Indian Reorganization Act (IRA)

Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 1 (Q&A)

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Native Nations Institute
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Presenters and moderators from the first day of NNI's "Tribal Constitutions" seminar gather to field questions from seminar participants on a variety of topics ranging from dual citizenship to the relationship between a nation's constitution and its economic development environment.

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Cornell, Stephen, Jill Doerfler, Robert Hershey and Miriam Jorgensen. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 1 (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Managment and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2013. Q&A Session.

Justin Beaulieu:

"Okay, I have a question. It's kind of three parts. So the first part is citizenship. This is important to me personally because my kids and myself are involved. Citizenship, is there any tribes that have identified dual citizenship with another tribe where, like historically where, I can be a citizen or a member of like Mille Lacs, White Earth, Red Lake, etc., and then what impact does that have on federal status? If I'm federally recognized from one tribe, can I not get...I don't understand that. So the second part of the question is, are we putting the cart before the horse when we talk about putting this in our constitution not knowing if that's going to pass or not because how do we consider the next generations when we haven't defined really who they are yet? And then the third part is, has any tribes faltered with their constitutional reform because citizenship was included in there?"

Robert Hershey:

"What was the third part again?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Has any tribes faltered with constitutional reform, like not passed it because there was a citizenship clause in their constitution, was it not ratified and what not?"

Stephen Cornell:

"So, who's going after that?"

Jill Doerfler:

"Well, I can say a couple things, I guess, probably with regard to White Earth. We don't have a clause that says anything regarding...that precludes dual citizenship, but we didn't really address it specifically like citizenship among multiple tribes and we felt...there was a question at White Earth if citizenship should be considered separately and that was sort of considered separately in the late "˜90s' efforts for reform where we kind of talked about those different options. And at that time, in the late "˜90s, the plan was to put up the new constitution and then put up citizenship sort of at the same time, but then have citizens vote on all those options. And as we worked on our effort more recently in the 21st century, we felt that it was better to put it up as a whole because then you can see the scope of the government because if you have a different type of citizenship that might impact other parts of the constitution and we felt that it would actually be better to put it up as a whole than to separate it out. So that's what we kind of came to."

Stephen Cornell:

"The only thing I'd add -- and this comes to a portion of your question -- there's nothing out there that says you have to redo a constitution all at once. And there's sometimes issues that people find particularly difficult to deal with, and as Jill was saying, this was an issue for them and they decided to put it altogether in a single package, but you can imagine a situation where a nation might say, "˜We need to make some critical changes; it's being held up by one issue over which we have real concerns. We're having trouble resolving that issue. We're going to set that issue aside and deal with it later.' Now that gets complicated for exactly the kinds of reasons Jill talked about, but there's nothing that says you've got to do it all at once and that's what most tribes seem to try to do, but this is your constitution and you're the ones who know whether some issue is going to derail the entire effort and whether one option should be to hold off on that until you can get some consensus over what it should look like. But in the meantime, let's do what we can do because we need to make these changes. So I just wanted to point that out."

Robert Hershey:

"Let me add one other little point to that. The majority of constitutions that we've looked at -- and we did a study of about 200 membership ordinances in different constitutions -- and the majority, the vast majority prohibited dual membership. And I think you'll see that more common than not. One of the tribes we were asked to assist, the question of membership was not even a part of the proposed amendments, but there was a suspicion that it was somehow part of the proposed amendments when it was not at all and that derailed the entire constitutional process. And I agree with what Steve said too, it's probably the trickiest part in there. It may be better to develop some sort of a consensus on the things that seem...like removing the Secretary of the Interior approval language at least initially on some of the ordinances to get that forum going. We have a tremendous amount of constitutional conventions that took place with White Earth to go ahead and inform the public and yet your turnout was a fraction of the people that were involved in the community so I think really it's about the process of education to where it becomes familiar because you're asking people to try and adopt something different than what they know what the status quo has been."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"I don't know of a tribe that has dual membership, although I heard that it was possible in Oklahoma. So I was glad to hear from Mike Burgess that is the case and I think one of the things that's important to think about is to go back to the fundamental idea of what matters to the nation in terms of its citizenship. If it's valuable to them because that's the way that many people see themselves or that there is a segment of the population for which dual citizenship is really important about what the definition of that community is, it might make sense to include it and I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of the reason in Oklahoma where because the Oklahoma Indian history and what, 45 nations relocated to Oklahoma, something like that..."

Herminia Frias (moderator):

"...Thank you. Marcelino?"

Marcelino Flores:

"Thank you to all our presenters, and what I'm understanding so far is that each tribal nation needs to come to an understanding of who they are and how they will govern themselves, but none of this happens in isolation. And I can appreciate Jill beginning to mention that where we're going is one of those questions and Stephen Cornell mentioning perhaps firewood issues and probably appropriate at the council meetings, but the question that I have is there are some things that just cannot be ignored and I think they need more clarification and understanding and that is the role of economic development, health care and housing, particularly for health care. We're largely dependent on the federal system and it's changing, it's very different now. We really don't know what it means to be under Obama Care, especially within the State of Arizona. So how do you address these larger issues in the context of constitutional reform?"

Stephen Cornell:

"I think that's a great question and I'll take a first shot at it. In some ways, I think in the areas you're talking about and I'm going to circle around and come back to your point. We had a tribal chair who said to us once, "˜We get a lot of money from the federal government for programs, a lot of that is treaty-based obligation and our attitude is, 'They owe that to us.'' But he said, "˜I pursue economic development because in my experience every one of those federal dollars is a leash around my neck and it restricts my freedom.' He wasn't talking about himself when he said "˜my,' he meant "˜my people.' 'It restricts our freedom because in order to get that money we've got to agree to year evaluation criteria, we've got to get your permission on how to spend it, we've got to spend it in the way that you think is best for us, not the way we might think is best for us.' And he said, "˜So economic development to me is a freedom program. It's how do I create the resources that allow me to escape that federal leash?' And he said, "˜Don't get me wrong. They owe us the money. They'll never pay us enough money to pay for the land they took, but I don't want to be sitting here having to ask their permission to do the things we think are important for our people.' Now you imagine getting, let's say he reached the point where he could afford health care for his people and where he could provide the housing and there are some nations that are doing that right now, that are pursuing tribally managed health care, for example. The real question is, if he got to that point, has he got the governing tools he needs to deliver on that responsibility? If you say to the U.S. government, "˜Treaty says you're responsible for health care, but you don't do a very good job of it. And I could sit here and wait for you to do a better job of it, but the chances are I might die waiting. So instead, we're going to take responsibility for that because I've got people whose lives are at stake and now we're getting the money to do it.' And now the question is, "˜Can I do it well?' That's going to depend on your constitution. That's going to depend on whether you've got the governing tools in hand that allow you to deliver the things you want to deliver to your people. Now you can get bogged down in the treaty argument and who should pay for it argument and all of that, but at some point you have to say, "˜There are things we want to do for our people and we've got to show that we can deliver.' So that to me is where all these things come back to constitutional questions. They come back to, what do you want to govern and do you have the tools to do it well."

Robert Hershey:

"This is where the Secretarial approval clause comes in too. If you're an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] tribe, does that say something about your ability to get bank loans and foster economic development? You have the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, the United States government behind you. Some lenders might look at the fact that you're an IRA tribe and they may go ahead and say, "˜Well, you're legitimate,' as opposed to another form of government, too. So that's something that...I said I wasn't going to give you a preview of tomorrow, but that's something I'm going to bring up."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"So now we know everybody's going to come back, Robert, because we're all excited about what you're going to talk about. I just want to say one thing and it's kind of to back up what Steve was saying and I will say that this comes from sort of thinking about what governments are structured to do. If your government is structured to provide health care to citizens and to seek funds to do that from the federal government, to provide housing to citizens and to seek funds from the federal government to do that and to provide streams of income to citizens and to use...rely on particular federal structures to do that, you have a government that's structured to do those things. But if you have a government that is structured to provide greater freedom and opportunity to your people and greater freedom and opportunity for the nation itself to be a self-governing, self-determined, sovereign entity, all those other things are likely to come, but you're going to have the government capacity to do it. So you have to think, "˜Have I built a government that's just about service provision or have I built a government that's capable of doing lots of other things and in the process, is therefore able to underwrite economic development, to underwrite the freedom of individual Native citizens of my nation to be able to access more streams of capital, to be able to have more opportunities and at the same time, yes, maybe I as a government am providing those things to them, but I'm structured to do much more.' So I think that's really the question that nations have to wrestle with -- are you going to limit yourself at the outset by saying, "˜I care so much about service provision that that's the only way I'm going to structure my government,' or, "˜I know that governments have lots of things that they need to do and if it does all those things well, it's going to be able to do service provision well as well.'

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. We have a question in the back here from Nimrod? Oh, one more response from Jill."

Jill Doerfler:

"I'll just make one quick comment relating to that about services and citizenship and sometimes a concern that comes up is if we increase citizenship then what about services, what about putting strain on that and in a lot of ways our goals are to create strong nations with strong citizens who don't necessarily need housing assistance, but who, because there's good job opportunities and economic development within the nation, don't need to access those, but instead are maybe pumping resources back into the nation rather than extracting them. And so we talked about that quite a bit at White Earth as well. We want strong citizens who contribute and in some ways that don't need certain services maybe."

Mohammed Fardous:

"Hello, my name is Mohammad Fardous, and actually you already answered part of my question, but the question is that is it important to address the economic development in the constitution? If so, what factors should be addressed? Thank you."

Herminia Frias:

"What was the question?"

Mohammed Fardous:

"That economic development, is that important to be addressed in the constitution?"

Herminia Frias:

"Oh, is economic development important to be addressed in the constitution?"

Stephen Cornell:

"To me, that's something for an individual nation to decide. You may be in a nation where you feel the culture of dependency that has been forced on you by subordination and so forth is so deeply entrenched that you want to say -- and one of the things that you may state in a preamble or somewhere in a constitution -- one of the things you value as a people is to be able to support yourselves, to have control over your life, which in this modern time and in this country is going to require dollars. They speak. If that's important to you, you may want to say, "˜One of the things we want this constitution to do is to support prosperity, economic growth for our people so that we can be truly independent of some other government and their control of the purse strings.' I don't know, but to me that's up to an individual nation. It depends what you're most concerned with, and I don't think there's one answer, just as on so many of these issues we've been talking about there's no one answer. The answer is, what resonates with your sense of who you're trying to be and of what needs to change and of what you're trying to protect? That's what a constitution's about. Who are we, what do we need to change, what are we trying to protect? How do we do that? So it's really up to you."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"I think at the same time, though, every constitution is about economic development, but not explicitly. This goes back to the notion that we know that regardless if you're a tribal community, you're a state or provincial government, you're an international nation state, there are fundamentals that support economic progress. One of them is the fair resolution of disputes, and if your constitution sets up that process, it is fundamentally saying something about economic development. You have to have laws like I was talking about that people will abide by so that you can be a society that is a rule-of-law society, and that's not in an oppressive kind of way of, "˜Here's the law and you have to follow it and I said so,' but rather, "˜Do we have laws that we together as a nation agree on that these are the highest expression of ourselves and the way we want to live our lives and to some extent this is how we want to do business?' So does the constitution put in place processes that allow for rule of law to exist? And those are not necessarily saying anything directly about economic development, but they're structuring a governing authority that can support economic development."

Robert Hershey:

"I just want to reiterate the thing that you said about having a dispute-resolution mechanism. That's having a tribal court that has an independent judiciary because you're going to have to have people, if you're going to have investors coming from off the reservation, you're going to try to raise money for economic development projects, they're going to have to have confidence in that dispute resolution forum."

Stephen Cornell:

"And we're going to talk about that tomorrow."

Herminia Frias:

"Jill, did you want to add anything?"

Jill Doerfler:

"No."

Herminia Frias:

"Okay. We have another question in the back."

Jamie Henio:

"Hello. My name is Jamie Henio with the Navajo Nation and my background is primarily in housing and criminal prosecution, but the idea of government reform and constitutions is new to me right now. And I've started working for the Speaker's office about seven, eight months ago and this is...the idea of government reform is pretty much a hot topic on the Navajo Nation right now. So I'm thinking here, listening to everybody and the term 'IRA tribe,' what is an IRA tribe is my first question, what's that? And then the other thing is Navajo Nation, they're looking at...well, there've been attempts in the past, 1930, 1955 and 1960 to develop a constitution, adopt a constitution, but it failed every time. So right now that's where the movement's at again, too, is to develop a document that will govern the Navajo Nation. So if the Navajo Nation should adopt a constitution at this time, would they be considered an IRA tribe and under the control of the Secretary of the Interior? That's my other question."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. An IRA tribe...well, first of all, after the terrible policies, after the terrible schizophrenic policies of how non-Native society has intruded upon and committed acts of aggression and genocide against Native peoples and then through the allotment period in the late 1800s to the 1920s, in 1934 some of the Solicitors and some of the people in Washington felt that they could go ahead and foster a restructuring of that terrible allotment period where Native peoples lost about two-thirds of their lands. They created what was called the Wheeler-Howard Act in 1934 and that was the Indian Reorganization Act and that basically then from that the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] went out and issued pattern constitutions for the tribes to adopt. I think...it was nothing that the tribes or the nations asked for at that time. What it was, I think it was a convenience mechanism for the United States government also to go ahead and foster its relationship and its so-called trust responsibility with Native nations at that time. So that's the genesis of the IRA. Navajo came about in...and I know that you've had three attempts at constitutional conventions and reformations and that has not passed and I have a historical document written by a Navajo student of mine that I can get you too that talks about that. I think it may have been lost somewhere from...that was given to the nation, but I have a copy of that for you. The fact that you would adopt a constitution does not necessarily make it so that you would be adopting it under the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act. You can adopt a constitution in another way, by yourself. The way Navajo came through the Navajo Business Committee in the 1920s was by virtue of Standard Oil coming to the Secretary of the Interior and basically saying, "˜We want your oil and your shale,' and therefore they established a series of business agreements that then became the councils, which then became the series of concessions and agreements with the Secretary of the Interior and a lot of mismanagement. But it was motivationally driven by non-Native people trying to seek Navajo mineral royalties at that time, out of which then your statutes and laws have evolved keeping in mind the fundamental laws of the Diné. So it does not mean that you have to become an IRA tribe."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. Kevin? Which mic is that? Six."

Kevin:

"The gentleman that was talking about economic development, I think every one of the constitutions that are in place in one form or another discuss it in a manner and you were talking about disputes. Well, the issue is if self-determination is applied through a lot of federal programs, that's also under that principle of economic development and the right to govern ourselves. But we have to remember that it's not an act that gives us that right, it's our birthright. So as we can all understand that it's our right as human beings to go in that direction, it's already applied. We just have to apply it. It's already there, written in probably everybody's constitution in one form or another, in the programs that we receive, the ones that do receive them, the monies are there for that principle. Thank you."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. We have a question, yes."

Audience member:

"I kind of...I have a question, but I don't know if I'm asking to you guys or maybe to the tribes, because in 2000 we went and passed our new constitution, 2000, the year 2000. So we had an IRA and we made changes. We made it to fit us as Yavapai people, to fit how we're going to do economic development, how we make laws, how we interpret and how all these things happen. But today I think our constitution, when you look back, we're having problems with membership, and I think that's one of the things as tribal people and leaders that you need to look at, what's going to affect you in 50 years. Because me as a leader, I try to look out for 50 years ahead of time or the babies that aren't even born yet. I don't look for today or tomorrow, that's what...that's how I was raised and one of the things, I know that's what we're struggling with is membership and we're working at it but I know like you...one of you speakers presented today that the U.S. Constitution hasn't been changed and it's hard to change and sometimes you don't want to always change your constitution, but as Native people we change every so many centuries and we don't know how many people are actually of our descendance or have just came in and moved in our territory. So I think really the question goes...I don't know if it goes to you guys or us as people. We're the ones that identify ourselves and define ourselves. How many years do you let go by...because here we're...this is year 13 for us with our constitutional change from 1934 and it's been working, but the membership part has been hurting us because we...like this lady here, she's a teacher and she sees all the children that she knows are going to always live within our reservation and their parents are tribal members, their grandparents were tribal members, but we can't enroll them. And I sit there and I argue with my council because I will say, "˜Let's just enroll them. We know who we are. I know that baby's never going to...or that baby's going to live here or that baby may be doing something good in the future and we're not even going to be a part of it,' but it's because our constitutional change that binds our hands and that's why it's so important like what the...like what you did with your community when you had all your forums and meetings and...our committee is doing that now and this is learning for them and I'm glad that they're here, they're learning from you that this is what we need to do is to identify, do everything you can with your community, involve them because in 2000 our community was not involved in this change of constitution. And it is a good constitution and we're tweaking it now. So like I said, I don't know if it's up to...I know it's up to us, but because you guys are the professors and you guys know the rule of thumb or you know the U.S. Constitution, how do we go as citizens of changing them? Do we look every 10, 15 years or do we just not do it and just say, "˜Hey,' cause we do have some elders that say, "˜Just leave it. Just leave it. Don't change it.' So how...what do tribes do that you guys have worked with, I guess is what I'm asking."

Stephen Cornell:

"Well, I was going to ask Miriam because I can't remember whether it's Cherokee or Osage who built into their --Cherokee -- who built into their new constitution the provision that they would revisit it every 20 years I think."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"Actually, it was in the 1976 constitution, that's what motivated the..."

Stephen Cornell:

"...The change, yeah. So it's a...you'd have to think what the appropriate interval is for you, but it's certainly one thing to consider is to say, "˜The world changes and do we wait for a crisis to arise that forces us then into some quick forced constitutional reconsideration or do we say, no, we're going to revisit this document every 10, 15, whatever it might be years, and we'll prepare for that and we'll know it's coming. And therefore it won't be this process that happens in crisis conditions where you don't have time to think about what you're doing adequately because you've got to respond to something that happened. Instead, this will be part of our deliberate, continuing growth of our government.' The world changes; your nation's changed. We sometimes have...I think the anthropologists are probably to blame, but probably all of us are, this notion of these unchanging forever communities that lived in North America. Well, heck, there were trade relations, people had new ideas, people tried new things, people discovered that the climate changed or that you moved because you were following a resource and you had to do things in new ways and the rules changed because you said, "˜Ah, we've got to come up with a new solution for this, deal with the situation we're in now.' Why shouldn't that be part of your new tradition of how you govern, that we're ready to change when the world demands that we respond to new conditions."

Herminia Frias:

"If I can add to that, I think that sometimes we get fixated on that this is done and we forget that this is really a living document, this is really something that we need to adhere to and pay attention to as our society changes. So thinking about it, how is it that we do things today, how is it that we do things tomorrow, and how is it that we're going to do things 25 years from now? It changes."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"So I don't think Jill's going to necessarily blow her own horn on this, but I think that their experience at White Earth is probably real similar to what could go on for you guys at Hualapai. Jill's presentations about historically where their blood quantum rules came from, where their membership and citizenship rules came from, and really telling the history of that. I had read things that Jill had written before meeting her and I encourage you, if you never read any kind of an academic article in your life, to read her 2009 piece in American Indian Quarterly. It's beautiful, it works from the point of storytelling and it puts you in the position as if you were community members in 1910, '13 when the Indian agents came around and assigned blood quantum and you get the understanding that it's an entirely constructed idea. And I think that a lot of citizens today in tribal communities don't understand a lot of that history and they think that it's something that's been...that's definite as opposed to something that's more or less made up and you gave that, a version of that kind of talk multiple times, and it really starts to break down on people's understanding of where these rules come from and opens them up to a greater acceptance that there could be different rules and it can be more inclusive of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and who's going to be in that community."

