fishing rights

UN 2023 Water Conference: Restoring Rivers, Restoring Sovereignty: Klamath River Dam Removals

Year

A discussion about the impacts of the Klamath River Dams on water resources, cultural practices, climate change and what the upcoming dam removals will mean for Northern California Tribal Nations.

Speakers:

  • Shannon Holsey, President, Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, Treasurer, NCAI
  • Russell “Buster” Attebery, Chairman, Karuk Tribe
  • Joe James, Chairman, Yurok Tribe
  • Michael Connor, Assistant Secretary, Army for Civil Works
  • Danielle Frank, Youth Coordinator, Save California Salmon
Resource Type
Citation

National Congress of American Indians. "UN 2023 Water Conference: Restoring Rivers, Restoring Sovereignty: Klamath River Dam Removals". (April 24, 2023). Video. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4bJsBONZ7Y

Transcripts for all videos are available by request. Please email us: nni@arizona.edu.

The Klamath River Now Has the Legal Rights of a Person

Year

This summer, the Yurok Tribe declared rights of personhood for the Klamath River — likely the first to do so for a river in North America. A concept previously restricted to humans (and corporations), “rights of personhood” means, most simply, that an individual or entity has rights, and they’re now being extended to nonhumans. The Yurok’s resolution, passed by the tribal council in May, comes during another difficult season for the Klamath; over the past few years, low water flows have caused high rates of disease in salmon, and canceled fishing seasons.

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Mike Williams

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in November 2001, Yupiaq Nation Chief Mike Williams discusses his fervent commitment to his people's subsistence way of life and how he runs the Iditarod dog sled race every year to promote sobriety, healthy lifestyles, and education for Alaskan children.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Williams, Mike. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Spokane, Washington. November 2001. Interview. 

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Mike Williams is a Yupiaq Eskimo born in the small village of Akiak, Alaska, in 1952 to the late Tim Williams, Chief of the Tribal Government of Akiak and Helena Williams, the sister of the traditional Chief Joe Lomack. As a child, Mike went with his family from camp to camp during the year with subsistence hunting and fishing, gathering food for the family and also for the dog teams. It was very hard but a good life, he recalls. Everything in the village was taken care of by a tribal council. Mike Williams learned the geography, the names of the rivers and landmarks and how his people had existed in earlier times from his grandmother. He grew up speaking only the Yupiaq language. He had two sisters and six brothers. All his brothers died due to accidents in the river or falling through ice. Mike is dedicated to telling the local and global community that accidental deaths can be avoided and that an alcohol and drug free life can be realized by his people. After boarding school at Wrangell Institute in southeast Alaska he attended high school at Chemawa Indian School in Oregon where he excelled in athletics, football, track and field and basketball. But sports alone did not satisfy him. He ran for and was elected student body president. A lifelong interest in politics and the rights of tribes was sparked at Chemawa where he was able also to build friendships with young people from many different tribes. One of his advisers, a Rosebud Sioux, saw his leadership potential and sent him to a summer leadership training institute. After high school Mike was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in South Korea. Returning to Alaska, he worked as a mental health counselor in Bethel and continued his education in Behavioral Science at Kuskokwin Community College. Mike Williams is a dedicated public servant of more than 30 years working with both Native and non-Native organizations. Today he is chairman of the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council. He has been vice chairman of the Alaska State Board of Education and held offices with the National Congress of American Indians, the Alaska Humanities Forum and the Native American Rights Fund. He has served as the Director of the Alaska State Governor's Alcohol and Substance Abuse Advisory Board. Mike has been honored with the Most Inspirational Award in the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. Among the other honors he has received are Alaska State Legislature Award of Honor for Sobriety Advocacy and the Citizen of the Year Award of the National Social Worker's Association, Alaska Chapter. He is passionate about protecting tribal governments, the rights of tribes and building economic self-sufficiency for Alaska Natives. Dog mushing is his culture and it is his tradition. He runs the Iditarod Dog Sled Race to promote sobriety, healthy lifestyles and quality education for his people. Mike married his wife Maggie in 1976 and they have five children. His wife and family have always supported his mushing career. Without their full hearted support he maintains he could not lead the busy life of an advocate for tribes, mental health counselor and runner for sobriety. He also continues subsistence hunting and fishing and enjoys reading and karate. The Institute for Tribal Government interviewed Mike Williams in Spokane, Washington, November, 2001."

The several worlds of Mike William's childhood

Mike Williams:

"Well, when I was a little child my role model was my father of course and he was an avid dog musher and also a subsistence hunter and fisher and a good one. And I wanted to be the greatest hunter and fisherman that ever lived in our lands and to provide for my family, to provide a good home and to manage our resources. So in terms of wanting to do something for the community, I think my parents were really advocates for learning the White man ways and the words as much as we can and that was very important for them. For my dad to tell me that I have to learn as much as I can of the words of the White man and that I would need that western education to protect our resources. So I think that...he did a good job in terms of keeping my identity intact while sacrificing me to this new education and I think he wanted me to know both worlds and I think he did a very good job."

On keeping the Yupiaq language intact, different approaches of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the missionaries

Mike Williams:

"Well, I think the missionaries came to us and the Moravian Church at that time. They came and they advocated for us to keep our language intact and I think it was the BIA schools, the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, that discouraged speaking of our language in the classes and they are the ones that washed my dad's mouth with soap and my mother's mouth with soap for speaking in our own language in our schools. But the missionaries for some odd reason advocated that our language should be intact and that our culture and the dance should be intact and it was our own people that did it to ourselves with our Yupiaq dance. Missionaries for the most part wanted us to keep our way of life intact. One of the missionaries by the name of John Kilbuck was a Delaware Indian and he came from the Delaware Tribe and came up to us as a missionary to our community in Akiak. And he's the one that spoke to our people about establishing reservations for people and to keep our language intact and to keep our culture intact and he, I think, was a big influence to the missionaries that came to our communities. And he was a big advocate for to claim our land. And in the long run I think the missionaries tried to help as much as they can in keeping our culture and our languages alive. And they have done a lot of translating of the Bible to our language and we have a written language. And they have done a very good job of...my grandfather and my grandmother were involved in translating the Word and they translated the whole New Testament from English to Yupiaq so they did a very good job of that. And right now they're translating the whole Old Testament from English to Yupiaq, word for word. So they're doing a very good job. But all in all I think for the most part the federal government or the Bureau of Indian Affairs tried to assimilate us into who we aren't and to the melting pot of the American society and that our way of life can be better and that our way of life can be better in terms of our living conditions and our ways of doing things. So I think for the most part the education program tried to change us into who we aren't."

As a child and teen, boarding schools contrasted with the traditional life Williams had known

Mike Williams:

"My older brothers were the first ones to go to boarding schools in Chemawa, Oregon, and some of them ended up in Chilocco Indian School and Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka. So at age 14 I was removed and put in a dormitory and all the rules and regulations and the haircuts. It was a very tough change from living in Akiak with loving parents and community and no running water and no electricity and no television and going into Wrangell Institute was a big change when there was television and there were phones. And I remember this guy, one of the teachers, teaching us how to use telephones. ‘And this is a telephone and this is how you dial.' That was a very big change. We never thought about watching television, we never grew up watching television and there we watched, the first time I seen a football game and other programs as TV shows as well. nd that was a big change and having to live with rules and regulations and with others. It was a big change and we were homesick and we wanted to go home because it was a very strange environment. I just questioned why my parents allowed this to happen. We would go home in the summers and then Chemawa Indian School came around and again our parents sacrificed us saying that, ‘education is very important, you need to learn the White man ways and get Western education.' So off we went to Chemawa Indian School. Again it was a very big change from going to Wrangell Institute to high school. And I think that was one of the best parts of going to an Indian school is I have made many friends from all over Alaska and other tribes and all over northwest and in the Navajo country. It was a hard adjustment from a loving family into a dorm life and at a very young age. But again, I think our parents keep telling us or keep writing to us that, ‘education is very important, that we need for you to learn as much as you can so... there are going to be some issues coming up with our lands and our resources that you need to fight on.' So encouragement by our parents to go on and the sacrifice they made for the children to go on was very difficult for us but I think it was... they felt it was necessary and they knew our language was intact and our culture was intact but they felt that we needed to learn the other ways as well. I think that was a very tough experience but I think it was a very good experience in terms of establishing contacts with the people in the northwest and the Navajo country and to see tribal governments in operation at first hand and getting involved in school politics as well. So I think that was a very good experience in terms of playing sports as well. We've seen some football games on TV but we wanted to play. A lot of us Eskimos came down and we've never put on uniforms to play football and we just seen excerpts of football games when we were going to Wrangell Institute. And I never dreamed that I would be playing football and there was several of us Eskimos that put on the equipment. And one memorable experience that I've seen was the hip pads that came along with the equipment. We were discussing the Inupiat and Yupiaq people and the coaches didn't tell us how to put on the equipment but we had to figure that out. And we put on our shoulder pads and the hip pads were very, the hardest one to figure out because of the tailbone or tail guard that we were wondering what we needed that for. But we put on the hip pads and we figured that it was to protect our private parts. So we Eskimos, we turned it around and we thought that tail guard was for protection of our private parts. But that was the most uncomfortable feeling after putting the pants on and a lot of us were running outside to practice but it was very uncomfortable in running and we were wondering why the coaches didn't tell us what those protections were for. That was for tail bone protection. So we reversed it and that was a little more comfortable. But I think with all those changes, those were very interesting and learning experiences for us. It was a big change, a major change from living in a small community and the school was four times big as my community. It was, I think the transition was pretty rapid but again we were homesick, we wanted to go home and hunt and fish and to live that life in the wilderness. I really missed hunting and fishing and that was the hardest part."

Learning politics and leadership at Chemawa Indian School

Mike Williams:

"I've had three years of sports but politics sort of interested me. I need to do something different, I need to try politics so I ran for student body president and I didn't know...I organized my campaign and had a campaign manager, which I picked out a popular guy in our school and he eventually delivered but I didn't know anything about Robert's Rules of Order and how to run meetings period. I was very green in terms of running meetings and politics and budgeting and setting policy with our schools. I didn't know what I was getting into. I think that was the best move that I've ever made in terms of establishing myself and leadership skills into the future. Of course sports were there but I seen myself not becoming a professional sports person, playing football or basketball. I wasn't tall enough to play college basketball or become a professional athlete. So I seen the opportunity with politics and that was the first time I was prepared for leadership positions where I had a real good adviser that was from Rosebud and he's a Sioux and he was a very knowledgeable adviser. He pointed me in the right direction and went to summer leadership institute and getting me away from fishing. And I went to St. Louis, Missouri for the summer to learn about how to become a leader and that was an institute for student body presidents, which all the presidents, the majority of presidents were from all over the schools in the country, from New York, from Florida, from all over. I think it was a very good experience for me and I learned how to run meetings and to know about Robert's Rules of Order and how to conduct meetings and to provide, how to provide leadership. It opened my eyes during that one summer when I would go there and participate with other leaders or school student body presidents. And it was a good learning experience on how to be a leader."

Alaska becomes the 49th state in 1959

Mike Williams:

"I was seven years old when Alaska became a state and I was 17 years old when Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed in 1971. At that time many of our people were out hunting and fishing and gathering and many of our people did not participate in the statehood movement and I think there was only one Alaska Native in that first constitutional convention that they gathered. Our people for the most part weren't involved in the shaping of our state constitution and it was for the most part people from the outside that established the State of Alaska and our people for the most part did not participate in that because of the remoteness of our communities. But there was news in 1959 that Alaska became a state and without any consultation or without any input by our Native people. And after that I think the state keep selecting lands or taking lands and people keep getting land and that's when I think Morris Udall said, ‘Gee whiz, people are keeping taking land here and there. We need to have a land freeze.' And the oil was discovered in the North Slope and that I think prompted the land to be settled and without any settlement. The pipeline couldn't be built from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez and everybody knew there was oil. And again our people during that time were not fully participating and there was no consent by the tribal governments at that time."

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act passed by Congress in 1971 eliminated 90 percent of Alaska Native land claims in exchange for guarantees of 44 million acres and a cash settlement

Mike Williams:

"And I was in Chemawa Indian School in 1969, '70, '71 and '72 and graduated in '72. But in 1969, '70 and '71 we took the land claims class and we studied the land claims and we were wondering why Alaska Natives were giving away our rights. Our aboriginal title was hereby extinguished; our hunting and fishing rights were hereby extinguished by the act. And all these extinguishments, we were wondering why Alaska Natives are agreeing to this. And being a junior in 1971 after studying the land claims with my peers we disagreed with the act and we felt that it was in the way terminating our rights, our lands and that we rightfully have and especially our aboriginal title to the land that people agreed to. Again we didn't have any say so being a very naí¯ve and very young person but I had strong feelings and my position was that Alaska Native people, our people should not agree to this bill or this land claims bill that diminishes our existence as people and that way we felt that it was a termination process for our people. And we tried to voice those concerns to our representatives and to people in Congress but it fell to deaf ears and we know it was crafted by the lobbyists that had interest in oil development and also by Congress. Congress convinced the Alaska Natives that we had a better deal of 44 million acres and $1 billion that was going to be going to our people to settle the land and that we would finally have land, our land. But I think we lost a lot in that, the land claims."

After military service Williams decides to train himself to be an educator and a politician

Mike Williams:

"After high school, I always wanted to be a coach and to involve myself into politics. And my thoughts were to become a teacher and to involve myself in making my people stronger in terms of getting ready for land claims and the land settlement. And also the problems that I've seen in the Native community that I wanted to do something further with our young people. And that is one of the reasons why I have been focusing on educational programs in Alaska. My brother and I were the last ones to be drafted into the United States Army. And I know I could have gotten deferment but we were the last ones to be drafted in the draft era and my brother ended up in Vietnam and he was there prior to my entry to the U.S. Army. And they couldn't send us both to Vietnam so I ended up in South Korea. And while he was serving in Vietnam I was serving in South Korea in the Army. That was one of the best experiences that I had in terms of learning more about discipline and about the protection of our country and the importance of services and being in the service. And my thinking at that point, ‘Well, I'll go along with the draft and further take advantage of the GI bill.' After my service in South Korea I became disabled and lost one eye and got out on a disability and decided to come back home. My brother and I came back home at the same time and he came back from Vietnam alive and I came home the next day. So we had a real good reunion at home. And we were finally, the family was finally together. But unfortunately after three months of stay by my older brother he overdosed on alcohol. And he survived the bullets in Vietnam but he didn't survive alcohol at our home. And that, I just felt, why [did] that happened? But I think he really had a hard time adjusting from the Vietnam experience into Akiak where he was not comfortable and he went through Post Traumatic Syndrome. And we had to deal with that in the three months that we were home and we had to deal with that and the only way that he could numb some of that terrible experience that he's gone through in Vietnam that the only way he could numb himself is through the use of alcohol and other drugs as well."

He begins advocacy for sobriety in the mid 1970s

Mike Williams:

"I decided to get back into the education where I wanted people to change or to avoid the terrible effects of alcohol. And I think that was the beginning of my advocacy for sobriety. And that was a terrible experience that we've gone through and we decided to advocate for sobriety. My dad was one of the first people that advocated for sobriety. So I decided to advocate for mental health programs and also substance abuse programs for treatment of people with problems."

Williams and his wife decide to raise their children in Akiak. He becomes active in the movement for tribal sovereignty.

Mike Williams:

"I was working full time and going to school full time for the two years and started mental health programs throughout Alaska and also substance abuse programs and saying that, ‘we need to take this problem to our own hands and deal with it.' And from there I think that my advocacy for running our programs started in terms of developing our own programs the way I think will work for our people. And at that time I took classes and kept going to school. That is when I met my wife and I decided to, after establishing mental health programs and my college education in Bethel that, and we got married and decided to raise our children back in Akiak, back in our village. And she had gone to school and taken business courses and became a bookkeeper for a very big corporation there in Bethel. So we decided to go back after getting married and raise our children in the village and that was our choice. There I became involved with our tribal government and to reassert our sovereign status and that was...well, when I began the tribal sovereignty movement in our communities and eventually I got elected to the tribal council and as a young man I have been involved with the tribal councils ever since and became, eventually became the chief of the village and of our tribal council. We began the movement at that time that we need to retake our programs and we needed to assert our rights as sovereign governments and despite the Native corporations, both regional corporations and village corporations under the Native Claims Settlement Act and that we need to keep our sovereign rights alive despite the efforts to terminate our rights in Alaska."

Based on the powerful grassroots actions of tribes Congress passes the National Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978

Mike Williams:

"And one of the major issues that we took on at that time, there was the tribal child that was removed by a state social worker and at that time we said, ‘We're tired of seeing many of our children being removed by the state social workers and put them into non-Native homes.' And at that time in 1975, '76, when that child was being removed that we objected to that permanently removing that child from a Native mother to a non-Native family. So we put a stop to that and it was Indian Child Welfare Act at that time and we got this lawyer guy by the name of Bert Terse from New York. and we knew that he was a lawyer from going to meetings, attending NCI meetings and other meetings that go around in the country and we began talking to Bert. We asked who would be a good Indian lawyer that would help us in our community to get that child back and we were very successful. Eventually that child came back to our community. I think that was a significant move by our tribe and that our children will never be removed without our consent or without the agreement of the tribal council, that we really wanted to keep our families together and keep our children in our communities. And I think that was one of the first major work that started in Alaska and we were the major players in asserting our tribal government's rights or keeping our children within the families or relatives in our communities. So that was significant work that we started up there and eventually this kid grew up in Akiak and went to high school in Akiak and during his high school years he became a heavyweight state champion. So I think I love to tell that story where one of our children we protected that eventually became a successful heavyweight champion of the state and he beat the guy by the name of Superman, his last name is Superman. So I think I like to tell that story because it was one of the success stories that we've seen and the significant victory that we had as tribal council in the state. And right now I think the majority of the policies in Alaska before children are being removed that they have a real good working relationship with the tribal governments with the state social service system. So I think that was significant and we also established a Yupiaq Nation where we are sovereign tribes and we want to tell the whole world that we haven't given up our rights and we started the Yupiaq Nation, which we, that despite the land claims and our other rights that were eroded or being extinguished that despite all that we want to keep our rights intact that we still have jurisdiction over our land and we still have jurisdiction over our members and we still have jurisdiction of our resources, which are the moose, the caribou, the fish and everything. And I think under that Yupiaq Nation charter we keep our rights intact."

In 1975 Congress passes the Indian Self Determination Act giving tribal governments more control over their tribal affairs and funds for education assistance

Mike Williams:

"And another significant issue that we took on was the education, the BIA program. And in 1980-85 we decided to contract those educational services to our K-8 program. And we used the Self Determination Act to contract with BIA. When we first started that, BIA said, ‘No, you can't do the contract, you can't do that because you've never ran the education program before and you're not qualified to do that.' We said, ‘Well, according to the Indian Self Determination Act we could do that and despite your objections we're going to do that. Here's the resolution.' And low and behold the Bureau of Indian Affairs said, ‘Okay, let's negotiate. Let's get the budget going.' And so from 1980-1985 we contracted the education program within our community and we hired and fired our administrators and our teachers at will. And that was the first time that we ever had total control over our educational program. And that was significant in a way that after the BIA told us that we could not operate that we went ahead and did that. So those are the two significant movements or efforts that we made at our tribal government level is the protection of our children and also education of our children."

How to prepare for difficult and adversarial situations

Mike Williams:

"Well, I think you have to do your homework and I think with...you have to do a lot of reading and preparing yourselves to really answer the questions that may arise beforehand. And I think with that effort, with the establishment of mental health programs, I think I did a lot of convincing to Indian Health Service and the negotiations. And we ran those programs and we convinced Indian Health Service that we could do that. We convinced that our kids can be protected and we did our homework with that. And also with the establishment of our educational programs, we also did our homework in convincing the passing of the resolution and establishing the school board and then getting the curriculum going and hiring our teachers. I think it takes a lot of planning and it takes a lot of meetings with our community members and we have engaged our tribal members in that process and whatever they mandated us to do we went ahead and did that. So when there is a mandate and when there is a charge for us to carry out something I think we need to be really prepared and have that blessing from the community to do that. And I think for the most part you need to have help from people that have done it before. During the Indian Child Welfare issues that we dealt with we collaborated with the south 48 tribes and we weren't the only ones that were dong that in terms of protecting our kids and there were other tribes from throughout the country that expressed some of those concerns that they had in terms of removal of Indian children from the parents and putting them into non-Indian homes. So we had collaboration going with that as well as the education programs. There were contract schools going on throughout the Indian Country from south 48 so we were collaborating with the Indian tribes that were doing contract work with the educational program. And I think you need to really collaborate with the other people that have done many of those things already so that's what we did and getting the best Indian lawyers we can find and the best people or finding people who've done it before."

Urban and rural issues and conflicts in Alaska

Mike Williams:

"For the most part I think the urban Native and the rural Native in terms of subsistence resources are together. Regardless of where the Alaska Native lives, we feel that that person has all those rights still intact that they can hunt and fish and survive the way they have done for thousands of years. We support that. But in terms of oil development I think that is the real, another real tough issue where the Inupiat people want to have oil development in the Anwar and the Quechan Indians wanting to protect the porcupine caribou who herd in that Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to protect from that development to occur."

Tribal governments, regional Native corporations and nonprofits make a complicated environment for getting things done

Mike Williams:

"We have 229 federally recognized tribes in Alaska and we have 12 nonprofit corporations within each region and we have of course 12 regional corporations and a 13th regional corporation outside of Alaska so it is very unique situation that we are in Alaska and I think in dealing with all those other organizations it makes it more complex. If we had one Indian Country and no corporations it would make life a lot easier in Alaska and do away with Native corporations and nonprofits and just have tribal governments. That would make life a lot simpler and we could do economic development, still run our casinos like the lower 48 and the land and trust issues and healthcare programs and BIA education programs. I think it would make life a lot easier if we had one organization."

