Governance

Wilma Mankiller: Governance, Leadership and the Cherokee Nation

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Native Nations Institute
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As part of its ongoing interview series "Leading Native Nations," the Native Nations Institute (NNI) interviewed Wilma Mankiller, the late and former Chief of the Cherokee Nation, in September 2008. In the interview, she discussed her compelling personal story as well as the challenges the Cherokee Nation have overcome, the lessons that can be learned from this experience, and her thoughts on nation building, governance, and leadership.

Native Nations
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Mankiller, Wilma. "Governance, Leadership, and the Cherokee Nation." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 29, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:  "Welcome to Leading Native Nations, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. I am your host, Ian Record. Today I am honored to welcome to the program the world-renowned Indigenous leader, Wilma Mankiller. As many of you know, Wilma was the first ever female chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, serving as her nation’s highest leader from 1985 to 1995. She also is author of the national best-seller Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. Perhaps the most notable of her many accolades came in 1998 when then-President Bill Clinton awarded Wilma the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Currently, she serves on numerous organization boards and works with several non-profits to promote community development efforts throughout Indigenous country. Welcome Wilma and thank you for joining us today."

Wilma Mankiller: "You’re welcome. Thank you, I’m happy to be here."

Question: "I’d like to start with a question I ask all of the guests on this program and that is how do you define sovereignty? What does it really mean for Native Nations?"

Mankiller: "I think that the sovereign rights of tribes are inherent. And I think that when thinking about that sovereign it’s important to remind everyday Americans that tribal governments existed before there was a United States government and that many tribes, including the Cherokee Nation, had treaties with other governments before they had a treaty with the first U.S. colony. So the definition of sovereignty is to have control over your own lands and resources and assets, and to have control over your own vision for the future, and to be able to have absolute, to absolutely determine your own destiny."

Q: "As a follow up, in that realm of sovereignty, how to you define a healthy Native community, what does it look like to you?"

Mankiller:  "For me, a healthy community would mean that people would have access to good health care, to education, to all the amenities that are available to a lot of Americans that are not now available to all Native people. But first and foremost I think that in a whole, healthy Native community is a community that still has a sense of interdependence, a community where people trust their own thinking, where people believe in themselves, when people are able to define for themselves what they want for their community, and then have within the community the skills and the ability to make that a reality."

Q: "The Cherokee Nation is the second-largest Native Nation in the United States as you well know, with at last count more than 240,000 citizens, probably more than that now. What challenges does the sheer size of that nation, of your nation, pose to its nation-building efforts, and how does the nation meet those challenges?"

Mankiller:  "I think that probably the biggest challenge is just the increasing cultural, social and economic stratification of the population. And so that in a population that size, for example, just culturally, we have in our communities people that are full Cherokee, that speak Cherokee, that have remained close to their culture. On the other end of the spectrum, we have some Cherokee-enrolled tribal members that have never even been to the Cherokee Nation and don’t have the same connection to the land and to the community, but are enrolled members and certainly have a right to membership, but are different in the way they think. Economically, we have tribal members that are struggling. I live in a very low-income community, in a county with a very low per capita income. So we have some tribal members that have a very low income and on the other end of the spectrum, we have some tribal members who are extremely wealthy. The fellow who owns the Tennessee Titans is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, for example, and there are many other examples of people like that. So I think the challenges is, one of the challenges with a population that size and that stratified – socially, economically, and culturally – is to try to make sure that you find some common ground for all the people who live very different lives, often."

Q:  "You once referred to the Cherokee Nation as a revitalized tribe, stating that, 'After every major upheaval, we have been able to gather together as a people and rebuild a community and a government. Individually and collectively, Cherokee people possess an extraordinary ability to face down adversity and continue moving forward.' Can you dwell on that statement, particularly with respect to the Cherokee Nation’s present and recent past?"

Mankiller:  "I can, and I believe very firmly that the Cherokee Nation is symbolic of other nations as well because I’ve seen the same sort of just heroic ability and to hold onto a sense of who we are as a people and rebuild our families and communities and governments again. What I meant by that is if you look back at Cherokee history, even before removal, and all the things that happened to the Cherokee people and the continuous shrinking of the land base and then the tragedy of the forced removal by the United States military from the southeast to Indian Territory. If you look at how our people reacted to that it’s pretty amazing. When Cherokee people arrived, the last contingent of Cherokee people arrived in 1838 in Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma, there had been a bitter political division within the tribe over whether Cherokee people should fight to the death to remain in the southeast or participate in that removal. So there was a bitter political division within the tribe. About one-fourth of our entire tribe was dead, that either died on the removal or died while being held in stockades. People had left behind everything they’d ever known in the southeast – places where there were cultural practices, places where their people were buried, places where they had a strong connection with – and watched their homes being raffled off to non-Native settlers. So they arrive with all of that after the removal and yet it’s really remarkable to see what they did. What they did almost immediately is they began rebuilding their families, rebuilding their communities, and rebuilding a government in Indian Territory despite everything that had happened. And it’s amazing. They built some of the first government buildings anywhere in Indian Territory, which are now the oldest buildings in what is now Oklahoma. They built a Supreme Court building. They printed newspapers in Cherokee and English. They started a school system, one of the first school systems west of the Mississippi, Indian or non-Indian, and they built a school for the education of women which is pretty remarkable for that period of time in that part of the world. And so that spirit that allowed them to go through that kind of tragedy and pain and division and yet, keep their vision fixed firmly on the future I think is what I meant when I said that we’re a revitalized tribe. And then after the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation was attacked by the United States Government, and various laws – the Curtis Act, the Dawes Act, our land was allotted – and we again faced another major upheaval. And so, between the early 1900s and the early ‘70s, we were not electing our own tribal leaders. And what’s remarkable is that in my grandfather’s time – and my grandfather’s name was John Yone (sp?), 'Yone' means 'bear' (Mankiller) – in my grandfather’s time, nobody ever, no Cherokees ever gave up the dream of having their own tribal government again. In my grandfather’s era, they would ride horses to each other’s houses and the Cherokee people, they would collect money in a mason jar to send representatives to Washington to tell them that we had treaty rights and we had rights to our own self-governance. So that’s what I mean, I think, when I talk about the spirit of survival and the tenacity of Cherokee people and their just abiding commitment to maintaining a sense of community and a sense of tribal government."

Q: "Let’s turn now to your personal story. Reflecting on your experience, first of all living in an impoverished neighborhood in San Francisco in the 1960s, you once said and I quote, 'That poor people have more tenacity for solving their own problems than most people give them credit for.' Can you elaborate on that statement, particularly with respect to Native peoples efforts to rebuild their nations?"

Mankiller:  "Sure, let me preface my remarks by saying that my family participated in the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program, which was really a poorly disguised attempt to remove Native people from their homelands and that’s how we ended up in San Francisco for twenty years. And the better life the Bureau of Indian Affairs promised us was actually a very rough housing project. What I learned living in a housing project in San Francisco which was predominantly African American is that people took care of each other in that community which was very isolated, and is still isolated, the housing project is called Hunter’s Point, the people helped one another and that’s how they got by in life. And what I saw in my own community before we left home, I was ten when we left Oklahoma and went to San Francisco, and what I’ve seen since I’ve returned home is a strong sense of interdependence in our community, and then in other communities that I’ve become aware of as well. People from Mexico, Central and South America, people that live in many of those communities have that same sense of responsibility for one another and interdependence. In our communities, there are always people who have formal leadership positions and titles and then there are the go-to people that folks gravitate toward when there is a crisis. And there are many people in our communities and in all low income communities that have great capacity for leadership, and I believe that community revitalization efforts can never be successful unless they begin at the grassroots level with families who know their community better than anything, outsiders who want to help a community with whatever project – whether its getting a water system or housing or health care or whatever, may have ideas about how to do that, but its never going to be successful if its conceptualized in a vacuum outside the community. For projects to be successful, they have to come from the people and because, you know you can be an expert in anything, there are a lot of smart people at this University, but people who live in low income communities are experts in their community. So the idea is to get a partnership between people who may have external resources and people in the community and then with that partnership they can move forward."

Q:  "Really what you’re talking about is solutions from within, solutions from the ground up, solutions from not just -- as you said, people in elected positions -- but local community leadership. How important is that? When you look across Indian Country and you work in Indian Country and you see some Indian communities very much dependent on the federal government to change things or they expect their tribal governments to do it all. And you’re essentially saying that the spirit of interdependence, the spirit of local solutions in the community, is really what change needs to happen."

Mankiller: "I think that all of that is part of a process of trusting your own thinking. I think if you trust your own thinking and you truly believe that within the cultural context of your tribal community that you can rebuild your nation then you can. Part of what’s happened over centuries of oppression is that our people came to rely on the federal government or the Bureau of Indian Affairs or well-meaning social workers to try to tell us how we should be and to provide things for us. And what’s happened I think in the last few decades is that people are saying, 'No! We can articulate our own needs and we actually have the skills to be able to make, to solve those problems, and make our dreams a reality.' So at the very outset of trying to do something – and I think you have to have a sense of self-efficacy – all these people are always going around to tribal communities with these hot shot business ideas and these other kinds of things, well you know what, you’re not going to get there until you do the basic work first. And the basic work first I think is working with people and making sure that people trust their own thinking first and have a strong sense of self-efficacy and believe in themselves. And once they believe in themselves and have that strong sense then they can do anything; they can move forward with that. It’s pretty easy to do that. People often ask my husband and I how we got people in rural communities to volunteer to build their own houses and water systems and that sort of thing. All we did was trust people; it’s that simple. I mean, not trust idly; it was an absolute trust. Can’t read and write, it doesn’t matter. If you have other skills; maybe the guy who can’t read and write in the community is the best repairman of heavy equipment and can keep the waterline going. There’s a role for everybody. Maybe someone in the community is a good writer, who can help write grants. There’s a role for everybody. So trust in your own thinking I think is key to that."

Q: "Really what you’re getting at is that rebuilding Native Nations, moving those nations forward, forging a common vision is really dependent on broad ownership in that process, it cant just be a top-down solution."

Mankiller: "Absolutely. Before I returned home, I did some work to prepare people for the 1977 treaty conference in Geneva, we were sending lots of Native people to Geneva. And it was interesting, but for me working on sovereignty in an international legal concept is one piece of work that’s important. But, for me, if you’re going to talk about sovereignty, you have to bring the people with you; you can’t be just tribal leaders talking to each other, and academics talking to each other about sovereignty. It has to be with families too, it has to begin with families. And so what we’re describing here is a part of that process."

Q: "Getting back to your personal story, I’m going to move now to 1969. It’s well known that you took part in the Indians of All Tribes takeover of Alcatraz Island. And you credited that experience with giving you more self-respect and a sense of pride. How did that change your life, that experience?"

Mankiller: "Well, it profoundly changed my life. I was a young house wife married to an Ecuadorian kind of living a middle class life in San Francisco. And when I took the boat over to Alcatraz – my brothers and sisters had gone over to join the occupation – and when I took the boat over to Alcatraz it was like an act of revolution almost to do that, to say, 'You know, I’m an adult.' And when I got there and I met leaders like Richard Oakes and John Trudell and many other people there and they articulated things that I had felt, but didn’t know how to express. And they talked about the fundamental rights of tribal governments and the conditions in tribal communities around the country, in a way that was very strong. It was the first time I had ever seen Native people stand up and stare down the United States government. Of course that had a profound impact on me. And because I had all these feelings running around, but didn’t know quite how to express them, so they expressed for me a lot of the things that I felt. And of course at the San Francisco Indian Center I had heard people talking about the relocation program and a lot of other issues, but not in the way these young people spoke about them. Richard Oakes who was Mohawk, and the first leader, was very articulate and very clear about the fundamental rights of tribal government."

Q: "Delving more deeply into this issue of community ownership and rebuilding communities, in the 1970s you returned to Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation. Can you tell us about your early work with the Cherokee community of Bell and specifically the lessons that community can teach other Native Nations about the importance of tribal citizens taking ownership in rebuilding their communities?"

Mankiller:  "Okay, the Bell community in the early ‘70s and late ‘70s was a predominantly Cherokee community, a bilingual community. About 95 percent of the population was Cherokee, there were a few non-Native families there. About 25 percent had no indoor plumbing. Very dilapidated housing. There was a local school there that was getting ready to close because young families were all moving out. And it’s one of dozens of small Cherokee communities within the Cherokee Nation that are more traditional communities. And they had been trying to get housing and they couldn’t get housing without a decent water system. So we decided that we could do a self-help project there. The idea was conceptualized not by me, it was conceptualized by Ross Swimmer. And I was a staff person at that time, the idea of a self-help project. So because I had this idea about community people being able to lead and had been very vocal about that and about the tribe putting more resources into ideas like that, I was tapped to lead the project. So what we basically said to the community is, 'If you want this to happen, this is your community, this is your houses, this is your kids. And if you want this to happen, you’re going to have to work on it.' And so we will, myself and my husband – my husband was my partner on this project, Charlie Soap – what we said to the people in the Bell community is that, 'We’ll provide the technical assistance and the resources if you will physically build a waterline, I mean put the pipe in the ground, cover it up, build it. And we will get the materials for some new homes and solar panels and we’ll rehab some homes in this community, get the resources to do that if you’ll do the work.' And this was a radical idea at that time, so they were saying: 'Why do we have to do that? The people down the road, the Indian Health Service builds their waterline and the Housing Authority builds their houses. Why should we do that?' And so we went through a process for about a year of meetings and talking and working with people to see that, so that they saw, not just us, but that they saw that it was in their best interest to do that. And that by rebuilding, physically rebuilding their community they would also rebuild a sense of control over their lives. The sense that we had when we went to the first meeting in Bell where almost nobody showed up by the way, the sense we had was that people thought: 'Aw things have always been like this, they’re always going to be like that. A lot of people have promised to help us. It’s not going to happen.' So we had to go from that point to a point where people believed that they actually could learn how to build their own waterline, they could rebuild their community, that things could be better, that the future could be better. So over a period of meetings, it was a long process of meetings, and that tapped into the values of the community. We got people to the point where they believed they could build the water system. Outsiders often focus on what the problems the community had when we started there, but we saw assets too. When we went into the community, the people who fished would share their fish with people in the community, people who hunted would share what they got with people who needed it, and during winter, if older people needed wood for their stoves, people would still get it for them. And so what we did was pretty simple. We just tapped into what we saw already existing there. Outside people said to us at that time, 'Well a lot of people in that community are on welfare. They won’t even work for a living. How do you expect them to volunteer to do these things?' Well, there’s no place to work. If there was a place to work, I’m sure they would, but there’s no place to work there. And so, we felt confident that people would rise to the occasion and build their own water systems and rehab and build their own houses because of what we saw in the community there, despite the problem. And so for me, the first day when we started building the water line, we had organized for a year and divided the water line project into sections so that each family had responsibility for a certain section. Driving down into the Bell community the first day, it was a pretty big deal because for me, it affirmed everything I believed about poor people. I always believed that poor people would rise to the occasion if you partnered with them. And so when I turned the corner and I saw all the people standing there getting ready to start the waterline, it affirmed for me my fundamental belief that we can rebuild our communities and we can rebuild our nations. To me Bell, a little tiny community within the Cherokee Nation, is symbolic of our nations, our people themselves stood on a porch and decided that they could rebuild their community themselves and they did it. And I believe that our leaders can get together and decide that they can rebuild their nations and they can do it."

