cultural match

Houlton Band Indian Child Welfare Services

Year

Seeking to establish collaborative working relationships with the state while firmly asserting sovereignty over Maliseet children, a Child Welfare Department was formed by the Houlton Band. The department created a Child Protective Team made up of professionals and volunteers to review and seek options for children needing services. Drastically reducing the number of children in out-of-home-care situations through culturally and family appropriate solutions, the Houlton Band is preventing child removals, supporting families, and fostering government-to-government relations. Most importantly, the Band is reclaiming its future, by caring for Maliseet children.

Resource Type
Citation

"Indian Child Welfare Services." Honoring Nations: 2006 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007. Report. 

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. 

Seizing the Future: Why Some Native Nations Do and Others Don't

Year

Both research and the experience among Native nations daily drive home the conclusion that the so-called "nation-building" approach holds the keys to self-determined social, political, and economic development for indigenous communities. This approach emphasizes the critical role of asserting rights of self-rule and backing up those assertions with governing institutions that are legitimate in the eyes of the people and efficient in their operation. This study examines the question of why is it that some Native nations seize upon the nation building strategy and take effective control of their futures while others do not. We find that foundational change in a community arises when the external and internal conditions a people face interact with their interpretations of their situation, producing a new, shared "story" of what is possible, and how it can be achieved. The keys to changing a community's "story" are found in proactive decisions to alter internal and external situations, acquire concrete knowledge of the feasible, build on the community's cultural assets, and exercise leadership--especially in educating the people in a new vision.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Cornell, Stephen, Miriam Jorgensen, Joseph P. Kalt, Katherine A. Spilde. "Seizing the Future: Why Some Native Nations Do and Others Don't." Joint Occasional Papers on Native Affairs No. 2005-01. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2005. JOPNA.

Archie Hendricks, Sr. Skilled Nursing Facility and Tohono O'odham Hospice

Year

For decades Tohono O’odham elders in need of skilled nursing had to move far away from family and friends to receive care, or stay home and forgo long-term care services. However, with the opening of the Archie Hendricks, Sr. Skilled Nursing Facility, O’odham elders can now remain in the community. Combining today’s latest technologies and world-class clinical care with traditional values, the nursing home has become one of the finest elder care facilities anywhere in the United States.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Archie Hendrick, Sr. Skilled Nursing Facility and Tohono O'odham Hospice." Honoring Nations: 2008 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009. Report.

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. 

Cherokee Nation History Course

Year

Launched in 2000, the Cherokee Nation History Course is a free, 40-hour, college-level study offered to 1,800 tribal employees and members of Cherokee communities. Through lectures, discussions, case exercises, and role-playing, the course teaches Cherokee history, culture, and government to both Indians and non-Indians. Designed to build social and professional cohesion and to share knowledge through Cherokee perspectives, the course is deepening understanding about Cherokee sovereignty while producing a stronger sense of nationality, patriotism, and pride.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Cherokee Nation History Course." Honoring Nations: 2002 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2003. Report. 

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. 

Good Native Governance: Keynote Address

Producer
UCLA School of Law
Year

UCLA School of Law "Good Native Governance" conference keynote speaker, Kevin Washburn, Assistant Secretary — Indian Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Interior, examines how Native nations are engaging so well in self-determination through good governance. 

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Washburn, Kevin K. "Keynote Address." Good Native Governance: Innovative Research in Law, Education, and Economic Development Conference. University of California Los Angeles School of Law, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, March 7, 2014. Presentation.

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

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

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

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

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

Ian Record:

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

Justin Beaulieu:

"Awesome. Thank you."

Ian Record:

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

Joan Timeche: The Hopi Tribe: Wrestling with the IRA System of Governance (Presentation Highlight)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "Defining Constitutions and the Movement to Remake Them," Joan Timeche (Hopi) discusses how the Hopi Tribe continues to wrestle with an Indian Reorganization Act constitution and system of governance that runs counter to its traditional, village-based system of governance and that currently does not represent a significant percentage of Hopi citizens.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Timeche, Joan. "The Hopi Tribe: Wrestling with the IRA System of Governance (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation highlight.

"My tribe has 12 villages that were autonomous before the federal government came in and they didn't want to talk to not just those 12 village chiefs, but we have a very complex religious...religion and cultural ways that we have multiple societies, there's chiefs of them, of all these societies, we have ceremonies, there's chiefs of those functions and basically they didn't want to have to deal with all the multiple chiefs. They said, 'We need...we want one person.' And a lot of...and we see that...we've heard of this in a lot of other nations where they really wanted to get to the resources of those people and they wanted to deal with one person, one chief who could put their fingerprint on those documents because they didn't want to have to deal with too many chiefs.

And so in this case, when our constitution was established, it's an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, in 1935, we had four of our villages who never willingly accepted that form of government and today have no representation on our council. They consider themselves to be traditional. One of those villages constitutes about 25 percent of our population. Can you imagine that? And then so we have...and now we're going through some political turmoil still and now we have only about five villages who are making decisions on behalf of the entire nation. So we have that hybrid that exists there. You have outside to...anybody on the outside sees the Hopi tribal council as its form of government. But internally, in my village and many other villages, we know all the decisions get made at the village level and the council has not much to say over the land base or what happens within the villages. So you see the hybrids that still continue to exist throughout even today."