Jill Doerfler:

"Well, thank you very much, Miriam, for noting that. Yeah, I didn't get a chance to talk at length about it in my presentation today, but as I said, my research has been on Anishinaabeg identity historically, and so part of that was how people were talking about identity and citizenship in the 19-teens and the historical record on it is amazingly rich. And so we have people at White Earth talking about identity and blood quantum and I was able to use lots of quotes from them extensively to say...what they said time and again was A, "˜we don't know what you're talking about when you try to say blood quantum,' and B, "˜that doesn't really matter to us. What matters is our families, what matters is how we live our lives.' I'll just give two quick examples because I can't help myself. One, what happened is they're asking people at White Earth, "˜is so and so a mixed blood,' and they want to know because of land sale. That's what they're really looking at, but I was interested in the identity. So they asked a woman, "˜Isn't it true...is your husband a mixed blood?' and she says, "˜No, my husband is a full blood. He made himself a full blood.' And so we see there her answer being surprising...I don't know how many people would say that today, they make themselves, but at that time Anishinaabeg people created their own identity by their actions, what they did made them who they were and they were really in control versus this idea of blood quantum, which is sort of pseudo science and it's something that we don't have control over, that's just some kind of number assigned to us at birth by our tribe or the Bureau of Indian Affairs or something like that. And the other fabulous quote that I'll mention, as a person was being asked time and again about another person's blood quantum and he finally said, "˜I don't know. That person has been dead a long time. If you really want to know, you should go ahead and just go dig him up.' So Anishinaabeg people always have some good humor and that's one of my favorites because they're like...there's no answering these questions about blood quantum. And so I think I'll leave it with that."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. Justin?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"One of the things that I was going to touch on with her question is that I did a research paper about blood quantum too because it was important to me. And one of the things that I identified was that the only people or the only things that are really identified by how much of something they are is some animals and Native Americans. That's the only thing. So if we're going to categorize ourselves into a category with animals because that...it's always kind of been about resources. The federal government didn't want to be babysitting a bunch of Indians so they said, "˜We're going to make...if you have a kid with a white person, they're half,' and then eventually we're going to be extinct before we're dead. So that was good to them. That was good for them and if that's what we want to continue, that's going to be our legacy, I guess that's our choice."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you, Justin."

Mike Burgess:

"Mike Burgess again. Not to answer the blood quantum issue, but this young lady, you had a question that you made a statement that how often or how many...when should you change your constitution? My response to that would be and a suggestion is, when your leaders no longer honor it. And so when your leadership doesn't follow through with what that constitution abides by, because I was struck by one statement here that was up on the screen that the law must be followed, rightly or wrongly, be followed. So a constitution that does not define how leadership should be held up, it should be a constitution that has generally your bylaws or your rules of behavior or your ordinance for conducting themselves. So on the reverse side of that, leadership that wants to be in office that can't honor those rules doesn't need to be there in the first place. I bring this up because of my own people again. One constitution, it was [Three] Affiliated Tribes, we broke apart in '65, new constitution in '67, been amended 14 times. We've attempted to change the constitution three times in the last ten years, but my people...put it in political rhetoric, you live with the devil you know. So people who are afraid of change have to be instructed, taught and shown that change is good and beneficial. And so the few of us in my people that want to make these changes, we can't get heard and that voice has been squelched. Well, thankfully the internet is there and even that is misinterpreted at times. But there are these things that can be put in place and for one, we are discussing among ourselves not anymore lowering blood quantum, but raising it. And someone asked me, "˜Well, when and where would you have the cut off line to raise it?' So in 1976, every Comanche enrolled at that time received a per cap and I explained to them, "˜When we first got started with this blood quantum stuff on the reservation days, everybody was a full blood and one-quarter of our tribe was not full-blood Comanche. So why don't we go back to that time frame to 1976 and everybody's a full blood and our children come up half or quarter or three-quarters.' So you're not faced with this reducing blood quantum to get more numbers, which hasn't benefited us in the long run precisely because of per cap, educational benefits, and half the people who don't live at home want their medical card, their education and their per cap and never come home. So some of us are discussing this idea of citizen responsibility, coming home to vote each year, being recognized in the community at specific events and times. So we are having to come back to what some of you have now, citizenship requirements and things of that nature. So I wanted to expand on your question of when to change the constitution. Thank you."

Herminia Frias:

"Thank you. Charissa, right down there."

Audience member:

"This is in regards to the blood quantum. I was just...I teach my kids not to be...not to be prejudiced, but I'm also defending myself and my tribe when I say marry your own tribal members so we don't face these kind of issues. We have a lot of benefits, we have a lot of resources on our own land within our own tribe, we have our language, we have our traditions, we have our ceremony, we have our land. In our tribe, in our tradition, you have that umbilical cord when you're born, then it falls off. We bury it where we're from. We pray for it and we bury it and that's why it's important to teach your kids to marry within your tribe, marry within your tribe so we don't face these kind of problems. And it's important; if you start now when they're young, when they're older it goes on and on. And I tell my kids that. I don't want you to marry somebody that's not a non-member. "˜Why?' I said, "˜Because you're going to lose it, you're going to lose the identity of being a full-blooded Apache.' "˜Well, mom, what makes me Apache?' I said, "˜What makes you Apache? Look at all the hills around you, look at the horse you ride freely, look at everything you do; you hunt, you pray, you dance, you play. You do that because you're Apache. If you're out there, you won't do it. You'll be sitting on a city bus, you'll be doing these things. You'll be following the federal government and the state government. On our lands we have our own laws and we should keep our own blood quantum within our own tribe. Thank you."

Herminia Frias:

"A question in the back."

Jamie Henio:

"Thank you again for letting me speak. I just wanted to share a story regarding the constitution and the Navajo attempts at the constitution. Last year, I was fortunate enough to listen to a speech by a former Navajo leader at the Navajo Nation Bar Conference. And he explained the previous attempts to the constitution and he shared a story with the audience and it goes like this. Back in the early days, there was a big movement about adopting a constitution on the Navajo Nation and you have your pro-constitution people here running around trying to convince everybody saying, "˜This is good for you, this is life, this is life-sustaining.' Then you have your traditional people here who were sort of against it. So they had a big meeting and at that meeting the traditional leaders and the pro people met and the traditional leaders were saying, "˜Okay, you're saying this piece of paper, this document is life-sustaining. Okay, let's put it to a test then.' He goes, "˜We'll build two fires here. One here for you and then we'll build another fire here. On this fire, that's your fire. On our fire what we'll do is we'll go to our flock, get a sheep, we'll butcher, we'll make some bread, we'll fry some meat and cook it and stuff. On your fire, get a big tub of water, boil it and then what you'll do is we'll be cooking meat over here and we'll eat. On your fire take the piece of paper that you're touting around and put it in there and boil it and then we'll see which sustains life.' So you get it? He's telling people, "˜Take your constitution and boil it and eat it and see if it'll sustain your life for you.'"

Robert Hershey:

"And you think mutton sustains life? Ooh. No, I'm teasing. I'm teasing. I loved it. I ate it every day."

Jamie Henio:

"Well, the thing is then later on the guy says, "˜You know the reason why they rejected the constitutions? Because we still have that fear of the livestock reduction program.' And that's why they've been rejecting the constitution because they think that might happen again. So that was his point at the end after that."

Herminia Frias:

"Any other questions, comments? Okay, we have one more at least."

Audience member:

"Hello. I just wanted to make one point, something that Miriam said, which I think...I hadn't thought about before and that's when looking at sources of law to put into constitutions this recognition of international law. I hadn't thought about that, but Indigenous people are making progress all over the world when they're back against the wall and no one will listen and courts will not listen domestically that they're starting to make progress in international law with the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the declaration on rights and obligations of man. I think that the way for this progress to continue is for it to be recognized in tribal constitutions. For example, the gentleman spoke about the birthright and where are you going to find that in a body of law to cite? But in something like an international document where self-determination and the importance of land to Indigenous people is emphasized. I think that's a great point, something I hadn't thought about."

Robert Hershey:

"I'm going to talk about that tomorrow, too. Thank you -- one of my students, an attorney, bright guy."

Herminia Frias:

"Anyone else? Yes, sir."

Roger White Owl:

"Hi. Roger White Owl. Three Affiliated Tribes. One of the things I guess I wanted to ask the panel, one of the things is as we look at this concept of the social contract in constitutions and what they are really about how important is ambiguity in these documents that you have a living document that isn't just technically written because even the great Greek philosophers said that the worst government was run by lawyers. So that is..."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"And I think Shakespeare said it, too."

Roger White Owl:

"Just how important...because as we see...as we see...as we see, as Mr. Burgess said, pointed out is that your constitution should not be too technical to where your people can't understand it. It's the people's document and so that's the reason why that attorneys make the worst lawmakers according to even Greek philosophers and the very essence of what we know as Western jurisprudence. And so as we look at that, it needs to be...our constitutions need to have this bit of room to be interpreted as the concepts of the rule of law in government and everything else is expressed in implied powers. That's what we have within the constitution and in constitutional interpretation. So how do you guys feel, how ambiguous should a constitution be?"

Miriam Jorgensen:

"Well, I can't give you an amount, like it should be 60% ambiguous and 40% not, but I think it is true that a degree of ambiguity is important and exactly for those reasons that you say a living document, that it allows there to be interpretation of that document that moves with the times. I've written a little bit about this and we talk about it as breathing room in a sense in the document, that you don't have to resolve every single issue by going into great detail in the document. That's what I was kind of getting at when I said about the rules of procedure, a lot of those rules of procedure for legislatures are very loose, they're sort of like, "˜Well, we're going to assign it to the legislative body to establish its rules of procedure. We're going to tell them how representation should occur and what the quorum should be. We might even tell them the dates on which they should meet or how often they should meet or the actual way that they establish their rules are going to be a little bit looser, that we're not going to specify this necessarily in the constitution, we'll just give some direction.' And that allows things to change a little bit if they need to. I think however that in order to have one of those constitutions that has breathing room in it, your constitution absolutely needs to specify a body that's responsible for interpreting the constitution because if you don't assign somebody to interpret the constitution, you've got this somewhat ambiguous document without any ability to say, "˜Okay, at this point in time this is what it means.' Our interpretation may change a little bit, we may change and grow like Steve was talking about, we may change to adapt to the times or to changing circumstances or whatever but you still need somebody to do that... that constitutional interpretation. And if you go back and look at the Mohegan constitution, that council of elders, which I said has that funny role, it's both a legislative body with respect to custom and tradition and certain kinds of traditional law, it's also a constitutional interpretation and judicial review body for that tribe. And so it has very clearly assigned this role." 

Ian Record: Setting the Focus and Providing the Context: Critical Constitutional Reform Tasks (Presentation Highlight)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "The Process of Constitutional Reform: The Challenge of Citizen Engagement," NNI's Ian Record lays out two critical overarching tasks that those charged with leading a nation's constitutional reform effort must undertake.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "Setting the Focus and Providing the Context: Critical Constitutional Reform Tasks (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation highlight.

"So here's just some responsibilities that you want to think about giving, delegating to those commission members. Obviously you need them out there spearheading the citizen engagement effort, soliciting input/feedback from your community members. So all of these things on this page are very important, but I would argue that there's two larger responsibilities that your constitution reform committee folks have. One is, set the focus. The second is, provide context.

What do I mean by that? Set the focus -- and this is something that leaders need to be doing as well. And Anthony [Hill] stole a lot of my thunder on this point so I'll be concise with it, but we've seen a lot of tribes struggle when the focus and the discussion around reform is confined to the current issues of the day, the problems, what's ailing us, versus what are our assets, what are our resources, what are our opportunities, what kind of future are we trying to create? Setting that focus is absolutely critical, because if you stay confined in that issues and problems thing, you're missing out, you have a very narrow focus and you're missing out on the broader picture.

I like to use the analogy of a car and your constitution being your nation-building vehicle. And those of you who are elected leaders or who work in tribal government and you're immersed in the machinery of governance every day, you see the problems, you see them firsthand, and you know what needs fixing, right? So every time that vehicle breaks down and you pull over to the side of the road and you get out and you're all huddled around -- elected leadership and everybody else -- you're huddled around underneath the hood and that's all you're looking at, instead of walking up to the next hill, turning around and taking a look at the whole picture. Taking a look at that vehicle and saying, 'Is this the right vehicle for us? Do we even know how to drive it? Is it even pointed in the right direction? Do we know which direction we want to point it in?' So you need to think about that. That's all about setting the focus. What is the premise, what is the lens through which you're going to engage in this effort?

And the second is, provide the context. We see a lot of tribes struggle when they start with, "˜What's wrong with our constitution?' instead of going back, doing a history on where you've come from. It's that old adage: it's hard to figure out where you're going to go unless you know where you've been. So you need to do your due diligence, and this is where the reform committee can play the lead role. How did we govern ourselves traditionally? I may know that being on the reform committee, 'cause they put me on there because of my knowledge of this, but do the people in the community know that? If not, we need to teach them.

Where did our current constitution come from? Oftentimes we hear people say, 'Oh, yeah, we're an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] tribe,' as if the person hearing that is supposed to understand fully what that means or they even understand fully what that means. But go back. Do you know? Do you have a working history of how your specific constitution and system of government was formed? Did your own people have a meaningful say in its formulation? For many IRA tribes, often that answer is no.

San Carlos Apaches, I've worked with them for a number of years, I've done a lot of archival research on how their IRA government was formed. They had a heavy contingent of Apaches back at the time that said, 'Self-governance? You're talking about self-governance? We're going to take the ball and run with it.' They actually developed their own constitution. They sent it to Washington. John Collier said, 'No way. You want to regulate marriage and divorce according to Apache custom? I don't think so. We have the Lutheran missionaries that can do that for you.' So you need to go back and look at your history and then, once you document that history, you need to share it with your people, because it will provide them a sense of context by which they can then analyze your current constitution and figure out what they want to change."

Robert Hershey: The Legal Process of Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Robert Hershey, Professor of Law and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, provides an overview of what Native nations need to consider when it comes to the legal process involved with reforming their constitutions, and dispels some of the misconceptions that people have about the right the federal government has to interfere in what changes Native nations make to their constitutions.

Resource Type
Citation

Hershey, Robert. "The Legal Process of Constitutional Reform." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

Robert Hershey:

"Let me just introduce myself just a little bit. I'm Robert Hershey; I was born and raised in Hollywood, California, born on Sunset Blvd. in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to...yes? I went to Hollywood High School for typing in summer school. I went to John Marshall High School, and the reason we had such a lousy football team is because our mascot was the Barristers. So I don't know if I was destined to become an attorney from the start. However, I skateboarded down the Avenue of the Stars before there were Avenue of the Stars. It was still concrete at that time and growing up in Hollywood as a young kid -- and you might think I'm only 39 with prematurely moonstruck hair -- but really I was born in the late '40s. It was a magnificent time to grow up and to be totally involved in a fantasy world that was very, very difficult to have any concept of racial hatred and discrimination, except when the African-American community decided that they certainly were not getting a fair share of things.

The Indians in my world were all portrayed on television and in movies and it's very important to consider the imagery of American Indian policy, how interwoven it is, because the idea of an Indian is a white construct. We use the term 'Indian and non-Indians' all the time, but at the same time it is something that is just made up. You didn't refer to yourself, ‘I'm Indian.' You referred to yourself by your name, you referred to yourself by your kinship, your family relationships, the nation you belonged to, the societies you were part of, but there's this whole fantasy thing that still dictates today American Indian policy and it paints Indian people with one long, broad brush. Every time there's legislation in Congress it's usually, it's a panoramic landscape of which it paints everybody with the same ideas.

So you come from Hollywood, California, and you find yourself going to big movie theaters that are 10 times the size of houses and you get a really different kind of view of where you were going to be. My grandparents had to leave Europe, they were chased out of Europe because they were Jewish. Fortunately it was before the Holocaust. They went to Cleveland, Ohio, then they came out to California. My parents met there and I was raised there. I went to college at the University of California at Irvine. I studied pre-med. Got tired of memorizing molecules and wound up in law school. I came here to the University of Arizona. When I graduated college at the University of Arizona from law school, I got a job on the Navajo Indian Reservation. How many Navajo speakers are here? Uh oh. I'm in trouble. I was hoping there wasn't going to be any, but we can share mutton together. My mutton story is that where I would go eat mutton every day, one day I was backing up to go back to work and I backed my car into a telephone pole and I still have the muscle spasm from that and that's from 40 years ago. That's my second mutton story. I worked for Diné be'iiná NáhiiÅ‚na be Agha'diit'ahii. So-so? How did I do? I did all right. Thank you. D.N.A. Legal Services, so I was a legal aid attorney there.

And my first experience, and I'd never been on a reservation before, but my first experience, because I was a part of the outdoor life my whole life, and my first experience on the reservation was I rented a house, actually rented a cabin. It was a one-room cabin -- no water, no electricity -- way back in a canyon off the road and the mud chinking was missing. When the wind blew my curtains on the inside of the cabin would blow. I had a two-burner wood stove. I'd fire that thing up, get that stove pipe going red hot, open the front door to a snow storm and I was absolutely in heaven. But when I first went there, my Navajo landlady, my landlord Bertha Harvey, she was about 70 years old, still riding her horses, still chopping her wood and she asked me one day, she said, ‘Robert' -- because she lived much closer to the highway and I lived about a mile and a half back in the canyon -- and she said, ‘Robert, would you...' She called me 'Shinaaí­' and, ‘would you mind taking my goats back to the pen that's next to your place?' Being from Hollywood, what am I going to say, I'm going to say I don't know how to do goats. I didn't know how to do goats, but anyway I said, ‘Sure, I'll do that.' And this one black goat who was the leader of the pack, his name was Skunk and he wore this big bill on him and he took off, he took the whole flock up into the hills and I chased after them and chased after them and chased after them and finally I couldn't get them to come back with me. So I slowly slinked back down the hill after about two hours and I told [her], I said, ‘Bertha, I am so sorry. I lost your goats.' And all she did was start laughing at me. And she says, ‘They know where to go!' So I go back to my house, walk back another mile and a half back and they're in the pen where they're supposed to be. I'm supposed to talk to you today about legal process. My first question, was that legal what she did to me? Then when I worked with the Apaches, they're real good jokesters and they do these joking imitations of the white man. Oh, when I left the Navajo Indian Reservation one of my Navajo friends, she put a thunderbird around my neck, a beaded thunderbird and she said, ‘This will bring you luck in your whole, white life.' And I said, ‘Okay, I got that.'

So I have been very fortunate and I'm absolutely amazed and in wonderment and as I said yesterday, I said, I'm so honored to be with people that care so much and it's been a 40-year commitment on my part to work with and be honored by and in this situation and watch the success of Native peoples. You may get discouraged at times, but look around you, look at the success of Native nations. I am astounded and so happy to be part of that and have based my career on being a participant in that. So thank you very, very much for allowing me that opportunity. So what's legal? Give me a concept. What is legal? Go ahead. I need a mic to give to this young man here. Yes, sir. What's legal?"

Audience member:

"It would be an activity permissible or sanctioned by the people."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. Who else has an idea about legality? What's legal? Because we talk about legal process, we know...we heard so much about law, but I want to know what's legal. You basically said, ‘It's sanctioned by the community.' It's an agreement. It's an agreement. Who else has an idea of what's legal? Go ahead."

