strategic planning

Regis Pecos: The Role of Core Values in Cochiti Governance and Renewal

Producer
Archibald Bush Foundation and the Native Nations Institute
Year

In this excerpted video, former Cochiti Governor Regis Pecos provides an overview of the core values that are integral to Cochiti's culture and way of life, and shows how his people relied on the application of those core values to overcome a catastrophe and rebuild its nation and community.

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pecos, Regis. "The Role of Core Values in Cochiti Governance and Renewal." Remaking Indigenous Governance Systems seminar. Archibald Bush Foundation, Saint Paul, Minnesota; and the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Prior Lake, Minnesota. May 2, 2011. Presentation.

"[Cochiti language] is, in my language, a greeting to all of you. I wanted to first express my appreciation and thanks to the, our sister and our elder who shared with us this morning a prayer and a song. And sitting back there as she sang really, it's not difficult to become emotional. If you think about how, over time, these songs of our people have been shared and really, no matter what language, it resonates deep with inside of us because those are the voices of our forefathers, those become the voices of all those who've gone before, that we are connected to, and so it's a beautiful way to remind all of us of the sacred trust that we have to all those in our communities, to all the children, to all those who are yet to be born. And I want to thank the Bush Foundation, as well as the Native Nations Institute. One, for creating the opportunity for this kind of discourse that really also needs to be said in congratulating all of you, in all of your respective capacities, to take this time in our collective journey to stop and reflect. I want to share with you, and I'm going to use my Native language because I think like the song shared with us, to begin this dialogue today, it's only in our language that we can fully come to appreciate and understand what enormous responsibility we have, at this particular time in our journey, and how everything that we do affects so many more into the future. But it also is a way to honor all those who have gone before who, in their time, rose to the challenge to define our inheritance, all that defines who we are as Indigenous people. And so I want to begin in sharing with you, something very intimate about Pueblo people. And I want to begin -- I have only 30 minutes -- and I'm going to take you from our time our origin or emergence or creation, all the way to 2012 in 30 minutes. So we're going to be on a fast track here. But, for us, this is how we describe from where we come from, what we're connected to that defines our present day sacred trust, to those who have gone before, but to those yet to be born...

This we call the gifts of the Creator. From this the Creator also gave us something that we call our traditional calendar, the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month. In all of our societies and all of our cultures we all have a cycle, don't we? We all have a cycle and here for us it's broken up into winter, spring, summer, and fall. But each of us know intimately something very similar to this calendar no matter where we are as Indigenous people. And this process, during the course of the year, is an annual renewal of these core values, reminders, validators, confirmation, reaffirmation of all that is connected to our core values. Year round we engage in this process. And if I went to table to table to ask, when is a time in your life when you find the greatest joy and peace in your existence? I'll bet to say that every one of you will point to a time somewhere in this cycle of our traditional calendar where we are engaged in ceremony and we feel the peace because there is an expected kind of behavior that connects all of us. We hear the children laugh, we see the love and respect given in accordance to our elders, we see those who are singing, those who are dancing, those who are supporting ceremony by observation and support and encouragement. Don't we? And we find incredible sense of joy and peace engaged in this process.

But, over time, our elders also spoke that along this journey that there will be times along our journey that there will be many challenges to these core values. For the Pueblo people it came at a time when conquistadors came to New Mexico, threatened the core values: our land, our way of life, our people, our families, our resources. And what was the response? As all of you in your time as you reflect upon your past and your history there have been similar challenges to your core values, the core values of who you are. And often our forefathers knew the only way to continue to sustain a way of life, to protect all the gifts of our Creator, was sometimes to give their lives to resist these threats. Right? Our forefathers gave often their lives so that we would inherit all that we have that sustains who we are as a people.

And so the Pueblo people in that time revolted in 1680 to move back the Spanish colonizers in what is now New Mexico. Upon their return was our first challenge of adaption. In order that Pueblo way of life, as the Creator gave to us, would survive they compromised necessarily and adapted to embrace Catholicism in order that our own way of life as was a gift from the Creator might survive. It also compromised to embrace an overlay to Pueblo government as they knew and as we knew it since time immemorial that results in a layer that is still part of that adaption today as we have governors and lieutenant governors, viscales, which is an overlay. But they adapted to protect our own internal leadership that continues to this day. And in that process of the first adaption, to protect what the Creator gave us, affected our governance system, creating one of the rare theocracies in this world where there is no separation of church and state. If we go through the rest of history since the time of colonization that all indigenous people have experienced, in all parts of the world, but for all of us in this country, right?

I just want to quickly take you through a timeline that would look something like this for everyone. Since colonization, since the U.S. experience, here we are, us, today. And here are our parents. Here are our grandparents. Here are our great grandparents, and so on, our connection to the past. In the last one hundred years, there is a personal connection to the imposition of federal policies and laws that threaten in the same way our core values. Our lands have been reduced, policies prohibiting the practice of our own way of life, policies and laws that attempted to destroy our family institutions, to destroy our communities. But 1934 became an important imposition for us to remember because 1935 is a reminder of one of the most significant impositions of recent history that affects the very foundation and framework of governance in our communities, the transformation, the detribalization of our own traditional governance systems, right? And the way in which many of our communities, that kind of imposition has resulted in the kind of dysfunction that results in similar dysfunction in this country. That when you turn on the television, turn on the radio, and all you hear is adversity and antagonism between the republicans and the democrats, right? Sometimes we think whether or not they are for the citizens of this country because it all is about what, the maintenance of power driven by the economics. And if we can imagine that kind of dynamics at one level, think about what that does in small communities where that kind of imposition results in tremendous conflict, sometimes unresolvable it seems. But let us think about that imposition and the lasting impacts and let us think about what happened in 1980 during the Reagan administration, where sometimes the unconscious imposition, in the name of development, results in equally devastating, the destruction of our core values with this kind of imposition for planning and development that has resulted in a whole other overlay, that results sometimes as it did for us; one of the first experiences, experiments in this country with private investment on reservation lands. And sometimes this kind of scenario drives us away from the core values paradigm of decision-making when we consider the cost and the benefits of imposed development.

On our reservation, as a result of these kind of proposals imposed, was a master plan for development. Forty thousand people -- where our Pueblo leased half our reservation for 99 years, creating an unprecedented non-Indian government that in time would compete against us. But an associated development with a master plan of this kind, unheard of, was a construction of the tenth largest man-made lakes in the world and in this country that destroyed in the process, revered places of worship. How could it be that this kind of decision would be made by leaders in our community? Well it happens when we move away from our core values, to disregard the costs and the benefits whether or not these decisions are compatible with the protection of something as sacred as our core values. And so it was for a predominately oral society, a traditional governance system, we had to work from within, stepping back as you all are in your respective capacities to assess what is happening and what is likely to happen if this continues. The obvious for us is that we would become a minority on our own reservation within just a few years if the master plan and the development were to be pursued and it became a reality; forty thousand on a reservation where we number just around a thousand, leasing half the reservation for ninety-nine years. I have a grandson who would be an elder in the community before that expires in 2065.

