolute key because I’ve worked with tribes where the committees that the tribal governments have established thought of themselves as the anti-government, if you will. That they thought of themselves as the shadow government because they didn’t trust their tribal councils. So they were creating their own agendas in and of themselves. That’s why this dynamic partnership between the leadership and this independent body is absolutely crucial and it’s consistent and constant.

There are tribes that have been working since 1975, one of your neighboring Apache tribes, since 1975 -- Pascua Yaqui has been working since 1990 -- to amend their constitutions. I worked two years with Pascua Yaqui. It is a difficult process. Don’t, you may get frustrated; it is still an amazingly worthwhile thing to do. The gentleman from Canada was talking about, ‘But what about housing, why don’t we work on that?’ And as I said, O’odham in their districts, they have special powers reserved to the districts. Same thing with Joan’s [Timeche] in Hopi, and many of your communities, have already worked these things out. You have historical precedence upon which to build. They all become the framework for constitutional revision.

The BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] -- as much of a tiger as you see the BIA -- I think it’s an administrative mindset in the BIA because the law seems to be more progressive than how the BIA is effectuating the law, because you have provisions in 2000, the reformation to contracts, not needing as much oversight, even in land leasing, if you will. Only those contracts that encumber land for more than seven years require BIA approval in leasing. There are special congressional statutes giving tribes the authority to go ahead and enact leases for 25 years, up to 25 years without secretarial approval.

But here’s the key, here’s the kicker I think of what you wanted me to talk about and Andrew’s [Martinez] going to talk later and he’s going to show you, in big bold type, of the Native American Technical Corrections Act where the removal of the clause that requires secretarial approval does not mean you will lose your status as a federally recognized tribe. I’ll say that once again. You remove the language, taking out from your constitutions the requirement of secretarial approval of what you do, does not mean you lose your status as either an IRA tribe or a federally recognized tribe. You can do that. And we had testimony from the folks at Kootenai today to that affect. Laguna is another community that has done that. You see this happening. Do not let them threaten you with the loss of federal status. Forget about it. Give yourself permission to be whatever you want to be.

One of the other things that I’d like to tell you about is that because of the trust responsibility, and we’re all familiar with the trust responsibility -- I’m not going to go ahead and give you law professor’s lecture on the origins of the trust responsibility other than to say that it’s almost 200 years old in the federal case law. But because tribes have been so whetted to this notion that if they do something that does not comport with the values of this dominant society that they’re going to lose some sort of federal support for what they do. You have to disabuse yourself, you have to stop thinking in that way because there are international precedents and Miriam [Jorgensen] brought this up, but I wanted to reiterate this and harp on this.

The American Declaration, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the International Labor Organization Convention 169, all are emerging and very, very, very strong and compelling documents that you should be thinking and you should learn about that and you have to ask your attorneys to tell you about that. If your attorneys don’t understand that, you send them to us, you send them to the University of Arizona for a crash course in international law precedents, and you start thinking in terms of the rights contained in those documents as being embedded in your constitutions. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, International Labor Organization 169, the American Declaration, the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, these should all be part of your signposts, your guides as well; very, very critical. This gives you a whole other avenue. The United States has signed onto the United Nations Declaration. This gives you a whole other strengthening body of instruments to help you craft what you’re trying to accomplish.

Two other small points, not so small -- what I call mapping intergenerational memories. Every time that you go to your community in this process, community engagement, you are also asking for bits of history, you’re asking your elders to contribute to a body of knowledge, you are asking them to give forth their intergenerational memories and those intergenerational memories are not just for one specific purpose, not just for the purpose of revising a constitution, not just for the purpose of what was the home site assignment. They are the purpose for everything that you do. So that anything you undertake has this body, this repository of memory, whether it’s map-making your ancestral territory, whether it’s in the case of litigation for aboriginal title, you’re marking place names...I understand there’s issues on revealing sacred knowledge. There’s issues on dealing when it is appropriate to reveal, to talk about these things. That’s up to each community, each distinct individual community, to find a mechanism to go ahead and preserve and identify these intergenerational memories that help you for your entire broad spectrum of what you want to accomplish because then, in today’s ethics, you’re carrying forward past ethics and into the future.

The last thing, and it kind of dovetails on this, is what I call the 'reality of river thought' and the reality of river thought came to me when I saw the movie 'Apocalypse Now' for about the 18th time. You get in a boat in Saigon and you’re in this very, very busy city and as you go down the river further and further and further, further down the river, the only thing that matters to you is what’s right in front of the bow, what’s right in front at that moment. We’ve had speakers talk about never forgetting about where you came from. So in the process of constitutional revision, always remember that you started out in a large society and that is what’s carrying you forward. So when you’re looking over the bow, remember, there’s a whole past bit of information. It’s much more grander in scope. Don’t get trapped into this idea that the attorneys are basically saying, ‘Everything has to be in the four corners.’ You have dances, you have songs, you have paintings. These are all constitutions. The trick is how you craft them in a way that substantiates and flavors -- and as John was talking about -- this magnificent opportunity to engage your community, to determine where you’re going to be next and you’re doing it with respect, integrity, neutrality, a few punches here and there, can’t be avoided. Don’t ever let anyone ever tell you that you have to be bound by the forms that you were given to. Create your own. Create your own.

Now, Andrew’s going to move us into this idea that, so right now, when you have these certain forms of constitutions, how do you go about, what is the legal mechanism how you go about then reforming under the processes that have already been dictated to you and how do you start shaking those things off?”

John Borrows: Revitalizing Indigenous Constitutionalism in the 21st Century

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Native Nations Institute
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In this thoughtful conversation with NNI's Ian Record, scholar John Borrows (Anishinaabe) discusses Indigenous constitutionalism in its most fundamental sense, and provides some critical food for thought to Native nations who are wrestling with constitutional development and change in the 21st century.

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Borrows, John. "Revitalizing Indigenous Constitutionalism in the 21st Century." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program, we are honored to have with us John Borrows. John is Anishinaabe and a citizen of Ontario’s Chippewa Nawash First Nation and he currently serves as the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota School of Law. John, welcome and good to have you with us today.”

John Borrows:

“It’s good to be here.”

Ian Record:

“Before we dive into our conversation, I was hoping you’d just start out by telling us a little bit more about yourself.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I’ve been a law teacher about 20 some odd years now and really have enjoyed that being in different schools. I’ve spent some time in U.S. schools -- ASU [Arizona State University], Minnesota obviously, Princeton; also taught across Canada, University of Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School, UBC [University of British Columbia], and University of Victoria. So I’ve got around in my career.”

Ian Record:

“So I wanted to start out by getting a little bit more of a perspective on your scholarly work. In preparing for this interview, I talked with a lot of your legal colleagues -- including some of them here at the University of Arizona in Tucson -- and they said you’re really one of the innovative thinkers and scholars when it comes to Indigenous law and I think differentiating that from federal Indian law but Indigenous law, and can you just provide a quick nutshell about why the focus on Indigenous law, why have you dedicated your career to this particular issue?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. I think it started growing up. A lot of the standards for judgments in our family were often taken from what we were seeing around us outside our door and we had lots of conversations about what our obligations were in relationship to one another and the world around us. We had a treaty that my great-great grandfather signed back in the 1850s and that was also a part of the conversation. So when I began my legal career and my graduate work I actually wrote an LLM thesis called The Genealogy of Law, where I took the seven past generations of my family and looked at what the criteria was that they used to be able to respond to the challenges they were encountering as they encountered the Canadian State. And I noticed in each one of those encounters they drew upon a deep wellspring of our own sense of what the appropriate standards were as to how to deal with the War of 1812 or the Royal Proclamation or the signing of the treaty, whatever it might be. And so what was exciting to me as I then started my legal career was a recognition that we have a lot of sources of authority that we can turn to to answer our questions. And so I think it grew from that place to just continue to drive my research and my interests in my work today.”

Ian Record:

“So you’ve spent the last two days participating in the Nation Nations Institute’s Tribal Constitution seminar both as a presenter and also as an observer. And I’m curious, what from the proceedings of the last two days as they’re still fresh in your mind really struck a chord with you?”

John Borrows:

“I think I like the examples that I saw that were practical and on the ground, that had a lot of deep thought behind them. I think when people come to seminars like this they might expect they’d encounter a process, but in fact what they see is a lot of work that’s done over a period of years that’s been cultivating of the different traditions and understandings that people bring to what constitutionalism is. And so I was impressed by the hard work that underlies and is behind many of those presentations. And while there are lessons that we can generalize, you did a great job I think of pulling out those generalized lessons, more fundamentally was context matters and paying attention to the specific context that a nation comes from seems to be the message that I took from the seminar.”

Ian Record:

“One of the first things we tackled on day one of the seminar was starting at the beginning and really defining what in the most fundamental sense a constitution really is and that can take many forms. It can be a written constitution, an unwritten constitution, and I’m curious, given that you spend so much time thinking about these things and writing about these things and doing research about things around this idea of constitutionalism I’m curious to get your perspective on what that is and maybe your definition of what that is.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I think of constitutionalism as a conversation and a set of practices around living tradition. Sometimes when people think of constitutions they just think of pieces of paper, but really what a constitution is is a verb, it’s a way of constituting a people through time. There’s a past and a present and a future tense as a part of how they might relate to one another. And so for me constitutionalism is this living, ongoing, breathing set of understandings, customs, procedures around trying to create a better life, a more orderly set of relationships between the people. The Anishinaabe have lots of different words for constitutionalism. [Anishinaabe language] is one of those words. It means 'the great guided way of decision making.' This idea of [Anishinaabe language] is almost the process of the creation of a tradition as you move from generation to generation. But there’s another word in Anishinaabemowin that communicates constitutionalism, which is [Anishinaabe language]. The root of that is [Anishinaabe language], which means 'old time, a long time.' So there’s this other strand of constitutionalism, which is you draw upon a long time way of doing things and you continually place it in a present context so that it can speak to the future.

And I think the tension there between those two different ways of looking at constitutionalism is important. One of those ways of proceeding is seeing this constitution as ongoing, living, breathing, continued in its development. The other one is a process of creation anew. That is, there’s an idea in constitutionalism that you would always have new starting points, that it’s never done, it’s never over. Like I said, it’s an ongoing conversation. That sense of constitutionalism isn’t something you just find within an Anishinaabeg or Indigenous peoples as well. In the United States, we have a constitutional tradition, which is called 'originalism.' And so you try to figure out what the meaning of the constitution is by going back to some magic moment, 1787, and you draw on the intent or the public meaning of what the founders said at that time.

We have another tradition within U.S. constitutionalism, which is called 'living constitutionalism,' which is yes, history is important, but we’ve developed as a people through time and while we take guidance from the history, the history is not determinative and I think within Indigenous constitutionalism we have that same kind of tension that’s present. Some of us want to go to that original moment, a creation story, a treaty, some kind of drafting of a document and you would find that people argue vigorously that the constitution can only mean what was said when that creation happened or when those people signed that document. In the U.S. constitutional context, you have [U.S. Supreme Court justices] [William] Rehnquist and [Antonin] Scalia that kind of take that way of proceeding though you have this other strand, living constitutionalism where you would look to what the people now understand the constitution means 200 or some odd years later and you would allow for that to occur.

In the Canadian context, we call this 'living treaty jurisprudence.' In the 1930s, the court was asked to consider whether or not women could be seated in the Senate because at the time that the constitution was drafted women were not political citizens and in the court...in looking at that they could have taken an originalist approach and said, ‘Well, at the time women didn’t mean persons, therefore they couldn’t be seated to sit in the senate,’ but the court took another approach. They said that the British-North America Act had placed in Canada a living treaty, which was capable of growth through the ages and that its roots continue to extend out branches that have new obligations that the people would encounter and so therefore the dominate mode of constitutionalism in Canada is living constitutionalism as opposed to originalism. Again, within a Native context you see those tensions very much present. Some want to look to that initial moment and find all the meaning in that moment. Others see it as a tree, they see it as more organic, living, growing, breathing through the ages.”

Ian Record:

“In some sense, doesn’t the constitutionalism of any nation and particularly Indigenous nations given all that they’ve experienced in North America in particular over the last 200, 300, 400 years that it must be able to adapt to the times, adapt to the changing circumstances, the new challenges, growing populations, all sorts of things?”

John Borrows:

“That is definitely my understanding of how constitutionalism proceeds in most Indigenous nations. I certainly see that within my own nation as well, though there are people that would differ. They say when the old people put us in the four corners of these sacred mountains they set up a way of being that we cannot mess with and that we have to ensure that we live in accordance with those original instructions. And to the extent that you start to take in influences from United States or Canada or just whatever the context you are in today, they would critique that and they would say, ‘That is polluting, that is compromising, that is not being true to what the founders said that we should abide by.’ And so while I do agree with you that a constitution needs this definite grafting on, growing, organic way of being in the world, there are people that would take a different approach and I think at heart some of the debates that happen throughout Indian Country around constitutionalism are that very debate, the worry that we’re departing from something that’s original that was given to us and that by trying to adapt to the present situation we’re just assimilating or swallowing some other kind of complicit line.”

Ian Record:

“Let’s talk a little bit more about the Anishinaabe and prior to colonization -- I’m curious, you’ve learned -- I think first and foremost through your own upbringing and then in the research you’ve been doing since getting into the academic realm -- a great deal about what the Anishinaabe constitution looked like traditionally and where it was found, where it lived and where it breathed. Can you shed some light on that?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I think one of the main influences on Anishinaabe constitutionalism is the environment that we lived in and live in today. And so we would take from the Great Lakes area and that watershed that surrounds it and the plants and the animals and the birds and the clouds and the rivers and we would see that behavior that was taking place in the natural world and we would learn from it. And when we saw things that were positive and uplifting and sustaining and nurturing and nourishing, we would try to analogize those behaviors to our own sets of ways that we should be. Or if we saw something that was troubling in nature, we would then take a lesson that we shouldn’t behave in that fashion. And so our constitutionalism is very much in the ecological type of principle.

