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Luann Leonard, Stephen Roe Lewis and Walter Phelps: Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders

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Native American Student Affairs
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Luann Leonard (Hopi), Stephen Roe Lewis (Gila River Indian Community), and Walter Phelps (Navajo) discuss how their personal approaches to leadership have been and continue to be informed by their Native nations' distinct cultures and core values and those keepers of the culture in their communities. 

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Citation

Leonard, Luann. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Lewis, Stephen Roe. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Phelps, Walter. "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Native American Student Affairs, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 14, 2013. Panel discussion.

Aresta La Russo:

"So to begin the program the Native American Student Affairs of the University of Arizona, they're presenting "Bridging the Gap: How Native Culture Forges Native Leaders." Our panelists are Native leaders. What I will do is they will introduce themselves and then we will begin.

I want to introduce myself. My name is Aresta La Russo. I'm a member of the Navajo Nation and my clans are [Navajo language]. I am a student here at the University and I'm over in the American Indian Studies Program. I'm a Ph.D. student there. [Navajo language].

So today our speakers are Lieutenant Governor of Gila River Indian Community, Stephen Roe Lewis; Walter Phelps, Navajo Nation Council Delegate; LuAnn Leonard, Arizona Board of Regents and member of the Hopi Tribe. [Applause] So if you could introduce yourselves panelists, that would be great."

Walter Phelps:

"Good evening. It's an honor and a privilege to be here this evening to be with you. My name is Walter Phelps. [Navajo language]. I represent...out of 110 chapters on Navajo, I represent five chapters, which is Leupp Chapter, Birdsprings Chapter, Tolani Lake Chapter, Cameron Chapter and Coalmine Chapter, so those are the chapters I represent in Western Agency in Coconino County."

LuAnn Leonard:

"Thank you. It is also an honor to be here. My name is LuAnn Leonard. I'm a member of the Arizona Board of Regents and I'm also the Executive Director of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. I'm Hopi and Tohono O'odham. My village is Sichomovi Village up on the Hopi Reservation and my father's from a little village on the T.O. Reservation of [village name], almost near the border of Mexico. But I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, but I've been out on Hopi for about 29 years. And my daughter Nicole is here, she's up here in the front and I have a nephew who's also here. So U of A [University of Arizona] is a very special place.

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"[O'odham language]. My name is Lt. Governor Stephen Roe Lewis and I am from the Gila River Indian Community. We're over 20,000 members and we just...as you know, we're right off the I-10 just south of Phoenix and I grew up in Sacaton, pretty much the home spot and the seat of power for the Gila River Indian Community. We have seven districts and we have 17 council members. Please don't hold that against me, I graduated from ASU. I told my council I'm coming down to enemy territory and if I'm not back by midnight to send out a search party. But I'm really honored to be here, especially with this...real honorable fellow guests here as well, representing both the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Tribe and as a tribal leader we work together, all the tribes in Arizona. Our paths cross and we work very respectfully as tribe to tribe, nation to nation tribes. Thank you."

Aresta La Russo:

"I want to say thank you for being here. Your presence here means a lot to our young students here who are getting their education to help their people back home. And I also want to say thank you...I want to acknowledge Karen Francis-Begay from the Office of the President, Tribal Relations for that office, and also our Native American Student Affairs Director Steve Martin -- thank you -- and also the students who have organized these events for the Native American Heritage Month, which is the month of November.

So to begin, we have 60 minutes allotted for the questions and they are structured and you have two minutes each to answer the questions. After the one-hour session for questioning, we're going to have questions and answers from the audience also. The first question: As a leader in the community, how have you handled times of criticism, opposition or failure? And give us examples of how well or not well you handled being in such situations. So if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"With a two-minute deadline I feel like I'm a pageant member or something. Thank you for that and as a...really as an elected tribal leader you really carry the hopes, dreams and values of your community, of your tribal community. We at Gila River, we're home to two tribes, both the Akimel O'odham and the Pee-Posh peoples. As tribal leaders, we are held to the highest standard and we are supposed to represent -- even though we're human beings -- in other words, we represent the best values of our community. And one of these values is that we respect the elders. That's a traditional teaching, a traditional behavioral control, societal, where the elders, their wisdom is something that you respect completely. And when you, if you're out during a tribal council meeting, you're out at a district meeting or any meeting or if an elder...with their teaching moments, when they lecture you...lecture, that also comes from our value, which is what the Akimel O'odham call our Himdag, which is our culture, our values, who we are. When those elders or who the society views as elders, when they lecture you, you take it, you listen and you respectfully take those words of wisdom. At times you're criticized and at times you may not even totally agree with them, but because of that value we place, because of those societal values that we place on our elders, you take that as a positive, you take that as a learning experience, especially as a leader. Even though you're a leader, you always have to respect your elders and there have been many times that I've been lectured and criticized and you take that in stride, you take that with dignity and then you...afterwards you try to understand why that occurred. So at least with that specific I'll lead off the discussion. Thank you."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"Thank you. Being a woman and working and living on the Hopi Reservation has been challenging. As I stated, I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, so I'm an urban Indian by the way I grew up, but I'm a reverse transplant I always say, because usually the trend is you come from the reservation to the urban area and you stay, but I did the opposite, which is a little different. When I...in regards to the question, when I graduated from Northern Arizona University in 1983, I worked for the Phoenix Indian Center for a couple years and then I went to the Hopi Tribe, very young. I think I was 23 years old, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, wanting to help my people. I got my first job as a college graduate and I believe I made $6.25 an hour, which was a lot at that time. So I'm working at the Hopi Tribe and I was working with parents and students and I'll give you this example of what can happen.

We had a situation with two students who -- it was during a summer program. So I sat them down, they were causing trouble because of their relationship, talked to them in a firm voice. Later that evening, one of the aunts of one of the students was very concerned and she was upset and so she called me. And I don't know if you've ever been on the phone with somebody who's yelling at you and you can't get a word in. All you can do is listen. But this woman was saying things like, "˜I know you're from the city. I know you're only going to be out here for one year, you're going to use our people and then you're going to leave. You're going to make money and make a name and then you're going to leave,' among many other things. And I was just this young kid about the age of some of you here, and all I could do was listen and at the end I was in tears, but all I could tell her was, "˜Thank you.' You grow really tough from things like that, but I see those as times when you grow. You have to accept that kind of criticism and thank them. It only makes you stronger and now, 29 years later, and I think I've done a lot of good things for not only our people, but people across Arizona. When I run into that woman, I always smile at her and she knows that what she said was wrong, but it only makes you stronger. And so I accept criticism, it's easier because of that; it's easier to accept criticism than it is to accept praise for me. It's kind of a little psychological thing."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. Walter Phelps."

Walter Phelps:

"Thank you and thank you for that question. Recently I came across a comment by a lady who said that, "˜As leaders your destiny, you become your destiny and you become the backbone.' She said, "˜As a leader who has become a leader, you are the backbone.' And then she said, "˜But you also have to grow your own funny bone and your wishbone.' I thought that was a very insightful statement because I think that all of us have different backgrounds, all of us have different personalities and I get the privilege to watch my colleagues, to observe my colleagues. We have 24 council members on the Navajo Nation Council and I can see the unique personalities, the strengths and the unique personalities of each individual, each leader that's there. So it's really a privilege to see that and especially to observe that, this being my first term in office.

But I think that as a leader, you have constituents. Our people always say that we have 300,000 Navajo constituents and with the five chapters that I represent, we have a certain percentage of people and people come from all walks of life. You have to anticipate that you will get people that will support you and that will be there to cheer you on and to encourage you and tell you, "˜We're praying for you,' but on the other hand, you also will come across people that will just basically try to express their views or their issues to you in their own unique way, which may not seem like a very friendly way or a very diplomatic way, but at the same time, what I've learned to do is just try to listen, try to listen.

What is it that they are trying to say? What is it that they really are trying to express? And the other thing you have to also remember also is that voice that you're hearing, no matter how harsh and how unkind it may seem, it represents a percentage of your people. It represents a percentage of the views of certain peoples and what you try to do is you try to process that. What you don't do is take it personally and that can be a challenge. But I think that being able to listen, being able to treat them respectfully, that's all that they expect. That's all that's required."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. And thank you for your leadership and thank you for all you do. The second question: I'm sure this second question -- it's about advice -- and I'm sure you have received many advice from elders, maybe your constituents. But the question is, what advice did an elder give to you to help you as a leader and probably maybe one that stands out the most? So if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Thank you and this is my, going on my...well, I just completed my second year in my term, my three-year term. Shortly after I was elected, a veteran tribal leader from Arizona, we were talking and although he's retired now, but he...one of the words that or the pieces of wisdom that he passed on to me as a tribal leader, especially when you're in a position where you're faced with...you're always in an imperfect position where you don't have as much information as you might need or there's a lack of time where you're being pushed because of a certain issue that it appears or a situation that appears needs to have action. And what he told me is that there's no situation where you as a tribal leader, that you feel that you need to be pushed into making a decision right then and there. That's what he found in his many years as being a tribal leader. He said, "˜Never get pushed into or pressured into making a decision before you're ready.' He goes, "˜They can...most...99 percent of the situations that come up can at least be decided tomorrow, at least by the next day.' And so never...and I thought of that, too, and I've applied that as well because as a tribal leader, like I said, sometimes you...there are more than one side, two sides or three sides to an issue and I think that was probably...there's a reason why some of our most thoughtful tribal leaders thought about things. And although sometimes from the outside they're wondering, "˜How come they act so slow sometimes within the deliberative process of tribal governments?' But I think that was...from how...I've taken that and applied that from a day-to-day perspective as a tribal leader. I think that piece of wisdom that passed down to me, that's really served me well."

LuAnn Leonard:

"What I've learned or what I was told was in this day and age we want things instantly, especially the younger folks, but I've always been told by elders that there's a reason why things take time. And I know there's a lot of kidding about Indian time and all of that, but this really played out true and I'll give you an example.

I had a nonprofit where we...the Hopi Tribe gave us $10 million, which we have invested and it -- right now it's valued at about $21 million -- but we were changing investment houses around 2008 and what was going on around 2008? The big recession. And we were going to change from Charles Schwab to Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch is this giant and here we are the little Hopi Tribe. We were trying to get our agreement signed and it took months. It took months and the reason was Merrill Lynch wanted the Hopi Tribe to change our legislation, which meant changing a law which would allow them, if we went to court, we would go to state court versus tribal court and we stood our ground. And eventually after about six months, we came up with wording and we were able to -- that was agreeable to both sides. And so the Hopi Tribe, it was like David and Goliath or the giant and the little man, but we stuck with it and they...we didn't have to change our law and they accommodated us, which was great.

But the beauty of it was, all that time that...2008 hit, remember stocks plummeted, everyone was losing money. You hear about these big endowment funds that lost millions of dollars. Non-profits were hit hard, but all our money stayed in bonds, which did decent during that period. And so I've really learned from something like that. We survived that area without a big hit like a lot of these non-profits did. But it's true, there's a reason why things take time and I think something was watching over us at that period. It's really hard because, my daughter will tell you, I'm not the most patient person in the world, but there is a reason why things take time."

Walter Phelps:

"I spent about maybe a total of eight years in South Dakota. My wife and her family live near the Rosebud Reservation and we worked with this organization, basically a ministry organization and they...after several years, after a few years they wanted me to, I guess, learn the administrative part and also the leadership part. So they gave me a title, it said Learning Vice President and I liked that title. But anyway, one day, we had a big warehouse like this, it was about this, maybe a little bigger than this room here and one big garage door on one side. And we would have distributions come and people would unload stuff and when you stood in the front of that garage door there was piles of material and supplies all over. There was no organization. It was just completely packed and full.

One day, our president came and led us to that doorway and he wanted us to start organizing and cleaning it. We stood there and looked at that and just looking at it was discouraging and he said, "˜How do you eat an elephant?' I had never heard that before. And he said, "˜One bite at a time.' So I never forgot that because looking back on that, there's a lot of wisdom there because every challenge in life may seem overwhelming, it may seem very big, but you just take it a step at a time, a bite at a time and I think that there's a lot to be learned. There's patience there that can be learned. Through time you begin to understand certain things.

Recently, you'll hear this during election season. Next year is election season and I've already heard some individuals say that, "˜You know, we thought that these new leaders that came into office were going to really make some huge changes.' They said, "˜Nothing has changed. Nothing's changed. Everything's still the same.' But when you look at it from the governance level, governance is a huge ship. It doesn't alter course quickly. So once you begin to appreciate that, it's...creating systemic change, creating change that could be positive and noticeable, it comes...it'll come eventually. You have to lay the groundwork for it. I'll probably never forget that piece of wisdom that was given to me."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. And so what I heard was, don't be easily persuaded when making big decisions, there's a reason why things take time and basically, one step at a time. So thank you. Your answers to these questions, for the students here, these are advices they are also taking, listening and taking with them throughout life. The third question: Being members of an Indian nation, give examples of how your cultural and traditional teachings have motivated your success. And if we could begin with Lieutenant Governor again."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, again, thank you for that question. And like I said in the beginning, as tribal leaders we are...we try to not necessarily epitomize, but we have to, at some point in our lives, demonstrate those values of what makes up our tribal communities.

For the Gila River Indian Community, and specifically the Akimel O'odham, we were historically agricultural. And when you live in the desert and you're agricultural, there's a way of cooperation, cooperation for the common good. And those...always cooperating with one another whether it's in your family, whether it's in your village, whether it's in your clan, your extended family, it's that respect, mutual respect and cooperation. And also because of our agricultural heritage, it's self-sufficiency, it's making sure that you're a productive part of your community and that you have a role to play. Because of that self-sufficiency, you have a responsibility and a role to give back and to enrich your community. And when you try to...it's good that Mr. Phelps, Councilman Phelps was talking about, "˜Come election time...' and again, election time always comes. And there's really, there's a big difference between governance and governments on a large level and especially as a leader, your leadership skills, you have to guide your people through...there are technical challenges and there are adaptive challenges. Technical challenges, those you can read a book, there are specific skill sets that you can bring in, you can look to financial advisers, you can look to public policy experts, you can look to economists, but it's those adaptive problems where your tribe, you're going on new ground, you're trying to bring your people along, slowly bring your people along to surface an issue, surface a problem.

With our community, we have...we're looking at exactly what does culture play in our community? We have a declining percentage of those people who speak, who are fluent speakers and so you have that criticism, "˜How come it's not being spoken? How come it's not being spoken in the family? How come it's not being taught more productively as part of cultural curriculums in our schools on the reservation?' And so you wonder why, you wonder why there's that gap between what those values are and what the reality really is and as a leader you've got to bridge those. You've got to look at exactly...as your people are adapting to these new changes, you've got to realize as a leader, what are the most important bedrock principles of what your culture is, what has sustained you, what has made you survive as a people all these years and use those. Use those as tools, use those as touchstones when you try to communicate to your people and you bring them along as a tribal leader. I think that's really what true leadership is.

And of course there's leadership versus authority. Your authority as a tribal leader, you have a role that's really demarcated whether it's in your bylaws or whether it's in your tribal constitution. Sometimes leadership though, sometimes you have to go beyond that role of your authority. You have to go beyond sometimes to really...if you want, if your people are stuck on some issue or stuck on some social problem, you're wondering why there are high incidences of drug abuse, those societal problems, those social problems, and how you can use those cultural touchstones, reach back into your culture, how you can use those tools to reawaken your people, to how you can use those tools as a call to action to start to focus on some of those issues. As a leader, you have to, at times, light the fire under the people. Sometimes...and you have to really gauge whether they're ready, you have to gauge how you're going to do it and in what type of a language and I'm not really necessarily talking about your traditional language or the English language, but the type of language, the type of words you use. Those can really...that's when you're really out there, when you're really, as what sometimes referred to as a leader, when you're on the line, when you're on the firing line there. You really are exercising leadership at that point. Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"The Hopi Education Endowment Fund is a nonprofit of the Hopi Tribe that...where we raise money for the scholarships and grants for our Hopi students to go to schools across the United States. So some of the Hopi students here receive our money. When we created the fund, the tribe gave the first give of $10 million, which was huge because they really put their money where their mouth was. All tribal councils say education is important, but we were so proud the Hopi Tribe did that 11 years ago or 12 years ago.

So we had, I was...came in as the first director and I had an opportunity, I had $10 million, I had no staff, no office, no computer, anything at all, but I had this $10 million, which some of it I could use for a budget. And I could have put...created our office and opened it up here in Tucson, Washington D.C., someplace where rich people live and start our new office. But I felt strongly that this organization must be for Hopi, by Hopi. I wanted to create jobs on the reservation for staff, Hopi staff to run this office and be able to be productive, but also make a good wage and be able to participate in culture. And so I brought on three college-educated employees and we began the Hopi Education Endowment Fund.

We deal with culture every day as we run our non-profit. A non-profit like Make A Wish, Big Brothers Big Sisters, stuff like that, they all have different approaches toward fundraising and fundraising was a new concept for Hopi and I'm sure for Native people. But what we've done over the years, people call it, they say we 'Hopi-fy' it. For example, death is not a, not something that a lot of us talk about, but in fundraising people leave money in their wills and things like that. So what we did with us, we really don't...you don't plan for your death, but in our way and I'm sure some of you can relate is you plan your grandparent's and your parent's plan who's going to take over the house, who's going to take over the field, who's going to take over the cattle. They leave things like that and there's a concept called \ˈnō-ə\ in our traditions on Hopi. And so we created a \ˈnō-ə\ Society and we... so we use our culture, we kind of modernize it in different causes, but we...being Hopi and running a Hopi organization, we know how far we can go without abusing it and that's the beauty of that.

And I hope, as people, as you get educated and you go back to your reservations and start working for the people, you'll experience the same thing because it's great to be able to have a program like that that you can take great pride in. For example, we never use kachinas in any of our brochures and things like that because we know how far we can take it without being disrespectful. And our people are always there to police us. But one thing, just real quickly, that we ran across was people think philanthropy, fundraising, what is that? But when you think back, who were the first philanthropists, who were the...who was the ones who got those Pilgrims through that first hard winter? It was Native people and we all have this in each of our cultures. We all have different practices and it's our jobs as professionals to pull that out and be able to use that in a new concept. So that's how we use Hopi culture in the everyday workplace."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, thank you. I think this is a great question to try and provide examples that can help motivate...what motivated me, what could motivate maybe somebody else. I guess on one hand, when you're young, when I was young, I wanted to know what my future was, what was in store for my future, what was my purpose for being here. So I remember coming home from, after being away for several years, coming home to my community there at Luepp and we were in a meeting like this and one of our elders said, and he was talking and he said, and he was the leader, he was the council member, council member that represented our community in Window Rock and he was speaking to us and he...I don't remember what all the context of his subject was about, but one statement that he made stuck with my like an arrow. It just like pierced me like an arrow and I walked away with an arrow stuck in me for years to come. And that eventually, it eventually, those words of wisdom eventually brought me down.

But what he said was, '[Navajo language].' In other words, why should you be such a promising person, such a promising person, an individual with such potential and just be that way and not do anything with it? More or less, that was the context of that statement. And I think those words eventually made me realize that there is a purpose, there is a purpose. And if I'm going to succeed one way or another and contribute back to, as to why I'm here, I just have to say, not everybody can be a council member, not everybody is cut out to be a mechanic, not everybody can be a doctor, but if you search for it, if you search for it, pray for it, it'll come to you. I've seen people study for engineering. They spend years in the classrooms in their institutions of learning. They come back to the community. What are they doing? They're doing something totally different. They find their passion in something else.

So what you're doing today may not be what you're going to be doing maybe 20 years from now. It could be something totally different, but I guess the pursuit of that is our privilege as Americans to pursue where we find ourselves and what we find our passion to be and what brings happiness and joy to us. And to me, people ask me, "˜So what is it like? What is it like being a council member?' I said, "˜Well, I enjoy my work. I enjoy my work. It's a challenge to me. I get up every day and I want to get up and do what I'm supposed to do today. It's a joy. It's a joy to me.' I guess it's a path and it's a journey when you find...when you know that you're on the right path, you will find fulfillment and it will be a challenge and you will enjoy doing it."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. [Navajo language]. I think from your speeches, from your comments, basically the principles of your culture of each tribe, we heard the words self-sufficiency, cooperation, philanthropy, giving and also the concept of \ˈnō-É™\ and we're here for a purpose. So that's to sum it up. So thank you. So we're going to go on to our fourth question and I'm sure you all have mentors. So who were your mentors that influenced you? But I guess here if you could mention a couple of them that would be great. And if we could continue on with the same line up with Lieutenant Governor."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, I think, as a leader and just as a human being, there's a process of growth, process of maturation and I've had the opportunity to go to school, to go to graduate school and you're exposed to a bunch of different...bunch of ideas, you're exposed to the great works, you're exposed to depending on your study. You can talk about Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Cesar Chavez or you start talking about even our great Native leaders in history and our great leaders within our individual respective tribes and then once you go back to your tribe, at least for me, and really take a leadership position and you start to reflect on your own personal journey.

And for me I guess I've always known this, when you start to think about those lifelong lessons and you start to reflect on, for me, on the people around you who raised you, your parents. I had the opportunity to not only spend some time with my father and my mother, but also my grandparents, your extended family. I know aunts and uncles are very important in tribal traditions as well. I know one of my uncles who was a -- and this is really kind of timely because we just had celebrated Veterans Day -- my uncle who was a Vietnam veteran and really had trouble adjusting always when he came back, but he was in the infantry, he was out there in Vietnam, out there really exposed to the horrors of war. But one thing I learned from him was that he, and from a leadership perspective, he walked point a lot for his infantry, for his platoon and he always surveyed the areas. He always...he listened, he used all of his faculties and smell, hearing, sight, just really developed those skills and tested an environment before you go in.

And I think I really want to apply that as well to leadership. You have to go in, you have to use all of your senses, you have to really understand exactly what the barometer of a situation is if you're going to go in and do problem solving, if you're going to go into a meeting and you have to reveal bad news or challenging news to your community members, to your tribal members, to tell them that there's a shortfall in funds, to tell them that the housing budget has been cut by the council, to tell them that so and so might have been terminated. And so you really...and before that, you have to, you're almost like a scout, which essentially was what my uncle was and you're always measuring what the winds of change or the winds of exactly what's going through your community. What is the pulse of your community out there, the pulse of your environment?

You can't...as a tribal leader sometimes, and I've noticed this, is that when they obtain these positions and thereby the people who put them in there by they separate themselves from their community, they're in their tribal office and where before they might have gone out and were among the people, now they're in meetings in their office and they're traveling a lot, maybe traveling to Washington, D.C. -- and there's no criticism about tribal leaders who go to Washington, D.C., I've been to Washington, D.C. more times than I can remember in the past couple of years -- but you can't lose that tie to your tribal membership. You have to really...an old political axiom is "˜all politics is local' and that does go with tribal politics, at least in my experience. You really have to be attuned to what your tribal people are thinking about. You can't lock yourself up in your office once you get into office.

But I guess, going back to who really influenced me as mentors I would have to say my uncles, my aunts, of course my father and my mother. They were very instrumental. My father was one of the first...in fact, he was the first Native American to pass the bar in Arizona, first Native American to argue and to win a Supreme Court case and it was a tribal taxation case for our tribe back in 1980. And so public service does run in my family. So you have to really reflect what type of legacies run in your family. Of course, probably public service runs in everyone's family, public service extending to veterans. As we know, Native Americans, they've always served the highest percentage of any other group in the United States. Since the war on terror over 50,000 tribal members, 50,000 Native Americans have served and of course I think we all, of course, we have an illustrious history of Native Americans who've served. I think it's obvious for the tribes here represented; they can speak about their rich history. For Gila River, of course it's Ira Hayes. He was one of the flag raisers in Iwo Jima on Mt. Suribachi and really epitomized the sacrifice of all Native Americans. So as...when you're trying to find your way, you're trying to find your call to serve, what's very important and I think what really sustains you is, what is your...the legacies that you've...in your family, in your extended family. What are those legacies that you can continue on and you can bring with you as a leader in whatever position you choose to attain? Thank you."

LuAnn Leonard:

"You will each need a mentor to help you grow professionally. A mentor is not only a friend, but a colleague and a friend who will, who can be brutally honest with you to help you grow and I have two mentors. The first is a U of A grad. His name's Wayne Taylor, Jr., former Chairman of the Hopi Tribe. We were in tribal government about, gosh, 20 years ago when we first met and we had dreams for our people and we were both just younger professionals and we got along very well. And when election time came about, he was the one we wanted to get into office so that we can act on those dreams. And he was a one-term vice chairman, two-term chairman and has done so many successful things. So it's been great growing up with him.

My other mentor is Yoda. I call her Yoda. So picture this. I'm young; I just got my job as the Executive Director of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. No experience in fundraising, philanthropy and that, but I had motivation and I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. There was this lady named Barbara Poley. She's the Director...she was the Executive Director of the Hopi Foundation, which has been on the Hopi Reservation for over 30 years. She's been through it all. She was a friend, but also she was a colleague, and so I call her Yoda because I see her as the Yoda, the master, like the Jedi master. Here I was young Luke Skywalker wanting to do great things and just charging forward. But then Yoda helped pull me back telling me, "˜LuAnn, you've got to hold on. Think about this, this, this before you do this.' We laugh about it nowadays because Yoda is so ugly and everything, but she really is a Yoda and I hope that each of you find that Yoda in your life because you will need it once you get your education and go out there and pursue your dreams."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you."

Walter Phelps:

"Thank you. I think the...my first mentor that will always be somebody that I will remember forever is my father-in-law. My father-in-law perhaps was one of those individuals that I will never forget. We were privileged to get to know him after I got married and not knowing that he had a short life span to live not too long after that because he got cancer and by the time they finally discovered it, it was too late. It had already pretty much eaten up his whole insides and it was too late for treatment. But the man was a leader. If there was a man among men, he was the man. The memories that I have of being with him, being around him, watching him being the leader that he was with all the people that he worked with, he was a leader. He was a great leader. And when he passed away, his funeral was just packed. People came from all over the country; from back east, from Canada, from the west, the east to the west and north to the south, they all came to his funeral. I remember one gentleman, one leader from the Sioux Nation came and he said, "˜He was a pillar. He was a pillar among us.' But when you knew him personally, he was a very humble man, very humble man. He spoke very few words. When he spoke, his words had depth and he did not waste his words. His words were...they were not fancy words or anything, but he was always to the point, very matter of fact, common sense, never an unkind word about anybody, always very respectful of all the people he worked with. It's not to say that he wasn't frustrated or perhaps angry, but he never showed it. He never showed it. And I feel like I have a long ways to go to be like the way he was. He was a very spiritual man and also he was a man who prayed. If there was someone that helped me to become the person that I am, he contributed a lot.

