civic responsibilities

Native Leaders and Scholars: Citizens Versus Members: Some Food for Thought

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native Leaders and scholars discuss the pervasive role that terminology plays in conceptions of Native nation sovereignty and citizenship, comparing and contrasting the terms "member" and "citizen" and discussing the origins of the term "member" in Native nations' definitions of who is to be considered part of them.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Goldberg, Carole. "Designing Tribal Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2013. Presentation.

Tatum, Melissa L. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 2 (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Q&A session.

Timeche, Joan. "The Process of Constitutional Reform: Key Issues and Cases to Consider." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Carole Goldberg:

“You’ve often seen the word 'membership' used in lieu of 'citizenship.' The term 'membership' harkens back to something that Chairman Rocky Barrett of Citizen Potawatomi said in one of the earlier presentations you saw here today. There was in the development of tribal constitutions through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 a view of tribes as, in some respects, corporate entities that would have boards and members. There was also a view of tribes as something akin to private associations or even clubs that would have members. The terminology of 'citizenship' evokes sovereignty and nationhood. I think it’s become more common for Native nations to use the terminology of 'citizenship,' but any constitution has to have, as you heard earlier, the legitimacy and acceptance of the people whose government it is and the terminology will have to fit comfortably for whatever community that is.”

Melissa L. Tatum:

“Tribes need to consciously claim the language of sovereignty when they’re reforming their government, and that means using separation of powers if it’s appropriate, if it’s a cultural fit, adopting some other means of allocating responsibility and government functions depending on the tribe. But it also means being conscious of how certain words and phrases are viewed by other governments. For example, the three that I often use as examples are in the United States, tribes talk about 'membership' and who’s a 'member' of a tribe. But private clubs have memberships, country clubs have memberships, governments have 'citizens.' So we should be talking about citizenship and who are citizens of the government. One of the things that’s used a lot -- I work a lot with tribal courts -- there’s a movement to develop tribal common law, or it’s sometimes called ‘custom and tradition’ and then when lawyers, Anglo-American lawyers, hear this phrase ‘custom and tradition,’ they’re like, ‘Oh, how quaint. Custom and tradition.’ But yet if you look at the definition of Anglo-American 'common law,' it’s the norms of society. That’s what custom and tradition is. So simply instead of talking about custom and tradition, talking about common law triggers a different response in outsiders, even though it’s the same thing internally. But the other example I use, since I work a lot in the tribal courts and the criminal justice system, is in the United States there’s been some discussion in recent years about ‘banishment’ and about tribes using banishment. But every government on this planet has a method of removing people who misbehave from their society. It’s just usually called ‘deportation.’ And so we need to be conscious of the words we use and the labels we put on things, because words do have power and do have meaning and we need to be conscious not only of internal fit, but how those words are received by the outside world, too…One thing that I’m very concerned [about] from my perspective as an Indian law scholar is when the word ‘member,’ and ‘tribal member,’ started being used frequently in the U.S. Supreme Court opinions, that’s when the court started drastically reducing tribal authority over its own territory, and it’s the only time the Supreme Court has really started consistently reducing the authority of a government over its territory, is by introducing this word ‘member’ frequently into the dialogue, and so that’s one of my concerns, too.”

Joan Timeche:

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

Chris Hall: Cultivating Constitutional Change at Crow Creek

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native Nations Institute's Ian Record conducted an informative interview with Chris Hall, a citizen of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and a member of Cohort 4 of the Bush Foundation's Native Nation Rebuilders program. Hall discusses Crow Creek's current effort to reform its constitution and the importance of fully educating and engaging Crow Creek citizens in that process.

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hall, Chris. "Cultivating Constitutional Change at Crow Creek." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona and the Bush Foundation. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 25, 2013. Interview.

Ian Record:

So I’m here with Chris Hall, who is a member of Cohort 4 of the Bush Foundation’s Native Nation Rebuilders Program. Chris, welcome.

Chris Hall:

Thank you.

Ian Record:

Before we get into the questions and discuss your experience in the Rebuilders Program and talk a little bit about your own nation, why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself; what you do, where you come from.

Chris Hall:

I come from the Crow Creek in the Big Bend District on the Crow Creek Reservation, born and raised there. I won’t say I grew up there because I refuse to grow up, so that’s just a deal there. But yeah, I’m working with my nation in the hopes of improving our situation.

Ian Record:

So let’s talk a little bit about the Rebuilders Program and what led you to this day today, where you’re here at Spearfish, South Dakota, with no cell coverage, and you’re here learning with folks from other tribes across the region?

Chris Hall:

I think it was the state of our nation. After college, I had come back home after working on the East Coast and going to school, had come back home and really had an interest in getting involved. And when I did start, begin to get involved, I realized that there was some real issues that our leadership was struggling with and just one afternoon in a council meeting offered help. They were indicating they were overwhelmed and they were needing help so I simply said, ‘What can I do? How can I help?’ and was taken up on the offer. And they needed some help with their constitution revision, which hadn’t been done in a while. And so I stepped into that role.

Ian Record:

So you’ve had a few, you’ve been part of a few convenings of the Rebuilders Cohort 4 group now, and from your own personal perspective, what have been the highlights of the program thus far?

Chris Hall:

Oh, you know, the people are incredible, the leadership tools that we’re gaining, the support not just from the Bush Foundation and Native Nations Institute, but the cohort members themselves just has a real family feel and that sense seems to deepen with time. This is our third session out here in Spearfish Canyon and it really feels like we’re a family. We’re talking about getting together on each other’s land bases, reservations, and helping each other in an ongoing effort to just be together, because I think we’ve found strength in coming together. And we all have a commonality in our language and in our situations, a lot of familiarity with each other’s situation and now we have a common language that we can approach that with, and it feels really, really comfortable because we’re with like-minded individuals.

Ian Record:

So you’re not the first rebuilder from your nation that’s gone through this program or is going through this program,

Chris Hall:

Correct.

Ian Record:

There’s been some others, but I would imagine there’s a number of leaders in your, current leaders in your nation that don’t know a lot about this program, perhaps don’t know the value that it can have or perhaps is having for your nation. Can you talk, if you had an audience with the tribal leadership of your nation about this topic, what would you say to them? What would you want them to know about the Rebuilders program?

Chris Hall:

Well, I would assume that they are a lot like me. I would assume that with a desire to help, the first thing you seek out is resources. And one of the resources that I was looking for was information, information for my toolbox, for my toolkit, and I would think that current leadership and future leadership would want those tools so that they could address and compete on a level playing field with other leaders who are speaking the same language and talking about the same constructs, so that again, that we can all get on the same page and we can all move forward together. I’m beginning to see that it’s not each nation on its own path -- inasmuch as that is what’s going on -- but I sense a resurgence amongst all nations, and I feel like we are all gaining ground together and I feel like that synergy is really propelling us forward. So there’s a lot of inertia, and I would just encourage current and future leaders to tap into that, to ride that wave because it’s, I believe, it’s crashing towards a good shore and I think it’s actually going somewhere positive so it’s a good thing.

Ian Record:

So pretend for a second that I’m somebody that works in your nation’s government. It’s the day before the application deadline for Cohort 5 of the Rebuilders program and I’m sort of sitting on the fence. I’m not sure if I want to make this commitment, I’m not sure if I have much to contribute, not sure how much I’ll get out of this program. What would you say to me to convince me to apply?

Chris Hall:

I would say that you could make a lot of decisions in your life that may or may not assist you, but I could reassure you that this would be one that would propel you forward. This is a program -- if I can call it a program -- that really tunes in, listens, and provides you with tools for where you’re at and where you’re really intending on going. So even if you’re riding the fence and you’re not really sure, once you dip your toe in, you’re going to know that that water’s ripe for jumping in and swimming. So I would just say, ‘Put those fears and hesitation behind you and jump in,’ because it’s a real safe environment, it’s, like I say, they meet you where you’re at with your information, there’s no one person that is going to put you down for not knowing. So it’s a really, really positive experience and I think everyone needs that.

Ian Record:

So you alluded to this at the outset, that in recent years you’ve become involved in your nation’s, I would describe it perhaps as an ongoing effort to reform its constitution, perhaps it’s an ebb and flow, perhaps there’s work being done in some stages and just conversation at other stages, but can you first start off by describing the nature of your involvement in the sort of constitutional reform picture with Crow Creek?

Chris Hall:

By nature, what do you mean?

Ian Record:

Like so how are you contributing I guess to the reform process?

Chris Hall:

Oh, okay. Initially, I was the coordinator for a committee which was formed. There was a short time frame where we were allowed to present changes to our constitution, amendments to the constitution. We were asked to formalize those -- put that in writing -- present those for the decision, whether or not to move ahead. So a lot of the initial work that I was involved with was coming to the conclusion of what did we initially want to change, what [were] our top two priorities? And so it was weekly meetings, it was meeting with the community, tribal leadership, sort of cooking all that down and refining our selection to two amendments, which we put forth to vote. So that was the initial stage of my involvement.

Since the election, and the election didn’t go through, and there were a variety of reasons for that but that was...and I sort of knew this on the onset that it wasn’t going to be easily changed, we weren’t going to make two adjustments to our foundational document and then it was going to correct all our ills. So knowing that and having that election come and go and not have anything change, there wasn’t any disappointment on my part, in that we were making effort at changing.

So now this effort continues. There’s community education, leadership education; there’s lines of communication that are open that now need streamlining. There’s a very, very large picture out there that was at first unforeseen. There’s so much involved to wrap your head around that a lot of our citizens struggled with that. So since then, I’ve been working with the community and the leaders on clarifying that picture and clearing those lines of communication and this effort is, as you say, ongoing 'cause the revision process is just that -- it’s a revision process. The last time our constitution had been revised was 20-some years ago and that’s too long.

So the process that I’m involved in right now is an ongoing process of continuing education, of making resources available, clarifying that picture for our citizens so that they realize the importance of our foundational document, which is our constitution so that we can really accurately move forward in a knowing sense, so that we’re aware of what we’re doing rather than just throwing darts at a board, which at first, that’s what it felt like. We were under the gun, we had to come up with two prioritized amendments, and we were under the time pressure and it was just a shot in the dark.

Ian Record:

It sounds like it was a forced process when there needs to be sort of an organic nature to it, right? Where you allow people to fully immerse themselves and engage in the deliberations about this most precious governing document?

Chris Hall:

That’s a wonderful analogy. It does need to be grassroots, it does need to be organic, and I refer to our constitution as a foundational document. It impacts every aspect of our governance, of our culture, of our lifestyle, and people did not realize that at first. They thought this was just a piece of paper, it’s got some rules written on it and people are supposed to follow that if you’re in leadership and it doesn’t apply to the people, the nation. That concept has changed. Their appreciation of the document has deepened. They understand that this needs, that it’s wholesale; it’s across the board. This document affects every aspect of our living and our existence. So the importance of it now, I believe more and more people are becoming aware of that. Now the issue becomes, how do we not only specify in that document what our rules are, but how does that define us and which comes first? Do we define ourselves and then produce a document or is it vice versa? I’m letting people discover that for themselves. I believe I already have arrived at the answer, but I think that self-discovery for our citizenry is really, really important I think.

Ian Record:

I have two follow up questions for you on that. They were not on part of our original list, but this is typically what happens. Somebody says something really interesting and I ask them follow-up questions.

Chris Hall:

No, I think we need to stay on script.

Ian Record:

No, but the first one deals with this mindset you had, this recognition you had with the sort of forced process that you first were involved with, where it’s got to be two amendments and it’s got to be done by this date; that you recognized that win or lose that vote on those two amendments that this process we’re engaged in has some value to it because we’re beginning the conversation in the community and when we revisit this issue in the future, the baseline of knowledge and understanding and appreciation for why this matters will be that much greater. Is that sort of what you were getting at?

Chris Hall:

Yes, exactly. Moving forward in the dark, you grope, you feel your way, you’re unsure, and there’s a lot of fear. The fear of change in and of itself, not knowing what lies within that dark room, creates impediment, creates hesitation. So with the education, with the awareness, with the resource tools, people are coming out of that darkness, they’re shedding some light on the importance of this, the importance of the nation’s desires in proportion to leadership’s desires and the balance of that. So I think this whole process has been very positive, very productive, even though looking in from the outside, it may look like it was a complete failure, contrary to that from the inside, it’s been hard won, but, it’s filled with success, filled with success after success after success. Every time someone approaches me with a question and they get a satisfactory answer, I see that success in their eye, in their expression, in the ‘Aha!’ in the ‘Oh!’ So that’s been rewarding for me.

Ian Record:

So the other follow-up question I want to ask you is this dynamic between do you have the constitution define who you are, or do you define who you are and then have that inform the constitution. And this is a dynamic I’ve seen play out in a lot of other nations that are wrestling with the reform question. And where I’ve seen tribes succeed more often than fail is when the discussion around constitutionalism is paired with a discussion and a lot of deliberation about, 'Where do we want to be?' Not just who we are but where do we want to head, what sort of nation do we want to be 50 years from now, because that’s provides a lens through which to analyze, 'Well, how do we want to organize ourselves, what sort of vehicle do we want to design to get us there?' Is that sort of what you were getting at with that question?

Chris Hall:

Exactly. It’s cart before the horse; that analogy works. How can you create a document that will govern you without knowing either who you are or where you’re headed? So in my mind of course, you have to have a, I’ll go back to the word 'process.' I think we need to make some adjustments in our foundational language document, we also will then adjust as a nation and that will reciprocate back and forth. That’s why it needs to be an ongoing process. We will grow as a nation and if we’re smart enough to create a foundational document which can stay basically structurally the same and allow it to inform our law codes and inform our conduct as a nation, these two can support each other. So ideally, that’s the way it should move forward. Whether or not it will or not, that remains to be seen, because human beings are a very complex creature.

Ian Record:

So let’s backtrack a little bit; we’ve been talking about the reform process at Crow Creek. What prompted the nation to realize, 'We need to go down the reform road'? What were some of the issues that you felt necessitated constitutional change?

Chris Hall:

I don’t think it was my feelings necessarily, but more of different factions within the nation. There were factions that were concerned about our lease and our land use. There were factions that were concerned about our youth and our elderly. There were some gaps in some of our coverage in those areas and there were areas -- which a faction of the population had highlighted -- there was no action being done, there was no one at the bargaining table for some of our greater rights and our sovereign issues. So the issue of changing the constitution grew out of, 'Where are we at, and who’s got our bases covered, who’s protecting us and how do we get this done?' And so the conversation moved around, ‘Well, that all comes from your constitution.’ And there were very few knowledgeable people that had knowledge about our constitution. It wasn’t something that people talked about. They would rather talk about issues over and over again and not having any solution in mind whereas, we know that these issues stem from a weakness in our constitution. So that’s where that comes from.

Ian Record:

So in a nutshell, what’s the history of the Crow Creek Constitution? Where does it come from?

Chris Hall:

1949, it was drafted by Vern Ashley. We were given the choice to accept an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, which we chose not to accept, but we were forced to create a constitution in order to interact with outside governments in a mode that was understandable for everyone. So we adopted a constitution -- again, sort of force-fed -- but we are a treaty nation, and we did not really agree to the IRA, although we had to concede to creating a constitution. The constitution that we ended up with was drafted in a language that was foreign to most of our citizens at the time, and which has fallen out of date to the point where it’s very, very, very weak and very outdated.

Ian Record:

So Vern Ashley was, what was his background? Was he a tribal citizen or, ?

