Laws and Codes

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

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

Native Nations
Citation

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

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

June 13, 2011

[Sirens/gunshots]

Narrator:

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

Saint Anthony
Feast Day

[Gunshots]

Ysleta Mission

Narrator:

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

Javier Loera:

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

Narrator:

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

[Singing/bell ringing]

Carlos Hisa:

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

[Singing/bell ringing]

Narrator:

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

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

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

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

Trini Gonzalez:

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

Joseph P. Kalt:

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

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

Narrator:

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

Patricia Riggs:

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

Joseph P. Kalt:

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

Narrator:

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

John Baily:

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

Patient:

“Is it going to hurt?”

Dentist:

“No, you’ll be fine.”

Narrator:

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

Al Joseph:

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

Narrator:

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

Christopher Gomez:

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

[Singing]

Narrator:

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

Christopher Gomez: [to students]

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

Christopher Gomez:

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

Narrator:

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

Joseph P. Kalt:

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

Trini Gonzalez:

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

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

Narrator:

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

[Cheering]

Frank Paiz:

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

Narrator:

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

Carlos Hisa:

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

[Singing]

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation

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

Councilmen
Chris Gomez
David Gomez
Francisco Gomez
Trini Gonzalez

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

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

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

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

Producer
Patricia Riggs

Director
Jackson Polk

Camera
Aaron Barnes
Fernie Apodaca
Jackson Polk

TV Facilities
Capstone Productions Inc.

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

Rebuilding the Tigua Nation © 2013 Yselta del Sur Pueblo

Deborah Locke: Disenrollment: My Personal Story

Producer
Tribal Citizenship Conference
Year

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

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

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

Sarah Deer:

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

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

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

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

[Applause]

Deborah Locke:

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

Ms. Locke,

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

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

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

Think about that.

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

Sincerely,
Linda J. Nelson
Enrollment Officer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Ferdinand Martineau said, ‘It may.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawn Frank: Disenrollment: Considerations of Process

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Attorney Shawn Frank stresses the importance of Native nations ensuring that they establish and operate processes for disenrolling their citizens that is fair and transparent. He also offers some strategies that a Native nation can follow in order to create that fairness and transparency -- and importantly due process -- for those who the nation seeks to disenroll. 

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Frank, Shawn. "Disenrollment: Considerations of Process." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

"I'm Shawn Frank. I'm an attorney here in town and I've worked with a number of tribes on a variety of membership issues, one of them being disenrollment. And so I'm just kind of here to provide a legal perspective and kind of to talk a little bit about my experience in the area, but also to kind of talk about the process of disenrollment and if a tribe were to go down that road, kind of some of the things that I think are important for a tribe to consider in pursuing disenrollment.

As probably a lot of people have seen in the news recently and going back a good 10 years, the trend of disenrollments in tribes is on the increase. The first...one of the first big disenrollment efforts was in California with the Pechanga Band and there are tribes in California, Nevada, just recently Washington...at the Nooksack Tribe, began a series of disenrollments, Michigan, and those are ones that have had some prominence because of the number, but I think a lot of tribes have at various points undertaken some of these actions. When you start looking at some of the numbers and some of the statistics on there, some of the tribes in California have disenrolled almost about half of the membership and then the question arises is, what is driving the tribes to do this? And you usually hear one of two answers.

One is the tribe's perspective, that as a sovereign it has a responsibility to maintain a proper tribal roll and it has the authority to determine membership and it needs to enforce those requirements. On the member side, a lot of times it's seen as longstanding family animus or some sort of witch hunt against a family group or opposition or that if there are fewer members, especially if it's a profitable tribe, if there are fewer members, then everyone else's distributions go up and the membership numbers go down. And all of that aside, the Supreme Court has held fast that tribes determine their own membership and in determining that membership also comes the authority to revoke membership, to...you can grant membership, deny it, revoke it or put conditions on it.

So kind of from the legal perspective, the issue of can tribes disenroll is generally an emphatic, 'Yes, tribes can.' And so there's not a huge, I think, legal analysis that goes in there. Of course, every tribe has its own specific constitution and its own rules. There are tribes that...there was a tribe I think in California that before it even began its development of a casino project, it amended the constitution to prohibit the disenrollment of members so they had actually put in a safeguard even before it got to the stage where this issue could have arisen. There are a few other tribes that have some provisions or a tribe's ability to disenroll either by the constitution or the court's interpretation of the tribe's constitution limits it to cases of fraud or mistake. So there are certain limits that tribes do have, but it's limits that they have placed on themselves.

So what I'd like to kind of talk about is the process that I have seen that has worked I guess for some tribes and one of the things I was struck in Deb's [Deborah Locke's] presentation was when she was talking about the process that was due and I think that's such a fundamental issue. And I guess before I get into that, as an attorney representing tribes, the tribes are my client and it's a decision that the tribe makes to pursue these proceedings and it's a hot-button issue and there are a lot of strong feelings about it. So when I'm talking about having a fair process, it's not necessarily saying that a tribe's decision to do...to go down that road or not is something I would support, but representing the tribe, if they've asked me to help them enforce their constitution or to follow through on an action that they believe is lawful then I have an obligation to that client. So from my perspective it's kind of this...sometimes it's an uneasy practice, so when I talk about what things have worked for tribes, I mean what things tribes can do to provide members with enough opportunity to be part of the process before decisions are made.

So one of the things that I think tribes have grappled with is what is actually in their constitution, not only in terms of what is the membership criteria, but also who has the power or does the tribe even have the power to disenroll? I've seen arguments that have said the constitution doesn't include that so the council doesn't have that authority. And if it's a tribe where a lot of the power rests with either membership -- or sometimes it's called the general council -- or that...and it hasn't been delegated specifically to the council or the business committee, does the power of disenrolling or of disenrollment actually lie with the general membership? I haven't seen an instance where it lies with the general membership, but I'm not sure that that issue has been raised in some of these areas and generally it is the [tribal] council who has taken on the decision and the process to begin looking into these sorts of things.

One of the things that I think is really important is -- and some of this is my personal view -- is people have secured membership with the tribe and that has certain rights that come along with it and I think one of those rights is to be secure in that membership. And one of the things that I have seen on occasion is where members are not allowed the opportunity to have the evidence brought to them that what is the tribe's case, why is the tribe doing this, what documents does the tribe have? And sometimes there's an attempt to subvert whose burden it is to prove this. And one of the things, I think, if a tribe is going to establish a process is that the tribe needs to take the responsibility to A, make sure that it has its supporting documents.

There's been...I think there was...was it the Graton Rancheria in California, where literally one day people got a letter in the mail that said, 'You've been disenrolled.' So there was no...there was no warning, there was no opportunity. So what I've seen some tribes do is -- whether it's the council, an enrollment department, a separate board or panel -- will gather kind of the evidence and make a determination whether or not to begin a disenrollment proceeding. And so even at that really preliminary stage, they've shared that information with the member and given the member an opportunity to submit information that they have to kind of help clear that before they even begin the process. And sometimes some of these things are resolved at that stage, but occasionally the tribe will move forward and actually begin, in some instances, begin a disenrollment proceeding. Like I noted, sometimes the tribe just sit down and they just vote and say, 'You've been disenrolled.' So I think in terms of providing a process for the members to submit their evidence to really fight for their membership...because a lot of times the tribe's information could be wrong or it's incomplete, and so sometimes I think having that initial dialogue before the process or a proceeding begins is really helpful.

One thing I've also seen in some of these proceedings is if there is a hearing, I've seen instances where members are not allowed to have...be represented by counsel, where there were no outside people allowed in the proceeding, there was no recording of the proceeding, they weren't allowed to see the tribe's evidence, they weren't allowed to submit anything additional at the hearing. So there were a number of things, and I don't think you need to be a lawyer to realize that there's a big problem with having due process and meeting those sorts of requirements. So I think if a tribe has a process where it is going to conduct disenrollment proceedings that it should provide as many safeguards to the member as possible. I'm also aware of a tribe that -- in addition to being able to have a hearing where you get to submit evidence -- you get to call witnesses, you can ask the tribe for its evidence so you have some discovery rights, you can be represented -- I forgot where that was going -- but to have built in enough safeguards to allow the person to present their case so that it's not done in a vacuum and it creates a little more openness and transparency to the proceeding. And I think when you read a lot of media accounts of some of these things, that is usually the thrust of the article is that it's based on greed, they just want people off and nobody got a fair shake. The first two things I don't think lawyers or the tribes can deal with, but at least providing notice of a hearing and adequate safeguards at least prevents that perception from continuing that the tribe has not operated in an open manner.

And I think kind of one of the things when I was talking with Colette [Routel] about coming and doing this was from a legal perspective that's one issue, but then when you talk about the moral imperative that tribes have from a cultural component, it's kind of hard to, I think, kind of sit up here from a legal perspective and just kind of try to put disenrollment in a vacuum because there is such a human element. And one thing I also think that is critical is the more independent the fact finder can be, that it isn't the tribal council, that it's not the enrollment director, that it may be a panel of elders, it could be an independent person. I know one tribe that actually has an administrative process where they have law trained judges who evaluate the evidence based on the tribe's constitution and the membership criteria and they're the ones who make the decision, it ultimately goes back to the tribe but that has set in part an administrative record so when the court reviews it, there's actually a lot more information and a lot more process and I think that has allowed the tribe to document that to show that this isn't happening in a vacuum, this isn't a secret star chamber. These proceedings are open and although they may be...people may question why the tribe is doing them, at least the tribe has taken the steps it needs to kind of protect itself.

Kind of moving through the process, I guess one of the ultimate things is ultimately who is the decision maker and one of the things I've heard people talk about is, 'Well, if the council makes the decision, what recourse do I have?' And sometimes there is nowhere else to go, if the council has made its decision then that's the last step. And a lot of people have talked about, 'Well, there should be some sort of court review after that where the court actually will end up making the determination.' And one of the things I've always been struck by that is if the council is charged with ensuring a proper membership, but it's ultimately the judge or the judiciary who's making that decision, does that somehow run afoul of where the authorities in the constitution lie? And so sometimes I think the tribes' constitutions actually set up a process where there probably can't be judicial review because then ultimately the constitutional authority is being exercised by somebody that it wasn't intended to be and I've seen that a lot of times ultimately too in, especially in gaming regulation where you have licensing decisions being made by gaming commissions who are charged with regulating, but then they're challenged to the court and it's ultimately the court who's making the determination of license and eligibility, but they're not the regulator. So it kind of creates this strange dichotomy of, you want more review and you want process, but sometimes that's not possible.

And I think just in closing it's such a divisive issue and each tribe is unique and its history is unique and devising a process to review membership decisions...I think each tribe has the ability to craft whatever they would like, but at a minimum, I think that there'd need to be certain safeguards for the members and it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. So I look forward to questions here when we have the time. I'm sure there will be a few and I would like to turn it over to Sharon [Day]."

Vanya Hogen: Redefining Citizenship Criteria Through Constitutional Reform and Other Means

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law in conjunction with the Bush Foundation
Year

Lawyer and tribal judge Vanya Hogen (Oglala Sioux) discusses the difficulties inherent in amending Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) constitutions to redefine tribal citizenship criteria, and shares the story of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community as an example of one Native nation with an IRA government who was able to change its criteria through another approach: adoption.

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

Hogen, Vanya. "Redefining Citizenship Criteria Through Constitutional Reform and Other Means." Tribal Constitutions Conference, Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Colette Routel:

"Our next speaker is Vanya Hogen. Vanya is a graduate of the University of Minnesota's law school and ever since she graduated she's worked in the field of Indian law. She first worked at the BlueDog Indian law boutique firm and later went on to Faegre & Benson, which is now called Faegre Baker Daniels and then the Jacobson Buffalo law firm and has recently formed her own firm called Hogen Adams where she's representing Indian tribes.

Some of her sort of notable litigation successes I guess include representing Lauren Pourier in motor fuel tax litigation against the State of South Dakota and receiving a favorable decision from the South Dakota Supreme Court preventing the state from collecting motor fuel tax on the reservation to tribal members. And more recently she won a recent case in the 8th Circuit for the Fond du Lac Band [of Lake Superior Chippewa] challenging the required continued payments to the City of Duluth as part of their Fond du Luth Casino.

Vanya's going to talk with us here today about her representation of the Shakopee [Mdewakanton Sioux] Community in their enrollment and citizenship disputes and talk a little bit about revising IRA constitutions and non-IRA constitutions. I should say now she is actually a judge for Shakopee and has been for a number of years and doesn't represent them right now. So I hope you'll join me in welcoming Vanya Hogen."

[applause]

Vanya Hogen:

"Thanks not only for the nice introduction, but for inviting me to speak today. I'm going to apologize in advance because I've got sort of a bad cold and may break out into a fit of coughing during my presentation, but I'll do my best. The topic that I was given is "˜Mechanisms of Constitutional Reform' and I am going to talk about constitutional reform, particularly in the context of membership criteria, but I also want to talk to you about a way...another possible way to change membership criteria without having to amend your constitution. This is based on my experience in working with the Shakopee community.

As Colette mentioned, I am a judge for the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community's tribal court now. I have been since 2007, so everything I'm talking about today are from cases I worked on before I was on the bench, when I served as a lawyer for the Community and it's all from years of litigation in cases that are public, so that's why I can talk to you about it today.

The Community started in the early "˜90s to talk about changing its membership criteria from having a quarter blood requirement -- which was a quarter Mdewakanton Sioux blood -- to moving toward a lineal descendency requirement and it was a controversial idea. There was certainly not unanimity of opinions in the Community about whether they should make that move, but the Shakopee Community is very small. It only became federally recognized in 1969 and at the time they were recognized, there were less than 40 people who comprised the original membership of the community. And because of the quarter Mdewakanton Sioux blood requirement, they started to realize that kind of all the intermarriage that could occur within the community had already occurred. At the time we were looking at this in the early "˜90s there were really just eight different family groups that comprised the whole community and so if they kept the quarter blood requirement, folks could see that going into the future the membership was going to go down and down and down. And so there was a move to try to change the membership requirements and they ended up doing this in two different ways, one of which ended up being successful and one of it did not end up being successful. And I'm going to start by talking about their efforts at constitutional reform and this, I think, will be more broadly applicable.

The Shakopee Community was organized under the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] and its constitution has language in it that says that any amendments have to be approved by the Secretary [of Interior], which means calling a secretarial election. Other tribal constitutions -- for tribes who aren't organized under the IRA, for example -- aren't required to go through the secretarial election process that's set out in federal regulations. And some tribes who were organized under the IRA have -- since the time they were originally setting up their constitutions -- have amended their constitutions and taken out those federal...the requirements to do a secretarial election. But at Shakopee, they had this requirement, and so there are federal regulations at Part 81 of Title 25 of the CFR that say exactly how you have to hold an election to amend your constitution. And I want to just quickly walk through how that process goes and then talk about how it went at Shakopee.

The first step is that the tribe has to figure out some internal process to come up with what the proposed amendments to the constitution are and often this happens with...in consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and while that sounds paternalistic, if any of you are thinking of going through this process, I would actually recommend that you do get involved...get the Bureau involved early on, because at the very end of the process the Department of Interior has to approve or disapprove your amendments -- assuming they pass in the election -- based on whether they comply with applicable law or at least whether the Interior Department thinks they comply with applicable law. So you may as well know up front if the amendments that you're voting on comply with federal law at least in the view of the Department.

Once the tribe comes up with the proposed amendments, the tribal governing body has to vote to call the secretarial election. And the vote is not just to generally call an election to amend the constitution; it's a vote to call an amendment to amend the constitution in a particular way. So you actually are voting on calling election on the amendments that you are going to consider so you have to have them all done up front. The Department then has 90 days after that to call the election and then the Department sets up an election board, which consists of one Bureau official and two tribal members. And it's the election board's job to determine the voter list, to decide any challenges to the voter list and to actually oversee the election and the counting of the ballots, etcetera. The election board sets the potential voter list that gets published at the tribe and then people who are either...who have been left off the list and want to be on the list or somebody who's on the list and thinks other people are improperly on the list can file challenges with the election board. And what the regulations say is that the election board is supposed to be able to make final decisions about voter eligibility, which is important to the Shakopee story.

Once the election board decides on any voter challenges, they certify the final voting list, the election is held and then voters have three days in which they can challenge the election results. The Secretary then has...Secretary of the Interior then has 45 days to disapprove the amendments if she finds that the amendments are contrary to applicable law. So the way this is all written in the regs, it assumes that the challenges that are filed are not going to be about decisions on voter eligibility, it's all about the content of the amendments and trying to help the Assistant Secretary decide that they're contrary to applicable law.

What happened at Shakopee was the community engaged in a rather long process of holding community meetings to try to decide what the content of the proposed amendments should be, because they were not just looking at membership criteria, but they were also looking at, for one thing, taking all the requirements in their constitution for BIA approval of various ordinances and that kind of thing out of the constitution. If I recall correctly, because this was in the mid-1990s that they were doing this, they were also changing the size of their business council -- which governs the day-to-day activities of the tribe -- and several other things, putting references to the tribal court in the constitution. It was really kind of a major overhaul. So they came up with the language of the constitution, the governing body of the tribe, which at Shakopee was a general council, voted on those amendments, voted to call the election, the Secretary called the election or the...yeah, the designee of the Secretary called the election, an election board was set up, they put out a potential voter's list and there were challenges filed to over 50 percent of the voter's list and this kind of tells you a little bit about what was going on at the time in terms of membership disputes. As I say, there was a quarter-blood requirement, but there were a lot of disagreements in the community, as there are in a lot of different tribes at various times about, "˜Well, so and so isn't really a quarter blood. They never should have been included on that list,' or there's other families who everybody knows they're quarter bloods and they've been left off the list. There were all those kind of disputes and they all got filed with the election board as challenges.