Today, I'm privileged to work not only with the leaders that I now work with, but I also work with former leaders, those that had those positions before me and also have worked with other leaders. And I can think of one gentleman, in fact this past Saturday I held a meeting way out in Black Falls and he just happened to come to the chapter house. He's an elderly now. He's retired and I invited him. I said, "˜Hey, would you like to attend that meeting with me and maybe...I'd be happy to drive you over.' So he said, "˜Oh, yeah. Sure. I'll...' He said, "˜Let me go talk to the war department first,' which was his wife. So he got permission and we left. But he to this day is a mentor. He has so much experience, so much experience in working with leaders, working with people at the community level and I can always rely on people like that that understand people. My father-in-law once told me, he said, "˜You'll find later on in life,' he said, "˜You'll find that it's easy to run heavy equipment, work with machines and equipment,' but he said, "˜the hardest thing to do is to work with people.' He was right. I have to say, he was absolutely right."

Aresta La Russo:

"Okay. Thank you. So the message to me, if I could reiterate, is having mentors and they guide you and as students academically and for your professionally development and someone who's brutally honest with you and who is a friend. Thank you. So we have a little bit of time. I have two more questions that I would like to ask and I believe these are questions that we as Native students have experience or know about or we wonder what are our leaders facing? So the question is, what do you feel or think are the biggest challenges facing Native American leaders?"

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, I think for me as an elected leader and there's my...the governor of our tribe, in fact he's traveling back from Washington, D.C. right now. President Obama held the Tribal Leaders Summit with the White House and that's been going on for the past week and I'm sure all the tribal leaders were there. And of course I have to stay home and I have to make sure the tribe is still running.

But really what I've noticed, especially when we attend either tribal or national meetings like National Congress of American Indians and then you listen on like Indianz.com and you really see...this happened for Gila River, both myself and Governor [Gregory] Mendoza, we're one of the youngest to be elected to these positions. Usually you have senior members of our community who were elected, who served their professional career, who served our community and so really this is sort of a turning point among leadership among my tribal community. And then you start to see that really with other tribal communities as well. You see that up in the Plains, up in the Northwest coast and the Southern Plains, you see these tribal leaders who have...who were landmarks, who have really served in difficult times, in the "˜60s and "˜70s, '80s, and now you have this new generation of younger people, 50s and 40s and even 30s, who are being elected to tribal leadership among different tribes. And so you have this new generation that is slowly -- and it's only natural of course -- slowly assuming tribal leadership. There are new challenges, there are the...there are more sophisticated problems that you deal with. Keeping the pulse of your people is more difficult, making sure that you don't get alienated from your own constituency.

We're in the, really in the first wave of social networking. We have a lot of...I'm just constantly amazed at how many of our community members, how many tribal members, how many Native Americans who are on Facebook and all these other social networking sites. I'm sort of slow to adopt. My son who's just starting high school, he's an expert. In fact he kind of helps me with my own smart phone, making sure that I stay ahead or at least keep up with the technology. And then you...it's kind of interesting because then we even have some of...this really occurred during our last election, a lot of our young community members, tribal members are on Facebook, are on social networking sites and then you start to see a lot of our elder community members who might be homebound, they learn from their own grandchildren how to access those social networking sites too. So you have this virtual community on these social networking sites and so that creates a whole new different dimension to governance, a whole new different dimension to communication as well. So you have all these really...we're sort of really in this important transitional stage I think for tribal leadership.

Especially as well, I think from more of a formal governance perspective I know a lot of tribes are dealing with their constitutions. You have a lot of constitutional reform going on among different tribes as well and you have tribes grappling with do they want to keep their IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] form of government, do they want to reform it to a more progressive form or do they want to also make it hybrid models to incorporate their cultural values into their tribal government. Do you want to include...because most tribes are still on that tribal council, heavy tribal government where most of the express power is with the tribal council and there's not necessarily a separation of powers with the executive or with the judicial. So a lot of tribes are dealing with that, exactly how...making those...the tribal governments, making them accountable to the people, making them valid to the people and the process about going about that. Those are very important complex challenges that I see tribes, not only my tribe, but other tribal communities going through as well."

LuAnn Leonard:

"This one's kind of hard for me because I'm not an elected leader, but I've served elected leaders as staff, assistants and have worked with many of my chairmen of the Hopi people. But just watching them and knowing what they deal with, what I've seen them facing is, it's really hard to balance progress and tradition and this is coming from one of the most traditional people in the Southwest, the Hopi Tribe, where we still have our customs. You could look at the old Edward Curtis pictures and those things are still happening today because we protect them. And balancing how do you protect that without infringing on it, jeopardizing it? That's what I see them having to deal with. There are many opportunities out there for progress for our people. There's land leases with Peabody Coal Mine, just like the Navajo have, our neighbors next to us, power lines, all of this. How do you balance for example bringing a power line in and making sure that you're not near a cultural site that's significant to your people. So having that knowledge, but also having that authority and that power to be able to make the right choices, balancing that. I see them dealing with that.

I also see them dealing with, and we just dealt with this last week, with you students. What we're finding...we had a Laguna gentleman who did his Ph.D., he got his Ph.D. from U of A. He was...his Ph.D. was on how Laguna is using their students. What we're finding...what he found and what's similar with Hopi and probably with others is you're investing a lot of money into students, but what are we doing as a tribe to help bring you guys home? Are we creating jobs with decent wages? Do we have the housing? Do we have the medical facility? I joke, we don't have Starbucks and stuff, but we have so much more to offer and it's so fulfilling to work for your people, even if you have to sacrifice. But you shouldn't have to sacrifice having to live with three families in one home and so the...what we posed by bringing this gentleman in to start the discussion, the dialogue on the Hopi Nation, was what can we do as tribal employees, as leaders of non-profits and community members to make sure our students can come back because we are losing a lot of you and we do need you back. We do want that investment to pay off and I know I have full faith that it will, but we need to have people out there I guess like in the Hopi Education Endowment Fund who's willing to take that step and start that dialogue and get people thinking."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, this is a big question. What are the biggest challenges facing our leaders, our Native leaders? I think that the... what's happening today, what's happening...what started happening a year ago in regards to the sequestration and also the government shutdown, that has brought a lot of things to surface for us. It has, I guess, basically helped us to realize that we are in very unique times of leadership right now. In past administrations perhaps it may have been a lot easier to send more earmarks home to the communities, even from the congressional level. I used to be a congressional staffer so we succeeded with a lot of earmarks, even from the congressional level into our district. This was Congressional District 1. And health care, there's so much to talk about in terms of Obamacare [Affordable Care Act], but I think that...when I really think about this what perhaps is the biggest challenge for the Navajo Nation -- I really can't speak for the other nations, but perhaps this will go across the board as well -- is sustainability and independence. That's I think our biggest challenge. We have to start pushing and working so that we can stand on our own two feet.

I come from a rancher background. My dad had cows, horses, sheep. My brother back here drove me down here, he's been a bull rider and a calf roper, very successful one, and I remember riding my horse one day out there in the field and I came across three cows. The mama cow was standing right here and the other cow was standing right next to it and then another baby calf was standing on this side. The big, probably like a...I don't know if it was a two-year-old... the mama cow's in the middle nursing off of her own two year old cow and then the baby cow feeding off the other one. So in essence there was three cows feeding off of each other, nursing off of each other and when I remember that, I think about what are we doing as a nation?

We have the federal government, tribal government and the state government; each one has resources, very limited now, shrinking every day as we speak. We're trying to feed off of each other to sustain each other. We've got to find a way...we need to find a way so that we don't have to continue down that same road because at some point in time, I don't know when, how much longer it's going to be, but the U.S. government, the last time I knew was 16 and a half trillion dollars in debt, deficit. And so I think the biggest challenge for us is how do we move from here to the next point so that we can move our nation towards more stronger and sustainable nations so that we can truly be independent and exercise our sovereignty."

Aresta La Russo:

"Thank you. So what the challenge is, keeping balance in these transitional times whether it's with technology or within the governmental structure, and also another challenge is losing students not coming home, that's a challenge, and also having Indian nations, tribal nations be sustainable and independent in getting from Point A to Point B. Thank you. So the last question is, as leaders, as community members, as tribal members, what advice would you give to students in their future endeavors as leaders of all sorts, whether within their community, whether within their educational system, whether...? Yes, there's many ways to be leaders."

Stephen Roe Lewis:

"Well, thank you and I think this is a question that brings the discussion, the dialogue full circle. And this goes to being the essence of leadership and it doesn't have to be...we have three very important roles of leaders up here. You have an elected leader, you have a leader within a non-profit setting, and also you have also another elected leader as well. Leadership means going back in whatever capacity that...you could be a leader as an engineer; you can be a leader in the medical field. Leader means finding out exactly where your tribal community needs to either adapt to, to grow to. If there's some lack of capacity, as a leader, you could be that catalyst. You could be that catalyst to calling people to action on a certain issue whether it has to do with behavioral health, whether it has to do with diabetes, has to do with crime. There are so many ways that you can be a leader. It doesn't have to...leadership...and I think that's really...

When you talk about authority and leadership I think those are very non -- at least in my opinion -- non-Indian views. As a leader, you don't necessary have to have certain authority. You can go and you can make a change at any different part of your Indian society, of your tribal society. You don't have to be an elected leader, you don't have to be appointed, you don't have to be in a certain position. You can be an ordinary citizen, you can be in any capacity and you can exercise leadership. As students, you can...whatever gifts, natural, intrinsic gifts that you have proclivities to, whatever intellectual study that you're going to get your degree in, there are inherent opportunities to be leaders, to take that knowledge. Just like what was said, we have...and it's not just with the Hopi Tribe, it's with all tribes.

We're experiencing really a massive brain drain in Indian Country because there aren't those jobs for tribal members back home. If you're a molecular biologist, really what sort of job can you get as a molecular biologist back at Gila River, as a nuclear engineer or these very specialized fields? And I think that's why we really, as both as someone who's attaining those degrees, but also as tribal leaders, I think that's exactly where that gap is, where tribes who actually, at least for Gila River, when we are trying to educate our young people, we don't want to lose them to the outside world. We want them to come back, bring that knowledge back and what we found too is that most of our community members, if not all, they want to come back, they want to bring that knowledge back, bring those degrees back and put them to work in the community. So there are...so just...and I hope you just...you don't mix up authority with leadership. You can exercise and be a leader in any capacity within your tribal society."

Luann Leonard:

"I want all of you students to always remember this, that you are the lucky ones. You think about your reservations, you think about your people, you think about your high school classmates who are still there with a lot of kids, no jobs. On the Hopi Reservation, these guys are carving dolls, hoping to sell a doll to buy those diapers. You are lucky and you are privileged to have an opportunity to be at the U of A. Never take that for granted and do the best that you can so that you can use your skills to come back and help our people in some way. Some of you are going to come back and you're going to serve directly your people. Others, like he's talking about, a microbiologist who probably can't come back, but they can do research that can benefit diabetes or something that will help our people. Find a way that you can serve, find a way that you can give back because you are privileged and you are the lucky ones in this world, the reservations that we live in.

And the second thing is, I find it so amazing that in this whole world, the bahanas, white people, they...first man on the moon, first woman Supreme Court Justice, all of these...I call them the 'firsts.' They've been taken up. But in Indian Country, in your own communities, there are so many firsts left. When I was asked to be a Regent, I had to go through a Senate hearing at the State Capitol and they had to vote to allow me to become a Regent. Governor [Janet] Napolitano at that time is the one who appointed me and when they went in to make that vote, I was there and there was a bunch of people there and then they took the vote and the people left and I was thinking, I asked, "˜Why are there so many people here?' And they said, "˜You don't realize, you're the first Native American to ever serve on the Arizona Board of Regents and they have been around for 140 years. So that's...you just became a first.' And I say that with great pride, but I want you...I use it as an example because there are still firsts out there and each of you can find that First. Maybe you're going to be the first doctor in your community. Maybe you're going to be the first woman chairman or chairperson of your tribe. But there are still many firsts out there left for us and we should be thankful for that."

Walter Phelps:

"Again, I want to say thank you for the privilege to be here with you and spend this little quality time with you. I'm sure you have lots of questions as well. There was a statement by someone that said, "˜Why does the bird sing? Why does a bird sing? It's not because he has all the answers, but because he has a song, he has a song.' I think that if you pay attention to little details, it'll take you a long way. Just pay attention to little details. Tie your shoestring. Remember that? Button your shirt. Just do the little things, do the little things. Great people that have become great people paid attention to the little things and I think that that's very...probably the best instruction I was given. So if you see a trash can full of trash, take care of it. Don't let somebody else worry about it. If there's dirty laundry laying around, pick it up. Don't depend on somebody else to do it. That's the path towards greatness.

In my studies, I study some of the great leaders from way, way, way back. This is in the B.C.'s. Some of the greatest leaders that history talks about, you know what they were? They were shepherds, they were sheepherders. And my mom said one time, she said, "˜I used to be so embarrassed because we used to herd sheep with donkeys...' When she was young I guess they used to herd sheep with donkeys.' And she said -- my mom's a Christian -- she said, '...until one day I went to church and they said Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem.' And she said that totally changed her perspective. But what I've noticed is some of the greatest leaders were simply sheepherders and I think there's something magical in sheepherding. There's something magical in it. They're the stubbornest animals there are sometimes, but if you pay attention to them, take care of them, they'll take care of you. That's what we were told. [Navajo language]. It's your livelihood; it will take care of you. So I think that whatever it is, those little simple details in life that can really make a difference."

Karen Diver: Nation Building Through the Cultivation of Capable People and Governing Institutions

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Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Chairwoman Karen Diver of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa discusses the critical importance of Native nations' systematic development of its governing institutions and human resource ability to their ability to exercise sovereignty effectively and achieve their nation-building goals.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Diver, Karen. "Nation Building Through the Cultivation of Capable People and Governing Institutions." "Leading Native Nations" interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 17, 2009. Interview.

Ian Record:

“So I’m here with Chairwoman Karen Diver, who is the chairwoman of Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. And previous to that, she served as Director of Special Projects for Fond du Lac, so she has a wide range of experience, which is precisely why we’re having her sit down with us today.

The first question I’d like to ask you is a question that I ask everyone I sit down with and that is, how would you define Native nation building and what does it entail for your nation?”

Karen Diver:

“It’s almost straight out of the textbook: aggressive assertions of sovereignty backed up by capable institutions. You come into tribal government and it’s at different phases in its growth. And given that most tribes have really not been self-governing for that long, often times, we’re plugging the gap or reformulating. But if the basis of your decision is always putting self-governance first and self-determination, generally you can always plug in the gaps of your institutional capabilities along the way. But it’s the legitimacy of the actions and then backing it up with the way to actually implement them.”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned 'legitimacy in the actions,' and the Native Nations Institute and Harvard Project research holds that for Native nation governments to be viewed as legitimate by the people that they serve, they must be both culturally appropriate and effective, which is a double-edged challenge for a lot of nations, particularly those that have not governed, essentially been in control of their own governance for a very long time, and had that determined by outsiders. So how do you view that assertion that for governments to be legitimate, they have to be not only effective, but also culturally appropriate?”

Karen Diver:

“I think for tribes, we’re not as removed from government; government is very personal. Tribal members can walk in at any time, we employ our tribal members, we’re related to one another, so it’s not impersonal in a way that I think traditional government is. And when you’re decision making, the actual impact on real people in their real lives really has to be primary. And for that to work, you have to take into account the circumstances in which they live. It could be as simple, for us, making sure that our policies and procedures account for the ability to participate in cultural activities like wild rice leave, for example, is actually in our personnel policies. It’s a week-long endeavor; people need to do it when the crop is ready. Or it can be as broad based as, what do your family leave policies look like? Recognizing we have extended, large extended families, the grieving process is a community process. So just giving a bank of leave time might not be something appropriate. You might want to have some flexible use of leave to take into account that our families are large, complicated, and primarily their employment serves to take care of them and their families. So you have to have that balance. So cultural traditions matter, and to balance those with the needs of both governmental and the economic entities that we serve; that’s the only way we’re going to have a successful workforce.”

Ian Record:

“So I want to next run a quote by you that we reference often and it’s a quote by a Native leader who once said, ‘The best defense of sovereignty is to exercise it effectively.’ Can you speak to that statement?”

Karen Diver:

“To me, that really means once again building up those capable institutions. Everybody likes to know, ‘What are the rules that we’re playing by?’ Especially if you’re dealing with outside entities that you do work with, whether it’s governmental or through your economic development efforts, but also that you’re defining what those rules are and whether you’re dealing with a local unit of government, the feds, bankers, auditors, they don’t get to define the playing field. You’re defining the rules, you’re communicating them, and you’re saying that, ‘Your work with us is going to be defined by us.’ A lot of that is understanding the tenets of Indian law and explaining it to people and making distinctions between, ‘Who are we as a race?’ versus our political status and those are often confused by many people. So as long as you keep your political status separate than our cultural traditions and who we are historically and currently as a people. To me, that’s real basic and that’s really one of the main elements of sovereignty."

Ian Record:

“You, as I mentioned at the outset, you have served your nation both as a senior administrator and as currently, as chairwoman. I was curious to learn, what, based on your experience, do tribal bureaucracies need to be effective?”

Karen Diver:

“Well, that’s real key. We all know when it goes wrong. It’s the deviation from what is normal and it’s viewed as political graft or having a brother in power so to speak and that’s where…for the average citizen they feel that tribal government isn’t really serving them; it’s inequities in service delivery or access. And sometimes that happens at the service delivery level or the program level or institutional level with hiring and things like that. I think for tribal government, monitoring those activities, putting those systems in place, building accountability and transparency of the rules ends up being key to having equitable service delivery and equitable systems. And for our band members, the expectation that it doesn’t matter who you elect, the level of service you receive and your opportunities are the same.”

Ian Record:

“So it essentially supports stability and expectations among the people when they don’t…they see consistency. They see fairness and they can see consistency across administration so it’s not just, ‘Oh it was this way for this term,’ and then the new term comes in, new administration comes in and things change.”

Karen Diver:

“Well, you’re proving capability in government, too, because the reason you would elect people changes then it becomes about their effectiveness and their skills and ability to do the job rather than your personal connections and how you might gain from that. So it changes peoples’ I think reason for how and why they may vote for tribal leadership.”

Ian Record:

“And being a chair of a nation, you must experience this firsthand, this challenge of the dependency mentality. Where the expectations, at least on part of the citizenry, is rooted in, ‘What can the government do for me?’ or, ‘I’m going to go to the government and get the goodies,’ rather than really viewing that government as serving the nation, as advancing the nation’s long-term priorities. Is that something you struggle with and how do you do you work to overcome that?”

Karen Diver:

“Yes, I’ve struggled with it, but I’ve struggled with it in terms of, once again, how do we build those systems in place so that they serve the needs of our citizenry, but also changing the expectations of our citizenry? And the current tribal council has been a part of kind of changing the mentality of, ‘What our citizens should expect from their tribal government?’ And I usually say to folks, ‘Don’t ask me for a handout. Ask me for a job, or if you’re not ready for that yet, why don’t you tell me what you need to get there?’ And the framing of it is fairly simple. What I tell people is, ‘I care about you enough that I’m not going to put a band-aid on your issue because it’s going to come back. Unless I know what’s going on, we need to create or refer you to something that creates a long-term fix because I don’t want you to have to come back.’ And I really feel that promoting dependency within our own community is a part of the reason why we haven’t been able to move as forward as we could be yet because I’ve turned into a social worker now instead of an administrator, instead of someone who assures that there’s good systems. And I also think it’s not fair to our people to say to them, ‘The way that you get services is by telling me a lot of your personal problems that are going on.’ I need to know them to the extent that I need to identify any gaps in our system, but I also shouldn’t put my own people -- if I care about them -- in the position of having to beg, and there is a difference. I’m not doing it to satisfy my ego because I can feel really good about what I’ve done for you. I care about you enough to say, ‘Let’s look at a long-term fix instead of a short-term band-aid.’”

Ian Record:

“Right. So it’s essentially, ‘Let’s look at the root cause of your problem or your challenge,’ versus just simply addressing the symptom, which will be sure to reoccur at some point.”

Karen Diver:

“Right. And it helps me identify where we might have gaps in service, whether it’s combined case management, stabilizing your housing, where you really need some service delivery, whether it’s health issues, we should make sure that each of our systems are coordinated enough that there is a holistic response to the issues people face in their day-to-day lives.”

Ian Record:

“You mention this issue of building a holistic response, or the capacity to do that, to whatever issue is at hand or that you’re facing. And this really gets to this issue of developing a systems-based approach to service delivery, which we hear about more and more, and we see a lot of that sort of activity in Indian Country with nations saying, ‘The status quo is not working. We’ve got our programs and services going a million different directions, they often duplicate one another. We’ve got to take a systems-based approach that gets at these root causes that you discuss.’ Is that something that you’re working to do, take care of?”

Karen Diver:

“Oh, actively. And both as a staff member and then once I got elected. I’ll give you an example. One of our projects that we’ll be breaking ground here within a month is supportive housing. Supportive housing is what transitional housing used to be. It’s for folks who have had a hard time getting on their feet and for every step forward it might have been two back, chronic homeless, multiple episodes of homelessness. Well, homelessness isn’t the lack of a house, it’s a circumstance, a set of circumstances going on that are preventing people from being stable. In order to do supportive housing, you not only have to build the housing, but you also have to develop service delivery that looks at what are the needs of the family and they may be multiple. You’re also committing to staying by them whether or not they take that step forward or step back, and that’s why they call it permanent supportive housing, because unlike transitional housing the two years are up whether you’re ready to be independent or not. And what it really does is say, in terms of case management, what does the whole family need and it’s self-determined by the family. So much like for tribal government, it’s saying for families, too, to say, ‘What are my needs right now?’ and their needs might be simple in the beginning. It might be having adequate health care and getting their diabetes under control so they’re not facing chronic health issues. It might mean helping the family say at some point that they’re chemical dependent, coming to the realization that it is fueled by underlying mental illness, but there’s a safe place to be able to say that and get at the root causes of why people anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol. And what you’re trying to do is reduce the episodes of homelessness and instability in the family so that children can stay in longer, the same school longer, they can maintain their level of health care and what you see over time is school social workers are talking to mental health case managers. We know that health outcomes are affected by the lack of housing; we know that school performance is affected by that. Working together stabilizes the need for service delivery by multiple systems, but they all have to be at the table and integrated together. It’s a model that’s been shown to work outside Indian Country, not yet being implemented to a big extent within Indian Country. The model’s perfect for us because we know our families best. We need to be talking to each other and the family will be the one that hopefully will move forward because of it. So it’s an example, but we’ve built silos in Indian Country, much like we’ve bemoaned in larger systems that are out there, but we’re better contained within ourselves to actually break those down.”

Ian Record:

“So you mentioned you know your families best. And hearing you describe this approach of supportive housing, that requires an intimate understanding, intimate awareness of what’s going on in your community, what their needs are, what their challenges are, what their priorities are, what they need from the tribe in order to be made whole, or put them on the road to self-sufficiency, whatever it might be, that’s not an approach that an outsider can develop and implement. Is it something that has to be done at the local level by the people who it’s designed to serve?”

Karen Diver:

“Absolutely, because at any given point in that service delivery or that plan that the family develops, you’re going to have to have culturally competent service delivery. You’re going to have to understand that for a family to break their cycle of chemical dependency that it might be isolating to them for some of their other family members, and that’s a hard thing to do. So you’re recreating family systems and showing them a healthy way in a way that doesn’t deny their ability to still remain a part of a larger community. It’s understanding that children are served best when they’re with their families and an easy fix isn’t putting them in out-of-home placement, but intensive services for their extended families. It’s building even the actual facilities in a way that understands that we tend to congregate together and you never know when you might have a niece coming to live with you, and it shouldn’t upset your household composition because that’s what your housing rules say. So it requires us to be flexible. And I think that’s one of the beauties of self-governance is when you determine your own rules, you can be flexible enough to meet multiple demands, but in a way that’s also accountable so that everybody has the same access to that flexibility.”

Ian Record:

“As I mentioned, you were once a senior administrator of your tribe and now you’re the chairwoman. And I was curious to learn, having served in both of those capacities, can you speak to the importance of delineating clear, distinct roles, responsibilities, authorities for each of those key decision makers, implementers? And what happens when those roles aren’t clearly defined?”

Karen Diver:

“It’s an over-used phrase, but I think many people have heard it. If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take. I think that for both tribal government and tribal administrators, it’s all about the plan. Where do we plan to get in two years, five years? I’m a big fan of strategic planning. I’m a big fan of understanding who is responsible for the items in the strategic plan. Who’s monitoring the outcomes and making sure that we’re holding staff accountable? Has there been community input to the plan so that we’re actually serving them and going in a direction that they care about? And we are just starting to undertake now a whole community-wide strategic planning process that will inform tribal government and it’s a difficult transition. Last year I thought, ‘I’m just going to get the staff kind of primed and say give me a few goals and objectives for the year,’ and I almost started a mass revolt. I had the flurry of emails saying, ‘What did you mean by that?’ ‘Well, I want to know what you plan to do next year. This is not a trick question, what do you plan to do,’ because at the end of next year I’m going to say, ‘Did you accomplish what you had planned?’ And you’re actually going to maybe make presentations to tribal council about that. Also understanding your role, there’s a plan and each department should understand who their stakeholders are. Human Resources, for example, they think of the applicants and employees as their stakeholders, but they don’t necessarily think of their other divisions that they do the work for as their stakeholders and at the timeliness of their work and the quality of their work can have a big affect on operations. So right now, our tribal council has three of our members were in administrative positions before so we were on the other side of the tribal council table. It’s made a huge difference in terms of our understanding of the importance of their work, not frittering it away, making meeting time productive time and they’re happy. They’re happy because being accountable to us is different. It’s in terms of decision making, not necessarily these huge processes that takes up a lot of their time but doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything. So very important on both ends to understand, ‘What is our role?’ We’re an approving role, they’re doing the work and they’re bringing us their recommendations.”

