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Patricia Ninham-Hoeft: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (2009)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Oneida Nation Business Committee Secretary Patricia Ninham-Hoeft reflects on her role as a leader for the Oneida Nation and offers advice for newly elected leaders.

Resource Type
Citation

Ninham-Hoeft, Patricia. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2009. Presentation. 

"Thank you. And I want to reiterate what Mike [Mitchell] had said too. Welcome and congratulations to many of you who are new leaders and many of you who are continuing on in that position. I am the Tribal Secretary for the Oneida Business Committee in Wisconsin. We're located about eight miles west of Green Bay. The reservation is overlapped with several competing municipalities, two different counties, I think five municipalities. And our kids, we have our own tribal school but yet we still have five different public schools, districts that divide up the reservation.

As I said, I'm serving my second term. I was first elected to the tribal secretary position in 2005 and was recently elected seven months ago to a second term. And it's that second term that really poses some new challenges for me. Mike, before we had talked, Mike had reminded me when he first met me I was here at this event and talking about my experience and I was a very frustrated person, very frustrated council person. And it's funny that after the new elections, our new chairman Rick Hill was looking at the photographs that the council that I was on when I first got elected, looking at those photographs and he saw mine. And I looked very different three years ago than I did today. And he laughs and he says, "˜What is this, your high school picture?' It's because in those three years the work was very demanding. And the role was a very big burden that I'm not complaining about but just, and I know you all know that, that it's a big responsibility.

I always wanted to be the tribal secretary, or on the business committee. I always wanted to be on the business committee since I was a kid. And it's because of my mother, Sandy Ninham. And my mom as a young woman started working in her community, she was working in the tribe's civic center in their recreation, youth recreation program. And she and another woman, during that time, liked to play bingo at the local VFWs. And the civic center was having trouble getting its utility bills paid. So she and Elma Webster started their own bingo game in the gymnasium. That was in 1975-76. And today it grew into the Oneida casino, which now employs 3,000 people, 1,500 of those at the casino and 1,500 staffing different programs and services for our community. And it's my mom's can-do spirit, her entrepreneurial spirit that has always been my guide. And always in our house, either at my mom's kitchen table or her mom's kitchen table, relatives always gathered there to talk about and complain about what the tribe was and wasn't doing. So that's the story about why I'm here today.

Serving my second term as a tribal secretary comes after three years of being really frustrated. And I think this last seven months I've calmed things down and have learned a bit about how to be more effective. And that's sort of the basis for my story today is how to become more effective. Well, I'm going to talk to you about some of the things that I was surprised about when I got elected and then talk about some of the skills and maybe experiences that are helpful to someone if you're going to serve on the tribal council, some regrets or things that I wish I would have done differently, and then I'll end with some tips of things I've learned the hard way.

So getting elected, there were some surprises. One was, once I got elected it was the feeling of fear that I had, which caused me to be paralyzed at times and resulted in -- and I think a lot of the people, we have nine people on the business committee and I just wonder if they all had the same feelings -- because many times we'd have group think. And I don't have a good explanation for it now, but it's one thing that if you are working on a committee to know what it is and to know how to prevent it. Because oftentimes you're faced and confronted with many problems and you end up looking at each other not saying anything, no one's saying anything, and everybody wondering who's supposed to do something.

The other surprise I had was just learning how to become confident. That you sort of have that new honeymoon period of three to six months in your position, and you feel awkward and new, and you're trying to live up to that perception that everybody wants you to do something, but it's in that period where if you can relax and allow yourself to find your voice, but it's normal.

I've learned that you can't make promises. That no matter how small it is, do not promise anyone anything. Promise that you'll get their issue heard, promise that you'll present their request someplace, but don't guarantee that you're going to solve it. That's also advice from my mom who, my mom went on and served on the tribal council for three terms for nine years.

One of the things I also was surprised about is the amount of meetings you attend per day and night. And the meetings are important. You have to know the different kinds of meetings. You have informational meetings, meetings where you make decisions, meetings where you just, it's team building, but you have to come to those meetings and you have to come prepared.

Resistance was a big surprise for me when I got elected, because I thought once you got on the business committee that automatically everyone would embrace your ideas but that doesn't happen at all. You have to earn it from your managers and you have to earn it from your peers, especially. And it takes work and it takes a lot of time.

High expectations is another surprise and that one I get and I've gotten from myself: high expectations from my myself, from my peers, my friends and my own experience. High expectations, it's like the constituents, they think you can fix anything or they think that the business committee is responsible for solving all their problems. And you oftentimes disappoint people by what you did or by what you didn't do. The great story I use for myself is with my mom when she was on the council, and oftentimes she'd come home and want to vent or complain or have someone to talk to about maybe an issue she and the council were struggling with, but yet she didn't come home to a supportive daughter. She came home to a daughter who was criticizing my mom and telling her what she should have done and as a result she came home but she didn't talk to me anymore. And so now as I'm going through that experience and having it happen to me by my friends who pushed me to run, "˜We'll be right there for you, Patty.' And when I failed to do something right or failed to do what they thought I should do, they weren't there. And we're just recovering from that, my friends, we're just talking about that. And so it's important that you find somebody who's going to be there for you regardless of what you do, you need that person. And then to be easy on yourself, because oftentimes you're the biggest critic and then also, with your peers on your council 'cause they're probably feeling the same thing and they don't need their peer to be hounding them.

Skills and experience: before I got elected I wish I was better at conflict resolution as a skill. And the biggest thing about conflict resolution is how to avoid it in the first place, how to have the skills that you listen first, have the discipline to not react, have the respect to see all sides, know it first. And then if you are in conflict -- and I think Mike gave some really great examples of all that -- is work hard to find ways to resolve it and never give up in trying to find that common ground. Because I think with politics people forget that politics is about dealing with conflicts but using words to do it instead of violence and guns. And so you are in the business as a political leader to work on conflict.

Know the difference between governing and managing. Oftentimes, at least in Oneida, I see people crossing the lines in day-to-day business. Oftentimes, I see the elected officials getting involved in the day-to-day business. And I think it's because you don't know the difference between the questions of what to do and how to do it. And as an elected official your responsible for, I feel like I'm responsible to decide with my committee what gets done, what are we going to do, what are we going to accomplish, and then being able to articulate that so that your managers then can figure out how to achieve it. But that one question is hard and I think it stems in vision and strategy. And it's hard on a day-to-day basis to think about strategy. It's not sexy. It's easy to talk about, "˜Well, let's have a PR [public relations] campaign, and let's write five articles, and let's build a hospital, let's have an oxygen chamber for diabetes.' Those are all tactical kinds of things and our job is to focus on, 'What is our community going to be in 25 years or 100 years? Who are we?' And oftentimes too you'll hear managers accuse you of, at least I have, of being involved in day-to-day. And that's usually a red flag for me that either I am interfering and messing up my role or that they want to keep me out. And so that's where governing comes in that you have to know that you're responsible for governing, which means setting the direction and the vision but don't forget you have to oversee things. Oversight is especially important, that you have to make sure that your managers are doing what they said they were going to do, that the money that they got budgeted to them, that they're spending it the way they're supposed to spend it.

