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Honoring Nations: Julie Wilson: Child Welfare in Indian Country

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Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
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Scholar Julie Wilson opens the session "Family Strengthening in Indian Country" with a discussion of recent research conducted by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development that explores the role families play in improving child and community welfare in Indian Country, highlighting the work of five Honoring Nations award-winning programs that support child and youth development.

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Wilson, Julie. "Child Welfare in Indian Country." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 11, 2004. Presentation.

Julie Wilson:

"It is really a privilege and a great pleasure to be here today to talk to you about some work that Amy [Besaw Medford], Andrew Lee, Joe Kalt and I and a couple of our students did about a year ago. The Annie E. Casey Foundation approached Joe Kalt and asked him about working with them on issues of 'Strengthening American Indian Families' and Joe said, 'Wait a minute, you don't know about Indians. And we do economic development, we don't really know a lot about Indian families. Maybe we should start first by just exploring the terrain and seeing what's going on.' So Joe contacted me. My area of research has been primarily inner cities in America, but primarily focusing on child welfare. So this was my first opportunity to look closely at what's going on with American Indians in this area. So I want to start with two obvious points. First of all, I'm not an American Indian; everybody figured that out. And second, I'm a pretty nerdy academic. So what I'm going to try to do is briefly summarize what we think we found in our study and I'd like to open it up for discussion because I'd really like some feedback of, does this resonate? Is there something we missed or are there some things that we really got wrong?

What we did, by way of looking at this, is we took five of the winners of the Honoring Nations competition, five very different programs, and explored them in some depth. We didn't have the time or the resources to go out and actually visit the site, so we were very dependent on phone interviews and the types of information that the tribes had sent to us. And obviously the next step is to go out to these tribes and to other tribes and to look at programs more closely, and some of you may want to offer some programs for us to try to look at.

One of the programs we looked at was the Fond du Lac foster care licensing and placement agency. And basically this is the Lake Superior Chippewa band, who faced a problem that there weren't enough Indian foster homes for their children. They'd exhausted the resources on the reservation and their children were being placed in homes in St. Louis County, Minnesota, which is the area of Duluth -- for those of you who know Minnesota -- and they were being placed with non-Indian families. That's primarily a community of Scandinavians and Bohemians and these were the families that were raising their children. And the tribal child welfare agency had no authority to work off the reservation. So they couldn't really be out there recruiting foster homes and creating homes for their own children. So what they did was they started negotiating with St. Louis County child welfare agencies and they established their own licensing and placement agency. They negotiated with the state and with the county and began, then with the authority, to find homes. And as they suspected, there were Indian families very willing to take the children, but they really didn't feel comfortable working with the county agency. And they now -- after only a few years -- have 58 families and 70 children in placement.

The second is the Whirling Thunder Wellness Program for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and like many other tribes the Winnebago tribe had a very serious problem with diabetes, continues to have a serious problem with diabetes for both adults and children. Since the 1970s, they'd had a model Indian Health Service diabetes program, but it was in the hospital. It wasn't focused on preventive work, it was really very much hospital based. And they decided that what they really needed to do was get in front of the problem. So in this case it was the tribal health department who took the initiative and created the Whirling Thunder Wellness Program. Now, a piece of the history that you have to know if you're not a Winnebago or not familiar with them, that Whirling Thunder was a tribal chief in the 1890s and had the tribe run foot races to keep in shape. And so it seemed quite obvious to the tribe that the program should be named after a chief who had the foresight to focus on preventive health measures. What they do is they raise awareness about diet, about exercise, about diabetes. They have a lot of culturally appropriate primary and secondary prevention programs. They run a kids' cafe where youth of the community can come and eat; they serve a lot of Native foods. They also work directly with children in after-school activities built around sports and cultural activities and work directly with families who have members who are diabetic.

Third program -- again really different -- the Menominee Community Center of Chicago. This was started by a group of off-reservation Indians who had been scattered around Chicago. At one time, many of them lived in one neighborhood but with urban redevelopment, gentrification, and the kind of renovation that goes on in cities, they'd become scattered. At a funeral one day several of them said, 'We really ought to do something about this,' and kind of get ourselves together and they created a community, a community center that they then affiliated with the Menominee Tribe. They became an official part of the Menominee Tribe and in fact the tribal council holds one of its meetings each year in Chicago in the community center. They provide support for Menominee Indians in Chicago and also sponsor trips back to the reservation in Wisconsin to connect the Chicago Menominee with the culture, the traditions, and the members of the tribe.

Fourth is the Ya Ne Dah Ah school in Chickaloon Village, Alaska, very tiny group of people; a very small tribe. And this program was started by an elder, a grandmother, who was visiting youth in jail and realized that the reason there were so many of their youth in jail was they felt alienated from the Alaskan school system. They were dropping out of school, they had very few opportunities, they were getting in trouble, and they were ending up in jail. So she started a tribal school. And it turns out in Alaska, this is no small feat because the state runs all the schools and the tribes don't get any money from the state for their own schools, so this is totally self-funded. And the school uses tribal members. The forester teaches science, people who are working with computers are teaching math and information technology. They now have 100 percent parent participation in the school; they have tribal members moving back to the community so their children can go to that school. Their test scores are above the national average, and they're beginning to export curriculum built on their tradition to other schools around the country, including non-Indian schools.

The fifth program that we looked at is the one you heard about yesterday, and I'm not going to pronounce this correctly -- I'm sorry, Myron [Brown] -- Akimel O'odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council. For those of you who were here yesterday and got to hear Myron, you know that Myron is a star. And I am smart enough to know better than to even try to follow Myron. So I'm going to let his description of the program stand, but those of you who saw the video and heard Myron know that this is a really amazing program. But again, it was started by a member of the tribe, a young adult who said, 'Those of us who have the education are going off to college, we're not coming back. We've got to do something about building youth into the culture and into the governance of the tribe.'