Alaska Native subsistence fishing rights were upheld in the Katie John case

Mike Williams:

"For the most part I am a hunter and a fisherman. I am a subsistence hunter and fisherman. I depend on the fishing and hunting to survive and I practice what I preach. And that I will always have and that I will always practice and that I will always do that. Just before coming to NCI I had to really quickly get some fish and I'm trapping fish underneath the ice and I have to fish during the summer and put away and live as I did, as I described growing up in earlier years of my life and the way I was taught and I'm going to live that wonderful way of life that I still enjoy today and having dogs and everything that I need to survive. But the Katie John case, I think the issue has been with us for over 10 years and Katie John is a very good friend and the grandmother of all of the tribes in Alaska as we have gotten to know her and her lawsuit to keep her fishing rights intact where she has always done in Batzulnetas where she always had that fish wheel. She was told that she could not do that where she always filled so she was told that she's got to go way down to the river to get her fish not where her family always have done in Batzulnetas. I think over the years that we've been in court we've become, she has become well known in Alaska and I think the decision for Governor Knowles not to appeal the case was one of the most significant decisions that the governor did in not appealing this case to the United States Supreme Court and that was the major victory by Katie John and that State of Alaska was no longer going to fight her in court and that there was too much risk going in to the Supreme Court that the state might lose and Katie John might, it might become a lose-lose situation instead of a win-win situation for all of Alaska. And I think the governor did the right thing in not appealing the case to the Supreme Court."

Williams service commitment includes work for tribes on the local, regional and national levels

Mike Williams:

I'm currently the Chairman of the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council, which we enthusiastically organized in 1992-93. And I think we did the right thing in organizing the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council, which we have 187 tribal governments membership just on tribal governments and we just have that membership. And I've been involved ever since in 1970s, 1980 tribal sovereignty movements and organizing of the United Tribes of Alaska and Alaska Native Coalition and then eventually the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council. And currently I'm chairman of that for; I think I'm on my third year now. It's been never a dull moment in that organization and also our involvement with the National Congress of American Indians and I just have been serving my first term as Juneau area vice president for NCAI and I think that is a very important organization that supports tribal sovereignty throughout Indian Country at the national level. I'm in my last term with the Native American Rights Fund Board of Directors. I'm on the executive board right now and I'm on my last year and my last term and I've served for five years and it has been a wonderful experience working with John Echohawk and with the tribal sovereignty issues that we are dealing with throughout Indian Country. I think there's a lot more work to be done in the future with the protection of tribal governments or tribal sovereignty initiatives that we are working on right now. And I think with all that time commitment that is necessary and resources, sometimes I wonder where I'm finding all the time to do all that plus running the Iditarod and that takes more time and seems to...I don't know how I've done it before with full time work. I decided not to work full time anymore because I don't have the time to hold down a job but with the public service commitments that I've made I think that's one of the things that my dad taught me to do is if you believe in public service then do it. And with the support of my family and with the support of my tribe that I'm able to do the statewide organizations that I'm in and national organizations that I'm doing. My tribe has allowed me to do those things as well as my wife and children. So they strongly believe that in order to make a difference you need full support of the tribe and especially your family. So I'm fortunate to have a wife that really supports in what I do and she really believes that what we're doing is because of our future and because of our children. And I think that is what they see as what Chief Joseph did and see what the other warriors did to protect and do things for our future. So I think that's what I'm doing and I feel like I'm doing and I feel like I'm committed to do what is best for my children and for my future. And I have two grandchildren that I think need to be protected. For many years that I've been involved I have seen erosion of tribal sovereignty at the Supreme Court level and I've seen a lot of wars or I've read about all the wars that I've seen in the Indian Country ever since, for the last over 500 years and I feel that those issues are very important right now and we need to continue that battle."

Social, environmental and political dangers that Alaskan tribes face

Mike Williams:

"Well, I think the greatest danger that we face is again, like I've said, is the alcohol and substance abuse that are killing our people up there and suicides that I'm seeing at a very high level and the health programs or the health problems that we are seeing; cancer and diabetes and health problems that are deriving from the mineral development or environmental problems that we are seeing. I think that is the greatest threat I see is our people dying from all the diseases that were brought from the first contact. We had great deaths from influenza, tuberculosis, small pox and other health problems but the industries that develop our resources also has affected environmental problems as well as the changes that are made very quickly with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, especially our people changing real fast and changing overnight from being hunter/gatherer into the society where we're depending on cash and that transition problem going too fast. And then our people committing themselves, hanging themselves and shooting themselves and especially our young men. Also the erosion of our rights, the hunting and fishing rights and the erosion of tribal sovereignty in Alaska and the threat of being terminated completely as tribes and as Native people there. For many years the State of Alaska under its constitution and its statement that tribes do not exist in Alaska, there was no tribes in Alaska until the last time or this past year that the governor of Alaska finally recognized that there... tribes exist in Alaska. And also selling, the individual Native allotment owners selling their land to the highest bidder or the person that wants to buy it and that has... that's one of the biggest threats is of the loss of our lands and the control over our lands in Alaska."

Education and the protection of tribal self-governance will be Mike Williams' call for years to come

Mike Williams:

"We are intact and we need to make sure that that is protected and regardless of any administration both in federal level or the state level that we keep our tribal sovereignty intact and our sovereign rights intact at the statewide level. And I think we need to continuously educate the public, the organizations, our own Native corporations, our own people, our own backyard where we continuously educate the new people that are coming up from the lower 48 to Alaska and to continuously educate them about our issues and the importance of subsistence hunting and fishing rights and the importance of protection of our lands and protection of our resources. There are a lot of the industries; the oil companies, the mining companies and everybody that wants to take all the trees and everybody wants to come and develop and make the fast buck and go away and leave all the mess to us. That we don't want to see and that we as tribes benefit from that as well. We live in the richest state in the Union but we still live in the third world conditions and we're still trying to get funding from the Department of the Interior for a program to run our programs but we are so rich in our land but we are so poor. We still live in the third world conditions and we need to improve that."

Poverty and tragedy in Native communities and the need for the federal government's response

Mike Williams:

"In our Native corporations I've seen $20 in thirty years out of my Native corporations and that's how much we've seen as shareholders -- $20. Not everyone benefited from that and a lot of small Native, village Native corporations are on the verge of bankruptcy. So we haven't really seen any of the benefits and we still live in the third world conditions. And despite the oil development and despite the dividend program, despite the pipeline and those tribal communities within the pipeline, still haven't seen a dime and we still live in the third world conditions despite all the billions and billions of dollars that we generate. We still haven't really seen the benefits. With the issue of the September 11th disaster, I think our people have gone through that and personally I went through that in my own family in losing six brothers and more of my uncles and my relatives dying of diseases and dying of cancer and dying of what has been brought to our communities. And with the issue of that disaster on September 11th people need to realize what we as Native Americans have gone through or Alaska Natives and we were highly populated once but there were great deaths and that affected by people from the outside bringing in diseases to our communities and loss of our lands through these settlements. We've lost so much and people think that these health programs and education programs and these other programs think it's a free program. No, we paid for it big time already through the loss of our lands and through the people that have died along in the process. So we've had our own disasters here. And when the airline industries are in trouble the federal government just, $5 billion right there and... What about the housing issues and what about the healthcare problems and highest...? We have lowest per capita income in the country. It just...when we keep asking for by resolutions about more funding and better housing, water, educational program, healthcare program, all we hear is budget cuts. And that I think, here our people are dying, what are you going to do? Are you going to give us relief? And we haven't seen that. I wish the government would treat us as they treated the airline industry or the savings and loan scandal, when the banks are in trouble then the federal government comes in, ‘Here, we'll bail you out,' and I think we need that kind of treatment instead of having the lowest bottom of the totem pole getting that kind of money for tribal programs. So I think if we're going to be treated as governments and here we have our problems, we need to have that government to government relationship intact and people need to know that so we can have the American dream that everyone has in this country. A lot of our people still dream of that, the American dream where we live in the richest state of the Union and they can make, the government can make all kinds of weapons but what about our people. When we ask for improvement in the healthcare, improvement of our life and prevention of health problems that, why don't they give us the full resources and instead of fighting our tribal sovereignty which we always had and we have always had that inherent tribal sovereignty ever since, even before the contact, even before Columbus landed on this continent, we had our tribal governments intact and we took care of that. And I think this country owes us a lot and we just don't, we shouldn't be in a way fighting for every red cent to run our programs. We should have the full funding and full assistance from this very rich country."

Running the Iditarod for the health and future of his people

Mike Williams:

"Ever since the deaths of my six brothers, I decided to become proactive and take the story to the community. And of course I've been involved in the sobriety movement in Alaska for this past decade and ever since the last... My first brother died in 1973. So upon coming back from Vietnam and then right after that my brothers keep dying from accidental deaths and I keep advocating for sobriety and, ‘hey, let's prevent these from happening,' but in that process my brothers keep dying. At the end even though I was advocating I keep advocating for sobriety they keep dying. But I've been involved with the sobriety movement in Alaska and running the Iditarod and mid distance races to raise the awareness that we don't need this alcohol, we don't need these drugs and that we need to live a good life. And my message has been that once we are sober and educated we can do anything we want to do. We can protect our resources, we can protect tribal sovereignty, we can protect healthcare, we can improve healthcare programs and we can improve our education program and we can become really involved in making a healthy community for ourselves once again, as I have seen when I was growing up. So running the Iditarod has, it's a 1200-mile race through Alaska and what I've been doing is promoting sobriety movement and getting pledges over the years. And so far I have garnered over 60,000 sobriety pledges that people have said they're going to be sober for a year. And I think if 50 percent of those 60,000 pledges have succeeded then that next generation will succeed and it has a small snowball effect. And I've been trying to raise funds for advocacy programs and have been very successful in raising funding. But I have not been very successful personally in terms of raising funds to keep doing the Iditarod and I'd love to keep doing what I'm doing but I need some help. But I've raised enough funding for other programs and getting the awareness to the level that it has gone but personally I still need help to keep running that program."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo Credit:
Bill Hess – Photographer, Wassila, Alaska
Mike and Maggie Williams

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Roy Sampsel

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

Institute for Tribal Government Director Roy Sampsel is convinced that tribes have unique skills as natural resource managers. Sampsel often serves as a bridge between tribes and federal, state & local agencies. His past positions include Executive Director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Interior for the Pacific Northwest Region, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Policy, Department of Interior.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Sampsel, Roy. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. 2004. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Roy Sampsel has had a decade's long fascination with fish, water, forests, oceans, wildlife and the rights of Indian tribes. More than a fascination, he has maintained a steady and creative commitment to the sovereignty of Indian Nations and the protection of their natural resources. As a policy advisor to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission he has worked to protect, enhance and implement the tribal fishing rights of the Warm Springs, Yakima, Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes. Convinced that tribes have unusual skills and abilities as resource managers, he has worked behind the scenes and in front of the scenes to make sure tribes have a very solid seat at the table in the complex natural resource negotiations among federal and state agencies, tribal nations and other interests. Roy, who spent his early years in Broken Bow in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is both Choctaw and Wyandot. His is a member of the Wyandot Nation. When his father went into the Navy in World War II, the family stayed with Roy's grandmother, a storyteller and a savvy strategist in conducting business with tribes on the reservation. She would often take Roy down to a tribal gathering place, one of the old creeks on the reservation on whose banks Roy says, ‘still stands a huge cottonwood tree.' The Sampsel family moved from Oklahoma to Tulane, Louisiana, then to Portland, Oregon, where Roy got the spark for public service from professors at Portland State University and from Oregon political leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties. After working at the Oregon Legislature, Roy had the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. where he served from 1971 to 1976 as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior for the Pacific Northwest Region. He was responsible for assisting the Secretary in developing and implementing departmental policy for federal resources and for a liaison with tribal and state governments and federal agencies throughout the region. From 1977 to 1979 he served as the first Executive Director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. He returned to Washington in 1981 serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs for the Department of the Interior. In this position he worked on Indian rights protection and natural resources policy including timber, fish, wildlife, oil, gas and minerals. He also worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on putting into action the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975. He relished participating in a great time of legislative accomplishments on behalf of Indian people. Roy Sampsel is known as a generous, openhearted leader. Helping people figure out how to solve problems is a pleasure for him and he will often say in reference to periods of challenge, difficulty or accomplishment, ‘I can't even tell you what an absolutely wonderful time that was.'"

Roy Sampsel's family lived in Broken Bow and Tahlequah in his early years. When his father went into the Navy for World War II, the family stayed with Roy's grandmother

Roy Sampsel:

"My mother was the youngest of 13 children and I was the youngest of all of the grandchildren so we had a great sort of time with my grandmother. She had a great deal of influence on my life at the time. She was a great teacher and spoke all of the Indian languages for the civilized tribes in Oklahoma: Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw. She was an interpreter if you will for a lot of people who were trying to figure out how to do business or have dealings with the individual tribes. She was a fascinating woman. I can still remember her asking me how old I was as I was getting to be tall and taller than she was. And so I can remember when she took my hand, and I didn't think very much of it at the time, but kind of pronouncing that I was a man now, I was no longer her little boy. Of course that was the youngest of all of her grandchildren that she'd had. I had a lot of uncles that were gone before I was ever born of course because they had died in the first World War and I can remember granny saying to me that two of the saddest things that had ever happened was one, losing me as a baby cause I was now a man, and living longer than most of her sons."

Roy's father became a psychiatric social worker and the family eventually moved to Portland, Oregon. Roy had a variety of school experiences from Broken Bow to Portland.

Roy Sampsel:

"When we were in Broken Bow it was an Indian school in Tahlequah. I'm not sure if it was a state school or an Indian school but it was all Indian students. And then in New Orleans we lived in the student housing section at Tulane, which was a relatively wealthy section of New Orleans at the time. So it was not unusual to go to school in New Orleans and have classmates delivered there in their family limousine. So it was relatively...I wish I could remember the, there was a Mexican student. Anyway, he and I fought every morning with all the other kids. So it was kind of fun. Finally got a teacher who said, ‘that's not really a cool thing to do.' Franklin High School was a place where I decided; it's where I kind of developed my political student government interest, that type of thing. I was always better at politics and student government than I was at school itself, which was one of the things that was fun about Franklin. It was a place in which I got a lot of encouragement both from other student leaders that had been there prior to me getting interested and a faculty that was encouraging folks for that type of participation."

Roy learned from his professors at Portland State and from political leaders like Senator Mark Hatfield and Oregon Governor Tom McCall

Roy Sampsel:

"Dr. Garboni had one of the greatest and funniest lines about me ever. There was a student/faculty committee that they were appointing students to participate with faculty on the committee and he was advocating that I be one of those students and he was talking to his other faculty members at the faculty meeting and said, ‘Roy Sampsel is the smartest C student I've ever had.' That was kind of the classic reference to me. I was always the smartest C student that a bunch of these guys had ever had but we had a great time together and we got to be very, very close friends. And the University and the students that were there at the time had that opportunity to have that great sort of dialogue of politics and public service and communication at the same time."

After honing his skills in a job at the Oregon State Legislature, Roy went to work for Secretary of the Interior Roger Morton

Roy Sampsel:

"In the early part of the Nixon administration and he'd been the first kind of easterner that had been named Secretary of the Interior and we had...so they were looking for somebody that had a little bit of public affairs experience but who also understood some of the Western politics to work with him and Roger C.B. Morton. So Rog Morton was the Secretary of Interior starting in '71. He had actually got...I guess he started in '70 but in '71 they said, ‘We'd like you to come and work as part of his communication team,' and that was done primarily because of the political context. We did not know each other. We'd never really met. But some of the western Republicans were a little bit nervous to have this east coast guy running the Secretary of the Interior. And that was a great opportunity for me cause it kind of reintroduced me back into Indian affairs at a political level and at a level in which we had a lot of changes taking place. So here I was this basically Indian kid who had left Oklahoma, came out to Oregon, got involved politically in those types of public affairs types of discussions, had gotten involved politically both in terms of Democrat/Republican politics, now going to work for a Secretary of the Interior who had huge Indian issues on his plate. At the same time you had U.S. v. Washington taking place. So those were very high profile Indian treaty fishing cases. At the same time you had Wounded Knee going on, Alcatraz, the takeover of the BIA building in Washington, D.C. A very good friend by the name of Louie Bruce who was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. Louie Bruce was...ended up being a very great friend but was a person who had...they teased him when he first got in by saying that he was the only Republican Wall Street Indian they could find. Louie had worked in public affairs and worked in advertising and kind of the fame and fortune of creating the slogan for Miller Beer, ‘The Champagne of Beer,' was very well written and had been successful both financially and business wise, came in to be the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the time as the Commissioner when it was exploding with AIM and Wounded Knee and ended up being perhaps the only person during that period of time that could have held things together. He ended up...he's passed away now but he ended up being a great friend and everybody remembered him as probably the Commissioner of the 20th century for that period of time."

Major fishing rights and environmental issues came to the fore in the early 1970s

Roy Sampsel:

"So the environmental issues were huge. Legislative wise, you're at a period of time in which a small, relatively small group of people are working with a Democratic Congress to figure out how you're really going to implement, NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act because it had just been passed a little bit earlier and now you had huge issues like what was the NEPA requirement to build something like the Alaska pipeline? Well, part of the excitement of the time was that with all of these issues, all of which touched each other, the environmental issues touched each other, the treaty right issues had tremendous implications to what it would mean in terms of the fishing relationship between Canada, the United States and Alaska because you had those fisheries all of which went into the various jurisdictions, none of which had been resolved yet. You had major pieces of legislation that were being passed. Indian Self-Determination and Education, the Nixon administration came out with a major Indian policy, hadn't had one in literally decades and it said, ‘Indian self-determination without termination reversed the termination policy of the ‘50s; major, major policy statement of fact. But with everybody kind of struggling about how would you implement that, what did it mean in relationship to AIM and the real poverty and problems that are taking place on Indian reservations? What did it mean in relationship to those environmental concerns that are now becoming very, very sensitive and key both to the treaty and legal obligations that the United States had for Indian tribes? So we were passing things like Endangered Species Act, same time frame. Clean Air, Clean Water Act, implementation of NEPA and then how are you going to co-manage between tribes and non-Indians, major resources like the fishery resources that had been in the courts. So it was within that sort of context that not only did I get the opportunity to work with the Secretary of Interior but with the other assistant secretaries that were dealing with these issues, all of which were pushing this sort of environmental Indian awareness climate together with some very significant changes that were taking place both within the Congress and within the administration. So an exciting five or six years."

The excitement of converging issues, Native treaty rights, the environment, economic development

Roy Sampsel:

"I think it was the sense that there was great change taking place and that no individual change, act or personality was insulated from the other. Nat Reed was an assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Nat had kind of an Ichabod Crane character about him because he was thin and came out of Florida and he had wealth. He essentially was one of those people who had served on a number of commissions and a number of positions in government basically for a dollar a year because he had this great sense of social responsibility. And so in this Nixon administration he came in with this wonderful sort of environmental ethic that had been gained during this period of time. I can still remember Nat trying to understand the relationship between the Native rights in Alaska and his concern for building parks and refuges and how was he going to do that with this Native Indigenous subsistence right. It didn't seem to fit. So here was this wonderful person wrestling with what his job was in relationship to this overriding responsibility that he had...you couldn't learn it in school, you hadn't been taught it, there wasn't a place to easily pick I up, with an administration who said, ‘Hey, Indians have rights and Indians have their right to be self determined and educated.' This sounds a little silly to be doing that in the latter part of the 20th century but in fact this is when it was starting to come together or back together again in this sort of awareness. You also had a political climate in Alaska that said, ‘We don't want reservations. We don't want this settlement of this lands issue and the building of this pipeline which is very, very important to us economically to be hampered by the fact that we're creating reservations in this state.' Therefore you ended up with something called the Native Claims Settlement Act which essentially changed the character of Native people by creating corporations."

The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 was a money-land settlement with Alaska Natives establishing regional corporations and terminating certain rights

Roy Sampsel:

"Thirteen regional corporations, village corporations, that would be given land and resources from the oil revenues as the means by which to insure that there would be success or assimilation of Native people into the broader society without what was perceived to be the inherent failure of the lower 48 reservation Indian situation. So when you asked what was there, you had all of this coming together at a time in which it hadn't been sorted out but you knew that this was, that period of time was in fact going to be a major change and if you can get involved with pieces of it maybe you could help make some of those changes better."

As special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior he had frequent contact with tribal communities

Roy Sampsel:

"In Alaska I probably went to I would say at least half, maybe 60 percent of all the villages and it was a timeframe that was just absolutely fascinating. I had not spent any time in Alaska before doing that so getting a chance to meet the tribal leaders, getting a chance to meet all the people that was very, very exciting. In the lower 48 the answer is, yeah, I got to spend a lot of time talking to tribal folks about a range of issues and the...I think probably some of the most tense times were when we were dealing in Sioux Country around the Wounded Knee timeframe. Up in Red Lake; that was during a period of time in which all of this was taking place. You had Roger Jordain under a tremendous amount of fire from the dissention within the tribe and its own people. So yeah, I spent a lot of time with a lot of folks. The difference in doing it at that particular level is that you were essentially talking to leadership about a issue of the moment as opposed to where do you want to be in a few years, where do you see the change taking you and that was kind of the exciting part about dealing with specific issues cause you could actually sit down with the folks that were involved in the fish commissions or getting involved in the fish commissions in the later ‘70s. And they had a vision of where they wanted to see things go and what they were trying to fight and protect for."

