leadership development

Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School

Year

Founded in 1997, the Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School aims to create a dynamic learning environment in which community members not only learn and teach, but are able to actively contribute to the success of their nations. Four themes guide the Institute’s work: leadership, community service, public policy, and critical thinking. These themes are realized through the Institute’s four programs: Community Institutes, a Summer Policy Academy, High School Symposia, and Enrichment Opportunities.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

"Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School." Honoring Nations: 2010 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2011. Report.

Eva Petoskey: Empowering Good Leadership Through Capable Governance: What My Leadership Experience Taught Me

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Eva Petoskey, citizen and former council member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB), discusses her experiences as an elected leader during a pivotal time in GTB's history. She also stress the importance of Native nations developing capable institutions of self-governance in order to empower their leaders to think strategically, engage in informed decision-making, and focus their time and energy on achieving their nations' long-term priorities. Finally, she provides a detailed history of GTB's development of its revenue allocation ordinance.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Petoskey, Eva. "Empowering Good Leadership Through Capable Governance: What My Leadership Experience Taught Me." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. October 3, 2013. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host, Ian Record. On today's program, we are honored to have with us Eva Petoskey. Eva is a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and served as an elected member of the Grand Traverse Band Council from 1990 to 1996. She also is the better half of John Petoskey, longtime general counsel of the Grand Traverse Band, who is serving as Indigenous Leadership Fellow with the University of Arizona's Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy. Eva, welcome and good to have you with us today."

Eva Petoskey:

"Thank you for inviting me."

Ian Record:

"As I mentioned in your introduction, you served a total of six years as an elected council member of your nation during a critical time in the nation's growth and development. Can you briefly paint a picture of what that time was like and the kinds of decisions you were confronted with as an elected leader?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Sure, but first I think I'll introduce myself in our language because it is our custom when we're asked to speak, especially for our tribe or our experience with our tribe to do that. So [Anishinaabe language]; that's my Anishinaabe name and my clan. So now I'm in a better position to speak."

Ian Record:

"Okay. So I appreciate that and I was remiss -- I usually ask folks to introduce themselves when we start, but I'm curious, you and I have sat down a couple of times this week to talk about your leadership experience and you came into elected office at a really critical time and you mentioned a story that when you started in office the council actually met in a pole barn?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Well, actually our casino was operated in a pole barn and our council chambers were a very small room that we met in and so yeah, we were a much smaller operation and 1990 was two years after we finally adopted our constitution. We did receive federal recognition in 1980, but it took about eight years to get approval of our constitution because it had a lot of complicated issues. But once we had a constitution, we had elections and I was in the second cohort of elected tribal council members after our federal acknowledgement. So at that time, in 1990, our tribe employed about maybe 50 people, maybe that's on the high end of the estimate and currently we employ about 2,500 people. So you can see over the course of 25 years -- well, it isn't quite 25 years, I guess it's 13...I don't know, I can't do the math, whatever 1990 is from our current time here. I guess it is almost 25, 23 years, yeah -- so we've had a lot of growth and those six years that I served was a time when there was tremendous development.

We...I think...during that time, we signed the first gaming compact with the State of Michigan. Of course the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act had just been passed I think in '88 so we were among the new gaming tribes. We had a small gaming operation that was operated out of a small pole barn and it was making money, but after we entered into the compact and even before that time we did some gaming development locally and expanded our casino development. From the time I served from '90 to '96, we went from a small pole barn to two upgrades in a facility within our Leelanau County reservation, Grand Traverse Band Anishinaabe town reservation. And then later in 1996 -- at the end of my time of service -- we opened the Turtle Creek Casino, which is a large operation. So a lot of expansion in gaming, a lot of infrastructure development. I'm not a gambler; I really knew nothing about gaming, so a huge learning curve for me and other council members. Some of our council members had worked within the gaming operation so they knew more about the operation of the casino. I was totally new to that. I had come to it with about 15 years of work experience in human services, social services, education so I was not...that was a big learning curve for me and I think for all of us and a lot of the policy infrastructure that we had to develop.

In terms of other developments...do you want me to continue on? We had huge growth again in terms of health care. At the time that I was elected, we were operating our health clinic out of a modular building, a very small clinic that served primarily the Anishinaabe town community and we had a six county service area. So it was difficult for our members from other areas to come into the Anishinaabe town community because sometimes it was as much as a 60-, 70-mile drive to come to the clinic and that was the only tribally supported, Indian Health Service-supported clinic that we operated at the time. And so now over the course and during the time period that I was in office, we built a very large health facility using primarily gaming revenue, a few other grants, and some support from the Indian Health Service. But the Indian Health Service dollars were never enough and probably will never be enough to provide the support for health care and both health and behavioral health services that we provide through our clinic now. During that time, those six years we built this fabulous facility and have been operating it ever since, so that's another area of really substantial development.

Treaty fishing, inland hunting, we had a lot of continuing issues related to exercising our treaty rights to fish in the Great Lakes and Lake Michigan within our treaty territory. We were in a transition from using gill nets to trap nets. It was an enormous transition for fishing people, men and women, because the gill net is more of a traditional way of catching fish and to try to change your whole equipment and upgrade, all these...it's very complicated. It's very complicated and a wide array of issues that we dealt with: land acquisition, putting land into trust, those are some of the...we developed a lot of housing during that time. We also had I think only one tribal house that we had built in 1990, maybe there were a few more, but now we have tribal housing in all surrounding service area, out of all six counties I think five of the six counties now have tribal housing."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned health care and the fact that some of the gaming revenue that you had generated -- which rapidly grew during your time in office and certainly after -- went to healthcare and went to housing and so forth. And that involved the establishment of the revenue allocation ordinance, basically the tribe creating an ordinance in conjunction with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act to determine how the money that they were generating through gaming was going to be used by the tribe. And as you've shared with me, that was quite a long, drawn-out, contentious deliberations process. Can you sort of paint a picture of what that process was like in terms of coming to a decision about how the money was going to be spent and actually putting that into law and just what the revenue allocation is?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Sure. Before I do that, though, I'll say that we...even prior to the development of a revenue allocation ordinance, we did have a budget procedure and it was in policy. And so we had a transparent budget process where every...we developed an annual budget and we hold public hearings for the members to have input into the budget process and to review the priorities for the budget. So we already had that in place actually. And it was fairly new. We'd developed it during that time. I felt...for me that was one of my top priorities that we have a transparent budget process and that we have...that members have the ability or citizens have the ability to be involved in developing some of the priorities. So I'll say that first. We also were a tribe that...we kind of took development slow. We were trying to pay as we go, we didn't want to get into a big loan agreement with someone and so we were saving money. This was prior to the development of our per cap discussion...internal discussion on per capita distribution, so we had quite a bit of money saved, several million dollars. We were hoping that we would be able to use those funds to do gaming expansion without going deeply into debt. But somewhere around maybe 1993, a group of tribal members -- called themselves the Tribal Members Advocacy Group -- which actually normally I would be all for, because I think it's really important for citizens to have input into their governmental decisions, and in a way I was all for it except I was on the wrong end of the issue on the per capita distribution at that time, myself and...we had a seven-member council, four of us were not for the per capita, at least initially, and three members were. So we did have a majority to keep the per capita discussion distribution at bay. However, after a lot of internal debate and dialogue there was a petition drive to put the per capita distribution on the...as a referendum. And when I saw the petition, it was shocking to me as an elected -- I don't call myself a leader -- elected official of the tribe because everyone that I knew, all of my friends, all of my relatives, with the exception of my mother, had signed the petition for the per capita distribution. And I think my mother would have signed it possibly had she not been my mother. So there was a...it was a huge move, it was a huge movement, there really was no stopping it. So to me, it came down to the question of did I want to remain in office because I think had we dug our feet in? We probably wouldn't have been and that would have delayed the process, but I don't think it ultimately would have made a difference; the momentum was just too great. So I just say that for other tribes and other people in similar situations, not to say that you should necessarily make that choice, but it is an option and it was an option that I chose to eventually vote for the per capita distribution partially, probably in large part, so I could be part of the process of putting together the ordinance that would control how we would use the money and how it would be distributed. So if I'd have been removed from office I wouldn't have had that opportunity to participate in those policy decisions so it was a conscious decision on my part, a huge compromise. But those are the things that I think are the difficult challenges in leadership, especially if something... it didn't sit right with me. I made the statement in one of the public meetings that one of the challenges with the per capita distribution was that we would be in some...in a lot of cases, the people who could benefit most from the resources in terms of their income, people living in poverty or well below poverty, who were currently eligible say for food stamps or other benefits, health benefits, Medicaid, would lose those benefits. So in a way it was a wash. We were basically paying the money out to the federal or state government and while that was true and the facts supported it, it was really an unpopular statement because no one really was wanting to listen to reason at the time. So it was quite a learning experience. It was not a rational...particularly rational process, but that's politics and that's leadership, learning to set up the most rational system you can and then when the decision making isn't rational, learn to sort out with some degree of wisdom or insight as to which way to go, so we did put together a revenue allocation ordinance. I think we were probably one of the first tribes to do so, and right or wrong to avoid being held hostage by the momentum in the community we allowed, at that time it was up to 50 percent of your net revenue from gaming could be allocated to per capita distribution and that's what we did."

Ian Record:

"So the...and I know there's been some minor tinkering with it over the years and we'll get into one of the recent developments around it here in a second, but how does the per capita distribution policy currently work for adults and then how does it work for minors? And I know you've shared with me that the minors' trust accounts was a very contentious issue at the outset."

Eva Petoskey:

"Yeah, it was contentious, but let me say generally that the per capita distribution is half of the net revenue goes to individuals and the remaining half is split...well, I guess the remaining portions are split: 25 percent goes to tribal government operations, which would include all services and the operation of government itself. And then 15 percent to -- I always get these two wrong -- 15 percent to long-term investment and I think...or I think it's 10 percent to long-term investment, 15 percent to economic development, so that there were three other funds set up: tribal government operations, long term investment and economic development. So that was the whole pie of the...our revenue...I don't like to use acronyms -- so the revenue allocation ordinance. When it came to how the per capita distribution was to be, the 50 percent of per cap, that was very contentious and I sat as the chairperson of the committee that put the revenue allocation ordinance together. There were about maybe 10 or a dozen of us on the committee from all factions including people that were in the leadership of the TMAG, the Tribal Members Advocacy Group. So we all sat together and I think I told you this earlier when we were discussing this, I'm kind of a storyteller so forgive me if I start...I could be here for probably hours, but I'll tell the short story. I decided that we needed to use...try to come together. So we did this in a talking-circle format using some of our ceremonies, just simple...the smudging and then using an eagle feather that I had brought to kind of help us come together as a community to figure out how we would, now that we'd made a decision, how we would carry that decision out. So we had a lot of discussions and some of them were heated and well, I don't know if they were heated, they were... ctually they were quite civil I should say, they were quite civil, but a lot of difference of opinion expressed and...one of the things I brought up, I asked the group, "˜Many tribes, ours in particular, has a long history of kind of disruption, enormous disruption due to loss of land, a rapid kind of economic change, the whole culture over the last, we call it the '150[-year] Anishinaabe abyss period' and we certainly were emerging from that.' I think we're emerging from that now, but certainly was a very dark period in our history I would say from the 1850s forward until probably in the 1970s when we started to reclaim our place and through the law, which has been a good tool for us. But as a result of that abyss period, we have many of our people who were put in boarding schools, my mother went to Mt. Pleasant Indian School, my husband's parents went to Mt. Pleasant Indian School, all of that generation, people in our parent's generation and many in our generation either went to boarding school...my grandmother went to Carlisle, so it goes back several generations. So people were... had their lives disrupted in many ways. So we always bring this to the table in our deliberations because this is who we are. Many of us are people who have suffered enormous loss in terms of our family relationships, our cultural identity, our language, our ability to speak the language in our community. The generation that spoke the language is...many have passed on, but my mother's first language was Anishinaabe or Odawa. All of my family members could converse and I grew up hearing this, but now in this generation that's not the case. So I go into...I just say that because this is sort of who we are as we sit at the table together. We are all of these people that have...all of these humans that have brought all of this collective history to the table when we have a discussion and this particular discussion on how to distribute this money that we had, which most of us had never had, was a difficult one. So I did ask the group how many of us...because one of the issues that was very contentious was whether or not children should have an equal portion in the distribution and some of us had the position, including myself, that felt -- and a number of the group felt -- that everyone should have an equal share. There was another contingency that children should not have a share and that the money should go to their parents and then there would be more money just go for people 18 and older. That was probably one of the most contentious complaints and other smaller things about how frequently the distributions should be made, etc., but the one over who receives a share and what type of share was really a contentious discussion and in the end we made a...we agreed on a plan where everyone would have an equal share, but it was a painful discussion and at one point in the discussion I did as the group around the table just to tell you about not only our tribe, but the circumstances of many tribes and maybe...probably as many...maybe more so in our region of the country, I don't know how the impact of boarding schools and some of those effects were out here in the southwest. I'm not as educated about that, but in our part of the country many people were raised outside of their family, not by their parents, either through foster care, adoption, or through boarding schools and in our group of people around this table discussing our per capita distribution, only two of us had been raised by our parents, myself and one other member, one other citizen. So that was a sad commentary on where we were, where we are still. I think the impact of that..."

Ian Record:

"But you used that as a counter to the contention that parents should get their kid's share because they're the ones taking care of the children."

Eva Petoskey:

"Yes and I...it didn't make me popular, but I said a difficult statement of, "˜How well were we cared for by our parents? And no offense to anyone or to any of your parents. I am in the same category.' I just had a really strong mother who didn't allow things to happen and a really strong grandmother and some other people did too, obviously. But anyway, yeah, that was why I brought the discussion up. It was a hard discussion, but it did in part bring us around to a reasonable decision, which I think there have been problems with. So since we've had the per capita distribution...like I said to you the other day, I could probably talk for several days on this because it was a long, contentious process and other tribes have dealt with it in other ways, but now that...once we had a decision about how we would distribute, there have been challenges with it. Some young people don't use their money wisely. The money is held in trust for the young people until it is paid out when they're age 19 and...over 19, 20, 21 over three payments. So some young people use their money wisely. I guess they probably...whoever, however they're using it, I think they may think it's wisely, but maybe not. And others have not used it as wisely. We do have a new law I understand, I wasn't part of developing this because I'm not currently on the council, but we do have an amendment to the revenue allocation ordinance that requires that a child have at least a GED or a high school diploma in order to receive their payment. If they don't have it, I think it's deferred until they're 21. So I think that's a very good development. I would have liked to have seen that even sooner and I know other tribes have similar and maybe even more restrictive criteria to encourage people to continue to complete their education."

Ian Record:

"I'm glad you mentioned that. And you are right, there are a number of other tribes that have gone that route that may have not had it in place initially, but saw the effects of just sort of a basic issuance of the money once they turn a certain age without any sort of conditions set on the issuance of that money. I'd like to turn now to the topic of leadership and I know I'm asking you to look back a bit because you...it has been close to 20 years since you were in office, but if you think back to 1990, when you first came to office, what do you know now that you wish you had known before you first took office in the first place?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Well, I'm 25 years older so I've lived a bit. I guess in answering that question, I'd say probably two different avenues that I could answer that. One is I think I certainly have more knowledge about how government conducts itself. I didn't have that much coming into it and I think that's the case for a lot of newly elected tribal leaders that they come in inexperienced in tribal government. Even if they've worked for the tribe, it might not have been in a position where they were required to work with policy or maybe even to understand the larger historical and political and legal context in which tribes operate. That is very common for people to walk into it. So I think, in retrospect, I had some of that because I had 15 years of work experience in Indian Country and so I had some of that. I did work for tribal organizations and so I had some experience. I knew some core ideas of self determination, sovereignty. I even knew what sovereign immunity was because I'd worked with contracts with tribes. But I think a lot of people come in without that, so I think it's very important for people to have some education coming in either before...I know there are some tribes that have instituted some training programs for people interested in running for council. I think those are excellent ideas. Certainly if your tribe doesn't have that then having some kind of orientation and education program and process once a person is elected. I think to the extent that you can use people with prior tribal council experience that is a great benefit because not only will they get the information about the complex legal structure and all of the public policy issues, they also get some firsthand experience on people reflecting on their own leadership and some of the mistakes and successes that they had or mistakes they made and successes they had. So that's one track, I guess: education, education, education, education. I wish I had more of it when I came into this, but at another end I wish I had more wisdom. I wish I'd have been a wiser person. When you're young, a few...sometimes young people are wise, but more than often we're not when we're young. We tend to be impulsive. I know I would frequently get angry. Now as I've grown older, I've trained myself. I still get angry, but I usually don't speak when I'm angry. I've learned how to tell myself to hold that until I'm not angry. So I would even say it would be good if tribes -- whatever their culture is, whatever their Indigenous world view -- is that some of those teachings could be also shared or discussed as you go into your elected duties, that the person newly elected has an opportunity to sit down with someone, an elder or some other appropriate leaders within the community to, if they haven't had that proper or appropriate education and maybe some people do, they already have that. So we have -- in our Anishinaabe way -- we have the Seven Grandfather teachings, which tell us how to conduct ourselves in our relationships with other people. I see that sometimes we put them up on a poster someplace, but they're very difficult to follow in our relationships and looking back at my experience on the tribal council, aside from all of the challenging issues that we dealt with, the complex...context in which we found ourselves in, and in our case and the people that served with me, the enormous amount of development that we accomplished and worked tirelessly to accomplish was often painful in terms of our interpersonal relationships. And as you can imagine, when you're related to many of the people you serve with, that's just normal in a tribe that even on the council your relatives are sometimes on the council and certainly in terms of your constituents, your parents, your nieces and nephews, your cousins, just every...there's a very thick set of relationships. So how you treat one another in those heated political contexts, in the heated political context will last...will follow you for a long time."

Ian Record:

"One of the things you mentioned to me yesterday when we were chatting was this issue of consistency and in your relations with the people that you serve that the answers you give to the requests that they often make are consistent and the explanations for the answers you're giving them are consistent. Can you touch a little bit more on that in terms of being clear with the people who come to you with their hand out to say either 'yes, I can do this for you and here's why' or 'no, I can't and here's why,' and making sure that those answers are consistent no matter who's coming to you?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Yeah, this is a huge issue in tribal government. I think it...the responsibility there needs to be borne by the elected leader in term...and by the citizens. So I think...I'll talk about both of those, because I think it's a shared responsibility because if it is the norm that the council is kind of a patron system, which isn't outside of our cultural norm. See, that's one of the issues, that it's not really an unfamiliar cultural idea that you would give things away to your relatives. It's just that in the context of government, they're really not yours to give as a person, as an individual. They belong to the community. Whatever resources you have been elected and given the responsibility to be a good steward of are the resources of the community, so it really is different than giving out your own personal property, things that you've acquired in a giveaway at your home or in some kind of celebration where you're feeding everyone. That's your personal property and that is, within our cultural teachings, that's a different thing than taking the property of the collective and giving it out to your relatives. To me, that seems unethical. But I wasn't always...oftentimes your relatives would come in and expect you to solve a problem immediately, to give them some special consideration and I always gave them -- everyone really -- I tried to give special consideration in terms of listening and not shutting people off and then trying to help them problem solve where they could find a solution to their problem within our system. That implies that you have a system that helps people find a solution to their problem and that is part of developing your tribal infrastructure so that there is a known process for solving a problem, whether it's an employment problem or you felt like you've been treated unfairly, whether it's in employment or some other issue or involving your lot assignment or all kinds of controversies that come up. And we as a tribe, I'm sure others too, have...took us a long time to develop all that infrastructure so that there was a place for a person to go to get their problem solved or at least to try and they may not like the results, but at least there was a process in place. So it's both a shared responsibility on the part of the leadership to act in an ethical manner, again keeping in mind that the resources that you have been given the responsibility to be a good steward of are not yours, they're the community's, and so if you want to have a giveaway, go do it at your house with your own stuff unless it's the community giveaway and you're participating and it's open for everyone on an equal basis. And likewise, the members, the citizens need to understand that the more citizens that serve in government and in a good way, and the more citizens that come to understand how it's really a collective process and these are our collective resources and together we can build a nation and we can learn to put our...it's hard to learn to put your individual needs aside because many of our people live in poverty. It's still the case today. It's still the case. We have...if you go into the communities around our tribe, many of the homeless people are our tribal citizens. There's still a lot of people living...struggling to have their basic needs met and it's understandable why people feel frustrated sometimes. I totally understand that and yet it's an ongoing challenge for the elective."

Ian Record:

"And isn't it first and foremost a challenge of education? You mentioned that a lot of hard work has been done to build up the governmental infrastructure so that there are processes in place to help people that come with their hand out. And we've heard other leaders talk about really the education needs to begin with the elected official in that interpersonal exchange with the constituent to say, "˜Look, I cannot do this for you because we have a process in place that can address your problem. That's not my role.' We often hear leaders talk about role confusion, that they think they're a social service administrator and not a policy maker."