And then know what success looks like because you'll be given balance sheets, you'll be given financial reports, you'll be given reports to look at and you have to know what success looks like. The financial area is a big thing that I recommend everyone, if you're on a tribal council that you have to know the difference between a budget and a fiscal responsibility role. Budgeting is about spending. You start, you make a prediction about how much you're going to spend in a year to accomplish a certain number of things and you watch that, just like you would your own checkbook at home. But it's the balance sheet; it's the income statement that you get that is intimidating. So find, maybe there's somebody in your community who's a CFO of some local business or a non-profit and reach out to that person for advice.

Relationships is important, especially in a community like mine where we have all these different competing municipalities around us, that we have good relationships with various people in the community there. Also having relationships within your own tribe, be involved as best you can and within your own committee, that the relationships that you have with each other are important. That yeah, you're going to disagree and you're going to vehemently disagree, but in the end you still have to be kind to each other because you live with these people. For me, I've grown up with the people I serve with. They've either been older people who served as my mentor or we went to the same high school and college together.

And know the rules of your tribe, know your constitution, know your treaties, know the rules that your committee uses to operate and know the rules of the municipalities that are around you. Facilitating is another good skill to have and then also as I said earlier, knowing how to work as a body because for me, I'm one of nine members that serve on the committee. I don't have any authority as an individual. That authority only comes when we convene as a group and as a body.

And then finally look around, make sure you're always learning and look around the world. There's some great books out there about what other nations, what other Indigenous communities are doing to grow their communities. And look at that because I often hear the expression "˜power likes a vacuum' and you can see that, but "˜ignorance creates the vacuum.' And that's a phrase I just learned from a book about the cultural impact on development and prosperity in developing countries. Ignorance creates a vacuum. And I see that a lot when you're with people and they're not learning and they're not reaching out looking for new ideas and they're stuck in a mindset that doesn't work today.

Things I wish I had done differently: I wish I had held my tongue and controlled my emotions. There's a difference between being passionate and angry. And there's a difference between being persuasive and argumentative. And you just don't talk behind someone's back because you're trying to win people over to your ideas and they're not going to listen to you if you act with disrespect.

I have a great experience. When I first got elected there was a person on the council and I hadn't even started my first day. I was so full of energy and I was going to change things and do things differently and I just, I yelled and screamed in this meeting with her. And I still have not forgiven myself for that experience yet. I think she has of me, but if you can avoid having that happen to you, hold your tongue and control your emotions. It takes a lot of discipline, but it'll benefit you in the long run.

The other thing I regret, I wish I would have done differently is taking a public stance on per capita in my community. In 2008 last year we had a general tribal council meeting. And I don't know how many are organized the way Oneida is, but we have the IRA constitution, we have a general type of council that convenes. Everyone 21 and older, regardless of where they live, when they convene, it takes 50 people to sign a petition and then you have to call a meeting and a minimum of 75 have to show up for that meeting. Well, I could see this coming, many of us did see this coming that when the business committee became or wasn't dealing with the right problems, factions got very powerful. And so we had a petition for a per capita payment of $5,000 to people who were, I forget what the age, 55 and younger would get a one-time $5,000 payment and then everyone older would get $10,000. And more than 800 people came out for that GTC meeting and it passed. And all of the debate leading up to it, no one, I don't think any one person really stood up against that idea. And I was on the council at the time and sat back and let it happen. And I look back and I try to examine why I did that. And I know one of the reasons why I think it was fear. I was afraid to stand up. I was afraid to stand up against a popular interest. It's important when you have your family and your friends who are going to support you, that's when they're important and necessary [because] then they'll help you; so you're not alone, so you can do what's right.

And then wisdom to share: some tips. It's be dependable, be consistent, be transparent, accessible and prepared. That's how you gain trust. Right now in Oneida, we have this fantastic blogger who is very critical of the business committee and tribal government. And they're always talking about, "˜That business committee is corrupt, it's the good old boy system and the good old girl system, and they're secretive.' We're always getting those accusations and in fact, and daily. So the internet has been a good thing while bringing openness but it goes both ways. You get that feedback right away. But as long as you're dependable, consistent, transparent, accessible and prepared, you may not have to worry too much about that.

Know that you can't do it by yourself -- especially if you're on a committee, as in my case -- that you've got to change their minds too and being persuasive is the key, not attacking them; and knowing that to get your idea across, it takes time -- it may not happen the first meeting or the second or the tenth, but eventually it does happen, you can see. And you can't do it all at once, plant seeds -- and I've learned to be very excited about small changes, seeing that incremental change. And then embrace resistance -- you'll get a lot of resistance but embrace it, don't run away from it and don't be afraid of it: use it. Learn what they're saying, why are they resisting it, use it to help fashion your idea and make your idea better because -- like Mike said -- it's about building community and it's about building a people. And for me, it's about building a place where my kids are going to want to come back to and invest their lives and their grandchildren's lives forever and ever. So, good luck." 

Jason Goodstriker: Addressing Tough Governance Issues

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Blood Tribe Councilor Jason Goodstriker discusses how his nation went to great lengths to instill financial transparency and accountability to its governance system.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Goodstriker, Jason. "Addressing Tough Governance Issues." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Presentation.

"Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Great to be here and thanks, Manley [Begay]. You're very kind and congratulations again on last night. I've put in a lot of years myself and I know about getting over the hump. I was just coming down here to the group to be...I was excited about speaking. And then I see a lot of my relatives here; these are the North Blackfeet from Siksika. And Vincent and I have been friends. And it's just like that; just when you get a chance to get out of town and be far away, somebody from home shows up. It's good to see all of my friends here. We have...I've got to start with a joke. So we were talking yesterday about people that can remember back. And these three Indians were sitting there talking to each other about how far they can remember back. And the first one says, ‘I can remember back to going to residential school, when they took me and brought me there.' And the second guy, ‘Ah, that's nothing.' He said, ‘I can remember back farther than that. I can remember my grandfather holding me and giving me my Indian name.' And the third one says, ‘That's nothing.' He says, ‘I can remember going to the powwow with my dad and coming home with my mom.' I can't tell jokes like that at the powwow; since there's no kids here. Chief [Michael] Mitchell and I were able to go golf yesterday, with the kindness of the group here. And so we were able to go out. And I was telling him, I said, ‘Chief, why don't we switch presentations? What I would have known now and that type of thing.' And I said, ‘I'll just go up there and I'll talk about nothing but booze and women.' And that was kind of what we were joking around about on the course. But anyway, there's great stuff that I think I would encourage you to do.

And I'll tell you a little short story about a friend of mine; he's a colleague. He's one of the chiefs out in the Atlantic. And Rick Simon is one of the regional chiefs that I served with. How many of you can shorthand? I know there's some people in here that can shorthand, maybe one or two people. You know how to shorthand? Anyways, it was a little skill that they taught many, many years ago for a lot of people that were in media. And Rick Simon went to journalism school. So when he was elected -- and this goes back to the early '90s -- when he was elected he used to sit there -- and right up until now he's still sitting as the Atlantic chief -- and he would shorthand verbatim in black notebooks, his journals. And he has word for word what all was spoken in every major Canadian political event, all of the assembly meetings, everything. He has it word for word written down, who said what and at what time. And he has about 50 volumes of this of just handwritten notes. And I asked him, ‘What are you going to do with that?' And he says, ‘Oh, I have plans.' But for those young leaders that are here, you'll always think back. And I moved, my wife and I, we moved to Calgary and I looked back at all my old notes. Keep the good stuff. Keep the good stuff around and you'll reference that in the future. You'll go back to that stuff and you'll think about, ‘Geez, what was I going through then.' And write down notes. Take notes. Take good notes, even if it's a small journal. That's one advice. Second advice I would say, always, always, always -- never forget -- bring business cards, everywhere. You never know who you're going to run in to, whether it's on a plane or in a hotel lobby or wherever it is, always bring business cards; don't ever not bring them. A couple tidbits.