In U.S. and Canadian constitutionalism, when you draw analogies, you often do so from the cases that are there, the stories that have been told by judges through the ages. Our analogies were first of all the stories that were told to us by the plants and the animals and the rivers and the trees and then it was the stories that our elders, our wise ones told us about the animals, the plants, the rivers and the trees and so our case law became stories about how the skunk got its stripe and how the robin came to sing like it does and why the trickster is intervening in the creation of the beaver dam in that place. And so for Anishinaabe people that constitutionalism can be labeled [Anishinaabe language], which is you look at everything, [Anishinaabe language] and you take the lessons from what you’re seeing. Another way of thinking about that is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] is the Anishinaabe word for 'earth,' [Anishinaabe language] is 'to point towards.' [Anishinaabe language] then is this concept of you point towards the earth and you learn from the earth and you apply those teachings from the natural world around us in creating our sense of obligations to one another. It’s the similar word to our word for 'teaching,' which is [Anishinaabe language]. So to practice this way of constituting ourselves is to understand what the earth is trying to teach us.

I remember going to a seminar with an elder, Basil Johnston, back in 1996 when I was a newer law professor and we had convened at Cape Croker, [Anishinaabe language], to talk about our constitution and I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been but I was surprised that we began with the creation of the earth and the first formation of the rocks. And then after the rocks, we had stories about how the water came into place and after the rocks and the water we would start to talk about the first little crawlers in the ocean and on the lands and what they did in relationship to one another. And then the plants and there were stories about how we got corn and how we got cabbage and all these other things and then this went on to animals. We had all of these stories about the natural world for maybe four or five hours. Humans came along in the afternoon after lunch. And I realized in listening to that that Basil was trying to teach us that Anishinaabe constitutionalism is how are we constituted as human beings in relationship to this wider order that we see around us. And I’ll never forget that and it’s become one of the guiding lights for me in thinking about the practice of Anishinaabe constitutional law in a present day.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you bring that up because one of the things as a student of tribal constitutions who often...in my role with the Native Nations Institute, we’re asked to come in and help tribes wrestle with their current constitutionalism and wrestle with a deep...often a deep conflict between their sense of who they are and their sense of right and wrong with this whatever written document they have, whether it’s an Indian Reorganization Act constitution here in the U.S. or an Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act constitution or up in Canada it’s wrestling with the Indian Act system. And what you often see in reviewing these written documents is a lack of explanation of the people’s relationship with place and I use the word 'place' very purposely because you often will see references to, ‘Okay, this is our territory and we have jurisdiction over this territory,’ but it doesn’t evoke anything about the relationship between people and place, the reciprocity between people and place, exactly what you’re talking about with Basil Johnston. Do you see that as one of the big challenges that tribes face is, how do we evoke that and perhaps revitalize that relationship with place and then be nourished by that process of reciprocity that has sustained the people up until this day?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah, I definitely see that. One of the things I worry about in some of the contemporary constitutionalism that’s happening amongst Indigenous peoples across North America is that they de-contextualize who they are and their relationships to one another. By 'de-contextualizing,' meaning there’s something of a universal nature that appears in these constitutions as if all time and place can be subsumed in the wording that’s contained in the document. And yes, there are generalizations we can make, of course, but those generalizations have to be rooted in a particular set of relationships that a people have to a place. If not, the constitution’s actually not going to work. What you see in looking at constitutionalism in a non-Indigenous context is there’s many pretty documents that are in place in Central and South America or in some Asian countries, but that’s all they are is pretty documents. They don’t get connected or rooted to the place and the people that have to live in relationship to them. So you get nice words and maybe even good decisions from the court, but the decisions of the court, the words on the paper mean nothing unless people are also internalizing their constitution as well. And that’s why I started out by saying that a constitution is an ongoing set of conversations and practices about your tradition in a particular place and if the constitution is not doing that, you’re not really internalizing the ways of being and of course if you’re not internalizing a constitution, it’s someone else’s document. It’s the people’s or the place, the land, the animals, the plants, constitution there. So I think maybe, and I’m not sure it’s our biggest challenge, but one of our biggest challenges is to make sure that the constitutions that we’re dealing with actually reflect the place that they’re coming from.”

Ian Record:

“So what are some of the other challenges? Obviously you sat through a lot of different discussions over the last couple days and heard a lot about some of the challenges and I’m sure came into the conference well aware of some of the other challenges that Native nations in the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere, Indigenous peoples face when it comes to their constitutionalism and reconciling the past with the present and outside forces with internal ones and so forth. What are some of the other challenges you see?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest challenges in relationship to the creation of constitutions is having hope, having faith, having trust, to having love for one another. If we’re going to really internalize our constitutionalism, we have to think about those values at that level. When the U.S. was drafting its constitution, it put big words out there, 'life' and 'liberty' and the 'pursuit of happiness,' and there was the sense of freedom and association and forming a more perfect union. These big ideas were a part of what the aspirations of the people are and were and I think that sometimes we sell ourselves short by borrowing those words and not actually thinking about what our own aspirations and words are. For me, it would be what can we do in living together that would facilitate greater love, greater respect, greater honesty? There’s something called the Seven Grandfather/Grandmother Teachings of the Anishinaabe and those, I think, could be legal terms of art as well as spiritual and cultural and other types of ways of relating. We have a hard time when we put big words out there, then define them in a constitution. We’ve had no end of disputes through the years about what does freedom mean in the First Amendment? What does equality require in the 14th Amendment? But just because we have difficulty with the big words and we can’t quite pin them down doesn’t mean that we leave them behind. In fact, it increases our expectations of what those words might do for us. And so I would love to see Anishinaabe and other Indigenous nations start to...what do we want to create, what’s our equivalent of freedom and equality? If it is things like in Anishinaabemowin, [Anishinaabe language], thinking about love or [Anishinaabe language]. There’s different meanings of love that I’ve just given you. One’s kind of a stinginess, the other one’s kind of a compassionate way of being in the world or likewise around trust and honesty, [Anishinaabe language]. There’s a lot I think that we need on that ground. So I think that’s the biggest challenge actually.”

Ian Record:

“And you’ve discussed those things, those Anishinaabe values, those Grandfather teachings within the context of citizenship and identity and that’s a huge issue right now. I think in the nations I’ve worked with, there’s typically two considerations that tend to dominate. One is that if we continue with the criteria that we have...and I think most people understand where those come from and although I do think that some people still need to understand where those come from, but there’s two tracks. One is that if we continue this criteria we’re going to not be around because there’s not anyone that will be...that will qualify to continue to be citizens. And another is around basically what you were talking about, that we need to address what the criteria is doing to us in terms of our unity, in terms of our relations, in terms of how healthy our relationships are and how revisiting this might strengthen that in some way. How do you see that challenge today and what do you think nations who are wrestling with that issue need to really be thinking about as they in particular engage their community about this critical topic?”

John Borrows:

“So again, context is everything and each nation would have to pay attention to its own way of framing these larger ideas in relationship with the particular challenges they face around membership or citizenship. But what I would say is that we need eyes wide open to both of these concerns. One is that we have been overrun as a people and so there is a need to be able to create a set of criteria that would say who is Anishinaabe and who is not and those kinds of line-drawing exercises are very, very hard to do. Unfortunately, what I think we’ve done is we’ve drawn those lines in a very cramped and stingy and closed way and I’m not sure that that is consistent with that other stream that we need to be taking account of which has to do with all our relations, with our responsibilities, with the hospitality ethics that have been passed on through the generations within many Indigenous peoples. So I do think that lines have to be drawn somewhere, but I think we should be much more generous and open and liberal and large and gracious and hospitable in that regard. And when we do so, I think what we’ll start to do is not see the government as the source of authority and the source of resources that would help fund the future of a nation because when you start opening up the opportunities for people to participate who are connected to the nation, what you get is a huge infusion of what in some places is called human capital, but in just of speaking plainly of creativity and possibility.”

So when you see a broader-based conception of citizenship, what you do is you tap the potential of many sources of innovation and I think eventually that will create a broader base of resources for nations through time. And I think that’s going to contribute to our freedom as peoples, that we won’t be tied to a colonial government in the United States or Canada, that our freedom will come from our relationships with the earth, our relationship with one another writ large. The Anishinaabe word for 'freedom' is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] means 'to own something.' [Anishinaabe language] is this idea of owning our relationships, freedom being this sense of stewardship and responsibility to others. This isn’t necessarily the ownership concept that you would get in kind of western property law that we would alienate others or land and therefore have a sense of possession. This is the idea of ownership that comes through responsible stewardship and relationships. The word for 'citizenship' in Anishinaabemowin is [Anishinaabe language], literally freedom is owning...citizenship is owning our responsibilities with one another and our relationships. So yes, lines have to be drawn, but we I think can do much better in thinking beyond what the colonial criteria for that is and looking to our own legal traditions and then doing the analysis around what economically and socially and politically could be possible if we saw ourselves in that broader light.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you bring that up, the need to be more inclusive and that being an Indigenous value. We’ve seen a number of Native nations that, two that jump to mind, are Citizen Potawatomi and also Osage Nation in Oklahoma who’ve taken a more inclusive approach and they’re starting to see the benefits of that because they have gained this...regained this huge reservoir of human capital, of people who have things to contribute. They have skills, they have assets, they have ideas, they have creativity as you mentioned to contribute to the life of the nation and it’s starting...you’re starting to see a real shift in the ability of the nation to actually live as a nation. On the flip side of that though, isn’t it incumbent upon, as nations engage this issue of redefining citizenship criteria, of looking at their current criteria and saying is this...does this really work for us, isn’t it critical that they understand that this criteria of blood quantum is not cultural because we see that...we’ve seen because it’s been in place in a lot of communities for so long, we see some people embrace it as some sort of cultural value, that this is how we equate our identity and also that in that criteria there is a lack of civic obligation, of civic responsibility because the mentality is that, ‘As long as I have the blood I qualify and my work is done.’ Is that important to this conversation do you feel?”

John Borrows:

“It is. What I think it does is it identifies where our traditions may be harmful. That is, this is not something that was a historic tradition prior to the arrival of Europeans to set blood as a criteria for membership. Anishinaabe people could take in Potawatomi or Odawa people, sometimes Haudenosaunee people who were enemies became Anishinaabe so there’s that fluidity there prior to the arrival of Europeans. But you’re right, some people now, as a result of introductions from the Canadian and the U.S. government think that blood is the thing that marks out our identity and it’s a very, very...it’s a proxy for belonging, but it’s a very poor proxy for belonging because it doesn’t engage our traditions. Largely we’re talking about the plants and the animals and the...there’s just something that is then short circuited by that criteria. Again, I understand the need to be able to draw lines and some where you’re going to draw a line, I don’t think blood should be the way that we draw that line. There are other kinds of criteria that we could take that would form a gate-keeping function if that’s what we’re concerned about, but hopefully that gate keeping then would be around conceptions of civic responsibility that flow from an Indigenous legal perspective and the gate keeping is not the U.S. government’s worried about their obligations of having to fund 10 extra hospital beds if we increase the numbers of people in the tribe.”

Ian Record:

“So let’s turn to...back to this issue of constitutional challenges. As I mentioned at the beginning, you’re from the Nawash First Nation up in Ontario and the nation works...operates using an Indian Act government and I’m curious, what do you feel are your own nation’s largest constitutional challenges here in the year 2014?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So just a little thing about constitutionalism more generally in Canada, we don’t have one document that sets out our constitution. In fact, the preamble of our 1867 British North America Act is that we’ll have a constitution that’s similar in principle to that of Great Britain. Great Britain does not have a written constitution. It means that Canadian constitutionalism is not distilled into one written place. There’s an ongoing tradition in Canadian and British constitutionalism that extends back 1,000 years and then there’s little markers along the way like this 1867 document or 1982 document, but they never purport to spell out what the entire relationship of the people will be through their constitution. If I could draw an analogy here then, Anishinaabe people have a constitutional tradition that goes well beyond 1,000 years back into the mists of time and that tradition is what we’ve been talking about today. And then we’ve got the Indian Act, which is one moment of constitutionalism, which is an imposition from the Canadian government and what I would like to see is similar to what we have in the British context that that’s not the be-all and end-all of constitutions and that you can overturn that, that you can go back to some of the things that were there in the past, graft on other things today, but I don’t think the people see the Indian Act in that way. I think they see the Indian Act in somewhat a similar way to how some might regard something like the U.S. Constitution. It’s written in stone, can’t be changed, it can never be put aside and this is a matter of the heart and the mind so our challenge is to see the Indian Act for what it is -- anomalous, a drop in time. Yes, a very powerful set of Trojan horse-like laws that have run into our community and tried to take us over, but nevertheless have not. So when band decisions are made today at Cape Croker under the Indian Act, it is true that when you make a by-law, in order to have that approved you have to submit it to the Minister of Indian Affairs, if you don’t hear back in 40 days then it becomes the law of the community. But that exists in the midst of a wider tradition of people still trying to consult with family, still watching the land, still looking through the language, taking account of the deliberative structures that flow from the clans and the chiefs, etc. In other words, our constitutional tradition is not limited to that Indian Act imposition. It’s there and what we need to do obviously is peel out and pear off and get rid of that Indian Act oversight just as people try to get rid of secretarial approval in the IRA style of constitutions in the United States. And when we do that, it’s not as if there’s a legal vacuum that’s present because even under the Indian Act there is a set of traditions that have been flowing through our community that come from the past, but are the present and have something to speak to the future. And so when we peel that Indian Act out we’re not starting from scratch and then what we need to do is identify, have conversations, fight, discuss what are those things that we’re doing now that we can distill for this moment, not for all time and place again, but for this moment that would help us further remove ourselves from the Indian Act.”

