language fluency

LeRoy Staples Fairbanks III and Adam Geisler: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Leroy Staples Fairbanks III and Adam Geisler field questions from the audience about the role of education in nation building. The discussion focuses on the importance of Native people being grounded in their culture and language, and where and how that education can and should take place.

Resource Type
Citation

Fairbanks III, LeRoy Staples. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 6, 2013. Q&A session.

Geisler, Adam. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 6, 2013. Q&A session.

Renee Goldtooth:

"We have a few minutes for a Q&A. Is there anyone that has a question like just got to be asked? There's one back here and if you can speak loud, there's a microphone over here otherwise if you just say it loud if you can."

Tiffany Sorrell:

"My name's Tiffany Sorrell and I'm a Ph.D. student currently at the U of A [University of Arizona]. A lot of my focus has been on educational psychology and so I thought you touched on a lot of good points here with domestic violence and the drugs and alcohol, and you mentioned a little bit about education, but I just wanted to know more on your thoughts on some challenges that you've been facing with education. I've been focusing a lot in my dissertation on cultural influences and how that impacts learning and how that impacts curriculum and things like that and so I was just wondering also, a second part of the question is what recommendations and tools do you have to address these challenges that you've been facing."

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I guess my response to that would be that education is a huge...it's been a huge barrier of getting our membership to go...to take the step into higher education and I think that Leech Lake actually providing a tribal college in the community was the biggest thing they could have done for our membership or for our citizens to overcome barriers of trying to go off reservation for higher education. There's...the biggest barrier I would say with education is that drugs and alcohol are basically...they're probably the basis of all problems on the reservation and drugs and alcohol keep people from...even if they take the step into going to college, it keeps them from finishing out college. It keeps them from being focused, it keeps them from taking that extra step when things get difficult because they've started families early and it's difficult when you have a family that started early, and I would say that's one of my barriers is I didn't necessarily follow the societal norms that society tells you how you're supposed to live your life. Go to high school, go to college, get a job, find a wife, buy a house, have a kid. I kind of did mine all over the place. But I wouldn't have done it any other way. However my path has been to get to where I'm at today is basically because of my family and I'm...after my time here I'll be going back to get my education, but it's about inspiration and maybe making it cool for kids to go to school. And athletics, I would say at our tribal college is huge because there was a big bump in students who signed up for school this fall semester because of athletics. There just needs to be a motivating factor to keep them going and they have to see that the leadership is in support of doing that. Four year ago or four years prior to me getting in office, our tribal council reduced our direct allocation to our tribal college by 66 percent and that was one of the things that I ran on. I said, "˜If that's not a slap in the face to a priority of education then I don't know what is.' And so I've allocated money to going to build our library and archive center, building actual bricks and mortar foundations to our tribal college, building...just showing in our communities that we stand behind them and we're going to support them in any way, trying to establish new educational programs like critical professions programs, like an actual tribal endowment because we say we lack funding for colleges and so it's just kind of thinking innovatively of how students are getting their college money and they'll go to school for a little bit and they'll drop out. How are we keeping them...how are we going to keep them to finish the semester out because they're going to have a bad report back to the funding agency wherever they got their money from and it's going to affect them and they're going to be put on probation at whatever institution if they try to go back. But I would say that a big thing, it does fall on the shoulders of the leadership to show that there's going to be support there for their band members or their citizens to do what they choose to do in life and they can depend on their tribe."

Adam Geisler:

"Can I just follow up on that real quick? I'm kicking myself because I didn't put a slide up there on education. I actually thought about it after I printed the 60 copies. We started off...when we got in there, we had three kids in our after-school program. I think you hit on like the college component. I'll speak a little bit about the younger kids. We came in, there were three kids in our program. We had been suspended on the Healthy Food Program for...prior to us getting in, so we had some headaches that we had to get through. When we got there, that was the initial challenge because I think the biggest motivator that you have in anything that you're doing can always actually come back to food, especially in Indian Country, because our kids in our community, what we were finding was that was actually the only place they were getting a meal was at our after-school program, which is really heartbreaking. Title 7, we started doing exploration about what the heck is our school district doing with our Title 7 dollars? We use Title 7 dollars. And we started pressing the school board asking them...we'd been open for a year, we had seen the reading proficiencies and we had seen where our kids were struggling. We got tutors involved working with kids from first grade all the way up into high school. With very little money we were able to start addressing this. So after the school board found out that we had a woman that had a master's in education, very, very skillful, they recognized that we were serious about making sure that our kids were going to be receiving services and that they weren't just going to take those dollars and they were using it to supplement other things that weren't addressing our Indian kids specifically. So we got engaged with the district, we got parents to sign consent forms, because unfortunately we have parents that aren't parents in our communities. They may start families young, they may have abandoned their kids, whatever happened happened, but the reality is that still I viewed as something that we were responsible for because they are members of our tribe, we do take care of our own, we always have. So we started getting report cards, we started getting updates from the school district to a point where we actually even started showing up to parent-teacher conferences and relaying that information back. Maybe mom had to work and just can't make it, too. There's a lot of single mothers that are in our community. And so between those components and then the caveat of athletics we were really able to bring more kids into the program "˜cause they were getting food, entice them with sports, and then hold them accountable because finally somebody was actually seeing their progress reports and understanding where their proficiencies were and then providing the tutors to deal with that literally on a daily basis."

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I'll just add one more thing. He opened the door for like elementary education, and I would say that there has been feedback in the community from like elementary schools that have said that they know which families are going to school, which parents are going to college because they're understanding more of an importance of what it's about and that shows because they're making sure their kids are getting up and going to school in the morning. Something as simple as making sure your kids get up and go to school in the morning is huge because your kids are growing up with a huge...with a greater understanding of what it's about to get your education and taking pride in getting that education. If they aren't hearing those messages at home, it's difficult for them to prioritize that when they feel like they can't get out, if they feel like they're stuck wherever they're at. They need those messages and if they're not hearing them at home, they've got to hear them from somewhere. That's another big thing is down at the elementary and junior high [schools] as far as intervention goes."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Grand Chief, you had a question?"

Michael Mitchell:

"Thank you. First I'm going to apologize because I tend to speak loud and hard. I don't really need this, but I'm going to comply with the requirements here. We're from Akwesasne, which is a reservation that's half in Canada and half in the United States and it's a Mohawk community. And I've been where you guys are sitting right now and I just like to sit and listen to others that come after and it makes you think. One of the greatest lessons, and I hope that whatever I say to you you take it in a good way "˜cause it's not meant to be criticizing, more perhaps for sharing. The lady had a question on education and you talked about everything but the most essential part of teaching our Indigenous students is their own culture and language, to reinforce that before they leave because when they go to school, they go to high school off the territory, they go to a university, college off the territory and you want them to come home. At the end you want them to come home, you want them to be proud of who they are when they leave. We have to equip them, and so that's the greatest thing that we can give them is that knowledge of knowing who they are. And one of the things that you mentioned a while ago, nation building begins with our children, our families, our community. It begins with yourself of being comfortable of knowing who you are. If you're Mohawk language, Anishinaabe -- however you define yourself and your nation -- as you travel about and get into the education system, you will be challenged many times. Not physically, not even mentally, but generally. So when you get asked a question...a while ago you said the 'Ojibwe Band,' in Canada they go through this...there's national legislation called the Indian Act where they refer legally that we're not to be called 'nations' in Canada. We're not to be called even 'tribes' but 'bands,' and when I became chief one of the things that I worked on...I says, "˜That's a very offensive word because the government subliminal [message] is trying to get us not to recognize our people who we are, who we were and who we are now because of the proud nations that existed back then, it doesn't mean they don't exist now.' So my grandfather always told me to identify myself as a member of the Mohawk Nation, but when I went to school and as I grew up I started hearing other kids refer to themselves as the Mohawk Band of St. Regis Akwesasne. So when I became a chief I changed that name from St. Regis to Akwesasne, our traditional name for our community. We changed a lot of things back to our traditional names and that meant that the community became more aware of themselves individually, family, community, nation. And so as the chief, when we had a council meeting, because of many years of government telling us that we had to refer to ourselves as the 'Band,' all the chiefs...they had a Band administrator, they had Band programs, they had...everything was 'Band.' I put a coffee cup on the council table and I said, "˜The next person that says he's a Band of something, put a quarter in that cup and we'll have coffee for next week.' We had coffee for many months because they couldn't shake that. But after awhile they started seeing that they're not a Band and I would ask them, "˜What are you then?' "˜I'm a nation.' Yes! That spilled over to our staff, the community, everybody got into the game. Pretty soon more awareness. I say that because when I said 'Band' is offensive, the story you told about that little white lady that sat next to you on the plane, when she asked you what you thought of the name 'Washington Redskin,' you should have told her, "˜It's a racially offensive term,' that if it was the 'Washington Niggers' she would have noticed, anybody would have and that is how they equate the difference. No problem as long as they're called 'Redskin' but to all our young people they should know, we should tell them. And being [Mohawk language] and a member of a proud nation and for generations to come we no longer want to be referred to as 'Redskins' and it starts with a pro football team that should be leading this in a good way to say, "˜We are going to change it,' and for all the students going to schools that should be first and foremost that recognition of defining who we are, that it starts with those multi-million dollar sports organizations. So I've been in politics now 28 years and I've got a chance to share a lot of thoughts with a lot of leaders and in this way, in a good way, I want to share that with you, because you're going to be chiefs for a long time yet and you're going to be aware from the smallest population...we've got 18,000 at Akwesasne and 12,000 that we're directly responsible for. That responsibility is no less greater or less than the ones who have 700 in their community because the process of nation building, why we're gathered here, is to recognize ourselves, who we are and to equip our young people and our leaders with the tools necessary and that starts with spiritually, culturally, knowing how we define ourselves and so I thought I'd take a few minutes and share that with you."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Thank you, Grand Chief. I wanted to say that the beauty of a gathering like this is that we always get to learn new things like this from veteran leaders such as the Grand Chief and also the folks that are on the panel. It never ceases to amaze me how sometimes you hear just the right thing that you need to hear to put in your pocket or to carry in your heart or your mind for the next person to maybe ask that really critical question like the Redskins issue so thank you very much, Grand Chief, for those words and then also Tiffany for your question. I also...is there anybody else that had like a question that they just had like a burning...oh, we already have one guy jumping around over here. We'll have this question and I have kind of a wrap up question and then I have a couple of announcements."

