nation rebuilding

Policy Brief: Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the United States

Year

We live in the information age. Governments, industries, and organizations of all kinds are claiming a right to gather information on everything from our spending habits to our health records. Data has become a global currency, a valuable asset, and a source of power. Native nations are part of this data revolution, but encounter distinctive obstacles to fully realizing the power of data.

Purpose

This policy brief is a call to action on Indigenous data sovereignty. It defines the terms “data” and “data sovereignty,” explains the data-sovereignty rights of Native nations, describes the data history of Native nations, and offers recommendations for decolonizing data and asserting Indigenous data sovereignty.

Resource Type
Citation

Rainie, Stephanie Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, and Andrew Martinez. 2017. Policy Brief: Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the United States. Tucson: Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona.

Policy Brief: Data Governance for Native Nation Rebuilding

Year

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

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

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

Chairman Dave Archambault II: Laying the Foundation for Tribal Leadership and Self-governance

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Chairman Archambault’s wealth and breadth of knowledge and experience in the tribal labor and workforce development arena is unparalleled. He currently serves as the chief executive officer of one of the largest tribes in the Dakotas, leading 500 tribal government employees and overseeing an array of tribal departments and programs, including Higher Education, TERO (Tribal Employment Rights Office), the Tribal Work Experience Program (TWEP), and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) program.

He also oversees the Tribe’s economic activities, including its effort to create more local job opportunities for the Standing Rock Sioux people. Prior to becoming Chairman, Archambault successfully directed the Department of Labor’s signature workforce development program, TCC DeMaND, a regional consortium of tribal colleges led by United Tribes Technical College that pools expertise and resources towards meeting critical needs in Indian Country while addressing the challenges of unemployment and workers impacted by changing economic conditions.  

In this interview for Leading Native Nations, Chairman Archambault offers his insights regarding effective, elected leadership and shares examples of tribal governance changes implemented during his administration to ensure the vitality of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Chairman Dave Archambault II, "Laying the Foundation for Tribal Leadership and Self-governance," Interview, Leading Native Nations interview series, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, February 22, 2016.

Biography

Chairman Archambault's wealth and breadth of knowledge and experience in the tribal labor and workforce development arena is unparalleled. He currently serves as the chief executive officer of one of the largest tribes in the Dakotas, leading 500 tribal government employees and overseeing an array of tribal departments and programs, including Higher Education, TERO (Tribal Employment Rights Office), the Tribal Work Experience Program (TWEP), and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) program. He also oversees the Tribe's economic activities, including its effort to create more local job opportunities for the Standing Rock Sioux people. Prior to becoming Chairman, Archambault successfully directed the Department of Labor's signature workforce development program, TCC DeMaND, a regional consortium of tribal colleges led by United Tribes Technical College that pools expertise and resources towards meeting critical needs in Indian Country while addressing the challenges of unemployment and workers impacted by changing economic conditions.

Transcript available upon request. Please email: nni@email.arizona.edu

Chilkoot Tlingit "Nation Building"

Year

Excluded by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Chilkoot Tlingit are engaged in a process of nation-building. The process began in 1990 with the revival of their dormant tribal government, the Chilkoot Indian Association (CIA). From this institutional foundation, the 480-member CIA successfully negotiated the acquisition of a land base and began developing self-determined programs and initiatives. Today, the CIA administers almost $1 million of programs and contracts in the areas of education, health, housing, and economic development and participates in government-to-government relationships with local, state, federal, and international governmental entities.

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

"'Nation Building' Among the Chilkoot Tlingit". Honoring Nations: 2002 Honoree. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2003. Report.

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. 

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

Producer
National Congress of American Indians
Year

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

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

Ian Record:

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

Patricia Riggs:

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

Ian Record:

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

[VIDEO]

Patricia Riggs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Angela Wesley: Huu-ay-aht First Nations' Forging of a New Governance System

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Angela Wesley, Chair of Huu-ay-aht Constitution Committee, discusses the painstaking effort the Huu-ay-aht First Nations undertook to develop a new constitution and system of governance, and how they continue to work to turn the promise of self-governance embodied in their new constitution into governance practice.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Wesley, Angela. "Huu-ay-aht First Nations' Forging of a New Governance System." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 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 Angela Wesley. Angela is a proud member of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and has worked since 1980 with First Nations communities throughout British Columbia. Since 1992, she has been providing advisory and facilitation services in the areas of strategic planning, community development, communications and community engagement as well as governance capacity building. In recent years, her focus has been on providing assistance to her own nation as well as the other four First Nations that are signatory to the Maa-nulth Treaty. As Chair of the Huu-ay-aht Constitution Committee and member of the Huu-ay-aht Treaty Governance and Lands Resources Committees, she was instrumental in the development and community ratification of the treaty, the Huu-ay-aht First Nations Constitution and a suite of foundational laws that set the stage for her nation’s return to self governance as of April 1st, 2011. Angela, welcome and good to have you with us today.

Angela Wesley:

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Ian Record:

So I went through your rather voluminous bio and shared some of the highlights, but why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself. What did I leave out?

Angela Wesley:

I think you pretty much covered it. Some of the things that I’ve done more recently, or that I’m involved in more recently, involve being involved on some boards. And one of the things that I’m really liking doing right now is venturing into the academic world a little bit and I’m chair of the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology as well, which is a public post-secondary institute in British Columbia that was founded by First Nations in the interior of BC [British Columbia]. So I’m really starting to see my abilities to cross over and start sharing information on governance through that field as well, so really an exciting new eye opener for me and a new venture for me.

Ian Record:

So we’re here to talk about governance reform, constitutional reform and specifically the work that your nation has been involved in in arriving to the point it’s at today. And I’m curious -- let’s start at the beginning -- what prompted your nation to consider going down the reform road to begin with?

Angela Wesley:

Well, I think it’s a bit different in Canada than it is in the [United] States, where we didn’t have constitutions as I understand tribal governments in the States do. Really we were embarking on nation rebuilding. The constitution was one piece of what we were doing in rebuilding our nation. Our nation was involved in treaty negotiations and has been involved in the BC Treaty Commission process since about the early 1990s. So in thinking about where we wanted to go and really thinking about the vision for our nation, that’s what sort of prompted us to look overall at our nation and what needed to change. As we got deeper into our treaty negotiation process, we realized that we really needed to reform our government and start to rebuild our nation into something that meets the vision of our community. We started off I think back in the 1990s -- and not to say we didn’t always have a vision -- but we started to try to articulate that and bring that to our people and to say, ‘Where is it that we want to go as a nation? Clearly we have some healing that we need to do. We need to change the way we do business.’ So we really spent a lot of time talking to our people about what we wanted for the future, and our vision statement is not dissimilar to almost any First Nations’ vision statement, where we want a healthy community, we want to be able to govern ourselves, we want to make our own decisions, we want to set our own priorities, we want to revive and strengthen our language and our culture and we want opportunities for our people for the future. And that really set the tone for an entire nation rebuilding process I think.

Ian Record:

So it became obvious very early on that, 'If we’re going to fully engage in the treaty process and take advantage of that opportunity, we need to jettison the Indian Act system altogether and develop one that reflects who we are and where we want to head.'

Angela Wesley:

Absolutely. One of the biggest pieces that we were looking at or one of the bigger pieces we were looking at in treaty is the ability to have self government. We struggled originally in our treaty negotiations. We were being told by Canada that they wanted to keep self government outside of the treaty and that was a show stopper for us. Unless self government was included in the treaty and protected by the Constitution of Canada, we weren’t going to have a treaty. So on the basis that that was something that was so important to us we realized that we needed to start building our constitution and talking about what we wanted from our government in the future.

Ian Record:

We’re talking a lot at this seminar that the Native Nations Institute is holding on constitutions and the importance of process, that often for many Native nations, whether in U.S. or Canada or elsewhere, that there’s a broad recognition among people in the community that our current system is not working for us, it’s not going to get us where we need to head, but then a lot of folks have difficulty getting from that point to the point of a new system. Can you talk about the process that your nation devised to develop this new constitution, to engage in this nation rebuilding effort?

Angela Wesley:

Sure. I just want to start by talking about maybe there wasn’t such a broad recognition by our citizens of the situation that we were in and I think that sort of formed the basis of how we approached communication with our citizens as well. We started off, we have a general, what we called a 'band meeting' at the time, and I give a lot of credit to our leadership at the time and our former chief counselor Robert Dennis, Sr. was very instrumental in putting a process in place that the people would feel comfortable with. So it was opened up to the floor and it was the citizens that appointed the committee that was going to look at the constitution and we were told to go and find out what people wanted. So we were given a lot of flexibility and latitude in terms of how we approached things. So we really sat down, we talked as a committee about what it was that we wanted to achieve. We talked about our vision, the need to really get people to understand that that was the basis of moving forward was that we all had this collective vision and it was a vision of the people, it wasn’t a vision of a specific government or a specific council and I think that’s how we started. We did a lot of research, we looked at constitutions of other nations, we talked about other peoples’ experiences, and really what we started with was a questionnaire process. Once we had talked we went and did a little bit of interviewing and speaking with our people about the vision and is that in fact what we wanted. I don’t think anybody could argue with that’s what we wanted, we want to change our world, we want a better place for future generations. And everybody agreed with that.

