repatriation

Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Monitors Program

Year

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is located on 2.3 million acres of land in the central regions of North and South Dakota. Land issues rose to the forefront of tribal concerns after events such as allotment, lands flooding after the Army Corps of Engineers built a series of dams adjacent to the Tribe, and years of drought that caused drastic changes to a major river. Allotment meant that many sacred sites were no longer on lands controlled by the Tribe. Dropping water levels in the river, reservoirs, and lakes exposed culturally significant sites long covered by water. Dispersed over a massive land base, these numerous cultural and archeological sites were subject to looting and abuse. In 2000, using its authority to manage, protect, and preserve tribal property, the Tribe’s Historic Preservation Office established a Tribal Monitors Program. Archeologically trained personnel, working with tribal elders, identify and monitor these significant sites. Additionally, they see that the sites, the artifacts within them, and any exposed human remains are dealt with in a culturally appropriate way. The Tribe is managing and protecting its lands while preserving the spiritual and cultural heritage and resources that the nation truly depends on for future generations.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Tribal Monitors Program." Honoring Nations: 2005 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2006. 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. 

Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Year

The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways is the caretaker of cultural heritage for the Saginaw Chippewa. The Center educates the Tribe’s citizens and the general public through its permanent and rotating exhibits, research center, repatriation efforts, art market, workshops, and language programs. By sharing its story in many ways, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan is reclaiming its past and celebrating its vibrant present as Anishinabe people.

Resource Type
Citation

"Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways." Honoring Nations: 2008 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009. 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.

Navajo Nation Archaeology Department Training Programs

Year

The Navajo Nation Archaeology Department was created in 1977 to facilitate historic preservation on Navajo Nation lands as mandated by both US and tribal government legislation. In 1988 and again in 1993, the Department expanded to include training programs, undertaken in partnership with Northern Arizona University and Ft. Lewis College, which are designed to give Navajo students the professional skills needed to conduct these important historic preservation activities. The training programs provide field and laboratory experience to Navajo graduate and undergraduate students concentrating in anthropology or archaeology. By combining academic training with practical application on the Navajo Reservation and western technical skills with traditional Navajo knowledge and oral history, the programs are preparing a pool of qualified Native professionals to assume cultural resource positions that historically have been filled by non-Navajos.

 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Navajo Nation Archaeology Department — Training Programs". Honoring Nations: 2000 Honoree. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2001. 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. 

Makah Cultural Education and Revitalization Program

Year

The Cultural Education and Revitalization Program serves as the hub of the community and stewards of a world class museum collection. Keen efforts and awareness demonstrated by staff and community members make this Center unique. Programs are truly guided by the needs of the Nation and its citizens. Makah language is taught by certified teachers, while collection labels are categorized in the Makah language and stored according to culturally appropriate relationships. By claiming and caring for the treasures of their ancestors, the Makah Nation ensures the cultural viability of its people.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Cultural Education and Revitalization Program". Honoring Nations: 2006 Honoree. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007. 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.

The Hopi Land Team

Year

Reclaiming traditional lands has been a primary concern of the Hopi Tribe for the last century. In 1996, significant land purchases became possible under the terms of a settlement with the United States. The tribal government was faced with the problem of developing a plan for reacquiring lands, prioritizing various goals for the land, and evaluating potential purchases. In response to this challenge, in 1998, the Tribe created the Hopi Land Team, a committee of the Tribal Council. With the goal of striking a balance between preservation and the future, the Team works to identify potential purchases, evaluate their cultural and economic significance and potential, and recommend purchases. The work of the Team leads not only to new development initiatives that increase tribal revenues, but it also brings critical cultural resources and sacred sites back to the Tribe.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"The Hopi Land Team". Honoring Nations: 2005 Honoree. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2006. 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. 

San Carlos Apache Elders Cultural Advisory Council

Year

The Elders Cultural Advisory Council was formed by a resolution of the San Carlos Tribal Council in 1993 to advise on culturally related matters, to consult with off-reservation entities, and to administer and oversee cultural preservation activities. As a source of traditional wisdom, the Elders Council plays an active role in the Tribe’s governance by providing insight on issues as diverse as resource management, leadership responsibilities, cultural practices, and repatriation of sacred objects. The values of self-reliance, respect, and a deep connection to nature are central to traditional Apache life and are underlying themes in all Elders Cultural Advisory Council activities, consultations, and messages. In establishing the Elders Cultural Advisory Council, the San Carlos Tribe gains access to an important source of traditional knowledge and enables a key constituency to have a voice in tribal affairs.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Elders Cultural Advisory Council." Honoring Nations: 2000 Honoree. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2001. 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. 

Suzan Shown Harjo: Five Decades of Fighting for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this wide-ranging interview, longtime Native American rights advocate Suzan Harjo discusses her involvement in the development and ratification of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the legislation creating the National Museum of the American Indian. She also offers her definition of sovereignty, and paints a vivid historical picture of the forces at work that led to the passage of Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Five Decades of Fighting for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 11, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host Ian Record. On today’s program, we welcome Suzan Harjo. Suzan Harjo is a woman of many talents. Not only is she the President and Executive Director of the Morning Star Institute, which is a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native people’s traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research, but she’s also a poet, writer, lecturer and curator. So welcome here to Tucson, Suzan. Why don’t you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself."

Suzan Harjo:

"Okay. Well, I’m Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. My mother was Cheyenne and my father was Muscogee Creek and I was raised culturally in both ways in Oklahoma. And I’m a writer and that took me to New York City and it took me to Washington, D.C. and a lot of what I write is federal Indian law. So I’ve developed the line of cultural rights for Native people for a long time from the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to the follow on legislation of repatriation and I was part of the coalition in 1967 after our ceremonies at Bear Butte in South Dakota that began work that led to museum reform to the National Museum of the American Indian to repatriation law and to the Religious Freedom set of laws and policies."

Ian Record:

"Well, great. And we’re going to talk about a lot of those policies that you’ve been involved in firsthand, but first I wanted to start at the basic level essentially and discuss sovereignty. And what I wanted to ask you is the word sovereignty means a lot of different things to different people. It’s a word when you’re working on the ground in Indian Country you hear tossed around all the time and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I was wondering if you could just talk to us and tell us how you define sovereignty for Native nations."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, the reason you hear so many definitions is first of all we think it’s an Indian word and we don’t think it means jurisdiction and who controls the king’s animals and that sort of concept of sovereignty that comes from Europe. Sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. We as Native nations are inherently sovereign and whatever we do to act sovereign is the definition of sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"It was interesting, I was actually in a panel presentation yesterday in Denver with David Lester, who’s the Executive Director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes and he was discussing this exact question that 'sovereignty' inherently is a western term. It’s a colonizer’s term. And he defined sovereignty as, ‘it’s our right to be who the Creator intended us to be,’ and he said it’s really no more than that. And then he went on to talk about things like economic development, for instance, is just one of many ways that we work to become the people that the Creator intended us to be. I hear that same sort of refrain in your answer."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, when something’s inherent, it’s inherent. You are who you are from the inside out and it’s not something that’s over layered either in law or in policy and it’s not something that the Europeans brought from Europe. It is your language. Speaking your language is an act of sovereignty. Reclaiming your language is an act of sovereignty. So the way it’s used by many people is simply as jurisdiction or simply as gaming operations and that’s so limiting. That’s really myopic, but for some Native nations that’s all they have. They don’t have their language anymore or they don’t have other vestiges of sovereignty but we have those things that define us. We have our rights of selecting citizens, setting citizenship criteria, saying who we are and who we aren’t, who is not part of us. That is an act of sovereignty. Citizenship is an act of sovereignty. We’re not, where I think we’re kind of falling down is that a lot of our people are not respecting our Native nations, but that’s something that has been taught to us and laid on us by federal and state government and private people who have, teachers and others in public schools who for so many decades and generations disrespected our elders, disrespected our traditions, disrespected our languages, disrespected our children, on and on and on and said that we were nothing, we were dead, gone, buried, forgotten at the end of the 1800s. So it is no surprise that a lot of our people do not have a strong sense of civics about our own nationhood and our own sovereignty and our own personhood. We have to get through a lot of self-hatred, a lot of this internalized oppression. These are more than buzz phrases. This happened to us. When the federal government issued civilization regulations in the mid-1880s that outlawed the Sun Dance and all other so-called ceremonies, that outlawed Indian languages, that outlawed the so-called practices of a medicine man and characterized all that was traditional and fine and good as heathen and pagan and hostile and improper and illegal for which the people were punished mightily, some of them unto death. That was interference and suppression, social suppression, national suppression, tribal suppression, personal suppression, religious suppression of a high and low order for 50 years. They were not lifted until the 1930s. So when you have that kind of generational oppression, it doesn’t go away in one generation or two generations and still today, the question I’m asked most often when I work with different nations to undertake enterprises, things that are acts of sovereignty, the first thing I’m asked is, ‘Will this make them mad?’ Hey, well, and what are they going to do, take away the Western hemisphere? I hope it makes them mad. So sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. It’s whatever people do with their inherent powers."

Ian Record:

"Well, thank you for that answer. I wanted to move on now to again some of these monumental policy initiatives and changes in Washington that you’ve been a direct part of. As you know, since the 1960s and certainly the 1970s Native nations have aggressively moved to strengthen and expand their exercise of sovereignty. Can you describe this process from your point of view and your direct experience with that?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I reject the premise of the question. Native nations have moved aggressively to exercise sovereignty since coming into contact with the White man. There’s no beginning in the ‘60s or beginning in the ‘70s, so I reject the premise of the question. Native nations throughout the 1900s in the Pacific Northwest, for example, were moving aggressively to carry out their treaty fishing rights and treaty hunting rights and treaty gathering rights and they were stopped continually by federal and state people who denied that there were treaty rights, denied their part of the treaty in upholding the fishing rights of the people. So much so that in the ‘70s when the treaty fishing rights case that’s called the Boldt Decision finally went to the Supreme Court and was decided in 1979, the Supreme Court in effect said, ‘This case has been before us five times this century. We don’t want to see it again.’ They had consistently ruled that the Indians were right. They had consistently upheld the treaties. So what you are asking is when America started paying attention to Indian rights, when the general public started saying, ‘Oh, maybe the Indians aren’t all dead.’ That’s not the same as Native nations vigorously pursuing and aggressively pursuing sovereign powers and sovereign rights. Native nations all over the country were trying to do what it was we were entitled to do through the orderly processes of our nations and the United States in our nation to nation relationship, which is now sometimes diminished and called a 'government-to-government' relationship, but that really is lowering the bar. So I would submit that our nations never stopped being who we are and we often were not heard or our efforts were thwarted. And why? Because one side had superior weaponry. We don’t have the nuclear bomb so of course we’re going to lose some contests. But did we roll over and play dead? No. And I don’t think that there has been a more vigorous or a less vigorous assertion of sovereignty or sovereign rights since, well, at anytime. I don’t think there’s been an ebb and flow. I think that’s a fiction."

