constitutional reform process

Julia Coates: The Process of Constitutional Reform: What the Cherokee Nation Did and Why

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Cherokee Nation Councilor Julia Coates presents an overview of the constitutional history of the Cherokee Nation, and chronicles the process the Cherokee Nation followed to reform its constitution in 1999.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Coates, Julia. "The Process of Constitutional Reform: What the Cherokee Nation Did and Why." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

"I will begin, it looks like. This is the second time I've presented at this conference, and I want to thank the Native Nations Institute for inviting me back. I really leapt at the opportunity this year, because we've had some interesting developments related to our constitution that occurred last year and as part of our recent elections.

Just a few points about the Cherokee Nation first of all. The Cherokee Nation is not an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] government and it is not an OIWA government, the latter being Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, which is the IRA equivalent for tribes in Oklahoma who were exempted initially from the original IRA. So it's important to state that we're not organized in that fashion. We never have been, and that it's not required that a tribe be organized under either of those statutes. The second thing about the Cherokee Nation is that we actually don't have a reservation. We have never had a reservation. As many of you may know, in 1838 the Cherokee Nation was removed from the Southeast [United States] to the area that is now Oklahoma that was previously known as the Indian Territory, and as part of that removal we received a fee-simple patent from the United States, so essentially as a government we owned our land as private property. It was not land that was held in trust by the United States for the Cherokee Nation. It was land that we owned privately, so we've never had what is called a reservation, but at the time when allotments were made for us it was between the years of 1898 and 1906. The privatization to the government of our land base was smashed, and all of that land went into private individual ownership and unlike the allotments on reservations, that meant that it could be lost. Reservations have tribes with fractionation, or reservation tribes have problems with fractionation of their allotments right now, but for us, 90 percent of those allotments passed out of individual Cherokee ownership within 20 years after the allotment ended. So we only hold in trust or in restriction today about one third of one percent of our original land base to the government. So we don't have a land base per se. We have probably less than 100,000 acres that are in trust or restricted status. At this time, it's not contiguous. It's scattered out all over an area of 14 counties in northeastern Oklahoma. So what we have instead is called a jurisdictional service area, which is the boundaries of the old fee-simple land holding and we exercise jurisdiction for law enforcement purposes, for taxation purposes and things like that within that service area. There are about approximately 300,000 citizens of the Cherokee Nation right now. About 35 percent, 35 to 40 percent of those -- approximately 120,000 -- live within the boundaries. They are still a minority within the boundaries, albeit the largest minority. There are more non-Indians living in our jurisdictional service area right now, however, than there are Cherokees. And about 65 percent of the Cherokee citizenry lives outside of that jurisdictional service area. We are scattered all over the country and as a tribal councilor, I represent the approximately 170,000 people who live outside of the boundaries. There are only two of us out of 17 tribal councilors who represent that large at-large population.

The third thing, just introductory fact I want to give you right now, is that the Cherokee Nation has been a constitutional government ever since 1827, so we're coming up on almost 200 years of constitutional government. Someone made a remark yesterday that many tribes choose to do this, and we were one that did. It was a strategy that we employed to try to defend ourselves politically and legally in the Southeast when it was apparent to us that military options were not there for us any longer, that we could not prevail in that fashion, and so we were looking for other ways to do it in ways that the United States itself would understand and sort of on their terms that we could defend ourselves. So our first constitution was developed in 1827, but it was a long process. I would say it was probably 40 years of struggle internally, even within the Cherokee people, to try to get to that point. There were ups and downs along the way, there were several fairly nonviolent revolts nevertheless that took place against that process, as people did not understand what the movement was for and it took awhile for it to catch on. I would say however by the late 1800s, we had three or four generations who had lived under constitutional government by that time and who were deeply, deeply invested in the idea that they were a nation of treaty, of constitution and of statute that they lived by. All of that was smashed in 1907, when Oklahoma became a state and the Cherokee Nation government was pretty much driven underground I would say. It was a government in name only for much of the 20th century. And it's not until the early 1970s that it began to emerge again, that the social climate, the political climate kind of opened up enough to be able to do that. And so one of the first efforts was to develop a superseding constitution to the one that had existed in the 1800s and which had become outdated by that time. So that effort occurred in the early 1970s and it involved the [Cherokee Nation] principal chief at that time, W.W. Keeler, going to a number of grassroots community organizations that were all together known as the Original Cherokee Community Organizations, the OCCO groups, and asking them as community groups to provide input as to what they would like a superseding constitution to look like. Those groups did so. Keeler, his attorney Earl Boyd Pierce, [and]some others were involved in putting together a superseding document. That constitution was taken to Washington in 1975 by the principal chief at that time, Ross Swimmer, for Bureau [of Indian Affairs] approval. We were told in 1975 that Bureau approval would be required of us, even though we had not organized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. We were nevertheless told that, and so that Bureau approval was required. In that 1975 document, we have an article in it that states that the Bureau also will approve any amendments to this constitution or any superseding constitutions that the Cherokee Nation might develop. The following year in 1976, the Muskogee Creek Nation, a councilor of that Nation, brought a suit against the United States, against the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and one of the outcomes of that lawsuit was that the federal judge said that the five tribes -- the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Muskogee Creeks, the Chickasaws and the Seminoles -- didn't need to have that Bureau approval, that they could develop new constitutions as exercises of their inherent sovereignty. And so we knew at that point that that article didn't need to be in our constitution as the Bureau had told us, but by that time it was in our constitution and so that was something that we were living with as a result. That '75 constitution also said that we had to have a constitutional convention every 20 years. We had to revisit our constitution every 20 years to keep it current, to keep it updated, to see what kinds of revisions we wanted to make. And so in 1995, that convention took place. I'm sorry, the convention didn't take place, the vote took place to hold the convention. But at the same time in 1995, there was a very strange sort of non-election that happened in the Cherokee Nation, where we had two candidates that were involved in a runoff, and one of the candidates it was discovered had been convicted of felony offenses. The conviction had been expunged and so he had run on that, but the question had gone to our court and our highest court had said an expungement did not mean that he had not been convicted and so they disqualified him from running. At that point, the third-place finisher in the primary, a man named Chad Smith, who later did become our principal chief, questioned the tribal court as to whether he could now enter the election against the other person in the runoff. The court said, no, he could not. And so effectively in 1995, what happened was that a man named Joe Byrd was, just catapulted into the seat of principal chief without any election, any real election actually taking place. So this had happened in that year, and during the term of Chief Byrd, between 1995 and 1999, the Cherokees entered into what has been referred to in our history now as a constitutional crisis. By our constitution, the chief, the administration, is required to provide budgets to the tribal council, which has budgetary authority. The chief did not do that, and so for three years we went without any kind of budget, the council not knowing where the money was, how much money there was, and so they went to the court to try to ask for, to retrieve records from the chief's office. The court issued that order for those records to be achieved and our marshal service, our law enforcement, enacted that court order in what the chief styled as a raid on his office but which was actually a court-ordered search. And with that the chief fired every single member of the marshal service, and he impeached the justices of the Supreme Court, something which under our constitution he didn't have the authority to do. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs police was now brought in to the situation because all of our tribal law enforcement had been fired by the chief, and the justices were barred by BIA police, by federal authorities, from entering their own offices at this point under this mock sort of impeachment that had taken place. This led to a situation where eight of the 15 tribal councilors now began to boycott the tribal council meetings in order that a quorum could never be established and no business could take place. So everything had ground to a halt by 1997 in the Cherokee Nation in terms of any business being done, anything like that.