Steve Zawoysky:

"I wasn't jumping but I was excited to ask these questions. I really appreciate these talks about education. That's what we do, that's we're here and what the former speakers just said is really key. One of the things we found at our college is through research and through experience for anybody else who teaches at college or any other educational institution, for us to be really successful with our students or for them to be successful and to stay for the entire program, they have to feel like they belong. They have to feel like they have a support system, that they have a family, that they have connections to whether it's faculty members, other students, student organizations, activities. Those are the things that really keep students engaged in there and if we can base it out of a cultural understanding of who they are and they take that along with them, because we're really...for the most part we're teaching them a lot of like content area subjects: accounting, business law -- all these things that you could teach in any sort of environment, but without providing them the basis and context for them to understand where they live, where their families live because a lot of our students come back from being away from Lummi, the reservation where the college is on and they come back and they haven't...they've been raised by an extended family member in Los Angeles for 18 years and now they want to come back and get an education and learn about something that they've never learned about. So I just wanted to really encourage anybody in education to not just focus on the whole factual teaching of "˜We're going to increase your brain power' sort of thing. You really need to get to the cultural thing and you need to get to really provide them with the basis to have an opportunity to create meaning for their own life "˜cause if they can do that and if they have that meaning and they keep that in their mind then they're just going to keep moving on. This is of course all my perspective. So I just wanted to comment from an educational perspective, because this is really what we're trying to do, we're trying to engage students for their life, create lifetime learners, and so that they then can become the role models for their kids. "˜Cause one of the things we deal with, we have so many young parents at our college, which is good and bad but if we can teach these students how to be good role models, students, professionals, community leaders, council members, then their kids are going to pick up on that and we don't need to tell them that anymore because they've had a lifetime of experience of mother, dad doing these things."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Do either of you have a response to either of the last two comments?"

LeRoy Fairbanks:

"I don't really have a response to it all. I would say that I think you're on point as far as a cultural basis or spiritual foundation to every individual and an understanding of who they are, not just historical governance...is history but there's also a cultural history to each reservation. And I agree about 'the Band' and sometimes that's...you're very on point, and I'm really glad that you said that, because terminology is very key in understanding who you really are. I don't even like to say 'Indian' but sometimes back at home if someone's not changing the terminology, no one's going to change that and so I'm glad that I got to hear that today because it kind of motivates me to make more of a push to change things. We have...like Red Lake is a neighboring reservation and they're still Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. We're not Chippewa either and so it's just still some of those terms are still lingering out there though but that's one of the things that I didn't really get to finish with what I was going to say is that...and I'll just touch on it right now is family time that I didn't touch on when I was speaking earlier is that you have to dedicate that time for your family. That's one thing that I think is very important that you can't lose sight of during these years. You want to dedicate yourself while you're in office...if you choose to be in office for a very long time or short time, that you want to do the best job that you can do while you're there, but you can't forget about the family time or the family that supports you in doing the work that you do. My foundation is trying to keep that balance and I have elders in the communities that I look to for that balance to help keep me balanced. I have elders who kind of keep me on the straight and narrow sometimes because sometimes I lose sight of that bigger picture and that bigger picture is that balance of maintaining a healthy balance with your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health and so I appreciate your words. [Native language]."

Adam Geisler:

"I too appreciate what you had to say. I always...anytime I have an opportunity to learn and listen to others that have been before me and have experienced it...unfortunately I'm going to have a really hard time changing the name of my tribe from the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians and I mean no offense to you by that but the reality is for us to...I think it just goes to show that we all identify ourselves individually by our nations, by our tribes, and how we organize ourselves in that on one side of the...one portion of the country will view things one way and one part of the country will view things another way and that I think is the biggest part to overcome in anything that you're dealing with in Indian Country because I find it in every single program that we ever deal with. They always think that I operate the same way that somebody else operates and I think it's good to acknowledge the fact that we all come together and I think have commonalities with things, but at the same time view ourselves very differently depending on what part of the country you're in because we all have very different histories. I can appreciate what you shared about the language but the reality is I have one person that speaks it on my reservation due to termination and I would love to start a language class up there with that individual and we're trying to do that but the reality is it takes money, time and resources and a motivated individual who's willing to share the knowledge "˜cause I totally agree with that, that occurs in our community sometimes. The people that know, which we have a whole section of them that know because they ran into the mountains, they weren't captured by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and taken off to the boarding schools. They know and then there's others of us that come from families in the community that don't. But I do appreciate what you had to say and from the...people. [Native language]."

Renee Goldtooth:

"Thank you very much. We are coming up to the top of the hour and I wanted to again extend our deepest appreciation for you spending some time with us sharing what you've learned, especially as young men. It feels good to know that there are folks like you who are going to be leading the nations."

Gwen Phillips: Defining and Cultivating Strong, Healthy Ktunaxa Citizens

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Gwen Phillips, Director of Corporate Services and Governance Transition with the Ktunaxa Nation, discusses how Ktunaxa people gained a sense of Ktunaxa identity and belonging traditionally, and the different criteria that Ktunaxa is considering including among its citizenship criteria today.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

“But as a nation in our treaty making, in our self-government expressions, and even prior to assertion of those things in a formal way, we’ve already said, ‘We don’t care about status and we don’t care about residency, that we as a nation will determine who are citizens.’ And so we’ve created a number of categories, one of which is a descendancy through blood. But another one is adoption and there’s another one that basically -- well, it’s kind of a quasi adoption. An adoption would be sort of the formal place. But there’s another one that’s a recognition clause, and it’s kind of in contention right now, because some of the elders, the real elders -- and I’ll talk about the people that were there 100 years ago -- they’ll tell us that, ‘Come, sit, let me talk to you.’ After a while -- and you were sharing these stories with us at the break -- pretty soon that person’s a Ktunaxa. They think Ktunaxa, they act Ktunaxa, they speak Ktunaxa, therefore they are Ktunaxa. That’s the old elders, and then you get the ones that were sort of in the residential school place and subject to a lot of racism and subject to a lot of racial-program criteria and all of the above, and they get kind of, ‘Uh, no, you’re white or you’re this or you’re that or the other.’ We’re coming back to that point of recognizing -- because of the loss of our language -- that it might be important for us to say, ‘Hey, you speak Ktunaxa, you want to speak Ktunaxa, you want to be a citizen?’ That we might actually tie something to the language ability, because we need people to speak, and if people see a privilege of being associated with us and are willing to actually be a keeper of that language, some of us are going, ‘I don’t care what color you are. If you will be an active keeper of the language, we will turn you into a Ktunaxa person.’ So there’s differences in opinion about what a Ktunaxa is, and as we describe strong, healthy Ktunaxa citizens, it doesn’t say anything about blood. It’s all about the way you behave, the things you do, the associations that you portray, etc.”

Cherokee National Youth Choir - Video

Producer
Cherokee Nation Education Department
Year

This video -- produced by the Cherokee Nation Education Department -- is a sample reel of the Cherokee National Youth Choir, an innovative approach to promoting and encouraging the use of the endangered Cherokee language among its youth while also instilling Cherokee cultural pride. The award-winning choir -— comprised of 40 young Cherokee ambassadors —- has performed in venues across the US, including the Native American Music Awards, Ground Zero, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Cherokee Nation Education Department. "Cherokee National Youth Choir." Cimarron Sound Lab. Tahlequah, Oklahoma. 2002. Film.

This Honoring Nations "Lessons in Nation Building" video is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

Cherokee National Youth Choir
Sample Reel

5th Annual Native American Music Awards
Milwaukee, WI. Sept. 2002

Announcer:

"We have a very special performance in store for you next. This group of 5th through 8th grade children, under the artistic direction of Jamie Geneva and choral direction of Janice Blue, has already performed for many special events including the State of the Nation address. Reflecting the richness of Cherokee pride through music performed in their native language we proudly present to you the Cherokee National Children's Choir."

[Applause/Cheering]

[Performance]

[Applause/Cheering]

Ground Zero
New York City, May 2002

[Performance]

[Applause]

[Performance: U.S. National Anthem]

[Applause/cheering]

Audience member:

"Thank you very much."

Audience member:

"Thank you."

Dept. of the Interior & The National Mall
Washington D.C. May 2002

[Performance: U.S. National Anthem]

[Performance]

[Credits]

Cherokee National Youth Choir. Video Sample Reel

Cherokee Nation Education Dept. Cherokee Nation. Tahlequah, OK

Video & Audio Production. Cimarron Sound Lab. Tahlequah, OK

Honoring Nations: Dusty Delso: Cherokee Language Revitalization Project

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Dusty Delso presents an overview of the Cherokee Language Revitalization Project to the Honoring Nations Board of Governors in conjunction with the 2005 Honoring Nations Awards.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Delso, Dusty. "Cherokee Language Revitalization Project." 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.

Dusty Delso:

"Thank you very much. It's great to be with you today. I'm here representing the Cherokee Nation. This is half of our immersion classroom. The other half is at the Cherokee Language Bowl Competition so we split up today. So the other half, some of them will be there tonight so you may get to meet them tonight. We'd like to have a little reading right now if we could."

Cherokee language student:

[Cherokee language]

Dusty Delso:

"Come on out guys. Can you come out a little bit? What we'd like to do now is a couple of our teachers will serve as interpreters to you and if you would, we'd like to demonstrate that they know how to use their language. This is more than just memorization. We would like you to ask questions to the interpreters where we cannot hear them and then they will ask our students in Cherokee, they will then respond in [Cherokee language] English and then they will answer in Cherokee and the teachers will tell you what they said, if that would be okay. Are you ready?"

Cherokee language instructor:

[Cherokee language]

Cherokee language student:

"What color is your dress?"

Cherokee language instructor:

[Cherokee language]

Dusty Delso:

"We apologize. We have a very strict, strict adherence to no English in the classroom and they will not speak English unless forced. And that's the way we want it, right parents? We didn't know how well they would respond to the lights and all the glitz. This is a lot of glitz for us but thank you very much. We're very proud of them."

Amy Besaw:

"Any questions from the board?"

David Gipp:

"Could you go over the numbers of children being served and how this compares to your beginning efforts, I know it's probably a beginning effort, but I know you've got a large citizenry enrollment for the tribe and can you give us some comparatives of what you're doing here and what the numbers are and the challenges you face in doing the cultural and language restoration here?"

Dusty Delso:

"Yes, sir. Our numbers are over 250,000. We currently have 38 students in our Tahlequah Language Center. We have about 12 at Lost City I believe. The good news is we had trouble finding teachers this fall but we opened the teacher accreditation program where teachers are accredited by Oklahoma and we currently have over 45 students in that program. So we hope within two years to graduate teachers to fill positions for additional classrooms."