Ian Record:

"Well, with respect to your involvement, I believe you’ve been in D.C. fighting these battles since the ‘60s and I was wondering if you could just talk about your experience there and I think in particular with respect to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. That didn’t happen overnight. That was the fruition of many years of hard fought battles and can you talk about those battles and how, essentially what was going on throughout the country manifested itself in this major policy shift in Washington?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I didn’t get to Washington until the end of 1974, but I was outside of Washington watching the process, observing how things are done in Washington and as a journalist in part and as a radio producer in part and as a part of Native delegations to Washington. So I understood how things worked, but I was an outside person when we developed the ideas, when we envisioned the National Museum of the American Indian I was not in Washington. That was a result of our elders saying, ‘After ceremonies, don’t go away...,’ in June of ‘67, ‘...stay for meetings and let’s figure out how to do these things.’ And we came up with a whole agenda of how to gain more respect in American society and in how to elevate our status and get mummies out of, off display and that sort of thing. It was a whole agenda of respect. Now at that same time, a lot of Native people were doing other kinds of things that were developing economic development or other kinds of work in other areas and our common problem was in the way that Indian affairs were ignored in Washington, D.C. except by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then they were controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That common realization by young people, older people, elders and people who were in tribal leadership position, people who were religious leaders and people who were, as I was at the time, a practitioner of traditional religion. We all came to the same realizations that something had to be done with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Everyone having that realization led to an effort for Native nations to gain more control and for the BIA to have less control because in the ‘70s when we started going to...I first went to Washington in the early ‘70s, early ‘60s with my tribal delegation. They selected me and a boy when we -- Cheyenne boy and me -- when we were seniors in high school in Oklahoma City and they took us to Washington with them. And we were supposed to, it was the custom, stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and let them know where we planned to go. And so our act of resistance was that our business committee, our tribal leaders didn’t stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and we were followed around town by them as we went to the Justice Department, as we met with people on Capitol Hill and the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents would be short, right behind us and it was, and they were upset that we didn’t stop and talk with them and tell them where we were going so they had to follow us. That was their duty, that was their mission. So that’s the kind of thing that people were experiencing. The Bureau of Indian Affairs people really thought they controlled Indian tribes. So out of that, now it could have taken many forms. People really liked the title rather than the law itself, 'self-determination,' because it sounded good but a lot of people talked about it as self termination as well and weren’t quite sure that, there were some people who were very invested in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and having a strong federal agency presence because they had lived through termination and the severing of the federal tribal relationship so they wanted something that was solid and strong in Washington to act as an advocate for Indian people. For the most part though, it was not being an advocate for Indian people and the Indian Health Service was also perceived as something that wasn’t doing the job that it should do and there were so many people dying of the flu and colds and pneumonia in Indian Country, not to mention tuberculosis and the other far more serious in general society problems, but it was the common stuff that was taking its toll in Indian Country. So you had people in poverty, ill health, ill housed and the worst, the worst of the worst on the demographic ladder, Indians were always at the bottom of everything, the lowest employment. Anyway you could measure how a society was doing or how a people were doing, we were the worst. We were doing the worst. And so everyone understood that something had to be done to get more power to the tribes and to have more of the functions of the BIA -- that is money, that really translates into money -- transferred to the Indian tribes and that’s what was so important about the Indian Self Determination Act, not that it was a great law. You read it and say, ‘This is not much,’ but it was something and it was the answer to the anger that was building by everyone. Everyone was very upset, very angry and you had people in the Pacific Northwest being maimed and imprisoned for fishing under laws signed by the United States and treaties signed by their nation and the United States nation. 'How dare they do those things!' And so the outrage was very high and that was just a tiny escape valve for the federal government and good that it happened and it began, or helped, it helped further a trend that had begun under the [Lyndon B.] Johnson Administration where the Johnson Administration had tried to put a lot of social programs in the hands of tribes and make more social programs and more programs of general applicability available to the people, to the Indian people. And self determination under [Richard] Nixon/[Gerald] Ford, first the Nixon message and then the Ford law, was a furtherance of what the Johnson Administration had tried to do to get away from termination and get more money and power and programs in the hands of the people, just more local government. So that’s what that was all about. The Nixon 'Self-Determination' message, I remember Ramona Bennett who was the Chairwoman of the Puyallup Tribe in Washington State, coming to Washington and she said, ‘I came to Washington and everywhere I went the BIA, everywhere on Capitol Hill they handed me a copy of Richard Nixon’s 'Self-Determination' message. So I read it and read it and read it on the plane on the way home and got off the plane and we took over Cushman Hospital.’ And I thought that was just a marvelous example of what it set in motion. It did set in motion the self-determining of Native people that went beyond any sort of contracting law. It was sort of like your initial question about sovereignty. What is self determination? Doing what you, in their case, the tribe needed to take over Cushman Hospital and they did. And it was just funny that it was as a result of Richard Nixon’s statement on self-determination."

Ian Record:

"Yeah, that’s interesting you mentioned that example and also your characterization of the Self-Determination Act as a tiny escape valve, at least as far as the federal government conceded it because in the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project, what we’ve seen is a growing number of native nations beginning in the ‘70s and particularly since that time have driven essentially a Mack truck through that tiny escape valve and aggressively pursued self determination to a far greater scope than the federal government I think ever conceived through this law."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, yes. I was in part, I was one of the people that helped interpret the Self Determination-Act when I first worked for the National Congress of American Indians and we did a lot of testifying on Capitol Hill in ‘75, and ‘75 about the meaning of the Self-Determination Act, who could do what with it, what it meant and how it could be used to benefit the Native people. And so we did look for every opportunity in the Act and if the Act was silent on something, we assumed we could do it because it didn’t say no. And that was a unique way of interpreting federal Indian law. It had been interpreted in the opposite direction by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a very long time that if something didn’t say explicitly that you could do something then the answer was no, you couldn’t do it. So we flipped that and started saying, if it doesn’t have an express prohibition against doing it, then do it, just don’t ask permission, just do it."

Ian Record:

"Just do it, the Nike slogan."

Suzan Harjo:

"Yeah."

Ian Record:

"As you know, a lot of the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project dating back to the mid- to late 1980s -- so you’re looking at essentially a decade after this Act was passed -- has focused on why some nations have been more successful than others in pursuing their goals of self determination, whatever those goals might be. They might be economic, they might be cultural, they might be social, etc. From your perspective, do you see any common factors that perhaps empower some tribes to be more successful in that regard and perhaps some factors on the flip side that perhaps get in the way of other tribes from moving forward and pursuing their goals and achieving their goals?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, before Jack Abramoff, it was customary for the community of Native nations to come together for the common good and develop programs or general laws in a way that could be useful, beneficial for all Native peoples. What the Abramoff scandal brought to light was that there were Native peoples who were just behaving like any corporation and trying to get the edge over any other corporation and when I ran the National Congress of American Indians during the ‘80s, that was never ever the custom or the practice. So up until the late ‘80s, until we got the gaming law, everyone was supporting everyone else so it was a, you came together for mutual support and if one group, if one intertribal organization wanted to do something, everyone would support them in that effort or just stand back, certainly not oppose them. So this idea of just one-upsmanship and edging out another Native nation for profit, for personal profit I think is a sad turn of events in our national Native efforts, and there’s just no accounting for greed and we have very greedy people among us. We have a lot of greedy white people among us, a lot of greedy other kinds of people, and we have our own homegrown greedy people. So what accounts for the success of one nation and not success of another? In part that kind of greed, an overload of greed on the part of a successful nation willing to undercut, keep down another Native nation. I think that’s what was brought to light by the Abramoff scandal and what a lot of our leadership hasn’t owned up to and are still some of them covering up and that’s unfortunate. So the specific success by one nation as opposed to another may be as a result of dirty tricks and undermining and throwing a lot of money to see that the other nation is not successful. That has translated into other kinds of rights in other parts of the country and you see a lot of ugliness one nation to another and that’s where it’s backfiring for a lot of people and the leaders who let Jack Abramoff have his way or who encouraged him or hired him because they wanted a pit bull are being turned out by the people because they’re saying, ‘At home we don’t want to be this kind of person. We don’t want to be this kind of nation. We don’t want to have this kind of Native tribal character. That’s not who we are.’ And I think that’s really good. So we had to have a kind of pot boiler to make people decide. Now some are just saying, ‘Heck, yeah, we want that. We want to be the richest ones. We want to be the most cutthroat. We want to be the meanest ones.’ So it’s in a way like everything else, it all comes down to people and it all comes down to leadership and the people having the kind of leaders that they want to have, putting in office the kind of people they want to represent them. Now it doesn’t mean that they wanted the Jack Abramoff clones or payers or dupes. It does mean though that when all of that was done with and they assessed what had happened, they took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, whatever the opposite direction was and that’s still sorting itself out. We’ve been impoverished for a long time and we’ve only been comfortable...some Native nations have been comfortable, some are mega rich, only a handful, some are comfortable and some are still way in the depths of poverty. So we have to figure out what’s keeping the people in the depths of poverty. If it’s not other Native nations doing that and keeping them down, is it the federal government keeping them down? There are still people in the federal bureaucracy who are dying to get control of Indian tribes again and some of them are doing it through the kind of carrot and stick flattery. You see many, I’ve been in Washington a long time and I see people, delegations come in and they do cow tow to the very, to federal bureaucrats and they do sell out very, for a photo op and they don’t insist on substance. Not everyone. I’m talking about just a small number of people who do this. The most successful of the tribal leaders will not do the photo op unless they have something to back it up with, unless they’ve gotten something for the people, unless they have some sort of really clear promise or a negotiated agreement or a law or they, it’s not just, ‘How nice can we be to the white people?’ but some people still have that orientation and a lot of people in Washington exploit that because there are still people who are on the payroll or on the side of for other non-monetary reasons the people who are trying to exploit our resources and the people who are trying to keep us from not just making money on things, but having them altogether. So there are still people who are trying to take our gathering places, who are certainly trying to keep control of our sacred places. That has not stopped and there is a predictable backlash against any Native people that exercise sovereignty in any area, whether it’s water rights or gaming operations, whether it’s being too cultural. People get jealous of that and [say], ‘Give me some of that medicine.’ No matter what it is that is being exercised in a way that can be commodified, there are people who try to gain a share of that commodified entity or they try to take it away from Native people altogether and that’s still going on. There are still organized networks of people who call themselves in organizations 'anti-Indian' or 'equal rights' -- 'equal rights' is buzz word for no treaties, no special Indian rights. And this issue has been taken to the Supreme Court a lot and the Supreme Court always answers the same thing, ‘Special rights of Indians don’t interfere with the constitutional rights of non-Indians, so shut up.’ I mean, that’s what is supposed to happen, but that keeps going on. And in every way that Native nations raise a resource right or commit an act of sovereignty, there are non-Indian people who are there saying, ‘Either give me some or you don’t get to do that anymore.’ And why? Part of it is racism and an ancient fear that once in control of anything, Native people will be as bad to the non-Indians as the non-Indians have been to us. That is not our history. That is not our history. Whether you look at the Maine Indian land claim settlement of the claim to two-thirds of the state in a settlement for 300,000 acres of land, that was an act of compassion on the part of the Passamaquoddys and Penobscots in not suing every citizen in the claim area. That was an act of compassion because they said, ‘We don’t want to scare people the way our people have been scared.’ I thought that was so admirable of them and so they wanted their lawsuit held in abeyance pending the outcome of talks. They said, ‘Just talk to us.’ They didn’t want to go through an entire litigation process and hurt the people in that claim area. I thought that was extraordinary."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned sacred places, which is a good segue into my next question. As you mentioned, you were directly involved in the creation and the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Can you just describe what...how that act came about and really what was the impetus behind it and perhaps your perspective on its impact 30 years later?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I keep referencing this 1967 meeting, which was the nucleus of a coalition that became a national coalition for cultural rights and we had a second meeting, because we were mostly -- although there were people from other nations there at that ‘67 meeting in June -- we were mostly Cheyennes, Arapahoes and Lakotas, your basic Little Big Horn coalition. And we talked about a lot of things and realized that the Lakotas had different issues than the Cheyennes, even though we have so much in common, that there were slightly different things, slightly different experiences, different religions, different things that we had to do that we were being prevented from doing. So everyone had the ‘no trespassing’ signs in commons, the ‘no Indians and dogs allowed’ signs in common. We all had that in common, but what we realized was we needed to know more in order to do something that would help everyone and that was our goal was to help everyone. And it really was a, there was an emphasis on freedom. So we, and I can’t emphasize enough that we were still criminalized even though the civilization regulations had been lifted 30 years earlier, we were still criminalized when we practiced our religions and we were demonized by a lot of Native people too who had bought the whole bill of goods and who called us pagans and that sort of thing in resolutions and in letters to the BIA. So we realized that we had to do a lot of things to help ourselves and to help other people so, anytime that we tried to get to a sacred place that had been confiscated and turned into the public domain, we had to go through private property, federal property, sometimes state property and everywhere were these ‘keep out’ signs and ‘no trespassing’ signs and we were literally in order to continue a pilgrimage lifting barbed wire to get to these places. We still do that today in some places, so it’s not over, it’s not ended. So we wanted to see beyond that and make sure that in making ourselves free from a lot of these constraints that we weren’t imperiling anyone else. So kind of put out the word to different parts of the country what we were doing, what we were trying to do and that we wanted museum reform, we wanted a national cultural center, that’s what we called the museum facing the capitol and so the capitol, the people who were making laws about us would have to look us in the face. And we wanted something where people weren’t confiscated eagle feathers from us and we wanted the ‘no trespassing’ signs gone. So we got an invitation from Governor Robert Lewis to go to Zuni and so we went there, a pretty big delegation, and he had invited some other people and we had a similar set of meetings for a week and discussed what they needed and what they were afraid of and what they were confronted with and so that became, we were building a door like this and then it became a wider door, kind of a taller door. Everywhere we would go there would be another kind of issue that people wanted to be a part of this thing. So while we were building a door to get everyone through, we ended up with something that was very oddly configured and you can say the same sort of thing about all of these laws in the cultural rights realm, repatriation certainly is a good example of that, and the reason it doesn’t, these don’t look like other laws is because so many different cultures and so many different ways of dealing with issues had to be accommodated. And I do mean had to be. I mean, that was a real mission that everyone felt was we needed to be absolutely inclusive and to not have language that would restrict other people. So we just continued lots and lots of meetings like this, lots of gatherings, hundreds. We had hundreds of meetings of this kind, some later at Native American Rights Fund, some out in the open where everyone would camp, some at hotels in conjunction with Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians or National Congress of American Indians, and it was a very important movement that took hold in Washington and a lot of people were responsive. And the first two people I went to were Senator Barry Goldwater in this state and Senator Ted Kennedy because they were the most conservative and most liberal and then all you do is fill in the blanks in between. And both of them were so receptive and that’s when we really knew that we were going to prevail on a national Indian cultural rights agenda was when we were able to get really broad sponsorship and then in the House another person from Arizona, Congressman Morris Udall, was our champion there. So that, and if you look at the Religious Freedom Act and you look at the report of the president pursuant to the Religious Freedom Act, it was done after a year’s implementation. After a year’s implementation of 50 agencies' review of their rules and regulations in the context of Indian religious freedom, you see that it covers a lot of areas, it covers museum reform, sacred objects, sacred places. It’s quite a broad set of policies and the overall, overarching policy statement is to preserve and protect Native religious religions and practitioners of those religions. That was huge because it, the only, it had been the policy of the United States to destroy them. So that’s why we had to have an Indian religious act and why we had to have repatriation and the like, all the follow on legislation because this was a policy statement and then you go from there to make something that is specific to a topic. So that’s sort of how we got from the ‘67 meeting to just lots and lots of, they weren’t hearings, they were gatherings where we exchanged information and there was a lot of traditional knowledge sharing and learning that we were all doing. We all came away with in effect Ph.D.s in comparative religion. It was quite the thing. And I am so privileged to have been a part of that and to have been educated by so many extraordinary people. So that period was just an amazing thing. It was an, talk about an exercise of sovereignty. This was the people rising up and saying, ‘This is what we want and need and we need it to look like this.’ And that’s what repatriation was. We continued that same process from ‘78 when we did the Religious Freedom Act to ‘89 when we finally got the Indian museum and the historic repatriation provision agreement with the Smithsonian. And after that it took only 11 months to get it applied to the rest of the United States, to every other federal agency, educational institution and museum that was, that had any sort of federal tie. And that’s a pretty remarkable thing. And we literally got everything that we wanted and a process to try to do something about the things that were causing people so many nightmares. In part, our elders in ‘67 called us together because so many people were having nightmares about people who were held in these places and things that were held, our living beings, our sacred objects, that were being held in these places and they were describing them as prisoners of war. And at that point, we didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but by the ‘80s we had found the documentation to support what our oral history told us about beheadings. We knew there had to be a policy and a program to behead us and just because it was in everyone’s oral history, but we didn’t find until the ‘80s the information about the Indian crania study of the U.S. Army Surgeon General and we didn’t know until I started having negotiating sessions at the Smithsonian with Bob Adams, who was Secretary of the Smithsonian, that they had in fact 18,500 human remains, 4,500 skulls from the Indian crania study. We knew all of that from our own history, but we didn’t know how it was done until we found the paper, and thank goodness for the Magna Carta culture.