So, it was under these conditions that we were now going to hold a constitutional convention, and it was a very tough time period in which to do that because the animosities between the two sides in this conflict were becoming extremely entrenched at this point. Nevertheless the process -- which is what I'm really here to talk about today I guess -- was to take testimony, to try just as had been done in the early 1970s, to get input from the Cherokee citizens themselves as to what they would like to see in a very fundamental governing document. And we -- there were a series of essentially town hall-type meetings that took place in all of the communities of the Cherokee Nation, the larger communities at least, and very interestingly for the very first time the Cherokee Nation also sort of extended a hand to the majority of its citizens who were living outside of the boundary, so there were even several of these kinds of convocations that took place in other cities. I know there was one in Houston, there was one in Los Angeles, there was one in Sacramento, there was one that was scheduled to be in Albuquerque as well, but which got cancelled for funding reasons. But the reasons these areas were chosen is because they were areas where Cherokee citizens who lived there had sort of self organized into community organizations, so we had some kind of structure with which to interact in that process. Out of the people who provided testimony, the constitutional commission -- which had been formed by the legislation in 1995 -- selected about 75 delegates. Actually, there was a process where the judicial branch selected eight delegates I believe it was, the executive selected the same number, the legislative selected the same number, the rest were selected by the constitutional commission out of the people who had provided testimony. And I was one person who had provided testimony, and so I was one that was selected by the commission to participate. In total we had about 75 delegates that then attended a constitutional convention, which was held in 1999 just literally four months before there was to be a new election for principal chief. Now the constitutional commission had also drafted a document, a draft constitution out of the testimony that they had received from the people at these hearings, and clearly their intent was that these 75 delegates would come in over a weekend, that they would look at this draft document, they would kind of fine tune it and they would stamp it and we would have a new constitution. The delegates had a different thing in mind, however, as we might suspect, and they immediately hijacked the proceedings as the convention got underway. The commission had established a man named Charles Gourd to be the chairman of the convention. Now the problem for the delegates was that Gourd was also the chief of staff for the principal chief, for Joe Byrd, and so he was perceived as being very, sitting very heavily on one side of this conflict that was going on. So immediately the delegates replaced him with another man named Jay Hannah, who was perceived as a more neutral sort of individual, and from there it went on. They didn't just look at the document and fine tune it. They went line by line through every bit of that document, and what was intended to be a two-day process ended up being a nine-day process, 14-hour days oftentimes as the delegates worked very, very thoroughly through this document. We had a very mixed group. We had nine attorneys, all of them Cherokee Nation citizens, as part of the delegation. We had a number of community people who were part of it. We had people from the legislative branch, we had people who were from the administration, and we had about 20 delegates out of the 75 who were from what we refer to as the at-large citizens, those who lived outside of the boundaries. So it was a very good representation, I think, of real cross sections of the overall citizenry.

Some of the things that we did -- and this was not part of process -- but we strengthened the matters of referenda and recall, because the crisis was proving that we did not have good enough mechanisms to handle a situation such as the one we were finding ourselves in. We expanded the judiciary as well from a system of three tribal Supreme Court justices to five. They were given longer terms. The council terms were staggered. We had term limits placed on the legislative and judicial branches. We established two councilors for the at-large people specifically. They did not have separate specific representation up to that time. And we tried to address some of the outside threats from other tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs that were coming at us. So these were some of the things that were taking place.

Probably one of the most interesting things out of this document was the question of the little article requiring BIA approval, and the delegates at the convention removed that. There was just no discussion about it. It took about 20 seconds for everybody to say, 'No, we don't need to have the Bureau of Indian Affairs in our approval process.' So that came out of the 1999 document. But as we finalized this, the convention finalized this document, the next step was to send it to solicitors from the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the various agency offices throughout the United States, and as we did that, these solicitors began to sort of nickel and dime the thing. They looked at it said, 'We don't like this, we don't like that, we don't like...' And our chief at that time, who by then was Chad Smith, who had been elected to replace Joe Byrd, he essentially said to everybody, 'We didn't ask you if you liked it. We asked you if it would pass legal muster. That's all we asked.' And so with them sort of trying to nickel and dime everything, we quickly pulled it back from the solicitors, and what we did instead was that in 2003 we decided that we would put two questions on our ballot. We were having a regular election for principal chief again in that year and we added these two questions for the people to vote on. The first was to vote on one question, one amendment only, which would take the Bureau of Indian Affairs out of our approval process. And then the second question was to approve the overall 1999 document that the convention had put forth. And the people voted on both of those and both of those measures passed. The surprise to me is that in the Bureau of Indian Affairs only about, only two-thirds of our people voted to take them out. There was fully a one-third of our people who said, 'No, let's keep the Bureau in our approval process,' and it mystifies me to this day as to why. I think there was misunderstanding. People thought we were cutting all ties with the Bureau, that we were rejecting any relationship with the Bureau and what would that do to our federal recognition? But two-thirds said, 'Yes, get them out of there,' and so we sent one amendment to the Bureau and that was, take yourselves [the BIA] out of the process. The [BIA] director at that time was Kevin Gover, or the assistant secretary. He assured us that he would, but it never happened. Some people in the interim, Neal McCaleb was the one who got closest to it, sent us a letter stating that yes, that was their intent and then they would do it, but then he resigned before it was actually achieved. So we stayed again in this state of limbo of just sort of having promises from the Bureau that they would take themselves out, but they didn't. So by 2006 our tribal court just said, 'Go ahead and do it. We've got this letter of intent from Neal McCaleb,' and on the basis of that, they said just go ahead and enact this new constitution, implement it within the Cherokee Nation. Our tribal court said that. We had three justices on the court. At that time it was a two to one decision. The dissenting person who said, 'No, we can't move forward until the feds sign off here,' was a woman named Stacy Leeds, and again the following year she ran for principal chief against Chad Smith. So you can do with what you will with that piece of information. I know what I do with it, anyway. But anyway, it was implemented by the court in 2006. The Bureau never said -- we got a couple of things that said, 'You shouldn't do that,' but they did nothing. They took no action whatsoever and this went on for a process of five years until last year, and last year we had another very, very contentious election that took place. We had the incumbent Chad Smith, who in the first election appeared to have won by seven votes out of over 15,000 votes that had been cast. And so this sent everything to a recount. The court got involved, they looked at the votes and noticed that there were 24 ballots that had been improperly notarized and because the vote was so close they said that the winner could not be determined by a mathematical certainty, so it went to a revote basically of the whole situation. In the middle of that process, between the time when the first vote was cast out and the second one was to be taken, our questions over the [Cherokee] Freedman and their citizenship within the Cherokee Nation -- these are descendants of former slaves that had been held by Cherokees -- came up. And we had very quickly a process of the Supreme Court saying, 'No, they were not citizens,' the Bureau of Indian Affairs coming back with a very threatening and intimidating letter saying that we've never actually approved that amendment and we've never approved your election processes for this time. They had never demanded to approve the election procedures for 40 years previously, so we got a very threatening letter from them, we got funds cut off by HUD [U.S. Housing and Urban Development], and we were in this situation now, a situation that I firmly believe was intimidation of our voters, scaring them to death that federal recognition was going to be revoked, because that's what the letter from the BIA essentially states. We made a deal -- many of us did not agree with it -- but our interim chief made a deal at that time with the federal courts to go ahead and allow the freedmen to vote. They did vote, they were given an additional two weeks of voting time beyond that that most Cherokee Nation citizens received -- Cherokee by blood citizens received -- and as a result of that, the challenger won in the election. So this is where we sit at this time, and I know that my time is up at this point, so I'll stop there. But I know that some people have indicated to me privately that this is a question that is coming up for many right now about the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their involvement in the process of our constitutions and our elections. And I would say if you get them out of there, get them out of there, because they in my estimation essentially engineered our last election with these threats of intimidation and so forth. Thank you."