Anyway, excuse me. While we get going I want to run through this real quick. And this is just a presentation that I'd done at an auditing. I have finance background. I have an accountant and a few people that I've traveled with that have been part of that. I'm in this, the Haskin School of Business in Calgary right now, and like Manley mentioned, this is only my first semester taking a couple courses. I'm an arts and science guy going into the MBA. And the MBA, I don't have no B Comm, I don't have no Management or anything like that. All of the stuff that I learned is from the street. And so it has its pluses and its minuses. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield. That's me. So they kind of go through the theory and then they look at me, ‘How does it really work out there?' So we go through the bit.

Most of these speak for themselves. The context of the audit; when it comes down to the audit and financial process, there's a lot of -- in fact this morning I was talking with a tribal official up in Montana and she said that there was a lot of mishandling. Everybody seems to love this discussion of Indians mishandling money, especially when it comes down to big money and all that. And it just seems to be a vacuum of a microscope. Well, that's not always the case. And you look at this. I don't work for the New York Stock Exchange. I didn't come down here to bash Americans. I want to come back again. The context, look at else who has problems: Conrad Black, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac, the treasury. And what it all amounts to is trillions of dollars in losses, rescue packages; they're big. And when it comes back to how we build this, it really -- there's a slide that's coming up -- and what it is it's laying the foundations and the base for many of the doings that you're going to do.

What else has happened in the...as we discuss many of these items here, I'd like to point out that setting the foundation for the community is important enough that we go about and we've got to establish the relationships of your community with not only itself -- it's a healing process -- but also with outside communities and your towns -- the little racist towns that we all grew up with in the area. You have to bridge those, make those bridges, make those inroads and that's quite important, which kind of leads to where it is our involvement was. There's many, many things that have been mentioned a little bit. The United States and Canada coming out...back in the day, in the old days of Indian leadership, especially in Canada, it's written out what the delegated powers of chief and council are. And for the most part, pre-1960s they were talking about fence lines, they were talking about cattle projects, they were talking about agriculture, they were talking about a lot of simple things, but they were difficult and they didn have their challenges. As you ramp up the experience to today, you look at your authorities and what you have to decide over: health, education, social service, the safety nets, economic development. So you're dealing with a gamut of things and you have to be that much better prepared, which makes it quite a challenge for all of the new and the young leaders here today. And I don't need to tell you all about that.

So one of the things that I...(See, I get paid by the slide. That's why I put lots of them in here.) In terms of the auditing process -- and these are again just helpful notes and I would encourage you just to look at them as we, as you head home, head on the plane, but I'll kind of build it all the way up to page eight, if you look at it, cleaning up. And what's the easiest thing to do when it comes to the process here? It's an important concept. Tomorrow and today's walls are built by foundations and the foundations is the finance process. It is traditional, it is language, it is culture, it is having foundations of who you are as people, but when you look at it through a finance point of view you have to build the integrity of your people through the finance process. And that's the language that the Bureau reads, that's the language that funding grant people read, that's the language that the government and banks and loaning organizations -- they all read that. And so when you're prepared and you're designed properly, the dreams of economic development, the economic development projects, if you need a line of credit to do a budget overrun for one of your departments, you have to have the financial integrity all there and together. And that's, that can be quite a challenge because you've got to build that house almost by hand and brick for brick. It's exciting work; it's tough work. And the case study that... We never think about ‘we're in governance.'

Ten years ago, when I was in office, I never thought, ‘Well, this is a governance thing. I want to do it this way and I hope that it's going to get done.' What happened was is we had a $5-6 million project -- we were partnered with another group, they had $5-6 million in, the federal government had $4 million in on this project -- and it tanked. The year before I was elected in 2000, in 1999 the telecom market blew out. And so we had a $14-15 million project that was in our face. Anyway, I had nothing to do with that and I took office. So here I am. I put this project into receivership, wasn't popular. [I] went to the Band meeting and oh, they came in on me big time. ‘You...!' And I was just sitting there kind of taking it all in. And it wasn't fun, it wasn't easy. So I was thinking: there's got to be a better way to deal with this.

Now in most finance processes with communities, whether it's Bureau or reporting, all that mechanism, it always comes back to the audit -- audit, audit, audit. So on the money side -- when it comes to the audit and the discussion of this -- those Band meetings, you sit there and everybody's kind of coming in on you and you're discussing money spent. Well, I was sitting at home watching TV and the Canadian government was just getting ready to present their budget. And I was thinking of how to transfer interest. How is it that I can transfer interest? [Because] as one of the minor chiefs, I was made chairman of finance. So I was sitting there and watching and sure enough I thought, ‘Okay, I'm going to do it this way.'

So I went into the finance meeting. I said, ‘Let's make a budget speech. Let's make a budget speech and let's create this.' ‘Okay.' So 27 departments, we had $140 million to decide. And it's changed dramatically since then but these are 10-year-old numbers. So we had all of the millions of dollars, so we -- and this is the regular budget process where everybody submits their budget, then there's two percent that's discussed. And what happens is you decide, you cut here, you add there and then you make it process. The old way, in council chambers -- and we even used to smoke. When I was still sitting, when I first was elected you could still smoke in council. I don't know if many of you can today. But it's a smoky room, maybe there's one woman in there and you pass the budget and everybody kind of grumbles and they walk away. Well, I never figured that that was good enough. And so transferring interest and transferring ideas was we started to concentrate on the budget.

So the budget process, we got it passed. And just like the Canadian Parliament, I put on new moccasins -- like the finance minister puts on new shoes -- and the speech from the throne comes through and I said, ‘Okay, here it is,' counted my votes -- never bring anything to a council unless you know where your votes are -- counted my votes -- I knew it was all there -- I had a seconder so the chair turned it over to me, cameras went on and I started reading. ‘Tomorrow's education is a priority for the Blood Tribe members and because of that we see this design and that design and we are dedicating to this budget year $5.6 million. Health is the priority of the future...' and it went on and on and on and on. So there's a budget speech and right at the end -- as if I wasn't dancing enough -- right at the end I put, ‘and God save the Blood Tribe, the Blackfoot Confederacy, and God Save the Queen.' And that's how most budget speeches end. So they kind of end like that. And that was exciting enough for me. But on top of that we took it to the streets. So we voted it through. The council liked it; we voted it through. And to this day, it's still the process that exists.