Patricia Riggs: Making Change Happen at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo

Producer
Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

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

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

Ian Record:

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

Patricia Riggs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June Noronha:

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

Patricia Riggs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Porter: Cultural Match Through Constitutional Reform at Kootenai

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Vice-Chairwoman Jennifer Porter of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho explains what prompted her nation to enact several amendments to its constitution in the mid-1990s, and how its ability to govern effectively has been greatly enhanced by its decision to its cultural roots when it comes to how it elects its leaders.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Porter, Jennifer. "Cultural Match Through Constitutional Reform at Kootenai." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Insitute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host Ian Record. On today’s program, we are honored to have with us Jennifer Porter. Jennifer Porter is the former Chairwoman and now Vice Chairwoman of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. And we’re here today to talk about the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho’s constitution and some of the recent efforts they were engaged in to amend their constitution and how it’s working, etc. I guess we’ll just first I guess have you start off by just telling us a little bit more about yourself.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Okay. Good morning. My name is Jennifer Porter, Vice Chairwoman of the Kootenai Tribe. I’ve been on council for the past 17 years, I believe, so this would be my fourth term as a council member. I don’t know what else you want besides that. I could go in depth [on] family...”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, sure. Why not.”

Jennifer Porter:

“...I’m a mother to three children ages, 20, 14 and 12, recently a grandma. That was a big part of me stepping down from chair so I could have more time to just enjoy my life now.”

Ian Record:

“That’s good. You’ve got to have balance, right?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Oh, yes, and I’m loving it.”

Ian Record:

“And it’s hard to achieve that as an elected leader I know.”

Jennifer Porter:

“It is, yes.”

Ian Record:

“So we’re here to talk about your tribe’s constitution and you’re here in Tucson this week to serve as one of our presenters for our Tribal Constitution seminar. And one of the reasons that we focused on your tribe and on you in particular is because back in the mid-1990s, your tribe engaged in a referendum vote that ended up approving a set of amendments. And from what you were telling me yesterday there’s quite a back story to how all this came to be. And I guess we can start...if you could start just talking about where the tribe was in the mid-1990s, what sort of constitution it was working with, and sort of what prompted the tribe to go down the reform road.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Sure. It was pre-my term as a council, but I was of the age to understand, out of college. I worked in the accounting department and closely related to the council so I got to see what was going on and hear, read the minutes and such. And at that time and for a number of years prior to that, our constitution, it stated that it was a five-member council and one of those members was the hereditary chief and he had a seat on council. So every three years an election came, they elected four different council members, but the chief always had the residing seat on council. And that stemmed problems.

In our community, we are made up of three main families and three -- odd number -- there’s always one ousted. So every election they would elect two of those families to the council whoever the chief at that time was getting along with. And basically it came to where it was the chief and the chair that they would either be with each other or against each other and every time there was a discrepancy they would oust whoever the chair was or oust whoever the councilman that was going against whatever it was.

So at the time, my mother was the current chair and she said there was so much uproar all the time about decisions being made that whenever something was...a resolution was passed, an ordinance was made, she was just waiting for a petition from the tribal members. There were times where she went off to meetings and she would come back and she would be petitioned off the council and they would have to go through the whole system of putting her back on and it was just like that. It was just always...you just never knew what was going on at the time and it kind of...it stemmed from that where she just got tired of it. If they wanted her on council, if they wanted these four people on council for the three years then they needed to come up with some kind of agreement.

So what she had said, and I liked in yesterday’s...some of the, I forgot who that was talking, but he said that we need to go back into our old ways, our cultural ways, our customary ways of how we got together, how we determined where and how we’re going to move forward. Well, she went back to that and she went back to the elders and what she was told is that we would come together as families, the family heads would come together, the households, they would have council. And that’s what led her to her decision and she called all of the major...the three major families, the households, the people that she in the past had sat on council with. She called those people to the table. She also called some of the elders to the table that she knew that people listened to that made the difference, had certain wisdom amongst the community. She was able to gather them all at the same table. They talked and they came to an agreement. Some of them were for it, some of them were against it, but when they really thought about it, having districts...families having three different districts, then it was a win-win for everybody because no matter who was getting along, who wasn’t getting along, as a family you would always have two representatives on the seat of the council.”

Ian Record:

“So basically the solution was, ‘We’re going to do away with this system where...’ How did it work under the prior system where you had these five council members, one of which was a standing position with the hereditary chief, right? And that person sort of had a different status than the other four? Were the other four voted on at large by the entire community?”

Jennifer Porter:

“By the community, yes.”

Ian Record:

“So you could have a family who would not have any representation at all...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes, yes.”

Ian Record:

“...on the council. And so you moved to this system which makes more cultural sense and also ensures that virtually everybody in the community because they’re going to be from one of these three main families in some respect would have a voice in the decision making process. Was that basically the premise?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes, it was.”

Ian Record:

“So then in August of 1995, the tribe goes forward with these four amendments and this is to amend the 1947 constitution. I’m curious, what is your knowledge of that 1947 constitution? I believe that’s the first written constitution of the tribe.”

Jennifer Porter:

“That was the first written [constitution] of the tribe, correct.”

Ian Record:

“Do you have...do you know much about how that original constitution came to be and who sort of authored it and anything like that?”

Jennifer Porter:

“No. I was looking at the signatures of that and those were the people of the community, the past leaders, just some... the historians, yeah. And it’s interesting how it was written and as the chief had always a standing place on the council.”

Ian Record:

“So in August of 1995, as I mentioned, these four amendments are put up to vote and I’ll just roll through them very quickly. The first one deals with the issue of blood quantum and I would assume making a change to at least one-quarter...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“...degree blood quantum in descendancy from someone on a base roll. Amendment D basically just is a name change. You’re changing the name from Kootenai Tribe of Indians to Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. Those turned out to be not so controversial, which you would...it’s interesting that the blood quantum one doesn’t turn out to be controversial because...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Right.”

Ian Record:

“...folks will understand why here in a second, that the second amendment deals with exactly what you said, this change to this family-based system of representation on the council, per the three main families. And then the third amendment deals...is a related one that deals with changing the quorum requirements in accordance with how this new council was going to be constituted.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“So you guys hold a vote, you pass all four amendments, you send them to the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] per your constitution, which says that the Secretary of Interior must approve of amendments to your constitution, which is typical language of tribal constitutions from that era. Then tell me what happens next.”

