sovereignty

Honoring Nations: John McCoy: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Now-former Quil Ceda Village Director John McCoy talks about how and why the Tulalip Tribes established Quil Ceda Village, and also reflects on his tenure serving in the State of Washington Legislature.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

McCoy, John. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"Good afternoon. So you're all ready? I'm the last speaker. You can't wait to get out the door, right? I can't disagree with anything that was said today. It was all very important, to the point, and very informational. A lot of these conversations have triggered some more thoughts for me, and as some of my friends here say, 'That's dangerous,' because then I go off and do something. But anyway, you gave me a tough assignment; Harvard gave me a tough assignment. They want me to talk about Quil Ceda Village, which I can talk eight hours on. And then they want me to talk about my life in the state legislature, which is another eight hours. And you want me to condense it in 15 minutes. So, I will do the best I can to get all this done in 15 minutes.

First of all, we created Quil Ceda Village in 2001, but the seed of the village was planted in the summer of '94. What happened, I was recruited by my tribe, my own tribe, to come back home to be the business manager, do economic development. So I came back and the attorney that we have now was actually hired before me -- but he didn't get to work until a month after I started -- and that's Mike Taylor and a number of you know Mike. So I know my mission and I get Mike's office set up and all that jazz. And then that summer, I went to Mike and I said, ‘Mike, we -- you and I -- are charged with economic development. You the legal side, me figuring out what we're going to do. How are we going to get at the taxes?' And those of you who know Mike, you know that little smirk he gets across his face, ‘Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Here you are, John McCoy, we've been fighting this issue for 500 years, and you think you're going to solve it.' I said, ‘Well, Mike, I just had to ask the question.' And so we talked about it for a couple hours and then I had to go off and do some work. And then later in the summer I came back and I said, ‘Mike, what are we going to do about the taxes, I want to talk about this some more.' And he said, ‘I've already done something.' Mike at the time was a professor at the UW [University of Washington] Law School, and he made it a class project. How can Indians get at the taxes? And he told the class to go all the way back to the very first case and follow it all the way up to present time. So law school's three years, right? We're patient, right? We're all patient. So I patiently waited. And then Mike came in and he says, ‘Okay, we got it done, got the report here.' And I said, ‘I don't want to read it because I know it's all in legalize. I wouldn't understand it, so give me the thumbnail.' And he said, ‘Geez.' And I said, ‘Yeah, just give me the thumbnail.' And it's quite simple, 'cause most of you practice it already. All it is, to get at the taxes: one, it's got to be on trust land; two, you need to use your own money to put in the infrastructure; and three, it's got to be managed by an Indian. That simple. It is that simple. It's getting there that's not so simple, because then you have to have the resources to put in the infrastructure -- water pipes, sewer pipes, roads, street lights, traffic lights, law enforcement, court system -- you have to build all those. And there have been conversations around this all day long.

And so we embarked, and one of the, we started that project and then Mike came to me and he said, ‘Okay, now that we've kicked economic development off, now it's time to retrocede.' And I said, ‘Retrocede?' So he had to explain [Public Law] 280 to me. I said, ‘Oh. So now I've got to go down to Olympia to convince all those yahoos about Indian law and why they've got to retrocede.' And we did it. It took us two years, but we did it. We moved on. Our biggest problem was the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. They didn't want to have to sign off on it, because they didn't want to have to fund it. They were quite open. ‘If we sign this, then we've got to fund it.' And we said, ‘No, we're going to fund it ourselves. We told you that and we put it in writing.' But they said, ‘But you could come back to us and demand that we fund it.' We said, ‘Well, that isn't our intent.' Well, anyway, they finally signed off on it. So we got the retrocession. We start creating our police department and it's in place now. It's got 29 officers. This week we're installing our own E911 system. As you heard, the court system is up and running and doing quite well. We're getting a lot of folks coming in. We've had people from Afghanistan come in to look at our court system, from Iraq and a few other countries, just to come in and look at our court system. So it's doing quite well.

To finish off the Quil Ceda Village story, we had the BIA saying, ‘Nah.' Excuse me -- I need to back up a little more. We created the paperwork to create a federal city -- and as you know, back then there was only one in existence and that was Washington, D.C. Navajo has a city, but it was chartered for a totally different reason. So the Navajo were the first one to incorporate a city within their, under their tribe. It's their political subdivision. We went the extra step and we had to get BIA approval, well, [U.S. Department of the] Interior and IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and the Justice Department to get them to sign off. Well, we got Justice and IRS to sign off but the BIA just wouldn't do it. God, we argued with them, we fought with them, made many trips back. They just didn't want to do it. So Mike -- he's a great attorney -- he started looking at the structure of the BIA and what, primarily what was delegated down to the area and the regional offices. Guess what? Signing off on the city was delegated all the way down to Puget Sound Agency and she signed it. Not too long after that, that authority was revoked [and] sent all the way back up to central office. So I'm sorry, folks, you'll have the longer row to hoe.

So I set about putting in our infrastructure and the first thing I had to worry about was sewer systems. Well, I was negotiating with the City of Marysville and that was painful. That was really painful [because] that council -- they had five members -- four out of the five were purely anti-Indian. It was obvious. So I tried negotiating with them, negotiating, negotiating and I said, ‘Well, what would it take?' And their lead negotiator said, ‘Okay, you have to pay for 75 percent of the upgrades and we won't guarantee capacity.' 'Then why would I want to do that? I might as well build my own plant!' So that's what we did. We went and built our own state-of-the-art plant. I'm serious. It's state-of-the-art. This is membrane technology. The UW, University of Washington and Western Washington University, just issued draft reports we commissioned, but the output of our plant exceeds federal drinking water standards. That means you can drink it, but you can't get over the thought where it came from. So what we're doing, we're injecting it into the ground. We're irrigating with it and now, because of these reports, once we make them final and we get them filed with EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], we'll be able to discharge directly into wetlands and streams and rivers because we do no harm.

The reports show that this technology takes out all pharmaceuticals, including disruptors -- disruptors are birth control pills. Now a lot of folks say, ‘Well, tell everybody to quit throwing away their pharmaceuticals down the sewer.' That isn't the problem. Everybody has to pee. Pharmaceuticals do not break down in the human body. They just pass through. So we have to get it cleaned up. Because of this technology and what we've been able to do there at Tulalip, the City of Seattle changed their major bright water project over to that technology. We have cities in and around us that are changing over to that technology -- Jamestown S'Klallam, Ron Allen -- they're going to that technology and it's starting to pop up all over the U.S. We need to have more of it. We need to get technologies that we can put into individual septic tanks so that can get cleaned up so we're not putting it into the streams and rivers along with nitrates and a number of other things. That's an all-day subject by itself, if you want to know. And I've got five minutes to talk about my legislative life. Quil Ceda is doing great. We did all the work ourselves, paid it all. And those contractors that would not agree to our TERO [Tribal Employments Rights Office], we kicked them off the res. So you can do that. If they don't want to do TERO, tell them to take a hike. Then you go to the next lowest bidder. You get to write the rules, just follow the rules once you've written them.

So, my life in the state legislature. Everybody asks, ‘What's your toughest job?' My toughest job is serving two sovereigns and if, at the end of the day, if I did no harm to either, I've had a great day. I've had a great day. Now, the politics of the res and the politics down in Olympia -- my tribal elected and my fellow citizens, they ask me, ‘How is it down in Olympia?' I say, ‘Hell, I go down there to rest and kick back and relax.' They say, ‘What?' I said, ‘The worst politics is here at home. That's family politics. That gets nasty. And everybody remembers what your great grandmother did to so-and-so's great grandmother and it won't go away. But down in Olympia, who I'm arguing with right now, five minutes later he probably needs my vote on another issue. So he don't want to piss me off and I don't want to piss him off, or her.'

Going down there -- we have three Native Americans in the Washington State Legislature: myself, Senator Claudia Coffman -- a lot of you know, Nez Perce -- and the other one is Jeff Morris, he's an Alaskan. We had a fourth, but he lost his election last time. He uttered the hateful words, ‘I believe in personal income tax,' and it killed him. I've been successful. People like to label me the representative from Indian Country. I think I've proven [to] them that I represent all the citizens within my district. Within my district, Native Americans, the voting population is less than one percent, so I've got a whole lot of non-Indians to convince I'm the right guy for the job and I've been able to do that. I'm in the fourth term, my seventh year. Hopefully next cycle I will be unopposed so I can do something else.

I've been successful in getting a number of pieces of legislation passed -- tribal law enforcement, tribal history and culture, language, achievement gap study -- and now there's an implementation plan being developed and built on that. One of my peers last session, she sent me an email and said, ‘Look up bill so-and-so and tell me what's wrong with it.' So I pulled it up and looked at it and I said, ‘You're right, it sucks.' And she said, ‘Well, what's wrong with it?' And I said, ‘One sovereign is trying to tell another sovereign what to do and you can't do that. You can negotiate, but you can't tell them what to do.' And this was over fire district and what services were going to be provided and at how much. And what they wanted to put in the bill was the formula that the tribe was going to pay. And I said, ‘No, you just put in there that they will negotiate.' So that's what I do. I make sure no harm is done to either side. That's the toughest job.

I do have another sidebar job. I'm chairman of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators. It was started by Senator Fred Haney from Oklahoma back in '92. He took it for a few years and it kind of faded out because of lack of funding. Well, we started it back up in 2003 with money from Kellogg. When we restarted there were 23 Native American legislators. Today we're just short of 80. We have about 25 to 30 that are active in the National Caucus. Our annual meeting is next week in Scottsdale. There we exchange ideas on how to get bills passed or ideas for bills. And I'm also working with the National Hispanic Caucus, the National Black Caucus, and the Asian Pacific Islanders. We're talking about having a collaboration between the four of us in that, when we have a common interest piece of legislation, that all four of us walk up arm-in-arm on the capitol hill and say, ‘Hey, this is an issue, we need to take care of it.'

I still love working in the legislature. It was just kind of a natural thing. I was a tribal lobbyist and doing economic development and I just kind of fell into it. But I'm having fun and I love coming here and meeting, re-meeting all my friends here. Some of you guys -- the rest of you don't know -- Tulalip likes to do economic development studies. Well, Joe Kalt, Miriam [Jorgensen], Jonathon Taylor and a few others here have had to sign confidentiality statements with Tulalip because they know as much as I do and that's dangerous. So we do a lot of economic development studies and you need to also. If you're going to educate the public about you and what you're doing, you have to let them know what you're doing, because they'll sit back there and believe the lies and the untruths. So you have to educate them. Ready for your questions."

Honoring Nations: James R. Gray: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Osage Nation Principal Chief James R. Gray discusses what sovereignty means today through the lens of his first term in office under his nation's new system of government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Gray, James R. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium, Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"This is difficult having to follow what an excellent presentation you just heard. And I'm going to kind of steer not down that same road but try to talk to you more on a personal level -- what I think exercising your sovereignty is like as a tribal leader in the environment that we're in today -- and basically, just kind of maybe go through what basically a week in my life is like. I think this might give you some illustrations about how the exercise of tribal sovereignty is measured in moments, windows of opportunities, certain conversations you have with certain individuals, different institutions you interact with, your internal conversations -- with your staff, your departments, your programs, your employees -- your conversations you have with other institutions -- like our enterprises and our Congress and the Minerals Council. In all these capacities, whether you're doing this or not, you find yourself always wearing that hat. That you realize at some point during the course of your term -- the election's over, the confetti's already been swept away -- and you've now got that look on your face that Robert Redford had in the movie 'The Candidate,' where he looks at that guy at the end of the movie and goes -- he just won the Senate seat in California -- he looks up and he goes, 'Now what?' And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about is what happens after that moment. And realizing that I can draw upon from a lot of different experiences, just because I went through four years under a very federalized paternal kind of structure, to a transition of more of a modern tribal government exercising sovereignty in a way that's been very foreign to our own tribe for the last 100 years.

And so to illustrate that, my period as Chief of the 31st Tribal Council -- basically I had a ceremonial role. I cut a lot of ribbons, I made a lot of speeches, and I did a lot of 'grip-and-grins' -- as they call them in the newspaper business -- and occasionally I'll get to run the council meetings. Now the leadership that is expected of you in those meetings is that you have to understand Robert's Rules of Order and you have to run the meetings appropriately. The council that came in, came in basically attacking the previous chief. And I came in personally attacking the previous chief running for that position. After the election was over, we had the biggest wipeout in the history of Osage tribal government under that 1906 structure. And so I had eight people who were mad at me that just recently got elected. Even though it wasn't personal -- it wasn't mad at me personally -- they were mad at what the previous chief had done. And so they wanted to make darn sure that that wasn't going to happen under their watch.

So I paid for the sins of the previous chief by having a lot of my duties restricted. And so basically I was relegated to a very, very limited role in the tribal government, and realizing that the first thing they did was cut the salary of the chief -- who had a $70,000 year salary -- to getting paid $100 a day for running the meeting; and realizing that that was a huge hit to my family's income. I walked in the office one day about six months into my term and I said, 'You know, I used to run a newspaper and I still have an interest in it. And I'd sure hate to go back to writing news articles just in order to make a living. Because all I know is what's going on here at the Osage Tribe and boy, I'd hate to think that I had to spend all my time writing stories about my own tribe and about all of you nice people on the council if I end up having to make a living.' That next cycle, I got a $50,000 a year raise.

