Emerging Leaders

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

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

Paulette Jordan: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Coeur d'Alene Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Paulette Jordan, citizen and council member of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in Idaho, discusses the importance of Native nation leaders being grounded in their culture and consulting the keepers of the culture (their elders) so that they approach the leadership challenges they face with the proper mindset and tools. She also shares a story about she helped to mobilize tribal citizens and non-Indians in her community to support a tax levy in order to preserve adequate funding for local public education.

Resource Type
Citation

Jordan, Paulette. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Coeur d'Alene Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Presentation.

Herminia Frias:

"Our next presenter is Paulette Jordan and she is a tribal council member from Coeur d'Alene Tribe and she is going to be presenting her experience in citizen engagement and effecting change."

Paulette Jordan:

"Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity. It feels like a homecoming because I was here back in 2009, right Renee [Goldtooth]? And so it feels like home, and I really do appreciate the hospitality and the good nature that I've always been given. I started out here for the Emerging Tribal Leaders Seminar just when I was just elected on to the tribal council. And so it's always a learning process, but you just have to run and go. There is no college or any type of education that you can go through really to really prepare you for tribal leadership. It's one of a kind, it's all on its own. You can go and get any specific degree and your MBA, your doctorate, whatever, your law degree, but none of that really prepares you for the challenges of what you're about to face when it comes to the people with domestic violence issues or meth issues -- as we heard here -- and housing issues. There's always a concern and how you manage that with your own people really is based on how you base your culture within your own heart and your empathy to understand your people and not judge them.

And so that's always been my big learning curve...is thankfully being raised by the elders, they've always said, "˜As long as you hold your heart out in your hand, that is how you approach your people,' and so that's always been my strategy is just to listen first and foremost and so that's why I come here to you all and offer myself just more so as a student. So whenever someone tries to put me up on any pulpit or anything like that I just say, "˜I'm just a humble person. I was just someone who was just raised on the reservation who just wants to come back and help make my community a better place.' And so whatever title or whatever someone wants to put on you, you just have to remind yourself where you come from and that's one thing my [Coeur d'Alene language] always said. So all the challenges that I've faced, even the ones that I'm going to be facing tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that, I have to remember my grandmothers and they always said to never forget where you came from.

And I mention that because I've pretty much learned over the years where the necessary places for us as tribal peoples. Now how many in here are tribal leaders, sit on your tribal councils, your tribal government? We've got some good representation here. As tribal leaders, what I've learned is we face a lot of conflicts, a lot of challenges, and in those approaches we have to build relationships. It's your job and your duty and your responsibility not only to build a relationship with your people but those surrounding communities, whether you live within a certain county, within a certain state and just being in the U.S. You have to go and meet with the President, with the Congress, with your city council, with your county commissioners, etc. and you have to develop those positive relationships for your people. So you have to be able to communicate to express the nature and the value of your citizens. And so for me, coming in as a young tribal leader learning that we had to promote our own people, promote our own issues, they're all unique, but to me as a Coeur d'Alene woman coming in, the vested interest in me was that we had to tell our story so that our concerns would be addressed at home and that meant building these relationships with the non-tribal community. And so that's what I've been doing and that's been my goal. That's also the reason why I ran for a state representative position in the State of Idaho as a Democrat in a very Republican state. But the point of doing that was in a very racist state, we live 30 miles south of a KKK [Ku Klux Klan] compound. So Idaho is a very not only Republican state, but very white supremacist-natured state, so we have to deal with these issues. But it's...everyone, every state has their issues so no one's better, no one's perfect, no one's more challenged than the other. But that's something I raise today because that also helps to build up [to] what I'm about to get to.

And so I talk about how the white supremacy group comes in and why it is that I decided to step up to some of these challenges, because each and every day I've learned -- whether I worked in D.C. or came back home and worked or even sitting on the tribal council -- that it always comes down to not just telling your story, but being those rooms, the meetings, doing the work, getting there to tell the people, the non-tribal people that this is what you're about, that you're not here to be an enemy, but more so a friend and how you can work together, how you can build those partnerships. Not just for you and that other person in the room that you're sitting across the table from, but for your communities at large and how that's going to benefit both the tribal and the non-tribal aspects.

So that was one of the first challenges that I've faced being on the tribal council and I just wanted to reflect that, because to me for us to get better as communities we have to look at who our friends are and that has to be everybody. We can't just think, "˜Oh, we're sovereign nations, we're going to move forward on our own.' That's not going to happen and that's really more of a pie-in-the-sky and wishful thinking but in all reality, yes, that's great, we're sovereign nations and let's act as such. Let's practice our traditional ways, let's continue to get out there and dig our roots and gather our berries and hunt our game and our wildlife, but yet still we have to know that we are one aspect in the larger picture and we are a small function in the greater world. But as my uncle always says, "˜We could still be a leader in this world based on how we walk our talk even as small nations.' Something I wanted to share, he's one of my greatest mentors, I probably should [have] mentioned this before, but I wanted to share that, how he has always stated to me that "˜the dollar is not the Almighty.' And again I'll say that, "˜The dollar is not the Almighty.' '...And that we must always remember to be humble before the Almighty God, to take care of our children, our elders, our people, our employees and our communities, to walk our talk and lead by example and in doing so,' he said, "˜we can improve our societies and show the world who we truly are as a nation. Our humanity is all that matters at the end of the day and how we look upon one another as relatives.' And he stated, "˜Once we can understand why and what it is we hold sacred, we can truly move mountains.' And so that is a quote that I wanted to share with you from my own uncle, who really helped advise me to the business woman, the leader that I am today.

Still, I just consider myself again a student, so I'm constantly learning from my elders. But it's always stated that you have to talk to your children. Arlene [Templer], she mentioned how you have to mentor each other, you have to mentor your children into these stages. Consult with your elders, your statesmen, your tribal leaders to build this historical knowledge to help prevent you from making the same mistakes that they made and then learn from their experiences because they all have great ideas, but people tend to write them off and want to move them into elders' homes when that should never be the case, that yes, they're in their golden years, but it's golden years for a reason. They're these treasures within our society that are the greatest resource that we have and I've seen within every tribal community that people tend to think more so towards and lean more so towards the western society and less to a cultural education. And so the problem with that to me is when we go all the way back to the United Nations, we talk about the Indigenous rights and the whole purpose of us fighting for that is basically to keep ourselves as a unique society within the world, to have this general understanding that yes we exist and we have these rights as Indigenous peoples, but to have those rights you have to practice those rights. And so that's the whole point is if you're going to practice it, then really walk your talk and go out and do those things of your people, your traditions and then teach your children.

And so with that being said, we have to be the change that we want to see. So I have a story to share and I know I was asked to come in and share some of my stories and I said, "˜Well, there is one recent one that really kind of strikes me that I think would be good for people to know,' because I've kind of been sharing this up in the northwest quite a bit. People ask me, "˜Well, geez, Idaho...' for example, is 47th in the nation when it comes to education, we're 49th in overall ranking. We're just poor as it can be, but again it's a Republican state. We have so many challenges to deal with, but one is education, but to our tribe, to the Coeur d'Alene tribe, we value education as the utmost priority. So to me, it became a problem when the school district within our reservation cut funding and then they were going to close that school when that school teaches around 70 to 80 percent of our students who are tribal students. So just to give an example of how we can engage our citizens and how we can unite with one another for the common good is what I'm getting to here.

It started with a levy, and I'll try to do my best to keep the story short because it's a long one, but it started with a levy. And basically the state said, "˜We're going to cut funding to the school and most of the schools throughout the state,' but our school was the only one who failed the increased funding basically to keep the school open. So it was going to lose its accreditation, lose its sporting programs, lose kindergarten, preschool programs, cut teachers and even good, great teachers, ones who were dealing with math or language arts, music, primary functions I would think for young development. And when that was going on, the tribe wanted to play a role, but the tribe played a role in more of a political sense. For me, I was just coming off of my own state campaign and I felt really worn out because to me it was a challenge about...it's more about educating people to again, telling our story, what tribes really are, how we impact our local economy, socially and economically. And again, we're the number-one employer in the region, so we do quite well, but we don't brag or boast about it -- that's just not our way -- but we like to have other people tell that story. So again, the whole past six months of my life was spent trying to tell our story and educate people about the good that we do and how we want to work together to provide better resources to grow the economy, to create more jobs, to better the educational system, and to help those within even our smaller rural communities.

So after all this was going down and then the levy comes up, we thought, "˜Okay, everyone will vote for the levy. Why not, it's supporting our children, supporting education?' But then that failed and it failed miserably and the tribe became frustrated, the local non-tribal community was extremely frustrated, and sadly people were just ready to give up: the teachers, the students, everybody. So people were thinking, "˜Okay, where do we go next? Where do we go from here?' In a small community where that's checkerboarded [land] tribal and non-tribal, you get a lot of people thinking about their lives. What are they going to do next, where do we go, do we move, do we find a better school system? And this is a reservation and us Indian people, we don't just up and move to where we find a better life. This is our land; we have a sacred relationship with our land. So we don't just call it quits and move on and pack our trailer and go. We have to find a way to make it work. So a lot of the non-tribal people, they knew my plight and what I was trying to do and so they had approached me, the superintendent, the principal, and a lot of the teachers and I was kind of shocked by that, but they came to me and asked me...again, I'm just a tribal citizen in the community and they said, "˜Help us. We need your help. You know how to get out to the people and we think you can unite because we're going to need tribal and non-tribal votes to get this levy passed.' So you can imagine I was burned out and I really don't like politics. I really don't. I didn't like those forums and debates or really getting into the issues, but I do love helping the people and if I know that it's going to better the people overall, that makes me feel good about things.

So when I said to that superintendent of the district, I said, "˜Well, give me a week. I'm going to be here and there, but I need some time to think about it because I'm also a mother, too, and I know this is going to be another commitment and I already have a full plate.' So it came down to basically me seeing the school board panic. They panicked and then they had to cut everything and I felt bad for that school board and a few of them were tribal and I thought, "˜This is what they have to deal with. They have to deal with the state legislature who cut educational funding and it's trickling down to the people.' And so the rural county, the rural society, they're having to put the economy on their shoulders. So these are people just like you and I who have bills and families to feed and they...everyone has issues, they have a real...reality, basically to deal with. And so whatever that was, I thought, even my neighbors. I looked at their struggles and I thought, "˜It's just tragedy overall if we do nothing about it.' So this is what it comes down to, how do we engage our citizens?

So what I did was talked with all of our local folks. We had our education director, talked with our chairman. Basically I had to make this a grassroots effort and turn it into a community-wide, strong movement because they all had to come together. I said, "˜Even our students are willing to help and our teachers are willing to help, our elders, our tribal leaders, anyone and everyone needs to get out and vote.' But they're not only just responsible to vote. They have to get up and show up to these meetings and keep everyone educated because that was the reason why the levy lost in the first place. It always comes down to how you educate, how you tell your story and the people said, "˜Well, I don't really want to go door knocking. I don't really want to have public meetings. Why should we do this?' And I said, "˜Well, let's talk about John Deer, for example, who is a local business owner. He voted 'no' because he thinks that you want to basically bear this burden on his back as a local property owner. You're going to increase his taxes. Whether that's a minimal tax or a large tax, it's a tax and a local business owner does not want to be taxed any further than they already are.' But how do you tell that story? I says, "˜Well, speak from your heart. I'm teaching these young students here to tell their story and how it applies to their neighbors in that community.' I said, "˜And I learned going door...' It's really humbling to go door knocking, by the way, if anyone's done that or not. But I learned that if you want to win these elections and tell your story or have a vote in the broader forums, you have to get out there and tell people who you are and why you're running or what you're there for and how you can help them. And so I said to these students, "˜You're not here for yourself, you're here for your neighbor and you're here for their future because you are their vested interest. They're investing in you and you are the future.' I said, "˜When I went to school, my elders...' as much as I wanted to go back home to the reservation, I stayed in private school, but I said, "˜Only because I knew that my elders would always be with me,' and I knew that when they said, "˜Your education belongs to us. Your dedication, everything that you do belongs to the tribe,' I wholly believed in that. "˜So what you're doing today, this belongs to your community and you're bringing that back to invest a greater interest.'

