citizen education

Miriam Jorgensen: Organizing the Reform Process

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Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI Director of Research Miriam Jorgensen shares what she sees as some of the critical keys to Native nations' efforts to develop and implement effective constitutional reform processes. 

 

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

Resource Type
Citation

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Organizing the Reform Process." Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 3, 2011. Presentation.

"I'm going to try to -- like Steve [Cornell] said -- not take a lot of time but I want to accomplish a couple of things today. One of them is to just really help tie together some of the expertise that's in the room -- and as Frank [Pommersheim] did -- sweep together some of the pieces that you've been hearing the last couple of days, or the last day. Feels like a couple of days sometimes, doesn't it? So first off, I just want to say thanks to Frank for the very nice words about my mother. I think all of us know how important family is to us and I just think that was really nice that he honored her. And she's definitely a big reason why I'm involved in what I do. So thank you for that.

In your binder that you got, on tab six is the talk that, in a sense, I prepared, but I' d love it if you just looked at that as resources. I'm going to concentrate on three of the slides in there and the first one is just this. And it's a way of organizing, thinking about the project that all of you are engaged in. One of the things that we were kind of talking about in the hallways and in the lunchroom conversations is how everybody in this room is really at a different point in their process, but this is just one way to think about what the overall process looks like. These are really big, large steps. They're very summary. I think a little bit about what the judge did yesterday at lunch and break it down into, "˜...and then step six and step seven and step eight,' and those things are all embedded in this process. But if you think about it, what many of you at the beginning of the process are engaged in, is just this assessment process of what needs to change.

The next piece is really the exploration of solutions, and that is a huge portion of your process -- who's doing what, what are some things that I can learn from, what are those particular ways we can solve our problems -- then into implementation and sustainability, some of the things Frank was just talking about as well. But I think just having that kind of map in your head is really critical, because it says there is a way through this process, there's a sort of logical step. And sometimes, you're going to be moving backwards a little bit or sometimes I'm moving forward, but there is a process to go through. It's also a circle and I think this really picks up on something that Don Wharton said today. He says...I don't think of the process that Virgil [Edwards] shared with us about Blackfeet. And I know that there are others in the room who may feel like their processes are kind of stalling or slowing. It's not that these things stop, rather that they are very organic processes that have lives of their own and they turn in upon each other. Sometimes we're moving quickly around this circle, sometimes we're moving slowly around this circle, but it is a circle and a moving onward process. And sometimes even when you feel like you're done, maybe there's still some work to do. And that work is around the living the constitution, living the laws that you put together for your Nation that Frank just talked about. So again, I include the slides for reference, but there are just a few things I want to pick up on critically.

One of the things that we think it's really important to do in a constitutional reform process or a fundamental governance reform process is undertake processes of education. I think they actually take place at two different levels. One is the kind of citizen and community-wide education that needs to take place kind of on a constant sort of endemic sort of way. Scott Davis mentioned this a little bit in his remarks from the mic this morning, kind of saying, 'We really just wish citizens knew more about their governments and maybe tribal colleges are one of the ways that that can occur.' Maybe it's through some of the mandates that some of the states have about what education has to occur in state schools. Maybe it's through writing and rewriting curriculum. Maybe it's through community meetings.

And I think that one of the really exciting things that a number of tribes sitting in this room -- and I'm just going to pick on a few -- I'm just going to say that the work that the Oglala Lakota nation has been doing and also the Lac de Flambeau nation have been doing is around those lines of generalized citizen education that really prepares the ground for governmental change. So there are a number of folks from both those nations in the room if you want to talk to them about what they're doing in kind of preparing the ground for change. I think one of the really exciting things that Oglala Lakota nation has done recently for instance is draw together a lot of the kind of disparate groups within the Nation who sometimes feel like they might not have much in common -- they adhere to the IRA [Indian Reorganization] government or they adhere to the treaty government or they haven't been involved in government at all because they don't think it works -- and they've really brought those groups together for a conversation where they can feel common ground.

One of the things that a lot has come out of those conversations -- and again, also at Lac de Flambeau -- is these next two slides about, what it is you can hold conversations about? What are people's rights and responsibilities as citizens? What kinds of things do they need to know about their government? What's the substance of those conversations about how the tribe is currently governed and how it might wish to be governed? What are people's hopes for that? And these two slides just provide some lists of what those conversations might look like. So that's the first level of education in a process of change. I think the second level is a really, really critical piece too and it's actually after you get started. It's that thing that says, you know, we might have a convention or a commission for change, a committee that's charged with exploring those options, but that commission and committee also has to be engaged in vital outreach. And I think a real great resource in the room for some of that is the work that the Osage Nation did. Hepsi touched on it a bit yesterday, former Chief Jim Gray may touch on it a little bit later today; just that process of keeping citizens informed about what the process is and what the things being considered on the table are. Lac de Flambeau is also doing a lot of interesting work in that area of running citizens through mock examples of what constitutional change might look like.

One of the things I'm trying to do here is really encourage you to look around the room and as -- now I'm going to forget who mentioned this this morning -- of really using each other as resources. Maybe this was Richard Jack -- he put that on the table perhaps of -- how can we use each other as resources in this process? If you're in the room today, you're already committed to these ideas, right? You're committed to moving forward in terms of fundamental governance reform of some sort and so you're peer resources to each other. If nothing else, you're cheering squads for one another or support systems of saying, "˜Yeah, we got stuck there, too.' But you're also critically information resources. So I'm trying to point out some of the things that folks are doing so you have that notion of what some of those information resources are. So education critically is one of the pieces of the process we want you to pay attention to.

Another piece I want to talk about -- I'm just going to skip through this quickly -- is to really think about who's going to manage the reform process. We haven't talked about that much but there are a number of options out there of who's going to manage the reform process. One of the things that the evidence, the research evidence seems to suggest, is that it's really hard for the reform process to be managed by a sitting council. I think Hepsi Barnett talked about this a little bit yesterday, but it's really hard to get the people who in a sense may lose their jobs from the governmental change to manage the process. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be informed; you've got to keep them informed and you've got to educate them and make sure that they're knowing how you're moving forward as well. But oftentimes, it makes a lot more sense for the people to managing that reform process to be, have some independence. Now how have different nations done that?

Todd Hembree, who's been generous enough to give us his time this last couple of days, actually was engaged with the Cherokee Constitutional Convention back in 1999. That's a really interesting model that brought together a number of citizen delegates to just really work through the conversation. Blackfeet, that Virgil shared with us yesterday, is another model of citizens, in really large groups of citizens, coming together sometimes almost spontaneously to write portions of the constitution but then was followed up by the technical writing and review. The Osage experience was a constitutional committee, in a sense, that did a lot of the heavy lifting work. And so you can see there are a lot of different models out there. They're typically representative in some way, they're independent in some way, and they're able to really carry the ball to move the process forward. That's just the next slide of just a little information about what their tasks are. So you can see if you get engaged in this process of being on the committee or the convention, it's a lot of work, it's an important set of jobs.

One of the things the convention has to do -- you can see from that list -- is really be the ones to sort through options. And so it's really making sure that that committee or group of people have some access to those options. So I wanted to point out a couple of other groups in the room who might be doing some interesting work. Already, our representatives from White Earth have shared a little bit I know internally with some of their work on citizenship and membership, which is a really critical piece that a lot of people get hung up on and work with. Virgil and others have talked about some of the issues around economics and business enterprises. I think Osage has done some really important work in that area, too. So really thinking hard about these resources in the room, going to other tribes and saying, 'How did you think through this issue?'

Also seeking out expert advice. Maybe it's not necessarily another tribe that you're going to, but you're finding some expert who's worked through these issues and again there are those kind of people in the room as well. Tracy Fisher, who's way down here on the end, and again I'll point to Todd -- these are two folks who have done a lot of work parsing through what needs to go in a constitution versus what needs to be the stuff that follows the constitution like on the legislative and statutory front. Cheryl Carey back here has done some work with her nation in thinking through, 'What can you do in terms of administrative organization of your Nation that in a sense isn't even the constitutional work?' The constitution has to carry certain kinds of water and other kinds of water needs to be carried by the organization of government itself. So again, there are experts, peer experts and professional experts in the room who would be the kinds of people who could provide advice and information to your committee on issues of these sorts.

I wanted to just say a little bit about leadership education, because that's really one of the pieces that this committee has to do as well. I think that that also gets us down into thinking about our model again. When you're moving to this implementation and putting identified solutions to work, that's a little bit about what Frank was saying about believing in the constitution, of really making that constitution work by living it and implementing it. And here's a statement from one of our speakers yesterday -- I think former Chairman [Frank] Ettawageshik is not with us today -- sorry, this is what I get for skipping through the slide show; can't find the things I want -- I'm going to give you a minute to read this. This was actually a quote that showed up in not even the tribal newspaper, but in sort of the county press. This was a statement that former Chairman Ettawageshik made after losing the election. Now what to me strikes me about this is that this isn't the, "˜Well, you know, I guess the people voted for whoever they wanted or whatever.' It's not this kind of bitter statement of, "˜I lost.' It's a very generous statement that says, "˜I'm going to work with the next administration. I helped put this government together.' Remember Frank saying he'd worked for over 20 years through the reaffirmation process, through the process of showing up at the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] -- one of the times I've heard him tell a story when he was working with getting the recognition is -- the BIA wouldn't even look at their papers. And so they literally, he or another lobbyist, would go into the BIA tribal governance recognition offices every Monday and move their statement to the top of the pile so BIA would get to it. Six years they went in and moved it to the top of the pile every Monday kind of thing. So he was in the trenches for this for 20 years, and yet this is the kind of statement he can make at the end. And that's because he is living the constitution. He's implementing that constitution through his life, through his beliefs, through his work. And as that constitutional committee or convention or group of people is reaching out to leadership, what they want to be reaching out around is to say, "˜You know what, legacy leaders are what this nation needs. Legacy leaders who can make statements like this, who 50 years down the road, we're going to point to as a founding mother or founding father of our contemporary nation.'

We work with a nation in the southwest and in fact it's one of the nations I worked for, for over 25 years. Well, when I first began to work with that nation, everybody pointed to them and said, "˜Oh, my god, what a visionary leader they have.' That leader failed, however, to put into place fundamental governing institutions that would protect the nation against bad future leadership. They didn't put into place institutions that could prevent leaders or councils from kind of co-opting the government to its own purposes. And over the course of the last decade that nation has actually been co-opted to purposes that are not necessarily in the interest of the population. And so oddly enough where as when I entered the work in this field 25 years ago and people said, "˜Oh, look to that nation, great visionary leader,' no one is looking now at that person and saying, "˜A founding father,' because he failed to put into place those institutions. Instead we look to that nation and say, "˜Hmm, a missed opportunity,' A missed opportunity to leave a legacy of change and new direction for that nation. And in a sense that's kind of what you see up here with Frank is I think people are going to look down the road at him 50 years from now and say, "˜That was a founding father.' And we see this in other nations too. The Confederate Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation -- that Steve talked about a little bit yesterday -- they went through some really fundamental constitutional change in the '60s and again in the '70s. And people really do look back on them and say, "˜Our founding mothers and our founding fathers did that hard work. They gave up the opportunity for short-term personal gain but they live forever in our memories.' And that's a really important part of the outreach to tribal leadership and sitting council, political elected leadership in this period of change.

I think the last thing I want to say is to pick up on something that Judge [John] Tunheim said almost in passing yesterday. At the beginning of his statements, he started off really kind of where Frank did of saying, "˜You've got to review the law and the documents that are in place.' And I would add to what Frank said, it's not just reviewing the historical treaties but reviewing contemporary treaties as well. Does your constitution abide with the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? Does it pick up on some of those things -- that Tunheim was mentioning yesterday too -- around the international statements on the political, civil and human rights accords that the UN [United Nations] have adopted? Because those are valuable pieces for Indigenous nations as well, which are international nations as well as being nations within the United States' structure. I would say that in that statement he also talked about reviewing the culture and the history of the nation to see if there's anything in the culture and the history of the nation that you really have to take account of in the constitution -- and here was the critical piece that he just slid past -- that's going to help you implement the rule of law. And then he almost said, "˜Oh, that's more of an international nation issue,' but I sat back and thought, "˜No, that's an issue for every single Indigenous nation in this room.' Are there things in your tribe's history and culture that you can rely on in writing the constitution or in talking about the constitution to people that are going to help it get to this kind of implementation phase, that are going to help people believe in it, adopt it and live it because it reflects who they are? Are there ways that you can organize government that reflect who that nation is that then lead to the implementation of the rule of law in a lived way? And I think really good constitutional reform does that. And it's also the reason why we see all those innovations that Steve talked about yesterday and that David Wilkins talked about yesterday as well. Think about how innovative Native nations have been in the structure of their constitutions, in the structure of their legislation, in the structure of their administrative bodies. That innovation, in many cases the stuff that really works, is because tribes have thought hard about what it is that exists within their histories and their cultures and their ways of doing business that are going to lead to people really believing in their institutions of government and having them really, really work.

That's really all I have to say. If there are questions that you have arising from kind of just paging through those slides, I'm really happy to take any of those questions. And I just want to end it with I know you're all in different places. Some are at the very beginning, some are approaching the end with documents that just need to be affirmed by their citizenry and maybe affirmed into some sort of more formal way before implementation. Some of you are really in the process of saying, it may be...well, the Sioux is a good example of this. They had some constitutional changes about two years ago and they're in the process of just trying to live them now. And so they're back to that sustainability circle -- number four over there. So people are at all different places and I just want to encourage you and congratulate you and encourage you to rely on each other and on the folks in this room as resources in your progress forward. Thanks, and I think we're ready to hear some more stories from the field from Pat [Riggs] and from Jim [Gray]." 

Greg Gilham: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Blackfeet Nation Story

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Greg Gilham, Former Chair of the Blackfeet Nation's Constitution Reform Committee, discusses the process the committee developed to move constitutional reform forward.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Gilham, Greg. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Blackfeet Nation Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Presentation.

"I do want to commend Erma [Vizenor] for her presentation because she's hit on a lot of issues that our process up in Blackfeet Montana is going through. And we're probably, I think, a third of the way into our entire process. We started in October of 2008. We were appointed, there were five of us appointed to a committee to sit on this committee and do constitutional reform for our program. I'll get into that a little bit, but with 30 years of law enforcement experience, putting handcuffs and shackles on people, I can tell now what they go through.

Our Blackfeet Nation has a land description that I want to go over; a million-and-a-half total acres of land. Our reservation sits on the Canadian border to the north and we're adjacent to Glacier National Park to the west. 400,000 acres are owned by non-Natives on the reservation. We have 500,000 acres owned by the tribe and 600,000 acres owned by members. We have resources that we're very, very proud of on our lands and we have 136,000 acres of timber. Some of it burned in the last couple of years. We have 28 freshwater lakes and we got a real good opportunity with Glacier National Park next door to have a very good tourism set up. But because of our constitution as it is now, we're not getting anywhere. We're not building a stable government, we're not bringing in industry or tourism or business. I just wanted to relate to that. We have 16,482 tribal members, all have to fall within that quarter-degree of Indian blood, and about 9,200 live on the reservation and about 7,300 live off.

We were organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and it was adopted in 1935. Less than 10 years later our tribe was so concerned about this new IRA constitution that they requested a meeting with a Senate committee to try to address what they could do about this problem constitution that they were having to abide by. They were basically telling the Senate hearing that -- who by the way showed up by train and met with our tribal government then -- and their biggest concern was, 'What can we do to get ourselves out from under this new constitution, this new structure of government?' They basically said, "˜Well, you can certainly, you're allowed to make amendments to fit what you guys would need. You necessarily don't need to get yourself out from under it.' Well, since then we've had nine amendments to our constitution. I know Erma talked about enrollment. The only amendment to our enrollment that was done was accepting that quarter-degree mandate to be a member and that was done in 1963. This governing body that we have consists of nine council members who are all elected at large throughout all the members have an opportunity to vote them in. It doesn't allow for non-residents to affidavit vote or absentee vote from off the reservation, so in order for your vote to count and elect the councilors on reservation you have to show up at the polls.