Ian Record:

“So you’re probably well aware that in Canada there are a growing number of First Nations that are working to get out from under the Indian Act. They’re developing their own constitutions and sometimes it’s through the treaty processes that are going on in British Columbia and elsewhere, sometimes it’s through the development of custom election, what’s called custom election code approaches, and down here obviously in the U.S. there is a tremendous amount of activity going on, some successful, some not. And I’m curious -- we’ve been talking a lot about context and historical context and you just sort of related the historical and cultural context within what your nation tries to reconcile, wrestle with the Indian Act in your reserve and sustain your Indigenous Anishinaabe legal traditions and ways of doing, ways of constituting with that system. How important is it for nations who are engaging in this reform effort to really fully understand their traditional Indigenous legal tradition, their traditional Indigenous constitutionalism and also the origin story of how they came to have what they have now with often an imposed system? And when I say that, I’m speaking specifically for them, for their community, for their nation in particular because yes, for instance, all First Nations in Canada, most of them have the Indian Act, they work under the Indian Act. In the U.S. yes, most or a great number of tribes work with an IRA system or something akin to it, but their specific histories are very distinct. How important is it for nations as they engage this constitutional change prospect to have that cultural context, to have that historical context?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah, it’s huge and what you need is a lot of storytelling that can occur from the elders and from the teachers that might be there in the community, but you also need storytelling that’s good social science, research that has economic analysis and looks at the political system structures, you need education that’s also of a more public nature through Twitter and Facebook and media, YouTube, etc., putting those altogether, having people understand what are the different streams that are flowing into the present way that we’re constituted. Some of those streams are colonial, they come from the Indian Act and how does that...what is...how is blood quantum one of those streams, it’s actually polluting us right now, and identify that history and those streams and then also say, and yet there’s this other stream that we continue to pull upon. Why is it we begin with prayer at the beginning of our council meeting? Why is it that we do a lot of our business going in home to home to home? That’s not written in the Indian Act anywhere, but there’s a sense of people and clan and place still being involved in that. Why is it that my head councilor goes out and owl calls as a part of what he does with people in the community? And putting that all together and saying, ‘These streams are not so healthy, but these streams are continuing to be vibrant.’ Without that context, without that history, without both traditional and social science research you’re not in a place to do a good analysis about where you are and where you could possibly go from here. And I know that’s hard to do because there are just so many other pressing needs that a community has to encounter. You’ve probably heard that analogy before, often there’s people that are falling off a cliff, what ends up happening is the councilmen come over, ‘We need to get these people that are at the bottom of the cliff and make sure that they get help and healing.’ And so where all the time people are falling over the cliff in our communities and they’re bruised and bloody at the base of the cliff and we’re just dealing with the crisis of the moment instead of taking the time to put the fence at the top of the cliff and show where the boundaries might be so that we can cut off that flow of trauma that’s happening in our place. And so yes, there are those every day-to-day needs, but those day-to-day needs will eventually be attenuated if we could take that longer term approach and put systems, structures, fences in place that prevent us from falling down and really seeing the damage that’s a part of us.”

Ian Record:

“So a lot of what we’ve been discussing focuses on one of the key research findings of the Native nation building research that both the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development have been engaged in for the past 30 years and that is cultural match. Basically the match between...what is the match between the people and the governance system they use to thrive, survive, move forward as a people? Perhaps you can share your perspective on that, because it sounds like that’s really at the forefront of your mind when you think about the issues around constitutionalism and other issues as well.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I’m really celebratory of many of the findings that come from the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project because I think they’re right -- we do have to pay attention to cultural match, that we need to find greater fit between the context of a particular people and their own then constitutional expressions and that is not occurring and that message needs to be loud and clear and just repeated over and over and over again. But there is a caution in taking that approach, which is constitutions also have to challenge the culture of the people. It’s not just about matching the culture of the people. So let’s take an example just looking at the U.S. context. There was a tradition of slavery in the United States that of course was harmful to the people that were caught up into it that led to a civil war and the constitution, when it was first drafted, tried to paper over the differences that were there between the peoples and how they were living culturally in the North and the South, etc. Fortunately we found in the U.S. constitutional context that there was the ability of the 13th, the 14th and the 15th Amendment as they eventually were drafted or through the Brown vs. Board of Education case that the constitution itself became a challenge to the tradition and a challenge to the culture and without that challenge we would have continued to reproduce prejudice and racism and policies that are harmful to people that we should be in better relationships with. And the same thing could be put into any context. You think about the British constitutionalism, it of course is by and large a product of matching cultures of the people and their place, but that constitution also has conventions that says to the king, ‘You can’t just do what you want.’ It says, ‘If you want to act, you have to do so through a legislature,’ and there’s a lot of conventions that are found in British constitutionalism that go against the flow basically. And when a tribe designs a constitution, again the message that must be the overriding message is cultural match. We don’t have near enough of that. But as we do so, just be careful that we don’t get carried away because we need to think about those who might be a minority amongst us. That could be families, it could be clans, it could be non-Native people that are associating with us in our place and unless we have ways to also challenge our own traditions and have things that would go against the flow of the way we’re living, we will reproduce our own abuses and we will create conditions that diminish the dignity of people that live amongst us. And so it’s going to be a hard thing to do because you want the popular sovereignty of the people to largely guide your constitutions, you want people’s voices to be by and large what guides the day, but it’s worthwhile considering the trickster, which is an Indigenous tradition, by what is contrary there, what’s going on in another moment that we need to take account of and if we heeded our traditions of the trickster, that is contemplating at the same time things that can be harmful and helpful, kind and cunning, charming and playing mean tricks, our constitutions need to do that too and if we’re just all about a celebration of match and neglect those elements of push back that are within the community, we are not going to be living well together.”

Ian Record:

“Well, John, I think our listeners and viewers have learned quite a bit from you and giving them a lot of food for thought and we really appreciate you taking some time to sit down and share your thoughts and experience with us.”

John Borrows:

“Thank you. It’s been fun.”

Ian Record:

“Thank you.”

John Borrows:

“Great.”

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

Producer
American Indian Studies Program
Year

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

Manley Begay:

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

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

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

[applause]

Robert Innes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[applause]

Manley Begay:

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

Robert Innes:

It’s good for me.

Nance Parezo:

I’ll ask him something.

Robert Innes:

Sure.

Nancy Parezo:

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

Robert Innes:

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

Nancy Parezo:

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

Robert Innes:

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

Manley Begay:

More questions?

Audience member:

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

Robert Innes:

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

Manley Begay:

Any other questions?

Audience member:

Do you speak your language?

Robert Innes:

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

Audience member:

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

Robert Innes:

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

Audience member:

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

Robert Innes:

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

Manley Begay:

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

Robert Innes:

Thank you.

[applause]

Terry Janis: Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Terry Janis (Oglala Lakota), former Project Manager of the White Earth Nation Constitution Reform Project, provides participants with a detailed overview of the multi-faceted approach to citizen engagement that the White Earth Nation followed as it worked to educate the White Earth people about the nation's proposed constitution in advance of their November 2013 referendum vote on the new document. He also shares some lessons learned from his experience at White Earth, and stresses that those engaged in constitutional reform efforts always respect the opinions of all of those people who have a direct stake in the outcome of those efforts. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Janis, Terry. "Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation." Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

"So my name is Terry Janis. I'm Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation and I worked for the last year at White Earth Nation, which is in northern Minnesota, which is an interesting thing because historically Sioux people, Lakotas, are enemies with Anishinaabe people, Ojibwe people. But they hired me, so what can you say? And it was a fun year. I'm a lawyer; I came to the University of Arizona for law school. I've known Rob Hershey forever and the other people that are here. And this kind of presentation for me here today is not so much going to focus on the White Earth Nation constitution per se, but on our educational process.

By the time I got on the scene, in the 1990s like a lot of places there was a huge governmental crisis, indictments, convictions, etc. In '97, very soon after that was resolved, they realized that it was the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution that was really at the core of those issues. Whenever you engage and bring together all the power and decision-making authority in one small body, the likelihood of abuse and corruption is fairly high and they very quickly turned to this idea of reforming their constitution. They tried it in '97, but because of that recent history there was still too much division like in a lot of situations. I'm from Pine Ridge, we have plenty of examples of this where you get into a fight like this and you get factions and you have a hard time letting it go. So they waited for 10 years and then in 2007 did a process for drafting a proposed constitution.

There's important issues -- and we can engage in a long conversation about their drafting process because there's a lot to learn from it -- but the idea of an open and free opportunity for input, transparent drafting and revision process, opportunity for compromising consensus, the question of whether all of that is there in your drafting process is critical and there's going to be plenty of chance...Red Lake is doing an amazing job of really trying to engage that in a very real sort of way and a number of tribes are as well that are right in the drafting process.

But when I came on the scene, they had already completed that process and they had a proposed constitution. It was completed in 2009 and when I came on, my job was to start a dialogue, start a conversation amongst the community about this proposed constitution and then move it to a referendum vote so that the people themselves would decide whether they wanted to accept or reject this proposed constitution. And the other caveat that I had is that they were not going to allow any more changes, that the document that they created from 2007 to 2009 is the document that they voted on in November of 2013.

And I was brought on about a year ago, so in April of 2013. We had from 2009 to April of 2013 not really much going on, not a lot of conversation about it, some publications in the newspaper, but that was the challenge that we had ahead of us of how to pick this thing up, communicate to folks about what the delegates at the convention as well as the current council decided to do in moving this proposed constitution to a vote. And so I came in, we pulled together a team and started thinking about how do you engage an educational process with the community, how do you do that so that the people themselves are informing themselves and have opportunity to inform themselves as much as possible.

And so we looked at these three kind of ideas as a starting point and we realized that you really have to have multiple venues in multiple formats. You can't just hold one big seminar and expect that to meet everybody's needs. You can't just hold community meetings and expect that to meet everybody's needs. You have to have a range of different things: going door to door, talking to people in their kitchen, organizing community meetings that are part of the infrastructure that's already there with whatever that is, community councils, church groups, elder groups, whatever that is, utilizing all of the infrastructure that's already there and holding meetings and informational sessions with them, working with that infrastructure to bring people together, utilizing their networks, utilizing their relationships, utilizing their own feelings about this.

Formats as well. You know how the educational process is. Some of us learn best by looking and by hearing and by talking. Some of us learn best by reading, others have to write things out. Oftentimes for me, it's a combination of things. When I'm talking to somebody, when I'm listening to somebody, when I'm writing notes, when I'm reading it, it's that combination of stuff that does it for me. And so we try to engage all of those different formats and try to create situations where whenever we brought people together, we had all those formats there as well, recognizing everybody learns in their own way, especially as adults. Most of you are adults. We learn in different ways and hopefully we know how we learn best so we can bring those resources to ourselves.

So we tried to do that, a lot of meetings and types of meeting, utilizing the infrastructure that was already there, having a lot of printed materials, having a lot of visuals, having a lot of opportunity for conversation and debate, putting together a workbook where they could draw out and write notes and make it their own. And so we tried to create all of that functionality, all of that process.

The other thing that we really tried to do...and actually was the good thing about me being a Lakota coming into Ojibwe country is I wasn't involved in the drafting process; historically, I'm their enemy. I could be neutral. I didn't have anything invested in this document that they created. I didn't really have a strong feeling one way or another and I could maintain that idea that I was coming in to help people get the information that they need in order to make up their own mind -- that idea of neutrality. It was also strengthened by the kind of career that I pursued as well, that I could say in a very clear and honest sort of way that my interest in this is that the people make up their own mind, that the people have the authority and the information and the tools that they need to come to their own decision. Because as a Lakota man from our traditions, the sovereignty of our nation resides with each individual man and woman and then it moves from there to the family and to the tiospayes and then to the nation. And in our tradition, our sovereignty rests with each individual. And so that was my focus, that was the base of my assertion of neutrality, and I told them that story over and over and over and over. And so there's value in that -- of having an educational and informational process that's not tied to one family or one political party or pro or con. It's a group of people that you bring together to provide the resources for information and education that emphasizes the fact that sovereignty in this decision lies with each individual person. That's what was important to us, not what they decided or which way they went. So that idea of neutrality.

And then we went into it just thinking like Indian people. How are Indian people, how do they decide stuff, the use of humor, the use of respect and integrity, respecting everybody's position, everybody's history, everybody's ideas, connecting the materials to their interests. For me as an Indian person, if I have a conflict with my tribal government or some other thing, I may oftentimes -- or any of us might oftentimes -- put off this idea that we don't really care, but just the opposite is true. We as Indian people care deeply, almost always. And so the trick in an educational process is how do you connect these resources to the things that we as Indian people care about and thinking about who the people are, what their history is, what they really care about, and how do you present the material and information to them in the way that lines up with the things that they care about. That is what any good teacher will do -- whether you're teaching math or science or history -- is how do you line up the information that you're teaching with what the students care about and then how do you engage it with them from that perspective? So that's basically all we were trying to do.

The final thing that we came in this with...with this idea of respecting the politics of the community. Any time you're dealing with a constitutional reform process, regardless of how narrow or broad, it's a political issue, it just is. And if you're going to engage your community to help that community, to learn about it, come to their own decision and respect their decision, and you're going to do it in a way that really has good educational pedagogy and groundwork, that's not going to be enough.

In any reservation community, you're going to have to deal with the politics of the situation. You just have to. You cannot avoid it. You cannot wish it away. If somebody's mad, one family is mad at another, you've got to deal with that. You've got to find a way of dealing with it. If one group hates the elected leader -- which in White Earth they really, really do -- you've got to deal with that. You've got to go into communities maintaining your neutrality, maintaining your emphasis on this idea that the people are the source of sovereignty and it's important that they make a decision and that's why I'm here and that their hatred of the chairperson, their hatred of the secretary-general...or secretary-treasurer or anybody else is important, it's valid. Not that I'll agree with them, yes or no, but that their feelings, their political base is valid, it has value.