Chris Hall:

Vern Ashley is one of our elders and he still exists. He had a legal background, and I’m not sure if he was asked or volunteered or what that situation was, but he drafted and that is the constitution which we have now.

Ian Record:

So where would you say the reform effort currently stands? If you can sort of give somebody the 101 version of where are you at, in sort of the grand arc of reform?

Chris Hall:

I think we’re in the embryonic stage. I really believe that our awareness as a nation amongst nations, we are realizing that this document is important and the document that we have is weak. I think the awareness that it weakens our nation is prevalent now, more so than it ever has been, and I think with that knowledge people are, our citizenry is becoming more and more committed to strengthening our nation and they’re seeing that document as key to that future success. So we are at the beginning of a long road, and we have a map [the constitution] that is an old map and it’s tattered and it may actually be inaccurate for where we’re deciding to go, where we will decide to go.

Ian Record:

So I’m going to backtrack a little bit to some of the examples you shared with sort of what led the nation to decide to go down the reform path. There were different groups within the community that had sort of issue-based concerns on a variety of fronts and it sounds to me like all of those at some level stem from the realization that we talk about how we’re sovereign, but we’re not fully and strategically exercising our sovereignty and then being told that, ‘Well, it’s your constitution that’s preventing you from fully and strategically exercising your sovereignty.’ Is that basically how it was playing out and where the realization was rooted?

Chris Hall:

I think essentially, yeah. I think people were, our citizenry was spending a lot of time pointing fingers, being very accusational -- a lot of negativity -- and I think a lot of that was placed or aimed at our leadership, our elected leadership. And when we would go outside of that circle and ask for an external enforcement, they would, the citizenry would be told, ‘Well, those are your elected officials. You elected them and they’re operating off of their constitution.’ So I think it took several generations of sort of struggling with that, and I think now we’re in a completely different communication era. I think there’s avenues of communication where we can get an avalanche of information whereas before that was not available to people. So people are able to grasp and grapple with a lot more information that’s readily available. I think that has a big impact on people’s awareness so that they have really queued in on this and they’re to the point where they’re saying, ‘We’re not really wanting to blame, finger-point, because our leadership is actually in the same position as the citizenry; they’re not supported by a solid document and our sovereignty suffers because of it, and our leadership has suffered because of it,’ to no fault of the leaders, but because of the paradigm.

Ian Record:

So you mentioned this initial process and the fact that it led to a vote, which did not result in any changes. What do you feel that you and others that have been integrally involved with this current effort have learned from that first go-around? Are there lessons that you’re now applying in terms of how you’re trying to better structure the process moving forward?

Chris Hall:

Yeah. We, of course, we were just so anxious for change and hoping that those changes would fix everything. I think now we realize that we can still be hopeful for change, but that it’s going to take a lot more work. It took us a long time to become dysfunctional -- for the weaknesses within our governance to magnify and manifest them selves into what we have now. So it’s going to take us a little time to work ourselves out of that. We’ve learned some lessons about where the decision-makers are, who those people are, what their motivations are. I think we’ve learned a little bit more about how to move forward through what we saw as a mountain of bureaucracy. I think on the external side, there’s been some change in the bureaucratic end, which has opened itself up to our efforts more. So that has sort of eased some of the path, but it’s still a rough, rocky road that we have to walk. So some of the lessons that we’ve learned we will apply, but there are many more lessons that I’m sure we’re going to bump our heads against, but knowing that on the outset. If you set out on a journey and you know that there’s going to be storms, you’re okay. If you set out on a journey and think everything’s going to be sweet and peachy, you’re in for a surprise. So I think one of the most important lessons we’ve learned is, this is not going to be easy, it’s going to be hard and if we listen to our elder’s teachings, they told us, ‘Life is hard. Prepare, work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.’ I think a few generations maybe thought that this would just be an easy road and one of the hard lessons we’ve learned is it isn’t.

Ian Record:

Yeah, I think this is a common refrain we’ve heard from others, from nations who are engaged in reform is that you’ve got to dial back expectations, you’ve got to be realistic, you’ve got to understand that constitutional reform, the process is thorny and the outcome is not going to be a panacea, that it’s not going to be this sort of newly minted utopian existence the moment the new constitution is ratified, that it’s an uncertain path, but it’s one worth taking.

Chris Hall:

Expectations are a dangerous thing.

Ian Record:

So what are some of the changes -- without being too prescriptive here -- what are some of the changes that have been discussed as, ‘If we change this, if we change that with the constitution, we’ll end up with a stronger government that’s more capable of supporting the nation’s strategic priorities’?

Chris Hall:

Well, we’ve talked about criteria for leadership. We’ve talked about tribal sovereignty being strengthened through taking control of some of the programming that affects our tribal citizenry. We’ve talked about our land use and our resource base and how to step in and control that more for our citizenry’s benefit. We’ve talked about putting our own language in a prologue. We’ve talked about putting treaty language, because we are a treaty tribe, to strengthen that document and to reiterate to the citizenry that, ‘You are a treaty nation, you have rights, and because you have rights, you have obligations. With ownership comes the responsibility and you need to be able to shoulder that responsibility in order to properly own.’ And there are folks who want to own a resource base and own leadership who are not willing to face that responsibility. So those things, if we can instill that in a document, somehow, magically, hopefully that will transfer to future generations of citizenry that can stand firm on a firm document.

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you bring up this issue of obligations. We’re seeing an emerging movement among tribes that engage in reform, not just here in the United States, but in First Nations in Canada in particular, that are consciously reintegrating a sense of civic duty, civic obligation within the constitution, actually explicitly referencing if, here’s the criteria to be a part of us, of our nation, but once you are considered that, whether you’re born into that citizenry or you become a citizen through various criteria that you meet, that once you’re a citizen there’s expectations of you. It’s not just a one-sided deal; it’s a two-way street. Is that sort of the nature of the conversation that’s taking place?

Chris Hall:

Yes. You have to have someone have your six. If you don’t have anyone that you can rely on in tough times who has your back, then you’re not strong. So in order to have a strong nation, we all have to agree on some ground rules, we have to agree on what it means to be a nation and what it means to be a part of that nation, and that’s part of defining who we are and who is amongst us, who we call 'citizen.' So yeah, that’s a very big part of it. It’s a fundamental aspect of being a tribal citizen and not just a tribal citizen, but a citizen of any organized nation that wants to be strong.

Ian Record:

And at sort of an overarching level, isn’t that really ultimately about restoring balance to the nation, where it’s not, it’s no longer the government’s job, the tribal government’s job to support in its entirety the life of the nation, but the citizens themselves have perhaps a greater role to play and the government is there sort of supporting the people as they perpetuate the nation and its culture, and not simply replacing the role of the people in doing that, applying that task?

Chris Hall:

I think for me, philosophically, the government is a small supportive entity within a nation. I think the citizenry is the one who outwardly people see as the nation and they should be the ones that are producing. They should be the ones that are exercising that leadership, that autonomy that says that we’re standing on our own two feet. We are capable and we desire our future to be sustainable and we’re not going to give that over to a government institution and we’re not going to give that over to any large umbrella corporation that may or may not support our desires as citizens and define us differently than we choose to be defined. So yeah, it really comes down to the individual’s impetus of making the announcement and the statement, ‘This is who I am, this is what I stand for and this is what I’m willing to do to be a part of this nation.’ And you need people standing beside you that are like-minded.

Ian Record:

Well, Chris, we really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and experience with us.

Chris Hall:

You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you.

NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow: Rae Nell Vaughn (Part 2)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Rae Nell Vaughn, former Chief Justice of the Mississippi Choctaw Supreme Court, shares how her nation methodically re-integrated Choctaw core values into its administration of justice, and how Mississippi Choctaw's creation of a fair and efficient justice system is paying social, cultural, political and economic dividends. 

Resource Type
Citation

Vaughn, Rae Nell. "NNI Indigenous Leadership Fellow (Part 2)." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 22, 2009. Interview.

Ian Record:

"So the term 'Choctaw self-determination' is the motto of pretty much everything that the Mississippi Choctaws do. And I was curious to learn from you: how exactly does the tribal justice system, the court system that you were for a long time a part of, a reflection of that motto 'Choctaw self determination'?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Self-determination, in and of itself, has been key for Mississippi Choctaw. It's been the driving force of who the tribe has ultimately become, this very progressive tribe providing so many different services and outlets for the people, but it's so much more than that. It comes down to the very individual Choctaw member as to how you guide the people individually towards their destiny of being a successful people. There have been a number of areas in which self-determination has been very evident, one being the court system in and of itself. Within the court system, there could have always been the easier way of just allowing the tribe to go with state rule actually and just using the state system. What's the point of setting up your own court system? But just the mere exercise of sovereignty and having the ability to create your own laws and to develop your own court system is the very essence of self-determination and within that allowing your tribal members themselves serving in different capacities as a judge, as a bailiff, as a law enforcement officer, even as an attorney again only further defines for tribes and this tribe in particular self-determination. It's the mere exercise and expression of it."

Ian Record:

"So back in 1997, the court system underwent a significant revamping and strengthening, and it came at a critical juncture where Mississippi Choctaw had grown tremendously since the "˜60s and early "˜70s, particularly with their economic development initiatives and had come to this point where it said, "˜If we want to continue growing, we've got to do this.' Can you talk a little bit about that, and are you of the opinion that Choctaw could not have become what it has today if it were not for this strong and independent court system?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"I think that the continuing development and evolution of the court system was key to every aspect of the tribe in regards to its development. The tribe in its forward thinking knew that with the growth of the population, which was very dramatic, it jumped significantly after 1994 once the gaming doors opened of our casinos and then we began generating more revenue and our population, the membership increased dramatically. Currently, we're at close to 10,000 members versus back in the early 19th century when we were less than 1,000, so it's been a very significant jump. And with the increase of population obviously comes with it social issues, social ills, offenses committed against property and people, civil matters, civil issues as the tribe in its economic growth begins venturing further into business, and those issues of litigation with those businesses ultimately will land within the well of this court. So because of that, it was key for -- and I believe was the government's vision -- to strengthen and provide to the court system the ability to execute justice properly and at a much higher standard. And again, the tribe could have just said, "˜Let's just follow the state motto. Let's just hire state judges and let's just go from there,' but they didn't. They knew again -- going back to self-determination -- how key it was to have tribal members sitting on that bench. Granted, the bench itself was very diverse. You had non-Indians, you had non-tribal members, and then of course tribal members sitting on this very large diverse bench, and the ability to have that exchange for those who weren't members of the tribe to teach them Choctaw customary law, culture, and of the people and of the community and the area, and how important and significant it is to just maintain that body of knowledge and it continues today, which I'm very grateful for."

Ian Record:

"So with respect to this, 1997 -- that seemed to be the watershed year in which the tribe made a very calculated decision to say, "˜In order to manage this growth, in order to continue to grow, we have to expand the powers, the jurisdiction and the authority of our court system, equip it with what it needs to be able to carry out justice,' as you say. So there's an expansion in terms of the types of cases it takes on, in terms of the kinds of skill sets that it's bringing into the court system, etcetera, but also during that time there was a concerted effort underway to more fully incorporate Choctaw values as you mentioned into the court system. Can you talk a little bit more about that and specifically discuss this project that you were involved with, which was documenting those core values in the form of oral histories provided by your elders? Maybe talk a little bit about how they've worked to inform the incorporation of those values into the court system."

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"I believe that it was a lot of hands of fate that guided me into where I ultimately ended up serving as a judge, which I was very honored and humbled by being asked to do this. I worked in various areas within tribal government of the 23 years that I worked. I worked in the health area, in education and in the cultural center area, and all of these experiences, I believe, prepared me for that. So having said that, giving you that backdrop, once I got into the position as judge and ultimately serving as the principal judicial officer for the system, there were different projects that I felt would help us retain a lot of what we and who we are as tribal people in regards to what this thing was called, 'customary law.' Well, what is it? For the common person on the street looking at the general provisions of the codes, it's there, but what is it/. It wasn't tangible; it was an abstract thought, customary law. So how do we make that more concrete? And so with that I began looking at different models. Well, what's out there in Indian Country? What information has been generated and collected for the respective tribes? And I saw different models and I thought, "˜We can do this. We can do this here at Choctaw.'

And so we initiated what we call the Indigenous Law Project and this project basically...the original objectives of this project was to gather as much information from our elders concerning customary law, issues such as probate, disciplining of children, the structure of our society and how important -- being a matrilineal society -- those duties and responsibilities of individual members of the family and how important those things played in the role of the family, but not only the family, the community and the tribe as well. Now we weren't as fortunate as a number of the tribes west of the Mississippi to have been able to maintain and continue practices of traditional ceremonies and clan systems and things of that sort. However, there were few aspects that we continued to carry on that we needed to document. Now it goes against what normal translation would be in the sense of oral history, passing it down orally from one generation to another. Unfortunately, society has given us other opportunities with technology, unfortunately and fortunately, because the unfortunate thing is that we're not practicing this oral history, we're not sitting down and talking as a family. We're too busy texting one another half of the time. And so it seemed to me that the best thing to do is put the technology...benefit from this technology and use it. And so we initiated a number of interviews for, I believe, about three summers of just collecting interviews. And what I got away from the information or the exchange was how willing the elders were wanting to sit down and talk. Of course it was warming them up, putting them in front of a camera and the mic and all of this and of course we'd ham them up a little bit. "˜Well, you're going to be on TV,' and all of that. "˜You're the next movie star.' And so once they warmed up and you began asking questions, all of the outside distractions faded away and they went right into it and to be able to go back and pull all those memories and all of what they have been taught, that sense of pride of, "˜I'm proud of who I am and this is who...this is what I was taught and I'm so glad I'm able to teach you.' Now I did get my hand slapped at one point because I was asking my auntie, my great aunt, a question and she said, "˜You should know this.' I got put in my place real quick. "˜You should know this,' and as I sat there and I thought, of course I sat up a little straighter after she did that, but after I thought about it, I said, "˜Yeah, I do.' I had to go back and think because we weren't having that sit-down and we weren't having those opportunities without all the other distractions going on, of just sitting down and talking. And that's what we don't do anymore.

And so I say all that to say this: we got a wealth of just raw information, just conversations, and then...so what do we do with this? We begin extracting values out of each of these interviews and we're able to construct this circular...and we put it in a...we intentionally put it in a circular model because it's never ending. Our core values are never ending. And we developed about 12 core values and I can't think of each of them right now, but I do have that information, but it all centered around the family. It all centered around the family and one of the other objectives that I had...I had another project within the cultural center was, "˜Well, okay what do you do with information? How do you get this information across to the audience, the target audience you're shooting for here?' And so I looked at this project two-fold. One for the practitioner, the attorney that's coming into the court who may be arguing a child custody case and not understanding the matrilineal society rules as it were. And so there's a document that he can cite as he argues in court. Of course obviously -- if all things are equal with both parties -- society dictates...the tribe dictates traditionally that children would go into the custody of the mother. Discipline would continue with both sides, but the mother's brother, the uncle of the children also stepped in and took a role as well, whether it be a division... dissolving of a marriage or just within disciplining children. And so having that documented in a court opinion is very significant because it lays out for you customary law and it's there in black and white.