David Gipp:

"Those are your adult learners in the 45?"

Dusty Delso:

"Yes, they will be state accredited teachers. They will have a degree in education and it will also be in Cherokee education so they will be fluent speakers."

David Gipp:

"There's a bachelor's in Cherokee, is that correct?"

Dusty Delso:

"Yes, sir. We're the first tribe to establish that with a state department which ours is Oklahoma."

David Gipp:

"Good, excellent."

JoAnn Chase:

"I also have an additional question and that is that I know that your tribal government has taken a very active role in supporting this program and certainly language and culture programs are important to tribes across the country but I noted with particular interest that the Cherokee Nation declared a state of emergency with respect to what they perceive would soon be a loss of the Cherokee language and I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what you think may be the importance of the government itself prioritizing this issue and giving tribal government support, it seems to me comprehensively, and if you think that's been an important factor in the success of your program."

Dusty Delso:

"It's critical. Our program right now, it costs about three million dollars a year to run the language programs that we have. These are based on a study that was performed about two years ago and it found that we skipped a generation; we had no fluent Cherokee speakers under the age of 40. So to bridge that gap, and what we know from language study is if you skip a generation you are doomed to extinction. So we are going in and using a best practices model. We discovered through a review of the literature that the Hawaiians have the best model in the world and this is patterned after the Hawaiian model and Pila Wilson who saved the Hawaiians. We start at the preschool level because that's when the language window opens and it's amazing. The parents fuss sometimes because they can't keep up with what the kids learn. And we know we're doing some good. We couldn't get it on film but when they argue and fight about crayons or on the playground it's in Cherokee and it is just...it's a hoot to see them do that. It's really fun but that was the basis of the study and if you do not put them in immersion settings, we have not found anything to be a substitute for that. Partial immersion does not work, community courses are limited in effectiveness and that total immersion setting is the best way to do it. We also work with the linguists at Kansas University, Dr. Yamamoto. The hole in our program right now is the assessment. Most languages do not have a good assessment, objective assessment tool and we are contracting with them to develop assessments for preschool all the way through adulthood and master and those should be available this spring so we're very happy."

Honoring Nations: James Ransom and Elvera Sargent: The Akwesasne Freedom School

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Elvera Sargent and James Ransom from the Sain Regis Mohawk Tribe present an overview of the Akwesasne Freedom School to the Honoring Nations Board of Governors in conjunction with the 2005 Honoring Nations Awards.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Ransom, James and Elvera Sargent. "The Akwesasne Freedom School." 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.

Elvera Sargent:

"[Mohawk language] My name is Elvera Sargent but my Mohawk name is [Mohawk language]. My name means 'she is given room or space'. I've been the manager of the school for about four years now but I've been involved with the school for about 10 years. The school is 25 years old this year and this year we have 76 students. We have 76 students in pre-K to grade eight. Pre-K to six is all total...they're all taught in the Mohawk emersion and with a lot of culture integrated in that. Our students in seven and eight are taught in English and that's to prepare them for public school but our dream is that we have eventually go up to grade 12 or even college level. But that's a huge dream and I don't know if I have the energy to do it because it seems like when we teach them our language for eight years and then the last two years we're teaching them in English but it's kind of like we're taking away what we just worked really hard to give them. At this time too we also have a three-year adult fluency program, which we're training young women to become teachers to replace our current teachers. We're in our third year. We started with 20 students but today we only have 12 left. But that's okay. We know that these 12 are committed to learning it and eventually replacing our current teachers. Some of the moms of our kids are in that program. I think we have nine parents that have been studying the language so that they can in turn talk to their kids when their kids get home because that's a problem right now is our kids don't have anyone to talk to when they get home. I have poll presenters. Jim Ransom is going to go next and he was a parent in the school for a few years but he's been helping us and stayed involved with the school although their kids have graduated high school."

James Ransom:

"Thank you and good morning. I guess what...I wanted to make three points with the board here and thank you for allowing us to be here today. First, the Freedom School represents to me one of the best examples of tribal sovereignty that I can think of. It's grassroots, it has a dedicated Mohawk staff and it involves committed families. It's not only emersion but it uses ancient traditional teachings as its curriculum base. And finally it's community supported. It accepts no state or federal funding. Doing so creates financial challenges but it gives it the freedom to do what it does best. The second point I wanted to make is the influence it's having on the larger society. While it's sponsored by our traditional government in our community, its influence has spread positively to the public school district where I do have jurisdiction. Most of our students attend what's called the Salmon River School District. Out of 1,600 students, over 1,000 are Mohawk. It's the only school district in the State of New York that has a majority Native American student population. Thanks to the efforts and the contributions from former Freedom School staff, some of which I stole and put into that school district, and from their students who come up through the school district, what we've accomplished is that today our Haudenosaunee flag flies at the school alongside the American and Canadian flag. Our former staff teachers the Native Studies program at the school; before they had a non-Native teaching it. The Native content and curriculum in the public school system is enhanced. At graduation the school board passed a resolution allowing traditional clothing as an alternative to cap and gown, the only school district in the entire state to have that happen. Over the past 10 years, as the Mohawk student percentage has increased from 50 percent to over 60 percent, academic performance has gotten better, not worse. And finally, we send more students to college than any other tribe in the state. You have to add up all the other reservations to equal the numbers that we send. On a final note, personally, as Elvera mentioned, I know the Freedom School works. My daughter graduated from there. This year she graduated from Salmon River ranked third in her class and the highest ranked Mohawk, an accomplishment I'm very proud of. She knows who she is and she can compete in the larger society. That's what the Freedom School is about. Thank you."

[applause]

Mohawk language teacher:

"[Mohawk language]. My name is [Mohawk name]. It means 'I was the first to speak.' I graduated from the Akwesasne Freedom School in 2001 and then I went to Salmon River High School where I was inducted into the National Honor Society. And I was ranked in the top 13 out of 96 students, and then I went back to the Akwesasne Freedom School because I want to be a Mohawk language teacher. I'm a Mohawk speaker right now. I speak fluent. I went back to help my school. I'm taking a year off before I go to college to make sure that I want to be a teacher and to get a feel for it. Now I'm a teacher there and I know that my school's going to...I teach there now because I want more students to come out like me who want to go back and help and right now, like she said, we have pre-K to grade eight but that's not good enough. We need day cares, language nests so that the students when they go into the school they will be ready and willing and then we want the high school too. So right now, I'm working with students who went to school with me at the Akwesasne Freedom School and I want to try to start to get a day care there where the people who have graduated can go back and teach at the day care, the language to the younger generation so that they're ready to come into the school. They will go through until grade eight, they can probably learn all the way up until grade eight in the Mohawk language instead of up to grade six. Then we will have our high school where you can be taught in both the language and English and then you can go on to college. Thank you."

[applause]

Amy Besaw:

"Questions from the board?"

Brian C. McK. Henderson:

"I think that one of the biggest challenges to any society is the preservation of one's culture and the culture clearly starts with one's language, and I think you should be congratulated for this effort that now is over 25 years and obviously you still have many challenges including the challenges of running them and running the school and attracting teachers. I really have two questions for you. The first one is that obviously you're on the U.S. side of the Mohawk Nation. I just wondered how do you compare your efforts with the efforts across the border and do you get more or less support relative to the Canadian side in terms of the facilitation of government to help in this process of getting more resources or getting more funding? And lastly, do you have anything that is being, I guess, described as an outreach program to the state authorities to help either create the facilitation for teaching of teachers in advanced Mohawk studies, if I can use that term, that could be assisted through the state since obviously the school district is already starting to embrace the program in a way which is additive to the local school district?"

Elvera Sargent:

"I can answer part of the question. We do get some support from the Canadian, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. Their school board receives money from the government and our students that are enrolled with the Mohawk council, that funding comes to us, but it doesn't cover our overhead or management. So we do all kinds of events to raise money. We write proposals to foundations but we haven't had much time to do that lately. And a lot of...with the border being there also a lot of our students...we have more than half of our students and half our teachers are from the Canadian portion of the reserve. Maybe Jim can answer..."

James Ransom:

"Yeah. I'm a little bit embarrassed to say that historically the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe has not been a big financial supporter of the school. I've been in office now for two years. We're working to change that and I'm hoping that over the next couple years we'll make tremendous changes in our financial support of the school."

Elvera Sargent:

"You had another question with the state."

James Ransom:

"Training of teachers..."

Elvera Sargent:

"We didn't go to the state when we...we do have a three-year program right now that we're training teachers. With that we have a non-profit organization and we applied to the Administration for Native Americans and they funded us for this three-year program. But we want to keep the control I guess of what and who and how we teach. That's why we've kind of stayed away from the state. We don't want them to tell us basically how to do the job that we do."

James Ransom:

"What I've learned is that having a piece of paper doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be a good teacher and that equally as much just because you're fluent in Mohawk doesn't mean you're going to be a good teacher either. It's a combination of things and it's really the drive within the person, that internal instinct of wanting to help children. I think it's that combination that makes the Freedom School work is we have individuals like that in that school district. I think we're always trying...they're always trying to enhance it even further through formal education, but trying to balance it and make sure we don't forget our traditional teachings and one of them says, 'Stay in your canoe. Don't go into the ship.' And I think the Freedom School tries to stay with that."

Oren Lyons:

"What freedoms do you enjoy by being self-supporting and independent?"

Elvera Sargent:

"What freedoms? Our curriculum, we basically teach our kids what they need to know as [Mohawk] people. And we can teach them what we want them to know basically, to know themselves. Does that answer your question?"

James Ransom:

"I think that you can't overstate that and that...the value that my daughter got from going there in the class that she graduated with, the sense of knowing who you are, having an understanding of your language and then combining that with a public school education makes for better students in my opinion."

David Gipp:

"One other question, follow up to that. As you enjoy this freedom of your own curriculum and your own teaching and all of those things, what kinds of assessment or standards have you begun to look at or develop for your own selves when you talk about the attainment of language by your students?"

Elvera Sargent:

"I think our teachers look at how well our students speak, their vocabulary, how much do they know. Every activity that you do today, anytime, there's a lot of language involved in it. There's a lot of science, there's a lot of math in all of that. We have some samples with us of some of the things we...like for example, we recently had a...we took our kids fishing and then showed them how to prepare the fish and showed them which fish was good to eat so you got a lot of science in there because we're also located just down river of industrial plants, so there's a lot of PCBs and we can't eat all the fish that we need to, which is also affected our health. So I think I'm getting way off your question."