Audience member:

"Like a binding contract between two people."

Robert Hershey:

"A binding contract between...again, an agreement. Right? In reality, [it's] an agreement. Yes, sir."

Audience member:

"A treaty."

Robert Hershey:

"A treaty. A binding contract between two people. Anybody else? You've been talking about reformation of constitutions. You've been learning a lot about constitutions. This is something that you heard before; I'll reiterate. This is nothing that gets fixed in stone. This process of amendments you hear and you hear about, ‘Can we amend our constitution, can we keep it moving forward, can we start a constitution?' It just keeps rolling forward. It's as dynamic as your culture and as your culture rolls and rolls and rolls into contemporary societies that you've created, the constitution supports that and it gives you a greater understanding. Later on I'm going to tell you what I consider also different conceptions of what a constitution might look like. There was one comment that was made to me yesterday by a man who said that, ‘The treaty gave us rights,' and, ‘What about our treaty rights?' Let me tell you, I view things a little differently. Native peoples enjoy all the inherent attributes of sovereignty. Think of it as a big pie. You are inherently sovereign. You inherently control your own destiny. Treaties took away parts of that right. Court decisions take away those rights. Congressional statutes take away those rights. What's left is your inherent ability in addition to your traditionally inherent and aboriginal abilities to govern yourself. That's what's left.

When you hear the word 'sovereign', 'You're sovereign. You have rights of sovereignty,' do you know where that comes from? This is not going to be a federal Indian law lecture, but very, very briefly, in the early 1800s there was a series of three cases. The first case legitimized the Doctrine of Discovery. It basically says that the colonizing power of the United States could go ahead and be unapologetic about subjecting you into their dominion and control. They had plenary authority. The second case basically called you dependent...domestic dependent sovereigns. That's where that term 'sovereignty' came from, which over the years has also been my coin of the turn domestic dependent abuse at times or domestic dependent violence, but that's where that word sovereignty comes from. The third case involves, ‘Well, wait a second, if you are domestic dependent sovereign, then we must have some sort of a guardian/ward relation over you, therefore we have the trust responsibility.'

So since the 1800s, the early 1800s, that kind of relationship has been established and the United States then has taken away lands, it's allotted your lands to take away more lands and then, by the 1930s, that's when it passed the Indian Reorganization Act and those are the types of constitutions that we're talking about now. In addition to the Indian Reorganization Act, there's the Oklahoma tribes' organizing documents, there's other specific statutes for tribes that have organized in constitutional format. Is it all voluntary? And why isn't it voluntary? Because there was not equal bargaining power, there was a conquest, there was a power here and there was subterfuge and there was deceitfulness and dishonesty and saddled you with certain systems of government that you're still fighting against or rallying against today.

Now let me ask you this, and this is something that I would like some participation in, when we talk about the Secretary [of Interior] approving constitutions and having that kind of authority over you, there are a great deal of pressures that the Secretary of the Interior and the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and through the superintendents in the different agencies they exert over you. I would like you to share some of those stories before I go into what the secretarial process is all about. There have been cases where the Secretary, the agency personnel, they basically say, ‘If you want to go ahead and change your constitution to remove the authority of the Secretary to approve your actions, then you will either lose federal recognition or you will no longer be a participant to the benefits and advantages of the Indian Reorganization Act governments. You will lose that government-to-government relationship,' those kind of threats. In addition, financial pressures, can you say no to them? Are you strong enough economically to say no to them and carry on by yourself? I would like to hear some of you talk about the things that the BIA and the Secretary and the agencies have disclosed to you or have said to you when you've discussed with them the remodeling or the amendment or the reformation of your constitutions. Can somebody tell me some of the stories? Red Lake has its own history. Red Lake was not an IRA tribe. Navajos have no constitution. They've tried. Yes, please. Because I think it's important for us to share at this time the experiences that everyone's had with the Bureau before I get into the scope of what I think their powers are. Thank you."

Audience member:

"In the 1980s when I was tribal chairman, one of the things we became very much aware of was how ineffective and how not responsive to our needs the BIA was. We discovered some of the same things that Elouise Cobell wrote about and we made the BIA rectify those. When we saw how they were dealing with our land and how the land transactions weren't being carried out to the full extent that they are supposed to be, we decided to do something about it. And we didn't follow the same process you're talking about here today. We didn't follow like this very highly democratic process, but what the tribal council did was identify what we needed to do and that was to take away the authorities that the BIA had over us and take over the governance of the tribe ourselves because we knew that we had people who were much more capable than the individuals who were working for the BIA. We came up with the ideas or with the reforms that we needed, and one of the things that we figured we needed to do was to claim jurisdiction over all people in all lands within the exterior boundaries of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. And then we gave the authority to carry out those jurisdictions to the tribal business council. And we also went for a name change because the Three Affiliated Tribes was what we called...colonial appellation; it was given to us by the BIA. So we wanted to use our own tribal name. We wanted to call ourselves the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. After they drafted... after the legal department drafted those up for us, we went to every community, every district and showed it to them, we explained it to them. And I know you kind of poo-pooed that idea a little while ago, but it worked for us."

Robert Hershey:

"What was that?"

Audience member:

"Where we wrote out what we wanted, we took it to the community, they gave us our... to the communities, they gave us our blessing. They gave us their blessing and...we answered all their questions, we were honest with them and to me, I think the whole issue at hand was one of trust. Did our people trust us enough to let us do this reform? And by being open with them and honest with them and letting them know what we were doing and why we were doing it, when it came time to vote, they voted overwhelmingly for the changes. And that has helped us immensely down the road. After that we took over all the services that the BIA had. We took over the realty department because they were not doing a good job with realty and we knew that. It worked. These amendments worked out very well for us. I was wondering this morning when you were talking about that Violence Against Women Act and you were saying people need to change their tribal constitutions. Is there something within that Act that says we have to proceed in a certain way or if we already claim jurisdiction over all people and all lands are we okay with that already? That's just kind of an aside I was wondering about. But anyway, when it came down to actually running that Secretarial election, there were other things we wanted to do at the time, but the BIA told us that the people in Washington did not want us to have more than three amendments presented to our people because they thought it might confuse them. So we went along with that and later on we did another secretarial election to get other things done that we wanted to do."

Robert Hershey:

"And is your constitution still, the amendment process still subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior? If you wanted to amend your constitution again, do you have to have another..."

Audience member:

"We still have to have the Secretarial election. We were encouraged to leave that in there. One of the things I just want to mention that we found later on is that our...a number of our people, if things didn't go just the way they wanted them to, they kind of longed for the BIA again. And we found that kind of interesting because if they couldn't get their way with the tribe they thought maybe the BIA, if they still had control of the tribe maybe they would have let them have this, that or whatever."

Robert Hershey:

"Thank you for sharing that 'cause I do want to talk a little..."

Audience member:

"I have one other thing I want to say, too. If you're going to do this, you have...the tribe has to be the one to push on these. The BIA is very lax. They don't...they're not going to push things forward for you. We had a young man who was one of our tribal members, Ray Cross, and we had another legal counsel, Kip Quail. But Ray Cross, one of our own tribal members was very, very aggressive and he just...he pushed everything. It was always, ‘Okay, when is our next meeting? All right, when are we going to meet next?' And he was telling the BIA not...he was telling the BIA what to do. We didn't let them tell us what to do."

Robert Hershey:

"Absolutely. Thank you. You brought up a question that many of you might be thinking about. The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and also the Violence Against Women Act. They require certain constitutional rights, United States constitutional rights like the presence of a counsel, in order to go ahead and have increased sentencing authority or to assume jurisdiction over non-Indians in domestic violence cases on the reservation they have to be afforded United State constitutional rights, not just Indian Civil Rights Act cases. So if your constitutions have a provision in there where you have adopted the Indian Civil Rights Act and made that part of your constitution and that has old sentencing authority in it, it does not provide...it may be a limitation and that may be something you have to amend to go ahead to keep in pace with the jurisdictional advantage and the punishment that can be meted out under these two new acts, so that may be something. Yes. Thank you."

Audience member:

"Thank you."

Robert Hershey:

"Anybody else? How about somebody who has a good story about the BIA? Raise your hands. There's a young man over there who's got a good story about the BIA."

Audience member:

"I am not a young man, but thank you. We had trouble in our reservation and some buildings burned and tribal council moved their meetings off the reservation under the Roger Jourdain regime. And I had a friend that worked for the BIA in Minneapolis and she called me and told me to come down. And so I went down to the BIA in Minneapolis and she showed me an order from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At the time, there was a lot of mineral concerns that are still going on right now, but this was like in the 1970s, late 1970s and the directive from the Bureau of Indian Affairs was to allow oil companies and people that...companies that were looking for minerals to allow them to do that without informing the tribal council that the Bureau, local bureaus on each reservation throughout the United States, giving them the authority to go ahead and allow illegal coring and other matters that was going on. And it did happen in many Midwestern states. So I took that directive and I took it to Roger. Roger got mad at me. He said, ‘Where the hell did you get this?' I said, ‘Well, it doesn't matter where I got this. What matters is the directive from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.' I said, ‘This is what I'm giving you.' And it wasn't too long after that the superintendent of Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Red Lake Nation was booted out and Roger informed other tribal councils about that directive from the Bureau undermining tribal governments. And so that's a story I have about them."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. Thank you. Someone back here too. Because what I'm getting at here is that there are some sentiments on the reservations that the BIA there is to protect some people from actions of tribal councils and they do appreciate that oversight, as much as they do interfere with the tribes exercising their own self-determination. So there is that kind of split...

...Not only is there dependence on this bureaucracy, but some people are advantaged because of this bureaucracy. And so when you adopt the BIA constitutions, how many people are living today that have not been a part of a BIA constitution from a government, especially if your nation was there from the 1930s and adopted that constitution? So these are very powerful institutions, so that your leaders that are part of the IRA government, tribal council, they wear the clothes of power by virtue of these forms of government. So you're trying to change that, too. Now I've worked with a number of nations in constitutional reformation. One tribe has been trying to amend its constitution since 1975 and they've appointed a committee, a constitutional committee, but we heard yesterday too there's some fatigue that sets in and that fatigue...and so you have attrition, you have people falling out. And I've been at council meetings where there's been a call to the audience, ‘Who wants to be on the constitutional committee now? Who wants to be there?' And maybe one person might step up and give it a go. But we've advised these constitutional committees and some of these constitutional committees think that they are in effect a shadow government. I don't know if that's been an experience there where they think that they should have the power. They say, ‘The council's not doing this, this, this so we're going to change the constitution to make sure that they don't do this, this and this.' There [are] other people that I've worked with that have been trying to amend their constitution since 1990. This is a long, arduous process. Please don't feel that you have to get this done within any quick period of time. Before I continue...Yes, councilman.

Audience member:

"Just kind of a question, if you can discuss or point out the state of the organizations for example like the BIA and their role is changing, but they have some changes that are going on like some generational differences that are being felt and also I've heard that -- Ben pointed out at the legislative level -- where younger leadership is coming in and they're met with these older...at the state level it's become evident as well. There's just a generational gap in the organizations. And how is that changing and where do we see that going because I...one of the things, the good things I was going to say about the BIA is that they just got emails maybe about five years ago, which I thought was remarkable. They've come a long way."

Robert Hershey:

"I talked to some of my students...I've had two students that got a job a year-and-a-half ago at the solicitor's office. They were...I'm very proud of them. They were chosen out of about 1,000 people, there were four jobs open, two of our students from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy got jobs in the solicitors and I called them to ask them these types of things. There's still a climate of kind of hush-hush. There's still the politics going on there. Most of your experiences with the BIA are going to be at the agency level and so those experiences are not necessarily resonate all the way up to the central powers in Washington where you're going to get like a consultation policy from the Secretary of the Interior. Well, it looks really nice. They've done a fairly good job, but like all consultation policies, they're usually adopted before they consult with the tribes as to what a consultation policy should look like. And I'm going to come back to that in a little bit, but there may be a generational issue. But being youthful does not guarantee that you're going to have dramatic success. The youthful people on the Navajo Reservation in the 1920s are the ones that wanted to go ahead and start this process of exploration of shale oil development. But again, it's going to be your own individual experiences. Usually it's the agency superintendent levels that are going to determine...and those relationships I've seen have changed a bit to where they've been more supportive. But let me go on and talk about still how they make their determinations. Go ahead."

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"We can't retire. I'm sorry. We can't. You would all have that experience. One second, sir. I want to get to one other thing. They've given me a sign there and I've got about six hours of material to get through. How many people do not have an IRA constitution here? Navajo, Red Lake does not. Sorry?"

Audience Member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"It looks like it, but it's not under the IRA, am I correct?"

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"So you still went ahead and had the Secretarial approval. So there are those kinds of constitutions that have not been adopted under 25 USC Section 460, which is the Indian Reorganization Act, but you've put the Secretarial approval language in your constitution, so you're still bound by the Secretarial approval. Yes?"

Audience member:

"With our committee here one of the things we were looking at is to...striking that out of our new constitution and..."

Robert Hershey:

"You want to know the consequences."

Audience member:

"Under the law, and maybe international law, would it still be recognized in international law because it was signed off, our original one was signed off by the government."

Robert Hershey:

"Okay. I'm going to get to that in a minute, the consequences of removing the approval process by the Secretary of the Interior."

Audience member:

"Does that include Red Lake's unique status?"

Robert Hershey:

"That would include Red Lake's unique status as well because it basically...excuse me. Was it by statute or was it by just an inclusion that you put in there?"

Audience member:

"Inclusion."

Robert Hershey:

"Inclusion. You may get some backlash from the Secretary on that; however, you can get it done. There's been some threats that I've been made aware of where the Secretary would basically say, ‘Well, you're no longer going to be federally recognized.' Those of you that have succumbed to those kind of threats, that is not true. You cannot lose your federal recognition under the acknowledgement process by virtue of removing the Secretarial language. What will happen is if you remove the Secretarial approval language, like I said yesterday, in one sense, in one sense that you could remove the language that's filtered through all the language of the constitution that they have approval: attorneys, they have to approve mining, they have to approve leases, things...you can get rid of all that language. It's only when you go ahead and try to remove the Secretarial approval clause, ‘amending the constitution,' if you already have it in the constitution, that then you would no longer become an IRA tribe. It does not mean you lose your federal recognition. Yes, ma'am."

Audience member:

"[Unintelligible]."

Robert Hershey:

"Well, it is related to the trust responsibility and here's how, and that's a reason why some of the BIAs, how they view whether you can go ahead and amend their constitution or not. They're basically saying, ‘We have to support our trust responsibility to you, therefore we have to have oversight.'

Now, for the Secretary to...first of all, in the materials you have are the statutes, the Code of Federal Regulations that talk about the process of what you have to do to go ahead and have an amendment. How many people have...if you've had no constitution whatsoever and you want to become an IRA constitutional tribe, then you have to have 60 percent of the members that are on your reservation petition the Secretary of the Interior to have an election. If you already have, then you get together the people that want to go ahead and have an amendment to the constitution or a revocation of the constitution and then you have to go through a process where you tell the Secretary, the Secretary has 90 days to go ahead and look at your amendments, give you suggestions and advice under the trust responsibility, approve or disprove and then you have to...if they disprove, then you have to decide whether you're going to go ahead with the election or not; I'll tell you the grounds in just a minute. And then, once the election is had, 30 percent of your voting, the eligible voters must show up at the election, a majority of which then determines whether those amendments pass. The Secretary then, if they pass, the Secretary then has 45 days within which to approve or disprove of those amendments. If they don't make a decision within 45 days, they automatically become an amendment to the constitution.

Now here's where the trust responsibility comes in, because prior to 1988 when the Indian Reorganization Act was amended, the Secretary was insinuating itself in all manner of decisions as to whether or not it could approve or disprove your constitutional amendment provisions. And they...basically for any reason whatsoever, and the tribes were really getting hung up. As a result of the 1988 amendments, the Secretary only has the authority to disprove your...if your proposed amendments are in violation of federal laws, congressional statutes, court cases. What the Secretary is also doing is they say that they have the authority to insinuate themselves into the approval process if your proposed amendments violate federal policy. And this is where that trust responsibility comes in because there's no standards that talk about the violation of what the policies are. They can bring anything up. Now this is especially acute in membership issues, when you're trying to amend the constitution in terms of...the regulations are given in your materials under one of the numbers. You can read through that. So it is still unclear and it is not demarcated exactly what the authority is. The BIA Handbook of 1987 is still in use. There are working drafts of later, of 2009 handbooks, copies that I've seen and they're really hard to find, this handbook how the BIA determines whether or not it's going to go ahead and rule whether or not something is approved or not. For the most part the BIA has been approving. The consequences of not being an IRA tribe; if you remove that language, what are those? What else do you have in place at that time? There are communities that want that certitude, that they have the United States government exercising its trust responsibility through the Secretary of the Interior and steadfastly saying that, ‘We have the supremacy of the United States government behind us because they approve what we do.' The Secretary has no authority to approve your ordinances or resolutions, statutes, providing you have not given them that authority in your constitution. It's only in terms of the amendment process.

Now I want to move on because I have a few things to show you here. Somebody asked about the United States, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, some of the international law documents. I'm not going to run through all of it here but please, all of you should have a copy of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in your council rooms, in your attorney's offices because these laws are binding. Now there's no real teeth in them, it's not that if the United States Office of the Solicitor or the United States government in itself violates any of these principles, that you can then sue them, take them to task, but you can incorporate these principles within your constitution should you choose to do so -- I'm sorry these are not well written. I'm going to buzz through these because they're different -- but you have the right to determine your own members, you have the right to control your own lands, you have the right to make decisions about just about anything and no state government, United States -- and when I say state governments, nation states -- can go ahead and interfere with those rights as long as you continue to assert them through this process.

Now, the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation; if some of you are involved in sacred sites litigation, holy place litigation, the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation -- I'm sorry you can't see these -- just put a clause in there, it just came out last month that they're supporting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples within their advisory council materials. This is an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] policy. This is just for draft. It says, ‘Do not cite or quote.' Too bad. There's another provision in the EPA draft that basically says, ‘that we support the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.' This is the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Rights; this is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, one of the international law documents, the International Labor Organization Convention 169. Your attorney should be well versed in this. In fact, on April 19th at ASU, the Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples Human Rights is part of a symposium at Arizona State University on incorporating these Indigenous international law principles into the domestic discourse. Native peoples, Native societies and nations in this country have been reluctant to embrace this because they've held so fast to the trust responsibility. This is the frontier. This is the inclusion of the Indigenous Peoples Rights in the new constitution of Nepal. You will see this. And in Bolivia you will see this. This is the National Congress of American Indians. They have a draft.

Now, I want to think about something other than what you've been talking about, these kind of documents that you try to embrace within a written, English language written structure and whether or not there are other concepts of how you formulate government. How many people have conversations about plants, about place names, about a certain site, about a mountain? What's the story there, how does that envision, how does that help you then translate into what's appropriate to be written rules of conduct? The O'odham here, they basically teach their children, or at least traditionally, they taught their children, they waited until bedtime and when the child was just about ready to go to sleep they would tell them in their dream so they could dream about what was appropriate behavior or when they would wake up.