Tribal leaders of the recent past, Roger Jordain, Red Lake, Chippewa Cree; Wendell Chino, Mescalero Apache; Bob Jim, Yakima; Lucy Covington, Colville

Roy Sampsel:

"Respect for each other but they disagreed a lot on a lot of things and they were grand leaders of their time. They were cutting edges in a time in which the things that they had had to fight for were changing a little bit. They were very distrustful of government and what it was trying to do but also very demanding that government had a responsibility, that those treaties meant things, that there was a trust obligation of the United States that extended beyond the Bureau of Indian Affairs and that it wasn't just based upon the land, the treaties talked about education, it talked about healthcare, it talked about those things that were a piece of the federal trust responsibility. Yeah, they were very articulate spokesmen and they had visions for their people. I don't know that anybody will ever really understand what Wendell Chino did but he was a rock and there was no question about it, there was that sort of presence. When he was there to make a comment and to talk about things, you knew it was worth listening to and you knew it was serious. There were a number of people during that same period of time that we're going at. Yakimas had a...Yakima tribe in Washington had Bob Jim. Bob was a wonderful, strong Indian leader. When the Native people in Alaska were wrestling with how they were going to deal with the Native Claims Settlement Act, Bob Jim went to his council and said, ‘We need to help these people.' The Yakima tribe loaned the Alaskan Native leadership $250,000, which was a lot of money in those days, a lot of money today but a lot of money in those days, so that they could get organized to deal with the federal government because he believed it was that important. I was dealing with a water rights issue at the time because I was working in Interior. And we called all of the tribal leadership and tribal attorneys together to deal with this particular question and a lot was going on, it was a two day meeting. We were into the second day and I can still remember Bob Jim standing up and saying, ‘Well, Roy,' he said, ‘I really enjoyed the fact that you've been doing this today.' He said, ‘I'd like to ask all of the non-Indian folks that are here just if they wouldn't mind leaving for awhile so some of us Indians can get together and talk about this a little bit.' He was very courteous about it and at the end of that they...of course people started picking up their things and leaving cause they respected Bob Jim's desire. And about...as they were starting to leave he said, ‘Now, Roy, I want you to stay.' He said, ‘I want you to stay.' So he got in there and he shut the door and he said, ‘I want you to understand what water means to me and what it means to...' and he went around the room because he said, ‘I think you're dealing with this in too much of an abstract legal sense. There are attorneys to deal with it legally but this is what water means to us.' It was dynamic and these were people who understood what it meant to be Indian, understood what it meant to be Indian in a time of conflict and controversy."

The Indian Self Determination and Education Act of 1975 gave tribal governments increased control of their affairs and funding for education assistance

Roy Sampsel:

"What I think the legislation that changed the character, that represented a major shift if you will in federal policy was the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act. Not because of the detail of the act but for the recognition that tribes were in fact not going to go away. That the termination and the assimilation era that had been in the ‘50s and early ‘60s was not where we wanted to be as a nation anymore and that there was a recognition that tribes had the ability to not only run but operate their own form of government. So the significance was this major change. The other piece that was significant about it is that this came about during the timeframe in which you had guys by the name of Forrest Girard who was working on the Indian committee with Senator Scoot Jackson of Washington. Scoot Jackson had been one of the architects of the termination period and here was this man, chairman of this committee, with Forrest Girard an Indian person working on his stand, working with the administration to create this piece of legislation. It was a significant turnaround and Indians seizing upon that as the means by which to identify how they chose to do business with the federal government and how the federal government were going to have to respond to them in the future."

Working in the administration of President Richard Nixon

Roy Sampsel:

"It would be wrong to characterize him as a person who had this great passion for Indian self-government and the rest of it. What he did is he understood that there were people who did and he let them move forward in a way that I think speaks well for his overall leadership. It was a time that it may have happened anyway regardless of who was president. I don't want to give too much credence to some of these things that just are necessary and are evolving anyway. So if you look at the Nixon timeframe, he did things like return Blue Lake to the Pueblos, his tremendous culturally significant event because he knew that Indian self-determination and the right for tribes to have this sort of... required specific actions that would demonstrate there was in fact a change."

Roy returns to the northwest to work with tribes keeping old friends and allies

Roy Sampsel:

"I decided that there were a couple of things that needed to happen. One, I wanted to work closer with the Indian issues on a specific basis and I was fortunate enough to be in the northwest and the fact that you had a few things that had been achieved in the federal courts didn't mean that they were being implemented and the question was, ‘Could you implement a court treaty right? Could you make it work?' And we had the advantage of having some great Indian leadership at the time and some pretty gutsy folks that were sitting around trying to figure out how to make that happen. And tribes had understood that they were gaining in terms of their management responsibility and that they weren't going to go away. A guy by the name of Wyman Babby had been back as a young Indian person working with Louie Bruce. Louie Bruce, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, first chairman of the Nixon administration and he had ended up being the area director for Aberdeen, Wounded Knee, young Indian man basically beat up by that period of time. I brought him on my staff in Portland, Oregon, in the Secretary's office because quite frankly he didn't have any place else to go. He was looking for...he still wanted to be active so I take Wyman Babby and let him go work for Don Hodel. During this period of time Don Hodel says, ‘Gee, there's this treaty thing going on with Indian fishing rights and we're right kind of in the middle of it, aren't we?' And the answer is, ‘Yes.' So this is a period of time in which Wyman Babby, because of his education and the opportunity to work with the Indian people out here, has determined that maybe what Don Hodel ought to do is be the one who leads the charge. So during that period of time on the Columbia River you've got Don Hodel working with the tribes to reach the first agreement between the treaty tribes and Bonneville Power Administration that they have a seat at the table to deal with these issues."

The Columbia River Treaty Tribes, Yakima, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, Umatilla

Roy Sampsel:

"That memorandum of agreement between the four tribes signed by the Bonneville Power Administration really broke things open because it made the state very nervous and very unhappy. So that agreement was then modified and was signed also not only by the four treaty tribes and the Bonneville Power Administration but the Governor of Idaho, the Governor of Washington and the Governor of Oregon. The Governor of Oregon at the time was a guy by the name of Bob Straub, Dan Evans in the State of Washington and Cec Andrus in the State of Idaho. And so during that period of time is when you get the commissioned organized, that's when you get the tribal Indian commissions organized, you get this sort of expansion if you will of that authority, get the negotiation between the Puget Sound tribes on the U.S. v. Washington, the Bolt decision timeframe because the administration wanted very, very much to have a settlement of that court case. So there was a formal negotiation with the tribes, the State of Washington and President Carter had three cabinet officials as part of that team, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Interior. While all of this is taking place within this context about how do we begin to implement a court case and what is the United States' responsibility not only to file the case and to win it but then to implement it to make sure that the intent of that court case is in fact carried out, how much resource in terms of money is needed so all of this is being debated. How much authority do tribes have? What does co-management really mean?"

The strengths of the Pacific Northwest Tribes in the negotiations

Roy Sampsel:

"The one thing you can say about the tribal people at the time is that they never blinked. They knew exactly what it meant to them and they knew exactly what the United States was going to have to do. Now, we're still working to try to figure out what that means on any given day and how it still needs to be applied but during those late ‘70s and into the early ‘80s, there was this sort of commitment that we have won this right in the courts and the federal government needs to now step up to the plate to make sure that those rights are able to be implemented and that there is no further erosion."

Roy served as the first Executive Director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission from 1977-1979. The Northwest Indian Fish Commission in Puget Sound had been formed in 1974.

Roy Sampsel:

"I can still remember the meeting in which they asked if I'd be willing to come and be the Executive Director. We were meeting at the Portage Inn up in Dalles and the tribal leadership was up there and our tribal attorneys were involved and I said, ‘Well, let me just think about this for a minute.' And they said, ‘Well, you don't have too much time to think about it cause we've got a lot of work to do.' And so I said, ‘Okay, suppose I said yes, what would my first job be?' They said, ‘Well, you would have to go to Washington, D.C. and get some money cause we have no way to pay you.' And so that was sort of the...kind of the humor if you will about also and the importance of how would you actually put one of these commissions together? The commission in Puget Sound had been operating for a few years and it had gotten started a little bit earlier and we were still wrestling with those issues. Now, in comes the new administration and President Carter wants to try to figure out if they can figure out how to negotiate an agreement, a settlement to the disputes and the court cases in Puget Sound. So while we've started the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, I'm not its executive director and being asked by the Puget Sound tribes if I will be their lead negotiator in negotiating with the State of Washington and the federal government during the supposed settlement negotiations. It was absolutely a fascinating timeframe. Now, why would a executive director from the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission on the Columbia River be asked to be the negotiator for the Puget Sound tribes? And the reason is because the Yakimas were a party to both cases and saw the need for somebody who they trusted to be a piece of this negotiating team and all of this earlier sort of experience that I'd had doing all these things, there weren't a whole lot of Indian folks that had actually worked in the administration and worked politically and so it was that sort of...all of that background experience now became a useful tool in how could you start to implement a treaty right. And what type of skills would you bring to a negotiating table? Okay, Roy, you can go negotiate but your job is to give away absolutely nothing and the State of Washington had hired a negotiator, a gentleman by the name of Bill Wilkerson. Bill then goes on later in his life to become the Fish and Wildlife Director for the State of Washington. And all of us in those period of times were trying to sit around and figure out how could you craft certain types of agreements that were consistent with what the court had said and consistent with what the tribes wanted and needed in order to be able to implement their treaty right."

Values and strengths on which he drew in these times

Roy Sampsel:

"That's the beauty of grandma and mom and dad who...granny who had that great Indian wisdom, mom and dad who survived the Depression and going to Indian boarding school in the ‘30s. The political teachings of Frank Roberts and all of those folks and so basically the people that had been teaching me how to do specifics had also taught you how to deal with opportunity and controversy and the challenge. The leadership that wouldn't allow you to fear failure or to understand that there was even an option to quit, how could you possible do that with people who hadn't quit in their entire lifetime or in the lifetimes of their parents or their grandparents. This was not something...it was not casual and it wasn't just political, it was very, very significant in terms about the culture and the religion of those people. You could not...you could not not do what was needed. It wasn't allowed. It wasn't an acceptable alternative. So what you didn't know you learned and what you didn't know you created. Blind luck, a lot of it."

Serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs under Secretary of the Interior James Watt

Roy Sampsel:

"He was one of the people who probably did more to damage himself than anybody could have done for him. And I say that because he had a sense of what it needed to be, he didn't really understand what it was and he understood that self-determination was really a piece of how you turned Indian reservations and Indian tribes around was the ability to have great economic independence, greater economic independence from the federal government. He didn't quite understand the relationship between the tribal government doing that and what was necessary. And I have known every Secretary of Interior since Stuart Udall who served in the Kennedy administration and without exception most of the Secretaries of Interior have left their position disappointed that they were not able to do more in relationship to their tribal and Indian responsibility and part of that is I think because none of them truly had an understanding of what it would take to implement a trust relationship with tribes. This particular Secretary that we're dealing with now in this administration, Gale Norton, working for the Bush administration inherited a hundred year old failure of federal government to deal honestly with trust assets of individual Indians and tribes. Now, how...can you imagine that happening in any other avenue of society in the United States of America in which you would have 100 year of failing to deal with fiduciary responsibilities associated with dealing with individual Indians and tribal resources, cash, real dollars going to real accounts not being able to be tracked or understood? Gale Norton didn't do that but she is the lady in charge of that department now. So for 100 years Secretaries of Interior in the federal government fail Indian people. And when you get back to an individual Secretary, they each understood pieces of it but never understood it enough to take it seriously as a responsibility to fix the deficiencies which allowed for...Jim Watt speaking about the need to create Indian wealth while his department was managing billions of dollars of Indian monies and not being able to figure out that that was a primary responsibility that he had as Secretary. So pieces of this are still weaving themselves together into a fabric that I think will speak well for where Indians end up at say the mid point of the 21st century."

A perspective on tribes from the future

Roy Sampsel:

"You have to remember the time and schedule that tribes are on are a little bit different than the tribes and schedules that others might be on so they're going to be here for a long time and as many of my Indian friends will tell me, we're not going anywhere. We have our homes, we have our lands, our reservation, we have our homeland that we're...so you can change, society can change, it can change but we're going to still be here. So these sort of fixes that we're talking about will in fact take place. We don't know exactly what the picture of Indian America will look like another 50 years from now but I will tell you there will be an Indian America and the picture will be brighter than it is today, perhaps even superior to other societies that have failed to live with both their culture and their religion and their beliefs."

Leadership in Indian Country and the examples of the late Joe de la Cruz (Quinault) and Lucy Covington (Colville)

Roy Sampsel:

"I think Indian leadership will be enhanced by understanding that there have been previous great Indian leaders and that the ability to see that may encourage people to pursue it. I guess I would say the same thing about...Indian leadership is part of a tribal political process as well as a cultural process and if you're well grounded in your roots and the culture and the history of your people and your tribe, then you have to make a decision about whether or not the politics of it is something that you want to pursue and endure. What makes a great United States Senator? I would be hard to draw that profile. What makes a great President? Maybe the fact that he or she was a great Senator or a great Congressman or a good Governor or maybe it's just the events in which they find themselves and how they respond to the crisis of the moment. Would Lucy Covington have such an important place in my sense of history if she hadn't jumped off that tractor as a farmer in Colville and decided there was no way they were going to terminate her tribe? I don't know. If they hadn't been trying to terminate her tribe, would she have jumped off the tractor? So when you start looking at pieces of this, part of it is events and part of it is the fact that there is this sense of responsibility. And I don't know how an individual tribe or an individual person emerges to take on that level of responsibility but it's a personal thing. It's something that they are willing and want to do. Joe de la Cruz who was...there was never a meeting that Joe de la Cruz wasn't willing to go to. He was willing to participate at all levels because he was in some sense afraid not to for fear of what might happen if there wasn't that presence there. But I don't think there is an easy way to say, ‘What is...why did certain tribes have great leaders at this moment?' Well, they may have had spectacular leaders 200 years ago and we just don't know about it."

Tribes and Washington, D.C. politics in late 2002

Roy Sampsel:

"I don't see this administration being in a position or having as a priority great changes that would increase dollars and wealth to Indian Country and Indian tribes. Nor do I see it in a position in which it would be advocating additional resources for natural resources types of issues that Indian tribes are concerned about. I think the greatest sense that I see about Indian tribes and this particular Congress that's coming up and with this administration is that you have the growth of Native American caucuses in both the House and the Senate who are increasing in membership and are bipartisan. Now, that tells me that there is an understanding that the federal trust responsibility to Indian tribes and that special relationship is better understood now than it has been in the past and it is bipartisan in nature, not partisan in nature. I don't know of a Democratic or Republican way to improve Indian housing, to improve Indian health services delivery. There are ways in which it can be done but for the most part it's pretty well understood that those are responsibilities that need to be met. Now will the resources be there? More likely when you have greater money and you probably get a better response out of Democratic Congresses more than Republican Congresses but we'll have to wait and see. I don't see a major change coming about because there is a party in charge of all three. I'm encouraged by the fact that we see a bipartisan approach coming out of both the House and the Senate, Native American caucuses and I think that will have an influence on the budgeting that the President puts forth in future budgets. I think that I am more concerned about the Supreme Court now than I have been but anybody that's been tracking Indian affairs over the last number of years have been concerned about the Supreme Court for the last decade and a half and unless there is a legislative redefinition of federal responsibility and as a result of that the Congress defining the rights and responsibilities of Indian governments, I see continued erosion of that, regardless of which court is in there. But I don't see anything happening positive with this Court now or in the immediate future."

The changes in Indian Country and what's ahead

Roy Sampsel:

"A couple of these may surprise you. I think there are more people willing to say they are Indian now than there were 30 years ago. I think there is a greater personal pride in being an Indian person. There is I think a greater sense that...from the general population that Indians may have a unique wisdom that maybe wasn't appreciated as much 30 or 35 years ago as it is now and that the logic of taking care of the land and the water and the, if you will the cultural and religious significance of that Indian people is having a rebirth in non-Indian thought and pattern. I think that individual Indian entrepreneurship growth in terms of economic self sufficiency and development is what's going to be the most exciting thing to observe over the next couple of decades."

Roy has a reputation for goodwill and generosity: his comments

Roy Sampsel:

"It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be real. You've really got to care that this individual or this action or that type of activity will in some way be of value to something beyond what is now and certainly beyond who you are, that it isn't enough just to be right and to give the speech, it has to work and has to work over time and that requires the persistence and the diligence to make change happen."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government  

 

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: W. Ron Allen

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in June 2003, longtime Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Chairman Ron Allen discusses the role he played in his tribe gaining federal recognition and his work with the National Congress of American Indians. Allen thrives on challenge, greatly expanding the economy of his own small nation while simultaneously working on the national level with NCAI and other intertribal organizations.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Allen, W. Ron. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government. Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. June 2003. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Ron Allen, a citizen of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe was born in Sequim, Washington in 1947. With his three brothers and parents he enjoyed a small town life full of the outdoors and sports. Ron notes that he was a wild child during his teens and was not overly fond of school but he also had a curiosity about people and a zest for work and eventually developed a zest also for studies earning accounting and technical engineering degrees from Peninsula College and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Washington. Ron Allen's interest in his tribe was sparked in the mid "˜70s when he was unable to get a replacement tribal ID card. He had not really been following the tribal story or its politics. Trying to get his card, the tribe told him that the Jamestown S'Klallam was no longer a recognized entity by the federal government; but S'Klallam means "Strong People". Ron decided to pitch in with the effort to make the tribe's strength a present day, not just a past reality. He was asked to serve on the tribal council and by 1977 had become chairman. Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe was restored to federal recognition in 1981. He became its executive director in 1982 with responsibilities for the tribe's programs including education, health and housing, economic development, natural resource management and cultural/traditional affairs. He remains chairman and executive director today. In the tribe's quest for self sufficiency Ron has led it in establishing enterprises that include a seafood operation, art gallery, construction company and a tribal casino. Profits are plowed back into the tribe and the local community to create jobs, school improvements and health services. But one tribe alone cannot meet the many challenges Indian nations face. He is committed to alliances such as the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. He is one of four U.S. commissioners on the U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Commission. The organization he holds to be most crucial to tribes is the National Congress of American Indians. He has served as president, vice president and treasurer. Not shy to speak and speak out, Ron has provided congressional testimony numerous times and has actively engaged in media and public relations to educate the public about tribes. On all levels Ron Allen is passionately driven to protect and fight for the sovereignty of tribal nations and treaty rights. He was a leader in a 1994 historic White House meeting with President Clinton and tribal leaders from across the nation. In his home state he helped develop the 1989 Centennial Accord between Washington and its 26 tribes. The University of Washington awarded him a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2001. His travels have taken him not just to tribes around the U.S. but to other parts of the world. The condition of Indigenous people internationally is a growing concern. Though he thrives on his work and calling he is also dedicated to his two children, his garden and his wife whom he says has exerted a strong influence on his life and work. The Institute for Tribal Government interviewed Ron Allen in June 2003."

Parents, brothers and childhood

Ron Allen:

"My early childhood was primarily just a small town, rural, middle class community. My father and mother were as middle class as you could probably get. My father was a mechanic; my mother was a waitress. So they were definitely very people-oriented type of personalities. And we grew up in Port Angeles in very small neighborhoods. When you think of the Norman Rockwell kind of childhood, that's kind of what my childhood was about. My mother was just as outgoing a personality as you could ever imagine, classic waitress and everybody loved... She knew everybody and she was just a veracious reader. Even though she didn't go, neither of them went beyond high school, she was just incredibly bright and we'd get into almost any kind of conversation that we wanted. They were very avid Democrats, even though they weren't active type of Democrats but they were just as loyal to the Democrat Party as you could possibly get. And when I went into college and I ended up shifting more into Republic philosophical perspective. My mother had the hardest time with that. That was kind of an interesting development. But as far as values go, we just lived a very classic life, a classic rural life I guess and I just enjoyed it thoroughly. I just have nothing but fond memories from grade school all the way through high school.

Ryan's parents and the world of Indian issues

Ron Allen:

"My father experienced a lot of racism and my father was more on the fair skinned side as an Indian. And it was always interesting; as he grew up he ended up buying booze for his friends and relatives because he could get it with less hassle than his colleagues. My mother was Scottish-Irish so half of my heritage is from my mother's side. They just weren't very active. My father's father, my grandfather was very active. He was a former chairman of my tribe and very active with the lands claim settlement and so he was very much a part of that aspect of the tribal politics. But my dad just didn't get into it and neither did his brothers. He comes from a large family and there were seven of them. But none of them got interested in it, dad never got interested in it. I was always interested in it when I was a kid. My grandmother was one of the last speaking S'Klallams in our village and I remember her speaking it and I was asking her to try to teach me the language but she had absolutely no interest in it. She felt very firmly that it was dying and that I just needed to learn English well and that was her attitude towards it. So they just weren't active. My mother was very interested in it. She used to listen to the stories that my grandmother used to share about the experiences of the village and her memories of her mother and father, my grandparents of course."