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and also NAGPRA, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and just get your sense, now that there’s been obviously 30 years since AIRFA, moving on 20 years, I believe, since NAGPRA. How have those two acts worked out in practice? Are they achieving the goals that those folks that you were initially working with had set out?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, AIRFA is a policy statement, so it is what it is and we expected to gain more follow-on legislation from it than we have. So our big failing would be in sacred places protection and what we need are legal protections for sacred places and what we’ve been doing is cobbling together protections made of all sorts of other laws and processes and then some outright buying of areas of sacred places. We can’t obviously buy everything and some things were taken from the Indian people and we were confined to reservations and not allowed by the civilization regulations to roam off the reservation. That was an act that was unlawful, to roam off the reservation and for all of these sacred places that were off reservation, they were attempting to stop the relationship between the place and the people going there to pray. So a lot of people went there anyway of course, but had to do it underground and had to, had to make themselves criminals and hostiles and fomenters of decent and all of that and risk imprisonment, withdrawal of rations, starvation and any open-ended sentence that an Indian agent might apply in his discretion. So these places, none of these places were taken properly. They were all stolen. These were our usual and accustomed places, these were places that it didn’t occur to our ancestors that we wouldn’t be able to go there. Yet we were stopped. It didn’t occur to them that someone would take them and say, ‘Now these are ours, not yours.’ But that’s what happened. So we haven’t fulfilled the hope that we had of securing legal protections of a general nature, of a national nature for these important places to all our peoples. As far as repatriation, that is a good example of what was supposed to happen. We did do follow-on legislation. We were able to get it and I think we were able to get it because we were able to find so much of the documentation that was about an area of American life that most people on Capitol Hill had no idea existed and they would say, ‘You’re kidding. This is what the United States did? How is this possible?’ And there it was in black and white, there it was in green boxes in museums. So we had a good case, we made a good case for repatriation and I think, and we set up three processes, two laws and one process at NMAI and they were all slightly different, they had slightly different standards, the legal standard, the test under the two laws, one for the Smithsonian and one for everyone else, was or is preponderance of the evidence, which is 5941. In the NMAI [National Museum of the American Indian] trustees repatriation policy that governs NMAI, we made that a reasonable belief standard to see if that would be different in its implementation from preponderance of the evidence, reasonable belief not quite requiring a majority of belief, however you quantify these things. And it hasn’t made all that much difference, I don’t think, proving to me at least the point that everything comes down to people. It matters who’s in the delegation on the tribal side, it matters who’s in the repository receiving side and when the people get together what is their interaction and what are their motives and are they really concentrated on the good of the Indian people, the public good for education. Are they truly concentrated on these things or is it about people looking at us as if we’re the butterfly collection or our people, our ancestors as if they’re the butterflies that are pinned down. That’s a different way of looking at the world and that’s not the kind of world that we made with the repatriation laws. We made something that was interactive, that would bring together the peoples who cared most about the subject and that it was supposed to be for the good. I think that they’ve accomplished that and they’re not finished and it’s a long process. It’s a long process because Native people, it’s not a simple matter to repatriate. No one has the ceremony for what you do when people come and dig up your grave and take your great grandma or your grandma to Washington or to University of Arizona or UCLA or the Colorado Historical Society. There’s no ceremony for that except for those who have it now. So everyone, and you don’t just invent ceremony all of a sudden. You have to say, ‘Is this like anything else? What happened when there was a flood and bodies floated up, what happened? Ah, we did this, we did that.’ So people have to think of other things that it’s most like and find a way to discuss it in a way that’s not just ripping the scab off everything that’s happened in the whole of the 500 years and find a way to discuss it in a way that everyone can be put back together again. So that’s a lot and that requires a lot. Repatriation has placed a tremendous burden on Native nations, which is usually discussed as a paperwork burden. Say, ‘Wow, we’ve got a mountain of paper.’ It’s put a tremendous burden on everyone, but when it’s done best, it’s a tremendous learning process because people, well, like the teachers say, everything is a teaching opportunity. This is a teaching and learning opportunity for everyone. It’s a way of talking to the artist in the community. We want our cultural patrimony back so you see these designs. We want our people back so people can stop having nightmares about them and we put them to rest finally. So it’s a small measure of justice in a very unjust history and an unjust world. The really smart thing we did in repatriation law in both the ‘89 and the ‘90 law and in the NMAI trustees policy was to leave the implementation of the law up to the people doing the repatriations themselves. And that was, well, we had two choices. We could have guessed and we would never have guessed right, never. There are so many surprises that have come up in the individual repatriations. Or we could do what we did, which was to punt. We agreed on the general policy, we agreed that there was going to be a repatriation law, we agreed that it would be human rights of Native Americans. All of that was agreed to. And then we didn’t tie everyone’s hands with too much law. We left a lot to be, the manner of repatriation, so people looking for guidance in the law need to look to the spirit rather than the letter and then to do what they agree to do because that’s the whole point. People are coming together for a common purpose and they need to do whatever they need to do to make it dignified, to make it respectful, to make it lasting or to make it an interim thing. They might just say, ‘This is what we’re doing for now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to do it this way afterward,’ because it’s up to the current, to the living people to define cultural appropriateness, to do religious interpretation, to understand what the people need right now and then to, what kind of presentation? Does it need to be just something that’s written down and no one talks about it again? Does it need to be something done as a ceremony? Does it need to be something done that’s not a ceremony, but done with ceremoniousness? There are all sorts of ways to do these repatriations and the best thing is for the peoples to, on the Native side and on the repository side, to come together and to deal with it in the way that they can agree to deal with it. And that’s part of healing and that’s what we wanted to accomplish. So, and that’s what I hear from lots and lots of people who do repatriations is that they have accomplished that. But it takes a long time to get from point A to point Z. It just takes a long, long time. And sometimes you don’t quite get there, but you just run out of time or you run out of patience or you feel that it’s going in a negative rather than positive direction. There are lots of reasons that people decide that the end has been reached. Sometimes it’s a person on a particular repatriation committee knows they have three months in office or a tribal leader and they just have to get it done before then. Sometimes it’s a religious thing where the important thing is to get this back before this thing happens in the sky or before this kind of thing happens or to keep the salmon running or to keep the buffalo healthy. There are all sorts of community reasons that people do things or they just want not to deal with the subject anymore and to do, to resolve it quickly and quietly. There are all sorts of reasons for pace and style and as I said, I think that’s the smartest thing we did with the repatriation laws was to leave it up to the people."

Ian Record:

"You are also, among your many activities, one of the plaintiffs in the Washington Redskins trademark lawsuit, which has been going on for several years now."

Suzan Harjo:

"Sixteen."

Ian Record:

"Sixteen -- more than several. Just describe for us briefly why this suit was brought, what was the basis of it and what the current status of it is and essentially what larger problem it’s trying to address."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, all roads for me lead back to our ‘67 meeting at Bear Butte, which was just eye opening for me and the people kept talking about respect and respect and respect and how we were being, we were not being respected in general society and one of the things that got tossed around was all of the, all of these sports teams that were walking all over our good names and walking all over our reputations and that that was helping keep us down and helping make everything else possible and that not enough people were speaking out about it. And that really meant a lot for those of us who were from Oklahoma, where sports are a really big deal and we joined up with the effort already underway in Oklahoma to try to get rid of Little Red who was the mascot for the University of Oklahoma and that became the first of the American references in sports, Native American references in American sports to go by the wayside. It was ended...Little Red was the first dead mascot in 1970 and after that came Syracuse and Stanford and Dartmouth and a lot of others. Until this time, when we’ve eliminated over -- we collectively, not me, but we collectively -- have eliminated over two-thirds of the Native references in American sports. So we’ve won already. Now that’s in educational sports. In pro sports, not one has changed. So you have 2,200 in educational sports have changed, have dropped their stereotypes, not one in pro sports. So there was a trademark trial, a trademark lawyer, patent and trademark lawyer named Steve Baird who was doing research on causes of action in trademark law to deal with this issue and so he wanted to interview me when I was, I think I had just stepped down as Director of National Congress of American Indians, but I was all over the record on this issue for many years and decades. And so he called and he was in Minneapolis and could he come and interview me. So he and his wife came over and we were doing an interview and the first question he asked me was, ‘Why did you reject, ’ because I’d said that we’d met many times. He said, ‘Had you ever considered a lawsuit against the Washington team?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes, but we rejected the civil rights approaches and they didn’t seem quite right for this forum that we knew we would have the hardest row to hoe in pro sports.’ So he said, ‘Well, why did you reject the forum of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t.’ And he said, ‘Well, did you reject or why did you reject, if you did, the Lanham Act as a cause of action?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ And he was so smart, he explained all of this to me about a pocketbook incentive lawsuit and how the Lanham Act said that you can’t get a trademark license if you have disparaging -- there are four tests -- if you have something that’s derogatory to anyone or anything or if it holds people or thing up to contempt, holds a people or thing up to ridicule or is scandalous and it seemed to me that we fit all of those. It was certainly scandalous to us, but I didn’t know if it was scandalous to general society. So he explained that it would be difficult to have them do it retroactively. What we would have to do is ask them to cancel the licenses, the trademark licenses that the team owners had received in the late ‘60s and, rather than going in the front end to have them not issue the license and that there were complexities in the lawsuit. So by the time he left, I had hired him as my lawyer and then I took a poll of the, I talked to the Board of Morning Star [Institute] and Morning Star became the sponsor for the lawsuit and then I made elaborate lists and called up six people and each one said yes. And the first one I called was Vine Deloria, Jr. and he said, ‘Oh, hell yes. I’m definitely for that.' We’ve got to do something to take this burden on ourselves as the responsible adult population and not have our, not pass this burden on to our children and their children and their children. So that’s why we did it. And his other remark was so much like one of the remarks that had been made at that ‘67 gathering where he said, ‘We have to tell people that this is not acceptable, but we have to say it and we haven’t done enough of that.’ And that was exactly what I had heard and I thought, ‘This is really such a smart man and such a wise elder.’ I think there were many of us who knew Vine was a wise elder before he accepted that he was and he was always very self deprecating. And so we had, I wanted seven people because seven is a really important number for the Cheyennes and we won in ‘99 before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board. Filed in ‘92, won in ‘99, lost before the federal district court in 2003, and we’ve been on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals since then with one narrow question having been sent back to the lower court about whether latches, the passage of time runs against the youngest of the seven of us who was in diapers at the time that they filed for trademark protection and the Court of Appeals sent that question back with some language that said roughly, ‘There are always going to be Native Americans born and obviously some of them are going to continue to be offended. What about them?’ They were asking themselves and continue to do. So from that I concocted a lawsuit of young people who have no latches problem and again wanted to have it mirror our lawsuit and got seven, but one had to drop out. So it’s now six young Native people between the ages of 18 and 24 so there was no lag or minimal lag between them reaching their maturity and filing the lawsuit. And they filed our same lawsuit, they did that in 2006 and their lawsuit is being held in abeyance pending the outcome of ours."

Ian Record:

"So depending on how they rule on yours, they would proceed with the other one."

Suzan Harjo:

"Then they proceed, right. And it’s a different lawsuit so if they don’t, if the Court of Appeals does not reach the merits whether it’s disparaging or not to us, in our lawsuit then they have to reach it in the next one because they have no loophole, no escape hatch of latches for the Washington football club to get through. So they may escape through that loophole in ours, but they can’t through the next one and that’s just one forum and one cause of action and one tiny group of people. We’ve got a lot of relatives and there are lots of forums and all of that is to say that we’re on the downhill slide on winning this issue and, when you think about it, over 2,000 schools have gone through this process thoroughly and some at length, University of Oklahoma for almost 10 years, some of them really for a long time, before deciding to eliminate their Native references. That’s amazing. That’s really a societal sea change all around the country in the heartland, on the coast, everywhere, big towns, little towns, and almost all of those happened one by one by one except for LA [Los Angeles] Unified School District, they did it as a school district. Dallas-Fort Worth did it for half of Dallas-Fort Worth as a district. Lewisville, Kentucky did it as two counties in one school system. So other than those, though, it’s been done school by school and it’s always the same process and always the same arguments and it’s amazing how you could almost script it and say, ‘This is what’s going to be said. They’re going to say, 'You’re not offended.' You’re going to say, 'You’re not honored.' And that’s going to be the argument.’ And it has been and you almost want to say in the middle of these negotiations, ‘I know you think you’re being original, but we’ve heard it all before.’ Nonetheless, not every argument has been made in every situation and that’s what’s being played out all over America. So we’ve won on that. Whether or not we lose this lawsuit or win this lawsuit, these names are gone, these references are gone."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to wrap up with again getting back to a very general question and really what I’m curious to know from you is what do you see for the future of Indian Country and Native nations?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, "

Ian Record:

"I didn’t say it was a simple question, I just said it was a general one."