Ian Record:

“So it’s essentially -- and this gets to what my next question’s about -- what are the respective roles of elected officials and those administrators and bureaucratic employees because you’re seeing it less and less, which I think is a good thing, what you see in some Native communities is still the mentality among the leadership where they have to do it all, and a reticence perhaps to delegate authority. And I’m curious to learn from you how you envision the roles and the separation of those roles and where does one’s work stop and the other’s begin, perhaps?”

Karen Diver:

“I think we’re fairly typical of every tribal government and it comes up during campaign time and when we have our open meetings with our citizenry, they say, ‘The reservation business committee, they micromanage.’ And what I tell people is, ‘You expect us not to micromanage, you want us to take big picture, our appropriate role is in policy making, procedure development, setting vision and long-term direction of the reservation.’ I said, ‘But you want that until the issue involves you, then you expect us to micromanage and fix your problem, and if I go back and tell you you have the ability to provide a grievance or you can talk to the program manager and resolve conflict that way,’ you say, ‘you’re not taking care of my issue.’ So it goes back to that, how do you balance the personal aspect of tribal government, because we are all interrelated, we’re a community, a tight-knit community with the ability to put good governance systems in place and good business systems in place and there’s no perfect science to that, because first of all you’re never going to develop a policy where you’re going to expect to hit every possible outcome or gap. That’s why your policies are a work in progress and need regular review and updating. Also people come up with some really personal circumstances that you may want to accommodate. So I think that there’s a balance there.

The delegation of authority ends up being a lot about control and hiring capable staff and letting them do their job is really key in getting all of the work done because tribal government has a breadth unlike any other form of government. We are corporate, we are government, we are like non-profit service delivery agencies, environmental, education, health. We have to rely on content-area experts. However, I also think being a context expert, they don’t always recognize the big picture they operate in because they’re looking at it from their silo of expertise. So I think tribal government role -- if you look at it in terms of dialogue and challenging each other -- we can help them see the big picture, they can help us understand the peculiarities of their particular area of expertise. That’s where you come up with the win-win. It’s when it’s directive or when you impose upon them, but if you set up the right processes, we often say government-to-government consultation, well we need to have consultation within our organization as well so that we can come up with the best possible scenarios up front and tweak them along the way and see where we may have missed something.”

Ian Record:

“So you mentioned in part of your previous response about the expectations of citizens, particularly come campaign time. For instance, where internally between elected officials and administrators, bureaucratic employees, you may have a clear understanding of who should be doing what, but then there’s the citizen’s expectations that are always causing friction against that. How important is public education about the separations of authorities, about the checks and balances, about the delegations, about who does what? That it’s incumbent upon Native nation governments not just to have a clear internal understanding, but also to make sure the community understands so that it allows you to keep your momentum going?”

Karen Diver:

“It’s a difficult process, I’ll be very honest about that. And one of the ways I characterize it in some of the one-on-one conversations I have with tribal members is if all of my wishes could come true for our own people, one of them would be that it really didn’t matter who you elect, because it didn’t have relevance in your day-to-day life. That as an individual and as a leader in your family, you were able to get and/or acquire those things you need to meet the needs of your own family, whether that’s through employment educational opportunities, social services, that you knew what was out there and you could access it and you were using those resources to build your own self-sufficiency to the point where once it came to the ballot, it was much like traditional forms of government. Who has the skills to do the job? Do they have the background? Do they have a plan? And it changes your expectations. So I think that’s something that comes over time. But also, when people understand that in their best interest, they can self determine their own needs and you’re creating the systems for that to happen, I think it’s going to change the dynamic of what individuals expect out of tribal government.”

Ian Record:

“And isn’t that where strategic planning is very important because the community understands, ‘There’s a larger goal at work here. It’s not just about the now, it’s not just about what I need personally or what my family needs at this moment, but it’s about where we’re trying to head as a community.'“

Karen Diver:

“I think the economic crisis has really changed that a bit. I think in Indian Country -- especially for tribes who have been building a private sector economy within their borders and really using that as a surrogate tax base -- you’ve been able to plug in some of the gaps and funding in order to create programs or supplement them and access other sources of funding. And I think that the downturn really let people know that it’s not a given that tribal government’s going to continue to grow, it’s not a given that the things that are here now will remain. And we’re a per capita [distribution] tribe, so that’s one of the things we’ve been able to do purely as a poverty reduction; nobody’s getting rich off it. But people understood that maybe that isn’t a given and that we have to be smart about our resources, and maybe the best use of tribal government time is looking at economic and governmental stability and not necessarily the day-to-day issues that arise in tribal council’s life. They’re taking a little bit more ownership and more what we’re doing is more information and referral, ‘Did you know that this is available to you and this is available to you?’ rather than direct service, one-on-one."

Ian Record:

“So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about economic development. And a lot of what the NNI-Harvard Project research looks at is the two polar opposites when it comes to economies that we see in Indian Country. One, you have essentially the dependent economy, which is largely born of constitutions and governments that were imposed or systems of governments that were imposed by the outside. And then you have productive economies, which we’re obviously seeing more and more of as tribes take control of their own affairs, as they begin to launch and build diversified economies. I was wondering, from your perspective, how do Native nations move from a dependent economy, heavily reliant on outsiders, the federal government, to a productive economy where they themselves are in the driver’s seat of economic development? And in that process of moving from one to the other, what are some of the most important building blocks?”

Karen Diver:

“First and foremost, social capital. You need to develop your own citizenry to be a part of that. Talk to a lot of young people and say, ‘What are you going to school for? Liberal arts? Great. We need people to do services to our own band members, but gee, do you also know we need accountants? We need internal auditors; we need dentists and healthcare delivery people, teachers.’ So I think building that social capital so that the cultural competency comes from our own people serving our own community is real key. We can’t always use neighbors and people who aren’t familiar with our own community because then you miss that cultural competency piece. A lot of good people in Indian Country who are Native, but we really need to grow our own and provide the role models. The other part of it is purely regulatory. Do you have the systems in place where economic development can thrive? One of the gaps in our own system right now is we don’t have uniform commercial codes. So that’s kind of on the block. Developing systems of conflict resolution that are transparent and you know who’s rules you’re operating under. Once again, the tenets of Indian law, if you’re working with outside parties, do they really know what dealing with a sovereign is and the context with which this business relationship will be taken out? Regulatory control is also things as simple as what’s your background check policy? Are you going to be able to meet outside commitments that you’re making, for example, under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act? Do you understand their rules? If you’re in a banking relationship, what are their rules, their operating on and how do you mesh that with your own? So I think that a lot of homework goes into building a community where economic development can thrive. And part of it is do you understand your role in it and the role of your people and all of your different departments? For example, if you’re going to work with an outside agency that’s looking at some resources within the reservation, like mining, do you have your regulatory capacity there to look at environmental issues, for example? So, identifying those initiatives and seeing what you have within tribal government that needs to be involved, having them all on the table up front, and identifying your gaps, and either developing it or bringing in consultants who have it so you can have informed decision making.”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned this issue of, or the importance of investing in social capital, particularly among your young people. Not only finding out what their interests are, but saying, ‘Hey, we have needs in this area.’ That’s, but that, isn’t that the first step because then you have to make sure that the opportunities that are available are stable, that they’re consistent? That you’re not going to have the political turnover, ripple effect where the administration comes in and they clean house, which our research has shown causes this horrible problem of brain drain where people say, ‘I’m not going to invest my time and resources in the future of the nation because I can’t be certain I’m going to get a return on that investment.’ So I was wondering if you could speak to that issue of making sure that those opportunities are stable and that the environment in which you’re asking them to participate is reliable.”

Karen Diver:

“Once again, I think if you start to change and really have a conversation with your community about what do they feel is the appropriate role in tribal government in their day-to-day life, that then starts changing the stability of the workforce. And you’re right, we’ve invested heavily in education, both by creating our own institutions and through scholarship funds and telling people, ‘There’s a big world out there. Go learn things and bring it back home.’ Only for them to not be able to have the ability to worry about their sacrifices of their own stability in their family, and that’s sad. It’s sad and it’s unfortunate because you’re right, it creates brain drain. With the capable institutions, and with some emotional maturity and changing your expectations of what tribal leaders should be both personally and professionally, I think you get towards the bigger picture of, ‘If I’m here to serve my people, that means also dealing with my political detractors, as well as my political supporters,’ and they still end up being tribal members and deserve service whether they like you or not, whether they care about you or not, or whether they believe in you or not, you do your best by them. And I think it’s developing some political maturity to say, ‘Yes, I may not be meeting your expectations, but over time, can we find your place here within this community as well?’ So I think it’s a little shortsighted. We think we want to be surrounded by loyalty, but that’s a moving target. On any given day, you’re going to make a decision that may affect people in a way that they may not want, but it’s whether or not your transparency of government helps them understand why you’re doing it, that it’s not personal, that you were going to make this decision because it’s good for the whole and yeah, it might not work for everybody. So I think a part of it is just your skill at the politics of communicating why decisions are made and whether the transparency was there in the decision making so people understand why and then don’t take it personal.”

Ian Record:

“And doesn’t that really get to this issue of rules? The NNI/Harvard Project research clearly shows that rules are more important than resources in terms of building vibrant economies. Can you speak to that issue?”

Karen Diver:

“Yeah sure, it’s interesting because when I talk to folks and I’m in the unfortunate position of having to tell them I can’t do something for them, one of the things I usually preface it with or end with it is, ‘I know you want this, but one of the rules we follow here for this tribal government is if we can’t do it for everyone, we can’t do it for one. And so if…do you think if I ask the tribal membership if we should do this for you, what do you think their answer would be? Would they be supportive of this decision?’ And generally, when you put it in that context, people will understand that you are making rules for all, not the few. On the other hand, sometimes you come up with one where you say, ‘Geez, we should do something about that and would we be willing to do it for everyone? Maybe, maybe not because the circumstances matter, but it’s justifiable and you knew if you put the whole circumstances out there, our community would say, ‘Yeah we don’t maybe don’t want to make that a practice,’ but in this instance, for their set of circumstances, it’s the right thing to do because we do care about our community. But it’s justifiable in a way so you almost have the litmus test of community voting. And you’re saying, 'How would people think about this?' And if you constantly keep that in mind, and the fact that it doesn’t matter who’s in your office, assume you’re telling everybody because everybody will know. Your actions are public and if someone asks, ‘What’s going on with tribal government?’ you have to be willing to tell them. That transparency is what keeps government honest. So day by day, you take it as it comes and take each circumstances, but if you use that litmus test of, ‘If I put it to a referendum vote, or no matter who walked through the door, would you behave the same?’ generally, you’re going to get pretty close to what you need to a capable government whose rules are not only transparent, but consistency ends up being the biggest key.”

Ian Record:

“And when you have those consistent rules in place that are consistently enforced, isn’t that liberating for you as an elected official, because you then are in a position where you can say no to someone and have it not be personal? And say, ‘Here’s my reason. We have, for instance, a hiring and firing dispute, which I’m sure you encounter in an economic development entity of the tribe or within tribal government. You say, ‘Hey, we have a personnel grievance process for that. I’d be overstepping my bounds as an elected official to take on this issue, to even consider your complaint.’”

Karen Diver:

“Very much so. It is liberating in a way and it’s something that the current tribal council, in terms of building our own capacity to govern and also for our own stability in making sure we’re all behaving in the same way even when we’re not in a meeting, when we’re having different interactions, is to actually have those conversations with each other, have a set of board norms, take some planning time and say, ‘here’s something that you don’t necessarily need a policy for, but it’s something we’re confronted with. How do we behave? Let’s be consistent, all get on the same page.’ Your answer then can be, ‘Gee, I hear you and I understand but the council made a decision that this is the way that we’re going to handle it,’ and speaking with one voice. A lot of this goes to whether or not you’re building a capable board that’s cohesive and all operating off of the same page, so speaking with one voice. You have those arguments. It’s kind of like mommy and daddy, you argue, but you don’t let the kids hear you kind of thing. We have that time where we work things out amongst ourselves but once we come to talking about them in a public way, whatever answer prevailed, we all stick with and support and so a lot of it goes to good governance from an internal perspective as well. And you’re right, it is liberating. It gives individual members a way to say, ‘We all stick together.’ You can’t go from one to the other and try to get a different answer because we’re all going to talk about it and then give you our decision as a whole rather than an individual.”

Ian Record:

“One final question I wanted to ask you, and it was interesting, we were interviewing another tribal leader earlier this morning, and he likened being an elected leader of a Native nation to drinking from a fire hose, which I’m sure you can identify with. I was wondering if you could talk about, how can leaders manage the often overwhelming pressures they face, in order to lead effectively? How can they manage that load, forge ahead, implement that strategic vision, guide that strategic vision, so that the nation can achieve the future it wants?”

Karen Diver:

“I think it’s management principles, and I think as we develop our own folks and they decide to serve through elected leadership, they’re going to bring different management capabilities to the table. And I usually tell new managers or people who are also feeling that -- because it happens all through the organization, not just at the top -- is prioritize, delegate and advocate. You prioritize. I liken it to going to the casino’s buffet. You only get one plate at a time, but you have all those choices so you pick that first plate carefully. When things are going well, you might even start with dessert, but when they’re not going well you might start with your meat instead of your salad. So you prioritize and pick that first plate very carefully. You put out the fires, but you pay attention to what precedent are you setting. Don’t just make it go away for going away’s sake 'cause you’re setting precedent, but you put out the fires first and you kind of look at your organization methodically. Right now we’re lucky; we have no fires. So what we’re looking at is that middle layer of management that is actually broader than the emergencies, but has more long-term impact. Does our organizational structure fit the service delivery we need to do, are there gaps, are there efficiencies to be found so you prioritize and you clip your way through it. Delegating is you don’t have to do it all on your own. You have a hierarchy in place. Make sure the hierarchy is working for you. Use content-area experts; hire them if you need to. I think one of the biggest failings of tribal government is to not admitting what you don’t know and asking and listening to those who do. I couldn’t have done a lot of the work in the last year without listening to my environmental staff, my education staff, my health staff. In many ways I take my orders from them. What are your priorities? What do you need me to talk about? Who do you need me to call? And let them do their jobs. Advocate ends up being important, because a lot of I think doing with tribal government work is educating people around and within you of the role of tribal government. What are our boundaries? How do we get partners in to do our work? We’ve been so busy building our self-governance, we forget we have allies out there, different funding sources, the legislatures, building relationships with townships and counties, which I think is actually going backwards lately because of cuts in local government aid and the economy and they see tribes not as partners anymore, but how do we get into their pocketbooks. So maintaining those relationships and advocacy sometimes happens in a crisis, sometimes in a proactive way, but really saying, ‘Hello, we’re still here, we have an impact, we have a role to play. It might not be the one you define, but there are areas of win-win, let’s talk about those,’ and telling that story. And if you can slowly clip through it that way, it becomes a little bit more manageable. What I usually tell people is tribal government, we’ve only really been self-governing in any meaningful way, probably for thirty years. We’ll continue to get better at it and we’ll make mistakes along the way, but it’s what works and so we have to prove that. So prioritizing and making sure you’re hitting those things and trying to prevent them from becoming those fires ends up being really important.”

Ian Record:

“Well Karen, I appreciate your time today and thanks for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us.”

Karen Diver:

“Thank you, my pleasure.”

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 2)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In part two of his Indigenous Leadership Fellow interview, Grand Chief Michael Mitchell of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne touches on a wide range of nation-building topics, notably the importance of clearly defining the distinct roles and responsibilities of leaders and administrators working on behalf of Native nation governments, and the need for leaders to refrain from micromanaging the day-to-day activities of Native nation administration. He also discusses the need for Native nations to invest in the education of their people, and then to provide them opportunities to contribute to those nations onc they have completed their education.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell (Part 2)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

"This is our second interview with Chief Michael Mitchell, the first Indigenous Leadership Fellow of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. What I'd like to ask you about next is this question about defining moments. We see across Indian Country in the work that the Native Nations Institute does these defining moments where Native nations essentially say, "˜Enough is enough. We're tired of the federal government or the state or whoever, whatever external force it might be dictating to us how we're going to run our nation, how we're going to determine our future and we're going to take charge.' And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about when that moment came for Akwesasne and what that moment was."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"It wasn't long after I had become Grand Chief that I began to notice that the [Canadian] government has their hands in everything. Anything you want to know about education, health, social, housing, you had to ask somebody from government. That's how it was set up. And they had a system in place and the reporting system was directly...the final say always came from them. The other thing I noticed is there was a huge deficit within the community because they didn't have control of their budget. They couldn't forecast to the way that would be to the satisfaction of the community.

So probably within the first month, I got a pretty good reading and I went and secured a meeting with the Minister of Indian Affairs and I told him, "˜In my opinion, the people are not involved in the governance.' In theory, in literature, in all the stuff they write, governance for the people, but the way their system works, everything is going back to them. So the big thing for him was this, "˜How do you deal with this deficit?' Because the day that I got elected they sent in a guy from Indian Affairs to come down to Akwesasne and he said he had two mandates. One was to run the election because it was...elections were run under the Indian Act and Indian Affairs conducted the elections. The second was...he says, "˜I really came down to lock up your administration buildings because of this humongous deficit.' So this is what the Minister and I were talking about. He looked directly at me and he says, "˜How are you going to deal with that deficit?' I said, "˜I'm going to deal with it by setting up a whole new management regime. And in this regime, I'm going to separate the politics from the administration. And the second really depends on you, Mr. Minister. I want you to recall all your people and I want to hire my own people from the community that have the skills to do the administration. We'll set up a transparent governance system.' And I guess it kind of surprised him because he says, "˜You think my people are responsible for your deficit?' I says, "˜Yeah, you are. You don't give a damn how funds are allocated and if it's...they're always short of their goal. They never realize that there's no satisfaction then people don't care. People that come down from Indian Affairs to service the community, they don't care. It's not their house, it's not their school, it's not their roads.' I says, "˜You need to involve people in governance who are going to have a direct involvement in impact, they're going to be impacted by what you do.' And curiosity they say killed the cat, but this man says, "˜I never had that question posed in that way before.'

So he gave me a year. He gave me a year to put all these things in place. We're considered a large reservation and once he gave the go-ahead and pulled his people out, then the rest was up to us to try to find people to come home. They were either working in Washington or Syracuse or Ottawa or Toronto, Albany, New York City, but I had a list of people and I started phoning them up and, 'I'd like you all to consider coming home and let's do something for this community.' And it was a challenge. I made a plea to find the right people and they all came back. They left their jobs and they took time off and they moved home and we had a team, I'd say a core team of about 20 that head up all the different departments and in a team meeting you ask, "˜What is it that we have to do that hasn't been done before?' Well, for one, the people don't get information on what council's doing. They don't know your deficit. So we set up to give quarterly reports and at the end of the year an annual report, very carefully put together that deals with almost every aspect of governance, with stories that went along with it. But in the beginning, we also asked people to, from the community, to get involved in the governance and help us. So they got on various boards from the health board to legislative to justice, police commission. These were all things that weren't there before so they were new. That's what the adventure's about. Not dealing with the government, but dealing with your community because the authorities came from external. You have to look at what has to be done to get people interested in their governance and we thought of different ways.

Within the first few months, we made a community flag for Akwesasne and we put that in all the schools, just to put our identity in the community. And there already was in existence a nation flag for the whole Iroquois Nation. So we made a community flag to fly alongside the nation flag and beside Canada's flag. And this is when I went to the customs and all the government buildings and I said, "˜I want this flag flying alongside.' And it did a lot to stir up involvement, interest, pride and along the way, very early, we started changing the name of the St. Regis Band Council, and as I said a while ago, we... everything was "˜band.' And it was done for a purpose, not many people think about it. They say, "˜I'm from the Ottawa Band' and 'I'm from the Chippewa Band.' Over here they all say tribe, it's the equivalent, but it's a government terminology. But they forbid you to say nation and in my meetings I says, "˜Whatever happened, we were once nations. We belong to a nation.' So I started using that and nation thinking and in the community people, even the chiefs along the table that were veterans, "˜We don't talk like that.' I said, "˜I know, because the government trained you not to talk like that.' Anyhow, we made a game of it. We decided that we're not going to use the word "˜band' in the community anymore and had nothing to do with our finances but it had everything to do with pride. And so there was no more 'band office,' there's no more band programs,' there's no more 'band administrator.' Everything...it went around the table, everybody kicked in with ideas and I says, "˜Well, that's...all these things is what we're not going to say. We're going to give new names.' "˜Well, what about the St. Regis Band?' "˜Well, we're going to change that. Our traditional name is Akwesasne and we're a territory, we're not a reserve, we're not a reservation.' So with everybody's help it became the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne. It just grew.

Some of the older ones on council that had been in the system for a long time, they didn't kind of like go along with this right away and it's hard to deal with a mentality that has been there and they left it up to me. They says, "˜Look, you've got to find a way that we all go in the same direction.' Well, I wasn't about to tell somebody older that, "˜You're saying things wrong, your terminology is wrong.' So we made a game. Put a coffee cup in the middle of the table and said, "˜In our council meetings, anybody that refers to anything in the community about Band, if you say that, you're going to drop a quarter in here.' And they said, "˜Why?' I says, "˜That's just to remind you not to say it.' So when it became a game, it removed the tension, it removed the threat of direct authority. "˜Okay, let's do that.' Pretty soon, even when I'm not there, they were watching each other and months later they all had it, but I didn't realize that it influenced the program and service department and so they did the same thing and they're catching each other and everybody's laughing. Nobody's saying, "˜You can't tell me that.' And then they said, "˜Well, when government people come to see us, they better address us the right way.' Now they're growing in confidence and so whenever we had to meet with external governments, Department of Indian Affairs and provincial governments, authorities, etc., they sat at the table, we explained to them, "˜We don't want to hear that anymore and so if you say that, you're going to start donating.' And to everybody else on the table, "˜Yeah, [you] better do this.' And we would catch them. But attitude changed. The mindset changed. You start looking at your community differently. And that was the positive part. But trying to pull everything together that the staff would think different, that your council would adopt a different attitude, you've got to think community. So that was some of the initial things. It's still going on 20 some years later, just introduce new council members and they tell them, "˜These are certain things we want to watch out for in terminology. They're going to...external government's going to come and talk to you, you better watch for these things,' and all. So I'm noticing...and then it affected community members at large. Nobody says "˜band' anymore in the territory. If they do, if you say it inadvertently, somebody will catch you. That got everybody pretty well thinking on a collective basis.

Now going back to the governance part, we started having more public meetings, put out a newsletter to report on council activities and in the first year, any issue that was controversial, "˜Okay, let's go have a public meeting.' And mostly it was me going to the community saying, "˜This is what you need to know.' There was a big turnaround and leadership; Indigenous leadership goes in different format. Some are accustomed to doing things in a closed manner. The secret to success is you start opening up and report what you can. And as I... I'm explaining this because there are some things like let's say social welfare. Well, you don't have a public meeting about somebody... what they're going to get for welfare, if they're going to get a social job of some sort. So there's a need to keep confidential and we tell them, "˜There's things that we can't tell you but there's things we can.' And people understood that. After a while they would ask questions because in a community you're wide open, they'll ask you anything and that's why a lot of councils don't like to have public meetings. We have a radio station in Akwesasne and I make full use of it. Any kind of announcements, put it on the radio. Want to report something about a meeting, get on the radio. Get that information out there. And soon after it became settled in, that that's what leadership was about. It's subtle, it's not any secret or it's not any formula that's magic, it's just common sense and you see the turnaround in the community when they recognize the sincere efforts leadership is making."

Ian Record:

"Well, I think too, from what you're saying, they get on board, they jump on board that nation-building train when they feel like they have stake in it. Finally, after all these years of having no voice in governance, they have a voice again and the leadership is working with them to make sure that that voice is heard."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, in the training I can offer this. There's always opposition, you always have opposition no matter whether you're well off or you're the poorest, and once they get an opportunity, people in the community, that they have a voice, you're always going to have a few that's going to be at every one of your meetings and they're going to grill you, and I've seen a lot of that happen. Most of the time you'll see people that all of a sudden, "˜Geez, I can ask questions. I'm going to come to the next meeting.' So in the leadership training, you have to know how you're going to address them but always make time for those people who come to the meetings who didn't get a chance to ask a question, because if it comes up that they feel somewhat of elitist themselves, they start hammering the council members and that's what a lot of council members are afraid of is, "˜I don't want to get hammered like that. I don't want to get insulted like that. I don't want to have a shouting match.' Well, you don't have to and now it's ingrained in leadership that you owe it to report your activities as a leader and they're not going to go back to any more closed-door sessions. And that's what separates good leaders from bad leaders is their willingness to say, "˜This is the way it's going to be.' And for young chiefs, young leaders coming in, sometimes they say, "˜I got elected to have more housing here and that's what I'm going to do.' "˜Well, I'm sorry, but there's 20 other things that also has to be done for this. We've got to worry about the roads, we got a lobby to our new facilities, there's a lot of other areas of responsibility.' "˜But I got elected on...I made that promise I would improve that.' You're always going to run into that.

So how you get people on side back home...it was sort of a tradition with the Head Chief that everybody went to him. Well, on council we have 12 district chiefs. Everybody was assigned a portfolio. If I'm going to go look for money and I take a portfolio with me, whether it's education or housing or economic development or justice, policing, whatever it may be, is that I don't have to take the whole council. I'll take the portfolio holder, I might take the staff, I might take an elder from the community and we'll go out for a few days to deal with the meetings. We bring a report back of those meetings, the results of those meetings, and then council deliberates it. And everybody has always to be ready to go out. So public speaking becomes a requirement. You can't just sit on the table and say, "˜Well, let him speak.' You have to learn how to present; very important to be a leader that you can stand up and make a report, deliberate, talk to government, be a public person. If you weren't that when you got on council and you're only going to do that one thing, you better think different. And that's what makes for good teamwork because now you're part of a team. And in the council makeup, they all have to think like that. This is a team and it's not just the council that's a team. Your team extends to your administration, to your staff. It also extends out to people in the community, that you're going to see that they're going to be able to...that we're part of this layers and layers of team and we're in there somewhere. They all have to be able to have an avenue to talk to leadership and that's why you have meetings and different portfolios. Anyway, it's...a lot of it was common sense. A lot of it was based on tradition.

