citizen education

Ned Norris, Jr.: Strengthening Governance at Tohono O'odham

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Native Nations Institute
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Tohono O'odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr. discusses how his nation has systematically worked to strengthen its system of governance, from creating an independent, effective judiciary to developing an innovative, culturally appropriate approach to caring for the nation's elders.

Native Nations
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Citation

Norris, Jr., Ned. "Strengthening Governance at Tohono O'odham." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. February 16, 2012. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program we are honored to have with us Ned Norris, Jr. Since 2007, Ned has served as chairman of his nation, the Tohono O’odham Nation, winning re-election to a second four-year term in 2011. He has worked for his nation for the past 35 years, serving in a variety of capacities, from Vice Chairman of his nation to Director of Tribal Governmental Operations to Chief Judge of the Tohono O’odham Judicial Branch. Chairman, welcome, good to have you with us today.”

Ned Norris:

“Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.”

Ian Record:

“I’ve shared a few highlights of your very impressive personal biography, but why don’t you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself?”

Ned Norris:

“Well, I’ve… born and raised here in Tucson, born at San Xavier when it was a hospital in 1955, and pretty much grew up here and spent all of my life here in Tucson, and got married to my wife Janice in 1973. And actually Friday, February 17th will be 39 years that she’s put up with me.”

Ian Record:

“Congratulations.”

Ned Norris:

“So I really appreciate that. We have children, we have grandchildren, and it’s great seeing them, and seeing how our kids have developed over the years and seeing how our grandchildren are coming along.”

Ian Record:

“Well, we’re here today to tap into your knowledge, your wisdom and experience regarding a wide range of critical Native nation building and governance topics and I’d like to start with tribal justice systems. You’ve taken on many different roles in your nation’s justice system including court advocate, child welfare specialist, and judge. And so I’m curious, generally speaking from your experience and your perspective, what role do tribal justice systems play in the exercise of tribal sovereignty?”

Ned Norris:

“As I was thinking about this, I was thinking about where we were as early as the late 1970s. For some people that’s not early, for some people that’s a long time, but when we think about where our tribal system, judicial system has developed since ’79 and forward, we have really come a long way in realizing that the court system itself plays a significant role in ensuring or demonstrating our ability to be a sovereign tribal entity. Obviously the tribal legislature’s going to make the laws and the executive side of the tribal government is going to implement those laws, but the court system really has a key, significant role in determining, in how those laws are going to be interpreted and how those laws are going to be applied. And for me that’s really a significant role in the tribal judicial system ensuring that whatever we’re doing internally with regards to applying the law as it is written by the legislature and implemented by the executive branch that it is ensuring that sovereignty is intact, that it’s ensuring that we have the capabilities of making the decisions that we need to make in order to govern our nation.”

Ian Record:

“A law professor here at the University of Arizona who you know very well, Robert Williams, who serves as a pro tem judge for your nation’s judicial branch describes this systematic effort your nation has engaged in over the past three decades or so to build an effective, efficient, tribal justice system from the ground up. Why has the nation engaged in that effort and why is that important?”

Ned Norris:

“I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that we’ve got tribal legislators over the years that have really began to take a holistic look at the tribal government as a whole and realizing that for the most part as late as the 1970s, early 1970s, our tribal judicial system was really what I would refer to as a BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]-type system. Tribal codes were developed, but they were really taken off of boilerplates of BIA codes and so on and so forth. So I think that our leadership, our tribal council began to realize that these laws don’t always have the kind of impact that we would like them to have. And so in order for us to be able to govern ourselves and to determine our own destiny as it relates to [the] tribal court system, we’ve got to begin the process of changing the system and bringing it more up to speed, so to speak.”

Ian Record:

“And part of that I guess, regaining control of the justice function of the nation, things like making sure that you are charge of law and order, that you’re in charge of dispute resolution, that when you have a young person who has a substance abuse problem that they’re being taken care of, that issue is being taken care of internally versus them being shipped off the reservation, making the system more culturally appropriate, where the people in the community feel like this makes sense to us. Can you talk about that dynamic in the work that the nation has been doing in that regard to, I guess, make the justice system their own?”

Ned Norris:

“Well historically, I think it’s unfortunate that back then, and even to some extent even today, tribes do not have the level of resources available to address the more intricate needs of a substance abuser, an alcoholic, whatever the case may be, and so even today there are needs. There is a need to identify resources, whether it’s on or off the reservation to address that, but I think most importantly is the idea that we would be able to create the kinds of services that we’re using off reservation and bringing those services on the reservation where we’re playing a more direct role in that person’s treatment, in their rehabilitation and really looking at it like…from the perspective that this is family, this is part of our family. This individual isn’t just a member or a citizen of our nation, they are a citizen of our nation that we should take more of a responsibility to try and help within the confines of our own tribal nation, our people. And so I think when we think about it from that perspective, we begin to realize that maybe the services that we have are not as adequate or not as resourceful as we would like them to be. So we’ve got to be able to identify that and be able to identify where those voids are and bring those services into that program or create the program that…where those voids exist.”

Ian Record:

“It really boils down to the nation itself best knowing its own needs, its own challenges versus somebody from the outside that is simply just bringing in something from the outside that may not…”

Ned Norris:

“Not only that, Ian, I think that in addition to understanding that we have…we as the nation membership have a good understanding of what those needs are and what those resources are or aren’t, but also really realizing that if we’re going to bring or utilize outside resources to do this, those resources aren’t always going to be there. We’re going to be there, we’re going to continue to be there, our members are going to continue to be there and what makes more sense to us is to be able to take control and bring those services, develop those services where they lack and provide the services more directly by the nation’s leadership itself.”

Ian Record:

“One of the things that Professor Williams points to in this effort that the nation’s been engaged in around the justice system for the past 30 years is how the nation has invested in its own people, how it’s worked to build the capacity, internal capacity of its own people to provide justice to the community. Can you talk a little bit more about that? You’re a byproduct of that effort.”

Ned Norris:

“Well, I think that when we talk about investing in our own people, over the years in a more significant sense we’re…we’ve been able to establish our gaming operation. That operation has played a significant role in our ability to bring the kinds of services that aren’t there, that haven’t been there, or those kinds of services that we would for many years just dream about having and even to the extent that we’re developing our tribal members. I think, just to give you an example, pre-gaming we probably had less than 500, 600 employees that worked with the tribe and now we’ve got well over, I think it’s about 1,400 tribal employees and we’ve got a varied amount of programs that have been developed that are really beginning to address a lot of the needs that we’ve been having over the years. And not even that, the ability to develop our own tribal citizens in providing them an opportunity to train academically, whether it’s a vocational program, whether it’s a two-year or four-year college, whether it’s earning a bachelor’s degrees, master’s degree, doctorate degree, whatever the case may be. We’ve been able to provide that kind of an opportunity for our members to be able to acquire the kinds of skills that they lack academically and bring those skills back to the nation and apply those skills.”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, and I think what you’ve addressed is there’s a major obstacle for many tribes in that they’ll invest in their people, they’ll send them off to get a good education, but then it’s really critical that there’s a welcoming environment for those college graduates to say, ‘We’re sending you off to get a skill to come back and apply that skill here on behalf of the nation.’”

Ned Norris:

“Exactly, and part of our challenge as tribal leaders is making sure that we create the ability for those members to be able to come back. Too many times I’ve shared with different audiences over the years that we’re graduating more O’odham with bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees than in the history of the whole tribe, however, where we may lack in the ability to create the kinds of jobs that those individuals trained for. And so we need to prepare ourselves to be able to receive those tribal members back and provide them the kinds of job opportunities that they’ve spent four, six year, eight years in college acquiring, but also not only be able to do that, but to be able to pay a comparable salary for the kinds of positions that they’ve trained for.”

Ian Record:

“I’d like you, if you wouldn’t mind, to paint a picture. Before we went on air you were describing a little bit about what the nation’s justice system looked like when you came on board and started working within that system. Can you compare and contrast what the justice system and what the justice function looked like back in the early 1970s or mid 1970s, to what it looks like now?”

Ned Norris:

“Wow. It’s a night-and-day comparison really, because just physically we didn’t have the kinds of facilities necessary to really do… provide the kinds of justice services that our people should be afforded and we…when we talk about facilities, we talk about staffing, we talk about laws in themselves or codes, back in the late ‘70s, the early ‘80s, there was a time there that our law and order code was a boilerplate from the BIA code and I think that it took some years and some education and some effort to begin the process of understanding that this boilerplate code is obsolete in our mind and we need to begin the process of developing our own tribal codes. And so we began that process in writing our own tribal code, our law and order code, our criminal code, our civil codes and other codes and that took a process, but once we’ve done that and the tribal council adopted those codes, we started to apply them in the tribal judicial system. And so I think that when we compare where we were in the late 1970s to where we are now, the only… the concern that I have is, being a former judge -- I spent 14 years as one of our tribal judges and from ’79 to ’93 --and I’ve seen the court system develop over those years and seen how obsolete the laws were back in the late 1970s to where we were able to develop those laws. But also realize that back then in the early 1990s, I began to think about realizing the time that the court system is no longer processing and dealing with human beings, but they’re dealing with numbers. You become a number at some point, a case number or whatever because early on we came into this with the perspective that we’ve got this tribal member that is maybe committing crime, but there are a lot of factors that are contributing to why that tribal member has committed that particular crime and that we, the court system, although it has the law before it and the law may provide a jail sentence and/or a fine, the idea wasn’t always to throw this person in jail because of the crime they did, but to try and dig a little deeper into what’s really going on within that individual’s situation. Is it the home situation? Is it…was the person an abused person over a time of their life, was that person a victim of incest that just was never dealt with? And so we came to this with the perspective that the court system enforces the laws, applies the law and issues sentences, but some of that sentence has to take into consideration how can we help, how can we help this individual, how can we help the family address those issues that are impacting or having an influence in them committing the crimes that they’re committing?”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned that for several years you were a judge and so you’ve seen firsthand how the court system works and you’ve been a part of that court system. There’s an issue…there’s a major infrastructure challenge for a lot of justice systems across Indian Country. Can you talk a bit about what Native nation governments can do to ensure that their justice systems have the support they need to administer justice effectively?”

Ned Norris:

“One is, there was a period of time where the tribal legislature was what I refer to as the supreme authority on the O’odham Nation, at that time the Papago Tribe of Arizona. And as that supreme authority, there was really not a separation of powers between a three-branch system. And so, over the course of those years, early on the tribal supreme authority, the legislative authority really infringed on or encroached on what should have been an independent judicial system. And so I think, in answer to your question, tribal governments, tribal leadership should realize that it is imperative to the success of a tribal governmental entity that an independent system of judicial…a system to dispense justice is not having the kinds of influence by the other two branches of government that would impede its ability to deliver that justice. And I think that once we begin to understand that and realize that and realize that that not only does that involve the legislature not meddling into the judicial process, but it also has to involve an understanding that because in many tribal governmental entities the tribal legislator controls the purse, controls the funding, that they not use that as a basis to not fund the needs of the tribal judiciary. And I think that because the council has the authority to disperse funding resources that the courts still have to go to the council and ask and present their budget and ask for funding for infrastructure, for whatever the case may be. That there still has to be a relationship there, but I think that the tribal legislature needs to understand too that they shouldn’t use their role as a tribal legislator to deny the kinds of resources that the court system needs.”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned this issue of political interference and this is something that comes up in virtually every interview I do with folks on this topic of tribal justice systems and they all…almost all of them mention this issue of funding and how that can be rather than direct interference in a particular court case, but this kind of more subtle, insidious process of denying funding or reducing funding or holding funding hostage to…in exchange for certain considerations -- that that sends real messages and others have talked about how this issue of political interference can be a very slippery slope. That if a chair or a legislator, once they do it once for one person, word’s going to get around that, ‘You just need to go to this council person and they’ll get involved with the court case on your behalf.’ And in many respects doesn’t that distract the executive…the chief executive of the nation, the legislators from focusing on what they really should be focusing on?”

Ned Norris:

“Yeah, if we’re taking so much of our time and energy dealing with a relative’s court case and not allowing the court to apply justice to that situation, then obviously it’s taking us away from our real role, which is to provide the kinds of leadership and direction that we need to provide to run our government. So yeah, political influence, I think early on was an issue. Now, I think it’s rare. I think that we’ve educated our leadership to the extent that they understand the concept of separation of powers, that they understand that they shouldn’t use their position to try and influence a decision that the court is going to make. We’re not 100 percent, but we’re far less than what we were in the late 1970s and I think that that whole process just took a series of education and in fact, in some cases, some case law that’s already been established where the legislative branch was trying to encroach on the powers of the executive branch, we’ve had those cases in our tribal court system and those decisions are the law at this point.”

Ian Record:

“This wasn’t originally in my list of questions, but since you brought it up, I’d like to talk about the role of justice systems and the judicial branch, particularly your nation, in essentially being a fair umpire when there are conflicts between the executive function -- whether it’s a separate branch or not -- but the executive function of the nation and the legislative function. How important is it to have somebody, whether it’s your courts or an elders body or somebody, some entity that can, when there is conflict between those two functions to say, ‘Okay, let’s take a look at this and let’s be the fair arbiter here.’?”

Ned Norris:

“I think that it’s critical. I think it’s critical to be able to understand at some point in that particular dispute process that we’ve got to sit back and we’ve got to realize that as the two branches that are in dispute, is this an issue that we really want the courts to have a major role in deciding or do we want to come to terms or come to some level of understanding, try and resolve the matter before it ends up in court? I think that we should look at those kinds of issues from that perspective because once you get the court involved, the court is going to make its decisions based on the law, and the law is not necessarily always going to be the way to resolve or the way that you may… either side may want this particular issue resolved, and I think for the most part too, the court itself should realize if there’s an opportunity to resolve the dispute outside of the court, laying down the gavel and saying, ‘I hereby order…,’ that giving the parties an opportunity to resolve this dispute, whether it’s an encroachment by either branch, executive to legislative or vice versa, that we always have the opportunity to try and come to terms on resolution even if it means calling, I don’t know, I don’t want…I guess we could call him an arbitrator or mediator or a council of elders, to come in and provide some level of traditional means of resolving the dispute. I think that that’s important, but it’s important for the parties to make that decision. I’m not always open to the idea that court systems will order you to call in a council of elders or a medicine person to come help resolve this issue. I really think that that’s got to be the tribe themselves to make that decision. Over the years, the court has issued those kinds of orders and I think that they’ve worked, but for the most part I think that it’s the parties themselves need to make that determination and that decision.”

Ian Record:

“I would like to jump forward basically because of what we’ve been discussing and talk about the fact that virtually every tribe that I've worked with there’s always going to be some level of friction between the nation’s executive function and the legislative function. It’s just the nature of politics; it’s the nature of governance. And you being in that role of chairman now for multiple terms, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about that despite your best efforts, there are times when you come to an impasse or there’s a conflict that emerges. Can you talk about how do you build constructive working relationships -- as a chair -- with the legislative branch, the legislative function of government to try to make that relationship as productive and as seamless as possible?”

Ned Norris:

“Well, I have to say that I’m proud of what my first four years of leadership has done to do exactly what you’re asking because I felt and I sensed and I heard from many council members that there was really a breakdown in the relationship between the branches. And we knew then, Vice Chairman Isidro Lopez and I, and now even Vice Chairwoman Wavalene Romero and I realize, that it’s got to be a continuous effort to build that relationship, still maintain and understand there are certain constitutional authorities and powers that each individual branch has, that we need to understand what those constitutional powers are and that we don’t encroach our authority and violate what those powers are, because once you start doing that then you begin the resistance between the two and it doesn’t make for a good working relationship. We knew coming into office four years ago, and even continuing in my second term, that we’re going to need to continue to develop that relationship and I’m comfortable that where we’re at some, almost six years, five years later that we’ve been able to have a level of understanding that decisions are going to need to be made, that decisions that even though I have authority to veto decisions of our legislature, it’s been...in four years I think I’ve exercised that power twice and -- actually three times and -- both of those times those issues have been resolved. One issue is still pending in court, but I think that in itself speaks for the fact that we have a very understanding working relationship between the executive branch and the legislature and it’s really a continuous level of communication, it’s a continuous level to understand where they’re coming from on that particular issue, where you think you’re coming from and how do you work together to resolve your differences and how and at what point do you want to compromise in order to be able to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish. I think for the most part all of us want what’s best for the people of our nation. How do we get there from here to there, we may have some differences. And it’s discussing, resolving those differences to hopefully come to a positive outcome for providing the leadership that our people need.”

Ian Record:

“I’d like to switch gears now and talk about tribal bureaucracies. In addition to serving as your nation’s Director of Tribal Governmental Operations -- as I mentioned at the beginning -- you also have served as its Assistant Director of Tribal Social Services and as a former Commissioner for its Tribal Employment Rights Office, its TERO office. What do you feel from your diverse array of experiences, what do you feel tribal bureaucracies need to be effective?”

Ned Norris:

“Well one, I think clearly the individual that has a level of authority in that bureaucracy needs to understand themselves what…where do their powers derive from and to what extent do I have any power at all? And I think the individual then taking that in the whole from let’s say the tribal legislature or… I’m constantly having to make the kinds of decisions, leadership decisions that I need to make, but I’m constantly asking myself in my own mind, ‘Do I have the authority to do this?’ And I think that that’s the kind of understanding in our own minds that we need to continue to ask ourselves, ‘Do we have the authority to do this? What does the constitution say on this particular issue? What have the courts said on this particular issue? What has tradition said on this particular issue?’ And being able to understand that in all those perspectives I think is really where we need to…it’s going to help in the bureaucracy that’s created, because to me 'bureaucracy' isn’t a positive word in my opinion.”

Ian Record:

“Tribal administration.”

Ned Norris:

“Tribal administration, there you go. The Bureau [of Indian Affairs]’s a bureaucracy, but in tribal administration, I think that if we’re going to be able to…the end result is how do we get to be able to provide the kinds of needs that our people deserve and are entitled to? And are we going to create the kinds of roadblocks…and if there are roadblocks, then how do we break down those barriers, how do we break down those roadblocks, how do we begin to sit at the table with each other? I’ll tell you, there was a point in time where -- and I think it’s with any government -- but there’s mistrust, there’s a certain level of mistrust between the tribal branches or the governmental branches and it’s needing to understand that regardless of what I do there’s still going to be some level of trust. I’ve got 22 tribal council members. I still have to accept the fact that I know there’s at least one, maybe more, of those 22 council members that don’t want to see me where I’m at today and accept that. I accept that, but that doesn’t mean that I not continue to do what I think I need to do in working with my supporters and my non-supporters. They’re still a council member, I still have to work with them, I still need a majority of council to get the kinds of approvals or decisions to do things that I need. We need each other. The council needs the executive branch and the executive branch needs the council.”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned at the beginning of your response about the importance of every individual that works within the nation and for the nation understanding what their role is and what their authority is. Isn’t that absolutely critical when you talk about say, for instance, the nation’s elected leadership versus say your department heads, your program managers and things like that? That there’s a common understanding of, ‘Okay, when it comes to the day-to-day management,’ for instance, ‘of this program, that’s not my job as an elected official. That’s the job of the department head and the staff below them.' Because that’s a major issue that we’ve encountered across Indian Country, where there’s this constant overlapping of role boundaries if you will.”

Ned Norris:

“Micromanaging.”

Ian Record:

“Yes, that’s another way of putting it.”

Ned Norris:

“Yeah, micromanagement. I think for the idea or the idea of overstepping one’s authority where it appears, or at least you’re experiencing micromanagement, I think that for some time there was even a certain level of micromanaging that was going on and attempted to be going on from tribal council members or council committees on executive branch programs and we even see a certain level of that even today, this many years later. But I think how we handled those situations really has an impact, because I think for some time, we’ve got to realize that I’m not going to disallow my department directors, my department heads or anybody in those departments to not take a meeting with the tribal council committee if the council committee wants them to be there. That wasn’t always the situation in previous administrations, but for me, the council needs to be as informed on those issues in their role as a tribal council member. I think that when we think about micromanaging, again I think that it’s really a level of communication as to how you’re going to deliver. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Council member, you’re micromanaging my programs and that’s…I have an issue with that.’ I think that how we explain to them that we’re going to provide you the kinds of information that you need, but as the Chief Executive Officer under the constitution I have a certain level of responsibility to make sure that these programs are doing what they’re intended to do and I will assume that [responsibility]…I will exercise that responsibility, but we’re going to keep you informed, we’re going to keep…and if it’s personnel issues, that’s a different story. That’s clearly…we’ve got to protect the employee and the employer, but I think that for the most part we…how you communicate -- I’m trying to explain this. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of it -- but how you explain without offending is critical to the outcome. And I don’t want our council to think that I’m prohibiting our departments to communicate issues with the council, because once we start doing that then you start to create barriers there and I don’t want those barriers, but at the same time the council needs to understand that if it’s an administrative issue that is clearly within my authority as the Chief Executive Officer for my nation. I have directors, I have people that are…that I hold accountable to make sure that those issues are addressed.”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned a term that I think is really interesting, I’d like to get you to talk a bit more about it. You said, ‘It’s critical to explain without offending.’ And we’ve heard other tribal leaders and people that work within tribal government talk about the fact that the impulse to micromanage, the impulse to, for instance, interfere, for an elected official to interfere on behalf of a constituent, for instance -- it’s always going to be there. The question’s how do you explain to that person that wants to interfere, that wants to micromanage, that this is not the way we do things because we have processes in place, we have policies in place that prohibit me from doing that? That’s not to say, as you said, that we can’t have a communication, that you can’t understand what’s going on and why, or why a certain decision’s been made the way it’s been made, but we have processes in place. How critical is that to have that…I guess to have that basis upon which you can explain without offending? That there’s these processes in place that are critical to the nation functioning well?”

Ned Norris:

“Sure. I think that it’s extremely critical to be able to have a level of understanding, but a certain level of trust. I think follow-up is key. I think if you’re going to have a council member or a council committee that is raising issues that are clearly an administrative function of one of my departments, then I’m not going to leave them out of that issue because they have a reason, they have an importance, they have a constituent out there that brought the issue before them. They need to know, they need to understand and so I’m going to make…I’m going to give them the assurance that as the chief administrator, I’m going to make sure that my people are going to follow up on that issue, but I’m also going to make sure you know what we’ve done. Not necessarily what disciplinary actions might have been imposed, but how are we going to address that issue? And make sure that I get back to them and tell them, ‘Here’s where we’re at with this issue, here’s what we’ve done. I want the program director to come and explain to you where we’re at on this as well.’”

Ian Record:

“You mentioned this issue of personnel issues, which are inevitable. They always arise -- whether it’s a hiring and firing dispute, whatever it might be -- and you mentioned it’s a whole different ballgame, that that really is critical that that’s insulated from any sort of political influence whatsoever. And we’ve heard others talk about how important that is to achieving fairness within the tribal administration, achieving fairness within how the nation operates, how it delivers programs and services. Can you talk a little bit about how your nation has addressed this issue of personnel disputes?”

Ned Norris:

“Well, I have to say that I…we have a lot yet to develop. We have a system to grieve, there’s a policy, personnel policies are in place, there’s the policies outline as to how individuals grieve an employee-employer situation. And I’m not…I haven’t always been 100 percent satisfied with the system itself. And so we’re currently going through a rewrite or a restructuring of what that system should be and really all in the interest of facilitating the process in making sure the process is more friendly to both sides, the grievant and the grievee and so on and so forth, because I think that our process involves a panel of individuals that may not necessarily have the level of training or understanding of what their duty and responsibility is as a panel member hearing that grievance. And so we have a panel and an individual or individuals on that panel that may think their authority is much bigger than what is really outlined or that they may need to make decisions that aren’t necessarily related to the grievance itself and those kinds of decisions have come out and our current policy provides that as chair of the nation, the chair has the final decision over a grievance that hasn’t been resolved at any one of the lower levels. And it’s by that experience that I realize we’ve got to change the process; the process needs to be more equitable I think to not only the process, but to the grievant, the person grieving it themselves. So I think that you want to make sure, you’ve got to make sure…you’ve got to ensure to your employees that we have a system to grieve that is fair, that they have confidence in, that they have the comfort that they’re going to…they know that when they get to the process, that that process is going to move along as fast as possible, but that their issue is going to be resolved. And I think too many times we don’t get to that point, but I think it’s the process itself that needs to be looked at, but we need to develop a process that is fair.”

Ian Record:

“I’d like to talk now about a symbol of pride for your nation, and that’s the Archie Hendricks Sr. Skilled Nursing Facility and Tohono O’odham Hospice. What prompted the nation to develop this amazing, what’s turned out to be this amazing success story and what has it meant for the Tohono O’odham people and in particular, its elders?”

Ned Norris:

“Archie Hendricks Nursing Care facility was a dream for many years. I was in tribal social services when, not long after the tribe contracted [Public Law 93-] 638, those social services from the Bureau. And it was really unfortunate that too many times when our elders needed nursing care that those elders were, as a figure of speech, shipped to some nursing facility in Casa Grande, in Phoenix, in other areas of the state and literally taken away from their home, taken away from their family. And too many times, the only time that those elders came back was in a box, when they’d deceased at that facility. And too many times having our elders placed in off-reservation facilities limited or to some…and in some cases prohibited family members to participate in their care in that off-reservation facility. And it just made sense that we begin the process of creating a facility on the nation where our elders can stay home at a location that we think is kind of central to where members, family members can commute, have more easily the ability to commute to that facility and visit. Too many times…a lot of our folks don’t have vehicles. A lot of our folks pay somebody else who has a vehicle to take them to the post office, take them to Basha’s or take them to somewhere, in a lot of cases drive them to Phoenix to visit their elder in the nursing home. And even though that still is the situation today with many of our members, the drive is a lot shorter than it is just to go to the Archie Hendricks facility. But also not only to be able to bring our elders home and have that service here on the nation, but also to…it’s an opportunity to instill tradition and instill who we are as O’odham into the care of our elders and in doing that, also having the opportunity to train tribal members in that particular service. We have a number of tribal members that have gone on to earn academic programs that are now applying those skills in the nursing home. So it had a win-win situation all the way around, not only bringing our elders, but a job opportunity; an opportunity to create a program that wasn’t there.”

Ian Record:

“Obviously that success story has addressed a particular need and as you’ve shared, a very dire need. But I guess on a larger overall level, doesn’t it send a very powerful message to your nation’s citizens that if we have a challenge, if we have a need, we can do this ourselves?”

