constitutional reform process

Anthony Hill and Angela Wesley: The Process of Constitutional Reform: The Challenge of Citizen Engagement (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Presenters Anthony Hill and Angela Wesley field questions from the audience about the approaches their nations took to constitutional reform.

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Hill, Anthony and Angela Wesley. "The Process of Constitutional Reform: The Challenge of Citizen Engagement." Tribal Constitutions Seminar. Native Nations Institute of Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Q&A Session.

Stephanie Cobenais:

"I'm Stephanie Cobenais, Red Lake Nation. Just one quick question for Angela: you said you guys did one-on-one --did you give incentives for the people to participate?"

Angela Wesley:

"Not direct, like it wasn't... that's not how we drew people in, but we tried to incorporate a lot of things when we met with our people in all different ways and a lot of it is the kind of things that are being done here is just door prizes, showing people that you appreciate them coming out. We didn't have a lot of money or a lot of budget to be able to be paying people to come out, so we tried to do other things that would compensate for their time and show people that we valued their time. So we would feed people really well, we would bring some of our drummers and dancers out and we would have...not just business, but we would also have the opportunity to share some culture while we were out. We would feed people well, give little door prizes and those kind of things, offer childcare so that children could be looked after and entertained while people are there participating. So we didn't...in general we didn't pay people to come to meetings but we did try to reach out as much as we could directly."

Audience Member:

"In regard to the Gila River and the coordinator positions, what again was the compensation involved? Ian [Record] had emphasized again that whatever commission be well-funded. What is the rule of thumb for compensation, the size of staff, how long and also how do you separate that funding so that it's not how do you say driven by politics?"

Judge Anthony Hill:

"The coordinator position I don't know the exact amount. If you can get me your information I can probably find that out because we did have a budget every year. The amount of staff, I think...the key point of that I think, hopefully everyone goes away with this, that you need outside lawyers to help you. I didn't get to this in my presentation, but eventually because things were fizzling out, they cut the funding off for the lawyer. So we had to utilize our general counsel for the tribe and of course the general counsel for the tribe in their office has their own interests in mind. They don't have the interests of the people; they have their own interests in looking out for their clients, who are the council. So it ended up, we ended up fighting with the lawyer who was supposed to be helping us. Regarding the level of staff, you need to remember that the commission members or the task force members, whatever you want to call them, that's not going to be their full-time job. You're going to need someone in a position where they're able to organize the meetings, do the paperwork and things like that. I thought we had a good staff with the project coordinator and the administrative assistant. Regarding the budget, it was almost...it was always political, because obviously our tribe operates on a year-to-year funding basis and we were always having to go to the council and ask for the money every year and then eventually, like I said, towards the end they just started cutting the funding because they said we were taking too long and things like that. So we...at the beginning it was free of politics because everyone was behind it and at the end it got all tangled up in politics. So I don't think there's any way that you can get the funding out of the politics because it's part of the overall budget of the tribe."

Ian Record:

"Any other questions? One interesting thing I wanted to share with you that Anthony shared with me is, and actually Jill [Doerfler] and I were talking about this yesterday, is there really isn't any such thing as a failed reform effort. I think you would concur, Anthony, that no matter the outcome of this current effort, you've increased, enhanced the baseline understanding and interest in your own constitution and the importance of thinking about that. So that the next time you do convene a new effort, you'll start it sort of at a higher place, I guess you could say."

Judge Anthony Hill:

"Oh, absolutely, and the people remember it because they were such a part of it at the beginning. They always come and ask me, "˜Well, where is it? What happened to the input that we gave?' And I always tell them the truth. I'm always honest about it. But they remember it and they kind of shake their heads when they hear what happened to it, because what ends up happening is it makes them want to hold those council people accountable when it comes election time. And I'm not...it's been two years, I don't know if it's had any impact on whether those who were against the reform were turned out of office. I've never really looked at it. But they still ask about it. They thought there were a lot of good ideas within it and they would like to still see them implemented. Again, my hope is, it's hopefully not all a lost cause because the promise, it's just a promise, is that we're going to go back to the full draft and it'll go to the people eventually. The council just felt that by taking the Secretarial election out, you removed the biggest obstacle. Why they didn't do that at the beginning I don't know, but that's the way the cookie crumbles."

Audience member:

"If I can add another question: What is the size and kind of the appropriateness of planning and legitimacy of planning in your structures, your government structures? Do you guys have robust planning departments and does that like have already community involvement? Is it something the community's familiar with? And also, kind of the underlying infrastructures, do you follow like long-term plans, land-use plans, ordinances and the like?"

Angela Wesley:

"Thank you. One of the things that has been new for us under treaty in particular having additional lands, is the land management component and resource management component. So that's something that we've been planning for and knew that it was coming, but it's probably one of the biggest new parts of our government that we're getting to know. We're very fortunate to have some people in our community that are so tied to the land and fit into those kind of roles quite well in planning for the effective day of our treaty. We actually did a lot of that work, we did a lot of the comprehensive community planning, land-use planning and that to prepare ourselves for what was coming forward. It is a struggle because it's a whole new area for us, but we definitely have been focusing on putting plans in place and did those with a lot of community input as well. We actually brought the maps out to people, gave them pens, told them to draw things on the map in terms of what they wanted for the future. We have...we had the good fortune actually of having a young man who was trained in forestry technology and had moved into GIS training as well, so he came in and became part of our lands department as well. So planning has been a big component of us moving forward."

Judge Anthony Hill:

"From the Gila River perspective, one of the good things they did was they recognized that with the constitutional change there was going to be changes in the structure of the government and a lot of people recognized that the current government structure, there was a lot of things wrong with it and what they did is they sort of put it on a parallel track to constitutional revision was reorganizing the government and that's a real...a lot of people think that's a sexy term, reorganizing the government. Is it like moving the deck chairs around on the deck of the Titanic? I don't know, but what the community did was they engaged Arizona State University to come in and look at the structure of the government and then based on the way the constitution was going to go, the government would be restructured in accordance with the new constitution, which would basically be a three-branch government. Unfortunately, what also happened with that is that also stalled as well. There were some...some of the initiatives that were implemented, reorganizing departments, putting them under what we call community managers under the executive branch or the guise of the executive branch, but beyond that there really hasn't been any change. You still have an organizational chart that's all over the place. And so unfortunately, that was a good intention, but like the constitution it kind of just stalled as well."

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

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

Audience member:

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

Ruben Santiesteban:

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

Joni Theobald:

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

Stephen Cornell:

"Other questions or comments?"

Joan Timeche:

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

Ruben Santiesteban:

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

Angela Wesley:

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

Anthony Hill:

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

Stephen Cornell (moderator):

"We've got a question here."

Audience member:

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

Stephen Cornell:

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

Anthony Hill:

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

Stephen Cornell:

"Question here."

Mohammed Fardous:

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

Anthony Hill:

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

Mohammed Fardous:

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

Anthony Hill:

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

Stephen Cornell:

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

Anthony Hill:

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

Melissa Tatum:

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

Stephen Cornell:

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

Audience member:

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

Stephen Cornell:

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

Audience member:

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

Angela Wesley:

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

Anthony Hill: Constitutional Reform on the Gila River Indian Community

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's Path to Self-Determination"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Professor Joseph P. Kalt describes the dramatic rebirth of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, citing its development of capable governance as the key to its economic development success.

Native Nations
Citation

Kalt, Joseph P. "Constitutions: Critical Components of Native Nation Building." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy. University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2012. Lecture.