In 2008 our tribe did, through the efforts of a single councilman who has gone to [a] 'Native Nation Building' [seminar] before a few years ago, Rodney Gervais, he wanted to see under the structure of Native nation building an opportunity for the membership to look at getting ourselves out from under this IRA or reforming our constitution. So in essence he was able to convince the majority of the council that he sat with at the time to put a referendum vote on the ballot for the 2008 June election that we had. And this referendum specifically asks the membership, 'Do you want to see a change in the Blackfeet tribal government by amending the constitution and bylaws to include separation of powers?' If the tribal membership agrees to this restructuring, a committee of five persons will be appointed by the tribal council to conduct community meetings and come up with recommendations on a separation of powers, utilization of Blackfeet traditions, values and ethics and other amendments which will go to the people for a secretarial election. Overwhelmingly, the membership that did cast their vote at the polls passed this and they did want to see a separation of powers and a new reformed constitution.

Once the referendum is voted on with an approval to reform, we found out in our process that the election occurred in late June and, of course, the referendum did pass and it became law basically. Our council kind of sat on their hands and didn't formulate this committee right away. So we, in essence, lost about three months before our group was selected to begin our reform process and hold community meetings and so forth. But some of the suggestions that we found out that was important was that the council should solicit applications from the membership to sit on a committee like this. It's important that they take a good look at who they should appoint. I was very fortunate because when we have our community meetings, we don't need to ask security to show up because they basically rely on me. Selection shall be made upon closing of the application process and it should be important that each applicant vying for a seat on this committee answer a questionnaire. We found out that some of the important facets of applying for committees or boards within any tribal organization is if we can convince these folks that are making the appointments to take the time and read what these applicants are writing, as far as their commitment to any board or committee that is in place. I feel that I was appointed not only because of my law enforcement experience but because I made sure that I let them know that I was committed to this process. So some of the things I wrote down was what do you want to become a sitting member to this board or committee? Are you committed to sitting on this committee and dedicated to this process for however long it will take? What attributes or characteristics do you possess that qualify you for a seat on this board? Relate your personal, professional or traditional background and experience that would add to this committee.

When that referendum passed, I had a brother-in-law of course that was elected. It was his first time to be elected on the council. And I saw this referendum and the language that we just saw a little bit ago. And I thought, if more people would look at what was actually put in place, how our referendum read as far as restructuring and adding a separation of powers, more people would look into that and see how important a new constitution is only going to strengthen our government. Most of my career was working for our Blackfeet Nation government and you don't have to tell me any horror stories, I can certainly relate a lot to you. We do have a council that or councils in the past that have pretty much dictated what goes on day in and day out. Of course you have problems with people that hire relatives for certain things and so forth.

Some of the things I jotted down for the council was to select a diverse and dedicated group of committee members that maintain their commitment to this process. And this is important; their credibility will need to start with their appointment. Credibility is really, really important. I know that Erma talked about it in their process, in her effort to try to get this reform. Of course you have all of your naysayers and so forth that want to collectively try to stop your process, slow it down or do whatever they can. Unfortunately for our process, we're right in the middle of that right now in the last couple of weeks. It's important that the council support the effort for reform. We have nine councilmen and all nine of them are in support of reforming our constitution and that's very rare to see a consensus of nine versus none for a reform of a constitution. They basically understand the concept of Native nation building. I believe all of them have attended a session on building of Native nations. They understand how our government is functioning now and what they can see in the future as far as a new reformed constitution. They have all participated in forums and surveys regarding this reform process. The majority of them have sat on focus groups.

Credibility will take its form if the committee remains autonomous. With the support of this sitting council we have remained very autonomous and that helps with the credibility. Any political pressure or micromanaging will lower the committee's credibility perception by the membership. Early on we had run into that difficulty, but since then we've worked diligently with the council and I think we're all going in the right direction as far as a reform process. Council should support the effort by shelling over the dollars. What I mean by that is if you're committed and you have an appointed group that has to go out to these communities, has to go out to the membership, get them to buy into this reform process, it's going to take some money, it's going to take a lot of time. We were shooting initially for a six-month process of beginning our appointment and I guess it was eight months. We were hoping by the following June that we'd have something in place as far as a new reformed constitution but that was a year and a half ago now.

So far the process has cost about $150,000 and most of it is having several meetings a week with communities throughout the reservation. We have seven base communities that have a good population base and places we can meet. We try to get in touch with most of the membership, but we found out early on that education to this reform process was most important. We initially had community meetings throughout the reservation and like Erma said, very few people showed up. We were finding out that the reason a lot of them showed up is because they had never read the constitution as it sits now, they don't understand it. So why should they give their two cents when they don't understand our constitution as it is today? Well, we had to change direction immediately and hold some educational workshops.

We invited Stephen Cornell out to the reservation in January and he took part in a symposium of sorts, a conference, workshop for...all we could hold was 200 people and for the most part we were fortunate that we did get enough participation from the public in our effort to try to educate them. We educated them on a history of the constitution; we educated them on Native nation building. We pretty much related some of the efforts that we planned in the future as far as this reform process goes. We had a very, very good turnout and of course we had to shell out some money ourselves in order to be successful in this process. I think it went over very well. We had good participation; we had a lot of enthusiasm built up. Well, after this two-day event we didn't, we as a committee didn't maintain this enthusiasm and right away we were finding out that, 'Geez, that was really, really great.' So since then we've made some adjustments and we've sat down as a committee and thought of ways that we can continue our education process.

We've videotaped most of our sessions, whether it was committee meetings, workshops, community meetings, whatever and we plan on putting a documentary together since our process in 2008 began. This documentation, we're going to provide it to whomever would like to see the process that we have gone through in our steps to try to get community involvement, try to re-adjust our constitution to fit for our future generations. Our symposium workshop that we had in January, we're getting that edited and we're going to start distributing DVDs out to anybody and everybody that wants one. It was a very educational bit that we did.

Right now we have five members, I'll just go over a little bit of their background. I of course am the chairman. John Murray is the tribal historic preservation officer for the tribe. I believe he still has to get his dissertation done but he's pretty close. He said he's 63 years old. Virgil Edwards, he's a successful businessman locally. And George Kipp is the vocational education director at the community college. Linda Warden has worked with the youth in different capacities throughout the reservation. As you can tell, we had a pretty diverse group. John and Mr. Kipp, they both have a cultural and traditional background among them. Each of them respectively, they hold certain sacred bundles through our tribal program.

Once we get through with our process, which I can probably say is going to take another one or two years, we're going to present a reform constitution to the council. They'll ask for a secretarial election and that election process, it's a 90-day turnaround according to 25 CFR. I know that we were fortunate to have the Minnesota Band of Chippewas challenge the registration process that the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] mandates within their secretarial election. They felt that closing a registration process and the mail-in voting wasn't going to get enough members to vote on this issue of constitutional reform. During their request for a waiver they were granted authority to register the voters up to the day that they vote. So rather than worry about a 30 percent turnout, which made it a legal election, they were able to have 76 percent turnout because people that showed up to vote at the polls were allowed to register at the same time in order to vote. So we're in the process of using their effort to insure that we have enough votes so that we don't lose out on our effort for a long process of trying to reform our constitution and then have the membership...

Community advice is do not include enrollment changes as [part of the] process. That's what we're fighting with the grassroots group right now. They feel that our effort to throw in enrollments is going to kill our constitution reform. And it will. We've maintained that we won't bother that issue. The tribe should provide reform with an adequate budget. Although tribe remains the governing authority, they must provide committee with autonomy. Transparency, be open in everything you do. Public education is the only tool to combat apathy. This is what will mobilize the community. Committee planning and procedures, a media, public relations, get the information out. We have a website and it's under www.blackfeetvoice.org [note: this site is no longer active] and we have everything we've done, all of our research and all of our resources are available online. We have a telephone number, and that's it."

Virgil Edwards: How Are We Going About Remaking Our Constitution?

Producer
Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

Blackfeet Constitution Reform Committee Member Virgil Edwards discusses the process the Blackfeet Nation devised to reform its constitution, and describes how politics ultimately derailed the process before it could produce a new constitution for the Blackfeet people.

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Edwards, Virgil. "How Are We Going About Remaking Our Constitution?" Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 2, 2011. Presentation.

"I'll try to get through this. I don't really know how to operate this thing. I might use this little button here or maybe this button. I just learned to text last week. My grandkids said, "˜Why don't you text me, grandpa?' And I said, "˜Heck, I can drive out to your house faster than I can text.' So I'm going to try to push the right button here.

The Blackfeet Nation has a lot of resources like probably many of your reservations. We have a lot of acreage, timber and freshwater lakes, tourism. We're adjacent to Glacier National Park. We see two million-plus visitors. We have 340 producing wells and these new 25 wells looking for that Balkan formation; so a lot of resources. Sadly, there's about 400,000 acres of our one-and-a-half million acre reservation that's owned by non-members, but the rest of it is controlled by the tribe; the entire reservation is controlled by the tribe. We have roughly over 16,000 members. 9,000 or so live on the reservation, about 7,000 off. But we have 70-80 percent unemployment. How could that be with all of these resources? How could we have this problem, this poverty issue?

The Blackfeet constitutional reform is...the tribe, I don't know which other tribes did it, but when it came around, there were opportunities to vote on the constitution and the people voted for it and we had a constitution in 1934. Almost immediately, we found that we didn't get what we had bargained for back then. I wasn't around back then, but listened to the old timers talk about it. That we had, there was dissatisfaction with the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] government. And in 1944, there was a letter to the commissioner asking for reform. They wanted to change it. It didn't do as it had promised. It promised to do away with the loss of our land and to give us self-rule and to begin economic development. They weren't happy then with the constitution.

And then about ten years later, there was a constitutional convention, another attempt. And I found some records about that, how a group of people wanted to try to change the constitution. In 1964, another attempt was made and this is where I think corruption really started to happen, because of the lessening of that Class A funds. The Bureau of Indian Affairs controlled that funding source from our resources and then the councils got control of that -- and I think they were worse than the BIA -- and they became somewhat corrupt. And so in 1972, there was another attempt and I worked n that issue.

We began in 1970 and worked for two years in redrafting a constitution. Two hundred fifty people from across the reservation and off the reservation worked on the constitution to revise it completely to try to take advantage of our resources and curb this poverty issue and all the social ills that we have -- put the money where we thought it should go. And a new council was elected and that attempt failed through their council vote and so they did not support that so it went away. And there were sporadic attempts over those times to try to do something with the constitution and change it for the, to give the people a voice, but it just never really happened. And then we had a -- I guess this is just a little bit more about the IRA -- we adopted the IRA constitution and approval of secretary [of Interior] is riddled throughout our constitution. I think it appears in our constitution about 17 times. You really can't do anything unless you have the permission from the BIA.

In 2008 or maybe 2006, we had a council that started to believe in reform and had almost the perfect setting. The majority of our nine-member council wanted to see something happen and change. And so it was the beginning of this reform movement in this past two years that we had went through. So there was a referendum that was passed by the people and the people overwhelmingly supported this need for change. Incidentally, in our constitution, it says that this referendum process is legal and binding upon our councils. And so we had the support of a council that was in place. They put together a committee of five people -- myself included along with Greg Gilham and John Murray, and G.G. Kipp (we call him; he's a bundle holder), and Linda Warden has a background in law enforcement; I have a background in business -- and we began the process of trying to change the constitution.

We went out to the communities and sadly one of the things we discovered is that most of the older people who had lived under our constitution and maybe knew something about it were gone. There were only a few. In fact at the constitutional convention, we had a couple elderly ladies there that were in that reform movement that I was in -- and 85 years old. And they stayed there religiously every night to help frame the constitution. But we went out to the communities and we visited with the people. And these were sparsely attended, but what we found was that the younger generation was really ignorant of our constitution. They really didn't understand it or even know of its existence or what our council should be doing for them with their resources. We found then that -- because of this lack of knowledge of our constitution or our governing way for the Blackfeet -- that it was important then to go out and go to the people and find out another way to get their interest peaked in this area.

And so we got a hold of the Blackfoot Project and that's a group of people looking to improve their education, higher education people, people who were seeking their doctorates and masters degrees. And this is a group of maybe about 60 people, all Blackfeet members, mostly women. So they went out and we found these focus groups. We targeted the college students and the elders and the tribal employees, people who worked for our tribal government, business leaders, the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] participants, all of these different groups of people and put them into focus groups and discussed with the constitutional reform and change and getting their ideas. So I thought this was really significant. It showed us that people wanted to support the change after they talked about it. We made copies of our constitution, our present constitution, and placed those all over the reservation and brought them to the schools and to the Blackfeet Community College. I think we did the right thing in getting the people educated, but I can't overstate the importance of education of the membership that's going to be deciding the constitution. It's just so critical and a lot of time needs to be spent in this process.

We did interviews and went to the educational system. And then we found out that what we would do is we'd try to kick this thing off. We developed a plan and we had a symposium. We had a two-day symposium -- much the same as we're doing here -- but we had over 200 participants in that symposium. And we invited every walk of life on the reservation you can imagine and we took walk-ins also. We had standing room only at times and we invited people from the Native Nations Institute, other people that were involved in reform. I think we invited somebody from the Crow Reservation [that] had just recently changed their constitution. And so it really built some enthusiasm, groundswell of involvement.

People wanted to get involved and so we followed that up with a constitutional convention. It was overwhelming. We had it at the Blackfeet Community College in the commons room and we had all these participants showing up and we broke them into five groups and we began the process of them writing the constitution. We as committee members acted as facilitators in discussion and led them through each segment of our constitution. So that's how they wanted to start and we did it their way. So I think this ownership has to be from the people. You can maybe hire some [legalese] to go out there and write your constitution and do whatever you can, but it really is going to take the people to draft the constitution and that's what we did.

We had the people involved to every level. Of course we did feed them. They like to eat. Like I noticed that, where did he go? Taken Alive? I think that was the fifth trip he made up there to that. So we fed the people. Important to take care of their needs there and it was done after hours. People volunteered there. We made it available, the convention, on their time. We didn't hold it during the business hours so that people could attend in the evenings. Sometimes we went until midnight. So a very long day, but that's what the people did. They were really enthused and so we had a lot of people attend the drafting process.

We published everything that we did in the local papers. We built a website and we let the news out there and we got on the local radio station and we talked about the constitution. We had debates and just invited everybody into this thing so that it was real transparent to see what the change was, how it was affecting and answered all the questions. So we did all of this and it was a great thing. So finally after all of these sessions, and also we involved the...in some of the last sessions, we involved the people working for the tribal government, all the departments, all the directors. And they were excited about this change and it was just a great thing to see that this could happen.

So finally, I think the next planned step was to work with the attorneys. We hired a couple of attorneys that had worked in constitutional reform and they took the writings of the people and they began to condense them down. There's a lot of verbiage in these constitutions -- people say it like they want to say it -- and so we hired those people and we began that process in July. We were...after that, the plan was to get the draft and then go back out to the people, have them review it, see if there's any changes they need -- giving them a second look at it -- and then continue ultimately to that voting day when it would happen.