Ned Norris:

“Oh, I think that’s true. I think that that’s maybe one of the bigger messages that we’re demonstrating because even today we think about…in fact, I had some, a family member come into my office that were concerned about their child or their nephew that was in an off-reservation youth home placement and that individual turned 18 years of age and was released from the facility. Well, the concern was there was really no services that was provided to him while in that facility and so in their own words they says, ‘Why can’t we build the kinds of facilities that we did for our elders for our youth? Why can’t we bring our youth home into a facility that can provide the kinds of services that they need?’ And why can’t we? We should. We should move in that direction. There was a time when the nation operated a couple of youth homes, a girl’s home and a boy’s home. I’m not sure right now what the history is as to why that doesn’t happen anymore, but I think the bureaucracy is what I remember, was the bureaucracy got hold of the situation. It was probably a licensing issue that the Bureau required that we weren’t able to comply with and so on and so forth, but I’m not suggesting we want to run off, run facilities without being accredited in some way or certified or licensed in some way, but I think that we need to understand that if we’re going to move in that direction…and I totally agree that we need to begin developing those kinds of services on the nation, but we also have to realize do we have the capability to do that? Do we have…? We can build a house, we can build the home, we can build the facility, but do we have the resources to run the kinds of programs that it’s going to require, do we have the trained personnel, do we have the…all the requirements that you need in order to run a sound helpful service to these youth -- can we do that? I think we need to do an assessment ourselves and if we feel we’re ready to make that move, then by all means let’s start putting the…making those facilities available.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you mentioned that your citizens are now thinking, ‘Why can’t we?’ and that’s a very important shift in mindset, is it not? To where…from where in many Native communities 20-30 years ago, it was always, ‘Let the Bureau take care of it. We don’t need to deal with it.’ To now, ‘Why can’t we do it ourselves?’ That speaks to this larger shift that we’re talking about, the message that it sends to the people, does it not?”

Ned Norris:

“Well, it’s…I think about former leadership and I think about leaders that have had an impact in my life and I always share this story about…you remember the TV commercial, ‘Be like Mike,’ Jordan’s Shoes, ‘Be like Mike, play the game like Mike’ and all this and that? And I have my own ‘Be like Mike’ people out there myself. I think about the late Josiah Moore, an educator, a leader, a tribal chairman, former tribal chairman of our nation. I think about a Mescalero Apache leader by the name of Wendell Chino and think about other leaders that have gone on, but have demonstrated their leadership over the years. And I think to myself that those are the kinds of leaders that have vision, those are the kinds of leaders that have fought for sovereignty, that have fought for rights of tribal governments and those are the kinds of values as a leader that I think we need to bring to our leadership. Is, how do we protect the sovereignty of our sovereign nations? And it’s really unfortunate because somebody asked me, ‘Well, what is tribal sovereignty?’ And I says, ‘Well, I don’t agree with this, but too many times, tribal sovereignty is what the United States Supreme Court decides it’s going to be in a case or the federal government,’ and we can’t accept that. We shouldn’t accept that. We don’t want to accept that. We may not be a true sovereign, but we have certain sovereign authorities that we need to protect and we need to continuously exercise and whatever rights we have as a people, we need to exercise those rights, we need to understand what those rights are, we need to protect those rights just as well as protecting our tribal sovereignty.”

Ian Record:

“Isn’t part of that process… and you’ve mentioned this term a lot, assessing, assessing, assessing, assessing. Isn’t part of that process assessing where your nation could be exercising sovereignty or where it needs to exercise sovereignty, but currently isn’t and saying, ‘Let’s push the envelope here?’”

Ned Norris:

“Sure. I think that is. I think that…I like to do assessments, I like to do that mainly because you think you might understand what the situation is and you think you might have the right answer as to how you’re going to attack that situation or address that situation, but too many times we go into a situation not realizing what the impacts of your addressing that issue is going to be and so for me, I like to, ‘Okay, I agree with you, let’s address that issue, but let’s make sure we understand what it is we’re dealing with and whether or not we have the ability to address that issue,’ because to me to do something with half of an understanding really creates, to some extent, false hope because people are going to see that you’re moving in that direction. And if you’re not able to fulfill that movement, you’re going to stop and people may have liked to have seen what you were moving on, but don’t understand, ‘Why did you stop? We had hope in that. We thought you were going to address that issue.’ ‘Well, you know what, we didn’t do our homework and we couldn’t move it any further. That’s why.’ I think that we need to be, if we’re going to make a decision as a tribal leader, we need to fully understand the ramifications of what that decision is and to the best of our ability make informed decisions about the decisions we need to make and then move forward.”

Ian Record:

“I’d like to wrap up with…I’d like to wrap up on a final topic of constitutional reform. And as you well know, there’s been a groundswell of constitutional reform activity taking place across Indian Country over the past 30 years, in particular in the wake of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. And back in the mid-1980s, your nation, the Tohono O’odham Nation, completely overhauled its constitution and system of government. And I’m curious to learn from you, what did the nation change and why and what did it create and why?”

Ned Norris:

“Well, I had the experience of being involved in my tribal government under the old 1937 constitution and then the new 1986 constitution, and although I wasn’t as involved in the development of the 1986 constitution, I understand some of the history and that it took, and as I understand it, that whole process took some 10 years to accomplish, to be able to…there were several drafts of our 1986 constitution. The constitution committee had understandings and misunderstandings and decisions that they couldn’t come to terms on amongst themselves. So it was just a long, drawn-out process, but I think a 10-year process that was well worth it. And I say that mainly because I saw the government under the old constitution and I see it now under the ’86 and realize that even under the ’86 I don’t think that we fulfilled the possibilities under the current 1986 constitution. Going back to what I said earlier about that supreme authority under the old constitution, in many ways the council was the legislature, the executive and the judicial. And for me, you had that supreme authority under the constitution in 22 members of their tribal council. And so there were…because of that I think there were times as tribal judges or as…well, yeah, as tribal judges where we may have sat back and thought to ourselves, ‘Oh, I’ve got council person’s son or daughter in front of me in this courtroom, I better be careful on what I decide here.’ That consciousness or sub-consciousness about the fact that you’ve got a council member’s relative in front of you that you’re either going to throw in jail or you’re not going to throw in jail: ‘If I throw them in jail, then the council member’s going to come after me.’ I think there were those kinds of influences that the old 1937 constitution brought about and in different ways. That was just an example, but in different ways. And so when we…when the development of the 1986 constitution really brought on the whole concept of a government that is separated by three branches and three branches that are equal in power and authority and three branches that are clearly defined as to what that power and authority is in the constitution itself. I support that and I continue to support that. We’re going through a process now because over the last…since ’86 there have been some things that different districts and different and even I think need to be changed in the constitution. Literally, just take a look at our 1986, our current constitution and you’ve got more pages that cover the powers and authorities of the legislature than you do four or five pages under the executive branch. And so even on paper, is that truly a system that affords the level of powers and authorities that should be granted to each branch respectively. And so I think that constitution reform is good. I think that though there are still things in the constitution today that we don’t understand, that may not have been fully implemented or implemented at all, but I think that…and even educating our members on the constitution, I think, hasn’t been as adequate as it should have been. Because you look at the constitution, the constitution, the powers and authorities of the constitution is derived by the people. The people themselves need to understand the enormous power and authority they have under the constitution and they, under that power and authority, need to hold us leaders accountable for ensuring that we’re protecting not only the provisions of the constitution but protecting them as well.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you bring this up. We’ve heard so many other leaders of other nations whose nations have engaged in reform, either successfully or unsuccessfully, and particularly among those who’ve engaged in reform successfully, in that they’ve implemented certain changes, they’ve had the citizen referendum and it’s passed and all that sort of thing, they’ve all discussed this sort of critical moment where you overhaul your constitution, it becomes law and everyone kind of sits back and goes, ‘Whew, that’s done.’ But it’s really not done because you’ve eluded to this challenge of not just changing what’s on paper, but changing the political culture, changing citizen’s expectations of their government, educating the people about, ‘This constitution has a very direct impact on your daily life and here’s how.’ Is that something that… a dynamic that you’ve seen in your nation in terms of the challenge that it continues to face?”

Ned Norris:

“I think that everything that you’ve just mentioned as a leader whether you’re chair, vice chair, council, whatever the case may be, we need to understand that. We need to understand that simply amending, changing, instituting a brand-new constitution on paper doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t resolve whatever issues. Yes, it may be a better constitution in your opinion or a group of people’s opinion, but how we apply that, how we interpret that, how we educate the authorities to the people that the constitution is going to impact is a whole new process. And it’s a responsibility that we should take on as leaders to make sure that our people are… have at least an understanding of the constitution, but and I think to some extent have a working knowledge of what that constitution has to offer.”

Ian Record:

“You’ve mentioned vision and the importance of leaders having vision and you mentioned Wendell Chino and Josiah Moore. What’s your vision? What’s your personal vision for the future of your nation? And how are you working to make that vision a reality?”

Ned Norris:

“Vision, you’ve got to have visions in all aspects of leadership. What is the vision for the health area? What is your vision for the continuation of your economic development? What is your vision for the services that are delivered or that lack or that you dream about? What is your vision? And I think that one, the vision really has to take into consideration, where do you want to see your people, where are your people at now, where do you want to see your people five years from now, where do you want to see them 10 years from now? And we want to continue to educate, we want to continue to develop, we want to continue to be able to address the kinds of issues that are impacting, whether it’s a positive or negative impact on our people. We want to be able to identify a continuous identification of needs that our people have and how do we begin the process of addressing those issues, those needs, those whatever the case may be. I think that vision involves all of that and it’s not simply saying, ‘Well, my vision is that we’re going to rid the Tohono O’odham Nation of unemployment.’ That is a vision, but how do you get there? What do you…you have to…in order to have vision, you’ve got to be able to understand that there are things that are going on now that are going to impact your ability to apply that vision; and unless you understand what those issues are here, your vision isn’t going to mean anything. And so the vision might be big and it might have a bigger perspective, you want to address the health needs of…our vision is to eliminate diabetes amongst the O’odham. Great! I think all of us that have those kinds of problems on our nation want that as a vision, but how do you get there? What do you have to do now in order to address those issues? I want our kids to be positive, productive citizens of not only themselves and their families and their extended family and their communities and their nation, but I also want…I realize that there are things that are impacting our kids now that are going to have an impact on whether or not they’re going to be a productive individual. Too many times we take, we accept things, we accept things as the norm. Too many times, we accept alcoholism as the norm. Too many times, we accept drug trafficking or human cargo trafficking as the norm. That is not who we are. That is not the norm, and we need to impress on our people that those things are having negative impacts on us as a people as a whole and those things are going to have those negative impacts and are impacting our future, are impacting our ability to be the people who we are. And so the vision is being able to realize and understand those issues and make the kinds of changes in order to have a productive nation.”

Ian Record:

“Well, Chairman Norris, I really appreciate your thoughts and wisdom and sharing that with us. Unfortunately we’re out of time. There’s a lot more I’d like to talk about and I think we’ve just scratched the surface here, but I really appreciate you spending the time with us today.”

Ned Norris:

“I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.”

Ian Record:

“Well, that’s all the time we have on today’s program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at www.nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2012 Arizona Board of Regents.”

Honoring Nations: Mary Jo Bane: Preventive Health in Brazil

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Harvard professor Mary Jo Bane frames the session "Building Great Programs in a Political Setting" with an intriguing case study of a preventive health care initiative in Brazil, illustrating that effective program management can be achieved even in a highly political governance environment.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Bane, Mary Jo. "Preventive Health in Brazil." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 10, 2004. Presentation.

"Well, I'm delighted to be here with you this afternoon. Thank you for having me. What I thought I would do to start off our discussion this afternoon is talk through with you a case that I teach in my course on Strategic Management in the Public Sector. And I like this case because it is a case about a project that should not have succeeded, but it is a project that did succeed and from its success, I think that there are some very important lessons to be learned about program design, but even more importantly about management and about managing in a political environment. So what I'll do is describe the case, talk through some of the ideas about it, make a few general comments as a result of it, and then we'll move on to the other presentations in this session. What I'm going to talk about is a preventive health program that was run in Ceara, Brazil and this program is described by the political scientist Judith Tendler in a book, which I think is very good and if you find this interesting, you may want to look at the book. Her book is called Good Government in the Tropics and it's a set of cases about successful programs run in this part of Brazil and her analysis of why they were successful.

As I said, the interesting thing about this program is that it should not have worked. Any self-respecting management consultant, any self-respecting bureaucrat from the World Bank would have told the State of Ceara that this would never work. Now, why would they have said that this program would never work? This program was a program which hired 7,300 unskilled workers, sent them out into villages to do preventive health work with rather little supervision in a context where there was a history of corruption, where there was a history of clientelism, of patronage, of government workers abusing their power and abusing their authority, and a place in which there was a context of government workers -- shall we say -- not being particularly dedicated to their job. And the World Bank bureaucrat would have said, 'In this kind of a context, you should never...this kind of a program should never work. These people are not likely to perform their jobs; they're likely to get caught up in the patronage system, they're likely to engage in corruption, they're likely to do harm, they're likely to slack off. What you should do is privatize and have some competition in this program and make sure that the jobs of the workers are extremely well defined and that they are extremely well supervised.' That's not how this program worked. It should have failed, but it didn't fail, and it didn't fail according to some pretty important measures.

The program was started because the health situation in this particular part of Brazil was very poor. It continues to be very poor. The health indicators in this part of Brazil were very bad, very high infant mortality rates, very low immunization rates for children, very poor access for the citizens to preventive health programs and to health professionals, but after a couple of years of this program, infant mortality had dropped by 50 percent, immunization rates among children had tripled, and all of the people in this area now had access to doctors and to clinics. So why was it that this program succeeded where the predictions would have been that it should not have succeeded? Judith Tendler gives her own analysis of it in her book. My take on the success of this program is that it succeeded because the program incorporated some very interesting and important and innovative ways of structuring accountability, of building in accountability mechanisms in a way that was very different from the standard way.

Okay, what's the standard accountability paradigm when we think about a government program? How do we think about the mechanisms of accountability? How do we think about making sure that the folks who are employed by government actually do what they are supposed to do? Well, the standard way of thinking about accountability -- I would say -- is a way of thinking about accountability that looks like this: the elected officials instruct the state bureaucrats, the state bureaucrats instruct and oversee the supervisors in the program, the supervisors oversee the workers in the program, and the workers deliver services to the clients. To the extent there is accountability from the citizens in the course of the program, it's a very indirect form of accountability. The standard way we think about accountability in government programs is that the citizens elect the elected officials who then instruct the state bureaucrats who then instruct supervisors, who then instruct the workers, who then deliver the services to the clients. That's the standard way that we think about accountability.

And if you just think about this for a minute in the context of a preventive health program, you can see why you might predict that this kind of a structure wouldn't work. We've got a few state bureaucrats -- we've probably got a lot of state bureaucrats, but relative to the number of workers really, very few state bureaucrats -- who sit in the state capital, have 7,300 unskilled workers who are working basically in the homes of 850,000 citizens. They're basically working in rural villages, they're visiting homes, they're doing things in their villages and they're acting very autonomously because they have to. They're out in the middle of nowhere delivering the services that they're meant to deliver. There are 235 supervisors who are supervising the 7,300 workers and if you think about that and you think about the context, you can understand how supervision could not be close and direct. So that's why people said this is not going to succeed and indeed, one would not expect it to. But it turned out that as the program was being structured, a number of features of the program were developed that modified this accountability paradigm in some very interesting ways.

Now, I have to say when I talk about this case sometimes students ask, 'Did they really plan this? Did they really think through all these ideas in the way they designed the program?' And the honest answer to that question is no. Some of these things they did for political reasons, they did because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out working in a very interesting way and let me explain two pieces of it.

One way in which this program ended up modifying this standard accountability paradigm is that it developed in the workers, it developed in these unskilled, not particularly well-educated workers, a sense of dedication, a sense of professionalism, and a sense of pride such that I would say that these workers held themselves accountable in very important ways. Now, how did they do that? How did they develop in the workers a sense of professionalism and pride? There were a couple of things. And as I said, not all of these were completely planned out, not all of them were thought through as they were designing the program, but one thing the state bureaucrats did -- and if I'm being honest I have to say the reason they did this was that they wanted to enhance their own political prestige -- but one of the things that they did is that they gave this program an enormous amount of publicity. Everywhere you went, there were ads, there were radio programs, there was a real communication campaign saying to people in the villages, 'Your children are dying. Your children are sick. It shouldn't happen. Our infant mortality rates are too high. Our sickness rates are too high. We shouldn't put up with that and we're going to do something about it.' State bureaucrats thought, 'Yeah, that'll be good for us because now we're doing something important,' but what effect did that have on the workers? Part of the effect it had on the workers is to make them realize that they were part of something really important, that they were working for a program, working in support of a mission, that was important to their own families, to their own neighborhoods, to the whole State of Ceara, and that sense of working for something important gave them a sense of pride and a sense of commitment. The state also publicized any successes in the program and this was a program where there was actually a good likelihood that there would be successes because this was a program where there were some relatively easy things that could be done that could help improve health outcomes: dehydration treatments for kids, immunizations, pre-natal care -- all that kind of thing. And so they were able to publicize successes, they did that very regularly, and the workers gained from that a sense of pride. So that was one way in which they did it.

Another way in which they instilled a sense of dedication and professionalism was through the hiring process that they set up. I'm going to describe this hiring process. This is going to sound horrifying to you, okay? I'm going to warn you ahead of time. You're going to think, 'This is the most horrible hiring process I have ever heard of!' I'm going to describe it and then I'm going to tell you what effect it had. They decided that they were going to do a merit hiring process, that they were going to take applications from people and they were going to interview them and then they were going to choose the workers for this program as a result of their performance in the interviews. They got lots and lots of applications because even they were only paying the minimum wage in this poor part of Brazil, this was a good wage and people wanted it and people had their neighbors helping them to fill out the applications and so on. Then they held the interviews in public. They sent the folks to do the interviews of the workers in a public setting. And Tendler describes how they would be doing these interviews and there would be people looking in the windows and listening to the interview and watching the interview that was going on, and the people who were interviewing, they were pretty scared, and all of this was going on in public. And as a result of that they did it. Well, what people were hearing as they listened to these interviews were a couple of things. First of all, they were hearing the interviewer say how important this job was. Secondly, they heard the interviewer say, 'If you get this job you should be really proud because there are lots of applicants, and this is a very selective hiring process.' And then they heard the interviewer say, 'There are some requirements for the job, which you absolutely have to follow: you have to live in the village where you're working, you have to work eight hours a day, you have to visit every family once a month, and you may not distribute political information for anyone.' Those things are clear; everyone in the community heard that, everyone in the community heard those things. What did that mean? It had a couple of effects. One of the effects it had was that it, again, enhanced the sense of pride of the workers who were hired through this process, that they had indeed come through an important selection process. It also meant that the people who weren't hired and the citizens in the community knew what the requirements of the job were and kind of had their eyes on these people, so that was an important piece. The merit hiring process -- the way it was conducted -- was a very important part of leading to worker dedication.

They did a couple of other things in terms of enhancing professionalism and worker dedication that were very important. One was they provided the workers with three months of training to be health agents and to be health aides and they provided the workers with continuing training as they were doing their jobs, continuing training and professional education. Now, it turns out that many of the workers left these health agent jobs and went to work for hospitals or went to the city to work for health organizations and so on. So some people said, 'Gee, you're wasting this training because people aren't using it here for this job,' but they were smart enough to realize two things. They were smart enough to realize that that training that they were providing was really important to this piece of the equation, they also said to themselves, 'Gee, if we've got some better trained health professionals in the other sectors of the health system that's not so bad.' And that was a real incentive for the workers who, as I said, weren't being paid all that much, but knew that they had some prospects for mobility and that they were getting the training that they need. So that was another aspect of how they increased professional pride and responsibility. They also allowed the workers -- and to some extent they did this because they didn't have much choice, they couldn't supervise them closely -- but they allowed the workers to expand their jobs in a couple of different ways. They allowed the workers to do very minimal curative-type health work as well as preventive work, you know, putting Band-Aids on, taking sutures out, giving people aspirin, pretty simple stuff, but it was the kind of thing that allowed the workers to do something quickly for a family and therefore to be able to get the confidence of the family in order to do some of the more preventive kinds of things. Again, not something you might normally think about doing, they did it pretty much because they couldn't supervise them that closely, but it turned out to be very important. The workers also took the initiatives in generating public health programs in the community and also took the initiative in helping families in other ways.

So all of these pieces of the program led to a sense of dedication and worker pride that meant that the workers were in many ways monitoring themselves in the same way that professionals did, but from what I said about the hiring process, you can also see that there was another accountability mechanism that was very, very important that supplemented the professionalism of the workers in a way that if they were tempted to do some of the things that people were afraid of, they knew that somebody was watching. And the way it worked was because of the way the hiring process worked, the citizens and the rejected applicants knew what the requirements were for the job, and the citizens and the rejected applicants had information channels directly to the workers and directly to their supervisors and were able to communicate back when someone wasn't doing their job. Turned out they also communicated back when things were going well, when they thought the worker was doing a really good job. And that feedback mechanism, the direct framework mechanism from clients, and in this case rejected applicants to supervisors and workers, turned out to be extremely important. So what you had then in this program was an accountability paradigm, which supplemented the regular one with another arrow, which had some different relationships between the state and the citizen through which the state provided lots of information, lots of publicity, and lots of openness to enable the citizens to supervise. And so the accountability paradigm was supplemented in these various ways. I think there were some other things that probably contributed to the success of this program. I think there was probably some just dumb luck involved. I mean it was a program that was ripe to succeed. There was also a set of relationships between the state and the municipalities, which I haven't talked about because it was pretty complicated and I think not so essential to the success of the program, because what I think really was important was these different ways of getting accountability for workers who were basically unskilled workers.

So let me just close by making a couple of comments about general lessons from this case. It's interesting: usually when I teach this case, I teach it as part of a section in which I also teach a case about an agency in Sweden, which put into place a lot of teamwork, a lot of job enlargement, a lot of autonomy for relatively low-skilled workers and was very successful. And when I teach that case, first the students usually say, 'Well Sweden, of course it'll work in Sweden. Everything's wholesome in Sweden. Nobody steals anything. Everything works really well. So you know it'll work in Sweden, but it won't work any place else.' So when they say that, then I almost immediately try to teach this case about Brazil because Brazil is not Sweden. It's not Sweden in a lot of different ways. And then they say well, 'It'll only work in some place where you can't pay very good salaries and...'

So I actually think there are some real generalizable lessons here that one can learn about how to manage programs within government structures, within public structures in a way that can make them successful. And I think one lesson is not to underestimate the possibility, not to underestimate the potential, of even unskilled workers to act in ways that show professionalism, that show dedication, that show a real involvement in their job. That can especially be the case when the mission is indeed compelling, but that can be helped by the use of publicity, the use of information, the use of merit hiring, and the use of job expansion. So that's one lesson that I draw. A second lesson that I draw -- which I believe is generalizable and I think that you can find this in a variety of cases -- is that there are some accountability mechanisms, which involve the community and the citizens and the clients in direct ways, not indirectly through voting for elected officials and then blah, blah, blah, but directly in being able to report on, to correct and give praise and so on for the work of the workers.

So I would leave you just to think about this case and think about whether perhaps some of these lessons about worker dedication, about ways to enhance it, and about accountability mechanisms might be generalizable in some of the situations in which you work. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Myron Brown: Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former President Myron Brown discusses how the Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council is an example of building a great program in a political setting, and shares how Gila River youth are having their political voice heard through this innovative leadership development mechanism.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Brown, Myron. "Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 10, 2004. Presentation.

"'Building Great Programs in a Political Setting' is what I would like to present to you today. Youth have always have had the disadvantage of being both young and inexperienced in getting both their voice and needs recognized and heard. To engage in this type of dialogue at the tribal level [can be frustrating]. What has developed over the past 16 years is a series of interlocking programs and activities. These have provided the youth with a series of long and hard engagement within the world. This engagement has allowed the youth of Gila River to both understand and appreciate the efforts of working in a political setting. The following is a brief summary of the programs and the activities provided to 'Building Great Programs in a Political Setting,' and this program gives a basis by which to operationalize the following activities for hands-on engagement of active participants in the political setting.

One of our main programs that the Gila River Youth Council hosts every year is the Gila River Close Up Program, which started in 1998. This annual event explores the rights and responsibilities of tribal members' involvement in American and tribal government. The Gila River Close Up is an educational and leadership project for high school community youth to promote participation in government process. Now, with this program we usually...it's an intense two-day gathering within the...we invite, I think, 50 students from the community to participate in this program. And we host it. It's at a hotel; it's a two-day gathering. And that, within those two days the kids learn about our tribal government, the three branches of our government: legislative, judicial, executive. What we recently found out through Andrew Lee is that this is actually, the Close Up Program, Gila River is the very first, the Youth Council is the very first to focus a Close Up program on the tribal government and not on the state government. So that's one good thing, because our children, our kids in the community know a lot about the state government, the federal government and how it works, but they're not too familiar with the tribal government. It's a whole different thing, how our tribal government works. And then so...and during this two-day gathering, we invite a speaker from the state or the federal government. Speakers include Representative Cheryl Chase, Pete Rios, just like our tribal government, like our tribal leaders, people like that, people who influence our community. And within the two-day gathering, they get to travel to the courts and they have a mock trial. And so it's really interesting and the kids get to learn a lot about the community and the government.

Another program that we have is the Gila River Kids Voting Program, which the Gila River Kids Voting Project features specially designed curricular for grades K-12, and culminates with the community youth accompanying parents to the voting place on Tribal Election Day to cast their ballot in simulated election. The purpose is to instill lifelong habits in youth and boost voter turnout among future adults. Now, another thing is since this is a critical time, the Tribal Election is coming, the state election is here, the federal election is here, and so we're getting ready for the general election. And with that the kids get to vote. They get to vote for the president, they get to vote for state representatives, and it's simulated. And so the gig is they have to bring their parents along with them so they can vote, which is a cool thing because the kids want to vote. The kids, 'I want to vote.' And so the thing is they have to bring their parents with them. And our Tribal Election Department credits the kids voting for bringing a seven-percent increase in voter turnout in our community. And with that we have seven tribal schools, and so the youth population in the Gila River Community, the population in the community is almost 20,000, and the youth make up over 50 percent of that. So we're also the first tribe of the nation to have kids voting at a tribal, state and national election level. And so with that, the 2005 election is coming up, and so we're getting ready for that. And that's really a good thing. So we're just getting really ready for this election, the kids are excited. I actually work the voting polls, and this past primary election our state had, kids started coming and showing up. And the kids voting...it's not until the general election that the kids voting starts. And so kids were like, 'Can I vote?' I'm like, 'Aw. Yes, you can vote in the general, but please remember, bring your Mommy and Daddy, you know.' And so that's another influential program that the Youth Council offers.

Another, our next program, as you've seen in the video, a lot of that was with our Gila River Youth Conference. The Gila River Youth Conference is held annually for community youth and draws an average of 500 youth. An intense two-day gathering of addressing the issues rose during the year with regards to input from tribal leaders and recommendation to tribal leaders. During this time, changes to policies and procedures may be raised, new officers may be elected, and the direction of the council may be set for the upcoming year. This activity promotes youth leadership and communication while building confidence and self-esteem. Over this past summer, we just had our, we just celebrated our 16th Annual Youth Conference, and it was at our brand-new Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort. And so the focus for this year, we thought it best, we focused on diabetes seeing as though Gila River Indian Community is rated number one in the nation for high diabetes. And so the Youth Council thought, 'Well, let's do our conference on, you know, health,' which was, and we got a great turnout this year. We invited our hospitals, we invited our community leaders, we had a health panel, and the hospital did a, what do you call it, it was like a fair, like a hospital fair, you know, they had the X-ray department, they had the dental department. A lot of the kids who want to be, you know, maybe kids who want to be future dentists or doctors, you know, a lot of kids liked the booths. And so that was really good. There was a really good turnout in the workshops that we had, workshops such as, you know, dealing with health issues. Most of the workshops we had were, had to do with health. And so it ended. And well, we got a good turnout. Some have even called it the best youth conference ever. So I was really excited with the youth conference.