Q: "In 1985, you became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation after your predecessor Ross Swimmer stepped down to become the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. You subsequently won two elections for principal chief, the second with 82 percent of the vote before leaving office in 1985. Among other accomplishments during your tenure, you oversaw the Cherokee Nation’s historic Self-Determination Agreement with the federal government whereby the Cherokee Nation took over control of Nation programs and services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. How important was that step in advancing the Cherokee Nation’s efforts to rebuild their Nation and achieve self-sufficiency?"

Mankiller: "Let me start by talking about my election. I was actually elected in 1983 to Deputy Chief position; Ross Swimmer didn’t appoint me. I don’t think he would have appointed me, given that his entire tribal council opposed me. And so I ran for Deputy Chief in 1983 and was elected to that position so when he left in 1985, I automatically assumed his position. But, with regard to self-determination, it was critical. I began my first work in tribal government as a volunteer for the Pit River Tribe in northern California which didn’t take any federal funding. So I was a strong believer that tribe’s should be able to allocate their own resources and make their own decisions about the needs of their people. So during the self-determination era, we took advantage of that every step of the way. And I was in the planning department when we first started contracting tribal programs. So there was a sea change from the time I began working for the tribal government in 1977 to the time that we signed our first self-governance agreement. And I had had a kidney transplant and I was in a hospital in Boston when our first self-governance agreement needed to be signed, and I insisted that they Fedex it to me; I got out of my bed and set out and signed that self-governance agreement because I considered it so critical and so important for our people."

Q: "Following up on that, how did accountability change when you took over your own programs? Often in Indian Country, you see when the outsiders are calling the shots, when they screw up their not around to pay the consequences, it’s the local people. How did the feeling of accountability change when the Cherokee Nation took over?"

Mankiller: "For us, I don’t think it changed that much. We always felt very accountable and we always just dealt with whatever we had to deal with. We were very accustomed to having federal audits and that sort of thing. And so I don’t think that it fundamentally changed the way we did business. We understood that we couldn’t make the Bureau of Indian Affairs a scapegoat anymore. So I’m not sure that it changed that much; I found that most tribal governments are very accountable and set up their own systems for making sure that the funds get appropriated and allocated for the things that they were destined to be appropriated for. And so I’m not sure that made a fundamental change."

Q: "Okay. In 1976, the Cherokee Nation’s Constitution was ratified and just two decades later however, the Nation initiated a major overhaul of that constitution which culminated in the ratification of significant reforms just a few years ago. What compelled the Cherokee Nation to undertake constitutional reform and what were the major outcomes?"

Mankiller: "I think there was a period of time after I left office, and I didn’t run for office again, there was a four-year period when there was a great deal of debate and controversy within the Cherokee Nation. And I think the idea of reforming the constitution came out of that whole controversial era. I’m not sure that our model is the best model for anyone to follow; there’s some lessons people can learn from what we did. My feeling is that the constitution reform efforts, recent constitutional reform efforts, did not come from the people, they came from outside the communities. And my sense – I live in a Cherokee community and my husband works in Cherokee communities – and so we’re in that part of the Cherokee Nation, I’m not sure all the constitutional amendments were properly vetted or necessarily understood and completely supported by people. If you look at the hearings that they conducted around the Cherokee Nation, there wasn’t wide attendance at those hearings. So I guess if there’s a lesson for other tribal governments, if you’re going to do constitutional change, and make sure that the people that will be directly affected by the constitutional changes fully and completely…Take your time. Take your time. Changing a constitution is a major thing. Don’t rush into it. And look at each amendment separately and make sure that people completely and thoroughly understand it before putting it out there."

Q:  "And part of the constitutional reform process that the Cherokee Nation employed involved the Cherokee Constitutional Convention. And that’s essentially a permanent body that periodically reviews the Constitution. How important is that, I mean you talked about 'take your time,' and is that part of that focus on taking your time?"

Mankiller: "It is, but I think again it depends on whose involved in the Constitutional Convention. If you’re going to have a constitutional convention of opinion leaders and political leaders and that sort of thing, that’s one thing. But, if you want a broad citizen participation, then you need a different kind of convention. So, in a tribe as large as ours, a single constitutional convention is not going to get it. There would have to be constitutional conventions in lots of different places with lots of different populations. So again, the lesson I think from our experiences is to have broad participation and take it very slowly and have a great deal of discussion before putting it up for a vote."

Q:  "Because essentially what you need to do by taking it slowly is get that community behind it, which doesn’t happen overnight. [Mankiller: 'Absolutely, absolutely.'] Since you became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985, Indigenous Country has witnessed a surge in the number of females assuming elected leadership positions in their nations. What, from your perspective, do you feel is driving that trend?"

Mankiller: "I think that there are more pipeline opportunities for women. As tribal governments grow and expand and contract their own hospitals and run their own school systems and run their own businesses, that there are more opportunities for women to administer programs. And they’re in highly visible places. They get to work within tribal government and know tribal government and become known in the community. And so, there are more opportunities for women to lead within the tribe and then some go from an administrative position to running for council and then running for top leadership positions. And I think that education is a factor; I think that more Native women are getting an education, and more Native women are taking advantage of administrative and leadership opportunities within tribal government."

Q: "We’ve already talked about this issue, but I want to ask you a question directly on point. You once said that, 'I want to be remembered as the person who helped us restore faith in ourselves.' Why is this restoration of faith and self so important to securing a vibrant self-determining future for the Cherokee Nation?"

Mankiller: "Well, when I hear that quote I cringe because it sounds very self-important, so I actually hate that quote. But I do believe that an essential part of leadership is, besides all the things like making sure you’re working on legislative issues and legal issues and health and education and jobs and all that sort of thing, is to try to help people understand their own history and understand where we are within the context of that history and to believe in ourselves; to look at our past and see what we’ve done as a people and to remind people that if they want to see our future they just simply need to look at our past to believe in ourselves, to believe in our intellectual ability, to believe in our skills, to believe in our ability to think up solutions to our own problems. I think that is critical to our survival."

Q:  "Following up on that, what you’re really talking about is leaders not just as decision-makers, leaders engaging their citizens, teaching their citizens about what’s possible as you talked about, but also learning from citizens and really engaging them in this rebuilding process."

Mankiller: "Well, I think good leaders make decisions based on information they’ve received from their people. And leadership should be about listening to people, especially listening to people who differ from you and have very different ideas than you do, and then taking the ideas of the people and synthesizing them and then figuring out how to move forward. Leaders who make unilateral decisions and charge ahead I don’t think are good leadership. Good leadership is consultative and good leadership simply means listening to people. And what I tried to do very diligently when I was in office is to set up regular community meetings and I learned a lot more about what was going on in our tribal government in those community meetings then I did by listening to the staff. And so I think that for me the idea of listening is key to good leadership."

Q:  "Moving on, the Cherokee Nation has received multiple awards from the Honoring Nations Program of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development including one for its Cherokee Nation history course, which is mandatory for all new Nation employees, and one for its Cherokee language revitalization project, which seeks to revitalize the Cherokee language by focusing on Cherokee youth. Why did the Cherokee Nation develop these two programs and what role do they play in the Nation’s rebuilding efforts?"

Mankiller: "Well, I think that the history course is just critical. And again I think that for all of us we live busy lives and everyone goes to school and receives a good education, but not that many people have the opportunity to learn about the legal and the political and the cultural history of their own people. And so, the history course provides a historical and cultural context for the current work of staff and members of the Cherokee Nation. It’s a very popular course. I think it’s important to understand our context and where we’ve been in order to figure out how to move forward. And then with the language revitalization program that was started because less than ten thousand people of our tribal membership is still fluent in the Cherokee language. And I think that our current chief felt that there needed to be some radical intervention at all levels and so they’re teaching Cherokee language in the preschool programs, in the public schools, there’s a Cherokee language course at the local university, and encouraging community leaders to speak Cherokee as well. So I think they’re both critical to our survival. If we get you know down the road five hundred years from now, and nobody remembers our history and nobody speaks our language, it’s not going to be very healthy for our people. So this is a tip to make sure that five hundred years from now we’ll still have a viable language and still have a sense of who we are as a people."

Q: "Pretend for a moment that I am a newly elected tribal leader who has been chosen to serve his nation for the first time. Drawing on your extensive experience as a tribal leader, what advice can you share to help empower me to rebuild my nation?"

Mankiller: "I think the best advice I would give is to develop teams of interdisciplinary teams of people to help you in problem-solving; don’t try to do it by yourself. And to rely on people, not just on staff, but people in the community to help you solve big problems. I think that that’s very very important. The other thing is that I think it’s important for leaders to remain focused. The mistake I see not just in tribal leaders, but in leaders in general whether they’re leading a country or leading a parent committee, is that they try to do too many things. And so it’s very important to say, 'What is it I want to accomplish during my term? What are the two or three major things that I want to accomplish during my term?' And then stay focused on them. We have such a daunting set of problems to face each day in tribal government that sometimes you can get sidetracked and the little things take up as much time as the big things and so it’s important to remain focused; that’s another thing I think is very very important. The other thing is I think there needs to be kind of a seamlessness between – this is just a personal thing – between your personal life and your professional life. Indian Country is a very small place and within a tribe it’s even smaller, so that you can't mistreat women, for example, and then be in a leadership position of leading women. So I think that people expect their leaders to conduct themselves in a certain way and it’s important to do that. I had the privilege of working with Peterson Zah, President of the Navajo Nation, and he is just a great example of a family man, a grandfather, someone who always conducted himself with just great dignity and great respect and I think that that’s important too to remember when you’re in leadership its not about you, you represent people and always keep the faces of those people in your head when you go someplace, you’re representing them and when you speak, you’re speaking for them. I think that’s important as well."

Q: "You talked about the importance of leaders focusing on the big picture and not getting sidetracked with the little things. How important are rules and specifically, rules that clearly define the boundaries of your position, how important is that to empowering leaders to be able to focus on the big picture? Because oftentimes, among some Native Nations where the rules aren’t clearly defined, the council feels particular, the council or chief executives feel like they have to do everything because there’s no rules or boundaries set to keep them focused on the big picture."

Mankiller:  "Right, I think that the single most important aspect of that is for there to be a clear role for the executive officer, whether it’s a principal chief or chairman of a business committee, and a clear role for the tribal council. One thing that helped me was that those roles weren’t fuzzy. We had three branches of government, the tribal council had a very clear legislative role and they also had a role for fiscal oversight and budgetary issues, and then my role was to manage, and the courts had their role. And so I think that having a clearly defined role is critical, very critical. And if people don’t have that now, I would encourage them to work very hard to make that happen. I can’t imagine having to make decisions by committee you know, consult people, work with them, but not having fifteen or twenty different people trying to make a decision."

Q:  "These days you’re dedicating a lot of your time and energy to raising awareness about the importance of Native Nations, providing the mainstream media and the general public a clear balanced picture of contemporary Native America. In particular, the amazing stories of success, innovation and renaissance that are taking place across Indigenous Country. Why is this educational effort so critical to Native Nations ability to achieve their nation-building goals?"

Mankiller: "It’s critical because even after hundreds of years of living in our former towns and villages, most Americans don’t know anything about us and there’s not accurate information about Native people in the popular culture, there’s not accurate information about Native people in literature, there’s not accurate information in secondary schools and universities. And because there’s so little accurate information about Native people, a lot of nonsensical stereotypes get developed. And because of those stereotypes, every time a tribal leader goes to the United States Congress and particularly for new members of Congress, they have to educate them about the history of Native people in this country. And so there’s still a number of people who want us to be like we were three hundred years ago or something. And so I think that it’s critical; I actually see shaping public perception as a sovereignty protection issue because I believe very strongly that public perception shapes public policy and that unless we take control of our own image and help frame our own issues and change the image of our people, that it will ultimately affect public policy."

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

Sophie Pierre: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Ktunaxa Nation Chief Sophie Pierre discusses the Ktunaxa Nation's nation-building struggle, and offers her thoughts on what sustainable leadership is and what it requires of leaders.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pierre, Sophie. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

"Thank you very much. [Ktunaxa language]. I bring you greetings, my colleague and I. Gwen Phillips is here with me. Gwen is the person within our nation that is working with us on governance and so I thought that it was right that she be here at this gathering. I bring you greetings from the Ktunaxa Nation and if it's okay I'm going to stand. When I'm addressing you I feel like I should be standing. I want to first of all acknowledge the great Tohono O'odham Nation and thank them for allowing me to be here today in your traditional territory. I want to take a few moments and just introduce who I am, who Gwen is and who our people are. We're in the Rocky Mountain trench in the southeast corner of British Columbia, in northern Montana and Idaho. Our traditional territory runs along, from the big bend of the Columbia River at a place called [Ktunaxa language] all the way along what's today the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia, places like [Ktunaxa landmark] all the way down to Missoula, Montana, that's [Ktunaxa landmark] and along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It was mentioned earlier when Manley and Stephen were speaking that they were talking about the Kootenai Flathead Reservation and again it was a bringing together of peoples and of them learning how to work together. Those are the Kootenai people, those are part of the same people that we are. We speak the same language; we have the same culture, the same traditions.