Preparation for leadership did not necessarily begin in Ron's youth: Play, work and the Vietnam issue

Ron Allen:

"We used to party and drink a lot and basically do those kinds of things so I was...I think I was known as a bit of a wild child in high school days. In fact I was such a wild child that during high school I basically got picked up a great deal, a minor and possession. It ended up being one of the reasons why I did not go into the military. When I graduated in 1966, actually '67, '66 is when I was supposed to graduate, I was always in so much trouble by the time '66 came around most of my colleagues at the time were graduating, moving on and the guys were all going to the Vietnam War. And of course I had one more year to go and '67 we were still immersed in the Vietnam War and by that time I'd already been picked in minor possession 19 times and I had a couple of assault charges, getting into fights and things like that. Often they weren't necessarily fights that I incited, they were just things I was defending people that were friends of mine, and you're at the wrong place, the wrong time. And that was a lot of my story back in the high school and post high school years. And so I was not really being much shaped as a leader. I was always interested, I was always vocal but I was not necessarily shaping my leadership skills at the time. And when I got out of high school and of course the Vietnam War was moving along and I got my draft notice. I remember going in and passed the physical fine and then you have to sign up all this stuff that you did and I had to tell them all these minor possessions and the assault charges. And I remember the recruiter was looking at it and kind of going, "˜What is this?' And I said, "˜Well, you know, I kind of had fun during high school.' And I put all the stuff down because I was not really interested in going to Vietnam. My friends wanted to go there, paratroopers and what have you, and I was not interested in the war at all. I did not like it, I did not feel good about it, everything I read about it I didn't like it and so I told the guy, the recruiter, I said, "˜I'm not interested. If this keeps me out of the military, fine.' And I got a notice months later that gave me a 4F and a little note on the side attached to it and the recruiter says, "˜Well, bub, this is the best I can do for you.' So that kept me out of the military. I always had mixed feelings about that as I grow older and think about my friends who did serve and sometimes I wish I would have and did, I wish I did do that but I just didn't. And that's just the way it goes and I don't think twice about it and don't look back at it and think lesser of myself because I didn't do it. I am proud of my friends and those who have actually served in the military and am very appreciative of them doing that. But after high school then I started getting, I tried to go to college and it didn't work. I was not interested in anything, I couldn't stay focused, my grades were just terrible cause I just...I was not interested in school. I was always, all the way from grade school all the way through, well, my whole life; I've always been a worker. So because we were really a poor family, we didn't have much, anything that I wanted I had to work for. So I remember even as a teenager when I was 15 and 16 years old, I went up to Alaska and fished on a commercial seiner up in southeast Alaska and I'd come home with a lot of money. I had a lot more money than most of my friends just cause I had a little connection and I worked hard and I made money and then when I was in high school I always worked. I remember working as a mechanic in a bowling alley all the way through high school. So I'd go to work at 7:00 or 8:00 at night and not get off until 1:00 in the morning and then go to school the next day. So working was never a problem for me. As a matter of fact, when I was grade school and junior high I used to have three paper routes. They didn't want you to have three paper routes but one paper route wasn't making enough money for me so I figured out a way...we had three different papers at the time so I had all three routes in my area so I'd make a few more bucks. So I was never...I was always working and never was afraid of working."

The 1960s: Skills emerge in the counter culture experience, as does a fascinating with people

Ron Allen:

"So then my organizing and management control skills started emerging. I was always the one who handled the money for all my friends. If we were going to do anything, if we were going to...just manage everything from the household responsibilities to special events and we lived on a big farm out in the field and we would throw these small little mini rock festivals. I was the one who organized it, I was the one that put everything together and organized getting the beer and getting the bands and making sure the bandstand was all organized and figuring out how to hook up, make sure all the electricity was there and so forth and orchestrating who could park where and that's pretty much the world I came out of. And I was searching for something higher and searching for understanding of life without really knowing it. And then I was driving a logging truck and making pretty good money and all of a sudden I found myself reading a lot of magazines. I was just kind of fascinated with what it took to understand the people around me and people's personalities "˜cause I was always fascinated by people and wanted to understand what made them tick and why they acted and responded in a certain way, where their disposition led them as people. So I was trying to understand those issues. So then when I started reading and studying these different topics I just realized that driving a logging truck was not going to be a good enough deal for me. That was not the kind of vocation I was interested in. I was interested in something much more than that so I decided to go back to school."

Playing basketball in Indian tournaments, Ron gets carded

Ron Allen:

"I would always at the rebound and that was my main job, go get the ball and then get that thing out in the fast lane and I'd rough people up pretty good. And then pretty soon people were wondering about me cause I have fair skin, probably taking more after my mother, the Scottish-Irish side of my family. And they kind of went, "˜Who's this White guy out here? Is he really Indian?' I'm going, "˜Those are my brothers over there. You're not questioning them,' "˜cause they were more darker skinned than I was. And so they said, "˜We don't care. We want to see your ID.' And of course I didn't have it because I'd lost it on a fishing trip. I just loved basketball too much, I wanted to play so I went back to the council and said, "˜I need my ID, can you get me another ID?' And they said, "˜Well, actually we can't. The BIA has decided to no longer recognize our tribe and we are in the middle of reestablishing our standing as a tribal government and being recognized as a tribe.' That was the mid "˜70s, like 1974 pretty late in the fall cause we were playing basketball. So I was going to school and I was playing basketball and then all of a sudden that's when my whole career with the tribe emerged. I says, "˜Well, what's the deal with...how do we get the cards?' And they said, "˜we have to get recognized and there's a process called the Federal Recognition Process that they're...and we have a lawyer that we've hired,' through an organization the tribe was a member of called the Small Tribes Organization of Western Washington.'"

Ron is invited to fill a slow on the tribal council as he continues classes at Peninsula College

Ron Allen:

"So the guy says, "˜Well...' I said, "˜What does it mean?' And he goes, "˜Well, you just sit on the council and help us make decisions on what the tribe needs to do in terms of getting recognized and try to build up our ability to serve our people.' I went, "˜Okay, so I'll do that. If that means I can help get this card,' and that's all I was interested in was getting the card to go back and play basketball. So they appointed me to the chair or to the vacant council member in 1975. And then I started working with the lawyer and the anthropologist in terms of putting together the petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Meanwhile I was going to school at Peninsula College and all of a sudden those two simultaneous tracks started in my life, which kind of changed what I was doing. All of a sudden I became interested in what the tribe was doing and started asking questions, "˜What do we do, how do we provide services, where do we get our revenues?' We didn't have a land base. We didn't...we would meet in people's living rooms or at the VFW in Skwim and so that was kind of how we would orchestrate ourselves. Our files were...whoever was going to keep the files in their trunk and bring it to the meeting and that's pretty much how we handled business. The second two years at Peninsula College I was much more interested in politics and I became the president of the student body and then became only the second person to ever be the president two years in a row and was just very active on the campus and got more and more active with the tribe. And next thing I know by 1977, I was well into the engineering program up at PC, into the politics, and by that time I got elected the chairman of the tribe. Then all of a sudden my tribal career took off."

Jamestown Village was a cohesive community, which Ron got to know through his grandmother

Ron Allen:

"She always wanted me to come down and stay with her and so I did. I used to...summers I would go down there and stay for weeks on end. We used to have this little tiny hut on the beach. It was basically a two room place with an outdoor toilet and it didn't even have a shower. You had this little tiny bathtub in it. I mean it was the dinkiest little thing you could ever imagine. It's a good thing I was small back in those days. But I used to spend time with her on the beach and so I knew the community quite well. In those days what we referred to as the Jamestown Road was just all Jamestown people with a couple of non-Indian farmers around us. Today, because it's such a beautiful beach, it got bought up by a lot of very wealthy people and eventually pushed out a lot of our people. The prices of land taxes went up and it got exorbitant for many of our community. And so we really only have about a dozen or so of our members that actually still own land down in the original Jamestown Village. We're working hard at preserving more and more of that property and picking up pieces here and there to try to restore it as much as possible, but it's pricey for us. So we're doing that. But I was down there and was very much a part of the village. I didn't really realize that we were not an organized tribal entity. Before I became aware of it, I knew that there was a tribal police, there was actual IHS, Indian Health Service assistance that was made available down there, we had our own Shaker Church and it was just a very organized village and I guess you just didn't think about it. So I never thought much about it either and then all of a sudden all those factors became factors with the petition."

Juggling school, work and the rules of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Ron Allen:

"Cause I pretty much had exhausted what educational assistance I could get from the tribe I had to basically earn my way through. So I used to work on a graveyard shift from 11:00 to 7:00 in the shipyards as a ship fitter. I worked down at Lockheed and there was one other company I worked for early on but basically that's what I did for four years. Then I would go to school during the daytime and then I would run over and deal with the tribe in the afternoon, come back usually on the ferry at night. So I'd go over the Skwim two to three times a week and come back and basically it was one of those sleep fast kind of periods for me where I just had to figure out where I could find 15 minutes to sleep, on the ferry. It's one of those things, you're exhausted so you just sleep that half hour and somebody's knocking on your window telling you to get off the ferry. And so it was kind of intense for me. But I had high energy and so I just kept chipping away at earning a living, making sure I had money to pay for school and living expenses with myself and my wife -- I got married in 1981 -- and going over to the tribe and managing the tribal affairs. During that time when I went to the University of Washington in '79 we were finally getting to where we got a handle on the federal recognition process and so the BIA, cause part of our problem was the BIA kept shifting the rules, kept shifting the standards, which you had to meet; the criteria, standards and criteria that you had to meet in order to be qualified, to meet their criteria and be recognized as a legitimate government. And we had full support, we'd gotten full support from our sister tribes, Lower Elwha S'Klallam Tribe and the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe and then also the surrounding tribes. So the support was really, was well established. When the process actually emerged they actually moved us up on the wait list, and so we went from I think #19 up to #2 behind the Grand Traverse Tribe up in Michigan. And so that was a fast track for us. That happened in 1980 and then all the anthropologists and all the BIA teams started coming out and visiting us and going through our documents and visiting the tribe and making sure that we were "legit". So we got recognized in February. We passed all their tests and criteria. And February 10th, 1981, we were recognized. The summer of '81 we got a $30,000 grant from the BIA to help set up our governmental operation. By October of '83 we received $180,000. So now we were opening up shop. We had opened up a small little two-room office in Skwim, in this place called the Boardwalk Square. And so that I was coming over and actually dealing with tribal affairs; I was hired as the executive director in the summer of '82 and that's when I became the administrative head for the tribe. So that was the pattern. And then in '83, a year later, while I was working half time as the administrator for the tribe I finally graduated so just everything kind of happened. In the summer of '83 my wife and my newborn baby, my oldest son Joe, we moved back to Skwim. And during that time we were able to also secure a HUD grant. So we had put together a HUD grant and bought a little two-acre piece of property. Couldn't do it in Jamestown because Jamestown was designated a flood plain zone so you couldn't spend federal dollars there. So we ended up finding a site near one of the other village sites on Skwim Bay, it was the best we could do and we said, "˜This works.' And so that's how we actually got located where we are because we had to move fast and we found a site that worked on the Bay. And then on that particular site was a little house and I moved into it and just basically lived the tribal politics ever since then."

Response of surrounding communities to the tribe's restoration

Ron Allen:

"Indifference; indifference without a doubt. I think that the local community really didn't pay a whole lot of attention to us. The local Skwim community knew us as the Jamestown Village and knew the families that lived there and lived in the Skwim community. They didn't pay any attention to us. They didn't ever even think of us as a government. It just never crossed their mind. They were just "those Indians" who lived on the beach who were here forever and we like them. Most of our people were very likeable people and if you asked some of the old pioneers of the community they would say, "˜Yeah, I knew the Jamestown. I knew Lyle Prince real well, I knew Bill Allen real well, I knew Bill Allen's dad Joe. Yeah, I remember him.' County commissioners, they didn't pay much attention to us at all and just shrugged their shoulders. There was actually...there wasn't all that much engagement with the Lower Elwha S'Klallam Tribe and they just didn't pay much attention to them. So they weren't going to pay attention to that reservation that was well established since the 1930s then they certainly weren't going to pay any attention to us. And so we were not on their radar screen for many, many years. I think that when we first got on their radar screen was after the settlement. There was a settlement in 1985 for the land and we purchased some property and one of the pieces is actually where our casino is at right now. But on that property we ended up selling fireworks and that got their attention. Okay, now there's this Indian fireworks stand. So that's the first time they really started resonating that, um, we've got to deal with these Indians and that respect that they had no control over what we did on our property. That annoyed them but we were still so small, we were only a tribe of 250 people, they didn't pay much attention to us. And as we started developing businesses, I think that they started developing a confident level of who we were and how we interacted with the local community. They looked at us...I think many would look at us with a jaundice eye or a little bit of a skeptical eye but many said that, "˜Well, actually they're doing quite well and they're taking care of themselves. They're being very resourceful and very independent,' which is a very strong characteristic that we always took great pride in. S'Klallam means 'Strong People' and so...we took a lot of pride in the meaning of our people's name. So I think the local community actually developed a positive attitude towards us. We were always very progressive and we were never afraid of pursuing businesses off the reservation or out of the area. Often in reservation communities the people want to see the businesses where they actually can see them, they can know where the business opportunities are, job opportunities are, and the idea of owning businesses out of sight, off the reservation is something that creates a bit of anxiety and distrust. We never had that problem at all so we had a number of businesses that started off the reservation, out of the area altogether and we managed them to develop business credibility."

Strategies for economic development

Ron Allen:

"Our fundamental philosophy was to go slow, go after capital intensive businesses, get them solidified and strengthened and then step off of them to go after labor intensive businesses that create more job opportunities for our tribe. And as we moved along we had more successes than failures. We had a couple of failures, disappointing but we had far more successes and we made it work and I think the community opened up to us with strong reception that we are part of the community. I still don't think that they thought of us as a government. I think they thought of us as a business entity, kind of like a little association and that they have this unique authority to engage in businesses as an association. That's the way I read their attitude towards us. So I think it worked quite well and as time went along our businesses became more and more successful and all of a sudden we became one of the stronger employers in the community. Then we raised the eyebrows of the political sorts and the general public realizing that we made a huge difference. But also at that time we started raising the attention of those who were basically the anti-Indian sentiment, the people whose mentality was, "˜We defeated these Indians, why do they have these special rights, why do they get these special opportunities and why do they not pay taxes.' And so all of a sudden you started seeing, people started throwing rocks at us because of jealousy and envy."

The 1855 Point No Point Treaty made clear that the signing tribes retain the right to fish, hunt and gather. The 1974 Bolt decision affirmed equal fishing rights

Ron Allen:

"We're fish people. We grew up being fish people. We lived on the rivers, we lived on the beaches, fish and shellfish, that's our way of life and that's who we are. And it was true for the Jamestown S'Klallam people too and that is how we basically lived. I remember grandma telling me how they used to go get crabs and go eat Elkin clams and load it up on a wagon and actually take it to Port Angeles to sell to make a few bucks. So when we got recognized then it became evident to me that first things first, we need to make sure that we intervene in the Bolt decision, that we have equal fishing rights. So that was a huge issue. The Point No Point was the vehicle that we should be organized to manage the fishery and enforce the fishery and provide the fishing opportunities for our community. And of course the Northwest Indian Fish Commission was the collective entity that the 20 signatory tribes, including us at Jamestown, was organizing to deal with the state and deal with the federal government. In those days there was just five commissioners. It was organized by treaty area. So there's the five treaty areas: Point No Point, Point Elliott, Quinault and Macaw and Nisqually, Medicine Creek and that's how it was organized. And we had representatives in that forum representing the Point No Point treaty council. Then I started getting involved in that forum as well and became much more involved in reorganizing the Northwest Indian Fish Commission and I got more active in both forums, Point No Point and Northwest Indian Fish Commission reorganizing. So I started spending a lot more active energy in fisheries itself trying to help protect our interests and make sure that we were carving out our fair share. That included we, that Jamestown needed to make sure that we were preserving our unique exclusive areas, which is in front of our village, inside the Dungeness Spit was a very tense and still is a tense discussion because our sister tribes have their exclusive areas, the Gamble Bay for the Port Gamble S'Klallam and Freshwater Bay over there in front of the mouth of the Elwha River in front of the Lower Elwha Tribe."

How to balance work for one's own tribe with work for multiple tribal issues

Ron Allen:

"That's not an easy question to answer. If you're out there in the political forum, whether it's in the local regional level or the state level or the federal level, there are political issues, policy matters, that affect your rights, your political fishery rights, whether they're legal rights or whether they're just policy matters, and you have to protect and/or advance your interests in those forums. Your tribe has an interest but somebody has to take the lead to champion our interest in those various forums. And so when you're doing one you're doing the other. If you're a part of an aggregate that really means that you're championing your interest as a tribe but it just so happens you're wrapped up in the interests of your colleague, your sister tribes. And so that's true at a local level like Point No Point among the four tribes, it's true at Northwest Indian Fish Commission with regard to the 20 tribes, it's true in the Northwest if you're dealing with the northwest issues in the multiple forums. And some of the best examples are the Pacific Fishery Management Council forum where they manage the fishery from Puget Sound all the way down the coast, up the Columbia River and down the coast of Oregon or the U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Commission forum where you're dealing with the management of harvest management of fisheries from Alaska all the way down to the Oregon coast and up the Columbia River. So that's a very extensive area and in each of those forums you have an interest because the fish do not know any boundary, they don't know borders, they don't know do they belong to this tribe or to that non-Indian or to this Alaskan and so forth. So what you have to do is you have to go out there and negotiate and try to manage a fair share in terms of even defining what fair means to each respective party and you just get very involved in it. So while you're doing that, you're advancing the interests of the collective good. The collective means you're inside it, inside you're affected by it so you look at that with a very close eye to make sure that your interests are being protected as well. But you happen to be, because you're an active tribal leader in those forums, you're in a very fortuitous position to protect your tribe's community's interest in those forums."

Ron has participated in many fish forums and is one of four U.S. commissioners on the Pacific Salmon Commission, which represents treaty tribes from Washington and Oregon

Ron Allen:

"And actually since 1985, I've been active in the U.S.-Canada Fishery forum and eventually I became active on what's called the Frasier River Panel that actually actively manages the Frasier River Sockeye and Pink Salmon which was a big fishery for our people, the S'Klallam people and the Jamestown people. And so I was very actively involved with that for eight years. And then you take those issues and move them back to Washington, D.C. where you have the Magnuson Act and other fishery legislation whether it's being passed or whether it's being amended or whether it's being proposed and then you have to be back there championing those issues including the appropriation process that allocates budget for managing fisheries, protecting the habitat, advancing enhancement programs and so forth."

In the years of fish negotiations, the most difficult decision

Ron Allen:

"Persuading the tribes that...it basically is two fold. In the PSC forum, Pacific Salmon Fishery forum, in '85 there was lots of people who really believed that this was a bad deal for us, that it was a bad deal for the tribes and I believed that it was a good deal because even back then with limited experience and expertise and knowledge about fisheries and politics, it was evident to me that we were in a fish war and that war had to be stopped and we had to try to...we had to stop the bleeding of the decimation of our fishery. And that treaty was the vehicle to make it happen, to start forcing some actions. So I was pushing real hard to make that happen and likewise it ended up having its problems in implementation and lack of definition. And back in '85 we ended up negotiating another settlement, a revised and amended settlement of that treaty in 1999. And that was very difficult because it was not just the 20 tribes, which included my tribe, but it was the four tribes of the Columbia River that we had to persuade this was a good deal for us and we needed to move it forward and trying to make something happen that satisfied everybody was impossible. There were many others that were similar, shellfish negotiations or negotiations of exclusive areas even for my own tribe among the Klallam tribes. It's about trying to find some sort of common ground. And in every community you have a set of positions that can be the extreme and you can't...you can never settle any dispute on any end of the extreme. It just can't be done so you have to find that common ground and I've done it in countless forums. Sometimes people have accused me of being the negotiator of the middle ground and that that's to the detriment of the interest of the tribes. I don't agree with that at all. I agree that if you're going to lead then you need to lead and provide a path which you're going to be able to build and then if you make adjustments because you were not observant about one factor or another or a key issue then you go back and try to correct it. You work hard at trying to correct it because you now have more knowledge and more information with regard to that matter in terms of making some adjustments to improve it."

How resistance to tribal fishing rights changed over time

Ron Allen:

"The non-Indian community, over the course of the last 20-25 years, really has shifted its attitude towards the tribes as managers, the tribes as experts. The last, oh, gee, 5-7 years it's been real interesting because the state and federal government are essentially robbing our staff in terms of getting better staff. So for...from the "˜80s, early "˜80s all the way through to the mid "˜90s I think that we probably had among the best staff, the best technicians, best managers in the northwest. And then in the mid "˜90s then there became new problems. The ESA Act emerged and other kinds of problems emerged on its heels and there was a need for more and better expertise. And so they started providing the tribal staffers with better opportunities, more salary, better benefits and so forth and we had a tough time competing with them. The good part is that we trained them and they understand our rights and who we are and they have a stronger propensity to work with us. But on top of that, politically, the different organizations who represent different interest groups, the sport groups, the commercial groups and so forth. They started realizing that we are a friend and an ally and that we're really working closer together. And so you found us actually working on solutions in that forum, in the political forum in Olympia and in Washington, D.C. mutually going after resources to do a better job for management, to do a better job for enhancement and habitat protection. The alliances started shifting dramatically. There were still a number of very negative biased and racists personalities and organizations that are out there, they're still out there today. Some are even getting stronger in their organizational capacity and trying to be very clever in how they're spinning their attitude and the general public's notion of the tribe's unique rights."

