Intergovernmental Relations

Honoring Nations: Using Partnerships to Achieve Governing Goals

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Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Heather Kendall-Miller moderates this panel of Native leaders for a discussion on building and maintaining intergovernmental relationships.

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Citation

Anderson, Neily, Theresa Clark, Lori Gutierrez, Heather Kendall-Miller, Mark Lewis, Justin Martin, Mark Sherman, Miranda Warburton, Don Wedll, Cheryl Weixel and Nicholas Zaferatos, "Using Partnerships to Achieve Governing Goals," Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"It's my pleasure first of all to be an advisory board member. Coming from Alaska, oftentimes, we have our focus on our specific issues. And it's been so wonderful and so educational for me to be on the advisory board and to learn about all the wonderful things that are happening throughout Indian Country. The first advisory board meeting that I participated in I just walked away totally stunned and wowed because there is incredible stuff happening in Indian Country, as you've been learning these past several days and you've been sharing. So I'm really excited to be here and participate in this because as usual it's been eye-opening in many, many respects. Maybe what we'll do, while Andrew is passing out the name tags, is to offer our panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves and also to talk a little bit about the award-winning program of which they are here representing. And once we each have a chance to introduce ourselves then I'll begin to pose some questions. So why don't we begin over here with you, Justin."

Justin Martin:

"All right. Sorry I was late. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Justin Martin and I'm with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde where I'm the Intergovernmental Affairs Director, as well as a tribal member. I have a background in public policy and public administration, as well as working as a legislative assistant within the Oregon State legislature. Our program, Enhancing Government-to-Government Relationships deals exactly with that. We have, basically, a five-pronged strategy or approach to that that includes communication, education, cooperation, contributions, political as well as community contributions, and presence. All topics that we all have been sharing over the past couple days and I look forward, again, to sharing some more of that with you and this panel. So thank you very much."

Don Wedll:

"My name is Don Wedll. I'm with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. I've served as the Commissioner of Natural Resources for 18 years and also Commissioner of Education. I'm talking about today partnerships in regards to natural resource activities."

Theresa Clark:

"My name is Theresa Clark. I'm from Galena, Alaska, the Louden Tribe, which is a federally recognized tribe for Galena. Every village in Alaska is a tribe. I run Yukaana Development Corporation, which is a tribally owned business of the Louden Tribe and we've used partnerships extensively in developing our business."

Mark Sherman:

"[Native language] My name is Mark Sherman and I'm the Director of Planning and Development for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa [and] Chippewa Indians. I was really glad that I was chosen to participate in this particular panel discussion because I really believe in partnerships in achieving governing goals. In our department we knew what our mandate was and what our governing goal was. When we got started, we didn't know who our partners were. But the important thing that I wanted to say about our process and how it relates to partnering is that number one, when you have partners you have to start using the word ‘we' instead of ‘I' or singular uses of pronouns. And so it's been a great privilege of mine to develop these partnerships and accomplish our goals. I took inventory last week about some of the things we've accomplished over the last several years and who our partners were. I spent a lot of time analyzing it, categorizing it and listing it in different ways. Finally I came to the realization that there were too many to list, too many to talk about. And so what I wanted to stress today, as we get going further along here and get a chance to talk about our process a little bit, you'll come to understand that what's important is that we developed effective partnerships, not only externally with contractors and consultants and government officials and various other entities, but more importantly we developed an internal partnership with our own membership, with our own government. And these things really set the course and made my job much more fun. Thank you."

Nicholas Zaferatos:

"Hi. I'm Nick Zaferatos and I have the pleasure of working for 20 years with the Swinomish tribal community in Washington State and with Chairman Brian Cladoosby, who asked me to speak today because he had to catch a flight back home because general elections are being held tomorrow. The Swinomish have been involved for about 20 years, almost 20 years now in Principle #4 that was outlined today, which states that a strategic orientation matters. It was concerned with addressing chronic problems on the reservation dealing with the loss of control over the reservation territory that hadn't occurred since allotment days and brought about a lot of interest from outside governments that were making decisions about how the reservation ought to develop and a realization that none of that was benefiting directly the tribal government. So employing, developing a strategy, it looked like it had several ways of approaching that including and primarily regionalism, one of opening up dialogue and relations with a broader region, county, local government, state and us reasserting tribal interests in matters relating to land use control and development. The centerpiece for the project was a land use planning program that was begun in mid 1980s, but it also included all aspects of reservation development, water supply, sewer control, public works and the web of cooperation between the Swinomish Tribe that's been employed through this cooperative program really affects just about every jurisdiction that has an interest in operations in Skagit county. So it's a regionalism approach, it's one that's been tested for about 15 years now and it's still operating."

Miranda Warburton:

"Good afternoon, I'm Miranda Warburton. I work for the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department. I'm the Director of the Flagstaff, Arizona Branch Office of the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department. And I started that little office up in Flagstaff some 15 years ago and I would like to say that first of all it's been a tremendous honor and privilege to work for the Navajo Nation for the past 15 years. And the goal of doing this was to really set up a program to train Navajo students who were interested in cultural preservation, to give them the opportunity to do practical work on the reservation, and to learn more through interviews with Navajo elders, with knowledgeable people, to really be out in the field while they were working on their academic degrees. So our partnership was really between the Navajo Nation and Northern Arizona University. And I would say that the greatest example I can give you of the success of our program is that after 15 years, I'm quitting in October and a woman who is with our program, a Navajo woman, Davina Begay-Two Bears will be taking over. And as I speak, the reason that she's not here is that she's supposed to be turning in her Master's thesis this afternoon. So Davina is a great example of our program and I'm thrilled that I'll be turning it over to her and I'd also like to acknowledge someone else who's here, Reynelda Grant, who is the San Carlos Apache Archaeologist, tribal archaeologist. And Reynelda was part of our program too and that just like is a great feeling to be able to sit here and see Reynelda doing such a great job and speaking so well and setting such a great example. So again another example of what this partnership has done."

Lori Gutierrez:

"Good afternoon. My name is Lori Gutierrez. I'm from Pojoaque Pueblo and I'm the Assistant Director for Pojoaque Pueblo Construction Service Corporation. Our project that was awarded by the Harvard Project was the unique collaboration and partnership between Pojoaque Pueblo Construction Service Corporation, which is a for-profit tribal corporation and the Poeh Center Cultural Center Museum, which is a nonprofit arm of the Pueblo of Pojoaque. And the unique collaboration being that the corporation was first established to not only build the Poeh Center at cost but to, reduce the construction cost, but would do work both on and off the reservation as generating revenues to go back to build the Poeh Center as well as to sustain it through its long term goals. Thank you."

Cheryl Weixel:

"Good afternoon. My name is Cheryl Weixel. I'm the Wellness Center Director for the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and it's an honor to be here and it's also an honor to work with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe. 10 years ago the Coeur d'Alene area, or the Plummer and Worley area, didn't even have healthcare, hardly any. And even with the non-Indians and the Indians in the area, we had to go 40 miles to get healthcare. So the Coeur d'Alene Tribe partnered up with the city of Plummer and built a medical center and from there they decided to start changing lifestyles and the only way they could do that was to help people with exercise in Spokane, which is 40 miles away. So they saved money from third-party billing, grants, just partnering up with the city of Plummer again, got a HUD grant and built a $5 million debt-free wellness center and hopefully...we've been there four years now and we're changing lifestyles one person at a time and it's a great opportunity to be there and it's just very rewarding."

Neily Anderson:

"Good afternoon. My name is Neily Anderson and I'm here as the chairperson for the White Earth Suicide Intervention Team. I know...when I...I was so honored that we had gotten honors and I went around and was telling my friends and family that we received high honors from Harvard from the Governing Honor of Nations and they're like, ‘But you're a suicide prevention team, what does that have anything to do with Harvard?' And so it was kind of like we had to go through in depth and explain that the team was started by grassroots community members in 1990 and it was developed because there was a very high rash of suicide completions and attempts that year. So what they did was they formed...they did some forums and let the people talk and the tribal council really kind of hung themselves up and sat and listened to what the people had to say. Not just about the suicide attempts or completions, about everything else that was going on as well. And what they did recognize was that something needed to be done and so they signed a resolution stating that we needed a team and developed the team. And the team, like I said, is grassroots and it is community members. So it's not social workers coming in, saying, ‘Well, I'm a social worker and I'm here to help you'. It's, ‘I'm a community member and I care'. And that makes all the difference in a crisis situation and for Native American people. We just recently got a...received a grant and are working on getting some more funding because the team...the WESIT team, the suicide intervention team is a nonprofit organization. There's nobody paid to be on the team. There is 26 on-call volunteers that go every two weeks; there's a different set of three people on call. They go out all hours of the night and volunteer their time. And again, when you're talking about people in crisis or Native American people, knowing that these people are here because they care, not because it's their job to be there, not because they're being paid to be there and they have to be there to maybe please their grant makers or whatever. They're there because they want to be there and that makes the big difference. So as a grassroots organization the people volunteer their time, whether it's night or day, whether it's during work or out of work, and with the tribal R2C behind us 100 percent, we're allowed to leave work. If we get a call and we're on call, we're allowed to leave work and go wherever we have to go to respond to that call. The partnership that we have is mostly with the counties, the police department, the hospitals, facilities subject to our home facilities, things like that. We have partnered up with them basically. They have finally recognized us as a value to them, something...someone that they can use to actually lessen their job. We get a call through the dispatch system just like the police department does; we carry radios and get our call. And when we respond to a call, we basically get the information from the police officer; they make sure the scene is safe when we get there and they kind of turn it over to us. We're not allowed to sign 72 hour holds if that is needed, but the police officers are. And so our doctors as... but they're more willing now to go ahead and sign a 72 hour hold or what has been happening most recently is, they have the information, they know that this person needs a 72 hour hold, but they're calling us to see what our opinion is and same with the hospitals. We get more calls from the hospital where a family member has brought an attempter into the hospital; it's not done through the police department or the ambulance service. The family member brings them into the hospital and the hospital's calling us, they're calling our dispatch. We have a tribal dispatch, they'll call our dispatch and we'll be dispatched out. So it's a real grassroots...it's people who care and that's what I've seen a lot while I've been here is these may be our jobs that we do but they're just an added benefit. We do what we do because we care and that's what I've seen here. You people...the people that I've been surrounded by for the last two days are here because they care, they want to help their people expand, grow and accomplish things that they may not accomplish on their own and that's the job that they have. It's not that they're politicians, it's not that they're a tribal council member, they're there because they care and that's how I see you people here and the people that we have on call on our team."

Mark Lewis:

"Good afternoon. My name is Mark Lewis. I'm from the Hopi Tribe and I'm from the Third Mesa area, Hotevilla Village on the Third Mesa area. I am pleased to see a couple Hopis. [Native language] I'm an eagle clan so I wanted to say that since there's a couple Hopis in the audience. My mind's really spinning now because I had an introduction that I was going to do but I'm kind of worried about how it may come out after listening to Neily. I'm really concerned so if you bear with me I'm kind of going to tinker with it and I'm not meaning to offend anybody, but this is really how I was thinking I was going to introduce this. I was going to just make a remark that I'm in a rather unique situation here today because I've been asked to be on this panel as the...representing the Hopi High School. And as I was introduced they have Mark Lewis, the Hopi Guidance Center, and that is my job; I'm the Director of Behavioral Health and Social Services. And so given that I was going to make kind of a quick joke that I was relieved that I was introduced as representing the Hopi Guidance Center because I would feel much more comfortable speaking about the Hopi Guidance Center, but I'm not here to speak about that. I'm here to speak about Hopi Junior/Senior High School. The problem with that is I've only been...I've been elected to school board and I'm only on my third week and the reason I'm up here is because some of our more senior veteran board members were just unable to make it to Santa Fe today. And so what I'm a little nervous with my new friend here is I was just going to kind of make a remark that I am a professional social worker, I have my undergraduate and master's both in social work. I'm very proud of that and I was going to also say that I was thinking of the lady from Minnesota who I know very well, some of the negative perceptions of social workers throughout history. I was going to say I'm very proud to be a social worker and so should you and we should never not feel proud about being a social worker. But also I'm nervous too because I've just been elected to school board and that's very political in Hopi and I've been accused of being a politician. So I'm both now a politician and a social worker, but I'm also a community member and I do really care. So anyhow, the good thing going, my strategy was to...I was really relieved. I was excited coming here; this is my very first school board trip. I was really excited to come and meet new people, new professionals in other disciplines such as yourselves and then...but I got a call this morning around 8:00 from Mr. Glenn Gilman who you'll be hearing from shortly. He's our junior high principal, a very good, wonderful junior high principal. And he says, ‘Hey, just want to let you know that you're on a panel this afternoon and you're going to talk about 2+2+2'. And I says, ‘Well, that's because our board member called in late and was not able to make it', so that just kind of added to the excitement and nervousness I had about meeting a new flock of people. But as soon as I came in I saw Dr. Stephen Cornell and my colleague and friend Cecelia Belone of the Navajo Nation, my colleague, counterpart, and friend from the Navajo Nation, who I work a lot with in social services area. I also work with Dr. Stephen Cornell in the areas around TANF reauthorization, nation building etc. So I'll focus on you so I'm not as nervous talking about 2+2+2 at Hopi Junior/Senior High School. So I'm glad that you sat right there. I feel much more comfortable. I'll just pretend I'm talking about social services issues and maybe I won't sweat so much on my folder. 2+2+2 essentially it is partnership, it is partnership between three academic institutions, Hopi High, community college, Northland Pioneer College and Northern Arizona University and it was a partnership from the get go and I can talk more about that as we move on but it was genuinely a partnership from the get go in an effort to achieve one governing goal, one of the many governing goals that I know that we are working on. I'm learning more about the board and that was to try and do what we can to improve and prepare young students for academia beyond high school by giving them a boost while they're still in high school. And I can talk more about that but I don't need to get in too much detail because Mr. Glenn Gilman will be telling you more about that true partnership between community college, university and Hopi High. So again, thank you very much for allowing or asking me to be up here and allowing me to be up here."

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"Thank you, panelists for those introductions. Partnerships; each of you have given us examples of the partnerships that your tribal governments have formed in the process of implementing your vision. What interests me is, in some cases, some of you have been forced to develop effective partnerships and relationships with state and county governments, even federal government, and as Lance so articulately told us, we all as tribal people have experienced the hostility that is oftentimes focused on tribal governments by state and county governments. Given that history of hostility, how do you begin to build an effective relationship with an agency or another government? Justin, you want to begin again?"

Justin Martin:

"Sure. Well, I think that there are several layers to partnerships and as we heard from the panel, there are many wonderful partnerships on many different levels. When starting to work with what can sometimes be seen as hostile governments or governments that one, do not have an understanding of Native peoples or even tribal governments, I think it's very important and very critical to first of all understand their government, understand where the government that you're looking to work with is coming from. Whereas, we want folks to understand and respect tribal government and to learn how we elect our officials, how we operate our communities and governments, we should also make an effort to one, understand where they are coming from. And then I think it steps back even further and it looks to the personal level. Let's start to build some personal relationships while we are educating them to how our tribal government and how our people operate and conduct themselves. And that can be handled in many, many ways, but I think once you do that, once you get to know people, once you put your face with your name that's on your business card or the name that is seen in the newspaper or even your tribal newspapers, people start to understand where you're coming from. So it's basically a very basic relationship, find out who the people are, what makes them tick, even if it's outside of what you're both working towards. If you can find some common ground or a common goal, you can start to nurture that relationship. One other important point, I was talking to some folks earlier in the day, I think is, don't expect to make those top level relationships the ones that really get the job done at the end of the day. And I want to say this without offending tribal leadership and I've been very blessed to work with Kathryn Harrison and our tribal council who gets this. Those top level relationships need to happen out of mutual respect for a tribal government or a state government or a federal government, but at the same time, the ones doing the ground work, the ones trying to understand the tribal issues, and the ones that are going to be dealing with you on a day-to-day basis are the staff. And I think it's critical to involve staff at all levels. And from my own personal experience in working at the state legislature, I can't tell you how many times my state representative, who was new at the time, outside of his expertise area would call me as a staffer into his office and say, ‘Justin, what are we going to do?' Those are the people with the vote. So if you get to that staff member, create that relationship at those lower levels, then you begin to work up into the upper levels. Again, those are the solid foundation relationships. And who knows? I think in a lot of time within the tribal system and within state government and federal government, a lot of time that staff moves on to be that elected official or that leader. So to begin to lay that ground work in educating people to your government and also learning and being able to understand their government and where they're coming from is certainly an excellent tool that I feel needs to be utilized in every day relationships."

Don Wedll:

"Maybe to follow on that a little bit, one of the things that we saw that was very effective in negotiations and partnerships is that if you eat with someone, have lunch with them, it makes it much harder to fight with them a little bit later. You actually get to see them in a little different light than if you're in trying to negotiate and ultimately where you want to, after you've settled negotiations and you start building that partnership, a meal, that type of thing, is a very effective way to bring about a good partnership, get to know people on a very personal level and be able to discuss things and have trust in people that what they're committing to and the partnership that you're developing will grow and create a good forum for the types of things that you are working on. So that's my suggestions."

Theresa Clark:

"Yukaana itself does not have inter-government relationships. Our owner, Louden Tribal Council does. We separated government, politics and business so our partnerships, Yukaana's partnerships are business partnerships, whereas the government, inter-governmental relationships are left to the tribe or the politics are left to the tribe. I can go further on that, but I'd much rather let Louden tribal council do that because that's politics.

Mark Sherman:

"In our planning department we have forged a number of partnerships with county and township governments, worked a little bit with some state officials. We'd like to do a little bit more in that respect. Our relationship with our state government needs some improving. We've reached out to them on a number of times for a number of different reasons and for some reason, we have a situation where they prefer to minimize or should I say minimize that acceptance or recognition of the fact that we do exist. I think as the future goes forward that this will improve. It's got to come to a place where both sides have some common goals to work on. It's not always an adversarial situation and if it is an adversarial situation, you can usually accomplish more by searching for things that are...that you have in common rather than focusing on those points that are controversial. I found from my own experience in dealing with non-tribal government officials it's always better to listen than to talk. And if you hear something you don't like, you're better off rather than to argue the point, rather just to repeat the point, let them hear how ridiculous it sounds. It's not all give and take. Sometimes tribal governments have to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘This is our position'. And we've had to do that a few times too. Once they understand your position, whether they agree or disagree, they come away from the experience with a lot more respect for your organization having a clear understanding of why you made your position and why there's no room for compromise. And so you have to use every arrow in your quiver, you can't just go with one standard approach."

Nick Zaferatos:

"I think for Swinomish cooperation was a result that began by using confrontative tactics. That is, with the tribe being in business, as usual that was carried out for a really long time by county or other governments in making decisions on the reservation and where the tribe asserted its interest. And when that occurred there was a reaction and the reaction was the status quo was being disrupted and there were kind of two paths to consider. One was a path of conflict, litigation, problems, costs. And the other was a better understanding of what's the root of the change in course, talking, education, lots of education and a need for some kind of mutual benefit because cooperation does require a commitment of resources of time and money and people to engage in that. And when there's a perception that there is something to gain, I think that's almost always necessary in order to get the commitment both on the tribe's part as well as the government. The tribe entered into about a dozen separate agreements over the course of about 15 or 16 years with almost all of them the same kind of situation was presented where the tribe saw to disrupt business as usual and assert some kind of an interest and a receptiveness on the part of the other governments to at least begin discussing ways of cooperation, mutual gain. With all of them, it was formalized politically in terms of entering into some kind of an agreement, which then allowed the business of government to take place, which is almost always on a staff level on a day-to-day basis. And that's when the culture of cooperation really starts to take place. When you start dealing with lots of little itty bitty issues on a regular basis and you solve problems, it leads towards developing a more positive culture or at least more faith in working together to resolve problems. Sometimes political meetings are necessary, sometimes even litigation is necessary, and Swinomish has been more recently involved with some litigation, which the tribe views as okay because after you've exhausted the time of talking and trying to work things together through things at the staff level or even at the policy level, some things just really can't be agreed to and that's after all what the courts are all about. But even despite litigation from time to time, most issues with respect to land use development affecting the reservation do take place on a day-to-day basis, mostly in an administrative bubble, sometimes at a policy level. But there is an overall perception that there's a mutual gain in the long term by investing and keeping the doors of communication open, and in the process of doing that there's an awful lot of learning when the tribe understands the culture of the county or local governments and those governments understand a lot more about what the interests of the tribes are. And what we found is that the visions between those two governments were really not that far off and in fact, we were able to be brought together into like a unified land use policy. So there really wasn't a difference in terms of the vision."

Miranda Warburton:

"In our program we're really talking about a partnership between the Navajo Nation and Northern Arizona University and so there are some differences, it's not city or state governments. But I wanted to say a couple of things in that regard and first of all, to my colleague from Hopi, that if there's anything worse than a social worker politician, it's an Anglo anthropologist working for a tribe. So I kind of felt like I had this real uphill battle, but I think that there are a lot of people within the Navajo Nation who would like to see people like me replaced and I wanted to see people like me replaced as well. So in order to do that, in order to have an effective program, I felt that there really had to be a tremendous amount of cooperation between the Navajo Nation and Northern Arizona University. And I would just sort of reiterate some of the things that other people have already said. One, the long haul; people have to know you're there for the long haul. It's taken 15 years I think for me to feel like this program is really a success. I have three students who are getting master's degrees this year who I think all are going to go on to great things, but people have to know both within the tribe and at Northern Arizona University that you are there for the long haul and that there is a real commitment, that you really do care, and that if things get rough you're ‘not just going to sort of run away and abandon the whole thing; that you really are there and you really care about it and you really mean it. And I think what you just said about something to gain. I mean, NAU doesn't really care about our program, and this is like being the most sort of practical reality based statement but it brings in Native American students. So if I can convince them that it's worth having this program to recruit Native American students for their head count, they'll realize they have something to gain. The Navajo Nation definitely has something to gain because Navajo students are getting degrees, undergraduate and graduate degrees and anthropology or other social sciences and in many cases are returning to the tribe or to work for them or if they're not coming back to work for the tribe, they're going off into other places and setting a really good example. So the whole idea of something to gain and I think a personal commitment to being there for the long haul makes all the difference in effective partnerships."

Lori Gutierrez:

"We at Pojoaque Pueblo Construction, we have agreements with large business for outside business opportunities and I remember when we first started negotiations, there was extensive negotiations when dealing with sovereign immunity. Large business did not know structures especially dealing with small entities like Pojoaque Pueblo, with tribal enrollment of 320. It was really difficult to explain to them how you go about it. It turned out that they ended up hiring an Indian attorney so that they could get a better grasp about a tribal nation. But I think in order for a partnership to flourish or even to have longevity and continuity, it's important that during this time that there's mutual benefit because without that mutual benefit it doesn't exist. But I think it's important that during these negotiations that you keep in mind what that mutual benefit is and use that as your focus because I know that during these extensive negotiations we would get off on that and it was always a constant reminder to keep going back to what it is that we were doing this partnership for."

Chery Weixel:

"I think what was an important aspect to the medical center, Benewah Medical Center, and also the Coeur d'Alene Tribal Wellness Center came afterwards, was the fact that both there was a need out there and then there's a common vision. Everybody needed healthcare in the area so they brought the partners in, they utilized each other's strengths and built from there and then they took the weaknesses and built them up. And in that they had a vision and that is a better healthcare for the whole area and also a chance to change the future generations and provide fitness and exercise for the young kids so that they'll want to be healthy and they'll hopefully one day rid diabetes and heart disease from that area or at least control it. So I think if I go back, I think this strikes on the weaknesses and a common vision and a common goal is really what we needed. And today I can say that just from people telling me stories from the past that when they decided to build the medical center, they had the Indians and the non-Indians saying, ‘No way will I go in that building with an Indian', or ‘No way will I be in there with a White person'. And I can honestly say today that side-by-side there's Indians and non-Indians working together, playing together, sitting side-by-side in the waiting room together and actually talking and communicating for the first time, which I think is a tremendous accomplishment, especially in that area."