James Ransom:

"Can I add that I think a lot of times we tend to focus on the Mohawk immersion part of this, but the other part that the Freedom School offers is the culture and within our culture respect is probably one of the most important principles and that school teaches respect. Respect for one's self, respect for each other, respect for the natural world. And when they enter the public school system, the teachers in that public school system notice that difference about them that they come there respectful and willing to work with everybody else. So I think that's something that's usually not thought of when you talk about the Freedom School."

Duane Champagne:

"As you probably well know, through Indian Country many students are not finishing high school and fewer are going on to college. I think the preparedness rate in Indian Country is like about 16 percent. It's the lowest of any ethnic group in the United States. I suspect the same is in Canada. We've had other schools, we've looked at other schools and many schools do teach culture and community, but often their students still don't go on to college. They're not being prepared for college, but you seem to have a very good record in that way, graduating students from high school and going on to college. So what advice would you give to other people? What is the secret of a traditional education as well as motivating people to go onto college and to serve their community?"

James Ransom:

"We have a philosophy and we...again, it's based on one of our traditional teachings. We call it a 200 percent education. We want our children to get the 100 percent education that every other student gets in mainstream society that a public school system offers. But, we also want them to have a second hundred percent about who they are, about their language, about their culture so that they're grounded as they go into the public school system. And that's what the Freedom School provides is that second hundred percent. The problem that I see is that unless you have that second hundred percent, it's difficult to achieve the first hundred percent. And you see it, it manifests in low academic performance, in low attendance. As our students gets older, they start challenging what they're hearing, but they're not grounded in who they are so they don't have a base to challenge it from, but they certainly have questions. And I think the Freedom School helps to ground them so that they can learn from the larger society as well. And the ultimate benefit is that the second hundred percent benefits the first hundred percent in the non-Natives. It's always good to learn about another culture so combining the two benefits all of the students."

Honoring Nations: Elvera Sargent: The Akwesasne Freedom School

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Elvera Sargent discusses the Akwesasne Freedom School and the role it plays in the cultural identity of each generation that goes through the curriculum.

Resource Type
Citation

Sargent, Elvera. "The Akwesasne Freedom School." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Duane Champagne:

"Again, I think that our next program is a similar kind of program, in the sense that it's a grassroots education program, and it's trying to provide us with a solution to how to teach history and culture and identity. I think Akwesasne Freedom School is actually an extraordinary example of that, and so I'll let Elvera Sargent make the presentation."

Elvera Sargent:

"[Mohawk greeting]. I'm a little nervous. I'll let you say [Mohawk greeting]. See, now you know two words in Mohawk [because] I kept hearing the word 'Oweesta,' and that's a Mohawk word, too. My name's Elvera Sargent and I'm from the Mohawk Nation.

I'm here to talk about Akwesasne Freedom School, which [was] founded in 1979. And it [was] founded by parents, who wanted to control what, and how, and who would teach their children. The whole focus of the school is that they immerse their children in the Mohawk language and culture. The students -- we have 75 students this year, and they're ages between 3 and 14. Their studies are based on Ohenton Kariwahtekwen, and you may know that as the Thanksgiving address. Also part of the curriculum of the school is that they attend Long House for ceremonies. And I think all of these things, with the Mohawk language, the culture, I think that really strengthens and gives these students their identity. Then a lot of them don't get into that party mode once they leave our school. Right now, we have four staff people that are graduates of the school. So they've only had four years of high school in the Western, regular public school system. So I think this group of four are very special because they haven't done all the partying and other stuff that all of us did, the rest of us did. So I think that these teachers are our treasures and we need to do everything we can to encourage them, and nurture them, and keep them at the school, so that they can keep teaching and teaching their own children too.

The school's been in existence since 1979, and in that length of time, we've never gone after any federal monies to run the school. The school is very supported by the community. We actually just did our annual dinner and quilt auction. The parents of each child [are] required to donate a quilt as part of their tuition. That quilt auction happened last weekend, and in just that portion, the auction part, they raised $36,000.

We keep our students -- during the last two years of the, while they're at the Freedom School, the students are then taught English so that they can transition into the English public school. Last year we added a Grade 9 class. We only had three students who were in Grade 9 and now, this year, they're in high school in Grade 10. I think we have a unique and special school. The children are taught and cared for as if that child -- each teacher treats each child as if it was their own, and I think that's what is real different. [At] Other schools you don't have kids hugging their teachers, and here it's just a common every day thing to see that.

For the past two years we've had -- our first day of school has become real ceremonial and that's where the child that's coming into the school is introduced to their teacher. And the mom has the opportunity, or the parents have the opportunity, at that time, to inform that teacher what their expectations are and they can also tell what gifts or skills that child has, so that can be nurtured. So we have a lot of singing in the school. We have a lot of games. We teach a lot of traditional activities, such as medicine walks. A lot of our students know how to identify medicines. They know how to run a social in a Long House. That's just an example of some of the things that they do.

Since winning the [Honoring Nations] award in [2005], which I want to say thank you again for that -- I've left the school actually, in November 2006. I just needed to take a break and do something else for awhile. Like I said, they added the Grade 9 class. So this year that Grade 9 class is still going. We have many -- part of our success, I think, comes from the partnerships that we have with community organizations such as the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. We partnered with them for three years, and they had funded, and they paid for a cultural educator. And that cultural educator really got into the ceremonies of the Long House, and he was teaching them how to conduct ceremonies and all the wording that goes with each ceremony. I'm sure you all know that in your -- when you don't use your language you're going to lose it. Like this man -- I forget what man was talking about the walleye. I'm sure if they're not using those words in their walleye fishing, they're losing a lot of their words. So that partnership worked out really well. But unfortunately, this year they ran out of funding and there wasn't funding to continue it. But I'm hoping that we'll find other funding so that we can keep this particular person working at the school.

Funding again is always a major issue. We're always looking for funding. Last year, or this past year, we got a little bit of funding from the tribal council and I'm hoping that they're going to give more, more and more on an annual basis, instead of occasionally. We get some funding from the Canadian Board of Education. Again, they've cut a lot this year. So we have to, again, find new funding for that. I don't really worry about that part because I think, regardless if the funding is there, I think the school will continue because people realize the importance and they realize the importance of our language, our culture, giving us our identity. That's it." 

Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI "Tribal Constitutions" seminar presenters, panelists and participants Robert Breaker, Julia Coates, Frank Ettawageshik, Miriam Jorgensen, Gwen Phillips, Ian Record, Melissa L. Tatum and Joan Timeche field questions from the audience about separations of powers, citizenship, blood quantum and other critical constitutional issues.

Resource Type
Citation

Breaker, Robert. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Coates, Julia. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Ettawageshik, Frank. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Phillips, Gwen. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Tatum, Melissa L. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Timeche, Joan. "Constitutional Reform: A Wrap-Up Discussion (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 2, 2012. Presentation.

Ian Record (moderator): "If we can have our panelists from the last couple days and speakers come up to the front. We have Julia [Coates], Frank Ettawageshik, Miriam [Jorgensen], Joan [Timeche]. We're also going to ask two other participants here to join us who have a great deal of expertise in the area of tribal governance and constitutions and constitutional reform. We have with us Melissa Tatum. Melissa is the new director -- she's actually been with the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the Law School here at the University of Arizona for three or four years -- but recently was promoted from Associate Director to Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, and she's got a great deal of expertise in this area, works with a lot of different tribes on these sorts of issues. For several years, [she] served on the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals, and so she has a lot of experience in the area of dispute resolution and why that is so critical to effective governance. Bob [Breaker] is a long time friend of the Native Nations Institute and is a former First Nations leader, or, I would argue, still a First Nations leader. He consults with a number of First Nations up in Canada on these sorts of issues. Gwen [Phillips] has now joined us, so we've got a full panel here, and you guys can just swing the microphones depending on who the question is being addressed to. We're just going to open it up for questions now. We've got some expertise here in the room, that if you guys have any other questions based upon what you heard from each other. I feel like after listening to your feedback in this last session, some of you ought to be up here as well talking about some of these issues. Anyone have any opening questions, or are you going to leave it to me to pepper these folks?"

Gwen Phillips: "Let me start with a comment actually. I was mentioning to Ian just during the break there that I've really, really tried hard and I try hard to follow appreciative inquiry. So when someone says to me, ‘How are you?' I used to say, ‘Not bad.' And then I thought, ‘What am I doing trying to be bad? I'm not bad.' So I try to say ‘pretty good,' keep to the positive. Now I was challenged because, maybe it's because I come from Canada where we had King George and his gentlemanly ways and it was a different situation down here with the Indian wars, etc., and maybe it's because the Canadian national anthem speaks about our home...and down here it's bombs and things, I don't know. But I'll tell you what I noticed. We've been grappling with concepts that are foreign in my culture. We've been talking about separation of powers, not about separation of responsibility or function, and that, people, creates a whole different paradigm in your mind. Power. Who doesn't want power? Well, I don't, because I know what it really means. It means responsibility. Then you have to actually have the ability to respond. I want us to start thinking about unpacking some of those varied terms, because we hear this concept of cultural fit, and when I asked about the concept of power with our cultural elders they said, ‘That's spirit. Power is spirit.' We've heard pipe and politics don't mix. So I'm suggesting, let's put politics aside and bring governance, because the pipe does fit with governance, it fits with ceremony, and when we bring our culture and customs back and we start talking about function and responsibility, it's a whole different conversation we perhaps can have, and maybe that goes back to the where do we start. So it was a really challenging time for me as I kept hearing about separation of power, separation of power, because I tell you, you give people power, they assume that role, so it might be just a thing for us to think about the words we use and how we bring them to life in our communities."

Record: "Gwen's comment calls to mind Governor Rich Luarkie from Laguna Pueblo, who we've been inviting to events like this to share how they govern. They have a very traditional governance system, much like Cochiti Pueblo, and Regis Pecos shared with you a lot about how they govern yesterday. And he said, ‘You know, when I was chosen to be governor, I wasn't given power, I was given great responsibility.' And I think this echoes what Gwen is saying is that when you think about how do we make sure that our governance system and our constitution reflects who we are as a people, reflects, protects and advances our culture, you've got to reconceive everything, because the federal government has spent the last 100, 150 years redesigning that paradigm for you. And it boils down to terms, it boils down to words, and you've got to start at the very, very basic foundations and kind of with a clean slate and not presume that everyone understands what separations of powers means. I've worked with a number of tribes where every campaign season that word, that term gets thrown around left and right, left and right, and I can tell that a lot of people that are throwing it around as they run for office, they have no idea what they're talking about. They have no idea what separations of power means. Usually, for them it means we're going to try to separate the current elective leadership from their power and then I'm going to have the power. We have a question over here in the back, I believe."