So we rounded up the media, not just the tribe, the whole media around southern Alberta, Calgary. So they have satellite trucks, big scrum, five, six cameras and we released the budget. So the white people were like, ‘What are these guys doing?' The Bureau people were like, ‘Wow!' They couldn't think of it and they couldn't think of how much words to put behind it because there we were front and center outlining the money that we're dedicating to this, to health, education, Ec. Dev., Ag., all of the line items. And so that night, just like they would be reporting the Canadian budget, they were reporting our budget. And on the teleprompter, they're flashing $5.6 million, $7 million, $10 million, $12 million and it's going on and on. And people are like, so that's what's going on on the reserve. And it diffused all of the anger related to audits. So as that would come to an end, that's how we transferred -- instead of thinking about the old, think about the new. I never thought that I'd be in Arizona ten years later when I designed that, and never thought it was governance, but it ended up being something like that. But it's being creative.

So in the end, I just wanted to say that there is a finance crisis going on right now. If you built a house of bricks, you're going to...because one thing Indians we know how to do, we know how to be broke. And maybe that's what we have to teach the world through something like this that we've experienced over the past year we have lessons that we can help better with. So again, just on the final page, final slide I just wanted to, there's my contact information. I do have cards. I'll be again open for questions, but I'll wrap it up right here and I'll just say that one of the involvements of our group, Treaty 7, and it's an idea that we brought forward and we've passed it. NCAI [National Congress of American Indians] is the thing down here; up north it's the AFN [Assembly of First Nations]. But more than that, we have a big, major, major, major gathering in July and I want to invite you to that. I have contact information -- 633 chiefs in Canada, one million Indians in the land north of the 49th, and [in] July we're voting in our new national chief. I don't know if the current one is going to run again. I served with him. It's going to be in Calgary and we're anticipating about 5,000 Indians, right after the stampede. So after the cowboys are gone, the Indians will be there. Again, thank you and that's all I have to say." 

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft, Anthony Pico and Sophie Pierre: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft, Sophie Pierre, and Anthony Pico address questions about how to create and maintain a foundation for effective, sustainable leadership within Native nations.

Resource Type
Citation

Ninham-Hoeft, Patricia. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

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

Pierre, Sophie. "What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (Q&A)." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 25, 2008. Presentation.

Audience member:

"I know that many of you, all three of you, have eluded to it, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about continuity of the historic information that is within a tribal government so that new leaders can understand what happened in the past and why these decisions were made. And if that is considered important enough, how do you do it?"

Anthony Pico:

"It's important because again, we just talked about continuity of leadership. There were decisions that were made hundreds of years ago, maybe longer, and because of genocide, many of those decisions are no longer even known why they made those things. But as we continue to move and continue to re-establish ourselves -- actually reinvent ourselves sometimes in some areas -- but to know how and why the decisions were made before comes from a long line of not only our blood and our genes, but geography has something to do with it, our own tribal laws from the past have something to do with it. And they came from hundreds sometimes thousands of years of why people made certain decisions to cause harmony within the community. And so that's why I think that they're important. But also another way to do that too is to make sure that there's somebody continues to be elected on a tribal council that was there before that can guide the new people as making decisions or a mentor somewhere that is established along somewhere in there to say, "˜Hey, we made this decision a long time ago because of this reason.' And those are good decisions; that's why they made them. Sometimes they were made through trial and error, sometimes they were made and it cost them blood too. But to not I think consider that and why decisions were made, you're inventing like the wheel all over again.

Audience member:

"We have a tendency to forget the old wars. And because now, it seems like we're all -- the federal government is supporting whatever we do -- but we have a tendency to forget the 1950s, when people were being terminated. And that's one of the reasons why I think that it's really important to discuss why it is that those decisions were made and because so many of our old leaders are, younger peoples question them and say, "˜Well, they were bad leaders because of this.' And that's why I...that's what you're eluding to and I think that that's really important."

Sophie Pierre:

"If I could just add to that; maybe I need one more slide that says, sustainable leadership means that we must become the authors of our own stories. And I really think that that's what it is. We have everybody else telling our stories instead of ourselves. And that's really what we need to do, and to insure that that is passed on from generation to generation."

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft:

"I think in Oneida, we have several projects that are going on where people are videotaping elders and then replaying that throughout the year at different events. And especially now with Oneida, we have sort of this resurgence of people wanting to get involved in tribal government -- people who've never lived on the reservation or participated in community events and they're coming back. And they have no clue as to how the tribe came to be. They have no clue when tribal elders -- like an Amelia Cornelius or a Loretta Metoxen -- stand up to say something, they don't get the recognition anymore from the audience because they don't know who they are. And so this video project, this storytelling project is supposed to help reconnect people to the past. We also have a good minute taking or record of minutes where we capture meetings verbatim and tape recordings of those too that we're hoping to make more available to tribal members too but we don't have a real formal way of doing that. I think that's a good idea."

Joan Timeche:

"If I can just add to that; one of the, the storytelling and telling our own stories is actually an excellent project for our youth. It's a way to introduce them to what's happening within tribal government. And all of our students, all of our children have class projects that they have to do, whether it's History, whether it's English, or whatever it may be. And when they get into those levels...our kids are so technically [savvy], technology savvy, they can come in, they can off their cameras videotape things like that, put it into little short stories. There's a lot of things that can be done very inexpensively because they can do it as homework or extra credit or a report for us, but we capture all of that data. We'll take one last question then we have a couple of announcements before you leave the room."

Audience member:

"I have a question and it has to do with term limits. I recognize that a lot of Native Nations have tribal leaders who have been in office for many, many years. And also hear a lot about wasteful spending and frivolous spending. And I think that that wasteful spending is a good indicator of people being in office too long. And maybe term limits would be useful because then the council or the leadership would change and it would always, there would always be a fresh batch of new leaders with new ideas and new, maybe even more, education depending on what the situation is. But do you think term...but then again, if you look at tradition, leaders a long time ago were pretty much appointed for life. So if you...what do you guys think about term limits? Would it be useful or hurtful to Native nations and do you think wasteful spending is a symptom of not having term limits?

Anthony Pico:

"I think that has to be determined by every tribe because every tribe is unique, every tribe has their own unique economic situation, every tribe has its own unique way of making decisions. Even the topography and where you live will make a difference. And so each tribe will have to take that upon themselves whether they really... Take for example if Tribe A, there is considered by the majority of people that there's wasteful spending. If that is a fact and you can back that up by facts, then maybe you do need to do that. But there are many tribes who have people that are advising and have been there for a long, long time. In my personal opinion, I think the longer they're there the better. That's what I think."

Sophie Pierre:

"Well, having been, like I said, on council for 30 years I think you probably know where I'm going to be going with this. I really believe that it's not, it's not a problem; it's not an issue of the limit of the term. What it is is if you've got frivolous spending that is, it's not a problem of the term; it's a problem of the governing structure that the people have let occur. Because there needs to be, what you need to be working on, is more of a system that is transparent so that the leaders are talking about how they're going to be spending your tribal dollars before they spend it, not after they've spent it. Like in our community, when we do our, when we're getting together -- like we just did this a couple weeks ago -- we bring our annual budget to the membership and then we bring the audit in the fall to the membership and we make sure, we almost force, the people to read it. Like, "˜You've got to read this. This is really important stuff.' So it's really the process of government. It's how you organize your government, not how long your term is. Because really it's like Anthony said, "˜It's depending on each nation,' and it goes back to that whole business of cultural match. What is it that your people, what is it that makes your people who they are and have that cultural match? Maybe it is somebody that's a chief for their entire lifetime, but it's how they report and how they serve their people. [Because] first and foremost, you've got to remember that's what a leader does, is serve the people.