There's different ways of expressing what a constitution may be -- a land management plan. This is the Poplar River First Nation in Manitoba and what they have done is that they've organized together, they've mapped out their lands, they have a vision statement, which you might consider like a preamble to the constitution. One of the speakers just before me was talking about land management, comprehensive land management. The constitution reformation does not have to come before a comprehensive land management [plan]. One may inform the other. And in the process of developing comprehensive land management strategies, I suggest that you map your intergenerational memories. You probably already have done that. You've taken the statements of your elders. You've archived them. You've protected privileged knowledge. You've put them in your archives, you've created maps, you've created place names, you've gathered stories. These are important not just for whether or not you're going to go into aboriginal title litigation or whether you're going to design a constitution, but whether there's preservation of language because all those stories inform custom and tradition that can be used by your tribal courts in establishing common law.

So what they've done here is they have the vision statement, they spent 10 years working on this comprehensive land use plan. As a consequence, shortly after this they worked in concert with the government of Manitoba. The government of Manitoba passed Bill 6 and Bill 6 basically set aside most of the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba as conservation area joining the traditional lands of the Poplar River First Nation. You can get there. Go on their website and download this plan. It's magnificent. This is the constitution, according to my colleague Ray Austin, Professor Ray Austin, former Navajo Supreme Court Justice. He's one of our professors. He's a distinguished juris in residence at our college in our program. This is his constitution of the Navajo Nation. ‘Mother Earth and Father Sky and the rights and responsibilities and the protections afford each.' He says he can go ahead and talk about the whole Navajo system of government through this. He incorporates the terms hozho, hozho k'e, nayee, other concepts here.

Emory Sekaquaptewa, magnificent Hopi elder, Chief Judge of the Hopi Court of Appeals, one of my most significant mentors, wrote about Hopi songs and ritual dances as being constitutions, as being the stories. So when we think of a written constitution, we ask our self, ‘Who's it for or to? Is it to show to the external world? Is it for our selves internally? Are there other ways that we can go ahead and express ourselves by virtue of mapping, by singing?' These are all constitutions. These are all rules of conduct. The Maya Atlas, the Toledo Mayo in Belize put together an atlas. I would have you look at their...this is something called 'Dreaming New Mexico' and it's not a very good rendition. A project in New Mexico that got together all the stakeholders, the Native peoples, the Pueblo peoples, the food peoples, the people that were bringing food in, the energy inputs, the ranchers, the farmers, people...all your community, all your neighbors and they visualized and mapped something different because we're all talking about ecological sustainability here in addition to the promotion of self-determination and sustainability of Native identity within your community. So you have neighbors out there as well. I'd like to hear if any of you have any other questions that I might be able to answer or comments. I would love to hear from you please. Kevin? No. Yes, sir."

Audience member:

"This has to do with citizenship. If you were born on a reservation, your allegiance is to that piece of land where you were born, correct?"

Robert Hershey:

"I would hope so."

Audience member:

"And so if you were born off the reservation then your allegiance is to the United States? Is that part of..."

Robert Hershey:

"Me?"

Audience member:

"Yes."

Robert Hershey:

"Am I allegiance to the United States?"

Audience member:

"Yeah. Do you have allegiance...? When you're born in Hollywood...?"

Robert Hershey:

"That gets...that's a political thing. I don't want to go ahead and cast a disparaging comment about the United States government in front of this illustrious audience, but I will if you want me to. I'm much more comfortable with Native politicians than I am with Anglo politicians. That might answer your question there. I've had many more positive experiences on reservations and working with Native peoples. It's been my whole career except for surfing and skateboarding. Thanks. Anybody else before...yes, I knew you'd come back here, Kevin. Give that man a microphone, please."

Kevin:

"One of the questions I have is all the IRA governments, when you get sworn into office, you have an oath to the United States government...when you swear into office, does anybody swear an oath to the United States government? That's one of the issues with the IRA for some of us. So when we swear an oath, even though I was elected in with my own people, I swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States because it's part of our constitution. That, in turn, we become a body politic of the United States government in one form or another. I want to talk about an issue with White Earth, but it involves the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe about the issue with the BIA or Secretary Interior. In our constitution, if we wanted to remove somebody from office, we have a process called Article X. And if Article X isn't heard by or acted upon by the reservation business committee, our tribal council or the tribal executive committee, then it in turn goes to the Secretary of the Interior for review. For the last 22 years, the four petitions that went to the Secretary of the Interior have all came back and said, ‘It's an intratribal matter, deal with it yourself.' In the issue that happened with White Earth years ago on a removal process, the BIA stepped in and let a person sit office early at the tribal executive committee with only two members to run a reservation. So the BIA stepped in and told that person they were able to do that by violating the tribal executive committee and everything that existed under the constitution. So I don't know if that...everybody else in here has to deal with them kind of issues, but we as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, that's what we have to deal with. By the BIA stepping in sometimes and setting precedence or telling us, ‘No, we're not going to deal with it even though trust responsibility is ours, we're not going to deal with it, you deal with it.'"

Robert Hershey:

"Some of the things that they say they have authority to do is stepping on electoral matters."

Kevin:

"Exactly."

Robert Hershey:

"They do and they still...and I've seen cases of that right now. And they're very reluctant to do [it] in membership issues, which is striking because the Pala Band of Mission Indians, this case that just came out, it's a horrible, horrible case of disenrollment and the Federal District Court dismissed the lawsuit and basically said the tribe is sovereign, too. They had a sovereign immunity clause there. One other thing, if you go to the BIA website right now and you scroll down in their general thing and they have a pattern constitution you can click onto, just about the same as it ever was. So I suggest that all of you take over the BIA, start writing new constitutions and let's do it right. So thank you very much. I appreciate your time."

Carole Goldberg: Designing Tribal Citizenship

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Scholar Carole Goldberg shares what she's learned about citizenship criteria from her extensive work with Native nations across the country, and sets forth the internal and external considerations that Native nations need to wrestle with in determining what their citizenship criteria should be.

Resource Type
Citation

Goldberg, Carole. "Designing Tribal Citizenship." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2013. Presentation.

"Thank you very much for that introduction. I've already extended my thanks to the Native Nations Institute for inviting me here. I also want to extend my thanks to the Pascua Yaqui people for hosting this very informative event.

I'm going to be talking about tribal 'citizenship' -- that already raises questions about terminology. You've often seen the word 'membership' used in lieu of 'citizenship.' The term 'membership' harkens back to something that Chairman Rocky Barrett of Citizen Potawatomi said in one of the earlier presentations you saw here today. There was in the development of tribal constitutions through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 a view of tribes as, in some respects, corporate entities that would have boards and members. There was also a view of tribes as something akin to private associations or even clubs that would have members. The terminology of 'citizenship' evokes sovereignty and nationhood. I think it's become more common for Native nations to use the terminology of 'citizenship,' but any constitution has to have, as you heard earlier, the legitimacy and acceptance of the people whose government it is and the terminology will have to fit comfortably for whatever community that is.

I want to make one other preliminary point and that is about citizenship and constitutions, because many nations that don't even have constitutions will have citizenship or enrollment provisions in their tribal laws. So what difference does it make to have it in a constitution as opposed to having it in a code or an ordinance? We've heard constitutions described as fundamental law, which they surely are. One of the characteristics of fundamental law in general is that it is more difficult to change. So if you want to have the citizenship or membership provisions for your government to be more stable, less subject to change with political variation over time, then you will want to have it locked into your constitution.

Now there are many different ways your constitution can specify how difficult or easy it is to change the constitution. I come from California, where it is actually really easy to change our state constitution. As a consequence of that, we've had some fairly zany provisions in our constitution, but I will also say that I do not think we would have tribal gaming today in California were it not for the fact that it is relatively easy to modify the constitution of the State of California. By contrast, the constitution of the United States is really, really difficult to change and we've been stuck as the United States nation with some very old -- and, I would argue, antiquated -- provisions in our constitution precisely because it's so difficult to change.

So when you think about putting a citizenship provision in your constitution, also be thinking about how easy or difficult it is to change your constitution. You might want to allocate some of the authority over citizenship to your lawmaking process apart from your constitution precisely because that may be easier to change over time. So that's just kind of preliminary and a more global set of considerations to think about.

So you've heard already about the considerable variety of tribal constitutions both in times past and in the present day, notwithstanding the unifying force of the Indian Reorganization Act. There's still quite a bit of variation and that variation can be seen in the range of citizenship provisions that exist in tribal constitutions. I have given you a list of some of the more typical forms of citizenship provisions that you can see with examples afterwards of Native nations where those kinds of provisions can be found. So you can find citizenship provisions that rely on lineal descendants from a base roll or list. So anyone who can trace ancestry to a person who is on that list would be someone who could qualify for tribal citizenship. And the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is a good example of that. As you know, there is quite a bit of legal controversy over which lists, but the descendants from lists is the foundation for citizenship there.

There is also quite a bit of tribal constitution making that includes what I'm calling here minimum percent of tribal or Indian descendance, often referred to as blood quantum. And the percentage can vary from very high to very minimal, but some percentage would be specified and in some citizenship provisions the percentage of descendance can actually vary depending on the person's other descendants. So there are actually tribal constitutions in California that say that the minimum descendance requirement from that particular tribe is less if the remainder of your descendance is from another California tribe or in some instances from another federally recognized tribe. And that is a recognition of the fact that there are sometimes rather arbitrary divisions that the United States imposed when treaties were made or reservations were established and they wound up breaking up communities that had previously been unified. And so sometimes the constitution provisions say that if you come from one of our sibling or related tribal communities, you don't have to have as much descendance from our tribe, but if you're a total outsider then you must have the higher minimum descendance. So that's another array of possibilities.

There are yet other Native nations that specify that in addition to descendance, whether it's lineal or percentage, that you must also have your descendants be through your father's or your mother's line and we've got examples on both sides because there are matrilineal and patrilineal traditions in many Native nations and I've given examples of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico where it is patrilineal and the Seneca Nation of Indians in New York where it is actually through your mother's line.

Still another form of citizenship provision focuses not just on descendance, but where your parents were living at the time you were born, and this has to do in many instances with places like California where reservations were assemblages of peoples from that general area who had been scattered even though they weren't all part of a single community, but they were gathered together on a single reservation. So the place mattered a lot. So in order to be a member for example of the Tule River Indian Tribe in California, you must be born to parents who are living on the reservation. As you can imagine, this creates a huge premium on being able to live there and when your population grows and you don't have more places for people to live, it puts a lot of pressure on your citizenship rule. This by the way was a type of provision that was favored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the time of the Indian Reorganization Act in the 1930s.

And the last example I'll give in this list -- and I'm confident that I'm not exhaustive and there may be other examples you can all point me to -- but are provisions for citizenship by adoption or in the international sense we would call it naturalization. How do you become a citizen when you were not born as one? And here the variations are very great. So there are places like Nez Perce in Idaho where anyone can be adopted or naturalized as a citizen of the tribe. You don't have to have any other prerequisites other than the tribe is willing to have you. But there are other places where naturalization is limited, maybe limited to people who are not eligible for citizenship because they don't have a sufficient percentage of descendance or blood quantum or you might have to be a member of some other federally recognized tribe and give up that other citizenship in order to be adopted. Or you might have to be related to an existing citizen of the tribe. There are many variations that one can have and again, the process for adoption or naturalization is going to matter a lot if you have one of these provisions, because the process can make it extremely difficult or it can facilitate the adoption or naturalization of people into the tribe.

So there are all these choices out there. That doesn't mean that you can just put them all in a hat and pick one and say, ‘Okay, this one's ours,' or just deliberate for a little while and say, ‘Oh, this one sounds right.' There are a lot of important considerations that are going to go into thinking about which kind of citizenship provision matters and you're going to get a very specific case of those deliberations, but let me try in a more abstract way or general fashion to suggest what some of these considerations might be. So I'm going to divide them into external and internal. And by the way, I think the internal are more important, but the external are not irrelevant.

So do you have to worry about direct federal controls? My answer here is no. The federal government through the United States Supreme Court decisions through the pronouncement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs says, ‘We're totally hands off.' Now, does that mean they're totally hands off? No, it does not. They find ways to insinuate themselves. In the past, it was because if you had an Indian Reorganization Act constitution, the Secretary of the Interior had to approve the constitution. So they used that leverage to strongly recommend, if I may say as an understatement, that certain kinds of provisions be in there, and that's how places like Tule River were strongly encouraged to include these requirements that the parents be living there at the time the child is born. And the BIA's interest was in keeping tribal citizenship numbers low because the BIA was concerned about the burden on the federal government because certain financial benefits were to be distributed to tribal members. The federal government also gets involved in situations where there are contests over whether a particular tribal government should be recognized for dealing on a government-to-government basis and this is how the federal government has become embroiled in all the controversies at the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. But in general, this is your decision. The federal government should not be dictating and if they try they should be resisted.

There are however, some indirect ways in which the federal government has some influence on the choices you make. So to the extent that federal benefits and the applicability of federal laws turn on tribal citizenship, it will matter greatly how you define that citizenship. The federal government has increasingly made its laws turn on citizenship rather than on your descendants as a Native person and the reason they've done that is because they are fearful that they will be carrying out racially discriminatory legislation if they do otherwise. I would argue that they're not, but that's another story. My point is that for things like applicability of the Indian Child Welfare Act, can you have control over your children? Your citizenship provisions are going to make a huge difference because the law only applies to children who are members or eligible for membership. And there are many other benefits -- employment with the preferences within the Bureau of Indian Affairs, federal benefits for scholarships and other forms of federal disbursements that will turn on citizenship.

A second area where it can matter a lot is in the authority of a government to carry out its powers, so for purposes of criminal jurisdiction not only by the tribe, but by the federal government it will matter whether someone is enrolled. Now for federal criminal jurisdiction purposes, there's actually a little bit more leeway even if you're not formally enrolled. If you're recognized by the community as belonging there, the federal government rather than the state may have authority if some wrongful act is committed, but that's a very fuzzy area and it's a whole lot more secure to get out from under the authority of the state if a person is a tribal citizen. And these days, now the recent reauthorization of the VAWA act may make it less relevant for some purposes, but still for quite a few purposes, if the tribe wants to exercise its authority, both criminal and civil, it's going to be a lot easier to defend that in outside courts if someone is a tribal member. So there are other ways in which the federal government does this indirectly, but I'm going to move onto the more internal matters because I think these are the ones that deserve the most attention. So what are some of the things to think about from within your own community?

Well, as we've said many times already in this brief amount of time this morning, constitutions need to have legitimacy within your community, which means they have to have continuity within the values and beliefs within your community. That's not to say that those are static, that they never change, but there must be some organic sense that this reflects our community. So what does your community understand to be the expectation for someone to belong to that community? There's a lot that's been written by people in my academic world about whether kinship and descendants and blood quantum are new constructs for tribal citizenship that don't really fit historical ways of understanding, of belonging for tribal communities. And they point to the fact that hundreds of years ago individuals who were not biologically related to members of a community might be incorporated through a variety of means -- through marriage, through captivity in warfare, through political alliances. For a lot of reasons people might be brought into a community even though they're not biologically related. So why should native nations today care about descendants?

Well, I think there is an argument to be made that kinship has always been a fundamental component of belonging in tribal communities and how outsiders were viewed 200 or 300 years ago may not be the same way that outsiders would be viewed today. There is not the same concern 200 or 300 years ago about being overwhelmed by a population of immigrant colonizers from across the ocean. That wasn't an issue 200 or 300 years ago and so maintaining some expectation of kinship may very well accord with foundational beliefs in a community. How that kinship is understood is going to vary from place to place, blood quantum may or may not capture that, but the idea that kinship matters I think is something to be considered from an internal perspective.

At the same time, another important consideration is going to be maintaining numbers, I suggest, and maximizing political impact. So I've worked with a number of native nations, and you heard from some even earlier today, who were concerned about reductions in their citizenship numbers over time if they maintain very high percentage descendants requirements.

One interesting example is the Otoe Missouria of Oklahoma, who just a few years ago reduced their percentage descendants requirement from one-fourth to one-eighth. And here's what their leaders had to say. They said that, ‘Before the change there were about 1,400 enrolled members and only 129 of them were below the age of 18.' Today, since they changed their requirements there are over 2,500 members, 479 of those are minors and what the chair said at that time, this was announced two years ago, is that, ‘The future of the tribe is more secure both physically and financially.' The chair noted that a majority of the departments and services offered through the tribes are funded by grants and the higher the number of tribal members served by the grant, it means that the grant funding is generally higher. So there are many political, financial and other reasons. The chair also said, ‘Our tribe has gotten younger. A majority of our new members are younger people. This ensures a strong future for the Otoe Missouria Tribe. With a larger membership we should be able to obtain additional funds from government agencies and maintain and pass on strong traditional values to the growing tribal membership.' So this was some of the thinking behind increasing the numbers by decreasing descendants' requirements.

At the same time, Native nations have been concerned that if they expand their citizenship numbers too greatly, they may jeopardize cultural cohesion and they may be jeopardizing those who have shown their loyalty over time by maintaining affiliation. How do you at the same time sustain your numbers over time and at the same time not disburse your citizenship so widely that you lose connection to your home community. You saw from the depiction of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, with their 27,000, how widespread their population is. How do you ensure that you don't have a citizenship so large that the people are not vested in protecting their land and their home community? So that's another issue to consider. And protecting the tribal land base is going to be very important, because if you have lots and lots of citizens who do not reside or feel a connection to that land base, you may very well be in a position where the majority of your citizens are willing to see it despoiled because it will provide benefits to folks who are not present. And that is a danger that one must anticipate in thinking about the design of citizenship and related provisions.

Do you want to secure future generations? What I've heard so often in working with Native nations on their citizenship provisions is they want to make sure that their future generations are not left out, that they are able to pass on that tradition and culture and they are able to pass on that sense of belonging. And finally, I want to make sure that I mention, because I'm a lawyer, sorry, that you want citizenship provisions that are not going to be too complicated. You want ones that are not going to turn into huge arguments over time about what they mean. Okay.

So the last thing I'm going to talk about before I let you move onto the next presentation is what are some of the design options that you can be thinking about to try to balance some of these, especially these internal considerations, because sometimes they point in opposing directions and you have to be able to accommodate them. So one thing to be keeping in mind is that citizenship and voting provisions can be considered to some degree on separate tracks. You have to be very careful that you not have classes of citizens. We all know that there... until 1919 women were citizens of the United States, but they could not vote. And certainly those in the 18- to 21-year-old range who were being drafted in Vietnam were pretty unhappy that although they were citizens they could not vote on whether they were even going to be involved in a war. So that there is a powerful force that moves towards the convergence of citizenship and voting, but still there are ways to design voting provisions so that you can both expand numbers and at the same time protect your core community and land.

So one of the ways you could do it is you could say, ‘Fine, everybody who's a citizen can vote, but you must be living in the tribal community in order to have voting privileges.' In other words, anybody is entitled to come and live there so anybody who makes that choice can be a voting member. That way you can be ensured that those who actually make the decisions are the ones who are invested in that community. Or you could simply say, ‘No absentee voting,' meaning that you have to really care about this community in order to vote and make the journey. 'Come on voting day, but we will not let you sit in the comfort of your home in Anchorage and vote for what's going to happen in Citizen Potawatomi.' Or what you could do is what Citizen Potawatomi and Cherokee Nation have done, both of them places with large off reservation populations, and in the case of Cherokee Nation even contested whether there is a reservation, and what they've said is, ‘We are going to structure our voting by districts. There will be districts within our territory and then we will construct districts outside our territory that will not have an equal voice, but they will have a voice.' So the Cherokee Nation actually created a bunch of districts within their territory and then they said, ‘There is a separate voting district that will elect a representative for the off-reservation Cherokees.' And that way they are not excluded, but they are not given overwhelming influence.