Suzan Harjo:

"I was the National Coordinator for the 1992 Alliance, which was from ‘89 to ‘93 really providing Native voices on the occasion of the Columbus Quincentenary, which was 1992 and one of the things that I put in place for October 1992 to kind of wrap everything up was a meeting of 100 wisdom keepers -- all Native people -- wisdom keepers, artists and writers to come together and then I co-chaired that with my old friend Oren Lyons, who’s an Onondaga Chief from the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. And we invited, we just put together a list of our, of the people we most admired and respected and asked them to come. What we were finding was that we knew a lot of different people and that a lot of people, I talked to Vine Deloria for example and he said, ‘Oh, I think that’d be really interesting. I’ve never met, ’ and he named several people. So we put together people mainly so we could just talk about the future and we called it 'Our Visions: The Next 500 Years,' and I will tell you that no one mentioned Columbus at that entire week of meetings and we came out with a wonderful statement, which I will get to you so you can read it into this record called ‘A Statement Toward the Next 500 Years.’ And essentially it says we’re going to be talking our languages, speaking in our languages, we’re going to be the Native people, we’re going to reclaim a lot of our traditions, we’re going to clear out some of the underbrush of stereotypes so our images come through. And it talked a lot about reclamation in a sense and who we were going to be not in relation to anyone else, but as ourselves. And one thing, it was just a marvelous, marvelous thing, and there were all sorts of people there who knocked each other off the charisma meter. Scott Momaday and Vine Deloria and Joy Harjo and it was just an extraordinary group of hundred people, Thomas Banyacya, just amazing, amazing people. And everyone came up with this statement. So that’s how I feel and as the years have gone by there have been so many examples of things that have gone away, things that have been called extinct that are now being revived, which is just, our old people on the Muscogee side say, ‘Never count out anyone, never count out anything because there they will appear again.’ And people all over the place say that about medicine plants that haven’t been seen in a long time and here they are. The teal blue butterfly, which was thought to be extinct for 100 years has reappeared in northern California. And the Pequot language, which, well the Pequots were said to be extinct and then there they were. I know they were there, I was the lead lobbyist on their land claim settlement. And what they have done with their extraordinary wealth through gaming and creating the world’s largest casino, Foxwoods, is they’ve done a lot of good. One of the amazing things they’ve done is to reclaim their language. They know how it sounds. There are lots of Algonquin languages that are spoken today including Cheyenne. No one, everyone thinks we’re from the plains, but we’re not. We’re from up that way. And they, so they know the sound of the language, they know words and there’s vocabulary, a lot of stuff was written down and now they have people speaking it and that’s an amazing thing. Now talk about an act of sovereignty. Here they are doing language reclamation and it really, this is what we in effect envisioned in 1992 when we did our retreat and said, ‘What is it that we want for the next 500 years? We want to be the Native people in the next 500 years and even more so than we are now.’ So this is what’s happening."

Ian Record:

"Well, Suzan, I really appreciate your time. I think a lot of people are going to learn quite a bit from your thoughts and perspectives. We’d like to thank Suzan Harjo for joining on us on this program of Leading Native Nations, a radio series of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."

Honoring Nations: Darrell Hillaire and Sharon Kinley: Semiahmoo Project

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Darrell Hillaire and Sharon Kinley from the Lummi Nation and its Semiahmoo Project discuss the unfortunate circumstances that prompted the creation of the project, and how the Lummi are using the project as an opportunity to re-engage their culture, elders, core values, and language. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Hillaire, Darrell and Sharon Kinley. "Semiahmoo Project." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 10, 2004. Presentation.

Darrell Hillaire:

"We at Lummi, we feel quite honored to be here today. I also have Leonard Dickson here with us today and Greg Amahli, that are here representing Lummi. And it's, this is a place that we think carries a lot of prestige, but that isn't why we're here. We also recognize the agenda and recognize a lot of names of great leaders that are in attendance here, and we get kind of excited here about coming here to share some time with them. But I think, most importantly, we come here because we've established some pretty good friendships over the years. Joe Kalt, and we take his advice in the things that we try to do with our businesses and we're thankful to him for that. Andrew Lee, who's taken the time to come spend some time with us at Lummi and learn about us a little bit more, and it gives the program that we're working on together more meaning, and we thank Andrew for doing that. And of course our elder, Oren Lyons, who's been a friend of previous leadership at Lummi and continues to be our friend today and someone that we look up to with a great deal of respect. And that's the most important reason why we come here, to share some of our ideas with you and ask for help in some of the things that we're doing because we know that as we continue to grow, we're going to be making mistakes, and maybe you've seen something that we haven't seen.

We probably have a lot of things that we can talk about today. You know, we have the infrastructure issues that we work on, our water, our roads that requires partnerships not only within the Lummi government, but also other governments, state and local governments. We probably could talk about our casino and how we've set up the distribution of funds from our casino to the different programs, most importantly, education and to our members. But I think today we're going to talk about using financial and human resources wisely as it relates to a specific incident. That sometimes we talk about as a project and sometimes we talk about it as a program, but really, what it is, it's about the recovery of our ancestors. And what had happened four years ago is that, within our homeland, at a place called Semiahmoo, over 65 of our ancestors were disturbed, and removed, and disrespected, and located in other cities and in other homes. And it was very tragic for us to learn and understand what had happened and we had to respond with a sense of urgency to this crisis. After we got over the hurt, after we got over the anger, there was a lot of work to be done, and that work continues today. And this work is simple when we as a people follow the protocols of the old people, the work becomes simple, but it's hard when we come up against inevitable development, and talk about money and talk about politics and talk about political decisions, you know? And I think we're doing that because I think it goes right to the heart of who we are as people. When you think about it that way, when you think about standing up and fighting for the integrity of your nation and your people, then this work has to be done and those bridges have to be crossed, and we have to learn about that because at the end of the day it defines who you are. So that's why we felt that we needed to talk about Semiahmoo today as a project, but it's much much more than that.

So with that, I'd like to introduce Sharon Kinley. She's the dean for the Coast Salish Institute at Northwest Indian College, which is located on our reservation. She's also my relative, and she's also been with Semiahmoo from the beginning, for four years. We've been through three chairmen since this has occurred, and Sharon and ten other people have been there from the beginning and they're still there. And I sense that they'll be there until the work is completed. So with that, I'd like to introduce Sharon Kinley. Thank you."

Sharon Kinley:

"Good morning. My name is Sharon Kinley, I'm from the Lummi Nation. I am the director of the Coast Salish Institute, which is an institute that our new president, Cheryl Crazy Bull, has introduced to the college for the preservation and the revitalization of the Coast Salish cultures in our area that we serve. Last week -- I've done this presentation hundreds of times, but it never gets easy -- last week, I saw Darrell in the hallway and he said, ‘Gee, I'm going to Harvard to do this presentation and I decided that you should come and share what we've been doing at Semiahmoo because it really fits into the way that they lay out the honoring of nations.' And so I said, ‘Yeah sure, okay. I'll come.' And when I read the agenda on the plane over here and when I listened to you talk this morning, now I know why I'm here.

At Lummi, we have a very long history in Puget Sound, and the Georgia Basin, what is now called the Georgia Basin Watershed. We have for hundreds and hundreds of years, our old people, our [Lummi language] have fished and lived, raised their children, buried their dead, and all the areas that surround the Lummi Nation and all our neighboring tribes. And what we know about all these old villages and these old people is that where they lived, they buried their dead. One of the things that we're particularly interested in at Lummi at the college, is being able to reconstruct and to write about the history of reef netting, which is a technology that exists amongst the Coast Salish people, especially in our area, which extends across the Canadian border, and doesn't exist really, in any other culture in the world.

As many of you know, in 1855, the Lummi Nation, amongst others, entered into a treaty with, what is called the Point Elliott Treaty with the United States. As many of our elders have told us over the years that after those promises were made in the Point Elliott Treaty, the late Pateus used to say to us, '...and then they said,' to us, ‘go this is our land now.' In 1973, when I was a lot younger, the City of Blaine decided to construct a sewer plant -- not a wastewater treatment plant, but a sewer plant. And in that, the rules of development were very different, and 1973 was before a lot of the laws that have been established to protect cultural resources wherever written or certainly, ever followed. In 1997, as a result of the treatment plant, of the sewer plant, being constructed, Western Washington University, in conjunction with the University of Washington, had to come into the area and do what anthropology, what archaeology calls salvage archaeology, which is archaeology that you do ahead of the bulldozer. You're just going in to collect what you can in a very short period of time. And that report, when we read it all these years later, by Dr. Grabert, what we know is that what he collected there, he could determine was at least 3,000 years old. This site -- as it's located on the boundary exactly between the United States and Canada, in Puget Sound -- is probably the most well documented site in all of Puget Sound.

It was only in 1980, after all those years of trying to get their ancestors repatriated without any of the NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] laws, the Lummi were successful in doing that, brought the ancestors that were collected in the salvage archaeology home and reburied them at the Lummi cemetery. There was a lot of talk in the community by the elders at that time, because our belief is that the most important thing to do in these situations is to rebury our dead where they were originally dug up. In this case, the elders in their wisdom decided that we would rebury them at the Lummi cemetery because they just didn't think to rebury them at Semiahmoo would protect them. And they were right.

Probably over the course of this project, I personally and a lot of our staff has learned more about engineering studies, more about the permitting process in Washington State, more about NAGPRA, Section 106, and all the historic preservation laws. And what we know is that consultation with tribes takes place at the end of the permitting process, at least in Washington State. I don't know about Massachusetts, but in Washington State there's a whole phase of development that takes place that's called pre-permitting, where people, if it's your development, have spent a lot of money. They spend a lot of money on engineering studies and all kinds of things, and then they enter into the permitting process. And in that very long, complex permitting process, tribes are at the end, in consultation. By the time the developer and the city council make consultation and contact with the tribe, they'd already made up their mind that they were going to continue this project.

And in August 1999, through a very long story, we arrived out at the treatment plant only to find that what was supposed to be an expansion to the sewer facility actually was an acre excavation site that was 18 to 20 feet deep. And as you see, in the excavation site here, it was solid shell midden from the top to the bottom, which is thousands of years of habitation. It was solid shell midden from the top to the bottom. And we said that day, one of our cultural directors said that day to the people, to the construction people who were working there because they had come across a burial. And he said to them, ‘I'm so glad that I happened to show up today to be here while this burial was being disturbed.' And the guy who was kind of running the machine said to him, kind of offhandedly, ‘Oh well, that's nothing, you should have seen the 26 that we took out yesterday.' And we just froze. And so, it took us a day of people's attorneys calling other people's attorneys, our attorneys calling the sheriff, to get a stop work order in place. And as we were doing that, they continued to dig.