Frank Ettawageshik: "I wanted to expand just briefly on what I just heard, and that is what was shared with us earlier about the pipe and politics, and I like the way you put that. The pipe and governance do fit, and I think that's the, that's something that we really have to be aware of, because there are a lot of people who say we have to choose to be traditional or be involved in tribal governance, one or the other. Well, the thing is, our traditional governance was traditional, it was the spiritual part, all of that was involved in it. And so to me it's an important thing for us to think about, that perhaps the way that we perceive politics today certainly...I think back on a cartoon I used to have on my wall. It was one of those Ashley Brilliant cartoons. It had this...it was this cabin at the side of this big valley and there was a porch on it and there were two rocking chairs on it. And the sun was setting over the hills in the distance and these two older men were sitting in the rockers rocking back and forth. One leans over to the other and says, ‘You know, anybody who will do what it takes to get elected, is clearly unfit for office.' Well, to me I think that that sort of builds on what you were saying, and I really wanted to build on that because what we're really talking about, what I've gotten out of this conference has been the idea that it's not only a good idea, but it's essential that we tie what we do in our reforms of our governments, that we tie that to our traditions, and in some cases it's tie it to a thriving tradition. In some cases, we have traditions that are evolving or traditions that are being resurrected or strengthened again. But we have to keep that as the foremost reason behind us, because it really is what our identity is, it's where we come from, it's who we are, and that is essential to our inherent sovereignty. So I always feel that those are important things to think of and I wanted to expand on that briefly while I had that thought in my head. Thank you."

Melissa Tatum: "And could I expand on that a little bit further, because one of the things that I feel very strongly about is that tribes need to consciously claim the language of sovereignty when they're reforming their government, and that means using separation of powers if it's appropriate, if it's a cultural fit, adopting some other means of allocating responsibility and government functions depending on the tribe. But it also means being conscious of how certain words and phrases are viewed by other governments. For example, the three that I often use as examples are in the United States, tribes talk about membership and who's a member of a tribe. But private clubs have memberships, country clubs have memberships, governments have citizens. So we should be talking about citizenship and who are citizens of the government. One of the things that's used a lot -- I work a lot with tribal courts -- there's a movement to develop tribal common law, or it's sometimes called ‘custom and tradition' and then when lawyers, Anglo-American lawyers, hear this phrase ‘custom and tradition,' they're like, ‘Oh, how quaint. Custom and tradition.' But yet if you look at the definition of Anglo-American common law, it's the norms of society. That's what custom and tradition is. So simply instead of talking about custom and tradition, talking about common law triggers a different response in outsiders, even though it's the same thing internally. But the other example I use, since I work a lot in the tribal courts and the criminal justice system, is in the United States there's been some discussion in recent years about ‘banishment' and about tribes using banishment. But every government on this planet has a method of removing people who misbehave from their society. It's just usually called ‘deportation.' And so we need to be conscious of the words we use and the labels we put on things, because words do have power and do have meaning and we need to be conscious not only of internal fit, but how those words are received by the outside world, too."

Record: "We have a question in the back here."

Q: "I just asked Frank a question out in the hallway, and I'll sort of repeat it here for everyone and maybe get other perspectives as well. I was asking a little bit about the process of implementation, so that if perchance at White Earth or other nations are faced with the fact where we pass a constitution by referendum vote, then how are the different ways that implementation of that constitution might happen so that we can do that in the best way possible with hopefully the least amount of upheaval?"

Ettawageshik: "One of the things that we did is that we put a clause in our constitution that said that after it was adopted through election, it wouldn't go into effect until the officers that were going to run that government were elected and were sworn in and that that's the point when it would go into effect. It's really important to provide for that transition. Otherwise, you can end up with a real mess of who is responsible, who has...what duties do they have, and it can really be a mess. And so I really recommend that in any time that you're doing, to do amendments -- particularly ones that have a fundamental change in the structure of the government -- that you need to be sure to have something like that in there. The other one we put in was a clause that acknowledged all prior actions of the government. Basically it said that all prior actions of the government will remain in full force to the extent that they are compatible with the new constitution. So that leaves it open to interpretation. Someone can say it is, someone can say it isn't. What I said, what that does is it gives the court something to do for several years as you go through that process. But those are two things. From an implementation point of view, we went, it was important to us to... we'd been holding internal discussions, but it was important -- you know how they say an expert is somebody who's at least 500 miles away from home -- well, we had to hire somebody from at least 500 miles away to come to talk to us about this. But what we did is we brought them in and we gave them a copy of the constitution, we had them read it -- it was a couple of people that did this -- and we had them read it and we said, ‘We don't want you to tell us what's wrong with this. What you're here to do is to tell us how we implement this.' In other words, ‘How do we appropriate money under this, what kind of actions, describe the kind of actions that we're going to do,' so that we hear from someone else, and we had all of the council, the existing judges, we had the key staff, the tribal attorneys, everybody was in the room for this session that we went through where we had a period of time. And in our case, we did a full-day session on Saturday and on Sunday we swore in the new officers and had the constitution there. But for several weeks prior to that, we had taken, at council meetings we had passed certain things that would need to be in place that could exist under the old constitution and the new but would have to be in place. So we had a period of transition and it took several months to do that. So I would think that you need to anticipate that, you need to sort of think that process through and give some time, so that you don't just switch overnight from one to the other. Those would be what I would say, I'm not sure what other people may have to say on that."

Phillips: "Depending upon what constitutional reform you're doing, you may actually be able to do an incremental implementation, and for us that's been key, because we're talking about a whole big nation-rebuilding process, two years to get a vision adopted, two years to declare what our values are, etc. So what we've been doing is as we've confirmed something, we turn it into a regulation of some sort. It becomes a code, it becomes a policy, it becomes something, and then as it becomes complete, it's accepted, it becomes the norm. Then it's a lot easier to migrate those things that people can accept already into the master document. So if you look at an overall reform process that's going to take you ten years, pick the pieces you really need to have in place so that you can get comfort to move through those processes further and try to get some support for those incremental pieces and then migrate them to the master document later on."

Record: "Gwen brings up a really good point -- and Miriam, maybe you can speak to this, and I think she's getting ready to -- but I've seen some examples where tribes have staggered implementation of certain reforms, where in a referendum vote by the people they'll pass a certain number of reforms but those reforms don't all take place at the same time. There's a gradual acclimation process, which I think is very purposeful, where they want to do certain changes first and have those take effect first so people can begin to acclimate to the new way that things are going to be done."

Jorgensen: "I wanted to reflect on two different nations that we've seen kind of go through this sort of wave process. When you first do, implement a set of reforms, you're kind of going high and then you may slip back a little bit and you keep pushing forward. So anticipate that rush forward, pull back, rush forward, pull back thing. That's just the way implementation takes place, and know that that's going to occur. But I did want to talk about two nations, Osage Nation and Northern Cheyenne Tribe, which have had some mixed success but also have managed to do some reforms. Northern Cheyenne was done in the 1990s. They attempted a separation of responsibility, which for them they actually called their separation of powers ordinance, so that was a place where that term had meaning to them in a different way than power this way. They had a constitutional change and then they backed up that change with an ordinance in the way that Gwen has been talking about, to sort of clarify it and regularize sort of the agreement that was the constitutional-level agreement. And then they really tried to live that and they consciously lived it and here's what I mean. That when you would go there -- and I was doing some research at the time in the criminal justice area -- so I was spending a lot of time talking to the court and a lot of time talking to the legislature and a lot of time talking to the president and they would say, ‘Well, I can comment on that, but we don't make those decisions, because we have a separations of powers, here it is in the ordinance, here it is in our constitution.' They were very consciously engaging with those documents and publicly stating how they lived it. And so you talked to the folks on the court side and they said, ‘Well, I can speak to that and give you my opinion, but we do not do that. We have a separations of power and that's the job of the legislature.' So they were kind of embracing that. I think what's really interesting is that if you read -- and I'm not sort of saying this from a sort of Western hierarchical viewpoint but from rather looking at another tribe changing its constitution -- when you look at the early founding of the United States, a lot of the folks that we call our founding mothers and fathers had this notion as well for the Americans, that they said, ‘We're going to try to really live what we wrote down in those documents.' And they created in their writing and their public declarations that reference back to documents of change. So that was one of the things that Jefferson and Madison and folks like that were trying to do for the tribe of Americans who had just won their independence from the British.

And the third example I want to give is the Osage Nation. Two things that I think were interesting for implementation. First off, every time the new Congress of the Osage Nation under their new constitution passed a law, that the executive branch and the president's office, or I guess the chief's office, had to implement and the chief actually had to sign off on the laws -- that was part of their constitutional procedure. And sometimes he felt those laws were unconstitutional and he actually had to specify in a long note back to Congress why it had to go back to Congress to be fixed. And he had to refer in that memo, or his staff did, whoever wrote it for him, saying, ‘This is why I am not signing it,' and it had to refer to the constitution, the use of the constitution and why it was true. So again, that's that living the document. When I was watching, we took a class field trip down for a course that I teach down to Osage Nation and watched their Congress in action and the congress had actually hired a clerk to assist the speaker of the Congress in implementing the constitution, to say, ‘Okay, can we do this now? Is this what we do next?' I liked that because it didn't say, ‘Suddenly we passed a new constitution and every single member of our legislature or our council is suddenly an expert in the constitution.' Their clerk was their expert in the constitution, and that clerk made it their job to know exactly what to do, and if they didn't they were going to refer to advisors who would help them interpret their constitution. So it helped the Congress implement in a way that didn't assume that they, ‘Oh, we've got a new document, now we just implement it.' So they were trying to adopt these ways to live through their new documents."

Record: "One other thing that we've seen a few tribes do is approach it with the mindset -- and we've heard allusions to it this morning -- of saying, ‘We don't have to do everything that we think we might need to change at once.' I worked with one tribe where they did a lot of the right things. They put together a constitution reform committee that was independent of the political leaders, that represented a cross section of everyone in the community. They had elders, young people, traditional people, folks with Christian backgrounds -- all that stuff. They left them alone to do their work, do their deliberations. They had come to an agreement on several really important changes, things like creating a strong and independent court system, which you've heard over the last couple days is absolutely critical. But they got derailed because of one thing, which was a requirement for all elected officials to speak the language of the tribe. And because of that one conflict, it derailed the whole process, and to date that tribe has not been able to ratify reform, to ratify change, when they had so many other changes, critical changes that would have made their governing system incredibly more effective, [they] were not able to do that because of this one conflict. Because there were people on that constitutional reform committee that contemplated a future in politics who didn't speak the language, were deeply committed to the Nation, but didn't speak the language and said, ‘I'm not going to sign off on something that's going to preclude me from ever running for elected office.' So that's something to think about. I realize it's a very difficult challenge to consider when you think of the urgency of reform in many Native communities."