But the other objective, again two-fold, is how you use this information and we're always looking at... again, and it just... everything interweaves with one another, self-determination, and it's getting this information to the younger generation. "˜Well, how do we do that? How do you use this tool and where do you use it?' The most ideal place to use it was within the school system and we're fortunate enough to have a tribal school system. And so the next phase of this project was to develop a curriculum to incorporate this information into the school system starting at the very earliest level of elementary school, because you're in elementary school pledging allegiance to the flag -- to the [United States of America] flag. You're learning about presidents, you're learning about government, you're learning as you move along civics and your duty and responsibilities as a citizen of the United States of America, but what about your duties as a tribal member, talking about the importance of voting, the responsibilities of a leader, as chief, your council? Do you know exactly how many members are on your council? Do you know exactly how many and why there are three council members in one community versus only one in another? These are the things that need to go hand in hand with the instruction of state government, of local government and how state, federal and tribal all interplay with one another, and we don't have that, unfortunately, across the boards, across Indian Country really, you really don't have that. So my intention was using Indigenous law, this project, to relay what customary law is, but also incorporating information about government, tribal government, the judiciary. Because if you look at tribal government, Choctaw tribal government, we are so different from the U.S. government because we're a two-branch government. And, well, why is that? And then it goes into the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, it just...it just dominoes in information. And that's what's key. And so that was one of the projects that I initiated there as well.

Another project I initiated, again, and it interweaves with self-determination is the internship program, which was very important for us because we were looking at...with every tribe you want to have as many tribal members in professional positions as possible. We're a membership of almost 10,000 and there's only so many Choctaws and not everybody wants to be a doctor, not everybody wants to be an attorney, not everybody wants to be an accountant, but you also needed to provide a place for career exploration to say, "˜Well, maybe I might not want to be a judge, but I might want to be a probation officer or I may want to be a paralegal or I may want to be an attorney or I may want to be a judge or I may want to be a court administrator,' but giving them that opportunity. So I set up this project during the summer and it was a three-tier project. It started with your...the high school students, your juniors and seniors. We partnered with Boys and Girls Club. They have a leadership component to it called 'Keystone Club' and we opened it up to those individuals if they were interested and then of course to just the general population of that age group if they were interested to come in.

And we also had the second tier, which were college students who may be interested, and of course opening it also up to law students just to have an opportunity to see Indian law in action at the local level. It was a 13-week project. I partnered with a program called Youth Opportunity Projects with the tribe, which helped us with funding because money's always an issue and kids need money for the summer. So that was an incentive. We also partnered with a number of universities, Millsaps College, Southern [University], Mississippi State [University], Bellhaven [University] for those students, Memphis State University. For those students who were coming in at the college level, I didn't want them to waste this experience, and if there was an opportunity to utilize the internship program for them as well to gain benefit, I welcomed that. But also it provided us this window of opportunity to educate even the colleges as well, and so it's been a really great thing to see this thing progress. We've hit some dips here and there. Again, not everybody is wanting to go into the legal field, but we've had a number...we had a really large number.

Two years ago, we had maybe about four individuals going through. And then the year that the Edgar Ray Killen case was ongoing -- that was that summer of the 40th anniversary I believe, if I'm not mistaken, of the slaying of the three civil rights workers. That was just so important and a part of their internship program was to go and sit in that hearing and listen to testimony and to see...to look across the well of this courtroom and to see a diverse jury sitting there of African-Americans, of just the members of the community, which you would never have seen 40 years ago, obviously not. And to listen to testimony and to hear what had happened during that time, for them it's just...it's history, but it's something that people of my generation...I was born in 1964 and the things that I experienced growing up in the South during that time, not knowing how much of an impact it was going to have on me later once I understood, "˜I'm being denied service.' And so I want the young people to understand how difficult it was for the tribe to move forward, to get to where they are. They had so many different obstacles. And again, all these projects -- the Indigenous Law Project, the internship program, teen court -- all of these different projects have recurring themes of, 'Remember where you've been, how important your role as a tribal member is to our society.'"

Ian Record:

"You mentioned teen court, which is what I was going to ask you about next, as well as some of the other initiatives that grew out of the 1997 reform and particular initiatives that incorporated consciously the Choctaw values that you've discussed. So tell us a little bit about teen court and specifically, why was it developed, how does the process work, perhaps how does it engage those young people and work to teach them the value of their role in moving the nation forward?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"It's very interesting how teen court developed because we were in pretty much temporary housing and we were very limited in regards to detention space and we were seeing more and more of our young people getting into trouble at various degrees of severity and some of them very minimal, but still required some type of sentencing of sorts. And we weren't making an impact simply because our young people have been desensitized. "˜So I'm going to go to jail, so what? I'll go do my time, I come out.' And then secondly, because we weren't able to house them on site, on the reservation, we were having to use outside facilities that made it even almost more enticing. "˜Hey, I got to go to Scott County and be with the really tough people,' and that type of mentality. And so we were struggling, we were struggling. And within the youth code, it said that using detention was the very last alternative, but that's all we were using and we needed to find some mechanisms of using other alternatives to help deter juvenile delinquency.

And we were looking at other models. I'm real big about "˜look at a model.' There's no sense in reinventing the wheel. If something is working somewhere else, let's pull it in and let's pull pieces out to see if we can 'Choctaw-ize' it as it were and make it our own. So we investigated a number of models of teen court, a diversion program, which gives the youth court the opportunity to of course allow the juvenile delinquent a sentencing, but it's more so by his peers. The way the process starts out is the juvenile delinquent is brought before the court, goes through adjudication. If the court finds the delinquent...the juvenile delinquent of the offense, then if the judge feels that this is an issue that can be handled in teen court, then the case is then transferred into teen court. Teen court is more of a sentencing court of the teen's peers. Also we have members of our teen community who come in and serve in different capacities, as prosecutor, as defense counsel, bailiff, members of the jury panel, but the only adult that's in there is the judge himself or herself -- I've served as a teen court judge -- and the diversion coordinator. Those are the only adults that are involved, as well as the party's parents who are coming in. And so they go through this process, the go through the hearing, the case is presented to the judge again, but the jury ultimately decides.

And it was very amazing to watch the process when we set up a mock hearing or it was even the actual hearing, the actual first hearing. We'd gone and done some training with them and gave them the tools of what they needed and then we had an actual case. Well, they came back with a very severe sentencing. I can't recall exactly what the offense was, maybe breaking and entering or something of that sort, but they were given multiple hours of community service, they were going to write this letter of apology, they wanted them to stand at the corner of an intersection and say, "˜This is my offense,' and everything. And so we had to kind of reel them back in and say, "˜Let's really think about this.' And so when we initiated it in early 2000, it was very slow going because it's like, "˜Oh, what is this? Do I want to be a part of this? Is this geeky or what?' But as it moved along, people got more involved in it and we had more young women who were involved in it and we were really pushing hard to recruit young men, and eventually it's grown now. I went to their banquet last month and they have a total of 80 active members of teen court.

One of the other components within the sentencing of the juvenile delinquent is that he or she is to also serve three terms within a setting so if during a semester that there's three cases, that individual has to come after he's completed what he has to do for his sentencing, he's got to get in there and serve as a juror too, which was initially done by design to get him on the right track, him or her, on the right track basically and get them involved in that process because I want young people to see the other side of the bench. I don't want them to be only...their only point of reference is standing in front of the bench. I want them to know what happens behind the bench and so again, giving them that opportunity. Do some of them take it, they do and then they just kind of...either they embrace it or they don't, just like with anything else. But it was always good to see when you had success stories in that regard, because we know nationally that normally children who enter into the youth court arena eventually move into the adult criminal court setting, and you try really hard to get them out of that track of sorts. And so that was an alternative that we looked at, "˜Well, what else can we do?' Because obviously traditional form of court was not working, the adversarial form of court was not working. They were getting desensitized. It wasn't having an impact. So what do we do? And that's one of the things under my leadership I continuously looked at, "˜What are other alternatives that we can look at to help curb a lot of the offenses that are going on within Indian Country to create healthy communities locally at Choctaw and across Indian Country and so several different programs began cropping up. One of them was Healing To Wellness which..."

Ian Record:

"I was just going to ask you about that."

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Yeah, which was just phenomenal for me because we have such a high rate of offenses that were committed under the influence of alcohol. So what do we do? All we were doing basically was having this revolving door of people just coming through, domestic violence cases, public drunk, DUIs, so many different things happening and we recognized it was revolving around alcohol abuse. And so what do we do? So we looked at this model, we applied for an implementation...planning grant and we went to a series of trainings and found that this model meshed with the core values of this tribe and we eventually were able to receive a grant to start us off for three years. That grant has no longer, now has ended and we're no longer under that funding source. However, we presented to the tribe once our three years was up, "˜This program has ended and we really want to continue it.' And that's one of the issues that tribes face all the time is sustainability. And so how do we sustain this?

Well, we were able to present to the tribe how successful it was and that we were able to hit all the benchmarks that we had proposed in the grant. And a lot of...because it's a multi-disciplinary approach where an individual may be a first offender of DUI or alcohol-related crime and the judge feels that this may be a case that's prime for Healing to Wellness and then we'll transfer that case over into that program. It's a year-long process, which means the individual has the opportunity to opt in or opt out with it if the judge wants to transfer this over because they may say, "˜Forget it, I know I'm not going to be able to do this, let me pay the fine, let me do my jail time and let me move on.' But then you have those people who are really ready for change or who may be at the crossroads of their life and say, "˜I do need help and I do want to change.'

And so the individual then enrolls into this program and they have a multi-disciplinary team that works with them on a weekly basis and they go through the rigors of the program itself. Yes, they're required to meet with their probation officer, they meet with a behavioral health person, the judge is also involved, the Healing to Wellness judge is also involved in this. So you've got about maybe six to seven people that come together once a week, they review cases and then they have all the individuals, it's a group effort where they all come in and they go over what was the expectation for the week, what they were supposed to do, did they accomplish those things and then if they didn't, there are penalties and you're not able to phase -- it's a four-phase project -- you're not able to phase out so it just takes longer for you to move through the program.

And at the end of it, I've gone to a number of graduations. It's always been very emotional for these people because they see where they were going and they now know and have the keys basically because for them if they were...if this was a really big issue for them, dealing with alcoholism that it was going to be a day-to-day process. And so having those relationships developed with people in behavioral health was going to be more key for them, but we also recognize that we would have to cut the tether and that they themselves were going to have to make good choices. And so it was really...it was a really good exercise for them and for us as professionals within this area and also as community members to see this happen, because you want success, you want them to be successful and you want them to have the success not only for themselves, but for their family as well, because you know that there's a lot of them that come from very dysfunctional homes and they're the primary person who's bringing the income in and how important it is too, if not for yourself for your family, as well."

Ian Record:

"So these sorts of initiatives, the Healing to Wellness court, the teen court -- those are directly geared towards restoring health within the community and then there's the challenge of handling all of your relationships with outsiders that particularly grow out of economic development and all the commerce that involves outside entities, whether they're vendors, whether they're employees who are non-tribal who live off the reservation, whatever it might be. So when you guys really moved forward full bore with your economic development you had to be ready. And so you've put in several rules, policies, institutions within the court system, within tribal government to ensure that your justice is prepared for that challenge to meet the growth, the challenge of managing that growth. And I wanted to have you talk about a few of those and first off are a couple of things internal to the court system itself and that is the qualifications of judges. Can you talk about the qualifications that are mandated in the Choctaw tribal code for judges, how they're selected, approved, removed, and what sort of requirements do they need to be able to sit on the bench?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Well, the process itself, this...the judgeships are appointed positions. They are nominated by the leadership, by the chief, presented to the tribal council, the council then confirms them, but you have a list of qualifications that helps you filter through those individuals who may be interested or who you feel that might be qualified and able to sit on the bench. There's an age requirement, 35. So that tells you I'm over 35. You have to have a minimum of two years of college, a tribal member, which is key. One of the other requirements that -- because we had to have on the bench law-trained judges -- was that the chief has the ability to waive the membership. And so that's how we were able to have non-tribal members sit as well as non-Indians sit so that we could be able to provide, again to be able to handle the types of cases, the complex cases that would be coming in in regards to commercial law and civil jurisdictional issues on this bench. And so we were able to strengthen our civil division to be able to handle the types of cases that we anticipated coming before this court.

Another thing that the court did or the council did as well, which was earlier on in the mid to late "˜80s, was incorporate a canon of ethics. Initially that was set up primarily for the judges. And again, I think at that time it was more of setting the code up, "˜So let's get some models,' and so there never really was any deviation from the ABA's [American Bar Association's] canons of ethics. So they're pretty straightforward and mirror exactly what ABA states as well. Back in, I believe it was early 2000 or the late "˜90s, because the...no, it was the early-2000s era, because our system was growing, our staff was growing from a staff of prior to reorganization of maybe five to six people to now a staff of 32 people -- 12 members on the bench and support staff -- we felt that it was very important for them to also understand what it was to serve as a judicial officer and that they too needed canons of ethics to follow as well, although those should be inherent as just being people of the court and understanding why we're there, but we felt that they too were a part of this larger system of justice and needed to also have these canons as well. And we also shared with them, "˜It's not to hinder you. It's to also protect you because you will have other forces coming at you,' and so, "˜No, I can't. That violates my canons of ethics.' There you go, it's a shield. And so we incorporated and put that through the process of review with the Judicial Affairs Committee, which is the legislative oversight of the system and eventually brought it before the full council for approval and it was approved. There continues to be challenges because of where we sit within the organization of government, serving as a statutory court. Well, then you also are bound by your administrative personnel policies and that lack of understanding. Well, there are these things called canons of ethics and it's like this, what do we do with it kind of thing. We haven't really had any violations of canons of ethics on the judicial side of it, so we have not ever initiated any kind of mechanisms of removal, but the code is clear. If there are clear violations of the canons of ethics, that is grounds for removal and there is a process within the code, but beyond the language within the code, there isn't actually step-by-step processes, which was, as you know, there's a long laundry list of things to do and you just can't get to all of them. And so that was one of the other things that needed to be looked at. Well, you have this body of law, but there are no processes to...once the mechanism is triggered, what do you do? And so that was one of the other areas that needed to be worked on and hopefully they will at some point get back to that."

Ian Record:

"So there's this issue of the court ensuring its own integrity, essentially building those shields against either corruptive behavior, self-interested behavior -- whatever it might be -- and then there's this issue of, "˜Well, how do we help to neutralize any political impulses that may come from outside forces to actually interfere in the court's jurisprudence?' And so, specifically, there's a couple things that have been put in place to help mitigate against those impulses specific to the council and any behavior they may exhibit. So there's a couple things that you guys have put in place. Can you talk about those things? How has Choctaw worked to try to control any sort of political interference from the outside?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Well, even you as a judicial officer get inundated with a lot of ex parte[communications]. As I shared with you earlier in our conversation, as a judge you don't have the ability to just blend into the general populace; you can't. You've got people you see at the grocery store, at the post office, down the street at the gas station while you're pumping gas for your car and then someone will come up and say, "˜Hey, this is what's going on. Can you help me?' Or you have families that are in crisis and the only thing as a judge you can say is, "˜I can't help you, you need to get an attorney, you need to get advice from an attorney.' And that's one level, but then there's the other level of when you have tribal council crossing the line and wanting to apply pressure at making changes of decisions or in regards to possibly constituents in incarceration and things of that sort.