So the election board goes through all the information that's been filed, they rule on these challenges to the voter list and they then certify the final voter's list. And as I say, the regs say that the election board's decisions about voter eligibility are final. So then there is an actual election and the constitutional amendments pass by...given the small size of the community, it was actually a fairly sizeable margin. Well, within the time to challenge, there are a couple different sets of challenges filed, all of them based on voter eligibility. And it turns out that...so some of the people in the community who are very opposed to changing to a lineal descendency requirement are challenging the blood quantum of a lot of people who voted in the election and they file boxes of materials with the Assistant Secretary.

Well, under the...the way this is supposed to work, the Secretary -- it turns out to be the Assistant Secretary who did it in this case -- has 45 days to approve or disapprove the amendments and is only supposed to disapprove them if they're contrary to applicable law. Well, on the 43rd day, the Assistant Secretary issued a decision saying that because there was so much information filed he could not approve the amendments in the time allowed by the regs. And so what he was going to do instead, he ruled, was appoint an administrative law judge who would go through these boxes of genealogical materials that had been filed to decide who really should be allowed to vote. And then the Assistant Secretary said once the administrative law judge made recommendations to him about that, he would call a new secretarial election based on the decisions that were made about who should be allowed to vote.

Well, in response to that, the Community decided to sue the Department and to challenge the Assistant Secretary's decision, and the arguments that we made to the federal district court were first of all that the regulations say the election board's decisions are final and what does that mean if the Assistant Secretary can come back and reopen it to another process? So we argued that the Assistant Secretary's interpretation was unreasonable. The other thing that we argued was that because the Secretary didn't actually approve or disapprove the amendments within 40 days -- he just said I can't decide this in 45 days because there's too much material -- that the amendments should be deemed approved.

Unfortunately -- from the Community leadership's point of view and mine as their lawyer -- we lost that case. And what the district court said to us was -- ruled -- was that although he didn't necessarily think the Assistant Secretary's interpretation of the word 'final'...and what the Assistant Secretary had said was when the regs say that the election board's decisions are final, that just means final for the purposes of holding the election, it doesn't mean final forever. The judge said, 'That may not be the most reasonable reading, but it's not unreasonable so I'm going to uphold it.' And then the judge also ruled that the Assistant Secretary saying, "˜I just can't approve this within 45 days because of...there's too much information to go through,' was effectively a disapproval even though it wasn't a disapproval based on the only reason that you're supposed to be able to disapprove, which is if the amendments are contrary to law. So we appealed to the 8th Circuit, we lost on a two-to-one decision and so we ended up with a final ruling that the secretarial election process was going to have to start all over again after we waited for an administrative law judge to rule on the blood quantum of all these people who had been challenged.

Well, it took, after about two-and-a-half years, we still didn't have a ruling from the administrative law judge, and in fact we had gone through three administrative law judges because they kept getting transferred or quitting. And so finally the Community decided, 'Forget it. We don't want to deal with this process. We aren't going to try to amend our constitution. If we want to do another secretarial election, we'll start all over ourselves.' So they took a vote and voted to withdraw the request for a secretarial election, transmitted that to the Department and it took the Department just a mere year to finally acknowledge that that had been done and to say, "˜Okay, well, you're not going to hold a secretarial election, but we're still going to go through with this blood quantum process because we can use that information to distribute some Docket 363 monies.' So that process kept going for years even though it then had nothing to do with the secretarial election process.

As you might imagine, just from the length of time it takes for me to tell you this, it was about three years I think from the time that the Community had adopted these amendments to the time that they finally decided forget this process, it's not working. So they...and they had decided earlier to try this other approach as well and that was instead of amending their constitution to try passing an ordinance called an adoption ordinance that would allow the Community to adopt lineal descendents as members of the Community. Now the Community's constitution was sort of your stereotypical boilerplate IRA constitution, and so it has an article regarding membership and Section 1 of that article sets out the criteria, the blood quantum criteria for becoming a member. So you can either be listed on the base roll that was created when the Community was organized in 1969, you can be a child of one of those people who is at least a quarter-degree Mdewakanton or you can be a quarter-degree Mdewakanton and trace to the same roll that Lenor [Scheffler] was talking about earlier, the 1886, I think it was called the Hinton Roll. So that was...that's one section of their constitution regarding membership.

The second section is more procedural and what it says is that "˜the governing body shall have the power to pass resolutions or ordinances, subject to the approval of the Secretary, governing future membership adoptions and loss of membership.' So the Community's general council passed a resolution that allowed people to become adopted into membership if they were lineal descendents, that is you did not have to meet the quarter-blood requirement and it provided that once that happened they would get all...those adopted members would get all the same benefits of membership that any other member got. The Community submitted that ordinance to the, I think it was then actually even called the 'Area Office,' that's how long ago this was, sent it to the BIA and the BIA disapproved it saying, "˜We don't think it makes sense that you could adopt somebody into membership who doesn't meet the membership requirements. That's not what that section is intended to allow even though you, tribe, think that's what it's intended to allow.'

So we appealed that decision, that disapproval to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals and argued, "˜Look, if you have to meet the membership criteria to be adopted into membership, then what does adoption mean? It's a completely meaningless term.' The IBIA [Interior Board of Indian Appeals] ended up agreeing with the Community's interpretation and what they actually ruled was, "˜We don't think that the Bureau's reading is unreasonable, but we also don't think that the Community's reading is unreasonable. But because the Community's reasoning...the Community's interpretation is reasonable and it's their constitution, the Bureau should have deferred to their interpretation of their own constitution,' and so the IBIA directed the area director to approve the ordinance and that's what happened.

And I would love to say that that's the end of the story, but it was not the end of the story because of course that decision was appealed to the IBIA and it ultimately got dismissed just because it was an individual tribal member who had appealed it and you don't have standing in the IBIA to appeal if you're just an individual member as opposed to the government. But that ultimately led to federal litigation and for reasons that I won't go into, the Community ended up having to pass another adoption ordinance that essentially did the same thing but they fixed some perceived procedural irregularities and that ordinance was also...it got approved by the Bureau, but it got challenged in tribal court and in federal court, but ultimately upheld in both of those courts.

And that's the way the Community's law has stood now for about I guess a little over 10 years they've had this adoption ordinance on the books, and many, many people have been adopted as members of the Community. And at first -- in the first couple of years after this -- there were a lot of hard feelings as you might imagine, from the people who really didn't want that quarter-blood requirement changed. They weren't happy that the Community leadership had taken this approach and it ended up that you'd see a lot of people applying for adoption who were the lineal descendants of the then current tribal leadership, but not very many people from other families in the Community, that is descendants of the groups who didn't want the constitution amendment applying for adoption.

But over time, that has changed and even though I don't have as direct a view of it now because I'm on the bench, it now seems that everyone in the Community has endorsed this and you see people getting adopted from all different families. And so it ultimately has worked for that community, for that community to change their membership criteria by ordinance instead of doing it through the more traditional route of doing it in terms of a constitutional amendment. I think that what the whole experience shows -- and I'm sure not telling you anything you don't know -- is that these issues are extraordinarily contentious and it just, particularly in a place like Shakopee, where you've got a tribe that makes per capita payments, you get in a lot of people who are litigious and so...there were well over a dozen I would say lawsuits altogether that were fought over these issues and it took a long time to heal. I don't know if there are questions that folks have about either of these procedures."

Audience member:

"My question has to do with enrollment criteria and of course the mechanisms that exist under our current constitution, which identifies an election process like you discussed. If a tribe does not follow that particular...is there an avenue or an option for a particular band of that tribe to have an election process that deviates from the constitution's election process to change a membership criteria, as an example?"

Vanya Hogen:

"I can't see your name tag [and] where you're from, but I assume you're from one of the MCT [Minnesota Chippewa Tribe] bands. And I wasn't here in the morning if there was discussion about this. And that is such a unique situation, but I guess my top-of-my-head lawyer response is that if you have an IRA-approved constitution that sets out a procedure, that's probably the procedure you're going to get stuck with, at least to have the outside world recognize the results of your constitution, of your amendments. How's that for a vague, lawyerly answer?"

Matthew Fletcher:

"So it's been a couple of decades removed from your experience trying to get amendments to your constitution approved or the tribe's constitution approved and then to have this ordinance approved, do you think that the [Department of the] Interior has changed? Is it more deferential to try now than it was in the "˜90s or would you still see the same nitpicky, "˜Well, this isn't what your constitution intended to provide so we disapprove'?"

Vanya Hogen:

"Well, I would like to think that at least, if nothing else, because of the IBIA precedents that came out of that decision, that the regional offices have been better, and certainly for Shakopee when they did have to adopt that new ordinance and it went up, there was no question but that it was going to be approved. I think it has probably gotten better. Although it kind of depends on...if you'd asked me that question six years ago I might not have said that, but depending on where the direction is coming from the top I think that can really make a difference, meaning that if we have a good Assistant Secretary that can make a difference. And I don't want to say...I got very caught up in this fight when I was litigating it for years and years and didn't think that what the Assistant Secretary was doing all the time was in the tribe's best interest, but I do understand when you have...in this case in particular, there were a lot of people in the Community who did not think that the way the leadership was going about this was the best way to do it and they really thought that that quarter-blood requirement should stay in the constitution and that...and so I can see if I were... if I had been in the Assistant Secretary's shoes that I would want to try to make sure that every possible procedural safeguard was put in place before something...this kind of change was effectuated. I think that's it for the questions."

Colette Routel:

"Are there any other questions? Let's thank Vanya for speaking to us."

[applause]

Vanya Hogen:

"Thank you."

Sarah Deer: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation's Approach to Citizenship

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Sarah Deer (Muscogee), Co-Director of the Indian Law Program at the William Mitchell College of Law, provides a brief overview of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation's unique approach to defining its citizenship criteria, which essentially creates two classes of citizens: those who run for elected office, and those who can't. 

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Deer, Sarah. "The Muscogee (Creek) Nation's Approach to Citizenship." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

"What I'd like to talk about just very briefly is...first of all, I'm a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and I probably...by the way I look, you can tell I'm a lineal descendent as opposed to having a high blood quantum. And I want to talk a little bit about that because one of the things I think -- especially in Oklahoma -- they kind of joke about us. I'm not Cherokee, but they joke about the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Cherokees, and one of the things I think that's really important for someone like me to acknowledge is that I have privilege because of the way I look. I can walk into a store and I'm not treated as an Indian because people don't see me as an Indian.

And when I was talking to one of my mentors, an elder who works to help me try to learn my language, she talked a little bit about that with me recently, about...when she grew up in rural Oklahoma in the 1950s, the level of painful racism in her memory is still very palpable, being treated as second class because of her skin color and because of her name and so today when she sees people who can pass, who don't acknowledge their privilege, who say, ‘I'm a tribal citizen, but I'm just the same as you,' when I didn't go through the experience of racism is painful. And I think we have to talk about that when we talk about lineal descendency because I get the privilege of passing. I get to tell people I'm Indian if I want to and if we don't acknowledge that painful history, I think we're going to continue to have a lot of controversy about what this means to potentially open up citizenship. So I wanted to say that at the outset.

And the other thing that I think is interesting is that I'm asked often what my...how much Indian I am, my blood quantum. But the only people who tend to ask me that are non-Indian people. What Native people ask me is, ‘Who is your family?' So it's...the blood quantum itself is something that is of interest to people, but in my experience that's usually coming from outside the tribe.

Now, what I wanted to talk about was one particular facet of my own tribe's constitution when it comes to governance because we have two classes of citizens. One class is full citizens and the other class is citizens and I want to talk about the difference between the two in just a second. But typically, when we think about American citizenship, the American government really doesn't do much in terms of distinguishing between citizens. All citizens are treated the same. If you're naturalized, you have the same rights and privileges as people who were born here. The one exception that I think became I think a focal point of the election in 2008 was that the president must be a natural-born citizen and so to be the President of the United States you have to have been born here in the country.

So let me tell you about how this Muscogee constitution developed. We have a very complicated history as most tribes do. In Oklahoma in particular we governed...we had really no acknowledgement of our government between 1906 and 1977, 1978. We were still operating as a government, but the federal government didn't recognize us pursuant to the Curtis Act. So when we were able to fight and get recognized as having continuing governance throughout that time period, the federal court actually ordered a constitutional convention, which was interesting and sort of ironic that in terms of re-recognizing the tribal government, the federal judge says, ‘And we will tell you how to do this.' But we did end up ratifying and passing a new constitution in 1979, which governs us today, and citizenship in our nation is determined through lineal descent [from] the 1906 Dawes Roll.

One of the things that's interesting about that of course is that in 1906 during allotment, many traditional people refused the Dawes Roll. They refused to go and sign up for their allotment on principle because they never consented to breaking up the reservation and so you have a lot of traditional people in Oklahoma today who are not enrolled in any tribe because their ancestor stood their ground. So that's another interesting facet.

But what I want to talk about specifically is how the constitution distinguishes between full citizens and citizens, and this comes from Article 3, Section 4 of our constitution, and explains that full citizenship requires the one-quarter blood quantum and those folks are known as the 'full citizens.' And then all citizens who are less than a quarter blood shall be considered citizens and shall have all of the rights and entitlements as members of the Muskogee Creek Nation except the right to hold office. And I'm still doing some research to figure out exactly how this decision was made or what the dialogue in the community was, but to hold office under the constitution you have to have this quarter-blood requirement. So I can't run for office.

And so one of the things that happened is how do we interpret that language? So I just...I present this sort of as a cautionary tale as you're thinking about potentially designing language that would provide this kind of distinction, the kinds of ambiguities that can develop. So what does it mean to hold office? And this became the subject of a dispute in 1986 and the question of what is the right to hold office. So citizens of the nation elect a principal chief, a second chief and a tribal council. And justices and judges are appointed by the principal chief and confirmed by the council so they're not elected positions.

So in 1986, there was a district court case in our tribal court and the party who lost the case appealed to the Muscogee Supreme Court arguing that the judge, the district court judge in that case was not a quarter blood, he was an eighth and so the losing party challenged that decision saying that the judge was not qualified under the constitution because he was holding office with less than a quarter blood. And so what the tribal supreme court then had to do is to interpret what the constitution meant by hold office. And they ended up determining that the constitutional requirement for full citizens or quarter bloods applies only to elected officials. So in other words, the judge and the justices do not have to be full citizens under the constitution.

Now after that case, the Muscogee Tribal Council passed a law that required judges and justices to be full citizens. And this has never actually been litigated, although I suppose someone could challenge that as a question of whether or not the constitution saying hold office trumps the statute that says judges and justices are included in that. So we don't know for sure how the court would have ruled on that particular statute. But slowly, in recent years, I think what has happened is that the body of qualified judges and justices has somewhat shrunk in the sense that there's not a whole lot of quarter bloods practicing law in our tribal courts. And so how do you then find a judge or a justice who's qualified to sit on the court?

So in 2010, the tribal council passed new laws stating that the judges and justices must be full citizens unless there's a waiver passed by two-thirds of the council. And in 2012, they amended that again and now you must merely be a citizen of the tribe, which means there's no blood quantum requirement for the court, but still the quarter blood quantum requirement is for principal chief, second chief and council. So I can be a judge for my tribe, but I can't run for office is basically how that plays out for me; being not in Oklahoma, I suppose that I would not be in a position to run for office at any level.

So there's one other thing I wanted to say about that. Oh, so the other thing that may be important in thinking about this is that to be a district court judge or a trial court judge in our tribe you have to be an attorney. You have to have a JD, you have to have a license to practice law, and you have to have at least four years of experience practicing tribal law. For the justices of our Supreme Court, there is no requirement that you have a legal degree, you merely have to be appointed by the principal chief. And so we have elders on our tribal Supreme Court who are not attorneys and I think that's a really intriguing development where I see a mixture of attorneys and non-attorneys on the supreme courts of tribes where you can blend then traditional knowledge with sort of contemporary western legal traditions.

So I just wanted to give that as sort of a tale of being careful when you draft language, because I'm not sure that everybody agreed on what 'hold office' would have meant, but now it's pretty clear that judges and justices are exempt from the full citizenship requirement.

One other thing I just wanted to raise because we talk about the Veronica case and the Indian Child Welfare Act. One of the things that's interesting about ICWA is that it applies when a child is a member or eligible for membership. Can a tribal government distinguish between citizenship and membership? The reason I bring this up was partly based on a comment made this morning about the clumsiness of the English language and how the English language around the terms like 'citizenship' and 'members' is really incomplete or a mismatch for culture. But there is an English distinction between 'member' and 'citizen,' at least they're two different words, and so one of the questions that I would just pause at -- and I don't know that I have an answer to this is, could a tribal government distinguish between citizenship and membership specifically thinking about ICWA and expanding the body of children in which the tribe would have jurisdiction over? So that was just one piece that I wanted to leave you with and I think that's what I have to say. So thank you."

Patricia Riggs: The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story

Producer
National Congress of American Indians
Year

Patricia Riggs, Director of Economic Development for Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP), discusses how YDSP has spent the past decade developing and fine-tuning its comprehensive approach to engaging its citizens in order to identify and then achieve its nation-building priorities.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the National Congress of American IndiansThe "Rebuilding the Tigua Nation" film shown in this video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Riggs, Patricia. "The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story." 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace, National Congress of American Indians. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 15, 2013. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"So I'll turn the floor over to Patricia Riggs. Again, she's the economic development director with the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and as she told me today, she's sort of their de facto chief of citizen engagement for their pueblo. Anytime they face a challenge in this arena, they tend to turn to her because she's done so much wonderful work in this area. Did you want to start with the video or with your presentation?"

Patricia Riggs:

"It's a little long. If you want to start it and then kind of go through middle and then restart it again."

Ian Record:

"So again, this is a video that Pat was involved with putting together. It's called 'Rebuilding the Tigua Nation.' Tigua is another name that refers to her nation and this again I think...think of this not just in terms of what it shares with you, but think of this as a viable tool of citizen education and engagement. We're seeing more and more nations do things like this. These videos that instruct not just their own citizens, but outsiders about who the nation is and what they're doing and why."