So having said that, then we started to probe a little bit further, what people wanted from their government. So we started with a very intensive questionnaire process, and I always give credit to a young woman in our tribe, Trudy Warner. She was in her 20s at the time and very enthusiastic. She was working with us and she was assigned to the committee to be our administrative support. She ended up taking a questionnaire around, and I don’t think it was so important what was in the questionnaire as the fact that we went out and talked to people about it. So we devised some questions, some of them were good, some of them not so good, but it opened up the doors for people to start to tell us what it was that they wanted. We asked about terms of council, we asked about what kind of ethical behavior we expected of council, we asked about what kind of terms we thought would be appropriate, we asked about how disputes might be resolved, we asked about how to incorporate our traditional hereditary system into our government, which was huge for us. That was one of the things we really wanted to do. So we engaged in a process of communicating with our numbers over a long period of time. We probably did this over five to seven years on and off; it wasn’t consistent. We were a committee and we were limited by finances and what we could do; it was very expensive. We have probably 80 to 85 percent of our people living away from home, so it involved going out and going to the people or bringing them in, which was very, very expensive as well. But we really, we talked a lot to our people, we talked we brought that back and we talked as a committee about what that meant and what did our people really want. I think that some of what we found was that what I started with is that people didn’t really understand the system that we were under. We’re so used to blaming our band councils for things that go wrong without understanding that the Indian Act is behind all of that and that our councils really are structured under an Indian Act system that so clearly does not work for us, that oppressed us for so many years. And that’s what our people grew up with. So a lot of people didn’t know about our traditional systems, they didn’t know how we used to govern ourselves. All they knew was this oppressive system that we’d lived under that had hurt them in huge ways.

So sort of interesting, maybe to back up a little bit to the questionnaire process, our young citizen went out door to door, bless her heart, by herself and knocked on people’s doors and said, ‘I have this questionnaire and it’s my job to come and talk to our citizens about what it is you’d like to see in government.’ And she heard a lot of venting. So we tried to give her a lot of support and told her to not to react, don’t get defensive, don’t feel like you have to defend the council for things that happened 30 years ago, but listen, allow people to say what’s on their mind and bring that back to us, because that’s all relevant to what we need to change in the future.' Along with that commitment from the committee, she also had a commitment from our chief councilor at the time, who said that, ‘If somebody needs to talk to me, come back and tell me. Don’t take it on for me, but I will go.’ And he made that commitment and he did go and follow up with people, which was huge. So once people had a chance to get some of that stuff out that they had been holding on to a lot of times for 30, 40 years -- people had gone been taken out of our community, they’d gone to residential school, they’d seen what had happened to their parents and grandparents in the community and they’d gone from there and never come home. So these are people who have memories from the past that aren’t good memories in a lot of cases. So we were able to get through a lot of that. When people had the chance to just say that and get it off their chest with nobody trying to defend how they feel, then they kind of went, ‘Oh, okay.’ And they would say to Trudy, ‘Well, what are you here for?’ She’d say, ‘Well, I have this questionnaire.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, come in. Who are you and what family are you from?’ And there was this warmth all of a sudden that, ‘Come and have a cup of coffee and do what we do traditionally,’ is share information. So she was able to, I think, with her personality, with her youth, with her enthusiasm and with the commitments and backing that she had from the committee and from our leadership was able to break through in a lot of cases and make people feel Huu-ay-aht again. We actually had people say, ‘I didn’t think I was Huu-ay-aht anymore, I didn’t think anybody cared about me. But I was important enough, somebody came to my house and talked to me about these things.’ It was a huge breakthrough for us.

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you bring up this thing about recognition. My experience in the many nations I’ve worked with on constitutional reform -- primarily in the United States -- has been that people in the community fixate on the symptoms of dysfunction, which typically means they focus on the council, ‘Everything that’s wrong with us is because of the council,’ when they don’t it’s very difficult for them to draw that connection back to the roots of the dysfunction, which in many cases are an imposed system of governance. How important was it for you guys to shift that focus in your community to show people that, ‘Look, at the root of what ails us, what’s holding us back,’ if you will, ‘from rebuilding our community into something that we think is important and is culturally relevant is this system that is not of our own design.’

Angela Wesley:

It was the foundation of our communications, both in our constitutional communications as well as in our treaty negotiations. We just felt that it was so important for us to realize that there was no way out of that system unless we created something ourselves, and that’s what we were trying to do through treaty negotiations, to be able to get governance tools, access to lands and resources, additional financial boosts that could help us to move forward and to create that economy for our people. So in order to do that, we had to show that there was nothing in the current system that we could see that was going to allow us to dig ourselves out and to be able to change our world. We needed something else to add to it and having governance, having good governance in place through our constitution together with having some extra tools, access to lands and resources, recognition of our rights, the ability to build the economy was what was going to change our situation. And like I said, so many of our people just had no idea what the problems were and when we started to talk about that I think it really opened eyes and gained a lot of support. And the support wasn’t 100 percent. A lot of people were taking a leap of faith. We were creating trust through doing this kind of communications with our people and saying, ‘Can you give us a chance? This is what we think is going to help us to change our world. Let’s do all of this together.’ So that was it was really the root of what we were communicating to our people is that how else are we going to change, how else are we going to change our social situation because it’s not good the way it is right now.

Ian Record:

I wanted to back up to something you said earlier about the importance for Huu-ay-aht of having this new governance system that you were creating be an expression of the people’s will and not necessarily an expression of political will, meaning you wanted to ensure that it was the product of the people as a whole versus the product of a particular council or particular elected official or someone else. And we’ve seen where other nations have succeeded with constitutional development or reform, that recognition going into the process, that we’re going to sabotage our own effort if this either becomes politicized or becomes viewed as a politicized process at the very beginning. Can you speak a little bit more about why that is so critical to sort of make sure that the process itself is an apolitical process in how you guys ensured that you insulated it from sort of the political impulses along the way?

Angela Wesley:

Yeah, it probably was a key to our success in terms of the communication or in terms of the approval and ratification of the constitution. I can’t give enough credit I think to our leadership to be able to have stood back not only from the process of building a constitution, but also recognizing that we were trying to incorporate in some fashion our hereditary system back into our government or at least the ability to do that as time went on into the future. And again our chief councilor at the time is a very traditional individual as well. He’s a historian for our tribe and I think that really helped to show people that we were really trying to do what was best for the nation. So there wasn’t political interference, but there was huge political support for developing that system and I think that the leadership showed that they weren’t afraid, that they weren’t afraid of the changes that were coming up because this was what was the best for the nation. So the separation is good, but the leadership was such a critical element of it as well to be able to stand up and really support what we were doing.

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you keep using the word 'support,' because where we see tribes succeed is where the elected leadership plays a supportive role, not a directive role. Where we see tribes struggle is where the reform process is quickly viewed by people in the community as just another initiative by the current leadership that’s in charge. Do you see that as crucial where do you see that as maybe sending a message to the people in terms of, ‘This is something that’s so critical that it’s got to be bigger than us as a group of leaders, it’s got to be about the nation as a whole?’ Did people kind of stand back and say, ‘Wait a minute. This is a real opportunity for us to re-engage, to have our voices heard,' as you mentioned? You mentioned the one person saying, ‘Wow, my government’s never asked me for my opinion on anything before,’ to say it’s not just a command and control decision anymore, this is going to happen from the ground up.

Angela Wesley:

We really it is critical. We really emphasized that with our people as well to say when and who have you ever seen that’s had the opportunity to say how it is that we want to be governed as a nation. To take advantage, we encouraged people to take advantage of that possibility; we encouraged people to use their voices in a positive way. The system that we were in, I think, really led people to be complaining about things all the time. There was no way out, there was no way to resolve disputes, they just went on and on and on. And to have us going out into our community and talking to people about solutions and to have them feeding into, ‘Okay, if that didn’t work, what can work and how can it work better for us, how can we take how we used to govern because it sustained us for thousands of years, how can we take those principles and those values and move them into our government of today so that we can do things better?’ And I think people understood that and it didn’t even really become a visible issue of, ‘Oh, it’s not the politicians that are involved in this?’ People just started to engage because they liked the conversation. So I don’t think it was so much a factor that people hung anything on the process and said, ‘Well, the politics aren’t involved.’ I think they just started liking having the conversation and started feeling more and more comfortable with it. Probably one of the earliest things that people really responded to was the chapter in our constitution that talks about individual rights, to actually see in black and white that people would be treated equally, that they would have equal opportunities within the nation as citizens of the nation; that really sparked something. So starting there, having that conversation as a basis for our communication on the constitution was really, I think, winning as well.