And I want to believe that council members are coming with good intentions. It may be the man who is the only person that works in this family of five and he's gotten picked up and he's got to serve 30 days in jail, which means the possibility of his...of losing his job is great, which means there will be no income coming in and so you have the councilman that is saying, "˜Can you reconsider, can you make this change?' And so I want to...all of these issues put it in the light of they're really looking at the best interest of the constituent. That may not be so, I also recognize that as well, and the code is clear in regards to tribal council members. They're not allowed to come into court and practice as an advocate. They cannot come and represent a tribal member within court. Just the mere presence -- and that was hard for them to understand -- because just the fact that you're sitting in the well of that court can be perceived as applying pressure on a judge because the judge is not naí¯ve; he knows why you're there. You don't come to court every day to sit and watch tribal court in action simply because you don't have anything to do. And so just the appearance of it really would...the messages are sent. And so having that in place, as well as not allowing council members to sign bond or post bond and bail for individuals in incarceration was also another body of law that they put into place. That was really hard for them to understand, that you can't...you're just not allowed to..."˜I can't accept your money,' you're just not allowed to do that. And what it also provided was this means of insulating the two bodies, the judicial body and the legislative body, from that appearance of impropriety. It's a hard call because you're shifting, your code and your law is shifting in such a way that you have all these very specific things and it's like, "˜Why can't I do this? I'm trying to help the people.' And the unfortunate thing is that you may be doing a disservice for them by not allowing them to pay the price, the consequences of their actions because it's obviously detrimental, possibly if this is a habitual person who are not making change. They need to go through the process; maybe we get them into Healing to Wellness.

There are just...you've got to allow the process to take place, you can't interfere with process because that's the entire premise of this sovereignty, is allowing process to take place to allow us to interpret law and to perform and to render decisions. And if you're not happy, another thing that we also put into place was strengthening the supreme court, because initially it was set up as a court of appeals with the lower court judges serving as the reviewers of the case minus the division that the case came out of and it didn't quite work well. And so because of all this growth and the economic development, the population and everything, the idea was, "˜There needs to be a higher tier of court totally separate from the lower court.' Has it worked? It has worked. Has it had problems? Yes, it has had problems because we're still trying to figure out the role of the chief justice because even internally that role of the chief justice, which I struggled with every day, was the fact that I served as the principal judicial officer. I had two roles: I was the judicial officer, the chief justice for the supreme court, but I also was the court administrator over all of this system. And so you had issues of conflict at times whereas, okay, there's a complaint coming in from a judge on a particular case; procedurally, as their supervisor, administratively, I would receive these complaints. And so we had to look at another means of getting this information around so that someone else can be a reviewer, but then as a supervisor how can I get in there and evaluate performance if...you might have a judge that just sits there and sleeps through the entire session and then just drops the hammer and says, "˜Guilty!' And so how do you do that? And it was a constant struggle. We looked at a number of models, and the unfortunate thing is we weren't ever able to execute a way that I could administer fairly without that appearance of becoming involved in cases that had the potential of moving into the supreme court and that continues to be a struggle because you certainly -- and again, I'm real bad about talking out of both sides of the mouth -- you certainly don't want to have a rule for everything. You've got to be able to use some judicial discretion in judgment."

Ian Record:

"So there's this challenge internally of building a strong and independent court system, demonstrating it in practice, and then there's the further challenge of having to serve as an advocate for that system and go out and actually educate not only your own community but outsiders to say, "˜Hey, you need to take us seriously. We're a strong and independent court system. We can provide fair and effective justice to not only our own members, but outsiders as well.' You and your colleagues within the court system have made a concerted effort over the years to advocate for the court system, to build those relationships with outside entities, intergovernmental relationships that have really served the tribe and the court system very well. Can you talk about some of those?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Yes, that's always a challenge when you're having to lobby for the court. It's a juggling act because again, it's that relationship and you're presenting to your council who approves your budget of the activities of the court, the increases of the docket and, "˜Well, why do you need this much money? All you're doing is sitting there and providing justice.' Well, it's so much more than that with operations and looking at other alternatives and means to provide wellness to the community. Going to the area of education, that is what is key because people don't understand the system and it's a very...it's not a difficult system, but it is a tedious system because you have to go just...my question always is, "˜What happens when the paper hits the window of the court? Where does it go because that is not only paper, that's a party, that is a person, that is an issue that is happening out in the community. What happens to it? Where does it go?' And it goes through so many different steps and council members, the legislative body, just really doesn't understand why it takes..."˜Why does it take so long? Why does it take so long to get the case before the judge?' And so it's educating them. We initiated a symposium back in 2001 and we had tried to do this on an annual basis for our practitioners, but also for the general public to understand Choctaw justice, the judicial system and the legal community itself and to help them navigate through it and to also bring to them very specific issues such as issues of gaming, the latest cases that are coming before the Supreme Court, where they are and the impacts they may have on us individually as tribes. We also looked at a topic of economic development and the importance of having our practitioners prepared for maybe minimal cases in the sense of you may have a salesman coming through the tribe selling his wares and for whatever reason it doesn't work out and it ends up landing in court, all this commercial information. And then also, whenever we had new laws that were put into place, this was the forum to get that information out and also for them to have their bar meeting. No, it's not a very large bar, but we also wanted to keep in touch with them to let them know what was happening because as an attorney you're going through the daily rigors of it and it's pretty...it's the same stuff over and over basically of what they're dealing with and so it's just preparing them for whatever may pop up and then when you least expect it, it happens, a membership issue, possibly a challenge -- things of that sort. And we also provide for the council an opportunity to have a summit to sit down and talk with them during the session of things that they may want to...and this is more in closed doors so that...I've always believed if we've got issues that we have to deal with that, let's deal with it here at home because we certainly don't need it out in the public. One, there in the community because then it questions the trust of the system, but two, out in greater society because then it really may reflect a negative connotation of this thing called 'justice' on the reservation. And so if there are issues or problems, let's hammer it out here, let me know what may be an issue or problem and also we can also reciprocate with that and share with you what some of the challenges that we may be facing. For example, as we talked earlier, this issue of ex parte [communications] or trying to get to the judge to make changes and how important our integrity as a court system needs to remain intact. And so we were fortunate to be able to have those communications, but even more so that we were able to reach out beyond our own jurisdiction to the jurisdiction of the state and that was one of the very key things that happened during my tenure with this court was the ability to open that door with the Supreme Court for the State of Mississippi.

I had this visit where Chief Justice Jim Smith and his associate Jim Waller, Jr. came down and they wanted to have a conversation. And we sat down and we talked and I shared with them what our system was all about and we...and that's what initially began the conversation and then he invited me to come in and talk with a group of municipal judges at their annual association and then we invited him to our symposium to serve as our guest speaker. We also invited the state attorney general to come in and serve as a speaker and so we've been able to have that give and take and I've always believed...it's like, "˜Well, why didn't it happen earlier? Why didn't it happen way before my time?' But I truly believe it's time and place that really plays a key role and we were both open to having this dialogue. What else has spun from that, on the federal side we're able to have...because of relationship building more so with the leadership and at the federal level we have the ability -- which we may have already talked about earlier -- having a U.S. District attorney come to the tribe and office with us one day a week to handle cases that may be going through the federal system, which is unheard of. You don't have that across Indian Country if...I'm sure it's very few, if any, that have that ability to have a U.S. District attorney come in on the reservation and sit. We also have a U.S. probation officer that comes in as well. And again, that was developing relationships, [intergovernmental] relationships."

Ian Record:

"And don't those have really powerful benefits in terms of understanding because you have these outside entities that for many tribes have long interfered with tribal justice systems and now they're -- instead of being adversary or a constant source of irritation or interference -- they're now potentially an ally, or at least saying, "˜We recognize your authority, we recognize your competence,' etc.?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"Exactly and I believe that is, that's the clear message that it sends and that we are all partners now in this. And also we've experienced the same type of relationship building with the county system as well. We had two tribal members who had an issue in county court and the judge picks up the phone, and it was an issue he felt that could be handled in our peacemaking court and he says, "˜You know, I think that you could better deal with this than I can,' and he transferred a case out of county court to tribal court. And I don't...it never...for some people they just never really wrapped their mind around that, and I'm like, "˜Can you believe that even happened?' That was just something that was just really, to me it was historic, it was something you just don't...you wouldn't even think it could happen and it happened. But again, it goes back to that...the thinking that this is a stable system, this is a court system of integrity. You will receive fairness in this system. Some people may not agree with the system all the time, but they know they got a fair shot in there. And so if anything that's the clear message."

Ian Record:

"I want to wrap up with a quote from former Chief Phillip Martin and he made this statement a few years back. He was delivering, I believe, delivering a talk at Harvard and he was asked by a student, "˜Are you at all concerned that all the economic growth you've experienced has had a negative impact on your culture?' And he said -- he thought for a second -- then he said, "˜I don't know. It used to be everyone was leaving and now they're coming home.' And really what he was talking about was through this economic growth we've had an opportunity to create stability and to bring opportunities to our people. Can you comment on his statement and perhaps address specifically the role of the justice system in creating that environment of stability and opportunity?"

Rae Nell Vaughn:

"With the dramatic growth, you have your members coming back in, but how does this relate to the system, to the justice system? Twenty years ago, you would never have...I would never have had the opportunity to come as a tribal member and sit in a position of authority to assist our people in regards to justice. It may not have ever happened. I completed my college education. I could have easily left, but I chose not to; I chose to stay and become a servant of the tribe and to provide that service to them. And had the landscape not been such where I could have had that opportunity, it wouldn't have happened. Where would we have been had things not taken place, we probably would not have moved mountains as we have now. And so it just sounds so much like Chief Phillip Martin. "˜Yeah, they're coming back, they're not leaving anymore.' And if anything it strengthens who we are as a people. And we have so many talented people and now there's an opportunity to show that talent, for them to step up and take on these roles of leadership in different capacities. Not just the ultimate leadership but leadership within your community, leadership within the work that you're doing, leadership even within the State of Mississippi coming in as an entrepreneur, bringing employment and economic diversity to not only the tribe and the state. So yeah, they're not leaving, they're coming back and there's something to come back to and that's home."

Ian Record:

"Well, great Rae Nell. I really thank you for your time. It's been quite an education. That's it for today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit nni.arizona.edu. Until next time, I'm Ian Record. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2009 Arizona Board of Regents." 

Angela Wesley: A "Made in Huu-ay-aht" Constitution

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Angela Wesley, Chair of the Huu-ay-aht Constitution Committee, discusses the process that the Huu-ay-Aht First Nations followed in developing their own constitution and system of government. She describes how Huu-ay-aht's new governance system is fundamentally different from their old Indian Act form of government, and offers participants some lessons learned about constitutional change based on her own personal experiences.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Wesley, Angela. "A 'Made in Huu-ay-aht' Constitution." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

"Good afternoon, good morning, sorry. [Huu-ay-aht language] My name is Angela Wesley, I'm from the Huu-ay-aht First Nation on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I'm going to try to breeze through my presentation today. I'm known for being very long-winded when I get a talking stick in my hand. So I'm going to try to go through and honor my fellow panelist and make sure I try not to go into his time. I'm going to talk about a few things today. It's really hard to talk about our experience that we've gone through probably in the last 20 years and isolate it down to just one thing. So I do tend to wander around, so my PowerPoint slides are generally almost in a speech form so that you have something to take away and it keeps me on track as well. So I thank you in advance for your attention.

So these are the things I'm going to talk about today in terms of citizen engagement. I'm going to talk a little bit, as we do as aboriginal people, as First Nations people, we always start by talking about who we are and where we come from. I'm going to talk just a little bit about our 'Made in Huu-ay-aht' constitution. We're very proud that our constitution was very much citizen-based and we refer to it as that constantly with our citizens to remind us that this is our laws, this is what we have created for ourselves. I want to talk about what we communicated because that I think as much to do with community engagement and engaging our citizens as how we do that. I think how we communicate with our citizens was really pivotal to what we considered to be our success, and also talk just a little bit about how we communicated.

So 'Who We Are and Where We Come From': Those of you who know Canada I'll sort of narrow it down a bit. We're from British Columbia, the westernmost province in British Columbia. You see Vancouver Island down there on the bottom. This isn't going to work. Bamfield is where I am from, my community is from. And there is just zooming in a little bit on whereabouts we are. I always reflect on...some of the sizes of your communities and your nations here in the states -- we're just very small in comparison so one of my late chiefs used to tell me all the time, 'I don't know what Canada has got such a big problem within its treaty, I can put my little fingernail over our territory on this map. So why are they so concerned about giving it back to us.' Here's a couple of images. We are coastal people. We're very reliant on the resources. There's one of our little fish that we get out of the ocean, some of the logging trucks. That's one of our logging trucks, one of the enterprises we have and some of the trees that come out of the lands within our territories, coastal scenes. When we signed our treaty, we gained a lot more of our land and what you see up there is the survey posts, those long survey posts that go into the ground and we're very proud to say that along with the crown...you can see on there, you might be able to see on there very faintly our logo is actually within those survey posts now too, just showing very proudly that that's our lands. Again, we're coastal people. Some of our communities, that's the beach where I come from. My uncle always said, 'Why would you want to go to Hawaii when we've got this beautiful beach here?' It's a little colder where we come from though.

So 'Who We Are': Our traditional territories, the traditional territories of our nation amount to 78,500 hectares, which is just under 200,000 acres or 312 square miles. That's our traditional territory, where we come from and where our roots are. Our treaty lands that we recently gained through a treaty with Canada and British Columbia amount to about 8,000 hectares or about 20,000 acres. So we now own those lands as opposed to the way things used to be under the Indian Act where they were owned by Her Majesty, the Queen and right of Canada and who looked after us on those lands. Our nation is quite small in comparison probably to most of yours. We're about 700 citizens and it's significant for us in talking about governing ourselves to say that about 80 to 90 percent of our citizens live away from home. We are on the west coast of the island. You drive down a 60 mile logging road to get to our community and there's not a lot of opportunities there right now so that's resulted in a lot of our people living away from home. We're part of the Nuu-cha-nulth Nation and we're signatory to the Maa-nulth First Nations Treaty that came into effect on April 1st of 2011. So we're very happy and proud to say that as of April 1st of 2011 we are a self-governing nation, we operate under our own constitution, we have about 20 laws in place that were written by us that are in line with our constitution and we have additional lands and resources, governing powers that come to us through our treaty. So we operate under our own constitution and under our own laws.

I'll start by talking a little bit about our Made in Huu-ay-aht constitution and any presentation I give about our community and what we do and where we want to go always starts with our vision statement. How many in here have a vision statement for your community? Really, really important to develop a vision statement. It kept us...this vision statement has probably been in place for us for about 20 years and it has guided and supported our direction for 20 years so firmly and it is something that is grounded in our people, not just in a particular council or government. Our vision...and I do a lot of community planning, working with First Nations' communities and this vision isn't different probably from what your vision is for your communities. I find that almost every community I've been into shared some components of these visions. Our visions say that we envision a proud, independent self-governing nation. '[Huu-ay-aht language],' which is our word for respect -- respect for each other, respect for everything that's around us -- will guide us as we work together to establish a healthy, prosperous, self-reliant nation where our culture, language, spirituality and economy flourish for the benefit of all Huu-ay-aht. So that is the foundation of everything that we've done in our nation and this is our check and balance. Are we doing...is what we're doing leading us towards this vision? If it's not leading us there, we shouldn't be doing it.