And then I started finding that there were opportunities where I could exercise a limited amount of my authority, given the formal and informal role that I had. The formal role not so much, but the informal role was that, as the person who got to run the council meetings, I was able to make a legitimate decision on who I would recognize to speak. And oftentimes I would have conversations with members of the council before the meeting would start about certain issues and topics that were important to them and things that I was sharing with them that were important to me; and recognizing that during the course of a meeting, like a conductor of a symphony, you can bring different elements of the conversation into ultimately leading to a decision without sacrificing any responsibilities that these individuals had. But just by sheer, the nature of the relationships that I had to build with these individuals -- because let's face it, I was the youngest chief the tribe had ever elected and everybody on the council was way older than me. And so first off, 'What's this young pup doing in here trying to run this tribe?' And then it was, 'You know, it's probably good. We needed some youth in the tribal government to kind of speak to some of the issues that are facing the younger folks.' And then it was like, 'You know, we really need somebody who can actually speak directly to the folks and start engaging the community in a way that none of us had ever done before.' This was...all this was going on while we were trying to get our legislation passed. And so over time there was a transition building.

In the last two years of my office in the 31st Council, I was able to orchestrate enough informal influence with the council that they started to follow my lead on very, very important matters. And as a result I had to bend a little bit, I had to bend a lot in some cases, on involvement of the tribal council in day-to-day operations of the tribe. I had to involve myself, let myself, just kind of, not get mad permanently over certain decisions that they wanted to make because they had their own agendas that they had to pursue. But eventually, I kind of relegated to myself to just standing firm on two issues. And these two issues I would not back off of, I would fight for every chance I got and I would use the power of the bully pulpit that the chief has to exercise enough influence within the Nation to be able to exact change. And I was willing to fall on my sword. Everyone who is ever in this position knows that there's a give and take that goes on in this business, but eventually you're going to have to have some bedrock principles you're not going to back off of. And in my case, one was government reform that I felt like was necessary. A promise was made. We had a mandate of change and we were going to see it through. And I was going to make sure that that was never off our radar screen the entire time I was in office. The second thing was to do everything I could in my power to insure that the Osages got a fair and just settlement in our tribal claims that we had against the United States for mismanagement of billions of dollars of trust funds from the tribe that was developed over the years from oil and gas proceeds. And so those were the two main issues that I really would not bargain on, I would not back off of. I just asserted myself in the middle of those two issues to the highest degree that I could. Because of that, a lot of all the other issues I was able to work with the council on. And eventually they all took control over issues like health and education and economic development and things of that nature and we developed a kind of working relationship as a group.

And unfortunately, what I'm speaking to is that, this was a federalized system of government that we had to endure that was imposed on us, like Hepsi [Barnett] said. It was not something that we chose. We did not choose to govern ourselves...historically we never governed ourselves this way. Yet we had to adapt, over a period of 100 years, that the personalities of the principal chief had everything to do with how effective they were; it wasn't because they had any formal authority, it wasn't because they were granted any kind of legislative authority or judicial powers. We had all three branches of government contained in the tribal council and I was the figure head that represented the Nation. And so imagine how happy we were when President [George W.] Bush signed that bill into law in December of 2004. And within 60 days I had a big party, invited the entire Nation. We had Osages that flew in from Egypt to be a part of that big celebration. At that particular moment, we issued out medals to all the members of the tribal council who had fought for this and who had lobbied with me on Capitol Hill to make sure that we got this legislation passed. It was a great day for the tribe. It was a great day for the Osage Nation because in that moment, we embarked on the process of government reform, which is when Hepsi arrived.

And so what I'm saying is that the period of time, where I actually held the title of Principal Chief of the Osage Nation from 2002 to 2006, was an experience that was just nerve-wracking, because you never knew when that rug was going to get pulled out from under you by the council at any moment. And any decision that council made was subject to having the rug pulled out from under them by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. At any moment, our world was coming to collapse at any given time. So it was this very nervous period of time. So in the process of building the constitution -- getting it ratified, having elections under it and swearing everybody in -- one of the more dramatic things that I experienced in that period of time was the oath of office I took in 2002, which believe it or not was the Federal Employees Oath of Office. That was the oath of office I took when I was elected in 2002. In 2006, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the Osage Nation and in that oath -- that was drafted by Osages, voted on by Osages and written by Osages -- and it was delivered to me by an Osage judge.

So a day in the life of an Osage tribal leader under this government is like -- I started my week on a Monday having a quick briefing with Hepsi, talking about the legislative agenda for Congress, preparing to deal with a daily response that we had committed ourselves to giving every morning no matter what happened so that we would always be on, not only just on the front end fighting issues, but we were defending ourselves against other issues that was taking place. Before noon we had broken out of that meeting and discussed how we were going to do that.

Then we went back and I had to sign a stack of documents about this tall -- contracts, travel requests, various other transition issues that place between the government and countries. And all these different things that's taking place that on a day-to-day basis comes before my desk for my signature. After a very short period of time of that, I sit down and visit with my scheduler for about half an hour, who goes over all the things I'm supposed to be doing this week. And she makes sure that if I want to change it, this is the time to do it because she's going to call everyone back. After that I go grab a quick lunch -- usually it's with my staff -- and we go over what happened in the morning.

After that I go back to the office and I realize that I have to be down in Tulsa because the Gaming Enterprise Board is meeting and they need me to help them go over one particular piece of their gaming plan of operation that they're going to present to Congress. So I run down there and I visit with them for a little while about it. We talk with the attorneys that works for the enterprises and then I go and have a quick meeting with the Gaming Commission, which is the regulatory body and I said, 'Are you guys satisfied with the plans? And they said, 'Well, we have some issues.' So I bring them all together and we sit down and we hash out the issues. They make the necessary amendments that everyone seems to be onboard. I leave that meeting.

I go to a meeting with our CEO of our Osage LLC and we talk about the new energy projects that are coming down from the federal government. I get on the phone with Tracy LeBeau, the executive director of Indian Country Renewable Energy Consortium. She gives me an idea about some of the things that's going on in Washington, D.C. We make a quick plan on how we're going to do it. She talks to me about the new meeting that we're going to be attending in Washington. We go over the details of that with my scheduler. I come back to the office, which is about an hour's drive from Tulsa.

I come back in the office; I've got a crisis on my hands. Congress is passing some crazy legislation that we have to fight them on. So we get busy and we craft a response and we give it back to our wordsmiths and me and Hepsi put the final touches on at the end of the day. Then I run upstairs and I talk to accounting because they're having problems with something that they can't do unless I give them the authority to do it. So I have to sit down with the treasurer and talk to him about getting it written.

By the time I come back downstairs to my office, it's the Associated Press calling because they want to do a story about a recent mound purchase we did in St. Louis. We bought one of our ancient historic mounds that had been left relatively undisturbed over the last 500 years -- or last 200 years since the Osages left St. Louis -- and they wanted to do a full-blown interview on that.

So when I get done with that I've got some Minerals Council people in my office wanting to know, 'How come you're not helping us with this election that they want to hold next year?' So I have to get in the middle of that issue and really kind of explain to them that, 'You don't have to have the Bureau run your elections anymore. Our election board is going to run your elections.' 'But we don't want the election board. We don't want Hepsi Barnett involved in it. And we don't want this. And...' And they all start going around and making crazy accusations and then I have to calm them down and spend some time with them. And realize that I'm not going to get resolution to this today. 'So it's just going to have to wait and you guys are just going to go beat yourself up against the wall and go run up to the BIA. And they're going to tell you that they can't do it because you're a sovereign government and you can run your own elections.' Well, they found that out yesterday.

And so while I was up here I was laughing at Hepsi. I said, 'You know, some of these issues, they take a while to percolate, but when they do, they hit the wall and then we're sitting here ready to help them.' But sometimes when they're not listening, they're just too angry and the passion runs high, reason runs low -- you know the whole thing -- it becomes real obvious that the idea of running that symphony that I talked about with the tribal council, I'm doing it with federal government, state governments, our own institutions of governance, our business interests, our legal interests, our employee issues. And just realizing that if you're going to try to manage, to operate a $200 million operation on a day-to-day basis, you better have some good people with you. You've got to have good people who are going to go to bat and bust through walls for you but, at the same time, you've got to be able to pull back and let issues come to you. That's the push/pull strategy of running a tribal government today, exercising the sovereignty; that without that, you'd be back there getting permission from the BIA to order toilet paper for your restrooms. And that's how far we've come in just a very short period of time. I know my time's up, so I'm just going to turn the mic over to everyone else, and thank you very much." 

Honoring Nations: Duane Champagne: Government-to-Government Relations

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

UCLA American Indian Studies Professor Duane Champagne briefly discusses the history and importance of intergovernmental relationships for Native nations, spotlighting th Flandreau Police Department as a striking contemporary example.

Resource Type
Citation

Champagne, Duane. "Government-to-Government Relations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"One of the advantages of being on the Honoring Nations Board of Governors is that you get to choose to visit some of the sites as part of the evaluation process. And at one point in particular I and my wife Carole Goldberg, we were doing research on policing in Indian Country and there was a case that we had before the Honoring Nations Board, which was Flandreau, South Dakota. And it was an extraordinary case in [intergovernmental] relations, and I just want to give you a little brief overview of that as a segue into this topic.

Flandreau is [on the] Santee Sioux reservation, I think many of the Christian Indians from Nebraska migrated there sometime probably in the late 1800s and they established themselves in a town, which is now Flandreau, and the reservation and the town merged together over time. And the town was relatively small, as well as the tribe, and both the tribe and the town didn't have enough resources to actually form a police department. And the county of course had police, but the police in the county didn't do arrests or trafficking or any of those kinds of things. They spent a lot of time delivering various kinds of court orders and things like that. So that there was a big vacuum both in the city and in the reservation for police coverage and safety. And so what happened in this situation was that both the police and the reservation, a rather unusual alliance, decided to get together and organize a police department. What was rather unique about this was that the community was quite conscious -- the Flandreau community was quite conscious -- that the reservation had its own jurisdiction, had its own government, and so this became a government-to-government agreement. It was an agreement for a certain amount of period of time. The tribe could get out of it if it felt that it was not serving its purposes, but together they joined together to make a small police department, which in fact...one of the previous speakers actually -- Ken James is the chief of police there and actually was one of the Honoring Nations honorees from a previous time. I can't remember if it was 2006 or something like that.

And so I had the privilege of actually visiting and actually seeing this in action and seeing the relationships between the two governments and the respect that the police officers had for the jurisdiction for the tribe. If a person was in pursuit, if a police officer was in pursuit of someone -- a traffic violation or a crime -- and if the person moved into a tribal jurisdiction and the arrest was made in a tribal jurisdiction, then that case went to the tribal courts and vice versa. And so I find that as an extraordinary example that this seemed to be very cooperative, very efficient. It created certain synergies between both communities. Both communities got better police service, they combined their resources, they collaborated, and they respected both of their jurisdictions so that no sovereignty was given up by the tribe in this arrangement, but at the same time they got efficient service. And so I think that those are some of the assets of [intergovernmental] relations. It is efficiency, it's collaboration, it's honoring and strengthening sovereignty, because in these agreements you're recognized as a government and you establish that relationship. And once you establish a relationship like this police department, you can establish other relationships, not only with that government but with some of the other local governments. So we found that a very promising story.

Now, I'd like to say that those are all good reasons to establish government-to-government relations, but I'd also like to say that government-to-government relations are not new things in Indian Country, that these have been done probably thousands of years before the Europeans ever came, and there are all kinds of agreements and treaties of friendship that are made between tribes. And when the Europeans first came, the relationship that the Europeans have to the Indians is largely through treaties of friendship, that there's a very large number of these treaties, thousands of them that were negotiated in the early period. And what was really remarkable about these treaties was that they were negotiated under tribal etiquette, that the rules of negotiation were in fact done in Indian manner.

And in fact, some of those things, just to give you a little vignette, some of the features of those negotiations have actually become part of American culture now. So if you ever watch C-Span and you see a [U.S.] Senate committee or even the open Congressional seating and someone will get up and say, 'Well, the Senator from Nebraska has five minutes,' or sometimes they'll say, 'Oh, I'll give three minutes to the Senator from North Dakota.' And so that rule is derived from the colonial period. It derives from the idea that if a person is speaking, no one else interrupts them. Now that's Indian protocol in the negotiation of a treaty. The rules were that if a person's speaking, even now in Indian Country, no one else speaks while that one person is speaking. Now if you ever watch C-Span again and ever watch sort of like the British Parliament, there's a very funny but very interesting session where the Prime Minister takes questions. And there's a lot of hooting and hollering and all kinds of stuff that goes on. It's actually kind of funny and it's kind of raucous, but it's not the protocol that emerged from the way the tribal communities do it and in fact it has become the American tradition.