The Rafeedie decision, one of the most significant advances for Indian fishers since the Bolt decision

Ron Allen:

"Particularly, in light of the fact that shellfish became the new core fishery program as the fin fish continued to diminish and the market continued to diminish, the shellfish industry for gooey duck and crab and shrimp, sea cucumbers, started to emerge. So that Rafeedie decision was a huge deal for us and now we're still in the middle of settlement. We're just now closing that settlement out in terms of clarifying the relationship between the tribes' rights and the growers who also were acknowledged in the treaty days and so we had to work out some sort of a compromise and we're doing just that. The Bolt decision dealt with only the fin fish, the salmon. It did not deal with the shellfish, the crab and the gooey duck, the little necks and manila clams, which was an introduced clam to the northwest area. And it made it real clear that we preserve 50 percent of the harvest of the shellfish. So that made it real clear to the state that they had to co-manage the fishery with the tribes for those fisheries. Because those products became very marketable and increased stronger than the fin fish, it became more important to the Indian fishermen because they shifted their gear and their ability to harvest from fin fish to shellfish."

Elected officials in the State of Washington: friends and enemies of tribes

Ron Allen:

"For the longest time it was either hot or cold. Either you were supportive and sensitive to the tribes' rights and interests or you just were dead against it and you just, philosophically, did not agree with the tribes' rights. Over the time we've had a lot of different personalities out there. The former senators Magnuson and Jackson, they were strong supporters of the tribe. They unequivocally were supporting our rights and were huge champions, well liked by many tribal leaders and they had a very strong relationship. Then you move forward and then you had a series of different kind of players out there but Senator Slade Gorton was one of our deadly enemies, no question about it. He just philosophically...it's not that he...I don't think he hated Indians. I just think that he philosophically did not believe that the tribes should be dealt with differently and specially and that the treaties did not mean that they have special rights. Philosophically he didn't agree with that and he did everything he possibly could to object to that. From the time when he was the attorney general in the appeals to the Bolt decision and he lost all those appeals all the way to the Supreme Court to the time he became a Senator and tried to introduce legislation. We've had numerous congressmen in the area trying to introduce legislation that would undermine the tribes' treaty rights and they worked real hard at it. Fortunately we had a lot of friends and from the senators, Jackson and Magnuson, to today Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell -- I'll come back to Maria Cantwell in a second here -- but they have been good friends to us and we have worked well together. We've had numerous congressmen led by Norm Dicks who actually used to work for Maggie as the chief of staff and moved into Congress himself and has become quite powerful as a ranking Democrat in the House and has been a very, very strong supportive. We've had numerous congressmen who started off being against the tribes and being supportive of the non-Indian constituency and always being influenced by their contributions to their campaigns and so forth and advancing legislation that was detrimental to the tribes and trying to undermine the tribes' legal standing and rights. They lost a lot of battles and they started realizing that the tribes' political clout and knowledge or skill at fighting political fights in Washington, D.C. was ratcheting up dramatically and we had become, tribes in the northwest, including tribes across the nation, had become very good at watching what's going on in Congress in these different forums and spotting these riders that are being slipped into these various bills and generating support to oppose them or get them removed. In state politics for years and years a lot of the politicians didn't realize that they had absolutely power over the unique federal tribal relations that the authority over the tribes' unique right was at the federal level, was in Washington, D.C., it wasn't in Olympia. And they would try to pass pieces of legislation that was absolutely illegal that would get thrown out by courts left and right because they had no authority over tribes' jurisdiction. One, a Republican Representative currently, a job named Jim Buck, he's from my area as a matter of fact, and he was very much against the tribes' unique rights and thought that they should be changed. But this is where Billy Frank entered into the picture and really persuaded him, "˜Well, read the treaties and then if you still believe we don't have a right, then let's talk about it.' So he did. He actually sat down and read the treaties, read the unique relationship between the tribes and read the Bolt decision and all of a sudden came out, as conservative as he is, he's a very conservative, not a right winger but he's a very strong heavy to the right conservative Republican and he flat out believes that the tribes are right, that they're absolutely...they're co-manager and he's become convinced that we're good managers and that the state benefits from our collective efforts and has become quite knowledgeable about the truth of harvesting and protecting the fishery, which is a high interest of his."

The impact of Washington tribes on the Senate race of 2000

Ron Allen:

"Slade Gorton had been a senator for a couple of terms and introduced countless pieces of negative anti-Indian legislation and we had to spend a lot of energy and a lot of money fighting those bills and those riders that he was introducing and beating them. We finally said, "˜Well, we can either keep fighting him in those forums or we can fight him in the political election and just flat out tell him, we don't like you, we don't agree with you philosophically and we don't want you to be our senator anymore.' And so the tribes got more actively involved in that particular election in 2000 and I was an early proponent of Maria Cantwell. I remember her as a former congresswoman. She'd dealt with the Tulalip Tribe and was very fair and understood their position and was probably a good candidate. There were a couple others out there that we were interested in but she's the one that resonated; she's the one that rose to the top from my perspective. So we did two different things. One, we started generating money for her to help her campaign and number two, we started getting our people registered and we kept convincing our people that we have 100,000 Indians in Washington State and if we can just get half of them, if we can get 40 percent of them in the elections and to vote it's going to make a difference. And so we initiated some vote registration campaigns throughout the different communities, different people took responsibility for it, we held different meetings to get people enthused about it and help with Maria's campaign in terms of getting signage up and doing whatever we could to help the campaign resonate and that worked out quite well for us and we stuck by our guns. I remember that I had conversations with Slade Gorton's chief of staff, Tony, but his comment to us was, "˜Well, we're going to win and when we're done we'll talk about Indian rights and Indian issues.' His comment was, "˜You don't understand us.' I says, "˜Well, actually we do understand you. We understand when you're advancing legislation that is terminating our rights, that is eliminating our unique authority and that's undermining our governmental status,' I says, "˜we know exactly what you're doing. So I don't care how you want to rationalize it, you can do that all you want, but you're against us and we know it.' So we championed that legislation, excuse me, that campaign and we won. And in the end the 2000 votes, we contend were Indians votes. If those Indian voters, we got an additional we think somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 voters out there, if they'd stayed home, Maria would have stayed home too and Slade would still be in office. We chalked it up as an Indian victory, no question about it. Yes, when you're talking about the two million votes that are out there, that a lot of people contributed to it, no question about it, but without the Indians they didn't win the election and we think that was a statement from the Indians to politicians that we're not afraid of you, that we're willing to weather the consequences of any kind of retribution that you may want to levy against tribes. And I remember talking to a lot of my colleagues and they were very, very skeptical of doing this. They thought, "˜No, he's going to come back, he's going to win and he's going to nail us.' And I went, "˜He's nailing us now so what difference does it make, so stand firm, stand strong.' And we've started to get much smarter about that in terms of getting our people out and voting and getting our people motivated to contribute money to campaigns and we're getting smarter about how we contribute. We just don't dump money into a Democratic or Republican Party. We want to know, what is it you're going to do with this money? How is this money going to be able to benefit our community? How are you going to spend money to help us get more of our people registered and get engaged in politics? And how are you going to reach out to the tribes and so forth? So tribal politics has shifted in the "˜90s and now in the 21st century. You're now starting to see tribal people become more players, you're starting to see fundraisers and tribes being much more active. The numbers are rising because the tribes now have money because of the success of the gaming industry primarily, that has made a big difference in our ability to participate in the political process at all levels. I think the Republican Party really does want to try to mend fences between them and the Indian communities and its leadership."

Ron is a moderate Republican who has supported, admired and learned from Democrats

Ron Allen:

"First and foremost, I defend tribes rights, tribes sovereignty, tribes treaty rights. That's the bottom line for me. In college I developed a much more conservative philosophy towards independence of individuals and communities and the laissez faire economic development philosophies. And so I was actually quite conservative coming out of college. Since college and because of my experience in politics, watching how politics works, learning how it actually works and how you work out the differences of opinion about different philosophies and different issues that affect our communities from so-so issues to natural resources to political institutions that are important for us and so forth, it's come to my perception that my notion is still strongly Republican from economic development perspectives but I've become much more moderate. And a man who's really influenced me on that philosophy and approach is Dan Evans. I thought Dan Evans was a fabulous governor for Washington, I thought he was a fabulous Senator. He advanced a lot of legislation that advanced our issues in a dramatic way. And so his approach, his philosophical approach made sense to me. So it wasn't about your philosophy, it is about the objectives...goals and objectives you're trying to advance. And for me, my primary goal and objective was creating a political, legal environment that tribes could pursue their goals and their objectives and become truly self-determined and self-reliant on their own terms and that they could co-exist with their colleague governments that are out there, whether they exist on the same actual political, legal level or not. In other words, we primarily deal with ourselves with the federal government but we have a relationship with the state government. So for campaign purposes, it's about what do you stand for and how does your political position and platform mesh with the tribes' agenda? Are you going to be respectful of tribal governments? Do you believe we exist as sovereign governments and we have that unique relationship? Do you believe that our treaty rights are a very special contractual commitment between the federal government in our communities that cannot be broken, that holds the sacred...the sacred promise of the nation to Indian peoples or not? So the issue is if it's positive then my disposition is that you're a friend."

The need to educate the American public about tribal nations

Ron Allen:

"So I think that we really need to continue to work harder in terms of educating the society and the policy people. It's ever changing. The fundamental knowledge about who Indian tribal governments are or our communities and how we co-exist in the state, is a topic that really is developed in grade school and the middle school years. That's where the seed is really planted and we just have to work harder at shifting the curriculums and shifting the materials so that they more accurately reflect who the tribes are and what our history is because you're dealing with 250, well, actually more, 500 years of history but 250 years of history within this state, within the United States in this political relationship and most of them don't quite understand how we fit. And as you see the changing of the guard in Olympia for the state legislature or in Washington, D.C., it's about people who don't have a good fundamental educational background about tribal governments and treaty rights and the unique relationship between the United States society including Washington society and the Indian communities. So we're very conscious that we have to ratchet up our ability to change the curriculum in the educational institutions but also to work harder through the various other educational communication vehicles. It's using the media; all forms of the media -- the broadcast media, the print media, the magazine media -- every form of media that's out there in terms of getting our messages out there. Not just the controversial stuff, which is easy for them to print and cover, but the stuff that are fascinating stories, spending money to basically cause people to have a better understanding of who we are and how we make a positive contribution to our society and to our economy and to our mutual goals and objectives, and then reaching out to the special interest groups that are out there. It wouldn't matter whether it's associations or organizations of different sorts, whether it's church groups or whether it's Rotary and Lions Clubs and chamber of commerce organizations, you're reaching out to them to cause them to know who you are and staying engaged in that way while you're doing that you're educating. And you don't try to overwhelm them, you don't brow beat them but you just take a very subtle, very soft educational approach. So it's never too late but if we're going to change a society, a cultural attitude, it's more at the grassroots and more at the younger level. That's where you're going to make a huge difference. Indians can't stamp out racism faster than African Americans or Asian Americans and so forth, Latinos. It's just racism is racism out there and it's ugly roots are deep and it's going to take a long time to root them out. We're just a part of it and our focus just happens to be with regard to the Indian communities and our unique governmental relationship that the other ethnic groups don't have that unique relationship."

The extreme importance of an effectively run tribal government

Ron Allen:

"I firmly believe that the success of a leader or the success of a tribe is relative to the quality and effectiveness of their staff. You really need to have quality staff in order to get the job done. We're governments. That means that we have all the responsibilities of governments. Our community depends on it. It's easy to take shots at the governmental leadership and the governmental programs and the bureaucracy, if you will, but the bottom line is, if you're performing, you're not providing the kind of services that is expected. And as governments we have every responsibility that any other government has it just changed in scope relative to the magnitude of the size of your reservation and number of people you serve. But you have to take care of natural resources, you've got to take care of enforcement in court systems to protect the public safety, you need to take care of the educational interests or the healthcare interests, which is a very volatile arena and a very important one for us to focus in on, and housing needs and jobs opportunities and employment mobility and support systems that are important for our community, and all the family and community support systems that's important to strengthen, protecting and advancing your culture and your traditional practices with languages and stuff like that, taking care of your elders, having special programs for your youth so they are very comfortable with who they are. Those are all governmental functions and responsibilities to just mention a few. The Skwim community where Jamestown tribe is set up is very pretty, it's very rural, it's very safe, it's very comfortable and throughout the year and we've been blessed by being approached by some talent, some people who have just some talent. I've been a real strong support of women working in our environment and an upward mobility opportunity for women. So the majority of the heads of my different programs for our tribe are women. If they're the ones that get the job...I have one woman who is a high school graduate and she is just brilliant, absolutely brilliant and we've moved her up, against the objections of some people who have...who insist on higher collegiate degrees and training but this person has been able to do the job as well as anybody. And so we provide the opportunity for those who perform and produce the products that we're looking for, the service that we're looking for. So we've been doing quite well as a small tribe. We're only about 525 people right now. So that makes a huge difference. And then personally, it's about leadership and leadership is about being accessible. I firmly believe that. I've always been a high tech personality. When they first started making portable computers, I remember the first compact computer and it was as big as my suitcase. And I remember having to carry that around trying to get it on the planes and just to be able to get to where I needed to go and to get the job done. I remember Wilma Mankiller, the former chief of the Cherokee, at our big White House meeting that I helped orchestrate, she referred to me as the Cyborg chairman because I was so into technology and producing documents and briefing materials and data. So I had a lot of real strong technical skills. And in those days we didn't have a lot of money so I basically did a lot of work myself. I do a lot less now because I don't have to. I've got too many talented people around me but I review that kind of stuff myself very closely to make sure that it reflects the professionalism. That old notion, you only get one shot at a first impression, I don't even care if it's just a draft document, I want it to look good; check the grammar, check the spelling, check the format, making sure that it looks good. So I pay a lot of attention to that kind of stuff. If people call me then I call them back. If they email me, then I email them back. If I'm busy and I can't get back to them right away, I'll just leave a simple message saying, "˜I'm really, really busy. I'll call you in day or two.' And so I let them know. So they know that I got their message and that I'm going to respond to them. As a general rule I don't have to do that. As a general rule I will stop almost anything I'm doing to deal with my people cause they're my priority."

Ron's paramount commitments and concerns

Ron Allen:

"Sovereignty is the foundation of tribes, it is who we are, it's what we're about, it's our land base, it's our people, it's our culture, it's our way of life, it is the basis for our unique standing in America and it has always been under siege. We have some new challenges today dealing with the Supreme Court and its new political desire to redefine 200 years of law and interpretations of that unique relationship. So that's a new challenge for the tribes without a doubt. There's other issues that are out there that take a higher, they take high profile. Nothing's more important than that particular attack and that attack has got some momentum from the anti-Indian coalitions that are out there that are organizing themselves throughout the nation and you'll see them everywhere. You see them in Washington, Idaho, Montana, the Great Lakes area, down here in Arizona and so forth. So they're organizing and that means that we have to be better organized. I think that the importance of tribes being united is probably one of the most important ingredients to preserve our...preserve and protect our unique way of life in this society and its political, legal, cultural system."

The real tasks for the President of the National Congress of American Indians

Ron Allen:

"I learned a lot of difficult lessons as the president of NCAI for four years. One, if you're going to be the president of NCAI, it's not just dealing with Washington, D.C. and the politics, it's understanding the unique interests and issues of all of Indian Country. The Iroquois Confederacy Tribes have different interests than the Seminoles and Miccosukees in Florida. They have different interests than the Great Lakes, the Chippewas or the Crees over in Montana or the Lakota people in the Dakotas or the Northwest tribes, the Alaska Natives. Those interests and those issues are very different and the California tribes, the Southwest tribes, the Pueblos, knowing the difference with the Pueblos and the Navajo, understanding the Navajo/Hopi conflict. And that's just only just touching, there's many elements. Who knows the unique differences in the Hualapai and the Havasupai in northern Arizona down in the Grand Canyon and up on the ridge of the Canyon, what their unique problems and interests are. My good friend Billy Frank, I say one of his favorite phrases and I love it, "˜It's for the cause. It's bigger than you.' Mel Tonasket, another good friend of mine from the Colville Nation, the guy was just always, "˜the cause is bigger than you. You didn't know it was your time, you just rise to it.' Joe de la Cruz, I couldn't speak highly enough for Joe de la Cruz. Influenced me wholeheartedly about getting out there and getting involved and I used to challenge him about the international stuff. I said, "˜You know, Joe, we've got so many battles here in the United States, we're watching the Congress constantly, we're dealing with the administration and we're dealing with ONB, we're dealing with the White House, we've got to go back up to the Congress, we've got to back out to Indian Country and we've got to deal with the state legislatures, the Association of Attorney Generals, all these different organizations and you're basically covering your bases, you're trying to protect your turf.' And I says, "˜I don't know if we can deal with this international stuff.' And his comment to me was, "˜Ron, these are our brothers and sisters; they don't have what we have. We complain about not having enough support, we complain about not having the right kind of setting, the right kind of conditions because of all the economic, social and political factors that you use to measure the welfare of your society and your people. They're worse. We think that we're so low on that totem pole in measuring that criteria, they're worse, they're worse off. They've got worse conditions. They've got people killing them and genocide going on in different forums. They need our support, they need the exposure.' So I became convinced by Joe that those are things that we have to do."

What keeps Ron Allen going

Ron Allen:

"First of all, I'm always a very active personality. They always refer to the Type A personalities; I'm definitely triple A. So I've always had good energy. I've always been a runner. I've always thought my legs were Indian without a doubt cause I can run, I always could run. That was back in my basketball days cause I'd run the dickens out of them. I may not be able to out shoot them but I'll out run them and I'll beat them that way. And I think of my career the same way. I just have an ability to stay focused and don't worry about...there's lots of stuff going on, there's lots of pressures in all different kinds of forums, lots of things to do and it's just a matter of what's the most important thing you need to deal with right now, what's the most urgent crisis, deal with it and move on to the next, deal with that one and move on to the next. For the last number of years I actually didn't take care of myself as well as I used to. I was always a runner and I took very good care of myself and kept my weight down and then for about five years or six years or so I didn't and got real heavy. So I just now recently over this last year shifted and got my weight back down and started becoming more healthy conscience. I didn't want to trigger diabetes and that kind of stuff. I just felt I could contribute, I really feel I could contribute well into my 70s and 80s. And I saw some of my friends who I think a great deal of... Joe de la Cruz died at 62. Merle Boyd the second chief from the Second Flocks Nation, a good friend, died at 62. And I've had some friends having strokes and heart attacks at early ages and it dawned on me that I've got to start taking care of myself. So that's another issue that caused me to become more conscious of taking care of myself so that I can be a better servant to the Indian people, to my people and Indian people in general. And I just stay motivated; I just love doing what I'm doing. I don't know why. I really think it's spiritual, I think it's beyond me that the Spirit has caused me to have certain skills and I'm just driven by those skills. There's certain things I kind of perceive and understand and I just want to share them and want to provide it. I do have a strong voice and I think my voice should be out there."

In 1988 Congress authorized a project called Self-Governance that allowed many programs run by the BIA to be transferred to tribes themselves. Jamestown S'Klallam was one of the first seven tribes to participate.

Ron Allen:

"In 1987 there was this big brew haw about the federal government's mismanagement of Indian programs, a huge exposé, a whole bunch of hearings and so forth. And out of all that process came a challenge by the leadership in Congress to tribal leadership. And people who I was very motivated and influenced by, the Joe de la Cruz's, the Wendell Chinos from Mescalero Apache or the Roger Jordain from Red Lake Apache and Sam Keggy from the Lumbee Nation and so forth. They were all there. And they said, "˜How about if we just...you tribal leaders go up with Secretary Don Hodel at the time under Reagan and Ross Swimmer who was the BIA Assistant Secretary, "˜You guys go figure out what's the best way for us to better serve Indian tribes and Indian communities.' And we did. We came up with an idea of how that should work. Their proposal was a terrible one. Ours was, "˜Let us move this agenda forward on our terms.' We knew that it had to be on our terms. We were smart enough to know that they were trying to out finesse us and propose legislation that absolved the federal government of its treaty obligations or its trust responsibilities to Indian Nations and we said, "˜Absolutely not! There's no way we're letting you off that hook. But, we will propose a piece of legislation that allows us to negotiate our fair share of the federal programs that serve our community, our share from top to bottom, from the Secretary's office on down to the field, and then we will absolve you of any responsibility with regard to those programs and those services and then if there's specific legal matters then we'll negotiate them too so that we have our legal counsel with us in terms of making sure that we're real clear about how we're going to move this agenda forward.' When it started in 1988, they put out a notice to see who was interested in doing this. They said, "˜Let's get 10 tribes,' and they really wanted big tribes. And I kept, I was with them and I wanted our tribe to be a part of it. Here we were a small little 225 member tribe and they kept saying, "˜No, you're too small.' And I said, "˜No, we're not.' I said, 'Seventy-five percent of the tribes in the United States are tribes that are under 1500. Who represents them?' And so I kept making the case. Well, they couldn't find a 10th tribe so then I was leveraging with Congress and a guy named Sid Yates who was the Chair of the Appropriation Committee back then, they basically said, "˜Let them in,' and so that's how we got in. We were one of the first 10 and we have been a resounding success. And since then I basically was the technician and Joe who was the spiritual leader and Wendell and Roger, they're two characters that just was a real blessing to ever have experienced because they were in your face kind of tribal leaders. They did not back off from anybody and Joe used to always talk very fondly of those two. So we got in and then I got involved. Very early on I ended up being the Chair of the Self-Governance Advisory Council for the BIA. I decided that I was not going to get actively involved in the IHS side, just let somebody else spread the responsibility around. But I still am very actively involved."

Tribes today in the self-governance movement

Ron Allen:

"Today there's about 280 of the 560 Indian Nations that are out there. Like I said, we were one of the first 10 and we've expanded now so it's...self-governance is now being advanced in all the Department of Interior so not just the BIA but all the other agencies, Fish and Wildlife, Parks, Bureau of Reclamation, etc. IHS was hot it's heels and that law got passed in 1994. It's moving very fast forward and it's now moving into other agencies and programs in HHS as well. So it's under a program called Title VI and you see self-governance being advanced in housing, over in HUD as well now. So self-governance is really being a phenomenal success. It's about governments acting like governments. You take responsibility for it. That means if you make a mistake, then you own up to it. It's your fault, nobody else's fault. You can't point to the BIA or point to the federal government, it's their fault. You're in control of it."