And not only with the youth conference do we talk about future issues, it's also whenever we elect new officers for the Youth Council. And with that, on one of the days we send all the youth to, our community is composed of seven districts, almost like political districts. And so the youth from their respective districts would go into these separate rooms, district one through seven. And then so we'd have the leaders...like I'm District One, so I would lead the room. And since my term will be ending, you know, you'd address the youth, any of the youth who want to participate in the Youth Council, they'd nominate themselves or declare themselves candidates. And so with that they go through a process, they go through a caucus, they go through speeches, and then they go through the vote. And it's the youth of the community that vote them in the office. It's the youth of our community that vote us into office. And so, and then the results come back within the last day. We usually have dances every night for the young people and the results come in the last day, 'So and so, you're declared our District One candidate.' So that's how we develop our Youth Council, is through our youth conferences.

And closing with my presentation, as a result of the Honoring Nations 2002 study, these are the lessons that they concluded with: statements about the importance of tribal youth should be backed by concrete investments in their development. For example, tribal leaders can facilitate the establishment of youth councils, host, fund and participate in youth activities and events, and encourage you to participate in national organizations. These and other investments inspire youth to make a positive difference in the community and build up the pool for future leaders. With appropriate training and organizational support, youth can make meaningful contributions to tribal government, they can offer input into the issues affecting their peers, provide guidance and feedback in policy formation, and serve as effective spokespeople for the tribe. Like tribal governments, tribal youth councils require good organization, by-laws, staggered terms, a code of ethics, election rules, and clear processes for decision-making are institutional ingredients for success. So with that, that is the conclusion of my presentation. I'm open to any questions, you know, later on. So if you guys see me just holler or something."

Amy Besaw Medford:

"Does anybody have any questions right now? I can pass the microphone around."

Audience member:

"Are you open to invitations from anybody like us? We would like you, representatives of the Youth Council to come to our community to visit us."

Myron Brown:

"Can you say that again, please?"

Audience member:

"Are you open to invitations from communities all around the country? Like we would like one or two of your representatives to come and talk to our youth in our schools."

Myron Brown:

"Exactly. We're open to anything like that. Did I hear it right or what? I hope so. I think. I hope I heard what you said. But we get a lot of invitations from different youth around the country, youth who want to form organizations just like our Youth Council. Everywhere we go, you know, we always meet new people, and they're always fascinated by our program and they want to form something like this in their community. And so just get in contact with us. I have a business card if you've like more information about our youth council and how it got started. So, yeah."

Amy Besaw Medford:

"Does anybody have any questions for Chairman Pico or for Professor Mary Jo Bane or Myron Brown?

Audience member:

"I have a question for the speaker. Are things changing? You said traditionally, elders...oh, I'm sorry. I was talking to the Youth Council person. I'm embarrassed. OK, let me start over. I'm sorry. What I was going to ask is are things changing at Gila River? Are the elders now making a place for the youth? I mean it sounds like you've carved out your own."

Myron Brown:

"Yeah."

Audience member:

"But are they now looking to you for answers to some of the pressing issues there?"

Myron Brown:

"Well, we're always involved with our elderly nowadays. I mean we invite them to our youth conferences. This past youth conference, a lot of elderly came. They had so much fun. They danced with, sometimes they will dance with us, we'd have a good time with them. So to answer your question, yeah, we're involved with our elderly now. They have opened up a lot. They have pretty much adapted to our Youth Council, and so we're very thankful and we look up them, and so if that answers your question."

Audience member:

"It's more of a comment than a question. After today's presentation, I began to reflect a little bit about what's happening at Lummi. We have the Lummi Cedar Project, which is a youth initiative. We have a youth leadership program in place where they're looking at starting to serve as voting members on our nine commissions that we have in advisory capacities to the council. And after hearing the presentation today, I can tell you there's a national movement and is not limited to just Indian Country. I wanted to close my comment out with saying that I have every bit of confidence that Indian Country is going to be in good hands."

Myron Brown:

"Thank you."

Amy Besaw Medford:

"One more."

Audience member:

"I also, just to applaud the amazing things you're doing with the new community, and sort of to follow-up on the, I guess the question about the elders is the next question is, is within the tribal governance and leadership, is it the intention to be able to also have a voice there, or do you have a voice?"

Myron Brown:

"We do have a voice there. It's a formal voice. The Tribal Council is always asking us questions. They always want our input, which is a good thing because it never used to happen before 1987. It never was like that. Like Greg [Mendoza] and his friends, it was never like that. That's why we formed the Youth Council. Now that we're formally recognized as a youth council, the Tribal Council now make some kind of recommendations. Like an example, the Cardinals stadium that was coming into our community, it was a big issue for our community. And so the Tribal Council said, 'Well, why don't you guys ask our youth about it, ask our youth how they feel. What do they think about this big thing coming into our community? So the head from the Cardinals actually came to our youth council, made a presentation, and was giving out freebies trying to really, you know, trying to really go for that 'yes' vote. And of course, giving out footballs and all the good stuff. And so, yeah, I mean it's a good thing. The Tribal Council has always...we have a voice there. We also present matters to the Tribal Council. Like at our youth conference, we go into like unity circles and we basically develop problems. It's usually something, since our last conference was about health we talked about issues in health, why is everybody diabetic? Kids post some really good questions, and so at the end of the conference those questions are then tabulated into a report and it goes before Tribal Council. And they get to see what we talk about, and maybe changes can happen from there. So those are just some of the good things that the Tribal Council has done for us. And it's a bonding thing, we're all one."

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Frank Ettawageshik (Part 2)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Frank Ettawageshik, former chairman of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (LTBBO), discusses the critical role that intergovernmental relationship building plays in the practical exercise of sovereignty and the rebuilding of Native nations. He shares several compelling examples of how LTBBO built such relationships in order to achieve their strategic priorities.

Resource Type
Citation

Ettawageshik, Frank. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow (Part 2)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 13, 2010. Interview.

Ian Record:

"So we're back with Frank Ettawageshik. This is a continuation of the interview from April 6th. Today is April 13th and we're going to pick up where we left off, which was talking about constitutions. And I want to essentially go back to the very beginning on this topic and ask you for your definition of what a constitution is."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"The constitution is the method by which the people inform their government how they want the government to serve them and the government is a tool of the people to achieve what they need to achieve in terms of relations to other governments, in terms of relation to how things are going to work internally. The people themselves maintain the complete power. And then they can either give or take back certain powers to the government through the constitution. The constitution also establishes the mechanism for how the tribal government, the tribal nation will deal with other nations. It sets up the parameters for how you are going to do that, "˜which branch of government has which authority?' and all of those types of things. To me the constitution is a tool of the people for how they are going to manage their government."

Ian Record:

"What key ingredients do you feel constitutions need to have in order to be effective?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, constitutions...to me, there's a legislative function, there's a judicial function, and an executive function, and these need to be acknowledged and then the interplay between them is what the constitution does. Some tribal nations have constitutions where all of those powers are wrapped up into one body. Others have clear separations of powers, but even ones that have separation of powers the balance of those changes from one to another. So really those are important functions, I think another thing needs to be clearly you have to have an amendment clause on how you are going to amend it. You need to have some basic statements. I believe that it is extremely important to have like a bill of rights built into it. I think that's very important because those things need to be part of what our people come to expect in terms of how they are going to relate with their government. And when the people are telling the government how it's going to function they need to reserve for themselves certain rights, certain ways to protect themselves. I look at a constitution in a way as the people trying to protect themselves from their own government and I think that not only does it say how it's going to function, but it also limits how it's going to function, and guides it so that it will...constitutions that are poorly conceived or poorly written or ones that the community, the tribal nation has grown beyond, they can hamper how things will function. They can be difficult. For instance, constitutions do not require, nor does federal law require that they be adopted by secretarial election. Nor do they require that amendments be done by secretarial election, yet many constitutions throughout Indian Country require secretarial election by their own words, and so I think an important function there would be to not have that in your constitution. To me, you are either sovereign or you aren't, you are not part sovereign. And as a nation, tribal nations, sovereign tribal nations are constantly negotiating the exercise of that sovereignty with the other sovereigns around them. We may be with another tribe, another tribal nation close by, having some disputes about whose territories is whose or what...in economic development, there's room for competition and some issues. There could even be citizen issues regarding membership or citizenship. And we need to...the documents need to sort of deal with those things that are coming up."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up on something you said. You talked about a number of Native nations growing beyond their constitutions. We hear that sort of refrain, particularly in the discussions of tribes who have Indian Reorganization Act systems of government that were adopted in the 1930s. They had a very different conception of the scope of self-governance, if you will. Is that something you've seen in your line of work, working with tribes both as chairman and now as executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Every tribe has its own constitution or its own, either written or not written, in terms of how the government's going to function. Most of the tribes I've worked with have written constitutions and they're all different and they have...there are clearly times when you move beyond something. The United States has amended its constitution a number of times, and not always successfully. Witness Prohibition for instance, and the fact that there's one amendment that brings it in and another one that takes it out. So the fact that a government might need to amend its constitution is not unusual. Some amendments may be more far ranging than others. Some amendments are a sentence here, or two. Other amendments might be more drastic than that, but I would think that, think of it rather that the constitution is an organic document that is evolving as the nation evolves."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to pick up on a specific aspect of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians' constitution, which was adopted in 2005, and it gets at this issue that you mentioned in the outset when defining constitutions, which is international or diplomatic relations. And explicit in your constitution is an acknowledgment of other sovereign nations and their inherent powers presuming that those sovereign nations, in turn, recognize and respect the sovereignty of your nation. Can you summarize what that clause says and give an overview of perhaps why your tribe felt it necessary to include that?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, when you, like I said, when you acknowledge that sovereignty in yourself and in others then you have to exercise or negotiate that sovereignty with your neighbors. So what I think is here is that you're constantly working with those other sovereigns, but you need to figure out how to decide who you are dealing with and who you aren't. And so the most basic way of that is that if somebody else acknowledges you, well you can acknowledge them, but you have to have some sort of a process for that. What this clause in our constitution does is it establishes a basis for some office, or staff person, or somebody that would be akin to a state department for instance, where there's an international relations office that deals with negotiations with other sovereigns and those types of things. Those negotiations, those other sovereigns might well be the United States and the laws that they are passing could have an effect on the way we exercise our sovereignty, but the fact that, for the most part, what we have done in Indian country is that we have federally recognized tribes deal with federally recognized tribes and I think what that does is that sort of...we're letting the United States decide who we're going to have diplomatic relations with, and I don't think that is a good idea. But we have the right to make that decision ourselves, but then along with that right comes the responsibility to do it in a way that you are doing it reasonably. So then what do we do? Do we have a whole acknowledgement process, each one of us? How do we go about doing that if we're not going to sort of let someone else vet the potential list of people with whom we'll have relations. I think the whole federal acknowledgement process doesn't grant sovereignty to those tribes that make it through, instead it acknowledges that they have it and that's what it's all about. So what that means is that the non-recognized tribes also are sovereign, and the state recognized tribes are sovereign, and the federally recognized tribes are sovereign. Tribal governments have inherent sovereignty and no one gives it to them. They have it because it comes through being in this creation. Well, you still have the responsibility to do it, to do it wisely because not everyone who claims to be a tribe is a tribe and that's the difficult thing. There are examples of people who have formed...recently, there have been some prosecutions here across the United States of people who have had various money, get-rich schemes, that involve pretending to be a tribe and issuing cards and charging people for it. Those are things we have to look out for, but then that's the responsibility of a sovereign nation is to not just look inward, but look outward because threats come from outside as well as potential good things come from outside and we have to be able to recognize them and deal with them."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned or we've been discussing the constitutional mandate within your tribe's constitution to essentially engage in international relations. It places a high value on that process. Since the 1980s, there's been an incredible growth in intergovernmental relations between Native nations and various other governments and I'm curious to learn from you, what do you think is driving this growth?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"A recognition that we need to look outside ourselves and work together. I mean if you look at what has happened across the world in this time, the European Union is formed and variety of very nationalistic individualistic nations realized the value of working together. While they still have their independence and unique in their own countries, at the same time, they have a centralized currency and other things that make for a good sense. Tribes have the same kind of thing. We know that there is strength in numbers and as a matter of fact back there in the revolutionary time here in the United States, many of our leaders spoke to the Continental Congress and to the early [U.S.] Congress about the strength of working together. As a matter of fact, there is a famous speech about 13 fires being stronger than one that was given and these are the kinds of things that come from us and our understanding and we often formed alliances of some sorts with us coming together, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for instance is one, the Three Fires Confederacy is another, and there are others all across the country where different tribes have worked together. So what kind of things have we done?

One of the examples of working together is the formation of the National Congress of American Indians back in the '40s. It was formed to combat the national trend towards not recognizing the tribes, tribal governments or saying, "˜alright the tribal governments have progressed far enough, now we can terminate our relationship with them.' And so the whole Termination era came through and NCAI, that was one of the big pushes for NCAI. One of the things that we found as we were doing some studying and I still have more to do on this, but not only was there the non-profit corporation created that is the National Congress of American Indians, but at the same time there was also a treaty written and was signed by a number of the nations that acknowledged each others' sovereignty. I mean, it's a very...it showed and demonstrated in writing, the understanding of the tribal nations that they were and still are independent sovereigns and no matter what other people may think about it. And so, I think that that was one example, NCAI.

Other examples of working together I'm going to put up, more recently, we in the Great Lakes signed an agreement called the Tribal and First Nation Great Lakes Water Accord. This was done because the states and provinces were working on the issues of bulk ground water and diversion of water from the Great Lakes and how are they going to work together to deal with those issues as they came up and there had been a succession of agreements, finally one where they would agree and create binding agreements and then it was in the creation of these binding agreements that they started work and we got wind of the things. They talked to us a little, but they always talked to us as stakeholders and we felt that that wasn't correct. They needed to talk to us as sovereign governments within the region because we had court-adjudicated rights within that region. We were the only government with government-to-government relationship through treaties and that was important that we be apart of it, so when we weren't part of it and they did treat us as stakeholders we went out and called a meeting of all of the tribes and first nations in the Great Lakes Basin. There is about 185, some are together and some are not, and so when I say about there is a couple different ways of looking at it, but it's over 180 tribes and First Nations in the Great Lakes. We ended up having representatives -- either individually or either through consortia -- we ended up with representatives of 120 tribes and First Nations at a meeting with just a few weeks notice, which we negotiated and signed this water accord. Within one day, we were at the table, invited to the table to negotiate with the states and the provinces and what they planned on signing at about a month, it took actually almost a year before it was ready to go and we managed to strengthen those documents in a way that they will help protect the environment and the waters because we plugged holes that were there that were wide open because tribes and First Nations weren't there. We also took offending language out; they managed to negotiate language to come out of these documents that didn't acknowledge tribal property rights or tribal treaty rights. So in the end there's an interstate compact that's agreed [to] by all of the governors signed it with the tribes had to agree. And then the governors all had to get the state legislature in each of eight states to pass the identical wording which was no easy trick and they got that done and it went to the U.S. Congress where there was a lobby to push this through. If the interstate compact is approved by Congress it becomes law of the land and it's a provision within the U.S. Constitution that allows it.

So this interstate compact, there was a strong lobby trying to fight it because they thought it didn't go far enough. One of the key things it didn't do is it didn't bottle water in containers, 5 gallons and less is considered a consumptive use as opposed to a diversion. A lot of people felt that it should have been a diversion if that water was bottled and shipped outside of the Great Lakes aquifers. And so nevertheless it ended up passing at the U.S. Congress and it became law, then it was an international agreement that was signed between the eight states and the two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec. With parallel language, but the two provinces weren't able to sign onto the interstate compact so they created this other document that has that in it. It at least deals with issues when there is a permit for a withdrawal of a lot of water from the ground that will be vetted through a process. The tribes and First Nations agreed that we would have a parallel process to the states, rather that all be a part of one process. So we are still working on how that is going to be set up, but nevertheless we've all agreed to it. Since that was signed there have been another 30 nations sign on, tribal nations and we now have about 150-160 that have signed out of the 185. So that is an example of an international agreement working between the tribes and working across what the United States calls an international border between it and Canada. And there are others, League of Indigenous Nations is another way we're working with, not only First Nations and tribes, but also with the Maori and the Aborigines, potentially with the Indigenous folks throughout Mexico and Latin America and other places. So we're looking at what kind of things are there that we all have in common. And Indigenous intellectual property rights, our medicines and stories for instance...issues of climate change and there's substantial things that we all have in common, trade relations with each other, the ability to trade not just in goods perhaps, but to trade in ideas and thoughts. Those are things that are important."

Ian Record:

"You've been discussing international relations primarily between tribal peoples, between tribal nations. Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians has also been very active in the arena of intergovernmental relations between your band and other local governments, state governments and that sort of thing. I'm wondering if you could discuss in what areas is your nation currently engaged in that arena? I know, for instance, you have cross-deputization agreements with two counties. Maybe talk a little bit more about what your tribe is doing in that area."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"And we've come a long way from the point...quite a long time ago as the chair, I received a letter from a local prosecutor who indicated that our police were impersonating police officers and they couldn't be on the roads with their lights and they couldn't have car with emblems and most importantly they couldn't have radios with those little chips in them that allowed them to pick up police frequencies and that I had 10 days to deliver them to them. So we wrote them a letter back and said "˜You know where those cars are, you are welcome to takes those anytime you want, but as soon as you do be prepared for a visit from the U.S. Attorney.' So we called the U.S. Attorney and had a nice chat and that same person ended up signing off on a limited deputization agreement within about a year and a half after that and then we have full deputization that has been signed since then with two different counties. We worked on trying to have seamless public safety within the community. We didn't want to be a haven for people who were breaking the law on one side of a line and then crossing the other and then thumbing their nose at the police or things like that. So we worked hard to make sure that when there's a search and rescue for instance that is going on, our officers are trained and a part of the team and can help. And the public safety of the community is enhanced because they have this additional training. In addition to that, we have crowd control issues. Our officers have worked on part of the security detail for the governor when the government does the Mackinac Bridge Walk every year. And every year it's a five-mile span. Every year on Labor Day we walk the bridge. It's a huge crowd and frankly, they pull in different local people and our officers as well. We also work closely with the county and state police. One of the stories from this inter-cooperative agreement kind of thing that we've been able to do: we had the U.S. attorney general come to visit at Little Traverse. And we had all kinds of security things and there's all kind of things you have to do. We, of course, had to have a bomb dog to sweep the whole building and they have this and that and all kind of things. And as he was leaving after this meeting, and he was meeting with all the tribes in Michigan, and after he was leaving, he pulled out from our grounds and drove by Little Bear Cave and saw that there was a state trooper, country sheriff, a city policeman, and tribal police all standing together chatting right there. And we got a call from the FBI in the car with him. He got a question, 'How did we do that?' But that was part of what we tried to do, we tried to build that relationship. We also, if they come on our territory unannounced, we're not against making sure that they know that they're not supposed to do it. So if we had an investigation going on and they forgot to call us or something, we'd let them know. But likewise, if we did something that they didn't like, they'd let us know, so we developed, what we did is we built in safety valves in our relationships so that they were there if there was an issue, we had a way to deal with it right away. And so it's been a cooperative venture when the sheriff of both counties and his deputies show up and they stood before me as the tribal chairman and took an oath to uphold the tribal constitution and all of our laws, that was a pretty big step."

Ian Record:

"This case is interesting because it calls to mind this perspective or mindset you used to see more in Indian Country than you do now, but the idea that, well if you enter an agreement or develop a formal relationship with a local municipality just off the reservation, or a county or a township or something like that, you're somehow relinquishing your sovereignty because those are minor-league governments and we're sovereign nations. That -- from what I can gather -- that perspective is being replaced gradually by the perspective that when a tribe chooses to engage those other governments, in whatever way they see fit, that it's actually an exercise of sovereignty. How do you see what your tribe's been doing in that area?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, that's exactly the way I'd put it, it is an exercise of sovereignty. An example of an exercise of sovereignty working locally is if you have someone slip and fall at your casino and they hurt themselves and they sue you, of course you've got the insurance company, but if the insurance company turns around and claims sovereign immunity every time somebody sues what are you paying the insurance for? So an exercise of sovereignty, one that helps us protect us and our customers would be [what we did] is to waive our sovereign immunity up to the limits of our insurance policy so that someone could sue and be taken care of if they needed to be, therefore getting what we were paying for when we bought our insurance. Well, that's an example of an exercise of sovereignty that works well. And governments waive sovereignty on a regular basis for things. I mean they waive their immunity but never waive sovereignty, let me correct myself there. And that exercising your sovereignty through a waiver of immunity is a responsible thing for a government to do towards its own citizens and towards the citizens of other nations with which we deal: our customers at the casino, our guests at the gas station, the customers coming by, and we have a hotel and we have conferences there, we have lots of people coming through. We have to deal with the issues of...I mean, one of the issues we ran into was within Indian Country it was illegal for anyone to carry a firearm unless there was some law that was passed that allowed it. So in the absence of it, it's illegal to have it. Well we had guests; we had the outdoor writers coming as an association. They were coming to our hotel and one of the things they were going to do was a rabbit hunt and they had all brought their guns and it was going to be illegal for them to have them in their room, to have them in their car in the parking lot, and so we had to pass a law that allowed how this set up, how this was going to happen. It was one of those responsibilities of being a sovereign that it became important to work on."

Ian Record:

"And so what you're saying is it's not just international relations, it's not just a sovereign challenge involving other governments, but involving individuals who are citizens of those governments, individuals like these sports writers and the casino patrons and so forth."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, ultimately it actually is dealing with the other sovereign, it's just that the other sovereign has citizens. And so as you interact with those citizens, you're interacting with that other sovereign government and you have to figure out how that's going to be done. So those are just some examples of things that we had to do that I felt are important. And ultimately, these things were things that our tribal council passed as laws and our tribal courts have worked to enforce and for the police and the courts to go through this. And so this is our tribal government at work in the process of making laws, being responsible, and exercising sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up a little bit more on intergovernmental relations. And obviously the water accord that your nation participated in is one example of many that your tribe's been engaged in developing over the course of the last several decades. And I'm curious to get your thoughts about taking collectively all those relationships that you developed, all those formal agreements you forged, how do those collectively work to advance your nation's rebuilding efforts."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, the prior administration to me, actually it was a four-year time period when I was not in office and during that time period, our tribe was one of the tribes that worked with the governor of the state in a tribal-state accord in which the State of Michigan acknowledged sovereignty of the tribes, pledged to work together and establish certain things that they would do. We...I came back in office, we were preparing to have, I think one of the first meetings where we'd all get together following that. And as we were preparing for that meeting, I just don't like to go to meetings where the outcome of the meeting is, "˜Well, we'll have another meeting.' I'd really like to actually have a product from the meeting. And I spoke about that and wanted to do that, other people agreed, and as a collective we developed a water accord with the State of Michigan. So this was how the tribes and the state would deal with the collective, our collective interest in the waters of the state. And the accord itself was one that's right about...it's on the heels of our tribal and First Nations water accord and it's all this, this time period is all sort of involved in the same effort. But with this one, instead of the tribes pledging to work together, we pledged to work together with the state and establish twice-yearly meetings, staff-level meetings, not elected-level, but staff-level meetings where we would deal with the issues of what came up relative to water. And of course water is part of the environment, so certain environmental things started coming in. Subsequent to that, we came up with another agreement that we put together creating an accord on economic development. And then we came up with an addendum to that, creating, establishing an agreement to do and economic development fellows program that would say, half state, half tribal –- state folks and tribal folks –- that would work say, over a couple-year period to get a cohort of participants on the same page relative to the issues of economic development in Indian Country. Well this has been a little slower to take, but it's been one that's been brewing and we have a meeting coming up in just a couple weeks from the day we're doing this interview that, where we're going to be furthering some of those issues with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

Well, those are some of the things that we did and then, we also have signed a climate action, climate accord, dealing with climate change issues, also establishing twice-yearly meetings. I served on the Michigan Climate Action Council. I was appointed by the governor to be part of that council that helped create the plan for the reduction of the emission of greenhouse gasses and all the different issues surround climate change. And we turned in a report to the governor, and part of that report recommended that the tribe, that the state negotiate and sign with the tribes a climate accord. And the reason for that is because tribes are not political subdivisions of the state and it made, it would've been really difficult to incorporate us into the state's plan, but part of the state's plan was to sign an accord with us to work out common issues. And also part of the state's plan was to work with tribal organizations to further the issues. So for instance, they send a rep to the National Congress of American Indians' meetings relative to climate change, and to NTEC, the National Tribal Environmental Council, other meetings to make sure that they're, the state is sort of on sync with those things. So that's part of how we do with that accord. So when you look at each one of these accords, you put all this together, the tribal-state accord and the water, the economic development, the climate accord, you put all that together in terms of how we've related to the state, we've...I guess I should mention a couple of other things.

We also signed a tax agreement with the state. The state realized that we probably could go to court, which other tribes had done and that it was going to cost both of us millions of dollars and the outcome was uncertain. The uncertainty was there enough for the state that they felt that it was worthwhile trying to find a way to negotiate. So we ended up with a tribal-state tax agreement that is negotiated as a whole, then signed individually with the tribes and there's slight variations in each of them, but they're all pretty much set up...the system and then that also establishes an annual meeting where we get together to talk about the issues related to the taxes in the state. And sometimes our meetings, we've actually had a couple meetings that were over in 20 minutes. We had the meeting, we all got there, and we said, "˜Boy, it's really nice not to have anything to talk about.' So we chat with each other a little bit, reacquaint ourselves and eat a donut or two and we're done. Other times, we are actually in very long discussions and I've been in both of those kind [of meetings]. But the tax agreement was basically how the state is not going to collect taxes that it can't collect and what the mechanism is going to be for that. Well, these are other things that helped establish things. So we did this without having to go to court over the issue. And we believe that we got things that we wouldn't have gotten had we gone to court, but we also perhaps didn't get some things we might have gotten. So the question is, the state, both of us benefitted and we think that it furthered our interest by doing this."