Now sadly, what happened is that in June of 2010 we had a new election. That support that we had on that council was there, five out of the nine. And then unfortunately some of those people didn't get reelected. So we had a new council elected and they ended it all for us at their very first meeting. The chairman, along with the other four -- two of them newly elected -- voted to kill the reform movement. Now you would think then with all these people involved, the number of people that taught constitutional change, would have got excited and rushed to help us out, the committee. What I think it was like when Christ was there and he looked around and where were they? They weren't there.

But I'll tell you what happened. I think that...on our reservation, our Tribe, our government employs 850 people. And so if you look at that and you spider web that out there, you'd see that maybe this person isn't working for but your daughter may be working for the government. So if you speak up against these people, there's a chance then that you could jeopardize your family member's job. That's sad, but that's the truth. Our tribal government now goes through millions of dollars unchecked without anybody...a $15 million bonus here last month or two months ago and it's gone; disappears into what we call the 'Black Hole 099.' And all these opportunities for economic development are gone and change is no longer there.

So that's what happened to the Blackfeet. I think we did it right, I think we had the right idea, but sadly we don't have the support of the current sitting governing body and really that's the end of it. One of the interesting things I'd like to point out to you -- what the framers found as they were looking through our present constitution -- we have jurisdiction over a single line on the map. Most of these boilerplate constitutions that come out I suppose it said, "˜Define your boundaries by your last treaty.' Our last agreement with the government was for the sale of Glacier National Park and it describes the western boundary of our reservation. So we have jurisdiction over a single line on the map. A flaw, serious flaw that's still there after 76 years. We can't develop a meaningful inheritance code because of a single line in there and there are other issues. We give eminent domain to the State of Montana and any agency thereof or the federal government in our present constitution. Serious flaws, but we can't do a thing about it. And that's really it. That's what happened to us. That's the Blackfeet experience. I didn't see the stop sign, but I'm going to stop before she flags me. Thank you."

James R. Gray: Educating and Engaging the Community: What Works?

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Native Nations Institute
Year

James R. Gray, former Chief of the Osage Nation, discusses leadership and governmental reform through educating and engaging the community.

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Gray, James R. "Educating and Engaging the Community: What Works?" Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation, Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 3, 2011. Presentation.

"I have to admit that getting to go last, you get an opportunity to make some observations a little bit off the prepared script. And one of the things that's been going on this week -- that I'm sure all of you are aware of -- the recent events in Pakistan and the President's actions, recently. And I wanted to use this as an example to kind of comment on some of the discussions that I've heard over the last two days. One of them had to do with the questions of how much involvement the elected officials need to have in an action in order for them to properly take credit for it or to feel like they're accountable for it. And I think this is a big discussion. It occurred in the topic of economic development yesterday. I think it's occurring today in the discussions of government reform and the actions of your Nation. As an elected official, how much involvement do you personally have to have? Well, I think everyone is pretty well aware of the fact that if you're an elected official, you get way more credit than you deserve. And although I appreciate the low nut references and everything else, it's true. You do get more credit than you deserve. But with that you also get more blame than you deserve because a lot of things happen under your watch that you don't have control over but yet, regardless of the politics of your tribe or my tribe or the Nation, you're still accountable for it. Now had that accident, had that event that occurred in Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden failed, would they have blamed the Navy Seals? Nope. They would have blamed Obama. And that's just the way it is. Now you just take that as a given if you're an elected official. When you swear an oath to defend your Constitution and fulfill your duties in office that just comes with it.

Now having said that lofty idea here, now let's get down to the practical matters of how do you... what's the art of being able to do this? Now this is the part that I want to talk a little bit about because elected officials don't have to micromanage the process to ensure its success. They just have to make sure that the process they enact gives everybody the maximum amount of ownership so that the process results in an outcome in the best interest of the Nation. And I take seriously Sam's comment earlier that maybe what's in the best interest of the Nation may not be in the best interest of certain elected officials. And I'm aware of that but I promise you, whether you do it or don't do it, elected officials will always have that risk in doing something or not doing something. So the question comes back to you eventually, at what point do you make that decision if you're holding office? Because getting elected is only half the fun; and I say that facetiously because we all know how elections are in Indian Country. But governing is an entirely different matter. And doing the things that the Nation wants done is your biggest charge. And if you can do that and balance the differences between your own political interest, which you may put ahead of your Nation's interest, or putting the Nation's interest ahead of your own, these are questions that only you can answer. But I will say this, having been through several elections myself, having won my share and lost my share, I can tell you this, our motivations for moving the Nation into the need for government reform was not based on my elections. It was based on what I felt was the needs of the issues of our people.

I campaigned on the issue of government reform when I ran. And I found that when I did, I not only won but every member of the tribal council who also ran that same year who ran on that issue, they won. The people who didn't campaign on government reform didn't win. So as we got into the office we realized we had a bit of a mandate we felt to move this issue forward and realizing that it was going to require federal action in order for us to actually do government reform. And I take seriously the comments of our friend from Mandan Hidatsa Arikara who knows that the federal involvement in a tribal government needs that reform. And sometimes, in order to get the reform, you have to go to the feds to get yourself freed up to do that -- and that's what we did -- and realizing that that is a difficult proposition, having to ask permission rather than ask forgiveness. It's a difficult choice for anybody who's in the business of exercising tribal sovereignty. But when I went back and tried to look at this, capture it in my mind in preparation for this presentation, I realized that in order to step forward two or three steps you may have to take one step backwards first -- and that was to get that federal law passed, that reaffirmation of the Osage sovereignty where the United States government recognized the inherent sovereign right of the Osage Nation. I especially like the word inherent because that means the United States Congress did not give the Osage Nation their sovereignty. We had that sovereignty before the United States was even here. As Hepsi [Barnett] pointed out, we existed for millennia. We did not need the United States government to tell us we were Osage. But for certain purposes, of being able to grant ourselves the kind of sovereignty exercised in the modern era, we had to use the federal systems that were in place now that limited our ability to exercise the kind of sovereignty that we wanted.

We saw the obvious problems that we had. We had an interior solicitor tell us that the only Osages that they recognized were those that were still alive from the 1906 role. Realizing that we were less than five members left in 2002 we knew we didn't have much time to act. The second thing was, is that we had disenfranchised three-fourths of our tribal population from having any political rights whatsoever in the tribe. Now don't ever underestimate the power and the impact of a hundred years of paternalism on a tribe. Nothing can destroy your self-confidence, your ability to feel like you are in control, the ability to take action on behalf of your citizens, when you've had those rights completely jerked out from under you. And the old story goes that the Stockholm syndrome -- for those of you who may be familiar with it -- it's the Patty Hearst kidnapping issue. Suddenly after being kidnapped she adopted the attitudes and the politics of her kidnappers.

In some ways, when I campaigned for reelection in 2006 after our constitution was passed, I actually said this to a group of Osages who were demanding that I go back to the BIA and get permission to do what we already did on our own. And I said, 'look, I know we need the BIA. I know we need our federal trustee. And I will act in accordance with the constitution that allows me to work with them on a government-to-government basis because I know we need them. But don't ask me to love them because they have not returned that love to the Osage people.'

When we came out and did out constitutional reform, it did not happen with the active participation and support of our local BIA office. As Hepsi pointed out, it was quite the contrary. Many of our citizens were employed by the BIA so it had made it especially hard to try to work with our trustee knowing full well that when they were not at work they were busy trying to work up an agenda against this initiative. We overcame a lot in a very short period of time. And how did we do it? Well, it wasn't because of me jumping up and down. Maybe it was, I don't know. But I will say this; we took the initiative straight to the people. We did not waste a minute's time after Bush signed that bill into law. I think we took two months off. It was right during the holidays. By February we appointed our commission. And by April they were already having meetings. And by July Hepsi showed up, put the team together and got them focused. But once we did that we made some very clear directions.

The purpose of educating and engaging our tribal citizens; we believed this. We really did. It wasn't just rhetoric. We truly believed that the more information our citizens had about what was before them and what the challenges are, but more importantly what the opportunities were, we would be more successful in the end because we believed that the more informed citizenry will make for a better Osage government. We also had to get the buy-in and support so that they felt like the process that we laid out for the commission to carry out on behalf of the elected officials was going to be demonstrated in a way that any attendee that showed up at these events, to provide input into the government reform commission, that they felt like they owned that process. When they walked out of there they felt like their voices were heard, their concerns were documented, their questions were answered if there were. And there was a lot of demands for change and improved accountability. There was a lot of venting going on and it was fair. And the fact that we had our commission who were citizens themselves sitting in there hearing this, not me or the members of the council, but citizens there, it became more of an open conversation. And realizing all the tribe did was give them the funds to go do it. And I made a point to stay away as much as I possibly could. I actually attended one commission meeting and I pretty much got ran out of there by the commissioners, which was perfectly appropriate. Mary Jo Webb is an elder and she looked me up and down and said, 'you're not going to do this.' So I was just like, 'okay, okay, I know I'm not supposed to be here.' But that was the important thing. It wasn't my process anymore. It wasn't the Chief's commission, it wasn't the Chief's process; it was the Osage people's process.

The roles and responsibilities the Government Reform Commission was charged with was writing the new constitution based on input from our tribal citizenry. We sent questionnaires -- I think Hepsi covered a lot of this -- the Government Reform Commission meetings that they held, town hall meetings were held throughout Oklahoma and even across the United States. The areas for growth; in hindsight we did a much better job, I thought. Now others may disagree, but I felt like the work that we did in strategic planning, which came immediately right after the constitution was passed and elections were held and new government was installed... The last thing I wanted to look like, not only to the Osage people but to the world around us that interacted with us -- whether it's corporations, oil and gas companies, other agencies that had to deal with the Osage Nation -- I wanted to make sure we didn't look like what we call back home, like the dog who caught the car. Because we've been chasing this for a hundred years and once we got it -- what's the movie? The Candidate, Robert Redford; after he won this crazy election, he sat there and looked at his handlers and he goes, 'now what?' And that's kind of how I felt. I really did. I was like, whew.

And like Hepsi pointed yesterday, we thought the hard work of getting the constitution was the end of the work of itself. But we had no idea the work of implementing a new government, creating sound governmental institutions, continuing to have the buy-in from our tribal members to begin the process of nation building... Because like I said, 75 percent of our tribal members had no political rights for a hundred years, or at least leading up to those hundred years. By the time we finally got them, they were so used to being ostracized and left out of the process that it took really hard work to get them physically and mentally and spiritually and emotionally engaged in their government. And it was a real challenge, I'll tell you that. So the strategic plan process was designed to create a 25 year long range plan covering six major areas; education, healthcare, economic development, natural resources, governance and justice. What was that last one? 'Line!' Do you remember? There was a sixth one, I remember, what was it? It'll probably come back to me when I'm done. I'm sorry.

But as we went through this process, we had a team of teams of Osage citizens that went on the road and sat down and visited with our own citizens, applying the similar model that we did with the Government Reform Commission. This initiative was led by the executive branch funded by our Osage Congress. We had documented sitting down with over 2500 citizens in eight states across the United States, because most of our citizens do not live on the reservations, they live in New Mexico and Texas and California and Arizona and Colorado, Kansas. We still are connected in many ways but physically in order to get out there to have those conversations with them we had to go to their communities. So we went through that process, we documented the 25 year strategic plan in all these areas. Culture preservation, yeah, thank you. And as we did that, we put together a list of every single program and department within the Nation that we had. We put together every single project that the Osage people wanted and identified that they wanted to see us work on. And inside that grid we were able to identify every program that either had a leadership role in developing that program or support role in developing that program. At the end of the day we came up with nearly 300 projects in six major areas of the Osage Nation.

Putting together a plan, putting together a constitution is a process that I believe was probably the biggest thing that I did while I was Chief. It's not the length of time that I served that mattered to me, it's what I got done when I was there. For whatever it's worth, I don't regret any of that. I don't even regret losing. And I like what Frank's comments was because mine were very similar when I lost my election too because at that point I realized it wasn't about me anymore. It was about the Osage people and what was in their best interest. And was it in the best interest of the Osage people that I be a snit and pick up my toys and run away? Or was it in the best interest of the Osage Nation that I sit down and direct my staff -- who was also packing their bags -- to assist the incoming administration with everything they needed to know? So that when they came in on the first day of work they knew where everything was, they knew what the pending issues were, they knew where all the projects were, they knew where all the personnel grievance issues were, they knew where all the status of all our litigations were, they knew everything that we knew when we left.

And I'll say this -- we're probably getting way off topic here so I'm just going to go ahead and finish up -- but I'll say this. If you want to be remembered, I guess, and have a legacy personally, politically, it would be nice to be able to have total control over that process, but at some point you realize that that's not what it's about. The legacy is not so much what you personally do. The legacy is how much the Osage people or how much your tribe feels that they have ownership over their own sovereignty and their own government. And if you look at it from that standpoint, I know that my place in Osage history is okay because even after the process was over and the election was over, our Constitution is still there and it hasn't been changed. All the people that were elected in 2002 in the 31st council are no longer holding elected offices today. The people who were responsible for the Government Reform Commission are still actively involved. The people who were part of the team of teams in the strategic planning are still actively involved. Some of those folks are holding elected offices today in our new government.

And the new Chief of the Osage Nation, in his state of the Nation address just two months ago, pledged to continue to implement the Osage Nation strategic plan. To me, I always felt like that was probably the biggest complement he could have paid me because again, I tried to create a road map and I tried to give people some direction based on what they themselves have told me they wanted to go and to marshal the resources of the Osage Nation to give that to them. And in respect of all the people who had a chance to follow that process, whether it's in my own tribe or whether it's in your own community... I'm not saying a cookie cutter approach is the best because obviously, the presentation that was before me was incredible. I really appreciate the value of what the Tiguas did. And I can tell you that many of you who are thinking about doing something like this, realize that you have a wonderful opportunity to leave a legacy for yourself, to leave a legacy, more importantly, for your people, and if you can, there are rewards for that that go far beyond the next election cycle.

And I can tell you that when I came to office this in 2002 we had $300,000 in smoke shop revenue in our accounts. We opened seven casinos, we put 1800 people to work, we have an annual payroll of $50 million annually, we're a quarter billion dollar industry in Oklahoma, we're as big as Devon Energy, and we have a Constitution and a plan to take us to the next level. Now as far as I'm concerned I can sleep good at night and I don't have a problem supporting what's going on with our own tribe. I may never hold elected office again but I can tell you these were the best eight years of my life because I got to do some things I never would have dreamed I'd got to be able to do. So I wish you all the kind of success that I had. Thank you."

Denny Hurtado: Addressing Tough Governance Issues

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Skokomish Tribal Nation Chairman Denny Hurtado discusses how he, his fellow leaders and his nation exercised its sovereignty in order to navigate past some tough governance challenges to fund their government, restore their land base, and protect their natural resources.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hurtado, Denny. "Addressing Tough Governance Issues." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Presentation.

"Good morning. I'll tell a joke at the end too [because] that's part of who we are as people -- humor. I see people I know too, people from Washington. I see people from the Chehalis Tribe back there and they're close to me and close to us. We're only like 30 miles apart. When I go speak, education is my passion [because] I think that's a key thing that as tribal people that we need to really focus on that, but I'll talk a little bit about that later.

But I'd like to introduce myself. My Indian name is [Skokomish language] and the short definition of that is that when you come out of a hot house into the cold air you see that breathe of air. And that's kind of what the definition of my name means, [Skokomish language]. I got it from my great-uncle Dr. Charlie. My cousins like to think it's hot air and I like to think it's fresh air. And so we go back and forth, back and forth about that all the time.

