strategic orientation

David Montgomery: The Quinault Indian Nation's Q-munity Roadmap

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this interview with NNI's Ian Record, Quinault Indian Nation Budget Officer David Montgomery provides a comprehensive overview of Quinault's Q-munity Roadmap performance-based budgeting process, and discusses how citizen education and engagement has proven crucial to the success of this groundbreaking initiative. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Montgomery, David. "The Quinault Indian Nation's Q-munity Roadmap." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. February 22, 2012. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today ‘s program we are honored to have with us David Montgomery. David is a citizen of the Quinault Indian Nation and has served as Quinault’s budget officer since 2009. As his nation’s budget officer, David is overseeing the development and implementation of what is known as the Q-munity Roadmap, an organization-wide transformation focused on strategic planning, budgeting and performance management. David, welcome. Good to have you with us today."

David Montgomery:

"Thanks. Glad to be here."

Ian Record:

"I’ve shared a few highlights of your personal biography, but why don’t you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself. What did I leave out?"

David Montgomery:

"Okay. No, you did a good job, but basically I’ve been with Quinault for a couple of years and I’m their budget director and we worked together in our organization to develop this transformational process that has since gotten the interest of governments all around the world, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, because they’re learning -- non-Indigenous governments, mainstream governments -- are learning that there’s actually a lot that they can learn from us: our tribalistic, our collaborative approach that doesn’t exist in many governments. So what we’re going to be talking about today has been shared with governments from as far away as Denmark, Canada, all around North America."

Ian Record:

"That’s great. We’ve seen a lot of that with the work that we do on Native nation-building, research that [shows] Native Nations are teaching governments and peoples around the world on how to do things and how to do things right.

So we’re here today to talk about the topic of tribal administration and program service delivery, specifically what the Quinault Indian Nation is doing in this arena. I’m curious, let’s begin talking about the Q-munity Roadmap, and just so people understand how it’s spelled. It’s the letter 'Q' and then 'munity Roadmap.' Why and how did the Q-munity Roadmap come about, what was it seeking to do, what was it seeking to change?"

David Montgomery:

"So basically what happened is maybe five years ago, we really looked at our processes and we were trying to decide what we could do better and after analysis we discovered that even though we were a self-governance tribe, even though we had sovereignty and self determination, year after year we were just doing the same thing and if you traced it all the way back 20 years it was the exact same thing that the federal government was doing more or less. So we realized we were not, we didn’t have the capacity to really change it and make our budget, make our government truly our own and that’s because of all the things that were set up by the federal government that were just carry over because it’s hard to change those things. If you do the same thing every year, that’s easy. But when you really want to make dynamic changes, that becomes very difficult, especially if you have a complex organization with lots of employees like we did. So we went back to the drawing board and said, how can we re-imagine all these administrative processes that we’re doing to actually become a truly self-governing nation that meets Quinault priorities."

Ian Record:

"So can you compare you talked about essentially self-administration. That’s really what you were doing from what you’re saying that when you took over the federal government’s programs, you didn’t really change how things were done. Can you compare and contrast the Q-munity Road Map approach with how the Quinault Nation’s administration function before?"

David Montgomery:

"So before, we used what’s called incremental budgeting, which is where you just take last year’s budget and roll it forward, and almost every government uses this, so I’m imagining most tribes in the United States do. It doesn’t lend itself to making changes. You just if there’s more money coming in you usually give a percentage increase to people. If there’s less money coming in you do across the board cuts. But as an example, if you do across the board cuts, it doesn’t make a lot of sense cause if you think about your household budget you might have rent and food and maybe you’re dining out and some entertainment cost. So if you all of a sudden got a demotion and took in less money, you wouldn’t cut all of your budgets equally by 10 percent, 'cause your rent’s still the same; you’d cut your entertainment budgets. And so as a government we wanted to think about it that way so we wanted to be able to fund our priorities and take money away from the things that weren’t important to us anymore, even though we’d just been carrying them forward for 20 years. So we got away from the incremental budgeting approach. And we also, another issue is we were doing a lot of strategic planning, which is a great exercise and a lot of tribes do it, but then what happens after it’s adopted and it becomes official is it just sits on the shelf and no one does anything with it. And the reason for that is not because it’s not a good plan, it’s not because people don’t want to, it’s because there aren’t the mechanisms set up to do that because the budgets themselves aren’t tied to what the strategic plan says. So if the dollars are appropriated X, Y and Z, but now you want to do A, B and C, X, Y and Z is still going to get done because that’s where all the money’s going. So we need to be able to shift that."

Ian Record:

"It’s interesting you mention this, and we’ve heard this from a lot of other tribes and tribal leaders that they really began to make transformative change happen and sustain that change over time when they got a strategic vision of where they wanted to head, and then the daily administrative decisions that they were making were viewed through that lens of where are we trying to head, what’s the long term picture we’re trying to create."

David Montgomery:

"Yes, that’s exactly correct."

Ian Record:

"So I was reviewing some of the educational materials that you prepared and discriminated to your employees and your citizens as you are unveiling this initiative and trying to get people behind it, and it mentions in these materials that the objective of the Q-munity Roadmap is to combat bureaucracy and align the government with the needs and wishes of its citizens, and it acknowledges that prior to the unveiling and the launch of this initiative that you really weren’t satisfactorily meeting the needs of the citizens. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you assessed and came to that realization that we’re not meeting the needs of our citizens, we’re not making the kind of change that they want to see happen."

David Montgomery:

"Exactly. So basically it’s no secret that almost all governments around the world have very little trust with their citizens. That’s just a constant and so that was the same with us. You had the federal system -- BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], IHS [Indian Health Service] -- that was running things. We were unhappy with that. Our citizens were unhappy with that. Then we took over and we do the same thing so why would our citizens be pleased with that. We were doing all the strategic planning, we were saying we were going to do all these great things and then nothing was happening so constantly we were building people’s hopes up and then we weren’t following through. And so that’s how we determined we really need to change what we’re doing because it’s not about what government wants to do, it’s not about what’s easy for us, it’s about what the people actually need and that’s ever changing. And so we were trying to set up a government structure that could be dynamic and could adapt with the changing needs and wishes of our citizens."

Ian Record:

"So the official statement from the Nation introducing the Roadmap to employees and citizens explains that the initiative is an ambitious quest and is 'more than anything we’ve done before.' How so?"

David Montgomery:

"Basically we turned our whole organization upside down. We really focused on strategic planning, which at first a lot of people said, 'Oh, I need to do my real job. I don’t have time for this sort of stuff,' but in reality, strategy, long-term strategy is what drives your organization. So we forced people to spend, the whole management team to spend a lot of time on strategic planning and really trying to figure out what our strategies were. Then we went through a budget process that was unlike anything they’d ever done before. They really had to quantify what they wanted to do, how it was related to our strategic plan and how you were going to measure it, which we’d never done before so there’s accountability. And then we went through a quarterly reporting process which again has performance metrics and measuring and checking progress against our strategic plan. And all of this had never been done before. Basically if you became a manager you could just do the same thing every year for your whole entire career without a lot of oversight or accountability and never really having to change. So if you think about our organizational culture being that way for 20 years or more and then all of a sudden you’re just making all these changes at once, then it makes everyone really uncomfortable and so when people get uncomfortable they don’t want to make these changes and so that’s why we really tried hard to put together these educational materials you’re referencing and get our organization onboard. Because you can’t generally make one of these changes at a time cause they’re all interrelated so you have to kind of do a big initiative all at once."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned how you you’ve used this word 'transform' multiple times already in our conversation about what you were trying to do with the Q-munity Roadmap, and reading the materials I think in many ways it’s revolutionary what you’ve been working to do in terms of how the Quinault Indian Nation government operates. And you mentioned turning the administration upside down, turning it on its head and really reconceiving for your administrators how they do their jobs. How have you worked to get the Nation’s employees onboard with this? How have you worked to cultivate their buy-in and get them to realize that you’re empowering them to really make lasting change?"

David Montgomery:

"That was a big issue for us. It was a really top-down, command-and-control approach, and so when we conceived this new Q-munity Roadmap, we decided that we wanted to get our employees involved from step one and so we hosted an all employee launch party -- which I worked with Human Resources to do that -- and we did fun employee morale-boosting activities combined with this launch of our initiative because we wanted employees to associate this initiative as something positive for them, because it’s not going to lead to layoffs, it’s not going to make their jobs harder. That’s actually going to make their jobs easier in the long run and then we invited them all to participate and to be involved because we said, 'It doesn’t make sense to us that only senior managers are doing the budgets and being responsible for performance when it’s the frontline staff that are doing the job and actually interacting with our citizens and our customers.' And so we feel if we are going to be a responsive, effective government we have got to get their buy-in, we’ve got to get their knowledge and input into our process. Otherwise it’s not going to work. It’s going to be kind of more of the same. And so we had this launch party and then we also passed out logoed apparel so jackets and T-shirts and even bags, pens, pencils, all these different things with our brand on it and even though the employees didn’t at first maybe know what all this was about they all like free stuff most employees do. And so then the next day you could see employees walking down the hallway wearing this stuff, using the pens, using the pencils and so it gave the appearance of buy-in in our organization which helped push the momentum forward."

Ian Record:

"And do you think those sorts of efforts while seemingly maybe small efforts taken as a whole really send a message to the employees that this is something we’re doing, we’re not simply doing something that the feds have done. We’re taking ownership and claiming our own future?"

David Montgomery:

"Yeah. We wanted them to know that this is us, this is our process and that they actually get to be involved. They’re going to be decision makers. So one thing that we did in our budget process is we required every employee of a program to sign off on the manager’s proposal, which doesn’t necessarily mean they agree with everything but it’s saying that they were given the opportunity to provide input, because all too often managers would come up with the game plan and the employees wouldn’t know what it was. So then how is the employee supposed to be working towards this common goal if they’re all just kind of doing what they think is a good idea? So if they get together and they talk about the direction, they look at the strategic plan, kind of see our vision and then they as a group come up with what they want to do and how they’re going to measure it then the performance increases exponentially."

Ian Record:

"So pretend for a moment that I’ve just been hired by the Nation, the Quinault Nation, to work in one of its social service programs. Can you explain to me what this Road Map is and what it means for how I’m supposed to view and how I’m supposed to do my job?"

David Montgomery:

"Yeah. So first what we would do is we’d talk to you about the strategic plan, because that’s our foundational document. We’d say, 'As a social service employee, this section of our plan -- which would be wellness -- has to do with you. We want you to be familiar with this. This lays out where we want to be in ten years. This lays out our long-term and intermediate goals and we need every employee, and in this case you as a social service person, to be helping us to achieve this goal.' Next we’d say, 'This is your actual budget proposal, work plan, offer for your program. This is where we took the strategies in the strategic plan and your program manager and staff came up with these goals and objectives and this is how they’re measurable.' Then I’d let you know that we are going to be checking in quarterly and we want to see progress against these, so if you’re going to be a successful employee in our organization, you really need to stay focused on these things that we’ve identified or that actually you’ve identified as things that you want to work on. And then I’d also tell you that these are dynamic, these are ever changing. What’s a problem today may not be a problem ten years from now, and in fact it shouldn’t be. If we’ve done our job, we are making some progress on these things so always be thinking about what we can do differently, what we can do better or how things are changing and then when we come through a rewrite of our budgets then we want your input. And then I’d explain to you that every quarterly we do quarterly reporting, which is where we take those same goals and objectives and we ask you to report your progress. And then the last thing is for a 'job well done' programs we take that quarterly reporting information and we translate it into a magazine format that can go out to our public so they can understand full circle how it went from their strategic plan vision all the way through our government organization and came out the other end with a positive impact. And so I’d tell you as an employee you should be really wanting to be featured in that magazine as a 'job well done,' because that means that you have done what we have asked you to do in the strategic plan."

Ian Record:

"Isn’t that real important? And you see this as an issue in all governments -- whether tribal or non-tribal -- where there’s not enough recognition for a job well done, that these administrators, these frontline staff were toiling in anonymity for their entire careers without any sort of recognition or acknowledgement of the change that they’re making."

David Montgomery:

"Yeah. Exactly. That’s a big problem, and actually in Indian Country people are afraid of failure because there’s a really high expectation for success, but what I’ve observed is if you’re trying so hard to study things and consider them and make sure you’re doing the right thing, then you’ll almost fail by default because the program just continues and you’re not doing anything about it. So what we did when we started this new process is we said, 'Don’t be afraid of failure.' Do what you think is right because there’s very little that we can do that would be such a catastrophic failure that it would bring down our whole organization. In reality, it’s just a small failure and if your managers are always looking at things then you can just correct and it’s like a blip on the radar screen, nobody even notices it. But you have to create the culture where people feel like they can make mistakes."

Ian Record:

"Yeah, and we don’t see that everywhere in Indian Country. There are many tribes that -- and a lot of whom have those old federal systems -- that they’re just simply self-administering now where you make one mistake and you’re gone."

David Montgomery:

"Yeah, exactly.

Ian Record:

"And then in the process you’re not building up any of the institutional knowledge that you need to make change last over time."

David Montgomery:

"Yeah. And you wipe out innovation and creativity, because if you’re being innovative and being creative, you’re probably doing something new and if you’re doing something new, you’re not going to get it 100 percent right on the first try."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned performance budgeting. You mentioned that a new employee -- as you’re explaining to them how their job works -- that they have to essentially follow what’s dictated in the budget proposal for their department. Performance budgeting and the process that you’ve put in place, the bottom line is the Nation has limited resources, you’re going to have more proposals come in requesting more money than you have. So how do you as the budget officer and how does the Q-munity Roadmap, the people charged with carrying out that plan, how do they I guess vet those proposals, how do they rank them, how do they prioritize them, then how do they distribute the funds?"