We looked at these programs and we said, 'What can you learn from these?' Now, there's always a flaw in social science research of this sort and that is when you look only at successful programs and you think you've learned lessons, you might not have learned the right lessons. You'd like to look at some programs that started out with similar innovative ideas, but didn't quite make it to see if what you think are the real success factors in these programs were missing from those other programs. That's another stage. Right now, I'm going to talk about nine things we think we found. Five of them I think are quite obvious and four of them are not so obvious. Let me start with the first five.

First, that effective policies and programs are self-determined. This is a theme that's run through this entire conference, it runs through the whole Honoring Nations program -- this is not news to you --  but I think for foundations like Annie E. Casey who are interested in using their resources to support families and children, this is an important lesson because it wasn't, 'You guys have a real problem here with diabetes and have we got the program for you.' It was instead, 'Our youth and our elders are sick and we need to do something about this.' It wasn't somebody coming in to say we've got a training program for youth in jail and you guys ought to just get into this program with us, it was the grandmother saying we've got to do something about the large number of our youth who are really having trouble, who are struggling and end up in jail because they see no future for themselves. 

Secondly, what's clear from these five is that leadership for these programs can emerge at any level. In some cases, it came out of the formal institutional structures of the tribal government. In other cases like the Menominee Cultural Center in Wisconsin, it was a group of seemingly isolated members of the tribe who had lost contact with one another and lost contact with the tribe who gradually put themselves back into the structure of the tribe. So this means leadership is everywhere around us and we need to be sensitive to it and build on it. 

Third, in each of these cases, we think that buy-in on the part of the tribe and the tribe's formal leadership was essential. Now, buy-in can take many forms. It can be financial support, it can be incorporation into the long-term tribal vision, it could be commitment of leadership authority, could be commitment of buildings -- lots of different ways -- but in each one of these, the tribe itself and the formal tribal government got involved and kind of gave it stamp of approval as well as resources. I seem to be missing some parts of this so I'm going to have to sort of...let's see...the fifth one...the fifth idea that we came about is that each of these programs invested in the training and the growth and the education of the individuals involved in the program, the tribes invested in them. And this is important. If you heard Mary Jo Bane's talk yesterday what you saw is that the program she talked about in Brazil, they invested in the education of these individuals that went out into the community and in each case the tribe has invested in the people.

I think these are pretty important lessons, but they're also kind of obvious. We could have all sort of sat back and said, 'Well, yeah, that's kind of common sense.' I think there are four things, though, that are really very different about what we saw in these Indian programs that I have to say I've given a lot of thought to and I'm thinking about whether or not these are tools that could be used elsewhere in the country or whether there's something that is very unique about American Indian tribes that you can build on that others really don't have.

I think the first of these is that every single one of these initiatives is spiritual at its core. And spiritual is not the same as religious, that's very hard for non-Indians to understand. It takes a while for non-Indians to immerse themselves in this culture and begin to understand this concept of spiritual, but every one of these programs is spiritual at its core, both it is clearly articulated and it's implicit in everything that goes on. And in part this spirituality is played out through a second finding and that is that each of these initiatives draws on and strengthens tribal cultural practices. In some cases, tribes have deliberately tried to bring back a language and to modernize a language. You know, what is the word for computer and for some of these things that were invented after the language began to die? All of these programs involved teaching youth traditional tribal practices, the dances, the crafts, the culture, the food, the language, the music, and this is an explicit part of it. The third thing that I think is unique about these programs and about many of the Honoring Nation winners that were not explicitly focused on families is that these programs deliberately try to pull in people from all generations and all groups. And in part this is done through this deliberate attempt to build the cultural awareness, because powwows and other activities that draw people from across generations and across clans are very important to the success of these programs and very important to the community. And I think the fourth finding that is unique, although perhaps not as unique as the other three, is that each of these programs explicitly tried to strengthen children and adults' social networks and it did this against through this idea of articulating and rebuilding the cultural traditions. That's a lot that Indians have to build on. And I was struck in reading, I read through a lot of the Honoring Nations winners and runners up and other applications and I found even programs like policing programs or salmon farming programs had parts of those programs that deliberately brought youth in -- summer jobs as police or working with the police, youth in nature conservancy jobs with salmon fishing. I think there is something very unique about these programs that we ought to be building on.

As somebody who's spent a lot of time thinking about child welfare issues, there's another aspect of these programs that we did not write about in our report, but, which I think is really important and I think deserves some serious investigation, and that is the following. One of the things that we worry about a lot in America's inner cities is the fact that the men have left. So many children are growing up with young teen mothers and without fathers. So many of the men are in jail or have left the community for other reasons. This is a problem that is also afflicting American Indians. And yet American Indians have, in many tribes, this concept of elder; a highly respected person who has authority within the tribe and who has authority with individual families even if there is no blood relationship. This is an important role. There are a number of social scientists, particularly Elijah Anderson, who have written articulately about the loss of older black men in America's inner cities. This is a treasure that American Indians had. It came through again and again in each of these programs, the role of the elder. Sometimes in starting these programs, other times in articulating the vision and carrying it through and always playing a part in it. I know there are some other people following me and I'm hoping that we will get some feedback from you on what we think we've found and that you'll have ideas for us on what the next steps might be. So thanks."

Honoring Nations: David Gipp: Sovereignty Today

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

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

Amy Besaw Medford:

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

David Gipp:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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