I think people really felt that it was something that was going to reflect what it is they wanted. Because when you go out we often talk about how you explain such complex matters to people who are just trying to get by in their lives and we really chose to try to make our communications really relevant as opposed to saying, ‘This is what provision 16 is going to say in legal language.’ We tried to keep our constitution as plain language as possible and to make it relevant to people because that’s their question, ‘What does this mean to me and my family? How is this going to change the world? How is this going to protect the assets of our nation for future generations, for those who aren’t born yet?’ Those are the kind of things that were on people’s minds. So having the conversation around those kind of things as opposed to around what the provision is going to say, we tried to capture what people were saying and put it into the language.

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you bring that up because often the refrain that we hear in many Native communities -- particularly those that are struggling with reform -- is a sense among many in the community that they simply don’t understand why they should even care about the constitution. They have no sense of how it impacts their daily life, the current constitution and how a new constitution could improve their daily life, and so forth. And it sounds like that was at the forefront of your mind as you went into this process, is to educate people about and making sure that the deliberations were accessible so they could understand, ‘This is how this new system will improve your situation individually, your family’s situation, and the nation’s situation as a whole.’

Angela Wesley:

I think so, and I think that people saw that this was a way of helping to make our governments, future governments and present governments, more accountable to the people. The way the Indian Act is set up right now, your funding flows from the federal government to the council. So the accountability of councils in a legal sense is right back to the Ministry of Indian Affairs, and there’s really not a whole lot of concern on the part of the department as to whether you are accountable back to your citizens. It’s becoming more and more prominent now, but and it’s also becoming more and more of a practice among First Nations to be accountable to their people. So despite the fact that it’s not really a requirement -- although Canada has paid a lot of attention to that in recent years -- nations are becoming more accountable to their citizens and citizens are demanding that accountability. And I think the constitution strengthens that and allows us to do it  to have councils be accountable in a way that is acceptable to the people. What are you going to report to us, when you are going to report to us, to see that these things have to happen? They have to happen according to our own laws, not according to the Indian Act or Ministry of Indian Affairs. It’s because this is what our people want.

Ian Record:

It sounds like things have gone well with your nation in terms of governance reform, really governance rebirth, if you will. But I’m sure at some point you encountered some challenges.

Angela Wesley:

Oh, absolutely.

Ian Record:

And given that it took you seven years, I’m sure there were lots of challenges, a lot of bumps in the road along the way. Can you talk about some of the biggest challenges that you faced in the reform process and how you worked to overcome those?

Angela Wesley:

Well, I think the whole...in terms of our community, I think what I’ve just been talking about in terms of the understanding or lack of understanding of the reality of our situation was probably the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome in the development process. We did end up with a high approval rate of our constitution and of our treaty, and I think it was just our people agreeing that we needed to take this leap of faith, that this was our chance to try to do something for ourselves and to do it our way. So I think that that was a big leap of faith.

Ian Record:

That sounds to me like that was an initial challenge of getting the people to recognize the reality of their situation, of just how pervasive the Indian Act how it affected them in so many ways that they may not have been aware of. But how about when you got really into the process full-bore, you got beyond that initial education, were there some other obstacles you encountered, external factors, internal factors that threatened to derail the process?

Angela Wesley:

You know, politics will always sort of pop up and matters become more urgent as time goes on, but I think that by and large, given the process that we went through, I think we were able to overcome any kind of hurdles. I think that the committee that was put in place and the leadership that we had in place was able to work together to understand that we were there to support each other and that made a lot of difference, I think, to how we approached when we were getting towards the end when it’s sort of crunch time and you’re going to start looking at going into a vote. There was some apprehension on the part of our leadership and our council maybe that, ‘Where is this going to go?’ They were sort of feeling like any arrows that were going to come were going to come towards them and we said to them, ‘Well, we’re the ones as a committee that should be taking some responsibility, and feel comfort in the fact that we’re happy to stand up in front of our people and explain why the constitution is the way it is,’ and it is entirely because of what it was that people wanted in our government in the future together with trying to build a system of good governance. So I think we overcame those.

The challenges I guess that we’re looking at now, we’re two years into being self-government or self-governing and it’s hard. We didn’t expect it was going to be easy. This I think now is when we’re starting to face the challenges, when we realize what it means to be fair, to treat people equally. When those things that our people told us that they wanted, it now takes much longer to make a decision because you have to go through, you have to be transparent, you have to treat people equally. There aren’t exceptions. If there’s an exception for one [person], you’ve got to think of how that’s going to happen and play out for the rest of the citizens as well. So what all sounds really good and is really good takes a different process and takes a different way to be able to move forward. So I think we’re having those kind of challenges right now.

I’m seeing I’m not working directly in my nation right now, but I’m still always very connected. I’m working with our economic development side now actually, so sort of shifted over into that. But you see our leadership struggling. They want to do things right. They want to follow our laws. And I think if there’s things that can be learned, it’s to really think about what this is going to mean as you’re drafting your laws, because I think in some places we found that we’re almost overly accountable and what we don’t want to do is to constrain ourselves with our own laws. But the beauty of being self-governing is that we can change those things if and when we need to. And recognizing that I think is a big part of our learning curve.

So being self-governing doesn’t mean that everything is working perfectly for us right now -- far from it -- and when will we ever be doing things perfectly? No government ever runs perfectly. But we certainly feel better, I don’t think that there’s a person in our nation that thinks that we made the wrong decision in taking on self-government and doing it for ourselves. It’s hard, it’s going to be difficult for us as we continue to move on but we’re getting better at it every day.

Ian Record:

So it sounds to me given that you’re just about two years now into your new governance reality, if you will, that your nation is still working to grow into its new constitutional skin, its new governance skin, it’s going through those growing pains of actually transforming that document on paper into practice.

Angela Wesley:

Oh, definitely.

Ian Record:

And this is something we hear from a lot of other folks, we’ve worked with a number of tribes who are now three, six, ten years into their new constitution and system of governance and they describe this same sort of dynamic taking place, where it’s one thing to have a new constitution and it’s quite another to actually live that in practice. And I would imagine for you as with other some of these other nations, you’re really the larger task really is to transform the political culture that has been in place in your community for so long, the Indian Act culture. In the U.S., for many tribes it’s the Indian Reorganization Act political culture, where suddenly you can no longer go to the council for absolutely everything that ails you, every problem you have. Now there’s processes in place that you have to follow. Can you maybe shed a little more insight into how that’s unfolding in your community, and I would imagine it entails an ongoing education challenge does it not?

Angela Wesley:

It is. It’s definitely a learning curve. Under the Indian Act, as we’re hearing in the courses through NNI and the kind of sessions that we’re in today, you need to put up the mirror sometimes and see how it is that you’re operating. Councils are expected to do everything. That’s the history of most First Nations in Canada and I assume in the U.S., and transforming at the leadership level into being visionaries and creating the environment to succeed is a really difficult thing to do, because citizens still expect you to go and take care of everything, all of the things that are going on in the community. So it’s difficult for citizens because they can’t do that anymore, and it’s difficult for leadership to try to let that go and to put the administrative systems in place that allow the questions to be answered and that allow give citizens a place to go to get their questions answered instead of to the political side. So it is, it’s a transition; it’s a huge transformation. It’s a new way of doing business and operating our government. So it’s I give a lot of credit to our leadership in trying to get through that and trying to remind themselves every day that they need to show citizens where they need to go to get their questions answered as opposed to coming to them, because that’s the critical part is that you can’t leave our citizens hanging, they’ve got to have somewhere that they can go and that’s the council’s role.

Ian Record:

And I would imagine this clarification, redefinition and then ongoing clarification of the new roles within your new system is absolutely critical, because as you’ve laid out, your governance, your new governance system is expected to achieve far more ambitious things than the previous system was under the Indian Act. You’re tasking your governance system and the leaders who lead that system with creating this brighter future of your own design. And so I think this point that you brought up is absolutely crucial, where you’ve got to make sure that you create the space for your leadership to be visionary and to actually figure out, how do we implement the vision that we’ve created for ourselves for our own future?

Angela Wesley:

Yes, definitely. And being able to feel comfort in the organization that we set up is the other big part of it as well. You can put your constitution in place, but unless you’ve got an effective administration as well to be able to take care of that we had to do a lot of reorganizing at our administrative level as well. We had a typical First Nation operation or band council operation or band administration, where we had our band manager who had everybody in the organization reporting to them. So that person as well needed to be able to focus on making sure that the council’s wishes and directions are undertaken and that’s what their role is as well. So there’s a shift in roles all throughout the organization. People have to learn new things. People who are really good at managing resources now also have to learn how to manage people. So it’s a shift at all levels within the government and that’s going to take time, and I think we need to go easy on ourselves a little bit in these early years and just realize that we need to relearn a lot of things and we need to learn how to do business effectively and efficiently for the benefit of our citizens.