The destruction and the desecration is something we can undo with regard to where our emergence and our origin centers. So the elders said do what is possible to undo the mistakes made. And so now for the last thirty years we have been engaged to undo this master plan from within developing probably one of the first community development corporations as was recommended by the Reagan administration as a way to separate traditional governance from governing major business and development. But we chose to move in the other direction to really use the core values as the heart of our decision making and strategizing in how to reclaim, how to re-control so that those children yet to be born in fulfilling our sacred trust might still have a homeland. For the children yet to be born can still have a place to call home; that they might inherit from us, the language that connects them to the core values the Creator gave to us that they still might have a meaningful way of life connected to family, connected to community, connected and revering the relationships to the resources and the environment. But most importantly, that they maintain at the core of their existence, the kind of love and respect and compassion that comes with living core values as central and being the heart and the soul of what the Creator intended in the gifts the Creator gave us, in the traditional calendar of engagement of reaffirming and validating that that is what is the meaningfulness of our lives is to have that connection.

So over time there has been all these impositions using education as a classic example with the creation of boarding schools in 1890 taking children from our families from our communities to destroy all our core values, to wipe it out of existence so that we would become like everyone else in this country. Right? But our forefathers resisted. Think about when we became eligible as native people in this country with head start. What we still have not reconciled is one other classic example. That when we embraced head start we never asked the question of where is it a head start to? Is it a process of accelerating fluency of English at the expense of our mother tongue central to our core values? Since the time of forced integration of Johnson O'Malley into public school, the racial and discrimination that was epitomized in that time that resulted in many adults in their time making conscious decisions that they would not teach their children their mother tongue because of what they experienced. Right? A threat to our mother tongue. And today in this time of self-determination, let's ask ourselves that as we're controlling BIA schools, as we are now contracting schools through grant schools, tribally controlled schools now in our own communities, let us ask ourselves, what are we doing differently in this time of self-determination from those times when we didn't have control and that we were critical of? Right? Does that make sense? What are we doing differently in this time of self-determination from now that we are in control different from those times when we didn't have control and that we were critical of?

Education has been one of those other classic examples that has been elusive; knowing full well that that formal education process is a process and a movement from our core values. Right? At the expense of diminishing the influence of our cultural education connected to our core values. Think that in 2011 there are a few places in all of Indian Country that really has been able to strike a balance in the way that we educate our children. What we've not been able to do to maintain the connection of all those who we encourage to go out and to get an education in hopes that someday they might come home to be a part of the capacity of our communities, to create the kind of insulation so that we can preserve and maintain the internal aspects that connect us to those core values while we create the capacity of another concentric circle as we have in pueblo governance to deal with the external forces so that we insulate and protect the oldest form of our government system closest to our core values where we have been able to strike that balance internally, maintaining the leadership of our spiritual leaders, of our clan leaders who have their own role for the maintenance of this the maintenance of our traditional calendar so that what we have built over time are these concentric circles.

But all of these concentric circles that define shared responsibilities that insulate and protects the internal core and maintenance of our way of life while the capacity in another concentric circle deals with all the external forces with state government, with federal government, with business and development. But the center of the heart and soul of the strategy is how do we maintain the indigenous knowledge tied to our core values while we are able to deal with development in ways that does not threaten the survival of our core values, with our connection to all of these core values, as business and development can, in ways that in this time of self-determination to think about this in conscious ways that in this time of self-determination we cannot afford to do this. We're here today, us. The decisions we make today affect our children. Right? The decisions we make for those of us who are grandparents are already there affecting grandchildren. How many have great-grandchildren? The decisions we make today, we're already here effecting multiple generations but a hundred years hence. Our responsibility is to maintain these connections. The worst that we can do if we are unconsciously making decision not connected to the core values is to do this; is to contribute to the disconnect of future generation to our core values and thus breaking the relationship and connections that have existed since the time of origin of emergence of creation that has sustained our relationships our connection as the Creator intended along this journey.

For us in Cochiti, the threats to our survival, to our core values was real. But over the course of the last thirty years we have really used our core values to return to our policy making, our decision making to those set of core values to fully evaluate using the core values of all decisions with this very simplified cost/benefit analysis. That if a decision is going to be a threat to our core values it better have greater benefits because what we cannot afford to do in this time is to contribute to what the federal government failed to accomplish in all that it did to conceive policies that disconnected many from their homelands in the creation of the reservation, the laws that they created to kill our mother tongue with language prohibition, laws that they created to disconnect us from our way of life when they created codes and laws to persecute religious practitioners, laws and policies they created to dismantle family and community, laws and policies that they created to completely reorganize traditional governance systems, laws and policies the federal government created to completely remake our jurisprudence system, laws and policies this federal government created and implemented to disconnect us from our most precious resources. Right? But here we are today, starting with a prayer, with a beautiful song that represents that connection to our core value; using language as a way to communicate; rethinking how we maintain a way of life, our sense of spirituality. Here we are reflecting on how we restore our governance systems; that in the name of revenue and employment and development that it cannot be the ultimate compromised and demised to our core values. Here we are evaluating how governance, more comprehensively, is interrelated to all of the core values in this core values paradigm and not isolated. And how in isolation, if we treat it that way is a demise to the rest of the core values in this cost/benefit analysis, absent the core values.

And so I'm here simply to share in a very short period of time what holding true to our core values as the Creator intended has resulted in a second chance to maintain that connection as we have done in our little community of Cochiti, challenging the United States of America in its desecration and devastation of our place of worship and prevailing; undoing a master plan that would have brought forty thousand people leasing half the reservation with a non-Indian government. No one gave us a chance but we prevailed. Stopping hydroelectric power at that same sacred site, suing the federal energy regulatory commission. No one gave us a chance but we prevailed. That's our story. But we built from within using the core values using the oldest forms of government, no constitution, unwritten, using our oral societies, its customs, its traditional laws and applying it outwardly and externally to protect our core values at every turn drawing from that source, of that spirit and prayer that comes with our connection to those core values. We prevailed in all that David and Goliath challenges.

