citizen engagement

Floyd "Buck" Jourdain: Constitutional Reform and Leadership at the Red Lake Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Floyd "Buck" Jourdain, Chairman of the Red Lake Nation from 2004 to 2014, discusses his nation's constitutional reform effort and the supporting role he played in helping to get the effort off of the ground. He also talks about how comprehensive constitutional reform will empower his nation's elected leaders to effectively tackle its biggest problems and identify and then achieve its strategic priorities. 

Resource Type
Citation

Jourdain, Floyd "Buck." "Constitutional Reform and Leadership at the Red Lake Nation." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Walker, Minnesota. July 9, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program, we are honored to have with us Floyd Jourdain, Jr., a citizen of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota. Floyd, otherwise known as ‘Buck,’ served as Red Lake Nation Chairman from 2004 to 2014. An advocate of Native culture and living drug and alcohol free, Jourdain has spent the past three decades working as a counselor, community organizer and educator. Buck, welcome and good to have you with us today.

Floyd Jourdain:

Miigwetch. Thank you.

Ian Record:

I’ve shared a little bit about who you are, but why don’t we start off by having you tell us a little bit more about yourself. What did I leave out?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, you didn’t leave out much I suppose. It’s a good nutshell there. I grew up on a reservation, Red Lake, northwestern Minnesota and was educated there, graduated from high school, went off to college for a couple years and got involved in chemical dependency and recovery programs, and working with youth and youth councils and those type of things. Started studying sociology and racism and trying to combat those type of social factors in Indian Country, and then somehow it led me to be the chief of the tribe. I don’t know how it happened, but it did and I was the chairman for 10 years.

Ian Record:

We’ll talk about that, your tenure as chairman a bit later. What I wanted to start off talking about though is constitutional reform. In August 2012, the Red Lake Nation approved a plan to review and revise its constitution. That’s an effort that’s still unfolding, it’s very early on in terms of its, in terms of the process. From your perspective what prompted the nation to go down the reform road?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, it’s been a topic of tribal elections every two and four years. You hear catch phrases like 'separation of powers,' 'constitutional reform,' and candidates never really elaborate on that or what it is and people are left with this big question mark. I think that finally somebody came along who said, ‘This is something that really needs attention.’ I think my background in studying political science had something to do with that and also the culture of the tribe and the history and the treaties and our government structure and how we’ve evolved over time. So leading up to it, it just fell right in step with some of the things I was interested as a tribal leader, so I was right from the early on get-go interested in pursuing that.

Ian Record:

So you were chairman at the time that this effort, this initiative was formally given the green light by the council. And I’m curious, what role did you play in your capacity as chairman in terms of getting this movement going, to getting this effort off the ground?

Floyd Jourdain:

That’s one of the advantages of being the chairman is you’re able to carry out some of the vision and some of the things that the people are wanting to see happen. Over my lifetime, I’ve seen some political train wrecks and tumultuous times that had to do with the constitution within our tribe and others and being able to instead of pointing planners in the direction of saying, ‘Well, hey, let’s get some immediate things going.’ No, let’s try to embark on something that’s long range and constitutional reform is one of those things. It was a priority when I came into office and actually before that I was dabbling and studying it and going to school studying political science and those type of things. So I was pretty excited about finding some people who were interested in taking that on and then just letting them go.

Ian Record:

You talked about finding some people and letting them go. From what I’m hearing, there was a sense of your own place and how the extent of your involvement could be perceived by certain folks. Did you have any sense that, ‘I need to be careful about just how fully I as the chairman, as the chief elected leader of this tribe, get involved in the reform of the nation’s constitution and government?’

Floyd Jourdain:

Indian Country can be so divisive, especially when it comes to politics and you have to be respectful of someone’s, what you perceive as a bad idea at one point was somebody’s good idea and to build something lasting. You don’t want to have your name tied to, directly to it. And I think empowerment is key by planting that seed, finding the right people to carry it out, support them, step back a ways and just kind of guide things from the peripheral -- if you’re allowed to do that -- because at some point you do more harm than good if you’re directly involved in especially major efforts that are going to be carrying on for quite some time regardless of who the political leaders are.

Ian Record:

Was part of your role being like a source of information for folks who were curious about what’s going with this, ‘Tell me more about this,’ and sort of giving them the 411 on what this constitutional reform initiative is all about and who is in charge of it and things like that?

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah. Prior to coming to office people would come to me and say, ‘Well, what’s all of the big, what’s all the fighting about?’ And usually it was two political powerhouses fighting over who’s going to control the jobs and gaming and housing and who’s going to do the favors and control everything. And they would say, ‘Well, why are they doing it? How are they allowed to do that?’ And so a lot of the educating of like my family and friends and younger people, youth council, those people; so I was doing a lot of teaching back then about how governments work, in particular tribal governments because not only looking at tribal constitutions, but also the United States Constitution, European history and how all of those...American history affected us. Yeah, those, the education is a huge, huge piece of getting people to understand, ‘Why is there this dysfunction happening? There’s got to be a reason.’ So I’ve always been fascinated by prying and finding out why something happens or why it’s happening and not being satisfied just with that, but now what’s a good strategic way to do something about it?

Ian Record:

It sounds like you had a supportive role to play, you had an information-sharing role to play, also with a keen sense that you have to allow the people to take full ownership in the process. From what I know about the Red Lake constitution reform process, that seems to be the top priority: this has to be ultimately an expression of the people’s will and not, as you’ve sort of alluded to, to be assigned or attached to one political leader. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this sort of mindset that went into that?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, I can speak for my tribe when I can say the tribal chairman has always had a huge target on them and people come after the chairman, I don’t care who it is, and the same goes for a lot of other tribes as well. And so the chairman, if he gets behind something, a lot of times it’s, of course his supporters are going to say that’s a good thing, but then the other people are going to say, ‘Well, hey, this is something that we’re opposed to.’ You want to get as many people involved and empowered and be neutral and you’re exactly right, we just have to give it to the people and let the people take ownership of it and make it their own. The effort itself is, you basically cut the cord and watch it grow. And I think that’s a good thing because regardless of who the leader is, then the effort stays strong, it stays connected with the people, it has a grassroots feel to it and they will keep it moving. It takes on a life of its own and I think that’s a very, very strong way to go about approaching government reform.

Ian Record:

So can you describe in a nutshell the approach that Red Lake, the structure it created to shepherd this reform movement along, sort of at a macro level?

Floyd Jourdain:

The structure, well, we were hoping to,  I’ve seen like piecemeal efforts in the past to do constitutional reform and usually it’s the people in power will fix a little piece or this or that that’s going to work to their benefit and people were like, ‘Well, what was that all about?’ and it was never fully explained. So by putting together a team of people who are able to have this fervor and this interest and this energy to go after this and not only educate themselves on it, but to go out directly into the community in a strategic, planned out, chronological order, that’s been really effective. And starting with education: ‘What is constitutional reform? Why are we doing it? What is, I’ve heard about it, but I really don’t understand a lot about it.’ I think finding the right team and the right people and just letting them do their thing has been a good approach.

Ian Record:

Isn’t part of that challenge of getting the people engaged, you mentioned making them understand what constitutional reform is, but isn’t there a piece prior to that where you’re actually trying to make the argument, ‘Here’s why the constitution matters to you as a citizen of this nation,’ or, ‘here’s how revisiting and strengthening it can actually improve your life and the life of those yet to come’?

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah, I believe so. Just basic rudimentary government. A lot of this new generation coming up, some of them have had a misperception that we’re really steeped in tradition and language and we’re carrying on a tradition that has been there for hundreds of years when actually we’ve recreated a template of somebody else’s stuff that has very little to do with our tribe at all -- our identity, our language, our philosophies and our culture and any of that. So I think that’s where a lot of it starts is that people just don’t have any idea. And elections are, I see it as an opportunity to educate people because people will go out there and they’ll say, ‘We need a separation of powers and we need term limits and we need this and we need that.’ And then people are scratching their heads, ‘Is this a bad thing or why are we, ?’ So I think it’s really important to, again I can’t emphasize enough with youth councils, high schools and alternative schools and charter schools to educate at that level. Because in Indian Country I didn’t read anything about any of this stuff until I was like two years into college and on most reservation schools you have public schools or you have BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] schools; they don’t teach this stuff. We don’t know anything about it until we get a little older, but what’s encouraging is the next generation coming up, you see they’re more advanced in their thinking, they’re learning about federal Indian law and they’re fascinated by language revitalization. They’re educated at a whole other level now with social media and access to technology. It’s pretty fascinating digging through card catalogs to find out about the Marshall Trilogy and you’re two years into college. Now these young people on youth councils and they’re saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this thing going on on federal Indian law, would you be interested in coming to speak?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ Whoa, I wish I would have had that when I was younger because there was no such thing."

Ian Record:

Card catalogs. We’ll have to explain to our younger viewers what that is.

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah, it was cumbersome and a lot of work.

Ian Record:

You’ve alluded to this and I want to talk a bit more about it, but in the vision statement for the Red Lake constitutional reform initiative -- which is overseen by a reform committee that represents a broad cross section of people in your community -- but the vision statement for this initiative and for this basically the charge of the committee is in part to strengthen the ideas of self-governance in its constitution. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about how the current constitution doesn’t truly and perhaps fully enact notions of self-governance and in particular Anishinaabe Ojibwe self-governance?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think self-governance is inclusive of the people and that’s one of the things that’s been lacking. Elected officials --again I can speak for our tribe -- have no job descriptions. Nobody knows what they do. They’re not required to really do anything. You get on the tribal council, you’re elected to that position and there’s a misconception of what the role of a tribal leader should be. So basically we’re saying, ‘You write our job description for us. What are your ideas, what is your vision, what do you think a tribal leader should do? Is it to control all the housing and the jobs and bring all their political people in and do this and that and do favors and comps and all this kind of stuff?’ No, that’s not what a tribal leader is supposed to be doing. ‘Well, it doesn’t say they’re not supposed to be doing that.’

So in our particular situation, there’s job descriptions for the three executive officers: the chairman, the secretary and the treasurer, but the representatives, nothing. There’s nothing in there that says what the chiefs are supposed to be doing. There’s no criteria, there’s no qualifications that they’re supposed to have, there’s no code of conduct, ethics, no bill of rights and under that particular arrangement the people are detached from government; there is no empowerment. And I think with constitutional reform, it’s going to allow people to say, ‘These are the expectations of our nation. We expect better. We expect a higher level of representation. We expect to raise the standards of our tribe and what our nation is aspiring to be.’ And with a lack of that, you can do anything. You have these elections every two and four years, there’s a lot of upheaval, there’s no accountability. You have people perpetuating a system that is...basically contributes to sometimes, unfortunately, chaos and a loss of any potential and progress. So I think those are important. You just call it what it is.

When you start to point those things out, people will [say], ‘I had no idea. I thought a tribal council member was supposed to be the director of our gaming,’ or, ‘I thought they were supposed to oversee. I thought we could go to them and get money from them and those kind of things.’ So minus that, you get these people who are, they become almost in a sense sometimes enablers and they perpetuate it after awhile. I don’t know if it’s a sense of, ‘People are relying on me, they’re dependent of me, they need me,’ and next thing you know you lose focus. Our nation needs leaders and our job is to be, set the direction of the tribe, the vision to move our nation forward and be forward thinking. We’re supposed to be looking over here, not just right here and I think that that’s a huge part of constitutional reform is, ‘What are these leaders doing? They get bogged down in all these other things and what about us?’

I ran for office and I was a younger person and there was a lot of squabbling and fighting and the constitution was, ‘Oh, well, this person here is doing this and that one, we’ve got to have a recall and we’ve got to get this one out of here and we’ve got to, ’ and there was a lot of finger pointing back and forth and anger and emotions and tempers flaring and people marching around with petitions and all this kind of stuff and people were like, ‘This is crazy. What’s going on?’ Meanwhile, we had youth suicides and crack cocaine was infiltrating Indian Country, enormous, ridiculous amounts of diabetes with youth and juveniles and chemical dependency issues and joblessness and homelessness. But then you have all of these people fighting over, citing the constitution. ‘They’re not doing this, they’re not doing that, according to the constitution.’

So those are things that I think will contribute greatly to healthier communities, to more effective leadership, better education, better systems and it’s a huge, huge undertaking, but it’s one that has to be approached in a manner where you can just continually pass the torch, pass the torch, pass the torch. Sometimes it might take generations. It’s nothing something I don’t think that will happen really fast, but it’s something that definitely is happening now.

Ian Record:

So in this process of redefining self-governance and what that means and people are taking a full participatory role in that redefining process, how valuable is it for -- and it sounds like this is what the Red Lake constitution reform committee is getting the people to really focus on -- but how valuable is it for people to go back and realize and investigate that, ‘Hey, we as Red Lake, we had this self-governance thing figured out a long time ago. In fact, that’s the reason why we’re still here and maybe if we more fully examine the key principles that served as the foundation of that traditional governance system, there’s things that we can bring forward and make it more ours, make it more Anishinaabe.’ Is that a current you’re starting to see taking root within the community as sort of a topic of conversation?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think it is, because incorporating the language and culture into tribal courts, into tribal leadership, into education and melding that into a governmental instrument that’s effective for everybody is something that’s going to be, greatly enhance the quality of life for everybody. And the Anishinaabe philosophies and those principles and ways of living, they were minus a lot of the, how do I say, suppose ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and ‘getting a leg up on somebody’ all the little catch phrases. But yeah, it was, that is not reflected in the constitution that we have now. There’s absolutely nothing in there that pertains to Anishinaabe values, traditions, language, anything. And in fact, one time I was listening to a college president at a tribal college say, ‘When our elders wrote our constitution, they were thinking about us,’ and I had a copy of the constitution and I was flipping through it going, ‘Our elders didn’t write this.’ This was a college president. It was one of the boilerplates and I was like, ‘Well, they might have adapted it or basically modeled after it, but an Indian person didn’t write this. I know that.’ I didn’t say anything, but it was, so we really have come a long way from the way we, our traditional customs and systems were applied to leading a nation.

Ian Record:

You mentioned who wrote the constitution and that’s a topic we often see a lot of general understanding among people who are concerned about constitutional reform and the inadequacies of their current constitution in Indian Country. They’ll say things like, ‘We’re an IRA tribe and we have an IRA boilerplate constitution.’ But what we’re seeing I think in a good way now more and more is that more tribes are going back and gleaning the origin story of their constitution, going beyond just analyzing the words on the page, but saying, ‘What was going on at the time that this constitution was formed? What can the elders tell us about who was in charge and how, just how dominant the BIA or some other outside entity was in the formation of this document?’ Because as you said about Red Lake’s constitution, in most instances you can read this and realize in a heartbeat that this was not written by an Indigenous person or this does not reflect the voice of an Indigenous person. This was obviously someone else’s product. And it sounds from some of the video work that the reform committee’s doing that that’s precisely where they’re focusing is, ‘We’ve got to bring to the people a sense of context for where this constitution came from.’

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, some of the, at one point there was dozens of people on the tribal council and of course there was one central figure, again. Somewhere along the line you see just where respect was lost for chiefs, a total disregard for tribal chairmen and they were viewed more as adversarial people and maybe coopted by outside entities and not basically viewed as a person. This is a person who’s looking out for all of us. I went to NCAI [National Congress of American Indians] in Tulsa, Oklahoma several years ago and a young man stood up there in general assembly. He said, ‘I really got to hand it to you tribal leaders, especially chairpersons.’ He said, ‘My dad was on a council for many years and we saw what he went through as a family, what affect it had on him and on us as a kid growing up in a home of a tribal leader, and the toll it took on him and how much he poured into it. I really got to hand it to you. It takes a unique breed of person to step up to the plate and take the arrows in the back and take the bullets from the front.’ So the fight is out there, but you’re just getting hammered from fighting. Sometimes it’s so, so hard to try to do things for the people when a lot of times you’re perceived as somebody who is not looking out for their best interest, regardless of how much progress, what you’re doing.

So those definitions I think again really need to be re-evaluated and that’s where the lack of culture, the lack of, like in our language: [Anishinaabe language]. That’s, ‘There’s a man standing out in front of his people.’ All the people are here and there’s a man standing out there. That’s my Indian name that was given to me by an elder many years ago. I wasn’t a chairman then when I received that name, but somehow it happened for me. That’s part of our traditions and our teachings. I believe that the Creator up there has a plan for all of us and things do happen for a reason. So just the, how that factors in, the leaders are chosen not because he’s going to promise me a raise. Leaders were chosen because you say, ‘Well, this leader has a good heart and I know that he’s going to give everything that he can for the people.’ That is lacking in constitutions now so I think that the, if you connect those two together, then they’ll perceive tribal leaders to be more as human beings and more of caring individuals and not so much, ‘We’re fascinated by watching this individual topple,’ or ‘we need to get our guy in there.’ And then sometimes unfortunately across Indian Country, you have some pretty good things going on that are toppled because of an election and then later on the people are like, ‘Oh, geez, maybe we shouldn’t have, ’ And sometimes there’s others who need to have the next one come in and take over.

Ian Record:

So it sounds like in talking with some of the other folks that are involved with the Red Lake reform effort that it’s beginning to take root and more and more people in the community are beginning to get engaged, the turnout at some of the community meetings has been really strong, people are beginning to share their aspirations for what a new constitution and ultimately a new Red Lake future will look like or should look like. But I assume that you’ve observed,  I assume you’ve observed some challenges. Has there been some blowback to this reform effort? Are there people that are perhaps looking upon it negatively for whatever reason? And is that to be expected and perhaps how do you see the reform effort sort of dealing with those sorts of challenges?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think some of the people who are actually assigned to do or appointed to do the reform effort too, they have their own renditions or their own ideas and, some of the things I’ve seen is, ‘Well, we need to create new policies for human resources,’ and, ‘the programs need to be, ’ which has absolutely nothing to do with constitutional reform. And there’s others who have their own idea, who want to impose their own vision and not the collective of the people, Anishinaabe. Some want the language incorporated in, succession, those type of things and others have just adamantly said, ‘Well, you know what, I don’t know about that. I think this is, we don’t know if we trust this. This has worked up to this point so far.’

As far as the leadership, some of the leaders are like, ‘Hey, great. Anything that’s going to take away power from one individual,’ like the old Lord Atkins and immortal law, absolute power corrupts absolutely. If power’s concentrated in one figure for a long period of time, eventually the individual will become corrupt and those type of things. And so those type of things have been talked about is term limits and so there’s, it’s good healthy discussion. All of it is really, really good healthy discussion.

Some of the drawbacks I think from the leadership is that, ‘Well, geez, if we do this, does that mean we’re not going to have the power that we had or we’re not going to be as effective and what is our job then? The people elected me to provide for them and do this and do that and they have expectations of me and if I’m in a position now where I don’t do those things for them anymore, then I’m probably not going to be around here for very much longer.’ So the education piece also starts to radiate out to the leadership where they start to see that empowerment is a good thing for the nation, but it might necessarily be a good thing for them if they’re of the mind that they want to hold on to power.

And one of the things that I experienced being a younger chairman coming in, there was no Chairman 101 and all of the tribal council members who were there, they were not falling over each other to come and educate me on what it’s like to be a tribal leader. I don’t think they had expectations of me being there very long. So why are we going to do that?

So a lot of it is, you can go to school, you can get educated in American Indian history and law and federal Indian law, policy, sovereignty, treaties. You can study tribes all over the place, but when you walk into the office on day one, it’s like all of that is like, ‘Oh, okay. Well, that's not really what I’m doing here. The people have expectations that are aside from that.’ And a lot of times leaders come in and they see it that way. It’s like, ‘Well, hey, I’m here to satisfy people.’ And those are the ones that, they’re a little more resistant to empowering and allowing the nation to grow.

Ian Record:

You touched on one of the major challenges that I think a lot of tribes get sort of a cold splash of water in the face or a wakeup call is when they actually ratify new constitutions, there’s sort of a sigh of relief. ‘We cleared that hurdle,’ and then it hits them that now the hard part comes. ‘We’ve actually got to implement this thing.’ And part of the challenge then is you’ve got to educate not only the people about how the new government works, but you’ve got to educate your leadership about what their role is and how that role may have changed. And from what you’re saying, it sounds like that means that people have to take a whole new approach to how they govern, how they make decisions, how they view their role, how they interact with their constituents. It’s potentially a completely revolutionary process, right? And from what I’ve heard, Red Lake is considering comprehensive reform and not what you’ve talked about that’s happened in the past where there’s sort of these piecemeal little changes here and there, but we’re looking at the whole thing.

Floyd Jourdain:

Right. Yeah, I think it is, a more comprehensive approach is why just change one tire when you can change them all and the leadership taking a look at, ‘Well, if this happens, ’ And I give one example where a tribal council member said, ‘Well, then what are we supposed to do? If we’re not running the programs and we’re not overseeing the businesses and we’re not calling all the shots here, ? The people elect us to do these things and so then what are we supposed to do?’ So you can see how far reaching the influence of tribal leaders can be when they do not have a specific set of duties that they were elected to do. And changing that culture, it is a process and it would be like a fish out of water. They walk out of the ocean, they’re on the beach and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, this is not good. I can't adapt to this.’ Two minutes later they’re going to want to run back in the water. So it’s again passing down, and our elders teach us this. They say, ‘The knowledge that you have acquired in your lifetime, you have a duty to pass that on to the ones that are coming. Because you’re connected to your children, your grandchildren and just because you might be in the position you’re in right now, doesn’t mean you’re always going to be there. You might flop over tomorrow and take everything with you. So you have a responsibility to educate the ones coming up.’