Tatum: "Could I just add one more thing to that. A lot of the comments are things to anticipate. I think one thing that has to also be anticipated when you're drafting a constitution is that unanticipated things are going to happen. There are going to be crisis points, and a lot of times having a process, an agreed-upon process or an agreed-upon manner of either who's going to resolve it or how it's going to be resolved is critical to making sure progress can continue, even if it's in waves. We heard a little bit about this this morning with Cherokee Nation. There have been several crisis points in the Cherokee Nation, but yet there's always been some sort of process come through, that the Nation was able to agree on a process and that kind of process is really important. So be thinking about that as you're drafting the constitution as well."

Record: "I had a question to follow up on this citizenship discussion. Gwen and I were talking actually before we started this session about what are the role of citizens in this new government you're trying to create? And should you be explicitly addressing the roles and responsibilities of citizens, not just your elected leaders and the people who are in charge of the government, but your actual common citizens? What is their role in the future of the nation? And how do you articulate that? And I know, Frank, you and I have had long discussions about this, and I know that your nation went to great lengths, for instance, to reconceive, ‘What is the role of government in the life of the nation?' And also in so doing trying to reconceive for the citizens what is their role in the life of the nation."

Phillips: "So the investigation I was looking at giving some conclusion to is, are there any constitutions that begin with rather than ‘We the people,' that begin with ‘I the citizen'? And the reason I say that is because in the work we're doing in defining our vision statement -- strong healthy citizens and communities, that component of it -- we're getting a pretty clear picture of what a strong, healthy Ktunaxa person is. So once we know that, who's obligated? Is it the government's responsibility to shape the citizen, or is it the citizen's responsibility to shape the government? Well, I think it's the latter, that it's the citizen's responsibility. So as soon as we put...but we've also, as I say, concerned ourselves with having the ability to respond, not just saying it's your responsibility but do you have the opportunity, do you have the comprehension you need, do you have all the variables. So I was suggesting that as we have this picture we needed to describe our government as being, ‘I am the citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation, I have a responsibility to insure I do the best I can with my life to not burden my people with my legacy of ill health and all that other crap that we bring to the table at the end of it all, and expecting somebody to come out with a big box of band aids and fix me.' So as we're having this conversation at home, people are saying, ‘Yes we have, yes we have.' And we're putting in these various actions. Somebody said they got a lot of action going on to battle diabetes but again, that's government creating a program to take care of a condition rather than saying, ‘Hello, whose condition is this?' So, I'm just interested to see where this might go as far as, and I'm going to take it home with me for sure and see if we can't work it from that place, ‘cause I think it is really an empowering...I don't know how many of you have the ‘us and them' thing going on at home, where ‘us' is the people and ‘them' is the government and how we reform the government either in the community government or at the nation level, it becomes the ‘them' and the ‘them.' The ‘them' is them at the community level and then there's the ‘them' at the...it's weird. But there's never the ‘I' in any of that. It's always the ‘we' and the ‘them' and the ‘us,' so I'm thinking it might be time to put the I's back into place."

Ettawageshik: "The simplest way that I think about this is to say that the government isn't the tribe, the government serves the tribe. And so on any given day, most of the tribal members are cooking and eating and working and having birthday parties and getting married or getting divorced or doing this or doing that or doing something else, and they're all going through their lives doing things and they don't really say, ‘Gee, I wonder what the council's doing right now? I wonder what the executive assistant to the chairman's doing right now?' Very rarely those thoughts are there. And so what happens is we -- those of us who are in the government -- we get so involved, there's so much pressure, and we get so overloaded with all of the things that are going on, and then we see the importance, these long-term things we have to be working on, and there's all this stuff we can't get to that we want to because we're too busy doing the things that we have to do right then. And there's all this stuff going on, and it's really easy for us to just forget that we aren't everything that's going on and so you get this very sort of view with blinders almost sometimes, the leadership. Plus, then we also have all of the tribal citizens coming in insisting that we do a bunch of things that maybe we shouldn't do. Maybe when they come in and say, ‘We want you to do this,' we say, ‘Well, that isn't my role, this is what the constitution says I'm supposed to do.' But most people will say, ‘You know, I'll look into that. I'll look into that and get back to you.' And so then they run off on an investigation doing something that maybe they really shouldn't be doing or however, and what happens is that our citizens, their expectation of the government, we have to really work on making sure that that matches what our documents are, so there's an education in this. But we have to be real careful to not think of the government as the tribe, and remember that the tribe can generally get along without us a lot of the time. They need us every now and then and when they need us they really need us, they put us out front and we do what we're supposed to do, but the rest of the time, we just sort of have to stay out of their way and let them be who they are and let the tribe do what it's going to do. We're not responsible for educating every child. We're not responsible for growing all the food or buying all the food. We're not responsible for that. We're responsible for helping to create an environment in which our citizenry can do all those things for themselves and that's really what the thing...and that's where the I's start coming in, that the people have that, ‘cause they expect the government to do too much. And we can't pander to those thoughts. So when they come to us, we have to be really careful, and so a big part of what I considered in my job as a chairman was to talk people out of doing things that were sort of, probably not in their best interest."

Julia Coates: "I have so many thoughts about this conversation, because I'm coming here today, to this whole event, with a great deal of deep pain and deep grief for what has recently happened in my government, because we have had all of this, everything. To me, we've been moving so energetically with all of these thoughts for the past 12 years under leadership that has been reelected over three times and this message of the government, ‘I'm not supposed to do all of this for you, some of this you have to do for yourself.' There's been a backlash to some extent. There's been a very strong backlash, and there has been an individual who -- and pander is exactly the right word -- has pandered to that backlash greatly in the whole situation. And the government, the tribe could go on without the government, but in my tribe at least we've got very clear evidence of what happens when the government isn't there, because the government wasn't there for much of the 20th century and we were plowed into the ground by federal policy. And the government may not be primarily a social services agency, it needs to act as a government, but part of its role as a government is to stand between its citizens and those forces that are coming at them, that the citizens themselves are not equipped to hold off necessarily.

The process of education is one that I'm extremely interested in with everything that has happened. This is where all of my efforts are going to be going for the next few years, because in reflection when I think back about, ‘What was the mistake? What was one of the major mistakes of this government that was working? All of the books on development that you all have put out and everything, I teach those, I would read those and I'd say, ‘We're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this.' It was textbook and it was working. I'll tell you, in eight months we have taken 20 years off of that progress, and it's sickening to me what is taking place right now, and I just think the educational process has got to be, it's got to be part of it. It's got to come from the people, but it's got to come from the government as well. I don't think it's one or the other. I think there's got to, at some point, be a place where they meet up and they begin to have this dialogue. And in reflection, that may have been one of the greatest things, is that while I sat in as part of the government on a lot of conversations about vision and all of these kinds of statements, apparently that didn't get communicated to the people, we didn't get communication from the people about it to the extent that we thought we had. I was out there teaching it, a number of other people were but, and I don't know if it's just a matter of we're so big that it just is going to take a long time to get out there but..."

Tatum: "Could you add just a word or two about your work as an at-large representative and how the Cherokee approaches that, ‘cause you'll be out here again on Saturday."

Coates: "The Cherokee Nation has under the previous administration -- the present administration is doing something different -- but we had an initiative where we were able to identify areas where we had concentrations of our tribal citizens, mostly urban areas in the west, and we undertook a process of actually organizing them, because when you've got 3,000 households of Cherokees in Los Angeles -- where there are 15 million people -- how do they ever find each other becomes the first question. So we actually, as a government initiative, we actually started putting them together and helping them to form what we called their satellite organizations and we have 22 of them now, one of which is in Tucson and we have one in Phoenix also. And we began a process of strong interaction between the government and the citizens, but under the present administration again this is all being sort of derailed into politics. They saw these -- the people that I represent tended to be very, very strongly supportive of the previous administration, so my interaction with them is seen as a threat. They're trying to cut me off basically from being able to interact with my constituents. They're trying to place people who are basically cheerleaders for this administration into positions of working with them even though those people are not qualified to be doing this particular kind of work. So it's an initiative -- which rather than seen as something to build and strengthen the nation -- is something that is presently being regarded as the at-large people and their organizations are kind of a political football, have become that and have been made that, unfortunately. Very, very rapidly all of these things are taking place, and I just think about how long it takes. I mean we're talking here about years and years and years of building constitutions, and how hard that work is, and how long it takes to do that, and just watching how quickly it can be taken apart is so dismaying on the other hand as well.

But I think the educational process...we have recently started -- myself and a couple of other people -- our present tribal government is actually prohibiting us from teaching a tribal history course right now, because it is perceived that its emphasis on sovereignty is undesirable. They think we should go back to emphasizing culture, and there's nothing wrong with that, but who teaches sovereignty? Teaching cultural and social things is actually the more typical thing we find that is done in teaching tribal history. To teach a history of legal sovereignty, who does that? It's been tremendously effective, and that's the threat, that's the great threat. So it's even things like this that are coming apart. So we've started an initiative that we're going to have to fund somewhere else, we're going to have to try and build this as a really grassroots thing, which is hard, but we're calling it Education in Sovereignty, or at least that's the little behind he colon name of the project and that's what it's for. And it's just basically developing a number of workshops to help people understand how the government functions. How do you read a budget? Why is it important that your government doesn't run your businesses? Because we're heading back in that direction very quickly. All of these kinds of things that the people just don't understand, and the message that, ‘We're going to give you this, we're going to serve you in this way, you're going to get this program, you're going to get that house, you're going to get this' -- it really played well with the people unfortunately, and that was not the message of the previous administration and to some extent they went down because it wasn't the message."