Ian Record:

"I mean, I guess overall, overall from what you're saying, is that by consistently, continuously engaging in these sorts of efforts, you send a very clear message to the outside world -- whether it's the feds, the states, local neighboring communities to the reservation -- that, "˜We're big league governments. We're sovereign nations for real.' And then there's the message that you send to your own citizens. Isn't there a strong message that these sort of actions can send to your own people?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yeah. Well they, I think that and one of the other agreements that we did was we settled U.S. v. Michigan fishing rights case and as we worked on that the original case had been filed years ago and then it was bifurcated. The inland portion was sort of put on idle and the Great Lakes portion proceeded through court and we won the right in court and there have been a 15-year and then a 20-year consent decree that have been negotiated on how we are going to exercise that right on the Great Lakes and so we continue to work with the five tribes in the state that are involved in that. Well, the inland portion eventually got to the point where it eventually where it was heating up and looked like it was getting ready to go to trial and we actually hired our witnesses and expert witnesses and we had done depositions and we were moving towards court, but we at the same time worked and a couple opportunities came up and we moved ahead in some negotiations and we thought we try to negotiate. We successfully negotiated a settlement in the inland portion of the U.S. v. Michigan fishing, hunting and gathering rights case. Unprecedented. I believe it's an exceptional agreement in that the tribes gave up things that we surely would have won had gone to court, but those are things that we already were not likely to want to exercise ourselves and one of them was commercialization of inland harvest and also putting gillnets in inland streams and rivers. Both of those were things that we didn't think were too wise, but we could have won those rights and probably would have if gone to court.

However, the state stipulated without going to trial that our treaty right existed perpetually. It's a permanent consent decree and so this was a big deal to us. The second thing was is that they ended up agreeing that we could exercise that right on property that the tribe owned whether they had just purchased it or whether it had been purchased years before and or whether it was a part of the reservation, whatever. They also agreed to do this on private lands with permission and this is way more than we would have won had we gone to court. So we think that we got a lot of things that are very important to us and gave up things, while they are important, they also were worth it in the deal and this is without spending millions of dollars and continuing to spend. It would have been appealed; it would have been a 10-year case by the time it went on. This was a success.

Well, what did that do in the end? At the end when we got this agreement, together we had the state DNR [Departemtn of Natural Resources] touting the agreement and holding classes and seminars around the state to let their citizens know about this agreement and to say why it was such a great idea and we had tribes doing the same thing, but on top of that we also had the various sportsmen associations and the lake owners' associations that had been advising the state on the case and had been working with the state and they called it, the term was "˜litigating amicae,' which I understand is a term that the judge may have made up, I don't know at the time, but they were parties to the case and to that extent -- not parties, but they were amicae. Well, we had these groups, the Michigan United Conservation Club, the lake owners' association, and they were all promoting this so that instead of...result of this and in other states have had to call out the National Guard when they were dealing with this issue when they have really potential dangerous things going on and in Michigan when we got this settlement, everybody realized that it was going to protect the resources and it worked with minor exceptions here and there. I mean there were some tribal members that were upset and there were others. I mean we had some folks just as soon die on the sword, they would just as soon fight and lose rather than negotiate. There was more honor in that. And to me, I look at it, I wasn't worried about my honor or I was worried about that, what I was worried about is the long term. What are our great-great grandchildren going to be doing? And now in Michigan, they're going to be exercising treaty rights."

Ian Record:

"That's a great story and we're seeing more and more of those kind of stories across Indian Country because, I guess, this realization that negotiation, if done right and if done for the right reasons, can bring you much greater outcomes in both in the present and in the future than litigation. Because litigation, even if you win the case, there's this issue of enforcement can be very costly and then there's this issue of litigation begets more litigation. And then, on the flipside though, I mean you have negotiation where it sounds to me like this served as a springboard from improving relations between traditional adversaries, improving relations or perhaps dampening hostilities that had long been there. And, I mean, do you foresee this consent decree as perhaps serving as a springboard for other forms of cooperation in other areas."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, it's important that we sort of keep it alive. One of the things there is from this is there's an annual meeting, executive council, where all of the parties come together to deal with issues. And we have issues; we have issues. We'll have members who push things a little bit. We'll have state game wardens push things the wrong way a little bit and then we'll have to, we have to work through all those things. We'll have disputes about what actually was meant by a sentence and there will be differing views on that and those are things that have to be worked out. But in the process of doing that, we have regular relations; we worked hard and we developed a level of respect for each other and trust that we could achieve, that we were working together on an issue. It wasn't just working against each other. There are times, believe me, out of these...these were tough negotiations, these were not easy. I mean every one of us at the table, every one of the tribes, the state, I mean everybody at the table at some point or another was the one who walked away, and then came back, but everybody got upset. You don't have forty-some people negotiating every three or four or five weeks or two or three days at a time...that takes a long time. So some of those days were long days. We had some 10-12 hour days we were doing this. And so it was tough, but in the end we got something good, and these kind of agreements, building these relationships help because our tribal citizens...I'm a member of Farm Bureau for instance and I look at...we have other people that are members of Trout Unlimited and all the other groups. We have people, lake front owners that are part of lake owners' associations. So our citizens are actually a part of all these other groups with whom we were dealing and we need to strengthen those things. We need to let people know. So now when we do a fish assessments, it's just as common to have the tribes and the state out working doing the assessment fishing on a lake all together because the state's in a budget crunch and so are we, we have our equipment, when we all work together we have enough to do a big job, but just by ourselves none of us really could do that big job all by ourselves. So when we're doing the shock boat and the fish assessing and trying to explain to people that we're not killing the fish, the mortality rate is less than one percent with a shock boat that we have, those are good things and it's good to be working together on this stuff. In the end, what we're doing is we're all working toward similar goals. We aren't always going to agree, but then that's part of governance. In fact, if everybody agreed, that's a little dangerous. You need to have that, a little bit of tension in there to make sure you're doing things right."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned the hard work that's involved with establishing, cultivating and maintaining these relationships. I'm curious, based upon your extensive experience in this area, what advice would you give to Native nations and leaders for how to build effective, sustainable governmental relationships?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Patience. One of the, probably the biggest thing I learned and one of the things that guided me is that eventually, eventually comes and that you need to work towards things. You need to be willing to work a little piece at a time. You need to have a sort of longer-term vision about where things are. I was out walking the other day on a path, and I was, I was looking up at the mountains and to my detriment, I tripped on something right in front of me. But if you look in front of you all the time, you never see the mountains, you never see the other things around you because you're paying so much attention right in front of you. You have to -- without endangering yourself -- have to be looking up as well as in front of you. I think that that's a part of the whole thing about this patience. You have to have a longer-term vision and the government itself needs to work through and think about those longer-term visions."

Ian Record:

"And doesn't that involve educating citizens because leaders? As you've often said, leaders are transitory, they come and go, and some of these efforts are multi-year, if not multi-decade to get the outcome that you've been seeking at the beginning and doesn't that require, I guess, a certain level of understanding and approval by your own people that this is a priority of the nation?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes. I mean, it's really important for people to understand what...like I said in the beginning when we looked at the constitution and I said the constitution is the method by which the people inform their government how they want it to work. The people need to always be aware of and remember that that is what that is and that they...so they need to understand where those things are when you have a constitution that has a focus on international relations. They need to...when you have your budget hearings, there need to be...someone needs to stand up and speak up and support that budget line item that's going to involve some international travel, some travel that needs to be done. When you have...you have to have...people need to be aware of how things work to know how to allocate resources and how to support that or detriment. One of the issues that I see across Indian Country that I think is...it's a big issue and that is that leaders who do a lot of this international work with other tribes or that are working in a basis across the country often are away from home a fair amount and that needs to be supported. But too often people think that those of us who are traveling are wasting tribal resources, that we are out having a good time, that we're enjoying things at the tribe's expense and that there is no need to be doing this anyway. And so when people are traveling often there is quite a pressure or a candidate becomes vulnerable because of being gone and traveling. So you have to balance that domestic program within your nation with the international program and you have to find out how to balance that, but with the people themselves, there needs to be an acceptance. I was recently -- after I had left the chairmanship -- I attended a conference and elected leaders were taking it on the chin pretty high at the conference over the days because most of them...there were very few elected leaders at this conference. It was almost all other folks: individual activists and former elected leaders, but lots of people were very involved in working on environmental issues, but...and so I, towards the end of the conference I got up and set my regular program aside and I said, 'Listen. You've been...you're sort of upset because elected leaders aren't here.' I said, "˜When's the last time you ever thanked your leader for attending a national meeting like this. When the last time you went to a budget hearing and demanded they put more money in there in the line item for travel so that the leaders could afford to go? When's the last time you wrote a letter or stood up and supported this outside external activity at a community meeting or in conversations in your family or things? You need constantly, if you want leaders to do those things, you can't complain because they don't. You need to actually support them when you do, that way it becomes a priority and if that's really the priority for our nations to make sure that we have this balance between domestic programs and international programs.' We have to have a populace that actually understands and supports why that is necessary, and it becomes necessary. Going to Washington, D.C. is critical for leaders because the U.S. Congress passes laws that effect...while they can't, their laws don't limit our tribal sovereignty, they certainly can limit how we exercise our sovereignty. They limit how Health and Human Services can deal with us. They can limit how the justice system deals with us. And so because of that, it's important for us to pay attention to those laws and it's important for us to know what's going on and to have the relationships necessary there that when we speak, we're not going just to build a relationship. We're going and we already are known so that we can carry through on the issues that support us. And there are plenty of people that are going there on a regular basis who are detractors of tribal sovereignty and don't support tribal sovereignty and who want to do everything they can to do away with it or limit it or whatever. And so we have to constantly be on target and work on these things and that's a very important part of that international because we're dealing with tribal nations to the United States, that's an international arrangement. We have to be very careful on how it works. So it's essential to do that kind of stuff. We also have to do that with our state government because a lot of the funding that tribes get comes from federal government, but it's funneled through the states, even though we'd like them to all have set-asides and deal directly with...so that the tribes deal directly with the feds on those things. There's a number of programs that go through the state and the manner in which the state chooses to set up its programs, how they choose to write their programs or write their proposals and their agreements with the feds can limit how they deal with tribes. So you're constantly having to pay attention to that. And you have people who, once again, would be supporters and other people who wouldn't, but for the most part you also have people that just don't know. And so it's constantly our responsibility to make sure that they do. And whatever mechanism, whether it's the tribal leader going or whether there's an ambassador, I think that we could... I think there's a time coming as we're evolving our tribal governments that we're going to actually have people that ambassadorial function may well be through an ambassador at large. Some of the tribes already have these. And I believe that this relationship with the other governments with whom we deal, we need to have staff people that can deal with that. I use an example, the recent arms treaty signed, where the presidents of Russia and the United States were together to sign the treaty. You know that the two of them did not sit down and hammer that treaty out. They had staff that were working for years on this to work together how to deal with it and may have met a couple times to iron out a point or two, but for the most part, their major thing was to have the photo op of them signing it and shaking hands to sign the treaty and that was the top of the executive functions there. And then of course it's got to be ratified, yet. Well, these are...our governments function in the same way. We have those same kind of interplay of things and...but we need to make sure that we have built in the ability to deal with other governments and that it's a very important role for our tribal nations."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to switch gears, one last question before we wrap up this interview, to tribal justice systems and specifically ask you a question about the Odawa Youth Health to Wellness Court, which your tribe established several years ago, which by all accounts has proven quite successful. I'm curious to learn more about why did the tribe establish this program? How is it structured? And how has it benefitted your community?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, we clearly have a problem that other communities have, other tribal nations have. As to why we have it, I guess that's another whole other story, but the fact that we actually have this problem with drugs and we have problem with the youth and there are individuals who just don't seem to be able to respond to parental controls and/or other societal controls and end up being in the court system; and the court system is basically a win/lose kind of system. We've tried to develop other systems that are options and this is an option and can be chosen by someone who is before the court, by the youth and this particular thing is based around that wrap around concept where we have staff from a lot of different departments. I think there's 10 different departments, but they are all working with one youth and their parents and all focused on one case. There's responsibilities on all their parts by bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to this wrap around concept we're able to see success with individuals we had not been able to see success with other programs. This has gotten so successful that we have actually had offenders that are before the local county court who they've offered the option of coming to our program and actually people who they didn't have to assign to the program at all, the local judges have sent people to our program and has been because they recognize the success of it. So this is another way of building an intergovernmental relationship, building community relations with various institutions with whom you have to deal in the community."

Ian Record:

"And this, from what I understand, this health to wellness court is not so much focused on punishment, but on restoring health and harmony not only to the individual defender, but also to their family, to their community at large. Is that true?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes. And I think that that part of the approach, restoring balance is important. And I think that's true in a lot of our programs, that's one of the things we try to focus on. And we have, when you follow our traditional teachings, that whole thing of being in balance is your goal, it's the center, it's what you try to achieve, where you're not at any one extreme. No matter how that extreme may seem, as you move towards that, you're pulling away from being in balance and so something else gets out of balance. So the whole goal is to try to maintain that calm center in order to achieve that. In our traditional ways, that's one of the teachings. And so when we apply those teachings to, trying to apply them to court systems, trying to apply them to our various other social programs, frankly I'm working on how we apply the teachings of the medicine wheel to our budgets. How do we take a budget and determine whether that budget is in balance? And I think that the way we spend our money, the way we allocate our resources, can be just as out of balance as any other thing and it can be symptomatic of we might be having problems in our tribal community that are inexplicable to us. And it could be because the way we're choosing to allocate our resources is out of balance. And so, to me, this is something I'm working on and particularly now that I'm no longer the tribal chair, but I have time to reflect on these things. I want to work on that issue and try to see how that can be, that idea can be furthered."

Ian Record:

"Well Frank, I really appreciate your time today. I've learned quite a bit and I'm sure our listeners and viewers have as well."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, that's it for today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website: nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."

Ian Record: Setting the Focus and Providing the Context: Critical Constitutional Reform Tasks (Presentation Highlight)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "The Process of Constitutional Reform: The Challenge of Citizen Engagement," NNI's Ian Record lays out two critical overarching tasks that those charged with leading a nation's constitutional reform effort must undertake.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "Setting the Focus and Providing the Context: Critical Constitutional Reform Tasks (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation highlight.

"So here's just some responsibilities that you want to think about giving, delegating to those commission members. Obviously you need them out there spearheading the citizen engagement effort, soliciting input/feedback from your community members. So all of these things on this page are very important, but I would argue that there's two larger responsibilities that your constitution reform committee folks have. One is, set the focus. The second is, provide context.

What do I mean by that? Set the focus -- and this is something that leaders need to be doing as well. And Anthony [Hill] stole a lot of my thunder on this point so I'll be concise with it, but we've seen a lot of tribes struggle when the focus and the discussion around reform is confined to the current issues of the day, the problems, what's ailing us, versus what are our assets, what are our resources, what are our opportunities, what kind of future are we trying to create? Setting that focus is absolutely critical, because if you stay confined in that issues and problems thing, you're missing out, you have a very narrow focus and you're missing out on the broader picture.

I like to use the analogy of a car and your constitution being your nation-building vehicle. And those of you who are elected leaders or who work in tribal government and you're immersed in the machinery of governance every day, you see the problems, you see them firsthand, and you know what needs fixing, right? So every time that vehicle breaks down and you pull over to the side of the road and you get out and you're all huddled around -- elected leadership and everybody else -- you're huddled around underneath the hood and that's all you're looking at, instead of walking up to the next hill, turning around and taking a look at the whole picture. Taking a look at that vehicle and saying, 'Is this the right vehicle for us? Do we even know how to drive it? Is it even pointed in the right direction? Do we know which direction we want to point it in?' So you need to think about that. That's all about setting the focus. What is the premise, what is the lens through which you're going to engage in this effort?

And the second is, provide the context. We see a lot of tribes struggle when they start with, "˜What's wrong with our constitution?' instead of going back, doing a history on where you've come from. It's that old adage: it's hard to figure out where you're going to go unless you know where you've been. So you need to do your due diligence, and this is where the reform committee can play the lead role. How did we govern ourselves traditionally? I may know that being on the reform committee, 'cause they put me on there because of my knowledge of this, but do the people in the community know that? If not, we need to teach them.

Where did our current constitution come from? Oftentimes we hear people say, 'Oh, yeah, we're an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] tribe,' as if the person hearing that is supposed to understand fully what that means or they even understand fully what that means. But go back. Do you know? Do you have a working history of how your specific constitution and system of government was formed? Did your own people have a meaningful say in its formulation? For many IRA tribes, often that answer is no.

San Carlos Apaches, I've worked with them for a number of years, I've done a lot of archival research on how their IRA government was formed. They had a heavy contingent of Apaches back at the time that said, 'Self-governance? You're talking about self-governance? We're going to take the ball and run with it.' They actually developed their own constitution. They sent it to Washington. John Collier said, 'No way. You want to regulate marriage and divorce according to Apache custom? I don't think so. We have the Lutheran missionaries that can do that for you.' So you need to go back and look at your history and then, once you document that history, you need to share it with your people, because it will provide them a sense of context by which they can then analyze your current constitution and figure out what they want to change."

Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 2 (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Presenters from the second day of NNI's "Tribal Constitutions" seminar gather to field questions from seminar participants on a variety of topics ranging from citizen education and engagement to the role off-reservation citizens can and should play in a Native nation's present and future.

Resource Type
Citation

Hill, Anthony, Ruben Santiestaban, Melissa Tatum, Joni Theobald, and Angela Wesley. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 2 (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Q&A session.

Audience member:

"I have a question for Ruben [Santiesteban]. When you were doing your process to teach your young people, did you have any opposition from anybody from your sitting council or from your community?"

Ruben Santiesteban:

"No, actually I didn't. The youth council had been around before; it just didn't have a facilitator. And so Joni [Theobald] in the Education Department, I was doing the Tribal AmeriCorps Program at the time and with the Education Department, and so during my volunteer hours, that was kind of my task to kind of bring some youth together. And the only...I'll tell you things I seen was, and you can probably...you guys know this, but some of the problems or issues that we face in Indian Country, what I seen was mostly with the parents. The parents, if I had anyone objecting, it was kind of them. Like, am I picking the right kids? It was open to everyone. I think you always get that. Are they the right ones? Are these the next leaders? What are they doing? What are their grades like? And I think it went way beyond that in the teachings that we were doing for them. And with the parents, what I got to see was that the generations that have come before us, especially my parents and their parents before, haven't had a chance to lead, haven't had a chance to make decisions of their own. And those are the bigger issues I guess I faced with working with the kids."

Joni Theobald:

"Sure. I think what we find in our community, and I'm sure in some of the others is when you have the youth moderating or leading or kind of taking charge, it neutralizes a lot of the, I guess, the turmoil or whatever, the disagreements. Even though you want positive, I guess, disagreement and discussion, it was a way for...you're on a certain type of behavior. With the youth council we also had expectations. In the beginning, when we first had the first year, some of that expectations went into strategically having them present in dress. We have a workforce investment and a youth component and some of you may have that WIA [Workforce Investment Act] program, but within mind with that we talked about what is professionalism? So our youth council would come to tribal council meetings or whenever they conducted business or came together, even during their meetings, they dressed what we call dressed appropriate, which with guidance we kind of...they all had their suits. We also financial supported that so whenever they present, they're dressed professionally. And I think when they're approaching council we have the council that...which it's not right or wrong, but have the plaid and have the t-shirts and I think they kind of almost...it gave them...the way they perceived and looked to our youth who were coming and presenting who were dressed up. So there were many things that I think even in presence and presentation that the youth council brought to the council and even the community."

Stephen Cornell:

"Other questions or comments?"

Joan Timeche:

"I have a question and this is to any of the presenters who, particularly the tribal representatives. You had to do a lot of one-on-one contact with the community and we know that it's not always in a positive environment. So did those people that were going out and doing the one-on-one contact or doing the public education with the citizens, did you have to go through any kind of training about how to handle...? There's always going to be that person out there who's going to yell at you and how to deal with that kind of stuff or how you talk to someone who just doesn't want to listen or pushes you off? I'm interested in what kind of skills and prep you had... people had to have before they went out and engaged with community."

Ruben Santiesteban:

"Okay, I'll take it. What I found out in Indian Country, especially on our reservation in Lac du Flambeau, it actually was good. I think when I campaigned I probably knocked about 700 doors and I felt that was the best way to go right in people's homes and talk about my different concerns and what I could do for the community and get their perspective. And it went really well for the ones...I think we just have to remember is people who generally don't like you just aren't going to like you anyway, but they listen anyway because they don't really talk until you're gone anyway -- that's usually the way it goes -- but they listened. And I think I turned a lot of minds because, unfortunately, in Indian Country we have the rumor mill and if you don't get out there, the perceptions of what someone may have told someone about you is all they're left with. So I do encourage you to get out there and talk to your community so that you can stamp out any of those things and represent yourself well. What helped me get through that kind of stuff was, I was a Kirby man so I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners and I knocked on a lot of doors; being in sales and marketing for a long time really helped me build that thick skin, but in Indian Country it actually goes pretty well. They actually do listen and welcome you into the home."

Angela Wesley:

"That's a great question, Joan. I think that in our community we didn't do that at first when we started with our constitution. When we got into our discussions around treaty because of what we did learn, we did make sure that we had some communication, specific communications training in a lot of areas for our team that went out there. I'd certainly recommend it to anybody who's going to do that just to give some safety and security to the people who are going to be going out and doing it. Another thing after this wonderful young woman that I talked to you about, one of the things I would never do again is send somebody out by themselves, if only just to be able to support each other and to be able to sort of verify information that's gone out and that kind of thing. People respond in different ways better to some people than they do to others. So I've seen other nations, and it's something that we've encouraged other nations to do as well, and they have brought in professionals to come in and talk about...do a little bit more of the formal kind of training. We didn't have the time or the resources at the time we were doing it and I think we just didn't really think about what we were getting into. It would have been very beneficial to have had that kind of training, especially for our younger people."

Anthony Hill:

"One of the important things is that all...you need to make sure all your task force members are on the same page because when they go out, you don't want one segment not getting the information that the other segment is getting. What we did in our group is before we went out for each public round of meetings or door-to-door sessions is we actually practiced in our committee meeting and we would have talking points. "˜These are the points that you want to hit when you go out in the community.' So that was really important. And when they reported, we had standardized reports for all the committee members to report the same information to different audiences so that no one is left out. I think that's really important."

Stephen Cornell (moderator):

"We've got a question here."

Audience member:

"Just kind of an expansion on some of those thoughts. Is there a role for like a campaign manager or lobbyist in the process of looking at, especially where your laws come from? We have off-reservation members and so the jurisdictions that they're in have different requirements; there's different people in offices that have their history. So I'm wondering is there an appropriate role for someone to help guide you in what their backgrounds are, their histories and really, who...partners exist out there? And then as far as like citizen participation, again, is there a role for expertise in marketing? It may sound like it's counter-intuitive, but we've really got to market to the citizens. Is there a role for professionals in marketing?

Stephen Cornell:

"Anyone? He wants to know if you're looking for a job."

Anthony Hill:

"If you'll recall, part of the action plan was to take us through the election itself. And so what was going to happen and our plan was once we turned over the document, we would switch into basically campaign mode -- yes, mode -- and that it would be our responsibility to go back out, let the community know the merits of this new constitution and urge them to support it. And that was...essentially that was going to be our job. Unfortunately, we never got around to doing it, but that was what we were planning on doing. So whether...it's questionable whether or not you want your committee or commission to undertake that effort because some people thought, "˜Well, you did your job in writing or drafting the new constitution, step back and let the people themselves decide for it,' but that was what our plan said. We never got to implement it. And we always had help from...we have a communications office with the community and they were always helping us put together our posters, our flyers, our newspaper inserts, things like that. So we were lucky we had those resources."

Stephen Cornell:

"Question here."

Mohammed Fardous:

"Hello. My name is Mohammad Ferdoz and my question goes to Mr. Anthony [Hill]. You mentioned a good point before in your speech that I was real attracted [to]. The question is here that how did you get the people involved with the government and constitution who are not on the reservation? And you said that you had a meeting with tribal members in Los Angeles and how did it help to have the people work on the reservation or to be involved with government institutions and government all?"

Anthony Hill:

"That's a good question. I'm going to get off this thing because it has...I'm sitting on springs. It's just my weight. It's really important to make sure you get those who don't live on your community involved and like I said, the way we did it, we did it in a number of ways. The eighth person that was on our task force was from the Phoenix area and we have a large presence in Phoenix. We reached out to our members in other areas across the country because our enrollment office let us use the addresses for all our enrolled community members so we got their addresses. And the only reason that we knew they were updated was because it's the same address you get your per capita check at so everyone knows, everyone updated their addresses so we knew they were right and we sent flyers out to them. We went to Los Angeles and San Francisco about three times during the course of this exercise. The first time was to acquaint them with the project, the second time was to get their input on a draft, then the third time was to present the final draft. The way we enticed people in the non-reservation areas was we brought along other tribal departments. We brought along the enrollment department and they brought their portable ID-making equipment. So those who needed a tribal ID but who couldn't physically come to Phoenix to get one, they came and they were able to get one. We brought along our elections department. If you wanted to update your elections file and your registration, you could do that there. So literally it was this bandwagon of people going from L.A. and going to San Francisco and it was like a circus. Somebody from another department ran into a bicyclist in San Francisco and the police got involved and we were, "˜I don't know those Indians over there.' So that's what we did. And we also kept in contact with them through the internet. We had a web page that we utilized and they were able to check back for updates. So that's the way we kept our tribal members informed off the reservation."

Mohammed Fardous:

"How could they help the government and was the [unintelligible] for people on the reservation because this is unfortunately a challenge for most of the tribes today because the tribal members just maybe immigrate or go to other places and maybe they don't have enough human resources or [unintelligible]. So how could this plan help the government?"

Anthony Hill:

"You mean the revised constitution, how would it help the government?"

Stephen Cornell:

"I think the question is how can those people who live off the rez help the government on the rez? How can they be beneficial to you?"

Anthony Hill:

"Okay, I get that point. Thank you. It's interesting because in our constitution it says, "˜If you are away from the reservation for 20 years, you are automatically disenrolled.' Now, that's a big...that's a lot of people and when we went out to the people who didn't live on the reservation, we pointed that out and says, "˜Technically, a lot of you, we could probably disenroll you.' Now the community has never done it. Let me be perfectly clear, we never did it. No one ever exercised it, no one ever sought to do it, but that's scared a lot of them and they wanted to see that taken out. The other thing was is that they were concerned because they were enrolled community members yet they weren't receiving the benefits that came with living on the reservation and they were saying, "˜Well, you're using my enrollment number to help get casino machines, but yet I don't get the benefit from it just because I choose either to live off the reservation or you have no place for me to live on the reservation.' And their concern was, "˜How do you include me in that? How do you include me in the education programs? How do you include me in the housing programs or the health programs,' things like that? So it brought a lot of people out and we actually brought some elected officials with us to these meetings and they were asking them, "˜How can you help us be more connected to the government and how can you help us because we need help off the reservation, too.' And that conversation started...I don't know where it went, because unfortunately our leaders never went back out after they sort of tabled the constitution. That whole thing kind of died out, but that's the sad part of the whole thing I think because we had a good dialogue going with them; they were eager to see us. I met some people who were my relatives that I didn't even know that lived in other parts of the country. It's an open book still and it's not finished yet, but that's where I guess I have to leave it."