I want to simply say to end this that the elders speak that along this journey for all of us as indigenous peoples, each generation is faced with incredibly profound challenges and sometimes for all of us its overwhelming. Where we are today in our journey collectively as indigenous peoples, we've never been. Right? We've never been faced with quite the same set of circumstances but all we have to do is to reflect upon what our forefathers overcame, to look at their courage, their vision, their resiliency that sometimes what we feel so overwhelmed with, at a time when all these federal polices and laws have resulted in fragile nature of our core values, but they have survived and they have survived as a result from all those who have gone before who were never willing to compromise, all of that because that is what defines who we are as Indian people. The question becomes how will in a hundred years from now, how will those great, great grand-children reflect upon this time? And how...and will they be as kind as we are to our forefathers as they reflect what it is we did in this time that connected them to that time since origin, emergence or creation. That's our challenge today. But here you are in a very significantly profound time of stepping back and reflecting and asking, what am I contributing to? Am I contributing to sustaining and strengthening our core values in my community? Or are the decisions that I'm making taking us further away from our core values? And lastly, I just want to stop and ask, for all of us to ask this thought provoking question. What will our children inherit from us? What will your grandchildren inherit from you? And what will your community look like in the next one hundred years? These are all questions that you can't find anywhere else but within you. And you can be driven to connect them in this similar fashion if we hold strong to the core values.

And I really think as I was sharing with my good friend here that it is incredibly rewarding to know the courage that you all possess to simply be having this kind of discussion because it is a time in history, as long as we maintain and sustain this discourse, I think history will look kindly upon all of you and all of us as a time that we step back to reflect, to see where we've come from, to look at the complex challenges that have deep roots in the past but to be conscious in thinking of how I'm going to contribute to what those children of the future will inherit from us. And it truly is in time, I feel strongly, that will be represented by a definition that this really was a conscious time of a major renaissance of our people. That's how I look at this time. And I want to thank you for your courage and your own resilience because I know the difficulty in each one of our communities to be having the discussion that you all are. So thank you all and I hope this is a useful reflection in a very quick way."

Honoring Nations: Hepsi Barnett, Tony Fish and Joyce Wells: Reclaiming Native Nations (Q&A)

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Native leaders Hepsi Barnett, Tony Fish, and Joyce Wells share a deeper level of detail about the roots and impacts of their nations' Honoring Nations award-winning programs.

Resource Type
Citation

Barnett, Hepsi. "Reclaiming Native Nations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

Fish, Tony. "Reclaiming Native Nations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

Wells, Joyce. "Reclaiming Native Nations (Q&A)." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

Michael Lipsky:

"I'd like to ask the first question of Tony Fish. You said...you were very eloquent on the importance of restoration of community members. But I wonder if there was any conflict within the community as you began to do this work, and how you interacted with the community in order to help people understand what you were trying to do?"

Tony Fish:

"Initially, there was some conflict within the community. A lot of people [were] not buying into the idea that we should try and bring these people back into our communities, or give them a second chance in society at that. A lot of the initial response was, 'Well, it must really pay to be bad then. Should we go out and be bad so we can get this?' And my response to them was, 'No, it doesn't pay to be bad, but what good is it going to be to continue to downtrodden our citizens like this.' And then at that time, that's when I brought in to the scope of things about our culture and what we did early on as far as a Nation and a tribe on how we handled the people who committed crimes. And through that and through constant fostering of ideas to create the safer communities and going out into the communities and just talking with them and bringing people with me who had been incarcerated. A lot of times you cannot tell them from the next person you're sitting beside, so it was an eye-opener for them."

Michael Lipsky:

"So do you have questions for our panelists? Yes. We have a microphone. Would you tell us your name and where you're from as well as ask the question?"

Mary Lee Johns:

"My name is Mary Lee Johns. I'm from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. I'm the senior advisor for Rio Tinto Mining Company; it's an international mining company. My question is for Tony. Since the reservations have incredibly high amounts of problems with violence and a lot of problems with drugs and all that stuff -- that's not my question -- but being that that's kind of the setting right now, I was just wondering on your reservation or your area, when these individuals come back from being incarcerated -- actually I have two questions -- one is how do you, do you do some kind of like ceremony to bring them home so that, like a sage ceremony or anything to cleanse them or anything like that? That's one question. And then the second question is how do you keep them from getting back involved with their old buddies and continuing the crazy life?"

Tony Fish:

"To answer your first question, at each of the facilities they have a Native American group. And in that Native American group, there's a spiritual advisor. And what we do is we provide the sacraments -- the sage, the cedar, the sweet grass -- we provide that to them. They have somebody come in and they bless those sacraments and before they are released. They have their own ceremony where they do exactly what you're talking about, the purification and to bring good honor back upon them. And the...could you repeat your second question?"

Michael Lipsky:

"How do you prevent them from going back to their old buddies?"

Tony Fish:

"It's basically, it's an incentive approach. We try as hard as we can to deter them. If we feel it's going to be a bad situation for them, then we may not be able to help them with that. So we kind of...we don't hold services back, but we may halt services in order to try and maybe change their mind a little bit. Sometimes they want to go out and try it on their own and see for their self. And then they come to us and say, 'You know what, you're right, it's not working. I'm clay: mold me.' So that's basically what we try to do."

Michael Lipsky:

"Questions? Please introduce yourself."

James R. Gray:

"My name's Jim Gray, I'm Principal Chief of the Osage Nation. I have a question for Joyce. In Oklahoma, as you well know, there's a lot of slash in the makeup of our citizens in our communities -- Choctaw slash Chickasaws, Choctaw slash Cherokee -- and so if you have a lot of citizens that may be of mixed Indian blood in the public school systems, do you broaden that out to include those or is it primarily just focused on the Choctaw students that are enrolled?"

Joyce Wells:

"We go into the classroom as a whole. So we have a very diverse group of students that we visit with. And that was one of the things that I think Clair thought about when she started this program and then we tried to follow up with as well. That our Assistant Chief Gary Batten, what his comment was to me was that, 'We are of the community, so if we can help our neighbors then that's the way to do it, is in those second-grade classrooms.' So everyone is involved in that second-grade program and it works out really well."

Michael Lipsky:

"Thank you. Question. And you are?"

Audience member:

"Just a quick question: why'd you pick the second grade?"

Joyce Wells:

"I believe that when Clair was doing these studies on this, they thought that that would be a good age group to help mold them in some of the activities that they were starting to act out upon. With the Choctaw Nation, we are very blessed to have a really good Head Start program. So we know that they're getting targeted in that age group. So we moved on to the second grade and she kind of looked in that area. With that said, numerous schools have contacted us wanting us to do follow up programs for the third, the fourth and fifth grade. That's something else that we would love to get going as well. Like I said, it's a long process. I don't know, someone was talking earlier today that everything, they want it just to happen, and I'm one of those individuals. So it's [taken] me to have the patience to realize it will all come about in due time."