Frank Ettawageshik and Gwen Phillips: Reforming Our Nations' Constitutions: What We Did and Why (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Frank Ettawageshik, former Chairman of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and Gwen Phillips, Ktunaxa Nation Director of Corporate Services and Governance Transition, field questions from the audience about their presentations detailing how their nations either reformed or are in the process of reforming their constitutions.

Resource Type
Citation

Ettawageshik, Frank. "Reforming the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Constitution: What We Did and Why." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 1, 2012. Presentation.

Phillips, Gwen. "Reforming the Ktunaxa Nation Constitution: What We're Doing and Why." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 1, 2012. Presentation.

Q: "I have a very strong sense that there's a lot of communication, there's a lot of education of the citizenry that needs to take place still, that these concepts are difficult things to wrap our minds around when we've got such a strong recent history at least of occupation and of having been diminished in our own minds as well. Do you have, both of you I guess, things to share about any efforts that have gone on among the citizens to try to really elucidate to them what is meant by some of the concepts that you've shared with us today?"

Phillips: "All of our processes, and the reason it took so long, involved the citizens. So our treaty process, the negotiating process -- we have citizens' meetings in plenary. I don't know if you've ever been to one of those -- anybody from the NNI team -- but we'll have 200 or 300 citizens in the room when we're talking about values, for example, and the reason it took two years was because it went through the citizens' processes and came back to us from their voices. So everything we've done has involved the citizens from the ground up. It's been not so comfortable for the government, because it takes a long time, and they want things done in an expeditious way, and they want to say "˜Who's responsible?' And when we say, "˜Well, we all did it,' they don't like those things. They want one Indian at the table and that kind of a thing. So it's really key. And the other thing was years ago we made a real conscious effort to use some philosophy that was traditional but it was contemporized. Appreciative inquiry is one of those philosophies. Appreciative inquiry is basically a way of going into anything and looking for the good in it. We all can go in and look at...everything's got two sides to it. So when we consciously used those terms and taught people about it, stopped using the foreign terms that they gave us like "˜band member,' started to use the term "˜citizen' -- the words we use, and making sure the reflection back to people is there. So it has to be a slow and iterative process that involves the people because a good leader follows their people, but they stay one step ahead."

Ettawageshik: "One of the things that our community has done is consistent programs of community education -- as has been mentioned -- where we bring in speakers from other places but we also have, we had a process of recording in video and in audio all of our elders, and we worked with the elders and the youth and we have programs where...one of the programs that we did, the court did a cultural immersion program where they would have our staff and have community members and have people gather and try to get all on the same page relative to our heritage. And many of our people -- and it's true in so many tribes -- we've had problems where there were...with modernization, with the TV, with video games, and all these things, that there's a lot of pressures on our young people and our young families that cause them to be separated a lot from what normally has been a lot of traditions. And so what we did with that is we started a series of videos and we made a video we call Journey to Sovereignty that was about the process of going through the reaffirmation legislation that we did, and we made it a length that it could be broadcast on public broadcasting, and we then -- after we got it done, we made a copy and sent one to every single tribal citizen, whether they were a month old or 80. And so some families got 12 of them. But we made this so that...we wanted people to share that common experience, because when we all lived right next door to each other all the time and we were right with neighbors and very close, we had more common experiences, and as we've sort of drifted apart -- and sometimes in drifting apart, we may even be living next to each other, but we're so involved in the pressures of modern communication and technology...I had an experience just yesterday with someone where we were one room apart but we were emailing each other instead of getting up and walking and talking. Well, with those kind of pressures, we need to find ways to continue the passing on of our traditions and our culture, so the video productions that we did have been wonderful. We've done a series of those and sent them to every single tribal citizen. We also have other types of meetings where we've been dealing with our reservation lands for instance. There's a committee of the tribal council that has met that is in charge of dealing with issues relative to land and reservation, and they've held a series of meetings both for youth and for the adult members of our community, where we would gather and one of them was a powerful experience where everybody -- instead of pulling out maps and showing pictures of all of the things -- everybody was supposed to get up and just say where their favorite place on the reservation was and why. And after you had 60 people in a room all do that, it really builds those positive experiences -- as you're talking about -- where you're building on the positive things not just trying to...an absence of negatives. And to me, those are the kind of things that we've done. So maybe, hopefully this addresses the direction that you were headed with your question there."

Phillips: "Another thing we're doing is we're actually defining our vision statement. It's like a lot of people stop there. They put it in front of them and it's pretty words and then they go about their business. But I'm going, "˜No, no, no, no, no.' If that's the nation's vision, then we have to know that we've, we can measure it, that we've achieved it, because we're saying it's 150, 200 years to get back to that place. So we've taken the concept of strong healthy citizens, for example, and we're defining it in terms of the people. So we have community-based meetings. I just say, "˜What do you think a strong Ktunaxa is?' and "˜ba, da, da, da, da, da' -- a whole bunch of stuff comes out. You keep asking that, trends start to evolve. You start to define what basically we see as being a strong healthy Ktunaxa citizen. When we've defined that in measurable terms, it's coming out to things like, connected to your cultural heritage, uses the gifts and talents that, the inherent gifts and talents, given to you. So the concepts aren't saying reading, writing, arithmetic at all, and those things are put on to the last, last thing that we're going to learn, basically. So when we've defined what our vision statement is, then that means that we actually invest in processes, and I'm not going to use the term programs, "˜cause we're almost to the point now where we're choking on those words, because the government really likes programs and they work really hard to get strong programs. We're saying, "˜We don't want strong programs, we want strong people that don't need programs.' So that means we have to go about defining it and investing in the manipulatives, in the variables that make up that whole human. So when I say education reform, it is key, because that's where we learn to be nice to each other, we learn how to share, we learn generosity, we learn independence, we learn...the things we learn within that place. When I was a little girl in grade one and two, and this is no lie, my mother gave me the report cards. I missed over 70 days of school in grade one and two. I could already basically read, I could basically do math and they were trying to tell me in school to sit down and shut up. Now you've got 20 minutes of Gwen, can you think about sit down, shut up, Gwen? No. Grade three, the teacher clicked on me. I never missed a day that year, even when I was sick I was there, because she let me be socially responsible. She let me help and use the skills and gifts I had within the community class and that was a whole changing life experience for me. Whew, I finally found a place. So we have to create space and environment that is the right place for our people to be to do the things that they need to do that come natural, and that where they don't come natural that we can get them to be to that point of it taking over again so it does come natural again, because yeah, we've been forced to fight really, and that's not a good place and it's not our nature, it's not our nature place. And I've got a comprehensive database to measure those things, too."