Melissa Tatum:

"My husband is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation allows citizens who are outside the boundaries to vote and there are I believe it's two at-large representatives on the council. And what they do is they have set up a system that you can...there are official satellite communities where there's a critical mass of Cherokees who are living outside the boundaries and each satellite community has regular quarterly meetings. We have four meetings a year. They're on regular certain Saturday of the month. So people have it on their calendar, they expect it. Then the Cherokee Nation arranges programs, usually a potluck supper, but they bring representatives from council out, they have Cherokee history and culture classes, the at-large representatives come and speak and report on what's going on so that the satellite communities feel connected. So that's one way that Cherokee does it."

Stephen Cornell:

"Just to add to that very quickly ma'am before I come to you...there are a number of nations now doing this and we heard the first morning of Citizen Potawatomi, which has eight seats on their council from Potawatomi County, Oklahoma and eight seats, which can be filled by any Potawatomi anywhere in the United States and they run their council meetings with videoconferencing. So you'll have a Potawatomi councilor living in Los Angeles County participating in a council meeting on a video screen on the wall in the council chambers real-time voting on proposals, participating in the debate. And what Citizen Potawatomi says is, "˜Any service available to a resident, to an enrolled Potawatomi from this nation should be available to any enrolled Potawatomi no matter where you live.' So they have a home ownership loan program, they've got a small business startup program; they funded Potawatomi citizens to start businesses in Phoenix, in Kansas, all over the place. So that's part of their effort to do exactly I think what Anthony is talking about, re-link all these people to the nation and give them a sense that they have a stake in your future and the future of the nation where you are and there's power in that. Yes, ma'am. Sorry. Go ahead."

Audience member:

"I just have a comment to make to his question, too. When you have tribal members that are living off the reservation, because we have a lot in Fort McDowell that are in other states, we treat them like a regular...they're treated equally as anybody else living within our boundaries of the reservation because those people, most of the time, are going to be your most educated people because they have to follow other rules that you don't follow within your tribal government. Those people are very big assets to your community and all the tribes you should understand that because we use those people. Because when we have to go to D.C. to fight, a lot of those other senators sit on Indian Affairs commissions and boards and other things and you use those people that say you have a senator from Minnesota that's on an Indian Affairs. You tell your tribal member, "˜Write to your senator on behalf of your tribe over here because we have something going on in Arizona that we need their vote.' So that's why to us it's important on our reservation that we treat everybody the same because we use them, they're assets to our community and I think a lot of...like I brought up before, I didn't know there were tribes up there that had different classes of tribal members that whether they don't give you benefits or they don't because in our...in Fort McDowell ever since I was little, I've always known our Yavapai people to treat everybody the same because we're all family oriented and we don't tell one person, "˜Because you don't live here or you haven't been here that you're limited, your benefits are limited.' At one time that was brought up, but I'm proud of my elders that stood up and said, "˜No, those people are important just like you and we have to treat them the same.' And like you said, like us, we use them for very important things because we know that they know how to live off the reservation versus me as a tribal member that lives on the reservation. We have many benefits on our reservation and some of our tribal members, I don't think they could make it if they lived off in the city of Phoenix and Mesa because they got a lot of taxes they got to pay, city taxes, trash tax, water tax, all these other things that sometimes in the tribe it's a benefit to you. And sometimes you have to rely on those people, but that's just a comment that I wanted to let you know that on our tribe a lot of our people living on and off...the people off the reservation are very important to us."

Stephen Cornell:

"And I bet this lady on hold here, ma'am do you have a comment or a question?"

Audience member:

"When you're going out to your community members and talking to them about, educating them about a constitution, it says in the thing here that they'll say, "˜How does that impact my life?' What specific examples do you have that your people when they were talking to community members, what did they say to them that how this constitution impacts their life? Could you give any examples about that? Do you understand what I'm asking?

Angela Wesley:

"I'll start a little bit. It sort of ties in with the people that live away from home; when we do go away and have regular meetings with our people who live away from home, that's always the question is, "˜How is this going to impact me?' It really comes down to the constitution gives us the ability to make decisions for ourselves and like this lady was saying, just because people live...our people have been forced to live away from home doesn't mean they're not a part of us anymore. But the way our funding structure was from the Department of Indian Affairs is we were only allowed to spend money for people who were living at home. So that was something that we thought was really critical to us governing ourselves is that we would be able then to earn some wealth with resources that we were getting through treaty and to develop our economy so that we could start to provide services to people who live away from home, whether that be housing, health, education, increased medical services or dental services, that kind of thing, but we always said that's up to us. So many of those things were up to us and that we had to continue to have those conversations as we built our wealth so that the money is being put to where the people want it to be. In terms of reaching out to people and just talking to them and why we would do that, what they can bring, part of what we wanted to do with 85 percent of our people living away from home is to start to build that vision in our people, that just because you live away from home doesn't mean that your future generations aren't going to come back. Like you said, those educated people that are out there that can come with different skills to bring into our community when we start to be able to rebuild our economy. So we really wanted not just to make the linkage, but also to encourage people to start thinking about coming home. Our vision talks about strengthening our culture, strengthening our language, trying to reincorporate our traditional way of governing ourselves; people have to be home for us to do a lot of those things. So we wanted to start to build that notion in people's minds that yes, it will be possible. We don't have schooling right now, we don't have healthcare right in our community, but let's work so that we can so that we can start to attract some of those people to come back home and live comfortably in our territories. That's part of our vision is that our people are able to live at home. And we recognize that not everybody is going to do that, but we want more people to be able to do it."

Honoring Nations: Gregory Mendoza: Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council

Year

Gila River Indian Community Governor Gregory Mendoza, formerly the director of the Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council, provides a history of this trend-setting example of innovative governance and discusses the many different ways that it strengthens the Gila River Indian Community.

Resource Type
Citation

Mendoza, Gregory. "Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 11, 2004. Presentation.

Gregory Mendoza:

"Good morning. First of all, before I begin my presentation I'd first like to acknowledge my bosses. Our president, Myron Brown, Jr., all of you remember Myron. And one of my other bosses -- this is Britney Bydell, who didn't really get to speak yesterday, but she will have the opportunity right now. Britney."

Britney Bydell:

"Can you all hear me? Good morning, how is everybody? Good. My name is Britney Bydell and I am 16 years old. I am the District Three representative and we are divided up into seven political districts. And I am also a part of the Arizona Youth Commission for the State of Arizona. I attend Higley High, where I'm in the 11th grade. And I want to say that it's a great honor to be here and to be able to come and meet all of you wonderful people and to learn about Harvard University and to be able to experience and learn about the Honoring Nations and I will learn this all for the very first time. Greg."

Gregory Mendoza:

"Thanks Britney. And I don't know if I could top what Myron did yesterday, but I'll do my best. But I just want you to know that this program started back in 1987 and I was just right out of college and wanting a job, really. And I share this story with the youth council members. Every year we have our in-service orientation for the new members coming on board, and I think it's important for them to understand the chronological history of the youth council and where it evolved. But myself and about maybe nine other college students felt very frustrated back in our community.

Back in 1987 there was very few opportunities for our young people to come together. And so it was through that interaction with my colleagues that we wanted to bring our young people together to bring a collective voice for our community. And so that year began, and it was quite a frustrating process for me because my parents had to support me for one year from 1987 to 1988, but my parents understood my mission. They understood the importance of giving young people the opportunity to come together.

And our community is comprised of two tribes, the Pima and Maricopa Indians. Our ancestral names are the Akimel O'odham and the Pee-Posh. The Pima are referred to, our ancestral name is the Akimel O'odham, meaning 'the river people.' The Maricopa ancestral name is the Pee-Posh. So the youth council named...the official name of their organization comes from the ancestral names of the two tribes that make up the Gila River Indian community.

But again, the year 1987 was real trying because we had to sort of convince the people of my community to come together to support a concept, a concept in our culture which was really unheard of, to give young people a voice. Because in our culture we're taught not to be boastful, we're taught to be respectful, we're taught not to speak over our elders, and we're taught just to be there and listen to them. But we soon decided that we needed to bring the young people together and so we sponsored our first youth conference and we drew in about 300 young people and the idea of the youth council was born.

In 1988, the youth council became fully incorporated under the laws of the Gila River Indian Community. We became the first tribal youth council to be fully funded by our tribe. We are a youth servicing, youth-led organization complete with again, our bylaws, our constitution. And again, I've been their facilitator now going on 17 years. And as I reflect back on the 16 years, actually my 17th year will be coming up. On October 17th would be my 17th sort of year with the program and with the organization. As I reflect back, I have to just say that working with young people in our community is tremendous. It's a wonderful opportunity as you see with Myron and with Britney -- perfect examples of what our young people are capable of.

And I just have to add something about our president Myron because he's going to be leaving us very shortly. Myron is very involved. This young man is a precinct committeeman. He was manning the polls during the primary election. And I have to add this and he's not going to like this, but you know what, he has his own mind and he's a very proud Republican. And I think that's so unique about Myron. Myron was a delegate to the Arizona State Republican party convention. He's hoping that he will be a delegate at the next Republican National Convention. So he also just was recently elected one of the directors for Students for Bush. So Myron is involved and I admire that in any young person, to be involved at that level. And to tell you the truth, I don't know how he manages his time. This guy is a full-time college student, second-year political science major; he works part-time for a health care corporation. I don't know where he finds the time and he's still president of our youth council. As Britney mentioned, she's an up-and-coming rising star of the youth council. She just got appointed by the State of Arizona's governor to the state governor's youth commission. She has a voice for Native American youth at the state level, so that's very commendable as well.

Gila River Indian Community is comprised of over 20,000 tribal members. Young people represent about half of the tribe's total population. Our problems are no different from other youth from throughout the country. We have the same social issues that affect our youth, gang violence, drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy, which are very high within our community. And so we, the co-founders of the organization decided there was a desperate need and urgency to develop a youth program.

Our tribal council in the past have always focused on the elders and the young people were somewhat overlooked. Young people had no idea what the system was all about, the governance of our community. We were somewhat disillusioned about our lack of voice within the community and so the council was created based on giving that young people the opportunity to provide positive change within the community.

Today, the youth council has a formal voice and I invite all of you to come to our youth council. It's just amazing. You ever see a tribal council meeting? These guys do better. These guys know parliamentary procedures, they know motions, they debate motions; it's a really unique setting when you see them coming together on issues facing the youth of the community. And of course Myron being the president, he has the gavel and he controls the council with his gavel. But it's an interesting process because we get a lot of groups, youth groups particularly, that come to Gila River just to see and observe and study our council. I think our adults and our elders are just really taken by the leadership of this young group and it's really amazing.

So I do encourage if you're at Gila River, if you ever want to see a youth council meeting, the youth council meetings range from maybe three to five hours. Their agenda is anywhere from, what is it? Two- to four-page agenda. They have the same process, reports, old business, new business. Every once in a while they'll have resolutions on the table that they'll entertain, but it's a really unique setting.

I'm their boss and what I do is I work with them directly. I work really closely with the president; I advise him. I sort of give him some direction on where we need to go, but they sort of give me the insight, their perspectives, that I do as the administrator to put all these ideas together in the form of either a report, a grant application, or a position paper. My job is just to work with them and I do a lot of the writing on behalf of Myron but with his perspectives going into that.

I think it's really important for people today, if you're going to develop a youth program you need to make sure young people are involved in every phase and at Gila River we do that. And what's so unique about the relationship with our community is that our tribal council gives us that authority. These young people, once they're elected onto the council, they're actually sworn in by a tribal judge that makes them official. They're considered like any other tribal elected official in the community and they have perks just like any tribal council member. Of course, they get stipends, of course they travel, of course they're given many opportunities, just like tribal council members to attend various events, receptions, activities, stuff like that. And what makes that really unique is that the council, they get invitations from time to time to meet with the council members or even meet with the governor. So it's a really good setting for the young people in our community.

And I have to just say that the accomplishments are great and I'm just going to include some of the benchmarks over the years, in the last 16 years that this group has accomplished and it's really good. And I think Myron pinpointed some of those accomplishments.

In 1993, the youth council launched again the Kids Voting Program, which mocks the polls to the young people. What we did with the Kids Voting Program is that we developed a curriculum K-12 and what we did with that curriculum is we took basic concepts from the tribe's constitution and bylaws and we developed it into a curriculum. The curriculum also includes some corresponding activities so that the young people not only has the kids voting curriculum for their lesson planning, but they also have corresponding activities. So the curriculum, again, was adapted from a state program, but we included it, we tailored it to meet the needs of our community. And again, as Myron mentioned yesterday, we're getting ready for the presidential election, so you'll see young people coming to the polls come November second. Our youth council members will be manning the polls in each of our communities' districts, political districts. And what makes our community really unique at voting time is that our theme for our Kids Voting Program is called 'Voting is a Family Affair,' because you see young people taking the parents to the polls along with themselves. And what is even better is that community, they have like barbecues in all the districts and now the young people are afforded that same opportunity to eat with their parents in a sort of a community fun environment. So I think it's really something special when you see young people involved in the electoral process and understanding some of the basic fundamentals of voting and when they become of age...you know we've been doing this for almost ten years, just think what we're doing with all these young people that have gone through the program since 1993. The last Kids Voting Program, we brought in close to 1,000 young people to vote. We're looking forward to this next coming election because again we're hoping to surpass that 1,000 amount.

In 1996, the youth council succeeded in establishing a Boys and Girls Club in the community, the first Boys and Girls Club in the State of Arizona to serve a Native American community. This project grew from the youth council because we thought there was a great need to develop a youth program for the younger ones. So as you know, the Boys and Girls Club, they do a lot of their programs, they focus primarily with the young ones all the way up to teens. So what we did is we initiated the planning and the application process and we submitted a grant application to HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] and we were awarded a $1.5 million grant. The tribal council included an additional $2 million to the project, and to this day we're very proud to have two clubs now in our community.

In 1998, the youth council won a grant from the Close Up Foundation to implement an intense program focusing on tribal government, to explore the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democratic nation. The program is a hands-on program for young people. It exposes them to tribal leadership from the courts to the tribal council to the governor's office. So the young people got to see how our tribal council operates and how our government functions. And what's so unique about Close Up is that we bring the select group of youth, 50 young people from about 14 different high schools, including boarding schools that service Gila River Indian community, and they come in for three days to examine tribal government one on one. And it's a unique opportunity because the young people are even introduced formally to the tribal council, they're introduced to the governor, the lieutenant and our tribal judge. And what happens at Close Up is that they elect their own governor, they elect their own lieutenant governor, they elect their own tribal council. So these are like a mock community for the young people, and it's a really unique opportunity for them to examine their tribal government. What we also included in this particular program is that we have a curriculum that focuses on the three branches of government that is based specifically for high school students from our community. So we're very proud of this program.

In 2001, the youth council learned the benefits of persistence when we advocated back in the mid-1990s for a tribal teen court program. The youth council was first involved in the development of this grant when we were invited by the Department of Justice to go to Washington, D.C. to provide some feedback with regard to developing a tribal youth program grant for tribes throughout the country. Our youth council members didn't know at the time that they were developing a grant program called the Tribal Youth Program Grant and it was through that opportunity where they provided feedback to the Department of Justice on the needs of the young people in their community. And so as a result of that, the tribe won a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to develop a tribal teen court program. So we're very proud that we are now beginning to reduce and prevent crime within our community, particularly among the young people.

And just recently the youth council won a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop a 'Celebrate Fitness" grant initiative. As you know, as Myron mentioned to you, diabetes is the number one problem within our community and what we're discovering among our young people is that a lot of our young people are now being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. And so I personally am involved, not only my health because my parents are diabetics, but now my two younger brothers are diabetics. And it's something that I've been very passionate about with regard to our young people because it's starting to come to our young people. 60 Minutes did a special segment about the fattest Americans and which featured the Gila River Indian Community. We featured this video to our youth during our youth conference back in August and it was just alarming for the young people. I think for our young people in the community it was a shocking, an awakening for them to see that diabetes is an issue within the community and we need to begin to develop preventative measures to prevent this from our community. So of course, I've taken that as well because I work out, I try to work out every day and as you saw in the video yesterday I looked a little bigger in that video. So I've been very cautious about my eating habits as well as exercising daily. But again, we won this grant and so the youth council is beginning to develop Celebrate Fitness projects within each of our communities in the community.

So again, these activities and these different initiatives are all projects that had been launched by this youth council and it's remarkable what these young people can do together, collectively, as a group and it's a pleasure to work with them. Challenging at times, you know. And I just...I think it's the best job in the world and again you meet such great people as Myron and Britney. And again, a lot of our alumni, we've served over 300 alumni who have now become educators, teachers, firemen, policemen. We have some that are presidents of some of our tribal corporations and you have even one that's served on our tribal council. So 90 percent of our alumni that have gone through the program have come back to the community. They come back, they have a sense of community, they want to use their education and so they are. A lot of them are involved still and a lot of them still look to the youth council, they advise us, they give us direction. A lot of our board members, we do have an advisory board comprised of former members of the youth council.

So I just want to say that in the 16 years, it's been a great opportunity. I think Gila River is very fortunate because we also have the financial support of the community. Of course, as their administrator, I look into other financial sources, grants, and we've been very successful. So with that, thank you."

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Jamie Fullmer (Part 2)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Jamie Fullmer, former chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, shares what he wished he knew before he first took office, and offers some advice to up-and-coming leaders on how to prepare to tackle their leadership roles. He also discusses what he sees as some keys to Native nations developing diversified, self-sufficient economies that can be sustained over time.  

Ian Record:

"So, Jamie, you served two terms as chairman of your nation. I was wondering if you could share with us what you wish that you knew before you took office that first time."

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a great question. There's a lot of things I wished I knew before I took office, but when it gets right down to it I think that politics is a unique and challenging role, because in essence you're a public servant to the community, but you also have responsibilities as a public figure. And so I think one of the initial challenges was not recognizing how much of both of those things took of my time and my life and so had I known that before I would have been able to prepare for it before getting into office. But it consumes you rather quickly and your time becomes very precious because you have few moments of time to yourself and you have few moments of time when you're not expected to be in the public setting. And so with that said, I think that's the first thing I wish I had known before taking office. I think the other thing is, having never been involved in politics, not really knowing the process of any of the formal processes of running government, and so it was kind of a 'learn and lead at the same time' process, and if I would have been able to know initially what kind of steps I could have taken I might have been able to do some homework and really have a good feel of how to move the legislative process forward, how to take advantage of team building opportunities early on, and then also I think learn more about how to better enhance the institutional framework of information sharing. Not only being able to have access to it, but having everybody else have access to it so that we were on the same page when we were dealing with political issues or community issues or economic development issues in that sense."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned time management and we've heard this from other tribal leaders that that's one thing that you just...you can't anticipate in many respects coming into the job. I remember Peterson Zah, former chairman and president of the Navajo Nation, said once that that really puts the onus on you as the tribal leader to first prioritize your work and then in those places where you can, delegate your work to those people that are within the administration of government who've been hired to do those sorts of things."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The delegation issue is sometimes challenging, because even in the delegation process you have to meet and learn and get to know the staff and they may not be staff that you've chosen. And some political systems have a system where a new leader comes in and they're able to choose their executive team. Our system wasn't like that. The executive team that's in place is what you work with and it's really a council decision to choose those folks. Of course the chairman has a say, but if there are people already in existing positions you'd like to hope...especially in my case, I believed that the chairman before me had good sense of who they wanted. And so if they felt it was good for the nation, I respected that I could keep that same frame of thought. That challenging part though is getting to know who has the skill sets in different areas. They might have a certain title, but they might have skill sets in other areas that are a good fit for delegation of duties. And I think the other process in that is that there's the time management issue, it's also important to have good support staff to help manage the front end, the telephones, the documentation that comes in in stacks daily, and kind of arranging a schedule that helps you to meet not only your daily priorities, but also to address any of the community issues that come up where members want to have some time with the chairman in the office, and then arranging that with the travel that's necessary to do business on behalf of the tribe. So you live in a suitcase part of the time and then when you're home, you're really relying on others to keep you on track and on task."

Ian Record:

"What advice would you give them? It's somebody that's never served in an elected office before -- what advice would you give them as somebody who's either considering running for office or say they do get elected and are getting set to take office, what advice would you provide?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think the best advice I would give in starting out is [to] remember the promises that you make you have a responsibility to keep. And so I believe that part of the political process is one of the challenges we face, because there's so many promises made in the pursuit of getting elected -- both in Indian Country and we've seen a lot of promises going on right now during the election season at large -- but when you get into office you are only a part of something that's much bigger than one individual and you can play an important part and you can play a very important role in the advancement of your nation, but the advice I would give them is, "˜Be aware and take the time to learn what the struggles are, take the time to learn what the system needs to help it move forward, and before you make any promises to the community, take the time to learn if those promises can be met.' And I think that's an ongoing challenge, so that I thin, that's an important part. It's also valuable and what I would tell the person is, be ready to commit your time. You're raising your hand and swearing an oath to your people, to your nation, and to God that you're going to follow through to the best of your abilities and it's a challenge to give the best of your abilities all the time. And so I think you need to figure out at the front end how you deal with your down time and how you deal with your low moments so that you can keep a good presence about you as a leader."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned the fact that keeping promises is really important once you take office, the promises that you make maybe on a campaign trail or as part of your platform to get elected, and you began to touch on this. Doesn't that make it your job to be very careful about what promises you make and really think strategically about the promises in terms of are they promises to maybe just a certain portion of the citizenry or are they promises to the entire nation, because as an elected official are you not representing the entire nation?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a challenging question, because I think that obviously you serve your entire nation, but many tribes are organized where there are clans and there are familial priorities that take place, there might be village priorities, and so you may be really wanting to get in to address those issues. And depending on if it's a council position, that might be your role as a district councilor or as a village councilor, and so you do go in on those points that you're prioritizing. So with that said, I think the way that I reached out to the community was through goals. I had set goals based on what I had heard that the community wanted and that I felt like could be achieved in the period of time of the term in office or at least get some headway on historical processes that had gone on that hadn't been completed. And so there were some things that were challenges that I felt that I had the skills to help address and to put closure to that other leaders and other councils long before me had established and put into place and then there were other issues that had been initiated over time that I felt like needed to be at least started to being addressed. And so, rather than making promises because it's too difficult to make a promise, it was goals that I had set for myself and for our nation that if I were elected I would work on those goals."

Ian Record:

"And those two different terms send very different messages to your citizens, to your constituents don't they?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so because the goal is something you work toward, a promise is something that you try and keep."

Ian Record:

"Yeah. And you also mentioned this approach that you took when you took office which was continuing the priorities and the initiatives of previous administrations and that's not an approach that every tribal elected official takes. In fact, we've seen many that take the exact opposite approach. And I was wondering if you could talk about the difficulties you ran into with that or if it made your job easier, the fact that you were building on the momentum that had been generated before you came along."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think there's a point that's important. Really for me it wasn't about having the credit for getting anything, it was having our nation have the credit. And so my role was as the chairman, in my opinion, was to go in and assess our government, assess our enterprises, assess our community, assess our programming and look for areas that I could help strengthen it. And it didn't matter whether I was to start it or if it had been started by somebody else. It was obviously a priority to the community if it was already in place. And so maybe those needed to be updated or changed or some of the structures needed to be adjusted, but the idea wasn't to do any of that with the intent of getting credit for it. It was doing that because it needed to be done and accepting on the challenges that the community had set upon me about getting...there were certain priorities that they wanted addressed and so I felt it important to address those that I could."

Ian Record:

"You've been working with a number of tribes across the country, particularly in the Southwest and Pacific regions, on diversifying their economies. In that capacity -- in working with other tribes and also based on your experience with your own nation -- I was wondering if you could paint a picture for us of what you believe a full-fledged Native nation economy looks like."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. One of the challenges, the initial challenge that I see is that people have a different viewpoint of what 'economy' means. There's a lot of different arenas that are placed around the idea of an economy, but from a governmental perspective and from a societal perspective, that economy is a tumbling effect whereby, when revenues come into the system, those revenues advance themselves throughout the system. And I'll give an example: money generated from gaming comes to run the government. There should be something...then the government pays its employees and then those employees use that money to buy goods and services or pay bills. And so from an economic point of view, your ambition is to keep the money that's generated in a nation in that nation as long as possible. And so from that point of view, the economies are built to create more opportunity and generate more cash flow and protect the money that has come into the nation and keep it there for awhile. With that said, economic development is the process by which tribes create those kinds of business enterprises that will generate that opportunity.

And a lot of times, what gets confused there is the idea of economy has taken on, at times, the viewpoint of small business development. And I am definitely for small business development, I think it's a central part of an economy, but there are also other ways that generate economy, like creating infrastructure creates a baseline to build small businesses on, building housing creates opportunities for people to stay in the community so that they can pay and live in the community, which creates another set of economic values. You also bring in your, you keep your talent pool localized when you have job and work opportunities for those folks; they don't have to move away to go get a decent job. And so there are a lot of things tied to economy but I think the...my idea as a strategist and what I do with my company is we really focus on where the tribe's at and its structure, because economies are really tied to strong structures and institutionalized systems. They're really planned out and thought because there's a lot of money at stake in any type of venture -- business venture, enterprise development venture, acquiring businesses -- and so government is usually a reactive type of system, most bureaucracies are reactive in nature because they're political and business is more proactive in nature because it's usually driven by goals and end-production processes. You want to reach a certain budget, you want to reach a certain level of profit, you want to reach a certain level of job creation. And so with that said, there's more planning that takes place at the front end.

So from a tribal perspective and looking at tribes as nations, as sovereigns with the ability to create whatever they'd like, economic development to me takes on a number of scenarios. One is developing a strong government of laws, which include economic development, commercial laws, corporate laws, zoning laws, taxing laws, any other kind of law that can benefit the nation as a government. With that said, then you also have to have the legal system that can enforce those laws. A solid legal system is another key component to a strong economy. Another piece to that as well as that is the ability to create opportunities for individual members within the tribe to build business and so creating programming that will raise the initiative to have small business and entrepreneurship in the community. Those are other opportunities. And the government itself being proactive in supporting and promoting business within the community really takes on another level of public relations and commitment to helping to share information about the tribe and the tribe's capabilities and abilities, because many times when tribes are trying to develop an economy they want income and finances from other places to come in to generate more income locally. And so if you're looking for investors or partners or joint venture opportunities, it's very important for a tribe to recognize that they're going to be scrutinized by outsiders if they choose to take that path."

Ian Record:

"So really what you're...within this discussion of laws and institutions and structures and infrastructure, you're really describing essentially an environment-based approach to economic development and not just a venture-based approach to economic development, where you as a tribal council are trying to figure out, "˜Well, what business are we going to get into?' But really what you're saying is that tribal leaders need to be focusing on, "˜Let's create this environment for economic opportunity, whatever that opportunity might encompass.'"

Jamie Fullmer:

"You are exactly right with that point of view, because the environment is where the government has the most control, creating the laws, creating the systems, creating the policies that guide the direction. With that proper environment, the tribe or its members or private investors who come in to do business in the tribe have an opportunity to actually be successful because the environment is an environment of success. And so with that thoughtful planning at that -- in the environmental process -- it allows your economic development arm or your planning arm or whatever a tribe calls it, some call them 'authorities' and some call them 'enterprises' or 'boards,' it allows that arm to really do a good and effective job, because first of all they have something that they can go and promote and secondly, it challenges them to stay strategic in their thinking. If you have a specific zone where commerce can happen, you know the limits and the boundaries of where to do the commerce. It's just one example."

Ian Record:

"I also wanted to follow up on another point from what you were just talking about and that is you were describing this tumbling effect that you should be building towards in terms of how you structure your economy and you mentioned this point where the tribal government, for instance, or the nation raises revenues through gaming or whatever other enterprises it may have. It may, for instance, collect taxes on sales by citizen-owned businesses, whatever the form of revenue might be, comes in the tribal government, it funds that government, it pays the salaries to those tribal employees and then you mentioned those employees go out and buy goods and services. And this is where the research shows, this is where that tumbling effect tends to stop in so many nations because there aren't places on reservation to spend money on goods and services. Isn't that really one of the biggest challenges that Native nations face is creating those on-reservation outlets for consumer spending?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"There is that challenge, but I think in that challenge there's also a broader challenge that we many times in Indian Country all over America don't view the value of us buying from each other, doing business with one another, purchasing goods and services from tribal members or Indian-owned businesses, because that's part of a larger economy, the Indian Country economy. And I believe that when Indian Country comes to terms with adding that type of value and seeing the value in really committing to ourselves and our own success that we will have the ability to create a very powerful economy, sub-economy in the United States. But breaking that down to the individual level and the individual tribe, if the money that is made from whatever enterprise the tribe has only comes in and it goes directly out, it only benefits the tribe in that one sense. If that money were to come in, for example...an example that's challenging, but that some tribes have done would be a valuable one is a bank where people, where the money's made and then they store their money in the tribal bank. Well, now the tribe has access to use that money to do other kinds of investment and lending and create another revenue stream. A mall that has groceries and services that the community and the employees of the tribe would use is another way because you create...the money stays in the community, people spend it there, and you create more jobs with the same original money that was brought in, but it has now doubled its value. And so the ambition of a tribe should always be to see how they can vertically integrate the economy so that it will...there's an opportunity for it to stay there and it can be broken down in a number of arenas. Tribes buy all kinds of different products and goods and services. It would seem reasonable that they are able to create business opportunities for themselves as a tribal government owning enterprises or for membership and buying and selling those goods and services from individual Indian tribal members or other tribal enterprises or their own tribal enterprise."

Ian Record:

"You're working with the American Indian Business Network, which is an initiative of the National Indian Gaming Association on this issue of Native nations and Native citizens 'buying Native,' and really on a more macro level where you're talking about an Indian country-wide proposition, where it's not just Native nations and people buying internally within their own nation but actually buying from other nations. So I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about the motivation behind that project and how it's taking shape so far."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. I'm real proud of National Indian Gaming Association's commitment to developing the American Indian Business Network firstly because they are very close to a very powerful economic tool for Indian Country -- which is gaming -- and they see the value in tribes diversifying their economies. With that said, the American Indian Business Network was created by NIGA as a separate entity owned and operated by NIGA to develop a network whereby tribes could partner and do business with one another, that they could promote and establish a way to sell their own products and services of their tribal-owned businesses that they have and then also to look at partnering with other Indian businesses and also really for the small business owner or the entrepreneur that tribes would consider purchasing goods and services from those Indian-owned businesses. And with that said, with all of those levels of involvement and investment, we're really ultimately helping Indian Country, all of Indian Country by doing that because all along that chain, that food chain, Indian households and Native American families are being fed. And so we're really being more self-serving and self-sufficient, but not only that, we're also able to help the non-Indian economy because many of our employees are non-Indians, many of the businesses that we have are in partnership with non-Indians, there's a lot of non-Indian investment in Indian Country, and so the idea is not to exclude people or to make it exclusive, but to make it inclusive where Indian tribes, their enterprises, their buying power and their selling power gives a value to sharing resources across the country in one form or another, which could lead to a number of different opportunities. But just the concept is a very powerful one where we're not just looking, we're not just saying, "˜I want to take care of my tribe.' We're saying, "˜We want to take care of all tribes,' not by saying we're going to have to spend all of our money on other tribes, but by saying that we're willing to commit to buying Indian goods and services when they're at the same quality and level of the non-Indian goods and services."

Ian Record:

"So it sounds like a rather immense, untapped economic opportunity that will have kind of transcendent benefits not just for Native nations, but for the larger economy."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so, yes."

Ian Record:

"I would like to talk about another topic, broach another topic that's rather sensitive in a lot of Native communities, particularly among those who have experienced this newfound wealth and prosperity through gaming, and that's the issue of per capita distributions of tribal revenues. Yavapai-Apache Nation has a per capita distribution policy where it distributes a certain portion of its revenues to individual citizens, I believe on an annual basis, is that right?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Yeah, that's correct."

Ian Record:

"On an annual basis. And I was wondering if you could talk about how Yavapai-Apache Nation went about developing the policy, what it took into account when developing that policy, and how the policy and how the process of distribution actually takes place."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The per capita distribution and obviously the tribe's process of distribution was created for the membership -- and I won't get into any details to that because it's not my place or my authority -- but the distribution process was established because the community itself, as shareholders of the casino enterprise, felt as though there should be some distributions of that wealth. And the leaders over time had made commitments to doing that. When I got into office, it was very apparent that that was one of the things that was a priority to the people to get done. And so I made it one of my top and I think it was my first major initiative to move forward in office. The idea behind it was is that if we viewed the tribal membership as owners or shareholders of a corporation or a major enterprise -- which they are -- we viewed it much like a stock program in a private corporation whereby every year when business enterprises do well they might give their shareholders a revenue, a dividend, where they're sharing the dividend and that's how we really viewed it, that there's a percentage taken from the casino revenues and distributed to members each year at the end of the year based on the profit. And so with that said, I think the challenges; there were a number of challenges.

The first one is that when we put it together, there's the challenge of going through the process with BIA, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs takes its time in approving these kind of things, and so that was a challenge. And then internally the debate was, "˜How do we treat the dollars with respect to the individuals? Do we just give it to the adult members, do we give it to all members, is there any parameters that we want to put around the money?' Because it's not a lot of money. The council members at the time said, "˜We'd like to get the program started and we'd like for it to be shared and provided to all members.' With that said, we had to create a minors' trust program and so in that trust, there's an accountability of the money that comes in each year and how it's preserved for the individuals until they turn 18, which is the age that we gave and those dollars are accounted for by a separate accounting system. And I think the protections that we put into place or the monies don't come in through the tribal government, they go directly from the casino to the per capita account and then the money is distributed from there. And so that is helpful, too, to protect the integrity of the separation because it was approved, it was agreed on in our revenue allocation plan with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and so we really stay steadfast to that. And at the time, when we rolled it out, I think the challenge was is the people I'm sure wished that it was more than what it was and then I think the next challenge is that as we moved along we learned more about it because we would say, we would just...when we started, we wanted to get it out. And then along the way over the years we would kind of adjust it as needed, but the first year, the first issue was, "˜What if you turn 18 in the middle of the year? Do you get the money at the end of the year or do you have to wait?' And so that was one challenge. And then the next...so we had to set some timeframes on. If you turn 18 by a certain time during the year you are eligible for the dollars at the end of the year. So that was one challenge.

And I think another challenge was in dealing with elderly issues, that it might affect their Social Security benefits, and so we did try and find ways to manage that as well. But because it's young -- I think it's only been in place around four years or so now, maybe five -- but it was, we knew that we would have to work out some kinks and I think when it will be an impactful decision making down the road will be for those very young people that were maybe not even born or born when we started it that they'll have 18 years worth of revenue saved for them and at that point they may want to start considering some...putting in some safeguards for the individual, some requirements for them to get their money and those kind of things. But I think all in all, there's a lot of different positions on whether per capita is good or whether it's not good. I think in our case, because we viewed it as a distribution based on a shareholding, we had a little different viewpoint on it. Our ambition wasn't to subsidize the individual's life, it was to share in the overall profit of the, in our case, the casino. And so my own self, I have my own mixed emotions about whether it's good or bad, because I'm more in line with that the funds could be better spent providing programming, but I also recognize that the whole idea of gaming was to create an opportunity for quality of life of members. And so as you know and as we all know, every little bit counts, especially these days with everything being so expensive. And so if we create job opportunities, we create education opportunities, we provide social programming, and we are able to give distributions to help enhance the quality of life, then it's a positive thing."

Ian Record:

"You touched on a couple of the issues that the Native Nations Institute -- which recently published a policy paper on per caps and what Native nations needs to be thinking about as they develop their policies -- you touched on a couple of these critical issues. One of which is, when you issue a per capita distribution -- for instance particularly one that may fluctuate based upon the performance of the businesses or the enterprises from which the revenue for those distributions is coming from -- you have to be careful about what that's going to do to the eligibility of certain of your citizens for programs that they rely very heavily upon like Social Security."

Jamie Fullmer:

"The other challenge to that is if you expect...if you receive this much the year before and you only receive this much the following year, nobody's really happy about that. So one of the challenges as well is just growth, population growth. If you have a set percentage that you give and even if you make more revenues, if you have more births or enrollments in the year, it's still going to decrease the total payout. And so sometimes people assume that we are making less money when in fact, we're making more money, but we're growing faster than the money's growing."

Ian Record:

"Yeah and that's...I believe Native Americans are the fastest-growing population in the United States. That's going to be a huge challenge for those nations that issue per capita distributions moving forward, is it not?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I would think so, and I'm not real privy to any other distributions and values, but I would think that just that natural growth, something's got to give. If you've got a limited amount and you're growing here, well, something's got to give, whether it's programming or actual dollar distributions or both. It really depends on how well the tribe is planning for the future and that growth."

Ian Record:

"And it really gets back to this issue that we talked about earlier in our discussion about citizen education really, that you have to...because these issues like per capita distributions, these governing decisions that you have to make or at least lead in as elective leaders that you have to educate the citizens about what exactly all of this means. For instance, why is the per capita distribution amount down this year, or what does it mean when we're doing a performance based per cap or a profit based per cap based on a percentage of the revenue versus a flat amount every year?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That is again another struggle area because not everybody understands money, especially in the context of being one piece of a percentage. And it's challenging for those that understand money and so it's even more challenging for those that don't, and I'm talking about the percentages and how the common person in their thinking, they think about themselves and, "˜Hey, my check's less than it was last year. We must be making less.' That's the common sense approach to things, but when you look at the bigger picture and you realize and recognize that, as you said, if it's performance based, if the performance isn't as good, it's going to go down. If the performance is as good and you've grown and your membership has outgrown the dollar amount, it's still going to go down and so there might be two reasons that it's going down, two very different reasons. One is maybe a not so good of a reason, the other one is a good reason. Having great performance and growing as a nation is what we hope to do. So again that leads into the whole idea of diversifying where tribes should be considering, how do they create other opportunities, not just for per capita, but if the tribe itself is growing and continuing to grow then all of the programming is going to be effected: the education programming, the health care programming, the social programming, how the governments are staffed, staffing issues, the space allocations, the building sizes. You can go on down the list all the way down to the size of the pipes for sewage and water and it's not a bad thing to grow, but it's an expensive thing to grow and I believe that's one of the challenges, getting back to the challenge of the finances, is the common citizen doesn't take that into account. And sometimes when you lay it out there and it is statistically done and drawn out, it's hard for people to really connect to how those statistics affect the future growth."

Ian Record:

"So it seems to be two things that jump out of what you're saying about trying to meet that challenge or fight that struggle is strategic thinking and planning first of all: anticipating what the demands are going to be on tribal governance and tribal administration moving forward with the rapidly growing population, the strains that's going to put on programs, services, infrastructure, etc. And then it's the issue of not just citizen education, but education in laymen's terms, that most every citizen can understand."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Financial education is a very important next step for Indian Country, well, the whole country, but when we focus on Indian Country, that's a great next step because tribes have gone from over the last several decades, many of them were very poor and there was a lot of poverty. There still is a lot of poverty. I don't want to take away from that, but for those tribes that have been able to climb out of poverty, now they have to learn how to protect their wealth. It's not just a matter of generating it, but how do we protect it once we've generated it because it is very easy to spend. They always say, the more money you make, the more money you spend. It's very easy to spend the money when it comes in because there are always needs and there are always wants that people believe are needs and so there's a never-ending demand for services and programming and opportunities for members. But at some level, the institution, the government, the Native nation government needs to look at how do we prepare for our future growth. So they have to do some trending, they have to investigate their current size, they have to investigate their future needs, whether it's land needs or water needs or space needs, they have to look at the need for civic buildings and growth in that area and then they need to look at what kind of enterprises do we need to do. A couple of things: bring in more revenue to the tribe itself and bring in more opportunity for the tribal members. And so that isn't just increasing per capita, it's increasing the quality of life per individual. And that's I believe most of our goals as leaders is our ambition is to create a quality of life for our people that is comparable to what's around us."

Ian Record:

"And ultimately, as a nation, it's really about promoting independence and self-sufficiency not just as the collective, but among individuals."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. I think there's a little bit of I guess it would be backlash at times when a tribe becomes wealthy, people get angry about that. And it's really challenging in America that's supposed to be a country that is proud that people can go from poverty to wealth and they promote it in every other major arena and every other major setting, but when Indian tribes become wealthy, there seems to be a backlash that we don't deserve to be as wealthy as the other individuals that have wealth. I think that's another challenge that we face is we're still viewed as...that we may still carry on some of this second-class citizen status when we're well beyond that in the 21st century."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to wrap up with...first of all, I want to get your response to a quote and this is a quote that we heard first from, we've heard it from several tribal leaders, but we heard it from one in particular, Chief Helen Ben from the Meadow Lake Tribal Council up in Saskatchewan, and this really gets it back to this issue of governing institutions and she said, "˜My job as a leader is to make myself dispensable.' And really what she was getting at is, "˜My job as a leader,' and she expounded upon this, "˜is to put our nation in a situation where we have that infrastructure,' that you've been talking about, 'that environment in place of rules and policies and codes where when I leave office not everything falls apart.' There's a sense of stability and continuity there. And I was wondering if you could address that issue with respect to your own nation and what's going on in that respect."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think that my nation has been around for a long time, and there's been a lot of strong leaders and it's traditionally and culturally appropriate for us to have strong leaders. I think there's a balance between leadership and having a strong institution. Ultimately, I believe you need both because you can have a great institution, but if there isn't leadership steering it and keeping it moving and accepting the challenges that come up, then it can also stagnate. So I don't think that leadership is ever indispensable in my opinion. I think that leadership is a necessary part of everything that we do. With that said, a strong institution sure makes it a heck of a lot easier to be a strong leader and because you know what it is that you're wanting to accomplish and you know how to put to work the institution so that it can bring about the changes that the people want and need. And I think finally -- in my own nation as I said -- my ambition as the chairman was just to be a part of the growth, the ongoing growth, and I've never seen myself as anything more than that, never wanted to be more than that. That if I could say in my life that I contributed to my nation's growth in some way, then I feel like I have done my responsibility, and that holds true throughout my life. I feel like I can offer those same kinds of contributions to Indian Country as a whole and that's why I do what I do as the owner of Blue Stone Strategy Group. But back to the whole point of, I do believe that you have to have leadership, but I also believe that if you have a capable institution that you can plug folks into leadership roles, and as long as they have the necessary skills and ambition that there can be successes."

Ian Record:

"So in a nutshell what you're saying is that good governing institutions essentially empower the leaders to be effective."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe so. And there are those magnanimous figures out there that can, they don't need all of that around them to make it tick, but most of the people that sure does empower them to make wise and thoughtful decisions as opposed to reactive and crisis-oriented decisions."

Ian Record:

"Well, Jamie, we really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with us. I've certainly learned a lot and I think Native nations and leaders across Indian Country will learn a lot from your thoughts and perspectives on not only what your own nation has been doing, but what's going on in Indian Country. We'd like to thank Jamie Fullmer for joining us today on this episode of Leading Native Nations, a program, a radio program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit our website: nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us." 

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Jamie Fullmer (Part 1)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Jamie Fullmer, former chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, discusses the importance of the development of capable governing institutions to Native nations' exercise of sovereignty, and provides an overview of the steps that he and his leadership colleagues took to develop those institutions during his tenure in office. He also stresses the need for Native nations to fully and specifically define -- and distinguish between -- the roles and responsibilities of elected officials and tribal administrators.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to another episode of Leading Native Nations, a radio program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. I'm your host, Ian Record. On today's episode of Leading Native Nations, we're lucky enough to have with us former chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, Jamie Fullmer, who since he concluded his second term in office is now serving as Chairman and CEO of the Blue Stone Strategy Group, a company that works with a variety of Native nations on diversifying their economies. Jamie, I'd just like to open with giving you the opportunity to introduce yourself."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Thank you, I appreciate that. My name again is Jamie Fullmer. I'm the Chairman and CEO of Blue Stone Strategy Group and we work with tribes doing economic development and growth strategies. As was mentioned, I'm also the former Chairman of Yavapai-Apache Nation located in Camp Verde, Arizona, and very proud to have served my nation and have completed my terms in office with the term limit in our constitution. And since then I've founded and am the chairman and CEO of Blue Stone Strategy Group."

Ian Record:

"So Jamie, I'd like to start off with just a very basic question, but a very critical question for Native nations across the United States, Canada and beyond and that is, what is governance for Native nations in the 21st century? What does it entail?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a very good question. It's the question that we as tribal leaders ask, and in the modern sense I believe the ideal of governance has grown for tribal nations. The reality of governance as a tribal chairman or tribal president or governor is that you not only have to take the responsibility of being the head man of the community or head person of the community, you also have to take the responsibility of really running an intricate government with all of the nuances of any other municipality or state or federal government system. With that said, governance is really exhibiting the responsibilities of that nation, expressing the sovereignty of the nation and also finding ways to meet the challenges of the community itself."

Ian Record:

"The work of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, its sister organization, has really revealed what tribes are facing these days, what Native nations are facing these days and really the governance challenge is a complicated one. As you say, it's a complex one that involves various entities that transcend reservation borders and among other things -- as the research has shown -- that it's not really about just reclaiming your rights, but what you do with those rights once you have them. It has less to do with what rights you claim than with what kind of nation or community you want to be, really enforcing that or creating that strategic vision of where you want to go as a nation. For instance, it has less to do with other governments than with your own, the sense that it's up to us to shape our future, it's not up to the federal government. We can't wait for them anymore. And then finally, it really has no endpoint. The rights that are lost or won are fought for or defended when challenged, that challenge never stops; the governance never stops. It is a constant task. So those are some of the key findings of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project, and I was wondering if you could speak to that in your own experiences with that challenge at the Yavapai-Apache Nation."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The transition from the private life of a citizen of the community to the public life is a challenge in and of itself. Then the ideal of governance is learning, 'What does that mean?'

The tribe itself has been around from time eternity as we believe, and our ambition as [leaders] is to play a role in that continuance and that existence continuing on long after we're gone. With that said, governance and the challenges that are faced is based on what are the current challenges within the community itself, focusing attention on finding ways to help the people grow, to help the government stay stable, to help create economic and social resources, to maintain our future, and also to provide opportunity for our young people to be educated.

And so governance and the idea of what we claim versus what we express are important challenges because sovereignty is an unwritten rule; it's there. You express it by what you do to grow, and within that, though, what you claim is based on the structures that you develop. So in the modern sense, as a nation moves forward, the process and the ideal of sovereignty is, 'We are here, we express ourselves, we accept the challenge and responsibility of governing and seeing our own path forward.' With that said, we also have to interact with not only our community and our own issues and our own priorities and cultural concerns, we also have to face that as a dependent sovereign and in the United States we have some rules to abide by that aren't our own.

We have the United States federal government laws that govern the relationship in Indian Country that we have to address and deal with in our own communities. We also, being, a lot of times, neighbors with other regional municipalities not in Indian municipalities have to learn more about how to interact with the non-Indian communities so that we can protect our sovereignty through positive relationships and interaction and communication and dialogue. So the expression of our right of sovereignty is really one where we not only have to support what's been done in the past, what leaders have fought for and what our people have sacrificed in order for us to be sovereign in the 21st century, but we also have to recognize it's our responsibility to educate those around us.

And so really one of the roles of governance or expression of our own sovereignty is sharing with others what that means because in the mainstream systems not everyone really understands ever in their lifetime what a tribal nation or a Native tribe [is], what the relationship is with the federal government, the uniqueness. A lot of times we're placed in the same subset of a minority group, where in reality there's a constitutional relationship that predates all of us here and that relationship is bound in treaties and it's re-bound in the formation of individual constitutions that each tribe may have developed or within those trust and treaty relationships there may be a traditional government that's been formed and people have carried on the torch and forwarded down the road. And with that said though, because of that we look at the modern challenge of, of course, protecting our unique way of life, finding ways to create a safe and prosperous future for our community members and then also looking at, 'How do we continue to move forward with economic growth and expansion so that we can create a revenue base to maintain ever growing governments?'

And one of the challenges going back to my own leadership time, one of the challenges and key challenges I faced was that once you start offering services and you start offering programming, the demand for those programs and services never go away. And so you have to find ways to meet the increasing demands while at the same time manage and create a sense of accountability in how you spend the money. And so I would think that that challenge is universal for tribes and in my own tenure as chairman I saw that we would...we were growing. Our young people were growing, the population of our young people was beginning to outpace the adults -- the 18 and older population -- and that's a very positive thing, because we know that we're a nation that's growing, but with that said, the challenges and the responsibilities in the programming were changing. In other words, we would be...there were more requests for supportive programs around education and daycare and prenatal care and just a lot of other young familial issues, whereas there were still the ongoing demands and need for the elder care and providing job opportunities and resources for the adult population. And so governance is providing services that meet the needs of the people while at the same time the challenge is recognizing that there is a limited amount of resources, financial resources.

Most tribes don't have tax bases and so their resources, like my own tribe, were gained from...the primary revenue stream came from gaming, from our casino. And so with that said, a growing community, growing needs, growing programming, pretty set amount of revenue streams coming from the gaming facility. The other challenge then of governance is how do we develop economic development systems and how do we manage and create an accountability of our existing enterprises? Those two things I think are a critical path -- dealing with the realistic social issues and the ever-changing population needs and at the same time managing the expenses and finding new ways to create revenue streams. With that said, there's also an important process in there and that's the political process.

The political process in Indian Country is sometimes very complex, and a lot of times the challenges in that process are based on cultural values, they're based on priorities that have been not necessarily asked for but given to us because of federal laws and circumstances and financial limitations in circumstances, and so the political wrangling within our internal systems becomes one where we deal with trying to meet the social needs, trying to also address the governance needs, but also creating a new body of law that represents the modern time. And so many councils and leaders in this...as we move very strongly into the 21st century are facing a multitude of program differences, the challenges of a social...creating a childhood program is different than an elder program. The challenges of creating an economic base is different than managing the existing enterprises. They're still all responsibilities that lie within the role of governance.

There's another, I think, challenge and that is many tribal leaders when they come into office, they're expected to make change and they're expected to make change fairly quickly. That's maybe what ticket they ran on or what their constituents supported them on were new ideas or changing some of the old ways of thinking or making the system more accountable, and yet they're just one of more than likely a group of five or ten or sixty council delegates that might need to make the decisions. And so there's an important process in there where leaders...young leaders or fresh leaders, new leaders coming in need to take on the responsibility of learning their role as a legislator and learning their role as a community planner, but also limiting their...the natural tendency to move into trying to micromanage because that doesn't benefit the system in the long run and in fact there may be negative repercussions from that. You might lose good people, you might question areas that are really not based in fact, but are more caught into a rumor and so it's really important for tribal leaders to investigate, but to also recognize and define their role as a councilor or as a tribal leader. That is another challenge I think in the world of governance: it's making the laws and institutionalizing the laws, but also following those laws. And so that's another challenge, is that there's usually a separation between...within the government and understanding that separation and how it works is a critical path as well."

Ian Record:

"There's a couple quotes from fellow tribal leaders of yours that always stick with me and one of them is, "˜The best defense of sovereignty is to exercise it effectively.' And the second is, "˜Sovereignty is the act thereof -- no more, no less.' And really at the crux of those two quotes is this issue of building capable governing institutions, and I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit more about that."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. Building capable governing institutions involves a lot of hard work. It really involves several different levels of hard work. The first one is examining the existing institution. And a lot of times when you're thrown into a leadership role, you've gone out and spent your time campaigning on issues and priorities and then when you get in, especially for new leaders, there's not really an understanding of what body of laws or what body of institutionalized policies and programming are in place, and so there's really a critical path of understanding that needs to happen for, I believe, to have sensible governance. With that said, you're asked to do that with a team of other political leaders. And I use the word 'team' because for effective governance to really take place, it involves the entire team. That's not to say that everybody and every leader agrees on every issue, it's to say that if you've chosen a republic style of government or a democratic style of government, that once there's a vote and there's a confirmation of the vote or it's voted down, that everybody respects that. And so I think governance from that level is a critical path: the actual focus on the system and the act of sovereignty, the expression of sovereignty.

One of the critical portions of that is defining sovereignty. We've always heard sovereignty...in our Indian communities we've heard 'sovereignty' -- that word -- a lot and we've heard it in a lot of different scenarios. But there's also a legal terminology of sovereignty and there's also an expression of that sovereignty. And sovereignty is indeed the act thereof, but it is also understanding that it's important for us to redefine it as time allows us. There are things that we as Indian tribes and nations couldn't do 20 years ago that we can do now because people were willing to exercise and express the sovereignty and push the boundaries. And really those leaders and those tribes that took on those challenges, those spearheads, allowed the rest of us to be able to stretch our own boundaries. And so in a sense, sovereignty of a tribal nation is really being able to govern ourselves, to define what we consider to be wrong or right, to create laws to govern that, to find ways to protect and support our people and our way of life, and also create laws to protect that.

And then I think the idea of defending sovereignty is ongoing, because even as we move forward there's always attacks to our way of life, there's always attacks on the fact that we have the sovereignty in another sovereign nation and it's challenging for many people to understand that. They don't see how or why Indian tribes have that unique relationship and it's not for us to see how or why, it's for us to express it. And so moving forward, the idea of defending sovereignty is if we create quality set of laws to govern ourselves that people understand both internally and externally, that's one way, because sovereignty is really a legal expression.

Another way that we express our sovereignty is by pressing our boundaries of what we consider to be our rights as Native tribes and as Indian people in our...both in our reservation communities and in our ancestral homelands. There might be principle-based battles that we fight in the name of sovereignty. It's not on our existing trust land, but we have an ancestral connectivity; many of those battles are fought in the sacred realm, and we have to fight legal battles to protect our religious artifacts and our sacred land spaces or air spaces. And so those are ways to express sovereignty as well.