And so that's what the youth said. They understood that. They said, "˜Yeah, we know, we get that.' And then they told their stories from their heart and that's what it came down to and that's, I think, how we won because this is a happy ending because people were ready to give up and call it good and throw in the towel and move on. And then of course the tribe is stuck footing the bill because people thought, "˜Well, the tribe obviously should be expected to pay this bill. We should be able to hold up that fourth leg to keep it standing.' But it's not the tribe's responsibility. We don't have a leadership arm in the school district. It's the state and it's a state-funded school, but the state was not doing its job and it was withholding money from local communities. So to me that's a travesty, but also it's against the law because they were not upholding an Idaho State Supreme Court decision and it's a law that every child in the State of Idaho is guaranteed a free and good public education. So they weren't upholding the needs of the people and again, it's not the tribe's responsibility, but the tribe was willing to do whatever was necessary. But I said, "˜Wait a minute. This is not the tribe's responsibility, but we're all about community here. We want to build up our community just as the next person.' And so a grassroots effort -- you have to really get out there and tell your story if you want to make change. And so being the change you want to see is about walking your talk, sharing your message, being that voice. Each and every one of us has a vision and we are blessed to have those visions because not everybody is granted that ability.

You're here again for a reason, so you just didn't stumble through that door and decide, "˜I'm going to listen in on Paulette and Arlene here.' You have a good reason to be here. So I'm hoping this story is helpful because to me that really opened my eyes, because when I was in that room I was directing the command center at the last day on voting day and I didn't have the tribal council or the chairman, I was...I said, "˜You know what, this is best left aside from all politics. This is about the children.' So I put the children at the helm and I said, "˜This is their doing. They're the ones who got out and educated the community. They went door to door,' as shy as they are, some of them are the most shy people, but I think after that experience it's going to turn them into strong nationwide leaders because they are young warriors. And I said, "˜You have just been inducted into basically what is kind of like our Indian Way Leadership Academy. You have stood up and counted coup against this levy.'

And so that day was neat because in our tribal headquarters we had all of our youth, we had a lot of our tribal citizens, we had non-tribal people and the most amazing point of the day to me was when we had some non-tribal ladies joking with our tribal people and they were joking like we were all relatives and I've never seen that before. I've never seen tribal and non-tribal and again, we still have a lot of race issues, we still have that line there that we need to get rid of, but I think that line is not as bold as it used to be after that moment. And so for those race relationships we really helped one another, and I think that people will remember that day and they'll see that we came together for each other's children. And so people are starting to see that tribes are not enemies but we're friends and we want to be good relatives and good neighbors to one another and so we showed that by example. And so again, we walked our talk that day.

That was the story I was asked to share and I wanted to come down and express that much to you and I do hope you take something from that. But again, it is...engaging your citizenry is about being humble and having that vision and really I think having diligence and just being honest with your people about what the issues are and what the concerns are. Really tell them, if there's a problem, you have to tell your elders and your people and not be afraid of that backlash because, yeah, they're going to criticize you and I know it's hard to take, but just realize it's constructive criticism that will help you in the long run. I know I would, as the youngest person of the council, I used to develop and hold elders' meetings and I was the elders' liaison and the elders were considered the tough ones of all the bunch in our community. And so they said, "˜Oh, put Paulette over there, she can talk to the elders.' And they thought they were setting me up good "˜cause I was the young one and I got vetted for that job. And I said, "˜Well, I see that as an honor and a privilege. Thank you.' And all the elders of the council, they're all in their 60s, 70s, and so here I was at 28 and so I really seen that as an honor, but my first step was to engage them wholly and we had an elders' listening session and yes, that first session was great. All they wanted to know is that they were being listened to and that you were going to do what they said and not just throw it into the wind. So I followed up after those listening sessions and we had them yearly and so they became very productive. And I thought, "˜I wish we did this more often.' But I would have them once yearly and so trying to keep that tradition going. But that's all it's about is talking to your people and not being afraid to be disciplined and you know how that finger may be waved in your face or challenged in some way or form. So thank you. I appreciate this time again and I appreciate all of you having me and listening to me, especially after that good lunch we had. [Coeur d'Alene language]."

Paulette Jordan and Arlene Templer: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Paulette Jordan and Arlene Templer field questions from the audience, offering more details about how they mobilized their fellow tribal citizens to buy into the community development initiatives they were advancing. 

Resource Type
Citation

Jordan, Paulette. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Q&A session.

Templer, Arlene. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Q&A session.

Herminia Frias:

"Well, thank you, Paulette and Arlene. We're going to open it up for questions, but I just wanted to make a comment from both of these stories is that these are really good stories about engaging the community and the citizenship about their responsibilities and the whole effective change and the process that it takes. None of this stuff happened overnight and what they did require that vision, that vision and that communication and going back and just keep on moving one at a time. And a lot of times when we work with tribal leaders it just seems like everything is so urgent and everything is so crisis-driven that sometimes it helps to take a step back and see how other tribes have done things and that it didn't happen overnight and as long as you continue to focus on that vision, you'll get there, just like they did. You'll get there and when you look back, you'll look at the process and think, "˜Wow, we did a lot.' And again, nations are not always good at giving themselves credit for the wonderful work that you do and that's one of the neat things that we get to do in our role is to be able to identify and look at that and meet people like Paulette and Arlene and say, "˜You've got to share your story because more people need to know about the process that you went through so that it inspires them to say we can do it, too.' So questions?"

Ian Record:

"Minnie, if you wouldn't mind, I'm going to actually ask the first question of Arlene. I've actually been very fortunate in sitting down with her and chewing the fat with her about the work that her department has done. And actually we recorded an interview with her that at some point it's going to be on the [Indigenous Governance] Database website...which I'll share a little bit more with you about later. Arlene, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the messages that you were conveying to your citizens as you transformed the way that you delivered social services to them and the incentives that -- and disincentives -- the new sets of kind of incentives and disincentives that you, that were laid in that new approach. And also how important it was for you to know that, 'I've got the tribal leadership at my back, they fully support this new approach we're taking where we're really about self-sufficiency and everything we do is geared towards enhancing the self-sufficiency of our people.'"

Arlene Templer:

"It was hard at first. Like I said, we had that entitlement mentality; people wanted to sit back and just draw the government jack or just draw GA [General Assistance] or TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] [money]. And what we got them to see is that when we set up these work placements, when they went out there and actually did that, they seen how it changed family stability. They had checks coming in, they felt better about themselves, the domestic violence dropped, the alcoholism took a backseat, and people began to change. The entire system -- all the employees, all of the people -- all of a sudden you were on the outside. You weren't looking at the jobs or being part of the movement that was happening and the work experience, and it wouldn't have happened if it didn't come from the tribal council, because the council had to say, "˜Enough of the turf, all your programs are going together and you have one goal.' And they gave us just that much of a light and then we took it from there and developed how we would do that. A lot of people said, "˜Well, you're too hard on the people. You're doing this pushing of driver's licenses and drug tests and making their kids go to school.' When they got to a place that they had that first job or they had that driver's license, just the change and the light went on. I don't have to drag them along anymore, they're dragging the others. So it changed, they changed themselves for that. You just open the door, you just give them the hand and it works."

Herminia Frias:

"We have Renee and Ian back there with the microphones. Anyone else? I'll ask a question while you're thinking about it and this is to Paulette. Paulette, what process did you go through to mobilize and create that momentum to get those people behind you and start moving on this and get people to care?"

Paulette Jordan:

"I think easier said than done, but like you said before, it takes credibility. Over the years, especially after the last election it just seems like it...you can't just be someone out of the blue and decide to do this. I think I've always been the outspoken one and said...and I really don't waste myself about issues. I don't just get out there and I guess jump behind every single project that there is. If there's something like a great cause that I know would benefit everybody, you'll see me part of it and wanting to help benefit or lead in some way. So at this point with this particular function, for me to get people rolling with that, I guess I was really heated in the beginning. I was really upset and I don't show emotion. I'm not an emotional person, but to me, being upset is speaking with direct conviction and telling people, "˜You need to be involved.' We had very few tribal people in the beginning who wanted to be involved. There was a lot of non-tribal, mostly teachers, and then the superintendent and so I said, "˜Hey, wait a minute. This is not just your issue, this is all of our issue.' So I started trying to recruit Native people who I felt would work with me and then follow through and show up to these meetings or who were also good at communicating and then getting out there to push this message. So it's...you know, you really have to know your community. I couldn't do this if I were in just any other...in another random community. I think I'd really have to know the people. You have to know who you can work with, who you can trust, who will listen to you and respect you in some way or form because you have to...to be in a leadership position, people have to be able to trust you so you have to have that credibility is what I'm saying. But that's really what I think helped move folks to be involved. And then the students, the students were easy. They were just...students are always willing to learn and they always want to be part of something fun and great so they were just like, "˜Okay, great, let's do this. What do I need to do?' And so for three months straight they just were always at my doorstop just saying, "˜Okay, what do we need to do next. What do we got to do?' And so it was really fun just to work with them. But it wasn't just about being upset and mad. It was just about saying, "˜We need to make a difference,' and I think that goes with anything we have within our tribes, whether it's a drug issue...like right now we were facing a big drug issue so we were just saying, "˜Okay, let's get our community rallied together,' and sometimes that takes food, sometimes that takes the proper people. You would never want someone who was or is a drug dealer or using drugs to be leading that group discussion. You want someone who's credible and who you can trust and rely upon. So you need those qualities and I'm sure all of you have those here. So just get out and do it. "˜Just do it,' as they say."

Herminia Frias:

"Any other questions? Yes."

Steve Zawoysky:

"So I have a question for Paulette mainly about partnerships. Partnerships are like the preferable form of business or governmental relationships. But if you lived in a...or if you were in an environment where potential partner is not necessarily cooperative or don't have a lot in common, it can be challenging. So I'm curious, two questions, one after you got together and did the school thing, did you have better relations then with your non-Native neighbors who were affected by that decision?"

Paulette Jordan:

"Yeah, I'm one of the rare property owners that would be affected by that levy, but I think again it's always about pushing the envelope. And then being a local property owner myself and other property owners having issues in voting no against the levy, I said to them, "˜Well, someone at some point paid for your public education at one point of time.' I never went to the public school system. I was always tribal and then private school. So I've always paid for my own way.' But I said, "˜You on the other hand, you went through the public school system. The state paid for it.' meaning your neighbors and your community. So once people think about it that way, they go, "˜Oh, well, yeah, okay. I need to pay it forward as we say,' then the heart opened up a little bit. But building relationships, partnerships...people afterwards, after the levy passed, people were more happy and thankful about it passing. Really what we found out was the people who were voting 'no' and who kept winning that levy were people who were moving in or retired folks in the northern county who don't have children and just were worried about losing property value. And so it was always a selfish, I hate to say that word, but it's more of a selfish-based reason why they voted 'no.' So to me overall, though, it builds relationships with everybody, and to me it always comes down to race relations and how we can better understand one another because that's really what prevents us from developing businesses together or developing schools together or how we look at each other. I want people to smile at my children everyday and not look at them, or look down upon him because he's Indian and I want them to trust him at some point because maybe he'll run for president 30 years from now. We want people to trust us for the right reasons. Not because we can give them money because we have gaming and other enterprises, but because we are good, humble people, because again like my good mentors say, it's all about humanity and how we look at one another. So I think that this really helped us look at each other more as relatives rather than just next door neighbors."