Eva Petoskey:

"Exactly. Exactly. Well, that speaks to understanding what your role is and in most tribes the...I know in our tribe, the role of the tribal council members and the chairperson are specified in some detail in the constitution and that serving as a social service liaison is not one of them, although it is to look out for the assets and best interests of the tribe and to provide for the wellbeing and education, health of the tribal citizens. But a lot of people don't ever read the information on what their roles and responsibilities are and I found many times across Indian Country -- I won't point just to our own tribal council, but some of the work I've done elsewhere -- that many people don't read their constitution or even if they think it was a good idea to have a constitution because sometimes you get into that discussion. "˜Why are we adopting these types of governments?' And I think it's all a developmental process. I think that in our case, I look back at those times as we began to work...I wasn't part of working on the constitution, but as I've heard the stories I'm glad that we went in that direction and I think we put some good ideas into our constitution. We do have a separation of the judicial in our constitution so we have a separate court. That's an unusual situation in Indian Country. And we have both executive and legislative functions within our tribal council and then we have specific roles and responsibilities and a lot of other things that are spelled out that took great... that were given great consideration. We did not just adopt a constitution. We had a lot of discussion about how that should be and what type of government we wanted to have."

Ian Record:

"How empowering was it for you as an elected official to have that constitution to fall back on when somebody was not clear about your role and was coming to you and asking you to do something that was outside of your role for you to say, "˜Hey, look, I'm not allowed to do this and this is where it says I'm not allowed to do this'? Because unfortunately in a lot of tribal communities, leaders don't have that luxury to say, "˜Look, I'm prohibited.' It's sort of...there's so much gray area involved that they can sort of finagle it however they like. Was it...did you feel it empowered you or there was a sense of comfort there to be able to fall back on that rock-hard foundation?"

Eva Petoskey:

"I didn't use it so much in the context of dealing directly with individual citizens, but I did occasionally use it in dealing with some of the things that other council members would want to do and sometimes behind closed doors, which is where some of the really challenging discussions occur, even though we have, of course have to have open meetings, but there were certain things involving legal matters and really complicated legal matters that we did in closed session and sometimes we would have rather contentious discussions there, and I do recall on several occasions getting out the constitution and saying, "˜Read this, folks.' And sometimes people would want to fire people just arbitrarily. I hope I'm not...it's not an unusual thing. I'm not putting down my own tribe. I see it everywhere and I'd just remind everyone, 'That isn't our job. That is not our job,' in spite of the fact that maybe that person had said very insulting things to me and to the entire tribal council, but it was our job to maybe try to create a better climate so people didn't have to come in there and be that angry or have some other rules about how we conduct our business or just take it. If we weren't going to create those kind of rules. I know some tribes have now created rules about how... I'm not talking about Robert's Rules, but how...and of course tribes use those...but how...what the tone of the conduct of the meetings should be and that there must be a tone or respect. I like that idea. We don't have a rule like that currently, but I sure...if I were back...in retrospect, I would love to have a rule like that. I'd love to have those Seven Grandfather teachings not only on the wall, but somehow incorporated into our conduct so that we can hold ourselves accountable."

Ian Record:

"This last answer of yours has given rise to a few questions in my mind and the first deals with transparency. You touched on this issue a couple of times now, and in talking with your husband John and having him share with us all of the hard work that the government has done to not only build its infrastructure, its governmental infrastructure, but also build the background history of why it was developed the way it was. So you guys have gone to great lengths to document everything from council meeting minutes and making them not only...not only archiving them, but making them instantly accessible and obviously that helps for the purposes of transparency, but doesn't it also help for ensuring that folks that are in the position that you were once in can make informed decisions, can say, "˜What was the reason why we first started this particular project and what does it mean for the decision that is before us on this project today?'"

Eva Petoskey:

"Well, certainly as technology gets quicker and quicker -- at one time that wasn't possible because we'd be digging through all these old papers down in the basement of the tribal government center -- but now that it's readily available apparently our current council who actually uses that does a search, what did we decide on this and what's the history of this? And so I think that could be a very useful tool going into the future with technology as it is today. I think that wouldn't obviously be present if we hadn't have archived all that and I wasn't part...well, I guess I was part of that decision. One of the things I was going to mention that we did write a couple of tribal histories, especially some of the recent history and the early history of our federal acknowledgement and what led up to that. And so those documents are available also, but so that in the sense that you're archiving your process as you go along is a wonderful benefit to future generations because there is a record there to the extent that people are able to study it and with technology it's easier to study it. So it's awesome to do that and I think a real benefit both to the current councils and the future generations to see what people were thinking."

Ian Record:

"So another follow-up question deals with this issue of instilling culture into governance, into the practice of governance. And you mentioned that it's one thing to have the Seven Grandfather teachings written on a wall and it's quite another to figure out how do you practice it in the actual activities of governance at the elected leadership level and throughout the governmental organization. You're a big proponent of that. In our discussions you've brought that up numerous times. Can you speak to the importance of a Native nation consciously working to incorporate in a systematic way its culture into how it governs, into the crafting of a strategic vision for the future of the nation?"

Eva Petoskey:

"Yeah."

Ian Record:

"Easier said than done, I know."

Eva Petoskey:

"Well, it's difficult because it goes to the issue of who can speak. And I think when I was younger I didn't feel as though I could speak, but I'm 61 years old and I'm not 80, but I always felt like it would be great if I could have had a group of advisors that were elders and my selection, my ideal selection of elders in our community would have been people over 80 because it seemed like the people I knew, including my own mother or other people I knew within my extended family and other people I knew in the community who were over 80 seemed to have developed a different view, even if they had some culture...if they had the culture intact, they had their language, but as you age something happens and you have a different view. You're facing that kind of eventually your own death and I think...one of our elders told me that, "˜If you have the good fortune to come close to death as a young person, you're very blessed.' And I thought, "˜Well, that's an interesting thing to say,' because usually we think of that differently. But he was saying that it gives you a different view, a longer view of life, what is really important. I think sometimes we have, I think, lost view of that. So I always wished I could have had a group of elders over 80 advising me. I did. I had my own mother so I was lucky. So I think having elders in the community, however that community defines that whether through age or through some other ceremonial leaders, I think that is wise. I think...I really believe that dialogue and consensus is culture because sometimes without that... you're growing a seed, you're growing a seed of translating your own traditional teachings and culture and language into your contemporary setting. So I always feel like people were going way too fast. I think one way to incorporate your culture into your governance is to slow it down, and maybe not in all contexts because some meetings have to be conducted maybe in a more rapid manner because you're dealing with so many issues, but there should be a time where people can talk together and maybe...then again, sometimes the constitution doesn't allow the tribal council to speak together on tribal issues outside of a meeting that's been called so that's kind of problematic, too. But maybe it's not the council speaking or talking in a formal way, maybe it's an informal meeting with the constituents, with your citizens where you can talk things through. That's what our Anishinaabe people always did, always. I observed it in my own life, people solving problems through talking it through until everyone had been heard and then what comes out of that is remarkable, it's powerful. Once everyone's been heard, all of those ideas can be used to take something forward. And if you're applying the Seven Grandfathers teachings, which are principles upon which you're to live and to treat other people that what comes out of that would be part of what we call [Anishinaabe language], which is to live a good life and that idea is central to everything that is in the Anishinaabe world view. I know that other people and other tribes have other words and concepts like that, but essentially, what it means is that it's the interdependence of all things so that you as a human being are connected to your own inner self. That's why I spoke my name and my clan. Your own spiritual and inner self, your own ancestral history, but it's not like you're standing there alone. You're in this web of relationships that are both inside you and outside of you and it includes not only all the human relationships, but it also, and this is very important I think going into the future, it includes all of the other living things on the planet and in the universe so it includes all the plants, all the animals, all of the water, the sky, the rocks, the moon, the sun, the stars, all of the ancestors, all of the spirits out in the cosmos, the whole thing is interconnected and that it is your responsibility as a human being to walk in a good way and in positive relationships with all those things. So I think in that way in the incorporation of the culture and I think as we are going forward...I know within our tribe some of us women have really been starting to talk very...amongst ourselves about the environment and how can our tribe take a position. This is very culturally relevant let's say for every tribe, and in our case it's the water, in our case in Anishinaabe worldview, women are the keepers of the water and so we...I think...so that's one way of how do you incorporate this into tribal governance in terms of setting the priorities for what the tribe does in the future and the vision of the tribe in the future, you have to have elders and people with that collective [Anishinaabe language] vision to speak up so that we're not just taking care of ourselves, which is important -- not at all to diminish that -- we're taking care of those inner circles of [Anishinaabe language], but we're also taking care of the larger circle of the planet that we live on, very important today. Every day we wake up with an acute awareness of how responsible we are and I think tribes have a lot of power in that way because I know we do. We still have...we still retain our inland hunting and fishing and gathering within the Great Lakes, within regions of the Great Lakes and within inland. So we have a lot to say about our environment and if I live long enough I'm going to continue...that's going to be one of my priorities is on the water and things like that."

Ian Record:

"Well, Eva, we really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us, really appreciate it."

Eva Petoskey:

"You're welcome."

Ian Record:

"That's all the time we have on today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu. Copyright 2013 Arizona Board of Regents."

Catalina Alvarez and Robert McGhee: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tribal leaders Catalina Alvarez (Pascua Yaqui Tribe) and Robert McGhee (Poarch Band of Creek Indians) field questions from seminar participants on an array of topics ranging from codes of ethics to creating mechanisms for transparent governance.

Resource Type
Citation

Alvarez, Catalina. "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. October 10, 2012. Q&A session.

McGhee, Robert. "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. October 10, 2012. Q&A session.

Audience member:

"Robert, coming from a similar small tribe and situations I can relate a lot to what you brought up as far as what you're dealing with. I just had a question as far as the transparency. I agree with that and I know that it's...I'm sure it's a work in progress. What has worked and what hasn't as far as are there limitations as far as how transparent each governmental entity is for tribal members and do you get a lot of backlash when they ask for a document or want to see something that they're just not entitled to?"

Robert McGhee:

"They're entitled to every document that we have, able to see [them] as long as it's not employee related, if it's not involving certain employees or certain individual members themselves. What we do is...and one of the things, we do an annual report. We put money aside every year, we publish a book and the book goes out to every tribal member, it's talking about our current financial status and we put a letter in there asking them to keep it amongst themselves and this is for you and your household. And then two days before it goes out, well, about a week before it goes out we actually have a large community meeting that goes over the annual report and explains it page by page. So we go through all the funding issues, we go through ‘this is where all the money went, this is what's left, this is what we're we agree...' We'll tell them, ‘We wanted to build a capital reserve account to protect future assets and this is how much we're putting in there.' So that's the best way we handle it and if we have any documents that we're concerned, because we do have council members who do like to talk and they're social people. We have one council member, all he does, and this is not to be disrespectful but he's always at the funerals and someone who's going into the hospital, which I respect. But we tell him and it's like, ‘You need to tell them that you're coming on behalf of all of us because we can't all go to...' But he loves to talk and I don't think he means it disrespectfully, I really don't, but he just loves...so now we take any information that is valuable at the council meeting, if we want to have a private discussion, I actually take it back up from all the...they'll agree to me, 'You can have...I don't want mine.' Because if they have it in their hand they're more apt to share it and give it away and we'll be the first ones to say, ‘I don't want mine, you take mine back,' ‘cause then we'll just collect all the information from the tribal council, we'll have it destroyed and it's easier that way on some regards because it can be sensitive topics that they really shouldn't be discussing so we do take up some of those things. But the transparency is, it's difficult but it's a double-edged sword."

Audience member:

"But more positive than negative as far as being open to the community and there's no...because leaving that expectation or leaving people to their own ideas or what's going on behind closed doors. You're kind of alleviating that to an extent?"

Robert McGhee:

"I think so. They have the opportunity...every council member, we have...every council meeting, we have two a month, what we've done now though is our first council meeting is actually business and the second council meeting we have every director rotate in every entity come in and give financial updates and updates of who's been hired, who's been...like how many employees we have and things like that so that helps a little bit. If we can alleviate where they don't have to ask us a question or they don't have to...then we'll try to do it."

Audience member:

"Thank you. And just a final question for the two of you, as far as going forward as far as governance, economic development, sitting, being chairs and different committees, how important is it for leaders to be educated and be able to provide that additional information that if you just...all you know is the rez, all you know is that immediate community, you haven't lived off, you haven't experienced any other let's say tribal entities or network, how important is that to be able to move forward for the futures to come?"

Catalina Alvarez:

"Yeah, I think that's a...you have to be...where nowadays, we're not this small reservation, we're not this small tribe. We're running with a lot of and dealing with a lot of millions of dollars and you need educated people that are going to be making those right decisions for the tribe. A lot of times we would have...you still have those mindsets of the older generation that feel that they don't need those kind of people or sometimes they're like in his case as well -- I'm going to pick on Marcelino [Flores] over there -- we have some people that are very educated and that know a whole lot and we have a tendency not to...I think we have to have a balance of where we get the educated people but also having the previous council, the old founders of the tribe also respect and embrace the knowledge that he does bring because I know that a lot of times like I've talked to Herminia [Frias], at least have the sense that if you don't know where you're at as a council to know and to ask that you need to find the right people for those positions because otherwise, like with us, I know I've told some of the council, we are still in the process of trying to get back the gaming board, because a lot of us feel we are not capable of running a gaming institution by any means and that's where it becomes difficult, that you have a council that still wants to be in charge of everything. And is it beneficial for us? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. We were burned also with the gaming board and finding the right people because sometimes you get burned by those same individuals on the gaming board. There's a balance that you have to find educated people, also people that are practical in knowing what needs to be done."

Robert McGhee:

"I think the key is if you're not...if they don't have the say...we educate as much as we can across all areas. It doesn't necessarily have to be college educated. It could be business education, tribal law, business literacy. We've actually had people just come in even to the council and teach debits and credits so they can have a better understanding if tribal gaming...because there was a distrust issue too amongst...you have a board over here and we have a top management staff and they're presenting this and it's overwhelming what they're presenting to you. And now though they have to go through it step by step by step and it's an easier process but I encourage if you can put any type of, in place, training and education at your council level, please do, I would recommend that you do it. But also do it for...what we've just started doing for all of our directors and program directors and executive directors is we have sent them through intensive leadership training and they have really...they said that was the best thing that the council has ever done. We felt that they were a part of the organization, that we were listening to them and now they're going to offer it, we're going to offer it to even all the employees because it wasn't fair we felt when I said, ‘we went through this,' and let... It's called 'Lead by Greatness.' We went through this training and it wasn't really fair for us to have the training and not the people who run our programs. And so we've actually...that just started this past year and they're enjoying it and now it's getting down to all the employees. And all the boards and committees like I pointed out before, they're all...all tribal members have the opportunity to serve on those but they have to submit an application and the application actually has to say, ‘Why do you want to serve on this board?' If it's the Cultural Authority, ‘Why do you want to serve here? Is it because you have something to give or do you just want to learn more? Why do you want to serve on PCI Gaming?' Because we realize, like she said, we don't have the expertise to run all of these economic development properties that we have. But you've got to make sure that your job descriptions and you've got to make sure that your...are strong job descriptions and things that get people in the right places to do that for you. We have mentoring programs for our tribal members so they can serve under leadership positions, to learn that way."

Audience member:

"This is in regards to how you deal with or listen to tribal members. There's kind of a two-part question that I heard and I don't know what your responses are, maybe your suggestions on how. The first thing here is congratulations and I think we all know it's a blessing in disguise to be an elected official. So how do you kind of keep a happy about hearing that, ‘Congratulations, you're on council.' And then the second part seems to be, ‘Well, I think you guys should be doing this or you need to do that and I voted you in.' And how do you listen to the community, how do you respond to those questions?"

Catalina Alvarez:

"I'm not sure, like, how do you...the first one that you said, that people just congratulate you and still smile after you know what you got yourself into? Yeah. You have to at least...you're always going to be in that position I think either way, no matter where you're at. We all put up a front even though we're not...maybe we're not happy inside but at least we...we'll just...we portray a different image by saying we're fine and we're good and everything, but I think when tribal members come and expect things of you and are asking you to do things differently, usually when I get asked a lot of things and mostly complaints of things are not doing or I was left out of the process, before I would normally, being a first-year council [member] I would automatically just get it and run with it and not really hear the other side of the story. Now, usually I would ask them, ‘Well, what would you do in these positions? Give me some feedback on what it is that you want accomplished and we'll see what we can do,' but I'm not going to...I always tell them, ‘I'm not going to promise you that it can be done because of course I'm only one voice of other 11.' So it's very important for the community to know that it might not happen and it's okay to tell a community member no. But you've got to watch out that you don't say 'no' too close to elections! [Laughter]"

Robert McGhee:

"One thing she did say was right on that it is okay to tell a community member 'no.' But what happened is that I think the way I handle it is...I wanted to serve. I've wanted to serve as a council member since I was a child. That was...I wanted to come back and do that. I think now though it's when...when someone looks at you, ‘Well, I want this,' I'm like, ‘Well, you tell...why, why do you want that? Does it benefit just you, is it benefiting the family or does it benefit all of us as a whole?' Because I'll let them know in a heartbeat that if that program costs $2 million to fix or a million dollars to fix, you're taking away $2 million or something from another program that we need to look at. So it's almost, you provide me the solution. If that's a problem then, okay, how do we fix it? I think if you throw it back on them that way, because sometimes they have a tendency to put you here and they remind you that, ‘Oh, you think you're up here?' Well, I throw it back down on them and it's like, ‘No, I'm here with you and I do not know how to fix that problem. So how do we fix that problem together? Or why don't you come to a meeting and present solutions.' And they actually...some of them like that because then it gives them...they're involved again and they can make those...be a part of the decision-making process or at least come up with some great ideas that we actually have considered and moved forward with. I'm with nine people but you have 3,000 other people out there, they have some great ideas and I think if you take the opportunity just to challenge them though to say, ‘Well, why do you want that and does it benefit everybody? Because our job as nine is to benefit everyone and it takes a majority first to support it. And have you talked to the other nine? And if the other nine believe in it then that's actually something we could probably do.'"

Audience member:

"My question or thing is when I got in office I ran for chairwoman last term and I didn't make it but I had all these ideas and now that I'm here, how...because a lot of people aren't educated as...when they get on council. They finished high school but they did other things and there was no really like ethical issues that occur, understanding and following policy and procedure within the business frame and then the constitutional issues. How do we follow our constitution yet do our ordinances and all those? But my main thing, my main question is -- and you said you go to, you have training and stuff like that -- is the ethical issue is that when we know there's a relative, a friend, somebody that we have a conflict with we're not really up front to say, ‘I'm not going to be in this discussion, I'm going to step away.' How do you get those values across to your council members so that there is transparency, because the people out there know who's related to who and who's friends with who and all that stuff."

Robert McGhee:

"I know that sometimes what we have to do is you have to remind council members that there is actually a possible conflict and impropriety, there's a...what's the terms that actually gets...an appearance of an impropriety. So as long as we feel that there's an appearance, we will actually let the other council member know. We challenge, it's like, ‘I don't know if you should really be involved in this. You may not know this but this actually impacts so and so,' and we provide them the relation. We tell them the relationship. So maybe some of them do know it but they just needed someone to challenge them to say, ‘I think it's best that you step out, do we all agree that so and so needs to step out,' and they do. What happens is the majority of them will do, once you've just shown where the relationship is and usually you're doing it because of...and don't do it attack-tive. You do it, say, ‘I think...isn't so-and-so in that program or isn't...did so-and-so apply for that job, isn't that your sister-in-law...,' because you are related but there are so many things sometimes you do get confused on even what is a nepotism. Is sister-in-law, is my aunt, is my sister? We know some of them are but then you have, well, your grandparents but they take care of that child. So there could be the possibility of that. So I think if you point it out, we've done that in the past, we just did it or you have your legal department if they're in the room, too. Our legal department's always with us. We'll lean over and say, ‘I think there's a...' and we'll, ‘Hey, that's why that person gets paid the big bucks, you need to go tell that there's an appearance here and maybe it's best to not be...you can be here and maybe just not be a part of the decision.'"

Catalina Alvarez:

"For us, I think the first time that I got into council we actually passed an ethical ordinance and I believe with the new council you're given all the ordinances that have like a fiscal ordinance and the ethical ordinance so you can go back and read them. And it's a way also to challenge, for council to hold each other accountable. That's kind of worked a little bit. I laugh because Herminia used to be our chairwoman the first time that I got into council and of course there was a...it was used against her. She brought the issue into us as ethical ordinance and it's just...the council saw it as a way, ‘Okay, this is how we're going to use it against her now.' But it in essence the...why we decided to do an ethical ordinance was really just to hold each other accountable and making sure that the community knows that we are not going to be in those situations where nepotism does occur and that we're all on the same playing field."