[VIDEO]

Patricia Riggs:

"Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. As Ian stated, my name is Pat Riggs and I'm the Director of Economic Development at Ysleta del Sur [Pueblo]. We started community engagement back in 2006. Of course at the Pueblo, there's always been some form of community engagement, but we had a very significant event that took place. If you paid attention closely to the film, we talked about the casino being closed down. In 1987, we were federally restored and there was one little clause in our restoration act that said, "˜The tribe shall not have gaming that is illegal in Texas.' So when the State of Texas started bingo and lottery, we decided that there was gaming in Texas so we opened our casino and they sued us and the courts held that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act didn't apply to the tribe, that the language in our restoration act superseded that. So we operated gaming from around 1992 to 2002. It was open for about 10 years and it first started as a bingo hall and then later on to Class 2 gaming. So when the casino actually did end up closed, we had invested quite a bit in infrastructure and the tribe had done a lot of good things with our funding or our revenues that we got for the tribe, but we were basically at a...we were in shock. There was this economic turmoil that was taking place that we didn't realize was actually going to take place. We thought that there was no way that we would lose the case, but we ended up losing the case.

So citizen engagement started out of the need to really find out what the community needed. What we started doing is really looking at different groups and seeing what their needs are and really trying to identify with the tribe and what they needed. This is just a picture of what we call "˜listening to our ancestors,' because everything that we do really does come from our history and who we are as a people and where we've been so just the fact that in spite of everything that's happened to us, it seems like...sometimes they call us the 'Bad Luck Tribe' because if something can go wrong, it happens to us. We got left out of the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1861 so we weren't recognized with the other pueblos. We ended up on the Confederate side of the line. Just things throughout history ended up happening.

Really a lot what was happening, too, was our own mindset and the way we thought as a community, so when the casino was closed we kind of stood at a standstill, we didn't know what to do, we were in shock. And I had been working at another location. I'd been working in the City of El Paso and the tribe asked me to come back and I was like, "˜Economic Development, hmm.' So I really didn't know anything about economic development, but I said, "˜I'll give it a try.' But when I came back, one of the things that I started doing is really listening and trying to figure out what was happening in the community. And so I heard in the video that Ian played before from Native Nations Institute, someone said that some of the challenges or the biggest challenges for the tribe come from within. So I'm really about training and trying to figure out what the community wants and so they started asking me to train different departments. And so I started paying attention to what the community was actually saying and to what some of our employees were saying and these are actual...their quotes, their statements that were actually said and they're things like, "˜Tiguas don't want to learn.' Everything was always blamed on tribal council and we all know that there's problems with councils sometimes, but sometimes I think we exaggerate those things because we don't want to move forward or we don't...we try to rationalize what we are or what we're not doing in our departments. So it was always about, "˜We can't do that because tribal council won't allow it,' "˜It doesn't matter.' Some of our non-tribal employees were saying that we couldn't do particular, they wouldn't do particular things because the tribal members would go tell council what they were doing and it was just, it was ridiculous, really. When you really sat down and listened to it and you put all the statements together, it was ridiculous.

So basically...so what we determined that we needed to do is really engage our community in education and try to really figure out who the community was because we know who we are as a people, we know our culture, we knew traditions, but we don't really know the community in terms of what needs do they...are out there, what are the poverty levels, what are the education levels, who's employed, who's not employed, what kind of skills do they have? And as far as doing a needs assessment we needed that, but we also needed to take an inventory of what we have or had in order to move forward. So we started doing different things to try and get the community engaged. And so this is what it looks like if you do the 'flyer method' and it just doesn't work. You send all these beautiful flyers out there and just get ready for everybody to come and they don't show up. So it was like, "˜Well, what am I doing wrong here?' And we were actually, at one point we even brought Native Nations Institute and we had a very small crowd there. So we thought about what we could actually do to get the community more involved.

So what we found is actually working with groups and even within the reservation there are special interest groups. We all have little things that...or subjects that we're interested in and what we found is to look for those core champions in your communities. And there's people who are really just very traditional and that's what they want to discuss and that's what they want to do in terms of who they are so we asked them, "˜Okay, how do you think that we can infuse tradition into the things that we're doing?' We also started working with youth. The thing about youth is if you work with youth and you train them and you honor them and you show their parents what they're doing, then the parents come, too. So we started figuring out how to get parents engaged as well. And then we did different things with leadership, with elders. One of the things that we did learn is that we really need to figure out how to work with each group and how to...and so through the little groups we got the whole.

The big thing here is you can't expect people to just come to you. As I showed the meetings with the flyers, it just didn't work. We had to find different ways to actually go out into community and to seek input. So we went to the elders. And I mentioned earlier that our casino had closed, but it's actually operating now as a sweepstakes center. So it's kind of we have... they look like terminals, but they're actually all hooked up into one network. So there are signs all over the place that say you're donating to the tribe and you're donating to our health, to our education. So we just got creative on ways to do things. It's not quite as revenue generating as it was before, but there's still funding coming in. One of the times I went to the elders and I wanted to do a survey with them and so they said, "˜Oh, no, we don't have time for your survey.' And I'm like, "˜But I have 'Free Play'.' And they, "˜Oh, Free Play, okay. Sit down.' So we started talking to them and then they found out some of the things that we're doing and they were engaged in that, actually came to where they actually wanted to participate in some of the events that we were having. And so they started making the food and sometimes we could pay them and sometimes we couldn't, but they were okay with that and they started assisting us in our events.

So then we also, one of the things that we did is in order to engage the community...there is no greater engagement than actually serving the community, so we started an AmeriCorp program and the AmeriCorp program, they work with the elders, they work in the cultural center, they work in emergency management, in environmental. So they're kind of our ambassadors for community engagement in different areas. The other thing is we do a lot of data collection and we do a lot of surveys, but when we do it we work with focus groups or we work with all the other little core groups and we educate them about why we're trying to collect the information. So we educate them first and then they are kind of our core champions or leaders so they go out into their groups and they tell either the other elders or youth or whoever it is that we're working with why it is important. So we educate them on how to educate the community on getting that information and we've been very successful in gathering information for our tribe in order to determine what it is that we're going to focus on, whether it's health or whether it's economic development. I'll show you a little bit more in a minute about the successes with data collection and also the projects that we're working on.

I know that one of the first times that Joe Kalt went to Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, I had been working in writing grants not just for the tribe, but also for the City of El Paso and I wanted a model, I wanted a matrix and I was like, "˜Well, do you have a matrix?' and it's like, "˜No.' So I realized, I think I really like to visualize what it is that we're trying to accomplish, but I kind of think very methodical. So I have to figure out what exactly it is that we're going to tackle, but I also realize that those kind of models and theories, they're for other communities, they're not really for us. We can't take somebody's methodology and use it at our tribe. So I started to look back and thinking like what is it exactly that we're doing, and this is what I came up with.

Well, one of the things is we have a purpose. No matter what it is that we're trying to tackle, whether it's constitutional reform or building entrepreneurs, there's a purpose there. So you find that purpose and there's also...but with that purpose, there's always passion and I'm so passionate about what I do. That's all I do. I have to have people drag me away from it sometimes, but there's other people in your communities with that passion. So look for the passionate people and then harvest the information. You really do have to harvest information and gather that input from your community, because that's who you're working for and that's who really is driving you to do what it is that you do.

The other thing is...so you visualize and then you assess and you plan. And I know it's kind of theory-like, but when it comes to your community, what is it that you're visualizing? Like for us, one of the things that we're working on is a land use plan and land acquisition. So when we're visualizing, I'm not doing this theory of visualizing, we're actually looking at the community and thinking about the things that we lost and the things that we need for ceremony and where...the places that it's going to come from, from the land and how are we going to be able to redevelop our lands and preserve our lands as they once were and then also rebuild our community as a village because we're used to living as a village and that was taken away from us. So when we're visualizing, that's...we're visualizing how we want to live. It's about how the entire...what the entire community sees. So then of course we can work, work, work, work, but at the end of the day we really do have to have something to show for it. So you do have to measure those impacts and the outcomes of what it is that you're doing because...and then you take it back to the community and show your successes and so you report the results.

And then here's basically the same thing with a little bigger snapshot, but in the end it really is about community, whether you're trying to figure out what the community wants, you start at the community; whether you're trying to figure out the data, you're getting it from community, you're trying to draw a picture of what your community really is, and then in the end you report those results back to the community and then you also try to determine what is driving the community and those are things such as the ceremonies and traditions and culture and just living together as a Tigua society for us. So we look at the core values and we reaffirm them by asking different people in the community and also about what is the best way to apply the things in a manner that...that will work in a manner that is fair to the entire tribe and to every sector of the tribal population.

So this is a little bit of our timeline and as far as our economy is concerned...so really what was happening to us, we had basically lost all our lands. We were living in a small part of El Paso in a little, basically it was a neighborhood. It really wasn't a reservation and we had, there were small adobe houses, most of them were one room. It was during the termination policy, so we really didn't have any hope of having a better life. We were just happy to be able to still be there and still be living as a community and still, even though we weren't federally recognized, we still held tribal elections, we still had our ceremonies every year, we still had people in charge of dong the things that...the doings that needed to be done for us to continue to survive as a Pueblo the best that we could. So of course the civil rights movement took place later and that's when people started to gain more confidence and to start asserting their rights.

So what happened in the 1960s is we were basically losing our few homes that we had left to tax foreclosure because it was the City of El Paso now and throughout there's a couple pictures that you'll see the entire, what our Pueblo used to look like, and because we weren't on federal trust land. And one of the important reasons that we start that film where we're crossing the highway and the tribal police are directing traffic for us is because that one spot is where our Pueblo used to be and we had stacked adobe homes. And the City of El Paso -- because we weren't federally recognized or had trust status -- they decided to have condemnation proceedings against our Pueblo because they needed that one spot that's a highway and they needed it to extend the highway. So they had condemnation proceedings and they condemned the Pueblo basically. So that is the center of our tribe and that's why we decided to start the film there.

So land acquisition and development and regaining and putting land into trust is very important for us so basically there was a lawyer by the name of Tom Diamond that helped us to get federally restored or federally recognized in 1969, but we were basically terminated on the same day because the State of Texas had a Texas Indian Commission, so they turned over the trust responsibility to the Texas Indian Commission. Well, there were some good things that happened out of that. We did get some new housing out of it and there was a few more jobs and some economic development took place. So in the "˜60s, basically our unemployment rate was 75 percent. By the "˜70s it went to about 50 percent and we went from a fifth-grade education to about a 10th-grade education. So then in '87 we were federally restored and the casino was thriving and our unemployment rate basically went down to three percent. We went from 68 acres of land that were transferred over during the time of restoration to 75,000 acres of land that we invested in with our casino revenues and then we also built a lot more housing. I think you saw in the film where the housing was. And then we...but then the casino closed because we were sued. So basically, we were really at odds, we didn't know what we were going to do.

So we started off by doing projections on our funding and what we had in reserves and we determined was that if we continued to operate in the same manner we would run out of money in seven years. So we had to decide what it is that we were going to do, so that's when we started this nation-building process and we started investing money in a development corporation, which is now doing federal contracting and we're located in probably at least five places throughout the country: Washington D.C., Virginia, California, Colorado Springs. And that also took forming a board and separation of business and politics and having a committee that turned into...later to the board. And so this education process, we're educating different people in the community.

One of the things we did is we educated the board on how to operate as a board, which started as an economic development committee and then they ended up the board. So now this... we reassigned the economic development committee and now they're being trained as how to operate as a nonprofit board so then we're going to replace them and they're going to become probably another board. So we just keep getting small groups and keep educating so that they can build the capacity to do other things. But in order to do this we really, really needed to know what our state was as far as a community is concerned. So we were able to really determine what our... who we were, where our people were located at, what the rates of unemployment were and poverty levels, household levels, individual household levels.

The other thing that happened to us in our restoration act is that the language in there said that the tribe shall consist of membership that is on the base roll and people descending from that base roll up to one-eighth blood quantum. They said that in 1987. So we quickly realized that in a few years we'd no longer exist as a tribe because we would lose that blood quantum. So the tribe decided that they were going...we went to Congress and it took us 10 years of introducing different bills, but we ended up just recently having the blood quantum bill passed. So in order to do this, we really needed to figure out who we were as a people because we needed to take that information to Congress. So this is what our community looks like now and we also studied the people that live outside the service area, our tribal members that live outside the service area as well, and what we're finding is really they left before economic opportunity because they're a little bit better off in terms of education and household income.

I talked a little bit about cooperative education and so what we're also doing in order to engage our citizens and get this information -- because we collect that information every single year from tribal members and we've been successful as far as getting the information -- but we also make sure that we give it back to them and that when we compile any sort of information that we give them the reports back, like whether it's health and if there's a diabetes report or whatever it is. But the other thing is we all come to these conferences because we work as professionals, but your average tribal citizen doesn't have that opportunity to learn the things like we're learning today, what's happening in the federal courts and what's happening as far as policy is concerned and even what happened with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and so we take that education to them. We make sure that there's money in the budget to educate our tribal members and we do everything from Indian law to nation building to...we have other people even come and do community engagement to let them know how important it is. We have financial literacy training, but we also do like board training. And so if there's a subject that we think is important for us to learn and what's on the agenda here and at other conferences, we make sure that we find a way to take it back to the community and to be able to train them so that they know. And even when we work with our departments who of course...there has to be some professional training there, a lot of times some of our tribal members don't have the capacity to be in those higher positions of directors, so we tell our directors, "˜We're going to put this training out for you, but you need to pick a tribal member and it doesn't matter if it's a secretary or a maintenance person or whatever it is, you need to bring them to this training also and you need to figure out how you're going to get that information back to your department as well.'

As far as community engagement and what it's done for us as far as impacts are concerned, these are some of the projects that we've worked on that have really made an impact in our community. One of the things is we did this huge comprehensive strategy and that's where we determined that we were going to do things like the Tigua, Inc. Development Corporation, we were going to do workforce development, land use plan, land acquisition plan. All those things were outlined in this strategy and there was focus groups and surveys that were on our website. And if you actually look at our website all the reports are on there as far as the information that the community provided to us and what we compiled and gave back to the community. So this comprehensive strategy, a lot of strategies and plans just end up on the bookshelf, but as you can see it didn't. We like to say that you need to plan your work and you need to work your plan.

The other thing is Tigua, Inc., the tribe provided the seed money for that and now they have really just taken off over the last couple years and getting significant contracts and they're doing a lot of building maintenance all over the country. They just recently got awarded the Wyler Building in California, which is the second largest government facility in the country to do maintenance. This is the Tigua Business Center that we just recently moved into about a year and a half ago and it also incubates Tigua, Inc., but it also serves as headquarters for our department, Economic Development, and we're also just now building another extension to it, which is going to be to incubate tribal member businesses, and we also have, because we really truly believe in educating the tribe and we're not quite there yet as far as having a college. We're building the Tigua Technology Center there, which is also going to help to provide the software that some of our tribal members need to get their business done like the costing and pricing for construction companies and for auto mechanics and CAD and those things that are really expensive that they can't afford as far as software is concerned.

And then also our tax code, this was one of the things that also came out of the comprehensive economic development strategy. For some reason, the tribe had decided that it was going to adopt the State of Texas tax code, which made no sense whatsoever. It was 200 pages long and we couldn't enforce it. And so what we did is we took a look at what would best serve our needs and we went from 200 pages to 20 pages and in less than a year we went from $58,000 a year to $1.2 million in tax collections. The allocation also is divided up for different programming. But I'm able to support our department because we get 30 percent of tax allocation and that's how I am able to turn that into some of the programming that we're doing.

Here's the feedback and it's really a snapshot of the feedback that we got back from the community and the things that they were concerned with in land use. So they were, the community of course was concerned with things like cultural preservation and being able to maintain our traditional practices, having land for residential use, commercial needs and agriculture, as well as transportation. So we determined what the best use of lands would be and through community engagement we also took an inventory of our lands and created a database that had all the criteria of our lands, as well as GIS mapping, whatever, if there were environmental assessments. And so we have a really defined database of all our lands and then we created a master plan and an acquisition plan. The acquisition plan isn't quite finished yet, but this timeline that we looked at started with the need to preserve our lands and we have these milestones where we want to have our master plan and do energy development and make sure that everybody has housing and those things. But then at the end it ends with cultural preservation, too, because it demonstrates 100 years from now that we're still here and our land is preserved.

And then also on one side we have all the modern and things we need to survive today, but we also have all the things that are important to us historically and culturally. When we started writing a master plan through community engagement, we had these and we had these maps of the land...of our land in big sheets and we had the community write what certain places of what they wanted the land to look like.

And also they put places like by the river, like for example, that is still important to us today but that...we have ceremonies at the river that we can't just go to the river anymore. We border Mexico, so everybody knows about the big fence at the river. So we actually have to go ask the Border Patrol to let us go to the river to do our ceremonies. So part of our master planning is to take over the acequias or the irrigation system or the canal system that we actually created 300 years ago. So we created this cultural life cycle that we would incorporate into our land use and master plan and it talks about where we are at birth and how we're being nurtured and the lessons we're learning and how we learn about our culture and then how as elders our roles change and that then we become teachers and we pass on this tradition and culture. So in our land use plan we...that bar that intersects across there talks about the different places that we're going to create to make sure those things happen. So we have things like a nation-building hub and also an elder center and places for teens to meet as well.