Neily Anderson:

"First off I've got to get some things straight here. Being the chairperson on the team isn't my job. I'm also a social worker. But the team...when the team started, we started out with a goal. We weren't quite sure how to get to that goal. We knew what we wanted to do, we knew we had to do something and we knew that we had to do it now and that was kind of what we looked at. And so going in we...the only thing that we had that could link us to any attempts that maybe the police department had or any calls that the police department had about attempts or completions or whatever the case may be was our tribal dispatch. That was our only link at the time when we started. And we're going on 12 years now and we used to meet in the back of a restaurant, a local little restaurant and talk about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. And it was there that we realized that we needed to partner up with some people. We need to start going out and doing some in services and letting some people know what we were going to do. So we started going out to the hospitals and letting them know that, ‘this is where we're at, this is where we want to be in a year, can you help us get there? These are the people that we have on board. These are the caring people that we feel the community members will react to.' So it was the hospitals that we went to first and it was...it took years, it took years. And we're going on 12 years now and I would say in the last four years we've finally got...we still don't have 100 percent backing from other specific agencies, but in the last four years we've got...our policy is to, if Menominee County Police Department has a call, they call the tribal dispatch. Well, they know where I work so they were kind of skipping around things and calling me right at work. And the reason we had that policy was so that when we went out on a call it was the same for them. I have a radio, they have a radio. Our radios are our lifeline and if something was to happen to me, my dispatcher knows where I was, what I was doing. So next it took the police department. We were showing up at calls, the police department was looking at us like, ‘What are you doing here? You're interfering with the law.' We got a lot of that and so it took a lot of in services with the police department to say, ‘We can help you. We can work side-by-side. I'm not here to do your job. I'm here to help you make the situation better for a family', because with a police officer coming in and saying, ‘Okay, we're taking these people, we're putting them on a 72 hour hold', they never really took a look at how that affected the people that were left behind. So the next thing that we did was we went to other agencies, tribal and non-tribal, our tribal mental health programs and the non-tribal mental health programs, because we figured, ‘okay, we've got this person that's attempted suicide.' Now if they were to call and try and get an appointment, a lot of times the mental health field, to get an appointment it's really backed up. So what we would do then is, ‘Okay, I can get you an appointment tomorrow. I can make sure that you have transportation to get there. Is this what you want?' And so it got...now it's to the point where all I have to do is to make a phone call or another team member...all we have to do is to make a phone call and we can get that client some services immediately instead of having to wait two or three weeks down the road. The schools, we also work with because when, with the adolescence and the rate of suicide that we had at the time... In 1990 when we started, we were 50 percent lower, 10 percent, excuse me; we were 10 percent higher than the national suicide rate nationally but we were also 8.5 percent higher than the Native American rate normally was. So on our reservation we had a big problem. So in the schools when we had adolescents attempting or being placed on 72 hour hold, the parents not wanting to give up information when the school calls and says, ‘Where's your kid? Your kid isn't in school. Your child isn't in school. They're truant, they're tardy. What's the situation?' Then the parents really having a problem telling the school system that, ‘My child is on a 72 hour hold,' without the school system or without the family members feeling that the school system is looking down on them. ‘Oh, you must be bad parents if this is what's happening to your children.' So those were some other partners. The main partner that we have that we rely on is the tribal council backing us 100 percent in whatever direction we go, whether it be...like with the grant, we just applied for a grant. We just, before I left, we just got word that we had received the grant. We have received the grant, now we have to go forward with that. So it's the tribal council that has backed us and said, ‘run with it'. They have opened their arms and realized the fact that this is something that they cannot fix as a tribal council member. This is something that the community has to help themselves to do and with a little bit of organization. So with those things, those partners we would not be able to be a team, we would not be able to work as a team and that's why we come up with the name Suicide Intervention Team because it takes more than one person to fix the things that are going wrong with our people. It's a team effort whether it be...when I say the Suicide Intervention Team, I mean not just the people that are on call that go out there in the middle of the night, not the people that have to leave their jobs or get up from the table during dinner because they've got a call from dispatch, I also mean the police department, the mental health services, the hospitals, the tribal council, the schools. They're our team and we all have to work together as a team or else we will not exist. That's plain a simple. It took us a lot of years to establish that team but it was something that we realized right away that needed to be done. That was one of the things that we worked on right away and with our patients and I think what really kicked it off was we were there. When there was a call, we were there, somebody showed up. Whoever was on call took the call and that's what I feel really made the difference. It wasn't, ‘Well, I'm eating dinner right now', or ‘I'm sleeping and I've only been sleeping for a half hour and I don't want to get out of bed to go on this call', ‘I don't want to get up from dinner and skip dinner because I have a call. We got a call, we went out. It didn't matter what we were doing, who we were with. We took that responsibility when it was our turn to be on call, that was the responsibility that we took and not because that's our job. It was because we care about the people, about our people and what they are doing with their lives."

Mark Lewis:

"As for the Hopi High 2+2+2 program, you're going to learn that it is a partnership between a community college and Northern Arizona University. It involves interactive television; it involves a new satellite campus being built on the Hopi High school grounds and facilities. And what that really means is that...that meant that the Hopi High took the initiative to work with the state systems and other systems in order to be able to develop this program for the future needs of our kids and for the current development of those kids so that they can achieve success academic-wise in the math and sciences after they leave high school. And what I've observed and what I've noticed and in talking with my colleagues that I've worked with, I think that approaching a hostile government if you want to call it that, there's a lot of leadership that's involved with that, approaching that kind of a situation. I think in the case of Hopi High I think you had some real important dynamics that happened there. One of them, the board was made up of very experienced leaders within the Hopi Tribe in a variety of areas and it was also headed by former chairman of the Hopi Tribe, Ivan Sidney. So I think already Hopi High was in an advantageous position because there was already influences and relationships that had been established by that board. And so that leadership didn't think twice about worrying about government. They had already experienced working with these people, had already relationships established with these people and all they really did is capitalize on that, but that takes leadership and initiative. And so I think that that's one of the ways that Hopi High was successful in developing this 2+2+2 program, and as well from the former governing board, I think a lot of credit goes to them for being very proactive and for being very interested in taking the initiative to do things to improve upon Hopi High. One of the main things they did there is to get away from the Bureau and move into a grant school. And after that it was by rather than just, as somebody mentioned earlier today, by just kind of continuing to operate things as usual as the way the Bureau and as the way IHS has taught us, they weren't going to...they weren't satisfied with that. So they were very proactive and they went and developed an administration. Glenn Gilman is a wonderful example of somebody who had many years teaching and worked on his own principal-ship and those things were allowed to be developed because of the leadership of that board and being proactive and outreaching and going to get good administrators rather than just doing things as usual, doing an advertisement and selecting from whoever shows up at the door. So I think those are the kinds of things that are under...the underpinnings of the ability of the high school to be able to successfully develop partnerships with the state system. In my own experience, as an administrator, we are involved in a number of intergovernmental agreements with the State of Arizona, with entities that are regulated by the State of Arizona and without a doubt we have to work with the federal government as contractors of the federal government. And so my view about that is that...and part of it's probably just being a young administrator. You're allowed to be kind of stupid and risky and my view is to kind of approach these situations as not even thinking that I'm dealing with a hostile government or a resistant other entity, but rather expending more energy and time thinking about how can I best establish the rapport with these people because we need to get something accomplished. So that's been one of my experiences as far as developing partnerships is expending more energy on finding creative ways and skillfully and thinking strategically like the gentleman from Winnebago about how I'm going to make this thing happen, what can I do to make the relationship develop but also too having a little...enough savvy to say, ‘Well, what do I do if they're not resistant', and that's just a matter of holding people accountable. And so those are some of the ways that I think that you develop good partnerships with people is you're going in knowing that your mission is to produce a result, not to be expending so much energy on worrying about how hostile they are or how much they may not want to work with you or whatever. And the lady...the presentation at lunch brings up a very good point because I think that if we continue to see governments as hostile or if we continue to see states as ‘us vs. them,' if we continue to see and feel and believe that we're not respected, then that's how we're going to approach these situations. And oftentimes what happens is we just simply do not approach that situation, but if we're more proactive, if we feel and believe ourselves as equal partners, if we truly believe in and embrace sovereignty, I think that's how you're going to be successful in developing the kinds of partnerships that we're talking about here today."

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"Thanks. Well, listening to you I'm struck by the similarity of things that each of you have shared with us. It's obvious that in the work that goes into building relationships and building partnerships. There's obviously some core characteristics. I hear building personal relationships and the importance of those personal relationships. Communication, open communication both ways; communicating to others about tribes, tribal governments and then being open and listening to being educated about the needs and concerns of other agencies, state governments, counties or whatever. There was also lots of emphasis on common goals and finding ways of building upon what are going to be mutual benefits. That seemed to be fairly critical in establishing relationships and partnerships. Joint problem-solving; that was interesting that once those relationships are made that it takes an evolution of actually sharing in partnering in solving problems; education, respect, common goals, personal relationships. We've only got about five to 10 minutes left and so I'm going to ask you to keep your final comments fairly short but I'm intrigued about now that you have built these relationships, now that you've worked at establishing these partnerships, how do you maintain them? Do they become institutionalized? Do they become static or are they fluid? Do the relationships change as the tribal council changes? How does the continuity of these relationships continue? Again, I'm sorry to suggest that maybe you keep your comments within two to three minutes each and then we can quickly wrap this up, thanks. Go ahead, Justin."

Justin Martin:

"I think you kind of hit the key concept right on the head when you said institutionalize. And I think everybody here has worked very hard to institutionalize their program, especially once you find that vision or that clearly defined objective and you're able to go out and in a grassroots type of method start to educate staff, general public, your own membership as to what good governance is all about, then you start to institutionalize that. So then it becomes Grand Ronde, not Justin Marin. And then five years from now, what if Justin Martin or what if Neily Anderson isn't in that role? Well, the program has been built over time by grassroots through education, through communication, through cooperation and it becomes an entity in and of itself and I think the key is institutionalizing these programs so they do co-exist with that long term vision the tribal council can provide.

Don Wedll:

"In Mille Lacs's particular case with...ultimately our agreement with the state Department of Natural Resources was institutionalized through a number of things, court rulings and ultimately the setting up of schedules of annual meetings usually in January and July to re-discuss where things are at, set limits, and then there's actually some physical things that are happening as to what are safe harvesting of particular resources, those types of things then drive the partnership because neither side can arbitrarily make a decision on their own, they have to do it jointly. And so those are some examples in our particular case and how that partnership gets institutionalized and because of the physical harvesting of resources, there needs to be joint decisions about the amount of those resources that can be harvested and that I think binds that partnership and will bind it for as long as people are harvesting those resources."

Theresa Clark:

"Our partnerships are a little different because they're business partnerships and our business partnerships are through like joint venture relationships or teaming relationships and other businesses that have gotten us to where we are today. So I think ours are probably more short term. We partner on projects, completed the projects, and then the joint ventures are terminated or dissolved because the contracts have been completed. But we do maintain relationships with them, personal contacts or whatever for future projects. We may not be capable of doing a project or may not have the financial resources or whatever and we may be able to partner again in the future so we do...I do keep in contact with all our business partners that we have terminated joint ventures with."

Mark Sherman:

"Maintaining our relationships? The simple answer is we have to sort out our relationships and keep them differently. We do a lot of our work through contracting sources when it comes time to actually implementing the plan and one thing that has worked very well for us in our department is that when a contractor knows that we're releasing a plan for bid, they know that they'll be treated the same way they were the last time and the process is consistent in its fairness and that it's de-politicized and that all players in the process have equal opportunity at the table and that's essential in dealing with outside business entities because they will only play the political game one time and then you get a reputation in the neighborhood so to speak and so it's a good idea to maintain a sense of consistency and fairness. And then we try to reinforce our relationships, the ones that really matter as we go along you have certain partners that become more essential to your process and maintaining a frequent relationship and just not taking day-to-day matters for granted or assuming that everything is going to be smooth. Don't be afraid to just pick up the phone and call them even on problems that require simple answers because when you're calling them and they're calling you, that reinforces the relationship and makes them feel like there's a good reason to maintain an ongoing relationship in the future."

Nicholas Zaferatos:

"The agreement-making and relationship-building activities are part of this first generation experience for changing a hostile environment into a cooperative environment. I think that our honorable speaker from Hopi really expressed it very well by saying that the next generation should just simply come to expect that we operate in a cooperative environment and that's an ideal state that all of this work that we're mining right now will take us to, that this is the preferred status quo, this is the way people behave and nations behave and governments behave."

Miranda Warburton:

‘I agree. I guess in our case what I would like to say is that it was a long struggle to become "institutionalized," to develop some kind of institutional standing so that now we actually have a place, a space, physical space, at Northern Arizona University and we actually have funding from the Navajo Nation for our students. But once that's in place, as I see myself stepping down on October 31st and Davina [Begay-] Two Bears taking over, there's a certain amount of training for her that she needs to do but way beyond that, I just hope that whatever my vision was is done and that her vision, whatever she chooses to have happen, to make it become a truly Navajo program that that really happens and that that just really evolves in a wonderful way and I have every confidence that it will. So while the structure and framework is there in an institutional sense, whatever she chooses to have happen and whatever the next person who takes over after her chooses to have happen and how that evolves and I hope that none of us can envision what that's going to be. I hope that it just exceeds all of our expectations."

Lori Gutierrez:

"Maintaining our relationships, our established partnerships; we have concrete contracts in place. However, times change, our business changes, our needs change and I think it requires a constant evaluation of the partnership, evolving the partnership, making modifications, if necessary, to adapt to new needs and concerns."

Cheryl Weixel:

"Well, it's like any relationship with the special businesses that we keep the lines of communication open. I think that's very important for us and then also, not assuming something that we don't know from the other person. Ask those questions, get the facts and then make decisions based on that."

Neily Anderson:

"Well, with us and the team, to talk about suicide on our reservation was something that was thrown in our face, it was something that was chronic there, something we couldn't get away from. On other reservations, I've talked to several different reservations who want to start up a team on their reservation, and on other reservations this is something that is hush-hush, this is something that you don't talk about. Well, on our reservation, with the attempts and everybody being open about the attempts, about the completions, about the ideations, everybody who sits on the tribal council or sits on the team is or is in some way affected by somebody either completing suicide or attempting suicide. So everybody has been affected by it in one way or another. Even if the WESIT team or if WESIT was gone, I don't think that the people would settle with that. I think if I was gone, if the people who are on the team as on call members were gone, I think that the community would pick it up and run with it. We do have a resolution in place stating that this is the team and this is...we're going to keep this running one way or another, but even if we didn't have that, I don't think the people on our reservation would self-manage."

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"Mark, the last word?"

Mark Lewis:

"That's a tough one. I just started these relationships. I haven't had enough experience yet to maintain them. No. As a social worker and as a social work administrator but I actually began my career as a mental health provider for Hopi. And so one thing that I've learned, and also as a member of the Hopi Tribe, one thing I've learned is that collaboration, which is needed, a prerequisite for partnerships, it's a very profound word, it's a very strong word, it's embedded in our Hopi values that we teach. But as a mental health provider I've learned something that it's...the word is profound but to actually apply it and practice it is very difficult. It's not an easy thing; it doesn't just come natural for everybody to collaborate successfully. And what I mean as a mental health provider, I think that there's a mindset that goes with that. I think there's a condition that goes with collaboration, an ability to approach things to produce an outcome, ability to approach things healthy, healthy-minded and the skills necessary to collaborate successfully is a result of development, a fully or better, best developed kind of individual and people can be trained of course to be successful at collaboration. So I guess to maintain partnerships to me is to have...is to hopefully ensure you have good leadership that will continue to produce people that have that great unique skill of being successful collaborators and to ensure that those people are in those positions that make those decisions to maintain those partnerships. So that's the one thing I would say and as this conference notes here, leadership of course isn't something that is new, certainly not to Harvard, but I'm pleased that it's beginning to come in and infiltrate, if you will, Indian Country. Because I think that in this new world we have a lot of knowledgeable and intelligent people, but leadership skills, that's something that is...can require a lot of training and, at least for my tribe and I would bet for your tribe, is that we need to develop the leadership qualities in our tribal leaders because they're knowledgeable and intelligent, but to be an effective leader requires high level skills in practice. And so that's what needs to continue to happen and continue to develop in Indian Country. And I hopefully won't say anything more but as a tribal administrator, as a chairperson on several committees and now...I do this when I take my staff or a group or a team of Hopis to different meetings or symposiums but certainly without a doubt as a governing board member now it's very important that I support those people that do that work. And I do this with tribal administrators but I just wanted to be able to recognize the Hopi staff that really do 2+2+2 that have come along here; Glenn Gilman, you're going to see him in a moment, a wonderful speaker so he tells me, and Mr. Stan Bindell, one of the wonderful faculty you've seen around with a camera way in the back, he's...it's great to have a local reporter as well. He's a faculty member but also does a lot of work for the local newspapers and it's very important for Hopi for him to be able to come back and share this event with Hopi, the Hopi public and Stan's responsible for that. I'm very pleased also because what this is about is now you have these people like us jabbering but the people who actually do the work, that doesn't get enough attention. And Mr. David Logan who just walked in here, he's actually one of the teachers in the 2+2+2 program, if you can just kind of raise your hand. And we should be paying attention to these people so I just wanted to show my support as a governing board member. Thank you."

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"All right, thank you very much. Unfortunately, we do not have time for questions. We are out of time and we nee dto move on with the next speaker. So I want to thank all of our panelists very, very much for sharing with us your experiences and your insights. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: The Politics of Change - Internal Barriers, Opportunities and Lessons for Improving Government Performance

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Moderator JoAnn Chase facilitates a wide-ranging discussion by a panel of Native nation leaders and key decision-makers about internal barriers inhibiting good governance and opportunities and lessons for improving government performance in Native nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Belone, Cecilia, Dodie Chambers, Vernelda Grant, Julia "Bunny" Jaakola, Beth Janello, Aaron Miles and Gary Nelson. "The Politics of Change - Internal Barriers, Opportunities and Lessons for Improving Government Performance." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

JoAnn Chase:

"Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for that very generous introduction. And it's a pleasure to be here. It's always wonderful. This is one of the meetings over the course of the year that I so look forward to, is the Honoring Nations Advisory Board meeting. Many of you know that for several years I had the privilege of serving as the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians and, as Andrew [Lee] said, have now gone on to do some work in the field of philanthropy and have always enjoyed my time with the National Congress of American Indians, but so much of the time we spent working -- and that we collectively as Indian people spend -- is really fighting off a huge hostile audience, whether it's the Congress, sometimes it's the state governments. And so many times, we're reacting to things that are coming our way and really engaging in battle if you will, and often it's like hitting your head against a brick wall time and time and time again. One of the ways I was able to sustain my involvement with NCAI and enthusiasm and be rejuvenated was to come often and participate in these meetings and be so encouraged by the really truly innovative and creative and amazing things that are happening on the ground within our tribal communities of the truly exemplary programs that are being developed and implemented and the good governance that does exist. So it's always good to be back in this arena.

I'm excited this afternoon, we have...I think you're going to have a very compelling discussion, excellent participants. I thought the way we'd get started this afternoon is just ask each of the participants to briefly introduce themselves, your tribal affiliation, and maybe a sentence or so about the program that you're with and then we'll start off with some dialogue on some difficult questions. Maybe Beth, if you would start."

Beth Janello:

"Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Beth Janello. I'm the Environmental Director for the Pueblo of Sandia here in New Mexico and we have water quality standards, which we won an Honoring Nations award for in 1999. I'd like to invite everyone to come to the pueblo tomorrow and view our Bosque Restoration, our Rio Grande Restoration Project...

As I was saying, I'd like to invite everyone tomorrow to come down to the Pueblo Sandia and view our river restoration project. We have been a very active participant in trying to protect the Rio Grande and we've had some, definitely some problems working with our federal trustees, certainly the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. We're trying to educate them and trying to get help from them and from the State of New Mexico to protect the river, but it's not always an easy task and I hope today that I can share with you some of the things that we have learned and answer any questions you may have about protecting your own waterways. With that, thank you very much for this opportunity. I appreciate being here and I look forward to you coming out tomorrow to the Pueblo of Sandia.

Aaron Miles:

"Good afternoon. My name is Aaron Miles. I'm from the Nez Perce Tribe. I'm a tribal member and I work for my tribe as the Department of Natural Resources Manager. I've been on the job for a little over two years now and it's been very interesting, learning a lot and I think it's exciting to work for your own tribe in investing. So coming back home was a good thing for me. My background is in forestry. I graduated from the University of Idaho in the fall of 1995 and I worked for the other school, Washington State University, for a couple years as the tribal liaison in the provost's office. There's a lot of neat experiences I'm excited to share with you.

Dodie Chambers:

"Good afternoon. My name is Dodie Chambers with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan. The project we had gotten an award for was for planning and development for our tribe. Our tribe had never had a planning and development department so I was part of the initial setup of the planning and development department. Probably like some of you our projects were exceedingly overrun as far as budgets and the proper people weren't doing the proper jobs. And the contractors that were available knew that they were going to get money from the tribe and from the government, therefore skated on a lot of the absolutely mandatory things. About that time is when our chairman decided that we needed a planning and development department so that's how we began our start up. And because it was a first time for us of ever having a real planning and development department it's what we had won our award for. Not only was I the first department manager for planning and development, I was first tribal chairperson of our tribe, I was the first self-governance director of our tribe, I was first housing director of our tribe; so there was a lot of firsts. And of course planning and development was another challenge I had to take. So that's how we got started and we continue to work well with the planning and development department. Now I'm on the council again. I was 20 years ago and back on it again. We can do nothing but move forward now. Thank you."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"Good afternoon. I'm Bunny Jaakola and I represent the Fond du Lac Band of Minnesota Chippewa. That is my home band. I have been working almost 15 years as the coordinator for the Social Service Department there within the Human Services Division. Prior to that, I worked 15 years in juvenile justice. In our area, so many of the children, the youth that came through that court diversion program are now the parents of the kids and the families that we work with on the reservation. So I think everything that's been said about continuity really holds true. I think my familiarity with my own people and then working outside in a county/state kind of program and coming back to the reservation, everybody knows who I am and I've had people working with me now for several years. And for the first time in our history and probably some have not even heard of this year, we have people calling our Social Service Department and saying, 'I want to talk to a social worker.' When I started in social work, it was difficult for me to say that I'm a social worker because of our history with social work. So I think that anything's possible when we've got families who are in dire need making the call and asking for help. That's progress. And I'll talk more later."

Vernelda Grant:

"[Apache Language] My name is Vernelda Grant. I'm San Carlos Apache and I work for my tribe as the Tribal Archaeologist and Director of the Historical Preservation Archaeology Department. I work closely with the Elders Cultural Advisory Council, who I'm with here at this symposium. I primarily work with the national, state and tribal legislation on cultural resource management and work with the Elders Council on language and community education projects on cultural resources."

Gary Nelson:

"[Navajo Language] Hello. My name is Gary Nelson. I'm the Town Manager for the Kayenta Township. About a year ago, I came up to talk with [then-Navajo] President Kelsey Begaye about my interest in helping the Navajo Nation in the area of commercial industrial development and also one of the larger farms that the Navajo Nation has, it's actually probably the only real large farm we have and it's one of the largest farms in the nation, and that's the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry. Surprisingly, both what I asked for seemed to have fallen into my hands.

Kayenta Township is one...something that I really desire to assume, to contribute in that area but also in other areas. The township was awarded and recognized also probably a year, two years ago, and since that time also we've made great progress. We're doing new developments. We're currently going to build a 40,000-square-foot office building. Also 100,000-plus square foot of new shopping center. We assessed the township for need for new office space as well as the market area to see just what kind of population existed within the 50-mile radius up to 75-miles radius. We found that there was like 40,000 to 50,000 people that resided within that kind of distance from the township. With some of those numbers and knowing where some of the people shopped, we determined a need that we could easily support another shopping center or additional services that currently aren't there.

So the challenge is there and we're also pressing to really begin to make some legislative changes. Navajo tribal law as well as federal law, laws that currently are in place that prohibit our goals, we want to remove those stumbling blocks or barriers so that our people really move forward in the area of economic development and to build their economic strength and become a politically powerful people. I guess our vision and our understanding is that as long as our people are poor they're not going to have the sovereign strength or the economic strength or be in subjection to other powers, dominant governments, other races, whatever you want, but really economics has a lot to do with our sovereign rights and the power that's going to come behind it. Thank you."

Cecilia Belone:

"[Navajo language]. For my people, [Navajo language]. I am Cecilia Belone, the Division Director for the Division of Social Services within the Navajo Nation. We have a project, the Navajo Child Special Advocacy Project program that was recognized in the year 2000 for serving children who are victims of sexual abuse and working with their families, providing family-centered services and also applying cultural and traditional functions to providing these services. We're collaborating with really resources that are necessary in order to help heal children and families.