So I’ve always been fascinated by demographics and numbers and political science and statistics and watching trends, especially in Indian Country with the generations coming up in the education systems that are happening. They are going to inherit everything. We have a massive reservation, hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands and lakes and lands and resources and a government system that is very fragile. I had an elder one time tell me, ‘Buck, it’s really refreshing to know that some of these younger people coming up or even some of the older ones that we’re not really in tune with what is going on, now they’re getting interested, they’re getting involved and that makes me feel good as an elder because I know I can go off to the Happy Hunting Ground, lay my head down, knowing that our tribe is in good hands and it’s moving in a positive direction.’

Ian Record:

One of the issues that Red Lake has been focusing on in early stages of the reform effort deals with whether and how to remove the Secretary of Interior approval clause from its constitution. Why the attention to that specific issue do you think?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think that’s always been like a myth that we have to check with the Great White Father every time we do something. And over time with Red Lake, the sovereignty and the uniqueness of the government there, they’ve always maintained that, ‘Hey, we really don’t have to check with anybody? Do we really?’ And whenever there was a political fight going on, one party would say, ‘Well, hey, you guys can’t kick me out of here. I’m going to tell the Secretary on you.’ And then finally one group said, ‘Go ahead.’ And nothing happened. So I think over time is a misconception that just because we basically modeled ourselves after an IRA constitution that we had an obligation, a congressional mandate or something from the Department of Interior that, ‘Hey, you can’t do anything until you check with us,’ and Red Lake didn’t do that. So we haven’t been checking with the Secretary of Interior all of these decades, why should we start now?

So I think over time the Band itself, I don’t know if it’s lawyers or historians or chairpersons or whoever said, ‘Well, let me check that out.’ They checked it out and they said, ‘Well, no, it’s not in fact true. We don’t have to get the consent of the Secretary of Interior for anything.’ We have some code of federal regulations. We did away with those. We’ve done some things with business and courts and done some amendments over the years and there was no tribal chairman sending a, or secretary sending a letter off to the Department of Interior. So I think that’s an easy start and it is a start, I think just to get something going. Let’s do this, just to get the momentum going to say, ‘Look, we’re going to eliminate that from our constitution. It’s something we know we can do. It’s a slam-dunk for us. So let’s start there.’

Ian Record:

And it sounds to me like that’s a productive approach to take is to, in knowing that there’s going to be some really controversial issues, constitutional issues that are going to come whether it’s blood quantum or citizenship criteria, what have you, that you’ll ultimately have to deal with.

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, removing the Secretary of Interior clause is important because it also, that’s pretty monumental in itself because at one point, being a self-governance tribe, the Red Lake Band had certain agencies that had federal employees on the reservation for so many years. And those federal, Band members who work for these federal agencies -- IHS [Indian Health Service], BIA and law enforcement, nurses, what have you -- they were like, ‘We don’t want to be under the tribe. We like our government jobs. We want our pensions. We want to be under that safety and security net.’ And the Band has always maintained that at some point we have to strive for self-determination and self-sufficiency and we have to manage our own affairs and at what point are we going to pull ourselves out from the cover of this almost a demeaning subsidiary of the federal government itself.

Ian Record:

I know it’s still early, but looking forward, what in your view, when all’s said and done, will success look like for Red Lake in terms of constitutional reform? If everything goes right from your perspective and the process reaches its fruition, the outcome will be successful if what?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think if you have a new generation educated on the tribe, treaties, history, the role of government and also have a comprehensive plan and diagram of what the nation should, a healthy nation should look like. That in itself would be a huge, huge victory for the people. The empowerment is important and the education and the empowerment of the people is important because there’s certain things that people want. They want to be healthy. They want to be safe. They want clean water. They want land. They want their leaders to be looking out for them and they want their children and the generations coming up to preserve what we have: our culture, language and our traditions and our land. And I think that’s important and if we have a document or a guiding, some guiding principles and rules that not only the people have to go by, but also the leadership has to go by as well and that’s tempered, is balanced, it’ll build trust, it’ll build stability in government. It’ll be, it’ll contribute greatly to building an economy, strengthening our tribal courts. Because otherwise, if you have, there are no definitions, then you have a lot of the dysfunction that happens in Indian communities.

Ian Record:

I’d like to switch gears now and talk about governance and leadership and the relationship between the two. We’ve talked about leadership a lot already, but just recently, in May 2014, you lost in your bid for another term as chairman of the Red Lake Nation. I was following that election closely and was struck by how graciously you accepted your electoral defeat and in particular how you worked to ensure a smooth transition from your administration to your successor’s. In fact, at the council meeting just on June 10th, just about a month ago, where you handed over the reins to the incoming chair, you were quoted as saying, ‘Anything I can ever do, Mr. Chairman, I will be here for you.’ I wish I could say that is an approach commonly taken by outgoing leaders in any government including Indian Country, but unfortunately it’s not. I’m curious. Why did you take that approach that you did? It sounds like it comes from some of the teachings that have been imparted to you earlier in life, but maybe if you could just elaborate a little bit more on why did you take that approach?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, you’re right, a lot of that come from my parents, my mom and my dad, my grandparents. And embarking on leadership prior to being an elected tribal leader, I was also a mentor for youth and I worked for youth programs and trying to help people with their personal struggles with addictions and those type of things. So to keep hope alive and to keep dreams alive and to keep a positive attitude, I think that’s important. I’ve served as a conduit between one generation of people, our elders who are starting to leave us now, and the next generation coming up. So to keep that transition going and realizing that our lives are so short, that there’s value in supporting someone who’s coming in and continuing.

And like I said, there was no 'Chairman 101.' Now you can be surrounded by thousands of people and be the loneliest person on planet earth. And I know what that feels like. There’s very few people who know what that feels like and one of the things I spoke to in that inauguration as well was holding the weight of the people. It can be grueling and there are rewards, but there are times when you really have no one else to look to. ‘Who can I talk to about this? Is there anyone that,  Well, there’s Buck over here or there’s maybe Bobby [Whitefeather] and there’s like on this entire planet there might be one or two people that know what I’m going through that hopefully I can call them and consult with them or maybe they can help me with an issue.’

So I think it’s important to keep those doors open and when you’re talking about a nation, there’s a momentum that’s building, there’s a new generation coming, there’s, and a lot of times we like to think that, ‘Oh, geez, just because I’m out of here, I’m going to kick down the house of cards. They won’t have me to kick around anymore.’ It doesn’t work that way. The tribe will go on. The people will go on. The progress, that’s one of the scary parts about leadership is that everything that we’ve built, hopefully it won’t get all dismantled and then we’ll go back several decades to where we were before. I think people like to think that that’s going to happen, but I like to believe that we are good people, all of us.

These campaigns, they can be brutal, they can be ugly. The people a lot of times, it takes on a life of its own that they get so caught up in all of these things and at the end of the day, tribal leaders, though, they don’t wish each other harm or, we don’t want the next ones coming in to do bad because if they do bad, then we all do bad. So I think it’s just something that was taught to me was that, ‘Don’t go stomping off muttering and hanging your head and kicking a can.’ Just, you move to the next chapter and hopefully another door will open.

Ian Record:

So I’m curious, I know it’s, you’re what about two months now into your post-chairman existence, but how do you conceive your role now as a former elected official in terms of nation building and contributing to some of these nation-building initiatives like this constitutional reform effort that’s currently underway? Because you spent 10 years building up an incredible knowledge base. Not just in terms of about the needs of the people because you’re a public face and people come to you and share their problems and share their aspirations, but also because of your knowledge of how your current system works, the governance system and perhaps what could be improved. How do you view your role now that you’re no longer in the position of chairman?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, the transition is tough, especially if you go from 100 miles an hour to 20 overnight. And you go through certain stages of, ‘What’s my role now? I’ve been doing this for so long.’ I think passing that on is what I talked about. There wasn’t anybody that I could come to and say, ‘Well, I’ve run into a huge, huge situation here. Who do you turn to?’ So all of those experiences, the life experiences and the knowledge and all of the things that have happened over time, I think it’s important to share that with people, whether that be teaching or writing a book or just being in the community maybe as an elder or trying to get involved more again in the grassroots just to pass on what it is, in a good way, to pass on to the next generation some of the things that they otherwise wouldn’t know.

Ian Record:

Well, Chairman, we really appreciate you taking some time out of your retirement, your hopefully short-lived retirement, and sharing your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us.

Floyd Jourdain:

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Ian Record:

Well, that’s all the time we have on today’s program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2014 Arizona Board of Regents.

Justin Beaulieu: The Red Lake Nation's Approach to Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Justin Beaulieu (Red Lake Nation), coordinator of the Red lake Nation Constitution Reform Initiative, provides a detailed overview of how the Red Lake Nation's constitution reform committee has designed and is implementing a methodical, strategic, comprehensive approach to reviewing and reforming the nation's constitution that puts primary emphasis on full, meaningful participation by the Red Lake people in the process.

Resource Type
Citation

Beaulieu, Justin. "The Red Lake Nation's Approach to Constitutional Reform." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Walker, Minnesota. July 9, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host, Ian Record. On today's program, we are honored to have with us Justin Beaulieu, a citizen of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota. Justin currently serves as Coordinator of the Red Lake Constitutional Reform Initiative and earlier this year he was chosen by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development to serve as one of three members of the inaugural Cohort in its Honoring Nations Leadership Program. Justin, welcome and good to have you with us today."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Thank you, Ian. It's a pleasure."

Ian Record:

"So I've shared a little bit about who you are, but why don't you start off and just tell us a little bit more about yourself?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, I'm a father of two beautiful children with my wife Anne and pretty much my job and my kids are my life. I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I like to hunt, fish, trap, do a lot of the cultural activities, go ricing and maple syruping. It's...just kind of live the old way and I learned from my grandpa and my dad."

Ian Record:

"That's great. The reason I wanted to sit down and have a chat with you today is because of your involvement in Red Lake's constitutional reform effort, which is still very much early in its development and we'll talk about that, but I wanted to start at the beginning. And based upon your knowledge as a citizen of the nation and obviously your involvement as coordinator of the actual reform initiative, what in your view prompted Red Lake to go down the reform road to begin with?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think -- and this conversation's been going on for a long time -- we had a discussion with Chairman [Darrell] Seki, our new elected chairman, the other day and he was talking about how his grandfather and grandma used to talk with other elders in the tribe and this was probably in the late 20s, 30s and they were talking about how our constitution then, the 1918 constitution, it didn't align with our cultural values or who we are or what we're about to what we felt was important as a people. So then as a nation, I think that has been passed along from parents to children to grandchildren to great grandchildren and finally we did a GANN [Governance Analysis for Native Nations session] in 2010 with Native Nations Institute and I think that was one of the catalysts that kind of drove that conversation into the forefront that said, ‘Okay, we can do this now. We've been talking about it for a long time, let's go ahead and do it.'"

Ian Record:

"So I should mention a GANN is a Governance Analysis for Native Nations session. It's a tool that nations use to assess their current governance systems and constitutions being part of that. When I first met you, you were a member of Cohort 2 of the Bush Native Nation Rebuilders Program and at that time you were working for Mille Lacs Band."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

"And you've since returned to your own nation, Red Lake, and I'm curious, how did you become...how did you come to serve as coordinator of this constitutional reform initiative, and maybe shed a little bit of light on what your role is within this effort?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. Okay, we'll start at the beginning. Sam Strong, he went to Cohort 1 and he was part of the participation that did the GANN analysis and he was part of the team that brought me back to Red Lake. He had made a phone call, we had met through the Rebuilders. I didn't know Sam from anybody. He grew up in North Carolina and he went to school out east so we didn't have any previous history. So we met through the program and he called me and he said, ‘Would you mind coming home to work?' And I said, ‘Yeah, I'd love to. I've been planning on trying to find something.' I'd actually applied for three other jobs and the way it worked out I didn't get those...I didn't even get interviews for most of them because they would just fill them with whoever they wanted to at the time. So when he said, ‘Do you want to come back home,' I said, ‘Yes, I would love to.' And then he told me what it was for and I was really excited because with the conversations with my dad, with my relatives and with other people, we identified that the constitution is the first step in reassessing our governance and restructuring it to what we need as a nation to move us into the next generations. So that was kind of how I got involved in the process.

And my job as the coordinator is, we have a committee of 13 members who are...they're identified into each individual group. We have Redby, Red Lake, Little Rock and Ponemah. We have two from each one of those districts and they're the representatives that represent those people there. So they're the liaison between the people and their voice and then the committee. And then we also have a chairperson and we have a cultural advisor and we have a legal advisor. So those people are all citizen-members of Red Lake and my job is to help them to engage the community, is to get out there and do the grassroots, hit the ground running, try to figure out what they want.

But initially when I first came on, I was hoping everybody would be at the same level of education that I was with...and that wasn't the case. So we did probably like six to eight months of just real intensive training on what is a constitution, what is our constitution, researching our history, how did we get those constitutions, what was the relationships between the tribes and the governments, whether it be the state or federal during those times and what was...what were the catalysts of why they wanted to make an actual constitution in the way they did. So we did a lot of research and we put a lot of time and effort into figuring our what other tribes have done, what our tribe did in the past, how they made decisions and it was really an enlightening and learning experience for the whole committee.

So from there then I get to connect them with the community. So I coordinate community events, I coordinate... we do like powwows or celebration feasts. We also do just small group meetings. We do an advisory meeting. So my job is to make sure all of those go well, get all the people there, do all the coordination, get all the food. So it's a really intensive job, but I'm pretty good at it so I hope I'm doing a good job so far."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned when the group first got together and you guys were trying to wrestle with, ‘How do we tackle this and this challenge that's before us and how do we develop a process,' that there was some internal learning that needed to take place and it started with developing a constitutional history of Red Lake. How important is that and what is the constitutional history of Red Lake? Where is your current...I guess first and foremost, how did Red Lake come to have its first written constitution and how did it come to have the current constitution that it governs by?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Okay. So in 1918 we created a constitution and that constitution, it's basically identified a chieftain system, which we had the clan systems before then so it was similar to the same kind of system. But we needed to identify people to go to to make decisions about resources, about...because the government wanted trees, the lumber barons were there, the railroad was trying to come through. so there was a lot of people that needed to get access to those and also needed resources to go in and out of what we had as the current...the reservation. So when...they didn't have...they didn't know who to go to like, ‘Well, what clan deals with this or what clan deals...?' Instead they just created the constitution so they knew, ‘Okay, this is who we go to when we need to make a decision based on do we need to...require X amount of land or we want to get these trees from here so who do we talk to?' So that was one of the ways to limit the confusion between the federal government and also the businesses that were trying to do business with the tribe.

And then ultimately in 1958 we created a new constitution. This was a boilerplate IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution and, that's essentially what it was, but they had been proposing since 1937, 1938 to get that constitution in place, but the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was dragging their feet and saying, ‘No, the way it's going right now with Red Lake, we like it. We like the way it's going.' They did a big land grab with us. They got 11 million acres and we got to keep our tribe intact. We fought the Dawes Act so there's no allotment. Red Lake is one whole parcel, which I think that the foresight that our ancestors had for that was amazing. But in retrospect, looking back at it, the BIA had their hands in a lot of things for Red Lake, but Red Lake was a champion of sovereignty so they were pushing back and so they didn't want...’No, we don't want to implement this constitution because then there's democratic rule, then there's going to be some...we like the way the chief system works so we can just go, ‘Hey, we need this,'' and it was easy to work. So ultimately in 1958 they finally pushed it through and they adopted the revised constitution for Red Lake and that has been what we have been governed by since then."

Ian Record:

"So it sounds from talking with others that are involved in the Red Lake reform effort that there's a sentiment among many in the community -- including, as you mentioned, some of your own relatives -- that this current document that we govern by, it's not a product of us, it's not reflective of who we are. How much of that is driving this current movement for reform?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think a lot of that is. We look at our culture and our values that we hold to high esteem and none of those things are involved in that constitution. There is nothing that talks about our children, there's nothing that talks about our elders, there's nothing that talks about our language, our culture, the ways that we made decisions in the past. It's essentially a business model constitution on how to run like say for example a board of directors like Target Corporation. So it takes into account nothing that we hold near and dear to us and talks about our culture, none talks about our land. Our lake is one of the things that we're very much proponents for and stewards of and even that isn't included in there and unfortunately because of that we have lost a portion of Upper Red Lake due to mismanagement of how they did the survey and nobody was held accountable because nothing said in our constitution that ‘We are going to protect our lake in its entirety,' in the whole thing and that's going to be first and foremost. So ultimately we lost because of that."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to go back to the initiative in terms of how it was established. Can you briefly give us an overview of what this initiative looks like, how is it structured and why was it structured in the way it was and what is its I guess ultimate charge?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. Our charge is in the committee and that's who I help, is they're responsible for getting information to the people to give them a reason to kind of respond to stimulus. So if we want them to talk about something like land and natural resources, we put out a survey and ask them for information and then they respond back. And then based off that information we can kind of mine down the next questions to make them...to get kind of a smaller scope of how we're going to detail parts of the constitution and that's worked out well for us. We're separated completely from the tribal government, we're insulated in the fact that they signed off saying that they're going to be hands off for the committee and we also have contracts with each one of the committee members that states that they can't have a direct...somebody in their direct family that's either on the council or is going to serve on the council. So if like say somebody gets voted into office in our upcoming election, we have the runoff, then that means that if they were on our committee they have to step down then because that's in their contract. So that I think is...the way that is structured is good in the sense that it gives the people in the...the citizens, your average every day citizen, it gives them that sense of ‘Okay, this isn't the tribal council's idea. This is ours. This is our document, this is something that we can get behind, this is something that we can put our fingerprints on so to speak and it'll be ours.'

So it's, I think...we learned that from a couple other tribes who have done it differently and it didn't work out so well for them. It either...they either extended their time period that they...some of them even got basically...for lack of better words got their throat cut. They couldn't do constitutional reform anymore so we wanted to make sure when we set it up initially, that was one of my first questions to Sam when he asked me I said, ‘Is the tribal council going to be involved?' and he said, ‘No.' Then I said, ‘Okay, then perfect.' And I think that's the same...I don't think that I'm alone in that. I think a lot of the community members also have that kind of mistrust and it's not to say that our leaders are bad, it's just been over the years things have happened here, things have happened there and that trust has been broken and trust is very hard to build. So then to limit that, kind of the naysayers, or whatnot, we decided that we're going to keep the tribal council out of it and they're going to just allow the people to have this thing and it'll be ours."

Ian Record:

"And how important is that to send that clear message to the citizens who you're trying to engage, you're trying to get them interested in this discussion about reform and get them to offer their input, how important is it to send the message then that this is bigger than any one single elected leader or this is bigger than any current crop of leaders? It's got not just an independent nature to it, but it's got a larger, longer term nature to it, it's got a longer-term purpose to it than just who are the holders of the power right now."

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think the legacy of our forefathers -- like I talked about -- fighting the Dawes Act and that kind of shines through. And then when you tell them, ‘Hey, this is about us,' then they don't feel...they feel safer to share their ideas. They don't feel like there can be repercussions or, ‘My husband or my brother might lose their job or whatnot,' because that has happened in tribes over history that if you start political turmoil then things can happen to your...you can lose your spot on a housing list, you can lose some resources, you can get fired from your job. So making sure that there's that insulated barrier there, people will feel a lot more free to share their ideas and that fear isn't there and then that's where you get that real raw feedback and emotional response to some of these things. Where we talked about our children who are not enrolled because of our own standards of membership to the tribe, they are not covered under the Indian Child Welfare Act. So if something happens to like say myself and when my kids, they're not enrolled right now because they're 1/100th of a percent off of blood. They have enough Native blood to be enrolled in other tribes, but not just in Red Lake. They're not covered under that. They can be taken and then given to...anywhere. They can be sent anywhere in the states or whatnot and that's something that a lot of them it resounded with them like, ‘We need to protect our kids and we need to protect our land and we need to protect our people.' But none of that is covered in our current constitution. It just essentially talks about building a tribal government, a makeshift tribal government and how the resources can be divvied up then."

Ian Record:

"So I've been to the website for the constitutional reform initiative; very impressive. And I know some of your colleagues on the committee are doing a lot of...developing a lot of educational materials that will enrich that site moving forward, but I want to talk a bit about the vision statement because something in there struck me that explicit in that vision statement is this idea of strengthening ideas of self-governance in the constitution. Can you provide perspective on that and what is the nature of the conversation around strengthening this idea of self-governance? Because if you read that the implication is that, ‘Our current constitution doesn't fully enact our sense of what self-governance means.'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, self-governance, deciding what we're going to do and where we're going as a nation is important. And one of the things that we suffer from is the fact that we have to chase grant money and federal dollars and things like...we always have to jump through other people's hoops. So we're not really governing ourselves. We're governing by dollars or governing to whatever extent that a grant source wants us to do to get some money funneled and to try to help alleviate some of the hardships that the citizens face. So self-governance is taking that accountability, creating our own government, creating our own future, creating what we're going to do for economic development, what we're going to do to create better institutions and governing structure, how do we align our schools with our tribal government and how do we align our schools to be able to help our citizens become entrepreneurs if they want. It's creating a place where our tribal leaders can actually worry about what we're going to do in five years, 10 years rather than worry about who's going to get a job tomorrow or who's going to get a raise next week. Those are the things that...the decisions that they're making on a constant basis, and those are management-level decisions that should be made by the directors and managers. Those are not governance issues. Those are things that I believe and a lot of other citizens believe that those should be dealt with on those managerial levels, not necessarily on a council level. So they're dealing with every day, ‘Who's going to get their lights on,' those kind of things, when they should be worrying about, ‘What are we doing strategically to move ourselves into the next 10 years, next 20 years?'"