And so of course as time has gone on, the rules of the game, the relationships across the Indian communities in the very early period, in the 1600s, were in a position of power. And many of these treaties and things are actually recorded in the wampum belts say, of the Iroquois and other methods among many of the other communities, wampum belts as well as birch bark writings and things. So there is this long tradition, and I think in the beginning the rules are sort of Native rules, but over time those have changed in the world now, is that we're sort of working in the context of American negotiation, American rules. But I think that that's something that we should look at, because when we go to the negotiation table we should see that we are representing a certain culture, a certain point of view. And that may be alien to the negotiators, but I think that that's all part of the story of who we are. And I think that efficiency and cooperation are very important, but at the same time we want to sort of do it in a way that is compatible with our own culture. That making these agreements in fact is an old cultural way of managing relationships with other people, with other nations. But I would also like to say that and the reality is that it's not so easy to make some of these agreements and in many places it is very difficult.

Take the example of California, where the tribes have been very unsuccessful trying to make cross-deputization agreements with county and state governments. This probably has a lot to do with the history of California. I understand that North Dakota the same thing, even though it's a federal government, tribal government, often the outside police, the county and state police don't recognize the tribal police and that is in fact certainly non-recognition of sovereignty. And so California is a P.L. [Public Law] 280 state and so there's also controversy about who has authority. So that these negotiations -- I think people still continue to work on them and try to achieve them -- are not easy to do. And so whenever we do get agreements that actually work, I think it is quite remarkable.

And so I think we have a panel here today of people who've been able to make these kinds of agreements, and so we should pay particular attention because I think there's great benefit in making these relationships. I think it's also culturally something that is deep in Native culture, to have respectful and consensual relationships with other communities, and I think that may not be the context of the only reason to make the agreements now, there may be of course other reasons -- efficiency and things like that, and the Americans sort of have their own vision of how to make those arrangements -- but that's all to be negotiated and I think that's all part of the way that our communities have worked for many years."

Honoring Nations: Karen Diver: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Chairwoman Karen Diver argues that for Native nations to aggressively assert their sovereignty in order to achieve their goals, they must develop capable governing institutions to put that sovereignty into practice.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Diver, Karen. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations seminar. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

"I am so happy to be here reconnecting with former classmates -- I was a Kennedy School grad in 2003. I'm seeing some old professors and old friends and meeting some new ones. When I was here and taking the 'Building Native Nations' class, Professor Joe Kalt said over and over, and I took it to heart, 'Aggressive assertions of sovereignty are backed by capable institutions.' The part he didn't tell me that I had to learn for myself was, that really pisses people off. We learned this after the election. Capable institutions: what did they look like? What was Fond du Lac faced with? Building decision-making processes, first and foremost. We had an insulated tribal council. I've been interested in hearing from people from the service delivery fields, because it makes you feel like the big bad tribal council who gets in their way of doing things. And you know what, it's true. And I found it to be true. And I was a staff member before I was elected and I found it to be true. And I said, 'I'm not going to be a part of one of those tribal councils.'

And so we've worked hard to also include the citizenry and the staff as we kind of change our policies and procedures and implement those capable institutions. It's also been important for us to include tribal members in that. There is great safety in including more people than you in making decisions. One example [of] that hit my second day in office: 'How much money do you make?' I answered the question. Never had they been told before how much tribal council members make. And my motivation in it is, 'Maybe you will revise your expectations of what you get out of your leadership when you know how much money they make.' They should have to earn it. And if you're paying them well, you have a right to expect a certain set of accomplishments, skills and abilities come with it. But what we also pledged to do is said that was always a tribal council decision, let's get a citizen community together and do a salary review commission. They can look at data, we'll get them a consultant, we'll talk to other tribes, we'll compare what we do to others, and we'll do something so that our salaries reflect somewhat of the market but also the fact that this should be public service as well. And we did that. And it was no longer a secret. And you can't shut that door once you open it.

So that's been kind of cool having the citizens involved in strategic planning. I am one elected official who will be there for one term, maybe more, but strategic planning is also about my grandchildren and their children and my neighbors and my family. I am one of five people -- I cannot set the direction this reservation is going -- so really doing a holistic community involvement process around determining where we're going to go. And you've all heard the saying, 'It doesn't matter which road you take if you don't know where you're going.' I need to know which roads to take. Basically it's about transparency, too. Once you have a strategic plan and some established goals and objectives that everybody knows about, you can monitor performance and decide whether or not the people you pay or the ones you elect are doing their job. If I fail at that, I deserve not to be there. But those goals and objectives are determined by our entire community and not those five as demagogues sitting on tribal councils.

Another part of what we do is identifying gaps in policies that affect our social or business issues, but also enforcing the policies that were there. And we've heard about that a little bit -- barriers, RBC [Reservation Business Committee] barriers, we're a reservation business committee is what we call our tribal council, so if I lapse into RBC you know what it is -- enforcing the policies that were there. We look at gaps in service delivery, we want to try new bottles and find out we're the biggest problem with it. We need a CDFI, community development financial institution, and I would like to do tax credits. Until I get the RBC out of the decision-making -- what I tell people is, 'If we can't make our membership pay their propane bill or pay their housing rent payment or mutual health payment, how on earth am I going to meet the regulations for a CDFI or for tax credits?' We start at the beginning. So a little political will is needed in talking to our citizenry. We would like to meet your needs that you've identified for housing, etc., what are you willing to do? Are you willing to pay your bill? You're saying you'd like to borrow money, but you owe money to the propane company. Promotion of personal responsibility and self-sufficiency. We can't just talk about it from a tribal government point of view and say we need to be self-determined without saying that the individuals who comprise our communities also have to practice self-respect, self-responsibility for community and their own self-determination. Our systems are to assist them in doing that for themselves.

Housing issues: enforcing ordinances around that would support like mortgage foreclosures. I'd like there to be more lending, I didn't have the regulatory capacity for having a Section 184 program. So developing our ordinance, it was a gap. Small claims court: how do we handle lending within the reservation and microenterprise between Natives and other Natives if there is no enforcement? They can't take it into the district court, so putting into place small claims court; looking at wellness court as another way of getting our people and their social needs met; and working on uniform commercial code. So identifying gaps is huge. And tribal government, that's one of their biggest roles I think is to look at what is your safety net? Not only for your people with service delivery, but for creating a good economic development environment? And your job is to plug those gaps. What's missing? What do we need? That only works if you clearly define roles and responsibilities. You have to make sure your systems and policies are aligned with those roles and responsibilities. Governing bodies: we set the vision along with the community and we set the policies. I've made some clear distinctions with our community. The prior councils really, it was a little bit of a crap shoot. You went in before them, you were scared about what conversation you were going to have and how it might go off of track and you certainly...I frightened one of our department heads my first week in office because he came to us with an issue that he laid out in a rather lengthy way and I had dared to ask him, 'Do you have a recommendation?' 'Ahhhhh! You want me to have an opinion?' I frightened this poor man.

You didn't express an opinion before the prior tribal council and you certainly didn't use your expertise and your skills in your field to say what should be done. Well, what the heck? I have 28 different divisions. I'm not an educator. I am not a healthcare administrator. I certainly am not an environmentalist. Why on earth wouldn't I use the expectations and the skills of my staff to inform my decision making? The accountability comes is if they get it wrong. 'Okay, you mucked that one up. Now what you going to do to fix it?' That's their role. We set policy and vision. They know what the vision is. They have to come prepared to us to own it. I am not going to take responsibility for every single bit of work that comes out of my reservation. We have 2,000 employees. How could I even think I could do that? But they did. Then they wondered why they had eight-hour meetings and never had time for people and never were able to set the vision. It's a vicious little cycle. We use our own power to keep us out of touch with our own people. And we don't hold our staff accountable because of it. Basic management principles: distinguish between decision making and what is planning; use your tribal council to plan; use what you have to under your own rules for decision making; and then let your staff do their work. Tribal members often say, 'You're micromanaging.' Staff say it all the time, 'You're micromanaging. You're micromanaging.' What I tell people is, 'You say that all the time, you don't want me micromanaging, but as soon as it's you involved or your family, you come running up here. You can't have it both ways. There's a policy for that. If what you want is me to be a manager, use the grievance policy, use the systems that are in place, use the executive director, but you don't get to have it both ways -- that when you're getting your way I'm staying out of it, but when you don't get your way then I'm micromanaging. You make a decision then. Good luck with that.' So part of it is changing the expectations of our people too about what the appropriate role of tribal government is. Do you want us to look at the big picture, the entire community holistically? But the details have to be delegated to someone else in authority -- pay them well, make sure they're educated, grow your own, build your social capital, and then let them do their job and support them doing it. The squeaky wheels can no longer get the oil in Indian Country.

So you're building your capable institutions, and how do we assert sovereignty? What is the process? And you don't really think you're doing it until you look at it hindsight and say, 'What is the context when we're making these decisions?' One of the things we did right off the bat is we had a fairly new tribal council and I know everybody in here, remember these sayings you hear come out of elected officials mouth, 'The old council, the old council did that. Oh, that wasn't me, that was the old council. Sure that sucks, but that was the old council.' Well, you know what, new council, you're owning it if you don't do anything about it. You're just perpetuating the mistake. You can't say they did it and let it continue, because now it's yours. So here's to all the new councils, own that crap, whether you had an ability...whether you did or not, it's on your plate now. 'Old council' is not an excuse to let anything you've got on your plate continue. (Alright, I'm getting some chuckles over here.)

We have a new council, really five newly elected people. So some of us were tribal administrators and a couple came from the community but were not in tribal staff. And so one of the things we started doing was legal counsel administrators start putting together the books: 'What are our main projects, our main issues going on? And I want a review, I want a little binder, I want every ordinance involved, every federal law, every contract. Take us from beginning to end. So because of this thing we don't like now, help us understand how we got here.' Some of them you say, 'That stinks but we're in it, we'll make the best of it.' But some of them, oddly enough we found out, perhaps we had a foot to stand on to revisit those. If it was a 20-year-old agreement, think of the differences in federal law that have happened between 20 years ago and today. We've got court cases that talk about tribes not being able to waive sovereign immunity in many cases, [because] we all know the dreaded limited waiver of sovereign immunity. We've all done it at some point despite the fact we don't like it, but sometimes you need it to get something done. Well, you don't always get to give it away. Even though you say you did, it may not be enforceable. It's worth looking into. It's worth looking into, because there's been a lot of case law since then and interpretations -- look at what's happened since when you did it and now and see if there's room for your tribe to move. You have nothing to lose by trying it. It is an aggressive assertion of sovereignty. Certainly the people on the other side will be pissed off, but they didn't elect you. You've got to look out for your own. So make sure what the standard and what is the regulations for the issue you're dealing with, the federal regulations, the ones that do apply. Where do they give you room to move?

The other issue around aggressive assertion of sovereignty is the partners that come out of the woodwork. I have translated that into 'Now that you might have a little money to work with, let's see how we can work together, so I can stick my hand in your pocketbook.' These aren't the ones who were here while we were building from nothing and when we had nothing. They weren't the ones who respected our capabilities as a government. They're opportunistic in many ways. But tribes set the baseline for those discussions and we forget. I had a rather obnoxious fellow that I remember learning from but he said some cool, smart things that stuck in my mind. One of the obnoxious things he used to say is, 'The golden rule actually means he who has the gold makes the rules.' Well, tribes really never had any gold. Funny, you do now or you have access to it. You get to make the rules and it starts with your own jurisdiction, your own authority, your own regulatory capabilities. Nobody brings you a deal without you setting the table first. Do you have the regulations in place to handle it and they meet at your table? Let me give you some examples.

We were dealing with a pipeline, doing an expansion. The last time they negotiated was so long ago, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was handling our leases with them. The BIA actually gave them leases longer than they had authority to do so and -- yeah, it was a terrible thing. They had exceeded rights away, they had lapsed rights of way and they come to the table and, 'These pesky little tribes. We've got this billion-dollar project and you're just kind of in our way.' It's okay to get a little snotty once in awhile. Fuel yourself with some righteous indignation. They said, 'Well, you know, Karen, some of our pipeline is okay.' And I said, 'Well, it's a pipe. You only need this much not to work. Start talking, boys.' So they put an offer on the table and this is where the snotty comes in. I asked them, I said sweetly to them, 'Will you throw in wampum with that?' See, Indians laugh when I tell that story. I got nothing out of that crowd with it. We were cracking ourselves up, we got nothing. So basically what we told them is, 'Here's how it's going to be. You're going to follow our environmental standards. You're going to pay us enough that we build our regulatory and our environmental capacity to make sure you're not polluting us. Don't even think about going around us because we have treatment-as-a-state over air and water quality and there's some sensitive areas around our border, so you're not going to get those permits. So start playing nice boys or bring your shovels next time and dig your shit up.' [applause] 'But it's your job to counter now.' I said, 'White people wrote that book. Here's what I want. When you get there, we're done negotiating.' It took a year and a half, we got where we wanted. It was fun.

You set the table. You set the table, but you also have to know what you're talking about. I don't know anything about pipelines or I didn't. I know a whole lot more now. I had to hire an energy economist to tell me how you value what goes through a pipe. I had to bring in some more regulatory people [because] our environment people, despite our treatment as a state, they never had to deal with it. They had to build their own capacity. Invest in your community and if you don't have the help within your community, ask other tribal agencies, ask the feds, hire it if you need to, but you have to operate from a position of strength. Your partners will take advantage of you if you let them and if you don't educate yourselves, you are helping them. We already did that. That was the BIA. Okay? Same thing, banking. I actually have a background in economics. Banks don't understand that all of us have invested in ourselves and our community members. We know things now. You don't get to have interest rate and collateral. You assume risk, you make more interest. You have no risk, we don't pay as much interest. This is simple stuff.

We had a bank refusing to renegotiate one of them old council deals. Mmmm. $119 million project, balloon payment in two-and-a-half years. I'm negotiating it. It was just expensive. Economy dumped right before that. And I tell them, 'You can't have it both ways, boys. You've got our money in your bank as collateral, you're making some pretty good interest, I don't want to wait til the balloon is ready, let's start talking now.' They said, 'Well, no.' 'No?' 'No, no, that's the way the deal is, we'll talk when the five years is up.' We talked. We liquidated our portfolio the second week of September, paid off the entire $119 million, watched the market tank October 1st and no, I took every cent out of their bank and paid off their loan, they're not getting interest either. Put your money where your mouth is. I'm not going to say I knew what was going to happen in the market, but I also knew I wasn't going to let someone else take advantage of my own people and fail to act. And people knew the deal wasn't good and they kept bemoaning the fact and hollering and, just get off your ass and do it. The next bank that comes through the door isn't going to be so silly if they know you're going to do something about it. Aggressive assertions of sovereignty and some good business practice and a little knowledge thrown in.

The last thing that really has been most interesting for me around sovereignty issue is dealing with other jurisdictions lately. With the economy tanking and local government aid being cut, the other jurisdictions, especially the local ones -- townships, counties, things like that -- the relationships are just getting gnarly. They're feeling desperate. They don't like tribes taking land into trust, they don't see our employment and how we contribute. They see what they want to see. They say they see the use of social services and Indian Child Welfare and, 'Wah, we don't get to have casinos, you should pay for these things.' Excuse me, those are entitlement services. You don't allocate them based on race and perhaps, if your tone were different, we can talk about what tribes can do in partnership around roads issues, around fire districts, around lots of things. Some of it we might even wish to pay for but don't begin the conversation by telling me what you want. You tell me how can we help both of our communities do better [because] we're still residents of your county and your township and your state whether you like it or not. I have a housing issue; you don't get to abdicate your responsibility to Indian Country based on race and their status as citizens on a reservation [because] they're still citizens of your state. You will bring resources to this community and I will leverage them and I will reduce your burden because our people will be able to take care of themselves.

I had a local...president of our local county, his name was Richard Brenner, say to me, 'Well, you people don't pay property taxes.' And I said to him, 'Dick, I can call you Dick, can't I? Lots of people pay for lots of things because of this reservation. We pumped $125 million into your economy in payroll and distributions and income last year.' I said, 'We're the largest employer in your county and the second-largest employer in a nine-county region. Don't you dare ever come to my office with your hand out and call us 'you people.'' So a little righteous indignation goes a long way. You need...we're allowed to demand to be treated with respect for not only what we've accomplished to date, but the short time with which we've done it. Aggressive assertions of sovereignty is holding other people accountable not only for what we deserve as citizens but also making sure we are the best tribal government we can be so that burden is reduced. We're taking responsibility for our own people. And basically, success is the best revenge. That's just a fact. The other thing I like to tell people when dealing with other jurisdiction is don't allow people -- businesses too for that matter, I guess -- don't let them confuse tribes as political entities with race. In people's minds, they're fairly interchangeable -- like the 'you people' comment. He was coming to us as a political unit and saying he wanted something but then saying he didn't like delivering services to us because we were a certain kind of people. He was confusing the two. Yes, we are a race of people but we are a political entity. And this is going to be a government-to-government conversation and if you bring up race again, you're bad and I'm going to get you for it. It's an EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] thing. So, know the parameters of your own authority, hold people accountable, hold yourself accountable. But basically -- what it comes down to I think is -- how much are you willing to tolerate and what level of conflict are you willing to put up with? I think that for a long time tribal nations like to operate under the radar. And if we don't talk about our accomplishments and we don't back it up by being able to do it well, we're really not going to be able to advance the agenda of our communities. And we want that. And like everybody said with the cultural match, we know how to do it best, but you have to really be able to seize it and to sell it to those around you. Be your own best advocate and educator. And with that, I'll let you get on to the next speaker."

Honoring Nations: David Gipp: Sovereignty, Education and United Tribes Technical College

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

United Tribes Technical College President David Gipp discusses the impetus behind the establishment of United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) and the emergence of the tribal college movement, the growth of UTTC over the past four decades, and the critical roles tribal colleges and universities play in Native nations' efforts to rebuild their nations. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Gipp, David. "Sovereignty, Education and United Tribes Technical College." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"Thank you, Megan. It's great to be here. I don't often miss these sessions as a member of the Board [of Governors], and I apologize for not being here the last two days. Unfortunately, my schedule was such that it was difficult to get here, but I finally made it. I'm always late but I usually get there, as they say. So it's great to be here and I look forward to the presentations yet that are to come for this morning. I want to thank you for the prayer this morning and especially, the prayer where we talk about those who are in our communities -- and we use the word [Lakota Language] ones -- the ones that are kind of out there and we don't always see, the ones that are what we call pitiful and are in need sometimes, and don't get the privileges we have of being at this table here today at especially such a prestigious place. Those are the people that I serve, and I'm sure that many of you serve back in your home communities, especially if you're either in an elected position or have been in one. You know those people and who they are, and you know that these are the people that we really stand for back in our communities. Many of them are traditional people, many of them hang onto their culture in very closed and close ways, and some of them suffer because of the issues of poverty. In fact, many of them do -- at least in my part of the country in North and South Dakota and Montana and in other parts as well. So I think of these people when we're here and when I'm having a good breakfast, or whatever it is, and I appreciate that. And I've had my share of life from those days as well, having come up in that respect. So I appreciate that prayer and we think of these people. I want to extend my condolences to the Hill family -- and to all of you for your losses in your family as well -- and our prayers and good wishes for you and all of those who are dear to you. We have those kinds of things that happen to us, in all of our families again, because we're human beings and we come from the good earth here. So I think of those kinds of things.

I listen to Chief [Oren] Lyons and his speech about what happened back at Wounded Knee and I think of December 15, 1890 when Sitting Bull was killed. And two weeks later, the first Wounded Knee happened and quite a number of our people were killed -- Lakota people who were, Minneconjou who were, Hunkpapa, some Oglalas, Blackfeet Sioux and many others that were within that band -- that were on their way in, by the way, to give up, if you will, coming off the prairie. And [they were] some of the very last to be brought into what was to become reservation life, to the kind of confinement that we have lived with for many, many now centuries. And we were giving up a way of life, our freedom, if you will, giving up our constitution, if you will -- our constitution as we knew it and understood it. And many of our tribal nations have historically gone through that from the time that Columbus landed -- mistakenly landed -- on the shores of North America and stole the first Indian, kidnapped and took him back before Queen Isabella, and those kinds of things. Today, those would be considered crimes against humanity and inhumane acts. Although sometimes our own government continues to justify those things, as Chief Lyons pointed out, at the highest levels of government.

And so we need to be sure that what we do -- and this is one of the things that I think Honoring Nations does -- is brings the very best of Indian Country forward of what we're doing, that we're human beings, that we're not 'savages,' that we're not 'uncivilized,' that in fact we have our own civilizations and we have our own way of doing things and we have our own methodologies, all of these things that you know better than I do. And those are the presentations that we give to America -- and we have given freely and openly -- but we need to share them among ourselves so that those people that I talked about, the [Lakota language] ones, can benefit and can learn and talk about that. I talked to one of my students the other day, who has dreams of coming to Harvard. I don't know if he'll ever get here, hopefully he will, if that's what his dream is -- there are other places I told him he can go to school too, but we'll deal with that one later. Those are the kinds of things we look at when we talk about opportunity, because it's opportunity that -- as an educator --that we want to make. We want to be sure that our people are on a level playing ground and that they have that adequate and highly capable opportunity to bring themselves forward to be a part of life; and mostly, to do some good things for themselves and for their families and again for their community, as they so choose. And that's what United Tribes [Technical College] was about. We did officially, on September 6th, celebrate our 40th anniversary as an institution, as a school, as a training place that began in September of 1969. But the beginning of that goes back some years, back into the '60s, when a lot of us were ensconced with doing some fundamentals -- by us, I meant tribal leadership and tribal councils and other people.

I was just coming out of high school back in the mid-60s, but I remember listening to the TV at the boarding school that I was in South Dakota and watching TV. And the people of South Dakota had voted that day -- in I believe it was '65 or so -- and they voted that the tribes of South Dakota would continue to have their own civil and criminal jurisdiction. In North Dakota, something similar was happening. The tribes of North Dakota came together and they became United Tribes of North Dakota. In South Dakota, it was United Sioux Tribes of South Dakota and they were the remnants of the great Sioux Nation, by the way. But my point being is the tribes in many states, in many communities, were fighting for the fundamentals of civil and criminal jurisdiction. Jurisdictions that, yes, we continue to fight about even today -- in the courts and with all kinds of people and with the states and cities and counties and those kinds of governments versus our tribes and tribal governments, so that fight certainly isn't over -- but they laid the groundwork for those that were successful in retaining that civil and criminal jurisdiction in the mid-60s by having rejected Public Law 280 as a methodology for having the state to assume those jurisdictions; and that's what happened in North and South Dakota. And obviously, I capsulized this in a few brief statements because this was something that went on for years and years, and you know the origins of Public Law 280. My point being is they were at least successful in saving that fundamental of jurisdiction of the tribes, otherwise we would not have this -- and many of our tribes that went under 280 know the difficulties of being a 280 tribe -- because that was not our choice. It was put upon us by the U.S. government and then by the states themselves -- states that certainly didn't exist when we were long, long around, let's put it that way. We know that we predate all of these governments, including the U.S. Constitution.

So those were the formative years for places like United Tribes of North Dakota, but one of the lessons learned out of that success was, if we come together -- and in our region we have Arikara, we have Mandan, we have Hidatsa, we have Lakota and Dakota, and we have Chippewa, Ojibwe or Prairie Chippewa -- as sometimes they're referred to on the Northern Plains -- and all of those tribes had historic differences at various times, but you know all of those tribes also got along, long before the non-Native ever came around. And those are the stories that are not told. Those are the stories that are not told. And that's also an element of Honoring Nations: ways in which we come together in good ways, ways that we share and that we trade, and that's what Honoring Nations is about.

Sitting Bull is often portrayed as a great hostile -- a guy who hated everyone. That's not true. I'm a Hunkpapa, and our family and all of our people knew him as a humble, as a generous, and as an open man. One of the children he adopted, in fact, and raised was an Arikara -- a supposed enemy, by the way, archenemy of the Lakota or Sioux. So we knew and we knew how to get along in our own good ways when we needed to and when we wanted to. And so we didn't need the lessons of the non-Native, even today. And the lessons of Honoring Nations, I think, is an excellent way in which we begin to share effectively, effective ways in which we continue in rebuilding the renaissance of rebuilding tribal nations.

And that's in effect what United Tribes [Technical College] was about, because when they came together in those mid 60s -- saved, if you will, or preserved that civil and criminal jurisdiction -- one of the things they said, our tribal leaders said is, ‘We can produce other kinds of success by coming together in unity and in spirit.' And one of those results was United Tribe's educational technical center. They spotted an old fort in Bismarck, North Dakota called Fort Abraham Lincoln -- the second Fort Abraham Lincoln, by the way. The first Abraham Lincoln is to the west of us, just across the Missouri River in Bismarck, North Dakota. And that first Abraham Lincoln is in ruins and that's where Custer left for his final ride, I'll put it politely. So I'm over at the second Abraham Lincoln that was built between 1900 and 1910. And you'll see the parade grounds, the circular parade grounds, and the brick buildings and that sort of thing. For some people, it reminds them of old boarding schools, but it was a military fort. And they're what I call the cookie-cutter forts of the turn of the century, built from 1900-1910 or so, and that's when this one was built. And it produced soldiers for World War I. It went on and was used by the North Dakota Army Guard, by the way, up until 1939-1940, when INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] took it over and housed Japanese and German aliens there for five years. And then it was returned again to the North Dakota government. And in 1965, it was decommissioned completely and by 1968, we took it over. And that was again that lesson learned by United Tribes, by the United Tribes leaders and they said, ‘If we come together on issues, then why not do training?' We predate most of the tribal colleges, with the exception of Navajo Community College in 1968, but we actually were chartered in 1968, officially. And they said, ‘Let's get that fort,' one of our tribal leaders said and they did. And again, I simplify the story, but the point being is it was a good example of the Indians taking over the fort, but this time for peaceful and educational purposes and for our own wellbeing and on our own terms and conditions. So those are things that we keep in mind as we build and rebuild and we put things back together -- that our critical purpose is not only to preserve and protect, but to build. And again, I go back to what Honoring Nations stands for and what the kinds of lessons are that you provide for all of us throughout Indian Country, for those people back there at home.

And I look at my own Standing Rock area -- in North and South Dakota, which is where I'm from -- and I look at the issues of poverty, I look at the issues of the high suicide rate, some of the highest suicide rates in the nation, by the way. And I think of the story, of what Chief Lyons talked about at Wounded Knee in 1973 and going into that area at that time, about that same period of time. And what we were committed to was building and rebuilding our own educational systems, and we're still doing that. In 1973, there were six tribal colleges; today there are 37. In 1973, we were serving about 1,500, maybe 1,700 students nationally among those six schools, today we serve close to 30,000 students. Today 51 percent of our population or better across Indian Country is under the age of 25. And in many communities that 51 percent or better is under the age of 18 where you come from; we have a growing population. And so the challenge for us is to provide that quality education. The challenge for us is to provide even more, because our young people are hungry for the knowledge of who they are and what they're about. Yes, they need the skills. Yes, they need to be able to participate and actively compete, if you will, in areas of science, math and technology. I was just at a congressional panel yesterday in which we are beginning to develop our own engineering degrees on our own terms and conditions. [President] Joe McDonald out at Salish Kootenai [College] produced the first four-year engineering graduate this past May and we will do more. It starts in small ways.

But I remember in 1973 when a lot of people in D.C. -- where the Chief was -- said, ‘Why are you guys doing this? You can send your kids over to the local university, or whatever.' Well, local for us is anywhere from 50 to 150 miles away in our area of the country. The second thing is that mainstreams, only about 4 percent yet -- and this is a 30-year old statistic, by the way, that still stands -- only about 4 percent of our kids, our children that go through mainstream institutions, make it through with a four-year degree. That's a dismal shame upon America and upon American higher education, ladies and gentlemen. That's a shame. That's immoral that we have so few coming through the system getting and accomplishing degrees. So when I see an American Indian graduate with a two-year or a four-year degree, I tell you, I give them high commendations, I give them high commendations. And yes, there are great issues that they have to face even at that, but the point is we need more of these people. We need all of our trained and educated people back in our communities. And we face the risk of losing them every day to mainstream America because there are so many opportunities out there for them. And that is what nation building is all about, assuring that we have ways for these people to come back into the system. Too often, I hear young people say, ‘There's not a place for me to go back to,' either because the job doesn't exist or because there are certain kinds of politics back home. We need to teach our own tribal leaders -- and as leaders yourselves -- ways in which we welcome these people back, and ways in which we can have them come back into our communities, or ways in which they can continue to contribute -- whether they're in a national post, a regional post at even a mainstream institution -- because we are together and that is the way we continue and rebuild tribal America as I look at it.

And that's part of what really United Tribes [Technical College] is all about, that's part of what the tribal colleges are all about. But I mentioned in 1973 going into Pine Ridge -- myself with a crew of my staff, to do training among faculty, with Gerald One Feather, who had just completed his chairmanship, and Dick Wilson, of course, was chairman of the Oglalas at that time -- but going through roadblocks. On one end were -- Dick Wilson says, they often described them -- the GOONs [Guardians of the Oglala Nation]. So we turned around and went clear down the other way and went back into Nebraska and came back to the east side of that particular reserve. And then we ran into the AIM-ers [American Indian Movement]. So then we had to go back, come back through this way, double track and then go back through another road to get to what was then, the college. And the Oglala Lakota College -- which is now pretty much centrally located out of Kyle, but also has the rest of its centers, satellites, and all of the various communities throughout the Oglala Lakota area up there -- was pretty much in just what I would call broken down trailers and that's where they were teaching classes. But we went in and we talked to some of the staff and faculty and the president and did some work there. And then Gerald invited us out to his place just northwest of Pine Ridge. We managed to get over there late that afternoon into the evening and we had dinner with him. And we sat there and he was talking to us about what they were doing with the college and how things were going to go with it. We looked out of his windows there, his front windows, and they were all, there was no windows. We said, ‘What happened to your windows?' He said, ‘Well, they got shot out last night.'

But I guess my point is, we've had our war and this has happened in other communities as well, disparities. But what we have learned is we go on -- I'm not saying we aren't afflicted by them in negative ways -- but nevertheless we go on, because we're a strong people. We're a very strong, resilient people. We're a people that can accept and take change and incorporate it and do it in proactive ways. Otherwise we wouldn't be here, our children wouldn't be here, our grandchildren wouldn't be here -- given the size and makeup and complexity of our population, given the different languages that we have, the different customs that we have, from one nation to the other. As small and tiny as we are in this huge nation of 270, or more, million of the United States of America, we're still here and we will continue to be here. But the important thing is that we continue to build, as best as we can, and on our own terms and conditions. That's what tribal colleges are about: our own terms and conditions. They are the fundamental rights that go even before and beyond treaties.

Sitting Bull never signed a treaty, from where I'm from. He was a Hunkpapa Lakota, but as he said when he picked up that piece of earth and dropped it back to the ground, he said, ‘I never gave up or sold an ounce,' to be interpreted, by the way, of the earth, ‘because I am part of it. I've never given it up. No matter what they say. No matter what kind of piece of paper they put in front of me.' And yes, we have to adhere to things like treaties. And yes, it's important to assure that they're enforced, if you will. But he never signed a treaty. He fought his whole life and he gave his life telling people, ‘If you sign that, you sign your life away.' For him, that was what destiny was about and that was the loss of freedom. We're in a different era now, and even he recognized, though, that we had to make changes that were significant among ourselves, because he had gone on the Wild West Show with Buffalo Bill Cody and went clear across to Europe and been in D.C. One of the things -- he came back and he visited in a little school on Standing Rock, when it was settled, after he had been brought in, brought back from Canada and had been held in prison at Fort Randall for two years, brought back to Standing Rock and some of my own people followed him back up. They brought him back by riverboat up the Missouri and the rest of the people that were with him walked; they didn't ride on that boat. One of them was my grandmother, who was a little infant and brought up from that area of the country -- Fort Randall back up to Standing Rock. But he later visited that school where my grandmother was at, and it was called the Kennel Industrial School. It's not there anymore. In fact that whole community was inundated, flooded by the great dams that were put upon the Missouri River Basin from Montana clear down into Nebraska. But he walked in that school and he said -- and he talked to the children and he looked at all of them -- and he said, ‘You need to learn, you need to learn what the wasicus are doing and you need to learn how they write and what they do.' He said, ‘I can't read or write.' He could write his name, but he said, ‘You need to do these things and learn what they are about, because that is the only way you're going to protect yourself, it's the only way you're going to keep who you are.' He said, ‘I've seen them,' he said. He said, ‘They're going to come in such great numbers.' He said, ‘When you see the ant pile,' he said, ‘there are even more than that coming. They're not here yet, but they're coming. You see them around us right now.' He meant wasicus, the white man. He said, ‘They're bringing things that you can't see or understand all the time, but you must learn about them and you must learn their way, because otherwise you won't be able to take care of yourself.' He said, ‘I've seen them,' and he said, ‘there's more than you can ever imagine or think that are coming.' And he said, ‘It's something we cannot stop.' So even he knew at the end, just before the end, that there was a complete change in life. And he had his own school that was established in his community, just shortly before he was shot. So he was making changes himself.

But for other reasons, I won't get into the whole story about his killing, and how he was murdered, unfortunately, by other Native people. And these are the things -- and that is one of the first lessons we must always remember -- that the United States government has used effectively the Roman rule of ‘divide and conquer' very effectively among us. And we must always be cautious that we, as Native people, don't become continued victims of that, and that we don't use those non-Indian ways to take advantage of each other or to harm or hurt each other. Those are the realities. That was one of the lessons we should have learned out of the last Wounded Knee that Oren Lyons talked about a little bit ago. Because when we create those kinds of conflicts among ourselves, it also creates very harsh, bad realities, for generations to come, among ourselves. And then I can go back to the good lessons I hear and I listen to about what you are doing out in those communities -- of dealing with issues of disparity, turning them around and creating whole new kinds of opportunities, whole new kinds of wonderful hope and giving hope to others -- so that that student I talked to the other day may indeed be here at Harvard, but will continue on in a good way, carrying with him some good kinds of new proactive, if you will, weapons, but also ways that we continue to create peace and humanity among ourselves. Because that's where our hearts are, that's where our hearts are. They are good hearts. [Lakota Language]. Thank you very much."

Honoring Nations: Joseph P. Kalt: A New Era of Governmental Relations

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development Co-Director Joseph Kalt stresses that the only policy that has ever created and sustained community and economic development in Native communities is self-determination. He also introduces Jodi Gillette, Senior Policy Advisor for Native American Affairs for the Obama Administration.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Kalt, Joseph P. "A New Era of Governmental Relations." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 17, 2009. Presentation.

"...That is in reference to the fact that we are very fearful of a lawsuit against the Harvard Project [because] every single employee of the Harvard Project is female. Well, thank you Megan very much, and welcome to all of you.

As many of you know, this effort, the Harvard Project, the Native Nations Institute, have this tremendous focus on tribal governance. Why tribal governance? The focus here arises because in our early days, more than 20 years ago, the nerdy professors kept turning up the result that the only policy that was turning things around in Indian Country, the only policy that was bettering peoples' lives -- not only economically but socially, culturally, families, everything -- were policies of self-determination. I once was testifying before the [U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs] and I made that point that the only policy that's ever worked is a policy of self-determination. And one of the skeptical senators looked at me. And I said, 'Senator, you know, if I came up here as an economist...' I admit it. I'm an economist. You remember from college? Good with numbers and computers, not enough personality to be an accountant. Oh, I just insulted the accountants here -- I apologize. 'Senator,' I said, 'if I came up here as an economist and I told you, when we look across eastern Europe, we can't find a single case of sustained economic development, social improvement, cultural strengthening where some outsider was making the decisions for a nation, you wouldn't be surprised. Why would you be surprised about Indian Country?'

The lessons that you teach are that self-determination works. It works economically, socially, culturally, in every dimension of life. But it's also, as was indicated it's also a challenge. I had a very good friend of mine, a retired chairwoman of Muckleshoot, Virginia Cross -- some of you may know her -- one time say to me, 'This self-determination is sort of the two-edged sword.' She said, 'It used to be when anything went wrong we could blame the feds. Now when something goes wrong, they blame me.' And then she said, very wisely, 'And that's the way it should be, because the challenge of leadership is a challenge of service, is a challenge of accountability and what helps and what is improving things is answering that call.'

A cornerstone, an absolute cornerstone of self-determination as a Nation is self-governance. If you look -- many of you know this from friends, relatives or perhaps your own communities -- if you look at the history of termination of tribes in the United States, the termination of the powers of self-government, the termination of the status of nationhood made everything fall apart. Governance is a lot about bureaucracy; it's a lot about technical numbers and so forth. But without it, it is so incredibly difficult to hold together a community, to hold together the identities of people. This is true, as Steve [Cornell] said, not only Native peoples, it's true all over the world. So that the challenge of self-government is truly the challenge not only of nation building but of community building. A cornerstone of that is intergovernmental relations with your neighbors, of intergovernmental relations -- in our case in the United States -- with the federal government.

And we hope that a new era has been marked with a new administration, with the appointment of a high level advisor in the White House on Indian affairs. And we are pleased today, and it is my honor to introduce, the Deputy Associate Director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Jodi Gillette. Jodi now resides, if you will, in the White House. I don't think you get to sleep there though, do you Jodi? But obviously, [she] represents more than the symbolism but a commitment to true intergovernmental relations, because she's in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs; there's not only symbolism, but meat in that. Jodi is a graduate of the outstanding program at Dartmouth. Among a number of other people in the room here, Jodi is also a Bush Fellow. And we have a very close relationship with the Bush Foundation in St. Paul. [She] received her Masters in Public Administration from Minnesota. Prior to joining the Obama administration she was the Director of the Native American Training Institute and is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. So it's with great honor that we welcome Jodi to Honoring Nations. Thank you." 

Honoring Nations: David Gipp: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

President David Gipp of United Tribes Technical College synthesizes the words of the "Sovereignty Today" presenters at the 2007 Honoring Nations symposium, and discusses the direct relationship between a Native nation's effective exercise of sovereignty and its distinct traditional cultural values and identity.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Gipp, David. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Amy Besaw Medford:

"We're not just leaving yet. We're hoping that the microphones are still going to circulate around. Dr. David Gipp from United Tribes Technical College, also on the board of governors is going to join me and kind of synthesize some of the things that we've heard today, and set the stage for tomorrow 's discussion. So I hope you humor us, and participate with us, add to things that we may have missed, add to things that you would like to hear spoken about tomorrow, issues that you wanted to bring forward, things you want to further pull out. So without further adieu, Dr. David Gipp."

David Gipp:

"Well, I would say we had quite a discussion going already in terms of reflections and what's going on, and I'm not sure that I can do justice to some of the remarks that have already been made. But I was asked to give some remarks about our first panel and some of the other remarks that have been made throughout the day. It seems to me that every one of the panels -- both panels and the panelists themselves -- have really done a wonderful job of not only telling us what their projects and programs have been and how they're contributing to their particular tribal nation and community, but also how they are really reinforcing that infrastructure which is really critical to all of our lives, as the Chief [Oren Lyons], I think summed it up so well in terms of the world and the future and the generations to come, the seven generations.