“I’ll tell just one story about constitutional reform. On the left, you see a picture of basically the entirety of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma in the mid-1970s. This tribe -, well-documented -- in the mid 1970s, this tribe had two-and-a-half acres of land, 550 dollars in the bank, and that house trailer. That’s their tribal headquarters. Some tribal members that have been out there said they remember their parents talking about, ‘The house trailer is the boxing ring,’ because there would be cycles of impeachment where the tribal chairs would be impeached or removed from office. And the new guys coming in would come in and have to physically fight to get the old guys out. And they tell a famous story , they’re proud of this story in a certain way because of what I’ll put up on the right in a second. They tell a famous story, that house trailer, one of the impeached chairs of the tribe, his son is at the front door of the house trailer, ‘Dad! They're coming to kick us out!’ So dad’s afraid of getting beat up, and he kicks the side out of that house trailer and jumps in one of those cars. And Citizen Potawatomi points out that those are the three worst cars ever built. It’s a Ford Pinto, a Gremlin, and a Dodge Dart.

And today, Citizen Potawatomi Nation basically owns Shawnee, Oklahoma. They are not only the economic engine, they are the political engine of their region of Oklahoma. And just recently, in what may be one of the most striking instances of the effective assertion of tribal sovereignty, a local town, non-Indian town has opted into the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s court system. This is like real sovereignty when somebody says, ‘I want to be under your system of government and your court system.’ Well, this is a fascinating development. And part of story is well, how did it happen? And time and time again where you see these dramatic turnarounds, Citizen Potawatomi on the left mid-1970s, today Citizen Potawatomi Nation, engine of Shawnee, Oklahoma economically, politically, socially. They’ve taken a community -- these are Okies -- in the 1930s, this community was scattered like so many other people in Oklahoma. Consequently, they have Potawatomis all over in places you can associate with the Dust Bowl effects: Bakersfield, California; Fresno, California; Sacramento; Phoenix; other places. They now run tribal council meetings essentially with simultaneous big-screen TVs in multiple communities, and they’re building sub-headquarters, essentially. I think they’re trying to buy land in Phoenix right now to build one. I believe they’ve opened one in Bakersfield or Fresno, Sacramento, something like that. They basically used their development prowess to bring the community back together. How do they do it? Well, it's very interesting. The story they tell, and so many tribes with these dramatic turnarounds tell this story. I can’t tell you how many times , you’ve heard these famous cases of economic development: Mississippi Choctaw, Mescalero Apache, some of these places in the 1980s that started to break the patterns of poverty and dependency. And we go -- twenty years ago when I had more hair, I’d go out and interview some of these tribal chairs. ‘What’d you do to turn things around?' And I’d expect them to tell me stories about business. No. Almost invariably, they tell me a story, ‘We changed our constitution. We changed our constitution.’ There's a link here, a strong link, between economic development and constitutions. Turns out, economic development and the curing of so many of the social ills that come along with poverty, dependency and so forth -- economic development is fundamentally a challenge of governance, not resources. I go out and I go to conferences in Indian Country all the time and I keep hearing, ‘Oh, we need more resources and better training.’ It’s true, resources and training are useful; but if you can’t govern yourselves, everything falls apart."

Miriam Jorgensen: Organizing the Reform Process

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

 

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer
Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

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

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darrin Old Coyote: Reforming the Apsaalooke (Crow) Nation's Governing System: What Did We Do and Why Did We Do It?

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Vice Secretary Darrin Old Coyote of the Crow Tribe's Executive Branch provides a brief history of the Crow Tribe's governance system, and explains the factors that prompted the Tribe to abandon its governance system in 2001 and replace it with a new constitution and system of government entirely of their own making.

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

Resource Type
Citation

Old Coyote, Darrin. "Reforming the Apsaalooke (Crow) Nation's Governing System: What Did We Do and Why Did We Do It?" Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 2, 2011. Presentation.

"Good morning to all of you. My name's Darrin Old Coyote; I'm from the Crow Tribe. I'm glad to be here. I did a presentation at Harvard University for nation building on this same subject, and I'm fortunate to be asked to do this again. But I'm going to go through kind of a history of our government from the traditional form of government to the government we have today.

Reforming our nation's governing system -- and this is a quote that I used, ‘A constitution is a living, breathing entity of your government.' And today the question that brings all of us to this one location is government reform. Ask yourselves two simple questions to see if you need a constitutional reform. And this is the questions that we as a tribe, there was a group of us, asked: Is the current system working for us today or is it outdated? And does our current governing system reflect our unique tribal culture? And then we started from there. Getting started on reforming your government system, three main points: historical review of your government from pre-reservation to present day, and then establish lists of what is working and what isn't working in your current and past governing systems; set realistic goals for your government as a whole. And then -- this was the study I did -- the traditional form of government that we had as the Crow Nation.

There was a time when little boys would go with the warriors on war parties and they would call them Ichkaate or Warrior's Helper. And these Warrior Helpers would go on raids and warfare and then they became warriors. They were trained to become warriors. And then some, one that could run far, had great stamina would become scouts. And then scouts, they had scout leaders. And then your prowess as a warrior, they started offering pipes to the greatest warrior of the tribe and then these pipe carriers would then take war parties out. And then one would have to attain four deeds to become a chief: one was to strike an enemy in battle; two was to take an enemy's weapon in battle; three was to take a prize horse from the enemy; and four was to lead a successful war party. And then you became Baacheeitche, which is the term that we use for 'Good Man,' for the chief. And among the chiefs they would select 'Owner of the Camp' -- Aash Aahkee -- and he was the principal chief of the tribe. This was their way of...the people would choose their leaders that they would follow. After they would...if a man who had counted the four chiefly war deeds displayed outstanding qualities -- including generosity, kindness, fortitude, wisdom, and dependability -- then the people would naturally follow this man. And they would make public declarations about their choices. They say, ‘On this day, I'm going to follow this chief. On this day, I'm going to follow this chief.' Choosing a leader meant that the camp would not only be fortunate, but live well without threat from enemies and locating food -- and survival was kind of the main focus for the tribe at the time.

And it was a representative form of government; chiefs, band chiefs, and owner of the camp were the only ones to talk and vote on council. And the highest-ranking chief would convene the council and they would use tally sticks as ballots. And every time an issue came up, they would smoke the pipe and it would be lit by the man sitting to the right of the highest-ranking chief; the man sitting to the east and the south would speak first. And this was referred to as 'Smoke Talk' or Apsáalooke Ooppiilaau -- 'Crows Smoke Talking.' And that was our form of government -- the council.

The pipe was used to guarantee that individuals would speak with no interference. There was no interference from anybody and that individual would speak. And whatever he said, he was to tell the truth. And then they would pass the pipe over; they would discuss the issue. And the pipe was held in high reverence by the Apsáalooke; once lit, no one would talk except the one with the pipe. And then while each chief spoke, the person leading the discussion would place the ballots as represented by the tally sticks, either for the issue or against it. And they would place these tally sticks and at the end of the discussion all the chiefs would what they needed to say on this issue. And then they would take the majority of those sticks and say, the ones in the majority, they would say, '[Crow language].' They'd say, ‘The majority has ruled. This is what we're going to do.' And then one person didn't make all the decisions. And then all the chiefs would collectively decide on what the next steps would be on that issue.

And then there came a time when there was no longer need for intertribal warfare. There was no need for chiefs; intertribal warfare ended. Our last traditional chief was Plenty Coups, who passed away in 1932. And after the death of Plenty Coups, there were groups among the Crow that the U.S. government would consult with on Crow issues. They would just hand pick. They'd say, ‘You.' They'd see a person that had respectability among the tribe and they would pick that person. They'd say, ‘You can represent the Crow today.' And it was that way for years. And so these individuals gained...they're more for themselves than for the tribe. These individuals would go out and say, ‘I'm the leader of the Crow.' And anybody was a leader because the way we chose leaders back then was by those four deeds that they would attain to become the chief, to become the leader of the tribe, and they were well-respected. Even the term that we use today for chief is 'Good Man,' Baacheeitche, because they provided for the tribe, they looked out for the tribe. And whenever that person, that chief, was in the presence of the people there was respect. And now, the last traditional chief of Crow passed away and people were saying, ‘I want this piece of land,' and they're going off on their own and they would delegate groups from different districts.