My own personal experience, I was first elected in 1978 and I was pretty young. It's a good thing -- I thought I knew it all, had a lot of energy and it's been an incredible ride. For those of you young people that have just been, that are just coming on council, one thing I have to tell you is that 30 years -- it goes like that. Time passes so quickly. When I first started, when I was in my late 20s, I just figured that time went on forever and I had lots of time to do what I wanted to do. Well, of course time waits for no one. Time moves along very quickly. The experiences that have been described so far are very similar to what we have in Canada, in British Columbia, what we have in my own backyard, where we have family difficulties and leadership challenges, but it's been kind of an interesting anomaly in my own community. My community is called [Ktunaxa language]. It also in the book says St. Mary's Indian Reserve, IR #1. In my community, I'm an only child and in all the 30 years that I've been on council, when my mother was still alive, I always said, "˜I think I have one vote I can count on.' I was never quite sure because my mother, she was one of my biggest critics and she was also of course my greatest teacher and my greatest support. But we didn't have that particular dynamic and I think that that really does make a difference when you're not, you don't have those kind of almost imposed on commitments that you have to make just to one family as opposed to all of your people. And it has been able to help us in thinking on a nation basis because in Canada we have our separate Indian reserves that were set up, but we still belong to a nation. And that's why I shared with you where I come from because that is our nation territory. And as a nation of people, if you can move yourself from that mindset of family within one reservation and think of yourself in terms in of your nationhood, that is really what I feel that that's where Indian nations, that's how we are going to rebuild our nations and that's where our strength comes from is from our nations.

I was first elected in the late 70s and through the 80s. That was a time of great change and those of you that are my age and older, you know what I'm talking about. There was change that was happening here in the United States as there was across Canada. I was involved in lots of the sit-ins that we had, getting rid of Indian Affairs, well at least physically. We never really got rid of them totally in terms of the impact that they have on our lives, but at least getting rid of those offices that were everywhere, getting rid of the Indian agent. When I first started, when I first graduated from high school and I started working for my band, for my reservation, we still had an Indian agent. The Indian agent came around with the documents and had our people sign them. That's what I witnessed and I knew that was wrong so we went, so started from that to today where we're not totally there, but we're a long ways ahead from where we were. In my first few years of office I was just like everybody else. I chased all those grants and chased the programs because our communities needed it. We were like tall grass [NNI's "Tall Grass" executive education case]. We had unemployment, housing, like all those social ills and so we chased those programs -- not just myself but the other chiefs and councils within our nation. We chased all those programs. And we found ourselves bumping into each other fighting for that same money realizing that we were expending a tremendous amount of energy, but we weren't looking at our own, what was important for us as Ktunaxa people, what we needed.

Around 1991-92, two things happened that started to help us change our course. First of all, in the province of British Columbia, we entered what is called the modern-day treaty process. Now that's been a curse and a blessing in a way. It certainly brought about some changes, not all of them good. But luckily we have leadership within our nation that saw this as an opportunity for nation rebuilding and we have taken that, we have turned the treaty process around to meet our needs. We have insured that all of the negotiations that go on, they are what we call 'citizen-led.' Now that's made it a very, very slow process in terms of where some of the other nations are. We've had two nations just in the last year that have actually signed their implementation plan or they've signed their treaty with the provincial and federal governments and now they're in implementation and they're having difficulty. And the reason is because it's not been a citizen-driven process. We still have negotiating tables where there are lawyers and consultants that are sitting at those tables instead of our own people and that we know is wrong and that's something that we insured -- that we would not fall into that. So we have this treaty process. What the treaty process has enabled us to do, has brought to us, is financial resources and that's what really needed because we are on the Canadian side, four Indian reservations with virtually...we don't have two nickels to rub together, we don't have our own source [of] revenues. So we're financially, we don't have a whole lot of resources, but in other ways we have lots of resources. So we're using the treaty process, we're using the money that comes through the treaty process and we have been for the last 17 years, we've been using that to rebuild our nation.

The other thing that happened is that we have a former Indian school; I think they were called industrial schools down here. We called them residential schools. But they're the schools, those big, old buildings where they gathered up our kids from all over and they put them into these buildings for, like in our case, 10 months of the year you never got to see your parents. And their whole purpose was to take the Indian out of the Indian child. But we have this big, old residential school sitting just right next to my reservation. It's called St. Eugene. Well, about 1984 one of our elders had given us a challenge. Mary Paul was at a meeting with us and there was a lot of complaining going on in the room about just how terribly burdened we were. Woe is us. We lost our language and our culture and everybody was drinking and drugging and all the usual litany of woes that we have in our community. And Mary Paul stood up and she told us, "˜If you think...' and she said this in Ktunaxa so this is paraphrasing. "˜If you think that you lost so much in that building,' and she pointed across the road because it was just right there. She said, "˜If you think you've lost so much in that building, you haven't lost it, it's still there, go back and get it. Only if you refuse to pick it up again have you lost it.' Well, we didn't really know what she meant but we thought, "˜Oh, she's an elder, we've got to listen to her.' So we started thinking about it and we realized, yeah, we have a choice. We have a choice. We can continue, continue to go down that self-pitying kind of road, blaming everybody else for our problems or we can take control of it. We chose to take control of it.

To make a long story short -- because I like my long story about St. Eugene [because] I'm so proud of it -- but to make a long story short, today that former residential school is a resort. It's a five-star resort, 125-room hotel, a PGA-type golf course and of course a small casino. But that's where...so that was the other thing that was happening. So we have these two things burgeoning at the same time and one really helped support the other. So today we have this business and I am a walking billboard for St. Eugene. I'm always wearing our logo and I have this whole other presentation that I do about 15 lessons learned in getting into economic development because of the struggles that we had to go through. You can imagine going and trying to convince investors and bankers that you want to take a former Indian residential school...because at that point all these court challenges were coming forward and everybody was saying, "˜Residential school? Get away from me, we don't want to talk about residential schools.' If you can imagine taking that and turning it into the resort that we have today and -- just as an aside, we have a little TV clip that was done by Global Television and we're going to show it during the coffee break this afternoon if you're at all interested -- I think you'll find the story interesting.

Right now just a final word on St. Eugene. It was about partnerships, because Anthony [Pico] here mentioned that you're in partnerships with the Oneida on your developments. Well, we found that that's one of the strengths that we have with St. Eugene is that we have a partnership with the Sampson Cree Nation out of Alberta and the M'Njikaning First Nation out of Ontario. They have the Rama Casino just north of Toronto in their community. So they're our partners. And I think that that again is one of the strengths that we need to develop is how we invest in each other and work together in partnerships. We used the treaty process to rebuild the nation and as we're doing that we realize that what we really were talking about was enhancing sustainable leadership.

And I think that -- if this works, okay -- in dealing with sustainable leadership, first and foremost, leadership comes with inherent responsibilities. Our creation story sets out a relationship of the human beings to the land and to all of creation. And it's not, it's similar to all of the creation stories I'm sure that come from all the various nations in this room. [Ktunaxa language] is our word for natural law, which we received of course from the Creator and it's our mandate for stewardship and our responsibility to govern according to set principles from the Creator. As Ktunaxa people, we were taught to be respectful of leaders and those selected to lead were nurtured right from childhood. And other skilled individuals, their skills were enhanced and they became experts in their own field like the deer chief or the war chief. And of course there's always a high regard for spiritual leaders. Many societal activities were done by both male and female societies. Now the roles of the leaders changed and as those roles changed we started to see the breakdown of the nations. So what caused some of these changes?
There are historical impacts. These are just a few. Some of these are similar to the experiences that you had and some of these are particular to Canada. Well, I think that in reality all of them are similar instances because when I talk about laws in Canada, there are similar laws here in the United States that affected you also. We had things like small pox. The establishment of the 49th Parallel, that had a tremendous impact on the Ktunaxa people because here all of a sudden we are no longer on family, one nation. Now we have these outsiders telling us that we can't move back and forth. One of our communities is right on the 49th Parallel and when that reservation was being created that chief stood up and said, "˜What are you...why are you dividing my house in two? You're telling me that I have to live in my bedroom and I can't go into my kitchen,' was the analogy that he used. Because his particular group of families were actually moved from Montana, moved north and told that they're now Canadians and there's this 49th Parallel and that we can't go across this anymore. We have a way of dealing with that now and that's for another time.

Things like the Indian Act came in and it was mentioned earlier that those, there are similarities here in the United States. In Canada we had laws that prohibited our people from cultural practices. And if that wasn't enough, there was also laws that prohibited Indian people from hiring lawyers to protect our rights. Our reservation boundaries were formed in 1887 and residential schools were established in 1893 and there's a whole list of other things that were happening. One of the things that we don't have on there but that is very important in terms of our development was that in 1991 we did a full psych analysis of our entire school-age population and we found that 40 percent of our school-age children were suffering from some form of FAS/FAE [Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Effects] and we haven't heard very much about that, we don't hear enough about it. We need to be aware of that, of the impact that that has on our people.

With all of those things coming at us, we're really talking about trying to lead through chaos. The traditional roles of leaders have been replaced by government, particularly the traditional roles of men. That's within our nation, we know that's within nations in Canada, and I would imagine it's the same here. Most of our First Nations, we have tremendous experience in administering government programs, everybody else's agenda except our own. [I have to move a little faster Ian just told me.] At any given time, First Nations in Canada, we are managing programs for 20 different agencies all at the same time. So it's like 20 different balls in the air. You're so busy keeping those balls up in the air you forget about the real purpose of why you applied for that ball in the first place. And then the employment challenges within our communities were forcing our leaders to become, like the chief is the band manager or the other council members, the council member would be the band accountant because of employment challenges within our communities. So that too often our leaders, they're not governing, they're only administering, they are directing and they're managing programs. And in fact what they're really doing is they're managing crises, from ones crises to the next. We said that what happens is that we have taken on this challenge of looking at our problems, trying to solve our problems and that's the wrong way to go. You don't look at...as soon as you start just looking at your problems you get more problems. You solve one problem and it's created ten more. You solve those ten; all of a sudden, you've got 30 more. Problems generate their own. They're like rabbits. So quit concentrating on problems and start looking at, 'What are the good things that are in your community, what are the strengths in your people?' So find ways to enhance those strengths.

What we realized is that leaders need to be retrained to better understand the leadership role and we gained that to regain what it was really that leaders are all about. With us, we realized leadership; it's effectively guiding the people towards a common vision. And that was really what we needed to work on and this is where the treaty process assisted us with this, gave us the time and the resources to do this because it does take a lot of time and it can be expensive. This is our common vision of the Ktunaxa Nation: strong, healthy citizens and communities speaking our language and celebrating who we are and our history in our ancestral homelands, working together, managing our lands and resources as a self-sufficient, self-governing nation. It took us over two years of going to each household, working with all of our members, all of our citizens to come up with that as our vision. [I've just skipped through because I know that I have to finish off. Ian has just given up on me. He went and sat down. He's been waving his five-minute flag.]

First of all, sustainable leadership creates and preserves sustainable learning. Hereditary leadership is...that's what we have in some of our nations. We still practice that. Others we're in this election or appointing or whatever but what we're talking about is renewing leadership skills, always renewing them. [This would cooperate with us. So I apologize for this. You're going to have to try and find, well actually, I can tell you where it is then.] Traditional or sustainable leadership secures success over time. [So we have that. Okay, I'm having difficulty, I think I'm just; don't worry about the picture up there.] Traditional leaders are advisors until they pass on and we know that and it's been mentioned also by my friend here that going back to the teachings of our elders. We're not the first leaders, and I think that that's really the thing that we have to remember, that we are only following in a long line of leaders before us. Sustainable leadership sustains the leadership of others. You're only as strong as everybody else that you have working around you. Delegation builds trust and potency. Sustainable leadership addresses issues of social justice including a broad interest in equities. We talk about the 'haves' and the 'have mores.' We don't talk about the 'haves' and the 'have not's.' In our nation, it's every has and some people because of their own efforts will have more. And I think again it's a different way of looking at things.

Sustainable leadership develops rather than depletes human and material resources. We have that mandate of stewardship that all things are related. We must remember that. And sustainable leadership practices that. Sustainable leadership develops environmental diversity and capacity so that we're flexible and adaptable. This is, on the top corner, the older lady with the glasses -- that's a picture of my mother -- and talk about being flexible and adaptable. She went through an incredible time of change and she was able to maintain, even though at the time that she was young other Indian women were marrying non-Indians because it was considered a way of uplifting yourself. She never ever did that. She believed that we had to keep our culture and she ended up in the last years of her life being one of our most important teachers. Sustainable leadership undertakes activist engagement in the environment. And one of those that I'm talking about is that whole thing around FAS/FAE. It was very, very difficult to look at ourselves and see what we had done to our children because of the drinking and the drugging that's going on in our communities. It's still difficult today, but we do look at that challenge directly and that's what sustainable leadership is about, is that you take on those challenges. You don't just take on the easy stuff or the good stuff, you face those challenges. Another big one that we all know is in our communities we have to deal with, sexual abuse and where that came from. So it's those kinds of challenges. Thank you very much."

Native Nation Building TV: "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Joseph P. Kalt and Sophie Pierre explore the evidence that strong Native nations require strong foundations, which necessarily require the development of effective, internally created constitutions (whether written or unwritten). It examines the impacts a constitution has on the people it represents, successful reform processes among Native nations, and common features of constitutional-reform efforts.

Native Nations
Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform" (Episode 2). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Mary Kim Titla: "Welcome to Native Nation Building. I'm your host Mary Kim Titla. Contemporary Native nations face many daunting challenges including building effective governments, developing strong economies, solving difficult social problems and balancing cultural integrity and change. Native Nation Building explores these complex challenges and the ways Native nations are working to overcome them as they seek to make community and economic development a reality. Don't miss Native Nation Building next."

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Mary Kim Titla: "As Native Nations work to strengthen their governments and seize control of their own futures, the subject of constitutions has moved front and center in the debate about how to best achieve those goals. Today's program explores constitutions, the key role they play in effective governance by Native Nations in the U.S. and Canada, and the push by many Nations to reform their constitutions. Here today to discuss constitutions and constitutional reform are Chief Sophie Pierre and Dr. Joseph Kalt. Sophie Pierre has served as Chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band of the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia for the past 24 years. She also serves as President of the St. Eugene Mission Resort Holdings, and was formerly the Co-Chair of the First Nations Summit. Dr. Kalt is a Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Joe and Sophie, welcome."

Joseph Kalt: "Thank you."

Sophie Pierre: "Thank you."

Mary Kim Titla: "Thanks for being with us today. We're going to jump right into the first question and talk about constitutions and how they play a role in Native nation building, particularly with respect to effective governments and community and economic development. Joe, you want to tackle that first?"