Timeche: "I'd just like to follow up on some of the comments that were made earlier about individual versus tribal responsibility, and I'm always reminded about, constantly about our own upbringing in our own communities -- a lot of what Regis Pecos shared with us yesterday morning about core values, remembering who we are, remembering our identity. I was fortunate in that I was able to be raised in Hopi values that we're to be self sustaining, contributing members, citizens of our society and that we as individuals, we have responsibilities. Yes, we have rights, but with those rights come responsibilities. And I think that sometimes we take those things for granted, they're not written, they're taught to us by our parents, our Elders, our grandparents and our societies that we may be part of. Those are all engrained in us and we don't necessarily see it on paper, and we forget that it's there because we're bombarded by everything coming at us from all sides, and just the world as it's changing, quickly changing every day. So I think that if you think about some of the message that Regis was sharing with us yesterday, it's going back and taking that time to find out and remember and reinforce or reiterate, ‘Who are we? What do we believe in? What are our core values and who bears that responsibility to do that?' Because nobody is going to do this for us except us. It's going to be me, it's going to be people individually in my family. Each one of us bears that responsibility, and so we may write them in our constitution -- that was one of the proposed revisions in the Hopi constitution, this latest version, is to include an extensive list of a Bill of Rights. But there was no mention whatsoever about what our responsibilities were as individual citizens. So I think that's something -- I would really like to see that being added to my constitution."

Robert Breaker: "I just wanted to...I came as a participant, so I come from the north just to get replenished in regards to nation building. I do a lot of work with [First] Nations in Canada, and one of the exercises I always facilitate for leadership is to consider where you came from, what your original story is, and really have them articulate the journey that they've traveled to the current, and most times it's the same, absolutely the same. And so today, we talk about our rights. There's two types of nations that I come across. One is proactive nations that have taken the tools of constitution to establish their rights as a nation including their citizens. Others are reactive nations that haven't established those critical tools that they have had from the past and reenacted them in the formation of their clans, their societies, etc. And at the same time they're losing language, and always the question is, ‘If there is no more speakers of the language, can we call ourselves an Indigenous nation?' That's the dialogue that's occurring.

But I also have gone, more so in my nation...I would almost consider it a miracle. We have a young man that lives a good life and he goes and he fasts and he was given gifts and one of the gifts is our language. So here's an individual that through family not using the language, he lost the language, and so now he has that gift to not only lead ceremony, heal people, but also speak the language and I just say, ‘Wow. There is hope in relation to affirm, I guess, who we are through those processes whatever they may be.' But also at the same time, citizen engagement. A lot of nations are challenged when they look inside and they see a lot of dysfunctions, so always the thinking is, ‘The only happy people are the people that are healthy, that can think healthy, that can make healthy decisions.' So the biggest challenge in regards to citizenship engagement is to find ways and means to get our people healthy again and that way we can insure the continuance of our nations into a good future.

And I always say I think those are the challenges, and so when I do work with these nations, I also understand we have comfort zones through these colonizations and I always say [that] somebody needs to develop not only treatment centers for people with addictions to alcohol, to drugs, etc., etc., we also need treatment centers to not to think the BIA, INAC [Indian and Northern Affairs Canada] is the only good thing in the world -- that type of scenario. I just think this particular session allows individuals like myself to think beyond just what was given to us or forced onto us. We need to take back what was rightfully ours and continues in the future. So always the question is, ‘What legacy do I leave my children, my grandchildren?' And that's prayer -- to know who I am, be linked back into the societies, to know the songs, to know the ceremonies and all the things that are linked to who I am. And a part of that process is to ground myself, to really know who I am and what is it that I need to do in order to sustain my future of our nation. So it's a part of the citizenship engagement. So how do I -- I'm not elected leadership -- but in my own best way, I am a leader and I always have been, so how do instill that into the children, into the future generations to sustain who we are into the future? I just wanted to make that comment."

Phillips: "I wanted to pick up a little bit on just the comment around culture and sort of the course works in culture and social stuff on one side. That's all over the place. It's like we don't dare go and teach this stuff because it's this stuff, but we're safe teaching about these things over hear ‘cause it's kind of all out there. Well, guess what? We use this thing to do this because it's the same thing. We cannot talk about sovereignty without talking about our culture. In the work I do at home, in supporting our negotiations for treaty and developing our constitution and regulations, I had the challenge put to me by, and I'm smiling because this was to me like, ‘Oh, my god, really?' by the federal and provincial government. They wanted to make sure that our documents had a cultural fit and I said, ‘But we've been writing them ourselves from our people. I come from the community I...' But it was like, it was a boom for me, so I said, ‘Yeah, how do we know there's a cultural fit?' So I sat with the elders advisory and we went through all of these things and we came up with all of this list and it was good and it was directly, of course they were all there. But I just said to myself, ‘It's so clear that when they think of culture, they think about beads and feathers, and the rest of it all is whatever.' It's so critical to us that we don't let our kids think of culture as being the language only or making baskets, that we teach them the very essence of being [Ktunaxa language], of knowing where their root is and all of those things. That's governance, that's self-governance.

The other comment I wanted to make was the reason why it took us two years to approve a vision statement is because it's not the government's vision statement, it's the nation's vision statement. And the kids in the school drew pictures of what they saw it representing. It went all over to the elders, it got translated into the language and back again to make sure there was a cultural fit. Do we actually understand these concepts? And that was where we understood what strength was. When we said, ‘Define strength,' they said, ‘That's your spiritual power.' It wasn't about physical strength, it wasn't about all of these other things, it was that piece of it. And then healthy was those other things. Healthy was the body, healthy was the other things, but the string piece was the orchestration and the meaningfulness to bring those other things together. The values that we expressed are not the government's values, and believe me it's sometimes a choke for them to live up to those values, because one of them has been translated to a principle that says ‘ecological integrity takes precedence over economic gain.' Hmm. So what we are doing is developing -- outside of the constitution -- things like, we've got a strategic framework for the nation, which includes planning and evaluation cycles for all components from work plans all the way up to when do we evaluate the competencies of our governors, when do we look at structural issues, etc. because that's going to again inform us. Now we don't embed that in the constitution, because we don't know if it's going to work right, and that's why I'm thinking these ten years of amendments or ten amendments over ten years I'm going, ‘Oh, my god, our people would never have survived that. But they will adopt a set of values, they'll adopt that and they'll embrace that so we have to have the people, it has to be the people's,' ‘cause that's what again I'm saying about it's not the government, it's the people. So as of late, when we get these conversations about the us and them start to happen, it's a real reminder. We keep saying to people, ‘When you're a leader and they come at you like that you say, ‘I was a citizen before I took this chair and when I leave this chair I am still a citizen so what makes you think I'm different when I sit here.’ So we've got to try to remember that piece of it as well. You were, you are, you will be."

Q: "I have a question, but I want to make some comments first regarding the constitution that brought up. Our constitution, when we adopted it back in '86, the three branches, they were given four powers, the legislative, to make laws, executive to implement but also have the veto power, and the judicial to interpret the laws. All the rest that were put in there, and I agree, were just duties and responsibilities that we need to carry out, those aren't the powers. Those are duties and responsibilities. I agree on that portion.

Just a question. Yesterday, I heard regarding the enrollment. We have a problem regarding our own enrollment process. Yesterday, I heard about the blood quantum, putting in a degree of blood that may drive your tribe into extinction, but on the other hand, the way we have it set up on the Tohono O'odham Nation, it's based -- as far as to become a member -- it's based on your base roll, the descendants from your base roll. And there's another section that's based on residency. So when we look at those and looking at the trend, it seems to be heading in the same direction, going into extinction, because our blood degree is just getting lower and lower in both categories. So is there another way, is there another option that we can look at as far as without going extinct?"

Phillips: "We don't use blood quantum in Canada for the most part. However Indian Affairs tries to do it through a hidden mechanism in the Indian Act where they'll, ‘Your mother and your daddy and your...,' and pretty soon you're cut off, you're cut off through the status process. But as a nation in our treaty making, in our self-government expressions, and even prior to assertion of those things in a formal way, we've already said, ‘We don't care about status and we don't care about residency, that we as a nation will determine who are citizens.' And so we've created a number of categories, one of which is a descendancy through blood. But another one is adoption and there's another one that basically -- well, it's kind of a quasi adoption. An adoption would be sort of the formal place. But there's another one that's a recognition clause, and it's kind of in contention right now, because some of the elders, the real elders -- and I'll talk about the people that were there 100 years ago -- they'll tell us that, ‘Come, sit, let me talk to you.' After awhile -- and you were sharing these stories with us at the break -- pretty soon that person's a Ktunaxa. They think Ktunaxa, they act Ktunaxa, they speak Ktunaxa, therefore they are Ktunaxa. That's the old elders and then you get the ones that were sort of in the residential school place and subject to a lot of racism and subject to a lot of racial-program criteria and all of the above, and they get kind of, ‘Uh, no, you're white or you're this or you're that or the other.' We're coming back to that point of recognizing because of the loss of our language that it might be important for us to say, ‘Hey, you speak Ktunaxa, you want to speak Ktunaxa, you want to be a citizen?' That we might actually tie something to the language ability, because we need people to speak, and if people see a privilege of being associated with us and are willing to actually be a keeper of that language, some of us are going, ‘I don't care what color you are. If you will be an active keeper of the language, we will turn you into a Ktunaxa person.' So there's differences in opinion about what a Ktunaxa is, and as we describe strong, healthy Ktunaxa citizens, it doesn't say anything about blood. It's all about the way you behave, the things you do, the associations that you portray, etc. So there's some discussion underway right now because...and it's interesting, I was just saying to somebody, ‘Do you know what the Métis in Canada, what their symbol for their nation is?' The infinity symbol, because they have, it's all based on them just saying, ‘Oh, you're Métis, you're Métis, you're Métis.' But there's some governance interference in that right now because they're saying, ‘Oh, there's too many Métis.' Louis Riel, you can tell he was French, hey. He was an Indian, he had that French thing in there, he knew how to get a deal."