Jennifer Porter:

“So the first amendment was approved, the last amendment was approved, and just like you said they didn’t approve the districts and the idea of breaking the council up into the district families. So what does our council do? They...what we were told, the reason for that, I did find that out was basically because our tribe was very small at the time, it was maybe between 100 and 120 members, that BIA felt that it wasn’t...they were adhering to the U.S. vote of one vote, one person and since we were a small tribe they thought that not everybody in the tribe would have that vote if we broke it up. But we had the argument where each person would be represented though. They have the vote to their member, their family member being on the council. So I see that our council was very bold at that time, they were going in the direction of self-determination, exercising their self-governance. So they brought the 70 percent of the general membership, which I know there was way more than 70 percent at that time, came together because they wanted this to pass. They liked this whole concept and the whole idea. They came together and they voted to do away with the BIA approval. It happened, we sent that in and I believe that happened in ‘95 or ‘96 that BIA approved that. So less than a year later we instilled our own...the new amendment, too.”

Ian Record:

“So it’s been in place for close to 20 years now and I’m curious, you’ve been in a position of leadership within your tribe for virtually all of that time and you have a window into how divisive the previous system was. Can you compare how those two approaches to how the Kootenai citizens are represented in the decision-making process of the government and how those two have differed, how they compare and contrast?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Well, I was very blessed to be in the newer version of the constitution. I’d like to say I’ve never been petitioned off the council. I’ve never seen a petition since I started. Unfortunately, it was a loss of one of my family members is how I walked into our council. It was actually the first term of this new...the new constitution and he had passed away. So my family voted me into his...so I fulfilled the rest of his term, which was the three years. Since then it’s...I can only say good things about it. There have been no more petitions. Each member, if you go back home and you ask them, they all know who’s sitting on their family on the council. If they have an issue, the way the council works now is we ask them, ‘Have you talked to your family representative first?’ If they want something brought to the table, they have to go to their family representative. So it’s kind of like a two-point process. They can’t just come into a council meeting anymore. They have to have their family’s approval, they discuss it, and then it comes to the council. So as long as we know where they’re coming from, what kind of direction or what questions they’re asking.”

Ian Record:

“So from what you’re saying, I gather your governance system has become a lot more stable.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“Because the leadership is...there’s continuity there and there’s not as much in-fighting or perhaps any in-fighting of note. And then there’s also an ability for people to get their needs addressed where it doesn’t consume the entire council’s attention. So I would imagine that frees you up to really focus...sort of be more forward looking and strategic in figuring out, ‘Okay, what direction do we want to head and what do I need to understand and learn as a council member or as a chair or vice chair in order to get us there,’ versus being distracted by constituent concerns that are better addressed at the family level. Is that accurate?”

Jennifer Porter:

“That is accurate. It seems like every family has their interest, like one family has a cultural interest, another is education, another is economic development so it kind of made it to where each family can invest more time with that, but also bringing it to the table and able to work together. We don’t have to deal with the, ‘Someone doesn’t like someone' or 'They did this to me years ago.’ Yeah, it’s just not dealt with anymore as on...they have to deal with that within their own district.”

Ian Record:

“So have you seen a shift in how the average citizen regards the government as a whole since this change was made? I would imagine with that back under the previous system if there’s a lot of infighting, if there’s a lot of petitioning to say, ‘Oh, let’s throw that bum out. He doesn’t agree with me,’ or whatever, that tends to feed among the people a very low regard for government and a very low regard for leadership in whoever’s holding that position. Have you seen a change in terms of how the people tend to view their government? Is there more pride in the system and saying, ‘Hey, we can do things. We can make decisions. We can implement those decisions. We can really move forward.’”

Jennifer Porter:

“There’s a tremendous change. There is that pride there. There is that respect that wasn’t seen there before. It took them a few years to actually get the concept of, ‘Hey, I can bring something to the council. All I have to do is go talk to my family rep,’ instead of feeling like nothing can be done until we get a family member in there. So now they do have that voice, they can make a difference. And right now it’s broken down to council each has their different interest in the area and it’s kind of like if they don’t feel comfortable going to this council talking to education they’ll talk to their family member and then that family member will go talk to that council. So it’s kind of...it works so much better. It’s more...even though it’s more family based, it works better for the community overall.”

Ian Record:

“So are there other areas of the constitution that the tribe perhaps is having a conversation about changing or strengthening or anything like that? Is there more attention being paid now to figuring out, ‘Okay, yeah, things are working well. Are there ways we can make it work better,’ or are things just sort of chugging along.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Things are working well as it is and I think it’s more if it’s working just let it be.”

Ian Record:

“Well, that’s great. I wish I could say this is a typical story coming out of Indian Country but it’s...I think what Kootenai has done with you would think on its face one simple change, but it sounds like the trickle down effect throughout the government has been very constructive across the board. I think it offers a promising success story and a promising blueprint for other nations to look at to say, ‘If we just look to our own traditions, we just look to our own values and how we did things before and try to bring that forward into the 21st century we can achieve our own goals, we can govern well, we can make decisions in a unified fashion.’”

Jennifer Porter:

“And it was a blend. I like the way it was presented yesterday about going back to your traditions and your culture and the way I seen it when he was talking is it’s a blend of the culture and today’s world, bringing those together and being able to make it work.”

Ian Record:

“Well, Jennifer, really appreciate you taking some time to sit down with us. I know it was a little bit short notice, but I thank you for agreeing to share your story with us. We’re always eager to learn about new stories of constitutional success and constitutional enhancement and self-determination in action.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Well, thank you. It was a determination of...I think you guys have been asking me for like four or five years to come and I finally had the time.”

Ian Record:

“Well, persistence pays off, right?”

Jennifer Porter:

“It does.”