This is just a shot of the excavation site itself, where over 400 truckloads of fill were taken offsite to a local landfill site and deposited there. And this local landfill site, the gray area that you see, is the shell midden that came from this ancient cemetery. This is private property, probably about seven miles away from the treatment facility, and as we arrived there that day and walked that site, there were ancestral remains that were physically on the ground everywhere. And so, at that point in time, we had ourselves, the Lummi Nation, as a jurisdiction, the private property owner, the City of Blaine, the county, the developer, and USDA and Rural Development. We have multi-jurisdictions standing there looking at each other, wondering what they were going to do. And we knew right from the very beginning that we had many obstacles. Certainly externally: permitting processes, jurisdiction, unrelationships. And certainly, in those very first days, how we felt and, for the most part, when I stand here, I can still feel how we felt that day. We couldn't talk. We couldn't even talk to each other. And, internally, amongst ourselves, over many years of being affected by residential school and other federal policies, we did not agree in how to handle it. We did not agree what was the best method, what was the best road to take, in all of our diversity. And we knew we had no money. We didn't have money for cultural resource, or NAGPRA, or repatriation, or any of those things.

After long discussion with the tribal council, with our elders, with many community people, with our youth, the tribal council issued a resolution immediately that year to the city, the county, to the [unintelligible] office. And they said, 'We will recover our ancestors. We will take care of the gravediggers, our own people who are going to go out there and recover our ancestors. We will protect this site from further desecration, and we will make sure that this never happens again to anybody, not just here.' We decided, we made a conscious decision, and not all projects do, but we made a conscious decision that this was going to be a culturally driven project. And we went to the couple that you see here on the right, and we said to them, 'What's the first thing that we should do?' And they sent my daughter to Vancouver Island, in B.C., to a little tiny island off the coast, you have to take two ferries to get there, and we went to this elder that you see on your left, the late Rose James because she, at that time, was the oldest ritualist in this part of the country that has the responsibility for caring for the dead. And we went and got her and we asked her to help us, and she came, and she lived in my house for four years. And she got up every morning and she went with all the young people that we had taught to screen this material, the 400 truckloads of fill. This old woman, over 80 years old, got up every morning, faced the daylight and said prayers for us and our ancestors.

So we used to go out to this site and we used to work until noon, these old people, and after three or four months of my not being a morning person and being tired, doing this work and then going to my job, we would look at her and she just, she never faltered. And we thought, ‘Gee, if she can do this stuff, so can we.' And she used to say to us every single morning, ‘You can do this. You can do this.' And we used to look at 400 truckloads of fill and think, 'How are we ever going to do this?'

This is just a shot of some of the artifacts that we have recovered to date. We have artifacts, we have more artifacts in our possession presently than the university. We have artifacts in our collection that the archeologists in our area have never seen. The other thing that we knew that we had to do was, because this is a culturally driven project, we decided that the people that were going to do the work, was us. We were going to do the work. And after that, we went to the university and asked Dr. Campbell, who is the lead archeologist there, to send us two of her best graduate students. They had to be technically sound in archaeology, they had to have real good writing skills so that we could work out all this, all this permitting process, all the reporting that we had to do to the state because remember, Semiahmoo was not, was no longer our property. It belonged to the city and the county. And so in order to even work there we had to apply for a permit to the state to collect ancestral remains. And we told her, 'Send us your best graduate students and they're of no use to us unless they can teach. Unless they can teach us, they're no good to us.' And so we had 20 young Lummis and our elders, and these graduate students came and Dr. Campbell, and we started. And our elder used to say, ' You just get up every morning and you put one foot in front of the other.' And every morning she got up. She was over 80 when she first came. So I thought, I even thought we could do this.

The other thing that we did after a couple of years of screening material, and we are probably, in four years, we are probably not halfway done. In four years. And the other thing that we did is we decided that we had to look at this whole permitting process, we had to engage it, we had to become the most knowledgeable at it, we had to be able to interact with the county, the state, and all the other jurisdictions, and all our other neighboring tribes in a very different way than what we were used to. We created our own [unintelligible] office, we created a contract service office, which is archaeologists and our tribal people and we said to all the largest development people in the area, 'When you are going to develop within our Aboriginal territory, you come and ask us to do the survey and site work. You come and ask us first.' And we also have set up in, recently, the Repatriation Office, which is not just to respond to NAGPRA, but it's to respond to all the inadvertent discoveries that happened all the time in our territory. Last week, we handled five inadvertent discoveries in three separate counties, all affected by human remains, all cemetery or burial ground disturbances. And we developed Title 40, a code of law that we developed within the Lummi Nation that not only helps people who have been working in the surrounding counties and jurisdictions know how to work with us in these situations, but it also helped our own planning department. It helped us interact with our own land use plan, so that we could know when we were putting in a road, where not to build it.

We decided too, that -- I don't know how well you know us, because I don't travel a lot -- but we, we know how to be Lummi aggressive. What we decided was that we had to learn more about being proactive and assertive in a very different way. We realized that we had to build relationships and so we set out to do it very deliberately. We met, and we worked with the Watcomb County planning office, with the Watcomb County Council. We meet regularly and work closely with the State [unintelligible] Office. We work with San Juan County, Skagit County agencies, private industry in our local area. We also learned real quickly that we had to develop relationships with the media. We had to meet with editorial boards. We had to educate them about who we are. At Northwest Indian College, when we set out to expand our college and to build new buildings, we went out and hired a firm who went out and interviewed the county. And she came back and she met with the president and the faculty and she said, ‘Nobody knows who you are. Nobody even knows you're here.' And so, very deliberately, we then felt that we had to educate not only ourselves internally and be able to work together, but the surrounding our neighbors, and our neighbors' children.

The other thing that the tribal council did a lot anyway, but did a lot for us, was begin to work on very deliberate relationship building and agreements with all of the agencies that are doing and are affecting development in our area. USDA and rural development, we're the funders of this treatment plant. In the beginning, they had already put a couple of million dollars into this project when we said, ‘Stop.' We've also very deliberately over...yesterday, my husband met and worked on an inadvertent discovery with the Nooksack Nation in a burial disturbance that took place right on what we call the traditional boundary of both of our reserves, and so we work a lot with the neighboring tribes, both in our area, and in British Columbia.

We have learned about how to align our resources, how to use education as a tool to educate our people in archeological methods, hopefully to get them to think about going on to four-year universities, at least get them into Northwest Indian College, where we can give them basic skills and a really good two-year degree. And we have learned, I have personally learned more about the legislative process than I ever thought I would have to know. We knew every senator, every chief of staff, every secretary, we knew everybody. And we knew when to call them. We also knew that it costs a lot of money, and in the beginning we didn't have any, and so the tribal council made a very, a very difficult decision. It put $200,000 into this project in the very beginning. It was a very difficult decision, internally because one of our core values is to protect the graves of our ancestors, but we also need money for youth treatment and intervention, for the education of our children, for health care, and they were very difficult decisions that the tribal council had to make.

The last thing that we're going to show you that we worked on is...one of the things that we've done at Northwest Indian College, well two of the things that we're doing, is that we are utilizing the technology of GIS mapping, where we are actually teaching our young children the technology of GIS mapping. And I can't even articulate it to you because I don't understand it. And all of my kids are computer literate, but we are teaching them to actually map in the cultural resources. We've had long conversations internally about this, because the elders are very uncomfortable with it. And at this point, we're actually doing the work, but we haven't made those decisions about who we share it with other than ourselves. The other thing that we did was that we set up a whole program at the college where we would train our young people how to collect and learn their own history. And to collect the oral histories, to record the language because our elder, the late Rose, said to us the very first day that she came, 'Language is the most important thing. You have to turn to your culture for the answers.' And that's what we did. You have to turn to your culture for the strength, and that's what we did. And so we took all of these young people and we trained them in the technology of oral history, in video production...this is actually, looks like a laptop, it's actually a very expensive editing machine. And they go out and they interview the elders, they create biographical sketches that we then are turning into material for our curriculum that we are writing, on history, and at the same time, they are building relationships with their own grandparents, the people that they go and interview."

Darrell Hillaire:

"And where we go from here, well, we just settled with the archaeologist Gold and Associates. We had to take them to court via a class action suit, which meant we had to bring together the people to sign on to...would be very complicated for them to understand in legal terms, but they did it. And, as a result of that settlement, we were able to realize about $4.2 million that's going to help us continue the work. And this compensation that we receive for the people is not payment, but it's a thank you for having them standing with us; for those who are leaders in a traditional way and also for those such as myself who represent the government. We all stood together, and it's important for us to note that, if we stay true to ourselves these things can happen. And as the judge said, he said, ‘The court has never lost track of the fact that the money is the most inconsequential aspect of what we're dealing with here. This was a tragic event. It was something that never should have happened. The court recognized the fabulous job that the Lummi and its attorneys played to get recognition and acknowledgment to provide a solution to the tragedy.' He stated he believed that he hoped this work would 'prevent anything like this from happening in the future, for all tribes, not just in western Washington, but throughout the country, and even into Canada, where this case has resonated.' He commented that he hopes the Lummi feel that the American system of justice, which has let them down so many times in the past, didn't let them down this time. He stated that this result made him feel very, very good.

And I think as we went through this, I really can't even describe it as a process, but we had to have our time with a number of people, not only Gold and Associates, but the City of Blaine, the Department of Agriculture, the state historic preservation office -- all these people we had our time with -- and at the end of that time I think we had some things resolved and we came away with some friendship. And today, with the City of Blaine, their city manager, whom we fought hard with four years ago, today he was an auctioneer at an event we had for raising money for the Freedom and Liberty Bowl. He auctioned off some of our arts and crafts to the people. So that's how far we've come in this relationship, and we need to continue that. But today, you know, as Sharon said, we need to get involved with the permitting process. But I think, more importantly, we need to get involved with the planning process. And share our vision for our homeland. At Lummi, we've been invited by the City of Bellingham to join in the planning for the development of 139 acres right on the waterfront in Bellingham. To them, they'd like to see a replica of a traditional longhouse built right on that waterfront, and to us, that represents where my great grandfather lived. So some of these things can happen, but it means we have to get involved in the front end, so that's where we have to go from here. So, [Lummi language]."

Honoring Nations: Gabriel Lopez and Shannon Martin: Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Gabriel Lopez and Shannon Martin field questions from the audience about their nations' Honoring Nations award-winning programs.

Resource Type
Citation

Lopez, Gabriel. "Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

Martin, Shannon. "Government-to-Government Relations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

Joseph P. Kalt:

"Vice chairman Lopez, I'd like to ask you a question. We of course talked a minute and heard your stories. Does anyone not get along with you anymore? It seems like you're able to strike MOUs [Memoranda of Understanding] with the city, with the private developers. Where are you still having trouble, where are your current battle lines drawn?"