My mother had always said and my elder had always said that I was a current leader. I didn't really think that they meant being before people but eventually I was going to come before people and I had to watch what I say and I had to pick my words carefully. I never knew that...really knew what they were talking about until I started to work with child sexual abuse. And it's something that many of us deny that it exists, but on the Navajo Nation I feel like it's something that we have acknowledged that it does exist. And it's not so much talking about the existence of it, but the language by which you talk about it within the Navajo Nation and that was a challenge. And as somebody had said earlier that when you become recognized and receive an honor that just gives you a greater challenge and we've taken that challenge. And this program is only a part of a larger system, the social service system that involves a lot of other social and behavioral issues. And I have taken on that challenge and my boss, the president of the Navajo Nation has made it a priority. And having to have the Navajo Nation Council acknowledge that has just been a tremendous challenge and it's something that I'm very honored to be a part of. We will talk further about some of the issues that we have encountered in getting to meeting that challenge.

I would like to say thank you to the Harvard Honoring Nations program for acknowledging that there are many, many good things happening out there among our people and I would like to honor all the programs that are up here that have been recognized and all those who have gone before. They have set the standards for us and for us, with the Navajo Nation, we're pretty encouraged for our people. Thank you."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you to all of our participants. As you can tell, we have a great diversity in experience and I think we can have some really provocative dialogue for this afternoon. I want to concentrate and ask maybe you want to respond on part of the title of this panel, 'The Politics of Change.' And change is...it's difficult implementing change, creating change and then implementing change comes with lots and lots of challenges. The old saying that everybody wants to get to heaven but nobody wants to die I think has some meaning as we try to think about pushing boundaries and changing ways and meeting challenges.

As we talk about the politics of change and in what you have experienced in developing these programs and implementing these programs, certainly as we talk about some of the components in creating successful programs and examples of good governance, you might talk about some of those components that have contributed to the positive creation, but in so doing I'd encourage us to really speak candidly about some of those barriers. As I reminded myself of the programs I was struck by some of the tremendous challenges, sometimes our own tribal communities, our own tribal governments, challenges of tribal politics, dealing with hostility and misconceptions and even overt racism in outside communities, dealing with federal regulatory or state regulatory schemes that are in place that for years and years and years have been oppressive in trying to break those down and create partnerships. It's a tremendous amount of challenges that we certainly do have.

And so maybe I ought to ask Dodie, since Dodie you have served as a tribal councilperson in a variety of capacities with your tribe and now this program. If you might start us off in dialogue and ask folks to weigh in and talk again about some of those specific barriers, how those barriers you've broken down in getting through the first phase, which is creating successful programs."

Dodie Chambers:

"Well, I think for our tribe specifically, our tribe is fairly recognized only for 20 years now, 21 or 22, but we were Indians in the community and in the area and were dwindling. Like there may have been only about 10 families left in the 1960s. So the outlying area people, the founding people, the state people, the townships didn't want to recognize us as a government and even to this day they don't think we have the kind of government that...the government they have. So that was one of the big barriers was once we became recognized, once we start getting federal dollars into our tribe, once we were available to offer even our two-percent monies to the area, townships and county people, they still...we still had a little problem with them wanting to recognize and acknowledge that we are a government and we can run...we can have our own sovereignty and provide our people with our programs the way we want to. They still don't want to acknowledge that; we're still not quite as good as they are. That continues to be a smaller problem. It was huge 10 years ago even, but today it's a smaller problem but it still exists and we are still not 100-percent people when we go into town. So that continues to be a barrier. It has been, but we've knocked down some of those walls and unfortunately those walls came down because of the two-percent money from our gaming industry. That was one huge barrier that we overcame and continue to overcome and still work on today."

Aaron Miles:

"Some of the barriers that I see the internal things like me as a manager interfacing with the policy people, the elected leaders, getting on the same page as them is quite difficult. I think when you look at the different values, when you look at the diversity on the council, you have those who have just come out of this post era of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] running the show and so their institutionalized thinking is, 'This is the way it's always been done and it will continue to be that way.' And then I think some of the younger generations that I interact with it's more of 'How do we relearn the value system that was in place before pre-European contact? How do we gain a better understanding of protecting the resources that contribute to our culture and way of life in that context?' And so that's one of difficulty because right now the tribes aren't really...when you look at our tribes were forced into this era back to really become American citizens, to become this equal, but now I think tribal members now in this new age are really trying to...how are we going to be different? We want to remain unique among the American citizenship and our right to remain unique. And sometimes the things that we do are quite un-American, our way of thinking, our way...the way we do things and it's unintentional. How do we as Indian tribal people begin to implement something like that? But we still have to get on the same page it seems like internally before we can address those problems."

Beth Janello:

"I'd like to mention a barrier that I see in terms of trying to implement a scientific program and that is a real difference in values. Trying to establish water quality standards that protect traditional uses perhaps of the river. It's really hard to explain that to the EPA or to the New Mexico Environment Department. So having very different values for the protection of a resource can become a barrier if you don't have education or if you have ears that don't want to hear it, or economic value is the only value rather than habitat protection or water protection or ceremonial or traditional protection. So that's something I've found to be a real barrier in terms of implementation is a difference in core values."

JoAnn Chase:

"Beth, could you just take that a step further perhaps and talk about how you dealt with that. Clearly the difference is there. Was it dialogue, was it inviting folks to come be with you? Is it something that you're still continuing to deal with?"

Beth Janello:

"Yes, we deal with it every day and the most effective way that we've found to deal with it is through working through...perhaps maybe working through the laws. For example, we set our water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. We got treatment as a state, we followed the process, the legal process and so then it becomes very difficult for people to argue with that. One thing we've also done in the last couple of years that's been very effective is we collect data, we monitor the river on a weekly basis so we know what's in there. It's very hard to argue with fact. We know and actually we're discovering that not only are our water quality standards in some cases being violated, but so are the state water quality standards. So the potential uses for the river are not meeting state uses, not just tribal uses. So our data has become very effective. So sometimes it means, unfortunately, working in the system instead of trying to...for years I think we talked about, 'You don't understand you're not meeting the water quality standards,' but not until we had the data to back it up did people start listening. And we had the regional administrator from EPA come in and talk to the tribal council last month. So the Pueblo of Sandia has had water quality standards since 1993. We applied for them in 1991. So it's not really very new, but our EPA officials only came out in December. So it's an ongoing issue and I think a very effective means of dealing with the barrier is to have data and back up documentation."

Gary Nelson:

"I'll speak to you more in the area of business and economic development. Kayenta Township, the community of Kayenta, town commission, having gone through all the normal process for organizing itself into a township structure and doing all the necessary planning, master planning in preparation to really do economic development and then entertaining new businesses and to go through the process of this local review and local approval, having exercised this local governance, what we experience is that we still have a barrier in the way and it has to do with the existing law. There comes a point that the law, the structure, the current law is really prohibitive and it must change and that's really what we're experiencing. Listening to the business associations or the community, what they want, their desire, they want the economic freedom just like any community outside the Navajo Nation, the ability to gain equity, value in their businesses, the ability to sell that business or to utilize that lease hold interest to leverage capital. All those things are prohibited under existing law and it's really come to a point we have to say, 'No more. If our people are going to prosper, this law is not allowing it.' And so that's where we're at.

And we are currently involved with the Navajo Nation Council, some of the attorneys and economic development committees and divisions entertaining a new regulation, new ordinances that would govern Navajo Nation law from this time forward. The Navajo Nation also has been successful in getting congressional support and in entertaining the idea of forming their own business leasing approval without intervention anymore. But the challenge is that the Navajo Nation must develop these regulations, BIA still has to approve of it to see if it's going to be fine. But in the end, the Navajo Nation can't just duplicate the same law; it's not going to work.

So really what's happening is that we have gone out to the grassroots people, the local communities. We've asked for input. Kayenta Township, having had numerous years now as a township and a government structure, having probably more business development in recent years than any of the communities on the reservation, it provides some excellent direction and some of those are in the booklet that you received today. The bottom line is that BIA and the Navajo Nation must let go of authority, delegate that to the local people, let us determine our own destiny, how we want to do business or what we want to do with the lands that are available for development, whether we want to leverage the value of that land to get capital investment or those things. Those are the barriers.

The barrier also is that the current lease, they're okay. Many of the provisions can remain the same but let us do rent negotiations like any other off-reservation communities, cities, towns. And that's based on land valuations and improvements, the value of those things and determining a rate of return on those things as rent, but not a structure that the government has that is discoursing to outside business. We have a gross minimum annual rent that would be in place for the term of the lease whether it's 25 years or if there's a certain lease that's 99 years and that rent is there, or if the business is doing well then the other rent that would become effective would be a percentage of gross receipts. So if a business is doing two million dollars a year or even higher and they have a gross receipts percentage set at five, six, seven percent, usually that business will be paying $100,000 or more a year, whereas the value of the land is...the rental payment if it was based on land valuation could be one fourth that amount or even less.

So the more you penalize businesses we find that they're not going to come out to the Indian communities to do business. So our whole mission and focus now is to really create that environment that is favorable for business activity and that would allow our people and anyone who wants to do business to get into business easily and without much trouble. That's really where we're headed with what we want to changed, specifically."

JoAnn Chase:

"Bunny and Cecelia, you both deal with among the most precious of our resources and the reason why so many of us do the work we do, our children. And I'm sure that in implementing the amazing and effective programs you both have dealt with which are different programs there have been a number of barriers both within the tribe among our own people and certainly outside. I'm wondering if you might both make any comments specifically on some of those challenges with respect to the specific programs you've both dealt with."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"First, I want to be sure to thank the planners of this symposium, because one of the biggest barriers that I've run into within the tribe, within the county, within the state is the credibility. People just refuse to give one another credibility and I feel it more so on the state level and the county level here in Minnesota, but it's hurtful within the tribe. And we were awarded two honors awards from the Honoring Nations and one of them was a foster care program off reservation, very different, very unheard of, and the other was an online pharmacy billing program, very successful. But when you come up with the ideas, and I was not the one that came up with those ideas, but when people do bring ideas forward they need to be heard and encouraged. And the way that I've found to combat that is with education -- educating the community, educating the other co-workers, educating the county people and on the state level, wherever. It's a constant education process. And in fact I've said in kidding ways that before I went to social work school I should have gone to teaching school so I could help people to understand what we're trying to do. One thing that I didn't hear mentioned from the leadership perspective this morning was I found that to be a two-way street. I want to be able to rely upon my leadership for support and understanding and encouragement, but if they don't know what I'm doing or if they don't know what people are doing out there, they're liable to react to some things in a different way than if they were fully informed of what it is we're doing out there in the community, out there with the county, with the state, whatever it is. And I think that's very important, especially in a community where you are...this is home. Half the people are relatives and the other ones are in-laws so you need to be sure to protect your back. The way that I try to help the youth, the younger people that I'm mentoring is to look for that proactive stance wherever you can. Bring the information there. If you hear of a hot idea that's going to be different, be sure you let them know where you're going with that, because fear drives a lot of things and sometimes it's simply that fear of the unknown that brings about that resistance or that 'no' at first glance. Thank you."

Cecilia Belone:

"I have to agree that many times it's because people don't know and our social service issues are not physical. They manifest themselves physically maybe, but somebody talked about addressing deep-rooted issues, so you're talking about multi-generational issues that you're trying to address. But we seem to...our social service approach seems to be the band-aid addressing the symptoms and we all know that the symptoms are because of a lot of previous issues. And those issues are non-tangible, you can't see them. It's not like creating jobs. It's one of the most popular programs within the Navajo Division of Social Services, child care centers. You're doing great if you're putting up a bunch of child care centers. You're doing great if you're providing a lot of cash assistance. We're doing our own TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] program now from the three states and that's more popular than some of the non-tangible programs like the child sexual abuse program that we have. So for us, it's more internal because we're larger enough and we're sovereign enough to exert that authority. Most of what we deal with with the state now is just like working together on Indian child welfare issues, Indian Child Welfare Act issues. All the other services are provided through the tribe. So most of it is internal. Having to coalesce around these non-tangible issues requires a lot of education, a lot of outreach, a lot of communication, and you have to start right from the get-go. Are you going to work with these politicians, your tribal leaders or are you going to butt heads with them? I chose to work with them and actually get some things done, because if you start just right adversarial from the beginning that doesn't help you any. So you have to be aware of the dynamics within that leadership not just your immediate committee members, but the total council and everything...all of the other boards and whatever else there is. And you have to be able to collaborate within your own system, because it does not work and you cannot do it alone. And our social workers burn out, most of them are already burnt out, in two years, four years, and if they are there by 15 years, wow! Who's going to last 15 years in such a job, being out there among the people? And it's got to be a very dedicated person who does that. And most of all your people have to be committed because you can't go out and do...protect a child and deal with the family issues on a daily basis if you're not committed. Otherwise, you just become a part of the process. And it's very important for our people and our leaders to know that and educating them and working with them on those issues. We have the council actually acknowledge that the issue does exist and they actually committed some dollars to it in order to supplement the Bureau of Indian Health Service funds that we were getting. So this is not something that is created in a year, created in five years. It's something that started 20 years ago, that the foundations were being laid and you were really educating on basic issues. And it's coming to fruition and it has and we want to expand on that to include the entire...all of the social services issues, not just child sexual abuse."

Vernelda Grant:

"I sort of listed...since my job and the work I do with the Elders Council pertains to working with the past living cultures, the archaeology and prehistoric cultures and also the present living culture, living community, we have a wide working communication with just many different kinds of people from political leaders to community members to tribal programs to the Bureau of Indian Affairs agencies to federal agencies off the reservation, museums and whatnot. But I sort of -- just based on a working communication with those people -- I sort of listed barriers and I just kind of listed it now because this is like what I see overall just within our community. I'm just going to list them out. There's a lack of...there's cultural barriers, there's language barriers, there's a lack of self-identity, self-awareness, which kind of leads to lack of respect and there's barriers with the lack of technical expertise within tribal programs and a lack of communications with regards to economic development, commitment, the lack of the practice of good sovereignty and the lack of dedication. I sort of see this door opening interrelated in some sort of way and how we try to make those things positive, because we deal with it daily, is we sort of use our cultural, our Apache cultural beliefs and background, and we use that to basically focus on, I guess, objectives that we work with within our program. I'm just throwing that out."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you, and I actually want to take this a step further as well. We've heard some of the ideals and principles that have gone into planning and creating programs including communication, collaboration, dedication, commitment, pure tenacity. As you read through these programs, this didn't just start yesterday or the day before. It started 20 years ago and people have stuck with it. Education is a two-way street. Not only is it important to educate people that we are working with in order to create and develop programs, but it's also important ourselves to be educated about who it is we're trying to deal with and communicate with, and then both qualitative and quantitative. You mentioned Beth, facts speak volumes as part of breaking down these barriers and overcoming the programs. So we've created the programs, some of you have implemented the programs or are continuing to implement the process and probably facing certain challenges of implementation. And so I'd like to ask you also to comment on now that we've created these very innovative and wonderful programs, some of them rather new, how are they sustained? What measures need to be taken? How do we define and measure success? What can we do to ensure that this work continues perhaps as some of you go off to do other things and continue to be effective and valuable services to our people and to promote an advancing tribal sovereignty? I'll just open it up to the panel whoever would like to respond to that."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"I had mentioned mentorship a little earlier, and I think that's one sure way of continuity is being sure that the younger people, the newcomers are involved and because they will become committed as they feel the excitement of growth and development. There are formal ways to develop the mentorship, but there are easier informal ways of doing this and it's like taking someone under your wing so to speak. I like the comments this morning about the youth council. Those kids are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and the more they know about what's going on in their community the better participant they are going to be."

Dodie Chambers:

"Excuse me, I had to swallow that candy first. I think another way of ensuring that our programs will continue, like this morning, the Grand Traverse Band Junior Tribal Council is much involved and as we mentor them and allow them to shadow us in our programs, that will help...that's one way of sustaining our programs. Also within our tribe we have internal program directors training and within that training all the employees, all employees take this training where they learn everything about any program including budgets, report forms to the federal government, to the Bureau [of Indian Affairs], to Indian Health [Service]. This program directors training could help ensure that when I leave my program the next person who has learned the exact programs and rules and regs and requirements. Then when I leave then the next person, whoever it is, can step right in and that would be another way of sustaining our programs is to have the next person who has learned the exact rules and all the budgets and all of that per program and per agency and per federal government agency too. That's a way of sustaining some of the programs that we have.

I think also that tribes should insist on education for the young people. Too many people these days want to step into tribal government, just step right into it, with no prior training or knowledge or internal workings of the tribe, of the tribal standards and we need to insist that our kids at least get a minimum high school education, minimum, and encourage going on to college and then coming home to work and not starting at the top the minute they come home. Because that's what a lot of the kids today are demanding that when they get out of college and they come home they want to start at the top, and then if they start at the top then they step on toes and find out they don't know about tribal life. So although we encourage our kids to go on to school we have to kind of take them in at the entry level at least and let them learn for a minimum of a couple years at least, two years at least, tribal government and tribal ways. So yes, we need to pursue their education goals, but once they come home then we need to mentor them also for a year or two.

And I think also a fourth way of sustaining our good intentions and our good works, from this day forward, I would hope that the councils pass ordinances, makes it a law that the next generation of tribal council members have enough sense to go back...look backwards in the books and see if there isn't a law already or if there isn't a way to do things already. Because again, today too many of the kids automatically want to step up and assume something new without realizing they might be breaking an old law of some kind. So I think that would be a fourth way of sustaining programs is to ensure that ordinances are passed and that that book of ordinances is passed on to the next council so that anything that's in place is followed or anything that needs to be changed we would know where it needs to be changed, what paragraph, what section, whatever.

JoAnn Chase:

"Aaron, maybe as you address this question too and I know time is getting short on us here, but let me add a little twist to this to actually create a tie to some of the dialogue that took place this morning in terms of continuity of tribal governments themselves as well and how do the programs that we work with and how are they affected...?

Aaron Miles:

"Some of the things that I have seen with our gray wolf recovery effort is that we're in a totally different arena now that we not only serve the tribal membership, the general council now, but we also serve the general public. I mean the State of Idaho citizens now are stakeholders in wolf recovery and wolf management. So now a lot of my duties are to work with the state's entities and that's a whole new ballpark for the Nez Perce Tribe. And it was just recently in 1980, when I was growing up as a child, we fought the state, the Army National Guard at Rapid River in the central part of Idaho with the Fisherman's Committee, the state was trying to regulate us. And so when I come back to the tribe I go a whole 180-degree turn from not liking the state to having to work with them and so that was a different thing for me because my family had been adamant about not liking the state. And so finding common ground is where we're at right now. When you take a look at the Pacific Northwest, we're all in the same battle each...every...what is called the 'lord of yesterday,' the ranching, mining, farming, all that. We're all trying to protect our own heritages and we as Indian people are in the same boat. So we've got to find that commonality of how do we build our strengths from one another, rather than finding ways to oppose each other? That's kind of where the tribe...I think where tribes need to be, how do we protect each other rather than fighting and that common ground, hopefully, will make the tribes more visible because that's what we need right now. I was listening to Billy Frank, Jr. recently. He was saying, 'We've got to embarrass the hell out of the federal government for their past...the wrongdoings that they did to us.' Because right now we're...I was listening this morning, we are in a state of emergency of trying to protect our sovereignty and that's going to take educating non-Indian folks about who we are. It's very important. But I think also with that the tribe has to figure out ways to build leadership internally. What I see happening is that like for the Nez Perce Tribe, only the chairman can speak on behalf of the Nez Perce Tribe. Well, that leaves only one person being able to speak about the Nez Perce Tribe and there's a number of capable individuals on council or even managers that could speak on behalf of the tribe and start building that leadership so you have more individuals rather than just one. Attitudes in the workplace, there's different things that have changed the work environment from 20 years ago, 10 years ago and so tribes maintaining or keeping up with those...technology, the flow of information is so readily available, it's so different than yesteryears so we've got to keep up with those times, too. And I think tribes have been actually ahead of the game in many respects, especially with resource management. We've...like the Nez Perce Tribe, it's been the Nez Perce way of thinking that's been bringing back the species that belong in our Nez Perce country. It's not the science, it's the science that is meshed with the way the Nez Perce think, not just science alone. So that's the way I think most Indian tribes are operating and we've got to continue on like that."

JoAnn Chase:

"Comments by other panelists? Gary."

Gary Nelson:

"In order to preserve what we've worked hard for or even at the tribe certain values and things, first there has to be a strong identity and a national pride that comes probably before you can really say you have vision, commitment and all those things. I sat next to a Japanese man one time coming back from Chicago and I began to ask him questions. I started off by saying, 'You know, the Japanese people as a group are highly intelligent, capable, competitive, almost maybe you're equal, on par with the white race. What do you...what is your philosophy? What do you teach your youth?' His answer was fairly short and simple and he said, 'We teach them they're better than anybody. We teach them national pride, to believe in themselves.' It's the same thing what my grandmother taught me as a youth. '[Navajo language],' she says. 'Having confidence in yourself is a quality trait to have.' And so with our youth, all the things happening among them, the violence and the drugs and stuff, and then also I hear the elderly saying our youth don't know our cultural stories anymore but then it has to go further beyond that. Even the elders, or as a people, what does our culture mean or what does it...what's the interpretation of those things? Because you can't gain the identity without understanding what it means, and so that's something I've struggled with all my life. And I've seen my grandmother pray a certain way and how we're supposed to pray as the Diné and how she would say certain things to the thunderstorms but she had certain things she would say and I always wanted to know those things and I sought and searched myself and I finally came to realize what it is. So when you really realize where you fit in the human race and that you're not inferior, that you have a great heritage, it's a whole new world. The confidence that it gives you, that's what our youth need today. And to preserve that, I think the Kayenta Township, we have to build that into the system, the educational system. We have the strong desire at the community level for the Kayenta Township to continue. There was great effort to do away with it, to squash it, to limit it. There were strong forces out there that wanted to see it end but there was enough community vision, community support that stepped up and fought to keep it. Today with the new development, we're looking forward to tripling our tax revenues and the best way to sell is to show results. I'm a strong advocate for that. If people see the end product, how the new revenues or what it's paid for or new developments and new revenues and the kind of new services that the township might be able to help fund. So with that, the organizational structure, the right structures have to be there, a stable government. I think those are some of the components, I'm sure there's more but I think preserve something and to build that pride it will go. So if you do create this environment for business and if we do all the other things that help it, we know our people are going to get into business, they're going to...we'll see them doing business just like any off-reservation community."

JoAnn Chase:

"I'd just like to remind the panelists we're running a little tight on time, so if you have some comments about what it takes to sustain and courage to make those comments and then we'll wrap up and move on in the agenda. Vernelda."

Vernelda Grant:

"Just real quick. With the line of speakers this morning, I thought it was pretty interesting because I don't think I'm a conference Indian but I do go to conferences and I hear a lot of people speak and I try to sit back and keep my mind open to a lot of things that they have to say. But this morning I thought it was pretty interesting because it seems like each individual that was up there spoke on elements, well, like specifically Mr. [Robert] Yazzie and Mr. [Oren] Lyons, and I apologize but I didn't get the name of the doctor that spoke during lunch, but they all pointed to elements that make and sustain a leader and what a leader is and what a leader goes through. And you don't hear that much and it kind of points back to that self-awareness, the leader, the person who knows themselves and where they're going to go, where they've been and what they can do and who they can influence. So I think something like that that was pulled out, that's what I saw. I don't know if I'm just way out there, but I thought that was really interesting because we need that, we need that leadership and strength, I think, in our communities. We're lacking it with our tribal leaders, we're lacking it with our youth, we're lacking it with, I hate to even say this but in some communities with the elders, too. It's just everybody and I think that's...that leader, whatever field they may go into, governance, the cultural arena, dealing with money, different types of management, they can be successful no matter what they go into and like I said, they're all interrelated, not one works without the other and a person who's more whole, a person who's more...who can let their guard down and know who they are can go anywhere and like I said, can lead anybody anywhere. So I think that's what I wanted to stress about what I got out of this morning's line of speakers."

Aaron Miles:

"One of the concerns I had as well when I heard this morning's speakers was leadership. My concern is that in today's society, we have to teach our kids -- or there's this perception that we have to teach our kids -- how to be aggressive and get out there and do things, take initiative and direct people to do things in more of a military-type leadership. I was always brought up to always respect my elders and those characteristics to always be last in line or always offer your help, the humility, the things that servant leadership is really about in Indian Country sometimes don't mesh with the leadership in today's corporate world or whatever. So am I actually, when I teach my young kids, I have four kids, am I giving them a disadvantage if I don't teach them those ways? And so those are some of the daunting questions Indian people will be facing right now and in the future so who's leadership are we talking about and that's kind of where I'm coming from."

