data collection

Policy Brief: Data Governance for Native Nation Rebuilding

Year

Native nations in the United States are increasingly exercising Indigenous data sovereignty (ID-Sov)— the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data. While ID-Sov is the goal, data governance— the ownership, collection, control, analysis, and use of data— provides the mechanisms for achieving that goal. This brief serves as an initial primer on Indigenous data governance. It describes the relationship between reclaiming Indigenous data and Native nation rebuilding. This brief extends the ID-Sov conversation to tribal data governance and the implications for how other (non-tribal) entities govern data related to tribes, their citizens, lands, and communities.

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Rainie, Stephanie Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, and Andrew Martinez. 2017. Policy Brief: Data Governance for Native Nation Rebuilding. (Version 2). Tucson: Native Nations Institute.

Data as a Strategic Resource: Self-determination, Governance , and the Data Challenge for Indigenous Nations in the United States

Year

Data about Indigenous populations in the United States are inconsistent and irrelevant. Federal and state governments and researchers direct most collection, analysis, and use of data about U.S. Indigenous populations. Indigenous Peoples’ justified mistrust further complicates the collection and use of these data. Nonetheless, tribal leaders and communities depend on these data to inform decision making. Reliance on data that do not reflect tribal needs, priorities, and self-conceptions threatens tribal self-determination. Tribal data sovereignty through governance of data on Indigenous populations is long overdue. This article provides two case studies of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and their demographic and socioeconomic data initiatives to create locally and culturally relevant data for decision making.

Resource Type
Topics
Citation
Rainie, S. C. , Schultz, J. L. , Briggs, E. , Riggs, P. , Palmanteer-Holder, N. L. (2017). Data as a Strategic Resource: Self-determination, Governance, and the Data Challenge for Indigenous Nations in the United States.The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 8(2) .Retrieved from: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/iipj/article/view/7511/6155
 

Eileen Briggs: The Importance of Data and Community Engagement

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Eileen Briggs is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and is the Executive Director of Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Ventures. She is also the Principal Investigator on "Cheyenne River Voices Research" — a reservation-wide research project including a household survey of over 800 families that has created a historic set of baseline data for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and others serving the reservation population. In collaboration with researchers at NNI, Eileen is creating a series of papers on Tribal Data Sovereignty & Governance.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Eileen Briggs, "The Importance of Data and Community Engagement," Interview, Leading Native Nations interview series, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ,  March 03, 2015

Verónica Hirsch:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host Verónica Hirsch. On today's program we are honored to have with us Eileen Briggs. Eileen is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Ventures Program in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Eileen is also certified as an economic development finance professional, is President of the tribally owned energy corporation and is a small business owner. Eileen, welcome. Good to have you with us today. I've shared a little bit about who you are but why don't you start by telling us a bit more about yourself. What did I leave out?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I grew up on the reservation. I lived my young life there and then moved away and got some great experience living in other states working with other tribes in Wisconsin and Minnesota and then back in South Dakota working with other Lakota tribes in the region and it's just...it's great to be back working for my tribe, for my people and I think that I have been very fortunate to along my journey to have a lot of tools in my toolbox added as I've went along and to be able to bring them back home and gain so many more. So I just...I live there in the Eagle Butte community, our tribal headquarters and make my home there with my extended family."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. Eileen, could you please describe the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Ventures Program? What prompted its creation and what brought about the partnership with the Northwest Area Foundation?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Ventures Project is really the kind of project that I think a lot of our reservation communities sort of are in a way working towards without that kind of a title and for us it's really a larger strategic planning process that came to us through our partnership with the Northwest Area Foundation. And it's a project that's focused on poverty reduction and of course in Indian communities, our communities in particular we have very high rates of poverty for the nation and so we really had this opportunity with the 10 year poverty reduction plan to look at poverty and to stand around it together and determine what strategies and initiatives that we think would make an impact. And so what brought it about was the opportunity that the Northwest Area Foundation was bringing to the region that they serve and the Northwest Area Foundation selected Cheyenne River along with two other tribal communities in this round that we were invited in 2003 to participate in. And so we went through a process of strategic planning with an investment from the Northwest Area Foundation. That process was phenomenal in and of itself to give our reservation leadership, community members and organizations across the reservation a chance to talk to one another and to develop a strategic effort to address poverty."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. Can you please describe what the Tribal Ventures Project's purpose is?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Our purpose is specifically focused on this 10 year effort that began in 2006 to address poverty on the reservation and implement the strategies that came from the people and that the tribal council ultimately endorsed and made the focus of the plan and our efforts for the next 10 years. So our work and the mission of Tribal Ventures is to implement that plan, to take the ideas and make them into reality, to try them out. Some of them were brand new things that never existed on the reservation. All of the projects are focused on long term results and impact for our communities and were projects that weren't there on the reservation before. And it's really given us a chance to look at the kinds of ideas that came from the people and the kind of responses and designs that we would want to create for our own people."

Verónica Hirsch:

"You mentioned how the people really helped direct the Tribal Ventures Project strategies and focus. How were their opinions and their insights solicited and the incorporated into the project?"

Eileen Briggs:

"It was a very intense and really rewarding...I was able to be a part of that rewarding experience and a very focused engagement and a focus on inclusiveness. So it was a strategic effort to reach out to all of our communities. We have a very large land base, 2.3 million acres of land. And we have 19 communities on our reservation, small. 20, 25 houses to a larger city of 5,000 to 7,000 people. And we visited each of these communities and visited with our people. We sat with them over kitchen tables, had conversation, posed questions about what did they think poverty meant, talked about what ideas, what were the issues that were facing them. It really was a very...very thoughtful process of 18 months of not only going to the people in the communities and having conversation numerous times but we also engaged with tribal leadership following each round of community meetings and would share the themes that were emerging, have conversation with them and then we would return to the communities and have further conversations as well as meet with tribal organizations and programs of the reservation. And we also realized that our young population of 19 to say 30 were not really engaging in these community meetings and so we made a decision to survey them in a different way and so we conducted what was called the Young Voices Survey and we surveyed 704 young people, men and women throughout our reservation in their communities and in the larger city to get their ideas and thoughts around workforce development, education and future focus for the young people. So it was really a phenomenal process of engagement on numerous occasions over an 18 month period filtering that through systems and ultimately a core group of around 80 people participated in a...I think we were about six weeks of intensive meeting. We met every week for three hours. We had put in thousands of hours of meetings where people would basically distill this sort of idea into a tangible vision and strategic thought around what that program or that initiative would focus on. For instance, there was very much an effort around financial literacy. That wasn't the words that people said. What our people said were things like, "˜Our young people, our kids are getting taken by this money. They're getting taken,' they'd say. Like they would have a car and then they would make payments and then not be able to keep the payments up "˜cause they lost their job or some change had happened and they wanted to turn that car back. Well, obviously it affected their credit but the families were saying, "˜they're getting taken.' Or even if they're getting, they're paying really high interest rates. So we took statements like that and then a core group of people engaged in a process of saying, "˜Well, how would we...what would we design a program around to address that issue?' And that emerged financial literacy and youth development, an individual development account project. So those are the sorts of engagement that we were able to give and bring to our people to really include them in the process of creating this plan."

Verónica Hirsch:

"With the Tribal Venture Project's focus upon citizen engagement, how does that ultimately support or to what extent does that support the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's nation building efforts?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think it's a core foundation. I think it...this project was a project of the tribal council, the tribal leadership and very intentionally focused on engaging its citizens in a process of thoughtfulness and ideas and seeing their ideas actually come together in a plan.

I don't think that we were really calling it nation building efforts in any way, shape or form at that time but it really has as I've come to understand the nation building process it really was the kind of project that people felt included obviously. It also was a process that was transparent. It was the kind of project that wasn't...had an intention of trying to rebuild trust with community members from the tribal council and so oftentimes there's sometimes contentious situations or relationships sometimes between the tribal citizens and tribal government in public meetings and these opportunities dissipated that a little bit and demonstrated to ourselves as tribal citizens and us also just within that dynamic of tribal governance and government that things could be done in a good and appropriate way. And we're really proud of our people who participated in this opportunity because they're really...it is very much indicative of our culture to come together as extended families or tiyospaye and speak about and talk about an issue and then be able to take that, send somebody with that information to the tribal leadership or whomever and this was a component of that. And I think as a foundation of our nation and our culture that I think that created a bedrock for the nation building for our people."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. Who led the Tribal Ventures Project development?"

Eileen Briggs:

"The tribal council and the tribal chairman, Harold Frazier at that time, was the lead person to ensure that this happened. He was very much in support and understood the opportunity that was brought to us by the Northwest Area Foundation and he selected a long time tribal administrator and tribal citizen who has worked with many years, her name was Sharon Vogel and she really took on the project as the opportunity of a lifetime really for our people. The chance to...a once in a lifetime opportunity to really go out and talk with our people and have a process. So Sharon Vogel was the project administrator and then I worked as a project researcher and coordinator to help with sort of the logistics and then the development of the plan itself."

Verónica Hirsch:

"To what extent did the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Council, tribal citizens and/or tribal department staff influence the project's development?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think they were crucial. The tribal council met in with us along with the tribal chairman regularly and we had probably four to seven I think retreats with them where we would basically walk through the input that was coming from the people and then get their feedback and then as things got more refined ultimately they would provide input about the design of different programs but also the intent of the initiatives. The same for the program directors. They were all...those that were interested and obviously had a fit with this initiative, any of our workforce development efforts and our education systems, they were engaged to give their input and they were...when I talk about those thousands...thousand hours one July that we worked together on this, many, many people donated their time to be a part of designing the wording for the description for each initiative and strategy area which really is the focus of the effort."

Eileen Briggs:

"I think our tribal constitution sets the bedrock for the way the governance system works and the administration of the tribal efforts work and I think that this constitution provided for the proper oversight of the project. It also provided for just the development of the project. The tribal council was the final say to the plan. We talked about that with our tribal citizens that tribal council would have the final say but they could see where so many of our people's ideas had come into the plan that it wasn't the sort of thing where tribal council was just going to go into a side room and decide how would this investment be utilized. The constitution has a lot of challenges but I really felt like we used the...our respect for our tribal leadership and our tribal government appropriately throughout this process and I think that that reinforced the leadership and the governance structures that were...that are in place that work really well. But I also think just in general this process was so much really a self-determination type of effort. We were determining ourselves and I don't know if I mentioned this in the previous comments but we ended up with a $9.5 million investment from this Northwest Area Foundation to implement the ideas that came from our people and so this has really been a process that has been a part of trying to engage in a different way, try to self...design our own efforts and work collaboratively. So as far as policy specifically and the kind of constitutional sort of underpinnings, we really used what we had well and I think exercised the sovereignty to do things the way we wanted to do ultimately in the plan. And I just would make a last note that the way the tribal government made the decision about who would govern this project in order to ensure its sustainability and continuity was they determined to create a...delegate an authority board which they as a tribal council could do and they seated one of their tribal council members continuously on the project so they were always engaged fully in the project through their tribal council representative but they seated a board of partners who really focused on ensuring that project's success long term because we had continuity and focus."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. On that aspect of the Tribal Ventures Partnership Board, could you please describe the role of that board?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, the board's role was really to ensure that the project was implemented throughout the 10 year project as well as to ensure that we had designed partnership and oversee the funds that...there was of course the accountability of funds but also to ensure that we had an opportunity then policies that were fair and were not...were free of sort of political influence or situation, had some autonomy to make decisions, they were given that. And so I think that their role has been crucial to be able to focus on this and steer this course...keep it on course I should say, to move this project forward and to step back and do the reflecting about what have we learned, what has this process taught us and to have those opportunities together. And I think one of, it's not so much what their role was or their mission but I think you...we saw in our community many of our organizations, tribal organizations and nonprofits sort of sometimes working in silos and not connecting and I think this Tribal Ventures Plan in its...because it was a partnership board was to build the understanding and communication between those entities and organizations so that we can address these issues more collectively."

Verónica Hirsch:

"You mentioned that the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Council created the Tribal Ventures Partnership Board. I would like you to perhaps address what criteria were specified to create the board? You mentioned that a tribal council member remained a permanent part of the board. What other criteria were in place?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, there...it's a unique situation. We have a tribal council member as I mentioned. We also have two members of the community that are...well, we have members, I shouldn't say just two. But we have members of the community on the board that are living in poverty that have struggled with some of the challenges related to that. We also have partners that were key entities or stakeholders that were carrying out components of the plan that were actually sitting with the partnership...on the partnership board to help design and continue to ensure this participation. So the criteria included stakeholders as well as tribal leadership and community members."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. Realizing that the board included such a wide range of citizens who had various areas of responsibilities, can you please address how the board's creation ultimately promoted broader citizen inclusion and engagement?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think that having our community members seated on the board who had the real life experience with the challenges that our families are facing really helped us to always have that lens constantly on everything we were doing from our communications to the approaches that we were taking, the policies that were being implemented and then the kind of broader learnings that we're applying because this challenges around poverty and the struggle day to day around survival make it difficult to sort of be thinking long term so we not only got to kind of because when you're thinking and you've got a project and you're managing something, you're thinking this longer term effort and sometimes it's...sometimes you have a disconnect from the lived experience and when we have these continuous conversations and meetings, and I don't think we're so...any of our families are...when we live on the rez or with our communities we're not so far removed but you can get...you can lose sight of that and I think having that engagement together did support this project's success so far that we've seen that input available but also vice versa. Giving families and our community members that were on the board the opportunity to see a perspective longer range that maybe they wouldn't have had access to. And so when it got to the communities, when we'd do our community meetings, we would very much sort of speak to that perspective because we're rooted in it, we're right next to it, it's our friends and relatives who have informed how we approach talking about these issues, the ways and the methods that we describe, the efforts and the impact and outcomes of our work."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. What institutional support does the Tribal Ventures Project need and have?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think that we have seen over time, again, we've had a 10 year...we're running towards a 10 year, very close to that timeframe, of institution of the government, the organization, knowing what Tribal Ventures is, that we have a grant from this private foundation, we have these initiatives and I think that we've had a lot of support because people have seen the ideas that came from the people come to life, they have seen real change in their families; people getting their GED, financial education, jobs being created. We've seen the kind of policies and activities that we want to see happening in our communities, some adjustments. Sometimes they don't know that Tribal Ventures is...the investment from Tribal Ventures has helped to make that happen so I think that's one of the things that we do need is more of our story to be told and understood, the sort of what's behind the scenes. But I also think that we are very much accustomed in our tribal communities and we're no different to different federal funding sources or governmental funding and so we sort of get to look like another program–that program. And this has been more than just a program. This is really about a process and a movement towards moving our families forward collectively in a strategic effort and I think that that's a little hard to get your head around because people are just looking, "˜Well, what is your program and what can it do for me or my family or our community,' and when we're dealing with such larger issues, we...I think that's one of the things of the institution's understanding their role, the opportunity of engagement and it's sort of a living, breathing entity or organization. It's a process. I always say, "˜Well, we're not really a program, we're a project,' and it's a project that came from the people and a plan that we're seeing the results of over time."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. I want to return a bit to the role of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Council and its...I believe you mentioned previously that ultimately the tribal council decided what would be really the major focus areas for the Tribal Ventures Project. I'd like to ask what role does the council play in the day to day operation or the day to day governance of the Tribal Ventures Project?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, in our day to day operations the tribal government as a whole, the council doesn't play a role specifically. Because they set the Tribal Ventures Partnership Board with delegated authority on their behalf to manage this project for the duration of the funding it's really been able to create a little bit of that autonomy but also the trust and respect. So a number of things happen that do engage with tribal council. One, all of our reports go of course to our Board but they go...the same reports go to the Council and to the Northwest Area Foundation so there's a lot of transparency and communication through myself as the executive director as sort of the conduit of information and sharing but we do have a tribal council member who serves on our board. We've had three different tribal council members serve during the time period that we've been operating and our tribal council member–for instance, when we are drawing money down from our accounts into the operating, they're a signer on that so they do see every time we're drawing down, they know what we're going to use the money for so we have that accountability and transparency as far as this isn't just running its own program over there. Tribal council has some awareness and knowledge of course through...that tribal council member knows the detail of the activities and the goals and the intentions for that year and then now with this funding source. So we have some of that accountability that I see that they are involved in day to day through that tribal council representative."

Eileen Briggs:

"I think what we've needed for... I think that we've needed for the last seven or eight years is the opportunity to try these new ideas out, sort of the trust. We've needed the trust, we've needed the encouragement and the...I guess we have some level of autonomy but the understanding of what Tribal Venture's role is, what our project is and to let us do what we said we would do without distracting from that work. And we've had that and I think that that has been very remarkable. And we look for...as we look forward I think the work is really about what we need, it's really about again more conversation collectively in order for us to determine now what will we...what have we learned from this 10 years of poverty reduction efforts, what have we learned about ourselves, about our families and what direction does it give us about a future that we need to create and the kind of strategic thinking that is useful for our people. And I guess the last thing I would say about that is that I think that we have shown that strategic thinking has really been beneficial and so now the challenge is you have a different council, a different group of people so it's continuous education and conversation about what this project's intention was and what we've learned from it and then are we ready to do more strategic planning."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. What efforts have been undertaken to educate the tribal council regarding their roles and responsibilities to the Tribal Ventures Project?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, it's been an effort that I've taken on each new election that we have. We have staggered terms every four years so every two years I have...sometimes can have a set of new elected officials so I meet with the tribal elected officials and give them an orientation independently, just sort of walk them through what we...our purpose is, what our outcomes have been and what we intend to do. And then understand that this is a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation and that we have our responsibilities through a memorandum of agreement with them and so we just really clarify the roles of everyone very early on in their election being seated, after being elected. And the other roles that we've done is really helping as each tribal...new tribal elected chairman...we've had...this is...Harold Frazier is the chairman again so we've had technically three different chairmen in the time that we've worked this project and so again just my relationship with whomever is elected, respecting their leadership role, giving them as much information as I can so they know where we're at and just that process of seeing what we've learned. And so we do meet with them annually, the Tribal Ventures Board and the Tribal Council itself. We have a retreat and discuss this year's efforts and again our goals for the next year."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Regarding the annual meeting with the Tribal Council and the Tribal Ventures Partnership Board, how effective have those meetings been? Have...has there ever been discussion or suggestions regarding to how... Has there been discussion or suggestions regarding how to increase the efficacy of those annual meetings?"

Eileen Briggs:

"We've had these annual meetings... We've had annual meetings both on the reservation and off the reservation for Tribal Ventures Board and the Tribal Council to have conversation and my estimation of them they're very effective. Tribal council oftentimes are obviously meeting in official sessions and they don't often get to have sort of larger I would say conversations around the larger issues and just their own space to have conversations collectively. So I think we've created a space for that through the annual meetings or the project...the retreats with the council. I also think that it's given some insights to the efforts of nonprofit organizations and the role that they play in the community. It's helped to educate one another around the kind of collective efforts that we're doing. There are...there's...obviously we all work in our own little world and I think it's raised the awareness of each other's responsibilities, particularly around the kind of program deliverables and the kind of accountability that we all have and I think that that's made it really effective. And as far as feedback about when they want them, tribal council members say, "˜We need to have more of these,' so they're very interested in those. The other piece of that is really trying to have it go beyond just a presentation of outcomes and impacts but really create the space for the kind of dialogue and conversation about what are our core issues, what directions are we going and build relationships to move that way. We don't always have 100 percent participation from council but we've had I would 60 to 75 percent participation nearly every time."

Verónica Hirsch:

"What do you suggest could be done to maybe increase that participation level?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, we do find that if we have...it's sort of a 50/50 opportunity. If you have the retreat or the meeting on the reservation you may end up with more participation but there's sort of a distraction that happens with daily life and situations and so it's hard to stay focused. We do have council members who do not travel so I think that that's sort of our...we might have more participation if we kept...are able to keep it closer to home and been able to create that environment for focus."