Q: "I wanted to ask if you can talk very briefly, both of you, about how you were able to sustain this over a period of time because this is great, the momentum I'm sure was great at the beginning, and there could have been changes in leadership, you have...just time in itself. Can you talk a little bit about how you were able to do it over time?"

Phillips: "Well, first if you don't let the leaders lead it, you have the people lead it, then it don't matter when they change. So that's one of the key things is to have a champion that's not an elected person and every time I get nominated I say no. I have things I was born to do, thank you. So when you have that natural gift in your community, sustain it and don't let it be part of the political will that blows all over the place."

Ettawageshik: "In our case, the process, we have sort of an unusual situation in that our document that was governing, that was our governing document at the time that the reaffirmation bill passed in 1994, was recognized as an interim document and so there was a requirement under that law that we have an election for a constitution and that the process was driven through community meetings and we would take the draft and work on it between the meetings. We'd mail it out to everybody and then we'd ask for input, either written input or to come to a meeting and we'd have both for every single draft that we did. We did a series of these over time and we consistently had people coming all the way through the process. It took us a lot longer to get to the election than we wanted, but the initial law, the reaffirmation act, was...required a secretarial election, one that was run by the Secretary of the Interior. And many constitutions have a provision that if they're going to be amended that they require a Secretarial election. Well, our constitution has a provision that says that it doesn't require a Secretarial election. So what happened is the first one that we voted when this constitution was adopted, it had to be run by the Secretary of the Interior. But the constitution as it now stands is that if it's going to be amended, it would be amended by the people without going through the Secretary of the Interior. So we were able to put those points in there and the idea that we wanted to exercise our inherent sovereignty, exercise our rights as a sovereign tribal government, that really was an incentive for the community to continue working on this process to get to the point where we would have the document that we have today. And is it perfect? No, there's things in there that I sure wish that we had done a little differently, and so if you're thinking of looking at that and copying language verbatim, you want to be really careful, because you might get the thing that we really wish that we'd done differently. But on the other hand, this thing works well and it has done -- it's a reflection of our community because we are like the Citizen Potawatomi, who have citizens all over. Every one of our citizens votes, so we have voting tribal citizens in Germany and all over the world but predominately in Michigan and mostly within our traditional homeland. There is continued thought about it constantly and of course our court is -- it's a fairly new document as constitutions go, so we have yet to have some of the major court cases that are going to resolve the gray areas within it. Some of those disputes are still sort of working their way up and we are going to have them in the future, and what our hope is is that we've constructed a system that will give our citizens access to the courts in such a way that when there are constitutional issues and there are questions that arise, we'll be able to answer them. And I tell people that today we're dealing with our problems largely through petitions and signatures and elections and discussions but we still are, we're not a nation of political parties. We're a nation of families and so that immediately changes the way things work and that's a reflection, our constitution really functions well within that structure."

Q: "I want to thank you very, very much for those wonderful presentations. My name is Robert Hershey. I'm a Professor of Law in American Indian Studies here at the University of Arizona, part of our Indigenous Peoples' Law and Policy program. I've worked with a number of tribes on constitutional reformations, amendments including Pascua Yaqui tribe for over two years. Some of the tribes have been trying to amend their constitutions for more than 35, 40 years, and it's an ongoing process. You brought up the crisis reaction. I love the tennis ball machine analogy. Also, the remark about trust and the level of trust. So what are the stoppers? Tribes that have membership requirement, blood quantum in their constitutions, how do you defer those issues, how do you go ahead, and what are the things that you come across that prevent things from going on that you might find that are common? I know in Canada you have Bill C31-2 and that whole question of status, but here with North American tribes, how do you go ahead and proceed to take care of those things that are extremely meaningful, necessary, like the removal of Secretarial approval language from constitutions, and still defer those really trigger issues that prevent things from moving on?"

Ettawageshik: "I think a lot of this has to do with -- we heard this morning about how as Indigenous peoples we have often taken on the role of our oppressor. I once saw a slide at a presentation at a conference I was at that says, "˜Why do we need an oppressor when we do his work so well?' And we have...when we were negotiating this treaty for the United League of Indigenous Nations, we had a whole room full of people that had been working for several years and we were culminating the discussion, getting ready to finalize it, and we were talking about who was going to be able to sign it that day, cause we had 11 nations that signed on but one of the nations said, "˜Well, gee, you know, I don't know, will they let us sign this?' The question is, who is the "˜they'? And the point is that, all too often, we get so caught up in the system that we've been in that's part of the oppression, that we start defining ourselves with those terms and it's really important that we learn to define ourselves in our own terms. And so when you ask, "˜What do we do?' Part of it is community education, because the...the terms in terms of the blood quantum you mentioned, there were some places where they wanted everyone to be half blood of our own tribe, and then we live in an area where there's so many tribes around us that if we're going to marry somebody we're not related to, we're going to be marrying from one of them and vice versa, so very quickly we could end up with someone who wouldn't have enough minimum blood quantum to be a member of any of the tribes. I heard of one person when we were testifying in Congress that was a full blood who had, did not have enough blood to be a member of any of the tribes that he had blood from yet he was full-blood Native American. And so how do we deal with those kind of things? You've got to be careful as you set your citizenship requirements as to, that you don't basically legislate yourself out of existence. So how do you deal with that? I don't have an answer for it, because every single tribe is going to do that differently. But the point is, it has to be thought through, and it can't just be the emotional thing that's going on right now and it can't...you have to be thinking of defining yourself through your own terms, not using the terms of the, not using in our case the U.S. or the Canadian government's definitions of us, "˜cause if we accept those, if we accept that terminology, we've lost the battle before we start."