Michael Lipsky:

"Joyce, is Clair still in the room?"

Joyce Wells:

"Yes."

Michael Lipsky:

"Would it be okay with you if we asked her to say something?"

Joyce Wells:

"Yes, yes, yes."

Clair Richards:

"Initially when I approached the Choctaw Nation -- to answer both questions -- the tribal leaders, I said, 'Do we want this to be only for the Choctaw students?' And they said, 'Absolutely not. This is for everybody. If this is good for our kids, it's good for everybody. And it's good for the entire town, it's good for the entire community.' So that's the first answer. And the second answer is when I came in again to that same meeting, I had this grand idea of being in every elementary classroom, first through fifth grade, and following up every year so that the kids have it from the very beginning. But that was completely not possible. So second grade was early enough that the kids would still be very impressionable. I'm the youngest of three. I thought my brother and sister were pretty much as close to God as humans could be. So it's a very impressionable age. And the teachers in the classrooms were very easy to work with and very welcoming of the project."

Michael Lipsky:

"Thank you very much. Any questions? You are?"

JoAnn Chase:

"Hi, I'm JoAnn Chase. I have the good privilege of being on this Honoring Nations Board of Directors. I just want to say thank you, first to all, of the panelists. This is one of the most enjoyable experiences I look forward to. The participation and the depth of the dialogue and the inspiration that we leave with is just a real blessing. So thank you to all of you. I have, however, a specific question for Hepsi. And I was really intrigued by the legislative approach. And you made some reference to that obviously over a legal remedy, but I was hoping maybe you might just talk a little bit more about some of the challenges and the risks that were involved in that approach and how you overcame them. I have also the privilege of knowing the Principal Chief, and know that he's a very powerful and forceful and tenacious and well-respected advocate. So I can appreciate his role very much in that. But if you would talk just a little bit more, I think it would be helpful to the group, and I'd certainly be interested in hearing a little bit more about, why that approach over a legal remedy?"

Hepsi Barnett:

"Well, I think obviously we had tried to work through the courts and we had really exhausted that remedy. And I think for a lot of people, they were ready to give up at that point. And what really started it was when the new tribal council came in, the 31st Tribal Council. They really came in because the Osage people wanted to see that change. They had had a taste of when...during that three years when that government was, really it was almost imposed as well through the court system, but there at least was some Osage citizen input into that process.

So they had taken a few individuals who had brought the case, the Fletcher case, and they had had them work with folks on the federal side to create a constitution, our constitutional form of government. Again, it was semi-imposed, but some great progress occurred during those three years. And so I think that for the Osage people they saw that change was possible even though that remedy had been exhausted. And so they really looked to that tribal council; that newly elected tribal council. There was a complete turnover in the tribal leadership and everybody that came in with the new tribal council came in on sort of that campaign promise of bringing membership to all Osages.

Well, then they actually were elected. I think it was a bit of an upset. And they were elected and then they were really faced with the challenge of, how are we going to do this? And so they really began to analyze what the options were. And fortunately for us we had some very good contacts in Washington. An Osage was in Washington, Wilson Pipestem, a lot of you may be familiar with him. They really looked to Wilson to help provide them some expertise that he had as a lobbyist and a lawyer in Washington. If we wanted to do this, if we wanted to go back to the United States Congress, what are the steps that we need to put in place to do that? And so I think the advice from Wilson is, you have to create allies at the state-government level, in terms of the representatives from Oklahoma.

And so at that point, the tribal leaders began to work with the state leaders. And I think they created some very good relationships at that time with the state senators and with the representatives from Oklahoma. And they really, at that level, led the charge. The implications -- I mean, I don't really know how things work at the federal level -- but I know enough at our own level to know one of the first questions asked: 'Is it going to cost us anything? What are we going to have to give up at the federal level?' And I think once there was a recognition that we weren't asking for a settlement, we weren't asking for money, we were just asking them to reaffirm our inherent sovereign right that every other tribe in the United States under the policy of self-governance had.

And so they really took up the cause and that reaching out intergovernmentally was really key to making that possible. So I know that that sounds -- I may be simplistic the way that I'm presenting it -- but I think, and as I'm sure, I think there's a panel here on intergovernmental relations. That for tribes today, in order to make the progress that we need to make so that our people prosper, reaching out intergovernmentally -- both locally in your own communities and then at the state level and then at the federal level -- we have a lot of things to manage besides our own people, but that is just really a cornerstone I think in terms of today's, the realities of tribal governments today."

Michael Lipsky:

"Yeah. Let's take one more question and then...yes."

Susan Jenkins:

"I'm Susan Jenkins with the Cherokee Preservation Foundation. [I] was really interested, Hepsi, in your comment about the citizens-led 25-year strategic plan. Could you explain that a little bit more please?"

Unknown:

"Good question."

Hepsi Barnett:

"Well, again, we were just coming at the tail of the government reform process. I had the privilege of working with that government reform commission as a staffer. And like I said, there was a lot of pressure on us. There was obviously, like I said, with that level of change, there's a lot of conflict to manage. We were trying to do that in a collaborative fashion. In other words, we wanted it to be a win-win. We wanted this new government coming in to be a win-win. We didn't want to compromise, we didn't want to accommodate. We wanted to really collaborate. And what that meant was, we had to get out and we had to do a lot of listening to what the people had to say. I feel like that effort was successful because of that reaching out and engaging the people and it had been a long time since that had happened. Like I said, for most of us as Osages, we weren't really involved in the government. There were no, virtually no young people involved in tribal government. And so going out into the communities, telling people that, 'You matter as an Osage. We want to hear from you,' that went a long way.

And so when Chief Gray came in, was re-elected into the new government, his first charge really to me was...I think he came in one morning, our Congress was meeting and he said, 'You have two hours to create a plan for strategic planning, a 25-year strategic plan, an outline.' And I said, 'You've got to be kidding me?' And he said, 'No. I want to go to Congress and I want to get them to fund this.' He had pitched it to them and they said, 'Well, we want to see an outline of the process.' And so for me, like I said, it was fortunate that I had just came in from government reform. So [it] really took the elements of that that were most effective and sort of embedded that into the outline or the process for strategic planning. And really what it entailed was, usually you hire these consultants. They come in, they write up your strategic plan, it looks real pretty and it's great. And then they hand it back to the tribe to implement. Well, when it's a citizen-led effort, it doesn't look nearly that pretty, but I think what we found was that it meant something to the people. So they thought of things that a consultant or even myself or a tribal leader would never think of in terms of what their priorities were. And again, they had the opportunity to say, 'Yeah, now we have this new government, what are we going to do? And what do we want it to look like for our grandchildren?' And so creating that vision for the Osage people during that time was really critical. And I think going out, having those public meetings, we used a lot of techniques similar to, yes, that she was using. Not so much the moose thing, but engaging people in terms of using exercises that really provided the structure for them to get up and talk about what they wanted.