JoAnn Chase:

"That may be a very appropriate way to conclude our dialogue this afternoon. We are actually right at our time limit but this morning we had a chance to ask some questions and I encourage people in the audience, there's such great value and richness in the exchange that occurs to keep up the dialogue and ask the questions of the folks as we have a little bit more time together. But before we close this afternoon's session, does anybody have a particularly pressing question that they just need to ask before we let this panel go and move on along in the agenda?

We could be here all afternoon talking about some of these issues. These are great questions and again I appreciate the candor and the spirit of the dialogue among the panel. This will probably go...this is a question that raises some issues that need to continue to be talked about, not just a simple answer to a question but the kind of questions that we need to continue to raise and debate in our communities. And specifically, how do your programs address issues related to gender including sexism? I think it's a very provocative and important question and as I say, we need to continue to ask, and what is the distribution of leadership positions between men and women. So those issues of gender equity, certainly dealing with issues of sexism and probably added to that at some point important questions about racism both within our communities and the racism we face as well as various other -isms that are challenges to our communities. But in closing, does anybody want to talk about the gender issues with respect to their programs and within the leadership of their programs, whether it's excellent..."

Aaron Miles:

"We need more women in our leadership in Nez Perce."

JoAnn Chase:

"Anybody else have a response to that question? Bunny."

Bunny Jaakola:

"At Fond du Lac, unfortunately women are scarce in the leadership roles. The one position that's very important is the executive director in the structure that we have and that happens to be a female. However, it's my opinion that because the council members are all male, they see it easier to have a female in that position. So it's not...I don't really respect that and I'm wondering if you coordinators other than in nursing, the others are mostly male and the division directors are mostly male."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you for the question. Certainly those are important as I say questions that we need to raise. I again appreciate the candor of the panel discussion. I think if we don't raise the difficult questions sometimes and address them and talk frankly among ourselves, then they don't get addressed and the kinds of progress that we can make both within our programs and collectively is thwarted as a result of that. I also thank you, I've learned such a great amount in listening to each of you. We talked about some of the elements in terms of creating programs. We've talked about some of the elements in terms of sustaining programs and certainly one of those elements is the personalities involved and so each of you should be commended for your hard work and your personal commitment and dedication to really making a tremendous contribution not only within the tribe and your neighboring areas but collectively to the community as a whole."

Honoring Nations: What is Good Tribal Governance and Why is it Important?: Tribal Leaders' Perspectives

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Moderator Joseph P. Kalt facilitates a rich discussion by an impressive panel of Native nation leaders about the role leaders play in building and sustaining successful tribal programs.

Resource Type
Citation

Anderson, Marge, Jamie Barrientoz, Peter Captain, Brian Cladoosby, Justin Gould, Kathryn Harrison, and Claudia Vigil-Muniz. "What is Good Tribal Governance and Why is it Important?: Tribal Leaders' Perspectives." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Joseph P. Kalt:

"This next session is dedicated to hearing from tribal leaders and former leaders, former chairs who have had Honoring Nations award-winners. In listening to the discussion of Honoring Nations programs, of course, you understand that those programs are programs. They are run by managers, directors, and so forth, and yet when we talk to the managers and directors, what they keep stressing is the need for support from senior leadership within the community, and so we thought it would be very useful to start by hearing from those senior leaders about their roles in building excellent programs in tribal government.

We're going to allow these individuals to just take some questions and talk about what they see as the role of senior tribal leadership in building successful programs in tribal governance. And we'll talk about...Justin Gould as well. Justin, like all tribal leaders, I know Justin's been on the phone this morning having some problem back home. Let me introduce our panel. After we go through questions and answers from your talk show host, throughout the audience we will be circulating some little 3x5 cards and any questions you have that you'd like to pose to the panel, just filter them up toward the front here and we'll give those questions to the panel. And if that doesn't work, we'll do it live from the audience.

Let me begin on the far end with Jamie Barrientoz. Jamie is the vice-chair of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. Grand Traverse is actually a three-time honoree in the Honoring Nations program, only a two-year old program. They must be doing something right. The tribal court, the planning efforts, and the land use claim trust fund from Grand Traverse are outstanding examples of tribal governance. Kathryn Harrison is the retired chair of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Grand Ronde was a winner of an Honoring Nations award for their enhancing intergovernmental relations programs. Next, Brian Cladoosby is the chair of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. Swinomish was a winner of an Honoring Nations award for its efforts in cooperative land-use planning. Marge Anderson is a past chair of the Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians and also Mille Lacs has been a three-time honoree for their conservation code for the 1837 ceded territory, for small business development, and for their outstanding language development programs. Next, Peter Captain is First Chief of the Louden Tribal Council, and the Louden Tribal Council's Yukaana Development Corporation was an honoree for its outstanding work in the development of environmental cleanup mechanisms that have dramatically changed the face of their part of Alaska. Next, Claudia Vigil-Muniz is the president of the Jicarilla Apache. Jicarilla was a winner of an Honoring Nations award for the wildlife and fisheries department, a world-renowned program in wildlife conservation. And lastly, Justin Gould from the tribal council of Nez Perce; Nez Perce was a winner of an Honoring Nations award for its work on the Idaho Gray Wolf Recovery Program where Nez Perce has been a leader not only in its own community, but in the region in the preservation and introduction of the gray wolf. With those introductions, it's now your turn to talk and I'd like to begin with what I suggested a moment ago.

The honorees, your programs, are directed by on-the-ground managers and directors who are in their offices today or some of them are here, but we keep hearing from them that they couldn't do it without senior leadership that saw what they were doing and supported it. And so I'd like to just put a general question to you and get your comments on the way you look at the do's and don'ts of building successful programs like the programs of your own communities that have been honorees, but you don't have to talk just about those programs. I'd like to just hear what you say -- as senior tribal leadership -- about the role of that leadership in building these programs. I'll actually take a volunteer for the first time. Who has any thoughts on that? Kathryn.

Kathryn Harrison:

"It's really an honor to be here. As a past chair of a tribe that had faced termination for 29 years, I'm just astounded that I'm here, that we have taken our place in the family of Indian nations where there's a lot of hard work and, what I see as, a way for councils -- and I mean all tribal councils -- to work, to build their tribal government and their community and their nation is to be a team player.

What I saw on our council, each one had their place and each one had their duty. We had loggers, we had past loggers, past truck drivers, construction workers and they were left to get the young people, but they were already I guess mid-life I would say. They already had their life skills and to me that was a plus. There was no time to get out and say, ‘Well, I want to be somebody so I want to talk first.' Everybody had their role and knew they were valuable. So in our newsletters when I was chair, you would never see a report by me. I wasn't the one, and any chairman says they did it all there's something wrong. It's a team effort. And we heard over and over yesterday, ‘We're families.' As a tribe, one nation to another, we're a big family, so that team effort goes in there, too. You heard today, ‘Watch your back. I'm watching your back.' That brings to mind Sue Shaffer who, every time she goes on the [Capitol] Hill, you know she's going to protect every one of us and she is the chair of a past-terminated tribe.

I think maybe one thing we've learned is having lost our federal recognition for 29 years, we appreciated what it was that we had and it took everybody working together to gain back...for 11 years we were...to gain back that recognition in the eyes of our federal government. One of the things that inspired me each time we were discouraged, we had the good vision to hire former Congressman Elizabeth Furse. Of course, she had not been a congresswoman yet. But she guided us through our restoration effort and every time we went to our little one-room office we had to pass by our tribal tombstones of all those people that had gone on before us and had sacrificed and that always inspired us. If they could do it, if they could walk to where we were today and not even understand languages because there were so many different languages, then we could do it for what they had suffered for. And to me it's teamwork."

Marge Anderson:

"I'm really honored to be asked to sit on this panel and I don't know where to start. It's a long story, but if you bear with me, we'll get a history on where we were and where we are today. We were a very poor tribe. In fact, we had probably about 50 employees to what we have now; we have a total of about 3,000 employees. Not all of our...there is enough tribal members to fill all those positions so we have both Indian and non-Indians working for us. Early on, we had one form of government that the tribal council did the hiring, the firing, hearing appeals on the same board. And we took a look at that and we didn't think that was...we knew that wasn't a good way of doing government, tribal business. And we created a system of government based on the United States system, separation of powers not, that was based on the Iroquois Nation separation of powers. And through trial and error and everything else we had growing pains and through that system we created the executive branch, judicial branch and legislative branch and the executive branch was the chief executive and I had eight commissioners. You have to delegate, they have authority so they can do their jobs and through Band law, the duties and responsibilities were through Band law and we followed those and only answered to me. That's how we got this going. We had a lot of issues.

One, I guess I'll be talking about sovereignty. We had some conflict with the State of Minnesota that required us to waive our sovereign immunity in order to get the services from the state, which were by the way, passed through from the feds. We refused to sign the contract so we went...our people went on without service for about two years and our tribal government went without pay for a long period of time. But we stood our ground. We would not waiver and finally the state legislature passed a law that says they would not require tribes to waive their sovereign immunity in order to get programs, food on dollars.

But there was a lot of, like I said, fights along the way. One of them was treaty rights, 1837 treaty rights that we tried to resolve through mediation and we took it to the state legislature and they turned us down. And we told them, ‘We're going to win this,' and thought they would settle peacefully but they refused to do that so we went to court, into the federal court to the court of appeals and to the Supreme Court of the United States, which was a 5-4 decision at that time. At least it was a win."

Claudia Vigil-Muniz:

"I'll be the youngest of the women and let the elders go first. Good morning, everyone. My name is Claudia Vigil-Muniz. I'm the current President for the Jicarilla Apache Nation. I've only been in office for about a year and a half, so the program, the model program that has been referenced to was many years ago.

I believe that that program was successful because it was allowed to be developed. The managers and the people involved were allowed to create the program for what it has become. It's still in place today and mostly because we rely on that as a resource, a financial resource -- two of our primary resources are oil and gas and the game, not in terms of gaming but the real game -- the operation had to make some changes, but we have two biologists on staff who are non-tribal members who have contributed to the program and to the management of that particular game park that has allowed it to grow and develop and I think that's what's key in the does and don'ts. I really couldn't make any recommendations, but this is how it worked for us and this is how it continues to work for us.

We also currently have a ranch or a...we refer to it as Chama Lodge. We were successful in outbidding the State of New Mexico a couple years ago for the piece of property. At that time, the tribal council thought it was important that we get that piece of land back because that was original territory to the Jicarillas and it also plays a significant role in our traditional beliefs. We've taken that under a private...it's more of a chartership. We have a corporation that monitors that program and we let them operate on their own. And it's a package hunt and it's a private facility that's located on what we refer to as Chama land and it's an exclusive facility that brings in trophy hunters. And so we have that entity. And in one end, if we ever get this land successfully into trust, those two programs will most likely be combined and monitored by the same...in the same method that we have done in the past. And because of that role that we've taken, the government has basically stepped to the backside and allowed the managers to handle it. It's been working for us because they're the expertise, they know how to handle the animals and they know what to do with them. So in that particular issue, I think it's been very good for us."

Brian Cladoosby:

"Good morning. My name is Brian Cladoosby. I'm Chairman of the Swinomish Tribe. We're about 70 miles north of Seattle. I'm finishing my 17th year on the council and I'm finishing my fifth year as Chairman. And as I think about this question, the do's and don'ts of building good programs, I think the do's are, you need good strong leadership in order for these programs to work. You need to be inclusive and you need to know your past, you need to know your tribe's history, you need to know your history with the state, with the county, you need to know the federal policies that have affected your tribes, you need to know what you want today and you need to know what you want for the future.

And some of the don'ts, I think, is, number one, don't think you can do it all by yourself. That's where I say, be inclusive, don't micromanage. We're a small tribe of about 750 members to 800 members and I've got around 200 employees underneath. An elder once told me to always surround yourself with people smarter than you and I have no problem doing that. He said, ‘When you do that, you can take credit for their accomplishments and point your finger at them when they screw up.' But I think one thing you can't do is micromanage the people underneath you. You've got to let them do their job. And maybe some of you staffers at other tribes know what I'm talking about when you have strong councils who like to think they have to run every single program. But I'm a firm believer in not micromanaging. So my ‘don't' is, don't micromanage. Of course, don't make stupid mistakes. Some of you may have known leaders in the Indian and non-Indian communities that have made stupid mistakes. And so, don't make stupid mistakes or you're not going to be able to build good programs.

And don't think you're an island. We as tribes cannot think that we're an island. I cannot say, ‘Okay, Swinomish, I don't need you Tulalip' or ‘Swinomish, I don't need you Yakama' or ‘Swinomish, I don't need you Lummi.' We can't think of ourselves, don't think as an island. And reach out. And that includes the non-Indian communities. We need to reach out to those non-Indian communities. We are continually educating them, so don't ever stop educating those non-Indian communities, because their leadership changes all the time but the people in the communities are always there. So we not only need to educate the leadership, but we need to educate the people in our communities. And so I'm going to keep my comments brief because there's others up here also, and ditto to the ladies that have spoke also before me. Good remarks."

Peter Captain:

"Hi. I'm Peter Captain of the Louden Tribe from Galena, Alaska. It's in the Yukon in Alaska. First, I want to squelch a couple myths. For one, we don't live in igloos, although that's been around for years.' And we also are inclusive. In starting out, we have 229 tribes in Alaska and we're just one of them, and just about every village in Alaska is a tribe. And each village has two forms of government. You have the state government and you have the tribal government, and of course the federal government. But one of the first things we did was to be inclusive is we held many town meetings and invited the various entities into our meetings. And we had a five-year plan for a village and our portion of the plan was to take care of the economic...I mean the environmental portion of the plan. The city took care of the sewer and water and what not and the fish and wildlife and other entities took care of their federal... One of the things you hear is be all-inclusive and doing that, we found that we could function better in our endeavors. I'm always one for passing on knowledge. We have one of the more aggressive tribes in Alaska in all aspects of education, environmental cleanup and what not. And we don't limit that to ourselves. We try to pass it around.

We have what we call a Yukon Consortium. It's a consortium of about six villages right in the vicinity and we include all those villages within our group to pass on our knowledge, not to hold it in. This -- as you'll hear other people repeat this -- is passed down generations upon generations and my hope is...I'm not doing things for myself. I've never been one to do things like that. I do it for my people, of course, but ultimately I do it for my children and grandchildren and seven generations down. They're the ones that's going to be benefit from it. That's where we come from. Thank you."

Justin Gould:

"Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here this morning up here with this panel. My comments are somewhat similar to those expressed so far. I'm realizing now I really don't want to be in Jamie's shoes because I think I'm probably going to cover everything else that hasn't been said. I'm just kidding. Like the person sitting here to my right, it's an honor and a privilege to become a tribal leader in Nez Perce country and inherit some of the hard work of previous leadership. I was not on the tribal council when the Nez Perce Tribe got involved with gray wolf recovery as has been expressed by Joe here. Just to kind of shed some light as to...before gray wolf management, the Nez Perce Tribe was involved very heavily with many natural resource issues, primarily the fish management issues. And I believe it was from the record established in the direction that the Nez Perce Tribe had taken that naturally prompted the tribe in becoming involved with other natural resource management issues.

There is a long history in Indian Country of tribes striving to better their communities, striving to better themselves, and the common theme that the Nez Perce see in Indian Country is the direct relationship to the natural resources. It's evidenced everywhere you go in Indian Country, there's a story, there's a lesson to be learned in every part of our respective places.

Getting back to the Nez Perce story, it began in the late ‘60s with the tribe becoming federally recognized and having a formal government with constitution and by-laws, I believe it was around 1964. And at that time the fish runs were still alive and well in our country. The completion of the four lower Snake [River] dams had not even transpired yet. The Grand Coulee and Hell's Canyon dams were on the chalkboard and getting ready to go up. The Nez Perce Tribe learned early on that if these two dams were to go in it would drastically affect the future of the salmon in the interior northwest. Sadly these dams went in and consequently wiped out I would say 90 percent of the spawning beds of the Columbia River Basin salmon runs. And in the next 10 to 15 years, four or five other hydro systems were located in between these far-reaching projects toward the ocean, buttoning up the interior northwest for barging, irrigation, recreation. It was not until the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, that significant losses were recognized on the banks of the respective tributaries that our people used for thousands of years. And it was at that time a faction of our people recognized the need to create a level of awareness to bring about positive change to the situation the salmon were facing in Nez Perce country.

It didn't happen overnight. I recall these long nights as a child with my tribal leaders as a boy every night, every season there was another issue to discuss and at that time I felt we were beginning to organize ourselves and our thoughts. And it's taken a generation or so to really impact the home front in terms of educating our own people to the significance of these losses and what it means to the value of our culture that's providing the support we needed as leaders now to continue on in this good work of the leadership that we've replaced in some cases. It was only recently when our tribe was asked if we wished to reintroduce a species to the Columbia Basin that had been extinct for 20 or 30 years -- example would be the Coho salmon, the fall Chinook, the summer steelhead, the sockeye, the eel, lamprey. It was opportunities to look at these species and become true leaders and really step away from the followers that inevitably got us to the gray wolf recovery table. But it's the example that I'm speaking of now that is the basis for the tribe's involvement with gray wolf recovery.

Once we successfully returned and extirpated stock from Columbia Basin to its homelands again, the Nez Perce Tribe learned a valuable lesson and did its best to share what we could with anybody that would listen to take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves. So four years later we got adult returns from the first generation we transplanted and the concept the tribe has is not concrete to concrete like in some cases like hatchery operation, but from gravel to gravel. And so for the last 10 years now you could say we've been double planting all of the streams. We will take the hatchery surplus and take them out into the streams and let them spawn with the natural or be reared with the natural and the wild stocks that are out there thus providing the double...doubling the size of the small runs to the estuaries. And it was through a series of political moves by the tribe that we became party to the Pacific Salmon Treaty as an Upper Columbia River Tributary Tribe, and it was again from the efforts made by the faction of the Nez Perce 20 or 25 years ago recognizing that the fishery was being destroyed and something needed to be done.

All of the issues that are in Indian Country just take a little bit of organization and leadership in my opinion and many great things can and will happen if strong leadership avails itself to those specific issues. So that's kind of the basis for Idaho Gray Wolf Recovery and for the Nez Perce was getting management capabilities and being recognized in a field of science to be equal or greater than the experts in those fields and continuing in that fashion as being the only choice of the Nez Perce Tribe. Extinction is not an alternative for the Nez Perce Tribe so we will look to find every way possible to continue on with the work that we've begun. It's my hope personally that the work that I'm able to do the short time I'm on the tribal council will be another positive lesson in terms of legacy for those who are yet to replace me. Thank you."

Jamie Barrientoz:

"I'm Jamie Barrientoz and I agree with all the comments that were made. I just want to just highlight a few. For our tribe, we haven't got to where we are today -- like the others were saying -- we didn't get to where we are just because of the select few that stand out in the tribe. It's a collaboration of all the people in the tribe.

One of our awards from Honoring Nations is planning and development, and through our planning and development initiative we include throughout that part of our protocol is to hold public hearings and to include all of our members. And you'll see in the documents here that we held a series of planning meetings with our members where 400 tribal members turned out and they all gave input and very valuable input. That helped us to incorporate our culture into what we were doing. We accomplished that and the things that we've done are so beautiful and will be there for the long run because many minds put much thought into it and the council was very gracious and didn't stand in the way and didn't get bogged. We held our egos back, because oftentimes egos get in the way of the tribe and people think, ‘Well, I don't...' I'm just speaking for my tribe. ‘If it's not my idea then it's not going to happen at all.' We need to learn to set that aside before we can even move forward. We need to accept that we need to compromise and we need to agree and disagree on many issues and accept that Jaime Barrientos doesn't have all the answers, and I don't.

And we surround ourselves with many smart people, but also we surround ourselves with many practical-thinking people with common sense, because so often we can get caught up listening to just the lawyers and we can get into trouble sometimes just doing that. And so we've learned from many experiences like that that just having...surrounding ourselves with everyday people, people that are living in the community, the laws and the things that we are doing how it's going to impact them. Those are the people that we get the most valuable input from because those people are the ones that are living the day-to-day life on the reservation in the communities.

And so that's kind of where we come from, that's where we stand and all of our council meetings are open to the public and the majority of the time, the time that I've been on the council, I've spent most of my time on the roads. But I like that and I like to communicate. I'm corrected all the time but that's how I learn. I'm 30 years old and I have learned a great deal from many of my elders. And my mother and my grandfather and grandmother always told me, ‘Never forget the elders because that's truly where it comes from.' That's something that we need to work hard at doing, because oftentimes we think about if we're going to invest in something we need to get value back and we always think about the dollar and the returns that we invest in. Sometimes we forget about the culture and that's one thing that we're very strong on at Grand Traverse Band is our culture and our history and we will continue to be that way. Thank you. That's how we do it."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Let me put a question to you about the following. It deals with continuity within these programs and with the directions you try to set. All of you are elected officials, you're politicians, and politicians sometimes is used like a bad word but in fact, it's an act of tremendous courage to step forward and say, ‘I'm going to try to serve my people and I'm going to put myself out there, they might turn me out.' And all of you, Claudia is relatively new, Kathryn's retired, all of you have been through transitions at some point. We know that these programs to succeed need continuity in them. Any thoughts that you have about what you do in your community to put that continuity in there, recognizing there's going to be turnover in the elected officials, or things you wish you could do because some of you have probably been burned. It's a politician's life. It's a tough thing to do. Do's and don'ts or what you wish you could do around this issue of continuity -- how do you do it? How do you get continuity in programs when you retire, when you're newly elected? Claudia, any comments? You're recent, you said you're recently in office."

Claudia Vigil-Muniz:

"One of the things I'd like to stress is that something I learned a long time ago. I was in the education field for a long time and I had the opportunity of hearing a gentleman speak who was a former governor of the one of the pueblos here in New Mexico. And he put things into real clear perspective and it affirmed my way of thought and how we as Native American people fit into this whole picture. He basically said that we walk, you've heard this story of how we walk two paths and we have to know where the fine line is.

In one hand, we live in a society that has a different way of thought and we've had to adopt a western way of thought and that's the way of our lives now today. In order for us to survive, we have to be able to walk both of them because in the other hand we go home and we step into a different role and what...I guess it really didn't hit me until just by chance it was during the holidays and we went to his particular village and there was this gentleman that had spoken the day before at one of the universities and there he was. He was the leader of the group that was singing and from what we were told in that particular village, it's an honor to be selected as the head singer. That brought things into clear perspective about the role we play; for me it did. And also it's kind of fitting in terms of my own upbringing. My father was the one individual that I really idolized and who taught me. These little conversations that we would have during our visits, little did I realize what he was preparing me for. And some days I sit there and I think, ‘This is what he was talking about'. And sometimes I wonder, ‘How could it be that he knew that he didn't know.' Everything that he has prepared me for is for what I'm doing now.

The other thing is I'd like to clarify I'm not a politician. I do not agree with that. The reason why I say that is because, to be real honest, I didn't put my name into the race so to speak because I wanted to. It was because I was asked to and I had to discuss this with my mother, with several people and they basically told me, ‘You know what the honorable thing is. You know what it is that you have to do.' So I thought, ‘Okay, we'll do it.' Just to throw the numbers off. Little did I know I was going to win. But I think that it's important that, as Native people, that guides us in our decision-making and how we fit into this whole picture. Unfortunately, we do have to become the politicians as you refer to it. In my culture and what my father taught me was that that is not a good word and it has a lot of bad meaning to it. And you have to take it and use it to your best-decision making, because when I step into that role coming down here to Santa Fe, I do have to become the politician and I have to learn how to play the role of the beggar, so to speak, and that's sad that we as Native people have to do that. We have to come and beg for everything that we think our people could benefit from. Unfortunately, I don't know about the other states, but in this particular state, in my presentations to the state legislatures, it's always been to literally remind them that we play a role and that we too are citizens of the state and that we too deserve to be treated fairly and equally. And unfortunately, we have to come to that role. But I think that I deserve that same mutual respect from my colleagues as well as from other leaders and from other entities, government entities. And until we get that same status, I don't know if we'll be able to function as expected because of the term that the white man uses, which is assimilation. Unfortunately, that process is almost completed for all of us.