I'm a Lakota, a Hunkpapa Lakota. From Standing Rock is where I'm from, from North and South Dakota. And I'm President of the United Tribes [Technical College] in Bismarck, North Dakota. And one of my chiefs, the Hunkpapa, was Sitting Bull, and he was a man who believed in nationhood. He didn't believe in signing treaties and he never signed one to his death in 1890, just shortly before Wounded Knee. And I talk a little bit about that, because you raised the question of what would his generation say about us today and what would they say about even our remarks and our outlook on life. And oftentimes, I listen to some of my leaders out in my region of the country talk about being treaty tribes and bragging about it, when I know that Sitting Bull disdained the signing of treaties because he felt that was the first step towards defeat, the first step towards losing what we call sovereignty. And as you say, we did not have a word for that but other than our nation and the Lakota nation in our word, which was both 'friend' and 'ally' in terms of our translation. And so we look at that and look at the era and the times and how they have changed, and now we look at what happens with U.S. policy and how that continues to affect or disaffect us, I guess becomes the other part of the question.

But I look at the projects today and we know that they really are exemplary. They are the proactive things that we are doing among ourselves, and the creation of good things among ourselves to look at success, because indeed, we are constantly wrapped up with the issues of all of the problems that are out there -- methamphetamine, jurisdictional issues between our states and our tribes, and who takes precedent over whom in terms of how we enforce the laws of our own lands, and how those things are going to be affected, and the fact that we have not enough law enforcement officials on any one of our reserves, any one of our territories. You go to my place at Standing Rock, I think we have six officers full time, seven days a week if you will, to cover about actually, 2.3 million acres of land, similar to your territory in Hopi, similar to our friends at Red Lake. And the issues that are faced there constantly, day in, day out with the lack of adequate, just plain police protection of our own, by our own. And so these are the conditions that every one of our people face back home and have to live with on a day-to-day basis.

I listened to one of my councilmen from Standing Rock recently talk about the issues of gang and how they affect and disaffect rural reservation areas, and how you have to wait hours for a policeman to get there on the site when an incident occurs, and how the community is in fact disenfranchised from itself, and how mothers and fathers and elders are intimidated by those kinds of actions. And we talk about the Mexican influence of methamphetamine, and coming into our communities, and taking advantage of our women. Those are the disparities that we talk about every day.

But what is good about these projects, the Honoring Nations projects, is that they demonstrate clearly what we can do in our own communities by our own tribal nations, and how we can take, if you will, the bull by the horns and begin to reshape what we have in our communities, and do them in successful, in proactive, in positive and in constructive ways that can demonstrate what's so important to our youth and to our elders and to all of the rest of the adults in our communities. That we can create, in fact, our own role models, that we can create our own kinds of models themselves -- whether they are financial in nature or whether they are behavioral in nature -- through the courts or through education systems.

I've been in the business of tribal college development and university development for close to 34-35 years. I've been president at United Tribes [Technical College] for 30 years now, or better than 30 years. We serve nationally about 30-35,000 students around the country, among the 35-36 tribal colleges that are out there today. When we started out, we started out with six tribal colleges. Navajo Nation was at the forefront of creating, at that time, Navajo Community College, now Diné College, and was one of the leaders to help create the movement, if you will. And in North and South Dakota, the core of the tribal college movement began there, and emanated out to places like Montana and other parts of the nation, if you will. But when we started out, many, many academics said we could not do that, (A) because we didn't have enough educated people to educate ourselves, (B) because we didn't have the resources. And the U.S. government testified against us, in the first Senate hearing in October of 1975, and said, ‘Tribal colleges weren't necessary because we already had three institutions funded by the federal government and operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.' We said, ‘No, we want to do this ourselves for ourselves, by ourselves and through and with, and through Indian nations, and to reinforce the sovereignty of Indian tribes.' And some among us even challenged us saying that that is not what we were doing. We prevailed, if you will. At that point, in 1974-75 we had about 1,500 tribal students across the country. We have tribal colleges that are not only doing the two-year programs, but they're doing four-year programs and they're doing, beginning graduate programs. We're moving from a two-year to a four-year institution in the course of three years now -- one in the area of public health, the other in the area of business, a third in the area of law enforcement, because of the disparities that we see across the land, and the fourth dealing with leadership itself, and what tribal leaders need to know.

And that is why I think the beginning kinds of curriculum that we see here, that's been developed through the Harvard Project on American Indian [Economic] Development, are so critical. And all of the things that we're doing in our tribal communities become so, so relevant to what needs to be taught at, and through, and in our Indian communities, whether we have populations in rural reservation settings or in urban Indian settings. We must not forget the fact that we have a large concentration of our populations living in places like Minneapolis or L.A. or Phoenix, Arizona, or Albuquerque and on down the line. We must not leave those young people out of the equation because they are part of us. Some of them are your relatives; some of them are your brothers and sisters. They want a part of Indian Country and they want to be a part of Indian Country, but we must go back and begin to teach them the issues of values, the issues of language, of culture and of what community is about. And that I think is what is epitomized by the projects that we heard today, in all of the panels, in every one of them. Some doing it with resources, some with doing it with few or no resources, but nevertheless doing them and that was how we began the tribal college movement. What was significant about it is that the U.S. government opposed us all the way. And that's when I think of Sitting Bull who said, ‘I will do what I will do and I will prevail.'

I watched this Emmy-winning movie that was produced about Sitting Bull and, quite frankly, it was one of the greatest misrepresentations, at least the film version, of Sitting Bull. Fine that they used Indian actors -- and I'm glad that Indian actors were used as far as part of getting a bit of employment and perhaps some notoriety -- but the story was one of the greatest misrepresentations of who we are: Lakota people, Hunkpapa people, in particular. Some of the story lines and some of the things that were said in that movie were absolutely untrue. I remember the scene in that movie when Major McLaughlin appeared with Sitting Bull and told him that, ‘You will be educated by my schools.' And while that may be truth, in terms of the policy itself, it was a statement that McLaughlin never said, because Sitting Bull demanded his own schools. He had traveled the world, literally, to Europe in the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody. He came home and he went to one of our beginning, if you will, boarding schools back home in a place called Kennel, South Dakota, on the Standing Rock, and he talked to the children of that school. And what he told them was that they needed to learn the words of the white man, the wasicu. They needed to know how to use them and write them and construct them because he said, ‘If you don't, you will not survive.' He said, ‘I've been out there and I've seen them coming,' and he said, ‘there are so many you can't count them.' He meant like the ants and like the locusts. He said, 'There are so many that are coming.' He said, ‘You will never believe how many there are.' And he said, ‘If you don't learn these ways and these things, you will not be able to defend yourself and you will not have the life that you want.' I know those words were true, because one of those little children in that school was my grandmother and she knew what he meant. Don't give up your ways, but you need to learn and constantly take in all of these other things, and you must not forget who you are, but you must always be sure that you use them in a way that protects you. The adage that he used was, ‘If you see something in the white man's world and on the road, pick it up if it's good. But if it's bad, make sure you throw it away and don't use it, because it's not relevant to you and you'll lose your way.' Part of that is the issue of things like methamphetamines and the alcohol and all of those so-called things that are not a part of our life, because they were not part of our life, at least not among the Lakota, not originally. Now we're battling new kinds of battles.

So I look at what we're doing with the Harvard Honoring Nations, and indeed it's a great honor to have sat with this board and to look at the various projects, because then we get to see all of the wonderful and great things that are coming from America in terms of all of our own people, our own Native American Indian tribal nations. This is a good thing. And so you're at a good table, and there are good things in our road and we can continue to make those good things. That's what I observe today as I listen to all of the wonderful remarks. Yes, challenges, some of them difficult, but nevertheless I think every one of them things that we can use in good ways and make that road a good road, a good red road. We talk about it in the way that we say [Lakota language]: We're all related; we're all connected. There's not one of us that isn't connected. No matter what your language, no matter what your heritage, no matter how you understand your way, we're all connected and that's the way we have to be."

Honoring Nations: James Ransom: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Saint Regis Mohawk Chairman James Ransom provides his perspective on what sovereignty means today, and stresses the importance of using traditional Indigenous teachings in modern Native nation governance.

People
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

Ransom, James. "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Megan Hill:

"Next, we're going to hear from Chief James Ransom from the St. Regis Mohawk. As we know, Akwesasne Freedom School is a 2005 [Honoring Nations] honoree. Chief."

James Ransom:

"Thank you. I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to speak, and it truly is an honor to be here. I wanted to recognize David Cole from our tribe's economic development staff. He is also here, and you had already met Elvera earlier. Just as introduction to myself, I've been on tribal council now for four years but I've been working for my community for 29 years in different capacities. Akwesasne is pretty unique. We're an international community, half in Canada and half in the United States. And I've been fortunate to work for the tribe, prior to becoming Chief, to also work for the Canadian Recognized Council, as well as to -- I've spent five years working for the Confederacy itself. So I've kind of had a unique life experience of seeing all of our governments in action in different capacities.

What I want to talk about is, to share with you my perspective on sovereignty first. I think that I view it as inherent, as either you have it or you don't. There is no gray area about it. Someone else can't give it to you, and I feel strongly that someone can't take it away from you. I think that the Supreme Court just doesn't get it. They can only suppress it, but it keeps coming back. I think it was [Justice John] Marshall, on the Supreme Court, that called us 'domestic dependent nations,' as you heard this morning. Tell that to, as you heard this morning, tell that to Israel, tell that to China, tell that to Australia, who are looking to us for help today. That's not dependent on anybody. I think that the key to why sovereignty can't be taken away from us is because it's about responsibility. It's about our responsibility to live in peace and harmony with each other. It's about our responsibility to live in peace and harmony with the natural world. As Oren [Lyons] said this morning, it is about our responsibility to ensure that there is going to be a seventh generation.

The one thing that I've learned over the years about it is that it can become the longest four-letter swear word that I know when somebody abuses it. Particularly when individuals defend inappropriate actions by hiding behind it, that's the danger for us. The other thing that I've learned is that if you don't exercise then you can be pretty certain that somebody is going to try to exercise it for you and to your detriment. I wanted to talk briefly about the origins of tribal sovereignty in particular, and I think that -- I've heard a lot of the presentations today -- and the common theme that I keep hearing, resonating, is we need to look inward, we need to look at our culture. And I think the same holds true for sovereignty, that's the key to it. And for the Haudenosaunee, in particular, and I think for all tribes and all nations, we need to turn to our traditional teachings to answer the questions about the origins of sovereignty. And I think that when you're talking about responsibilities that our ancestors knew their responsibilities long before sovereignty was even a word, and that they embodied these responsibilities in the traditional teachings.

For us, you can see it in some of our teachings, like the Thanksgiving address, like the two-row wampum treaty belt, and they serve today as valuable guides on how we should conduct our relationships with others. And when you look at your teachings, look at the principles that underlie them. For us, I think that these principles are based on simple, but powerful words that are just as practical today as they were hundreds and thousands of years ago. For example, in the two-row wampum, there's three principles. The first one is [Mohawk language], or peace, and peace requires action. It doesn't just happen. It means that we have to work at it to achieve it. It means we need to be communicating with each other, always working to maintain the peace. The second principle, we call it, [Mohawk language], or a good mind. And what that means is that we set aside our differences and instead we try to bring our minds together as one and focus on our common interests rather than our problems. The last principle is [Mohawk language], or strength. And strength arises when our words and our actions match. That's what integrity is, that's what ethical conduct is.

In terms of sovereignty today, I thought it was important to set that backdrop to talk about it today. In that, if we look at Indian Country, we are approaching an economic crossroads. Some are already there, some are fast approaching it, others have a ways to go. And I think that the message I try to give on that is that now, more than ever, we need to make sure our decisions are rooted in our traditional teachings. I think it can make the difference as to whether we control our decisions or whether our decisions control us.

I wanted to give Akwesasne as an example to try to convey the message. We've had more than our share of problems, we've had 100 years if not more of industrial pollution. We've seen the destruction of our traditional lifestyles. We have health problems today from this pollution that weren't there before. In terms of education, in the 1950s, we turned over the responsibility of educating our children to the state and the public school systems. Internally, we've struggled as a community. We've struggled in particular to come of one mind as a community.

As I said, we're one community that's international, but we've become a community divided, and it's more than just the border dividing us geographically. Today we have three Mohawk governments. I sit on the elected council on, quote, 'the American portion.' We have an equivalent Canadian federally recognized government on the northern portion of the community, and we have a traditional government, and we [have] a couple of others that are trying to claim to be governments as well. I think to say that we haven't always gotten along is to put it mildly -- anybody who knows our community. If we look at our surrounding area and our region, locally and regionally, we have similar stories to others. We've been marginalized over the years, we've been viewed as being irrelevant, unimportant. We've got the St. Lawrence Seaway and the associated hydroelectric project in our backyard, but we have none of the benefits of that. We certainly have the environmental harm. Our local school district that we send our children to has an arena, has a swimming pool, at one time it had a planetarium, all built with Indian dollars because our students were going there.