Audience member:

"This question kind of piggy backs off of the last question, but as elected officials and members of council how are you able to effective work against factionalism in council? I think that in a lot of tribal communities relationships ties, family ties run really deep. And so in spite of council and elected officials assuming integrity in their positions, they're always subject to sway. And I think that you see that in a lot of council where many times members will kind of group together on certain decisions and push legislation, ordinance or policy a certain direction when maybe it's kind of not based on the content but more on maybe who they're talking to and who they're being influenced by. As leaders, how are you able to combat that or at least address it within your councils and your communities?"

Robert McGhee:

"I've pictured...I've painted this like perfect council up here and we are not...by no means perfect. We do have our issues but with 3,000 there's definitely a difference between 3,000 members and say a 10,000 member tribe where factions can change elections. There's no doubt. One of the things that we have done is...it's funny, when we know certain people are getting together on a vote, we'll be like, ‘Well, I really don't care.' We won't be a part of it because it depends on what the issue is. If it's something about, oh, we're going to...it's like if we want to spend money here for this program, well, if I don't have a say or a personal attachment to it or something like that, we'll be like...but they've worked up this whole, us five support it or...’Well, have at it and if it works that's great and if it fails, I'll be the first one to let you know that failed,' but I won't be...but we won't do it...we don't air it to the rest of them. I think that if it comes to stuff that is...we have a strong and hopefully a lot of you do have an ethics code and the ethics code was the hardest thing to get passed. That was the hardest. It went to a vote five different times over a year because...and we kept...when we would challenge our tribal council members at the table, ‘Why are you not supporting the ethics code? Are you unethical?' But what happened was even our general council members who are looking, who are at these meetings and seeing so and so quit, he's not or she's not supporting the ethics code, not supporting the ethics code. It all came about though, the reason that individual was not supporting because the appearance of the impropriety. He was so scared of that word because of like you said factions or your council member's brother on another side of the family would be like, ‘Well, hey, he was a part of that decision that...' And so there's an appearance there and he was terrified of that ‘cause he was involved in business himself. And so we were like...so we made it stronger where the appearance, we gave it a little bit more teeth into that document to help him support it. But I think when it just comes to the factions I would...we don't have strong factions, we know that board and committee...it's funny it's only on board and committee appointments because they want Johnny in that position and they'll go meet and we'll say, ‘Well, which ones did you guys...who do you think you're going to choose today.' ‘No, we didn't do that yet.' Call them out on it. We do. But we've got a pretty good close relationship because we've spent so much time together in retreats and workshops and I do not...we do not have a problem calling each other out and one of the things that we had learned from one of these retreats that we went to, they pretty much told us, ‘Call them out. If they are not being the leader that they're supposed to be or if they're not supporting something...say it. Why are you not supporting this initiative? I need an answer.' And we couldn't have them flip-flop anymore either, that was the other thing too. We'd be in a workshop and we'd go around and just do a roll call. It was like, ‘You support it, you support it, you...' and then we'd get to a meeting and, ‘I don't support that.' Made us look like...that only happened a few times. So then we had another leadership, together, Kumbaya saying, ‘I get angry when you do that.' It was almost like a social therapy session. ‘I get angry when you do this. That's not appropriate ‘cause you're giving me your word and all that I feel that you have is your word. That's what makes you a credible person to me is your word and your actions and your actions are going against your words.' So now they actually will tell us, ‘Okay, I'm just going to be honest. I'm not supporting that.' Or if they're about to flip, because they've done it, we'll have another workshop, ‘I want to change my vote.' ‘What? Why?' And then I said, ‘Well, you told us before that from now on you're going to stick to your vote or stick to your decision,' and I called him out. He's like, ‘Yes, but I did tell you that if I changed I would let you know beforehand.' I'm like, ‘You've got me, you're right.' And he changed. He went in that council meeting and his vote changed and I'm like, ‘Well, at least you let me know beforehand.' I was leaning over to another council member, it was like, ‘We lost that one.'"

Catalina Alvarez:

"I think we're still trying to figure that out. You're always going to have I think, at least since I've been in council we have not had like this kind of council that can just sit down and talk, but we always had those kind of factions and we know that they're, sometimes they're influenced. The last...we haven't, this council since it's barely starting, we haven't gotten to that point but the previous council, we knew something was up and the committee knew what was going on and council members would pull in of course all their family so you were kind of pressured to vote in that direction. One of the things that took years and it still has been an issue was like that in the [Adam] Walsh Act, I couldn't believe how difficult it was for council to say that we want to first have the same kind of stuff...that we were going to opt into it and then where we were going to put our note...to notify the community, in which methods. It became so...I'm not even sure, well, I'm assuming that a lot of...in council you would have a sexual pedophile as a family member, that's the only reason why I thought that they could...they thought that I thought that they would be so hesitant in securing our community, but not until we actually had a switch in council that that...we were able to figure out where we were going to post the sexual pedophiles and what kind of notice was going to be given out to the community. But I think a lot of times that [faction], it's always going to exist because we're a tribe of 16,000 or 17,000 and we're always going to have that [faction]. We have council members that are related to each other and you know that they're going to pass ordinances and policies that are going to benefit their families or friends and it's very difficult to find out, at least for us right now. We're still....we're in the stage of trying to figure out how we can...how to resolve that."

Audience member:

"Just a couple of questions here. I'm busy scribbling things down. In today's world of course we live...we all live in two worlds and that is we live in America but at the same time we live within our tribal nations. And quite often, we have a clash in cultures and cultural values and we need somewhat to reconcile some of the things that we do. And was mentioned earlier the idea of nepotism. In the white world of course, that's a no-no. You don't do that, that's unethical behavior. At the same time, as a tribal member, we're taught form a very early age that our responsibility is to our family. Our responsibility is to our relatives, our responsibility is to our community. That's where our citizenship is, that's where our allegiance and where we should be focused. And we also understand that when someone close to you, a relative or whatever, comes for your assistance, you are not supposed to refuse because they're the ones who are going to support you when the chips are down, when you have a tragedy, when you have a sorrow, when you have a great need, you depend upon your family, yet and this job as tribal council is going to be gone in four years, but you still have to face that family member. And that's a difficult thing because you want the betterment of your nation, but at the same time when you're close relatives or clan members, clan fathers, whatever it is comes to you and needs something, how do you reconcile that? I know that's a challenge, ‘cause we have to keep our cultural values alive but we still have to work and thrive in the modern day era. So that's one of the things I think that has to be reconciled.

Another is with our traditional ways as you've mentioned earlier, to call them out. I think from a traditional mindset we're taught not to do that ‘cause we choose avoidance over confrontation whenever we can. And when we have a conflict with somebody, that's when we give direct eye contact, that's when we have that confrontation with them and we go full force. But we don't like to do that but rather we avoid confrontation whenever we can. If that means going on the other side of the street or not returning a phone call or not showing up for a meeting, for many of us, that's the proper thing to do rather than call them out. That's more of a modern day, white man kind of a thinking, at least I think. Utilizing our elders is another traditional way where we as tribal leaders or whatever we are think we're all it and leave out that segment of decision making or reliance upon our tribal elders to utilize them.

And I think what I'm gathering as part of what's happening here is to rebuilding nations is really about going back, going back. It's not building the tribal nation, it's rebuilding and it's remembrance and keeping a lot of our cultural values alive, of the form of governance that was thrust upon us. And if we look at those things, I do have a question specifically for you guys or anyone can answer this and that is, what would happen if salaries were not paid to elected council members and only expenses were paid, what kind of people would we have in there? What would we gain, what would we lose, what would it look like if we went back to that traditional sense of governance where these were not paid positions? Looking forward to your responses."

Robert McGhee:

"Just want to touch on a couple things there that you stated before. Yes, I have an allegiance to my family but I was raised to have, mostly from my mother, my father was a military man and things, but my mom, there was something about honesty, there was something about humility. And what bothers me is say when I have a larger family, not the nucleus but the extended family come up and ask me to do something that is inappropriate. I don't have a problem asking them, ‘Why are you asking me to do this? This is not...' because right now when you sign, when you run for council it's no longer mom, dad and my brother and my nephews and my grandparents, it's my...it's the 3,000 other members. Now every council member in here may have a different idea of that. That's mine. I represent all of them, the ones that you don't want to represent, the ones that still will call you by not your real name, any other name, the ones that still have some varied problems that we need to address. So I always know that I can go back to my family once I'm done serving my terms if I choose not to get elected because my dad doesn't allow us to speak tribal politics in our house either whenever we have an event or anything like that because he used to serve there. So he's like, ‘No one's allowed to come up to each other and talk to me about this or that or why did you do that?' He posted it on...he actually has a sign, he writes and he puts it on the door, ‘No politics are going to be discussed today,' which is helpful because sometimes you do...all of us here, you do get tired of going to certain events because you know someone's going to come up and ask a question or question you about this so at least I know it's...in the house, dad's house, it's off limits even at my brother's house ‘cause he served too. So he's like, ‘We don't talk about that.' To get back to your calling out question, I think I put that, yes, when I said calling out but keep in mind that we do it respectfully. It's one of those things of when I know...I don't necessarily have to call you always out in front. If I know you're upset, what I'm going to do though is have a conversation with you somewhere to ask why because I don't think me personally that we can move forward until I know what your issues are.

The full-time council...I agree with you on the...our part-time members...about four years ago we only got paid a stipend of $50 a meeting, five years ago. However, though, I would say the difference between that was there was also a different leadership at that time, too, so the council wasn't involved...a lot of them were involved but they just didn't feel that they had the time because there were some things going on where, ‘We're going to have a meeting today at 10:00.' ‘Well, I can't make a meeting today at 10:00. I'm working.' And until you got this...until you can change where you know that the leadership or whoever, the chairman, is going to respect if it's either a part-time council or a full-time one to know that we'll work around various schedules. I meant they do it for us now. We ask them, because like I said, two of us are part-time so we only have workshops on one day a month, all day. I actually use vacation time to do that. But the rest, they're welcome to attend their committee meetings. The committee meetings that I serve on, I'm allowed to determine when those meetings are so I think it could work as a part-time, but I don't think you would have the problems that you do. But keep in mind when you're full-time too, I think there are added pressures where a lot of the general council members now are looking at qualifications of putting somebody in office because they're paying them this much money. So that's actually a good, I would say a good side to it. Now, individuals are having to run on their qualifications because they're making salaries that are...that the program director or so and so, I make this and I have to have a master's in this or I make... So what are you bringing to the table as a council member that you're worth that much money? And so I think that's a good thing to it. It's stepping up to get other individuals involved that have qualifications or whatever those qualifications are it just could be not necessarily educational, it just could be serving on various committees or boards or things like that. And we have a cell center, just so you know, and that's where all our seniors hang out, all our elders hang out and I'm there probably...I eat lunch with them once a week to twice...to hear what they have to say. And we play bingo with them in the area and that's the best time to do it is when they're all gathered and just, ‘Well, what do you guys want us to see or where did I screw up today,' and they'll let you know quickly where."

Catalina Alvarez:

"I think as...and you're right, as individuals we're taught from the beginning our roles, our female roles and male roles and where you stand and even how we should address our elders. I think one of the things with the previous councils and when I first came on to council is we have our cultural leave availability for employees to do their cultural participants and participate in their culture activities. And I think as I talk to elders as a council, when we would get into discussions and I had one of the councilmen go, ‘You're supposed to respect your elders all the time.' It's true, but as a council, you guys are all equal, we are all equal at least my response to them because you were all elected by the people and they expect you to have a voice like any other individual on council. That was my response to him. And I think that more and more the council understands that we all should have a voice in how we do things and even elders in our council, they're always constantly...and I point out to Mary Jane [Buenamea], ‘They'll keep us in line as well,' but I think they're open to know that we all can share our own ideas and still try to move forward on some of our activities. I know that the last council since I was the only female, they would not include me in some of the discussions on cultural and even like on stipends that we give for our festivities, which I would get upset because I'm like, ‘as a council, male, female, I'm here as a voice to the people that voted me in. So you can't hold that against me that I can't give my input on what's going on.' But I think as we move into a full-time council I think if they weren't...if we wouldn't receive a stipend, it would be very difficult to move as fast as we have I think. As a council it allowed us to pass a lot of and meet more frequently to get things done within the tribe."

Audience member:

"I had my question for Robert and I wanted to know...you talked about the three sides that have to be heard. Could you just tell us very quickly what those three sides of any issue?"

Robert McGhee:

"Your side, the other side and the opinion. There's always this side, this side, but then there's also just what's the opinion out there of this problem. There's a lot more of those than there are the opinions themselves.

Shannon Douma: Cultivating Good Leadership: The Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Shannon Douma (Pueblo of Laguna) provides a detailed overview of how the Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy works to develop Pueblo youth to ably take the leadership reins of their nations through a rigorous curriculum designed to build up their sense of cultural identity and personal self-confidence and self-esteem.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Douma, Shannon. "Cultivating Good Leadership: The Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Presentation.

"Good morning everyone. My name is Shannon Douma. I'm from the Pueblo of Laguna -- I'm also Hopi/Tiwa -- and for the past couple years I've been serving as the Director of the Summer Policy Academy, which is a program out of the Santa Fe Indian School. I also serve as the... I share a couple hats at the Native American Community Academy. It's an urban charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it's our eighth year as a school and we serve primarily urban Native students in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I serve as the Enrollment Director, Out of School Time Learning Director.

Today I wanted to share with you though a program that has been in existence for...since 1997 called the Summer Policy Academy. So there are some key questions that I wanted to touch upon in my slide in reference to some of the things that are...you'll want to consider in your constitutions, consider when working with young people. This is a program, it's for Pueblo students and I wanted to draw your attention to how we start our program. We select about 25 Pueblo students from across New Mexico and one of the big...one of our key components of our program is really focused on identity development, understanding self as an individual. We have students that come in from many different parts of our communities, some students that live in urban settings, some students that are born and raised on the reservation. It's important that we identify the students that our Pueblo communities represent, but I wanted to draw your attention to this.

When we work with our students, we start off with an understanding of self, their core values, how they relate to the world. So in terms of who am I as an individual, my inherent qualities, the skills that I have and all of us possess these qualities whether it's our personality, the skills that we posses, our ability to live those core values, the ability to get along with people. In terms of if you think about this as you as a whole person, all of us are individuals that come from families, whether we're a sister, a brother, uncle, auntie, there are very important roles that we have in our communities and how we interact with each other, but also our young people. And so in terms of as individuals, how we live out these responsibilities as brothers and sisters or aunties and uncles is a really important thing that we share with our students because we want to know their role in preserving families within their own communities.

Then, if you think about our self in relation to our communities, how we...what are our roles and responsibilities in our communities? Think about...my community, we have very specific roles and responsibilities that we have as community members and how we live together in our village. In terms of myself, I've been raised as the oldest daughter; I have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to things that happen in our communities around our feast days, around our ceremonies. Being the oldest daughter, I was taught at a very young age to learn how to cook, to clean, to take care of my family. So those are things that have been instilled in me that I now possess and now am passing onto my children.

So in terms of our self in relation to the global world, we want our students to understand that when they leave our communities, they go outside of our communities, they're interacting with people who know little about them, little about who we are as Native people and sometimes there are stereotypes, sometimes there's misperceptions about who we are and it's important that our students know how they relate to the world outside their communities, how does the world see them and how do they maneuver in and out of that world as they go to college, as they seek work in the workforce outside of our communities and then as they come back home.

So all of us possess an understanding of ourselves in many different ways based on our experiences, our backgrounds, our relationships with our families, how we grow as individuals into adulthood. And so this is where...when we talk with our students, this is where we start; it's from an understanding of their core and who they are and how they relate to every aspect of their lives. When we start our work with our students, we start from our core values. Our core value...it's not...all of us have these core values that we possess, that we learned from our families, from our communities –- love -- being able to show the love and compassion to each other and it's something that we want to model to our students when they come and they work with us throughout the time that they're with us how we want to relate to one another. If you think about respect, sometimes respect in a sense is we have an understanding of it, but how do we practice it? Do our students understand what respect is and how they live that through their daily lives? Of course there's a lot of core values that I think resonate with all of us and we possess all those core values and this is a foundation, this is how we advocate for a better future, a desirable future for our students.

And then if you think about...the other side is our...the gifts of our Creator: the ability to learn, our education, the ability to think forwardly, the ability to be innovative and creative and then...so all of these things on the other side are basically things that are inherently given to us by the Creator, whether it's the land, our culture and resources, our families and how we take care of them. And then also governance: how we live our lives and how we govern ourselves, what are those specific responsibilities that we have within our own villages is really important as to how we raise our children, how we develop their most desirable future for our communities.

So when we work with our students, this is the foundation that we start from. We start from our core values. It's a really important place and I think all of us can see that this is what drives how we want to create a better community for our communities. And so this is what we start off with our students. When I move forward, I'm talking about our Summer Policy Academy. So the Summer Policy Academy is a project out of the Leadership Institute of the Santa Fe Indian School and we have 12 programs under that program. And I want to acknowledge my colleagues that have been working on this, the leadership Institute for the past probably 15 years plus.

The program started in 1997 and it was a forum to bring Pueblo people together to talk about important issues like education, like family, like law, health, these important issues that are impacting our communities. This is a picture of our students that have participated in our program. Our Summer Policy Academy is for incoming juniors and seniors representing the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico. Our mission is to grow leaders, youth as critical thinkers, conscious critical thinkers. Just sitting here this past couple of days, a lot of these issues that we talk about, whether it's law, governance, education, health, they're very challenging issues, issues that impact our communities. And so throughout this process that our students are going through, through a two-week process we're engaging them in critical thinking, asking those critical questions of each other, but also our leaders, our faculty that serve in our program. We want students to understand public policy.

And this program began and also our Leadership Institute began because we saw the need to have more people represented in our state government, to be people who are making laws, people who are advocating on behalf of our communities. At that time, there was less people that were representing our communities, our Pueblo communities, so we wanted to advocate and start early to get students to start thinking about these tough issues that sometimes we don't know about until we're in tribal leadership positions and we're in places of leadership in our communities where we start learning about governance, start learning about family issues, about all of the public policies that have been developed over time that have impacted our communities and specifically our Pueblo communities.

Also our program focuses a lot on community and service. We want students to give back, we want students to contribute back to our community, we want students to come back home to our Pueblo communities and serve in key roles in our communities, whether it's program planners, program developers, village roles, tribal leadership. And then of course leadership is an important skill for anyone to have, the ability to problem solve, the ability to speak in public, the ability to problem solve and make decisions so those are all key areas that we focus on with our program.

Our curriculum is designed so that students consider Indigenous issues from a world perspective. I'm going to start from the local tribal perspective. There's issues in our community that our students are studying, in our villages, things that come to the table when it comes to, for instance, health. What's the status of health in our communities? What's the status of health among our Pueblo communities in regards to Native youth? And then looking at our state and tribal governmental relations, we take our students to the New Mexico "Roundhouse," the legislature. They participate in a mock legislative session with our co-director, Mr. Regis Pecos.

And we also study national issues. What is our relationship with the federal government? And so that's important for our students to understand the relationship and how when we advocate and we go to Washington, D.C. We're going to learn about our programs that we have an understanding of what those national issues are and how they impact our communities.

And then globally, what are those Indigenous issues that are happening in places like New Zealand, in Africa, in Australia. We have a key area that we focus on with our students when it comes to understanding that there's communities across the world that are experiencing the same issues that we are as Native people here in the United States.

So our program is a four-week program. It's two weeks on campus at the Santa Fe Indian School. Our students stay in the dormitory there. And our topics focus around those 10 areas that I mentioned in the couple of slides, the gifts of the Creator. And those topics came about through the community institutes that have been happening since 1997, Pueblo people saying health is an important issue, education is an important issue. So those topics are areas that we focus on with our program.

Another part of our program focuses on health and wellness. We want students to know that being healthy and well is important. So part of that is...one part of it is starting every morning with positive affirmations, taking care of their body physically, understanding emotional health, social and emotional health and wellness.

And one part that we do is a talking circle that happens in the evening time where students are pretty much talking about issues that are important to them. What's, maybe, their own personal issues that they want to bring to the table?

Another part is project planning. We want our students to know the essential ingredients to put together a plan and a project when they go home so that they have something to go off when they're implementing their projects.

Team building is important. We have our students for two weeks so we want them to know one another; we want them to reinforce the core values of family, of brothers and sisters. And so that's a key component of our program is being able to be together when it comes to living together and growing together throughout the two weeks that they're with us.

A creative writing component: our students are developing creative writing, free verse poetry, and so we have individuals that come in and share with our students how to do that. And then art is a piece that we just added to our program. We spend a couple days with Pueblo artists. This past year we spent...the past two years, we've spent the week with Robert Tenorio who's a Pueblo potter from Kewa Pueblo. And so he's really instrumental in reinforcing and encouraging students to be involved in...to grow their interest in art and to also display their art and be advocates for people in the community that are wanting to be artists.