We had a very short amount of time in each of these community meetings, and so we structured it so that it was experiential and people had to get up. And we started really with the history. The very first thing we did was we put up a great big -- have you seen those big sticky boards? We put up a great big sticky board and we gave them however much time to talk about something that they knew about Osage history. And so we first rooted it in, who are we as Osage people? Because what people tended to write about when they talked about what something that they personally knew about in terms of our Osage history was we had them first, sort of create who are we, what are our principles, what are our values, what's most important to us, by having those people write down what they knew about history. So we created this timeline with individual family stories. Once we had it tied to who are we, then we could start to talk about where we're going. Because it's very difficult to determine where you're going if you don't know where you've been as a people.

From that point forward, we then started to talk about the future and I think that that was a, that little exercise in and of itself really set the tone for us to engage in a real conversation about what we wanted. And so what came out of that was sort of six focus areas that we looked at in terms of creating a vision for -- and Chief Gray help me out here if I forget one of them -- but it was education, health and wellness, culture and language, economic development, governance and justice -- and I've left one out, yes -- minerals and natural resources, which is just a given at the Osage Nation. Not a shareholder. It's not quite as important for me yet. So we looked at those six target areas as we began to focus on creating a vision for each. And another interesting thing that I think, that I hope will be a takeaway here is that we didn't have those six focus areas compete with each other when we prioritized. In other words, we felt like each of those areas was important enough to stand on its own. So that when we were creating priorities we created priorities for each of those areas versus having those areas compete against each other. Thank you."

Michael Lipsky:

"Well, now you know one of the things you do when the dog catches the car. I hope you'll join me in thanking our speakers for starting us off so well. Thank you so much."

Honoring Nations: LuAnn Leonard: The Hopi Education Endowment Fund

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Hopi Education Endowment Fund Executive Director LuAnn Leonard (Hopi/Tohono O'odham) speaks about the purpose and growth of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund and how the initiative has inspired those HEEF serves to answer the question: What does it mean to be a Hopi?

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Leonard, LuAnn. "The Hopi Education Endowment Fund." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Michael Lipsky:

"Our next speaker will be Luann Leonard, the Executive Director of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund [HEEF]."

LuAnn Leonard:

"Good morning. My name's LuAnn Leonard. I'm Hopi and Tohono O'odham from Arizona. We've come a long way. Yesterday morning I woke up really late and so this morning I woke up really early to be prepared, and now I'm all sleepy. So hopefully I won't fall asleep on you here. But the Hopi is located in northeastern Arizona. I'm from the village of Sichomovi on First Mesa. I'm from the Deer Clan, the Hopi Deer Clan. I wanted to introduce the people who are here with me. Monica Nevumsa in the back; she is the president of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. And then sitting at our table, he's not here right now, is Ben Nuvamsa; he is the chairman of the Hopi Tribe. And no, they're not married, same last name. Our colleagues, Cedric Kuwaninvaya, he is a councilman with the Hopi Tribe and also a former recipient of an award, and Bernita Kuwaninvaya, she is a 2006 honors awardee; and yes, they are married, these two.

I wanted to thank Mrs. [Amy Besaw] Medford -- I had to say that -- and her staff for inviting us here. Everyone was telling us when you win honors, or high honors, with [the Harvard Project] you really join a family and I think that that's true. We've felt very appreciated and we appreciate the involvement and having us come out all the way [here]. I had to mention, in your booklet you see us listed with those big donors. And it's funny because they had put out a, you probably all got one, a letter asking for donations; they're non-profit. And we wanted to be one of the first to respond because we know how hard it is to raise money and so we responded to the call. And I challenge all of you to do that because it will make their job more easier to raise money if the people who they're asking know that we are all trying to contribute, even if it's a little bit to the fund to make this keep going cause this is a great program. I think you all can agree with me on that.

There's Chairman Nuvamsa. I told them you're not married to Monica -- he's her 'boyfriend' in Hopi way.

A little bit about the HEEF and then I want to get into the topic. We are a 7871 non-profit of the Hopi Tribe. We're the only one in the United States that focuses on education. We are not a rich tribe. We're located in a remote area of northern Arizona. We're not gaming. We established our 7871 through a tribal ordinance and that was done on purpose to protect it from the politics of the day. We have a 30-member board, which 80 percent are Hopi. We have a seven-member executive committee of which Monica is the president and the president must be an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe. What's really nice about our organization is no member of the tribal council can be a member of the board, but we're part of the tribe. So we're protected from the tribe but we're part of the tribe. The seven-member executive committee has the fiduciary responsibility. They're my bosses, and talk about a challenge that changes every year, that board. But I get a new boss every year, but it's a great, wonderful group of people. We truly believe in Hopi for Hopi. When we created the endowment fund seven years ago, we chose to keep it on reservation. We're located on one million acres in northern Arizona in Kykotsmovi village, a little rock house, you probably would get lost looking for it, but we do all of our outreach from there. I have a three-member staff, all of which are Hopi.

When we came on board none of us had any non-profit experience, but we had a desire to make this work and I believe we are making this work. When we went to trainings, what was really encouraging -- we went to trainings at Indiana, IUPUI [Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis], University of Indiana; they have a non-profit program there. And one of the first things we heard is Native Americans were the first philanthropists and I think about that and I think that's so true. And we've come to find that out. We're not experts in what we do yet, but hopefully we will be, but we believe that we have things to share. I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, so you can take our ideas and hopefully change them into something that you can work with, with your people. With the Honoring Nations award we produced our first video. We used some of our money to create the video about our program. I brought a few copies; this one's for Oren Lyons because he's so special. If you'd like a copy, just give me your card and I'll make sure you get one. But it's a seven-minute video, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about when you see our video. It's called Planting the Seeds...for our Children's Future.