Joseph Kalt: "Sure. I think we're in this point in history in which tribes and First Nations in Canada are struggling to assert their rights of self-determination and self-government. They turn out to be like other nations in the world. You can assert those rights, you can get those rights but if you can't exercise them effectively, you're going to fall flat on your face like any other nation in the world. And so the tribes and First Nations in North America are struggling right now to rebuild institutions of their own design and they do it by starting with the basic structure of the way they're going to govern themselves, their constitution."

Mary Kim Titla: "Sophie, would you like to add to that? What's happening in your community?"

Sophie Pierre: "In British Columbia, we're doing something that's just a little bit different because we're involved in treaty making. In the year 2005 we're involved in treaty making. This is something that happened 200 years ago started here in the United States and 100 years ago in Canada but as the federal government moved across the country, by the time they got to British Columbia decided that treaties weren't necessary, so now in 2005 we're in treaty making. But we're looking at it as nation rebuilding, because we were very strong, established Nations at one point and we now need to rebuild that. And this particular process -- the treaty process --makes it possible for us to actually have something that I first heard coined by Dr. Kalt and by Dr. [Stephen] Cornell, which is to put the self back into self-government, 'cause we're looking at self-government but through a constitutional reform, the constitutional process, you identify that self and I think that that's why it's so important."

Mary Kim Titla: "Very important. Now, I personally am familiar with what is happening on my community, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, and this seems to be a movement really across the U.S. and it sounds like Canada. Can you talk about why that's happening?"

Joseph Kalt: "I think in both the U.S. and Canada, we're at a point in history where tribes have asserted their rights, they've developed the capabilities internally to run their affairs and they're starting to find that systems of government -- San Carlos Apache, 1930s, the [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt administration -- these are systems of government that really didn't fit the tribes of Canada and the United States. And so now people are saying, 'Hey, we've got to find a system that fits ourselves.' And it's like every nation in the world, you've got to find a system that works for yourself, and I think we're at a point in history where the First Nations and the tribes are saying, 'It's time to change the basic structures so they work for us.'"

Mary Kim Titla: "And a lot of tribal governments I'm sure are going back into their own oral histories and that comes into play in reforming their constitutions. Is that what's happening in your community?"

Sophie Pierre: "Absolutely. And what it does, when you look at and you start bringing forward some of the traditions, then it really creates that understanding of why we're doing what we're doing and it develops the ownership which everyone -- I think that we all understand that if you don't have that ownership coming from the nation, then all the paper in the world and all the advice that you put together in the world, it's not going to work in a community if there isn't that ownership. And that's really where it starts from is when you feel that it's yours."

Mary Kim Titla: "How has this process worked in your communities? Is it working out well? I'm sure there were challenges."

Sophie Pierre: "Oh, there's always challenges. There's always challenges. There's a challenge for the whole treaty process. We started the treaty process about 12 years ago and it's very slow. I think that we expected that we would be able to get through and actually have some signed treaties today in Canada and in British Columbia. For the treaty process, we started with the First Nations Summit. We don't yet have a signed treaty, but I think that that's okay too with us with the way that we're doing it, 'cause we're spending a lot of time and a lot of effort in ensuring that the citizens really understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, 'cause some day we're going to have to ratify this and if the people aren't along with you, you could have done a whole lot of work and spent a whole lot of money and not be any further ahead, and we don't want to be in that position."

Mary Kim Titla: "And I know it's a tedious process and you have these public hearings and public meetings and you have these long documents to read but it's really important for people to be involved and to have a say really. I'm sure that you've been through that."

Sophie Pierre: "Yes."

Joseph Kalt: "It's a long process, because there's a process of public education that goes on. Most of us in our lives, we don't walk around every day thinking about the constitution of our nation, and so I think it's a long process that gets people to understand why you're doing it, why are you undertaking this really revolutionary step to change how you're going to run yourselves, and then you have to go through, well, what are you going to do. If you're throwing the old out, you've got to figure out what the new is and that takes time. So there's a long process of public education, and I think sometimes we work at the Native Nations Institute and at the Harvard Project with tribes and First Nations and people get impatient and they want to have it happen quickly. No, it takes years and years often because it's got to be in the people that they understand that they want this, they understand why they're doing it, what they're doing. So it's a long, long process."

Mary Kim Titla: "And how different is this process with the U.S. tribes and the First Nations in Canada, how different are the issues?"

Joseph Kalt: "Sophie, the treaty process is very different."

Sophie Pierre: "Yes, as I mentioned, the treaty process, but that's only going on in British Columbia. There are the self-governing legislation that is available for other First Nations in Canada, and so it's like a constitutional reform, where rather than being under the Indian Act in Canada that there's possibilities for new legislation on self-government, so we're taking that just one step further by actually having treaties with the government of Canada and the government of British Columbia. And that definitely is a long and tedious process."

Joseph Kalt: "And here in the United States many tribes either operate under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Public Law 280 and so forth, and quite often here in the states it's not a treaty process, it's often tribes now getting out ahead of anywhere where the federal government might want them to be, changing the constitutions and then, in many cases, these constitutions in the United States have what are called a secretarial approval clause where the Secretary of Interior can approve or disapprove of constitutional reform. Through some recent efforts by the Cherokee Nation, for example, that precedent has now been broken and so tribes have I think potentially now greater freedom to step out and do what they're going to do. But it's not occurring in the kind of treaty process that British Columbia First Nations are going through."

Sophie Pierre: "We're really talking about different levels of government now or different branches of government, the names of the tribal leadership titles. We have now not only chairman but we have president, governor, lieutenant governors and so...chiefs. It's really changing to what really fits each tribe I suppose."

Joseph Kalt: "And I think so many of these historic governments that were really not adopted by the tribes. They were written by outsiders quite often. Well, now tribes are coming back and saying even what name we want to use, like you mentioned. You were 'Kootenai' for a long time."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That's right. We're also known as 'Kootenai,' but 'Kootenai' is an English word and our people, our nation decided to go back to our own name for ourselves which is 'Ktunaxa.'"

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "I tried very hard to say that properly."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Yes, and you did very well."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Thank you, I appreciate that. Well, even here in Arizona with Tohono O'odham and some of the others, they've gone back to their original names."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "And then people are also working -- it goes far beyond the names. As you say, they're working on, what structure do we want? Do we want a president that's directly elected by the people? Do we want the president selected by the tribal council? Do we want our tribal council to be elected at-large, do we want it to be elected by districts? Will we have an off-reservation district, 'cause so many citizens will be living off in here -- say in Arizona -- off in Phoenix or Tucson, so will you have an off-reservation district. So people are getting very inventive and starting to invent new systems and new structures that fit their particular situations."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Can you talk about the efforts by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and how they've been involved in this process?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Yes. We've been running a program we call the Initiative on Constitutional Reform. About 15 tribes or so approached us because we're professors, we write nerdy papers. But they approached us and said that they wanted a forum because, as you pointed out when we started, this is like a movement right now. There are lots of tribes and First Nations doing this. So these 15 tribes came and said could we help organize a forum where they could talk to each other and learn from each other, because tribes are so different and yet they have some common issues: the citizenship, the structure, the issues of land control and jurisdiction. And so we've been running these programs that really allow tribes to sit down and the constitutional reformers can sit across the table and, 'Oh, you're doing that, we're trying it this way.' And it's a great way I think for tribes to be able to learn from each other."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And network."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Absolutely. And you find now that, once we heard about what was going on in the United States and we started having some of the influence of the Harvard Project coming into Canada, you found that there was just an immediate uptake. There was just a lot of excitement. Our own tribal council had Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell come and do a three-day workshop with us just to take us like right from the very beginning and the very basics and talk about why, what was it that we really wanted to do, how did we want to rebuild our nation and it was just an awesome time. But that particular exercise was just with the leadership and what we really need to do and we have to ensure it happens is that it gets out to as much...as much as possible throughout the whole Nation so that it gets into the schools, into the colleges and right into the elementary school, it gets into all the community meetings. This whole movement, it can't be just with the leadership. So it was a good way to start for us but we made sure that it moved forward from that."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "In this process, we often say that the leaders like Sophie, they have to become community educators. It's not going to be the university types who come in and reach into the community and I think often -- I don't know what you think -- I feel like I watch leaders shift their roles a little bit. They think they're supposed to be decision-makers, but at this stage of building and rebuilding nations, you're really an educator. You're not really making the decision, you're trying to educate a community so the community can make intelligent decisions that fit them. But it's that shift in role for a leader from decision-maker to educator."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That's right. And it's sometimes a little bit disconcerting, because you're elected chief so you kind of figure that you're supposed to be like this decision-maker, this all-around leader, but really to be a leader you have to...you're more, you have to be a servant of the people. That's how you become a leader. And so that sure puts you in that place where when you start bringing this information into the community meetings and you start getting to have to answer the really, really difficult questions or you ask those difficult questions that people don't really want to talk about. For example, citizenship and this whole thing about blood quantum, those are really, really tough questions and somebody has to ask them because we have to deal with those issues. And so sometimes being that leader asking those questions makes you really, really unpopular, but it has to be done."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And I know that in California they're dealing with some of those issues right now with tribal enrollment and blood quantum and it's just become a really tough, tough thing to deal with because now you've got some tribal members who are no longer members of a tribe they thought they were for life, and all of a sudden they have no tribe that they belong to."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "And in the process ultimately, you have to get to the questions of the structure. How's your council going to be elected and who are the chief executive officers going to be and how are you going to handle your judicial and dispute resolution? But what we keep finding in our work with these 15 tribes we've been working with is this issue of citizenship. It's the self in self-government. Until that can get settled down, it's hard to move on to how are we going to elect our council and our chief and so forth, and so this issue of citizenship really for so many tribes and First Nations, it's the number-one issue and it's a very hard one to resolve. There's not one right answer. You look across North America and you see different answers: blood quantum, family relationships, adoption mechanisms, all kinds of different mechanisms. There isn't one right answer, and you've got to go look for your own."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "How did your community deal with that issue?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, we went back to our word, we have a word in our language, it's [Ktunaxa term] and it means 'root,' and we've got this picture of a plant that has the roots and when you talk about your relatives, the word for relative is [Ktunaxa term], so what it really means is if you can show your roots, you know where your roots are, you're Ktunaxa, you're born Ktunaxa, you're going to die Ktunaxa, but will you be able to show your roots. And it doesn't matter -- blood quantum doesn't matter in our case. What we're saying is, you show your [Ktunaxa term] and your Ktunaxa. So it's gone back to this whole thing of how we were as traditional people and using our language. Yes, using the language. The language is just so powerful with all of our nations, and I think that we all know that that's what distinguishes us amongst each other even as First Nations people of both North America and South America. It's our languages that differentiate us and so you have to use that and that's part of your traditions."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white">"And sometimes that's hard to translate into English terms really because I know that with... for instance, in the Navajo culture there's this ke'e which is -- it means a lot of things and basically 'family,' and so that's really interesting how you've dealt with that."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "But there's nothing that says you have to translate it. There are First Nations and tribes who are using their own language to write their own constitutions. There are many tribes, in fact there are Nations around the world that don't have written constitutions. Israel doesn't have a written constitution, for example, quite successful nations and I think we get caught up because this word constitution has that... it's like a high school civics text in Canada or the United States and it's very Anglo and western. But the notions of constitutions isn't an Anglo or western concept, it's just people governing themselves. And in going back to one's roots and one's language. For some tribes in the eastern United States and eastern Canada where so much of the language is completely gone, sure it's done in English and that's fine, that's their culture today. But each tribe has to find the way that works but it doesn't have to be translated, it doesn't even have to be written."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And really there was just an understanding in Native communities about what everyone's role was and it wasn't written down. It was very much oral, so you're right. You talked about some of the obstacles already being dealing with citizenship and some other things. What are some common obstacles in constitutional reform?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, I think one of the obstacles -- and I'd appreciate your comments on this, Sophie -- one of the obstacles is I think so many First Nations and tribes go into constitutional reform thinking that there's kind of this golden moment where we'll all agree and everything will suddenly be perfect and the reality is that Native communities, they're human communities and [have] all the same problems. You have vested interest in the status quo, people who don't want to change because perhaps their job currently depends on the system or they're comfortable with it, and that's a major obstacle in this process of just some people are liking the status quo and don't see need for change or reason for change. So some of the obstacles I think are just to recognize that there are just going to be good old politics out there where you're going to have to worry about people with vested interests and so forth but that's where leadership again comes in."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "And again I think too that understanding that there's not a perfect answer out there being the major thing, that the perfect answer, if there is such a thing, is going to come from within. So bringing in advisors is good and it gives you options, it gives you things to think about, but at the end of the day it has to come within, within the nation and I think that that's really a difficult part because we all kind of like to look around and say, okay, what's others done. Well, then that works over there, maybe something works for Navajo, let's bring it over to Ktunaxa and see if it works and sort of impose it. Well, no, that's not going to be that way."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Yeah. You talk about conflict resolution and just this idea of agreeing to disagree I'm sure comes into play. There are, as I mentioned, this really starting at the grassroots level and getting a lot of people involved, getting the entire community involved. What did your community use that worked, that was grassroots?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "We started the treaty process like everybody else did where it was, as I mentioned was the leadership was going to be involved and we had a chief negotiator and we had called in the lawyers and the economists and other advisors to work with us and then it was about eight years ago that we realized, and based on some examples of what was happening around the province, that if we didn't have the citizens involved in this negotiation that we were really doing ourselves a disservice. All of the work that we're doing is on borrowed money, so at some point we have to bring this to a ratification and we have to settle the bill at the end of the day and we could be wasting a whole lot of time and whole lot of money if we don't bring the people along with us. So we realized that we needed to do that. So that's easier said than done, though. So we started out with -- we're just changing our whole way of governance within our nation. We're not going to have the elected people under the Indian Act the way that we have it now, and so we've gone back to the main families within each of our communities and the main families putting forward their spokespeople and then having the meetings with the families and sometimes that works better than having sort of a general meeting where all the families are in there and all the usual fighting and just little niggling that goes on all the time in a community. Well, it happens in families, too. That's not to say that family meetings are smooth or anything. There's lots of really interesting discussion."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "It just works better."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, it's just another forum. So we do all of that. We do the family meetings, we do the community meetings, we do the nation meetings."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Is that what you're also seeing?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "We see different strategies. I've seen everything from family meeting-based mechanisms because the community meetings didn't work. Different tribes have different traditions and the notion that everybody gets in the same room, well, maybe instead you get around the elders in the family or the clan leaders. And I've seen situations at the other extreme where things were so tense politically that I know faction leaders would go out at 2:30 in the morning and wake up their opponents and try to talk one on one to get conversation going. And so sometimes this notion that somehow we're just going to all get together in the room and have a wonderful meeting of several thousand people, sometimes we have to face the reality that maybe there's a lot of political tension. So we've seen it families, community meetings and then down to the level sometimes where the leadership just has to privately talk among themselves for awhile to say, 'Look, we don't get along, but we need to start talking about this because if we don't reform things we're never going to really be able to effectively govern ourselves.' And so we see a wide range, and I think the correct impression to leave is that it's going to be different everywhere and there isn't like a little formula where on Tuesday we'll meet and on Wednesday we'll agree. It just doesn't work that smoothly."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "What about the role of attorneys in this process?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "They very definitely have a role, and that's to give advice, to give options and to answer questions, to help people think through things. But at the end of the day, it's not their decision to make. It's not they who are going to live the decision, so when it comes time for decisions, all attorneys out of the room unless you're a nation member, then you stay there and then you're there as a nation member -- not as an attorney -- to ratify this. But I think, yeah, there's a role for them but I think that they have to remember what that role is."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "I had a very smart tribal attorney say to me one time, 'Well, you know, attorneys shouldn't write constitutions. The law comes from the constitution, so the attorney comes after the constitution.' And I think that's very perceptive that what you're doing when you create a constitution, whether written or not, whether in English or another language, you're really saying, 'This is how we will make our laws. Once we've done that, yeah, we might need some attorneys.' I think where the attorneys do play a critical role is on those edges around, okay, what are the boundaries of jurisdiction and so forth that we are going to state and so forth. But the core issue as Sophie says is the attorneys don't make the constitution, the people make the constitution. And so the role of attorneys is important, but we see many problems created where...this isn't like negotiating a contract or something, here, hire an attorney and please give us back a constitution. It's not going to work."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "But unfortunately some of the treaty discussions that we've had, that is how it's been looked at. It's been looked at like it's a contract, you get the attorneys to write it up, then when it goes back to the people to be ratified, everyone's saying, 'Where did this come from?' And there's just no way that they're going to accept it. So, yeah, it's a difficult process to go through, there's no doubt. But I think that we definitely, as we started looking it as nation rebuilding, then I think maybe it makes it a little bit easier for people to accept and to realize."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "I think part of this, and Sophie's remarks have touched on this, once you get into this, and as she says, this is a process of nation building and rebuilding, I've seen leadership -- it's kind of a freeing experience. 'Hey, wait a minute, we don't always have to ask the attorneys or we don't always have to ask an outside federal authority, maybe we want to run ourselves this way.' Figure that out and then give it to the attorneys to write the language perhaps, but the decision and the design -- it's a very freeing experience for leadership and for the citizens to say, 'Hey, we are actually going to design the way we run ourselves.' That's what self-government's all about."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "What about predictions for the future in terms of constitutional and government reform among Native nations?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, I think it's going to continue here in North America. While there's a movement and there's more and more tribes doing it, there are still hundreds of First Nations and bands and tribes that still have to face this issue. It's starting to take hold outside of North America even. I think the other piece is not only will this continue but we're seeing really inventive things being done that the whole world can learn from. The notion that there are only three branches of government. We're watching tribes create some version of a fourth branch, a kind of ethics branch, a council of elders or a council of ethics which just sits there and watches over the process as people govern themselves. Something that other nations, many other nations in the world might be able to learn from. So I think there's going to be inventiveness and an ongoing process of reform for quite a few years. This is a long process."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "But it's a positive one. It's something that needs to happen."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Absolutely. It's very positive. I just came out of a nation meeting before coming here and we had, I don't know, about 250 people in the room and almost every person that came to the mic to speak was someone that was under the age of 30. So it really is, it's a good thing that's happening there."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "For the future. Thank you so much for being with us today. This is truly educational for me and enlightening and I really appreciate you both being here and talking about the process."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "My pleasure. Thank you."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Thank you."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Again, we want to thank Sophie Pierre and Joseph Kalt for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building. Native Nation Building is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed on today's program, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Gwen Phillips: Reforming the Ktunaxa Nation Constitution: What We're Doing and Why