David Montgomery:

"So basically what we’ve done is we’ve created results teams which since we...that’s what they were called when it launched, and since then we’ve morphed them into our strategic-planning teams, but what they are is they’re frontline employees mostly, some mid-level managers and community members, and they’re organized by domain in our strategic plan, which is kind of functional areas. So for example we’ll take wellness from the social services example earlier. There’s a wellness team that’s responsible for the strategic plan, but then also when it’s time for budget, they review all those proposals and provide recommendations and do an analysis of how closely those proposals align with our strategic plan, because at the end of the day that’s the document that we look to to make those hard decisions."

Ian Record:

"So give me an example of how the performance budgeting process works for say law enforcement, kind of from the beginning to the end."

David Montgomery:

"What we look at is we look at outputs and outcomes as our performance measures. A lot of governments they don’t do any performance measures at all, the rest that do mostly focus on outputs. And so just to get the terminology straight, an output would be like number of tickets issued. So it’s a measure of productivity, which is good, but as an example if you’re a government decision-maker, the number of tickets that you issue doesn’t necessarily correlate with any sort of positive impact on your people. Instead you need to focus on outcomes. So if we’re trying to eliminate drunk driving, for example, then maybe we would look at the number of citations for drunk driving issued or maybe we would look at something else, maybe a measure that goes to the court system. How are those being resolved that are being prosecuted? All those things are great, but what we really want to see is a measurable outcome, which is a decrease in drunk driving-related deaths. And you can go through that exercise for almost any program, and you want to come up with both because you want measures of productivity, those are short-term that you can really keep track of, but you want the longer-term measures of outcomes. Are you making a positive impact in the lives of your people?"

Ian Record:

"So where do we talked about where the employees fit in in this process, particularly those maybe below the level of a department head or senior manager. Where do the citizens of the Nation fit in this Q-munity Roadmap process? What role do they play and what has been your challenge, I guess, and how have you addressed the challenge with getting their buy-in?"

David Montgomery:

"Basically, the citizens, we don’t expect them to be experts on our government process, on our bureaucracy if you will, so we engage them at the very beginning which is strategic planning. We want them to tell us where they want to end up and how they think we should get there. Then we go through our process and our own internal accountability and the next main point where they get engaged is when we send out this magazine. It’s kind of a first-of-its-kind publication because it takes anecdotal information which you’d see in a normal magazine, lots of pictures, things that are easy to understand, but it combines the performance data and the strategic-planning initiatives. So we’re trying to translate this highly technical and complex government system into something that the citizens can understand with the thought being that once they get this magazine and they read about our progress and they also experience the services and they observe what we’re doing, then the next time we go into a strategic planning cycle they’re more informed and educated about what we’ve done and then as they give us their feedback it’s real relevant and up to date and so we just keep it’s like a feedback, we just keep going through this cycle."

Ian Record:

"Have you seen their view of government improve as they’ve seen that loop come back to them and they’re seeing progress being made on their wishes, what their long term vision of the future is?"

David Montgomery:

"Yeah. Right now, we’re admittedly only three years into it, so we have a lot of improving to do, but basically I’ve heard almost nothing but positive feedback. At first, in the first year and a half it was rough because we were changing the organization and when people don’t like change they want to bad mouth it. But now that they realize they can’t get away from it, they’re actually, employees are starting to like the accountability because they can prove to the citizens and other people, 'This is what I’ve done for you. This is what I’ve done to earn my paycheck.' And so I’ve had managers and staff tell me, 'Thank you for implementing this. This is keeping us on top of things, this is making us more productive and this is making us feel better about our jobs,' which then that message is spilling over into the community, so even though the community still maybe doesn’t totally understand what’s happening, they know the government is making an effort to improve, to be more effective and to be more responsive."

Ian Record:

"So this is a good segue into my next question and it deals with the fact that you mentioned at the beginning: that you’ve been presenting the work that Quinault’s been doing to audiences from all over the world. And in those presentations you quote a U.S. Navy Admiral who said, 'Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.' Why do you site this quote in your presentations and how is it relevant to the Q-munity Roadmap process?

David Montgomery:

"Basically because when you do a big change like this, it requires a lot of courage. It does. But when you think of courage, normally you think of charging into battle or something like that and that’s not what this is about. If you come into it and expect a success in six months, in a year, even in two years, you’re probably not going to see it. So what you have to train yourself to think about is it’s courageous patience. To make a big change in a complex organization with lots of engrained systems, you’ve got to stick with it and you’ve got to fight those battles, those small battles every single day until it becomes part of the organizational culture and then it’s sustained that way."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned that it’s only been, this Q-munity Roadmap has only been in place about three years now. But can you talk from your perspective in terms of how the Q-munity Roadmap and this new innovative approach to governmental budgeting is improving the Nation’s provision of programs and services to its citizens?"

David Montgomery:

"Number one, we’re just more effective and accountable for how we spend our money, because before we didn’t really know and we didn’t know the difference between success and failure because we weren’t really measuring it. And so what gets measured gets done and so now we’ve identified these are the things we think are important, we’re going to measure them and now they’re getting done at a higher rate, because all of a sudden managers are having their attention directed at that. Another benefit to our citizens is we are becoming much more competitive for grants and so we’re tracking all this data, we’re following our own strategic plan and at the present time those are really big concepts, important concepts with federal funding agencies and private foundations. They want to see a community vision that you’re following with performance metrics. So that’s why I always encourage other tribes to do that, because as federal funding is becoming more tight, we have to become more competitive to get a share of that money, and then we can stop competing with each other and start competing with cities and others..."

Ian Record: "So following up on that, how is the Q-munity Roadmap enhancing the Nation’s ability to achieve its long-term strategic goals and is it realizing its desired effects?"

David Montgomery:

"Yes. When you look at a long-term goal, you can’t really assess that in three years of course, but it appears to be trending in that direction. We had done -- this last strategic plan was our fourth strategic plan, and by all accounts the first three were abject failures and now people are saying, 'Wow, this is actually leading to something.' And so we feel that in ten years, when we look back at this, we are going to be much closer to our desired future condition than we’ve been with any of the other plans over the last ten years. So we are excited, but only time will tell."

Ian Record:

"Well, David, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts, wisdom and experience with us."

David Montgomery:

"Yeah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure."  

Ian Record:

"Well, that’s all the time we have on today’s program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2012, Arizona Board of Regents."

 

Peterson Zah and Manley A. Begay, Jr.: Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Manley Begay and Peterson Zah field questions from the audience concerning the Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund and how they and others worked to mobilize and sustain the citizen support necessary to keep the fund intact and allow it to grow.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Zah, Peterson and Manley A. Begay, Jr. "Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008.

Audience member:

"We are currently facing a recession here in the United States of America. I guess number one, how safe is our investment from a possible crash in the market? And number two is how will the recession affect the trust fund? Did you guys do any research on that?"

Peterson Zah:

"One of the things that the Navajo Nation has to weigh right now is, because of the economic condition nationwide, I believe they have to pass a legislation that would allow the money managers -- if it should completely go down, before that happens, when it's beginning to go down -- they should probably withdraw that money and reinvest some of those monies into other accounts where it can maintain the status quo or even make more money. They haven't really decided that yet.

There's been a lot of discussion with the budget and finance committee, the money managers, and other finance people within the administration to try to come up with something so that they don't have to take a big hit on what is happening at the national level. So it's something that I think the work group has to come back together and really take a hard look at that to insure that the money is safe and that it will not completely hit the bottom.

When you have monies like this in trust, it's like a roller coaster. It's a roller coaster. And I guess the smart ones withdraw some of those monies when it's at its height. And I think Navajo Nation has to learn how to play that game. And definitely the budget and finance committee is addressing those issues right now."

Audience member:

"With your experience in this process, what would you suggest to a smaller tribe that is interested in this but doesn't have that initial large amount of income, like in the court case, to get a fund like this started?"

Manley Begay:

"So the question is, for a smaller tribe that might have less of a windfall, what we would suggest to that particular tribe? My suggestion is -- in the same vein as what we've been taught by President Zah -- is to save. There really has to be some mechanism by which to save that amount of money, because we don't really know what the future holds. But one of the primary responsibilities of leaders is really to think strategically, to think way ahead of everybody else.

In the Navajo way we say, naat'aanii. The naat'aanii, those are leaders. That particular person is responsible to plan strategically for the long haul, to plan for those that are yet unborn. In the Iroquois Confederacy philosophy they're talking about seven generations. So sometimes, we sort of just think about the here and now -- the here and now is really, goes fast. I mean, look at Curt Massey and myself. We're already at that age where we can't play basketball like we used to even though we might think we can. So time flies very, very quickly. And so for leaders, the primary responsibility is to figure out what's our vision? What are our priorities and concerns? And then make a commitment to the long run.

And also to leave a legacy; my brother here has left a legacy for the Navajo Nation. He'll always be remembered as that leader that thought way ahead. And to this day, we are reaping the rewards of that. And the generations to come will also reap the rewards as well. So the primary responsibility is to answer the question, 'What legacy are you going to leave for your people? How are you going to be remembered a hundred years from now? What will people say about you? How will they remember you?' I think that that is a crucial, critical question for all leaders."

Audience member:

"I wanted to know how did you educate your community members and how did you educate your council members? I know you say you have 88 members, that's a large legislative branch. And how did you get the majority to set up this accounting? How is it educated within the communities, districts or what not?"

Manley Begay:

"So the question is how did you educate the people? At Navajo we're, as I was saying earlier, Pete Zah's like E.F. Hutton. However, people out there in Navajo country, they want to know what's going on. They're also thinking about the future as well and they're interested in the future of the Navajo Nation. And so it was really actually very easy to gather a group of people and begin a discussion. And there are some amazing, intelligent individuals out there. At the same time, also with a lot of humor. So they don't take things too seriously, but at the same time they're thinking very hard about the future of the Nation and less about themselves. This person that made the statement about the corn, this is a guy that was wearing a T-shirt and Levi's jeans and worn out shoes. And he said, "˜Don't worry about me.' He says, "˜I can take care of myself. I get by.' So he wasn't thinking about himself, he wasn't being selfish. He was thinking about everybody else -- his relatives, his grandkids, his children and all of his relatives. I think that that was, there was this spirit about these public hearings that was unbelievable."

Peterson Zah:

"Let me add a bit to that. If you look at the Navajo Nation and its demographics, we have something like 82,000 children that are of school age. We have something like 144 schools on the Navajo Nation; 50 high schools on the Navajo Nation. And in terms of educating those kids, I take the time each year to do what we call a Navajo tour. We just completed one two weeks ago, where I go across the reservation with ten or a dozen Navajo college students from ASU [Arizona State University] -- students that are getting their law degree, engineering, nurses and some of those students. This year we took a trip with ten of them during the spring break. This is when all the other college kids are on their spring break. We choose those students and we go across the Navajo Nation with them. And our job there, while we're doing that, is to recruit other Navajo students to come to ASU. While we are doing that, I make sure that I end up in two or three of these classes at these high schools where there are seniors and juniors. And we talk to them about tribal government and the establishment of the Permanent Fund -- how it is their money and that they should have a role in the say so as to how these monies are spent. So we do that. We still have on schedule, within the next two or three weeks, another ten high schools that we will be going to. So we take that trip each year. So that's one way.

The other way is that with the chapter leaders they usually have an agency council. We have some chapter officers right here. Agency council meetings, they usually have those six times a year where all the leaders from those different agencies come together. We go over on occasion to make those presentations just to keep the local leaders informed as to what's happening so that they have some idea as to the current events surrounding the Navajo Nation trust fund. And so we do that.

And then what I usually do personally is I get on the radio. They have KTNN radio station, Navajo Nation-wide. You can blab away in Navajo about some of these activities regarding their trust fund, just to keep the Navajo people, the general public informed as to what has happened. I love doing that. Now, let me give you the last one, which is hard.

I do that because I really believe in it. I don't get paid for what I do. It's just work that needs to be done. So because of that, people know it. People know it. I don't have any conflict. If you don't work for any of the institutions on the Navajo, you can say whatever you want to say -- whether a council delegate is there or not, or President [Joe] Shirley is there or not, I don't really care -- but it needs to be said, it needs to be done and because I don't work for anybody. You're free -- really, really free -- to express those views. To me, that gives you more integrity. That's where the power is. But once you start demanding some kind of income, compensation for what you do, then you've shot all of what you're trying to do to pieces. And that's why I do what I do.

Let me give you another good example. In gaming, in the state of Arizona we have a gaming compact all these Indian tribes signs with the state of Arizona. And they have on the Navajo Nation X amount of machines dedicated to the Navajo Nation, but Navajo Nation is not in gaming yet. But the law says that if the Navajo Nation wants, it can use its designated number of the machines and lease it out or rent it out or sell it to the other Indian tribes. And so all these tribes, this tribe, Gila River, Fort McDowell, and six or seven other tribes want Navajo's machines. But Navajo politicians weren't ready to make any movements. They were afraid because once they touch this whole idea of pooling those machines to give it to the other tribes for rental -- even though it's for money -- they were afraid to face the people about what they did because they know the Navajo people would say, "˜We were ready to open a casino and you sold all of our machines to somebody else.' Well, what I do in those cases is I put all the tribes together -- the leader that you heard today, four or five of those tribal people -- and say, "˜Okay, what do you guys really, really want? The Navajo has those excess machines.' And then I go back to Navajo and I tell the president, the speaker of the Navajo Nation, and council and I said, "˜This is what these tribes want.' So you put them all together and they negotiate and they come to some kind of an agreement. You don't get paid for what you do. You don't get paid for what you do, but it's something that needs to be done that other people, the politicians who are paid to do that, they don't want to do because it's a hot potato. So when you begin to do something like that, it gives you a lot of credibility, a lot of credibility. And I think more and more of our tribal leaders need to do that. You don't wait to see if anybody's going to compensate you for what you do, but there's just a lot of work that needs to be done.