The villages here in New Mexico still maintain their beliefs and they're very strong about it and they are to be admired for what they maintain. Their history goes back a long, long ways. Mine -- in particular with the economic development that's taken place -- you can see where we're losing our children and a lot of it has to do with that almighty dollar. Having to remind your own people where you come from is what's most important and knowing who you are and where you come from so that they can make the right decisions, reminding them about the mutual respect that should exist so that we can progress on some of these issues because there again, we have to play the role of...the same role as the rest of the world in order for us to survive. If we don't, we don't educate our children and if we don't point these issues out, we're not going to do it. Our children are the key to this whole thing and we keep hearing about the seventh generation. Where are we at in the midst of that? And it's up to us to decide and to guide our children in that direction."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Claudia, if I could follow up with one question. You've been president for a year and a half approximately. As you came into your position, on this question of the continuity of programs, what specific steps did you take to review the personnel, the programs, assess their strengths and weaknesses? What's it like, in other words, to be in this new transition and how did you go about managing that process? What specific steps did you try to take?"

Claudia Vigil-Muniz:

"I came on and I've been assessing basically on my own and observing to see how things...because as any tribal entity, there are a lot of rumors that go flying left and right about how you're going to...their interpretation of how you're going to be leading. It's been difficult, because you have to play a role as a personnel director and as a leader, so to speak, because you're constantly...when you go home you deal with bad personnel issues, at least in my case I do. And so redefining that, a lot of the policies are in place, they've been created and they're there, but what I've been having to do is actually implement them. I refer many things back to the departments and to the directors, executive directors, and trying to maintain the continuity, so to speak, but there's a lot of resistance because the policies have never been really enforced. But it's important to me because, in order to move forward in the economic development portion, several things have to fall into place. The personnel matters cannot interfere with the role of the government.

Earlier we heard about the separation of powers. Well, in our particular situation, to a degree, it exists, but still it needs to be refined. And in this assessment process, we also have to update our own policies and our own procedures based on who we are. They've been developed for us and that's what we're doing right now, but the continuity portion of it has been assessed to the degree that they've been allowed to function. And then now we're going to back and we're going to say, ‘Wait a minute. These things are going to have to be refined,' and looking at it from the positive things of improvement rather than from the negative things and trying to encourage everybody's participation, because I don't believe in functioning only hearing one side of the story. For too long we've done that. And coming from a matriarchal society this has always been encouraged and allowed and for some reason we got caught up and we have a misinterpretation that has distracted us. But now I think we can get back to hopefully...my term is four years and I don't think I'll see that. If I'm elected again, if the people wish, then we'll continue it. But it's only striving for the achievement of what everybody would like to have and everybody's say so."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Anybody else on this continuity question. Marge?"

Marge Anderson:

"I think first of all you have to have checks and balances and accountability and hire a team who has expertise in those areas of education, services and so on. I think it's...in Indian Country, you've got elections out there and we had continuity when I left office. And it's unfortunate the recent elections I was in Phoenix so I don't know what's happening there now. But you need to have long- and short-term goals and a strategic plan to see where you're going."

Brian Cladoosby:

"Continuity with programs. I'm going to be speaking on programs that we've set up with others outside of our communities in the non-Indian communities and I think of the in-stream flow that we have established. As many of you know, water's a big issue out there in Indian Country and our tribe was the first one in the state in the last 20 years to establish in stream flows and there's already attacks by politicians to try to undermine that. So it's, once again, educating, educating, educating.

We have been able to set up a program with the Department of Ecology, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to allow us to do NPDES permitting, that's the National Pollution Discharge something-something committee. That's why I hire those smart people, they know about those names. I think it's like poop and stuff...that's laymen's terms. But our tribe is able to issue those permits and programs like that need to continue. Our land-use planning, the award that we won through the Harvard Honoring Nations, a program like that needs to have continuity. Our police on our reservation, they carry...they're also sheriff's deputies in the county. Programs like that need to continue and our utilities. We recognized back in the ‘80s and ‘90s that when you control the utilities you control growth on your reservation. So we came to agreement with the other purveyors in the county and they recognize us as the only ones on our reservation that will be allowed to issue a permit.

Now these are programs that have been established...I can go on and on and on. We have a list of probably another dozen programs that we've established, but how do you continue continuity with those programs and make sure that they last and continue? For one, you have to have a foundation. You need to create a foundation; you have to have some kind of mechanism in place that people will recognize in perpetuity. Now there's no guarantee that that will take place because like I said, our in-stream flow...one of the county commissioners in our county who is running this year and his platform is going to be the anti-Indian crusader out there fighting the tribe on all issues and he's already got some lawyers from Seattle, downtown attorneys reviewing that to see if there's any cracks, any way that he can get his little finger in there. So I think educating, educating, educating.

We continue to have new politicians and we are politicians and...I finally...someone had told me what politics means. It's a Greek word. It's 'poli' meaning 'many,' and 'tics,' 'blood sucking insects.' I refer to those as the D.C. politicians. But I think just educating, to have continuity to those programs you need to continually educate these new officials that come into office. That's the only way you're going to have continuity. We've had two new county commissioners this year. I spent two hours with them just educating them on things that the tribe has done with them over the years, so I think that's the key, just educating these...and I'm just referring to outside programs, not internal programs."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Thank you. Kathryn, yes."

Kathryn Harrison:

"Thank you. I think one of the things that has worked for us was reaching out to the communities but not only that, being role models as tribal council. It's not a 9-to-5 job. Once you're elected, no matter what you do, where you go, awake or asleep, you must be a role model for your people. That includes and inspires continuity among the next lot to come along.

The other thing is when we campaigned for our recognition, we told everyone, ‘We won't have any surprises.' That included our people, the people in Washington, D.C. and the local people, the county commissioners, the schools. So our meetings were open and that is why we established our intergovernmental program that was our winning program with the Honors for Harvard. I like to have Justin and Nicole, Justin Martin and Nicole stand and be recognized for the good work that they do in reaching out to our legislative people not only in the State of Oregon, but in Washington, D.C. They keep their finger on the pulse of what's going on in Indian Country, they advise us of bills we need to monitor, they tell us when to come to the state capitol, the attempts [unintelligible] on Indian services, which includes every representative from every tribe in Oregon that's recognized and [unintelligible] representative from [unintelligible] and also a state senator and a state representative.

I think the other thing is you include all our people. We've held a lot of meetings that we included the county commissioners and everyone around us to show what we were going to do and ask them, ‘What do you think of this? Where do you see us in five years, in 10 years?' That included them. You have to show your people what works and once it's in place it's going to take a lot of convincing from the other side that wants to try to change anything and that puts continuity in place. And the last thing I want to say is I think we all agree how important spirituality is. That's what's carrying all of us, no matter what trouble we face, no matter what obstacles we face and that's what's going to pass on from our ancestors. That's how they overcame the struggles, that's how they pass on things to us and that's something we must never forget.

One thing I learned to say to our council is, ‘If you want to be treated like a tribal government then you have to act like one.' And by the way, I had black hair when I started. Thank you."

Peter Captain:

"I remembered what the other myth was coming from Alaska, not all tribes are oil rich. Unfortunately, ours is one of those that's not oil rich. So we have to be innovative in the things we do to keep these programs running. Our state dollars and federal dollars are being depleted. So we need to come up with innovative ways to keep all our programs running. You hear people say, ‘Well, you've got to surround yourself with smart people,' and that's good. You also have to integrate within your school systems the teaching of the young children on the different pollutants and the different aspects of the worldly comings, otherwise they're not going to know what's coming down the path and when it does hit they're going to be caught off guard. So a good solid education, if you can incorporate those within your school system, great. Short of cloning that's one way of continuity."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Something I think that Claudia said must have sparked...you mentioned about looking at these programs and maybe some of the systems you have in place may not be working as well. A number of people are asking questions that deal roughly with the same thing. People would like to hear you talk about the way you handle issues of hiring, having to fire and promoting the career development of your employees. What role do you as senior leadership play in that regard? Any comments on that? A number of people have actually sent me questions like that. I know people wonder about those relationships. Anybody? Marge."

Marge Anderson:

"In our system of tribal government, separation of powers, that's delegated to the [unintelligible] policy board, which consists of all the commissioners and they handle all the personnel issues. I didn't have to worry. So that's how we handle those issues. What was the other one?"

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Both the enterprises and the programs, are they handled in the same way?"

Marge Anderson:

"The enterprises, we have a general manager and we have a corporate commission. We did have anyway, and that's where the personnel issues were dealt with."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Continuity, though I heard you say could be an issue here. Anybody else? Jaime."

Jamie Barrientoz:

"For us, many times, the tribal council went, particularly with just the Grand Traverse Band members, we have public forums where...at our council meetings we have an open forum where any member can say anything that they want of their choice and oftentimes those kind of issues are brought out there and then we give the direction to those members on what they need to do to get their issue resolved. We do have an administrative appeals board. That's not perfect. We're always continually having to refine that, because we're a small tribe and often family members get involved on the board and then they get involved in employee disputes and we have to sometimes separate that and sometimes if you're new to the community or whatever you don't know who's related to who and what kind of click is going on. But we have those and we do have dispute [resolution] mechanisms, but mainly for the Grand Traverse Band members they come to the council and the council points them in the direction that they go. There are some times where the situation is so gross that the council has to intervene and make a decision based upon the tribal manager or the CEO not taking charge because oftentimes the tribal manager or the CEO is unsure if he gets involved. Which segment of the tribe is going to be coming down on him? So it's a real touchy situation, it's continually being refined, but it seems to be working for us. For the most part it seems to be working for us. There are some cases that are so difficult that they have to go to the court system and that's how they resolve it."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Marge."

Marge Anderson:

"I need to add if they go to the [unintelligible] policy board they're going to work with their supervisor. If they're not satisfied with that then you go to the [unintelligible]. If you're not satisfied there then you go to tribal court."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Brian?"

Brian Cladoosby:

"Personnel issues are the toughest to deal with in Indian Country. I hate dealing with personnel issues. That's why I tell my directors, ‘If you can solve it, solve it.' But we have this thing in our policy called nepotism, but I think it needs to be defined differently in Indian Country. But it is tough to deal with personnel issues in a tribe, especially a small tribe. At Swinomish, where the vast majority of our people are located within a very small area so everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody's business and the casino, we have 300 employees down there and we started just gung ho with a lot of tribal members filling those jobs and slowly. And I'm speaking to the choir here for those that have casinos, slowly by slowly those numbers start to dwindle for various reasons and you get calls as the chairman. ‘My daughter just got fired.' And I said, ‘Well, what happened?' ‘Well, she...it's not fair. She's a tribal member, she should have that job.' So I call the casino. ‘Well, the last 21 days she had 21 either lates or no-shows or no-calls or tardies or something.' And so it's real hard to deal with because you're so...you know them, you grew up with a lot of them. There's just such a personal connection there and it's...but...you know what I'm talking about. Personnel issues are the toughest to deal with, but unfortunately as the chairman you're put into a position where maybe a tribal member needs to be let go because they've been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment or something like that and that's when the director comes to you and says, ‘I can't deal with this, can you deal with this?' I think personnel issues are the toughest in Indian Country to deal with."

Claudia Vigil-Muniz:

"Yeah, ditto. I mentioned earlier that I've been trying to refer back to the policies and procedures that are in place and so I kick them back. We have what we refer to as the five meg-department structure where we have five executive directors, one in...[unintelligible] director and education, public safety, health and welfare, education and public works. I guess, in the past, no one's been using these executive directors and they didn't know where they fit into this whole picture.

So when a decision comes to my desk, and as you well know, everyone has a tendency to go directly to the council or to the leader, and it's like, ‘No, I'm sorry. I'm not going to...I won't deal with that.' I'll kick it back, I'll call the executive and then I tell them, ‘This is your problem, you need to handle it, come up with a solution. If we can't resolve it, we have a human resource program, let them set up a grievance hearing committee.' Council is the last resort, and I keep reminding them that if they come to the council, they've exhausted all the remedies. And so people are finally beginning to adapt and adjust to that method.

The other...for the enterprises what we...we have boards in place for a lot of the enterprises that we have because they're under federal statute corporation. So they have a five-panel board that makes all the...that will make the decisions for them so that it leaves us out of the picture and that's how I've been handling it. Like was mentioned, with the nepotism issue, trying to keep things in perspective and try to correct the behavior that was mentioned about people being tardy, coming in late and what I keep reminding them of is that what I was taught was that anything you do in this organization it's yours, the resources are yours, what it pays for is yours. So you have a say so in every decision that we make here, but you have to remember that if you're going to go crash that vehicle that was on loan to you from the motor pool, that comes out of your pocket. It may not be a direct impact, but the fact is that you have ownership in that vehicle because in the title it is Jicarilla Apache Nation. And by doing that they're like, ‘Oh, yeah.' And so trying to re-establish the ownership part of it because the ownership, somewhere we've lost it along the way because it also flies to such things as being involved with the public school system. You hear this all over Indian Country, ‘Well, the school district isn't doing this for us, they're not doing that for us.' Well, what are we doing about it? What are we saying about it? Those are our children that go to those schools, so it just doesn't make any sense constantly going back and reminding, ‘You do have a say so on any of these things.' So I think it goes back to the gentleman here from Swinomish where you play a role in all of this and I think that's important for our people to understand that."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"You touched on something there and I have a question related to this. I'll introduce it by way of a story. One of the tribes we work with at the Harvard Project, one of the tribal chairs says to me one time, ‘All this stuff is great, Honoring Nations, nation building. My daughter's the president of the student body of her high school and doesn't know what I do for a living.' I've got a question. What ways do you have in place and what are you doing to involve the youth in your community in tribal government? They are the future leaders. What steps are you taking, what concerns do you have in that area? Justin."

Justin Gould:

"Being relatively young, it's not hard to remember the days of youth. Ten years ago, I got involved with the United National Indian Tribal Youth Program. In 1991, I was the National Youth Coordinator for the 1992 Alliance, an Indian advocacy group on Capitol Hill. I was a person who made the second to the motion at the policy table right after I swore my oath to be an elected official of the tribe. The motion maker made a motion to create another subcommittee within the structure of the Nez Perce Tribe. That new subcommittee is called Youth Affairs Subcommittee and it's a culmination of various efforts of the different youth provider programs within our tribe. We have social services who has concerns with our tribal youth dedicate employees to that cause. We have education liaisons who are dedicated to the needs of the youth in terms of their education. We have various examples to draw from that are essentially the same path and direction and vision but with no true administrative support to enhance one another's abilities to provide that positive future for our youth.

So under discussion a lot of that came out and before I called for the question I just reminded them that by taking this serious stance toward youth initiatives and youth services that will make it better tomorrow for us when we become the elder and they become the leader and if we could keep this direction going. I looked at my elders and said, ‘I will take care of you tomorrow and through this youth affairs committee we can set that value strong within Nez Perce territory that these children coming up have an obligation as well to take care of us tomorrow.' And that was the basic theme behind the rationale to it, looking at the national statistics in Indian Country among other things prompted us to do that.

Currently, I work with...as a natural resources chairman for the Nez Perce Tribe. I work with the other subcommittee chairs on developing holistic initiatives that will represent unity among all the generations alive on my...in my country in setting up literal examples of week to week, month to month, seasonal activities that we can all enjoin and share together in the spirit of health prevention, education, cultural identity, pride, all the good things that our forefathers had set aside time to provide to us. So it's just a simple continuation in a formal contemporary sense of something that we've all had a little taste of in our lives."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Just let me put a question to you real quick. Specifically with respect to tribal government, is this Youth Affairs Committee attempting to expose the children and the kids and the high school kids and so forth to the work of the tribal government or are you working more broadly on youth issues?"

Justin Gould:

"Both. We actually have three youth that serve at the tribal policy level on this committee representing the different communities on the reservation; the eastern side, the western side and the northern side. So it's new but it's...and it's having a lot of growing pains, I would guess, but it's working. We now have an agenda that recognizes every youth provider to come in and be accountable and for the first time it has a direct impact to tribal policy formulation development versus being some kind of a quarterly report in a little bulletin fashion format that is like page 156 of a 600-page quarterly report. So that's kind of where we'd been treating them administratively, our youth, and this is a way to really let them tell us as tribal leaders what those concerns are. So it works."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Good, good. Anybody else involving youth? Jaime."

Jamie Barrientoz:

"We have a junior tribal council that we established. It's a seven-member board of youth that are elected by the youth and they have a budget and they have a chair, vice chair, treasurer, secretary and they do their own fundraisers. And we have a thing called a Youth in Government Day where these youth -- not necessarily just the Junior Tribal Council -- but any youth that is selected through a process can job-shadow a council member or a high executive official on a day. And sometimes these youth are taken out on the road with us and exposed to these kind of meetings. We need to do more of that, but we are trying and we make attempts and they have a board just like a mini-council and they make decisions that impact the kids and how they try to influence us into making things easier for them because they understand what it's like with the environment that they're in in school and in the neighborhood and stuff. So we have that vehicle for them to be able to hear us. And there's an administrative...school administers board where the deans and the superintendents of the schools all get together quarterly and that's hosted by the Junior Tribal Council. They can talk to the school superintendents directly and say, ‘These are our issues as Indian kids. These are what we're facing and this is how we think you can help.' And the council is there and we're all there listening to their concerns and I must say that these kids are very smart. Sometimes we might take that for granted thinking they're young and they've still got a lot to learn but, man, I went to the last Junior Tribal Council and superintendents meeting and I was blown away by how much they really could articulate their point of view and move these superintendents into making policies that are positive for them and it was great."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"We're going to have to bring this to a close, but I'm always struck by the tremendous combination of leaders such as yourselves, show both the vision and tremendous ability to manage and to make things happen and to lead in good, strong directions. We've joked a little bit about the word politician but if you all are the examples, then the word is on its way in Indian Country to being a term of honor and respect as it should be. So thank you to all of you. Thank you."

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

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

Andrew Lee:

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

Miriam Jorgensen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring Nations: Justin Martin: Enhancing Government-to-Government Relationships

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Justin Martin, Former Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at Grand Ronde, discusses his nation's relationship in previous years with the state government, and how Grand Ronde was able to build and sustain success over time in the state's legislative arena.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Martin, Justin. "Enhancing Government-to-Government Relationships." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Our last morning presentation is from a man who's always on the go, Justin Martin, who's the Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. He's done a fantastic job and I know working with Kathryn [Harrison] and his team and Nicole [Holmes], they've just done a great job and being recognized as a sovereign and just making a ton of headway with state and federal interactions, so Justin Martin."

Justin Martin:

"Thank you, Andrew, for that kind introduction and thank you all for having us and being here today. I'm going to talk not so much about my program today, I'm sure you've all read about that in the report. Today I'm going to focus a little bit on state-level politics and our journey through the past five years with the state-level government and how we were able to build some success in that level. I'm actually going to talk specifically about some numbers today, because I've approached this from a very general perspective over the past couple days, and then talk a little bit about what got us to the level that we are today with respect to being able to effectively promote our sovereignty.

First, before I go into that I'd like to take a quick moment to, as Andrew mentioned, to thank Kathryn Harrison, who as I went through this journey over the past five years, I've been fortunate personally to work with several mentors. Some of the best lobbyists at the Oregon level; a man that's been in the building for 45 years, one of the best public relations/public affairs persons in the Pacific Northwest. And then finally Kathryn, as a mentor to me, I have been able to learn from your vision and your guidance and your commitment, and most of all, Kathryn, your perseverance. And those are lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my life, so thank you very much for that. It has been a blessing to go through this journey with you for five years. Also I'd like to thank my sidekick, my partner in crime, Nicole Holmes, who is the other half of the Intergovernmental Affairs Department -- a whopping number of two employees in that department. We were able to steal Nicole from a state representative, which I wouldn't recommend to a lot of folks, but he was a very big fan of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and realized her value to this tribe. So, Nicole, thank you for all your help and all your work over the past three-plus years.

So with that, a little bit about this journey. I am a tribal member and how I came to be in this role is in 1995, a state representative went to the tribal council and asked if there were any young Native Americans interested in coming to work for a state representative in the legislative process. My grandfather was on the council at the time and gave me a call and said there's a man in Salem that's interested in having somebody come and work for them. So I saw this as an opportunity within my curriculum at school to go and do this. As I mentioned yesterday, my background is public policy and public administration. So that's what got me into the legislative process. It was a generous offer by a state legislator and one that allowed me to start to create some of those personal relationships at the state level that in turn wound up getting me to Grand Ronde. Another nice side of that is I was able to then, when I went to work for the tribe in '97, to create a relationship with my grandfather who I did not have a relationship with growing up. Him and my grandmother had been split up for the 26-some years that I had been alive so that also in and of itself has been a wonderful experience. He is retired from council and moved on but again, I've been able to build that relationship; a relationship with some of my culture and heritage that frankly, I didn't pay much attention to growing up. The Grand Ronde Tribe was a tribe that was terminated in the ‘50s. So for the first 14 years of my existence, the tribe did not exist in terms of federal recognition.

So, a quick kind of history of Grand Ronde: 26 bands originally were moved to the Grand Ronde Reservation in the 1850s. That was originally a 69,000-acre reservation. Through termination, that went down to two-and-a-half acres in the 1950s and then again, through perseverance and commitment of some of our elders, we were able to be restored in 1983. Kathryn was a big part of that, also Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, who wasn't a congresswoman at the time, played a big role in that. We were recognized in name only and did not get any of the reservation back until 1988, a separate act of Congress. The 1988 Reservation Act in which we got about 9,800 acres of contiguous timberland back in which to sustain our government. So from that time until the onset of Indian gaming in 1995, that is how we operated. So with that onset of Indian gaming came all kinds of new issues with respect to the state.

So as I told you a little bit earlier, I'm going to talk specifically about some of the state-level programs that we've been able to get involved with and have some success with. Right before 1997, we signed a permanent compact with the State of Oregon for our gaming facility that opened up several avenues and several concerns. So in the 1997 legislative session when I came aboard with Grand Ronde, we saw about 39 legislative measures that had some potential impact to Native American tribes in Oregon. Out of that 39, about 19 of them were considered damaging, what could have an adverse...a potential adverse affect on the tribe. So we went to work and we went to work trying to educate elected officials to let them know exactly how this would impact the tribe and we were able to successfully defeat all those.

So in the time between 1997 and 1999, this is the nice part of what we've been able to do, we can actually start to quantify some of the success of government relations, which is very, very difficult to do. In the '99 session, we saw only three potentially damaging measures. So that went from 19 to three in about a two-year period. Well, how did we make that happen? We hit the road, we started educating elected officials. This is kind of where my program comes in, we started communicating, we started educating, we started cooperating with the communities, we started making contributions and yes, those are political contributions in the form of dollars, but again those are other contributions in the form of being community members getting involved in the community making things happen there. And then finally we started to create a presence, a presence where people knew if they were dealing with Native American issues, they were going to have to talk to Grand Ronde and the eight other tribes that existed.

So now we can kind of follow this journey again and quantify it even more so in the '01 session and in the '01 session we did see about six measures that were potentially damaging. So you might say, ‘Well, Justin, you went from 19 to three, that's quite a remarkable feat but then you went back up to six potentially damaging pieces of legislation in ‘01.' Well, we've also been able to widen the scope of legislation that we have tracked. So on a percentage basis, it's about the same percentage of damaging legislation that we saw in '99. But the really effective number that I think, out of those six potentially damaging measures that were introduced in the recent '01 session, not a single bill got a hearing. And to even keep something from even creating a public discussion or some public sentiment is truly a win in and of itself. I would rather have 10 potentially damaging measures that don't see the light of day than even one that could create some kind of public swell. Not only was that the effective part of the '01 session, but we saw something that we hadn't seen in Oregon I don't think ever.

We were able to pass, and I say we, this is not just Grand Ronde, I like to believe that all the tribes working collectively were able to pass six pieces of positive legislation. So you look from 1997 where everything was negative, negative, negative and how does this affect...we were able to effectively make a complete turn, 180-degree turn and now we're passing positive legislation. And one of those, for a quick background, Oregon, I think, is a real progressive state. We have had a progressive governor that has looked at creating state-tribal relationships that go beyond just the everyday legislature and just beyond everyday state-level programs. There was an executive order in 1996 encouraging state-tribal relations, and that included one summit every year, that included individual cluster groups for tribal agencies and state agencies to start working together. Some of those cluster groups are natural resources, environmental resources, public safety, health, education and finally economic development -- a wonderful, wonderful program. But what happens when the current governor is gone? So we looked at that collectively as tribes and said, ‘Why don't we do something about this executive order? Let's pass some legislation and put this into statute.' And that's exactly what we did. Senate Bill 770 passed the legislative session this year essentially guaranteeing that we will continue that government-to-government relationship throughout the future no matter the administration, whether they're Native friendly or not. Again, just a landmark piece of legislation, one that we're very proud to have passed. Some of the other pieces of legislation, Senate Bill 690, a Native American Teaching License Certificate Bill, which allows elders to go back into not only Native schools but public schools and teach the language. It effectively took away the barrier that said you have to have this college degree and this teaching certificate because we don't want to lose what these elders can offer at this time. Just a wonderful bill. Some of the other bills, both a statutory bill and one that sent a message to Congress was the deletion of 'squaw' language from Oregon geographic board names. We passed that both in statute and within our memorial, just a wonderful message to Native Americans throughout the state. And then finally the creation of local mental health authorities on reservations in areas that even the community, non-tribal members don't really have access to mental health care. Now they can begin to get those services and also look at some alternative funding methods combined with tribes, again, in those areas that are outside of the metropolitan areas.