So our 'Made in Huu-ay-aht' constitution at the very base of it, we've talked about a lot of the different components and the legalities of constitutions, but at the very base of it, the Huu-ay-aht constitution recognizes and affirms who we are. In our preamble, it talks about who we are and where we come from. It recognizes our hereditary system, where we come from and that system that governed us for thousands of years before any kind of contact. We did govern ourselves through our hereditary system. It provides for the protection of our lands and our resources including financial resources, which is a huge concern of our people. It establishes a trustworthy, accountable, transparent government system that people can understand, our own citizens as well as others who will do business in our territories. And it sets out rules and responsibilities at every level of our government. It also guarantees the individual rights of citizens, and one of the last pieces that we put into our constitution, it also talks about what the responsibilities of our citizens are back to our nation and I think that was the one thing we were trying to figure out what was missing in our constitution and that was the very last thing that we added where we felt, 'Okay, we've arrived.'

So in terms of the process, as I said, we were in treaty negotiations and part of what we were negotiating was self-government. We wanted self-government included in our treaty and protected by the Constitution of Canada so it couldn't be taken away from us. So in doing that, our treaty negotiations were requiring us to have a constitution, but we realized that we really needed it because unlike the tribes in the United States, tribes in Canada don't have constitutions, whether they're under the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] -- is that what you call it? Our constitution was really the Indian Act. So how we started was our elected council asked our citizens at an open meeting of our nation to select some of our citizens to serve on a constitution committee, and I was fortunate to be one of those people. So our citizens selected our hereditary leader, who was to always to be a standing member of that committee. The others of us could be changed, but our hereditary leader was to remain as a member of that committee. So there was three of us that were appointed to the committee. Our task was to develop a document that reflected how our people wanted to see ourselves governed in both the near future and into the future that lied ahead. Significantly, the council provided us with resources and they stepped back. They acknowledged that if they were seen to be driving the process of rewriting our constitution and how our government operated that the people would think that it was just politically motivated, that they were trying to protect their own jobs. So I give a huge amount of credit to our leadership who just stood back and said, "˜Okay, you go and talk to the people, you go and find out what it is that the people want in terms of government.' They really recognized that this constitution wasn't about them, it was about the government of our nation.

So our committee spent probably about seven years on and off researching, discussing, communicating with, and seeking input from our citizens. We'd talk about things, we'd learn things for ourselves, we'd go back, we'd talk about that with our citizens, share what we'd learned, and ask them for some feedback about what they were thinking about things. Our process really started with a questionnaire -- and I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes -- where we went out and ask questions of our citizens. The final draft of our constitution just coming to the end of that seven years very quickly was supported by our elected council, it was supported by our hereditary chiefs and it was ultimately ratified with 80 percent voter approval in our community. And that 80 percent was...I think 65 percent of our voters actually turned out, which is also a very high turnout for us and of those 80 percent voted in favor.

So it's also important to say that in terms of engaging our citizens, it wasn't just about the constitution we were talking about. We had some other really significant initiatives going on in our community that helped us to understand the context of why we were writing our constitution. We were negotiating a treaty, as I said, that would deal with our rights in title in our territories, it would provide us with additional lands and resources -- including financial resources -- and provide us with that self-rule, the governance piece. We also were doing some comprehensive community planning, talking to our citizens about what they saw for the community; not just the governance, but what their vision was for community. We had little kids sitting at tables and drawing, giving them crayons and telling them, "'Draw what your future looks like. What do you want to see in this community as you grow up?' They've got really amazing insights, children. We had land-use planning exercises going on. So we were talking to our people at many, many different levels and there were also other initiatives going on in our territories at the same time. We were trying to assert our rights throughout our territories through things like forestry agreements and just helping governments to understand that we still had a place within our territories.

So what we communicated, I always call this 'Indian Act 101' and 'Huu-ay-aht 101.' What we found when we started talking to our people was that so many people didn't understand our own history, they didn't understand our history that they had never seen terms of our traditional governing systems, that we had a system in place, that it worked for us for thousands of years, that we were able to sustain an economy and sustain our people for thousands of years before settlement ever occurred in our territory, but people had never seen that -- generations had passed. They also didn't understand that the system that we lived under was an Indian Act system. It was something that was imposed upon us and our council was getting blamed for everything that went on, but people didn't understand why council had to act the way they did and it was because we were operating under a system that was foreign to us.

So the context of our communications, first of all we talked about that vision, that's the very first thing that we went out with when we talked to our citizens. 'What do you see for the future of this nation? What do you want to see for your people, for your children, for your grandchildren and those that are yet to come?' Because we needed to ground all of our discussions in that, we couldn't just talk about what it was like today or enter into those discussions without thinking about where we wanted to go as a nation. So it was very empowering to bring that collective vision statement together. We also wanted to talk about what is good governance. Our people didn't understand what good governance was. They're out trying to feed their families, they're out trying to make sure their kids could get through school, they're out trying to deal with matters that are beyond their control. They're not thinking about governance except for how bad the Band council is. So we really needed to have a discussion about that.

Once again, I have to really credit the Native Nations Institute. It was around the time we were starting our constitution process when I met Steve Cornell and heard a presentation that he made and I thought, 'This makes so much sense when you hear the findings of what makes a nation successful.' And our people got that, they understood that if we had strategic vision, that if our government matched our culture, that if we were making decisions in a proper way that things would work better for us. It was really something that helped to ground people in where it was we were going in terms of governance. So when we also talked about how we were going to communicate, we wanted to talk about our past, our present and our future, the fact that we came from a rich history, the fact that we were living under a governance system and the fact that we wanted to change things into the future.

So our past, many of our people didn't know about our traditional form of government. We had a constitution; we heard that talked about yesterday. We had an unwritten constitution. As I'm sure happened in all of your communities, we had strict laws, strict laws. They weren't written down, but all of us knew, we knew what we were allowed to do and we knew what the consequences were and sometimes those were very, very severe in terms of what happened if you broke one of our laws. Everyone had a role and responsibility. We heard that in Steve's presentation yesterday. In my community, we had people who looked after beaches, who were responsible for getting halibut and bringing that into our community. We had people who were responsible for making sure that our elders were taken care of. All of those things were governing...those were our governance systems. So if people weren't fulfilling their responsibility, our system didn't work. So we did a lot of education about that. That system was interrupted by the imposition of the Indian Act.

So under the Indian Act, it's just a history of oppression within that system. I don't know how many of you know what was in the Indian Act, but it's a pretty disgusting piece of legislation that still exists today. It has been changed over the years, but fundamentally the Minister of Indian Affairs still controls every decision that's made in and about our community. It rules our lives from cradle to grave, from birth to death, everything that we do -- if we live on reserve -- is governed by the Indian Act and the Minister of Indian Affairs. It defines who our members are so we don't have control over our citizenship. It imposes a band council system. It tells us how long that band council is to stay in place. It tells us how the band council runs, what its authorities are and the minister makes all decisions. Any decision that's made by our council has got to somehow receive the approval of the Minister of Indian Affairs. It allows us only to administer not to govern, so we're administering federal dollars, federal programs based on their rules. We do have some bylaw making powers under the Indian Act and it's often referred to as just 'dogs and weeds.' We can make laws, bylaws about dogs, control of dogs on our reserves and noxious weeds and that's about the extent of the bylaw-making powers we have under the Indian Act. And the consequences have been devastating on our people and that's evidenced in well-known statistics. Sadly our constitution before April 2011 was that Indian Act. So it wasn't hard, once we started explaining that to our people, to realize that something had to change, something had to change and that's how we started talking about our constitution. So in our future governments, what did we want? We wanted to achieve our vision, bring together our values, our traditional governance principles and practices with the realities of today to provide good governance for our people of today and tomorrow. And a tag line that we came up with was, "˜A rich history, a bright future.' When we started to understand where we had come from and where we wanted to go, this became our tag line.

So how we communicated? First of all talking about why we engaged citizens. It would have been very easy just to go out and do some research and come up with a document, write it out and then bring it around to people and say, "˜What do you think? How does this work for you?' But we decided that we needed to start from the ground up. We needed to build this based on the knowledge and understanding of our people. We knew that if people didn't participate in the change that the changes wouldn't mean anything to them. At the end of the day, for those people who are struggling to get by every day, all it meant was that it moved...the power moves from the Minister of Indian Affairs to the band council. Nothing really changes for them, so we really wanted to make sure that we involved our people in the process. Their participation meant that our citizens understand and are a part of the change, that they understand the importance of using their voices in a positive way to help to find solutions to the things that have been pressing us and suppressing us for so long. And they can always say that they participated in a step towards achieving a vision for our nation. We wanted people to feel like they own it.

So our first step was the questionnaire I talked about. It had a number of questions in it and the questions weren't so important I think as the process that we went through in reaching out to our people. We went door to door, at home and away from home. As I said, we have about 85 percent of our people that live away from home and we sent one of our young citizens, she was probably about 20...actually I was looking at Nicole and I was thinking, "˜She's our Trudy.' That's what you're going to end up doing in your community. It was her involvement and her role, her passion, what became her passion for doing this I think was really pivotal in terms of what we did in our community engagement. A young woman went door to door with her questionnaire and she had a job to do and she stood on people's doorsteps who hadn't been home for 30 years, who had left with bad feelings because their house was taken away or they were sent to residential school or they didn't feel connected to their nation anymore and people vented at her. They told her what they thought about our nation and that young woman stood and she took it. And we told her, we told her as a committee that she would have our support and not to get defensive with people, let them do their venting, let them say what they had on their mind. The other part of it was she had a commitment from our chief councilor that if somebody wanted to talk to our chief councilor about something, he would follow up. That was huge. That was huge to the people who had somebody come to their doorstep to talk to them about what they wanted for their future government. So that was a huge part of a foundation for where we were going and that being the result of our constitution process. So just some examples of the kind of things that we asked; I've got five minutes and I've really got to talk fast.

What does it mean to us to be Huu-ay-aht? What are our traditional values and practices? How can we make things work for today and tomorrow based on our own values? How can we make things work better for today and for tomorrow? And then we asked sort of just the general questions to get people thinking that this is how we have a say in how we build our government. What do you see in terms of numbers, in terms of council for chief and council? How long should they be in place? What about gender equality, did we want to see balance of males and females, did we want to see youth on council? What about our hereditary chiefs' involvement? How are they going to be involved? What about decision makers and processes, elections, meeting frequencies, how often should our council be reporting to us as citizens? We asked questions about finances and budgets, approvals, reporting requirements. What kind of ethical conduct we expected out of our leadership, what our expectations were, what were the restrictions around the use and allocations of land and other assets and where did the decision points lie? We heard Miriam [Jorgensen] talking about that yesterday. At what point do you need to go back to your nation in order to ask to get that approval to move forward for those bigger things? Our people said, 'We're fighting to get our lands back under treaty. There is no way that any government should be allowed to be selling our lands once we get them back after a long struggle.' Our people were passionate about that, so our constitution reflects that in terms of the high level of approval that's required in order to do anything permanent with our lands in terms of letting them go. And actually asked them also about thoughts on amending the constitution. I think the most important question that we asked our members during that first round is, "˜Do you want us to come back and talk to you again?' And I think it caught people off guard, people who hadn't seen anyone from their nation for 30 years was all of a sudden being asked, "˜Do you want us to come back?' and people said, "˜Yeah, I'll talk about this some more. Yeah, I think you should come back.' So it really engaged people early on in our process. So when all those emotions and the venting were gone, what our citizens wanted -- and this is just a very brief list -- but they wanted a say in decisions that affect our people and our resources no matter where we lived. Because we lived away from home didn't mean we weren't connected to our tribe anymore. They wanted fairness and accountability, fair and strong leadership, good decision-making and working towards a vision for all of our people.

Our communications plan: it was really important for us that we made our communications relevant. The most common thought that we had when we talked to people is, "˜What does this mean for me? What does it mean for my family? How is this relevant? Why should I be interested in this process?' Using plain language and not legalese, talking about concepts not provisions or legal words that are going into the constitution was really, really important. "˜Remember that you are living this.' Those of you who are on the constitution committee, who are on your council, you think about this stuff all the time. You end up going to bed and you wake up and you're thinking about some provision in a constitution. Remember your people aren't doing that. They're out there putting food on their table, working in their jobs, doing what they do in their daily lives. So you need to bring it down a notch when you go and talk to your people because you can overwhelm people by starting to talk about these huge concepts; [it's] really important to keep it simple. And don't just communicate when you need something or when you want something. That turns people off right away. There are so many things that we need to communicate and where problems could be resolved in our community if we just kept up the communication. And that goes in waves. Communication is very expensive; it takes a lot of time. So we need to give ourselves a bit of slack, but we need to remember the importance of communicating. And be honest and sincere in our communications. That results in stronger unity and trust. I think we built a lot of trust in our community when we were going around talking about our constitution and our treaty negotiation process. The communication plan -- one of the things that we said especially when we got into our treaty negotiations cause people were so afraid that council was going to make a decision without them. We always went out and said to our people, 'Nothing is final without membership approval. Nothing is final without membership approval.' So when people started to get rid of that anxiety that they had, their ears would open a little more and they'd be willing to listen a little bit more about what we had to say and to participate in that discussion. Really important to involve the entire team in communication efforts, it's not just your communication worker that's responsible for communication; it's everyone. Everyone on the team needs to speak the same messages, everyone needs to involve themselves in communicating because we all have different people we can reach within our own networks and families.

We need to engage citizens in many different ways, especially in direct, two-way personal communications. People respond so much better when you're talking to them directly instead of sending them a piece of paper or something along those lines. So we had meetings, phone calls, we had our own newspaper for awhile, which we don't anymore and I have my own feelings about that -- not worth getting into discussion about here -- but newsletters, bulletins, frequently asked questions, responding to people, letting them know that you heard what it is that they said and that the questions they have other people have as well, so people sharing their stories and sharing their questions is really helpful to the process. We didn't use it so much because social media wasn't so big when we were doing it, but a lot of nations now are finding positive ways to use Facebook, Twitter, other kinds of social media. We did coffee houses, home visits, family meetings. The key was to respond, respond to people, let them know that their questions were valid questions. Follow up, meet your commitments that you make, respond to questions, put the right people in touch with the right people. Not everybody wanted to hear from me. I talk too much. They wanted to talk to somebody else. Make sure that you match people up with somebody that they feel comfortable with. Openness in leadership, our leadership being prepared to respond, allowing for informal discussions sometimes. Don't always use an agenda. We had a young man on our communications team and we had all sorts of scripts and PowerPoints and everything and he'd just come in the office and he'd grab a map and he'd go out and talk to people and our elders loved that or he'd grab pictures and those are really effective ways of communicating. Treat people well, incorporate our culture into meetings. We'd sing songs. We'd bring our songs and dances out to our people. We feed our people well. We provide daycare so that their children will be looked after so that they can focus on what's happening at meetings.

So final thoughts, our 'Made in Huu-ay-aht' constitution, community involvement and input, built from the ground up. We think that's why we were successful. We responded to the input and feedback of citizens. We incorporated what it was that people were telling us. That provides a solid government structure that people understand and what they wanted. Not everybody's concerns were met in the constitution, but we tried our best. It provides for accountability at all levels. It provides for the individual rights and equality of citizens. Why we think it worked? It was citizen based. They selected the committee, they were able to provide input throughout and it was based on our collective vision and thinking. Leadership was committed to the process and the outcome whether we achieved treaty or not, very important. Maybe not so much to you who have the ability to make your own constitutions, there were a lot of things in our constitution that we couldn't do unless we got a treaty, especially in relation to our lawmaking authority. But our council committed that they would do their best to improve government in our community. So whether we got a treaty or not, our leadership said, "˜This isn't a waste of time. We're not just coming out and asking you these questions and if you don't approve a treaty we won't have good governance.' They wanted to see good governance in our community. And it was built on what we were taught and what our people have always believed in. It incorporates our values, beliefs and thoughts. Treaty negotiations provided us with an opportunity to rebuild our nation starting with our constitution. We were determined whether or not we achieved treaty to have a constitution in place. Having a strategic plan and a vision in place, always knowing where you're headed to is so important, visible leadership support for initiatives, looking to your past to determine how to move forward in restructuring your own government, building your constitution from the ground up and seeking true engagement from your citizens. Use plain language, explain concepts and potential changes not legal provisions, demonstrate that change can be positive not scary. People are really afraid of change. Start to implement what you can during the constitution process. Refine your decision making processes, define and formalize what roles and responsibilities people have. Start to learn how to govern again by doing things in a different way. Restructure your organization. Involve the youth. Involve the youth. Where's Ruben [Santiesteban]? Involve the youth. Our youth came to life in these processes. Our youth got it. Our youth understood that we needed a new way to move into our future. They wanted to get rid of the Indian Act. It was our young mothers that stood up with their children and said, "˜I am so glad that my child will not know life under the Indian Act. I am so glad that we will be making decisions for ourselves.' So I'm not going to read them out but there's some statements, really profound statements that came from our youth when we achieved our constitution and our treaty.

So we've been self-governing, we're burning the Indian Act page by page the night before we signed in our own laws. It was a pretty awesome feeling. And this is the sign you see when you enter our territories. It says, 'Huu-ay-aht First Nations. Hish Uk Tsa Wak,' means everything is one, we're all connected, everything is connected. Welcome to our territory. Owners for 10,000 years. Stewards again after 150 years. Please treat our children's inheritance with respect.' [Huu-ay-aht language]."

Herminia Frias: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Herminia Frias, former Chairwoman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, discusses the citizen engagement challenges she encountered when she took office as an elected leader of her nation, and shares some effective strategies that she used to engage her constituents and mobilize their participation in and support for moving the nation forward.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Frias, Herminia. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 24, 2011. Presentation.

"Thank you, Cheryl, for your kind introduction. And like she said, my name is Herminia Frias, but most people know me as Minnie. And in fact, I ran for council at a younger age and I was elected to be on tribal council as the first woman, the first chairwoman and also the youngest chair of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Most of the community knew me as Minnie and most people know me as Minnie. And it was kind of funny because I had two kind of campaign slogans that I used to run for council. One of them that I used was I created an acronym LAW and I said, ‘LAW stands for Listen, Advocate and Work. That's what I'm going to do for you.' And then I did all my campaign information and everything around LAW and then wrote everything that I planned on doing, and it really was what I did for the whole time and believe me, people held me to that. ‘You said you were going to listen,' and it's very important to listen. But the other thing that I did is I did a little campaign slogan that said, ‘Don't be a weenie, vote for Minnie.' So I don't know which one got me elected. But either way, it was really an honor to serve the nation for as long as I did and I had a great opportunity to meet so many wonderful people and to really take what I had learned and to be able to help the nation move forward. But a lot of people knew me because I was a social butterfly. If there was issues going on in the community, I wanted to know about it. I was out there talking to everybody. So I was engaged in the community. If I didn't like something that was going on, I'd ask questions and I'd figure out how to get things done.

And I started my career working with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe as a social worker. So I really got to experience what was going on at the community level and some of the hardships and some of the poverty and some of the struggles that our community members were dealing with. And I realized that in order to solve these problems, it wasn't about being just the social worker and helping them to get by day by day, but it was really looking at it at a systems level and taking a step back and looking at our tribe, looking at our nation and thinking about what do we need to do as a nation to help our people move up. There's all these individuals that I was working with that suffered from serious mental disorders that were kind of lost and I was out there working that system for them. I knew every program within the tribe and outside of the tribe because I needed to find those resources for them. And I thought, ‘There's something here that has to be improved,' and that really inspired me to get into policy, to run for council, and to really pay attention to what's going on and to think about the community as a whole and how we move forward. It wasn't about me wanting to be chair. That wasn't even my intention. I just wanted to be on council so I could help. But it was really about how do I help the citizens of our community move forward? They've got a lot to say. And I didn't like people speaking on our behalf. I had gone to Washington on a few trips with my tribal council before I was on tribal council, and it just irked me to see our lawyers speaking on our behalf. I worked for a congressman, Congressman Tom Udall from New Mexico, and I would see lots of tribes from New Mexico come in and their attorneys did the speaking for them. So I made sure that when I was on council I was doing the talking. As the chairwoman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, I was doing the talking. Sure, I'd have my attorney there for all the technical stuff, but you needed to tell me. I read so much and said, ‘Teach me what I need to know because I'm going to do the talking. This is why the people elected me.' And the same with the rest of the council members; we went up and we represented the tribe. It wasn't about someone else. But that's just a little bit about the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and my background and how I got involved in politics as a community member.

And one of the things that, for my tribe, we're a tribe of 14,000 and we're located here in Tucson, Arizona, the reservation. But just to give you a little bit more history is we're a federally recognized tribe, so we don't have a treaty with the United States. But we went through this whole federal recognition process. Before I was even born it started. So it was past leaders that started this federal recognition process and they knew that it was an important process, that it was important for us to be federally recognized. We were Indigenous people, we had our culture, we had our system, but we had all moved to all different parts of Arizona. So we had a group of people that kind of understood what was going on. We had another group of people that maybe understood it a little bit better. And then we had other people that really didn't know what was going on and we had all these different communities located throughout Arizona. And many of you are not from Arizona, but here in Tucson we had one community that said...we have three communities here in Tucson. The reservation, we have a community in...actually we have four communities. We have a community in South Tucson, which is a little pocket in Tucson, in the middle of Tucson. We have another community, Old Pascua, which is within Tucson and then we have another community in Marana, which is [north] of Tucson -- it got incorporated a few years back, Marana did. And we have a community up near Phoenix, our Guadalupe Community, and then we have another one in Scottsdale, our Penjamo Community.

Now all these communities had been established long before the reservation was established. So when we were going through our federal recognition process, they decided to give us a piece of land way on the southwest side of town and said, ‘Here, go ahead and start moving all your tribal members over there. This is going to be your land, so everybody start moving.' So the people who were actually going through the process of getting this done started going to all the communities and telling them, ‘Pack your stuff, we're moving to the reservation.' Sound familiar? And the problem was not just people telling you to move, but the fact that we had already had ceremony on that land; that was our community now, we had built a community there. And once people, your own people, started telling you, ‘Pack your stuff, we're moving to the reservation,' and not even understanding what a reservation was. ‘Are we going to be wards of the federal government? Can we leave the reservation? Are we going to be fenced in? Is there going to be barbed wire?' There were just so many unknowns and yet the communication isn't like it is today. We didn't have internet. Not everyone had phones. It was about traveling back and forth and letting people know this is what's going on. So there was a lot of resentment and people decided not to go and said, ‘You can have your reservation and go ahead and move, start your reservation over there. We're staying in our communities.' And they did. They stayed.

Now these are not formally recognized communities as far as the municipalities are concerned or the federal government, but these are communities that we recognize as a tribe. So what ended up happening, and I share this story because I share it as a way of a learning experience about what not to do or not how to do it and it's not necessarily because they had bad intentions, the intentions were good, it's just the process that they took was not the best. And what ended up happening was there was distrust. Not all that information was shared. ‘Who are they to tell us, I don't even know him. He's related to me I think, I don't know, but they're telling me to move.' That distrust, there was anger, resentment. Those are the feelings that we felt, but when you think about it now and you think about all of the different things when you talk to your communities as tribal leaders and you say, ‘Trust in the government.' What is that? Knock on the door, ‘I'm here from the government, I'm here to help.' Yeah, right. People develop apathy. You've heard this throughout the presentations in the past few days, like, ‘Nothing's ever going to change, things stay the same. They say they're going to do one thing and they don't.' And in our case it also created these fractionated communities because we had communities that stayed in their own place and initially were not recognized. But later, 10 years later when we actually wrote our constitution, which is far from perfect, at least one thing that is in there is the recognition of our traditional tribal communities. So as a result of that change and that force to move these were the types of feelings, emotions that our community felt and hopelessness. You hear that a lot but that...I'm not here to depress you. These are just the facts. This is what happened.

Now again I use that as an example of how things have happened and how not to do things [because] I've learned things the hard way, kind of hard knock, how not to do things because I did it and I said, ‘Ah, I should have done it a different way.' But like I said, I was very involved in the community and I learned that it is extremely important to involve your community. It is extremely important to involve your citizens because your citizens are the nation. We talk about governance, we talk about government's role, and a lot of times meeting with different people, different tribes, people begin to believe that the tribe is the government and it's not. The government is just a system set up to govern. It's not the nation. How can a tribal council govern if it has no people? The nation is the people and that often gets confused in a lot of nations, or a lot of people that feel, ‘Well, the government's not doing this, I just leave it to the government, I just...' They're not the nation. So it's very important to know that. And the people, the citizens must believe in what the vision of the tribe is, of that nation is. So it's important to engage them to have them understand, ‘This is where we're going, this is why we're going there. What is our vision so that we can all get there together?' If we all understood the vision back then about why we wanted to be federally recognized, it probably would have been a little bit easier process but we all didn't know. There was a vision, but we just didn't know what it was. You need the citizens, because they're going to be the ones to determine sustainability and success.

As a chair for a tribe and even as a social worker, what good are your programs and services if people aren't going to use them? If there is a really good program out there like a cultural preservation program that the people want, you want them to advocate for that in the next budget. You want them to keep that program going. If you don't have enough money to sustain that program, you want people to take the time to volunteer to be able to continue to have these programs. It's not just about having the government give you everything and provide for you, but it really is going back to that sense of civic responsibility, your sense to your tribe. Not the government, not that leadership, but to your nation, what your responsibility is to each other. And then what I learned too is that -- I was young when I became chair, I was 31 -- is that perspective. I didn't have nearly the experience that many of the former tribal chairs that I served with had. They were there in 1960; I wasn't. They were there working on the cause for years and years and years before I even entered kindergarten. So it was so important for me to talk to them and to engage them. Not just the former leadership but the people in the past. There are so many beautiful stories that I heard in my life by just talking to some of the elders and listening to them and just thinking, ‘Wow! It is amazing.' And not just the leaders, but even in my work as social work to listen to those stories of the challenges that people had and to see how they have lived their lives and worked very hard. It's inspiring. And those were the kinds of stories that kept me going and kept me thinking. Hearing about people who have had...we've heard some of the tribes talk about suicide. That is a very painful and heart-wrenching experience for a family and a community as a whole, but to see the resilience is really inspiring. And those are the kinds of stories that kept me going and that's why it was so important for me to listen to what other people were talking about, to listen to other people's experiences because I hadn't experienced all that stuff. I had my own stories to share, but they weren't the same. I can only speak from my perspective. It was so important to hear from other people so that we can move the tribe, our nation forward.

And another reason it's important to get your citizens involved is to build that mutual relationship. I kind of hit on that a little bit earlier that it's not about your expectations of your tribe but your expectations to your nation, to your own citizens, to each other as a family. We talked a little bit earlier about conflict of interest and about familial relationships. Well, that goes far but it goes even further when you talk about ceremonial relationships. We had a judge that had to, she had to, she couldn't hear any cases because it wasn't that she was related to everybody in the tribe but she was ceremonially. So these are things that go beyond that you are a big family and as a family there are so many opportunities to help each other move up. But it's important to get the citizens engaged so you have that mutual relationships that it's not just, ‘You do this and you do that,' but we both do it and we all move forward. And it also helps with that reduced entitlement and give-me attitude when you have that mutual expectation.

When I used to get community members, I had this one elder, he was 90 years old and he was running for council but he was all full of energy, he still is. And I remember he was running for tribal council and somebody in his 30s came up to him and said, ‘What are you going to do for me? What are you going to do for me when you run for council?' And he says, ‘Well, what do you want?' And he's like, ‘Well, do you have kids?' He says, ‘Yeah.' ‘Well, what do you want?' ‘Well, I want to go to school and I want to do this and I want to do that.' And he says, ‘Well, then why don't you?' And he's like, ‘Well, aren't you going to help me?' He says, ‘Well, I'll tell you right now you missed the bus.' And that guy was like, ‘What?' ‘You missed the bus. You need to start doing these things right now. You have a family you have to raise. It's not just about you anymore. Now not only do you have to help yourself, now you've got to raise your family. You missed the bus.' So we started telling that to all these young kids, ‘Don't miss the bus. You don't want to be older and start asking for tribal council for all this stuff. Get on that bus and do what you need to do to get it together the first time around while you still can. And then help the rest of your nation move forward.' But it's really about reducing that entitlement and that give-me attitude. And at first I had ‘eliminate' but I didn't put that because ‘eliminate' is extreme; it's really about progress. We want to get it down and eventually eliminate it, but it doesn't happen overnight and it's attitude change. But at least we can start chipping away at it and start reducing it until it doesn't even exist.

So some of the...how do you do this? How do you engage your community? The toughest thing is to earn that trust back. That is tough. Because like I said, you go knocking on the door, ‘I'm here from the government, I'm here to help,' you've got to show them that you're there. You've got to prove that as a leader, you're there to help your community members, your citizens be productive, be proactive, be engaged. The citizens need to have respect for the government and at least believe that the government is legitimate. It's not this, what Rob Williams was talking about yesterday, kangaroo [court] city. It's not a joke, it's not a Mickey Mouse tribal council, it's not ‘just forget about it, I'm not even going to bother asking for anything [because] I'm not related to an important person, my family's not on the council, I'm on the blacklist.' It's really about fairness, equity and not who's who. And it happens everywhere, but as a nation, as your own nation, there's so many opportunities to build it the way you want to build it, not the way it's been built necessarily, but the way that really reflects who you are as a nation, who you are; matches your culture, what's important to you, your values, your tradition. It's an awesome opportunity. And that was one of the things that really excited me about when I was on tribal council. I was like, ‘Wow! Where do you get this kind of opportunity?' Even though it was hard and I took a lot of hits, it was still, ‘Wow! What an opportunity!' I wasn't always this happy. Sometimes I'd be like, "Uh! What a challenge.' But, when you really take the time to look back it's just like, ‘Wow! When do you get an opportunity or a chance to look at your nation and say how do we do this better. How do we create a thriving nation? A thriving nation, not just let's get to tomorrow, but let's get to tomorrow and think about the future. How do we get there?'

So some of the strategies about...some of the strategies to do this and to get your community engaged, there are many, and I'm sure and in a minute we'll share some of those that you may have done, but some of the strategies that I put together is really about transparency within your government, sharing with the people what is going on. Yesterday we talked about one of the tribes that published their budget. I did that at an employee meeting before we passed the budget, put it on a big PowerPoint, ‘This is where all our money's going. These are perpetual funds. This is how much your program costs. This is this and that. These are our capital projects that we have for the next five years.' And people were shocked. ‘Wait, what are you doing?' And I had a council member tell me, ‘Be careful what information you give them because they're going to expect more.' It did make my job tougher and they said, ‘Benevolent dictatorship, that's what it is, benevolent dictator. It's for their own good, just as long as you know you're doing the right thing.' Sure benevolent dictatorship is a whole lot easier, but it doesn't mean it's right. It sure made my job a lot tougher, but I knew that I had to do my homework and I had to be up to par when it came to that budget. I had to know where everything was going.