But I'd like to talk about two things. One is the fish tax issue, when I first started becoming involved with the tribe. And the other one is about a lawsuit that we filed against the City of Tacoma for first damming our river, and then diverting the whole water out of the north fork of the watershed. Those are the two things I want to talk about real quick [because] we only have 20 minutes. But I'm also a recovering tribal chairman. And it's kind of like that [because] there's a lot of demands on you and your life and it's a hard job to deal with. Especially with us, when we started. 

Our small tribe -- it's a small tribe in Washington State, population of 900 people, small land base of 5,000 acres in God's country, a beautiful place. And when the Boldt Decision passed in Washington State, [it] was a big issue. The tribes were fighting for their right to fish in their usual and accustomed fishing grounds and the fishing business in Washington State was big business. And so of course the state didn't want us to have that right. And so we went to court and fought for that right and won that right. And the right guaranteed us 50% of the fish in our usual and  accustomed  fishing grounds, which meant on and off reservation. And so that was the beginning of the fish wars and a lot of racism came out. There was bumper stickers that said ‘Save a Salmon, Kill an Indian.' And it just happened recently, too, when the Makah's got their whale. There was bumper stickers up there, they were saying ‘Save a Whale, Kill a Makah.' And so we have to deal with these issues all the time of racism and ignorance. So once that passed then our people started going fishing off the reservation, buying big boats, making big money [because] fishing is big money, especially salmon.

And so when Boldt was decided the feds gave us money to help us manage our fishery. However, they never give us enough money to succeed. They only give us enough money to fail. And so we had to start thinking about ways to supplement what little money we got from the federal government. And so we started talking about, ‘Well, let's pass a fish tax.' And oh boy, that was no fun at all. [Because] Indians back then, probably still today, say, ‘We're Indians, we don't have to pay taxes. Why do we have to pay taxes and act like Europeans?' We're thinking, well, we're having these problems out there because it expanded our territory immensely. Because before we had to fish on the reservation, now we can go in our usual and accustomed fishing grounds, which meant we had to cover a larger territory to enforce our regulations that we put out for our tribal members. And then we started hearing issues about, ‘Oh, yeah, everybody's outlawing out there,' which means they're fishing illegally -- they're fishing out of season and what not. And so we're saying, ‘Hey, if we don't control our fishery, then that'll give the government a right to come in and say, ‘See, we told you people. You guys can't manage your fishery. We need to really rethink this and maybe go back and do something different.''

And so as the council, we started talking about imposing this fish tax. So we developed this ordinance which was a five percent fish tax, wasn't really much, but it was a lot of money [because] people were making a lot of money. So we figure well, we can make some money to help supplement our fishery program. So people were just complaining and I'd get threats. Back then, this was in the late '70s and Boldt was decided in 1975. And back then, like you said, it was different. We would go party and that's who we were and it wasn't a good thing. But one time I walked into this bar, and there's this little old lady, God bless her soul, she's gone now. She's like 4 foot 10, but she was one of the most radical people in our tribe. And she came up to me and she goes, ‘I'm going to kill you.' And I'm like, ‘Well, okay. If you do, my mom's going to kill you.' And people feared her because she had killed two of her husbands. And I actually feared her, but I had to stand up and say, 'Be strong.'

So then everybody refused to pay the tax. Not one person paid the tax. But before that, I think a key element of trying to get ordinance passed on your reservations is that you have to educate people why you want to do something and what is the purpose and what is the goal. And so I started thinking about it. 'Well, okay, we need to really start educating our members about what are we going to use this five percent of money we're going to get for?' So we developed this plan, and it was like 50 percent would go directly to fisheries department for whatever they wanted to do, enhancement or whatever. And then 25 percent would go to enforcement because we needed to hire another law enforcement officer so they can go out and make sure that our people weren't outlawing. And then the other 25 percent, and we did a...we had a general council meeting and we're asking what is important to our people. And so always education and elders come at the top and goes like that -- treaty rights. And so I figure, well, 'Why don't we dedicate 25 percent of this money to education and elders?' So like 25 percent of that went to the education, for education purposes and for elders, supporting elders' program. And it was still, people were okay with that, ‘Yeah, okay. That's good. We can kind of support that.' But in the end, when it came time -- looking at all the people fishing, and the majority of our people are fishermen -- nobody paid the tax. I'm like, well, okay. Well, let's just wait until next fishing season.

Next fishing season came rolling around. They came to fisheries to get their permit, tribal fishing card. And so we said, ‘Okay.' First one came we said, ‘Oh, you owe, $2,800 before you can get your fishing permit.' And they're like, ‘What?! Nah, we ain't...' ‘Well, don't pay it then. Next.' And it went like that, and pretty soon everybody realized that they had to get this permit and pay their tax first in order to get their permit so they could exercise their fishing right. And that's kind of how it went down. Everybody paid their tax 'cause there was a lot of money to be made, but they couldn't make that money unless they got their fishing permit. And it was a big issue. It was a big step for us, because we're so engrained in not wanting to pay taxes and not wanting to be like Europeans and not this and that. But I think that in order to supplement your tribal governments, you have to take bold stands and go forward and look at it in a different way. But it was challenging, it was scary, but you have to stand your ground and that's how things get done.

The other issue I'm going to talk about is what's called the Cushman case. I dedicated about 25 years of my life to this suit. Cushman was a suit about the north fork of our river. The City of Tacoma in the 1920s had went in there and completely dammed the north fork of the river and diverted all of the water out of the river down these big pipes so they could generate power at the powerhouse. And it was just, their whole focus was just power generation. What that did to our reservation was that because of the flows that that north fork created in the river, over time the riverbed rose like 10-15 feet and then our reservation started getting flooded, our septic systems were becoming corrupted. And so we thought, 'Well, we really need to focus on doing something about this.'

When we started this process, it was like David and Goliath. Here's Skokomish, this little tribe with very little money and very little political clout fighting Goliath, which was the City of Tacoma, which had deep pockets, which were connected to all the politicians -- Norm Dicks being one of them, now the chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

When we were pursuing this suit, we realized that we really had to make sure that we did all the science. What I've learned from this suit, I've learned more from being involved in this suit than going to college for seven years, because you're so immersed in it and you learn about hydrology, anthropology, economics; all this stuff was wrapped up into this one suit.

I thought, 'Well, how am I going to sell this to the council and to the people more importantly, the general council.' So what I decided, I thought, 'Well, the more you get people involved in the process, the better off you are because that way you're more accountable and you're more transparent.' Those are two key things that as tribal leaders we need to make sure we do, that we're accountable and that we're transparent so that the membership can see exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it. [Because] that's when a lot of rumors start to boil up and if they don't know what we're doing, then they start saying, ‘Oh, they're just going to get the money and do whatever they want with it and not listen to us.'

So I had planned to start this what's called the 'Rights Protection Committee.' And the way that committee was designed was that we would get members from key families on the reservation to be part of this committee. That way everybody and everyone of their families had someone in there to represent their issues and concerns. And it was great for a while and then that was like 15-17 years. And then I got married and I decided, 'Well, I'm going to come off council and dedicate my time to my wife. So after a couple years, after that then the Rights Protection Committee kind of went away. In the meantime, we were ordered [into] court mediation to try and resolve this issue out of court.

And so just recently, last few months ago, we came up with a settlement package to settle this suit that lasted 80 years. I really never thought I would see the day when we would settle it. I didn't think it was going to happen, and it wasn't going to happen because we had a general council meeting and I started hearing rumors, ‘Well, the council over there, we don't trust them,' and you know how it goes. I'm speaking to the choir and they don't always trust us. And so there was going to be a vote at the general council meeting to not accept the proposal. I was looking at the proposal and we wanted, of course we always want more. But as leaders we need to figure out, 'Well, is it worth it to take that crap shoot and go to court and might not get much or less, or you might get more?,' you just never know. But in looking at the settlement package, part of it was getting 1,400 acres of prime land back to our reservation. And that really, to me, that was the main thing for me. The money I could live without, but I could use it too, but that wasn't really the purpose of our suit. The purpose of our suit was to get the water back into the river and that was a big part of our suit and we've always stayed that course.

And so I think you have to be resilient and persistent and stay your course all the way to the very end. [Because] in the midst of all this, we had another meeting like ten years ago with Tacoma and they were trying to buy us off with peanuts. 'Here, $10 million,' but not in cash but in other little different ways, in fisheries and what not. And we're like, 'No, this is not about money for us [because] our elders told us that we just want the water back in the river.' And so part of that settlement is that we do get the water back in the river and the 1,400 acres. But tribal people, a lot of people, this is bad times right now so people do need money and I understand that, but we stayed the course. This is about bringing the water back to our river.

So at this meeting all these rumblings came up, ‘Well, we're going to vote it down. We're going to vote it down.' I'm like, ‘Ah, geez.' I'm not on council anymore, but I'm on the budget committee. And if you're not on council, the best committee to be on is the budget committee [because] that's where you see where everything goes and how everything works. And so I was thinking, 'Well, okay.' I got up and I did this speech about how our elders wanted the water back in the river and our focus wasn't about money and we need to be united in our effort in this [because] if Tacoma sees that we're divided then they're going to use it against us. And so I said, ‘Okay, I recommend that we reinstate the Rights Protection Committee, that we have members from each family on the reservation be on this committee to represent them, we have two council members from the council to be on this Rights Protection Committee, we have two youth -- I think as council people we need to start mentoring our young people to be the leaders so we need to involve more of our kids in the stuff we do at the tribal level -- and then we have two elders to be part of that committee.' And that's kind of what sold the vote.

So then I just said, ‘I call for a vote. Let's vote on this. We're either going to do it or we're not going to do it.' And it ended up being unanimous; we accepted the settlement. In the end it was $46 million. That's more money than we've ever had in our history and we got our water back. We're getting our water back and we're reinstituting the fish runs in that river. We had a sockeye run that went up so we have a plan to reinstitute sockeye back into our fisheries. And so it benefits all our tribal members, but the only way it got through was involving this Rights Protection Committee. And I think that that's a good venue to use because then they have a voice and they feel like they're being heard and they can give input and what not. And if you don't have that then they're going to fight you every inch of the way. I see those things really work well. There are still problems, but at least we got the vote through and we seen light at the end of the tunnel.

I always, the only thing that I regret being a chairman was that it took so much time away from my family. That's the main thing that I regretted. We all deal with that, but that's just the nature of the beast. But that's the main thing that I regret about being on tribal council was that it took so much time away from my family and my friends. But somebody's got to do it, because we've got to make sure we govern our tribes in a good way.

So now we do have some money to work with, we have our water back, we have prime land; we got 300 acres of tidelands, we got the salt water park right next to the dam, we got 500 acres of land up at Lake Cushman. These are real prime properties that were ours originally anyway, but now at least we have them back to put them back into our reservation. So I'm going to close with a joke. Don't get offended 'cause it's just a joke. How are politicians and diapers alike? They both need to be changed and for the same reason. That's what I have to offer and thank you for listening to me."

Sheila Morago, Jill Peters, and Theresa M. Pouley: Some Tools to Govern Effectively (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Sheila Morago, Jill Peters, and Theresa M. Pouley field questions from the audience concerning lobbying, the importance of public education about tribal sovereignty and development, and how the Tulalip Tribal Court deals with fetal alcohol syndrome and its effects. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Morago, Sheila. "Some Tools to Govern Effectively (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

Peters, Jill. "Some Tools to Govern Effectively (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

Pouley, Theresa M. "Some Tools to Govern Effectively (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

Audience member:

"This is a question for Sheila. What's your feelings on the effectiveness of like short DVDs in lobbying? I testified at a language bill and this other tribe brought in a short DVD and it had their elders interviewed, their children, and it's talking about the impacts of learning the language in the schools. And it seemed to be very positive, pretty short, but do people spend time to actually watch them?"

Sheila Morago:

"Actually they probably do, especially if it's an issue that's coming up and is very relevant to something that is going to get voted on. What I would say that if you're going to do that, you don't want to show it while you're sitting there unless it's really short. Sit there, encourage the person that you're talking to to watch it. And especially if it's something that has your elders, your children, a group consensus of how this is going to affect you, all of that works. Again, they want to see how it affects the tribe itself and those tribal members. So absolutely any, [because] the last thing they want to see, to be real honest with you -- Jill working in Senator McCain's office -- is someone walking up and handing you a stack of paper this big and say, 'Here's the background on this. Can you read that before the vote tomorrow?' It goes shoo! right back there. So one of the things, that is a quick and easy way for someone to get all their listening, seeing and being able to get that very quickly so that's a great idea.

James R. Gray:

"I wanted to ask a question of [Jill]. If you had...I know in one case on our reservation we have a grocery store that's owned by the tribe. And it's a good case study on how to deal with something in kind of a crisis moment because we had bought a going concern from a non-Indian business owner who was going to close his business so we took it over. A significant number of our tribal members lived in that town but it was serving everybody there. And one day the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture walked in and did a survey like they always do on that store owner's maintenance of the WIC [Women, Infants and Children program] and food stamp program. And we were carrying out that contract within our tribe, but at the grocery store level it put us in a completely different role. And in that circumstance they fined us. Not because we were charging too much for the program, we weren't charging enough. We were cheapening our own business. For some reason, it was just a mistake on our end at the management level, but we ended up cheating us. But they said, "˜Well, we brought this to your attention on four different occasions and your manager never fixed it. So now we're going to have to fine you.' And as embarrassing as that was, we said, "˜Well, can we apply the fine in the form of a payment for contracted services?' Because what we didn't have in our tribe was a health department of agriculture that was going to do this anyway. Had we had that, we would have provided that assistance, but since we didn't have it we entered into an agreement with the State of Oklahoma Department of Agriculture to pay them to come and monitor that program. Because the Daily Oklahoman made a big story about this and put it on the front page of the newspaper that Chief Gray and the Osage Tribe were kicking out the State of Oklahoma off the reservation for being cited for health department issues, which created a freak-out among the community that something was wrong with our grocery store. And so they never corrected it of course, but we entered into this agreement where rather than accept jurisdiction of the state into our grocery store, we just paid them to come on and make sure that those programs were running right and everyone got to save face. And we left the jurisdictional fights for other bigger issues [because] you didn't want to get into a big court fight over something that you didn't do right, but because the issue of jurisdiction would never have been heard properly in the right context. So the suggestion I wanted to ask, maybe you could speak to is, could you talk about how important it is to pick your fights and ways in which you want to advance your interest as you're protecting your rights as well?"

Jill Peters:

"Sure. And I think that's a very important point, because you're going to have a whole range of issues that will be coming before tribal governments. And some of those may be some of these, I don't want to say it's a small issue, but at the same time you're going to have bigger issues dealing with the state, that you're going to have to deal with on that and are going to really have long-term impacts. And that really is going to be a balancing of the tribal leaders' responsibilities. You really have to set priorities and when you're developing your agenda you really have to think forward. "˜Well, these are the issues that we're going to deal with and we want to address.' And maybe on a very large or overarching level, part of that is to say, "˜Well, we need to look at where we are lacking in our resources. Where are we lacking? Maybe we don't have that State Department of Health. So we need to look at well, how are we going to fill that gap?' So part of that may be a bigger policy type of approach where you decide, "˜Well, let's talk to the local [government] or let's talk to the state and maybe we can try to develop that cooperative approach.' So that way, again it comes down to the tribal government kind of determining priorities. And I think you also have, in some ways it helps to have someone who can handle your PR [public relations] in a way that can help manage those messages as well. So when you have these kind of like little fires that come up, they can help the tribal government sort of help manage so that the wrong message is not being communicated to the community members who are out there who don't have the privilege or knowledge of what the tribal government is doing. So again, it's probably not going to be a very simple reply or answer to that, but again it's a matter of the tribal government determining what are the priorities, looking at areas where maybe they're lacking in resources and trying to see how they can make up for that in resources. And some of that may be a little preemptive. You may be thinking ahead about problems that you may not have at this point in time, but you have to look at, "˜Well, if you have checker-boarded lands and you have checker-boarded jurisdiction in your community, what are some of the issues that may come up as a result of some of those conflicting jurisdiction issues.' So it's not a very uncommon issue. It could be a gas station, it could be something else. You may have a gas bill. How do you deal with that? It's an individual owner and you have checker-boarded land and then -- you want to be able to kind of anticipate some of these issues. So some of that may be looking ahead, being a little more proactive, rather than reactive. So and again it comes back to the tribal leaders determining some priorities, having some good planners, having a good PR person. Some of those things can help manage some of those issues. And again it may just be looking for other avenues of resources that are out there. What are the tribal communities doing maybe to kind of help address some of these issues? I don't know if that directly answers your question or if anybody else has anything to offer on that particular issue."