So how did we do this? How did we get to this point where we were able to totally turn a negative situation to a positive situation? And I've heard from some other folks that other states aren't quite that progressive and that, obviously, is understandable. And some of the questions on the panel yesterday talked about kind of volatile environments, how do you start to make a difference? Well, what Grand Ronde did, what the vision of the tribal council did is said, ‘We need to be involved, how are we going to do that?' and then went and they worked with outside professionals. We went and we hired again that best lobbyist, we went and we hired that best public relations manager, we hired the best marketing firm, but council said, ‘We're not just going to do that and we're not just going to put that in the hands of somebody that doesn't understand the Grand Ronde way, doesn't understand what the Native way of life is all about. So we're also going to take from these people what we can in the way of education and experience and we're going to start to create it for ourselves.' And that's where I have personally been fortunate to be brought into that. But that also carries over in every department within our government. So we've been able to utilize that external expertise, not only utilize it out there, but to utilize it internally to learn from it and become stronger and in the future we'll be able to do that for ourselves. Now, when you go out and you look to contract with somebody, make that a part of the deal because, you know what, we've got a good issue and that's something that professional lobbyists or professional public relations persons, that's something they want to work with. You as a tribe will be a feather in their cap as far as a client. That's out there. Do it on your terms because you're the one that's ultimately responsible for protecting that sovereignty and again, effectively promoting it. You're not giving up jurisdiction, you're not giving up your sovereign rights, you're finding a more effective way to deliver that message because some of these external professionals open doors that we would never have had a chance to open five years ago. Get that in, start to create those relationships at the grassroots level and you're going to be that much more effective.

So that is some of the success that we've had at the state level. I've also been having some side conversations with folks. What are some of the other really successful things that you've seen? What we have been able to see is sentiment that says, ‘Okay, the Oregon State Lottery provides...it's about $900 million per biennium for the state.' But every voter that sits in those rooms wonders, ‘What do they do with the money? What are they doing with the dollars?' But, what we've seen, almost two out of three voters in these focus groups is Grand Ronde. What have they been able to do with the dollars? What have they been able to do within their community? As soon as you ask them about, ‘Well, what about the other gaming that goes...? What about the other gaming product in Oregon? What about Indian gaming?' and the first thing you hear is, ‘Well, they're giving something back to the community. They're delivering dollars. They funded LifeFlight, they funded OMSI', which is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. ‘They work in conjunction with the Oregon Food Bank. Those guys are going it right'. And when you hear that your government, a small tiny tribal government is doing things the right way, that's when you know you've been effective, that's when you know you're changing public opinion, that's when you know the grassroots has taken effect, that's when you know you've been able to sway public opinion because, you know what? We're all on the right side of a good issue. We're not pushing anything bad here and once you educate people to that fact, and I've seen it a million times, it clicks. 'Why don't they tax...why don't Indians get taxed?' 'Well, we're paying for services outside. We contract with Polk County, we contract with Yamhill County. We don't have our own water; we don't have our own sewer.' It clicks. People go, ‘Oh, that's why'. Or we seeded LENA. ‘Oh, that's why. I didn't think about that 'cause that's not what I hear in the newspaper.' So get out there and educate, grassroots. It sounds simple and easy and it is because again it's getting down to the lowest level of building personal relationships. Once you find something in common -- and I think we can all find things in common with other folks -- you can make it happen.

So with that I'm just going to close by telling a little story. Again, I think, Kathryn, when I first started, I was about three months on the job and Kathryn wasn't feeling well and she was to give a speech about the Grand Ronde history in front of a bunch of state agencies. She said, ‘Justin, I'm not feeling very well, can you do this?' I thought, ‘Oh, my god. Okay, you've got Kathryn Harrison, who's again a model of perseverance and understands and has been through that, and then you've got Justin Martin, an urban kid from Salem that has been working for the tribe and really doesn't have a grasp about that. What the hell am I going to talk about?' And so I went over...on my way over and I started trying to formulate this speech, which I was going to give in about 40 minutes and started thinking about, ‘What can I talk about?' And I looked to the right to that two-and-a-half acres when the tribe was terminated and thought about my grandma...my great grandmother who I was very fortunate, again to be able to spend about 21 years of my life with before she passed in 1992. So I started thinking about her a little bit and I turned left -- and if you guys have been to Grand Ronde, you eventually come up on the casino, which is huge and then I looked at that and I thought, ‘Boy, that's really impressive'. And then I kept driving a little bit and I started thinking, ‘Well, boy, I wonder what my great grandmother would have thought, my Grandma Cora. Boy, she would have really been impressed by seeing that building.' But then about 15 miles down the road I started thinking, ‘Would she really have been that impressed? Well, no, would the bright lights or that great big building have impressed my grandmother? No. Would the five restaurants with all the fancy food or all the money and all the fancy machines, would that have impressed my grandmother? Well, no. What would have impressed her?' And so a little further down the road I started thinking, ‘Here's what would have impressed her. We've been able to do something at Grand Ronde that hasn't been able to be done in that area. We're starting to bring people back home, people that had to leave the reservation because of assimilation, failed assimilation policy. We're able to bring them back home. We're able to start turning their lives around through programs in health care and education and housing and elder pensions and elder care. We're able to bring back that community, we're able to make our members more self-sufficient and best of all we're able to give them some hope.'

So thank you all very much for hearing me today. And again, you can make a difference at the state level, you can make a difference at the federal level, and you can make a difference at the local level, just get out there and meet some people and make it happen. Thank you very much."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"We've got a few minutes to take maybe a couple questions for Justin if you have them so let's go ahead and take a few."

Audience member:

"I'll restrict my 50 questions to one, Justin. Could you talk about your relationship with other interests in the state, being a small population group in Oregon? Undoubtedly you need additional support in order to get your legislation passed. And also there are a lot of issues in the state that aren't specifically native issues, but which affect Native interests very much. I imagine employment policies or health policies or TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] policies and so on. So what's you're relationship with other lobbyists and interests beyond the Native community?"

Justin Martin:

"Great question. Thank you for asking. We start to see...I think you start to see a spread and this gets to where my program really focuses on presence. So not only are we a government presence, but now we're starting to be a presence in the business community, now we're starting to be a presence in the non-profit and the charitable community, and we're able to utilize not just political contributions to our advantage. So say we start to build some partnerships in that community, we start to build partnerships in what we call regional problem solving where in Yamhill County, Polk County, the tribal government, and then the local governments start to work together in a consensus fashion to be able to make those things happen. That also happens like I said in the business community. You start garnering support and you start working side by side with some of the big business interests. So okay, it's not just Grand Ronde, a small tribal government. They've got that right, they've got...we need to give them that respect. It's also Grand Ronde, the largest employer in Polk County. So okay, we don't have a lot of votes to deliver say in an election or we don't have a lot of individual contributors to certain programs, but look at our workforce. And they're going to go out in their communities and back to their homes and spread the work about Grand Ronde. So it becomes...again it's kind of this groundswell of grassroots, but it's also in other areas that we would never have thought possible and that's not just politics, that's employment, that's in natural resources, cultural resources. People start to look to the tribe as experts in each and every one of those areas."

Honoring Nations: Charlie O'Hara: Developing Productive Government-to-Government Relations: Swinomish Cooperative Land Use Program

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Charlie O'Hara discusses the Swinomish Cooperative Land Use Program and the importance of developing productive mutually beneficial government-to-government relations.

Resource Type
Citation

O'Hara, Charlie. "Developing Productive Government-to-Government Relations: Swinomish Cooperative Land Use Program." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Our final presentation from an Honoring Nations winner today is Charlie O'Hara, who's going to be talking about developing productive government-to-government relationships. Charlie's from the Swinomish Tribe in Washington State, which is about 80 miles north of Seattle. And they deal with a problem that many of your nations face as well, which is how to deal with checker-boarded reservations and how that impacts land use planning. In 2000, the Swinomish Tribe won an Honoring Nations award for their cooperative land use program. It's really a model that I know lots of folks around the country have looked to for inspiration in developing good sovereign-to-sovereign relationships on reservations that are highly checker boarded. Charlie, good to see you here. Ready to hear and learn from you today."

Charlie O'Hara:

"You notice Andrew tilts the mic the whole time to accommodate his six -oot height. Thank you very much. I generally don't need a mic that much.

Let me first start off by saying that I'm a recent employee at the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. And the work that was done to actually gain this award was done by my predecessor, and much of the credit goes to the tribal senate. Fortunately, I have my tribal chairman here, who can correct me when I make some errors in this presentation, but he and his predecessors deserve much of the credit because this was really a process that took place over a long period of time. It was roughly 15 years, I believe, in terms of the tribe's recognition of the issue and that is the land-use regulation in a checkerboarded reservation and how to best deal with that. The tribe took the position that they had land use jurisdiction over all lands on the reservation. Of course the county's position was, ‘No, you only have land use regulation over the trust portions of the reservation.' So there was a disagreement obviously.

There were options. They could have gone to litigation. The tribe and the county instead chose to try to work out through cooperative agreements a mechanism for dealing with this disagreement. Initially there was a period of mutual education where, through extensive meetings, there was actually a building bridges process that took place of some rather intense workshops to mutually educate both the county and the tribal members regarding each other's concerns, each other's issues in how they might seek some way of accommodating those kinds of concerns. Eventually, out of that process there was an agreement reached as to some basic understandings of the different approaches and how they might be bridged. Ultimately, it ended up with a cooperative agreement that talks about sharing responsibilities for dealing with land use regulation on the fee lands within the reservation. The tribe still exercises complete jurisdiction over trust properties, but it shares responsibilities with the county on the fee lands.

So for example, let me give you an example of how that works. If an individual is going to get a clearing and grading permit, for example, he has a choice of either going to the county or to the tribe. We have mutual processes...similar processes and that individual can go to either place. If he comes to the tribe, I have five days to forward that permit application to the county. They then have 15 days to respond and tell me if there's a problem with it. Likewise, if he were to go to the county, I would have that same opportunity. My response...I might have an issue, for example, because of concern over cultural resources in that particular area or other specifically tribal kinds of concerns. But basically, we use the same UPC, we use the same codes in other words, and we share expertise in a variety of areas. That's kind of the guts of the thing. I'd like to kind of talk a little bit if you don't mind about some of the more abstract aspects of government-to-government relations and effective government-to-government relations.

There's basically three types of relationships you can have with the outsiders, the non-Indians, and that seems to be isolation, litigation or adversarial kind of relationship, or some kind of cooperative relationship. All of them have their applications. In other words, some of them have our appropriate but different kinds of situations. Let me give you an example. For example, on certain cultural practices, isolation may be the best approach where a tribe has no interest in sharing a particular, whether it be ceremonies or practices, with non-Indian community. Isolation, in that case, would probably be the best kind of approach. And quite honestly I think that's probably the approach, is that fair to say at Swinomish with the smoke house? No interest in what the county's doing or anything else. It doesn't impact them. Litigation is often, too often probably, a situation where it ends up being the only avenue in order to protect essential tribal rights and so litigation becomes the only method of resolving an issue. The problem with litigation is often that it's very costly both in terms of financial resources as well as staff resources, it's lengthy, and you never know what the outcome is. It's a crapshoot in other words. And one of the other parts of the problem with that kind of an adversarial relationship is it tends to color other issues and you may be litigating only on one issue but all of a sudden you find that negative atmosphere spreads out over other issues that you're trying to deal with and so it gets less than productive in that sense. Cooperative relations, on the other hand, can be productive, but there needs to be in those cases perceived balance of power relations. Too often, you see groups pulled into cooperative or collaborative situations where the power isn't equal and, I would argue, that those are difficult situations for tribes to be in. One situation for example that I particularly don't care for is those kinds of cooperative or collaborative efforts where tribes are viewed as another stakeholder. Often, the situations involve trust responsibilities, treaty rights, other things where tribes are not just another stakeholder. And in those cases it really requires a defined government-to-government relationship and tribes shouldn't be treated as just another stakeholder. So I guess my point is that each of these approaches have their application.

The Swinomish Tribe has a culture of respect for all people and a willingness to try to find a cooperative way of working through issues. It's probably the most respectful group of people I've ever had the privilege to work with and I really enjoy that opportunity. The cooperative relationships can be the most productive however, when that perceived power relationship is balanced. And that can often require a lengthy mutual education process and that's often necessary. And that's the process that the tribe went through with Skagit County so that they could both understand their issues. Often we feel that our issue is the right issue and whoever we're talking with, their issue doesn't have value. Typically for cooperative relationships to work, there needs to be some kind of mutual respect development. Like I said, cooperative relationships can be most productive, because like the adversarial relationship it can spread and it tends to resolve other issues.

I want to allude here for a minute to Jon Cooley's remarks about the cooperative agreement with [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife. In a prior life, I worked with White Mountain Apache Tribe as well, and so I had the opportunity to work on that issue. And just because it's a nice thing to talk about, that statement of, what actually turned out to be a statement of relationship developed out of a meeting between the chairman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; one-on-one in a neutral location with a ground rule that no lawyers were allowed. Interestingly enough, that meeting was brokered by Joe Kalt. Joe Kalt recognized the conflict that the tribe was in with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and I happened to be seeing him and he asked me, ‘Do you think Chairman [Ronnie] Lupe would meet with Molly Beattie?' And fortunately Chairman Lupe agreed and it was a most productive meeting. The interesting part of that though was that we had been thoroughly engaged in a conflict situation; we had been spending all of our resources fighting with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the statement of relationship concluded, all of a sudden the whole thing changed and we were working hand-in-hand in the field, doing things on the ground to improve the situation for endangered species. So it was an interesting experience. But like that experience, it rested on an agreement to disagree. The Chairman emphatically stated that the Endangered Species Act does not apply on Indian lands. Molly Beattie said, ‘I have to...my job is to implement the Endangered Species Act. We don't agree.' They said, ‘Fine, we don't agree, but let's set that aside and see how we can move forward.' Likewise, in the case with the Swinomish Tribe and Skagit County there was an agreement: ‘We don't agree on who has jurisdiction over fee land, but let's set that disagreement aside so we can move forward productively.' Those kinds of mutual respect and agreements to disagree are necessary for cooperative relationships because you're not going to agree on everything.

I guess I'm going to try to close. But currently we're involved right now in both the litigation and the cooperative relationship mode and it's going to be interesting to see how that works out. But the one interesting fact, although it's rather contentious litigation and it has to do with treaty rights and endangered species and natural resource management and the tribe protecting those rights, nonetheless the cooperative agreement regarding land use regulation has stood up and it is still a touchstone that we go back to to demonstrate that on some things we can cooperate and we can proceed in a cooperative manner.

So I guess in conclusion, I guess effective government-to-government relationships require mutual respect, they require some level of technical expertise whether it be on fish and game issues or whether it be in the case of land use planning. In the case of the statement of relationship, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recognized that the White Mountain Apache Tribe had really good wildlife biology program and management program. In the case of the Swinomish Tribe, they recognized that they had good land use planning and good policies in effect. Those are kind of important, that technical underpinning of those agreements. Third, there has to be a consistency of policy. In other words, when you reach an agreement, then that agreement has to be maintained. It can't be re-read, redefined for every issue. Fourth, there needs to be open communications. That's one thing that we really need to work on is continuing communication with Skagit County. Often, if you don't have an issue, you don't communicate. And then when you have a negative issue the communications can really go sour quickly. Finally, for any of these things to work there has to be political will. If you don't have the will of the senate or in our case the tribal senate or in most cases tribal councils, these things won't stand up. And really, when we talk about what does it take for exemplary governance, it takes a lot of political will on the part of the elected leadership of tribes. Thank you."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Charlie, as you know, the purpose of the Honoring Nations program is to provide a mechanism by which tribes can learn from each other. And as you know, the Swinomish example is now being used explicitly. I was at Nez Perce just 10 days ago and trying to provide examples to other situations in other tribes to learn from your successes. I have two questions about this; basically it's one question. Is it working? Specifically, two parts to this: one of the things that's been done so much at Swinomish is something that we see nations around the world doing when they don't share a government. That is they both think they're sovereign, they both assert their sovereignty. You all have used these techniques of ‘You have .3 members, I have .3 members and we'll pick a neutral' and that's actually very common in governments around the world is the sign of the exercise of sovereignty. I'd like to know whether that specific mechanism, how it works and then secondly I'd like to know more generally, are these cooperative agreements working? Let me tell you why. When I talk to you or I talk to Ned, one version is, ‘Wow, man it's nothing but trouble. We're negotiating all the time.' And I don't know whether to interpret that as they aren't working or is it like me complaining, ‘My university doesn't work, this thing called Harvard...it doesn't work at all because I'm fighting with my dean.' Well, of course it works at one level. So in other words, does it work? And when I hear you say it doesn't work, does that mean it's not working [unintelligible]?

Charlie O'Hara:

"Let me answer the first one first, which is, ‘Does that mechanism set-up of the advisory group work?' We haven't had an issue of enough significance to call it into being. Quite honestly, that's a shortcoming and I'll take blame for that because we really should be working that group in the event that we do have a big issue. We're likely to have one fairly soon."

Brian Cladoosby:

"Let me add just a little bit. I'm Brian Cladoosby. I'm the chairman at Swinomish. Now, this board is set up: if I as a fee-land owner give a permit, bring it to the county, the county sends it to Swinomish and Swinomish says, ‘No, that goes all against everything that we want to do at Swinomish,' then it goes to the deal board. The deal board hasn't had to hear any of these...Swinomish hasn't denied, county hasn't denied. So basically the board...everything that we do is so unified as far as land use that this board hasn't had to have been used in the couple years since it's been set up. So, in a sense, they're there in case we appeal within the county issues or the county appeals to things that we issue. So the board is there, but we haven't had to use it."

Charlie O'Hara:

"And in answer to the second part of that question is, I guess it depends on what day you ask me because sometimes you're optimistic and sometimes you're not. Right now, for example, the tribe...it's what's called the buffer case, meaning that the tribes have been pushing farmers in Skagit County to create bigger buffers on streams to protect salmon habitat. That, of course, cuts into the farmland so you've got farmers up in arms and they tend to be the political power brokers in Skagit County. And so it's very contentious. The tribes have gone to court; the tribes have won consistently in court. The county has tried to get the tribes to back off that position and used a number of mechanisms, intimidation in holding up fee-to-trust applications and a number of other arm-twisting mechanisms. But, surprisingly, it has not affected the land-use agreement and we've had a couple of issues arise, particularly one most recently involving cultural resources or the potential of cultural resources being on a piece of property that was being developed. And the landowner, being a particularly contentious person that claimed he had a cultural survey done, and there was nothing there. So the tribe said, ‘Fine. Show it to us.' He refused. The county then said, ‘Look, if you don't show us this survey, we're not going to go forward.' And so he reluctantly turned it over to the county. He wouldn't turn it over to the tribe. The county then turned it over to us and everything worked out okay. But the point was that it was tested and it worked. And so I guess I'm feeling optimistic today so yeah."

Audience member:

"Let's turn the question around another way. One supposes that good relations between potentially conflicting groups need to be constantly renewed. So are you actively thinking about ways to show as you're doing just today that it's working and celebrating the cooperation that exists against the day when you may have a conflict and you'll need to draw upon the reserve of good will that you're hoping to build up."

Charlie O'Hara:

"Probably not enough to be quite honest with you. But, for example, we've shared like breakfasts with the Skagit County permitting people and brought our cultural resources planner there to explain cultural resource issues and how they can be better sensitive to when they may run into cultural issue resource issues when they're doing projects. We've participated jointly in some conferences but it's never enough. It's something that has to be continually worked."

Honoring Nations: Jon Cooley: Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance: White Mountain Apache Wildlife and Recreation Program

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Jon Cooley, former director of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation division, discusses how their program went about building capable institutions of self-governance in order to manage the Tribe's natural resources -- specifically wildlife -- in a sustainable manner.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Cooley, Jon. "Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance: White Mountain Apache Wildlife and Recreation Program." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Let's now turn our attention to the next theme, which is 'How to Build Capable Institutions of Self-Governance.' Here with us today is John Cooley, who's the director of Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which won High Honors in 2000, last year, for their Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation program. [I] had a chance to visit the reservation; it's simply fantastic, whether you know it or not. I guess it was last year you got $38,000 for a single elk tag. It's a wonderful blend of conservation and profit-making activities. Welcome, Jon."

Jon Cooley:

"Thanks, Andrew. Thanks also for the invitation and the hospitality. It's been great. It is an honor for me as well to be here.

As Andrew said, my talk is on 'Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance' and being the kind of analytical-type person that I am, I'll break that into two big pieces. Keep in mind now that I'm here today, in 2002, not because of what's really happened in the last few years or so. Our program today is a reflection of a lot of progress and a lot of hard work that has really gone on for decades at White Mountain. Basically, just to give you some really quick background on the program, our Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation division is a blend of two different things happening at the same time. On the regulatory side, of course, we're responsible for the sustainable management of tribal resources, wildlife resources and the conservation of those resources through our law enforcement branch. But on the other hand, we also serve as one of the most profitable, actually, of the tribal enterprises in terms of building a recreation and tourism economy for the tribe, which is really an important part of its entire business approach on the reservation there. So in terms of the building capable institutions part, as far as the White Mountain example is concerned, I think that really started with just building a tribal regulatory framework of, consisting of tribal codes, laws and regulations that regulate not only tribal member activities, as it relates to wildlife, but also non-tribal members coming on to the reservation, which clearly is an important first step. And then the other piece of that of course is building an organization and through the years we've gone through a lot of different changes. Today I'm happy to say that we have our professional branch of biologists consists...all but two people consist of tribal members, college-educated degree tribal members who act as our biologists both in terms of fisheries management and wildlife management. We started early on though, of course, bringing in skilled people from the outside using 638 [Public Law 93-638] contracts and whatever was available to us, working with the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] or the Fish and Wildlife Service to help build the capacity to manage our resources. But the vision all along was for us to do it and to do it the way we felt was appropriate.

Now in terms of... self-governance, to me, implies empowerment and independence. And in the case of White Mountain, I think it also meant just the idea of controlling its own destiny as it related to, again, both running businesses and managing its resources. And when you control your own destiny, I think that goes further in implying that you're incorporating tribal values into the way that you do that. So we try to remain and always have, I think, remained cooperative and we try to collaborate as much as possible with key players like the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Fish and Wildlife Service. But there's times when you run into a conflict between what may be national priorities or policies and what the tribe feels is important. So I think that's...when you get into those situations where you have conflicting goals and ideas of what the future should be is when you have to assert and in our case we've asserted this notion of self-governance.

And just, again in terms of background, two critical points I think in our development as an agency, the first was with the State of Arizona, this was back in I believe the '70s, early '80s when the state had jurisdiction over non-member hunting activities on the reservation where they were required to purchase state permits in addition to our tribal permit. So there was kind of a double-permitting system going on there. Plus the tribe -- because they were subject to the state regulations -- wasn't able to develop its recreation and tourism businesses the way it felt it should be able to. So we filed suit and through a series of different cases ultimately prevailed. That, in and of itself, allowed the tribe then to develop its trophy elk-hunting program that Andrew referred to earlier. I think the first hunt the tribe had they probably brought in like 20 clients at $700 apiece, which at that time was pretty outrageous. We since have built it into a million-dollar operation and in the process we're employing tribal members and returning revenues back to the tribe, so again it's a good thing for the tribe economically and it's reflective of their desire to advance their business in the way they feel is appropriate, while also providing for the sustainable management of its resources.