So these are...see those are pictures of maps that we used where the community actually drew what they wanted the community to look like, and these are statements that the community provided back. And then we also had different criteria as far as what the community wanted to see and graphed and charted what the community best wanted for our lands. So these are also places that we don't own yet, but they're what we used to own. And so in our land acquisition process, we want to buy these locations back and this is what we could do with them as far as economic development is concerned. And it seems like way out there, but in reality it really isn't. When you think about we just had 68 acres in 1987 and we have 75,000 acres now, it's attainable. And then so this is what our acquisition process is going to look like and how we mapped it. Everything that is in yellow is what we own and what's in the darker colors is our long-term acquisition. We know that we can't buy everything, but we do...those are the gaps that we want to fill in. I talked a little bit about our enrollment ordinance. Well, we're working on an enrollment ordinance, a new citizen engagement [process] because of the blood quantum bill that just passed last year. So I had thought that that was going to go to somebody else, but I just was told last week that that citizen engagement process would actually come to our department so that's something that we're working on now. This was just a little conversation that the team had last week and these are questions that we're really thinking about what we need to ask the community. It'll be much more comprehensive, but just basic things like what does citizenship mean to you and how did you learn how to be a good citizen from your parents and your community, and so that's the way we usually start with just the basic questions and then we move into real comprehensive model.

These are just a couple, I guess, pointers to just make sure that you try to identify what your tribe needs and also...and then as far as when you're working within your community just know that everything that you're doing is either going to impact your tribe either positively or negatively. And what the work [is] that you're doing, how is that going to actually help your tribe or not help your tribe because sometimes we're afraid to move forward and to change, but in order to change you really need to know what it is that your community wants and to respect what their thoughts are and what they want for the future. Thank you."

Catalina Alvarez and Robert McGhee: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tribal leaders Catalina Alvarez (Pascua Yaqui Tribe) and Robert McGhee (Poarch Band of Creek Indians) field questions from seminar participants on an array of topics ranging from codes of ethics to creating mechanisms for transparent governance.

Resource Type
Citation

Alvarez, Catalina. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 10, 2012. Q&A session.

McGhee, Robert. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 10, 2012. Q&A session.

Audience member:

"Robert, coming from a similar small tribe and situations I can relate a lot to what you brought up as far as what you're dealing with. I just had a question as far as the transparency. I agree with that and I know that it's...I'm sure it's a work in progress. What has worked and what hasn't as far as are there limitations as far as how transparent each governmental entity is for tribal members and do you get a lot of backlash when they ask for a document or want to see something that they're just not entitled to?"

Robert McGhee:

"They're entitled to every document that we have, able to see [them] as long as it's not employee related, if it's not involving certain employees or certain individual members themselves. What we do is...and one of the things, we do an annual report. We put money aside every year, we publish a book and the book goes out to every tribal member, it's talking about our current financial status and we put a letter in there asking them to keep it amongst themselves and this is for you and your household. And then two days before it goes out, well, about a week before it goes out we actually have a large community meeting that goes over the annual report and explains it page by page. So we go through all the funding issues, we go through ‘this is where all the money went, this is what's left, this is what we're we agree...' We'll tell them, ‘We wanted to build a capital reserve account to protect future assets and this is how much we're putting in there.' So that's the best way we handle it and if we have any documents that we're concerned, because we do have council members who do like to talk and they're social people. We have one council member, all he does, and this is not to be disrespectful but he's always at the funerals and someone who's going into the hospital, which I respect. But we tell him and it's like, ‘You need to tell them that you're coming on behalf of all of us because we can't all go to...' But he loves to talk and I don't think he means it disrespectfully, I really don't, but he just loves...so now we take any information that is valuable at the council meeting, if we want to have a private discussion, I actually take it back up from all the...they'll agree to me, 'You can have...I don't want mine.' Because if they have it in their hand they're more apt to share it and give it away and we'll be the first ones to say, ‘I don't want mine, you take mine back,' ‘cause then we'll just collect all the information from the tribal council, we'll have it destroyed and it's easier that way on some regards because it can be sensitive topics that they really shouldn't be discussing so we do take up some of those things. But the transparency is, it's difficult but it's a double-edged sword."

Audience member:

"But more positive than negative as far as being open to the community and there's no...because leaving that expectation or leaving people to their own ideas or what's going on behind closed doors. You're kind of alleviating that to an extent?"

Robert McGhee:

"I think so. They have the opportunity...every council member, we have...every council meeting, we have two a month, what we've done now though is our first council meeting is actually business and the second council meeting we have every director rotate in every entity come in and give financial updates and updates of who's been hired, who's been...like how many employees we have and things like that so that helps a little bit. If we can alleviate where they don't have to ask us a question or they don't have to...then we'll try to do it."

Audience member:

"Thank you. And just a final question for the two of you, as far as going forward as far as governance, economic development, sitting, being chairs and different committees, how important is it for leaders to be educated and be able to provide that additional information that if you just...all you know is the rez, all you know is that immediate community, you haven't lived off, you haven't experienced any other let's say tribal entities or network, how important is that to be able to move forward for the futures to come?"

Catalina Alvarez:

"Yeah, I think that's a...you have to be...where nowadays, we're not this small reservation, we're not this small tribe. We're running with a lot of and dealing with a lot of millions of dollars and you need educated people that are going to be making those right decisions for the tribe. A lot of times we would have...you still have those mindsets of the older generation that feel that they don't need those kind of people or sometimes they're like in his case as well -- I'm going to pick on Marcelino [Flores] over there -- we have some people that are very educated and that know a whole lot and we have a tendency not to...I think we have to have a balance of where we get the educated people but also having the previous council, the old founders of the tribe also respect and embrace the knowledge that he does bring because I know that a lot of times like I've talked to Herminia [Frias], at least have the sense that if you don't know where you're at as a council to know and to ask that you need to find the right people for those positions because otherwise, like with us, I know I've told some of the council, we are still in the process of trying to get back the gaming board, because a lot of us feel we are not capable of running a gaming institution by any means and that's where it becomes difficult, that you have a council that still wants to be in charge of everything. And is it beneficial for us? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. We were burned also with the gaming board and finding the right people because sometimes you get burned by those same individuals on the gaming board. There's a balance that you have to find educated people, also people that are practical in knowing what needs to be done."

Robert McGhee:

"I think the key is if you're not...if they don't have the say...we educate as much as we can across all areas. It doesn't necessarily have to be college educated. It could be business education, tribal law, business literacy. We've actually had people just come in even to the council and teach debits and credits so they can have a better understanding if tribal gaming...because there was a distrust issue too amongst...you have a board over here and we have a top management staff and they're presenting this and it's overwhelming what they're presenting to you. And now though they have to go through it step by step by step and it's an easier process but I encourage if you can put any type of, in place, training and education at your council level, please do, I would recommend that you do it. But also do it for...what we've just started doing for all of our directors and program directors and executive directors is we have sent them through intensive leadership training and they have really...they said that was the best thing that the council has ever done. We felt that they were a part of the organization, that we were listening to them and now they're going to offer it, we're going to offer it to even all the employees because it wasn't fair we felt when I said, ‘we went through this,' and let... It's called 'Lead by Greatness.' We went through this training and it wasn't really fair for us to have the training and not the people who run our programs. And so we've actually...that just started this past year and they're enjoying it and now it's getting down to all the employees. And all the boards and committees like I pointed out before, they're all...all tribal members have the opportunity to serve on those but they have to submit an application and the application actually has to say, ‘Why do you want to serve on this board?' If it's the Cultural Authority, ‘Why do you want to serve here? Is it because you have something to give or do you just want to learn more? Why do you want to serve on PCI Gaming?' Because we realize, like she said, we don't have the expertise to run all of these economic development properties that we have. But you've got to make sure that your job descriptions and you've got to make sure that your...are strong job descriptions and things that get people in the right places to do that for you. We have mentoring programs for our tribal members so they can serve under leadership positions, to learn that way."

Audience member:

"This is in regards to how you deal with or listen to tribal members. There's kind of a two-part question that I heard and I don't know what your responses are, maybe your suggestions on how. The first thing here is congratulations and I think we all know it's a blessing in disguise to be an elected official. So how do you kind of keep a happy about hearing that, ‘Congratulations, you're on council.' And then the second part seems to be, ‘Well, I think you guys should be doing this or you need to do that and I voted you in.' And how do you listen to the community, how do you respond to those questions?"

Catalina Alvarez:

"I'm not sure, like, how do you...the first one that you said, that people just congratulate you and still smile after you know what you got yourself into? Yeah. You have to at least...you're always going to be in that position I think either way, no matter where you're at. We all put up a front even though we're not...maybe we're not happy inside but at least we...we'll just...we portray a different image by saying we're fine and we're good and everything, but I think when tribal members come and expect things of you and are asking you to do things differently, usually when I get asked a lot of things and mostly complaints of things are not doing or I was left out of the process, before I would normally, being a first-year council [member] I would automatically just get it and run with it and not really hear the other side of the story. Now, usually I would ask them, ‘Well, what would you do in these positions? Give me some feedback on what it is that you want accomplished and we'll see what we can do,' but I'm not going to...I always tell them, ‘I'm not going to promise you that it can be done because of course I'm only one voice of other 11.' So it's very important for the community to know that it might not happen and it's okay to tell a community member no. But you've got to watch out that you don't say 'no' too close to elections! [Laughter]"

Robert McGhee:

"One thing she did say was right on that it is okay to tell a community member 'no.' But what happened is that I think the way I handle it is...I wanted to serve. I've wanted to serve as a council member since I was a child. That was...I wanted to come back and do that. I think now though it's when...when someone looks at you, ‘Well, I want this,' I'm like, ‘Well, you tell...why, why do you want that? Does it benefit just you, is it benefiting the family or does it benefit all of us as a whole?' Because I'll let them know in a heartbeat that if that program costs $2 million to fix or a million dollars to fix, you're taking away $2 million or something from another program that we need to look at. So it's almost, you provide me the solution. If that's a problem then, okay, how do we fix it? I think if you throw it back on them that way, because sometimes they have a tendency to put you here and they remind you that, ‘Oh, you think you're up here?' Well, I throw it back down on them and it's like, ‘No, I'm here with you and I do not know how to fix that problem. So how do we fix that problem together? Or why don't you come to a meeting and present solutions.' And they actually...some of them like that because then it gives them...they're involved again and they can make those...be a part of the decision-making process or at least come up with some great ideas that we actually have considered and moved forward with. I'm with nine people but you have 3,000 other people out there, they have some great ideas and I think if you take the opportunity just to challenge them though to say, ‘Well, why do you want that and does it benefit everybody? Because our job as nine is to benefit everyone and it takes a majority first to support it. And have you talked to the other nine? And if the other nine believe in it then that's actually something we could probably do.'"

Audience member:

"My question or thing is when I got in office I ran for chairwoman last term and I didn't make it but I had all these ideas and now that I'm here, how...because a lot of people aren't educated as...when they get on council. They finished high school but they did other things and there was no really like ethical issues that occur, understanding and following policy and procedure within the business frame and then the constitutional issues. How do we follow our constitution yet do our ordinances and all those? But my main thing, my main question is -- and you said you go to, you have training and stuff like that -- is the ethical issue is that when we know there's a relative, a friend, somebody that we have a conflict with we're not really up front to say, ‘I'm not going to be in this discussion, I'm going to step away.' How do you get those values across to your council members so that there is transparency, because the people out there know who's related to who and who's friends with who and all that stuff."

Robert McGhee:

"I know that sometimes what we have to do is you have to remind council members that there is actually a possible conflict and impropriety, there's a...what's the terms that actually gets...an appearance of an impropriety. So as long as we feel that there's an appearance, we will actually let the other council member know. We challenge, it's like, ‘I don't know if you should really be involved in this. You may not know this but this actually impacts so and so,' and we provide them the relation. We tell them the relationship. So maybe some of them do know it but they just needed someone to challenge them to say, ‘I think it's best that you step out, do we all agree that so and so needs to step out,' and they do. What happens is the majority of them will do, once you've just shown where the relationship is and usually you're doing it because of...and don't do it attack-tive. You do it, say, ‘I think...isn't so-and-so in that program or isn't...did so-and-so apply for that job, isn't that your sister-in-law...,' because you are related but there are so many things sometimes you do get confused on even what is a nepotism. Is sister-in-law, is my aunt, is my sister? We know some of them are but then you have, well, your grandparents but they take care of that child. So there could be the possibility of that. So I think if you point it out, we've done that in the past, we just did it or you have your legal department if they're in the room, too. Our legal department's always with us. We'll lean over and say, ‘I think there's a...' and we'll, ‘Hey, that's why that person gets paid the big bucks, you need to go tell that there's an appearance here and maybe it's best to not be...you can be here and maybe just not be a part of the decision.'"

Catalina Alvarez:

"For us, I think the first time that I got into council we actually passed an ethical ordinance and I believe with the new council you're given all the ordinances that have like a fiscal ordinance and the ethical ordinance so you can go back and read them. And it's a way also to challenge, for council to hold each other accountable. That's kind of worked a little bit. I laugh because Herminia used to be our chairwoman the first time that I got into council and of course there was a...it was used against her. She brought the issue into us as ethical ordinance and it's just...the council saw it as a way, ‘Okay, this is how we're going to use it against her now.' But it in essence the...why we decided to do an ethical ordinance was really just to hold each other accountable and making sure that the community knows that we are not going to be in those situations where nepotism does occur and that we're all on the same playing field."

Audience member:

"This question kind of piggy backs off of the last question, but as elected officials and members of council how are you able to effective work against factionalism in council? I think that in a lot of tribal communities relationships ties, family ties run really deep. And so in spite of council and elected officials assuming integrity in their positions, they're always subject to sway. And I think that you see that in a lot of council where many times members will kind of group together on certain decisions and push legislation, ordinance or policy a certain direction when maybe it's kind of not based on the content but more on maybe who they're talking to and who they're being influenced by. As leaders, how are you able to combat that or at least address it within your councils and your communities?"

Robert McGhee:

"I've pictured...I've painted this like perfect council up here and we are not...by no means perfect. We do have our issues but with 3,000 there's definitely a difference between 3,000 members and say a 10,000 member tribe where factions can change elections. There's no doubt. One of the things that we have done is...it's funny, when we know certain people are getting together on a vote, we'll be like, ‘Well, I really don't care.' We won't be a part of it because it depends on what the issue is. If it's something about, oh, we're going to...it's like if we want to spend money here for this program, well, if I don't have a say or a personal attachment to it or something like that, we'll be like...but they've worked up this whole, us five support it or...’Well, have at it and if it works that's great and if it fails, I'll be the first one to let you know that failed,' but I won't be...but we won't do it...we don't air it to the rest of them. I think that if it comes to stuff that is...we have a strong and hopefully a lot of you do have an ethics code and the ethics code was the hardest thing to get passed. That was the hardest. It went to a vote five different times over a year because...and we kept...when we would challenge our tribal council members at the table, ‘Why are you not supporting the ethics code? Are you unethical?' But what happened was even our general council members who are looking, who are at these meetings and seeing so and so quit, he's not or she's not supporting the ethics code, not supporting the ethics code. It all came about though, the reason that individual was not supporting because the appearance of the impropriety. He was so scared of that word because of like you said factions or your council member's brother on another side of the family would be like, ‘Well, hey, he was a part of that decision that...' And so there's an appearance there and he was terrified of that ‘cause he was involved in business himself. And so we were like...so we made it stronger where the appearance, we gave it a little bit more teeth into that document to help him support it. But I think when it just comes to the factions I would...we don't have strong factions, we know that board and committee...it's funny it's only on board and committee appointments because they want Johnny in that position and they'll go meet and we'll say, ‘Well, which ones did you guys...who do you think you're going to choose today.' ‘No, we didn't do that yet.' Call them out on it. We do. But we've got a pretty good close relationship because we've spent so much time together in retreats and workshops and I do not...we do not have a problem calling each other out and one of the things that we had learned from one of these retreats that we went to, they pretty much told us, ‘Call them out. If they are not being the leader that they're supposed to be or if they're not supporting something...say it. Why are you not supporting this initiative? I need an answer.' And we couldn't have them flip-flop anymore either, that was the other thing too. We'd be in a workshop and we'd go around and just do a roll call. It was like, ‘You support it, you support it, you...' and then we'd get to a meeting and, ‘I don't support that.' Made us look like...that only happened a few times. So then we had another leadership, together, Kumbaya saying, ‘I get angry when you do that.' It was almost like a social therapy session. ‘I get angry when you do this. That's not appropriate ‘cause you're giving me your word and all that I feel that you have is your word. That's what makes you a credible person to me is your word and your actions and your actions are going against your words.' So now they actually will tell us, ‘Okay, I'm just going to be honest. I'm not supporting that.' Or if they're about to flip, because they've done it, we'll have another workshop, ‘I want to change my vote.' ‘What? Why?' And then I said, ‘Well, you told us before that from now on you're going to stick to your vote or stick to your decision,' and I called him out. He's like, ‘Yes, but I did tell you that if I changed I would let you know beforehand.' I'm like, ‘You've got me, you're right.' And he changed. He went in that council meeting and his vote changed and I'm like, ‘Well, at least you let me know beforehand.' I was leaning over to another council member, it was like, ‘We lost that one.'"

Catalina Alvarez:

"I think we're still trying to figure that out. You're always going to have I think, at least since I've been in council we have not had like this kind of council that can just sit down and talk, but we always had those kind of factions and we know that they're, sometimes they're influenced. The last...we haven't, this council since it's barely starting, we haven't gotten to that point but the previous council, we knew something was up and the committee knew what was going on and council members would pull in of course all their family so you were kind of pressured to vote in that direction. One of the things that took years and it still has been an issue was like that in the [Adam] Walsh Act, I couldn't believe how difficult it was for council to say that we want to first have the same kind of stuff...that we were going to opt into it and then where we were going to put our note...to notify the community, in which methods. It became so...I'm not even sure, well, I'm assuming that a lot of...in council you would have a sexual pedophile as a family member, that's the only reason why I thought that they could...they thought that I thought that they would be so hesitant in securing our community, but not until we actually had a switch in council that that...we were able to figure out where we were going to post the sexual pedophiles and what kind of notice was going to be given out to the community. But I think a lot of times that [faction], it's always going to exist because we're a tribe of 16,000 or 17,000 and we're always going to have that [faction]. We have council members that are related to each other and you know that they're going to pass ordinances and policies that are going to benefit their families or friends and it's very difficult to find out, at least for us right now. We're still....we're in the stage of trying to figure out how we can...how to resolve that."