I always tell the president at ASU, I says, "˜President, I know that ASU sometimes goes through a budget crunch. And I just want to let you know that if you feel like that I'm occupying a space here, you can just kindly tell me what you think. Because I'm going to end up doing what needs to be done anyway, which is to recruit more Navajo students. I always work for ASU. I don't have to do it from that office. I can do it from Phoenix or from Window Rock. I'll just keep on doing the same thing because that is the way it is meant to be. So I don't need to work here and I don't really need to work for anybody.' And I think when people begin to do more of that, we all end up winning -- this tribe, all the other tribes, the Navajo people, and the Navajo students. Your question was how do we educate people? Well, you educate them that way and people will listen. He was, Manley was saying that people listen. Well, people listen because they know that there's no conflict. They know that what you say really has a lot of credence and they know that what you're saying is the truth because nobody is paying you to say those things."

Mediator:

"Anymore questions? Well, in that case..."

Manley Begay:

"Just one second. Let me just conclude by saying that strategic vision is really so critical. It might sound like sort of pipe dreams, but it really has a concrete purpose and that purpose is really, it gives you a basis on which to make decisions. It gives you a basis on which to consider choices. If you don't have a set of priorities and concerns laid out...remember the story I told earlier about the Cherokee Nation and that their number-one priority is language retention, their number one concern is language retention. So you know what? They put all their money into that. So when somebody comes to your office and says, "˜Let's spend the money over here.' You can say to them, "˜No, we can't do that because you told us that this was our number-one priority, number-two priority, number-three priority. This is our number-one concern, number-two concern, number-three concern and that's where our money is going.' It takes the burden off of you. You have a way to go, you have a function, you have a road that's laid out. So strategic visioning, setting priorities of concern has a real concrete purpose. And that's what this session is about here. So with that, thank you. [Thank you, my older brother]. I'm really happy that I spent time with him. We call each other almost every other week, joking, laughing, but underneath that is some real main serious reasons to think about the future of Indian people. And I'm just so happy that we have leaders like Mr. Zah. I'm so happy that he came into this world. And as a result the world is a better place, for me and for everybody else. So with that I just wanted to also thank him. [Again, thank you, my older brother]." 

Native Nation Building TV: "Bonus Segment on Native Nation Building"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Joan Timeche, Stephen Cornell and Ian Record with the Native Nations Institute at The University of Arizona discuss the "Native Nation Building" television and radio series and the research findings at heart of the series in a televised interview in January 2007.

 

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of Fox Channel 11 in Tucson, Arizona.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Bonus Segment on Native Nation Building" (Bonus Segment). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2007. Television program. 

Announcer: "This is Fox 11 Forum, a look at issues of concern to Tucson and Nogales, with your host Bob Lee."

0
0
1
3310
18869
The University of Arizona
157
44
22135
14.0

0
0
1
3310
18869
The University of Arizona
157
44
22135
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Bob Lee: "Good morning. I hope you're having a nice weekend. This morning, we'll be discussing a new broadcast series that looks at some of the challenging questions facing American Indian, Alaska Native and Canadian First Nation governments. Each program in the series looks at successful nation-building efforts and at the issues that had to be overcome. We'll learn more on this in a minute. Stay with us, we'll be right back."

[Music] [On screen: Native nations in the U.S. and Canada ae recognized as Indigenous nations with a measure of sovereignty. / The Native Nations Institute was founded by the Morris K. Udall Foundation and The University of Arizona.]  

Bob Lee: "Welcome back. Native Nation Building is the name of a new ten-part radio and TV series that's now being seen and heard across the U.S. and in Canada. It addresses a number of issues currently being addressed by contemporary Native Nations, and we're going to talk about that because it originates right here in Tucson. Let me introduce my guests. Dr. Ian Record is Curriculum Development Manager with the Native Nations Institute at the U of A. Dr. Joan Timeche is Assistant Director of the Native Nations Institute, and Dr. Stephen Cornell is Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy -- a co-founder of NNI, a U of A professor, and generally involved in a number of things. Before we talk about this really interesting series of programs, let's talk a little bit about NNI and remind people what that's all about. What is the Native Nations Institute? What led to its founding?"

Stephen Cornell: "I'll take a shot at that. The Native Nations Institute is a research and outreach unit within the University of Arizona that's designed to assist Indian nations in the U.S. and First Nations in Canada at dealing with governance and development issues. It's really an effort by the U of A to focus university resources, research results, practical lessons that we've learned about development and governance, focus those on Indigenous issues, provide a resource to Indigenous nations that are wrestling with governance challenges. It's now what, five years old -- 2001 -- and was founded by the University of Arizona and by the Morris K. Udall Foundation, which is a federal foundation located here in town."

Bob Lee: "I think it's important, too, that we note that this is not just focusing on local tribes, that as I mentioned in the beginning it's Alaska and Canadian, it's truly an international effort that's being spearheaded here. Is an overall goal of what the Institute is all about, is there something five years from now you'd like to have seen achieved?"

Stephen Cornell: "Well, I think if we looked five years down the road, we would find Indian nations in the U.S. and in Canada first of all in charge of their own affairs, making decisions for themselves about their lands, about how they organize their governments, about civil affairs, about their relations with other governments -- states and the United States government. We'd find those nations building economies that support their people, reducing the kind of dependence that has plagued many Indigenous nations for years. We'd find those nations fully engaged with other communities across the United States, yet finding ways to maintain and sustain their own ways of life and their own cultures. We don't see the Native Nations Institute as the sort of key to all of that, but simply as one of an array of organizations and resources working closely with tribes to try to enable that, to help make that happen."

Bob Lee: "How much sovereignty is there now? It sounds like there isn't a lot."

Joan Timeche: "There actually is quite a bit of...tribes have been exercising their sovereignty more recently with the passage of a number of public laws that allowed the tribes to take over more of the responsibilities that the federal government had been providing on their behalf, and increasingly we're finding tribes who are beginning to make their own decisions for their own future and they're testing, they're questioning and they're exercising."

Bob Lee: "Is it conceivable that one day instead of as we drive down the freeway and a sign says, 'Entering the Pascua Yaqui Reservation,' we might see the term 'reservation' disappear and this would be...we would be entering in effect another country or another political entity entirely?"

Joan Timeche: "I would imagine so. That would be fantastic if we could see that, and I think essentially that is already occurring today. I come from the Hopi Reservation and Hopi Nation, and so when you go out there, we don't have so much the signs that you might see in the metro reservation environment and you clearly are going into another country when you go out onto the Navajo Reservation, onto the Hopi Reservation, and I think the terminology, that 'reservation' may stay because it's written in a lot of government language, documents."

Stephen Cornell: "Even today we see -- there are places where you go -- I remember driving in Oklahoma just a year or two ago and passing a sign saying, 'Entering the Cherokee Nation.' These are really nations within a nation and they certainly view themselves as nations, they enjoy a very substantial degree of sovereignty as Joan said, and I think we're likely to see them increasingly using that sovereignty to shape their lands and their peoples in the way that they desire. And the idea of driving onto the Tohono O'odham Nation, for example, is likely I think to become more and more part of the language."

Bob Lee: "Let's talk about this broadcast series that is -- I believe, as I look at some of the topics of the individual shows -- calling attention to some of the goals and objectives of the NNI [Native Nations Institute] and helping acquaint the general public as to some of the issues as well as, it seems like, there's sort of a rallying effort underway here too among the Nations themselves. How did the series come to be?"

Ian Record: "The series really began with the realization that...a lot of what NNI does through its research efforts is collect stories, collect stories about what Native Nations are doing, what's working in Indian Country, and why it's working. And lots of times on reservations, Native communities, they get so wrapped up in their own situation, their own circumstances, the challenges that they face, that it's hard for them to bridge the gap to other Native Nations and learn what they're doing. So that's really what the series is all about is really bringing those stories, connecting those tribes and really flattening that learning curve about nation building."

Bob Lee: "When you set upon putting the series together, now does it rely on the resources within our local nations or does it encompass Canada, Alaska, etc.?"

Ian Record: "We have a number of guests from Native nations in Arizona. We also have guests from Native nations throughout the United States and some from Canada, and what you really see by watching the series is that the nation-building messages are really universal. The specific circumstances, the specific challenges that a particular Native Nation might face may be different from that of another, but at the same time the key components necessary for nation building -- there's five of them that NNI commonly cites and those are practical sovereignty or genuine self rule, effective governing institutions, cultural match -- and what we mean by cultural match is a match between a given nation's governing institutions and the way that the people in that community believe that authority should be organized and exercised. The fourth is strategic orientation -- thinking and planning long term -- and then the fifth is finally leadership. And we find that the messages that we see through this nation-building research are universal to all nations."

Stephen Cornell: "Bob, I might just add, Ian mentioned that it's a pretty diverse group of guests and it ranges in this series from Robert Yazzie, who's the retired Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court; Rob Williams, a professor of law here at the University of Arizona; so both of those are Arizona sources. But it also includes people like Sophie Pierre, who's the Chief of a First Nation in British Columbia; Elsie Meeks, who has been involved for a long time in economic development efforts on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota; a number of people drawn from nations across the United States. So it's a very...it's a national perspective and an international perspective when you bring in some of the Canadian First Nations that are dealing with very similar issues to what Indian nations here are dealing with."

Bob Lee: "What are some of those issues? We'll talk more about that in just a minute. Stay with us, we'll be right back."

[Music] [On screen: Between the U.S. and Canada, there are more than 1,100 Native-American tribes. Native peoples around the world are working to invent new development strategies and governance tools that match their unique needs and contribute to maintaining their cultures.] 

 

Bob Lee: "Native Nation Building is the name of a new broadcast series that debuted here in Tucson this past weekend. Where and how can people see or hear what we're discussing on the program this morning?"

Ian Record: "Well, the television version of this series is currently running on the U of A Channel, which is Channel 19 on Cox and Channel 76 on Comcast. It airs Friday evenings at 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 1:30 p.m., and it will be running through March 26th. People who are interested in listening to the Native Nation Building series on radio, it's going to be distributed nationally by the AIROS Native Radio Network, and so if you're interested in getting that series here locally, it's the same old song and dance -- you've got to contact your local public radio station and let them know you want to hear the series."

Bob Lee: "And the tribal radio stations are also carrying it. Unfortunately, the stations here in southern Arizona are not carrying it. I'm going to show a website address in a little bit and I did discover that there's going to be a webcast available also."

Ian Record: "Yeah, you can webcast. You can podcast. You can listen to it online both live and whenever you wish."

Bob Lee: "So there is a way to get around the fact that the stations down here are not carrying it."

Ian Record: "We're hoping they'll come around, but not yet."

Bob Lee: "Well, they're independent. Let's talk about some of the subjects that are addressed on the program. I was particularly drawn to the sixth program, which looks specifically at tribal economic development and tribal entrepreneurship, and these are issues that everybody's interested in. Let's talk about that specifically. What are some of the aspects of economic development?"

Joan Timeche: "Aspects in general or...you're going to find that on most reservations, the tribal governments are the ones that own the enterprises. They are the ones that have the resources -- monetary, human, all of the additional resources -- that might be needed to get it off the ground. They have the know-how, they've had the perseverance, and so on. But increasingly what we're seeing is more citizens who are beginning to...who have expressed an interest in owning and developing their own businesses, and we often see tribes have a two-pronged approach to development. One where the tribes own the enterprises that usually require large intensive capital or maybe it's natural resource-based or something like that, but we're also seeing more of an approach moving towards helping their own tribal citizens start their own businesses. But it requires a lot of regulatory development that has to be done, creating that environment, so it's conducive for a member and they don't have to go through hundreds of steps to be able to get perhaps the land to lease to start the business. So we're seeing changes, very positive changes moving towards those directions."

Bob Lee: "So there's a regulatory aspect that has to be perhaps addressed and loosened up a little bit?"

Joan Timeche: "Yes, yes. In some cases, well, on all reservations they have the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] regulations for leasing of land have to be followed. They're very cumbersome. If you have traditional land holdings, like on Hopi and Navajo, the Tohono O'odham Nation, the land is controlled at the local level, so then you have to get permission from clans to districts to chapters to villages before you can even approach the formal tribal government. So the process can be very cumbersome, and then once you get to the tribal approval, then you've got to go back to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to get the final say-so on all of the lease agreements, so it can be very cumbersome."

Bob Lee: "Something I had mentioned earlier, and I guess it comes back to what we were saying, when you talk about the BIA, one of the things that probably would be a long-range goal would be to somehow not have to deal with the BIA and have true sovereignty."

Joan Timeche: "Yes, that would be good, and I think that there are some tribes who are trying to work that out in their leasing regulations and in some of the codes that they have adopted where they've been able to set up a process that still meets the needs that the Bureau of Indian Affairs' [has] in terms of its own documentation and its own processes, if they can accept and authorize, delegate in a sense to the tribes the authority to be able to sign off on those processes."

Bob Lee: "You wanted to say something and maybe it was what I was going to follow up on."

Stephen Cornell: "Well, I don't know. I was just going to add that I think one of the things that the session that you're talking about, that interview, does is discuss what tribal governments themselves can do to support citizen entrepreneurs, because the very complexity of the regulation that Joan has just described, the effect of that is often to take people who've got ideas and get up and go and they say to themselves, 'Gee, it's going to be too complicated to start a business here, I'll move to Tucson or Phoenix or L.A. and start it there.' And increasingly, we're seeing tribal governments saying, 'Okay, what steps do we need to take to keep our own citizens here, keep that talent here, keep that energy here and engage them in the economic development effort?' And we're seeing some very innovative work by some tribes that have really solved this problem. They've taken control of the regulatory environment and are creating an environment that encourages their citizens to stick around and invest at home. So there's some really interesting things happening out there, and a lot of that comes up in the interview."

Bob Lee: "So in a sense they're going through the same thing that many cities, Tucson included, are going through is how do we keep our talent here. Another question that came to mind, when we talk about the BIA, why don't they just...why does in a sense Uncle Sam want to keep his hand involved in this? Why not just walk away and let the tribal nations do their thing? It seems like there's a lot of talent and abilities to get that done without somebody hanging on there. 150 years ago I can understand that, but now..."