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Gwen Phillips, Director of Corporate Services and Governance Transition for the Ktunaxa Nation, discusses how Ktunaxa is using the British Columbia treaty process to reconceive and restructure its governance system from the ground up in order to revitalize Ktunaxa culture, language and core values and create a vibrant future for the Ktunaxa generations to come. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Phillips, Gwen. "Reforming the Ktunaxa Nation Constitution: What We're Doing and Why." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 1, 2012. Presentation.

"[Ktunaxa language] Good morning everyone. My name is Gwen Phillips and I'm from the Ktunaxa Nation in the southeast corner of British Columbia, but we also extend into Montana and Idaho, and my grandmother was a Montana Ktunaxa or Kootenai as we're known down here. So I was asked to come and present on what we did with our constitutional reform, and we're actually doing a number of constitutional reforms. And you're going, ‘What?' Because we're involved in a number of different things, and so we'll get into a little bit of that as I move forward. But what we did and why we did it was sort of what we're here for today. [Singing] We don't own the land, the land owns us. We are just the keepers of a sacred trust. Sustained by the water, the land and the trees, our ancestral home for centuries. Yeah. We don't own the land, the land owns us. It's a concept that's not necessarily understood by those that we share the land with. So in our constitution making -- I was chuckling earlier that it should be reconstitution, a reconstituting because we've had constitutions in front of us -- and then I thought about the use of that word ‘reconstituted,' and then it brought me to orange juice immediately, and I wasn't quite sure about that, because we know it starts as an orange and then it turns into something and then they add, I think, it's water to turn it back to an orange, but I'm not quite sure if that's really what they're adding, and I'm not quite sure if it's really got the same nutritional value as an orange would at the end of it all. So I'm not sure about that use either. And we have to be really cautious as we use words, because words create worlds, we've come to see. And worlds are different all over the place. They're different for every one of us, the world that we come from in our immediate. So the constitutions that we create really have to be reflections of ourselves in our immediate place and space. [Ktunaxa language] Oops! Too quick with the clicker. [Ktunaxa language] This is not unfolding quite right. Anyway, there's another word on that page. It's [Ktunaxa language]. [Ktunaxa language], the word [Ktunaxa language] means something that is actually connected to the earth. The picture in the middle is some hoodoos, and in that particular region of our territory is where our creation story is said to have taken place. The very end of it, when the humans were brought to the earth. ‘We came from the dirt,' it is said, so [Ktunaxa language], the suffix of that or the root word of that one with the added suffix of [Ktunaxa language] means taking your life from the earth. [Ktunaxa language] means literally as me a human, my children, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren. So when you understand the connection of those phrases, those terms, it's immediate and it's huge. It's not saying necessarily that we own the land, that we take our lives from the land. [Ktunaxa language] -- also Ktunaxa words. The Ktunaxa language is one of the isolate languages in the world. It's not related to any other language. It's only spoken by my people. It breaks down into no further dialects. In Canada we have 11 aboriginal language families. My language is one of those 11, and it's the most critically endangered of all of those languages at this point in time. My land, my language, my people. If nothing more, our constitution has got to speak to, understand, and reflect those concepts back to ourselves.

Early relationships. Well, this is really important to us in British Columbia. For those who don't know, British Columbia is actually just in treaty negotiations right now. So when Canada was being born a way back when, and King George was laying down his Royal Proclamations in 1763, it was a very different circumstance we were experiencing in Canada than what was going on in the United States. In the United States, and I watched movies about Indian wars, it was kind of strange for us, because we had King George actually saying in his gentlemanly way, ‘Yes, we know this is your land, but we're coming to get it, so we'll take it for a bead and a feather.' Basically, there's treaties that have been established in Canada right from Royal Proclamation days forward. So in 1763 there were treaties established. Anybody here from those treaty nation areas around that neck of the woods in 1763? Guess where those treaty areas were? Right along the St. Lawrence Seaway. Why? Because they wanted access to those lands so that they could get in there and get the furs and the riches that were held inland. So King George laid off this beautiful statement back there in 1763, but none of us understood English back then, so we weren't quite sure what was going on. We really have what's called unextinguished title in British Columbia right now. It's kind of a strange place to be in, in that we know we have rights to govern, we know we've been subject to other people's interpretation of what those rights might be, but we are in a place where we're actually defining what they are through negotiations. It's interesting though, I heard somebody say about the assertion of their responsibility to govern over their people when they're not on their own territory. Well, of course we would. Why wouldn't we? The provincial government of British Columbia and the federal government of Canada seem to think that our jurisdiction only relates with Indians on their land, and if ya'll come on my land, I can tell you what to do, too. But as soon as I step off that land, I'm not an Indian anymore. I'm not Ktunaxa anymore. Well, that's just crazy for us. Crazy! And in fact, they followed that thinking along with policy and then they've created bureaucracy, and then da, da, da, da, da. So we have on and off reserve, status and non-status, aboriginal and not. We have this crazy place in Canada, it's unbelievable. So we're educating them about concepts around jurisdiction. The jurisdiction can take the forms of territorial jurisdiction as well as personal jurisdiction. We have a phenomena in Canada that we use a term ‘aboriginal people.' We have to use that term because we as Indigenous people, inherent right, First Nations people and the Inuit people up north, are what we call Indigenous people, and then we have this other group of aboriginal people called Métis people. Somebody was speaking French to me on the break. French people in meeting peoples that they met and in becoming Métis people are not subject to the same inherent right that we have. The reason I say that is because the concept upon which our inherent right is sort of figured out is about nations that existed prior to contact. So prior to contact, did we exist as a nation and occupy territory, etc.? And yeah, we did. And so in a funny, humorous way, when I'm teaching people about these subtleties I say, ‘What's the difference between the inherent right and the aboriginal right?' About nine months. Because we have that inherent right to govern which brings us both territorial and personal jurisdiction. Métis people do not have territorial jurisdiction. They have the personal jurisdiction, and so what we have been doing is trying to reconcile those understandings with the other governments, and trying to get them to see that, the government can delegate a certain perspective or a certain part of their responsibilities to all aboriginal people, but they can't delegate to us as Indigenous, inherent right people because they don't own something to delegate to us. So we're at this reconciliation place right now where we're trying to say, these are our rights, these are our interests, this is what we're wanting to do, and trying to reconcile it with them. And we have different concepts. Something so simple as, we should have the right under a democratic, democratic, democratic -- I love that term -- philosophy to select what we want for our government. But they're telling us, ‘No, you have to have an election.' And we're going, ‘But if our people want to select you because you're the best person, we can't do that?' ‘No, that's not a democratic process.' Isn't democracy supposed to be of the people, for the people, by the people or something like that? So if our people want something, they should be able to do that. So here we are at this treaty negotiation table taking ten years to actually come up with an understanding of what we're going to do as far as getting our people at the table to govern for us. And we still haven't got some resolution over certain concepts, because they can't get their head around some of these concepts, because they only use their head. In my language, the word ‘to think' means you use your heart. If it feels right with your heart. Doesn't mean about the head. So when I talk about governance, I liken it to the human body, the head being the govern, or the governance, in that you have eyes to see, ears to hear and listen, you have a nose to smell what don't smell right, and you only have one mouth. So that you should be doing twice as much listening, twice as much looking, and not quite as much talking, as the governors, as the leaders. Government on the other hand is like the body. It's the arms and the legs that do it, and they connect up where? On the trunk of ourselves where our heart is. So if we do good work in creation of governance theory, philosophy, concepts, instruments, then hopefully our government can do what it needs to do to get us to the place we want to be.

So constitutional reform for us has been a multiple [shivers] process, because as a nation we are not acknowledged by the government of Canada. They do not acknowledge in the Indian Act nations, even though King George in his Royal Proclamation did. The Canadian government recognizes Indian bands and an Indian band is a legally defined term in the Indian Act, and so that's the people they want to talk to, the Indian bands. That's not the Ktunaxa Nation. We are a nation as we govern. So again, we have to operate as a nation under non-profit Society [Act] legislation, which is about the bottom-basement governing authority you can have in all of the constructs of governance, other than an association. But we operate under this non-profit society construct and we have to have a Society Act constitution and by-laws. Try using the term ‘sovereign' in that level of instrument. Provincial government regulates that stuff and they don't want to see that word ‘sovereign' in there. ‘No, you're no different than the hockey club down the road.' That's how they look at us as a nation.

So we have this Society Act constitution that went through a whole bunch of reform and was adopted in 2008 as sort of an in-between place because we have other things we need to do. We need to celebrate and protect our identity. We need to incorporate our vision and our values. ‘Your what, you say?' ‘Our values.' We heard this morning about core values and how important they are. We want to re-establish an internal economy. Why? When I was the director of education for my nation, we did a full psych-ed assessment of our school-aged population, and we had over 40% fetal alcohol affected individuals. Forty percent. That's now our working-age population, and don't think that that is a high statistic, because in some of the more rural and remote communities, they have even higher indexes. What does that mean? Well, when we talk to the federal government they go, ‘Oh, my god, that's terrible.' And we go, ‘No. That's reality.' Is your cup half empty or is it half full? Change the size of the cup, people. You might even flow it over for awhile, more than you need, because you develop expectations based on what your reality is. So when we talk about an internal economy, I'm not talking about being wealthy like the big oil companies. I'm talking about being able to take care of ourselves again, because something in our vision speaks to that. We're also interested in revenue sharing. Before we asserted ourselves as a nation and they looked at an Indian band on a reserve, they said, ‘Whatever, you're a federal liability.' But as soon as we walk off the reserve, we're in their face. Then we're everybody's liability, and then it becomes in their interest to relate to us. And there's actually been federal policy passed around consultation and accommodation. Because of our ability and our right to govern, more so our responsibility, when the government is doing something major that will impact our inherent right, they have to consult with us and potentially accommodate our interests. And if they can't accommodate our interests, then we go into sharing some revenues and mitigation and all those other things.