Audience member:

"Just a couple of questions here. I'm busy scribbling things down. In today's world of course we live...we all live in two worlds and that is we live in America but at the same time we live within our tribal nations. And quite often, we have a clash in cultures and cultural values and we need somewhat to reconcile some of the things that we do. And was mentioned earlier the idea of nepotism. In the white world of course, that's a no-no. You don't do that, that's unethical behavior. At the same time, as a tribal member, we're taught form a very early age that our responsibility is to our family. Our responsibility is to our relatives, our responsibility is to our community. That's where our citizenship is, that's where our allegiance and where we should be focused. And we also understand that when someone close to you, a relative or whatever, comes for your assistance, you are not supposed to refuse because they're the ones who are going to support you when the chips are down, when you have a tragedy, when you have a sorrow, when you have a great need, you depend upon your family, yet and this job as tribal council is going to be gone in four years, but you still have to face that family member. And that's a difficult thing because you want the betterment of your nation, but at the same time when you're close relatives or clan members, clan fathers, whatever it is comes to you and needs something, how do you reconcile that? I know that's a challenge, ‘cause we have to keep our cultural values alive but we still have to work and thrive in the modern day era. So that's one of the things I think that has to be reconciled.

Another is with our traditional ways as you've mentioned earlier, to call them out. I think from a traditional mindset we're taught not to do that ‘cause we choose avoidance over confrontation whenever we can. And when we have a conflict with somebody, that's when we give direct eye contact, that's when we have that confrontation with them and we go full force. But we don't like to do that but rather we avoid confrontation whenever we can. If that means going on the other side of the street or not returning a phone call or not showing up for a meeting, for many of us, that's the proper thing to do rather than call them out. That's more of a modern day, white man kind of a thinking, at least I think. Utilizing our elders is another traditional way where we as tribal leaders or whatever we are think we're all it and leave out that segment of decision making or reliance upon our tribal elders to utilize them.

And I think what I'm gathering as part of what's happening here is to rebuilding nations is really about going back, going back. It's not building the tribal nation, it's rebuilding and it's remembrance and keeping a lot of our cultural values alive, of the form of governance that was thrust upon us. And if we look at those things, I do have a question specifically for you guys or anyone can answer this and that is, what would happen if salaries were not paid to elected council members and only expenses were paid, what kind of people would we have in there? What would we gain, what would we lose, what would it look like if we went back to that traditional sense of governance where these were not paid positions? Looking forward to your responses."

Robert McGhee:

"Just want to touch on a couple things there that you stated before. Yes, I have an allegiance to my family but I was raised to have, mostly from my mother, my father was a military man and things, but my mom, there was something about honesty, there was something about humility. And what bothers me is say when I have a larger family, not the nucleus but the extended family come up and ask me to do something that is inappropriate. I don't have a problem asking them, ‘Why are you asking me to do this? This is not...' because right now when you sign, when you run for council it's no longer mom, dad and my brother and my nephews and my grandparents, it's my...it's the 3,000 other members. Now every council member in here may have a different idea of that. That's mine. I represent all of them, the ones that you don't want to represent, the ones that still will call you by not your real name, any other name, the ones that still have some varied problems that we need to address. So I always know that I can go back to my family once I'm done serving my terms if I choose not to get elected because my dad doesn't allow us to speak tribal politics in our house either whenever we have an event or anything like that because he used to serve there. So he's like, ‘No one's allowed to come up to each other and talk to me about this or that or why did you do that?' He posted it on...he actually has a sign, he writes and he puts it on the door, ‘No politics are going to be discussed today,' which is helpful because sometimes you do...all of us here, you do get tired of going to certain events because you know someone's going to come up and ask a question or question you about this so at least I know it's...in the house, dad's house, it's off limits even at my brother's house ‘cause he served too. So he's like, ‘We don't talk about that.' To get back to your calling out question, I think I put that, yes, when I said calling out but keep in mind that we do it respectfully. It's one of those things of when I know...I don't necessarily have to call you always out in front. If I know you're upset, what I'm going to do though is have a conversation with you somewhere to ask why because I don't think me personally that we can move forward until I know what your issues are.

The full-time council...I agree with you on the...our part-time members...about four years ago we only got paid a stipend of $50 a meeting, five years ago. However, though, I would say the difference between that was there was also a different leadership at that time, too, so the council wasn't involved...a lot of them were involved but they just didn't feel that they had the time because there were some things going on where, ‘We're going to have a meeting today at 10:00.' ‘Well, I can't make a meeting today at 10:00. I'm working.' And until you got this...until you can change where you know that the leadership or whoever, the chairman, is going to respect if it's either a part-time council or a full-time one to know that we'll work around various schedules. I meant they do it for us now. We ask them, because like I said, two of us are part-time so we only have workshops on one day a month, all day. I actually use vacation time to do that. But the rest, they're welcome to attend their committee meetings. The committee meetings that I serve on, I'm allowed to determine when those meetings are so I think it could work as a part-time, but I don't think you would have the problems that you do. But keep in mind when you're full-time too, I think there are added pressures where a lot of the general council members now are looking at qualifications of putting somebody in office because they're paying them this much money. So that's actually a good, I would say a good side to it. Now, individuals are having to run on their qualifications because they're making salaries that are...that the program director or so and so, I make this and I have to have a master's in this or I make... So what are you bringing to the table as a council member that you're worth that much money? And so I think that's a good thing to it. It's stepping up to get other individuals involved that have qualifications or whatever those qualifications are it just could be not necessarily educational, it just could be serving on various committees or boards or things like that. And we have a cell center, just so you know, and that's where all our seniors hang out, all our elders hang out and I'm there probably...I eat lunch with them once a week to twice...to hear what they have to say. And we play bingo with them in the area and that's the best time to do it is when they're all gathered and just, ‘Well, what do you guys want us to see or where did I screw up today,' and they'll let you know quickly where."

Catalina Alvarez:

"I think as...and you're right, as individuals we're taught from the beginning our roles, our female roles and male roles and where you stand and even how we should address our elders. I think one of the things with the previous councils and when I first came on to council is we have our cultural leave availability for employees to do their cultural participants and participate in their culture activities. And I think as I talk to elders as a council, when we would get into discussions and I had one of the councilmen go, ‘You're supposed to respect your elders all the time.' It's true, but as a council, you guys are all equal, we are all equal at least my response to them because you were all elected by the people and they expect you to have a voice like any other individual on council. That was my response to him. And I think that more and more the council understands that we all should have a voice in how we do things and even elders in our council, they're always constantly...and I point out to Mary Jane [Buenamea], ‘They'll keep us in line as well,' but I think they're open to know that we all can share our own ideas and still try to move forward on some of our activities. I know that the last council since I was the only female, they would not include me in some of the discussions on cultural and even like on stipends that we give for our festivities, which I would get upset because I'm like, ‘as a council, male, female, I'm here as a voice to the people that voted me in. So you can't hold that against me that I can't give my input on what's going on.' But I think as we move into a full-time council I think if they weren't...if we wouldn't receive a stipend, it would be very difficult to move as fast as we have I think. As a council it allowed us to pass a lot of and meet more frequently to get things done within the tribe."

Audience member:

"I had my question for Robert and I wanted to know...you talked about the three sides that have to be heard. Could you just tell us very quickly what those three sides of any issue?"

Robert McGhee:

"Your side, the other side and the opinion. There's always this side, this side, but then there's also just what's the opinion out there of this problem. There's a lot more of those than there are the opinions themselves.

John Borrows: Anishinaabe Principles of Citizenship and Identity

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

University of Minnesota Law Professor John Borrows (Anishinaabe) provides an overview of how Anishinaabe people defined citizenship and identity traditionally, and how the cultural principles embedded in that traditional definition possess great power to inform laws defining tribal citizenship today. 

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Borrows, John. "Anishinaabe Principles of Citizenship and Identity." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

"[Anishinaabe language]. I'm grateful for the opportunity that I've been given to be able to come and speak with you today. This is an incredibly important topic, and I'm thankful that we had this amazing presentation about the historical context that we can now talk about these things. When my daughter was young, someone asked her who she was. So she came to me one day and asked me who she was and she said, 'Am I some kind of money Indian?' I couldn't figure out what she was meaning there. 'Am I some kind of money Indian?' she said again. We talked a little bit about what she was trying to get at -- she was maybe five, six, somewhere around there -- and through prompting and eventually she said...through prompting, it eventually occurred to me that someone had tried to identify her as a 'quarter Indian' and in her mind she saw her Indianness as related to money when this notion of quarter was talked about.

What a scary thing to be able to introduce into a child's life in thinking about who they are fundamentally in the world, to be able to calibrate worth based on money, to calibrate dignity based on quarters. I think we can do better than that. And I want to talk today about some of the wisdom that's found within Anishinaabe law that might have us work through this on a different basis. I want to talk about principles that we can identify, that we could measure Indian status against, that we could measure what we do when we think about citizenship against. And if our laws fall short of these principles, they might be valid in terms of the passage by a council, by recognition under federal Indian law, but I wonder if they are valid in relationship to those things that have been passed onto us through time. That is, are the laws that we're working with really the principles, the standards, the criteria that our ancestors wanted us to follow in creating sense of community?

The first thing I want to talk about is [Anishinaabe language], love. Do our laws foster and encourage love when we are thinking about citizenship? If our laws get in the way of love by cutting people out of our extended family or immediate family relationships, I want to suggest that they are not facilitating love. [Anishinaabe language], an Anishinaabe word, has a couple of different meanings attached to it.

I was talking to an elder that lives at home on my reserve, Basil Johnson, about this idea and he talked about [Anishinaabe language] or love as being reflected in the landscape around us. We have this concept as Anishinabe people called '[Anishinaabe language].' That is, we learn about what our behavior should be by observing the earth. Our laws are literally written in and on the earth. Our textbooks are found in the flowing of the rivers and the passage of the clouds and the sound of the wind in the trees, [Anishinaabe language]. And so as I asked him about love, he referred to me a feature that's close by, a river, called [Anishinaabe language].' It refers to the mouth of the river. What happens at the mouth of the river? You have this great outflowing of energy, you have this great outflowing of nutrients that nourishes a whole range of life that's at that zone where the river meets the bays and with that [Anishinaabe language] you get growth, you get life, you get strength. He was suggesting to me that our laws that might help us calibrate how we should relate to one another, these ideas of citizenship are related to [Anishinaabe language]. If I wanted to say, 'I love you,' I would say, '[Anishinaabe language].' I want that flow between us that encourages growth.

There's another meaning though to this word. It means to be stingy. It means to be close with those that you are around. So if I say to my wife, [Anishinaabe Language], it means I'm being stingy with her; I want her to be a part of my circle. I wonder when we think about blood quantum in particular in setting rules for citizenship if it follows this idea of flowing out of energy and of then holding close to you those people that we love and if blood quantum is diminishing that ability of us to be able to create those relationships I would question as to whether or not that is [Anishinaabe language]. It's one principle that we could look at to measure our citizenship.

We have other principles. As I introduced myself today, I said [Anishinaabe language], I am of the Otter dodem. Whenever I go across [Anishinaabe language] and I meet someone that's a member of the Otter dodem, I know their family, and historically we would have had mutual rights and obligations with one another. My reservation is on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario about four hours north of Detroit, about three hours north of Toronto. If I traveled from the Cape Croker Indian Reserve, [Anishinaabe language], to these places just north of here that are Anishinaabe and I encountered someone who is [Anishinaabe language], I would know that they were family and I could think about citizenship not being arranged hierarchically but being arranged vertically. Difference in orientation in thinking about citizenship, if we started to imagine our relationships as being spread out as opposed to being aligned in a hierarchy, blood quantum often aligns us in that hierarchy and doesn't spread us out across the land in the way that made us strong as Anishinaabe people for thousands of years.

Dodem -- there's an interesting etymology to that word. The Anishinabe word for heart is [Anishinaabe language], dodem, heart is a part of what we think about when we identify family members, when we talk about dodem. And to what extent do laws aimed to citizenship build that sense of family, build that sense of heart. That etymology is found in the word for town, [Anishinaabe language], where people live together in the sense of being joined at the heart or there's a sense of a gathering place where the heart of the community is found. I believe that there are important principles to measure our citizenship laws that flow from our family laws. Are our citizenship laws anti-family by cutting out our heart, by cutting out those that we should consider close to us; love, family, criteria for citizenship?

The third one: When I introduced myself I said, '[Anishinaabe language].' Hello all my relations. Who are my relations? You are my relations. As I came to this place today, I noticed the beauty that surrounds with the plants and the trees and the birds and again the livingness. When we talk about [Anishinaabe language] as Anishinabe people, there's an encouragement there to be generous in who we identify as a part of us, to be open in thinking about others as being a part of us. When we begin ceremony, we often try to encourage this understanding by putting down tobacco, [Anishinaabe language]. That is, there's a sense of reciprocity that's involved when we ask for help as to how we should proceed because we realize that we are nothing without our relations. We need all our relations to be fully Anishinaabe and if we don't practice that sense of reciprocity and if, through our citizenship laws, we find ways to narrow our world of relationships, we are not being consistent with our ceremonial paths, we are not being consistent again with what we learn as we look at the world around us.

[Anishinaabe language]. What the earth's teachings are to us, when you look at an ecosystem, you understand that the strength of that place does not come through a monoculture. You need a variety of plants to be able to sustain and support one another. If you get into a monoculture situation, what occurs is that ecosystem becomes endangered, because if a disease comes along or if something comes along that targets a particular strain and it happens to be the strain that's dominant, you will lose the vibrance, the vitality, the strength of those relationships. There's an economic term for this too, it's called diversifying your portfolio. When you make an investment, you don't just put your stock into one industry. You try to ensure that your money is placed across different opportunities for development because as one struggles, another might be drawing strength and you can even out through time the possibilities of you sustaining yourself in that way. It's so important to think about [Anishinaabe language], to think about all our relationships, to think about the ecosystem approach to understanding citizenship: love, family, relationships as criteria for judging citizenship.

We also could do well to think about what citizenship means in our languages and in [Anishinaabe language], the word is [Anishinaabe language]. It flows or is closely related to a word [Anishinaabe language]. What's this word for citizenship? What's this word? It actually means 'freedom,' freedom in a particular way, freedom with a sense of ownership attached to it. [Anishinaabe language] is like to own something. [Anishinaabe language] is to own the responsibility that we have in our relationships. Do blood quantum laws, do our citizenship laws encourage that sense of freedom, owning the responsibility for our actions in ways that enable us to flourish, to think about freedom in its broadest conceptions?

When my great-great grandfather was a young man growing up on the shores of Georgian Bay, he was a runner. He was charged [by] the chief and council of taking messages to the Anishinaabe communities around eastern Great Lakes areas. So he would run from Cape Croker, which I again told you is about three hours drive from Toronto, four hours to Detroit. He would run to Toronto in four days. He would run from Toronto to Detroit in eight days. How did he do that? Because he was free, because he was raised by women who knew about medicines and food and as he went from place to place to place, he didn't have to carry his groceries on his back because he knew where those plants were that would sustain him as he was making his way from community to community. He was free. Do we, in the way we think about citizenship, encourage this type of freedom?

Again, talking about Basil Johnson, I asked him what freedom means. He gave me these words and he said, 'It's that you're free to come and go as you please. That's what it means to be Anishinaabe. That's what it means to practice our citizenship, to practice it in the sense of owning responsibility. Freedom isn't just carefree, do what you want. There are obligations that we have. Do our citizenship laws encourage and develop freedom or do they cut us off and prevent us from being fully who we can be in the world? So there is this sense of love and family and relationship and freedom that we might use to look at our laws.

I want to also have us consider in our own languages what are our names for ourselves because there were no Indians in North America 500 years ago. That is an invented concept. My grandpa, when he was on the earth, used to make fun of this word and he said, 'We're Indians because Columbus got lost looking for India.' He said, 'It's a good thing he wasn't looking for Turkey. We would be in trouble at that point.' But these are invented concepts, 'Indian.'

So who are we? We are Anishinaabe. There are great criteria for citizenship that are embedded in the languages that we have and our names for ourselves. What does it mean to be Anishinaabe? My grandfather told me that that means to try to be good. Our word for 'good in the world' is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] is 'man.' Anishinaabe, someone who tries to be good. Is there this element that's embedded in blood quantum?

Another word is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] means 'nothing.' [Anishinaabe language], those who are pitiful, those who are the least of creation when we compare ourselves to the plants and the animals and the birds and the clouds and the winds and the rivers and the escarpments, [Anishinaabe language]. And what an amazing thing to then craft our laws in the sense of this humility, that we don't think that we have the power to be able to cut off those who are family and are close friends because of some foreign concept of Indianness, which was not a part of who we are. So, love, family, relationships, freedom, nationhood, Anishinaabe.

I also want to suggest that healing can be another part of what we think about as criteria for passage of laws. The Anishinabe have a way of engaging in healing which is to look to [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] means 'strength.' [Anishinaabe language] is the earth. How are we healed? Through [Anishinaabe language]. There's this strength that comes from the earth that we can take into ourselves that we can use again as criteria for understanding our responsibilities. There's this historic problem that encountered as Anishinaabe people. They're called [Anishinaabe language]. It means kind of dirty, [Anishinaabe language]. Someone becomes cannibalistic, consumptive. As they are going about their activities, they take everything to themselves in a way that's never satisfied. They're voracious. The sense is that it's never ending in the appetites that we have. When we had [Anishinaabe language], what happened? You would often read about the stories that they would take their teeth and they would tear open the veins at their wrists and they would drink their blood and what Anishinaabe people tried to do when [Anishinaabe language] were doing that is apply the strength of the earth and there's lots of [Anishinaabe language] stories that give a legal process for the healing of a [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] were rarely killed. Those are the stories that get the attention but that was the last step in the attempts to deal with a person that was harmful.