Herminia Frias:

"Any other questions? All right. I'd like to thank both of the presenters. Thank you so much for sharing your stories." 

Arlene Templer: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Salish and Kootenai Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Arlene Templer, Department of Human Resource Development Director for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), discusses what prompted CSKT to develop the Department of Human Resource Development and how the department works to cultivate self-sufficiency in CSKT citizens and use CSKT's resources for social services more effectively and efficiently.

Resource Type
Citation

Templer, Arlene. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Salish and Kootenai Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Presentation.

Herminia Frias:

"I'm very pleased to be here today to introduce our panelists and moderate this session. We are going to start with Arlene Templer, and Arlene Templer is the Director of Department of Human Resource Development for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. And last year, I had the opportunity to go out and visit their nation and just see all of the amazing things that they do in their nation. And Arlene came out and presented and told us about this project she's going to share with you and we just thought, ‘Wow! More people need to know about what they're doing.' So without further adieu, her bio is in the booklet so I won't go into all that information, plus we're already starting a little bit late. Arlene is going to be our first speaker."

Arlene Templer:

"Good afternoon. I've worked for the tribe for 33 years, so it's given me a lot of background, I've seen a lot, I've tried a lot, I've survived a couple of coups. It still seems like in the tribal world, we have that crab effect where the further we get up the more people want to pull you down. So it's by perseverance and the glory of God that I sit in front of you today. The Creator put me here for a reason.

The Flathead Reservation is different than most of your reservations out there. We are 80/20 non-member. So 80 percent of our reservation are non-members. So it puts us a minority on our own Indian reservation. It's a beautiful place in northwest Montana and we own half of Flathead Lake, so it's a very pretty place. Salish Kootenai likes to be first or likes to get out there in the forefront in applying for programs and taking over programs. We're one of the first Self-Governance tribes. We have our own tribal court. We have a fantastic Salish Kootenai College, which most...I think last year, we had over 450 tribes attending our college. We were one of the first in 4E and we've contracted most of the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] programs. We used to have the superintendent and a secretary, but we don't even have the superintendent anymore. So we've pretty much contracted everything that the Bureau has done.

What I want to do today is give you kind of a practical implementation. What the tribe did in 1998 was looked around and looked at services. We were sitting at 41 percent unemployment. In Montana, you had to be 50 percent unemployment to not have the limitation on you, the five-year [limitation] on TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families]. And the tribe was applying to take over TANF at that time and applying for 477. So they created a new department and it was Department of Human Resource Development. Not a personnel department, it was human resource development. How were we going to develop our membership so that we're ready for jobs, we're ready for that home run industry that might step...come to the reservation and we're ready to stabilize families and make them self-sufficient? So they started taking programs from all other different departments. Our reservation is 1.25 million acres so we had maybe social services in St. Ignatius and we had housing up in Pablo and we had tribal health in Ronan. So we were...when people come in for services, it was, ‘Oh, you've got to go to St. Ignatius or you're got to go up to Polson or you've got to do this, you've got to do that.' We were running people all over the reservation to get services so the tribe said, ‘No, let's do an ease of service for people.' So they created the first tribal one-stop. We call it a 'one-stop' program and we were doing that before the state started doing one-stop programs. We didn't seek out their accreditation or their certification. We were already doing it. We have a tribal one-stop program.

In that one-stop, we have TANF and we run our TANF different because the tribe said, ‘We want stable families and we want self-sufficient families.' So in TANF, you have to get your driver's license, your kids have to go to school -- school participation is a must -- you have to attend mentoring. Mentoring is a 40-hour-a-week class. You come at 8:00 in the morning, you get a half-an-hour lunch and you go home at 4:30 at night. It's just like a regular job to teach people how to work. We also do drug tests. We don't base the eligibility on the drug test, but you have to do the drug test. If you fail it, it's put in your IFP, individual family plan, and you work on it. You go get an assessment and you follow the assessment rules. We have work placements. We have a problem with soft skills. We have generations of welfare, we have generations of poverty, and people don't know how to work. So we are trying to address those in the TANF. Transportation was an issue. A lot of the membership was losing their TANF eligibility because they couldn't make it to their appointments, they couldn't make it to their job seeking, they couldn't make it up to the county to make it to see their case worker. They would get up there and most of the people were hitchhiking and walk in the door and if they were five minutes late, the door was shut in front of their face. So the council said, ‘No. We're going to take the welfare from the county.' So we took the welfare and what we did was we bought two vans, started out with two little vans from TANF and we started transporting people to get to your work placements, to do your work requirements, to do the things you needed to do. And we also did assessments on those people. We found that 40 percent of the people on TANF that we brought from the county had disabilities, language disabilities, physical disabilities -- you name it, they had disabilities. Voc rehab was one of the programs we took in to DHRD [Department of Human Resource Development].

We also are very good at grant writing. I know grant writing has been a little bit negative in this workshop overall, but grant writing has set up our department. And what we did when we were grant writing is looking at grants that would enhance and train the membership. We applied for Fatherhood. We had the first Fatherhood program. It was five years and then we applied again for another three years. We've been successful both times. In the Fatherhood [program], we targeted soft skills. We have people go into work sites, we ask people not to fire them, they're called work experience placements and we work with whatever the issue is. We have a lot of our families that work in crisis. As soon as the babysitter calls and says, ‘I can't babysit today,' then they don't go to work. The refrigerator goes down, they don't go to work. The car breaks down, they don't go to work. So we're trying to work through all of those issues to make people self-sufficient. We also have LEAP [Low-Income Energy Assistance], commodities and food stamps. Food stamps, we invited the county to come down and have an office within our department, so instead of our people having to go to the county to apply for food stamps, it's in our one-stop. We gave them an office to come down and sit and have their own office in ours. So they don't have to go to the county for services anymore.

We have OCS, that's Office of Community Services, and we have all of the elder programs. And the tribe gave us a pot of money called 'Dire Need.' ‘When there's no federal dollars, there's no other dollars, there's no state dollars, we're going to give you this pot of money so that you can help the membership out.' So we've been given free reign on $100,000, it started out at $125,000, and it's to help people in emergency situations. So the council has been good to us for that. When they took all of these programs from all these other departments, it eliminated all the turf issues immediately. We still get in those little turf, ‘This is my budget, this is my money and I'm going to run it how I'm going to.' We don't have that anymore. You have one director, you have all the budgets under that person, and it eliminates all of the secretarial support for all of those different departments. It eliminates all of the support services, so we're able to save a lot of money in doing that.

After 15 years of running the department, we just now have people reaching their five-year limitation, so after 15 years. I've got an awesome TANF director. What we do is get people into work-experience placements, we get them working, we help create jobs. Up on the reservation they can do firewood, they can do post and pole, they can do Christmas treeing. Also we get per capita. We just got a recent large per capita, it was the Salazar payout of $10,000. Well, she worked with those people and said, ‘Get off the program for six months. Get off the program for the next year. Save your eligibility, you might need it.' So she has worked with people for the last 15 years doing that, so we just now have people reaching that limit. After 15 years, we're down at 24 to 29 percent unemployment depending on who you ask. So we've almost dropped that in half by putting the services into the people and making a work-first mentality. We fought a lot of mentalities. There was the government owes us, per capita, the tribe will pay for it. It was hard getting third-generation families that have never worked or third-generation families that have been caught up in alcoholism and drugs to work. We had people make that decision to be poorer. They decided, ‘No, I'm not jumping all your hoops.' What we have done is leave the door open so that when we do school clothes for kids or we do the school backpacks, we invite those kids in. We make sure that we cover all of those things.

I am the second department head. There's only been two department heads in 15 years. The first department head kept pretty much central control over all of the budgets, but she was there for probably 60 to 70 hours a week. I decided coming in that I didn't want to do that. What I did is develop nine divisions and we developed those people as division managers to run their own departments. I gave them their budgets, gave them their staff and said, ‘Okay, you guys all need to run your budgets.' The first couple of years it wasn't good. People don't know how to do budgets. People had a hard time supervising staff. But today they are all supervising, they are all doing a fantastic job.

The transportation was a tough issue. We started out with two vans and we'd seen with work-related work placements that we needed to develop a transportation system. So we applied for grants. We applied for the state grants, they have the 5311, they have JARC, they have all of their different kind of initials. We were very successful in getting those. We also got the tribal transportation grant. And then most of those state grants have these huge matches. So we were always going to the council saying, ‘I can get the grants, but you need to match them.' And second year, third year I was getting tired of going and begging for that money from the council. So I said, ‘How about if you guys let me buy the gas station?' There was a gas station that was right on our complex. ‘And I'll use the money, the revenues from the gas station, for revenues to the transportation department.' And they said, ‘Hmm.' So I wrote a couple earmarks and I was successful getting them. Senator [Max] Baucus, I wrote them to him -- both of them from him. We were able to purchase the gas station as a transportation hub. The second earmark I was able to build mechanical bays on the store. So then I was taking federal money and making it a revenue for the tribe. One of the gentlemen had asked, ‘How do you do that?' So now we are making money as a business and using the revenues to support the transportation system. Works well for us.

We also do a lot of training. I have a WIA [Workforce Investment Act] grant that does training. I have a BIA grant that does training. I have, let's see what else do I have...? Fatherhood does a lot of training. And I wrote another grant that allows us to CDL [Commercial Driver's License] training. I developed a bus system. I got 20 buses now. I need people that have CDLs. So did Forestry. They didn't have any people to take up their buses during firefighting. So did the school districts. So we wrote another grant and we will have 60 CDLs by the end of next year. We had 30 this summer. So what we do with grant writing is find the need and then go look for the grant. We're not just writing for anything that's out there. We actually say, ‘Hey, we could target that. We could bring that home and it could do this for us.' So we've been able to do that.

Lessons learned. I ran into a very strong, loud tribal member in my youth starting out. His name was 'Bearhead' Swaney. I don't know if any of you know him. He taught me very early that we are only one rung from our clients. He said, ‘In 90 days, anyone of you...' he was looking at all of us managers, ‘...would be in the same place as your clients. We're here to give them a hand up. We're here to all be successful.' And that has stuck with me from day one. That's how I work, that's how I operate, is in 90 days I could be in the same position. So help out your neighbor.

Credibility, relationships that you develop: I, over the 33 years, have developed very strong relationships with the state; I get grants from them, the federal government, the congressmen, other department heads. Senator Baucus asked me if I would come out and talk to the Senate Finance Committee on how meth is affecting tribal members on the reservation. I ran right out there and did it for him. Good things come out of relationships. I told you I got those two earmarks right up doing that as well. So make those relationships. What happens on our reservation is the tribal council is fighting with the state people over fish and game, water rights, gaming, so that there's this fight going on over the top of us and water rights right now is huge on our reservation. But us as leaders down below and the department head, I'm still reaching across the aisle to the state people, to the fed people, the people that I need to so that we can work. I'm finding those people that we can still get our job done, I can still get the grants I need, I can still bring that money home to our reservation and still allow the tribal council to do their job. So I see us once removed to be able to do that.

How do you keep the membership involved? I do this in a lot of ways. I do public hearings for a lot of my programs. I invite the public to come in and talk to me about LEAP, how could we do things different? Childcare, TANF, you name it. We have...we set a place across the reservation, we bring in cookies, we bring in drinks and we say, ‘Tell us what we could do differently.' We try to listen to the people. When we developed the Child Support Enforcement Forum, we sent out a survey. I didn't think that survey would work. The girls said, ‘Well, let's put $10 gas voucher on it, let's see how many we get.' So we did a $10 gas voucher, 500 people responded to that survey. So we really had a good idea what the people wanted. We also go to the culture committees. Boy, that can be a tough place to go. We have two culture committees. We have the Salish and then we have the Kootenai and the Kootenai is a tough place. You're going to be grilled and you're going to learn everything you probably didn't want to know about your past. We went there five times. Five times before we got that Child Support Enforcement stuff done, but we were doing code development, we were hearing what they wanted us to do and it worked for us because once we got to the council arena then, we didn't have people coming in saying, ‘No, don't do it.' I had a survey, I had a wheel showing 87 percent of the people on the reservation want this. They supported us. They were happy to do it.

The other thing that I do is allow education in my staff. I allow them... we have the college right next door, we have this beautiful bridge actually that just walks across the street to the college. There's a four million dollar bridge and it's absolutely beautiful and you walk right across and go to school anytime you want. So I encourage people, ‘Get your degrees. Continue your education.' I give them time off to do that. I say, ‘Go to school. I'm extending that hand, go get it done.' I've told my staff, ‘I've got five years left, guys. There's a couple of you in here, you can finish your degrees, you can mentor, you can do a lot of things. Get ready. Get ready.' The other thing I do is surround myself with people smarter than I am. I have a problem with writing, so I surround myself with people that know...have very good writing skills. I lack culture. I'm one of those people that grew up in a very domestic violence and alcohol home and culture wasn't passed down to us, so I surround myself with those cultural people that I need.

The questions they wanted me to answer are: What roles do tribal citizens play in rebuilding the nation? I believe that we're all there together and all we need to do is a hand up to each other to build our nations. We role model. We need to role model. I'm there at every morning at 7:00. I don't go out the door until 5:30. I don't think there's anybody in the office that can outwork me. I model every day what I expect out of my workers and I don't see anything less. I had one of my division managers come in and complain and complain and complain about a worker and I said, ‘She's just doing what you're doing.' What you model is what you're going to get out of your employees. I also try to express membership responsibility. We talk to a lot of TANF, a lot of welfare, a lot of people just beginning and I try to teach and model what you do affects us all.

Based on your experience what are some of the challenges? Some of the challenges I see are the crab effect, the pulling down of each other. I have survived two coups myself within the tribe, people wanting to take over, people wanting you out of the office, people going after you. I think with credibility and resilience and persistence and people see what kind of work you do and the grants and the funding that you can bring in, you survive.

What are the benefits to engaged citizens? If you're teaching through your programs the responsibilities, they're going to see the goals and the visions of the tribe. Also you're showing, you're demonstrating the norms for leaders. And also when I go to council, if I've done my work, if I've done due diligence, I don't have to worry about a group of people showing up and demonstrating or not wanting us to get through or wanting us to take through something touchy like Child Support Enforcement. I don't have to worry about that. I think that's all I have. Thank you."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. [applause] One of the things that I also remember when I went out to visit Arlene's nation was the number of people that they had employed in their top positions -- in directors, program managers -- were their own citizens and that was really impressive. Their own citizens that had the credentials, the experience to do the job, and I thought, ‘Wow, that is really good to see that they're fostering it within their nation and it's not let's bring outsiders in and have them do it because they can do it better.' It was good to see. Yeah, it's their own people that are there and we had all these people presenting and they're all..."

Arlene Templer:

"We call them homegrown."

Herminia Frias:

"Homegrown?"

Arlene Templer:

"Yeah. We just start them out in WIA or Fatherhood or whatever and develop their skills, their credentials and then we hire them."

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."

Robert Yazzie: Traditional Principles of Leadership

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Chief Justice Robert Yazzie of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court provides an overview of the traditional Diné governance system and specifically the leadership principles that Diné leaders relied upon to make sound, informed, strategic decisions in consultation with and on behalf of their people. He offers a convincing argument for Native nations to consult their traditional governance systems in order to meet the challenges they face today.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Yazzie, Robert. "Traditional Principles of Leadership." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 6, 2013. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"I have the great pleasure of introducing Robert Yazzie, who is...who I've known for many years through his affiliation with the Native Nations Institute. He's been one of our longest serving members of our International Advisory Council. He's a real major figure in the area of tribal justice systems, and in fact I think Rae Nell [Vaughn] and Eldena [Bear Don't Walk] may reference the Navajo Nation Justice System tomorrow because they're really viewed...that system is really viewed as a leader in the process that many Native nations are engaging in in terms of reclaiming the function of justice in their own communities and returning it to a position where it's culturally appropriate and culturally relevant and reflective of culture. And Robert was one of the main architects of that movement, to make that justice system work for the Navajo people in a Navajo way. And we have the great honor...it was interesting, we see Robert a couple times a year and after the last time we saw him he mentioned a desire to come and speak to leaders such as yourself about what he calls the ‘traditional principles of leadership' and basically how you work to instill your own core values in the actions and decisions that you make as leaders, again, whether you're an elected official or just a decision maker within your own community, within your own family, within your own nation. So with that I'll turn the floor over to Robert. He's going to present for about 20 minutes or so and then we want to leave a little time at the end of his session for some questions."

Robert Yazzie:

"[Navajo language]. Anybody here? I have a humor to share with you just as an opener. When we say '[Navajo language],' we always say, ‘Goodness be unto you.' And so I had a solicitor when I was the sitting chief justice, he used to -- he's a white guy, used to see his Navajo wife every weekend. They would go to drive three hours to Albuquerque and when they meet they'll say [Navajo language], hugs and kisses and everything. So around 8:00, she would tell him, ‘Hit the hay.' And then over the weekend when she gets mad at him, she'll say, ‘What the hay?' I know that would get you going. Thank you for the cake. Good for my sugar level.

I would like to talk about the principles of Diné leadership and I want to talk about the definition of how Diné leadership can be understood in terms of its definition, in terms of its qualities, and also the challenges and experience of Diné leadership yesterday and today. So for purposes of achieving a better government, the question is, ‘Can the modern day leadership incorporate the traditional principles of governance from the past?' I think that's a very important question on our table.

So what is leadership? Studies of political systems show a scale of differing patterns, from absolute authoritarian leadership to leadership that's only persuasive. Some leaders exercise command with force and others only persuade. Most form of western leadership are based on the notion of power, to back up a command. In other words, leadership in that respect usually means power, control, authority and coercion. Diné, traditional Diné leadership is not about power, it's not about control or coercion, but a recognition that words are powerful through influence and persuasion. Persuasive leadership is based on compliance with the command or advice of a leader such as a wise uncle or other relative out of respect.

The Navajo word for leadership is '[Navajo language].' I think the concepts really teach us a lot, so I'm going to be talking about concept as a way to understand something about leadership, traditional leadership. So the Navajo word for leadership is '[Navajo language],' which in essence means 'a planner' and it comes from a word base means ‘speaking' [Navajo language]. The word for ‘planning' is '[Navajo language],' refers to talking things out to make a plan. The Navajo word for ‘leader,' '[Navajo language]' arises from power as a speaker and the word for ‘planning,' '[Navajo language]' is about problem solving and discussing plans. An elder would say '[Navajo language],' that it is about learning how to think, '[Navajo language],' learning how to use your thinking when the [Navajo language]. The [Navajo language], the leader uses those elements of thinking and planning as tools for leadership.

We generally understand that traditional leadership is based on possessing wisdom and the ability to speak, create plans for successful outcomes and results, create respect that compels people to follow. It's something like his or her word is law. So given that brief definition, we can ask the question, ‘Well, what are the qualities, what are the characteristics or traits of leadership and how does one get the qualities of leadership and earn respect?' So when we look at the thinking of the leader or for anybody for that matter, we look at two things that are opposites. The simplest way of saying it is you have something good, you have something bad. That's the centerpiece to your thought...to your thinking. So in that respect, our old system of government last seen in operation 1859. '[Navajo language]' means ‘the peaceful chief.' '[Navajo language]' is more of the opposite of a good peaceful chief. '[Navajo language]' means ‘firm.' It could mean something very rough as well. So looking at those concepts helps us to understand the Navajo leadership definitions and qualities according to the early style of leadership we call '[Navajo language].' So if you can imagine a circle, imagine that you have 12 leaders sitting toward each other, one representing the peace, one representing the war. So as I said, that was last observed in 1859.

So the two kinds of leaders traditionally, '[Navajo language]' or 'war leaders,' and the '[Navajo language]' or 'peace leaders,' the word '[Navajo language]' relates to decisions that are prompt, powerful and aggressive. That's the person's characteristics. The speaking done is for...the speaking to that...for that quality is for war. So the ability to immediately evaluate a situation and to speak to a plan to...and speak to a plan of immediate and aggressive action is necessary. Individuals get a reputation of being successful warriors. The word '[Navajo language]' comes from the word '[Navajo language]' basically means 'understanding of something good.' Understand [Navajo language] as a state of perfection. One definition is that [Navajo language] is that state of being where everyone and everything are in proper place relating and functioning well with everything to achieve a state of harmony or perfection. That requires a kind of speaking to achieve a perfect state that is wise and successful.

So Justice Austin who I used to sit with, Raymond D. Austin, who was Associate Justice when I was Chief Justice and after he retired he went to...went back to school. He was a law school graduate and he was a member of the Arizona Bar. He went back to the University of Arizona to earn a...to do his dissertation in Navajo common law. So he has come up with a book called The Navajo Nation Courts: The Common Law and in his book he talks a lot about the duty of a [Navajo language], the duty of a leader, which is to maintain [Navajo language] as a perfect state of condition and he said that could be the theory, but in terms of practice, the leader would identify a problem, a [Navajo language], and that leader has the obligation to engage himself or herself in what we call '[Navajo language].' In English is to say, ‘Think for the people to find the problem.' Identify the causes of the disruption of the state of [Navajo language] and once you have done that, then the challenge in one is to restore [Navajo language].

Individuals who want to be leaders do not appoint themselves. The status is earned. The western notion of advancing one's own name for political office by election makes no sense. Election in a traditional sense is spontaneous and based on necessities. For example, there may be plans for spring planting over a winter fire. So there would be talk of when to plant, who could read the stars to know when that is done and other matters that call for leadership guidance. So people who talk about what would be the best...who would be the best person to guide the planting season; that is a way leaders were chosen.

I served as the Navajo Nation court judge and the chief justice for the Navajo Nation Supreme Court for 19 years. As Navajo judges, we are considered as successors of the traditional [Navajo language], peace chief, because we are chosen for our individual qualities. Traits that make a difference in being a good leader include adherence to the duty of promoting harmony and order and treating people with fairness and humility. [Navajo language] of the past and today are looked upon as role models and the respect for our decision depends upon our personal integrity. Humility is a personal value, which prompts people to respect us judges for our decision not for our position.

One of the traditional terms for leader is that person is slightly higher than others and it reflects the view that leadership and the acceptance of its authority comes from those who conduct themselves well. It comes from individuals who speak well, plan well, show success in community planning or those who can talk the goods in for the people. Humility is not simply self-effacing behavior, but behavior that is consistent with competent leadership that is tempered with humility. Leadership is not for the self, but for the people. The people [are] the source of that power.

What is the traditional Navajo process for planning and decision making for leaders? The way of achieving [Navajo language], the good things, is by talking things out. As I said, the Navajo word '[Navajo language]' means 'to talk,' is related to leadership because of the common expression, as I said, words are powerful. Words of great leaders are powerful because they speak solution into reality. Navajos believe thoughts become action in words and that words create action or reality when they are spoken. Thinking becomes speech become action. That is the thought system where thinking and intuition drive words and speaking. Speaking in groups is planning and action is the result of thinking and planning. The Navajo word for leader '[Navajo language],' which arises from power as a speaker and the word for planning '[Navajo language]' is about problem solving and discussing plans. And there's a word, I'm sure that you have your own word for this concept, called '[Navajo language].' It's a very important concept in the past traditional practice of leadership. '[Navajo language],' which is 'talk things out.' It involves having free discussion among the leader with his people, with the community to clarify relationships, to identify problems and disputes and provides for a method of planning and making decisions. [Navajo language], talking things out process requires that reciprocity, doing things for each other in return, is about his or her obligation to what we call '[Navajo language]' and [Navajo language] is a concept that really can't be translated into English and I believe you have the same...the same experience is true with your language. That one word cannot be said, while '[Navajo  language]' means respect. '[Navajo language]' can mean many, many different things, even a book won't satisfy a good explanation of what that word means, but at best '[Navajo language]' is something like treating people with respect, compassion, reverence. So [Navajo language] or talking things out requires that reciprocity be practiced to ensure there's equal and equitable treatment for the people.

And there's another word that is very important as well, '[Navajo language].'Can you all say that? [Navajo language]. Not today? [Navajo language] is one of the practices for [Navajo language] and as I said, it's understood as knowing how to treat people with dignity and respect. The [Navajo language] as a [Navajo language] is always expected to act as though you have relatives. If you walk around, talk around, walk around and talk as if you have no relatives and the people would always say, ‘That person is forgetting about his or her obligation through [Navajo language].' A [Navajo language], a leader is always expected to honor his obligation through the concept of [Navajo language]. Talking things out with the people helps a leader to learn about ideas, expectation and recommendation of the community. An important aspect of making effective decisions by a leader is being well informed of the issues and concerns of the people. To be informed is to know what the people want. I think that is probably your experience as well when you observe Navajo Nation tribal council in session. Not everybody is there to know...to fully know what the people want, because the more you observe sometimes the more you find out the leader really needs to understand what the people are thinking and what is it that they're concerned about.

The other part, the other issue that was discussed is transparency and it's something that is really difficult to translate from English to Navajo, but at best you can say in Navajo, we say '[Navajo language],' means you can't hide your plans. '[Navajo language],' it means to make clear your plans. [Navajo language] requires transparency, a free flow of information, a duty to communicate, to make known the issues at hand. Planning for action can be transparent except for war way planning so that everyone who is affected can see what is going on and have an opportunity to have a say. Navajo tradition requires energy and good will when putting plans into action so that good intentions reflect positive energy [and] will produce a good result.

What are the challenges and experience of leadership in Navajo country? In 1989, we had a major crisis. The Navajo Nation government was, were nearly as a whole was nearly put on its knees. The Navajo Nation Chairman Peter MacDonald was accused [of] bribery and kickbacks and the Navajo Nation Council proceeded to put him on administrative leave for accusation and for other serious criminal allegations. He refused. He told the Navajo Nation Council, ‘You have no legal basis.' And he was right, but the matter was put before the Navajo Nation Council on a certified question and the Navajo Nation Supreme Court came back with a response and said that...he says, ‘under traditional method of selection of leaders, people choose their leaders [Navajo language] based on trust and confidence. If a leader breeches the trust by wrongful acts, the people would simply walk away.' This practice was what justified the council action to remove Chairman Peter MacDonald from office.

I think one of the questions that really bothers a lot of us is that when it comes to decision-making, how effective are the leaders in making a good decision? I think here's where we can involve the question, ‘Does traditional Diné leadership make a difference in the modern day?' And we talk about the problems we have on the...in Indian Country, that at times the atmosphere towards leadership can be very negative. And you look at the situation in Indian Country, people are living the hard life, frustrated, overwhelmed with trying to make things...trying to make ends meet and because there are no jobs, no money, no educational opportunities people are suffering from domestic violence. People cannot help but feel that leadership is inefficient, ineffective. So here's where we are asked the question, ‘If we were to do something a little different,' for example, look at the question, ‘Do the principles of Navajo traditional governance have a role in this scenario?' That is to say, does the traditional Diné leadership make a difference in the modern day? And sometimes when we need to respond to that kind of question we always talk about journey narratives, we always talk about Twin Heroes.

Twin Heroes were out to help save the people when the bad energy, the bad monsters began to take its toll on human lives. People really struggle, people were suffering, people were living with chaos and disharmony and so when we look at these narratives we can say that there was...that the Twin Heroes came and helped the people in many, many ways. They destroyed almost everything, all of what we called '[Navajo language],' the bad energy. But there were some who say, ‘Please save us. We can help the human race to live a quality of life.' But there are certain type of [Navajo language] that have no mercy on humans and so when the Twin Heroes, before killing the monster, the father, the Sun said, gave instruction and said to carefully study and observe the movement and behavior of the monster. Before you make the attack, thinking before you make the attack is a value that advises leaders today to carefully observe the problem before taking any sort of action. So it's telling us that where there's chaos is to really study the problem, understand the problem before you proceed to say, ‘What are the alternatives?'

So one of the things that we're trying to do within the Navajo Nation is to make some changes. I have a proposed legislation here before the Navajo Nation Council and it's about creating a uranium commission that would help to clean up the abandoned mines. We have so many... so much abandoned mines that it's causing a big risk. It's already causing a lot of health problems and people have died from it. And I was told, ‘Well, could you help us? Could you design a legislation that touches upon the fundamental law of the Diné?' And so it took me a long time to think that when we look at our tribal code, we see a lot of incorporation of state law, federal law and I think the emphasis should be, now that most of our kids are going to law school and are coming back to establish their practice, I think the emphasis is to take seriously and to say, ‘How do we develop our Indian thinking and use it as a tool to craft legislation?' So when I thought about this in terms of creating a commission and I thought about the leadership of that commission, that this leadership should be guided by the fundamental law of the Diné, and also the leadership also should be informed about the laws that we have, the laws from the time of creation. The laws from the time of creation is telling us about what is the natural law, '[Navajo Language]'? Natural law means laws that come from the earth and the universe and that itself, the natural law was like planting the seeds, planting the seeds to develop other forms of law.

For example, we have what we call traditional law, custom law and common law. So the medicine people sat down and said, ‘Well, the natural law should be something that is coming from the water, from the air, from the fire, from things that grow on earth. They have their own independent existence. We are...we come from those elements and then as such we should observe a relationship that is one of respect.' Everything that we learn from those elements we say that '[Navajo language],' means everything is related, we're all related in one way or another and as such we are the elements of nature and the elements of nature is us. So in that respect, we can't dominate those elements and the only thing we can do is to clearly understand that from the time those things were put in place and the time we were created is what the holy people did and said to us, ‘This is the law and I put it in your hand. [Navajo language] in the holy way I put it in your hands. Now you shall become the stewards to take care of these elements. These elements, you take care of them, they'll take care of you.'

So those were the thoughts in terms of creating a commission. I know that a lot of us are concerned that what is it that we should recover from our past? There are sources already that we can learn about, that we can apply, that we can work with and if we proceed to do that, it's amazing how much that can be done, it's amazing how much of an influence it has on the kind of thinking we have. It'll change the paradigm. Like you said, this is the way Navajos handle it, this is the way the Mohawks handle it, this is the way the Blackfeet handle it, is what we will be saying if we were to proceed down this path. And I think a lot of us learn, know our language. And this legislation is talking about a story as an approach to develop a law, but it's not a matter of talking about the story. The story should be to say, ‘How do I use this material to develop something for this modern day? How can I develop this as law so my kids in the future can say, this is the law of our grandfather and our grandmother.' A lot of us are up in age, we are the grandmothers, we are the grandfathers, and a lot of grandmothers and grandfathers say, ‘I have no idea, I have no clue about the creation story.' When the grandkids are asking questions, the response is, ‘I don't know.' But it's not simply that we can't just say, ‘I don't know,' because I know that a lot of us Indian people know a lot about our past and if we take the time to share that and say, ‘How can we revive those? How can we learn to articulate those teachings so that they sound like law in the statutes, in case laws?' Thank you."

 

Adam Geisler: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Adam Geisler, Secretary of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, discusses the diverse set of challenges he faces as an elected leader of his nation and discusses some of the innovative ways that he, his leadership colleagues, and his nation have worked to overcome those challenges. He also offers a number of pointers for how to lead effectively based on his own experience.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Geisler, Adam. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 6, 2013. Presentation.

"Thank you, Renee [Goldtooth], for inviting me out here. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to have the opportunity to speak to all of you. You're probably looking at me wondering, "˜Who's this kid? What can he say, what can he share, what does he know?' I'm going to hopefully enlighten you a little bit on some of the challenges that I endeavored through. My name is Adam Geisler. I'm the secretary for La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians. I've been in office for five years. I have been working for my tribe since I was 14 years old and I guess I'll just kind of start with, 'Tribal council, are you ready?'...

A little bit about the photo. We have a five-member council. We have roughly 10,000 acres with about 700 enrolled members that live on and off the reservation. We have roughly 189 houses, about 15 miles of roadway, three separate water systems, and the major northern loop of the utility for feeding San Diego running through our reservation. I always like to talk about my council because I think a lot of times in Indian Country we hear about all the politics and everybody fighting and people don't like this or that, somebody didn't get a house because of this or that and the road didn't get taken care of. I'm really blessed to be able to sit with a council that works together, communicates well, and really has been a solid opportunity for me to learn some things. The woman in the middle is actually my mother. Her name is LaVonne Peck. She is the chairwoman for our tribe.

In the first two years that we were in office, we went through a process with UCLA law department to update, revise and bring back our constitution, all of our ordinances and all of our bylaws, because they hadn't been touched in about 30 years. So there was a lot of things that didn't make any sense when you read through them from everything from enrollment to land. The reason why I say that's my mom is because number one, I want to acknowledge the fact that she's my mom, but anytime we're doing business I call her 'LaVonne' or 'Chairwoman.' Nepotism exists in Indian Country. I'm not going to act like it doesn't, but I did run for a separate office. In my second term, I ran unopposed. The same thing goes for her and I just want...I guess I'm coming from a unique perspective because what I didn't realize coming into this was how challenging it would be working with a family member as close as your mother in this process, but it has been very rewarding and I'm very fortunate to be able to have gone through this.

Some other things that I didn't quite understand when I got in...I was always sitting out in the general membership kind of wondering, "˜Hey, why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they dealing with that? How come I didn't get a budget for this?' And I had no idea the type of time obligations that that was going to require and I had no clue when I got into office that this position was going to afford me the opportunity to learn about energy, learn about gaming, learn about finance and I'm going to highlight some of those as we move through this.

So something that I walked into right away that I wasn't prepared for, I got in council when I was 25 years old, I'm now 29, and I had no clue that I was going to have the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] show up one day on my doorstep and say, "˜Hey, the Mexican cartel just grew a field of marijuana on the backside of your mountain.' "˜Okay. Well, how do I deal with this?' "˜Well, why don't we take you up in the helicopter so we can take a look at this and understand how these guys are moving product in and out and how we can work with your law enforcement to make sure that we can monitor this more closely.' That kind of dives into Public Law 280. California is a Public Law 280 state, which means that we have concurrent jurisdiction. Some of you probably come from reservations that are directly funded through the federal government for your police, your prisons or jails. We're not. Although we can establish them if we have the money to do it, we're really relying upon the Sheriff's Department, which doesn't always respond in a timely manner because they're small not necessarily because they don't want to. The days of that are gone. But that's part of the situation that I wasn't aware of.

The other big aspect that I wasn't ready to come into was domestic violence. I have it in the letters on the bottom; we lead statistics in some really sad areas. I didn't know coming into office that a woman will go back to her abuser 11 times before she's either killed or before she finally leaves the guy. In a community as small as mine with 700 members, this was actually something very prevalent that our community was tired of and finally addressed. We wrote some grants, we held the first ever Domestic Violence Walk in the state of California, which is partly why I have that purple ribbon there, and we brought out all kinds of people from both tribal and non-tribal to support the efforts that we're making towards these things.

We sat through a ton of meetings in my first couple years dealing with these issues, where people were coming and talking about the meth head that lives next door or the dealing that might have been going on. And by the way, my community is a beautiful community. I'm just highlighting some of the challenges that are there. Making it sound like La Jolla, you're going to walk in, there's going to be like people high all over the place or something. It's not like that at all, but the reality is that you all have these, Native or not, you're going to have these folks in your family, you know who they are, and the funny part is that the neighbor who might not be in your family is coming to you telling you to deal with it and you're sitting there trying to figure out, "˜Well, man, how do I deal with my cousin? How do I deal with my brother or my uncle?' And those things are very real when you get into this office and there's expectations on both sides. Your families are going to come at you and expect you to protect them, the public is going to come at you and expect you to uphold the ordinances and the laws and enforce the job that you're there to do. And so right off the top, I had to realize that being impartial...I've always been fairly impartial about things, but these types of issues really started to test your ability to do that on a daily basis because these things just happen.

So DV [domestic violence], drugs, alcohol abuse, and then kind of figuring out how we address that; we formed a program called 'AVELICA.' As I mentioned, in our language that means 'butterfly.' Obviously the women coming out of their situation, being more aware on how to address the DV issues. And one thing that we did is we creatively developed the program, we hired and trained advocates from within our own community, we established domestic violence shelters for the women and these were all things that I walked in, I never had a clue about how to address. And I'll go over some training components later, but just realize this, if you're going to be successful when you come into doing this, if you're motivated, you have a heart and you're willing to get up every day and wear some broad shoulders, you'll be able to make through it.

Jobs; we talked about cousins, brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces. Jobs is always an interesting discussion in Indian Country because I appreciate the former, the presentation beforehand about reliance as opposed to... I don't know, I think sometimes our communities get really dependent on these programs that come in. And so... and unfortunately I'm in a community where when I walked in the social norm was seasonal employment. We have a campground. I'm not a gaming tribe, I know a lot of people think, "˜oh, you're a Southern California Indian, you're rich.' Nope, not me. I've got Harrah's Rincon, I've got Pala, I've Pauma, I've got Pechanga, Valley View, but not me. I have a campground that brings in almost 150,000 people a year and supports our tribal economic development and government operations. But back to the idea that people came in wanting to know, "˜Where's my job? I put you in office, I expect you to get me a job.' And I said, "˜When I asked for your vote, I made it really clear to you that I'm not going to promise you anything.' And so my comment about jobs is, when you get into office, don't make promises. The guys that were in there before me, they got in, "˜I'll get you a job. I'll get you on this project. I'll do this, I'll do that.' I have stated...I've stayed where I'm at as long as I'm at because I don't BS my people. Excuse the term. I know we're being recorded. I don't. You have to be up front with your folks. You have to be transparent. You can't be afraid to share with them the truths about the realities that you're in. If there are jobs available, see what you can do to hire your folks. Tribal Force Account is an amazing, amazing, amazing thing that you can utilize. It's a tool that I didn't realize.

Partnerships with, for example...here's a road, this is the picture. I guess talk about the picture for a second. This road is a road that was done by all Tribal Force Accounts, which is really rare in California because we don't really have the dollars coming in federally or always the personnel to be able to staff a full-time roads department or a full-time public health department. And what we were able to do is bring in about 30 tribal members to come in and basically create a road going through the middle of a mountain -- because I'm on the side of a 7,500-foot mountain, which makes development fun -- and we put our guys to work. And what was really amazing about this process was number one, Davis-Bacon [Act] doesn't apply because through our sovereignty, through exercising our sovereignty we created our own Tribal Force Account wages, we set a standard that was proper for what our people were doing and in some cases we are beating Davis-Bacon. By the way, this project, because of tax exempt abilities and delivery onto the reservation, we also built this for one third less than what any other public department could build in the county, in the state or from a federal standpoint. So recognize that.

I'm going to kind of couple this with TERO [Tribal Employment Rights Office]. How many of you guys have a TERO ordinance on your reservation? How many of you guys really use it? When I got into office, no clue about what the heck TERO was, I didn't understand what are these four letters representing, what's the point behind it, why is it here? I learned very quickly that this is another tool that we have in Indian Country that we can utilize, the Tribal Employment Rights, Opportunities and Ordinances that you can establish and then use that in working with the Department of Labor to go after federal contracts and dollars are awesome. That's the part I didn't know about TERO. I didn't realize... I thought TERO was, "˜Oh, you're going to build a project, I'm going to tax it, then I'm going to take it and I'm going to train somebody with that money.' There's a whole other side of TERO that I didn't know about that had to do with federal contracting and compliance.

And one thing that I want to highlight that we were successful in doing in utilizing TERO in San Diego was we actually... we have 18 tribes in San Diego County. How many of you guys have that many tribes in your county? The answer is none because we have the most in the country. Sorry. We have 18 tribes in San Diego County, which means that federal contractors are required to notify all of your tribes about the fact that there's jobs coming online and the reason why that's there... everybody goes, "˜Oh, it's an ethnic thing, it has to do with racism, the Indians.' No, it's a political relationship that the tribes have with the United States government, which is why if you're qualified as an Indian and they're qualified as a non-Indian, you go to the top based upon laws that were passed based upon your political standing. Not because you're Indian, but because of the sovereignty that your tribe exercises and you being a citizen of a nation.

So what we did is we realized that all these federal contractors were coming up and they did not know how to send it out to 18 tribes because some are rich, some are poor, some have fax machines, some have an HR department, some have something in the middle. And so we got everybody together because the federal contractors were tired of getting audited and fined and in all fairness, how do you communicate with 18 different governments that all operate differently? What we came up with was a website called nativehire.org and this... write it down, Google it later. You're going to like what I have to say about this. Nativehire.org was a concept that came out in working with the Department of Labor, in working with the federal contractors in San Diego County and in working with the tribes. What we did is we sat down and discussed how can we get this information out collectively for job availability, for contracts that are out there and then how can we also...our tribes ourselves look for these things. Nobody has ever thought about how to create this. Well, we did. We created nativehire.org. It's basically an Indian version of Craigslist and monsters.com mixed into one. You can be notified via email when jobs are available. You can be searching for jobs and the cool part is it's going to be coming actually out here to Arizona and shortly it's going to be heading nationwide because that's the Craigslist part of it. I want to work in Idaho. You click on Idaho and all of a sudden 15 different jobs come up in Idaho that you can be eligible for and that you can qualify for under TERO because they're trying to meet these guidelines. So TERO was something I didn't know a whole lot about. Since then I've created a website to help implement this utilizing the federal TERO policies to employ people, train people and so on and so forth. And I will say this, the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] -- people beat up on the Bureau a lot and sometimes it's deserving -- the Bureau worked with us actually very hard to make this a success because that was the beauty of what we recognized. It wasn't the tribes pointing the finger, it wasn't the businesses pointing the finger, it was everybody just sitting down at the table recognizing that we had some issues to work out and finding a solution for it and the Bureau actually was able to help us find the dollars to get this thing generated through a 638 contract. I'll go over 638 contracts. I didn't know what the heck those were either when I got into office. So nativehire.org.

Financial awareness. Obviously, financial partnerships are key for your tribes to succeed moving into the future. In California we have tribes that, yeah, they went out and they made their money in gaming, but the neat thing that we're starting to see is they're getting into banking. There are tribes that own banks. They're getting into real estate, they're getting into, I guess hotels are real estate. They're getting into tourism components. And all these things are capable because, yes, they cut their teeth on the casino development but they realized that through these financial partnerships in leveraging with different industries they were going to be able to grow and maintain the self-resiliency of their tribe. Let's get off the federal dole. I might bother some of you by saying that, but to be real honest with you, my goal by the time I'm out of office is to make sure that I don't need those federal programs. That's what it's about. If we're going to claim sovereignty, if we're going to claim the ability to exercise our own rights and take ownership of our own nations, then we need to understand that there's a financial component with that.

So some terms I wrote over here on the side: profit and loss. Man, my first council meeting where I got a financial statement was a trip. I sat there for probably three hours trying to digest what my CPA [certified public accountant] was feeding to me because he was talking about debits and credits and encumbrances and half the terms that I see over here on the side that I had no clue. Audits: I didn't realize the shape that my tribe was in quite honestly when I got into office. You always hear about, "˜Oh, that guy stole, that guy did this, that guy did that.' Well, when I got in I didn't find anybody that was stealing, but what I did find was that my tribe was on high risk because we had not done the SF425s, the IRA reporting documents, or federal documents. We had not done our reporting to the federal agencies so we went on high risk. And had our administration not come into office at the time when we did, the Bureau was actually ready to yank all of our funding and we were going to be operated and functioning out of the BIA office out of Riverside, our local area office. Luckily, we were able to get all the documents together, complete all the reporting and unfortunately I had to go back two years. So my first two-and-a-half months in office were really, really...they were really boring to be honest with you. There was a lot of stressing out and a lot of numbers, but I got to learn a whole lot.

GAAP, GASPI, the difference between government accounting and standard general accounting practices in the way that tribal governments are unique, and this is a thing I think that states really have a hard time digesting. They don't realize that we have the opportunity to operate both businesses and government, and unfortunately they don't do it very well when they try it. I think tribes are an awesome model of how you can exercise these things and they could really learn a lot from us. I will say this -- in San Diego I think that they are, they're realizing opportunities that are there. Leverage ratios. I never thought I'd be negotiating a multi-hundred million dollar casino deal and I have...this picture is actually with us signing our letter of engagement with Key Bank. I don't know if you guys know Key Bank. Some of you may, some of you may not. They came on to be our financial advisor for our tribe and the gentleman in the middle, his name is Jay Maswagger, and he used to tease us because he said, "˜By the time we're done going through this process you're going to have an MBA, a Maswagger MBA.' The gentleman is Indian from the Middle East, from the East Indian. And he started to give me this huge education on things that I never knew about; waterfall agreements, how to structure debt appropriately, leverage ratios. These guys use these big fancy terms and it basically boils down to, "˜Look, in order for me to give you $10 I need to see that you're going to give me $2 first.' So I learned about things like that.

Natural disasters: for whatever reason the other two photos didn't show up on here. I've been through two natural disasters, federally declared. My grandma's house burnt down, my mom's house burnt down, my businesses were devastated by flooding, and I had to learn the entire process about how to recover both immediately, so address and respond, but then go into long term and then find the money on how to do that. By the way, something that has changed in the last five years is that you as tribes can now declare your own federal disasters. You don't need to wait for the state to do that, which is huge, that you couldn't do in the past. You might not think it's ever going to happen and then one day it's going to hit you and you'll realize, "˜Man, I wish I would have gone to do some training.' You're actually required by law to get out there and become NIMS compliant, National Incident Management System compliant. So if at all today when you guys go back to your tribes or if you're in leadership positions, go back and ask...oh, there it is. There's grandma's house. If you can, go back and start asking questions. Emergency management is not just about fire chiefs and cops. It really boils down to your community members because they're going to be responding to the incidents first. That's who's there, it's your family, it's your friends.

Energy. That's Secretary Chu before he headed out. I was a year-and-a-half into my term and energy conference in D.C. and lo and behold here comes Secretary Chu and I made sure I sat right behind that guy because I wanted to talk to him about what kind of dollars were going to be available in Indian Country. And he and I had about 15-, 20-minute conversation. Have you guys ever sat down with a secretary of the President's cabinet? It's near impossible if you can ever get there and to get 15 or 20 minutes is almost unheard of. Snuck in there. So again, be motivated, get up every day and do your best to get where you can around these folks. We got to talk about some of the needs and the roll out that was going on under the stimulus program and this conversation really changed my opinion about how I thought about energy in general. I didn't realize how inefficient the homes are on our reservation. I didn't realize the need for R38 insulation. I didn't realize the need for LEED which is like a fancy term for building green. I thought green was like a roof with grass on it or going back to the old days for us with like mud lodges and things like that, although those are actually very energy efficient. But also looking about how can you control your own energy future. We're going to come back to the sovereignty thing. Another part besides being financially astute, aware and responsible is also controlling the energy itself. In the northern loop of San Diego County runs the main distribution line that feeds North County San Diego. Well, guess what, their easement's up in 2021. So in 2021, that means that I can either condemn their lines and they're going to have to go around my reservation, which is all federal land, impossible environmentally, or they can work with me and they can work with me to generate an energy production on my reservation. We're actually starting a 10 megawatt energy production facility of PV on our reservation right now; photovoltaic (PV), photovoltaic panels. So again, another thing that I really wasn't aware of.

Partnership. I'll just go point at these really quick. The main reason I wanted to put this up there is because partner with everybody. Try partnering with people that you think will never partner with you. Have those conversations. Have the uncomfortable conversations because those are the ones that are actually going to bear fruit I think in the end when you really need to talk with those folks. You guys ever heard of Bob Filner. He was our mayor that got booted out of San Diego. I just put this up here because he showed up at Native Hire, when we launched nativehire.org. These are all chairmen and there in the middle is Mr. Filner and I thought it was interesting because again, you never know where politics are going to lead you. You never know who you're going to meet. But partnerships wherever you can make it happen.

Training. You guys are here. Obviously you're proactive in trying to find training opportunities so just get out there. I was able to take financial training courses; I was able to take energy courses. They have these conferences. If you're elected into office, ATTG, Aid to Tribal Government dollars are a way that we have been able to afford to go out to these things. A lot of times there's scholarships available. I put this photo up here. That's not me speaking at NCAI. It's actually a gentleman from Pala and I put this up here because we're here talking about leadership. He's a former council member, he's actually a hard core conservative and he gave Romney's speech -- I don't know if you guys were there -- at NCAI in front of the whole delegation. And I don't put this up here to be political but my point is this: that's a heavy room to walk into and knowing what you're up against and knowing what people think and just generally how Indian Country operates and to have a man walk up there and speak his mind, speak his voice and exercise the way he thinks was just something that I thought was worth highlighting because he's educated, he's smart, Harvard background, pilot, but he didn't get there by just being lazy, not showing up to things. He got there because he was motivated and he wanted to train himself and it put him in front of a very large audience at a very heavy hitting conference.

Pass the knowledge. You're not going to be there forever. How many tribal councils out there actually picked out people out of their membership to go up and be trained so that they could be replaced into the future? We did. I'm 29. I don't want to be doing this forever, and the reality is that if you're going to do this job effectively on a day-to-day basis, you're going to get a little bit tired. It's not going to be something that you're going to be able to do, in my opinion, I know some guys can do it for 20 or 30 years, but a lot has changed in 20 or 30 years. And when you don't have the dollars like us that means that I'm doing it. I don't have staff, like I said, I don't have an HR department, I don't have an energy department; it's me and it's my council. We have two people that work with us intimately on these projects. So pass the knowledge both here and both with the youth. I should have put a slide up here on education. Maybe you can hit on the educational component a little bit.

Lastly, recognize your successes and your strengths. You wake up every day and you fight for something; water rights, energy, housing dollars, just motivating your people sometimes, but recognize that you do do that work. It's okay to recognize that you do work hard, in a humble way. But then also don't be afraid to share it. I'm happy to be here today to kind of talk about a whirlwind of things that I've been able to be a part of, but La Jolla's actually set the model in a lot of ways and I'll be happy to say it. We are the fastest recovery in Indian Country after our wildfires in 2007. No offense, but nobody's ever beat us in our recovery time; everybody back in their houses in nine months. We were the first tribe in a long time for the Bureau to actually hand us over $2 million and say, "˜Go build the road,' because everybody was scared, the old days of the Bureau. "˜We're not going to give you the cash. You Indians don't know how to spend it. You don't know how to operate your government.' I said, "˜Really? Watch this. Just give me the cash.' Government-to-government contract, here we go and we got the thing done. So don't be afraid to share those successes and if you guys have questions, I'll be happy to answer them later.

Tough stuff. Five things. Most challenging thing about this job: ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act]. I struggle so hard with ICWA because these are the kids, these are the future, these are people that don't have voices necessarily for themselves, and this is the hardest part. Our council meets quarterly with our ICWA representative, the county case workers, our clinic case workers, and these things just rip your heart out. If you have a heart while you're on council and you go to your first ICWA meeting, you'll understand what I mean because you're hearing horrible stories about these kids and their living situations and the way they were treated and the saddest part is it all boils back down to families that you know. That's the hard part and sometimes you can't do anything about it. Sometimes the mom that is using drugs that is smart enough to take the kid over to her other mom's house so that she can leave for the weekend to go do drugs is not being a neglectful parent because she was of right mind at least to take the kid out of the situation. Now to me I'm going, "˜Mom's using drugs, mom's not really being mom, mom maybe shouldn't have the kid.' Those are the types of decisions that you're going to run into that I was never expecting. And then, when you make the decision for placement, when the county comes to you asking for the recommendation or your tribal court or however your ICWA is set up and you make a recommendation based on the best interests of the kid's health...we had this. I'll be real honest. Our council agreed to take a child from a home and put them into a non-Indian home, which I understand that this is the point of ICWA, but the reality was that to find Indian homes in our area that were going to be healthy for the kid, didn't make sense at the time to transition them out because the home that they were in, the kid's not...how's it going with the kid in this home? 'They're not cutting themselves anymore, they're not drinking, they're not sleeping around,' and I'm going to take a kid out of that situation? ICWA is the hardest thing you're ever going to have to deal with when you're on council.

Last four things, most surprising thing, you guys just heard the whirlwind. If you've got a small council, you're going to deal with everything. You never know what's going to happen in a day. You're going to wake up one day and you'll be talking to Secretary Chu or you'll be talking to the governor and then you're going to get a phone call about the dogs chasing your kids home from the bus. That's just your day when you're on council, it's just how it is. I had to quickly learn about a variety of different laws. One thing I could change that I do a lot better now with is I don't sweat the small stuff. You can't do it all and I'm not saying that you give up by any means, but the sooner you recognize that there are just going to be things that happen that are out of your control, the easier it's going to be to lead more effectively when you're up there. And part of what's helped me do that really comes down to the last thing.

Effective leaders. Yeah, you listen. You guys are all here, you probably understand this. You all listen. You have to be patient. You have to be fair. But for me, the biggest way that I...the main core reason why I'm able to get through this on a daily basis is because I have a connection and a relationship with who created me. I have a religious understanding of how I work with god and how god works in everybody else's life and in mine. You need to stay centered when you're doing this because everybody is fighting with you. Well, a lot of people are fighting with you. There's a lot of great people encouraging you. There's going to be people pulling you this way, people pulling you that way and at the end of the day if you can't stay centered in what you believe, how you were raised and what you think, you're not going to be successful. You're not. You're going to get overwhelmed. So I would just end with sharing that. Wake up every day, reflect on who you are, reflect on what you know, and start there if you're going to get into office because it just gets crazy sometimes. Thank you very much for your time."

LeRoy Staples Fairbanks III and Adam Geisler: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Leroy Staples Fairbanks III and Adam Geisler field questions from the audience about the role of education in nation building. The discussion focuses on the importance of Native people being grounded in their culture and language, and where and how that education can and should take place.

Resource Type
Citation

Fairbanks III, LeRoy Staples. "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. November 6, 2013. Q&A session.

Geisler, Adam. "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. November 6, 2013. Q&A session.

Renee Goldtooth:

"We have a few minutes for a Q&A. Is there anyone that has a question like just got to be asked? There's one back here and if you can speak loud, there's a microphone over here otherwise if you just say it loud if you can."

Tiffany Sorrell:

"My name's Tiffany Sorrell and I'm a Ph.D. student currently at the U of A [University of Arizona]. A lot of my focus has been on educational psychology and so I thought you touched on a lot of good points here with domestic violence and the drugs and alcohol, and you mentioned a little bit about education, but I just wanted to know more on your thoughts on some challenges that you've been facing with education. I've been focusing a lot in my dissertation on cultural influences and how that impacts learning and how that impacts curriculum and things like that and so I was just wondering also, a second part of the question is what recommendations and tools do you have to address these challenges that you've been facing."

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I guess my response to that would be that education is a huge...it's been a huge barrier of getting our membership to go...to take the step into higher education and I think that Leech Lake actually providing a tribal college in the community was the biggest thing they could have done for our membership or for our citizens to overcome barriers of trying to go off reservation for higher education. There's...the biggest barrier I would say with education is that drugs and alcohol are basically...they're probably the basis of all problems on the reservation and drugs and alcohol keep people from...even if they take the step into going to college, it keeps them from finishing out college. It keeps them from being focused, it keeps them from taking that extra step when things get difficult because they've started families early and it's difficult when you have a family that started early, and I would say that's one of my barriers is I didn't necessarily follow the societal norms that society tells you how you're supposed to live your life. Go to high school, go to college, get a job, find a wife, buy a house, have a kid. I kind of did mine all over the place. But I wouldn't have done it any other way. However my path has been to get to where I'm at today is basically because of my family and I'm...after my time here I'll be going back to get my education, but it's about inspiration and maybe making it cool for kids to go to school. And athletics, I would say at our tribal college is huge because there was a big bump in students who signed up for school this fall semester because of athletics. There just needs to be a motivating factor to keep them going and they have to see that the leadership is in support of doing that. Four year ago or four years prior to me getting in office, our tribal council reduced our direct allocation to our tribal college by 66 percent and that was one of the things that I ran on. I said, "˜If that's not a slap in the face to a priority of education then I don't know what is.' And so I've allocated money to going to build our library and archive center, building actual bricks and mortar foundations to our tribal college, building...just showing in our communities that we stand behind them and we're going to support them in any way, trying to establish new educational programs like critical professions programs, like an actual tribal endowment because we say we lack funding for colleges and so it's just kind of thinking innovatively of how students are getting their college money and they'll go to school for a little bit and they'll drop out. How are we keeping them...how are we going to keep them to finish the semester out because they're going to have a bad report back to the funding agency wherever they got their money from and it's going to affect them and they're going to be put on probation at whatever institution if they try to go back. But I would say that a big thing, it does fall on the shoulders of the leadership to show that there's going to be support there for their band members or their citizens to do what they choose to do in life and they can depend on their tribe."

Adam Geisler:

"Can I just follow up on that real quick? I'm kicking myself because I didn't put a slide up there on education. I actually thought about it after I printed the 60 copies. We started off...when we got in there, we had three kids in our after-school program. I think you hit on like the college component. I'll speak a little bit about the younger kids. We came in, there were three kids in our program. We had been suspended on the Healthy Food Program for...prior to us getting in, so we had some headaches that we had to get through. When we got there, that was the initial challenge because I think the biggest motivator that you have in anything that you're doing can always actually come back to food, especially in Indian Country, because our kids in our community, what we were finding was that was actually the only place they were getting a meal was at our after-school program, which is really heartbreaking. Title 7, we started doing exploration about what the heck is our school district doing with our Title 7 dollars? We use Title 7 dollars. And we started pressing the school board asking them...we'd been open for a year, we had seen the reading proficiencies and we had seen where our kids were struggling. We got tutors involved working with kids from first grade all the way up into high school. With very little money we were able to start addressing this. So after the school board found out that we had a woman that had a master's in education, very, very skillful, they recognized that we were serious about making sure that our kids were going to be receiving services and that they weren't just going to take those dollars and they were using it to supplement other things that weren't addressing our Indian kids specifically. So we got engaged with the district, we got parents to sign consent forms, because unfortunately we have parents that aren't parents in our communities. They may start families young, they may have abandoned their kids, whatever happened happened, but the reality is that still I viewed as something that we were responsible for because they are members of our tribe, we do take care of our own, we always have. So we started getting report cards, we started getting updates from the school district to a point where we actually even started showing up to parent-teacher conferences and relaying that information back. Maybe mom had to work and just can't make it, too. There's a lot of single mothers that are in our community. And so between those components and then the caveat of athletics we were really able to bring more kids into the program "˜cause they were getting food, entice them with sports, and then hold them accountable because finally somebody was actually seeing their progress reports and understanding where their proficiencies were and then providing the tutors to deal with that literally on a daily basis."

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I'll just add one more thing. He opened the door for like elementary education, and I would say that there has been feedback in the community from like elementary schools that have said that they know which families are going to school, which parents are going to college because they're understanding more of an importance of what it's about and that shows because they're making sure their kids are getting up and going to school in the morning. Something as simple as making sure your kids get up and go to school in the morning is huge because your kids are growing up with a huge...with a greater understanding of what it's about to get your education and taking pride in getting that education. If they aren't hearing those messages at home, it's difficult for them to prioritize that when they feel like they can't get out, if they feel like they're stuck wherever they're at. They need those messages and if they're not hearing them at home, they've got to hear them from somewhere. That's another big thing is down at the elementary and junior high [schools] as far as intervention goes."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Grand Chief, you had a question?"

Michael Mitchell:

"Thank you. First I'm going to apologize because I tend to speak loud and hard. I don't really need this, but I'm going to comply with the requirements here. We're from Akwesasne, which is a reservation that's half in Canada and half in the United States and it's a Mohawk community. And I've been where you guys are sitting right now and I just like to sit and listen to others that come after and it makes you think. One of the greatest lessons, and I hope that whatever I say to you you take it in a good way "˜cause it's not meant to be criticizing, more perhaps for sharing. The lady had a question on education and you talked about everything but the most essential part of teaching our Indigenous students is their own culture and language, to reinforce that before they leave because when they go to school, they go to high school off the territory, they go to a university, college off the territory and you want them to come home. At the end you want them to come home, you want them to be proud of who they are when they leave. We have to equip them, and so that's the greatest thing that we can give them is that knowledge of knowing who they are. And one of the things that you mentioned a while ago, nation building begins with our children, our families, our community. It begins with yourself of being comfortable of knowing who you are. If you're Mohawk language, Anishinaabe -- however you define yourself and your nation -- as you travel about and get into the education system, you will be challenged many times. Not physically, not even mentally, but generally. So when you get asked a question...a while ago you said the 'Ojibwe Band,' in Canada they go through this...there's national legislation called the Indian Act where they refer legally that we're not to be called 'nations' in Canada. We're not to be called even 'tribes' but 'bands,' and when I became chief one of the things that I worked on...I says, "˜That's a very offensive word because the government subliminal [message] is trying to get us not to recognize our people who we are, who we were and who we are now because of the proud nations that existed back then, it doesn't mean they don't exist now.' So my grandfather always told me to identify myself as a member of the Mohawk Nation, but when I went to school and as I grew up I started hearing other kids refer to themselves as the Mohawk Band of St. Regis Akwesasne. So when I became a chief I changed that name from St. Regis to Akwesasne, our traditional name for our community. We changed a lot of things back to our traditional names and that meant that the community became more aware of themselves individually, family, community, nation. And so as the chief, when we had a council meeting, because of many years of government telling us that we had to refer to ourselves as the 'Band,' all the chiefs...they had a Band administrator, they had Band programs, they had...everything was 'Band.' I put a coffee cup on the council table and I said, "˜The next person that says he's a Band of something, put a quarter in that cup and we'll have coffee for next week.' We had coffee for many months because they couldn't shake that. But after awhile they started seeing that they're not a Band and I would ask them, "˜What are you then?' "˜I'm a nation.' Yes! That spilled over to our staff, the community, everybody got into the game. Pretty soon more awareness. I say that because when I said 'Band' is offensive, the story you told about that little white lady that sat next to you on the plane, when she asked you what you thought of the name 'Washington Redskin,' you should have told her, "˜It's a racially offensive term,' that if it was the 'Washington Niggers' she would have noticed, anybody would have and that is how they equate the difference. No problem as long as they're called 'Redskin' but to all our young people they should know, we should tell them. And being [Mohawk language] and a member of a proud nation and for generations to come we no longer want to be referred to as 'Redskins' and it starts with a pro football team that should be leading this in a good way to say, "˜We are going to change it,' and for all the students going to schools that should be first and foremost that recognition of defining who we are, that it starts with those multi-million dollar sports organizations. So I've been in politics now 28 years and I've got a chance to share a lot of thoughts with a lot of leaders and in this way, in a good way, I want to share that with you, because you're going to be chiefs for a long time yet and you're going to be aware from the smallest population...we've got 18,000 at Akwesasne and 12,000 that we're directly responsible for. That responsibility is no less greater or less than the ones who have 700 in their community because the process of nation building, why we're gathered here, is to recognize ourselves, who we are and to equip our young people and our leaders with the tools necessary and that starts with spiritually, culturally, knowing how we define ourselves and so I thought I'd take a few minutes and share that with you."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Thank you, Grand Chief. I wanted to say that the beauty of a gathering like this is that we always get to learn new things like this from veteran leaders such as the Grand Chief and also the folks that are on the panel. It never ceases to amaze me how sometimes you hear just the right thing that you need to hear to put in your pocket or to carry in your heart or your mind for the next person to maybe ask that really critical question like the Redskins issue so thank you very much, Grand Chief, for those words and then also Tiffany for your question. I also...is there anybody else that had like a question that they just had like a burning...oh, we already have one guy jumping around over here. We'll have this question and I have kind of a wrap up question and then I have a couple of announcements."

Steve Zawoysky:

"I wasn't jumping but I was excited to ask these questions. I really appreciate these talks about education. That's what we do, that's we're here and what the former speakers just said is really key. One of the things we found at our college is through research and through experience for anybody else who teaches at college or any other educational institution, for us to be really successful with our students or for them to be successful and to stay for the entire program, they have to feel like they belong. They have to feel like they have a support system, that they have a family, that they have connections to whether it's faculty members, other students, student organizations, activities. Those are the things that really keep students engaged in there and if we can base it out of a cultural understanding of who they are and they take that along with them, because we're really...for the most part we're teaching them a lot of like content area subjects: accounting, business law -- all these things that you could teach in any sort of environment, but without providing them the basis and context for them to understand where they live, where their families live because a lot of our students come back from being away from Lummi, the reservation where the college is on and they come back and they haven't...they've been raised by an extended family member in Los Angeles for 18 years and now they want to come back and get an education and learn about something that they've never learned about. So I just wanted to really encourage anybody in education to not just focus on the whole factual teaching of "˜We're going to increase your brain power' sort of thing. You really need to get to the cultural thing and you need to get to really provide them with the basis to have an opportunity to create meaning for their own life "˜cause if they can do that and if they have that meaning and they keep that in their mind then they're just going to keep moving on. This is of course all my perspective. So I just wanted to comment from an educational perspective, because this is really what we're trying to do, we're trying to engage students for their life, create lifetime learners, and so that they then can become the role models for their kids. "˜Cause one of the things we deal with, we have so many young parents at our college, which is good and bad but if we can teach these students how to be good role models, students, professionals, community leaders, council members, then their kids are going to pick up on that and we don't need to tell them that anymore because they've had a lifetime of experience of mother, dad doing these things."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Do either of you have a response to either of the last two comments?"

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I don't really have a response to it all. I would say that I think you're on point as far as a cultural basis or spiritual foundation to every individual and an understanding of who they are, not just historical governance...is history but there's also a cultural history to each reservation. And I agree about 'the Band' and sometimes that's...you're very on point, and I'm really glad that you said that, because terminology is very key in understanding who you really are. I don't even like to say 'Indian' but sometimes back at home if someone's not changing the terminology, no one's going to change that and so I'm glad that I got to hear that today because it kind of motivates me to make more of a push to change things. We have...like Red Lake is a neighboring reservation and they're still Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. We're not Chippewa either and so it's just still some of those terms are still lingering out there though but that's one of the things that I didn't really get to finish with what I was going to say is that...and I'll just touch on it right now is family time that I didn't touch on when I was speaking earlier is that you have to dedicate that time for your family. That's one thing that I think is very important that you can't lose sight of during these years. You want to dedicate yourself while you're in office...if you choose to be in office for a very long time or short time, that you want to do the best job that you can do while you're there, but you can't forget about the family time or the family that supports you in doing the work that you do. My foundation is trying to keep that balance and I have elders in the communities that I look to for that balance to help keep me balanced. I have elders who kind of keep me on the straight and narrow sometimes because sometimes I lose sight of that bigger picture and that bigger picture is that balance of maintaining a healthy balance with your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health and so I appreciate your words. [Native language]."

Adam Geisler:

"I too appreciate what you had to say. I always...anytime I have an opportunity to learn and listen to others that have been before me and have experienced it...unfortunately I'm going to have a really hard time changing the name of my tribe from the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians and I mean no offense to you by that but the reality is for us to...I think it just goes to show that we all identify ourselves individually by our nations, by our tribes, and how we organize ourselves in that on one side of the...one portion of the country will view things one way and one part of the country will view things another way and that I think is the biggest part to overcome in anything that you're dealing with in Indian Country because I find it in every single program that we ever deal with. They always think that I operate the same way that somebody else operates and I think it's good to acknowledge the fact that we all come together and I think have commonalities with things, but at the same time view ourselves very differently depending on what part of the country you're in because we all have very different histories. I can appreciate what you shared about the language but the reality is I have one person that speaks it on my reservation due to termination and I would love to start a language class up there with that individual and we're trying to do that but the reality is it takes money, time and resources and a motivated individual who's willing to share the knowledge "˜cause I totally agree with that, that occurs in our community sometimes. The people that know, which we have a whole section of them that know because they ran into the mountains, they weren't captured by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and taken off to the boarding schools. They know and then there's others of us that come from families in the community that don't. But I do appreciate what you had to say and from the...people. [Native language]."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Thank you very much. We are coming up to the top of the hour and I wanted to again extend our deepest appreciation for you spending some time with us sharing what you've learned, especially as young men. It feels good to know that there are folks like you who are going to be leading the nations."