Two other suggestions for design that can help you start to accommodate some of these considerations. One is the idea of the right of return and this idea is the idea that anyone who is a lineal descendant would have special privileges to become a citizen if they so chose. So they would have to make an active effort. They would not automatically as a lineal descendent be a citizen, but they would have to make the affirmative effort to affiliate and if they did they would be allowed to do so. It's not that they would have to be subject to someone else's decision about it, but they would still have to make the active choice. That way you can ensure that there is some real connection that that person has to the community.

And finally, you can think about doing what Fort Peck did back in the 1980s. They created a category that they called associate members and these were people who were given the...belonging to the community because they had members by their title, but it was specifically presented that they would not be voting members and they would not be entitled to the distribution of tribal assets. So these were folks who had a lesser percentage of descendance or blood quantum, but they still were descendants of the nation. They just didn't qualify for the percentage required under their constitution.

What I want to emphasize is that there are a lot of choices available, in theory. That doesn't mean that all of these choices are available just because they sound intriguing. You have the hard work, the hard work of political process and I've worked with communities that have tried to develop consensus on what should be the criteria for belonging. It's not easy. They did everything from holding coloring contests for the preschoolers in order to get the parents involved, to surveying the elders, to holding meeting after meeting after meeting. There was somebody on that screen who said, ‘This is not a three year maybe not even a six year process.' It takes time and commitment, but the possibilities are there. Thank you.

Anthony Hill: Constitutional Reform on the Gila River Indian Community

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

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

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring Nations: Cedric Kuwaninvaya: The Hopi Land Team

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Chairman of the Hopi Land Team Cedric Kuwaninvaya presents an overview of the tribal subcommittee's work to the Honoring Nations Board of Governors in conjunction with the 2005 Honoring Nations Awards.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Kuwaninvaya, Cedric. "The Hopi Land Team." Honoring Nations Awards event. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Tulsa, Oklahoma. November 1, 2005. Presentation.

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"[Hopi language]. Greetings from the Hopi Tribe to the Honoring Nations Advisory Board and honored guests. It is with great honor and privilege to deliver our final presentation to you. The Hopi Land Team is a subcommittee of the Hopi Tribal Council and has delegated authority to develop land policy, to explore and administer the best and most favorable uses of our natural and water resources and to seek and purchase viable business and land opportunities. I would like to recognize the current Hopi Land Team members: Ms. Marilyn Masayesva from the village of Bacavi who's our Vice Chair, Denny Humetewa from the upper village of Moenkopi, Jack Harding, Jr. from the village of Kykotsmovi, John Polela from the village of First Mesa, Leon Carew from the village of Mishongovi, and Wayne Taylor, Jr. who is the Chairman of the Hopi Tribe. My name is Cedric Kuwaninvaya. I am from the great village of Sipaulovi and the Chairman for the Land Team here.

A fundamental principle consistently exercised by the Hopi Tribal Council is our innate responsibility to preserving our homeland as an act of inherent sovereignty. As the original inhabitants of the isolated desert terrain of our aboriginal lands in the Southwest, the Hopi Land Team has focused its efforts on the restoration of our aboriginal lands, to restore free access to shrines, culture and religious sites balanced with contemporary goals of economic development and tribal self-sufficiency. The Hopi Tribe will soon be transferring up to 420,264 acres of acquired lands into trust. Since the passage of the Hopi-Navajo Land Settlement Act in 1996, much thought and planning has taken place to select fee, state and U.S. Forest, BLM lands that lie within our aboriginal lands. Although these lands do not encompass the original extent of our aboriginal lands, the acquisition of these lands symbolically replenish lost lands and more importantly regain our inherent land stewardship responsibility handed down since time immemorial. Moreover, these acts of the Hopi Tribe strategically lay the path to search new opportunities for economic development and to build a promising future for the Hopi people.

The purchase of lands is balanced with the purchases of business concerns such as commercial retail properties, a cattle-ranching business providing a product to the premium beef market, a bed-and-breakfast business, and a full truck stop serving the traveling public and commercial fleets off Interstate 40. Since the year 1998, these businesses have returned approximately three million dollars in profits to the general fund of the Hopi Tribe, which comprise approximately two percent of the annual general fund budget each year. The funds are then allocated to the Hopi villages for village projects such as elder and youth programs and to the Hopi tribal government for its operations. A comprehensive land management plan will govern the development of the newly acquired lands. The resources on these lands include hunting, fishing, boating, cattle grazing leases, recreation, power line rights of ways, management of cultural sites, a utility-scale wind energy farm and a potential utility-scale solar energy farm. These new economic development opportunities will generate revenue, create jobs, and enhance the portfolio of the Hopi Tribe.

The long-term goals of the Hopi Tribe and the plans to manage the development of the newly acquired lands and business concerns will be overseen by the Hopi Economic Development Corporation, a chartered corporation. In addition, our Wildlife Endowment Fund will provide the core funding for wildlife management on all Hopi lands. More importantly, as the picture shows, the most significant opportunity is the strengthening of the Hopi Tribe's ability to continue the practice of long-held religious, cultural and traditional practices. As the lands acquired formally aboriginal lands include eagle shrines, cultural sites, sacred trails, access to herbs, plants and wildlife used in our religious ceremonies. The future of the Hopi rests on its resources. Therefore the Land Team drives forward the concept that land is the foundation for Hopi beliefs and values and in the modern context an investment in the future. The growth and stability of the Hopi people rests on the proper activities of the Hopi tribal government and the Land Team serving as the enforcer for the tribe's responsibilities and vision. We remain committed to preserving our homeland and stand strong on the principle of preserving the good things of Hopi life and dealing with the modern problems with the United States government and with the outside world. [Hopi language]."

Alfreda Mitre:

"First of all, I want to say I'm very jealous of the Hopi Tribe's exclusive right to identify and select and purchase land and then have that land transferred into a trust status. Not many tribes have that opportunity. As a tribe, a small tribe in Nevada, we struggle very hard to acquire our traditional lands back so I want to first of all congratulate the Hopi Tribe and the team here for all of their work. Out in...throughout the United States you have tribes that are purchasing back their homelands and often are accused of ‘reservation shopping,' looking for convenient locations for economic development. Could you elaborate a little bit on how the selection of lands to be purchased or acquired are made?"

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"In Hopi, our elders have always told us where our lands had extended previously into the four western states and so with that knowledge when we were having a dispute with our neighboring tribe there, we had this dispute for over 100 years, and how we got acquisition of our lands back, we went to court and fought over this trying to get our aboriginal lands back. So through a congressional act we acquired...the Congress allowed us to get up to 500,000 acres that we could put into trust. So through the congressional mandate, that's what happened with our tribe. And once when we were given the authority to go out buying land, we looked at the land, what was on the land -- including water rights -- because we needed water to survive and look at that in terms of putting an investment into the future for our young people."

Alfreda Mitre:

"The next part of the question is, given that there aren't too many tribes that have the same opportunity that the Hopi's have, what advice would you have to tribes in terms, should this opportunity become available to them, what advice do you have for them?"

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"I guess the advice I have for them is make sure you know your culture, your traditions because everything hinges on that and the places where you're going to identify that maybe once identified to your people. Be aggressive, pursue it because we all know that the federal government took our lands away and because of treaties or other tribes that are under the IRS or IRA [Indian Reorganization Act], they owe us a lot so I would advise that the people in the tribes pursue it aggressively."

Elsie Meeks:

"I have a question for you. Congratulations on being one of the finalists and for the work you've done. What do you see as the next phase in this process? What are your next goals? Is it more land purchase, is it trying to get businesses profitable or what..."

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"Right now, we have a limit of acquiring up to 500,000 acres to put into trust so we're still going to be looking for lands cause it's still available to us. The other part is also looking at economic opportunities. Right now we have established an economic development corporation and all of the purchases that we've made will transition into that corporation, so they're the experts at doing business so that part will be transitioned. The other part is, yes, a lot of education needs to be done at our local level because all of these years we've had our lands taken away and the Hopi people have been stretched out, put a lot of money into trying to get our lands back, a lot of time and effort has been put into that. Now they need to feel relaxed and there needs to be a lot of educating at the local village level whereby we tell them, ‘Yes, we are gaining our aboriginal lands back and you can make use of it of how you made uses of them before, a long time ago.' There's still a lot of challenges and opportunities out there for the Hopi people."

Oren Lyons:

"The land dispute between Navajo and Hopi is an old one. What was it that made the breakthrough to work together? How did you do that?"

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"There's one that's called the 1882 Land Case. That one we went to Congress to settle. Then there's another one that's called the 1934 Case. That one has been in court for a lot of years, but I think what the tribes decided to do was rather than having the court settle it because the courts don't know how we live on Hopi, how the Navajos live their lives. We came together with the Navajo Tribe and said, ‘This is our land, these are our people, we know what's going on with our lives. We don't want the federal government or the courts to settle this.' So we came together and we...what happened from that was we had a compact on the different areas where the tribe goes into the other tribe's lands to get herbs or do religious activities there. So that's how this one came about and right now the Hopi Tribe has approved the 1934 compact and it's before the Navajo tribal council. So if they approve it then that's the end of our land disputes that we have."

David Gipp:

"Where is the bed-and-breakfast ranch that John Wayne used to own?"

Cedric Kuwaninvaya:

"That's located in Eager, by Springerville in Arizona. I understand John Wayne turned several times in his grave when he heard that the Indians had conquered his ranch."

Gerald Clarke, Jr.: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Cahuilla Band of Indians Council Member Gerald Clarke, Jr. shares his thoughts about what he wished he knew before taking office as an elected leader of his nation.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Clarke, Jr., Gerald. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 20, 2012. Presentation.

"Thank you very much. I just want to start by saying I'm really honored to be here amongst you. At various times you're asked to speak at various events or what have you and this one to me really matters. So I am very honored to be here and to speak with you. How many of you heard your community in the previous presentation? Raise your hand. Yeah, me too. Me too. My tribe went through what's called the GANN [Governance Analysis for Native Nations] with the [Native Nations] Institute back in April and the whole time they're going through this standard approach I'm shaking my head. Sometimes I'm laughing, sometimes I'm crying. But that's us. Right? So one of the things I would stress is you're not alone. There's a lot of us that are in a similar situation.

Just a little bit about me is I was a college professor for about ten years. I left reservation, went to college. I come from a long line of alcoholics and it was very hard for both my sister and I to stay home and to be around that and so we left and went off to college and then we got teaching jobs, both of us, at different colleges. Again, we worked; I was in Oklahoma for about ten years. And we kept our ties back to the reservation, we came home every summer, but it was just really painful for us to live there full-time and that's why we didn't. My dad was an only son and so he ran the family's ranch and when he passed away in 2003 I quit my job and moved home [because] it was always just understood that as the only son that's what I was going to do. And so that's what brought me back to the reservation back in 2003.

And so I'm going to be painfully honest with you this morning. I think there's power in truth, in being honest about the current situation. And so you can, once we get the questions, feel free to ask me just about anything. Okay, so a little bit about my tribe. In the introduction, it was near Palm Springs. It is not Palm Springs. It's 40 miles southeast up in the mountains, even farther economically. Our reservation was set up in 1875 as an agricultural reservation. The Cahuilla people, there's a variety of Cahuilla bands. We're some of the first cowboys in California. As the Spaniards settled, did the missions, they needed someone to work the livestock and that's what we've kind of done for the last couple hundred years. We have approximately 240 adult members and we have monthly general membership meetings of which between 30 and 40 people show up. That's where most of the decisions get made. We are not traditionally democratic. And that was one of the things, when I experienced this session back in April, was does your governing system match your culture? And we were not traditionally democratic. We had an inherent line of leaders called 'the net,' and that actually wouldn't have been my lineage, but what they said went. I'm very culturally involved and I like reading the old records and talking to people. One of the things that I've found that was very striking is that when the net said something, you just did it, you didn't question it or anything like that. Today, if tribal council says something, you get laughter. There's not nearly that respect that there was back in the day and so it makes me wonder. Sonny and I just met this morning, we were talking about how in America we stress that this democratically elected governing system is the system and we criticize all nations in the world who are not democratic, but I can't help but wonder if that system really fits my tribe or not. We may be looking for something different in the future.

So back in the 1910s, actually, what happened was my great grandpa Pio [Lubo] and five other men were involved with the murder of the superintendent of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] on our reservation and they were all sent to prison. The real issue was the BIA not wanting to recognize the net and wanting to recognize their own person. And it ended up in this murder of the superintendent. They sent these men to prison and really kind of broke the chain really well that way. My great grandpa Pio actually died in prison; he never got to come back. But after that event, they imposed this Roberts Rules of Orders and this IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] kind of system. So we have five tribal council members that are elected -- chairman, vice chairman, secretary and two at-large members. These are non-paid positions. So each one of us has a job where we pay our bills and support our families, which is another hurdle I think that we struggle with. I think sometimes people think being on tribal council 20-30 years ago is the same as it is today, and there's just so much going on. I feel like I'm that guy --remember on the old like Johnny Carson [show] or whatever, spinning the plates and then you have to run back and keep them going? That's how I feel most of the time.

We have no constitution. We are a customs and traditions tribe, and that is something that is being looked at. It seems to me that we have a membership who likes to call on their customs and traditions when it's convenientand not necessarily consistently, and that has been a problem. All major decisions are made in these general membership meetings. The tribal council presents the issue, the grant opportunity, the resolution -- what have you -- and it's the membership who vote on approving that or not. Again, I said, 30 to 40 members actually show up to these meetings. So it's actually a small portion of the total voting membership who make these decisions. And I often talk about a silent majority. Our tribe I think has a silent majority who -- and this is part of the brain drain that was spoken of earlier -- we have a number of educated people within our tribe who, starting like in the 70s and the 80s, they went, got educated, they came back, they did kind of what I'm doing, got fed up and now they're off doing their own things with law firms or what have you. And so there's a silent majority who doesn't come to the meetings who has certain ideas, but it's this core 30 or 40 people who really end up making a lot of the decisions.

We could spend all day on this: ‘What I wish I knew before I became a tribal leader.' Accounting: it's important to rely on -- and I made this presentation specifically for the emerging tribal leaders -- you have to rely on your experts, your professionals trained in your field. We have a CFO [chief financial officer] and they are in charge of doing...bring an outside audit firm come in annually. They're in charge of overseeing the monthly financials. I wish I knew more about accounting, because just because they say something doesn't mean it's true. And when I got in office I found out that we were like four years behind on our annual audits and this is something that wasn't really relayed. They were saying, ‘Oh, yeah, it's going, it's in the works,' and just kind of pacified the membership, but it wasn't happening. So I wish I knew more about accounting.

Law. Tribal law. What a mess, huh? Nothing is black and white; everything is gray. It will be applied in some cases where it's convenient. And I'm not talking tribally; I'm talking the state or the feds even. And then if it's going to get kind of messy for them, they don't want to deal with it, they don't have the resources, they just don't apply it. There's no consistency at all.

Public safety. One of the things my sister and I -- whose also on council -- we tried to bring in our own tribal police and tried to get some grants to get that going, because I'm a firm believer that stability, safety, those things are core things that need to be done. In a way it's economic development, too. Who wants to come and invest in your tribe if there's no stability, if there's no safety?

ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act]. I heard an ICWA person earlier, I forget who it was. Okay, over here. Wow! ICWA is kind of its own entity. My sister, in addition to be on council, she's our domestic violence advocate for a consortium of four tribes in our area. And when we first got in that, my belief -- okay, so you have a husband and spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend, they're beating each other up. We'll split them up, that sounds good to me. There's kids in every one of these cases, just about. What do you do with the kids? And so this ICWA thing is very, is going to be, for those of you who are just now getting on council, this is going to be something you're going to have to deal with. Hopefully some of you have your own social services programs. We don't. So the tribe really has to educate itself. We have a five-council team, so my sister has kind of picked up that ball and said, ‘Okay, I'm going to do what I can to study up and learn all about ICWA.' [Audience question] Indian Child Welfare Act, it has to do with custody, traditional tribal adoptions, all these kinds of things. It's very complicated. And the other thing -- and some of you in this room know this -- you're going to spend a lot of time educating other people about these things. The county, the state social workers, half of them don't even know what ICWA is either, and so you having to educate them.

I'm a rancher and I recently got involved with the National Conservation Resource Service about trying to get some grants for range improvements and things like that. And so I met with their tribal liaison and apparently I guess his credentials were he watched Dances With Wolves once or something, I don't know. He had no clue about tribes at all. He's the tribal liaison, so here I am teaching the tribal liaison. I went through a two-year process of trying to get my ranch registered and in the end he said, ‘Okay, all we've got to do is get a copy of your deed and we'll send it in.' And I'm like, ‘Wait a minute.' I said, ‘We don't have deeds. We're assigned on the reservation, not even allotments, assignments.' And he didn't even know anything about that, what to do. So that caused me another two years of going through all these systems, going to national conventions, and meeting with the USDA. And so a lot of time is spent educating other people.

IGRA [Indian Gaming Regulatory Act], gaming is big. I'm not a fan of gaming at all and so I allow another member of our tribal council to be more up on those things. But it's good to know. It's good to know your rights if you are thinking about gaming or getting into gaming.

Environmental protection. The important things to know... these are the things that I just brainstormed all the things that I deal with.

Taxation. Recently the Board of Equalization in California notified our tribe and asked us to give them a list of all the businesses on the rez so they could tax them. Pretty alarming when you think about sovereignty and such. And so we didn't participate. But it's good to know what your rights are in tax law.

Budgeting, making budgets. It's a constant thing that you have to deal with. Emergency management is something that is becoming more and more...you hear it more and more within tribal governments. Working with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] is a complete headache as well. You see on the news, oh, they're helping this community and that community and it's not nearly as streamlined as they try to make it. It's not nearly as, really as helpful. They're coming from a national office, coming to your community trying to tell you what your community needs or what have you and it doesn't work.

State legislature and federal legislature. I'd never been to the state capitol until I got on tribal council; we've gone and met with representatives, been to Washington D.C. as well. I will say that one of the battles we have within our tribe is that some people want to get all tied up in the little local family disputes that are happening on the reservation and don't really understand you've got to go to your state legislature if you want to promote certain laws or you want to get certain help getting certain projects accomplished. You've got to start...you've got to get to know these people. In California, we have term limits which means every two years we get to re-educate all the new people and so that again is another...I remember, ‘Get these career politicians out of there.' At the time I was like, ‘Okay, that sounds okay.' But now that I'm in politics myself, I see it's just a constant having to go back and teach them about sovereignty, about taxation issues, about gaming issues or what have you.

When I first got on council or before I got on council, I just saw, I would sit in these general membership meetings and I was like, 'Man, is anybody doing anything?' It just didn't seem like anybody was really doing anything. Once I got in office, I realized everybody's trying to do everything, and we've lost a lot of good personnel in our accounting department, tribal administrator, because you've got too many people trying to tell the employees what to do and it's really been a nightmare. And as far as a tribal leader goes, I think you have to have strength to say, ‘No, I'm not going to get involved with that. That's not my duty.' Recently, in the past year, we developed an economic development corporation, an LLC [limited liability corporation], and they elected a board of tribal members. And they're the ones that are involved with overseeing the management of the tribal business enterprises. So this is new just within the last year, and I can tell you that we have tribal council members who don't like it and who are constantly wanting to interfere with those enterprises. We do have a small gaming facility and the tribe has benefited almost nothing from that gaming facility, because when that passed and gaming came into California, a lot of unscrupulous backers swooped into Indian Country and a lot of tribes were taken advantage of and I feel like our tribe was one of those. And so this gaming facility is still open. I'm surprised with the downturn it's even still open because we are in a very rural area. It stands on this hill right where everybody can see it. It's almost a beacon of our failure. And Steve talked about [it], it's bad enough when outside people think you're incompetent, but it's when your own people think you're incompetent that it's really sad. We hope to turn that around.