Another example is with Fish and Wildlife Service, recently. The conflict was endangered species and the way endangered species issue should be handled on tribal lands. And with the Endangered Species Act and the way it was being applied at the time, it was creating a lot of havoc as was some of your experience as well. And again, it got to a point where we felt that okay, we have this conflict in vision and goals here. And there's this approach sometimes from Washington that a one-size-fits-all [approach] can work, and it just didn't in our case and we challenged it. And the result of that was a cooperative agreement with Fish and Wildlife where they basically recognized our institutional capacity to manage. Now, of course, we had to build upon that because with that self-governance, of course, comes a lot of responsibility. Recent examples of that collaboration with Fish and Wildlife, is the Apache Tribe Recovery Program. It's one of...I think it's the only fish right now being considered for de-listing. We played an active role in that. We've also just recently completed the development of a Mexican Gray Wolf plan. It's a tribal plan though. It's not a Fish and Wildlife Service plan handed to the tribe. We developed it.

So again, this notion of self-governance, there's times when you -- in our case at least -- we've just had to assert this idea of wanting to do it ourselves and the reason is because we felt it was necessary to control our destiny and to make sure that the tribe's values were being reflected. I mentioned this idea of with self-governance comes a lot of responsibility. And I think in doing that it's not this idea of necessarily you're out there on your own, because it is important to still network and we do that as much as we can to utilize other agencies that are involved, whether it's Fish and Wildlife Service or the BIA or what have you. So the point is that we still try to foster those relationships as much as possible, because funding is usually a limiting factor, at least in our case, and it's important to maintain those ties. But in doing so you have to be loyal to your community and to their interests and to those values that should be guiding our vision and our focus as an agency. So we try, when we work with these outside agencies, I think it's important to maintain that community connection and being loyal to your vision basically, your mission. Throughout, whether it's on the business side for us or on the resource management side, sustainability of both is really critical and I think it's important when talking about sustainable, how do you do that, what does that mean?Well, I think setting goals and setting benchmarks for yourself and your staff and in our case as an agency that's really important. This gets back to the responsibility point as well and accountability and having as much of a focus on results is I think important because, again, if we can't show a return -- and I'm not just talking about a financial return -- if we can't show a return, in terms of sustainably managing the resources for the tribe, that's a return as well, then we're really not being effective I feel.

So stepping back, in closing, going outside of just our agency and I guess what's needed is to grow and be successful. There's also the tribal, macro-tribal organization that's involved as well and I think it's always a struggle for us, as I'm sure it is for every tribe, but consistency -- we were talking earlier. I think consistency is really important and I'm talking about just having the support, the community support and the political support, to allow agencies to thrive and to innovate is really important. And in the case of White Mountain, I think that's been there to allow us to move forward. Because obviously, without some kind of degree of reliability, it's difficult for I think any program to really build a foundation, number one, and to move beyond that foundation. And in terms of sustaining self-governance through time, economic viability is important and just in general vision and leadership is critical, a strong judicial system I think is really important. There needs to be that sense of fairness and just in general creating an environment as much as possible to allow organizations to be innovative and creative in how they do what they do because ultimately that's what drives people to do good things at the end of the day. So with that I'll close and take any questions you might have."

Audience member:

"This is a two-part question. I would imagine your agency has many staples. You've got tribal leaders, you've got clients who are citizens of your nation, clients who are not citizens of the nation, you've got probably citizens of the nation who aren't your clients but have some viewpoints of what it is that you do. The first part of the question is how do you as an agency take all of that information in, figure out what the harvest is going to be or what the yield is going to be, and where the hunting is going to take place and not take place? The second part of the question picks up on your closing remarks on what is it that the tribe or the council has done or that you've done that allows this innovation to take place?"

Jon Cooley:

"As far as the first question is concerned, the process that we go through, we do have separate and distinct regulations. I'll talk about hunting; for non-tribal members and for tribal members, deference is absolutely given to tribal members because if they're not happy, we're not running a business. That's the bottom line. When we do the regulations for tribal members, we do public meetings. They're not necessarily always well attended, but the point is that we do make an effort to try to get public input. That's a fine line though, because that public input is absolutely necessary, I think, to fine-tune regulations and that make you feel like we're being responsible and responsive. But at the same time, I'm always worried about management by public referendum if you will. In other words, there's skilled technicians that need to have as much influence and input I think on those, especially the critical game management issues. So that is a fine line that we walk, but whenever we take those regulations to the council who ultimately approves them before they're adopted, they'll always ask and want to know that there's been some level of public input. So I think that's important. Now as far as non-members are concerned, like I said, once we've done tribal...we have an idea of what our overall management objectives are, then we'll deal with the business side after we have a pretty good idea of how we're dealing with the tribal members. And we try to balance the two as much as possible because, again, we are running a business. That's how we fund our resource management is by these urban revenues that are generated. [I] hope that answered your question. You're going to have to remind me of the second."

Audience Member:

"It was talking about allowing your institution to thrive and innovate. What is it that's, at White Mountain Apache, whether it's on the council side or your side, that's allowed this to happen, to thrive and innovate as an institution? What has the tribe done well?"

Jon Cooley:

"Well, I think first of all there's a built in incentive. The economic incentive is the better we can do managing the resource, the more funds we can generate to do our management, and to hire good people and to hold them, and hopefully motivate them in whatever fashion we can. Now we don't pay big bonuses like Enron does, but we still...the point is that I take the opportunity, I can't speak for my predecessors, but to show them that, 'Hey, you guys can build your management programs if we can do well managing the resources that have the quality there that will attract this demand.' But the bottom line is we have to...our mission statement, the way it's written, it talks about the two major functions of our division. One is manage the resource in a sustainable fashion. Then, after we've done number one, but only after we've done number one, then we can talk about commercial success of the enterprise. So I think that's one thing. But the other thing is just be bold and...I'm bashful when, whether it's economic or political influences start to try to erode away at the morale or what have you is just hold tight and beat the drum and just remind people of what we're trying to do. This gets back into goals and vision and what we're trying to do and how successful we've been up to now and let's try to maintain the course as much as possible. I don't know about other places, but there is temptation sometimes for politics to kind of...to get into the organization. We try to fight that as much as possible, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Any other questions? Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Julia "Bunny" Jaakola: Turning Sovereignty into a Practical Reality: The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola shares how the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa turned sovereignty into a practical reality through leadership, community engagement, and collaboration with outside entities.

Resource Type
Citation

Jaakola, Julia "Bunny." "Turning Sovereignty into a Practical Reality: The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"The first person I would like to introduce -- comes from the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa -- is Bunny Jaakola. If you don't know, the Fond du Lac Band has won a number of awards, both in 1999 and in 2000, in 1999 for their off-reservation Indian foster care program that Bunny is involved with, and also in 2000 for their pharmacy online billing initiative. I don't know whether you're going to be discussing both in particular, but she certainly has a great deal of knowledge about 'How to Turn Sovereignty into a Practical Reality.' Welcome, Bunny."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"Thank you very much. It's a real privilege to be here. I thought that I was going to come and see some mild, nice weather coming from Minnesota, because we have a shortage of snow there. We're not having normal winter weather at all. But it's real nice being here in the sun. I'm Bunny Jaakola. I'm from the Fond du Lac Band of Minnesota Chippewa in northern Minnesota, and I work as the coordinator of social services for the tribe. I've been there almost 15 years now. I've been in the tribe a lot longer than that.

Fond du Lac has an enrollment of about 3,500 people and has grown to be the largest employer within the county of about 30,000 people. We have two casinos, one of which is in downtown Duluth. This came about as a partnership between the Band and the city council and continues to be a profitable endeavor.

Our chairman, Robert Peacock, sends his regards and regrets that he couldn't be here. I can also tell you that the chairman is very proud of the accomplishments of the staff at Fond du Lac. It's through his leadership and the support of other council members that we have been able to do what we do. A good idea for growth and development receives the attention necessary to proceed. The leaders recognized the merits of community input to determine needs, and that allows the workers to turn those needs into goals. These goals eventually become the actual steps in the overall development of services for our Indian people. Trust in the people who are hired to carry out such plans has been the impetus that retains long-term employees and nurtures the commitment to continue such projects.

Our leaders have acknowledged and continue to promote the value of working closely with the county and state neighbors to address some very hard issues, while not giving up our sovereignty. Collaboration is the key for Fond du Lac and the Minnesota conservation departments to establish hunting and fishing practices that are fair to everyone and yet retain the tribal rights of Indian people. The Fond du Lac education division strives to work closely with the public school systems and yet develop an American Indian educational system that will retain cultural values, traditions, and provide a better understanding for children of our very valuable history. Fond du Lac is also successfully carving out a tribal law enforcement program that will be able to work in conjunction with county, city, and state police. Efforts are currently at work to develop community response programs to provide options for the county court judges that will give a first or early Indian offender an opportunity for rehabilitation rather than jail time. The tentative plan requires no additional staff, nor additional funding.

More specifically to the human service division, a partnership was formed in 1994 with St. Louis County to provide Families First services to the Indian people who reside in Duluth -- and Duluth is about 25 miles away from our reservation. We have a contract with Arrowhead Juvenile Center since 1998 to provide an Indian employee to work with the Indian youth who are incarcerated there, trying to reduce the recidivism rate of the kids who are incarcerated. We have a contract with Carlton County that has been renewed each year since 1996 to maintain an on-reservation foster care program. We are just completing three years of contracts with the Duluth Family Collaborative to employee two social workers who provide wrap-around services to the Duluth Indian families.

The support I receive from Fond du Lac leadership has made it possible for me to actively participate in seven long years of the development, negotiation, and finally, the eventual signing of a tribal-state child welfare agreement with the State of Minnesota. The signing of this agreement has finally begun to change the ways counties are handling Indian child welfare cases in the state. The agreement provides four major opportunities for a better working relationship between the state and the 11 tribes in the state. They are, number one, ICWA training for all new child protection workers in the state. Two, it opens the door for additional contracts with the tribes, with counties, with the state. Three, it provides additional legislative input for tribal child welfare. Four, it instituted an eight-member ICWA compliance review team to monitor ICWA cases throughout the state.

One of the successful projects specific to Fond du Lac is the Fond du Lac Licensing and Placement Agency, which earned an Honoring Nations award in 1999. The success for the foster care program is that we were able to resolve both the jurisdictional questions and increase the number of Indian families interested in providing substitute care for those Indian children when necessary. It's a plain fact that Indian people work better with Indian providers. Because the jurisdiction laws of the state prohibit tribes from licensing off the reservation, we found a way to extend the sovereignty with full cooperation from the state. A corporation was formed and consists of Indian employees and other interested Indian people, including one tribal council member. A contract was developed and signed between this corporation and the reservation business committee. All personnel and accounting services are provided for the corporation by the tribe through this contract. In essence, you would call the corporation a step organization of the Fond du Lac Band. This program is also unusual because the corporation is licensed by the State of Minnesota. You can see how the program is actually an extension of sovereignty outside reservation boundaries. Through this contract, Fond du Lac employees have been able to impact the placements of Indian children in foster care all over northern Minnesota and further empower our existing structure.

Prior to the establishment of this arrangement, counties had few and some had no Indian foster homes. Counties had great difficulty recruiting Indian people for a variety of reasons, historical mistrust being the most obvious. This could be used as a convenient reason for not placing Indian children with Indian families as the Indian Child Welfare Act requires. It was also a lucrative income for existing foster parents, given the number of children that were being removed in the past. Since our start-up about 10 years ago, we have placed nearly 500 children in these Indian homes and provided about $3.5 million to Indian foster care providers. The future is bright for Fond du Lac's social services with our current ability to be reimbursed for the targeted case management that we've been doing since 1980, actually. Through successful negotiation by individuals committed to Indian people and a positive partnership with state employees, the road has been paved for tribes in Minnesota to finance their own social service departments in this manner. This is something that's just getting started, being reimbursed for target case management.

The award that was given to Fond du Lac in the year 2000 was the Pharmacy Online Billing Initiative. I don't know that much about the computer world but I will try to be brief to give a better description of what that project was. The resource patient management system, or the RPMS, is the existing Indian Health Service tool for the collection of data for all tribal accounts. This system has no capacity for billing. In time of rising costs and third-party payers, Fond du Lac recognized the need to change the system. The people at the human services department, or division, applied for and [were] awarded an IHS tribal management grant to attack just this problem. With the grant, Fond du Lac was able to purchase a computerized system for billing and record-keeping. A vendor was found for the development of the software that was actually implemented. Within a year we had an online pharmacy billing system that was compatible with the Indian Health Service and served the financial needs of Fond du Lac very well. The reality is that very soon after a check was received for $625,000 dollars that represented allowable billing for pharmaceuticals at Fond du Lac. This is a successful project that can be and is being replicated by other tribes. Some of the more tangible benefits that come from that particular project is an expanded pharmacy program, an optometry clinic for the Indian people in our area, a summer day camp for at least 120 kids all summer from early June until the end of August.

A few of the words I used to describe Fond du Lac are the following: We have people who have a vision; it's radar. They have that radar out there and they listen for ideas and they push to get them into place. Collaboration, negotiation and the nurturing of relationships, respect and trust, acknowledgement of existing limitations; knowing what we're not going to give away, knowing what the other party is not going to give away and working from there. Investment in membership equals long-term, committed workers. Building and nurturing a rapport with key people not only locally, but statewide and nationally. Development of resources for funding in partnerships, engaging participants in the actual planning, and thinking outside the box."

Honoring Nations: Rick George: The Umatilla Basin Salmon Recovery Project: Building on Success

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Rick George, former Program Manager for Rights Protection and Environmental Planning with the Confederated tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, shares what he sees as the foundational characteristics of the Umatilla Basin Salmon Recovery Project and other examples of successful, sustainable nation-rebuilding initiatives that Umatilla has developed.

People
Resource Type
Citation

George, Rick. "The Umatilla Basin Salmon Recovery Project: Building on Success." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 11, 2004. Presentation.

Amy Besaw:

"And next up we have Rick George from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation. Rick is the -- excuse me while I look -- environmental protection and rights protection manager for the nation."

Rick George:

"Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an honor to be able to speak to you this afternoon. I'm here at the behest of Donald Sampson, he sends his apologies and he also sends me to give them to you. We lost a tribal leader a few weeks ago and he was a very close friend of mine and he was my boss and I want to honor him today with my words.

One of the most important lessons I've taken from these last couple of days -- and I was not prepared for it, it's not something I considered in coming here -- was the lesson from the younger generation. The youth, the young adults, the recognition that this program has given them and the role models that you provide not just your youth but all of us. I applaud that and I think that if there is a standard of measure of success of this Harvard program of honoring nations it is that. It is that you have recognized the younger generation and you have singled them out in a national award recognition program that I think supersedes all of the other recognition processes and programs and things that I'm aware of. And I just hats off to you all. It's been a pleasure, it's been an honor to be here with you for the last couple of days.

And for that reason I just want to say thanks to Harvard and I want to say thanks to Ford and to the Casey foundations. I don't know if you have other supporters, I'm sure you do, but just watching the younger folks here I don't think there's a better way to represent the success of your funding, of your contribution, of your support and of the work of the people that make this program what it is. So thank you very much. And I think when you talk about how to sustain programs, how to make good things continue, that's one of the first things you do, you recognize them. You honor them and you give thanks for them and that's what we're doing and that's what this Harvard program does. So I think that's one of the first key components in maintaining and actually building on successes.

I work for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, which is located in northeastern Oregon, made up of three tribes, the Walla Walla, the Cayuse and the Umatilla. At one time, prior to treaty, they utilized country that is now part of the southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon and far beyond that area. The tribe has been honored by the Harvard program, high honors for a project called the Umatilla Basin Project. It's a project that restored stream flows to the river that flows through the heart of the reservation after 70-plus years of having no stream flows for six months out of the year and then putting salmon back in those waters, three different stocks of salmon. The river has gone from dry for six months out of the year for 70-plus years and it has gone from zero salmon for 70-plus years to 30,000 adult salmon returning each year and to a flowing river 12 months out of the year. It was conceived of, negotiated, and implemented by the Confederated Tribes.

The tribe was awarded also high honors for a salmon foundation funding program that's operated by a tribal consortium that includes the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, also includes the Yakima, the Nez Pierce and the Warm Springs tribe and that's the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission out of Portland. And the tribe received honors recognition for its cultural resources protection program, a program that has just been a phenomenal success on the reservation as far as being a demonstration for Indian people at home and for tribes across the country, and in some cases across the world, for how to protect your cultural artifacts, your sacred places, by doing it yourself, by taking over the expertise, the responsibility and the obligation and taking it away from folks that have been trying to do it for a century and a half.

I think there are several foundational characteristics in addition recognizing and rewarding successful programs that the Umatilla tribes use day in and day out to make sure that successes continue and that they actually grow into new successes. One of those is vision and leadership. And I am fortunate enough today to be here at Harvard with the chairman of the Confederated Tribes, the chairman of the board of trustees, chairman Antone Minthorn. Antone, would you stand up please? [Applause] Chairman Minthorn has been on the board of trustees for 20 years and when you talk about vision and leadership in our country, in our part of the world, Chairman [Antone] Minthorn is the vision and the leadership that has guided the Umatilla Basin Project, the salmon and water restoration project, from start to now. It's his vision, it's his leadership that makes sure that that program is well understood and honored by both tribal people and the off-reservation, non-Indian people. And one of the things you get the opportunity to do when you come back to a program like this is learn from other people. And yesterday during Chairman [Anthony] Pico's moving presentation, Antone looked at me and he elbowed me in the side and he said, 'Now that chairman has a good speech writer.' [Laughter] So I'm going to take that home and I will learn from that.

Vision and leadership -- it is the foundation to make sure that you continue on with your successes and that you honor them as you should. Funding, obviously you've got to have funding and it's got to be stable funding to keep the program going and to allow it to grow and bud off into new successes. I think it's equally important, though, to recognize -- and this tribe recognizes it very well -- that because you may need a quarter of a million dollars to get the project going and implemented, you don't need that much money and you potentially don't need the same staff to keep it going. In fact, it's going to change. Funding levels need to change with that transition and often supervision of the project needs to change, too. Umatilla Basin Project is a good example. Once that was negotiated, congressional legislation passed, funded, implemented, meaning it was constructed and operational, the tribe then transferred it out of the program that I work and into a different program that has the expertise to operate and maintain a project like that. That leaves us available to do different work, to do new work.

Commitment. One of the things that you won't see successful programs without is commitment. If you think about what you've heard today and yesterday from the tribal leaders -- young and a little bit older than that -- one of the things you've heard is that none of these projects were one-year projects. They weren't five-year projects. They were decades-long projects. Commitment from tribal leadership and from the tribal membership is absolutely critical. New successes have to have that same level of commitment. And I think that new successes become easier once you have successes to build on and that level of commitment, that institutional investment that runs from tribal policy down to tribal membership, is easier to come by once you break that barrier of major successes.

One of the things the tribe has been really good at doing is moving off of successes, leaving them where they should be to be implemented, taken care of, nurtured, funded, but then moving the people, the policy priorities, on to new projects and programs to create new successes. In the Umatilla Basin Project, once that project was operational, the tribe immediately stepped over the mountains to the next river which had the same problem, an off-reservation river but a river that the tribe maintains treaty-reserved rights to fish in. Same problems, agricultural diversions dried up the river, it fuels the economy of that river basin, the Walla Walla river basin in Oregon and Washington, and the tribe simply stepped over and used the same model that worked in the Umatilla Basin. And that's not a technical-fix model, that's a 'how do you work with people?' model. It's a sit down with people and negotiate a resolution and then figure out together how to make it happen, how to get the millions, and in this case probably more like $150 or 200 million to make it happen. And the tribe itself coughed up $2.5 million of its own money. First went back to Congress to get a change in the legislation so that they could do that, $2.5 million over the course of the last three years to contribute to the federal agency that's planning and designing the project. So applying successful models: you get one, you move it out, and you do it again. And you continue doing it and you learn every time you do it how to do it better. The Umatilla tribes have just done great work at using that model concept and moving it out.

And lastly, and this may well be the most important component that I know we've learned back home on the Umatilla Indian reservation, and that is you have to have an intimate connection to the Indian people. That's another thing you think about with the projects, the people that you've listened to today, that defines every project I heard was an absolutely intimate connection to Indian people from start to finish. Without that connection to Indian people you will drift and your project won't have that foundation back on the reservation that will allow all the other things to happen, continued funding, continuity of funding, continuity of it being a priority at the political level within tribal governments and that communication connection to tribal people is just absolutely foundational.

And finally, in closing, I want to say that Chairman Minthorn came out here for whatever reason, his administrative staff at home must have told him that he was going to speak so he has a wonderful speech prepared, he's wanting to give it so give him a call back home and I'm sure that he will give you his speech over the telephone [Laughter]. We can do a conference call; it's a wonderful speech. Not as good as what we heard yesterday, but it ranks right up there.

I want to say thank you and I want to say that this two days has been very, very instructive for myself. We have learned things that we'll take back to the reservation and we're very eager to continue to work with you all and to be in the presence of, as was said by the speaker before me, the elite of tribal leadership and tribal people. Thank you very much."

Michael K. Mitchell: A History of the Akwesasne Mohawk

Producer
Native Nation Building: Governance and Development undergraduate course
Year

Grand Chief Michael Mitchell of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne offers students a broad overview of the governance history of the Akwesasne Mohawk and the efforts his people have made during his time in office to exercise true self-governance and rebuild their nation.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "A History of the Akwesasne Mohawk." Native Nation Building: Governance and Development undergraduate course (faculty: Dr. Ian Record). American Indian Studies program, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 31, 2008. Presentation.

Michael K. Mitchell:

"[Mohawk language] What I said in my language is it's an honor to be here and I'm very nervous anytime I stand before a class that seem to be at the university level that have garnered so much knowledge from books that I don't quite know how I could relate, but I'm going to try.

I come from a territory that got dissected by the U.S./Canadian border. Half of Akwesasne is located in upstate New York and the other half is in Canada. Three quarters of what's in Canada is in the Province of Quebec and a quarter of it is in the Province of Ontario. So we have five jurisdictions on the outside perimeters of our reservation.

As I'm going along, I may be asking you some questions because I'm working on almost like an autobiography of my upbringing and political experience and a question I have is if any of you already know, what year did the American war of Independence end? Does anybody know? I should have you on Jay Leno. In the late 1700s, right? Because later on, it lead into the War of 1812, but around that time was when they put the international border. And for some reason it split our Mohawk community in half. So part of us became Americans and the other part Canadians. So you have brothers and sisters, one's American and one's Canadian at least by the standards on the outside.

We always consider ourselves to be nation members and citizens of the Mohawk Nation. And I don't know how much you would learn about the Iroquois in your American Indian studies but the Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations. And the nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy are the Mohawk, the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Senecas and Tuscaroras. At the time, what we called the 13 Fires or the 13 Colonies, when Europeans were starting to settle in North America [want to break for a minute?] they met and got permission from the Iroquois Confederacy and established relationships with the Haudenosaunee as to where European settlers would take up residence. It started with the Dutch, Germans and later the English and each group that came, each group of settlers that came made treaties with the Iroquois.

Now in making these agreements there was one particular agreement that we know very well that was made in Albany, New York. It was called the two-row wampum because our people recorded our history in wampum belts. And this is a story that our people talk about in our earliest relations with European settlers. There was a belt that had two rows and our elders said that at that time it signified two ships, two vessels. One was a ship and one was a canoe and what they told the European settlers is that, "˜On this ship you came to this land to escape from religious prosecution, from not being able to practice your governments the way you would want to be represented and so in this land we're going to give you that freedom to do so, speak your language, practice your traditions, your culture, everything that you would like to be as a people will remain on that ship and in our canoe will be the same thing. Our governance, systems of government, our languages, our cultures, our traditions, our ceremonies, our religious beliefs will be in our canoe and they will go down the river of life together in parallel. I will never make laws, my nation will never make laws for your people and you will never do the same with us.' So it was that kind of a relationship. "˜But throughout time, we'll always be there to help you.' And as it was in the earliest times, Europeans were not aware of their surroundings, they were not aware of the many types of foods that they could cultivate and eat. So the Native Americans were the first ones to show them, the first time that they would ever have experienced squash, pumpkin, corn, beans and down the line, as well as medicines. In this exchange, Europeans showed them how to hunt, utensils, farming equipment, etc., so there was this exchange.

Anyway, in those days where they came from they told a story about being ruled by kings and queens, nobles, barons and peasants, religious prosecutions. So one of the earliest historical leaders in this country was Benjamin Franklin and in his earliest writings he talked about sitting at the council fire of the Iroquois and he watched how they governed their people, for it was something drastically different than what he was accustomed to and he invited others to come and observe when nations got together and talked about governance.