Gabriel Lopez:

"I think it's educating. We have a lot of non-Natives that move into the area. We had, in Arizona we had our dove season. Many times what happens is we have new people that come into the area, don't know where the reservation starts. We posted signs, tribal, state, federal laws, trespassing signs. I can go back out, I usually ride, I'm an avid horseback rider and I ride out there after the season's over and I'll find cuts. People will come in, ATVs will go into washes, will come in and try to ride all over. And we try to discuss that with the city and let them know [because] they have their own city website to voice our concerns. And by a joint venture we're starting to work on that now. But also with other developers that are coming into the area and trying to educate them and having them come to the -- as a consultation with the community -- to voice our concerns and what we want. And like I said, we really don't want to hamper growth, we know it's coming and we have to handle it, we have to deal with it. But bring us to the table so we can voice our concerns. I think maybe that's what -- and I think that's what's working. But there's still a lot to be done.

For instance, Roman and I were over at federal EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] when the presentation was done back in Arizona, we were still on the battlegrounds fighting with the EPA there. It's an ongoing process, and we just need to stay up on top of that. And as tribal leaders, because when there's only a five-member council, we can't possibly get to all of them, so a lot of times we kind of rely on our staff. We'll hear about it and that's how the task force came out."

Audience member:

[inaudible]

Duane Champagne:

"Oh, back there."

Charlie O'Hara:

"...remarks about, particularly about the EPA and I think the EPA has this stovepipe kind of funding by media, which is totally inappropriate for tribes. For, I don't know how many, 15 years we've been capacity building under GAP [General Assistance Program], but there's no mechanisms for implementation. It's a really outdated system and it has to be changed."

Duane Champagne:

"There's a question in the back."

Audience member:

"I do have a question but I do have a comment as well. You want to talk about how to take over and utilize your natural liberty to enforce your -- a watershed council is a good example of retaking responsibility for your environment and just doing what you need to do. It's a great example. I'm glad that Pat's here.

My question though is for Shannon. How did -- what was the strategy or the argument when people would come to you from the educated side, academia, and maybe try to pressure you that you didn't know what you were doing because you didn't have the letters behind your name?"

Shannon Martin:

"Well, we continue to nurture, first and foremost, those professionals that do have the letters behind their name and keeping those as close to us as we can through consultative relationships. Our curator William Johnson and I, again we were subjected to some serious scrutiny during, throughout the whole course of this process. And that, because we didn't have the scholarship behind us -- as far as best practice in anthropology, archaeology, 'any-ology' -- our concerns and our process in working through those ideas and those methods with our tribal community council and elders, they were at various points dismissed by city officials, by the Genesee County Land Bank, [because] we continued to advise them throughout this process as to what they needed to do to mitigate. We even provided legwork in giving them two bids for archaeological consulting crews -- to come in and take care of the damage -- with the tribe overseeing and monitoring. But again all of that, of course, was dismissed because of lack of funding from the City of Flint and from the Genesee County Land Bank.

The unfortunate situation with HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] -- who has been a friend to tribes across this country in providing adequate funding -- is that HUD was slippery in this situation. They were at the negotiating tables within the first couple of meetings of this disturbance, but then soon realized that once the tribal council had imposed a cease-and-desist order -- that was going to be adhered to by the city officials and the Genesee County Land Bank, the landowners -- HUD pulled out of the project. They slipped out of it on a technicality, stating that the funding that was earmarked for this project, which was essentially the pouring of the basements, the cement basements, because that part of the agreement had not been reached, they then pulled their funding from the project. So in doing so there were these, City of Flint and Genesee County Land Bank didn't have to comply with historic preservation laws. So the court -- the tribe had no recourse to count on national NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] for their support, but more importantly, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation [ACHP] -- the Section 106 Law, which would directly implicate this process -- and HUD would have to provide funding to mitigate.

So the onus of all this coordination fell squarely upon the shoulders of the tribe. And an unfortunate situation is resulting in an unfortunate precedent-setting event. Because in doing so, and us addressing and putting together this proposal based on all of these individuals' tribal and archaeology consultants, and then the tribe bearing the responsibility to provide the funding for the mitigation, that precedence has been set in which -- we weighed that heavily throughout the process because we knew that on one scale was this precedence. On the other end of the scale was making sure we were respecting and doing what was culturally appropriate to take care of these ancestors at our cost. So now there are going to be some scholarly articles written on this, because the situation was just layered in complexity.

And we're fearful now, really, as a tribe that they're going to be private landholders. And if there is a federal undertaking that they're going to pull out of the project if there's an overt discovery. And who are they going to turn to be responsible to mitigate and to come up with a proposal to recover and rebury? The local tribe. And if that tribe doesn't have the resources that -- the Saginaw Chippewa fortunately has the resources to do this work -- that local tribe is going to have to possibly stand by and watch it just get bulldozed back in, without any respect or due process for the ancestral remains."

Josh Weston:

"Good afternoon everybody. My name's Josh Weston. I'm the chairman or the president for Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe who we started out the session with. I had one general comment to make and then I've got a question for the cultural portion of it.

I just wanted to add a little bit about the educating the public, the being able and willing to work with your local governments both tribal and city, state and federal has been and is continuing, I'm sure for most tribes, an uphill battle. And as far as I'm concerned we continue to try to address some of those problems and work through our differences of opinion. We're kind of at a head road with our project. Our chief is leaving us; he's the only one of two, well, three now. One of our members finally made it onto the tribal police department and he's leaving to better himself. So it's going to be an interesting discussion on how we continue forward. And we hope that both communities can come to some agreement on how we can make that transition, one way or another.

The second part of the comment or the question I wanted to ask was, in our area we have a tribe to the south of us that is having, has had problems with non-members into burial sites and taking artifacts and removing of the remains and that sort, in that area. And part of the problem is that they can't do anything about it. They can't hold when they report. It's kind of in an area where there's a [Army] Corps of Engineers and there's that no man's jurisdiction -- the tribe doesn't have jurisdiction, the state really doesn't have any jurisdiction, the U.S. attorneys don't want to prosecute it because nobody's gotten hurt to a certain extent. So they kind of fall into that huge void of, 'Yeah, we have to protect these people without hurting them and letting them take our remains away from those sites,' and then trying to go after them afterwards for bringing them home. So I was just wondering, had you had any experience with any type of that jurisdictional problem when it comes to -- do you have any -- was there any federal land in there where you kind of had some of these problems? And maybe if you could talk about that a little bit."

Shannon Martin:

"Not in relationship to burial site desecration on federal or state land, but we are currently addressing a sacred site that is state land. Because like many other states in the union, Michigan is [experiencing a] lack of resources and capital to maintain certain state parks. And there is a state park that is managed by three agencies, that's the Department of History, Arts and Libraries, the Michigan Museum Association and the Department of Natural Resources. The sacred site is the Sanilac Petroglyphs and it falls within the historic territory of the tribe. We have been carefully and diligently monitoring the site because it has fallen into neglect. Individuals are making their way into this petroglyph site that at one time contained over 300 distinct teachings or cultural etchings in our language, we call it [Anishinaabe language], which is 'teachings on stone.' These petroglyph carvings have been altered, they've been literally bore out of the sandstone site, out of the rock itself, and have been taken away. And we've been beginning to more urgently address this issue and insert ourselves, to call these agencies together and meet with us in tribal council, to place on the table, a management plan and/or a plan for them to turn this 274 acres, that contains the site, over to the tribe if need be. So we've been trying to compel them to, 'Let us manage it, let us take care of it. We have the resources -- and/or sell it to us at a fair price. Let's buy it and take care of it.' So that's one issue that we're currently working on because the site is so significant to the cultural and collective history of the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region. And the tribe is taking -- through our work at the Ziibiwing Center -- these proactive measures to begin calling together these different agencies and really trying to compel them to turn the management over.

And we're beginning to, we are going to work with Dr. Sonya Atalay, an Ojibway archaeologist out of Indiana University through a program, a project, a grant project called IPINCH, which is the Intellectual Property Issues and Cultural Heritage project, and it's an international multi-disciplinary grant that is being administered through Simon Frasier University in British Columbia. And our project specifically addresses the long-term plan and management of the Sanilac Petroglyphs, so that we can protect it and we can monitor it so that it doesn't fall under disrespect, vandalism and neglect. But as far as desecration of burial sites, that's something we haven't encountered on federal or state land, just private land."

Duane Champagne:

"Do we have any more comments? Here. Oren, in front here."

Oren Lyons:

"I want to make a comment on your opening statement about the wampum and protocol and governance. Rick Hill, from Tuscarora, has been doing a research project and is now into three volumes of transactions using wampum, the first 400 years here. And just to add some information to you that First Continental Congress, John Hancock, one of his first duties was to make a wampum belt. And that was the belt that he used for peace and neutrality. As they were getting ready to fight one another, we being the Six Nation Iroquois said, 'Well, look, we know your father and we know you.' And, 'Look at this as a fight, the father and son.' And, 'We don't think it's appropriate for us to be in on one side or the other.' And they said, 'Thank you, because that was going to be our second request. If you don't fight with us, don't fight against us.' And so that belt was made by John Hancock, as one of his first duties as president of the Continental Congress. And later George Washington also made a belt, 1794 Canandaigua Treaty, called the George Washington Covenant, is about a six-foot wampum belt with the thirteen colonies; and also...from our position, peasant from his position. And I just want to add that on because, just, if you think about it, here we are -- 1794, well into the new United States -- and they are still using wampum as protocol."

Duane Champagne:

"Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Shannon Martin: Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways Director Shannon Martin presents a history of the Ziibiwing Center and discusses the work it has been engaged in since it won an Honoring Nations award in 2006.

Resource Type
Citation

Martin, Shannon. "Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"[Anishinaabe language]. I'd like to acknowledge, first and foremost, this land and the tribes that reside here and the ancestors of those tribes as we gather here and we bring all of our hopes and our blood memories and our ancestral peoples here to this symposium -- this wonderful opportunity that was provided to us by the Honoring Nations and Harvard Project staff.

So with that, my name is Shannon Martin and I'm the current Director of the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways. We are a tribally owned and operated cultural center and museum that belongs to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. Our project started through a grassroots initiative that was based upon addressing the newly enacted Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA]. And through that grassroots effort, a small cultural society was formed by those originating members. That cultural society was termed the Ziibiwing Cultural Society. Ziibiwing in our language means 'by or near the water.' And it was named to represent a historical gathering place of the Saginaw Chippewa of the region, there in central Michigan.