Around this time from 1932 to 1948, we lost a lot of the land. We lost a lot of our...like our...I don't know if any of you know where Bozeman, Montana is. That was our first Crow agency and then the second agency was just west of Billings and then today we're at the third agency -- 30 million acres and today we have 2 million acres. Around that time we lost a lot of prime land. Today you see Paradise Valley; all the movie stars live there. I think Ted Turner lives right outside of Bozeman, Flying D Ranch -- largest landowner, private landowner. But that was Crow land. Because of all the chaos there was loss of a lot of land. And then in 1948, there [were] students that were coming back from Carlisle boarding school.

And then the Crow adopted a constitution at the time. U.S. government initiated an IRA (Indian Reorganization Act) asking all tribes to establish tribal business councils. But the Crow adopted their own form of government because they were a treaty tribe -- they didn't adhere to. They weren't a tribe that was placed there by executive order or presidential proclamation. They were a treaty tribe. And they adopted their own form of government, utilizing a council-type form of government to conduct tribal business because that's the way we conducted business was council-type. Every chief had a say in what was going on. And so instead of having leaders, they had every individual 18 and older -- Crow tribal members -- and they would elect four officials every two years. And then they would have councils every three months. And there was chaos. Every three months all the business of the tribe was voted on, discussed, in one day. And it came to a point where, in 1990, there was a chairman elected who stayed in power for ten years, being elected every two years with supreme powers. There was a resolution that gave authority over the tribal judge, the tribal police, kind of a dictator controlling the whole system. We were kind of a...and there was no term limits. And councils were held every three months: January, April, July and October on the first Saturday. And this was the only time business would be discussed on and voted on. And there was no continuity or stability.

There was a time when, I remember I must've been an eighth grader. I went to a council. My mom was the recorder for the council. She was taking minutes and so we would have to be there early. And in the back room, the tribal chairman and all of his staff, they would sit there and they would say, 'This is what we're going to do today.' They would line out which agenda they wanted to pass and which agenda they wanted to not discuss that day. And this was how the council was run. The chairman would sit up there and say, ‘I call this council to order.' And they would say, ‘Division of the house'; they would ask for division of the house to establish numbers. And so there'd be six individuals sitting right in front of the chairman and they would have, to establish numbers, they would have...a hundred was a quorum. A hundred tribal members was a quorum for the council. And so they'd be, they'd say, ‘All those people that are for the chairman's agenda, line up.' And they would run them through the line. Every tenth person they'd stop them and tally ten. ‘Alright, ten more.' And this is how they established numbers. And they'd say, ‘All those ones that were against the chairman's agenda, go through the line.' And the chairman would be standing there and he knew who was going against his issues. If there was a director, he knew. If there was a tribal employee...it got to the point where a lot of people didn't know what they were voting on. A lot of people were voting because they wanted leases for their cattle, they wanted tribal loans to buy a car, and there was a lot of vote buying. And the chairman would sit there and he would know who's going against him and who was for him. And they'd say, ‘On this issue...' and a lot of people didn't know what they were voting on but they'd say, ‘Let's go!' and they're all herded like cattle going through the line.

And then elections were held every two years; vote buying was the norm for every chairman ever elected since 1948. Every time a council was coming up, they would buy votes to pass their agenda or agendas; there's no self-sufficiency or business ventures pursued. So let's say a business deal would come to the Crow Tribe and they want to come by. We have nine billion tons of coal at Crow. A company would come and say, ‘We want to partner with you to produce a coal mine.' They'd say, ‘Next council, we'll vote on it.' And from the time the company got there, to the time the tribe voted, individuals would go to that company and say, ‘Give us money. We'll see that it passes,' under the table deals. And this happened since 1948. And then in 1999 a handful of young men consist...we met every night, almost every night, and talked about the problems with our government and discussed ways of reforming the government. It was election year and the majority of Crows wanted change. They were tired of this 10-year reign of dictatorship. It happened before but nobody paid attention. And then we visited with chairman candidates and discussed change but none wanted to deliver.

Change in our government system: young men went to the districts to hold hearings and gain support from the people to change the government system. The support from the Crows who wanted change was so great that chairman candidates were coming and wanting support from our group. And this group was all young people. One strong candidate with much support from the beginning impressed the group so much so that they supported the candidate and he was elected by a large majority to win the election in 2000. And the newly elected chairman promised change and he delivered in 2001. After much review and many discussions of the old '48 document and the traditional form of government, there was a provision in the '48 Constitution allowing the council to amend the constitution from time to time as needed. At a January 2001 council, the majority voted to amend the 1948 Constitution. The amendments were then written into a new document, which was then voted on in secret ballot; majority voted in favor of the new constitution in December 2001. The Secretary of Interior acknowledged the new document as the governing system of the Apsáalooke Nation.

And now we have a three-branch form of government. Chairman, vice chairman, secretary and vice secretary elected every four years starting in 2004. The legislative branch, 18 representatives -- three from each of the six districts -- are elected every four years -- staggered terms for two reps, then one rep elected two years later -- all serving four-year terms. We have one chief judge; two associates judges elected every four years. The executive branch duties is to implement and enforce all laws, resolutions, codes and policies duly adopted by the legislative branch; represent the Crow Tribe in negotiation with federal, state and local governments. The legislative branch duty is to promulgate and adopt laws, resolutions, ordinances, codes, regulations and guidelines in accordance with this constitution. The judicial branch shall have jurisdiction over all matters defined in the Crow law and order code. Stability was achieved with this 2001 Apsáalooke/Crow Nation -- constitution. There is more stability. Continuity was achieved. Business could be conducted in a more timely manner. All issues pertaining to the Crow tribe could now be discussed and reviewed before being voted on. Separation of powers along with checks and balances is now in place. Majority rule is instrumental on all decisions made by the Apsáalooke Nation.

And today, the constitution that we have, Department of Interior acknowledged it. We didn't have them approve it. We didn't have them say, ‘That's the document to use.' We said, acknowledged this as our constitution. And today every business that we do, it doesn't have to be approved by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], it doesn't have to go through all the red tape, bureaucratic red tape. But today we have an LLC [limited liability corporation], probably the first tribe to have a limited liability company to bring business in. We have a work first protection act that we passed, which strengthens TERO [Tribal Employments Rights Office]. We have more of...there's more businesses coming to the tribe. There's more tribes coming, more businesses coming to the Crow, because there's more stability, continuity. And so that's our constitution from traditional form of government to the one we have today -- 2001. (I saw a sign over there that said stop so I have to stop.)

Priscilla Iba: Osage Government Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Osage Government Reform Commission Member Priscilla Iba discusses the historical factors that prompted the Osage Nation to create an entirely new constitution and governance system, and how the Nation went to great lengths to cultivate the participation and ownership of Osage citizens in the reform process.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Iba, Priscilla. "Osage Government Reform." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"I am honored to have been asked to speak to you today, and will speak to you on the Osage government reform process. I served on the Osage Government Reform Commission, and hope to give you some insight into our process of completely changing a government that had been imposed on the Osage people for 100 years.

First I want to give you a very brief history of our former government. Then I'll take you through the phases of the reform process and highlight some of the challenges we had and how they were overcome -- or still remain challenges. Lastly, I'll read a short speech I gave to the newly elected Osage Government.