Audience member:

"Yesterday, Sophie Pierre mentioned that tribes must be the authors of their own stories and also, Chairman [Anthony] Pico said tribes must be more transparent and project a better image, because ultimately it will be the voters who decide the fate of many of these Indian issues. My experience is that tribes could do a lot better job here in this area especially in engaging their local communities. You've talked a lot about engaging the political structures, and particularly in Washington. My experience again, when tribes do engage public relations, it's often an outside firm that has little knowledge or understanding of Indians or of the local community, and that few tribes actually take the time to explain what they're doing with their communities on their websites. So my question to you is what can tribes do more to better tell their own stories, particularly with local communities and with local citizens who will decide many of these issues for us, like it or not?"

Sheila Morago:

"PR is something new for tribes and it's really difficult for them to make that transition. We're taught very quickly, especially -- I work in the gaming parts, so talking about how much money you make, what you're doing with it, how your charitable contributions are being made -- to be real honest with you, that's very tough. We're taught not to brag and that's kind of bragging. So one of the things that we do a lot, especially here in Arizona, you have to be pretty transparent. Chairman Pico's right. A lot of this, especially when it comes to gaming, is voted on by the people. We just went through our referendum in Arizona in 2002. California just went through theirs just recently and before that. One of the things that we do particularly is we publish an annual report -- and they're actually out on the table right now. Every year Arizona does an annual report that tells how much money we made, statewide -- not individual tribes. We tell how much money went to the state and one of the great things that one of the tribes does is TGen, they give some of their money to TGen, which is great. We have to work with local communities. Those people are going to be the people who are voting on our particular issues if it comes down to a gaming issue. So if you're asked to speak at community meetings, you go. If you can be part of any type of cities and towns forum, you go. You want to be the resource. So you want to have an intergovernmental relations person that is within the political structure of the governor's office or the state legislature or your representatives. Anytime that there is an opportunity to speak, you speak. Anytime you have a reporter call you, you answer. That is one of the biggest things that really that you'll see in any type of newspaper article. All attempts to contact a tribal representative were not answered and you're like, 'Kch!' So it's difficult because --especially if you're dealing with something that's bad -- you really don't want to be the front person. And as we all know, it's very hard for anybody to be the one spokesman for the tribe. And that is something that has to get done on a tribal level that the council and the tribal leadership actually gives that responsibility to somebody. And that's a difficult issue, too. Everybody is in different parts of that in developing all of that. But once you get very good at it, you'll realize the benefits that happen with that. All of a sudden you're not the bad person. And sometimes you can spin it to where you're the hurt person in the deal and it helps a lot, especially when you're dealing in intergovernmental relations and doing cross-jurisdictional things. The more people know about you, the easier it is for them to understand where it is you're coming from when you're dealing with that stuff."

Jill Peters:

"Yeah, I know intergovernmental relations, when I talk about it, it sounds a lot easier than I think, in practicality, it is, and for a lot of reasons. And I think one of those main things is information and sharing information and it really is a hard thing to do. And tribal governments, as Sheila mentioned, are sort of now just coming onto par of actually having web pages and putting things on their web pages, sending out press releases. A lot of tribal communities that I work with do have newsletters. So they send out newsletters, but these may be only quarterly or something else. So they don't include -- it's very limited information. So, as Sheila mentioned, it is helpful to have someone who can be working on PR issues for you and be able to give information out, especially to neighboring communities. I work in Phoenix, so one of the issues that is constantly dealt with are the communities that live within the city boundaries of Phoenix. So you have a community where one road separates Scottsdale from a tribal community. I mean you literally walk on one side you're in a tribe and you walk on the other side you're within the city. It's taken many, many years, but these two communities have learned to work together. And it's not always easy, but I think they do a lot of information sharing as well. I can't speak to exactly what that is, but I think at least they know who to call if they have questions. So there's a contact person. Also, some communities establish working groups with other jurisdictions so that they meet on an annual basis -- or what other type of regular basis -- and they just share information and they share different areas of priority that they're working on and see where different areas of -- they match where they might be able to work together. So I think there's a variety of ways that you can deal with that issue but it's just again, it may be that there's not someone on the ground whose taken that responsibility, or is not assigned that responsibility, or there's not resources to deal with that issue. But communication really has to be a key part of tribal government for a lot of reasons. Again, if you don't know what's happening in your neighboring community, they're not going to know what's happening in yours. And so if you keep operating in that mode, chances are someone's going to take an action that's going to negatively impact you or vice versa. So I think really it just has to be a priority again at the tribal level. Someone has to reach out, whether it's the tribe or the local community. If you're working with the other community reaching out really is the first step."

Gwen Phillips:

"I have a quick comment. It's just exactly what you're speaking about here. Chief Sophie [Pierre] had to leave the room because we have reporters asking about a purchase of land and did we support it and all this other stuff. So I was madly looking for support for her, as a director, to give her. So my job as a staff is to make sure I've got all of that information and then to feed it to her, in a timely manner and a concise manner, so she can do her job. My question is actually for Theresa, Judge Theresa. I was the Director of Education for our nation for ten years. And Sophie had alluded to our having done a full Psych Ed assessment of our school-aged population in the early 90s. And we had assessed, at about, 40 percent-plus fetal alcohol syndrome; fetal alcohol affects. We had a very intensive program operating for a good dozen years addressing fetal alcohol affects, but we repeatedly and continually -- in all systems out there that are designed to assist individuals in growth -- come up against brick walls all over the place. Not our own brick walls, of course, but those of the institutions that we have to deal with. And I'm wondering what approach, if any, that your nation has taken in addressing this, because these are the ones that are the circles?"

Theresa Pouley:

"Well, there's a couple of really important issues. One of them is fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol affect. And Tulalip does a great job about this. And it's the judge's job to make sure the state court thinks we're doing an okay job from a due process perspective, but Tulalip has taken the position that unborn children belong to the tribe. So if you are a substance-abusing mother who's in the court system, there is some possibility you may sit out your pregnancy in jail because it's our responsibility to those children not to have them be subjected to that. That's a pretty hard line and that's a hard thing to do as a tribal council person. I don't want to sort of minimize that, but there is this huge recognition of that. Wellness courts themselves, which institutionalize a structure -- weekly meetings, weekly reporting -- actually that works great for people with fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol affect. So for our clients that have those particular issues, it's working really well. And the sort of last one is how do you get it started. I think Tulalip is sort of like the perfect example of anywhere you want. The chief of police took the resolution to the board of directors -- not the tribal court judge -- the chief of police. The chief judge was doing it on the ground already. The board of directors passed a resolution. It is a most amazing thing when you can empower your judge to invite people to the table, because if the judge invites you to come sit, lots of people come and sit. So it's kind of a surprising tool that you can use to be able to orchestrate that. So I hope I got all three of your issues."

Gwen Phillips:

"Yeah. I'm just -- the reason I'm saying that is because we're in modern-day treaty negotiations. So we have the federal and the provincial governments that we're negotiating with. And we had tabled with them our intent to strike both within our liquor control legislation and our child protection legislation, the very thing that you spoke of. And they were just freaking out big-time talking about the charter of rights and freedoms and da, da, da, da, da. So exactly like you say, once the woman has made the choice to keep that baby, that baby belongs to us. So I'm pleased and will probably be in touch with you to figure out how we work it out systemically."

Joan Timeche:

"Thank you very much."

Theresa Pouley:

"If tribal court judges have a job, that's it. We have to figure out how to put a Western-style justice system face on remedies that are tribal. So that's our job and we take that job real seriously. Now we'll see, we may have Roe vs. Wade in Tulalip Tribal Court any day and I'll let you know how that comes out." 

Peterson Zah and Manley A. Begay, Jr.: Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Manley Begay and Peterson Zah field questions from the audience concerning the Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund and how they and others worked to mobilize and sustain the citizen support necessary to keep the fund intact and allow it to grow.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Zah, Peterson and Manley A. Begay, Jr. "Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008.

Audience member:

"We are currently facing a recession here in the United States of America. I guess number one, how safe is our investment from a possible crash in the market? And number two is how will the recession affect the trust fund? Did you guys do any research on that?"

Peterson Zah:

"One of the things that the Navajo Nation has to weigh right now is, because of the economic condition nationwide, I believe they have to pass a legislation that would allow the money managers -- if it should completely go down, before that happens, when it's beginning to go down -- they should probably withdraw that money and reinvest some of those monies into other accounts where it can maintain the status quo or even make more money. They haven't really decided that yet.

There's been a lot of discussion with the budget and finance committee, the money managers, and other finance people within the administration to try to come up with something so that they don't have to take a big hit on what is happening at the national level. So it's something that I think the work group has to come back together and really take a hard look at that to insure that the money is safe and that it will not completely hit the bottom.

When you have monies like this in trust, it's like a roller coaster. It's a roller coaster. And I guess the smart ones withdraw some of those monies when it's at its height. And I think Navajo Nation has to learn how to play that game. And definitely the budget and finance committee is addressing those issues right now."

Audience member:

"With your experience in this process, what would you suggest to a smaller tribe that is interested in this but doesn't have that initial large amount of income, like in the court case, to get a fund like this started?"

Manley Begay:

"So the question is, for a smaller tribe that might have less of a windfall, what we would suggest to that particular tribe? My suggestion is -- in the same vein as what we've been taught by President Zah -- is to save. There really has to be some mechanism by which to save that amount of money, because we don't really know what the future holds. But one of the primary responsibilities of leaders is really to think strategically, to think way ahead of everybody else.

In the Navajo way we say, naat'aanii. The naat'aanii, those are leaders. That particular person is responsible to plan strategically for the long haul, to plan for those that are yet unborn. In the Iroquois Confederacy philosophy they're talking about seven generations. So sometimes, we sort of just think about the here and now -- the here and now is really, goes fast. I mean, look at Curt Massey and myself. We're already at that age where we can't play basketball like we used to even though we might think we can. So time flies very, very quickly. And so for leaders, the primary responsibility is to figure out what's our vision? What are our priorities and concerns? And then make a commitment to the long run.

And also to leave a legacy; my brother here has left a legacy for the Navajo Nation. He'll always be remembered as that leader that thought way ahead. And to this day, we are reaping the rewards of that. And the generations to come will also reap the rewards as well. So the primary responsibility is to answer the question, 'What legacy are you going to leave for your people? How are you going to be remembered a hundred years from now? What will people say about you? How will they remember you?' I think that that is a crucial, critical question for all leaders."

Audience member:

"I wanted to know how did you educate your community members and how did you educate your council members? I know you say you have 88 members, that's a large legislative branch. And how did you get the majority to set up this accounting? How is it educated within the communities, districts or what not?"

Manley Begay:

"So the question is how did you educate the people? At Navajo we're, as I was saying earlier, Pete Zah's like E.F. Hutton. However, people out there in Navajo country, they want to know what's going on. They're also thinking about the future as well and they're interested in the future of the Navajo Nation. And so it was really actually very easy to gather a group of people and begin a discussion. And there are some amazing, intelligent individuals out there. At the same time, also with a lot of humor. So they don't take things too seriously, but at the same time they're thinking very hard about the future of the Nation and less about themselves. This person that made the statement about the corn, this is a guy that was wearing a T-shirt and Levi's jeans and worn out shoes. And he said, "˜Don't worry about me.' He says, "˜I can take care of myself. I get by.' So he wasn't thinking about himself, he wasn't being selfish. He was thinking about everybody else -- his relatives, his grandkids, his children and all of his relatives. I think that that was, there was this spirit about these public hearings that was unbelievable."

Peterson Zah:

"Let me add a bit to that. If you look at the Navajo Nation and its demographics, we have something like 82,000 children that are of school age. We have something like 144 schools on the Navajo Nation; 50 high schools on the Navajo Nation. And in terms of educating those kids, I take the time each year to do what we call a Navajo tour. We just completed one two weeks ago, where I go across the reservation with ten or a dozen Navajo college students from ASU [Arizona State University] -- students that are getting their law degree, engineering, nurses and some of those students. This year we took a trip with ten of them during the spring break. This is when all the other college kids are on their spring break. We choose those students and we go across the Navajo Nation with them. And our job there, while we're doing that, is to recruit other Navajo students to come to ASU. While we are doing that, I make sure that I end up in two or three of these classes at these high schools where there are seniors and juniors. And we talk to them about tribal government and the establishment of the Permanent Fund -- how it is their money and that they should have a role in the say so as to how these monies are spent. So we do that. We still have on schedule, within the next two or three weeks, another ten high schools that we will be going to. So we take that trip each year. So that's one way.

The other way is that with the chapter leaders they usually have an agency council. We have some chapter officers right here. Agency council meetings, they usually have those six times a year where all the leaders from those different agencies come together. We go over on occasion to make those presentations just to keep the local leaders informed as to what's happening so that they have some idea as to the current events surrounding the Navajo Nation trust fund. And so we do that.

And then what I usually do personally is I get on the radio. They have KTNN radio station, Navajo Nation-wide. You can blab away in Navajo about some of these activities regarding their trust fund, just to keep the Navajo people, the general public informed as to what has happened. I love doing that. Now, let me give you the last one, which is hard.

I do that because I really believe in it. I don't get paid for what I do. It's just work that needs to be done. So because of that, people know it. People know it. I don't have any conflict. If you don't work for any of the institutions on the Navajo, you can say whatever you want to say -- whether a council delegate is there or not, or President [Joe] Shirley is there or not, I don't really care -- but it needs to be said, it needs to be done and because I don't work for anybody. You're free -- really, really free -- to express those views. To me, that gives you more integrity. That's where the power is. But once you start demanding some kind of income, compensation for what you do, then you've shot all of what you're trying to do to pieces. And that's why I do what I do.

Let me give you another good example. In gaming, in the state of Arizona we have a gaming compact all these Indian tribes signs with the state of Arizona. And they have on the Navajo Nation X amount of machines dedicated to the Navajo Nation, but Navajo Nation is not in gaming yet. But the law says that if the Navajo Nation wants, it can use its designated number of the machines and lease it out or rent it out or sell it to the other Indian tribes. And so all these tribes, this tribe, Gila River, Fort McDowell, and six or seven other tribes want Navajo's machines. But Navajo politicians weren't ready to make any movements. They were afraid because once they touch this whole idea of pooling those machines to give it to the other tribes for rental -- even though it's for money -- they were afraid to face the people about what they did because they know the Navajo people would say, "˜We were ready to open a casino and you sold all of our machines to somebody else.' Well, what I do in those cases is I put all the tribes together -- the leader that you heard today, four or five of those tribal people -- and say, "˜Okay, what do you guys really, really want? The Navajo has those excess machines.' And then I go back to Navajo and I tell the president, the speaker of the Navajo Nation, and council and I said, "˜This is what these tribes want.' So you put them all together and they negotiate and they come to some kind of an agreement. You don't get paid for what you do. You don't get paid for what you do, but it's something that needs to be done that other people, the politicians who are paid to do that, they don't want to do because it's a hot potato. So when you begin to do something like that, it gives you a lot of credibility, a lot of credibility. And I think more and more of our tribal leaders need to do that. You don't wait to see if anybody's going to compensate you for what you do, but there's just a lot of work that needs to be done.