Stephen Cornell: "It's interesting, Bob. We've done some systematic and robust research over the last 20 years on some of these issues, and one of the things that comes out quite clearly is that as federal decision-makers relinquish that decision-making role and move into a resource role, tribal development tends to do better. When tribes are in the driver seat making decisions for themselves, development does better. So one of the...I think the core question here is how do you move the BIA or other external bodies out of decision-making into a resource or support role where they're needed and when you do that? Then Indian nations themselves begin to benefit from their own decisions, pay the price of mistakes they make, they tend to begin to create the world that they want, which is what should be happening out there anyway."

Bob Lee: "Good government -- we'll talk about that in just a minute. Stay with us, we'll be right back."

[Music] [On screen: NNI works with Native nations and organizations on strategic and organizational issues ranging from constitutionl reform to government design, intergovernmental relations, and economic and community development. / Native nations that have been willing and able to assert their self-governing power have significantly increased their chances of sustainable economic development.]

Bob Lee: "Welcome back. We're talking about Native Nation Building, a new 10-part radio and TV series that's now being seen and heard across North America actually and it originates right here in Tucson. We've got about six minutes left. I want to try to touch on two more issues that are a part of this radio and TV series. We're talking about developing a new sort of tribal government, nation government. What are some of the keys to making that happen and that is the topic of one of the programs."

Stephen Cornell: "A lot of governments in Indian Country were not really developed by Native people. A lot of them have their roots in federal legislation in the 1930s, a lot of them are modeled on mainstream U.S. organizations, they don't represent in many cases the ways Indigenous people would like to govern themselves. One of the most striking developments of the last 25 years or so in Indian Country has been an effort by a lot of Indian nations to reclaim the right to design governments that fit their ideas, their cultures, and in practical terms this is leading to a lot of constitutional reform. One of the interviews in this series focuses on tribal constitutions and on the efforts the tribes are making to rethink the constitutions they currently are working with. We think of it as sort of remaking the tools of governance, and a lot of tribes are engaged in doing that, trying to figure out, 'What is going to work in our situation, what will the people being governed believe in?' You've got to have governing institutions that those being governed think, 'Yeah, these are good, we believe in these, these are our institutions, not somebody else's imported.' So a lot of that is happening in Indian Country and a good chunk of the program is about that."

Bob Lee: "This all leads toward what is essentially the final episode in this first series, and there may be more I suppose, and that has to do with looking, moving toward nation building and very quickly explain again what we mean by nation building."

Stephen Cornell: "I think you can think of nation building as putting in place the foundational institutions and practices that can support long-term development, not just economic development, but development of the kinds of quality of life that Indigenous nations themselves want. It's trying to put the foundation in place that tribes can build on according to their own designs over the next 100 years, whatever it might be, whatever their thinking is about their long-term vision. So it's really about, 'What kinds of tools do we need to build the future we want? Have we got the right institutions in place? Have we got the right decision-making capabilities in place? Do we have the right relationships in place with other governments?' All of that is part of nation building, and that's what a lot of these nations are engaged in."

Bob Lee: "We should perhaps address very quickly, is there a commonality in terms of the Native nation culture from Hopi to Pascua Yaqui to Canadian Nations and so forth that would help facilitate this, or are there a lot of differences that also have to be overcome?"

Joan Timeche: "I think that you're going to find that every tribe is different from each other, they're all unique and although they may have, there may be bands that may be similarly, familially related or come from the same region or whatever, have the same barriers to overcome, their languages are different, their cultures are different, and therefore their governments are going to be different from each other. But there are some commonalities. Take New Mexico, there are 19 Pueblos there, and almost all of them operate on a theocracy, where it's a traditional form of government where their cacique, their chief comes in and he does an appointment of their elected leadership on an annual basis..."

Bob Lee: "So one of the challenges, then, is that one size isn't going to fit all?"

Joan Timeche: "Yes. But there are common elements of governments that do apply across the board."

Bob Lee: "That would be helpful in seeing this to its fruition. Ian, what do you hope is going to come out of this? When the series is, the first ten episodes are said and done, what do you hope for?"

Ian Record: "Well, we do view this as an ambitious series, but at the same time we view this as a modest starting point. We view this as a way to start a dialogue between nations, Native nations and other individuals, non-Native individuals, people in positions where they make decisions that affect Native communities -- to educate them as well, to really get a dialogue going about what's really going on, what are some of the phenomenal things that Native nations are doing, and really educating everyone about those efforts."

Bob Lee: "Terrific series from what I've seen and heard about it, and hopefully it won't end here. Thank you very much for being with us this morning to talk about this. And you can log onto American Indian Radio on Satellite, airos.org, and you can learn more about the success that many Native nations are having in restoring economic health, developing effective governments, shaping their own futures, and that website will give you lots of links, one of which can take you to the live streaming broadcast as well as archives of the programs that we talked about here today. Again it's airos.org, http://www.visionmakermedia.org/, and follow the links there and you can get a lot of information. Next week, we will be discussing prostate health here on this program. Until then, for Fox 11 I'm Bob Lee. Have a safe week ahead, we'll see you again next week."

Native Nation Building TV: "Introduction to Nation Building"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell present the key research findings of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. They explain the five keys to successful community and economic development for Native nations (sovereignty or practical self-rule, effective institutions of self-governance, cultural match, strategic orientation, and leadership), and provide examples of Native nations that are rebuilding their nations. 

Mary Kim Titla: "Welcome to Native Nation Building. I'm your host Mary Kim Titla. Contemporary Native Nations face many daunting challenges including building effective governments, developing strong economies, solving difficult social problems and balancing cultural integrity and change. Native Nation Building explores these complex challenges and the ways Native nations are working to overcome them as they seek to make community and economic development a reality. Don't miss Native Nation Building next."

0
0
1
3951
22524
NNI
187
52
26423
14.0

0
0
1
3951
22524
NNI
187
52
26423
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

[music]

Mary Kim Titla: "Today's program examines where, how and why nation building is currently taking place in Native communities throughout the United States and beyond, in particular the fundamental issues governing Native nations' efforts to restore their social sovereignty and economic vitality and shape their own futures. Here today to discuss these nation-building issues are Drs. Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell. Dr. Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is Director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as Senior Lecturer in the American Indian Studies Programs. Dr. Cornell is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and a Professor of Sociology and Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona. For the past two decades, they both have worked extensively with Native Nations in a major research effort that seeks to identify the keys to solving the challenges to nation building. Welcome, gentleman, nice to have you here today."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Thanks for having us."

Mary Kim Titla: "First of all, what is nation building in practical terms?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Nation building is really about how Indigenous nations in the U.S. and elsewhere can put together the tools they need to build the futures that they want. And by the tools they need, we really mean the tools of governance. These are nations in our experience with very ambitious goals, they face daunting challenges, they carry the legacies of colonialism, they are trying to overcome deficits in economic affairs, in health, in all kinds of areas. If they're going to do that, they need the governing tools that are adequate to that task and Nation building is about identifying those tools, putting them in place, being sure that they match Indigenous ideas and culture and putting them to work."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can you talk about some of the tools? Explain that."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Yeah. A lot of Indian nations here in the United States have governments that they did not design. That's not true of all of them, but a lot of tribal governments were designed basically by the U.S. Department of the Interior back in the 1930s. They aren't very sophisticated structures of government. Some of them have no provision for adequate court systems or ways to resolve disputes within the nation. Some of them have got unwieldy legislatures. Some of them don't have the kinds of procedures that you need if you're going to move vigorously and effectively to make good decisions, implement them, get things done. So we're talking about rethinking some of the those tools of government. What kinds of tribal courts or other dispute resolution mechanisms will serve Indigenous needs and interests? What kinds of governing structures will people believe in and support within the nation's own community? Are those structures adequate to what the nation is trying to do? So when we talk about tools, we're talking about the practical mechanisms that nation's use to organize how they go about trying to get stuff done."

Mary Kim Titla: "Dr. Begay, would you like to add to that?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "Sure. It seems from the work that we've been doing that nation building or nation rebuilding, as Steve mentioned, really began to occur with most Indian nations around 1975 when the Indian Self-Determination Act was ushered in, and since then a lot of Indian nations have begun to wrestle with rethinking their political systems, rethinking their economies and it's not unlike other nations that have gone through colonization and all of a sudden found themselves in the midst of freedom, if you will, very much like what occurred in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union fell apart. Poland is wrestling with issues of constitutional reform, you had the European Union there, and Indian nations are in the same boat and a lot of other colonized society are wrestling with Nation building and rebuilding."

Mary Kim Titla: "Let's talk about the research. What prompted the Harvard Project and the Native Nations Institute to embark on the research?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "This kind of got us wondering what is it that makes some nations more successful than others, and in fact the data that we first looked at had to do in part with timber and with forestry. A lot of Indian nations have timber resources. Some of them seemed to be doing a better job of managing those resources than others and we got interested in why. And being professors, we thought maybe we knew the answers already -- typical of professors -- and so we thought, well, it'll be educational attainment or it'll be the Nations that have big natural resources will be doing well or the ones that have access to capital will be doing well. But we decided we'd better go look and we got a grant from the Ford Foundation to do some research. We spent a lot of time in the field getting stories of what was working, how did this enterprise succeed, how did this one fail, what else have you tried to do, what seems to be working here, what are the problems you're encountering. And the interesting sort of payoff to the research was it turned out that the critical elements were really political ones, that if you had your political house together, if you had some stability in the government, if you were successful in keeping political considerations out of enterprise management decisions or out of tribal court decisions -- if you could do some of those political things, then these sort of economic assets like good education or good natural resources or being close to a major market -- those would start to pay off. If you couldn't get the government house in order, then those assets tended to be wasted. So the result to the research was really to focus our attention on these political issues and the effect they were having on how these Nations did, whether or not they were able to achieve their goals."

Dr. Manley Begay: "And what was really interesting about the research findings initially was that we knew of no known cases of economic development, successful economic development, occurring without assertions of political sovereignty. And secondly, we also found that capable governing institutional development was a major piece of nation building. And thirdly, those institutions had to be culturally appropriate. And since then we've also found that Indian nations that are planning for the long haul if you will, a hundred years down the road -- what kind of society are we going to build, what do we perceive the society to look like 50 years from now --and those that have done that seem to be faring well or faring better than others that have not. Lastly, leadership is really critical. So these five components and research findings formed the basis for the work that we've been doing all along."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can you give us a snapshot of current Native nation-building efforts among indigenous peoples throughout the U.S. and Canada?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Yeah, in fact there are a number of Nations across the U.S. right now that are engaged in constitutional processes. The Osage Nation in Oklahoma has just launched a major constitutional reform effort. The Crow Tribe of Montana, the Northern Cheyennes are involved in that. The San Carlos Apaches are engaged in governance reform or rethinking how they govern themselves. This is happening a good deal across the U.S. It's also happening in Canada where we see First Nations that are engaged in constitutional processes. Some of them are also engaged, especially in British Columbia, in treaty processes that involved working out new relationships with British Columbia and with Canada and that process also involves rethinking governance. So we see a lot of constitutional stuff happening there. We see some developments in tribal courts. The Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, which straddles the Ontario/New York boundary, are engaged right now in trying to rebuild their justice system. They of course face some interesting justice problems because of that boundary, because they're a nation that operates in two different jurisdictions and then they have their own jurisdiction. It's a complicated situation. They're trying to develop a court and justice system that's adequate to that set of challenges. We see a number of nations like the Ho-Chunk, the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, have started a corporation called Ho-Chunk Inc., which has been a very successful enterprise reducing unemployment there. They put a lot of thought into, how do you set up this enterprise so that it has a good chance of succeeding?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "And up in Canada there's the Membertou First Nation on the east side of Canada that's actually wrestled with figuring out how to develop a capable governing institution and they did that through what's called the ISO [International Organization for Standardization], sort of international standards set-up, and then also the Siksika Blackfoot Nation in Alberta have also really moved forward in thinking about nation building and is actually doing relatively well. Lac La Ronge as well. They're finding some success in promoting their wild rice not only in Canada and the United States but also overseas as well. So there are a number of stories of First Nations and bands up in Canada, tribes in the United States that have gone the extra effort to figure out how to build nations that work, and obviously one of the major success stories is the Mississippi Choctaw. And they did that without gaming. Initially they set up good governing institutions, they asserted sovereignty, really thought through how to develop a culturally appropriate political system and actually we refer to them as the Singapore of Indian Country. They did that without gaming. Only later on did they get into gaming and every day you'll see upwards of 7,000 black and white workers going on to Nation land to work. As a result, they've become the major political and economic powerhouse in the southeast and they've done that through nation building."

Mary Kim Titla: "And I've been there to Mississippi Choctaw and I've seen what they've done. It's really great with [Chief] Phillip Martin and other tribal leaders. I imagine that they must face many obstacles and of course those obstacles can get in the way of objectives. Can you talk about some of the obstacles that some of these Nations are facing?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Boy, I think one of the obstacles that -- in fact I was just last week in Canada and talking with a First Nations leader and he said, 'You know, a lot of my people have been, we've learned over time to be dependent on Canada and to be dependent on federal agencies in Canada, and part of the work that we face as First Nations leaders,' he said, 'is trying to change that mind frame, trying to get into a mind frame that says, 'We can change this, we can take responsibility for what happens here.'' There's a -- Manley just mentioned the Siksika Nation of Blackfoot in Alberta. Chief Strater Crow Foot, whose the chief of that nation, he spoke at a session that Manley and I were both at not long ago and he said, 'We're trying to replace the victim attitude with a victor attitude.' He said, 'The victim attitude keeps you sitting still, the victor attitude gets you moving.' And he said, 'In my nation, that's one of our primary tasks as leaders is to change that attitude, a feeling that if we're really going to have an impact we've got to alter the way people look at the world around them, the way they think about what's possible.' So that's certainly one of the obstacles. Another obstacle, and Manley touched on this, is simply that sovereignty obstacle. It's getting the jurisdictional power to make decisions for yourself. That's something which Indian nations in the U.S., they've had a lot of jurisdictional power. It gets chipped away at by the U.S. Supreme Court, it's often under attack in the states and in Congress. Luckily, so far, much of it is surviving. In Canada, First Nations are struggling to achieve the level of sovereignty Indian Nations in the U.S. have, but that's an obstacle. If someone else is making the decisions for you, you're not likely to go much of anywhere. It's their decisions, the program represents their interests. Shifting real decision-making power into Indigenous hands is a critical piece of nation building. These nations have to be rebuilt by Indigenous people, not by decisions made in Washington or Ottawa or someplace like that. So I think the other big obstacle is that sovereignty piece. You've got to have the power to make things happen."