Following our program, we have a two-week timeframe where students go back home to their communities, they initiate a service project, and then after the two weeks they come back and they present it at a graduation banquet that they share their project with their peers, their family, the community, tribal leaders.

How do we choose our leaders? Basically, it's a reflection of our community in our communities and our Pueblo communities, any of us can be called upon to serve in key roles in our communities, and so we want our students to reflect our communities. So we don't choose students who are doing well academically only. We want our students who have that leadership potential and so how we recruit students is by recommendation.

I, for the last, since I started the program have served as a recruiter, and so I seek recommendations from our faculty, from community leaders, people that know the students in the schools that can recommend those students, and then understanding that we have different leadership styles and that we...

All of us possess different styles and so we have our students go through an exercise to understand what their leadership styles are. We've graduated seven to eight classes over the...since 2007. We have 150 youth leadership fellows. We have students that are now entering adulthood and moving toward college and career development. I'm going to go through these slides because my time is almost up.

One of the things I wanted to emphasize is the support from our community institutes. Our adult and Pueblo leaders serve as leaders and mentors to our students and Governor [Richard] Luarkie and my brother, Casey Douma, they serve as our faculty. So Governor Luarkie has shared with our students a presentation on governance and what that means and how it's displayed in our community, how it works in our communities, our Pueblo communities and then also with Casey talking about law and what that means. So it's really, really important that we look to our own people because we're the ones that have the expertise, we're the ones that possess those skills and talent and education. So we rely a lot on our community members to contribute back to the community and to our young people.

We're also encouraging adult and youth partnerships, adult and youth relationships, whether it's a parent and child, teacher and student, advisor and a student. We want to encourage that students can seek out an adult for support. And so throughout our entire time that our students are with us, they have the ability to make contact with an individual that they can rely on and trust. I'm going to finish up with a couple of slides.

We're beginning to have the conversation about role of women in leadership and in April 2012 we had a Pueblo Convocation that brought together about 400 people from all the 19 Pueblo communities to focus on the 10 topic areas that I had mentioned. And from this we started understanding the opportunity to bring in women because for the most part women are not involved with the political aspects of our communities. And so we started having the conversation from the public convocation, which led into a Pueblo Women's Convocation, Pueblo Institute for Women, which came from the Brave Girls Project at the Santa Fe Indian School. And so it's a program that we are focusing on in terms of how do we engage women in dialogue and discourse about key issues with our governance in our communities. So this is a three-year process.

We have our SPA One program we spend at the Santa Fe Indian School. We have SPA Two program where we travel to and study at Princeton University. Our students are matched up with a team leader where they research key issues that are pending legislation in Congress. And so our students are studying these issues at Princeton and then eventually travel to Washington, D.C. where they present these issues. We also have an SPA Three program that's an internship program where the students are actually serving in key roles, whether it's in legislator's office, program offices, libraries. We have students at my school that are serving as interns.

I think it's important to understand that when our students commit to our program, we invest the time in them. We invest the time from the time that we meet them with their families to the time they go through our program. And so time is really important when it comes to young people because their times is valuable and they need that investment.

The communication is building our network. How do we build our network of young people? And we've seen through the experiences of SPA that our network has been growing because our students having a deep interest in these issues, but also having the opportunity to network across the Pueblos with each other. We have a conscious investment in our curriculum. We tweak it; we tailor it to see what's worked.

We've tried many programs, many different I guess opportunities when it comes to partnerships. And so we kind of welcome new opportunities, but we also notice when we need to tailor our program to meet the needs of our new audience of students. I guess an opportunity to be open to partnerships.

We have a lot of partnerships through like UNM [University of New Mexico] law school, UNM medical school where we take our students and expose them to law, to health, just for an example. So we want them to pursue career interests in these areas and come back home and support our people.

We have a key component around youth involvement and contribution. So we have students that are developing service projects over the two week time that they're in their communities. But also we have students that serve as representatives at the United Nations Permanent Forum. So we have students that are participating in the youth caucus there, but also internships, that they...of their interests.

And then lastly -- this is the last slide I want to share with you -- is what we have learned and it's something I wanted to pass on to you because we talk a lot about involving young people, we talk a lot about investing in young people early. There were comments about, 'We need to do this in schools,' and so what we've learned is that we need to value youth voice. And we say that young people are important, that young people are our future, that young people are going to be in positions that we are in, that we have to value their voice, we have to engage them in conversation. And then finding money, channeling money to youth initiatives that are going to benefit young people so that we're putting our money where our mouth is really. We're talking about our future; we have to invest in our young people.

Encouraging collaboration among our community tribal programs to support youth. There's a lot of programs in our communities. How do they collaborate to leverage resources to bring ideas together to support youth? And then also identifying real youth advocates in our communities who are invested in youth and support them. There's a lot of things happen in our tribal communities that we may not know about because there's a lot of grassroots organizing that happens with young people. They see an issue, they want to be involved. How do we get them involved and how do we support them?

So the last thing is we always leave our students with this question. What will be your contribution? What is it that you're going to give back to your community? And so throughout the whole entire process when our students are going through this, we notice that young people are eager to be involved. They want to be involved and so our job is to connect them with the resources. And so I just wanted to leave this question with you all so that you can think about what will be your contribution to your communities, whether it's your individual contribution, your family contribution or your community contribution to what happens in your community. I think that's all the time I have, but if you have any questions I'm here." 

Shannon Douma and Richard Luarkie: How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Shannon Douma and Richard Luarkie (Pueblo of Laguna) field questions from seminar participants about how the Pueblo and also the Santa Fe Indian School's Summer Policy Academy groom Pueblo youth to take over the reins of leadership of their nations.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Douma, Shannon. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Q&A session.

Luarkie, Richard. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership? (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Q&A session.

Casey Douma:

"If you think about it in the context of that analogy of farming, you have to clear the land and plow the field and get it ready for irrigation. Get intentional rather than just take some seeds and throwing out there and hoping something grows, and from that crop becomes the people you select for leadership. We're very intentional in providing the environment for our children so that when they grow with the proper care and attention, that as they grow and the care is given to them, that when it comes time to select the leaders, that we have individuals like Governor [Richard] Luarkie who have been instilled with those types of values, and that when it comes time for harvest, the individuals possess the values and attributes of leadership that we hope for. And we know that that doesn't just happen on its own, it's very intentional in the communities.

So emphasizing the work with youth is so critical because we have to keep thinking of the next generation of leaders: who will be our caretakers, who will sustain us into the future? So in the efforts to think about leadership and leadership development, when it comes time to elections, when it comes time to get leadership in place, you think about who are our choices of people, what types of attributes do they have? And if they lack in those attributes, how do we instill that so that in the future we're not going to just let up, take the best of the worst and just take the whoevers? So as a part of growing leadership to...because so much of the stuff that we talked about for the past two days it comes back to how do we make this happen, how do we get things moving or how do we have a constructive conversation regarding constitutions, about governance, about laws and about our judicial systems? It takes a mindset of critical thinkers, of people who are eager to contribute to their communities. And that doesn't happen naturally. We have to be intentional in our approach.

So I'd like to just add that...commend both Shannon [Douma] and Governor Luarkie of our people for providing that respect. That as youth develop, it is so important because we were blessed by the...we were blessed with...we have leadership like Governor Luarkie, others who are products of the community, that are able to effectively govern and lead."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"Are there other comments or questions? Thank you very much, Casey."

Terry Janis:

"As far as your leadership strategies that you're engaging in in the youth program, speak a little bit more about how you're thinking about the critical nature of service and core values in particular. I ask you for a couple reasons. One is I'm constantly impressed by the Pueblos in the role of service in so many parts of governance and community and everything else. And I was wondering if you could speak more about that kind of balance between service and core values in your curriculum, your pedagogy, and how you think about them."

Shannon Douma:

"I just wanted to touch upon that. I think with the Summer Policy Academy we recognize that we have to establish a strong foundation for our people, for our young people, to instill and reinforce the core values of our people. Our students come in with an understanding...our students come in from a variety of places. They come in with a lot of knowledge about their communities. They've been involved in their communities, they've been raised to know what those values are. And then we have students that have lived outside of the communities that are Pueblo communities... they're Pueblo students, they've lived in places like Colorado Springs or in Albuquerque that maybe don't have as much exposure to their communities, and so we understand that our students come in with a variety of experiences.

So going back to talking about being intentional, we have to be intentional about how we work with our students because they're not learning it in the schools. We know that. They're not learning our history, our knowledge, and our experiences in the school settings. So how do we instill these values with our students to understand service, to understand reciprocity? We want our students to come back home and help our communities and that's something that I think...with all of us...I think for myself, being able to go away and experience college outside of my community and to know that there was always an opportunity to come home and serve my community and in what capacity, but to understand that we serve our communities in many different capacities. Some of us are in direct positions, some of us are working from afar, but to understand that it looks different for all of us and to recognize that.

And I think one of the things that I wanted to mention is that the core values advocate to achieve a higher standard for ourselves and families and our leaders. I think once the expectations are established we begin to reinforce those in our communities, with our families, with our leaders and we start holding each other accountable and so that's what we notice in our students is they start an understanding of how we're supposed to function, how we're supposed to live in terms of through this experience of understanding the history, the culture of our people. There's a real intention that students have in like, 'What can I do to give back? I've learned how my people have gone through this policy with boarding schools.' We've also learned about self-determination. 'How can I now give back to my community?' and it happens in many different ways. It happens through individual service, in groups, it happens within the schools that they go to school at. We have students that, in our school, we have some students from Laguna Pueblo that came to our program this past year and there was three students, they said, 'I didn't learn about this. I'm not learning about this in my school at all. How can I bring back the language and culture to our communities?' And so through that is a process of how we provide them with the tools, but also how we support them along the way.

So I think one of the things that we learn is that our students have the need to give back and they support one another and they help one another and I think they're eager to stay involved. And how we keep them involved is devoting our time to them, real intention of how we support them throughout the process. We don't just say, 'Come to our conference, hang out for a little bit and then go home.' We want them to understand that we're all a network now, we're a community now. So how do we support one another to serve our community because we're all representing those communities of the Pueblo people. Was that helpful?"

Miriam Jorgensen:

"We have one more question and then it's going to be our last question because I want to make sure we have a chance for a brief break and then we also have time for a very exciting pre-lunch panel as well. So sir, you've got the mic for the last question."

Esequiel (Zeke) Garcia:

"I've got a question for both panelists. The Institute, does it incorporate anything like an internship where the youth is paired up with a council member and actually gets hands on experience? And then the question for the Governor, for incoming tribal council members is there any type of...in y'all's setting in your Pueblo...any type of like orientation or how they...any type of orientation to make them aware of what their role is and how they should go about practicing their position as a leader?"

Shannon Douma:

"I think in terms of like an internship with the governor's office or in...I think that's possible. We haven't had a student that was interested in that particular internship. So that's an idea that I think it's something that we can explore. Our internships span across many different areas and we rely a lot on our faculty. Like for instance, the UNM [University of New Mexico] Law School, we have Professor Christine Zuni Cruz who has interns work with her, understanding how it all works with the law school programs, services provided. And so basically students have a certain interest area that they'll pursue and they'll ask us if they can have an internship there, but we haven't had anybody right now that has had an interest in being in the governor's office. I'm sure that would be a great experience for our students, but...so I think that's an idea that we'll explore when it comes to our internships for the coming years. But thank you."

Richard Luarkie:

"Thank you for the question, sir. As far as incoming council members, those officials, we don't...we have a process as I explained earlier where you're kind of groomed from the town crier to the mayordomo to the council. So that's kind of the longer version of our orientation preparing them for those offices. When an individual is then eventually put into office on January 1st when we have our installation ceremony, it's the opportunity for the people to encourage and remind the officials of what their role is. So it's the people that provide that first level of orientation. 'Here's what your responsibility is. Here's your reminders. Here's what the priorities are that we set forward, continue with this.'

When we get into the council environment, when we convene as a council at the beginning of the year, we normally have...we go through what we call our council policy, just our conduct, how we conduct ourselves, our responsibilities. As an example, council members...in council members with the exception of the staff officials, the cane-bearing officers, the only time our council members have authority is when a council meeting is convened. When the council meeting ends, they're regular Joe Blow. They can't go out in the community and say, 'Council said this or I have the authority.' They don't have that authority unless we delegate them. So those kind of things are done to orientate.

Now as far as an internship in the governor's office or the treasurer or the secretary's office, I don't see that those are impossible because we have the Government Affairs Office that's a part of the governor's office. But again, back to our teachings, we're taught, 'Don't chase these positions,' [Pueblo language]. They remind, 'Don't put your hand where you're not ready yet.' So they're very reminding that you don't chase them. When the people think they're ready, then they'll start putting you into these positions and that's kind of your flag that they're probably -- as Casey mentioned -- they're intentional about beginning you down that process. So that's probably a reason from the traditional side we've not necessarily had internships in those offices, but that doesn't mean that the other functions we can't create it now. Even I think in this modern day and age, I don't think that that's something that's unattainable. As a matter of fact, I think it'll be a really cool project that we can develop something like that to help our students, help our students with."

Richard Luarkie: How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: The Pueblo of Laguna

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Pueblo of Laguna Governor Richard Luarkie provides a brief overview of how Laguna citizens gradually and systematically ascend up the leadership ranks within the Pueblo through their adherence to and practice of Pueblo core values.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Luarkie, Richard. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: The Pueblo of Laguna." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2014. Presentation.

"Good morning everyone. Good to see all of you here. Thank you to the University of Arizona for inviting me down to have some time with you today and Shannon [Douma] did a great presentation this morning on focusing on the development of youth. I'm going to talk a little bit more on the...what she's building for on the tribal leadership side and those elements.

And many of you are currently serving in different roles or have served in roles or you support even those that served in roles, but I guess the perspective I want to take with you is pretty basic. We're taught in all our different communities about who we are and where we come from and all those critical pieces of education. In Laguna, we're taught about our creation story and how we came to be as Native people.

And [Pueblo language], our mother, the Creator, created everything. As Shannon mentioned, we all have roles. So she created first the moon, the sun, the stars, the earth, [Pueblo language], the sage singers. And she gave them [what their] roles and responsibilities would be and what their responsibility was to be; talked to them day in and day out. The sun as we all know comes up every morning from the east, goes across the [Pueblo language], protects us, gives us light, gives us guidance, [Pueblo language]. The moon, the sun, they come out or the moon, the stars then it's their turn. They take turns watching over us. So we're never in the dark because there's always some light on us. That's their role.

Then the spiritual beings were created and their role, as we all know, we start most every day, in your own particular teachings, but we're taught you carry your pouch, you carry your corn meal. We start every day with prayer, ask for that guidance, extend your appreciation for the day, for the life that you've been given. [Pueblo language], it's only borrowed. It's [Pueblo language], the breath we breathe, the heart we have; it's only borrowed. We thank for that every day that we have an opportunity again for a new day. We thank the spirits for that. We ask for her strength for guidance to live a good life.

Then the last creation was us, [Pueblo language], the people. But we were bestowed responsibility as well. [Pueblo language] she bestowed us [Pueblo language], love one another. [Pueblo language], respect one another, [Pueblo language], be careful with one another's heart, don't hurt each other, take care of yourself. [Pueblo language], as we grow, have the ability to learn. [Pueblo language], to be obedient. [Pueblo language], to be disciplined in your thought process. Those are the responsibilities we were given.

So I start in that manner because when you look at leadership, when you look at governance, it's not about your degree, it's not about how good you can write policy or how good you interpret the law. It's how do you take care of the people right? When I talk to young kids, I tell them your most important education is what she talked about; what does grandma teach you, what grandma teaches you, what mom and dad teach you, what the community teaches you. That's your most important education. And I'm not saying a degree is not important because it is, but it's a tool. You can have masters and have a law degree, a PhD, a medical degree, but if you're a jerk it doesn't matter. You need to be a good person. You need to be a good person.

And so those are really important things I think that we need to keep in mind when we think about the earth because when you come into leadership, in Laguna as an example, we're taught, and Shannon and Casey [Douma] can verify results with me. When we're preparing for leadership, we start our leadership in the community. You're responsible for, 'Go help your grandpa, go help your grandma, go cut weeds, go help with everything.' That's where it starts. Not to punish you, not to penalize you, but to teach you responsibility, and paying the price up front first before you go play. Nothing wrong with that.

When we looked at our offices that we had in the Pueblo, we have positions that...what we call the town crier, that's kind of your entry-level position. It's the guy that goes around and he lets the community know that there's going to be a village meeting, there's going to be ditch work, there's going to be grave digging or whatever, keeps the buildings clean and that kind of stuff. Then we have the next officer, which is our mayordomos or ditch bosses, those that are responsible for the land, the irrigation, the land issues, those kind of things. Then you have the council member. The council member obviously serves in our tribal council. Then you have a staff officer. We have six villages and so each village has a staff officer and that staff officer is kind of like the mayor of the village so he's the head of that village. And then we have the governor, secretary, treasurer, interpreter, those positions, the at-large positions.

So in our way, you should normally start as the town crier because you get to know who's in the community, you get to know your community. Then once you finish that maybe you can go to the middle, then you start being a little bit more involved with the direct family issues and your community issues, land issues. Then you can go to a council member once you've completed here, then you can be a council member because now let's assume you've learned your community just a little bit more, you've understood the foundation. Then you can go to the staff position, kind of the head of the village. And then if the people think of you otherwise, then maybe they might consider you for the governor position or the other positions. And that's an important process because it teaches you...it teaches you patience, it teaches you how to learn about your community, but also about yourself.

The other piece of our process is that we don't have a process or a system that allows for declaration of candidacy nor can you campaign. As a matter of fact, if you do those you're disqualified. It's up to the people to decide who is ready for these positions. Then they put your name in for consideration, the people will do the nominating as to who's going to go on the ballot. But even at that point, that teaching, again that starts to what Shannon was talking about, that starts in the home. That teaching also teaches you about [Pueblo language], permission.

When I got nominated for the governor position, I could have just said, 'Alright, I got nominated.' That's not what you're supposed to do. I have to go home now and tell my wife and get her permission and say, 'They nominated us,' not just me. Do I have your permission to accept because it's not just me?' And if she said no, then that's as far as we get. We go to the village and say, 'Thank you for your consideration.' But in this case she allowed it. So you need permission. That's what we're taught in our community, the males, what we get from the female, so we can't just do as we please or we shouldn't anyway. Unfortunately there's a lot of inconsistency with that, but that's our teaching. The clans and all those things we get from our mother. But what that teaches you as well is that humility and serving and being there to carry out the responsibility of the office and the policies and the rules and everything.

So as I stand here as governor with you, it's interesting because at the beginning of the term when the people that's holding office, they give you the canes. We've got canes that represent the symbol of our authority. We have a cane that goes back to the 1600s when the Spanish recognized the Pueblo's right to self-govern. We have a Mexican cane from the 1800s. We have from Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln gave us pueblos in the 1800s, 1863, 1864. So the governor carries the Abraham Lincoln cane. The First Lieutenant carries the Spanish and the Second Lieutenant carries the Mexican. So we still have those and every term or administration, we hand those over to the next official. And when they hand those over, they give us the offices then of course we have to speak to the people and let them know our elections and so on and so forth.

There was one year when we went through that process and one of our officials, they gave us the canes and he got up to make his comments and he said, 'You know, I'm willing to serve and willing to take care of our responsibilities, now you've given me the power to make decisions, I have the power to do this, I have the power to do that.' And he finished his comments. So it got to my turn. I got up to speak, made my comments, but I also touched on what he said about power and I believe this to this day. As the governor, I have no power. All I have is responsibility and authority, that's it. And it's defined for me in the constitution, the policies and the bylaws that we have ordinances. I have no power. The minute I believe I have power, I've lost touch because it then becomes about me and there are people that are very adamant about [Pueblo language], it's not about you. [Pueblo language], literally means 'don't puff your chest, don't show off, don't brag. It's not about you. The people are behind you.' The power resides [Pueblo language] our people [Pueblo language] with our Creator. That's the only place that has power. I have none.

So in that regard, going back to the creation story, the start of it, the little tidbit, Twitter of our creation story. If you don't have that piece, it's very easy to get caught up in all this other stuff. It's very important you start your day in prayer, however it is you pray. Keep your faith. Don't be jumping from this way to this way to that way. Keep your faith, whatever it is. And I think as we go forward in the development of leadership those are things that where at the point of time you need to be aligned with one another.

As parents now, a lot of times...I remember growing up in the Pueblo there and when my...grandpa and grandma raised me. If grandmother had something on the table, if I didn't like it, guess what, I didn't eat. But now sometimes I see parents going and trying to figure out, 'What do I feed my kid who doesn't like what I serve?' We need to get away from that, we need to be able to get our kids to be responsible, to be faithful. You want them all to grow up and be appreciative of what's provided. Whatever little bit, maybe not lobster, but if it's fried potatoes a couple nights in a row, to me that's a feast. Those are feelings that you need to be reminded because when you come into leadership role, those are the things that will help guide and help you make sound decisions, the simplicity.