In 1881, in an effort to adapt to the changes facing our nation and to be recognized as equals with the United States, Osage leaders wrote our own constitution modeled after the United States Constitution. This meant consciously separating our traditional cosmology from our government. Primarily due to the push for allotment and statehood for Oklahoma, in 1900 agents of the United States illegally abolished our constitutional form of government.

The U.S. Congress imposed the 1906 Osage Allotment Act.

  1. It concentrated all power within a resolution style government, known as the Tribal Council, although the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] had the ultimate power over Osage affairs.
  2. The entire reservation was allotted, and because we had purchased our reservation, we were not forced to give any of it away.
  3. We also retained our mineral rights as a tribe, and each Osage was also allotted a share of that trust, termed a headright. These 2,229 were the original Osage allottees.
  4. This Act dictated the voting members to be only Osages who had inherited some portion of a headright, and were descended from those original allottees. These were also the only people who could run for office. Through the years many Osages fought to keep the Allotment Act intact, because it was unclear what would happen to us as a tribe without it.

For a number of years, candidates for the tribal council ran on the promise to obtain the vote for all Osages. In the 1970s, the U.S. courts gave us permission to reform our government and decide our membership. That government was abolished because an Act of Congress was necessary for us to be able to choose our governance. It was our own people who encouraged the U.S. government to rule the new government invalid.

In 2004, after much work by our 31st Tribal Council, our chief, two of Oklahoma's U.S. Legislators, our very able legal team, and support from the National Congress of American Indians and other political experts, President [George W.] Bush signed Public Law 108-431, An Act to Reaffirm the Inherent Sovereign Rights of the Osage Tribe to Determine Its Membership and Form a Government. This set the process in motion.

There were some decisions to be made before the Osage Government Reform Commission began to function.

  1. The Osage Tribal Council and our Chief decided who would be on the commission. Each council person submitted two names, then selected 10 commissioners and two alternates from that list of names. The people nominated could not be related any closer than cousin to anybody in the government and could not be employed by the tribe. You can imagine how difficult even this first step was.
  2. The Council, as our acting government, had to decide who would be eligible to vote in the referendum. They resolved that the people who would be able to vote would be the descendents of those original allottees on the 1906 Roll. The Osages eligible to vote could be shareholders or non-shareholders.
  3. The Council decided that a new government would be in place by our next election, which was 16 months in the future.
  4. Leonard Maker, the senior tribal planner, wrote a plan for the probable path this reformation would take.

The people making up the Commission were truly a cross section of our nation. Whether this was a part of the selection process, I don't know, but it was a very good balance. Most of us had to learn about our own government and were not knowledgeable of other governments. Obviously there was a huge learning curve ahead of us.

It also happened that we were all shareholders (headright holders), and we did not all know each other.

Our primary charge was to listen to the will of the Osage people and bring into existence the governmental choice of that majority. This was something that we took very seriously from the onset. We may have been slow starters and stumbled many times, but this was our glue. We were humbled by this mission and were determined to fulfill it.

We also knew that autonomy was absolutely necessary for us to do the job, and that we could not be influenced by anyone in the present government. That crucial independence was given to us. We do not believe reform is possible without a trustworthy commission who is free of political influence. We did report back to the Council and request any resolutions that would be needed to complete our job.

To say that it took us a while to get going is an understatement. Early in the process, we relied heavily on Leonard Maker to guide us. Later I will go more into the dynamics of our beginning. I just want you to know that it appeared we were getting very little done in the early stages.

I'll give you just one example of our difficulty in getting started. Whenever we get together now, we always laugh about this incident.  It's not really all that funny. At one meeting, it took us at least 45 minutes to decide what food we would have at the Grayhorse town meeting.

Since our meetings were all open to the public, and we voted to have them all filmed, you can imagine how we can only shake our heads at our early ineptness.

After the arrival of our coordinator, we were able to move forward with amazing speed. We all felt that a new government would not have happened without her knowledge, hard work and guidance.

It seems imperative that the coordinator or the reform commission chair have a knowledge of governments in general, is intelligent, is available to work ridiculously long hours, understands the culture, knows how to work with people and how to get them to work, and is loyal. 

We had at times three other staff members that we couldn't have done without. They did all the clerical work, record keeping, errand running, and many other jobs. This staff must be organized, hard working, computer literate, and loyal. They had to be able to get along well, especially in stressful situations.

Much of the early part of our tenure was devoted to deciding things that had nothing to do with a government. We were pleased to be able to make many of these choices, but they still took up a lot of time. In addition to the basics of electing officers and deciding how we wanted to run our meetings, we had to outfit an office and hire staff.

We had to get to know each other quickly.

Our education in government started right away. Leonard had prepared a booklet with information on various reformations made by other tribes, and we had a very enlightening seminar with the Harvard Project and The Native Nations Institute. Soon after this, we had a seminar with the Indian law department at Tulsa University.

We were told that we could request meetings with anyone and obtain any sort of information we needed, but we didn't have a clue who we needed to talk to or what sort of information we needed in the beginning. We were working hard, meeting every week, but we really didn't get moving until our coordinator, Hepsi Barnett, got there.

This is the way our work progressed:

  1. Our commission meetings were held weekly and always included a time for attending citizens to give opinions.
  2. We held over 40 town meetings to hear what the Osage people wanted in a new government.
  3. We planned to get a packet to all Osage people with lots of information about government reform. This happened late, and it was not as comprehensive as we would have liked.
  4. We hired an excellent Indian law attorney. Our decision not to hire an Osage was met with strong approval and disapproval.
  5. Many mailings went out with applications for tribal membership and information about upcoming functions and elections.
  6. A camp was held in the summer for high school-aged students to help them become familiar with governments in general and especially the history of and the issues facing our Osage government.
  7. We mailed out a survey with many governmental issues that needed to be decided. The responses -- combined with all the input from the town meetings and commission meetings -- were used to help formulate key questions put forward to eligible voters in a referendum in November 2005. This referendum marked the first time all Osages, 18 and over, had voted in a tribal election since 1900.
  8. This referendum was not in the original plan, but we felt we needed this mandate before we could proceed.
  9. Results from the referendum, Hepsi's research on other constitutions and governments, submissions from many Osage people, and work done in the drafting committee were all used to help write an Osage constitution.
  10. Near time for the vote on the Constitution, we had a two-day workshop with Osage attorneys, our council, and a few others to go over the "final" draft with a fine-tooth comb.
  11. There were still many commission meetings left to get the truly final copy ready for a vote.
  12. The Constitution was ratified on March 11, 2006 in a second referendum vote. The Osage Nation adopted, by a 2/3 majority vote, a new constitutional form of government which includes executive, legislative and judicial branches with a separation of powers between the three.
  13. We helped with the transition from one government to another. We met with program directors, casino executives, the treasurer, and anyone else we could think of and requested their records and specific information that would help make the transition easier.

This was a very challenging and rewarding experience. Maybe knowing some of our tough issues will be helpful to you.