But I shared that and I also shared our plans. When we had a big project coming up like, for example, there's a big hotel going up, it was important to share that with the community and let them know what the economic impact was going to be of that hotel, let them know that if it's going to have an impact on government services, how much that loan is going to be, how long we're going to pay for that loan. Let them know what the return on investment is going to be in the long run. And also, I always saw it as, if we're going to invest in economic development, we've also got to invest in the community and education. It's really about a balance. You can't just put all your eggs in one basket but you've got to...people want to see something, too. They can't just say, ‘Well, we got a really nice casino and an awesome hotel but I'm still part of the crappy school system. I'm not getting what I need for me in the future.' So it's got to be that balance. You've got to think about how you're going to help your nation as a whole and not just think about it as one way. Really, you've got to think about it in the bigger picture. But there's opportunities for you to share this information and also opportunities for you to engage the community by having committees, having boards, advisory boards For my tribal council when I was there that was very tough to do, very tough because as Steve [Cornell] was talking about earlier a lot of the thought was, ‘We're the tribal council, we're supposed to do everything.' But I thought, ‘Wow, there's so many other people that are not politicians that could do a much better job on an education board or a cultural committee or a youth council or advising on healthcare or social services or substance...' There are so many opportunities you can look at within your community to develop these types of advisory boards, committees, councils. It doesn't all have to be tribal council. There is more opportunities for the rest of the community to get involved. Also improve communication, share information that's going on, publish your tribal council minutes in the newspaper, share on the radio if you have a radio station. If you don't, work on maybe establishing one or using the internet. It just depends on the type of environment that you're in. You may be able to use this, you may not, but these are just some things to think about. And you may not be able to use it today but you may be able to use it in the future.

Another thing that we've seen a lot and we did within our school on the reservation is incorporate the nation's history in the education curriculum. Have them teach tribal history not only to the students but also to your employees so they understand what their role is, so they have pride every day when they go to work and say, in our case, 'I work for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.' I used to meet with my employees once a month, last Friday of the month with all of the employees and just give them a ‘this is what we're doing,' and always thank them -- tribal member or non-tribal member -- for the work that they did for our nation and always try to help them understand that the work they were doing was important. You have opportunities to help these non-tribal members or even tribal members that maybe don't know that much about their own history by sharing that with them, in orientation. We'd have an orientation. It was only...ours was short, it was only about two hours, but some tribes have ongoing orientations, classes, certificates, that people who work for the tribe have to pass. That's not a bad idea. That's pretty neat. Wish we would have done something like that. It doesn't mean we can't. But these are just ideas of what you can do and also with the students -- identify and create civil responsibilities. What is your role in the community as a citizen?

When I was working for a non-profit I was working with a lot of youth who...it was a substance abuse, HIV/AIDS prevention program but one of the things that we made sure that the youth did -- they got counseling and services and field trips and stuff like that -- but one of the important things that we did is we engaged them in the community. Service learning, we called it. They had to volunteer. We'd take them to these fairs [and] they were the ones giving out the questionnaires, they were the ones doing all the stuff and they really took ownership of that program. They were our...they could target that audience better than I could as a peer, as a young 13-14 year old, they could go talk to somebody about substance abuse, about HIV/AIDS where...at first I thought, ‘I wonder if these kids are going to want to do it.' And they did it, they loved it, they wanted to be involved. And these are young people. You can do that within your community.

We talked about the roles of tribal council, the role of government, the role of everybody else's role but what about your role, your responsibility to your tribe? And there are ways too to incorporate that into policy, into your constitution. It's not just as part of your enrollment, it's not just about blood quantum, lineal descent, who you are, but what are your responsibilities? And we see that a lot. In my tribe we see that a lot. ‘Well, these people just moved into the reservation, they don't even know what being Yaqui is.' Well, teach them. It's not just about moving on the reservation and getting on the top of the housing list, it's about sharing your culture, your history with each other and feeling [Yaqui language] in our case. So there are ways to do that is to identify ways that you can create that. Having a cultural committee or a council of elders, a steering committee that'll help you create that, incorporate it into an ordinance, a constitution, whatever fits your community or just these are the principles, this is what you'll do.

So how do you ensure an engaged citizenry? Well, it's a process and it is a trust issue, but if you have some of these, some of the infrastructure there, the communication, it boils down to transparency about what you're doing. We heard Chairwoman [Rebecca] Miles yesterday talk about what you do behind closed doors. There are a lot of stuff that's confidential, but you have to explain that to the community so they know why. They have to understand why, otherwise it's just going to be that question mark, ‘Why do they always do that?' But communication is so important and it's so important for you to keep that level of trust. Not everybody's going to trust you, don't get me wrong. I'm not Pollyanna. I know how it works. But it's about getting there. And I think that's my last slide which is my conclusion is about progress. It takes time. Things don't happen overnight. One step, two steps back, a giant leap, a tumble and a fall, but as long as you pick yourself up and you continue to have that vision. And the tribal council can't have that vision without the buy-in from the community. They're the ones that are going to move it forward. When you hear about these stories that you've heard about, one tribal council starts something, another council removes it and starts it all over again or just quashes it, somebody else...If the community had really, there was an opportunity for the community to say, ‘No, you're going to keep that project because it's important to us,' then maybe all of that flip flop wouldn't happen as much. So you need to think about progress as a process, as a long-term process. And believe me, that was a reality [check] because there were so many things that I wanted to get done. People said, ‘Slow down, slow down.' And then I had to realize, ‘Yeah, you know what, I've got to take the time to share what the vision is and to show them the steps of how we're going to get there, because right now I'm just showing them the end-all product, but I'm not really being honest with them by telling them that it's going to require a little bit of sacrifice here, a little blood and sweat and tears here.' You have to share that with the community. It was amazing though once you did start sharing this that people started saying, ‘Wow, nobody ever told me that. If they would have told me that it would have been alright.' But it's a good thing I didn't follow that council member's advice. It did make my job harder by sharing more information, but I'm not on council anymore but a lot of people still ask me, ‘How does the system work, who do I need to talk to, how do I get this done?,' and I have no problem sharing that with them, ‘This is what you need to do, this is who you need to talk to,' because to me it's our tribe.

So just remember progress takes time and as leaders I know that you get inundated with what they call these social ills, ‘I've got to take care of this problem right away, I've got to do this,' but it's so important to think about the long term, the future, and to use your citizens to help the tribe move forward. Really, there's so many opportunities for them to be involved -- I just named a few -- but there's so many opportunities for them to become involved that'll help the nation and they'll be a part of it, a part of the success."

Honoring Nations: Joyce Wells: Project Falvmmichi

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Choctaw Nation Healthy Lifestyles Program Director Joyce Wells describes how a 16-year-old Choctaw citizen transformed her idea and passion into a comprehensive education and mentoring program that seeks to prevent domestic violence in Choctaw communities. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Wells, Joyce. "Project Falvmmichi." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

"And I just wanted to kind of start today to tell you about our program. It started back in 2004 and it was started by a 16-year-old student. She is a Choctaw member and in fact, we have her in the audience today; she goes to Harvard, her name is Claire Richards -- she's back in the back. We're just really thrilled to be a part of Claire's life and for her to have allowed us to work on this program. Like I said, it started back in 2004. She had got a proposal together basically -- at 16 years old -- and went and met with tribal leaders with the Choctaw Nation and let them know that she had some concerns and had done some research. She had found out that for the Choctaw Nation in our rural area, there was a great number of individuals with diabetes, with obesity, with domestic violence, with depression and she just felt like that the domestic violence was something that she wanted to try and change in those communities. She also found out that in the Indian child welfare cases that a high number of those did relate back to domestic violence. With that said, she wanted to train high school students to be mentors to elementary students and to teach those students that it was 'not cool to hit.' That's just a phrase that you hear all the time, those second graders know automatically. That's the main phase in Project Falvmmichi. Claire reviewed dozens of existing curriculum and she visited with state professionals, with volunteers, with tribal individuals, people that [were] educated in the causes of domestic violence and she pulled from all of that information to develop the curriculum for Project Falvmmichi.

She chose the name Project Falvmmichi because in Choctaw 'Falvmmichi' means 'to reclaim,' and she wanted to reclaim youth from the continuing cycle of domestic violence. She wanted to teach the children to learn new ways to deal with anger. Instead of hitting or lashing out at someone else, to figure out and to give them new ways to deal with those thoughts instead of hitting anyone. In May of 2006 Claire handed over Project Falvmmichi to the Choctaw Nation Healthy Lifestyles Program and in partnership with the Youth Advisory Board that's with the Choctaw Nation. Now in its sixth year, we went from five schools in the very beginning and we're now currently in 35 schools of our 76 schools in the Choctaw Nation. We're in 63 classrooms a month, so we're seeing around 1,300 second-grade students and we have over 300 mentors, high school mentors. What we call the mentors or what Claire chose to call the mentors was [Choctaw language], which means 'friend' in Choctaw. The Choctaw Nation is also blessed to have many adult sponsors that are just volunteers throughout the community that helps to work with those mentors. We also, with Choctaw Nation Healthy Lifestyles, we have several staff that are able to go out and assist when possible or when needed.

The teen mentors are in 8th through 12th grade. We usually have a training at the first of each school year. They're trained on what domestic violence is, they are also trained on confidentiality, what the lesson plans are and what the crafts and activities will be when they go into the classroom. Once trained, the mentors go into the second-grade classroom for 45 minutes a session and they are there for eight months of the school year. They go in every month. Each lesson consists of a puppet skit, a craft activity and always the message is around the single thing that it's not cool to hit. After the skit, the mentors talk about the message with those second-grade students and they answer questions, they summarize the points, they talk about anything with those second graders that might be on their mind. They then break into small groups, usually there's no more than maybe six, and they'll have one teen mentor with those six students. The second graders love those teen mentors and will confide in them about anything. Our mentors are trained that if it is a situation that they find out about with that second grader that's concerning to them, they know to go to their adult sponsor and then the teacher and then they'll handle that through the counselor at the school.

A poster is also left in the classroom to help the teachers and the students to remember throughout the month that it's not cool to hit. With that said, the second graders are not the only ones that are learning something in this process. The teen mentors learn how to be a good listener, they learn how to be compassionate, patient and encouraging, they learn to praise the children and to acknowledge their strengths, they learn to display good habits as the second graders are always watching them. Our communities are extremely small, so they see those high school students everywhere. The mentors also learn to -- they become leaders. We've seen that happen in a lot of the communities with those students that we're working with. At first some of them are a little bit leery of getting in front of even the second-grade students but usually, within a few, couple of times of the practicing and getting in there, they're ready just to take the show on the road. They have...it really boosts their self-esteem as well.

As I said, Claire did hand the program over to us. Our desire is to be in every second-grade classroom within the Choctaw Nation. Like I said, we're currently working on that. We have been able to gain a few more staff in the past years and we're hoping to do so hopefully in the next couple of years. We've seen that in some instances that it has made a difference. We've seen where that in some of the second-grade classrooms that counselors did find out about some domestic abuse or child abuse that was going on in homes and those have been reported and taken care of. The first year that we [were] in the program when Claire was still along with us before she went off to college, one of the schools, they had a second grader that they had been in the class with and that second grader had had a surgery and passed away. And so the next day the kids were in class and they were trying to bring in counselors for those students and the students asked for those teen mentors. They wanted them to come in and they needed their consoling. That's just one of the many stories that we hear now.

There's been a few cases where that there was maybe a few children that might have been acting out in the second grade and when they moved on to third grade, some of the mentors would pull that student in to help them go into the second graders' classroom to teach them again that it's not cool to hit, and so they felt like they were being a leader and in return that helped them to kind of close off the hitting aspect of it. That's our program in a nutshell and I'll be glad to talk to you afterwards if you have any questions. Thank you." 

Native Nation Building TV: "Leadership and Strategic Thinking"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Peterson Zah and Angela Russell tie together the themes discussed in the previous segments into a conversation about how Native nations and their leaders move themselves and their peoples towards nation building. They address the question all Native nations have: How do we get where we want to go?

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Leadership and Strategic Thinking" (Episode 9). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

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

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[music]

Mary Kim Titla: "The challenges facing contemporary Native leaders are daunting. Typically, they are expected to do everything from defending and expanding the sovereign powers of their nations to tackling day-to-day social issues to finding ways to improve the future of their fellow citizens. Leadership can be tough. You get blamed when things go badly and sometimes fail to get credit when things go well. Today's segment examines what Native leaders are doing and can do to rebuild their Nations and forge a vision for their long-term futures. With me today to discuss leadership and strategic decision making are Peterson Zah and Angela Russell. Peterson Zah, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, has twice served as his tribe's chief executive, first as chairman from 1983 to 1987 and then as president from 1990 to 1994. For the past ten years, he has worked at Arizona State University, where he serves as advisor to the President on American Indian Affairs. Angela Russell, a citizen of the Crow Nation of Montana, currently serves as Chief Judge of the Crow Tribal Court. She previously served as a member of the Crow Legislature as well as the Montana State Legislature. Welcome to both of you."

Angela Russell: "Thank you."

Peterson Zah: "Thank you."

Angela Russell: "Good to be here."

Mary Kim Titla: "Leadership. Peterson, you know best about that I think, and I'm sure Angela can give us her advice as well, but why don't we start out by talking about just leadership in general and how it is so critical to our Native nations as they move forward."

Peterson Zah: "I think it is perhaps the most important issue today, mainly because of all of the questions that are being raised about Native leadership. The issues that we face as Indian nations, there are questions thrown at the Indian people regarding the sovereign powers of [an] Indian tribe, the social problems that we have on our reservation, things that we never ever thought will come to the reservation is now on the reservation, mainly alcoholism, drugs, the behavior of young people at the high school. Those are very, very crucial issues in the area of education. You also have questions on land, and recently it's the administration of justice on Indian land, in Indian Country."

Mary Kim Titla: "Angela, tell me what you can advise after all these years that you've served on the legislature on the tribal level and state level."

Angela Russell: "Well, among our people, when we say leader we say '[Crow term],' which means a good person or a good man, and I think leadership is extremely important to all of our nation,s and it's important not only for the leader to have a vision for his people but as citizens of a particular nation, we need to be very supportive to our leader, but we also need to be participatory in a sense that we need to give some direction, we need to give support, we need to give encouragement. I think too many times it's easy to be very critical and to not look ahead toward the vision. You have to have goals, you have to have reachable goals, whether they're short-term or long-term. So leadership is very important, but it's a very, very difficult thing, because in the past our leaders were usually men who had many deeds, many accomplishments and that's how they became a leader. They were supported by the community, and today it's a whole different role, different dynamics, a different society we live in -- lots of challenges ahead for leaders."

Mary Kim Titla: "You said something that was really interesting to me and that has to do with criticism. As a journalist, I always like to encourage people to give me constructive criticism and you really have to have thick skin."