One of the things that really didn't work for us, and it wasn't working when I became chief, was the term; we had two-year terms. And most tribal councils, chiefs, councils both in the States and in Canada, you'd be surprised, they still operate that way, two-year terms. And then you hear them, "˜I just got used to how I'm going to be developing, how I'm going to contribute to council, I have an understanding...' Boom. Time to have a...go back on the campaign trail. 'I've got to make a lot of promises, I've got to spend council's money.' How do you maintain a certain level of responsibility? How do you keep a level of your target that you want to hit, not this year, but you've planned that for three years, five years down the road, because you're going to have to have a joining of other ideas, other funding sources, so it doesn't happen right away. So what we did is we wanted to get out of Indian Affairs-controlled election, and so very early we opted out to develop a custom community election. And for the most part of that first term they went door to door and sat with people. And they had a discussion and I told them why a two-year term is not working under the Indian Act and if we opted out, do you want to see a three-year term or four-year term, a five-year term and also you had all that, people were commenting and at the end they settled on three years. And if the leadership is good, we can always go back, because now it's ours, if we want to extend that to four years the community will decide that. So we kept telling them, "˜It's your decision.' And then we had a massive vote after the first term and they brought it home.

Now back home there's a traditional side and they don't vote. So we got a letter from their council, the traditional council, that they liked the idea that we would bring an elected code, election code back home that would belong to the people, no longer controlled by government. And so those people who are always protecting, filing injunctions, "˜I want to go to court. I should have won. I want somebody to hear this. That guy cheated,' whatever it is, fine. We now have our own court, file with them. Matters will be decided here. If the community sees that you're way out of line, you'll also know about it. And so this is how our justice system became important to us, our courts became in handling these kind of situations. Now all of that is important. There's no one magic formula. It takes a combination of ideas to get people involved and that was some of the things that was done back home."

Ian Record:

"The title of this program is 'Leadership for Native Nation Building.' If you had say 10 minutes sitting down with newly elected leaders or young people, young Native people who are thinking about getting into a leadership position somewhere down the road in their lives, contributing to the nation building efforts of their own nations, if you had 10 minutes with them, what would you tell them about how to be an effective leader?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I would tell them that language is very important. We've had two generations of external forces telling us we've got to get an education. "˜Your language and culture, tradition is not important.' So we're the end product. Young people now don't speak the language anymore so they're not aware of the traditions and then there's elders and there's community and there's people that all has steps. If you're going to be a leader, always support the culture and tradition of your community. And the wisdom that comes from the elders in the community, when they give you support and they recognize that you're going to be respectful of your traditions, then support comes and follows after that. And don't be a person who is going to talk it, but don't walk it. You have to show community...and you do it by a number of ways. If you don't speak the language, then try to say the most important things. In my language it's [Mohawk language]. "˜Hello, how are you, how are things going?' And you learn the basics and let people know that those are the first things that you're going to offer back is culture, tradition, language. Know the history of your community, know the history of your nation, because you're expected to know that if you're going to be a leader. Know it well. If there are things you haven't learned from the dances to the history to the songs, then support it. They don't have to be all that instant, but it certainly helps to support things that are Native. And there are times when you have to speak out, learn how to speak well. And if you can't speak in your own language to your own elders, you're going to hit a bump right off the road, so communication. And the most important part isn't coming from Harvard or some other place and come home, "˜Now I'm going to be a chief because I got a degree.' The most important thing is what's in here, what's in your heart, what's in your mind, because that's what's going to go out. And within six months, people will know what kind of leader you're going to be. If you're dedicated...

The chief that got elected for saying, "˜I'm going to get more housing,' there's a set thing in place that's already pre-decided what you're going to get. Unless you have a magic wand or you've got a lot of money you can throw to the community and say, "˜Here,' it requires teamwork. On any issue it requires teamwork. So you have to work with different people, you have to work with your staff. Don't bully the staff. They know what they're doing and you're going to need their help to pull things together, to plan, to write a proposal, to write a report, to prepare a strategy of what you're going to say when you get out there. Don't be ashamed to take your staff with you when you have to travel somewhere, you have to negotiate something or you have to sell something. And that teamwork is very important. We had a leadership course just a few days ago and I heard one example after another, staff's not respected, they don't listen, and then they're polarized. Secret for success for new chiefs: recognize the abilities of people that are there.

And the other thing that's always important, especially for the younger ones, for some reason reservations right across the country, territories on the Canadian side, small or large, we all have our enemies, we all have people we don't like, so don't take that with you if you're going to be a leader. You have to serve all the people. You have to let them know by your decisions that you have looked all over and you have served them well. It might not reflect right away but people will know that you're going to be a leader that's going to be for the community. Not just your family, not just your friends, not just the faction that you belong to or the people that say, "˜We got you in.' But when you're in that spot, make sure you're speaking for the whole community and expressing thoughts of the whole nation with respect. You don't go to school for that. They'll teach you...elders will teach you to have that kind of respect and so always have respect for your elders. Know the way to the temple of your nation, how far the way things are going because you can spot them. You don't have to be a politician to know there's factions, there are Hatfields and McCoys almost in every reservation and as soon as you get on, make sure that you pronounce yourself, "˜I'm here for the community.' And they might not like it, but by your decisions people will have respect for you.

The ones that say, "˜I've got a certain thing I've got to do here and that's all I'm going to do,' most times they will last one term, maybe two terms and that'll be it. Or they'll leave, they'll exhaust it because a lot of frustration, if you're going to look at things in an individual basis. See, everything with us is a collective. We're a collectivity. I don't know if that's proper English, but that's how I look at it. Sometimes I make up my own words in English, but our treaties have to benefit the collectivity of the nation. Our rights are for all of us, not just an individual, not for you to say, "˜I'm going to make money off my right,' because I see a lot of that happen in my time. You have to ensure that the benefits are equal. That's on any given subject -- opportunities for education, opportunities for employment, a vision for education, for a school, for an arena, for recreation, for elders -- but it's the collectivity and that's the mark of a young leader when he sees that, that's the nation I'm thinking about."

Ian Record:

"You've talked...you mentioned this chief from your own nation who kind of came in on this campaign platform of housing, "˜I've got to get housing for the people,' and was kind of taking that narrow view of what his job was essentially. In the work that the Native Nations Institute does cross Indian Country, we see...we see this mentality that often incoming councilors have, incoming chiefs have, of "˜I've been elected by the people to make decisions.' And that's kind of the extent to which they view their job and when it's really much more than about, "˜I've got to make all the decisions, I've got to have my hand in everything.' From what you've been saying in terms of what's really powered nation building at Akwesasne, it's a much broader view and a much more multi-faceted view of leadership in terms of what leaders have to be in order to serve their people and their nation."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Don't be ashamed to say, "˜I got stuff to learn to be a politician and I might take the first six months and learn my leadership craft well. I need to consult with more established leaders, I need to talk to the staff, I need to go seek feedback from community people, from elders.' You spread yourself out there and tell them you're not here to make decisions right away, because if you don't know what kind of decisions you have to make and you're making decisions, it's liable to be wrong, it's liable to be selfish and it'll come back on you. So give yourself a little bit of time to know what people...what things are in place and what people are feeling, what's on their mind. And for a good leader, he'll always go around the first six months of his term and listen. And it's not a crime to stand up and say, "˜I've got a little bit to learn here and I see some chiefs here that have been here for awhile. I know some people here that used to serve on council and I'm going to make sure I learn my craft well.' You get a lot of respect in the community if you can say that. On the other hand, yeah, I've seen the ones that pounded the table, say, "˜I'm here, I was elected, I'm going to make decisions.' "˜Well, you go out there and you look for money then.' "˜Well, the staff should be doing that. I'm going to tell them to go.' It doesn't make for that teamwork building that you're going to do. You might be mean, you might be tough, but six months down the line, people can't stand you. So what do you do after that? You're always on the outside because now you isolated yourself. So be a team player when you come into leadership, the most important thing."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned earlier this issue of when...essentially the crux of the defining moment of when Akwesasne really went down this nation-building path was when first of all you took control. You said, "˜We're not going to let these external forces dictate to us how we're going to lead our lives,' but then you did this important institutional step, which is you said, "˜We're going to separate politics from the administration of our governance.' And essentially what you're talking about and it relates back to this point of leadership, which is leaders can't micromanage. It's not an effective way to do things and achieve our priorities and our goals and objectives. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit more about first of all the importance of that, separating the politics out of the administration of tribal government. And then second, what kind of message that sent to the community."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"You know, the sad truth that sometime in the history of leadership, could be any community, you're going to have leaders around the table who have come from the staff, who have come from some program, who have come from school and have moved back home and that now they think they know what it's going to take and when they sit around the table, that's when you start hearing, "˜I'm going to go over there and I'm going to do this. I'm going to make sure that I'm watching that guy. I think that's not being done right, I'm going to be going over there and making sure that gets done right.' You're not a leader anymore and the word is micromanaging when you do that. If you catch yourself and you say, "˜I shouldn't be doing that because if I'm going to be a leader, those people can report. I can ask for a report to come in, I can look at it, as a council we can look at it, see how things are going,' but if I'm going to stand over the shoulder of somebody who's going to say, "˜I want to see what you're doing,' that's micromanaging. If there's programs that you have an expertise and that could be in any capacity, finance, you're over at the finance every other day watching. "˜I'm going to be watching how you're spending money.' That's not what you're elected for. People want to see you make decisions and they want to see you do things that are going to benefit the community at-large. Read those reports, look at and be able to write reports, make sure those reports are going to be going out in some way that's going to reach the community. But when I meet leaders, that's the biggest complaint, members of council, somebody's always in there, running over there and it's sad, but we have to appreciate in all walks of life you've got people coming back either from a job outside and they're home a little bit, they run for council and because they don't like something or they come home from school and they say, "˜I want to get on council here because now I have an education, I'm better, I know more than anybody. I got a degree, I got something.' And that usually triggers off the wrong message and certainly you don't intend to be a micromanaging chief, but ask yourself six months down the line.

Now what do chiefs do then? If you let the staff do the administration part and let the people do the finance part, they know the system, you direct that to say, "˜We will expect a report on this,' and you'll have it, but you no longer have to be running over there, chasing after people, looking over somebody's shoulders. You now have time to look at the politics of your community and start doing...analyzing the reports that are coming in, do some forecasts, do some three, five years, 10 years, 20 years. Where do you want your community to be in 20 years? That's a good leadership question. And how are we going to get there, what is it going to take for us to get there? What kind of population would we have then? So what kind of infrastructure are we going to require down that line? Because we have to start planning. Community planning is very important. So there's enough to do for political leadership not to be running over there. There's always people on every council that's going to be like, unfortunately, but that's a fact of life. And the more that people can be groomed and told and kind of guided and given responsibility, it slowly turns around. Sometimes the chief, the veteran chiefs will say, "˜What in the hell's the matter with you? Get down away from there.' Or it could be them that's always going over there, but the general council has to be aware that good planning requires good teamwork and good planning will get you down that line when you have a vision that you can look further down the road where you want your people to go. Because if you only got about 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, then work with your staff that's going to say, "˜Where are we going to be forecasting 10, 20 years down the road?' Then you can start planning.

We've got things that affect us from the outside. It could be anything from the state, it could be from the town, from the municipalities. You could be trying to create good relations with them, it could be defending a land claim and how are we going to use that. There's an endless amount of things for good leaders to sit around and say, "˜Boy, we've got a lot of work to do.' You don't have time to be micromanaging. Unfortunately, though, it's very particular...I guess it impacts most councils, because I hear it a lot and on one hand it's sad and on another hand it's a fact of life and so when you can recognize it, if it's you, if it's your council, all you've got to say is, "˜Let's not go there. Let's not get into that rut that we know is going to happen.' But unfortunately, somebody comes from a teaching background and they're going to be on council, so right away they say, "˜I'm here to make sure that those education...it's going to change over there. I'm going to be going over there and I'm going to be watching them,' or some other. You've just got no time for that. Good leaders start from the day one and they ask, "˜What are the things that we have to be concerned about?' And teamwork works best."

Ian Record:

"You and I both know that the governance challenges facing Native nations seem to get more and more complex from one day to the next. And what it sounds like you're saying is that teambuilding as you've mentioned several times is not just a goal, should not just be a goal, it's in fact a necessity if a nation's going to really move forward in an effective way. The idea that essentially councilors can't do it all by themselves anymore."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I tell you why I like the word 'nation building.' You live on the reservation, you could be Lakota, Sioux, you could be Cheyenne, whatever nation you belong to, but there's seven, eight other communities that you belong to the same nation further recognizing you're not the nation. So you look at that and say, "˜But if I'm in a nation-building mood,' and I would always consider the whole nation first, 'I will impact for your benefit the nation. I will do things and make efforts to bring goodness and pride to everything that we're going to do.' Selfish thinking is, "˜Well, what do I want to get out of this in my time? What can I do for myself?' So nation building prepares you right off the bat that if you're going to be a nation leader, you have to think of everybody and the decisions that you're going to make has to impact for their benefit.

Leadership on a nation basis is that collective thing that I was talking about, it impacts the general benefit and it's the general interest of everyone out there. And it's not easy because nowadays we're like this: Some people have a casino, they've got good revenues coming in, good streams of revenues, they lease land, they've got good income and capacity building. You can have that very important ingredient in between that calls for good leadership mind, that's good planning. But let's say you don't have any of those things and you don't know where all your money's going to come from. Can you still have good leaders? So we're here and we're here. Yes, you can. And I think the true test of a leader is when you don't have all those things and you set those goals, you set those targets and along the way you find, yeah, there's something over there, there's a little bit over there and there's a little bit over there and as you collect them and as you develop teamwork, all of a sudden things start to move. But if you're a council that's going to be arguing all the time and those arrows are flying back and forth and sometimes it lands on your back, most cases it might happen, it could come from your community, it could come from your council, it could come from your staff, but the true test of a leader is to consider the farther, greater majority and do some community planning.

If you're shortsighted and it's that same guy that's going to say, "˜I was elected to do this,' well, it isn't going to happen. And we've seen it too many times in past events that they come and go. But there'll always be a spot for people like that and it's up to the other council members to influence them and say, "˜Here, we've got a lot of things, you're welcome to come and work with us and let's share some of this responsibility,' because portfolio, you may be the head of education, but other chiefs may come and help you with that. You may be the head of justice, but you can have another group that's going to work with you. It's not a one-man operation. Nor is the...sometimes you call them the Grand Chief or the Head Chief, the 'big chief,' whatever people would be referring to, it's just a man, it's just a woman and got a lot of responsibilities and for the Head Chief, he's got to hold everything together, he's got to make sure he's not the king, he's not the queen. It's a responsibility that is shared and that's the secret to good success."

Ian Record:

"From what you've been saying, Mike, one of the keys to Akwesasne's success over the past 25 years or so has been instilling transparency and accountability in government where none essentially existed before. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the importance of transparency and accountability to empowering a nation's leaders to do their jobs well."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Sometimes a chief will feel he's got to do everything so that he can get the credit for it and he'll want to have hands on personal charge of something. The secret to good leadership, if...let's say you are that person that can do it well, you can speak well, you can write well, you can articulate, then pull other people in with you. And the staff, there's got to be somebody in that particular area that you're talking about that will fit. You introduce the topic and allow for other chiefs to contribute, allow an elder or a staff person to be part of that team, because if you want to do everything yourself and you think that's the only way it's going to get done -- unfortunately that's very true with a lot of our people -- it doesn't always work because your own team will begin to feel like, "˜Eh, he's a big show-off. He's a know-it-all. He's the only one that can do it.' You're not part of that team and sometimes we don't see that. You go home thinking, "˜Boy, I sure gave it to them. I sure made a good speech. Boy, they must have liked me for things that I was able to say,' while in reality they probably said, "˜That guys was hogging the whole...wasn't a team player and he spoke way too long and he's very selfish in his attitude,' etcetera. So you have to analyze the situation and put yourself in the place where what do you want to do with the gift that you have.

The elders will say when you're born and as they've been watching you grow up and they put their hand on you and they say, "˜I saw you dance, you're going to be a good dancer. I heard you speak.' And as you're growing up, they'll say, "˜You're a good hunter. You have a gift.' And as you grow up a little bit more they'll say, "˜You're a good speaker. You'll be a good leader someday.' Use those abilities well. They didn't tell you that you're going to be the only one speaking. They didn't tell you you're going to be the only one singing because it requires everybody to sit together to make good music. It requires you to speak well and blend and carry people and work with them and that will resonate, that will have strength. In Iroquois teachings, when the Peacemaker came to the Mohawks and when they were doubting his message, he gave them one arrow and he says, "˜Break it.' So that Band councilman, he just crunches it and throws it back at him, show him how strong he is. He turned around and he took five arrows in a bunch and he says, "˜Now break this one.' So he's there trying to break it and it wouldn't break. The message that he was telling him was when you have people working together, when you have nations working together, the restraints there and it won't break. So these are things that are taught to us to say it's far better to concern yourself in working on a collective basis, working together, achieve your goal and if the nation has to fight on issues, it's better if we're all on the same side and going the same way. If we can't settle that, then we don't go fight. We manage to settle it at home. Make sure that by the time we get done we're going to go in a certain direction. So those are all important things to know."

Ian Record:

"How important an asset has an educated community been for Akwesasne as it's moved down the nation-building path?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"What's that?"

Ian Record:

"How important an asset has an educated community, an involved community, been as Akwesasne has moved down this nation-building path?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, we covered it a while ago. It's easy to regress. When leaders...you have to allow for leadership to change. In my 25 years there were times when I left and made room for others to try it. Some will last a year, maybe they won't even complete their term but they will say, "˜That's a tough job.' But you always room for people to learn. Some are members of council. "˜I'm going to try that.' And then you appreciate how difficult it is because it's not that it's so difficult, it's what you do with it when you're there and how do you involve people and get them working together because if you don't do that, then those micromanaging minds come back again. And so with us it goes up, it goes down, it goes up. And when you have people that are fairly new, you're always going to have that problem because they're going to look at what they do well. And they will always say, "˜We need a lot of training. We need to know the issues.' But some will say, "˜We can't, we can't, we can't let people know we don't know a whole lot so we're not going to invite anybody. We're just going to drift in and we'll watch the house.' So nobody goes lobbying, nobody goes to meetings, nobody negotiates, nobody takes on the hard issues and you get to the end of the term, boy, the community says, "˜Geez, they didn't do anything here.' "˜We didn't have a crisis, we didn't get into any trouble.' "˜Yeah.' "˜We didn't go too far either.' So there's another change. So to me, it's always nice to see a blend of experienced people, new people coming in, elders, young people coming in, and with that blend you can do a lot. So I'm not going to say...and the reason I was a little stunned by your question, we're not in any degree in Akwesasne up here. It goes up and down and you learn as you go along.

I'll talk a little bit about my community. This long table, if you separate it in half, that's Akwesasne. This side is the United States, this side is Canada, and you separate what's on the Canadian side to two-thirds is in Quebec, one-third is in Ontario so that's five jurisdictions on the outside. Then you have a tribal council for the American side, then you have Mohawk council elected government on both sides. You have a nation traditional council that governs in a traditional way. So there's three governments and five governments, that's eight governments. I always think of the community, do they understand everything that goes on? And try to get as much information out. So it goes up and down and we have our share of crises because of all those borders, it's inviting for criminal organizations to say, "˜Ah...' There's the St. Lawrence River -- let me clarify -- right in the middle of our territory and for policing authorities, it's a "˜no-go' zone because these borders, the international border zigzags around islands so the law enforcement is virtually impossible on the river and people hear about that and so they take advantage of it. And people come and entice our young people to say, "˜Take things across for me and you'll make some money.' So it's always a battle to have a law-and-order society. It's always a battle to keep your young people on line.

Educated? Young kids will say, "˜Why the hell should I get an education, I'm making $5,000 a week?' Years ago, it's still going on, the greatest pride was for a high steel worker. "˜I work in New York City, I work in Philadelphia, I work in San Francisco.' Anywhere there's a big building going up, there's Mohawks on there. That's our skill. And we all aspire when we're young that that's, 'I want to be like my uncle, like my father, like my brother.' So that's the thing that's still ongoing. But now this new thing has come in that has influenced and it's not just cigarettes any longer. There's drugs going across, there's guns going across, and so it's becoming a real dynamic criminal activity and there's major players on both sides. So leadership is hard. It's hard to stabilize; it's an ongoing battle. Having said that, then knowing all that then you say, "˜Okay, well, what makes for a good leader, then?' It's all those things that you have to apply. And people go in and they say, "˜Well, that guy that got elected to look after the housing issue?' There's guys that went up on council to look after the smugglers, protect them or some other issue, and he winds up on council.

So it's...leadership is tough and it's as best as everybody else is going to work together and keep things moving. And it might be that someday be down or it could be just as hard for other leaders on other reservations, it's never easy. Historical, current, future leadership, Native Americans, never easy; but what you do in your time to be a leader, you leave a mark and if you want to leave your mark and if you've been on council a long time, how do you want that people to make their mark? It's nice for them after you've left council, people come up to you and shake your hand and say, "˜I'm really grateful that you've come home and dedicated your time and there's things that we see here that you've contributed to,' and you feel good inside. Or you can be selfish and say, "˜Well, I did my thing. I got some houses there. I did my thing and that's it,' and you have this empty feeling. So it's a lot of work, it's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes there's hardly any pay or very little of it so devotion as a commitment comes into play."

Ian Record:

"Your discussion just now brought to my mind a comment that one of your colleagues, Chief Helen Ben of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, once said. She said that, "˜My job as a leader is to make myself indispensable.' I'm sorry, "˜To make myself...my job as a leader is to make myself dispensable.' And really what she was referring to is how important it is for leaders to govern beyond their own term in office or their own potential terms down the road, however many terms that might be, to really govern for the long term. And you've talked about that. I was wondering if you'd talk a little bit more about that and how that should be foremost in a leader's mind."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Well, when you work with your staff and figure out where you're going to be in 10 years, 20 years down the line and you start planning for it and you say, "˜Our population is going to double in that time and so we need infrastructure, we have to build new roads and all, we've got to allot some land, we've got to have a community center expand, our school programs, our buildings are going to have to expand so we have to work for those things.' After you leave, whether it's one term or 10 terms, but those are the kind of things that people will be grateful for, that you've had that wisdom and you'd had that long sight to say, "˜We've got to look at the future as well.' It is so important for leaders to gauge the present and where they came from, to where they are, to where you need to go. And if you're in a community where you have neighboring reservations and you can work together on something, not compete with each other, but whether it's solving a land claim, having an arena you can share, or a justice system you can share and the more things that you do, it extends beyond where you live. If your cousin, relatives are close by, there's eight reservations and you're all the same nation, then do that long planning, "˜What could we all do together?' Because maybe as a result that the collectivity of all those territories, it might be 40,000 and then in your planning you say, "˜Well, what do we need for 40,000 now?' So maybe we need a judge that's going to be trained or a number of them that'll be able to go around and hear cases for all of us and then we can all have a justice system, we can all have our court system, we can all have those laws that'll be for our people to provide for that law and order. But on my own, "˜I've only got 800. I can't afford to do that. But if we all chip in, what could we do?' So when somebody says, "˜I dispense myself to this community and to around,' that's what I see, the ability to well, work on issues from your community to your own region, your own area to national and international because you can go to a national chiefs meetings, National Congress of American Indians to Assembly of First Nations and you get to know the issues. It's always time well spent. What are the national issues that are affecting us? And to have that experience, to know it well and before you go, what are they talking about over there. So I'll just do a little bit of reading to know what's all the stats in regards to education, what are the funding, what are the national housing dollars, health situations and if you don't have it when you go up there, make sure you go around and you ask for that information so you can bring it home. Knowing data, have information on the national trend. Even if it's how many of our people make up the prison population? How many of our own people are dropping out of school, suicide rates? A leader needs that information because wherever you're going to go talk, you have to be able to quote statistics. You have to be able to know how we're impacted. Know the other side, too. A lot of our people are now going to school and graduating. A lot of people are now coming home. They're our doctors, they're our lawyers. Well, how many is that? How many from our area? What's the national trend? Those are things that leaders have to know, it's good to know to have in your pocket so that when you're talking to a government person on the side and he says something, there's no greater satisfaction if you can put him in his place with statistics. But if you know what you're doing, it'll certainly help."

Ian Record:

"So essentially what you're saying is it's critical as a leader to know your community and not just know it well and systematically, so you know for instance what problems and challenges your community faces -- whether it's drug use, alcohol use, whatever it might be -- but also on the flip side knowing what your assets are, knowing how well educated your community is, who those recent graduates as you said are. That can be critical as you try to apply those resources towards what your goals are."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"That long-term planning is knowing how many of your children are going to be coming back from college, university, having...all this time, how many are in a certain level and their career planning and you reach out to them. "˜Don't forget, we'll have something in place you can come home to.' The saddest part for all of us is that we have nothing to offer them when they get an education and the other sad story is that they graduate and they keep going and they say, "˜Well, there's nothing for me at home. So I'm going to marry off the reservation, I'm going to live off the reservation and I'll still maintain...I'll come home once in awhile,' and you get disconnected. So maybe not here, but maybe that other reservation needs a doctor, needs a lawyer, they need something. That's why I'm saying, make sure that on a collective basis you know what your stats are, what your numbers are, and where people are going and what they're learning and amongst yourselves create that team. The team isn't just around the council, isn't just around your community, it's your whole nation and even beyond and knowing the organizations that are out there. Could our children land in some institution, some organization that they could work for that would still benefit us, because they're always just a little jump to come back home."