Finally, in closing on the idea of sovereignty is...sovereignty I believe is best expressed when we ask not what we can do, but why can't we do it. The question we can ask is, "˜Why can't we do it?' We're not asking, "˜Well, can we do that?' We're asking, "˜Why can't we do that?' Have others prove us wrong and not have to prove ourselves wrong first."

Ian Record:

"You've been quoted in the past as referring to your nation, when you took office, as "˜having the form of a jellyfish.' Do you recall that conversation?

Jamie Fullmer:

"I do."

Ian Record:

"Essentially, that your nation was like a jellyfish and that it needed to gain a backbone. And I think this really crystallizes what you've been talking about with this issue of building capable governing institutions. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what you meant by that and how your nation came to gain a backbone during your time in office."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. The idea...it was a...the way I could relate it to myself is our nation has been around forever. It has...it's full of life, it's real, it's there, but it's also caught up at the time with the waves and the currents of whatever was coming at us. And so from that point of view is that we were a reactive-based government and the idea of that is that we are very strong still to this day at reacting and handling and managing crisis, but the movement that I likened it to was going from a water creature that had to react to the flow and the ebb to this jellyfish type of flowing -- kind of being tossed and turned at times -- to a land animal that had a backbone. And the idea for me of a backbone is that structure, creating a formal structure that would help to stabilize our government while at the same time still allows us to be very fluid and withstand the things that go on. So in a sense, my explanation of that backbone had to do with formal structure, moving from a very informal system, which I think is important, and so I definitely don't want to downgrade that part of who we are, but the idea of a formal structure as a government protects our sovereignty in a number of ways, both internally it helps us to be more accountable to ourselves and externally it helps other people to understand that we're very real, that we do have it on paper, and that we do have a process for accomplishing the things that we want to accomplish. And I think the final piece to that is that the idea of that structure also allows us to move into the next stage of development as a nation, which was really looking toward the future and planning. If you have a solid structure, you can make plans to help move that structure. If you are more based on personality-driven systems, then when those personalities aren't there the structure doesn't move the same way. So I think that's a pretty clear way to express what I meant with that concept."

Ian Record:

"You stole my thunder with this next question and I really wanted to focus in on this issue of strategic planning, that when you gain that backbone as a governing system, you move...it helps you in a tremendous way in moving from this kind of reactive mode of governance where you're kind of constantly fighting fires and in crisis management mode to a kind of proactive thing where you can...you've got this basis from which to operate. Is that the experience you had at Yavapai-Apache Nation?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure, and I definitely will not take credit in having any of those thoughts first and foremost. That thinking and that type of leadership had always gone on in my nation. I think what had happened at the time that I came into office is that we had gone from a major transition of a long period of extreme poverty to a decade of having, generating an initial wealth to grow. And so we had kind of like popcorn. I always...the way I express it, you have the corn on the pan and when it gets hot enough it just pops. It's no longer that small kernel of corn, it's a big piece of popcorn and I think that's...when you have that, it's really hard to manage that type of growth. So you move from 30 employees to 250 employees in a relatively short period of time. So the idea of creating the structure and the goal setting was really to help manage the ongoing, day-to-day efforts of the programming while at the same time giving us the opportunity as leaders to really take time to vision what we would like to see the future of our community. With that said, before I had gotten in office, there was an initial planning process that had taken place where the community had been involved and there had been a lot of time and effort taken to develop that, but it had gone...it didn't take hold and the plan itself was tabled. And so when I initially got into office, because I had taken part in the planning and in my role prior to being the chairman, I felt like it was a good document and it was a good foundation for us to really begin to hone in on what should be our main priorities as we look towards a long-term future. And so we moved from a long-term, 30-year visioning process to an annual and multi-year planning process with action plans and objectives to reach and a process to get there. And that included the financial goals to meet with that, so that while we were moving forward that we were also dealing with and looking at what were the financial costs of executing these plans? And so I think that for nations that are moving towards growth or have been in gaming for a while, the next natural movement or actually the next important movement is taking on the responsibility to do diversification planning and then also growth strategizing for both the long term so that the community can kind of get out on paper and on the table their priorities, and the short term so that leadership can work together to find common ground and then also common purpose in moving forward."

Ian Record:

"And also isn't it about to a certain degree the...when you have that strategic plan in place, when you've gone that community...when you've had that community dialogue about where you want to head as a nation, as a people, as a community it gives you a lens through which to make decisions?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure it does."

Ian Record:

"So it provides, in a sense, provides you that context because what we've seen with a lot of nations is they experience this tremendous growth particularly in revenues through gaming or some sort of other enterprise and then they're making decisions with what to do with that revenue essentially in a vacuum because they haven't done that visioning process. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. There's a fine balance there in the community perspective as well. The challenge of the community perspective is a lot of people in their own worlds and in their own thinking, they don't take the time to look at the big picture, and yet that is the leader's responsibility is to take that time. So the individual might think in their minds, "˜Why can't we build a substance abuse clinic here,' which is a great question and it's a great challenge. The answer to that is, "˜We probably can, but it will cost this, it will take this much time, we will need to have these structures in place, these laws to govern it, these management objectives in place,' and so there's a whole list and cadre of questions and planning that needs to happen for that to take effect. The idea of that as a vision is an important thing because that can be done over time, the planning, setting aside the land, the building of the building, creating the processes for that to happen; this is one example. That can happen through a visioning process with the community. Breaking that down with the community is also very important because the community should understand that everything that you're doing takes time and it takes money and it takes resources -- human resources and sometimes physical resources and maybe land space resources. So there's opportunity cost to doing whatever you do. But involving the community at that front-line thinking process gives them the opportunity to hear the responses to some of these challenges that they raise and it also I think along the process allows them to either vent historical frustrations or create current challenges or make current requests based on what they see their own needs are and then as a group what the needs kind of come out as. There's an important balance that needs to be stricken there or that needs to be weighed out in that process, and that is that you can also turn those ongoing meetings into just dialogue, running dialogue. And so you might have meeting after meeting where you have nothing but dialogue and interaction and yet there's nothing that goes beyond that. At some point, the leader, the leaders in their seat of authority need to say, "˜We've heard enough. We've taken it all into consideration. We need to start moving forward with actually making some of this happen,' because you can actually get so much on your plate that you can't accomplish any large amount of it. I found very quickly in my term in office that I...when I initially ran for office, I had 10 goals to reach for on behalf of the tribe and I shared those goals as I was out in the community. When I got into office, I quickly found that I could not accomplish all 10 of those goals and I refined that to five goals. And I worked on those five goals my entire time in office."

Ian Record:

"And as you've pointed out before, those were goals and not promises."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Those were goals. The idea of promises is that as I said, you have to work with an entire team. It's a very big challenge as a council member, especially because you're only one vote in a group of nine or 19 or, as I said before, it could be larger, but you are a decision maker with a body of...a group of other people. As an executive branch head, you have the challenge of not only do you have to work with that team of legislators to try and get passage of budgeting and support for initiatives, but you also have to manage the government to make certain that you have the resources to reach those goals once you've set them. And so that's the...the kind of the separate challenge of the executive branch versus the legislative branch is that you have to interact with not only your team at the leadership level, but you have to interact with your team at the management level as well, and you have to find some way to get those broad, large, encompassing goals down into a management system that handles the day-to-day movement towards reaching those goals."

Ian Record:

"I want to backtrack just briefly because we've been essentially talking about, how do you manage growth, how do you ensure that growth moves your nation forward according to its own design. And the reality is that for so many nations across Indian Country because of gaming, because of other economic opportunities that they've capitalized upon, the growth that they've experienced -- particularly in the area of economic development -- has been astronomical over the past 15 to 20 years. And the challenge that a lot of them face is, "˜How do we ensure that we capitalize upon these revenues, that we move these revenues through our system into our community in a way that does in fact promote self sufficiency, promote independence not only of our people as individuals, but our people as a collective instead of simply promoting dependency, continued dependency.' I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, about that sort of challenge."

Jamie Fullmer:

"That challenge is I think the most difficult one that leaders face, because as a political leader you find out what the community's wants and needs are and you try and promote yourself to being able to help solve some of those issues. That might be the ticket that you run on. And so when you get into office the people might say, "˜Well, we would like to have more cash distributions. We'd like to see more funding in certain areas,' and yet those areas might not be -- when you look at the system institutionally -- they might not strengthen the role of the government or the role of the family. I think the challenge that I faced is...I have a background in social work, I have a Master's in social work. And as a social worker, part of that field was community development and in the ideal of community development you want families to come together and work together to grow and to face challenges together. What happens, and what I've seen happen, is that a tribal government wanting to share the wealth, so to speak, that has been created from gaming and other resources creates programs that take the place of family. And the challenge in that is, yes, it's warranted and the people want it, but where's the role of the family in the process?

And so, in a sense, the government is taking on the role of the family member, and at times that's a positive thing and at times, I believe, that's a negative thing and that's a balance that every leader when they get into office has to strike is, what is positive? Yes, it is positive that people have more cash in their pocket to do things, to pay bills, to go on vacations, to spend more time with family, but that also can be seen as a negative because some people might view that as their way of life now. "˜I don't need to take on some of the challenges and responsibilities of self-sufficiency because I can rely on the welfare system of the tribe.' And so I think that's an ongoing challenge and every tribe is unique in its characteristics. Some tribes are more independent natured and want their people to be independent, and others are more communal in their thinking and they want the people to be really spend time in communal settings, and others are work-minded and they want to create jobs and create a working class citizenry, and other tribes are culturally based and they want to spend a lot of their time protecting and sanctifying and expressing their cultural values through ceremony and through song and dance and through commitments in that way.

And so the balance of a leader is, 'Where do we lie in that spectrum? Where do we spend our time and energy as a government and where do we spend the people's money in that? Do we spend it on making the programs bigger, do we spend it on making the programs better, do we spend it on both of those things, do we spend it on developing future economies by investing the money, do we invest the money into passive investments with just a return to protect the wealth and to grow the wealth, do we take that wealth and use it diversify our economies?' These are the real challenges of maintaining the integrity of the tribe's monies through the fiduciary responsibility of leadership. And there's no one right answer and even the answers that you think are right might end up wrong because, for example, the economy itself, the greater economy affects us and now we see slumping areas of...in business across the board, whether it's in the mainstream or in Indian Country. And so those are challenges that we have to face, too, is we don't completely have the control over it that we'd like to, and we as leaders, we listen and we learn and then we have to act. And we may look back in time and say, "˜I would have done that differently if I would have had more information, knowledge,' but that's what life's about is learning from that kind of thing."

Ian Record:

"A lot of your thoughts so far have really focused on this issue of elected leaders needing to understand the big picture, to be in a position where they can take a step back, understand the spectrum -- as you mentioned -- of everything that the tribe has going for it in terms of assets and not just financial assets, but human assets, cultural assets, natural resources, etc., and understand that big picture better than anyone else and then conveying what the options are to the people so that they can then in turn decide on a course of action that the leaders can then implement. And that's really hard when you're down in the trenches every day fighting fires or perhaps micromanaging a program."

Jamie Fullmer:

"It is really hard. The challenge of leadership is exactly that -- it's a lot of times when leaders come in they feel as though they need to know it better. They don't necessarily need to know it better, but they need to take the time to know it and they also need to trust the experts that they have on board to help guide them through some processes. That's another challenge is we need to utilize the resources and at times we need to look outside of ourselves and bring in third-party, unbiased opinions so that we can hear it as an unbiased point of view as opposed to a political point of view or a community point of view. Looking at best practices, internally it's a challenge because each of us think that what we're doing is the best way to do it, and yet if we heard it from somebody outside of us who's looking at us from the outside in, they might have a completely different idea of what we're doing and how it might make better sense to do it differently to make it more efficient and effective.

So I think the challenge of leadership is we get that feeling that we need to know it better than everybody else. I don't believe that at this point in the game, and as I look back and reflect I think it was really relying on the people that we had in place to do their job and to make certain that I was communicating the desires and the priorities that leadership developed and then also that I was executing my role of governance and management of the tribal government and tribal enterprise oversight. And inclusion was really the best tool for success in some of the things that we were doing, inclusion of the tribal council members at the governance level, at the decision-making level, and then setting the boundary of, 'We've made the decision, we've agreed upon it, now it's my responsibility to execute it using our resources.' And if we don't have the resources, reaching out and bringing in resources that understand this and do know how to do it so that we can make certain that it gets done on behalf of the people.

So the people play a major role in that the people vote in who they think are going to help that process or change that process and that's where they have the ultimate control. Then, once the people are voted into leadership roles, they have a responsibility to take action and part of that responsibility is the challenge of defining the role that is both positive and respectful of the institution. And it is a lot funner to go in and micromanage a program than it is to develop a commercial code. It's more...you get more...it's more tangible results. You get to see people move and you get to see action happen, whereas creating a body of laws that's going to impact the entire future might take months and months and months of discussion and debate and it's all in legal terminology and it's long days and hours sitting reading and discussion and debating why that law is valuable."

Ian Record:

"And not only that, but the results of it may not be seen immediately."

Jamie Fullmer:

"The results may not be seen immediately because that body of law might not even get done until the next set of leaders come in and say, "˜Let's finish this off.' And so that's the challenge of leadership is long-thinking, creating and supporting growth, and enacting laws and governance structures that will protect the nation or tribe long down the road while at the same time facing the day-to-day challenges of the fire drills and the crises that come up and the community expectations and the social and cultural priorities, and doing that in a balanced approach that respects the people's view of you as a leader, but also respects the institutional rules that have been set up for you as a leader. That is the ongoing leadership challenge."

Ian Record:

"Yeah, and it's a difficult balance. We've heard this from a variety of tribal leaders from a variety of nations talk about the position you want to get yourself to, one of the major reasons that you go through this arduous -- as you've just described -- arduous process of building these capable governing institutions, building these laws, these codes, these policies is to get yourself to a point where you as a nation, you as a group of elected leaders are sending a different message to your people about what leadership does, what it cannot do, what you, for instance, as a councilor or as a chairman are able to do for them and what you're not able to do for them. So when you say 'No,' for instance, to a relative that comes to you with their hand out for a job or something like that, you can say, "˜I can't do this for you. We have a policy in place. It's not personal, but this law, this code, this resolution says that I can no longer act this way because it's against the best interests of the nation as a whole.'"

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a challenge in itself because it's a lot easier said than done. It can be written on paper and you can say, "˜That's the best practice,' but when the family, the individual, the group is in your office, you have to make a decision then and there. And I think that's another challenge of leadership, because leaders themselves as politicians have been voted in to make some decisions that they maybe have made promises on. And so it's just like everything else: if you give your word on something, you want to be of your word. So that is the challenge and it's an ongoing challenge, it isn't going to go away, it doesn't just happen in Indian Country, it happens in every political seat in every...at every level of government in every country in the world. And so that, I think, is unique...the unique status of it in Indian Country is most of the larger municipalities and state and federal governments, you've got a lot of buffers to go through to get to the decision-maker. In Indian Country you only have...the only buffer is usually the door, and usually the door's open and they walk in. And so that I think is a critical path that -- once you institutionalize policy -- that you also are able to follow through with that policy in a respectful way. And sometimes you need to make a crisis-call decision that goes against the policy, but that should be the exception not the rule, and it shouldn't be based on just the ideal of nepotism or the familial relationship, it should be on the merits of the problem.

There might be a crisis where...I'll give an example where something that came into my office, I'm sure it came into a lot of them. An elderly couple, tribal member -- they have no money for gas. They need to travel to a ceremony. They come to the tribe for that and you think about it and you're like, initially you think, "˜Well, why aren't you going to your family'. Well, you know that their family has no resources either. And then you're saying, "˜Well, part of our responsibility as a government is to respect...we've been promoting cultural advancement and protection of culture.' Here's a perfect example of that. So the recommendation to them might be, is that something that you can give from the cultural program since that's a cultural, I can see that as a cultural thing. If you can get the support of that director, I don't have a problem approving it, that...kind of saying that you don't have a problem, because in our particular system you had to have a director's approval and then the chairman would sign off on it. So in that kind of scenario...and it can go across the board to a child, a mother without resources. They've just moved back home, they've been away, they have no place to stay, they'd stay at the parents, but the parents already have another of their siblings and families living there. You can go from one end of the spectrum and every scenario and the challenge, and I think the reason that you become a leader is to make that decision. But those are the exceptions, those are not the rule. The rule is, "˜Well, we've got a policy for that. Here, I can help you. Let me call the director and have them come in and meet with you and then they can take you down to the right office that you need to be at.'"

Ian Record:

"A lot of what you've shared about the tremendous growth at Yavapai-Apache Nation has really culminated in changes in the community for the better, essentially translating the resources that have been generated, the financial resources generated through gaming, your other initiatives, your economic initiatives, and translating that into real-life quality of life changes at the community level. And I was wondering if you could talk about how Yavapai-Apache Nation has approached using economic development as a tool to better the quality of life for your citizens."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think economic development is one of the critical responsibilities or arenas within the ideal governance, that as tribes grow and as tribes have the opportunity and the responsibility to develop economies that economic development within the tribe itself is one of those processes that really needs to take a priority within the tribal mindset. The end results of that are obvious on a number of levels. The first one is that when a tribe takes time to build the economic avenues within the community that creates job opportunities. And so you have opportunities for the people to take...to get work, to create their own lifestyle based on their commitments to working. And that's an immediate opportunity, but then as well once a tribe is also able to start to create a strong management of its financial resources and begin to diversify and to invest those dollars, it creates opportunities for tribes to grow and protect wealth. Now that's not say that everything that you invest in is going to be successful, and in our nation we had successes and we had failures, but I think the one thing that our nation and many other nations have been able to do is learn from those mistakes and find ways to make better systems the next time we do it. I think the key there for leadership is being willing to have the courage to try again if you fail. In every tribe, in every particular avenue there's been a failure in something.

For our particular nation, we've been fortunate in that most of what we've done in the last decade has been...we've at least had the opportunity to create jobs locally, create revenue streams to diversify from gaming and then also begin to, 10 years into this and right now we're at 13 years into it, out of the beginning of gaming, begin to diversify and to build other opportunities and other businesses. With that said, the revenue streams can also help the tribe to stabilize the infrastructure. Once an infrastructure's put in -- I'm talking about your basic piping and utilities and water systems and waste systems -- now you have an opportunity to build upon that. Once you have infrastructure in any area, you have the opportunity to begin looking at can we create a commercial corridor here? Is there opportunity to build an outlet or retail mall? What can we add value to our own...to our gaming enterprise by building? What kinds of things can we create for the membership so that they can build their own businesses? And so there's a lot of positive results that come from economic development.

The challenge is obviously always the same as the rest of the governance responsibility; what do you do today and what do you try and establish for tomorrow and how do you strike the balance between the current demands and hopes of the community with regards to developing and what do you have to really plan well for because it involves a lot of moving parts? Economic development is very challenging because you have to reach out and do a lot of planning and the planning takes a long time and people grow impatient with that. And then when you begin to build larger types of businesses or even buildings, those take years to build and so that's just the initial stage. Once you actually do the development locally, you have to look at, 'What challenges are there within the framework of the laws and the lack of laws and what kind of policies and protections are in place for a business?' So I think those are some of the challenges of economic development.

I think the other arena of economic development is trying to create revenue streams coming into the reservation community. What kinds of things can we do to not only generate wealth, but keep the wealth locally? Examples would be grocery stores and shopping stores which the tribal members themselves can use and maybe they've earned money by their job for the tribe, the government or one of the tribal enterprises, and now they spend that money in the community, which creates more jobs. And so that compounding effect is something that I believe tribal leaders need to understand from an economic point of view, that's not to say that everybody needs to be an economist, but it's to say that what's going to add value to protect the wealth that we've established, to generate more opportunities, to diversify so that we're not relying so heavily on one revenue stream. And in many nations, my own nation included, gaming is the primary revenue stream. And everybody that I've talked to in the back of their mind has the idea that we believe that gaming can't last forever. What can we do to begin taking some of the pressure off of the gaming as the main and only revenue stream? A lot of tribes these days are looking at not just building locally, but buying and acquiring businesses off reservation to start to bring that revenue stream from a different place into the reservation community and on the tribal nation's lands. And so those are very important processes for tribes to learn more about and actually very, very carefully plan and develop execution or strategic plans to actually make those things happen."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned, you touched on the importance of tribal leaders in particular again taking a step back, looking at that big picture and seeing in building...systematically building an economy, one of the things we have to attend to is the need for us to create on-reservation outlets for spending, which as you mentioned not only creates jobs, but keeps those dollars circulating within the community so they don't automatically go off reservation to the nearest Walmart or something every time you have a payday. And one of the things that your nation did recently was I thought very interesting was the creation of discounts for tribal citizens, to encourage them to spend their dollars in on-reservation, nation-owned ventures, and I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about how you went about that process."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure. A couple of things: because we're not an immensely wealthy tribe from gaming and gaming basically helps us to kind of run the government and take care of some of the social needs of the community and it doesn't take care of everything by any means, but one of our thoughts when I was in office was, "˜Is there a way that we can provide value to the tribal member and then also at the same time provide that same value to the tribal system?' And what we thought about was is that on our tribal membership cards we ended up putting on a magnetic strip on the back and so with that the member can use that and get a percentage reduction in fuel at the tribe's own convenience store or even the membership verification allows them to get a discount on the restaurants in our...that we own and even down to getting discount on the cement products and on some of the other enterprises that are owned by the tribe. With that said, the value is that for membership, that because you share in the value of ownership you should also be able to get some of that value back. And that's a challenging thing when you don't have enough resources to do everything for everyone, you can at least try and find ways to try and provide some sense of value to the membership."

Ian Record:

"Among the most successful nations -- Native nations across Indian Country that we've seen in terms of achieving not just their economic development goals, but their community development goals, their priorities as a nation -- among those nations you typically see or in many cases you see leaders who understand that they're not just decision makers, that their job when they come into office is not just to make decisions but then also educate their citizens about why they made the decisions they did, also engaging the citizens to make sure that they're making informed decisions that respects the community's position on a particular issue. I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of that and how perhaps you tried to implement that during your time in office."

Jamie Fullmer:

"It's definitely a principle that I believe in. I believe that the challenge for it is the amount of time that it takes to do it. As a leader -- as you pointed out -- you don't have just the responsibility of leading, but educating. And to educate the masses, it's a challenge at times, and at what level and how far in depth you go to do that is really another challenge. But while I was in office, one of the things that we instituted was a quarterly report where we would share the government's goals and objectives, the tribal leaders', the council members' goals and objectives, how we were doing with regards to creating a chart that showed our expenses of the government, talked a little bit about each of our enterprises and where we were at in the growth process with those. And the idea behind that was that at least we could share to the best of our knowledge what was going on and that information sharing would be helpful for the community so they felt they were informed. We would also hold community meetings and we'd go and present those reports. I'm proud of the new leadership that's in place now because they're still continuing on with even more assertive types of community presentations. I think they're doing it monthly, which is very good for the community and it helps them stay informed.

The challenge is always going to be that as you get enough initiatives going and moving forward that really there might be times when not a whole lot is going on because you're in a hurry up-and-wait mode and so you're not reporting anything different and then the people think that you're not doing anything. And that's some of the challenges, especially with community development and infrastructure development and when you're doing planning and law creation. A law isn't a law until it's on the books. It might take you eight to nine months, a year, a couple of years to create that law, but if it's not on the books, it isn't a law and so the people will say, "˜Well, we thought you were working on this law.' "˜We are.' "˜Well, it's taken you a year, why aren't you done?' Those are some of the challenges of what and how you share that information. But the process is still a very valuable process, because at some point you pass the torch and you hope that you've at least laid enough groundwork that if the leadership that takes over doesn't understand what's been done, at least your employees and your community understands where your community lies and maybe helps to create the expectations for the continued movement forward."

Ian Record:

"So following up on that, there's really...in building these capable governing institutions like Yavapai-Apache Nation's been doing for the past decade plus, perhaps even longer..."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Probably longer, yeah."

Ian Record:

"...There's a process of education that has to take place after those governing institutions are built, because essentially a lot of those laws, codes, rules are either filling voids in the current system of government or in the pre-existing system of government or they're overturning something that was pre-existing in that system of government and essentially, there's changing things on the books and then there's changing things in the political culture that's been long at play in the community. I was wondering if you could talk about that challenge."

Jamie Fullmer:

That again is another...you're really raising a lot of the important and difficult challenges. The institution itself has...for example, our nation has been in place since the IRA days, 1934-1936, in that period and was around before that. And so...but once the nation and the tribe had accepted and acknowledged the constitutional government and started to formulate law and create written law, there's a whole body of law that's maybe almost a century old. Some of that law is outdated; some of that law has never been utilized or worked itself into the framework, not because the tribe didn't want it to because they voted it in at some point, but because it got lost in the shuffle. I think that in this modern setting that it's important for tribes to maybe take a look at using technology as a tool to help gather information and store information. Moving from a paper system to saving information in data files that can be brought up so that during council meetings there can be a cross reference immediately to say, "˜Is there a law on the books that has to do with water rights that we've passed in the last decade and if there is, what is it?' and maybe be able to answer some questions that new lawmakers or lawmakers that have come into office recently don't have an understanding on. So I think the challenge of that institutional knowledge is that there's not a good firm grounding in communicating that institutional knowledge and sharing that institutional knowledge and transitioning that institutional knowledge forward as new leadership takes hold and takes steps to move into place. And so that challenge I think can be met by utilizing technology. Not all tribes are ready for that, but it is a tool that can be used to start storing, saving and creating collection systems that can categorize the laws so that it can be done more rapidly and in real time as opposed to, "˜We'll get back at that at our next meeting or next set of meetings or somewhere in the future.' So those issues can be addressed while they're hot, as opposed to waiting for them to go cold or transition into new leadership and it's been left out without being completed."

Ian Record:

"How important is transparency to the effective exercise of governance?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I think transparency is a very important portion of it. And again, I always get to the idea of the piece of, how much do you share? And it's not a matter of withholding information, as much as when you give too much information it's overwhelms people. When you give the details of a process that's taken years to encompass, you've got years' worth of information to share. And so I think that in some respect, you have to look at, how much information do we share to make sense and how much information do we share to inform the community, while at the same time a lot of decisions are sensitive to the tribe itself and they don't want them open to everybody. So how do we share that in a way that is open and yet private from people that the tribe or the membership doesn't want to have included in the information chain? That's another challenge that tribes often face. And so what happens many times is bits of information gets shared in the spirit of transparency and that information can get twisted and it's just like when you go around the table and you tell one person a secret and it goes around the table and it comes back as an entirely different thing. That happens in every political system as well. And so it's important to have information, to be clear about it, to be concise about it, but also to make certain that you're protecting the tribe's interests."