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft:

"I agree with Sophie and Anthony. I think it just depends on your tribe and the problem that you're trying to solve. I don't know if term limits is what would solve decreasing or preventing wasteful spending, and I think it is the system."

Patricia Ninham-Hoeft: What I Wish I Knew Before I Took Office (2008)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Oneida Nation Business Committee Secretary Patricia Ninham-Hoeft reflects on her experience as a leader of her nation, and shares a list of the five leadership skills she wished she had mastered before she took office.

Resource Type
Citation

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

"Good morning. My name's Patty Hoeft. I'm the Tribal Secretary on the Oneida Business Committee, which is a nine-member committee that's elected every three years. We are facing elections this July, and it's my first time serving for my tribe and so I'm entering or finishing up my third year. Why I ran for tribal secretary is something that I always wanted to do since I was a kid, and I always wanted to be on the Oneida Business Committee. My mother served three terms on the Business Committee and she and another woman founded Oneida Bingo back in the mid "˜70s, and so I've always been involved in tribal politics. But the situation I inherited or stepped into when I won was very different than what I thought it would be. I thought that before getting elected that I was energetic and enthusiastic and I had big dreams and I was going to help make positive changes. I was going to help deal with the frustration that has been running through my community for the past 10, 15 years or so, and right now we're seeing that frustration I think starting to climax a bit. I'm hoping it's climaxing, and I think the frustration is just from tribal members who want more from their tribe or expect better performance from the Business Committee or the people that they elect. So I came to the job, took my oath with all of those ideas, and instead after three years I find myself in tears wanting to quit, wanting to rip out the part of me that feels Oneida and walk away from it. I feel very overwhelmed and it's been very hard and so I've been trying to search for reasons to explain why it's that way, because it's not just that way for me. My mother talked about it all through her terms, and I remember the difficulties she had -- nine years on the council -- and the people that would come up to her and asking her, "˜Sandy, you can solve this, do something about it.' And when she didn't, even me, her daughter, turned my back on her, and I find myself in that situation now: dear friends of mine feeling disappointed in what I didn't do or didn't do enough of.

So things that I wanted to talk about that I think I would have liked to have known before I ran I think start with leadership skills, and the second area are roles and responsibilities of the council itself and the importance of visioning and strategy setting. As tribal secretary, I came into a job that has a dual role. It's both a management position because I am supervising a staff and we have a specific function to carry out, a constitutional function, and that's to organize the council's meetings, take the minutes, maintain the official record, and do that not only for the council but for the General Tribal Council. And the General Tribal Council is when 75 voter-eligible members come together for a meeting and they form the council, which in the last couple of years has been setting the course for what's happening in Oneida. I'm the tribal secretary. My dual role, I have to be a manager, an administrator, and also a leader on the council, a policy maker. As the tribal secretary, I inherited the staff, I inherited a staff that was not content with their position. We had complaints about the individual performance of staff. We had complaints about the function of the office itself, that it wasn't performing. And so I came in with a vision for the tribal secretary's office based on my background as a journalist. I worked as a newspaper reporter for the Green Bay Press Gazette for a few years and covered the tribe a little bit, and always the frustration is the lack of openness and transparency in Oneida. So I really saw the tribal secretary's office and function as a way to start initiating good government ideas. How to make sure that the business and the affairs of the council, of the government, were available and open to the constituency that we served.

So leadership skills? There are five of them that I think that I wish that I had spent more time knowing more about before I took the job. They seem to be five that I stumbled across throughout the last three years that I saw myself, I think, naturally engaging in. The first is a catalyst. It's leading innovations and managing change. It's skill in motivating and promoting change. It's being future orientated and inspiring and having a vision. And I see myself when I first took office as really taking a catalyst role, coming in and changing a mindset, changing expectations and changing...challenging the status quo. And so a lot of that meant motivating others, persuading them to understand what I was seeing, and trying to persuade them to jump on and help me pursue this vision.

The next is collaboration, and that's building community through inspiration, empowerment and really working together in partnership with not just my fellow peers on the Business Committee, but also the tribal constituency themselves. And I felt, growing up in Oneida, that a lot of times things were done in a vacuum, ideas were done in a vacuum. And so this was a way to kind of try to find ways to reach out in helping people help themselves. And I think the collaboration skill is important because there seems to be, in Oneida at least, this dependency mindset, that everybody sits back and they wait for the Business Committee to solve all the problems and come up with all the answers, and it's really trying to tell people that my role as an elected official is merely to represent and reflect the will of the people, that it's up to you to organize at a grassroots level and come up with ideas and then together we will put them into action.

A communicator is the next skill, learning how to deal with interpersonal relations, how to be in a public speaking situation, and also how to deal with personal attacks, and verbal judo I think is a course that I would recommend for anyone because the attacks come from all over the place, and I've learned just recently after surviving a round of personal attacks that how I reacted really helped move it into a more positive path. And I think that starts, too, with having self-discipline over your own emotions, that you really have to hang on to your gut and have faith that it will pass and it will get better, and so that's been really important. In fact there was one evening where I stayed up I think until 3:00 a.m. searching the internet for verbal judo lessons to get through a round of attacks.

The next is just be a competent practitioner, knowing the difference between effective governance and managing and having knowledge about the tribal, your tribes' rules and processes and culture, the constitution, the by-laws, ordinances. And you also need to know the rules of the surrounding municipalities that you will interact with.

And then the last one, the fifth one, is just personal, the cornerstone of personal leadership, growth and development. These are things that I've been dealing with in a personal way and it's my tone. I came in as I said very enthusiastic, I was going to make change, I was going to challenge the status quo and I wasn't afraid to do that and I wasn't going to take any prisoners, and so my tone was very angry and harsh. And when I realized -- after coming down from some of these episodes -- that I was dealing with people who I grew up with. I was dealing with older folks who were my mentors when I was a kid and here I was using this harsh tone on them and not realizing that we all make mistakes and that we're all trying the best we can. So over the last three years -- and I'm still having difficulty with it -- is trying to temper my tone so that it's more productive and still passionate, but not so damaging. And having patience I think, where you're in it for the long haul, that the big changes I thought were going to happen I'm going to have to settle for small ones and be satisfied with that. But having patience that it will work out. And then making sure that when you make decisions that you're able to live with yourself about them and that you choose your battles wisely.

Leadership skills, and there's five of them that I think are ones that I wished I would have spent more time honing before I took office, but it's the catalyst and it's collaboration, communicator, competent practitioner, and the cornerstone of your own personal leadership and development. Then I just wish our council spent more time early on getting to know each other. When we first came together, it seemed that we spent a couple of days kind of having a really quick overview of the tribe as an organization itself, trying to see what departments and divisions were doing, but then it seemed like the nine people just broke up and everyone went their individual ways. I think it would be important that when you start that you sit down and you clarify roles and responsibilities with each other and expectations -- not just as a council as a whole, but each individual person on it. And then learning to identify the kinds of decisions that the council is expected to make, because there are decisions that the council shouldn't make, but people would like you to make them. And knowing the difference between governing and oversight and setting direction versus getting involved in the day-to-day matters and micromanaging. That's a tough one, and I think it stymies a lot of folks in knowing the difference between it. I see extremes. I see some council members who say, "˜I'm not getting involved in day-to-day matters,' and so they also throw out the responsibility of oversight. Let managers decide that. Well, there's a difference and I think knowing...talking about it upfront so that everyone's clear is important. And then group think, learning what group think is, how to avoid it, how to set up a process among your council so that it's okay to speak out and disagree with each other and that speaking out doesn't mean that you're disloyal to the group or that you're trying to shake up the balance of good feelings that everybody has, but that it's important to disagree.

Then I also wish that our council spent more time getting a comprehensive look at the organization itself and focusing on visioning and strategy, "˜cause too often today we get caught up in the bickering and the fighting and the power struggles, and it's like...it's these power and control struggles. It's like playing Monopoly with family once a year and everybody comes to the table with their own set of rules and you never get to finish the game "˜cause you're all bickering over what the rules are. It's really important I think to come together and look at the organization and find out what do we do and how are we doing and who do we serve.

There are just so many things I think in Oneida that we're responsible for as elected leaders, so many services. There's public safety, long-term care, health care, environmental protection, land use and planning, relationships with surrounding municipalities. Then you have investments, you have the annual budget and then you have the golden goose for Oneida is our gaming operation and knowing how to manage that. It's sitting down in the beginning and getting a good comprehensive look at all of that before you start off I think is important.

Bottom line is you can't do it alone, that change is slow and I wish I would have started small. I wish I would have valued relationships more in the beginning. I'm trying to go back and repair some of those things. Learning to fight the right fights, knowing when to fight is important. And visioning -- trying to get the council to focus on visioning versus managing, and really trying to answer the question, 'What do we want to be 100 years from today?' And for Oneida, we're eight miles west of the City of Green Bay, and we're surrounded by municipalities and we have a major fight with a village that lies entirely within our reservation boundaries and they just hired an Indian fighter from the CERA [Citizens Equal Rights Alliance] group. I forgot what that stands for, Equal Rights Alliance. So we've got some major battles ahead but it's exciting, I'm glad to be a part of it and I just know it will...I just have faith it will work out. Thank you."

Honoring Nations: Michael Thomas: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Former Mashantucket Pequot Chairman Michael Thomas provides his definition of what tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and stresses the importance of Native nations examining and reconnecting with their traditional governance principles as they work to exercise sovereignty effectively.

Resource Type
Citation

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

Megan Hill:

"So I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Chairman Michael Thomas. He's the Chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. And he's representing our New England region. Thank you."

Michael Thomas:

"Thank you, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to the folks at Harvard [University and] to the elders in the room. When we think about what sovereignty today means, rather than focusing upon a definition, which many will do, and frankly, given how often it is tortured and twisted, they probably should do, I want to talk you today about some of what sovereignty means in a connective sense. Not the definition of sovereignty, but what does sovereignty mean in terms of what it creates for us. And from the standpoint of a tribal leader, sovereignty, first of all, means equal parts of authority and responsibility. And we are, as tribal governments, becoming more responsible as time goes on with the authority that sovereignty affords us. There have always been places where -- although we don't talk about these things publicly very often -- sovereignty has been used against the very people in the tribal community from whom it originates. And we have to, increasingly, examine our own tribal government systems so that we can provide for our people all of the things that we would have provided in traditional governmental forms, but provide them through these modern mechanisms, often forced upon us by Relocation-Era policy or other eras of policy that you all in this room are as familiar with as I am. And for us, at Mashantucket Pequot, it has meant government transparency and accountability. And I want to talk about those things, and talk about how important those things are, and talk about how traditional those things are. These are not modern, democratic, American things that are creeping their way into tribal governance. These are things that are traditional, values-based, Indian things that are creeping their way back into tribal governments, if you approach it from the right perspective.

And so, for us, it's meant basic government accountability mechanisms. Financial transparency. I am extremely proud of having been a part of achieving financial transparency in our tribal community. Ten years ago or 15 years ago, a tribal citizen at Mashantucket had no right to any financial information that was produced from any of the tribal enterprises that we've been fortunate enough to build or acquire. Today, any person in our tribal community goes to the clerk's office and can see the last ten years of audited financials; can see last year's spending, up to and including all of mine; can see the next 10 years of cash flow forecasts, so that they even have a good idea of what might be coming, although clearly all of those things have disclaimers on them. You don't want people in our tribal community assuming that pro formas are reality, but they should see the pro formas, they should understand what they are. They should understand 10- and 15- and, frankly, for tribes, 50-year cash-flow projections. These are things that in a normal business sense, people even here at Harvard [University], would tell you are just unrealistic. You can't do a 50-year cash flow forecast. To which my question is, why not? We're going to be here in 100 years, and 100 years after that, and 100 years after that. I don't think it's ridiculous to wonder about sustainability of tribal government, sustainability of community service delivery, over that 50-year window. From a tribal perspective, it's actually a snapshot in time.

And so we've begun to blend the traditional values that grandma taught us -- and speaking of grandma, I have to give credit where credit is due. I am a third-generation tribal leader, and proud to walk in the moccasins of my mom, who helped to establish Foxwoods way back in the day, and walk in the moccasins of my grandma, who was on the tribal council in the 1970s, before we were federally recognized. And so, I have huge moccasins to fill that I probably never can fill, but I have a whole lot of fun trying to fill. And if we remember our community roots, we always come back to the same traditional values. Sometimes, being governments and seeing ourselves as modern governments, actually pulls us away from the traditional values that make us who we are. And so, the reality is that most of what we need to succeed in life as tribes, as people, as human beings, our grandma taught us when we were three, or four, or five [years old]. I spend the vast majority of my time in this de facto CEO role that you see many tribal chairmen assuming in this modern era, teaching business executives five times as smart as I am the basics that their grandma taught them when they were five [years old]. And when we get through those, then I begin to teach them the ones my grandma taught me when I was five [years old]. And that's the layer they need to finish their perspective and serve a tribal community fully.

And so, I think increasingly, one of the things that sovereignty today should mean is an examination of the separation of powers in tribal governance. The reality is that yesterday's model, where, well, I'll say it to you all the way I say it to the folks in the family at home -- yesterday's model, where the next nut in my position has to be a de facto CEO, and the chief of an Indian community, and the mayor of a small place where you want an economy and you want community activities -- it's just becoming increasingly unrealistic that any individual leader or even group of seven leaders -- seven is our traditional tribal council number, we went away from that for awhile at the behest of the state government, and in the last 15 years or so we've been back to the traditional number of seven -- but for seven people who only must achieve popularity in the tribal community in order to be where we are, this presents challenges for us as tribal people. And I do believe in the principle that -- given the time and the resources -- frankly, we are as creative at adapting and overcoming what is in front of us as any group of people on the face of the Earth. And so, too, can we examine our own government structures with that same set of glasses on.

So, I think tribal sovereignty today means, frankly, the continuing defensive effort that our parents, and our grandparents, and their grandparents, fought before our time. But, just as excitingly, the new opportunity for us to examine ourselves in the mirror and reconnect ourselves with the values that we were all given by our grandma. To reconnect ourselves with the true meaning of representation as tribal leaders, not just leadership as tribal leaders, is what I hope sovereignty is beginning to mean today. Thank you all 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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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."

Ned Norris, Jr.: Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tohono O'odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr. speaks to aspiring and current Native nation leaders about the keys to being an effective leader and shares his personal experiences in preparing to become the leader of his nation.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Norris, Jr., Ned. "Perspectives on Leadership and Nation Building." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"Thank you. How is everybody? Good. Alright! Thank you, Manley Begay, for that introduction. I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you, welcoming you to the Tohono O'odham Nation and welcome to our home. This is one of our business facilities that we just opened in the beginning of January [2008] and we're pretty proud of it. We're proud of what we have been able to accomplish thus far, and realize that there are more things ahead of us that we know and that we may not know that we'd like to accomplish for our people. This gives us the opportunity to establish some economic base for us to do some of those things that we just dream about.

Just a little bit of a background, the Tohono O'odham Nation, when you think about our ancestral lands, you will know that the ancestral lands of the O'odham include those lands which are where the city of Tucson sits today all the way east to where the Rincon Mountains are at, all the way north to the city of Phoenix and Scottsdale is at, all the way west to where the Colorado River is, and all the way south some 130 miles south of what is not the international border of Mexico. Those are ancestral lands of our people, of the O'odham. Today, we ended up with 2.8 million square acres and always tell an audience, 'We're 2.8 million square acres small.' And usually when you have a non-Indian audience, they kind of look at you like, "˜What are you talking about? 2.8 million square acres is a pretty big piece of land.' But when you think about the ancestral lands of our people, 2.8 million is nothing. So I wanted to give you that background. Also, we have about 28,000 enrolled tribal members, so there are about 28,000 of us running around here in the United States and in some other countries. In fact, we have about 1,500 enrolled tribal members that live in Mexico and not necessarily because they want to live in Mexico, it is because when the international border was established, they cut them off from the rest of the people, from the rest of the land here. We continue to have about nine communities that still exist within Mexico, and my trip to Nogales, Sonora this afternoon is meeting with a couple of members of the O'odham in Mexico, because the lawyer that they are working with can't get on this side of the United States, so we're going to go meet with him down there and talk a little bit about land issues that are important to us that still exist in Mexico.

And actually I wanted to get a feel of the audience. I was asking Manley Begay, "˜Who is the audience here?' And he said to me that "˜there are newly elected tribal leaders here, there are aspiring tribal leaders here.' I was speaking to one of the young persons here and they said there are some people from a college up in Phoenix area that are here to learn about leadership, and learn about what you might want to be thinking about as you are emerging into a tribal leader. And then I was also told that there are some emerging old tribal leaders, and I'm like emerging old tribal leaders, and I'm wondering what he's talking about. And I'm assuming that they are those newly tribal elected leaders that, for some odd reason, you decided to get back into the thick of the politics and get elected again, so you're back. It's a return of the old leadership. He pointed out a couple of you to me, take for example, "˜So and so over there or so and so over there, they are old returning tribal leaders.' And I won't point you out because you know who you are.

I was sharing with Manley that I knew I wanted to do this job 30 years ago. I knew I wanted to be the Chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation 30 years ago. When I started my first job in 1977 as the assistant director for the Tohono O'odham Nation Children's Home, I knew someday I wanted to hold this job. And over the course of the last 30 years, I have done different things -- consciously and sub-consciously -- preparing myself for this day, preparing myself for this job. And people ask me today, "˜How do you like what you're doing?' And I tell them, "˜I love it. I love this job. It's everything that a job needs to be. It's challenging, it's exciting, it's frustrating, it's disappointing.' All of those things that our jobs need to be in order for us to grow, in order for us to challenge ourselves, in order for us to be challenged. We have to have all of those experiences, all of those ingredients in order for us to be successful as tribal leaders. And I know that over the course of the last 30 years, there are things that I have done in my life that probably put question on whether or not I should or shouldn't be elected as a tribal leader. And I think every single person in this room has done something questionable in their lives that may have put question on whether or not we should elect you or not elect you, but you know, we learn from those situations as well. We learn from those mistakes. We learn from that part of the journey in our lives in order to prepare us for what we are doing today as tribal leaders. And that's the way I like to look at it. That is the way I like to look at the past 30 years. And I've been married for 35 years. My wife -- and actually I tell this story -- that my wife has put up with me for 35 years. We just had our 35th anniversary in February, and I'll share with you now that in the 35 years that we have been together, there have been things that I've done that would have probably required her or wanted her or forced her to leave me, but she didn't. She didn't leave me, she didn't give up on me. For some reason, she believed in me and my ability and my capability, and I love her more today for not giving up on me because she stood by me. And I always say that, "˜Behind a good man, there is always an even greater woman,' the woman that is there to help us, to pick us up when we fall. To help us gain the strength or regain the strength we may have lost at different times in our life, and so I appreciate that of her.

You know, over the course of my years involved in politics -- and we see sometimes on the TV commercials, the commercial about Michael Jordan and there was a commercial that said, "˜Be like Mike.' It caught a lot of the attention of our young people: "˜Be like Mike Jordan, buy these $250 tennis shoes and you can be like Mike Jordan. Be like Mike.' Well, you know, there's people in my life that I would like to be like, that I had sat back years ago watching leaders, watching aspiring leaders, watching people over the course of time that I have said, "˜You know what, I'd like to be like that person. I'd like to be like that leader. I'd like to be able to think like that leader. I'd like to be able to have the good heart that I see that leader have and be like them.' Just like the commercial is saying, "˜Be like Mike.' There are several Mike people out there that I would like to have been like. You know it really is an honor for me to be standing in front of you sharing these thoughts with you, because one of those people that were "˜Be like Mike' for me in my life' was Dr. Peterson Zah. I am standing up here thinking, "˜What am I going to be able to say to Dr. Zah that is going to make any sense or that he hasn't already said or has already experienced himself?' So it is an honor for me to stand in front of you, sir, and be able to share some thoughts with you, because I'm thinking, "˜Man, I can't share, I can't teach you anything.' But it's out of that respect that I hold for him as a leader, as a continued leader, and what he's been able to do not only for his own people, but for all nations, all tribal people nationwide.

One of the things that I have shared with different audiences is some of these quotes. I keep these, I keep some quotes in this thing that we use now called this Blackberry, and I keep these in here because at times over the course of, you know, when you are feeling down or when you are feeling like maybe you're questioning what you are doing or questioning the worth of what you are doing, I go back to these and I start reading these. One of the things that I've always thought about -- and I try to live my own leadership ability after -- is this quote, and it says, "˜You can accomplish anything in life provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.' 'You can accomplish anything in life provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.' As leaders -- and that quote is attributed to Harry Truman -- as leaders I like to think of myself in that way. That what I have to do -- the people have entrusted in me their trust to lead them and to guide them for the term that I have been elected. As a leader, I should not ever take advantage of that trust that the people have placed in me. I should never take the position that, "˜That was my idea, not yours.' I should not take the position that, "˜It's my way or the highway.' As a leader, that should not -- that's not something that we should be doing as tribal leaders. The [Tohono O'odham Nation] vice chairman and I -- Isidro Lopez -- when we ran for these offices, we ran on a campaign that we say in O'odham, it says [O'odham language], and [O'odham language] translates to "˜All of us together.' And what we wanted to be able to do was to bring the people together, to bring our people together, to give our people the opportunity to actively participate in the decision-making process. Too many times, we get tribal leadership that think they are going to impose those decisions on the people. We can't accomplish that, we can't accomplish what we need to accomplish if we are going to dictate to our people. That's not our purpose. Our purpose is to lead, our purpose is to work together, and our purpose is to bring our people to the table so that we can hear what they have to say. And there have been times in the last nine months that the Vice Chairman and I have served in office that people have said, "˜So much for [O'odham language], because I thought we were going to work together.' And that is because they were on the short end of a decision. You know, and we have said that this theme is going to be the heartbeat of our tenure in office. We intend to make sure of that. Now, people need to understand that we're not always going to agree on what the outcome of a decision is. We can't expect to always agree. There are going to be things that we disagree with each other on, but we are always going to make the effort to try and involve you in the decision-making process. So that is what I wanted to share with you on that.

The other quote that I look at, that I've always tried to model my leadership after, it says here, "˜The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he or she wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.' You know we're elected leaders, we are elected to lead, we are elected to direct. I always make comments to my staff, I say, "˜We only are as good as you are.' You know, we end up getting the credit for a lot of the work that a lot of other people that aren't elected leaders do, and I try every time to let my staff do what they need to do in order to get done what I gave them the direction to do. If I keep meddling in what they are doing and micromanaging what they're doing, why do I have them? If I'm going to take that responsibility, why do I have them there to do that job? So that's what I like to look at and think about at times.

One last one that I want to share with you is -- wow, what happened to it? But I remember it, because I remember it off of a fortune cookie, and I put that thing in my wallet many, many years ago, probably about 20 years ago at least. I know that for a fact. I opened this fortune cookie and I read it and it says that, "˜One of the greatest things in life is doing what people say you can't do. One of the greatest things in life is doing what people say you cannot do.' I usually use that in an audience of young people, of teenagers, high-school age, and I tell them, 'I'm not telling you to be defiant. I'm not suggesting you violate school rules or the rules of the household. What I am telling you is that when people stand there and tell you that, "˜You are not going to [amount] to anything. All you are is a troublemaker, and you are not going to be worth anything in your life,' that you challenge them on that.' And I stand here before you and tell you that I was one of those students. I was told that by a teacher in high school at one time. You know I probably gave him reason to think I was going to be worthless. I probably gave my family reason to think I was worthless. I know I gave my wife reason to think I was worthless, but you know I took that and I try to live that as a challenge to me in my life as a leader.

So those are things that I wanted to share with you. I really am honored that I was given the opportunity to stand in front of you and to share these thoughts with you and that you were actually listening. I was wondering, "˜This is going to be difficult. I'm going to be hearing papers clashing and cups making noise.' I've talked to audiences before lunchtime before, and I might as well just not stand here and say nothing because nobody is listening, but that's not true today. I see you listen, I feel listening, I see what you are doing here. And in closing, I wish all of you the best of success in your leadership. I wish all of you the best of success for your people, for your tribes. You know we have many, many challenges ahead of us. And I say that it's been nine months that we've been in office, but it feels like nine years. I think in nine months my hair had grayed more than it has if I wasn't sitting in this office, but you know that is the sacrifice that we make. That is the sacrifice that we make. And I wish all of you well. I congratulate you for the positions that you were elected to lead in, and I want to say to those young emerging leaders, "˜Stay on course, stay focused, and know that you have support out there.'

I want to share this last thought with you. One of the most honorable times that I was honored in my life in being able to sit down at a lunch table with the late Wendell Chino. Years ago, Wendell Chino, a great Mescalero Apache leader for many many years. He was one of those "˜Mike' people for me, it was like I wanted to be like Wendell Chino. I wanted to have his drive, his same good heart, and his same good thoughts. One time we were sitting at a luncheon and it was just, it ended up me and him being the last ones at the table and I was like, "˜Wow, man I'm sitting here with Wendell Chino, man, this is great!' I started picking his brain about leadership and at the end, he said, "˜You know what the sign of a true Indian leader is?' I'm asking does anybody in this room know what the sign of a true Indian leader is? And he said, "˜It's those people that can take the bullets from the front and the arrows in the back.' So be prepared for those bullets and those arrows. Thank you very much."

Membertou: Accountable to the Community

Producer
Centre for First Nations Governance
Year

Leaders of Membertou First nation explain how a high level of accountability to citizens and partners has been key to its success in both governance and business.

Native Nations
Citation

Centre for First Nations Governance. "Membertou: Accountable to the Community." Centre for First Nations Governance. Canada. 2011. Film. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuHc-sONf4g&list=UU6Kmkt3MUlLgGT4vN4NVKWQ, accessed May 6, 2014)

Valuing Tradition: Governance, Cultural Match, and the BC Treaty Process

Year

Self-governance negotiations are an integral part of British Columbia’s modern day treaty process. At some treaty tables, impasses have resulted from differences on how to include traditional First Nations governance within treaty. Although some First Nations are determined to pursue traditional structures, inflexible negotiation mandates and fundamentally different understandings of good governance have been barriers to achieving this end. Emphasizing the value of culturally matched governance as integral to effective governance and genuine self-determination, this capstone uses a literature review, case studies, and stakeholder interviews to analyse why some First Nations place a priority on traditional governance and what the benefits of these structures are. The capstone analyzes obstacles preventing inclusion of these traditional structures in treaty and identifies opportunities for alleviating the barriers to their adoption. Policy options are identified and evaluated based on a multiple-criteria analysis, and a recommendation is made on next steps for addressing this policy issue.

Resource Type
Citation

Hoffman, Kaitlin S. Valuing Tradition: Governance, Cultural Match, and the BC Treaty Process. School of Public Policy. Simon Fraser University. Burnaby, British Columbia. Canada. April 10, 2014. Master's Thesis. (http://summit.sfu.ca/item/14012, accessed May 23, 2014) 

Traditional Governance: A Case Study of the Osoyoos Indian Band and Application of Okanagan Leadership Principles

Year

There are traditional Okanagan governance and leadership principles and guidelines that have been informed through language terms and traditional stories. These have been interpreted and taught to us by our elders of the Okanagan Nation. Five principles of traditional Okanagan leadership will be discussed; will of the people, leadership training, protection of the land, leading by example and continuously validated authority. These are the principles that will be applied to the leadership of today. The focus of such analysis will be on the application of these traditional principles to current governance systems, including accountability, transparency, consultation, communication and decision making. The Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB) will be the case study used to contextualize this analysis. There are several Western leadership principles that have been accepted and adopted by our leadership, at OIB and other bands and Nations. These are the Western principles that need to be Indigenized so they will benefit our communities. However, I will not stop there, as it is easy to criticize without proposing any real changes. So, following each criticism I will add my own propositions or beginning proposals to change that is needed to re-vitalize our systems of governance in order to rightly incorporate traditional values.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Baptiste, Ethan. "Traditional Governance: A Case Study of the Osoyoos Indian Band and Application of Okanagan Leadership Principles." Sharing Indigenous Wisdom International Conference. Green Bay, Wisconsin. June 2007. Paper. (https://fngovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Traditional_Governance_Osoyoos.pdf, accessed February 15, 2024)