I always tell the president at ASU, I says, "˜President, I know that ASU sometimes goes through a budget crunch. And I just want to let you know that if you feel like that I'm occupying a space here, you can just kindly tell me what you think. Because I'm going to end up doing what needs to be done anyway, which is to recruit more Navajo students. I always work for ASU. I don't have to do it from that office. I can do it from Phoenix or from Window Rock. I'll just keep on doing the same thing because that is the way it is meant to be. So I don't need to work here and I don't really need to work for anybody.' And I think when people begin to do more of that, we all end up winning -- this tribe, all the other tribes, the Navajo people, and the Navajo students. Your question was how do we educate people? Well, you educate them that way and people will listen. He was, Manley was saying that people listen. Well, people listen because they know that there's no conflict. They know that what you say really has a lot of credence and they know that what you're saying is the truth because nobody is paying you to say those things."

Mediator:

"Anymore questions? Well, in that case..."

Manley Begay:

"Just one second. Let me just conclude by saying that strategic vision is really so critical. It might sound like sort of pipe dreams, but it really has a concrete purpose and that purpose is really, it gives you a basis on which to make decisions. It gives you a basis on which to consider choices. If you don't have a set of priorities and concerns laid out...remember the story I told earlier about the Cherokee Nation and that their number-one priority is language retention, their number one concern is language retention. So you know what? They put all their money into that. So when somebody comes to your office and says, "˜Let's spend the money over here.' You can say to them, "˜No, we can't do that because you told us that this was our number-one priority, number-two priority, number-three priority. This is our number-one concern, number-two concern, number-three concern and that's where our money is going.' It takes the burden off of you. You have a way to go, you have a function, you have a road that's laid out. So strategic visioning, setting priorities of concern has a real concrete purpose. And that's what this session is about here. So with that, thank you. [Thank you, my older brother]. I'm really happy that I spent time with him. We call each other almost every other week, joking, laughing, but underneath that is some real main serious reasons to think about the future of Indian people. And I'm just so happy that we have leaders like Mr. Zah. I'm so happy that he came into this world. And as a result the world is a better place, for me and for everybody else. So with that I just wanted to also thank him. [Again, thank you, my older brother]." 

Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI "Tribal Constitutions" seminar presenters, panelists and participants Robert Breaker, Julia Coates, Frank Ettawageshik, Miriam Jorgensen, Gwen Phillips, Ian Record, Melissa L. Tatum and Joan Timeche field questions from the audience about separations of powers, citizenship, blood quantum and other critical constitutional issues.

Resource Type
Citation

Breaker, Robert. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Coates, Julia. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Ettawageshik, Frank. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Phillips, Gwen. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Tatum, Melissa L. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Timeche, Joan. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Ian Record (moderator): "If we can have our panelists from the last couple days and speakers come up to the front. We have Julia [Coates], Frank Ettawageshik, Miriam [Jorgensen], Joan [Timeche]. We're also going to ask two other participants here to join us who have a great deal of expertise in the area of tribal governance and constitutions and constitutional reform. We have with us Melissa Tatum. Melissa is the new director -- she's actually been with the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the Law School here at the University of Arizona for three or four years -- but recently was promoted from Associate Director to Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, and she's got a great deal of expertise in this area, works with a lot of different tribes on these sorts of issues. For several years, [she] served on the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals, and so she has a lot of experience in the area of dispute resolution and why that is so critical to effective governance. Bob [Breaker] is a long time friend of the Native Nations Institute and is a former First Nations leader, or, I would argue, still a First Nations leader. He consults with a number of First Nations up in Canada on these sorts of issues. Gwen [Phillips] has now joined us, so we've got a full panel here, and you guys can just swing the microphones depending on who the question is being addressed to. We're just going to open it up for questions now. We've got some expertise here in the room, that if you guys have any other questions based upon what you heard from each other. I feel like after listening to your feedback in this last session, some of you ought to be up here as well talking about some of these issues. Anyone have any opening questions, or are you going to leave it to me to pepper these folks?"

Gwen Phillips: "Let me start with a comment actually. I was mentioning to Ian just during the break there that I've really, really tried hard and I try hard to follow appreciative inquiry. So when someone says to me, ‘How are you?' I used to say, ‘Not bad.' And then I thought, ‘What am I doing trying to be bad? I'm not bad.' So I try to say ‘pretty good,' keep to the positive. Now I was challenged because, maybe it's because I come from Canada where we had King George and his gentlemanly ways and it was a different situation down here with the Indian wars, etc., and maybe it's because the Canadian national anthem speaks about our home...and down here it's bombs and things, I don't know. But I'll tell you what I noticed. We've been grappling with concepts that are foreign in my culture. We've been talking about separation of powers, not about separation of responsibility or function, and that, people, creates a whole different paradigm in your mind. Power. Who doesn't want power? Well, I don't, because I know what it really means. It means responsibility. Then you have to actually have the ability to respond. I want us to start thinking about unpacking some of those varied terms, because we hear this concept of cultural fit, and when I asked about the concept of power with our cultural elders they said, ‘That's spirit. Power is spirit.' We've heard pipe and politics don't mix. So I'm suggesting, let's put politics aside and bring governance, because the pipe does fit with governance, it fits with ceremony, and when we bring our culture and customs back and we start talking about function and responsibility, it's a whole different conversation we perhaps can have, and maybe that goes back to the where do we start. So it was a really challenging time for me as I kept hearing about separation of power, separation of power, because I tell you, you give people power, they assume that role, so it might be just a thing for us to think about the words we use and how we bring them to life in our communities."

Record: "Gwen's comment calls to mind Governor Rich Luarkie from Laguna Pueblo, who we've been inviting to events like this to share how they govern. They have a very traditional governance system, much like Cochiti Pueblo, and Regis Pecos shared with you a lot about how they govern yesterday. And he said, ‘You know, when I was chosen to be governor, I wasn't given power, I was given great responsibility.' And I think this echoes what Gwen is saying is that when you think about how do we make sure that our governance system and our constitution reflects who we are as a people, reflects, protects and advances our culture, you've got to reconceive everything, because the federal government has spent the last 100, 150 years redesigning that paradigm for you. And it boils down to terms, it boils down to words, and you've got to start at the very, very basic foundations and kind of with a clean slate and not presume that everyone understands what separations of powers means. I've worked with a number of tribes where every campaign season that word, that term gets thrown around left and right, left and right, and I can tell that a lot of people that are throwing it around as they run for office, they have no idea what they're talking about. They have no idea what separations of power means. Usually, for them it means we're going to try to separate the current elective leadership from their power and then I'm going to have the power. We have a question over here in the back, I believe."

Frank Ettawageshik: "I wanted to expand just briefly on what I just heard, and that is what was shared with us earlier about the pipe and politics, and I like the way you put that. The pipe and governance do fit, and I think that's the, that's something that we really have to be aware of, because there are a lot of people who say we have to choose to be traditional or be involved in tribal governance, one or the other. Well, the thing is, our traditional governance was traditional, it was the spiritual part, all of that was involved in it. And so to me it's an important thing for us to think about, that perhaps the way that we perceive politics today certainly...I think back on a cartoon I used to have on my wall. It was one of those Ashley Brilliant cartoons. It had this...it was this cabin at the side of this big valley and there was a porch on it and there were two rocking chairs on it. And the sun was setting over the hills in the distance and these two older men were sitting in the rockers rocking back and forth. One leans over to the other and says, ‘You know, anybody who will do what it takes to get elected, is clearly unfit for office.' Well, to me I think that that sort of builds on what you were saying, and I really wanted to build on that because what we're really talking about, what I've gotten out of this conference has been the idea that it's not only a good idea, but it's essential that we tie what we do in our reforms of our governments, that we tie that to our traditions, and in some cases it's tie it to a thriving tradition. In some cases, we have traditions that are evolving or traditions that are being resurrected or strengthened again. But we have to keep that as the foremost reason behind us, because it really is what our identity is, it's where we come from, it's who we are, and that is essential to our inherent sovereignty. So I always feel that those are important things to think of and I wanted to expand on that briefly while I had that thought in my head. Thank you."

Melissa Tatum: "And could I expand on that a little bit further, because one of the things that I feel very strongly about is that tribes need to consciously claim the language of sovereignty when they're reforming their government, and that means using separation of powers if it's appropriate, if it's a cultural fit, adopting some other means of allocating responsibility and government functions depending on the tribe. But it also means being conscious of how certain words and phrases are viewed by other governments. For example, the three that I often use as examples are in the United States, tribes talk about membership and who's a member of a tribe. But private clubs have memberships, country clubs have memberships, governments have citizens. So we should be talking about citizenship and who are citizens of the government. One of the things that's used a lot -- I work a lot with tribal courts -- there's a movement to develop tribal common law, or it's sometimes called ‘custom and tradition' and then when lawyers, Anglo-American lawyers, hear this phrase ‘custom and tradition,' they're like, ‘Oh, how quaint. Custom and tradition.' But yet if you look at the definition of Anglo-American common law, it's the norms of society. That's what custom and tradition is. So simply instead of talking about custom and tradition, talking about common law triggers a different response in outsiders, even though it's the same thing internally. But the other example I use, since I work a lot in the tribal courts and the criminal justice system, is in the United States there's been some discussion in recent years about ‘banishment' and about tribes using banishment. But every government on this planet has a method of removing people who misbehave from their society. It's just usually called ‘deportation.' And so we need to be conscious of the words we use and the labels we put on things, because words do have power and do have meaning and we need to be conscious not only of internal fit, but how those words are received by the outside world, too."

Record: "We have a question in the back here."

Q: "I just asked Frank a question out in the hallway, and I'll sort of repeat it here for everyone and maybe get other perspectives as well. I was asking a little bit about the process of implementation, so that if perchance at White Earth or other nations are faced with the fact where we pass a constitution by referendum vote, then how are the different ways that implementation of that constitution might happen so that we can do that in the best way possible with hopefully the least amount of upheaval?"

Ettawageshik: "One of the things that we did is that we put a clause in our constitution that said that after it was adopted through election, it wouldn't go into effect until the officers that were going to run that government were elected and were sworn in and that that's the point when it would go into effect. It's really important to provide for that transition. Otherwise, you can end up with a real mess of who is responsible, who has...what duties do they have, and it can really be a mess. And so I really recommend that in any time that you're doing, to do amendments -- particularly ones that have a fundamental change in the structure of the government -- that you need to be sure to have something like that in there. The other one we put in was a clause that acknowledged all prior actions of the government. Basically it said that all prior actions of the government will remain in full force to the extent that they are compatible with the new constitution. So that leaves it open to interpretation. Someone can say it is, someone can say it isn't. What I said, what that does is it gives the court something to do for several years as you go through that process. But those are two things. From an implementation point of view, we went, it was important to us to... we'd been holding internal discussions, but it was important -- you know how they say an expert is somebody who's at least 500 miles away from home -- well, we had to hire somebody from at least 500 miles away to come to talk to us about this. But what we did is we brought them in and we gave them a copy of the constitution, we had them read it -- it was a couple of people that did this -- and we had them read it and we said, ‘We don't want you to tell us what's wrong with this. What you're here to do is to tell us how we implement this.' In other words, ‘How do we appropriate money under this, what kind of actions, describe the kind of actions that we're going to do,' so that we hear from someone else, and we had all of the council, the existing judges, we had the key staff, the tribal attorneys, everybody was in the room for this session that we went through where we had a period of time. And in our case, we did a full-day session on Saturday and on Sunday we swore in the new officers and had the constitution there. But for several weeks prior to that, we had taken, at council meetings we had passed certain things that would need to be in place that could exist under the old constitution and the new but would have to be in place. So we had a period of transition and it took several months to do that. So I would think that you need to anticipate that, you need to sort of think that process through and give some time, so that you don't just switch overnight from one to the other. Those would be what I would say, I'm not sure what other people may have to say on that."

Phillips: "Depending upon what constitutional reform you're doing, you may actually be able to do an incremental implementation, and for us that's been key, because we're talking about a whole big nation-rebuilding process, two years to get a vision adopted, two years to declare what our values are, etc. So what we've been doing is as we've confirmed something, we turn it into a regulation of some sort. It becomes a code, it becomes a policy, it becomes something, and then as it becomes complete, it's accepted, it becomes the norm. Then it's a lot easier to migrate those things that people can accept already into the master document. So if you look at an overall reform process that's going to take you ten years, pick the pieces you really need to have in place so that you can get comfort to move through those processes further and try to get some support for those incremental pieces and then migrate them to the master document later on."

Record: "Gwen brings up a really good point -- and Miriam, maybe you can speak to this, and I think she's getting ready to -- but I've seen some examples where tribes have staggered implementation of certain reforms, where in a referendum vote by the people they'll pass a certain number of reforms but those reforms don't all take place at the same time. There's a gradual acclimation process, which I think is very purposeful, where they want to do certain changes first and have those take effect first so people can begin to acclimate to the new way that things are going to be done."

Jorgensen: "I wanted to reflect on two different nations that we've seen kind of go through this sort of wave process. When you first do, implement a set of reforms, you're kind of going high and then you may slip back a little bit and you keep pushing forward. So anticipate that rush forward, pull back, rush forward, pull back thing. That's just the way implementation takes place, and know that that's going to occur. But I did want to talk about two nations, Osage Nation and Northern Cheyenne Tribe, which have had some mixed success but also have managed to do some reforms. Northern Cheyenne was done in the 1990s. They attempted a separation of responsibility, which for them they actually called their separation of powers ordinance, so that was a place where that term had meaning to them in a different way than power this way. They had a constitutional change and then they backed up that change with an ordinance in the way that Gwen has been talking about, to sort of clarify it and regularize sort of the agreement that was the constitutional-level agreement. And then they really tried to live that and they consciously lived it and here's what I mean. That when you would go there -- and I was doing some research at the time in the criminal justice area -- so I was spending a lot of time talking to the court and a lot of time talking to the legislature and a lot of time talking to the president and they would say, ‘Well, I can comment on that, but we don't make those decisions, because we have a separations of powers, here it is in the ordinance, here it is in our constitution.' They were very consciously engaging with those documents and publicly stating how they lived it. And so you talked to the folks on the court side and they said, ‘Well, I can speak to that and give you my opinion, but we do not do that. We have a separations of power and that's the job of the legislature.' So they were kind of embracing that. I think what's really interesting is that if you read -- and I'm not sort of saying this from a sort of Western hierarchical viewpoint but from rather looking at another tribe changing its constitution -- when you look at the early founding of the United States, a lot of the folks that we call our founding mothers and fathers had this notion as well for the Americans, that they said, ‘We're going to try to really live what we wrote down in those documents.' And they created in their writing and their public declarations that reference back to documents of change. So that was one of the things that Jefferson and Madison and folks like that were trying to do for the tribe of Americans who had just won their independence from the British.