Ian Record:

So a couple things out of that. One is that I think what you’re referring to is what we’ve heard from other folks from Native nations who’ve been involved in reform efforts is you’ve got to in many instances dial back expectations, that just because you have a new constitution doesn’t mean everyone’s problems are going to be solved overnight. There is going to be a learning curve, we’re going to make some false steps, we’re going to do two steps forward, one step back kind of thing, but the idea is that we’re in charge now and if we find that something in the new constitution isn’t working, as you mentioned, that we have the power to change it.

Angela Wesley:

And it’s not  in our case it’s not only the constitution, it’s the treaty as well, which both came in place at the same time. Probably one of the biggest lessons learned is to have not only that reorganizational plan in place to get your government ready, but also to start getting the economic side and getting that plan in place as well and start to make sure that there’s even small steps towards making changes that people will see some of the early things that we’re able to change that made a difference to our people. As we changed things like our education policies, we weren’t able to fund trades before and now we have the flexibility to be able to do that. So we’ve made little changes like that that make a difference to the people and to plan to do things like that to start to address some things that you can point to to say to your people, ‘Yes, things are working differently now. We are making small steps and hopefully as we continue to grow and build our economy, we’ll have lots of successes that we can look at and that’s going to happen over time.’

Ian Record:

The other thing I wanted to bring up from your previous response is you mentioned that the band manager, their reality has changed because of this new governance system, and I think that that’s often lost on folks is that this new constitution, this new system of government, it will definitely change the role of leadership or clarify perhaps the role of leaders and it will transform it will necessarily transform the expectations citizens need to have of their government, but really what you’re saying is that it’s going to change reality for everyone that is either part of the nation, works for the nation, or interacts with the nation. And can you talk a little bit about how I guess compare and contrast the new governance reality at Huu-ay-aht with the old governance reality? Say I came and visited the community under the Indian Act system and I had to work with the band government on something and now I’m getting ready to come back, I call you on the phone and say, ‘What should I expect, how are things going to be different for me if I have to come and work with the nation on this particular issue?’

Angela Wesley:

I think there’s a lot of fundamental differences, and we’re getting used to working within a new system as well. Having a treaty, having the constitution to go along with it and having a whole new set of laws, things have to be done differently. It’s not as easy now as going up and calling all the council members together and sit down and, ‘We have this new initiative we want you to look at.’ There’s a lot of things that need to go into it before it gets to that council level so the way of doing business. Do you need a permit to be able to go out and do certain things on the land? Do you need to be talking with our manager of natural resources to get all of those kind of things in place? Nothing goes before our council now without a full briefing note and some options that are provided to them so that they’re making decisions based on full information. One of the things that’s in our Government Act is a requirement for the way decisions are made and it’s actually written into our legislation of what needs to be considered at the council level in making a decision particular, well about anything, but particularly in relation to things that require money. Have you got all of the information that you need in order to make the decision? Have you looked at what the impact is on other programs? Where is the funding going to come from? Are there other options here? Is there a need to consult the community on this? What kind of impacts there’s a whole list of those things that are in the laws. So it’s our law that requires those things get done and that means a much more thorough process is required. So things are different, things take longer and hopefully we can refine that as things go along, but it’s probably better to walk on the side of caution a little bit first, at the same time being able to move forward economically and be able to make those changes in our nation.

Ian Record:

So I mentioned in the introduction that you have been intricately involved in your nation’s development of a whole new suite of foundational laws. You get the new treaty in place; you get the new constitution in place. Where did you guys focus your lawmaking energy at the beginning? What to you was, ‘We’ve got to address these issues right now. There’s nothing on the books that helps us deal with X, Y and Z.'

Angela Wesley:

What we did in approaching our lawmaking was to look at the real critical areas. We had gone through a process that I described of creating trust in from our citizens that we were going to do things right. So the first laws that we put in place were, we called them 'laws that govern our government,' because people were a little afraid. What are these new laws going to be and are we going to be expected to have all these new laws in place that we need to know. We thought it was really important that we put in place laws that show our people that our government needs to be accountable. So we have things like a Government Act, a Code of Conduct and Conflict of Interest, Election Act, Citizenship Act, all of those kind of really foundational pieces. We didn’t start touching the bigger areas that we now have lawmaking authorities under like adoption, child welfare, education, culture and language. We’ve got lawmaking in a lot of areas, but we decided first that we need to continue to build the trust of our government and allow our government some time to settle in to governing well. So we really put laws, a lot of laws in place that talk about how our government operates and how they’re to be accountable back to the people.

Ian Record:

So basically what it sounds like you’re saying is you worked to enhance the lawmaking engine to then make laws in the areas where you had newfound or newly affirmed powers.

Angela Wesley:

Yes. Yes. Yes and to make sure that there were ways in place that citizens could have an input, that they would be able to always have a say in government, making sure that our Government Act specified for example what the rules were around having people’s assemblies where people would have their voice, what the rules would be around providing financial accountability back to the people. So these were our laws that we promised people when they said, ‘How can we be sure council isn’t going to run off with all the money that we get under treaty?’ Because the constitution says they can’t and because there’s a law that says what they need to do and how they need to report back to the people. So we’re making sure that those checks and balances were really firmly in place before we start venturing off into other areas. Other areas that were really important to us in lawmaking was protection of our lands. So we have a few laws that deal with lands and resources. Areas that still allow our people to exercise our rights, harvesting rights and that kind of thing, so we made sure laws and permitting process and that were in place so that on effective date people wouldn’t say, ‘Well, how am I going to go and hunt now? Where does all of this happen?’ So we worked really hard to make sure there was no disruption in those kind of activities as well.

Ian Record:

So I have a final wrap-up question for you and that deals with lessons. You guys were involved in a process that lasted several years, you’ve managed to come through the light at the end of the tunnel and you have a new governance system in place. What do you feel that other First Nations in Canada, other Native nations in the United States can learn from the Huu-ay-aht experience?

Angela Wesley:

Well, that’s kind of difficult to say. You never really want to say what we’ve done that other people should do. We’ve done what we think is best for us. We’re happy to share our story and to see if what we’re doing can be of any assistance to others. We are grateful to those who came before us as well, there’s now 10 First Nations in British Columbia that are no longer subject to the Indian Act. We learned from them. We learned from the Nisga’a, we learned from Tsawwassen, we learned from other nations that are self-governing under self-government agreements as opposed to treaties. So I don’t know how to answer that except for to say it’s really important to bring the people along because if they don’t understand the change that’s coming up, nothing really changes for them. It’s just a shift in power from one to another and they won’t see the difference unless they’re involved in that. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing that I feel proud of that we did in our nation is we really did our best to bring the people along.

Ian Record:

Make sure they’re on board the nation rebuilding train before it leaves the station.

Angela Wesley:

Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. So it was a healthy experience for us. We’ll talk to a lot of our citizens who aren’t happy with the way things are going, I’m positive of it, but that will never go away either. But I think what we’ve learned through the process and what our citizens have learned is to use our voices and to try to be positive in terms of saying how things can be better. If it’s not working, let’s not just complain about it, because we can fix this if we want to. So I think that’s something that we’ve learned and that we’ll continue to learn as we become more comfortable in governing ourselves once again.

Ian Record:

Well, Angela, I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts, experiences and wisdom with us and good luck to you and your nation on your new governance journey.

Angela Wesley:

Thank you.

Ian Record:

That’s all the time we have on today’s program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations and the Native Nations Institute, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2013. Arizona Board of Regents.

Chris Hall: Cultivating Constitutional Change at Crow Creek

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native Nations Institute's Ian Record conducted an informative interview with Chris Hall, a citizen of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and a member of Cohort 4 of the Bush Foundation's Native Nation Rebuilders program. Hall discusses Crow Creek's current effort to reform its constitution and the importance of fully educating and engaging Crow Creek citizens in that process.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Bush Foundation.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hall, Chris. "Cultivating Constitutional Change at Crow Creek." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona and the Bush Foundation. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 25, 2013. Interview.

Ian Record:

So I’m here with Chris Hall, who is a member of Cohort 4 of the Bush Foundation’s Native Nation Rebuilders Program. Chris, welcome.

Chris Hall:

Thank you.

Ian Record:

Before we get into the questions and discuss your experience in the Rebuilders Program and talk a little bit about your own nation, why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself; what you do, where you come from.

Chris Hall:

I come from the Crow Creek in the Big Bend District on the Crow Creek Reservation, born and raised there. I won’t say I grew up there because I refuse to grow up, so that’s just a deal there. But yeah, I’m working with my nation in the hopes of improving our situation.