Ian Record:

"So you've touched a bit about...you touched on a bit already about some of the things that you guys are doing, some of the activities that the reform initiative and the committee members in particular are engaged in. Can you talk about some of the strategies you and the committee are taking to engage the people and sort of hook them in and then keep them engaged throughout what could be a multi-year process? From everything I've heard from you and others, you're going into this knowing that this is going to take a few years to get done if we want to do it right."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes. So we started off and once we got the information that we thought was going to be relevant to us to start the process, we started off by doing an initial survey. We did some excerpts in the papers, we did some kind of op-eds and discussing what we're doing, what the project looks like, what the timeline is so people could get an idea of, ‘Okay, if you ask us some questions, we're not going to expect you to give us a new constitution in two weeks or in a month, something like that.' So they understood the process and the timeline. And then we also first initially started talking about things that are near and dear to people's hearts. So we talked about language and culture, which is very important to us, to our tribe, to our nation and we also talked about our natural resources, which is another thing that we hold very dear. So that was the thing that we could get everybody to rally behind. So it wasn't a polarizing thing, it wasn't like talking to them about membership or something like that where you've got people on extreme opposites of that continuum. It was easy for us to transition everybody into getting behind the project and see what it is and then give them feedback on that level. We also met people where they were so if they couldn't come to a meeting, we offered the website, we got a Facebook page, we got a YouTube site that we up materials on. So if we have something that we think is really important, we'll put it out on those mediums so that they can see it on the phone when they're in the car or at their house. If we've got elders that can't make it into a meeting, we can bring them a DVD of what we did. So it's really important that we find out who needs to be at the table and then find out how to get them there or find out how to bring that table then to them."

Ian Record:

"You've talked about some of the strategy you guys are employing to get and then keep people engaged and I'm curious, what are some of the challenges that you've encountered thus far? I know it's early, I know you guys are in terms of full-bore implementation of this reform process you're about a year in or so, but what are some of the challenges you've encountered and how are you working to overcome those?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think life is the biggest challenge. People have lives, people have things that they're concerned about. They're concerned about keeping food on their table, their lights on. Those are real-world issues and we're not a rich tribe. We don't have money coming in from casinos, and so we're just trying to combat what the I guess side effects are of that, then try to keep people engaged in that. And it's hard when you're looking at something that's a grandiose idea like a constitution versus, ‘How am I going to get food in my fridge for my kids.' And then also get them to say, ‘Okay, now I need to stop what I'm doing over here and invest some time into this.' So it was hard to initially capture their attention, but then keeping them engaged is something that's been very difficult. I think being transparent and continuing to kind of not so much bombard them but keep them up to date with information has been the easiest way. Posting things on Facebook, questions, throwing ideas out there. If somebody comes by my office and they have a really great idea, I'll put that out on Facebook and put it on our website and say, ‘What do you guys think of this?' And it gives people an opportunity to weigh in and then those things get shared by a bunch of people and pretty soon it's kind of like this landslide of things coming in. So it's easy in that sense where if using a tool, a technology like Facebook that something can happen like this and next thing you know 10,000 people have seen it. So just kind of capitalizing on those things has been an easy way to try to alleviate the issues of life happening.

Another thing that's recently happened is we went through...we lost our chairman. We lost 'Buck' Jourdain and that's not to say that the new Chairman Darrell Seki isn't going to do a good job, but he [Jourdain] was a big supporter of constitutional reform, which isn't bad or good; Darrell Seki is also a big constitutional reform proponent. And so he comes along and says, in his statement he says, ‘I'm going to support this fully.' But there's other people that are on the council that may not like the idea of losing kind of the way things are...change is a hard process for anybody, it's hard for me. So then if you go in and somebody identifies, ‘Uh oh, this might change the way we do things.' ‘Well, we've been doing this...I've been on council for 15, 20 years. What are we going to do? I won't know what I'm doing.' So that's kind of scary for them. So it's easier for them to kind of sit back and not help us with it and in the same sense we did tell them to kind of stay out, but those have been two of the things that have been kind of the hardest to keep people engaged because of the idea that once you...when you have an election, it is a polarizing thing. Families start fighting and people who are husband and wife start fighting. It gets down to that molecular, granular level that we have to try to keep these people focused on the big picture and not just the here and now."

Ian Record:

"So keeping them focused on the big picture; and you mentioned people have real issues in their lives, people are busy, in many tribal communities there's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of social ills that people are wrestling with, it's very time consuming, it distracts their attention from these sorts of things. Isn't part of the way to combat that though is instructing people on the role the constitution plays in their lives currently and then how a stronger constitution could benefit their lives, enhance their lives, enhance the lives of their children, that sort of thing? Is that part of the argument and the education that you guys are sharing with citizens in these community meetings and through other ways to say, ‘Look, the constitution matters. You may not see it operating in your lives every day, but it matters and on many levels'?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, when we first started, probably about 85, 90 percent of the people had never even read the constitution, didn't really know what it meant and didn't know how it applied to their life. And that was one of the questions, like you said, we got was, ‘Why does this matter to me?' So then finding out that tie between where we're at now and some of the problems that have stemmed from us not having a constitution that matches our culture and then identifying with them some places that have changed their constitution and look at the things that they've been able to do now. They've been able to grow as a nation, they've been able to implement new procedures that helped them get new economic opportunities, that helped them revitalize some of their language where they were losing it, get some more fluent speakers. These are things that people really, really want and these are things that our current constitution isn't going to allow to happen. So that aligning their ideas of what they want in their own lives with what the big picture is that'll help the tribe is something that we've done as a committee and is part of my job, yes. And it's been very important on keeping people engaged and also identifying with some people who were the ones sitting on the back like, ‘Oh, I don't think that I really want to get involved in this.' ‘This matters to you.' ‘Why does it matter to me?' ‘Are your kids enrolled?' ‘Yes.' ‘Are your grandkids enrolled?' ‘Well, no.' ‘Aren't they part of your family?' ‘Yeah.' ‘Are they part of this tribe? Well, I guess not. So let's talk about that. How can we figure this out, because these are problems that a lot of people face? You're not alone in this.' So then they're like, ‘Oh, that's...okay, so the constitution can do that?' ‘Yeah, the constitution covers our government and how it...how we as a people want that government to function.'"

Ian Record:

"One of the issues that Red Lake has been focusing on and discussing in the early stages of the reform effort is whether and how to remove the Secretary of Interior approval clause from its constitution. Why the attention to that specific issue?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, historically Red Lake has been a champion of sovereignty and also pushing the limits of what the government thought was okay and not okay and that's one of the things...if you look back to the Roger Jourdain era, he was going to D.C., he was a very vocal person, he was the "squeaky wheel" that pushed a lot of these issues that other tribes also face into the laps of Congress to say, ‘What are you going to do about this?' So then looking at that, Red Lake has not necessarily asked anybody what to do. They've decided what to do for themselves, but somehow they included that we have to ask for the Secretary of Interior to approve our constitution, our changes to it, our membership stuff. So those are things that people have said, ‘Well, why do we even have that? We ran the BIA out of here a long time ago.' Well, we wrote that into our own constitution, we asked for that to happen.' So they're, ‘Well, why don't we just take it out?' ‘Okay, let's talk about that.'

They decided to do that, they put it up for referendum vote back in 1990...I think 1998 and it lost by over 600 votes and so that was concerning to me. I was asking -- at the time Bobby White Feather was the chairman -- and so I went and asked him, I said, ‘What was going on during that time? Like why were people...why were they not...they were okay with kicking the BIA out, but they were okay with keeping this language in here that says we've got to ask them for approval to do things. Why were there...' And he said he thinks that it was -- and I'm kind of paraphrasing here -- he thought it was because of the mistrust that [people had of] the tribal government had at the time. They had just gone through an era in 1979-1980 where there was turmoil in our tribal government. There was shootouts going on, there was buildings being burned down, a lot of our history was actually lost because our tribal council building at the time was burned to the ground. So we look at, that's where our archives were, that's where a lot of our important documents were.

So the people were like, ‘No, we think the government should be involved in this because we want them to watch.' But they didn't really know that the government's not really caring what the tribe does, they just...’You put that in there in 1930, they cared back then. 1980, 1990, 2000s, they don't really care what you're doing. Look at some of the Supreme Court cases,' they said. ‘You figure out your membership. You figure out what you're going to do with your people. You figure out what you're going to do with your resources. You now have the ability to do your own self-governance stuff so we're not going to have our BIA people in there anymore.' So they kind of cut those parental ties so to speak, but we still have that in there because we thought we had Big Brother watch so ‘The tribal council can't screw us over,' or something to that effect is kind of what I got out of it. And there wasn't a whole lot of education done with it. They didn't go out and say, ‘This is what's going on with this. This is why it's important that we take ownership back of our constitution.' So I think that if they'd have done a little more education behind that and a little more transparency, I think that probably would have passed back in the ‘90s and we wouldn't be worrying about it right now."

Ian Record:

"I know, being a student of a lot of different tribes' constitutional reform efforts, I know that this is a common topic, common issue of concern, and I know that some tribes have approached this as they engage in sort of comprehensive reform to say, ‘We're going to go ahead and take this...we're going to do this as round one. We're going to get rid of this approval clause.' Laguna Pueblo is a good example of that. Back in 2012 they just said, ‘We know one thing that everybody can...we've gotten everybody to agree on, let's get rid of this language. Because we then want to engage in a discussion about what sort of constitution we want for ourselves without any sort of secondary or perhaps even primary consideration of what the feds are going to think.' Where's your nation right now? I know it's early, but is there a consensus yet on, ‘Is this going to be part of the overall package that we ultimately get the people to vote on or are we going to break this out as a separate amendment again?'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"That's the big question. We've been posing that to the community and one of the things we did is we actually wrote to the Secretary of Interior and asked them, ‘Can we just take this out and you guys will approve it?' He said, ‘Of course. Definitely take it out. We encourage you to take it out because we don't necessarily want to be meddling in your business.' So they wrote us a one-page letter that's going to be good for helping us to educate our own people like, ‘Look, this is something that can benefit us. This is some...we don't need somebody else approving any of our documents, approving what our government is and how it works. That's up to the people.' So that was one of the first steps we took. We also polled them. We did a survey, ‘What do you guys think of the Secretary of Interior? What does it mean to you? How do you think that it applies to us as a nation?' So that was enlightening too to kind of get those different responses and kind of get a feel for where everybody's at in the process. That way we can tailor our message to whatever individuals we have to to try to get the education part of it out so they can make a decision, an informed decision on their own versus, ‘I don't know what that means so I'm going to vote no because I know how things go when it is in there.'"

Ian Record:

"You've made...you've discussed...you've touched on some of the issues that have sort of been coming out in some of these meetings: culture, language, obviously the Secretary of Interior approval issue, membership as you mentioned is a big issue. What are some of the issues that have been bubbling to the surface as you've guys begin to engage the community and get their thoughts on constitutional reform?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"It's a lot of the buzz words like the transparency of the government. ‘Why don't they come and tell us in the individual communities what they've been talking about, what they're doing, what they're working on?' A lot of the people, they find out after the fact like one day all of a sudden there's this building going up. ‘Well, what is this? Why didn't anybody tell us there was a...why didn't anybody ask us what was going on?' So transparency is a huge thing. They want the tribal government to be transparent. They also want them to be accountable. They want them to be accountable to the people and to themselves. So that means...I guess it would mean some sort of job description they've been talking about like, ‘What does...what is the secretary-treasurer, what is their job? What are they supposed to do?' Because how can you hold anybody accountable if you have no idea what they're really supposed to do. So it's looking into some of those things.

Also they want to talk about our economic development not just trying to get casinos, but also working with the tribal members to kind of make it where the tribal government will allow the citizen entrepreneurs to actually have their businesses versus making them get a license, making them jump through this hoop, making them do this, making them do that, which is I think was important to them in the past to be able to kind of control what was going on in the communities, but now there's people who are very well educated. There are some very, very smart people in Red Lake that want to start their own businesses, want a culture that has a bank that they can go to. There's no bank, there's no banking system. So a lot of those things that would be extended to you in an outside world or an outside community is not available there so they want to talk about that.

What is economic development for the tribe? What does it mean for our people? Also, what does it mean for our government to get involved in the economic development versus we're doing it on our own or is it a separate entity, setting up tribal businesses like we have right now in Red Lake, Inc. Is it that? We have Red Lake, Inc. and we've had them for quite a few years now, almost four years, and our businesses are turning profits now. They never did before in the past. Not to say that any one person or any one thing is responsible, but to give that back to people who went to school for business, who know how businesses run, who now how to do budgets and who know how to do just anything that has to do with business. It was good for our tribe because we're making money on those businesses where we were just kind of pouring money into them and trying to get them to work before. So it's how do we separate all those different silos and then how do we then created a government that's going to be looking at what's more important for our future, what's more important for our children, dealing with the issues that we have rather than putting Band-Aids on things."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned this early on about how you, in structuring the reform initiative, 'I'm trying to figure out what's a proven strategy that will work for us,' that you looked at some other nations. Can you talk a little bit more about how you're learning from the constitutional reform experiences of other tribes? And perhaps on the flip side, yes, it's early on but what could other nations that are perhaps just discussing reform right now and when they start reform, what could they learn from Red Lake?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. I don't know for a fact what they can learn from us, but I can talk about what we've learned from other tribes. We've learned from some experiences that White Earth [Nation] had, that the Blackfeet [Tribe] have had, that Gila River [Indian Community]  have had, that the Cherokee [Nation] have had and just looking at kind of dissecting and mining through what they've done and how they got their process going, how they worked it. Did they have a committee, did they just have like a quorum of people that came together? How did they identify those people? How did...so it was kind of a learning experience for us to first initially set up like, ‘How are we going to do this that's going to be a good way, that our people can get behind and respond to?' And what we came up with is a committee of people who are from each individual community so that they felt represented. Sometimes in our communities, and it's a funny thing, the divide-and-conquer mentality. We have four communities and people identify with those communities more than they identify with the nation as a whole. So we decided, ‘Okay, that's how they identify, that's how we're going to work it. We're going to give them two representatives from each one of their separate districts and then those people will be the ones who they go to or can be a liaison for the committee to bring back the information, to bring back the ideas, also to share them forward. So they're like a conduit for each individual district.

And then like I touched on, we needed to figure out how to engage the community because we looked at, let's say White Earth for example, they got together I think it was about 40 people and they did some sessions where they would kind of hammer out all these details. And they did it with good hearts I'm sure and good intentions, but I looked at the videos of the people in the communities and they were really upset. ‘Why didn't you come to us? Why didn't you ask us what we thought? Why weren't we involved in these conversations?' And that's something we didn't want to answer in the future so we thought, ‘We better get them involved first in the process and then figure it out,' versus bringing it to them after the fact and saying, ‘Here this is good for you.' Because historically that's happened for Native peoples throughout history since first contact is, ‘Here, this is good for you, take this.' So we wanted to get them involved so that their DNA and their fingerprints and everything was on it. So their ideas were in it, it resounded with them, they can get behind it and say, ‘I had those ideas. I shared these ideas. These are now in our governing document. That's awesome!' So that was something that we learned from them.

Gila River, with Anthony Hill, he came in and he did a full meeting. We had about four hours. And so basically he came in and told us everything, how the whole process worked for them, how they started, how they got these road bumps along the way, how they worked past some of them. Then their regime change came and kind of put a kibosh to everything so they had to work really, really hard, but their documentation process was I think the thing that we learned the best from Gila River is they kept everything that they did and they kept record of everything they did so that way they could I guess regurgitate that at any time to anybody, ‘Why did you guys do this?' ‘Well, because we polled everybody in a survey or we had a community meeting and this is the results from what you guys said you wanted to see done.' So that was important for us so that we could, in the future, if somebody came along, even if somebody comes along in 50 years and they had no idea of how this constitution was here, they can go back and they can look through the whole process. We have it digitized, we have video, we have it in a lot of different forms. That way if some...one written form or something gets destroyed, it's always going to live on and it'll always be there so people can go back and say, ‘That's how they did that.'"

Ian Record:

"Isn't that critical also for interpreting the constitution because we hear a lot of attorneys, in particular tribal attorneys, talk to us about, the constitution's typically these short documents. They don't go into a whole lot of detail. They set up the basic parameters and judges say this too, ‘If I'm being asked to interpret the constitution, often it would be really helpful for me if I know the back story.' What was the motivation behind why this provision reads the way it does?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Anthony Hill came to me and I actually got to ride with him. I drove him back and forth from the city so he got a good 10 and a half hours in the car with me. So I was asking him and he said, ‘The biggest thing is legislative intent. When I'm sitting on my...I've got my judge hat on, I'm sitting there and I'm trying to figure out is this a constitutional issue, how did they make this decision, how do I apply this?' He said, ‘And so I thought, that's the best way to do that is to actually have that in there with our documentation inserts, this is why we decided this. So then when a judge picks that up they can say, ‘Oh, legislative intent -- this is why they did it so this is how we can apply it.' And then if it needs to be changed, then you know why that decision was made so you know how you can change it then ultimately."

Ian Record:

"So I'm curious, I know it's early but looking forward, if this process succeeds, it reaches its fruition, what will success look like when all's said and done?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Success I think for the committee and for myself, too, is that a new document ultimately gets written that's accepted by the people, but I think the real success is the implementation of that, is getting to that final product, is getting everybody onboard and I think that the way we're engaging the community now and getting their feedback and getting them involved in the process is going to help to expedite that process in the future because then when you sit down and you have a director of a program who's ultimately going to be their daily, day-to-day, basic stuff that they do is going to be impacted by this new constitution, that they're going to know why this stuff was done, how it was done because they are going to be part of the process. So then they can buy into it and everything can move, that transition can happen more quickly and also less painfully, the growing pains of trying to implement that. So I think that for us would be success is when that finished product is done and the implementation is done."

Ian Record:

"And isn't that really critical because when you think about it, when you ratify a new constitution, you're simply changing a document. You're changing paper and then you've got this much larger challenge I would argue of actually having to change the political culture of the community, not just of the elected leadership and those who work within government, but the citizens and how they interface with government, right?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

"It's an on...does that not require some sort of ongoing education, educational challenge to remind and instruct people, ‘This is why the constitution is set out the way it is. This is what we decided at the time and why and this is what it means for you, citizen, program director, council member, chairman.'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes, for example, let's say I'm under a hardship and I need some help paying my light bill. Right now the process is they can go and just kind of ask one of the council members and say, ‘Hey, I need help. I need my lights paid.' And then they can then in turn pay that, but with the new...the way that the government will potentially kind of be set up it's going to have those checks and balances where if I don't do what I'm supposed to do and use my due diligence, then those...I'm going to have to go through the hoops of whatever we have for programs available to help me out rather than trying to just go right directly to one of my elected leaders and saying, ‘I need help. I want help.' So that's going to be a growing pain for some people because they're used to that. They've been doing that now for 10, 15, 20 years saying, ‘Hey, I need help with this. Hey, I need help with that.' So that is going to be very difficult for some people, but I think the overarching goals that we're going to have in place are going to kind of supersede any of those, the little...the intricate things that are going to have to get ironed out in the end. My hope is that that learning curve isn't so hard and it doesn't take as long, but I guess the people will ultimately be the ones to judge that and then the success will be based on how we adopt it and then implementation of it."

Ian Record:

"Well, Justin, we really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule -- I know you've got a lot on your plate -- to share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Awesome. Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, that's all the time we have on today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2014 Arizona Board of Regents."

Miriam Jorgensen: Considering People-Made Law in Your Constitution (Presentation Highlight)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "Key Things a Constitution Should Address: 'How Do We Make Law?'," Miriam Jorgensen lays out some of the different ways that Native nations can provide mechanisms for citizens of those nations to make laws or change laws governing those nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Considering People-Made Law in Your Constitution (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation highlight.

"So what if a representative council isn't the only place you want that law made? Here critically I'm going to point out that there might be lots of decisions that you decide are perfectly appropriate to depute to a legislative council, to a representative council of some sort. But there may be certain kinds of decisions that you don't want to give over to them, that as a community, as a people you think there are certain kinds of decisions that you want to have broader agreement on and that's where a general council decision or a decision of the entire body of the nation, of all the voting age citizens or whatever, might be something that you want to make a provision for in your constitution.

I will say this one caveat, which is the first point above there. If general councils are the only way you're making law, that every time you want to make a new decision and you take it to the entire voting public, most research evidence proves...suggests...I shouldn't say proves because all that research do is sort of say, "˜Here's the general trend that we see out there.' Most research suggests that if you take most decisions to a general council, all decisions to the general council, that's a recipe for instability. There's just in a sense too much authority given over to kind of who showed up in the high school gym on any given night. But very successful Indigenous constitutions or other kinds of non-Indigenous constitutions too do have certain kinds of decisions that they say, "˜Yeah, this needs to go to a wider public.'

Now for a lot of native nations, one of the decisions that almost always goes to a broader public are decisions about land. So when you look across Native nation constitutions, Indigenous constitutions, and you see, okay, here's the powers of the tribal council or whatever the representative legislative body is, the congress, again, a council or a legislature, whatever it's going to be termed, there's still almost always when there are decisions to be made about purchasing land, selling land, changing the use of land, those go to a broader body, to a general council of some sort. So that's one way.

Another newer kind of provision we see in some of the very modern tribal constitutions might be called referendum or initiative and these are not quite the same as a general council meeting, but it comes from sort of the, I guess, the progressive and reform movement where basically even in non-Indigenous nations people said, "˜Well, individuals should have a voice. Individuals should be able to challenge their governments not just at election time but should be able to challenge and say, 'Hey, my representatives on the council didn't carry forth a piece of legislation that I would have liked to have seen'.' And initiative and referendum provide an opportunity for people to get enough signatures and then push a piece of legislation forward themselves as a population. So some constitutions provide for that kind of effort as well. And I've provided some examples in the handout first of limited general council power.

So here from the Coquille Indian Nation, where they've given the opportunity to the general council to make certain kinds of decisions, they're going to elect the tribal council, they can amend the constitution and they can make advisory recommendations. There isn't a listing here about land but again that shows you providing a general council with some limited legislative authority."