When Amy gave me the topic of the panel, I thought about, what am I going to talk about? She talked about community participation, what [role] it plays in nation building, how do we engage our community members so that we create ownership, sustainability, and program effectiveness. The bottom-line question is what do we do to connect with the community to foster that support? And I asked myself some questions. I asked, what inspires a talented 16-year-old high school student to donate a piece of his first artwork to our silent auction? What motivated an artist living in low-income housing to donate a $700 painting that he could sell to sustain him and his family? What motivated him to donate that to our silent auction? What moved a high school graduate to donate $25 to our alumni challenge in the name of his alma mater, which is Stewart Indian High School? And finally, what motivated the Hopi Tribe, the Hopi Tribal Council, to really walk the talk and, that day in October of 2000, to create the Hopi Education Endowment Fund and to give us the first gift of $10 million? How did we do it?

So I thought about what in our culture made us be this way because, obviously, there's people who really need the money but somehow they're giving of their own. Our goal at the Endowment Fund is to turn our people into our ambassadors. We want every Hopi to know who we are, what we do. And when someone, a visitor, an Anglo friend comes our to see a dance and they say, 'How can we help?' They can say, 'Hey, you should think about the Hopi Endowment Fund.' And they can go online and find us real quick. As I thought about it, I found that the answer lies right before us and it lies right before each of you too. It's in your teachings, your practices and your beliefs.

You all have been given a copy of a piece called A Hopi. This piece was created in '95 and I was happy to see this created. It was kind of started funny because we have the Hopi, Navajo-Hopi Observer that comes to our reservation. And for a while there they had an award, Hopi of the Year, Navajo of the Year. And then we all thought, 'Hey, I want to be Hopi of the Year.' But what is a Hopi? And so we got into this big discussion. Joan Timeche was Hopi of the Year one year. So you'd join a high caliber of people there.

But what is a Hopi? And so we had a person in our group who thinks way beyond the present and he came up with the piece. And I don't want to read the whole thing to you but I want to read a couple of sections that really hit what we do as philanthropists. The third paragraph down; a Hopi is one who fulfills the meaning of Sumi'nangwa and will come together to do activities for the benefit of all out of a compelling desire and commitment to contribute or return something of value or benefit to the society. A Hopi is one who fulfills the meaning of Nami'nangwa by helping one another or give aid in times of need, without having to be asked to do so, and without expecting compensation for that deed. A Hopi is one who places the society and/or community's interests and benefits above their individual and personal interests and gains. And finally, a Hopi is one who understands that the greatest feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment is one's participation in social and community functions or activities and knowing that your contributions have resulted in benefit to the community and people. I think each of you can relate to this. Each of your native teachings and beliefs have this, involve these kinds of thoughts. We incorporate these teachings into all the things that we do.

We work to help our people understand what we do because, although we were the first philanthropists, formal philanthropy is not really understood. And so just the 'endowment,' even the name of our fund, throws our people off. But what we do is we help them to understand what we do and translate it into the concepts of Hopi. One example is that we're known for farming; we farm blue, white, red, yellow corn, beans and squash. The beauty of that is it's dry farming; we have no irrigation. It's all hard labor and prayers for the rain to come. When we talk about our Endowment fund, the seeds in the planting cycle, we let the people know that the seeds are the money; that's the donations coming into our organization. When you plant the seed, your next step is to cultivate that. Keep those relations going, go to your field, check on it and keep that plant growing. So that's what we do when we cultivate our donors and we watch over our investments so that they grow day to day. Eventually, the harvest comes. And the harvest -- we take part in the harvest, we eat part of it. And how we relate that to what we do is we disperse out our money, and we fund college students across the United States with some of that money, some of the harvest. The final part of the planting cycle is the storing. Hopis always store part of that crop for the next year and the next year after. Our storing is reinvesting our money and hoping that it will grow and benefit people 50 years out. Another good concept in helping them understand investing, cause investing itself is so technical, is planting in more than one field. I don't know how many of you are farmers, but Hopi men, they usually plant where their wife is from and then they plant in another area, maybe where their traditional clan has a planting field -- because you never know where the rain's going to fall and your family has to eat. So you need that kind of diversity to make sure you're going to get something out of your crops. When we explain investments and diversification, such as stocks and bonds, that makes sense to people and it helps them really understand, 'Hey, these guys are doing the right thing.' So think about those kind of things when you are working with your people to enhance your community involvement.

My message to you is to look within yourselves and ask, 'What is a Lummi? What is a Sioux? What's a Chippewa? What's a Umatilla? Who are you?' And find that connection and use those teachings, use what you find in a very respectful manner in dealing with your people. They know when you're overusing those kinds of beliefs and maybe materializing them and they will take you to task on that. But use them in a respectful manner and you'll find that you're going to grow your own ambassadors. Those people are going to be the spokesperson for your programs. In closing I'd like to say, to be a Hopi is to continually chase a rainbow. It's looking for that pot of gold, but you know you're never going to get to it. But if you read A Hopi and you live this way, and I think if you go back and you look at your own people and you live this way, you'll agree that it's going to be a long journey. But along the way, you'll make the world a better place. So I wanted to thank you for this time and opportunity to speak. Askwali."

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]." 

James R. Gray: Government Reform: Mobilizing Citizen Participation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Osage Nation Principal Chief Jim Gray explains the significant citizen-engagement hurdle the Osage Nation had to overcome in creating a new constitution and governance system, and how its ability to cultivate citizen participation and ownership in the development of Osage's new government played a critical role in its development of a 25-year strategic plan for the Nation.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Gray, James R. "Government Reform: Mobilizing Citizen Participation." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"Well, thank you all. I really want to recognize Priscilla's [Iba] work on this. One thing -- I like to tell a story about Priscilla -- is that, while she covered a good portion of what my experience was in watching what they were doing during the government reform process, it was pretty clear that things were not going well at first. And this was before Hepsi [Barnett] arrived and it was somewhat chaotic. The group of commissioners were holding a meeting and they were deliberating on that fact that they couldn't get anything done and they couldn't get anything started and they couldn't get momentum going to start this process and they were discussing the idea that we just need to call the, get on the agenda for the council and tell them that we can't do it. And Priscilla said, 'No, we're not going to. I'm not going to be a part of anything that's going to fail.' And she just put her foot down and rallied that whole group of people together and they got busy again. And I really admire her for that because when they start talking about this government years from now, and they'll talk about some of the critical moments that took place to make this thing go, I have to admit I think Priscilla's little speech that she gave to her commissioners that day was one of those critical moments that had she not done that I don't think we would have gotten it done. So I just want to thank you for that.

The topic that I've been asked to talk about is citizen participation. As a tribal leader yourself, you know that oftentimes -- once you hold an election and you're sworn into office and you start doing your job as a legislator or as a representative to the executive branch or in some kind of leadership role for the tribe -- you find yourself busy going about the business of governing; and that means doing a lot of internal work, doing a lot of program management, doing a lot of administrative work, budgets and various other issues, legislatively, of getting things accomplished. But in that respect what we have accomplished in this regard was that, while the campaign to elect officials was done in 2002, the mandate that the people gave us at that time -- and this is true for those people who were elected to the 31st Council -- ironically, I didn't think it was lost on any of us that once we got in, we realized and looked at each other, we realized that every one of us who got elected ran on this issue of government reform and membership.