Ian Record:

So let’s talk a little bit about the Rebuilders Program and what led you to this day today, where you’re here at Spearfish, South Dakota, with no cell coverage, and you’re here learning with folks from other tribes across the region?

Chris Hall:

I think it was the state of our nation. After college, I had come back home after working on the East Coast and going to school, had come back home and really had an interest in getting involved. And when I did start, begin to get involved, I realized that there was some real issues that our leadership was struggling with and just one afternoon in a council meeting offered help. They were indicating they were overwhelmed and they were needing help so I simply said, ‘What can I do? How can I help?’ and was taken up on the offer. And they needed some help with their constitution revision, which hadn’t been done in a while. And so I stepped into that role.

Ian Record:

So you’ve had a few, you’ve been part of a few convenings of the Rebuilders Cohort 4 group now, and from your own personal perspective, what have been the highlights of the program thus far?

Chris Hall:

Oh, you know, the people are incredible, the leadership tools that we’re gaining, the support not just from the Bush Foundation and Native Nations Institute, but the cohort members themselves just has a real family feel and that sense seems to deepen with time. This is our third session out here in Spearfish Canyon and it really feels like we’re a family. We’re talking about getting together on each other’s land bases, reservations, and helping each other in an ongoing effort to just be together, because I think we’ve found strength in coming together. And we all have a commonality in our language and in our situations, a lot of familiarity with each other’s situation and now we have a common language that we can approach that with, and it feels really, really comfortable because we’re with like-minded individuals.

Ian Record:

So you’re not the first rebuilder from your nation that’s gone through this program or is going through this program,

Chris Hall:

Correct.

Ian Record:

There’s been some others, but I would imagine there’s a number of leaders in your, current leaders in your nation that don’t know a lot about this program, perhaps don’t know the value that it can have or perhaps is having for your nation. Can you talk, if you had an audience with the tribal leadership of your nation about this topic, what would you say to them? What would you want them to know about the Rebuilders program?

Chris Hall:

Well, I would assume that they are a lot like me. I would assume that with a desire to help, the first thing you seek out is resources. And one of the resources that I was looking for was information, information for my toolbox, for my toolkit, and I would think that current leadership and future leadership would want those tools so that they could address and compete on a level playing field with other leaders who are speaking the same language and talking about the same constructs, so that again, that we can all get on the same page and we can all move forward together. I’m beginning to see that it’s not each nation on its own path -- inasmuch as that is what’s going on -- but I sense a resurgence amongst all nations, and I feel like we are all gaining ground together and I feel like that synergy is really propelling us forward. So there’s a lot of inertia, and I would just encourage current and future leaders to tap into that, to ride that wave because it’s, I believe, it’s crashing towards a good shore and I think it’s actually going somewhere positive so it’s a good thing.

Ian Record:

So pretend for a second that I’m somebody that works in your nation’s government. It’s the day before the application deadline for Cohort 5 of the Rebuilders program and I’m sort of sitting on the fence. I’m not sure if I want to make this commitment, I’m not sure if I have much to contribute, not sure how much I’ll get out of this program. What would you say to me to convince me to apply?

Chris Hall:

I would say that you could make a lot of decisions in your life that may or may not assist you, but I could reassure you that this would be one that would propel you forward. This is a program -- if I can call it a program -- that really tunes in, listens, and provides you with tools for where you’re at and where you’re really intending on going. So even if you’re riding the fence and you’re not really sure, once you dip your toe in, you’re going to know that that water’s ripe for jumping in and swimming. So I would just say, ‘Put those fears and hesitation behind you and jump in,’ because it’s a real safe environment, it’s, like I say, they meet you where you’re at with your information, there’s no one person that is going to put you down for not knowing. So it’s a really, really positive experience and I think everyone needs that.

Ian Record:

So you alluded to this at the outset, that in recent years you’ve become involved in your nation’s, I would describe it perhaps as an ongoing effort to reform its constitution, perhaps it’s an ebb and flow, perhaps there’s work being done in some stages and just conversation at other stages, but can you first start off by describing the nature of your involvement in the sort of constitutional reform picture with Crow Creek?

Chris Hall:

By nature, what do you mean?

Ian Record:

Like so how are you contributing I guess to the reform process?

Chris Hall:

Oh, okay. Initially, I was the coordinator for a committee which was formed. There was a short time frame where we were allowed to present changes to our constitution, amendments to the constitution. We were asked to formalize those -- put that in writing -- present those for the decision, whether or not to move ahead. So a lot of the initial work that I was involved with was coming to the conclusion of what did we initially want to change, what [were] our top two priorities? And so it was weekly meetings, it was meeting with the community, tribal leadership, sort of cooking all that down and refining our selection to two amendments, which we put forth to vote. So that was the initial stage of my involvement.

Since the election, and the election didn’t go through, and there were a variety of reasons for that but that was...and I sort of knew this on the onset that it wasn’t going to be easily changed, we weren’t going to make two adjustments to our foundational document and then it was going to correct all our ills. So knowing that and having that election come and go and not have anything change, there wasn’t any disappointment on my part, in that we were making effort at changing.

So now this effort continues. There’s community education, leadership education; there’s lines of communication that are open that now need streamlining. There’s a very, very large picture out there that was at first unforeseen. There’s so much involved to wrap your head around that a lot of our citizens struggled with that. So since then, I’ve been working with the community and the leaders on clarifying that picture and clearing those lines of communication and this effort is, as you say, ongoing 'cause the revision process is just that -- it’s a revision process. The last time our constitution had been revised was 20-some years ago and that’s too long.

So the process that I’m involved in right now is an ongoing process of continuing education, of making resources available, clarifying that picture for our citizens so that they realize the importance of our foundational document, which is our constitution so that we can really accurately move forward in a knowing sense, so that we’re aware of what we’re doing rather than just throwing darts at a board, which at first, that’s what it felt like. We were under the gun, we had to come up with two prioritized amendments, and we were under the time pressure and it was just a shot in the dark.

Ian Record:

It sounds like it was a forced process when there needs to be sort of an organic nature to it, right? Where you allow people to fully immerse themselves and engage in the deliberations about this most precious governing document?

Chris Hall:

That’s a wonderful analogy. It does need to be grassroots, it does need to be organic, and I refer to our constitution as a foundational document. It impacts every aspect of our governance, of our culture, of our lifestyle, and people did not realize that at first. They thought this was just a piece of paper, it’s got some rules written on it and people are supposed to follow that if you’re in leadership and it doesn’t apply to the people, the nation. That concept has changed. Their appreciation of the document has deepened. They understand that this needs, that it’s wholesale; it’s across the board. This document affects every aspect of our living and our existence. So the importance of it now, I believe more and more people are becoming aware of that. Now the issue becomes, how do we not only specify in that document what our rules are, but how does that define us and which comes first? Do we define ourselves and then produce a document or is it vice versa? I’m letting people discover that for themselves. I believe I already have arrived at the answer, but I think that self-discovery for our citizenry is really, really important I think.

Ian Record:

I have two follow up questions for you on that. They were not on part of our original list, but this is typically what happens. Somebody says something really interesting and I ask them follow-up questions.

Chris Hall:

No, I think we need to stay on script.

Ian Record:

No, but the first one deals with this mindset you had, this recognition you had with the sort of forced process that you first were involved with, where it’s got to be two amendments and it’s got to be done by this date; that you recognized that win or lose that vote on those two amendments that this process we’re engaged in has some value to it because we’re beginning the conversation in the community and when we revisit this issue in the future, the baseline of knowledge and understanding and appreciation for why this matters will be that much greater. Is that sort of what you were getting at?

Chris Hall:

Yes, exactly. Moving forward in the dark, you grope, you feel your way, you’re unsure, and there’s a lot of fear. The fear of change in and of itself, not knowing what lies within that dark room, creates impediment, creates hesitation. So with the education, with the awareness, with the resource tools, people are coming out of that darkness, they’re shedding some light on the importance of this, the importance of the nation’s desires in proportion to leadership’s desires and the balance of that. So I think this whole process has been very positive, very productive, even though looking in from the outside, it may look like it was a complete failure, contrary to that from the inside, it’s been hard won, but, it’s filled with success, filled with success after success after success. Every time someone approaches me with a question and they get a satisfactory answer, I see that success in their eye, in their expression, in the ‘Aha!’ in the ‘Oh!’ So that’s been rewarding for me.

Ian Record:

So the other follow-up question I want to ask you is this dynamic between do you have the constitution define who you are, or do you define who you are and then have that inform the constitution. And this is a dynamic I’ve seen play out in a lot of other nations that are wrestling with the reform question. And where I’ve seen tribes succeed more often than fail is when the discussion around constitutionalism is paired with a discussion and a lot of deliberation about, 'Where do we want to be?' Not just who we are but where do we want to head, what sort of nation do we want to be 50 years from now, because that’s provides a lens through which to analyze, 'Well, how do we want to organize ourselves, what sort of vehicle do we want to design to get us there?' Is that sort of what you were getting at with that question?