Now, blood quantum can be in my view likened to a [Anishinaabe language]. It's consumptive, it's voracious, it never ends in searching for that perfect moment of finding that blood quantum. I've heard it said that blood quantum is the vampire of Anishinaabe and Indigenous communities, sucking the life out of us by paying attention to blood. We need this healing from the earth, [Anishinaabe language], this ability to be able to stop...stop that flow of people being cut away from us.

Final point: Anishinaabe people like to think in sevens. This idea adding to love and family, relationships, freedom and healing is the sense of sustenance, looking to [Anishinaabe language], looking to things that create life. I talked about our laws being [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] is something that you make up and when I talked to Basil about laws he actually doesn't like that word. He prefers [Anishinaabe language], because rather than making it up in thinking about law, [Anishinaabe language] implies something that's been a long time. [Anishinaabe language] means 'a long time.' [Anishinaabe language] and thinking about building our laws, our customs around [Anishinaabe language] enables us to think about alternative paths than the ones that were presented to us by Bethany [Berger].

Now, these are very broad concepts that might seem too ambiguous to enact as legal principles. Let me suggest that the concepts of equality and liberty and security and assembly and freedom of speech, etc., are also vague, ambiguous concepts, but they're given meaning through practice and through interpretation and Anishinaabe people can give meaning to these concepts through practice and through interpretation. As we do so, I believe we will be stronger as a people. We will then be able to fight the challenges that this presents to the government by claiming that we are going to be a larger people than they want us to be. We are going to have greater numbers in the future with greater talent spread amongst those numbers as we grow our nations.

When I was visiting in New Zealand, I appreciated what the Maori did in their laws. When someone got married, they married in rather than marrying out if they married someone who is biologically non-Maori. And that has brought a strength to that nation in terms of their numbers that is just that's almost impossible to calculate. Anishinaabe or any Native nation might think about taking the paths of love, family, relationships, freedom, nationhood, healing and sustenance because I don't want my children to be money Indians. I want my children to be Anishinaabe in the best sense of the word. [Anishinaabe language]." 

Robert Miller: Creating Sustainable Reservation Economies

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative and lively talk, law professor Robert Miller discusses the importance of Native nations building diversified, sustainable reservation economies through the cultivation and support of small businesses owned by their citizens, and offers some strategies for how Native nations can then leverage the economic activity of those businesses.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Miller, Robert. "Creating Sustainable Reservation Economies." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Presentation.

Stephen Cornell:

"We want to turn our attention from courts to economies in this next presentation, and we're very fortunate that we were able to persuade Bob Miller to come down and talk with us this morning. It's my pleasure to introduce him. Robert Miller is a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. Bob's been engaged in Indian law for more than 20 years now. He's served as a judge, a justice, is now I think Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals at Grand Ronde and is currently Professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. You can read the details of his bio in the book...the curriculum booklet, but he's recently just a year ago published a new book called Reservation Capitalism: Economic Development in Indian Country that's now available out there and some of you may want to look for, but it's a pleasure to have Bob down to talk to us a little bit about creating Indigenous economies and sustainable communities. So please let me welcome Bob Miller."

Robert Miller:

"Thank you, Steve, and thank you all for being here and thank you for inviting me from Native Nations Institute. I gave this talk last night to a class at ASU [Arizona State University] and I took an hour and 40 minutes. I don't think I have an hour and 40 minutes today. In fact, I've been asked to talk for about 20 minutes and then leave the floor open for questions and we'll see what you want to talk about and what comments and questions you might have so I'm going to try...you have the materials and the slides in the book, the slides go way beyond 20 minutes so we're going to roar through this.

As Steve mentioned, I've been working on economic development ever since I was hired as a professor. In 1999, I was hired as a full-time professor at Lewis & Clark [College] in Portland, and the first topic I wanted to address was economic development in Indian Country. I do not think I'm overemphasizing this point: I think that economic development may be the most important issue you are facing as tribal leaders. As tribal communities, we need to create sustainable homelands where our people and our citizens -- if they choose of course -- where they can live and have access to adequate housing and adequate wage jobs. How are our reservations going to be sustainable communities, that next seven generations that we think about and talk about, how are we going to have young families able to live on reservations, to attend tribal colleges to learn language from elders, to learn culture from elders. So when I'm talking economic development, I'm talking about far more than just making money and I'm not talking about making the next Indian Donald Trump or making someone rich. We're talking about making reservations sustainable communities that continue to survive for those thousands of years that we already have.

So I have a couple of just sort of prime messages that I wanted to write in this book and the very first chapter is really just...let's look at all those really at the same time. So my number one chapter, I guess it's chapter two, but I'm trying to establish even for Native peoples, but certainly for the American society at large, that Native communities supported themselves by intelligent, hard work for centuries, and dare I say that it was entrepreneurial, family type businesses. We didn't...the picture of Americans is that Indians frolicked through the forest like wood nymphs living off the bounty of nature. I think there's a nefarious purpose for American society to have that vision. I think that helps their consciences feel less guilt about the taking of this reservation -- excuse me -- this continent and the resources. So they'd pretend that Natives didn't own private property, they'd pretend that Natives didn't know how to develop resources and to protect and marshal those resources to have an economic life that they could live and survive in.

I have a quote in my book that's interesting: What's the economic year? I'm not an economist and I don't use that many economic terms, but there's a few points I want to make today. Your economic year is how long it takes you to create...either to earn the money or create the resources for you to survive for a year. And what I've read is that most tribal peoples survived on a three- to four-month economic year. They could either grow, harvest, hunt or gather the products they needed to support themselves. What's your economic year now? What's the average American economic year? It's fifty weeks, isn't it? ‘Cause doesn't the average person only get...gee, whose economic system was better? So I'm trying to drive home a point to American Indians that we did work intelligently, we did know how to create economic valuable properties and we did understand private property. And let me address that because I think also American society thinks, ‘Oh, Indian people don't own property. Gee, you don't want to work, dude, because you don't own property.' Well, I dare ask you what that you have do you not consider your private property? Our lands, we view tribal governments as owning lands in common and that certainly has been our history and then sort of the legal property regime, but in chapter two of my book I talk about economic principles of tribal governments. Even though land was held in common for the tribe, individual families acquired private property rights. I cite the Hopi Tribe and various Pueblo tribes where various planter chiefs maybe, if that's the correct word, would assign plots and lots to various families, but they would then grow, harvest and those crops were theirs to use as they saw fit. And as long as that clan or family used that resource, it was in essence private property.

Where I'm from, the Pacific Northwest, I know a fair bit about the salmon cultures and the Columbia River. Native families up there would own prominent fishing rocks. Native families built wooden platforms to fish over the rapids at Celilo Falls, for example. Those were private property. No one else used those items without the permission of the tribal family. They were even inheritable property. That's something that some people, [it] would just boggle their mind that Native societies had a vision of private property. And in the tribes...the Makah Tribe at the very northwest tip of Washington and then their relatives up Vancouver Island, the Chul-nuth people, they took the ownership of what today we call intellectual property -- that's the second-to-the-last point I have there -- to a high degree that I think most Americans are unaware of. In the cultures of the northwest and into British Columbia, you owned songs, names, totem symbols, ceremonies, dances, and no one else would dare to use those privately owned intellectual pieces of property without permission of the recognized owners. The potlatch ceremony, I know Professor Trosper's written a lot about that. In fact, he's coming to speak at a conference at our school in February. So if any of you want to come to Arizona State February 27th and 28th, we are having a two-day conference about creating the tribal economy. So that's primarily what I'm interested in, what I'm talking about.

So the one economic term I'll put forward to you today is the idea of leakage and the multiplier effect. Again, I'm not an economist so I've learned these recently, but what do they mean? You've probably lived the idea of leakage. That is when money leaves a community sooner than is optimal. In 1994, I heard a Navajo tribal official say that 84 cents of every dollar a Navajo person receives leaves the reservation immediately. Now that is the case on practically every reservation I'm familiar with. Why is that? Because there are no businesses. There's no place to spend the money on the reservation. So the reservation that I'm actually the most familiar with is the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana because I worked for the Tribal Housing Authority for over three years. The first time I went to Navajo or, excuse me, to Lame Deer to apply for the job I got the map out, saw how I would fly there and then drive there and I said, ‘Oh, I'll just stay at the motel at Lame Deer.' Now you know where this story's going don't you? Good thing I had my tent and my sleeping bag with me because I slept on the front yard of my friend's house. So I go, I show up in Lame Deer, there's nothing to eat, there's no place to buy anything. The only business is a tribal gas station and there is an IGA store owned by a non-Indian. So that really started to open my eyes to some of the issues that economics face in Indian Country.

So I should ask Professor [Ronald] Trosper this, but I think economists say that a dollar should circulate in your community five to seven times. That's sort of the optimal goal before it is then taken and spent elsewhere. So that's what's called leakage, but in Indian Country with almost nowhere to spend your money, what happens? We know that our people get in the car. Perhaps there's not even a bank on the reservation. At Northern Cheyenne there was no bank. No reservation in Oregon that I'm aware of. Well, I better preface that, very few banks on reservations. As of a few years ago and I cite that in my book, only eight tribes owned banks. My tribe purchased a bank. We're in a small trust land-only corner of northeastern Oklahoma, but we purchased a bank by buying shares in that bank so sort of a different way just through the stock we ended up buying a bank. I do not know the number of how many tribes own banks today, but banking in Indian Country as you are well aware is an issue and so where can you cash your check? So at Northern Cheyenne people would get whatever kind of check they got from working or government or whatever, 42 miles to Hardin, Montana, that's where they would cash their check. One hundred and two miles to Billings, that's where they could cash their check and that's where that money got spent. That's a disaster for economic development for what we call the multiplier effect being spent on the reservation.

So what I have been talking about is creating businesses in Indian Country and emphasizing the importance of economic development. I meant to read you a quote of a couple chairmen that I interviewed for my book. Because this idea that economic development is the most important issue in Indian Country, many people might go, ‘Wait a minute, what about sovereignty, what about jurisdiction, what about social welfare issues? All those things are important.' Well, what I mean is that all of those issues are tied up with having an economy and having economic resources so that a tribal government can engage in social welfare programs, economic development welfare programs, improving their court systems as we just heard about, and in doing all the things that government is expected to do and what we hope [for] from government. But economic development is also crucial for individual Indian families to support themselves and to contribute to supporting their community and to educate their children, feed their children and help just the lifestyle of the reservation -- lifestyle, wrong word, the improvement of economic conditions in Indian Country.

So here's what Chairman Clifford Marshall of the Hoopa Tribe in Northern California told me back in '99. He said, ‘There's nothing traditional about having the federal government take care of us. There is nothing cultural about that.' 'My idea,' the chairman said, ‘of tribal economic development is that sovereignty is economic independence. Until we get there, we are not independent.' Another chairman from the Umatilla Tribe, Antone Minthorn told me, ‘If you own the economy, it won't hurt culture.' So we always run up against that question, ‘Is economic development somehow anti-Indian?' And that was one of my primary goals in working on this book. Native people have always worked intelligently and hard and even at risky businesses. It's not safe and easy to go whaling, is it? It's not safe and easy to be a buffalo hunter, is it? These are dangerous occupations. But Native peoples knew how to acquire resources and how to use them, even if that included distributing and sharing resources through giveaways perhaps or the potlatch ceremonies from the northwest. We knew how to use resources to support our cultures and our societies and I think we're in that same place today or we need to be in that place today. So I'm going to just quickly slash through some of this. I don't want to spend any time on that.

I am tired also at looking at these statistics. Maybe you're tired of talking about these things. I want to talk about improving issues. I don't want American Indians to be the least-educated, specifically identifiable racial group in the United States. I don't want us to be the least healthy group in the United States. I want us to improve our situations. And can we rely on the United States to do that? Does the United States care? I have a statement in the book, ‘Okay, we've relied on arguing you owe us certain things under our treaties, you have a trust responsibility for us, help us, assist us.' Well, we've waited 200 years for that. How's that worked out for us? Well, here's the situation. So if we don't do it ourselves, who's going to do it? So that...when I'm talking about creating an economy, I'm talking about intelligent tribal government and intelligent tribal communities working together to create a public and private economy in Indian Country. We often do rely just on you folks, the elected tribal leaders and we think that it's the tribal government's job to create economies and that's not completely true, is it? You create the conditions in which an economy can thrive, just what we heard about the tribal court system. Without laws for commercial issues, without laws about how you incorporate on a reservation, how you lease land on a reservation, without effective bureaucracies -- which the Harvard Project has taught us -- without effective institutions economies can't thrive. Entrepreneurs will go elsewhere. I have a cite or two in my book, a quote or two, excuse me, about Arizona Natives who started a business and they said they were going to open that business in Phoenix and not on their reservation and they had some reasons they didn't want to do that. And so that like kind of hurts me. We hope that Native entrepreneurs will consider their own reservation, will create jobs, will become mentors, and will help that new generation of young people to see that, ‘Gosh, being an owner of your own business is very much Native and is very possible.' So that's what I keep pushing for.

These statistics are quite old. You can see this is based on the 1992 Census and this chart is created by ONABEN. I was on the Board of Directors for ONABEN for 12 years and that's why when I became a professor this was the topic I wanted to write about. ONABEN stands for the Oregon...look at that, I can't hold that pointer steady. You guys are making me nervous or something or maybe it's that I'm 62. Oregon Native American Business and Entrepreneurial Network. Four Oregon tribes created ONABEN in 1992 because they knew that they needed individual entrepreneurs to open businesses on their reservations. So ONABEN's mission is to help individual Indians learn to draft business plans that are fundable by a bank, that could perhaps be given a loan and then we used to teach classes, in fact a year-long class we taught on how to operate your business, accounting, management, employment, all sorts of issues. But ONABEN took these statistics for Oregon and you can already see the stats. So in Oregon as of 1992, white Oregonians owned a business per 1,000 people at the rate of 81. 81 Oregon...white Oregonians owned their private business. Look at where American Indians were and I don't know how much that number has changed even though these statistics are pretty old. We have enormous room to improve in creating economies on our reservation and to encourage entrepreneurial activities. These are statements from ONABEN and this is the effect of poverty on Indian Country so I guess...I should have worded these I guess in the negative. So poverty causes education, economic, social and health issues; it injures community cohesion. As we know, if our people have to leave the reservation to go to school, if our people have to leave the reservation to live, to find adequate housing and jobs, that's what we call the brain drain, isn't it? That's assets, those are positive benefits we need on the reservation, but because of the lack of certain services and opportunities on the reservation they have to go elsewhere so that hurts community cohesion. If the parents have to leave to work or to be educated, that hurts family stability. Ultimately it hurts many things that we do care about.

So here's what ONABEN says are the benefits. Earned income: there's pride from earning and supporting yourself. There's pride from being able to buy your kids that toy they'd like to have, right? Support them and feed them. We already talked about the multiplier effect. The more we can keep money on the reservation circulating, even though it's only one dollar folks, what we mean by the multiplier is that it increases the effect of it. It's paid to the employee, the employee then goes to the local gas station and buys gas. Well, that pays the employees and the rent there and for the gasoline. Someone then goes to the local grocery store. That's paying employees and profit for everyone. So as long as we can keep that dollar in Indian Country, that's the goal of every community in the United States, capture those dollars, make the multiplier effect continue.

So ONABEN, like I say, tribally run organization, our board was made up of tribal representatives appointed by the tribal councils and then a few of us were Willamette Valley representatives. So I was the Willamette Valley representative. It's not anti-Indian to own your own business and I've already hammered on that point I think. That's what my chapter two is about. We all ran our own businesses, didn't we, whether it was family or individual, we engaged in economic activity to support ourselves and we were proud of that. So I think that's an ethos that we need to reinforce that that's cultural. Being poor is not cultural. Do you know of any tribal community that wants to be poor? Do any of us have a culture that said we had to be poor? I'm unaware of one, so we need to ban that idea from our mind.

ONABEN says, ‘We all benefit from a quality of business ownership in Indian Country.' Now I'm not going to spend much time talking about the Harvard Project because we have those representatives here and you've heard that so these three points: Being involved in economics or tribal government thinking of developing an economy is not somehow anti-sovereign. Even if you're thinking about helping develop private businesses. Yes, that's a business the tribal government might not be in control of, but all of these decisions are based on sovereignty and help support sovereignty because if we have an economy in Indian Country, again, a more sustainable reservation, a place where our people can live if they choose to and it contributes to and helps strengthen tribal government. Our institutions matter. The court system you just heard about. Without the laws, without a fair court that will protect property rights, contractual rights, what entrepreneur is going to open a business in your tribal community?

I mention in my book...I already told you about some Natives here in this state that chose to open their business in Phoenix because there were things they were concerned about about being on the reservation. So if there are governing principles or if our own institutions are somehow slowing business down or injuring business or if we have a court system that's not fair, no entrepreneur is going to invest their human capital -- their time and expertise and experience -- or their physical capital -- their money, materials they own, tools they own, etc. They just will not operate in Indian Country if they're afraid that their rights that they've worked for will not be protected. So these are governance issues, and culture matters the Harvard Project has shown with study after study after study. A comment that I just made in Bozeman, we had a conference this past weekend of economists in Bozeman and I'm not an economist so I mostly sit there and listen, but...and now I totally forgot where I was going. Oh, the comment I made is, ‘You probably would not open a hog farm in Israel, would you?' I don't pretend to be an expert on Judaism, but I don't think pork is a big seller in Jewish communities. So there are reservations where certain jobs or industries won't be supported. So an intelligent investor is going to research that topic and going to go, ‘I can't open Business X on Reservation Y. It's crazy. It'd be like opening a hog farm in Israel.'