Phillips: "I think for us it was key, "˜cause we have triggers. One of the biggest problems that we had in all of these processes was families that fight, was a brother that doesn't talk to a brother or a cousin. I had a cousin come to me one day as a girl who was probably about 25 or so. She's actually a cousin below me so her mom would be my cousin and she said to me, "˜Gwen, how come we're allowed to play as kids and as soon as we become like a certain age we're not supposed to talk to each other anymore?' It's because your grandpa did something to his auntie, whatever, and nobody wants to talk about it. Well, people, we've got to talk about it, "˜cause if we don't, we're just going to just allow it to keep going. It's the elephant in the room and we all talk about the stink, right, the ugly stink. We've got to clear that stink out of the room. How do we do that? By not allowing it to come into the room in the first place. So, it's been a challenge because we have broken, hurt and healing families everywhere. So when we tried to look at the issue of fetal alcohol syndrome for example, now it would have been one thing for the chief and council to lay down a policy around that, but no, what I established was called the Community Healing and Intervention Program. So we understood we had to go through a process of healing, healing, healing. Believe me, constitutional reform is healing, people. That's why I was talking about process being more important sometimes than product, because depending upon how you go about the process, processes, because ours took many forms in order to actually achieve, to come to the same place. We had to actually put something that we could all see ourselves in, undefined at that point. So we also, that vision statement, I cannot say how important it was to us because we all owned that because we all had a piece in it, every single...whether it was a kid in a school, the grandmothers, everybody had a shot at that statement. When we look at that piece of our vision statement that says, "˜celebrating who we are and our history and our ancestral homelands,' that was a key piece for us. That was where we could identify all of these darned elephants that marched in the room and heck it wasn't ours, elephants don't even come from here. So that was a process of actually going through our history to come to the places where, oh, gosh, that's where we got that ugly piece. Okay, well, let's get over that, let's heal through that. So I don't know how many of you know but our residential school, boarding school, is now a four-and-a-half star casino resort gold course. Chief Sophie Pierre may have spoken about that in her previous visits here. Transformation. The elders said, "˜That place took our culture away, it needs to bring it back.' If we would have just knocked the building over like many people have done, we would all be still packing that hurt in our hearts. It wasn't the building that hurt us, it was a process. So we had to go undo the processes in order to then redo something. So that reconstitution thing again, it's like, okay, let's squeeze the orange out but just keep the orange juice. The other thing was values, in that defining of your values. That brings you together in a healthy way, because it doesn't say -- when we say we value family, family means family, people, it doesn't mean whether you're a C31 or whether you're a section 12-1B or you fit in which category of Indian Affairs. No, no, no, no, no. And so, we, the Nike nation -- I say Nike nation, "˜cause we just do it -- we look at law and policy, if it makes sense, okay, fine. But more importantly we look at what we're trying to achieve and we just do it. So for example, I broke the master tuition agreements, which was a federal provincial agreement that used to send money from Ottawa to the provinces for all our kids that were in school. Policy reads, for every status Indian student normally residing on reserve and attending a public school as of September 30th -- so I understood the policy. So guess what I did in August. I held our kids in community all of September. In October we sent them to the public school, and in October we got a big thing from the public school superintendent going, "˜You can't do that, you owe us a bunch of money.' We said, "˜No, we don't, the policy says for every da, da, da,' because we used to be subject to the reverse. They held our kids with Velcro to their seats until September 30th and then they pushed them all out the door on October 1st. Suspension after suspension. "˜We don't care where you are, "˜cause the money's been paid,' and it was a whole different thing when we held the money or when no money was paid. Before they didn't want to talk to us and then all of a sudden they wanted to talk to us. The wrong reason, but at least we're at the table talking. So we've done this time and time again where we see what we want to do, we see what's going on there, we say, "˜Okay, this is what we have to do to get there.' Sometimes it's breach policy, sometimes it's change policy, sometimes it's just do it and you don't tell anybody you did it. And then they come back and say, "˜Gee, that worked, we'll take ownership over that under this new program.' It's kind of strange. But it's really I think getting the picture in your mind of what you're trying to achieve as a collective, and that's where you're going to gain the energy, that's where you'll gain the strength. That vision statement, every Ktunaxa citizen knows we have one. Now they might not be able to say it, articulate it quite in its beautiful form, but they know we have it and they know what it speaks about. And as we more comprehensively define it, then we're going to actually see it evident right amongst us cause we're measuring it. One of the things when we were developing our indicators of our wellbeing, one of the elders said, "˜We need to have a sparkle in our kids' eyes. They need a sparkle in their eyes again.' I thought, "˜Ooh, I better get a calibration instrument. How sparkly are your eyes today?' What they were meaning was excitement, they wanted to see that, that passion for life again. So it's a process really, is what it is."

Native Nation Building TV: "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Joseph P. Kalt and Sophie Pierre explore the evidence that strong Native nations require strong foundations, which necessarily require the development of effective, internally created constitutions (whether written or unwritten). It examines the impacts a constitution has on the people it represents, successful reform processes among Native nations, and common features of constitutional-reform efforts.

Native Nations
Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform" (Episode 2). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

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

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[music]

Mary Kim Titla: "As Native Nations work to strengthen their governments and seize control of their own futures, the subject of constitutions has moved front and center in the debate about how to best achieve those goals. Today's program explores constitutions, the key role they play in effective governance by Native Nations in the U.S. and Canada, and the push by many Nations to reform their constitutions. Here today to discuss constitutions and constitutional reform are Chief Sophie Pierre and Dr. Joseph Kalt. Sophie Pierre has served as Chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band of the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia for the past 24 years. She also serves as President of the St. Eugene Mission Resort Holdings, and was formerly the Co-Chair of the First Nations Summit. Dr. Kalt is a Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Joe and Sophie, welcome."

Joseph Kalt: "Thank you."

Sophie Pierre: "Thank you."

Mary Kim Titla: "Thanks for being with us today. We're going to jump right into the first question and talk about constitutions and how they play a role in Native nation building, particularly with respect to effective governments and community and economic development. Joe, you want to tackle that first?"

Joseph Kalt: "Sure. I think we're in this point in history in which tribes and First Nations in Canada are struggling to assert their rights of self-determination and self-government. They turn out to be like other nations in the world. You can assert those rights, you can get those rights but if you can't exercise them effectively, you're going to fall flat on your face like any other nation in the world. And so the tribes and First Nations in North America are struggling right now to rebuild institutions of their own design and they do it by starting with the basic structure of the way they're going to govern themselves, their constitution."

Mary Kim Titla: "Sophie, would you like to add to that? What's happening in your community?"

Sophie Pierre: "In British Columbia, we're doing something that's just a little bit different because we're involved in treaty making. In the year 2005 we're involved in treaty making. This is something that happened 200 years ago started here in the United States and 100 years ago in Canada but as the federal government moved across the country, by the time they got to British Columbia decided that treaties weren't necessary, so now in 2005 we're in treaty making. But we're looking at it as nation rebuilding, because we were very strong, established Nations at one point and we now need to rebuild that. And this particular process -- the treaty process --makes it possible for us to actually have something that I first heard coined by Dr. Kalt and by Dr. [Stephen] Cornell, which is to put the self back into self-government, 'cause we're looking at self-government but through a constitutional reform, the constitutional process, you identify that self and I think that that's why it's so important."

Mary Kim Titla: "Very important. Now, I personally am familiar with what is happening on my community, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, and this seems to be a movement really across the U.S. and it sounds like Canada. Can you talk about why that's happening?"

Joseph Kalt: "I think in both the U.S. and Canada, we're at a point in history where tribes have asserted their rights, they've developed the capabilities internally to run their affairs and they're starting to find that systems of government -- San Carlos Apache, 1930s, the [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt administration -- these are systems of government that really didn't fit the tribes of Canada and the United States. And so now people are saying, 'Hey, we've got to find a system that fits ourselves.' And it's like every nation in the world, you've got to find a system that works for yourself, and I think we're at a point in history where the First Nations and the tribes are saying, 'It's time to change the basic structures so they work for us.'"

Mary Kim Titla: "And a lot of tribal governments I'm sure are going back into their own oral histories and that comes into play in reforming their constitutions. Is that what's happening in your community?"