Ian Record:

“Well, again, thank you and hopefully others will learn from Kootenai’s story.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Thank you."

John Borrows: Revitalizing Indigenous Constitutionalism in the 21st Century

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Native Nations Institute
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In this thoughtful conversation with NNI's Ian Record, scholar John Borrows (Anishinaabe) discusses Indigenous constitutionalism in its most fundamental sense, and provides some critical food for thought to Native nations who are wrestling with constitutional development and change in the 21st century.

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Citation

Borrows, John. "Revitalizing Indigenous Constitutionalism in the 21st Century." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program, we are honored to have with us John Borrows. John is Anishinaabe and a citizen of Ontario’s Chippewa Nawash First Nation and he currently serves as the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota School of Law. John, welcome and good to have you with us today.”

John Borrows:

“It’s good to be here.”

Ian Record:

“Before we dive into our conversation, I was hoping you’d just start out by telling us a little bit more about yourself.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I’ve been a law teacher about 20 some odd years now and really have enjoyed that being in different schools. I’ve spent some time in U.S. schools -- ASU [Arizona State University], Minnesota obviously, Princeton; also taught across Canada, University of Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School, UBC [University of British Columbia], and University of Victoria. So I’ve got around in my career.”

Ian Record:

“So I wanted to start out by getting a little bit more of a perspective on your scholarly work. In preparing for this interview, I talked with a lot of your legal colleagues -- including some of them here at the University of Arizona in Tucson -- and they said you’re really one of the innovative thinkers and scholars when it comes to Indigenous law and I think differentiating that from federal Indian law but Indigenous law, and can you just provide a quick nutshell about why the focus on Indigenous law, why have you dedicated your career to this particular issue?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. I think it started growing up. A lot of the standards for judgments in our family were often taken from what we were seeing around us outside our door and we had lots of conversations about what our obligations were in relationship to one another and the world around us. We had a treaty that my great-great grandfather signed back in the 1850s and that was also a part of the conversation. So when I began my legal career and my graduate work I actually wrote an LLM thesis called The Genealogy of Law, where I took the seven past generations of my family and looked at what the criteria was that they used to be able to respond to the challenges they were encountering as they encountered the Canadian State. And I noticed in each one of those encounters they drew upon a deep wellspring of our own sense of what the appropriate standards were as to how to deal with the War of 1812 or the Royal Proclamation or the signing of the treaty, whatever it might be. And so what was exciting to me as I then started my legal career was a recognition that we have a lot of sources of authority that we can turn to to answer our questions. And so I think it grew from that place to just continue to drive my research and my interests in my work today.”

Ian Record:

“So you’ve spent the last two days participating in the Nation Nations Institute’s Tribal Constitution seminar both as a presenter and also as an observer. And I’m curious, what from the proceedings of the last two days as they’re still fresh in your mind really struck a chord with you?”

John Borrows:

“I think I like the examples that I saw that were practical and on the ground, that had a lot of deep thought behind them. I think when people come to seminars like this they might expect they’d encounter a process, but in fact what they see is a lot of work that’s done over a period of years that’s been cultivating of the different traditions and understandings that people bring to what constitutionalism is. And so I was impressed by the hard work that underlies and is behind many of those presentations. And while there are lessons that we can generalize, you did a great job I think of pulling out those generalized lessons, more fundamentally was context matters and paying attention to the specific context that a nation comes from seems to be the message that I took from the seminar.”

Ian Record:

“One of the first things we tackled on day one of the seminar was starting at the beginning and really defining what in the most fundamental sense a constitution really is and that can take many forms. It can be a written constitution, an unwritten constitution, and I’m curious, given that you spend so much time thinking about these things and writing about these things and doing research about things around this idea of constitutionalism I’m curious to get your perspective on what that is and maybe your definition of what that is.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I think of constitutionalism as a conversation and a set of practices around living tradition. Sometimes when people think of constitutions they just think of pieces of paper, but really what a constitution is is a verb, it’s a way of constituting a people through time. There’s a past and a present and a future tense as a part of how they might relate to one another. And so for me constitutionalism is this living, ongoing, breathing set of understandings, customs, procedures around trying to create a better life, a more orderly set of relationships between the people. The Anishinaabe have lots of different words for constitutionalism. [Anishinaabe language] is one of those words. It means 'the great guided way of decision making.' This idea of [Anishinaabe language] is almost the process of the creation of a tradition as you move from generation to generation. But there’s another word in Anishinaabemowin that communicates constitutionalism, which is [Anishinaabe language]. The root of that is [Anishinaabe language], which means 'old time, a long time.' So there’s this other strand of constitutionalism, which is you draw upon a long time way of doing things and you continually place it in a present context so that it can speak to the future.

And I think the tension there between those two different ways of looking at constitutionalism is important. One of those ways of proceeding is seeing this constitution as ongoing, living, breathing, continued in its development. The other one is a process of creation anew. That is, there’s an idea in constitutionalism that you would always have new starting points, that it’s never done, it’s never over. Like I said, it’s an ongoing conversation. That sense of constitutionalism isn’t something you just find within an Anishinaabeg or Indigenous peoples as well. In the United States, we have a constitutional tradition, which is called 'originalism.' And so you try to figure out what the meaning of the constitution is by going back to some magic moment, 1787, and you draw on the intent or the public meaning of what the founders said at that time.

We have another tradition within U.S. constitutionalism, which is called 'living constitutionalism,' which is yes, history is important, but we’ve developed as a people through time and while we take guidance from the history, the history is not determinative and I think within Indigenous constitutionalism we have that same kind of tension that’s present. Some of us want to go to that original moment, a creation story, a treaty, some kind of drafting of a document and you would find that people argue vigorously that the constitution can only mean what was said when that creation happened or when those people signed that document. In the U.S. constitutional context, you have [U.S. Supreme Court justices] [William] Rehnquist and [Antonin] Scalia that kind of take that way of proceeding though you have this other strand, living constitutionalism where you would look to what the people now understand the constitution means 200 or some odd years later and you would allow for that to occur.

In the Canadian context, we call this 'living treaty jurisprudence.' In the 1930s, the court was asked to consider whether or not women could be seated in the Senate because at the time that the constitution was drafted women were not political citizens and in the court...in looking at that they could have taken an originalist approach and said, ‘Well, at the time women didn’t mean persons, therefore they couldn’t be seated to sit in the senate,’ but the court took another approach. They said that the British-North America Act had placed in Canada a living treaty, which was capable of growth through the ages and that its roots continue to extend out branches that have new obligations that the people would encounter and so therefore the dominate mode of constitutionalism in Canada is living constitutionalism as opposed to originalism. Again, within a Native context you see those tensions very much present. Some want to look to that initial moment and find all the meaning in that moment. Others see it as a tree, they see it as more organic, living, growing, breathing through the ages.”

Ian Record:

“In some sense, doesn’t the constitutionalism of any nation and particularly Indigenous nations given all that they’ve experienced in North America in particular over the last 200, 300, 400 years that it must be able to adapt to the times, adapt to the changing circumstances, the new challenges, growing populations, all sorts of things?”

John Borrows:

“That is definitely my understanding of how constitutionalism proceeds in most Indigenous nations. I certainly see that within my own nation as well, though there are people that would differ. They say when the old people put us in the four corners of these sacred mountains they set up a way of being that we cannot mess with and that we have to ensure that we live in accordance with those original instructions. And to the extent that you start to take in influences from United States or Canada or just whatever the context you are in today, they would critique that and they would say, ‘That is polluting, that is compromising, that is not being true to what the founders said that we should abide by.’ And so while I do agree with you that a constitution needs this definite grafting on, growing, organic way of being in the world, there are people that would take a different approach and I think at heart some of the debates that happen throughout Indian Country around constitutionalism are that very debate, the worry that we’re departing from something that’s original that was given to us and that by trying to adapt to the present situation we’re just assimilating or swallowing some other kind of complicit line.”

Ian Record:

“Let’s talk a little bit more about the Anishinaabe and prior to colonization -- I’m curious, you’ve learned -- I think first and foremost through your own upbringing and then in the research you’ve been doing since getting into the academic realm -- a great deal about what the Anishinaabe constitution looked like traditionally and where it was found, where it lived and where it breathed. Can you shed some light on that?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I think one of the main influences on Anishinaabe constitutionalism is the environment that we lived in and live in today. And so we would take from the Great Lakes area and that watershed that surrounds it and the plants and the animals and the birds and the clouds and the rivers and we would see that behavior that was taking place in the natural world and we would learn from it. And when we saw things that were positive and uplifting and sustaining and nurturing and nourishing, we would try to analogize those behaviors to our own sets of ways that we should be. Or if we saw something that was troubling in nature, we would then take a lesson that we shouldn’t behave in that fashion. And so our constitutionalism is very much in the ecological type of principle.

In U.S. and Canadian constitutionalism, when you draw analogies, you often do so from the cases that are there, the stories that have been told by judges through the ages. Our analogies were first of all the stories that were told to us by the plants and the animals and the rivers and the trees and then it was the stories that our elders, our wise ones told us about the animals, the plants, the rivers and the trees and so our case law became stories about how the skunk got its stripe and how the robin came to sing like it does and why the trickster is intervening in the creation of the beaver dam in that place. And so for Anishinaabe people that constitutionalism can be labeled [Anishinaabe language], which is you look at everything, [Anishinaabe language] and you take the lessons from what you’re seeing. Another way of thinking about that is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] is the Anishinaabe word for 'earth,' [Anishinaabe language] is 'to point towards.' [Anishinaabe language] then is this concept of you point towards the earth and you learn from the earth and you apply those teachings from the natural world around us in creating our sense of obligations to one another. It’s the similar word to our word for 'teaching,' which is [Anishinaabe language]. So to practice this way of constituting ourselves is to understand what the earth is trying to teach us.

I remember going to a seminar with an elder, Basil Johnston, back in 1996 when I was a newer law professor and we had convened at Cape Croker, [Anishinaabe language], to talk about our constitution and I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been but I was surprised that we began with the creation of the earth and the first formation of the rocks. And then after the rocks, we had stories about how the water came into place and after the rocks and the water we would start to talk about the first little crawlers in the ocean and on the lands and what they did in relationship to one another. And then the plants and there were stories about how we got corn and how we got cabbage and all these other things and then this went on to animals. We had all of these stories about the natural world for maybe four or five hours. Humans came along in the afternoon after lunch. And I realized in listening to that that Basil was trying to teach us that Anishinaabe constitutionalism is how are we constituted as human beings in relationship to this wider order that we see around us. And I’ll never forget that and it’s become one of the guiding lights for me in thinking about the practice of Anishinaabe constitutional law in a present day.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you bring that up because one of the things as a student of tribal constitutions who often...in my role with the Native Nations Institute, we’re asked to come in and help tribes wrestle with their current constitutionalism and wrestle with a deep...often a deep conflict between their sense of who they are and their sense of right and wrong with this whatever written document they have, whether it’s an Indian Reorganization Act constitution here in the U.S. or an Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act constitution or up in Canada it’s wrestling with the Indian Act system. And what you often see in reviewing these written documents is a lack of explanation of the people’s relationship with place and I use the word 'place' very purposely because you often will see references to, ‘Okay, this is our territory and we have jurisdiction over this territory,’ but it doesn’t evoke anything about the relationship between people and place, the reciprocity between people and place, exactly what you’re talking about with Basil Johnston. Do you see that as one of the big challenges that tribes face is, how do we evoke that and perhaps revitalize that relationship with place and then be nourished by that process of reciprocity that has sustained the people up until this day?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah, I definitely see that. One of the things I worry about in some of the contemporary constitutionalism that’s happening amongst Indigenous peoples across North America is that they de-contextualize who they are and their relationships to one another. By 'de-contextualizing,' meaning there’s something of a universal nature that appears in these constitutions as if all time and place can be subsumed in the wording that’s contained in the document. And yes, there are generalizations we can make, of course, but those generalizations have to be rooted in a particular set of relationships that a people have to a place. If not, the constitution’s actually not going to work. What you see in looking at constitutionalism in a non-Indigenous context is there’s many pretty documents that are in place in Central and South America or in some Asian countries, but that’s all they are is pretty documents. They don’t get connected or rooted to the place and the people that have to live in relationship to them. So you get nice words and maybe even good decisions from the court, but the decisions of the court, the words on the paper mean nothing unless people are also internalizing their constitution as well. And that’s why I started out by saying that a constitution is an ongoing set of conversations and practices about your tradition in a particular place and if the constitution is not doing that, you’re not really internalizing the ways of being and of course if you’re not internalizing a constitution, it’s someone else’s document. It’s the people’s or the place, the land, the animals, the plants, constitution there. So I think maybe, and I’m not sure it’s our biggest challenge, but one of our biggest challenges is to make sure that the constitutions that we’re dealing with actually reflect the place that they’re coming from.”

Ian Record:

“So what are some of the other challenges? Obviously you sat through a lot of different discussions over the last couple days and heard a lot about some of the challenges and I’m sure came into the conference well aware of some of the other challenges that Native nations in the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere, Indigenous peoples face when it comes to their constitutionalism and reconciling the past with the present and outside forces with internal ones and so forth. What are some of the other challenges you see?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest challenges in relationship to the creation of constitutions is having hope, having faith, having trust, to having love for one another. If we’re going to really internalize our constitutionalism, we have to think about those values at that level. When the U.S. was drafting its constitution, it put big words out there, 'life' and 'liberty' and the 'pursuit of happiness,' and there was the sense of freedom and association and forming a more perfect union. These big ideas were a part of what the aspirations of the people are and were and I think that sometimes we sell ourselves short by borrowing those words and not actually thinking about what our own aspirations and words are. For me, it would be what can we do in living together that would facilitate greater love, greater respect, greater honesty? There’s something called the Seven Grandfather/Grandmother Teachings of the Anishinaabe and those, I think, could be legal terms of art as well as spiritual and cultural and other types of ways of relating. We have a hard time when we put big words out there, then define them in a constitution. We’ve had no end of disputes through the years about what does freedom mean in the First Amendment? What does equality require in the 14th Amendment? But just because we have difficulty with the big words and we can’t quite pin them down doesn’t mean that we leave them behind. In fact, it increases our expectations of what those words might do for us. And so I would love to see Anishinaabe and other Indigenous nations start to...what do we want to create, what’s our equivalent of freedom and equality? If it is things like in Anishinaabemowin, [Anishinaabe language], thinking about love or [Anishinaabe language]. There’s different meanings of love that I’ve just given you. One’s kind of a stinginess, the other one’s kind of a compassionate way of being in the world or likewise around trust and honesty, [Anishinaabe language]. There’s a lot I think that we need on that ground. So I think that’s the biggest challenge actually.”

Ian Record:

“And you’ve discussed those things, those Anishinaabe values, those Grandfather teachings within the context of citizenship and identity and that’s a huge issue right now. I think in the nations I’ve worked with, there’s typically two considerations that tend to dominate. One is that if we continue with the criteria that we have...and I think most people understand where those come from and although I do think that some people still need to understand where those come from, but there’s two tracks. One is that if we continue this criteria we’re going to not be around because there’s not anyone that will be...that will qualify to continue to be citizens. And another is around basically what you were talking about, that we need to address what the criteria is doing to us in terms of our unity, in terms of our relations, in terms of how healthy our relationships are and how revisiting this might strengthen that in some way. How do you see that challenge today and what do you think nations who are wrestling with that issue need to really be thinking about as they in particular engage their community about this critical topic?”

John Borrows:

“So again, context is everything and each nation would have to pay attention to its own way of framing these larger ideas in relationship with the particular challenges they face around membership or citizenship. But what I would say is that we need eyes wide open to both of these concerns. One is that we have been overrun as a people and so there is a need to be able to create a set of criteria that would say who is Anishinaabe and who is not and those kinds of line-drawing exercises are very, very hard to do. Unfortunately, what I think we’ve done is we’ve drawn those lines in a very cramped and stingy and closed way and I’m not sure that that is consistent with that other stream that we need to be taking account of which has to do with all our relations, with our responsibilities, with the hospitality ethics that have been passed on through the generations within many Indigenous peoples. So I do think that lines have to be drawn somewhere, but I think we should be much more generous and open and liberal and large and gracious and hospitable in that regard. And when we do so, I think what we’ll start to do is not see the government as the source of authority and the source of resources that would help fund the future of a nation because when you start opening up the opportunities for people to participate who are connected to the nation, what you get is a huge infusion of what in some places is called human capital, but in just of speaking plainly of creativity and possibility.”

So when you see a broader-based conception of citizenship, what you do is you tap the potential of many sources of innovation and I think eventually that will create a broader base of resources for nations through time. And I think that’s going to contribute to our freedom as peoples, that we won’t be tied to a colonial government in the United States or Canada, that our freedom will come from our relationships with the earth, our relationship with one another writ large. The Anishinaabe word for 'freedom' is [Anishinaabe language]. [Anishinaabe language] means 'to own something.' [Anishinaabe language] is this idea of owning our relationships, freedom being this sense of stewardship and responsibility to others. This isn’t necessarily the ownership concept that you would get in kind of western property law that we would alienate others or land and therefore have a sense of possession. This is the idea of ownership that comes through responsible stewardship and relationships. The word for 'citizenship' in Anishinaabemowin is [Anishinaabe language], literally freedom is owning...citizenship is owning our responsibilities with one another and our relationships. So yes, lines have to be drawn, but we I think can do much better in thinking beyond what the colonial criteria for that is and looking to our own legal traditions and then doing the analysis around what economically and socially and politically could be possible if we saw ourselves in that broader light.”

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting you bring that up, the need to be more inclusive and that being an Indigenous value. We’ve seen a number of Native nations that, two that jump to mind, are Citizen Potawatomi and also Osage Nation in Oklahoma who’ve taken a more inclusive approach and they’re starting to see the benefits of that because they have gained this...regained this huge reservoir of human capital, of people who have things to contribute. They have skills, they have assets, they have ideas, they have creativity as you mentioned to contribute to the life of the nation and it’s starting...you’re starting to see a real shift in the ability of the nation to actually live as a nation. On the flip side of that though, isn’t it incumbent upon, as nations engage this issue of redefining citizenship criteria, of looking at their current criteria and saying is this...does this really work for us, isn’t it critical that they understand that this criteria of blood quantum is not cultural because we see that...we’ve seen because it’s been in place in a lot of communities for so long, we see some people embrace it as some sort of cultural value, that this is how we equate our identity and also that in that criteria there is a lack of civic obligation, of civic responsibility because the mentality is that, ‘As long as I have the blood I qualify and my work is done.’ Is that important to this conversation do you feel?”

John Borrows:

“It is. What I think it does is it identifies where our traditions may be harmful. That is, this is not something that was a historic tradition prior to the arrival of Europeans to set blood as a criteria for membership. Anishinaabe people could take in Potawatomi or Odawa people, sometimes Haudenosaunee people who were enemies became Anishinaabe so there’s that fluidity there prior to the arrival of Europeans. But you’re right, some people now, as a result of introductions from the Canadian and the U.S. government think that blood is the thing that marks out our identity and it’s a very, very...it’s a proxy for belonging, but it’s a very poor proxy for belonging because it doesn’t engage our traditions. Largely we’re talking about the plants and the animals and the...there’s just something that is then short circuited by that criteria. Again, I understand the need to be able to draw lines and some where you’re going to draw a line, I don’t think blood should be the way that we draw that line. There are other kinds of criteria that we could take that would form a gate-keeping function if that’s what we’re concerned about, but hopefully that gate keeping then would be around conceptions of civic responsibility that flow from an Indigenous legal perspective and the gate keeping is not the U.S. government’s worried about their obligations of having to fund 10 extra hospital beds if we increase the numbers of people in the tribe.”

Ian Record:

“So let’s turn to...back to this issue of constitutional challenges. As I mentioned at the beginning, you’re from the Nawash First Nation up in Ontario and the nation works...operates using an Indian Act government and I’m curious, what do you feel are your own nation’s largest constitutional challenges here in the year 2014?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So just a little thing about constitutionalism more generally in Canada, we don’t have one document that sets out our constitution. In fact, the preamble of our 1867 British North America Act is that we’ll have a constitution that’s similar in principle to that of Great Britain. Great Britain does not have a written constitution. It means that Canadian constitutionalism is not distilled into one written place. There’s an ongoing tradition in Canadian and British constitutionalism that extends back 1,000 years and then there’s little markers along the way like this 1867 document or 1982 document, but they never purport to spell out what the entire relationship of the people will be through their constitution. If I could draw an analogy here then, Anishinaabe people have a constitutional tradition that goes well beyond 1,000 years back into the mists of time and that tradition is what we’ve been talking about today. And then we’ve got the Indian Act, which is one moment of constitutionalism, which is an imposition from the Canadian government and what I would like to see is similar to what we have in the British context that that’s not the be-all and end-all of constitutions and that you can overturn that, that you can go back to some of the things that were there in the past, graft on other things today, but I don’t think the people see the Indian Act in that way. I think they see the Indian Act in somewhat a similar way to how some might regard something like the U.S. Constitution. It’s written in stone, can’t be changed, it can never be put aside and this is a matter of the heart and the mind so our challenge is to see the Indian Act for what it is -- anomalous, a drop in time. Yes, a very powerful set of Trojan horse-like laws that have run into our community and tried to take us over, but nevertheless have not. So when band decisions are made today at Cape Croker under the Indian Act, it is true that when you make a by-law, in order to have that approved you have to submit it to the Minister of Indian Affairs, if you don’t hear back in 40 days then it becomes the law of the community. But that exists in the midst of a wider tradition of people still trying to consult with family, still watching the land, still looking through the language, taking account of the deliberative structures that flow from the clans and the chiefs, etc. In other words, our constitutional tradition is not limited to that Indian Act imposition. It’s there and what we need to do obviously is peel out and pear off and get rid of that Indian Act oversight just as people try to get rid of secretarial approval in the IRA style of constitutions in the United States. And when we do that, it’s not as if there’s a legal vacuum that’s present because even under the Indian Act there is a set of traditions that have been flowing through our community that come from the past, but are the present and have something to speak to the future. And so when we peel that Indian Act out we’re not starting from scratch and then what we need to do is identify, have conversations, fight, discuss what are those things that we’re doing now that we can distill for this moment, not for all time and place again, but for this moment that would help us further remove ourselves from the Indian Act.”

Ian Record:

“So you’re probably well aware that in Canada there are a growing number of First Nations that are working to get out from under the Indian Act. They’re developing their own constitutions and sometimes it’s through the treaty processes that are going on in British Columbia and elsewhere, sometimes it’s through the development of custom election, what’s called custom election code approaches, and down here obviously in the U.S. there is a tremendous amount of activity going on, some successful, some not. And I’m curious -- we’ve been talking a lot about context and historical context and you just sort of related the historical and cultural context within what your nation tries to reconcile, wrestle with the Indian Act in your reserve and sustain your Indigenous Anishinaabe legal traditions and ways of doing, ways of constituting with that system. How important is it for nations who are engaging in this reform effort to really fully understand their traditional Indigenous legal tradition, their traditional Indigenous constitutionalism and also the origin story of how they came to have what they have now with often an imposed system? And when I say that, I’m speaking specifically for them, for their community, for their nation in particular because yes, for instance, all First Nations in Canada, most of them have the Indian Act, they work under the Indian Act. In the U.S. yes, most or a great number of tribes work with an IRA system or something akin to it, but their specific histories are very distinct. How important is it for nations as they engage this constitutional change prospect to have that cultural context, to have that historical context?”

John Borrows:

“Yeah, it’s huge and what you need is a lot of storytelling that can occur from the elders and from the teachers that might be there in the community, but you also need storytelling that’s good social science, research that has economic analysis and looks at the political system structures, you need education that’s also of a more public nature through Twitter and Facebook and media, YouTube, etc., putting those altogether, having people understand what are the different streams that are flowing into the present way that we’re constituted. Some of those streams are colonial, they come from the Indian Act and how does that...what is...how is blood quantum one of those streams, it’s actually polluting us right now, and identify that history and those streams and then also say, and yet there’s this other stream that we continue to pull upon. Why is it we begin with prayer at the beginning of our council meeting? Why is it that we do a lot of our business going in home to home to home? That’s not written in the Indian Act anywhere, but there’s a sense of people and clan and place still being involved in that. Why is it that my head councilor goes out and owl calls as a part of what he does with people in the community? And putting that all together and saying, ‘These streams are not so healthy, but these streams are continuing to be vibrant.’ Without that context, without that history, without both traditional and social science research you’re not in a place to do a good analysis about where you are and where you could possibly go from here. And I know that’s hard to do because there are just so many other pressing needs that a community has to encounter. You’ve probably heard that analogy before, often there’s people that are falling off a cliff, what ends up happening is the councilmen come over, ‘We need to get these people that are at the bottom of the cliff and make sure that they get help and healing.’ And so where all the time people are falling over the cliff in our communities and they’re bruised and bloody at the base of the cliff and we’re just dealing with the crisis of the moment instead of taking the time to put the fence at the top of the cliff and show where the boundaries might be so that we can cut off that flow of trauma that’s happening in our place. And so yes, there are those every day-to-day needs, but those day-to-day needs will eventually be attenuated if we could take that longer term approach and put systems, structures, fences in place that prevent us from falling down and really seeing the damage that’s a part of us.”

Ian Record:

“So a lot of what we’ve been discussing focuses on one of the key research findings of the Native nation building research that both the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development have been engaged in for the past 30 years and that is cultural match. Basically the match between...what is the match between the people and the governance system they use to thrive, survive, move forward as a people? Perhaps you can share your perspective on that, because it sounds like that’s really at the forefront of your mind when you think about the issues around constitutionalism and other issues as well.”

John Borrows:

“Yeah. So I’m really celebratory of many of the findings that come from the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project because I think they’re right -- we do have to pay attention to cultural match, that we need to find greater fit between the context of a particular people and their own then constitutional expressions and that is not occurring and that message needs to be loud and clear and just repeated over and over and over again. But there is a caution in taking that approach, which is constitutions also have to challenge the culture of the people. It’s not just about matching the culture of the people. So let’s take an example just looking at the U.S. context. There was a tradition of slavery in the United States that of course was harmful to the people that were caught up into it that led to a civil war and the constitution, when it was first drafted, tried to paper over the differences that were there between the peoples and how they were living culturally in the North and the South, etc. Fortunately we found in the U.S. constitutional context that there was the ability of the 13th, the 14th and the 15th Amendment as they eventually were drafted or through the Brown vs. Board of Education case that the constitution itself became a challenge to the tradition and a challenge to the culture and without that challenge we would have continued to reproduce prejudice and racism and policies that are harmful to people that we should be in better relationships with. And the same thing could be put into any context. You think about the British constitutionalism, it of course is by and large a product of matching cultures of the people and their place, but that constitution also has conventions that says to the king, ‘You can’t just do what you want.’ It says, ‘If you want to act, you have to do so through a legislature,’ and there’s a lot of conventions that are found in British constitutionalism that go against the flow basically. And when a tribe designs a constitution, again the message that must be the overriding message is cultural match. We don’t have near enough of that. But as we do so, just be careful that we don’t get carried away because we need to think about those who might be a minority amongst us. That could be families, it could be clans, it could be non-Native people that are associating with us in our place and unless we have ways to also challenge our own traditions and have things that would go against the flow of the way we’re living, we will reproduce our own abuses and we will create conditions that diminish the dignity of people that live amongst us. And so it’s going to be a hard thing to do because you want the popular sovereignty of the people to largely guide your constitutions, you want people’s voices to be by and large what guides the day, but it’s worthwhile considering the trickster, which is an Indigenous tradition, by what is contrary there, what’s going on in another moment that we need to take account of and if we heeded our traditions of the trickster, that is contemplating at the same time things that can be harmful and helpful, kind and cunning, charming and playing mean tricks, our constitutions need to do that too and if we’re just all about a celebration of match and neglect those elements of push back that are within the community, we are not going to be living well together.”

Ian Record:

“Well, John, I think our listeners and viewers have learned quite a bit from you and giving them a lot of food for thought and we really appreciate you taking some time to sit down and share your thoughts and experience with us.”

John Borrows:

“Thank you. It’s been fun.”

Ian Record:

“Thank you.”

John Borrows:

“Great.”