So that's sort of a little bit of the past, but today, we're a community in transition, and that's where I want to bring back the traditional teachings. In that, particularly the last 30-40 years, I think we've seen a return to those traditional teachings, an enhancement of them to guide our community. If you look at some of the examples, I don't know if people are familiar with Akwesasne Notes. That newspaper, I think, really was a big part of the renaissance in terms of traditional teachings coming back into our community, and that thinking being reinvigorated. The Akwesasne Freedom School in 1979, and that institution being established. It's literally wrapped in traditional teachings, both in the Thanksgiving address and in teaching in the Mohawk language. What Elvera didn't talk about is the influence the Freedom School has had on the public school system. And what we've been doing the last 10 years in particular is taking back responsibility for the education of our children. I think that we send the majority of our students to a public school system and today over 60% of the students in that school district are Mohawk. It's the only school district in the entire state of New York that has a Native American student population that's the majority. Today, five out of the nine school board members are Mohawk. The curriculum is now incorporating the Thanksgiving address into it. You can go to the school and the Haudenosaunee flag flies alongside the Canadian and American flags, and it has carried over into Onondaga territory and the other territories as well. You can go to graduation now and you can see Mohawks in traditional clothing as an alternative to cap and gown at graduation -- it is a powerful visual sight. If you look at [the] environment, that we've been using the teachings to change relationships with state and federal officials and with industry. We've been using them to explain how we've been harmed from the pollution. We've been able to, by doing this, force -- literally force -- hundreds of millions of dollars of environmental cleanups. We're also using the teachings to restore our agricultural base. We are now planting original Haudenosaunee heirloom seeds in our community. We've planted thousands of black ash trees to support our basket makers. We've now developed an environmental assessment process based on the Thanksgiving address. I think that going forward from here for Akwesasne, and I think for Indian Country, is we need to develop a positive vision for that seventh generation that Oren [Lyons] talked about. In Akwesasne, what that means for us is getting control of our infrastructure.

Right now, we're in the process of forming a tribal electric distribution company and we've convinced the local company to leave our territory and allow us to buy them out and take it over. We're working with the Mescalero Apache, and we hope to form a tribal telephone company. We're working to heal the rift in our community, and that's probably the most daunting task we have. The reason is that, I think it's a trust issue in that the years of distrust work against us and it takes years to build trust. And when I talked about the last principle of [Mohawk language], or the strength, what I've seen is that when our words and actions don't match, it can take years to repair that damage. That being said, I believe our community is well positioned going forward. There is a lot of cooperation going on in the community that wasn't there before. We held a referendum on land claims in 2005, first time in the history of Akwesasne that we held a referendum on the southern portion and the northern portion on the same issue, on the same day, at the same time. And in that same time period, the traditional council held a similar debate over the issue. All three councils came out and the community literally came out in support of the settlement. That's the power of working together. What's changed probably most significantly is how the outside community views us. And I think that we're now getting our respect from our neighbors, our non-Native neighbors, that's been missing for a long time. And in fact we're becoming recognized as the economic hope for the region.

So I wanted to share this perspective with you and again I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak."

Anthony Pico: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians Chairman Anthony Pico reflects on his experiences as leader of his nation, and stresses the importance of Native nations strengthening their systems of governance in order to protect and strengthen their cultures and ways of life. 

People
Resource Type
Citation

Pico, Anthony. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

"First of all, good morning to all of you here! It's an honor and a privilege to be here before you, because I know that there literally has been 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 leaders that have come before you -- if you think about the history of your people and your Aboriginal histories. I'd also like to thank the Tohono O'odham Nation for allowing me to be here on their land. And I'm very grateful to Native Nations Institute, the University of Arizona and Ian Record for inviting me here today. And I'd also like to thank my people -- the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay -- and our tribal council and the honorable Bobby Barrett -- our chairman -- for making it possible for me to be with all of you. I'd like to introduce to you the Vice Chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay, the honorable Raymond {Coy) Hyde. Also, my good friend and childhood friend and one of the ones -- he and his mother approached me many years ago to run for tribal chairman. I remember that. (You're going to get it.) And I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the University of Arizona, the Morris K. Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, Native Nations Institute and its founders and directors and its staff for their continuous and social and economic progress for America's Indigenous peoples. I'd like to particularly extend my gratitude to Manley Begay, Stephen Cornell, Joseph Kalt, Miriam Jorgensen and Joan Timeche and others who have tirelessly advocated for tribal sovereignty and self-governance.

I recently recalled with a friend, the early days in Viejas -- at a time when about 152 impoverished citizens shared the land with an equal number of dogs and cats and frogs and coyotes. There was little economic development then on the res. And for young men and women -- mostly young men I guess at that time -- without a job there wasn't much to do except play baseball and pitch horseshoes. I remember at nighttime, with a star-filled sky, and you could still hear the clanging of horseshoes on iron pegs. I served more than two decades as the elected leader of my people and there were many on the reservation who contend my greatest accomplishments during those days was my ability to pitch horseshoes in total darkness. As in the case with many American Indians, I was raised poor in an abusive and alcoholic family, and were it not for res adoptive parents -- and this was before the Indian Child Welfare Act -- and the support of a nurturing spirit of our community, I'm convinced that today I'd either be dead or I'd be wasting away in some prison, as was the fate of many of my contemporaries. I eventually received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane letters from Long Island University in New York, but I wasn't a good student in my early years. I was continually put in remedial classes, and halfway through high school [I was] still in those remedial classes. And I was really convinced that I was stupid. But there were exceptions, in the fourth grade and the seventh grades, I remember the teachers who expressed an interest in me and my grades soared from Ds and Fs to Cs and Bs. And so I learned then, in retrospect, that such is the power of the caring spirit. I battled alcoholism from when I was a young man, and it's a struggle that continues with me today. It's a struggle that I will continue for the rest of my life, but I am surviving this and I even thrive under those conditions. And why am I so sure? Because I've always been a firm believer of the strength of the human spirit; I've always maintained that the Creator instilled in every man, woman and child the ability to rise above the fray and to succeed where others have failed and to achieve what others may view as unachievable.

Leadership, in my experience, is defined and created by adversity; and I know this to be true. I saw it in Vietnam when I served as a paratrooper in the United States Army infantry, where I witnessed young and normally docile men who in combat reached down deep within, and grasping the courage that they never dreamed that they even had, overcoming fears and leading our comrades to victory or safe haven. And I've seen it here in the United States with American Indians' struggle for social and economic justice and the protection and preservation of sovereignty and self-governance. Our tortured history since European settlement is, of course, a saga of loss and struggle, death, poverty and disease, war and suppression, misguided federal policy, racism and neglect. We've been able to hold onto what little that we have only through the courage of our elders and our ancestors who rose above the turmoil and reached down deep within themselves to surface as warriors and scholars and diplomats and prophets. They were all leaders.

The title of this seminar is 'What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office.' Who thought that up? Huh? Where is Mr. Kalt? I had some difficulty with the topic, largely because I'm not at a place in my life where I harbor any great deal of regrets. I can say, however, that I went through a transformation of sorts. It occurred later in my second decade of my nearly 24 years as tribal chairperson. I was not so much groomed for leadership as I was influenced by the caring spirit of my people at Viejas -- citizens of Viejas who freely gave of their time. And it's the Kumeyaay way to share and to care for other people as it is I know for your people. Even when we were poor in finances, we were and are rich in spirit and our sense of community of family has always been strong. That's why I've always given freely of my time. As I said earlier, were it not for the community of Viejas I would be dead or in jail, I have no doubt about that. When tribal leaders in 1983 asked me to seek public office, my response was of course to say 'yes.' They knew me. They saw me growing up as a boy to manhood. They had confidence in me, and suffice to say their belief in the human spirit was perhaps greater than mine. And the fact is that they really pulled me up out of the gutter and asked me to lead them.

Our tribal government budget deficit at the time was $3,000. My elders wanted me to create an economy there at Viejas and that was my focus for the first 15 years as elected tribal leader of my people. Viejas is recognized today for its success in creating a strong and diversified tribal economy. We have of course a casino, we own our own community bank, a shopping center, two RV parks, an entertainment business, and we created tribal partnerships in the development of the Marriott Residence Inn in Washington, DC -- a block and a half from the capitol, from that museum, and actually on the capitol mall in Sacramento. And one of our partners is Oneida. And we today are planning to build an $800 million casino resort. I can't take the bulk of the credit for my success. The strategies and policies that paved the way to progress on Viejas was largely the achievement of a competent staff under the direction of able leadership from the Viejas tribal council and our general membership.

Viejas also benefited from the leadership of California tribes during the gaming wars of the 1990s that resulted in landmark ballot initiatives in tribal-state compacted gaming. And again, it was adversity that brought out our leadership qualities of Indian tribes. When we were fighting the gaming wars, California tribal leaders walked in lock-step unity. We knew how to manipulate the press and we were savvy in our public relations. We learned the political game and played it like a drum and we were a formidable coalition. When the war was over we became complacent; we forgot what made us so formidable. With the leadership of four tribal governments rose yet again in referendum success earlier this year and that allowed us to expand the casino operations. It was late in the gaming wars of 1990 that I went through a transformation as I mentioned earlier. Danny Tucker, my good friend and mentor and chairman of the Sycuan Band of Kumeyaay hired a brilliant tactician -- former chairman Larry Kinley of the Lummi Nation -- to assist us in developing strategy in our ongoing political confrontation there in California. The Lummi and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest fought the landmark legal battles with Washington State and the federal government over the fishing rights. The battles resulted in the victorious 1974 decision by U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt affirming tribal rights to 50 percent of the salmon and the harvest of Washington State. The landmark Boldt decision was later upheld in the United States Supreme Court. The Lummi later were among several tribes that adopted newly elected federal policies of self-governance, embracing self-determination -- independence from the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Lummi Nation has never accepted money from the federal government paid to them for their land and despite crippling poverty and desperate needs, it sits in a bank untouched. To take the money, the elders taught, would be an erosion of their sovereignty. The Lummi have never signed a treaty and to this day they say would be a violation of that sacred right. I've always embraced a vague notion of sovereignty and its importance to Viejas and other tribal nations.

The Lummi Nation taught me that sovereignty was the journey -- it was a long and never-ending trek. That through a hurricane of rival interests, competing political agendas, and a greed for power, the Lummi ignited a fire in my belly and it still burns to this day. It's not economic progress that will sustain Native America for the next seven generations and beyond; it's sovereignty and the strengthening of our governments that will insure that future generations will continue to live what you consider, a Native way of life. That is in fact, what is put forth by Native Nations Institute -- that only by strengthening our governments and non-economic institutions can we build a foundation for long-term economic and social progress.

As you know, times have changed. Tribes are changing. Our children are changing, subject to the influence of the modern world in which we all live. Our languages are dying and so are those who practice and teach us the old traditions and values. We need to see, feel and imagine and reinvent Indian sovereignty into what it is. And we need to do this within each tribe within all Indian Country, and there are different paths and future emphasis for tribes to take. Some tribes will strengthen heir sovereignty through spiritual and religious beliefs and practices; some will provide new modern and strong 21st-century tribal governments. Others will focus on economic development as they build the infrastructure. I hope the tribes will focus on healing the pain of the past and the psychological damage of poverty and social disintegration that haunts each generation. Each can and will carry us to a new place if we continue to share and learn from each others' experiences and examples. It's critical that we find ways to free ourselves from the patterns of self-destruction, the unrecognized anger we have, the abuse and racism that drives so many to alcohol, to drugs and suicide. We have to learn to live life again not deaden ourselves to it. If not for ourselves, then we must learn to be life-affirming for the sake of our children and those children that aren't born.

It's an incredible challenge to break new ground in Indian Country. It's an ever greater challenge to find and forge a path that preserves our roots while accommodating the demands of today's world. The moment has come to exercise and claim such a place for modern Indians. Can we seize this opportunity and create a renaissance for our tribe and people in the present? What we and our elders and those of us before have struggled so hard to hold onto, our sovereignty and our right to self-governance, we can so easily lose. The greatest and most important legacy that we leave our children, grandchildren, and those generations to come is the opportunity to live a Native way of life. We can only keep that promise if we grasp our sovereignty tightly and not let it gradually slip away as grains of sand through a clenched fist.

Am I worried about the future? No. There will be struggles, there will be adversity, but the struggles will make us strong and diligent. From the seeds of adversity will grow our future leaders. Struggle and adversity can bring the best in the individual. I know this to be true and it can do the same for tribes. I have a concern and it rests with the United States Supreme Court and its ability to strengthen or erode sovereignty and our right to govern our own lands. This is where our focus must be, in my opinion, in protecting our shield of sovereignty from attack by the nation's highest court. I have a wish that tribes embrace transparency in governance, openness with both tribal citizens and non-Indian governments. Truth is our most important and powerful ally and I strongly advocate that tribes look carefully at their image with the non-Indian public. How we are perceived by the public and elected officials and policy makers will define our future. We are increasingly being perceived not as nations and governments, with a stalwart and culturally rich past, but as businesses and corporations, purveyors of gambling and that is a dangerous trend. Openness in public relations is an arrow in our quiver, which we have not successfully used. We must sharpen it and aim it to where it does the most good. Make no mistake, I believe -- and I've been criticized for saying this -- but I firmly believe this: when push comes to shove, it's the voting public of this country that will determine the fate of Native Americans.

I'm in the autumn of my years now; my days in public office are over.* But I look over the audience today -- and speaking to others while I've been here at today's and tomorrow's leaders -- and I take great pride and comfort knowing that the future of Native America is in competent and capable hands. I will not chart your future; that's for you to decide. You must look to yourself, to your tribe, to your Creator and just as important, to your ancestors who have gone before you and communicate with them, through prayer or however ways you can do that. They are there and they're willing and they're able and they will listen to you. And in conclusion, never, never forget the blood of our ancestors have blessed the continents of North and South America. That blood runs in your veins right now as I speak. To not do the best that we can and are capable of would be an insult to the suffering and their pain that they had to endure. Fight as fiercely and as wise as you can and deliver Native America to the next generation. Thank you." 