Angela Russell: "You do, you do. You have to be able to take a lot of abuse. But there are lots of rewards, too. I think it's a real challenge to be in government, to be in leadership, because we are like third-world countries. There's lots of needs there. We do have resources. We may not have gaming where I live, but we do have a lot of natural resources, and that puts responsibility on leadership to take a look at what can the leaders do that would be best for their constituency. Abuse is there, criticism is there, but I truly believe that with good communication, you can dispel some of the criticism that goes on. You've got to have a good media outlet so that people always know what you're doing. We get very suspicious as human beings when we don't know the full story. We want to know what's going on."

Mary Kim Titla: "Peterson, we talked some years ago about your role as President -- Chairman and President -- of the Navajo Nation, and it really is an overwhelming job."

Peterson Zah: "It really is overwhelming. I see some of our leaders today -- particularly with Navajo leadership -- those people are overwhelmed and they have so much on their plate. They have so many things to do decide and every one of them are crucial. Everything that they have on their mind is important that people bring to them. But one thing that the leaders have to learn how to do is prioritize their work, because you have all of these problems coming at you. You have to sit back and say, 'This issue has a priority over all the others,' because in the representation of your constituency you have to learn how to do that. Number two, I always say that you also have to learn how to delegate responsibilities. You have a certain amount of responsibility as the leader for Indian people, Indian communities. You also have on the other side the council, you also have the tribal courts, and they are there to take on certain issues. You have to learn how to play your role and where those limitations are and be able to have enough trust in your people to say that they'll do a good job of handling those situations and you don't need to be everywhere. And that's where learning how to prioritize your work really comes into existence."

Mary Kim Titla: "We are going through elections constantly, and a lot of times people may come across as being a good leader. But after you elect them, you realize, well, 'Maybe they weren't the leader that I thought they would be.' We make mistakes sometimes in choosing our leaders. How can tribes, tribal people protect themselves from poor leadership?"

Angela Russell: "I think it's real important for tribes to have primary elections for one thing. It's only been recently that we've had primary elections. So people just entered a race and if they won, they won. But now I think we have a little more choice and we like to have our candidates be out there and talking about policy, about their platform. I would really like to see us have our leaders address the state of our nations and that would be research: What is the status of our tribes? What is that poverty level? What is the main economic income that's coming in? What are those potentials out there? I think if we had a State of the Indian Nations, or if it was the Crow Tribal Nation, I think any candidate should address that and say, 'This is what I want to see for our people.' You've got to have that vision. You've got to be projecting what is best for your people. You've got to move away from self interest and you've got to be looking at the interest of the whole."

Mary Kim Titla: "I'm sure you've dealt with that, Pete, with especially all the different delegates and members of the tribal council that you have to deal with."

Peterson Zah: "Well, I think the key is participation. The Indian people who are listening to this program for example, the students, the young people, they should never say to themselves, 'Let the tribal council do it, let the tribal chair, the tribal governor do it.' They have to learn that this is their government, these are their leaders that they elected. They have to learn how to work with them and they also have to participate in the tribal government process. In the process of participating, then you can judge how your leaders are doing. So I believe that's very, very important, because our leaders need to be held accountable for many of the things that they do, and I guess that's why I am in education. I always believe that education can solve many, many things and some people will say and argue with me and say that education can't solve everything. But, by god, education can solve a lot of our problems. It may not solve everything, nothing ever does. But if you have an educated community, people who are aware, people that have had the experience handling the affairs of our tribal nations, then I think we're in better hand as a group, rather than just sitting back and watching the tribal government do something that isn't pleasant to the local people."

Mary Kim Titla: "You touched on what was going to be my next question, and that is the role of non-elected leaders in the community. There are many of them. Can you give some examples of how people can become more active in their tribal government? I know attending meetings would be one thing, but can you give some examples of that?"

Angela Russell: "It's important for legislators, and I was one, you need to get out in the community, you need to let people know what is on the agenda for the next session, and you really need to solicit their participation. I had a woman just a few months ago who said she was really concerned about horses that were just all over the road, dogs that were abandoned and not fed, and why were these individuals having livestock and not tending to them. And I said, 'Well, you know what you can do is talk to your legislator and by the petition route, if you get a signature of 10 percent in your district, you can promote [a] resolution and that may become law.' So I think we need to really encourage people to participate instead of griping. You can say, 'Well, you can do something about that.' Another example is truancy: A lot of kids missing school, suspension of kids from school and somewhere, somehow somebody brought together a truancy bill, and now our students have to be in school 'til they're age 18 and we are going to enforce it. In fact we're getting ready through the court to enforce that shortly. So we need to have people participate. Instead of having a gripe, let's put it into action and do something."

Peterson Zah: "I also happen to believe that those things that really make our tribal government function very well is the people who participate in a lot of those programs, because you can go out into any Indian reservation, you won't have any problem finding the problems. They're there, many, many problems. I think the role of the local people, the non-elected people, is to define some of those problems and then say to themselves, 'How can I make a difference as an individual? How can we, the two or the three of us, make a difference? Let's see if we can do something about this particular problem,' instead of not doing anything, and to do that you have to motivate the young people. In the generations of Indian people that we have on Indian land, Indian Country nowadays, students are completely different than those students that I knew when I was just a young man, and motivation has to take place among those young people for them to begin having them become active in a lot of the social problems that we have on the Navajo reservation, for example."

Mary Kim Titla: "And I'd like to see more of that, young people really taking charge in their communities. I tried to do that as a young person and I'm hearing more from young people about efforts they're doing. In fact one young lady I met recently is going to spearhead a suicide-prevention walk, and I thought that was excellent because as we know, that's a big problem in Indian Country right now. What changes do you see in our leaders today? I know you've touched on this a little bit, but from say 10, 20 years ago, how different are they?'

Angela Russell: "Well, I think that the challenges, the demands of leadership today are just monumental. We're bombarded by so many requirements, so many changes that our societies need and I guess even going back further, I really like this term of enlightened democracy, where people have information, they're educated, they can make a decision looking at all the facts. But I think Indian people have a long way to go yet because we have so much poverty on many of our reservations and it really is a luxury to be participating in government, because a lot of our people are just kind of living from day to day, making sure that they're going to get through the day with whatever needs they may have. And it's not unusual for those of us who live on the reservation and are blessed to have employment, we have a lot of people knocking on our doors, people looking for work, people just looking for money and hopefully if we ever have a secure economic base for our people, then I think that we can start having more participation. Right now, I think it's limited, but I'd like to see that expand, and I think the economic situation is really important to take a look at for all tribes, not only our tribe but other tribes, too."

Peterson Zah: "I think this is probably where we have such a big difference between leaders of 20 years ago and today. If you go back 20 years ago, even in this state here [Arizona], we have Dr. Annie Wauneka for example on the Navajo. We have Ronnie Lupe with the White Mountain Apache Indian nation. Agnes Sevilla with the Colorado Tribe. And if you look at those folks, what did they have? What did they not have, and what did they not do for example? They really didn't have the education that we now have with our tribal leaders, but they have one thing that is so important in my own estimation which is a commitment and education and the dedication that they had to their people and they were honest. They didn't have much money to work with. They didn't ask for let's say compensation for their travel. They did things where the Great Spirit told them to do things. When the Great Spirit moved them, that's when they move and they were good leaders, women leaders in this state, and they were solely dedicated to, for example, eradicating tuberculosis on the Navajo by Dr. Wauneka. And she did all of those while there were no roads on the Navajo Nation and she rode horses, she rode wagons and she used radio, she used the Navajo language to do all of those things that needed to be done. She did not have the kind of education that many of our tribal leaders today have. And so I would say probably today's leaders are less traditional than let's say they were 20 years ago, but 20 years ago those leaders, 40 years ago, you could never outdo them in traditional way of doing things. You could never outdo them in dedication and commitment. I think that's what's missing."

Angela Russell: "I think tradition is extremely important, and for many of our tribes, it's real important to speak our language and to communicate with people through our language. We have a clan system and it's important to include clan members or to give them information. I think tradition is really the backbone of our society so we need to foster that and continue it. But I think if you can deal with tradition as well as trying to develop modern ways of dealing with things, I think that's the best route to go."

Mary Kim Titla: "What about our future leaders, our young people? What advice would you have for our young people who want to become tribal council delegates or tribal chairmen or presidents?"

Angela Russell: "I think that we don't use our young people to the extent that we need to use them. I think the tribe really needs to set up internships, they need to set up fellowships, give people practical experience, have them get their feet wet, so to speak. A lot of young people come home, they may go to college with the intention of coming back and doing something and they may graduate, they may come back, and there's nothing there for them. I remember a young man who just got his degree in civil engineering and he came back and he was really excited about working for the tribe, but the tribe did not hire him. And we have other instances like that. We have to make room in our government to encourage young people to participate and to take some leadership roles."

Peterson Zah: "If you look at the three of us, we came from a family where the tradition was very strong so we were taught by our parents and our grandparents about traditional belief. Now, if you look at the young people that we have today in college, their parents are less traditional, and many of the students that we now have coming from single parents and they don't have as much tradition as what the three of us had. And I think that presents a problem because the young kids today represent a totally different set of values that they have. The values aren't the same and I think that's going to cause some problems for the Indian nation. So we have to go not only to the young people but to the parents that are raising them, and then their children. And so to some degree we're losing the tradition that helped us survive among all of the Indian nations for this long. And the young people should never ever forget that we survived as long as we had because of our traditions, because of our language, because of our culture. Those may not have dollar signs, but they were more powerful than all of the dollars that the tribe gets now, and the young people should never ever forget that."

Mary Kim Titla: "One of the things that I was interested in learning more about from you Pete is this Navajo Nation Permanent Fund. Tell me about that and what made it become a reality?"

Peterson Zah: "I was very, very lucky when I became the tribal chair back in 1983. We had an 88-member council. Most of them were traditional people and a totally different perspective about leadership and about Navajo life and Navajo goals and aspirations. The difference is that back then those were visionary leaders and during that period in the history of the Navajo tribe we won several very, very important court decisions. One of them was Kerr McGee versus the Navajo Nation, a United States Supreme Court case where the Navajo Nation wanted to tax all of the companies that were extracting minerals off Navajo land, businesses that operate on Navajo Nation. We decided what we should do is tax them, and that's been in the works with the tribe for many, many years and so finally the tribe says, 'We're going to tax all of you, as you're being taxed elsewhere, you're doing business throughout the United States.' And so we did and they took us to court. While we were in litigation during the court process, they were paying us escrow funds, the amount of taxes that they're supposed to pay the tribe. So by the time we won in 1984, it had accumulated a huge amount of money in the escrow account, so all of a sudden as a young chairman of the Navajo Nation, $214 or $216 million was dropped on my lap and my job was, what to do with the money? As you know and Angela well know, when you have a tribal council such as what we have among Indian people, they want to spend, spend, spend. And any time you raise the issue of wanting to save you were an oddball. So in my case, I decided that I'm going to go against the grain of what the Navajo Nation Council wants, which is we're going to invest all of these monies, and the one that people always hear about is the Permanent Fund. That is where you establish a permanent account and we put something like $26 million into a permanent Navajo fund and we want that to grow. Back then, from 1984 to 2004, for [a] 20-year period we all agreed that we wouldn't touch that amount of money, and then the Navajo Nation was to contribute 12 percent of its total revenues into that account each year. So you had the $26 million that was earning interest and the Navajo Nation council was also depositing 12 percent of the total revenue each year into the account and that thing grew and grew and grew. And to this day, 2006, we're almost at a billion dollars. And when we reach a billion within the next several years, that money is to be used by the Navajo people after they have a referendum vote, so it's not only up to the council to decide how that money should be used. It's going to be up to all the Navajo voters. We had hearings three summers ago and the Navajo people decided that what we should do is don't use it all. Use only the interest off that one billion. We can handle that but keep the one billion in the bank so that you'll always have money in the bank for a rainy day for example, and only use the interest. And we can use that interest just to keep the tribal government, tribal services going and not ever spend the one billion. So that was the kind of visionary leaders the Navajo council was back then, and I was just very, very lucky as a young person to be in that seat working with them when that thing happened."

Mary Kim Titla: "Sure. And Angela, you have a new constitution."

Angela Russell: "We do."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can you talk about what prompted the tribe to develop this and where did the leadership for that come from?"

Angela Russell: "Well, I think there were only a couple of tribes that had a town council form of government. We were one of them. Our constitution was actually modeled after a Moose Lodge charter, and that was in 1948, so that was the constitution we had. And with mineral development possibilities, with changes in our society, we really needed to be more business-minded, and looking at that old constitution, it wasn't going to work. We had a group of individuals that were part of a committee called the 107th Committee but they -- in discussing where the tribe needed to go -- recognized that we needed changes in our constitution and there were a number of things that they really wanted. They wanted separation of powers, they wanted longer terms for tribal officials, looking at maybe limited waivers of sovereignty. There were a number of things that they looked at and when they looked at the old constitution, it just was not going to work. It was either in conflict or it was so inconsistent that it would raise lots of problems. So back in 2001, actually even earlier than that, many of us who participated in those old councils worked hard to try to look at a new constitution or constitutional reform. I remember I had a resolution before the council -- I think it was 1973 -- just asking for a study to look at different constitutions and bring it back to the council and that was defeated. So it's taken a long time to get where we are, but in 2001 we did approve a new constitution, and that gives you the three branches of government, six districts on our reservation and we have three representatives from each of those districts. And then we have the executive branch and then we have the judicial. If we really are going to move forward into business, it's really important that we have the three branches of government, because a lot of businesses don't want to come on Indian land if they don't feel they have a right to certain things or if they believe their rights aren't being protected. At least the courts provide a forum hopefully to be fair to individuals working on the reservation. So it's new and it's pretty exciting. There are problems that we need to work out, but I think it's moving along."

Mary Kim Titla: "We could talk all day about leadership and issues that our leaders are dealing with in their own communities, but we've run out of time. So I just want to thank you for your insight and your advice. I've learned a lot today."

Angela Russell: "Thank you. It's good to be here."

Mary Kim Titla: "We want to thank Peterson Zah and Angela Russell for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building. Native Nation Building is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation building and the issues discussed on today's program, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. That's www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Cheyenne River Youth Project Turns 25, Launches Endowment and Keya Cafe Featuring Homegrown Food

Year

Twenty-five years ago, Julie Garreau (Cheyenne River Lakota) developed the Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP) from a converted bar on Main Street in the tribe's capital Eagle Butte, South Dakota. For 12 years she volunteered her time to get an after-school program off the ground...

Resource Type
Citation

ICT Staff. "Cheyenne River Youth Project Turns 25, Launches Endowment and Keya Cafe Featuring Homegrown Food." Indian Country Today. January 28, 2014. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/cheyenne-river-youth-project-turns-25-launches-endowment-and-keya-cafe-featuring-homegrown-food, accessed March 22, 2023)

Empowering Parents Brings Community Change in Wind River

Year

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

The 2013 Narrm Oration: Taiaiake Alfred

Producer
The University of Melbourne
Year

The 2013 Narrm Oration, "Being and becoming Indigenous: Resurgence against contemporary colonialism", was delivered by Professor Taiaiake Alfred on 28 November.

Professor Alfred is the founding Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He specializes in traditions of governance, decolonization strategies, and land based cultural restoration.

The Narrm Oration has been hosted annually by Murrup Barak, Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development at The University of Melbourne with the support of Rio Tinto Australia since 2009.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"The 2013 Narrm Oration: Taiaiake Alfred." Murrup Barak, Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development at The University of Melbourne. The University of Melbourne. Parkville, Victoria. November 28, 2013. Video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwJNy-B3lPA, accessed January 6, 2014)