Verónica Hirsch:

"What strategies have been used to engage and educate Cheyenne River Sioux citizens about the Tribal Ventures Project's process, where it is right now?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, we've used a number of different techniques. One.. Of course we've done a newsletter that has sort of summarized each project and given little tidbits of information. We actually hosted a radio show on our local community radio station regularly on...and it was not only just about Tribal Ventures but it was about the...looking to the future and projects that were happening on the reservation so we brought in other entities. So I think that in and of itself showed our people an opportunity to communicate about the efforts and progress of Tribal Ventures in conjunction with other progress and efforts that were happening on the reservation. So those two mechanisms through communication I think have been key. And then we've been very diligent about our communication with tribal communities that we visited in the first place. So we return to communities on an annual basis to do sort of an updates, give a report to the community so we'd give a presentation, we'd have different participants and different initiatives speak about their experience and what they got from that. Then we also held...periodically we would host a large community celebration. Again, in our culture and our way we realized that this was a gift that came to the Cheyenne River people and this...for this gift we give thanks and so we would have an annual...not annual but about every three or four years we'd give a [Lakota language] which is Thanksgiving gathering. So we would feed the people and have a celebration and at those events we sort of would do the reflecting back again of sharing about what the progress has been. So that sort of 800 people coming to a gathering is one example. And then also very small events and programs where we would present to programmed officers and departments again about what our efforts have been. And timely, trying to find places where there might be a natural intersect. And as we've come towards...we're coming towards the end, we're not completely finished with our project, recently we've used two specific tools. One has been again the community meetings so I just finished 45 presentations throughout the communities in about three months and with that we actually used videos. We designed and created these videos that helped tell the story of the strategic areas of economic, community and individual development of the plan as well as our Voices project and then the overall impact and outcome of Tribal Ventures. So these short four minute videos have been phenomenal where we've been able to interview participants, people have been able to see their relatives and see different components and parts of the reservation benefit from the efforts of the Tribal Ventures plan and I think that has been really helpful and we are seeing some momentum here for people feeling positive about the work that was done not just for Tribal Ventures but really proud of our own people for the steps that they've taken to take this path that Tribal Ventures has created for people."

Verónica Hirsch:

"You mentioned several means of engaging and updating the community on the status of the Tribal Ventures Project including the newsletter, radio broadcasts, community meetings where videos were features, the [Lakota language]. Were these various methods...were they part of a larger citizen education plan?"

Eileen Briggs:

"No. I think we were...we were looking at I think as much as it formed was our commitment to the respect we gave to our community members who gave us so many ideas in the beginning of the effort and tribal leadership and it was that continuous I guess the continued commitment to their voice and their ideas that came from the people and the respect for them that we of course needed to bring that back to them because this came from them. This came from the people so this needed to return in a good way to give them the updates, let them know what's happening and I believe that when people saw the plan when it was written that they could see themselves, they could see their families. They actually saw their quotes. We had quotes from people in there. Maybe not identified but people could see themselves in the plan and so that I guess...that commitment and respect for them was so important to us that I guess that was the underlying plan was that we would of course give this back to them, take this back to the people "˜cause a lot of times we get these grants and programs and they come and go and we don't one have the resources to do that communication to talk about the impact and the outcomes of that and so we're trying to see not only is this different money but we're trying to show our people that we can do this. We can tell our stories about what has worked, what hasn't worked and where we need to go from there and give people the opportunity to participate in that so it's not a separate effort. And I think we've modeled that."

Verónica Hirsch:

"What participation method or venue do you feel proved most effective?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think these videos have been phenomenal. I think obviously face to face meetings. We was in a small community, Thunder Butte. It's a small community of 10, 15 houses and around 45 miles from our tribal headquarters and was there a couple of...just a couple nights ago and we were just...we got the feedback. They were participating. We had 10 or so people there and the reality was people said, "˜Nobody comes out here. Nobody comes to us and tells us these things.' So they were so appreciative of the meeting, of being face to face and then I think the videos have been just incredibly effective. They were very short and concise, positive but they didn't just gloss over things. They tried to talk about the issues that we were dealing with but in a way that people could absorb and I think that those have been really effective."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. How are coalitions built between and among other Cheyenne River Sioux tribal departments and programs with the Tribal Ventures Project?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think it's happened in a number of ways. Obviously around areas of interest. We had a financial literacy, youth individual development account, effort there and that effort focused on a lot of young people so there were efforts to reach out to schools, connecting to that program. There was also an effort within the tribal government with their employees to increase financial education amongst employees. There has also then grown out of that a larger...we don't necessarily call ourselves a coalition but a group of people who are focused on workforce development coming together talking about just really what does a workforce strategy look like on this reservation but understanding that the basis of that is we need to understand each other. Programs and departments don't necessarily know what someone's role is, they have an expectation that's maybe not realistic or they don't realize there's an opportunity that they're both going after because there isn't necessarily communication. So I think that those coalitions or those coming together have helped to improve services, to help us to coordinate better. I don't at some level sometimes collaborate but I think sometimes you kind of go with just communication and coordination first and then you get to some collaboration over time. So that's the sort of effort that I think we've seen sort of outgrow with our partners. And I would say that the Tribal Ventures Partnership Board in and of itself is the kind of collaborative work between tribal department programs, nonprofit, community members, tribal leadership so that itself has its own dynamic that is impacting the kind of understanding that we need to have collectively to address issues like poverty and other issues on the reservation."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. Were any external partners included or approached in a type of coalition framework and when I say external I mean external to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I know that we worked with the...we created a Cheyenne River Chamber of Commerce and they connected to other native chamber of commerces to do... They connected to other chamber of commerces in both native communities and non-native communities to understand and educate and make connections. We also saw the South Dakota Indian Business Alliance engaged with some of the efforts with Cheyenne River as a result of our work together. We saw with a number of the work around GED attainment. We created a very successful GED program and that has built our understanding and relationship with different organizations in the state that provide similar services to better provide services on our reservation and also to improve the kind of services needed to be provided to native people."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. I'm going to transition here and ask you to in a sense predict what... What dynamic do you think would exist within the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation among the Lakota people there if the Tribal Ventures Project did not exist, had not come into being?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I moved home about the time this project emerged on the reservation so I don't have a ton of sort of previous experience but...but, I think that...we have a lot of challenges with our own trust of one another, our own sense that we can...we have great ideas but I think that we often worked in silos and I think that that was a result of very much governmental resources and scarce resources and then all of us having to sort of protect those resources. I don't think that people intentionally were trying to be territorial, I just think that you've got...that naturally started to occur. And so I think that that would have continued I think to a larger extent. And there wouldn't have been this opportunity for sort of a collective effort and reaching out to our...think of our whole reservation and not just your community or your family but we could think of us collectively. And I think intuitively we want to think of ourselves as the Lakota...Four Bands of the Lakota that live on our reservation but oftentimes when you're mired in survival and struggle and just trying to keep what you have and maintain that in the midst of much, much challenge it's difficult to think of the larger, bigger picture and I think that that's one of the things that I think has made a...we've seen an impact. And then I would just also add that the work of the tribal council over time to see that this continued on. That in and of itself... When tribal programs or funding comes and goes and you're kind of used to, "˜Well, that used to be here, it was good but it's not here anymore,' usually in three year timeframes–we had 10 years of effort and it's...we're going to be in the same boat as we look forward. Will this just end? What will we do? There's a lot of questions in front of us as a tribe but regardless of that, we've had this time to sort of stop and think together and I think that that may not have happened for...and it's hard to predict or to be able to say, "˜Well, this wouldn't have been here.' But we know that lives and resources have been changed, opportunities that weren't here before that really just made sense like, "˜Yes, we should have that,' but we never had the resources to make that happen. And we have opportunity now with our own tribal...some tribal resources that we have available now and I think this has helped to demonstrate a collective effort. Obviously I've spoken about that but I think it also demonstrates the creativity and the thoughtfulness that's necessary for effective programming and we have some resources available to us as a tribe now through some settlement money and some decisions are being made and you're hearing things like, "˜Well, we need to think that out or have a strategic plan,' and I'd like to think that Tribal Ventures would have...has influenced that but if not we may have just been acting again in a survival mode. "˜Here's some money, let's spend it. Let's not think about what...' Not that our people didn't think but I think that you just get caught up in reacting. That's all. And I think we've been able to have at least a breather and take a pause and make an effort together."

Verónica Hirsch:

"How does the Tribal Ventures Project represent Cheyenne River Sioux citizens and reflect Lakota values?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, one of the values is about respect itself and I think that the work that we've done with our partners is really about trying to meet people where they're at, be respectful of their opinion and position but also try to give this exchange an opportunity for everyone to have room to be where they're at but also emerge from that in a place of your own vision for yourself and I think we reflected that on an individual level and then the community's vision of itself and then our families and our whole economy really that vision. And I think that those kind of respecting...we're always kind of putting those lenses...asking ourselves those... We'll run into challenges, communities or projects that we got started really...many of them have been very successful but we've hit a lot of bumps in the road, things that didn't go the way we wanted them to, partnerships that didn't work out the way we thought they would. And we always come back to asking ourselves, "˜Well, what do our values tell us? How should we handle this? What should we do?' We had some contentious issues a couple of times and we really just felt like, "˜Well, we need to go there and just listen and talk to one another and understand each other.' And that in and of itself is a reflection of how we do business. We are very much committed to our communities, the historical and cultural connections that are in our communities and in our families and so when we approach communities even for a community meeting we'll say, "˜Well, who's the grandma in that community?' or "˜Who's the person that we reach out to?' "˜Well, that's who this is, this is the person but that's her nephew so you can him.' So we're very much going within the dynamics of our own community and respecting that process even who's cooking. We're going to make sure we ask appropriately for someone to cook for us and try to feed our people and do things in a way that is comfortable for them and respecting that and giving thanks. I think that that's something that we really focused on at Tribal Ventures is to be able to be appreciative and thankful for what we have and to be honest about the opportunities. That's another value of ours is honesty and being honest about things when they didn't go well and things when there's opportunities and challenges that we have to say, "˜We have to look at this. This isn't...' I always say to people, I say, "˜Well, no one's going to care about this place as much as we do and so we're the ones that are going to have to lead this change and have to be willing to listen to one another even though we disagree. We still have to have those conversations.' And I think that value of fortitude, of being something to stay with something is very much underpinning of the work that we've done to say, "˜You've got to stick with this and we've got to keep going with this because the children are depending on something to happen.' And so we're very much talking about values. We recently did a support of a couple of veterans groups who were going to be traveling across our reservation and elsewhere and so we supported them by creating these t-shirts and we wrote, "˜The Lakota Values,' on the back of the shirts and we said, "˜These are just words unless we live them.' And so we're sending a message around values and talking about that as well as we created this cultural mini-grants. We had small amounts of money that really were giving people opportunity to carry out their ideas that they felt would support and encourage a positive Lakota cultural value. So all kinds of ideas from horse rides for young men and women who wanted to learn about horsemanship but also our culture and our values "˜cause no one was teaching them that. So we supported that in a small way. Other projects...we're helping other community members think about the positive decisions and positive lifestyles about living this life and choosing to live in the wake of many suicides that we have in the community. So there were every ideas that came. People have really good ideas about promoting positive self-identity and our cultural values and so we put out a little bit of money to help to support food or t-shirts or something that they wanted to make it happen but they made it happen. And I think that that self-determination or that value of...that you know what you need to do and to support that and with this little bit of money...it was a little bit of a catalyst, it was an activity that we did but we found that people really wanted to talk about their values and it meant so many things to different people and yet as a group we will not move forward with any kind of poverty if we don't feel good about who we are, if we don't live the values that we have as a people and we don't talk about them. So I think just the process that we've engaged in with our community just sort of...it's embedded. It's real hard to pull it out and say "˜Oh, well we were talking about values on Thursday.' We live them and talk about them more directly with people to shine a light on it when we can but just to remind ourselves that we're Lakota, we need to be Lakota."

Verónica Hirsch:

"How do Cheyenne River Sioux citizens understand and define their tribal council's roles?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I think there's a couple of things I...my perspective is. I think that they have a lot of expectation of their tribal leadership to be their advocate, to be some sort of a social worker problem solver, to be a legislator, to be a diplomat, sort of ambassador for the tribe and those roles are a lot of different hats but I think because of our community and many other communities I'm sure face this, there is an expectation a lot in that social worker problem solving advocate role and so I think our community members sort of define like, "˜You're supposed to be my spokesperson.' And that's very much part of our traditional life ways that we have an [Lakota language] and you send someone up to be that head person to speak and so that's who's...even though we have a political process and elections now, it's still embedded in sort of who from that community are they putting up to speak for them. And so when you're up there and you're on tribal council, that is the expectation that you're going to be the conduit for any elected leader but a lot of times you're trying to help someone get their electricity turned back on which many elected officials in the United States do not have to deal with on a daily basis but I think that the expectation is very high for our tribal leadership and understanding those roles and responsibilities is really key because oftentimes your time is used up filling some of those hats and you're not able to focus on the legislative part or fix things on a policy level or legislate. And oftentimes, this is just my opinion but I think as a leader sometimes it's overwhelming–it is overwhelming and so I can... "˜Let me do the thing I think I can handle. I'll work on this electricity thing or this other problem that I think I can make changes and this is a whole other arena that I'm not as knowledgeable about or I haven't learned as much as I want to yet to really affect the kind of changes.' So I think that's the balance that we have facing our...when we look at our tribal elected leaders. But we as a people in our...what I've seen at home is that our people very much respect that that tribal leadership is a responsibility and they respect that. They don't agree with it a lot of times and that's okay. I don't think that's been the issue of not respecting it but I do think that they see that it could be better and they would like to see some changes. I think that's a larger see change and some things that can happen over time but we have made the IRA government system work fairly well on Cheyenne River because we are Four Bands of the Lakota, we have... Before the IRA government we were already doing sort of representative councils to make decisions around our area but what I've seen since then is that we realize that things could be improved and we want to make changes. But our leadership and our tribal citizens need to be clear about what all those roles are because I think we become mired in the role of the problem solver and the challenges because so many people are in survival mode."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. You've mentioned citizen participation in some of the Tribal Ventures Project's community meetings. You mentioned that community members expressed gratitude for having Tribal Ventures staff come to them and to really make a deliberate effort to engage them. Now this far into the timeframe of the Tribal Ventures Project have you noticed that citizen participation has increased in these type of community events?"

Eileen Briggs:

"I don't know that I've seen a huge increase. I think that social media has changed in the last 10 years for this reservation and I think that participation in face to face meetings you're kind of getting around the same number of people coming. It depends on the community. We were in a what I would call more traditional community of Green Grass recently. We had 25 people come. That's phenomenal. They have like maybe 20 houses there so we had a big turnout for that community and they very much are reflective of...they don't have as great of internet service there so they're very much communicating word of mouth, telephone, face to face works best for them so we have great participation. Other communities where there's a lot of technology and that, a younger population is using that. They're getting information in a different way. So I think that that's changed us a certain amount so I don't know if I've seen participation in that way in our community meetings. We have different Facebook groups that definitely have a lot of...it's a great place that you can stand behind your computer and have all kinds of opinions and ideas and sharing that happens with social media. And so I think that kind of participation is...we're seeing that but I don't know if we've seen the kind of participation that is sort of engaging to change things collectively in a face to face way quite as much. Not in my experience. But I think that we're ripe for it because we have the social media to gather people. I think our colleges are a nice central location as well, our tribal college so those are some places where I've seen a little bit more participation but they're a little bit more engaged. It's sort of indicative of the structure of education."

Verónica Hirsch:

"You've mentioned the changing dynamics of participation mechanisms. How do you think the Tribal Ventures Project can address those changes and maybe even harness some of let's say that youth involvement albeit that involvement takes place as you mentioned maybe behind a computer screen? Do you think there's a way to even using that means to somehow inspire or promote an increased level of let's say youth citizen participation?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Oh, definitely. I think that we see young people participating in their own way. We have a group of young people on our reservation currently that are very concerned about some issues–health issues, some environmental issues–and they have organized themselves to do some research and collectively try to advocate on that and it's a different arena than I work in every day but I watch that and I'm in awe that they have taken on these steps and I certainly can't speak to every detail of that but they're going to be participating in a research conference that we're going to be having in a few weeks and I just see them wanting to be engaged in something and I feel like the work that we've done with Tribal Ventures and I think the work that we see tribal programs and departments do, they...we certainly have not excluded that kind of participation so we're welcoming it, making room for it and opportunities for the kind of participation that we all need. And I would also make a comment around communication. I think that that's a critical issue in many, many of our communications that the communication is very low, trust is low, so is the sense of...leadership is low and I think we have these high incidents of sort of imbalance in our community and oppression and racism and things like that that we're facing but I guess I have done some understanding but I see this kind of thing that we should push down on some of those things that are really high but I think the work of really trying to grow and push up levels of trust and leadership and communication can naturally push those other things down in what I've come to understand. And so I really think that communication is a key component. And if I had a magic wand and I could say, "˜I would like to have every tribe have some significant communication tool consistent for just information and positive stories but the kind of information that...' We don't have that as consistently as I would like for our people because when you don't know, you're going to be in poverty, you're out of the loop, you don't know... If you're not related to the right person, you're not connected in some way, you can become disconnected and it can hurt, your family can continue to be disenfranchised I guess in a way, like struggling out there. And I guess I feel like any tools, whether it be a newsletter or radio or the sort of videos or trying to harness how we can use social media and other tools to try to communicate that that's sort of my own interest but I see other tribes... I watch the Confederated Tribe of the Umatilla. They have an amazing newspaper that they've had for many years. Well, they have some gaming money, they can support that and just understanding what did that sort of communications office of the tribe do and how much does it cost to run one and what kind of deliverables can they provide the people? There's always challenges with that but I just feel like that's a gap that's missing in our communities is communication and particularly from the government. So you have this continued disengagement of citizens because there's no communication, websites aren't updated, there isn't sort of anybody who's writing about what's happening that's good and we just like to talk about what didn't go well and, "˜Did you hear what they did?' And that's in every community but I feel like we have a gap there and that could really affect some change."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. The Tribal Ventures Project spearheaded a large data collection attempt to learn about the tribal community. What was happening at the community that made that particular project, that data collection project a priority?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think two things. One, we had a 10 year poverty reduction plan with the Northwest Area Foundation where we were really looking at the kind of outcomes and impact that we were making and trying to determine what would be the key indicators, what data points will we point at from 2006 to 2016 to indicate some kind of change. And of course we were looking at census data which is not reflective of Indian communities and is historically under representing our statistics for our families and demographics and we really felt like we were just...that was our only option and as much as we looked at other points where we could talk about participation outcomes and things around that, it really didn't really show kind of where the status of our families was at so I think that was one of the drivers behind that. And I think the other was just the overall dissatisfaction with the census and how it isn't good data for us as Indian people. And so we said, "˜Well, we have an opportunity to use some of the Northwest Area Foundation investment here under our evaluation to create this...some tools and so we made a decision to create a baseline dataset around our families. And we decided to do a household survey across the entire reservation surveying every fourth house on the reservation and up to five families in that home. And I think it has been a very remarkable effort. It's sort of like...sometimes I step back and I say, "˜Whoa! What did we do?' Because we got in deep in families. We got participation from 819 families, from 520 some households across the reservation, both native and non-native, drove every road on the reservation, used our own tribal members to do the surveying, got three attempts at every house. Our methodology is very solid and our sample size is amazingly large. But that dataset has created a baseline about lots of information. We asked over 160 some questions around land, around their home, around the demographics or the people and their household characteristics. Were people a veteran, what was their highest level of education at this point, how many children were in the house, what were their ages? We asked questions around income and expenses for their home. How much money do you spend a year on birthdays? How much money...do you...who do you trust to lend money to or who asks you to lend money? Do you trust banks? Lots of questions. And then we asked a lot of cultural resource type of questions. Do you hunt traditional foods? Do you pick traditional foods? Do you participate in cultural activities? What do you...how many times a year? Lots of questions. We asked a lot of very quantitative questions as well as qualitative questions. We asked questions about...qualitative like what do you think the hardest thing is about being Lakota today and that kind of information. 819 families participating and giving us their input and providing us what we call the Cheyenne River Voices Research Project. It is the voices of our people. It is an opportunity to now have a tool. We have an executive summary of that that we've created to help our tribal leaders have some direct feedback and what we call backup. We like backup for their...maybe your gut check says, "˜Well, yeah, of course we spend a lot of money, leaves the reservation to shop at these larger discount stores.' But what percentage of our people shop at that and we can tell that story. We have an actual number. How many people have children in their home? How many people have a cell phone? There's so many questions that we asked. We're basically sitting on...we call it a treasure chest of data and information for our people. I don't think we've even begun to understand even how we can use that because it is fairly fresh. It's been in the last year. But we are definitely seeing people saying, "˜This is a tool. This is something I can use to design program or this is a tool we can use to support grant efforts, this is a tool we can use to strategically think if we moved up or down in our efforts.' And of course we need to do the research again to survey to have some sort of comparison data and also ask similar questions that might be asked in the national survey but I think that it's really...it's changed our data, changed our data that we're used to accepting from the census. For instance, the census said, when we started this project in 2012 that we had around 6,109 people that live on our reservation within the two counties that encompass our reservation and we did...our Voices research came with 10,527 people living on our reservation. So we changed our population number and it was tribally driven data. This data was driven and...driven...collected by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe on behalf of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, it's their data, tribally collected, the questions we wanted to ask, the kind of things that we wanted to know about our own community with our own nuances and we're so grateful to the 800 and some families that participated in the Voices research. We're so grateful. And so we've been taking that back out to the communities and sharing with them what we found out and people so appreciate that. They're like, "˜Wow, you really were listening to us.' And so we haven't even...we still have so much work to do but that just kind of gives you an overview of the Voices research and the work that we've done to really try to capture the story and be able to tell the experience of our families."

Verónica Hirsch:

"You mentioned how the Voice project permitted the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to exercise sovereignty in data collection and arguably will be able to exercise that same measure of sovereignty in data interpretation. With that in mind, how do you think the data that has been collected can impact or influence tribal governance systems, whether it's happening currently or however far into the future?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think we can do a number of things that this sort of data collection, that we're capable of doing that, that we have...not just capable but we have the willingness and the strategic forethought to do that and I think governance systems can be responsive to those sorts of notions and that that sort of becomes to be expected. Well, we're supposed to do that, Cheyenne River is known for that, we've don't that. And I think when you talk about governance systems, systems that often obviously in high poverty, high areas of struggle and reactivity, it is very...the governmental system is only reflective of that life and experience of its people. And so I think it can only be and I think that these opportunities that we have with the Voices data, with the work of many partners in this effort has really...has a chance to influence the governmental systems. We can think through these processes, we come to expect that we should have some sort of baseline information, something to compare it to. We can help educate each other about what are the realities and then design and frankly evaluate our efforts more effectively. I think that we oftentimes are just...we're just trying to work grant to grant. That's no different than paycheck to paycheck. So we're working grant to grant and we're trying to say, "˜Well, what does this...how does this grant fit within our strategic effort? What do we want...what do we want for this population that we're trying to serve or for our future? And I think we have some sense of that but I think this data can help us pinpoint that a little bit more. I think that this data can change the governmental governance systems in a way that looks at our policies, that looks at our human capacity, human capital so to speak and see our families in a new way and figure out how do we move our families forward so that our government can move forward."

Verónica Hirsch:

"With that in mind, how can the Tribal Ventures Project excuse me, the Voices Project, really promote those in tribal government as well as tribal citizens to get onboard with this idea of data collection, of realizing its significance, its importance and its relevance to the tribal community?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Well, I think they see themselves in the Voices data. They see, "˜This is reflective, this is data that we're interested in that will impact.' I think that a lot of times our people haven't been asked, not asked relevant questions that are relevant to their life, to their own culture, to our own way of life in the middle of the prairie, wherever we live and these sorts of efforts...oftentimes data collection is often done by people from outside and that data gets collected and then carried away and we don't ever see the results of that and I think this kind of effort we're keeping at some level inside the camp and we made a lot of work to make sure that when this data was released that our own people held onto it, sat with it, looked around it themselves and there's so much more. But we know that other tribes, other organizations are interested in what we've done. We are sharing it to the best of our ability but the focus is inside the camp. And our focus is to make sure that we actually see this data being utilized to impact the changes and I think that's what will engage people because data does... Decisions are made every day that affect our people based on data and if we aren't deciding and getting that data ourselves, somebody else is going to do it and we may have nothing to do with it and I think that we are showing here that we need to be involved, we need to create, we need to drive the bus as I say. We're driving...we need helpers. I don't have statisticians on every street...every corner at home but we have helpers who can come and help make those things a reality and a partnership that can help get us what we need. But, we have to know and stop and figure out what our intention is around data. What do we need to know? What are the kind of questions that we need to be asking ourselves so we can move forward?"

Verónica Hirsch:

"Can Lakota values be employed to educate the tribal citizenry about what data is, what it is, what it does and why we care about it?"

Eileen Briggs:

"Yes, I think Lakota values and our way of life...I think we've always been data collectors as people. I think that we have over time...obviously we've survived...survival and problem solving in a survival mode is always analyzing data, looking at information. We don't call it data. We talk about stories. We know the stories and we make decisions based on the stories that we know of our families and the experiences they're having and we feel like that's reflective of the situations that we need to impact. And so we've been doing that. I think that Lakota values are really...it's not so much values but knowing who we are as Lakota and keeping...or knowing who we are and living those...that experience of historically. But this isn't necessarily new. It's a new way of doing things, a sort of a more modern way of understanding that yes, we've been collecting data a lot of times for federal programs and federal requirements for compliance primarily but not for strategic direction and I think we are in a position right now in Indian Country to get a hold of that and to take a more of a proactive and I think strategic approach to collecting that data, looking at that data ourselves. Either the data we've already been sending to wherever and understanding it and analyzing it better so we can make better programmatic and evaluative decisions but also collecting additional data. But that's a process. Data isn't a priority for everyone. They think, "˜Well, that's just the way we've done it all these years.' But that's because of the generational experience with the federal government compliance and data requirements. It's not something that we have been...that hasn't been invested in. Tribal govern...federal government has given tribal government any experience and expertise and technical assistance to develop our own data collection systems. We now are seeing where that needs to...we are wanting to make that happen and trying to go in those directions and I think that's the effort, that's the opportunity that we see that are our cultural values. We need to make decisions based on information that came from us not on information someone else is deciding about us and that's...data is power and data and power money, they all go together and we need to be sovereign of that. We need to be understanding our own data. We need to be able to design mechanisms and ways to collect that data so that we are the ones determining our future."

Verónica Hirsch:

"Thank you. That's all the time we have today on today's episode of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations please visit NNI's Indigenous Governance Database website which can be found at igovdatabase.com. Thank you for joining us."

Rudy Ortega, Jr.: Asserting Sovereignty and Self-Governance

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Rudy Ortega, Jr., then Vice President and citizen of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, shares his experiences leading his community and engaging in Fernandeño Tataviam self-governance in spite of his nation not yet being a state or federally recognized tribal government.  Vice President Ortega's years-long advocacy for the rights off Fernandeño Tataviam citizens and participation in tribal constitution creation demonstrate the means some Native nations and leaders have used to assert tribal sovereignty within the cities, counties, and states in which they reside.

Resource Type
Citation

Ortega, Rudy Jr., "Asserting Sovereignty and Self-Governance," Interview, Leading Native Nations interview series, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, December 05, 2014. 

Veronica Hirsch:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host Veronica Hirsch. On today’s program we are honored to have with us Rudy Ortega, Jr. Rudy currently serves as the Vice President of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians in San Fernando, California, and as the Chairman of the Los Angeles City and County Native American Indian Commission. Rudy, welcome.”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Thank you.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Good to have you with us today.”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“It’s a pleasure to be here.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“I’ve shared a little bit about who you are but why don’t you start by telling us a bit more about yourself.”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Sure. I’m the sixth son of my father, Rudy Ortega, Sr., who was tribal Captain, Chairman of the tribe for five decades.

I’m the sixth son. I have sisters from him as well. Two of them are from San Ines, from his first wife. My father was married three times and today as growing up in the community I was beside him for many years and in 1976 he served on the Indian Commission, two years after I was born and then followed his footsteps from there as I was being raised from him and he pretty much inspired me. He was kind of my role model in leading the tribe and not just our tribe itself but our community and that’s where I got the insight or inspiration of doing the services and working for the community and from there that’s where I then later served on the Indian Commission in 2002. So I serve on multiple boards besides the Commission itself, an organization. I’m also the Executive Director for our nonprofit Pukúu Cultural Community Services where we provide services out to the community.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. Can you briefly share with us some of the Fernandeño Tataviam community’s history and specifically as part of that history what does the term California Historical Tribe, what does that designation mean for the Fernandeño Tativam?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Well, the history of our people, Tataviam, we’re one of the tribes in Los Angeles County. There are several other tribes and it’s, today it’s not just one tribe in California, we work in multiple bands and villages. So a lot of our villages are autonomous. We had Captains and each village had four Captains. So as, through historical times from the mission era to the Mexican era and now to the United States era, we collaborated our villages and stayed united that way and so we have the Tataviam Band, which we use the Fernandeño which describes what mission we’re from in San Fernando out of the LA area and a lot of, and today we only have three surviving families from all the villages that from historical times to today. And as a historical tribe in California what that means is that it gives us the power and the right to interact with inter-government, state government, local government and also participate on some cultural resources artifacts or things that may come up pertaining to the tribe as far as ancestral burial grounds, artifacts and it weighs us, allows us to weigh in and gives us our right to consultation and protection of cultural resources. So that way the tribe can retain its rights and sovereignty and be able to engage in those local governments and be influential about the policy making and the rights to protect the tribe’s role in the communities.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you for your answer. What does the classification as a non-federally recognized tribe mean for the Fernandeño Tataviam?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“It means that today although the United States fails to acknowledge the tribe as an American Indian tribe, it means that the tribe doesn’t have a trust agreement with the United States government, it’s not under the rule, it’s not under governance of the United States. It doesn’t have an MOU in short, a memorandum of understanding between the United States government and our tribe. So we’re pretty much kind of like outside of a foreign government within a government and even though we’re in our own homelands, the United States still looks at us as a, in short terms like I said, foreign government or hostile government depending on the role or actions that our leadership takes. So that’s the term of non-recognized and what the tribe is doing is seeking acknowledgement so that we can have a seat at the table with the federal government agencies as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs so we can advocate for more resources and benefits for the tribe itself. Without that the tribe seeks its own resources, innovative ways to bring funding to the tribe and protects and maintains our identity as American Indian people. Without non-recognition, with the classification of non-recognized, our people are limited to identification as Indian people when they go to a federal agency for services or to Indian Health Services, they’re turned away because they don’t come from a federally recognized tribe. So the tribe’s constantly pursuing that and that’s where the avenue of regaining acknowledgement is very supportive but is also not the ends to all means in the sense that the tribe still needs to lead its governance and protect the sovereignty of the people and identification of its own people as well.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“You mentioned that the Fernandeño Tataviam community is in the process of seeking federal acknowledgement or in this case really re-acknowledgement. Can you describe where the community is at in that process?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We’re at the, under the Office of Federal Acknowledgement list of Ready for Active Consideration and that list pretty much states that our petition has been completed and verified by the Office of Acknowledgement to proceed and move to the next category on their list as far as active consideration which means that they will continue to, at that point in time they will begin the review process which is mandated under the federal register, the timeframe, the two year process of the public hearings, the review of our documentation, our petition for classification of a federal acknowledgement. So that’s where we stand today.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“From your perspective, in what ways and to what extent does the designation of either current, non-federally recognized status or federally recognized status impact the Fernandeño Tataviam or does it impact?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We contemplate that many times in our tribal community as far as the impact or non-impact to our community and truthfully as a community that’s surrounded by the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, we are limited as far as access to as I mentioned earlier federal housing under Indian housing, Health Services, welfare assistance and just to be the fact saying you’re Indian, checking the box and saying you’re Indian and going for those services that the members may desire to have. Without that we are used to just going to the regular public services of the county and denouncing our Indian heritage because when a member checks the box off, the public agency or the county agency will say, ‘You need to go over to Indian Health Services or Indian Welfare,’ and then when that member goes over there, they get turned away because they don’t come from a federally recognized tribe. So that’s the impact of not having federal acknowledgement. The non-impact towards it is that the tribe today, we’ve written our own constitution, we’ve created a nonprofit, we’ve created a business and under the guidance and leadership of our own people. We have no interference from the United States government, we listed our tribal as a mutual benefit corporation in order to put our funds into a bank account. So we sought out innovative ways to continue our existence as a tribal community, as a tribal government without the interference of the United States government. But as far as I said, just to have a further reach as far as identification and it’s, that’s the process of federal acknowledgement. And some people today have returned to more modern contemporary White tribes who are fighting or existing why don’t the tribe have federal acknowledgement. The question we always receive is why don’t you have federal acknowledgement and the simple fact is that we’re in Los Angeles. At the time in 1892 the Mission Relief Act, when the tribe was being reviewed and moved into trust lands, the local politicians, the mayor of Los Angeles, the founding mayor of San Fernando, the City of San Fernando didn’t want American Indian tribes there and other folks didn’t want American Indian tribes there because the Indian people were sitting on land that had natural resources such as water or gas or minerals that were useful for the communities and to have a tribe exist in Los Angeles was detrimental to their profit, detrimental to their view of American history, American dream. And that’s why today when we advocate to our youth today, we’re not actually telling them to go get education and become, and stretch out for the American dream because we’re not looking for the American dream. We’re looking for our own community dream. We’re looking for our tribal nation dream as far as sustaining and building our nation itself. So therefore that’s the impact that we have and the non-impact of it and having, not having federal acknowledgement just gave us more of the power, more of the fire in our bellies to say, ‘Hey, this is something that we need to build up regardless of acknowledgement or non-acknowledgement. And if acknowledgement never comes our way, ’ We found innovative ways as I said. We created a business, a nonprofit to continue, to maintain and to look towards our traditional cultural. We lost so much because we had to go underground. Within our own community, within our own homelands we had to not say we’re Indian, we couldn’t speak our language, we couldn’t sing our songs, we had to work in American society. Our ancestors or prior to that when factories came into Los Angeles, gold mines were being built, we had to work in those resources and we had to say that we’re simply Mexican or Caucasian just for the fact of survival. So we adapted ourselves and from that we maintained a hidden society within the society itself.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. Can you discuss the ways in which the Fernandeño Tataviam and/or other non-federally recognized Native nations politically interact with the State of California and do such inter-governmental relationships exist? And if not, why do you think that is the case?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Many tribes in California who don’t have the federal designation do interact with California and it’s two limited statures. One as I mentioned the cultural resources. Many of the tribes have an opportunity to participate with the California Historical Commission in California which is the lead agency to oversee cultural resources. So we get to engage in policymaking as far as protecting and enhancing tribal rights over cultural resources and ancestral territory. Other areas we do depending on county to county, the level of participation. Some counties welcome tribes to engage with them and even so a federally recognized tribe will have trouble engaging with counties. From what I hear other counties are not so reluctant, not so easily approachable to engage with the tribes regardless of their federal or non-federal status. They just don’t, they still 40, 50 years back in my words I like to say they haven’t matured yet to understand that we’re living in a new century where racism should be limited but so far many of these counties still are not engaging with these tribal communities to hear from them and these areas that we’re talking about is protection of Indian children when they go into ICWA, my tribe has limited participation depending up to the judges. In Los Angeles, some judges are very friendly and approachable and allow the tribes to engage and we took even that as a different approach. We’re saying, ‘Okay, you don’t acknowledge the tribe or the tribe’s not on the federal list but we’re an organized community of organized families. We’re the extended family of this one child and we wish to participate and give insight to where we feel that this child should be placed or how they should be placed so they can maintain its, the child can maintain their cultural and traditional values within the community.’ So that’s one area where many tribes that are non-federally recognized get to participate. And again it’s limited because once the judge waives is the tribe federally acknowledged and the tribe gets too advanced or too, with too much requests or too many demands the judge can simply excuse the tribe out and say, ‘The tribe’s not federally recognized so we’re not going to no longer hear from them.’ So it’s limited to how much participation we have in the State of California as a non-recognized tribe.”

Veronica Hirsch:

 ”I want to transition now to some nation building questions as we’re terming them that are specific to Fernandeño Tataviam community and with that I’ll begin by asking how do you define nation building personally and to piggyback with that, what does that mean for the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, this idea of nation building?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Well, nation building, honestly it began back in 1950s when my father and many of the elders who passed before him. Back then we said we rebuilt the tribe. In retrospect we didn’t rebuild the tribe or we didn’t build the tribe, we rebuilt, what we’ve done is restructure how our organization or how our tribe was organized in the community. And we needed to reestablish ourselves or establish us more strongfully with our current situation of non-federal acknowledgement with no lands in trust, no resources coming our way, no one supporting our community outside our own selves so our tribal members are the ones who supported this community, our tribal members who have the passion and desire to have this continue solidly from historical times to today and the desire to know their heritage and traditions is where we started beginning our nation building or enhancing I’d say more than rebuilding or anything like that. In the 1950s they looked at bylaws, regular corporation bylaws, rules to write down and say, ‘These are the governing rules which all our members should participate.’ And the reason why our leaders back then looked at that is because that’s what western society wanted and that’s what the United States government looked at, that’s what the county understood. They understood rules and policy that were written down and documented and saying, ‘How are you leading your people or how are you following certain rules? How can we engage with you? If we talk to you one day as an Indian tribe, your story changes the next day,’ and that’s how they felt. So my father and many of the leaders said, ‘Well, we need to document our history. We need to document our government leadership, our rules, who should speak for us and this way we can point back to it and say this is how we govern ourselves.’ So as we move forward through the decades, the 1970s we solicit or petitioned for lands to be moved into a reservation, into trust for us and we were denied and it says we were denied in 1892. And then we later sought for federal acknowledgement in 1995 where we went back to community again. We actually went back to the elders first and said, ‘Are we going to the next step of soliciting or petitioning federal acknowledgement,’ and they said yes, to try for that. And that’s when we reached out to our general membership in our tribe and said, ‘This is what we’re doing, what we want to have done,’ and the consensus from all of them was to proceed forward and to pursue federal acknowledgement and to continue building our tribal communities. And one of the things they asked for was resources. We, they wanted to know, they were limited in jobs, the low paying jobs, they needed more education, they needed scholarships so they sought for us as leaders or back then as leaders to pursue and build our tribal governments regardless of our federal acknowledgement status or not. And so that’s where we began building our nation from there. Rebuilding, actually enhancing the building. Like I said, it’s more of enhancing it, bringing it to the next future and as we’re doing that we’re looking at local and I said county and state governments. And since they have a ton of code, laws, policies that governs themselves and that’s how they understand, that’s where they’re at as far as communicating and their successors after that. And so the tribe sought to do the same as well so that we can have an easier transition. So when we’re speaking to the county, they can understand us and we can understand them and there’s a set of rules that we all can follow and guide ourselves with it. So that’s how we looked at as nation building is going back to the community, speaking with them and also not just our own community but the community that surrounds us as well so that we can engage with them more extensively.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. Based upon your experiences, what other unique challenges are there for being a council member of the Fernandeño Tataviam realizing that its status is currently non-federally recognized? Are there any advantages to that status? You’ve touched upon some of them that you’ve been able to work within and around and at times between certain very defined structures that place an emphasis upon codes, regulations and policies. Within that defined structure, have you found other ways to be innovative and have you experienced unique successes because of your current status?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We’ve, in a lot of ways I think it’s up to the leaders who are elected and appointed to these positions and myself from what I’ve seen the ones before me and the ones that are coming after me and the ones that are being elected today including myself it’s confidence and also belief behind it as well. And when you walk into a meeting and are wishing to deploy a policy that your own people decided on or make, you had to have confidence behind it to advocate for it. And in myself it’s more of getting to the table and hoping and soliciting and petitioning in a way that the gentleman across the table will or woman across the table will listen and engage with you and be able to come to a solution. And I think the one avenue that we saw that I see that we’re successful was to work with the federal, national, The Angeles National Forest and to repatriate, we buried two remains that it took my tribe, another tribe, a nearby recognized tribe and along with the federal agency to successfully rebury remains that were unearthed for approximately 40 years and that was the success. And we continue to do that. More recently my tribe with the same tribe that we advocated before were able to successfully negotiate half an acre of property within county property as designated area for reburials, for future reburials and reburials that we currently have that need to go back into the earth. So that’s the success. As being a leader in the community, advocating for the people, it takes a lot of dialogue because as you’re dealing with ancestral remains, you’re not only going to the county in this case to request that it be reburied back to the location they were found or nearby but also working with another tribe who has federal acknowledgement as well going back to your own community and elders of council that you had to speak to ask for their desires and wishes and then go back to the general membership of the tribe and ask, ‘What way or method shall we rebury these remains and is this the location you wanted to have it go back to?’ So it’s a lot of contemplating and a lot of working, a lot of negotiating, a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings for us to get to this point in time and it’s a lengthy process that takes several months to years to complete. So that’s a success that I will say that as a leadership and serve as my capacity as a leader the road that I must take is that you’ve got to be able to be open minded, to listen, maybe put your own ideas and thoughts and put them up to the people and say this is how you view things will work successfully and be able to articulate that back to the community. And at the same time listen to their wishes and demands as well and be able to deliver their message back to whoever you’re negotiating with or whoever you’re discussing with.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. On that topic of leaders responsibility to the community, how does the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians community choose their leaders and hold them accountable?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Well, in 2002 we established our constitution and prior to that it was really done very traditionally where we have selected community leaders by through our leaders or through community, through families who selected their spokesperson that would designate their person to speak on behalf of the families. In 2002 when we wrote our constitution we now go through election process and through our election process we elect our tribal president, treasurer as a whole through the entire community and then we select our legislative persons through districts to two different districts. One that would encompass the San Fernando Valley and the other that would encompass outside the San Fernando Valley. And those members living in those district areas will vote for those elected officials, five in district one and four in district two and then that will comprise our legislative body of nine people. Then our executive would be the president, treasurer, the vice president would be the one selected from our tribal legislative branch. They would choose their own vice president, they would choose the vice president for the tribe and the secretary and then those two will serve on the executive committee as well. So that’s how today we politically choose our officials and that’s how we explain to the rest of the world and the rest of the outside governments how we elect our officials and they understand that process because they’re familiar with a similar process to how they choose the leaders today. We choose a county supervisor, a City Council member for a city so they understand that process. One process they don’t understand is not written in our constitution is how we still go by our traditional ways of having our spokespersons and they are selected again by their family members. They speak on behalf of the family and they bring the information back to the community, to our elected officials. So the way we hold our elected official accountable and responsible for the duties is that one we do have a general election, vote for items that wishes to be heard by the people or move on action. We have monthly meetings that both bodies have to report on the status of what they’re working on and then the people get to address what items they find or seek that needs to be worked on or addressed. And any question that the community member wishes to find information or status or a desire for an item to be worked on, it’s brought up to the monthly meetings to ensure that our elected officials are addressing or communicating or moving forward on a project or an item that they may have a question or a query on.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You’ve given us a brief description of Fernandeño Tataviam traditional governance and also explained the context in which those elements of traditional governance remain and apply to today. I want to ask you why, what was the choice to not include a description of Fernandeño Tataviam traditional governance within your current constitution?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We really looked at it extensively. We, before coming up with our final constitution there was 10 different drafts and one of the drafts did encompass it. And as we were going through it, some of the elders felt that once you’ve written it down it’s that forever and a lot of traditional ways it didn’t stay forever. It was, the spokesperson may have a direction and the way they spoke about it was it’s like the river, it changes path over time. And once you’ve written it up, we become like the United States government where, or any government who writes government up, writes up the rules and you can’t change it unless you go by everyone’s opinion or changes and that’s not tradition. It’s not easily flexible, it doesn’t bend like the trees in the wind as they expressed back then. So by writing it up you lose a lot of the sensitivity, the common sense, the traditional values of living life. One, life itself is not written in stone and that’s what they expressed to us and so by writing our traditional way in the constitution we lose that value. We already lost so much in oral tradition, whatever was remaining must be handed down and traditionally passed on. So we redid it in a different way where we have cultural classes at one point in time or we continue to have them or we, certain people are mentored how these traditions are handed or passed on. So we prefer to have it that way than have it structured and written to a constitution where it may be followed, may not be followed and it’s a rule that shouldn’t be documented in such a forceful way, that’s the way they saw it.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. Can you discuss, you referred to it briefly in some previous answers that you provided but could you discuss more fully how Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians relates with other tribal communities and governments?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We engage in multiple levels. Our community members, I would say the best avenue of communicating with other tribal, with other tribal communities because we participate in cultural traditional dances and songs, participation and engagement in festival activities and that’s the more natural way, the more harmony way. Politically, we may see different points of agenda or interest or discussion so we engage in consultation with one another, we discuss items. Just recently we’re working on two projects that involve communities from both federal and non-federal tribes to participate and engage on reburial of ancestral remains on the villages, locations. Overlapping villages was also an interesting discussion as far as who’s ancestors are more tied to a village than the other but those are, those are discussions and well-deserved discussions because that means everyone has a very passionate and hard decision, interest into it. If no one cared, then there won’t be no argument or discussion over it. But other projects are discussion on protection, future protection of artifacts and decisions on whether or not to, how we protect them. And so that’s where, how we engage. So we have the levels of tiers of engagement politically. There’s that formal way of discussing and sitting down to the table and discussing politics and discussing agenda items and others are just community engagement in participating where the tribe will invite us to their activities, festivities and vice versa, we invite them to ours as well.” 

Veronica Hirsch:   

“You made an important point about these different levels and means and even applications of engagement distinguishing that between a political form of engagement and more as you mentioned the harmony way that culturally informed form of engagement. In your opinion, how do those differing forms of engagement complement each other?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“I would say the way they’re complementing each other is that understanding that there’s a common denominator behind it in the sense that we’re all Indian people and regardless of whatever the level of participation we have, that our communities are always engaging and participating with one another and the livelihood of our future generation will coexist. And we’re able to bring to the table discussions that may surface at one point or another and we know what communities to participate with. If it needs to be a political item or an item that becomes a political item we know where the items or leaders who will be discussing such actions and as far as a community it just means that at one point in time we all come together, we break bread together and we have a good time as far as having our communities engage with one another with song and dance.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Looking back now what do you wish you knew before you first began serving on your nation’s elected council?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“That’s a difficult, for myself a difficult question. Coming from one of the sons of my father and I guess it was always looked upon that from his children or my other siblings that we, this is the role you take or as it was said to me by elders that mentored me, ‘You’re not asked to or you’re not put in the position that you want to be in. You’re in the position because you were selected to be in and for myself seeking out, that’s a question I looked at and contemplated quite a bit is what was it that I would have known prior. I think the best thing to do is or say is to engage more with the elders than I have in the past. I was mentored by mostly all of them and spoke with them and making sure that their visions or questions were sought out but as far as understanding or questioning of, it’s real, difficult for me to answer because I was taught that I’m in this position because I was asked to be in here and to serve in here as this position. That’s the, I think that would be the only way I can answer that question.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“On that point of being asked to serve in a position of leadership versus an individual seeking leadership or political recognition for himself or herself, can you discuss how that viewpoint of being asked by the community, how does that tie into some of these elements of Fernandeño Tataviam traditional governance that you’ve mentioned previously?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“I think me being asked is along the lines of the traditions. When I was asked to serve, I was 17 years old and sitting with the elder’s council. Well, actually with the tribal council which had the elders at the table at the same time and this was a discussion of seeking acknowledgement for the tribe itself. And at that time I was the only 17 year old in the room. A lot of the elders at that point in time said they have put a lot of energy in and looked towards me as the new, young energy that can help continue and enhance the tribe. So being asked to, was along the lines very traditional along that ways and someone who’s seeking federal, seeking to serve in the community, I never really asked why they would want to serve but more so we embraced it in a way as they are seeking it we sit down and counsel them and hope to give them as much information as possible so that they can become great leaders to serve the community and also to give back to the community to make sure that they are listening to community’s wishes as well.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You mentioned previously how in 2002 the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians adopted a constitution and you’ve already discussed a bit what prompted the nation to adopt a written constitution. Are there any other factors other than the ones that you’ve provided that you believe served as motivation for the community choosing to go this written constitution route?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“There are several factors. One factor is the fact of seeking federal acknowledgement, engaging with local governments, having outside governments understand our ways so this way we can hand them a written document and they can understand how we function and work. That really supported our concept as our own nation. But more importantly it was internally. As in every community, there’s always difference of opinion. We can always agree to disagree. So we had families, we are three families in the tribe and sometimes even within the family itself disagreed. You have siblings who didn’t see eye to eye so families didn’t really participate, didn’t feel they had a voice. Under one person’s leadership or another person’s leadership and they fought to be who will be the main person in charge of the tribe and since traditional ways wasn’t, it’s not going to be documented, it wasn’t going to be documented and they always felt strong with traditional ways, we thought that writing a constitution that people can agree onto and understand that that elected officials will be the way we appoint our people to lead the tribe in the political arena, not in the traditional way, and that’s how we kept our traditional way, our songs and dances. Families can teach their own children, they can engage in social events outside of a political arena and the political arena we can always elect our own officials. They can determine who should become our leader and those who are seeking it, they can desire if the people choose to vote for them or not. We found it easier. This way we can break down the barriers of internal fighting and come to a more cohesive way of electing our folks to leadership rather than well, from what I understand the old ways [people would argue] ‘no one appointed that person to be leader of our tribe or my family, this is our leader of the tribe’ and that was a discussion prior to the constitution. And today now that they understand the constitution’s in effect, we all get an opportunity to vote for our main leader of the tribe and they get to lead us and hopefully and they have, they’re hold to the standard. Like I said earlier, we can ask them questions every month, daily and give us progress reports, reports of all their activities and hold them accountable. Under our constitution and under our tribal code as well.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You mentioned how in this process of adopting a written constitution that there was a concerted effort to engage members of various families, of the three main families that comprise the Fernandeño Tataviam and I would ask you I guess for more information on that point, specifically what process, whether they were formal or informal, what processes were used to engage the citizens about their constitution?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“The formal process it’s difficult. You can’t put our tribal people into a presentation or a PowerPoint, very lengthy lectures. They want to know pretty much the blunt of why we’re writing such a document and the constitution as we’ve gone through it the leaders who were coming up with the drafts were sitting down with the attorneys, the UCLA attorneys that assisted in drafting our constitution in a way that, we looked at it in many different avenues but one thing we wanted to make sure that our constitution was something that the people would vest into, understand, be part of so we had to translate from what the attorneys were speaking, their lingual, even for us. I would get lost. I had to pull up a dictionary and find out what the heck they were talking about at certain times. Not immediately in the meeting but after I left the meeting I was like, ‘Okay, let me see what they’re referring to.’ And translate it to make sure that it didn’t come from them, it wasn’t the attorney’s vision of writing the constitution but it was the tribe itself. And so we had meetings to discuss it and we handed out drafts of the constitution. Don’t know honestly if everyone read it. They probably just saw a ton of text and paper, outline, red outline but I know that some folks engaged with us and in the public forum not everyone spoke but once we broke off and just had a regular discussion, one on one folks would come up to the leaders and discuss their points of view of the constitution. There was other times when we had the attorneys in the room no one would speak at times and I didn’t know why. So it was just engaging in different ways. And the way we’ve held our hearing listening sessions of the constitution was in community family homes, in certain backyards more of a potluck style and engage with them that way. If we’d try to have like a hall rented, literally no one would show up. They thought it was too formal, too rigid but having it in someone’s backyard and having everyone there at the same time having some traditional songs and dances carry on during the time of consulting with the constitution was more productive than to have a formal method of engagement with the community.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“And it sounds like that these strategies and approaches that you used to educate Fernandeño Tataviam citizens were more leaning as you said less rigid formality and more so drawing upon that traditional governance structure and that ability to relate, as you mentioned that these are listening sessions regarding the constitution. In your opinion, were these strategies, both the formal and informal, were they successful and to what degree?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“I would say they were successful in the sense of crafting up the constitution in a way that encompassed the visions of our people and I have to be honest, it wasn’t 100 percent successful ‘cause today, even today we go back and wanted to change our constitution that best serves the people itself and even though we had these sessions or listening sessions we’re now coming onto a new generation of Tataviam citizens who don’t recall the time when we had these listening sessions or meetings with the folks and a lot of them were done with predominately elders and that’s where the traditional ways kind of doesn’t work with the more modern ways and now our new generations are more in tune with today’s modern technology and modern ways that the elders who were consulting, were engaging, a lot of them have passed and so it’s more of a reeducation of our constitution. So the success of it would be the fact that we have a constitution that we follow and the fact that we get to practice a political authority and the people have the power to engage with the leadership and be able to address their interests or points. More successful of it is in our constitution that our leadership got to open up enrollment for the tribe which we took out the word enrollment. We felt that enrollment meant that you’re already part of something and you’re in but with our government status, we’re talking about registration, they had to register with the tribe to become a citizen of the tribe and engage within that and this way the families who didn’t understand the registration or the enrollment process got to come in later on and enroll. So many folks thought that because you have blood already you didn’t have to document your documentation with the tribe and so that’s a success as through over the decade of having this constitution we got to change our method of registering our tribal members, identifying our tribal members, educating them on the procedure of registration and be able to vote in the tribe itself and as they go through the constitution they get to learn how much power they have with the tribe and how they can select their leaders, how they can voice their concerns to the legislative body and how they can have the tribe champion maybe their concerns, maybe something they had an issue with in the outside community that they needed to address and by using our constitution or bylaws or of any method to engage with the tribal leadership and to ensure that they are voicing out their concerns to the communities as well.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You mentioned this idea of educating and in fact reeducating this younger generation of tribal citizens regarding the constitution, regarding not only its history but also its practice and purpose. You also mentioned the importance of being specific in language and in using language that is relatable and understandable to the tribal citizens. I want to ask, is there a means in place whether it’s formal or informal, is there a means or method in place to continue this idea, this process of reeducating tribal citizenry regarding the Fernandeño Tataviam Constitution?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Right now the place that we’ve sought to seek is firstly the folks who are registering newly to the tribe. We give them our constitution and that gives us the opportunity to hold a conference or a session. In our constitution we have it written that we have one general meeting throughout the year and kind of that’s where a bit of our own traditional ways is written in there, kind of tucked in there because in that general meeting anything goes. You can, if you didn’t like the tribal president you can vote for a new tribal president in that meeting. But that’s the traditional way of it and that’s a time where it can take place. So at that point in time we can, we take advantage of it to address the people of our rules, of our laws, what rights they have and along with that we also have another section, we have public hearings on budget. And so they get to listen or follow ‘cause that’s where everyone will like to come in is follow the money, is address their concerns and be able to engage with it. When we first started this process, a lot of our tribal members didn’t engage and they’re now coming around to engage and realizing that the constitution does hold weight in the tribe, that the bylaws that we write, the code, does hold weight and that we follow it and is ensuring that we enforce these rules to ensure that there is a checks and balances within our government system rather the old way of one family leading the tribe only or one person is more favorable. We’re all family members so you can’t really use the nepotism card. Everyone is related one way or another. So this way they can engage and that’s the point in time where at each sectional block we educate our members of the rules, of the laws. This is where it says that you can participate in the tribe at a certain point in time to discuss funds, a certain point in time to discuss anything you want is the general council meeting of the people. And also we have, outside of that we have our cultural activities that we have coming up. In winter we have winter social gathering where we celebrate the winter solstice and Christmas. And we bring a little bit of tribal government into it just stating, ‘Here’s our rules, here’s our laws.’ Not intensively because they’re there to have a great time but a way to just ensure that there is a book, there’s rules and that if they ever want it they can go and pick it up and read it and discuss it and if they have a question about it because we always look for their opinion. And sometimes they’ll give us the opinion without reading through the constitution but say, ‘Is there something, ’, especially from elders. I have several elders that will always come up to me every time they see me, every chance they have and say, ‘Why aren’t you doing this for the tribe?’ or, and it’s amazing because they’re very innovative. Even though they’re thinking very modernly these elders are in their 90s and late 80s and they’re saying, ‘The tribe should have a hedge fund where members of the tribe will contribute and anyone who contributes to it could have a share of this fund and anyone who takes out from it will have to repay it.’ So these are the thoughts that they’re thinking about in which we have to go back and say, ‘Okay, how are we going to make this function? How are we going to make this work?’ And we tried it numerous times but it hasn’t gotten passed yet but each time they say, ‘How come that hasn’t passed or moved on it?’ So this is a way that we get to engage with them and say we’re writing up the tribal code, the tribal constitution and there’s certain limitations that we have as leaders, unless it comes from the people or we vote on it, then we can act upon it and this way we can also educate them as well at the same time.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. To what do you credit this increased level of citizen engagement? You mentioned how even as let’s say more strictly social settings or settings that have spiritual components, cultural components to it that education and elements of reeducation regarding the tribal constitution that they are integrated in a way that is not off-putting, in a way that is approachable and understandable. What other factors do you think are responsible for this ever increasing growth in tribal citizen engagement with the constitution?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Honestly it would have to be 100 percent return back to the people, showing them the truth of every dollar we earn goes right back into the larger pot, the larger vision. It’s not one person’s secret agenda. It’s not one person idea, that it’s the whole community and that we listen to your voice. We may not get to it really quickly or expedite it as much as you wish but we will eventually get there to that point in time. The fact of educational programs. Our members wanted us to grow our education department. The tribe received a grant from the Department of Indian Education for after school tutoring and mentoring our college students for higher education so the program’s in full force now. Our nonprofit that provides social services, scholarships. So everything that we bring into our community, not one person’s getting wealthy and we make sure that it’s divided equally and that it’s going to programs not everyone will receive. Of course those who are in their mid-40s or on or who don’t want to go to college are not going to apply for a scholarship, is not, or has a steady job, don’t need social services, I mean welfare services but there’s some point in time we will have a program or activity that will go to them. And if a member comes to us and it’s at different levels. So like I said earlier, an elder who asks us to create a hedge fund or a fund where every member can give into and be able to grow the funds for the tribe because now they see that whatever the tribe does and produces we’re giving it right back into the community. Not one person, like I said, not one person is receiving, be the beneficiary of those activities rather it goes to everything else and establishing our self structurally. The tribe has an office right across from the City Hall of San Fernando and just to have a stable location and the members that come in there understand that there’s rent involved, there’s bills to be paid just like a house and their own families. The tribe itself has those overhead that needs to be covered as well. So just the continued growth and the continued involvement and giving everyone an opportunity that asks to come and work for the tribe or volunteer for the tribe, give them that opportunity and not shunning anyone out or excusing anyone away from us but just making sure that everyone’s level of participation is well received within the tribe and making sure that everyone’s growth and visionary’s growth continues to grow as well with us.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Can you define in your opinion the distinction between this idea of membership and citizenship within the Fernandeño Tataviam community?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Sure. Well, the concept behind it is the fact of enrollment versus registration is that membership and also the fact of membership versus citizenship. Citizenship is part of a nation and part of a tribe or part of a community where membership you can lose your membership. To me it’s more, it sounds like a gym membership. You only have, or school membership or school enrollment and you’re enrolled to be part of a university, enrolled to attend higher education. But citizenship means that you have more rights, you have power, you have political power, you have authority to be part of and I didn’t want to downgrade or we didn’t want to downgrade the tribe and say, ‘Our members are only part of this community,’ versus ‘Our citizens are this community,’ and that’s a different statement to state in the fact that it’s saying that we are sovereign and to say the fact that our members are not just a organization of a nonprofit versus our citizens are these people when their child are born we’re registering their child to ensure that they have equal rights and that they have rights in this tribe, in this community and that they at one point in time when they turn 18 years old they’re eligible to vote, they’re eligible to lead, they’re eligible to run for tribal office or consult with the tribal government. So that’s the statement we want to be sure that our citizens of the tribe are able to engage with us and to know that when they are coming to enroll, they’re not just enrolling into a program. They’re coming to register the tribal citizens, register their children and also the fact that the reason why we chose that because in the ‘70s, in the ‘50s, in the ‘20s when the Bureau of Indian Affairs were registering members for the California Indian Judgment Fund, they were enrolling them into this program fund so they can get their share from the settlement. They have the impression that because of that action took place, they’re automatically enrolled in the tribe and that they have a designation to be part of this community but as tribes go, there’s different families. In our tribe we have three families that we descend from. You have to show proof of lineage to these families. You have to register with the tribe to become a citizen, to participate with the tribe itself and to be able to vote like I said and to engage with us. So registration is, it’s a way of saying that just like United States government, when a child is born everybody doesn’t understand that once you register your child with the county records you’re actually registering that child to become a citizen of the United States. It’s an instant documentation that occurs and that’s the same concept that we’re leading and doing with our tribal families is that we’re saying, ‘As you register your child at birth, we would like you to register your child with the tribe and record them because we have our own register records and we want to make sure that we have our census and understand how many children are being born.’ But it goes further. It goes further than collecting that data. What we found off that data is that we learn about health issues. In our community boys that are born are born with a highly chance of heart defects. We learn through the census data that we’ve, we had our own census in 2010. We built our own online system where we get characteristics instantly as they register. It’s all instant census versus waiting for someone to fill out information. But when they fill out their registration form we ask for information as far as their mother, their father, if they’re not tribal community, their health, if they have asthma, heart defects, just like in any county facility and the more, the reason that prompted it is because as I said we found that there’s boys born to tribal citizens that had heart defects so we had some children that had heart surgery as early as four weeks to as late as 12 years old and some of them, a good portion of them made it, a lot of them didn’t make it. Some of them passed through crib death, didn’t understand that the child had heart defects. So now that we understand that we’re able to deliver this message to the community, deliver it to our tribal citizens and say, ‘If you have a male, be sure you thoroughly check them. Have an expert check their hearts, a cardiologist check them because this is a high issue of the tribe.’ And just to know it closely, it affected me, my own son. One of my son’s didn’t make it. He had a heart defect. My sister’s son had a heart defect. He passed. He didn’t make it. But then one of our tribal legislators, senators, who served for a short period of time, he had a heart operation and his father who served for a longer time was always concerned every, they had told him that he would never make it past 24. Now he’s 32 years old, he walks around and a few others as well so we know that that’s a real health concern for us and that’s part of registration. So enrollment you just fill out a form, you’re not asking a whole lot of things. You have interest, you want to become a member of, it sounds like a social club versus a government and it doesn’t sound very, in the sense of registering the members and capturing characteristics, capturing information that will be beneficial as a whole for the community. Even the fact of education. When we have our census data we ask them do they go to college, have they gone to college, how many folks, we’re able, and that in turn turns around for us inside the government and the administration department where to apply for grants and how to apply for grants. And applying for grants you need this data to state your cause and we have that data. We’re able to capture that data and that it starts from the point of time of registering members for citizenship. So it’s more than just becoming a citizen, it’s more than like I said, more than just a member because it’s a lifestyle, it’s a community, it’s health issues, it’s, it’s a lot of things that come with it and just to understand the community and how it functions, that’s the reason why we are, we have dropped the word membership and went with the word citizenship and went with registration versus enrollment and just to empower our tribal government. Also too we found in the tribe that the federal government, the U.S. government minimizes the tribes and say, ‘You’re a member of,  You’re enrolled. Where are you enrolled in?’ But when we talk about that we’re American citizen everyone proudly to say that you’re an American citizen, even folks who’ve just recently become American citizens who may have immigrated more recently into the United States, they’re proud to say they’re a citizen of United States versus,  And as Indian people we say we’re proud to be Tataviam, we’re proud to be Navajo, we’re proud to be Tohono O’odham so you take that statement but we’re citizens of that organization versus memberships. We’re citizens of that tribal nation and that’s what we went with preferably and then the word enrollment.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You mentioned how Fernandeño Tataviam conducted its own census in 2010. What prompted that action?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“We’ve, in our tribal code we’ve written a census to be conducted so in, it took us a lengthier time. We wrote a lot of rules, a lot of code as we got advice from elders and other people but a lot of stuff do take place really quickly, some stuff takes some time for certain things to occur so census was one of the areas that we’d written down that we conduct a census every five years, every four years, every,  So we went with every 10 years to have a census and the reason is for a couple fold. One, election boundaries, where people move and districts. So now that people understand that affects your districts, now everybody’s really interested in the census because District 1 has five seats, District 2 has four seats. So now the struggle of who has the more seats where it’s like the United States Republicans versus Democrats. It’s who you want more seats in one district because they feel you pay more attention to a district. So they, that affects that. Also the census creates, captures data of education levels. We have an education department. We want to apply for grants that we can be able to enhance our educational process, send people to college, to universities or retrain someone. So through our census we found that we have a high level of people who didn’t graduate high school. And so they’re coming back to the tribe and say, ‘I had my child.’ Well, one education is much more difficult. Math problems are much more complex than what we did 10, 20 years ago so their kids are coming home with homework that are more complex so the parents are now saying, ‘We need to be reeducated. We need to be, we need to catch up to our own children because we want them to enhance.’ So that census helps us capture that data. Health concerns, also social welfare, if they’re living on SSI, the seniors. If they’re in Los Angeles it’s very difficult, high cost of living so we saw a trend that a lot of people moved further north or out of the county because of cost of living, because of employment so that census catches that data and it helps us because as leaders, as we’re advocating on the behalf of the tribe, we can speak to corporations. We can say, ‘You’re leaving not only, ’ Like a regular county supervisor or City Council member who says, ‘You don’t want a factory to leave L.A. because you’re taking the jobs.’ We can say it too but we can say it more passionately because we can say, ‘Hey, this is our homelands. Our people are not from New Mexico, we’re not from Mexico. This is where we’re from. We like the jobs here but the level of our education of our members or the skill level of our members, workforce is factory work.’ Or if it’s some type of engineering type of work ‘cause we found a lot of folks are, may not have the high school level or college level of education but they’re working almost like quasi-engineers in the type of work field that they’re in because they’re working on airplane manufacturing parts. So if you have these companies leave this area, we’re not able to retain them and our members, our citizens are able to, are going to travel with them or lose those jobs so they have to be retrained or reeducated. So we have to follow the trend, we have to be educated on the trend so this way we can bolster employment for the members, for the citizens of the tribe. We can look for health concerns. Like there’s no Indian Health Services fully in Los Angeles. There’s a smaller clinic so with the concerns of our citizens and using the census data we can say, ‘Here’s these high numbers,’ as I raised the case of heart defects among the boys, among the men. We can bring those case studies and be able to really show data that here’s the cause and here’s the reasons and why we may apply for a grant or may solicit a corporation for jobs because of the census data that we retain and capture.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. What can other Native nations engaging in reform, in constitutional reform, learn from the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indian’s process?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“I think what they could learn is the methods of adapting and enhancing their own community’s concerns and really jump into their communities and understand, listen to them as far as how they can reform their constitution or establish one if they don’t have one, create the laws because it goes beyond the tribe itself as I mentioned throughout is that it reaches out to local governments, state governments and federal governments to say, ‘This is our Aboriginal territory’ and there’s a whole plethora of concerns that will come up and you need to advocate on their behalf and it gives you that tool that you’re able to go to the table and negotiate or stress your concerns for your community, for your tribal nation. But it starts off with the community itself and perhaps a constitution lengthier or smaller,  Our constitution, I believe it’s in total 14, 15 pages so we made sure it wasn’t as lengthy or just short enough to really capture the needs and desires of our community and the concerns of our citizens and the same thing for anyone who are seeking to reform themselves and their method. And it’s a way of thinking for the future and it’s best, always best that it comes from the tribe versus someone enforcing it ‘cause I know that [IRA], the federal government’s saying, ‘You have to write up bylaws, you have to write up a constitution.’ You’re under their power, under their wing and many times you may not capture what your community wants to be able to enforce or capture or what’s really, like I said for our community. We didn’t capture tradition in our constitution. We felt that it needs to stay out of it. Even though it helped mold our constitution, it’s not really enforcing the constitution because it comes from generational folks who may want to one time enforce it or not enforce the rule of traditional rules but it’s a way to keep the government moving forward and be able to advocate and participate with the surrounding communities. And as we understand, the United States government is, doesn’t want to go anywhere, doesn’t want to get on ships and move back to wherever they all came from so they’re here, they made this themselves a home and we have to understand and come to the realization that they’re here to stay as well and they love these lands as well as we do so we have to learn to engage with them and one way is to reform our constitutions or create the constitutions so that we all have the same type of speaking engagement with each other.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Has the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians changed aspects of its political culture to meet this constitution?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“In the last 10 years it has changed. It really has changed from the time my father passed in 2009 because with him he went through the decades of tradition, introducing a modern way. He’s the one who first introduced bylaws so he was one that was, and he served on the Indian Commission in 1976 so working for that or being part of that you understand government the way they were thinking so it’s slowly changing. They didn’t change rapidly but when he passed, since he was kind of the threshold behind it, folks just followed him naturally. He was naturally selected to be the spokesperson of the tribe, he was naturally voted to be the chairman and tribal president ‘cause he went through the different changes of names in our tribal constitution to become our leader that when he passed all of a sudden our laws too effect. The vice president became the tribal president, secretary became the vice president and everyone in the community was scratching their head and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We know certain individuals should have been the leader of the tribe, why didn’t that occur.’ And the wake of the constitution was in effect and actually did, was enforced, the tribal citizens didn’t realize the rule that we created is standing and is in force. And so that made them pay attention to it and said, ‘Okay, now we understand elections are really viable we just can’t elect anyone we want in there, we’ve got to make sure that they’re accountable, credible and knowledgeable to explain the tribe’s history and advance the tribe forward on our needs and desires, that our wishes that the citizens may want. So that’s what made them really pay attention was it took that travesty of my father passing to kind of wake up everyone. It wasn’t as, seeing it back then it wasn’t a full on like rude awakening, more of a realization that the constitution is in force and that we are following it. And that’s what really took place. Even though we follow other things, the budget hearings, everything else, that was the time when we really truly followed it, that was noticeable to the citizens at large that we followed our constitution and it took in place.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“On that topic of these type of watershed moments where the larger tribal citizenship realizes this is our constitution at work, our constitution in action, are there other specific moments that you can think of and maybe describe as maybe those watershed moments where people realized our constitution is working, our constitution is in action?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Other moments,  I would have to believe,  I would have to say the fact of conflict among families, among siblings where the constitution is in force and it has to be more than one person enforcing it to make it a realization that the constitution is in force because in tribes we’re still family, we can just rip up the constitution any given day and say, ‘Hey, we’re going with a whole new constitution someone wrote in the midnight hour and came up and here’s the new one,’ ‘cause we’re so small as far as community wise go and we’re governing our ownself, we have our own sovereignty so if there’s a reign of new power that comes up, they can wish to do so. But it’s a matter of everyone believing in it and following the constitution and I believe that, not to go into huge depth of the conflict that occurred but just the realization of people saying, ‘Why don’t we change that person out? We don’t like his politics. We don’t want them to be in leadership anymore. We need to remove that person. How can we do it?’ And you have these rules in place. At the same time the individuals, the citizens, other elected officials question themselves and say, ‘Do we really want to go through with this ‘cause it’s pretty harsh to go through the tribal code and the constitution in order to remove an elected official because that per, then all of a sudden everyone’s now second guessing themselves because we’re all family and we say, ‘Well, we don’t, if we do such an action we’re never speaking to that person, they’re going to forever hate us.’ So it shows the power of the constitution and the tribal code and at the same time how people can really look at it and not act impulsively, on an impulse of emotions to make a decision and just raise their iron fist and say, ‘We’re coming in with a whole new reign of power, a whole new regime,’ versus where we have to follow these rules, we have to follow this constitution and it’s put there for a reason and it made people sit down a t the table again and to discuss and have dialogue and hopefully which it did, sit down with the elected officials and say, ‘Okay, we understand you’re voted in here, you got your seat, let’s try to make the best of it and make it work and you have your agenda and you’re here for a reason,’ and the other officials were there for a reason so they had to work together to make the tribe move forward and understand they have to move their own personal agenda and work for the larger which is the tribe.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. Can you discuss in a bit more detail your involvement and I believe you mentioned your father’s previous involvement with the Los Angeles City and County Native American Indian Commission?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Sure. The Indian Commission was established in 1976. It was established by Indians who were part of the Relocation Act and made Los Angeles their home so they sought to see rights of Indian people being heard and being protected and services rendered to tribal people who may call Los Angeles home or called it home at the time. So they sought to, the Los Angeles mayor at the time, Mayor Tom Bradley and the supervisors ,  to create the Commission. So as they created the Commission my father became one of the first community elected commissioners. So the community elected commissioners are elected by tribal people only in Los Angeles and they’re broken down similar to like the county supervisors. They each have a district and so my father had the Northern Los Angeles County and he was elected by the community of the Indian people living in the Northern Los Angeles County area. So he served on there and advocated for education, health. Those were two of his biggest agendas and which was also samely on the tribal side two of his biggest agendas here on the tribe itself. So he found that serving on the Commission can expand and reach across the tribe’s politics as well as the community of Los Angeles politics and he found them very similar, which they are, in the sense that they both needed the educational programs and health programs and social services programs as well. So he found that bridge in order to connect and bring those services to the Northern portion of Los Angeles which served our tribal members as well as the folks who call Los Angeles home. Myself, when I joined in 2002, pretty much I was firstly elected, appointed actually from Mayor Hahn who was the son of Commissioner Hahn who established the Commission. So it was kind of like father/son kind of championship kind of thing that we served and Mayor Hahn at the time was pleased to appoint me to the Commission since his father helped establish the Commission and then my father served so it was this monumental moment, a time that we shared. And the same reasons my father had the visions, my reasons to serve on the Commission is to bridge that gap, to bring extended services to the community, to be a voice for all of Indian people in Los Angeles and to champion programs and some of the initiatives that we’re working on now is Indian housing in Los Angeles, very similar to what they have in Minnesota from Little Earth. We’re looking to bring such an initiative to Los Angeles because of the cost of living and that’s the same concern that our tribe was facing as well is the cost of living. More and more members are leaving the county or moving further away from the main homelands of the tribe so it’s beneficial for me to serve and exciting for me to serve on the Commission in order to voice and opinionate and bring issues, to address issues as well that are of interest to the larger Indian community as well as my tribe and just to be a participant of it as well is great.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. You mentioned I believe a distinction between, referring back to the Los Angeles City and County Native American Indian Commission, the distinctions between being elected versus appointed to the Commission. Can you give us a bit more detail?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Sure. The makeup of the Commission, we have five appointed seats from the city, from the mayor and it’s concurred by the City Council and he gets to select five American Indians who are in, who live in the City of Los Angeles to serve on the commission and there’s additional five members who are appointed by the Board of Supervisors. Each Board of Supervisor gets to appoint one member to the Commission and concurred with the Board of Supervisors, full board, and then there’s five community members that are also selected which makes a total of 15 members on, that serve on the Commission. The community members is to bring the election of the community members to vet those folks to serve on the Indian Commission. So when my father served, I remember him telling me time after time that he was questioned because he comes from a tribe who’s well, one right there in the Los Angeles area and two a non-recognized tribe and they had to show proof of enrollment in the tribe. So the tribe itself didn’t really have a form of procedure of enrollment, more everyone knew who the families were and so you had to use the California Judgement Rolls to show proof that he was who he said he was as a Tataviam Fernandeño Indian at the time. So that’s pretty much the makeup of the Commission and the community elect members are also today, in 1993 we created a Self-Governance Board which acts like a tribal council. It’s an Indian organization that serves the community and receives a grant from the state to provide programs to the Indian community in Los Angeles. So they’re the ones, the Self-Governing Board oversees the grant funds and are the five community elect members plus one member from the City Council appointed and also from the Board of Supervisors appointed which will be a total of seven members on the Self-Governance.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Reflecting upon your personal experience as the son of an elected leader and now in your position of elected leadership, what advice do you have to give to those future, those upcoming Fernandeño Tataviam leaders?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“The advice I would give them is understanding the role of leadership, understanding what they’re asking to be part of in leading and directing and guiding the tribe is to listen to the general membership, general census of the people, the citizens of the tribe, to understand their wishes and desires and to be humbling to yourself and to understand that it takes 50 percent of your energy into it because you have to leave your other 50 percent at home and that same concept is to understand that 50 percent of the people may love you at one point in time and the other 50 percent may hate you for your decisions and hope that you change out or change in, into their direction. But just to give great leadership, great guidance and understand that you’re there as that, as a guidance tool, as a leader as the tool. You’re not there as the ruler and you’re not there to dictate how the tribe should function or rule and to understand that you need to listen to every aspect of the tribal citizens in the tribe from the elders to the young and their opinion counts and is vital. And myself, that’s where I’ve looked upon. A lot of the decisions that I seek or solve to champion were not of my own, were those collectively of elders, the young people and they’re the ones who give you inspiration because sitting at a seat and writing tribal laws will get tiresome and bored and you get fatigue over it versus if you’re always innovating yourself by speaking to everyone and fighting that next solution and fighting what’s the next progress that the tribe wants to go to and in order to do that you need to speak to everyone and you need to give your attention to them and that’s the relationship that you want to carry on as a leader is that you’re going into a seat it’s like a coin toss and one day you may make a bad decision and to be honest to yourself as well. To be honest that you are leading and guiding and that you are also a follower of those who...of the people who put you in that position and you’re the follower of them but you’re leading as a whole to everyone else who they ask you to task, to carry out the task for.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Lastly, for those Fernandeño Tataviam tribal citizens who want to affect positive change in the community but are perhaps reluctant to take on positions of leadership, what encouragement would you give those individuals?”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“If you’re reluctant to take on leadership and they want the change to occur, the best thing to do is, honestly, either engage fully with your elected officials or seek out someone else that will have the passion and desire to run for office because we know the scary thought behind being in leadership, you’re in the spotlight and there’s times more ugly than good in serving the seat so you’ve got to be, have the ability to take on criticism, take on insult but understand that you’re there as a servant to the people and be able to carry on their wishes. And if you’re an individual who wants to see the change done but are a person who don’t want to run for office, find an individual within the tribal community, a citizen who has the passion and desire, who has the makings of a strong advocating leader, someone who has a great voice to carry on and champion many objectives for the community and is very promising. That would be the best method in finding the best solution to make the change occur and happen. Many times things may go in a downward spiral of elected official and the reason for it is because they’re exhausted. Not because they’re bad but maybe they’re just tired and exhausted and had enough and since maybe no one else is running for office they just out of habit continue to put their name in for office and continue to run. But if speaking to the individual doesn’t make change, then finding a new individual that can be promising would be the best solution if you choose not to run for office.”