So let's see what's next and let's...this is what I've been talking about. Here again, I'm borrowing from Harvard and if I get the facts wrong, tell me, Steve. But I think their studies have proven that a tribe that separates the operation of a tribal business, if they separate it from political decisions and from the tribal council, if they get an experienced board of directors that knows business and operates that business, there's a 400 percent greater chance that that business can be profitable. Tribal governments can't afford to run businesses that aren't profitable. That's not sustainable and I'm talking about sustainability.

Also, the Harvard Project shows that a tribe that has a court system and a dispute resolution system that is deemed to be fair, that is not tainted by political influence, will have a five percent better employment rate on the reservation than another tribe without that. Steve gave that comment -- you won't remember this, but I do -- in 1994, at a conference in Utah, you made that statement and I came up to him afterwards and I go, ‘How can you prove that?' He slapped me around a little bit. So I've been nice to him ever since. We know what the obstacles are. I talk about them in the book. Maybe we can talk about them a bit, but I want to close with some of these points.

Does your tribal government -- and boy, I'd really like you to think about this -- are you as a policy engaging in buying from your own Indian entrepreneurs on your own reservation? Now I have heard the executive director of the National Indian Gaming Association and he says, ‘We know tribal casinos are not utilizing enough Native entrepreneurs.' That's a $27 billion-a-year industry. Where are the tribal casinos buying their laundry services, their janitorial services, their paper towels? Are we buying these from Phoenix and Tucson businesses? We're hurting ourselves then, aren't we? We're spending our own money outside our community. Well, that's not very -- how dare I say -- that's not the best strategy. So I want to advocate, I was glad also to hear the judge mention nepotism because this was discussed at this conference I was at at Bozeman. Nepotism is a bad word out in the American economy, but we do work with our bands and families and extended families and we are related to practically everyone. How can you not be related to everyone on a community of only a couple thousand people? At my tribe, practically everyone has my mom's maiden name. The last name 'Captain' is the primary name at my tribe. So I'm related to practically everyone. So you can't avoid nepotism in the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, but I am so much advocating that we keep our money in our reservation.

Is the tribal government being a client of tribal entrepreneurial businesses? If you're not, you're spending your money on non-Indian owned businesses at some far distance from your own community and you are -- I don't know how strongly to say this -- but that's hurting our own communities, isn't it? So Buy Indian acts, I am advocating that tribes adopt a ‘Buy Indian' act, perhaps even designate a specific amount of the tribal budget to be spent on tribally owned -- not tribally owned -- individual Indian-owned businesses or even in tribally owned businesses. Let's keep the money in our communities. So let me show you the federal ‘Buy Indian' act. It's a joke. The current version was drafted in 1910, so please ignore that top one but this was the direction of Congress in 1910 that the Secretary of Interior in acquiring goods and labor for Indian Affairs that he or she try to buy Indian-owned goods and labor. But look, it's not mandatory. It's about as discretionary as it can get. It even has the word discretion. ‘As far as may be practical...in the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior.' So the Buy Indian Act has hardly been used. There are some federal lawsuits in which an individual Indian business owner has sued the Secretary saying, ‘I was fully capable of doing Job X, I applied for it, you didn't hire me.' The federal courts go, ‘You lose that case because the Secretary can do whatever they want.' So I'm advocating that tribes try to get Congress to make this law a little more powerful.

An example is in the Department of Defense budget. The Department of Defense is required to spend five percent on minority- and women-owned businesses and that five percent set-aside has led to several tribes creating -- I think Salish Kootenai is one of them -- making products for the military and has helped tribes enormously, a few tribes. So if we had some sort of requirement that the Secretary spend at least five percent, if tribal government said, ‘We will spend five percent of our budget on Indian-owned business,' what will Indian entrepreneurs do? What does an entrepreneur do? What is an entrepreneur? They see an opportunity, they think, ‘I can do that. I'll take the risk.' So if tribal governments were committed to spending money in Indian Country, I think entrepreneurs will see that and follow that."

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"I agree with your point. However, I've seen in the past where you have a tribal member who'll throw up a shingle and say, ‘I do this now,' and it turns into a pass-through. We try to at Choctaw and define Indian preference in regards to buying services, to say that you must have 51-percent ownership in your business; you must show years of business interactions. And so that's one of the challenges I know that across Indian Country some people face, because then all you're doing as a tribal member setting something up to get maybe $25,000 out of the $1.5 million furniture contract that was set aside for the building, and so that's one of the things I think we really need to focus in on what is true Indian entrepreneurialism and true Indian business."

Robert Miller:

"You're exactly right on that. Now did you say that your tribe has a statute on this or some kind of regulations?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Regulations."

Robert Miller:

"I would love to see that. So you're Mississippi Choctaw or Oklahoma?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Mississippi Choctaw."

Robert Miller:

"Okay, great."

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"My brother is Oklahoma Choctaw down the way there."

Robert Miller:

"They're close to us. Yes, sir."

Audience member:

"Thank you, Professor Miller. So I had a question. My question basically surrounds entrepreneurship. You sort of touched upon a definition of it. Social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that concept, on that model with respect to having put together any social enterprise on a reservation where one is working with both profit and non-profit ability hybrid model using some type of federal funding and building on a revenue component to that set up because that's something that I'm tinkering with along with some folks up in Navajo, that western part of Navajo. That's what we're looking at and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that."

Robert Miller:

"Okay, well, that's almost a new idea to me. So you might have to explain it a little more, but an organization that has a social welfare...objective."

Audience member:

"Objective. A social objective, a social impact on one hand; on the other hand, have a revenue side so that you built it a hybrid model. So basically you're addressing two things at one time. So if that's quite successful, I know a lot of organizations are going in that direction, and one of the great examples is right there in Phoenix in Maricopa County with the school districts. That's something that they did and I'm wondering if that would be something that tribes can perhaps pursue."

Robert Miller:

"Well, I am absolutely for anything that brings any job to Indian Country practically and anything that can produce some income that perhaps might be spent on a reservation. So an organization like you're saying, sort of has a mixed agenda, right? They're engaged in social welfare activity. So I know there's an organization at Navajo I believe that's working on traditional foods, traditional crops. So in one sense I guess you could call that a social welfare idea -- let's bring some tradition back -- but if that's producing crops and jobs that then will be on the reservation, man, I applaud that. And we always like to bring federal dollars to the reservation, don't we? But then we've got to capture those dollars and we want to keep them there as long as possible."

Joan Timeche:

"If I can also add, on my reservation we've long had...it's called the Hopi Foundation. It started out as a 501(c)(3) and it was really designed by former tribal employees that were frustrated with the government because they were not able to...the government was not acting in a speedy process in terms of applying for grants and being able to meet social needs. So they first started out providing social services. They have spun off a number of non-profits and a number of for-profits and they're all in different areas. One of them deals with international victims and it's actually based here in Tucson. It's a non-profit, but it's a spinoff of this overall, this Hopi Foundation about helping...and then we have, out of it came a solar energy project because it was a social program, the first to introduce photovoltaics because we have a number of villages out on Hopi who by choice did not have electricity so they were trying to introduce alternative energy options to them. So it started out as a non-profit and then later on merged, spun off as a for-profit so that existed and out of it came our Education Endowment Fund, which then became a whole separate entity. So there are models out there that can work."

Robert Miller:

"Well, and let me just add to that, while you're moving the microphone. In my book, I advocate for a mix of businesses, for a diverse economy. I think the strongest economy is one that is diverse. So there's no, just because I'm talking about entrepreneurship or ONABEN's talking about entrepreneurship, I'm not somehow anti-tribal government business or then anti this social welfare arena. Economic development can come in many ways and she gave an example and so did you, sir, of what sort of a social welfare agenda, but can lead to jobs and money on the reservation. So I'm advocating for as diverse of an economy as we can get. We realize some tribes are in such rural areas that the economy they're going to be able to develop, the opportunities are very slim. We know American rural areas are the poorest parts of the United States just because of the lack of infrastructure, highways, internet, telephones, water, and we know that tribes in rural areas face those issues. But I am advocating for the development of as much of an economy, public, private, tribal, non-Indian investors, Indian investors, etc. Yes, ma'am."

Audience member:

"Well, to further touch on what he was talking about, where I work and where I live, I live in 'ag central,' I'm from Nebraska. I work at Little Priest Tribal College and right now I'm the USDA grant coordinator and what I do is I have obtained this money and what we are doing in my program, we're going through our last year's funding, but I have... we are a hybrid. I function off a grant that's for community sustainability through agricultural and economic development. We are taking our food sovereignty and we're taking our seed sovereignty and we are building on that. And I'm able to employ approximately 40 tribal members seasonally and we teach people how to can, and we have a Farmer's Market, and we're expanding on that and we're going to be able to operate the next couple of years off the monies that we've made via our federal monies that we were awarded. But food sovereignty is a really big movement in Indian Country right now. Seed sovereignty is a really big thing and I really encourage other tribes to expand on that. It's really important because it is a social problem because so many of our communities are fighting diabetes, thyroid problems, all these health issues and it's because of the genetically modified foods that we're eating. It's so important that we stick to our Indigenous diets. And I'm from the Omaha people, I'm also a Burns Paiute too, and we have an Indigenous diet that's really important. Back home we have ceremonial corn, but we have corn to eat every day too and it's really important to embrace that, grow it, teach your kids how to grow it. There are ceremonies that hold on to those things, do it and teach the people. And then if you can, you can build a hybrid on it. Right now we have an apple orchard. We have expanded on that apple orchard. It's been really awesome. It's really exciting. It's really a big thing for me. If you guys want to know anymore about it, I'd be more than happy to share information about it. But we have, we've developed a hybrid program. We're very successful. Like I said, we're going to be able to operate the next couple of years without federal dollars because of the revenue we've brought in because of our product. And organic food market is huge right now. They love Indian food."

Robert Miller:

"Did you say you work for the Department of Agriculture?"

Audience Member:

"Yes. Well, I'm a USDA grant coordinator and I'm working...I'm collaborating a lot with the USDA and I work with the Little Priest Tribal College."

Robert Miller:

"Well, you'll have to come on February 28th to our conference because the Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture, Patrice Kunesh, is going to speak. She wants to advocate how much the Department of Agriculture has available for tribes. Tribes are just thinking of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], and the Department of Agriculture in the areas you're already talking about has so much more as far as money and funding than the BIA has. It's incredible. So she's coming to Phoenix to talk about that issue on February 28th. And for food sovereignty, it's interesting she should mention that because a Native woman who I think is the first dean of a law school in the United States, Stacy Leeds, is the dean. She's Cherokee and she's the dean at University of Arkansas and they just started a food sovereignty clinic. I think that's the right word or at least program. So she's coming to our conference to talk about food sovereignty, so exactly what you're talking about. And then what she said ties in with what your question was sir, that here's sort of a social welfare, I guess, developing our Native foods again and bringing them back. That doesn't necessarily sound so economic, does it, but what an economic and cultural benefit that it has. So this is a wonderful example of the synergy of mixing these ideas and goals and so economic development's not hurting culture, we can use it to support culture."

Stephen Cornell:

"We've got a question right here."

Arlene Templer:

"I'm happy to hear you say to support the Buy Indian acts. I'm Arlene Templer from Salish Kootenai Tribes and under my department I have a gas station, convenience store, grocery store, laundromat, and it costs me more to run an Indian-owned business. I can't compete with Town Pump, and so what I have to do is sell it to the tribe's membership that this gas station provides work experience placements, it also provides revenue to the transportation system throughout the reservation because I have to charge between almost 10 cents more a gallon for gas. I can't compete with Town Pump so we have to support each other until we can get there and the Buy American act can help with that."

Robert Miller:

"Excellent. Next time I'm at Flathead I'll come to your gas station. That's what we talk about you keeping Indian money in the Indian community. Let me expand that just one step further. Let's not think just about our reservation, but a perfect example in the State of Washington. The Cowlitz Tribe, a brand-new recognized tribe wants to do gaming. So instead of turning to some Vegas company, which as you know many, many, many tribes have partnered with Harrah's and those Vegas companies, but the Cowlitz Tribe in Oregon partnered with...in Washington, excuse me, partnered with the Mohegan Tribe from Connecticut. Gosh! So in one sense that's keeping our dollar within the Indian national community, isn't it? So I really enjoyed seeing some tribes working on things together. Another example from Oregon, the Grand Ronde Tribe and the Siletz Tribe are working together to develop lands that used to belong to the federal government and the Chemawa Indian School and they now have received those lands through various federal programs. So these two tribes, instead of then competing and fighting each other over who gets to develop it, they're working together. I see that again as keeping money in our Indian community."

Stephen Cornell:

"Mr. Henry?"

Audience member:

"I'm on the tribal council and it's hard for entrepreneurs sometimes to go through tribal council I think. Comes up with a great, great project and then after that the tribe kind of just shuts them down after that. But then, is there a way for the tribal member to go through, if they have BIA, if they have Section 17 from BIA to where it helps the tribal member and the tribal council sets or adjust the code for the development for a tribal member and then instead they don't have to go through the tribal council, but go through Section 17 with the federal government, which too allows the reservation development to where if those two can work together to where instead of the tribal member for entrepreneurship goes straight through...go to the tribal council, but instead just follows the Section 17 in corporation building? Have you ever come across something like that?"

Robert Miller:

"Yes. Incorporation is a big issue, folks, and this is part of the law building that the tribal court panel was talking about, but that I'm talking about that many tribal governments do not have an incorporation code. [Okay, we have two minutes. That's in total? You showed me two minutes, two minutes ago. Did you give me two more minutes? Oh, five okay. I didn't see it. So let's see, where was I going?] Incorporating, for a Native person to incorporate their corporation pursuant to their own tribe's governmental code, that's an exercise of inherent sovereignty. So there are three ways to form corporations in Indian Country. Under state law, which is probably the least beneficial, that exposes you to state regulations, state taxation. Section 17 that you mentioned, which to my knowledge is only available for tribal governments. My own government created a Section 17 about a decade ago. I think there's a fairly small number of Section 17 corporations because tribes haven't really seen that the way to go. But to incorporate under your own inherent law, and if you have the code that governs and taxes businesses, then people know what the landscape of the law is. So I advocate for tribes to have corporation codes and for tribal citizens to incorporate under the inherent authority of their own tribe. Now you are then subject, however to the tribal law. So that's where we get back to effective institutions. Is the tribal court fair, does the tribal court have experience in interpreting contract and business law; have we appointed judges with that kind of experience? Those are the issues that are the institution business that the Harvard Project has showed...studied and has shown is so important. So you raise a very good issue that needs to be worked out and I'm not sure how many tribes have enacted their own corporate codes. Probably not too many, but it certainly sounds like the way for tribal entrepreneurs to incorporate."

Stephen Cornell:

"Can I just add to that, Bob? In regard to your question, from the sound of what you said, you may be in a situation where starting a business then runs afoul of council interference or obstacles and this is exact...Bob is exactly right. This is where these institutional issues become critical -- that you've got in place a set of laws that facility instead of hindering economic development. All the things Bob talked about trying to build an economy, that can be brought to a halt by a set of governing institutions that burden the entrepreneur so much that they run to Phoenix or Flagstaff to set up their business. So if what you're encountering is, ‘Gee, we can't get a business going because we have to go through council and it's too involved and it takes too long and the politics get into it and all the rest of that,' you are a prime candidate for rethinking some of that governing structure so that you can begin to support entrepreneurship on your rez."

Eldena Bear Don't Walk: So What's So Important about Tribal Courts?

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Eldena Bear Don't Walk, Chief Justice of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, discusses some of the things that tribal justice systems need to have in place in order to be effective, and how important it is for Native nation governments and citizens to respect and support the decisions those systems make. She also reminds that people need to remember that many if not most tribal justice systems are in the early stages of development, and that their continued development must be cultivated.

Resource Type
Citation

Bear Don't Walk, Eldena. "So What's So Important About Tribal Courts?" Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Presentation.

"I'm Eldena Bear Don't Walk and I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself before I get started. I am that kid who always planned to be an attorney. I either wanted to be an attorney or Loretta Lynn; I'm not quite Loretta Lynn, yet. My father is Urban Bear Don't Walk and my mother is Marjorie Mitchell-Bear Don't Walk. My father is one of the first American Indian attorneys in the United States. He's mentioned in In the Courts of the Conquerer. He is the second Crow to ever get a law degree and I am the second generation of Indian attorneys and we're very proud of that in that as Indian people we are developing, we are creating legacies. We now have not just a single generation, but generations of college graduates, we have generations of doctors, we have generations of attorneys, and I think that that can't be emphasized enough in that as we are developing as tribal people, our systems are developing.

How many of you don't have tribal courts? I think that there are several tribes who don't have tribal court systems yet, who might use inter-tribal court systems, whose court systems are fairly new. And I'm 40 and I tell you that because, for example, the Crow court system, in 1975 when my father was still in law school, he and my uncle developed the Crow Court. So the Crow Court is only 38 years old. It's like my little brother and in that, that means that it's still developing.

I became the first woman ever to be the chief justice of the Crow Tribe, but I like to tell people about that process. I got a phone call one day that said, ‘Hey, we really want you to do this; it's an appointment that you have to get through the chairman. He's interested in having you do that.' And so I called my parents because that's the way I was raised. I was raised that in the big decisions in your life there is a lot of consultation and it needs to be meaningful consultation. I call my grandparents, I call my parents, I call my brothers, I talk to my child, I talk to my partner. And I called my dad and he said, ‘Well, this is the third time they've asked for you, so I guess I'll say yes.' Apparently they had been asking him if I would do this and he had been saying no, for whatever the reason was, apparently maybe he didn't think I was ready yet, and I think that that's an important step sometimes in developing programs, are people ready? I don't think it's the best idea to throw a brand-new graduate into running a court system. I think experience is meaningful and powerful and valued in tribal systems. So I started that.

I've been an appellate judge for eight years for a variety of tribes. I worked for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. I've served almost every tribe in Montana with the exception of Fort Peck and Blackfeet and I worked in Blackfeet Court as an attorney. I haven't served in Fort Peck because, man, it's far away from where I live. It's like 20 hours. It's practically in North Dakota. So I want to talk about that though.