And as I close here, whether you're a leader for this tribe or that tribe or whatever tribe, whether you're working in a particular program or whatever, know that the people have value; everybody has value. We're in a situation in our communities that I'm seeing now as we go across the country and go to different meetings and what not where we see, well, maybe a person committed murder, maybe a person did this, did that, and we're saying, 'Get rid of that person.' It's a difficult conversation that we're having to have now because in Native communities, we don't have the right to pull a weed and just throw it. As a leader, I don't have the choice to pick and choose whoever. I have to accept and love all of you regardless of what you've done. Granted, there's laws, there's passion, there's safety, responsibility -- all these things we need to balance. But going back to the creation story, our Creator didn't say, 'Leaders, you only need them and them. You only love them and them.' That's not our teaching, but we're embracing that. Then we're willing to fight with our own. Everybody has value.

So I want to encourage you that we find that way...we find a way to recognize that value in one another. The elders, I know a lot of times...like I said, my grandparents raised me. My grandmother was born in 1903. When I came around she was already in her 60s, when I was born. She died in the '90s, she was 88. But, you know, grandparents are so very, very special and those of you that are grandparents know that you're loved, know that you're loved. You are teachers, you are caretakers, you are guides, you are protection and you are angels. You never know if you're going to...these are all elements I intentionally bounced because in our Native communities we don't have a written document that states, 'Here's how you need to live.' All these things contribute. Back to my point: everyone has value. Grandparents, I love you because my grandparents raised me. I have a special tie to them as grandparents.

So with that, I hope that I've been able to contribute here. Just on the comical side, a couple years ago, my daughter, she was about eight years old and she said, 'Dad, help me with this science problem.' 'Sure.' And it was on sugars and all those kinds of things and when I started college I so I was like a biology major and chemistry minor so I learned about carbons and sugars and all that kind of stuff. So I took off and was [sharing] my knowledge and my wisdom. So I went into talking about the structure of sugars and all that kind of stuff and she was sitting there really listening intensely. So after I finished she goes, 'Wow, Dad.' And I thought she was going to say, 'Wow, you're the smartest guy in the world.' And she goes, 'Wow, Dad, you have a lot of useless information.' Thank you very much."

Paulette Jordan: Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Coeur d'Alene Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Paulette Jordan, citizen and council member of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in Idaho, discusses the importance of Native nation leaders being grounded in their culture and consulting the keepers of the culture (their elders) so that they approach the leadership challenges they face with the proper mindset and tools. She also shares a story about she helped to mobilize tribal citizens and non-Indians in her community to support a tax levy in order to preserve adequate funding for local public education.

Resource Type
Citation

Jordan, Paulette. "Engaging the Nation's Citizens and Effecting Change: The Coeur d'Alene Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 7, 2013. Presentation.

Herminia Frias:

"Our next presenter is Paulette Jordan and she is a tribal council member from Coeur d'Alene Tribe and she is going to be presenting her experience in citizen engagement and effecting change."

Paulette Jordan:

"Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity. It feels like a homecoming because I was here back in 2009, right Renee [Goldtooth]? And so it feels like home, and I really do appreciate the hospitality and the good nature that I've always been given. I started out here for the Emerging Tribal Leaders Seminar just when I was just elected on to the tribal council. And so it's always a learning process, but you just have to run and go. There is no college or any type of education that you can go through really to really prepare you for tribal leadership. It's one of a kind, it's all on its own. You can go and get any specific degree and your MBA, your doctorate, whatever, your law degree, but none of that really prepares you for the challenges of what you're about to face when it comes to the people with domestic violence issues or meth issues -- as we heard here -- and housing issues. There's always a concern and how you manage that with your own people really is based on how you base your culture within your own heart and your empathy to understand your people and not judge them.

And so that's always been my big learning curve...is thankfully being raised by the elders, they've always said, "˜As long as you hold your heart out in your hand, that is how you approach your people,' and so that's always been my strategy is just to listen first and foremost and so that's why I come here to you all and offer myself just more so as a student. So whenever someone tries to put me up on any pulpit or anything like that I just say, "˜I'm just a humble person. I was just someone who was just raised on the reservation who just wants to come back and help make my community a better place.' And so whatever title or whatever someone wants to put on you, you just have to remind yourself where you come from and that's one thing my [Coeur d'Alene language] always said. So all the challenges that I've faced, even the ones that I'm going to be facing tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that, I have to remember my grandmothers and they always said to never forget where you came from.

And I mention that because I've pretty much learned over the years where the necessary places for us as tribal peoples. Now how many in here are tribal leaders, sit on your tribal councils, your tribal government? We've got some good representation here. As tribal leaders, what I've learned is we face a lot of conflicts, a lot of challenges, and in those approaches we have to build relationships. It's your job and your duty and your responsibility not only to build a relationship with your people but those surrounding communities, whether you live within a certain county, within a certain state and just being in the U.S. You have to go and meet with the President, with the Congress, with your city council, with your county commissioners, etc. and you have to develop those positive relationships for your people. So you have to be able to communicate to express the nature and the value of your citizens. And so for me, coming in as a young tribal leader learning that we had to promote our own people, promote our own issues, they're all unique, but to me as a Coeur d'Alene woman coming in, the vested interest in me was that we had to tell our story so that our concerns would be addressed at home and that meant building these relationships with the non-tribal community. And so that's what I've been doing and that's been my goal. That's also the reason why I ran for a state representative position in the State of Idaho as a Democrat in a very Republican state. But the point of doing that was in a very racist state, we live 30 miles south of a KKK [Ku Klux Klan] compound. So Idaho is a very not only Republican state, but very white supremacist-natured state, so we have to deal with these issues. But it's...everyone, every state has their issues so no one's better, no one's perfect, no one's more challenged than the other. But that's something I raise today because that also helps to build up [to] what I'm about to get to.

And so I talk about how the white supremacy group comes in and why it is that I decided to step up to some of these challenges, because each and every day I've learned -- whether I worked in D.C. or came back home and worked or even sitting on the tribal council -- that it always comes down to not just telling your story, but being those rooms, the meetings, doing the work, getting there to tell the people, the non-tribal people that this is what you're about, that you're not here to be an enemy, but more so a friend and how you can work together, how you can build those partnerships. Not just for you and that other person in the room that you're sitting across the table from, but for your communities at large and how that's going to benefit both the tribal and the non-tribal aspects.

So that was one of the first challenges that I've faced being on the tribal council and I just wanted to reflect that, because to me for us to get better as communities we have to look at who our friends are and that has to be everybody. We can't just think, "˜Oh, we're sovereign nations, we're going to move forward on our own.' That's not going to happen and that's really more of a pie-in-the-sky and wishful thinking but in all reality, yes, that's great, we're sovereign nations and let's act as such. Let's practice our traditional ways, let's continue to get out there and dig our roots and gather our berries and hunt our game and our wildlife, but yet still we have to know that we are one aspect in the larger picture and we are a small function in the greater world. But as my uncle always says, "˜We could still be a leader in this world based on how we walk our talk even as small nations.' Something I wanted to share, he's one of my greatest mentors, I probably should [have] mentioned this before, but I wanted to share that, how he has always stated to me that "˜the dollar is not the Almighty.' And again I'll say that, "˜The dollar is not the Almighty.' '...And that we must always remember to be humble before the Almighty God, to take care of our children, our elders, our people, our employees and our communities, to walk our talk and lead by example and in doing so,' he said, "˜we can improve our societies and show the world who we truly are as a nation. Our humanity is all that matters at the end of the day and how we look upon one another as relatives.' And he stated, "˜Once we can understand why and what it is we hold sacred, we can truly move mountains.' And so that is a quote that I wanted to share with you from my own uncle, who really helped advise me to the business woman, the leader that I am today.

Still, I just consider myself again a student, so I'm constantly learning from my elders. But it's always stated that you have to talk to your children. Arlene [Templer], she mentioned how you have to mentor each other, you have to mentor your children into these stages. Consult with your elders, your statesmen, your tribal leaders to build this historical knowledge to help prevent you from making the same mistakes that they made and then learn from their experiences because they all have great ideas, but people tend to write them off and want to move them into elders' homes when that should never be the case, that yes, they're in their golden years, but it's golden years for a reason. They're these treasures within our society that are the greatest resource that we have and I've seen within every tribal community that people tend to think more so towards and lean more so towards the western society and less to a cultural education. And so the problem with that to me is when we go all the way back to the United Nations, we talk about the Indigenous rights and the whole purpose of us fighting for that is basically to keep ourselves as a unique society within the world, to have this general understanding that yes we exist and we have these rights as Indigenous peoples, but to have those rights you have to practice those rights. And so that's the whole point is if you're going to practice it, then really walk your talk and go out and do those things of your people, your traditions and then teach your children.

And so with that being said, we have to be the change that we want to see. So I have a story to share and I know I was asked to come in and share some of my stories and I said, "˜Well, there is one recent one that really kind of strikes me that I think would be good for people to know,' because I've kind of been sharing this up in the northwest quite a bit. People ask me, "˜Well, geez, Idaho...' for example, is 47th in the nation when it comes to education, we're 49th in overall ranking. We're just poor as it can be, but again it's a Republican state. We have so many challenges to deal with, but one is education, but to our tribe, to the Coeur d'Alene tribe, we value education as the utmost priority. So to me, it became a problem when the school district within our reservation cut funding and then they were going to close that school when that school teaches around 70 to 80 percent of our students who are tribal students. So just to give an example of how we can engage our citizens and how we can unite with one another for the common good is what I'm getting to here.

It started with a levy, and I'll try to do my best to keep the story short because it's a long one, but it started with a levy. And basically the state said, "˜We're going to cut funding to the school and most of the schools throughout the state,' but our school was the only one who failed the increased funding basically to keep the school open. So it was going to lose its accreditation, lose its sporting programs, lose kindergarten, preschool programs, cut teachers and even good, great teachers, ones who were dealing with math or language arts, music, primary functions I would think for young development. And when that was going on, the tribe wanted to play a role, but the tribe played a role in more of a political sense. For me, I was just coming off of my own state campaign and I felt really worn out because to me it was a challenge about...it's more about educating people to again, telling our story, what tribes really are, how we impact our local economy, socially and economically. And again, we're the number-one employer in the region, so we do quite well, but we don't brag or boast about it -- that's just not our way -- but we like to have other people tell that story. So again, the whole past six months of my life was spent trying to tell our story and educate people about the good that we do and how we want to work together to provide better resources to grow the economy, to create more jobs, to better the educational system, and to help those within even our smaller rural communities.

So after all this was going down and then the levy comes up, we thought, "˜Okay, everyone will vote for the levy. Why not, it's supporting our children, supporting education?' But then that failed and it failed miserably and the tribe became frustrated, the local non-tribal community was extremely frustrated, and sadly people were just ready to give up: the teachers, the students, everybody. So people were thinking, "˜Okay, where do we go next? Where do we go from here?' In a small community where that's checkerboarded [land] tribal and non-tribal, you get a lot of people thinking about their lives. What are they going to do next, where do we go, do we move, do we find a better school system? And this is a reservation and us Indian people, we don't just up and move to where we find a better life. This is our land; we have a sacred relationship with our land. So we don't just call it quits and move on and pack our trailer and go. We have to find a way to make it work. So a lot of the non-tribal people, they knew my plight and what I was trying to do and so they had approached me, the superintendent, the principal, and a lot of the teachers and I was kind of shocked by that, but they came to me and asked me...again, I'm just a tribal citizen in the community and they said, "˜Help us. We need your help. You know how to get out to the people and we think you can unite because we're going to need tribal and non-tribal votes to get this levy passed.' So you can imagine I was burned out and I really don't like politics. I really don't. I didn't like those forums and debates or really getting into the issues, but I do love helping the people and if I know that it's going to better the people overall, that makes me feel good about things.

So when I said to that superintendent of the district, I said, "˜Well, give me a week. I'm going to be here and there, but I need some time to think about it because I'm also a mother, too, and I know this is going to be another commitment and I already have a full plate.' So it came down to basically me seeing the school board panic. They panicked and then they had to cut everything and I felt bad for that school board and a few of them were tribal and I thought, "˜This is what they have to deal with. They have to deal with the state legislature who cut educational funding and it's trickling down to the people.' And so the rural county, the rural society, they're having to put the economy on their shoulders. So these are people just like you and I who have bills and families to feed and they...everyone has issues, they have a real...reality, basically to deal with. And so whatever that was, I thought, even my neighbors. I looked at their struggles and I thought, "˜It's just tragedy overall if we do nothing about it.' So this is what it comes down to, how do we engage our citizens?

So what I did was talked with all of our local folks. We had our education director, talked with our chairman. Basically I had to make this a grassroots effort and turn it into a community-wide, strong movement because they all had to come together. I said, "˜Even our students are willing to help and our teachers are willing to help, our elders, our tribal leaders, anyone and everyone needs to get out and vote.' But they're not only just responsible to vote. They have to get up and show up to these meetings and keep everyone educated because that was the reason why the levy lost in the first place. It always comes down to how you educate, how you tell your story and the people said, "˜Well, I don't really want to go door knocking. I don't really want to have public meetings. Why should we do this?' And I said, "˜Well, let's talk about John Deer, for example, who is a local business owner. He voted 'no' because he thinks that you want to basically bear this burden on his back as a local property owner. You're going to increase his taxes. Whether that's a minimal tax or a large tax, it's a tax and a local business owner does not want to be taxed any further than they already are.' But how do you tell that story? I says, "˜Well, speak from your heart. I'm teaching these young students here to tell their story and how it applies to their neighbors in that community.' I said, "˜And I learned going door...' It's really humbling to go door knocking, by the way, if anyone's done that or not. But I learned that if you want to win these elections and tell your story or have a vote in the broader forums, you have to get out there and tell people who you are and why you're running or what you're there for and how you can help them. And so I said to these students, "˜You're not here for yourself, you're here for your neighbor and you're here for their future because you are their vested interest. They're investing in you and you are the future.' I said, "˜When I went to school, my elders...' as much as I wanted to go back home to the reservation, I stayed in private school, but I said, "˜Only because I knew that my elders would always be with me,' and I knew that when they said, "˜Your education belongs to us. Your dedication, everything that you do belongs to the tribe,' I wholly believed in that. "˜So what you're doing today, this belongs to your community and you're bringing that back to invest a greater interest.'

And so that's what the youth said. They understood that. They said, "˜Yeah, we know, we get that.' And then they told their stories from their heart and that's what it came down to and that's, I think, how we won because this is a happy ending because people were ready to give up and call it good and throw in the towel and move on. And then of course the tribe is stuck footing the bill because people thought, "˜Well, the tribe obviously should be expected to pay this bill. We should be able to hold up that fourth leg to keep it standing.' But it's not the tribe's responsibility. We don't have a leadership arm in the school district. It's the state and it's a state-funded school, but the state was not doing its job and it was withholding money from local communities. So to me that's a travesty, but also it's against the law because they were not upholding an Idaho State Supreme Court decision and it's a law that every child in the State of Idaho is guaranteed a free and good public education. So they weren't upholding the needs of the people and again, it's not the tribe's responsibility, but the tribe was willing to do whatever was necessary. But I said, "˜Wait a minute. This is not the tribe's responsibility, but we're all about community here. We want to build up our community just as the next person.' And so a grassroots effort -- you have to really get out there and tell your story if you want to make change. And so being the change you want to see is about walking your talk, sharing your message, being that voice. Each and every one of us has a vision and we are blessed to have those visions because not everybody is granted that ability.

You're here again for a reason, so you just didn't stumble through that door and decide, "˜I'm going to listen in on Paulette and Arlene here.' You have a good reason to be here. So I'm hoping this story is helpful because to me that really opened my eyes, because when I was in that room I was directing the command center at the last day on voting day and I didn't have the tribal council or the chairman, I was...I said, "˜You know what, this is best left aside from all politics. This is about the children.' So I put the children at the helm and I said, "˜This is their doing. They're the ones who got out and educated the community. They went door to door,' as shy as they are, some of them are the most shy people, but I think after that experience it's going to turn them into strong nationwide leaders because they are young warriors. And I said, "˜You have just been inducted into basically what is kind of like our Indian Way Leadership Academy. You have stood up and counted coup against this levy.'

And so that day was neat because in our tribal headquarters we had all of our youth, we had a lot of our tribal citizens, we had non-tribal people and the most amazing point of the day to me was when we had some non-tribal ladies joking with our tribal people and they were joking like we were all relatives and I've never seen that before. I've never seen tribal and non-tribal and again, we still have a lot of race issues, we still have that line there that we need to get rid of, but I think that line is not as bold as it used to be after that moment. And so for those race relationships we really helped one another, and I think that people will remember that day and they'll see that we came together for each other's children. And so people are starting to see that tribes are not enemies but we're friends and we want to be good relatives and good neighbors to one another and so we showed that by example. And so again, we walked our talk that day.

That was the story I was asked to share and I wanted to come down and express that much to you and I do hope you take something from that. But again, it is...engaging your citizenry is about being humble and having that vision and really I think having diligence and just being honest with your people about what the issues are and what the concerns are. Really tell them, if there's a problem, you have to tell your elders and your people and not be afraid of that backlash because, yeah, they're going to criticize you and I know it's hard to take, but just realize it's constructive criticism that will help you in the long run. I know I would, as the youngest person of the council, I used to develop and hold elders' meetings and I was the elders' liaison and the elders were considered the tough ones of all the bunch in our community. And so they said, "˜Oh, put Paulette over there, she can talk to the elders.' And they thought they were setting me up good "˜cause I was the young one and I got vetted for that job. And I said, "˜Well, I see that as an honor and a privilege. Thank you.' And all the elders of the council, they're all in their 60s, 70s, and so here I was at 28 and so I really seen that as an honor, but my first step was to engage them wholly and we had an elders' listening session and yes, that first session was great. All they wanted to know is that they were being listened to and that you were going to do what they said and not just throw it into the wind. So I followed up after those listening sessions and we had them yearly and so they became very productive. And I thought, "˜I wish we did this more often.' But I would have them once yearly and so trying to keep that tradition going. But that's all it's about is talking to your people and not being afraid to be disciplined and you know how that finger may be waved in your face or challenged in some way or form. So thank you. I appreciate this time again and I appreciate all of you having me and listening to me, especially after that good lunch we had. [Coeur d'Alene language]."

Adam Geisler: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Adam Geisler, Secretary of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, discusses the diverse set of challenges he faces as an elected leader of his nation and discusses some of the innovative ways that he, his leadership colleagues, and his nation have worked to overcome those challenges. He also offers a number of pointers for how to lead effectively based on his own experience.

People
Resource Type
Citation

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

"Thank you, Renee [Goldtooth], for inviting me out here. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to have the opportunity to speak to all of you. You're probably looking at me wondering, "˜Who's this kid? What can he say, what can he share, what does he know?' I'm going to hopefully enlighten you a little bit on some of the challenges that I endeavored through. My name is Adam Geisler. I'm the secretary for La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians. I've been in office for five years. I have been working for my tribe since I was 14 years old and I guess I'll just kind of start with, 'Tribal council, are you ready?'...

A little bit about the photo. We have a five-member council. We have roughly 10,000 acres with about 700 enrolled members that live on and off the reservation. We have roughly 189 houses, about 15 miles of roadway, three separate water systems, and the major northern loop of the utility for feeding San Diego running through our reservation. I always like to talk about my council because I think a lot of times in Indian Country we hear about all the politics and everybody fighting and people don't like this or that, somebody didn't get a house because of this or that and the road didn't get taken care of. I'm really blessed to be able to sit with a council that works together, communicates well, and really has been a solid opportunity for me to learn some things. The woman in the middle is actually my mother. Her name is LaVonne Peck. She is the chairwoman for our tribe.

In the first two years that we were in office, we went through a process with UCLA law department to update, revise and bring back our constitution, all of our ordinances and all of our bylaws, because they hadn't been touched in about 30 years. So there was a lot of things that didn't make any sense when you read through them from everything from enrollment to land. The reason why I say that's my mom is because number one, I want to acknowledge the fact that she's my mom, but anytime we're doing business I call her 'LaVonne' or 'Chairwoman.' Nepotism exists in Indian Country. I'm not going to act like it doesn't, but I did run for a separate office. In my second term, I ran unopposed. The same thing goes for her and I just want...I guess I'm coming from a unique perspective because what I didn't realize coming into this was how challenging it would be working with a family member as close as your mother in this process, but it has been very rewarding and I'm very fortunate to be able to have gone through this.

Some other things that I didn't quite understand when I got in...I was always sitting out in the general membership kind of wondering, "˜Hey, why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they dealing with that? How come I didn't get a budget for this?' And I had no idea the type of time obligations that that was going to require and I had no clue when I got into office that this position was going to afford me the opportunity to learn about energy, learn about gaming, learn about finance and I'm going to highlight some of those as we move through this.