And part of, I think, the turnaround is to get away from micromanagement. Let the businesses run themselves, allow your professionals to do their job. We had a tribal member who was doing a mulching project and there was some trash mixed in with the mulch and so tribal members were concerned, and they should be. We have an environmental program. We have our director who's a highly educated and trained professional. He went over there, he did a site visit, he did tests, he sent off samples for testing and he brought it back and he said that it was even cleaner than what they were claiming to begin with. The membership didn't like that answer so they...and it's like, if you have professionals, let them do their job and trust that they're doing their job. This micromanagement, it becomes very politicized. And Steve was talking about that earlier where, ‘Let's get rid of this person and let's get one of my cousins in there,' what have you. It takes strength as a tribal leader to tell your cousin, ‘No, you're not qualified. Maybe go to school and then we'll put you in there.'

It's not just a job, it's an adventure. Before I took office, I knew I'd have to go to meetings and I do think I've put on the 20 pounds, the tribal council 20 pounds, [because] I'm sitting all day in these meetings. But what I didn't know is I would be woke up at three in the morning with a car flipped over in the middle of the road or a domestic violence incident or a shooting or what have you. You can be a council member, but I think there's a difference between a council member and a tribal leader and it's all encompassing. You have to walk the walk to try to get these things done. But it's a lot more than simply going to these meetings.

Self-determination. I just put it down exactly how I believe. I should say my dad was full blood and my mom was a redhead from Texas and their marriage lasted about three years -- long enough for me and my sister -- but everything that could go wrong, miscommunication culturally or whatever. And my mom would say, ‘Those Indians,' which is a bad way to start. ‘They have all this land and they're just letting it lay and doing nothing with it.' I don't think she ever understood it's kind of nice that way, too. But one of the things...I heard all of that -- that we were lazy, that we never did anything for ourselves, we're waiting for the handout. But I've read Cahuilla people are very self-determined people or at least we used to be and when the reservation was formed, the only thing that the Cahuilla people wanted from the federal government was a paper defining the four corners of the reservation. We didn't want free housing, we didn't want any of that stuff. And my dad was the chairman in 1970 and he was trying to bring these free houses in through HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], or whatever program it was back then, and it got voted down. And his mom -- my grandma -- voted against it. And he was all mad [because] he was trying to help his people. But I don't think, I think the older people understood that you help yourself. And that's been a really tough struggle for me, is when is it helping your people and when is it enabling your people? That's a very hard thing to deal with. And so I heard that a lot, that we wouldn't do things for ourselves. Now that I'm in there and I'm trying to get some things going, the BIA, other federal agencies, the state, they don't want you to do any of this stuff for yourself, they really don't. This is my perspective.

My sister and I wanted to have our own tribal law enforcement and we have got nothing but criticism and friction from our county sheriff who has that coverage area. A tribal member, who is actually a cousin of mine, pulled a gun on me and my uncle in front of my house and I was able to diffuse the situation but my wife called the sheriff. Anyway, I went to bed by the time a thousand lights pull up, and I had to get up and he said, ‘Okay, we had a call about a gun.' I was just like, really? I could have been out there dead. We don't get service. We wanted to serve ourselves. And think, with the state budget crises throughout the nation, the more the tribes do for themselves the less the state, the less the federal government has to do. But they don't want it. It's easier to keep the status quo. I'm also in the process of starting our own fire department and again through Cal Fire, again in California, nothing but hurdles thrown at me to start this up because if we start answering our own fire calls on our reservation then Cal Fire can't answer them. So their call volume goes down, guess what, they get less money from the state for that station. So I go to these meetings and they're talking about reimbursements and budgets and things and I'm like what about health and safety? So keep that in mind that just because you want to do it doesn't necessarily mean that other people want you to do it.

It really has...I don't want to present myself as I have all the answers. Really, it's been a struggle and the age thing I think is also...I see some younger people in here. It's strange -- I just turned 45 years old and it's strange to call myself a tribal leader. I was always raised to respect the people older than me, the elders, and it even is spelled out in our creation beliefs. But at the same time, and this is part of that truth element, I've seen some older people who are making decisions not based on the benefit of the tribe or the whole, the community. And I'm ashamed to say that and I feel guilty for saying that -- again for how I was raised -- but I see that and I want to put that out there because it's a conflict for me in these meetings to have to go against people that are older than me. But it's something that as a tribal leader you have to deal with. Again, my dad passed away, he was my go-to guy and then another elder who was my go-to person passed away a couple years ago. So right now I'm kind of looking for that guidance a little bit. And if it's not there, you've just got to go with your gut instinct of what you feel is right I think.

Another issue is tribal time is not the same as state legislative time; it's not the same as county budget time. Our creation story tells us about the creation and nothing happens overnight, everything takes time. And when I got on council, ‘Ah, I'm gung ho, I want to get this done and get that done.' And now I see I've got to slow down and really think about things and plan and try to do what I can while I'm in there. And what I found, another thing I found is it's all about, what is it about? It's all about communication. I've sat in general membership meetings where there's like two factions fighting, but it's obvious that they both agree, they're both on the same page. Yeah, okay. But neither side kind of understands that they're both agreeing and I'm just like, wow, this is... Communication. What a rare skill, to really be able to get your point across and to have other people understand. Our meetings are horribly long and a lot of it is just lack of communication. I think it could be cut in half if it was a little more efficient and people had that ability. And it's tough; it's definitely an art. Keep it simple. Keep it concise. That sounds funny, to rehearse, but I rehearse a lot before I go into my meetings so I can present it in a way that's understandable. Because you're in the mix, you're the expert in that issue because you're the one fighting with the county or working with the BIA or whatever. And then these people come in once a month so you've got to be able to relay that.

So there's that tribal time, you've got to have patience even if you don't get something accomplished. And like the police [force] that my sister and I were trying to do, it was voted down I think [because] some people thought we were trying to be Big Brother or something as opposed to just public safety. But maybe you introduce the idea first. Maybe it gets shot down. Maybe next year, okay, let's relook at that or what have you. And if you can kind of get the current going maybe eventually it'll happen.

This was some advice that was given to me back when I was teaching in Oklahoma from a man who I respect a lot. ‘Do not expect the same of others that you would expect of yourself.' I'm not a very good delegator because I don't trust anybody to do as good of a job as I could do. But what ends up happening is I get overwhelmed and overloaded and then it doesn't get done very well or at the last minute. So trust the people around you. If you expect the same out of them as you expect out of yourself, you're going to be disappointed for the rest of your life I think. So you've just got to check your expectations a little bit, do your best, absolutely but don't expect that out of others. I think that's all I've got. I appreciate the time and I guess we'll have questions later, so I'll be happy to answer anything."

Erma Vizenor: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The White Earth Nation Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

White Earth Nation Chairwoman Erma Vizenor discusses some of the historical factors that eventually compelled her and her nation to undertake constitutional reform, and the issues her nation has encountered as they work to ratify a new constitution and governance system.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Vizenor, Erma. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens: The White Earth Nation Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Presentation.

"Good morning. At home we say, '[Anishinaabe language].' Good morning. I want to thank everyone for being here, and to come to such a beautiful place. I came in late last night, so all I saw as the cab was driving me in was this huge place with all kinds of lights. And I was so anxious to see it this morning and it's gorgeous. Your home, your beautiful home, yes. I'm just sorry I can't stay very long today, but I want to thank my dear friend Manley Begay for inviting me to this seminar. He contacted me at least two-and-a-half, three months ago, and of course I checked off the date and made sure that I had this time open. So Manley and I, way, way back we started our doctoral program together at Harvard. This is kind of funny because this is how things happen but we were just overwhelmed with everything and we were also changing Harvard at the same time, because I know that we worked hard to get the Harvard [University] Native American Program as it is today. So we were overwhelmed with all of our doctoral studies and Manley and I said, we were sitting there and he said, ‘Yeah, we're going to go home in three years. We're going to go back where we belong.' Well, Manley stayed on at Harvard for 12 or 13 years doing good work at the Kennedy School of Government. I went home after three years and I got into a reform movement to oust corruption in my tribe and I did that for five years. All good work, necessary work. We didn't leave as we should. The day that I...or a week after the indictments came against three council members for bid rigging, election fraud, embezzlement theft, all kinds of crimes, a week after that I received a letter from Harvard. The letter said, ‘You come back and finish your dissertation or else by the end of...by the spring of 2006 we're going to drop you.' So I jumped on the plane and went back to Harvard and worked very hard, had to do everything over again, and I didn't write a masterpiece but I finished my dissertation and graduated that spring.

We as Indian people, I just want to say and commend all of you because most of us have to run twice as hard, work twice as hard, run twice as fast to keep up and that's the way it is. I don't think anything comes easy for us. I want to say that I am...say a little bit about the White Earth tribe. We are called; the federal government calls us the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Indians. I have gotten, I have worked hard to get our people -- although when we sign our documents with the federal government I have to use that name -- but amongst ourselves we call ourselves a nation because that's what we are. We always have to remember that we are what we call ourselves. I say to our people back home, ‘A band? My goodness, we're a nation of many bands and we think about a band -- loose, disorganized, small. We're more than that, we're a nation.' And so the White Earth Nation is located in northern Minnesota. We're one of 11 tribes, seven Ojibwe tribes and four Dakota Sioux tribes in the southern half of the state. White Earth is the largest tribe. We have 20,000 members and we're part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, which is White Earth, Leech Lake, Fond du Lac -- and I know Chairwoman Diver was here yesterday -- Grand Portage, Bois Forte and Mille Lacs. We comprise the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, which is an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] structure created in 1936. The Red Lake Nation is not a part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. The Red Lake Nation is Ojibwe -- and we have a good relationship with Red Lake -- but Red Lake is unique. It's a closed reservation because they didn't participate in the Allotment Act, the Dawes Act. They kept all their land in common and didn't allow...didn't participate so the land was not allotted and consequently lost. Wise chiefs in those days.

That did not happen to White Earth. White Earth was allotted all out and White Earth...and Red Lake by the way was the federal government's solution to the Indian problem in Minnesota and created these two large reservations to move all the Indians in Minnesota to the Ojibwe Indians, Chippewa Indians to these two reservations. Relocate the Indians again and get them all together where we can oversee and control them, but that didn't work because our Indian people did not leave their homelands and so we still have our reservations up of Fond du Lac and Mille Lacs and Leech Lake and Bois Forte. People went home again, even if some of them did come to White Earth. So that didn't work, but White Earth is the largest tribe because many of the different Ojibwe people came to White Earth. And the land was allotted out at White Earth and consequently because of that allotment process the land was lost, it was swindled, it was theft, it was lumber companies and farmers and people who were homesteading. So our land was lost. We had...our reservation was established in 1867 and comprised approximately 850,000 acres of land. By the 1900s, we had 50,000 acres of land left. The rest was lost. So land acquisition is a huge priority, large priority for us. Today, when the federal government organized the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, the six reservations together, it put all of our land in common. We have approximately 60,000 acres of land at White Earth out of the 850,000 acres. That's in tribal trust land and it's under the ownership of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe in common. I worked hard to get that back and some of the tribal leaders want to be paid out within the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and I tell them, ‘I don't see your tribe in our treaty.' But that's the federal government creating these problems for us as Indian people.

The governance of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe is an IRA constitution adopted in 1936 and is a very...since 1987...Vernon Bellecourt was a White Earth secretary/treasurer and was a very progressive man. He initiated a resolution that the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe conduct a constitutional convention. I admire Vernon because he was a visionary person. And in 1987, the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe passed that resolution but it never to this day has not held a constitutional convention. Well, we have an IRA constitution and it's very, very difficult for our people -- how many of us read our state constitutions or our United States Constitution and figure out what our rights...how many of us do that? We know it is taught in our schools, but our constitutions are not taught. And so when I came back from Harvard after I finished my classes, we had corruption in our tribe at White Earth, huge corruption. Our elections were fraudulent, we had bid rigging, and so I worked with elders on a grassroots reform movement and I spent the entire summer of 1991 in jail because we had all of this corruption. By 1995, and with the help of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, an investigation was done and indictments were issued and consequently a federal court trial. This grassroots movement really involved a lot of people at home and got them engaged.

When I was at Harvard, I studied the...Manley and I and Colleen Larimore, we did a paper together on community organizing. And so I learned some good skills there and so we engaged, I engaged the community, the reservation, which is a large area. It's a square that's 36 miles on each side and a lot of our people live in Minneapolis/St. Paul and they came up to help. So we had this huge momentum and change had to come and the people were, the people were empowered to make that change. We had to have open meetings every night, every night we had open meetings and it was spiritual because we had our spiritual people there and we always gathered around to pray first and we always said that we need the Creator to help us.

So in 1996 I was appointed the secretary/treasurer, which is the second role in government and I was elected to that position and re-elected in 1998. I lost my election in 2002. I lost it. But I ran on the platform of constitutional reform. Other tribal leaders run on it but don't do anything about it. But I did. I put together a committee and in 1997, '99 the committee drafted a constitution, I took it out to the reservation, to the Minneapolis area, and very few people showed up. It was a very, very difficult constitution to understand because it was...it talked about grand councils and it talked about language that we had never experienced before. And so when I lost the election in 2002, the constitution went off the radar screen, many things went off, went to the bottom of the drawer. I ran for election for the tribal chair in 2004 in the primary and I won the primary, beat the incumbent and constitutional reform was back on the radar screen again. And so we have, I facilitated, I organized and I facilitated all of the constitutional convention process from delegates, kept the entire process totally transparent and we drafted a constitution and we ratified it by the delegates about a year ago.

And then because...I say we're part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe with this IRA constitution, I've gone to the...now I'm at the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe level and I'm getting stalled. Some tribes don't want to change, and I think it's because of the colonization and the institutional oppression that people haven't come out of yet. I really do. Don't see the need to change, don't see the need to. There are some issues that are huge. The blood quantum issue is a huge issue, very controversial. Well, that's one of the most controversial ones is the blood quantum and in our new constitution we...our delegates voted on lineal descent. We are terminating ourselves, people, if we cooperate with the federal government on one-fourth blood quantum. We just need to do the math and pretty soon within...we think of seven generations, by seven generations most of us will be gone. That's a controversial issue and even our tribal members in our constitutional conventions get to the point where they say...they get into ethnic cleansing. We have African...our tribal members have married to African-Americans and look like African-Americans and they don't want them there because they're black. I say, ‘My goodness, ethnic cleansing? I can't believe that.' But that's where we're at sometimes. I want to just...I know I don't have a lot of time, but I want to just stop right now and turn it over. Thank you very much.

Ben Nuvamsa: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Chairman of the Hopi Tribe Ben Nuvamsa speaks about his tenure as the elected chief executive of his nation, and how the governance issues he and his nation have experienced in recent years offer important lessons to other Native nations.  

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Nuvamsa, Ben. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 24, 2010. Presentation.

"What I have for you is basically a Reader's Digest version of what happened at Hopi. Manley Begay did a great precursor of the presentation that I'm going to make. I'm going to talk a little bit about the situation I got into, walked into and what happened. And I'm going to show you an example of really what happened. We talk about separation of powers, we talk about balance of powers, we talk about sovereignty and those kinds of things and I'm going to actually tell you really what happened. It's a lesson learned, and I think that's the intent of this session is to teach you how to, tell you how we can learn from this experience. With that...Manley we're 'Nation A,' Hopi Tribe, in Manley's case study. We had all the resources, we had the tribal membership and so on, but there was no strategic direction and so on and a lot of the faults that Manley spoke of for Nation A.

Let me tell a little bit about the situation that I walked into. Our former chairman was removed by the tribal council for I'll just say conduct unbecoming, and so that...he was like eight months into his term and so that required a special election. So I had really actually thought maybe not running that time but maybe the next term, but then I kind of got recruited, kind of like what the chairman here did. I kind of got recruited into it. In fact several emails and phone calls and constant barrage of these requests and I finally decided, 'Okay, let me do it,' so we did. So there was actually the national limelight on Hopi even on the Jay Leno Show. Some of you have seen that possibly, perhaps. And so the people were wanting to rebuild that credibility, the integrity of the Hopi Tribe. Because after all, we were the most traditional tribe in North America, we're supposed to be the peaceful people and all that. And there was great expectations of that new chairman, whoever that might be, to pick up the pieces and get us back on the road. So I thought that maybe with my education, my experience, and the vigor I had to step up to the plate -- not that I was going to be the solution, but I knew it was going to be very, very tough because all the dynamics that are happening in tribal politics. So that was the situation.

There was a great expectation by the Hopi people of getting this new administration, getting back and regaining the status and the integrity of the tribe. As you all know, Indian politics is cutthroat politics, but I really didn't fully grasp that we've always had this problem of the 'us against them' kind of feeling between the tribal council, the villages and the people, but I didn't realize that it was such a big division there. You also need to know that the Hopi Tribe is composed of 12 traditional villages, autonomous villages, and our constitution says they're self governing villages. So typically in any kind of government, you'll have three separate functions; you'll have the executive, the legislative and the judicial. At Hopi, we also have one important component and those are the villages. And so we've always had that conflict between the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act]-type constitution and our traditional governments. And I admire the brother, the sister tribes of New Mexico -- the Pueblos -- and how they're able to merge and incorporate their traditions in with their modern ways and the religion there, but at Hopi it was quite different.

I didn't also realize that the role of the tribal attorney played quite...it was just so significant and major that perhaps part of the problems we are encountering right now is because that attorney played a real significant role in basically shaping how the council operates and the advice that the attorney gave to the tribal council. And then there's the role of the outside interests and you keep that in mind because we talk about economic development, there are going to be companies out there, corporations out there -- and I think that as the Chairwoman [Karen Diver] talked about is -- that they're going to want that piece of the action. Well, in the case of Hopi, it was even deeper than that and it is even deeper than that and that is they're trying to regulate how you govern. And I'll talk a little bit about that later, but it was just so influential that it almost seemed to be that our council, some of our council members are kind of like puppets to these corporations and to the attorneys. And we talked, and Manley talked a little bit about that self-rule; you call the shots.

We always had our own separation of powers and balance of powers that we had, because one society would oversee the other. For example, I'm Bear Clan. At Hopi [Hopi language], which is the village leader, usually come or do come from the Bear Clan. And we don't go and appoint ourselves to be the village leader. Somebody else in another society picks that person. The One Horn Society picks that person and there is a process, a ceremony and process that then the person is then ordained, is given certain duties and responsibilities by this One Horn Society. And if that person is not functioning according to what they had prescribed to him, they will bring him down to the kiva and basically have like a performance evaluation, tell him this is how he's supposed to be. And that leader is supposed to be a humble leader. And there's a story that goes the Creator or at least the keeper of this world has this...gave this -- Joan's [Hopi language] said that he gave the people a planting stick and a bag of seeds. That's all that he gave them. What does that mean? Those are really powerful words that you go and you have to live a simple life. You can survive by what I gave you, the know-how. So that's the...and then we have certain other societies at Hopi, the kiva chiefs and so on. Their names are appointed or designated in a traditional process.