It's not my place as an educator on these issues, on these highly political issues, to argue with them about the rightness or wrongness of their politically held positions. My job is to see them, to understand them and to respect them and to make room for them. In an educational process, if you're going to have a conversation about the content of a constitutional reform and help people to understand what that reform is, you're going to have to make space for those political issues.

So that was our starting point and we went through six months of almost 60 different community education sessions, hundreds of small-room conversations, thousands of phone conversations, an all-day seminar, eight radio interviews...there's a community radio station that we used a lot...internet and web-based streaming formats of all of the training sessions, all of the seminar materials and other stuff, everything available online. Even the ugly conversations, we put it up on the web. The whole world was able to see if they wanted to how intense and vibrant this thing was. And that was our goal. We put all of this stuff up and there's a few things that we learned. [I've got a few more minutes.] These are the things that we learned.

Politics and power in the community must be respected. I ended that previous slide with it and I began this final slide with that. This cannot be overstated. You have got to make room for the politics of that community. You've got to. A constitution is inherently a political document and people have got to see it and engage it. If they're not engaging it, if they don't have...and remember what I said earlier, we as Indian people, we care. There is not one of us that lacks for caring. Even if it's the only thing we care about is drugs or something, we as Indian people care deeply about a lot of different things. And whenever you combine that with a political issue, especially if you're dealing with membership and citizenship, which the White Earth constitution did and moved from a quarter-degree blood criteria to lineal descendancy; a hugely, hugely volatile issue for the entire community. And we realized that coming off the history of that community, coming off what this proposed constitution was proposing that politics and power in the community must be respected. And that process is not easy; it requires you to deal with sometimes very extreme emotions.

I can tell you, when somebody's really angry and you know how spit'll comes out of their mouth sometimes, I can tell you exactly how far it goes so I put myself right at this space so it doesn't hit me. That was the nature of it. You just...you've got to be okay with it and it may not come to that, you can do a number of things that try to engage it in a way that defuses it, but sometimes you're not going to be able to.

The truth for me, I found, that what I wanted was an escalating interest and that is going to show itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes people are going to get more excited and more positive about it. Other times people are going to get more excited and more negative about it. We want an escalating amount of interest in this thing because we had a timeframe moving to November 19th to a vote. We wanted an escalating amount of energy, an escalating amount of dialogue, people taking positions and arguing for their decisions. I said this over and over and over, "˜Don't be quiet. Talk to every family member, go to the tribal council meetings, talk about these things as much as you can.' I wasn't at the council meetings so I didn't care, but that was my job.

The second thing is the importance of emotion and passion, which we basically just talked about, but it really does work, this idea. And in some ways it was just happenstance, something that you stumble across, but it was something that my elders told me. Once I was deciding to go to law school and stuff like that, we started having these conversations about sovereignty and where it comes from and what's the traditional base of it amongst Oglala Lakota people, and those are the things that they taught me. And I used what they taught me from that traditional base to have these conversations in the White Earth community, that there's value and reality in the individual holding the base of that sovereignty and making those sovereign decisions for themselves, taking that responsibility, carrying that burden and making that decision. So that results in emotion and passion, that results in interest and care, that results in decision-making and advocacy, and I think that's what you want. You want your people to be interested and from that perspective, there's no win or lose. Whether the constitution passed or not, we created interest and care and passion about it.

Timing and place for building momentum. Do not put yourself in a situation where you complete a drafting process and then wait three or four years before you do anything with it. It's a tough deal, if you're going to actually go through the process of drafting it, and what I'm learning about Red Lake and other places that are engaging the drafting process, do that in a deliberate way where you have plenty of opportunity for feedback and compromise and engagement. Engage an educational process without a bunch of delay. I think it's fine to make a decision -- once you have to draft -- to move it to a vote without further change, I think there's value in that, but if you have a huge delay like this, like we had, it's kind of fishy, it's kind of weird. How important is this thing really if you're going to do that? So keep that in mind.

You really do want to build momentum. You want to build this process where there's participation and engagement in the drafting process, that there's time and debate on people...allowing people to come to a decision. This is a pretty important decision, whether it's a small constitutional amendment or a complete reform of their constitution. Each one of those is critical and if the people are going to vote, then it's important that they be a part of that or at least have an opportunity to participate in that drafting and then give them time to really come to a decision, fight with each other, engage with each other, debate. And then a process for a vote.

Maintaining a firm principle in neutrality -- and again, some of this is just fortuitous -- but not only was I given the opportunity to do this as a Lakota in Ojibwe country, but the elected leadership, the tribal council, the chairperson, the secretary-treasurer were consistently supportive of that idea as well. Not because of me -- and I'm sure they had their own political reasons as well -- but when the council also supported our educational efforts and our education team, gave us the space and the resources to engage, didn't interfere. They still had their own opinions, they were divided just like everybody else was, but they emphasized the desire that the people themselves would decide and that the educational process would engage in a neutral fashion, that we would not promote one direction or another. There is real value in that. If you engage in an educational process and you're pushing it one way constantly, it's just going to fail. I think it's going to push against you and I think you're going to end up with a bad result. And so there was real value in that.

The final thing that we really learned as much as anything else -- especially when you're engaging a very broad reform like we did and on very highly controversial issues like from blood quantum to lineal descendancy -- you're going to get some pretty intense opposition and some of you have experienced that. Almost every other tribe that I've talked with that have engaged this, they come up with words like "˜the local Taliban' or the kind of intense kind of argument and debate and opposition. It's really important to just do it, to maintain your focus, to stay your course, and that attitude of doing it has to be a commitment from your educational team that does it with respect, respecting all of those people that would give voice to the strength of their opinions regardless of what that opinion is. But also the elected leadership, the elected leadership cannot back away. They have to maintain a principled approach to this and that was the value of White Earth's elected leadership as well. Their position -- whether they supported it or opposed it -- consistently, "˜We want it to go to a vote, we want the people to decide and we'll respect the decision of the people.' So those kind of principles and those kind of ideas help you as a team to stick with it, to stay with it and bring it to a referendum vote or whatever the eventual process is.

So those are the key principles that we engaged in our educational process. They're very simple. There's a lot of other details. Whenever you start into it, you want to think about the educational process, what is a learning process for adults on your reservation? They're going to be fairly consistent. We learn through different formats. We have to learn by seeing it, by coloring it, by writing it, by hearing it, by arguing it, by watching a movie, by going to your grandma's house or whatever it is. That's how we learn. You're going to have passion with it. So the general educational process in the pedagogy of your people, adult education; this is not new stuff, none of this is new stuff. This is understood.

As Indian people, how do we learn? Humor, everything else, food, it's got to be there. And the passion. The passion is there. We as Indian people, we are passionate people. We just are. We care deeply. How are you going to connect these sometimes very technical things, constitutional reform? We're going to go over some of those technical stuff, the legal side of this this afternoon as well. How do you connect that to what people really care about and have those conversations and take the time. It takes time, evening, morning, whatever that timeframe is that people think the best. I've set up sessions at 5:00 in the morning because that's when that guy thought the best and we did it. This is what it takes and it's doable and it's fun in a lot of ways. If you care about education, this combination of education, grounded in tribal sovereignty. That's what we learned as the keys to having a successful education and information process."

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

The Tigua Indians of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in Ysleta, Texas produced this 16-minute film in 2013 to demonstrate how a Native American tribe can work hard with business skills and tribal customs to shape a prosperous future through education for all levels of the Tigua Nation.

Native Nations
Citation

Riggs, Patricia. "Rebuilding The Tigua Nation." Honoring Nations, Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Capstone Productions Inc. El Paso, Texas. February 27, 2013. Film.

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

June 13, 2011

[Sirens/gunshots]

Narrator:

“We are the People of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. We came from the open lands of what became Central New Mexico and now we live in West Texas and our lands are surrounded by El Paso, Texas.”

Saint Anthony
Feast Day

[Gunshots]

Ysleta Mission

Narrator:

“In 1680 the Spaniards forced our ancestors to move here. They built this mission church in 1682.”

Javier Loera:

“In this display we have photographs and images of our mission, of our church, which we helped build. The oldest image, it’s actually a drawing, that we have of our mission is this one in the year 1881. It was a very simple structure without the added bell tower which was added a couple years later.”

Narrator:

“For more than 300 years our people have performed corn dances on June 13th at the Feast of St. Anthony.”

[Singing/bell ringing]

Carlos Hisa:

“It’s the way of life, it’s who we are, we’ve been doing this for hundreds of years and we just continue to do it. It’s who we are as a people.”

[Singing/bell ringing]

Narrator:

“The Tigua People honor our ancestors who kept the ceremonies and traditions, also the traditions of the elaborate feast preparations, which takes weeks to prepare for. Our people come together to share in the responsibilities to prepare for the feast, which is served after the rituals and blessings at the mission. These activities show that our tribe keeps the customs and practices that we have always valued. We now live in a modern world and must balance traditions with the present day needs. The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo has proven strong willed and has persevered over the changes of time.

Tiguas have been faithful to our traditions, sometimes hiding our ceremonies to avoid punishments from non-Indians. Our people have proven to be resilient time and again in our extraordinary struggle for cultural preservation.

Our struggle continued into the 1960s when a lawyer named Tom Diamond helped us get federal and state recognition as a Native American tribe.

As a declaration of tribal sovereignty and economic development efforts, the Pueblo decided to enter into casino gaming in 1993 and our financial future brightened. The State of Texas fought our right to have gaming in Texas and through a federal lawsuit managed to shut the Pueblo’s Speaking Rock Casino in 2002. The casino was profitable while in operation and provided for better healthcare, housing and education of tribal members. The Pueblo still runs Speaking Rock, but now it operates as an entertainment center.”

Trini Gonzalez:

“Speaking Rock has kept us afloat during this economic struggle, both money wise and also creating jobs for our tribal members. The success would have to be free concerts. We’ve used the concerts to draw people in to actually show people that Speaking Rock isn’t closed. A lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s closed. It’s not a casino no more.’ Which it isn’t, it’s an entertainment center and we do provide quality entertainment for free to customers who come in here.”

Joseph P. Kalt:

“Well, when we look across Indian Country we see a consistent pattern of the tribes who get their act together and really worked successfully to improve the economic and social and political and even cultural conditions in their communities and Isleta del Sur Pueblo stands out as one of these examples. They show first what all these successful tribes have is a sovereignty attitude. Their idea is, ‘We’re going to do things ourselves. We are a sovereign nation and we can govern ourselves. We’re going to take those reins and we are going to put ourselves in control of absolutely everything we can.’

Secondly, and you see this at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, they recognize that you can talk the talk of sovereignty and nation building, but you’ve got to walk the walk and what that means is you’ve got to be able to govern yourselves and govern yourselves well. And Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is an Honoring Nations award winner because it has invested very systematically in building its governmental capacity, its laws, its ordinances, its regulations, its accounting systems, its personnel policies, its judicial system in a systematic way to say, ‘We’re going to put ourselves in position so we’re not dependent on any other governments.’”

Narrator:

“Ysleta del Sur Pueblo has been building the capacity for economic growth. It has established structure and policy such as a highly capable economic development department, a small business development program and tribal ordinances dealing with corporation establishment and tax laws. The Pueblo was restored as a federally recognized tribe in 1987. Our goals are to preserve our culture, sustain our community and raise the standards of living for tribal members. We have built capacity over the years and recently established our long term economic development and nation building goals. Our entire Pueblo had input on the process.”

Patricia Riggs:

“We started this process to change and transform our community and through economic development, through education and through services and infrastructure so it was a whole comprehensive strategy that took place at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.”

Joseph P. Kalt:

“Ysleta del Sur, what you see is another thing we see across Indian Country more and more and that’s an attention to culture, making what we call cultural match. The way they govern themselves here at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is under a traditional structure with no written constitution. There is no contradiction for the Tiguas between having their traditional cacique system, no written constitution and running a very good day-to-day government because it’s founded in that traditional system. And having that cultural foundation underneath your government is absolutely critical. If it isn’t there, you’re not legitimate in the eyes of your own people and Ysleta del Sur stands out for recognizing that in everything they do they’re doing it based on and flowing from their traditions, their culture, their traditional governance systems. And then lastly, Ysleta del Sur also shows a fourth thing that stands out with tribes that are successful—leadership. Leaders not only as decision makers, but leaders as educators and the leadership at Ysleta del Sur has systematically invested in everything from the broad community to the youth with education on what it means to be a self governing Tigua nation. And so Ysleta del Sur Pueblo stands out for that sovereignty attitude, for strong capable tribal government founded on the tribe’s culture with a leadership that understands it needs to educate the people as to what this sovereignty game is all about.”

Narrator:

“In order to become effective in the modern world, the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is striving to become a self determined and self sufficient Pueblo while preserving our cultural foundation. With our economic development plans now in motion, we have taken the first steps in forging a prosperous and strong Tigua nation and we have established Tigua, Inc. that operates tribal businesses.”

John Baily:

“We are the business arm for the Pueblo itself. We manage and operate all the business functions that contribute to the success of the Pueblo. We’re able to focus on a long term strategy and build that for five, 10 years out and really start implementing plans as we go down. So our goal is to develop the long term stream of profit and revenue that is repeatable regardless of the environment we’re in. We’re for real. We’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.”

Patient:

“Is it going to hurt?”

Dentist:

“No, you’ll be fine.”

Narrator:

“We have increased our administrative abilities and have created a grants management and program development branch of the Economic Development Department resulting in programs that provide health and other services.”

Al Joseph:

“And we’ve managed to build 63 new housing units last year after a big infrastructure project the year before so we’ve got a lot of projects going on to the total of about $20 million worth right now. The quality of life for the average Pueblo resident I think has been greatly enhanced by the combination of construction of new housing, very affordable housing and the rehabilitation of 160 houses on the reservation has definitely improved the quality of life for the residents that have been living in those houses, some of them for as long as 35 years. They now have modern, up-to-date housing that everything works and it’s a much nicer place to live.”

Narrator:

“One part of the economic development of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is the attention our tribe gives to educating tribal members on various subjects in order to improve individual quality of life and skills for all age groups.”

Christopher Gomez:

“Things are different now because we’ve gotten on the nation building path now where we’re doing a lot of long term visioning, we’re thinking beyond what’s coming ahead the next month, the next year and we’re thinking 20, 30, 40, even 100 years down the line. What do we want Tigua culture to be in a hundred years? Where do we want to see our community? That visioning has really put things into a different perspective.”

[Singing]

Narrator:

“With our Tigua youth, we stress tribal traditions and working together.”

Christopher Gomez: [to students]

“Here we have language, social dances, Pueblo arts, Tigua history, nation building, tutoring, traditional culture, Native American games, environmental issues…”

Christopher Gomez:

“We’re thinking about the next generations now. Just like we were left a legacy from the generations that came before us who established the Pueblo, we want to make sure that we’re continuing that legacy and that our people are able to in a changing world adapt and utilize new skills to be able to carry forward the Tigua legacy and really define what that Tigua legacy is.”

Narrator:

“Our younger children learn about computers and nature from tribal program experts. We have established new programs such as pre-K and modern care facilities where children are taught general education and tribal traditions through tribal arts and crafts. At the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo education for our people goes hand in hand with our economic development because as we increase our understanding of Native American heritage and strengthen the businesses of our tribe, we multiply the return to our people many times. It is a great time to be a Tigua as we graduate more members from college and create higher paying jobs. Outcomes include increased revenues and more programs and better tribal member services.”

Joseph P. Kalt:

“One of the things that Ysleta del Sur has done in its nation building efforts is it’s bootstrapped itself into this little engine that could, is it’s invested in communication and you can…any of us can go to their website and in their economic development section you’ll find a systematic laying out of the many steps that they’ve taken from community education, youth programs, the development of their strategic plans, the development of their laws and ordinances, the development of their new institutions, even their financial development. So Ysleta del Sur is doing a service to all tribes by providing this information in an easily accessible way and I encourage anyone who’s interested in how Ysleta del Sur has bootstrapped itself in this way, it’s on their website and it’s just a tremendous resource for anyone engaging in this challenge of building native nations.”

Trini Gonzalez:

“Recently we just got accepted by our brothers up north into the AIPC, the All Indian Pueblo Council and a lot of the Pueblos up there model themselves after us. They see that we’ve been a…I guess a big hitter here in our economy and the way we go after grants and the way our money is utilized, the housing that we do, the entertainment center the way it’s operated, our smoke shop. Everything that we do, it’s being looked at and dissected and I think that’s a huge feather in our cap to say that they’re looking at us to try to correct some things on their reservations.

The powwow enlightens a lot of people on the culture, the dance, the regalia, everything that has to do with a powwow let’s people know there is a tribe here in Texas and it’s Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.”

Narrator:

“In May 2012 our Economic Development Department opened the Tigua Business Center on tribal land in a renovated building.”

[Cheering]

Frank Paiz:

“The Tigua Business Center demonstrates the will and spirit of the Tigua people to grow and prosper. The tribal journey began at the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which resulted in our migration to an establishment of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo 1682. Since, we have been determined to preserve and continue Tigua way of life and flourish as a community."

Narrator:

“As our Tigua nation becomes stronger, we will continue our traditions and our success in this modern world.”

Carlos Hisa:

“We are Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. We are a community strong with tradition and culture. We have survived in the area for over 300 years and with economic development behind us, I can very easily say that we will continue to be here for hundreds of years.”

[Singing]

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

2012 Tribal Council
Cacique Frank Holguin
Governor Frank Paiz
Lt. Governor Carlos Hisa
War Captain Javier Loera
Aguacil Bernando Gonzales

Councilmen
Chris Gomez
David Gomez
Francisco Gomez
Trini Gonzalez

Saint Anthony Dancers
Feast Preparation
Trini Gonzales Tribal Councilmen
Adult Tribal Social Dancers
Joe Kalt Harvard University
Youth Nation Building
Youth Financial Literacy Class

Pat Riggs, Economic Development Director
John Baily, CEO of Tigua Inc.

Tigua Inc. Board
Ana Perez, chair
Chris Gomez
Rudy Cruz
George Candelaria
Al Joseph

Housing Director Al Joseph
Empowerment Director Christopher Gomez
Cultural Center Dance Group
Tuy Pathu Daycare children
Pre-School Dance Group
Pow Wow Dancers

Producer
Patricia Riggs

Director
Jackson Polk

Camera
Aaron Barnes
Fernie Apodaca
Jackson Polk

TV Facilities
Capstone Productions Inc.

Funding provided by Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development Honoring Nations

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation © 2013 Yselta del Sur Pueblo

Deborah Locke: Disenrollment: My Personal Story

Producer
Tribal Citizenship Conference
Year

Deborah Locke, adopted by a Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa couple when she was a small child, shares her heartbreaking story of how she and her adopted siblings were disenrolled by the Band decades later because they were not the biological descendants of Fond du Lac Band members and also because they did not meet the minimum blood quantum requirement as established by the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe constitution.

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

Locke, Deborah. "Disenrollment: My Personal Story." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Sarah Deer:

"Our final panel today is looking at the question of disenrollment. So we have a number...we have three speakers who are going to each discuss one angle or one facet of the controversial issue of disenrollment. So we have legal, personal, and traditional perspectives on this question. We have three speakers.

I'm going to start with Deborah Locke from Turtle Mountain. She is a former editorial board member for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a former reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. She also edited and wrote for the newspaper of the Fond du Lac Reservation, worked for almost three years on a legacy amendment funded project on the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War at the Minnesota Historical Society and she is currently a freelance writer for the Mille Lacs Band.

Shawn Frank from the Jacobson Law Group is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, joined Jacobson Law Group in 2002, has substantial experience representing Indian tribes, tribal organizations and entities that do business with tribes. He became a shareholder in 2003. Mr. Frank does speak regularly at lawyer's seminars on the subjects of tribal sovereignty, doing business in Indian Country, the Freedom of Information Act and the administrative appeals through the Department of Interior.

And finally Sharon Day, Executive Director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force from Bois Forte Band [of Chippewa]. Ms. Day is one of the founders of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, formerly known as the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force. It began as a volunteer organization with all of the work performed by the board of directors. They hired their first staff, Ms. Day, in 1988 and she has served in this capacity since that time. Ms. Day has received numerous awards including the Resourceful Woman Award, BIHA's Woman of Color Award, the National Native American AIDS Prevention Resource Center's Red Ribbon Award, and most recently the Alston Bannerman Sabbatical Award. She also is an editor of an anthology and a lead walker who carries the water from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior with the Mother Earth Water Walk. I'm looking forward to all their presentations, so please join me in welcoming our panel."

[Applause]

Deborah Locke:

"Hi, I'm Deborah. It's nice to be here today. I hope you can hear me. I received this letter dated January 6th from the Fond du Lac [Band of Lake Superior Chippewa] Reservation Business Committee:

Ms. Locke,

It's come to the attention of the Fond du Lac Reservation Business Committee that you are not the biological daughter of Frederick and Anna Marie Locke and that you were in fact adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Locke. Under Article 2, Section 1c of the Minnesota [Chippewa] Tribe Constitution, only the biological children of members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe are eligible for membership in the tribe and if born after July 3rd, 1961, must also possess one-fourth degree MCT blood quantum.

There's a lot of lawyers in this room. I think most of you know that by heart.

The Reservation Business Committee has accordingly directed that disenrollment proceedings be initiated against you in accordance with MCT Ordinance #9. You have 30 days from the date of this letter to request a hearing before the Fond du Lac Tribal Court to provide evidence and argument as to why you should not be disenrolled.

Think about that.

In addition, per capita payments from the Band are being immediately suspended pending the final outcome of this matter.

Sincerely,
Linda J. Nelson
Enrollment Officer

I was standing outside the Rosedale Target when I read that letter one cold day and I cannot even explain to you how weird I felt. I felt damn weird. The day before I was identifying with Pocahontas, today I'm a white girl. The day before I was a Band member. I had family at Fond du Lac. Today I'm cut free. I'm a white girl. I tell you, that felt a little bit weird and it also felt embarrassing. More than anything else it felt embarrassing. I thought, ‘What did I do to bring this on? I was born and I was adopted. That's all that I ever did. What...they've got Band members that shoot each other, that use drugs, that steal, that...the list goes on and on and they're getting rid of me?' I tell you, I was totally perplexed. I called my mother from my cell phone in the parking lot and told her what I'd received. She was absolutely incensed. She was very, very upset and bewildered and she started calling relatives after we hung up. So let me tell you a little bit more about my mother and my dad.

They adopted four American Indian kids in the 1950s and they had always...they wanted children. They went to Catholic Charities in Duluth. A social worker asked them if it was okay if the children were Indian. My mother is a Band member at Fond du Lac and she said, ‘Are you serious? We don't care what color they are.' Dad said the same thing and so four children came fairly quickly after that. I was the first and when I was a little girl my parents had a book that they read to all of us starting with me that was called The Chosen Baby and it was about two kids named Peter and Mary. And Peter and Mary were adopted, and what I took from that book starting when I was three years old is that being adopted is really special. Being adopted means that you are a gift to someone and being adopted means that you were chosen for a very special reason. And so I lived with that magic for a long time and most of my life believing that adoption is a good thing.

So that's my family background a little bit, and I'll tell you that the Fond du Lac Band was also interested in that family background starting with this letter dated July 22, 2009. The Band had sent a letter to the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe asking for assistance in getting my adoption records from the state. So a letter went to the Minnesota Department of Human Services and I'm going to read a little bit about this. ‘The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe branch of Tribal Operations is inquiring of the circumstances of the adoption of...' and then it lists the four Locke children and it's signed by Brian Brunelle, Director of Administration for the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. And that was followed by an affidavit dated December 23, 2009 from a Jamie Lee with the Department of Human Services at the state and she's responsible for maintaining the adoption records and in this document, in this affidavit she ensured everybody that I was indeed adopted. Here's the date I was adopted, when it was finalized, here's the case number and my name was changed from whatever to Deborah Locke on this date.

Also within these papers that the tribe had was a resolution from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe dated 1978 wherein I and my brothers and sisters were enrolled with the Band. We were enrolled with the Band because my uncle, Peter DeFoe, Sr., had gone to my mother one day and said, ‘You should have the children enrolled. They're all Indian. They're my nieces and my nephews. I recognize them as such and they should be enrolled.' And mom said, ‘All right.' So she went through with it and apparently that went without a hitch. All I know is that one day in my 20s I was told that I was enrolled. Well, I thought that was pretty cool, but I didn't really fully understand it quite honestly.

You might wonder, where did this all start at Fond du Lac? And from what I can tell it began maybe at least five years earlier, maybe longer, with a family that had adopted two non-Indian children. The woman, Roberta Smith Poloski was a Band member. Her husband was not. He's not American Indian. And they adopted these two girls and had them enrolled in 1982 and there were Band members who very much resented that. The little girls grew up with their Indian relatives, identified with American Indian culture, and were pretty much accepted as far as I knew. We were good friends with them; they lived just down the street.

So the Poloski girls were later identified as non-Indians with Band benefits and there were complaints about that that were registered with the RBC [Reservation Business Committee] starting again minimally five years before this and it might have even been 10 years. I can...I'll read this to you, this is the RBC open meeting minutes from the Brookston Community Center dated November 19, 2009.

Geraldine Savage asked, ‘What is going on with the disenrollment issue?'

Chairman Karen Diver said, ‘There has been a hearing and we're just waiting to hear on the judge's decision.'

Ms. Savage asked, ‘Why is the RBC waiting for the judge to decide?'

Mr. Ferdinand Martineau said, ‘We are following the ordinance that was done in 1988.'

Ms. Savage said, ‘It should be the RBC making the decision.'

Mr. Martineau said, ‘This is the way the ordinance is set up.'

Ms. Joyce LaPorte asked if this is going to cause a backlash.

Mr. Ferdinand Martineau said, ‘It may.'

Mr. Martineau said, ‘The individuals were enrolled under a different council.'

Ms. Geraldine Savage asked, ‘How long will it take for a decision?'

Mr. Martineau said, ‘The enrollment issue should have been easy to decide.'

Mr. Martineau said, ‘Conflict would come if the tribal court said to leave them enrolled.'

Ms. Savage said, ‘This would be a conflict then.'

Mr. Martino said, ‘But we have brothers and sisters and some of them are enrolled and some of them are not enrolled.'

Ms. Nancy Sepala asked if we are going to lose Band members because of the blood quantums.

That last question was never addressed. They went on to talk about elderly housing. I think that last question is really a key one, and that was a question that a lot more people than Ms. Nancy Sepala was wondering at that time. What would be the ultimate outcome of these disenrollments that we're starting?

So anyway, the Poloski girls had their day in court and the tribal judge ruled against them. They decided to come down to St. Paul and present their arguments to the Court of Appeals, the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Court of Appeals, and that court gave them a decision dated March 30, 2010 that said, ‘We affirm the Fond du Lac Tribal Court decision and their justification was that all children of at least one-quarter degree Minnesota Chippewa Indian blood born after July 3, 1961 to a member...' and then there's that language. So apparently the girls didn't fill that criteria. And then there's reference to the fact that ‘the constitution is unambiguous and that the children must possess a direct biological link to members of the tribe and that at least one-quarter of the applicant's biological lineage must trace to Minnesota Chippewa Indians. Applying this clear requirement to the facts at issue in the appeal is a straightforward task, but it's a task that we do with sadness.'

So Renee and Robin were disenrolled and they complained to the RBC that there were other people who were still enrolled who were also adopted including those Locke kids who were just down the street. And so the RBC took that charge pretty seriously and started its investigation, and I've just read to you some of the documentation that they were working with. What happened to me? Well, after that very fateful day when I received the letter, I was working as their editor and I went to work and made a couple of calls and discovered that not everybody agreed that that disenrollment action was a good idea and that made me feel pretty good. In fact, there were a few people who were rather upset at the Fond du Lac Band when the news of this got out. I don't think it was a groundswell. I don't think that...nothing like that happened, but there were a few key people who mean something to me who didn't like what happened and they had some good advice, including names of attorneys throughout the state who I should contact to get some advice from and so I did. I made phone calls and discovered that I should request a petition date. I'm sorry I'm not a lawyer, I can't get into too many of the legalities, but I do know that it wasn't long after that before we did set...we sent documentation and asked for a hearing. And then I had to wait quite awhile before that hearing date actually came up.

But in the meantime, again I was in this odd rather limbo-like state. I knew some details of my adoption. I knew that my biological mother was from Turtle Mountain. I had seen documentation from the county, St. Louis County, which said that my...the name of my father had never been released. There was no reason for us to presume he was not Fund du Lac. The only description and information I ever learned about my father was that he was tall and he liked to hunt and fish. Well, now that covers about 98 percent of the men at Fond du Lac, although not all of them are that tall, but there could be a tall one out there somewhere. So they all like to hunt and fish and he was athletic, so that was all very interesting, but it didn't tell me a whole lot. It didn't tell me whether or not he was in fact a Band member.

What happened from there is this. I was urged to find an attorney, I couldn't. I called everywhere I could think of to get someone to take the case. Finally, Tim Aldridge did and he was an attorney at Bemidji all the time, had done some work for a couple of bands and Tim agreed to take on the case. The reason these lawyers said 'no' was because there was no precedent. They didn't know what they were getting into and they weren't quite sure how to win it. I'm sure the list goes on and on and on. But my mother went into her savings to pay for the retainer, which absolutely broke my heart, but I didn't have many choices at the time and I think this is true of a lot of people who are included with me. What I heard is from 20 to 40 people at Fond du Lac got that letter and I was the first one to go through with a trial or a court hearing, which says that I was the only one who paid the money that it required. That's an advantage tribal courts have. They know that the people who they represent often don't have the money to pay for an attorney. I think that's one of the worst tragedies of this story.

Anyway, I went ahead, I had this great lawyer and when we got the hearing date, he and a couple of other...quite a few people were sort of involved with this and giving me various kinds of advice. They put together a summons and complaint and I filed it and things were quiet for awhile and then we had our...and I hired the attorney and we had our initial hearing. That went okay. I'm not even quite sure...that was just to see what information...discovery, that was discovery. And then we set the date or the hearing date in the tribal court offices or the tribal courtroom, whatever that's called. And I argued that or my attorney argued with me a number of things and here's what I can tell you from the complaint.

He cited the Indian Civil Rights Act and he said that that states that, ‘No Indian tribe in exercising powers of self-government shall deny to any person within this jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws or deprive any person of liberty or property without due process of law.' Again you're wondering, property, yeah, that little $400 a month payment that I was getting was very useful. That was cut off with absolutely no notice whatsoever. That's just the beginning of what was cut off. I was informed of a -- this goes on -- now this is my voice. ‘I was informed of a pre-hearing conference set for May 18, 2010, but have not received the documents that will be used against me. I request...' and here's B, ‘I request the honorable court to scrutinize the purpose of the disenrollment attempt as to procedural and substantive due process. The January 6th letter sets forth vague information that an adoption is used as the basis for the disenrollment. I may be entitled to enrollment apart from the adoption allegation moreover admitting tribes have the right to determine membership.' Those were the two strongest arguments I think from this document. It also says, ‘My specific allegations alleging lack of due process justifying injunctive relief are as follows...' I was told and I remember this phone call, I was told in a telephone call by a court employee that I would only be allowed to look at the evidence against me at the time of the hearing without prior notice of what may be used against me and B, the pre-trial hearing was set prematurely without a scheduling hearing, a discovery period and without adequate time to be allowed for me to prepare a meaningful case based on the merits. Defendants failed to give a fair warning of the nature of the case. This goes on for maybe another couple of pages. It's signed and dated May 17, 2010.

So, we waited again and it wasn't until I'm thinking, yeah, by late December I was really wondering when are we going to be getting some sort of a decision from the judge and an order arrived or was sent to my attorney on January 22, 2011 and it said this, it said, ‘The issue was whether the petitioner met the tribe's membership requirements when the decision to enroll was first made.' In other words, did that initial RBC and did the officials with MCT just make a simple mistake back in 1978 when they permitted this to go through. And the judge's order also said this, ‘Petitioner's request for hearing did not set out the reason she believed she should not be disenrolled, but stated that she understood the fact that she was adopted was the reason for her disenrollment. She requested documents leading to the decision to proceed with the disenrollment.' The order also said that I provided a document from my biological mother that showed I had enough Indian blood to be enrolled and it also said the Band argued that an enrolled adoptee must be born to a member of the MCT. The judge also referred to the letter from the St. Louis County Adoptive Services that stated my biological parents were each American Indian and although the judge did say the document named my father, it didn't. His name...that name has never surfaced. The order says that, ‘Though I am perhaps of Chippewa descent...' That's the word she used -- 'perhaps.' ‘Perhaps she's of Chippewa descent, it's not enough information to conclude that I met the requirement of MCT membership.' And consequently the disenrollment was approved.

So I received that information, my attorney and I talked a little bit about it. I talked with these other attorneys who had been involved and they all said that, ‘You cannot give up at this point. You have to appeal this. You've got to go to St. Paul to Bandana Square and talk to these judges,' and that means of course I need to hire another attorney because by this time Tim Aldridge had left his practice in Bemidji. I thought, ‘What's this going to take? I have to go to my mother again and borrow from her savings for what may be another losing case and I have to try and find an attorney, most of whom don't even want to come anywhere near me. And what else do I have to...I have to get up in the morning for how many months ahead, each morning, and deal with this thing.' I cannot even begin to describe how this weighs on a person. I can't even tell you how it just turns you upside down, not only me, my siblings, my mom who was elderly to begin with, my extended family and friends. And I didn't realize how much it had affected them until I had heard a rumor through my brother that we were suddenly all to be reinstated. And I told one of my friends whose husband is a Band member and she started crying and so I realized that this is something that is really touching a lot of people in a lot of different ways.

What I heard from one of the attorneys is this, he said, ‘Membership is a right. If you are born to an MCT parent...' and no one proved that Deb was not born to an MCT parent... ‘Fond du Lac and MCT shifted the burden of proof to me after more than 30 years following an open enrollment process.' Those were the words I heard from one of the attorneys. In the meantime, personally what was going on, my youngest brother David has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. He is living in Tucson right now. He has been for quite a few years. The $400...he cannot work. He can't. He has a...he's got a disability that will not permit him to function very well. He's about 12 or 13 years old emotionally and in every other way. So he's in Tucson and he gets the same letter that I did. He goes to my mother and he's crying on the phone. He's already torn up his ID and all of his papers and anything that ever had anything to do with Fond du Lac. He's very distressed about this thing and my mom of course is very distressed about it and what are we going to do about David now -- because that piece...that puny little $400 a month was basically all he had and some food stamps. So my mom and I started paying his bills that year and he's...my heart goes out to him because he lives in like this world of confusion. There's so much he doesn't understand and it is not his fault that he doesn't understand it. Anyway, in December of 2010, David got a letter that he would receive a check for $4,800, which is a year of casino dividend payments. The letter said he was getting a lump sum because he filled the annual dividend form incorrectly in January. He never got one. What he got in January was the same letter that I got. I reminded my brother that I got the same letter he did in January a year earlier about disenrollment proceedings.

So where does this leave us and where does it leave me? It leaves me with a lot of confusion about what I call 'cultural competency,' because in the course of that year and a half of trauma, one of the first things I was told was that in Ojibwe history and culture adoptees have the same status as biological children, that it had been that way for hundreds of years and that you truly were a chosen baby. I was also told that the tradition of adoption...that adoption meant that children were called to the Band for a very special role and that included the Poloski girls, excuse me, but it did. The Poloski girls as well as me and my three siblings all fell under that blanket. For some special reason, the Creator placed us with this Band. We were babies, we didn't have much say about it, but that's what happened and what I learned from these attorneys, who actually were culturally competent and kindhearted and everything else you would look for in an attorney, and I'd never met people like this in my life, but wow they were good. Anyway, a sidebar.

What I had hoped for through this proceeding and somewhere buried in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe constitution was something that said that traditions matter and that the fate of children matters and that when you get to be in your 50s and 60s, people don't pull the rug out from under you the way they pulled the rug out from under me and my family. My mother had a good solution early on. She said, ‘If the Band wanted to change something, they could have grandfathered all of you in and said, 'From this point forward this is the way it's going to be.'' And I think that would have been a good solution, but of course they didn't think of that. It was just too easy to say, ‘Well, maybe Renee or Robin are making a point.' I don't even...I can't even speculate where they were coming from on that. I don't... was it a cost savings? I don't think it was that great a cost savings, 20 to 40 people. I still see myself as a 'chosen child' and I really wish the Fond du Lac Band was Ojibwe enough to understand what that means. Thank you."

Sharon Day, Shawn Frank and Deborah Locke: Disenrollment (Q&A)

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Panelists Sharon Day, Shawn Frank, and Deborah Locke field questions from the audience and a few participants offer their closing thoughts on the question of tribal citizenship and identity. 

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

Resource Type
Citation

Day, Sharon. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Frank, Shawn. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Locke, Deborah. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Matthew Fletcher:

"My wife, Wenona Singel, wrote a paper where I think I've learned more from this paper than anything else I've read and she...two points about the paper I think that are important. The first is...the paper's called "Indian Tribes and Human Rights Accountability" and it seems to me that there is a -- seems to her and I agree -- that there's a gap in human rights coverage and the gap applies to Indian tribes. International law obligates nations to guarantee minimal human rights and there are things in the United Nations Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], for example, that include these kind of principles, but they don't apply to sub-nations like Indian tribes and so tribes ostensibly have no outside accountability for some of the things they do. That's one of the reasons we have the lack of federal court jurisdiction over things like tribal membership issues is an issue. The other thing is the question of sovereignty and Indian tribes assert sovereignty over tribal membership decisions and if you think about sovereignty, the same kind of arguments that tribes are asserting now when they're defending themselves from challenges on questions of disenrollment are exactly the same things that the southern states made when they were challenged over slavery prior to the Civil War. And if you read the Dred Scott case, there's a long rambling dissertation in there about sovereignty, how internal governance matters should be left to the states alone and outsiders shouldn't have anything to say over that. So I just wondered if you wanted to... if that inspired any commentary from anybody."

Shawn Frank:

"I just think in terms of the sovereignty issue -- maybe I shouldn't answer this since it's framed versus an exercise tantamount to endorsing slavery -- but I think the tribes do have that authority and they can take actions pursuant to that authority. I think the question becomes of whether or not they should, but I certainly...one of the things I do believe is that tribes have to exercise their sovereignty in certain regards because what good is being a sovereign nation with independent authority in certain instances if you're not willing to exercise it? And I think that in issues of membership, that's an important exercise of a tribe's sovereign authority. And I think kind of getting back a little bit to kind of one of the themes of Sharon's [Day] presentation was I think Indian nations are in an interesting position because you have these traditional notions -- not notions, that makes it sound quaint -- these traditions of clans and kinship and where things were really fluid and loose, but as tribes became more like western governments and they adopted constitutions and laws, the tribes now are required to follow those constitutions and laws and sometimes they don't allow this sort of traditional healing, community togetherness concept because there are specific criteria in the specific things that tribes have adopted. So it's kind of a desire sometimes to get back to more kinship and inclusive thing, but the tribes by their own adoption of some constitutions and some other ordinances have really prevented that from being able to happen."

Sharon Day:

"But sovereignty also means that they could do that as well, they could move in the direction that I was referring to if they so choose. That's sovereignty, that's exercising sovereignty."

Audience member:

"After hearing everything that was presented today, I often wonder what the 570-some tribes throughout the United States that are going through enrollment issues, that if there could ever be a conference or a reunification of Indigenous tribes here, not just the continental United States, but the South American, Canadian come together and look at what has...so that there'd [be] a standardization hopefully maybe within the tribes, so that we'd send a message say to the federal government, to the Department of the Interior that we all have the same standards, that's what we're going to abide by. I think we're all going through the decolonization as Sharon was saying and we're still gun shy in what we do. Why? Because we're only one tribe amongst nations of many others and to set a precedence, not just for our tribe, but other tribes here have different things. For instance, they were talking about citizenship and that presentation. Well, if you don't reside on a reservation you don't get any of the benefits. And there again the question was, well, you get benefits, but you have pride in being a tribal member. And often we all say that what's good enough for one tribal member is good for all whether it be the benefiter or etc.

And so I think as a short-term goal probably within say even a year is try to get the message out to all the tribes in the United States, come together somewhere say centrally located, Oklahoma, Nebraska, whatever, come together and have a large summit. That would be a dream and if we go with the clan systems or a way of life, which our people followed many years ago that...whatever, it'd work out to be the best because...me and Willard went to Las Vegas for an enrollment issue and listened to that and we hear different perspectives on enrollment; you hear good stories, you hear sad stories, you hear pondering stories. You're like, 'Okay, I've got my head scratching, I'm thinking,' but you have to know your people also. Ms. [Deborah] Locke was talking about what happened to her and that could very easily fit a lot of tribes throughout the United States and nobody likes to open up Pandora's box to what legalities would come out of that. But the big thing is I'd love to see a summit because if we make these changes today, we're going to leave a legacy for our children and I still think that our children will still be looking at this issue down the line going into the 22nd century. [Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"Any other questions or comments for the panel? I guess we have a lot to think about. Well, let's thank our panel for speaking...for joining us today."

Audience member:

"Well, actually before we clap I guess, we're hoping to get a copy of your article because we'd like to..."

Sharon Day:

"I'll send it to Colette [Routel] and she can send it."

Audience member:

"...Because we'd like to include that into our newsletter and I think...I really enjoyed your presentation..."

Sharon Day:

"Thank you."

Audience member:

"...As a member of the lodge, it's good to have our grandmothers stand up and remind us of the different things that we have. And it's...one of the things I've always enjoyed about when I worked at White Earth is that even though it's a different place there's the common teachings that exist and it's good to know that, John Borrows talked about when you identify your clan you have that connection, so for us in the lodge is that understanding because one of the things that they teach us is the unconditional love, it's to be able to accept them as they are and respect all ways. I guess I do have a comment.

So one of the things I hope that...I hope for not just as a tribal attorney, but as a tribal member is that there is an effort to try to educate our tribal members to understand...someone presented about tribal civics and we talked about this in some of the council meetings, we've talked about this on the reservation about having an opportunity to teach ourselves what our government is like, because there's such a distrust that's come from this federal model and that people who are afraid of trusting authority automatically attack our tribal model and that undermines us because it's...but for the fact that we have these treaties that exist because there's no such thing as an individual sovereign, there's the idea of tribal sovereignty. People will attack our governments because they don't like to be told 'no,' but they don't know what to do to try to get to 'yes.'

I think sitting at this table...I try to remind our council...because I studied this when I was a kid growing up. My dad was someone who was very vocal and involved in this type of work and then when I went to college and I went to the Marine Corps, I went to law school, you keep the sense of identity of who you are and it attaches to your tribe, but more for me it was attaching to who my family was. I'm a junior so I carry myself in the way that knowing that my actions reflect on my dad, but they also reflect on my family and that's a teaching that we have in our lodge and that. So for me citizenship is kind of really difficult for me to understand because I'm always going to be a member of my family and [Anishinaabe language], means 'all my relations.'

And so when one of our family members walks on in our lodge, and I know this is taught in other lodges, someone else needs to stand up and do their work because that work needs to get done. And so that's what I envision and that's what I've seen growing up on the reservation, me and Willard. We've kind of been joking with him the whole day about trying to get him to speak, but I grew up with Willard and as we get older we take more of these responsibilities and among the people that I grew up with we say, 'It's our time. It's our time to do this work now. It's our time to look to our elders like Gordon and Rusty and the ones who've opened up this path for us. It's time for us to pick up that...' Well, they probably don't want to drop it right now, but they're ready for us to start doing this work and helping them carry it that much farther so that our children have an idea of where they come from. But we have to start...I think we need to do more to trust the governments that we have and trusting them by understanding what their role is, understanding where the root of the idea of sovereignty comes from, understanding what the role of the government is supposed to be so that just because you get a negative decision, and I don't mean that in reflection of anything that's been said today, but you understand the purpose of what it is. You have to protect the identity and the protection that we have as a collective group because for every negative instance we have there's a positive instance of a negative action from a government. And I say that as a lawyer.

But people...some tribes sell their memberships and they sell it to people who can pay whoever is on council to do that or they sell the right to go hunt and fish and those are things that are not intended as those treaties were done. My dad used to...my dad told me, 'One of the major things about the treaties was Article 5 of the '37 Treaty.' He said,  ''42 was the best one negotiated for the Ojibwe's, but Article 5 is the one that encompassed us the right to hunt, fish and gather as the way we understood that because hunting, fishing and gathering was the instrument and the means for us to get the deer, the wild rice, the fish and the plants and the medicines for us to have our ceremonies. And for us to have our ceremonies allowed us to go from birth to passing with all the ceremonies that go on in between there and that allowed us to keep our connection between our ancestors and we have something to give to our grandchildren. And that maintains our identity as Ojibwe and as Anishinaabe.' And so when I get an opportunity to teach in the schools I talk about that, but I try to put a face on that.

Gordon was the chairman for our tribe when we had the void litigation that opened up this idea of reaffirming our rights in the 7th Circuit and also in the Western District of Wisconsin. Rusty has been a 20-year veteran in the Army. And so we need to do more to recognize the contribution of our individual members and when they sit on council it's not just 'f*in' council did this' or 'f*in' council did that.' What it means is that we have people who have made a sacrifice of their personal selves to put themselves in a leadership position to take the responsibility of what happens and then respect them for their contribution instead of saying, 'Well, their family did this or their family did that.'

When I took the job as the tribal attorney, I stood in front of the council and said, 'I will let go of my responsibilities as my family and not carry the grudges going forward and I will serve my council to the best of my ability to carry that forward,' and I've tried my best to do that. You've got pressures that come all the time, but I think if we're going to really have a serious conversation about what citizenship is, whether it's the political discourse or membership, whether it's belonging to that group, you have to have an idea of what is your responsibility to contribute and not just expect something in return, not just to say, 'Well, I get to go hunting and fishing because that's my treaty right.' That treaty right came at the sacrifice of thousands of people who had to sneak in the woods at night because there was people who were trying to take that away from them. I read the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] reports, I've seen the game warden reports from like 1910 when they confiscated the fish and the deer from this old elderly couple from Lac du Flambeau and the father...the male died in custody and they made the mother walk home from the lake that she was at. You would never even think about doing that now. You would never, ever contemplate doing that, but that's a sacrifice that they did so that...we need to remember those stories and they did that because...they did that to survive, but I bet you their children knew how to hunt, fish and gather and they knew how to speak their language and they understood those seven principles that come from your teaching in the lodge and they understand what the seven fires are.

And I hope that if there's some day that we have that conversation so there is a thread that connects us so that we never forget the sacrifice of who we are and what's been done to give us that chance. And I hope that we are able to make that same sacrifice so that our grandchildren can look back and say, 'Well, there was this fat guy at a conference one time who said...kept jabbering on, everybody wanted to go home...' but at least we keep that connection alive. So that's what I would say. And I say [Anishinaabe language] for your teaching."

Sharon Day:

"[Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"Thank you." 

Sharon Day: Disenrollment: Contemplating A More Inclusive Approach

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Sharon Day (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa) makes a compelling case for Native nations to abandon externally imposed criteria for citizenship that continue to cause internal divisions within Native nations and communities and instead return to Indigenous cultural values and teachings predicated on unity, inclusion and love.

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

Day, Sharon. "Disenrollment: Contemplating A More Inclusive Approach." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

"[Anishinaabe language]. So I just want to start by telling you a little story.

In 1984 or 1985 -- I'm not exactly sure when -- I went to Nicaragua as a member of a LGBT work study brigade. There was about four of us, we went to Nicaragua and we stayed with families in León and we took medical supplies because of course there was a U.S. embargo against Nicaragua. And so they couldn't get medical supplies or if they had a John Deere tractor that needed parts they couldn't get parts and none of those kinds of things. And it was actually the sixth anniversary of the revolution there. One of the towns that was near León was a little place called Subtiava and Subtiava was the birthplace of [Augusto César] Sandino who was...the Sandinista pattern themselves after Sandino and that was the beginning of the revolution.

So when I went to Subtiava, they had a cultural center, a museum and it was the only cultural museum in Nicaragua. And so I asked the people there, ‘Who...' because I was trying to figure out like how are they Indian, because they said Sandino was an Indian. So, ‘Who lived in Subtiava?' ‘Anybody who wanted to.' ‘Well, how do you govern yourself?' ‘Well, we have a council.' ‘Well, who can vote for the council?' ‘Whoever lives in Subtiava.' And this was like, what? Like how can this be because of course in our reservation systems who can live on the reservation, who can vote in the election, all of that's very tightly regulated, right? And so here's this community, an Indigenous community, in Central America where everything was just so open.

And so I was still having a...'Well, maybe they're not Indian after all.' And so I asked them, ‘Well, what do you do in terms of like...do you use like traditional medicine?' ‘Oh, yeah.' And so they showed me some of their medicines and they said, ‘In fact, right down on the beach a little ways up the coast we had a medical school where we train traditional practitioners in how to heal people before the Spaniards came and there was maybe...it was a school and we had 100 people there.' And one of the first things that the Spaniards did was burnt down that traditional medical facility. So then they pulled out all their land claims maps, like that I could understand. Same as us, right? But it was...this was 1985 and this is very...this changed a lot of the way that I thought about Indigenous people.

So I'm not a lawyer, I worked for the state for a number of years and had to deal with some state-tribal law for about 10 years and had some many good discussions there with especially the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and who as a result the tribe...the state had to change their contracts with tribes, all their language. But you know what, as tribal people, we had a governance system prior to 1492. We had a system of governing ourselves and this system of governance really for the Ojibwe people involved our clan system. And so there were clans and myself, I already told you I'm [Anishinaabe language], and where we sit in the lodge is in the western doorway and our job is to protect the people. And so ever since I was a little child I could hear my dad saying, ‘Your job is to take care of your family, your clan, your band, the tribe, all Indigenous people and ultimately all of humanity.' Now I've been lucky all my life to be able to work in positions that have enabled me to do that.

We all have clans and there's sub-clans, but these are the major clans that governed, took care of things and some years ago we started a small charter school in Minneapolis. It was called Native Arts High School and it operated for about three years and we couldn't make it go financially, but the way that we planned everything was that we had the students broken up into clans and if there was a dispute, the clans got together and they made a decision. And if they couldn't decide then we went to the Fish Clan because they were the philosophers and they ultimately made the final decision. When that decision was made, that was it. So I guess they were sort of like the Supreme Court.

And so we also have these seven grandfather teachings, and I know among the Lakota and Dakota they also had a system. They had these very same values with the addition of fortitude because life out there on the plains is a little more difficult and so fortitude is something that is one of their values. And so you can't practice...you can't choose which of these values you're going to practice, which of these values you're gong to incorporate in your life because if you don't practice one of these, you're practicing the opposite.

I know it's the end of the day and there's...just to make it short and sweet, we had laws before 1492, we had ways of governing ourself. It was based on inclusion as opposed to exclusion. Everybody had a job to do. When I was a little kid, I was telling somebody at lunch, my...I was one of 13 children and I was smart. And so when my parents would get up at 5:00 in the morning, if I did all my work the day before, I got up with them at 5:00 and my dad would...I'd get to eat with my daddy, eggs and bacon and things like that. And he would tell my mother in Ojibwe what a wonderful child I was, what a wonderful child I was because I'd done all my work and I understood all of this that he was saying in Ojibwe, and it was my time to be with my parents. When I didn't do my job, I stayed in bed.

So we practiced these, we were taught these things, and in my work now at the Indigenous Peoples Task Force we have a youth theater program that's been in existence since 1990 and we have a cessation program for young people and when the kids come in every day, the first thing they do is they have tobacco ceremony. They say this is the favorite part of the program because they sit in a circle and they talk about who they are. And when they come in, they grab a little name badge like this and it has one of these words on it, one of these values and they put that on and in all the rest of the day there that is how they're going to respond to everything. And so we learn these values through practice and if we could begin to develop some of our programs on the reservations beginning in Head Start, pre-school, incorporating these values, we would be about being including people because the more people we have, the more power we have.

Right now, we're only one percent of the population or something like that and so we need to...we've lost so many people and so we need to become larger, to become stronger, and it's not just about those immediate resources. We need to think about how do we do this? We do this through...all of our children should know where did they come from, how did they come into the world. They should know their name. My name [Anishinaabe language], that means something to me. In my clan...next week I'm meeting with five young women who want to be put on their berry fast. These are the things that we're doing, teaching these young people these kinds of things.

The effects of colonization: none of us have, no matter what, I don't care if you're a lawyer, if you sit on the Supreme Court or if you're an elected tribal official, none of us have escaped the effects of colonization. We all have felt anxiety and depression, some of us more so than others and this is a picture that many of you have seen and it's actually Spaniards setting the dogs on people that they considered to be so different from them that they weren't quite human and these were...LGBT native population, we...many of us have self medicated, we've become addicted, and we've lost more than 50 percent of our gifts because we only come into the world with gifts and we have to get those back. And so how do we go through this process of de-colonization?

We're introducing these teachings into our community, hold community gatherings where we invite everybody, where...one of my cousins, she was on tribal, she was tribal chair for a couple of terms up at my reservation and one day she said to me, ‘Why is it that...you moved away from home when you were young and I stayed here and lived on the reservation all my life and why is it that you know so much more of the cultural teachings?' Well, partly it was because I sobered up when I was 21 years old. Between the time I was 14 and 21 I used up my quota of alcohol and drugs and the first thing I did was I learned how to meditate, and then gradually I found my way to the Midewin Lodge and began to learn some of these teachings.

Somebody else I was talking to a little while ago, Mr. Barber there, he said, ‘Some of those folks back in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, we were the old St. Paul families, the Indian families, and we clung together. We clung together because we were all that we had and nobody missed that Saturday night powwow at 475 Cedar St. where the Indian Center was.' And so we had those kind of community gatherings where people participated and we need to include everyone and we need to reorganize these kinds of community events in our...and I think we need to change our way of thinking. Instead of thinking about the glass being half full, we need to think about how do we fill up that glass so everybody gets a drink of that water? How do we build those kinds of homes? In our own community, my grandfather built many of the homes at Bois Forte and I tell you those houses were far better than those HUD homes that they came along in the ‘60s. But they did it together, my grandfather and my uncles -- they did that work together and that's what we need to do.