So something that I walked into right away that I wasn't prepared for, I got in council when I was 25 years old, I'm now 29, and I had no clue that I was going to have the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] show up one day on my doorstep and say, "˜Hey, the Mexican cartel just grew a field of marijuana on the backside of your mountain.' "˜Okay. Well, how do I deal with this?' "˜Well, why don't we take you up in the helicopter so we can take a look at this and understand how these guys are moving product in and out and how we can work with your law enforcement to make sure that we can monitor this more closely.' That kind of dives into Public Law 280. California is a Public Law 280 state, which means that we have concurrent jurisdiction. Some of you probably come from reservations that are directly funded through the federal government for your police, your prisons or jails. We're not. Although we can establish them if we have the money to do it, we're really relying upon the Sheriff's Department, which doesn't always respond in a timely manner because they're small not necessarily because they don't want to. The days of that are gone. But that's part of the situation that I wasn't aware of.

The other big aspect that I wasn't ready to come into was domestic violence. I have it in the letters on the bottom; we lead statistics in some really sad areas. I didn't know coming into office that a woman will go back to her abuser 11 times before she's either killed or before she finally leaves the guy. In a community as small as mine with 700 members, this was actually something very prevalent that our community was tired of and finally addressed. We wrote some grants, we held the first ever Domestic Violence Walk in the state of California, which is partly why I have that purple ribbon there, and we brought out all kinds of people from both tribal and non-tribal to support the efforts that we're making towards these things.

We sat through a ton of meetings in my first couple years dealing with these issues, where people were coming and talking about the meth head that lives next door or the dealing that might have been going on. And by the way, my community is a beautiful community. I'm just highlighting some of the challenges that are there. Making it sound like La Jolla, you're going to walk in, there's going to be like people high all over the place or something. It's not like that at all, but the reality is that you all have these, Native or not, you're going to have these folks in your family, you know who they are, and the funny part is that the neighbor who might not be in your family is coming to you telling you to deal with it and you're sitting there trying to figure out, "˜Well, man, how do I deal with my cousin? How do I deal with my brother or my uncle?' And those things are very real when you get into this office and there's expectations on both sides. Your families are going to come at you and expect you to protect them, the public is going to come at you and expect you to uphold the ordinances and the laws and enforce the job that you're there to do. And so right off the top, I had to realize that being impartial...I've always been fairly impartial about things, but these types of issues really started to test your ability to do that on a daily basis because these things just happen.

So DV [domestic violence], drugs, alcohol abuse, and then kind of figuring out how we address that; we formed a program called 'AVELICA.' As I mentioned, in our language that means 'butterfly.' Obviously the women coming out of their situation, being more aware on how to address the DV issues. And one thing that we did is we creatively developed the program, we hired and trained advocates from within our own community, we established domestic violence shelters for the women and these were all things that I walked in, I never had a clue about how to address. And I'll go over some training components later, but just realize this, if you're going to be successful when you come into doing this, if you're motivated, you have a heart and you're willing to get up every day and wear some broad shoulders, you'll be able to make through it.

Jobs; we talked about cousins, brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces. Jobs is always an interesting discussion in Indian Country because I appreciate the former, the presentation beforehand about reliance as opposed to... I don't know, I think sometimes our communities get really dependent on these programs that come in. And so... and unfortunately I'm in a community where when I walked in the social norm was seasonal employment. We have a campground. I'm not a gaming tribe, I know a lot of people think, "˜oh, you're a Southern California Indian, you're rich.' Nope, not me. I've got Harrah's Rincon, I've got Pala, I've Pauma, I've got Pechanga, Valley View, but not me. I have a campground that brings in almost 150,000 people a year and supports our tribal economic development and government operations. But back to the idea that people came in wanting to know, "˜Where's my job? I put you in office, I expect you to get me a job.' And I said, "˜When I asked for your vote, I made it really clear to you that I'm not going to promise you anything.' And so my comment about jobs is, when you get into office, don't make promises. The guys that were in there before me, they got in, "˜I'll get you a job. I'll get you on this project. I'll do this, I'll do that.' I have stated...I've stayed where I'm at as long as I'm at because I don't BS my people. Excuse the term. I know we're being recorded. I don't. You have to be up front with your folks. You have to be transparent. You can't be afraid to share with them the truths about the realities that you're in. If there are jobs available, see what you can do to hire your folks. Tribal Force Account is an amazing, amazing, amazing thing that you can utilize. It's a tool that I didn't realize.

Partnerships with, for example...here's a road, this is the picture. I guess talk about the picture for a second. This road is a road that was done by all Tribal Force Accounts, which is really rare in California because we don't really have the dollars coming in federally or always the personnel to be able to staff a full-time roads department or a full-time public health department. And what we were able to do is bring in about 30 tribal members to come in and basically create a road going through the middle of a mountain -- because I'm on the side of a 7,500-foot mountain, which makes development fun -- and we put our guys to work. And what was really amazing about this process was number one, Davis-Bacon [Act] doesn't apply because through our sovereignty, through exercising our sovereignty we created our own Tribal Force Account wages, we set a standard that was proper for what our people were doing and in some cases we are beating Davis-Bacon. By the way, this project, because of tax exempt abilities and delivery onto the reservation, we also built this for one third less than what any other public department could build in the county, in the state or from a federal standpoint. So recognize that.

I'm going to kind of couple this with TERO [Tribal Employment Rights Office]. How many of you guys have a TERO ordinance on your reservation? How many of you guys really use it? When I got into office, no clue about what the heck TERO was, I didn't understand what are these four letters representing, what's the point behind it, why is it here? I learned very quickly that this is another tool that we have in Indian Country that we can utilize, the Tribal Employment Rights, Opportunities and Ordinances that you can establish and then use that in working with the Department of Labor to go after federal contracts and dollars are awesome. That's the part I didn't know about TERO. I didn't realize... I thought TERO was, "˜Oh, you're going to build a project, I'm going to tax it, then I'm going to take it and I'm going to train somebody with that money.' There's a whole other side of TERO that I didn't know about that had to do with federal contracting and compliance.

And one thing that I want to highlight that we were successful in doing in utilizing TERO in San Diego was we actually... we have 18 tribes in San Diego County. How many of you guys have that many tribes in your county? The answer is none because we have the most in the country. Sorry. We have 18 tribes in San Diego County, which means that federal contractors are required to notify all of your tribes about the fact that there's jobs coming online and the reason why that's there... everybody goes, "˜Oh, it's an ethnic thing, it has to do with racism, the Indians.' No, it's a political relationship that the tribes have with the United States government, which is why if you're qualified as an Indian and they're qualified as a non-Indian, you go to the top based upon laws that were passed based upon your political standing. Not because you're Indian, but because of the sovereignty that your tribe exercises and you being a citizen of a nation.

So what we did is we realized that all these federal contractors were coming up and they did not know how to send it out to 18 tribes because some are rich, some are poor, some have fax machines, some have an HR department, some have something in the middle. And so we got everybody together because the federal contractors were tired of getting audited and fined and in all fairness, how do you communicate with 18 different governments that all operate differently? What we came up with was a website called nativehire.org and this... write it down, Google it later. You're going to like what I have to say about this. Nativehire.org was a concept that came out in working with the Department of Labor, in working with the federal contractors in San Diego County and in working with the tribes. What we did is we sat down and discussed how can we get this information out collectively for job availability, for contracts that are out there and then how can we also...our tribes ourselves look for these things. Nobody has ever thought about how to create this. Well, we did. We created nativehire.org. It's basically an Indian version of Craigslist and monsters.com mixed into one. You can be notified via email when jobs are available. You can be searching for jobs and the cool part is it's going to be coming actually out here to Arizona and shortly it's going to be heading nationwide because that's the Craigslist part of it. I want to work in Idaho. You click on Idaho and all of a sudden 15 different jobs come up in Idaho that you can be eligible for and that you can qualify for under TERO because they're trying to meet these guidelines. So TERO was something I didn't know a whole lot about. Since then I've created a website to help implement this utilizing the federal TERO policies to employ people, train people and so on and so forth. And I will say this, the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] -- people beat up on the Bureau a lot and sometimes it's deserving -- the Bureau worked with us actually very hard to make this a success because that was the beauty of what we recognized. It wasn't the tribes pointing the finger, it wasn't the businesses pointing the finger, it was everybody just sitting down at the table recognizing that we had some issues to work out and finding a solution for it and the Bureau actually was able to help us find the dollars to get this thing generated through a 638 contract. I'll go over 638 contracts. I didn't know what the heck those were either when I got into office. So nativehire.org.

Financial awareness. Obviously, financial partnerships are key for your tribes to succeed moving into the future. In California we have tribes that, yeah, they went out and they made their money in gaming, but the neat thing that we're starting to see is they're getting into banking. There are tribes that own banks. They're getting into real estate, they're getting into, I guess hotels are real estate. They're getting into tourism components. And all these things are capable because, yes, they cut their teeth on the casino development but they realized that through these financial partnerships in leveraging with different industries they were going to be able to grow and maintain the self-resiliency of their tribe. Let's get off the federal dole. I might bother some of you by saying that, but to be real honest with you, my goal by the time I'm out of office is to make sure that I don't need those federal programs. That's what it's about. If we're going to claim sovereignty, if we're going to claim the ability to exercise our own rights and take ownership of our own nations, then we need to understand that there's a financial component with that.

So some terms I wrote over here on the side: profit and loss. Man, my first council meeting where I got a financial statement was a trip. I sat there for probably three hours trying to digest what my CPA [certified public accountant] was feeding to me because he was talking about debits and credits and encumbrances and half the terms that I see over here on the side that I had no clue. Audits: I didn't realize the shape that my tribe was in quite honestly when I got into office. You always hear about, "˜Oh, that guy stole, that guy did this, that guy did that.' Well, when I got in I didn't find anybody that was stealing, but what I did find was that my tribe was on high risk because we had not done the SF425s, the IRA reporting documents, or federal documents. We had not done our reporting to the federal agencies so we went on high risk. And had our administration not come into office at the time when we did, the Bureau was actually ready to yank all of our funding and we were going to be operated and functioning out of the BIA office out of Riverside, our local area office. Luckily, we were able to get all the documents together, complete all the reporting and unfortunately I had to go back two years. So my first two-and-a-half months in office were really, really...they were really boring to be honest with you. There was a lot of stressing out and a lot of numbers, but I got to learn a whole lot.

GAAP, GASPI, the difference between government accounting and standard general accounting practices in the way that tribal governments are unique, and this is a thing I think that states really have a hard time digesting. They don't realize that we have the opportunity to operate both businesses and government, and unfortunately they don't do it very well when they try it. I think tribes are an awesome model of how you can exercise these things and they could really learn a lot from us. I will say this -- in San Diego I think that they are, they're realizing opportunities that are there. Leverage ratios. I never thought I'd be negotiating a multi-hundred million dollar casino deal and I have...this picture is actually with us signing our letter of engagement with Key Bank. I don't know if you guys know Key Bank. Some of you may, some of you may not. They came on to be our financial advisor for our tribe and the gentleman in the middle, his name is Jay Maswagger, and he used to tease us because he said, "˜By the time we're done going through this process you're going to have an MBA, a Maswagger MBA.' The gentleman is Indian from the Middle East, from the East Indian. And he started to give me this huge education on things that I never knew about; waterfall agreements, how to structure debt appropriately, leverage ratios. These guys use these big fancy terms and it basically boils down to, "˜Look, in order for me to give you $10 I need to see that you're going to give me $2 first.' So I learned about things like that.

Natural disasters: for whatever reason the other two photos didn't show up on here. I've been through two natural disasters, federally declared. My grandma's house burnt down, my mom's house burnt down, my businesses were devastated by flooding, and I had to learn the entire process about how to recover both immediately, so address and respond, but then go into long term and then find the money on how to do that. By the way, something that has changed in the last five years is that you as tribes can now declare your own federal disasters. You don't need to wait for the state to do that, which is huge, that you couldn't do in the past. You might not think it's ever going to happen and then one day it's going to hit you and you'll realize, "˜Man, I wish I would have gone to do some training.' You're actually required by law to get out there and become NIMS compliant, National Incident Management System compliant. So if at all today when you guys go back to your tribes or if you're in leadership positions, go back and ask...oh, there it is. There's grandma's house. If you can, go back and start asking questions. Emergency management is not just about fire chiefs and cops. It really boils down to your community members because they're going to be responding to the incidents first. That's who's there, it's your family, it's your friends.

Energy. That's Secretary Chu before he headed out. I was a year-and-a-half into my term and energy conference in D.C. and lo and behold here comes Secretary Chu and I made sure I sat right behind that guy because I wanted to talk to him about what kind of dollars were going to be available in Indian Country. And he and I had about 15-, 20-minute conversation. Have you guys ever sat down with a secretary of the President's cabinet? It's near impossible if you can ever get there and to get 15 or 20 minutes is almost unheard of. Snuck in there. So again, be motivated, get up every day and do your best to get where you can around these folks. We got to talk about some of the needs and the roll out that was going on under the stimulus program and this conversation really changed my opinion about how I thought about energy in general. I didn't realize how inefficient the homes are on our reservation. I didn't realize the need for R38 insulation. I didn't realize the need for LEED which is like a fancy term for building green. I thought green was like a roof with grass on it or going back to the old days for us with like mud lodges and things like that, although those are actually very energy efficient. But also looking about how can you control your own energy future. We're going to come back to the sovereignty thing. Another part besides being financially astute, aware and responsible is also controlling the energy itself. In the northern loop of San Diego County runs the main distribution line that feeds North County San Diego. Well, guess what, their easement's up in 2021. So in 2021, that means that I can either condemn their lines and they're going to have to go around my reservation, which is all federal land, impossible environmentally, or they can work with me and they can work with me to generate an energy production on my reservation. We're actually starting a 10 megawatt energy production facility of PV on our reservation right now; photovoltaic (PV), photovoltaic panels. So again, another thing that I really wasn't aware of.

Partnership. I'll just go point at these really quick. The main reason I wanted to put this up there is because partner with everybody. Try partnering with people that you think will never partner with you. Have those conversations. Have the uncomfortable conversations because those are the ones that are actually going to bear fruit I think in the end when you really need to talk with those folks. You guys ever heard of Bob Filner. He was our mayor that got booted out of San Diego. I just put this up here because he showed up at Native Hire, when we launched nativehire.org. These are all chairmen and there in the middle is Mr. Filner and I thought it was interesting because again, you never know where politics are going to lead you. You never know who you're going to meet. But partnerships wherever you can make it happen.

Training. You guys are here. Obviously you're proactive in trying to find training opportunities so just get out there. I was able to take financial training courses; I was able to take energy courses. They have these conferences. If you're elected into office, ATTG, Aid to Tribal Government dollars are a way that we have been able to afford to go out to these things. A lot of times there's scholarships available. I put this photo up here. That's not me speaking at NCAI. It's actually a gentleman from Pala and I put this up here because we're here talking about leadership. He's a former council member, he's actually a hard core conservative and he gave Romney's speech -- I don't know if you guys were there -- at NCAI in front of the whole delegation. And I don't put this up here to be political but my point is this: that's a heavy room to walk into and knowing what you're up against and knowing what people think and just generally how Indian Country operates and to have a man walk up there and speak his mind, speak his voice and exercise the way he thinks was just something that I thought was worth highlighting because he's educated, he's smart, Harvard background, pilot, but he didn't get there by just being lazy, not showing up to things. He got there because he was motivated and he wanted to train himself and it put him in front of a very large audience at a very heavy hitting conference.

Pass the knowledge. You're not going to be there forever. How many tribal councils out there actually picked out people out of their membership to go up and be trained so that they could be replaced into the future? We did. I'm 29. I don't want to be doing this forever, and the reality is that if you're going to do this job effectively on a day-to-day basis, you're going to get a little bit tired. It's not going to be something that you're going to be able to do, in my opinion, I know some guys can do it for 20 or 30 years, but a lot has changed in 20 or 30 years. And when you don't have the dollars like us that means that I'm doing it. I don't have staff, like I said, I don't have an HR department, I don't have an energy department; it's me and it's my council. We have two people that work with us intimately on these projects. So pass the knowledge both here and both with the youth. I should have put a slide up here on education. Maybe you can hit on the educational component a little bit.

Lastly, recognize your successes and your strengths. You wake up every day and you fight for something; water rights, energy, housing dollars, just motivating your people sometimes, but recognize that you do do that work. It's okay to recognize that you do work hard, in a humble way. But then also don't be afraid to share it. I'm happy to be here today to kind of talk about a whirlwind of things that I've been able to be a part of, but La Jolla's actually set the model in a lot of ways and I'll be happy to say it. We are the fastest recovery in Indian Country after our wildfires in 2007. No offense, but nobody's ever beat us in our recovery time; everybody back in their houses in nine months. We were the first tribe in a long time for the Bureau to actually hand us over $2 million and say, "˜Go build the road,' because everybody was scared, the old days of the Bureau. "˜We're not going to give you the cash. You Indians don't know how to spend it. You don't know how to operate your government.' I said, "˜Really? Watch this. Just give me the cash.' Government-to-government contract, here we go and we got the thing done. So don't be afraid to share those successes and if you guys have questions, I'll be happy to answer them later.

Tough stuff. Five things. Most challenging thing about this job: ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act]. I struggle so hard with ICWA because these are the kids, these are the future, these are people that don't have voices necessarily for themselves, and this is the hardest part. Our council meets quarterly with our ICWA representative, the county case workers, our clinic case workers, and these things just rip your heart out. If you have a heart while you're on council and you go to your first ICWA meeting, you'll understand what I mean because you're hearing horrible stories about these kids and their living situations and the way they were treated and the saddest part is it all boils back down to families that you know. That's the hard part and sometimes you can't do anything about it. Sometimes the mom that is using drugs that is smart enough to take the kid over to her other mom's house so that she can leave for the weekend to go do drugs is not being a neglectful parent because she was of right mind at least to take the kid out of the situation. Now to me I'm going, "˜Mom's using drugs, mom's not really being mom, mom maybe shouldn't have the kid.' Those are the types of decisions that you're going to run into that I was never expecting. And then, when you make the decision for placement, when the county comes to you asking for the recommendation or your tribal court or however your ICWA is set up and you make a recommendation based on the best interests of the kid's health...we had this. I'll be real honest. Our council agreed to take a child from a home and put them into a non-Indian home, which I understand that this is the point of ICWA, but the reality was that to find Indian homes in our area that were going to be healthy for the kid, didn't make sense at the time to transition them out because the home that they were in, the kid's not...how's it going with the kid in this home? 'They're not cutting themselves anymore, they're not drinking, they're not sleeping around,' and I'm going to take a kid out of that situation? ICWA is the hardest thing you're ever going to have to deal with when you're on council.

Last four things, most surprising thing, you guys just heard the whirlwind. If you've got a small council, you're going to deal with everything. You never know what's going to happen in a day. You're going to wake up one day and you'll be talking to Secretary Chu or you'll be talking to the governor and then you're going to get a phone call about the dogs chasing your kids home from the bus. That's just your day when you're on council, it's just how it is. I had to quickly learn about a variety of different laws. One thing I could change that I do a lot better now with is I don't sweat the small stuff. You can't do it all and I'm not saying that you give up by any means, but the sooner you recognize that there are just going to be things that happen that are out of your control, the easier it's going to be to lead more effectively when you're up there. And part of what's helped me do that really comes down to the last thing.

Effective leaders. Yeah, you listen. You guys are all here, you probably understand this. You all listen. You have to be patient. You have to be fair. But for me, the biggest way that I...the main core reason why I'm able to get through this on a daily basis is because I have a connection and a relationship with who created me. I have a religious understanding of how I work with god and how god works in everybody else's life and in mine. You need to stay centered when you're doing this because everybody is fighting with you. Well, a lot of people are fighting with you. There's a lot of great people encouraging you. There's going to be people pulling you this way, people pulling you that way and at the end of the day if you can't stay centered in what you believe, how you were raised and what you think, you're not going to be successful. You're not. You're going to get overwhelmed. So I would just end with sharing that. Wake up every day, reflect on who you are, reflect on what you know, and start there if you're going to get into office because it just gets crazy sometimes. Thank you very much for your time."

Ruben Santiesteban and Joni Theobald: Choosing Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership: The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Ruben Santiesteban and Joni Theobald of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians provide an overview of how Lac du Flambeau developed a new approach to cultivating and then selecting quality leaders to lead the Band to a brighter future.