Ettawageshik: "I wanted to address that idea about citizenship. If you chose, you could become a naturalized citizen of most of the nation states in this world, and it would require renouncing other citizenships in some cases, some cases it doesn't, but you could go and you could study and you could learn and you could take a test so that you had the basics of what you needed to be a citizen. And somewhere along the line people started looking at us and thinking in terms of blood quantum, and they started to use it as a way of measuring us. And they sold it to us, they sold it to us so well that we think it's our own idea now. And we're living with it and we are, as I said yesterday and one of my favorite phrases these days is, why do we need an oppressor when we do his work so well? Well, this whole concept of tying citizenship to blood quantum is something that we're going to really have to think about in the future, because we have people who -- at home we refer to people that are -- we say ‘apples' -- they're red on the outside but white on the inside. In other words, they have, they look Indian, they maybe have an Indian name or Indian family name, but they haven't lived the culture, they don't know the language, they don't live on the reservation, and some of them don't even live anywhere near other Natives, and yet they still would meet the blood quantum requirement for being a citizen of our nation. Some people talk about when the blood quantum gets diluted we lose a lot. Well, it isn't just the blood quantum. When the knowledge of our culture and our language and the tie to our land gets diluted, have we not also lost just as much? And so somehow we have to be thinking about what it means to be a citizen and we need to think of, ‘If we were going to have a naturalized citizen of each of our tribal nations, what is it that we would require of that person to become a naturalized citizen?' Now, under all the regulations with the Bureau and all these other things, though we could never get any funding for this person, so we would have to think about what that meant, and there's all these other different issues that are out there. But we shouldn't be thinking about that as the criteria for what our citizens are, for what citizenship is, because that citizenship is really what's going to perpetuate us in the long run and we have to think about that. And we're nowhere near there, because I know across Indian Country the idea of, every tribe is doing this a little differently, and in many of the tribes there's a pecking order of who has the highest blood quantum and there's all this sort of social strata that develops in ways. But we've bought into that, and the question is, we should really seriously think about where this is going to go in the long run and how we approach this. So your question I think is a very thought-provoking one, and one that we have to address. Each of us are going to do it in a different way, but we really need to think about what is it that we need to be a citizen. And I look at it as sort of...the term ‘cultural literacy' from 20, 30 years ago, there were lots of books about this and everybody was all excited about it, but I've still been thinking about that because I read those books and I thought about ‘What does it take to be a culturally literate Odawa? And what does that mean? What things do you have to know in order to fulfill that role? What does it mean to be an informed citizen so that you can actually live up to your responsibilities not just demand your rights?' And I think that those are the kind of things that we have to do and I don't have answers. I just know that this is a question that in Indian Country and all across the Indigenous nations of the world all of us have to be thinking about this."

Coates: "When I address this subject -- and again I teach entire classes about this one topic of identity and sort of how it gets defined -- the three most prominent categories seem to be the political identity of citizenship and sovereignty, and I love it that people are shifting the language away from member to citizen, and that to me is the broadest sort of category. It's the one that is inclusive. The racial category -- which is what we're really talking about with blood quantum -- is probably the narrowest. And then you go to what I would call the ethnic or heritage or cultural category -- something along those lines -- which is broader than blood degree, but is still a more narrow category than simply that of citizen of a government. Because we also have to acknowledge that there are many citizens of governments that don't have that knowledge and maybe never will have that knowledge, but who are still willing to support those who do, to take action on behalf of those who want it and who will make an investment in those cultures, in those communities, in those nations nevertheless, even though they themselves may not hold out much hope for ever learning the language or being fluent in it and who may for whatever reasons not be able to acquire the degree of cultural knowledge. But we have to understand the racial one is the one that doesn't change. Everything else can change. There are potentials. As has been pointed out, you can relearn quite a great deal that you've never started out with. Culture doesn't flow in our bloods, it's something that we take on, and that investment, that understanding of nationality and of the people and of the communities is also something else that we can take on to greater and greater degrees and make those investments. So to me, those other categories, it's not about where people are in a fixed way, but it's about what people can become, and I think that that's what we have to, we have to open the doors for those possibilities, for those potentials, because if we don't, we're just going to have people drifting away into the generations. We're not going to be able to retain anybody with these very limited and fixed sorts of categories that we seem to be holding to."

Phillips: "...It's pretty much up to you when you determine when you want to start using the term ‘citizen' versus ‘member.' It's an internal concept, really. It's nobody telling you to do that. It's about you taking that on."

Q: "It's kind of like people using ‘Native American' versus ‘American Indian' versus all these other things that we've determined for ourselves and how we want to identify ourselves. So I think you have to be in a comfort zone when you express that so ‘citizen' for me is -- it's more standoffish for me. I don't identify with that because I identify that word with the United States government. That's just my feeling."

Phillips: "Yeah. And that, awhile ago probably would have been the feeling of some of our people, because they really looked at the membership with the Indian Act as being the only sacredness they had with relationship to who they were as an Indian. But as we've ‘Nike'd up,' people are saying, ‘No, no, we determine who we are. I am a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation, and our government has just as much authority as...' So what I've done is I've created little hierarchical charts that show, ‘Guess what, we've got the Canadian government up here and guess what, right along it we've got the Ktunaxa government, ‘cause we have just as much authority as they do.' And then I show the provincial governments and here's all the subsidiary governments below them. So our own citizens get empowered to see that, ‘No, we can confer citizenship, because we have the same authority as that other government does.' Hierarchical. So it's an evolutionary process, but what it's allowed us to do, because that's where the government has defined us as being a member, as having status, as being eligible for programs and services, as being enumerated for certain things. We've said that doesn't cut the mustard as far as our traditions go. ‘You're Ktunaxa, you're not a second-generation cut off by the Indian Act, etc., you're still Ktunaxa.'

What we've done by asserting authority off tribal lands into the mainstream region is we have actually allowed ourselves and positioned ourselves to generate funds that are not tribal funds. We get mainstream dollars for providing services to mainstream people. We provide services through street operations for street people that the municipalities can't even touch because they just don't go there. They don't want those people in their health clinics, they don't want those people. But they always find us. Our child and family agency, we've got people saying that they're Aboriginal when we know darn well they're not, because they prefer our values and our services which are positioned upon appreciative inquiry, going in and helping the family get well, rather than going in and saying, ‘This is a bad family, we've got to take these kids away.' So we actually, I've said to the province of B.C., ‘Wait long enough, we'll take you over. We'll slowly get your citizens believing in our ways of doing and being.' And it's starting to happen. We've got training by our agencies going on around the province and I've actually had to say to our director in one of our agencies, ‘Okay, you step aside, I'm taking on the minister now,' because they've issued a directive to our agency, one of our agencies that says we have to switch to this provincial standard for programs and services and we're going, ‘No way, when we used your standards we didn't have any good outcomes. When we've developed our own standards, we do things our own way, we've proven that we can succeed in your domain through your quality control mechanisms, but more importantly we've got better outcomes for our people.' So I'm ready for that. I would love to make a full public statement in the Globe and Mail to say, ‘This is what's going on, people.' So we have to consciously think about what we're doing internally, and how that impacts what goes on around us, and that's where we get a lot of support from all of those other people that, heck, we've got Niedermeyer, the hockey guy. He's standing up for our glacier, for [Ktunaxa language], so it's like, yeah."

Tatum: "One thing that I'm very concerned [about] from my perspective as an Indian law scholar is when the word ‘member,' and ‘tribal member,' started being used frequently in the U.S. Supreme Court opinions, that's when the court started drastically reducing tribal authority over its own territory, and it's the only time the Supreme Court has really started consistently reducing the authority of a government over its territory, is by introducing this word ‘member' frequently into the dialogue, and so that's one of my concerns, too."

Q: "And the reason why I asked that question was because in our constitution and by-law right now, that's the word that's used is ‘tribal member.' So I wanted to get your input on that so we can wrap our minds around it and take it back and dialogue on it and decide what is best for us."

Ettawageshik: "I just wanted to say that in our constitution that was written over that ten-year period, adopted 2005, it uses the word ‘member,' too, but we just stopped using the word ‘member' and when we have a, when we define in a law, we say ‘member' equals ‘citizen,' and then we use the word ‘citizen' all the way through everything so that we've been, that's the way we've been incorporating it into our, into the way we do it, and we nearly have everybody saying ‘citizen.'"

Coates: "Our treaties from the 1800s all say ‘citizens' of the Cherokee Nation of Indians in them, and the rhetorical writings of Cherokees from the 1800s, they commonly used the term ‘citizen,' so I think it's something pretty longstanding with us."

Q: "I was just wondering if it would benefit all of us to be standardized, and I don't know if that would benefit all because having you help me understand that really helps me think on this end to what is best for all. Thank you."

Record: "Well, thank you everyone. We are running a bit behind schedule and we need to wrap up the day and the seminar and get everyone on their way. We'd like to thank all the panelists for their wisdom and insights.

Hopes of preserving Cherokee language rest with children

Producer
U.S. News & World Report
Year

Kevin Tafoya grew up hearing Cherokee all around him – his mother, a grandmother and grandfather, aunts and an uncle all spoke the language that now is teetering on the edge of extinction.

Yet his mother purposely didn’t teach him.

“She told us she had a hard time in school transitioning from Cherokee to English,” Tafoya said. “She didn’t want us to have the same problem so she never really taught us when we were younger.”

Now the 37-year-old wants something different for his 6-year-old son, Moke, and his 2-year-old daughter, Marijane. Both are enrolled at New Kituwah Academy, a Cherokee language immersion school...

Resource Type
Citation

Waggoner, Martha. "Hopes of preserving Cherokee language rest with children." US News. March 25, 2015. Article. (http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2015/03/25/hopes-of-preserving-cherokee..., accessed March 30, 2015)

Chickasaw Nation: The Fight to Save a Dying Native American Language

Producer
International Business Times
Year

A 50,000-year-old indigenous Native American tribe that has weathered the conquistadors, numerous wars with the Europeans, the American Revolution and the Civil War is now fighting to preserve its language and culture by embracing modern technology.

There are 6,000 languages spoken in the world but linguists fear that 50% of them will become extinct within the next century. In the U.S., 175 Native American languages are spoken, but fewer than 20 are expected to survive the next 100 years.

The language of the Chickasaws, known as "Chikashshanompa", is a 3,000-year-old living language that is categorized by Unesco as being "severely endangered"...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Russon, Mary-Ann. "Chickasaw Nation: The Fight to Save a Dying Native American Language." International Business Times. May 8, 2014. Article. (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/chickasaw-nation-fight-save-dying-native-americ..., accessed March 22, 2023)

Sleeping Language Waking Up Thanks to Wampanoag Reclamation Project

Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

It’s been more than 300 years since Wampanoag was the primary spoken language in Cape Cod. But, if Wampanoag tribal members keep their current pace, that may not be true for much longer.

Tribal members have been signing up for classes with the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project while families and students have been attending summer language camps. Now plans are underway for the Wampanoag Language Public Charter School, expected to open in August 2015 to serve kindergarten through third grade...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Rose, Christina. "Sleeping Language Waking Up Thanks to Wampanoag Reclamation Project." Indian Country Today Media Network. February 25, 2014. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/sleeping-language-waking-up-thanks-to-wampanoag-reclamation-project, accessed November 13, 2023)