Here's an example from Skokomish [Tribal Nation], where they have an initiative provision and I love this initiative provision because it basically says, "˜Yeah, yeah, we know that people may still want to come forward and make law and not just have the council do all of that for us,' but look at this, they say, "˜An initiative can't just be a way to destabilize government. You can't just use an initiative to go out there and say, 'Oh, hey, that council, they didn't do what I wanted. There, I'm just going to bring an initiative forward and make law without them'.' Skokomish says, "˜I recognize that I want people to be or we was a nation recognize we want people to be able to make law and to put it out there, but they need to have 60 percent of the number of people who cast ballots in the last election sign a petition for this initiative and then it has to pass by two-thirds of all persons who voted in that election.' So it's a pretty high bar, right? It says, "˜This is going to...you can pass people-made law, but it has to meet a pretty high standard before it...otherwise it's going to be too de-stabilizing to government.'

Just a little aside, a lot of political scientists...I do economics and political science is my sort of academic degrees...a lot of political scientists look at California and say, "˜California doesn't do this well enough.' What do we know about California? Constantly they're having these referenda and initiatives and a lot of people said that California has too low of a bar, it allows too much of that disruption of the day to day flow of political business to go on by setting the bar too low. So it's too easy in a sense for the populace to kind of disrupt the government business by forcing these things forward.

So as a tribal nation with an even smaller population, I think it's really important to consider, yeah, it might be nice to have people-made law and to have provisions for that in your constitution, but really take seriously this notion of which kinds of things are you going to depute to a representative council, which kinds of things are you going to depute to a regularly convened general council and which opportunities do you really want to give to initiative and referendum. So that's a set of allocational decisions you need to be making in your constitution."

Ian Record: Some of the Difficulties of Constitutional Reform (Presentation Highlight)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "Defining Constitutions and the Movement to Remake Them," Ian Record discusses two of the many challenges that Native nations typically encounter when they move to change their existing constitutions or develop new ones.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Record, Ian. "Some of the Difficulties of Constitutional Reform (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation highlight.

"Legacies of colonialism complicate it [constitutional reform]. I've had the great fortune of sitting down with Joe Fliles-Away, who you heard from this morning, and he often discusses when it comes to the issues of constitutions and constitutional reform -- and he may have shared it again with you this morning -- that it's really hard to do in Indigenous communities because you have so many people in your communities who are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, they're dealing with those traumas, however they're manifested whether it's substance abuse, alcohol abuse, violence in the home, whatever that is and you're trying to get them to care about their constitution and get them to provide input on how to change it. It's really, really difficult to get that person to contribute to this process because ideally you want everybody in your nation providing their voice to your constitution because your constitution is, ideally, supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. Frank Ettawageshik said it yesterday -- the constitution is the vehicle through which the people inform the government how they want the government to serve them and ideally you want all of your people providing that voice to that government.

So you have the legacies of colonialism. You have this issue of time. I'll never forget, and it was only a few months ago, we received an email from a tribe that we've been working with on and off over the years and it was from the chairman of the tribe and he sent us this email and he said, 'We're talking about constitutional reform here.' He said, 'I've only got X number of months left in my term.' He goes, 'I want to get this thing done before we get out of office or potentially I get booted out and somebody else comes in who may not share my belief that constitutional reform is a necessity for our tribe.' So he says, 'Here's the process I've laid out.' And we were reading through it and basically he had it in mind to come up with an entirely new constitution within six weeks. Six weeks. This is a nation of more than 5,000 people and he said, 'We can go from initiating a conversation with the community to having a draft constitution in six weeks.' It's not realistic. It's not realistic.

And so you really need to be cognizant of that issue about time because if you're going to engage in meaningful... a meaningful dialogue with your people around this issue of constitutionalism and what you want your constitution to look like moving forward, you've got to be very cognizant of time. You've got to understand going in that it's an organic, messy, unpredictable process and you can pre-plan it as much as you can and try to design the perfect process and inevitably you're going to have to retool, you're going to have to re-task in the midst of it because it's unpredictable. Unforeseen obstacles are going to arise and the idea that you can do it in that short a timeframe, it's just...it's on one level insane because it sort of assumes that you're not going to get to that level of engagement that you need to have with your people because often the challenge you face at a fundamental level is your people do not have ownership in that system, often because that system is not theirs. And so if you're serious about re-instilling in your system of governance a true sense of ownership by the people in that system, it's going to take time."

Patricia Riggs: Making Change Happen at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo

Producer
Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

Patricia Riggs, Director of Economic Development at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP), discusses how YDSP has developed and honed a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to ciutizen engagement over the past decade in order to ensure that the decisions the YDSP government make reflect and enact the will of YDSP citizens.

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Riggs, Patricia. "Making Change Happen at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo." Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. St. Paul, Minnesota. February 6, 2014. Presentation.

Ian Record:

“So without further ado, I want to introduce Patricia Riggs. As I mentioned earlier, Patricia is the Director of Economic Development for Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in El Paso, Texas. We’ve worked with Ysleta del Sur for a number of years sort of off and on and we’re often asked to come and teach, do executive education with some of their leadership or program managers and so forth, and what we often find is that we end up learning a heck of a lot more from them than we actually teach them. We consider them one of the breakaway tribes that are really enacting these nation-building principles we’ve talked about and doing it in very culturally distinct ways. Patricia is going to talk about actually making change happen, how did they actually make change happen because they were faced with a crisis about 12, 13 years ago now, 2002, that threatened to really derail the nation and how did they come from that point where, listening to you guys talk, where a lot of your nations are, the struggles that you’re having and how do you actually begin to go down that nation-building road. So without further ado, Patricia Riggs. Thank you very much, Patricia, for joining us and enduring the cold weather.”

Patricia Riggs:

“Thank you very much. I’m really glad to be here. I know I emailed Ian yesterday and asked if it was still on because it was one degrees, and to me that’s like really a catastrophe because we don’t get that kind of weather. So I guess to you it’s pretty normal. I’m here and I’m really happy to be here and I want to share with you some of the things that we’ve done at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. We’ve actually done quite a bit of work over the last 10 years and I know and I feel how you’re struggling to get everybody involved in what you’re doing. So I’m glad to share the practices of the programs, as well as the strategic plans and how we implemented them at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

One of the things that we really truly believe in is citizen engagement and we do it as a comprehensive approach. So we get everybody involved in whatever program or project that we’re working on and at first it was really, really difficult. We really didn’t have a plan, we didn’t have a structure and we just kind of figured it out as we went along, but what we’re doing now is we’re looking back and kind of evaluating our successes and coming up with a model, not just for ourselves, but to share it with other tribes as well, and also teaching that model within our own community to the different programs so that they can follow it.

So as far as community engagement is concerned, we really believe that all our tribal members have to be involved in the planning and decision-making, and especially when it comes to a particular issue. If it’s something that could be life changing for the tribe or has just significant meaning, we make sure that we get that input from our tribal community. And then the other thing is…one of the things is we really try to make sure that it’s not just one group or one person kind of setting the agenda for what we’re trying to change because that involvement from the community is necessary in order to get the buy in for the project. And then also just listening and respecting the community and leadership and elders, all your people that are going to help support this program. So at the end, you get all that feedback that you got for the community and that’s the tool that you use in order to make an informed decision.

So as we worked over the years with the community and we came up with different plans and program models -- as I said earlier -- we looked back and kind of started to look at what we actually did and at first we used things that were like theories and models and things that were developed by academia and what we realized is that all the time we had to tweak them. We were constantly tweaking them to make them meet our needs. So what we determined is really this is what our comprehensive model is at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

First you have to have a purpose and a passion. So we all know our purpose as leaders in our tribe, that we’re there to preserve and to do things for our community so that we can build stronger communities but…and so we all have passion for that, but we also have to break down that purpose into more detailed objective so that we can have a plan for what we’re doing. So we also harvest ideas and input from the community and along the way we have to find those core champions. There’s the people that will help you in the community to get things done and then…

So what you’re doing now with this action plan is you’re visualizing and assessing your community and then you’re going to plan. So you also have to measure the outcomes and impacts and at the end you have to have the data that something changed or that something was improved and you have to report the results. And I have ‘report the results’ at the end, but it actually takes place all the way through.

So this is that same model with a little more background to it. So for us the things as far as purpose and passion, includes really looking at what the Pueblo needs are. So our needs are always about our values and our culture and traditions and governance, but then you also break down those things into the other things that are necessary to survive today. So the purpose or the passion for your particular project could be health, education or in my case economic development.

So in regards to harvest ideas and input, what we really found as we kind of worked with the community is that it really is honoring the people. In the work that we do, we need to honor the people and that’s why we need that community engagement because they have something to say and they also sometimes don’t articulate it in the same way that we do because we’re professionals and we’re trained, but they have input that sometimes you’ve just got to bring out from them. And then also we talk about things like historical trauma and just everything that we have to do to survive as a community. So sometimes it’s really hard to get the ideas and input and get community engaged because they have their own things that they’re dealing with. So we have to find different ways to bring it out.

So one of the things that we do is we always talk about community values and figure out how we’re going to instill those values in the projects that we’re working on. So when you’re working with the community, you’ve got to earn that trust. You’ve got to demonstrate to them that what you’re doing is for the benefit of the entire community. So in order to earn that trust, you’ve really got to listen. When we first started listening, we started listening by doing like small advisory groups and focus groups and as time went on, we found that more and more people wanted to communicate what they felt about what we were doing.

So we started doing surveys and…which is not really a traditional way of getting information, but we made sure that the surveys really had questions in them that people cared about and that were going to benefit out community in the long term. And much to our astonishment, people were answering the surveys and we had these open-ended questions where people were just putting these really profound statements that we couldn’t have said any better. And as we started collecting the information, we found like maybe…we found trends and if it was about rebuilding or re-establishing maybe like old pueblo [style] homes, we kept finding those…people had the same concerns. So we were able to report that out and find consensus in that. And then the other thing is we never said who said what, but we put statements and actual quotes and people began to become proud of their quotes actually being in our reports.

We had a lot of community meetings and we did a lot of study, but we always have to report it out, always. So then what we found is we…you have to have those core champions in your community. You have elders and traditional people and opinion leaders. When you have your advisory groups, you get the people that have a lot of influence in different clans or different parts of the community and we brought them along. We also looked at the different partners, youth, as well as employees, and programs. One of the things that I do want to say about using employees is sometimes when we use employees we don’t realize that we saying, ‘Oh, they’re all tribal so that’s our community.’ But what we don’t realize is the employees are usually the ones that are better off and have bigger incomes and have less need than the people that are really out there in the community. So you’ve really got to be careful to make sure that your groups are really truly diversified.

And so what we’re doing right now, we’re creating these action plans. So we’re visualizing what we want to do, and assessing what our community needs are, in order to make that plan. But really what I call it is a shared dream. We have a shared dream to sustain our cultures and our communities both traditionally and economically and unfortunately nowadays we really have to have an economic foundation in order to save our culture and our languages and our traditions and our ceremonies. So we really...by getting the input from communities, we’re able to visualize and to have that statement and create those goals and mission and vision statements.

Of course you set the goals and do all the traditional things that you do in strategic planning here, and so then we measure our outcomes and impacts and that really is about collective success. We’re a community who all have to have some sort of collective success in order to continue to live as a community. But we do those things like, for example, we teach nation building and we do the pre/post tests and we make sure that we increase the knowledge. If we do financial literacy, we make sure that people are actually saving money and that they’re creating bank accounts. And if we do…we have a VITA [Volunteer Income Tax Assistance] program. So we…but you report all those things out to the community and then you report the results.

We have all kinds of ways that we report the results. We have newsletters, we do community, what we call juntas, which is where the community is informed of certain things both business and traditional doings, but it’s a place where the community has a voice and so we also present whatever it is we’re going to…any big project that we’re going to start working on, we present it there. And we have a really good website also.

This presentation has kind of evolved over time and at first we were just doing the presentation maybe to council and the community and we…parts of the presentation we were doing to…presenting to youth council, but now we’re finding that more and more as we build more programs that are more sophisticated that you have to bring consultants in. And a lot of times, our tribal members don’t have certain expertise, so you have to bring those other people in to help you with your programs.

So these four…the 'Five Rs for Tigua' is what we’re calling them is we’re really advocating that people have a job to do and that they need to do it correctly and that they need to consider the community. Note that whatever you’re working on, you’re representing the entire Tigua community and the Tigua people. You have a responsibility to teach, protect, speak up for, ask, inquire, develop trust and stand up for the community. You have to reach out to the community and you have to teach, educate. Sometimes we go back and forth, it might take a year or two to actually get just the vision for one program. But you have to make sure that it is what the community needs. And then research, and this is mostly for researchers coming into the community, but even us as tribal employees, we have the responsibility to know that there’s cultural issues in research and that culture does matter and that whatever research and data that we collect that we have a responsibility to protect and then of course report the findings.

So I’m not going to go through all of these, but I’m sure you heard them every day in your work. I heard some people talking about negativity and how it is…how hard it is just to get past that, but the fact of the matter is that it’s just actually always going to be there and that you, as hard as it is, we have to find ways to tell people that that’s not actually true because some of these things that are being said are actually misconceptions or aren’t really true because…there are times that I’ve been sitting at the table and we’re discussing how we’re going to develop this new program or change something and people are saying things like, ‘Ah, what does it matter? Nobody cares. Tiguas aren’t going to listen. Tiguas don’t want to learn,’ and just some really negative statements where I think if I was somebody else, I would jump over the table and just kind of slap them upside the head, but you can’t do that, you’re working for the community.

One of the other things is that I know that we all have problems with our council, but sometimes we also use that as an excuse to not move forward. It’s easier just to blame everybody else than to look at our own programs and look at what we’re doing and to determine if there’s ways that we can change things to do better outreach and to educate people and to take more time to explain how things can be changed or things can be better. Believe me, I’ve gone through all kinds of just things with a terrible council, I don’t want to get into it, but there are days that they support me and there are days that they don’t support me at all. So I just have to figure out how to get through it and just keep moving. Otherwise I might as well just throw in the towel.

Does everyone think that sustainable development is a really difficult concept to teach? How do you build better economies? It seems really complex, right? But in reality we’ve been doing it forever. This is sustainable development -- finding ways to use your resources in a way that is best for your community.

This is Taos Pueblo, which somebody just mentioned today, but this community has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years and it’s still there and it’s still being maintained and people are still living there.

This is Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in 1880. Unfortunately, it’s no longer there in that way. What happened is in about 1880 the county decided that they wanted to extend a highway. So they held condemnation proceedings against the tribe and they tore it down and they put the highway right through there. So now actually to go through our ceremonies, we have to go across a busy highway and they have to stop traffic, tribal police stops traffic for us to go into procession to go into our traditional ceremonial places. But we’re still sustaining ourselves and we’re still sustaining our culture and despite all this adversity we’re still doing what we need to do to continue our ceremonies.

So I just can’t imagine what the people felt when the entire Pueblo was being torn down and the kind of adversity that they faced in order to continue our traditions. So we have a lot of adversity in front of us, but there’s been that adversity all the time, and it’s people like us, and it’s people like you that are going to get our people through it. So I’m just saying don’t give up because we’re still here and no matter how much…I’ve gone to bed crying. I never do it in front of community. I’m always like, ‘Suck it up, Pat.’ But I know how it feels to be working so hard for your community and just not feeling like you’re not getting to where you want to be.

I just feel like everything that we’re doing is a test. So we have these big things to do that are a test for our community and it’s a test that other people have already been through and it’s our turn to pass that test. So there’s different ways that we need to do it and one of the things that we do at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is we’re always finding ways to educate the community and to empower the community. So as Ian said, we have all these different seminars, but we’re also now able to put these presentations on ourselves. So we’ve been learning everything that people like Native Nations Institute has showed us, as well as Harvard Project or NCAI, and we’ve tailored just about everything we’ve learned to fit into our community.

The other thing is we go to conferences and we have the opportunity to go to training and get certifications, but our people don’t. So somehow we need to bring those things back and make sure that we teach it in a way that they can understand also. Right now you all are developing programs and your action plans. These are our views of how we see what we need to do to reach our community. Like economic development for example, we want sustainable self-determination. Land use, we do land use also. We have to bring housing, roads and water. And we have social and health concerns, we have cancer, diabetes, and child abuse just like any other Native community. And then we also have education programs and we want to get them from pre-K to get them college bound, and actually become college graduates. And then we have cultural programs as well.

But there are ways that we view it and all those technical aspects of the programs that we’re developing, but you really have to sit back and think about what the community thinks because they’re viewing it different. They have the…a lot of it is not as complex to them and also about what it means to them personally and traditionally and culturally. So we have to find ways to make our programs culturally relevant and change those messages to get it out there to the community. Just keep in mind that they have a completely different view potentially than you do. At the end it might be the same, but how to make sure that you’re on the same page is you…it takes a lot of effort.

In order to harvest these ideas and input, we also have to address the longstanding concerns such as land loss, historical trauma and discrimination. Some of our people or our kids don’t even know that our…their great-grandparents went to boarding school. We have really nice housing and a really nice community, but these…all this housing and new infrastructure is new. All these other things such as historical trauma and…it didn’t go away. You can’t put somebody in a new house and it all of a sudden disappears. So we really try to discuss these things and talk about it even to the youth.

We also honor Indigenous knowledge and make sure in everything that we do we get those expertise from the community to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into what we’re doing. And then just realize…I know that…I think I heard somebody talk about how everybody has different views. So in Native communities, we all don’t think the same so we need to make sure that we get the different views from different community members and that we get those people with the knowledge. So look for those people that can help you with your programs and again earn trust. I can’t stress that enough.

So this is about value systems and as I said I teach this to different people, sometimes with local agencies that work with the tribe, but the top part here is kind of the value systems that everyone has or should have. They’re values from different organizations, maybe tribal…city governments, corporations, but then we also have our own set of value systems and we have to make sure that these things mesh and that they balance in order to get our programs and our goals out there.

A little bit about community engagement. If you invite them, they will not come. This is the flyer method and I did it, too. When I first started I just kind of sent out some flyers and then sat there and talked about how nobody was engaged, nobody cared, and in reality how many flyers do you get or correspondences that you never look at? And if you’re never looking at them, how do you expect to have a different reaction from your community members? So you have to figure out different ways to engage your community.

This is us at work, playing games instead of working, but we’ve developed these different games, traditional games and this is a game that we did with the directors. You can see they’re having a lot of fun, kind of icebreakers and stuff. But the point that I want to make is sometimes we have these inter-agency or director meetings and we start doing all our planning, but we’re not really engaging your community because this is your community -- it’s the people that are out there.

So what we do as far as trying to do effective marketing and getting the community engaged and involved is we actually will host a different series of events and we have different partners engaged. We will take our message to things like Grandparents’ Day. We’ve had like just mini pow wows to show off what the youth can do, and also go to the elder center and take our message to them and try to get people involved in the projects that we’re working on, and just recruit advisory people from even a community picnic. We do a lot of things for the vets also because we’ve also found that they’re just…there’s a lot of leadership there as far as the vets are concerned and so our message is put out there through various ways.

You really have to look for those core champions. You have to work with the youth. We do have a youth council and we teach them the nation-building concepts and we work with youth in entrepreneurship and other ways, but the thing about youth is they all have parents. So when you honor your youth and you demonstrate to them and you have these awards and certificates, their parents come too. And then so we do a lot of things with leadership as well. As I said, we work with elders, with the different program directors and then we also invite traditional people to a lot of our events and we have them give the traditional prayer, we might have them do storytelling or a blessing.

And then we also have the tribal enterprises work with us and we teach this to new employees coming in, but we also teach it to the enterprises as well. So we ask the people that are coming in, especially when they’re outside of the community, to take this training, which actually has about…there’s actually 10 different presentations that we do. We work with them as well and they also sponsor us, but it’s also a marketing and advertising tool for them also.

So these are just kind of again different things that we do. I won’t go over all of them, but of course food always works, and letting people talk, and also we all have our own little kind of tribal jokes that we tell also.

This is just a map that I kind of put out there to try to help you map how you’re going to get your community…you can do it whatever way that you want, but depending on the project, the map might go in different directions to be able to get the input and engagement and support that you need from different community members. I think Ian is going to have this available. We don’t have a whole lot of time. I don’t need to go over that. I think we all know that. But sometimes you get people from the outside that just don’t understand. The reason…teepees might be relevant where you have Sioux, Lakota, but for us we have Pueblos. That stereotypical kind of put some guy on a horse type of thingstill happens from time to time. We actually had one director who was non-tribal that thought that she could incorporate cultural relevancy by just putting the word 'tradition' in front of every bulletin agenda item.

June Noronha:

“Pat, just a question. So when you say not to do it. You’re not saying not to do traditional education, right?”

Patricia Riggs:

“No, it’s actually two different things. What not to do is put the word 'traditional' in front of every bullet item and expect it to be traditional. And then in order to really get out there and figure out what you need to do for your community, you really do have to know the footprint of the community. You need to know everything. What are the community values, what do you think the elders are concerned with, what is this generation concerned with and what is the next generation going to face? We need to know the ancestors and our history and everything cultural and ceremonial and where our sacred places are because everything -- no matter what it is that you’re doing -- it somehow interrelates. And you have to take all those things from the past and all our cultural things and apply them to what we’re doing now.

I have ‘make no assumptions’ out there, because a lot of times we don’t really go out there and study what the needs are. We just kind of make these assumptions based on our own experiences, but you really do have to have a collective measure of what the community needs. And then I have this up here because our communities have always been planning. And so this model, whether we know it or not, it worked in the old days, too. So in our community, we had to build homes. So that was our purpose and our passion, but we had to go out there and we had to look for the clay and we had to get the trees so we had to harvest the ideas from people in the community to figure out where to get those resources from. We had a core of champions that would actually make the things happen and build the architecture in the community and then we had to visualize, assess and plan. Our communities always faced east.