And while the only people who were allowed to vote in that election were those individuals who had inherited an interest in the mineral state, that group only represented 25 percent of the tribe's population. And so you got a group of basically, people who owned a property interest in the oil and gas activity of our reservation. We're the only ones who had any political rights whatsoever. And while we used our CDIB program to recognize Osages with blood, they did not have any political rights to vote in an election or to run for office. And as Priscilla covered it greatly that these people were like second-class citizens within the tribe, and the only way you could get an interest in the mineral estate is if, your parents had to pass away, and you inherited their interest, your fractionated share of it, if you had brothers and sisters in your family. And so over the years, of the 2,229 original allottees and original head rights shares that were issued at that time, by 2002 they were split up to about 4,500 different people. So some people got to vote two, three votes. Some people got to vote one third or one half or an eighth or a sixteenth of a vote. And so it wasn't equal in any way at all, and it gave people a sense of superiority. It gave people a sense of inferiority if you weren't an interest, didn't hold an interest in the mineral state.

And so realizing the social dynamics of 100 years of that, that was managed and operated and enforced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it created a schism within our tribe that was really hard to deal with when we first came to office and we realized that what the people had asked for were two things. One, let's fix the government so that any individual -- Osage -- who desires to be a part of the tribe can be a part of the tribe in a new government that respects them politically. But don't mess with my head right because that's mine. And given the high oil prices that we're having right now, you can imagine how valuable that is. The current head right prices are going about $28,000 a year for each individual share. So it's a property interest, it's a money issue, but it's also the social dynamic of trying to convince 75 percent of our population of our tribe to get back involved. And it was a very timid, it was a very nervous, it was very -- I guess the right word was -- is that they were humble, they were quiet and they were very introverted about the whole process. [Because] they didn't want to say anything, they didn't want to do anything, they didn't want to speak in any kind of way constructively to the government reform commission or even our strategic planning task force -- that had town hall meetings last year -- on the issue of whether or not there was people that were related to them in the room. Elders, grandparents, aunts and uncles who were head right owners and they didn't want to make any of them mad by saying anything that was going to offend them.

So we had to really work hard to break through a hundred years of what I call bureaucratic dysfunction that split this tribe in two. And the goal to try to bring the tribe together was probably the biggest challenge. And even though we accomplished it on paper -- and we went through a lot of hard work internally to make sure that the process was as open, as fair and as transparent as we possibly could -- we were not free from ridicule, we weren't free from gossip, conspiracy theories, undermining and -- I would even go as far as to say that -- we got some of that undermining from the Bureau of Indian Affairs themselves. Because unlike other tribal governments and constitutions...Well, let me just ask you. How many here are governed by an IRA constitution? So there's some of them. Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act? There's some others out there that are governed by federal law that require the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage the control of what goes in your constitution and how it's enforced. And we didn't have a constitution for a hundred years. We were governed by an act of Congress that not only allotted our lands, preserved our mineral state, but at the same time defined who an Osage was and who got to participate in the political process of the tribe, what the powers were of the council, what they could and couldn't do, and how long their terms were, and a whole variety of other things that was outlined in Section 9 of the 1906 Act. So the big thing that we did by getting this new legislation passed was to take Section 9 and just throw it out and insert that into this process. So despite how it was done in the past, we were free to redesign it with only one caveat is that we weren't going to interfere with anybody's interest in the mineral estate. So if you got ahead right before, you're still going to have a head right after this process was over with, and that we made sure.

But to get back to the point, is that we had to overcome such an internal and external effort to try to derail it and undermine it or capitalize or make fun of it or in any kind of way devalue what took us a hundred years to get back, which was our inherent sovereignty to form our own government and determine our own citizens. And so while this process managed to go down the road, we realized early on that just getting the constitution passed wasn't going to be enough. We got it on paper, we got people to vote, we got a positive result and it became really clear at the outset that once these new officials were put in, they were of the same mindset of the old tribal council model that was in the 1906 Act that we operated in over the last hundred years [because] it was the only thing they were familiar with. So they brought all their expectations and ideas and the way they wanted to get things done into a government that wasn't reflective of that. And so there's some real cognitive dissonance out there. Everybody wanted change but just keep everything the same. Well, you could understand how impossible that was going to be. So what we did was that we went back and tried to make a couple of efforts.

One was to have a process called strategic planning. Not just for this term of office for these elected officials, but more importantly for the next generation of Osages that are coming down the road. [Because] there were a few things that I identified really quick. One was that during the 31st Council we got into gaming in a very big way. And so when this new administration came on board, we had four operating casinos at that point. In the last two years since the election, we've opened three more. We now have seven casinos -- a couple of them you can fit in this room, so I'm not going to brag too much about our efforts here. But really we put a lot of people to work. We've done a lot of good things with it. And we've reinvested those monies back into tribal programs providing services, educational scholarships, preservation of our language and our culture and our museums, providing additional services for our elders, expanding our health care services and moving down a road that many other tribes have already gone down.

But what was really clear at the very beginning is that, especially during the campaign for chief and council and the minerals council positions and all these candidates, we had 64 candidates run for 20 offices. So whenever there was a political forum, it was a four-hour affair. There were more candidates than we had citizens who were looking to vote were showing up at these things. And they were going out and they're saying, 'Okay, if I get elected we're going to build a lake on our reservation and we're going to provide tourism capabilities. If I get elected, we're going to buy our land back and get our reservation back, get our land base started. If I get elected, I want to make sure everyone gets universal healthcare coverage,' and it goes on and on and on. One day I was just writing it all down and I said, 'Unfortunately, there's a lot of good ideas out there,' and what was really clear was that everybody had a pretty good idea of what we could be doing with our gaming money when they were campaigning.

We've never seen it before. All the money that we got in the past from oil and gas royalties went straight to those shareholders. The tribe never saw a dime of it. So once we got gaming we had, administratively speaking, millions and millions of dollars sitting in our laps where before we'd never even had it before. So I was explaining to the public one day, I said, 'We're going to have maybe $10 to $20 million dollars on any given year that we can reinvest in any short-term or long-term projects that's unobligated, that's not taken away from health, social, educational and cultural programs. This is just unobligated funds that we could put in the bank, we can reinvest it, put it in the stock market, whatever.' And during this forum I started adding it up and if all these candidates got what they wanted by getting elected and was able to implement what they promised if they got elected, there's $800 million roughly of expenses that are tied to everyone of these promises. Now if you only got $10 to $20 million a year to play with, how are you going to deliver on $800 million worth of promises?