Mary Kim Titla: "We've talked about obstacles. Let's talk about assets. What are some of the greatest nation-building assets?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "Leadership is an asset. However, it's only an asset if you can couple that with developing good capable institutions, and if you set in place the rule of law and policies and codes and constitutions. That goes a long way. You can wait for a good leader to come around, and it takes 20 years to get a good leader, but you can't always be sure that the leader was going to be good. However, if you put in place policy, rules and regulations, you can always trust those rules, and enforcing those rules becomes part of nation building, and it seems to me that that's an asset that we see, the creativeness, the innovativeness of Indian people to really wrestle with figuring out how to do this, and to do it in a culturally appropriate fashion is an asset. And it's not something that's new."

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "The other thing we have to recognize as an asset is Indigenous cultures themselves, and sometimes people who think about how Indigenous culture is an asset think of it mainly in terms of stuff you can sell -- arts and crafts or something like that -- and that's an important way to think about it. We tend to think about it, though, in terms of what can we learn from Indigenous cultures about appropriate organization, so that the government that works at Navajo is not necessarily going to be the same as the government that works at Osage, because they are different nations with different heritages, different cultures, and part of the challenge of nation building is figuring out what set of institutions in fact resonate with what people here believe about how authority should be exercised, about how we should pursue goals. We've worked with some of the Pueblos in New Mexico where you have governing institutions that are very traditional. There are no elections, there are no legal codes, no written constitutions. The governing institutions are deeply rooted either in Pueblo tradition or in several hundred years of working under Pueblo influences, Spanish influences and other things. They've been borne out of Pueblo experience. You go up to the Flatheads in Montana, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and you'll see a tribal government that looks very different. It looks, as our colleague Joe Kalt likes to say, 'It looks like it came out of my high school civics textbook.' Well, you've got three nations on that reservation and those nations have had to find a way to govern themselves that they all can support so it doesn't look very traditional. There are three traditions there, they might be in conflict with each other. So they've had to find a set of institutions that work for them. But that link to Indigenous cultures, that ability to tap into the fact that these nations long ago solved tough human problems and maybe the ways they solved some of those problems still work today. Let's tap into that. At Navajo, their court system, their justice system today combines western jurisprudence with longstanding Navajo ways of dealing with disharmony or conflict and that makes them an extraordinarily effective court system that no outsider could have invented. It had to be generated by Navajo people."

Mary Kim Titla: "Can we talk about more of the research and the five major keys to successful community and economic development among Nations?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "The first finding that came out of this research really was the sovereignty finding, the fact that Indigenous nations themselves have to be in the driver's seat if things are going to happen. So there's a kind of a power issue there. Where is the power? And from a research point of view, it just underlined something that Manley touched on earlier, that we haven't been able to find a case across Indian Country of sustained, self-determined economic development where someone other than the Indigenous nation was calling the shots. So that turns out to be a necessary piece of the puzzle. The second piece that came in on the research findings was that, yeah, but that's not enough in and of itself. You've got to back it up with the kinds of governing institutions that Manley has been talking about. They've got to be capable of dealing with contemporary challenges. They've got to be stable. They've got to control, keep politics in its place. They've got to assure people that if I have a claim, a dispute with the nation, it'll be dealt with fairly. Part of the challenge for Indigenous leaders today is, how do we hang onto our talented, energetic young people with ideas? If I've got a family to support, will I pursue supporting that family at home on the rez or will I move to L.A. or Minneapolis or something like that? For tribal leaders, how do we create an environment that says, 'You can do it right here, we'll make it possible, we'll keep you'? That means a governing situation in which it doesn't matter who my family is, who I voted for, I'll get a fair shake. So that second finding was about capable governing institutions. The third was this thing we've just been talking a bit about of the cultural match piece of making sure those institutions really have the support of the people, that people believe this is our government, not an import from somebody else -- this is ours. And then these last two pieces that Manley talked about, the strategic thinking that gets people to make decisions on what's on our agenda today in terms of what matters in the long run and what does that mean for how we decide this today. And then that piece of leadership."

Dr. Manley Begay: "Yeah, to give you an example, back to Mississippi Choctaw. Initially a big portion of the population of the Choctaws were moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, so you essentially had this society that was uprooted back in the 1830s and only small groups stayed in Mississippi. But they held onto the land, they held on to who they were as Choctaws. And as time went on they went through the termination period, they went through...and here comes the Indian Self-Determination Act and they essentially wrestled jurisdiction and power and control from the feds as well as state government and began to pursue a long-term plan, and Chief Phillip Martin was sort of the main impetus for assertions of sovereignty back then. And once they wrestled a significant amount of decision-making power from the federal government and also from the State [of Mississippi], they began to think through, how do we develop a capable governing institution? And they did that basically by necessity because before they could attract manufacturing companies to the nation, they had to think about a commercial code, they had to think about appropriate policy rules and regulations, laws being put in place, a good court system, separating business from politics, and so forth so that the investor could feel safe in investing on nation land. And then the cultural match piece came in. Historically, Mississippi Choctaws really had the strong chief executive-type of political structure, but they also had a strong court system. They had a separation of powers and checks and balances set up, which allowed for them to plan well. So a lot of this was planned out years and years ago. A lot of the success Mississippi Choctaws are having now was planned 50 years ago, and so today you essentially have a zero percent unemployment rate, you have to import labor and so forth, so the strategic thinking piece came into play. And then you have good leadership, you essentially have really good leadership. So all of the ingredients to successful nation building seems to be present at Mississippi Choctaw. But we've seen it at Fort McDowell, we've seen it at Siksika, we've seen it at all of these places that we've mentioned that have built nations that seem to be working well."

Mary Kim Titla: "We do want to talk about more of those positive stories, those models if you want to call them that. I like Mississippi Choctaw, so I'm glad that you touched on that. Are there some other examples out there that you'd like to add?"

Dr. Stephen Cornell: "Well, one that we're particularly fond of is the Citizen Potawatomi story from Oklahoma. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation back in the 1970s -- this today is a very large nation, I think its population is well over 20,000 people -- but in the 1970s they had very little land that they controlled, less than 100 acres, they had hardly any money in the bank, life was tough, [the] situation was grim. Today the Citizen Potawatomi Nation owns the First National Bank of Shawnee, Oklahoma. Today they own the supermarket in Shawnee, where they sell beef grown in their own cattle herd and vegetables grown on their own farm. They've basically got a vertically-integrated food business going. They own some of the media outlets in town. And when you talk to "Rocky" Barrett, who is the current chairman of the Nation, he says, 'Well, you know, it's really an institutions story.' And I remember the first time I heard him tell the story of the Citizen  Potawatomi Nation at a conference in Oklahoma, and afterwards I talked to him and I said, 'You know, you really tell a nation-building story about governing institutions.' And his response was, 'Oh, yeah, if you're not thinking about constitutional reform, you're not in the economic development ballgame, because what you've got to do is get that political house together and then you'll be able to create the kind of economic success.' So we look at Citizen  Potawatomi, a remarkable turnaround from the mid 1970s to the start of the 21st century in that nation's fortunes. Some nations, there are these success stories out there, and some of them are about pieces of nations and we've been fortunate -- in doing this work on nation building -- you come across nations that are doing extraordinary things that you don't hear about. I think often what we hear about are the problems in Indian Country. But some of the...we've talked about the Navajo Nation court system, which is one of these striking successes. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, another example of nations coming together and solving a difficult problem creatively and effectively. At Fond du Lac, they've got a foster care program that has solved a major problem they had with the placement of tribal kids in non-Native homes. They've come up with a way to deal with that problem. It's effective, it works. These kinds of stories are all over the place out there and in one way or another they are nation-building stories."

Mary Kim Titla: "And then trying to train the young Native leaders, I think the Gila River Indian Community has done an excellent job of that with their youth council and really they're a model for a lot of tribes around the country. Anything you'd like to add?"

Dr. Manley Begay: "The Cochiti Pueblo is another Indian nation that sort of has built these very successful economic ventures. At one point in time, Cochiti, a significant part of Cochiti, was actually under water when a dam was built, and very little seemed to be in the works for how to get out of the situation that they were in. And lo and behold they essentially began to assert a certain amount of jurisdiction and a certain amount of power and authority, and today you find a tremendous amount of success at Cochiti. They've developed one of the top 100 public golf courses in the United States. They have a retirement community where Harry and Martha from Ohio go to retire. And it's a very interesting turnaround. Here a very traditional society is doing relatively well in pursuing certain economic development projects and they've done it with, as we said earlier, first pursuing jurisdiction and decision-making power and authority, and it really resonates to non-Indian society. Often non-Indian society [has] a hard time grasping political sovereignty. The thought is, 'Well, we've got to take political sovereignty away from Indian Country and then we need to tell them what to do essentially.' However, it seems as though that it's in the best interest of non-Indian society to support political sovereignty, because in the long run when economic development takes place in Indian Country, it affects nearby communities, it affects the region and in turn it affects the nation as a whole. So it has this domino effect. So it really is important for non-Indian communities, also governments, to support political sovereignty."

Mary Kim Titla: "Well, I want to thank the both of you. We've talked about a lot of things today, about some of the positive stories that are out there, some of the obstacles that Native tribes are facing and I must say that they've dealt with adversity very well and they have a history of dealing with that. I see a bright future, so thank you for what you're doing. We'd like to thank Dr. Begay and Dr. Cornell for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Native Nation Building TV: "Moving Towards Nation Building"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Manley A. Begay, Jr. and Stephen Cornell contrast the two basic approaches to Indigenous governance -- the standard approach and the nation-building approach -- and discusses how a growing number of Native nations are moving towards nation building. It provides specific examples of how implementing the five keys to nation building bring wide-ranging benefits to Native communities.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Moving Towards Nation Building" (Episode 10). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Mark St. Pierre: "Hello, friends. I'm your host, Mark St. Pierre and welcome to Native Nation Building. Contemporary Native Nations face many challenges including building effective governments, developing strong economies that fit their culture and circumstances, solving difficult social problems and balancing cultural integrity in change. Native Nation Building explores these often complex challenges in the ways Native Nations are working to overcome them as they seek to make community and economic development a reality. Don't miss Native Nation Building next."

Mark St. Pierre: "Over the last decade or so, many Indigenous nations have been moving to an approach to economic development that has been described as nation building. Today's program examines this nation-building approach to development and contrasts it with the older approach that remains pretty common today, the so-called standard approach. With me today to discuss these two approaches are Drs. Manley Begay and Stephen Cornell. Dr. Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is the Director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as senior lecturer in the American Indian Studies program. Dr. Cornell is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and a Professor of Sociology and Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona. Welcome, gentlemen. It's nice to have you both here today. The Native Nations Institute in its extensive research has found that there are basically two approaches to Native Nation governance. Can you describe these?"

 

Manley Begay: "The standard approach has been in existence probably for the better part of the 20th century, and it's really an outgrowth of [a] long-held belief that dependency is the way to go by the federal government and also by many state governments as well. And the nation-building approach is a recent phenomenon sort of borne out of the political research and stuff of the '70s. Interestingly enough, I think the roots of the standard approach is really around colonization, forced dependency, and as a result political decision-making has been very slow. Others besides those that are most effected make development decisions, and it sort of views Indigenous culture as an obstacle to development, whereas on the nation-building approach which has been recently pushed and thought of by Indigenous peoples is really rooted around the exercise of sovereignty, claiming jurisdiction, building effective political systems and institutions of self governance, using culture as a way to design political systems and also to design economic systems as well. And so it's really two very different type of approaches, and also has produced two very different types of results."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Steve, when you talk about the standard approach, what are some of the inevitable outcomes?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "Well, I think the standard approach -- as Manley has indicated -- the results have not been very positive for Indian nations. I think you have to sort of realize that the standard approach leaves...it makes an assumption, it assumes that Indigenous nations are not really capable of making major decisions for themselves, so the priorities in development are ones that are put together in Washington, D.C., put together by federal bureaucrats who are saying, 'Man, these tribes poor, we've got to do something about it, let's come up with a program to help them.' So they design a program and they fund it and they make decisions about how the program will be run and Indian Country experiences the results. But if you look at that model, it's one in which tribal priorities do not appear, bureaucratic priorities do, Washington's priorities do, federal priorities do."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "You could almost call that the well-intended approach."

 

Stephen Cornell: "It's a very well-intended approach, it's just not a very well-accomplished approach. So tribal priorities don't appear in there, tribes do not exercise real decision-making power. In many cases, what it creates is this expectation that well, 'It's up to the feds to do it for us so you get this kind of looking to the feds as the source of not just money, but ideas and suggestions and solutions, so tribes get excluded from the decision-making process, they get excluded from thinking through what kind of development they want. The result over the -- Manley said it sort of dominated the 20th century -- if you look at the 20th century in Indian Country, the performance in economic development is pretty poor."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Steve, you talked about the standard model, sadly the traditional model of planning that's been used by the EDA [Economic development Adminitsration] planners that tribes hire. Give us an idea of what that process looks like."