Chris Hall:

Exactly. It’s cart before the horse; that analogy works. How can you create a document that will govern you without knowing either who you are or where you’re headed? So in my mind of course, you have to have a, I’ll go back to the word 'process.' I think we need to make some adjustments in our foundational language document, we also will then adjust as a nation and that will reciprocate back and forth. That’s why it needs to be an ongoing process. We will grow as a nation and if we’re smart enough to create a foundational document which can stay basically structurally the same and allow it to inform our law codes and inform our conduct as a nation, these two can support each other. So ideally, that’s the way it should move forward. Whether or not it will or not, that remains to be seen, because human beings are a very complex creature.

Ian Record:

So let’s backtrack a little bit; we’ve been talking about the reform process at Crow Creek. What prompted the nation to realize, 'We need to go down the reform road'? What were some of the issues that you felt necessitated constitutional change?

Chris Hall:

I don’t think it was my feelings necessarily, but more of different factions within the nation. There were factions that were concerned about our lease and our land use. There were factions that were concerned about our youth and our elderly. There were some gaps in some of our coverage in those areas and there were areas -- which a faction of the population had highlighted -- there was no action being done, there was no one at the bargaining table for some of our greater rights and our sovereign issues. So the issue of changing the constitution grew out of, 'Where are we at, and who’s got our bases covered, who’s protecting us and how do we get this done?' And so the conversation moved around, ‘Well, that all comes from your constitution.’ And there were very few knowledgeable people that had knowledge about our constitution. It wasn’t something that people talked about. They would rather talk about issues over and over again and not having any solution in mind whereas, we know that these issues stem from a weakness in our constitution. So that’s where that comes from.

Ian Record:

So in a nutshell, what’s the history of the Crow Creek Constitution? Where does it come from?

Chris Hall:

1949, it was drafted by Vern Ashley. We were given the choice to accept an IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution, which we chose not to accept, but we were forced to create a constitution in order to interact with outside governments in a mode that was understandable for everyone. So we adopted a constitution -- again, sort of force-fed -- but we are a treaty nation, and we did not really agree to the IRA, although we had to concede to creating a constitution. The constitution that we ended up with was drafted in a language that was foreign to most of our citizens at the time, and which has fallen out of date to the point where it’s very, very, very weak and very outdated.

Ian Record:

So Vern Ashley was, what was his background? Was he a tribal citizen or, ?

Chris Hall:

Vern Ashley is one of our elders and he still exists. He had a legal background, and I’m not sure if he was asked or volunteered or what that situation was, but he drafted and that is the constitution which we have now.

Ian Record:

So where would you say the reform effort currently stands? If you can sort of give somebody the 101 version of where are you at, in sort of the grand arc of reform?

Chris Hall:

I think we’re in the embryonic stage. I really believe that our awareness as a nation amongst nations, we are realizing that this document is important and the document that we have is weak. I think the awareness that it weakens our nation is prevalent now, more so than it ever has been, and I think with that knowledge people are, our citizenry is becoming more and more committed to strengthening our nation and they’re seeing that document as key to that future success. So we are at the beginning of a long road, and we have a map [the constitution] that is an old map and it’s tattered and it may actually be inaccurate for where we’re deciding to go, where we will decide to go.

Ian Record:

So I’m going to backtrack a little bit to some of the examples you shared with sort of what led the nation to decide to go down the reform path. There were different groups within the community that had sort of issue-based concerns on a variety of fronts and it sounds to me like all of those at some level stem from the realization that we talk about how we’re sovereign, but we’re not fully and strategically exercising our sovereignty and then being told that, ‘Well, it’s your constitution that’s preventing you from fully and strategically exercising your sovereignty.’ Is that basically how it was playing out and where the realization was rooted?

Chris Hall:

I think essentially, yeah. I think people were, our citizenry was spending a lot of time pointing fingers, being very accusational -- a lot of negativity -- and I think a lot of that was placed or aimed at our leadership, our elected leadership. And when we would go outside of that circle and ask for an external enforcement, they would, the citizenry would be told, ‘Well, those are your elected officials. You elected them and they’re operating off of their constitution.’ So I think it took several generations of sort of struggling with that, and I think now we’re in a completely different communication era. I think there’s avenues of communication where we can get an avalanche of information whereas before that was not available to people. So people are able to grasp and grapple with a lot more information that’s readily available. I think that has a big impact on people’s awareness so that they have really queued in on this and they’re to the point where they’re saying, ‘We’re not really wanting to blame, finger-point, because our leadership is actually in the same position as the citizenry; they’re not supported by a solid document and our sovereignty suffers because of it, and our leadership has suffered because of it,’ to no fault of the leaders, but because of the paradigm.

Ian Record:

So you mentioned this initial process and the fact that it led to a vote, which did not result in any changes. What do you feel that you and others that have been integrally involved with this current effort have learned from that first go-around? Are there lessons that you’re now applying in terms of how you’re trying to better structure the process moving forward?

Chris Hall:

Yeah. We, of course, we were just so anxious for change and hoping that those changes would fix everything. I think now we realize that we can still be hopeful for change, but that it’s going to take a lot more work. It took us a long time to become dysfunctional -- for the weaknesses within our governance to magnify and manifest them selves into what we have now. So it’s going to take us a little time to work ourselves out of that. We’ve learned some lessons about where the decision-makers are, who those people are, what their motivations are. I think we’ve learned a little bit more about how to move forward through what we saw as a mountain of bureaucracy. I think on the external side, there’s been some change in the bureaucratic end, which has opened itself up to our efforts more. So that has sort of eased some of the path, but it’s still a rough, rocky road that we have to walk. So some of the lessons that we’ve learned we will apply, but there are many more lessons that I’m sure we’re going to bump our heads against, but knowing that on the outset. If you set out on a journey and you know that there’s going to be storms, you’re okay. If you set out on a journey and think everything’s going to be sweet and peachy, you’re in for a surprise. So I think one of the most important lessons we’ve learned is, this is not going to be easy, it’s going to be hard and if we listen to our elder’s teachings, they told us, ‘Life is hard. Prepare, work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.’ I think a few generations maybe thought that this would just be an easy road and one of the hard lessons we’ve learned is it isn’t.

Ian Record:

Yeah, I think this is a common refrain we’ve heard from others, from nations who are engaged in reform is that you’ve got to dial back expectations, you’ve got to be realistic, you’ve got to understand that constitutional reform, the process is thorny and the outcome is not going to be a panacea, that it’s not going to be this sort of newly minted utopian existence the moment the new constitution is ratified, that it’s an uncertain path, but it’s one worth taking.

Chris Hall:

Expectations are a dangerous thing.

Ian Record:

So what are some of the changes -- without being too prescriptive here -- what are some of the changes that have been discussed as, ‘If we change this, if we change that with the constitution, we’ll end up with a stronger government that’s more capable of supporting the nation’s strategic priorities’?

Chris Hall:

Well, we’ve talked about criteria for leadership. We’ve talked about tribal sovereignty being strengthened through taking control of some of the programming that affects our tribal citizenry. We’ve talked about our land use and our resource base and how to step in and control that more for our citizenry’s benefit. We’ve talked about putting our own language in a prologue. We’ve talked about putting treaty language, because we are a treaty tribe, to strengthen that document and to reiterate to the citizenry that, ‘You are a treaty nation, you have rights, and because you have rights, you have obligations. With ownership comes the responsibility and you need to be able to shoulder that responsibility in order to properly own.’ And there are folks who want to own a resource base and own leadership who are not willing to face that responsibility. So those things, if we can instill that in a document, somehow, magically, hopefully that will transfer to future generations of citizenry that can stand firm on a firm document.

Ian Record:

It’s interesting you bring up this issue of obligations. We’re seeing an emerging movement among tribes that engage in reform, not just here in the United States, but in First Nations in Canada in particular, that are consciously reintegrating a sense of civic duty, civic obligation within the constitution, actually explicitly referencing if, here’s the criteria to be a part of us, of our nation, but once you are considered that, whether you’re born into that citizenry or you become a citizen through various criteria that you meet, that once you’re a citizen there’s expectations of you. It’s not just a one-sided deal; it’s a two-way street. Is that sort of the nature of the conversation that’s taking place?

Chris Hall:

Yes. You have to have someone have your six. If you don’t have anyone that you can rely on in tough times who has your back, then you’re not strong. So in order to have a strong nation, we all have to agree on some ground rules, we have to agree on what it means to be a nation and what it means to be a part of that nation, and that’s part of defining who we are and who is amongst us, who we call 'citizen.' So yeah, that’s a very big part of it. It’s a fundamental aspect of being a tribal citizen and not just a tribal citizen, but a citizen of any organized nation that wants to be strong.