Resource Type
Citation

Santiesteban, Ruben and Joni Theobald. "How Do We Choose Our Leaders and Maintain Quality Leadership?: Lac du Flambeau." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

Joni Theobald:

"Again, my name's Joni Theobald. I'm the Education [Lac du Flambeau language] and Workforce Development Director. Part of my work with the tribe and with the constitution started about three years ago, actually a little longer than that, but really more intensely with...a lot with our tribe and my role...I guess I'm pretty direct, I'm pretty...for me, it's all about process and that's kind of my fit with the constitution, the policy, and the tribal council. So with the Education and Workforce Development, our goal, our mission, one of the first things that...I brought my slides and I'm going to probably jump around a little bit just to kind of give you an idea of the background, but also what is the process and how we came about where we are today.

When I came home maybe a couple years ago, actually I had grew up in Lac du Flambeau, went off to college, spent some time in different capacities, work capacities before coming back. Our tribe was going through a lot of difficult time and it was kind of a synchronized I guess of what had happened. There was an opening, the Education Director. There was a takeover within our tribe. There was a lot of turmoil, but it was kind of a new term for the tribe where I moved in the director, new council members came on board, and it was still some existing council members as well, but what we came into is...along with interestingly enough was the Native Nations Institute kind of was a couple of years ago coming around, they were in Lac du Flambeau. So again all these synchronized things happening with our tribe. We brought into the light for us the constitutional reform and someone again, in some of the tribes I know we all face is communication, transparency and just basically engaging and looking for solution-based...

So back to my real direct and one of the main things that I was brought in to along with and asked to help was just kind of organizing and creating a process for change. Change in a sense that was very task- and action-oriented, I guess you would say. Again, my background is when I look at trying to take a lot of what was going on and how do we look at communication, how do we look at making informed decisions, this kind of led to the path of where we started creating a process, whether it was developing and maintaining our leaders through education or it was developing and trying to make change in mindset or if it was a change in our constitution, it really followed what I say and some of the documents I put in here kind of represent that change and that's where I wanted to kind of focus my...what I would talk about today.

So I'm just going to go through. One of the things that...well, just to back up a little bit. One of the main things when I started...I have family on the council, many of us do, started getting calls about how do we create change and how can we bring an educational piece? My background also was that as Director of Indian [Education] on Madison, Wisconsin before moving home for a while. And so there was...just coming back and forth some of my family members and some council are reaching out and talking to me about, "˜What can we do to bring this type of training and understanding as we go throughout reform? We've got to make sure we bring along our tribal members in understanding preamble all the way to the different options for membership.' So one of the things we talked about was, how do we communicate, how do we create [a] classroom situation, but how do we look at what do we look like today and then where are we trying to go? One of the things that our tribe maybe some that we weren't doing and some of you may be already involved in it is looking and collecting data, really looking at, 'What do we look like?' And then from there, really having really great discussions about who do we want to be and then how do we get there.

So one of the things we decided...we're in a...we're a per cap tribe, but one of the things we haven't done was on per cap we really haven't had a way of collecting data or opinions or what are some of the ideas of what our tribal membership was thinking about. But as a baseline, one of the first things, I was moving home and it happened to be the Education Director job opened up in our community, was to take a look at who are our tribal members, who were they, how old were they? And so I'm not going to go and talk through all the tribes, but I just wanted to give an idea because I think really giving the council a good understanding of who we are and what were our ages and what we represent was the first for us. We do have the census, but again it wasn't...it wasn't -- sometimes it's skewed. It really didn't break apart some of the off rez/on rez of what we were looking at. So housing again I know with a lot of tribes is always...it generates a lot of discussion and interest. One of the unique things about having our survey, it was...we also -- which Ruben will talk about a little later -- is we created a youth council. We strategically set that up because what we're doing, we thought about our youth in about 10 years according to our criteria could run for council. We have a large learning curve and there's so many things you need to know. Let's start, let's create a council that looks at tribal governance but also is uniquely involved in this process of informed decisions and looking for solutions to different issues that we have. So they were instrumental in the data collection, the formulation of questions, what's a valid question, and it was just a learning process for all of us. So I'm just going to go through a few of the slides that we created.

So we looked at employment and I'm just going to...and mainly for me coming as education [director], there really wasn't a strategic purpose to our department. It was all about give out the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] grants. So we really expanded, worked on a strategic plan of our department of what was the purpose of our education and workforce? Workforce came about six months later underneath the education department along with Head Start. So I have the full gambit from the pre-K to senior college that we have in place. So it was really neat to see the patterns and to watch as we develop and leaders as we started our pre-K was does a leader look like, what does it want...where do we...what do want our leaders to be, what are the characteristics and what do we have in place in our systems, whether it's governance, whether it's schools, whether it's just ethics? So again back to our survey, it's looking at our educational levels.

One of the triggers as well, we had...at the same time that I was moved into our Education Director position our tribal administration position was up as we...I don't recall, but we were looking for a replacement and it was vacant. We had three tribal members apply for tribal administrator and one of the policies that we have is a tribal member needs to be the tribal administrator. Well, we had three candidates, but only one candidate had the educational criteria to take the job and at the time the candidate wasn't the preferred choice given our turmoil, things going on. So that kind of also...we looked at...again, but the education, what we found out of our 4,000-member tribe, we had about 60 tribal members with bachelor's degrees, maybe I think 30 with master's, and about seven with a Ph.D. Of those, as many of you may have experienced, is most of them didn't live on the reservation, kind of had a disconnect and weren't home and again, strategically with our department we were looking to groom and develop leaders who were going to stay home and help us in the trenches. You can feel free to...I think they have these all on...if you would like to take these. I know some of your copies are hard to read.

Again, one of the key things that we looked at is, as we think about developing leaders we think about someone, we think about culture and languages always out on our strategic plan that we started implementing as language revitalization was key and very important to a leader. So having this data and having these, so council can make informed decisions on budget and on programs, was real critical. This wasn't a process that was in place, looking and collecting data. Internet access, I think...we talk about...this is looking at our distance learning, bringing college to the reservation. That was really important as well. Again, we broke it off to on- and off-reservation. But again, that was kind of our key, our start, and later on I can talk more about our candidate and our training and educational programming. As you look in your binder, we started creating and prioritizing what were key topical areas, areas of need in tribal governance and in employment that we were looking to train and develop leaders, managers for our projects. So that led into more of our really formalizing and structuring the educational programs that met the needs, what we looked for, addressing barriers of place-based education as free as possible. I pitched that to many colleges, they didn't buy it, but they at least gave us a discount and we had collective contracted classes.

One of the main things is though is the mindset of the council and the newly formed was really education always was critical in importance and so they supported and backed and invested in developing our capacity. That was instrumental in getting off the ground and moving this into a real formalized educational process. One of the documents we have is the resolution for council and that was a key of making college in the workday for all tribal members' employment. We are the largest employers in our region and the tribe employs...almost half of our employees or actually 60 percent are tribal members, so we created college in the workplace where it reduced travel, the barrier. Our closest college was an hour away. We developed our broadband fiber system so we could have distance learning in real time, kind of what we are watching here today. We had the same issues with the real time. And also the cost factor -- so we wanted to make it very affordable because one thing we talked about is many of our tribal members are very knowledgeable. Had they had the opportunity to build college within and make it applicable to work they could have easily in 30 years had their master's or doctorate degree and we wanted to find a way and create that opportunity at home. I'm sure we'll have questions about it, but I'm going to give some time to Ruben. Again, this is...he's going to speak about how this transition, how we strategically pulled in the youth in this process as well."

Ruben Santiesteban:

"Thank you. I just want to thank everybody. [Lac du Flambeau language]. My English name is Ruben Santiesteban and my Indian name is '[Lac du Flambeau language].' It means 'King Bird' and '[Lac du Flambeau language]' is 'Lac du Flambeau.' I just want to say [Lac du Flambeau language] to all our veterans and elders here and I'm just really thankful and grateful to be speaking to you today.

How do we choose our leaders and maintain quality leadership? What an excellent session to be a part of. Our constitution criteria, blood quantum if you have the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, you have to be at least 25 years of age, quarter blood, 25 signatures from the community, and at least living on the reservation for one year. There really isn't a lot of criteria there, but it's what we have. You can change some of those things through your election code, just to give you an idea of where you can kind of make those changes. Now in Indian Country, what we see that's trending always and you all know this, last names in family members. When it comes time to vote, who do you vote for? Well, if you don't know who you're voting for, who do you vote for? We don't have many voters out there, but we do have some and when they do go to the polls, if they don't know anything about anybody, who do they vote for? You can assume that they'll vote for a cousin, uncle, auntie, grandpa, grandmother. That's the way it goes in any country. That's just the way it is. I wanted to speak about that because one of the greatest things about being a leader in any country on your reservation is that we all have the same issues, we all are facing the same things on each reservation with our people.

I'm one of the youngest leaders ever voted to council and I had the highest vote count in Lac du Flambeau history and part of that was from the candidate endorsement training. That training gave candidates the opportunity to state their positions in current affairs and what they hoped to accomplish in their term in office. And we don't get to see that in Indian Country. We need to do that. How do you know who you're voting for? I'm Ruben Santiesteban, definitely don't have the strong name on our reservation, but through the candidate endorsement training [it] really gave me an opportunity to state who I am, where my family comes from. So it was...if you have any questions about that, we'll be available to you. You should do that, implement that on your reservation if you have a constitution and you choose your leaders the same way in which we do in Lac du Flambeau.

Now to move on to talk about the Waswagoning Youth Council is also part of UNITY. This young group of leaders has been such a positive force in our community. They have a unique understanding of treaty rights and tribal governance. The youth council travels state and nationwide networking with new youth groups and tribal leaders in Indian Country to help rebuild Native communities. This leadership team consists of youth between the ages of 12 and 24, because at 25 you can run for council. They attack issues like youth engagement, teen suicide, and substance abuse among teens and I'm truly honored to be mentoring our future-generation leaders. If you want to make change in your community, start promoting things like youth councils, immersion, community events, after school programs, leadership conferences, cultural activities we do need to promote in our communities. It's vital to our family asset building and I hope all of you are doing that and if you're not get to it.

I want to talk about the Expo, it's in your binder there and the [Lac du Flambeau language], which stands for "˜We Are All Doing This Together.' It was named by one of our spiritual leaders in the reservation that gave us [Lac du Flambeau language] to help me build this Expo. Now the parents knew the Connections Expo was an opportunity for our community to meet and greet with their tribal service providers, local area service providers and potential employers, college and recreational opportunities. This Expo also gives our tribal service providers a chance to build their brand awareness. We all know that we need that in our community. We know that we have the resources and the tools, but we need to get together. Most importantly these opportunities allow program managers and team members to network with each other and possibly collaborate on future projects. What do we know in Indian Country? We use our resources up all the time. Some of us have a lot of programs. In our case we have over 91 programs, and of those 91 programs I can tell you right now that a lot of them have the same goals, to make Waswagoning a better place. So to get together and collaborate and pull those resources together can be very beneficial to your change. There's some key components to the Expo and one of them was community development, building program awareness, networking, and also building capacity in the community. The Expo, in its second year this year, had the most families together in our history. That's important to me.

They had asked me to kind of talk about my story a little bit and I didn't kind of want to do that, but to talk about my upbringing. I grew up in both Lac du Flambeau and Milwaukee and it gave me a unique insight on small-town and big-city communities. My childhood was full of adventure and ups and downs, but encouragement to succeed from family members was everlasting on me. I'm sitting here in front of you and I'm going to tell you that I was an at-risk youth and I was going to be a nobody. I was told I wasn't going to make it, told I wasn't going to be able to make any change in my community, I was going to be in jail for the rest of my life, and really had no direction. And I persevered, just like Indian people have for the last 10,000 years. I was not going to put up with that and I created a new chapter in my career and it has been nothing short of the greatest moments of my life and I get to do things like this and speak in front of you, in front of tribal leaders, and I just really appreciate that. My whole life I've been a dreamer, but this time where I sit before you today, I get to live this dream.

To move on and try to move through quickly, I wanted to talk to you about personal branding and what that means. We all have a brand. People are making assumptions and perceptions of who we are and today it's going to be about your tribe, your reputation and actions that you take in your community. That's your brand, that's who you represent. My personal brand and how I carry myself, and hopefully I've left an everlasting impression on you today. I'm going to say a quote from someone who's been a real good mentor to me. His name is Brian Jackson. He's the President of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association: "˜What is good education? Is getting a good education mean getting good grades, or is it making sure students are motivated to learn? Education comes in all forms. We just have to learn to achieve the goals and help students be motivated for higher education after high school.' I think about that all the time and I think it's just positive and being where I come from and the upbringing and the struggles that I've had to face -- just like many of you have -- that it feels good to have words like that to be told to me.

I will speak a little bit on leadership. Communication, the fight against the silo effect...my biggest fear, we talked about this yesterday is we have council sometimes that rescind the things that we've done. That's a fear of mine. The work that you're doing, will it matter if we don't communicate better with each other when new councils come in, will they change what you've done? And will 10, 15 years later your great idea that you had will come back again and it'll seem new and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but we need to get out of that silo effect and that's part of leadership. When it comes to leadership we have to challenge the myth that it's about position and power. The truth is leadership is an observable set of skills and abilities. Leadership is learned. We don't just get to wake up one day and become the greatest leaders in the world or the greatest leaders in Indian Country. Learning to lead is about discovering what you care about and value, the kind of things we talked about. In Ojibwe country, we have the seven grandfather teachings and we have the clan systems, which we abide by. Those are the governing systems that we used before the 1934 constitution came and that's who we are. And as we become leaders, we're faced with some difficult questions and the one that I ask myself all the time is, 'Am I the right person to lead at this very moment, is it me, and why?' You have to remember, you can't lead others until you've first led yourself through struggle and opposing values. And I'm definitely not telling you anything that's new, but I will sit here and remind you of why you're here, of who you are, the choices that you make that represent your nation and your people. The most critical knowledge for all of us and for leaders especially turns out to be self-knowledge or personal brand and the most powerful leaders encourage others to lead. As we encourage youth to come and come lead our nation, are we going to be ready to hand off those leadership roles to them? Because that's exactly...the hardest thing we have to do is being able to let others lead.

Now I have a minute left. I want to make sure that we...I give a shout out to the Native Nations Institute and [the] Continuing Education and Certificate in Indigenous Governance. I was a part of that and I think it was fantastic. And I just want to say in Lac du Flambeau, the actions that we take today isn't just for tomorrow, it's for the next 30 years and that we are...we do have a sovereign attitude and we also are building education for capable institutions in our cultural match and using our seven grandfather teachings and instilling that culture into our people. I would like to end today by saying that leadership is in the moment and after speaking with Steve Cornell yesterday, I have a quote or a statement for you that I want you to remember: "˜Successful nation building starts with our greatest asset: our children, the youth. What are we doing to protect what we have built? Education and language revitalization are key components to the foundation of the survival of our community in improving the lives of our people.' With that being said, I just want to say miigwetch and hope I have a chance to speak with you more after we're done."

Honoring Nation: Lance Morgan: Ho-Chunk, Inc. Economic Development Corporation

Author
Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Ho-Chunk, Inc. CEO Lance Morgan share the lessons he and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska have learned about the keys to creating an economic development environment capable of fostering successful nation-owned enterprises. He stresses the need for some Native nations to engage in constitutional reform in order to create that environment, in particular staggering the terms of elected officials to ensure a nation's institutional stability and, in turn, the strategic direction and advancement of the businesses it owns and operates.

Resource Type
Citation

Morgan, Lance. "Ho-Chunk, Inc. Economic Development Corporation." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Santa Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Miriam Jorgensen:

"My name's Miriam Jorgensen. I had the opportunity to talk to some of you yesterday. I'm the Research Director for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and I'm more recently the Associate Director for Research for the Native Nations Institute. And as many have said already, that one of the most exciting projects they're involved with is the Honoring Nations program. And it's through the Honoring Nations program that I personally met our next speaker and then had the opportunity to get to know him even better through the program that Gail Christopher, your lunchtime speaker, runs, the Innovations in American Government program, because I got to do the site visit to Lance's program this past July and met with him, and he shared a lot of information about what he's up to both with the business, what the tribe is doing and about some of their ideas and goals. And that work then led, his work that I wrote about for the Advisory Committee, led to the award that he received for Innovations in American Government.

On one hand, Lance doesn't need a lot of introduction. The experience that I had with him is that he's just a remarkable guy, because one of the things that happens is that you spend just a few minutes with him and he leaves an incredibly strong impression. You feel, ‘Boy, I really know this person and I'd really like him as my friend and if he isn't my friend, I really don't want him as my enemy,' because this is one smart guy in terms of strategy, in terms of politics, and in terms of getting things accomplished. There are a couple things I want to say about Lance, that it's just a real honor to introduce Lance Morgan. He's a Harvard Law School graduate, he is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. I grew up in South Dakota and we tended to just kind of ignore that state down there. And he's a real family man. One of the things I really enjoyed about the visit that I made to visit his program is I got to meet his wife and one of his two daughters. He's somebody who really believes in investing in community and using his smarts to help move his community and his nation forward. He's really bright with economic development. He's a very savvy politician. He can tell many stories about how he's really stood up to the States of Nebraska and Iowa and the federal government and won his way in terms of sovereign rights for his nation and he's a real fighter for Indian issues. And the last thing I want to say about Lance is, when he takes the mic you never know what he's going to talk about. So he may talk about his winning innovation and he may talk about other things but I'm sure you're going to come away moved so I give you Lance Morgan of Ho-Chunk, Inc."

Lance Morgan:

"Wow! I'm really glad I caused something to talk about. I really appreciate that introduction. Miriam came and took the time to really spend some time and get to know us and we really enjoyed her visit. And I think it was really instrumental; our experience with the Honoring Nations program was really instrumental in us winning the Innovations in Government Award, which I think is kind of the big brother of this award, I'm not sure, but they seemed awful similar. And so I really appreciate the time and effort that everyone in Honoring Nations program...they put in on our behalf to do that. And I really appreciate coming down to do this. I've been traveling a lot lately and I was trying to think of a way that I could reasonably not come, because my family's been really pressuring me to spend more time at home, but I thought it was important to come down and share some of our stories and I really came down to talk about Ho-Chunk, Inc., but I've really decided that I don't want to talk about that all and as the time that I've spent here, just like Miriam suggested. I really only have one point to make and it's going to take about 15 minutes. I'm starting to take after my grandfather I think. What I'm going to do is generalize a lot and I kind of want to apologize in advance for that because every tribe is very, very unique and I think in order to do this without all these kind of side issues coming up or all these caveats or all these exceptions, I'm going to talk in very general terms. So I want...and I really don't want to offend anybody in this situation so I want to just apologize right up front.

Since we won the Innovations in Government Award and the Honoring Nations Award, I think we've really struck a chord and we've been visited by over 30 tribes, and we've put our information together in a package and we've sent it out to 40 or 50 other tribes. And so what's happened is, over the last 18 months, we've learned a lot of things and that's what I want to share, some of the simple insights from that. And we've really been on almost like a crash course of tribal economics. And what we've learned are really two simple things. And the first thing is something that's very obvious is that almost all the tribes are suffering from the same problems. We all seem to be having universally the same issues that we're all dealing with. And the second thing -- and this one came as a bit of a shock to me -- we were really forced to think about why we were successful. And the reason it came as a shock because I was thinking it was me and that's not the answer. And it hurt a little bit, but I'm over it now. Why we were successful, what are the reasons behind that? And what are the reasons behind some of the other tribe's reasons why they continue to struggle all the time? They had...we're not...we don't have a lot of money in our tribe and our corporation has grown to the point where we're projecting $100 million in revenues, which strikes me as absolutely insane. In 1995, Ho-Chunk, Inc. was in my apartment in the second bedroom, and so it's amazing. Our tribal casino makes $3 or $4 million a year. And how have we been able to take -- and Ho-Chunk, Inc. does nothing with the tribal gaming -- so how have we been able to go from literally zero to $100 million in revenue in that period of time? And I think it...this is why I was taking the credit, I was thinking it was me, but really it's a...we're really a product of our environment and that's what I want to talk about a little bit.

We've boiled down some of this that we've learned to a couple of really, really simple points and some of them have kind of coalesced here just in the last day doing some of these roundtable discussions. Harvard says sovereignty matters. Harvard says -- I've been saying this for years -- institutions matter. They say that culture matters. That's right, of course they matter, but what conditions in a tribe allow the development of the institutions that can effectively use sovereignty and still integrate culture? Well, in other words, the real question we should be asking is not the what -- what did Ho-Chunk, Inc. do to be successful -- is the why. Why were we successful, what was behind it? And to be honest, what we have done from a business standpoint to be successful is meaningless to this discussion because you should do something else. You should do what works for you. But the why, the why our government was willing to make such a radical change, was willing to do something we'd never done before and commit, at that point, 20 percent of all of their money to starting Ho-Chunk, Inc., everything they had, and a very poor tribe. Why were we willing to invest in that institution on a long-term plan when we were suffering from huge social problems and huge unemployment issues? What caused our tribe to make that radical decision and to also let go of that authority, that micromanagement over it, and set a system up that had a chance to kind of flourish and develop? And to me, that's really the issue.