When I was five, you know you have those career days, or maybe it wasn't five, it was like fifth grade and I wore my dad's judge's robes and everybody thought I wanted to be a nun. I am far from being a nun. The sad thing is I was looking for his judge's robes just recently and I can't find it. I swear I saw it because I wanted to wear it. That's what I wanted to wear in court. We all have things that are important to us and most importantly that judge's robe was important because my mom made it. My mom made it for my dad in a time when tribal courts were in the back of some building trailer in the middle of nowhere. Now you go to tribes and they have amazing courtrooms. We went to Pascua Yaqui while I was here. I've never had to go through security that tight. Pascua Yaqui has like TSA-quality security. You have to empty your pockets; they want to see what's in your bag. You'll plan ahead what you take with you before you go into their court system.

So now I work in two courts, three on occasion. I have written 70 appellate opinions in my career at this time, hopefully more to come, so I have a great value for tribal courts and I'm very passionate and enthusiastic, but I'm also very honest about tribal courts and their systems and what is helpful and what is not helpful. So I want you to keep in mind that while you hear a lot of complaints about tribal court systems, we're developing, we're young. Tribal courts are as young as some of your children, as young as some of you and in that, you know at this stage in your life you don't know everything, you don't have everything in perfection, and without that sense of humility about our court systems, it's difficult to drive them forward, it's difficult to make them into something better. You have to treat them sometimes not like a child, but as a developing progress. I like to tell people that our codes are living documents, just like anything else, just like the American constitution, just like the American code, our codes have to be refined, they have to be rewritten, they have to be addressed, because 30 years ago when the first code was written for your tribe or for my tribes nobody knew about meth, nobody knew about certain drug laws, nobody thought about writing a dog ordinance for all of the crazy dogs running around town. You didn't talk about seat belts; you didn't talk about housing issues in your codes.

I'm very excited about the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes right now; they just developed their own Child Support Enforcement Code, instead of using Montana's, instead of using somebody else's we developed our own and why shouldn't we because tribes are best situated to determine for themselves what their needs are. That does not mean though that tribes should reinvent the wheel. There's lots of great code out there, there's lots of tribal courts doing amazing things. What an honor to sit here with Justice [Robert] Yazzie, knowing that the Navajo Court is one of the pinnacles of tribal courts in what they do in instilling cultural value in dictating to their tribal people what their law will look like, what they want their tribe to continue. Law and lawlessness in Indian Country is historical. We've always had laws. Maybe they weren't written down in a little code or on your computer or on the Internet, but we've always had laws and we've always had people who maintained them. We've always had mediators. We've always had people who needed that mediation and who needed some reminding that they need to follow the law and that their actions impact people.

So in talking about what's important in tribal courts, I once taught -- I'm an adjunct professor at the University of Montana School of Law -- and my father always says the most dangerous person in the room is a first-year law student because they know just enough and not enough. So in trying to teach federal Indian law, tribal law, why we should have those values to lots of non-tribal people you really have to focus on what is community development, what does it look like to non-Indian people. And I would tell you in going through Rae Nell's slides that what's important and the key components to justice systems are investment, whether it's personal investment, monetary investment, community investment and it's building laws. Either you are developing a court system or you're destroying a court system and your development or your destruction has a significant impact on the community that you live in.

I am not a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes as an enrolled member, but I am a member of that community. I live there, my kid goes to school there, I speak Salish, I go to those ceremonies. I'm a member of that community. While it might seem that I'm a member of the tribe -- I don't get to vote -- the decisions that tribal administrators make impact me. They impact me as a judge; they impact me as a community member. It is important to think as leaders that you have a duty to your tribe absolutely, but you also have a duty to the people who live in your community and as we become bigger tribes with more mixed people, you're going to have a lot of descendants and you may have jurisdiction over them or you may not.

One of the things that's important to note about the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes is that we're a P.L. 280 [Public Law 280] reservation. So we have concurrent jurisdiction over Indian people with the State of Montana. So what does that mean? For me, that meant as a public defender that many of my clients were my cousins, many of my clients were people I had grown up with. That's investment in your community because you have to see their mom at a ceremony, you have to see their mom in the grocery store, but that also means, and it also means quite frankly that that particular county is one of the most prison-sentencing counties in the State of Montana. It means that there are many, many American Indian people in the Montana prison system. It is, I believe, six times higher, the percentage rate of our existence in the State of Montana. So there are lots of things to consider in tribal court systems. Our tribal courts are a reflection of our community. Again, either we're developing or we're destroying and we have to really make that commitment.

Again, your codes are developing. Some people have very basic codes that they adopted from somebody else. Codes are changeable; just because it's not in your code doesn't mean it can't be in your code. And I would tell you again as leaders -- we were talking about this earlier and I think I had talked to Ian about it on the phone -- the biggest threat to tribal courts are the tribal people themselves. And I will tell you that specifically in the framework of let's say you have an election and you're unhappy about the election and you take it to the tribal court and the tribal court does its job, the job you entrusted it to do, the job you wrote the constitution for them to follow, you wrote a code for us to uphold and we did our job and now you're unhappy. So what do you do? What do people do? They bash it. They go to the newspaper and talk about, 'What a kangaroo court this is, how the judges don't know what they're doing, the advocates don't know how to run the court, they interpreted the law wrong.' And I would tell you that that is not any different than anything that you can watch on CNN. Every court in America is terrible when somebody loses according to the person who lost. But what you're doing on a bigger scale is invalidating the work that generations of people have already done for you.

I take the work of working in a court system very seriously because I know the work that my father put into that court; I know the work that my parents put in just graduating from college. I think that we can't take in our own flippancy the seriousness of what comes out of our mouth; we cannot be harsh enough about some of those things because we have long-term effects. If people don't trust our court systems, they don't want to do business with you. If they don't think that they can get a fair shake in there because you're related to everybody, they don't want to come into your court system, they don't want to avail themselves, and so when they don't avail themselves to our court, what do they do, they want to go take it to a state court where they're more comfortable. Are you going to get a fair shake in state court? Probably. Maybe. Are you going to get a fair shake in tribal court? Maybe. It's all the same.

Now people talk about tribal courts saying, ‘Oh, you...that's your cousin.' You're right. I have 20 first cousins. My mother has 100 first cousins. My grandpa was the youngest of 11 kids and all those kids had seven kids and my grandma had...there were five of them and they all had a trillion kids and I'm related to almost everybody. It was hard to find somebody to marry on your reservation when you have that many first cousins and we actually have cousins in common. So when he's really mad he'll be like, ‘And your damn cousin...' But they're his cousins too, but we're not related. So back to my rant. Of course you're related to those people. My rule is, if I don't have to talk about it with you at Thanksgiving dinner, then I'm working on that case because if I had to recuse myself for everybody that I could show that I was related to, man, you'll never get anybody to be able to sit on those seats. But let's not fool ourselves. I walked into a justice of the peace court and the judge was talking to a man who was on a bond hearing and the judge said to the guy sitting at the bond hearing, ‘Well, I'm going to let you out on your own recognizance because I need you to finish my deck this weekend.' It happens everywhere. Don't fool yourselves to think that tribal courts are better or worse than anybody else, but I will tell you that there's a special investment made by people who are part of tribal courts that can be beneficial. Some people call it nepotism. I think nepotism is an idea that you got something because you didn't deserve it and somebody is allowing you to do that and maybe they're your mom, maybe they're not, whatever.

In reality, we're a community and our tribal communities are built of people who are related and sometimes that investment means that maybe because we understand where that kid is coming from, maybe we can better address their needs in juvenile court, maybe we can better deter them. Maybe what they need is to learn to go chop some wood for a lady for a couple days or to get something...CS&KT [Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes] has a grandparent program as a diversion tactic with its youth because we have generations of children who don't have grandparents who are actively involved in their lives. I hope to be the grandma that I was raised with. My grandmas are finger-shaking, chest-popping old ladies who will tell you to knock it off and behave and go wash your hands. Those are the kind of people that sometimes you need in a juvenile court. That's the investment that you want to make. That is about being familiar with your community. That is about being invested in your community. So yes, are we all related? Quite possibly. Does that mean that we're making the wrong decisions? Absolutely not.

So when I took an oath to be a judge, a justice. Let me clarify that. I am a justice. I'm not a judge, unless I'm sitting in the lower court. There is a chief judge for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe, Wynona Tanner, and then I'm the chief justice. And the only difference really is which court we oversee. But when I took an oath to be a justice, in the Crow code specifically... And again, if you don't like what's happening, write it in your code, fix it. Don't complain about it, do something about it and that means writing in your code. That doesn't mean going and firing all your judges because you're unhappy. If you don't like how your judges work, get them some training. If you don't like the timeline in your courts, fix it. It isn't an all or nothing deal. Every time we make things all or nothing, we again destroy our own credibility.

So again, when I took that oath, in the Crow code it says that I will act without fear or favor. I don't see that in many other codes and I am bound by the ABA Model Judicial Code. The ABA Model Judicial Code is like eight canons, but they're pretty important canons and if you translate them into tribal communities, they're even more important canons, for example, the appearance of impropriety. Some people think, ‘Well, this is my friend. He's a lower court judge, I'm going to go have lunch with him.' What do you think my clients think when they see prosecutors and defenders having lunch together and then my client doesn't get a great deal? They think I sold them out, they think that I'm not doing my job, they think that I'm lazy and that I am not doing the best that I possibly can for them. You have to think about that. Just like leaders in the community, if they see you glad-handing with somebody and then that person gets something over the other, we all can make the appearance of impropriety and you need to be conscious of that.

Quite honestly, being an attorney and a judge on the same reservation is kind of a lonely, solitary existence. One, because you're always getting hit up in the grocery store for free advice, and two, people do want to know what's going on, people do want to talk about their case with you and you can't do it. But even that moment, that moment where they're approaching you in the grocery store trying to talk to you about it, other people see it, it looks improper and it's important to try to not have that happen.

A strong, independent tribal court system will have trust and it's your job as leaders to build the trust in the court as much as it is my job as a judge to build trust in the court. Finances are important, but finances aren't the end-all be-all. I run my appellate court, we probably hear...we have five justices, two lay justices, three attorney justices and one clerk on $78,000 a year. We deal with probably 20 cases, which is a pretty big load for most appellate courts. It is not the load that say Navajo has or some of the Ojibwe nations have who have bigger court systems. Development -- again, we don't have bad court systems, we have developing court systems. We have places that need help. We have opportunities to help them. There are lots of us out there who work in tribal courts who consult on how to develop better code, how to develop better judges, who do a lot of training that we offer for free. Department of Justice right now is really hot on offering trainings. Not only will they offer it, but they will bring it to you.

So Owl's Nest Consulting, my friend Mato Standing High, who is also an attorney who was the AG [attorney general] for his tribe for many, many years. He'll bring you how to make better prosecutors, how to be a better trial court judge, how to write good opinions, and they'll bring it right to where you are. So courts can't say, ‘Well, we can't get anything. We can't do that.' As leaders, develop your court system. Make a commitment to developing your court system because as Rae Nell said, if your court system is strong people believe in you. If your court system is transparent, people believe in you, they want to do business with you, and if they don't believe in you and you have a great court system, that's not about your court system, that's not about their belief in your tribe, that's just them finding a reason not to do business with you.

Again, as I said, either you're building a court or you're destroying a court. A court should be extraordinary when you leave it. We are a transient population as judges. We come and go. Some places elect their judges, some places appoint their judges. Some places appoint their justices for life. My appointments are four years long, I can come and go at the whim of the administration if they like what I've done, if not, I don't have to. But when I leave a court system, I want it to be the best possible place that it can be. It should stand...your court system should stand alone. It should not need one particular judge. It helps if you have great clerks. I have a phenomenal clerk, Abby Dupuis, who has been the clerk of the appellate court since its inception, so for 14 years. She really runs the court. She knows every case. Be good to your staff. And any attorney will tell you, the best thing you can do is not to know the judges, it's to know the clerks, it's to know the people behind the scenes, it's to know the janitors in your building. Those are all good tidbits of information for people to know. It's the same in tribal courts.

I want to tell you quickly about what is so important about tribal courts, and one is about the idea that we are making some pretty new and exciting law. I can tell you that being a judge sometimes means that all I have to hear about is people's really unhappy divorces and that is no different than being an attorney and I promise you nobody's happy in a divorce. But recently the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Appellate Court made a decision about a First Amendment case, about a person's right to say what they want to say, free speech. Those are exciting cases and maybe only if you're kind of like a law nerd do you really think that that's exciting stuff, but it's exciting stuff. And I talk about it to everybody I possibly can because I want people to know not only are we making good law but we're making new...we're going into territories we've never gone into before. We're addressing issues in our code that again nobody thought about. We just did a case about particularized suspicion with a bad stop from a cop. Does that make me the most popular person? Probably not, but I wasn't the most popular person to begin with because I'm a defense attorney. I have to tell you when I became a public defender, my parents said, ‘I don't know if I really want you to do that. Don't people...isn't it unsafe to be a defense attorney?' I said, ‘No, mom. People kill their prosecutors, they don't kill their defense attorneys.' They buy their defense attorneys beers; their grandma makes them banana bread. There's a lot of perks to being in public defense. But we are making new and exciting law. We have great stuff on the best interest of the child. Tribes are incorporating their beliefs into best interest-of-the-child standards. We're incorporating our beliefs into First Amendment issues.

One of the other exciting things I know that's going on in Indian Country is the idea of holistic defense. I don't see American courts addressing holistic defense in a way that I think that tribal courts can. And what I mean by holistic defense is in Montana let's say -- we'll use something pretty vanilla -- if you don't have insurance on your car and you get pulled over for the third time, that is a mandatory seven days in jail for not having liability insurance in a place that there is no public transportation system. Our reservation is about 100 miles long; there's no public transit. So of course people...I'm not encouraging people to break the law, I'm encouraging people to prioritize, but I know that people drive to get to work, to feed their kids without liability insurance; it happens. I've been hit by one of those people. So here's my best legal advice to you right now, here's some free legal advice, write it down. Make sure that you get under-insured and uninsured motorists on your insurance. I see Renee writing it down. Good job. Uninsured, under-insured, because if you get hit by those people who don't have insurance, your insurance helps you cover it then, because I have been hit.

So this person is sitting in jail waiting to get out on bond or not getting bond because they can't make bond because obviously they couldn't even afford to get insurance. They have kids, maybe they're a single mom, there's a potential that their kids could get into the system because nobody's home watching their kids. There's a chance that if they sit in jail for seven days that they're going to lose their job, their car's already been impounded because they couldn't find any...they didn't pay their minutes and they couldn't find anybody to come get their car so they couldn't leave it on the side of the road. Snowball effects happen all the time. Holistic defense addresses those. We have defenders who now say, ‘Okay, what are the other issues? We don't want them to lose their housing, we don't want her to lose her kids, we don't want them to lose their job. How can we work with a prosecutor to make this all good and get it in front of the judge as quickly as we possibly can?'

We have incredible opportunities as tribal courts to mend our communities by being willing not just to say that crime is bad or that divorce is bad, but in addressing some of the other issues that will come with those things by being flexible, just and creative. I think that people who don't have much learn to be as creative as they possibly can. Like your grandma when she was poor and didn't have any money to feed you, she would still figure out how to feed you. We still need to figure out how to solve our problems whether we have money or not. And again it's the same thing. Your tribal council, maybe they have all the money and they're not giving it to you to fix it. That doesn't mean you stop trying to fix it. It means you try to figure out what you can do creatively and if that means feeding them popcorn. It's like a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving -- everybody gets popcorn and toast and whatever it is that you have. It is the same in tribal court systems.

It is important to be transparent in your code. It is important to make things accessible. I have worked in a court system where nobody knows where the code is. Nobody knows where the code is. It is not online. You can access almost every case from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Crow Tribe, almost every tribe in Montana, almost every tribe I know of who has a solid, longstanding appellate court, you can access their opinions and I do, because when I write an opinion I would rather use another tribe's decision than use a state's decision. Why? Well, in some cases because we're all similarly situated with the Indian Civil Rights Act or it's because our code looks like another code or our constitution is based on the same treaty. All of those things are important that maybe non-tribal court system people don't take into account. If I'm writing in a state system, yeah, I might steal something from another jurisdiction, but if I'm writing something in a tribal court I want it from another tribal court because I think they have invested in the same values that we do.

Again, we have opportunities that other people don't have. States are regulated in ways necessarily that we're not. I would ask you though as tribal people and tribal leaders, when you're building your court systems, really take into consideration what's the best thing? Do you think that lay advocates are the best way to go? Would you let a lay advocate operate on you? I don't know. And I'm saying that that's equally as dangerous. So would you let a lay advocate...? Let me make sure that I'm very clear on this. There are some incredible lay advocates. My uncle who helped start the Crow Court has been a lay advocate for 38 years and he knows the Crow code inside and out. He may not know form, but he knows substance. That is important. But there are other people who go in and pay their fee and then try to write your will or want to help you with your divorce. Maybe not necessarily without training. Be specific about those things. Do you want your judges to not have any training, to just come in and go off the cuff? Do you want everybody to be attorneys? Is that really the most financially sound way to go? Not always. I like to keep myself in business, but that doesn't mean that there's not room for everybody to work in there, but I think training is important. You can never learn enough and quite honestly, you can never share enough of your training with other people.

Again, I encourage people really to build strong court systems in the idea that make it fit what your tribe needs. Your tribe might not need a drug court, but you might need a dog catcher. You might need a youth court, but you don't know how to start it. We're sharing people. Everybody has them. People are developing, there's money out there and grants to get them. There's lots of resources. Your law schools in your states usually have incredible resources. For example, the Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana, Maylynn Smith, never says 'no.' Aw, I'm done now. Thank you very much. I think we're going to open this up for questions."