Ian Record:

And at sort of an overarching level, isn’t that really ultimately about restoring balance to the nation, where it’s not, it’s no longer the government’s job, the tribal government’s job to support in its entirety the life of the nation, but the citizens themselves have perhaps a greater role to play and the government is there sort of supporting the people as they perpetuate the nation and its culture, and not simply replacing the role of the people in doing that, applying that task?

Chris Hall:

I think for me, philosophically, the government is a small supportive entity within a nation. I think the citizenry is the one who outwardly people see as the nation and they should be the ones that are producing. They should be the ones that are exercising that leadership, that autonomy that says that we’re standing on our own two feet. We are capable and we desire our future to be sustainable and we’re not going to give that over to a government institution and we’re not going to give that over to any large umbrella corporation that may or may not support our desires as citizens and define us differently than we choose to be defined. So yeah, it really comes down to the individual’s impetus of making the announcement and the statement, ‘This is who I am, this is what I stand for and this is what I’m willing to do to be a part of this nation.’ And you need people standing beside you that are like-minded.

Ian Record:

Well, Chris, we really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and experience with us.

Chris Hall:

You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you.

Honoring Nations: Miriam Jorgensen: Lessons to Take Home

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

NNI Research Director Miriam Jorgensen concludes the 2004 Honoring Nations symposium with her impressions about the lessons learned from the convening, from the great diversity among Native nations to the great strides they are taking when they devise their own solutions to the challenges they face.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Jorgensen, Miriam. "Lessons to Take Home." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 10, 2004. Presentation.

"I just want to say thank you to the previous speaker because he really...it's Rick George? I'm sorry, I was busily writing down all your notes and the name was like the thing up ahead. You just did a fantastic job of making a lot of the same kinds of summary points that I'd like to make. Even though you were thinking ahead to the future about how to continue on the success of programs, I just hope that everyone was really taking to heart a lot of the things that he was talking about, because they really scored deeply in my mind as things that were very important. So in a sense, I kind of feel like I'm kind of adding to your list or underscoring some of the same things that you were saying. I was asked to draw together some lessons that we've heard at this symposium and also to offer some more reflections, just to try to put a tie up on things.

And I think we all have probably some different ideas about what we've learned, the thing that we're walking away with that touched us the most, but I just wanted to start off with this observation. Boy, tribes are solving really tough problems, aren't they? These are not sort of little easy things that your programs are addressing, not little administrative fixes, not little 'let's take this small program and do this little change and things are going to be done.' You're addressing problems that are as big as the rights of Native people incarcerated in local, state and federal prison; preserving the rights of American Indians and Native nations to have the say over how remains are appropriately treated and reburied; the right to control land and water and other natural resources in ways that make sense. The programs that address really tough problems like children's safety, family violence, and problems that are very overarching, but hit at the core of what Native sovereignty means, like control over whether or not you get to run your own law enforcement department, because what more fundamental right is there in tribal government than to be the one that controls, who wields coercive force within your society? Should that be the federal government? No. And tribes are...and we've honored a program, the Gila River Police Department that took that on, that task. So these are tough problems.

And that leads me to one of the big lessons that I think comes out of what we've learned today: that in addressing these tough problems, there's clearly a lot that we can learn from each other. There are ways to figure out the way through the administrative maze of working with state departments or with the federal government or even going up to the international level when that's necessary. Things we can learn from each other about those administrative fixes or about particular strategies that apply sometimes across programs of different sorts, or when we have programs that are very similar to each other, there are definitely things to learn from each other. But there's also a sort of a parentheses at the end of that, and that's the notion that if you look around this room there's also tremendous diversity. And I think that's kind of the notion of saying, 'Yeah, we can learn a lot from each other, but sometimes what we learn from each other is how different we still are.'

I think there's this thing...and I do a lot of teaching about Native America to non-Natives and of course others have said this before, that one of the things that's the first reaction is, ‘Oh, my gosh! You mean there are still a lot of Native people in the United States?' And after that they say, ‘And of course they're all the same, right?' And you look around this room and say, ‘No, we're not.' We come from very different cultural traditions. We come from very different practices, very different histories. Some tribes have the Trail of Tears, others had no removal; some had no major battles, some had lots, some have a very modern history of struggle and fight. There's just a lot of differences out there, and I think in learning from each other about our programs, it's also acknowledging that difference and saying, ‘You do it that way and that's helping me understand how our way is different and we need to be different as well.' So I think there's lessons in difference as well, as much as there is to learn from similarities and things we can do the same.

One of the other big points that I walk away with -- and all of you who have been close to the Harvard Project for years or just learning about the Harvard Project may think that this is just one of the things that we trumpet all the time, but in hearing conferences and symposia like this, I think that we're getting it right: that you can't ever abandon this notion that tribal sovereignty, the sovereignty of Native nations and the issues of self-determination and self-governance just stand above all in a lot of these programs. And you can just hear it in the strains of how important that is in the way the programs are implemented and the actions that the leaders are taking to make those programs work.

But I think another...and a reflection and something I've heard in listening to the breakouts and listening to the speakers is that the notion that that battle for sovereignty just never ends. And I think it was somebody yesterday who talked about being wary of complacency, that you may feel like you've gotten to a point where things are successful or that battle is won, but I'm reflecting on something that the gentleman Edward [Wemytewa], whose last name I'm not going to pronounce correctly, who's the Zuni Eagle Sanctuary representative said to us, ‘You know, we have to fight that battle all the time because the personnel change and sometimes memories are short. Even our own memories change and we have to keep at the forefront what our battle is for -- it's for our rights and our sovereignty,' and that's just something that keeps going as a lesson throughout as well.

Sort of a sub-piece of that, and this again is to tie into what Rick George said, is that one of the very important pieces, and kind of picking up on what, you know, the reactions I heard to Myron's [Brown] talk yesterday and some of the things that Greg Mendoza said this morning, is that one of the ways to keep fighting that battle is to really train the youth, be they on-reservation youth, off-reservation youth, folks who are really engaged or folks who are not yet engaged, is to teach them about tribal government, about the rights of American Indian people, and to have them be ready to hold that banner forward as well.

The next point -- and this is just a quick one because it's already been covered well by Mr. George -- this is the one where I was thinking, ‘Hey, this is exactly what I was going to say,' is the notion of leadership. Julie Wilson talked about this this morning a little bit, how she said there's leadership in every place. She said that was what struck her, somebody coming from the outside, looking at Indian Country, not thinking about it very much before, is how the leadership of the Honoring Nations programs emerged from lots of different places. When we think about the safety program that the Mississippi Choctaw have put together, one of the things there is that this emerged from just activists, community activists. It's the same with a program we honored several years ago, the White Earth suicide intervention program. These are not people who are already engaged in tribal government, but activists that bubbled up from within the community. Other times it's a tribal bureaucrat who says things can operate differently or somebody like Greg who was out of government, just a youth who said, ‘We need to change the system.' So leadership is everywhere and honoring that, reacting to it, providing a means for them to move forward is just an important piece too.

The last thing I want to say, and if anything this is the thing that I felt this symposium did really well and that Amy [Besaw Medford] really needs to be honored for and those who really worked with her on that, is that one of our goals in all of this is to create an environment where we can learn from each other and I think that happened. I think that this has been a place where, and I'm going to use a really sort of Harvard Business School kind of word I guess, the 'network' word, but I think we've done more than network. I think what we've done is expanded our circle of friends. Manley Begay earlier in the day was saying to me, I said, 'how do you like those sessions, Manley?' And maybe I'm telling tales out of school, but he said, ‘I've just been having trouble getting to the sessions, Miriam, because I've just been talking to so many really interesting people about great programs and learning a lot about them and expanding our teaching skills and thinking about stuff that we ought to be looking into and making more friends and renewing old friendships.' And I said, ‘Manley, I know what you mean.' And I walked away from that and I kept looking around going people are really engaging with each other. If they didn't know each other before, they're introducing themselves to each other, they're renewing old friendships and they're even getting together with their group that they came with and said, ‘Oh, I just talked to so and so and I learned about this.' That is great. That's what we wanted to do. And that, I think, is more than networking because networking to me kind of implies I'm going to get out my pack of business cards and I'm going to hand it out to people because I'm going to say to them, ‘What are you going to do for me? Are you going to get me a job? Are you going to get me a connection?' But this is networking among friends. It's expanding that circle of friends so that when we walk out of here we know lots of people who do very interesting things that can help us and the tribal communities that you work with certainly, but there are also support systems and colleagues and people to share joys with -- people who care about us personally, about our professional careers, and about the Native nations that you serve. And I think to that extent this symposium has been very successful and helpful and something that I'll definitely remember.

So those are the lessons and reflections that I offer and I just want to send you off with that spirit of positiveness and hope that you've gotten that joy out of this symposium like I have."

The Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development course series

Producer
Charissa Delmar
Year

This short video provides a comprehensive overview of NNI's "Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development distance-learning course series.

The curriculum examines the critical governance and development challenges facing Native nations and surveys the breadth and diversity of Native nation-building efforts across Indian Country. Sharing lessons learned through 25 years of community-based research by NNI and its sister organization the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, it explores what is working, what isn’t, and why as Native nations move aggressively to reclaim control over their own affairs and create vibrant futures of their own design. Featuring eight different course options, Rebuilding Native Nations provides a dynamic individual or group learning experience, weaving together video lectures by course instructors, the perspectives of more than 100 Native leaders and scholars, curricular materials from NNI’s “Native Nation Building” and “Emerging Leaders” executive education seminars, in-depth case studies, illustrative graphics, the Rebuilding Native Nations course textbook (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2007), and original readings drawn from the NNI-Harvard Project research.

Citation

Delmar, Charissa (producer). "The Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development course series." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2013. Video.

Benny Shendo, Jr.:

It's not necessarily about nation building, but it's about rebuilding, because if you look at our communities historically, we were very powerful nations.

Robert A. Williams, Jr.:

Federal Indian law is not the reason that Indians are still here. The reason that Indians are still here is because tribal people and tribal leaders clung to their traditions and found ways to perpetuate them -- below ground.

Sophie Pierre:

We have a choice. We have a choice. We can continue, continue to go down that self-pitying kind of road, blaming everybody else for our problems, or we can take control of it. We chose to take control of it.

Anthony Pico:

Sovereignty is the right to govern ourselves, control our resources, follow our respective traditions and customs, and create our own visions for our own communities and our children's future.

Erma Vizenor:

And so we have to have structures and institutions that empower us so that we are never taken advantage of again.

Narrator #1:

"A revolution is underway among the Indigenous nations of North America. It is a quiet revolution, largely unnoticed in society at large. But it is profoundly important. From the High Plains states and Prairie Provinces to the southwestern deserts, from Mississippi and Oklahoma to the northwest coast of the continent, Native peoples are reclaiming their right to govern themselves and shape their futures in their own ways. Challenging more than a century of colonial controls, they are addressing severe social problems, building sustainable economies, and reinvigorating their cultures, languages, and ways of life. In effect, they are rebuilding their nations according to their own diverse and often innovative designs.

The Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development a distance-learning course series explores this growing movement. Sharing lessons learned from more than 25 years of community-based research by the Native Nations Institute and its partner organization the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, it examines what is working, what isn't, and why as Native nations work to regain control over their own affairs and create vibrant futures of their own design.

Rebuilding Native Nations provides participants a dynamic learning experience, weaving together video lectures by course instructors, the firsthand perspectives of more than 100 Native leaders and scholars, case studies of nation-building success stories, informative graphics, the Rebuilding Native Nations course textbook, and original readings drawn from Native Nations Institute and Harvard Project research.

Featuring eight different course options, the curriculum offers Native nation leaders, key decision-makers, administrators, employees, citizens, tribal colleges and universities, and others a variety of options to learn about the keys to successful nation building and how to -- once again -- develop healthy nations that work."

Narrator #2:

"The Native Nation Building Introductory Course."

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft:

Nation building to me is about building a place -- a place where my children and their children will live and play and work and raise their families forever and ever as Oneidas. And this place is important, I think, because we allow a collective group of people to become Oneida because they live in this place, and it becomes a way of life.

Narrator #2:

"The Administration Short Course."

Wilma Mankiller:

"When I think about developing communities in a real sense, not in an abstract sense, but taking a community and developing the economy, or developing water systems or community buildings or health care or whatever, what I think is that you have to have a strong enabling center to do that. The people who do community development and develop the economy can't go out and do good work unless they have a strong enabling center. And so, again, it's important to have a good accounting system, a good administrative system, and a strong tribal government in order to do that work."

Narrator #2:

"The Constitutions Short Course."

Gwen Phillips:

"And as you were speaking, I was getting this picture in my mind of a shield, that a constitution should be like a shield, and I'm the battle warrior -- we're back to the 'Star Trek' theme. Did you see that? I brought it back to the 'Star Trek' theme. But that shield, to me, shouldn't be a big shiny shield that's really pristine and looks like it's never been taken out of the case. To me, it should be all dented and it should show your battle scars, 'cause to me your constitution should live through all of those, to be able to take the sideways hits, to be able to stand up to the arrows and sometimes the bulldozers and whatever else, and live through all those things."

Narrator #2:

"The Economic Development Short Course."

Lance Morgan:

"When we started our company, we created two missions. We have two primary goals, and one is to create economic self-sufficiency and the other one is to create job opportunities. And I think that, before we started, we had a long history of kind of having businesses there, and we kept them open even if they weren't necessarily profitable because of the jobs issue. And I always kind of thought that was kind of a bit of a cop-out for poor management or poor decision-making or poor governmental structure. I think that if you don't have the profits, you're not really going to have the jobs for a long-term, sustainable period of time. And so, I think you really need to focus on developing a successful business. If you do that, the jobs will follow."

Narrator #2:

"The Intergovernmental Relations Short Course."

Jaime Pinkham:

"It is an exercise of sovereign powers. When we do these intergovernmental agreements, it is we -- it is a sovereign decision for us as a tribe to pick and choose who we want to be our governmental partner. And we get to identify and set the stage, the framework for the nature of those relationships. So it is...it's not an erosion of sovereignty, but in fact it's an expression of sovereignty in working out these sorts of agreements."

Narrator #2:

"The Justice Systems Short Course."

Theresa M. Pouley:

"Your tribal court system is part of your government every bit as much as any other department. And the fact that we have separation of powers, doesn't mean we have separation of problems. You and I all have the same problems. It doesn't mean that we have separation of solutions. Because I am a judge, I know a variety of things about promising practices. Because you're tribal council people, you know a variety of things. If we put our heads together, we can get it done."

Narrator #2:

"The Leadership Short Course."

Ned Norris, Jr.:

"People ask me today, How do you like what you're doing? And I tell them, I love it. I love this job. It's everything that a job needs to be. It's challenging, it's exciting, it's frustrating, it's disappointing.' All of those things that our jobs need to be in order for us to grow, in order for us to challenge ourselves, in order for us to be challenged. We have to have all of those experiences, all of those ingredients in order for us to be successful as tribal leaders."

Narrator #2:

"The Rebuilding Native Nations Full Course."

Ivan Makil:

"The things that we do today are not new. The challenges that we face today may be different than they were 100, 200 or 1,000 years ago, but the way in which we start to resolve these issues, the process is very similar as to what our ancestors had to do to resolve the issues and challenges that they faced as well. And so if we look back and we start to reacquaint ourselves and again understand the challenges of our ancestors, and the processes that they went through, that they developed to respond to these challenges, to make decisions, we'll find that there are some answers for us that will help us to make really good long-term decisions."

Narrator #1:

"To learn more about the Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development course series, please visit: rebuildingnativenations.com."

The Rebuilding Native Nations course series was developed by the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy at The University of Arizona. The course series development team:

Course Series Director
IAN RECORD, MANAGER, EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES, NNI

Lead Developers
IAN RECORD, MANAGER, EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES, NNI
RYAN SEELAU, SENIOR RESEARCHER, EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES, NNI

Graphic Designer
ARIEL MACK, GRAPHIC DESIGNER, NNI

Course Contributors
JULIAN BILLY
CHERYL ELLENWOOD
CHARISSA DELMAR
BEN DICKEN
DEIDRA GOLDTOOTH
DANIELLE HIRALDO
VICTORIA HOBBS
EMILY MCGOVERN
RAYMOND NAITO
SHERYL POLING
TARISSA SPOONHUNTER
JENNINE STEBING
CARRIE STUSSE

REBUILDING NATIVE NATIONS COURSE SERIES DEO

Writer & Director
IAN RECORD

Producer
CHARISSA DELMAR

Narrators
IAN RECORD
CHARISSA DELMAR

Music
KEITH SECOLA

Artwork
Shaman by PABLO ANTONIO MILAN

Images courtesy of
ARIEL MACK
GWENDOLEN CATES
HARVARD PROJECT ON AMERICAN INDIAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
HUU-AY-AHT FIRST NATIONS
KATE SPILDE
KERI PICKETT
JOHN RAE/NYC (RAEPHOTO.COM) and HONORING NATIONS
MOHAWK COUNCIL OF AKWESASNE
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
PROVINCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
RED LAKE BAND OF CHIPPEWA
WINNEBAGO NEWS

Funding for the Rebuilding Native Nations course series provided by
BUSH FOUNDATION
MORRIS K. UDALL AND STEWART L. UDALL FOUNDATION
SALT RIVER PIMA-MARICOPA INDIAN COMMUNITY
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

This video is a production of The Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy at The University of Arizona. Copyright (c) 2013 Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved.