sustainable development

Honoring Nations: Jon Cooley: Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance: White Mountain Apache Wildlife and Recreation Program

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Jon Cooley, former director of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation division, discusses how their program went about building capable institutions of self-governance in order to manage the Tribe's natural resources -- specifically wildlife -- in a sustainable manner.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Cooley, Jon. "Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance: White Mountain Apache Wildlife and Recreation Program." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Sante Fe, New Mexico. February 7, 2002. Presentation.

Andrew Lee:

"Let's now turn our attention to the next theme, which is 'How to Build Capable Institutions of Self-Governance.' Here with us today is John Cooley, who's the director of Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which won High Honors in 2000, last year, for their Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation program. [I] had a chance to visit the reservation; it's simply fantastic, whether you know it or not. I guess it was last year you got $38,000 for a single elk tag. It's a wonderful blend of conservation and profit-making activities. Welcome, Jon."

Jon Cooley:

"Thanks, Andrew. Thanks also for the invitation and the hospitality. It's been great. It is an honor for me as well to be here.

As Andrew said, my talk is on 'Building Capable Institutions of Self-Governance' and being the kind of analytical-type person that I am, I'll break that into two big pieces. Keep in mind now that I'm here today, in 2002, not because of what's really happened in the last few years or so. Our program today is a reflection of a lot of progress and a lot of hard work that has really gone on for decades at White Mountain. Basically, just to give you some really quick background on the program, our Wildlife and Outdoor Recreation division is a blend of two different things happening at the same time. On the regulatory side, of course, we're responsible for the sustainable management of tribal resources, wildlife resources and the conservation of those resources through our law enforcement branch. But on the other hand, we also serve as one of the most profitable, actually, of the tribal enterprises in terms of building a recreation and tourism economy for the tribe, which is really an important part of its entire business approach on the reservation there. So in terms of the building capable institutions part, as far as the White Mountain example is concerned, I think that really started with just building a tribal regulatory framework of, consisting of tribal codes, laws and regulations that regulate not only tribal member activities, as it relates to wildlife, but also non-tribal members coming on to the reservation, which clearly is an important first step. And then the other piece of that of course is building an organization and through the years we've gone through a lot of different changes. Today I'm happy to say that we have our professional branch of biologists consists...all but two people consist of tribal members, college-educated degree tribal members who act as our biologists both in terms of fisheries management and wildlife management. We started early on though, of course, bringing in skilled people from the outside using 638 [Public Law 93-638] contracts and whatever was available to us, working with the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] or the Fish and Wildlife Service to help build the capacity to manage our resources. But the vision all along was for us to do it and to do it the way we felt was appropriate.

Now in terms of... self-governance, to me, implies empowerment and independence. And in the case of White Mountain, I think it also meant just the idea of controlling its own destiny as it related to, again, both running businesses and managing its resources. And when you control your own destiny, I think that goes further in implying that you're incorporating tribal values into the way that you do that. So we try to remain and always have, I think, remained cooperative and we try to collaborate as much as possible with key players like the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Fish and Wildlife Service. But there's times when you run into a conflict between what may be national priorities or policies and what the tribe feels is important. So I think that's...when you get into those situations where you have conflicting goals and ideas of what the future should be is when you have to assert and in our case we've asserted this notion of self-governance.

And just, again in terms of background, two critical points I think in our development as an agency, the first was with the State of Arizona, this was back in I believe the '70s, early '80s when the state had jurisdiction over non-member hunting activities on the reservation where they were required to purchase state permits in addition to our tribal permit. So there was kind of a double-permitting system going on there. Plus the tribe -- because they were subject to the state regulations -- wasn't able to develop its recreation and tourism businesses the way it felt it should be able to. So we filed suit and through a series of different cases ultimately prevailed. That, in and of itself, allowed the tribe then to develop its trophy elk-hunting program that Andrew referred to earlier. I think the first hunt the tribe had they probably brought in like 20 clients at $700 apiece, which at that time was pretty outrageous. We since have built it into a million-dollar operation and in the process we're employing tribal members and returning revenues back to the tribe, so again it's a good thing for the tribe economically and it's reflective of their desire to advance their business in the way they feel is appropriate, while also providing for the sustainable management of its resources.

Another example is with Fish and Wildlife Service, recently. The conflict was endangered species and the way endangered species issue should be handled on tribal lands. And with the Endangered Species Act and the way it was being applied at the time, it was creating a lot of havoc as was some of your experience as well. And again, it got to a point where we felt that okay, we have this conflict in vision and goals here. And there's this approach sometimes from Washington that a one-size-fits-all [approach] can work, and it just didn't in our case and we challenged it. And the result of that was a cooperative agreement with Fish and Wildlife where they basically recognized our institutional capacity to manage. Now, of course, we had to build upon that because with that self-governance, of course, comes a lot of responsibility. Recent examples of that collaboration with Fish and Wildlife, is the Apache Tribe Recovery Program. It's one of...I think it's the only fish right now being considered for de-listing. We played an active role in that. We've also just recently completed the development of a Mexican Gray Wolf plan. It's a tribal plan though. It's not a Fish and Wildlife Service plan handed to the tribe. We developed it.

So again, this notion of self-governance, there's times when you -- in our case at least -- we've just had to assert this idea of wanting to do it ourselves and the reason is because we felt it was necessary to control our destiny and to make sure that the tribe's values were being reflected. I mentioned this idea of with self-governance comes a lot of responsibility. And I think in doing that it's not this idea of necessarily you're out there on your own, because it is important to still network and we do that as much as we can to utilize other agencies that are involved, whether it's Fish and Wildlife Service or the BIA or what have you. So the point is that we still try to foster those relationships as much as possible, because funding is usually a limiting factor, at least in our case, and it's important to maintain those ties. But in doing so you have to be loyal to your community and to their interests and to those values that should be guiding our vision and our focus as an agency. So we try, when we work with these outside agencies, I think it's important to maintain that community connection and being loyal to your vision basically, your mission. Throughout, whether it's on the business side for us or on the resource management side, sustainability of both is really critical and I think it's important when talking about sustainable, how do you do that, what does that mean?Well, I think setting goals and setting benchmarks for yourself and your staff and in our case as an agency that's really important. This gets back to the responsibility point as well and accountability and having as much of a focus on results is I think important because, again, if we can't show a return -- and I'm not just talking about a financial return -- if we can't show a return, in terms of sustainably managing the resources for the tribe, that's a return as well, then we're really not being effective I feel.

So stepping back, in closing, going outside of just our agency and I guess what's needed is to grow and be successful. There's also the tribal, macro-tribal organization that's involved as well and I think it's always a struggle for us, as I'm sure it is for every tribe, but consistency -- we were talking earlier. I think consistency is really important and I'm talking about just having the support, the community support and the political support, to allow agencies to thrive and to innovate is really important. And in the case of White Mountain, I think that's been there to allow us to move forward. Because obviously, without some kind of degree of reliability, it's difficult for I think any program to really build a foundation, number one, and to move beyond that foundation. And in terms of sustaining self-governance through time, economic viability is important and just in general vision and leadership is critical, a strong judicial system I think is really important. There needs to be that sense of fairness and just in general creating an environment as much as possible to allow organizations to be innovative and creative in how they do what they do because ultimately that's what drives people to do good things at the end of the day. So with that I'll close and take any questions you might have."

Audience member:

"This is a two-part question. I would imagine your agency has many staples. You've got tribal leaders, you've got clients who are citizens of your nation, clients who are not citizens of the nation, you've got probably citizens of the nation who aren't your clients but have some viewpoints of what it is that you do. The first part of the question is how do you as an agency take all of that information in, figure out what the harvest is going to be or what the yield is going to be, and where the hunting is going to take place and not take place? The second part of the question picks up on your closing remarks on what is it that the tribe or the council has done or that you've done that allows this innovation to take place?"

Jon Cooley:

"As far as the first question is concerned, the process that we go through, we do have separate and distinct regulations. I'll talk about hunting; for non-tribal members and for tribal members, deference is absolutely given to tribal members because if they're not happy, we're not running a business. That's the bottom line. When we do the regulations for tribal members, we do public meetings. They're not necessarily always well attended, but the point is that we do make an effort to try to get public input. That's a fine line though, because that public input is absolutely necessary, I think, to fine-tune regulations and that make you feel like we're being responsible and responsive. But at the same time, I'm always worried about management by public referendum if you will. In other words, there's skilled technicians that need to have as much influence and input I think on those, especially the critical game management issues. So that is a fine line that we walk, but whenever we take those regulations to the council who ultimately approves them before they're adopted, they'll always ask and want to know that there's been some level of public input. So I think that's important. Now as far as non-members are concerned, like I said, once we've done tribal...we have an idea of what our overall management objectives are, then we'll deal with the business side after we have a pretty good idea of how we're dealing with the tribal members. And we try to balance the two as much as possible because, again, we are running a business. That's how we fund our resource management is by these urban revenues that are generated. [I] hope that answered your question. You're going to have to remind me of the second."

Audience Member:

"It was talking about allowing your institution to thrive and innovate. What is it that's, at White Mountain Apache, whether it's on the council side or your side, that's allowed this to happen, to thrive and innovate as an institution? What has the tribe done well?"

Jon Cooley:

"Well, I think first of all there's a built in incentive. The economic incentive is the better we can do managing the resource, the more funds we can generate to do our management, and to hire good people and to hold them, and hopefully motivate them in whatever fashion we can. Now we don't pay big bonuses like Enron does, but we still...the point is that I take the opportunity, I can't speak for my predecessors, but to show them that, 'Hey, you guys can build your management programs if we can do well managing the resources that have the quality there that will attract this demand.' But the bottom line is we have to...our mission statement, the way it's written, it talks about the two major functions of our division. One is manage the resource in a sustainable fashion. Then, after we've done number one, but only after we've done number one, then we can talk about commercial success of the enterprise. So I think that's one thing. But the other thing is just be bold and...I'm bashful when, whether it's economic or political influences start to try to erode away at the morale or what have you is just hold tight and beat the drum and just remind people of what we're trying to do. This gets back into goals and vision and what we're trying to do and how successful we've been up to now and let's try to maintain the course as much as possible. I don't know about other places, but there is temptation sometimes for politics to kind of...to get into the organization. We try to fight that as much as possible, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Any other questions? Thank you."

Greg Cajete: Indigenous Paradigm: Building Sustainable Communities

Producer
University of Arizona's Department of Language, Reading, and Culture
Year

Greg Cajete, Director of Native American Studies at the University of Mexico, shares his more than three decades of work and research on Indigenous epistemologies for human and ecological sustainability, and discusses the need for scholars, academic institutions, and others to fully embrace these time-tested epistemologies as effective tools for combatting major issues such as climate change and global warming.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Cajete, Greg. "Indigenous Paradigm: Building Sustainable Communities." Department of Language, Reading and Culture, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 23, 2007. Presentation.

“Thank you, Candace and thank you Native students here at the University of Arizona for inviting me once again to give a presentation to your group and also to this group. As we say in my language [Tewa language], ‘Be with life, see that is the way it is.’ And I use this greeting, this way of opening my presentation today to sort of highlight, I guess, what I’m going to say to you and what I’m going to present to you in the context of this presentation. A lot of the work that I’ve been doing really within the last six years has been really around the notion of how do we develop a place for Indigenous thought, perspective, understandings within mainstream education. So hence, my role and my taking up the challenge of being the Director of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico and actually attempting, not only with myself but also with some colleagues, to introduce in a kind of basic way this paradigm, these thoughts, these ideas into a Native/Western-based Native studies program.

So you can see that part of this has to also be about creating space and place within the academy, within the western academy for the thoughts and the ideas and the diversity of thought and idea that Native people have and have always had and have always brought to universities such as the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico. And so my work today really is revolving around partly being an administrator. And all of those of you who have ever been an administrator know what that means. It really means lots and lots of time and meetings and working with political entities and coming forward and doing your presentations in hope of getting some money from some source to continue your program. The other part of it is internal work, which really requires you working with a variety of entities, particularly students and other faculty members to create a kind of openness first of all and secondly a kind of mechanism that allows you to begin to, in a sense, bring forward some of the ideas that are a part of what I call the Indigenous paradigm. And I’ve been working on this work actually for about 33 years now. It’s going to be 33 years that I’ve been ‘in the trenches’ as we say, a teacher starting really at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the high school science teacher and also the basketball coach and evolving into with the Institute into their college program, becoming the Dean of the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange there at the Institute and then also being the Chair of their Cultural Studies program before moving to the University of New Mexico 11 years ago now.

Part of my reason for taking on the leadership of the Native Studies program at the University of New Mexico is I felt that it was a time and a proper time to bring forward some of the ideas and perspectives that I had been working on as a cultural educator, as a Native educator within the secondary ranks and also within tribal college, as was the case with the IAIA [Institute of American Indian Arts] and bringing that into a university setting. And it’s not been without its challenges, it’s not been without much, much work but I think it’s becoming a point or a place where at least at the University of New Mexico where at least the Indigenous ideas and perspectives are becoming a part of the regular dialogue and discussion among students and Native faculty who are at the University of New Mexico. So the next stage of that is to make it a part of the dialogue of the University as a whole, which I think is probably going to be happening soon.

So my presentation today really is about what I would consider kind of my new work although it’s actually old work. It’s actually taking up some of the ideas and perspectives that I wrote in my first book Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, in which I sort of began to take a look at what was indeed Indigenous education, what were its sources, what kinds of components did it have, what is the epistemology if you will of Indigenous education and how can we use it as a foundation to begin to create new curriculum from and in a sense to engender a kind of process of thinking that would allow the Indigenous perspective to have a place within mainstream education. And so Look to the Mountain is about philosophy, it’s about epistemology, it’s about a lot of things that deal with what I would consider foundational, philosophical, epistemological understandings that Indigenous people share not only here in the United States but actually worldwide with regard to language, with regard to community, with regard to understandings and relationships to environments in which they live, with regard to the arts and with regard to spirituality and with this whole notion of education.

And that then led to another book that I wrote, which is Native Science from a Native American Perspective which outlines some of the kinds of content that I began to use in a curriculum that I developed at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe those 33 years, beginning those 33 years ago. And in Native Science, what I talk about really is the Native ecological mind if you will, the perspectives and understandings that Native people have and have developed a knowledge base around that has sustained them through many generations within the context of the communities and the places in which they have lived. So the thoughts and ideas of Native Science are really about looking at and trying to understand and trying to bring forward some of those foundational ideas, those essential ideas into a dialogue and into a kind of context of education for the 21st century. And what I talk about in Native Science is really the understandings that Indigenous people have about their relationship not only to each other but to the world around them and especially to the cosmos. And so while I use primarily examples from Native communities in the United States and a few from Mexico and Canada, a lot of the thoughts and ideas and perspectives and orientations actually could be utilized for tribal peoples from Africa, from Asia, from Australia, from New Zealand and so on. [Okay. That makes a difference, doesn’t it?] So given that, given that understanding, what I want to do is give you some thoughts and perspectives related to that but let me finish these books up first.

After writing Native Science, I realized that a lot of people were beginning to talk about how to create curriculum that integrated or introduced Native content into the teaching of science and then I thought, ‘Didn’t I write something about that a few years ago?’ So I didn’t actually write my book on Native science modeling until about 1999 and it actually is my dissertation in a kind of synopsized form and sort of represents the idea, the concept and also a model that I had developed and utilized at the Institute of American Indian Arts. And so the book actually was a book about probably that I should’ve written first. Because the usual thing is that you do your dissertation and then you try to find a publisher and then you try to publish that. In those days, in 1986, you were hard pressed to find a publisher that even understood what you were talking about in the context of this kind of culturally based education perspective. So in those days it actually was pretty difficult so it wasn’t until 1999 that I actually got Igniting the Sparkle written into a book form. So for those of you that are educators, this is the book that’s kind of the recipe book that if you’re looking for some thoughts and ideas about how do you actually take these ideas of culturally responsive science and make them real for Native students in the classroom, this would be the book for you.

I don’t have a copy of my other book which is called A People’s Ecology, which is actually more along the lines of the presentation I’m going to give you today, but it’s called A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living and that’s published by, I believe the publisher is Clear Light Publisher for that. So hopefully you’ll also take a look at that. My last book, which actually did not get distributed very easily because my publisher, Kivaki Press, actually went out of business so I’m left with having to move this book around, but it’s called Spirit of the Game: An Indigenous Wellspring in which I take ideas and perspectives of Native games and begin to build a pedagogy of curriculum around them. And so what I find myself doing these days is actually beginning to create what I’m hoping is a kind of series of books and representations of the Indigenous thought and the Indigenous paradigm within these various kinds of contexts of education and hoping that people such as yourselves, students such as yourselves will take the challenge to sort of bring forward those ideas in your own ways, in your own perspective, in ways that make sense for you within the communities and schools that you teach in and to make them real once again within the context of Native life and Native education in the 21st century.

So with that I want to invite you to this presentation, "Indigenous Paradigm: Building Sustainable Communities," because what I’ve notice in all these years of working in this field is that there’s a kind of paradigm that’s beginning to form among Indigenous people, Indigenous scholars. And that paradigm is a paradigm that is both ancient and also new in many respects in the sense that it’s bringing forward some of the ideas and the principles and the understandings and the histories that Native people have always had and making them real in the 21st century. And so that evolving paradigm is something that Indigenous scholars around the world are participating in in a variety of different kinds of contexts and in a sense creating this kind of body of work and if you will in academic circles a kind of theoretical base essentially that Indigenous people are beginning to form that they can now begin to work from in a variety of different kinds of context; education, health, economics, governance and sustaining Indigenous communities ecologically and socially, culturally and spiritually and otherwise.

So the presentation today talks about that, that perspective, that understanding and I want to sort of take you through really for me it’s a kind of going back to some earlier thoughts and ideas, bringing them forward and working with them. So it’s a creative process on the part of myself as a scholar as I do this. But recreating Indigenous education is really for me one of the most important kinds of undertakings if you will in the sense that what we’re attempting to do is really begin to take a look at teaching and learning, which is transformative and anticipates change and innovation within the context of Native communities, Native education and more particularly within the minds of Native students. As I say there, ‘Indigenous education can integrate and apply principles of sustainability along with appropriate traditional environmental knowledge.’

The whole notion of sustainability is really important I think to understand today and one of the reasons why I’ve taken up this work again reminding you that part of my training is actually as a field biologist and that I’ve been following kind of the environmental crisis for 33-plus years. And the understandings we have now for instance with regard to global climate change, to the evolving environmental crisis, these kinds of considerations and understandings and the indicators that this was happening within the global living sphere that we call Mother Earth is and was there 33 years ago. The footprints, the evidence was beginning to evolve, we began to see the melting of certain glacier formations, especially in the Andes and beginning to see changes in climate and environment. A lot of this was happening 33 years ago and I remember as an undergraduate biology student studying global climate change and some of the possibilities that were being considered as ramifications of that kind of change.

So now we find ourselves in the year 2007 with no more excuses and literally with the evidence in such overwhelming amounts that global climate change has been happening, is happening, that human beings are largely responsible for it and the kinds of societies that we have created, the focus on fossil fuels and also our lifestyles, all of these have contributed really to this mounting evolving crisis. What we find ourselves in as education institutions and also as educators is that we haven’t necessarily anticipated this kind of process, this kind of challenge and certainly our institutions in many ways are not prepared to teach students in ways that are necessary to begin to have a real understanding of how to address some of the issues and the problems that global climate change will begin to gradually bring to us. So we’re finding ourselves in the midst of having to change in terms of a society, in terms of the way that we view and understand education but not really knowing how to change in many ways and not really understanding the ways that we need to begin to think and rethink the process of education today.

So my thesis has been and continues to be that Indigenous societies have always had a form of education that in a very practical and very direct way ensured that communities remain sustainable through environmental change and also through environments and maintained also a kind of relationship with the natural world that ensured that sustainability was really a possibility. And I’m thinking and I’m saying essentially that in today’s society, we have to begin to revisit some of these older traditions of knowledge, of education, of ways of being in community in order for us to begin to understand what we need to do in order to in a sense become sustainable within our environments once again. It’s a huge challenge and I think we’re just at the very beginning of realizing how huge it is and it is going to have an impact on all of our educational institutions and the way that we view education as a whole.

So I’m saying essentially that Indigenous education forms a foundation for community renewal and revitalization. So for Native communities this is…there’s even more, an even larger imperative. In many ways in Native communities we’ve been torn and have a history with education that is less than positive and we’re really just beginning to move into a stage where we’re able to at least have access to higher education, we have access to professional kinds of positions in government, in economics but it’s just at the very beginning process. And as we move into that, there’s always been the question, ‘How much of myself, my tradition, my community do I bring with me as I move into this world, this world of western education?’ But for me Indigenous education is one of the foundations of this community renewal and revitalization and this particular slide I think represents for me that understanding because it is about a kind of relational thinking, a relational position that you take both individually and as a community that ensures a kind of process of reciprocity and mutual relationship that ensures survival over the long period of time.

We’ve heard this many times in many phrases, in many ways, in many linguistic forms that Indigenous people have, ‘We are all related, we are all related, we are all related.’ And that idea of Turtle Island, which has been used many times as an ecological metaphor, which in biological circles has…is associated with what we call the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that the earth is this one gigantic living system and that we live within that living system, that we’re related within that living system. Things that we do as human beings does have an impact in that greater living system which we call the earth. And so those ideas and those concepts, while in Western biology many times it was debated if there was even such a thing as a global system such as Gaia, such as the Greeks called 'Gaia.' Well, I think climate change and the effects of climate change really does show that the whole earth is enveloped in this living, interactive system and it’s a living system and we’re a part of that living system. And of course if you study Indigenous traditions, Indigenous languages, Indigenous stories, you begin to see that theme played over and over and over again represented from numerous kinds of perspectives that we are all related.

And so those ideas, I think, have to become a part of the new epistemology, I think you would say, that begins to guide us as educators, as institutions, as communities, because the truth is that our survival may depend on it, ultimately that our survival as human communities in this biosphere earth depends on it. So given that challenge, what do you do, because if you’re training people for a paradigm of economic development that in a very short time will probably not exist, at least not in the way that people are being trained for that. If you’re training people for positions or community development concepts that in very short time may not be in vogue, it may be totally obsolete, what then do you have to fall back on from the standpoint of educational strategy? So this is why I’m saying that the ideas that Indigenous people have are important. Traditional and environmental knowledge can provide models and creative insights necessary to renew communities, revitalize human communities and economies.

I think also we have to begin to take a look at how and also as I say up there, a long and hard look at the current educational, economic and community development policies, planning and processes which may many times make us complicit with the status quo and so this is a debate that happens certainly within the institution and certainly it’s a debate that happens among my faculty and my students is being complicit with your own, in a sense, demise, in some cases as it’s sometimes referred to. But I think that more it has to do with the orientation or the paradigm that we work from and beginning to take a look at that paradigm seriously and really, really, really thinking about it in terms of how it allows us or doesn’t allow us to become the kinds of sustainable entities that we wish to become. And so that’s the reason for that idea of complicity.

For me, as Director of Native American Studies, the problem becomes, how do I develop new Native studies, programming, courses, perspectives that build on this evolving paradigm that’s based on sustainability? And so the new kinds of things that it brings forward have to do with new kinds of courses, new kinds of delivery of courses, new ways of looking at courses, new connections of courses and faculty and community. How do you make that connection work? Again, a new kind of Native studies education predicated on guiding Native students towards this vision of health, renewed and revitalized, sustainable and economically viable Indigenous communities. So a lot of what is happening today in Native contexts and circles has to do with this concept of building Native nations. So when you go around and you talk with tribal entities, tribal governance, tribal communities and individuals within those communities, the overwhelming focus and intention is how do we sustain our communities in the face of a variety of different kinds of challenges. How do we self-determine within a political environment that doesn’t necessarily recognize our legal and our communal kinds of mandates to self-determine or wish to self-determine? So these are the kinds of issues that then become a part of the discussion about what is nation building, Native nation building in the 21st century? It’s not just about economics, it’s not just about governance, it’s not just about education but what is underlying all of those understandings and to understand that you have to go back and ask yourself the questions, ‘Well, what did Indigenous societies found their understandings of all of these different entities on, why were they doing it, what was the underlying kind of motivation for having systems of governance and having economies and having these systems of education?’ Well, it’s probably…more than likely it was to sustain one’s self. It goes back to sustainability. It goes back to sustainability. And sustainability is connected to another philosophical idea that we call ‘being with life’ or ‘life perpetuating,’ perpetuating the life of a community. So I began this session with the words ‘Be with life or with life…,’ which is basically the same as saying, ‘sustain life,’ and it’s a term that’s used in many Indigenous settings to create a mindset, a way of looking at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

So understanding this, I think, is a very important piece of this puzzle that we’re putting together with regard to, ‘What is the Indigenous paradigm and how is it related to Indigenous sustainable community development?’ We know that…when you study Indigenous cultures around the world, we know that there are certain kinds of characteristics of Indigenous sustainable communities that come at you all the time, that sort of reflect in a variety of ways and part of it has to do with this focus or refocus or constant focus on some sort of ecological integrity. Meaning that what you do as a community in some ways or another comes right back to some sort of an ecological connection, ecological sustaining connection to the environment, to the places, to the plants, to the animals, to the world in which you live. And so this is a part of that Indigenous epistemology and part of it is really start from the premise that what you do has integrity and honors life-giving relationships.

So now translating that ecological integrity into an action kind of statement and so if you were to ask the question, ‘Well, how do we develop Indigenous sustainable communities, what are their characteristics, how do we emulate that?’ Well, start with the premise that what you do has integrity and honors life-giving relationship. So what does that mean, how do you teach for that, how do you reflect that in the way you create your institutions, your economies? A sustainable orientation: building a process, which sustains community, culture and place. If you hear Native people talk both historically and also in contemporary settings, what you’re hearing many times when they talk about their communities, when they talk about the places in which they live, that’s what they’re saying; building a process which sustains community, culture and places, that connection.

Also, vision, purpose, vision and purpose. See what you can do in the light of revitalization of community. There’s things that can happen both individually and collectively that in a sense revitalize, that bring life back to something within the community. So if you begin to educate for those kinds of ideas, those kinds of actions, those kinds of ways of being in the world once again, those will more than likely happen. So we have today things like community-based education, we have things like service learning, we have a variety of different kinds of ecological restoration projects going on in a variety of different contexts, which in an of their essence bring life back to something, they revitalize something. And so that vision and purpose, see what you can do in the light of revitalization of community becomes a very important, imperative. Because what you work with when you’re developing sustainable community is you’re working with a culture, community and its resources and you begin to see those within the context of this greater challenge, this greater impetus of creating and teaching for sustainable community.

We know -- and as Native peoples we have always had -- a kind of spiritual purpose that has been and continues to be a kind of foundational understanding that we carry with us in a variety of contexts of education. So spiritual purpose especially has a very important role in this process of revitalizing Indigenous community. So this idea of cultural integration: actions which orient or originate, rather, through spiritual agency that stems from connections to a cultural way of being. That idea of Indigenous spirituality, it also has a practical purpose and it always has had a practical purpose. And that was to keep in the minds of a community that what you’re doing not only has spiritual purpose but it goes right back to that process, that understanding of being with life, seeking life or in some ways revitalizing, to revive or to bring life back to something. And so it also includes respect for all. Actions stem from respect for and celebration of community. This idea of respect, mutual respect, respect not only for each other in communities but also respect for the land, its plants, its environments, its whole environment if you will. And then engaging participation of community, the community is both the medium and the beneficiary of activities.

So the idea of education being of a community base first and foremost in Indigenous thinking, in the Indigenous paradigm, becomes a very, very important component of what I would consider the new kind of Indigenous education, which is largely community-based, not university-based; big difference between university base and community base. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have community in universities because you can and you do all the time, we create communities in universities, and what we’ve tried to do at the University of New Mexico Native American Studies is we’ve tried to create an Indigenous learning community that parallels the communities that the students and the faculty do come from. But what I’m talking about here is really that true Indigenous education happens within and through and around and with the Indigenous communities that it’s meant to serve.

If you study Indigenous education around the world, you begin to find that what moves it is relationality, that it’s based on a relational philosophy that relationship becomes one of the key principles of how things happen, how things get learned within those communities, how things get related to literally. And so when you take a look at Indigenous cultures around the world, it becomes a kind of tour of relationality in all of its many faces, all of its many representations. And so when you teach for relationality, it’s a very different kind of mindset than teaching for let’s say independence or rather individualistic kinds of endeavors or individualism. When you teach for relationship, you’re actually teaching for an understanding of how best to not only create relationship but extend it, maintain it and make it the foundation of all the things that you do. And so building upon and extending relationships are essential, process of this develop. Restoring and extending the health of the community is also part of that process ‘cause relationships can be positive or negative, can be healthy or not so healthy so relationship also has two sides to it. And you have to understand that part of what we’re doing is trying to create and maintain and extend relationships that are life giving so all of those things become important. Initiative should generate…the initiative should generate dynamic and creative process, the idea that relationship takes work, that it’s not just something that happens but rather is something that you have to work for and you have to constantly nourish because it’s a living process in and of itself.

There’s this business of commitment to developing the necessary skills, commitment to community renewal and revitalization, commitment to mutual reciprocal action and transformative change, that idea of commitment to each other and communities. There’s also the characteristic of Indigenous sustainable education in which the focus is to educate for the recreation of cultural economies around an Indigenous paradigm, so when we begin to look at things like economic development in the context of Native communities and we’re taking a look at some of the kinds of issues and challenges of global climate change, the dwindling resources, a variety of different kinds of ecological issues, then you have to begin to look at what it is that can begin to help people recreate some of the cultural ecologies or the cultural kinds of economies that once were a part of their life and their livelihood. So this is one of the reasons why Native people today, especially those that have a land base and resource base, fight so tenaciously let’s say for their fishing rights, fight so tenaciously for their hunting rights, fight so tenaciously for their gathering rights, fight so tenaciously for their rights to be…to continue let’s say traditional, environmental and/or lumbering practices or agricultural practices. All of that is based on this sentiment you see and this understanding. So begin by learning the history and principles of your own Indigenous way of sustainability, explore ways to translate that into the present, research the practical ways to apply these Indigenous principles and knowledge basis. So this is some of the kind of work that you would do in the creation of and moving forward to this kind of paradigm, if you will, of education.

Basic, shared Indigenous principles include many things. It’s place-based, resourcefulness and industriousness, collaboration and cooperation, integrating difference in political organizations, alliances and confederation building, trade and exchange. These are things that Native people have always done in the context of the kinds of ways in which they’ve created their sustainable communities alongside other sustainable created communities by Indigenous people. So in other words, Indigenous people have been creating these communities all along, but they haven’t been creating them in isolation. They’ve been creating them in relationship to other Indigenous communities, other regions, other places. And so we have a history of this, this relationship.

So what are some of the challenges to Indigenous sustainability today? In other words, if we were to create Indigenous communities, what are some of the kinds of issues that we would face immediately in attempting to do that? Well, establishing political self-determination is one of the issues that we continue to work with and continue to have to in some ways defend and find ways to express. Decolonization and culturally responsive education; decolonization in the sense that it’s a kind of re-education process for us as Indigenous people to begin to take a look at some of our own complicity and some of the issues of colonization and trying to begin to not only understand that but to reverse that. And part of the ways that you reverse that is through culturally responsive education, beginning to take a look at that paradigm seriously, express it, maintain it, extend it.

Also taking a look at economic exploitation, diverse and competing ideologies in some of the political restructuring that happens in Native communities and happens as a result of federal Indian policy, that mitigate against communities creating themselves or recreating themselves as sustainable communities. Other issues include the very fact that we have individual diversities among Native peoples, identity redefinition, creating formal and informal institutions also become a part of the task of in a sense retooling ourselves and retooling our view of ourselves towards this Indigenous paradigm. Challenges also include the cultural, the social, the political and the spiritual fragmentation that all of us experience in communities and also in different kinds of situations of community building. Creation of formal and informal institutions, which advance sustainability: some universities, some colleges, some tribal colleges are beginning to do some of this kind of work but much work needs to be done because it does require new kinds of courses, new kinds of configuration of courses, in some cases even maybe new institutions that begin to look at this kind of advancement of sustainability. Challenges also include flowing with heterogeneity, complexity and differentiation. As modern people living in a modern society today, Indigenous people have been affected by all of these challenges of differentiation and changes of perspective and understanding. So we have to begin to look at that and see how that has affected us.

And then also in many cases it’s also a matter of political restructuring both internally and externally. But what do we have going for us? You can’t just leave it there and say, ‘Well, these are all the challenges, let’s just give up and forget about it.’ The fact is is that as Indigenous communities we do have resources that we can actually draw on now and these include things like our extended family, clans and tribes, which are still functional in many Native communities, which are organizations of people, related people. We do have still community in bits and pieces in places. We also have places and regions in which those communities are situated and which can be affected in a sustainable way. We have political, social, professional and trade organizations that can be mobilized in a variety of ways to support sustainability of communities. We have had always co-ops, federations and societies which have developed around the ideas of how to perpetuate in many cases community activities and even the corporation, which can be sustainable if founded on principles of sustainability. Now that’s a controversial statement that I make there because some would say you can’t teach corporations new tricks. Well, the corporation believe it or not is actually a kind of community. It’s a very, very self-centered community maybe -- focused on maybe just one goal -- but the fact is that it is a community. Corporations function as communal entities and so beginning to take a look at what is the sustainable corporation. Does it exist, can it exist? I dare say that it probably has to begin to exist if our future is going to be one that is going to be sustainable. In other words, corporations do have to become more sustainable and more…and have more ownership towards community goals. And so there’s a whole group of people that are beginning to write about, ‘What is the sustainable corporation? Can it even exist?’

So finally Indigenous food traditions, Indigenous family, Indigenous communities, Indigenous relationship, Indigenous health, Indigenous education, these are all areas, these are like different seeds. Remember I showed you some corn cob and there were seeds on it and there were different kinds of…hues of the kernels of the corn. They were different, but they all were on the same corn cob and that principle in biology is called unity and diversity. You have a unity in the form of the community itself but you have diversity in terms of the individual kernels of corn which will turn into individual corn plants. Well, the fact is that we have individual kernels around which ideas, concepts and education around Indigenous sustainability can actually be taught, can actually be experienced, can actually be extended and ultimately it’s coming back to that old, very ancient notion of a celebration of life or an extension of life. ‘Be with life’ was what I started the presentation with and that idea is I think an idea that has never grown old. It may have been subsumed by other kinds of understandings, other kinds of ways of looking at things, other perspectives, but the fact is that human beings live in communities and part of the real deep instinct, I think, that we have as human beings is that we extend life and that we’re a part of this greater life process, which is the earth’s life process.

And so this is a vision of education. I’m not saying that it exists in any place right now, maybe in a few Indigenous communities that haven’t been too assimilated. It may exist somewhere in the world. It doesn’t necessarily exist in its pristine form as it once existed and I’m not really saying that we need to go back to that way of living but we have to understand what that way of living had to teach us. And I think more particularly the principles of knowing and understanding what it takes to be sustainable in a world that is under great crisis today and will continue to be under great crisis in the succeeding generations. So it’s both a challenge, it’s both a vision, it’s a perspective, it’s new work that I think myself and others are beginning to undertake. It’s really almost like a research question. What is the sustainable, Indigenous community? Can it exist, does it exist, where does it exist, how can it exist? And more particularly the education question is how do we educate for that or at least educate towards that? Because I think ultimately the next generation of scholars, of foundations of education have to be ecologically sound, they have to be about environmental sustainability. It can’t be just a marginal kind of undertaking but rather it has to be I think an integral part of education in the 21st century. And I will bet you that you’ll begin to see not only writing and not only new kinds of ideas coming forward because now they have to around these issues, around these perspectives.

So for Indigenous people, what is Indigenous education? And it’s something I started in my dialogue in Look to the Mountain. Where have we been? Which is our traditions, our ways of life and understanding those. Where are we now? Which is really the context in which we all find ourselves with the challenges, with the kinds of institutions and then we have to have a vision of where we’re going to go in the future. What are the possibilities and what are the paths that we need to get there? So that’s what Look to the Mountain was. Look to the Mountain was a metaphor for, ‘Where have we been, where are we now and where can we go in the future,’ in terms of Indigenous education. So I leave you with that question. It’s a hard question. It’s not an easy one. It requires multiple heads to think about it. It requires a community to do it.

There was the old saying that I used in Look to the Mountain that ‘Indigenous education is about finding one’s face,’ which is to find one’s identity, that’s what we call identity today, ‘find one’s heart,’ which is that passionate sense of self that moves you to do what you do, ‘to find one’s foundation,’ which is in today’s language vocation, that kind of work that allows you to most completely express your heart and face, and that all of that is within a relational circle. That it’s first of all relationship between yourself and yourself, which is self knowledge; relationship between yourself and your family, your clan, your tribe, the place in which you live, and then finally the whole cosmos and that it is towards an understanding of becoming complete as a man or as a woman. And you see that whole thing is a sphere and it’s a sphere of relationality, a relationship, and that’s an Indigenous paradigm that is reflected in a variety of different ways in Indigenous philosophies about what it is to be educated, what it is to be a person of knowledge. So these are ideas that I think are very important to begin to consider as we move into the 21st century and have to really rethink the way we’ve created our institutions, the way we’ve educated, the way we have been educated, the way we understand the process and the importance of community within education and the importance to in a sense come back to that.

So with that I’d like to thank you and I’m now open for questions. I should also say that since this is being filmed that the slides that I’ve shown you are actually archival slides that comes from the University of New Mexico and so those are slides that just were meant to bring your thoughts and your ideas to those points, those perspectives. They’re based on Southwestern Pueblo life and tradition but it could just as easily have been Navajo, slides of Navajo life, slides of Apache life, slides of Pawnee life, slides of Algonquin and other peoples’ lives, other Indigenous peoples from all over the world. The same ideas and concepts I think have a similar kind of play within those societies. While we are different even among Indigenous people, we do share some common ideas and understandings and I think that’s what in a sense allows us to maybe call ourselves 'Indigenous.' So with that I’ll take some questions, comments, perspectives.”

 

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Edward T. Begay

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview conducted in November 2001, former Vice Chairman and Speaker of the Navajo Nation Council Edward T. Begay talks about his long and distinguished career with the Navajo Nation, as well as his commitment to preserving Navajo traditions and creating a sustainable, culturally appropriate economy for his people.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Begay, Edward T. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Window Rock, Arizona. November 2001. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Edward T. Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was born in the Church Rock Community of New Mexico about six miles east of the City of Gallup. The boundaries of the Navajo Reservation extend from northwestern New Mexico into northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah. The reservation is larger than many states and the Navajo Nation is recognized as the largest Indian tribe in the United States. Ed T. Begay's grandparents encouraged him to get an education in the dominant culture. They sent him to Rehoboth Mission High School rather than a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. He then attended Calvin College and received his degree from Southwest Business College. He was later awarded an honorary doctorate from College of Ganado. After service in the U.S. Army from 1959 to 1960 he came to Window Rock and served as head of the Data Processing Unit for the Navajo Nation. During this time he saw issues that needed to be addressed and thereafter began a long public service career with the Navajo Nation. The structure of the Navajo Nation government has changed over time as the people have taken greater control over their affairs. In the 1860s tensions grew between the Navajo, the U.S. Army and non-Indian ranchers who had settled in the area. Although many Navajos resisted, Kit Carson rounded up approximately 8,000 and force-marched them to Fort Sumner. Several thousands died on the march, the four-year imprisonment and the march home. This episode of misery but also survival is known as the Long Walk. The Peace Commission and the Treaty of 1868 allowed the Navajo survivors to return. The treaty set aside a reservation, a fraction of the original homeland. And in exchange for peace the U.S. Government promised basic services to the Navajo. The tenacious Navajo people built their lives and communities again. In the 1920s a Navajo Nation Business Council was established by the U.S. Government to deal with oil companies that were seeking leases on Navajo lands. Then in the 1930s the first Navajo tribal council was organized. In 1989 the National Council was again restructured. A legislative branch was created and an Office of the Speaker established. The 88 members of the council are elected based on the population of 110 chapters. The Speaker is the CEO of the legislative branch. Ed T. Begay was elected to two terms to the Office of the Speaker, first in 1999 becoming the third Speaker of the Navajo Nation council. Before his terms as speaker he had already built a distinguished career in service of the Nation serving as a council delegate for the Church Rock and Bread Springs chapters for more than 30 years. He proudly served on several committees including Education and Economic Development and Planning. From 1983 to 1987 he served the Navajo Nation as Vice Chairman with then Chairman Peterson Zah. Ed T. Begay is committed to the project of developing the economic self sufficiency of the Navajo people. Government work on many levels fascinates him. Today he serves as a Highway Commissioner for the State of New Mexico. He is also engaged in an initiative that will document Navajo traditions and culture. He has two daughters, Charlene Begay Platero and Sandra Begay Campbell. He is the grandfather of twin toddlers whom he says, ‘really like to use their voices.' The Institute for Tribal Government interviewed Edward T. Begay in November, 2001 in Window Rock, Arizona."

The Navajo Long Walk of the 1860s, Kit Carson and the peoples' four-year imprisonment at Fort Sumner

Edward Begay:

"Through my grandfather Jesus his grandfather was the official, he was a Spanish man and he was the official interpreter for the Navajos in Fort Sumner. So by virtue of that my grandfather's grandfathers and mothers they were part of that Long Walk. Well, I guess by reading about them later on in life sometimes it's irritating from a standpoint that there was no human rights in those days. I guess there was but nobody emphasized that so it was more or less on the plunder and conquer approach. Sometimes a bit of resentment but then you have to take it into perspective in terms of history and what was taking place and try to work with the attitude that's in place."

As a child, Ed Begay learned about leadership and the rules of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from his family members

Edward Begay:

"My sisters and I were raised by my grandparents and my dad eventually he moved back to Tohatchi where his family, his mom and dad were. But as...I don't know, about five or six years old my grandfather always talked about different policies that are being placed upon Navajos by Bureau of Indian Affairs. Why he is so astute to that is him being the chief rancher and cattle rancher and raised horses so they always talk about grazing areas and units of sheep and how many you're supposed to be limited to such and such numbers in order to fit the pasture. So as small as I was just listening to the elderly people discuss I became very keen aware that there is an ongoing struggle in terms of federal government's rules that are placed upon Indian people, in our case Navajo people. And my grandfather Tom Jesus was very involved in leadership role. He was...I guess some people nowadays would say he was a headsman of a group in a community. And from there on it stemmed into Navajo chapter government so he was chapter president for I don't know how long. But from the meetings he would always bring back what the government policies are and the programs that they want to undertake -- they, meaning the Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives."

Learning the dominant culture at a Christian boarding school and at home the teachings of grandparents

Edward Begay:

"As I was growing up my grandmother and grandfather they wanted me to get educated in a dominant society. So rather than that they placing me what the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school they put me in private school. It was an interesting experience. Not knowing a word of English and I thought to myself, ‘Let's see how would I do best in learning other language and who would speak to me so that I would readily understand and also be able to maintain it and also practice it?' But I wasn't the only one, there was...at the whole class, the first students in my age group, we were all similar. There was one or two that understood the English language. Of course in those days they taught from the simplest book in pictures. So in that way I can readily relate what they're trying to describe and name names and the action that they produce to get your verbs and so forth. But once in awhile when we would play by ourselves, we would talk Navajo and we were punished, I guess we were disciplined for doing so because the teachers and the people that were advising us, they wanted us to learn and speak fluent English and understand the printed page and so forth. It was interesting. But we paid attention to the discipline that was involved and oh, discipline meaning along the lines of military type of discipline where we'd go to...time to go eat breakfast and lunch and dinner we would all get lined up according to size and we would march not so in military steps but we'd march and go in groups and then we would sit in the dining room. We learned etiquettes of the world. Then also in terms of play you've got to give a fair consideration for the other person. That's a key in terms of getting along with people and in terms of you had to share responsibilities in different areas, in classrooms, keeping the classrooms tidy and not only that but also in the dormitory situation and also in terms of studies and all different subjects. To me ... and learned was that it meant something as a tool, as a tool that you could use in life. It wasn't just something like the temporary stuff. These are the things that one would learn and keep and maintain because I keep going back to grandparents. If you learn something, if they teach you something, you better pay attention and understand and be able to apply it because their teaching was, ‘If you can learn well, then you will be positioned to teach your children later on when you get married and have your own children. And if you don't know, then it will get chaotic.' That was the teachings of our grandparents.

The need for flexibility when operating in two cultures

Edward Begay:

"Learn the phrase, when you're in Rome do as the Romans do and that goes a long ways. I tell you it can even work today. It's just like yesterday I was attending the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission which is to redraw the state legislature boundaries and also congressional down in Arizona, been following it real close. So we had to play their game. That's what it means. You have to speak the language that they use that they can understand and that they pay attention and that's the phrase that it'll go a long ways for. Many people if they could understand that rather than saying, ‘I'm Navajo therefore I can't be open to what the discussion is about or the subject matter that's being discussed.' If you do that then they leave you behind so you've got to keep up with it. There's a constant awareness that one must be aware of."

Learning and teaching discipline in the military

Edward Begay:

"Then I got my assignment in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I used to train troops for 18 months. The people that, the majority that came through that army camp was Puerto Ricans and they thought that they could just run over me by being stubborn and all that. So I said, ‘Okay, if that's what you want to do, I've got the patience and I'm in shape and we could run and run and run.' That's how I got my point across. They don't want to run, ‘Okay, you pay attention to what I'm teaching.' So as long as I'm on the platform I'm in charge, you do as I say because I know what I'm talking about because these are the things that I got taught and therefore you have to learn the discipline. About the third day I was understood pretty well. They know who's in charge and why. One of them asked, they said, ‘Why?' I said, ‘If you don't learn discipline here, when you get into actual combat you'll be the first casualty.' I said, ‘That's why I'm teaching you discipline to pay attention and understand the commands that are given. When I say hit the dirt you say how hard. That's for your safety. No other reason just for your safety.' Once you put that thought across then it goes a long ways for being understood and provide timely leadership and also surprisingly by the time they finished four weeks or eight weeks, they come and thank you for all the lessons that you taught them. That's gratifying."

Ed Begay began his service with the Navajo Nation in data processing

Edward Begay:

"They thought I was a computer whiz then but then the community that I come from, Church Rock, they have this chapter, local government of the Navajos. I would go to these meetings and I would just sit in the audience and there were some things that I thought they were overlooking, I thought they were elementary so I would address that in a timely manner. So one day they said, ‘Young man,' they said, ‘if you think you're so smart, we're going to put you in as chapter president. What would you say then?' I responded to the gentleman and I said, ‘If that's a challenge, as soon as you vote me in I would provide leadership for you, the community.' I said, ‘Leadership means that I have to tell you what to do, when to do it and how to do it. And then you have to pay attention.' I said, ‘That's what you're asking of me to do, then you vote for me.' So that's how I got elected chapter president and I served, didn't finished my term, three years or so then I got nominated to serve on the...to be candidate for Navajo Nation council delegate."

He was in the forefront of forming the Navajo Area School Board Association

Edward Begay:

"So we got organized and from all over the reservation and they said, ‘We want to get in that circle where the decision is made, approving budgets, hiring personnel and program changes.' So I was one of the organizers for federal legislation where the Bureau has to recognize a school board membership where they would be responsible for Bureau of Indian Affairs school. So I got elected from my chapter to Fort Wingate High School Board, one of the original and served there and by virtue of that there was at that time 67 schools on Navajo, Bureau operated, funded. Then each of these all had school board members eventually. When the federal legislation came through, we got organized so that we have an area association that oversees these school operations. A lot of work but we got it done, it's in place, it's working."

Meeting resistance to reform

Edward Begay:

"Some people naturally in any society there's always resistance but that just adds a lot of energy that you want to do better and you want to convince them and that's the approach that I took, especially with the people that understood what the agenda was, which was to be properly authorized so that could be in charge of these schools as a school board elected by the community that we come from where we send our children."

The influence of the 1960s on the Navajo people, using their voices

Edward Begay:

"Being out there in various communities, working and also being part of communities in different places, yes, I think Navajo people got swept into those movements and I guess in that way they realized, Indian people realized that, hey, you could be outspoken and be heard and you could write your opinions and like writing to the editor in news media or get interviewed and get your thoughts across. A lot of people would pay attention to what you have to say if you take it a positive way with the human interest in it, yeah, people will pay attention."

He has devoted 35 years to the service of the Navajo Nation

Edward Begay:

"I've been reelected since 1970 up to 1982; '82 I guess I could have continued but at that time, 1982 I was asked by Peterson Zah that he was running for chairman of the council and he asked me if I would consider being his running mate as the vice chairman of the council. So I resigned from my candidacy as a council and came up with the Peterson Zah to seek the nomination and election for primary and general, which we did. So I served as vice chairman of the council from 1982 to 1987. For reelection we lost reelection by 750 votes."

Restructuring the Navajo government following the years of Peter McDonald

Edward Begay:

"I was out of office that period of time. However, as all politicians do that you work behind the scenes to get your ideas and programs in place. So I worked a lot in that period of time in that fashion. And some of the sitting council friends and relatives they were active participants in that. I think they're just...I knew being on the council prior I knew that this was going to come about sometimes. By that I mean that the Navajo Nation council is the governing body and whoever's chairman or president, if they want additional powers to do certain things, they have to go back to the council to receive that authority. During Peter McDonald's term in '87, '88, '89 at that time quite a bit of or most of the power was delegated to the chairman then. So when Peter McDonald came back to regain his seat he knew he had all the delegated authority so he didn't pay attention to what was being advised by the council. He said, ‘I'm duly authorized, therefore you have no say.' So the council said, ‘Okay, we'll test this.' So they stripped him of all the delegated powers and reserved unto themselves. They brought everything back only the position of the chairman and the vice chairman. It came down to they tell him when to come to work and when to quit and what he can do and what he can't do. That's where all the eruption that the council did wrong and that they were abusing their power at allegation and so forth. But that's, to me that's the bottom line. So he had to pay attention to the council. So by virtue of the restructuring, all the powers that were delegated to the chairman then was given...the council took it all back and they did distribute that power to the standing committee of the council. That's the way it is now, which is Title II as amended. And then by virtue of that they created the office of the president and vice president, they created office of the speaker for legislative branch to preside over the council and also oversee the day to day activity of legislative branch. And then of course we have the judicial branch, which is headed by chief justice to do all the activities. So they worked those things out and that's what we have in place now."

The Nation has turned down gaming

Edward Begay:

"I think in the area of authorizing legalized gaming on Navajo I think it's a mix. The elderly people, those that pay close attention to culture, say that it's not the proper thing for the Navajos to establish because it creates a lot of disruption in the family, disruption in the spending pattern and then also disruption of marriages and all the related vices that goes with outright gaming if one does not closely control and monitor. I think that's one of the basic reasons why they kind of, the Navajo people kind of says, ‘Slow down a minute.' And then there's some other segment of Navajo population they like to establish gaming so that we could capture all the monies from other people rather than from the Navajo people themselves. But in order to do that I think education is the key to that."

The place of traditional wisdom in the everyday decisions of life

Edward Begay:

"In my personal life in the early years I was brought up as believing in the practice of Navajo beliefs meaning Navajo prayers, meaning Navajo songs and certain things of doing. People call it rituals but it's just the way Navajo practice their beliefs and practice through the ceremony, that's how I was brought up. But when I got into a Christian school then I was taught about the discipline of Christian practice and to me they are very strict. It's not just hearsay. By that I mean they're in thick books, they're all spelled out and you could, if there's a certain subject matter you wanted to address or find out why they are written you go to those source and they'll explain it to you, detail. Before I lose my train of thought, that's where I would like as a speaker to council now before my term is up I'd like to get those, some of those principles in Navajo practice to print and into maybe a law but the people tend to say you shouldn't do that. But I myself believe it should be written down, you should have books on it so my grandkids that follows me would know what I was talking about, they could go to that reference. The way it is now you have to find some elderly folks to be your reference on those songs or prayers and practice. On the other side, in the Christian faith it's all written down so that there's no room to wiggle ‘cause it's there. But for myself, if you just pay attention to those principles that are written down and then also the principle of Navajo that are handed down verbally we understand I can almost put it together just from my own belief and there's some variations but very little if you pay attention to those fine print. I think that that helped me in life to have a strong faith in myself and also the good Lord above that guides me and provides me wisdom to make all these supposedly hard decisions, tough decisions. But if you have those things in place those are just day to day decisions one makes to survive in life."

The need for real commitment to the task of developing economic self-sufficiency

Edward Begay:

"At the same time we have to pay attention to orderly development in all these different areas because there's so much regulation, environmental protection laws. We have our own environmental protection laws in place now. If one could pay attention to all those I think there's a business opportunity for an entity. The Navajo Nation talks about developing Navajo entrepreneurship but they just say it in words, they need to put it in practice. But at the same time the people, the Navajo people, business people need to have a personal initiative, drive, which means you have to sacrifice to achieve what you're after because nobody's going to give it to you. If you wait for that, there's a long list for handout. The handout just lasts a little bit but if you're in private business I think you have unlimited opportunity that I think which we Navajo individuals yet to grasp fully so I think that's a challenge for not only Navajos but I think it's for Indian communities."

On whether the tribal council shares his views on economic development

Edward Begay:

"I wish 87 other members did, they would be a very dangerous council to work with meaning that they would just blow up the opportunity, that's what I mean. But they express it but when it comes to financing then everybody starts hedging back. Let me just use the word loosely or even the full meaning, they hate to take risk. I feel if anything you want to do worthwhile for yourself or for your family or for your neighbors and your kin folks, you have to take some risk. But you've got to know the risk that you're taking up front rather than just surprise type of thing. I think that's a virtue that people have yet to fully learn."

The Navajo Nation and the U.S. Congress

Edward Begay:

"This might surprise you but the strongest advocate that the Navajo has is a Hawaii senator, Senator Dan Inouye. He's very interested in Navajo language, he's very interested in culture and very interested how we do things. I guess...he says it intrigues him and it also challenges him. Secondly is from New Mexico, Senator Pete Domenici. Sometimes he gets upset with us but I always tell him, ‘Senator, you have nowhere to go. We're here to stay.' So he's very helpful. Senator Jeff Bingaman although he doesn't take our advice at times, but then he too has to pay attention to Navajo. Then you get to the Arizona side it's a different story. By that I mean they tend to take care of the dominant society's interests first, then if there's some left over they might share it with you or support you, DeConcini, Kyl. Then to Utah the Mormons have all these wonderful things for me the people should do but when the pressure is applied they have a tendency to shy away. There again, they take care of their own first and if there's some left over we'll share with the Native Americans. This is in terms of proper funding from the federal government. That's what I'm alluding to and also for ongoing support for economic development. By that I mean if United States government can at the twinkling of an eye can appropriate $40 billion, no argument for some other places they can't even take care of their own here. This is sad. But that's in the real world."

Asserting Navajo sovereignty on every level

Edward Begay:

"That doesn't mean we have to sit down and say, ‘We're going to give up.' No, that just adds fuel to our work and for myself, I get involved in the state legislature, county government, chapter government, United States government and international. Last fall three of the council members we were delegates to United Nation in Geneva, Switzerland. They meet for two weeks. Anyway I was there for one week and then my counterpart Chief Justice Yazzie took care of...sat in the second week so we had full coverage. So that's where in that forum as a government, you have to go there as a government to be effective I learned. But when I gave my statement on some issues all those people turned around and faced the Navajo delegation when we made a presentation because we were there as the Navajo government. Interesting, it was very interesting. And they pay attention to what you have to say and they said they value the recommendation that you present to them. That's a very rich experience in terms of worldwide governance I call it. That's where each Indian Nations of the United States and Canada should be. Hopefully Navajo Nation will get a seat one of these days."

The most important quality in leadership

Edward Begay:

"The key things is your upbringing, putting it to use at the higher level, higher level meaning in the government with the mass, let me just say the mass population of your group. You have to be dedicated. I guess some leaders they want to go for individual achievements. It could be done but they come and go to me. But if you're serious in being dedicated to impact and also improve the livelihood of your people you have to be honest with them. I think a lot of leaders come and go because that's where they fall. They're not honest, the true sense of the word honest with their people. I like to pride myself in being honest and level with the people that I represent meaning that I just tell them just the way things are at and also give them the consequences that might be involved if you continue to...sometimes it's not a pleasant thing to do. To achieve that you have to be honest with yourself in order to be honest with your fellow man."

Edward Begay's family

Edward Begay:

"Right now I'm a widow. I lost my wife 10 ½ years ago. She was Cecilia Damon Begay was her name. She was very supportive. I think one of the reasons is her upbringing and also the educational background that she had. She was a graduate of UNM in health science and she was a registered nurse. We have two daughters, Charlene Begay Platero, a son-in-law John Platero. Two weeks ago they adopted twin babies, a boy and a girl so they are proud parents as I speak. My daughter's a UNM graduate and she has her discipline in marketing. She works for Navajo Nation Economic Development in the area of all these activities marketing. She's an outspoken lady. She's a Rehoboth school board president until she resigned last week ‘cause she has two babies to tend to. She works really well with the state legislature and the State Department, New Mexico and working her way into the Arizona portion, coordinating in the area of economic development and ongoing things. And my son-in-law works, he's a foreman with the giant refinery just out of Gallup so they live in Gallup. My younger daughter Sandra Begay Campbell, she's a structural engineer for Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque and her husband is a mechanical engineer. Yeah, my daughter Sandra got her master's degree out of Stanford University and presently she just last January she was appointed to the University of New Mexico Board of Regents, appointed by the governor and confirmed by the New Mexico Senate."

His daughters did not speak the Navajo language in the home but many years later Speaker Begay and other leaders agreed to utilize it in government activities

Edward Begay:

"Surprisingly they understand but they can't talk fluently back to me. But that was my own fault, my wife and I's own fault. We consciously made a decision early on since both of us did not understand English, speak English when we went to school, as we went through school we had a tough time, at least I did, I had a tough time doing English composition. I always switch words around and I was thinking Navajo instead of English language and so we made a conscious decision that we would talk English to our daughters and that way they could excel. And they did I think, in my mind they did but then they had to go back and pick up learning Navajo and I think they can do that. They understand but it's just a matter of practicing speaking, a conversation with their aunts and so forth. But other than that I think in some cases Navajo families we speak mixed language, Navajo and English, we intermingle then that way you would understand me fully if I spoke to you in that way or the same way with the Navajo. If I spoke to them in Navajo and English to them they would lose the true meaning of my conversation or the idea I'm trying to convey to them. Knowing that, President Begay and I and Chief Justice Robert Yazzie, we said during our term or at least my term be supportive of them and they supported me is that they would preserve Navajo language and culture in all aspects of our governmental activities. That's what we're going with. It's a struggle. They say, ‘What are you saying?'"

Achievements and disappointments

Edward Begay:

"I guess there's several but just achieving the goal of getting educated and also provide leadership to Navajo people, not only the Navajo people but provide leadership to the county. I was a county commissioner for two terms in McKinley County and right now I'm serving as a highway commissioner for the State of New Mexico serving second term, the only individual that was appointed twice. So if I complete my term I will have served the State of New Mexico in that capacity for 12 years. And in that earlier statement I made was that when you're in Rome do as the Romans do and that's what I do best in those settings is provide leadership in that commission in terms of budgeting. But if I could only have that opportunity on the Navajo council it would have been wonderful but on the commission side I just deal with five versus I have to deal with 87 on the council side, that's the difference. I think the other one is achieving to be the Speaker of the Navajo Nation council elected twice, the second term being elected by a commission. So I'm the third Speaker of the Council, which is I think an achievement in terms of it's a new concept and being able to come and being the third one that in itself to me is a special achievement."

The legacy he would like to leave

Edward Begay:

"One of them probably be is just being fair and being honest and always promoting Navajo interests. Then also too is that I've been able to work with any government meaning that I said before that I'm electable in Navajo setting and also getting appointed to a state commission position and do an excellent job for them. That way they reap the benefit of the achievements that I made in those areas."

The dream of documenting Navajo traditions in a lasting piece of work

Edward Begay:

"Under my current term one of my plans was that I'm going to put Navajo Common Law to writing. As we speak one of my staff members is...I just gave them outline and I said, ‘Now you fill in the blanks.' In there it would be a guide, a guide and also a constant reminder for whoever reads this that these are the concepts and the practice that were used by our ancestors and this. But if they do it proper in reverent manner they could never go wrong so we'll have a book on it I hope."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo credit:
Navajo Nation
Edward T. Begay

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Governmen

 

Martin Harvier: Building Sustainable Economies: The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Story

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Vice President Martin Harvier offers a brief history of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa's efforts to cultivate citizen-owned businesses and then do business with those companies.

Resource Type
Citation

Harvier, Martin. "Building Sustainable Economies: The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Story." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2010. Presentation.

"I'd like to welcome you all here this morning. I'm grateful for this opportunity I have to speak. Again, my name is Martin Harvier. I know this conference is for newly elected officials so how many of you are actually newly elected officials? Do you know what you're getting yourself into? Actually I'm in the last year of my four-year term. This year my term expires, and I've already decided to throw my hat back in the ring and see what happens. But it's been an experience. To be honest with you, the position that I'm in I didn't expect to be here. I went the night they had nominations for the positions that were being offered that night -- the president, vice president and council members -- and an individual got up the night of the nominations and pronounced my name as a vice president nominee and I was kind of surprised and taken back. And I just thought about my life opportunities that I had that I didn't take and I thought, 'You know what, I'm going to go forward with this.' I felt very humbled that I was picked.

I was actually born in Parker, Arizona. I'm not sure if you know the state of Arizona and where Parker's located. It's actually on the western boundary. It's the boundary of California and Arizona. The tribes that are there -- the Chemehuevis, the Mojaves, the Navajo and the Hopi tribes -- are located in La Paz County in Parker. My dad was a full Native American. He was Tohono O'odham and he was Pima, half and half. And my mom, she was actually born in Fort Worth, Texas. She's Anglo. She said she's Cherokee, but they all say that. I'm a quarter Pima and a quarter Tohono O'odham. I was actually enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community, which is actually west of here also. The tribes that are represented in Gila River are represented in Salt River where I reside. In 1996, I relinquished my membership from Gila River and I was adopted into the tribe of the Salt River in 1996. I'm not sure how many of you know one of our former presidents Ivan Makil. He was the president at that time and I call him daddy because he was the president and he accepted my enrollment. So I call Ivan my father since he adopted me into the tribe in 1996. But I've been a member of that tribe ever since then and like I said, I feel very humble to serve in this position, being an adoptee into the tribe, and it's been I think a learning experience for me. And I'm sure all of you will have a good experience and there'll be some bad experiences, but I really enjoy it.

I'd like to go ahead and get started. Just a little bit about our community. Again, there's two tribes, the Akimel O'odham, which are the Pima tribe, and the Xalychidom Piipaash, which are the Maricopas. The Maricopa tribe actually resided in the Yuma area again, which is along the Colorado, which is the western boundary of Arizona. And the history says in the early 1800s there was an uprising in that area and that the tribes that were located there were chasing the Maricopa people wanting to kill them, to destroy them and when they chased them as far as into the Pima territory, which is now Sacaton, they said that the Pimas made an arrangement with them that if they would help, if the Pimas would help them, that they would help the Pimas fight their enemies, which at the time were the Apache tribe. So what happened, the Pimas and the Maricopas banded together and they killed all, the history said they killed all of them except one, and they sent him back to the Yuma territory and told him not to come back here because the Maricopa and the Pima were now one tribe. So that's how the history tells us that the Pimas and the Maricopas came together. And they resided in the Gila River Reservation, which is Sacaton and the reservation is pretty large. The Pimas and the Maricopas are known as farmers and they farmed that area. And the settlers, when they came in they were really impressed with the produce that was produced by the Natives there, the irrigation systems. And so that's what they did until the settlers came in up east and they started damming up the river and so the water stopped flowing. And when the water stopped flowing a group of the Pimas and the Maricopas headed north up to what now is the Salt River Reservation.

Right now we have, as of December 31st, 2009, our enrollment stood at 9,110 members. And I'll just kind of give you a view of our community. I want you to kind of look at this outline right here, this red area. I do that because in our community, in January 10th of 1879, [President] Rutherford B. Hayes by executive order gave this land to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and at the time it was 680,000 acres of land, which encompasses Phoenix, Tolleson -- if you know that area -- all the way down to Chandler. And actually boundaries of the Gila River Reservation, it comes up and it follows the canyon, the Salt River all the way up into the Salt River Canyon. Again, it was 680,000 acres and approximately six months later, because of pressure from the settlers that were in that area, it was changed to this, which we now have our land and again that piece was established June 14th 1879. Again, six months later it was changed to what we have now, which is 52,600 acres. So in the span of six months we lost approximately 630,000 acres. I wanted to show this picture to you also and just keep in your mind this area right here, the western boundary. Again this is Scottsdale area. As far as location to our community this is Scottsdale, you've got Tempe boundaries here, Mesa, Fountain Hills, and so we're surrounded by these surrounding cities here. So that's our community and again I want you to think about this part when we go into our discussion.

As far as our enrollment, the 9,000 members, half of that, 50 percent of that we are told is under 18 years of age. So our population, a lot of it again is under 18. As far as our land base, again there's 52,600 acres, 19,000 of that is held in natural preserve and that encompasses our sacred mountain, which we call the Red Mountain. If you go into that area, you'll see the Red Mountain, it's very beautiful. And behind the mountain we have only a portion of the river now that flows. Right now the river is actually flowing pretty good because of the rainfall and the snow that we have. They're releasing water through the river. So the river through Phoenix is actually running right now, which is really nice. And right now we have about 12,000 acres that's under agriculture. And just to let you know, right now we do not have any community members -- like I said the Pimas and Maricopas were known as farmers -- we do not have any community members that farm. The land that's being farmed is from outside and they're leasing the land from the community members.

Just wanted to go back here now and talk about our for-profit enterprises. We do have a casino. We actually have two casinos. It's called Casino Arizona. We're actually right now in construction. We have a soft opening, which we'll be opening April the 15th. That's tax day, so if you guys want to spend your tax money or you need tax money to pay I encourage you to come to our new casino that will be opening. It's actually a 15-story resort with 498 rooms, with restaurants, everything you can think of that's there. That's the two casinos that we have. And we also have Saddleback Communications that provides communication to our community members and all the businesses that is encompassed in our community. We have the Salt River Materials Group, which is a sand and rock operation and also with that we have a cement plant, which isn't located in our community. It's approximately 120 miles north in the Prescott, the Cottonwood area, but our community does own the cement plant. We have DevCo, which is a real estate management and development [company]. It goes out and finds those that are interested in developing in our community and they work with them. We have the Talking Stick Golf Course, which is two 18-hole golf courses that's located right next to the new resort that's coming up; it's operated by Troon Golf. And the spring training facility that's under development, I don't want to say this too loud because the two teams that will be housed in our facility is the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks who are in their last year of being here in Tucson. And I know Tucson got kind of upset when they found out that they were leaving. Next year they will be down in our area and that's the first time that any spring training facility has ever been built in Indian Country so we're pretty happy about them making the agreement to build in our community. And then we have a Salt River Landfill, which has been in our community for quite a few years and for the longest time that was the moneymaker for the tribe until the casino came along. We do have non-profit enterprises. Our Salt River Financial Services Institution, we'll get into that a little bit more. Our Salt River Community Housing Division, our Salt River Education Department and the Salt River Community Children's Foundation. The Children's Foundation organization has been put together, employees are able to, if they wish to donate through their payroll and it goes to a foundation that helps the youth in our community and things that the children need. And then the other governmental services that the government provides for as far as public works, just the regular government services and programs that we have. Again, that's the map.

Today we're going to be talking about, as far creating an environment for a community member-owned business, the opportunities, access to contracting, technical assistance, coaching and education, financing, access to capital and the policy making, the procurement and vendor relations. Since the 1990s in our procurement policy for the tribe, community member preference was included as far as language in the procurement policy but there was never another step, it was just there. So nobody really knew what to do for the community members that wanted to start a business. They didn't know what to do; they didn't know the process. But even though there was no process we just wanted to point out that even though that wasn't working we have two community members that have nationally recognized companies. One of them is Pima Awards and the other is O'odham Ki and they're a construction company and the other one is awards. I think anything that we get in our community as far as when people come and they give them gifts, little trinkets and whatever, our Pima Awards, which is our community-owned business, provides those, tournaments that they have, T-shirts they give out. We got to Pima Awards, which is a community member-owned business. The O'odham Ki Construction, they've built a lot of buildings in our community. Not only in our community, but they've done a lot of business off the community and they got their business started off the community. They got started off the community and then they're coming back on to the community. Requests were made to support building community-owned businesses and that request came primarily from these two individuals that started. And they knew how hard it was to get started and how hard it was to work through the government to get things going. So they came back and they requested to the community that we need to start supporting the community-owned businesses. And then the council created a technical assistance and lending entity to support the development of the community-owned business system. We'll get into that as far as the technical assistance.

From 2000 to 2006, the Community engaged in the planning and development of the Community Development Financial Institution. The CDFI, the Community Development Financial Institution, is part of the U.S. Treasury and its funding is given, but there has to be a certification that has to be done by the tribe to receive that type of funding. So the community went through the process and they were given some funding underneath that program of the Treasury. The goals of the CDFI included development of full-service financial education programs for all community members. And I can tell you that through that program there have been numerous individuals, community members that have received education on financial education on how it works as far as trying to get a business started. And they also provide the loans, home loans for the community members. A lot of these things weren't available until this institution came about. Then the council created a non-profit CDFI on April 5th, 2006, called the Salt River Financial Services Institution and that's put in place again to help community members understand what they're getting into. A lot of times, community members know what they want to do they just don't know how to get started so that was put in place for the community members to go to get information on what they need to do. And a full-service individual and group technical support financial education and entrepreneurship classes were also offered. Next was the financing. The community member-owned businesses and people wishing to be entrepreneurs were missing access to capital. A lot of time our community members had no relationship with banks. They didn't know how it worked. When they tried to go get money, if you do not have credit history, we all know that they are not going to give you a loan to start anything up, so a lot of them fit into that category. They didn't have any banking history. That's what the next bullet point is, they were un-banked. That's what that means. They didn't have any type of credit history. The technical assistance allowed the creation of a lending program.

The technical assistance -- here we're talking about again is the Salt River Financial Institute. It was created to provide micro-loans to launch new entrepreneurs from ideas to action. And these micro-loans were loans that were for $50,000 or less, and sometimes that's not enough to get a business going, but at least it's there to help them to get started. Again, a lot of them had ideas, but they didn't have the finances to do it so it helped them act on the action that they had. The next one is the community and the policy making to support the entrepreneurship. The community is home to an active association of business owners. Again, the two individuals that I had talked about, they started the Salt River Business Association. We used to call it the Small Business Association. They got onto us. They said we're not the Small Business Association; we're the Salt River Business Owners Association. They made that clear. And so in 2005, the organization continued to work with the Salt River government to find avenues to create policies that community member business owners are friendly and by that meaning preference. They're given preference. One of the things that's kind of hard is that a lot of times the businesses that are coming in that are trying to get work didn't have the experience and a lot of times as an example of building a building and you want the best. You want to make sure they have the experience and know what they're doing. So a lot of them didn't have that experience and it was kind of hard for them to get started, the opportunities were hard to come by and so the community staff worked with the Salt River Business Association. In 2006, again the financial association was created to lend us support and right now the institution, the Salt River Financial [Services] Institution has a staff of about eight people and again people go in, if they have questions, they're there to help them. The Salt River government purchasing policies, again when opportunities are there, they go through the list, they see the community-owned businesses and they're given preference to have opportunities to do business with the community and again I kind of made example of the Pima Awards. When something comes up, they're given preference because they're a community-owned business.

The community office staff also developed a procurement preference language in the master commercial lease language of the Pima Corridor. When we started -- and I showed you the map of the community -- I made reference to the western boundary. The western boundary of our community, there's the 101 Freeway goes through there and when that was put in, that was strategically put in to create an economic development corridor through there. It's about a quarter of a mile in some areas, it's a nine-mile stretch and it goes from the southern boundary up to the northern boundary. In some areas it's wider than a quarter of a mile, but that area has been set up for economic development. We really feel it's important that since the community developed this corridor that we educate our community members on the potential opportunities that they're going to have in that area to have a business or to provide service for people that have businesses there. So that was some of the things that the staff has worked with as far as the business association.

The community and the policy making to support entrepreneurship, the procurement policy was written to be specific about what preference means and how it is implemented. Preference is given in succession. First, community-owned businesses. And in talking with staff...okay, well, second, the community member-owned businesses and third, other Native American-owned businesses. The community-owned businesses like we pointed out the enterprises that we own like the Salt River Materials Group. If there's anything that goes on construction wise, the community-owned businesses have preference. If there's other things that come in that we do not supply, just say like paper, if we need paper. If there's a community-owned, member-owned business that supplies paper, they get preference and that's the way it's been set up. And if we don't, if there's another Native American company out there that has it, it goes through the succession and then it just goes down the line, then we go to another Native American, if it's not out there, then we just go out and get what we need. The certification process was created. The intent of the certification process was to insure that organizations are not fronts.

My previous job before I came to work for the tribe, I worked for an asphalt company. And when an individual found out, that worked for the asphalt company, found out I was working for the tribe, he approached me and he asked me if I wanted to go into business with him as far as doing roads, laying down asphalt. It sounded really good. He said that I would be 49-percent owner of the company and that way -- actually 50 percent -- and that way we could go in front of council when job opportunities came. And because preference was given to community members we would get those jobs. And this was put into place to insure that those things wouldn't happen and I think it's important when you see things like this. I didn't think about it, I really thought it was a good idea. I was thinking, "˜Wow, we could make some money here.' But somebody informed me that when you use a front, and say I'd went with this individual and we did a road, after the road's completed, my partner leaves. Say six months down the road, and it's a one-year guarantee on that road, something happens to that road. Well, they're going to come after me; they're not going to go after the other guy. So I'm going to be responsible. And I think that's important and I think that's why a lot of Natives were taken by this, is that they need to know that they're responsible for anything that they do in Indian Country. After it's put down that they're going to be responsible, not the individual that used them as a front to get that project. So that was put in to make sure that there wasn't any fronts.

Certification of community member-owned businesses is based upon the community member owned no less than 51 percent of the business, community members perform active day-to-day, hands-on role in the management and operation of the business and the community member is entitled to no less than 51 percent of the profits of the business. Part of the policy, the procedures that go through of certifying community-owned businesses is that they are asked to show their taxes from the year before. If they say that they're a business, they need to show their taxes to prove that they are the owner of that business. And we've had community members that get upset and they say, "˜We're not going to do it,' but the community has held fast to say, "˜No, you will show us just because of the fact that we do not want fronts coming in and doing business like this.' So that was put in to help make sure that there wasn't fronts.

Right now in our community there are currently 27 preferred vendors on our list. We have six community-owned businesses, enterprises, twelve community member-owned businesses, and nine Native American-owned businesses. And today, total value of the community member-owned business contracts since October 1, 2008, is $10,747,540.30, which is quite a bit of money. I think it just shows the success of our community members. And what's next for the community in this arena? Youth entrepreneur camp; again our financial institute puts on a camp at Arizona State University to help with our youth. We really feel that's important. Our tribe does pay per capita out to its members. We have a lot of youth that have trust money and by the time they turn 18 they have quite a bit of money. And it's very important we feel as leaders that they know what they need to do when they get that money. A lot of them get it and they'll just throw it away and it's gone. This is an opportunity for them to learn. If they wanted to get into business, they can learn these at an early age. Again, the financial institute, the researching, the development of the Future Business Leaders of America chapter, to continue financial education and lending opportunities and refining policies to support and manage the creation of new opportunities for the community-owned businesses. So these are some of the things that we are doing as leadership in our community. We know how important it is of our members that want to be successful and we know there's a lot of them that have ideas and they have goals but they don't know what to do and the process. So we've been trying to set up ways that will help them and we think that's very important and our council supports these departments in doing that. So with that, thank you."

Joseph P. Kalt: Sovereignty: Your Best Tool for Development

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development Co-Director Joseph Kalt share some innovative ways that Native nations have exercised their sovereignty in order to foster sustainable economic and community development.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Kalt, Joseph P. "Sovereignty: Your Best Tool for Development." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2009. Presentation.

Joseph P. Kalt:

"What I'm going to do is...this is fun for me. Part of what our jobs let us do -- [because] we work for universities and we don't really have to work -- is we get to drive around a lot and see the world and see really cool things out there. And so the real title of my talk is ‘Some Cool Ideas We See Out There That Might Be Interesting to You.' [Because] part of our job...I had, actually, a tribal chairwoman up in the Pacific Northwest one time say to us, ‘Oh, I get you guys. You're just a pipeline; you suck up information over here and shoot it out the other end.' [Because] you guys are too busy. You don't work for universities; you don't get to run around like we do and just sort of hang out. Really, some cool ideas we see out there, maybe they'll be useful to you. But the theme is, the theme is ‘Sovereignty is your Best Tool for Development.' You can feel in these sessions the only policy that's ever worked to turn things around in Indian country -- rebuild the communities, give people jobs, rebuild families -- is self-determination. That's the only policy that's ever really worked. Why? Well, sovereignty is a tool of development. I'm just going to show you (if I can figure out how this works...see I can do it; here we go) some cool ideas, things we see out there, people using their sovereignty as an asset, just like having money in the bank.

Create a city: what a cool idea! All around the earth we human beings, everywhere, we create little towns. Just pause and think about it. We do that, that's what we do. And they usually have a title like alcalde, if you're in Mexico, or mayor or something like that, whatever. You go out in Indian Country and quite often, there's only one town with any government. It's in the central, where the tribal headquarters are. Why is that? Why don't we see more? Not just a little community, but a real self-governing town? We human beings do this because someone's got to decide what the speed limit is down there on the road. Someone's got to decide, 'Where are we going to locate the solid waste facility?' Somebody's got to decide these very local things that all over the world we human beings have to face, but you don't see it in Indian Country. The tribal government, the central tribal government does it all. Why is that? ['Jurisdiction.'] What do you mean? She says 'jurisdiction.'"

Audience Member:

"The town of Mission, on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, is the only real city in Mission, South Dakota. And they have their own functioning city council and this kind of thing. So it's a jurisdictional issue for us because if a non-Indian gets a DUI, then the city sheriff would pick them up and haul them in."

Joseph P. Kalt:

"And one of the reasons everything out there is run through the central tribal government is because historically, when the feds controlled everything, they only wanted one government to deal with, partly so they could control everything. ‘If I channel all my money through you, name you tribal chair; well then I can control everything.' And so you've got this legacy out across Indian Country of -- like you say -- no towns, in the sense of little governments. Not big governments trying to rule the world, but just getting the little things of daily life done. Alright. So there's some real cool cases out there.

One of the fastest growing towns in Indian Country for the last ten years has been Kayenta on the Navajo [reservation]. Interesting. Notice how I wrote that. That's the way towns identify themselves. You don't see that in Indian Country, right? [Because] of this legacy of, ‘We're going to channel those dollars so the federal government and all the power through the central tribal government [because] we want to control that. We don't want real self-determination for tribes. We want to control it.' What did Kayenta do? Well, they went out and basically said, ‘Darn it, we're going to create a town,' basically, a township. And they said, ‘We're having trouble with things like, well...' It's no different than any other nation. They were complaining about the central Navajo Nation government, just the typical thing. There's nothing wrong with central Navajo Nation, it's just they had local needs down on the ground, so they go in and they create a township.

They didn't levy taxes. They're not called taxes; they're called fees, little business fees. And they convinced the local, very small business owners and so forth, ‘Look, if you'll pay small fees to support what we're doing, we'll go out and do things like go in and do all the archaeological surveys we need to do as one big block and create a little industrial or business area.' Because what was going on was every time anyone would want to open a business, it'd then take 18 months to do...’Well, we'll go do it ahead of time and figure out, okay, this is a safe place for our history. We can have some business. Oh, we'll also use our little fees to put in, oh, water lines, buy a fire engine,' the things that towns do, okay? Oh, and they promised the community business permits. ‘You submit a permit,' I think they said, ‘we'll have it to you within 10 working days,' not two years -- fast. We'll try to provide local service for you.

Here's another case. Quil Ceda. Quil Ceda Village at the Tulalip Tribes north of Seattle. This is a really cool case. Sort of like, ma'am, like what you were saying about Mission. Well, they're a little frustrated. They're sitting next to Marysville, Washington and Seattle sort of dominating them. So they went out and they created a village. And it's this chartered city. It's a separately chartered city. It's a separately chartered city. This is actually their charter. That's actually part of their charter. They said, ‘We're going to exercise our sovereignty and...' you can just eyeball it there. ‘There's going to be a village council, there's going to...' the bottom right-hand corner, ‘we're going to start putting in our own public utilities.' They actually now have a company that runs the fiber optic system on the rez and it's taking over the cable television operation and the telephone operation and all the data stuff and so forth. They have ordinances and resolutions about how they're going to operate. They have administrative departments of clerks and treasurers. They have boards and commissions. They have taxes. They basically created a town.

They went to the feds and got their congressmen -- lobby, lobby, lobby. It's a federally chartered city. It's only the second federally chartered city in the United States. Anybody know what the first is? What's the first federally chartered? Huh? Washington, D.C. And now the Tulalips have the second federally chartered city. Why'd they get it federally chartered? [Because] they're getting -- don't tell anybody else -- they're getting ready for a big fight with the State of Washington over taxation. And by getting themselves federally chartered they can build an argument that, ‘Hey, wait a minute, Washington. We're not a city of the State of Washington, we're a city of the United States. You state, you don't have jurisdiction over us.' Pretty cool little try they're doing.

And what did they end up with? They've ended up with this economic powerhouse, just an absolute economic powerhouse. Quickly, their two basic businesses are two shopping malls. They just opened a major casino a year ago April, but they basically built themselves on two shopping malls. There's one of them. Just the classic big box stores; Home Depot, Walmart, etc. And then they have one of these high-end outlet malls. And the payoffs for them: jobs. It turns out by creating a city, it's like running a business. There's lots of jobs. ‘Oh, I now have to have a crew, because I've made myself a city, I have to have a crew who takes care of the strips along the roads of the grass and so forth [because] you've got to keep vegetation a little ways off the roads so you don't have fires and so forth. Oh, and I have to have my own water company and I have to have my own cable TV company and I have to have my own building inspectors and I have...' and on and on and on. If you pause and think about it, it's actually a pretty good business because you create all these jobs.

They now are the economic powerhouse of their region. I think they employ something like three times more people than are members of the tribe, or at least adult members of the tribe. And most of their citizens are working for their tribal government. Go ahead and let somebody else stand behind the cash register at Walmart. Their tribal members are out there running the highest tech -- I took a tour recently of it -- running the highest-tech water treatment facility in the United States. They've got this, they've got a special -- I'm not very good at science -- but it has something to do with a membrane that you push the water through and so forth. And they're now being looked at around the United States as one of the best water companies in the United States. And they have fire departments and they have health inspectors and so forth -- income for people.

They started asserting jurisdiction. You gave me the perfect lead for this. They started asserting jurisdiction. Because now, ‘Wait a minute. No, thank you. Our cops will patrol here. No, thank you. Our school buses will go here. No, thank you. Our health inspectors, our fire inspectors...' Jobs, jobs, jobs. But also, jurisdiction, jurisdiction, jurisdiction: using that power to create a town, using sovereignty to create economic development, but also to expand their jurisdiction. Also, in the process, building an unbelievably qualified and capable set of employees. They're sitting there now as the economic powerhouse, as the economic powerhouse in their region.

So what happens? They get invited to every damn meeting. They're starting to complain. They basically are starting to be treated like another county or city [because] they're so powerful. All the other governments around them have to recognize their sovereignty and have to deal with them. And so they now have these employees who are getting so well trained, they go to the meetings and they're the dominant, they dominate the meetings. They go to the meetings with the surrounding counties and they're going to have a meeting on, they have big problems, they live right on an interstate highway and -- the weirdest thing I ever heard -- right on this interstate highway, whenever they need a medevac [helicopter], they close down I-5, right in front of the Tulalip's, and land helicopters and it causes all the traffic to have to get off the freeway and run through the middle of Tulalip. Well, this creates all this jurisdictional trouble. The tribe basically controls the process, because they've got the best traffic planners out there. They can tell you -- it's just fascinating -- they can tell you exactly the rate at which light posts will be demolished by cars at parking lots. You might think it's crazy but it's some crazy...They have to apparently replace like 65 light posts a year. They all cost like $8,000 or something like that. But they're in charge of this in building essentially a city that is dominating their region.

Jurisdiction: it also gives them pride. They're the ones calling the shots on water treatment. They're the ones calling the shots on traffic control. It may seem like little things, but now the kids grow up with a different image in their mind, don't they? The kids grow up thinking, ‘Hey, this is sort of cool. Yeah, we go down to that meeting with the counties and we're there. So they're kicking butt. We know what we're doing. We've got the best-trained people. We've got jurisdiction.' And you see that resurgence of pride. How did they do it? How did they do it? How did they do it?

They started to get a mentality -- when I talk to people there -- they start to get a mentality that they don't run grants and programs, they don't have a housing program, they don't have a fire prevention program, they don't have a street-paving program run on some grant. They have departments. They're a government. They're a city. They have to do all of these things. And it's a change in mentality to think, ‘We're not just here living from hand to mouth.' And if someone funds highways next year we'll have a highway program. Nuh uh. They're investing in the planning, building the infrastructure to be departments, if you will, not grants.

And codes for everything. Codes for everything. These guys are code mad. They have the health code, they've got the fire code, they have the code for how far the sidewalk has to be placed away from the street, how often the grass has to be cut next to the street. Why did they do that? Why would anybody...they spend all their time writing codes, writing codes. Jurisdiction. They describe it as just a shield. When somebody wants to assert, ‘You don't have authority to have your own fire department.' You pull out, ‘Yes, I do. See my code? See my code? I do too.' ‘Where'd you get it?' ‘Well, our government created it. Well, that's the same way you, City of Marysville, got your fire department is you created a code.' So this tribe very much is conscious of the number, one of the main tools they have now to fight with over this issue of jurisdiction, is they basically any time anyone comes at them, 'Well, you don't have a good health department.' 'Wait a minute, my health department's better than your health department.' They're very aggressive, very, very aggressive about this.

They also have an attitude. 'We're going to do it ourselves and we're going to do it better. We're going to do it ourselves and we're going to do it better. When we walk into that meeting, when we walk into that meeting with the counties on traffic flow, or whatever it is we're going to do, or sharing the cost on repaving a road that cuts across the res, we're going to be better prepared, we're going to have better training, we'll have harder numbers. And if you fail me, if you don't do your job and don't show up, you're not going to have this job anymore as the head of our highway department.' I'm picking on you, I don't know why. You look like a nice guy, too, I don't know. My point is, they have this attitude and they hold each other to it. It's an attitude of, ‘Look, guys, let's go out there and really, really be a nation.' In this case, be a city. They hire the best. They hire the best.

Now, that sometimes means they don't hire Indian, but it doesn't bother them because they say, ‘Well, we're in charge.' Now watch me pick on somebody. ‘I'll hire this white guy here to be my police chief.' Why? Because he's the former president of the State of Washington's police chief's association and no one's going to be able to come in and push him around. Now, sure, part of his job is to try to get a young Tulalip guy to come along and be the next police chief, but the attitude is one, ‘We're going to go out there and we're going to get the best, and I don't care if you're Native or not [because] we the city, our sovereignty, our jurisdiction controls you.'

And then taxes...and not grants. It's that same mentality. It's that same mentality. All over Indian Country, people have to live in this environment in which the governments are so weakened because people keep taking jurisdiction away. Most governments in the world, it's actually not an evil thing -- if you provide services back to your citizens, it's not an evil thing that you go out and levy taxes. And so this tribe is sitting there, taxing these businesses -- actually trying to tax even more -- starting to tussle with the state, as you can imagine. But again it's that mentality of being a real government. They don't spend their time with grant writers. They've got a couple, I think they have one grant writer, but that's not what they fundamentally do. They don't make their life and their livelihood off of that mentality. They say, 'Look, we're going to provide services to our citizens and to the people who are in our shopping malls. We're going to provide them services and we provide good services, actually people don't complain.' And the result of this is they are not putting pressure on their neighbors, these sort of horribly run cities around them, who are now having to reform themselves because the non-Indian citizens at the next town were saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Quil Ceda Village is much better run than the town of Marysville.' And so you start to see that assertion and the pride and the ability to get these things done.

Now maybe this works for you and maybe it doesn't. I don't know. But it's a pretty cool idea in terms of using your sovereignty, using sovereignty to really go out and make it an asset in the fight for development and jurisdiction. A couple more real quick ones. Start taxing: another cool idea. But maybe you don't call it that. It's still a bad word. I'm not stupid. But, well, maybe I am stupid; you guys can judge that later. But start taxing. Why? Because you're trying to get off of that system of, ‘Oh, is my department going to survive depending entirely on whether I can go get a grant,' and whether, ‘you got sick last year and didn't get the grant written,' or whatever it was. But to do it, you've got to do the first thing, in a sense. And it doesn't have to be a city. The message obviously is if you can provide capable and high-quality services to the people, they turn out not to fight you quite so much about that second thing up there.

Examples: 2002, the Navajo Nation instituted the first comprehensive sales tax in Indian Country. What did they do? They earmarked it for things that met their priorities, for their priorities -- trust fund, land acquisition, local governments. And then they had smart and culturally based exemptions. Cultural organizations not subject; if you're selling things and you're a non-profit, not subject to our sales tax, for example. [Because] you're trying to design a system that works for you, not somebody else's sales tax. The payoffs? Started to build the missing infrastructure. What do I mean by missing infrastructure? All around Indian Country, I'll give you an example, there are no street lights [because] the feds never fund street lights. Another one: dental clinics, eye clinics. It's real interesting, you look around Indian Country, as tribal governments start to generate their own resources under their own jurisdiction, you can see actually where the missing stuff is, the missing services. Things like eye care never was a priority. Teeth. ‘Oh, teeth didn't seem...' ‘Well, wait a minute. Why should some outsider tell me whether my teeth are important?' And also, again it's very interesting -- here's a guy standing up here to tell you to go tax your people, but in all honesty it starts to send a signal. This is our government. It's a government of us. It's a government of the people.

One last idea: leverage your sovereign immunity. What do I mean by that? Incorporate under your own laws. It's kind of a movement around Indian Country now. Why incorporate under the State of Montana law? Why incorporate under the State of New Mexico law? Why not incorporate under your own law? And so you have cases; here's a tribe actually in El Paso, Texas, Ysleta Del Sur [Pueblo], can't get any economic development going. They feel like every time, they've got kind of a racist government around them in the State of Texas, and they create their own laws of incorporation. That's just parts of it there, sort of again, it's what the Tulalips are doing: codes, codes, codes. Well, in this case, we're going to create our own through our own jurisdiction. You don't have to incorporate in the State of Delaware or the State of South Dakota. You can incorporate here at this nation. This just goes on and on. It's interesting, Ysleta Del Sur is a Tigua, is Tigua. And so notice down at the bottom there: 'Corporate name shall be in the Tigua...' This is their law. The State of Texas, I'll guarantee you, never would have said, ‘Any business incorporated in the State of Texas shall have a Tigua name.' Ain't gonna happen, guys.

Challenge the nation with sovereign immunity. Waiving sovereign immunity? Where did this idea of immunity come from? Do you know where the word sovereign comes from? Do you know who the sovereign is? It's the king. This idea of sovereign immunity comes from British and European kings saying, ‘I am above the law. You, my subjects, cannot ever sue me or come after me in anyway. I am above the law.' Well, that's interesting. So the idea of sovereign immunity actually comes out of these Western European kings. Here's what real nations do with sovereign immunity.

My first one is, who wants to be West Virginia? Here's an interesting little tidbit. The poorest state in the United States is West Virginia. What's West Virginia also known for? They get on TV now and then. Coal mining. When do we see them? Yeah, or when there's an accident and there are 32 miners trapped in...now that's interesting, the government mine inspectors don't seem to work very well. We did a little analysis of the state constitutions around the United States. The State of West Virginia has the absolute strongest prohibition on any waivers of sovereign immunity of any state in the United States. You can't waive sovereign immunity in the State of West Virginia for anything. And they're the poorest place in the United States,

Now that's a tough issue, right? Wait a minute. Waive sovereignty? Well, waiving sovereign immunity isn't the same as waiving sovereignty. What real nations do all over the world because, face it guys, they're not going to lend you money unless there's some recourse. You're not going to get lended; no one's going to lend you money. So what governments do all over the world? They create international treaties. Example, the Treaty of Mauritius, [because] it was signed in this little country called Mauritius. A bunch of countries in the world said, ‘Okay, I'll deal with you, you deal with me. We'll set up our own separate court system. We'll set up our own separate court [because] I don't want to waive sovereign immunity into your courts and you don't want to waive sovereign immunity into my courts.'

Options: more and more tribes are succeeding in writing contracts in which they waive sovereign immunity on their company, but they don't waive sovereign immunity on the state, that is on their nation. They waive sovereign immunity into their own courts. 'Yes, you can sue my coal mine company. Yes, you can. I'm waiving immunity, but you've got to sue in my own courts.' That's what other governments do. That's what other governments do, except for West Virginia. West Virginia can't sue anybody from the state. And so those mine inspectors are just horrible, they have no accountability and they get on TV [because] they kill people. Waive sovereign immunity into your own courts. But to do that you have to have courts that work. You can talk a big talk, you can talk a big talk, but you have to have courts that work.

Second, waive sovereign immunity into international courts. Examples: Pacific Northwest. The Northwest Indian Tribal Court essentially says to a bank or a car dealer, ‘Hey, I'm going to waive my sovereign immunity, but we're going to waive it into the Northwest Indian Intertribal Court.' Oh, that's sort of cool. How's it work? Fundamentally it works if I'm a car dealer and I'm going to...'What tribe are you from? You're not Pacific Northwest. Okay, you're Tulalip. I'm going to waive...I'm going to sign a deal with you and if we get into a dispute, we're going to go into...Okay, I'll do it.' 'I'm the banker. I'll sign a deal with you. We're going to go into the Intertribal Court. We get to the Intertribal Court and nobody from your tribe can be on the hearing panel. We'll have judges from other tribes.' As long as you're not AIG, that's right. As long as you're not AIG, good point. So creating courts among tribes is one way by which you can provide assurances. Investors don't think the best things of state courts. It's not like people, like business people have great confidence in state courts. In fact the State of West Virginia has some of the worst courts in the United States. Indian tribes can out-compete by making yourself safer and a true rule of law.

Last point: waive yourself into arbitration. More and more tribes essentially say, 'We'll waive ourselves into arbitration,' meaning, you pick. 'If we get in a fight, you and the banker, we're going to...you pick one person, I pick another, so we're equal and then they'll pick a so-called neutral and we'll have...at least we'll have a level playing field.' But then you have the issue of -- and I'll tell you one last sort of cool story -- you have the issue of, if you have an arbitration award, who enforces it? Who enforces it if you have an arbitration award? 'You owe me money. The arbitrator, our arbitrator here just said you owe me $10,000,' and you go like this. You say, ‘I'm not going to pay you.' How do we enforce it? Very interesting. There's a very interesting case of a tribe borrowing like $110 million. They set up an arbitration clause and they had this big fight in the tribal council, should we waive sovereign immunity and here's what they did. It's kind of a cool idea. This is what I mean by challenging your own nation. We're trying to borrow $110 million. We don't want to waive sovereign immunity completely. We'll waive into arbitration. By that I mean, if we get in a fight, we'll go to arbitration and then on enforcement of an arbitration award, that will go to tribal court. If our tribal court won't enforce an otherwise proper arbitration award, then you can take us to state court.

This is a tribe that basically said, ‘Look, the tribal council meeting was cool. Look, we're talking big shots like we're sovereign and all that. We might as well back it up.' If we won't enforce our own agreements, what's it do? It puts the pressure then on the tribal council to make sure that they've got a good tribal court because that arbitration award, if it wasn't enforced by the tribal court, then it was going to go to state court. And the bank said, ‘Yes.' They've never had a fight, never had to do this, but it was enough for the investor to say, ‘Hey, we'll do it.' You waived yourself into your own courts.

Alright. I don't know, just kind of cool ideas we see out there, just kind of things we see that tribes are doing. Whether they work for you, I don't know. Everybody's different, but there's a lot of cool stuff going on out there."

Honoring Nations: Patricia Ninham-Hoeft: Oneida Nation Farms

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Patty Ninham-Hoeft, Business Committee Secretary for the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, discusses the impact of Oneida Nation Farms on the Oneida community and how it is a concrete expression of tribal sovereignty.

Resource Type
Citation

Ninham-Hoeft, Patricia. "Oneida Nation Farms," 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.

Heather Kendall-Miller:

"Now the people that we have today, on our panel, each have wonderful programs that they have been affiliated with, and each of them have their own stories of leadership and the roles that leadership played in developing nationhood. The first person that we are going to -- I want to first make note that we are missing, unfortunately, Tim Mintz, who was going to be here to speak on behalf of the Tribal Historic Preservation project and he is an officer of the Standing Rock Sioux [Tribe]. The Tribal Monitors program was one that we honored in 2005, a wonderful program. And you'll find in your reading material a summary of that program. And even though Tim is not here to speak about that today, I encourage you to look at that for yourself...We are going to begin with Patty Ninham-Hoeft and she's the tribal secretary with the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She's going to speak a little bit about the Oneida Farms project that was given high awards in 2005. Very, very interesting I would say. Again, [I] happened to be there. It was one of these stunning projects that we're all going, 'Yeah, yeah!' So with that, here's Patty."

Patty Ninham-Hoeft:

"Good afternoon. My name's Patty Ninham-Hoeft. I'm the tribal secretary for the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin. I'm serving my first term as one of nine people elected to the tribe's Oneida Business Committee. I'm here to talk about the Farm, which was honored by the Honoring Nations program in 2005 as an example of leadership. And I'm feeling very humble, a little not confident because I didn't really have, I didn't actually have any role in developing the Farm as an applicant to receive that award. Although I was there watching the people on our team compete for that award. What I'm going to share with you are some of the perceptions that I, personally, have about what the Farm represents to me and as a reflection of what I think is occurring in my tribe in Oneida. I think the Farm is a quiet leader. It's the result of working hard and doing a good job every day. And that comes -- that's a description from Pat Cornelius who, at 69-years-old, is still managing the Farm. You look at Pat and she looks younger than I do.

The idea for the Farm started around 1978 with 150 acres of land, 25 head of cattle. But many people since 1978 have worked that idea about having a farm. Today, the farm has I think almost 9,000, or more than 9,000 acres of land. 4,000 or more are in a mix of crops. There's alfalfa, corn silage, corn, soybeans, wheat, some pasture. And 4,000 acres of that land is used for federal conservation programs. We have restoration programs in place of wetlands and trout streams and waterways. We even have some cooperation going on with local municipalities in restoring some of the smaller trout streams that run through the reservation. We have Black Angus as livestock, about 450-550, and 125 or so cow/calf grazing programs. When I was asked to present on the Farm, that was a surprise to me, because as soon as I saw that the summit was announced, I immediately signed up because I wanted to attend because I'm a big fan of this project. And so then later, when I was asked to talk about the Farm, I sat down with Pat Cornelius to talk to her about it. And really all Pat had to say about the Farm was that it was just the result of hard work and doing a good job every day. And I kept urging her to describe more about what this represented and that was all I could get. So that's why you're going to get my perceptions.

The Farm I think is becoming visible. It's been a quiet leader, but it's becoming visible. And I think the visibility came when it got the 2005 award. And for me, someone who grew up in Oneida, I kind of took the Farm for granted. I watched in 1978 as some people, a little older than me then, tried to create a place where they could grow some indigenous crops and I watched them struggle and I watched the community beat it down and I watched somebody revive the idea. And then in 1992, I think that's when Pat came around, and she started running the Farm.

The Farm is becoming visible in ways that, because it uses tribal dollars and it manages the Farm with tribal members and it uses its land for the common good of the tribe. It generates revenues; it's a way to offset taxes. Because Oneida is a checkerboard reservation, we have overlapping jurisdictions across Oneida. We have two counties, we have a village and a town, we have the city of Green Bay, we have the village of Ashwaubenon, we have five public school districts and -- I think there's two towns actually, the town of Oneida and the town of Pittsfield. So we have lots of complexities and our goal has always been to reacquire our lands by the year 2020, or reacquire 51 percent of the lands by 2020. And so the Farm is a way as we're acquiring the lands, reacquiring through purchasing -- It's difficult to convert that land into trust status so we have taxes to pay. So this is a way to farm the land, get revenue back, and offset those taxes. The Farm is also a place that gives jobs and it's also become a place where Oneida gets to practice its culture. It's a place where Oneida values are brought to life. It's also a place where we get a chance to exercise our sovereignty.

Ways in which the Farm is a quiet leader: People want to buy the farm products, not just Oneida people, but people in the surrounding Green Bay metropolitan area. And the tribe -- marketing right now is a problem, Pat says. It's time to start marketing the product; right now it's just word of mouth. And you see the products in the local grocery store, at Festival Foods. And it's a source of pride, I think, for tribal members to walk down the aisles and see, in the fresh produce aisle, Oneida apples and to see people wanting to buy Oneida apple cider and specifically looking for it. It's great to be around people -- I belong to a sailing club and if we have cookouts they want Oneida buffalo burgers and buffalo brats. And it's great to have white corn products in your refrigerator. I remember as a kid growing up, the only way to get corn bread, white corn bread, these hard heavy loaves, was usually at Thanksgiving time and they were hand-made by elders in the community. But now you can get them every day.

Area farmers, another place where we're having some leadership is with area farmers. I think when the Farm was starting in those early years, local farmers looked at Oneida and said, 'Can these Indians farm? What are those Indians doing?' And now they are still asking that same question, but they're doing it because they want to learn and replicate our practices. So what's happening there is we're building relationships with our neighbors, and understanding.

Pat, as the manager, also is changing the role of women and the role of age. At 69-years-old and a woman managing a farm, she's breaking stereotypes and setting new examples for us.

The Farm also is helping us maintain the rural character of the reservation. And as I described all the multiple layers of jurisdiction, we have lots of competition for land use with Oneida and that competition is from developers. And Oneida is struggling right now because we don't have strong zoning rules, we don't have a comprehensive plan in place. And so the people that are defining how Oneida will look, how the geography of Oneida will be used, are the developers. And I see it happening on the outer perimeters of the reservation. I drive around and what was once rural, is now filled with pole metal buildings, storage sheds, and they're starting to define what my place is going to look like. So the farm is a way to kind of get this land, put it to use, and kind of slow development for a bit. And it's also good for, when we're paying taxes, because agricultural land, maybe some real estate people will argue with that, but it's a better tax base because there's less infrastructure to support it. So they're happy. And then it also helps to preserve the continuation of hunting. My dad, my brothers grew up hunting on the reservation, but as Green Bay encroaches into the res, hunting is becoming less and less. There are less places to do that. And, in fact, the village of Hobart, which is on half of the reservation, is starting to assert its rules of not allowing hunting.

The Farm has become a place to teach children and families about where their food comes from, the cultural values that Oneida had in regards to food and in regards to the land. And it's also a place where we're learning, revitalizing our language. One aspect of the Farm is called Tsyunhehkwa. And it's an Oneida word that means 'provides life for us.' And sometimes, on a good day, as I'm writing out a check for something there I can spell it from memory. But I run into my friends who aren't Oneida and they talk about going to Tsyunhehkwa to get essential oils or an herb. And the Farm has become a place to gather for community events. They have husking bee events, jigging contests.

The idea of the Farm, like I said, has been worked on by many people and I've watched them struggle; but Pat, I have to give credit to Pat who said to me -- when we were talking about what she does and what I do and the struggles that Oneida is having now and she said, 'You couldn't pay me enough money to be on the Business Committee.' But I think she's found a place to provide leadership for people who get elected to the Business Committee and she is an example of many community leaders from her generation who saw a problem, who took the initiative, had the spirit of entrepreneurism, and they went to work and they found ways to solve it. And my mother is an example of that generation. Pat's 69, my mom is 64, and when my mom was 32 years old (and I'm 45), she and another woman started Oneida Bingo in the gymnasium of the tribe's civic center. And they started it because, she was working in the civic center, couldn't afford to pay the utility bills, and they were playing Bingo at the local VFW and they started their own game; and it grew and grew. And in 1980, the tribe was issuing payroll checks for the first time and she was building a new building across from the airport in Green Bay. It's an example I think of people taking the initiative of that generation. And many projects I think that Oneida has been proud of have come from the community.

Oneida has a system where -- we have a direct democracy system where you can petition to have a special meeting, take action. So we have a representative system that I think sometimes is in conflict with that direct democracy system. Fifty people can petition; they get a meeting. As long as 75 people show up for that meeting you have, what you call, a General Tribal Council (GTC) meeting, and it's there where decisions can be made and they are often made there. But from there came ideas like the Farm, where it got its support; a scholarship program that is now in place, where Oneidas who want to pursue higher [education], wherever they live, get $20,000 a year to do that at three different levels -- undergrad, masters and a doctorate program. All those ideas came from the community.

The Farm is also a place like I said to exercise our sovereignty and they do that quietly, I think. It's a place where we can work more at, in the future I think, to develop land use policies. Because I think it's in the land use area where the tribe really is going to need to put its work toward improving, enhancing, our sovereignty. And so it's in zoning, it's how we control development. It's how we decide how someone is going to care for the land, storm water, runoff practices. And it starts with comprehensive planning. And the tribe started a comprehensive-planning process and has been doing it over and over and over again. And we are about to engage a consultant to come and help us do that. And I hope we get it finished next year.

Exercising sovereignty also happens too by knowing where our food comes from. And I have a cousin who's on the council, Paul Ninham, who really is a strong supporter of food sovereignty, and he's been introducing that concept wherever he goes. But it's really, kind of, being able to sustain yourself, sustain the production and the distribution of your food. Diabetes is a big problem in Oneida and according to the application that we submitted 10 percent of our population -- we have 16,000 members -- have diabetes. And they say we get one new patient a day with diabetes. And I think it starts with, it stems from food as one of the components.

My husband and I and our two kids last year started, for one month, for 30 days, we did the local food challenge, the 100-mile diet, where, in October, for one month we would only eat foods that we could find within 100 miles of where we lived. And what we learned from that was that our family became closer, because we spent more time preparing meals. We sat down and ate. Breakfast was really great. We produced less waste. We had less garbage that we brought to the curb. And it tasted better. We went to farmers' markets. We got to meet local farmers. We got to meet people who produce food. But the one thing that we found out was that it was very expensive. That if you wanted to eat good food, you have to have a higher income to do that. And so I think that's a challenge for Oneida too is because even white corn, dried white corn, I think, a pound of it was nine dollars -- very expensive. Controlling our seeds and you talk about heirloom seeds and our farmers market, we have a farmers' market. I forget how old it is, but it's located on an asphalt parking lot behind the tribe's Oneida One Stop gas station in the center of town. And as I was sitting there with Pat last week, we were sitting on a picnic table eating Oneida buffalo burgers and -- but the trucks that were using the gas station, semi-trucks would roll by us as we were talking and I thought, 'This is not the place for a farmers market.' But those are challenges that Oneida has in developing our space.

And then the Farm, as an exercise in sovereignty, helps to spread our ideas about Oneida; our values of Oneida get spread. When people use our food, when they start to depend on us for food and they start to trust what we are providing, I think then that's another chance to express our sovereignty. So, in conclusion, I think we have lots of challenges, lots of opportunities, the Farm is one of those quiet places I think where the community needs to look at as a source of inspiration. We're at a crux in Oneida; we're at a crossroads, I think. We have, we're searching for leadership, we're searching for people like Pat who can help guide the tribe in our next path, our next journey.

The tribe just recently passed a motion at a GTC meeting that created a per capita distribution plan. And on August 11 of this year [2007], we had more than 800 people show up for a GTC meeting. And more than 500 of them agreed that we would have a one-time per capita distribution by December 12 of this year. Tribal members 62 and older will get $10,000 and everyone younger will get $5,000. With 16,000 members, that'll be more than $88 million. It will deplete the rainy day fund that we have spent years and years of building. The vote, I think, is an example of, or a symptom of, an expression of frustration with tribal leadership. And the Business Committee constantly gets blamed for that. And it doesn't matter who's on the Business Committee, it's just the Business Committee gets blamed for that. And I think there's a lot of people who feel they've been invisible, that their needs have not been met. And I think too, the tribe, Oneida -- and I'm very critical of the tribe right now, I'm trying not to be. But I think we've lost sight of our purpose, that we've become great casino managers and thought that the casino was the end result when really it was supposed to be the means to the end. And this vote, as we're trying to figure out how we're going to pay for this and how we're going to distribute it, it really is forcing the entire community, the entire organization to think and reflect on who we are as a people and who we want to be in 25 or 50 years from now.

So I've heard people talk, it's about back to the basics and it's forcing us, that vote is forcing us to go back to the basics and really talk about what we want to be. I'll just leave this -- I was at a history conference in Oneida this summer and I got to hear just the end of someone's talk. It was a professor from Minnesota traveling back to Oneida. He's Oneida. And he said as he was driving home he asked himself, 'How do I know I'm Oneida. How do I know that?' And he said, 'I know because I have a home to come to, I have a place.' And to me, I think part of my purpose, part of being on the Business Committee, part of working for Oneida, is really trying to build, define this vision of what Oneida is going to look like. And it's really busting the stereotypes about a reservation community, about what a reservation community should look like. It's rethinking everything. So the Farm is, I think, a step in that direction at defining the place. And I'm just hopeful that the rest of the community will see it that way. And hopefully, when we come back and talk again that we'll have something more positive about what that vision's going to look like. Thank you very much."

Native Nation Building TV: "Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant explore corporate governance among Native nations, in particular the added challenge they face in turning a profit as well as governing effectively. It focuses on how tribes establish a regulatory and oversight environment that allows nation-owned enterprises to flourish, particularly the separation of day-to-day business operations from politics.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises" (Episode 4). 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: "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."

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[music]

Mark St. Pierre: "Today's show looks at enterprises owned by Native nations, how those enterprises are run, why many such enterprises fail, and what Native nation governments and elected officials can do to help ensure their success. With me today to discuss why some Native nation enterprises succeed and others fail are Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant. Lance Morgan, a citizen of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, is the Chief Executive Officer of Ho-Chunk, Inc., the Winnebago Tribe's award-winning economic development corporation. Kenneth Grant is a research fellow with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and a senior policy scholar at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. I'd like to thank both of you gentlemen for being with us today. Kenny, I'll start with you. Give us a definition of tribal enterprise."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think most people think of a tribal enterprise as a company that's owned by the government, and that's not quite correct. It's a company, a business unit, that's owned by every single tribal member by virtue of the fact that they're a citizen of the tribe, and these business units typically have as their objective to earn financial returns and other social objectives that accrue to the entire community, so that all the citizens are owners and share in the benefits. So that's what I think of when we talk about a tribal enterprise."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Lance, you've developed one of the best models for tribal enterprise. What are some of the toughest challenges that tribes have to overcome?"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Well, you have to think about it terms of the situation that we have to function in, and we have a political system we didn't design, we have a system that doesn't allow capital to flow to reservations very easily, you have a poor educational system that doesn't necessarily deal with business development, you don't have a history of entrepreneurial and business success. And all of these things combine to create probably the toughest business environment in the United States."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Is one of the problems that you encounter, and this is for either one of you, separating business from tribal politics?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white">"There's a real difficulty in separating the roles. With government-owned or tribally-owned enterprises, people are wearing multiple hats at the same time, and so you're a citizen of the tribe and yet you're also a part owner of the enterprise. A council member has governing responsibilities, is also an owner, is also a citizen. That collapsing of the distance between government and business often creates a lot of role confusion for tribes that is difficult to overcome."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I once went to a conference and gave a speech there, and before I spoke somebody said, 'There are 30 government entities to help you tribes get into business.' And it occurred to me that they're helping us set up these government-led economic models, kind of the communism or socialism things that we had spent billions of dollars or trillions of dollars probably in 30 years fighting it 'cause it's inherently evil. And that's the system they had in mind for us. And I'm not so sure, I'm not going to make a comment on...at the end of the speech I said, 'I think that...I can't believe Winnebago is Karl Marx's last hope.' But I think that you have to understand the situation we're in. If we need to develop businesses, the government is really the entity with the only access to capital to do that, and so you almost have to get into this, and if you don't then you have this kind of capital-starved entrepreneur sector you've got to hope for the best with. But if you don't have that tradition or those capabilities, the government really is the only answer, so if you're going to set it up, you have to figure out a way to set it up that takes away some of the negatives of having a political entity run the business and I think that's really the challenge. You really...the tribe doesn't have a choice."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Right, exactly. And a lot of people say, 'Oh, it's separating politics from business and the fact is you can't separate the two. It's a question of how they meet and making that relationship as productive as possible."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"We're owned by government entities, so really politics plays into the decision-making to some extent. It always will. But you still have to figure out a way to balance those issues."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Those of us that have been around for awhile remember a lot of failed EDA [Economic Development Administration] attempts to create tribal enterprises. Is the climate different today than it was in the past?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think that there's a lot more success out in Indian Country in running tribal enterprises. So you can look from the Citizen Potawatami Nation to Mississippi Choctaw -- who have a plethora of successful tribally-owned enterprises -- to individual instances, whether it's Yukaana Development [Corporation] up in Alaska. You can look across the tribes, north to south, east to west, and there are examples of success, and I think Lance can speak to this better than I can, but they are becoming much more sophisticated in understanding sort of what the dangers are and how to promote business and run these operations."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "You referred to kind of the old grant-based economic development model, and I think that that's still an important part of it, but we need to...we've transitioned I think, or the challenge of transition is away, from the grant as our only development tool. What we did is we ran kicking and screaming from anything to do with the government for the first seven or eight years we were in business. And then it occurred to us when we wanted more capital that, hey, maybe we should go back and dust off the old grant model, and we've been able to raise grant money, but it's a supplement to what we're trying to do and it gives us some of the startup capital we need and we're not dependent upon it. And I think it's still a tool that you need to [use] but -- as you grow in sophistication -- that it really factors into your decision-making, it doesn't drive it."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Kenny, you've worked with a lot of tribes. Why do you think so many enterprises have failed?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think part of it is there are issues that are particular to each tribe. Let me put it this way. I think the most insidious problem that I've seen -- working with tribes and trying to run tribal enterprises -- is when the tribe and the citizens think it's an operational problem, when really it's an institutional problem. So I'll give you a quick example of working with one tribe where they had a plethora, I mean just a whole bunch of human capital, great natural resources, access to financial capital. These were very, very well-educated people, and yet the tribal enterprises kept falling. If you talk to the tribal citizens they'd say, 'Well, we just haven't been as civil as we used to be, or people aren't following the procedures book -- and there's this big procedures book.' Or the opposition would say, 'If I were in power all of this problem would go away.' In fact, what you saw is that there were really big disputes that had never been resolved because they had no tribal court system and these disputes were creating distrust and they would just bring an operation to a standstill. A council meeting would just come to an end. And so it wasn't really about civility, it was really about the foundation and the institutions. And that's the toughest problem is when you think it's just our accounting isn't in order, when in fact it's really about how the institutions are operating."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"Yeah, I'd like to add to that a little bit. I think that people tend to simplify the problems, and they focus on whatever bad thing happened at that time and they try to allocate blame, and some people try to do that for their own political gain and all these kinds of things, so you have a tough kind of local political environment. But if the people would take the time to say, 'All right, if we're having this problem over and over again, there's probably some reason for it.' And I always recommend, when tribes come to visit us, that they look at their government structure, they look at their corporate structure, and they figure out in advance what their challenges are going to be and try to plan for them in advance. If they do that, then their chances of success in avoiding these kinds of constant cycles of problems are much higher."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "To follow up, Lance, then what are some of the things that Native Nations need to look at to build success?"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Ho-Chunk, Inc. is really the second attempt. Winnebago Industries was our first attempt in the 1980s, and that pre-dated me a little bit, but when we got there and we decided that we wanted to set up a new corporation, we sat down and we said, 'What are all the reasons we failed before?' 'Cause we have a long history of failure in some of these businesses, and we listed them out and we tried to design a system that would allow us to actually deal with some of those things right up front, and I think that's probably a pretty important step."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "That statement reminded me of a speech that Chairman [John "Rocky"] Barrett gave at Native Nations Institute maybe four or five years ago now, and he was talking about his economic development plan. He's chair of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and he said, 'My constitution is my economic development plan,' meaning, 'I wanted to get the institutions right, I wanted to sort of be able to lay the foundation. That was my goa. Then let the economic activity flourish.'

Lance Morgan: background:white"> 'It's not even a difficult thing to really figure out how to address [that], because you can almost go to any -- ask a tribal leader and economic development person, 'What are your problems?' And they can list them out in detail, and they're almost the same as everybody. But why not take a little bit extra time and put your institutions in place to deal with some of those problems right up front?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "The one place I might have a little disagreement is the problems are often known, but when you're talking about changing systems, that can be a very difficult process, because people have gotten used to the system that they have, they know how it operates, and so trying to transform those institutions can be a real challenge."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Oh, it's actually...it can actually not just be a challenge, it can be dangerous because I think you can do things -- I've seen some tribes do some things that are actually counterproductive, and they do it in the name of maybe some kind of ode to a traditional practice in the past, but it really doesn't make sense in a modern contex. And I've seen some tribes do some things, set up governmental structures that really sounded good and sounded like a great idea but in practice have been a real impediment towards their growth and development."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "And I think it's interesting that the first part of this conversation has really focused more on foundational issues about institutions -- and we can get into the operational issues of the tribal enterprise -- but clearly you can see where Lance and I are going about getting the environment right in which the enterprise can then begin to perform."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, that kind of leads to a logical question, I think, and that is that Lance listed at the beginning some of the obstacles that are very real that every tribe face, especially the larger tribes, larger populations. What are some of the factors that tribes can control?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I sort of come at it from the economics and I look and I say, 'Okay, there's the market out there and there's much that the tribal enterprise can't control. They have to go out and compete against other companies that are providing the same services and then there's policy over here and tribal policy, maybe they've got some say in there but there's not too much control and then there's federal policy.' So I look at it from the economics and say, 'What they really can control is their operations. Are their operations running efficiently, the accounting and the reporting, the board structure?' That's really what they have within their own control."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"I think that's right, but I think what we've done is we've had a tendency to look for some advantage. I always joke that...all of a sudden we're all business experts because of gaming, but I think that it doesn't take a huge sophistication I think to make a lot of money in gaming if you're right next to a big city and you have a monopoly. But what we've had to do is find niches where we have not as huge an advantage as gaming but some advantage over our competition, and there's huge advantages being a tribe. You have your own governmental jurisdiction, you can make your own rules, you can get preferential treatment on some contracts, maybe you can get some start-up capital from various places. So we've tried to focus on areas where if we make a mistake learning, that it's not going to kill us, and that if we get our act together, we should be able to long term have a viable entity because we have some inherent niche or some inherent kind of advantage in that market."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Mark, I'll just follow up. That's a great point and that's a lesson that's seen over and over and over again, is exploiting these small niches where there's a comparative advantage for the tribe and then growing that. You can see it in Yukaana Development Corporation, which is an environmental remediation group up in Galena, Alaska. Very focused on a few issues, they basically have their teams all over Alaska now. The Cherokee Tribal Sanitation Program run by the Eastern Band [of Cherokee], servicing first their own community, then got so good at it went out and signed contracts with neighboring jurisdictions so that they provide waste facilities, a transfer station for their neighboring communities, and they sort of grow off this seemingly little niche but they learn the game and then grow."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I don't think it's a coincidence that tribes everywhere are involved in gaming, are involved in gasoline- or tobacco-type issues. Those are kind of the stereotype economic development issues. And what those really are, if you think about them, they're not inherent Indian businesses. What they really are are businesses that you can get into and take advantage of having a jurisdiction or a different tax base or making a decision on gaming, for example, that another place doesn't. And so I think the challenge is -- or I recognize that these are jurisdictional advantages and we're going to develop our businesses. The challenge for us has been, all right, these businesses are controversial, they create clashes with the state, they create competitive threats that people don't like, and our challenge has been to figure out how we take the money we've made and move to the second stage. How do we take that money and get into home manufacturing, get into construction, get into government contracting, those kinds of things, things that take full advantage of being a tribe but aren't nearly as controversial and aren't a stereotyped business. I think then that's been the challenge for us."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "This is for Lance, but Kenny if you want to jump in as well. A lot of folks, tribal people are very concerned about the job issues and the whole issue of jobs versus profits and the social impact of tribal enterprises and I'd like you to talk about that for a minute."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "When we started our company, we created two missions. We have two primary goals, and one is to create economic self-sufficiency and the other one is to create job opportunities. I think that we've had a lot...before we started we had a long history of kind of having businesses there and we kept them open even if they weren't necessarily profitable because of the jobs issue, and I always kind of thought that was kind of a bit of a cop-out for poor management or poor decision-making or poor governmental structure. I think that if you don't have the profits, you're not really going to have the jobs for a long-term, sustainable period of time, and so I think you really need to focus on developing a successful business. If you do that, the jobs will follow. If we would have, for example, made the decision early on to keep a business that was failing open, that capital would have...we would have had to supplement that business over a period of years and it would have prevented us from making other decisions further on that would have been very helpful for us. And so by focusing on the real economic development issues, we now have more jobs than working-age people in our community. So I think if you focus on success everything else will follow."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Kenny, would you like to respond?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I agree. I think in some sense it's a false dichotomy, but I think Lance is absolutely right that you have to...if the goal is sustainable, ongoing economic activity, the tribal enterprise is going to be here for today, tomorrow, five years, then the focus has to be on profit and then the industry that you go into, the service you provide, or the product that you make will then dictate the number of jobs that are allowed, 'cause you can't force 20 jobs into a position where the market really only allows one job, but if you want that job to sustain itself, then it has to be the focus on profits."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think the key decision upfront is does your tribe need the jobs? Some tribes necessarily don't. If you do need the jobs, then you have to go into businesses that are labor intensive and then try to be successful there. So the real decision is up front in what type of industries do you want to go after or try to develop."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I would think, too, that the grant mentality of the two- or three-year jobs based on a grant cycle versus long-term jobs created by real enterprise and real profits are kind of an adjustment that tribal citizens have to make, especially for those tribes that have been invested in that grant economy."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I would agree. I think a lot of times what you're doing is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Those grants are coming from Washington. So you know the old EDA hotels. It just was the wrong enterprise, and that's not what should have been going, but the money was there, and so there's this sort of predilection to want to go get that money and do that enterprise even though the tribe may not have a regulatory advantage, it may not have a business or a competitive advantage, and they fail and that sort of begins a cycle of..."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think if you don't have a clearly defined strategy, that you're likely to make some mistakes on the grant side of things. These grants are written to say do certain things, but we have found that if you come forward with a very well-conceived plan and they have trust that you're going to do it, that the government entities on the grant side are very flexible. If they believe in what you're trying to do, they will modify their system to help you accomplish your goal. So I think the real key is to figure out exactly what you want to do and make sure that that makes sense and get other people to buy into [it]. Then you can spin the system to help you."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Right. But notice in that case whose leading. Here's the tribe saying this is...or the enterprise saying, 'This is where we want to go. This is our goal and are there grants out there that will fit into this process,' as opposed to, 'the grant is out there so we'll do whatever the grant says we're going to do.'"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Yeah, you've got to flip the equation so that you're in the power position."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Lance, kind of on that same plane though, there's one of the fears out there that as tribes thrive rather than survive that the culture is going to be eroded, that as tribes move into a more professional business model that somehow cultures or tribal cultures are going to die."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Yeah. That's really a major challenge that especially I think young Native American professionals are facing right now. I've always said that culture is really based on a lifestyle based on how you live, and that's based on economics and I think that tribes have a tendency to stereotype themselves based on a positive image that we had of ourselves 100 years ago. But those cultural things, some of those values carry forward, but some of the things that they did were based on a different economic reality, and so I think we need to figure out a way to do Native values like taking care of your family, sharing in your community, but figure out how to be successful in a modern context. I think too often somebody will stand up in a meeting, make a speech about culture and it'll kill a project, and I don't think that that's probably the...and I think then they pat themselves on the back for being pure and then nothing happens and people still aren't able to take care of their families. I also think it's used to make young Native professionals feel bad. You question yourself all the time: Am I doing the right thing? Who am I now? And I think we need to try to embrace success and really figure out what the context of what part of our culture do we want to take forward and reapply it in a modern context. And I think that's the core challenge we're facing."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "This came up once in a classroom with Chief Phillip Martin, Mississippi Choctaw, and I will never say it as eloquently as Chief Martin said, but basically his point was, through our success we actually have citizens returning to the reservation, and so the people are coming back and now they have the language programs and all the sort of benefits that are accruing from being financially successful through their tribal enterprises. So he's sort of saying, 'How's that destroying my culture when I have all my people coming back?'"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Our culture 20 years ago was one of poverty and all the 'isms' you could think of, all the negativisms, alcoholism and all these kinds of things, and our culture's changed. When we first started our corporation we had this discussion, 'Do we really want to be like corporate America?' And we didn't want to. Do we really want a change? But what's really happened is, as the economy has flowered, as people's lives have gotten better, cultures take on a renaissance. Things like the alcoholism and the drug abuse and some of the social issues have begun to die down and people are much more focused on getting back in touch with who they are and taking more pride in themselves and I think that's a pretty critical...that's something I guess I didn't think through, but that's something that's definitely happened in the last 10 years in our community."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I'm going to change direction a little bit here now, and I think we're talking about exciting things. We're talking about thriving. But in order to get that to happen, you need to create some separation between tribal politics or tribal governmental structures and business enterprises. Could you address some ideal ways where that distance can be structured?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think I will start from the global view. I don't think there's one way. I don't think that there's a silver bullet here. I think it's particular to the situation. I have seen some tribes and some tribal enterprises that basically rely on a strong CEO and a good relationship with the council. I've seen other tribal enterprises such as the Yakama Nation Land Enterprise has a board that is essentially a subcommittee of the tribal council and that works for them. In other instances, there are formal boards of directors essentially that stand between the government and the enterprise, and so they're sort of making sure the enterprise is reporting to the council and they're helping the enterprise set strategy."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think the key for us, the real key is -- one of the main keys I think -- is having a political system that is very helpful, it's very stable. We have nine council members and three are elected every year and usually only one or two change over so we never have this huge kind of change in at-the-top strategy level, and the new people that come in, even if they're kind of curious or suspicious about what we're doing, kind of have a time to adjust and they learn, 'Okay, this isn't so bad.' And so that gives us a stable political environment to work in. Within that we have a board of directors -- we have a tribal corporation, we have a board of directors, the council appoints the board, they passed our long-term plan and they approve our annual plan. That's really their only job. They only have three roles. The board has all the other roles and then myself as CEO makes sure the business functions. And so we have clearly defined roles and we stick to them and we occasionally have to pull out the old long-term plan from '94 and dust it off and read it in a council meeting and that's been pretty helpful for us."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Yeah, getting people to stick to their roles is the challenge, 'cause many times I've seen boards have really just become advisory boards and the CEO is reporting to the council because over time people have moved away from the agreement that they originally set down."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "What we did is -- I mentioned earlier that we had listed all the reasons for our failure and we added an additional part to it. We took an additional step and I think that's been the key. We developed something we now call -- then it was the long-term plan -- but we're a little more sophisticated now, we call it the 'principles governing the interaction between the tribe and the corporation,' and we have this list of rules based on the reasons we failed before. For example, we failed because we had to go to the council for every dollar we got. So we said, 'All right, the tribe is going to give us 20 percent of the casino profits in an account that the board controls so we don't have to go to the council so every investment decision isn't politicized. We failed once before because the tribe would suck out all the money from the corporation just because they had needs to...social needs to spend it on.' But the tribe said, 'All right, for the first five years, you get to keep all of your money, and then now we're giving 10 percent of our profits back gradually up to 20 percent. We have a system in place. We failed because of personnel issues. We created our own personnel system. We failed 'cause of the lack of accounting systems, accounting was in the tribe's. We have our own accounting system. So we figured out up front and established all these rules, and every once in awhile we have to read these things and remind the council of it and everyone gets back onboard and we move forward."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That leads to another logical question I guess. The Harvard Project and the Native Nations Institute research says that dispute resolution and having a good organ to do that is important."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Well, it gets back to the politicization that we were talking about earlier and creating the unstable environment and what the dispute resolution does is it helps hold that in check. People have a place to go to resolve the dispute and if the mechanism is seen as fair, it helps hold the politics of spoils in check. That makes it easier for the tribal enterprise to attract the human capital and the financial capital that it needs to operate successfully."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "We don't have a lot of problems on the dispute-resolution side with our individual businesses. Our primary dispute is balancing the separation with the government and the business and we really, since we're owned by them, we really have to figure out ways to get along with them. And so our disputes are played out kind of through negotiation typically, and I think that if we ever really got into a fight with our owner we would probably lose. They could pass laws, they can make motions, they can change the board, so our challenge is to educate people and to get them onboard with our long-term concepts and make them a believer in what we're trying to do."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "And that's the follow up: How do you do that? How do you educate the tribal citizens who are also the tribal politicians eventually in this process?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think it speaks to the issue of transparency, and that doesn't mean that every decision that Lance makes is open for review or put up to a vote by the citizens, but it is keeping people aware of what the mission of the operation is, how it's performing, what its financial returns are, what its goals are, and I do think that the political leadership has a role in helping to educate the tribal citizens and the owners of the enterprise."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "One of the things we do is we have a mechanized system for putting information out to the people and to the government. We have to provide audited financials every year and an annual report and we even had a PR campaign, kind of a sophisticated thing which really was kind of a failure I think. I think what's really helped us is really going out and directly talking to our membership. One on one we've brought in our employees, we've kind of given them a fact sheet about what we do and given them information, they go home, talk to their families and we deal with kind of the little negative issues that emerge in a small community and I think our sophisticated PR strategy and press releases and all that stuff really didn't work until we started talking to our people."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Sadly, we're running out of time, but I'd like to do one final question for both of you. This is exciting stuff. Where do you see it headed?"

Kenneth Grant: " background:white">I think there's been a tremendous change in the last 20 years, and I think more and more examples of success are breeding more and more success within Indian Country on operating tribal enterprises. I think it's one of the biggest changes we've seen in the last 20 years, and I think the trend is very, very positive."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Where is Ho-Chunk?"

Lance Morgan: "Our challenge is to continue to transition from these controversial businesses to these businesses that take advantage of being a tribe, and really make a lot of money hopefully and we can take that money and funnel it towards our community in a social kind of side of the equation. I think that what I don't want to get lost in this [is] it's not really, it's never really about the money. We're never going to be Microsoft. We're a company that is focused on making our community better, and I think the more we realize that ourselves, the better off we are. So I think the future for us, drive the business forward, be as great as we can, as competitive as we can, and figure out ways -- challenging and interesting ways -- to spread the wealth in our community so that everybody benefits from it. And I think that in the end is going to be the key to our longevity there, because that's what's going to engender I think good feelings towards the tribe."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to both you guys for traveling here. I'd like to thank Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

Island First Nation grasps potential of alternative power

Year

While oil pipeline debates, anti-fracking protests and increasing fossil fuel demands embroil the country from coast to coast, a small Vancouver Island First Nation is leading the way on a different path.

In the past five years, the seaside T’Sou-ke nation has become a world-renowned leader in solar energy. Their projects are the model for others in the capital region and around the province.

They also have a massive wind-energy partnership in the works that could augment power for all of Vancouver Island, on a power grid connected to the mainland...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Petrescu, Sarah. "Island First Nation grasps potential of alternative power." Times Colonist. January 5, 2014. Article. (http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/island-first-nation-grasps-poten..., accessed July 26, 2023)

Glimmers of hope on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

Author
Producer
MSNBC
Year

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has become emblematic of rural poverty, neglect and the plight of struggling American Indians. But across the reservation, there are glimmers of hope and resistance against the monumental challenges the Lakota people face.

In the case of Alice Phelps and the Wounded Knee School, it means raising expectations and squeezing the most out of meager resources. For others it’s the simple yet provocative notion of going off to college and one day returning to the reservation to work. Or it’s a scrappy community-based group re-imagining the reservation’s infrastructure, with dreams of creating jobs and high-quality housing for residents. Others are planning an all-girls school or pushing for state charter school legislation that would give community folks the opportunity to run their own schools infused with tribal language and culture...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Lee, Trymaine. "Glimmers of hope on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation." MSNBC. May 23, 2014. Article. (http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/pine-ridge-wounded-knee-hope, accessed May 15, 2023)

Building better homes in Indian Country

Year

There's no other house like it on the Oglala Sioux's 2 million-acre Pine Ridge Reservation: Its walls are insulated by 18-inch strawbales rather than plastic sheeting, and its radiant-floor heating is much cheaper than the typical propane or electric. A frost-protected shallow foundation inhibits mold and is more energy-efficient than the damp basements common here.

Surrounded by South Dakota's open prairie, the rectangular home with its red-metal roof is one of four prototypes the local nonprofit Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation is building with South Dakota college students and the University of Colorado Boulder's Native American Sustainable Housing Initiative. Others will feature compressed-earth blocks, structural insulated panels made of plywood-faced foam, or standard wood framing...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Seltenrich, Nate. "Building better homes in Indian Country." High Country News. January 20, 2014. Article. (http://www.hcn.org/issues/46.1/building-better-homes-in-indian-country, accessed March 14, 2023)