But through that work, the Ziibiwing Cultural Society began to identify repositories of tribal proceedings and treaties and other historical documents that were languishing in the basements and attics of former tribal council members and chiefs and leaders. So congruently, the work to address the stacks of inventories and of information of, items of cultural patrimony; those summaries were stacking up in the tribal government offices. The Ziibiwing Cultural Society began to address those inventories and [came] up with a plan to begin working towards bringing home ancestors through repatriation and disposition, and then also distinguishing that place to be the repository for the tribal archives and the tribal collections and treasures.

So from that humble grassroots beginning, the Ziibiwing Cultural Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways emerged and we opened our doors in May of 2004. So we have a short term of being a tribal museum. And we learned from some other established tribal museums and acknowledging their work and their reciprocity in sharing their information with us. In doing this work, Honoring Nations again provided us with those opportunities to create tools so that we can in turn be reciprocal and redistribute the information that we've acquired and best practice and what we've learned. So in that way, [Anishinaabe Language], the Harvard Project and Honoring Nations, for the privilege of being here today. In this presentation, I would like to focus on the work that we have been doing post-honors award.

At this exact moment, there's members of the Ziibiwing Center team who are mitigating the desecration of an ancestral burial ground in downtown Flint, Michigan. This sacred site was disturbed by construction activity in January of 2008. So this unfortunate situation has been complex at every turn -- from January 2008 when the [inadvertent] discovery took place -- we have come to find out. Through a series of meetings with the landholders -- who are a non-profit organization, an urban rehabilitation housing organization called the Genesee County Land Bank. We've been present at these meetings since that discovery with their representatives as well as the City of Flint -- because they were working in concert with the City of Flint. So we're sitting through a series of meetings, from January 2008 until this past spring, trying to come up with a mitigation plan and a resolution to the situation.

So in working through those complexities, our team discovered that there was negligence at many levels -- negligence that was taking place from the first assessment of the site, in which -- historic preservation letters are supposed to be sent to all of the federally recognized and state historic tribes in Michigan. These letters never made it to our offices. So there was some negligence going on between the federal agency, who is HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development]. They were providing some funding towards this rehabilitation project. They designated the City of Flint to be the federal designee and to do the work and be the contact. So between the City of Flint and the Genesee County Land Bank, fingers were being pointed at each other as to the mystery of where these historic preservation letters somehow vanished to. So with that, we came in at that point when the damage had already been done. And then the following consequences of that were that essentially, the Genesee Count Land Bank and the City of Flint expressed that they do not have, did not have the funding to mitigate the situation.

So these talks have been continuing since then and finally, this summer we have come to a proposal and a resolution. But the tribal council from the Saginaw Chippewa tribe has been actively involved in this situation since the get go. They supported the Ziibiwing Center team in letting us go down there to assess the situation when it first happened. And in an unprecedented event in their tribal history, the tribal council issued a cease-and-desist order that they presented to the Genesee County Land Bank in the City of Flint and which -- they honored that cease-and-desist order even though the tribe had no jurisdiction there. It was within the tribal historic territory but, with no jurisdiction, they still honored that cease-and-desist order to stop all construction activity at that site as we were having these talks, meetings and negotiations to mitigate the situation.

So on June 2, 2009, the Genesee County Land Bank and the tribe agreed to a mitigation proposal. That proposal essentially stated that the tribe would assume responsibility of coordinating this recovery and reburial effort, including incurring the cost to do this. So it was, the tribe was at these discussions, these negotiation tables, and the Genesee County Land Bank just wanted to bulldoze all of the dirt piles back into the ground and cover it up and reseed it. But through our assessment we just couldn't let that happen. Our team met with tribal attorneys, we met with the tribal council, we sought advisement from tribal elders. Because of the state of the situation, splintered ancestral remains and fragments were scattered throughout all of this dirt that was pulled from the earth. So mixed in with that, with our ancestors, was modern day garbage, trash, broken glass, old housing debris from the original structures that they raised and just an assortment of, what we've coined at the site as, 'Euro-trash.' So in doing that we didn't want to, we couldn't allow them to push the earth back in. So in that instance, we jumped into action and began to outline that proposal to mitigate the situation and tribal council voted on June 2 to advance that mitigation proposal. The Genesee County Land Bank and the City of Flint agreed to the proposal and we began to put into place, through a short time frame, a window of opportunity, the Ziibiwing Center was tasked, by the tribal council, to coordinate this effort.

So we began the recovery process on August 13. And through that recovery effort we are doing it at a low cost as possible; it's powered by volunteers, who are coming to the site daily to assist us. And then we have consultants on site; so we do have a credentialed archaeologist who's working with us on site to monitor the work and to provide the basic archaeological skill sets to begin sifting, for volunteers to sift, through the dirt. So we're looking at over 76,000 cubic feet of dirt that was pulled from the earth in four dugout basement sites; so it spans a city block. But there are four sites that we need to address. Splintered ancestral remains were, we have assessed that they're in every dirt pile, so we have to carefully sift through those piles and respectfully separate those ancestors from the rest of the unassociated debris. So the monitoring by the archaeologists and by field supervisors -- these individuals have stepped forward to provide that necessary expertise to us. They've been working in concert with us since this discovery and they are foregoing some of their own family and personal and professional obligations to help us and being at that site about six days a week that we are currently operating this recovery effort.

So in doing our work at the Ziibiwing Center, it can best be summed up by this quote. It's a quote from over 100 years ago that really resonates with our team. And this was penned by a journalist who was in Chicago by the name of Finley Peter Dunn when describing the purpose of newspapers. He said, 'In that work we must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' And at Ziibiwing we love to afflict the comfortable. The Flint ancestral recovery effort is doing just that. We are shaking the hallowed halls of various academies throughout Michigan, and I'm sure throughout the Great Lakes region, because this effort is beginning to attract statewide and national attention.

So in that, we are kind of being a lightning rod for unsolicited criticism and paternalistic overtures of assistance from professionals in the field -- archaeologists who would just love to come in and provide the necessary monitoring consultations with the end result that they get to take the goods home, the goods back to their university. So we're not letting that happen. Then the criticism comes and they're telling their colleagues in the 'Academy' that they should just bulldoze it back in. So that's their recommendation, since they can't be there to do the work the way that we want the work to be done. Now they're saying, on the flip side, that it should just be bulldozed back in with all the associated debris and contents. So in that work we're dealing with the criticisms and trying to shield as well the archaeologists and the graduate students who are working with us. One of the graduate students in a Saginaw Chippewa tribal member and he's at Michigan State University -- and his wife Nicole is also a graduate student there, too -- and they're our primary field supervisors. But they are catching a lot of flack, as well as the archaeologists; there's three archaeologists working with us. The Academy is criticizing their work; they're rogues. All sorts of attachments have been given to them and now they're seemingly being outcast within their own profession. And some of their colleagues have even called them up and said, 'Being a part of this project and working with the Saginaw Chippewa you are essentially ruining your professional reputation.' So we're working through those issues as well.

The Genesee County Land Bank, upon this mitigation proposal when we've completed what we need to do there, they would like to donate this land to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. So once we've recovered the ancestors -- reburied them and restored the land to meet our needs or to suit our protocols -- the tribe can then oversee and manage the land and take title of it so that that area can never be disturbed again.

And finally, the project is contributing to the tribal community in accomplishing cultural capacity and kinship building. Tribal members are being drawn to the site and are assisting daily. Many of whom expressed that they felt a need to be there, they just had to be there, they said. All ages of tribal members are working with us on this project. And this is the first time that many of them have expressed that they have wanted to be actively engaged within their own community, their own tribal community. One grandma who travels with us -- our staff -- almost daily, she said that she never really felt like she fit in her tribal community until this project. She works in the elements and in the hot sun with us carefully sifting and finding and recovering our ancestors.

I also have to acknowledge clients. We have -- the Ziibiwing Center has a strong relationship with the residential treatment center and the behavior health program. We've developed some curriculum based on the permanent exhibition within the center and we work with those clients once a week. Well, now that work has taken new life through this project. In that, the residential treatment center clients travel down to the Flint site about twice a week to assist in this effort. And they have said that working there, taking care of the ancestors, doing the physical labor, practicing spiritual protocols at the site has strengthened their road to recovery and has provided them with more spiritual connection to one another and to their own heritage.

So with that, that's the most pressing work, at this point, that the Ziibiwing Center has been doing since our honors award. I'd like to also mention some other defining moments in our work that includes the successful transfer, which will be taking place of culturally identifiable human remains. That claim was jointly done in May, this past May, with Central Michigan University in Portland, Oregon. So we are going to be bringing home 144 minimum number of individuals and 350 associated funerary objects that will be reburied on tribal land in the ancestral cemetery. We were also awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services, Native American Native Hawaiian Museum Services grant for fiscal year 2010 to develop our disaster and emergency preparedness plan so that we have those systems in place to protect the tribal treasures and to protect our human resources and visitor-ship. And then just a few days ago we were notified that we were awarded an award through the Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums for Institutional Excellence in Museums, which we'll pick that award up next month.

Other work that we're doing on a local level, working again with behavioral health, is that we're going to begin looking at developing curriculum that addresses domestic violence as well as Two Spirit history and identity. Many clients have expressed that their addictions and their struggle in their lifetime is due to identity issues. So we're going to help provide the context for that history and provide curriculum to behavioral health in that effort and we'll start instilling that history and that pride back into the community because of the imposition of, as we know, the colonizer and our views on that today.

I'd like to close by saying Miigwetch, first and foremost, to an old friend who's on staff, Misko Beaudrie. She was able to connect Audrey and I yesterday afternoon to members of staff at the Peabody Museum. And Sandra's here. Audrey and I met with Sandra and Diana this morning to begin talks of repatriation for nine ancestors that are currently housed here at the Peabody and their associated funerary objects so we're going to be putting together that road map and put that in place. We'd like to acknowledge the Peabody staff for making time for us this morning, so that we can begin those relationships here at Harvard and bring home our ancestors from this area that were taken.

So as we work together to repatriate those ancestors, our work still continues on being a place that comforts the afflicted in addressing multi-generational historical trauma, through exercising our cultural and spiritual sovereignty. And our work will also continue in afflicting the comfortable. So presenting our history, presenting our culture, protecting our intellectual and cultural property and infusing it all with our spiritual life ways,  again on our terms -- just seems to really afflict those who like to rewrite our history and tell us how we should be.

So Miigwetch to Honoring Nations for this recognition and this privilege for being here and to spend time with all of you these past few days. Audrey and I have just been commenting and talking about all the inspiring things that we've learned while we've been here. If you can, we have a few copies of this product, which was a direct result of our Honoring Nations award. We were able to publish and distribute a four-year report. In the words of the Video Professor, try my product."