We want to give our government purpose again, and more importantly we want to rebuild our citizens' trust. In the 20 years that I've been involved in constitutional reform and nation rebuilding, that's the thing that comes up and bites me every time. ‘We don't trust, we don't trust.' Most of us in Indian Country don't even trust ourselves anymore, let alone the neighbor or the guy down the road. ‘We're going to give them our life? No.' So that to us is key. How do we rebuild trust? And I know I'm not supposed to talk about process, but sometimes process is more important than product, and that's all I'm going to say about process. But the environment we're in is not a lovely place to be. Now if I could just go and think and dream and develop constitutions that would be lovely. But you know what it's like working in Indian Country, don't you? It's like the tennis-ball launcher has been madly turned on, and there you are in the morning with a broken hockey stick trying to do something. It's crazy. They throw more at us and more at us and more at us. So right now I feel privileged, or maybe it's not privileged, maybe it's the dream that turned into the nightmare, to be part of the national government's exercise to look at all of the authorities that the federal government has in place that deal with Indians. They're trying to reduce those authorities cause we're in a fiscal-restraint process. So the axe is swinging in Ottawa and I went, ‘Please give me the handle of that axe.' So I'm the only Indian involved in this big old committee that's doing this work, because I want to make sure if the axe is swinging it ain't gonna hit the jugular vein. And I've actually got them already within three weeks to see the light about on reserve, off reserve, extra bureaucracy, extra costs. Aah! ‘Yeah, you can save me some money?' ‘Yeah, we can save you some money, and we will.'

And somebody said something about root causes. Well, that's what we're really trying to do, because we see a vision, and that song that I started singing is our vision song. Strong, healthy citizens in communities speaking our languages and celebrating who we are and our history and our ancestral homelands, working together, managing our lands and resources as self-sufficient, self-governing nation. Key, key – self-sufficiency. It does not say wealthy. And every time I ask my people about money cause they always want economic development to bring in money. I say, ‘Why?' ‘Cause we need things.' ‘Well, tell me what you need.' ‘Well, we need money.' ‘No, no, no, no. Next time I come I'm going to dump a big pile of money in the foyer of the Band office. What you going to spend it on?' Aah! ‘We don't know.'

I watched about 20 school children's vision statement -- pictures, art -- one time and I got sick to my stomach, because every child's vision statement said, I see a future where there's no more fighting, I see a future where there's no more drinking, I see a future where there's no more, no more future. Really, what they saw was an eradication of ugly things, and that's not good enough for us. We want a picture of good things. We want to know what's good about ourselves. So as we put that vision statement in front of us we said, ‘Holy cow, if that's where we're trying to go, and that's the car we're driving via our constitution and regulations, etc., we ain't never gonna get there.' So we had to say, ‘Okay, we need a new vehicle. What is it going to be, a Ferrari, a four-wheel drive? No, let's just get the horse and buggy, cause that worked the best in our territory.' We want to rebuild our nation, but what is a nation? Can you smell, touch, taste a nation? No. You feel it in your heart, that place where you think from. But what is a nation? It's a whole bunch of communities, and in our case we've got five in Canada, one in Montana, and one in Idaho. So a nation is a whole bunch of individual semi-sovereign entities. But what is a community? Well, in our understandings, it was an extended family group living in a particular locale. When it got too big to be supported in that locale, they broke apart and another band was formed. So we have a whole bunch of families. And by the way, our governance structures included family. But the only real change agent in any of this is about the individual citizen. You can't change the family unless you change the people in it. You can't change the community unless you change the people in the families that live there. So our whole nation rebuilding is about rebuilding our nation one person at a time. And why are we doing that? On a basis of values and principles, traditional values and principles. Not rights and freedoms. Not rights and freedoms, but responsibilities and privileges. And so strong, healthy citizens speaking our language and celebrating who we are -- it's all part of our reorganization, our structures. So that vision statement turned into regulation and instruments and restructure within our nation, the way we do business.

So we have sitting councils in those four areas and we have an executive body that ensures that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing to ensure that we can fulfill our responsibilities and continue to access our privileges. Not rights and freedoms -- responsibilities and privileges, people. The only right I have in the morning is opening my eyes, and everything else after that is a responsibility to achieve a privilege.

So we've taken a strategic approach. Hey, hey, I've heard this term before. Building strong healthy people, not just getting rid of problems. Not just getting rid of problems. Don't focus on problems, focus on the good things you have. Implementing value-based governance, not just adopting the status quo. Balancing interest across the sectors. In our communities, we get lots of money for social programs and none for language. So we've got to make sure that we're the ones that are divvying out the dollars, not them. That we have ecosystem-based land use planning, not just resource development. That we manage an economy, and not just economic development. That's the only way you can ensure that your own people are alive and well and working and engaged and that you can [achieve] your vision statement. Clarifying relations to the people and the land. Again, not just looking at the absence of negatives. What we want is a presence of positives.

And so where are we? We've developed our vision, and that was a two-year exercise. So when somebody says, ‘It might take two or three years to do your constitution.' Hey, it might take two or three generations, and it might be the good one that you have that'll last for the next 20, 30, 50 generations. Vision, values, guiding principles. Done, done, done. That's ten years work, ten years work. But those things became alive as soon as they were done. It just didn't stop and wait for it. They've been permeating every aspect of what we have, because we're not just buying a new car, we're trying the car, putting on different wheels, we're trying a new... We're trying it out as we're driving it, because we want something that's going to work for us.

So this is where we are right now, defining standards for ourselves again across the board. What are our own standards, and that informs our law, and then we'll know what institutions we need. And I'll tell you right now, we've already said that one of the major institutional changes that has to happen is within the education system, because if we're dealing with all of this ill health, then why are we not using the human capital-building machine to address those issues. And I included along the side a few little concepts that we heard somewhere. Cultural fit, de facto sovereignty, strategic approach. I recognize those things from somewhere.

So our constitution, yes, it's been reformed a couple of times, we're working on a self-government constitution right now, which is really interesting. We have gone through I guess the process of putting ourself back into the picture. Now we have to get to the point where we actually can cut the strings from those other guys, because we're not quite there yet. But what we're saying is that we will have the responsibility for things like preserving, promoting and protecting our cultural heritage, language, identity; protecting and preserving ecological and environmental integrity of the lands, etc., etc., etc. But, as we do this, we acknowledge there's a lot of resources that [are] required, strategic investments. So we've gone away from using terms like ‘development' and using terms like ‘investment,' so we expect to see something coming back. And we're looking at things as independent variables. The government likes to talk in terms of capacity building, but they don't want to give us tools, they don't want us to have document management systems and things that they have that allow them to function effectively. So we're doing this work, we're actually sitting down and defining the full complete picture of what we'll need all across the board to govern effectively, right from competency to capacity, tools and instruments all the way along, because we have a vision and we want to achieve that vision. [Ktunaxa language]"

Peterson Zah and Manley A. Begay, Jr.: Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund

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Native Nations Institute
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Former Navajo Chairman and President Peterson Zah and NNI Faculty Chair Manley A. Begay, Jr. discuss the role of strategic vision and planning in the establishment and cultivation of the Navajo Navajo Permanent Trust Fund, and stress the need for Native nations to forge a long-term vision for their communities and peoples.

Native Nations
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Citation

Zah, Peterson and Manley A. Begay, Jr. "Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

Peterson Zah:

"[Navajo Introduction]. In the Indian way and Navajo way you always identify yourself, who you are, where you come from, who you're related to because, after all, that's what we're all about. And so that's normally the way you start your conversation. Because you're not the only one I'm talking to here in this room. We have other entities that are also here and they always want to know who you are. I wanted to say just two or three words before we get going with what I'm supposed to be doing here.

Number one, I now work at Arizona State University [ASU]; I've been there for the last 14 years. And after the Navajo people kicked me out of office I went down to the University and I started working with young people because, at the time, they only had something like 600 Native American students on campus. And the President says, "˜That's as far as we get. We come to that number then we always come down. Our graduation rate is horrible,' he says. "˜So we need to improve that. Let that be your concern.' He also said, "˜I can't tell you how to do your job because I don't know what to tell you. You evidently know.' And so essentially that's the way we got started. From 600 Native American students to today, we have 1,500 Native American students. Our goal is to reach, within the next five years, 2,000 Native American students. So we're doing very well in recruitment. Our retention rate is improving. Our graduation rate is improving also. And so I wanted to just give you that little commercial. If I didn't say anything about ASU, the President it's going to get back to him and he's going to be angry. So I wanted to just say this.

Number two: I really, really enjoyed the conference here during the last two days. I'm learning a lot and listening to all of the young ones -- all of you, participating in these discussions -- and all of the dedication, and a good sense of where we should be headed all comes out. And as an old man, as a grandpa, that really makes me happy. And we need more of these kinds of training to equip the upcoming leaders with all of the tools that they need so that they can do better among their people in their communities nationwide. So I just wanted to say this.

In terms of the subject today, the establishment of the [Navajo Nation Permanent] Trust Fund, I always tell people that the needs of the Navajo people back then in the mid-1980s were the same as they are now. Some people say, "˜Well, you were able to do all of that because the needs back then weren't as great.' Well, to be honest, they were the same, basically the same. As the tribal chair sitting there at that desk every minute people coming in, they want service, they want to talk to you, they want advice, they want a sense of direction, they want this and they want that. And so your time is occupied a hundred percent throughout the day, almost 24 hours a day -- how they want those services to be rendered to them. And so basically that was the backdrop of the Navajo Nation back in the mid-1980s.

Navajo, as you know, is the largest of all of the Indian tribes, whether it's a pure membership or land base: 88-member council, over 300,000 Navajo people, 110 chapters. And at those chapters you have chapter president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, grazing committee members. So you can multiply 110 times five, and that's how many people you have to work with as an elected official of the Navajo Nation government. So to put your program into place, you have to work with those officers at the community level as well as the 88-member council. So it's not an easy task. You may have a great idea but if you don't do your homework to begin with, you're in trouble right from the word "˜go.' And so with establishment of the trust fund, we had to basically deal with that kind of infrastructure on the Navajo to get to where we wanted to go. I do not know in this room how many of our tribal government, tribal leaders, have tried to create trust fund for the Indian people. I was extremely lucky to be working with a tribal council that had a lot of vision. They were visionary leaders, the 88-member council. I would say probably one half of them had no greater than 10th-grade, 11th-, 12th-grade education. We didn't have a single college graduate but they were visionary in a lot of the things that they did. So we were very, very lucky to have that number in the Navajo Nation Council.

Prior to my becoming a tribal chair I worked at the legal services program called DNA [Diné be'iina Náhiilna be Agha'diit'ahii or "˜attorneys who work for the economic revitalization of The People'] People's Legal Service. I spent 11 years there as the executive director, as a non-lawyer executive director. There were always a lot of people who wanted me to go to law school and I used to tell them, "˜Listen, I'm better off than a lawyer. So I'm going to continue running the program. Because when you become a lawyer, you get tunnel vision and sometimes you can't see things out here. And therefore you have to really, really concentrate on the overall problems of the Navajo people.' And as such I was always working with lawyers to make sure that the cases that we handled at DNA, many of which went to United States Supreme Court, was handled right because I knew that when you get into that court you don't really know what's going to happen. Sure, the lawyers will tell you that they're going to win, this is their argument and this is what we want to do. But we always had a mock trial that we insist our lawyers go through that mock trial -- not only once or twice or three times -- 10 times to have those kinds of sessions before they went into the United States Supreme Court.

So I was intimately involved in Kerr-McGee vs. the Navajo Nation, a taxation case that was accepted by the Navajo Nation to go on to the United States Supreme Court. Within that four-year period, we were able to win in the United States Supreme Court where the tribes were given the authority to tax companies that work on the reservation, that extract minerals on the reservations and that do business on the Navajo Nation. I remember the controversy when we passed that taxing legislation by the Navajo Council, all of the people who do business, companies who do business on the reservation, they all banded together and they said, "˜We're going to sue you because we don't think you have the authority as Navajo Nation to impose taxes on us because we have this contract with you. And we look at that contract as a bible and in there it says we are not to be taxed.' But those were the old leases that were approved by the Navajo Nation Council and the contracting parties. And so when we decided that we're going to start taxing people, they used that against us, the very same thing that the other Navajo Council did in the past.

And so what happened was that we went into court and basically did all of our homework and we [ended] up winning that case. And I remember getting a call from the clerk of the United States Supreme Court saying, "˜I'm just letting you know a decision was made today. It was nine to zero. You guys won the case. That means Indian tribes can now begin taxing companies that operate on the Indian nation.' That was a precedent-setting case. And what that did, what that did was I told the companies, when they decided to sue us in court, I says, "˜As a tribal chairman you get sued every week so it doesn't really matter. And so can I get a concession out of you that while this case is going on can you pay the amount of money that you're supposed to pay in escrow, in escrow account? If you win, you take all the money back. If I win, I take all the money.' And so basically that's how the $217 million was accumulated. So when we won the United States Supreme Court, I went down to the bank and got a check for $217 million. I was the most popular person in Window Rock.

But the question about what to do with that amount of money was really, really something that people, leaders, have to deal with because it was the election year. The 88-member council, they said, "˜We understand you picked up the $217 million. Let's call the council into session and I've got a project. I want to be reelected.' Council delegate from Chinle says, "˜I want to have a laundry, laundromat at Chinle chapter and we'll call it Chinle Wash. We want to have that going because using that I can get re-elected and we'll get further in our progress that we're trying to accomplish.' And so that was something that was really a lot of pressure, activities that happened on the Navajo Nation. The problem was, what do you do with that money? A lot of services are needed. Anything you can think of you can throw the $217 million at those problems because it's election year. And so everyone wanted a role in terms of how they all thought we should spend the money.

My mother is a traditional Navajo lady. She never went to school. She doesn't know a word of English. She has lots of sheep all her life. And every once in awhile she always wants us to come home, spend a night, two or three days with her. So when the pressure got so hot, boiling over in Window Rock, I jumped in my pickup truck and I went home. And I got to the house late in the evening, slept and early in the morning my mother was butchering the sheep. And she says, "˜I'm cooking for the kids.' And then when I got up she started talking. And I told her and she says, "˜Son, I hear all these things on the radio about what's happening in Window Rock. What is happening? What is happening with that money? What did you do with the $217 million that you got from the bank?' And I says, "˜I just put it in the safe and I'm trying to decide what I should do with it.' And so then she started talking about her herd and she says, "˜Is there a way, is there a way that you can treat money the same way as you treat a herd, the sheep?' And she says, "˜Remember, say back several years ago, when our herd came down and we only had 15 sheep and we were all worried? Then I told you kids, let's not eat the sheep anymore for the next two years. If we do it that way, the 15 will multiply to 30 if we leave it alone. The following year we'll have 60. The following year we'll have 120 and we'll be back to where we were. Can you treat money that way?' And this is a traditional Navajo lady talking with me. I could have probably hired a consultant at $400-500 an hour to tell me the same thing, but the mother cares. She's a permanent fixture on the Navajo Nation. She's a tribal member. So I thought to myself, 'Well, she's given me an advice and what she's really, really talking about it is putting money into trust so that it can multiply the same way as her herd multiplied.' And so I got all recharged. At the end of that two-day period, I went back into Window Rock and I went to the council and I says, "˜Ah ha! I've got the answer. Let's put these monies into trusts, let's not spend it. Let's not spend it foolishly. Yes, we all want to get reelected -- I do too -- but let's be prudent. Let's use our judgment in the right way for the Navajo people.' So it was advice that I got from my mother that was highly valuable to the Navajo Nation.