The cultural programs of Jamestown S'Klallam

Ron Allen:

"I'm very actively involved with in terms of helping shape out what it is we're doing, helping make sure that we're providing resources and support for people who have an interest in restoring some of the artistic skills whether it's basket weaving, carving or other kinds of practices that have been utilized historically, understanding who we are as a people and making sure the programs are there. It was through my leadership that we just got a book published on the history of the Jamestown tribe. So that was really cool that we've documented it now."

Ron has noted numerous people who embody the spirit that drives him

Ron Allen:

"My wife; always there, steadily. When we got married she knew I was active, she knew how important the tribe was and as we had kids we'd talk through it and I told her, I said, "˜Look, I'm just going to travel a lot, it's just the nature of the game,' and we've got two kids to bring up. But she was always there. Always she has such a practical insight. I would share things with her more or less just venting and she was interested in what I had to say and what was going on. But she would ask some of the most practical questions and throw back some of the most logical, simplistic responses and it wads very helpful for me. I just kind of went, "˜Doggone it, that's the answer.' It was real simple, it was right in front of me and my wife just kind of responded to me and gave me the best answer I needed. So she was always there and I can't speak fondly and lovingly enough because of what she's done to influence me to do what I'm doing."

Grooming future leaders

Ron Allen:

"As far as mentoring goes, I always think about Joe de la Cruz's comment cause he got asked this question a lot and it's not...it's a challenging question and it's a difficult one for people. They kind of want you to take your skills and experiences and perceptions and just give it to some young person who's coming along. Joe's comment was that, "˜you have to wait for the right person and the right person has got to come to you and want you to share that with them and to teach you.' And I remember it vividly in terms of trying to be able to transfer what you know and your thoughts and your approach about dealing with Indian politics at a local level versus all the way up to the national level. And we haven't had a lot of kids who are interested. Today's society is a little different generation than what I grew up out of and I'm still trying to understand. But the good news is that we've got a young woman who is very interested in tribal politics and comes to our meetings regularly just to listen and observe and participate when and where she can. So we're working it out so that she works with me and spends time and I spend time talking to her, talking to her about politics and I have high hopes for her. Maybe she will, maybe she won't become a leader. I don't know. Only time will tell and the Great Spirit will make that decision within her walk. So I think the transfer to the youth and the mentoring is about when that opportunity can happen. That's why I liked the Institute for Tribal Governance program because it creates an opportunity to share your perspectives. I think I've earned respect among my colleagues in terms of being knowledgeable about the political process at all levels and how to interact with each other. I've tried to help solve some of the inter-tribal problems and some were successful, some not successful and you've got to roll with it. If you get too wedded to some of these matters then it's a huge mistake because you...it's too emotional."

The passions that drive Ron today and a look at the future

Ron Allen:

"I guess the passion of advancing strong tribal governance is one that drives me the most, that protects our sovereignty and treaty rights and so forth, that drives me the most, wanting the tribal governments to get stronger and more sophisticated. Some of our colleagues are doing a really good job and very, very impressive and I'm just a tip of the hat and huge smile at them. Some have got a long ways to go and there's a lot they need to learn. So that's a huge issue for me. NCAI is a huge passion for me. I love the organization. I think the world of it. I think that Indian Country doesn't really as a general observation appreciate how important it is to the welfare of our people and to be able to always protect the front lines of where the fight in this war with the American Indians and Native Alaskans with our society. It's the entity that makes the difference and I really want it to get stronger, I want it to develop a presence in Washington, D.C. I really...I have a passion that we're going to develop our own Hall of Indian Nations in Washington, D.C. that people are going to drive by and be very impressed with and want to go in and see. So it's not just the American Indian Museum as if we're relics of the past. We're alive and well and doing well as a political set of entities. So that's a big deal to me. And then personally it's just about my own family. I think a great deal of my kids and my family life. I kind of one of these just strange little backyard gardeners; I love gardening. I'm a gardener. I can go out and spend hours. I can be on trips like right now thinking about plants that I'm concerned about that I planted and I want to make sure they take good root and things I want to do to beautify my little five acre track that I think the world of. So I plant what I like to plant and I know what I think it's going to look like in 40 years. I think about that when I think about those trees. In that same context that's what I think about with the tribe and the tribes collectively, what we're doing. I want to think about what we're doing makes a difference to make it stronger and make it bloom better in 20 and 40 years. In that way you feel like you really have made a difference."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo Credit:
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Ron Allen

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government 

Terrance Paul: Building Sustainable Economies: Membertou First Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Chief Terrance Paul shares the keys to a sustainable economy through examples from the Membertou First Nation.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Paul, Terrance. "Building Sustainable Economies: Approaches and Perspectives." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Presentation.

Terrence Paul:

"[Mi'kmaq Language] I would first like to begin by thanking the Native Nations Institute for inviting me to this seminar and you for being here. It's an honor to have been asked to give a presentation on Building Sustainable Economies: Approaches and Perspectives. I hope through my presentation you will receive valuable information.

To begin, I thought I'd start this presentation off by showing you this photo. This is a photo of a stop sign in my community. The reason why I chose to share this with you today is because although it's a simple road sign it represents so much more. And let me talk to you about the background.

In our community...we have the local municipality. In our community, we live in the city and it's called City of Sydney, and they have an agreement with the Department of Indian Affairs to provide us services, infrastructure services. One of them is keeping the traffic signs up to date there. So we lost some stop signs either through snowplowing when we do get snow and perhaps vandals coming from anywhere, they could have came from town, we don't know. Those things happen from time to time probably everywhere in the world.

Anyway, after two years of writing to them and asking them to replace these signs we weren't getting any responses and that showed how much disrespect they had for us. So we decided then after a really good meeting about it and because we were concerned about the safety of our children and our people in the community and others that come in, we decided that enough was enough. We decided to put up our own signs and in fact when we did put up our own signs we would have them in our language. So that's why these signs, and if you go there today, when Manley was there he might have seen them, that's naqa'si, which means stop.

So what happened after that, we got a very nasty and terse letter from the local municipality there telling us that... And I didn't understand some of the words so I know that a lawyer wrote these. So we're not about to argue with a lawyer; we'll get another lawyer to do that. So we got hold of our lawyer and we explained the situation to them and we helped develop a letter responding to them because in the letter they accused us of stealing these signs and that we were subject to perhaps a criminal charge for theft.

They also accused us of surreptitiously doing this. And I didn't know at the time what that meant and I had to ask our lawyer. "˜What do they mean? Are they being mean to us or are they being nice to us? I'm just worried.' And we got two meanings from this word and one being that we did it without telling them or we did it secretly, and I can assure you that we did not do that secretly. We didn't tell them, but we felt that after two years of asking them to do this and not doing anything, we felt that it was time for a change. And there was a good way of filling that field. They vacated it. It's a jurisdictional issue here and this is where we feel that we're starting to get control of our lives by deciding what traffic signs go up and in what language. So we have all of the stop signs in our community in our language. We also have all our street signs in our Mi'kmaq language and all our buildings are in the Mi'kmaq language. So that's the beginning of taking back control of who we are.

Now, who we are: Membertou is an urban Mi'kmaq community made up of 1,205 band members. There are approximately 774 on the reserve and 429 off reserve, but if you were to go to Membertou, there is much more people that even our population. There's thousands of people that are there; either they're working or they're socializing or they're utilizing our facilities, either its gaming or the trade center or the market or the plaza. There's a lot of people that are there day in and day out. Membertou is named after Grand Chief Henri Membertou. As you can see, he was over 100 years old. Some say he was 120 years old when he died.

On a side note, this year I had the opportunity to travel to France on a trade mission. This trip was very important to our community. Actually this summer Membertou is celebrating its 400th anniversary of the baptism of the Grand Chief Membertou. Most Mi'kmaqs in the land of Canada are Catholics. Some are very devout. The missionaries who baptized him originated from the very region of France that I visited. At a reception there I had the opportunity to sign a commemoration of friendship with a representative from the town of LaRochelle, that's where the missionaries... In fact that's a Basque district. We feel that they were Basque missionaries. It was a [memorable] experience and so important considering this year's anniversary.

Part of the Unama'ki District of the Mi'kmaq Nation is Membertou. It's called Cape Breton Island, we call it Unama'ki and it doesn't mean Cape Breton Island. What it actually literally means, land of the fog. I know we have... we get fog, but it's not every day so I don't want to scare people away who just are thinking about coming to Unama'ki. We get a lot more sun than fog. It's one of the five communities around Cape Breton Island, around Unama'ki and it's one community of 13 in all of Nova Scotia. Membertou is the only Mi'kmaq community in Atlantic Canada that's located within city limits. Sydney has a population of over 100,000 people.

In 1970 the chief and council began to take control of federal programs and services. Now, this just didn't happen. It was the result of a policy, a federal policy that the government tried to implement in 1969. It was called the White Paper Policy. And in fact, it was the then Indian Affairs Minister was a person named Jean Chretien. You might have heard of his name, but he later on moved to the Prime Minister of Canada. So that incident to me, as I remember, and I was a student back then, galvanized the Aboriginal people right across the country. We were very upset about this policy and really... putting it in a nutshell, the policy would eliminate your Indian-ness. You wouldn't be Mi'kmaq anymore, you wouldn't be Cree anymore, you wouldn't be Haida anymore, you wouldn't be Ojibwe anymore and so on. So we would be like the rest of society and they thought that was the way to... that was the answer to our problems and that, which was absolute nonsense to us. So there was protests, blockades, everything going on right across the country so finally the government relented and withdrew that policy. So soon after that a lot of the Aboriginal people in the country got organized and began to go after the government for much better services and deals. So they began to loosen up at least their administrative hold on all our programs so at least that created some jobs.

Membertou has also played an important role in the evolution of Aboriginal law in Canada. Membertou has also played an important role in the recognition of Aboriginal rights and treaties. The two most important issues for us was the Donald Marshall, Jr. decision and that was a fishing case and also his wrongful conviction. His wrongful conviction came in the 70s. And what happened to Donald Jr. was that he spent 11 years in prison for a murder that he did not commit. So we knew... we found out that the judicial system was against him every turn of the way, in every level of the judicial system, right from the probation officer to the judges and everybody in between.

And what happened after that when it was proven that he was innocent, there was a public inquiry carried out. And what that did was to help change the laws not only in Nova Scotia, but in the country so that Aboriginal people in the country when they have to face the courts -- and we certainly outnumber anyone per capita in the court system -- that we're treated a lot better, and that there are different circumstances to consider when you need to answer a charge. So it is a lot better, but there is a lot more ways to go as far as the judicial system is.

Donald Marshall Jr. was a band member of Membertou and he was also the son of the late Grand Chief Donald Marshall Sr. Donald Jr. passed away last year, in fact it was last August that he passed away. He's left a tremendous legacy for all of us to benefit and to learn from.

As I said, Jr. was responsible for a court challenge that was taken to the Supreme... all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada is the supreme law of the country. That's where it ends. That's the highest court that you can go and they confirmed that we had an inherent right to a livelihood fishery. It was interesting at the time because I was directly involved in Jr. when he was being charged for fishing. He was harassed and hassled. He had his nets being taken away, his boats. In fact he bought new nets and they took those away. So finally when... and he kept in contact with me as he was fishing and as these things were happening.

So of course we had our lawyer involved in this and he certainly understood the treaties and the rights that we have. And after a very short discussion about what was going on, we were advised to tell Jr. to keep fishing. So Jr. had called me about three or four times and that was my answer, "˜Keep fishing.' So finally the government took us to court. This is what everybody wanted to do anyway. We certainly wanted to do it because we believed that we had that right and the treaty gave us that right. Also, as I said before, Donald Marshall Jr's wrongly conviction... major changes were made in Canada's judicial system when it came to convicting Aboriginal people. It's a little better, but it's certainly a long ways to go yet.

Another major historical event was the relocation of our people, our community from Membertou from the Sydney Harbor, which was just below the hill where we are now presently. In 1916, Membertou became the only one, the only community, Native community in Canada that was affected by this law that the government enacted. In fact, the government enacted this law to deal with an issue in British Columbia, I believe it's the Musqueam Band. And they enacted this law to go after them, to relocate them because they were in Vancouver prime real estate, probably the primest in Canada. So for some reason that issue resolved its self. So the bureaucrats got together, whoever in the bureaucracy knew that there was issues in Membertou on the east, furthest side of the country and they decided to use the law against us so that's how they were able to relocate us. So that's the only time that law was ever used.

Going forward Membertou success can be traced back to the adoption of good governance, financial management, accountability, transparency, education and a belief in our people. The people. We hire Band members that have education and the experience. We hire the best people to do the job and job-coach younger community members to gain valuable experience. Now we have a policy of hiring our people that have... that are qualified. If they are not, then we have to hire the most qualified person, whoever they are. It doesn't matter what color, as long as they're qualified and they help us move. But, we have a proviso in that when they are hired, that a band member will be taking this job at some point when they are qualified and we help them get qualified. We just don't say, "˜You're not qualified, go away.' It's not... If a person is interested in that, work your way up, get your education, we will help you get there.

Financial accountability and stability: We provide community members with audited statements, our annual audited statements. Every household in our community gets audited statements and they have the ability to ask any questions they have on those audits. So we feel that this is part of not just saying that we're accountable, not just saying that we're transparent. They're nice words, but they don't mean a thing if you don't do anything with them. We prove it by providing this. We inform our community very much, well informed.

We have a weekly newsletter that goes out every week and we talk about like what our plans are, what are we doing, we have open houses on our plans. We invite the community in to have their input in these plans and that way you get the commitment and the backing of the people because they know what you're doing. And also the newsletter can be used for people that want to complain about us. All we say is that, "˜don't be cursing when you write to us and don't slander people.' And also very important is that you back it up by signing your name to it. We do not accept anonymous letters. You have to sign it. And we assure them that there is no backlash. You have a right to do that and it helps us work better and plan better and helps us understand where the people want to be.

Good governance. We partner with organizations such as the National Center for First Nations Governance to improve and develop new ways of governing because we're in the process of establishing a self-governing process in our community.

Political stability, very important we feel in our leadership roles. Most of the Membertou Band councilors have been on council for over a decade, some over 20 years. I myself as Manley indicated, it'll be 26 years this June I'm chief. So there's continuity and then there's stability. In my... I don't really campaign really. I used the same platform when I started 26 years ago and that's being honest, honesty and fairness. Even when you have to fire someone, be fair to them. And although it's a difficult thing to do, they feel much more respected when you talk to them about the reasons and how the person can change and help them change and help them move on.

Looking at competitive advantages, partnering. We partner with a number of First Nations, private businesses and we feel that in order to grow our economy we can't stay within the boundaries of the reserve. We have to realize, and if all Aboriginals realize that the market is the world, that's where our market is and don't be afraid to go after that market. You know that in Canada that less than .1 of one percent of the private capital that's available is all what Aboriginals get. Most of our capital is public money and with very stringent rules. So it's really difficult to operate that way. The government certainly does not operate at the speed of business and it's very key to have timely... to have your packages and your plan in a timely basis because it's not going to stay there. Business moves.

We also believe in the treaty economy, trading and purchasing goods and services with other Aboriginal communities from across North America. My colleague here, Richard, which I hope he'll be back pretty soon, he's here, like he's here talking to a number of tribes. In fact he has a meeting tonight to talk to a local community here about fish. We sell fish. We know the casinos utilize fish so why can't we trade and why can't we buy from each other and whatever goods are here we could exchange or buy. That way the market is created. We have a philosophy back home in Nova Scotia and they like it, the government likes it and private business likes it an what we say is that, "˜What's good for Membertou is good for Nova Scotia and vice versa,' and so that helps open up doors.

We also feel that you need to be bold and what I mean by that is that sometimes like some communities, and we were like that, we come up with all kinds of ideas and all kinds of plans and then we get so many ideas and plans we end up doing nothing. So pick a winner, pick the one that you feel has the best chance of succeeding and take action, do it. Take action. But at the same time, be accountable and be transparent and not just use the words. Like I said before, prove it, show that you are accountable, show that you are transparent and live that way. Live it.

Membertou, our people, our best resource: Membertou believes that our people are our best resource. Identifying and recruiting community members that have professional level education and real world experience is a key to Membertou's success. And as an example, Richard who is missing, is that. He's gone out and got his education, a really good education. He got really good job experience in the rest of the country. He's been probably in every province and a lot of states. So he has that experience with him, which is very helpful not only to the council, but to the individual people in the community."

Manley Begay:

"And he's not Tom Selleck."

Terrance Paul:

"Yeah, but you may be mistaken for Tom Selleck, but that's not Tom Selleck. That's Richard. He reminded us of that this morning. He thought it was Tom Selleck.

We also encourage our young people to go into fields that have really good job prospects. A lot of our kids go into the arts and that's needed, but it seems like there's too many that go in that area. We need people in the sciences and engineering and business and education in the emerging industries that are relevant to a transforming economy like the alternative energies field, which is sort of like in the beginning stages of it and if we don't do anything we're going to miss that boat too. So we certainly have made sure that we're very involved in that area. It's a new industry, it's growing and there's part of our future is that.

Every year almost 100 percent of our Membertou eligible high school students graduate and go on to higher education. Some years we don't. Some years it's 90 percent. It's a really good statistic that we have and we're really proud of that. Membertou is the first Aboriginal community in North America to be ISO certified. Membertou recognized that in order to be taken seriously it had to demonstrate and adhere to the highest management practices. By doing this we have increased our credibility with all stakeholders including government, financial institutions, industry and more importantly, probably most importantly, our community members. We selected the ISO standard because it's recognized internationally.

Just for a bit of information, ISO is not an acronym; it's a word. I think it's a Dutch word because it began in Belgium in 1948 where a person wanted to... it's just the letters lend itself as an acronym, International Standards Organization. But if you look up ISO, you'll understand that it's a word and this is what it means. It's very interesting.

Obtaining and maintaining ISO certification wasn't easy, but it was transformational. It demonstrated Membertou's ongoing commitment to the best management practices and continuous improvement. ISO certification gave old and new partners confidence in us and attracted new business opportunities to Membertou. I'll give you a little example of that where it was the very next day when we made the announcement that we were ISO certified that we got a call from a very large defense contractor and that was part of the reason why they called us. They heard that we were ISO certified. So they explained to us, "˜That tells us that we don't have to be concerned about your management structures, your credibility,' because as I said before, it's not easy to get this designation. It's even harder to keep it. We go through an audit every year. We don't pick all the programs, but the programs are selected by the auditor on what they're going to audit to keep that certification. But every three years we have a full audit where they audit all the programs and then we need to do this in order to keep that certification. So we've been lucky enough to go through two complete audits and we're still certified.

Diversifying our economy. Gaming initially provided the financial economic catalyst for Membertou's transformation. Our gaming operations are not like the U.S. scale casinos. In fact we're not allowed to call our gaming facilities casinos. There's a long story behind that, but we still make a lot of money. It provides stable employment for our people and an economic base upon which to build from and an annual community dividend. Every year... we don't call it dividend. Just for tax purposes we have to call it a donation.

So every year every community member in Membertou gets $1,500 as a donation as a result of our profits in gaming, and every child from zero to 19 gets this donation and it's put away in a trust for them. And in the meantime, the people that look after the trust from time to time regularly come to our community and sits down with the kids to talk to them the importance of making your money work for you. So by the time they're 19, they're fully aware of how this money could grow for them if they utilize it right. So we feel that gives them a better chance of keeping their money longer.

Gaming also led Membertou to develop a 50,000 square foot convention and meeting facility. The Membertou Trade and Convention Centre is also home to Kiju's Restaurant. We just recently had a name change to Kiju's. We used to call it Mescalero's and maybe some people here will recognize that name, Mescalero's. My former CEO was traveling through, in fact it was Arizona at some meetings and he ate at a restaurant, it was called Mescalero's and it was a steakhouse. And he loved it; he loved the meal and everything. So he asked, he asked the owners... he told the owners we were building a restaurant back home and could he use the name Mescalero's because we wanted to build a steakhouse so they allowed it.

So for about the first five years of the restaurant we were calling it Mescalero's. It sort of ran its course and the food was the same, the chef wasn't moving for us. So we changed it and the chef was let go. We brought in a new one. We felt that we needed a new change, we needed to renovate the restaurant, which we did. We closed down for a month and we changed the name too to a Mi'kmaq word. Kiju means either mothers or grandmothers depending on whom you're speaking about. So we thought that was a nice name for the restaurant. People identified with that. It's really... it's packed. We can't believe how successful this is. In fact we can't make reservations for this restaurant because there's too many other people utilizing it, a lot of people from town. And they just... it's like chalk on a board, you scrape like the way some people pronounce it. They say kay-jus, key-jes, ku-jus. It's Kiju's.

So we also have Petroglyphs Gift Shop, which consists of our traditional items, regalia, in fact headdresses, baskets, anything cultural we'll sell. We'll even sell for people from other communities and it's doing pretty good. We do the best when the cruise lines come in and the passengers from different parts of the world come in and they... the first place they really want to go to is this gift shop and our restaurant. So we have like a captive audience when they come in on these ships. And we help do that too, we bus them up for nothing as part of our contribution to them. Then we have the Membertou Data Center, which is doing pretty well and we know we're expanding as we go each year.

At the Trade Center we have concerts, weddings and conventions. It fills the Trade Center daily. In fact somebody was kind of joking around about our weddings and even they have pre-wedding shows for the brides to buy their dresses now and sometimes things don't work out. And there was community members that were joking and said, "˜Well, we should do divorces too.' There are people that celebrate divorces. I'm just telling you that these are some of the ideas that we were given. There hasn't been one yet.

The gaming also led to the development of a 1,200-seat Bingo and entertainment facility. There's a niche in Cape Breton. We have probably more Bingo players than anywhere else in the world. They just love the game, so we fill that niche there and it's absolutely doing great. We put up a $5 million entertainment center for the bingo scene. We were in our third year when we started making money and the building is almost all paid for and at the same time we're able to tell the public that we donate all of these Bingos, over half a million dollars a year to charities. Then the charities, we don't donate, the charities do all the work and we get all the credit. So it's just good all around and it helps us... like the relationship between the city and ourselves has just turned around several times. The relationship is much, much better.

Diversifying our economy. Gaming revenue has permitted Membertou to incubate several professional service businesses promoting our treaty business philosophy. As a result of Mi'kmaq treaty challenges the Supreme Court of Canada demanded creation of a Mi'kmaq commercial fishery. Now Membertou operates a successful commercial fishery and seafood brokerage, part of the reason why Richard is here, part of the reason why he'll be coming down with two other communities that sell fish and we're all working together to try to sell fish at the local casinos here, not only here but we're dealing with the Seminoles and we'll be going to the Seminoles and they'll be hosting this presentation with a number of casinos across the United States.

Membertou also operates several successful businesses including an insurance brokerage firm, real estate development and recent investment in renewable energy with prominent international partners. Our treaty economy efforts led to recovering our history and economic development with our Basque partners in Spain, which are tremendous leaders in the alternate energy area. The company that we have partnered with are fully integrated in alternate energy and that is the wind turbines, the biomass machines and the solar panels. And they're a very, very well managed company. And we have sort of the same values as I will explain later.

Continuing on to diversifying our economy. We looked at our history to help identify new opportunities. Membertou focuses on opportunities that have a cultural and philosophical relevance to the community, such as renewable energy and fishing. Once identified, an internal champion, like Richard, there's a few others, we have about half a dozen like him, prepares the business planning documents, budget and presents those to a small committee who recommends continuing our investment in the project. Membertou assists in the building of internal management capacity by providing training allowance to our Native and non-Native employees. We are always in the need of qualified Aboriginal people that have real world experience in business management.

We encourage qualified community members by providing post-secondary educational funding. We do that with all our staff in Membertou. We have a policy that if an individual wants to increase and move up in our system and they need education to do that, we help them get there. We don't ask them to leave the work. Get your education while you're working and that helps them to look after their families and help us by improving their background in the areas that we need. By diversifying our economy we offer community members more career choices and help create an entrepreneurial spirit among our people. I'll show you that has proven itself later. I only got a couple more slides.

So where are we going? Membertou will be focusing on opportunities which will allow us to collaborate with other Aboriginal communities across North America. Recently, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Center of First Nations governance, which is wholly run by Aboriginal people from across the country -- in fact the main office is in British Columbia -- an organization that will assist us in implementing an effective self-governance structure, and that you seen in the picture on the signing of the two people there, myself and the COO, I believe they call him, of the governance center is from British Columbia. So we have one province on the Pacific side of the country talking to another community member that's on the Atlantic side of the country and then we work in. So it's fascinating. It can be done.

Membertou is also gaining momentum in the international markets and will be partnering with the renewable energy leaders in Spain. Our relationship with the Basques extends well beyond business and renewable energy. Very important in this relationship is the 500 plus years shared history the Mi'kmaq have with the Basque, the Basque that live in Spain. I made the mistake of... They're very proud people and they have a similar background as we have, Aboriginal people. They certainly have a similar background as the...with the Mi'kmaq because of their fishing efforts back 500 years ago.

We came to understand that especially in the international markets trying to sell something to them right away is the wrong step to take. You have to develop the relationship and you find a theme that helps develop that relationship and our theme was recovering our history. Recovering our history. And that helped us open the doors to the see the chairmen of all these large companies because they're very, very interested in our history. So we used that theme and that's helped us develop a partnership with a fantastic company called Guascor and they...we're finalizing our partnership agreement with them. In fact, the chairman of the company will be coming to Canada to sign this agreement and then he wants to make a big show of it. So you may hear it here in the States, we don't know, but he wants to make a major thing with it.

Anyway, one time, not too long ago, maybe a year or two ago, in one of the visits -- because we've been visiting back and forth. We've been to the Basque country about a half a dozen times and they have been back and forth about half a dozen times to our country to sort of like kick the tires -- and we were sitting around and we had government people, high level government people there, the Basque representatives, ourselves and representatives of the town that we were...that they were looking at utilizing an empty factory that they have there. So I came up, and they asked me what I thought of this relationship and it just came out that we... I said that, "˜500 years ago the wind brought the Basque to us and 500 years later the wind is bringing us back to them.' It's part of that. It helps move relationship and resulted in mutual and beneficial partnerships.

I believe this is the last slide and it continues on where are we going. And future projects are for example the hotel that we'll be building and it's going to be the Membertou Hampton Inn and Suites, and Hampton Inns are part of the Hilton chain so it's... they're really nice hotels and they're all suites. We're planning on breaking ground this May and hopefully it'll be done by September the following year.

We also have plans for a heritage park because we believe that part of our identity is to show off our culture. At the same time though, doing whatever we can to retain our language because like everywhere else it needs to be really looked at and make sure that we do everything we can to retain or bring back our language. And we know it can be done, especially when you develop economically you have a lot more time to attend to your culture. So we expect to do that probably within three years.

We also have plans to build a multi-functional community athletic center and to me that's just a fancy phrase for saying ice arenas. That's our plan to build ice arena and what our plan is is to build a two pad ice arena because through our studies we found out it costs the same to have two ice surfaces in one, believe it or not. So we could get more people in that way and also using a different type of heating system like the geothermal, that's heat that comes from the ground. That saves, as compared to other arenas that saves you about 75 percent in electrical costs. So that in itself is important to look at and plan the right way. Look at other people, what other people have done and they're very open to tell you about what they've done and what mistakes to avoid. So it's a really good exercise to do that. So we expect to build that within two years.

We also plan on building a new public works building, a new community office, a new elementary school. The business plaza is almost complete now. It should open sometime in May. We're over-subscribed. We have more people wanting to go in there than have space so we call that like... back in our community we call that a happy problem. We like dealing with happy problems. Within that plaza we have Aboriginal incubator units where we set aside a number of units for our people to take advantage of that and help them to develop as entrepreneurs. We give them a preferred rate, we give them a better rate than the tenants that come from town. Although the tenants from town, there's a waiting list of who wants to go in. So already we're looking at perhaps expansion plans because of the interest in Membertou.

We find out that it doesn't matter who people are. People like going to a place where it's happening. People like going to a place where they feel safe like Manley felt. And we ensure that we create that atmosphere so that people will come to us. It won't be a place to just to go by accident, but it'll be like a destination. That's the end of my presentation and it's very exciting times for me and my job. I feel that it's the best job in the world because every day I'm excited to go to work. Thank you."

Manley Begay:

"Any questions?"

Audience Member:

"I have one if nobody else... A quick one. Two. One is how are you... How is your community's economy compared to the surrounding non-Native economy? And related to that you started your presentation sharing with us the story about the stop sign, which was sort of conflict, initial conflict, but throughout your presentation there was a tremendous amount of cooperation and work with the entire community and in the end you said it's part of your philosophy and that you have really good relationships. And so I guess I just have a question of... Do you have an external community relations department or a person that does that? Do you do that? How does that work?"

Terrance Paul:

"Well, you have a number of questions there. You're like a reporter, I'll answer one."

Audience Member:

"Take your pick."

Terrance Paul:

"As far as economically, we're doing much better than the surrounding community and in fact like several times in several different premieres of the province, they would be like a governor of a state, they have indicated publicly that Membertou is an economic driver for the province. So we're a driver here and we employ a lot of people from the outside community. About 30 percent or a little over 30 percent of our employees are non-Indian because our people can't fill them. I can honestly say that... Anywhere I speak I can honestly say that anybody that wants to work in Membertou can get a job. If they're not working, either they're in school or they can't work or they don't want to work, but anybody in Membertou that wants to work can get a job.

So in the other thing, the relationship, yes, that... After the stop sign incident, it took a little while for people to come around and of course people retired and there was change and there's newer people and younger people coming in and they don't have that old... they're not keeping the old habits here. And of course ourselves, we consciously sat down and felt and agreed that it would be much better to build bridges. So we deliberately and consciously made sure that we were respectful in dealing with these issues. And so over time the relationship has... And I think the business community started the relationship before the municipal government and the municipal government started seeing that, "˜Wow, the business community is really attached to what Membertou is doing. Maybe we should change our attitude,' and they certainly have. They bend over backwards to help us now and it's a really good feeling."

Manley Begay:

"Chief Mitchell."

Mike Mitchell:

"I was down at your place a couple years ago with all the World Box Lacrosse Championship being in Nova Scotia. I saw your arena. One of the things that I'm trying to do is go to all our Aboriginal communities and convince the leaders and their people, especially their youth, to get involved in the game of Lacrosse. This is a game that came from our people and it's working. From the Metis to First Nations people are finding out more and more about it. If you're going to put up an arena, just don't think about the winter and relating to hockey because we're trying to get our team to support the notion that we can resurrect our traditional game of Lacrosse and we're trying to get some communities up your way to take an interest in it and get our kids playing the game. As you know, we've have Iroquois Nationals compete in international competition as a separate nation. We're the only one that's recognized to play against Canada and the United States and all the other countries and it's that whole process of our own nation building because we go into these countries with our own passport and we have our own songs for... When they sing Oh, Canada, well, we have our own song. So if you catch the youth at a very young age and put that in their head that these things belong to us and put the pride back in them. So I pass that along to you."

Terrance Paul:

"Chief, that's an excellent idea, very excellent idea and I'll certainly bring that back home. And I know that our people would be interested in a Lacrosse game. It's a fantastic game and I know it was invented by the Mohawk. We invented the hockey game, they invented LaCrosse."

Mike Mitchell:

"That's true. That's not a lie. The Mi'kmaq were hitting our players and our players were yelling "˜hockey! Hockey!' So they called their game hockey."

Manley Begay:

"Eric."

Audience Member:

"Yes, you mentioned that your philosophy is what's good for us is good for Nova Scotia and vice versa. And my question is, how did you get to that point with the province? I think in the states so many tribal-state relations are a bit contentious, that if you are a tribe down here in the United States and you attempted to begin implementing a philosophy like that you would initially encounter a bit of derision because the two tend to be at loggerheads. Did you guys start from a position of conflict with Nova Scotia, and managed to work towards having a situation where everybody including the province believed that philosophy?"

Terrance Paul:

"It depends on how far back you want me to go in history. We certainly had conflicts, wars and to a state of where not even talking to each other. And part of the reason though is that history, and the denial of it, and also like our feelings towards the governments. We refused to talk to them for a great deal of time. It's that like enlightening ourselves. And you may feel good for a while in doing that, but we're still in our state of poverty. So it really doesn't help. And they're part of the... we feel that they're part of the answer. So it is good to be able to talk to those levels of government to ensure that if we work together we've got a much better chance of succeeding. And it took awhile, it took a number of years to be able to get the government to work with us and a lot of it was the result of the court cases that we won. It's pretty well like... a lot of it is not that they want to, it's that they have to. And we feel that we get much further with the government if we deal with them in respect and that they don't feel fearful of us. The biggest thing about the governments or society not changing is the fear that they have. They feel... They think like the fishing... like god, the Mi'kmaq is going to take all the fish when we're less than one percent, less than one percent of the total fishery effort. So that's the reality. So when they find out reality and they find out that we want to fish with them -- in fact we hire some non-Indians in our fishing enterprise -- and they realize we're just as human as anyone else, and we have goals and we have dreams, and we want to see the country improve as a nation, but respect us also. So we've gained that and things are improving... have improved much, much more. But like I said, there's still some fear there that we're going to take everything and we're going to send everybody back home and that's not the case."

Manley Begay:

"Another question?"

Audience Member:

"A very quick thing. How do you educate the [unintelligible] society in which you operate about your [unintelligible] friendship treaties in terms of just making society more aware of the inherent rights that you have? Because there's a community on the west coast, actually my husband's community and he's chief of his nation and he's finding that there's a real lack of understanding of political will amongst the municipality to get... enter into any west coast nation, I'm thinking that there are so many parallels. And there's just no understanding and respect, recognition of the inherent rights to look after the parks or look after the land and oceans."

Terrance Paul:

"I guess from the experience that I've had like it's educating them. They need educating too. In fact there's times when a minister understands the issue, but everyone below them doesn't and that's who runs the programs, runs the country is the bureaucrats and that's who needs to be educated; like developing a policy that changes for our benefit is one thing, implementing it is another, especially where you have bureaucrats that are not on side, that have the old world view and we... I'm constantly educating them to do that. I'm constantly telling the ministers that that's what we need to do. So it's an educational process and it's ongoing because there is a lot of people that are ignorant about our people. There's millions of people don't even know that we exist anymore, they're surprised. There's people that lived within a mile of our community and have told me and written to be saying that because of our improvements like, "˜I grew up in Sydney just about a mile from you, never knew you guys existed.' Imagine, huh?"

Manley Begay:

"One more question."

Audience Member:

"I can see that the... I guess I can call it a First Nation community is there a problem or is it a tribal community, a regional community? Membertou... First Nation?"

Terrance Paul:

"First Nation. Well, that's the popular phrase now. We've branded ourselves to be called Membertou, a Mi'kmaq community."

Audience Member:

"What is your population?"

Terrance Paul:

"It's a little over 1200, close to 1300."

Audience Member:

"The question I have is more related to, in terms of the way you established yourselves as a community, what would you say was the big key priority for you to... in terms of how you established yourselves? I can guess that it has to do more with the business types of things, but now you're looking to new governance and transparency, accountability and all that stuff, even the ISO."

Terrance Paul:

"ISO, yeah."

Audience Member:

"It's something fairly new I guess in terms of really how you got recognition or is it certification that's recognized internationally? How did all of that come about in terms of where you're at right now and I find that it's very interesting that... I find your presentation very interesting as in very solemn stuff as you're presenting it. It sounds like you're really going in a direction where most First Nation communities want to be where you're at. What is the key thing or key part or key priority that places you where you're at right now?

Terrance Paul:

"I can only pick one, eh? It's the people. It's the people. Believing in your people and getting them onboard and having them be part of the visioning process. Include the community. I know that you can't do it every day, but there are appropriate times when you... If you have the community on side, if you have your management working as a team, it makes it much easier to accomplish these processes that you have. In the Basque country we met an individual, I think he's a genius, Juan Azua. In fact he even teaches at Harvard now and then. He's the one that really established a process called clustering. Clustering. And it's putting businesses in strategic areas where they're all competitive, but being in a cluster helps them, but the cluster isn't just the businesses themselves. You need the infrastructures that draws people to there so what do people want? Well, they want good schools; they don't want to go back to a place where it's dysfunctional. So eliminate that dysfunction. Safe, secure communities and we've created that: churches, schools, hospitals are close by. That's an important consideration for people, anyone. And have the governments, the business community, the chambers of commerce, instead of having their own silos working together to achieve this. And to adopt his phrase and what he means by that and in doing that is the process. He calls it the magic of the process. It's just fascinating."

Audience Member:

"[Unintelligible]... What would you say would have been the turning point for your community in terms of looking at it the way you do... [unintelligible]."

Terrance Paul:

"No, this is the turning point. This is the turning point. Stop this dependence. Stop this dependence and look at the world as our market."

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Billy Frank, Jr.

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary tribal leaders who have been active in the struggle for tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in June 2001, longtime treaty rights activist and chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission Billy Frank, Jr. (Nisqually) shares his experiences as a leader battling on the front lines to protect and maintain the treaty-guaranteed fishing rights of his people and other Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Frank, Jr., Billy. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Olympia, Washington. June 2001. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders, whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans, both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Billy Frank, Jr., born in 1931, is a member of the Nisqually Tribe in southwestern Washington. A principal activist in the struggle to uphold Indian treaty fishing rights, he learned his tribe's heritage from the vivid stories of his father, Willie Frank. The life of the Nisqually people was abruptly altered in the mid-1850s, the treaty period of federal Indian policy in the northwest. The Medicine Creek Treaty took away some of the Nisqually villages and prairies but it did guarantee the tribe's right to fish at 'all usual and accustomed grounds and stations in common with all citizens of the territory.' Billy Frank was fishing with his father in an area restricted by the State of Washington when, at age 14, he was first arrested. The opponents of tribal fishers held that tribal members were subject to state regulations while fishing off their reservations and that treaties signed in the mid-1800s were invalid. Over the years he was arrested more than 50 times. His family endured repeated persecution, raids, beatings, fines and jail. The so-called 'Fish Wars' of the 1960s and '70s became a symbol of the struggle for tribal sovereignty rights across the nation with celebrities like Dick Gregory lending support. Many U.S. citizens became aware of sovereignty issues being played out in the Pacific Northwest. The politically charged events, which rival a Shakespearean history, culminated in the landmark ruling of federal judge George Boldt in 1974: 'Indian fishers are entitled to half of the harvestable catch of salmon in Washington.' But Billy Frank learned that victory in court did not eliminate conflict and hostility. He became an artist of shrewd compromise, bringing diverse interests together to seek solutions on complicated issues. In 1992, he received the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Award. Today, he chairs the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which represents 20 Washington tribes in negotiating natural resource management plans with state and federal officials. Charles Wilkinson, in Messages from Frank's Landing, writes, 'Billy Frank, Jr. has been celebrated as a visionary, but if we go deeper and truer, we learn that he is best understood as a plain spoken bearer of traditions, passing along messages from his father, grandfather, from those further back, from all Indian people really, messages about the natural world, about society's past, about this society, and about societies to come.' Wilkinson reflects on the development of Billy Frank as a leader: 'If it is true that Billy's first three decades scarcely suggested what was to come, it is also true that a standard account of a budding activist's education and jobs rarely reveals the personal qualities churning and building over the years of a young life that will cause a person to assume the burden of challenging accepted authority on behalf of a sacred cause.' The Institute for Tribal Government interviewed Billy Frank in June 2001 at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission."

The Nisqually Watershed before the arrival of explorers and settlers

Billy Frank:

"You know, this place was a magical place, and my dad and grandpa always talked about how they never wished for anything. They had everything, and they always asked my dad about Social Security number and he never did have one. He always said he never did need one. He had everything. He had all the fish and all the food, we had all the vegetables up on the prairie, we had all of our medicines, we had everything. We had shellfish down here and clean water and clean air and just everything that you needed. Every year on the watershed, we had our lodges up in the mountain where we picked huckleberries and all of our berries and gathered up on our mountain and then down with our canoes we went down and out into Puget Sound and gathered and dried all of our shellfish. We caught a lot of flounders and different foods that we'd put up for winter but it was always a cycle of the first salmon would come in in springtime and that would start our ceremonies and winter would be over. And then from that day on we start preparing for the next winter and so that cycle would just keep going. We had our flutes and we had our drums and we made our own music and we knew our own songs and we played them and danced and we had everything. Our society was intact."

The State of Washington often fought tribal treaty fishing rights

Billy Frank:

"All of a sudden, the laws started to be wrote. Here comes the State of Washington, became the State of Washington, and of course they had a legislature that started writing laws and they wrote laws against us, us Indian people, for fishing and not on the reservation, but our reservation was only like maybe two miles long along the watershed. And so they pretty well had us just on the reservation. That's what brought about the U.S. v. Washington, because it just was a continual fight with the State of Washington, and even the United States Army was on the State of Washington's side. They were across the river all the time and the State of Washington used their property to get to us. I just continued to go to jail along with a whole bunch of us and we continued to fight the State of Washington. Other tribes also continued to do that now. So we protested."

Billy Frank's mentors were Nisqually leader Leschi and his own mother and father. His father was moved to what is now Frank's Landing when the Army took over most of the Nisqually reservation for Fort Lewis in 1917.

Billy Frank:

"My dad lived to be 104 and mom lived to be 96 so they were with us all the time and that was, they held us together and kept us together and that was a big part of us. The Bureau of Indian Affairs -- which at that time was in South Dakota somewhere -- and they knew that the Army was taking over the reservation, two thirds of it, but they said, "˜If you buy land, Willie Frank, anywhere we'll put it back in trust for you, restricted trust status,' and so that's why we ended up at the mouth of the river. But yeah, dad had a hard time. He was taken away to school when he was young and they took all the Indian kids up to this side of Seattle, a long ways away from home and they gathered them all up and hauled them off to school. All of that time, if you're not in the community, people die and aunts die and uncles, and people all of a sudden they're gone."