And I didn't understand this, because Ho-Chunk, Inc. was set up in late 1994. I graduated from law school in '93. I worked at a law firm. I showed up and thought it was me, but really, as I've been there, I've realized that it was the product of a very, very long process. The tribe even tried to do this in the ‘80s and that I was...that my plan was really just the next step, was really just the next logical basis for it and the only reason we had a higher chance of success is because we had some gaming dollars; before they were trying to do it with smoke and mirrors. And so I've learned a lot. I've really been forced to think about that. We've learned that success in tribes seems to happen kind of randomly, somewhat randomly. One tribe does this here; the neighboring tribe is not doing very well. But there really seems to be two circumstances under which a tribe is successful and one of them involves kind of the really good individual, the great individual or this group of individuals, the super-motivated person. A tribe is a very unique place you get to work at because one person can make a difference there. You can...and if one person is highly motivated, they can bring others into the fold and make a difference. And I wonder, what I wonder when I see some of these programs up here, I wonder how many of them are motivated by, are the result of great individuals or great systems. And I think that if you're relying upon the great individual, it's probably a mistake because they probably don't come along that often. And so I think that you're better off waiting for number two or working on number two, which is the tribes who are successful tend to be successful because it's kind of a natural and kind of logical evolution of some of the systems that they put in place, the systems that kind of allow long-term continuity and stability. In other words, the success isn't random; it's really a predictable kind of factor in their environment if they have these systems in place.

So since the individual's topic is too hard to discuss because it's too random, I really want to focus on what I think that we learned about continuity and long-term stability. And all this is leading up by the way to the simplest of points and will be obvious soon. Most tribes are structured around their tribal council. Think about your tribal government. In the structure, the organizational structure of a tribe...I've seen lots of neat charts, but really what they are, the typical organizational chart in reality is very wide and very flat with everybody reporting up to the council, businesses, departments -- everything has to go through the council. And what that means is that a lot of times things aren't necessarily dealt with efficiently, they're forgot about, they're dealt with only when things go negatively. And it also has the additional side effect of making your tribal government incredibly dependent upon the skills and knowledge base of that tribal council. So the system is designed to funnel through the council and it's only as strong as the individuals on that council and that's a weakness, that's a weakness in my view. I'm going to back up a second here.

How can we ensure that those council members, since we're so dependent upon them, are good? And I was thinking and I want to say that I'm not an expert on this because I'm going to talk about Winnebago and what we used to do traditionally. And I'm just going to say what was told to me and I want it very clear that it's not my place to talk about this kind of thing typically. Traditionally in Winnebago, our leaders were the head of each of our clans and those leaders were selected by the women in those clans because it was felt that their concern for their family and their children automatically meant that they would pick somebody who they thought was knowledgeable...that was the best person and typically they picked the eldest person within that group, family group and the most experienced. Not always -- sometimes they would take somebody younger. It wasn't a rule that it was the eldest, it just typically was. So what we had was a system, a rational, traditional system based upon knowledge and experience. We had it kind of built into what we already did and change usually occurred at death. Not the next election. The reason we had this is because if we didn't, we would make mistakes and people would probably die. We had a cultural imperative for a rational system and that changed when the federal government forced kind of these constitutions on tribal governments and that changed the system dramatically. And when they did this, I can just imagine some lawyer in D.C. typing this up in the ‘30s, saying, ‘Well, this is a good idea', and someone said, ‘Sure, fine.' And there wasn't any thought whatsoever as to how to kind of institutionalize or introduce some of these already very rational processes that we had in place. It just happened. And we've been dealing with that for the last 70, 80 years.

The majority of tribes in our area have a tribal council that's elected every two or three years. This system is horrible, absolutely horrible for long-term continuity. I'm going to list a few things that it does and this stuff to anybody who's been with the tribe, this is not going to be earth shattering, but I think it's helpful to put it altogether. It creates kind of...these elections become all-or-nothing events and it creates a highly negative political environment on the reservation where attacking is the way to get on. There is no kind of getting on board, being part of the team. It creates a possibility of complete turnover of the elected representatives every two or three years. These new council members in this negative environment are often elected by attacking the current system. You don't get elected by praising the existing government. And so...it hasn't worked for us anyway. It used to be very...when we first started Ho-Chunk, Inc., it was very common to get elected by attacking Ho-Chunk, Inc. It was a very good way to get elected in Winnebago. It was very controversial at the time, which was almost the best way to do it. But this attack system almost forces the new council to tear down what's there. They almost had no choice. Their electorate expects it. It also leads to kind of inconsistent political strategy. You have no relationship with the local, the state, and the federal authorities. They don't even know who the next guy is. And it also hurts business dramatically. It really hurts your strategy. You have no continuity over a period of time. Business needs to be continually moving; it can't wait and stop for the election. You can't wait for the hammer to fall. You can't replace the CEO every couple of years and hope to have any kind of consistency in what you're doing. And the other thing is it also creates a lot of short-term thinking; both right after the election, you've got to make your big splash, and right before an election.

We joke that...one time we gave a dollar raise, the council did, to every employee at the casino before an election and we calculated how much that was over the period of a year and I said, ‘We only have...' I mean, you could win our election with 120 votes. We tried to work it out per vote and only a third of the employees were tribal members and it came out to an astronomical number per vote, what that cost the tribe. It was something in the tens of thousands per vote. But it was a very popular decision at the time and the tribe had money then to do that. And so before the election at least all kinds of really random short-term thinking and decision-making that has long-term implications that screws up long-term planning. And it makes it even worse when they don't...when it doesn't work and they don't get re-elected and the new guys come in and have to deal with that and tear that down and there really isn't any sense of long-term strategy in that stuff. So these tribes are in this kind of cycle, this perpetual cycle of starting over and unless the tribal electorate is incredibly rational in a very negative, in an environment that's likely to be very negative -- because that's your system for success to get elected -- unless they're very rational and elect the same people consistently over and over again, which does happen in some tribes -- some tribes they're all up for election and they reelect generally the same people -- unless they do that, the possibility of any kind of long-term cohesive strategy or continuity is very, very minimal in a tribal government that has its election every two or three years and everybody's up to bat.

In Winnebago, we're lucky and I didn't realize how lucky we were really, I mean I knew it was a good thing, but I didn't realize how lucky we were until we visited with these other tribes. We have staggered terms. We have nine tribal council members. Three of them are up for election every year and usually two or three are re-elected again. I'm going to list the nine, just the number of years that each council member has been on our council to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. And a lot of people when they get older will leave the council and they'll kind of designate some of the younger to start cycling through. It's very much a logical system, really kind of based behind the scenes on families and clan membership and stuff. But our council members are one year, three year, three year, four year, five year, five year, eight year, 14 year, 16 year and our tribal chairman is in his 16th year. And so I was going to do the math on it and do the average number of years there but I didn't have a calculator. My math skills are worse since high school. My guess is that's around six, six or seven. And what does that do for long-term strategy? Our tribal chairman was there in 1986 when we first tried to start a corporation. The Winnebago Business Code of 1986, he was there, he was behind it. So in 1993 or '94 we started again, of course he supported it. This made more sense, it was the next evolution in this process and these staggered terms, they have several kind of natural results. It reduces the kind of emphasis on the elections themselves. It prevents this kind of radical short-term thinking that we were talking about. There isn't this great push...because only two or three of them are going crazy before the election, but the rest of them can kind of hold them in. It also allows kind of naturally a long-term planning and a long-term kind of projects to continue to move forward. It automatically allows for kind of an institutional knowledge base to continue to grow. There is no starting over here. And the elections, I've never seen an election that's resulted in a firing of a key employee. I've never...because it doesn't happen that way because the rest of the people obviously support that person. And more importantly, I think it allows kind of a system where these institutions can naturally evolve because they're really focused on the long-term perspective. I think this not starting over is very positive. And I didn't know, I didn't really think about this in these terms until very recently. And I'll give you the two reasons or the two examples that popped up that caused me to start thinking why, that caused me to start thinking about the real benefit of an institutional kind of knowledge base in these situations.

And the first one was, somebody asked me recently, we have our corporation, we recently formed a planning department to go after government grants and a non-profit corporation to also bring in additional funding into our community. And someone said, ‘What made you think of that?' And the answer was, ‘Well, in '95 I was totally against it, in '96 we got a grant to do this.' So I said, 'Hey, that's pretty cool.' In '97 we didn't do anything. In '98 we got a low-interest rate loan through our own kind of efforts and we said, ‘Hey, this is a pretty good deal.' In '99, we got another one. In 2000, we got a grant to build a new office building. It was great for business because we didn't have to pay for it anymore; we got a new building. But in 2001, we learned that all these opportunities are out there that we're not tapping into. The non-profit will do it. And so one day I come back to my office on a Monday and there's a note on my computer from Friday that says, ‘Form a non-profit you big dummy.' It was to me, I wrote it because I didn't want to forget by Monday. But he asked me that question, ‘What made you think of it,' and it caused me to think, ‘Well, I didn't think of it.' It was the next step in the natural evolution of the internal knowledge base that we built up.

And the other example that integrates not just Ho-Chunk, Inc., but that integrates kind of the governmental side is, we recently just signed a groundbreaking tax agreement for gasoline on our reservation that recognizes our jurisdiction over non-Indians. And somebody said, ‘How did you do that?' And I did the same thing again. In '95 we took over the tribe's grocery store and you used to have to sign your name and write your ID number and get your refund from the state and I said, ‘We're not doing that anymore.' I said, ‘This only applies for Winnebagos,' and we said, ‘Any Indians a good Indian, we'll send you your money instead.' And so that was kind of a big deal for us. In '97, the Omaha Tribe next to us started a cigarette factory and they ruled that that's tax-free because they make the cigarettes on their reservation. I said, ‘Hey, that's pretty interesting.' In '98, they start selling gas tax-free, we supplied it to them through a loophole in Nebraska law. In '99, Iowa threatened to sue us because we were taking it to that state. So we went into negotiations, which went poorly and then they cut off our supply of fuel, which really just made me mad. And they were saying bad things about us, called us ‘shady characters.' And so we got in trouble. We called the governor and we didn't appreciate that. And so they said they would negotiate with us but they never got around to it and they didn't really...they put some feeble efforts in. And so we said, in June of 2000 after the second crack at negotiations, we said, ‘We're going to start our own tax.' And six months later we figured out a way to make it legal and essentially all we do is take the alcohol and blend it in with the gasoline on our reservation to make a charter product, similar to...and it's a manufacturing process similar to what we learned the Omaha Tribe did in '97. They made a manufacturing process and said, ‘Well, this is just our manufacturing process.' And it really threw them for a loop and we implemented kind of a political...we learned how to do that because we had a gas station business. Now, by the way, we have seven trucks and we sell 100,000 gallons of gas a day. This is like a year and a half later and we sell it to seven tribes now, but that's a different story -- all because Iowa really pissed us off.

We put together kind of...we learned how to do this from our business side but we had a legal element -- I'm a lawyer, our tribe's lawyer -- and we learned from the Omaha Tribe's legal experience in '97. And we had a growing kind of political knowledge because of the success of the tribe. And so we put together kind of a sophisticated political, legal, business-oriented strategy. We already had de facto control, we owned all the stations so we could pass any tax and apply it to us. And we offered to negotiate right off the bat. We always kept the lines of communications open. And anyway, that was in 2001, just a few weeks ago the governor signed our tax agreement that gives us, that locks in, that recognizes our jurisdiction and locks in a real good price advantage for our businesses that helps 70 of my employees keep putting food on the table. And that took years of natural kind of development both on the governmental side and both on the operational business side. And that kind of knowledge didn't just happen. People always...they come down to visit and say, ‘How'd you do it?' and really, it's a hard thing to say because it took a long time. It's a hard question to answer and this format has caused me to really think about that, how important it was to have the government stable and learning and developing relationships, how important it was for us to have a stable business environment that was learning these things and that was taking pieces from elsewhere. This strategy that we evolved would not have happened if the lawyers in a council meeting would have said, ‘Hey, we've got this problem.' They'd have said, ‘Well...' The lawyers probably would have only said, ‘This is how you'll end up in jail,' or ‘the state will do this to you,' and we probably wouldn't have went forward. But we had a business imperative to do this. We had jobs at stake, we had money at stake, and we found a way to do it using our knowledge that we had learned over a period of time and the reason we were allowed to do that is because our government is a highly stable environment.

And in summary, that's the point I want to make. In order to have any chance at long-term success, the tribes really have to structurally institutionalize continuity and that's a lot of big words in a row. But really what I mean to say is you need to change your constitution. And I'm not talking about the big changes, the ones that, the committees, the general councils, ‘We're going to go back to the old ways.' I'm talking about one simple tiny little change that will give you a chance at some of these kinds of successes. They'll be different than ours obviously, but just stagger your terms, allow your tribe the opportunity to have a chance at continuity and that will allow the natural kind of abilities and instincts and knowledge to form and flower on your reservation and that should lead to the kind of environment where these institutions develop, institutions that can take advantage of sovereignty, that get smart, that are Native American, and go forward on a cultural basis. And I realize that it's a very, very simple recommendation to make after the big introduction I got, but I think sometimes that's what you need to do, the simplest answer is the easiest. And I don't know if I have any time for questions but I'm done essentially."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"We do have time for questions, so if Lance would take a couple of questions it'd be great, so if you want to just raise your hand and pose the question to him, Lance will probably answer it. Are there questions?"

Audience member:

"Lance, in some of your fuel acquisitions and some of that, how have you dealt with kind of adverse public relations issues such as the large Petroleum Marketers Association lobbying and some other groups like that as well as the states, and you didn't mention Iowa?"

Lance Morgan:

"Oh, that's a funny question. We actually went to the...we were negotiating the tax agreement with Nebraska and the head of the motor fuels department was in our office and I said, ‘Do you want to go to a KKK meeting?' And she said, ‘What are you talking about?' I said, ‘Well, the Iowa petroleum marketers and Nebraska ones are getting together to talk about us.' And she goes, ‘Oh, I talked to them. I cleared all this up.' I said, ‘Well, let's go to lunch up there.' So we went and she's sitting...she had just said, ‘We need this information from you, I've got a report.' I said, ‘I'm not giving you that, that's going to put a gun to our head. They're going to use it against us.' And as soon as we walked in there, they started bad-mouthing Indians and they said, ‘We need to get this information. Nebraska's going to give it to us and then we can go after them.' And he said, ‘Because we could go down to the reservation and get it, but they'll probably throw you in the Indian jail. You know what that is? That's when they tie you to one of their slot machines.' And I busted out laughing. These people had no idea who I am and they're talking about they've got these lawyers and they're going to sue you if you try to say anything to them. It's basically they're just lying through their teeth to their constituents, see, and the head of the motor fuels department is sitting there. She goes, ‘I can't believe they're doing this.' I said, ‘See, this is what we're dealing with.' And so at that point she started talking in terms of ‘we.' ‘What are ‘we' going to do to deal with this kind of stuff?' And I said, ‘She's like Patty Hearst.' We were going to make her an honorary member of our tribe after that and they lost all credibility.

We took the time to educate Nebraska and then we showed them the dirty side of what we face. And the term we always use is 'jealousism,' that's our little term. It's not racism, it's jealousism 'cause they don't like it for us. We've lost our place a little bit. But we also did some other things in advance of before we started. We felt that the current taxation system was based upon the color of your skin and I think sometimes we're so used to making that distinction that we don't even think how crazy it is. You go on to the reservation, the Native American pays one price, the non-Indian pays the other. Now how in the hell is that right? Where else in America do you make a racial distinction based upon taxation? It's all about jurisdiction and it's all about...it's all about the entity. And I said, ‘We're not going to stand for this anymore' and so our PR campaign was going to be based on race. We were not going to do this anymore. If you come to our jurisdiction, you pay our tax and it sold with everybody. We had a reporter who wrote a couple weeks after we implemented our tax, on the front page of the Sioux City paper, she said, ‘A cashier...when you buy gas in Winnebago, the cashier has to determine the color of your...he knows what to charge you by the color of your skin. In Winnebago, race matters on what to charge and the Winnebago Tribe has implemented the race-neutral tax.' So we invented these terms, race-based taxation, race neutral. Republicans, they loved it. The Democrats, we give them a lot of money. So they basically backed off.

And the fact that we also were offering to negotiate...when we implemented our tax we wrote a three-page letter. The first half talked about how their legal system wasn't worth the paper it was written on and it was just very much rhetoric. And the last part talked about our strong, strong legal arguments that we put in place. The pre-emption argument, the fuel blending, the manufacturing, all these kind of things are very, very strong legal arguments on our side. We thought we had a very high chance of winning in court under this situation and at the end we said, ‘We will negotiate.' And we thought that if we said, ‘We will negotiate', that three, four, five months at least, we'd get to do this. And after a while everything died down and the state actually met with us in a very contentious relationship, contentious meeting, and when we laid out all of our legal arguments and all of the rationale behind it, they really got on board with us and then we did negotiate. The primary thing that turned the tide was we showed...on our reservation we have half the land and one third of the roads and you've got...the county got $1.6 million for excise tax money for gasoline to fix the roads and none of those roads are in our neighborhood and we got zero. So when we show our blending process and all our investment in these trucks and fuel additive things and gas stations and the people on the jobs and show how much money you're getting and how we're getting nothing, I said, ‘I can't wait to get to court with that. I said we're on a war footing.' And they said, ‘Okay.' But all this was planned. Our eventual goal internally was to get our tax agreement and that's all we wanted, that recognized our jurisdiction and we ended up getting it. But we did it with a combination of kind of PR, of political thing, of operational, of legal buffing, and it worked for us. But there was a lot of attacks along the way. But you've got to plan this out in advance.

We wrote a very interesting memo for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Tribe that balanced the business, who now have their own gasoline-blending and taxation system on their reservation. And it was not a legal memo, it was a combination legal and business memo that balanced these interests, talked about their PR strategy, talked about their legal strategy, talked about how to do this operationally, an all encompassing kind of thought process that you don't normally get in these environments. You only get those piece...tribes never quite pull those pieces together and we were lucky that we had all those pieces in our organization. And we now think strategically about how, and automatically about how to develop our sovereignty to strengthen our institutions. It's very strange, but it's kind of a natural evolution of what went on."

Audience member:

"Can you talk a little bit more about leadership in the business side of your programs and where or what is that continuity? Obviously you're a good example of continuity, but the other issue is what about other leaders within your tribe? And how is that coming with respect to, I guess, leadership development and how that works in terms of the business side of things in the different entities that you're working with?"

Lance Morgan:

"We talk about systematic approaches. We have the exact same thing on what we're doing. We have a general tribal preference of employees, but we target internally our best and our brightest. We've had every valedictorian the last several years working for us at some point, summer jobs or coming back from college. We have our own internship program. We've actually expanded to other tribes. We've had lawyers actually from a couple of other tribes come and work. They've stayed at my house and they work with us for a little while to get some insight into what we're doing. We've kind of...our internship program to me is my ability to directly nurture kind of the up and coming people. We've gotten so big now that some of our companies and departments are now going to start their internship program this year and we're just starting that so that they can have them too. We just hired one of our tribal members who just graduated, or is about to graduate from college with a computer degree to do research for us in our planning and non-profit company. And so we've kind of systemized it and now have expanded it.

On leadership on the business side, I think it's very important, and we talked about this a little before -- not here -- and I think tribes pass these corporations, they form these entities and then they just run off and they expect them to be successful. And I think the real effort needs to be when you form the entity. You have to set up principles of governance between the corporation board and the tribal government and you need to go through all the possible abilities of interaction from how do you handle your finances? How do you handle personnel? You don't want the tribe's personnel policies. You don't want to use the tribe's accounting system, you'll never get a check written; somebody won't sign it, they'll take the day off. You have to decide how you're going to send money back to the government, what you can retain. You need to do all of this stuff up front and we have a list of 10 or 12 things depending on the tribe and then once you have those, you need a leader with the courage to stick to that and hold them to it, because a lot of tribes have corporations that don't... and their CEOs are puppets and they just do what the tribal council says and they're afraid to make decisions.

I've had meetings with tribal councils where I've whipped out the long-term plan from 1994. I said, ‘Let me refresh your memory,' and I've read from it. And one of the sentences said, ‘If we did that, that would contradict the very reason for our existence.' Everyone else said, ‘Oh, yeah.' But if you don't do that up front, then you have no chance of saving it later because the tribal government is a very flexible dynamic entity. They'll adapt their mindset to whatever is politically expedient at the time, whatever they feel they have to deal with, they'll rationalize their approach to it. And so you have to stick...you have to do your homework and be willing to have the courage to stick to it and not in a disrespectful way. You don't have to do that. I have a lot of respect for our council leaders, but really sometimes you have to remind them...and since we have this kind of institutional knowledge base and memory of these things, people say, ‘Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. We can't do that,' and they deal with it some other way. And so it really isn't just leadership, it's planning and leadership and sticking to it over a period of time."