The IRA constitution was something very, very outside of our normal process and today, even today we are having problems with that. In my experience as chairman, if there's a final analysis of my experience as chairman, it would be, one of them would be the constitution and the form of government that we have, in which we have to incorporate our cultural, tribal values into those principles, in those provisions in our constitution. And I guess...so where we're at with what happened is if you don't have this balance, and if you have leaders that are sitting on the council don't have that appreciation and the need to be truly self-governing and to be truly looking out for tribal members and the long-term vision of Hopi, of the tribe, you're going to have an ineffective government. And you're also going to see how it impacts the traditional side, and it has, because the role of the [Hopi language] has been compromised, because he's supposed to be a sacred person, a religious person. Well, he's now...he has now been brought into the political circle and is appointing tribal council members to the council, which is not his responsibility and the constitution does not provide for that. And it's now filtered into the kivas, into the ceremonies and so on, where we now have conflicts and so on. It has broken apart or at least [caused] some conflicts within families and so on. And so that's really unfortunate. But those are the kinds of things that are happening.

Where is Hopi now? I think we're in a transition. We have to look at now what, who we are and where we need to be. We're at a kind of a transition happening or needs to happen from this form of IRA-type constitution that we've been living with since 1936 -- that's when the tribe adopted the constitution -- up [until] today. And look at the experiences that we gained, we've lived through and be able to fix that, so that it can be more meaningful to us in how we can operate, because I think that that's one of the real -- the things that I know that the Udall Foundation talks about and the [Harvard University] Kennedy School of Government which I've worked with before, helped out in certain projects -- is that we need to fix our institutions. We need to really look at what is our institution that we would govern ourselves, our constitutions, our codes and so on? We have to take a look at that and make sure that it's meaningful to us in how we are as a tribe. Not every tribe is the same. Therefore the IRA was this cookie-cutter thing that didn't work. It perhaps served the purposes for the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], but it certainly created a lot of problems for tribes. So it all goes back down to governance and that's what Manley talked about. We have to fix our constitution, our institutions, so that it goes back to how we govern ourselves. What happens at Hopi and the lessons that we learned from this experience is going to define our future, and I think that's what we need to be looking at and how we need to be looking at this unfortunate situation.

The importance of separation of powers -- and I have a case study later on -- but separation of powers is this political doctrine that says that the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government are supposed to be kept distinct to prevent abuse of power. So that is why it's so important that as I try to explain to you that in our traditional way there is no, there was no abuse of power because we had our checks and balances, we had this society looking over that society and we had a village chief [Hopi language] that's supposed to be a humble religious man and didn't go out and expound on what he has accomplished and so on, but a very simple man. That was his role. I guess I'll get to the case study at the end.

Basically we have learned -- if there's any one accomplishment in my administration -- we have basically learned that there is some deep, deep problems in our government and that we can learn from that and that we can shape our future from those lessons learned. In a typical democracy, the central institutions for interpreting and creating laws that are the three branches of the government, the impartial judiciary -- and you'll see what happened at Hopi -- a democratic legislature -- those are real good things, right? -- and an accountable executive. Those are kind of the principles that we have with the separation of powers and there should be a system of checks and balances, but you will see that all that went by the wayside.

The other thing is that it's so important on the rule of law that the rule of law is there. It is the most basic, in its most basic sense, the rule of law is a system that attempts to protect the rights of the citizens from arbitrary and abusive use of governmental power. I brought lawsuits after lawsuit against the tribal council. I won every case. On appeal also, I won those. But you know what, so what? They didn't care. So that's why it's really important that the rule of law needs to be complied with, because it's supposed to apply to everybody. No one is above the law.

The role of the tribal courts; it is so important. That to me is the most fundamental or the core of our sovereignty is to be able to have a court system that can interpret your laws and settle these controversies because if you have a tribal court system that is so corrupt and compromised, you're not... just basically your sovereignty is going to be wasted. And so fortunately at Hopi we had a great court system and that's continuing on. I think back in 350 B.C., Aristotle said, 'The rule of law is better than the rule of any individual,' and that's true. It's really important that you have a good court system that makes the right decisions or interprets your tribal laws the right way and make sure that the tribal council, everybody in your tribal government, complies with it. And I think that that's, to me, is the most important thing. And even though we have those decisions our people are still not complying with it. I just want to also quote that President [Barack] Obama said back when he had just gotten elected, he said, 'Transparency and the rule of law will be the touch tones of this administration.'

The other things that I think that I probably should have really honed, boned up on, is parliamentary procedures. It is so important. When you're chairman, when you're presiding over a council meeting -- you can picture this -- 22 council members all hate you, most of them hate you. And there's tribal members out there, they're probably supporting you, but they basically, they can't really say much. And these people are going to have what I call parliamentary trickery. They have an agenda and they're going to do whatever they can to trick you, parliamentary trickery. And so it is important, and you are in charge, you are in charge, know your rules. You have meeting rules, study them. Robert's Rules are only guides, but there are some good things in there that you can use. Robert's Rules are meant to protect the minority. You saw what happened on CNN just a few days ago. All these parliamentary procedures, effective use of them, and the Speaker of the House or the presiding officer right there just controlling the process as it goes through. I wish every tribal council meeting could be conducted that way so that we have some fairness. It is so...I don't know how many of you have presided over council meetings, but you have to look at body language. That person is doing some signs or they may just really hate what you said or they're sending notes or maybe nowadays texting back and forth. But you have to be so aware of all of those. So parliamentary procedures is so really important.

The art of conducting meetings, understanding group dynamics; you look at where they come from, what village they come from. At Hopi, everybody's related or maybe in Indian Country everybody's related. I'm Bear Clan and in our culture I'm a parent or father to everybody, even you. You're my children. So you have to keep those in perspective. Anticipate what the other side's going to do. Learn how to be able to strategize. Okay, this person has this objective or this person has this agenda and so on. Talk to them, say what you're proposing is going to be good for them and then maybe try to convince them. What I usually do is I have little meetings before the upcoming council meetings and try and get support. Have a legislative strategy, have a legislative agenda and that way you're not all over the place. You talk about strategic planning, that's part of it. And the chairman just said here, was it planning to plan or lack of planning is planning for failure.

I'm going to jump to some of the other things. Some of the lessons learned from this is that there is significant influence from the outside. You have to know who you're dealing with, hope America is out there. You've got your natural resources, you've got your oil, you've got gas, coal, water, land, now solar, and everybody's going to want that and they'll do whatever they can to get that, even through the state legislature or federal legislation and that's what we have at Hopi. Water rights -- it is so important to be able to have your water rights and be able to say, 'This is mine,' because it's going to be leverage you're going to use in negotiations. At Hopi, some of you know about the Peabody Coal, our vast coal resources. Our neighbors from Navajo, probably the country's richest coal deposits -- the highest quality, the low sulfur coal, very little what they call 'the cover.' So it's easily accessible for open-pit mining. Well, we are at the...we hold the cards to energy production in Arizona, California and Nevada. And so the State of Arizona plays a big role, the state governor plays a big role, Salt River Project plays a big role, the owners of the Navajo generating station play a big role including...that goes into California. The federal government, Office of Surface Mining, Minerals Mining and Bureau of Reclamation, the State of California, State of Nevada and the Navajo Nation. Know who you're dealing with and it always goes back to...some of you heard about this term economic sovereignty. What does that mean to you? It goes back to what Manley says, be able to call the shots. Talk about and protect that sovereignty but be able to say, 'This is my resource, this is my water, this is my coal, I'm going to make the decisions.' Don't let somebody else make those decisions for you.

We just recently won a major lawsuit against the Office of Surface Mining. Not as the tribe, we as the citizens. After I left office, we filed suit against the Office of Surface Mining for this life-of-mine permit that they were going to give Peabody Coal Company. The life-of-mine permit, because they were burning about 8.5 million tons of coal up in Navajo generating station, and the coal deposits were close to 800 million tons or a little over that, so that means Peabody would have access to our coal for over 100 years. That basically says to us, 'You're not going to have any kind of diversified economy, you're not going to be able to set and regulate the prices, you're not going to be able to determine how that coal is going to be mined and what's going to be manufactured from that,' and all of that. Well, Navajo was able to tax and back in 2005 figures were able to collect $20 million a year from Peabody Coal, the State of Arizona did the same, but Hopi did not. They didn't have an ordinance so we were getting no dollars. Part of economic sovereignty is going to be able to say, tax.

The other things is everything is a process, you have to go through the process and make sure that...sometimes you have to walk away from some of the battles. Choose your battles, but never lose sight of the big war that you're going to be fighting and the big picture. Be futuristic, look at the longer, some people say seven generations. Be visionary and think holistically, think and look at the big picture. And be very strategic, because if you're not strategic, a lot of things are going to or you're going to be doing things independently on your own. Take charge, you're the top elected official, but also exercise your responsibility, your authority responsibly and in the Indian way have respect, [Hopi language], for everybody.

One of the things that I think really, the teachings I had in my upbringing is what really kind of helped me survive is having a really solid foundation as a Hopi person. But my work is not done; it will continue. One more comment before I quit. In the Hopi way, our knowledge, our philosophy about a leader, a [Hopi language], is his path is like a sharp blade of a knife and you walk that real fine line; it's really sharp. If you veer one way, you're going to get hurt, you're going to get cut; if you veer the other way, the same thing. So as you're walking down that fine line, that path, you look back and make sure that your children are still following you, your people are still following you. If they are still following you, you're on the right path. But if you look back and your children are fighting and they're not there, then you have to assess yourself. 'What is wrong? Do I need to correct myself? Do I need to do certain things, or do I need to step down?' That is the teachings we have in Hopi and it goes back to management and leader, and that is you cannot -- the chairman here just talked about that -- you cannot take sides. You have to look at the big picture. So that concludes my statement, and if you want to take a look at my case study, come here at lunch time and I'll have more time to talk to you about it. [Hopi language]."

John "Rocky" Barrett: A Sovereignty "Audit": A History of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Governance

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Native Nations Institute
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Citizen Potawatomi Nation Chairman John "Rocky" Barrett shares the history of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and discusses its 40-year effort to strengthen its governance system in order to achieve its goals.

Native Nations
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Citation

Barrett, John "Rocky." "A Sovereignty 'Audit': A History of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Governance." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 11, 2012. Presentation.

"[Potawatomi language]. It's nice to see all of you emerging tribal leaders. That's wonderful. I like to think of myself as emerging, hopefully on a constant basis. I was first elected to office in 1971 as a 26-year-old whatever I was at the time. I was selected as vice chairman. I was named to finish a term and then I was...the two year terms back then. Then I was elected about seven months later for a two-year term as vice chairman. Vice chairman of what was hard to say at that time. My uncle was the chairman. My mother and her eight brothers and sisters were agency kids. We grew up...they grew up on the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] Agency. My grandfather was the BIA marshal then or the tribal...or the BIA police. And so that area...I am one of the eighth generation of my family consecutively to be chairman of the tribe. Back in those days when that vacancy came up, it came up because my uncle had been named chairman because...he was the vice chairman and the chairman had gotten removed from office for carrying around the tribal checkbook in his hip pocket and writing checks to the grocery store for groceries. And we only $550 in the bank and he used about $100 of it to pay his grocery bill and the feds got him. So he was removed from office and my uncle was made chairman, which created a vacancy in the vice chairman spot and so I was named to it.

And we went over to the BIA Superintendent's office. Now you've got to understand my uncle grew up on the Agency and the BIA in 1971 was the law. And he didn't believe you could have an official meeting of the tribal government without the Agency superintendent in the room and that the minutes of our meetings were not official unless they were filed with the BIA. So we went over to see the Agency superintendent and he was going to tell the superintendent that we were going...the tribe was going to appoint me as vice chairman. Now why, I don't know. But we go in and the Agency superintendent starts trying to talk him out of it and he finishes up by saying, ‘Now the last thing I want to do is hurt you guys.' And so as we're going out the door, my uncle turns to me and says, ‘That means it's still on the list,' to hurt us.

So I got the drift about then and, but...became the vice chairman and served two terms then I became director of the inter-tribal group. The State of Oklahoma forced all of the tribes -- the federal government forced all the tribes in the ‘70s to create inter-tribal corporations that were chartered C corporations or non-profit corporations in the State of Oklahoma. The federal government would not give money to an Indian tribe back in the start of the old [President] Lyndon Johnson program days. So you had to be given to a corporate entity that was in the state. And the state even tried to take 10 percent off the top of every federal dollar that came to Oklahoma as a condition. The issue back then was whether or not tribes were responsible enough to manage the money and everyone...I was the youngest person on the business committee. I was the only high school graduate; I was one of the three out of five who could read. All of the people on the business committee were smart but they were not educated people, but they had all grown up...of course, I'm not smart enough to know how to operate this damn thing. There we go. I did a good job of that, didn't I? Side to side or up and down? Ah, okay, that was the problem I went... I killed it. No? Ah.

But the Citizen Potawatomi Nation back then was the Citizen Band of Potawatomi Indians of Oklahoma, was the name of our tribe. The 'Band' was something the BIA stuck on us in 1867, actually 1861 when we separated from the Prairie Band when we were all one tribe. We tried to get Band out of our name for almost 75-80 years after that and finally were successful. We still can't get the BIA to stop calling us that even 20 years later. But we're the Citizen Potawatomi Nation; implication being that 'Band' is not a full-blown tribe.

But what's described as this audit of sovereignty -- we weren't that smart. We didn't just all of a sudden one day decide, ‘Oh, we're going to audit our sovereignty. Where are we sovereign? And where are we not sovereign? And here's what we're going to do about it.' We weren't that smart. We really didn't know what sovereignty meant. Remember, everyone on the committee, and this includes me, we were all children of the ‘50s and the ‘60s. Primarily, except me, were children of the ‘40s and ‘50s. You've got to remember what was going on about then. 1959, Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins of Utah chaired the Interior Committee of the Senate...Interior Committee on Indian Affairs and helped shepherd through House and Senate Concurrent Resolution 108 was provided for termination of tribes. The Secretary of Agriculture, who was also from Utah at the time, in the interest of doing something good for Indians, were tremendous proponents of termination and got it done. The McCarthy hearings were on about then and anybody who held things in communal ownership was probably a communist and that included Indian tribes. Yeah. And if you were an Indian leader and you didn't like the way the federal government treated you, it wasn't that you were saying that you didn't love the government, it's when you discovered that your government didn't love you is when all of a sudden things got rough.

And this was a tough period of time and everyone on the business committee, all five of us, were all a product of when self-governance and self-determination, that was the language of termination. Self-determination and self-governance meant termination. That's what they said they were going to do. And in those days you had to prove that you were going to be too broke and too incompetent to run your own affairs to keep from being terminated. If you had a business and you had money and you were conducting your affairs in some semblance of order, then you were eligible for termination and we were on the list. Why? I don't know because we had neither pot nor window. And it was...it was absurd that all the Potawatomis got thrown in there together 'cause we were down to $550 in the bank and two-and-a-half acres of land held in common, in trust, and about 6,000 in individual allotments. We were down to nothing and they were going to terminate us. And my uncle, listening to the Choctaw chief at that time who -- remember, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole chiefs were appointed by the president until some 20 years after that. They were not elected. So the Choctaw chief was a big proponent of termination. He believed that was the right thing to do. My uncle didn't think that we should be terminated but didn't even really know what we were being terminated from 'cause we didn't own the building where we met. It was a trailer that the [Army] Corp of Engineers had abandoned on a piece of land that the BIA had and they were letting us use it. We were pathetic, pitiful people.

And so when they started these hearings on Indian stuff and the outcome of it was Senate Resolution 108 and the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, Turtle Mountain Chippewa and all the tribes in the State of California, New York, Florida and Texas were to be terminated. Now 108 didn't terminate them, but it authorized the termination and then the BIA started working up the list. When I said earlier that the BIA superintendent said, ‘The last thing in the world we want to do is hurt you, but it's still on the list.' So, that was the mindset of our business committee and when I took office of our tribal government. Senator Watkins had the support of Senator Robert S. Kerr, the owner of Kerr-McGee Oil Company, to date the richest man who's ever served in the United States Senate and was the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate and coined the phrase what we call a Kerrism and that's still in use in Oklahoma is that, ‘If I ain't in on it, I'm ‘agin it.' And that's how he got in the uranium business. All that saved us was we sued the government in 1948 under the Indian Claims Commission Act and that lawsuit settlement was pending and tied up in the courts and if it hadn't been for that they would have terminated us 'cause you can't terminate someone who's in court suing the government cause it looks like you're trying to get rid of them to get rid of the lawsuit and that's all that saved us.

Very quickly, we came from Newfoundland down the Saint Lawrence River 1100, 1200 mini-Ice Age, ended up in Michigan, split from the other...the Ojibwa, Odawa, Ottawa people. We were all one tribe called Anishinaabe, we came into Michigan and settled. In the war with the Iroquois over the beaver trade they drove us all the way around the lake until the French armed us and then we drove them back to the east coast. We were in refuge in Wisconsin from the Iroquois attacks when the French, John Nicolet showed up with some priests and we helped unify the Tribes of Wisconsin against the Iroquois invasion and that group was able to drive them back once armed with the French connection. The French connection through a series of alliances, primarily inter-marriages and the inter-married French and Potawatomi became the Mission Potawatomi who became the Citizen Potawatomi.

But this area was an area that we controlled quite a large area, though it didn't show up on the slide, but it was a very large area around the bottom of Lake Michigan and then because we sided with the French against the British, with the British against the colonies, we ended up under the Indian Termination or the Indian Relocation rather, Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act and we got marched to the Osage River Reservation in a march of death along this route and the ones that didn't die on the walk, another fourth of them died that winter. My family survived it on both sides and in 1861 after the Copperhead [U.S.] President Franklin Pierce allowed settlers to come into Kansas on top of the reservations anyway without a treaty. We were on the Kansas/Missouri border. We were part of the Underground Railroad to help hide runaway slaves and transport them up north. And so we were part of the depredations of the Civil War from Missouri, a slave state, into Kansas.

And so we ended up getting out of there, separated from the Prairie Potawatomi in 1861, sold the reservation to the Atchison-Topeka and the Santa Fe Railroad in 1867, took the cash and bought this reservation for gold south of the Canadian River from the Seminole Reservation line to what's called the Indian Meridian that divides the state in half between the North and South Canadian rivers, became our reservation that we purchased. And we took United States citizenship as a body in 1867 in order to protect the ownership of that property as a deed. We were denied access to the courts in removal from Indiana. We had lawyers hired and people trying to stop the removal from Indiana and we were part of the group that was...the ruling was that because we were not United States citizens we could not plead our case in the United States courts. And hence the name Citizen Potawatomi was to defend the purchase of this property.

We came to a place called Sacred Heart. We had the Catholic Church with us and helped them form the first Catholic university and school, settled in Sacred Heart. We had a division over the Ku Klux Klan. We had a Protestant and Catholic business committee. Of course the Klan was as strong in Oklahoma and Indiana as it was in Mississippi and Alabama and it caused a great deal of trouble. The Shawnee Agency government in Shawnee where the Indian Agency was basically after the tribe was able to heal the split, we didn't have a headquarters after we left Sacred Heart. The trailer that you see on the bottom was a...belonged to the Corp of Engineers and it set on a surplus piece of property. I want to get a little larger version of that picture because it's so much fun. Car and Driver Magazine certified the three worst cars in U.S. history were the Ford Pinto, the AMC Gremlin and the Opel Cadet, and all three of them are parked right there. First thing we did was out of the 550 bucks, we spent $100 of it on that air conditioner 'cause it was too hot to sit in this trailer. The guy who got removed for writing those checks got drunk with his brothers and came to whoop us all at the first meeting and the chairman...I mean the guy who was supposed to succeed, because I got appointed he showed up, is how I got appointed. But he showed up to become the first choice appointee and he kicked a hole in the back of it right here 'cause this was the only door to get away from the impending fist fight. But it was mostly conversation, nothing happened. But that was us in '73 on a gravel road. That was all we had.