  1. Trust within the commission was the first hurdle we had to overcome. Early on it kept us from forming workable committees, which kept us from putting together the information packet for the Osage people. However, once the commissioners began to trust each other, we listened to each other with completely open minds. We were a hard, fast unit. We were of one purpose and that was to create a government that the people wanted.
  2. It took some of us a while to really own this reformation process. Hepsi saw this as her first goal to help this happen, and she did. 
  3. We had 16 months to complete the work. Obviously, this is a very short time. More time would have helped when our best-laid plans went awry. However the finished product is a good one, and can be amended when the need arises.
  4. Getting a valid list of all the Osages who would be eligible to vote took some time and hard work by both our staff and those in the CDIB department.
  5. I believe we could have done a better job with our town meetings.
    a) We started having them before we were really knowledgeable enough.
    b) We had a time limit for comments early on, but we didn't do a good job sticking to it. It is very difficult to cut off an elder when he's trying to make a point.
    c) Many of our meetings were dominated by negative rants, so that constructive comments were harder to be made.
    d) We saw as our job to listen to the people, but many of the people really didn't have enough information to comment in these meetings.
  6. There were issues that kept coming up, so that it was difficult to cover the many topics that needed to be discussed at town meetings. An example was membership. Many wanted to take the opportunity to create a roll different than the 1906 Roll, since there were many names that had been challenged by the Osage Government at the time. Even after the referendum determined that the 1906 Roll would be used, time at meetings was still taken with the issue.
  7. Untrue gossip dogged us for the whole process.  
  8. We had a unique situation with shareholders in the mineral estate. They were the only people who could hold office and vote before this reformation. There were many who didn't want to give up this elite status.  
  9. Even though we felt we had a very good election company, they made some serious mistakes, which fueled gossip about the reformation process. 
  10. It was a challenge to provide for minerals administration and development in the constitution. The people chose the option of a mineral council made up of shareholders, elected by shareholders, who would function as an independent agency within the Osage Nation, but with no legislative authority in the Osage Nation government. It will take a while for everyone's roles in that to become clear.

Hepsi has said that 'wholesale government reform is complex and messy.' Hopefully, we will constantly be learning and striving for the best possible government for all Osage people. The future is bright, but still challenging.

  1. The Osage people all over the country have been participating in a 25-year strategic plan. Many methods to gather input and engage our people that were used in the Government Reform Initiative are being used in this process.
  2. We on the Government Reform Commission know that the constitution produced is not a perfect document. We know that times will change so that the initiative, referendum, and amending processes provided in the constitution, while not made easy, are certainly available so that the Osage people can constantly improve their governance.

I gave a short speech to our incoming government leaders, and I'm tempted to hit them with it again. I think the points I made might be of interest to you emerging tribal leaders embarking on a new life serving your people. In comparing the Reform Commission with these newly elected leaders, I said to them:

Here are some things for you to think about.

  1. Each of us represented ALL the Osage people, not any special interest group. Our backgrounds were diverse, as yours are. That's important in seeing issues from all directions. However, we couldn't let our personal ideas and desires get in the way of looking at the big picture. You will have to constantly remind yourselves of what your job is and who you represent. You are here for all of us.
  2. It was a challenge for us to get started. In the beginning the most difficult and possibly the most important issue for success is trust. Believe me, it is not an easy thing to do for people who don't know each other well, particularly a bunch of Osages. In order to establish this, all the hidden agendas must either be exposed and discussed or dropped. Trust was crucial to doing our job as it is yours.
  3. With trust comes respect. Everyone should give it and be worthy of it. Having respect for each other and his/her ideas was the only way we could fulfill our mandate.
  4. The truly amazing thing about the Commission is that we were free from political influence. We could do our jobs on behalf of the Osage people only. Of course that is a little more difficult for you, but we expect it of you. The beauty of our government is that we don't have parties. You each have one group to serve, and that is the Osage people.
  5. The learning curve was great for most of us as it is for you. Everyone has to get on board quickly.
  6. Personalities and egos: All of us on the commission were actually amazed that we could disagree so wholeheartedly on various issues, and not be angry at each other. Having a shared goal makes all the difference in the world. 
  7. Our work was humbling. We always knew that we had been asked to do a job for the Osage people, and that was such an honor. Your job isn't about power. It's about service, service to the Osage people.
  8. What we learned: Of course we had much to learn, as you do, about governing. There are other things that are equally important and long lasting. We learned:
    a. to listen, to listen, to listen.
    b. to work as a group while still allowing everyone to have and share individual ideas.
    c. to respect each other and truly care for each other.
    d. what an honor it is to serve the Osage people.
    e. to truly listen to all ideas, especially those contradictory to our own.
  9. This government is new to the Osage people and to other Native people. We are setting an example for many, and many are watching us. There are people who would like for this government to fail, and sadly some of them are Osage. Please do everything in your power to show the world that we can govern ourselves fairly and with grace. Make us proud, not embarrassed.

Thank you for your time."

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

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Timeche and Joseph P. Kalt: The Process of Constitutional Reform: Key Issues and Cases to Consider

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Joan Timeche and Joseph P. Kalt share two stories of constitutional reform processes undertaken by Native nations and discuss what factors spurred or impeded the ultimate success of those efforts. 

Resource Type
Citation

Kalt, Joseph P. "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.

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.

Joseph P. Kalt: "This panel arises somewhat unusually for us in the sense that we don't usually do this kind of panel, but it arose when we were talking among ourselves about the curriculum for this event, this session. When one starts talking about the process of constitutional reform, in other words not what are you going to put in your constitution but how do you go through the process, it's very easy, particularly for us professor types, to paint a picture of perfection. We all get together, we have long conversations, we take our time to deliberate, we arrive at collective values and wisdom. And we kind of started to realize, "˜Well, that's a real interesting view, and it's often wrong.' Because in the real world, changing one's government, from the Soviet Union to Cherokee or whatever, is often a very messy process, and yet...well, that's the real world that -- if any of you have invested in these efforts -- you encounter, and so we thought what we would try to do is try to talk about some real-world cases and then have some conversation about and draw out, "˜What do you learn from real-world cases where people change their constitution?' And so that's the goal here is to, "˜Let's get real guys, this is a real messy thing.' I, for example, have had my life under threat, just for being the guy who came and talked at an event. For real. Because for real nations, there are real stakes here, and it gets messy for lots of reasons. People have vested interest in the status quo. People -- the general public -- is often very poorly educated in any country about these kinds of issues. So there are lots of reasons that the real world gets a lot messier than maybe that picture of, have a lot of public meetings, set up a website. Oh, that's how you change your constitution? In most cases, nope. There are different ways. So we thought, that's our purpose here, and Joan is going to start with a case near and dear to her heart, her Hopi heart."

Joan Timeche: "As you know, I am a citizen of the Hopi Nation and I want to tell you, I'm going to make a disclaimer right up front that I'm talking from the perspective of not as an official representative of the Hopi Tribe but as an individual citizen, "˜cause I can see a lot of things, I get frustrated about a lot of things. I'm also -- in our nation I'm also one of the off-reservation citizens, and thankfully our constitution allows off-reservation citizens to participate in all of the elections. So we're able to do so either by physically going on reservation to vote in our villages or either by absentee ballots. So we're able to participate in this whole process, and I just want to say that -- very quickly, before I forget -- that we actually have a large contingent of off-reservation citizens too, probably about 4,000 who live off, and we're very active in what is happening within the nation because oftentimes we're the ones who can understand the complexities of the laws, and we go back home and we share that information with our citizens to help them understand how it impacts them.