And then we had to measure the outcomes and impacts. We figured out whether we were building homes that were going to sustain the community and then report results. We love to brag. The same thing works with food. We had to plan our acequias. We actually created or established the entire irrigation system, what is in El Paso’s lower valley, which is no longer under our control, but we’re the ones that put the main channels of water systems into that community. And then of course our ceremonies took a lot of planning as well and throughout the year.

Why did we do this? Ian talked a little bit about how we had major problems that we really had to address and that we were kind of dumbfounded on how we were going to move forward. Well, our tribe, because we were situated in West Texas, we were never federally recognized because we were part of the…Texas was in the Confederacy when Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the Pueblos in New Mexico so we got left out. We continued to practice our ceremonies and continued to have a tribal council, but it wasn’t until the 1960s, when we were losing all our homes to tax foreclosure because our properties weren’t on trust and in the 60s we were in El Paso. El Paso was growing around us and everybody in El Paso had electricity and running water except for us. We had this community right in the middle of El Paso and our unemployment rate was 75 percent, our education was fifth grade. We worked in the fields that were once ours to sustain ourselves.

And so we had somebody come in, an attorney assisted us and we were federally restored in 1969, not restored, but recognized. So our economy started to get a little bit better. Our unemployment was by the 70s at 50 percent, which is better than 75 percent and our education started to rise as well. At least we made it to high school and we built our first housing division. When we were recognized, we were also terminated at the same time. I know it’s kind of odd, but Texas had the Texas Indian Commission so the United States transferred the trust responsibility to Texas, but when Texas went broke in the 80s they decided the first thing they were going to do away with was the Texas Indian Commission. So we had to go back to Congress and get federally restored.

So that’s when we decided that we were going to open the casino because Texas had passed a gaming law with the Lottery Act. And there was one small clause in our restoration act that said, ‘The tribe shall not have gaming that is illegal in Texas.’ And with that one sentence they were able to sue and close us down. So for a short time we experienced high employment rates and we had…our unemployment rate went down to five percent, we started building all this infrastructure and housing, we started buying our land back. We went from 68 acres to 75,000 acres and then when Texas sued, they actually won, and most of that is because we were in the Fifth Circuit and the Fifth Circuit doesn’t really have any experience with tribes.

So by 2002, the casino closed and our unemployment rate went immediately up to 18 percent in one year and we haven’t been able to lower it to single digits since then and all our businesses except for the smoke shop were failing so we had to come up with something. So we started doing nation building. And in order to do nation building we really started looking at our…and assessing where we were as a community so we did a lot of data collection and those are one of the surveys that we started getting information from all the community and started having to educate them about how important it was for them to give us this information because we needed to bring more money into the community. Some of the money came in through grants and we needed this money to be able to build other ways to be able to sustain ourselves and we didn’t think that the grants were going to be a long-term solution, but we needed them to have…jumpstart us.

I’m not going to go through all the profile, but just to let you know that we do on an annual basis collect all this data. We know who’s enrolled, what the poverty levels are, what the unemployment levels are and what basically the status of all tribal members as a whole. When we started working on different projects, first we started with a comprehensive economic development strategy, which include economic and community development in both housing and jobs and community development corporation and we established Tigua Inc. to separate business and politics. And then we also created policy and infrastructure that would help the tribe be more successful.

One of the things that we did is we changed our tax code because for some really odd reason the tribe had decided to borrow the State of Texas tax code, which made absolutely no sense and it was way too long and we couldn’t enforce it. So just by changing it we went from like a 200 page tax code to 20 pages. In one year we went from $58,000 in taxes collected to $1.2 million.

And then this is our new Tigua Business Center, which is an incubator for the Tigua Development Corporation, as well as houses Economic Development and that was in Brownsville. There was an old Texas Department of Public Safety maintenance facility and now it’s a LEAD certified energy efficient building. And then just real quick here…

We’re also doing a lot of planning and development in land use. So planning and development and protecting our lands is important to cultural preservation as well as our traditional practices, but we also need land for residential and commercial uses and agriculture and transportation as well. So this is kind of lays out our plan over the next 100 years in a snapshot, but really what the reality is is that we need to preserve Ysleta del Sur Pueblo because we’re in the middle of the city and the city keeps encroaching even more and more on us and we have all these kind of technical things that we need to do, but in the end 100 years from now it’s still about preserving Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and continuing our culture.

We are always continually looking for resources to get this done and planning and this is all the planning that takes place in the modern sense, but I think it was Winona LaDuke that said that, ‘Loss of biodiverse land and natural resources is directly correlated to loss of culture for Indigenous communities.’ So in the end we’re trying to buy back as much land as possible to bring back and to keep those traditional places.

This is just an example of our land use survey and we did different…these are…on the bottom we had these maps and we had the community draw out in certain areas what they wanted the community to look like and then of course we went through a series of different questions. And these are…I talked a little bit about us when we do the reports, we put actual statements. We don’t identify the people. These are also statements. And then what we found as we were talking to the community is that they wanted to see our cultural life cycle built into the way that we planned our community. So we have places for youth to nurture them in our plan and as well as places where people come together to do, like we have a nation-building hub and elder center. And at the end how is our plan going to sustain us into the next generation. And then this is some of the modern areas that look not so nice right now, but these are also areas that are slated for land acquisition that we no longer own and this is a plan of what we can potentially do with them. This real quickly is, everything in yellow is what we own because we have a severe checkerboard situation and we know we can’t buy everything back, but what’s in purple is what we eventually want to look like.

We also do some things around citizenship. In our restoration act also our blood quantum was set at one-eighth. So we had to go back to Congress to remove our…we were one of the only two tribes in the country whose blood quantum was set by Congress. So that was one of the big things that we just recently had passed by Congress, so there’s a lot of planning around that and how we’re going to get everybody on the rolls and also provide services for everyone. And then this is just a little joke for my nephew Chris [Gomez], just saying that people in the community have thoughts and messages to convey, so make sure you get them.”

Jennifer Porter: The Kootenai Tribe: Strengthening the People's Voice in Government Through Constitutional Change

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Jennifer Porter, former chairwoman and current vice-chairwoman of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, discusses how her nation moved to amend it constitution to change its basis of political representation, how the U.S. Secretary of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) tried to block the move, and how and why her nation decided to remove the U.S government from the constitutional reform equation in order to make its governance system more culturally appropriate -- and effective.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Porter, Jennifer. "The Kootenai Tribe: Strengthening the People's Voice in Government Through Constitutional Change." Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

Herminia Frias:

"Okay, so we're right before lunch and we have two great speakers lined up to talk about the issue and the challenges of citizen engagement. And I'm sure many of you have many stories to talk about when it comes to citizen engagement. How do you host a meeting and actually have people come and show up or have people actually come and participate? So we have two wonderful speakers this morning and the first speaker is going to be Jennifer Porter and she's the Vice Chairwoman for the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, and she'll be speaking first. And then she'll be followed by Terry Janis, who is the Project Manager...who was the project manager for the White Earth Constitution Reform Initiative. So if we'd...first we'll welcome Ms. Porter."

Jennifer Porter:

"So my name is Jennifer Porter. I don't know what's worse, going before lunch or going after lunch because everybody seems to be thinking when are we going to eat this afternoon, and after lunch you're all tired and want to go to sleep. So I'll try to make this brief, but touch on the aspects of it.

There were a few questions yesterday that were asked and it was a gentleman over here and he kept wanting to know, ‘Well, how do we do it?' He wanted to know about like...I felt like he was asking a question, ‘How has it been done in the past? Like who actually did this? Who reformed their constitution? And I just...you kept hearing people say, ‘Well, tomorrow we'll have that story, tomorrow.' Well, tomorrow's here and I'm one of those stories.

I'm a former chairwoman. I've been on the council for the past 17 years. Recently this past October, I stepped down to the [vice-chairman's position] just to have more family time and to enjoy my life. After eight years, I think it was about time. I have recently become a grandmother so I thought, you know, it's time to let the youth...it's weird to say that, but I just...I've hit that point where I can say the youth now are coming up and taking these positions.

So our story, like I said, the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, we're in northern Idaho. It's about a half-hour south of the Canadian border. It started in the mid 1990s. Prior to that our constitution, it stated in there a five-member council with our hereditary chief at the time having a sitting position on the council. So every time they had a new council come in and seated, it was always that same chief. He never had to vie for that position. He was always had that position and it seemed to be creating problems all the time. You have this one position and in our community it's made up of three main families. So you see three's the odd number. Whoever's getting along at the time, they'll vote these two families in. ‘We don't like this family, so we're going to keep them off.' And it did that for so many years and you see how every...

At the time, my mother was the chairwoman and she sat on for maybe about 10 years at that time and she said there were times where she would come home and she didn't know if she had a job or not. There was petitions; she would go off to a meeting, she'd come home and there'd be a petition to have her taken off the council. So she would kindly clear her office, fight the council, come back on and they would have her on again. And we hear about that in Indian Country all the time, and it kind of got to where they weren't moving forward. They were always just doing this little 'jumble effect' with council, who's going to be chairperson this week, who's going to be chairperson next month, that kind of thing, and we hear a lot about that in Indian Country still today.

Well, she was tired of it and she was tired of petitions and just like one of the gentlemen was stating yesterday, she kind of...she went back and she goes, ‘Well, how did we...how did we work as a so-called government before constitution, before this was put upon us? How did our elders do it? How did our community work?' She talked to the elders at that time and being with the three main families, it worked. They didn't need voting, they didn't need a constitution, they didn't need a paper telling them how to work their community and how to move forward. So what she did is she got those three main families together. And it was hard. And I could imagine all the fights back then, but all the people that were on council at that time, all the elders that were within those families at that time, all the people that would like...write those petitions and take them around and getting them signed. She got them all together at that time and she said, ‘We need to stop. We're losing our young people. We're losing our old people. In order for us to move forward and to grow as a tribe, we need to stop this.' She can't do her job, nobody can do their jobs. So they came to that agreement.

They all sat down and they came up with something. She said, ‘We need some kind of system that all three families will be represented, that nobody will ever feel left out again. We can all get along at the table.' So what they decided was they were going to rewrite their constitution and all three families were always going to have a seat at the table. They rewrote it to where they took off the chief as the standing position. Each district would be allowed to vote in -- from their families -- two positions on the council.

So mid...it was about 1995 they proposed four amendments to BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. Amendment One had to do with blood quantum and changing enrollment wording with our tribe. Amendment Two was a proposal of changing the district factors into the three main families. The third amendment was the quorum issue, changing the seating from the three [for] a tribal quorum to the four. And the last issue was the naming of the tribe because we didn't want to be known as the Kootenai Tribe of Indians anymore, we wanted to known as the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. So BIA was okay with the first amendment, they passed that no problems. They were okay with the fourth amendment. We have the right to change our name. But they weren't okay with us changing our structure.

They said we couldn't change it from the five people to the six people. So I asked yesterday, ‘Why weren't they okay with it?' And the answer I got was because of the size of our tribe -- which we are a very small tribe -- at that time, we were a little over...maybe between 110 to 120 and BIA said they were opposed to it because they more or less went towards the U.S. vote, 'one person, one vote,' and they felt going to the three districts or the three different families not every person would be represented as a vote. But we argued with that because we said the way it worked in our past was as long as they were within one of those districts, which made up our whole tribe, they would get a vote.

So it didn't take my tribe long, and I always say they were a bold council back then, and they weren't going to let BIA tell [us] what to do, so they took it upon themselves, they got all the tribal membership, they got them all onboard saying, ‘This is going to work. This is how it's going to work but we need you guys to jump onboard with us. We need you guys to support us. So what we're going to do is we are going to vote that BIA doesn't have a say on how we govern ourselves anymore.' So all they needed was a 70 percent voting of the membership. They got more than that. I think they got about 90 percent of our membership to say, ‘This is right. This is how we're going to do it.' They sent that to BIA, BIA approved that. It's just funny how they had no question to that. They approved it. They couldn't tell the tribe anymore how to run our constitution or how to do our government.

So once that was approved, the tribe took it upon themselves to change the constitution. They didn't need those powers over them and we changed it. So running today, we are the three family districts. Everybody votes for two members and I believe it's been 18, 19 years since that [amendment] and it works today, still today. I was just asked this morning, how is it run? I've never seen any better form of government. I can say maybe I haven't experienced what it was before, but I've only experienced this and I've never been through a petition. It's always worked. I have...out of all of our tribal members -- you ask any of them -- they feel like they do have a word in the community. They can go to a family, whoever their district representative, their family representative is and ask for something to go to the council.

And the way our council works is we do come together, but if a family or community member is asking for something or wants to know what's going on, the first thing we ask them is, ‘Have you talked to your district representatives?' Because with us, it's their responsibility to take care of their family first before they come to the table. We don't deal with the ones who, if they're from Family A, jump over to Family C and want us to push and fight. We've gone away from that. If they do make friends with Family B or C, we said, ‘No, you still have to go through your Family A. We won't even address that issue until we hear from your family and how they deal with that.'

I know I was asked to speak a little about how the tribe decided to not allow BIA to determine where the tribe was going and I found it interesting yesterday that there are so many tribes that are still under that notion that they've still got to ask BIA for everything. They've got to have BIA approval. And I guess maybe it's the whole way of thinking, but today with self-governance and under self-determination, it's the tribe's right to not do that anymore. And we just were one of those tribes who moved forward and got it done and it's working great today.

Joan [Timeche] finally got me down here to speak about my tribe. She's been after me for a number of years since I shared that story, because at the time she said she'd never heard of that concept, she's never heard of a tribe dividing like that and making it work." 

Terry Janis: Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Terry Janis, former Project Manager for the White Earth Constitution Reform Project, fields questions from the audience about his specific role in White Earth's constitutional reform process. He stresses the need for those engaging in constitutional reform to be cognizant of the fact that a process involving foundational change will necessarily entail Native nations citizens to confront and deal with the enduring legacies of colonial federal policies.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Janis, Terry. "Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Q&A session.

Audience member:

"Okay, to develop this, I guess this governance model because we've been at this for awhile now and we got our... Let me take you back. It first started, we tried to go to self-government, that was shot down; people were scared of that. Our land code, people were scared of that; that went down. But we got our own election code and that's what the people passed and membership code. I guess how I see it is you gave us all this information how to govern ourselves, the whats and ifs, what if this happens, what if that or whatever, all the unknowns. Maybe it was too much for our people to give them all that at once. Now we have a problem of backlog of over 400 and some odd homes, some houses are boarded up and need renovation and so it boils up dollars.

So let's say if we develop a model and this is important what you're talking about on communication, that's important. With that same concept, if we've already got our election code and membership code, now let's develop the housing code because we have a problem, we pay rent. Nobody understands that money goes back into their homes and whatever to develop and all. Nobody likes paying rent. They think everything's free. So we have a problem of collecting rent. If we develop this model, let's say just for the housing area to start off, develop this kind of model, bring it out to the people, not evictions, whatever might work.

So is there processes like that that'll slowly sort of keep the whole picture into the... To me, the way I look at it is, there's too much, they can't digest all that. So bit-by-bit, I guess that's how I'm looking at it. Now what we're talking about here is just the housing part of it. We've got our own education, hopefully we develop that. At least in this term, at least we can push something, working with... It's a process to make it work, at least we're going someplace instead of taking a step back all the time. I'm trying to look for solutions I guess."

Terry Janis:

"I don't know if this is on, but can you hear me okay? In every situation you have to deal with the reality of two issues, one of which is our colonization. And we as Indian people have a colonized mentality, regardless of whether we realize it or not and when we're talking about change, we have to accept that. So we are a colonized people and change in that sense is going to be difficult to accomplish. And as people that are moving our communities towards change, whether it's a broad constitution or a specific code, that's got to be part of the educational process is accepting our people for who they are and where they're at. There's beauty in our people and because of the history of what we suffered there's also darkness. And when we're thinking about how we're informing and how we're educating our people, we have to keep in mind the colonized mindsets that our people have and are we going to engage that because we have to engage it, otherwise it'll kick us in the ass. It'll stop things from moving forward. And the reality is, it's only going to be able to move forward as far as it can. Sometimes you have to take a staged process. So that's one thing.

And the second thing I spent a lot of time with earlier is just the politics of our community. Anytime you're talking about change and you're talking about an informational, educational process the politics of the community are very real and you have to deal with that. I didn't mention earlier the kind of colonized reality or colonized mindsets because it's sometimes difficult to really accept about ourselves. But...and it's not always the best strategy to say it directly, but you see it over and over and it's a part of the reality of who we are as Indian people. It's how we grew up. We have certain ideas.

My dad growing up on Pine Ridge, the idea was that him as a landowner is he was completely free; he could never be regulated, he could never be taxed, he could do what he wanted with his land. That's what it meant to be Indian on a reservation. And the reality is that's just not true at all. We as Indian people are regulated and managed and controlled more than any other people on the country, my dad included. And if the tribe wants to move forward and start to assert its sovereign authority by zoning and regulating and taxing and doing other things with their property, they're going to do that at some point. But that's our reality and the colonized mindset comes from what happened to us as Indian people, but also the unique sort of situation that we live in, what we've gotten used to, the things that we think we can do and that are inherent, but oftentimes are just circumstantial. For my dad, it's just because the tribe hasn't chosen to regulate their tax yet and that's all that is.

But I agree with you completely. Thinking through, knowing your own people, how best to achieve change, how best to inform and educate your people about that process, maybe a staged sort of process is the best way, maybe a broad complete reform-like what White Earth did is the best way. You're in the best situation to make that decision but it's a decision you have to make. You have to make that decision. It's tactical, it's strategic and you're responsible for it. As leaders, you are responsible for making that decision, period. And you'll live or die on that. Sometimes it'll be the wrong decision and then it'll all fall apart, but that's your job and that's what you do."

Herminia Frias:

"Another question...do we have a question on this side? Okay, question over here. Oh, I'm sorry. Ms. Porter did you want to respond?"

Jennifer Porter:

"Oh, no."

Audience member:

"Okay, so I have a question for you, Terry. So you mentioned maintaining a firm principle of neutrality. That's really interesting and I suspect I'm probably not the only one thinking this, but as you noted, as a Lakota person working up with Ojibwe people, it's really difficult for me to imagine that, one being a Diné, I cannot imagine Navajo, in this case we have a constitution, but a Navajo government development person who is basically in charge of putting together a reform or a government that is one for either Comanche or worse case with the Ute, speaking from that role. So referring to that again what I'm saying is I commend you White Earth Nation and you for doing that. Getting to the question is the neutrality piece to it. We all come with our values, our perceptions, our thoughts. I can't help but think that at some point during this process that you sort of like wanted to nudge folks in one way or another on some of your own issues with respect to one being an attorney and having a good understanding of federal Indian law in relation to Indian Country. I just wanted to ask how do you handle something like that?"

Terry Janis:

"Yeah, yeah. There's two answers to that. The first is that in this particular issue, this idea of neutrality, it only focuses on the educational and informational process. The whole drafting of a constitution or an amendment to a constitution, you cannot be neutral on that. You're going to make decisions and you're going to compromise and it's going to be one way or another and that's the work that tribal members really need to be doing I think. So as far as your own governmental reform, actually drafting the reforms, actually thinking them through, I think the very nature of that is positional and political and about compromise. For me the neutrality thing was important from an educational perspective, strictly in getting information out there, educating, helping people to understand, answering their questions. When they're completely wrong about something, fighting with them about that. That's the only time I took a position. When they were wrong about what they were saying about what this proposed constitution said, then I fought about that because I just wanted them to get it right. I don't want...that didn't decide for them one way or the other, I just wanted their information to be accurate, that they learned the materials and I got into plenty of fights, I had plenty of fun on that. The reason why we go to law school is we kind of like fighting a little bit, right? And so you get into plenty of fights and you have plenty of fun with that, but that neutrality position is really directly tied to the educational and informational process as a community-based thing. This is community-based work. This is going into people's house, this is personal, this is physical, this is live; you've got to be comfortable with that. You've got to get educators and people that are a part of your community training and information thing that are comfortable with that kind of arrrgh. It's a beautiful thing and it's really fun if that's what you enjoy and that's what you love as an educator and that's... So no, I never really compromised in that sense. I didn't really have a struggle with that ever."

Herminia Frias:

"We have time for one more question and just to let you know, we're going to continue this conversation after lunch. Ian Record is going to be continuing this on citizen engagement. So Robert, you'll have the last question before lunch and if you have more questions, we'll open it up again after lunch."

Robert Hershey:

"Thank you and thank you very, very much for the presentations. In response to the gentleman from Canada, I was going to talk about this in my presentation later, but let me just say really the idea of big bites versus small bites. And there are a number of constitutions, like you talked about housing, well, the Tohono O'odham have a constitution that has a lot of power reserved to the districts. The districts are responsible for home site, land site assignments. The way the Navajos constructed land site assignments through matrilineal. The Hopi, the villages have independent authority in many regards and things are specifically reserved. So by working on these different codes, your election code, your education or whatever, it might be your housing, you are actually then having the discussions, which will then transform themselves when the time comes into writing themselves as constitutional amendments. So you are basically in the process of creating constitutions by virtue of your actual practices in these different areas."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you, Robert. And I'd like to thank both of the panelists for sharing their stories. Thank you very much. Give them a round of applause." 

Carlos Hisa and Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Carlos Hisa and Zeke Garcia from Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP) field questions about YDSP's current community-based effort to redefine its criteria for citizenship, and they provide additional detail about the great lengths to which YDSP has gone in order to document the origins and history of their current criterion for citizenship (blood quantum) in order to make an informed decision about whether/how to change it.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Garcia, Esequiel. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Q&A session.

Hisa, Carlos. "Ysleta del Sur Pueblo: Redefining Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Q&A session.

Ian Record:

"We have about 10 to 15 minutes for question and answers before we break for lunch and we have microphones set up here on the...just in front of the panelists here and then there's also one... Steve's got a running mic there in the back. He's quite swift, so here we go, Terry."

Terry Janis:

"Yeah, I'm Terry Janis working with the White Earth Nation on these issues for the last year. First of all, I commend you on getting the information to your tribal members. That's huge if you're going to make a solid decision on this and be a part of it. Two basic questions: one is [audio cuts out for a few seconds] ...conversation that is more about limited resources, right? We have limited resources. If we double the population, will the system take more away from us? How much of that is a part of the conversation and how do you resolve it? And then the second question is have you started thinking about the verbiage of the language of how this phase is going to be laid out? Is it just going to be straight moving to descendency or is there going to be more of a process as was discussed earlier of dislocation, engagement and involvement on the part of being enrolled into citizenship?"

Carlos Hisa:

"To your first question about whether it's a concern about the services we're providing and the cost-benefit or will we really need to adjust, like Zeke said, we did send out a survey and I was astonished with the responses. The descendants don't want to be a burden. They want to do what they need to do for the Pueblo. They want to do their part. We have mentioned to the community that the biggest impact is going to be in health care because in the other areas we have been providing for descendants as we recognize them when it comes to education, when it comes to other things. It's just health care that's going to be the big one and in my conversations to the youth, the descendants out there, they're willing to give that up, for our elders, for those that really need it. So it's not...the discussions haven't really been focused on the benefits we're going to receive by the federal government to more as, 'We're Tigua now, we're going to be recognized as such.' So that's something that...it's unbelievable to me because that's the way I was raised, and for a period of time I thought that was fading away, but it's obviously there. We planted that seed and it's still there. The second question..."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"What was the second question?"

Terry Janis:

"It's more about what sort of language are you going to utilize to define citizenship, just straight lineal descendancy language or is there going to be more language on involvement, participation, understanding of community, etc.?"

Carlos Hisa:

"That is the beauty of getting the community involved and having this board because the board consists of elders, people that have been there before in council, individuals that are outsiders that live out of town, descendants. So it's a good group of different aspects. So when the discussions are coming, those questions are brought up. What is a Tigua? To me -- and that's what I always tell my daughters, 'No document that's out there, no blood quantum requirement is going to identify who you are as Tigua.' I said, ‘It's what you do for the community. Your involvement spiritually, emotionally and physically is what identifies you as such.' But that's just me, the way I was raised. We need to hear from everybody.

But those conversations are being held when we have our meetings as a board. I, in the beginning, stepped away and said, ‘I want this board to function on its own.' But I was quickly dragged back into it because it is a sensitive issue and there's a lot of opinions and very...people are very passionate about it, so they're wanting to go out there and implement these type of things. If you want to be a Tigua, this is going to be your responsibility. Like I said, we don't have a constitution. We are governed by oral tradition and the way it's been taught to us in the past is we don't want to put it in writing per se because if you want to know it, you've got to live it. If you want to stay away, well, stay away and once you become...you come, we're always going to embrace you, come over, the doors are always open. But when you start living this way of life and understanding, you understand the essence of what we have in place, you'll feel it, you'll know it. But again, that's just me. That's the just the way I've been taught.

Things have changed, but those conversations are being held, and together as a community I know we're going to come up with something strong, something that's going to stay there for a long time. At the same time, it's not going to be sketched in stone. If there's something that we need to change and learn from, it's all going to...we're going to be able to have that flexibility, but again it's going to have to involve the entire community as a whole. I hope I answered your questions there."

Audience member:

"...And how do you...what are some of the strategies to meet that goal and to say it's the will of our people so that we need to make this decision?"

Carlos Hisa:

"I see the point. What we're trying to...what we're doing, we're in the process of doing is getting all the information together. First, what our people see as identity like he said, one of the things we had on there. Okay, we're going to identify who we are. These components identify who we are as a people. Those are being identified. The survey we have, we're getting that information on there. That's being put together. We don't have the complete report; hopefully by the end of this month we'll have it. The other thing is looking at...showing the community as a whole what the impact's going to be financially. We want to get all that information together and create a...I guess a final decision...resolution to be able to present to the community and say, ‘After all the research that we've done, this is what we see as a council [is] the right way to go,' and present it to the community. And like Zeke said, we have quarterly meetings, and you call them like town halls, where we invite the entire community to come and make decisions on things like this. We will present the information and make a couple of, I guess, suggestions on how we can move about and we'll allow the community to vote on that decision. Again, that's something that we're going to put together and recommend to the community once we have all the information in place."

Ian Record:

"If there's no other questions at the ready, I had a question and it's sort of a leading question because I've been involved with this effort in a very peripheral way, but...and it really speaks to what John [Borrows] was bringing up with basically imploring folks to think about your own histories as you engage this issue. And what I was really struck by in working with Ysleta del Sur last summer is the lengths to which you guys have gone to capture the history of this issue in your community. The number of interviews that you guys have done with the people who are in the decision making roles within your nations back when that blood quantum requirement was first initiated and the sorts of pressures that were being exerted upon the Pueblo at that time because...and I think that's very important and I was just hoping you could speak to that because one of the things we often see as we work with communities, particularly on this issue, is there's a feeling I think, and often I think it's misplaced, that we own this, that this criteria that we're currently using is somehow ours, it's somehow cultural when if, when you go back and do the history like you guys have done, you realize often very quickly that it never was cultural."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"When we were doing the research, we had to go back and realize that our presence in El Paso, Texas, was in existence in 1682. There was no blood quantum back then, there was no enrollment number, no enrollment card issued or anything like that. And we had to go back that far to understand where we want to be at. Right now, because of federal monies, enrollment cards are required. Some tribes require a blood quantum as a requirement and we needed to let our community know that, ‘Okay, the ball is in our court. What do you want? Do you want a blood quantum? Do you not want a blood quantum? Do you want to just go through descendency?' And this because of the 1984 act, a lot of our way of thinking was that that was the norm, our blood quantum and some of our tribal members kind of...we kind of accepted that and we felt that we need to continue that. That's why initially we were just reducing our blood quantum and we came to a point when we said, ‘Well, does really a blood quantum determine if you're Tigua?' And that's one of the things that we're facing with right now and our community members are becoming aware. The ball's in our court. What do we want to do? Do we want to continue with that, do we want to change it? And that's where we're at."

Carlos Hisa:

"And in addition to that we...our history is well documented. We have a set of archives and we realize that there was a census back then. We have enrollment documents that date back to the 1800s that have family members from the past on there. But again, there is no blood quantum on there. It just says that they're Tigua, they are part of the community and they kept a list. So a census I think is something that we do need, but it shouldn't be restricted is what we're saying."

Ian Record:

"So I think we have time for one more."

Audience member:

"...I think it's interesting to see the level of...go into the engine that's giving you the...in this conversation. One of the experiences we had in Pueblo Laguna, a couple years ago....constitution...on enrollment was prior to engaging the community about the most substantive issues of what...who is a tribal member, we had to first have a conversation of shifting the thinking of how should we think about this issue because easily these decisions can lead to resources, the lack of resources, power and how we're going to be stretching our resources thin but we realized that as we had this conversation, what is the core values of our people? Are we inclusive or are we exclusive, because our elders didn't have...they hadn't seen the impacts of blood quantum for whatever reason for generations out. Well, we're seeing the impacts of grandchildren who are participants in the culture but they did not have the blood quantum...that door of blood quantum of the tribe or another...down the road. So how to engage the conversation then...first question, how do we...this? We have clans that...Certainly that blood quantum was the issue there and certainly our people didn't...So it's a constant reminder when we had to engage the community in this discussion of let's shift our thinking first and set the foundation of how we're going to think about this. We have to be inclusive of people. That is our way, that is our values and we have to go forward with this citizen discussion with that mindset. So I think that was critical for us to engage the community because it was when we decided to go that direction of monetary resources, well, if we have more people, this is going to mean we get less per capita, whatever. But there was the second...is that are we pushing away the prosperity of people if...close the doors, are we closing off the blessings...responsibilities? So I think it's important to ...that level and focus it as shifting the mindset of how..."

Carlos Hisa:

"I agree. That was something that we were afraid was going to happen so we did the impact study, we did all this research on everything and we still need to present that information to the community we feel, but our community is leaning more towards being Tigua and what we need to do to continue to exist. The real battles I think were back in the day. Right now our battles are not as devastating as they were back then, but this is a battle that we have to face and it's going to determine our future and who we are as a people. And again, and I tell my daughters, I said -- and this is something that's been implemented in my family is where, 'When the Pueblo is good, you do your part. When the Pueblo is struggling, you have to sacrifice, you do more.' And that's what I'm seeing is still something that's very, very strong in our community and it makes me very proud and happy at the same time and gives me just more encouragement to keep pushing forward to get this done. But I agree with what you had to say. Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, let's do one last round of applause to our panelists. I think we've learned a lot."

Terry Janis: The White Earth Nation Constitutional Reform Process

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this lively and far-reaching discussion with NNI's Ian Record, Terry Janis (Oglala Lakota), former project manager of the White Earth Nation Constitution Reform Project, provides an overview of the citizen education and engagement campaign that preceded White Earth's historic vote to ratify a new constitution in November 2013, and specifically the role he played in that process.  

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

Janis, Terry. "The White Earth Nation Constitutional Reform Process." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. St. Paul, Minnesota, February 6, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program we are honored to have with us Terry Janis. Terry is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and for the past year he has served as project manager for the constitutional reform process of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. Terry, welcome and good to have you with us today.”

Terry Janis:

“Thanks, man. It’s nice to be here.”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, it’s good to see you again.”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah, yeah.”

Ian Record:

“So I’ve shared a few highlights of your personal biography, but I’m sure I left some pertinent things out. So why don’t you just tell us a little bit more about yourself.”

Terry Janis:

“From Pine Ridge, came over here to Minnesota, went to McAllister. From there went to Harvard for a master’s in education, University of Arizona for my law degree and several jobs since then -- kind of a balance between international Indigenous rights, land rights issues and broader national policy issues as well. So that kind of education -- law, law reform, policy development -- was a good fit for this particular job.”

Ian Record:

“So we’re here today to discuss constitutional reform”

Terry Janis:

“Right.”

Ian Record:

“a big topic across Indian Country and specifically, the work you’ve done on behalf of the White Earth Nation over the past year or so. As the White Earth Nation has worked to develop and then ratify, recently ratified, a new constitution, but the process has been underway there at White Earth for quite awhile.”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah.”

Ian Record:

“And can you sort of talk aboutcan you begin by talking about where White Earth was in the process when you came on board because as I mentioned, this thing had been underway for quite awhile before you joined the nation and its effort.”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah, they really started this effort of drafting a constitution in 2007 and it took them a couple of years. By 2009, they had had four constitutional conventions and came up with this draft. The number of delegates that participated in that process, voted on itthe idea was to approve a draft of this constitution that would then be moved to a referendum. That drafting process was completed in 2009 and it kind of sat there for a bit; I think part of the dynamics are complex. It’s difficult to move a constitutional reform process forward. The drafting process is critical and very difficult, but every stage subsequent to that is equally difficult and part of the issue was funding. And so a grant from the Bush Foundation helped them to move it to the next phase of really engaging in active community education process, move it then to a referendum, and then start to think, after that referendum depending upon the outcome -- and this one was positive -- to then look at the implementation process.”

Ian Record:

“Based on your understanding, of someone who is charged with helping to lead and implement that community education effort, what prompted the nation to go down the reform road to begin with?”

Terry Janis:

“I’m not from there, and because of that I don’t have the kind of personal insights or the personal biases that a person that’s from there would have. What I observed and the stories that I’ve been told is, like a lot of tribes, they went through a governmental crisis, a profound foundational crisis in the ‘90s with the 'Chip' Wadena administration; his conviction of embezzlement and how broad that was throughout their whole governance system. In reacting to that, not only did the people stand up in order to reassert an effective governance, but they really looked at the genesis of that: how did it get to that stage? And they immediately turned to the constitution.

And the conversations that you heard from that period of time, that were told to me when I got there, was how the constitution is so centralized in its power structure -- that the people, in power, can be dominated by a single person. And that kind of absolute power, in their experience, did corrupt absolutely. And so without any kind of way of balancing that they, as a reaction to that, they immediately moved to this kind of conversation of, ‘What can the constitution do to create checks and balances, to really have an independent judiciary and do those kinds of things?’ But I think that was the genesis of it.

So they actually started a constitutional reform process in ‘94, ‘95, ‘96. They drafted a constitution at that time as well and attempted to take that out into the communities. The stories that I’ve heard, both from the people that were doing it and the community members themselves, is there was just way too much tension still. They had gone through this amazing crisis. The communities were divided -- not just in two factions, but multiple factions -- so every time they brought this idea of a new constitution out into the communities, those factions and emotions really dominated the story line and it was just too premature. So they waited the 10 years. In 2007, brought it again and that’s where we stand.”

Ian Record:

“So you mentioned there was this profound governance crisis, if you will, that culminated in this high profile scandal. So they go down this reform road and in developing and ratifying, now ratifying, this new constitution system of government. What are some of the main things the nation is hoping to address? You’ve made quick allusions to them but”

Terry Janis:

“And I think that comes out of those crisis points. And what you see in this new constitution is a very clear separation of powers: a legislative body, an executive body and a judiciary. They clearly put a lot of time into that. Also the value of me not being in that drafting process, I wasn’t there, but you can see from the text itself that those parts of the constitution are clear, clean, deliberate and well drafted; that’s what they put their heart and mind and time and energy into. So there’s a very clear separation of powers, there’s clear establishment of an independent judiciary, they also put a lot of time into thinking about what it means to have a traditional government, something that’sin looking at separation of powers, you really harken back to the U.S. Constitution, which hearkens back to the Haudenosaunee constitutional form of government, but what you really get caught up in is it’s an American style of constitutional government -- the separation of powers, how they frame it, how they reference it -- but the way they do it is quite unique in the way of establishing mechanisms with language that tie it back to Anishinaabe traditions -- using Ojibwe language as a part of the constitution preamble and frame of governance, making sure that their judicial system isn’t just about punishment, but really emphasizes restorative justice -- engages the kind of most foundational aspect of the constitution in a way that depends on the people themselves to organize governance. So a range of different things that are quite unique that is really, I think, less controversial and more easily understood.

They also took on this huge issue of defining membership, citizenship. We all know or we should know about the way the federal government used blood quantum as a part of a military and colonial strategy to subjugate us. The ultimate result of that was our disappearance and that’s still on the books. And so they tackled that though with a very broad and dynamic rejection of blood quantum and move to lineal descendency. And that was a thing that came out of those conversations in 2007, 2008 and 2009. It’s part and parcel, very simple, very straightforward in the way the constitution defines it and it ended up being one of the most controversial aspects of their conversation.”

Ian Record:

“I think you’ve touched on some of these already, but from your vantage point, what do you see as some of the fundamental differences between the old constitution system of government, basically an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] model, and this new creation?”

Terry Janis:

“I’ve talked about this new one. You got -- in order to make a comparison -- you’ve got to read their oldall of the IRA constitutions, but the MCT [Minnesota Chippewa Tribe] Constitution is even worse. And I’m not knocking MCT; they’re some good people, they’re trying to do good work with a bad system. But you’ve got to understand the history of the Indian Reorganization Act, its shift away from allotment; it ended the allotment process, which on its face is a very positive thing, but what this country was at that period of time, after the Great Depression, just before World War II, was all about assimilation. It wasn’t about recognizing the strength and sovereignty of Indian nations, it was about making Indian people white.

And the constitutions that came out of the Indian Reorganization Act, this model constitution that they had, the primary purpose of that was to make things easier for the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- their colonial objectives, their oversight, their kind of attitudes of superiority in having a trust responsibility towards Indian people actually owning Indian land, and Indian people having to ask for permission for using everything. These constitutions have at least a dozen, the MCT constitution has almost 30 specific places where before the tribe can do anything, they have to ask for permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and it’s in their constitution. And so that’s their starting point.

And it establishes a mechanism where, for example, even though White Earth has the majority of the population, they’ve set up a governance structure in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe where each of the separate bands is represented by two individuals on their governance structure. And so White Earth has over 50 percent of the population almost; they only have two votes out of 12. It is completely unrepresentative. There is no government in the world that would allow that kind of unrepresentative form of government and they accept it. It’s what they were forced to take up. The Bureau of Indian Affairs wrote their constitution for them. There’s no story or history or genesis of the language of this constitution coming out of Indian minds. It was the Bureau of Indian Affairs that wrote it, put all of these tribes together under one body so they didn’t have to build relationships with six separate tribes. They only had to deal with one entity.

So this is as colonial a system as you can imagine and me coming from the outside, I’m shocked honestly that they find a way to make it work, every day. But that’s where it’s coming from and having that conversation, and engaging that conversation as a part of this conversation, was a part of everything that we put together as well.”

Ian Record:

“Let me follow up on that. This is not part of our original questions, but this is something that I see come up in so many tribes I work with on the issue of constitutions and constitutional reform is...you’ve just shared with us a pretty deep knowledge of the genesis of, until recently, what was the law of the land for the White Earth people. And so often when these tribes struggle with this issue of, ‘Our constitution is inadequate. We pretty much understand we need to change it.’ It’s a whole other question of, ‘How do we do it?’ But a lot of folks contemplate reform without a full working knowledge of, ‘Where did our specific constitution come from? Did our own people have any meaningful say in its creation? Did they have any meaningful sense of ownership in this apparatus that they now use to make decisions and try to live as a nation?’ And how important is it for other tribes -- if people are going to look at White Earth as an example -- how important is it for other tribes to understand that historical context when they tackle the question of, ‘Do we need to change our current constitution and how?’”

Terry Janis:

“Honestly, I don’t think it’s all that important. At the end of the day, it’s relatively irrelevant because when you get to this scale of change, what you really have to have a deep understanding of is politics, power and change.

Politics is important. Who has what political source, where does it come from, how did they engage and develop it? In order to engage at this scale, you have to have a deep respect for politics, you have to understand the politics that’s happening in that community at the local level and a broader level that affects it. When you look at process of change, you’re going to recognize that some people are gaining, are benefiting from the current system and other people will gain or benefit from the change. And so you have to recognize where those tensions are going to come from, where’s the push-back going to come from, and you have to respect that and honor that and deal with it in a very real and dynamic sort of way.

And then that’s the process of change, the engagement of it. Whenever there is a compelling reason for change, like in White Earth -- the constitutional crisis in the ‘90s, history of where the constitution that they’re working under comes from, and how it contributed to the disaster that they just went through -- is an important part of what pushes and sustains. And that’s important, that has to be there, but in order to actually for change to actually occur, you’ve got to deal with the reality of politics and power and that is all a part of the conversation. Some of it is one-to-one information sharing education process, others are very practical sitting down and trading realities. ‘You’re going to lose this. Your people are going to gain that. How important is it that your people gain even though you may personally lose in certain ways?’ And you just deal with that in a very real sort of way.

The leadership at White Earth, at Bois Forte, at all of the MCT bands, are the same as the leadership in any other Indian nations; they’re practical, they’re very realistic and they’re in it as a life issue. And I didn’t say life and death. They’re in it as a life issue. Our leaders are politicians from that life perspective, but whenever you start to challenge them to give up, or this is going to be taken away -- this thing that has benefited you and your family -- that has to be an open conversation. It has to be a real conversation and you have to honor their integrity, their respect, and their ability to come to a decision that not only helps them to deal with the practical realities, but also fits with their integrity.”

Ian Record:

“In the point you just made, doesn’t that argue for tribes ensuring that they develop a reform process that is distinctly theirs and that distinctly attends to their own local dynamics, as you laid out?”

Terry Janis:

“Absolutely. You cannot do it any other way. And there’sin this situation -- having me as an outsider come in -- there’s value in me being able to say, ‘I don’t care what you do. I didn’t draft this thing. I have noof my own self into it at all. What matters to me is you, as the people, make your own choice. Do you realize the power that you have? That’s what matters to me.’ So me coming in with that kind of outsider perspective, and also coming in with the history of really fighting for and having some losses and successes in supporting tribal sovereignty, that was the base. And we can have those conversations, and they could insult Erma Vizenor or the elected leadership and everybody else, and I’ll sit there and I’ll nod my head and I’ll let them give voice to that, and then we’ll try to turn to a deeper understanding of what this constitution says and the changes that it incurs. And without that conversation, without having the ability to sit through the emotions, and the local history that’s there, and understand it and take it in, and then incorporate that into a conversation about, ‘Look at the text of this language.’ And so all of those things are local, they’re about that local community, they’re about the people that are there and their personal histories and stories.”

Ian Record:

“I want to follow up a bit on this issue of power and politics that you mentioned. My sense in working with a number of tribes on reform is that yes, that is a huge dynamic that you have to wrestle with and that the approach that you develop in response to that has to be local, it has to be unique to that tribe, and it has to attend to those unique circumstances, but isn’t part of it also dealing with the reality and developing a process that deals with the reality? That, in many times when you’re dealing with fundamental sort of foundational change like constitutional reform, often entailsif you’re going beyond pro forma type amendments and really dealing with substantive constitutional change, you’re often asking the people of the nation to put up a mirror in front, and [to] look in the mirror not just as an individual citizen, but as a collective group and say, ‘Who are we, how do we want to govern, and what do we want our future to look like?’ And often that involves confronting a lot of colonial trauma, a lot of historical trauma, and that tends to contribute to a very organic and sort of messy process that you have to be ready for, does it not?”