In 1982, I had left the inter-tribal group and left tribal office and gone back to the oil field and in 1982 my grandmother whose father and grandfather and great grandfather and great-great grandfather had been chairman and my mother's father and my grandfather also on his side had been and my grandmother called me up and told me that I needed to come back and I said, ‘I've already done my piece, grandma. You've got 26 other first cousins. Why don't you get them to do it?' And I got that silent thing and she scared me to death with that so I went back out there in '82, in 1982 because I'd had the previous history in office and as running the inter-tribal group. Became the tribal administrator in '82. I served until I ran for chairman in 1985.

But in 1984 there was a set of tribal statutes that were being promulgated by a now famous Indian lawyer named Browning Pipestem, the late Browning Pipestem. Browning Pipestem and William Rice, Bill Rice, made a presentation to us. Now I was the tribal administrator. The chairman at the time had a reading disorder so the way that business went of our tribe was he would go out in the hall and his wife would read it to him and he would come back in and reconvene the meeting and we would handle that piece of business. This meeting started about 5:30. It was about 1:00 am when Browning Pipestem and William Rice finally got the opportunity to speak. Browning Pipestem was married to a Citizen Potawatomi. He was Otoe Missouri and he started the meeting off, 'cause he'd been cooling his heals out in the hallway for about five or six hours, by saying, ‘I own more land than the Potawatomi tribe. I have more trust land than you do. My children have more trust land than you do. The area over which you govern, my family owns more than you do.' Well, it was kind of an odd thing to say, but I knew Browning was...he was a riveting speaker, and I knew he was going somewhere with this and he said, ‘You guys are known up north as the shee shee Bannock,' the duck people, because we were so good with canoes. Supposedly Potawatomis invented steam bending the keel of a canoe to avoid knocking a hole in the bough on rocks on rivers. ‘You guys are called the duck people by the other tribes 'cause you got around in so much active in trade and so much commerce and you got around so well on the water.' And he said, ‘Well, here's what sovereignty is. If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, it's a duck most likely, and sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty. It's not something that you get, something that you buy or something that someone gives you. It's like your skin. You had it, you are a sovereign, the United States signed treaties with you, 43 of them, all of them broken, the most of any tribe in the United States, the most treaties of any tribe. And they don't sign treaties with individuals and they don't sign treaties with oil field roughnecks. They sign treaties with other governments. You are a sovereign government with the United States and sovereign means the divine right of kings.' Well, he lost us there and he went on to say that...explaining that ‘unless you take on the vestiges of a sovereign government and exercise the authorities of a sovereign and recognize where you can exercise your sovereignty and where you cannot and what it is, then you're not. But if you do, you are.'

Well, for me the lights went on about then because the Thomas-Rogers Act constitutions in the State of Oklahoma, all the tribes in Oklahoma adopted the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act Constitution and it basically...that was back in the days when it was the fad, we all had to be corporations. I'm the chairman of the tribe and we have a vice chairman and a secretary/treasurer and we have members of the business committee, like a board of directors of a corporation. And somehow they thought that our way...best way to govern is that we would all get together in this thing called the general council that would be the supreme governing body of the tribe and that we all got together and everyone had an equal voice, the 18-year-old had an equal voice with the 65-year-old and everyone would get together and democratically design the best thing for the tribe, which is utter nonsense. Absolutely utter nonsense. We never governed that way in our history. If you got up in my day as a young person and had something to say in council, your grandpa would and could and should grab hold of your pants and jerk you back down and apologize for the fact that you spoke at all without asking the permission of your elders.

Of course our government, because it was a meeting...now we didn't have anything, we were broke. We didn't have any land, didn't have money, we didn't have anything but we could meet in the one general council that we had annually on the hottest day of the year and the last Saturday in June at our annual general council that convened about 1:00 and we'd keep going ‘til about 7:00 when the low blood sugar kicked in and it would come to blows. And as a result of that, we couldn't get a 50-person quorum. We had an 11,000-member tribe. We couldn't get 50 people to come to council. We used to have to get in our cars and delay the start of the meeting to go around and force your cousins to get in the car so we could get a quorum so we could convene the general council meeting. No one wanted to come and I don't blame them. I didn't want to go either. If I hadn't been in office, I wouldn't have gone. It wasn't government. It turned into a bad family reunion. That's all it turned into. And so the...what happened out of that, calling that government, was the more acrimonious the meeting became, the less people wanted to come, and the less like government it was. And it wasn't a government. We weren't governing, we weren't sovereign, we weren't anything.

So first thing that came to us is, ‘We've got to change this Thomas-Rogers Act thing.' The supreme governing body of the tribe can't be a meeting, and we could call special meetings of general council with a petition and 25 people could call a petition and you could get another meeting and get 50 people there and 26 of them could change everything that the previous one did. So one family could all get together and we could back and forth have these special general councils and we could reverse this and change this and chaos, utter chaos. So we decided to redefine what the general council was, if that was to be the supreme governing body of the tribe, it had to be the electorate, it had to be the people who were eligible to vote, the adults of the tribe. And so that was the first thing we decided to do, but that evening it ended about 2:00 and we all went home.

But the next few days we started talking about, ‘What does a tribal government do? What are we supposed to be doing here? We're getting a few bucks from the government here and there to try to keep the lights on.' We had $75 a month coming in of revenue and it kept the lights on but, ‘What are we?' So we got it down to three things: the land, the law and citizenship. What land do we govern? What's a law? So it was about three years and I got elected chairman in 1985. I came back in '82, I ran for chairman in '85 and have been in office since then. We've amended our constitution five times since then. One really major one and we have been to the United States Supreme Court three times, to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals seven times. We have been in litigation every year since 1985. We're still in litigation. I'm a lawyer's dream -- not one penny in tribute and millions for defense. That's not my saying.

When we talk about the land, how much land do we govern? Now we had that two-and-a-half acres of land that was held in common, we had about 60 acres that was in fee that was old school land and then we had about 6,000 acres of land that was held in trust that had a whole variety of heirs, very few people living on it. And you could fly over the countryside of Oklahoma on our reservation and here'd be a whole bunch of land that was all in cultivation, people making hay and raising cattle and then there's be an 80-acre piece right in the middle of it that was overgrown with blackjack trees and weeds and trash and no fences and crummy looking un-utilized piece of property and that was a Potawatomi allotment. That's how you could tell because with so many heirs no one actually owned it, no one actually used it. It was in the fourth generation of ownership of a family that was split up to where it wasn't happening. Plus the fact the government at that time, there was a big move that tribes that were allotted tribes that didn't live on Indian Reorganization Act reservations like most of you guys weren't really tribes and really didn't have a definable jurisdiction. That was before the federal definition of Indian Country.

How much land do we govern, what are our boundaries, what authority do we have over our land, can we buy more and will it become subject to the authority of our government and what's the difference between allotted land and tribal trust land? We didn't know that. We didn't know. We didn't know that allotted land was subject to the authority of the tribal government even though the only thing we had were resolutions. We didn't have statutes, we didn't have a code, we didn't have a court, we didn't have police, we didn't have the vestiges of the government, but we had resolutions. That's how we decided what to do and we could do a resolution that would have an impact on tribal trust land if you could survive the political outfall. We didn't know that. We didn't know that our boundaries where we could take land and buy the residual interests in the allotted lands was the original jurisdictional boundary of the reservation, the 900 million acres that we lost. What authority did we have over the land? We didn't know we had authority over anything. Remember, we thought we had to have permission from the Agency to meet. So it was the discovery and the inquiries that we began about what our land base was, what our boundaries were, where could we buy land and get it put into trust; we were told by the Agency superintendent that no individual could put land into trust. And the reason was that you had to be incompetent for them to put individual land into trust. And if you were smart enough to ask to get your land put into trust, you weren't incompetent. Catch 22.

The law. We didn't know we could pass a law. We were passing resolutions; we didn't know they were laws. We have a resolution, ‘We're going to meet next Friday and have a pie supper.' We didn't know that was the law. We didn't know a tribal resolution was law. When we enrolled someone, we didn't know we were behaving lawfully. We knew we had to follow the constitution. We thought the constitution was the only law we had and if it wasn't in there it didn't exist. If it wasn't in the book, in the constitution book, it didn't exist. How we enforced law. We didn't have police. The BIA had police but we didn't have police. We didn't know you could have police. We didn't have a judge for sure. The CFR courts hadn't even been invented.

In CFR, the Court of Federal Regulations, that didn't really start happening until about 1981, '80, in Oklahoma. Can we make white people obey our laws? Can white people come onto our land and shoot game? Can white people lay a pipeline right across our land and not tell us or get permission? Can they run cattle on these allotments which they were doing. Can they produce oil off of those allotments and not pay us? All of those things, we didn't know how to do that. Does the BIA, whose law...do we have any impact on the BIA, do they have to do what we say? Does the State of Oklahoma? And if we have laws is there a Bill of Rights? Can we pass a law that says that my political opponent needs to be put in jail for being a fool and is there an appeal? And worse yet, the big scary one, the word, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the one word nobody wanted to use was can we levy taxes? Whoo hoo hoo. Taxes.

Citizenship. We knew we could amend our constitution because they told us that the only way we were going to get this payment from the 1948 Indian Claims Commission, the 80 percent of the settlement that had been tied up since 1948, in 1969 is we had to have a tribal roll and the BIA told us that the only way you could be on the tribal roll was to prove that you were 1/8th or more Citizen Potawatomi. Now the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi were derivatives of one guy from the government in a log cabin in Sugar Creek, Kansas in 1861 who was told to do a census of the Potawatomi, the Prairie Potawatomi and the Citizen Potawatomi. And he told everyone that they had to appear. And as they came in the door, he assigned a blood degree based on what color their skin was in his opinion and full brothers and sisters got different blood degrees, children got more blood degree than their parents 'cause they'd been outside that summer and those were the blood degrees of the Citizen Potawatomi. There was a full-time, five-person staff at the central office of the BIA in Washington, DC, who did nothing more than Citizen Potawatomi blood-degree appeals, about 3,000 of the blood-degree appeals when I first took office. When I became chairman, it had grown to 4,000 or 5,000 and I was in the room when a guy named Joe Delaware said, ‘I have a solution to the Potawatomi blood degree problem. We'll resolve all this. The first mention in any document, church, federal government, anywhere, anyhow that mentions this Indian with a non-Potawatomi language name, he's a half.' Well, they were dunking Potawatomis and giving them Christian names in 1702, full-blooded ones. If you were dealing with the white man, you used your white name and if you were dealing with the Indians you used your Indian name, like everybody else was doing. And so it was an absurd solution. I told him, I said, ‘That's nuts. That's just crazy. You're going to get another 5,000 blood-degree appeals over this.' He said, ‘Well, that's the way it's going to be.' Well, that was the impetus for our coming back and establishing, ‘What are the conditions of citizenship?' And we stopped called our folks members like a club. They're citizens. And it finally dawned on us that being a Citizen Potawatomi Indian is not racial. It's legal and political. If they...according to the United States government, if a federally recognized Indian tribe issues you a certificate of citizenship based on rules they make, you are an American Indian, you are a member of that tribe. And you're not part one, not a leg or an ear or your nose but not the rest. You're not part Citizen Potawatomi, you're all Citizen Potawatomi. The business of blood degree was invented so that at some point that the government established tribes would breed themselves out of existence and the government wouldn't be obligated to honor their treaties anymore. That's the whole idea. That's the whole idea of blood degree and we're playing into it all over this country, now over divvying up the gaming money. But I'm not going to get into that. But the business of blood degree, the 10 largest tribes in the United States, nine of them enrolled by descendency and that includes us. We changed it from blood degree to descendency, which was the only reasonable way to do it because we had no way to tell because of this guy in the log cabin in Sugar Creek was what we had. And then we had permutations of that over the next eight generations that became even more absurd and Potawatomis had a propensity...we're only 40 families and all 31,000 of us had a tendency to marry each other. So when one Potawatomi would marry another Potawatomi, I'm not saying brothers and sisters or first cousins but when they'd marry another Potawatomi then you got into who was what and it was... And this business of the certified degree of Indian blood was ruled to be unlawful, to discriminate against American Indians in the provision of federal services based on CDIB. It's supposed to be based on tribal membership, not the BIA issuing you a certified degree of Indian blood card. A full-blooded Indian who is a member of eight different tribes, whose family comes from eight different tribes, not any white blood, would not be eligible to be enrolled in many tribes. They had absolutely no European blood, would not be eligible simply because he was enrolled in multiple tribes.

The other thing about citizenship is ‘where do we vote?' The only way you could vote in an election at Citizen Potawatomi was to show up at that stupid meeting, violent meeting, and the guys that were in office would say, ‘Okay, everybody that's for me stand up.' Well, nobody could count that was on the other side so everybody would kind of creep up a little bit so you could count. Well, they counted you 'cause you creeped up a little bit so you voted against yourself. So the incumbent would say, ‘Okay, everybody that's for this guy stand up. I won.' Well, that's not how to elect people. That's not right. Two-thirds of our population lives outside of Oklahoma, one-third of it lives in Oklahoma. Those people are as entitled to vote as anybody in the tribe, so the extension of the right to vote and how we vote and whom we vote [for] and what the qualifications of those people and the residency requirements of those, that was an issue of citizenship that we needed to determine.

So we went through a series of constitutional amendments. We redefined the general council as everyone in the tribe over 18, is the general council and that is the electorate, that's who decides all issues subject to referendum vote. Everyone in the tribe can vote by absentee ballot if they register to vote in an election. We established tribal courts that are independently elected just like the chairman and vice chairman and the members of the tribal legis...and secretary treasurer and the members of the tribal legislature and that the tribal courts have authority over all issues relating to law enforcement. We adopted a set of tribal statutes and we used the ability under the Indian Reorganization Act that we recede the authorities of the IRA in our new constitution to have a tribal corporation in addition to the tribal government, two separate entities. An incorporated entity and the sovereign entity is the Citizen Potawatomi Nation government. Next amendment was to change the name to the Citizen Potawatomi Nation from the Citizen Band Potawatomi. ‘Cause back then when you had Citizen Band, people would say, ‘What's your handle good buddy? 10-4. What's your 20?' Remember all that stuff that went on back in the day with the Citizen Band radios? Or what instrument do you play in the Citizen Band? That was the other one I used to get all the time. We changed our name and we went to descendency citizenship and we enrolled everyone that needed to be enrolled if they were descendents of the original families, 41 families that made up the tribe in 1861.

I issued an executive order that we would hold council meetings in every area, city or metropolitan area with more than 2,000 members of the tribe. And so we began a series of meetings in 1986 in Houston, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Kansas City or Topeka area, Kansas City/Topeka area, Portland, Oregon, alternating with the Seattle/Tacoma, northern California -- the prune-pricker Potawatomis. We met in Sacramento, in southern California -- the oil field Potawatomis. We met in Los Angeles or somewhere, Bakersfield or somewhere down there. And we met in Phoenix, Arizona, for the rich Potawatomis. But we started having these meetings and we started going to hotel rooms and ballrooms like this one and buying a meal ‘cause we had a little money coming in from bingo and selling cigarettes and we started having these meetings and we found out something, that if you have a meeting and you feed Potawatomis, they won't fight with you. So as soon as I started serving food at the general council back home, never another cross word, never had another fight, never any issues of that.

But the revision of 2007...in 1985 was the big one. I almost...I'm out of time. We separated the branches of government with a true separation. There is an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judicial branch. We now have 16 members of the tribal legislature, eight from Oklahoma and eight from outside of Oklahoma. While it's a one-third/two-thirds population, the way we balanced that is that of the eight from Oklahoma three, the chairman, vice chairman and secretary/treasurer, are elected by everyone in the whole United States. So there is a nod or an impetus or balance given to the population outside. The fact that our jurisdiction, that the area over which we govern, our revenue, is all based in Oklahoma on the reservation is recognized by the fact you have to be from Oklahoma to be chairman or vice chairman or secretary/treasurer. Legislative districts. The whole United States is represented. We eliminated the grievance committee. The grievance committee existed because we didn't have a tribal court and the grievance committee created grievances. We had staggered terms of four office...for four-year terms of office, staggered terms of office. The old two-year terms of office where we turned over the majority of the government every 24 months, crazy. The legislature has total appropriation control of the money. But the legislature can't even answer the phone. It speaks and acts by resolution and ordinance only. They can't run the government ‘cause they can't even answer the phone. The legislature speaks and acts by resolution or ordinance. They appropriate the monies for a specific purpose, but the executive branch spends it and runs the tribe. I have a veto, I have 10 votes out of 16 not counting mine so 10 votes out of 15. And the BIA no longer has to approve our constitutional changes. Each of our constitutional changes took the BIA over four years to consider.

So that's where we are, that's the old bingo hall, that's Firelight Grand Casino. It's $120 million operation, we're doing $150 million addition to it now. Everywhere in our tribe we have these symbols of corn plants. Don't eat the seed corn. We do not make per capita distributions. We fund 2,000 college scholarships a semester, we provide free prescriptions to everyone in the tribe over 62 wherever they live, we do home loans for people, we do all of those things based on need, not actual checks. We believe we're like a family. No one comes homes, sits down at the table, brings the kids and wife and sits there and says, ‘Okay, I'm going to divvy up the paycheck.' They don't do that. They pay the bills first, they address the needs of the family first, and then if there's discretionary income they decide whether to save it, invest it or spend it and that's the way we do ours. But we consider the money from gaming to be found money; it's seed corn.

We bought this bank on a gravel parking lot. It was a prefabricated structure and it was failing. We bought it from the FDIC, the first tribe in the United States to buy an operating national bank. It took the government six months to decide whether to let the bank fail and break all of the depositors or let us put a million dollars in it and save it. They finally decided to do that and now First National Bank is the largest tribally owned bank in the country. We have seven banks, seven branches and it's $250 million back from the original $14 million. If you're going into the bank business, be a little more financial healthy than we were ‘cause if the tribal chairman has to go repo boats and cars at night, that's an ugly business. That's no fun. We had a repo guy named One Punch Willie and boy, he was a tough...he could steal a car in 30 seconds and I went with Willie out...Willie Highshaw, went out on the lake with Willie Highshaw, a great guy. We went out and repoed cars at night when people wouldn't pay us.

These are our businesses. We have a $50 million-a-year grocery business; we have a wholesale grocery business. We have Redi-Mix Concrete. We have a number of enterprises of 2,040 employees. These are our government services. We operate the largest rural water district in the area. We are retrofitting all of our facilities to geothermal, ground source heat pumped geothermal with our own business.

This is my advice: press on. Three steps, two steps back is still one step forward so just stay at it. I've been at it a really long time. I love what I do. I'd do it if they didn't pay me. The first 11 years, by the way, they didn't pay me. But plan. And once you get plans, decide. Even if you decide wrong, it sets in motion the mechanics to get something done. But indecision just locks you up. Fix your constitution. Don't try to patch around it. We did it for years. Fix the constitution. If you have problems with not getting process at your tribe and it's because of the structure or because of something that is happening with the government that isn't fair or right or honest, fix the constitution. If you're not in the constitution-fixing business, you're not in economic development, you're not in self-governance, you're not a sovereign. Thank you."