So we sat down with the council and we developed a plan in terms of how that $217 million should be distributed and used to the trust fund. And we established what we call Chapter Government Nation-Building Fund. We put something like $60 or $70 million into that account. That means at the end of the year, whatever interest that it earns those monies were divided among the chapter houses and that's the way their chapter houses operated throughout the year. We created a $20 million Navajo scholarship fund. We had something like maybe $20 million in there already, but we put another $20 million on top of that for something nearly $40 million and we said the interest that this earns at the end of each year will keep the Navajo kids going to college, a college and a university of their choice. So we took care of the chapters. We took care of the young people but not everybody is fit to go to college. Some want to go to vocational education. So we said why don't we take care of them? And we put something like $7 or $8 million into that account. The interest that it earns then can send those Navajo kids to those vocational institutions.

Then we had some problems. There was tremendous need for the handicap people. It was right at this time that old man Ronald Reagan came into power and he cut off all those social programs. Remember back then? Maybe some of you were in diapers still but Ronald Reagan came in and they said, "˜No more of these social programs.' So he cut them. Well, that left the senior citizens out in the cold. We then said, "˜Why don't we have a handicap trust fund?' So we put $7 or $8 million in there for all the elderly people that may need hearing aid -- like the one Manley is wearing -- and hearing aid and all of these other things that they need, the senior citizen. And they're the ones that use that trust fund to help them with some of their problems that they were having. And then there were senior citizens' trust fund. All the senior citizen organizations on the reservation and we put some money into the trust fund for them. And we said that the interest that it earns, "˜You can use that for your activities,' all the seniors.

Then we gave Navajo Academy -- the only Navajo high school, a prep school -- we gave them some trust funds so that they can establish a truly Navajo Nation school. And that was built in Farmington, New Mexico, and today it's still there. They're the only high school on the Navajo Nation that sends every graduate to colleges and university. And I like to go over there and recruit students. So they're the ones that have that Navajo prep academy.

The other one that is not listed, these things happened in 1984-85. In 1990, early 1990, we established three more trust funds. One of them is what we call Land Acquisition Fund. All of you are wondering, "˜Say, how come the Navajo Nation has such a big land base, big huge reservation?' Well, we buy land back. We buy land back. So we created what we call Land Acquisition Fund. There are some ranchers, non-Indian people adjacent to the Navajo Nation that always put their land up for sale. We said, 'When those people make their land available, we should get to the bank, make out a check, buy the land.' Now our reservation is growing. It's getting bigger and bigger and so we established that Land Acquisition Fund. Today it has $50 million, $50 million in that account. So anybody who puts out their land for sale, we use that money to buy land. The reason why we did it is Navajo Nation keeps on growing; the people, the membership is getting larger and larger. We want the land to grow with those numbers. And so every year we purchase more and more land, and we're not going to stop until we get back the whole Southwest. And so that's why we established that fund.

The other fund that we created during that period was a trust fund to take care of a lot of these economic development that's taking place on the Navajo Nation. They have their own trust fund that they can tap into to do economic development projects. And so basically those are the trust funds that the Navajo Nation now has. Now why did we do that? My thought back then was, you can use the $217 million, put them all into trusts. If you have enough trust accounts that you establish, I want to see the day the Navajo Nation government would run on trust fund; we don't have to beg anybody for money. Is that called self-sufficiency all of you young people? Self-sufficiency, that's what we're striving for. Twenty years has gone by. Many of these trust funds are being utilized and they have matured. So much of your trust fund is being utilized to keep the tribal government going.

Now I work for Arizona State University as I told you. We have a rather new president that came out of back east. His goal is to put Arizona State University in a position so that all of these monies that people donate, he puts it into trusts. He calls it endowed funds. And he says, "˜I'd like to put the university in the position where we don't have to go to the state legislature and beg for money each year, we don't have to go see the governor. We want to run this university like NYU, Harvard, Yale, all of those universities. They all run on their own. They're all running on trust funds.' So basically the Navajo concept was to essentially to do the same thing.

The biggest one that we wanted to talk about is the Permanent Fund. It was established because of the natural resources being depleted. I told the Navajo people, I said, "˜We have coal, but you know coal is a non-renewable resource. Once the coal is gone, where are we going to get our money? Once the coal is all extracted from Navajo Land, where are we going to get our income? So while we can, we should put these monies into trust.' So a permanent fund was established by the Navajo Nation. One thing that we had to keep on explaining over and over to the Navajo people is, 'What is the difference between the principal and fund income?' Probably the most simplest thing that you can put across to people, but there was a lot of misunderstanding between principal and the fund income. And we keep on saying, 'We want to make it so that we don't spend the principale when we are at a point of using, beginning to use these trust funds.'

The way it works now is, when the permanent fund was authorized, we put something like $26 million as a basis, as a foundation of the Permanent Fund; we put that in the bank. On top of that we said, '12 percent of all projected revenue shall be invested from the Navajo Nation.' So each year, the Navajo Council comes to decide the budgeting process. The first thing they do is they take, on top of everything they get, 12 percent of that, they put it on top of the Permanent Fund. So the Permanent Fund enjoys two things. One is the interest that it earns goes back into the Permanent Fund. The Navajo Nation uses 12 percent of their general fund total, they put that on top of that. So it enjoys a lot of deposits of money and the generation of revenues that way.

We agreed among the council, I told the council, I said, "˜I want to get an agreement from you that we're not going to ever touch this money for the next 20 years. For the next 20 years, you shall not come to my office and ask that you withdraw these monies. We're going to put it into trust for 20 years and we're going to see what happens, how much money it can generate. After the 25-year period, we will then have a five-year plan where 95 percent of the money could, may be expended according to rules established by the council.' And so that is still in the plan. However, there is no program in place right now for the use of those permanent fund[s]. And so basically that is something that the Navajo Nation agreed to and that they are still, we are still holding them to those agreements. All of the expenses that is associated with the administration and the management of the Permanent Fund comes out of that amount of money that it earns. And so that's what happened to the Navajo Nation and the establishment of its permanent fund.

Today, March 27th -- is it today? -- we have some like $1.4 billion in that permanent fund. This is money that is not earmarked for anything. It's free money. So money in the bank, 1.4 [million dollars]. One of the biggest push by the council every time they come into session is they want to get at it. They want to spend the money. So usually Manley Begay and I are there in Window Rock saying, "˜No, no, no, no. You guys agreed not to do this. Let's keep it growing, let's keep it going.' So thus far, we have been successful and so that is the way this permanent fund and all the other trust funds was established.

Now in 2002, a work group was established called Permanent Fund Work Group. The Navajo Nation Council wanted to get seven people from the Navajo Nation that can decide what to do with that permanent fund. And they made me the chair and then we selected people like Manley Begay and others. And we've been meeting on and off since then and talking about what the future holds for the Navajo Nation trust fund. Manley says, "˜You go first, talk about how these were established, but no joke.' He says, "˜As long as you agree that you aren't going to tell any joke to this group, then you should do this.' So before I crack a joke, I'd like to give him the floor."

Manley Begay:

"The reason why my brother walks around real slow is [because] he has $500 million in both pockets. A good friend of mine, I ran into him again, Curt Massey from White Mountain Apache. I used to play basketball with him years ago. I noticed he was walking real slow, too. I told him, I said, "˜You're walking really slow.' I said, "˜Are you still playing basketball?' He says, "˜No, I don't have any more knees.' I used to play ball with him years ago. We used to be neighbors over there in the East Fork area of the White Mountain Apache reservation. So it was really good to see my brother and good friend Curt Massey. Now he's on the council at White Mountain Apache. And one thing about my brother Pete Zah is that he used to play basketball also, years ago at the Phoenix Indian School, and he was actually on a championship team. So quite an athlete back when.

As Pete was saying, we were selected to this permanent fund work group. And lo and behold, we're sitting on millions of dollars, and it was our responsibility to decide what to do with that money. So I asked Peter, I said, "˜What should we do with the money?' And he said, "˜We should buy Tahiti, the Island of Tahiti, and move over there, get a flock of sheep and herd sheep by the ocean.' But can you imagine the responsibility that's given to you about what to do with that amount of money? In 2002, the money was hovering around $800 million and seven of us, these individuals, we were the ones to decide how the money was going to be spent. As my brother was saying, when they first won the legal case, everybody became his best buddy. They'd come out of he woodwork. The same thing happened again, this time to me, again. People I hadn't seen for years they said, 'Brother, uncle, grandpa, have I got a deal for you.' So can you imagine the amount of responsibility we were given?

And so what do you do? How do you handle this? Because everything's important, right? Grandpa and grandma are important, the handicapped are important, roads are important, health is important, education is important, veterans are important, the youth are important, and there are 300,000 Navajos. Shall we go per cap, 300,000 Navajos? Not much money to go around. And so that was what we were facing. So what did we do? We did a lot of research. First we wanted to figure out what's been happening all these years since the money was put into a trust fund and we wanted to find out exactly how much money there was.

So my brother and I and the five other individuals, we had the fund managers come to see us and we had meetings with them about where the money was at, how the money was invested, where did it go, how much is left and this was shortly, if you'll remember, after 9/11. And the stock markets were really fluctuating around that time. It probably would have been up to $1 billion, but 9/11 sort of made it dip, up and down. And we consulted with the community. One thing about my brother here is that he's very close to the people, the people that are out there in the community. And he said, "˜I want to ask them what they think because that's the heart and soul of who you are.' And he says, "˜We have to go there, we have to go there and ask.'

Then we found out, lo and behold, we found out that in the year 2000 this legislation was passed. The Navajo Nation during an election year earmarked 50 percent of the money to go to this local governance trust fund. And so that remained that only 45 percent of the fund income would be available to us to determine an expenditure plan for and then the 5 percent would be reinvested back into the principal. So essentially this is what happened. So we were actually only dealing with $6.8 million and the vastness of the needs of Navajo is unbelievable and here we were only dealing with about around $7 million. And here we were thinking, we're going to buy Tahiti. But there was a reality check. All of a sudden things began to change very, very quickly. So what to do, what to do?

And so we began to figure out how to do this, what do we do, how do we think through this particular...? So we began to research more and more about how much money there actually was and we wanted to know if there were other extenuating circumstances. This bullet point three. Were there other things that were going on with the money that we hadn't known about earlier? We requested reports from just about everybody at Navajo; we met with the money managers again, we talked to attorneys, we went to the natural resource department. We wanted to know how much time is left for the coal deposit at Navajo? How much more oil do we have left? Because all of that plays into how you plan for an expenditure plan. We held public hearings and then we began to devise a final permanent fund work group report to the Navajo Nation Council. Here is an assumption chart that if coal reserves at our coal mine were depleted, if our oil fields were depleted, what's going to happen to the Permanent Fund trust. And so this middle road is sort of the best route that was imaginable.

So 2008, we're talking about the money hovering around maybe $700-800 million. But as my brother was saying, it's actually at $1.4 billion; so the stocks doing a really, really good job. And here's sort of the market value chart of the Permanent Fund. So you can imagine that in 2010 it would be nearing $1 billion, but it's actually exceeded expectations. Here's another chart that we were working with. In terms of the local governance trust fund -- let's say -- if the money went there, what's the best-case scenario? So we were thinking through what to do with this money and we held public hearings. We wanted to hear from the people. We wanted to hear what the people had to say. And my brother here is like -- remember the old commercial of E.F. Hutton? When Peterson Zah speaks, everybody listens. It's absolutely true. He has that stature that when he goes out to the community, when he talks to the people, people really listen to him. They want to know exactly what he's thinking. To this day, even though he's not in office, he's still a leader. He's still a leader to be respected, to be listened to, to be thought through. So at these community hearings, this is what we put together. And here are the public hearing questions. So we started to gain data and information. And this was actually my brother's idea. He said, "˜We've got to go over there, talk to the people, find out what's going on. Let's pose to them these questions and let's find out some answers about what they're thinking.' And these were their comments.

There was a big push for reinvesting the money, instead of spending it. They said, they told us...these were grandmas and grandpas, people that we would consider sort of everyday people. Very intelligent, smart people. And they said to us, 'Reinvest the money.' But they didn't come out and say, 'Reinvest.' They said this, "˜It's like seeing your corn grow. You should pick the corn only when it is ripe. If you pick it when it's too young, you won't get enough to eat.' So what they were saying was, reinvest the money, put it back. They also said, in reference to the local governance trust fund, they said, "˜There's this huge cow with lots of milk, but only a few calves are allowed to feed, then others are all standing around hungry. The money is like milk, it all goes to just those few.' So they were saying to us, 'Wait a minute. Let's wait a minute.' And then those of us that are living off Navajo Nation land, they were saying, "˜Count us in; don't count us out. Don't call us outsiders. We know our homeland and the homeland knows us. Our umbilical cords are buried in our homeland. We are still your relatives. We are only here because of jobs, education, training and for medical reasons.' Often these services are not available on the Navajo Nation. In the Navajo way, when a baby is, the umbilical cord falls off, there's a whole ceremony that it entails. So where it's buried is where your heart and your soul is at. So no matter where you go, wherever your umbilical cord is at, that's where your heart and soul will be.

And so what did we do, we put together this permanent fund work group report and this is what we said. Number one, we challenged the Navajo Nation Council and we said, and we also challenged the Navajo people, and we said, "˜Develop a vision with a strategic plan for the Navajo Nation as a whole that can provide guidance to those -- including the Navajo Nation Council -- who must make momentous decisions regarding finance and other matters affecting the long-term future of the people.' We said, "˜Reinvest all of the Permanent Fund until 2012, an additional period of five years, or until the corpus of the fund reaches $1 billion, whichever comes first.' As my brother said, it's at $1.4 billion and everybody wants to get at it. And we said, "˜Repeal the legislation requiring the Permanent Fund income go to the local governance trust fund.' And we said, "˜the Navajo Nation should really resist further legislative diversion of the money. It makes the fund quite vulnerable.' And we said, "˜set up an endowment commission.' The endowment commission's responsibility would be to figure out according to policy, rules and regulations, how the money would be dispensed.