Ian Record:

"Really what you're describing, and we see this in so many Native communities on both sides of the border, is this issue of brain drain, where your best and brightest young people go off, get their educations and then when they finish there's no opportunity for them. And what we've seen is where leaders, where nations do the due diligence of creating stability in their nation, stability in their governing systems, it tends to foster those opportunities where those young people can then come back and become a part of the community again and not drift away."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Yep. Let me point a few things out from experience. This is for young leaders and I'm thinking, "˜Well, I want to be a good leader, what should I do?' You get on council, get a list of all your students that are out there in college, universities that are far away from home. Write to them, tell them you're on council and get their thoughts, get their opinions. Tell them, "˜Your council would like to know and they'd like to keep in touch.' You don't know how it impacts a student that's far away, that's going to keep going unless somebody goes out and say, "˜Hey, I care and we're thinking of you and we're hoping that when you get an education, we hope during that time you're getting an education that you're going to maintain contact with us.' And it's never a bad idea for leaders to go and visit the schools where their students are going to school. Activities. Those students will probably have, if there's a bunch of them, will have some kind of a Native student activity going on. Leaders should go to those things. We only look at the statistics. How many people we lose, not dying, not suicide, not drugs. We lose our nation members because when they get outside and they learn and they don't want to come home because we haven't maintained contact with them, we haven't kept in touch with them, we haven't told them we care about what they do. And so they marry off, they marry somebody in the city and then they come back home and they say, "˜Hey, you're not one of us anymore.' And all those other things start coming into play. So the wisdom of a leader is gauged not just what goes on in his community, but with the youth and what is going to impact them down the line and that connection part. Sometimes we only concern ourselves when a person comes home and they're married to a non-Native. And it's, "˜Ah, damn it, they have no rights here. They just want our gaming revenue, they just want our education fund, they want our status.' And nobody maintained any contact and that's not exactly a welcome home. There's elders around and we haven't made that connection. So there's all kinds of reasons, pros and cons, but isn't it better to be proactive and maintain contact and tell them...your young people you care and give them that traditional and cultural and spiritual support so that they value who they are and they know who they are and that they will come home?"

Ian Record:

"And also creating the opportunities for them to come home, to follow those careers that they went off..."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"You want to be a good leader? Well, let's see. Let's build another school, a higher level. We need teachers now. What about our health institutions? We need our own nurses. We need our own doctors. That's the challenge of being a leader is what institutions can be facilitated and be homegrown and communications with your young. If you trained for this, there's something for you at home. And then when you do those things, well, then somebody's got to build those schools, somebody that's good with their hands has to build those schools so there's jobs at home, so a lot of community development."

Ian Record:

"Where we've seen this issue of brain drain really rear its ugly head is when you have a high level of political instability, meaning one administration replaces the previous administration and the new administration fires everybody and they put their own people in and very soon the message is clear to everyone in the community that -- and particularly those that have gone off to get their education -- if they've come back, they've invested their education, their skills in the community and suddenly they're out of a job. They say, "˜Why am I going to stick around for this?' We see that so many places and I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. You're starting to laugh I see."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Man, I've seen enough of those. I guess I could cry. You feel bad about seeing those things. I've seen them at home. Fortunately, it's recent past and as we develop more, there's less and less of it happening, but it still happens and attitudes like that. And so nowadays you always have to have a balance from the youth and family and elders in the community that is going to have to say, "˜We need good leaders.' It is who you put in, because the ones that get on and unfortunately somebody has an idea, he might either buy his way on, he'll garner the votes, he'll get on and he'll take the community to a certain direction. I look at it say, "˜Well, it goes on, it's like that all over the world. You have leaders of nations that are like that but why do we have to be like that?' And I guess it's just dialoguing, it's just communicating. When you give an example like that, you tend to turn around and say, "˜Not my community, we're not like that.' And you get home and you say, "˜Well, we were like that five years ago. This council's like that but do we want to be that way.' It's a lot of thinking, a lot of soul searching and when you hear of things like this, you tend to think of your home community right away. "˜What are we like over there? How much of this nation thinking goes on at home?' And that's the most important message. And it's controlled a lot by the people that don't even have that recognition or the thought that, "˜We're the ones that are in power here.' And we could take them out of power if they don't behave. But they don't go vote, they don't want to get involved. They're sick of the way the leaders are, but they don't do anything. So it's a society thing. But those thoughts have to be transmitted and I always try to go to the younger ones that are saying, "˜You can impact it. You can go home and...' "˜Well, there's nothing to go home to.' They say, "˜You ought to see my leaders where I come from.' Well, then, how about changing it. So I've heard all the different views, I've seen a lot of situations like that and sometimes I'm asked to sit with them and just by communicating they kind of recognize where they're at. You see them at national meetings, where a guy's up there and he's talking about how sovereign he is and then he goes home and he does his BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] thing. He falls into the system. How do you get out of that system? Nation building allows you to think on a broader scale. When you're thinking of the whole nation, you're thinking of the young people and the elders and the families, you're thinking of your community, you're thinking of your nation and then the challenge goes on from there. Man, there's lots to do for a leader without having to micromanage, without having to have bad feelings against one person or another or a group or to represent just a few. But let's face it, in reality it's like that."

Ian Record:

"Really what you're speaking to is that while it is really important to elect good people that have, as you said, in their heart the entire community in mind when they make decisions, it's also jobs...the job of effective governments to put in place those rules that either discourage or punish those bad leaders for acting in ways that only advance their own interests and not the nation's."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"In about our second term, we started recognizing that that might be a situation with certain leaders coming down, whether they're on council now, or we've seen this happen or you'll say, "˜We don't want it to happen.' So we put together a code of ethics for chief and council, how they're going to behave. One of the things that you don't do, and if you do, what does the community have to empower to take you out or discipline you or suspend you or remove you from office? And we went out in the community and got all that feedback and then they put it together. So when you are installed into office and you sign a commitment to the community, your pledge, you also sign a code of ethics that you're going to be a good leader. That's what I was saying a while ago that we've seen it and we learn from experience. If we don't want to go down that road, put things in place in your community so that when you have situations like that and all that is based on something that may have happened before, you see it, or you even have a fear that you don't want to go down there and you put things in place. And when leaders go into office, they will make a commitment that "˜this is how I'm going to serve.' They won't be embarrassed to say, "˜Yes, I will sign a pledge, I will sign a commitment, I will sign a code of ethics how my conduct will be while I'm in office,' and I've seen a few people taken out of office when they violate that, but that's the rule. And if there's communities that need to work on things like that, involve the community, they'll give you a lot of good ideas."

Ian Record:

"What would be your advice to nations, Native nations both in the United States and Canada who, for example, have been operating under either Indian Reorganization Act governments or Indian Act governments where it's essentially created this system where outsiders are calling the shots, where they're kind of stuck in this dependency mode and are searching for a way out or searching to begin to rebuild their nations as nations. What would be your advice to them in terms of where they might begin?"

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Sometimes you are impressed by something you've heard out there, it could be a national chiefs' meeting, it could be a regional meeting, it could be out there or another tribe that's, groups that have made a presentation and you bring it home. I guess the first point of contact is if you find people out there, bring them and introduce them to your council. If you have a thought that you say, "˜Geez, that's different thinking. They talk of different ways than we're doing,' invite them. And it's that thought that it's not just you because it's frustrating when you're the only leader that wants to change and everybody else is locked in. We call that the Indian agent mentality or the mode. If you find people that have these ideas or you've learned of some community that has done things a certain way, invite them or go visit them. Take a delegation, go visit them and bring that information back. It's productive. It can do wonders because a change in attitude, sometimes they don't know and they've got consultants, they've got lawyers running their business. There's nothing more adventurous and more satisfying than to have a community try something or leadership try something and say, "˜It'll get us far better results. Tradition, we haven't been doing that. We haven't gone down that way.' Well, there's always room for leadership to try something. If you've got an idea, bring it to council and if it's something that you can try...nation building is, sad to say, is still new. People are engrained in a certain mentality, locked in a certain way that they're going to do business. It's hard to change them. And as younger people come on and the more they see the outside and they have a broader perspective of things, those are the ones that will say, "˜We'll try it.' How do you change it? I guess we just have to try to advance more people out there, spread the word more. But there's...yeah, I know what you mean. There's a lot of councils out there that are still locked in and it's very unfortunate, but I get a lot of letters from chiefs across Canada asking about the same thing. "˜Can you direct us somewhere or somebody could come you can recommend?' And I recommend a lot."

Ian Record:

"So really what you're saying is, it's learn as much as you can about what other nations are doing in nation-building ways so you can then start a dialogue within your own community, because it's not going to happen overnight."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"As we were developing, in the first couple terms in Akwesasne, I started signing agreements with First Nations and they weren't just Iroquois communities. West Bank in British Columbia, that's at the other end of the country, we signed an agreement with them to exchange information, to share resources, to exchange thoughts on leadership, on issues, land claims, nation-building ideas, and as far as we have been separated we're always exchanging ideas. And they're one of the very few communities in Canada that have settled a self-government process with Canada and they created a constitution, a charter that was drafted by the community and now they're trying to, understand this isn't easy, with all kinds of things in here that are accountability factors that we haven't done before. Sometimes they'll say, "˜Can you fly up here and talk to our community?' Or if they're in Ottawa and I invite them to come and visit us. And they're not the only ones. There are others.

We had a trade treaty with Mayans in Guatemala. I heard what was going on with a tribe over there and they had finished a 30-year war and when they got home they got about a tenth of their original territory, they had no economy, but they're in a warm climate, they had access to coffee. We flew down there and said, "˜We'll buy coffee from you.' But I went to the government and I told them, "˜We're buying coffee from them. We don't want you to come in here and say I'm going to take the percentage off because I want to do this treaty with them that's going to say fair market.' And it ran about five years and it went quite well. A lesson we learned is, when is the proper time to take something like that and turn it over to a private entrepreneur and let him take that off? You've created the opportunity, but our council was saying, "˜Gee, that's our idea. We control that.' Well, it was up there, a lot of nice things being said and everything, then it came crashing down because as leaders changed they don't know what's going on, they're not so committed to it anymore. It was a wonderful idea. I advocate trade amongst First Nations, among Native American tribes and it was a longstanding tradition. It's like that for all of us. What could we do to improve our economies? What could we do for our youth to have, secure good employment? So it's something that's not on the table, but I would advocate to any nation-building group to think of those things because you share resources, you develop resources, you develop good nation people and they'll stay home, you create opportunities. I just throw that in there because that's something that's starting to scratch the surface.

I went through the Supreme Court in Canada on trade. All they asked me, the government in Canada, "˜Can you prove that you have an aboriginal right to trade by some treaty or some Aboriginal right? If you can prove in a Canadian court, we'll accommodate you, we'll implement it, and we'll negotiate the exercise of that right.' So we set up a test case. Four or five years later, it finally gets to court and I win everything. The government is so thrown back. I says, "˜You asked. This is a test case and now you have it recognized in a Canadian court.' Well, six years later, ministers have changed, government people have changed, your justice people are paranoid to no end. "˜We've got to appeal. We didn't think you were going to win here.' Well, it went to the next level. I won there, too. So now a new government is in place and they don't like it. "˜Well, we don't know who made that commitment,' but isn't it typical of our history? "˜Oh, that group made that treaty with you. We're no longer responsible for that.' So they went to the Supreme Court and then they altered, restructured the argument. So I lost on a 'no' decision. They didn't take the right away that we could cross back and forth, they didn't take the right away that we could cross with our own goods duty free, tax free. The only thing we were concerned about was the trade, with that decision you could threaten the sovereignty of Canada. With that decision you could threaten the financial institutions of our country because you could set up all the reservations with goods crossing back and forth. I says, "˜That's not what the argument was about. The argument was about the right for Native Americans to conduct trade amongst themselves. It can be regulated. It can be controlled. We can do it across the table from you but we have that right.'

So I got gypped, as all the lawyers in Canada would say, "˜You got robbed.' So I took them to the International Court and we've had the hearing, we're waiting for a decision so the adventure goes on. It's always a good fight. It don't have to be with spears and bows and arrows or AK-47s. The fight continues when you have spirit to advance those things, but the most important part, what can be done in Aboriginal trade that would really benefit our nations? It's unknown territory and yet we haven't realized we have a lot of resources, we have a lot of potential and that's the next frontier. So we can stay in a socially deprived, in social conditions or we can say, "˜We've got to do some nation building here and we've got to take that challenge up.' And I give that message to all the young leaders that want to build. It don't necessarily have to be right from home, but you look at layers and layers of processes of nation building and it's a lot of satisfaction. If you're going to be a good leader you'll last a long time because there's so many challenges out there for leaders to think about."

Ian Record:

"So the moral of the story is think outside and work outside of those many boxes that the colonial forces have created for Native nations and begin to forge your own boxes and your own opportunities."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"I had an elders' council advising me most of my time on council. And I would always ask them what did they think of something because sometimes they [slap], "˜That's bad for us.' "˜All right, well, let's talk about it,' and we'd get a bigger discussion going. And all of a sudden, "˜Well, it's bad for us now. What do you want to do with it?' "˜Well, I don't know. I think we should build an arena to have a place for our youth to gather rather than hanging around the streets.' Pretty soon other people join in and discussions flow and the next thing you know it turns into a better idea, but you have to be able to discuss the pros and cons of anything I guess, but I always liked the idea of taking matters to elders and running it by them. And after a while, anything new I would always go to them and say, "˜What do you think of us?' and get that feedback. And sometimes they'll say, "˜Well, wait a minute. This is an issue that our daughters, the women folk should know about. This is something that the men should know about.' So we'd call a men's meeting and get that feedback, especially if it means you want to build something and you know they're going to say, "˜Well, there's employment there,' but there's also unions and there's also these other things. So it's better to have that support if you're going to go out there and say, "˜I want that employment for my people in my reservation, I want the most, I want to be able to identify how much of that can best be turned around and have our people employed.' You're never wrong if you go back to your people and say, "˜What are your ideas and what's the feedback?' And when they understand it, they'll give you a good decision."

Ian Record:

"Well thanks, Mike, for this very informative discussion. It's been very enlightening for me and I'm sure for Native nations and Native leaders across North America."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"[Mohawk language]." 

Jamie Fullmer: Taking a Strategic Approach at Yavapai-Apache Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Jamie Fullmer, former chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, discusses how his nation developed a strategic approach to tackling its nation-building challenges during his time in office. He stresses the importance of Native nations and leaders conducting comprehensive of the state of their communities and people in order to engage in informed, effective decision making that yields positive, lasting results.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Fullmer, Jamie. "Taking a Strategic Approach at Yavapai-Apache Nation." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. April 12, 2007. Presentation.

"My name is Jamie Fullmer. I'm Chairman of Yavapai-Apache Nation. I'm President of Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona and this is my second term in office.

As the Chairman of Yavapai-Apache Nation, I understand what all of you as tribal leaders are going through. We go through some strange and unique times because we come in with dreams and goals and commitment to doing great things and then we get hit by the reality of what goes on in our communities.

I had been graced with the idea and the fortunateness of working with my tribe as the Health and Human Services Director and I got to see what was really going on. I know about the drug problems in our communities. I know about the young people having babies in our communities. I know about the hard fact that some of our people don't have education. I know about the reality of the difficulty of finding jobs. And I think one of those things that...all of these things really connected to me and it helped me as coming into the chairmanship that I needed to do some things that were very important, but I also needed to be realistic. And I think that's the one thing that I'm very grateful for today is that my experience in social work and working with people helped me to be realistic.

It doesn't mean that we can't have dreams and hopes. It means, though, that as tribal leaders and as people working for our tribal governments that you take an honest look at what's going on in the community. I heard one time a tribal leader that said something that hit me home because I didn't agree with it, but out of respect I listened. He said, ‘I like to think that we don't have any problems in our communities,' when I was the Director of Health and Human Services and I knew full well what the problems were in our community. But I think that the important part of what we're learning in these sessions and what we're learning through NNI is that we have to be reality-based and we also have to be based in understanding or learning to understand what is it that we have.

And I guess the challenge for us all is to take a look and do a survey. In my community, I do an annual survey on a couple of different areas. And before I get to that though, Manley [Begay] had represented the idea that when I got into office I knew that I needed some help. I knew that I needed some ideas. I knew that I needed expertise. I knew what we had internally and I knew we needed more, because sometimes the outside words of wisdom are listened to a little more clearly than the inside words. And I think we all face that in our own lives and in our leadership roles. So I reached out to the group down here, NNI, Native Nations Institute and I was pleasantly surprised and I'm very appreciative.

And we did...originally we had worked out a 30-year comprehensive plan. And when I got into leadership I thought that 30 years is a long time. In this pace of reality, 30 months is a long time. Things change so fast and so I asked that they come back and we did another work session where we narrowed our 30-year vision down into a three to five-year increment because I felt like that's manageable, that's something that all of us can feel. I can say, ‘We can accomplish this in 30 days, in 90 days, in one year and we can put actions behind the words.'

When I got into the office I got into a very...somebody was talking about a corner office. I have a corner office. But when I walked into that office there was a bookshelf and it was full of books and every one of those books was a master plan. And these were plans from 1975, 1985, 1992, 1994 and believe it or not I read through them all. But I understood why the leaders couldn't accomplish what was in those plans. Because they weren't realistic and they weren't...I heard the word earlier...they weren't culturally matching to our community.

So when I challenge people to do a survey of your community, I'm not only asking how many people do you have? I know in Yavapai Apache Nation we have 2,020 tribal members. We just enrolled a handful more and we're growing and we're proud of that. I know that half of them live in the community and half of them live off the community. I know that of that half that live off the community, a majority of them live in Phoenix. I know those things about our community based on our demographics. I know that we have a young people, that 1,000 of our people are 18 and under. I know that we have only 60 of our very important and critical resources, which is our elders over 60 years old. I know these things and because I know these things, we plan around that. How do we utilize our human resources? And I'm not talking about human resource...some of you are probably human resource for employees, but as a leader we need to look at what are our human resources in our community.

I'm very proud to say our people today, we have 240 tribal members in a college or higher education. I'm very proud of that. But then the next step of that is how do we get them to come back into our community? It was talked about earlier, brain drain. What is it that we can provide for our community that will give them a commitment level to want to come back? In my case in coming back it was more of a spiritual thing and I know that not everybody is driven by the spirit in their young lives but they become more driven by the spirit as they grow older. But how do we get people to connect to the important part of our culture, which is spirit. I think those are the challenges that every one of you as well as myself face in our leadership roles and in our management roles.

Because one of the things we heard earlier was colonialism. I've heard that a lot over...I guess I'm still young. Some people say I'm not a spring chicken anymore. This colonial ideal: how do we as traditional people living in traditional ways move forward with this colonial system? We adopt constitutions; that's not our way. We adopt European laws; that's not our way. And then we have to put inside of that the parts of our culture that maybe sometimes don't fit. So at times in our modern-day systems, we have pieces that don't naturally fit. What is it that leaders need to do to be able to mend that or create that weaving or that tapestry that will connect those pieces? Those are the questions that every one of you are asking or you wouldn't be here for the last two days. Those are the questions that we need answers to that we can pass along to our people.

Because I'm proud of my people, but my people challenge me. They challenge me all the time. And as a tribal leader, you may be thinking about a big decision, ‘We need to create policies for commerce and economy, we need to create laws that will govern the future of our people,' and still you'll have an elder come in and say, ‘My transmission's broken and you need to fix it.' And I'm going to tell you what, if you don't treat those two on equal grounds, you're not going to be in the seat very long as a leader because they are just as important to our people. Or when a young person dies in the community and yet you're considering and you're thinking, ‘I'm developing an economy for the future. I'm developing things for the future.' All of you as leaders know that in your heart you're crying about the young person who's died in the community and yet you have to be the one to stand strong so that your people can rely on your strength. I think those are the critical pieces that we face in the modern world as tribal leaders.

I'm fortunate to live in a time as we move into the 21st century, well into it now, as we move into it, we are in a time where we have the most...from the 20th century to now we have the most political freedom that we've ever had. Believe that or not. We're still oppressed, but we have the most freedom that we've ever had. And how do you exercise that? How do you exercise sovereignty in this world? Some people would argue, ‘Well, when you waive limited sovereign immunity you're giving up something.' But you know what, if you don't, if you don't acknowledge that you have something, how can you give it up? You have to acknowledge that you have something. That's what sovereignty is, in my humble opinion. There are challenges to that and I respect those challenges. Every community is different and every one of you have different priorities in your community. I respect that.

I think that one of the biggest pieces that I see now as we move into things is that as we're all here trying to figure out how to govern our societies, how to create economy, how to do important things for the people, and yet at the same time still be close to the heart, still be close to the earth, still be honest about the social problems, because we can have giant dreams but if people don't buy into the dreams, it doesn't go anywhere. I think that that's probably the biggest challenge for leaders, for those of you working for tribes. The leaders care deeply about their people. They wouldn't sacrifice their personal lives to lead if they didn't care deeply about their people. But yet your job as management is to understand their vision, learn from them, and use your skills to help move the system forward. These are the challenges that all of us face and I know that and I respect you for facing that.

As we...as I talk a little bit I'm going to go over just a few areas and then I know it's time for dessert so you'll be ready for some carrot cake or...Torry, did you cook dessert, too? We move forward and we have to look at the reality of it is that everything we do in this modern world that strengthens our government or strengthens our society is in some strange way connected to our financial resources. And this is a hard thing for us. We saw earlier the very powerful speaker, Professor [Robert] Williams. We heard about him and how the trade was governed differently, how the thoughts were governed differently. But I know very well in our community, and I pray about it -- I'm a prayerful man, I live in that world -- and the answer always comes back that if you have strong ties to culture, if you have strong ties to spirit, and you can learn to respect and understand finances, you will be successful and last a long time as people. Those things are critical. Even though I'm not a man that's tied to finances in my own thinking, I understand that you have to respect it in order to strengthen it. Just like with everything. You have to respect yourself to strengthen yourself. You have to respect your people to strengthen your community. Those things go together.

And so as I look at this, I think there's some important things and you're taking part in one of them and that is council training and learning how to teach one another to be a team. The one thing about council is that we are in...as leaders we're in oppositional seats at times because we have to fight one another to get where we're at. That's part of the politics. But when that's over and the battle's over and that's won and you've organized your group, it's in the best interest of the people to learn how to work as a team. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have your opinions, that doesn't mean you shouldn't debate, because I also believe that strong and powerful debate makes for strong and powerful decisions. So you should debate, you should argue, you should do all those things on behalf of your people but at some point you have to say, ‘This is where we need to stop the debate and move forward with action.' And so I think that's a critical link.

The other thing as a tribal leader and as the head of my executive branch -- many governments are defined differently -- but one of the things that I look at is the organizational structure. The organizational structure has to do a couple of things: it has to help you as leaders and managers govern your programming and it also has to help the people that work for our nation, that work for our community, understand and learn to respect our system and if the system is, what's the word they used to use in that political or flip-flop or wishy-washy, 'some way' is the word we use. If it's 'some way,' if it's not consistent, then you don't get good quality movement from your people, from your staff. And so I think one of the critical things that I've noticed in my government is make the policies, and this was brought up earlier, make the policies and stick to them.

I've taken a lot of criticism for that. ‘You're doing things the white way.' And I'm like, ‘Business isn't a white concept.' Business is a worldwide concept. Discipline is a very important concept to my people traditionally, very strict discipline. We live very disciplined lives, so if they say that's not an Apache concept, they're completely off the track 'cause we did live very disciplined lives. So if we can keep that as a cultural thing and say, ‘This isn't a white concept or a non-Indian concept, this is a concept that we embrace.' That's how the organizational structure should work.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that there needs to be...when you create your chain of command, it needs to be an honest chain of command, because again people will try to go around the structure and the structure is what creates the strength. If you're like a jellyfish...relatives from right off the coast here. If you're like a jellyfish, you go like this. You kind of float around, you don't have the backbone. For us that live on the ground, we need a backbone to move forward.

The other thing is, I think this is critical and I know it's been brought up a little bit, but you have to have your financial house in order. You have...you don't necessarily have to be an accountant or finance wizard or anything like that, but you better have people in those positions that you trust. You also better get...we focus on ours, we created an internal audit so that if our leaders have question or our people have question we can go audit ourselves and take a look at it and give a response to them. That way it's dealt with and if they don't believe that then they can wait until our annual audit comes up by the outside auditors. But I guess what I'm saying is that for this to work, in my opinion, this is only my opinion, but you have to have the financial house in order and you always have to keep your eye on the money. Not to say that you have to be so scrutinable that you forget everything else but know your financial position, know what needs to be in place. These are things that are challenges for us, because not a lot of us are financial wizards. I trust the people that work for me and if I don't, then I can't rely on them to do the things that the tribe wants us to do.

Finally, I think as we get ...am I okay on time? Is everybody okay, you want me to shut up and get down? Sit down, shut up and get out. Finding a balance in the priorities as leaders and as managers and I think...I'm going to talk a little bit for you tribal leaders because again, this is only coming from me and what I've seen, but I've been fortunate in my I guess middle-aged life now to see a little bit in Indian Country and I think that we're pretty consistent in that we've all faced the same struggles. No matter where I go I'm like, ‘Wow, that sounds just like home.' I'm like, ‘That is so strange that coast to coast we're so similar and yet we have so much difference,' and I respect the difference, but I also think that we have to appreciate the similarity in our worlds. We've seen the historical perspective. We've all faced oppression for hundreds of years. So right now when we have political freedom, when we have a way to express our sovereignty, we need to look at a couple of things as leaders. We need to look at and set priorities to our legal...we heard earlier, what codes do you have in place? What guides do you have in place? What policies and procedures do you have in place to govern, which in my mind is leadership, governing? Those are critical things to work on.

Right now in our community, we're definitely not where we need to be, but we're very aware of what we have gaps in and so we're working on it. It takes a long time to put in a judicial code because it impacts all of your kids, or excuse me, a juvenile code. It impacts all your kids. It takes a long time to put in a commercial code, because you're not only considering yourself, you've got to look, what's it going to look like 50 years down the road. These are big decisions and so leaders who take your time, I appreciate that, but at some point you have to get through the discussion and make it a law and live with it. I think that's the big part about the legal piece that comes into play because I know we can debate, we're good debaters. In the Yavapai-Apache Nation, we like to debate. But you can debate so long and then at some point you have to just draw the line and say, ‘This is where we need to stop and if the future leaders want to change it, they have that right but at least they have a baseline, at least they have ground to walk on.'