Terry Janis:

“Right, absolutely, absolutely. And the fact that I can tell you with some of the folks that I’ve had conversations, how far spittle travels between you and that other person because that’s how pissed off they are and emotional, and that kind of anger and anguish and frustration and fear is very real. Me coming into this as an outsider with absolute respect for the sovereignty of an Indian nation -- and when you’re dealing with the fact that this constitution is going to move to a referendum vote -- that sovereignty lies within each individual. And so my job is to absolutely respect where that person is and where that person can move to. I can have a conversation with somebody about the colonial dynamics of the MCT constitution. If they say, ‘I cannot accept the idea of defining me as a 'citizen' or defining the White Earth Tribe as a 'nation,' we are a 'band,' I am a 'member,'‘ they insist on that over and over and over, my job is not, as an academic, to know better than them and say, ‘You’re wrong.’ My job is to say, ‘Okay. This is your choice. You are the sovereign here. Your vote is all that matters. Your decision and your opinion is all that matters. I respect that a hundred percent.’”

Ian Record:

“So then didn’t your challenge then become, in respecting their ability to choose, and that’s ultimately what self determination’s all about, that your job then became, ‘how do I make sure that they, when they do choose, that they’re making as an informed choice as possible in that they understand fully what this constitution says and more importantly what this constitution will do in terms of structuring how the government actually works and how it makes decisions, how it carries out decisions, etc.’?”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah, yeah. If you think about how Indian people come together and we talk, we learn things as much from laughter as from serious conversation. We learn things as much from getting into a fight and getting a bloody nose as we do by reading a text together side by side. And so that is a multi-faceted dynamic of the process, Indian people coming together and learning this kind of document, this kind of resource materials, this kind of system, systemic construct, it’s really complex.

The White Earth constitution is amazingly complex, how they all fit together and flow together; you are not going to achieve full understanding, period. What I realized is that each person is going to need a certain level of understanding in order to come to their own decision point and that’s my job, is they know how much they need to understand and I’m going to keep pushing everything at them with every vehicle and mechanism that I can. Whenever we came in and designed the educational strategy, there wasn’t going to be just one event in every community and the national symposium. We were going to have dozens. We ended up having over 50 across every single community, a national symposium, multi-media resources, videos, radio turned out to be incredibly important with Niijii Radio and other radio interviews and individual conversations, follow up with thousands of individuals, taking the time to have all of those conversations in as many ways as possible, talking with folks over dinner, over breakfast, in their houses, on the street, wherever. And so that’s just how we are. We as Indian people, we learn in a certain way and if you’re comfortable with that, if you can engage that, if you can get with that, then there’s the potential that you’re going to make the offerings and people are going to come at them in the way that they can come at them.

I never expected to find perfect understanding. The more I got into it, the more I realized I don’t have perfect understanding. There are so many nuances to this stuff that a relationship between this person and that person as a drafter, as an editor, as a voter was a much more complex and real sort of dynamic as well, but having respect for the sovereignty of the individual to make this decision because that’s where it really lies in a referendum, as well as the learning process of us as Indian people. It’s personal and being able to do that and willing to do that and enjoying doing that.”

Ian Record:

“Was part of your challenge trying to sit down in a community session or via multi-media and the many different tools and strategies and approaches you took, but was part of the challenge getting people to care about the role of the constitution in their lives? To say, ‘Okay, basically this current constitution we have, this is how it impacts you as a citizen. This new constitution we’ve drafted, this is how it will change the nation, this is how it will change the, potentially change the community, this is how it will change the role that you can play in the governance of the nation.’ And you talked about making it personal -- is that not part of the challenge?”

Terry Janis:

It’s definitely part of it. It’s not so much how do you get them to care. Again, it’swe’re Indian people, and in my experience, we care deeply; we just do. The question is, ‘What do we care about?’ And so that was the issue, trying to figure out what this person cares about or if it’s a group of five or 20 or 100 or 200, what is the sense of what they care about and then how do you take that and share the information about the text of this constitution, how it changes things and what it will mean? How do you then tie that into what they care about because it is tribal politics, and so much of that is personal? It’s going to be, ‘This person is an elected leader and I hate him or her. She did this or he did that,’ and that is a very real sense of care and is very personal and it’s got nothing to do with me, but it has everything to do with this educational process on this constitution. And so people that are working within their own tribal communities and try to engage an educational process about constitutional reform, you have to respect that, that somebody cares about this thing and that does tie into their ability to learn about the constitution. And as an educator, that’s what makes a quality teacher is finding a way to tie that in so that you’re using that person’s energy, what they care about, to help learn about this thing. Every teacher, every quality teacher that is perceived of as being a good teacher, that’s what makes them good. It’s just normal education. This is not new stuff. This is not unique stuff. In order to do this well, you need good educators and you need people that are grounded in tribal sovereignty.”

Ian Record:

“And ideally grounded or at least understanding of the community, right? As you mentioned and sort of the dynamics and the”

Terry Janis:

“Absolutely, absolutely.”

Ian Record:

“So you made reference to this a little bit earlier in discussing the new constitution and how different it is from its predecessor and how different it is from anything that the United States government would ever conceive of. From your perspective as an outsider, can you share with us some of the things that are contained in this new constitution that are distinctly Anishinaabe, that advance Anishinaabe values, that reflect Anishinaabe culture, governance principles? For instance, you made reference to restorative justice and the use of language and things like that.”

Terry Janis:

“I’m not Anishinaabe and I can’tI cannot communicate that from that perspective. What I can do is say that the preamble uses Anishinaabe language and that is referenced throughout the constitution. The judicial system places a very real emphasis on restorative justice rather than the punishment model of a judiciary. That language ‘restorative justice’ is not in Indian language, but the heart of it, the substance of it, that is all Indian, whether it’s Anishinaabe or Lakota or whatever, that is about that community and the way they’re going to implement it is going to be all Anishinaabe, it’s going to be all Ojibwe.

Whenever you look at...the constitution allows or provides for, requires, three advisory bodies, formal advisory bodies that have direct advisory responsibility to the legislative council and the office of the president, an elder’s council, a youth council and a community council. The constitution establishes them specifically and it states specifically certain aspects of Anishinaabe culture and tradition that that elder council is responsible to give advice to the legislative body and the president on. You don’t see that in other constitutions, period. So it structurally establishes a mechanism for that to be in there, but it also, at the same time, is an advisory body. So it’s not a full shift over to a traditional model of governance where the chiefs are making decisions in that process. It’s a unique sort of mechanism in that regard.

The last one that I think is most unique is if you think about a governance, you’re really talking about the ability of a representative to truly represent their community. That’s where so much of the gap is. In this country, what is the percentage of American population, voting age population that actually votes? It’s a huge gap because the representatives that we can vote on to represent us don’t represent us. Here, in this constitution, the people themselves organize their own voting districts. They are responsible for organizing those voting districts and if they’re the ones that have to carry that burden, there’s a greater potential that they’re going to organize the voting districts that actually mean something to them and if it does, then they’re going to select a person to represent them and then there’s that connect. That is f*cking awesome. It really is. And it is so problematic. How do you actually implement that? Nobody’s ever done that before.”

Ian Record:

“But I would argue that that is righting one of the greatest wrongs of, in particular, the IRA system, which”

Terry Janis:

“Absolutely, absolutely.”

Ian Record:

“It either corrupted, or displaced entirely, these traditional governance systems that, as you mentioned earlier, centralized power. And really what are you talking about when you talk about power? You’re talking about decision-making responsibility and basically where in most, if not all, traditional Indigenous societies everyone had a valued role to play, everyone was expected to contribute to the governance of the nation in some respect, and it wasn’t called the governance of the nation back then, it was called something else, but basically that’s what it was: young people, old people, elders, everyone had a role. And now from what you’re saying is that White Earth has made a conscious decision to return some of that decision-making authority directly to the people so that they can once again have a valued role.”

Terry Janis:

“I think that if you really apply this accurately, this is the whole ball of wax. If this constitution is going to be effectively implemented, the people themselves are going to organize their own voting districts. That’s the only way it’s going to move forward. And in order for that to succeed, they have to be engaged much more broadly, much more actively, much more dynamically than they have now. The strategy for full ground up, bottom up community development to implement this, requires that kind of engagement for them to really understand that and to organize their own voting districts so that it means something to them. And the constitution provides that they can organize it based upon population centers, historic associations, clan systems and their understanding of that, ‘What does that mean?’ is what defines it. The constitution uses these broad, open words. They have to be defined and the only one that can define them under this constitutional form of government is the people of White Earth and that’s just exciting.”

Ian Record:

“That’s cool. So I want to turn now to the process and that’syou were involved with the process because, as you mentioned, you came on board after the constitution had been drafted, and your job in part was to work with citizens that had been designated by the tribe, employees, etc. to figure out what’s the best approach to actually teaching the people about what this constitution says, what it does. Can you give us a brief overview of the campaign, the comprehensive citizen engagement, citizen education campaign that you guys launched and continue to implement?”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah. We went over it just in the fundamental way. On a most basic level it has to be personal. In order for it to be personal, you have to engage in multiple venues, multiple formats, multiple times. And so small gatherings, unique gatherings, having as active and dynamic a calendar that if they miss this one, there’s going to be another opportunity and another and another. And so really playing that out so that it’s personal in that regard.

Secondly, if you’re going to do this, it really has to engage multiple medias. The majority of the population does not live on the reservation and so we had events not only on reservation, but in the Twin Cities, in Cass Lakes, on the Iron Range and other places where major populations are, but we didn’t go outside of the State of Minnesota, and there’s a huge White Earth population outside of Minnesota as well. And so having the website, having different resources and materials on the website, videos. We did the whole training, a whole two-hour session over each article of the constitution and posted that on the website as well, and then having a symposium that was live streamed on the website; accepting the offer of another entity, Truth to Tell, to host an event on the reservation. The chairperson, the primary drafters of the constitution, all came together and participated on that and had a raucuous good time. It was like really intense.”

Ian Record:

“I watched it -- very intense. I’ll ask you a follow-up question about that.”

Terry Janis:

“And it was real. And so just multiple mechanisms for doing that and making sure that number one, it was personal. Number two, that there were multiple mechanisms for doing that. And then number three, there was absolute certainty that we were neutral, that we presented the materials with, as best as I could, with no offer of an opinion one way or another, good or bad, up or down, a complete respect for the sovereignty of that nation, which in this process meant the sovereignty of the individual to come to their own decision, to make up their own mind with their own process. And my job was to provide as much resources for them to do that as possible.”

Ian Record:

“That Truth to Tell forum, which was live streamed, that was quite athat was on our ‘Must See TV’ list for quite a while. I remember watching it and then saying, ‘You guys got to watch this, you got to watch this.’ And they hadI know they posted the first part first and then there was a little lag and then the second part and we were all waiting with baited breath. And it was interesting the conversation that we had internally because some folks among us said, ‘Oh, man, look how crazy this was. Look howlook how ugly it got at times with people beingraising their voice and calling people out.’ And I made the point, I said, ‘Having watched enough tribes struggle through constitutional reform, seeing some succeed and some fail, that this to methe beauty of this forum that you guys had and the way you did it and the fact that it was so open and it was so transparent,’ I said, ‘to me, that is the most important thing is because --aside from what’s being shared in that forum -- the nation and the project in particular are sending a message to the White Earth people that ‘we want to be transparent in this process, we are doing our part to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard.’' And isn’t that the most important thing, is that you’re giving everyone in the community every possible opportunity to make sure that their voices are heard so at the end of the day nobody can say, ‘I didn’t have a chance.’”

Terry Janis:

“And the reality is, whenever you get to learn of a community, after you’re there for a while, you realize people gather at this one place on a regular basis. If I had known that, I would have incorporated it into our strategy and done that. So being very open to the possibility that somebody else is going to come. This was not organized by me, or the tribe, or anybody else. This was organized by Niijii Radio with Truth to Tell and TPT; they did all the structuring of it, they paid for it, they put it all together, they decided on the format. I contributed a lot in conversations with them about the participants and everything else, but to accomplish their goal, having a balance between people that were supportive of it and people that were opposed with strong voices on both sides, even though we didn’t necessarily have strong voices in every situation. Some people didn’t feel comfortable in that environment, but it was their agenda and their show and their program and that kind of transparency is what the tribal council and Chairperson [Erma] Vizenor and Secretary Treasurer Robert Durant committed themselves to. They never interfered with our process at all and were very supportive of that.”

Ian Record:

“I’m glad you bring that up because with another nation we worked with over the past decade or so, they went through constitutional reform about seven or eight years ago now, and they attribute the success of their reform effort to, first and foremost, the fact that they went to great lengths to ensure that the process maintained what was termed an ‘aura of independence.’ Meaning that yes, the politicians, the elected leadership have a role to play and whether it’s funding the process, setting up the body that will lead the process to see it through, but once that’s done, it’s imperative that the politicians take a back seat, that they don’t come to dominate the process, or at least appear to be dominating the process, because it’s imperative that the process itself espouses the kind of principles that you’ve been talking about, which is, ‘It’s not my job to take sides, it’s not my job to champion this, it’s my job to make sure you understand what’s in it.’”

Terry Janis:

“There were people thinking about that in the hiring process. And as many times as I was attacked for not being Ojibwe, this outside guy -- especially a Lakota guy, we’re enemies -- coming in and taking one of their jobs, as many times as I was attacked there was somebody in the audience always who said, ‘This is the best way to do this. There’s no other way we’re going to have an objective look at this and give at least that a chance.’ And so even for the people in the hiring process and the selection committee -- you have to ask them what they were thinking exactly -- but I heard it over and over and over in the community as well.”

Ian Record:

“You talked about some of the strategies that you guys implemented in making sure that you were generating broad community awareness of not just what was in the constitution, but the choice that was before the people about this process, you talked about some of the strategies that you guys implemented in making sure that you were generating broad community awareness of not just what was in the constitution, but the choice that was before the people, individually and collectively. I’m sure not everything went according to plan. You’ve talked about some of the things that you didn’t anticipate when you first set out. Can you share what, from your view, were and are some of the biggest challenges to both, I guess, the process leading up to the vote and then now? And then, what did you do or what are you doing to overcome those?”

Terry Janis:

“On the one hand, you deal with the situation that you have and you create the best strategy you can realizing that you’re going to change it as you get into it. So all that being said, they finished the drafting in 2009 and had quite a few years of not a lot happening. If they could have done a level of this kind of process starting in 2009 leading to a referendum vote on November 19, 2013, that would have been awesome, but they didn’t. And so havingnot having that gap in time -- because you have to make up a lot -- the kind of impetus of coming together and drafting a constitution and then nothing happens and people forget, you lose momentum, you lose context, you lose memory, you lose priority. And so that had to be dealt with and energy created and generated in order to get interest and get everybody back on the same page as far as, ‘This is a priority,’ and ideas and tactics for doing that. That’s what we had to deal with. If something could have been done differently, it would have been changed in the past and have some process engaging from 2009 to the referendum vote.

It also is a really complex document and we put a lot of energy into reading it, working with educators, curriculum developers, the education department at White Earth, Joan Timeche who is the director [of the Native Nations Institute] -- she was really helpful in all of this -- my experience with curriculum development, etc. and thinking through, as adults, what sort of resources and tools can we bring to the table to help somebody work through a hugely complex document. And so reorganizing it, simplifying the language, creating summaries, creating a workbook, getting the text out, really emphasizing the text itself that even though this summary is a summary it’s in a useful way of introducing yourself to it, really being willing to sit down there and go through it word by word as well.

If there was something that we could have taken from that and learned from that, I think it might have been a broader range of stuff. Where if there was more time, really do a pre-K through full adult, develop an educational resource mechanism and tools and strategies to cover that whole broad range because developing a coloring book for a pre-K kid is going to help an adult with that education process as well. And because you’re doing it for a pre-K kid, it’s not insulting to that adult that is actually going to benefit from that. You see what I’m saying? But because we didn’t have that much time, we didn’t develop that full scope and full range of educational resources and tools and have the time to implement it at that scale.

But dealing with a very complex document that is the genesis or basis of a very complex system really would have benefited from more time, a broader-scale approach that engaged non-voting age members and voting age members in an equal sort of basis because everybody votes frombenefits from all of those resources being available to them. That’s just the reality of it. We didn’t have that time. We didn’t scoperamp it up to that scale and that scope of it right away just because of the timing issues. But if we were going to do it over again with more time, especially not losing momentum from the initial 2009 completion of the draft drafting process, I think that’s how it would have gone.”

Ian Record:

“Isn’t that couldn’t you argue that that’s the challenge now before the White Earth Nation is, ‘How do we now actually live this new constitution?’ And isn’t part of that challenge, of figuring how to live it, is this tribal civics challenge?”

Terry Janis:

“Oh, absolutely.”

Ian Record:

“of engraining in our people young, old”

Terry Janis:

“Absolutely.”

Ian Record:

“of all ages not only what the constitution says, but this is who we are, this is how we govern, this is how we make decisions, this is the future we seek for ourselves?”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah, and whenever people think about this kind of constitutional change, one of the easiest things to think about is, if you understand what an IRA council is, an IRA constitution and the tribal council and business committee that comes out of it, their kind of authority to make decisions into the most minute things. ‘Oh, you can’t fire that secretary’ or ‘cut their pay,’ or whatever. The council is integrating themselves in every single decision because that is the scope of power that they have; there is no limits on authority or separation of powers. And so for the new legislative council, once it gets organized, to really learn what it means to legislate, to legislate; for the office of the president to really know what an executive authority and role is, the limits and scope of that; for the judiciary to really believe that they’re fully independent. In order for that to happen, the training and education process have to happen from today. As we get resources and tools out there or White Earth gets resources and tools out there to help the people organize their communities, their voting districts, that education process has to happen at that scale.”

Ian Record:

“And doesn’t it also have to be. you mentioned. White Earth has to be sure that the chief executive, whoever that may be, whether Erma or someone else, that they fully understand”

Terry Janis:

“Exactly.”

Ian Record:

“what their role is under this new constitution. The constitution and the limits of that role, where it begins to get into thatoverlaps into someone else’s role and where they need to think twice and vice versa the legislative side.”

Terry Janis:

“And whenever the kids in the community and the people that aren’t going to run for those elected offices, if they understand it.”

Ian Record:

“Well, I was just going to say, that’s critical because they’re the ones that apply pressure, healthy or unhealthy, on those people”

Terry Janis:

“And who are organizing those voting districts and the representative that comes out of those voting districts is going to be one of them. And so they’re going to be selecting somebody based upon an understanding that they have. It’s a true ground-up, building-a-nation process that depends upon education at that broad scale.”

Ian Record:

“I want to switch to one of the strategies that you guys employed and, I think, were more aggressive, I would say, than we’ve seen with other nations that have gone down the reform road and that’s the use of multimedia. And you mentioned that you guys -- and I’ve seen the videos you’ve done. The website is very robust. It has a series of videos featuring you and some other folks talking, sort of, as you mentioned, breaking down the constitution, making it accessible, talking about constitutional, often very legalese-style language and breaking it down and talking about it in very accessible, laymen’s terms for somebody with a 10th-grade education, for instance, trying to make it make sense to them. How did the community respond to that, to that particular strategy of, ‘Here, we’re going to tell you a story about this particular aspect of the constitution and we’re going to use this visual media to do it’?”

Terry Janis:

“The only way that I can really respond to that is the few positive responses that we got. ‘I watched it. It was great.’ All of that was good. I think more importantly though is we put a lot of energy and thought into not just having a strategy and design for doing it, but doing it, constantly, persistently and not only in creating these multimedia things and getting them out there, but doing the community events, but also being absolutely responsive to everybody that called, everybody that walked up, everybody that wanted to talk, that responsiveness -- so returning 20 phone calls a day and having 40 -- and so that kind of response. I think it was the whole thing. And so from day one, building that on an increasing basis, feeling the tension ramp up because there was a growing interest and a growing desire for more information, a growing process of people actually making up their mind and caring about it and getting aggressive about it, and trying to convince their friends and their relatives and other people about their position, that’s all we wanted, that’s all we pushed for. And the only way that I definitively noticed success is when I felt people get more impassioned, more opinionated, and more aggressive about it. The more fights we had, the more I was excited.”

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you bring that up because on one hand you would think, ‘Oh, going into this, I want to avoid anxiety, I want to avoid tension,’ but”

Terry Janis:

It’s just the opposite actually.”

Ian Record:

“You want the opposite.”

Terry Janis:

“It has to build.”

Ian Record:

“Because you want passion and interest and you don’t want apathy.”

Terry Janis:

“Exactly. Exactly. And that’s how we knew we were being successful is because it did grow. And by the time it came to the referendum vote itself, it was a crescendo. It was so intense. It was like, ‘Ah!’”

Ian Record:

“So where does constitutional reform at White Earth stand today, if you can just give a quick snapshot?”

Terry Janis:

“A quick snapshot is passed in the referendum vote; the current process of deciding what the relationship is between White Earth and the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. So what the elected leadership at White Earth decided from day one of my participation there, my contract there, was that they want to remain a part of MCT, if at all possible, to organize under this new constitution, if it gets approved, and negotiate with MCT to remain part of MCT. So that’s what they’re doing right now, a good-faith effort on their part to have conversations with MCT. And because the changes in this new constitution compared to the MCT constitution are quite profound, and how that’s really going to happen, one of the initial thoughts is to request from MCT to sponsor a secretarial election that would change the MCT constitution that would allow each Band to establish their own constitutional form of government, and there’s other options for negotiating that as well. So those things are happening right now. They’re pretty tough; MCT doesn’t want to change. I described to you a completely unrepresentative form of government. The smaller bands that are benefiting from that, why would they want to change? They’ve got their own issues internally within their own governance. The system that they have benefits their current leadership. There’s going to be changes, etc. So it’s a broad dynamic. Whether that succeeds or not and how long White Earth commits to those negotiations is a decision of the elected leadership at White Earth right now, and they haven’t given up yet.