Sophie Pierre: "Absolutely. And what it does, when you look at and you start bringing forward some of the traditions, then it really creates that understanding of why we're doing what we're doing and it develops the ownership which everyone -- I think that we all understand that if you don't have that ownership coming from the nation, then all the paper in the world and all the advice that you put together in the world, it's not going to work in a community if there isn't that ownership. And that's really where it starts from is when you feel that it's yours."

Mary Kim Titla: "How has this process worked in your communities? Is it working out well? I'm sure there were challenges."

Sophie Pierre: "Oh, there's always challenges. There's always challenges. There's a challenge for the whole treaty process. We started the treaty process about 12 years ago and it's very slow. I think that we expected that we would be able to get through and actually have some signed treaties today in Canada and in British Columbia. For the treaty process, we started with the First Nations Summit. We don't yet have a signed treaty, but I think that that's okay too with us with the way that we're doing it, 'cause we're spending a lot of time and a lot of effort in ensuring that the citizens really understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, 'cause some day we're going to have to ratify this and if the people aren't along with you, you could have done a whole lot of work and spent a whole lot of money and not be any further ahead, and we don't want to be in that position."

Mary Kim Titla: "And I know it's a tedious process and you have these public hearings and public meetings and you have these long documents to read but it's really important for people to be involved and to have a say really. I'm sure that you've been through that."

Sophie Pierre: "Yes."

Joseph Kalt: "It's a long process, because there's a process of public education that goes on. Most of us in our lives, we don't walk around every day thinking about the constitution of our nation, and so I think it's a long process that gets people to understand why you're doing it, why are you undertaking this really revolutionary step to change how you're going to run yourselves, and then you have to go through, well, what are you going to do. If you're throwing the old out, you've got to figure out what the new is and that takes time. So there's a long process of public education, and I think sometimes we work at the Native Nations Institute and at the Harvard Project with tribes and First Nations and people get impatient and they want to have it happen quickly. No, it takes years and years often because it's got to be in the people that they understand that they want this, they understand why they're doing it, what they're doing. So it's a long, long process."

Mary Kim Titla: "And how different is this process with the U.S. tribes and the First Nations in Canada, how different are the issues?"

Joseph Kalt: "Sophie, the treaty process is very different."

Sophie Pierre: "Yes, as I mentioned, the treaty process, but that's only going on in British Columbia. There are the self-governing legislation that is available for other First Nations in Canada, and so it's like a constitutional reform, where rather than being under the Indian Act in Canada that there's possibilities for new legislation on self-government, so we're taking that just one step further by actually having treaties with the government of Canada and the government of British Columbia. And that definitely is a long and tedious process."

Joseph Kalt: "And here in the United States many tribes either operate under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Public Law 280 and so forth, and quite often here in the states it's not a treaty process, it's often tribes now getting out ahead of anywhere where the federal government might want them to be, changing the constitutions and then, in many cases, these constitutions in the United States have what are called a secretarial approval clause where the Secretary of Interior can approve or disapprove of constitutional reform. Through some recent efforts by the Cherokee Nation, for example, that precedent has now been broken and so tribes have I think potentially now greater freedom to step out and do what they're going to do. But it's not occurring in the kind of treaty process that British Columbia First Nations are going through."

Sophie Pierre: "We're really talking about different levels of government now or different branches of government, the names of the tribal leadership titles. We have now not only chairman but we have president, governor, lieutenant governors and so...chiefs. It's really changing to what really fits each tribe I suppose."

Joseph Kalt: "And I think so many of these historic governments that were really not adopted by the tribes. They were written by outsiders quite often. Well, now tribes are coming back and saying even what name we want to use, like you mentioned. You were 'Kootenai' for a long time."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That's right. We're also known as 'Kootenai,' but 'Kootenai' is an English word and our people, our nation decided to go back to our own name for ourselves which is 'Ktunaxa.'"