So I wanted to just talk very briefly about what had happened at Hopi, because we too have gone through constitutional reform. And you'll see on the screen some photos of Hopi. We've been very fortunate, probably because of our isolation, our distance from metro areas, and if you wanted to come visit Hopi, you really had to have a reason to come visit us because it's so far and distant out there. And that probably, the fact that we live on mesas, high up in high elevations probably helped to keep our language and our traditions and our customs alive. But we still have a lot of that in existence today, despite the decline in our language and some of our loss of our societies because we have people who pass on who don't carry that information on. So you can imagine that on Hopi, if you've ever visited the Hopi Nation, you'll see a real diversity out there in terms of our government. We have 12 autonomous villages and within these villages they control all of the land, they make all of the decisions within their area of jurisdiction, and here comes in the federal government that imposes upon us a constitution. We were one of the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] tribes that in 1936 we approved the constitution. But like as you heard many other speakers here, our people did not go and vote. They voted with their feet, which meant that they stayed home, because that election that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was conducting was not their form of how we make decisions. Ours was based on clan hierarchy. We were a traditional culture and so all of our leadership was elected and appointed in a different way, and it wasn't a democracy as this IRA constitution was putting us into. So we had these 12 villages. So if you look at what was happening out on Hopi, if you look at the 12 villages, for many, many years after 1936, only eight of those villages decided that they were going to recognize the constitution, and four of them did not. And one of those villages had probably about one-eighth of the nation's population, and today still does not recognize it, so they're not represented in council. I'm not represented either, because I come from a traditional village, the village of Old Oraibi. So there are probably about, we have population today of 12,000. I would guess that probably a quarter of our population is not represented effectively on council because we say, "˜That's a foreign government, that's the [Hopi language] form of government.' But as you all know, what happens out there is we had to be able to get services at one point or another, and sometimes it came down to the decision of almost to the lesser of the two evils. We're in dire need of services so do we accept it, do we not accept it. There's a lot of controversy over whether or not you've accepted it if you take some of the services that are funded by federal governments, on and on -- all of this controversy continued throughout.

And so what ended up happening over the years, Hopi life continued. And I will say that as a child growing up and until probably the 1990s, we really just lived out there and did our own thing and we had this government, this tribal council that dealt with the external forces and all of this. So we had two forms of government ongoing all the time, and over those years, since 1936, we had three amendments. Most of them dealt with citizenship as we moved from half-blood quantum, we moved down to a quarter and so over the years we'd had amendments made to our constitution. And then in the, let's see, I believe it was in 1998 there was a decision made that we need to begin to start changing, to take a look at this, because by then Western culture had come in and there was more, many of us were becoming more acculturated, there was this transition, and so many of us were now looking at the tribal government, this modern form, this IRA form of a government as the government, except for these four villages that continued operating in a traditional way. So you can see the majority were transitioning over, and we were having a number of problems. So some of the things that they looked at in determining why this was happening was we didn't have adequate coverage in terms of our sovereignty. There wasn't a separation, there were disputes over what the roles were, and we really actually had one single council up there. If you can look at that, they had the powers to make law, to be able to adjudicate, and to run the administration. So they were doing everything. They were the be-all of our nation. And so those are some of the reasons why that this change was occurring. And if you talk to an everyday citizen out there like my cousins, my uncles and whatever who don't really have any real connect to the tribal government, they're not employed there, they're just out there living their lives as Hopi citizens, they had no clue. They saw this as just, "˜Oh, we don't know what those tribal, what they're doing down at the tribal headquarters, they're crazy,' kind of a thing. "˜Why don't they all get together, and why don't they just try to meet our needs that we have here out in our community?' So in this effort, the committee, they actually passed a resolution. There was a committee, a constitution commission that was formed. It was supposed to have been represented by -- each of the 12 villages was supposed to have two reps on this committee. That committee never got formed as such. Instead [it] ended up being a seven- or eight-member committee if I remember correctly, and they began to set about going out to working on these issues that had been identified, they went out and conducted hearings and they were moving forward much as we heard from the last two panelists. They were moving forward on their plan of seeking the input, trying to be able to make the changes.

And so around 2002 we...I'm sorry, 2004, all of this just stopped. It just stalled out in the communities. There was beginning to grow dissent within the tribe over what the powers were within the communities. Our people began to actually file lawsuits. Before, we had always resolved our disputes internally within families, within villages. We only used our courts really for criminal kinds of cases, and now we were beginning to see the change of civil kinds of cases coming into our courts. So we were clearly changing there. So they went back -- during the years of 2005 to 2010, you probably have read many articles in national papers and heard about all of our political turmoil that occurred over residency criteria, eligibility criteria for our chairman and then [him] being removed, and then going through another election and basically the council overturning the vote, the results of the election, which said they basically nullified what the people's votes were and there were all of these civil suits that were being put out in the courts by groups and individuals because the council had violated individual civil rights because they nullified our vote, which was to elect a different person than they wanted. So you can see there was all this turmoil that occurred.

We still have turmoil today, but not to the degree that it was at that time. What then happened is it stabilized a little bit. Around 2009, we had a new chairman come in and in 2010 the new chairman, as it happened, was one of the co-chairs of this constitution reform committee back in the day. So one of the platforms that they ran on was that they were going to stabilize the community, they're going to look at whether this in fact has been an illegitimate council that's been operating for years and decades, and they were going to resolve those issues. So one of the ways that they decided to do that was, "˜Okay, let's look at our constitution again and pull that out and figure out what's working, what's not working.' So they went out and the committee, they reconstituted the old committee with as many members as they could get back on there, and they basically -- and here you'll hear my bias -- they came and they took out the old version from 2002, from which they had the hearings that got pushed off, because there was a lot of, it was going, there were many people who felt that it was going to take the powers away from the villages, that the traditional form of government was just going to be diminished, and their powers were going to be diminished by this foreign IRA kind of a concept and a constitution. So what ended up happening, they dusted it off, they reconstituted the committee, they went out and re-held more hearings during the year 2010 and the year 2011. In a Secretarial election, the council passed the motion that this constitution was going to go forward. It went out, they processed the appropriate paperwork with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the notices went out. But the notices went out right around Christmas, and who looks at their mail during Christmas? I was one of those citizens who did not see this letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in my stack of mail until after the deadline passed. But then I learned that I was not the only person who did not see this notice. So across the State of Arizona, wherever you found Hopi citizens, on the rez, wherever, off rez, there was an effort that got started where there was a civil suit that was filed to halt the election, because there was not adequate notice provided, because as you've heard the BIA requires that you register with them. It didn't matter that I was a registered voter through the Hopi Tribe and through our election ordinance, I then had to re-register with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and this is what created a lot of controversy.

So what ended up happening come January 27, 2012, an election was held, and guess what happened at that election. Think it passed? No, yes, maybe, whatever? Well, what ended up happening is that it got defeated, again back to the fact that what was cited as the reason was, "˜We didn't know what you were proposing to do with this constitution. We gave you comment, but you totally disregarded it. You sat there and you listened, but you made no attempt to modify this constitution that you drafted five years ago or whatever the timeframe was.' So you had citizens out there who said, "˜This is not going to work. We need to go back to the drawing board.' And so I guess, what I wanted to share there was basically we took the steps forward, two steps forward, or actually maybe one step forward, and we took two back, and then we went one step forward and we're going two back. But I think that what's going to happen in this next version -- because we still have a lot of unrest, political unrest -- is that there's going to be a greater effort at citizen education out there, and already you can see groups and entities and individuals who are already beginning to make that attempt. There's greater awareness about and questioning about, "˜What are the roles of our council? What are the roles of our elected officers? What are our roles and responsibilities as individual citizens?' So it's creating all of this flurry out here, and sometimes -- as you probably all have experienced -- sometimes the activity is just heightened, it's on everybody's mind and it's being talked about at the dinner table, and other times it just totally at the bottom and it goes up and down. But what'll come out of this is, as I said, greater citizen education. So again, it's another story of things can't all be perfect. You make the effort, one forward, two back, one forward but we're going to keep trying to resolve and strengthen our government on Hopi. Thank you."

Kalt: "Thank you, Joan. We thought we'd tell a few stories like this and then open it up to questions. Let me tell you a story a little bit like Joan's. While I'm obviously not Native and not a member of the Crow Tribe, I want to tell you about the Crow story. Actually, it has a happy ending. It's a rough and rugged story in the sense that the process that they went through to change their constitution doesn't look like anybody's textbook and it has some unsavory parts to it. And yet at the end of it, in a certain way, they've been successful, and so as I tell this rough and rugged story, it has a happy ending, even though at times it won't sound like it.