 

Stephen Cornell: "Well, as we were saying, a lot of the ideas for what tribes should do tend to come out of Washington. I think very often what happens is an Indian nation, facing tough unemployment, difficult time getting people through the winter -- all the kinds of problems that we see in extremely poor rural communities -- those nations just, they've got to get something going. And so you call in the tribal planner and you tell the tribal planner to go get a grant, go find some money, go get something started. So the planner goes off and looks for whatever they can find out there, where are the federal dollars, has anybody else got anything I can apply for. You start whatever you can fund. You appoint your relatives or your political supporters to run the projects. The council micromanages the heck out of it, and everybody just prays that something will work. We think of it as this sort of six-step model for planning in the standard approach. I think we've seen a lot of that."

 

Manley Begay: "We were in southern British Columbia working with a group of First Nations and we had an executive education session and this is sort of the steps that Steve mentioned. We talked about those steps and then at the end of the presentation one elder in the back raises his hand and he says, 'I know what's wrong with that planning process'. He says, 'They should have prayed first!' Basically he was eluding to the fact that the nation-building approach is very different in terms of planning than the standard approach. There's actually forethought and there's long-term planning, rather than sort of the short, grant-type of mentality. And you're actually more proactive in thinking about how you're going to plan, rather than reacting to the agendas being set by Washington or those that you're getting the money from. And then you're setting the development agenda, not someone else. So the planning process is very different under the nation-building approach."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let me follow up with this. If tribal officials are feeling pressured out of desperation to solve immediate, crisis-type problems, they would have to be politically brave to go with the longer vision, to map out something that might take years to accomplish."

 

Stephen Cornell: "It's not that they shouldn't be chasing the federal dollars. From our point of view, there aren't enough federal dollars in Indian Country. There will never be enough money to compensate for what's been taken from Indigenous nations nor to take care of all the problems that are out there. You need those federal dollars and it's right to be pursuing them. The problem is with an approach to economic development that stops there, that simply is looking for where's the homerun project that's going to solve all our problems. 'Oh, man, let's go for this grant, maybe that'll solve our problems. Let's go for this one...' instead of saying, 'How do we build an environment here that can sustain long-term economic growth? How can we build an environment that will actually produce the jobs and the economic activity that fits our culture, fits what our people want and has -- as Manley says -- long-term staying power?' And if tribes manage to do both of those at once, let's find the dollars to deal with the crisis we've got today, but let's not neglect the task of building a nation that's capable of supporting its people for the long run without having to depend on Washington, D.C. That's what tribes need to be doing and it is tough. I think it's...Indian nations face terribly difficult tasks, but they've demonstrated over and over again that they can handle difficult tasks. It's going to take work, but it can happen."

 

Manley Begay: "And Indian nations know best what their needs are. An occasional politician that arrives on the reservation might think, 'Oh, you need a motel right there. That's a good intersection.' So he gets the money, a hotel is built there, and it doesn't work, because that's not exactly what the nation really needed and wanted at that time. It didn't fit into their scheme of things. So somebody else promotes that rather than Indian nations themselves."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "A lot of tribes suffer from brain drain. Do either of you want to talk about that problem and how that comes about?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "Yeah, I'd be glad to say something about that. I think brain drain in fact is one of the characteristics of the old way of doing economic development in Indian Country. One of the things this sort of grant mentality does, it turns tribal government into simply a grants-getting organization, and you begin to encourage an idea among tribal citizens that that's really what tribal government is about. It's a funnel. It's a funnel for jobs, money, services that come from the federal government and they land at tribal government, and tribal government distributes them out to communities and people. And so your idea of tribal government is, there's nothing particularly impressive or ambitious about it, it's just kind of a hand-out-the-goodies organization. And then you look at, let's say, young people on a reservation, the young citizens of the nation and when they imagine what they might do with their lives, are they going to think about, 'Boy, I'm going to get involved in the leadership of this nation'. But if that's all government is, what's exciting about that? When you shift to nation building, a couple of things happen. You move decision-making out of federal hands and you put it in Indigenous hands. Suddenly the burden of responsibility is on the nation itself to decide, 'What kind of future do we want? How are we going to create that future?' And it starts to get real because you feel you're in the driver's seat. You may actually be able to make that future come alive. Suddenly it's starting to get to be an interesting thing, this tribal government business, 'Hey, if we could do that...' So young people may be more likely to stick around. Plus, if you back up that decision-making power with capable government, so that if I'm a young person and I want to invest time and energy and ideas in the future of the nation, I actually have an opportunity to do that. It won't depend who I voted for in the last election or who my relatives are. We've got a more competent government than that. We've got a government that is focused on producing good things for the nation, not on just distributing goodies to friends or something like that. Then I'll begin to think it might make some sense to invest here. I might stick around because I could really build something for my family, my community, for the nation. That begins to slow down that brain drain that has young people headed off to Minneapolis or L.A. or Rapid City or Houston or someplace, and that's a critical thing for the future of Indian Country, is to retain the incredible array of talent and resourcefulness that is in tribal communities and get it working on behalf of these nations."

 

Manley Begay: "Could I just add to that. As Steve was mentioning, it creates a sense of hope. When somebody else is dictating to you how you're going to live, you lose the incentive to do things for yourself. So it becomes more appropriate to just have Washington, D.C. decide for you. Or to compare to Eastern Europe. For a long time, all decisions were made in Moscow, so you'd just go to Moscow. Up in Canada, you go to Ottawa for decisions to be made, and there's less of incentive to do good things and to hope for good things because somebody else is deciding for you. So as a human being, you want to be in a decision-making position about determining for yourself what the future is going to look like. If somebody else is doing it for you, you say, 'Well, forget it.' You have less of a vested interest."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Some of this seems to be buried in or attached to the original IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitutions which were two-year elected terms. Is this relevant to the discussion? Is the fact that many tribes operate on a two-year cycle related to the fact that they can't plan long term?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "If you look at those IRA constitutions, the boilerplate constitutions -- which were not Indigenous creations --those were created in the U.S. Department of the Interior for Indian nations. It was the United States saying, 'We know how you should govern yourselves. Here's the model, take it and go.' If you look at those models, they're very simple models of governance, they tend to put a whole lot of power in the hands of a tribal council, of elected officials. They make no provision for judicial functions or dispute resolution, things that tribes had enormous experience for generations in doing. It's not part of that government. The terms of office are short as you say. You get these two-year terms in many of those governments, so you get real rapid turnover in leadership, and Manley was mentioning you combine that with the federal funding cycles, and basically something's changing every year in the array of people who are working on development. So it's tough to get continuity. Now having said that, that doesn't mean everybody needs four- or five-year terms. We've seen some nations with two-year terms or even shorter, some nations where the senior people in government turn over every year. If the rules by which you govern stay the same, then you can get the kind of stability and continuity that capable governance needs. The real problem is if every two years when that administration perhaps changes, if it's a whole new ballgame, pretty soon you get people sitting there saying, 'Man, I'm heading out of here, I can't deal with this. You never know what the rules are, you never know whether you can trust the people you're working with to still be there tomorrow.' So I think, yeah, the standard model is a model that tolerates very high instability in tribal government, encourages very high instability in tribal government. That's one of the reasons why it's a pretty lousy approach to development."

 

Manley Begay: "And if you don't have staggered terms, it gets even worse."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "That's where I wanted to follow up, Manley. If you could talk a little bit about tribal governments that are operating more within the nation-building approach. What do they look like, tell us what they look like?"

 

Manley Begay: "As Steve was mentioning here earlier, we find that those that are operating within the nation-building approach have stability and stability in the rule of law. We find that to be quite important, because rule of law allows for the understanding that when a new administration comes in, things aren't going to change, contracts don't have to be rewritten. Rather, it creates this stability and so investors begin to feel as though, 'That's the place where I want to invest.' The Indigenous elementary school teacher says, 'I want to go there and work there because I know my investment of time, energy, education is going to be safe and that's where I want to be, and I don't have to leave elsewhere to provide a stability for my family. Rather, this is the place where I want to be.' Outside investors begin to feel as though that their investment will be safe as well because the rules don't change, it's very stable, and you get less of a conflict-of-interest situation where the court system is very stable, it provides for good rules of order, good law that's been set in place, and I think that you find economic development occurring much quicker and in a much better fashion in the long run."

 

Stephen Cornell: "Can I jump in and add a little piece to that which Manley reminded me of? In the standard approach, one of the other characteristics of that approach is the tribal government does everything. Now if you do that, one of the things that happens is you get a lot of political involvement in business management, because you're basically asking councilors to wear a political legislator hat for certain decisions but then take that hat off and be a business manager for other decisions, and for most of us that's tough to carry those kinds of roles and keep them straight, particularly when you're under pressure from constituents. In the nation-building model, one of the striking aspects of that model is the pulling apart of political decisions and the management of enterprises. You begin to get tribal governors, councilors, focused on certain core issues. What are the laws that we need? Do we have the appropriate governance capabilities in place? Do we have a set of policies and rules that will -- going back to the brain drain question -- keep the talented people here? Those are the kinds of things you want elected leadership to deal with, but then when the tribally owned enterprise gets going, you hope that business managers will be able to make intelligent, smart business decisions free from the kinds of political interference that the old model almost guaranteed."

 

Manley Begay: "The root of that type of stability creation really is around claiming jurisdiction, claiming sovereignty. Rather than having somebody else make decisions for your people, your resources, and all the issues that you deal with, you're in the decision-making position. You decide how your resources are going to be allocated, you decide how your political system is going to be developed, and it essentially marries decisions to consequences, whereas in the past, decisions were being made by other folks and you didn't have this marriage actually occurring, and as a result if somebody really messed up from outside of the tribe, they moved to Ohio or Denver or elsewhere. But for Indigenous people there's a vested interest there. You have to make good decisions to get the consequences that you want, and so that's very critical and part of that is just gaining control of the decision seat it seems to me."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "It seems to me that one model tends to foster confidence, growth, hope -- that sort of thing -- but I'm sure even within the nation-building approach, conflicts arise. How are conflicts resolved in either model?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "I think in the standard model, conflicts are resolved by firing people or the feds step in and say, 'We're yanking the grant,' or something like that. And in the nation-building model, ideally, you have some kind of mechanism that is rooted in community, custom, law, tradition so that it has respect in the community, so the people believe in it -- some mechanism that's capable of resolving disputes in a way that the various members of the community think is fair. The question is, how do you deal with those disputes and can you deal with them in ways that don't rip the society apart, so that the disagreement between these two families doesn't suddenly become or eventually become an immobilizing piece of community life where nobody can agree about anything and people are constantly at each others' throats and anything that you get is my loss and that sort of thing? So that sort of dispute-resolution mechanism -- and in many cases, it's an independent tribal court, in some cases, it might be a set of elders who have the authority and the stature to help resolve disputes, it may be traditional kinds of peacemaking approaches. There are a lot of ways to do it, but you've got to have a mechanism like that because there are bound to be disputes."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "And because a nation-building approach, the way you describe it, apparently draws on local culture, tradition, history, it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of situation like sadly the IRA government attempted to be. Manley, when you look at the nation-building approach, how does that affect strategic planning or strategies that tribes can develop over time?"

 

Manley Begay: "The strategic orientation focus in the nation-building approach way of thinking about things really allows for long-term thinking. Rather than the three to five years or 'grant mentality,' you're thinking about, 'What are my kids going to be doing 50 years from now? What kind of clothes will they be wearing? How will they be worshipping? What kind of language will they be speaking?What kind of education will they have? What kind of homes will they be living in? What kind of jobs will they have?' These are questions that must be answered by the leadership, and so [in] the nation-building model, you begin to address those questions, whereas in the standard approach somebody else is making decisions for you. It's just very short-term thinking. So as a result of the nation-building approach, you're planning for the long haul."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let's take a few minutes then to look at in your experience -- and you both have a broad experience in this -- some successes and some failures based on these two approaches."

 

Stephen Cornell: "There are a lot of stories out there, because the nation-building approach is not something we came up with. It's something that Indian nations came up with, and I think since really for about 30 years now, since the mid 1970s, we've begun to see a growing number of Indian nations who are taking control of their own affairs, putting in place capable governments and beginning to think very strategically as Manley described and accomplish things. One of the nations that I like to talk about is the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma. In the mid 1970s, that Nation had -- today it's a very large nation, more than 20,000 citizens. In the 1970s, they had a tiny land base and almost no money in the bank. They had some ideas. How do we get people to come and invest here so we can create some jobs for our citizens? And the young tribal council member went out to talk to business people around Oklahoma and say to them, 'Hey, you should come and invest in our community. We're good people, we'll give you some tax breaks, come build with us.' And some of these business people, their response was, 'Well, okay, that all sounds real interesting, but let's say I get into a dispute with somebody on the reservation or with the tribe itself. Have you got a court system that I can depend on?' 'No, we don't have a court system.' 'Okay. And how do I know that the promises that you're making to me to help get me to work with you are going to be respected if when the administration changes. Can I count on the rule of law?' 'Well, we haven't really thought that part through.' Eventually this council member came back to the nation and said, 'We've got some political work to do. We've got some governance work to do before we're going to be successful at pulling these people here.' They did that work. It took a long time. They did it piece by piece. They built a capable set of governing institutions and they began to get the kind of investment they were after, not just from outsiders, from their own people. It's a nation that has taken enormous strides by kind of seizing control of its own destiny and then doing the hard work to put the institutions in place that could support what they wanted to do."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Manley, what's one of your favorite stories? What would you like the viewers to hear?"

 

Manley Begay: "Some of my favorite stories really is around Indian nations actually grabbing hold of sovereignty and moving forward, sort of the first piece of the puzzle in the nation-building approach. There seems to be these defining moments where things just change from the standard approach to the nation-building approach. Some of the nations did it very smoothly and in a calculated fashion, as Steve just mentioned: Citizen Potawatomi. Some Indian nations, you had near violence. For instance, like at Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. When gaming was first being initiated, you found two opposing views of whether that nation should have gaming or not, which led to essentially the closure of a road into the casino and you basically had a standoff which forced negotiation to occur. And at that moment in time things began to change. The Indian nation began to think about themselves as truly a sovereign entity with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation, and there are a number of stories throughout Indian Country about this where Indian women would go into the Bureau of Indian Affairs office and literally threw the superintendent out. And at that moment things began to change. It's not unlike Lech Walesa in Poland saying to the Soviet Union, 'We're going to do things our way.' It's not unlike Nelson Mandela in South Africa saying, 'No more Apartheid, it's got to stop here.' And there are a number of these stories out in Indian Country like that."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Let's look at First Nations in Canada. What are some examples of First Nations that have gone through a similar process? Steve?"