Fishing was a way of life, and getting arrested

Billy Frank:

"I'd take my canoe and go up the river and I'd leave my canoe. You can't do that now, there's so many people along the watershed you can't even hide your canoe or anything. But I could hide my canoe along the river and I could go up the trail at dark time, no light or anything, get my canoe and come down, pick my net up and come on home. I'd just pick one or two nets up. It would depend what I had in and I'd just float down. Nobody'd ever hear me or see me or nothing. But if they were laying for you, then they could catch you. Well, they were laying for me, and they caught me on that side of the river, because where you go is you usually find a bar -- either a sand bar or gravel bar -- and you park there and you fix your net out and take your fish out. That's when these guys caught me the first time and then a whole hell of a lot of times after that. They wouldn't take my canoe at that time, they wouldn't confiscate all your things. They'd take maybe one net or something, but they wouldn't take the canoe or anything. Then they start taking everything, taking the body and everything that we had. I fished all the time, and sneaking out and fishing. I fished right off the front of the house. Our house was right on the river. But they continued to arrest me up until 1950 and it was '54 when I got out of the Marine Corps and then after I got out, then we started to fish and going back to jail again, just a whole lot of things was happening then. But that was the "˜50s. Of course, the "˜50s wasn't a good time for Indian people. They were taking our reservations in other parts of the country, termination was going on strong throughout the United States and we were getting involved in all of this fighting termination, and so there was a lot of things happening. [Dwight] Eisenhower was president at the time and started to terminate all the tribes and they started relocation of Indians and sending them to Los Angeles and New York and wherever, Chicago and Seattle and everywhere. So all of them things were happening in our time. But we were still fishing on the river and still not even dreaming that we were going to be part of some big movement. The Civil Rights movement started happening in the '60s and then all of a sudden the Kennedys and all of the other things that happened throughout our time, my time. But taking part in all that and being there and understanding that we had...you have to live a long time. These guys will die. Our strategy is United States Supreme Court guys, they'll die, Congress, they'll die, new guys will come along, Governors will die, Senators will die, bad guys. The bad guys will die. And will there be another bad guy? I hope not. I hope they'll be better understanding of our people. So that's how we keep going because...I always say, 'I'll outlive all these guys.' But when I'm gone and all of the people that we have that are my age and beyond or younger, they'll take our place and it'll be the same, our people, nothing will change. We will still have the treaty, we'll still have fighting to bring our salmon back now that they're gone and clean water and the principles of life and the food chain that has to sustain all of us. This is what it's all about. I'll never quit doing what I do. Everybody says, 'Have you got a retirement?' 'Hell, no, I ain't got a retirement. I live right here. I'm not going anywhere.' If things go to hell I can go down here and dig clams and catch fish and flounders and they're still there. That's what I do and that's being an Indian, just being an Indian and try to bring people together to work together. That's the only way that the salmon and the water and the environment, the habitat's all going to work if we bring people together and people come together to try to find a balance for the salmon. If we can't find a balance in the middle of the road for the salmon, then they'll be gone. You can't fight and be way over there, you can't fight and be way over there. You've got to be, find a balance and keep moving forward and try to make it better every day. And so that's a principle of life that I have to live on and even though sometimes we go to court, the State of Washington vs. the Indian tribes or the United States government taking our side. That's not bad. That's something that we have to do. We have to get a principle of law before we can all continue to move down the road or something."

The importance of outside support and coalitions

Billy Frank:

"One of my old friends is gone now. His name was Ralph Johnson at the University of Washington, a professor. We have them in Portland and we have them all along the United States, our professors that fight for treaty rights and he said, 'You have a treaty, don't ever let the United States government or anybody such as Slade Gorton, Senator Slade Gorton...that treaty is there and they better respect it and not abrogate it, even the United States Supreme Court and Congress and so on.' So that was a big part of us being educated and understanding what we were doing in this big fight. The fight never ends. The fight's going on today. It's just a war between a culture and them. There was good people that didn't like what the State of Washington was doing and the United States government was doing and what the dams were doing and what was going on with just the environment. So there was coalitions all over and there was people at the universities and there was doctors and there was people just in every profession was thinking of getting involved. Certainly we'd have never made it without them. You can't...with all your power and all your community and everybody staying together -- you can't fight that battle alone."

The Sohappy vs. Smith case in 1969 led to Judge Robert Belloni's ruling of a "˜fair and equitable share of fish for tribes', which influenced later debates on 'allocations.' Years after the ruling, David Sohappy, Sr. served a sentence in federal prison for selling fish out of season, suffering several strokes in prison.

Billy Frank:

"It's an ongoing fight, a continual ongoing fight, even in the year 2000 now. There's just been so many things that I...David [Sohappy], my partner, my friend, I went over and testified for him over at Yakima. They killed David. The United States people killed David Sohappy, one of our own people that wanted to be left alone to just be able to harvest salmon down on the Columbia River, and what in the hell is...that is not a big thing, of 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 salmon a year, whatever for this community. What is so big about that? They made such a big thing and they put him in prison and killed him, trade and everything. And way back in 1800s, they talked about trade, they talked about commerce for the Indian people and we had it then. We had it way before Lewis and Clark ever came. We had trade with big baskets of salmon and trading with these ships and everything. Here in 1968 and up until our time it was, anytime that we had anything to do with the economy they didn't want us to be part of it, even blaming us for killing the salmon or whatever it might be, even though we had judges on the Columbia River as well as in our district over here that ruled for us and continue to rule for us today and thank them. We never win anything. It's sad but true. Even the United States Supreme Court were hanging on today with the five-to-four decision for the tribes on sovereignty and they're still ruling for us, thank goodness. We're just hanging on by our teeth when it comes to law. But I think the Sohappy case and other cases on the Columbia River were positive cases and they set a precedent for the United States to uphold the sovereignty of tribes. The allocation can't work if we go back to the turn of the century because there was a lot of fish, 20 or 30 million salmon in the Columbia River. Now there's three million, very little fish. So that allocation...but they looked at the tribes over here and they said the tribes have to have an allocation and they looked at the non-Indian and they cut him way down. So out of all of that fighting and law and trying to...and winning, something good comes out of that but you look at it and we're still fighting. They are still raping the water. They want potatoes, they want grapes, that's more important than salmon and they use the water, the irrigation. Eighty percent is going to them guys for potatoes and whatever they grow irrigating. What goes for the fish? They've left...they've completely sold the fish out, the United States as well as the states and the political people. Survival, survival is what we're talking about, survival of us Indian people and of our salmon and our food chain out there and our whales and our eagles and all of our fur bearing animals and everything. We're talking about all of those things and our mountains and our trees. That's what we're talking about."

Judge George Boldt and the courtroom scene in U.S. v. Washington, when Boldt ruled that Indian fishers are entitled to half the harvestable catch of salmon

Billy Frank:

"In this one particular case on a day there's standing room only in this place. You had to get there early to get into the courtroom, and for 70 days it went on like that. This day this lady over in Suquamish, lives across the bay from Seattle, she was up on the stand, and Slade Gorton and his prosecutors were there for the State of Washington, they were asking questions on everyone. Grandma Haler was up there and she was, the judge was sitting here and she's sitting here and she...they started asking her some questions about some of the things that went on and she couldn't understand them so she started talking Indian to dad, which dad was...she's sitting here and dad's way over there and she started talking Indian to, our language to dad and dad answered her back. And boy, the prosecutor jumped up and objected. 'We can't have this going on in the courtroom,' and all this. Judge Boldt overruled these guys and said, 'If she wants to clarify what you're saying, she can talk to grandpa.' And this is...that was a recognition of our language, a recognition of us -- what the judge just did -- and an understanding person that's a federal judge, conservative judge that understood what we were saying and what we were doing and trying to get the information out to him so he could make a decision. It was a lot of things like that that the judge did in that courtroom, that he had respect for all of our people. He had respect for all of our people, and just things that he did on his own as a human being in what he did. There's other judges that did similar things, but that's one of the things that I don't forget because when he rendered the decision in '74, I got to take him around to all the tribes. He had retired and all the tribes had wanted to give him dinners so I took him to all the tribes. Judge Boldt is well and alive even though he's gone, that case and the respect that he had for all of our people, our grandmas, our grandpas and our uncles and our aunts and our children. It was just...we respected him so much and we gave him that big welcome when we all took him and had big dinners. Every one of these reservations did something for him. And also Senator Gorton, then Attorney General of the State of Washington, was telling the people of the State of Washington that, 'You don't have to abide by that ruling because we're going to get it overturned when it gets to the United States Supreme Court,' which it did get to the United States Supreme Court in 1979 and they upheld it. So all of that was telling the people, the people of the state to proceed as usual, go out and rape the fishes you were doing and go out and fish illegal even though we have regulations. And so they were fishing illegal out here. In 1980, a task force was formed and I testified that there was lights from Canada to South Sound here, just non-Indians fishing night and day out in these waters raping the salmon and they did. And the State of Washington let them do it. Now Judge Boldt brought them back in court and took their sovereignty away. He took the State of Washington...Slade Gorton come in and he said, 'You're that far from being held in contempt of court. As of today...' Now there was shooting going on in the water, they were shooting at each other and just a whole lot of bad things happening in the State of Washington on commercial fishery. And so he told them at that time that, 'You no longer manage the salmon. The federal court...I manage the salmon. National Marine Fisheries and the Coast Guard will immediately take over out here in these waters.'"

Resistance, hostility and racism after the Boldt decision

Billy Frank:

"Racism, they were putting sugar in our gas tanks and in 1974 we had a gas war. You guys are too young to know this, but there was a gas war in the United States and nobody would gas our boats up out here. They'd gas all the non-Indian boats, they wouldn't gas the Indian boats. So I'm out here representing the tribes in this office and, 'What the hell is going on?' Our fishermen were, they couldn't buy gas out here on the water. And so that's racism at it's best going on into the fisheries management and everything else. So all of these things and it was hard feelings going every direction and they were shooting at each other and there was every kind of thing happening in the northwest. But we were still managing it, we were here, the tribes were here with the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and all of our tribes and we were still managing putting a comprehensive plan together like the judge ordered."

The tribes are involved on every front -- the mindset that it takes to persevere

Billy Frank:

"Down on the river on my canoe I always thought, 'Jesus, I wish I had somebody that was protecting us.' I'd look at the State of Washington over there and they had a fishery department, they were saying they were managing, but they were always mismanaging it seemed like, and they had attorney general and they had their government doing what they do. But nobody was protecting us, nobody was protecting the salmon, nobody was protecting the watersheds and nobody was protecting our treaty. But the tribes are unique, very unique in as far as being the best and the best at management, the best at doing whatever they do and always being the protector or the one that speaks for whether it's the grass or whether it's the river or whether it's the mud out there or whether it's the clean air or whatever it might be, it's always bringing common sense to what's all around us, whether we're there or over there or where it might be. I've always thought...now here we are today, we have a laboratory back here with doctors and how did we get there, we started out with maybe three or four people here and all of a sudden we have a range of professional people, the highest quality people there is down in Oregon and wherever we might be. The tribes have their own management going and we coordinate among all of us. We coordinate from there over to here and down there and the Pacific Coast and Canada. We're in the international treaty. When we started with the treaty, U.S.-Canada International Treaty, they were intercepting all of our fish coming down here. And we couldn't get in the door, we the Indian tribes could not get in the door in U.S.-Canada. They wouldn't even let us sit on any of the panels or anything, any government position. U.S. Fish and Wildlife was our representative, United States Commerce was our representative and we said, 'No, we've got to be our own representative.'"

The relationship of the Nisqually Tribe with the Army and Fort Lewis

Billy Frank:

"They managed that country like if it was ours. They don't harvest and clear-cut and do all the crazy things. We know that their mission is to train troops and we work together. They do not drive the tanks over the rivers and the streams anymore. They got cement bridges built. So these are positive things that we can live together and work together and share the watershed. So that's kind of where we are and that makes me feel good."

In a battle over dams, Judge Stephen Grossman took testimony about the conditions of the Nisqually River from 100-year-old Willie Frank.

Billy Frank:

"We'd go to Seattle every year to the federal building in Seattle and so I'd take dad every year. We'd go up there and we'd stay and we'd have hearings for two weeks. But two particular days I'd have to take dad up and all the lawyers from the City of Tacoma and all the lawyers from the City of Centralia and the State of Washington and the tribes and the Federal Energy Commission with their lawyers and our judge presiding over it. And so we started to put the watershed together and getting in-stream flows and so on and so forth and the plan...this is the Nisqually plan going into effect. And so Judge Grossman, my great friend and I think the world of him, we were up there, dad now had reached 100 years old and I told the judge that, 'Dad can no longer, I can't bring dad up anymore. We've got to park and walk up these stairs and then the elevator and whatever.' I said, 'We're not going to bring him up anymore, dad's going to stay home.' And so he said this in front of everybody and put it into the record and he said, 'Well, Willie Frank, Dad, Grandpa can't come up here anymore. He's 100 years old now,' I don't know what he said and then he said, 'But I want to know if anybody has a problem with us...we're going to move the courtroom down to grandpa's house on the Nisqually River tomorrow morning at 10:00. Now is there any objections?' Nobody will object to a judge and so, 'Court will preside in grandpa's house tomorrow morning at 10:00.' So everybody come from Seattle clean to grandpa's house at the Landing and the Federal Energy Commission and Judge Grossman, they held court right there."

Billy Frank speaks about transcending past grievances, focusing on the future and what can be done.

Billy Frank:

"I think back, way back to Chief Joseph and him saying, 'I've got to quit fighting and I've got to gather my people up.' To me, everything is survival, everything is survival not for me so much, it's my kids and our aunts and uncles and our relatives that are all out here. Everything that we do is not...it's for survival of everything that's around us. So I know the politics, I know who sits on these task forces, they're here today, the President appointed them in 1980, they're still here, I work with them. There's bad guys and there's good guys. You take advantage of whoever you have in this picture that we're in to work to bring everything together. I think that we're on the good side, we're not on the bad side and that's a big difference in life when you can always say that you're on the good side. I think that...everybody says, 'Well, how can you keep going with these guys?' There's a change every day and there's a change for the bad and then there's a change for the good and to try to find a balance out of that for our people, we just hang in there long enough things get better and they might get worse in the meantime, but then they start getting better and getting better means that you have new thinkers coming up, you have new children coming up, you have new...our people are still there and they're still ready to sit down and work, they're still down in the coves, they're still up the rivers, they're still along the Pacific Coast and they're still out on the prairies. You've got to go see them people and you've got to go take part in their energy and their ceremonies and things in Canada or wherever it might be. That's a whole thing in life if you can see that and take part in it."

The state of Nisqually watershed in 2001

Billy Frank:

"The watershed is in fairly good shape. We have a lot of good programs going on it. Certainly the Nisqually Tribe manages the watershed and along with the state and a whole bunch of environmental people and people working together and local governments as well as the counties and on both sides of the river and the Army. And I think the watershed is a workable watershed and the farmers and the ag [agricultural] people, everybody on that watershed participates, so that's a good thing, the hydroelectric dams and all of us. Even though sometimes we go through these droughts and everything, we work together to try to find a balance and that's the most important thing. Now our salmon, our steelhead is pretty well gone, they're wild steelhead. We don't know why they have never come back. There are just a lot of things that happen. Our pink salmon are getting healthier and that's a wild stock and our chum salmon are not as healthy as they used to be, but we're still holding our own on those, them are all wild. And then the rest, the Chinook and the coho and sockeye and other things that we've got are artificial and so we have to take advantage of that and try to work the wild and the artificial together and we're working on that every day and it's a continual thing that we work on. But that watershed is a workable watershed with all the people that's involved on it. I think we've been able to be observed out there by the United States as kind of a model watershed to try to bring people together to look at it and try to design other watersheds."

How to be a leader on the local and national level

Billy Frank:

"Well, the tribes are the ones that allow me to do that. The tribes, I don't do anything to hurt the tribes and I don't do anything to hurt any of our people politically or any way. I'm always trying to help wherever I can and support and bring them together. If there's a conflict of any kind between other tribes or anything I try to help and make some sense out of it. But the tribes allow me to basically speak with one voice. We have our commission and all of our tribes belong to them and they all...we pass resolutions and we pass initiatives to go forward to Congress or wherever we might be. It's like our Columbia River people and our California people, we try to all work together in this form of management for natural resources and support one another."

How to work with people who think the choices are either/or, fish or power, salmon or farmers

Billy Frank:

"Maybe some of these people you can't work with, but you don't give up on them. You don't give up on them and you don't tell them to go to hell because you're just going to have to get the best of them by doing what you do. You can talk to them in a forum or you can talk to them one on one and you can make them feel bad, you can...you use every damn trick you've got in the book. You can make them ashamed of themselves. You can get down and dirty with these people and you can talk about money, you can talk about who the hell they are and you can talk about where we was and where we are today and where in the hell are we going if we follow your route. You educate these people as you talk."

The importance of educating people, from tribes to Congress

Billy Frank:

"A big part of it now is all education. I could be speaking all the time, there's no stop to that, at the universities or the kids down here in the grade school and I do that. But a lot of it is testifying in front of the United States Congress, it's getting hearings throughout our country, it's trying to educate the courts to be part of the watershed: 'Spend your money on the watershed, that's an investment that's going to always be there.' It's the type of things that you can actually make happen with the position that you're in, to make them think about what has to be done. But education is the biggest part of trying to turn this big ship the right way; even our own people, educating our own people of the direction that we all have to go. It's a big job and will always be there."

Wa He Lut School, the dream of Maiselle Bridges

Billy Frank:

"It was her dream to have an Indian school at the Landing. She's my oldest sister. In 1974 the school was born in a little one-room building we built and then the Army was across the street from us. The little road was right here but the Army owned this piece of land. So on September of '74 we moved the schoolhouse, we just moved it over on the Army land and then we built our school over there. Before the general or anybody could know what was going on we had a school and about 20 kids going to school over there. Pretty soon the general come down one day and we were blacktopping the road going into the school, it was all mud and everything so we were blacktopping. He said, 'Billy, what are you doing?' And I said, 'Oh, we're blacktopping this road.' And so he said, 'You can't do this, this is Army land.' I said, 'Well, you never did run our pigs off on this side or our horses and so now you're going to run our school children off?' And so I went to...Senator [Warren] Magnuson was a senator of the United States at that time, and Senator Magnuson was our senator here in the State of Washington, I said, 'I've got a school down here that is on Army property and the Army wants me to move off and I'm not moving, all of us, my sister and all of us.' So we negotiated with the Army and so now we have that property. The Army deeded it over to dad and the Landing and it's being held there for our school purposes. Now we have like 130 kids going there. Senator Gorton was a big part of making sure that that school was rebuilt after the flood. The flood of 1998 was this big flood that we all along the Pacific Coast here, it was a terrible flood. It devastated our Nisqually River and everything. It took our school our and everything but we built a new school and that's it in that picture, but he was a big part along with Norm Dixon, Congressman Norm Dixon and all of our delegation from the State of Washington. They made sure that that school is still well and healthy and is funded. We just really take pride in these kids."

The message Billy Frank would like to leave

Billy Frank:

"We're going to survive and we're going to be healthy. With the help of all the neighbors, of all the medicines that are out there, the new technology is going to be better, the technology that's going to put the dams out of business. There won't be no more fight over dams; they'll be all gone. There'll be new technology to find power and so on and so forth. There'll be new technology to take these things that are destroying our environment out there, that destroyed some of our bays, these big giant plants that are put in poisons the water and everything, they'll be gone. They'll be gone. Why will they be gone? Because there's technology now that it's not feasible to have these dams any more, it's not feasible to have these kind of plants that destroy our little cities and smell them up and everything. These are things that if you're looking at life and you're a manager you look at way down the road, things might be bad today but how are we going to get better. Are we going to get better down the road? Yeah, we're going to get better."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Special Thanks to Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission

Charles Wilkinson, Author
"Messages from Frank's Landing"
University of Washington Press, Publisher

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government

Klamath Agreements Strengthen Tribal Sovereignty

Author
Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

From time immemorial, salmon, steelhead and other fish runs have sustained the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute members of the Klamath Tribes. It has been more than 100 years, however, since our tribal members have seen salmon and steelhead migrate home to the Upper Klamath Basin, or had an opportunity to exercise our Treaty right to fish for them. Four aging dams have blocked migration of these fish into the homelands of the Klamath Tribes, and severely damaged fish runs relied upon by those whose homelands are downstream of the dams. As horrific as this history has been, the future looks brighter because the Klamath Tribes have been able to work collaboratively with the Karuk Tribe and others for the benefit of future generations...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Gentry, Don. "Klamath Agreements Strengthen Tribal Sovereignty." Indian Country Today. August 7, 2014. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/klamath-agreements-strengthen-tribal-sovereignty, accessed August 1, 2023)

Billy Frank Jr.: A World Treasure (1931- 2014)

Year

“I was the go-to-jail guy.” That’s how Billy Frank, Jr., (Nisqually) often described his role during the treaty fishing rights struggle in the Pacific Northwest of the 1960s and ‘70s. Beginning as a teenager of 14, he went to jail more than 50 times and was arrested more than three times that. His canoes and gear were confiscated by the Washington fish and game police, who did not respect federal-tribal treaties, including the Medicine Creek Treaty that guaranteed fishing by the Nisqually, Puyallup and Squaxin Island Tribes near Olympia, Washington...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Billy Frank Jr.: A World Treasure (1931- 2014)." Indian Country Today Media Network. May 15, 2014. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/billy-frank-jr-a-world-treasure-1931-2014, accessed March 8, 2023)

Tribal Rights Legend and Leader Billy Frank Jr. Walks On

Author
Year

In 2004, we celebrated 30 years since the Boldt Decision of 1974, the landmark Indian fishing rights victory, that Billy Frank Jr. fought so hard for.

“Frank is widely credited as conscience and soul of the efforts by Indian people in Washington to secure their rights to a fair share of fish on their ancient waterways and, by implication and serious struggle, the effort to ensure the survival of steelhead and salmon,” says an editorial that ran on IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com on March 1, 2004. 

Today, we mourn his passing. He was 83...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

ICTMN Staff. "Tribal Rights Legend and Leader Billy Frank Jr. Walks On." Indian Country Today Media Network. May 5, 2014. Article. (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/native-news/tribal-rights..., accessed May 5, 2014)