Veronica Hirsch:

“Thank you. That’s all the time we have on today’s episode of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit NNI’s Indigenous Governance Database website which can be found at igovdatabase.com. Thank you for joining us.”

Rudy Ortega, Jr.:

“Thank you.”

Good Native Governance Break Out 2: Indian Gaming in California

Producer
UCLA School of Law
Year

UCLA School of Law "Good Native Governance" conference presenters, panelists and participants Jonathan Taylor, Victor Rocha, and Alexander Tallchief Skibine discuss gaming and its impact for Native nations in California. Mr. Taylor provides a summary of data collection illustrating change in California Native communities from 1990 to the present. Victor addresses the status of online Indian gaming in California. Dr. Skibine talks about how California court can resolve upcoming issues relating to internet gaming. 

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

Citation

Taylor, Jonathan. "Indian Gaming in California." 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.

Rocha, Victor. "Indian Gaming in California." 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.

Skibine, Alexander Tallchief. "Indian Gaming in California." 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.

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.”

Patricia Riggs: The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story

Producer
National Congress of American Indians
Year

Patricia Riggs, Director of Economic Development for Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP), discusses how YDSP has spent the past decade developing and fine-tuning its comprehensive approach to engaging its citizens in order to identify and then achieve its nation-building priorities.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the National Congress of American IndiansThe "Rebuilding the Tigua Nation" film shown in this video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Riggs, Patricia. "The Role of Citizen Engagement in Nation Building: The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Story." 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace, National Congress of American Indians. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 15, 2013. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"So I'll turn the floor over to Patricia Riggs. Again, she's the economic development director with the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and as she told me today, she's sort of their de facto chief of citizen engagement for their pueblo. Anytime they face a challenge in this arena, they tend to turn to her because she's done so much wonderful work in this area. Did you want to start with the video or with your presentation?"

Patricia Riggs:

"It's a little long. If you want to start it and then kind of go through middle and then restart it again."

Ian Record:

"So again, this is a video that Pat was involved with putting together. It's called 'Rebuilding the Tigua Nation.' Tigua is another name that refers to her nation and this again I think...think of this not just in terms of what it shares with you, but think of this as a viable tool of citizen education and engagement. We're seeing more and more nations do things like this. These videos that instruct not just their own citizens, but outsiders about who the nation is and what they're doing and why."

[VIDEO]

Patricia Riggs:

"Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. As Ian stated, my name is Pat Riggs and I'm the Director of Economic Development at Ysleta del Sur [Pueblo]. We started community engagement back in 2006. Of course at the Pueblo, there's always been some form of community engagement, but we had a very significant event that took place. If you paid attention closely to the film, we talked about the casino being closed down. In 1987, we were federally restored and there was one little clause in our restoration act that said, "˜The tribe shall not have gaming that is illegal in Texas.' So when the State of Texas started bingo and lottery, we decided that there was gaming in Texas so we opened our casino and they sued us and the courts held that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act didn't apply to the tribe, that the language in our restoration act superseded that. So we operated gaming from around 1992 to 2002. It was open for about 10 years and it first started as a bingo hall and then later on to Class 2 gaming. So when the casino actually did end up closed, we had invested quite a bit in infrastructure and the tribe had done a lot of good things with our funding or our revenues that we got for the tribe, but we were basically at a...we were in shock. There was this economic turmoil that was taking place that we didn't realize was actually going to take place. We thought that there was no way that we would lose the case, but we ended up losing the case.

So citizen engagement started out of the need to really find out what the community needed. What we started doing is really looking at different groups and seeing what their needs are and really trying to identify with the tribe and what they needed. This is just a picture of what we call "˜listening to our ancestors,' because everything that we do really does come from our history and who we are as a people and where we've been so just the fact that in spite of everything that's happened to us, it seems like...sometimes they call us the 'Bad Luck Tribe' because if something can go wrong, it happens to us. We got left out of the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1861 so we weren't recognized with the other pueblos. We ended up on the Confederate side of the line. Just things throughout history ended up happening.

Really a lot what was happening, too, was our own mindset and the way we thought as a community, so when the casino was closed we kind of stood at a standstill, we didn't know what to do, we were in shock. And I had been working at another location. I'd been working in the City of El Paso and the tribe asked me to come back and I was like, "˜Economic Development, hmm.' So I really didn't know anything about economic development, but I said, "˜I'll give it a try.' But when I came back, one of the things that I started doing is really listening and trying to figure out what was happening in the community. And so I heard in the video that Ian played before from Native Nations Institute, someone said that some of the challenges or the biggest challenges for the tribe come from within. So I'm really about training and trying to figure out what the community wants and so they started asking me to train different departments. And so I started paying attention to what the community was actually saying and to what some of our employees were saying and these are actual...their quotes, their statements that were actually said and they're things like, "˜Tiguas don't want to learn.' Everything was always blamed on tribal council and we all know that there's problems with councils sometimes, but sometimes I think we exaggerate those things because we don't want to move forward or we don't...we try to rationalize what we are or what we're not doing in our departments. So it was always about, "˜We can't do that because tribal council won't allow it,' "˜It doesn't matter.' Some of our non-tribal employees were saying that we couldn't do particular, they wouldn't do particular things because the tribal members would go tell council what they were doing and it was just, it was ridiculous, really. When you really sat down and listened to it and you put all the statements together, it was ridiculous.

So basically...so what we determined that we needed to do is really engage our community in education and try to really figure out who the community was because we know who we are as a people, we know our culture, we knew traditions, but we don't really know the community in terms of what needs do they...are out there, what are the poverty levels, what are the education levels, who's employed, who's not employed, what kind of skills do they have? And as far as doing a needs assessment we needed that, but we also needed to take an inventory of what we have or had in order to move forward. So we started doing different things to try and get the community engaged. And so this is what it looks like if you do the 'flyer method' and it just doesn't work. You send all these beautiful flyers out there and just get ready for everybody to come and they don't show up. So it was like, "˜Well, what am I doing wrong here?' And we were actually, at one point we even brought Native Nations Institute and we had a very small crowd there. So we thought about what we could actually do to get the community more involved.

So what we found is actually working with groups and even within the reservation there are special interest groups. We all have little things that...or subjects that we're interested in and what we found is to look for those core champions in your communities. And there's people who are really just very traditional and that's what they want to discuss and that's what they want to do in terms of who they are so we asked them, "˜Okay, how do you think that we can infuse tradition into the things that we're doing?' We also started working with youth. The thing about youth is if you work with youth and you train them and you honor them and you show their parents what they're doing, then the parents come, too. So we started figuring out how to get parents engaged as well. And then we did different things with leadership, with elders. One of the things that we did learn is that we really need to figure out how to work with each group and how to...and so through the little groups we got the whole.

The big thing here is you can't expect people to just come to you. As I showed the meetings with the flyers, it just didn't work. We had to find different ways to actually go out into community and to seek input. So we went to the elders. And I mentioned earlier that our casino had closed, but it's actually operating now as a sweepstakes center. So it's kind of we have... they look like terminals, but they're actually all hooked up into one network. So there are signs all over the place that say you're donating to the tribe and you're donating to our health, to our education. So we just got creative on ways to do things. It's not quite as revenue generating as it was before, but there's still funding coming in. One of the times I went to the elders and I wanted to do a survey with them and so they said, "˜Oh, no, we don't have time for your survey.' And I'm like, "˜But I have 'Free Play'.' And they, "˜Oh, Free Play, okay. Sit down.' So we started talking to them and then they found out some of the things that we're doing and they were engaged in that, actually came to where they actually wanted to participate in some of the events that we were having. And so they started making the food and sometimes we could pay them and sometimes we couldn't, but they were okay with that and they started assisting us in our events.

So then we also, one of the things that we did is in order to engage the community...there is no greater engagement than actually serving the community, so we started an AmeriCorp program and the AmeriCorp program, they work with the elders, they work in the cultural center, they work in emergency management, in environmental. So they're kind of our ambassadors for community engagement in different areas. The other thing is we do a lot of data collection and we do a lot of surveys, but when we do it we work with focus groups or we work with all the other little core groups and we educate them about why we're trying to collect the information. So we educate them first and then they are kind of our core champions or leaders so they go out into their groups and they tell either the other elders or youth or whoever it is that we're working with why it is important. So we educate them on how to educate the community on getting that information and we've been very successful in gathering information for our tribe in order to determine what it is that we're going to focus on, whether it's health or whether it's economic development. I'll show you a little bit more in a minute about the successes with data collection and also the projects that we're working on.

I know that one of the first times that Joe Kalt went to Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, I had been working in writing grants not just for the tribe, but also for the City of El Paso and I wanted a model, I wanted a matrix and I was like, "˜Well, do you have a matrix?' and it's like, "˜No.' So I realized, I think I really like to visualize what it is that we're trying to accomplish, but I kind of think very methodical. So I have to figure out what exactly it is that we're going to tackle, but I also realize that those kind of models and theories, they're for other communities, they're not really for us. We can't take somebody's methodology and use it at our tribe. So I started to look back and thinking like what is it exactly that we're doing, and this is what I came up with.

Well, one of the things is we have a purpose. No matter what it is that we're trying to tackle, whether it's constitutional reform or building entrepreneurs, there's a purpose there. So you find that purpose and there's also...but with that purpose, there's always passion and I'm so passionate about what I do. That's all I do. I have to have people drag me away from it sometimes, but there's other people in your communities with that passion. So look for the passionate people and then harvest the information. You really do have to harvest information and gather that input from your community, because that's who you're working for and that's who really is driving you to do what it is that you do.

The other thing is...so you visualize and then you assess and you plan. And I know it's kind of theory-like, but when it comes to your community, what is it that you're visualizing? Like for us, one of the things that we're working on is a land use plan and land acquisition. So when we're visualizing, I'm not doing this theory of visualizing, we're actually looking at the community and thinking about the things that we lost and the things that we need for ceremony and where...the places that it's going to come from, from the land and how are we going to be able to redevelop our lands and preserve our lands as they once were and then also rebuild our community as a village because we're used to living as a village and that was taken away from us. So when we're visualizing, that's...we're visualizing how we want to live. It's about how the entire...what the entire community sees. So then of course we can work, work, work, work, but at the end of the day we really do have to have something to show for it. So you do have to measure those impacts and the outcomes of what it is that you're doing because...and then you take it back to the community and show your successes and so you report the results.

And then here's basically the same thing with a little bigger snapshot, but in the end it really is about community, whether you're trying to figure out what the community wants, you start at the community; whether you're trying to figure out the data, you're getting it from community, you're trying to draw a picture of what your community really is, and then in the end you report those results back to the community and then you also try to determine what is driving the community and those are things such as the ceremonies and traditions and culture and just living together as a Tigua society for us. So we look at the core values and we reaffirm them by asking different people in the community and also about what is the best way to apply the things in a manner that...that will work in a manner that is fair to the entire tribe and to every sector of the tribal population.

So this is a little bit of our timeline and as far as our economy is concerned...so really what was happening to us, we had basically lost all our lands. We were living in a small part of El Paso in a little, basically it was a neighborhood. It really wasn't a reservation and we had, there were small adobe houses, most of them were one room. It was during the termination policy, so we really didn't have any hope of having a better life. We were just happy to be able to still be there and still be living as a community and still, even though we weren't federally recognized, we still held tribal elections, we still had our ceremonies every year, we still had people in charge of dong the things that...the doings that needed to be done for us to continue to survive as a Pueblo the best that we could. So of course the civil rights movement took place later and that's when people started to gain more confidence and to start asserting their rights.

So what happened in the 1960s is we were basically losing our few homes that we had left to tax foreclosure because it was the City of El Paso now and throughout there's a couple pictures that you'll see the entire, what our Pueblo used to look like, and because we weren't on federal trust land. And one of the important reasons that we start that film where we're crossing the highway and the tribal police are directing traffic for us is because that one spot is where our Pueblo used to be and we had stacked adobe homes. And the City of El Paso -- because we weren't federally recognized or had trust status -- they decided to have condemnation proceedings against our Pueblo because they needed that one spot that's a highway and they needed it to extend the highway. So they had condemnation proceedings and they condemned the Pueblo basically. So that is the center of our tribe and that's why we decided to start the film there.

So land acquisition and development and regaining and putting land into trust is very important for us so basically there was a lawyer by the name of Tom Diamond that helped us to get federally restored or federally recognized in 1969, but we were basically terminated on the same day because the State of Texas had a Texas Indian Commission, so they turned over the trust responsibility to the Texas Indian Commission. Well, there were some good things that happened out of that. We did get some new housing out of it and there was a few more jobs and some economic development took place. So in the "˜60s, basically our unemployment rate was 75 percent. By the "˜70s it went to about 50 percent and we went from a fifth-grade education to about a 10th-grade education. So then in '87 we were federally restored and the casino was thriving and our unemployment rate basically went down to three percent. We went from 68 acres of land that were transferred over during the time of restoration to 75,000 acres of land that we invested in with our casino revenues and then we also built a lot more housing. I think you saw in the film where the housing was. And then we...but then the casino closed because we were sued. So basically, we were really at odds, we didn't know what we were going to do.

So we started off by doing projections on our funding and what we had in reserves and we determined was that if we continued to operate in the same manner we would run out of money in seven years. So we had to decide what it is that we were going to do, so that's when we started this nation-building process and we started investing money in a development corporation, which is now doing federal contracting and we're located in probably at least five places throughout the country: Washington D.C., Virginia, California, Colorado Springs. And that also took forming a board and separation of business and politics and having a committee that turned into...later to the board. And so this education process, we're educating different people in the community.

One of the things we did is we educated the board on how to operate as a board, which started as an economic development committee and then they ended up the board. So now this... we reassigned the economic development committee and now they're being trained as how to operate as a nonprofit board so then we're going to replace them and they're going to become probably another board. So we just keep getting small groups and keep educating so that they can build the capacity to do other things. But in order to do this we really, really needed to know what our state was as far as a community is concerned. So we were able to really determine what our... who we were, where our people were located at, what the rates of unemployment were and poverty levels, household levels, individual household levels.

The other thing that happened to us in our restoration act is that the language in there said that the tribe shall consist of membership that is on the base roll and people descending from that base roll up to one-eighth blood quantum. They said that in 1987. So we quickly realized that in a few years we'd no longer exist as a tribe because we would lose that blood quantum. So the tribe decided that they were going...we went to Congress and it took us 10 years of introducing different bills, but we ended up just recently having the blood quantum bill passed. So in order to do this, we really needed to figure out who we were as a people because we needed to take that information to Congress. So this is what our community looks like now and we also studied the people that live outside the service area, our tribal members that live outside the service area as well, and what we're finding is really they left before economic opportunity because they're a little bit better off in terms of education and household income.

I talked a little bit about cooperative education and so what we're also doing in order to engage our citizens and get this information -- because we collect that information every single year from tribal members and we've been successful as far as getting the information -- but we also make sure that we give it back to them and that when we compile any sort of information that we give them the reports back, like whether it's health and if there's a diabetes report or whatever it is. But the other thing is we all come to these conferences because we work as professionals, but your average tribal citizen doesn't have that opportunity to learn the things like we're learning today, what's happening in the federal courts and what's happening as far as policy is concerned and even what happened with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and so we take that education to them. We make sure that there's money in the budget to educate our tribal members and we do everything from Indian law to nation building to...we have other people even come and do community engagement to let them know how important it is. We have financial literacy training, but we also do like board training. And so if there's a subject that we think is important for us to learn and what's on the agenda here and at other conferences, we make sure that we find a way to take it back to the community and to be able to train them so that they know. And even when we work with our departments who of course...there has to be some professional training there, a lot of times some of our tribal members don't have the capacity to be in those higher positions of directors, so we tell our directors, "˜We're going to put this training out for you, but you need to pick a tribal member and it doesn't matter if it's a secretary or a maintenance person or whatever it is, you need to bring them to this training also and you need to figure out how you're going to get that information back to your department as well.'

As far as community engagement and what it's done for us as far as impacts are concerned, these are some of the projects that we've worked on that have really made an impact in our community. One of the things is we did this huge comprehensive strategy and that's where we determined that we were going to do things like the Tigua, Inc. Development Corporation, we were going to do workforce development, land use plan, land acquisition plan. All those things were outlined in this strategy and there was focus groups and surveys that were on our website. And if you actually look at our website all the reports are on there as far as the information that the community provided to us and what we compiled and gave back to the community. So this comprehensive strategy, a lot of strategies and plans just end up on the bookshelf, but as you can see it didn't. We like to say that you need to plan your work and you need to work your plan.

The other thing is Tigua, Inc., the tribe provided the seed money for that and now they have really just taken off over the last couple years and getting significant contracts and they're doing a lot of building maintenance all over the country. They just recently got awarded the Wyler Building in California, which is the second largest government facility in the country to do maintenance. This is the Tigua Business Center that we just recently moved into about a year and a half ago and it also incubates Tigua, Inc., but it also serves as headquarters for our department, Economic Development, and we're also just now building another extension to it, which is going to be to incubate tribal member businesses, and we also have, because we really truly believe in educating the tribe and we're not quite there yet as far as having a college. We're building the Tigua Technology Center there, which is also going to help to provide the software that some of our tribal members need to get their business done like the costing and pricing for construction companies and for auto mechanics and CAD and those things that are really expensive that they can't afford as far as software is concerned.

And then also our tax code, this was one of the things that also came out of the comprehensive economic development strategy. For some reason, the tribe had decided that it was going to adopt the State of Texas tax code, which made no sense whatsoever. It was 200 pages long and we couldn't enforce it. And so what we did is we took a look at what would best serve our needs and we went from 200 pages to 20 pages and in less than a year we went from $58,000 a year to $1.2 million in tax collections. The allocation also is divided up for different programming. But I'm able to support our department because we get 30 percent of tax allocation and that's how I am able to turn that into some of the programming that we're doing.

Here's the feedback and it's really a snapshot of the feedback that we got back from the community and the things that they were concerned with in land use. So they were, the community of course was concerned with things like cultural preservation and being able to maintain our traditional practices, having land for residential use, commercial needs and agriculture, as well as transportation. So we determined what the best use of lands would be and through community engagement we also took an inventory of our lands and created a database that had all the criteria of our lands, as well as GIS mapping, whatever, if there were environmental assessments. And so we have a really defined database of all our lands and then we created a master plan and an acquisition plan. The acquisition plan isn't quite finished yet, but this timeline that we looked at started with the need to preserve our lands and we have these milestones where we want to have our master plan and do energy development and make sure that everybody has housing and those things. But then at the end it ends with cultural preservation, too, because it demonstrates 100 years from now that we're still here and our land is preserved.

And then also on one side we have all the modern and things we need to survive today, but we also have all the things that are important to us historically and culturally. When we started writing a master plan through community engagement, we had these and we had these maps of the land...of our land in big sheets and we had the community write what certain places of what they wanted the land to look like.

And also they put places like by the river, like for example, that is still important to us today but that...we have ceremonies at the river that we can't just go to the river anymore. We border Mexico, so everybody knows about the big fence at the river. So we actually have to go ask the Border Patrol to let us go to the river to do our ceremonies. So part of our master planning is to take over the acequias or the irrigation system or the canal system that we actually created 300 years ago. So we created this cultural life cycle that we would incorporate into our land use and master plan and it talks about where we are at birth and how we're being nurtured and the lessons we're learning and how we learn about our culture and then how as elders our roles change and that then we become teachers and we pass on this tradition and culture. So in our land use plan we...that bar that intersects across there talks about the different places that we're going to create to make sure those things happen. So we have things like a nation-building hub and also an elder center and places for teens to meet as well.