 

Stephen Cornell: "There's actually a lot happening in Canada right now with First Nations. I can think of a couple of the interesting ones to us. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Saskatchewan is a group of nine First Nations, some Dine, some Cree, who first got together to try to do economic development together. They realized that if they started doing development planning as a single group of nations they would get more leverage and be able to do better. Today, they're beginning to build political institutions at that same tribal council level. The Ktunaxa Tribal Council in British Columbia -- that's five First Nations and they're doing kinds...building the kinds of governing institutions that we're talking about at the tribal council level where these five First Nations are cooperating. Right now, they're involved in trying to design a government that will support their long-term strategic goals for preservation of the land, preservation of their culture, development of enough prosperity and productivity to support their community. So it's happening in a lot of different places, and if we had the time we could give you quite a list."

 

Mark St. Pierre: "Well, it's pretty apparent that Native nations that want a successful future have to invest tremendous time and effort into those issues, and I want to thank our two guests today, Dr. Manley Begay and Dr. Stephen Cornell, for appearing on this edition of Native Nation Building. This is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Peterson Zah and Manley A. Begay, Jr.: Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Navajo Chairman and President Peterson Zah and NNI Faculty Chair Manley A. Begay, Jr. discuss the role of strategic vision and planning in the establishment and cultivation of the Navajo Navajo Permanent Trust Fund, and stress the need for Native nations to forge a long-term vision for their communities and peoples.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Zah, Peterson and Manley A. Begay, Jr. "Strategic Thinking and Planning: Navajo Nation Permanent Trust Fund." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

Peterson Zah:

"[Navajo Introduction]. In the Indian way and Navajo way you always identify yourself, who you are, where you come from, who you're related to because, after all, that's what we're all about. And so that's normally the way you start your conversation. Because you're not the only one I'm talking to here in this room. We have other entities that are also here and they always want to know who you are. I wanted to say just two or three words before we get going with what I'm supposed to be doing here.

Number one, I now work at Arizona State University [ASU]; I've been there for the last 14 years. And after the Navajo people kicked me out of office I went down to the University and I started working with young people because, at the time, they only had something like 600 Native American students on campus. And the President says, "˜That's as far as we get. We come to that number then we always come down. Our graduation rate is horrible,' he says. "˜So we need to improve that. Let that be your concern.' He also said, "˜I can't tell you how to do your job because I don't know what to tell you. You evidently know.' And so essentially that's the way we got started. From 600 Native American students to today, we have 1,500 Native American students. Our goal is to reach, within the next five years, 2,000 Native American students. So we're doing very well in recruitment. Our retention rate is improving. Our graduation rate is improving also. And so I wanted to just give you that little commercial. If I didn't say anything about ASU, the President it's going to get back to him and he's going to be angry. So I wanted to just say this.

Number two: I really, really enjoyed the conference here during the last two days. I'm learning a lot and listening to all of the young ones -- all of you, participating in these discussions -- and all of the dedication, and a good sense of where we should be headed all comes out. And as an old man, as a grandpa, that really makes me happy. And we need more of these kinds of training to equip the upcoming leaders with all of the tools that they need so that they can do better among their people in their communities nationwide. So I just wanted to say this.

In terms of the subject today, the establishment of the [Navajo Nation Permanent] Trust Fund, I always tell people that the needs of the Navajo people back then in the mid-1980s were the same as they are now. Some people say, "˜Well, you were able to do all of that because the needs back then weren't as great.' Well, to be honest, they were the same, basically the same. As the tribal chair sitting there at that desk every minute people coming in, they want service, they want to talk to you, they want advice, they want a sense of direction, they want this and they want that. And so your time is occupied a hundred percent throughout the day, almost 24 hours a day -- how they want those services to be rendered to them. And so basically that was the backdrop of the Navajo Nation back in the mid-1980s.

Navajo, as you know, is the largest of all of the Indian tribes, whether it's a pure membership or land base: 88-member council, over 300,000 Navajo people, 110 chapters. And at those chapters you have chapter president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, grazing committee members. So you can multiply 110 times five, and that's how many people you have to work with as an elected official of the Navajo Nation government. So to put your program into place, you have to work with those officers at the community level as well as the 88-member council. So it's not an easy task. You may have a great idea but if you don't do your homework to begin with, you're in trouble right from the word "˜go.' And so with establishment of the trust fund, we had to basically deal with that kind of infrastructure on the Navajo to get to where we wanted to go. I do not know in this room how many of our tribal government, tribal leaders, have tried to create trust fund for the Indian people. I was extremely lucky to be working with a tribal council that had a lot of vision. They were visionary leaders, the 88-member council. I would say probably one half of them had no greater than 10th-grade, 11th-, 12th-grade education. We didn't have a single college graduate but they were visionary in a lot of the things that they did. So we were very, very lucky to have that number in the Navajo Nation Council.

Prior to my becoming a tribal chair I worked at the legal services program called DNA [Diné be'iina Náhiilna be Agha'diit'ahii or "˜attorneys who work for the economic revitalization of The People'] People's Legal Service. I spent 11 years there as the executive director, as a non-lawyer executive director. There were always a lot of people who wanted me to go to law school and I used to tell them, "˜Listen, I'm better off than a lawyer. So I'm going to continue running the program. Because when you become a lawyer, you get tunnel vision and sometimes you can't see things out here. And therefore you have to really, really concentrate on the overall problems of the Navajo people.' And as such I was always working with lawyers to make sure that the cases that we handled at DNA, many of which went to United States Supreme Court, was handled right because I knew that when you get into that court you don't really know what's going to happen. Sure, the lawyers will tell you that they're going to win, this is their argument and this is what we want to do. But we always had a mock trial that we insist our lawyers go through that mock trial -- not only once or twice or three times -- 10 times to have those kinds of sessions before they went into the United States Supreme Court.

So I was intimately involved in Kerr-McGee vs. the Navajo Nation, a taxation case that was accepted by the Navajo Nation to go on to the United States Supreme Court. Within that four-year period, we were able to win in the United States Supreme Court where the tribes were given the authority to tax companies that work on the reservation, that extract minerals on the reservations and that do business on the Navajo Nation. I remember the controversy when we passed that taxing legislation by the Navajo Council, all of the people who do business, companies who do business on the reservation, they all banded together and they said, "˜We're going to sue you because we don't think you have the authority as Navajo Nation to impose taxes on us because we have this contract with you. And we look at that contract as a bible and in there it says we are not to be taxed.' But those were the old leases that were approved by the Navajo Nation Council and the contracting parties. And so when we decided that we're going to start taxing people, they used that against us, the very same thing that the other Navajo Council did in the past.

And so what happened was that we went into court and basically did all of our homework and we [ended] up winning that case. And I remember getting a call from the clerk of the United States Supreme Court saying, "˜I'm just letting you know a decision was made today. It was nine to zero. You guys won the case. That means Indian tribes can now begin taxing companies that operate on the Indian nation.' That was a precedent-setting case. And what that did, what that did was I told the companies, when they decided to sue us in court, I says, "˜As a tribal chairman you get sued every week so it doesn't really matter. And so can I get a concession out of you that while this case is going on can you pay the amount of money that you're supposed to pay in escrow, in escrow account? If you win, you take all the money back. If I win, I take all the money.' And so basically that's how the $217 million was accumulated. So when we won the United States Supreme Court, I went down to the bank and got a check for $217 million. I was the most popular person in Window Rock.

But the question about what to do with that amount of money was really, really something that people, leaders, have to deal with because it was the election year. The 88-member council, they said, "˜We understand you picked up the $217 million. Let's call the council into session and I've got a project. I want to be reelected.' Council delegate from Chinle says, "˜I want to have a laundry, laundromat at Chinle chapter and we'll call it Chinle Wash. We want to have that going because using that I can get re-elected and we'll get further in our progress that we're trying to accomplish.' And so that was something that was really a lot of pressure, activities that happened on the Navajo Nation. The problem was, what do you do with that money? A lot of services are needed. Anything you can think of you can throw the $217 million at those problems because it's election year. And so everyone wanted a role in terms of how they all thought we should spend the money.

My mother is a traditional Navajo lady. She never went to school. She doesn't know a word of English. She has lots of sheep all her life. And every once in awhile she always wants us to come home, spend a night, two or three days with her. So when the pressure got so hot, boiling over in Window Rock, I jumped in my pickup truck and I went home. And I got to the house late in the evening, slept and early in the morning my mother was butchering the sheep. And she says, "˜I'm cooking for the kids.' And then when I got up she started talking. And I told her and she says, "˜Son, I hear all these things on the radio about what's happening in Window Rock. What is happening? What is happening with that money? What did you do with the $217 million that you got from the bank?' And I says, "˜I just put it in the safe and I'm trying to decide what I should do with it.' And so then she started talking about her herd and she says, "˜Is there a way, is there a way that you can treat money the same way as you treat a herd, the sheep?' And she says, "˜Remember, say back several years ago, when our herd came down and we only had 15 sheep and we were all worried? Then I told you kids, let's not eat the sheep anymore for the next two years. If we do it that way, the 15 will multiply to 30 if we leave it alone. The following year we'll have 60. The following year we'll have 120 and we'll be back to where we were. Can you treat money that way?' And this is a traditional Navajo lady talking with me. I could have probably hired a consultant at $400-500 an hour to tell me the same thing, but the mother cares. She's a permanent fixture on the Navajo Nation. She's a tribal member. So I thought to myself, 'Well, she's given me an advice and what she's really, really talking about it is putting money into trust so that it can multiply the same way as her herd multiplied.' And so I got all recharged. At the end of that two-day period, I went back into Window Rock and I went to the council and I says, "˜Ah ha! I've got the answer. Let's put these monies into trusts, let's not spend it. Let's not spend it foolishly. Yes, we all want to get reelected -- I do too -- but let's be prudent. Let's use our judgment in the right way for the Navajo people.' So it was advice that I got from my mother that was highly valuable to the Navajo Nation.

So we sat down with the council and we developed a plan in terms of how that $217 million should be distributed and used to the trust fund. And we established what we call Chapter Government Nation-Building Fund. We put something like $60 or $70 million into that account. That means at the end of the year, whatever interest that it earns those monies were divided among the chapter houses and that's the way their chapter houses operated throughout the year. We created a $20 million Navajo scholarship fund. We had something like maybe $20 million in there already, but we put another $20 million on top of that for something nearly $40 million and we said the interest that this earns at the end of each year will keep the Navajo kids going to college, a college and a university of their choice. So we took care of the chapters. We took care of the young people but not everybody is fit to go to college. Some want to go to vocational education. So we said why don't we take care of them? And we put something like $7 or $8 million into that account. The interest that it earns then can send those Navajo kids to those vocational institutions.

Then we had some problems. There was tremendous need for the handicap people. It was right at this time that old man Ronald Reagan came into power and he cut off all those social programs. Remember back then? Maybe some of you were in diapers still but Ronald Reagan came in and they said, "˜No more of these social programs.' So he cut them. Well, that left the senior citizens out in the cold. We then said, "˜Why don't we have a handicap trust fund?' So we put $7 or $8 million in there for all the elderly people that may need hearing aid -- like the one Manley is wearing -- and hearing aid and all of these other things that they need, the senior citizen. And they're the ones that use that trust fund to help them with some of their problems that they were having. And then there were senior citizens' trust fund. All the senior citizen organizations on the reservation and we put some money into the trust fund for them. And we said that the interest that it earns, "˜You can use that for your activities,' all the seniors.

Then we gave Navajo Academy -- the only Navajo high school, a prep school -- we gave them some trust funds so that they can establish a truly Navajo Nation school. And that was built in Farmington, New Mexico, and today it's still there. They're the only high school on the Navajo Nation that sends every graduate to colleges and university. And I like to go over there and recruit students. So they're the ones that have that Navajo prep academy.

The other one that is not listed, these things happened in 1984-85. In 1990, early 1990, we established three more trust funds. One of them is what we call Land Acquisition Fund. All of you are wondering, "˜Say, how come the Navajo Nation has such a big land base, big huge reservation?' Well, we buy land back. We buy land back. So we created what we call Land Acquisition Fund. There are some ranchers, non-Indian people adjacent to the Navajo Nation that always put their land up for sale. We said, 'When those people make their land available, we should get to the bank, make out a check, buy the land.' Now our reservation is growing. It's getting bigger and bigger and so we established that Land Acquisition Fund. Today it has $50 million, $50 million in that account. So anybody who puts out their land for sale, we use that money to buy land. The reason why we did it is Navajo Nation keeps on growing; the people, the membership is getting larger and larger. We want the land to grow with those numbers. And so every year we purchase more and more land, and we're not going to stop until we get back the whole Southwest. And so that's why we established that fund.

The other fund that we created during that period was a trust fund to take care of a lot of these economic development that's taking place on the Navajo Nation. They have their own trust fund that they can tap into to do economic development projects. And so basically those are the trust funds that the Navajo Nation now has. Now why did we do that? My thought back then was, you can use the $217 million, put them all into trusts. If you have enough trust accounts that you establish, I want to see the day the Navajo Nation government would run on trust fund; we don't have to beg anybody for money. Is that called self-sufficiency all of you young people? Self-sufficiency, that's what we're striving for. Twenty years has gone by. Many of these trust funds are being utilized and they have matured. So much of your trust fund is being utilized to keep the tribal government going.