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "I tried very hard to say that properly."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Yes, and you did very well."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Thank you, I appreciate that. Well, even here in Arizona with Tohono O'odham and some of the others, they've gone back to their original names."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "And then people are also working -- it goes far beyond the names. As you say, they're working on, what structure do we want? Do we want a president that's directly elected by the people? Do we want the president selected by the tribal council? Do we want our tribal council to be elected at-large, do we want it to be elected by districts? Will we have an off-reservation district, 'cause so many citizens will be living off in here -- say in Arizona -- off in Phoenix or Tucson, so will you have an off-reservation district. So people are getting very inventive and starting to invent new systems and new structures that fit their particular situations."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Can you talk about the efforts by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and how they've been involved in this process?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Yes. We've been running a program we call the Initiative on Constitutional Reform. About 15 tribes or so approached us because we're professors, we write nerdy papers. But they approached us and said that they wanted a forum because, as you pointed out when we started, this is like a movement right now. There are lots of tribes and First Nations doing this. So these 15 tribes came and said could we help organize a forum where they could talk to each other and learn from each other, because tribes are so different and yet they have some common issues: the citizenship, the structure, the issues of land control and jurisdiction. And so we've been running these programs that really allow tribes to sit down and the constitutional reformers can sit across the table and, 'Oh, you're doing that, we're trying it this way.' And it's a great way I think for tribes to be able to learn from each other."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And network."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Absolutely. And you find now that, once we heard about what was going on in the United States and we started having some of the influence of the Harvard Project coming into Canada, you found that there was just an immediate uptake. There was just a lot of excitement. Our own tribal council had Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell come and do a three-day workshop with us just to take us like right from the very beginning and the very basics and talk about why, what was it that we really wanted to do, how did we want to rebuild our nation and it was just an awesome time. But that particular exercise was just with the leadership and what we really need to do and we have to ensure it happens is that it gets out to as much...as much as possible throughout the whole Nation so that it gets into the schools, into the colleges and right into the elementary school, it gets into all the community meetings. This whole movement, it can't be just with the leadership. So it was a good way to start for us but we made sure that it moved forward from that."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "In this process, we often say that the leaders like Sophie, they have to become community educators. It's not going to be the university types who come in and reach into the community and I think often -- I don't know what you think -- I feel like I watch leaders shift their roles a little bit. They think they're supposed to be decision-makers, but at this stage of building and rebuilding nations, you're really an educator. You're not really making the decision, you're trying to educate a community so the community can make intelligent decisions that fit them. But it's that shift in role for a leader from decision-maker to educator."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That's right. And it's sometimes a little bit disconcerting, because you're elected chief so you kind of figure that you're supposed to be like this decision-maker, this all-around leader, but really to be a leader you have to...you're more, you have to be a servant of the people. That's how you become a leader. And so that sure puts you in that place where when you start bringing this information into the community meetings and you start getting to have to answer the really, really difficult questions or you ask those difficult questions that people don't really want to talk about. For example, citizenship and this whole thing about blood quantum, those are really, really tough questions and somebody has to ask them because we have to deal with those issues. And so sometimes being that leader asking those questions makes you really, really unpopular, but it has to be done."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And I know that in California they're dealing with some of those issues right now with tribal enrollment and blood quantum and it's just become a really tough, tough thing to deal with because now you've got some tribal members who are no longer members of a tribe they thought they were for life, and all of a sudden they have no tribe that they belong to."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "And in the process ultimately, you have to get to the questions of the structure. How's your council going to be elected and who are the chief executive officers going to be and how are you going to handle your judicial and dispute resolution? But what we keep finding in our work with these 15 tribes we've been working with is this issue of citizenship. It's the self in self-government. Until that can get settled down, it's hard to move on to how are we going to elect our council and our chief and so forth, and so this issue of citizenship really for so many tribes and First Nations, it's the number-one issue and it's a very hard one to resolve. There's not one right answer. You look across North America and you see different answers: blood quantum, family relationships, adoption mechanisms, all kinds of different mechanisms. There isn't one right answer, and you've got to go look for your own."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "How did your community deal with that issue?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, we went back to our word, we have a word in our language, it's [Ktunaxa term] and it means 'root,' and we've got this picture of a plant that has the roots and when you talk about your relatives, the word for relative is [Ktunaxa term], so what it really means is if you can show your roots, you know where your roots are, you're Ktunaxa, you're born Ktunaxa, you're going to die Ktunaxa, but will you be able to show your roots. And it doesn't matter -- blood quantum doesn't matter in our case. What we're saying is, you show your [Ktunaxa term] and your Ktunaxa. So it's gone back to this whole thing of how we were as traditional people and using our language. Yes, using the language. The language is just so powerful with all of our nations, and I think that we all know that that's what distinguishes us amongst each other even as First Nations people of both North America and South America. It's our languages that differentiate us and so you have to use that and that's part of your traditions."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white">"And sometimes that's hard to translate into English terms really because I know that with... for instance, in the Navajo culture there's this ke'e which is -- it means a lot of things and basically 'family,' and so that's really interesting how you've dealt with that."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "But there's nothing that says you have to translate it. There are First Nations and tribes who are using their own language to write their own constitutions. There are many tribes, in fact there are Nations around the world that don't have written constitutions. Israel doesn't have a written constitution, for example, quite successful nations and I think we get caught up because this word constitution has that... it's like a high school civics text in Canada or the United States and it's very Anglo and western. But the notions of constitutions isn't an Anglo or western concept, it's just people governing themselves. And in going back to one's roots and one's language. For some tribes in the eastern United States and eastern Canada where so much of the language is completely gone, sure it's done in English and that's fine, that's their culture today. But each tribe has to find the way that works but it doesn't have to be translated, it doesn't even have to be written."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "And really there was just an understanding in Native communities about what everyone's role was and it wasn't written down. It was very much oral, so you're right. You talked about some of the obstacles already being dealing with citizenship and some other things. What are some common obstacles in constitutional reform?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, I think one of the obstacles -- and I'd appreciate your comments on this, Sophie -- one of the obstacles is I think so many First Nations and tribes go into constitutional reform thinking that there's kind of this golden moment where we'll all agree and everything will suddenly be perfect and the reality is that Native communities, they're human communities and [have] all the same problems. You have vested interest in the status quo, people who don't want to change because perhaps their job currently depends on the system or they're comfortable with it, and that's a major obstacle in this process of just some people are liking the status quo and don't see need for change or reason for change. So some of the obstacles I think are just to recognize that there are just going to be good old politics out there where you're going to have to worry about people with vested interests and so forth but that's where leadership again comes in."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "And again I think too that understanding that there's not a perfect answer out there being the major thing, that the perfect answer, if there is such a thing, is going to come from within. So bringing in advisors is good and it gives you options, it gives you things to think about, but at the end of the day it has to come within, within the nation and I think that that's really a difficult part because we all kind of like to look around and say, okay, what's others done. Well, then that works over there, maybe something works for Navajo, let's bring it over to Ktunaxa and see if it works and sort of impose it. Well, no, that's not going to be that way."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Yeah. You talk about conflict resolution and just this idea of agreeing to disagree I'm sure comes into play. There are, as I mentioned, this really starting at the grassroots level and getting a lot of people involved, getting the entire community involved. What did your community use that worked, that was grassroots?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "We started the treaty process like everybody else did where it was, as I mentioned was the leadership was going to be involved and we had a chief negotiator and we had called in the lawyers and the economists and other advisors to work with us and then it was about eight years ago that we realized, and based on some examples of what was happening around the province, that if we didn't have the citizens involved in this negotiation that we were really doing ourselves a disservice. All of the work that we're doing is on borrowed money, so at some point we have to bring this to a ratification and we have to settle the bill at the end of the day and we could be wasting a whole lot of time and whole lot of money if we don't bring the people along with us. So we realized that we needed to do that. So that's easier said than done, though. So we started out with -- we're just changing our whole way of governance within our nation. We're not going to have the elected people under the Indian Act the way that we have it now, and so we've gone back to the main families within each of our communities and the main families putting forward their spokespeople and then having the meetings with the families and sometimes that works better than having sort of a general meeting where all the families are in there and all the usual fighting and just little niggling that goes on all the time in a community. Well, it happens in families, too. That's not to say that family meetings are smooth or anything. There's lots of really interesting discussion."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "It just works better."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, it's just another forum. So we do all of that. We do the family meetings, we do the community meetings, we do the nation meetings."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Is that what you're also seeing?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "We see different strategies. I've seen everything from family meeting-based mechanisms because the community meetings didn't work. Different tribes have different traditions and the notion that everybody gets in the same room, well, maybe instead you get around the elders in the family or the clan leaders. And I've seen situations at the other extreme where things were so tense politically that I know faction leaders would go out at 2:30 in the morning and wake up their opponents and try to talk one on one to get conversation going. And so sometimes this notion that somehow we're just going to all get together in the room and have a wonderful meeting of several thousand people, sometimes we have to face the reality that maybe there's a lot of political tension. So we've seen it families, community meetings and then down to the level sometimes where the leadership just has to privately talk among themselves for awhile to say, 'Look, we don't get along, but we need to start talking about this because if we don't reform things we're never going to really be able to effectively govern ourselves.' And so we see a wide range, and I think the correct impression to leave is that it's going to be different everywhere and there isn't like a little formula where on Tuesday we'll meet and on Wednesday we'll agree. It just doesn't work that smoothly."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "What about the role of attorneys in this process?"

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "They very definitely have a role, and that's to give advice, to give options and to answer questions, to help people think through things. But at the end of the day, it's not their decision to make. It's not they who are going to live the decision, so when it comes time for decisions, all attorneys out of the room unless you're a nation member, then you stay there and then you're there as a nation member -- not as an attorney -- to ratify this. But I think, yeah, there's a role for them but I think that they have to remember what that role is."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "I had a very smart tribal attorney say to me one time, 'Well, you know, attorneys shouldn't write constitutions. The law comes from the constitution, so the attorney comes after the constitution.' And I think that's very perceptive that what you're doing when you create a constitution, whether written or not, whether in English or another language, you're really saying, 'This is how we will make our laws. Once we've done that, yeah, we might need some attorneys.' I think where the attorneys do play a critical role is on those edges around, okay, what are the boundaries of jurisdiction and so forth that we are going to state and so forth. But the core issue as Sophie says is the attorneys don't make the constitution, the people make the constitution. And so the role of attorneys is important, but we see many problems created where...this isn't like negotiating a contract or something, here, hire an attorney and please give us back a constitution. It's not going to work."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "But unfortunately some of the treaty discussions that we've had, that is how it's been looked at. It's been looked at like it's a contract, you get the attorneys to write it up, then when it goes back to the people to be ratified, everyone's saying, 'Where did this come from?' And there's just no way that they're going to accept it. So, yeah, it's a difficult process to go through, there's no doubt. But I think that we definitely, as we started looking it as nation rebuilding, then I think maybe it makes it a little bit easier for people to accept and to realize."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "I think part of this, and Sophie's remarks have touched on this, once you get into this, and as she says, this is a process of nation building and rebuilding, I've seen leadership -- it's kind of a freeing experience. 'Hey, wait a minute, we don't always have to ask the attorneys or we don't always have to ask an outside federal authority, maybe we want to run ourselves this way.' Figure that out and then give it to the attorneys to write the language perhaps, but the decision and the design -- it's a very freeing experience for leadership and for the citizens to say, 'Hey, we are actually going to design the way we run ourselves.' That's what self-government's all about."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "What about predictions for the future in terms of constitutional and government reform among Native nations?"