And the third example I want to give is the Osage Nation. Two things that I think were interesting for implementation. First off, every time the new Congress of the Osage Nation under their new constitution passed a law, that the executive branch and the president's office, or I guess the chief's office, had to implement and the chief actually had to sign off on the laws -- that was part of their constitutional procedure. And sometimes he felt those laws were unconstitutional and he actually had to specify in a long note back to Congress why it had to go back to Congress to be fixed. And he had to refer in that memo, or his staff did, whoever wrote it for him, saying, ‘This is why I am not signing it,' and it had to refer to the constitution, the use of the constitution and why it was true. So again, that's that living the document. When I was watching, we took a class field trip down for a course that I teach down to Osage Nation and watched their Congress in action and the congress had actually hired a clerk to assist the speaker of the Congress in implementing the constitution, to say, ‘Okay, can we do this now? Is this what we do next?' I liked that because it didn't say, ‘Suddenly we passed a new constitution and every single member of our legislature or our council is suddenly an expert in the constitution.' Their clerk was their expert in the constitution, and that clerk made it their job to know exactly what to do, and if they didn't they were going to refer to advisors who would help them interpret their constitution. So it helped the Congress implement in a way that didn't assume that they, ‘Oh, we've got a new document, now we just implement it.' So they were trying to adopt these ways to live through their new documents."

Record: "One other thing that we've seen a few tribes do is approach it with the mindset -- and we've heard allusions to it this morning -- of saying, ‘We don't have to do everything that we think we might need to change at once.' I worked with one tribe where they did a lot of the right things. They put together a constitution reform committee that was independent of the political leaders, that represented a cross section of everyone in the community. They had elders, young people, traditional people, folks with Christian backgrounds -- all that stuff. They left them alone to do their work, do their deliberations. They had come to an agreement on several really important changes, things like creating a strong and independent court system, which you've heard over the last couple days is absolutely critical. But they got derailed because of one thing, which was a requirement for all elected officials to speak the language of the tribe. And because of that one conflict, it derailed the whole process, and to date that tribe has not been able to ratify reform, to ratify change, when they had so many other changes, critical changes that would have made their governing system incredibly more effective, [they] were not able to do that because of this one conflict. Because there were people on that constitutional reform committee that contemplated a future in politics who didn't speak the language, were deeply committed to the Nation, but didn't speak the language and said, ‘I'm not going to sign off on something that's going to preclude me from ever running for elected office.' So that's something to think about. I realize it's a very difficult challenge to consider when you think of the urgency of reform in many Native communities."

Tatum: "Could I just add one more thing to that. A lot of the comments are things to anticipate. I think one thing that has to also be anticipated when you're drafting a constitution is that unanticipated things are going to happen. There are going to be crisis points, and a lot of times having a process, an agreed-upon process or an agreed-upon manner of either who's going to resolve it or how it's going to be resolved is critical to making sure progress can continue, even if it's in waves. We heard a little bit about this this morning with Cherokee Nation. There have been several crisis points in the Cherokee Nation, but yet there's always been some sort of process come through, that the Nation was able to agree on a process and that kind of process is really important. So be thinking about that as you're drafting the constitution as well."

Record: "I had a question to follow up on this citizenship discussion. Gwen and I were talking actually before we started this session about what are the role of citizens in this new government you're trying to create? And should you be explicitly addressing the roles and responsibilities of citizens, not just your elected leaders and the people who are in charge of the government, but your actual common citizens? What is their role in the future of the nation? And how do you articulate that? And I know, Frank, you and I have had long discussions about this, and I know that your nation went to great lengths, for instance, to reconceive, ‘What is the role of government in the life of the nation?' And also in so doing trying to reconceive for the citizens what is their role in the life of the nation."

Phillips: "So the investigation I was looking at giving some conclusion to is, are there any constitutions that begin with rather than ‘We the people,' that begin with ‘I the citizen'? And the reason I say that is because in the work we're doing in defining our vision statement -- strong healthy citizens and communities, that component of it -- we're getting a pretty clear picture of what a strong, healthy Ktunaxa person is. So once we know that, who's obligated? Is it the government's responsibility to shape the citizen, or is it the citizen's responsibility to shape the government? Well, I think it's the latter, that it's the citizen's responsibility. So as soon as we put...but we've also, as I say, concerned ourselves with having the ability to respond, not just saying it's your responsibility but do you have the opportunity, do you have the comprehension you need, do you have all the variables. So I was suggesting that as we have this picture we needed to describe our government as being, ‘I am the citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation, I have a responsibility to insure I do the best I can with my life to not burden my people with my legacy of ill health and all that other crap that we bring to the table at the end of it all, and expecting somebody to come out with a big box of band aids and fix me.' So as we're having this conversation at home, people are saying, ‘Yes we have, yes we have.' And we're putting in these various actions. Somebody said they got a lot of action going on to battle diabetes but again, that's government creating a program to take care of a condition rather than saying, ‘Hello, whose condition is this?' So, I'm just interested to see where this might go as far as, and I'm going to take it home with me for sure and see if we can't work it from that place, ‘cause I think it is really an empowering...I don't know how many of you have the ‘us and them' thing going on at home, where ‘us' is the people and ‘them' is the government and how we reform the government either in the community government or at the nation level, it becomes the ‘them' and the ‘them.' The ‘them' is them at the community level and then there's the ‘them' at the...it's weird. But there's never the ‘I' in any of that. It's always the ‘we' and the ‘them' and the ‘us,' so I'm thinking it might be time to put the I's back into place."

Ettawageshik: "The simplest way that I think about this is to say that the government isn't the tribe, the government serves the tribe. And so on any given day, most of the tribal members are cooking and eating and working and having birthday parties and getting married or getting divorced or doing this or doing that or doing something else, and they're all going through their lives doing things and they don't really say, ‘Gee, I wonder what the council's doing right now? I wonder what the executive assistant to the chairman's doing right now?' Very rarely those thoughts are there. And so what happens is we -- those of us who are in the government -- we get so involved, there's so much pressure, and we get so overloaded with all of the things that are going on, and then we see the importance, these long-term things we have to be working on, and there's all this stuff we can't get to that we want to because we're too busy doing the things that we have to do right then. And there's all this stuff going on, and it's really easy for us to just forget that we aren't everything that's going on and so you get this very sort of view with blinders almost sometimes, the leadership. Plus, then we also have all of the tribal citizens coming in insisting that we do a bunch of things that maybe we shouldn't do. Maybe when they come in and say, ‘We want you to do this,' we say, ‘Well, that isn't my role, this is what the constitution says I'm supposed to do.' But most people will say, ‘You know, I'll look into that. I'll look into that and get back to you.' And so then they run off on an investigation doing something that maybe they really shouldn't be doing or however, and what happens is that our citizens, their expectation of the government, we have to really work on making sure that that matches what our documents are, so there's an education in this. But we have to be real careful to not think of the government as the tribe, and remember that the tribe can generally get along without us a lot of the time. They need us every now and then and when they need us they really need us, they put us out front and we do what we're supposed to do, but the rest of the time, we just sort of have to stay out of their way and let them be who they are and let the tribe do what it's going to do. We're not responsible for educating every child. We're not responsible for growing all the food or buying all the food. We're not responsible for that. We're responsible for helping to create an environment in which our citizenry can do all those things for themselves and that's really what the thing...and that's where the I's start coming in, that the people have that, ‘cause they expect the government to do too much. And we can't pander to those thoughts. So when they come to us, we have to be really careful, and so a big part of what I considered in my job as a chairman was to talk people out of doing things that were sort of, probably not in their best interest."

Julia Coates: "I have so many thoughts about this conversation, because I'm coming here today, to this whole event, with a great deal of deep pain and deep grief for what has recently happened in my government, because we have had all of this, everything. To me, we've been moving so energetically with all of these thoughts for the past 12 years under leadership that has been reelected over three times and this message of the government, ‘I'm not supposed to do all of this for you, some of this you have to do for yourself.' There's been a backlash to some extent. There's been a very strong backlash, and there has been an individual who -- and pander is exactly the right word -- has pandered to that backlash greatly in the whole situation. And the government, the tribe could go on without the government, but in my tribe at least we've got very clear evidence of what happens when the government isn't there, because the government wasn't there for much of the 20th century and we were plowed into the ground by federal policy. And the government may not be primarily a social services agency, it needs to act as a government, but part of its role as a government is to stand between its citizens and those forces that are coming at them, that the citizens themselves are not equipped to hold off necessarily.

The process of education is one that I'm extremely interested in with everything that has happened. This is where all of my efforts are going to be going for the next few years, because in reflection when I think back about, ‘What was the mistake? What was one of the major mistakes of this government that was working? All of the books on development that you all have put out and everything, I teach those, I would read those and I'd say, ‘We're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this.' It was textbook and it was working. I'll tell you, in eight months we have taken 20 years off of that progress, and it's sickening to me what is taking place right now, and I just think the educational process has got to be, it's got to be part of it. It's got to come from the people, but it's got to come from the government as well. I don't think it's one or the other. I think there's got to, at some point, be a place where they meet up and they begin to have this dialogue. And in reflection, that may have been one of the greatest things, is that while I sat in as part of the government on a lot of conversations about vision and all of these kinds of statements, apparently that didn't get communicated to the people, we didn't get communication from the people about it to the extent that we thought we had. I was out there teaching it, a number of other people were but, and I don't know if it's just a matter of we're so big that it just is going to take a long time to get out there but..."

Tatum: "Could you add just a word or two about your work as an at-large representative and how the Cherokee approaches that, ‘cause you'll be out here again on Saturday."

Coates: "The Cherokee Nation has under the previous administration -- the present administration is doing something different -- but we had an initiative where we were able to identify areas where we had concentrations of our tribal citizens, mostly urban areas in the west, and we undertook a process of actually organizing them, because when you've got 3,000 households of Cherokees in Los Angeles -- where there are 15 million people -- how do they ever find each other becomes the first question. So we actually, as a government initiative, we actually started putting them together and helping them to form what we called their satellite organizations and we have 22 of them now, one of which is in Tucson and we have one in Phoenix also. And we began a process of strong interaction between the government and the citizens, but under the present administration again this is all being sort of derailed into politics. They saw these -- the people that I represent tended to be very, very strongly supportive of the previous administration, so my interaction with them is seen as a threat. They're trying to cut me off basically from being able to interact with my constituents. They're trying to place people who are basically cheerleaders for this administration into positions of working with them even though those people are not qualified to be doing this particular kind of work. So it's an initiative -- which rather than seen as something to build and strengthen the nation -- is something that is presently being regarded as the at-large people and their organizations are kind of a political football, have become that and have been made that, unfortunately. Very, very rapidly all of these things are taking place, and I just think about how long it takes. I mean we're talking here about years and years and years of building constitutions, and how hard that work is, and how long it takes to do that, and just watching how quickly it can be taken apart is so dismaying on the other hand as well.

But I think the educational process...we have recently started -- myself and a couple of other people -- our present tribal government is actually prohibiting us from teaching a tribal history course right now, because it is perceived that its emphasis on sovereignty is undesirable. They think we should go back to emphasizing culture, and there's nothing wrong with that, but who teaches sovereignty? Teaching cultural and social things is actually the more typical thing we find that is done in teaching tribal history. To teach a history of legal sovereignty, who does that? It's been tremendously effective, and that's the threat, that's the great threat. So it's even things like this that are coming apart. So we've started an initiative that we're going to have to fund somewhere else, we're going to have to try and build this as a really grassroots thing, which is hard, but we're calling it Education in Sovereignty, or at least that's the little behind he colon name of the project and that's what it's for. And it's just basically developing a number of workshops to help people understand how the government functions. How do you read a budget? Why is it important that your government doesn't run your businesses? Because we're heading back in that direction very quickly. All of these kinds of things that the people just don't understand, and the message that, ‘We're going to give you this, we're going to serve you in this way, you're going to get this program, you're going to get that house, you're going to get this' -- it really played well with the people unfortunately, and that was not the message of the previous administration and to some extent they went down because it wasn't the message."

Timeche: "I'd just like to follow up on some of the comments that were made earlier about individual versus tribal responsibility, and I'm always reminded about, constantly about our own upbringing in our own communities -- a lot of what Regis Pecos shared with us yesterday morning about core values, remembering who we are, remembering our identity. I was fortunate in that I was able to be raised in Hopi values that we're to be self sustaining, contributing members, citizens of our society and that we as individuals, we have responsibilities. Yes, we have rights, but with those rights come responsibilities. And I think that sometimes we take those things for granted, they're not written, they're taught to us by our parents, our Elders, our grandparents and our societies that we may be part of. Those are all engrained in us and we don't necessarily see it on paper, and we forget that it's there because we're bombarded by everything coming at us from all sides, and just the world as it's changing, quickly changing every day. So I think that if you think about some of the message that Regis was sharing with us yesterday, it's going back and taking that time to find out and remember and reinforce or reiterate, ‘Who are we? What do we believe in? What are our core values and who bears that responsibility to do that?' Because nobody is going to do this for us except us. It's going to be me, it's going to be people individually in my family. Each one of us bears that responsibility, and so we may write them in our constitution -- that was one of the proposed revisions in the Hopi constitution, this latest version, is to include an extensive list of a Bill of Rights. But there was no mention whatsoever about what our responsibilities were as individual citizens. So I think that's something -- I would really like to see that being added to my constitution."

Robert Breaker: "I just wanted to...I came as a participant, so I come from the north just to get replenished in regards to nation building. I do a lot of work with [First] Nations in Canada, and one of the exercises I always facilitate for leadership is to consider where you came from, what your original story is, and really have them articulate the journey that they've traveled to the current, and most times it's the same, absolutely the same. And so today, we talk about our rights. There's two types of nations that I come across. One is proactive nations that have taken the tools of constitution to establish their rights as a nation including their citizens. Others are reactive nations that haven't established those critical tools that they have had from the past and reenacted them in the formation of their clans, their societies, etc. And at the same time they're losing language, and always the question is, ‘If there is no more speakers of the language, can we call ourselves an Indigenous nation?' That's the dialogue that's occurring.

But I also have gone, more so in my nation...I would almost consider it a miracle. We have a young man that lives a good life and he goes and he fasts and he was given gifts and one of the gifts is our language. So here's an individual that through family not using the language, he lost the language, and so now he has that gift to not only lead ceremony, heal people, but also speak the language and I just say, ‘Wow. There is hope in relation to affirm, I guess, who we are through those processes whatever they may be.' But also at the same time, citizen engagement. A lot of nations are challenged when they look inside and they see a lot of dysfunctions, so always the thinking is, ‘The only happy people are the people that are healthy, that can think healthy, that can make healthy decisions.' So the biggest challenge in regards to citizenship engagement is to find ways and means to get our people healthy again and that way we can insure the continuance of our nations into a good future.

And I always say I think those are the challenges, and so when I do work with these nations, I also understand we have comfort zones through these colonizations and I always say [that] somebody needs to develop not only treatment centers for people with addictions to alcohol, to drugs, etc., etc., we also need treatment centers to not to think the BIA, INAC [Indian and Northern Affairs Canada] is the only good thing in the world -- that type of scenario. I just think this particular session allows individuals like myself to think beyond just what was given to us or forced onto us. We need to take back what was rightfully ours and continues in the future. So always the question is, ‘What legacy do I leave my children, my grandchildren?' And that's prayer -- to know who I am, be linked back into the societies, to know the songs, to know the ceremonies and all the things that are linked to who I am. And a part of that process is to ground myself, to really know who I am and what is it that I need to do in order to sustain my future of our nation. So it's a part of the citizenship engagement. So how do I -- I'm not elected leadership -- but in my own best way, I am a leader and I always have been, so how do instill that into the children, into the future generations to sustain who we are into the future? I just wanted to make that comment."