Now I work for Arizona State University as I told you. We have a rather new president that came out of back east. His goal is to put Arizona State University in a position so that all of these monies that people donate, he puts it into trusts. He calls it endowed funds. And he says, "˜I'd like to put the university in the position where we don't have to go to the state legislature and beg for money each year, we don't have to go see the governor. We want to run this university like NYU, Harvard, Yale, all of those universities. They all run on their own. They're all running on trust funds.' So basically the Navajo concept was to essentially to do the same thing.

The biggest one that we wanted to talk about is the Permanent Fund. It was established because of the natural resources being depleted. I told the Navajo people, I said, "˜We have coal, but you know coal is a non-renewable resource. Once the coal is gone, where are we going to get our money? Once the coal is all extracted from Navajo Land, where are we going to get our income? So while we can, we should put these monies into trust.' So a permanent fund was established by the Navajo Nation. One thing that we had to keep on explaining over and over to the Navajo people is, 'What is the difference between the principal and fund income?' Probably the most simplest thing that you can put across to people, but there was a lot of misunderstanding between principal and the fund income. And we keep on saying, 'We want to make it so that we don't spend the principale when we are at a point of using, beginning to use these trust funds.'

The way it works now is, when the permanent fund was authorized, we put something like $26 million as a basis, as a foundation of the Permanent Fund; we put that in the bank. On top of that we said, '12 percent of all projected revenue shall be invested from the Navajo Nation.' So each year, the Navajo Council comes to decide the budgeting process. The first thing they do is they take, on top of everything they get, 12 percent of that, they put it on top of the Permanent Fund. So the Permanent Fund enjoys two things. One is the interest that it earns goes back into the Permanent Fund. The Navajo Nation uses 12 percent of their general fund total, they put that on top of that. So it enjoys a lot of deposits of money and the generation of revenues that way.

We agreed among the council, I told the council, I said, "˜I want to get an agreement from you that we're not going to ever touch this money for the next 20 years. For the next 20 years, you shall not come to my office and ask that you withdraw these monies. We're going to put it into trust for 20 years and we're going to see what happens, how much money it can generate. After the 25-year period, we will then have a five-year plan where 95 percent of the money could, may be expended according to rules established by the council.' And so that is still in the plan. However, there is no program in place right now for the use of those permanent fund[s]. And so basically that is something that the Navajo Nation agreed to and that they are still, we are still holding them to those agreements. All of the expenses that is associated with the administration and the management of the Permanent Fund comes out of that amount of money that it earns. And so that's what happened to the Navajo Nation and the establishment of its permanent fund.

Today, March 27th -- is it today? -- we have some like $1.4 billion in that permanent fund. This is money that is not earmarked for anything. It's free money. So money in the bank, 1.4 [million dollars]. One of the biggest push by the council every time they come into session is they want to get at it. They want to spend the money. So usually Manley Begay and I are there in Window Rock saying, "˜No, no, no, no. You guys agreed not to do this. Let's keep it growing, let's keep it going.' So thus far, we have been successful and so that is the way this permanent fund and all the other trust funds was established.

Now in 2002, a work group was established called Permanent Fund Work Group. The Navajo Nation Council wanted to get seven people from the Navajo Nation that can decide what to do with that permanent fund. And they made me the chair and then we selected people like Manley Begay and others. And we've been meeting on and off since then and talking about what the future holds for the Navajo Nation trust fund. Manley says, "˜You go first, talk about how these were established, but no joke.' He says, "˜As long as you agree that you aren't going to tell any joke to this group, then you should do this.' So before I crack a joke, I'd like to give him the floor."

Manley Begay:

"The reason why my brother walks around real slow is [because] he has $500 million in both pockets. A good friend of mine, I ran into him again, Curt Massey from White Mountain Apache. I used to play basketball with him years ago. I noticed he was walking real slow, too. I told him, I said, "˜You're walking really slow.' I said, "˜Are you still playing basketball?' He says, "˜No, I don't have any more knees.' I used to play ball with him years ago. We used to be neighbors over there in the East Fork area of the White Mountain Apache reservation. So it was really good to see my brother and good friend Curt Massey. Now he's on the council at White Mountain Apache. And one thing about my brother Pete Zah is that he used to play basketball also, years ago at the Phoenix Indian School, and he was actually on a championship team. So quite an athlete back when.

As Pete was saying, we were selected to this permanent fund work group. And lo and behold, we're sitting on millions of dollars, and it was our responsibility to decide what to do with that money. So I asked Peter, I said, "˜What should we do with the money?' And he said, "˜We should buy Tahiti, the Island of Tahiti, and move over there, get a flock of sheep and herd sheep by the ocean.' But can you imagine the responsibility that's given to you about what to do with that amount of money? In 2002, the money was hovering around $800 million and seven of us, these individuals, we were the ones to decide how the money was going to be spent. As my brother was saying, when they first won the legal case, everybody became his best buddy. They'd come out of he woodwork. The same thing happened again, this time to me, again. People I hadn't seen for years they said, 'Brother, uncle, grandpa, have I got a deal for you.' So can you imagine the amount of responsibility we were given?

And so what do you do? How do you handle this? Because everything's important, right? Grandpa and grandma are important, the handicapped are important, roads are important, health is important, education is important, veterans are important, the youth are important, and there are 300,000 Navajos. Shall we go per cap, 300,000 Navajos? Not much money to go around. And so that was what we were facing. So what did we do? We did a lot of research. First we wanted to figure out what's been happening all these years since the money was put into a trust fund and we wanted to find out exactly how much money there was.

So my brother and I and the five other individuals, we had the fund managers come to see us and we had meetings with them about where the money was at, how the money was invested, where did it go, how much is left and this was shortly, if you'll remember, after 9/11. And the stock markets were really fluctuating around that time. It probably would have been up to $1 billion, but 9/11 sort of made it dip, up and down. And we consulted with the community. One thing about my brother here is that he's very close to the people, the people that are out there in the community. And he said, "˜I want to ask them what they think because that's the heart and soul of who you are.' And he says, "˜We have to go there, we have to go there and ask.'

Then we found out, lo and behold, we found out that in the year 2000 this legislation was passed. The Navajo Nation during an election year earmarked 50 percent of the money to go to this local governance trust fund. And so that remained that only 45 percent of the fund income would be available to us to determine an expenditure plan for and then the 5 percent would be reinvested back into the principal. So essentially this is what happened. So we were actually only dealing with $6.8 million and the vastness of the needs of Navajo is unbelievable and here we were only dealing with about around $7 million. And here we were thinking, we're going to buy Tahiti. But there was a reality check. All of a sudden things began to change very, very quickly. So what to do, what to do?

And so we began to figure out how to do this, what do we do, how do we think through this particular...? So we began to research more and more about how much money there actually was and we wanted to know if there were other extenuating circumstances. This bullet point three. Were there other things that were going on with the money that we hadn't known about earlier? We requested reports from just about everybody at Navajo; we met with the money managers again, we talked to attorneys, we went to the natural resource department. We wanted to know how much time is left for the coal deposit at Navajo? How much more oil do we have left? Because all of that plays into how you plan for an expenditure plan. We held public hearings and then we began to devise a final permanent fund work group report to the Navajo Nation Council. Here is an assumption chart that if coal reserves at our coal mine were depleted, if our oil fields were depleted, what's going to happen to the Permanent Fund trust. And so this middle road is sort of the best route that was imaginable.

So 2008, we're talking about the money hovering around maybe $700-800 million. But as my brother was saying, it's actually at $1.4 billion; so the stocks doing a really, really good job. And here's sort of the market value chart of the Permanent Fund. So you can imagine that in 2010 it would be nearing $1 billion, but it's actually exceeded expectations. Here's another chart that we were working with. In terms of the local governance trust fund -- let's say -- if the money went there, what's the best-case scenario? So we were thinking through what to do with this money and we held public hearings. We wanted to hear from the people. We wanted to hear what the people had to say. And my brother here is like -- remember the old commercial of E.F. Hutton? When Peterson Zah speaks, everybody listens. It's absolutely true. He has that stature that when he goes out to the community, when he talks to the people, people really listen to him. They want to know exactly what he's thinking. To this day, even though he's not in office, he's still a leader. He's still a leader to be respected, to be listened to, to be thought through. So at these community hearings, this is what we put together. And here are the public hearing questions. So we started to gain data and information. And this was actually my brother's idea. He said, "˜We've got to go over there, talk to the people, find out what's going on. Let's pose to them these questions and let's find out some answers about what they're thinking.' And these were their comments.

There was a big push for reinvesting the money, instead of spending it. They said, they told us...these were grandmas and grandpas, people that we would consider sort of everyday people. Very intelligent, smart people. And they said to us, 'Reinvest the money.' But they didn't come out and say, 'Reinvest.' They said this, "˜It's like seeing your corn grow. You should pick the corn only when it is ripe. If you pick it when it's too young, you won't get enough to eat.' So what they were saying was, reinvest the money, put it back. They also said, in reference to the local governance trust fund, they said, "˜There's this huge cow with lots of milk, but only a few calves are allowed to feed, then others are all standing around hungry. The money is like milk, it all goes to just those few.' So they were saying to us, 'Wait a minute. Let's wait a minute.' And then those of us that are living off Navajo Nation land, they were saying, "˜Count us in; don't count us out. Don't call us outsiders. We know our homeland and the homeland knows us. Our umbilical cords are buried in our homeland. We are still your relatives. We are only here because of jobs, education, training and for medical reasons.' Often these services are not available on the Navajo Nation. In the Navajo way, when a baby is, the umbilical cord falls off, there's a whole ceremony that it entails. So where it's buried is where your heart and your soul is at. So no matter where you go, wherever your umbilical cord is at, that's where your heart and soul will be.

And so what did we do, we put together this permanent fund work group report and this is what we said. Number one, we challenged the Navajo Nation Council and we said, and we also challenged the Navajo people, and we said, "˜Develop a vision with a strategic plan for the Navajo Nation as a whole that can provide guidance to those -- including the Navajo Nation Council -- who must make momentous decisions regarding finance and other matters affecting the long-term future of the people.' We said, "˜Reinvest all of the Permanent Fund until 2012, an additional period of five years, or until the corpus of the fund reaches $1 billion, whichever comes first.' As my brother said, it's at $1.4 billion and everybody wants to get at it. And we said, "˜Repeal the legislation requiring the Permanent Fund income go to the local governance trust fund.' And we said, "˜the Navajo Nation should really resist further legislative diversion of the money. It makes the fund quite vulnerable.' And we said, "˜set up an endowment commission.' The endowment commission's responsibility would be to figure out according to policy, rules and regulations, how the money would be dispensed.

Today, what's the future of the Permanent Fund? We're not sure. It's sort of a question mark, although we're all following Mr. Zah's lead. He says, "˜We sometimes as Indian people have a hard time saving. We get a paycheck and then we're driving to town, we spend all the money. We're happy going over there, coming back we're all quiet. No more money.' And he says, "˜We've got to save. We've got to save that money.' So we're following his lead to this very day." 

Good Data Leads to Good Sovereignty

Year

The lack of good data about U.S. American Indian and Alaska Native populations hinders tribes’ development activities, but it also highlights a space for sovereign action. In coming years, tribes will no doubt continue to advocate for better national data and at the same time increasingly implement their own “data agendas” by gathering high quality, culturally relevant information about their communities. With more meaningful data, tribal policymakers can make informed decisions about which policies and programs are right for the task at hand. Strategic data planning empowers tribes to tell their communities’ stories through their own data, and not that of others. 

Resource Type
Citation

Schultz, Jennifer Lee and Stephanie Carroll Rainie. "Good Data Leads to Good Sovereignty." Indian Country Today Media Network. June 3, 2014. Opinion. (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/good-data-leads-to..., accessed June 3, 2014)

Tribal Strength Through Economic Diversification

Author
Year

The potential impacts of Internet gaming legalization was a major topic at last month’s National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) convention. Another critical topic, not surprisingly, was economic diversification and Tribes’ ability to pursue and manage the process of planning for change.

Legalization of online gaming is gaining traction; a few states already have passed legislation allowing it. Should this trend continue, it has been estimated that Indian gaming revenues could take a hit of up to 25 percent. This would be disastrous for many Tribal communities whose economies are built upon gaming revenue as their sole economic pillar.

If there is a bright side to the potential challenges in the gaming industry, it is that many progressive, forward-thinking Tribal leaders have been planning for this day...

Resource Type
Citation

Fullmer, Jamie. "Tribal Strength Through Economic Diversification." Indian Country Today Media Network. April 18, 2013. Opinion. (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/tribal-strength-through..., accessed April 22, 2013)

A Place Called Poarch PCI: all about diversifying

Author
Year

The Poarch Band of Creek Indians didn’t coin the phrase “economic development,” but they are certainly taking it to new heights. With revenue from successful gaming venues in the state and the drive to diversify their economic interests, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians is working on several projects around the state and into Florida...

Resource Type
Citation

Digmon, Sherry. "‘A Place Called Poarch’ — PCI: all about diversifying." AtmoreNews.com, October 24, 2012. Article. (http://www.atmorenews.com/2012/10/24/a-place-called-poarch-pci-all-about..., accessed October 29, 2012)

Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development - An Online Course Series

Producer
Liz Hill and Justin Severson
Year

Martha Fast Horse of the Martha Fast Horse Show in Minneapolis interviews Ian Record of the Native Nations Institute (NNI) and Jaime Pinkham (Nez Perce) of the Bush Foundation about NNI's recent launch of its groundbreaking online course series, "Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development." Their conversation touches on the governance challenges facing Native nations, the solutions they are developing to overcome those challenges, and the findings from the ongoing research by NNI and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development about the keys to successful nation building.

Resource Type
Citation

Hill, Liz and Justin Severson. "Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development - An Online Course Series." The Martha Fast Horse Show. Minneapolis, Minnesota. May 26, 2013. Radio interview. (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/marthafasthorse/2013/05/27/jaime-pinkham-bu..., accessed May 28, 2013)