And so I'll actually start at the end. I mentioned yesterday the Crow Tribe constitution of 1948, not an IRA constitution. They had rejected the IRA. 1948 constitution written by non-Indian lawyer from Hardin, Montana, had this "˜every voting age member is a member of the tribal council, a quorum is 100 people, tribal council shall meet once every quarter.' It had a fourth clause to it, which was Secretarial approval. It said -- last clause of the constitution -- any changes or amendments to this constitution shall be subject to the approval of the Secretary of Interior or his designee meaning the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. That was their constitution from 1948 "˜til 2001.

And the happy ending is, since 2001, they're operating under a constitution that I'll describe in some detail in a moment, but it's actually brought stability to a tribe that had been under tremendous instability. I mentioned that the last three chairs elected under the 1948 constitution became convicted federal felons while in office. I believe from 1967 to '97, approximately not a single chair was not impeached and removed from office. And they've now stabilized that as they've gone through a cycle of one chair who served out a complete term, didn't go to prison, was reelected, then unfortunately passed away while in office from a heart ailment, put in a new chair, went through the transition of power. That chair has survived and so forth, and many other signs of stability being brought to the Crow Nation since 2001.

So it has a happy ending, but how did they get there? So you have this crazy constitution from 1948. Some of the difficulties around the constitution. Not only did you have all the convicted federal felons, not only did you have impeachment of every tribal chair from about 1967 to '97, but you had this phenomenon -- just to give you the flavor -- of a quorum is 100 people in the tribal council. What that meant was kind of the optimal size political faction, there were so few jobs, was 99 of your friends and you, because if you could get yourself elected chair, you would immediately kick out all the employees, the head of natural resources, the head of the police force, whatever, and appoint your 99 friends, "˜cause that's what they expected of you. That's why they were part of your chairman's faction. It was to the point in which good friends of mine -- actually, Miriam was with one of these gentlemen yesterday -- they would self refer, "˜I'm a lieutenant in the chairman's faction, or I'm a lieutenant in the out-of-power faction.' People were very conscious of this need to be in tight little factions and get your chair elected so you could then have jobs for the next 90 days until somebody kicked your chairman out and you lost your job. By the way, the Crow talk openly about this. They know this was a messy system, and in fact by the mid-1980s, by the mid-1980s if you went and interviewed even the man on the street in a sense -- you're talking about your relatives who don't pay much attention like most people, why should you -- people would say, "˜Oh, it's "˜cause of our screwed-up government.' And yet they couldn't change the government, they couldn't change this constitution. And in the late 1980s a very wise gentleman, Chairman Richard Real Bird at the time and kind of one of my mentors in this game, said, "˜We've got to change this system. We're just killing ourselves.' But because everything had become so factionalized, he literally would have to go out, wake up in the morning at 3:00 in the morning, drive over to another faction leader's house, throw rocks at his window, "˜cause he couldn't be seen [saying], 'Hey, we've got to change this constitution.' Because he couldn't be seen doing that in public because, "˜Oh, you're, uh oh, he's not loyal to my faction anymore,' and your own faction would dessert you. And so there was a social breakdown in the ability of leaders to talk to themselves, and that's critical because if you go through constitutional reform, you're going to have people who don't agree with you and they're leaders in the community, and you'd like to be able to talk to each other and say "˜can't we find a way to solve that problem' that Joan just put up there, for example. What, four of the twelve aren't part of the government? So you have a big chunk of the Hopi Nation, Hopi Tribe, that don't even participate. What would you say, 30 percent don't participate or something like that? A quarter? Okay.

So you saw this kind of breakdown. The way these things would be manifested, you'd be chair, you'd get impeached and removed from office on a Saturday at the tribal council meeting, the quarterly meeting, and the next Saturday or so you would go to the office with you and your relatives with pickup trucks and take every piece of paper out of the office, so that the new chair would come in and there would be no paper record for example. This led one time at Crow to the casino being shut down because someone challenged the Crow Nation to show us where your gaming compact is with the State of Montana. And it had been taken out of the office, and they literally ran into these kinds of problems where literally, imagine trying to run a government, build a community, run a language program in the school, get some business...in that kind of situation? Chaos. But there was a deep recognition that there was this chaos, and it was very interesting.

In the late 1980s, this one chair really started a drive to try to change the constitution. And he started to run into opposition of a couple of types that you may run into in your own community of different flavors. One was the 1948 constitution had been culturally associated with a particular elder in the tribe and a lot of people were responding, "˜You're attacking that elder if you change our 1948 constitution.' What had actually happened was this lawyer from Hardin, Montana, had gotten this elder to kind of introduce the constitution, but it wasn't like the elder was deeply connected to it or anything, it was just that's how it kind of happened and got stuck in people's mind that it wasn't the white lawyer in Hardin, Montana who wrote the constitution, it was this elder. He's now very elderly. And you kind of got this opposition of, "˜You're somehow tampering with our elders.' And the chair of the tribe at the time in the late 1980s wrote a new -- they wrote a new constitution, he and his lieutenants wrote a new constitution, put it up for a vote and it was a pretty solid constitution with strong separations of powers, shrinking the legislature from a legislature of about 6,000 adults to like 18 people, a little more manageable, putting in some checks and balances so you couldn't just willy nilly impeach the chairs every three months or so. But as the 1980s came up and the constitution was put up for a vote, in the days leading up to the constitutional vote, the chairman's own faction started to desert him and it lost just hands down, just got clobbered. Why would the chairman's own faction desert the chairman's effort to put in a new constitution? Well, if you talked to people at the time, it was the vested interest in the status quo. "˜If I'm the 34-year-old current head of the natural resources program, I have this job because of this tribal chair. If we get this new constitution, damn, I might not be able to get on that gravy train. It might be a system in which I won't win.' And so you had this kind of sense of risk on the part of even the chairman's faction that this new constitution would end the gravy train of me and 99 of my friends. And so it ended up losing tremendously.

Now fast forward 15 years and behind the scenes, now we're going to go to 2001, where they succeed in changing the constitution. Changing the constitution is still a kind of dirty idea. "˜Oh, don't touch that, don't touch that.' But, some young leaders within the community -- all in their kind of early to mid-30s -- start saying, "˜This is crazy.' "˜Cause some of them had come to sessions like we're doing here and they come away thinking, "˜Maybe the reason we have 80 percent unemployment and suicide rates that are 15 times the national average and people who are taking our land from us right and left, maybe it's "˜cause we've got a messed up government.' So these young leaders say, "˜We're going to try for constitutional change.' And it's very, very interesting what they did. They could not hold big public meetings on constitutional reform. Literally, they were running the risk of physical harm to themselves if they did that. That is that there would be riots at the meetings, and I had friends beaten up behind the racetrack at the State Fair at Billings, Montana one day because they were trying to push for constitutional reform. Crow on Crow, Crow on Crow. So how'd they do it? These young 30 somethings, first they thought hard substantively, "˜What changes do we need to make?' It was easy to say, this every adult member is a member of the tribal council, this sort of chaos, that was easy to say that was screwed up but what do you replace it with, what would work for this community? And I'll say a little bit more about that in a second. Secondly, how do you get the constitution on the agenda? And here's what they did. They started...there was a series of meetings of I think it's called the 107 Commission or Committee, and it deals with a completely different matter at Crow coming from an old dispute over some land and some money compensation and so forth, and many of the older tribal leaders are involved in the 107 Committee. They went to this committee and they started essentially doing the following, "˜Hey, we hear you're going to have a committee meeting about these monies and this land issue, we'd like to come and talk about the new constitution.' Unannounced kind of. It wasn't like it was come to the meeting and full notification. And they started to go around to these meetings and these 30 somethings would come in with the cooperation of elders now on this committee and start talking about, "˜You know, why we're having trouble making decisions about land, it's "˜cause of the constitution' -- started to shift the conversation to maybe "˜it's this messed up constitution that was written not by us in 1948.' And as they started this conversation and they'd get a little, enough support going.