Today, what's the future of the Permanent Fund? We're not sure. It's sort of a question mark, although we're all following Mr. Zah's lead. He says, "˜We sometimes as Indian people have a hard time saving. We get a paycheck and then we're driving to town, we spend all the money. We're happy going over there, coming back we're all quiet. No more money.' And he says, "˜We've got to save. We've got to save that money.' So we're following his lead to this very day." 

Ned Norris, Jr.: Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tohono O'odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr. speaks to aspiring and current Native nation leaders about the keys to being an effective leader and shares his personal experiences in preparing to become the leader of his nation.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Norris, Jr., Ned. "Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"Thank you. How is everybody? Good. Alright! Thank you, Manley Begay, for that introduction. I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you, welcoming you to the Tohono O'odham Nation and welcome to our home. This is one of our business facilities that we just opened in the beginning of January [2008] and we're pretty proud of it. We're proud of what we have been able to accomplish thus far, and realize that there are more things ahead of us that we know and that we may not know that we'd like to accomplish for our people. This gives us the opportunity to establish some economic base for us to do some of those things that we just dream about.

Just a little bit of a background, the Tohono O'odham Nation, when you think about our ancestral lands, you will know that the ancestral lands of the O'odham include those lands which are where the city of Tucson sits today all the way east to where the Rincon Mountains are at, all the way north to the city of Phoenix and Scottsdale is at, all the way west to where the Colorado River is, and all the way south some 130 miles south of what is not the international border of Mexico. Those are ancestral lands of our people, of the O'odham. Today, we ended up with 2.8 million square acres and always tell an audience, 'We're 2.8 million square acres small.' And usually when you have a non-Indian audience, they kind of look at you like, "˜What are you talking about? 2.8 million square acres is a pretty big piece of land.' But when you think about the ancestral lands of our people, 2.8 million is nothing. So I wanted to give you that background. Also, we have about 28,000 enrolled tribal members, so there are about 28,000 of us running around here in the United States and in some other countries. In fact, we have about 1,500 enrolled tribal members that live in Mexico and not necessarily because they want to live in Mexico, it is because when the international border was established, they cut them off from the rest of the people, from the rest of the land here. We continue to have about nine communities that still exist within Mexico, and my trip to Nogales, Sonora this afternoon is meeting with a couple of members of the O'odham in Mexico, because the lawyer that they are working with can't get on this side of the United States, so we're going to go meet with him down there and talk a little bit about land issues that are important to us that still exist in Mexico.

And actually I wanted to get a feel of the audience. I was asking Manley Begay, "˜Who is the audience here?' And he said to me that "˜there are newly elected tribal leaders here, there are aspiring tribal leaders here.' I was speaking to one of the young persons here and they said there are some people from a college up in Phoenix area that are here to learn about leadership, and learn about what you might want to be thinking about as you are emerging into a tribal leader. And then I was also told that there are some emerging old tribal leaders, and I'm like emerging old tribal leaders, and I'm wondering what he's talking about. And I'm assuming that they are those newly tribal elected leaders that, for some odd reason, you decided to get back into the thick of the politics and get elected again, so you're back. It's a return of the old leadership. He pointed out a couple of you to me, take for example, "˜So and so over there or so and so over there, they are old returning tribal leaders.' And I won't point you out because you know who you are.

I was sharing with Manley that I knew I wanted to do this job 30 years ago. I knew I wanted to be the Chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation 30 years ago. When I started my first job in 1977 as the assistant director for the Tohono O'odham Nation Children's Home, I knew someday I wanted to hold this job. And over the course of the last 30 years, I have done different things -- consciously and sub-consciously -- preparing myself for this day, preparing myself for this job. And people ask me today, "˜How do you like what you're doing?' And I tell them, "˜I love it. I love this job. It's everything that a job needs to be. It's challenging, it's exciting, it's frustrating, it's disappointing.' All of those things that our jobs need to be in order for us to grow, in order for us to challenge ourselves, in order for us to be challenged. We have to have all of those experiences, all of those ingredients in order for us to be successful as tribal leaders. And I know that over the course of the last 30 years, there are things that I have done in my life that probably put question on whether or not I should or shouldn't be elected as a tribal leader. And I think every single person in this room has done something questionable in their lives that may have put question on whether or not we should elect you or not elect you, but you know, we learn from those situations as well. We learn from those mistakes. We learn from that part of the journey in our lives in order to prepare us for what we are doing today as tribal leaders. And that's the way I like to look at it. That is the way I like to look at the past 30 years. And I've been married for 35 years. My wife -- and actually I tell this story -- that my wife has put up with me for 35 years. We just had our 35th anniversary in February, and I'll share with you now that in the 35 years that we have been together, there have been things that I've done that would have probably required her or wanted her or forced her to leave me, but she didn't. She didn't leave me, she didn't give up on me. For some reason, she believed in me and my ability and my capability, and I love her more today for not giving up on me because she stood by me. And I always say that, "˜Behind a good man, there is always an even greater woman,' the woman that is there to help us, to pick us up when we fall. To help us gain the strength or regain the strength we may have lost at different times in our life, and so I appreciate that of her.

You know, over the course of my years involved in politics -- and we see sometimes on the TV commercials, the commercial about Michael Jordan and there was a commercial that said, "˜Be like Mike.' It caught a lot of the attention of our young people: "˜Be like Mike Jordan, buy these $250 tennis shoes and you can be like Mike Jordan. Be like Mike.' Well, you know, there's people in my life that I would like to be like, that I had sat back years ago watching leaders, watching aspiring leaders, watching people over the course of time that I have said, "˜You know what, I'd like to be like that person. I'd like to be like that leader. I'd like to be able to think like that leader. I'd like to be able to have the good heart that I see that leader have and be like them.' Just like the commercial is saying, "˜Be like Mike.' There are several Mike people out there that I would like to have been like. You know it really is an honor for me to be standing in front of you sharing these thoughts with you, because one of those people that were "˜Be like Mike' for me in my life' was Dr. Peterson Zah. I am standing up here thinking, "˜What am I going to be able to say to Dr. Zah that is going to make any sense or that he hasn't already said or has already experienced himself?' So it is an honor for me to stand in front of you, sir, and be able to share some thoughts with you, because I'm thinking, "˜Man, I can't share, I can't teach you anything.' But it's out of that respect that I hold for him as a leader, as a continued leader, and what he's been able to do not only for his own people, but for all nations, all tribal people nationwide.

One of the things that I have shared with different audiences is some of these quotes. I keep these, I keep some quotes in this thing that we use now called this Blackberry, and I keep these in here because at times over the course of, you know, when you are feeling down or when you are feeling like maybe you're questioning what you are doing or questioning the worth of what you are doing, I go back to these and I start reading these. One of the things that I've always thought about -- and I try to live my own leadership ability after -- is this quote, and it says, "˜You can accomplish anything in life provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.' 'You can accomplish anything in life provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.' As leaders -- and that quote is attributed to Harry Truman -- as leaders I like to think of myself in that way. That what I have to do -- the people have entrusted in me their trust to lead them and to guide them for the term that I have been elected. As a leader, I should not ever take advantage of that trust that the people have placed in me. I should never take the position that, "˜That was my idea, not yours.' I should not take the position that, "˜It's my way or the highway.' As a leader, that should not -- that's not something that we should be doing as tribal leaders. The [Tohono O'odham Nation] vice chairman and I -- Isidro Lopez -- when we ran for these offices, we ran on a campaign that we say in O'odham, it says [O'odham language], and [O'odham language] translates to "˜All of us together.' And what we wanted to be able to do was to bring the people together, to bring our people together, to give our people the opportunity to actively participate in the decision-making process. Too many times, we get tribal leadership that think they are going to impose those decisions on the people. We can't accomplish that, we can't accomplish what we need to accomplish if we are going to dictate to our people. That's not our purpose. Our purpose is to lead, our purpose is to work together, and our purpose is to bring our people to the table so that we can hear what they have to say. And there have been times in the last nine months that the Vice Chairman and I have served in office that people have said, "˜So much for [O'odham language], because I thought we were going to work together.' And that is because they were on the short end of a decision. You know, and we have said that this theme is going to be the heartbeat of our tenure in office. We intend to make sure of that. Now, people need to understand that we're not always going to agree on what the outcome of a decision is. We can't expect to always agree. There are going to be things that we disagree with each other on, but we are always going to make the effort to try and involve you in the decision-making process. So that is what I wanted to share with you on that.

The other quote that I look at, that I've always tried to model my leadership after, it says here, "˜The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he or she wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.' You know we're elected leaders, we are elected to lead, we are elected to direct. I always make comments to my staff, I say, "˜We only are as good as you are.' You know, we end up getting the credit for a lot of the work that a lot of other people that aren't elected leaders do, and I try every time to let my staff do what they need to do in order to get done what I gave them the direction to do. If I keep meddling in what they are doing and micromanaging what they're doing, why do I have them? If I'm going to take that responsibility, why do I have them there to do that job? So that's what I like to look at and think about at times.

One last one that I want to share with you is -- wow, what happened to it? But I remember it, because I remember it off of a fortune cookie, and I put that thing in my wallet many, many years ago, probably about 20 years ago at least. I know that for a fact. I opened this fortune cookie and I read it and it says that, "˜One of the greatest things in life is doing what people say you can't do. One of the greatest things in life is doing what people say you cannot do.' I usually use that in an audience of young people, of teenagers, high-school age, and I tell them, 'I'm not telling you to be defiant. I'm not suggesting you violate school rules or the rules of the household. What I am telling you is that when people stand there and tell you that, "˜You are not going to [amount] to anything. All you are is a troublemaker, and you are not going to be worth anything in your life,' that you challenge them on that.' And I stand here before you and tell you that I was one of those students. I was told that by a teacher in high school at one time. You know I probably gave him reason to think I was going to be worthless. I probably gave my family reason to think I was worthless. I know I gave my wife reason to think I was worthless, but you know I took that and I try to live that as a challenge to me in my life as a leader.

So those are things that I wanted to share with you. I really am honored that I was given the opportunity to stand in front of you and to share these thoughts with you and that you were actually listening. I was wondering, "˜This is going to be difficult. I'm going to be hearing papers clashing and cups making noise.' I've talked to audiences before lunchtime before, and I might as well just not stand here and say nothing because nobody is listening, but that's not true today. I see you listen, I feel listening, I see what you are doing here. And in closing, I wish all of you the best of success in your leadership. I wish all of you the best of success for your people, for your tribes. You know we have many, many challenges ahead of us. And I say that it's been nine months that we've been in office, but it feels like nine years. I think in nine months my hair had grayed more than it has if I wasn't sitting in this office, but you know that is the sacrifice that we make. That is the sacrifice that we make. And I wish all of you well. I congratulate you for the positions that you were elected to lead in, and I want to say to those young emerging leaders, "˜Stay on course, stay focused, and know that you have support out there.'

I want to share this last thought with you. One of the most honorable times that I was honored in my life in being able to sit down at a lunch table with the late Wendell Chino. Years ago, Wendell Chino, a great Mescalero Apache leader for many many years. He was one of those "˜Mike' people for me, it was like I wanted to be like Wendell Chino. I wanted to have his drive, his same good heart, and his same good thoughts. One time we were sitting at a luncheon and it was just, it ended up me and him being the last ones at the table and I was like, "˜Wow, man I'm sitting here with Wendell Chino, man, this is great!' I started picking his brain about leadership and at the end, he said, "˜You know what the sign of a true Indian leader is?' I'm asking does anybody in this room know what the sign of a true Indian leader is? And he said, "˜It's those people that can take the bullets from the front and the arrows in the back.' So be prepared for those bullets and those arrows. Thank you very much."

Return of the Red Lake Walleye (trailer)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The Native Nations Institute film Return of the Red Lake Walleye chronicles the extraordinary effort of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians working together with the State of Minnesota and the federal government to bring back the culturally vital walleye from the brink of extinction and restore it to health in Red Lake. It examines how the Band and State overcame decades of bad blood to forge an innovative public policy solution that puts cooperation before conflict and science before politics, fueling an amazing recovery that has defied the odds. A compelling example of tribal sovereignty in practice, Return of the Red Lake Walleye documents the significance of the walleye's return for the Red Lake community, its people, the tribe as a whole, and those generations yet to come.

Resource Type
Citation

NNI Films (in association with Arizona Public Media). "Ogaag bii azhe giiwewag: Return of the Red Lake Walleye" (trailer). Tucson, Arizona: Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. 2010. 

"It was their most important natural resource.

'They grew up doing this. They lived by the lake shores in the summertime.'

But it was on the brink of collapse.

'We weren't gonna have fish any longer if something wasn't done.'

Now thanks to determination and cooperation, it will provide for centuries to come.

'We learned a good lesson by what happened here. We need to show respect for that fish.'

Return of the Red Lake Walleye."

Native Language: Pathway to Traditions, Self-Identity

Year

Stacey Burns says a transformation has taken place within the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony from something as old as the Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone tribes themselves: their native languages...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Spoonhunter, Tsanavi. "Native Language: Pathway to Traditions, Self-Identity." Indian Country Today Media Network. July 31, 2015. Article. (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/education/native-education/native-language..., accesses July 31, 2015)

How Can Tribes Relate to Off-Reservation Citizens Better? Study Aims to Help

Author
Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

How do you define “home?”

“Home is where one starts from” is one explanation, while another states, “Our feet may leave home, but not our hearts.”

Where you call home is especially important to Native Americans who have left the familiarity of where they grew up among fellow tribal members and moved to urban areas. How they stay connected with their past and what efforts their tribes make to stay in touch is the genesis of a recent pilot study on young adult tribal citizens living off the reservation...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Allen, Lee. "How Can Tribes Relate to Off-Reservation Citizens Better? Study Aims to Help." Indian Country Today. July 28, 2015. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/how-can-tribes-relate-to-off-reservation-citizens-better-study-aims-to-help, accessed July 18, 2023)

Tribal Governments Come In Many Forms

Year

When the U.S. and Canadian governments suggest and support Western-style governments for indigenous nations, they are trying to improve Native government and make it more compatible with national government. Indigenous nations have diverse political arrangements and forms of government. When adapting to present-day nation states and market economies, if possible, indigenous nations will make political changes that express their historical political and cultural relations...

Resource Type
Citation

Champagne, Duane. "Tribal Governments Come In Many Forms." Indian Country Today Media Network. June 23, 2015. Article. (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/events/tribal-governments..., accessed June 24, 2015)