My mother was born in Canada, three generations ago. Her mother lived in Canada, my great-grandfather came from Leech Lake, but I'm full blood and I'm from Bois Forte, but you go back three generations and these boundaries that we have today did not exist 200 years ago. So why are we so intent on upholding these practices that tear us apart? In this room, you are the brightest people, you are the leaders, we've got to put our minds together and our hearts and come up with a new way of being, because this is the seventh generation and they said that if we are to ignite that light of the eighth fire that leads to peace and harmony, that we need to do it from a spiritual frame of view and to move forward that way.

So today, I will choose love and I hope that you do too because who are we if we are not...if we do not choose love. So it makes me really sad to think about some of the things that happen in our communities today -- some of the things that that we heard about this afternoon -- to many people, and if we're to survive and light that eighth fire, we need to move in that direction and if we're to not only survive as a people, but we have to make some different choices in terms of all humanity, all the people who currently live on Turtle Island, we need to bring them together. When they said, a new people will emerge in the time of the seventh fire, they meant we are all of that new people. We are all of those people and so it takes all the people on Turtle Island if we're going to survive as a species because certainly we know that the Creator has cleansed the earth before and there are many things that are going on today. We need to look at our resources and what are we doing to those.

On my reservation, I wrote an article about the water and they chose not to print it and they said because the mining companies might not like that. I said, 'But it's not about the mining companies, I'm not talking about the mining,' although we should be very careful about that because the sulfide mines that they're proposing are nothing like the mining that is taking place on the Iron Range near where I live. They said, ‘Well, but if we print it then the mining companies might want to have equal space.' And I said, ‘But you're the editor, you can choose.' So anyhow, they didn't and I went on and published it on a place called Alternate, which was then picked up in Canada and in many places and the article was about what I just said: today, I choose love. [Anishinaabe language]."

John Borrows: Who Are We and How Do We Know?

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

University of Minnesota Law Professor John Borrows (Anishinaabe) discusses how the Anishinaabe traditionally defined and practiced notions of social identity and belonging, and how those definitions and practices were rooted in relationships: relationships between those deemed to be part of the group, as well as their relationship with the natural world. He recommends that Native nations consider their own, Indigenous notions of identity and belonging as they tackle the challenge of determining what criteria for citizenship make the most cultural sense for them today.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Borrows, John. "Who Are We and How Do We Know?" Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"I have the great honor of moderating this next session. We're at session two in your agenda and in your booklets and the title of this session is "Key Things a Constitution Should Address: Who Are We and How Do We Know?" And we're going to be tackling a number of critical aspects of what we've identified from our ongoing research as key things that a constitution should address. It's not to say that these are all of the key critical issues, but the ones that we most often hear are issues that Native nations are struggling with, are tackling as they engage in answering this question of does this constitution meet those tests that Joan [Timeche] left you with at the end of the last session. And one of the most critical areas that we see tribes, First Nations in Canada struggling with is this issue of identity, of citizenship, of answering that question of who are we and then how do we either define or redefine a process by which we determine who can be a part of us. And we have the great fortune today to have with us a distinguished series of panelists and I will introduce them very briefly and then leave it to you -- if you wish to learn more about who they are -- to consult the rather lengthy biographies in your booklets there.

But the first panelist we're going to hear from is Professor John Borrows. John is a citizen of Ontario's Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, an Anishinaabe, and he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota's School of Law back in 2009. Many of my colleagues know John well and regard him as one of the most innovative and influential thinkers and scholars when it comes to Indigenous law, not so much Federal Indian law, but Indigenous law. And we came across John -- and we thought he would be the perfect fit to serve on this panel -- when he partook in a seminar specifically on this question of tribal citizenship that the Bush Foundation up in Minnesota put on back last November I believe it was. And we were struck by his very thoughtful, deliberate approach and message to getting people thinking in a new and, I would argue, more cultural way about what citizenship means in the most fundamental sense of the word.

And then second, we are joined by actually two representatives from the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo in Texas. I've had the great honor and privilege of working with Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo over the last several years on a number of fronts. Most recently, last summer I worked with them on this very topic of citizenship. Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo is currently engaged in a process to redefine its citizenship criteria and we thought that what better way to get you thinking about this critical topic than to hear directly from a nation who is currently engaging this critical issue. So just to give you a quick overview of how this session will proceed, John will speak first. He will share his thoughts and then we're going to turn it over to Carlos Hisa, who is the Lieutenant Governor from Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and then Esequiel Garcia who is basically leading up the effort to understand this issue of citizenship within the community, to engage the community itself about this issue, and then ideally arrive as a nation to a consensus about how the nation wishes to define its citizenship criteria moving forward and then how that will actually work. So we'll hear from the two of them and then we're going to hold questions until the end. So with that I will turn it over to John."

John Borrows:

"[Anishinaabe language]. I'm grateful for the opportunity that I have to be able to come and speak with you this morning. It's wonderful to be here on Pascua Yaqui land. As I went out running along the buried cable road this morning, it was amazing to be able to watch the sunrise and to be able to hear the morning doves and see the little lizards scurry off through the sands and to be able to greet this day in this beautiful place.

I think this place can teach us a lot about what we might consider in our deliberations about citizenship, our deliberations about what a constitution might require. That is, we can look to our own lands, our own territories, our people and our own relationships to try to construct, to try to revive our understanding of who we are and how we should be appropriately relating to one another. And often those first messages about how to be a good citizen come to us as we take in the messages that occur when the sun shines on us, when we see the life around us and when we witness that surge of energy that takes place as we greet the new day.

When our ancestors signed treaties, they often talked about these agreements being for as long as the rivers flow and the grass grows and the sun shines. And I think there's a reason for that, which is that one of our most important sources of law is in the natural world around us. So to be able to understand what our criteria for judgments are, what our standards for decision making are, what are the guidelines that we might choose to follow as to how we would relate to one another, we would take a page out of what we've observed for as long as the river flows, the sun shines and the grass grows.

The Anishinaabe -- of which I'm one -- on the shores of Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Ontario have a word for thinking about law and constitutionalism that comes in this pattern, which is [Anishinaabe language]. That is literally our laws are [Anishinaabe language] the earth, [Anishinaabe language] they're taken by pointing to the earth and looking from lessons that are drawn from the earth. It's a derivation of our word [Anishinaabe language], which is the word to be able to teach. So how do we learn, how do we teach, how do we understand our laws? We look to [Anishinaabe language]. We look to the things that are literally written on the earth. So where are our laws? They are written on the earth. What are the texts of our cases? They are found in how the sun interacts with the birds in those first few moments of the day and then how those birds might interact with their surrounding ecosystem as the day develops.

The point I'm getting at here is as we think about the earth as our teacher and we think about our language in relationship to the earth, we can begin to understand how we might frame conceptions of citizenship. This notion of citizenship in Anishinaabemowin is actually linked to the word for freedom. Now I know you'll have different words and different languages, but the point is to go back to your communities and think about what the earth might teach you about how you should relate to one another and think about what your languages might teach you about how you relate to one another in thinking about these ideas as citizenship.

So, Anishinaabemowin talks about [Anishinaabe language], 'freedom.' If I was to say that I owned something, I would say [Anishinaabe language] if that was animate. And if it was inanimate, I would say [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] has the same root for 'ownership.' Freedom means some kind of ownership of our responsibilities, of our relationships. Did you ever think about citizenship in that fashion, the responsibility for owning your relationships? Our word for 'citizenship' then is [Anishinaabe language], the sense of almost a property-like type of responsibility, but not a western notion of property law where you alienate land or people from you, but a notion of Anishinaabe property law, which is about relationships and how we take responsibility for our relationships.

Many of our debates that we're having about citizenship throughout Indian Country don't fully involve our teachings as drawn from the earth and from our relationships or drawn from our language and we find ourselves talking about blood and we find ourselves talking about cutting off our relations. One of the greatest teachings that I learn about citizenship again comes from looking at, 'for as long as the river flows, the grass grows and the sun shines.' These are not concepts of cutting off and diminishing. They are concepts of energy, about enhancing, about growing, about seeing energy flow through the world and also seeing energy flow through our communities. So let me just talk a minute about rivers.

In Anishinaabemowin the word for river is...the mouth of the river is [Anishinaabe Language]. Now you know at mouths of rivers you find a place of great life. This is where all the energy comes off of the land by way of organic matter and it feeds this vibrancy of life with the fish and the plants and the birds of many different species that would gather there and then as the people of course come to use the plants and the fish and the animals and the birds in that place, this idea of [Anishinaabe language], the mouth of the river, is a place of nourishment, of growth, of abundance. And in Anishinaabemowin the word for 'love' is [Anishinaabe language], if I'm talking about something that I love that's animate, or [Anishinaabe language] if I'm talking about something I love that's inanimate. Interesting, legal principle, constitutional principle that in the behavior of the river, the abundance, the nourishment, the flow, the energy, the creation, the sustenance of life, is also how we should think about love. I would like to suggest that our citizenship codes, at least as Anishinaabe people, should look to those lessons and that language to think about what we might be able to do as Anishinaabe people to encourage that flow, to encourage that energy, to see that nurture and that nourishment flow to all our relations and not see them cut off by some artificial channeling that we might choose to put into that place. This word [Anishinaabe language] obviously is for as long as the river flows and our sources of law, how we are constituted, relate to how we are in the world around us. We are part of the world not separate from us.

Another word that I can think about that's drawn from our treaty languages, not just, 'for as long as the river flows,' but, 'for as long as the grass grows.' At this time of year, maybe just a little bit later throughout Anishinaabe territories, you get the small buds starting to come out on the branches, very, very nascent at this period but as the spring goes along you start to get the energy from the sun shining down onto the bark of the trees, on to the ground as it's eventually uncovered, and you get water flow up. When does water flow uphill? In the springtime around the Great Lakes as the saps start to go up and down those trees. [Anishinaabe language], this flowing again of energy, even against impossibility flowing up. What you have at the end of these branches or in the earth around is [Anishinaabe language] in the good earth season is you get these budding out of the leaves. [Anishinaabe language] related to [Anishinaabe language], which is our word for the flowing of the rivers related to [Anishinaabe language], our word for love from one another. Imagine crafting our citizenship codes by thinking about what the Creator has placed all around us by way of analogy and drawing from those analogies and seeing them as constituting who we are, all our relations [Anishinaabe language]. 'As long as the river flows and the grass grows and the sun shines.'

[Anishinaabe name] is the name of a little girl I know. [Anishinaabe name] is her father, Jason Stark. The name of this little girl is this name of the sun, [Anishinaabe language], the sun streaming its energy down upon someone so that that person can grow. But what it also means is the love gets streamed down on that little one so that she can grow and become a healthy person, a healthy citizen amongst the Anishinaabe.

What does it mean to be Anishinaabe? It doesn't mean the same thing as to be an Indian. What does it mean to be Salish or Blackfoot or Apache? What are the words in your language for citizenship, for who you are as peoples and what might be found in those words for setting your codes, your patterns of behavior for belonging? Anishinaabe, there's different ways that we could think about what this might mean for us as Ojibwe or Chippewa people, constitutionally speaking, in citizenship perspectives.

One of the words means as follows. When I was growing up, if I did something well, my grandfather would say to me, '[Anishinaabe language], that's good, [Anishinaabe language].' And the word for being in Ojibwe is 'naabe.' Anishinaabe, 'a good being.' What a great aspiration for citizenship that's been given to us by our grandmothers and grandfathers to try to be good in the world, to try to live such that that love can flow from us like those rivers, like that energy and the newly forming leaves, like that sun that shines down upon us. Anishinaabe or if you're a woman Anishinaabekwe. Better any day than an 'Indian.' Or sometimes if we're joking with one another you might say, '[Anishinaabe language],' I'm just saying nothing. [Anishinaabe language] means those who really are nothing meaning that we are the weakest in creation, that we follow a long pattern of reliance upon the world around us and if it wasn't for the sun and the plants and the insects and the birds and the fish and the animals, Anishinaabe, we would be nothing.

How many of our citizenship codes take a humble stance towards thinking how we might be constituted as a people? Notice the verbs that we're talking about here. Anishinaabemowin is 70 to 80 percent verbs. Everything's relational. It's about action. It's about the past, the present and the future. It's not about nouns. It's not about categorizations and if we think about citizenship in this relational, verb-oriented context, we might think about how are we relating to one another in the past, in the present and in the future. The beauty of taking Anishinaabe in its many different...can mean from whence the species was lowered. There are many different ways of working through this. It can help us understand that our traditions are living, legal traditions that draw upon how we are constituting ourselves today. So beware of a draft that tries to put within the four corners of a document a categorization, a noun. If you put your understanding of how you'll continue to constitute yourself within that document, make sure that there are many framings within that place that point you beyond the document, that point you to the living nature of your traditions.

Traditions can be the dead faith of living people or the living faith of dead people, and sometimes our traditions are a dead faith of us who are living today because we don't apply them. We want to preserve them, but in the preservation they are so housed and under glass looking cases that they don't have relevance in our lives. Our traditions can be the living faith of dead people, the living traditions of what our ancestors have passed along to us. A constitution is a living or should be a living tradition and therefore it should not just be about cultural match as important as that quality and criteria are. That is, our traditions change and in changing there are times that we go through our ways of being together that we have a conflict and that conflict -- as we look to the world around us -- can also be more effectively processed. That is, when we look to our traditions, we have to make sure that we leave room for the trickster.

We have stories that are taken from the land and our observations of those around us and in drawing on those stories we don't just seek for match. If we did not have the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in the United States, we might still have formalized informal discrimination against African-Americans, black people in the South in particular, but throughout the nation. That is the constitution existed to challenge tradition as well as facilitate tradition. Grateful -- I see my time is up -- to be able to speak to you just a few moments about what tradition might mean as you think about our languages, as you think about our stories, as you think about the world around us, as you think about the living nature of who we are as peoples. Again, I appreciate this invitation. [Anishinaabe language]. Thank you."