If it moves away from that, then you’re really talking about withdrawing from MCT and issues of secession. One of the issue points with the Bureau of Indian Affairs is this is their baby –- MCT -- and they set up this broad infrastructure to maintain and sustain this thing that they created. BIA initially doesn’t want to see this thing changed as well. They can see the arguments for it and against it, etc. There’s a very clear sort of distinction. One of the concerns that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is naturally going to have, as a broad bureaucracy, federal bureaucracy is, what is the ripple effect? So if White Earth withdraws from MCT, the federal government is supportive and recognizes their right to do so and establish their own form of government. Does that open the door for another entity to do the same thing?

San Xavier as a district on the Tohono O’odham Nation, Sandy Lake at Mille Lacs, situations where there isn’t the history of treaty recognition and treaty establishment, for example, White Earth and the federal government. San Xavier necessarily doesn’t have that kind of relationship, or maybe they do, I don’t know their story that well, but there are some things about this that distinguish it in a very real sort of way, not only the treaty relationship between White Earth and the federal government, but at every level, legislative, judicial, executive that recognizes White Earth as a distinct, federally recognized tribe independent of MCT and treats them that way and operates that way. So that kind of historical and practical federal recognition that exists in MCT and doesn’t exist in other places can argue or should argue that there’s not going to be the slippery slope sort of situation that is going to cause a problem to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the reality is, it will and those are very practical realities for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So that’s the other thing.

A bottom line for the elected leadership at White Earth right now is they are not going to do anything that jeopardizes the relationship, the federal recognition relationship between White Earth and the federal government. They are not going to do anything that would jeopardize their funding, their relationship, or their status. So that’s got to be resolved before they actually withdraw from MCT. That’s a pretty sticky situation.”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, it’s uncharted waters. It’s hard to find another parallel in the United States.”

Terry Janis:

“There’s none. MCT has no parallel in the country, period. And you can make an argument for that and I can call youI can describe 10 times as many reasons why it’s distinct because it is.”

Ian Record:

“So let’s turn to your own tribe for a second. As I mentioned at the outset, you’re a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, often cited as one of the poster children, if you will, of IRA, the Indian Reorganization Act in that”

Terry Janis:

“I thought you were going to say something else, but I actually”

Ian Record:

“Well, no, in that there’s been a lot ofthere’s been books written about IRA formation at Pine Ridge and the process and you’re quite passionate about IRA, a lot of people are, and I’m wondering, you’ve beenyou’re working with a nation that just basically jettisoned -- or you could argue based on what you just said is still in the process of trying to jettison -- their IRA system, and your own nation still operates with one.”

Terry Janis:

“Yeah.”

Ian Record:

“And being that you’re sort of in this unique position, in that you’re sort of a student of your own nation and its governance system and then you’ve come to learn so much about another nation and their governance system and how they’ve changed it, I guess, if you can sort of try to meld those together and, I guess, what does the White Earth experience say to you about Oglala Sioux and its own governance system and potentially what the future of that could hold?”

Terry Janis:

“The political history of Pine Ridge has had a fairly consistent policy of holding the Bureau of Indian Affairs accountable for its trust obligations. That’s a stronger way of framing this idea and that has been the position of Pine Ridge virtually my whole life. I have argued with them about this a lot, that Pine Ridge should be contracting every function that we can...taking over all obligations, responsibilities, and if it costs us more money, we’re going to do it 10 times better than the federal government will. But the policy position of Pine Ridge is to not let them get away with doing a bad job, to hold them responsible to their trust obligation. That’s how their positioning it. I’m hoping that if they continue with that position that will actually change the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal government because that’s what it’s going to require. In order for Pine Ridge to succeed with that, they’re going to have to change the Bureau of Indian Affairs and move it away from a colonial, paternalistic structure to a service entity. That change is not coming any time soon that I’m aware of.”

Ian Record:

“I would agree and looking more internally though, because basically what you’re getting at is that they’ve taken a very staunch position, and I agree with you based on my work with them that that’s my impression as well, but looking internally, this sort of deep self examination that White Earth has gone through in terms of looking at their own governance system, do you feel inspired or encouraged by the White Earth experience to think that Oglala Sioux will engage in that full examination of their own governance system and perhaps identify a better way?”

Terry Janis:

“No, only because Pine Ridge is Pine Ridge and White Earth is White Earth. We as Oglalas are going to chart our own course. For me it goes back to, ‘Do I respect tribal sovereignty or not?’ And I do. And Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, any other reservation has an obligation to assert their sovereignty and make that decision for themselves. I think that Pine Ridge is wrong in that position in regards to the trust obligation and their ability to really change the federal government. I think it’s a lack of recognition of what the federal government is vis-á-vis Indian nations and that relationship, but given that that has been their position and the strength of it -- that’s why I don’t speak in weak terms in that regard and I speak in strong terms -- that it is the policy of the Oglala Sioux Tribe to require the federal government to live up to its trust obligations, period. That is a strong statement, an assertion of tribal sovereignty and it puts the obligation for improvement and reform on the federal government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in particular. And that’s the best I can do with that.”

Ian Record:

“Final question. You’ve been immersed in the White Earth constitutional reform process for about a year. What, and I understand your point that every tribe is distinct in the way it chooses to express its sovereignty is unique, but aren’t there lessons from the path that White Earth has traveled and is traveling right now that other nations who are feeling like their constitutions and their system of government aren’t up to par, that aren’t reflective of who they are, aren’t there lessons that they can learn from the White Earth experience?”

Terry Janis:

“Absolutely. The bottom line is, White Earth is doing it. You saw the Truth to Tell; you saw the level of opposition to this thing. White Earth is doing it and the vote that the referendumI was sitting there when the count came in. I was completely shocked. We had a registration process that had a larger percentage of registering voters than has ever turned up to an election before, over double the normal turnout and of that, 80 percent of them voted for it. I was stunned. I didn’t expect it to be that large. Given thatand one of the things that you, if you have a conversation with the folks at Osage, for example, the kind of opposition that you saw in Truth to Tell that I saw every day out there, that they saw at Osage as well, whenever you’re thinking of a fundamental and profound change like this, there is going to be opposition. There has to be. You have to accept the reality of this colonial history and that people actually benefited from it and they’re not going to give that up without a fight, period. And that fight is going to be intense and you’ve got to stick with it and you’ve got to make it happen and see it through and let the people decide in as full and honest as a vote as you can get. And if they reject it, that’s great because that then leads you to another conversation and to draft a constitution that they really do want. That’s all that means.”

Ian Record:

“I’m glad you brought that up because I’ve heard a number of folks who’ve been directly engaged in constitutional reform say, ‘There’s no such thing,’ or something along these lines, ‘there’s no such thing as a failed reform effort.’”

Terry Janis:

“Exactly.”

Ian Record:

“For instance, Lac du Flambeau just went through a referendum vote on some pretty important amendments and they were voted down. And I think that if you talk to the people that led that effort, they might be discouraged a little bit, but they’re not giving up and I bet you they would say that, ‘We came out of this process with a greater understanding of what’s at stake and what the role of the constitution is in the life of the nation than we did before and that’s a good thing.’”

Terry Janis:

“And that’s the bottom line that I take from this experience. White Earth is doing it, an Indian nation, a tribe that wants to define their own governmental system. You don’t accomplish that without doing it. Whether it succeeds the first time or the 20th time, it doesn’t matter because each time you do it, you’re informing your population, you’re engaging the conversation and you’re building that base and that is nation building.”

Ian Record:

“Great way to end. Well, Terry, we really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts, experience and wisdom with us.”

Terry Janis:

“It was a pleasure. It was good seeing you again, too.”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, good seeing you. That’s all the time we have today for Leading Native Nations, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."

 

Terry Janis: Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Terry Janis (Oglala Lakota), former Project Manager of the White Earth Nation Constitution Reform Project, provides participants with a detailed overview of the multi-faceted approach to citizen engagement that the White Earth Nation followed as it worked to educate the White Earth people about the nation's proposed constitution in advance of their November 2013 referendum vote on the new document. He also shares some lessons learned from his experience at White Earth, and stresses that those engaged in constitutional reform efforts always respect the opinions of all of those people who have a direct stake in the outcome of those efforts. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Janis, Terry. "Citizen Engagement and Constitutional Change at the White Earth Nation." Tribal Constitutions Seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation.

"So my name is Terry Janis. I'm Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation and I worked for the last year at White Earth Nation, which is in northern Minnesota, which is an interesting thing because historically Sioux people, Lakotas, are enemies with Anishinaabe people, Ojibwe people. But they hired me, so what can you say? And it was a fun year. I'm a lawyer; I came to the University of Arizona for law school. I've known Rob Hershey forever and the other people that are here. And this kind of presentation for me here today is not so much going to focus on the White Earth Nation constitution per se, but on our educational process.

By the time I got on the scene, in the 1990s like a lot of places there was a huge governmental crisis, indictments, convictions, etc. In '97, very soon after that was resolved, they realized that it was the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution that was really at the core of those issues. Whenever you engage and bring together all the power and decision-making authority in one small body, the likelihood of abuse and corruption is fairly high and they very quickly turned to this idea of reforming their constitution. They tried it in '97, but because of that recent history there was still too much division like in a lot of situations. I'm from Pine Ridge, we have plenty of examples of this where you get into a fight like this and you get factions and you have a hard time letting it go. So they waited for 10 years and then in 2007 did a process for drafting a proposed constitution.

There's important issues -- and we can engage in a long conversation about their drafting process because there's a lot to learn from it -- but the idea of an open and free opportunity for input, transparent drafting and revision process, opportunity for compromising consensus, the question of whether all of that is there in your drafting process is critical and there's going to be plenty of chance...Red Lake is doing an amazing job of really trying to engage that in a very real sort of way and a number of tribes are as well that are right in the drafting process.

But when I came on the scene, they had already completed that process and they had a proposed constitution. It was completed in 2009 and when I came on, my job was to start a dialogue, start a conversation amongst the community about this proposed constitution and then move it to a referendum vote so that the people themselves would decide whether they wanted to accept or reject this proposed constitution. And the other caveat that I had is that they were not going to allow any more changes, that the document that they created from 2007 to 2009 is the document that they voted on in November of 2013.

And I was brought on about a year ago, so in April of 2013. We had from 2009 to April of 2013 not really much going on, not a lot of conversation about it, some publications in the newspaper, but that was the challenge that we had ahead of us of how to pick this thing up, communicate to folks about what the delegates at the convention as well as the current council decided to do in moving this proposed constitution to a vote. And so I came in, we pulled together a team and started thinking about how do you engage an educational process with the community, how do you do that so that the people themselves are informing themselves and have opportunity to inform themselves as much as possible.

And so we looked at these three kind of ideas as a starting point and we realized that you really have to have multiple venues in multiple formats. You can't just hold one big seminar and expect that to meet everybody's needs. You can't just hold community meetings and expect that to meet everybody's needs. You have to have a range of different things: going door to door, talking to people in their kitchen, organizing community meetings that are part of the infrastructure that's already there with whatever that is, community councils, church groups, elder groups, whatever that is, utilizing all of the infrastructure that's already there and holding meetings and informational sessions with them, working with that infrastructure to bring people together, utilizing their networks, utilizing their relationships, utilizing their own feelings about this.

Formats as well. You know how the educational process is. Some of us learn best by looking and by hearing and by talking. Some of us learn best by reading, others have to write things out. Oftentimes for me, it's a combination of things. When I'm talking to somebody, when I'm listening to somebody, when I'm writing notes, when I'm reading it, it's that combination of stuff that does it for me. And so we try to engage all of those different formats and try to create situations where whenever we brought people together, we had all those formats there as well, recognizing everybody learns in their own way, especially as adults. Most of you are adults. We learn in different ways and hopefully we know how we learn best so we can bring those resources to ourselves.

So we tried to do that, a lot of meetings and types of meeting, utilizing the infrastructure that was already there, having a lot of printed materials, having a lot of visuals, having a lot of opportunity for conversation and debate, putting together a workbook where they could draw out and write notes and make it their own. And so we tried to create all of that functionality, all of that process.

The other thing that we really tried to do...and actually was the good thing about me being a Lakota coming into Ojibwe country is I wasn't involved in the drafting process; historically, I'm their enemy. I could be neutral. I didn't have anything invested in this document that they created. I didn't really have a strong feeling one way or another and I could maintain that idea that I was coming in to help people get the information that they need in order to make up their own mind -- that idea of neutrality. It was also strengthened by the kind of career that I pursued as well, that I could say in a very clear and honest sort of way that my interest in this is that the people make up their own mind, that the people have the authority and the information and the tools that they need to come to their own decision. Because as a Lakota man from our traditions, the sovereignty of our nation resides with each individual man and woman and then it moves from there to the family and to the tiospayes and then to the nation. And in our tradition, our sovereignty rests with each individual. And so that was my focus, that was the base of my assertion of neutrality, and I told them that story over and over and over and over. And so there's value in that -- of having an educational and informational process that's not tied to one family or one political party or pro or con. It's a group of people that you bring together to provide the resources for information and education that emphasizes the fact that sovereignty in this decision lies with each individual person. That's what was important to us, not what they decided or which way they went. So that idea of neutrality.

And then we went into it just thinking like Indian people. How are Indian people, how do they decide stuff, the use of humor, the use of respect and integrity, respecting everybody's position, everybody's history, everybody's ideas, connecting the materials to their interests. For me as an Indian person, if I have a conflict with my tribal government or some other thing, I may oftentimes -- or any of us might oftentimes -- put off this idea that we don't really care, but just the opposite is true. We as Indian people care deeply, almost always. And so the trick in an educational process is how do you connect these resources to the things that we as Indian people care about and thinking about who the people are, what their history is, what they really care about, and how do you present the material and information to them in the way that lines up with the things that they care about. That is what any good teacher will do -- whether you're teaching math or science or history -- is how do you line up the information that you're teaching with what the students care about and then how do you engage it with them from that perspective? So that's basically all we were trying to do.

The final thing that we came in this with...with this idea of respecting the politics of the community. Any time you're dealing with a constitutional reform process, regardless of how narrow or broad, it's a political issue, it just is. And if you're going to engage your community to help that community, to learn about it, come to their own decision and respect their decision, and you're going to do it in a way that really has good educational pedagogy and groundwork, that's not going to be enough.

In any reservation community, you're going to have to deal with the politics of the situation. You just have to. You cannot avoid it. You cannot wish it away. If somebody's mad, one family is mad at another, you've got to deal with that. You've got to find a way of dealing with it. If one group hates the elected leader -- which in White Earth they really, really do -- you've got to deal with that. You've got to go into communities maintaining your neutrality, maintaining your emphasis on this idea that the people are the source of sovereignty and it's important that they make a decision and that's why I'm here and that their hatred of the chairperson, their hatred of the secretary-general...or secretary-treasurer or anybody else is important, it's valid. Not that I'll agree with them, yes or no, but that their feelings, their political base is valid, it has value.

It's not my place as an educator on these issues, on these highly political issues, to argue with them about the rightness or wrongness of their politically held positions. My job is to see them, to understand them and to respect them and to make room for them. In an educational process, if you're going to have a conversation about the content of a constitutional reform and help people to understand what that reform is, you're going to have to make space for those political issues.

So that was our starting point and we went through six months of almost 60 different community education sessions, hundreds of small-room conversations, thousands of phone conversations, an all-day seminar, eight radio interviews...there's a community radio station that we used a lot...internet and web-based streaming formats of all of the training sessions, all of the seminar materials and other stuff, everything available online. Even the ugly conversations, we put it up on the web. The whole world was able to see if they wanted to how intense and vibrant this thing was. And that was our goal. We put all of this stuff up and there's a few things that we learned. [I've got a few more minutes.] These are the things that we learned.

Politics and power in the community must be respected. I ended that previous slide with it and I began this final slide with that. This cannot be overstated. You have got to make room for the politics of that community. You've got to. A constitution is inherently a political document and people have got to see it and engage it. If they're not engaging it, if they don't have...and remember what I said earlier, we as Indian people, we care. There is not one of us that lacks for caring. Even if it's the only thing we care about is drugs or something, we as Indian people care deeply about a lot of different things. And whenever you combine that with a political issue, especially if you're dealing with membership and citizenship, which the White Earth constitution did and moved from a quarter-degree blood criteria to lineal descendancy; a hugely, hugely volatile issue for the entire community. And we realized that coming off the history of that community, coming off what this proposed constitution was proposing that politics and power in the community must be respected. And that process is not easy; it requires you to deal with sometimes very extreme emotions.

I can tell you, when somebody's really angry and you know how spit'll comes out of their mouth sometimes, I can tell you exactly how far it goes so I put myself right at this space so it doesn't hit me. That was the nature of it. You just...you've got to be okay with it and it may not come to that, you can do a number of things that try to engage it in a way that defuses it, but sometimes you're not going to be able to.

The truth for me, I found, that what I wanted was an escalating interest and that is going to show itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes people are going to get more excited and more positive about it. Other times people are going to get more excited and more negative about it. We want an escalating amount of interest in this thing because we had a timeframe moving to November 19th to a vote. We wanted an escalating amount of energy, an escalating amount of dialogue, people taking positions and arguing for their decisions. I said this over and over and over, "˜Don't be quiet. Talk to every family member, go to the tribal council meetings, talk about these things as much as you can.' I wasn't at the council meetings so I didn't care, but that was my job.

The second thing is the importance of emotion and passion, which we basically just talked about, but it really does work, this idea. And in some ways it was just happenstance, something that you stumble across, but it was something that my elders told me. Once I was deciding to go to law school and stuff like that, we started having these conversations about sovereignty and where it comes from and what's the traditional base of it amongst Oglala Lakota people, and those are the things that they taught me. And I used what they taught me from that traditional base to have these conversations in the White Earth community, that there's value and reality in the individual holding the base of that sovereignty and making those sovereign decisions for themselves, taking that responsibility, carrying that burden and making that decision. So that results in emotion and passion, that results in interest and care, that results in decision-making and advocacy, and I think that's what you want. You want your people to be interested and from that perspective, there's no win or lose. Whether the constitution passed or not, we created interest and care and passion about it.

Timing and place for building momentum. Do not put yourself in a situation where you complete a drafting process and then wait three or four years before you do anything with it. It's a tough deal, if you're going to actually go through the process of drafting it, and what I'm learning about Red Lake and other places that are engaging the drafting process, do that in a deliberate way where you have plenty of opportunity for feedback and compromise and engagement. Engage an educational process without a bunch of delay. I think it's fine to make a decision -- once you have to draft -- to move it to a vote without further change, I think there's value in that, but if you have a huge delay like this, like we had, it's kind of fishy, it's kind of weird. How important is this thing really if you're going to do that? So keep that in mind.

You really do want to build momentum. You want to build this process where there's participation and engagement in the drafting process, that there's time and debate on people...allowing people to come to a decision. This is a pretty important decision, whether it's a small constitutional amendment or a complete reform of their constitution. Each one of those is critical and if the people are going to vote, then it's important that they be a part of that or at least have an opportunity to participate in that drafting and then give them time to really come to a decision, fight with each other, engage with each other, debate. And then a process for a vote.

Maintaining a firm principle in neutrality -- and again, some of this is just fortuitous -- but not only was I given the opportunity to do this as a Lakota in Ojibwe country, but the elected leadership, the tribal council, the chairperson, the secretary-treasurer were consistently supportive of that idea as well. Not because of me -- and I'm sure they had their own political reasons as well -- but when the council also supported our educational efforts and our education team, gave us the space and the resources to engage, didn't interfere. They still had their own opinions, they were divided just like everybody else was, but they emphasized the desire that the people themselves would decide and that the educational process would engage in a neutral fashion, that we would not promote one direction or another. There is real value in that. If you engage in an educational process and you're pushing it one way constantly, it's just going to fail. I think it's going to push against you and I think you're going to end up with a bad result. And so there was real value in that.

The final thing that we really learned as much as anything else -- especially when you're engaging a very broad reform like we did and on very highly controversial issues like from blood quantum to lineal descendancy -- you're going to get some pretty intense opposition and some of you have experienced that. Almost every other tribe that I've talked with that have engaged this, they come up with words like "˜the local Taliban' or the kind of intense kind of argument and debate and opposition. It's really important to just do it, to maintain your focus, to stay your course, and that attitude of doing it has to be a commitment from your educational team that does it with respect, respecting all of those people that would give voice to the strength of their opinions regardless of what that opinion is. But also the elected leadership, the elected leadership cannot back away. They have to maintain a principled approach to this and that was the value of White Earth's elected leadership as well. Their position -- whether they supported it or opposed it -- consistently, "˜We want it to go to a vote, we want the people to decide and we'll respect the decision of the people.' So those kind of principles and those kind of ideas help you as a team to stick with it, to stay with it and bring it to a referendum vote or whatever the eventual process is.

So those are the key principles that we engaged in our educational process. They're very simple. There's a lot of other details. Whenever you start into it, you want to think about the educational process, what is a learning process for adults on your reservation? They're going to be fairly consistent. We learn through different formats. We have to learn by seeing it, by coloring it, by writing it, by hearing it, by arguing it, by watching a movie, by going to your grandma's house or whatever it is. That's how we learn. You're going to have passion with it. So the general educational process in the pedagogy of your people, adult education; this is not new stuff, none of this is new stuff. This is understood.

As Indian people, how do we learn? Humor, everything else, food, it's got to be there. And the passion. The passion is there. We as Indian people, we are passionate people. We just are. We care deeply. How are you going to connect these sometimes very technical things, constitutional reform? We're going to go over some of those technical stuff, the legal side of this this afternoon as well. How do you connect that to what people really care about and have those conversations and take the time. It takes time, evening, morning, whatever that timeframe is that people think the best. I've set up sessions at 5:00 in the morning because that's when that guy thought the best and we did it. This is what it takes and it's doable and it's fun in a lot of ways. If you care about education, this combination of education, grounded in tribal sovereignty. That's what we learned as the keys to having a successful education and information process."