So these are...see those are pictures of maps that we used where the community actually drew what they wanted the community to look like, and these are statements that the community provided back. And then we also had different criteria as far as what the community wanted to see and graphed and charted what the community best wanted for our lands. So these are also places that we don't own yet, but they're what we used to own. And so in our land acquisition process, we want to buy these locations back and this is what we could do with them as far as economic development is concerned. And it seems like way out there, but in reality it really isn't. When you think about we just had 68 acres in 1987 and we have 75,000 acres now, it's attainable. And then so this is what our acquisition process is going to look like and how we mapped it. Everything that is in yellow is what we own and what's in the darker colors is our long-term acquisition. We know that we can't buy everything, but we do...those are the gaps that we want to fill in. I talked a little bit about our enrollment ordinance. Well, we're working on an enrollment ordinance, a new citizen engagement [process] because of the blood quantum bill that just passed last year. So I had thought that that was going to go to somebody else, but I just was told last week that that citizen engagement process would actually come to our department so that's something that we're working on now. This was just a little conversation that the team had last week and these are questions that we're really thinking about what we need to ask the community. It'll be much more comprehensive, but just basic things like what does citizenship mean to you and how did you learn how to be a good citizen from your parents and your community, and so that's the way we usually start with just the basic questions and then we move into real comprehensive model.

These are just a couple, I guess, pointers to just make sure that you try to identify what your tribe needs and also...and then as far as when you're working within your community just know that everything that you're doing is either going to impact your tribe either positively or negatively. And what the work [is] that you're doing, how is that going to actually help your tribe or not help your tribe because sometimes we're afraid to move forward and to change, but in order to change you really need to know what it is that your community wants and to respect what their thoughts are and what they want for the future. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Julia "Bunny" Jaakola: Education and Social Services

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola reports back to her fellow Honoring Nations symposium attendees about some of the keys to effective governance that the education and social services breakout session participants identified.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Jaakola, Julia "Bunny." "Education and Social Services." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"I'm from the Fond du Lac Band of Minnesota Chippewa and I am the Coordinator of the Social Service Department there. So in our social service group one of the similarities that came out loud and clear was that within the tribal structure, social services isn't always high priority, but with that we recognized a lot of other very pointed advantages to being involved with the social service part of the whole tribal business. When we looked at the structure, the...oh, in fact I wanted to say about our group, we were a small group but we had one person who claimed connection to the Pope and we heard a little bit about a party in Boston, but I don't remember the details. So within a structure, we learned that we really require user-friendly information systems. It's pretty clear that with technology as available as it is we really need to train our people and get them to the point of feeling comfortable with it. Structures that relieve tribal council of the burden of the day-to-day management, and one way that we do that is to be sure that the key people have the ear of the tribal council and the ability then to keep them informed. And the agreement between tribal council priorities and program goals, that's kind of what I meant or what we meant when we said about the place and prioritization that goes on. And we really have to work to keep our tribal council involved and aware of the needs in the social service area. Staff continuity is really a plus, an advantage, something that everywhere, not just in social services, but if you have that continuity in your area of business you're going to have a more solid business and business that's going to continue long after you're gone and it will strive or live through those changes of governmental officials, too. Lessons learned in the area of process: staff-directed, long-term planning. We talked about the community-based needs assessment and keeping reports going of day-to-day work that gets done; the development and adoption by the tribal council of the manuals and policies that describe the job description and therefore lay the expectation out for the employees who come to work there. The regular, for example, quarterly reporting procedures, we found that we all have to report to funding sources -- especially if we're on granting process -- but we have to do better at using that data, finding ways to take advantage of the fact that we do have the data collected and it's not just sitting around. Then we talked about the long-term planning. At Fond du Lac, we have a tribal specific health plan that is developed by the staff, by the advisory council that's made up of community people and the officials. And as changes are made in the tribal council, that policy...that plan is already in place so there's no, I was going to say, there's no way that changes are going to be made, but for the most part that plan is there and the people are still there who made that plan. So the plans are carried out and it doesn't matter that people change positions."

Honoring Nations: The Politics of Change - Internal Barriers, Opportunities and Lessons for Improving Government Performance

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Moderator JoAnn Chase facilitates a wide-ranging discussion by a panel of Native nation leaders and key decision-makers about internal barriers inhibiting good governance and opportunities and lessons for improving government performance in Native nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Belone, Cecilia, Dodie Chambers, Vernelda Grant, Julia "Bunny" Jaakola, Beth Janello, Aaron Miles and Gary Nelson. "The Politics of Change - Internal Barriers, Opportunities and Lessons for Improving Government Performance." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

JoAnn Chase:

"Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for that very generous introduction. And it's a pleasure to be here. It's always wonderful. This is one of the meetings over the course of the year that I so look forward to, is the Honoring Nations Advisory Board meeting. Many of you know that for several years I had the privilege of serving as the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians and, as Andrew [Lee] said, have now gone on to do some work in the field of philanthropy and have always enjoyed my time with the National Congress of American Indians, but so much of the time we spent working -- and that we collectively as Indian people spend -- is really fighting off a huge hostile audience, whether it's the Congress, sometimes it's the state governments. And so many times, we're reacting to things that are coming our way and really engaging in battle if you will, and often it's like hitting your head against a brick wall time and time and time again. One of the ways I was able to sustain my involvement with NCAI and enthusiasm and be rejuvenated was to come often and participate in these meetings and be so encouraged by the really truly innovative and creative and amazing things that are happening on the ground within our tribal communities of the truly exemplary programs that are being developed and implemented and the good governance that does exist. So it's always good to be back in this arena.

I'm excited this afternoon, we have...I think you're going to have a very compelling discussion, excellent participants. I thought the way we'd get started this afternoon is just ask each of the participants to briefly introduce themselves, your tribal affiliation, and maybe a sentence or so about the program that you're with and then we'll start off with some dialogue on some difficult questions. Maybe Beth, if you would start."

Beth Janello:

"Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Beth Janello. I'm the Environmental Director for the Pueblo of Sandia here in New Mexico and we have water quality standards, which we won an Honoring Nations award for in 1999. I'd like to invite everyone to come to the pueblo tomorrow and view our Bosque Restoration, our Rio Grande Restoration Project...

As I was saying, I'd like to invite everyone tomorrow to come down to the Pueblo Sandia and view our river restoration project. We have been a very active participant in trying to protect the Rio Grande and we've had some, definitely some problems working with our federal trustees, certainly the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. We're trying to educate them and trying to get help from them and from the State of New Mexico to protect the river, but it's not always an easy task and I hope today that I can share with you some of the things that we have learned and answer any questions you may have about protecting your own waterways. With that, thank you very much for this opportunity. I appreciate being here and I look forward to you coming out tomorrow to the Pueblo of Sandia.

Aaron Miles:

"Good afternoon. My name is Aaron Miles. I'm from the Nez Perce Tribe. I'm a tribal member and I work for my tribe as the Department of Natural Resources Manager. I've been on the job for a little over two years now and it's been very interesting, learning a lot and I think it's exciting to work for your own tribe in investing. So coming back home was a good thing for me. My background is in forestry. I graduated from the University of Idaho in the fall of 1995 and I worked for the other school, Washington State University, for a couple years as the tribal liaison in the provost's office. There's a lot of neat experiences I'm excited to share with you.

Dodie Chambers:

"Good afternoon. My name is Dodie Chambers with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan. The project we had gotten an award for was for planning and development for our tribe. Our tribe had never had a planning and development department so I was part of the initial setup of the planning and development department. Probably like some of you our projects were exceedingly overrun as far as budgets and the proper people weren't doing the proper jobs. And the contractors that were available knew that they were going to get money from the tribe and from the government, therefore skated on a lot of the absolutely mandatory things. About that time is when our chairman decided that we needed a planning and development department so that's how we began our start up. And because it was a first time for us of ever having a real planning and development department it's what we had won our award for. Not only was I the first department manager for planning and development, I was first tribal chairperson of our tribe, I was the first self-governance director of our tribe, I was first housing director of our tribe; so there was a lot of firsts. And of course planning and development was another challenge I had to take. So that's how we got started and we continue to work well with the planning and development department. Now I'm on the council again. I was 20 years ago and back on it again. We can do nothing but move forward now. Thank you."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"Good afternoon. I'm Bunny Jaakola and I represent the Fond du Lac Band of Minnesota Chippewa. That is my home band. I have been working almost 15 years as the coordinator for the Social Service Department there within the Human Services Division. Prior to that, I worked 15 years in juvenile justice. In our area, so many of the children, the youth that came through that court diversion program are now the parents of the kids and the families that we work with on the reservation. So I think everything that's been said about continuity really holds true. I think my familiarity with my own people and then working outside in a county/state kind of program and coming back to the reservation, everybody knows who I am and I've had people working with me now for several years. And for the first time in our history and probably some have not even heard of this year, we have people calling our Social Service Department and saying, 'I want to talk to a social worker.' When I started in social work, it was difficult for me to say that I'm a social worker because of our history with social work. So I think that anything's possible when we've got families who are in dire need making the call and asking for help. That's progress. And I'll talk more later."

Vernelda Grant:

"[Apache Language] My name is Vernelda Grant. I'm San Carlos Apache and I work for my tribe as the Tribal Archaeologist and Director of the Historical Preservation Archaeology Department. I work closely with the Elders Cultural Advisory Council, who I'm with here at this symposium. I primarily work with the national, state and tribal legislation on cultural resource management and work with the Elders Council on language and community education projects on cultural resources."

Gary Nelson:

"[Navajo Language] Hello. My name is Gary Nelson. I'm the Town Manager for the Kayenta Township. About a year ago, I came up to talk with [then-Navajo] President Kelsey Begaye about my interest in helping the Navajo Nation in the area of commercial industrial development and also one of the larger farms that the Navajo Nation has, it's actually probably the only real large farm we have and it's one of the largest farms in the nation, and that's the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry. Surprisingly, both what I asked for seemed to have fallen into my hands.

Kayenta Township is one...something that I really desire to assume, to contribute in that area but also in other areas. The township was awarded and recognized also probably a year, two years ago, and since that time also we've made great progress. We're doing new developments. We're currently going to build a 40,000-square-foot office building. Also 100,000-plus square foot of new shopping center. We assessed the township for need for new office space as well as the market area to see just what kind of population existed within the 50-mile radius up to 75-miles radius. We found that there was like 40,000 to 50,000 people that resided within that kind of distance from the township. With some of those numbers and knowing where some of the people shopped, we determined a need that we could easily support another shopping center or additional services that currently aren't there.

So the challenge is there and we're also pressing to really begin to make some legislative changes. Navajo tribal law as well as federal law, laws that currently are in place that prohibit our goals, we want to remove those stumbling blocks or barriers so that our people really move forward in the area of economic development and to build their economic strength and become a politically powerful people. I guess our vision and our understanding is that as long as our people are poor they're not going to have the sovereign strength or the economic strength or be in subjection to other powers, dominant governments, other races, whatever you want, but really economics has a lot to do with our sovereign rights and the power that's going to come behind it. Thank you."

Cecilia Belone:

"[Navajo language]. For my people, [Navajo language]. I am Cecilia Belone, the Division Director for the Division of Social Services within the Navajo Nation. We have a project, the Navajo Child Special Advocacy Project program that was recognized in the year 2000 for serving children who are victims of sexual abuse and working with their families, providing family-centered services and also applying cultural and traditional functions to providing these services. We're collaborating with really resources that are necessary in order to help heal children and families.

My mother had always said and my elder had always said that I was a current leader. I didn't really think that they meant being before people but eventually I was going to come before people and I had to watch what I say and I had to pick my words carefully. I never knew that...really knew what they were talking about until I started to work with child sexual abuse. And it's something that many of us deny that it exists, but on the Navajo Nation I feel like it's something that we have acknowledged that it does exist. And it's not so much talking about the existence of it, but the language by which you talk about it within the Navajo Nation and that was a challenge. And as somebody had said earlier that when you become recognized and receive an honor that just gives you a greater challenge and we've taken that challenge. And this program is only a part of a larger system, the social service system that involves a lot of other social and behavioral issues. And I have taken on that challenge and my boss, the president of the Navajo Nation has made it a priority. And having to have the Navajo Nation Council acknowledge that has just been a tremendous challenge and it's something that I'm very honored to be a part of. We will talk further about some of the issues that we have encountered in getting to meeting that challenge.

I would like to say thank you to the Harvard Honoring Nations program for acknowledging that there are many, many good things happening out there among our people and I would like to honor all the programs that are up here that have been recognized and all those who have gone before. They have set the standards for us and for us, with the Navajo Nation, we're pretty encouraged for our people. Thank you."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you to all of our participants. As you can tell, we have a great diversity in experience and I think we can have some really provocative dialogue for this afternoon. I want to concentrate and ask maybe you want to respond on part of the title of this panel, 'The Politics of Change.' And change is...it's difficult implementing change, creating change and then implementing change comes with lots and lots of challenges. The old saying that everybody wants to get to heaven but nobody wants to die I think has some meaning as we try to think about pushing boundaries and changing ways and meeting challenges.

As we talk about the politics of change and in what you have experienced in developing these programs and implementing these programs, certainly as we talk about some of the components in creating successful programs and examples of good governance, you might talk about some of those components that have contributed to the positive creation, but in so doing I'd encourage us to really speak candidly about some of those barriers. As I reminded myself of the programs I was struck by some of the tremendous challenges, sometimes our own tribal communities, our own tribal governments, challenges of tribal politics, dealing with hostility and misconceptions and even overt racism in outside communities, dealing with federal regulatory or state regulatory schemes that are in place that for years and years and years have been oppressive in trying to break those down and create partnerships. It's a tremendous amount of challenges that we certainly do have.

And so maybe I ought to ask Dodie, since Dodie you have served as a tribal councilperson in a variety of capacities with your tribe and now this program. If you might start us off in dialogue and ask folks to weigh in and talk again about some of those specific barriers, how those barriers you've broken down in getting through the first phase, which is creating successful programs."

Dodie Chambers:

"Well, I think for our tribe specifically, our tribe is fairly recognized only for 20 years now, 21 or 22, but we were Indians in the community and in the area and were dwindling. Like there may have been only about 10 families left in the 1960s. So the outlying area people, the founding people, the state people, the townships didn't want to recognize us as a government and even to this day they don't think we have the kind of government that...the government they have. So that was one of the big barriers was once we became recognized, once we start getting federal dollars into our tribe, once we were available to offer even our two-percent monies to the area, townships and county people, they still...we still had a little problem with them wanting to recognize and acknowledge that we are a government and we can run...we can have our own sovereignty and provide our people with our programs the way we want to. They still don't want to acknowledge that; we're still not quite as good as they are. That continues to be a smaller problem. It was huge 10 years ago even, but today it's a smaller problem but it still exists and we are still not 100-percent people when we go into town. So that continues to be a barrier. It has been, but we've knocked down some of those walls and unfortunately those walls came down because of the two-percent money from our gaming industry. That was one huge barrier that we overcame and continue to overcome and still work on today."

Aaron Miles:

"Some of the barriers that I see the internal things like me as a manager interfacing with the policy people, the elected leaders, getting on the same page as them is quite difficult. I think when you look at the different values, when you look at the diversity on the council, you have those who have just come out of this post era of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] running the show and so their institutionalized thinking is, 'This is the way it's always been done and it will continue to be that way.' And then I think some of the younger generations that I interact with it's more of 'How do we relearn the value system that was in place before pre-European contact? How do we gain a better understanding of protecting the resources that contribute to our culture and way of life in that context?' And so that's one of difficulty because right now the tribes aren't really...when you look at our tribes were forced into this era back to really become American citizens, to become this equal, but now I think tribal members now in this new age are really trying to...how are we going to be different? We want to remain unique among the American citizenship and our right to remain unique. And sometimes the things that we do are quite un-American, our way of thinking, our way...the way we do things and it's unintentional. How do we as Indian tribal people begin to implement something like that? But we still have to get on the same page it seems like internally before we can address those problems."

Beth Janello:

"I'd like to mention a barrier that I see in terms of trying to implement a scientific program and that is a real difference in values. Trying to establish water quality standards that protect traditional uses perhaps of the river. It's really hard to explain that to the EPA or to the New Mexico Environment Department. So having very different values for the protection of a resource can become a barrier if you don't have education or if you have ears that don't want to hear it, or economic value is the only value rather than habitat protection or water protection or ceremonial or traditional protection. So that's something I've found to be a real barrier in terms of implementation is a difference in core values."

JoAnn Chase:

"Beth, could you just take that a step further perhaps and talk about how you dealt with that. Clearly the difference is there. Was it dialogue, was it inviting folks to come be with you? Is it something that you're still continuing to deal with?"

Beth Janello:

"Yes, we deal with it every day and the most effective way that we've found to deal with it is through working through...perhaps maybe working through the laws. For example, we set our water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. We got treatment as a state, we followed the process, the legal process and so then it becomes very difficult for people to argue with that. One thing we've also done in the last couple of years that's been very effective is we collect data, we monitor the river on a weekly basis so we know what's in there. It's very hard to argue with fact. We know and actually we're discovering that not only are our water quality standards in some cases being violated, but so are the state water quality standards. So the potential uses for the river are not meeting state uses, not just tribal uses. So our data has become very effective. So sometimes it means, unfortunately, working in the system instead of trying to...for years I think we talked about, 'You don't understand you're not meeting the water quality standards,' but not until we had the data to back it up did people start listening. And we had the regional administrator from EPA come in and talk to the tribal council last month. So the Pueblo of Sandia has had water quality standards since 1993. We applied for them in 1991. So it's not really very new, but our EPA officials only came out in December. So it's an ongoing issue and I think a very effective means of dealing with the barrier is to have data and back up documentation."

Gary Nelson:

"I'll speak to you more in the area of business and economic development. Kayenta Township, the community of Kayenta, town commission, having gone through all the normal process for organizing itself into a township structure and doing all the necessary planning, master planning in preparation to really do economic development and then entertaining new businesses and to go through the process of this local review and local approval, having exercised this local governance, what we experience is that we still have a barrier in the way and it has to do with the existing law. There comes a point that the law, the structure, the current law is really prohibitive and it must change and that's really what we're experiencing. Listening to the business associations or the community, what they want, their desire, they want the economic freedom just like any community outside the Navajo Nation, the ability to gain equity, value in their businesses, the ability to sell that business or to utilize that lease hold interest to leverage capital. All those things are prohibited under existing law and it's really come to a point we have to say, 'No more. If our people are going to prosper, this law is not allowing it.' And so that's where we're at.

And we are currently involved with the Navajo Nation Council, some of the attorneys and economic development committees and divisions entertaining a new regulation, new ordinances that would govern Navajo Nation law from this time forward. The Navajo Nation also has been successful in getting congressional support and in entertaining the idea of forming their own business leasing approval without intervention anymore. But the challenge is that the Navajo Nation must develop these regulations, BIA still has to approve of it to see if it's going to be fine. But in the end, the Navajo Nation can't just duplicate the same law; it's not going to work.

So really what's happening is that we have gone out to the grassroots people, the local communities. We've asked for input. Kayenta Township, having had numerous years now as a township and a government structure, having probably more business development in recent years than any of the communities on the reservation, it provides some excellent direction and some of those are in the booklet that you received today. The bottom line is that BIA and the Navajo Nation must let go of authority, delegate that to the local people, let us determine our own destiny, how we want to do business or what we want to do with the lands that are available for development, whether we want to leverage the value of that land to get capital investment or those things. Those are the barriers.