Ian Record:

"And it's not just a question of how much you share or what you share, but also how you share it."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned community meetings and that sort of thing, what other ways does the Yavapai-Apache Nation ensure transparency in government in relation to the people?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Well, I would think that...well, when I was in office and I'm certain that they're still working on and through this, not only the community meetings, but the chairman and vice chairman share in our tribal newspaper their issues and then in the council meetings themselves, they're all held and members can go and get that information, can request a copy of the transcripts of any of the general sessions. And I think that part of that is internalizing that mechanism. Another part of it is defining how often, how much, and what kind of information gets shared. I mean, there are a lot of, not speaking of my nation specifically, but there are a lot of opportunities now with technology to share basically everything...the tribe's history, I've seen a lot of tribes have really creative websites and a lot of information on those websites that really help people understand who they are. And I applaud those tribes because I think that's an important way to do it and it seems like these days that's something that people do. They go and Google© or search, look through search engines to try and find information so that they feel well prepared and are respecting...if they have a meeting with the tribe or want to reach to them. And a lot of tribes have members that are distant from the community but still want to stay involved at least in the information-sharing process."

Ian Record:

"So from what you're saying transparency and openness in government is not just important for a nation's citizens, but also those outsiders that the nation chooses to do business with or chooses to, for instance, enter into some sort of working relationship with?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure it is, and that's where the struggle of tribes that are private and confidential happens with regards to...being confidential is not the same as living in a vacuum. There's still information that you have to share, especially when you have outside business relationships, especially when you're looking to partner or to find ways to find funding for projects, and so those kinds of things...as well as safeguarding your relationship in the region that you live in. That information might be shared in a way so people understand and know what you're doing so they themselves don't get concerned of, "˜What's going on over there, they're so secretive they must be doing something wrong.'"

Ian Record:

"And that sort of mentality prevails within the community too when you're not actively educating your citizens."

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's a human issue, that isn't...I don't think that's focused on one race or another. That is the human element. We always look to the idea that if people aren't sharing it there must be something wrong with it."

Ian Record:

"One of the most important governing institutions or perhaps policies that came about at Yavapai-Apache Nation recently and that is the development of a code of ethics. Maybe give us an overview of what exactly is included in your code of ethics, the process by which the nation adopted that code and how it's played out so far. For instance, how is it enforced? What's the reception of the community been to it? How has it come into play perhaps?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"The code of ethics was really developed because it's written in our constitution that the tribal council can create a code of ethics for the policing and how the tribal council conducts itself in leading the nation. And so back again in office, this has been a couple of years ago now, we worked on building a code of ethics that included a lot of things such as conflict-of-interest issues, the discussion of how a tribal council member conducts themselves when representing the nation, the idea of information sharing, raising issues of concern when they're brought to their attention if it's about or with regards to another council member. So really it was a means to try and protect the integrity of our nation's leadership and at the same time give us a way to be fair with one another and then also show the community that there was that fairness and equity and that we were doing tribal business in a legitimate fashion. And so the code of conduct was established as a means for the tribal council to identify areas that were concerning, that had been brought up by constituents from this date all the way back to whenever it was being brought up, that were considered concern areas that tribal council shouldn't be engaged in or should be concerned about or that other tribal council members should be made aware of if that was to happen.

And so by doing that, I think that again -- since I'm not there in the last six months -- I'm not quite certain how it's working for them now, but in that first year of putting it in place, we were able to deal with a lot of issues that had come up in the past where there weren't answers and we were able to deal with them in an upfront fashion using our code of ethics to determine, "˜Is there a violation of the code of ethics?' We would let our attorney general review it if it was a legal discrepancy or if it was a conflict-of-interest issue, we would let there be a review by the attorneys and separate it from us so that there was a third-party, unbiased point of view on it, and then we would follow through with that, the recommendations on that depending on the level of severity if there was one could lead up to removal from office, but it could be a suspension, it could be just a discussion and being made aware and clarifying. The code of ethics, I think in the long run, will really help maintain the integrity of the tribe. How it was viewed by the people, I think the people, the reason that we put it together I think was a response...in response to the people's request to have some way of assuring fair government."

Ian Record:

"And I assume part of that code of ethics covered the interference by elected officials in, for instance, program management."

Jamie Fullmer:

"That's correct. It prevented micromanagement. Council members weren't allowed within the code of ethics to go and address a director. They had to do it through the executive branch using the chain of command that has been approved by the council. The organizational chart in our system is approved by the council. So they had to actually utilize that organization chart and the chain of command in order to address the issue. It doesn't mean the issues don't get addressed, it means that there's a respect for laws that leaders have put into place and structures that leaders have voted in as acceptable structure to follow through with. There are...definitely one of the goals was to prevent ongoing micromanagement if there was any. The ethics code really helped to minimize that."

Ian Record:

"We see a lot from the top down the impact of micromanagement in terms of...for instance if an elected official micromanages nation-owned enterprises, particularly for instance if it's forestry or something like that, transforming the business from one built on profitability to one run as essentially an employment service."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Sure."

Ian Record:

"We've seen that in a lot of places. I was wondering if you could talk about the impact of micromanagement by elected officials from the management end, from the program end, and what messages does that send to those people who are trying to manage the nation, who are trying to carry out those programs and those services when an elected official walks in and starts trying to run the show."

Jamie Fullmer:

"I believe that from that point of view that one of the protectors is not only the code of ethics, but the structure. Part of micromanagement comes when there's a lack of structure for people to really understand, what is your role and so they have...everybody has their own belief about what a certain director role should be doing and if there's no clear job description or policy of how that program or department runs, then it leads to, in a way, the micromanagement coming up because people are saying, "˜Well, I don't believe that's part of your authority or your responsibility,' and so that oftentimes leads to it. So one side of it is the management side, that there needs to be that structure to help everybody be on the same page. On the flip side of it, back when I was a director, the concern issues weren't so much...they didn't so much have to do with people coming in and making their complaints and making their requests as much as when a decision was made, if that decision was reversed or if a decision was made and that decision was trumped. That is very hard to run a solid program if your decisions aren't supported at the leadership level. So from a management position, if you don't have the structure in place from the management side, you're going to assume that you have certain authorities over your department and program based on your experience in running departments and programs or lack of experience in running departments and programs. So of course you develop a boundary that you think that works. What happens is you might overstep that boundary unknowingly or someone else sees that boundary as either being bigger or smaller. And so I think the challenge for management, when there is micromanagement from leadership is, should I even make the decision or why should I make the decision? If I make the decision, they'll just reverse it."

Ian Record:

"So they tend to sit back and cool their heels and not come up with innovative answers or solutions?"

Jamie Fullmer:

"I would think that's one of the challenges. I can't say that I did that. I would always move forward with the idea that I have a responsibility to run the programs as I see fit based on my ethics as a social worker, but with regards to that, if I made a decision where I told someone 'no' and they went around me and went up into leadership and that was reversed, there's not much I was going to say because that's the leader's prerogative. The challenge was is that if you're running a system and you're getting that from eight or nine different leaders that are saying, "˜Why did you do that?' "˜Well, because the other leader did that.' And so you get caught up as a manager in a political struggle or can get caught up in a political struggle and I don't believe that many managers at any level want to get caught up in that or they would have run to be political leaders themselves. When they're a manager, they just want to manage their program, do the best job they can and try and help serve the community at whatever capacity they can in their professional role."

Ian Record:

"Ultimately they want to do the job they were hired to do."

Jamie Fullmer:

"They want to do...most people that I've ever met in a professional role, they want to do the very best job they can. But without rules to do that job, there are people that make up their own rules and there are people that don't do anything. It just depends on the personality of the individual."

Ian Record:

"While we're on the topic of programs and services, the all-encompassing bureaucracy of the nation, you've stated to me before that one of the major challenges that you faced when you first came into office was kind of this unmanageable bureaucracy. And we see this across Indian Country, where a tribe's bureaucracy over the course of several decades is essentially, just this collection, this kind of assortment of programs; there's kind of this horizontal structure. We call it the 'silo effect,' where you have all these individual silos; a lot of these silos may actually duplicate services that the other one's doing. I was wondering if you could talk about what that looked like when you came into office and what you guys did about it."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Well, when I came into office we had a lot of program directors and a lot of programs. I know it was over 40, I think it was up there. The problem with that was exactly what you pointed out. There were silos. It was ineffectiveness and inefficiencies in some of those areas. And these are critical path areas: health care, human services, police and public safety, trying to find ways to provide better housing and community programming for the tribe. With that said, when I first got in office, I worked with our tribal council to try and refine the organizational chart and the tribal council was in agreement that it was too...spread out too wide and we looked at, 'Well, how do we make it more like a pyramid, like a true organizational structure?' And so we limited those program directors and brought our programming into five major programs and within the five major programs, we put all the other programs under those departments. And so now we had accountability, we had a chain of command and we had also a program where there could actually be built into it a set of policies and procedures and guidelines for how people do business. So we created the administration, the public safety, housing, economic development, and finance and everything fell under those five processes. And we did that to match our own system. They could have been...we could have called them different titles and different processes and we put some in other areas because there were better fits individual-wise not necessarily programming-wise. So we tried to make certain that we made those fits without completely disrupting the existing course of business. But it did take a little while to get used to and there was a challenge initially because people that were directors now became managers and they weren't necessarily happy about that. But in the best interest of the tribe and how business was done within the government, the bureaucracy of the government, it made things more sensible. We could call on one person and they could deal with their issue within their department as opposed to maybe there are four or five. Before, you'd have four or five people coming in to represent a case or an issue that was brought to the council. Now you had one person and it was their job to bring in who they saw fit to deal with the issue, but the council and the executive branch and the administration were only dealing with the director."

Ian Record:

"So it sounds like overall it helped to eliminate waste and make the operation of government more efficient."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Well, definitely that was our goal. Our goal was efficiency and accountability within the government. And I believe we did that. We were able to come under budget all the years in office."

Ian Record:

"And isn't it at some level about reclaiming your government because a lot of those silos...that silo effect is so often created by federal grants coming in from the outside and the sorts of requirements that they have and the structures that they mandate and that sort of thing."

Jamie Fullmer:

"And a lot of people don't recognize it, but in a way creating programming and utilizing everything under grants, you're really giving the authority to the granting party because most of those grants say, 'You have to do this, that and the other,' and when you sign the documents you've acknowledged that you're doing that. So yes, the answer to that is yes, you do get the authority back and one of the principles that we established there is that we don't create programs based on a grant. If a grant fits our programming, we'll go after it, but we're not going to create programs based on a grant. There's another key piece to this and I want to bring it up because it has to do with efficiency and that is that in our government we had a three-branch government. And so we had a court system that still, even though they were separate, they still had administrative responsibility to be efficient. And so we would still challenge them not on any of their court cases or anything like that because that was totally in the hands of the judges and the appeals court, but the way the system would run. They got a budget just like the rest of the government and they would have to tell us why they needed the funds that they needed and how they were working towards accountability and efficiency."

Ian Record:

"So you touched on it without actually saying the term, but in terms of this bureaucratic reorganization, this streamlining, this creation of accountability within that structure, this issue of kind of a wholesale shift away from the 'project mentality,' as it's sometimes referred to, to program management where a nation's programs, its bureaucracy is predicated on finding the next grant and if we have to create another program, let's do it and that's how that silo effect is created. So you were...it sounds to me like you were trying to get away from that, consciously."

Jamie Fullmer:

"Consciously, it was one of our goals is to reduce the amount of reliance on grant funding that didn't make sense or didn't meet our needs. And so we restructured our grant program to only reach out to grants that would fit in some requirements that we established. The other part to that I think as well is that when I left office we were working on...we had moved through stages of development within that and we were actually working on accountability-based budgeting, so the goals of the department would match the budget and so that there would be an accountability of you would know whether or not a department was doing well by their reporting and how it matched their initial goals that they wanted to achieve before the end of the year. I'm not certain if they're still moving in that direction, but that was the direction we were taking in 2007." 

Anthony Hill: Constitutional Reform on the Gila River Indian Community

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) Chief Judge Anthony Hill, who served as Chair of the Gila River Constitutional Reform Team, discusses the reform process that GRIC followed, the current state of GRIC's reform effort, and what he sees as lessons learned from Gila River's experience.

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Hill, Anthony. "Constitutional Reform on the Gila River Indian Community." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

"Last year I came here and I want to thank the Native Nations Institute for inviting me back. Apparently, I didn't embarrass them too much so they had me come back. When I was here last year, I talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of constitutional reform: what to do, what not to do, things like that. This year I'm sort of taking a step back and maybe looking at the whole picture. I'm still going to try and talk to you about the beginning and all the way to the end, but maybe we look at it from a wider standpoint because as Ms. [Angela] Wesley's presentation shows, you can successfully achieve constitutional reform, you can engage your citizens, you can make them excited about this endeavor. I don't want to be the 'Debbie Downer.' Have you ever seen that character on Saturday Night Live? ‘Wah, wah, wah.' I don't want to be that character, but sometimes things don't go right. The best plans fail. The people that are excited at the very beginning are often the first ones to drop out at the end and that's probably where I'm coming from and that's the perspective that I'm going to present to you because Gila River did engage in constitutional reform and it's something that we have been looking at for quite some time.

Our community has and I'm sure as a lot of you have, we have a 1960 IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution. It has only been amended once in that time and that was when the voting age was lowered to 18. And basically, since the ‘80s there's been a movement to try and change the constitution to make it more flexible, to adapt to the times that we're living in because many people felt that, of course, having an IRA constitution imposed on you is against the idea of sovereignty, but in addition to that, our community was growing. Our community is engaged in gaming activities and with that comes economic development, comes the growth of the size of government, comes the dependence on the government. So we needed a more flexible form of government than the IRA constitution could provide. And there were attempts in the ‘80s, there were attempts in the ‘90s to revise our constitution. Those unfortunately did not go anywhere. And again, the community decided to pick up where they left off in the ‘90s.

And so about the middle of around 2005, the council, our tribal council, started talking about the idea of constitutional reform. And they decided to pursue it again and they entrusted constitutional reform to a panel of eight citizens from the community. Now you're probably wondering, where did we get the number of eight citizens? Our community is divided up into seven we call them districts, basically those are geographical areas that council people represent. So we have seven districts in our community. The eighth member was from the community members living off the reservation in Phoenix. So the council felt it was important to include them because they are members of the community and they are governed, again, under our constitution. So the community council decided we need to include them as well and they came up, the group they come up with is the Tribal Constitutional Reform Project. And our project was very well-staffed. Not only did we have the eight members of the task force, we also had a lawyer, an outside lawyer that was brought in. So we didn't have that conflict of in-house counsel, which represents the current government, also representing the task force, which was seeking to change the government, because unfortunately that does happen a lot and unfortunately it happened in the end and I'll get to that. But we had an outside lawyer, we had outside counsel. We actually had a project manager who was experienced in constitutional reform. They brought him in and put him under contract. And we had an administrative assistant. So we had a pretty good team set up.

And when the members of the task force were brought onboard, there was a seven-phase they call action plan that we were to follow to achieve our constitutional reform and the action plan was drawn up by the project manager. So that was in place before the task force members got there. And that is our action plan or that was our action plan. Some of the titles that were given to it, I certainly didn't choose these titles for the plan, but as you can see there's a lot of emphasis on reaching out to the public, just as Ms. Wesley's group did, that's what we tried to achieve as well. And the ultimate goal was to reach the Secretarial election. To revise our constitution I'm sure as you know we needed to have a Secretarial election. So that's the goal we were going on. And there's sort of a timeline for you. It took a lot longer than we expected it to and perhaps that's the first thing everyone needs to keep in mind. We had a strict timeline and with this strict timeline we should have been done I think in 2010 and we obviously didn't achieve that. So the best-laid plans do not work out and your plans...hopefully you'll have a plan when you go back and you decide you want to revise your constitution you will have a plan on how to do that. And yes, your plan will include a timeline and I'm not sure whether it's going to end up like our timeline where we are still what seven years out and we still have really no new constitution.

In January 2011, we did submit the final draft of our constitution. And I didn't put it on there because I actually couldn't fit it in, but what happened is not only did they accept the final draft, but at the same time they dissolved the reform project team. Now they didn't tell us they were going to do this, they just did it. ‘Thank you. We appreciate your help. The door's over there. See you later.' But if you recall, the phase, the seven phases would have included the reform project carrying through all the way until after the Secretarial election. So the action plan that the council passed itself, they decided to change it themselves, and they showed us the door and I think we were standing outside the council chambers saying, ‘Did that actually...? Did they say what I think they said? So we're not having a meeting next week?' ‘No, I think we're done. Go home. It's over with.' So we submitted the final draft in January of 2011 and it has sort of sat there for almost two years. What has happened to it is, when we submitted the final draft we submitted it with wholesale changes. What the council decided to do was to pick one change out of it, which is to take the Secretarial election out of the constitution and leave all the other changes on the back burner. So as far as we know, we will be having a Secretarial election this coming spring, but it will only be on one question, whether or not to remove the Secretarial election or keep it in there. The council tells me, and they reassure me, and I have friends on the council, and I believe what they say, that they will put the other revisions back before the people very, very soon. Are they telling the truth or not? Time will tell. So this is a to-be-continued story, which comes...I come to my first point.

Our constitution or our draft constitution, I guess, came out of a crisis and that's not the best way to approach this endeavor. Our community was going through a lot of things. There were some leadership tensions between the council. Our executive is called the governor. There were some tensions between the governor and the council. There was a lot of infighting. There was attempts to suspend the governor, to remove him from office. And what happened is they were planning the constitutional reform before this fighting started, but by the time they got around to approving the reform it sort of came out of this crisis, if you will, and unfortunately that tainted, I think, the whole project. So if you are looking at constitutional revision as a way of addressing a crisis or a breakdown in the government, I would probably ask you to step back because you don't want your project to be colored by this whole crisis. And during the whole time we were working on this project, the council would come in and say, ‘You know what, we want you to do this,' and then the governor would come in and say, ‘I want you to do this.' Well, who do we listen to? They entrusted the task force with revising the constitution yet they were...we were not at arm's length as we should have been. And I guess that would be my suggestion to those of you who are elected officials that if you create a task force, let them do their job. Now that doesn't mean that they're to run roughshod over everything; hold them accountable, by all means. If you're going to invest resources and you're going to invest the fate of the community with that group, you should hold them accountable. But do not use that group to fight...as a proxy to fight out your battles with one another because I think in the end that's what happened. Our task force was used to battle the other branches of the government because they didn't want to do it themselves. So remember that when you go...and I have a quote there from John F. Kennedy, ‘When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed to two characters. One represents danger, the other one represents opportunity.' In our case, that crisis came with danger and we probably should have saw it because this brewing battle was the backdrop for our constitutional reform. Your crisis should never be the driving force behind your constitutional reform. Now a lot of people will say, ‘Well, what if the crisis is because we don't have an adequate constitution?' And a lot of the problems come because many Indian communities do not have adequate constitutions. Again, I would just go back and say, things change, leadership changes, councils change. Let things settle down, let the dust settle, then start with the clean slate on your constitutional reform.

The other problem we had because our constitutional reform was born out of crisis, the changes that were made to the constitution were changes that were designed to deal with the crisis. They weren't designed to deal with the public interest in the future. They were designed to deal with things now and as Ms. Wesley pointed out, your constitution should last beyond the people that wrote it, beyond the people that are governed by it. It should go into the future and I know when we started out with this project that's what we were looking at. We were looking generations down the road and one of the examples and whether you like it or not, you look at our own United States Constitution. It has lasted over 200 years and it has served our country pretty well, with the exception of the amendments that have been added. And that's something that I think all of us in Indian Country would try to strive for is a constitution that looks into the future. But our constitution when we revised it, it was shortsighted because it was designed to deal with the crisis. And so we shortchanged our future because we weren't looking ahead far enough.

In our constitution, the blood quantum is in there and I'm sure many of you have blood quantum requirements for your membership. Despite all...there was a great emphasis on changing the blood quantum or addressing the blood quantum, but because we were so busy looking at everything else, at the end of this nearly five-year project we didn't even touch blood quantum. And that was a great failure on our part because the membership of a community is the most important thing. It is literally the lifeblood of a community and if you can't decide on who should be in your community, you're not going to have a community in the future. So that was a failure on our part because we didn't address that issue because we were so busy addressing the crisis that we...the time we were living in.

My second point to you was not only are we revising our constitution, but we're also starting a conversation with the people, and as Ms. Wesley pointed out very correctly, it's a time to engage our community because all of us know that we don't communicate enough with our community members. For those of you who are on council, even myself as a judge, I live in the community of the people that I'm supposed to be judging, but I don't communicate with them as often as I should and there's a lot of reasons for that. We're all very busy people, there are pressing issues that we have to deal with. So the revision allows for a conversation with the people. It allows us to look at, to start talking about how is our government now, and what kind of government do we see in the future. We had to do what we call -- and I think Ms. Wesley, you also pointed it out as well -- we had to do a 'Constitution 101.' That's just basically we as a task force, we had to go out to the community and explain to them, first of all, that we have a constitution. A lot of people didn't know we even had a tribal constitution. It was the first time they had ever seen that document and we went through it and we explained to them the genesis of the 1960 IRA constitution, we explained how the constitution worked, and we explained or we asked them, ‘What would you like to see changed about this constitution?' And just as Ms. Wesley's group did, we had exercises; we had surveys that we filled out. We even did exercises on blood quantum. We asked people to use their own family members and we put hypotheticals before them. What happens if we change the blood quantum to eight-percent Indian blood or something like that and we actually had them map out how it would affect their family. You'd be amazed at how much people are drawn into the conversation when it affects their own family because if we revised the constitution and set the blood quantum at a certain rate, some of their family members might not even be eligible. So it has a real-life impact on people's lives and that's one of the things I hope that when you go and revise your constitution you'll let them know that, that this document, as stale and as old as it is, it has a direct impact on the lives of the people, especially if your membership requirements are in that constitution. You have to have an open and honest conversation.

I have been the subject of many conversations in my community and some of them are not good, that's just life in politics in Indian Country. We actually have -- and I'm not going to tell you the website or anything -- we actually have a Facebook page where people talk garbage about people in our community and that's a little more open and honest than I would like to get -- I'm waiting for my name to show up on that web page -- but an open and honest conversation about our community about the state of the government. And for those of you who are elected officials, when we talk about open and honest conversation, that includes talking about you as well and some of you maybe don't like to be talked about. If you're in politics, I don't know why you would not like to be talked about, but some of that conversation is going to be about you. So please don't be too uncomfortable when the people have that conversation because they're going to look at it through your eyes and they're going to look at it through the people that are in those positions now. So be prepared for a little criticism.

When you're revising a constitution, you will have many audiences. You will have the body that you report back to -- the council -- you will have to report to the people, and you will have to report to some of the key players that are involved. In our case, those key players include the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because any revision has to go through the Bureau. So we had to keep them in the loop. So you have to make sure that, at the beginning of your revision, you make sure that you touch base with everyone that's involved because it's more difficult to pull them in later than when you do it at the beginning. Communicate with the decision-makers, and when I say decision-makers, most likely that will be your council or those in elected positions. As a task force, we routinely reported to the council on our activities. Part of the action plan that I referred to earlier, we had to get permission from the council to go from phase to phase because they wanted to make sure we had accomplished all our goals in that one phase before we could move to the next. So we kept the decision-makers informed. Communicate with the people -- that should be a given, that should be your primary goal. You have to do it from the beginning and I'm pleased that our group did that. From the moment the council authorized the revision of the constitution, we deployed out to our various constituencies and reported that this project is coming up, please keep a lookout for it, please become involved and please give your opinion. And be creative in your methods; you see the usual ways of communicating, through the Internet, through mailings. What we actually did is our community's enrollment office allowed us to have the mailing address of every adult member in the community and we mailed them out information because a lot of people don't have the internet or a lot of people are not tech savvy. They get a lot of information through the mail. So we communicated it through the mail. We have our community newspaper; we put articles in there, we put special sections of the newspaper in there. Then we communicated through our meetings. We have what we call district meetings, community meetings where we reported to those people who showed up.

If you have populations, large populations that are off the community, off the reservation, include them. Half of the people who are enrolled in Gila River, they live off the reservation. So there is a big component of people off the reservation and while we're near Phoenix, we had some of our best input from community members who lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And we actually went to go see them and we had meetings with them. And you know we had more people attend the meeting in Los Angeles than we did in some of our own district meetings on the reservation. So reach out to them and identify, where are they and reach out to them. And again, communicate with the key players. Again, as I mentioned, the key players in our case were the Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, our superintendent. We constantly kept her up to date on what we were doing because eventually that whole document will be going to the superintendent and she will look over it and she will have to forward it down the chain of command in BIA. So she was always aware of what we were doing so nothing was a surprise.

Productive public meetings: sometimes meetings drag on like I am now, on and on and on and on and you're safe because I have one minute. You always want to educate your community members 'cause as I said, when you do Constitution 101, your community members may not even know you have a constitution and they may not know what is contained within the constitution. But a bedrock principle that you need to communicate to your people is, what is a constitution? What is it, why do we need it? And that's the foundation on which you're going to build your education. You're going to educate your people. We had exercises as I mentioned earlier, the exercise about blood quantum, survey exercises that we had, feedback. Just as Ms. Wesley's group got feedback from her people, we got feedback from our people. Some of it was negative, some of it was positive, but all of it was helpful. And then catalog your results. It's interesting because when we submitted our final draft to the community council, we showed them the results of our survey and I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of survey results so they could see what the people were saying. We cataloged each and every comment, written comment that we received. So you could comment by the email, you could comment on paper and the council got a copy of each and every single comment that was made during the course of this whole five-year project. Those are the results that you want to accompany your draft constitution. Time, just as I know now, time is not a luxury. The timeline that you work out, it may not work like ours did, but you kind of have to know when to put a cap on things. Know when to stop. I think what happened is we had planned, we had followed the timeline, but we kept going back out and getting more survey results, over again and again and again. We had to put a stop to it, so don't get caught in having meetings after meetings after meetings.

The final point is sometimes we're short of the goal line, sometimes we don't make the touchdown and that's the one regret that I have about the exercise that we went through, the revision that we went through. The momentum can be difficult to maintain. People are excited about this project, they think that we're going to go back, we're going to change our constitution, rah, rah, rah and it's a long process and people sort of drop away as time drags on. So the momentum is difficult to maintain. Always keep your communication lines open with the people, that's so important. And then at the end of the day, all the hard work that you do revising your constitution, you're going to hand it over in most cases to your elected officials, to your tribal councils and we did that. This is the final report that we gave to the council. I have a copy. I keep a copy of it and I keep a copy in my office all the time. So elected officials, tribal council members, when you get this from your task force, your constitutional revision team, don't just put it aside, because a lot of people worked very hard to put this material together. Your own people gave of their time and their effort, their voice so that it could be put in front of you. And don't do what our council did and just set aside for two years and hope that it would maybe go away because it's in your hands, you're supposed to represent the people not your own interests, not in keeping power for yourself. You're supposed to represent the people. So if you do task an outside group with constitutional revision, make sure that you do reach that goal line, cross the goal line, make the touchdown; change the constitution. And I hope maybe if they have me back here next year I'll have positive news to report, but that's where we are now. And I don't mean to paint our elected officials with the same broad brush. There are a lot of supportive people in our community; there are a lot of people who care about constitutional reform, who still wish that it would go ahead. So it's a story whose ending we do not know, but I know that my time is out and I thank you for your attention."