Phillips: "I wanted to pick up a little bit on just the comment around culture and sort of the course works in culture and social stuff on one side. That's all over the place. It's like we don't dare go and teach this stuff because it's this stuff, but we're safe teaching about these things over hear ‘cause it's kind of all out there. Well, guess what? We use this thing to do this because it's the same thing. We cannot talk about sovereignty without talking about our culture. In the work I do at home, in supporting our negotiations for treaty and developing our constitution and regulations, I had the challenge put to me by, and I'm smiling because this was to me like, ‘Oh, my god, really?' by the federal and provincial government. They wanted to make sure that our documents had a cultural fit and I said, ‘But we've been writing them ourselves from our people. I come from the community I...' But it was like, it was a boom for me, so I said, ‘Yeah, how do we know there's a cultural fit?' So I sat with the elders advisory and we went through all of these things and we came up with all of this list and it was good and it was directly, of course they were all there. But I just said to myself, ‘It's so clear that when they think of culture, they think about beads and feathers, and the rest of it all is whatever.' It's so critical to us that we don't let our kids think of culture as being the language only or making baskets, that we teach them the very essence of being [Ktunaxa language], of knowing where their root is and all of those things. That's governance, that's self-governance.

The other comment I wanted to make was the reason why it took us two years to approve a vision statement is because it's not the government's vision statement, it's the nation's vision statement. And the kids in the school drew pictures of what they saw it representing. It went all over to the elders, it got translated into the language and back again to make sure there was a cultural fit. Do we actually understand these concepts? And that was where we understood what strength was. When we said, ‘Define strength,' they said, ‘That's your spiritual power.' It wasn't about physical strength, it wasn't about all of these other things, it was that piece of it. And then healthy was those other things. Healthy was the body, healthy was the other things, but the string piece was the orchestration and the meaningfulness to bring those other things together. The values that we expressed are not the government's values, and believe me it's sometimes a choke for them to live up to those values, because one of them has been translated to a principle that says ‘ecological integrity takes precedence over economic gain.' Hmm. So what we are doing is developing -- outside of the constitution -- things like, we've got a strategic framework for the nation, which includes planning and evaluation cycles for all components from work plans all the way up to when do we evaluate the competencies of our governors, when do we look at structural issues, etc. because that's going to again inform us. Now we don't embed that in the constitution, because we don't know if it's going to work right, and that's why I'm thinking these ten years of amendments or ten amendments over ten years I'm going, ‘Oh, my god, our people would never have survived that. But they will adopt a set of values, they'll adopt that and they'll embrace that so we have to have the people, it has to be the people's,' ‘cause that's what again I'm saying about it's not the government, it's the people. So as of late, when we get these conversations about the us and them start to happen, it's a real reminder. We keep saying to people, ‘When you're a leader and they come at you like that you say, ‘I was a citizen before I took this chair and when I leave this chair I am still a citizen so what makes you think I'm different when I sit here.’ So we've got to try to remember that piece of it as well. You were, you are, you will be."

Q: "I have a question, but I want to make some comments first regarding the constitution that brought up. Our constitution, when we adopted it back in '86, the three branches, they were given four powers, the legislative, to make laws, executive to implement but also have the veto power, and the judicial to interpret the laws. All the rest that were put in there, and I agree, were just duties and responsibilities that we need to carry out, those aren't the powers. Those are duties and responsibilities. I agree on that portion.

Just a question. Yesterday, I heard regarding the enrollment. We have a problem regarding our own enrollment process. Yesterday, I heard about the blood quantum, putting in a degree of blood that may drive your tribe into extinction, but on the other hand, the way we have it set up on the Tohono O'odham Nation, it's based -- as far as to become a member -- it's based on your base roll, the descendants from your base roll. And there's another section that's based on residency. So when we look at those and looking at the trend, it seems to be heading in the same direction, going into extinction, because our blood degree is just getting lower and lower in both categories. So is there another way, is there another option that we can look at as far as without going extinct?"

Phillips: "We don't use blood quantum in Canada for the most part. However Indian Affairs tries to do it through a hidden mechanism in the Indian Act where they'll, ‘Your mother and your daddy and your...,' and pretty soon you're cut off, you're cut off through the status process. But as a nation in our treaty making, in our self-government expressions, and even prior to assertion of those things in a formal way, we've already said, ‘We don't care about status and we don't care about residency, that we as a nation will determine who are citizens.' And so we've created a number of categories, one of which is a descendancy through blood. But another one is adoption and there's another one that basically -- well, it's kind of a quasi adoption. An adoption would be sort of the formal place. But there's another one that's a recognition clause, and it's kind of in contention right now, because some of the elders, the real elders -- and I'll talk about the people that were there 100 years ago -- they'll tell us that, ‘Come, sit, let me talk to you.' After awhile -- and you were sharing these stories with us at the break -- pretty soon that person's a Ktunaxa. They think Ktunaxa, they act Ktunaxa, they speak Ktunaxa, therefore they are Ktunaxa. That's the old elders and then you get the ones that were sort of in the residential school place and subject to a lot of racism and subject to a lot of racial-program criteria and all of the above, and they get kind of, ‘Uh, no, you're white or you're this or you're that or the other.' We're coming back to that point of recognizing because of the loss of our language that it might be important for us to say, ‘Hey, you speak Ktunaxa, you want to speak Ktunaxa, you want to be a citizen?' That we might actually tie something to the language ability, because we need people to speak, and if people see a privilege of being associated with us and are willing to actually be a keeper of that language, some of us are going, ‘I don't care what color you are. If you will be an active keeper of the language, we will turn you into a Ktunaxa person.' So there's differences in opinion about what a Ktunaxa is, and as we describe strong, healthy Ktunaxa citizens, it doesn't say anything about blood. It's all about the way you behave, the things you do, the associations that you portray, etc. So there's some discussion underway right now because...and it's interesting, I was just saying to somebody, ‘Do you know what the Métis in Canada, what their symbol for their nation is?' The infinity symbol, because they have, it's all based on them just saying, ‘Oh, you're Métis, you're Métis, you're Métis.' But there's some governance interference in that right now because they're saying, ‘Oh, there's too many Métis.' Louis Riel, you can tell he was French, hey. He was an Indian, he had that French thing in there, he knew how to get a deal."

Ettawageshik: "I wanted to address that idea about citizenship. If you chose, you could become a naturalized citizen of most of the nation states in this world, and it would require renouncing other citizenships in some cases, some cases it doesn't, but you could go and you could study and you could learn and you could take a test so that you had the basics of what you needed to be a citizen. And somewhere along the line people started looking at us and thinking in terms of blood quantum, and they started to use it as a way of measuring us. And they sold it to us, they sold it to us so well that we think it's our own idea now. And we're living with it and we are, as I said yesterday and one of my favorite phrases these days is, why do we need an oppressor when we do his work so well? Well, this whole concept of tying citizenship to blood quantum is something that we're going to really have to think about in the future, because we have people who -- at home we refer to people that are -- we say ‘apples' -- they're red on the outside but white on the inside. In other words, they have, they look Indian, they maybe have an Indian name or Indian family name, but they haven't lived the culture, they don't know the language, they don't live on the reservation, and some of them don't even live anywhere near other Natives, and yet they still would meet the blood quantum requirement for being a citizen of our nation. Some people talk about when the blood quantum gets diluted we lose a lot. Well, it isn't just the blood quantum. When the knowledge of our culture and our language and the tie to our land gets diluted, have we not also lost just as much? And so somehow we have to be thinking about what it means to be a citizen and we need to think of, ‘If we were going to have a naturalized citizen of each of our tribal nations, what is it that we would require of that person to become a naturalized citizen?' Now, under all the regulations with the Bureau and all these other things, though we could never get any funding for this person, so we would have to think about what that meant, and there's all these other different issues that are out there. But we shouldn't be thinking about that as the criteria for what our citizens are, for what citizenship is, because that citizenship is really what's going to perpetuate us in the long run and we have to think about that. And we're nowhere near there, because I know across Indian Country the idea of, every tribe is doing this a little differently, and in many of the tribes there's a pecking order of who has the highest blood quantum and there's all this sort of social strata that develops in ways. But we've bought into that, and the question is, we should really seriously think about where this is going to go in the long run and how we approach this. So your question I think is a very thought-provoking one, and one that we have to address. Each of us are going to do it in a different way, but we really need to think about what is it that we need to be a citizen. And I look at it as sort of...the term ‘cultural literacy' from 20, 30 years ago, there were lots of books about this and everybody was all excited about it, but I've still been thinking about that because I read those books and I thought about ‘What does it take to be a culturally literate Odawa? And what does that mean? What things do you have to know in order to fulfill that role? What does it mean to be an informed citizen so that you can actually live up to your responsibilities not just demand your rights?' And I think that those are the kind of things that we have to do and I don't have answers. I just know that this is a question that in Indian Country and all across the Indigenous nations of the world all of us have to be thinking about this."

Coates: "When I address this subject -- and again I teach entire classes about this one topic of identity and sort of how it gets defined -- the three most prominent categories seem to be the political identity of citizenship and sovereignty, and I love it that people are shifting the language away from member to citizen, and that to me is the broadest sort of category. It's the one that is inclusive. The racial category -- which is what we're really talking about with blood quantum -- is probably the narrowest. And then you go to what I would call the ethnic or heritage or cultural category -- something along those lines -- which is broader than blood degree, but is still a more narrow category than simply that of citizen of a government. Because we also have to acknowledge that there are many citizens of governments that don't have that knowledge and maybe never will have that knowledge, but who are still willing to support those who do, to take action on behalf of those who want it and who will make an investment in those cultures, in those communities, in those nations nevertheless, even though they themselves may not hold out much hope for ever learning the language or being fluent in it and who may for whatever reasons not be able to acquire the degree of cultural knowledge. But we have to understand the racial one is the one that doesn't change. Everything else can change. There are potentials. As has been pointed out, you can relearn quite a great deal that you've never started out with. Culture doesn't flow in our bloods, it's something that we take on, and that investment, that understanding of nationality and of the people and of the communities is also something else that we can take on to greater and greater degrees and make those investments. So to me, those other categories, it's not about where people are in a fixed way, but it's about what people can become, and I think that that's what we have to, we have to open the doors for those possibilities, for those potentials, because if we don't, we're just going to have people drifting away into the generations. We're not going to be able to retain anybody with these very limited and fixed sorts of categories that we seem to be holding to."

Phillips: "...It's pretty much up to you when you determine when you want to start using the term ‘citizen' versus ‘member.' It's an internal concept, really. It's nobody telling you to do that. It's about you taking that on."

Q: "It's kind of like people using ‘Native American' versus ‘American Indian' versus all these other things that we've determined for ourselves and how we want to identify ourselves. So I think you have to be in a comfort zone when you express that so ‘citizen' for me is -- it's more standoffish for me. I don't identify with that because I identify that word with the United States government. That's just my feeling."

Phillips: "Yeah. And that, awhile ago probably would have been the feeling of some of our people, because they really looked at the membership with the Indian Act as being the only sacredness they had with relationship to who they were as an Indian. But as we've ‘Nike'd up,' people are saying, ‘No, no, we determine who we are. I am a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation, and our government has just as much authority as...' So what I've done is I've created little hierarchical charts that show, ‘Guess what, we've got the Canadian government up here and guess what, right along it we've got the Ktunaxa government, ‘cause we have just as much authority as they do.' And then I show the provincial governments and here's all the subsidiary governments below them. So our own citizens get empowered to see that, ‘No, we can confer citizenship, because we have the same authority as that other government does.' Hierarchical. So it's an evolutionary process, but what it's allowed us to do, because that's where the government has defined us as being a member, as having status, as being eligible for programs and services, as being enumerated for certain things. We've said that doesn't cut the mustard as far as our traditions go. ‘You're Ktunaxa, you're not a second-generation cut off by the Indian Act, etc., you're still Ktunaxa.'

What we've done by asserting authority off tribal lands into the mainstream region is we have actually allowed ourselves and positioned ourselves to generate funds that are not tribal funds. We get mainstream dollars for providing services to mainstream people. We provide services through street operations for street people that the municipalities can't even touch because they just don't go there. They don't want those people in their health clinics, they don't want those people. But they always find us. Our child and family agency, we've got people saying that they're Aboriginal when we know darn well they're not, because they prefer our values and our services which are positioned upon appreciative inquiry, going in and helping the family get well, rather than going in and saying, ‘This is a bad family, we've got to take these kids away.' So we actually, I've said to the province of B.C., ‘Wait long enough, we'll take you over. We'll slowly get your citizens believing in our ways of doing and being.' And it's starting to happen. We've got training by our agencies going on around the province and I've actually had to say to our director in one of our agencies, ‘Okay, you step aside, I'm taking on the minister now,' because they've issued a directive to our agency, one of our agencies that says we have to switch to this provincial standard for programs and services and we're going, ‘No way, when we used your standards we didn't have any good outcomes. When we've developed our own standards, we do things our own way, we've proven that we can succeed in your domain through your quality control mechanisms, but more importantly we've got better outcomes for our people.' So I'm ready for that. I would love to make a full public statement in the Globe and Mail to say, ‘This is what's going on, people.' So we have to consciously think about what we're doing internally, and how that impacts what goes on around us, and that's where we get a lot of support from all of those other people that, heck, we've got Niedermeyer, the hockey guy. He's standing up for our glacier, for [Ktunaxa language], so it's like, yeah."

Tatum: "One thing that I'm very concerned [about] from my perspective as an Indian law scholar is when the word ‘member,' and ‘tribal member,' started being used frequently in the U.S. Supreme Court opinions, that's when the court started drastically reducing tribal authority over its own territory, and it's the only time the Supreme Court has really started consistently reducing the authority of a government over its territory, is by introducing this word ‘member' frequently into the dialogue, and so that's one of my concerns, too."

Q: "And the reason why I asked that question was because in our constitution and by-law right now, that's the word that's used is ‘tribal member.' So I wanted to get your input on that so we can wrap our minds around it and take it back and dialogue on it and decide what is best for us."

Ettawageshik: "I just wanted to say that in our constitution that was written over that ten-year period, adopted 2005, it uses the word ‘member,' too, but we just stopped using the word ‘member' and when we have a, when we define in a law, we say ‘member' equals ‘citizen,' and then we use the word ‘citizen' all the way through everything so that we've been, that's the way we've been incorporating it into our, into the way we do it, and we nearly have everybody saying ‘citizen.'"

Coates: "Our treaties from the 1800s all say ‘citizens' of the Cherokee Nation of Indians in them, and the rhetorical writings of Cherokees from the 1800s, they commonly used the term ‘citizen,' so I think it's something pretty longstanding with us."

Q: "I was just wondering if it would benefit all of us to be standardized, and I don't know if that would benefit all because having you help me understand that really helps me think on this end to what is best for all. Thank you."

Record: "Well, thank you everyone. We are running a bit behind schedule and we need to wrap up the day and the seminar and get everyone on their way. We'd like to thank all the panelists for their wisdom and insights.

Empowering Parents Brings Community Change in Wind River

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If you are a parent who has ever thought, “What can I do?” or “I am just a parent,” Clarisse Harris, Northern Paiute, has a program that might interest you. On the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the Parent Leadership Training Institute is arming parents with the tools to bring changes within the schools and communities...

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Rose, Christina. "Empowering Parents Brings Community Change in Wind River." Indian Country Today. January 27, 2014. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/empowering-parents-brings-community-change-in-wind-river, accessed April 11, 2023)

The wisdom of our tribal elders

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A centerpiece of our Chumash culture is that tribal elders should be admired and honored for the knowledge and experiences they've gathered over their lifetimes. Our elders, and the ones before them, have endured so much for us to stay together as a tribe.

For example, our reservation in the valley did not have running water until 1969. Some of our ancestors were sent away to boarding schools where teachers tried to stamp out our language and traditions...

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Zavalla, Nakia. "The wisdom of our tribal elders." Santa Ynez Valley News. January 16, 2014. Opinion. (http://syvnews.com/news/opinion/commentary/chumash/the-wisdom-of-our-tri..., accessed January 17, 2014)