* Anthony Pico was elected to another term as Chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay in December 2010.

Michael K. Mitchell: Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Mohawk Council of Akwesasne Grand Chief Michael K. Mitchell discusses the Akwesasne Mohawk's effort to regain control over their own affairs, and offers his advice to leaders who are working to regain jurisdiction over their lands and resources as well as rebuild their nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Mitchell, Michael K. "Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

Michael K. Mitchell:

"Mohawk golf club. Guaranteed to go 300-400 yards, no problem. So if you can't hit your drives, I'm selling good sticks. Actually I wanted to come up here and start with this because the game of lacrosse is a contribution of Native American. It's an Indigenous game. We were playing this game when Europeans came to the New World. But if you read your history, it will tell you the Jesuits, the first time they saw Iroquois playing this game against another tribe, they recorded in their history that they were at war because they played the game so intensely. It gives you an idea how far apart -- their view and ours -- because they were really playing this game to honor their Creator. They were playing the game to honor their elders. They were playing the game to get physically fit. And it could be, in them days, close to 100 braves on one side. And if they had a difference of opinion or a difference with different nations, they wouldn't necessarily go to war, but they would agree to have a lacrosse game. And the winner would be accorded the right of whatever differences they had. And I wanted to inject a little culture because I want to donate this stick to our Indigenous golf tournament that we're going to have Friday. Don't you guys get any ideas about using it for a driver, either."

Joan Timeche:

"We will be, I'm not sure if we're going to, we'll probably auction this off at our golf tournament on April 4th here in Tucson. Thank you very much."

Michael K. Mitchell:

"It was a real pleasure to sit in the audience this morning and listen to the presenters share some of our experiences on leadership, Indigenous leaders from different nations. There's a lot of wisdom there. From what I understand, there's quite a few young leaders that are attending this conference. Heed their words, because nation building is a process that you cannot get from books, you certainly can't get it from Washington or Ottawa. These ideas of governance stem right from the heart of our nations, passed on from our elders.

They say in our traditions back home -- among the Mohawk Nation, Haudenosaunee -- our leader is acknowledged from the time he is crawling on the dirt, to when he walks, to when he's a young man and he hunts. And everything he does defines his characteristics. And depending on what clan he belongs to -- because we also, like many nations, have our clans (I belong to the Wolf clan, my Mohawk name is Kanentakeron) -- and so we are defined [by] how we are conducting ourselves within our own society. And from that, back home the women of the clans would select who the leader would be. And they say that he has already proven his leadership from the way he conducts himself, morals, leadership to how he relates to his people, how he takes care of them, how he acknowledges the elders in the families that are in his nation. So the women already knew he was going to be a good leader. And they say that he would be a leader for as long as he demonstrated those qualities. If at any time he wasn't a good leader, that he would fall on something, the women gave him three chances in his lifetime to set it straight; they would set him straight. And so if he went beyond that and he didn't follow the principles of [Mohawk language], a good mind, the women would take you out of office.

Well, back home in Canada, Canada thought they could improve on that kind of leadership and that kind of democracy. And you've been hearing this morning about the Indian Act in Canada. You also heard about the Indian Reorganization Act in the United States. That was Canada's idea of governance for First Nations. I grew up in the longhouse. My mother is a clan mother, my brother is a wampum keeper, and I have a sister who is a very strong Christian -- goes to church just about every day. So for my family, I think we cover all the elements. Now I come from a territory that is located in upstate New York and it's right on the border of Canada/United States. Half the reservation is in the United States side. My brothers -- James Ransom is the tribal chief, he's here; Ron LaFrance, Jr. is a tribal chief, he's also here –- he's one of the younger ones. We were just talking to James a while ago and he's on his third term. They both adhere to those principles and philosophy from the traditional side of our nation. And when you have that in your heart and in your mind, it just about guarantees that you have the nation's heart and mind, that you're going to be a good leader. And so those ideas about all the frustrations that you're going to face in your political lifetime, there's another saying back home, the elders tell you as you're growing up: If you're going to be a leader, you have to have a skin, and in our language that means 'seven thumbs thick,' or sometimes they'll say 'seven skins thick,' because you have to exercise a lot of patience, you have to exercise a good mind and good will. And you will take a lot of abuse. And so you take that home. And how you conduct yourself as a leader that will be judged by the people in your territory, in your community. And so for us, term limits is something that is decided by your nation and that term could be your whole life if you're a good leader. So those people that you saw -- those three people that sat in front of you and gave presentations just before noon -- look at them as very wise leaders who are willing to share their experience with you, because they have demonstrated the type of leadership that our people need and have served our nations well.

I became Grand Chief in 1984 and all I had in knowledge was my traditional upbringing. I didn't realize that under the Indian Act that all the authority comes from Ottawa, comes from the Indian Act, comes from the Department of Indian Affairs. The council that I inherited was in a deficit of close to $2.5 million and all they were responsible for was $5 million. The government was sent to come down and put our administration finances under third-party management. So I came to be a leader at the wrong time. And I studied, talked to people, and I found out that it's pretty well the Indian agent, Indian Affairs, their officials pretty well ran the community -- education, they controlled health, they controlled social, welfare, housing. And it was just like they said this morning; the chiefs that were on council were really just administering the programs. So the head chief was the band administrator. The language that was prevalent; nobody said 'nation.' Nobody spoke of 'nation.' As a matter of fact, our people at that time looked down on nation people. They were the Long House people, traditional people, and they never gave up the idea that we're a nation. They kept that alive. But they were very few because they also followed their own Native American religion. They still had their ceremonies and they kept that going. They kept our tongue alive: [Mohawk language].

We only spoke our language, first language. And so when I got to work in my term, there was some men by the council office and they didn't have an appointment. So they stayed outside because that's the way you met with the chief back in them days and you better have an appointment. So they caught me as I'm going in and they said, "˜We'd like to meet with you. And we don't have an appointment, but it's kind of important. Could you make some time for us?' I said, "˜Come on in.' Sat down, gave them some coffee, spoke in our own language and I said, "˜What seems to be the problem?' And they said, "˜Well, our friends over here were out fishing the other day and a conservation officer stopped them. And he said they didn't have any license to be on the river to be fishing, by the interior government. And so they confiscated our boats and motors and nets. And in the last six months it's been a steady process of having this happen. You're a new chief. We're wondering if you might consider checking into this.' I said, "˜Listen, I'm going to make time tomorrow morning. I'm going to get my boat and I'm going to track down this conservation officer from Ontario and ask them,' because you grow up believing that our waters is ours. And they were making new laws and the government was changing things, creeping more into 'civilizing us' by making us come under their law -- provincial law, state law. And so the Aboriginal right to hunt and fish at that time was slowly being taken over. Anyway, when I told them that I was going to go on the river they said, "˜Well, we'll come with you because we know the river. We know where he's going to come in from.'

So early in the morning we got out on the river. It didn't take long before they found where he was coming from, Cornwall. You have to come around a certain island. And the river current is very fast. So when you come around this one island eastern corner island, St. Regis Island, you have to, you're in United States waters and you're in Quebec waters and he's in Ontario. That's where we were waiting for him. And as soon as he come across that island we came out and we stopped them on the river. And then we shut off the motor and we started talking. He didn't want to hear anything about...I was asking him if he could return the boats. Maybe he didn't understand that we don't need a license. He was aggressive. He was talking down to us like we didn't know anything. So I tried to be very diplomatic, and when it came down to the end -- remember that seven thumbs thick, patience and all that -- I said, "˜Sir, you won't tell us where you took their boats but we want them back. So I have to take your boat.' And his jaw just dropped and he says, "˜You're what?' I said, "˜Yep, I have to take your boat until they get their boats back. You're coming with us.'

We took him down to St. Regis Village police station and then I phoned Toronto, Ministry of Natural Resources and I told them, I said, "˜I have your administrator official here.' Well, it worked up very fast up the chain of command. People were calling. "˜Is he a hostage?' Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada. I said, "˜No, I just want those boats back.' So it didn't take long, maybe a couple hours. Their Premier, Prime Minister of Ontario, he calls. He said, "˜Look, this might be an international crisis situation. I'm sure we can resolve this.' Anyway, we worked it out, they traced; they found those boats in Toronto, which is a four-hour drive from Akwesasne. I said, "˜I want them boats back by 9 o'clock in the morning or I'm going to call a press conference.' So he calls back in half an hour, he says, "˜Those boats are on their way.' You see I learned very fast that you've got to speak their language. That's the only way they'll do business with you. Those boats came back. The same guy that arrested them brought the boats back in the morning -- turned them over, they inspected and everything was there -- the motor, boats.

And then I asked my council and our administrator, "˜Why is it that we don't have any authority on the water? We live by the river. We're on the St. Lawrence and we don't seem to have any authority left.' The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they enforce the federal laws. The Quebec Provincial Police and the Ontario Provincial Police enforce the provincial law. So everybody was an authority out there except us. Anyway, I passed a council resolution. We put together our own conservation law for the water, for the environment, for the wild game, for the river life; sent it to Ottawa. Well see how fast it came back and said, "˜You have no authority under the Indian Act to do this.' Anyway, seven times, diplomatically. Again, they said 'no.' I turned around and I went to the nation chiefs, the traditional leaders at the longhouse and I said, "˜I want to implement a nation law based on our inherent right.' We went to the Iroquois Confederacy Grand Council meeting and passed it as a community law for Akwesasne.

I said, "˜Now, we need our conservation officers.' And Canada says, "˜Nope. Whoever heard of Mohawk conservation officers executing their own law?' Ontario said no. The feds said no. Ontario said no. Don't forget where we live. I called Albany, New York -- New York State Police Academy -- and said, "˜Do you have a conservation course up there?' They said, "˜Yeah.' "˜Can you register some Mohawks to take this program?' "˜Yep.' Six months later they come home wearing uniforms. They had the state trooper headgear, nine-millimeter sidearm -- 'Dirty Harry' guns -- and they hit that water and they started bringing in.

Oh, at the same time, we executed our conservation environment law in the justice program; we set up our courts. Well, that court was nonexistent. We're only doing dog catching and little municipal things. We upgraded our statute [because] we had judges but they just weren't allowed to hear bigger cases. Those conservation officers were bringing in non-Natives who refused to buy our fishing licenses, hunting licenses, safety license and they brought them to our court and they were kicking and screaming saying, "˜This is a kangaroo court. You have no authority. I'm going to contact my member of Parliament.' But when they opened that door, there's a courtroom that had the Mohawk community flag, the Haudenosaunee flag, on the wall. There's a judge sitting up there, there's a prosecutor and there's a lawyer there that would defend you if you needed one. They read the charge, they read the law and they paid the fine. And that's how we started our justice program.

And those, I guess in reflection, is stand up for your nation's rights; putting them back in action. Those conservation officers, the first time they went over to Canada into Cornwall, the Ontario Provincial Police arrested them, confiscated their weapons saying, "˜These are totally illegal in Canada.' They went to court, produced their training from the United States. The judge says, "˜These people are qualified for the work they do. You return them guns.' And so you have to fight the legal system, you have to fight the government system, but after awhile -- oh, the appeal, they lost the appeal, too. Anyway, you have to take control. And then I noticed that on council, the way the programs were running, the Department of Indian Affairs just about ran everything, all the different programs. So I went to see the Minister of Indian Affairs and said, "˜Look, these deficits are going to keep occurring "˜cause your people don't give a damn about how our business is...' (Thank you very much. That wasn't peace; that was two minutes.) Well, to make a long story short, I asked the minister, [because] all these government people that were in authority over us, none of them was [Mohawk language], none of them were Native. So I cut a deal with him. I said, "˜I'll wipe that deficit out within five years but you've got to let us do it our way.' He says, "˜What's that?' I said, "˜A lot of our people are skilled in financing, administration, proposal writing. Why do we have to get authority from you?' So we made a deal. That was kind of a curiosity for him. And I said, "˜You take back all your government people and we'll hire our own to look after the affairs of our people. We'll look after our administration.'

We did wipe all that deficit within five years and our government grew. We established a relationship with the traditional government and passed a resolution recognizing them as our historic national government. We started having meetings with the tribal council on the American side and we started planning for the future. It's just an idea that evolves from your own nation. A lot of other episodes happened like the stories that I'm telling you. I was on a little bit of a roll there. When you're a leader, you require patience but sometimes it's the audacity, shocking the Canadian and American governments to say, "˜Yes, I have that authority and I'm going to do something about it.' You also got to think of your youth and your elders, and I proposed the writing that led us to having our own nursing home, our own arena, looked at development around in the community that needed those programs and our people went after them. So it's out there. For those fights between a tribe and the Long House on our side was an ongoing affair. Today, they sit together and they plan for the whole territory. And that's the kind of story I guess I can leave with you. Don't allow yourselves to fight with one another because the Indian Act, criteria from the American government, state, etc. -- we have that jealousy factor; it don't belong to us but we are so full of it in our communities. The longer vision in nation building, you rise, give knowledge to your young, respect your elders, look after the people in general and fight together. And I guess I could say that to all of you."