The other is the social issues. I always look at that. I'm very proud of our people who are getting educated. I'm very proud that we have been able to get resources through our gaming to begin to expand our economy, but there's still social problems. This crystal meth in our communities -- and I don't know how many of you are afflicted by this plague -- but it's terrible and I don't know the answer. We've made our laws stronger, we've increased our police force, we've increased our treatment services, we've done educational, and the only thing you can do is keep doing more so that you never give up on your people. And I guess that's the big thing about social programming is that you have to keep doing more and never give up on your people.

Cultural: this is one unique area for our tribe because we have the Yavapais and we have Dil zhę̨̨́é and we have Apaches in our community and each of them over time we've grown together and we call ourselves one nation 'cause we live together, but we have distinct differences in our historical culture. So how do we embrace that, what I'll call 'ancient history' with our more recent history in that we've been a nation together for 100 years? How do you make that bridge in a helpful way or a healing way and some of you may have those issues with traditional and non-traditional, people who live in the old way and practice our traditional value system and people who have adopted the Christian viewpoint or whatever other viewpoint out there. How can we embrace that and still be one people? It can be done, but it takes a mature...it takes mature leaders to teach people to be mature about how we can be separate but equal.

Economic, very proudly...we were one of the poorest tribes in America before we got our gaming. Gaming has changed us in that we have been able to begin to create economy, but you also have to look at your economy as what are you doing? We talked about that this morning. What are you serving, what purpose is it serving? So there needs to be some evaluation in that is our economy just to create money or should it create jobs or can we do both. Is it on reservation, off reservation, in Arizona, out of Arizona, in America, out of America? The world is our playground now so we may as well use that.

Sovereignty is an important thing. We're very proud at Yavapai Apache Nation because we appreciate partnering with other tribes and expressing our sovereignty through tribe-to-tribe relations. We've helped four other tribes build casinos and we have a partnership with an Alaskan Inupiat company for constructing buildings. And we've also...right now we're in a partnership...

And believe me, I'm not saying this as a bragging thing. I just think it's an important thing to express that I don't just say this before you and walk out of here...'I really pulled the wool over their faces,' but it's not that way. We do...we say it and we do it and we do it and we say it. We're proud of what we do...what we do, what we say we're going to do. That's cultural. I'm sure every one of you are that same way in your cultures, but some of these things are important because we've got to bridge a gap that was created between us as Indian people. This whole federal government got in the way and said, ‘You guys can't do anything on your own. We've got to be your big brother.' We seen earlier the river, the wampum belt with the river. That's how it has to be. It's not...we don't need a big brother. We need partners, we need relatives, we need friends, we need things that are going to go a long way together. We don't need a big brother anymore. We're all grown up. We never did need a big brother.

So I think those are important things, but we also have to respect that there's that mindset there. We have to be honest and I think that's the important thing is be realistic and that's a difficult one because I would like to...I'd be like that one that said, ‘I'd like to think that the federal government, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and IHS [Indian Health Service] and all those are out to help us.' I'd like to think that but my eyes that don't deceive me, they tell me the truth. So if that's the case and I hear them saying, ‘Oh, we're giving all the help that is humanly possible,' but my eyes see that we still struggle because there isn't that help. What can we do? How do we embrace it? And I think that's where we're at in the modern sense is we're in that place of questioning. We're in the place where we have to be careful about the challenges. Because as was brought up earlier, the swipe of a pen in 1875 we had a...Yavapai-Apache Nation in Camp Verde was 800 miles, was the original reservation, and with the swipe of a pen Ulysses S. Grant completely wiped it off the face of the earth. So it can be done with the swipe of a pen today and so we have to be careful about that but we have to be strong in our assertions.

We also have to be science-minded in a sense. We have to...brought up earlier, demographics. Understand your needs, understand your community, understand your natural resources and your cultural resources and how to protect the integrity of your society. I think that's a critical piece to it. What are the faux pas and the 'no nos' and the 'yes yes' and everything else? Feasibility and market studies; get your experts to analyze things. To me, I think it's worth paying the $30,000 to prevent a $5 million loss even though we can debate all day long to say, ‘Why do we need that feasibility study and why do we need to study this, we already know it's going to work.' But if it doesn't work, would your people be more angry at the $30,000 expense for the study or the $5 million loss because of a bad investment. I'll take the heat for $30,000. I'm not going to take the heat for $5 million. So that's important too as leaders and as managers: realize that you have a fiduciary responsibility of your people's financial dealings. I think that's an important part of this. Put yourself in the same boots because you're walking for your people when you're out there. You're walking and talking for your people.

Also I think...I brought this up just a touch, but I'll get into it a little bit about the political landscape. Right now in Indian Country, we're in a difficult political landscape around us. We've had some negative vibrations come to us. And so how do we as people need to be...how can we be public and create relations with our local communities around us so that it isn't so bad of a taste? You go to the east over there and they're all crazy right now. This, that and the other, we need to change all the laws against gaming and it's kind of mind boggling in a sense but then you have to go home and say, ‘How do we keep ourselves stable at home? How do we protect home?'

And then not only your external landscape, but your internal landscape. Are you in an oppositional system or do you guys fight a lot and is that your customs? That's fine, but can you get agreement on some things so that at least something comes out of it? All of us that have term limits have a limited time to get things done. And I think that's the important thing too as leaders of things. What kind of compromises can you make and what ones do you need to stand by? And I think that's an important thing, at least for me. There are things that I'm willing to compromise to make the bigger picture work. There are things that I won't because it's in my heart not to and I think as people we need to take personal integrity inventories to decide...I guess it's an internal code of ethics. What drives you and how...what drives your other fellow leaders and how can you work together?

And I think one of the discussions that was brought up, Joan [Timeche] you brought this up, and it's about the community readiness. One of the things that we really have to understand is what is our community ready for. My Indian name is [Apache language], which is 'Jumping Lizard,' because my people say I'm always jumping around. And I think that's the biggest thing that you have to look at is what is the community ready for? Because some things get exciting and then some things get scary and then some things feel overwhelming. I think that's one of the important facets to this and that's. What these sessions help with is taking little bites out. We're all going to hopefully eat this carrot cake when it comes but can we...some of us, like me, we'll put it all in and eat it and some of us got to take it one bite at a time. And I think that's an important thing that...I know that I've been...one of my challenges is being able to see and instead of asking, ‘Why aren't you ready?' asking, ‘What can I do to help you be ready?' And it's a simple question of change, but it's a hard one for someone who says, ‘Everybody should know why we should be able to build more, bigger, better, faster-moving machine.' But not everybody feels that way. Some people like to go slow. Some people like to think through things and I respect that.

Just in closing, I really appreciate the concepts that have been brought out because this is really what we need. We need to have leaders coming together because again today I hear all of these important questions coming out of you obviously important people and they're the same questions that I'm asking at home and I'm like, ‘Gosh, this is a good day and age because we're growing, we're doing important things,' but now we've got to have a change of thinking. We can't think about what is the world around us going to give us. We have to think about what in the world can we give ourselves and can we give that to others as well. And it's our time. I really believe that it's our time, that we can do good things with one another like's being done today by learning together. We can do good things with one another by teaching together. We can do good things with one another by creating fantastic, amazing businesses together and we can do a very important thing which is, as was brought up earlier, about teaching Americans, teaching the Indians how to be Americans. We can teach the rest of the world how we are and they can learn to respect us as we learn to respect ourselves. And so I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you all today. It's an honor and it's a privilege and thank you, [Apache language]."

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "Administrative Competence"

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI Executive Director Joan Timeche discusses the need for Native nations to develop administrative competence through the cultivation, attraction and retention of qualified staff.

Citation

Timeche, Joan. "Administrative Competence." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy. University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2013. Lecture.

"When you have administrative competence, you also have to look at the people factor of it, and it's finding competent people to go...capable individuals who can come and work for you. And these don't all have to be tribal citizens. Oftentimes, we have to go out and depend on them -- on non-citizens -- to come and work in their communities. And I've had...every community can probably name a number of individuals who've been non-Natives who've come in and worked and done a tremendous job for us and helped us improve and become more effective. But one of the things you have to do is you have to find these individuals and when you find them you have to be able to support them. And this is where things like brain drain occurs. This is where you don't want council -- this is where politics can come into play and you're going to want to make sure that you're hiring people who can do the job and not people who are getting hired because they happen to know the chairman or the mayor of their town and not people who know...who got a job because their cousin was a council member or their last name was the same as the party that's in favor. You're going to want to make sure that you hire skilled individuals and you have to be able to retain these people and that means not second-guessing them at their jobs, because after all you pay them the great salaries to come in and provide that expertise to you. Otherwise, what'll happen is off they'll go off the reservation, and you can talk to a number of individuals, Native individuals who perhaps at one time worked for their own tribes and left. I'm one of those where politics was just too much for me, I was too young at that time and I had different ideas of where we should be going, probably too progressive for their likes, one of the only females at my level, there was no upward mobility for me, so it just got to be a really difficult situation so I said, "˜I know I can be treated elsewhere better,' so off I went to work for a university. And so they lost the talent there and that's what you don't want to have happen is you want to keep those people that are talented on the reservation to help you to deliver services."

Native Nation Building TV: "Introduction to Nation Building"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell present the key research findings of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. They explain the five keys to successful community and economic development for Native nations (sovereignty or practical self-rule, effective institutions of self-governance, cultural match, strategic orientation, and leadership), and provide examples of Native nations that are rebuilding their nations. 

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

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Mary Kim Titla: "Today's program examines where, how and why nation building is currently taking place in Native communities throughout the United States and beyond, in particular the fundamental issues governing Native nations' efforts to restore their social sovereignty and economic vitality and shape their own futures. Here today to discuss these nation-building issues are Drs. Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell. Dr. Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is Director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as Senior Lecturer in the American Indian Studies Programs. Dr. Cornell is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and a Professor of Sociology and Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona. For the past two decades, they both have worked extensively with Native Nations in a major research effort that seeks to identify the keys to solving the challenges to nation building. Welcome, gentleman, nice to have you here today."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Thanks for having us."

Mary Kim Titla: "First of all, what is nation building in practical terms?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Nation building is really about how Indigenous nations in the U.S. and elsewhere can put together the tools they need to build the futures that they want. And by the tools they need, we really mean the tools of governance. These are nations in our experience with very ambitious goals, they face daunting challenges, they carry the legacies of colonialism, they are trying to overcome deficits in economic affairs, in health, in all kinds of areas. If they're going to do that, they need the governing tools that are adequate to that task and Nation building is about identifying those tools, putting them in place, being sure that they match Indigenous ideas and culture and putting them to work."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can you talk about some of the tools? Explain that."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Yeah. A lot of Indian nations here in the United States have governments that they did not design. That's not true of all of them, but a lot of tribal governments were designed basically by the U.S. Department of the Interior back in the 1930s. They aren't very sophisticated structures of government. Some of them have no provision for adequate court systems or ways to resolve disputes within the nation. Some of them have got unwieldy legislatures. Some of them don't have the kinds of procedures that you need if you're going to move vigorously and effectively to make good decisions, implement them, get things done. So we're talking about rethinking some of the those tools of government. What kinds of tribal courts or other dispute resolution mechanisms will serve Indigenous needs and interests? What kinds of governing structures will people believe in and support within the nation's own community? Are those structures adequate to what the nation is trying to do? So when we talk about tools, we're talking about the practical mechanisms that nation's use to organize how they go about trying to get stuff done."

Mary Kim Titla: "Dr. Begay, would you like to add to that?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "Sure. It seems from the work that we've been doing that nation building or nation rebuilding, as Steve mentioned, really began to occur with most Indian nations around 1975 when the Indian Self-Determination Act was ushered in, and since then a lot of Indian nations have begun to wrestle with rethinking their political systems, rethinking their economies and it's not unlike other nations that have gone through colonization and all of a sudden found themselves in the midst of freedom, if you will, very much like what occurred in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union fell apart. Poland is wrestling with issues of constitutional reform, you had the European Union there, and Indian nations are in the same boat and a lot of other colonized society are wrestling with Nation building and rebuilding."

Mary Kim Titla: "Let's talk about the research. What prompted the Harvard Project and the Native Nations Institute to embark on the research?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "This kind of got us wondering what is it that makes some nations more successful than others, and in fact the data that we first looked at had to do in part with timber and with forestry. A lot of Indian nations have timber resources. Some of them seemed to be doing a better job of managing those resources than others and we got interested in why. And being professors, we thought maybe we knew the answers already -- typical of professors -- and so we thought, well, it'll be educational attainment or it'll be the Nations that have big natural resources will be doing well or the ones that have access to capital will be doing well. But we decided we'd better go look and we got a grant from the Ford Foundation to do some research. We spent a lot of time in the field getting stories of what was working, how did this enterprise succeed, how did this one fail, what else have you tried to do, what seems to be working here, what are the problems you're encountering. And the interesting sort of payoff to the research was it turned out that the critical elements were really political ones, that if you had your political house together, if you had some stability in the government, if you were successful in keeping political considerations out of enterprise management decisions or out of tribal court decisions -- if you could do some of those political things, then these sort of economic assets like good education or good natural resources or being close to a major market -- those would start to pay off. If you couldn't get the government house in order, then those assets tended to be wasted. So the result to the research was really to focus our attention on these political issues and the effect they were having on how these Nations did, whether or not they were able to achieve their goals."

Dr. Manley Begay: "And what was really interesting about the research findings initially was that we knew of no known cases of economic development, successful economic development, occurring without assertions of political sovereignty. And secondly, we also found that capable governing institutional development was a major piece of nation building. And thirdly, those institutions had to be culturally appropriate. And since then we've also found that Indian nations that are planning for the long haul if you will, a hundred years down the road -- what kind of society are we going to build, what do we perceive the society to look like 50 years from now --and those that have done that seem to be faring well or faring better than others that have not. Lastly, leadership is really critical. So these five components and research findings formed the basis for the work that we've been doing all along."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can you give us a snapshot of current Native nation-building efforts among indigenous peoples throughout the U.S. and Canada?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Yeah, in fact there are a number of Nations across the U.S. right now that are engaged in constitutional processes. The Osage Nation in Oklahoma has just launched a major constitutional reform effort. The Crow Tribe of Montana, the Northern Cheyennes are involved in that. The San Carlos Apaches are engaged in governance reform or rethinking how they govern themselves. This is happening a good deal across the U.S. It's also happening in Canada where we see First Nations that are engaged in constitutional processes. Some of them are also engaged, especially in British Columbia, in treaty processes that involved working out new relationships with British Columbia and with Canada and that process also involves rethinking governance. So we see a lot of constitutional stuff happening there. We see some developments in tribal courts. The Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, which straddles the Ontario/New York boundary, are engaged right now in trying to rebuild their justice system. They of course face some interesting justice problems because of that boundary, because they're a nation that operates in two different jurisdictions and then they have their own jurisdiction. It's a complicated situation. They're trying to develop a court and justice system that's adequate to that set of challenges. We see a number of nations like the Ho-Chunk, the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, have started a corporation called Ho-Chunk Inc., which has been a very successful enterprise reducing unemployment there. They put a lot of thought into, how do you set up this enterprise so that it has a good chance of succeeding?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "And up in Canada there's the Membertou First Nation on the east side of Canada that's actually wrestled with figuring out how to develop a capable governing institution and they did that through what's called the ISO [International Organization for Standardization], sort of international standards set-up, and then also the Siksika Blackfoot Nation in Alberta have also really moved forward in thinking about nation building and is actually doing relatively well. Lac La Ronge as well. They're finding some success in promoting their wild rice not only in Canada and the United States but also overseas as well. So there are a number of stories of First Nations and bands up in Canada, tribes in the United States that have gone the extra effort to figure out how to build nations that work, and obviously one of the major success stories is the Mississippi Choctaw. And they did that without gaming. Initially they set up good governing institutions, they asserted sovereignty, really thought through how to develop a culturally appropriate political system and actually we refer to them as the Singapore of Indian Country. They did that without gaming. Only later on did they get into gaming and every day you'll see upwards of 7,000 black and white workers going on to Nation land to work. As a result, they've become the major political and economic powerhouse in the southeast and they've done that through nation building."

Mary Kim Titla: "And I've been there to Mississippi Choctaw and I've seen what they've done. It's really great with [Chief] Phillip Martin and other tribal leaders. I imagine that they must face many obstacles and of course those obstacles can get in the way of objectives. Can you talk about some of the obstacles that some of these Nations are facing?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Boy, I think one of the obstacles that -- in fact I was just last week in Canada and talking with a First Nations leader and he said, 'You know, a lot of my people have been, we've learned over time to be dependent on Canada and to be dependent on federal agencies in Canada, and part of the work that we face as First Nations leaders,' he said, 'is trying to change that mind frame, trying to get into a mind frame that says, 'We can change this, we can take responsibility for what happens here.'' There's a -- Manley just mentioned the Siksika Nation of Blackfoot in Alberta. Chief Strater Crow Foot, whose the chief of that nation, he spoke at a session that Manley and I were both at not long ago and he said, 'We're trying to replace the victim attitude with a victor attitude.' He said, 'The victim attitude keeps you sitting still, the victor attitude gets you moving.' And he said, 'In my nation, that's one of our primary tasks as leaders is to change that attitude, a feeling that if we're really going to have an impact we've got to alter the way people look at the world around them, the way they think about what's possible.' So that's certainly one of the obstacles. Another obstacle, and Manley touched on this, is simply that sovereignty obstacle. It's getting the jurisdictional power to make decisions for yourself. That's something which Indian nations in the U.S., they've had a lot of jurisdictional power. It gets chipped away at by the U.S. Supreme Court, it's often under attack in the states and in Congress. Luckily, so far, much of it is surviving. In Canada, First Nations are struggling to achieve the level of sovereignty Indian Nations in the U.S. have, but that's an obstacle. If someone else is making the decisions for you, you're not likely to go much of anywhere. It's their decisions, the program represents their interests. Shifting real decision-making power into Indigenous hands is a critical piece of nation building. These nations have to be rebuilt by Indigenous people, not by decisions made in Washington or Ottawa or someplace like that. So I think the other big obstacle is that sovereignty piece. You've got to have the power to make things happen."

Mary Kim Titla: "We've talked about obstacles. Let's talk about assets. What are some of the greatest nation-building assets?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "Leadership is an asset. However, it's only an asset if you can couple that with developing good capable institutions, and if you set in place the rule of law and policies and codes and constitutions. That goes a long way. You can wait for a good leader to come around, and it takes 20 years to get a good leader, but you can't always be sure that the leader was going to be good. However, if you put in place policy, rules and regulations, you can always trust those rules, and enforcing those rules becomes part of nation building, and it seems to me that that's an asset that we see, the creativeness, the innovativeness of Indian people to really wrestle with figuring out how to do this, and to do it in a culturally appropriate fashion is an asset. And it's not something that's new."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "The other thing we have to recognize as an asset is Indigenous cultures themselves, and sometimes people who think about how Indigenous culture is an asset think of it mainly in terms of stuff you can sell -- arts and crafts or something like that -- and that's an important way to think about it. We tend to think about it, though, in terms of what can we learn from Indigenous cultures about appropriate organization, so that the government that works at Navajo is not necessarily going to be the same as the government that works at Osage, because they are different nations with different heritages, different cultures, and part of the challenge of nation building is figuring out what set of institutions in fact resonate with what people here believe about how authority should be exercised, about how we should pursue goals. We've worked with some of the Pueblos in New Mexico where you have governing institutions that are very traditional. There are no elections, there are no legal codes, no written constitutions. The governing institutions are deeply rooted either in Pueblo tradition or in several hundred years of working under Pueblo influences, Spanish influences and other things. They've been borne out of Pueblo experience. You go up to the Flatheads in Montana, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and you'll see a tribal government that looks very different. It looks, as our colleague Joe Kalt likes to say, 'It looks like it came out of my high school civics textbook.' Well, you've got three nations on that reservation and those nations have had to find a way to govern themselves that they all can support so it doesn't look very traditional. There are three traditions there, they might be in conflict with each other. So they've had to find a set of institutions that work for them. But that link to Indigenous cultures, that ability to tap into the fact that these nations long ago solved tough human problems and maybe the ways they solved some of those problems still work today. Let's tap into that. At Navajo, their court system, their justice system today combines western jurisprudence with longstanding Navajo ways of dealing with disharmony or conflict and that makes them an extraordinarily effective court system that no outsider could have invented. It had to be generated by Navajo people."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can we talk about more of the research and the five major keys to successful community and economic development among Nations?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "The first finding that came out of this research really was the sovereignty finding, the fact that Indigenous nations themselves have to be in the driver's seat if things are going to happen. So there's a kind of a power issue there. Where is the power? And from a research point of view, it just underlined something that Manley touched on earlier, that we haven't been able to find a case across Indian Country of sustained, self-determined economic development where someone other than the Indigenous nation was calling the shots. So that turns out to be a necessary piece of the puzzle. The second piece that came in on the research findings was that, yeah, but that's not enough in and of itself. You've got to back it up with the kinds of governing institutions that Manley has been talking about. They've got to be capable of dealing with contemporary challenges. They've got to be stable. They've got to control, keep politics in its place. They've got to assure people that if I have a claim, a dispute with the nation, it'll be dealt with fairly. Part of the challenge for Indigenous leaders today is, how do we hang onto our talented, energetic young people with ideas? If I've got a family to support, will I pursue supporting that family at home on the rez or will I move to L.A. or Minneapolis or something like that? For tribal leaders, how do we create an environment that says, 'You can do it right here, we'll make it possible, we'll keep you'? That means a governing situation in which it doesn't matter who my family is, who I voted for, I'll get a fair shake. So that second finding was about capable governing institutions. The third was this thing we've just been talking a bit about of the cultural match piece of making sure those institutions really have the support of the people, that people believe this is our government, not an import from somebody else -- this is ours. And then these last two pieces that Manley talked about, the strategic thinking that gets people to make decisions on what's on our agenda today in terms of what matters in the long run and what does that mean for how we decide this today. And then that piece of leadership."

Dr. Manley Begay: "Yeah, to give you an example, back to Mississippi Choctaw. Initially a big portion of the population of the Choctaws were moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, so you essentially had this society that was uprooted back in the 1830s and only small groups stayed in Mississippi. But they held onto the land, they held on to who they were as Choctaws. And as time went on they went through the termination period, they went through...and here comes the Indian Self-Determination Act and they essentially wrestled jurisdiction and power and control from the feds as well as state government and began to pursue a long-term plan, and Chief Phillip Martin was sort of the main impetus for assertions of sovereignty back then. And once they wrestled a significant amount of decision-making power from the federal government and also from the State [of Mississippi], they began to think through, how do we develop a capable governing institution? And they did that basically by necessity because before they could attract manufacturing companies to the nation, they had to think about a commercial code, they had to think about appropriate policy rules and regulations, laws being put in place, a good court system, separating business from politics, and so forth so that the investor could feel safe in investing on nation land. And then the cultural match piece came in. Historically, Mississippi Choctaws really had the strong chief executive-type of political structure, but they also had a strong court system. They had a separation of powers and checks and balances set up, which allowed for them to plan well. So a lot of this was planned out years and years ago. A lot of the success Mississippi Choctaws are having now was planned 50 years ago, and so today you essentially have a zero percent unemployment rate, you have to import labor and so forth, so the strategic thinking piece came into play. And then you have good leadership, you essentially have really good leadership. So all of the ingredients to successful nation building seems to be present at Mississippi Choctaw. But we've seen it at Fort McDowell, we've seen it at Siksika, we've seen it at all of these places that we've mentioned that have built nations that seem to be working well."

Mary Kim Titla: "We do want to talk about more of those positive stories, those models if you want to call them that. I like Mississippi Choctaw, so I'm glad that you touched on that. Are there some other examples out there that you'd like to add?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Well, one that we're particularly fond of is the Citizen Potawatomi story from Oklahoma. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation back in the 1970s -- this today is a very large nation, I think its population is well over 20,000 people -- but in the 1970s they had very little land that they controlled, less than 100 acres, they had hardly any money in the bank, life was tough, [the] situation was grim. Today the Citizen Potawatomi Nation owns the First National Bank of Shawnee, Oklahoma. Today they own the supermarket in Shawnee, where they sell beef grown in their own cattle herd and vegetables grown on their own farm. They've basically got a vertically-integrated food business going. They own some of the media outlets in town. And when you talk to "Rocky" Barrett, who is the current chairman of the Nation, he says, 'Well, you know, it's really an institutions story.' And I remember the first time I heard him tell the story of the Citizen  Potawatomi Nation at a conference in Oklahoma, and afterwards I talked to him and I said, 'You know, you really tell a nation-building story about governing institutions.' And his response was, 'Oh, yeah, if you're not thinking about constitutional reform, you're not in the economic development ballgame, because what you've got to do is get that political house together and then you'll be able to create the kind of economic success.' So we look at Citizen  Potawatomi, a remarkable turnaround from the mid 1970s to the start of the 21st century in that nation's fortunes. Some nations, there are these success stories out there, and some of them are about pieces of nations and we've been fortunate -- in doing this work on nation building -- you come across nations that are doing extraordinary things that you don't hear about. I think often what we hear about are the problems in Indian Country. But some of the...we've talked about the Navajo Nation court system, which is one of these striking successes. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, another example of nations coming together and solving a difficult problem creatively and effectively. At Fond du Lac, they've got a foster care program that has solved a major problem they had with the placement of tribal kids in non-Native homes. They've come up with a way to deal with that problem. It's effective, it works. These kinds of stories are all over the place out there and in one way or another they are nation-building stories."

Mary Kim Titla: "And then trying to train the young Native leaders, I think the Gila River Indian Community has done an excellent job of that with their youth council and really they're a model for a lot of tribes around the country. Anything you'd like to add?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "The Cochiti Pueblo is another Indian nation that sort of has built these very successful economic ventures. At one point in time, Cochiti, a significant part of Cochiti, was actually under water when a dam was built, and very little seemed to be in the works for how to get out of the situation that they were in. And lo and behold they essentially began to assert a certain amount of jurisdiction and a certain amount of power and authority, and today you find a tremendous amount of success at Cochiti. They've developed one of the top 100 public golf courses in the United States. They have a retirement community where Harry and Martha from Ohio go to retire. And it's a very interesting turnaround. Here a very traditional society is doing relatively well in pursuing certain economic development projects and they've done it with, as we said earlier, first pursuing jurisdiction and decision-making power and authority, and it really resonates to non-Indian society. Often non-Indian society [has] a hard time grasping political sovereignty. The thought is, 'Well, we've got to take political sovereignty away from Indian Country and then we need to tell them what to do essentially.' However, it seems as though that it's in the best interest of non-Indian society to support political sovereignty, because in the long run when economic development takes place in Indian Country, it affects nearby communities, it affects the region and in turn it affects the nation as a whole. So it has this domino effect. So it really is important for non-Indian communities, also governments, to support political sovereignty."

Mary Kim Titla: "Well, I want to thank the both of you. We've talked about a lot of things today, about some of the positive stories that are out there, some of the obstacles that Native tribes are facing and I must say that they've dealt with adversity very well and they have a history of dealing with that. I see a bright future, so thank you for what you're doing. We'd like to thank Dr. Begay and Dr. Cornell for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Native Nation Building TV: "Moving Towards Nation Building"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Manley A. Begay, Jr. and Stephen Cornell contrast the two basic approaches to Indigenous governance -- the standard approach and the nation-building approach -- and discusses how a growing number of Native nations are moving towards nation building. It provides specific examples of how implementing the five keys to nation building bring wide-ranging benefits to Native communities.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Moving Towards Nation Building" (Episode 10). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Mark St. Pierre: "Hello, friends. I'm your host, Mark St. Pierre and welcome to Native Nation Building. Contemporary Native Nations face many challenges including building effective governments, developing strong economies that fit their culture and circumstances, solving difficult social problems and balancing cultural integrity in change. Native Nation Building explores these often complex challenges in the ways Native Nations are working to overcome them as they seek to make community and economic development a reality. Don't miss Native Nation Building next."

Mark St. Pierre: "Over the last decade or so, many Indigenous nations have been moving to an approach to economic development that has been described as nation building. Today's program examines this nation-building approach to development and contrasts it with the older approach that remains pretty common today, the so-called standard approach. With me today to discuss these two approaches are Drs. Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell. Dr. Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is the Director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as senior lecturer in the American Indian Studies program. Dr. Cornell is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and a Professor of Sociology and Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona. Welcome, gentlemen. It's nice to have you both here today. The Native Nations Institute in its extensive research has found that there are basically two approaches to Native Nation governance. Can you describe these?"

 

Manley Begay: "The standard approach has been in existence probably for the better part of the 20th century, and it's really an outgrowth of [a] long-held belief that dependency is the way to go by the federal government and also by many state governments as well. And the nation-building approach is a recent phenomenon sort of borne out of the political research and stuff of the '70s. Interestingly enough, I think the roots of the standard approach is really around colonization, forced dependency, and as a result political decision-making has been very slow. Others besides those that are most effected make development decisions, and it sort of views Indigenous culture as an obstacle to development, whereas on the nation-building approach which has been recently pushed and thought of by Indigenous peoples is really rooted around the exercise of sovereignty, claiming jurisdiction, building effective political systems and institutions of self governance, using culture as a way to design political systems and also to design economic systems as well. And so it's really two very different type of approaches, and also has produced two very different types of results."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Steve, when you talk about the standard approach, what are some of the inevitable outcomes?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "Well, I think the standard approach -- as Manley has indicated -- the results have not been very positive for Indian nations. I think you have to sort of realize that the standard approach leaves...it makes an assumption, it assumes that Indigenous nations are not really capable of making major decisions for themselves, so the priorities in development are ones that are put together in Washington, D.C., put together by federal bureaucrats who are saying, 'Man, these tribes poor, we've got to do something about it, let's come up with a program to help them.' So they design a program and they fund it and they make decisions about how the program will be run and Indian Country experiences the results. But if you look at that model, it's one in which tribal priorities do not appear, bureaucratic priorities do, Washington's priorities do, federal priorities do."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "You could almost call that the well-intended approach."

 

Stephen Cornell: "It's a very well-intended approach, it's just not a very well-accomplished approach. So tribal priorities don't appear in there, tribes do not exercise real decision-making power. In many cases, what it creates is this expectation that well, 'It's up to the feds to do it for us so you get this kind of looking to the feds as the source of not just money, but ideas and suggestions and solutions, so tribes get excluded from the decision-making process, they get excluded from thinking through what kind of development they want. The result over the -- Manley said it sort of dominated the 20th century -- if you look at the 20th century in Indian Country, the performance in economic development is pretty poor."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Steve, you talked about the standard model, sadly the traditional model of planning that's been used by the EDA [Economic development Adminitsration] planners that tribes hire. Give us an idea of what that process looks like."

 

Stephen Cornell: "Well, as we were saying, a lot of the ideas for what tribes should do tend to come out of Washington. I think very often what happens is an Indian nation, facing tough unemployment, difficult time getting people through the winter -- all the kinds of problems that we see in extremely poor rural communities -- those nations just, they've got to get something going. And so you call in the tribal planner and you tell the tribal planner to go get a grant, go find some money, go get something started. So the planner goes off and looks for whatever they can find out there, where are the federal dollars, has anybody else got anything I can apply for. You start whatever you can fund. You appoint your relatives or your political supporters to run the projects. The council micromanages the heck out of it, and everybody just prays that something will work. We think of it as this sort of six-step model for planning in the standard approach. I think we've seen a lot of that."

 

Manley Begay: "We were in southern British Columbia working with a group of First Nations and we had an executive education session and this is sort of the steps that Steve mentioned. We talked about those steps and then at the end of the presentation one elder in the back raises his hand and he says, 'I know what's wrong with that planning process'. He says, 'They should have prayed first!' Basically he was eluding to the fact that the nation-building approach is very different in terms of planning than the standard approach. There's actually forethought and there's long-term planning, rather than sort of the short, grant-type of mentality. And you're actually more proactive in thinking about how you're going to plan, rather than reacting to the agendas being set by Washington or those that you're getting the money from. And then you're setting the development agenda, not someone else. So the planning process is very different under the nation-building approach."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let me follow up with this. If tribal officials are feeling pressured out of desperation to solve immediate, crisis-type problems, they would have to be politically brave to go with the longer vision, to map out something that might take years to accomplish."

 

Stephen Cornell: "It's not that they shouldn't be chasing the federal dollars. From our point of view, there aren't enough federal dollars in Indian Country. There will never be enough money to compensate for what's been taken from Indigenous nations nor to take care of all the problems that are out there. You need those federal dollars and it's right to be pursuing them. The problem is with an approach to economic development that stops there, that simply is looking for where's the homerun project that's going to solve all our problems. 'Oh, man, let's go for this grant, maybe that'll solve our problems. Let's go for this one...' instead of saying, 'How do we build an environment here that can sustain long-term economic growth? How can we build an environment that will actually produce the jobs and the economic activity that fits our culture, fits what our people want and has -- as Manley says -- long-term staying power?' And if tribes manage to do both of those at once, let's find the dollars to deal with the crisis we've got today, but let's not neglect the task of building a nation that's capable of supporting its people for the long run without having to depend on Washington, D.C. That's what tribes need to be doing and it is tough. I think it's...Indian nations face terribly difficult tasks, but they've demonstrated over and over again that they can handle difficult tasks. It's going to take work, but it can happen."

 

Manley Begay: "And Indian nations know best what their needs are. An occasional politician that arrives on the reservation might think, 'Oh, you need a motel right there. That's a good intersection.' So he gets the money, a hotel is built there, and it doesn't work, because that's not exactly what the nation really needed and wanted at that time. It didn't fit into their scheme of things. So somebody else promotes that rather than Indian nations themselves."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "A lot of tribes suffer from brain drain. Do either of you want to talk about that problem and how that comes about?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "Yeah, I'd be glad to say something about that. I think brain drain in fact is one of the characteristics of the old way of doing economic development in Indian Country. One of the things this sort of grant mentality does, it turns tribal government into simply a grants-getting organization, and you begin to encourage an idea among tribal citizens that that's really what tribal government is about. It's a funnel. It's a funnel for jobs, money, services that come from the federal government and they land at tribal government, and tribal government distributes them out to communities and people. And so your idea of tribal government is, there's nothing particularly impressive or ambitious about it, it's just kind of a hand-out-the-goodies organization. And then you look at, let's say, young people on a reservation, the young citizens of the nation and when they imagine what they might do with their lives, are they going to think about, 'Boy, I'm going to get involved in the leadership of this nation'. But if that's all government is, what's exciting about that? When you shift to nation building, a couple of things happen. You move decision-making out of federal hands and you put it in Indigenous hands. Suddenly the burden of responsibility is on the nation itself to decide, 'What kind of future do we want? How are we going to create that future?' And it starts to get real because you feel you're in the driver's seat. You may actually be able to make that future come alive. Suddenly it's starting to get to be an interesting thing, this tribal government business, 'Hey, if we could do that...' So young people may be more likely to stick around. Plus, if you back up that decision-making power with capable government, so that if I'm a young person and I want to invest time and energy and ideas in the future of the nation, I actually have an opportunity to do that. It won't depend who I voted for in the last election or who my relatives are. We've got a more competent government than that. We've got a government that is focused on producing good things for the nation, not on just distributing goodies to friends or something like that. Then I'll begin to think it might make some sense to invest here. I might stick around because I could really build something for my family, my community, for the nation. That begins to slow down that brain drain that has young people headed off to Minneapolis or L.A. or Rapid City or Houston or someplace, and that's a critical thing for the future of Indian Country, is to retain the incredible array of talent and resourcefulness that is in tribal communities and get it working on behalf of these nations."

 

Manley Begay: "Could I just add to that. As Steve was mentioning, it creates a sense of hope. When somebody else is dictating to you how you're going to live, you lose the incentive to do things for yourself. So it becomes more appropriate to just have Washington, D.C. decide for you. Or to compare to Eastern Europe. For a long time, all decisions were made in Moscow, so you'd just go to Moscow. Up in Canada, you go to Ottawa for decisions to be made, and there's less of incentive to do good things and to hope for good things because somebody else is deciding for you. So as a human being, you want to be in a decision-making position about determining for yourself what the future is going to look like. If somebody else is doing it for you, you say, 'Well, forget it.' You have less of a vested interest."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Some of this seems to be buried in or attached to the original IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitutions which were two-year elected terms. Is this relevant to the discussion? Is the fact that many tribes operate on a two-year cycle related to the fact that they can't plan long term?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "If you look at those IRA constitutions, the boilerplate constitutions -- which were not Indigenous creations --those were created in the U.S. Department of the Interior for Indian nations. It was the United States saying, 'We know how you should govern yourselves. Here's the model, take it and go.' If you look at those models, they're very simple models of governance, they tend to put a whole lot of power in the hands of a tribal council, of elected officials. They make no provision for judicial functions or dispute resolution, things that tribes had enormous experience for generations in doing. It's not part of that government. The terms of office are short as you say. You get these two-year terms in many of those governments, so you get real rapid turnover in leadership, and Manley was mentioning you combine that with the federal funding cycles, and basically something's changing every year in the array of people who are working on development. So it's tough to get continuity. Now having said that, that doesn't mean everybody needs four- or five-year terms. We've seen some nations with two-year terms or even shorter, some nations where the senior people in government turn over every year. If the rules by which you govern stay the same, then you can get the kind of stability and continuity that capable governance needs. The real problem is if every two years when that administration perhaps changes, if it's a whole new ballgame, pretty soon you get people sitting there saying, 'Man, I'm heading out of here, I can't deal with this. You never know what the rules are, you never know whether you can trust the people you're working with to still be there tomorrow.' So I think, yeah, the standard model is a model that tolerates very high instability in tribal government, encourages very high instability in tribal government. That's one of the reasons why it's a pretty lousy approach to development."

 

Manley Begay: "And if you don't have staggered terms, it gets even worse."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "That's where I wanted to follow up, Manley. If you could talk a little bit about tribal governments that are operating more within the nation-building approach. What do they look like, tell us what they look like?"

 

Manley Begay: "As Steve was mentioning here earlier, we find that those that are operating within the nation-building approach have stability and stability in the rule of law. We find that to be quite important, because rule of law allows for the understanding that when a new administration comes in, things aren't going to change, contracts don't have to be rewritten. Rather, it creates this stability and so investors begin to feel as though, 'That's the place where I want to invest.' The Indigenous elementary school teacher says, 'I want to go there and work there because I know my investment of time, energy, education is going to be safe and that's where I want to be, and I don't have to leave elsewhere to provide a stability for my family. Rather, this is the place where I want to be.' Outside investors begin to feel as though that their investment will be safe as well because the rules don't change, it's very stable, and you get less of a conflict-of-interest situation where the court system is very stable, it provides for good rules of order, good law that's been set in place, and I think that you find economic development occurring much quicker and in a much better fashion in the long run."

 

Stephen Cornell: "Can I jump in and add a little piece to that which Manley reminded me of? In the standard approach, one of the other characteristics of that approach is the tribal government does everything. Now if you do that, one of the things that happens is you get a lot of political involvement in business management, because you're basically asking councilors to wear a political legislator hat for certain decisions but then take that hat off and be a business manager for other decisions, and for most of us that's tough to carry those kinds of roles and keep them straight, particularly when you're under pressure from constituents. In the nation-building model, one of the striking aspects of that model is the pulling apart of political decisions and the management of enterprises. You begin to get tribal governors, councilors, focused on certain core issues. What are the laws that we need? Do we have the appropriate governance capabilities in place? Do we have a set of policies and rules that will -- going back to the brain drain question -- keep the talented people here? Those are the kinds of things you want elected leadership to deal with, but then when the tribally owned enterprise gets going, you hope that business managers will be able to make intelligent, smart business decisions free from the kinds of political interference that the old model almost guaranteed."

 

Manley Begay: "The root of that type of stability creation really is around claiming jurisdiction, claiming sovereignty. Rather than having somebody else make decisions for your people, your resources, and all the issues that you deal with, you're in the decision-making position. You decide how your resources are going to be allocated, you decide how your political system is going to be developed, and it essentially marries decisions to consequences, whereas in the past, decisions were being made by other folks and you didn't have this marriage actually occurring, and as a result if somebody really messed up from outside of the tribe, they moved to Ohio or Denver or elsewhere. But for Indigenous people there's a vested interest there. You have to make good decisions to get the consequences that you want, and so that's very critical and part of that is just gaining control of the decision seat it seems to me."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "It seems to me that one model tends to foster confidence, growth, hope -- that sort of thing -- but I'm sure even within the nation-building approach, conflicts arise. How are conflicts resolved in either model?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "I think in the standard model, conflicts are resolved by firing people or the feds step in and say, 'We're yanking the grant,' or something like that. And in the nation-building model, ideally, you have some kind of mechanism that is rooted in community, custom, law, tradition so that it has respect in the community, so the people believe in it -- some mechanism that's capable of resolving disputes in a way that the various members of the community think is fair. The question is, how do you deal with those disputes and can you deal with them in ways that don't rip the society apart, so that the disagreement between these two families doesn't suddenly become or eventually become an immobilizing piece of community life where nobody can agree about anything and people are constantly at each others' throats and anything that you get is my loss and that sort of thing? So that sort of dispute-resolution mechanism -- and in many cases, it's an independent tribal court, in some cases, it might be a set of elders who have the authority and the stature to help resolve disputes, it may be traditional kinds of peacemaking approaches. There are a lot of ways to do it, but you've got to have a mechanism like that because there are bound to be disputes."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "And because a nation-building approach, the way you describe it, apparently draws on local culture, tradition, history, it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of situation like sadly the IRA government attempted to be. Manley, when you look at the nation-building approach, how does that affect strategic planning or strategies that tribes can develop over time?"

 

Manley Begay: "The strategic orientation focus in the nation-building approach way of thinking about things really allows for long-term thinking. Rather than the three to five years or 'grant mentality,' you're thinking about, 'What are my kids going to be doing 50 years from now? What kind of clothes will they be wearing? How will they be worshipping? What kind of language will they be speaking?What kind of education will they have? What kind of homes will they be living in? What kind of jobs will they have?' These are questions that must be answered by the leadership, and so [in] the nation-building model, you begin to address those questions, whereas in the standard approach somebody else is making decisions for you. It's just very short-term thinking. So as a result of the nation-building approach, you're planning for the long haul."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let's take a few minutes then to look at in your experience -- and you both have a broad experience in this -- some successes and some failures based on these two approaches."

 

Stephen Cornell: "There are a lot of stories out there, because the nation-building approach is not something we came up with. It's something that Indian nations came up with, and I think since really for about 30 years now, since the mid 1970s, we've begun to see a growing number of Indian nations who are taking control of their own affairs, putting in place capable governments and beginning to think very strategically as Manley described and accomplish things. One of the nations that I like to talk about is the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma. In the mid 1970s, that Nation had -- today it's a very large nation, more than 20,000 citizens. In the 1970s, they had a tiny land base and almost no money in the bank. They had some ideas. How do we get people to come and invest here so we can create some jobs for our citizens? And the young tribal council member went out to talk to business people around Oklahoma and say to them, 'Hey, you should come and invest in our community. We're good people, we'll give you some tax breaks, come build with us.' And some of these business people, their response was, 'Well, okay, that all sounds real interesting, but let's say I get into a dispute with somebody on the reservation or with the tribe itself. Have you got a court system that I can depend on?' 'No, we don't have a court system.' 'Okay. And how do I know that the promises that you're making to me to help get me to work with you are going to be respected if when the administration changes. Can I count on the rule of law?' 'Well, we haven't really thought that part through.' Eventually this council member came back to the nation and said, 'We've got some political work to do. We've got some governance work to do before we're going to be successful at pulling these people here.' They did that work. It took a long time. They did it piece by piece. They built a capable set of governing institutions and they began to get the kind of investment they were after, not just from outsiders, from their own people. It's a nation that has taken enormous strides by kind of seizing control of its own destiny and then doing the hard work to put the institutions in place that could support what they wanted to do."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Manley, what's one of your favorite stories? What would you like the viewers to hear?"

 

Manley Begay: "Some of my favorite stories really is around Indian nations actually grabbing hold of sovereignty and moving forward, sort of the first piece of the puzzle in the nation-building approach. There seems to be these defining moments where things just change from the standard approach to the nation-building approach. Some of the nations did it very smoothly and in a calculated fashion, as Steve just mentioned: Citizen Potawatomi. Some Indian nations, you had near violence. For instance, like at Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. When gaming was first being initiated, you found two opposing views of whether that nation should have gaming or not, which led to essentially the closure of a road into the casino and you basically had a standoff which forced negotiation to occur. And at that moment in time things began to change. The Indian nation began to think about themselves as truly a sovereign entity with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation, and there are a number of stories throughout Indian Country about this where Indian women would go into the Bureau of Indian Affairs office and literally threw the superintendent out. And at that moment things began to change. It's not unlike Lech Walesa in Poland saying to the Soviet Union, 'We're going to do things our way.' It's not unlike Nelson Mandela in South Africa saying, 'No more Apartheid, it's got to stop here.' And there are a number of these stories out in Indian Country like that."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let's look at First Nations in Canada. What are some examples of First Nations that have gone through a similar process? Steve?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "There's actually a lot happening in Canada right now with First Nations. I can think of a couple of the interesting ones to us. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Saskatchewan is a group of nine First Nations, some Dine, some Cree, who first got together to try to do economic development together. They realized that if they started doing development planning as a single group of nations they would get more leverage and be able to do better. Today, they're beginning to build political institutions at that same tribal council level. The Ktunaxa Tribal Council in British Columbia -- that's five First Nations and they're doing kinds...building the kinds of governing institutions that we're talking about at the tribal council level where these five First Nations are cooperating. Right now, they're involved in trying to design a government that will support their long-term strategic goals for preservation of the land, preservation of their culture, development of enough prosperity and productivity to support their community. So it's happening in a lot of different places, and if we had the time we could give you quite a list."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Well, it's pretty apparent that Native nations that want a successful future have to invest tremendous time and effort into those issues, and I want to thank our two guests today, Dr. Manley Begay and Dr. Stephen Cornell, for appearing on this edition of Native Nation Building. This is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Jerry Smith: Building and Sustaining Nation-Owned Enterprises (2008)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Laguna Development Corporation President and CEO Jerry Smith discusses the evolution and growth of the Pueblo of Laguna's diversified economy, and the importance of building an infrastructure of laws and rules in ensuring the success of Laguna's nation-owned enterprises.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Smith, Jerry. "Building and Sustaining Nation-Owned Enterprises." Executive Education Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Rapid City, South Dakota. September 18, 2008. Presentation.

“Morning everyone. I was afraid that when she was talking about the pig story, she was going to introduce me as the first pig on the panel. I appreciate being here today to speak to you on the experiences of and growth of Laguna Development Corporation, and in general the Pueblo Laguna. As some of you may know, Laguna Pueblo is located in Albuquerque, about forty miles west of Albuquerque on I-40. And what we have done over the years, my career, I’m very impressed with the academic capacities of the folks presenting to you in Native nations. Some of us on the other side are kind of educated in the school of hard knocks, in that we grew up in the tribal end of the entity at first. I worked, probably, about 20 years on the tribal side working as a tribal administrator for the tribe, and more specifically in the areas of trying to develop the economy of the tribe. And then later in the late '90s, I moved over and began to run one of the enterprises of the tribe. So I kind of have the understanding and experience of both sides of the equation.

My first slide basically gives you kind of a view of where our economy has been over the last number of years. Laguna economy pre-'50s is basically an agriculture-based economy, very entrepreneurial, small business (as I like to refer to them) -- individuals who ran farms, cattle, livestock, sheep. So, as we moved into the '50s, fortunately in our situation, uranium was discovered on our tribal lands. And so we went through a period of tremendous economic prosperity in that, we had at its peak production, the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine, and it provided substantial resources to the tribe as well as employment. We were able to live in a great environment. Unfortunately, that resource, as a result of the anti-nuclear type programs in the late '70s, mid-late '70s, we entered into the down crash of the uranium market. The mine ended up closing in the early '80s. So, from the '80s, as you can see, the tribe began to look at what to do. We had a situation of close to 80 percent unemployment. When I interviewed for the tribal administrator’s job in 1982, the question I recall, the most pressing question I recall being asked is, 'What are you going to do to find me a job?' Asked by one of the tribal council members. And just out of business school, I didn’t have a whole lot of answers, except, ‘I’ll do my best.’ And quite honestly, I was not really looking forward to being hired, because I really didn’t have the answers that I thought they were looking for. But surprisingly, I was hired by the tribal council as a tribal administrator to come in and begin work on these situations.

It’s key in that, for Laguna, it was very key in that, a lot of things we were able to do in the '80s were structure-related issues. We worked on a lot of infrastructure, and the reason we could work on infrastructure is we had the wealth of the uranium mine, which funded tribal government operations. So we had a period of time where we could focus on infrastructure development, which meant we had to change philosophically the way the tribe thought, the way they approach things, and began to take a look at how we could do things different in a way that we could grow tribal enterprises, which meant that we had to do a lot of education. And it was really strange for me, fresh out of business school, to be educating people that were very experienced in tribal operations. A lot of our leadership -- and it seems to be the same way today -- a lot of leadership comes from the federal sector. You know, leadership and tribes come out of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], IHS [Indian Health Service], HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] -- you know, those programs. And so when you begin to take a look at educating tribal leadership in this new mentality, you know, definitely training, educational training had to happen. So we began to develop our tribal enterprises.

Our first project was a project called Laguna Industries, where we stepped in and developed a manufacturing company. And at the time, at this time as you recall, the Defense Department was growing very significantly. So we targeted the Defense Department and developed a company that went after defense work. And the created company that, in its peak, employed close to 350 people and is still today, operating and defense contracting. They have, they’ve done not only manufacturing of electro-assembly products, but they also do a lot of on-site support training for the military. We have teams that go out to Korea, who have been out in Iraq, have been out in Germany, you know, supporting the troops in the systems that are built within the company. After learning this experience, then we were caught with the situation of claiming this open pit uranium mine. So, as we began to work with the company that operated that mine, we began to take a look at, 'How we can build a company, instead of using these dollars to go out and just contract a general contractor to come in and do the mining project?' We began to take a look at how we could do this ourselves.

So we created a second company called Laguna Construction Company. And Laguna Construction Company ultimately came on board, they performed the reclamation of the Jackpile mine and then began to develop the capacity in reclamation remediation and began to get defense contracts to begin to do work, not only within the United States, and did a lot of reclamation. This time as you see military base closures were coming online. So there were needs to go in and reclaim those military bases. So they received initially a lot of work doing that; and then they stepped into, then the Iraq situation came on. Right now they’re one of the subcontractors of Halliburton, doing a lot of the reconstruction of Iraq in terms of rebuilding buildings and doing a lot of the reclamation work over there. So it’s significant in terms of their growth and experience.

The third company we created was Laguna Development Corporation and that’s the company I run. In the creation of the first two companies I stayed on the governmental side, and the companies were set up and we brought in management in those arenas. This third company, I kind of wanted a career change, so I kind of moved to the company and we set up this company called the Laguna Development Corporation. Initially, the mission of Laguna Development Corporation was retail development. We ran retail operations. And if any of you have run C-stores, a grocery store, you know how tough that is because your margins are at the bottom line, hopefully, about 3 percent. So as we began to run those operations, it became very important for us to have the proper infrastructure in place in terms of the business itself. Later on we brought in the gaming operations. So our growth has been substantial. We were created in 1998 and our first year, full year of operation in 1999, we had out $6.5 million in sales. In closure of our books in 2007, we closed our books in excess of $250 million in sales, of which over 50 percent is non-gaming revenue. It’s a substantial effort in terms of trying to diversify our corporate portfolio. And one of the things that we learned coming out of the Jackpile Mine was that, as a tribe, you cannot put all your eggs in one basket. You have to take the opportunity and begin to diversify the economic base because if you lose a Jackpile Mine -- and if any of you and I’m sure a lot of you are experienced or have experienced 80 percent unemployment -- it is not pleasant. It creates a whole lot of social/economic issues for you as a tribe, and it’s very important to keep people productive and keep them working and keep their value system in place.

So as we stand here today, we lost close to about 600 jobs in the closure of the Jackpile Mine. Since then, with the enterprises, we’ve been able to create close to 1,600 jobs within the tribal environment. So as I speak here before you -- and I don’t have any statistics to support this -- but I would say Laguna, as a population base, we’re pretty close to full employment, which is saying that anybody that wants a job can get a job. So that’s been an experience. Now we’re working on the quality of the job. Now we’re working on moving people in their career development towards improving the quality of the job and improving their quality of life, improving their capacities.

Tribal government also benefits because I sat on tribal council in the mid-90s and as a tribal councilman, I began to take a look at where our mix of revenues were coming from. And at that point, 80 percent of our revenues were coming from federal sources, 20 percent of our revenues were coming from investment income off the Jackpile uranium operation. As I stand here before you today, 80 percent of our revenue comes from the enterprises, 20 percent of the revenue [of] the tribe comes from federal sources, federal/state sources. And when you look at that equation, you begin to see why these business development efforts are very important for the survival of the tribe, because I think the only way, one of the ways we can exercise our true sovereignty as tribal people is to be fiscally solvent, so that we don’t have to have our hand out to a governmental entity and take all the flow-down conditions that come with those contracts and grants that say, 'You got to do it this way, you got to do it this way, you got to do it this way.' It’s great for the tribe to have that discretionary money, that money that doesn’t come with any strings, to go out and do the things the tribe wants to do, without having to say, 'Mother, may I?' And if, coming from the tribal side, it’s very frustrating to me to always have to talk to a grant, a contract administrator on the federal side that basically gave me permission to do this or do that or do this other thing. And it really, in my opinion, stymied a lot of economic development in tribes, because federal people are not business people. They are not risk-takers. They are not people that have to go out and lead and be the entrepreneurs to go out and take the risk. They are very low-risk tolerant. So a lot of the projects fell on the wayside because I had to go before an administrator who had no experience telling me what I could and couldn’t do. So in that regard, this money that’s discretionary, this money that comes from enterprises that the tribe has full flexibility to decide what they need to do with -- it gives a tremendous opportunity to begin to take a look at getting outside that box.

One of the things we have to do from a tribal side, is teach our tribal leadership how to get outside that box, because these tribal leaders -- and this is no different than my tribe -- many of them grew up in the federal system. Many of them are contract administrators for the BIA. Many of them ran BIA/IHS programs and have since come back and are working for the tribe. So they’re trained. Their whole career is trained in this federal process and it says nothing’s wrong with them -- I’m not saying anything’s wrong with it -- but on this other side there’s this whole different dynamic that we have to work with and that is risk and learning how to manage risk. And fundamentally, in order for you to be successful in an enterprise, is to be able to understand that and take safe calculated risk; but you’ve got to take risk. So from a Laguna story standpoint, I’m learning as I’m going on, talking to people, a lot of tribes, especially gaming tribes, 90 percent plus of their money now come from their enterprises. So we are no longer federally dependent. We are independent from a fiscal management standpoint, but we’ve got to get out of old habits. We’ve got to get out of habits of letting public policy from somebody in Washington (D.C.) tell us how to run our communities and begin to take responsibility for being creative to develop those communities that fit our situation, which leads me to the next slide, and that is understanding the difference between the governmental model and the business model.

What was very difficult for me, in the early '80s, was to educate my tribal leadership that governments are important. Tribal governments are important. Governments have to exist and have to exist and be effective, but you don’t run a business to a governmental model. Governmental models are there to provide governance to the tribe, to the organization. They are not profit motivated. Ask a tribal budget manager as to what their profitability is for this year and they don’t know. They can’t answer the question. Business models work within the governance of the tribe and that’s a very important point. People think you have to choose one or the other; it’s not that way. The governmental infrastructure has to be in place and the governmental rules have to be in place and stable so that the business can flourish within that environment. So they have to work together. So what you have to do is build the governmental infrastructure in place so that the business can survive because business as a fundamental, any start-up business -- what is the statistic? Sixty-five percent fail in their first year of operation. So you’re already dealing with a very dynamic situation in running a business with a high propensity to fail. So if you move the tribal environment on top of it, you create a higher percentage risk of failure if you don’t have the infrastructure in place to support that.

So in that regard, governance is very important, but it also has to be, it has to provide the energies for businesses to succeed. The other thing is that business model is profit motivated. And that’s one thing our tribal leadership have a hard time with because many of us have to be sometimes in position where we have to say, ‘I am not meeting my EBIDA [earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization] goals.’ And a tribal leader will look at you and say, ‘What? What is that? What is EBIDA?’ You know, that is a measure of business performance. And as you begin to take a look at the language, it’s kind of like, in some cases, speaking French and English because the terminology is not the same. Even the way that you’re audited is different. Governments are audited to what’s called GASB and I think probably a lot of you know what GASB is. Businesses are operated on a FASB process. And so you have to understand that even the formula and even how things work, are different. So when you go to a tribal leader and say I’ve had tremendous EBIDA performance you have to take the time to take them through what EBIDA means, because they do not have the experience and understanding of what EBIDA means.

And so those kind of things are, there are differences in terms of the name of the game and how the game is played. So what we did over our evolution at Laguna was we tried different business models. We tried different business structures. We initially set ourselves up under tribal enterprises. Now one of the benefits, and we talked about lessons learned at Laguna, was prior to trying to put the structures in place, we killed a lot of good businesses. We killed a lot of good businesses because we just could not keep people in their roles. And one of the strongest influences in this environment is political influence. And what you ended up having was you ended up having political leaders making business decisions. And the business decisions normally were not of quality because they were not being made for the necessary reasons, or the proper reasons why that decision should be made. One of the biggest challenges, for example, one of your biggest expenses in the business is labor. And your revenues fluctuate as you operate during the year, and especially if you’re running a seasonal business. So as a business leader, you have to manage labor and you just can’t have people sitting in an office, twiddling their thumbs waiting for the season to pick up. So you have to deal with the issue. You may have to lay people off or you have to lay them off seasonally. So if you don’t make that decision, then you’re going to be impacting your EBIDA line. And EBIDA is Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization, and that is how businesses are measured. They are not measured on net income. They are not measured performance from an operational standpoint on what your profit is. It’s basically what your EBIDA is, because your EBIDA is what really tells you whether or not you’re operating efficiently or effectively. So the two things you watch for in a business is EBIDA and cash flow. And if you are not functioning in those areas then you better do something.

So in that regard, we started in tribal enterprises. Tribal enterprise worked, but unfortunately we got into the mix of IRS. And I give IRS a lot of credit for this because we would not have gone through the evolution we went through without IRS intervention, because IRS intervention or interest was to tax our profits. And at that time they did not recognize tribal enterprises as an acceptable structure for them and they basically determined at that time, and this is again in the '80s, that our income was taxable. So we went then and went to a state chartered corporation. So we chartered one of these entities under the State of New Mexico and we were able to get away with that for a little while until IRS came down again and told us state charter corporations are taxable. And so then we went to the structure we are now and all three of the entities I showed you on the board are structured under this is a Section 17 federal corporation.

Now one of the things that this did (and you can go to the next slide), one of the things that it did is it helped educate the government to the point where they understood why we need to separate business from government and why they had to release day-to-day control of the business. And it has to do with something called liability. Because when you’re running a business, the fundamental nature of the business is risk and you have to take risk. Why do private people with money, with wealth, set up corporations? It’s because they’re protecting their personal assets. So they set up these corporations where if something happens from a risk decision in that corporation, their nest egg is protected. Fortunately, at Laguna, we had a nest egg that came from the uranium mine. We had a substantial nest egg. So we were able to approach the tribal council to say, ‘Before you go out and start taking risk propositions you need to protect your nest egg. And we need to build this wall between government and the enterprises so that if something happens within the enterprise, your assets are protected. They can sue the corporation only to the extent of the assets of the corporation. They cannot touch tribal assets.' So with the protection mechanism in place it was very, it helped us tremendously in selling the concept. Now we were a tribe without assets and it’s the same fundamental thing. How many of us own private corporations because how many of us have something to risk and lose? So we don’t really think that way. But when you’re a person of wealth, you think that way. It’s a difference in thinking. So if we were to try to do that today, with what’s going on today, we would probably have a very difficult time. For the reason that tribal, and it’s still happening in all governments, the tribal political factors want to get into day-to-day operations. They want to get into day-to-day control of the enterprises. So how did we define this so that we can protect the enterprises from that situation, and how can we protect the tribal council from assets being touched? It’s called penetrating the corporate veil.

If a tribal leader comes down into the corporations and starts hiring and firing employees, that tribal leader has penetrated the corporate veil. So what happens is they put a hole in the corporate veil and if they’re sued back, whoever is filing the claim can go right back through that hole and get the tribal assets. So as you can see, there’s a lot of education that needs to go on. And a lot of these principles aren’t necessarily understood at the beginning, but as you keep educating, educating, you begin to finally hit home with some of these things. One thing that was very important to us was to formalize these relationships, not just gentlemen’s agreement, not just from one council to the next, because councils turn over quite a bit. So the institutional knowledge of the government isn’t always there. So when you go back to this say, ‘You remember ten years ago we talked about it?’ And you look at the people in the room and they’re all different. No one remembers what you talked about ten years ago. So it’s very important to formalize anything that you enter into in terms of relationship with the government. And you’ve got to treat it like a state government, like a federal government. Tribal government, even though they’re your owners, you have to also understand that they’re governments. And so nobody has a problem writing a grant proposal and signing a grant agreement with the state government, with the federal government. That’s a formulation of what the conditions are and what are the terms and what happens in this situation. It’s very important that we be at Laguna, that we begin to formalize this relationship so that we can retain the institutional knowledge of what was agreed to. So we have charters. We have corporate charters. You can go online, because we’re a federal corporation, you can go pull up our charter. You can see what our charter looks like. Bylaws of the corporation; bylaws are what the board of directors manages the corporation by. It’s their internal rules of the corporation. We have very sophisticated reporting relationships. We provide financial statements to the tribe on a monthly basis. We provide them quarterly financial statements. We go before the council twice a year in terms, semi-annual shareholder’s meetings.

Our tribal councilmen wear two hats. They are councilmen from the government side, but they are our shareholder’s representatives and they have to learn how to operate in two different environments. As shareholder’s representatives they are not councilmen, they are not governmental representatives, they represent the shareholders. And they fall within corporate law duties of shareholders and they have to fill their duties to shareholders. And what is their primary duty? Their primary duty is the appointment of the board of directors. I report to a five-member board of directors and that board of directors is delegated authority to run the corporation. And so the major power of the tribe is to make sure they have good, competent people on the board of directors, and experienced people on the board of directors.

We also have a very sophisticated agreement with the tribe on how cash moves from the corporation to the tribe. I’ve worked and I’ve consulted to a number of tribes and it amazes me when I go in to sit down with them and I ask, ‘How does cash transfer?’ And they say, ‘Well, the tribe comes in and gets it every month.’ So then I say to them, ‘Well, how do you take care of capital maintenance, capital development reserves?’ And you can begin to see real quickly in the enterprise why they haven’t replaced, in the gaming property, slot machines; why they haven’t replaced carpet; why they haven’t done, you know from a maintenance standpoint; they haven’t developed a new venture. It’s because the tribe comes in and takes it all out. And so the enterprises really don’t retain the cash because it’s sucked out to the government on a monthly basis.

In our situation, we’ve negotiated a relationship with the tribe where money transfers, but it transfers at year-end after all the audits are done. And so we do transfer like pre-payments monthly, but it’s all reconciled at year-end. And it’s based on a formula so that, like anything else, as the audit kicks in and it’s produced then formulas run. So there’s no dispute. And if they want to come in and look at the books and understand why they got this in their check, it’s all auditable, it’s all transparent. So even those relationships are formalized so that we don’t get into disputes. Many times we get accused of holding all the money in the enterprise, but in reality, we can answer that claim any time; just come in and audit us and we’ll show you exactly where things are.

And so, as it relates to that, we probably at this point within our enterprise, the two things that usually are stress points are the financial end of it and human resources end of it. So from the financial end of it, we’ve been able to take 50 percent of the equation in terms of disputes away. We still fight over human resource issues on a day-to-day basis. But at the same time, we set up a system where I’m the final say on human resource issues. Nothing goes to my board of directors, nothing goes to the tribal council. And so as we deal with day-to-day operations, we’re able to handle those things and I’m able to handle issues that some tribes…and I’ve had people tell me how...tribal councils have come in and you’ve disciplined a brother or nephew or niece and they’ve come in and damaged the organization. We’ve had to deal with those kind of things up front and it’s very, it’s worked effectively today.

We also have had to take investment and tried to help the government infrastructure develop. One of the things that happened at Laguna with the quick growth of the enterprises is what we call the brain drain syndrome. The capacity that used to sit on the tribe transferred to the enterprises for a number of reasons. One was pay; we could pay more on the business side than what they were getting as a tribal employee. So what ended up happening is that we ended up wakening capacity of human resources at the tribe. So we’ve been going back in and helping them develop their capacities: how to read a financial statement; how to read a business financial statement versus a GASB financial statement; and what it is you look for in terms of managing the enterprise. Most of us know, especially those of us who run gaming enterprise, your three big numbers are revenue, marketing expenses, and labor. That’s probably 60-70 percent of the equation. So you can make comment about ‘how come so and so’ or ‘how come somebody got a company car?’ But that’s so minute compared to those big numbers.

So as you begin to educate tribal government, then you begin to help in building this bridge between government and enterprises. One of the things we went into was help develop, for a tribe, a budgeting ordinance where we set up the infrastructure where they come and ask us for forecasts, five-year forecasts for revenue. How many tribes have five-year forecasts in terms of their operational standards? Businesses have to do it all the time. So we took that into that environment and said, ‘You guys need to do a five-year forecast. This is how you get the information from us so that you can begin to start planning your growth; because the money’s going to be coming over and the growth and the revenue of the tribe are substantial, are going to be substantial for the next five years.’ Unless they know that, how can they begin to plan? How can they begin to put their governmental infrastructure in place to be able to do the things that they need to do? What normally happens is they do it on a year-by-year basis.

So we’re involved in developing that capacity on the tribal side by teaching them some of these disciplines and hopefully over the years -- we’re not there yet -- we use Joan’s program a lot to come in and do the same kind of training that’s going on here with tribal leadership. But still yet it’s on a hit-and-miss basis. We hope to, and it’s very difficult, we got to do it with a lot of humility, because we don’t want to be; I mean, we’ve been accused of being the Pueblo of LDC and that’s not what we’re about. But we definitely need to do what we can as a child in this household to be better children and help dad and mom develop their infrastructure.

So we work with the administration, you know, a lot of us, you know, depend on tribal water, so we have to help with the water department. We have to help with all those areas where we draw resources out of the tribe so we can deal with them within a business context. We also have to help in the legal arena; because a lot of the areas, for example, in human resources individuals do have a tribal resolution if they do not agree with my decision, and that decision is in the structure is to take me to tribal court not to tribal council. So if they have a problem with wrongful termination and they believed that as the chief executive officer of the tribe, I mean, the enterprise, that I made a wrong decision then, in Laguna, they have the ability to take me to tribal court. So then we go into an environment where we can deal with things on a very consistent basis. In a tribal council environment, for example, there’s this thing called 'freedom of information,' and unless I get release from that individual to release their personnel file, I’m going to walk into that tribal council with my hands behind my back and they’re going to slap me all over the place and I cannot tell them the true story unless I have that sheet of paper that says I can. And employees who take you to that venue, I have not yet found one that’s willing to sign that piece of paper. So you will always lose in that environment because they have the bullets and the gun. You have the bullets, but you don't have the gun. And so we were able to set up legal environments where now it doesn’t go to tribal council -- council has the ability to raise policy issues/policy questions with us -- but in terms of individual cases, the legal infrastructure of the tribe takes care of those issues for us.

Again, emphasize the appointment of board members. It’s very important that you get the best competency on your board of directors if you want them to be managing a $250 million business; and so board development is also very important and the continued development of board of directors, especially for tribal members who want to get active in this area is very important. So we do the same kind of programs in trying to develop our board of directors. The last thing is, one of the other things that government has to do effectively is properly capitalize the business. A lot of tribes, especially in the gaming industry, don’t capitalize their business adequately. At the Pueblo Laguna, from a $250 million business, the initial investment into us was $250,000. That’s all we got from the tribe. So we had to go out and get the capitalization needs from outside sources; where it has an effect on the tribe, is now we have to pay interest, expense, cost of money that could be going to the tribe. So those are the things you have to deal with in this environment and this is kind of the issues we’re working with. Capitalizing the business effectively, especially in your low-margin businesses, it’s very important; because a lot of these businesses can’t afford the cost of money that we sometimes have to pay, especially in today’s market. Now as Laguna Development Corporation, it’s interesting that if you read the paper right now, the down economy and people always thought gaming was recession proof. Across the country, the gaming industry is beginning to experience their first effect of a down economy and its impact on gaming. Gaming is down 10-20 percent across the country. And why is it that I’m here telling you to look at these things? It’s because at Laguna Development Corporation, Albuquerque in New Mexico is tagged as one of the most competitive Indian gaming markets in the country because we have five significant properties around a little over half a million people population base; very competitive. And in a down economy, you definitely have to take that planning into consideration. Our infrastructure has helped us. It’s helped us retain executive competency. In the gaming industry, turnover is almost annual. General managers are released almost annually. In New Mexico, 1.5 years is the average life of a general manager. My executive team has been with me since they came on board because they understand stability. One of their first questions to me, because a lot of these individuals have come out of Indian gaming, have said not, ‘How’s the business running?’ but ‘How does this thing work between the tribe and the business?’ And so I have not had anyone refuse or pull their application as a result of understanding this structure, and it helps me go after better people. It opens the door for me to go recruit better people [because] they know that their head’s not going to be taken off by tribal government. My head may be taken off, but their heads are going to be protected because of the infrastructure, and it’s helped me tremendously.

The last thing is a discipline issue, is, the other thing is you can have all the rules in place, but if you don’t adhere to the rules they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. So discipline, in terms of teaching people their roles, and ensuring from business side that we operate to our boundaries, on the other side, the governmental side they’re operating in their boundaries, has been very successful for us in that arena.

(Next slide.)

What’s the business’s responsibility? The business’s responsibility is to hire the best executive team it can find. I always remember my 201-business course and I was told, ‘Your key to success is to hire the best you can afford.’ And I’ve taken that principle and I’ve applied very consistently within our operation. So I go hire the best I can afford. Some I can’t even, I can’t afford now but I cannot not afford them. So I go after the best. So I have a senior team that is very -- and I guess I would be bold enough to say -- I’ll put them up against any senior team in the country in terms of their depth, their experience, their knowledge and the industries that we run. We provide and evolve our business systems constantly, our operating systems, our financial systems, our human resource systems. We under our, probably our fifth revision of our HR [human resources] manual because the dynamics of what happens within this industry, you can’t just take a book and adopt the rules and just let it sit. You’ve got to evolve them and you got to keep current.

And so we’re constantly looking at those fundamental processes that we have in place and updating them constantly. We provide adequate reporting to the board and to tribal council. That’s one of the big things that has to happen is that the board needs to fully understand full disclosure, what’s going on. The tribal council needs to understand in full disclosure what’s going on. And so in that regard, the board, you know, we have very confident board members so it’s not difficult for them to come back and say, ‘Okay, what happened here? What happened there? How come you…?’ You know, on the tribal council side we’re still evolving there. How do you read a financial statement? You know. How do you read…? How does an income statement differ from a balance sheet? And how does a balance sheet different from a statement of cash flow? You know, most tribes when tribal leaders look at a financial statement, they stop at the income statement, you know. That’s probably the least effective document in the statement. It’s your balance sheet and statement of cash flow that really tells you what’s going on, you know. And so teaching tribal leadership how to evaluate that balance sheet and really see where their net worth is now. You know, we in this down economy, this 20 percent decline in Las Vegas, 18 percent decline in revenue in Las Vegas; in 2008, we grew our revenue by 26 percent. We’re only two companies in the JP Morgan --which just bought out Lehman Brothers -- we’re one of two companies in the JP Morgan portfolio that had a growth in revenue in this down economy in the gaming industry. And a 26 percent growth in revenue while others, the big boys, MGM -- those big boys are losing 18 percent. So to me, it’s fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.

(Inaudible question from the audience).

Indian gaming. You know, this phenomenon is going on in Indian gaming as well, but in the JP Morgan portfolio, JP Morgan is big investor and they’re where we get our money to do our projects. They basically have a portfolio of all the people they loan money to in their portfolio, they just bought Lehman Brothers, that’s this transaction you read about in the papers, so they’re one of the biggest companies in the, finance companies in the United States. We’re one of two of their gaming companies in their portfolio that had growth in their portfolio, in their revenues. So, and again the other company didn’t have the substantial growth we had at 26 percent. Even in this down economy, where everybody else is losing 10-18 percent of their revenue, and we’re doing it in Albuquerque which only has a half-million population base. So, as I can say, it’s focusing on basics.

(Inaudible question from the audience).

They’re the things I’m talking about here: put an infrastructure in place, put in the relationships, tying them together, teaching people their roles, and education is very critical component to this thing. One of the other thing is we focus on growing and developing the business, we don’t focus on politics. We have tribal elections this year. We have no strategic agenda to be involved in tribal elections. They happen on the election side. We’re here to grow the business. And we don’t make decisions on day-to-day objectives, investment objectives as to who’s going to be the governor and what kind of council we’re going to have next year. We focus on the business and we stay focused on the business and run the business, because at the end of the day, you’re not going to be evaluated based on whether or not you did the right political thing, you’re going to get nailed if you don’t get the EBIDA, you don’t get the revenue over to the tribe, because that’s really what they’re all about, what they need.

(Next: Lessons Learned).

This is my, I think, final slide and it’s what have I learned through all this? I’ve got pretty close to 30-some years in doing this. I’m an old man. Maintaining separation of government and business is a very delicate balance. Like I said, if I was to try to do this at Laguna today, I probably would not be able to succeed, because the tribe was not as desperate today as they were twenty years ago.

I’ve been asked to come into some tribes and help move this model into their operation. I had a situation recently where the tribe came and adopted our structure, almost identical. Tribal leadership changed. The tribal leadership came in and had a socialistic agenda and they wanted to build community projects that had no ROI [Return on Investment]. And they said, ‘I don’t care, we want the money.’ 'Well, I have a project over here that’s going to give you 15 percent return on investment.' ‘I don’t care, we want to build this community program.’ And they just said, ‘I’m sorry. What you have to give us is we don’t need it this time. I need this more importantly.’ So we just said, ‘Okay, that’s fine. You don’t need us then. We can do something else. We don’t need to do this.’ One of the criteria my board of directors have on me, before I can do any projects, I have to show my 15% ROI. And that goes all the way down to entertainment. We have an entertainment venue, and if I’m going to bring in Carlos Mencia, I have to show the board that I can get a 15 percent return on that investment. So that’s what I mean in terms of decision-making. It’s not that…there’s some people that say, ‘How come you don’t bring in country [music]?’ It’s because I can’t get an ROI on country. I have lots of people that like country, but I cannot financially make it work; because it’s not about the entertainer, it’s about its impact on the gaming floor and how much more money I can make that night if I do that. So those are the kind of things we have to work on.

But maintain this separation from tribal government. Probably about 80 percent of my job is in two areas: one is human resources dealing with people; the other one is managing tribal government, constantly being available to tribal government, constantly working with tribal government to try to help them understand so that I can protect my management team. My management teams needs to be able to have the flexibility to do their job and they cannot do it with tribal interference. So the buck stops here both ways. And it’s building that trust through example that your management team develops that trust in you, that you’re able to do that. Doing proper due diligence on the management groups that you bring in especially when it’s staff.

One of the things I see in the gaming industry is that industry grew so fast that the development of executive capacity in the industry did not develop as quick as the industry grew. So a lot of Indian gaming facilities were hiring executives that had no experience. They were an assistant table game manager and they gave them the role of GM [general manager]. And you see that a lot. It’s amazing how much you see that. The guy puts on a suit, looks nice, talks well and they’re sold. But they don’t have the experience because nobody did the due diligence on this person to found out whether they really had the capacity. And that’s why you see this turnover in management because after a year, the person shows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so then the tribe has to fire him because he just lost money for them or did something that he wasn’t supposed to do. So due diligence on the executive team is very critical.

Setting up the infrastructure’s very critical. I can’t stop reinforcing that area. Government has to be there. The business entity has to be there. The infrastructure for the two -- it’s very important to develop those things. Business needs to hire the best capacity that it can afford. I hired, we opened up 150-room hotel just recently. I hired an individual that ran a thousand-room property, because I wanted his experience that was beyond what I was doing because not only did I want to open that facility with zero problems, but I wanted somebody there that could take me to a thousand-room property. So I hired for five years from now, not just for today. My chief of gaming operations; right now we have 2,100 machines; he ran a facility that had over 5000 machines. So again, it’s to take me to where he’s been. I don’t want to go that path for the first time myself. I want people that have been there, that have been down that trail that know what the pitfalls are. And so every position I have, from food and beverage to retail to the gaming operations and all my administrative staff are people that have been there before. And I’ve made sure from a due diligence standpoint, I verify they’ve been there before, because I definitely don’t want to go where no man has gone before. I want to go with someone that’s gone there before.

The next thing is tribes need to adequately capitalize their business and the last thing is tribes need to look at diversification of economy. Even within our business, we’re on diversification strategies. What happens if gaming goes away, heaven forbid? What happens if it goes away? We know that, because we thought uranium was going to last forever. So again, the strategies are: what are we going to do? What are we going to do to diversify? And we’re looking at those strategies now, right now within our portfolio and that’s within our five-year planning cycle. And so these are the things that I can offer you today. I hope that I, I hope I fit the bill in terms of what you wanted me to do today. But again, these are real experiences and things that I experienced at Laguna. And again, ours is just one story and there’s plenty more stories, successes out there that can help you in your decision-making."