It was really clear that we had to come up with some kind of way of making the argument that this constitution that's up there on the screen a minute ago, that we can use this document to help meet our goals over the next generation, not just for this term of office. Because in the past, what we've always came across was that we would get people elected and they would engage in a series of four year projects, stuff that they could get done right before election day so that they can campaign on something. And so what we tried to do is get people to break out of that model and talk to our Congress and be able to say, 'Look, this...look at this preamble. This doesn't speak to anything about any four-year projects. It talks about the ancient history of the tribe and how we want to preserve it for future history of our tribe as well.' And we had to realize that growing out of this mindset of four-year projects, four-year campaign promises, and not really vetting anything, not really evaluating whether or not we can actually afford to provide universal healthcare for our kids and every member of our citizens of our nation of 15,000 people. There's no way we're going to be able to come across with a legitimate plan that is going to buy land back, advertise it in public so everyone knows the Osages are dedicating millions of dollars to buy their land back, and then have all the white ranchers come up and jack up the price four times its value. You can think of all kinds of reasons why you need to sit down and think this through before you do it. And so we engaged in this process of strategic planning using this constitution as the base of how we're going to accomplish it, utilizing the three branches of government -- the executive, the legislative and judicial branches -- to prioritize what each one's responsibility is going to be. Take the tribal programs and put together a priority list of how many programs are going to be involved in engaging in this project and that project -- how we're going to vet them, how we're going to determine the value of them.

All these things we did over the last year and a half. It took us 15 months to do this. But we got research, we had Native Nations [Institute] come down and give us a presentation on strategic planning. We also went back out in the communities again. We got past the issue of what kind of government you wanted. The question at that point was, 'What do you want the government to do, not just for you today but what do you want your children and grandchildren to do?' And so we engaged in a series of public hearings, we had this discussion, it was facilitated by an outside facilitator from the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, and we put together a document of understanding who we were in our past, understanding what our history was -- not only our tribal history but our personal family history. And then once we got an agreement on how our history evolved, then we took it to the next step of telling everybody, 'Now that we know this, what do you want us to do with it in the future?' And all these ideas came out. Instead of campaign promises they were citizens and, believe it or not, it was remarkably different than what the people campaigned on that got elected.

So we focused on those projects diversifying our economic base, developing more tourism capabilities, becoming more green in our environmental policies, which is remarkable because we've been an oil and gas tribe for the last hundred years. Who would have ever thought the Osages were a bunch of tree huggers? But that's what you get when you listen. You learn things about your own people that you didn't know was there. And we didn't just confine our conversation to those Osages that lived on the reservation. We went to California; we went to Arizona, we had one of our meetings in Phoenix; Denver; Dallas and Houston; Albuquerque; and of course Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We engaged in a conversation with 24 percent of our population, almost 3,000 people were participating in this process once we added them all up. By doing that we have produced a document that we sent back to them and said, 'This is what you've told us, did we get it right?' We went back there and talked to them again. 'Did we get it right? Is this what you told us?' Just to reaffirm that's true. We then prioritized...we had a list of projects that everybody wanted us to work on and we sent it to them in the form of a questionnaire. It went out to all Osages no matter where they lived and we got 24 percent return on those. Those things just kind of prioritized what people wanted most and how quickly. From there we were able to put implementation plans around each individual project. Once we got the implementation plan we were able to prioritize our legislative agenda to Congress. Congress got involved. They reconfigured all their Congressional committees to consistently fit each one of the six main areas of the strategic plan.

So now everyone's busy about the business of implementing a plan that I never would have thought possible six years ago. Because we're now thinking about the year 2029 and it's phenomenal, it really is, when you think about where we were and where we are now. Not to say we're still not free from gossip and conspiracy theories and various other things, but the vast majority of the Osages have become embraced with what we've accomplished at this point, because they now feel like they have just as much of an ownership in that plan and this constitution as any elected official does. Thank you."

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

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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
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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." 

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)

The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and its Application to Canadian Aboriginal Business

Producer
Simon Fraser University Beedie School of Business
Year

This lecture is part of a course Stephen Cornell is teaching in Simon Fraser University's Executive MBA in Aboriginal Business and Leadership program. A panel of three joined Dr. Cornell in a discussion about the building of First Nation economies and the role citizen entrepreneurship can play in that process: Dr. Sophie Pierre, Chief Commissioner of the B.C. Treaty Commission; Lori Simcox, Senior Manager, Tsleil Waututh Nation Economic Development; and Dr. Doug McArthur, Simon Fraser University School of Public Policy.

Resource Type
Citation

Cornell, Stephen, Doug McArthur, Sophie Pierre, and Lori Simcox. "The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and its Application to Canadian Aboriginal Business." Executive MBA in Aboriginal Business and Leadership program. Burnaby, British Columbia. Presentation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b11QeZqizK4, accessed October 18, 2013)

Indigenous Data + Open Governments

Producer
Open Data Conference
Year

Presentations at the "Indigenous Data + Open Governments: 3rd International Open Data Conference" in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, featuring:

  • "Developments in Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Insights from the United States & Aotearoa NZ." by Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear
  • "Cheyenne River Voices." by Eileen Briggs
  • "Indigenous Data Governance and Open Data Futures." by Stephanie Russo Carroll

 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Phillips, Gwen. "Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Nation Rebuilding." Indigenous Data + Open Governments. 3rd International Open Data Conference. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. May 2015. Presentation. (http://opendatacon.org/webcast/recording-indigenous-data-open-governments/, accessed June 30, 2015)

Rodriguez Lonebear, Desi. "Developments in Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Insights from the United States & Aotearoa NZ." Indigenous Data + Open Governments. 3rd International Open Data Conference. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. May 2015. Presentation. (http://opendatacon.org/webcast/recording-indigenous-data-open-governments/, accessed June 30, 2015)

Briggs, Eileen. "Cheyenne River Voices." Indigenous Data + Open Governments. 3rd International Open Data Conference. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. May 2015. Presentation. (http://opendatacon.org/webcast/recording-indigenous-data-open-governments/, accessed June 30, 2015)

Carroll, Stephanie Russo. "Indigenous Data Governance and Open Data Futures." Indigenous Data + Open Governments. 3rd International Open Data Conference. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. May 2015. Presentation. (http://opendatacon.org/webcast/recording-indigenous-data-open-governments/, accessed June 30, 2015)