Next step in their process. They succeed in getting elected in this chaotic system a gentleman, a very nice gentleman, who had no experience in tribal politics. I live up, I have a little ranch up there, "˜cause I work so much at Crow. I'm just off the Crow reservation. This very nice gentleman was literally the snowplow driver on my road that comes into my ranch. Nice guy, but no experience in politics. And I don't want to imply, but I am kind of implying, a little bit of a puppet in a certain way. This is the tribal chair. And here they come up to 2001, and here's how the new constitution gets adopted. They'd been going out to these little local meetings, ostensibly not about the constitution, but nevertheless talking about it in these meetings a little bit. They go to the July 1st, 2001 tribal council meeting, every adult member of the tribe is a member of the tribal council, there are several thousand people there, and the Crow, under that old government, had a tradition where they could "˜take the sense of the house' -- I think is the phrase -- where they would decide as the first action on the Saturday morning of the council that everything would be conducted by a voice vote or counted vote, and they decided, "˜Let's do it all by a voice vote. All those in favor?' And it's literally kind of everybody just sort of shouts out, "˜Yay, nay! Okay.' Chairman bangs the gavel, "˜We will conduct the whole meeting by voice vote. First item of business: We need to paint the tribal police station or something. It's going to cost about $1,200. All those in favor?' "˜Aye.' "˜Next item of business...' And there's actually a tape recording of what I'm talking about. "˜Next item of business is the new constitution.' No discussion. "˜All those in favor?' No discussion. "˜Next item of business: the new constitution. It'll help us. All those in favor?' A bunch of people start screaming "˜Aye.' "˜All those opposed?' And suddenly people are screaming, "˜No, no, nay, nay, nay,' and you can hear this on this audio tape. And at least the fellow Miriam was with yesterday, a gentleman I know, said to me one time, "˜If you had a decibel meter, maybe the nays won in the screaming match there.' The lieutenants are sitting -- you're our tribal chair -- the lieutenants are sitting, "˜The ayes won it, ayes won it, bang the gavel, bang the gavel!' The chairman bangs the gavel. "˜The ayes have it.' And they're screaming and yelling and everything else and he's banging the gavel, he's banging the gavel. I don't know exactly what the next item was, but, "˜Next item of business, next item of business. We've got to change the tipping fee on the trash collection from $15 to $18.' They're banging and everybody's screaming and pretty soon things kind of...and they go on and they vote on the tipping fee for trash collection. True story, folks. I don't know if it's tipping fee on trash, but that kind of event.

Next, two more layers to the story real quickly. They then go and they have this new constitution. I want to say a word about what they did with the constitution, because it's very important. These were gentlemen -- these 30 somethings -- who really believe in their community. I can't find a "˜serve myself, get 2800 pairs of shoes' bone in their bodies. They are devoted to helping Crow, but they had to do it in this way because they couldn't figure out any other way to make this happen. What did they do? They wrote a constitution in which they said, "˜You know, I've listened to those people at NNI about cultural match. We used to have a council of clans and a council of warriors, a two-branch government. The council of clans historically in our society concerned themselves with civil life -- divorce in the camp, murder in the camp, whatever might happen, that was the council of clans job.' The council of warriors is what it sounded like. They were foreign affairs. They fought the Lakota, they fought the Cheyenne, they treated with the U.S. government and so forth. They had a very strong separation of powers. So they did two things. They looked around and they said, "˜You know, our clan system is still pretty strong, and it's kind of not perfect but related to districts. People over here in the Pryor District tend to be of this clan. People over here at Lodge Grass tend to be of another clan. Let's create district representatives, three from six districts, 18 people tribal legislature, tribal council.' And what'll happen is, they're thinking like this, "˜We'll tend to get legitimate leaders in the community, the clan leaders, to come now be political leaders in the sense that they'll now be the legislature, three from each district.' And they wrote that into the new constitution. The second thing they said is, "˜We want a really strong separation of powers, council of clan, council of warriors.' So at Crow, I'm told that if I'm the tribal chair, the executive, if I go over to the legislature building which is just sort of caddy corner across the street over here -- I've been out there many times, spoken to them -- I can be arrested if I go in my official capacity because I'm not part of the legislature. I'm the council of warriors. I can fly to Washington and do my work and everything else and I can administer programs, but the council of clans, the Crow legislature, is from the clan leaders in the six districts. So they create this kind of government.

Now fast forward. So July 1st, 2001, bang the gavel, the ayes have it, the ayes have it, the ayes have it. New constitution. They go and they hold elections. How do you hold elections? Well, because now you're kind of empowering the clans, in each district the clans are anxious to hold elections, "˜cause they can now feel, "˜Hey, this is kind of cool. We might have some clout around here instead of this chaos.' They hold the elections. They go for inauguration, and any of you who've been to Crow Fair, kind of down near where ya'll park at Crow Fair, there's a big round building, roundhouse, and as I understand it they go down there for the inauguration ceremonies, and so all the new officers go down to get inaugurated, and another faction takes over the tribal headquarters claiming that the new constitution is invalid. And so now you have a sit-in going on at the tribal headquarters as the inauguration is going on. Interestingly enough, because the clans are starting to say, "˜Hey, we kind of like this new government,' this faction that takes over the tribal headquarters, their argument isn't that the constitution is bad, it's it wasn't adopted legitimately. It had that Secretarial approval clause in it, remember. The Secretary of Interior shall approve or disapprove of any changes or amendments to this constitution. They have a sit-in, I may get the facts a little bit wrong, but basically the BIA and tribal police and state highway patrol are there and they say, "˜We're coming in at 4:30 with tear gas to get you out of there, to the sit-inners.' And they somehow get, at the time Neal McCaleb was the Secretary for Indian Affairs, they somehow get him on the phone and in an act supporting tribal sovereignty he says, "˜Oh, wait a minute, the Secretary of Interior doesn't have to approve the new constitution, because it's not a change or amendment to the old constitution, it's a whole new constitution.' And so now that you've got this constitution...and the sit-inners, he's just pulled their rug out. They walk out. They walk out. And you ended up with a system then in which what was really happening was, behind the scenes, "˜You hothead whose taken over the tribal headquarters -- did I tell you I'm your clan father by the way -- you need to leave before 4:30. Did I tell you I'm your clan...' You're watching the finger wagging of cultural legitimacy supporting a constitution now which was giving power to the legitimate structures and authorities, the cultural match of the Crow people. And while it had this very sort of rough and ready and tumbling start, it sits there stable now. They just had a big meeting on the anniversary basically of, "˜Hey, this is working pretty cool for us.' How is this working? And so I tell you this story because in it is that story of leadership, citizens often aren't paying much attention, for good reason. As you said, they want to live their lives. Go out to the guy here who's parking cars, this young man, he couldn't care less about the constitution of the United States. He's thinking about when is Friday, "˜cause I want to go drink beer or something. Any citizens, the man or woman on the street, doesn't care and quite rightly. Leaders have to step forward. Yes, you have to respect the community, but somehow you've got to strike a balance there where the leaders are the ones putting structure to the process, and that's what those 30-somethings at Crow did."