Their leaders were called [Mohawk language], chiefs. And contrary to the way politics are run today for both of us, because I'm an elected leader, usually have a term of three to five years. But in those days a Native American chief would be put up by the women of his nation. We all had our own clans. I belong to the Wolf clan. Among the Mohawks there's three major clans, the Wolf, Turtle and Bear. And so it would be the women of that nation is was said that would watch men form the time they crawl on the ground to the time they walk to the time they hunt to the time they marry, the women of that nation would know and judge the character of a man; how he provides, how he related, how he conducted himself as a human being, as a family person. If he was a good hunter, if he was a good speaker, if he knew ceremonial, cultural things that belonged to his nation, then they knew he would be a good leader. And so he didn't have to make promises to say, "˜I want to be a chief.' The women already had made up their mind that he would be a good leader.

And so when they picked a man to be the chief, the women had a fair notion what would make for a good leader and in them days, and we still have that system of governance today, a man had three chances in his lifetime, in his adult life, in his leadership life to be a good leader. If he did something against what would harm the people of his nation, the women would come to see him three times and straighten it out. He would have three chances to retain his chieftainship. And on the third time, they would have a head warrior with them to take his title away. It was considered a disgrace if a chief ever had to have his title taken away.

And with our tradition, a man who was a chief was given a headdress that had deer antlers and he carried that, he wore that in council meetings and in ceremonies and important events when they met with other nations. And so that symbol of office, if there ever came a time that he would be removed from office, there was a term called "˜de-horning a chief.' They would take his title away by taking his antlers away from him. He would never be recognized as a leader again ever in his lifetime. And so that was the system of governance for us. Then European governments came and said, "˜We have a better system.' And I'm going to talk about my experiences on the Canadian side, but there's parallels on both sides.

In Canada in 1867, they created a federal legislation called the Indian Act. It had three major objectives or principles. One was to Christianize the Indian nations, make farmers out of them, and educate them; what they call educating the Indian-ness out of them, make them non-Indians. And so they set up these residential schools. They would round up all the Native kids off their territories, send them hundreds of miles away in a church-run school and those kids wouldn't see their parents until eight, ten years later they would be allowed to come home. That was a system that ran and stopped probably around 1971, '73, they started closing off the so-called residential schools in Canada.

Did it work? Many times it did, for our people returned home strangers, no language any longer, no awareness of their customs and traditions, cultural values, can't speak the language, but they were educated. And the thing that happened with many is that they were lost. They couldn't mingle with their people, associate with them, but they couldn't survive in the cities, outside the reservations because now they had lost something very important, their spirit as Native Americans. So for many to get home, they had to relearn or get re-educated as to who they were. The churches played a strong part de-Indianizing of our people because all these schools were run by religious institutions.

Some significant things that happened is that when they started catching on as to the effects of residential schools in that just under a hundred years in Canada, is that suicide rates, social conditions prevailed on the majority of people who came out of residential schools. Suicide rates are high. In Canada there's 30 million people, population in the country. We form the majority of the prison populations in Canada because one other factor that was crucially important, alcohol wasn't meant for our people to touch. In the time that they drank they became...they lost their memory, they committed a crime, they killed somebody, they robbed something that would land them in prison, lifetime, 20 years. And so that became a big social impact in our development, progress as people.

We are now starting to realize the consequences because the values that we were taught as Native Americans, as Mohawks in nation for us, the virtue of what makes for a good person was in our cultural teachings, and when they took that away from us and tried to make us into something else, we couldn't adjust there, either. And so in Akwesasne, those that are on the Canadian side wound up in a school strange enough called 'Spanish.' On the American side they wound up in a residential school, which escapes me for the minute. Anybody ever hear of Jim Thorpe? What school did he go to? Carlisle [Indian School], that was the school where they sent our people on the American side, and a lot of our elders went to school with Jim Thorpe.

So they would return home. Now there are some people that use their education and they did make something of themselves but in between that was a sad story. So those of us that got an education within our community, there was a fight all the way through. I was raised by my grandparents and they gave me the cultural teachings, the language, ceremonial songs, what makes for a good person. Many of the stories of the nations that I find myself now being an elder in a community of sorts and as strange as it is, the governance that I told you a little earlier about how people get put up, my mother is a clan mother and they are the ones who put up leaders. And so I would say from the time I was small being raised that I had retained all these teachings that I was going to be a traditional chief, where the women would put you in office.

In the 1970s to "˜80s in our community, there was always turmoil between the elected leaders and the traditional people. And then for us there was elected leaders on the Canadian side and there's elected leaders on the American side and there was the Mohawk Nation traditional chiefs. So if it wasn't bad enough to have five governments on the outside, we had three inside the reservation. And like the Hatfields and McCoys, the elected leaders were usually the Christian leaders and the traditional chiefs were people who they called them the Long House people. They were the people who maintained the ceremonies, the language and the customs and traditions and they adhere to a traditional form of governance as I had told you.

Anyway, as in any society when they don't get along there would be skirmishes. So the nation people said, "˜We want to find a way to exchange our cultures in the event that maybe we could make for a better world in the next generation. So we're going to exchange some of our people.' So they send me over to the elected side and in 1982 I became, I was elected as a chief in the elected system and at that time I was probably the first one. We were referred to as pagans because we weren't Christian and the church taught them that if you're not a Christian you must be a pagan. So that was a very catchy name on council by my peers, to have a pagan chief. Not that I really knew much about it, so it didn't really bother me. But as I later found out, some cruel things. The priest in our reservation was a Mohawk from another reservation and so when you get somebody believing in something really hard, they espoused a lot of hatred and that existed in my time growing up. If you weren't a Christian Mohawk, then you were something of a lower class. My duty and responsibility was not only to be a good leader, but to change that whole image and that whole attitude of what makes for a good Mohawk person.

So two years later...they've only got two-year terms; we had another election. In that time, I looked at our elected governance, chief and council, the way they conducted their business. They didn't have any public meetings, they didn't show the community any of the minutes of their meetings so they know how much education dollars, how much housing dollars and welfare and house...so it was all like a big mystery. And usually it's a favorite; some people get catered to. If you elect a person and you represent so many of a large family, you're looked after. If they didn't think that you were supporting particular people on council, you didn't kind of work your way up the ladder.

So it was that kind of governance I wasn't really used to. So I started taking minutes of our meetings and I would show them around. Finally I did a small newspaper, I would ship them out into the community. I became very well versed on information that had to get into the community. So I took it upon myself -- because that was my tradition -- to take this information and provide it to the community. Now for some reason, the community liked having this information even though I was traditional and the next year they wanted me to become the Grand Chief of the reservation.

Now I'm going to go back a little bit. The first time I went for elections and I was put up, our traditional people don't vote. So I had to get elected by the other side. I still don't know how that happened, but it did and I got in. So the second time around when I competed for the Grand Chief position, a Grand Chief is elected among the general populace. A District Chief is elected from his own area. So I thought I was safe there. And to jump in that short time was a little difficult...and it was rough for somebody that came from the traditional side of the community. I got beat up going to work. The office that I had was occupied by protestors who didn't believe that the Grand Chief should be traditional. My life was threatened. And so it didn't kind of work out at the beginning, but if you have a thing in your mind that you want to try to govern, I had to mix my upbringing into my politics. So I found different avenues, different venues where I would get information to the community, "˜This is our situation.' And as I'm trying to fight off my opponents, I also had to fight off the governments on the outside. So I got together with the chiefs and we had some sessions, normally like you would anywhere else where you decide to get everything out in the open. And I convinced them that we're here for the same reasons -- to have effective governance.

Don't forget about the Indian Act that I told you, because not that long ago in our community the Indian agent ran everything. He controlled the chief and council, told them how to vote, what is the important issues and how they should govern, how they should make decisions. When I was coming out of high school was the last few days of the Indian agent was around in our reservation but the effects, government policy, everything was decided in Ottawa. If the chief and council made a decision about something, whether it's a school or a health facility, anything that would benefit the community, you had to ask for permission through the Department of Indian Affairs and they would let you know if you could do it. I was very much opposed to not having the community be the ones who decide on issues and I advocated that the people had to get involved.

Now we live on a reservation as I told you that's half in Canada, half in the States. For me to come from Cornwall Island, Ontario, I have to cross through the customs to the American side of the reservation to get to St. Regis, Quebec. If I have to go to Snye, I have to go back to the American side and get back into Quebec. So every day I'm going through borders. And when we had problems crossing borders, I convinced the community that we should stand up for ourselves. After a few meetings we got people worked up, we shut down the international bridge; fifty of us went to jail. But that was the first time in "˜70s that in Canada people started, Native people started organizing themselves, speaking up for themselves, and that was the time that changes started to happen. Then we started getting in touch with our brothers on the American side.

One of the things that happened, we affected government policy. I convinced Ottawa to allow us to hire our own people because they had non-Native coming on the reservation to be our education director, to take notes in terms of social programs, to take health information back and statistics that they kept and nobody really was comfortable with that kind of relationship. In the space of two years, I was able to convince the governments on the outside to allow young people who were coming out of colleges and universities to come home and work for us, stay home. They became our administrators, they became our teachers, they became our police people, our conservation, environment...we had jobs of all kinds, but they weren't really our people that were working there. So that was the changes that came about in the "˜80s. As the changes started to happen, confidence came back to our people, that confidence and tradition.

There's something important I left out, an event that happened in 1984, which was just as I was starting my second term, my first term as Grand Chief. The Pope came to Canada and he had asked the bishops that... he was tired of the churches in U.S. and Canada every time a figure like that would come around they would dress up the Indians, put the war bonnets on and put them on horses just the way you see them in cowboy and Indian movies. That was the perception. So as easterners we were not very much aware of the prairie Indians, they still would put western headdresses on our elders and parade them around. Well, the Pope that we had passed away just a few years ago, Pope John Paul. He didn't want that. He said, "˜I want to see real people. I want to see them how they do their spiritual practices, I want to experience it.' So the priests on my reservation wrote to them and said, "˜We just elected a pagan over here so I'll send his name up.' And I got a call from the Vatican and they said, "˜Would you be interested in putting a ceremony on for the Pope?' And I agreed. I went back to the Long House and I told them what had been requested and in their wisdom they said, "˜Maybe it would make for better relations because as long as they don't understand they've got hatred in their hearts.' And so we put together a small group. We went to Midland, Ontario to do this ceremony for the Pope.

When I got there, just imagine what it must have been in Woodstock when they had this great big celebration over there, change it around, the Pope was the main attraction but there were about I'd say 70,000, 80,000 people in these foothills, cameras, everything was broadcast worldwide. And this event that he was trying to pursue was one that he was pushing for all religions to have greater tolerance and understanding of each other. And this one mission that he had in North America was to understand the Native spiritual practices better. And so I worked with the Ojibwes and the Crees in Canada with the Mohawks to put together this ceremony. And we put together a healing ceremony that consisted of smudging, sweet grass, sage and tobacco, the three main things that we use to conduct our ceremonies. I'm a singer. I sang with a group of other young guys. And so the whole event was televised and when it come up to putting the words to him and singing and putting him through the ceremonies, the Pope started to have tears come down. And when we got done and everything was translated to him what we were saying, I knew that it had a profound effect on him.

So when it was over, and by the way about 500 perhaps maybe more than that of the same people that called us down and called us pagans were in the audience out there somewhere. I know because I put buses on to get them there and I paid for their gas as chief so I know somewhere they're out there. And it was slightly uncomfortable because they said, "˜Well, now that we've got a pagan chief we know we have to go out there. The previous chief would have given us money.' Well, I did give them money and I put buses on and I helped them get there so I knew somewhere they were in the audience.

But what happened that day was, the speech that he gave at the end of the ceremony where he said, "˜The European people that came across the salt waters, the religious, the churches that came across believed that the Native Americans in this country were godless, soulless people and ever since then we have advocated to everyone that the only one way they would be human beings if they became Christians.' Then he put down his papers and he looked right at them and he said, "˜That was wrong. For I have experienced a religious experience from these people that I want to talk about.' He proceeded to lay everything out for them saying, "˜The churches have been wrong. The White man has been wrong,' he says, "˜to even have thinking that you've got to be like us.' Then he talked about the residential schools, talked about the education systems. By the time he got done, he offered an apology on behalf of the Church. And then he told everybody, he said, "˜I know there were ways that you have shown the distaste of your own practices. I'm going to ask you to go home, incorporate your traditional teachings in the Church.' And from that time on for me life became easier because the protest, the occupations, the beating have stopped and I was given a chance to govern.

We went to the churches, me for the first time, to give talks like this about peace and brotherhood, because for me in my upbringing we also had a spiritual leader. He had a name, referred to as [Mohawk language] but we only refer to him as the Peacemaker because with him he came to our people like close to a thousand years ago at a time when there was warfare going on between nations. And he advocated the great peace, the Great Law of Peace where people would put away their weapons and always find a way in whatever you do advocate a more peaceful way to live. Now you also had in the Great Law of Peace the constitution and that constitution advocated fairness in representation, fairness in governance. The people were the ones who made decisions and put their leaders up more to be like servants and so [Mohawk language], a chief was really a person who followed the wishes of his Nation. And this is when I was telling about women wound up being the ones who elected their leaders. Very interesting concept: five nations in unity governing on the basis of peace on the law that was known as the Great Law of Peace.

This was the meetings that Benjamin Franklin sat in and he brought his people along to say, "˜Look at these people making decisions and look at the way they govern and the way they advocate their governance, is that they would find a way to speak, counsel, make decisions all on the basis of peace.' And so they influenced the Constitution of the United States. I offer you these tidbits of information because I know you're going to go back and check, where did this all occur. Well, today it's pretty well a foregone conclusion that these events did happen and that there were these early influences, but with us when governments met and they came to a decision, nations would have to all unanimously agree. That's something that Benjamin Franklin said, "˜My people cannot ever do.' So they opted out for majority decision. So that was the difference in our lifestyle back home in governance.

In my time, I tried to cooperate a combination of our traditional cultural practices in a modern elected governance system. And that law called the Indian Act in Canada, I opted out of the provisions of that so that I could replace it with some strong, Mohawk-flavored governance models; giving the power back to the people. That's why in 1982, '84 I was asked by the elders to consider being a chief maybe for a term or two just so that they could turn things around and maybe politics would get a little better. And as I said a while ago, in 2006 the second time that I retired, people kept putting me back in office and they always said, "˜For one more term, until we can find and develop new leaders that will take your place.' And I began to find myself stuck to a position that I was only supposed to be there on a temporary basis. Now mind you, the excitement of governing, the challenge of representing and serving your people is a fire that is always going to be ignited inside you if you're a leader. And so I agreed to keep going.

Now I serve on the advisory board for the Native Nations Institute, but I also serve in advisory capacity to many other developments, both American and Canadian, Native American leaders. Offer them advice based on many years of experience. I wasn't...I'm not going to lie to you, it wasn't always a peaceful leadership style based on peace. When I talked about shutting down international roads and bridges, took over islands but just to get people involved in a non-violent way without guns, without clubs, but simply assert yourself. And so I started doing this across Canada and people rose and life is better when you can speak for yourself and nations can speak out. And that was a time for us that led up to 2006 when I finally made my decision to pursue a private life, more or less. Elections are coming around back home next year and they said, "˜You had enough rest. You should consider coming back.'

Well, presently I'm working on my book. Basically I made a very fast cut through of my experiences but in more greater detail of events that happened in the United States with Indian Country, events that happened in Canada, because I offer certain parallels that are very distinguishable. But my survival in politics led to my knowing my traditions and my culture and my language, taking the best of the non-Native world and combining it, pushed education a lot but the social conditions in our community has improved. But being on that border, we got famous for something else. I don't know if you can guess at it but whenever there's a border there, what's likely to happen? Anybody take a guess? Smuggling took place and in a big way because we've got 100 miles of the St. Lawrence River of islands and in the dark of night, our people know that territory inside out. And so it started with cigarettes. Canadian companies, cigarette manufacturers would reroute their cigarettes from Buffalo, New York to Pennsylvania to New Jersey to Boston and make a big circle and then would bring them back in and they were using our people to bring them across the border. It wasn't long before people caught on and they started doing their own smuggling. It's still going on. So I had that to contend with. Pretty soon motorcycle gangs called the Hells Angels in Montreal started, "˜Hey, there's a profit to be made here,' so they started enticing people to bring drugs across. And then when that started, some of that drug stayed in the community. So for us it was always an ongoing battle.

When 9/11 happened, and if some of you have a good memory CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC all had giant screens with a map of Akwesasne saying, "˜Those terrorists came through that Indian reservation.' For two weeks that was going on. They were reporting that it had to be this complicated, unique Native community where they might have come through. The more they talked about it, the more they convinced themselves that that in fact happened. It wasn't until maybe two, three weeks later that they found out they didn't come through there, that they were in fact in the country. I was Grand Chief at the time and you will not know your gut, the heart, what it felt like thinking they crossed and killed so many people because of this border. And it's a border that much unlike...I went to visit the Tohono O'odham Nation here. Their reservation is the same way. Part of it is in the United States, part of it is in Mexico and they've got 85 miles of nation territory they have to watch over. People are coming over, but not to the extreme or as dangerous as people coming from Canada into the States because they have one thing in mind, smuggle something over. So now our concerns is explosives, guns, terrorism types, finding a way through our reservation.

So that became the greatest concern. So we made up our own border patrol program. We added to our police force. Now we work with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs, State Troopers and it's a program called IBET [Integrated Border Enforcement Teams], integrated policing. And that's becoming another big part of our reputation, coincide with the smuggling concern.

But all in all, you advocate to your young people, "˜Go to school, get an education, seek something out that you want to be but come back home.' And that thing that started in the 1980s is still going on today. And so I've just given you a very fast run-through of what life is like for where I come from. I don't know how much of it you can digest in a short time, but you invited me here to talk a little bit about where you're from and what you do or what you were doing and that's the story of Akwesasne. By the way, Akwesasne in Mohawk means "˜land where the partridge drums,' and at the earliest times along the St. Lawrence you still see quite a few, I guess you call them grouse, partridges, from that family, very prevalent on the St. Lawrence. And they call our place the home of the partridges. Anyway, that's my story."

Ian Record:

"I've got a question about...you mentioned just now the jurisdictional agreements you have around law enforcement to try to control the smuggling and all that. I've had conversations with you before where you talked about the kind of early origins of when Akwesasne started really asserting their jurisdiction back over their own territory and I wonder if you could talk about that, because at least originally Canada and the provinces and even the states weren't too approving of that, were they?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"That's right. On the Canadian side the Mounties enforce...Royal Canadian Mounted Police enforce the federal law and the Provincial Police, Ontario Provincial Police and the Quebec Provincial Police enforce the provincial laws. That was on the river and on the mainland. And they enforced the Criminal Code of Canada. And so as complicated as our territory is there was no room...we had a Native police force but they weren't giving them any respect. As a matter of fact there's a term I still remember. They called them "˜window dressing cops.' If they won't let you do anything but they were still complaining that they weren't arresting our people on driving intoxicated or speeding. They didn't keep up their quota so they had a very narrow definition of what makes for a good peacekeeper. And when I became chief, I wanted to see that change. But I found nowhere where that would happen. They had everything cornered off.

As a matter of fact, the time that I became chief our people were being arrested on the river for fishing, traditional fishing whenever they would net and have enough for their families, put away... The laws on the outside said, "˜You can't do that anymore.' So they started taking the boats, the motors, the nets, confiscating, making seizures. So when I became chief, our people came to me and said, "˜What has changed so much that we can't practice our traditions any longer?'

Well, I went to see the person who was the...the officer who was making these seizures on the river, in the middle of the river. I stopped him with a few other boats that were traveling with me, let's put it that way, and as nicely as I was talking to him asking him, "˜We don't need provincial, federal license to fish. It's in our treaties.' He says, "˜That's in the past. From now on you will learn to get a provincial license.' So I says, "˜But we don't have to.' And I was diplomatically I was trying to be...he was just squashing, didn't care about it. So I took it to the next level and I said, "˜Look, sir, if you don't tell us where the boats are that I can go get them, I might have to take your boat.' He just laughed. As soon as I give the signal, our guys are waiting, they shut the motor off and took his equipment out, tied a rope and we towed his boat back to St. Regis to the police station and we seized the conservation officer's boat.

When I got back, then I phoned Toronto, the main office of the Ministry of Natural Resources and told them what I had done and actually they said, "˜This could be an international situation, crisis of sorts so what can we do?' I said, "˜I guess we have to negotiate the release of our boats, half a dozen of them.' They just had elections in Ontario so there was new people there and they said, "˜Well, that man, the officer, is he a hostage, are you holding him in a hostage situation?' I said, "˜No. I'm holding his boat hostage.' "˜Well, is he allowed to go home?' I said, "˜Yep. If he can walk or swim, he can get back across the river, but the current is very strong, so he's going to stay here until we get our boat back.' So pretty well half the night we're negotiating back and forth. The Premiere gets on the phone, he says, "˜I want to put an end to this. I know you don't need fishing licenses to fish in your traditional territories. I'm well aware of that.' He says, "˜So I've got people looking for your boat.' As it wound up it was in Toronto. So he says, "˜We'll have them back by 9:00 in the morning.' So they returned all the boats. Naturally it helped my leadership because I was able to resolve the situation without any violence of sorts. And the same man that made these seizures was the same man that was made to bring them back the next day.

I wanted to see our own people become Conservation Officers so I went back to Quebec federal government in Ontario. "˜Nobody,' he says, "˜We never heard of that before.' Being an international community I picked up the phone, I phoned Albany, New York. They had a state troopers, conservation police training. I said, "˜Can I send some people down to be trained to become Conservation Officers?' They called back and said, "˜I don't see why not. These are dual citizens, you can do that.' So I sent two. Six months later they got home. They had the state trooper Stetson hats, 'Dirty Harry'-type .9 mm pistols, everything that's totally legally in Canada that's...they came back and they're certified police force and they hit the waters to start patrolling.

By that time we had set up our Mohawk Justice Court, we had laws that I had registered with the nation council and they started executing. And that raised in the community a perception that we could take care of ourselves, that we could have law and order and it could be done with our own people. And the attitude on the outside changed too. We didn't always have to be fighting each other. The right people came and the relationship led to us having more police under our jurisdiction, having our own justice, having our own courts and because I was able to diplomatically negotiate these things, it became a much better environment for us, on the river and on land.

I like being, talking about being a good strong advocate, a good leader, but some funny things happened along the way. Those two conservation officers that returned home, within that same week they were on patrol, they got a call from the island I was from and an incident had taken place. I'm in the main village with elders. We were talking about how we could build a new seniors' home for them and they walk in. So all the elders made a big fuss over them. "˜These are the people we've heard about. They've trained and now they're out there on the river, they're looking after our people and are giving out licenses for non-Natives and they're making them buy licenses from us. What a change! And they give them cookies and milk and everything.' They said, "˜We're really here to talk to the grand chief.' So I went over and said, "˜What's up?' He said, "˜Sir, there's been a murder on the island where you're from. We've investigated and found out that somebody in your family is involved and we need to talk to you outside.'

Geez, when you get news like that the first thing you do is boom, it hits you right here. Did somebody die in my family? Did something happen? Did somebody in my family do something? I went outside and he said, "˜There's a farmer up there who called us. We got there and found out that his pig had been killed. And the pig had piglets, six of them. They were all killed too.' And he said, "˜Chief, it was your dog that killed them. You're under arrest.' I said, "˜What?!' The first person on the reservation when they got back from training that was arrested was me and I tried to dispute it. I said, "˜Well, you got no evidence.' They had pictures. There was a trail of piglet parts down to my house, to my farm. Around the house, where he had dug up, there were piglet parts. I was raising an Alaskan malamute. So he was laying there, he had blood on his face; he had blood on his chest. They took pictures, a very thorough investigation. I had nothing I could say but the whole reservation was laughing up and down. "˜There's your conservation officers.' So they marched me across the street to the Justice and charged me and I had to go back for my hearing two weeks later.

In those two weeks, there was a lot of commotion, a lot of discussion "˜cause all I had to do was say, "˜Drop it,' or the elders would say, "˜Don't go there because how hard he's worked to get this program this far.' And people were either for or against. I went to court, I paid the fine and it was done. I said, "˜We have a very efficient peacekeeper and we all have to follow the law regardless who it is.' So that's how the law and order picked up in our community.

I just don't like telling this story but he heard it once and he always asks me about it. Anyway, thank you very much."