The barrier also is that the current lease, they're okay. Many of the provisions can remain the same but let us do rent negotiations like any other off-reservation communities, cities, towns. And that's based on land valuations and improvements, the value of those things and determining a rate of return on those things as rent, but not a structure that the government has that is discoursing to outside business. We have a gross minimum annual rent that would be in place for the term of the lease whether it's 25 years or if there's a certain lease that's 99 years and that rent is there, or if the business is doing well then the other rent that would become effective would be a percentage of gross receipts. So if a business is doing two million dollars a year or even higher and they have a gross receipts percentage set at five, six, seven percent, usually that business will be paying $100,000 or more a year, whereas the value of the land is...the rental payment if it was based on land valuation could be one fourth that amount or even less.

So the more you penalize businesses we find that they're not going to come out to the Indian communities to do business. So our whole mission and focus now is to really create that environment that is favorable for business activity and that would allow our people and anyone who wants to do business to get into business easily and without much trouble. That's really where we're headed with what we want to changed, specifically."

JoAnn Chase:

"Bunny and Cecelia, you both deal with among the most precious of our resources and the reason why so many of us do the work we do, our children. And I'm sure that in implementing the amazing and effective programs you both have dealt with which are different programs there have been a number of barriers both within the tribe among our own people and certainly outside. I'm wondering if you might both make any comments specifically on some of those challenges with respect to the specific programs you've both dealt with."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"First, I want to be sure to thank the planners of this symposium, because one of the biggest barriers that I've run into within the tribe, within the county, within the state is the credibility. People just refuse to give one another credibility and I feel it more so on the state level and the county level here in Minnesota, but it's hurtful within the tribe. And we were awarded two honors awards from the Honoring Nations and one of them was a foster care program off reservation, very different, very unheard of, and the other was an online pharmacy billing program, very successful. But when you come up with the ideas, and I was not the one that came up with those ideas, but when people do bring ideas forward they need to be heard and encouraged. And the way that I've found to combat that is with education -- educating the community, educating the other co-workers, educating the county people and on the state level, wherever. It's a constant education process. And in fact I've said in kidding ways that before I went to social work school I should have gone to teaching school so I could help people to understand what we're trying to do. One thing that I didn't hear mentioned from the leadership perspective this morning was I found that to be a two-way street. I want to be able to rely upon my leadership for support and understanding and encouragement, but if they don't know what I'm doing or if they don't know what people are doing out there, they're liable to react to some things in a different way than if they were fully informed of what it is we're doing out there in the community, out there with the county, with the state, whatever it is. And I think that's very important, especially in a community where you are...this is home. Half the people are relatives and the other ones are in-laws so you need to be sure to protect your back. The way that I try to help the youth, the younger people that I'm mentoring is to look for that proactive stance wherever you can. Bring the information there. If you hear of a hot idea that's going to be different, be sure you let them know where you're going with that, because fear drives a lot of things and sometimes it's simply that fear of the unknown that brings about that resistance or that 'no' at first glance. Thank you."

Cecilia Belone:

"I have to agree that many times it's because people don't know and our social service issues are not physical. They manifest themselves physically maybe, but somebody talked about addressing deep-rooted issues, so you're talking about multi-generational issues that you're trying to address. But we seem to...our social service approach seems to be the band-aid addressing the symptoms and we all know that the symptoms are because of a lot of previous issues. And those issues are non-tangible, you can't see them. It's not like creating jobs. It's one of the most popular programs within the Navajo Division of Social Services, child care centers. You're doing great if you're putting up a bunch of child care centers. You're doing great if you're providing a lot of cash assistance. We're doing our own TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] program now from the three states and that's more popular than some of the non-tangible programs like the child sexual abuse program that we have. So for us, it's more internal because we're larger enough and we're sovereign enough to exert that authority. Most of what we deal with with the state now is just like working together on Indian child welfare issues, Indian Child Welfare Act issues. All the other services are provided through the tribe. So most of it is internal. Having to coalesce around these non-tangible issues requires a lot of education, a lot of outreach, a lot of communication, and you have to start right from the get-go. Are you going to work with these politicians, your tribal leaders or are you going to butt heads with them? I chose to work with them and actually get some things done, because if you start just right adversarial from the beginning that doesn't help you any. So you have to be aware of the dynamics within that leadership not just your immediate committee members, but the total council and everything...all of the other boards and whatever else there is. And you have to be able to collaborate within your own system, because it does not work and you cannot do it alone. And our social workers burn out, most of them are already burnt out, in two years, four years, and if they are there by 15 years, wow! Who's going to last 15 years in such a job, being out there among the people? And it's got to be a very dedicated person who does that. And most of all your people have to be committed because you can't go out and do...protect a child and deal with the family issues on a daily basis if you're not committed. Otherwise, you just become a part of the process. And it's very important for our people and our leaders to know that and educating them and working with them on those issues. We have the council actually acknowledge that the issue does exist and they actually committed some dollars to it in order to supplement the Bureau of Indian Health Service funds that we were getting. So this is not something that is created in a year, created in five years. It's something that started 20 years ago, that the foundations were being laid and you were really educating on basic issues. And it's coming to fruition and it has and we want to expand on that to include the entire...all of the social services issues, not just child sexual abuse."

Vernelda Grant:

"I sort of listed...since my job and the work I do with the Elders Council pertains to working with the past living cultures, the archaeology and prehistoric cultures and also the present living culture, living community, we have a wide working communication with just many different kinds of people from political leaders to community members to tribal programs to the Bureau of Indian Affairs agencies to federal agencies off the reservation, museums and whatnot. But I sort of -- just based on a working communication with those people -- I sort of listed barriers and I just kind of listed it now because this is like what I see overall just within our community. I'm just going to list them out. There's a lack of...there's cultural barriers, there's language barriers, there's a lack of self-identity, self-awareness, which kind of leads to lack of respect and there's barriers with the lack of technical expertise within tribal programs and a lack of communications with regards to economic development, commitment, the lack of the practice of good sovereignty and the lack of dedication. I sort of see this door opening interrelated in some sort of way and how we try to make those things positive, because we deal with it daily, is we sort of use our cultural, our Apache cultural beliefs and background, and we use that to basically focus on, I guess, objectives that we work with within our program. I'm just throwing that out."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you, and I actually want to take this a step further as well. We've heard some of the ideals and principles that have gone into planning and creating programs including communication, collaboration, dedication, commitment, pure tenacity. As you read through these programs, this didn't just start yesterday or the day before. It started 20 years ago and people have stuck with it. Education is a two-way street. Not only is it important to educate people that we are working with in order to create and develop programs, but it's also important ourselves to be educated about who it is we're trying to deal with and communicate with, and then both qualitative and quantitative. You mentioned Beth, facts speak volumes as part of breaking down these barriers and overcoming the programs. So we've created the programs, some of you have implemented the programs or are continuing to implement the process and probably facing certain challenges of implementation. And so I'd like to ask you also to comment on now that we've created these very innovative and wonderful programs, some of them rather new, how are they sustained? What measures need to be taken? How do we define and measure success? What can we do to ensure that this work continues perhaps as some of you go off to do other things and continue to be effective and valuable services to our people and to promote an advancing tribal sovereignty? I'll just open it up to the panel whoever would like to respond to that."

Julia "Bunny" Jaakola:

"I had mentioned mentorship a little earlier, and I think that's one sure way of continuity is being sure that the younger people, the newcomers are involved and because they will become committed as they feel the excitement of growth and development. There are formal ways to develop the mentorship, but there are easier informal ways of doing this and it's like taking someone under your wing so to speak. I like the comments this morning about the youth council. Those kids are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and the more they know about what's going on in their community the better participant they are going to be."

Dodie Chambers:

"Excuse me, I had to swallow that candy first. I think another way of ensuring that our programs will continue, like this morning, the Grand Traverse Band Junior Tribal Council is much involved and as we mentor them and allow them to shadow us in our programs, that will help...that's one way of sustaining our programs. Also within our tribe we have internal program directors training and within that training all the employees, all employees take this training where they learn everything about any program including budgets, report forms to the federal government, to the Bureau [of Indian Affairs], to Indian Health [Service]. This program directors training could help ensure that when I leave my program the next person who has learned the exact programs and rules and regs and requirements. Then when I leave then the next person, whoever it is, can step right in and that would be another way of sustaining our programs is to have the next person who has learned the exact rules and all the budgets and all of that per program and per agency and per federal government agency too. That's a way of sustaining some of the programs that we have.

I think also that tribes should insist on education for the young people. Too many people these days want to step into tribal government, just step right into it, with no prior training or knowledge or internal workings of the tribe, of the tribal standards and we need to insist that our kids at least get a minimum high school education, minimum, and encourage going on to college and then coming home to work and not starting at the top the minute they come home. Because that's what a lot of the kids today are demanding that when they get out of college and they come home they want to start at the top, and then if they start at the top then they step on toes and find out they don't know about tribal life. So although we encourage our kids to go on to school we have to kind of take them in at the entry level at least and let them learn for a minimum of a couple years at least, two years at least, tribal government and tribal ways. So yes, we need to pursue their education goals, but once they come home then we need to mentor them also for a year or two.

And I think also a fourth way of sustaining our good intentions and our good works, from this day forward, I would hope that the councils pass ordinances, makes it a law that the next generation of tribal council members have enough sense to go back...look backwards in the books and see if there isn't a law already or if there isn't a way to do things already. Because again, today too many of the kids automatically want to step up and assume something new without realizing they might be breaking an old law of some kind. So I think that would be a fourth way of sustaining programs is to ensure that ordinances are passed and that that book of ordinances is passed on to the next council so that anything that's in place is followed or anything that needs to be changed we would know where it needs to be changed, what paragraph, what section, whatever.

JoAnn Chase:

"Aaron, maybe as you address this question too and I know time is getting short on us here, but let me add a little twist to this to actually create a tie to some of the dialogue that took place this morning in terms of continuity of tribal governments themselves as well and how do the programs that we work with and how are they affected...?

Aaron Miles:

"Some of the things that I have seen with our gray wolf recovery effort is that we're in a totally different arena now that we not only serve the tribal membership, the general council now, but we also serve the general public. I mean the State of Idaho citizens now are stakeholders in wolf recovery and wolf management. So now a lot of my duties are to work with the state's entities and that's a whole new ballpark for the Nez Perce Tribe. And it was just recently in 1980, when I was growing up as a child, we fought the state, the Army National Guard at Rapid River in the central part of Idaho with the Fisherman's Committee, the state was trying to regulate us. And so when I come back to the tribe I go a whole 180-degree turn from not liking the state to having to work with them and so that was a different thing for me because my family had been adamant about not liking the state. And so finding common ground is where we're at right now. When you take a look at the Pacific Northwest, we're all in the same battle each...every...what is called the 'lord of yesterday,' the ranching, mining, farming, all that. We're all trying to protect our own heritages and we as Indian people are in the same boat. So we've got to find that commonality of how do we build our strengths from one another, rather than finding ways to oppose each other? That's kind of where the tribe...I think where tribes need to be, how do we protect each other rather than fighting and that common ground, hopefully, will make the tribes more visible because that's what we need right now. I was listening to Billy Frank, Jr. recently. He was saying, 'We've got to embarrass the hell out of the federal government for their past...the wrongdoings that they did to us.' Because right now we're...I was listening this morning, we are in a state of emergency of trying to protect our sovereignty and that's going to take educating non-Indian folks about who we are. It's very important. But I think also with that the tribe has to figure out ways to build leadership internally. What I see happening is that like for the Nez Perce Tribe, only the chairman can speak on behalf of the Nez Perce Tribe. Well, that leaves only one person being able to speak about the Nez Perce Tribe and there's a number of capable individuals on council or even managers that could speak on behalf of the tribe and start building that leadership so you have more individuals rather than just one. Attitudes in the workplace, there's different things that have changed the work environment from 20 years ago, 10 years ago and so tribes maintaining or keeping up with those...technology, the flow of information is so readily available, it's so different than yesteryears so we've got to keep up with those times, too. And I think tribes have been actually ahead of the game in many respects, especially with resource management. We've...like the Nez Perce Tribe, it's been the Nez Perce way of thinking that's been bringing back the species that belong in our Nez Perce country. It's not the science, it's the science that is meshed with the way the Nez Perce think, not just science alone. So that's the way I think most Indian tribes are operating and we've got to continue on like that."

JoAnn Chase:

"Comments by other panelists? Gary."

Gary Nelson:

"In order to preserve what we've worked hard for or even at the tribe certain values and things, first there has to be a strong identity and a national pride that comes probably before you can really say you have vision, commitment and all those things. I sat next to a Japanese man one time coming back from Chicago and I began to ask him questions. I started off by saying, 'You know, the Japanese people as a group are highly intelligent, capable, competitive, almost maybe you're equal, on par with the white race. What do you...what is your philosophy? What do you teach your youth?' His answer was fairly short and simple and he said, 'We teach them they're better than anybody. We teach them national pride, to believe in themselves.' It's the same thing what my grandmother taught me as a youth. '[Navajo language],' she says. 'Having confidence in yourself is a quality trait to have.' And so with our youth, all the things happening among them, the violence and the drugs and stuff, and then also I hear the elderly saying our youth don't know our cultural stories anymore but then it has to go further beyond that. Even the elders, or as a people, what does our culture mean or what does it...what's the interpretation of those things? Because you can't gain the identity without understanding what it means, and so that's something I've struggled with all my life. And I've seen my grandmother pray a certain way and how we're supposed to pray as the Diné and how she would say certain things to the thunderstorms but she had certain things she would say and I always wanted to know those things and I sought and searched myself and I finally came to realize what it is. So when you really realize where you fit in the human race and that you're not inferior, that you have a great heritage, it's a whole new world. The confidence that it gives you, that's what our youth need today. And to preserve that, I think the Kayenta Township, we have to build that into the system, the educational system. We have the strong desire at the community level for the Kayenta Township to continue. There was great effort to do away with it, to squash it, to limit it. There were strong forces out there that wanted to see it end but there was enough community vision, community support that stepped up and fought to keep it. Today with the new development, we're looking forward to tripling our tax revenues and the best way to sell is to show results. I'm a strong advocate for that. If people see the end product, how the new revenues or what it's paid for or new developments and new revenues and the kind of new services that the township might be able to help fund. So with that, the organizational structure, the right structures have to be there, a stable government. I think those are some of the components, I'm sure there's more but I think preserve something and to build that pride it will go. So if you do create this environment for business and if we do all the other things that help it, we know our people are going to get into business, they're going to...we'll see them doing business just like any off-reservation community."

JoAnn Chase:

"I'd just like to remind the panelists we're running a little tight on time, so if you have some comments about what it takes to sustain and courage to make those comments and then we'll wrap up and move on in the agenda. Vernelda."

Vernelda Grant:

"Just real quick. With the line of speakers this morning, I thought it was pretty interesting because I don't think I'm a conference Indian but I do go to conferences and I hear a lot of people speak and I try to sit back and keep my mind open to a lot of things that they have to say. But this morning I thought it was pretty interesting because it seems like each individual that was up there spoke on elements, well, like specifically Mr. [Robert] Yazzie and Mr. [Oren] Lyons, and I apologize but I didn't get the name of the doctor that spoke during lunch, but they all pointed to elements that make and sustain a leader and what a leader is and what a leader goes through. And you don't hear that much and it kind of points back to that self-awareness, the leader, the person who knows themselves and where they're going to go, where they've been and what they can do and who they can influence. So I think something like that that was pulled out, that's what I saw. I don't know if I'm just way out there, but I thought that was really interesting because we need that, we need that leadership and strength, I think, in our communities. We're lacking it with our tribal leaders, we're lacking it with our youth, we're lacking it with, I hate to even say this but in some communities with the elders, too. It's just everybody and I think that's...that leader, whatever field they may go into, governance, the cultural arena, dealing with money, different types of management, they can be successful no matter what they go into and like I said, they're all interrelated, not one works without the other and a person who's more whole, a person who's more...who can let their guard down and know who they are can go anywhere and like I said, can lead anybody anywhere. So I think that's what I wanted to stress about what I got out of this morning's line of speakers."

Aaron Miles:

"One of the concerns I had as well when I heard this morning's speakers was leadership. My concern is that in today's society, we have to teach our kids -- or there's this perception that we have to teach our kids -- how to be aggressive and get out there and do things, take initiative and direct people to do things in more of a military-type leadership. I was always brought up to always respect my elders and those characteristics to always be last in line or always offer your help, the humility, the things that servant leadership is really about in Indian Country sometimes don't mesh with the leadership in today's corporate world or whatever. So am I actually, when I teach my young kids, I have four kids, am I giving them a disadvantage if I don't teach them those ways? And so those are some of the daunting questions Indian people will be facing right now and in the future so who's leadership are we talking about and that's kind of where I'm coming from."

JoAnn Chase:

"That may be a very appropriate way to conclude our dialogue this afternoon. We are actually right at our time limit but this morning we had a chance to ask some questions and I encourage people in the audience, there's such great value and richness in the exchange that occurs to keep up the dialogue and ask the questions of the folks as we have a little bit more time together. But before we close this afternoon's session, does anybody have a particularly pressing question that they just need to ask before we let this panel go and move on along in the agenda?

We could be here all afternoon talking about some of these issues. These are great questions and again I appreciate the candor and the spirit of the dialogue among the panel. This will probably go...this is a question that raises some issues that need to continue to be talked about, not just a simple answer to a question but the kind of questions that we need to continue to raise and debate in our communities. And specifically, how do your programs address issues related to gender including sexism? I think it's a very provocative and important question and as I say, we need to continue to ask, and what is the distribution of leadership positions between men and women. So those issues of gender equity, certainly dealing with issues of sexism and probably added to that at some point important questions about racism both within our communities and the racism we face as well as various other -isms that are challenges to our communities. But in closing, does anybody want to talk about the gender issues with respect to their programs and within the leadership of their programs, whether it's excellent..."

Aaron Miles:

"We need more women in our leadership in Nez Perce."

JoAnn Chase:

"Anybody else have a response to that question? Bunny."

Bunny Jaakola:

"At Fond du Lac, unfortunately women are scarce in the leadership roles. The one position that's very important is the executive director in the structure that we have and that happens to be a female. However, it's my opinion that because the council members are all male, they see it easier to have a female in that position. So it's not...I don't really respect that and I'm wondering if you coordinators other than in nursing, the others are mostly male and the division directors are mostly male."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you for the question. Certainly those are important as I say questions that we need to raise. I again appreciate the candor of the panel discussion. I think if we don't raise the difficult questions sometimes and address them and talk frankly among ourselves, then they don't get addressed and the kinds of progress that we can make both within our programs and collectively is thwarted as a result of that. I also thank you, I've learned such a great amount in listening to each of you. We talked about some of the elements in terms of creating programs. We've talked about some of the elements in terms of sustaining programs and certainly one of those elements is the personalities involved and so each of you should be commended for your hard work and your personal commitment and dedication to really making a tremendous contribution not only within the tribe and your neighboring areas but collectively to the community as a whole."

Indian Country must put more effort in public relations

Producer
Indianz.com
Year

While sipping my morning coffee I began reading a White House document titled “2014 Native Youth Report.” As with every other tribal member, I am aware of the long-standing socio-economic quagmire we have been enduring.

The fact that we are still alive and well is short of miraculous and thought provoking. In this enclosed Lakota biosphere of ours, we have life fundamentals that should be public knowledge. However, we rely on outside entities to provide skewed numbers or statistics relevant to language, education, and population.

We have a severe need to develop and establish our own data regarding areas of public concern. Such statistics will be local, accurate, and up-to-date...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Star Comes Out, Ivan F. "Indian Country must put more effort in public relations." Native Sun News. January 22, 2015. Opinion. (http://www.indianz.com/News/2015/016202.asp, accessed July 21, 2023)