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, I think it's going to continue here in North America. While there's a movement and there's more and more tribes doing it, there are still hundreds of First Nations and bands and tribes that still have to face this issue. It's starting to take hold outside of North America even. I think the other piece is not only will this continue but we're seeing really inventive things being done that the whole world can learn from. The notion that there are only three branches of government. We're watching tribes create some version of a fourth branch, a kind of ethics branch, a council of elders or a council of ethics which just sits there and watches over the process as people govern themselves. Something that other nations, many other nations in the world might be able to learn from. So I think there's going to be inventiveness and an ongoing process of reform for quite a few years. This is a long process."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "But it's a positive one. It's something that needs to happen."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Absolutely. It's very positive. I just came out of a nation meeting before coming here and we had, I don't know, about 250 people in the room and almost every person that came to the mic to speak was someone that was under the age of 30. So it really is, it's a good thing that's happening there."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "For the future. Thank you so much for being with us today. This is truly educational for me and enlightening and I really appreciate you both being here and talking about the process."

Joseph Kalt: color:#222222;background:white"> "My pleasure. Thank you."

Sophie Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Thank you."

Mary Kim Titla: background:white"> "Again, we want to thank Sophie Pierre and Joseph Kalt for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building. Native Nation Building is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed on today's program, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held

Year

Issues that affect the Nation's language, culture, land and resources were the topics of the final session of the first round of meetings hosted by the Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Committee (CRI). The committee was seeking input by Red Lake enrolled Citizens and immediate family in the Bemidji area on these issues.

The meeting was held at the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) on campus at Bemidji State University on Monday, April 14, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. This was the last of a series of meetings held in Duluth, Minneapolis, and all four communities on the Red Lake Indian Reservation...

Resource Type
Citation

Meuers, Michael. "Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held." Red Lake Nation News. April 29, 2014. Article. (http://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/04/29/news/red-lake-constitu..., accessed August 29, 2014)

Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held

Year

The meeting at Bemidji was one leg of the second round of informational meetings conducted by the Red Lake Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC) in order to seek input and feedback from the membership regarding Constitutional Reform. Meetings are held in Duluth and the Twin Cites in addition to the four reservation communities.

The AIRC seems and appropriate place to hold such a meeting. Upon entering the AIRC one is surrounded by an environment steeped in cultural heritage and tradition – a gathering place that honors the past and helps shape the future.

Resource Type
Citation

Meuers, Michael. "Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held." Red Lake Nation News. September 29, 2014. Article. (https://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/09/29/news/...) accessed May 2, 2014)

Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meeting held in Redby

Year

The second of six scheduled Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meetings was held at the Redby Community Center on March 24, 2014 from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.

The first meeting was held at the Minneapolis American Indian Center on March 22, 2014 with about 60 people in attendance, as stated by one of the Constitution Committee members.

According to a press release on March 17, the Bush Foundation approved a grant of $1,542,700 to the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians to support constitutional reform outreach, education and meetings...

Resource Type
Citation

Barrett, Michael. "Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meeting held in Redby." Red Lake Nation News. March 27, 2014. Article. (http://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/03/27/news/red-lake-constitu..., accessed April 29, 2014)

White Earth Nation Adopts New Constitution

Producer
MR Online
Year

In a historic vote, on November 19, 2013, the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota became the first member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT) to adopt a new constitution. Of the 3,492 ballots counted, the vote was 2,780 in favor and 712 opposed, a 79 percent approval. Since the ballots were secret, there is no way to know the demographic breakdown of those who voted. But with a membership of nearly twenty thousand, the rather low participation seems to reflect a certain apathy on the part of many tribal members. Still, the turnout was twice that for most tribal elections. (Anecdotally, of several tribal members I know, only one had read the proposed constitution and none voted.) But the small turnout in no way diminishes the significance of the vote. "Since the White Earth Reservation was established in 1867, this is the most monumental, historic moment in our history, White Earth Tribal Chairperson Erma Vizenor told the Forum News Service...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Thorstad, David. "White Earth Nation Adopts New Constitution." MR Online. November 21, 2013. Article. (https://mronline.org/2013/11/21/thorstad211113-html/, accessed February 12, 2024)

Leech Lake, Red Lake Ojibwe bands moving on constitutional reform

Author
Year

On Tuesday, tribal members of the White Earth Nation voted resoundingly to adopt their own constitution and eventually split from the 80-year-old Minnesota Chippewa Tribe constitution that dictates the laws of many Ojibwe tribes in the state.

Neighboring Ojibwe bands at Leech Lake and Red Lake may not be far behind in similar constitution reform efforts. Reformers with both bands said Wednesday they are working to gauge what the people want in their new framework...

Resource Type
Citation

Kayser, Zach. "Leech Lake, Red Lake Ojibwe bands moving on constitutional reform." Bemidji Pioneer. November 20, 2013. Article. (http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/content/leech-lake-red-lake-ojibwe-bands-m..., accessed November 22, 2013)

Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation: Constitutional Reform

Year

Days after certification of the Secretarial Election, positive comments were coming into the office of the Constitutional Revision committee. Donna Morgan and Ramona Two Shields began receiving flowers and calls from tribal members happy with the results.

Both Two Shields and Morgan say it was the tenacity and commitment of the late, former North Segment Council Representative Titus Hall who kept them going. Titus Hall served as Chairman of the Election Board and believed it was past time to take our government back...

Resource Type
Citation

Baker Embry, Glenda. "Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation: Constitutional Reform." MHA Nation News. September 17, 2013. Article. (http://www.mhanation.com/main2/Home_News/Home_News_2013/News_2013_09_Sep..., accessed October 7, 2013)

Leech Lake Band pushes for governmental reform

Year

The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe is hosting the three-day “Build our Nation” convention which kicked off at noon Tuesday, Sept. 17 with a powwow and informational fair, followed by a “Nation-Building 101” educational session on Wednesday, Sept. 18, and wraps up on Thursday with a gathering of community leaders at the Local Indian Council Summit...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Denton (Denny) Newman Jr. "Leech Lake Band pushes for governmental reform." Brainerd Dispatch. September 17, 2013. Article. (http://brainerddispatch.com/news/2013-09-17/leech-lake-band-pushes-gover..., accessed September 20, 2013)